Denis Diderot, Jacques Le Fataliste

Diderot’s status amongst the founding fathers of contemporary literature is continually rising, and mostly because of his antinovel, or metanovel, or hypernovel, Jacques the Fatalist and his Master: the text’s richness and innovative thrust will never be fully exhausted.

The first thing to note is that Diderot reverses what was the principal intention of all authors of the time, that of making the reader forget that he is reading a book, and of then having him abandon himself to the story being narrated as though he were experiencing the events for himself. Instead Diderot foregrounds the conflict between the author who is telling his story and the reader who is waiting only to hear it: the curiosity, expectations, disappointments and protests of the reader, which are pitted against the intentions, polemics and whims of the author in deciding how the plot will develop, constitute a dialogue which frames the dialogue between the two protagonists, which in turn acts as a frame for other dialogues …

Diderot transforms the reader’s relationship to the book from one of passive acceptance to that of continuous debate or rather one of constant surprise which keeps his critical spirit alive. In doing so he anticipates by two centuries Brecht’s aims in the theatre. The only difference is that Brecht will do so on the basis of very precise didactic aims, whereas Diderot gives the impression of wanting only to abandon any deliberate authorial intention.

It must be said that Diderot plays a kind of cat and mouse game with the reader, opening up a range of different possibilities at every turning in the plot, almost leaving him to select the development which he prefers, only then to delude him by rejecting all of them but one, and that one is always the least ‘novelistic’ development. In this respect Diderot is a forerunner of the idea of ‘potential literature’ which would be so dear to Raymond Queneau, yet he also rejects it to a certain extent: for Queneau will set up a model for his Un Conte à votre façon (Yours for the Telling) in which we seem to hear Diderot inviting the reader to choose a sequel, whereas in fact Diderot wanted to prove that there could only be one sequel to the plot. (And this corresponds to a precise philosophical option, as we shall see.)

Jacques the Fatalist is a work that eludes rules and classification, and acts as a kind of touchstone against which to test several definitions coined by literary theorists. The structure is one of ‘deferred narrative’: Jacques starts telling the story of his love affairs but, after interruptions, digressions, and other stories inserted into the middle of his own, only concludes them at the end of the book. This structure, articulated in a Chinese-box pattern of stories inside other stories, is not only dictated by a taste for what Bakhtin will term ‘polyphonic’, ‘Menippean’, or ‘Rabelaisian’ narrative: it is for Diderot the only authentic image of the living world, which is never linear nor stylistically homogeneous, though its linkages, while discontinuous, always reveal an inner logic.

In all of this one cannot ignore the influence of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, an explosive novelty of the time in terms of literary form and of attitude towards the things of this world: Sterne’s novel is an example of a freewheeling, digressive narrative which lies at the opposite extreme from eighteenth-century French taste. Anglophilia in literature has always been a vital stimulus for the literatures of continental Europe: Diderot made it his emblem in his crusade for expressive ‘truth’. Critics have pointed out phrases and episodes which have migrated from Sterne’s novel to Jacques; and Diderot, in order to prove how little he cared about charges of plagiarism, actually declares before one of the final scenes in the book that he has copied it from Tristram Shandy. In truth whether he lifted the odd page either word for word or paraphrased does not matter very much; in its broad outlines Jacques, a picaresque story about the wanderings of two characters on horseback who narrate, listen to and live through various adventures, is as different as could be from Tristram Shandy, which embroiders on largely domestic episodes involving a group of family members or people from the same parish, dealing in particular with the grotesque particulars of a birth and the early misfortunes of the infant. The similarity between the two works should be sought at a deeper level: the real theme of both books is the concatenation of causes, the inextricable linkage of circumstances which determines every event, even the most insignificant, and which has taken the place of Fate for modern writers and readers.

What counted in Diderot’s poetics was not so much the originality of a book as the fact that it answered, argued with or completed other books in turn: it is in the cultural context as a whole that a writer’s every endeavour acquires significance. The great gift bequeathed by Sterne not just to Diderot but to world literature as a whole, which would subsequently affect a fashion for romantic irony, was his unbuttoned attitude, his giving vent to his humours, the acrobatics of his writing.

Nor should it be forgotten that a major model openly admitted by both Sterne and Diderot was Cervantes’ masterpiece, even though they both inherited different elements from it: one combining it with his felicitous English mastery in creating fully realised characters by underlining the peculiarity of a few almost caricature traits, the other drawing on the repertoire of picaresque adventures that take place in inns or on the highways in the tradition of the roman comique.

