Diderot's Vitalist Materialism and the Development of the Modern Novel

Abstract

This paper analyzes the distance between Diderot´s alleged novelistic project, developed in the “Éloge de Richardson” (1762), and his concrete praxis as a novelist. Firstly, we reconstruct the eccentric place of the novel in the philosophe´s thinking and focus on the difficulties faced by criticism when trying to understand it. Secondly, we propose that the crisis of the novelistic form by the co-director of the Encyclopédie, especially in Jacques le fataliste et son maître (posthumously published, in its complete version, in 1796), is not only posed against the roman in its early-modern and medieval form—as a reading of the “Éloge” qua the author´s poetics might suggest—but against the modern genre that is vindicated in that text: the sentimental novel. We suggest that it is possible to illuminate this criticism if we read it in relation with the skeptical and eclectic epistemological proposals defended by Diderot since the late 1740s. Under this light, Diderot appears as a fundamental precursor of the modern novel.