the line between natural and artificial decor. At one and the same time,
orgy connotes the hybrid, repetition, and equivalence, and constitutes a
scene. Parody, which may reflect admiration as much as censure, is distin-
guished from other forms of imitation by its heterogeneous diction. It
imitates and burlesques a discourse or code which it weds to other dis-
courses, without muffling the discord between them. Parody can be de-
fined in two essential ways: it can either reinscribe some classic discourse,
and thus have limited relevance, or else convey a subversive, innovative,
and plural discourse. Sade's novel falls largely under this second definition,
even though passages of it are borrowed or collaged or parodic in the nar-
row meaning of the word. The text is overwhelming and yet elusive, and
this phenomenon is not to be accounted for uniquely by the not inconsid-
erable dimension of self-parody. The essence of the text is parodic because the
Sadean imaginary doubles the parodic structures characteristic of the orgy motif,
that is, circularity and specularity, transgression, inversion, heterogeneity. ²

These are also the structures of carnival, and the popular, ribald strain
running through the orgy in the novel can be linked to carnivalesque lit-
erature. More clearly than this tradition, however, the Sadean orgy seems,
if we discount the difference in social levels, directly to inscribe the vio-
lence of the brutal real-life charivaris, which, as Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie shows in Carnival in Romans, turned at times into blood baths. ³ Con-
versely, even if the Sadean scene does preserve certain elements of carnival,
it lays much greater stress on pessimism and death. And yet Sade is even
closer to the eighteenth-century libertine novel in which the orgy, while
maintaining its connection to pornography, binds philosophy and eroti-
cism together in a line that goes back to Plato's Symposium. Admittedly,
the Roman Saturnalia -- the term reappears in several eighteenth-century titles -- linked orgy and carnival, but the differences between the two are
far deeper and more important than the similarities. The literature of car-
nival is not necessarily centered on eros. More particularly, carnival is a
public event, democratic in appearance if not in function, whereas the orgy
is for the elite and performed behind closed doors. Most of the actors who
take part in the orgy are aristocrats, and the action is played out amidst
luxury and abundance, all of which distorts the inversion of the class re-
lations characteristic of Saturnalia. ⁴ Readers are never in doubt as to the
aristocratic status of orgy, and any disproportion in rank among those in-
volved never poses a threat to social hierarchy. The only representatives of
the lower classes with whom the nobles consort are servants or prostitutes.
The stereotype of the marquise granting her favors to a valet could more
properly be described as the valet rendering his mistress a sexual service. ⁵

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