/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10876697]

Do you think Marquis de Sade’s work has any redeeming qualities or was he simply a purveyor of vulgar trash? Seriously, what the fuck was up with this guy?

[Anonymous No.10876717]

>>10876697
A great, great writer, one of the greatest ever. He reinvented sex, not many people can say that.

[Anonymous No.10876732]

The writing is exceptional.
However, I think he was trying too hard to see how far he could go until he got killed. That or he was writing out his fantasies on a era without internet.

[Anonymous No.10876742]

Philosophy in the bedroom has some fun intellectual conversations in between the degeneracy scenes.

[Anonymous No.10876830]

>poo poo yum yum
Yes a great writer

[Anonymous No.10876889]

>>10876697

de Sade certainly could write decently and knew his way around words very well. The subject matter however, is not quite horrendous - it's simply fantastic, with no grasp of actual reality. The unbearable woes he inputs onto his characters are just that, plainly unbearable, and no one would be able to live through, let alone authentically experience (i.e without fading out/dying ahead of time), half of those machinations of inducing despair.

His works are a perfect case of "the idea of X can be so much more dreadful than X itself", and he would certainly have been a prominent fanfic writer today. It's also humorous that during his later years he was imprisoned by the Napoleonic regime and "subjected" to enacting his own plays using prisoners as actors several times over. He was also married to a 14 year old a couple years before he died, presumably nothing of the horrendous sort was done to her other than, well, having sex with de Sade.

To put it simply, his works present good insight into the mind of a degenerate but not a good insight of degeneracy itself. It plays out much more beautifully and horrendously in his head, than reality is able to reflect.