DENIS Diderot is universally acknowledged as one of the leading thinkers of the 18th-century Enlightenment. As a philosopher in that intellectually exciting whirlpool of the post-Cartesian age, which had been further agitated by the rationalism of the British empiricists that had made David Hume a celebrity in France, Diderot was the equal of his two great contemporaries and friends, Voltaire and Rousseau. But he was not merely a philosopher. His essays on the art of his time exhibited at the biennial Paris Salon are considered the foundation of modern art criticism. His work compiling the first comprehensive encyclopedia after Chambers is an enduring proof of his powerful intellect which had a deep understanding of what had been accomplished by, and what was the potential of, the advances associated with the arts and the sciences. As a political thinker, he was ahead of his time: his was the rare voice of reason that spoke out against colonialism even as European colonialism was arrogantly claiming that it was doing the world a favour by devouring its resources.

According to his biographer P. N. Furbank, Diderot thought “that colonialism, in its very nature, was a crime; it brought its victims none of the famed benefits of ‘civilisation,’ and it brutalised all those who engaged in it.” And then, he wrote novels which remained largely unknown to anyone but a dozen or so privileged recipients among the European aristocracy of a privately produced journal in which they appeared. Chance led the great German poet Goethe to come across a copy of Rameau’s Nephew, which so impressed him that, translating it himself, he launched Diderot as a major European novelist 20 years after his death — in German, from a copy found in St Petersburg where Diderot had lived at the court of Catherine the Great as her guest, and it took another 16 years for it to be published in France in an edition translated into French from Goethe’s German!

Some of his work for the theatre was performed and published during his lifetime. His articles for the encyclopedia involved him in trouble with the authorities, including imprisonment, for this was an age when the Church confronted rationalism and the unanswerable pragmatic questioning of its dogma by the thinkers with the one defence that religious establishments routinely deploy — a harsh combination of intolerance, prohibition and incarceration. Censorship and the public burning of books that causes such universal indignation nowadays was practised in Europe then as it is in South Asia today. Diderot countered accusations of uttering blasphemy by publishing two courageous texts: Letter on the Blind and Letter on the Deaf and Dumb. These are works that question theological assumptions with rigorous logic, and the truth of Diderot’s conclusions, which so impressed Voltaire as to make him want to meet him, remains convincing more than 250 years since they were published.

As a philosopher, Diderot is very much our contemporary: many a current debate on problematical social issues, such as minority rights and belligerent sectarianism, would find him arguing persuasively on the side of reason. And as a novelist, he is closer to being our contemporary than many a current practitioner who’s still stuck in the traditional 19th-century mode. Diderot’s first novel, La Religieuse (Memoirs of a Nun and The Nun in two currently available translations, each with an excellent introduction), published 15 years after his death was considered by some to be an immoral work, for here was an author presenting a lurid picture of lesbian sexuality under the excuse that he was a mere historian of reality and it was not his fault that some of what real people were engaged in was morally offensive.

The author who claimed he was an objective historian who merely held a mirror up to nature and truthfully described what he witnessed there had been well-established earlier in the 18th century by Daniel Defoe whose Moll Flanders and Roxana offered a good deal of salacious voyeurism while the author presented himself as a sort of investigative reporter who solemnly exposes social filth that needs urgent cleansing. Diderot’s novel, however, is not inspired by some convenient socialist cause but by an elaborate conspiracy with his friends to compel the Marquis de Croismare to return to Paris, which he had abandoned for the country — the absorbing details of the conspiracy aimed at making the Marquis rush back on reading the desperate story of the nun, given at length in each introduction, are themselves entertaining.

