Sodom, LLC: The Marquis de Sade and the office novel | Hacker News Reader

Sodom, LLC: The Marquis de Sade and the office novel

laphamsquarterly.org

35 pointssamclemens13 comments

Well, she's not wrong that 120 Days of Sodom is unbelievably dull. Other than that, though, I think Chuck Palahniuk put it quite a bit better.

Where?

And, well..., I don't know for translations but, read in French, Sade's books are never boring. They are extremely attractive from a stylistic point of view, but the theme and the story are utterly repulsive. It's just the work of a lunatic genious. He was obsessed by debunking one particular lie, which is that virtue is always rewarded, eventually. To me Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu is his only book I was able to read to the end.

People always miss the point that the extremely vile debauchers represent the upper society: the aristocracy, church, the rich, and whatever was the fourth main character.

Then, they do all the horible things to the poor in their isolated castle with the help of hired gunmen.

The style is absolutely fantastic (I do not know about English translation)!

It's been a while, but I recall the English translation's prose as being rather dry and stiff; it wasn't an obstacle to the reader, but neither was it rewarding.

> Where?

Fight Club makes a lot of the same points about office life, but does so with confidence in its own observations rather than by pegging them to someone else's work where they really do not fit.

To be clear, I'm not sure I agree with a lot of what Palahniuk has to say on the subject, either, and I'm not really a fan of his in general - IMO he goes for shock over substance rather too often, and he looks like the sort of dentist of whom you're not really surprised to hear he's been caught molesting his patients. But I'd have to say that in Fight Club he outdoes himself.

> Indeed, according to Sade, sex can never be too orderly or too public. It is this valence of his thought that seems overwhelmingly applicable to the contemporary office, if not to contemporary social life overall.

An interesting feature of the modern world is that transparency isn't about freedom but about control; we need to see the actions of others at all times not because we are genuinely interested in them or their actions, but because we need to make sure they conform to established models of morality.

I don't really understand why people treat de Sade's writing as different than any other run-of-the-mill elaborate fetish fiction. I suppose because, at the time, nobody else was publishing their elaborate fetish fiction, and so it was easy to pretend that de Sade was the only person in history who'd ever had a fetish.

But guys, really, we've had the internet for 20 years now. There's nothing remotely interesting or unique or special about somebody else's boring, self-absorbed wankfic.

I think there's a certain mystique to de Sade because so few people actually ever bother to read him - I suspect he's one of the better known writers for whom most people cannot name anything he's written, and certainly haven't read any of it, but do of course know the general theme. (I count myself in this group - despite having a degree in literature, I have never been anywhere near any of his writing; though I have seen the film Quills, which I enjoyed.)

(I'm writing this from a strictly English perspective - I don't know whether the situation is different in his native France: perhaps all French schoolchildren are forced to read de Sade!)

Also, not many people get their name turned into a lowercase noun in English!

> I don't really understand why people treat de Sade's writing as different than any other run-of-the-mill elaborate fetish fiction.

de Sade does spend a great amount of time expounding at length about philosophy and society in between the sex and torture, and if you took out the sex and torture, it looks a lot like a prediction (and criticism) of national syndicalism and fascism more than a century before those ideas became widespread. It's hard to look from 200 years later and see a prediction of something that happened 100 years ago as forward-thinking, but it was at the time.

I also think that his work has become more relevant today, not to the concept of the office, but to identity politics. But given the gratuitous imagery, esoteric style, and loss through translation, I'm not sure the benefit/cost ratio is high enough to warrant attention from an English-speaking reader.

I only read philosophy in the boudoir so I am far from an expert on De Sade, but in the book I cited above he took a long (and quite abrupt) detour to illustrate his ideas on "proper, rational" way to organize public life - it is actually an essay (written by one of the characters, and he takes a break from the sexual endeavours to read it to others) titled Frenchmen! One more effort to become real republicans.

And his own version of "Philosophy" is part of the sexual initiation of one of the other characters. A girl who is a virgin, and has been raised in a traditional way and so, from the point of view of the other characters, has been fed lies for all her life.

> I don't really understand why people treat de Sade's writing as different than any other run-of-the-mill elaborate fetish fiction.

I'm pretty sure the general public ("people") would burn him at the stake today, too. His writings are pushed by a tiny subset of "people".

I also question the characterization of his work as "fetish fiction". It remains to be determined if his imaginal musings were prompted by his clear hatred of nature or whether his frustrated lust ultimately dressed up in a pseudo intellectual garb to cover its rather banal impulses.

But it is not fetish fiction at all! Sorry for copy/pasting my other comment, but anyway: " People always miss the point that the extremely vile debauchers represent the upper society: the aristocracy, church, the rich, and whatever was the fourth main character. Then, they do all the horible things to the poor in their isolated castle with the help of hired gunmen. The style is absolutely fantastic (I do not know about English translation)! "

This is an interesting point but it's a little like saying we don't need to care about painters because we have had color photography for about a century.

And there is in fact a point to be made that non-figurative painting was a response to the increasing realism of photography. But still, Rembrandt can still be enjoyed today, Salgado notwithstanding.

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