EQUIPAMIENTO PARA LA PRODUCCIÓN, TRANSPORTE Y PUESTA EN OBRA DEL HORMIGÓN

A

T FIRST GLANCE ONE WOULD NEVER ASSOCIATEDiderot, man of the En- lightenment, with the fairy tale genre. Nonetheless, The White Bird (1749), includes all of its earmarks: a fairy, miracles, transformations, evil geni, and supernatural events. Author of such ground-breaking works as

Philosophical Thoughts, Letter on the Blind, D’Alembert’s Dream, Rameau’s Nephew, and Paradox of the Comedian, and general editor of, as well as contrib-

utor to one of the century’s great achievements, The Encyclopedia, Methodical

Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Trades—Diderot chose the fairy tale to point

up the absurdit y of certain religious, political, and social ideas. Ultra ref lective in its philosophical thrust, The White Bird may be considered a blend of Diderot’s fundamental rebelliousness with high doses of satire, parody, and mystifying intent. Mixed with these are Diderot’s usual provocative signs, sen- sations, and images whose purpose is to destabilize, if not eradicate, the re- pressive and regressive religious dogmas, mores, and political regimes f lourishing in the France of his day. To his bent for humor, one of the most powerful weapons to gain the reader’s attention, he added an arresting psy- chological technique which we today label “active imagination.”

E

CTYPAL

A

NALYSIS

Born at Langres, in eastern France, Diderot belonged to a family that had for several generations been involved in the cutlery trade and in the Church.

Taught by the Jesuits, as were many French children of the day, the precocious lad was then sent to the Collège d’Harcourt in Paris, where he completed his formal education. Acquiescing to his father’s wishes, he enrolled at law school, but after t wo years of desultory study, he opted for what he enjoyed: classics, physics, and mathematics—resulting in his father’s withdrawal of financial support. Although details are scarce concerning the hardships the young man subsequently suffered, certain scenes in some of his works, and particularly in

Rameau’s Nephew, reveal that he may have gone many a day without food. So-

ciable by nature, whenever time and funds permitted the young man spent many pleasant hours at the celebrated Café Procope, and later at the Régence which attracted not only chess players, but the intelligentsia of the day as well. His marriage in 1743 to Antoinette Champion, a simple girl whose mother kept a lace and linen shop, came as a surprise. The t wo had nothing in com- mon intellectually. Their only surviving child—Diderot’s beloved daughter, Angélique, the future Mme Vandeuil—wrote her father’s memoirs.

Life for a person of ideas and ideals was not easy in eighteenth-century France. To write or speak openly on science, religion, and/or politics fre- quently invited imprisonment, exile, or, even death, yet Diderot, together with his “liberal” contemporaries, determined to infuse a spirit of inquiry into these fields. Deism, for example, an English import, emphasized the ex- istence of an impersonal God who was neither manifest in history nor imma- nent in nature. Although Deists accepted the notion of immortalit y of the soul and the realit y of good and evil, they considered organized religion su- perf luous and dangerous—a spreader of bigotry, hatred, and war. In Philo-

sophical Thoughts (1746), Diderot increasingly freed his beliefs from

constriction by adopting a virtually pantheistic view of divinit y: “Enlarge God,” he wrote, “see Him everywhere or nowhere at all.” In Promenade of a

Skeptic (1747), he pointed to his disbelief in religious mysteries and in the su-

pernatural. Nor did he hide his antagonism toward Christianit y and its pow- erful and exploiting clergy. Scientific in thrust, Diderot expressed his virtually atheistic views in his Letter on the Blind (1749). Following its publi- cation, he was predictably condemned by the Parlement of Paris to imprison- ment at Vincennes for several months. In the years to come, his literary career burgeoned with D’Alembert’s Dream, Jack the Fatalist, The Paradox of the

Comedian, The Nun, Indiscreet Jewels, Salons, and more.

Diderot’s innovative thoughts and thirst for knowledge, his perceptions, humor, rambunctiousness, and licentiousness, his gracious, and extroverted temperament, drew friendly and illustrious minds to his side. Among these, were D’Alembert, Condillac, Grimm, and Baron d’Holbach. Meanwhile, Diderot’s reputation, which had spread far and wide, elicited an invitation from Catherine II of Russia to visit her court in 1773. He did so. Not only did

she buy his library, but made him its curator. Two years later, Diderot’s meet- ing with Sophie Volland (1755), a woman he called “a trif le baroque,” led to deep emotional ties, a lifelong friendship, and brilliant correspondence be- t ween them (Furbank, Diderot 187f.).

