"I didn't finish this book and find it very difficult to rate it. At first I was interested in all the characters of the book and all their different sexual persausions (sic). But the further I got into the book, the more extreme I found it. Towards the end was a summary of the torture that was inflicted upon the victims. I found it quite sick, that human beings could think of such horrors, never mind do them. So before reaching the end I actually burnt the book, which may seem extreme, but that is how I felt about it. So, not for the faint hearted!"
They burnt the book.
It made me incredibly sad, reading this, and wondering whether this is the way many people think about books. I suppose the fact that this customer was moved to action, of any kind, by the book is in some ways a resounding success for de Sade, but the commonplace way they write it – “I actually burnt the book” – is both terrifying and awful, symptomatic of the ignorance and escapism – rather than a way to be challenged, linguistically, philosophically, whatever – that have become synonymous with too much modern fiction. Why would it even come into your mind, burning, as a satisfactory response to a book you didn’t like? Surely it isn’t the first thing you think of? One sexual perversion too many and you reach for the flammable material, stoking the white hot flames of de Sade and Bataille and even Bret Easton Ellis and James Joyce (o, the dreaded coprophagia! Hot Karl! Shitplay! In fact, a Hot Lunch – and I used to ponder the validity of this oft rumoured fetish – does very much indeed involve “the act of shitting in clingfilm stretched over someone’s open mouth then fucking the mouth and at the point of ejaculation bursting through the cling film giving the recipient a mouthful of shit and spunk”, although some of the... specific details are open to regional interpretation, it would seem [mild thanks to Urban Dictionary, although I corrected your spelling]) over a perpetually burning metal incinerator in among twin-coloured wheelie bins and flowerbeds in the garden of some modern semi in the home counties. “Bring me the Ballard and the Palahniuk and the Bukowski, love, it’s getting cold”. Why not just put it down, stop reading it, sell it maybe or give it away, anything but take the flames to it like a psychotic Nazi Montag in a room full of Torahs, the ceremonial pomp of it sickening to picture, to imagine.
Did he clutch a bible as he burnt it, was he shirtless or drunk? Were his objections political, religious, moral, intellectual (and I doubt the latter very much)? Let’s go back to the review. “At first,” he says, “I was interested in [the characters] and all their different sexual persuasions (sic),” which itself implies a certain looseness of morals, at least sufficiently so to bother reading as notorious a writer as de Sade in the first place, let alone garner some deviant pleasure from the outlines of the characters primarily excrement based – liquid or indeed solid – vices. Yet as he continues the book the sexual “torture” becomes simply too extreme, even for a man who admittedly enjoys reading about the libertines sexual persuasions and preferences. So wait a minute. Where did the arbitrary line get drawn? The reviewer – who, annoyingly, refuses to use their real name, opting instead for A. Customer – is obviously not the textbook prude who dismisses de Sade and his oeuvre as filth before even allowing a cursory glance at the text (as proven by his purchase and part-consumption of the book). He does not, therefore and apparently, dismiss and then burn all books of a graphically sexual content prior to reading, a sweeping condemnation of devoutly religious proportions, say. Instead something in ‘120 Days of Sodom’ seemed to trigger a knee-jerk response which culminated with the burning of a book, I assume privately. What pushed him over the edge?
Far be it from me to credit anybody with intelligence, but one must assume that a reader enters into a relationship with de Sade based on a certain foreknowledge pertaining to his notoriety, to the subject matter commonly associated with him, to Salo, and if nothing else then to the other reviews written on Amazon. Yet still he bought it, this customer, read it and then burnt it. Am I missing something? You can’t have everything, sir. You can’t enjoy the (comparatively) mild piss-drinking and fart-swallowing anecdotes of the first circle without the bloody torturous sex-murders of the book’s second half. And would you want to? “All things are good when taken to excess”, after all. The review continues, “Towards the end there was a summary of the torture...” (the book was incomplete, yes, lost in the authors transferral between institutions. I don’t think de Sade simply got bored and reverted to bullet points to get the bugger finished more quickly); then: “I found it quite sick, that human beings could think of such horrors, never mind do them.” Oh yes, sweet Lord, heaven forbid that man might utilise imaginary thought to construct a work of fiction relating to the sexuality of fellow human beings and the darker psychosexual perversions present in a life above the law! In a world of rape, murder, war, destruction, how hard it is to believe that any man could write a book about a dark sexuality! After holocausts and genocides, ‘120 Days of Sodom’ is really the straw that broke the camel’s back, the very essence of its words destroying any shred of the human the 20th century might have left us with, its publication – nay, its very existence – representing the very end of moral fibre, the death of all hope! It’s a work of fiction, idiot. It uses fictional accounts of fictional situations to explore something greater than the sum of its parts. Did no one ever tell you to read between the lines a little of your mass market paperbacks (although I’m sure there isn’t much to see between the lines of D. Brown, or B. Shit), or to just think about what you’re doing, what you’re reading?
