Denis Diderot: Extravagance et génialité (review)

94 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 should perhaps have heeded his own remark that this distinction has a "faible fondement théorique" (p. 86), for it remains quite debatable. The argument that, "S'il est une différence entre Moi et le narrateur du prologue, elle tient [...] à la pudeur ou à la prudence qu'il oppose aux tentatives du Neveu pour le pousser dans ses ultimes retranchements" (p. 89), overlooks the fact that at the beginning of the dialogue Moi's self-assurance has not yet been subjected to Rameau's attacks. The "réticences" are the product of the development of the encounter, a development within himself which the narrator, looking back, traces in his text. Jacques presents the most complex inscription of narrative voices in various space-time spheres, and Terrasse devotes considerable critical acumen to his analysis ofthe question. Again, there are readings with which I take issue (for example, the idea that the "narrateur explicite" is represented as becoming aware ofevents at the same time as the reader, pp. 120, 125), but there is much stimulating reflection here. If I have one particular reservation about this book, it concerns a rather too frequent tendency to present what is self-evident, notably in the case ofthe meaning conveyed by narrative verb tenses. It seems unnecessary, for example, to point out that the imperfect is used to indicate repetition (p. 47), or to state that the conjunctions "quand" and "lorsque" introduce an unforeseen event (p. 19). Such remarks are doubtless dictated by a desire for thoroughness, but they are a rather regrettable aspect of what is, on the whole, a valuable study. One correction: the article "Terns" in the Encyclopédie (cited on p. 98) is by Formey, not D'Alembert. Lawrence Kerslake University of Toronto Marie-Hélène Chabut. Denis Diderot: Extravagance et génialité. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. 170pp. US$31.50. HF160. ISBN 90-420-0493-2. "[J]e n'écoute que pour le plaisir de redire." With these words, Mlle de l'Espinasse disappoints Dr Bordeu's expectation that she will keep silent about their delightfully indecent speculations at the end of Diderot's Rêve de d'Alembert. One might also use those words to summarize both the argument and the gesture performed by Marie-Hélène Chabut's excellent book on Diderot. Chabut listens carefully to five important texts by Diderot—the Réfutation d'Helvétius, the Lettre sur les aveugles, Le Rêve de d'Alembert, the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, and Le Neveu de Rameau—and to nearly all that his French and English-languagereaders have said about them, and she takes pleasure in rehearsing and recasting these texts in a new way. She organizes her analysis around various emblematic images ("disparate," "écart," "délire," "déguisement," "dissonance") that Diderot uses to portray artistic genius, and especially genial writing. In Chabut's view, Diderot 's genial writing is "extravagant": that is, programmed to wander away from REVIEWS 95 both its models and itself. Diderot's work, she contends, provides both theory and practice of genial writing, because while recognizing the program it fatally repeats (the "grand rouleau" of Jacques le fataliste), this work also performs that program so exuberantly that it becomes free—like the conversation between Dr Bordeu and Mile de l'Espinasse—to move in unpredictable directions. At the beginning of the book, Chabut frames her presentation of Diderot's entire corpus as asystematic or "extravagant," by deliberatelyjuxtaposing a mature work of Diderot with an early one. Chapter 1 sets forth Diderot's theory and practice, in the Réfutation d'Helvétius (1774-75), of genius (and genial writing) as fundamentally "disparate." According to Diderot, although individuality and inequality are naturally determined (pace Rousseau), they are always woven into a pre-existing text, which both permits and limits individual differences: hence the continuous, dialogic interplay in his writing between theoriginal and themodel, the exception and the norm. Hence nature is programmed to produce departures from the "textual" norm—in the form of originals, monsters, and geniuses—but these departures are always determined and limited by their context. Although this line of argument...