No novel more clearly demonstrates its dual economy on first reading than the Sadian novel: discursive economy on the one hand, which unrolls and strings together both a succession of events the narrative and a succession of arguments the discourse ; scenic economy on the other, which stops, blocks the discursive unfolding to give to see, to make tableau, to arrange in space and no longer to string together in time.
Traditionally, this double economy has a subversive function: the discursive economy establishes a symbolic norm, a frame of reference, customs, mores, rites, laws, a system ; the scenic economy transgresses this symbolic norm: technically defeating the discursive logic, it simultaneously questions the meaning, the validity, the spring of this norm. To move from the linearity of discourse to the device of the stage is to move from the establishment and repetition of a norm to the questioning and subversion of the norm.
The stage thus constitutes itself both semiologically and symbolically i. Scene versus discourse, then, such is the classic use of the novelistic scene, discourse being understood in the very broad sense of discursive logic, of everything that connects, both narrative and argumentative discourse proper 1. No doubt that the Sadian scene is supremely scandalous, nor that this scandal, indeed the visceral horror it arouses, is one of the mainsprings, if not the fundamental one, of the fascination that the Sadian text exerts on its reader.
But what norm does it transgress in the order of discourse, itself inhabited and colonized by the libertine's discourse, which merely prepares its advent and justifies its event? Sadistic perversion also works on a semiological level. While the subject matter and rhythm of the Sadian novel seem to mimic that of any novel of the classical era, the articulation of scene and discourse has been profoundly perverted. We'll begin by showing how the Sadian scene perverts the scenic devices it seems to mimic, tending to abolish the differential system by which they ordered both the system of looks and the production of meaning.
This abolition, this precipitation, this carrying away of the Sadian scene towards its own annihilation is paradoxically repaired by the discourse, which re-establishes a differential system of signification: in Sade there is not one, but two discourses, of vice and virtue, not one narrative route but two paths, which are also two competing sexual paths, the anal and the genital.