Throughout his life, Diderot worked tirelessly—and mainly covertly—to condemn and fight superstition, intolerance, persecution, and religious dog- matism. He reiterated his credo of a godless universe just prior to his death at the dinner table. “Life is merely a long workday, death a long sleep, the grave a bed of repose, and the earth a pillow where it is very pleasant, at last, to lay one’s head in final sleep” (Fellows and Torrey, The Age of Enlightenment 210).

A

RCHETYPAL

A

NALYSIS

The world of dream and sleep, and all that lies beyond the rational physical sphere, is metaphorized in The White Bird, essentially a parody of the Chris- tian dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Understandably his fear of retri- bution governed his decision not to have the parody published during his lifetime. He probably composed The White Bird at about the same time he was writing his innovative risqué novel Indiscreet Jewels (1748). Both works are parodic, replete with ribald humor and wit, supernatural intercessions, al- legorical digressions, and pungent ironies.

Diderot’s reconstitution of exotic lands, his f luid transpositions of var- ied lifest yles, and his injection of somewhat fictitious mores in The White

Bird were seemingly inf luenced by Antoine Galland’s translation or version

of Thousand and One Nights (1704–1717). The original work (1450), a selec- tion of ancient Persian-Indian-Arabian tales featuring fanciful creatures, su- pernatural beings, outlandish happenings, and satiric innuendoes, had become popular fare in the France of Diderot’s day. Similarly, Antoine (or Anthony) Hamilton’s novel, The Four Facardins (1730), written ostensibly “for the beautiful sultan who slipped bet ween t wo bed sheets for t wo thou- sand consecutive nights to listen to tales à dormir debout,” earned popularit y as well. Its semiotic perspective and its accompanying sensations aroused the reader’s lustful desires. After all, “what woman would have slipped bet ween t wo sheets to simply listen to old wives tales” (Barchilon, Le Conte merveilleux

français from 1690 to 1790 81).

Diderot’s proclivit y for the risqué prompted him to well-modulated, yet overt sexual pronouncements and innuendoes in The White Bird (Barchilon 79–81). Nor was he alone in preparing rich brews of drollery. Equally hu- morous and searing was Montesquieu’s The Persian Letters (1721), in which Persians visiting Paris ridiculed French mores and the country’s dogmatic

political and religious climate. Voltaire, likewise, attempting to rectify some of the France’s governmental and religious injustices and fanaticism had re- course to miraculousness and licentiousness in some of his philosophical tales, particularly Zadig (1747); to giants and extraterrestrial travel in Mi-

cromégas (1752); and to unicorns, griffins, and talking birds in The Princess of Babylon (published posthumously in 1768). What better way was there in

times past (and times present) to proclaim intellectual and religious freedom than to insert impossible happenings into a fairy tale—certainly a perfect de- vice to avoid the greedy appetites of anthropophagous censors. Nor must we forget that the philosophes, “the libertines, and libertarians” added to their list of demands, not only “freedom to pleasure,” but “freedom to investigate,” ergo, to gain enlightenment (Starobinski, L’invention de la liberté 10).

The White Bird, written in the form of a dialogue, is set against an exotic

backdrop: a harem. A sultana with difficult y sleeping hires to combat her in- somnia a specialist to tickle the soles of her feet, and t wo women and t wo men to improvise a tale that would last for seven nights. The narrative’s ex- oticism, locale, and most importantly, the unmoderated thirst for sensualit y are, to a large extent, a simulacrum of humankind’s miraculous capacit y to fantasize. By playing on people’s thirst for novelt y, Diderot underscored in a titillating way the oddities and inequities involved in France’s regressive po- litical and religious systems.

The White Bird hones in on a single Japanese prince, Genistan, who, dur-

ing the course of events, is transformed into a white pigeon. The variet y of fe- male t ypes introduced into the narrative during the seven evenings, each ambiguous in her own way, ranges from the prude and the ascetic, to the het- aera and the coquette. Not without interest is the author’s emphasis on women. Although The White Bird is not a diatribe in favor for or against women’s rights, Diderot, like Montesquieu, D’Holbach, and Grimm, believed that the oppres- sion of women was but one aspect of many injustices existing in eighteenth-cen- tury France. Neverthelesss, Diderot was far from kind in his characterization of women in his essay “On Women” (1772). Although he expresses pit y of the fair sex for their physical sufferings, he depicts them as being obstinate, secre- tive, superstitious, curious, ignorant, arrogant, vain, violent, given to jealousy and hysteria. When prey to mood swings, their faces became grotesque and their bodies distorted (Diderot, Oeuvres 953). Believing women to be in general intellectually inferior to men, Diderot nevertheless courted (with the exception of his nonintellectual wife whom he married on impulse) intellectually oriented women, notably Mme de Puisieux—perhaps not without purpose in her case, since he was composing at the time his libertine novel, Indiscreet Jewels (1748).

