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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Uses of Incongruities in Diderot's Works: From the Salons to Le Rêve de d'Alembert Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4cs4r6kr Author Gamson, Sandra Abijmil Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Uses of Incongruities in Diderot’s Works: From the Salons to Le Rêve de d’Alembert A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies by Sandra Abijmil Gamson 2014 © Copyright by Sandra Abijmil Gamson 2014 ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION The Uses of Incongruities in Diderot’s Works: From the Salons to Le Rêve de d’Alembert by Sandra Abijmil Gamson Doctor of Philosophy in French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Malina Stefanovska, Chair Throughout his œuvre, Diderot declares that his writing follows the order of his thoughts, quite distinct from the rational order. Pursuing unexpected paths of free associations, Diderot builds his own philosophical system, according to the principle of incongruity. By juxtaposing ideas of art and morality, philosophy and science, and by adopting an active role of agent rather than dispassionate observer, Diderot uncovers new potentialities of interdisciplinary couplings and thereby creates original ideas. The three works examined in this study, the Salons, Le Neveu de Rameau, and Le Rêve de d’Alembert exemplify how the principle of incongruity functions within the Diderotian system. In the Salons, the confluence between art and morality creates a dynamic interaction of incongruities, which range from the beholder conversing with a ii painted figure, to his entry into paintings. Not only did this interaction call for the reader’s active participation, it also modified the meaning of the beautiful. In his exploration of the relationship between art and morality in Le Neveu de Rameau, Diderot stages a grotesque character endowed with the gift of mimesis. The Nephew uses pantomime as an alternative language to evoke a response from the beholder or reader. The language of gestures, which illustrates the mime’s power of imagination leads to an expression of the sublime. This experience brings Diderot to the harmonization of discordant ideas, bringing forth transcendental knowledge. In Le Rêve de d’Alembert, Diderot lets his imagination wander the farthest. His intellectual journey takes the reader from the conjecture that a rock can feel to the creation of a goat man. A mixture of philosophy and science, this text shows Diderot’s materialism taken to the extreme. Diderot’s imagined manipulations of matter in nature result in the conception of a prototype, which allows him to demonstrate how dead matter can transform into sentient matter. Based on the scientific theory of epigenesis, matter in nature goes through countless transformations in order to achieve this change. The incongruity of Diderot’s monstrous creations illustrates the dynamics of his intellectual thought process by which he challenges the status quo. In all three works, Diderot confronts the firm belief that knowledge can only be acquired through reason. His unrestrained imagination allows him to design experiments and manipulate them in order to transcend the limits of knowledge, and present a vision of the potentialities of nature that lie beyond man’s observation. iii The dissertation of Sandra Abijmil Gamson is approved. Patrick J. Coleman Charlene Villasenor Black Peter H. Reill Malina Stefanovska, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 iv DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my husband Mark, and my sons Benjamin and Joshua. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: Writing Incongruities and Perceiving Dissonances in Diderot’s Works 1 CHAPTER 1: Navigating the Beautiful through Morality in the Salons 13 CHAPTER 2: Performance of Passions: Le Neveu de Rameau 62 CHAPTER 3: The Limits of Analogy: Incongruities in Le Rêve de d’Alembert 100 CONCLUSION 141 WORKS CITED 144 vi VITA 2002 B.S., Biochemistry and French & Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles 2002-2003 Teaching Assistant, French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles 2003-2008 Teaching Associate, French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles 2005 M.A. French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles 2009 C.Phil., French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles 2009-2011 Teaching Fellow, French and Francophone Studies University of California, Los Angeles 2011-2012 Graduate Student Researcher Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies University of California, Los Angeles 2013-2014 Lecturer Mount St. Mary’s College Los Angeles, California PRESENTATIONS Gamson, Sandra. “Aesthetic Incongruity in Diderot’s Salons: Redefining the ‘Beautiful Nature.’” Paper presented at Text and Image, the 20th Annual French Graduate Student Conference, Columbia University Department of French and Romance Philology, New York, March 2011. ---. “Inside Diderot’s Salons: Beautiful Nature or Grotesque Representation?” Paper presented at Incongruities, the 44th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Association Symposium, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California, October 2009. ---. “Diderot’s Imprint: Paris and the Salons in the Enlightenment.” Paper presented at Branded City/ La Ville Marquée, the 14th Annual Graduate Student Conference, Department of French and Francophone Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, October 2009. vii Introduction: Writing Incongruities and Perceiving Dissonances in Diderot’s Works Characterized by his French contemporaries as the philosopher par excellence of the Enlightenment, Diderot was perceived as a controversial figure and a lead thinker in his time. He was also recognized as le philosophe internationally in the Republic of Letters, for his provocative, contentious and witty remarks on religion, aesthetics, art and morality. From 1746 until his death in 1784,1 his curious mind led him into different areas of interest: literature, philosophy, the sciences and the arts. His literary creations varied from novels to theoretical texts, theater plays to philosophical dialogues, and to the art criticism of the Salon exhibitions for the Correspondance littéraire philosophique et critique.2 Diderot’s contribution to the philosophy of science is shown through his involvement as one of the editors of the Encyclopédie. This expansive collaborative project was recognized as a fountainhead of knowledge and served to enlighten a population who would have otherwise been left in the darkness of superstition. This monumental undertaking enabled Diderot to acquire knowledge in different areas of science, especially biology and chemistry, but he remained first and foremost a humanist. As it would turn out, this conjunction of the humanistic and scientific search for the truth in nature created tensions in Diderot’s thought. 1 1746 marks the date of Diderot’s writing of the Pensées philosophiques, his controversial work on religion. 2 The Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique was a bi-monthly newsletter in manuscript form edited by Diderot’s friend Friedrich Melchior Grimm. Its intended audience was made up of a dozen princes and emperors of Europe such as Catherine II of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia, the queen of Sweden, the king of Poland (Stanislas Poniatowski), among others. 1 Some scholars and thinkers have criticized Diderot’s status as a philosopher and denounced the lack of inner logic in his work. Such condemnations, which started in the eighteenth century, continue until today.3 Diderot’s contemporaries reproached him for not fitting the mold of systematic philosophers and scientists, such as Étienne de Condillac (1714-1780) and Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who wrote the Traité de système (1749) and Systema naturæ (1735), respectively. Diderot could not conform to the rigidity of such systems, and as an unconventional thinker, he was well aware that “si tu veux être philosophe, attends-toi à être tourné en ridicule.”4 This adage, written in 1751, and which Diderot borrows from antiquity, proves to be true. The playwright Charles Palissot de Montenoy (1730-1814) ridiculed the encyclopedists in general, and especially Diderot, in a theatrical play entitled Les Philosophes (1760) and staged at the Comédie française. The main purpose of this public humiliation was to strip Diderot of his appellation as philosopher and belittle his work on the Encyclopédie. Daniel Brewer reminds us that Diderot’s works were not all published in the eighteenth century, and that Palissot and other readers knew Diderot only through a few of his writings: the Encyclopédie, Les Bijoux indiscrets, the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, among other plays and tales (207). Palissot and other contemporaries of Diderot therefore based their judgments on only the few works that were available to them, a circumstance that hindered their ability to provide a unified image of him. Later, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808-1889) was outraged by the Garnier brothers’ decision to publish Diderot’s complete works (28). He claimed that “la 3 In Diderot’s Part, Andrew Clark traces criticism of Diderot as a philosopher in a chronological fashion starting with Barbey d’Aurevilly (2-6). 4 Lettre sur les sourds et muets, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: