When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and the artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have one in regard to the eye in a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy the details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave toward the book as we do toward a painting.

When Nabokov makes a distinction between “what the book is about” and our “artistic appreciation” of the book, he is separating our reading of the subject, story and characters — the book’s aboutness — from our appreciation of the book’s so-called artistic qualities, the details we would notice if we looked at a novel the way we look at a painting.

Nabokov assumes that we all look at paintings for more than the resemblance they bear to old dead people in funny clothes, for more than romantic seascapes and sunsets. He assumes that we see, for example, Whistler’s mother as something other than an elderly lady in a plain black dress and that we know, perhaps, that the painting of Whistler’s mother was originally titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black” and that when Whistler talked about painting he would say, as he did in a letter to his friend Fantin-Latour:

…it seems to me that color ought to be, as it were, embroidered on the canvas, that is to say, the same color ought to appear in the picture continually here and there, in the same way that a thread appears in an embroidery, and so should all the others, more or less according to their importance; in this way the whole will form a harmony.

Whistler is talking about patterns, patterns of color that exist over and above and through the subject of the picture, its aboutness. And when Nabokov talks about “artistic appreciation,” he is talking about appreciating the patterns of the novel in the same way, the repetition of certain verbal events or structures in a novel like the colors in a painting. This is precisely the way we appreciate poetry, where it is, as I have said, much easier to see that sounds and words are like oil paints or, for that matter, like notes in a piece of music…

What they did was put a theory to the things painters like Whistler and, soon after, the French Impressionists, and Surrealist poets like Breton, Eluard and Ponge — all the way back to Mallarme (Nabokov sneaks Mallarme quotations into his novels) — had been doing ten, twenty, thirty or more years before. They simply recognized that aboutness and pattern were two aspects of the things we call art and language, and that you could, in fact, have pattern without aboutness.

Since it seem impossible to have aboutness without pattern, a corollary of this is that aboutness is somehow secondary, a poor cousin, on the aesthetic scale of things, to pattern. Nabokov again:

There are…two varieties of imagination in the reader’s case… First, there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature… A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.

This is what the post-Sausurrean critics, recently so popular in Europe and on American university campuses, are saying. Aboutness is old-fashioned, authoritarian, and patriarchal. Signs — read, pattern, poetry — are playful, subversive, and female. How a thinker can jump from a purely logical incongruence — the fact that, apparently, you can have pattern without aboutness but not vice versa — to these strings of value-loaded predicates is marvelous indeed and evidence that the instinct for narrative and romance has not died behind the ivy-covered walls of academe.

Another corollary of splitting the categories of pattern and aboutness is that there is a sense in which pattern itself creates meaning. Or to put it another way, the novel is about its own form. Or every book is about another book, or books. And every work of art is a message on a string of messages which begins nowhere and ends nowhere, to no one and from no one, and about nothing except the field of pseudo-meaning created by previous and future messages. It is all a game of mirrors and echoes. A little dance of images, words, and patterns. The of the Hindus, or all is vanity, all is dust, sure enough.

Keats wrote, “A man’s life is an allegory.” Nothing else. Or conversely, Korzybski says, “The map (read, the allegory, the pattern, the words) is not the territory.” Which is to say, as Jacques Lacan does, that all utterances are symptomatic and that the real is impossible.

Back in the 1920s, Brecht had started an adaptation of The Pit, Frank Norris’s epic novel about the extravagances of the Chicago wheat exchange, but what had interested Brecht was not the wheat exchange as such but the corrupting process that separated the growing of wheat from the final loaf. As in his Saint Joan of the Stockyards, he wanted to pit the soulless entrepreneur, Joe Fleischhacker, against the humble creator, the baker, and to dramatize the creator’s triumph over the merchants. After a long talk with a German-American writer named Ferdinand Reyher, Brecht wrote in his Arbeitsjournal: “I tell Reyher the plan for the Joe Fleischhacker in Chicago, and in a couple of hours we develop a film story, The Bread King Learns Bread Baking. There is no real bread in the States, and I really like to eat bread: my main meal is at night, and it is bread and butter. R thinks the Americans have always been nomads, and nomads understand nothing about eating.” The idea of these two nomad writers was that Joe Fleischhacker, the villainous millionaire, should find happiness in munching bread baked by a poor farmer’s wife. When he tried to buy her recipe, waving his checkbook as a weapon, he was told that good bread required not only good flour but “one day of good work; one world of good neighbors; a heart of good will; and a good appetite.”