His ideas concerning women’s education were contradictory. Although he was in favor of the furtherance of women’s education collectively speaking,

his daughter Angélique’s instruction revealed his own mysogyny. Her intellec- tual explorations were restricted to the home, to rearing children, and to car- ing for the household. Like many other thinkers of the Enlightenment, Diderot remained “a prisoner of the gynophobic mentalit y of the past” (Trouille, “Sex- ual/Textual Politics in the Enlightenment,” Romanic Review 85: 197, 202).1

SLEEP: TICKLING AND ACTIVE IMAGINATION. Reminiscent of Thousand

and One Nights, Diderot’s tale deals inter alia with the problem of insomnia—

not the sultan’s, as in the original work, but rather the sultana’s. Nor was the sultana’s life at stake in Diderot’s tale as it had been in the fifteenth-century collection of Arabian, Hindu, and Persian tales. Unlike its predecessor as well, Diderot’s tale recounts that sleep was brought on not only by the narra- tor’s expertise as a storyteller, but by a combination of this talent with mas- tery in the art of tickling the soles of the sultana’s feet. To prevent “overworking” the imagination and vocal chords of the t wo emirs and t wo women called upon to participate in the tale-telling process, each took up the plot where the former had left off.

Although one might initially surmise that the act of tickling would ex- cite rather than subdue a person, it had the contrar y effect on the sultana, whom we encounter at the beginning of Diderot’s tale resting comfortably on her divan. Indeed, so pleasing and so relaxing were the sensations elicited by the tickling process that they lulled her to sleep. The continuing droning and lilting of the narrators added the magical effect of language to the expe- rience. By enticing his readers into far off realms, Diderot awakened them to the intangible, supernat ural and abstract domains of “active imagination.” A technique used by Diderot and referred to in D’Alembert’s Dream as “asso- ciationism,” active imagination, invites the protagonists in The White Bird to confront their psyches by encouraging their full participation in the “fantasy-drama” related (Hannah, Active Imagination 1).

The technique of “active imagination” is the heart of storytelling—and is to a great extent the basis of religions, myths, epics, fairy tales, and fiction in general. It is only in recent centuries that it has been used with positive ef- fects in mental hospitals for healing purposes. As a process that encourages both listener and teller to gain possession of a nonfunctional libido (psychic energy), active imagination also allows associations and fantasies the greatest possible latitude in the structuring of the individual’s scenarios. Diderot, by highlighting subliminal yearnings in painterly patternings and plot lines, had instinctively understood what Jung noted t wo centuries later: “We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid—it ref lects the face we turn towards it. Hostilit y lends it a threatening aspect, friendliness softens its features” (Jung 12, 29; Hannah 7).

As conjurer of fantasy realms, each installment of Diderot’s tale is a paradigm of the author’s foray into active imagination. Heretofore dormant archet ypal images, awakened in the sultana’s unconscious, f lood her mind with memories, int uitions, auditive, or tactile sensations. The hypnagogic or pre-sleep condition into which the four narrators lull the sultana divests her of her empirical concerns, ridding her, at least temporarily, of her re- sponsiblities, aggravations, and controversies. Dist urbing problematics having receded into the background, she is free to dwell on mysterious sce- narios that offer the glitter and excitement of novelt y. The resulting condi- tion of affective interaction and dependency among the participants creates a psychologically porous climate that leads each into heretofore uncharted territories.

Just as painters and sculptors give visible shapes to unmanifested essences, sensations, and abstractions that lie dormant in their subliminal spheres, so the dramatis personae in Diderot’s tale spin out multiple events in concrete form. In so doing, they not only give expression to their moods and fantasies, but imbue the entire scene with idea, pitch, and rhythm. Un- usual was Diderot’s technique of unif ying dualities: each pictorial repre- sentation contained its opposite, or its struggle against the ver y notion enunciated within the same context. The energy charges summoned by these moral and ideological dichotomies served either to liberate or further incarcerate the protagonists’ inner demons, spirits, ghosts, or loving deities, affording them in the process the opport unit y of undergoing new inner experiences.

