by Steven Moore
The nephew is an amazing comic creation, a Rabelaisian motormouth who pantomimes and makes faces as he talks, attracts a crowd as he imitates an opera (singing/playing/acting all the parts), and whose cynical defense of his sycophantic life gradually breaks down as he confesses his feelings of failure to fulfill his own talent and achieve what his famous uncle did. Talent and the nature of genius obsess both speakers—the nephew admitting he lacks them, Diderot hoping he does, despite (and to spite) his malicious critics—as does the question of education, since both have children, putting personal philosophy to a practical test. (It is in this context Diderot makes an observation that Freud later admitted anticipated his theory of the Oedipus complex.178) They tackle the most important challenge in ethics and morality, namely distinguishing between the “two kinds of laws: some absolutely equitable and universal, others capricious and only owing their authority to blindness or force of circumstances” (39; the latter, which many people confuse with the former, are the ones the philosophes sought to overturn.) This extraordinary novel has to be read to be believed, and to appreciate the suppleness and vitality of Diderot’s dialogue (impressive enough in his earlier novels); the nephew admits his own style “is the hell of a hybrid squawking, half literary world, half fish-market” (112), and Mr. Philosopher enjoys hearing him talk even as he recoils from his amoral hedonism. It’s an astonishing performance, a tragicomic duet in several keys, and even though Diderot didn’t publish it—it would have got him in great trouble—he knew he trounced his critics, all of whom are forgotten now. Appropriately enough, the last words of the novel are, “He laughs best who laughs last” (125).
D’Alembert’s Dream (Le Rêve de d’Alembert, written 1769) opens in the middle of a heady discussion between Diderot and his coeditor of the Encyclopedia about the materialistic (atheist) view of life and the universe, which Diderot urges upon the mathematician. The next morning, d’Alembert’s housemate, Mademoiselle de L’Espinasse, tells a visiting doctor that d’Alembert has been raving all night, uttering broken fragments of his earlier discussion with Diderot. The doctor interprets and expands upon these remarks as they discuss a wide range of scientific topics and speculations. (It is safe to say that, prior to this novel, no man ever asked a woman “to strip yourself of your present bodily organization and return for a moment to the time when you were simply a soft, fibrous, shapeless, vermicular substance, more comparable to a bulb or root than to an animal” [189].) Later that day, after d’Alembert wakes and leaves, the doctor returns at Mademoiselle’s invitation for a frank talk about sexual matters, specifically chastity—which they both agree is an abomination to nature—masturbation and homosexuality (acceptable), and the possibilities of human–animal breeding (intriguing – their view, not mine). The novel is essentially a talking-heads review of the latest scientific findings and their philosophical implications (the doctor speaks for polymathic Diderot), with prescient remarks about evolution, DNA, and genetics, among other things. But it lacks the appeal of Rameau’s Nephew; it’s an important document in the intellectual history of the 18th century rather than its literary history. One of his biographers claims, “In its philosophical sweep and imaginative power, Le Rêve de d’Alembert is Diderot’s greatest work of all” (Wilson, 559), but it’s not his greatest novel.
The unnatural perversion of abstinence recurs in Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage (Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, 1772), which Diderot wrote shortly after reviewing Louis-Antoine Bougainville’s Voyage around the World, notorious for its description of the sexual freedom in Tahiti. In Diderot’s novella—which begins in fog, dispersed on the final page by the sun of clear thinking—a character denominated B. tells his friend A. he is reading Bougainville’s Voyage, which they discuss. B. then shows A. two sections left out of the book (Diderot’s own inventions): an old Tahitian’s insulting farewell speech to Bougainville, and a discussion between a younger Tahitian and a French priest comparing the two nations’ sex and marriage customs. The novella concludes with A. and B., two of civilization’s discontents, agreeing that France’s laws on these matters are “insane,” but should be honored until they can be abolished. The novella recalls the conflict between the two kinds of laws mentioned in Rameau’s Nephew, namely, the laws of nature versus those of civilization. Regarding monogamy, for example, the young Tahitian asks: “Does anything, really, seem more senseless than a commandment which makes a sin of the changeableness which is in all of us and dictates a constancy which is not to be found in any of us, which violates the nature and the liberty of man and woman by chaining them to each other forever?”179 A. and B. have nowhere near the personalities of Mr. Philosopher and Rameau’s nephew, and the Tahitian commentators are just Diderot in a grass skirt, but the novella is a sensible study in cultural relativity—“Don the garb of other countries when one goes there,” as A. says, “but dress like one’s neighbors at home” (112)—and a call not for primitivism but for “Enlightenment utilitarianism, evolving out of the older natural law and basing itself on the emerging sciences of the nature and behavior of man” (Wilson, 590). The novella is included in Feher’s Libertine Reader because of its fantasies of sexual freedom, but it’s more at home in Kramnick’s Portable Enlightenment Reader, which contains a few excerpts from it.
