Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

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.

This is a subject that affects us directly in Latin America, and is central to our literature. We were born into modernity (after being excluded from it by the Spanish Counter-Reformation) during the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century offered us a linear conception of time; there was no other way of being modern. We were told to forget the instantaneous, circular, and mythical times of our origins in favor of a progressive, irreversible time, destined to an infinitely perfectible future. We traveled from the time of otherworldly Christianity to the time of secular Christianity, a time without a final judgment but, again like Christian time, a future-oriented temporality. Christianity leaves behind the paradise of the origin, the place of the fall and the corruption of nature, and addresses itself to redemption in a future, otherworldly paradise. The creso-hedonist societies of modern industrialism rush from the past, the cavern of the barbarian in Voltaire’s eyes, in order to conquer an admirable future of infinite wealth and pleasure: progress is the name of secular eternity.

When this dream proved to be vain, and the brutal experience of our own time, from the war of the trenches to the concentration camps, demonstrated that progressive linearity offered too many exceptions for us to put our wholehearted, innocent faith in it, the critique of linear time became, positively, a way of recovering other times: the times of others, including our own, Latin American, time. The final judgment did take place, between the Marne and Dachau, between the Gulag and Hiroshima, and the creation of new times by Proust and Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner was a way of offering alternative temporalities to the exhausted linearity of eighteenth-century time. All of the rediscovered times of the West further coincided with the recovery of the true times of Latin American culture by Borges, Asturias, and Carpentier; by Neruda, Vallejo, and Paz; by Rulfo, Cortázar, and García Márquez: times in which the present contains past and future, because the present is the place of both memory and desire.

We shall not sacrifice anew what we are. We shall let them all speak: the twenty voices offered to us as a gift, from the heart of eighteenth-century France, by our friend Diderot.

III

Elisabeth de Fontenay has written that Diderot is the avant-garde which we lack today. He is, I repeat, our contemporary. During the ceremonies in Mexico City celebrating the seventy years of the poet Octavio Paz, the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos was telling me that the best Latin American novelist of the nineteenth century was the Brazilian Machado de Assis. I certainly agreed with him, but was ignorant of the reason Campos gave me: Machado had carefully read Jacques Le Fataliste, and by reading the European writer of the eighteenth-century avant-garde, he had become the writer of Latin America’s nineteenth-century avant-garde, which, needless to say, became our own twentieth-century reality: both Diderot and Machado were, thus, our contemporaries.

Fontenay and Campos are warning us, besides, against the dangers of generalizing too much (as I, a confirmed reader of Vico, sometimes tend to do), against certain evils that, joyfully and guiltily, our own century hangs around the neck of the eighteenth century. If the Enlightenment consecrates a linear and progressive notion of human time, it is also true that, in the novels of Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot, it discovers all the intelligent exceptions to the futurizing ideology of Condorcet and the French Revolution.

A Latin American can be irritated by the Eurocentrist arrogance of the Enlightenment; but we must also recognize that the century of revolutions denied would-be social inferiorities, dissolved entrenched hierarchies, and granted to all human beings (while confusing Europeans with humankind and human nature) maximum potentialities. All this demanded an intensity of presence (Danton on the grandstand, Sade in the bedchamber) which, in the case of Diderot the novelist, is accompanied by a critical concept of time which he shares, as if it were the mission of the novel to save and project the best of the eighteenth century for our own times, with Sterne and Tristram Shandy. This critical concept can be presented, almost, as an equation: the greater the intensity of presence, the greater the intensity of time and the greater the sensation of the simultaneous.