THE MANIFESTATION OF THE HOLY GHOST AS A MIRACULOUS WHITE BIRD—MASS HYSTERIA! Diderot’s tale opens in a convent in China delin- eated in salient and rapid brushstrokes. The first female narrator recounts the miraculous advent of a white bird to the young virgins in this house of worship. All express their overwhelming delight at the appearance of this splendid pigeon that has just alighted on the branches of a palm tree within the convent’s precincts. With its beak, described in curt and semiotically sig- nificant terms as emerging from within its thickly clustered plumes, it begins to groom its wings and tail. A titter is heard among the young virgins, who are immensely attracted to this spectacularly plumed creature. They gather around it and most surprisingly speak to it in loving terms. “Bird of my heart,” Agariste whispers, “bird, my little king, come to me, fear nothing; you are too beautiful for us to want to hurt you. Come, a charming cage awaits you. Or, if you prefer freedom, you may roam free” (Diderot, III, The White

Bird 303). Compliantly, the bird f lies toward the cluster of virgins, landing

gers with seemingly lustful glee over this God-sent creature’s thick, smooth, and shiny feathers (White Bird 304).

The excitement of the giggling convent girls attracts the attention of the old mother superior, referred to as “la grande guenon” (a hag-like “fire-colored female monkey”). She, in marked contrast to the convent girls, looks at the beautiful bird with pronounced “disdain” (White Bird 304). The young virgins rush toward Agariste, bombarding her with questions about the bird. With everyone’s attention focused on him, the magnificent creature ascends into the air, hovers over the postulants, and “its shadow encloses them in its embrace.” All the girls, Agariste and Mélissa in particular, are suddenly overcome by strange, utterly sublime, but heretofore unknown sensations. Their aroused bodies move about in erotically inspired poses. Filled with rapture, they give expression to their reaction to the White Bird’s hovering presence through unimagineably indecent wigglings, gyrations, and frenzied tremblings. It was as if, Diderot wrote, “a divine fire, a sacred ardor [had] lighted in their heart ” (White Bird 305). Suddenly, as if invaded by the subtle luminosities of this heav- enly being, the intensit y of their gyrations reached such a pitch as to become the first known miracle to have taken place in the Chinese convent to date. Diderot noted simply that the miraculous manifestation of the bird as the third person of the Trinit y, unlike that in the biblical account, transformed “two idiots” into the most “spiritual and awakened” females in China (White Bird 305).

When the White Bird burst into song, no ordinary tonalities emanated from its throat. The “melodious” resonances reverberating throughout the convent impressed themselves so powerfully on the tittering virgins that they “[fell] into a state of ecstasy,” or experienced their first orgasm (White Bird 305). Even the “grande guenon,” who had until this moment scorned the bird, upon hearing its celestial sonorities throbbed with sexual desire. As if a pulsating vibrator had been placed on her, she felt ravished by the energy charges coursing through her body. Overwhelmed by the powerful sexual stimulation and the concomitant urges the sound waves had activated in her body, she screamed: “Oh! I can no longer bear it! I’m dying! Charming bird, divine bird, just one more little melody” (White Bird 305).

The confusion, the breathlessness, the pantings, frenzied climaxes, rav- ings, and “wild-eyed” gazes accompanying the protracted bodily gestures of the convent virgins, and carried to most shocking extremes by their mother superior, had divested them all of the abilit y to verbalize their sensations. The outbusts of erotico-spiritual frenzy visibly experienced by the “grande guenon” during the event had so hyped her that she fell to the ground, land- ing on her prayer cushion.

“Ecstasy,” the word used by Diderot to narrate the occurrences in the convent during the White Bird’s advent, is defined as a “state of being beyond

reason and self-control,” as “a mystic or prophetic trance,” a psychological con- dition in which the individual undergoing the experience surrenders to it com- pletely, allowing it to “occupy the entire field of consciousness” (Webster’s

Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, 1983; Campbell, Psychiatric Dictionary 233).

The miraculous event followed by the ecstatic experience aroused the virgins’ heretofore hermetically sealed sexual urges to the extent of opening them up to the joys of complete abandon. As former prisoners of their ele- mental powers (or energy centers), the postulants understood for the first time the meaning of the sexual experience. The sudden release of their pent- up instinctual powers, having overcharged their inner electric counters (li- bido), led to bouts of intense mental confusion on their part—ergo, to a

In document Estudios de Mercado. El mercado de Maquinaria de Obras Públicas y Construcción en la Federación Rusa (página 40-45)