It was about this time that Diderot wrote an ingenious story called “This Is Not a Story” (“Ceci n’est pas un conte”), in which a captious reader argues with the author. By this time Diderot had fallen under the spell of Tristram Shandy, and the nature of the author–reader relationship inspired both this story and Diderot’s greatest novel, which could have been called “This Is Not a Novel.”180 Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (Jacques le fataliste et son maître), written in the 1770s but not published until after his death,181 might offhandedly be described as a cross between Candide and Tristram Shandy. Instead of mocking Leibniz-inspired optimism and its catchphrase “the best of all possible worlds,” it targets Spinoza-inspired fatalism that insists that everything that happens “was written up there, on high” in “the great scroll”; instead of a linear story told by a confident, sarcastic narrator, we have a tangle of story-lines crossing and interrupting each other, told out of chronological sequence by a peevish narrator being pestered by a conventional-minded reader; instead of concluding, Jacques suddenly stops, followed by an invitation to the reader from the narrator to wrap it up while he does further research into the memoirs he’s been using for his book, returning a week later to offer a lame conclusion he found but which he has doubts about.182 Twice as long as Candide but half the length of Tristram Shandy, it has the velocity of the former and the endearing eccentricity of the latter.
On one level, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master describes the adventures of a loquacious valet and his employer as they travel over a 10-day period to a city where the master has some business to take care of. (James Nicholls suggests the trip is between Paris and Langres, Diderot’s birthplace, in August 1765.) To pass the time, the master—a nameless conformist whose activities are mostly limited to taking snuff, consulting his timepiece, and listening to his valet talk—asks Jacques to recount his amorous adventures, which the valet reluctantly begins but never finishes, partly because of his own Sternean digressions, partly because of constant interruptions by events on the road and by others’ stories, almost all of which involve staging a duplicitous fiction of some sort. (The longest is by a landlady who is also frequently interrupted as she tells the story of a woman who takes elaborate revenge on a decent man who gradually fell out of love with her, only to have it backfire; the master tells another long one that sets up the novel’s unexpected ending.) As the story-lines proliferate, the reader is enmeshed “in a network of lines that enlace,”183 engineered by a narrator who insists on telling all this in his own fashion, not as the reader might expect it. For “this isn’t a novel” (34), he insists, but a documentary history, and he wants to be true to his sources, not to the conventions of fiction.
He sniffs, “I don’t care for novels, unless they’re by Richardson”—who also pretended his were true—for “there’s nothing easier than churning out a novel. We’ll stick with the truth” (199) he bluffs in this fiction about fiction. What he’s really saying is “let people tell their stories their own way,” as Tristram Shandy pleads (9.25).
As engaging as all the stories in Jacques the Fatalist are—and this is a fun book to read, despite (if not because of) its experimental complications—the most interesting story is about the author and reader. They get off on the wrong foot at the very beginning, which opens with the reader asking questions with childish insistence: “How had they met? [asks the reader] By chance, like everyone else [the author snaps]. What were their names? What’s it to you? Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Does anyone really know where they’re going?” (3). The reader shuts up long enough to let the author begin the novel in medias res, who halts after a page (when Jacques and his master stop for the night) to let the reader know who’s the boss:
You see, Reader, I’m into my stride and I have it entirely in my power to make you wait a year, two years, three years, to hear the story of Jacques’s love affairs, by separating him from his Master and making the both of them undergo all the perils I please. What’s to prevent me marrying off the Master and telling you how his wife deceived him? or making Jacques take ship for the Indies? and sending his Master there? or bringing both of them back to France on the same vessel? How easy it is to make up stories! But I’ll let them off lightly with an uncomfortable night, and you with this delay. (4)
But two sentences later, the reader butts in again, and so it goes for the rest of the novel: the author and reader share an occasionally adversarial but codependent relationship like the one between Jacques and his master. And like their relationship, the author is the unpredictable, individualistic one, while the reader—as anonymous as the master and just as predictable—keeps expecting conventional plot developments. This metastory could be called Denis the Fictionist and His Mass Market.
