(the) American (Novel of)

126 Mark S. Roberts
nature nourishes itself, sustains itself only through crimes and if crimes
are necessary they cannot outrage either nature or the imaginary being
whom you suppose to be her mover. . . . All the means which you use
to succeed not only could not be criminal, but become even virtuous
since the first law which nature inspired in us was to preserve ourselves
at whatever price and at whosoever expense it may be.”
What, then, could be more natural and useful than crime and
criminality? For Sade, practically nothing. They serve an essential dual
purpose. On the one hand, the heinous criminal act defies the arbitrary
limits of transgression, preordained by an imaginary God and ultimately
valorized by organized religion. Each criminal exploit, each act of
blasphemy serves to further obliterate the limitations placed on human
action and thought. We can only venture beyond by reversing the poles
of good and evil, of what is acceptable and what is despised by organized
religion, and, subsequently, by society as a whole. On the other
hand, crime serves to benefit nature, and is thus not in any way a
perversion but a necessity dictated by nature itself. If we are preconditioned
to survive, to perpetuate our species, how could any act that
accomplishes this program be considered perverse or criminal? Nature
simply induces us to follow an agenda, bringing us both good and evil
in more or less equal portions. Should we, Sade argues, distinguish
between the two so as to judge one natural and the other unnatural?
One perverse and the other normal?
The transgressive, upraising, and fashionable aspects of crime were
not without their adherents in the nineteenth century as well. The
Romantic essayist Thomas De Quincey, for instance, demonstrated a
deep fascination with the infinite aesthetic possibilities of crime, particularly
mass murder. His chilling, scientifically analytic, and often humorous
essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” begins,
satirically, with a kind of disclaimer condemning the various societies
formed around evil and vice, particularly those devoted to the promotion
of murder. Ironically, he then proceeds to dash off a broad celebration
of murder, which runs throughout the body of the essay. His main
interests in this most inhuman of crimes are sociopolitical and aesthetic.
Regarding the former, he invokes a broad range of sociopolitical phenomena
associated with murder, particularly certain statistical data collected
from ancient times to the present. His political interest also
extends to the social upheaval caused by acts of murder. Murder, De