In our most recent post Dr Julie Bates and Dr Feargal Whelan, collaborators with the Library in a Trinity Week project, touched on the question of the quality of literary writing materials. Does the cultural value of poor quality materials alter depending on who wrote on them, or where they were produced or where they are read? In today’s post the two authors consider this question in relation to the manuscripts of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814).
The eighteenth-century libertine Le Marquis de Sade created his most challenging work Le 120 Journées de Sodome (The 120 Days of Sodom) while incarcerated in the notorious Bastille prison in Paris in 1785. The book itself is a deeply disturbing work of cruelty, nihilism and indulgence – a book that is aggressively pornographic and transgressive, yet its method of composition and the artefact of its manuscript are remarkable in their own right. It should be noted that Beckett was a great admirer of the book, seeing beneath its surface obscenity a brutal examination of the limits of literature – Beckett even considered translating the book into English!
Having become involved in the French Resistance during the war, Samuel Beckett had to flee Paris with his partner Suzanne, going on the run before eventually seeing out the war in the village of Roussillon in the south of the country. Throughout the whole period of adversity he carried a notebook in which he wrote what eventually became the novel Watt which was published in 1953. He wrote it ‘in dribs and drabs’ as a way ‘to stay sane’ he said of the book. The manuscript contained in the notebook, now at the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas at Austin, contains an inflated version of the novel, adorned with doodles and drawings, which has been compared to an illuminated manuscript such as the Book of Kells. Beckett’s notebook has become an artefact with an aesthetic value beyond the mere narrative it contains. When Beckett returned to Ireland through England at the end of the war he was debriefed by the intelligence services who suspected the manuscript was written in code!
Sade’s book was written on small pieces of parchment which de Sade had smuggled in to his cell. He glued these fragments together to make a continuous scroll, 12 metres long, on which he wrote the piece in tiny handwriting, and which he kept in a copper cylinder. Following the storming of the Bastille which led to his release at the beginning of the Revolution, he hid the scroll in a crevice in his cell fearing its confiscation. The manuscript appeared to have been lost but resurfaced a number of years later, changing hands on a number of occasions, until it ended up, in 2014, in the possession of a Swiss investment broker who was subsequently convicted of fraud. When the scroll came up for auction, the French Government intervened to declare the item a national treasure.
The questions raised by the story of Sade’s manuscript and the creation of the Watt notebook echo some of those in this blog and the current exhibition in the Long Room. Sade’s scroll was fashioned by an incarcerated individual from poor materials into a medium for their work, and was transformed by the story of its creation, hiding, discovery, and passage from one owner to another into something beyond its material status and the words it carries – indeed, into a national treasure. Similarly, in hiding from persecution, Beckett filled this notebook and ended up with a multi-faceted and highly valued artefact. This prompts a series of questions, including: Are these manuscripts works of art in themselves, independent of their narrative content? What relationship exists between the writing as script and the material on which it is written? Does one intensify or moderate the other? Sade’s scroll is now a national treasure but would the book it contains have ever gained that status had it only existed on paper and ink? Does the act of creation under duress make either the work or the author any greater? And a final question to which we find ourselves returning during this project: what effect does incarceration have on creativity?
Dr Feargal Whelan (Centre for Beckett Studies) and Dr Julie Bates (School of English)