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C h a p t e r 5 The Demon of Reality (Diderot) In 1857—the annus mirabilis of realism that saw the appearance of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal—novelist and critic Champfleury pressed Diderot into service as a precursor of Balzac, Sue, and Hugo, one of a handful of writers who, possessed by a benevolent “demon of Reality,” refused tribute to the elevated style that dominated poetic creation at the time.1 Champfleury ’s genealogy of realism pointed all the way back to Homer, who “observed and described with precision the mores of his time,” and it is hard not to think of the later syntheses of Erich Auerbach or M. M. Bakhtin as the scholarly culmination of this line of thought. Indeed, Mimesis and the essays in The Dialogic Imagination, more than studies of realism, might well be considered realist studies—of a part, that is, with a movement that had from its very beginnings sought to identify possible forerunners in works composed in vastly different poetic contexts. If the moment of this sweepingly teleological brand of literary history has long since past, Champfleury’s attention to Diderot is hardly baseless nonetheless : even in an age of pseudofactual pretense, the philosophe’s concern with making his narratives seem real stands out. The memoir novel La Religieuse was originally conceived as a part of a hoax on an altruistic but gullible soul, and Diderot prided himself on the utter simplicity of its style. Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne ends with a meditation that on the face of things provides a pretty fair approximation of Roland Barthes’s “reality effect”: the gratuitous yet appropriate detail makes readers cry out, “My word, this is real; such things can’t be invented.”2 Indeed, aside from the early (and reportedly disowned ) Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748), all the novels and “tales” Diderot worked and reworked from the 1760s until his death in 1784—La Religieuse, Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, Ceci n’est pas un conte, Madame de la Carlière, and even 140 chapter 5 the notoriously playful Jacques le fataliste—exhibit a concern with their own truth that clashes with the common assumption that pseudofactual assertions underwent a long, slow decline over the course of the century. Precisely at the moment in which one would expect the least interest in the literalness of literature, Diderot intervenes by infusing the old pseudofactual posture with new techniques for convincing readers that they held the truth in their hands. How, then, to explain Diderot’s demon? Subscribing to Champfleury’s lineage does not seem like an option: Diderot’s plots, at bottom sentimental, pay little attention to what we associate with realism proper—history, milieu, social organization and advancement, and so on.3 It is thus not surprising that most modern scholars have taken a different, even opposite tack from Champ- fleury. What if, instead of being proto-realist, Diderot’s interest in truth were ultimately subversive of the transparency of realist signs? According to this popular interpretation, Diderot, initially a believer in art as illusion, underwent a process of maturation. La Religieuse stands as the pivot between an earlier enthusiasm for sentimental absorption (evident in the 1762 Éloge de Richardson, in which Diderot describes reading as a wholesale passage into the world of the book) and a later desire, fully realized in Jacques le fataliste, to “raise literature itself to a new level of skeptical self-awareness.”4 Diderot’s devilish tales teach us, then, that literature is not real. Yet this common view is beset with as many problems as Champfleury’s— problems more serious than the sheer banality of the putative lesson. The view’s harmony with late twentieth-century received wisdom about critical distance, indeterminacy, and the intransitivity of writing is suspicious, as is its postulation of supposedly more primitive and popular “mimetic” forms of reading deflated by Diderot’s genius. Furthermore, the maturation hypothesis does not fit well with even the brute biographical facts. We know, for instance, that the composition of Jacques le fataliste, dating back at least to 1771, is essentially coterminous with the very tales that make such a concerted use of reality effects; and that Diderot puts his final loving touches on La Religieuse and publishes it in the manuscript newsletter La Correspondance littéraire after and not before the appearance there of Jacques le fataliste, which he called its “counterpart.”5...

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