Brecht finished this peculiar scenario on a Saturday night in October of 1941, and he was so pleased with himself that he hurried over to MGM the following Tuesday to present his creation to Max Reinhardt’s don, Gottfried, who was then working as an assistant to one of the studio’s leading producers, Bernie Hyman. “For an hour and a half,” Reinhardt recalled, “Brecht fascinated me in his unalloyed Augsburg dialect with a film story about the production, distribution, and enjoyment of bread… He had the right man but the wrong place, and he had no illusions when I said as he left that I would try my best to sell the story.” Reinhardt apparently did make some effort to interest MGM in Brecht’s idea, but the results were predictable. Brecht’s scenario, Reinhardt later observed, “had as much chance of being sold to MGM as ‘Gone with the Wind’ had of being played at the Berliner Ensemble.”

But Brecht did have illusions. He registered his idea about bread at the Screen Writers Guild to protect his claims on it. And his journal records at the end of 1941 include a frantic assortment of movie projects: a biography of the labor leader Samuel Gompers, which William Dieterle hoped to direct; an adapatation of Arthur Schnitzler’s comedy Reigen, which was supposed to interest Charles Boyer; a lost work known as Days of Fire. The journal even contains lists of Brechtian titles: Refugees Both, The Senator’s Conscience, The Traitor, and … Boy Meets Girl, So What?

“Again and again,” Brecht wrote, “seeking a living, I am told:

Show us what you’re made of
Lay it on the table!
Deliver the goods!
Say something to inspire us! Tell us of your own greatness!
Divine our secret desires!
Show us the way out
Make yourself useful!
Deliver the goods!

… Freud says that the super-ego is something we make; it in turn makes something of us, turns us into a certain kind of person (just as, say, Frankenstein’s monster turns Frankenstein into something that he wasn’t before he made the monster). The super-ego casts us as certain kinds of character; it, as it were, tells us who we really are; it is an essentialist; it claims to know us in a way that no one else, including ourselves, can ever do. And, like a mad god, it is omniscient: it behaves as if it can predict the future by claiming to know the consequences of our actions – when we know, in a more imaginative part of ourselves, that most actions are morally equivocal, and change over time in our estimation. (No apparently self-destructive act is ever only self-destructive, no good is purely and simply that.) Self-criticism is an unforbidden pleasure: we seem to relish the way it makes us suffer. Unforbidden pleasures are the pleasures we don’t particularly want to think about: we just implicitly take it for granted that each day will bring its necessary quotient of self-disappointment, that every day we will fail to be as good as we should be; but without our being given the resources, the language, to wonder who or what is setting the pace, or where these rather punishing standards come from. How can we find out what we think of all this when conscience never lets go? …

Although Sade was never to know it, his manuscript had survived that night, and every night since: having been smuggled out of the Bastille it was handed down through three generations of one French family before appearing at auction and then being bought by a German sexologist, who published it in Berlin in 1904 as The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage. Publication made the manuscript’s subsequent movements, if anything, still more mysterious. It has since been stolen at least once, and been the subject of a great deal of litigation. For decades it couldn’t travel outside Switzerland because of fears it might be seized by the French authorities. Last year it sold at auction for €7 million; Lloyd’s insured it for €12 million.

