Sauvage, Emmanuelle, «L'évidence du tableau dans
les
Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome et les trois Justine de
Sade», Montréal, Université de Montréal, thèse
de doctorat, août 2002, xxiv/471 p. Ill. Dir. : Michel Delon et Benoît
Melançon.
The aim of this work is to examine the relation of Sade’s novels to
theater and painting by referring to the æsthetic doctrine ut
pictura poesis, which is still very much alive in France at the end
of the eighteenth century. According to this famous quotation inherited
from Horace, a poem (and literature in general) is like a painting: words
possess a pictorial power (enargeia, evidentia), which is
given them by textual images, such as descriptions and verbal figures (e.
g. hypotyposis). In Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome
and the three versions of Justine, the portraits and libertine scenes
are substitutes for engraved images and dramatic pictures. Philippe Hamon’s
linguistic approach and Jean-Michel Adam’s one may help to understand the
organization of the Sadean descriptions in lists, sequences and tableaux.
Moreover, such descriptions are indirectly linked to the taxonomic methods
that prevail through the Ancien Régime, and more directly
to the development of the sentimental genre (novel, drame, painting).
Sade’s novels share with Diderot’s drames and Greuze’s paintings
the notion of the tableau, which implies the presence of many observers:
narrator, characters and reader. The witnesses’ visual activity is presented
in Les Cent Vingt Journées and Justine in different
ways, depending on their point of view about the scenes that they observe.
Justine is reluctant to see what hurts her principles and her eyes, and
consequently she always refuses to look at it and to describe it, but all
the same she does. Even some libertine characters refuse both to be seen
by their sexual partners and to see the objects of pleasure which have
nothing to do with their passions. In spite of these restrictions,
their vision rules the world in Sade’s novels.
Keywords: Eighteenth Century, Sade, Novel, Description, Æsthetics
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