Category Archives: literature

Reflections on the Novel by Sade: first English translation?

The Crimes Of Love (1800) – Marquis De Sade [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Reflections on the Novel (French: Une Idée sur les romans) is an essay by Sade first published in 1799 in Les Crimes de l’amour. Its preface features a history of the novel and Sade’s theories on the ‘modern novel‘:

“The modern novel is born with Richardson, Fielding, Rousseau and Prévost. It then procedes to the The Monk and Ann Radcliffe“

Sade goes on to note that “It is Richardson and Fielding who have taught us that only the profound study of the heart of man . . . can inspire the novelist.” And goes on: “If after twelve or fifteen volumes [of Clarissa] the immortal Richardson had virtuously ended by converting Lovelace and having him peacefully marry Clarissa, would you . . . have shed the delicious tears which it won from every feeling reader?”

The essay exists in translations by Geoffrey Gorer and David Coward.

I have been looking for a public domain English translation of this text. Can anyone point me in the direction of the first English language translation?

Update: Wolf’s Hollow: The Marquis de Sade in English.

Lowell Blair seems to be have been the first English translator of Crimes of Love. No mention is made if he also translated the prefatory essay I mention.

Notes

Hans_Baldung_Grien_The_Young_Woman_and_Death_Dornai

Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives) died, so did Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead) a couple of days ago. Above is an image by Grien celebrating one of my favorite themes: death and the maiden. The painting is probably a detail of a larger – unidentified – piece. I had never seen a painting with a blindfolded baby. Tip of the hat for the painting: Morbid Anatomy.

No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity,
No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not
Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce.

–Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles

The Kingdom of Tenderness

  La Carte du Tendre

The above is not a somatopos, i.e. an instance of somatopia.

It is a Map of tenderness featured in the first volume of the Madeleine de Scudéry novel Clélie, published in 1654. The map details the distractions and pitfalls—depicted as towns and landmarks—that lovers encounter along their journey from New Friendship (the town at the bottom center of the map) to intimacy in the Kingdom of Tenderness.

At the moment, I am trying to stay clear of the lake of indifference.

These unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body

well

The Well of Loneliness (1928) Radclyffe Hall

Denounced, banned and applauded — the strange love story of a girl who stood midway between the sexes, complete and unabridged.

Stephen begins to dress in masculine clothes made by a tailor rather than a dress-maker. At twenty-one she falls in love with Angela Crossby, the American wife of a new neighbor. Angela uses Stephen as an “anodyne against boredom“, allowing her “a few rather schoolgirlish kisses”. Then Stephen discovers that Angela is having an affair with a man. Fearing exposure, Angela shows a letter from Stephen to her husband, who sends a copy to Stephen’s mother. Lady Anna denounces Stephen for “presum[ing] to use the word love in connection with… these unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body“. Stephen replies, “As my father loved you, I loved…. It was good, good, good — I’d have laid down my life a thousand times over for Angela Crossby.” After the argument, Stephen goes to her father’s study and for the first time opens his locked bookcase. She finds a book by Krafft-Ebing — assumed by critics to be Psychopathia Sexualis, a text about homosexuality and paraphilias — and, reading it, learns that she is an invert. —The Well of Loneliness

“I am interested in women as words.”

Thinking About Women

Thinking About Women is work of feminist literary criticism by Mary Ellmann first published in 1968 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. In it, she supposedly said “I am interested in women as words.” The publisher describes it as “a scathingly witty attack on literary misperceptions of women and prejudice against women in letters by an Oxonian critic and writer.” From the cover: “An original, often starling, genuinely funny, and deeply serious investigation of our conceptions of femininity as revealed by writers from Jane Austen to Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer. ”

Anne Koedt used this book to refute Freud’s two-orgasm theory in her “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm“.

Why women love apes

Waarom vrouwen van apen houden

Why women love apes by Stine Jensen

Dedicated to my friend M______. A belated happy birthday.

Twentieth-century western culture is full of examples of erotic relationships between dark-haired apes and blond women: there is a striking connection between woman and ape not only in movies and novels, but also in scientific practice of primatology. In this fascinating study, literary theorist Stine Jensen shows how the roles of ape, woman and man, too, have changed fundamentally throughout the last century.

For example, the famous film classic King Kong from 1933, was born of the nineteenth-century obsession with the rape-ape, but at the same time it presented the ape as an ambiguous creature – both malicious and gentle. Thereafter, mostly female researchers, such as Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas, ensured that the image of the primate changed from killer king to gentle giant. In their endeavours to make primates seem milder these women pushed such issues as the killing of younger troop members and other violence within ape society into the background.

See previous posts here and here.

 

“I am a writer of tales of the uncanny”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jQtkGJMtH0]

Fake H. P. Lovecraft 1933 WPA Newsreel Interview via William Gibson

Today, William Gibson reported on the above footage. In a second post, Gibson admits having been fooled. As he writes in a second post:  “I guess I so wanted to believe that that was Lovecraft that I managed to ignore the actor’s complete lack of HPLoid bone-structure. (Lovecraft was one distinctively-jawed New Englander.)

Faking elder footage on YouTube, though, has great potential as a form.”

Cherchez la femme #1

Colette Peignot

Unidentified photo of Colette Peignot sourced here.

“I believe in our life together . . . I believe in it the way I believe in everything that brought us together: in the most profound depths of your darkness and of mine. I revealed everything about myself to you. Now that it gives you pleasure to laugh at it, to soil it––this leaves me as far away from anger as it is possible to be. Scatter, spoil, destroy, throw to the dogs all that you want: you will never affect me again. I will never be where you think you find me, where you think you’ve finally caught me in a chokehold that makes you come. . . . As for me I am beyond words, I have seen too much, known too much, experienced too much for appearance to take on form. You can do anything you want, I will not be hurt.” Colette Peignot in a letter to Georges Bataille via Laure: The “True Whore” as Muse by Jason DeBoer

Laure [Colette Peignot] began her affair with Bataille in 1934, and it proved to become one of the more tormented love stories of modern letters. Their correspondence reveals a mutually influential sharing of transgressive ideas: she was the woman of action, and he was the man versed in scholarly knowledge. Her uncompromising, anguished lifestyle proved very inspirational to Bataille, especially Laure’s own infatuation with the sacred and communication, two important ideas in Bataille’s later work. —source

Colette was born 104 years ago today.