culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BLACK ROMANCE
AND THE LIBERTINE COUNTERCULTURE
de censures (celle des mœurs) masque toujours un profit idéologique.”(1971:
153) Other Sadean critics, like Coulet or Phillips, insist on the latter,
philosophical-ideological dimension, for the development of which, though
‘pledging faith’ to verisimilitude, Sade often relied upon romance-specific
devices. I would say that, at least in part, they are all right, in the sense that Sade
married in a sort of black romance both his ideas on nature, virtue and vice, body
and soul, and a radiographic study of his contemporary society and its manners.
Irrespective of the narrative structure which he chose to adopt in each of
the three versions of Justine, Sade always opened up the novel by having an
external narrator introduce a peculiar philosophical perspective on virtue and its
relationship with the divinity, nature and society, to be practically expanded
upon throughout the narrative for the benefit of the readers’ education.
Consequently, the demonstrative function of the characters and of the events
they are involved in is explicitly underlined. Justine, portrayed as physically and
morally opposed to her sister Juliette (or Madame de Lorsange), becomes the
subject of a case-study on the unnaturalness of virtue and the triumph of
‘natural’ vice. The framework provided by the external narrator establishes from
the very beginning her condition as a perfect victim, a romance-like figure of
innocently seductive virgin. An “embodiment of virginal innocence and
sensibility, having a potentially erotic vulnerability” (Phillips 2001: 91), she
fails, however, to impress as an individual and exists more as an abstraction
meant to arouse the libertines’ wrath and serve thus the purposes of the
demonstration.
Nevertheless, there are elements in the same framework that would make
an assessment of the character as a potential picaroon not exactly inappropriate.
It is true that Justine is not of humble birth, but after her parents’ death, the
young orphan finds herself in the position of looking for ways to survive and
perhaps rejoin in time the social class she actually belongs to. She thus sets out
on a journey across a familiar geographical background, during which she has to
adapt, like any other picaroon, to the new social cells she is temporarily forced
to move within, such as those of the rich financiers and usurers, aristocratic
debauchees, judges, surgeons, bishops and monks, but also thieves, assassins and
prostitutes. Each and every of the encounters along the road, told about either by
Justine in her own voice or by the external narrator, is actually multifunctional.
On the one hand, a new social category is brought into discussion, but on the
other hand, a new facet of vice is put forth and argued for and against before
triumphing over this taboo created upon religious and social prejudices that is
virtue. In a remarkable exercise of simplification, Sade has his Justine finish her
account with an instance of “self-assessment,” the summary of a lifetime of
suffering that reveals, above all, how blind nature, which justifies all crimes,
rewards the worst villains and punishes all kind action contradicting its laws.
What might have appeared in the outset as an initiatory journey turns out to
teach, owing to its repetitive and sequential romance-specific nature (Schaeffer
2002), but one lesson, that of ‘natural’ crime, which even providence seems to
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