Sometimes the reader over his shoulder is useful, as here when the author negligently switches from third-person to first:
It was late, the gates were all shut, and they’d been forced to stop at an inn outside the town’s walls. There I can hear a great hullabaloo . . .
You can hear? But you weren’t there. How could you have heard anything?
You’re right. So Jacques . . . his Master . . . er . . . a terrible hullabaloo is heard. I see two men . . .
You don’t see anything of the kind. This has nothing to do with you. You weren’t there.
True enough. There were two men chatting quietly at a table . . . (73)
Elsewhere, the author acknowledges the reader’s sharp ear for diction: after making a countrywoman say “Do you realize I’ve been waiting for you for an hour that has seemed an eternity?”, the author admits, “Reader, you’re far too pernickety. Agreed, ‘an hour that seems an eternity’ is for smart ladies in town. ‘An hour and more’ is what Madame Marguerite would say” (178). Sometimes he becomes defensive, as when Jacques use the word hydrophobic, on which the hypercritical reader pounces:
Just a moment! “Hydrophobic”? Jacques said “hydrophobic”?
No, Reader, he didn’t. I confess the word wasn’t his. But if you want to apply such high critical standards, I challenge you to read any scene from a comedy or a tragedy, one dialogue, however well-written, and not detect the voice of the author in the mouth of his characters. (224)
Of course, for the reader who doesn’t notice these slips at first, Diderot is providing a valuable lesson in reading critically; the novel is a tutorial on how fiction works. Like the Encyclopedia, Jacques is “an effort at public re-education,” as Stephen Werner notes in his insightful monograph (19). But usually he taunts the reader for his/her lack of imagination and conventional tastes, especially those who prefer romances—“But, Reader, why must there always be love stories? . . . All you’ve ever wanted since the day you were born was to gobble up love stories and you never get tired of them!” (151)—or when the prudish reader chastises him for obscenity, which he first dismisses as pointless (“If you are pure in heart, you will not read my book; if you are depraved, you will not be affected by reading me” [184]), and second defends by citing Voltaire and paraphrasing Montaigne as he insults the priggish reader:
I rather enjoy—pausing only to change the names—writing down the stupid things you do. Your follies make me laugh, but what I write offends you. To be perfectly frank, Reader, I’d say that of the two of us the more unkind is not me. I’d be only too happy if it were as easy for me to defend myself against your aspersions as it is for you to defend yourself against being bored or imperilled by my book. Just leave me alone, you miserable hypocrites. Carry on fucking like rabbits, but you’ve got to let me say fuck: I grant you the action and you let me have the word. (185)
The point of this is to shock the reader out of complacency and outdated thinking, just as the point of Diderot’s Encyclopedia and the Enlightenment in general was to blow away old-fashioned beliefs and prejudices with the latest findings in science and progressive thinking. The conventional novel—the author cites Prévost’s Cleveland as an example—belongs to the ancien régime, as do the philosophies of fatalism, providence, predestination, and other modes of magical thinking. Already sniffing the Revolution in the air, Diderot senses a regime change, when class distinctions (as between commoner Jacques and his aristocratic master) will disappear, when the cold comforts of Christian providence will give way to the harsh reality of meaningless chance (as in the novel’s opening sentence), even existential alienation: “if there’s hardly anything we say that’s heard the way it’s intended,” Jacques laments, “there’s far worse: it follows that there’s hardly anything we do that is judged by what we had in mind when we did it” (46). It’s a world characterized by what Pynchon calls “anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything” (Gravity’s Rainbow, 434), where things happen at random, not in coherent, predictable sequences (as in conventional novels), and where one should expect the unexpected. That world is formally replicated in Jacques the Fatalist by its seemingly chaotic structure, where—as in real life—things happen out of the blue, stories are interrupted, and where things don’t turn out as planned. To portray this world accurately, the author needs to be the reader’s master, not her servant, needs to disobey orders on occasion, to abandon love stories for more heuristic ones, and to talk frankly. Just as the commoners in this novel are more resourceful and interesting than aristocrats like Jacques’s master—whose bland rhetoric contrasts with Jacques’s inventive palaver, and whose ancien régime sense of honor gets Jacques imprisoned in a dungeon—subversive novels like this one are more resourceful and interesting than conventional ones. And truer: not true to the sources the author pretends to be following, but truer to life. The tough-love purpose of Diderot’s insulting remarks to his readers is to inspire them to cast off both conventional thinking and conventional novels and to join the revolution, where a novel like Jacques the Fatalist becomes the new standard for fiction, not a zany aberration. Of course it didn’t work out that way: the Revolution was a bloody mess, and the conventional novel continues to be preferred over the antinovel, but one can’t blame Diderot for that: he could point the way, but it was up to others to follow.
