Before Fiction by Paige Nicholas D.;

Author:Paige, Nicholas D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

The Wart Trick

Though Roederer could not have been familiar with the modified Préface-annexe, he may well have known that details had been on Diderot’s mind since his writings on and for the theater in the 1750s, in which pantomime emerged as a central component of the techniques of the drame. A character pacing the stage, pulling out his watch from time to time, gave us the impression of spying on something not intended for public consumption; we weren’t being informed of what the character wanted to tell us of himself, we were observing for ourselves the clues as to his mental state. Detail is central as well to Diderot’s praise of Richardson: if Clarissa is long, this is because the novelist focuses our attention on the forgotten micro-events that make up life’s larger drama. “Know that illusion depends on this multitude of little things,” Diderot writes, adding, in a line that recalls his praise of pantomime, “gesture is often every bit as sublime as speech” (D 902). But it is in the coda to his 1770 tale Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne that Diderot develops an even more explicit theory of the detail’s importance. Any narrative that aims to move us, he reasons, must contain bits of poetic eloquence; but it also must convince us it is true, because we cannot be moved otherwise. These two conditions, unfortunately, are mutually exclusive: eloquence, by calling attention to itself, breaks illusion. The way out of this impasse is the unmotivated, insignificant detail, capable of counterbalancing rhetorical excess. Diderot looks to painting for some examples: the illusion-producing detail would be, say, a cut on the portrait-sitter’s lower lip, or maybe a slight scar, or a wart on his temple. Thus we are pushed to exclaim, “My word, this is real; such things can’t be invented” (D 449).

The similarity between this metapoetic reflection and the one that closes the Préface-annexe is obvious enough: both offer means for overcoming the palpable artificiality of poetic eloquence, one through simplicity, the other through detail. La Religieuse and Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne share additional similarities as well, for the latter also originated in a hoax that, sure enough, was described by Grimm in the Correspondance littéraire. In the December 15, 1770, issue—a mere nine months after the initial description of the Croismare episode—Grimm recounts his late summer trip with Diderot to Langres in Champagne, the philosophe’s birthplace. Taking the waters in nearby Bourbonne, the friends met up with a mother and daughter, who were there on account of the latter’s ill health. The ladies had been distracting themselves by “telling tales” to their correspondents in Paris, one of whom was “uncommonly gullible”: “he faithfully believed the yarns [les fagots] these ladies sent him, and the simplicity of his responses amused the two friends as much as the absurdity of the tales they told” (D 463). This gave Diderot an idea: he would write tales for the young lady to insert into one of her letters to this

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