Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

Diderot chooses the form of the novel (the genre without genre, or the genre of all genres) to say that the sense of presence in a narrative text is what can transform the successive into the instantaneous and, in this way, identify desire and its object. For, after all, Diderot’s problem is our problem: How to obtain what we desire? How to overcome the social, political, psychological, and purely material obstacles — time and space — which constantly rise between ourselves and the object of our desires? His answer is, typically, both direct and sinuous: Let us make ourselves present. Where? In a book. With whom? With the author and with the readers.

But it is the answer to the How? that is most important in Diderot. Yet it is a simple response: We make ourselves present through movement. We overcome obstacles and we obtain what we want because we move. It moves, therefore it desires.

Diderot employs an abbreviated time which hastens, stylizes, and finally makes visible a vivid sensation of the passage of time. Instead of describing, Diderot produces movement with the purpose of diminishing or accelerating the march of time. The production of movement as abbreviation, as velocity, occupies the place of the descriptive. Diderot sees description as an obstacle to presence. Do not describe, he pleads in Jacques le Fataliste:

Do me this favor, I beg of you, spare us the description of the house and the doctor’s character … and the progress of the cure; jump, jump over all of that. Fact!. To the fact! [ Au fait! Allons au fait! ] Your knee is almost mended … and you have fallen in love.

Like most novelists past or present, Diderot has his own problem with time. Perhaps there have been times without novels, but there has never been a novel without time: how to present the temporal fact is a fundamental narrative decision, for Scheherazade as well as for Dumas, for Proust and for Agatha Christie. Scheherazade narrates in order to gain time; Dumas, perhaps and deservedly so, to lose it; Proust to recover it; and Christie to kill it. (There is thus a double murder in her novels: both Roger Ackroyd and Time are killed. Why not? comments Ezra Pound: Kill time, if you like your time dead.)

Diderot’s modernity is designed by the way he gains, loses, kills, and recovers rime. He does so because he has a quarrel with the march of time. And he has this quarrel because the human time known by the writer does not satisfy his immediate desires; it postpones or cancels them. Diderot responds to this insufficiency by creating a narrative time: he invents a time for his desire.

IV

Ever since the eighteenth century, Diderot knew that only a perfect memory is chronological. No one has it. And who wants it?

Diderot tells us that true time is created by desire. But if desire and time are to coincide, duration must be saved from the demands of chronology. Rabelais achieved this through the verbal carnival (as Mikhail Bakhtin has brilliantly defined it) which abolishes all barriers between classes and between bodies. Cervantes achieved it thanks to the multiplication of the levels of reading and of the points of view of his character, Don Quixote. And Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, obtained it through the mediation of paradox: the constant digression in the mind of the narrator.

Diderot saves time from the tyranny of the calendar by producing movement. He writes novels with the purpose of uniting movement, time, and desire, which in reality are separated. He writes to clear the obstacles erected by chronology on the way to the fulfillment of our desires. How does he do this? His works abound in dazzling suppressions of mediate time in benefit of immediate time, a time in which duration, movement, and desire identify one another instantly.

In Le Salon, for example, the author encounters “a woman as beautiful as an angel … I want to go to bed with her; I go: I have four children.”

Diderot’s novels do not depend on the verisimilitude or psychological autonomy of the characters. They depend on the author’s capacity to draft (the expression is Kempf’s) the reader as co-creator of the work.

The author (and how!) is already present in the book. Diderot is not coy about it; he does not disguise his authority; he makes it evident. He demands that the writer — Diderot — be recognized as the creator and not as the mediator of the narration. The conventional narrator supplies facts for the narration. But the iconoclastic narrator, such as Diderot, supplies the narrative itself. He refuses to answer the reader’s questions about the characters. “What are they called, how did they meet?” asks the reader. And the author, because he is such, answers: “By chance”; or: “None of your business.”

Yet this authorial presence, fulsome as it may seem, will need another presence: that of the reader. Diderot introduces the reader into the narrative with as much brio as he introduced the author, transforming the reader into the interlocutor of the author. In Jacques le Fataliste, the servant and his master travel the length of the roads of France, from inn to inn. This is the classical form of the pilgrimage, and literature has not been able to exhaust it: from the Odyssey to Lolita, passing through Cervantes and Lesage. It has also become one of the preferred formulas of the movies, from Chaplin’s Pilgrim to Buñuel’s Milky Way, with a stop at the lunch counters, motels, and highways of Capra’s It Happened One Night. Histories of the road, marching histories, they are full of a sort of kinetic felicity. I underline the traditional character of the situation in Diderot so as to see clearly the novelty of the movement he then impresses on the form of movement itself: the ludicrous odyssey of Jacques and his master.

It so happens that this master has lost his watch, his tobacco pouch, and his horse, the three things that keep him going in life and, of course, on this trip. He is thus obliged, along with his servant, to occupy the time of the trip looking for what he lost during the trip itself, so that the loss of the objects becomes the object of the trip. But the interesting fact is that to this search for things Jacques and his master add, as a way of passing their time, a search for the narration. The master, who, in the narrator’s words, is an obsessive and boring man, wants to hear the story of “The Loves of Jacques.”

The search for the lost object thus becomes the search for the lost narrative. Over this double operation, yet another one hovers: the search for an abbreviated time so that desires can be fulfilled.

“What about your loves, Jacques?”

This question becomes the novel’s ritornello: “Let us go back to your loves, Jacques.” [ Revenons à tes amours. ]

Certainly this, the announced theme of the novel, is evaded, postponed, and constantly disguised, because, in the first place, the theme of Jacques’s loves cannot be separated from the author’s whim; second, it cannot be separated from the author’s will as it confronts the reader’s presence; and, finally, it cannot be separated from the variety and energy of movement which determine the duration that both author and reader are a part of.

The extraordinary thing about this situation is that Diderot should raise such obstacles with the purpose of hastening the meeting of desire and its object. The irony of the “Loves of Jacques” theme, of course, is that it is not the real theme or the real object of the narrative, but only the pretext for the author and the reader to show themselves naked, radically an Author and radically a Reader, bereft of the realistic, psychological, or melodramatic disguises that they should wear if the subject of Jacques le Fataliste truly were the “Loves of Jacques.”