Shocking?

Far more than Justine. But, as Sade says in his Preface to Juliette, “… the New Woman will only emerge when she learns to commit every horror and violence that till now society has denied her as foreign to her temperament.” In short, though he talks of a personal revolution, it is still a real and corporeal one—as real as the one he lived through.

Why should such a revolution be necessary?

For a moment ignoring the overwhelming evidence of life, let us simply look at what literature makes so evidently manifest.

This is the moral stance that controls, totalitarianly, the modern novel in all its genres, high or low:

“It is the novelist’s duty to attack society, for its false complacency, for its repressive rigidity, and for its self-righteous insensitivity. Society is women. Therefore, the novelist must attack and punish women in his works.”

At first glance, this must look very similar to the moral template of Justine. It is, with this difference: Sade goes to great pains to show that the idea that women are the upholders of the values of society and civilization is an illusion fostered on them purely to get the better of them—so they may be raped, enslaved, and all money and economic power they may be fortunate enough to have inherited or actually to have earned by their own work can be stripped from them more easily. And the larger point, of course, is that Justine is only a fraction of the dialogue, the fraction that sets out this stance in order, at so much greater length, to demolish it by positive example. And it is this denial—Juliette, not Justine—that is Sade’s truly “banned” novel.^*

Understandably, the most successful novelists are not the ones who have espoused the novel’s moral stance intellectually, but the ones whose basic psycho-sexual mechanism holds them to it despite their more cerebral beliefs.

Reading the modern novel, one realizes all its energy, its bravura, its whole aesthetic life springs from this stance; both its art and its intelligence are straited by it, whatever its ostensible topic. Without it, novels would miss the very drive that propels them from incident to incident; and the novel as a form would deliquesce.