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FREEDOMWAYS
THIRD QUARTER 1966
DE SADE UP-DATED

THE WIG. By Charles Wright. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York. 179 pages.
  $3.95

THE WIG ends with the hero having a red-hot steel rod jabbed into his penis.  At this sado-masochistic triumph over the vileness of masculinity, the hero beams ecstatically: "I'm feeling better already!"
  The reader, however, does not fare so well.  If he manages to avoid a bad attack of nausea after reading this book, it is because his sensibilities have already been dulled by the poisonous fumes of our cold-war culture.  The Wig does not in my opinion deserve a review at all, despite Charles Wright's undoubted talents.  It is a flimsy exercise in literary masturbation, juvenile in concept and execution.  It is worth dealing with only in terms of what it signifies, what it tells about the state of American literature.
  The resurrection of the Marquis de Sade indicates perhaps more than anything else the trend of our literary scene. What began almost innocently with Lolita has now come into full flower with the Theatre of Cruelty, the so-called “underground movies” and a stream of pornography of the most perverse kind. De Sade, who lived during the last era of the French monarchy, insisted that his lifetime preoccupation with horror was of great social and philosophical significance. And perhaps it was, amid the corrupt and crumbling relics of a feudal France with all its diseased glitter, which only the bloodbath of the French Revolution swept away. At other times he was read primarily as a chronicler of a pathological mental condition to which he bequeathed his name. The value of his book has been that of a psychiatric text rather than literary effort. But today de Sade is revived with great fanfare and his resurrectors-including some major writers and thinkers-insist that his writings are indeed of great social significance, even revolutionary.
  It is strange that this society, which relentlessly hunts down anyone who presumes to criticize it, much less revolutionize it, should be so eager to applaud the “rebels” of its fiction and drama, rebels whose war cry is not against exploitation, misery, injustice and hunger, but against the supposed “Puritan” censorship of our communications media-uprisings not for human improvement, but for the unrestrained traffic in drugs and pornography. This society welcomes any philosophy, any artistic or literary expression which sees 

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-09 13:20:33