Two Centuries of Diderot
I
When Milan Kundera hears the well-worn critical question “Is the novel dead?” he brings out his literary pistol and shoots out five syllables: De-nis Di-de-rot.
Diderot, born in 1713 and dead in 1784, did many things and did them all well. Editor of the Encyclopedia, theoretician of the theater, founder of modern literary and art criticism, materialist philosopher, and, if that were not enough, mentor to Catherine of Russia, Diderot is, as the Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco has said, unembraceable.
Unembraceable Diderot was (besides? above all?) a novelist and, according to Kundera, the greatest example we have that, far from exhausting its possibilities, the novel has yet to saunter down unexplored or forgotten paths, listen to muffled calls, and fully accomplish its possibilities in the realms of playfulness and criticism, fabulation, humor, creative novelty, and the endless potentialities of the ars combinatoria. This call to novelistic arms — risk, discovery, a growing perception of an endless reality — is there, if one wants to hear it, in the fictions of Denis Diderot.
Kundera’s critical concept of the potential novels contained in the inexhausted novels of the past is part of an aesthetics of reception. How to make the past present? Diderot wrote in the eighteenth century. Why are we capable of reading and understanding him more and more with the passage of time? Why does a writer such as Diderot become more and more present instead of more and more absent? What is the secret of artistic presence? This is my question from and for Diderot on the bicentennial of his death: my question homage.
Boileau, in his Poetics, excludes the novel from his system of genres, and in order to make themselves look respectable, the novelists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries swear eternal fealty to the classics in their prefaces. The novel is born without parents because it makes its debut as a potential fact, unforeseeable and unclassifiable in a world which only wants to recognize itself in the classical, since the classical is, by definition, the recognizable, or, as Hegel put it, classical is that which signifies itself and interprets itself, with no need for mediation.
Given this orphaned background, Diderot sets out, precisely, to write a novel that is nothing but an act of perpetual mediation between the author and the reader, an exchange of insecure signs, a constant rupture of the dramatic unities and of linear narrative. Diderot’s fiction is an emission of uncertain questions: Is this a novel? Are you a reader? Am I a writer?
Jacques le Fataliste, Diderot’s great novel, was published between 1796 and 1798, more than two centuries ago, and posthumously. Yet it is not only one of the great novels of the eighteenth century; it is one of the great novels of the twentieth century: it is vibrantly contemporary. The novel begins as a dialogue between Jacques the servant and his master; but it finally becomes a vast debate between the author and the time of his readers. But the premise of what I am saying is this: Diderot the philosopher is acutely conscious of the demands of classical poetics; the narrative must respect the unities of time, place, and action. Diderot the sociologist is equally aware of the traditional expectations of the reading public of his own time. But Diderot the artist swiftly proceeds to break the unities and to frustrate the expectations. The artist finally triumphs over the rationalist and the statistician.
This does not mean, of course, that Diderot’s art is deprived of either philosophical reason or social content. Diderot the materialist philosopher, a profound reader of Lucretius, wishes to think and write in the same fashion that nature produces: indifferently, in perpetual clash, and open to the accidents of chance. Akin to nature, the narrative text in Diderot never rests. Comparable to matter, it mixes, assimilates, digests, and expels everything (this was the principal romantic criticism — Schlegel’s — against Diderot): but, once more like matter and like nature, Diderot’s narrative performance is constantly rehearsing new forms. The reader of Lucretius is also a reader of Heraclitus, and one of the most beautiful definitions of the philosophy of movement comes from the pen of Diderot:
All is perpetual flux. The spectacle of the universe offers but a passing geometry, a momentary order.
Instead of “the spectacle of the universe,” Diderot could have said the presence of the world, or the presence in the world of human beings, the societies they inhabit, and the cultures they generate.
II
Diderot has ceased to be, strictly, a novelist of the eighteenth century. He is a contemporary novelist and he shows us that art does not progress: art is and makes itself present.
Presence, points out Roger Kempf in his admirable study Diderot and the Novel, is the passion which rules Diderot’s relationship to the novel. The passion for presence is, likewise, the technique that the French writer employs to give life to his fictions. “Sensation,” states Diderot, “does not possess the successive development of speech; and if sensation could speak through twenty mouths, each mouth saying its own word, all that I have said could have been said at the same time.”
Diderot is fascinated by the possibility of identifying the intensity of presence and the simultaneity of expression. On another occasion, he declares: “Everything has been written at the same time.” Borges would analyze the anguish of the literary mind, capable of seeing the simultaneity of things, as in a painting, but only capable of writing those same things down successively, because language is successive. In Borges’s story The Aleph, everything can be seen at once, and each and every one of the actions of this world, “pleasurable or atrocious,” can occupy the same point in space, without superimposition or transparency.
Before Borges, but after Diderot, Balzac in his novel Louis Lambert had given the most desperate literary form to a desperate endeavor: how to give verbal expression to thought processes far swifter than words. Lambert is the most intelligent man in the world, yet his verbal impotence transforms him into the world’s most stupid man. His thoughts are far too quick, and rich, and immediate, to achieve verbal expression. So he sits in a darkened room, unfurnished save for the chair (Van Gogh’s chair?) occupied by this forecast of the man Nietzsche, Louis Lambert, whose thoughts take place in the order of the simultaneous while his words occur in the order of the successive. He can no longer communicate. The poignancy of this novel is all the greater since Balzac presents Lambert as his alter ego: they share the same biographical origins (in this novel, Balzac describes his life as a schoolboy) but not the same biographical destiny. Balzac writes a vast constellation of novels before his death at age fifty. Lambert cannot write, or even say, anything. He cannot communicate. In Louis Lambert, Balzac powerfully foresees not only the Nietzchean figure of intelligence and stupidity hand in hand but also Mann’s Adrian Leverkühn in his Faustian exchange of creativity for illness and of genius for death. He poses all these literary and philosophical possibilities within the boundary of the relationship between time and the manifestation of time.