... Understanding Sade means understanding his libertines. Justine grew through ever more attention being given to them, with each successive version casting more light on what these supremely ruthless men and women are doing. What is made immediately clear is that they are not hedonists, and are not simply following their desires. Their pleasure principle is rigorous and reasoned, and their ultimate goal isn’t even pleasure in any easily recognisable form. This is not so much because it contains pain – it’s a common enough idea, from ancient Greece to recent studies in neuroscience, that pain and pleasure are wedded in mysterious ways – but because their goal is to feel nothing at all, precisely as they perform the most criminal acts imaginable. Sade’s libertines cede to every criminal, harmful, violent impulse that occurs to them; they find that reason not only encourages but obliges them to do so. But the same does not apply to generous or loving desires. They strive to reason away any kind or caring impulse that might come to mind. A libertine in Juliette speaks for all her fellows when she describes ‘a tranquillity, a repose in the passions, a stoicism that allows me to do everything and suffer everything without emotion’. (The true Sadean libertine is never a sadist in the modern or medical sense of the term: although they freely cause pain to the bodies around them, they are ideally indifferent to anything those bodies experience.) This is why the scenes of debauch are so theatrical, so architectural, so excessive, as well as being the reason they are largely unsensual (in that they make few appeals to any sense but sight). We are told in precise detail who is whipping whom while perched on what, we are given the exact position of gardener, turkey-cock, cleric and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, but there is almost no sensual detail, no tingling of excitement, no tiny modulation of voice, no warmth of touch, no odour. What Sade presents is a scenography, and he makes no secret of the fact: he routinely employs terms from the theatre such as ‘scene’, ‘act’, ‘posture’, ‘position’ and ‘tableau’. You aren’t meant to imagine that you’re there and participating: you’re meant to imagine that you’re watching. But the most important thing that Sade’s idea of an exalted apathy explains is why the books can never end and why their libertines are so enraged.

Sade’s philosophy describes a circle of fire in which the libertines are trapped. The first stage of their dialectic of Enlightenment involves doing away with God in favour of Nature. Nature burns away religious belief through the heat of its passions – or so it seems to the apprentice libertine. But things can’t end so harmoniously. For what is Nature, when capitalised in that way? ‘Whore!’ says Juliette, as it dawns on her that Nature is just one more imposition of order on chaos – less obviously erroneous than a Christian God, but of the same immaterial substance. If you are a libertine in Sade’s world you are seeking to break something you fear is unbreakable: belief in order and care for others. This is where real libertine rage sets in. In the speech that gave the Musée d’Orsay their exhibition title, a libertine cries out that he wants ‘to attack the sun so as to deprive the universe of it, or use it to set the world aflame’. The same rage makes a libertine elsewhere in Sade cry out: ‘Oh, if I could set the universe on fire, I should still curse Nature for offering only one world to my fiery desires!’ With the loss of a coherent idea of Nature the libertine loses, as Juliette loses, a coherent idea of crime: Juliette is forced to conclude that ‘crime has no reality: that is, the possibility of crime does not exist because there is no way to outrage nature.’ Sade’s libertines dream of apathy, but for them apathy is like the grail – they can never quite reach it.

‘Far from placing desire above all,’ Blanchot observed, ‘Sade judged it suspect and subordinated it.’ Desire fully felt moves you towards someone, and the very point of the libertine exercise was to move away from them, to ascend ever higher into the empyrean of one’s own autonomy. So much of our energy, Sade observes, flows towards others. Were we able to reverse that flow, to feel all our energy flood back into ourselves, we would be truly free. This is the libertines’ end. That is why they do all they do: why every ounce of fellow feeling has to be systematically stamped out. ‘It is no accident that sadism, as an individual phenomenon bearing the name of a man,’ Foucault remarked in his (unpublished) lectures on Sade, ‘was born of confinement and, within confinement, that Sade’s entire work is dominated by the images of the Fortress, the Cell, the Cellar, the Convent, the inaccessible island, which thus form, as it were, the natural habitat of unreason.’