Body and Story: The Ethics and Practice of Theoretical Conflict

2 On the Matter of Bodies

C H A P T E R T W O On the Matter of Bodies Plus, plus de confiance en celui qui peut feindre avec tant de vérité. [No more relying on someone who can fake it so convincingly.] — DIDEROT, Est-il bon? est-il méchant? 395 Language is compliant; things are resistant. The distinction is fundamental to Diderot’s reflection on the status of Suzanne Simonin’s mode of existence in La religieuse. Language can project entities with such facility, words are so labile, that they produce effects in a mode and at a velocity that can leave us completely flummoxed. That might at first seem a heady advantage, and in the atmosphere of Postmodern textualism it has been taken to be one. But in Diderot ’s understanding such facility seemed a mixed and unsettling blessing. For in our sub-lunar world everything real is constituted by the kind of limit that it seems to be language’s vocation to exceed or evade. This difference between the registers of language and materiality haunts and fascinates Diderot in La religieuse. The novel’s peculiar enunciatory situation injects an enigma between realism and truth. Today this distinction may seem oddly old-fashioned. Perhaps it has already dissolved in contemporary projections of an all-embracing metatheory of texts and representations. This latter conceptual complex has revealed much—particularly, a better understanding of the increasingly mystified nature of the codes by which meanings are constructed in modern social formations and cultures.1 1. On this problem, see Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse, chap. 1, esp. 101–11. 40 The Consequentiality of Bodies But profiting from these textualist insights has meant bracketing foundational distinctions between texts and bodies, between semiotics and materiality . So our theorizing has taken place at an increasing remove from the ground on which it used to appear we stood and on which lives are still presumably being lived. Under these circumstances the differential bite of the notion of ‘‘fiction’’—along with ‘‘literature’’ itself—has seemingly devolved into irrelevance or invisibility.2 Not so in the Enlightenment. Diderot’s period understood and practiced fiction differently. We need to mine and to make sense of the distinction between our own contemporary internalization of the category of fiction and eighteenth-century constructions of it.3 A body of thoughtful scholarship, notably in the work of Georges May and Vivienne Mylne, has traced how the ‘‘realist illusion’’ we term vraisemblance in eighteenth-century French fiction was disengaged from the melodramatic and fantastic surround of the traditional adventure tale and slowly organized and articulated itself.4 But such scholarship has typically seen eighteenth-century realism through the Enlightenment progress myth I referred to in chapter 1: as a self-validating goal toward which literary technique was, naturally, satisfactorily and salutarily tending. This tradition thus focused upon the ‘‘achievement’’ of verisimilitude as the resolution of a writing problem contained within a quasi-autonomous literary realm, rather than understanding it as a socialized and historically determined practice of perception, cognition, and representation. To be sure, the rhetorical and generic effects of Enlightenment fiction were dependent upon the formal 2. On the evolution of these conceptions, see Jameson, Postmodernism, 277: ‘‘Many analyses . . . have tried to show the waning and obsolescence of categories like ‘fiction’ (in the sense of something opposed to either the ‘literal’ or the ‘factual’). But here I think a profound modification of the public sphere needs to be theorized: the emergence of a new realm of image reality that is both fictional (narrative ) and factual (even the characters in serials are grasped as real ‘named’ stars with external histories to read about). . . . Today, culture impacts back on reality in ways that make any independent and, as it were, non- or extracultural form of it problematic . . . , so that finally the theorists unite their voices in the new doxa that the ‘referent’ no longer exists.’’ 3. For example, the following distinction, unexpected from our contemporary perspective: ‘‘When an eighteenth-century novelist says that his story is ‘true,’ we should in many cases be prepared to substitute the modern equivalent, ‘based on fact’ ’’ (Mylne, Eighteenth-Century French Novel, 28). 4. May, Le dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle; Mylne, Eighteenth-Century French Novel; and Barguillet , Le roman au XVIIIe siècle. For corresponding issues in Britain, see McKeon, Origins. The opening sentence of Diderot’s ‘‘Éloge de Richardson’’ dismissively characterizes the rhetorical and cognitive situation of the traditional adventure tale (what Diderot...