Jacques the servant, the squire, comes first – even in the title – before his master, the knight (whose name we are never told, almost as if he existed only as a function of Jacques, as his maître; and even as a character he remains more shadowy than his servant). That their relationship is one of servant to master is certain, but it is also that of two friends: hierarchical relationships have not yet been questioned (the French Revolution is at least ten years away), but they have lost some of their significance. (On all these aspects there is an excellent introduction by Michele Rago to the Italian translation, Jacques il fatalista e il suo padrone, in Einaudi’s ‘Centopagine’ series: it provides a complete and accurate account of the historical, literary and philosophical context of the book.) It is Jacques who takes all the important decisions; and when his master becomes imperious, he can occasionally refuse to obey, though only up to a certain point and no further. Diderot describes a world of human relationships which are based on the reciprocal influences of individual qualities, which do not cancel out social roles but at the same time are not crushed by them: it is a world which is neither a utopia nor one which denounces social mechanisms, but one which is observed almost transparently in a period of huge change.

(The same could be said about relations between the sexes: Diderot is ‘feminist’ through his own innate mentality not because he wants to deliver a particular message. For him women are on the same moral and intellectual plane as men, and are equally entitled to the pursuit of emotional and sensual happiness. And in this respect there is an unbridgeable gulf between this work and the cheerful, indefatigable misogyny of Tristram Shandy.)

As for the ‘fatalism’ which Jacques purports to represent (everything that happens has already been ‘written up above’), we see that far from justifying resignation or passivity, it leads Jacques always to display initiative and never to give up, while his master, who seems to incline more towards free will and individual choice, tends to become discouraged and to let himself be swept away by events. As philosophical dialogues, their discussions are somewhat rudimentary, but scattered allusions refer to the idea of necessity in Spinoza and Leibniz. Against Voltaire, who in Candide or Concerning Optimism takes Leibniz to task, Diderot in Jacques le Fataliste seems to side with Leibniz and even more with Spinoza, who had upheld the objective rationality of a single, ineluctable world, proved by his geometrical method. If for Leibniz this world was only one of many possible worlds, for Diderot the only possible world is this one, whether it is good or bad (or rather, always a mixture of good and bad), and man’s behaviour, whether good or bad (or rather, it too is always a mixture), is valid only insofar as it is capable of responding to the set of circumstances in which he finds himself. (This includes cunning, deceit, and ingenious fictions – see for instance the ‘novels within the novel’, the intrigues involving Madame de La Pommeraye and Father Hudson who devise in real life calculated, theatrical fictions. This is very far from Rousseau, who exalted the goodness and sincerity in nature and in the ‘natural’ man.)

Diderot had worked out that actually the most rigidly deterministic conceptions of the world are the ones which generate in the individual will an urge to move forward, as though will and free choice can only be effective if they carve out their openings against the hard rock of necessity. This had been true of the religions which had exalted the will of God to the maximum over man’s will, and it will also be true in the two centuries after Diderot which will see new theories of a determinist kind assert themselves in biology, economics and society, and psychology. We can say today that these theories have opened the way to genuine freedoms even as they established an awareness of necessity, whereas cults of will and activism have only led to disasters.

Nevertheless, one cannot say outright that Jacques the Fatalist ‘teaches’ or ‘proves’ this or that. There is no fixed theoretical point which is compatible with the constant movement and cavortings of Diderot’s heroes. His horse twice goes its own way and leads Jacques to a hill where the gallows stand, but the third time explains all, for it takes him to the house of its former owner, who was the hangman. This is certainly an Enlightenment parable against belief in premonitory signs, but it is also a forerunner of the darker vein of Romanticism with its images of ghostly hanged men on barren hillsides (even though we are still a long way from the special effects of a writer like Potocki). And if the finale descends into a succession of adventures condensed into a few sentences, with his master killing a man in a duel, and Jacques turning into a brigand with Mandrin and then rediscovering his master and saving his castle from being sacked, we recognise here that eighteenth-century concision which clashes with the Romantic pathos of the unexpected and of destiny, such as we find in Kleist.

Life’s accidents in their uniqueness and variety cannot be reduced to laws and classification, even though each one follows a logic of its own. The story of the two inseparable officers, who are unable to live apart but who nevertheless regularly feel the urge to duel with each other, is told by Diderot with a laconic objectivity which however does not conceal the ambivalence of a passionate element in their relationship.

If Jacques is an anti-Candide, it is because it was conceived as an anti-conte-philosophique: Diderot is convinced that truth cannot be constrained into one form, or into one didactic fable. He wants his literary creativity to match the inexhaustible details of life, not to prove a theory that can be enunciated in abstract terms.

Diderot’s wide-ranging way of writing is opposed as much to ‘literature’ as it is to ‘philosophy’, but today what we recognise as genuinely literary writing is actually Diderot’s. It is no accident that Jacques the Fatalist has been recently given a modern, theatrical form by a writer of the calibre of Milan Kundera, and that Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, shows him to be the most Diderotian of contemporary writers for his skill in blending together the novel about emotions with the existential novel, philosophy and irony.

[1984]