Illustration for Pauliska ou la Perversité moderne (1798)
by Jacques-Antoine Révéroni de Saint-Cyr [1]
"L'amour est une rage; il peut s’inoculer par la morsure ..."
I.
The Marquis de Sade may be the best-known aristocratic French author writing dark Gothic fiction with a sexually explicit flavour, but he wasn't the only one.
And I'm slowly getting round to read Révéroni de Saint-Cyr's two-volume novel Pauliska ou la Perversité moderne (1798); finally translated into English, by Erik Butler, and published by Tartarus Press (2018) [2].
II.
Considered a (minor) classic of its kind, the work tells the story of a young Polish countess, Pauliska, as she travels around Europe, à la Sally Bowles, "inch by inch, step by step, mile by mile, man by man" [3], and misfortune by misfortune [4].
Combining supernatural elements with those of an erotic nature, the book is essentially a fatalistic meditation on desire, depravity, and the accursed nature of a life determined more by chance and random events, than moral law or human reason.
The suggestion is therefore given that we are all just helpless playthings, or, if you prefer, victims awaiting our own senseless death, rather than free-willing agents who can shape what happens to us and build an orderly world.
Pauliska, is thus a deliberate slap in the face of those philosophes promoting the ideals of the Enlightenment, which is perhaps why Foucault seems to be such a fan of the work ...
III.
Writing in a text entitled 'So Cruel a Knowledge' [5], Foucault delights in the novel's opening where we encounter Pauliska fleeing a burning castle, as invading soldiers rape and disembowel the chambermaids; their screams reverberating in her ears as she makes good her escape:
"Pauliska abandons her scorched lands to the Cossacks [...] her countrywomen bound to the pale trunks of the maples, her servants mutilated and their mouths covered with blood. She seeks refuge in Old Europe [...] which sets all its traps for her at one go. Strange traps, in which it is hard to recognise the familiar ones of male flattery, worldly pleasures, scarcely intended falsehoods, and jealousy. What is taking form is an evil much less metaphysical [...] an evil very close to the body and meant for it: A modern perversity." [6]
This, obviously, is not good news for Pauliska, who encounters all kinds of terrifying men belonging to all sorts of strange sect, secret society, or criminal gang: political fanatics, libertines, counterfeiters, mad scientists, religious mystics, she is misfortunate enough to meet (and fall victim) to them all.
Foucault writes:
"In this underground world the misfortunes lose their chronology and link up with the world's most ancient cruelties. In reality, Pauliska is fleeing a millennial conflagration, and the partition [of Poland] of 1795 casts her into an ageless cycle. She falls into the castle of evil spells where the corridors close up, where the mirrors tell lies and watch what passes before them, where the air distills strange poisons [...] It is a paradoxical initiation not into the lost secret but into all those agonies that man never forgets." [7]
This initiation into suffering - into evil - is achieved, says Foucault, through silent myths and wordless complicity; Pauliska is kept in the "harsh and monotonous condition of the object" [8].
And what is it she has to learn?
That mankind will never establish a world of peace, justice, and freedom, because the savage truth is this; "man is nothing but a dog to man; law is the appetite of the beast" [9], and we're all trapped inside a giant cage from which there is no escape (for even death, as Nick Land reminds us, is at best, a temporary pause or refreshment before the inevitable return to the compulsive dissipation of life) [10].
Alternatively, dear reader, if you prefer we end with a different metaphor ...
We're all bound - virtuous and wicked alike - naked on an enormous electric wheel; just like Pauliska at the end of Révéroni's novel. And when this diabolical object par excellence begins to turn, sparks will fly and we'll cry out in endless agony.
Notes
[1] Born in 1767, Jacques-Antoine Révéroni de Saint-Cyr belonged to an Italian family that followed Catherine de' Medici to
France in the 16th century. Unhappy with his less-than-glittering military career, Révéroni
decided to try his hand as a writer. Sadly, despite writing a large number of plays, novels, and essays, Révéroni never quite established himself as a man of letters and when he died, insane, in 1829, he was already more or less forgotten.
[2] Readers who wish for a recent French edition of Révéroni Saint-Cyr's novel might like to see the one edited by Antoine de Baecque (Payot & Rivages, 2001).
[3] Lyric from the song 'Mein Herr', written by Fred Ebb, with music by John Kander, for the film Caberet (1972), directed by Bob Fosse. The character Sally Bowels was famously played by Liza Minnelli.
[4] Pauliska is clearly indebted to Sade's novel Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu (1791), although it arguably possesses its own unique charm.
[5] Michel Foucault, 'So Cruel a Knowledge', in the Essential Works 2: Aesthetics, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 53-67.
[6] Ibid., p. 54.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., p. 56.
[9] Ibid., p. 57.
[10] See Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 180.