By taking a real-life situation, that of a woman named Marguerite Delamarre who had been obliged by her parents to enter a convent, and adding to it layers of invented dramatic action to generate the graphic force that makes a text take on the appearance of immediate reality in a reader’s mind, Diderot then gives it a philosophical veneer so that the whole narrative glitters with ideas that question any current ideological complacency. And astonishingly, his ideas, which were fresh and politically significant before the French Revolution of the 18th century, are still fresh and politically significant after the Arab Revolution of the 21st century. Diderot exploits the theme of lesbianism — the older Mother Superior seduces the innocent young nun — with a fairly explicit description that raises a sensational storm from the sentences without the language descending to the indecency of pornographic prose; though, like any professional novelist, he keeps the reader’s senses aroused by the action and plays with received ideas with such phrasing as when the nun, in the throes of carnal frenzy, says, “I was afraid, I trembled, my heart thumped, I had difficulty in breathing,” Diderot’s focus is on the deeper significance of the event, especially on the disturbing human problems that arise from a nation’s commitment to a religion’s inflexible prescriptions. There is a spiritual level, too, implied by the action. Experiencing orgasm, the older woman seems to die. It is the Self’s sense of extinction in that delusional moment of being totally possessed by the Other which the mind associates with a spiritual sensation, an idea common to Christian mysticism and Sufism that has inspired so much literature.

With Rameau’s Nephew Diderot leaves the traditional form of The Nun behind and presents the novel of ideas in the form of a dialogue between the author and his principal character, the real-life nephew of the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. The impecunious nephew Rameau has been surviving by playing the sycophantic court jester at the luxurious banquets of Parisian society but one moment’s lapse from heaping inflated praises on his hosts and speaking his true mind instead has caused him to be thrown out into the pitiless streets. Meeting Diderot in a public garden, the two have a conversation in which Rameau expresses a range of intellectual ideas; however, to say this, and even to refer to the work as a novel of ideas, is to give the impression that this is an arid, cerebral work. On the contrary, it is highly entertaining, and Diderot’s Rameau is not so much the historical person as a marvellous comic creation. Some of what he is made to say is no doubt Diderot’s outlook on life and literature, and also the settling of some personal scores against critics of his encyclopedia, but behind the discussion is the question that puzzles the intellectual will — how a materialistic philosophy, which is obliged to envision life as a headlong succession of events driven by an implacable Determinism, can be reconciled with the tenet of free will so sacred to the materialistic philosopher.

Ontological hypotheses are also projected in Diderot’s next novel, D’Alembert’s Dream, in which the dialogue form is extended to a conversation among four characters, the whole comprising an engaging discussion of ideas related to individual identity. Our senses, especially of sight and touch, establish at least an illusory conviction that a cognitive self is a material presence in a molecular cosmos, but what becomes of this self when the mind is dreaming? One of the characters answers: “I seem to exist as a single point, I almost cease to be material and am only conscious of thought. I have lost the sense of position, motion, body, distance and space. The universe is reduced to nothing and I am nothing to the universe.”

Being and Nothingness, the two terrifying demons locked in perpetual combat within human consciousness, as uniquely formulated in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, are the inspiring force behind some, if not all, of the greatest creative works in the arts and those texts which claim to be narratives of the divine cosmic drama, like the Old Testament or the Ramayana, each with its own incredible story of how being came out of nothingness. There has not been an imagination that has not been drawn to refiguring a representation of nothingness into some semblance of solidity, from the shadows in Plato’s cave to the almost bodiless humans in Beckett’s The Lost Ones; even Dickens has vivid passages of some phantom-like being emerging out of the appearance of a hallucinatory world, as in the opening chapters of Great Expectations and Bleak House.

Works of fiction like Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream and Rameau’s Nephew do not have the easily accessible interest of the more traditional novels in which the reader becomes hooked to a story and identifies with the hero or heroine in one more version of a gossip-filled soap opera full of flashbacks playing their trivial domestic dramas in the minds of middle-aged men and women, voiced as remembrance and sentimentality, that have a vast appeal to an ill-educated public and, in most years, to the judges of the Man Booker prize. Because it is structured on a mindlessly repeated formula, the traditional novel depends almost entirely on its content for its success; like a good priest, the novelist knows there’s money in keeping his followers blindly faithful to the illusory creed of a happy ending.

