THE CHRONOTOPE OF THE BANQUET IN SADE: THE REBIRTH OF THE GROTESQUE
banquet; carnavalization; chronotope; grotesque; novel.
Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade, lived in France between the 18th and 19th centuries. Despite his titles, he became famous for his radical libertine sexuality practiced and exponentially represented in his works, which include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political treatises. This occurred despite the rejection and prohibitions that his publications historically suffered until very recent times. In fact, his literary images were confused with his own reality, in addition to being pointed out as encouraging perversion, which, for many experts, mistakenly associated his name with a psychiatric typification, resulting in names such as sadist and sadism. From then on, in a dialogue established over a period of almost three centuries, between the context of Sade, 18th century, and that of François Rabelais, 16th century, the fundamental theoretical studies of Bakhtin (1989; 1998a; 2010a; 2010b; 2018a; 2018b; 2022) and Voloshinov (2018; 2019), with the support of works by one of the greatest experts on Sade, namely, Moraes (2006; 2013; 2015; 2017; 2021), were crucial in establishing a dialogue between Sade's text (1785), namely, Les 120 journées de Sodome ou L’École du Libertinage, and that of Rabelais' complete works (1861), Ouvres de F. Rabelais, the latter two being the works that make up our corpus. Bakhtin's theoretical-literary studies on the chronotope guided our analytical activity with the perception of a common and creative element in the works of the corpus: the chronotope of the banquet. Thus, we analyzed the aforementioned category from different perspectives in order to perceive, in our investigation, the compositional contiguities between the aforementioned texts under the aspect of transformations, maintenance and/or absences of elements of this same chronotope, guided by a dialogue under a carnivalesque and grotesque axiology such as, for example, the factors of hyperbolization and hybridization in the composition in line with its own axiology. In this process, passages that reinforced the hypothesis of compositional contiguity between the works of the corpus were selected. Thus, the Rabelaisian chronotope was the most specialized analytical category for achieving the possibility of establishing, or not, a compositional dialogue between Sade and Rabelais.