This is a subject that affects us directly in Latin America, and is central to our literature. We were born into modernity (after being excluded from it by the Spanish Counter-Reformation) during the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century offered us a linear conception of time; there was no other way of being modern. We were told to forget the instantaneous, circular, and mythical times of our origins in favor of a progressive, irreversible time, destined to an infinitely perfectible future. We traveled from the time of otherworldly Christianity to the time of secular Christianity, a time without a final judgment but, again like Christian time, a future-oriented temporality. Christianity leaves behind the paradise of the origin, the place of the fall and the corruption of nature, and addresses itself to redemption in a future, otherworldly paradise. The creso-hedonist societies of modern industrialism rush from the past, the cavern of the barbarian in Voltaire’s eyes, in order to conquer an admirable future of infinite wealth and pleasure: progress is the name of secular eternity.
When this dream proved to be vain, and the brutal experience of our own time, from the war of the trenches to the concentration camps, demonstrated that progressive linearity offered too many exceptions for us to put our wholehearted, innocent faith in it, the critique of linear time became, positively, a way of recovering other times: the times of others, including our own, Latin American, time. The final judgment did take place, between the Marne and Dachau, between the Gulag and Hiroshima, and the creation of new times by Proust and Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner was a way of offering alternative temporalities to the exhausted linearity of eighteenth-century time. All of the rediscovered times of the West further coincided with the recovery of the true times of Latin American culture by Borges, Asturias, and Carpentier; by Neruda, Vallejo, and Paz; by Rulfo, Cortázar, and García Márquez: times in which the present contains past and future, because the present is the place of both memory and desire.
We shall not sacrifice anew what we are. We shall let them all speak: the twenty voices offered to us as a gift, from the heart of eighteenth-century France, by our friend Diderot.
III
Elisabeth de Fontenay has written that Diderot is the avant-garde which we lack today. He is, I repeat, our contemporary. During the ceremonies in Mexico City celebrating the seventy years of the poet Octavio Paz, the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos was telling me that the best Latin American novelist of the nineteenth century was the Brazilian Machado de Assis. I certainly agreed with him, but was ignorant of the reason Campos gave me: Machado had carefully read Jacques Le Fataliste, and by reading the European writer of the eighteenth-century avant-garde, he had become the writer of Latin America’s nineteenth-century avant-garde, which, needless to say, became our own twentieth-century reality: both Diderot and Machado were, thus, our contemporaries.
Fontenay and Campos are warning us, besides, against the dangers of generalizing too much (as I, a confirmed reader of Vico, sometimes tend to do), against certain evils that, joyfully and guiltily, our own century hangs around the neck of the eighteenth century. If the Enlightenment consecrates a linear and progressive notion of human time, it is also true that, in the novels of Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot, it discovers all the intelligent exceptions to the futurizing ideology of Condorcet and the French Revolution.
A Latin American can be irritated by the Eurocentrist arrogance of the Enlightenment; but we must also recognize that the century of revolutions denied would-be social inferiorities, dissolved entrenched hierarchies, and granted to all human beings (while confusing Europeans with humankind and human nature) maximum potentialities. All this demanded an intensity of presence (Danton on the grandstand, Sade in the bedchamber) which, in the case of Diderot the novelist, is accompanied by a critical concept of time which he shares, as if it were the mission of the novel to save and project the best of the eighteenth century for our own times, with Sterne and Tristram Shandy. This critical concept can be presented, almost, as an equation: the greater the intensity of presence, the greater the intensity of time and the greater the sensation of the simultaneous.
Diderot chooses the form of the novel (the genre without genre, or the genre of all genres) to say that the sense of presence in a narrative text is what can transform the successive into the instantaneous and, in this way, identify desire and its object. For, after all, Diderot’s problem is our problem: How to obtain what we desire? How to overcome the social, political, psychological, and purely material obstacles — time and space — which constantly rise between ourselves and the object of our desires? His answer is, typically, both direct and sinuous: Let us make ourselves present. Where? In a book. With whom? With the author and with the readers.
But it is the answer to the How? that is most important in Diderot. Yet it is a simple response: We make ourselves present through movement. We overcome obstacles and we obtain what we want because we move. It moves, therefore it desires.
Diderot employs an abbreviated time which hastens, stylizes, and finally makes visible a vivid sensation of the passage of time. Instead of describing, Diderot produces movement with the purpose of diminishing or accelerating the march of time. The production of movement as abbreviation, as velocity, occupies the place of the descriptive. Diderot sees description as an obstacle to presence. Do not describe, he pleads in Jacques le Fataliste:
Do me this favor, I beg of you, spare us the description of the house and the doctor’s character … and the progress of the cure; jump, jump over all of that. Fact!. To the fact! [Au fait! Allons au fait!] Your knee is almost mended … and you have fallen in love.
Like most novelists past or present, Diderot has his own problem with time. Perhaps there have been times without novels, but there has never been a novel without time: how to present the temporal fact is a fundamental narrative decision, for Scheherazade as well as for Dumas, for Proust and for Agatha Christie. Scheherazade narrates in order to gain time; Dumas, perhaps and deservedly so, to lose it; Proust to recover it; and Christie to kill it. (There is thus a double murder in her novels: both Roger Ackroyd and Time are killed. Why not? comments Ezra Pound: Kill time, if you like your time dead.)
Diderot’s modernity is designed by the way he gains, loses, kills, and recovers rime. He does so because he has a quarrel with the march of time. And he has this quarrel because the human time known by the writer does not satisfy his immediate desires; it postpones or cancels them. Diderot responds to this insufficiency by creating a narrative time: he invents a time for his desire.
IV
Ever since the eighteenth century, Diderot knew that only a perfect memory is chronological. No one has it. And who wants it?
Diderot tells us that true time is created by desire. But if desire and time are to coincide, duration must be saved from the demands of chronology. Rabelais achieved this through the verbal carnival (as Mikhail Bakhtin has brilliantly defined it) which abolishes all barriers between classes and between bodies. Cervantes achieved it thanks to the multiplication of the levels of reading and of the points of view of his character, Don Quixote. And Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, obtained it through the mediation of paradox: the constant digression in the mind of the narrator.
Diderot saves time from the tyranny of the calendar by producing movement. He writes novels with the purpose of uniting movement, time, and desire, which in reality are separated. He writes to clear the obstacles erected by chronology on the way to the fulfillment of our desires. How does he do this? His works abound in dazzling suppressions of mediate time in benefit of immediate time, a time in which duration, movement, and desire identify one another instantly.