Diderot’s type of novelist, however, is an irrepressible heretic who, rejecting the commonly accepted neat idea of the world with its beginning, middle and end followed by a future of eternal bliss, attempts to refigure reality in all its formal disarray by straining the essential pattern of life through an art that is a linguistic assemblage of the chaos we call existence. Long before Diderot, the European novel had experimented with substituting a superficially observed reality with its exaggerated distortion or by rendering it fantastical. Rabelais, and then Cervantes, and to a lesser extent Joanot Martorell, had created narrative forms that did not duplicate a sequential ordinary reality but projected a radically invented version of it, thus snatching away the conventional idea of truth proffered by theologians and mocking it by presenting what to the common understanding appeared to be perverse and obscene. The novel had established itself as a formal instrument of perception: what a telescope was to Galileo, language was to Rabelais. But that approach was subverted in post-Elizabethan England with the need to provide cheap entertainment to the new leisured class created by money beginning to be sucked from the colonies, and by the mid-18th century the novel that we now call traditional, or mainstream, had become established. Richardson, Fielding, Defoe gave the people what they wanted. And then there was Laurence Sterne.

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy mocked mainstream conventions, sabotaged narrative coherence, and dismissed the presumption of historical certainty. No longer a mere recorder of the passing show of life, the novelist was now an artist: “Writers of my stamp have one principle in common with painters. Where an exact copying makes our pictures less striking, we choose the less evil; deeming it even more pardonable to trespass against truth, than beauty.” (Tristram Shandy, Vol. II, Ch. IV). Form was not an inflexible belief from which the novelist was forbidden to deviate; rather, it was a sort of ophthalmic peculiarity through which the novelist captured a unique vision of reality, so that an innovative form was more likely to produce an original work of art than a traditional one which was inevitably doomed to a repeated reaffirmation of what was already envisioned.

Diderot embraced Sterne’s method to the extent that he appropriated a passage from Tristram Shandy for the beginning of his own masterpiece, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master. Interruption and seeming irrelevance, as well as the author’s resigned helplessness to check his characters’ impulsive digressions from where he had intended them to go, become the narrative method. It is a form of calculated disorder or designed chaos, a madness of confounded expectations. Early in the novel, having just begun a scene, the author addresses the reader thrice with the remark, “You are going to think that …”, followed by a suggestion of what the reader might be expecting, and then announces, “It’s completely up to me …” what happens next. But he makes his character, Jacques, believe that “everything that happens to us down here” has been “written up yonder,” which leads to the paradoxical suggestion that even the author’s conviction that it is his free will which chooses what’s to happen next could also be what’s been written up yonder.

When the Master demands of Jacques that he “say the thing as it is,” Jacques points out the impossibility of so doing considering that each individual’s interests, taste and passion dispose him either to exaggerate or to understate his view of what that thing is: our dialogue is composed of sequential misunderstandings because each human mind is a complex of biological, spiritual and cultural prejudices and transforms another’s propositions into a pre-ordered system of beliefs. Given to uttering maxims, Jacques says: “If one says practically nothing in this world which is understood as it is said, there is something even worse, for one does practically nothing that is understood in the spirit in which it was done.” These philosophical generalisations aside — and to many readers they are absorbingly interesting — the novel contains stories filled with diverting action, hilarious, and sometimes scatological, situations, which are constantly interrupting the central narrative of Jacques’ love, all presented in a shuffled disharmony that is more real than the linear discourse of the ordinary type of realistic novel which invariably ends up being dully predictable.

There is high entertainment in Diderot’s novels whether the reader is undemanding and simply wants passing diversion or is fastidiously particular about the novelist’s relationship to his art and seeks a complex engagement with his general aesthetic and philosophical ideas. And those of us still cornered in a postcolonial reality — born in one world, living in another, and trying to find our place through art — will surely find in him a friend and a guide. Even politically, he is our contemporary. Referring to Diderot’s objection to colonialism, his biographer Furbank quotes him calling out to Africans: “Flee, unhappy Hottentots! Flee! Hide yourselves deep in your forests. The wild beasts who inhabit there are less to be feared than the monsters under whose rule you will fall.”

An 18th-century European who brands his contemporaries as monsters for what they have begun to do in Asia, Africa and the Americas was perhaps a misfit in his time but we can only think of him as our contemporary.