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master is so novel that Diderot could have claimed to have reinvented the novel, but he acknowledges his debt to others near the end when the narrator grandly boasts he’s written “the most important work to appear since Pantagruel, by François Rabelais, and the life and adventures of Compère Mathieu” (237).184 Diderot follows in the jaywalking footsteps of Rabelais, Béroalde de Verville, Sorel, and all those who followed Sorel’s way (Scarron, Cyrano, Furetière, Subligny, Hamilton, Lesage, Bordelon, Marivaux, Crébillon, Bougeant, Longue, d’Argens, Voltaire) as well as Cervantes and Sterne, both
of whom are mentioned—and in Sterne’s case, plagiarized (or appropriated)—in Diderot’s antinovel. Jacques the Fatalist had a few admirers in the 19th century, such as Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and the Goncourt brothers, but it wasn’t until the 20th century that Diderotic novels like his began appearing. (Jacques didn’t appear in English translation until 1959!) I’ve mentioned Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler and Markson’s This Is Not a Novel in footnotes, but it is also the godfather of Gide’s Counterfeiters, Alfau’s Locos, O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, Gaddis’s J R,185 Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” and virtually every other metafiction featuring a self-conscious narrator trying to write a novel. Susan Hayward (the critic, not the actress) found parallels between Diderot’s novel and Beckett’s Molloy, and Jacques the Fatalist inspired a play by Milan Kundera and a book-length poem by Lyn Hejinian entitled The Fatalist. Though the novel was banned in France in 1825 as an “outrage to both public and religious morality and to common decency,” Diderot, like Rameau’s nephew, has had the last laugh.
After the great strides made in the novel by Diderot and Voltaire, those of the other major novelist of this period, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), look like a huge step backward. His major—some say only—novel, Julie, or The New Heloise (Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse, 1761), is huge and slow-moving where theirs are slim and fleet, retro and sentimental instead of modern and ironic. It’s significant that this epistolary novel begins in the early 1730s, when Prévost’s novels and Marivaux’s Life of Marianne were popular, before the libertine, philosophical novels of later decades rained on their parade of virtues. In soap-operatic fashion, a Swiss baron’s 18-year-old daughter falls for her 20-year-old tutor called St. Preux (not his real name) and is seduced by him, but is forbidden by her class-conscious father from marrying the commoner. (Julie tries to force the issue by allowing the tutor to impregnate her, but she suffers a miscarriage before her father learns of it.) An English aristocrat takes St. Preux under his wing and tries to elevate his social standing by taking him to Paris, where St. Preux falls in with the wrong crowd, gets drunk, and sleeps with a prostitute, as he confesses to Julie in a letter. Devastated by her mother’s death, which coincidentally follows her discovery of Julie’s passionate correspondence, Julie obeys her father’s order to marry an old friend of his, a decent but emotionless Russian aristocrat named Wolmar. In a stunning about-face that could be used to illustrate the pathology of denial in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Julie forsakes her passions and becomes the perfect hausfrau, converting her home at the foot of the Alps into a rural utopia. Over the next decade St. Preux tries to forget her by taking a trip around the world; upon his return, Julie and her husband invite him to join their household and become the tutor to their children, a post he accepts though both he and Julie fear a romantic relapse. While St. Preux is away in Italy, Julie rescues her son from drowning but dies soon afterward from the exertion, admitting during a long deathbed scene that she still loves St. Preux and looks forward to reuniting with him in Protestant heaven.