Success in Circuit Lies: Diderot's Communicational Practice (review)

288 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:3 Rosalina de la Carrera. Success in Circuit Lies: Diderot's Communicational Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. ? + 238pp. US$29.50. ISBN 0-8047-1923-3. Rosalina de la Carrera's new book on communication in Diderot offers stimulating readings of his fiction, history, and natural philosophy: La Religieuse, L'Histoire des deux Indes, L'Essaisur les règnes de Claude et deNéron, and Le Rêve de d'Alembert. De Ia Carrera 's references to other parts of the Diderot corpus are wide-ranging and well-informed, but she does well to restrict herselfto examining the ramifications ofa particular analytical model in detailed readings of a few selected works. The model is drawn from Michel Serres's discussion of "noise" in La Communication . Serres argues that noise enters inevitably into the constitution of any message, and that communication takes place, not in spite of noise, but because of it. The threat of disruption "creates a bond between the two interlocutors; instead of maintaining an adversary relationship, they join forces to block out the noise that could potentially interrupt their exchange" (p. 7). The noise, or threatened interruption by a third term, takes on a variety of forms in the texts that de la Carrera proceeds to examine, and she gives us a convincing account of the mechanics of Diderot's dialogue with his reader. The reading of La Religieuse, which includes separate chapters on the Preface-annexe and on the novel proper, occupies nearly half the book, and deserves particular attention. De la Carrera chooses to begin with the Preface-annexe. Critics have traditionally looked at this text in an effort to identify its status as either mystification or document; she begins with a skilful analysis of its epistolary form, showing how the most effective communications among the increasingly complex network of real and fictional characters are necessarily indirect and related to the transmission of affect. The transmission of affect is equated with a seduction by fiction and loss of mastery, as when the ironic conspirator Diderot shows himself as overwhelmed by his own artifices: "Je me désole d'un conte que je me fais." The pitfalls of readership are neatly underscored in dissections of two classic readings of the novel by Georges May and Herbert Dieckmann. A number of issues in the analysis of the Preface-annexe continue to resonate throughout the book. The mechanism by which an apparent "detour" both permits communication and allows the communicational circuit to achieve a richer degree of complexity, further explored in Diderot's fiction, becomes particularly interesting in the contexts of his historical and philosophical writings. At the same time certain questions remain. De la Carrera is at pains to incorporate Diderot's treatment of the reader in a politically progressive, emancipatory project. The concept of "seduction," however, raises questions of power and persuasion that lhe notion of "noncoercive seduction" (pp. 3435 ) cannot dispel, and to define "communication" as "seduction" seems reductionistic. To show how Diderot brilliantly stages his own abdication from "authorial authority" hardly lessens, but rather enhances, his writerly power, since it places the emphasis on his selfconsciousness and pedagogical acumen. The question of control arises in the heart of the communicative model adapted from Serres, which foregrounds bonding and complicity between the interlocutors. I agree that such complicity is crucial in Diderot's dynamic relationship with his reader, but the implications of taking noise as constitutive of communication are significant. For noise is precisely that extraneous unpredictable event over which one has no control, and thus the message produced in the process is always to some extent free from any strategic intent of the sender. While de la Carrera wants to show Diderot as free of any illusions concerning our ability to legislate meaning , she also wants to preserve his ability to fulfil specific intentions with regard to the reader. REVIEWS 289 Seduction is undeniably an important model for examining the web of relationships in which the narrator of La Religieuse finds herself. The chapter "Musical Conversations : Narrative Models and Communication in La Religieuse" offers a fine analysis of the novel's multiple forms of indirect communication, which it convincingly...