The Deep Zoo: Essays by Rikki Ducornet

Author:Rikki Ducornet [Ducornet, Rikki]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566893817
Publisher: Coffee House Press

You will recall that in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant proposes that each one of us “always act in such a way that you can also will that the maxim of your action should become universal law.” It is evident that for the individual with a will to do good, Kant’s criterion affords a rigorous practice in moral living, one that, above all, demands a searching conscience and fearless inquisitiveness, and the willingness to restlessly question dogmatic thinking—one’s own and that of others—to engage in, tirelessly, a process of disenthrallment.

Sade’s Silling offers a Manichean reversal and negation of such a moral practice. In Silling, Libertine Law, Universal Law, and the Law of Nature are one and the same. The friends are simply acting as Nature intends: brutally and blindly. Sade is an anti-Rousseauian (although he did admire that “threat for dull-witted bigots!”) and, curiously, very much in keeping with the teachings of the Inquisition, which, fed by stories of naked New Worlders worshipping devils and buggering one another, argue that nature—a satanic realm studded with glamours and perversions; demons in the shapes of bears, wenches, and wolves; the semen of frogs and serpents teased into malefic powers—leads straight to madness. Such pessimism evokes a radical Gnosticism, proclaiming as it does man’s active place in a scheme of chronic pain and interminable night. Sade’s Nature knows nothing of pity and is forever tormenting her creatures with plagues and mortifications; later, in Juliette, Sade will write, “Are plants and animals acquainted with mercy, pity . . . brotherly love?”

Sade, always paradoxical, offers up this curiosity: he despises the church and its stultifying myths, yet climbs into bed with a churchy arsenal of crucifixes and wafers and, when it comes to Nature, embraces with a vengeance the Catholic worldview at its most extreme. It is an awkward backwardness for a man who was in so many ways a radical thinker—a champion of female sexuality, a vociferous detractor of the guillotine.

I recall a story by the Belgian writer of fantasy, Jean Ray, in which a diabolical house—much like the Aztec universe—demands to be fed fresh corpses. Silling is such a place. And “ces messieurs” are famished; their famishment, too, is cosmical. They would take on everything, even the weather:

He passes an entire brothel in review; he receives the lash from all the whores while kissing the madame’s arsehole and receiving therefrom into his mouth both wind and rain and hailstones.

Such a madame, one supposes, can be nothing but the embodiment of Mother Nature.

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