culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

GABRIELA IULIANA COLIPCĂ
despair and “mutual and unchangeable hatred.” (Beckford 1970: 119)
Paradoxically, this is both their reward and their punishment. Consistent
throughout the tale in his focus on the manifestations of evil, by the way he
phrases his conclusions, Beckford reveals a certain anxiety regarding the heavy
price of individual loss that the libertine pays for her/ his mastery: “Such was,
and such should be, the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious
deeds! Such shall be the chastisement of blind curiosity, which would transgress
those bounds the wisdom of the Creator has prescribed to human knowledge;
and, such the dreadful disappointment of that restless ambition, which aiming at
discoveries reserved for beings of a supernatural order, perceived not, through its
infatuated pride, that the condition of man upon earth is to be humble and
ignorant.”(1970: 120) Another difference between Beckford and Sade becomes
thus obvious: hidden under the fantastic ‘clothes’ of a richly imaginative, but
immoral tale, melancholy emerges in the grimly coloured ending and casts back
a different light on human nature than expected. That is why, according to
Coulet, Sade’s novels, although set in the real world, seem, in comparison to
Beckford’s tale, rather “inhumains and déclamatoires.” (1967: 470)
Yet, for all their different choices in terms of narrative patterns –
exploiting more the slightly realistic potential of romance (Justine ou les
Malheurs de la Vertu) or its fantastic basis (Vathek) –, both Sade and Beckford
managed to prove that only a certain ‘libertinage’ of representation, epitomized
by the black romance, could best convey an image of the union between the
“libertinage de mœurs” and the “libertinage d’esprit” that a counterculture in
decline still used to cling to in order to claim its right to absolute freedom of
expression and the triumph of relativity putting forth an alternative (im)moral
code at the turn of the century.
References:
Barthes, R. 1971. Sade. Fourier. Loyola, Paris: Editions du Seuil
Beckford, W. 1970. Vathek, London: Oxford University Press
Brânzeu, P. 1995. The Protean Novelists. The British Novel from Defoe to Scott,
Timişoara: Universitatea din Timişoara
Coulet, H. 1967. Le roman jusqu’à la Révolution, Paris: Armand Colin
Groden, M. and Kreiswirth, M. (eds.). 1994. The Johns Hopkins Guide to
Literary Theory and Criticism, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press
Phillips, J. 2001. Sade. The Libertine Novels, London, Sterling Virginia: Pluto
Press
Reichler, C. 1987. L’Age libertin, Paris: Les Editions du Minuit
Sade, Marquis de. 1973. Justine or les Malheurs de la Vertu, Librairie Générale
Française
Schaeffer, J.-M. 2002. ‘Le romanesque’ in Vox Poetica. Available:
http://www.vox-poetica.org/t/fiction.htm [2003, October 29]
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