Then we get to the money shot (and how can such a short review feel so arduous?): “So before reaching the end I actually burnt the book, which may seem extreme, but that is how I felt about it. So, not for the faint hearted!” Indeed, not for the faint hearted. But then the faint hearted wouldn’t have bought de Sade, certainly wouldn’t have burnt a book. They’d be too faint of heart for that.
It’s the exclamation point, perhaps, that offends me most. So jolly, that cheeky little punctuation. Like he’s just thrown in a little gag at the end of the review lightening the mood from his entirely humourless and dreadful act of self-imposed censorship. Was it too inhuman, for him, this work of fiction? Was he protecting the human spirit from the evils of fucking and killing? If so, he was starting in the wrong place; the work of the long-dead de Sade is of little consequence to the horrors of the world, and if you don’t want to read something then please, don’t read it. Certainly don’t burn it. It can’t be good to be in the mindset where if you don’t like something your gut reaction is to burn it. Imagine the criminal implications of such unharnessed pyromania. Argument with the wife? Burn her. Don’t like your job? Set the fucking place on fire. In short then, it does, it does seem extreme. Parts of the book are pretty unpleasant, but that’s the point. It’s not erotica, it’s not Mills and Boon, it’s a devastating exploration of the darker sides of humanity, of social inequalities and – in these contemporary times – of mass production and material values, of the commodification of sellable sex. Entirely divorced from love and romance and without the shackles of a social system, sex becomes a truly free act (albeit a degrading one), primitive, very much taking its place at the forefront of human interaction, not relegated to the darkness of a repressed id. The Libertines themselves, four men of significant social standing in the ‘outside’ world who as such live their lives outside of the law, untouched, without interference. They are the law, as it were, a law unto themselves, corrupt and ghastly to the last, these Bishops, dukes and judges are the lords, the politicians, the CEO’s of today, the power and the money to be the freest men alive, a ticket out of anything.
When people start to burn books, when they think it’s a valid and reasonable response to a work of literature – irrespective of its content – this is a dangerous place to be. Even if this isolated – somehow tragically stupid – act of a particular reviewer is little more than his own moronic embarrassment, an internet-wide admission of his flimsy principles (the burning of this one book alone makes no difference, of course), it is still an attitude to be discouraged, vilified. It is censorship based on ideology (Nazi’s, Islam vs. S. Rushdie). No matter how poor, offensive, provocative a book might be it should not be burned. What is literature but a blueprint for further thought, a catalyst to contemplation, an invitation, even, to think and respond in kind? Not in flames but in kind. If not censorship it’s – and even worse – incitement to ignorance, or incitement to hatred.
I watched this programme about Rushdie’s fatwa, for ‘The Satanic Verses’, and I was surprised at just how violent it became, how fucking stupid people are. There were book burnings here, in the UK, in Bolton and Bradford, and effigies of Rushdie were burnt outside Parliament. In Central London. Like this is okay? It was inciting hatred and inviting violence; there was very real, internationally public death threat – or more of a death promise – in place, and so little was done about it. It doesn’t seem okay that you can burn effigies of a writer in public for writing a book deemed fucking blasphemous. On top of that, it seems even less right that nobody says a thing about these threats, this publically fuelled hatred, these real intents to cause harm, because they don’t want to tread on the toes of some religious belief. People did die, as well. Translators of the book stabbed to death. Even newsreader Peter Sissons got a fatwa after interviewing an Iranian representative about it all. He said something like “in a civilised [accentuation very much on the ‘civilised’] society we would not threaten to kill someone blah blah blah.” Dodgy choice of phrase, this civilised, but the sentiment was ultimately right (and civilisation doesn’t need to come into it): humane people don’t threaten to kill other people for a difference in opinion, and certainly not one expressed through a work of fiction. Thank fuck for Peter Sissons, the voice of (near) reason in any highly charged television interview scenario. And that was the funniest thing: half the fucking protestors hadn’t even read the book, and half of them said if Rushdie would merely print a disclaimer on the cover – like “this book is a work of fiction and in no way represents the actual truths portrayed with the Holy Qu’ran” etc. – then everything would probably be okay, no more fatwa. Absurd, to the highest order, more so because of the fact that the only people who would be offended by the question of truth or falsity in the book (‘The Satanic Verses’) are the same people who I would imagine ‘know’ that it is fictional because it does not correspond to the scripture, and are therefore acting solely as a result of some archaic religious law madness that demands Rushdie stoned, or something, to death. And this was, what, twenty years ago?
Reading Mr Customers review you see what progress we haven’t made. If he was still alive he’d probably have de Sade publically sodomized over a pile of his own burning manuscripts. That’d show him, blasphemous bastard.
