Justine, Or, The Vicious Circle

Abstract

Justine, Or, The Vicious Circle NANCY K. MILLER I don’t know whether we must burn Sade; I do know that it is difficult to approach his work without getting burned: any literary analysis runs the risk of betraying Sadian ecriture, of neutralizing what is meant to be violation, of bridging the gap where there is meant to be rupture. The difficulty, of course, lies in the coinci­ dence of sex and text: inevitably turned on or turned off, analysts, in the main, tend to treat one problematique at the expense of the other.1 Aware of the danger, and without seeking to put out the fire, I would like to propose a reading of one of Sade’s novels, confronting simultaneously sexuality and textuality. I have chosen Justine, ou les malheurs de lavertu2 neither the original nor the ultimate version, but the second variant which has provoked both extreme distaste: “C’est une sorte de conte philosophique dans lequel 1’heroine est caricaturee franchement, et franchement invraisemblable;”3 “Sade a ecrit la sa plus mauvaise oeuvre, la seule vulgaire;”4 and boundless admiration: “L’oeuvre de Sade sans doute la plus complete et la plus parfaite, parce qu’en allant jusqu’au bout de sa conviction et de son genie, le philosophe -poete y reste maitre de son imagination, de son coeur, mais d’abord de son art.”5 This polarized reaction (a perfect homology to Sade’s own esprit de contradiction) is symptomatic of the 215 216 / NANCY K. MILLER double and very literary bind in which Justine II places her readers. Leaving to one side the problem of esthetic value, how­ ever, but respecting both the protocol of consumption encoded in the text and its status as the product of a genre, I shall try to expose the text of the dilemma, the reader’s—and the critic’s— trap. Justine apparently obeys the conventions of fictional organiza­ tion as they prevail in the eighteenth-century novel: a first-person account of suffering virtue. And not any virtue, but that emi­ nently popular and vulnerable commodity, exemplary femininity via the metonymy of virginity. From the beginning, however, the reader can anticipate not only Perversion with a capital “P” as Sollers defines it, “la pensee theorique elle-meme,”6 but a concretization of the phenomenon by a conversion1 of establishment values, where positivity is marked with a negative sign, and nega­ tivity with a positive one. The title itself serves as the first “signpost” directing the calvary to come; and the English translation, Justine or Good Conduct Well Chastised, points even more clearly to the reversal of canoni­ cal and positive itineraries, the sagas of virtue well rewarded. The dedication explicitly states the author’s preference for literary revalorization: “Le dessein de ce roman (pas si roman que l’on croirait) est nouveau sans doute; l’ascendant de la Vertu sur le Vice, la recompense du bien, la punition du mal, voila la marche ordinaire de tous les ouvrages de cette espece; ne devrait-on pas en etre rebattu?”8 However, if the byway down which the reader is then invited to travel is characterized as “une route peu frayee jusqu’a present,”9 there is familiar and comforting compensation promised for any hardships incurred along the way: “l’une des plus sublimes leqons de morale que l’homme ait encore reques.”10 The dedication thus officially salutes the reigning ideology while preparing the reader for a renewal of its dominant cliche. This double stance which involves co-opting a structure designed to support other values, is the key to this version of Justine. As Shamela mocks Pamela, Justine subverts every quest for happiness undertaken by a virginal The Vicious Circle I 217 heroine in the fictional universe of the eighteenth-century novel, although it is a parody that elicits no laughter. The novel opens with the all-purpose eighteenth-century cele­ bration of the truth as guiding light, and the reader’s indulgence is requested for the exposure of the “situations quelquefois un peu fortes,”11 that love for truth requires. Yet it is not difficult to predict that verisimilitude, as Genette has defined it, “le principe...