Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master (2 page)

Jacques the Fatalist
is a novel which refers insistently to other novels, to story-telling and fiction. The reader soon becomes aware that a powerful attack is being mounted against a particular sort of novel, and will have little difficulty in recognizing what kind of fiction is under fire – undemanding, escapist literature, full of implausible plotting and stereotyped characterization, relying heavily on a strong love-interest. In its refusal of the romanticizing exaggeration of conventional fiction,
Jacques
belongs to a long and important tradition in the European novel, a tradition which can be defined by its rejection of the tawdry resources of ‘mere’ fiction and its proclamation of its own adherence to the superior claims of truth.
Jacques
repeatedly asserts not only that it is not an invented story, but also that it is a
true story
referring to the
real world
.

Readers who come to
Jacques
anticipating a ‘true story’ might find some initial reassurance in the Narrator’s repeated assurances of fidelity to the truth. This might even be reinforced by the presence in the text of some of the indicators readers have come to expect as evidence of the authenticity of the story they are being told. They are, for instance, given dates, places and proper names belonging to people who really existed. They are given explanations about the provenance of the story and its transmission via the Narrator to themselves. However, it soon becomes clear that the mere presence of these indicators does not mean that they work very successfully. A simple example is the matter of historical dates. One might imagine, on a first reading, that the presence of references to major events such as battles
and great natural disasters secured the novel in a firm chronological framework. Closer examination reveals that, far from offering the reader the security of a stable historical context, dates are delusory. Jacques was wounded in the knee in 1745 at the battle of Fontenoy, and refers to himself as having limped for twenty years, thus locating the time in which he is telling the story of his loves somewhere in the mid-sixties. What then are we to make of the reference to Mandrin’s gang in the final pages of the novel? Mandrin himself died in 1755. The dates appear to be contradictory. A similar situation arises when the reader pauses to consider the provenance of Jacques’ life story. There seems to be a manuscript somewhere which is the basis of the Narrator’s claim to be telling a true story. At the same time, there appears to be direct contact between Jacques and the Narrator (‘Jacques told me…’). In the final pages, however, this apparatus is thrown into doubt by the sudden intervention of an ‘Editor’ who inevitably reduces the Narrator from being a powerful authenticatory voice to a mere fictional device.

Once the readers’ suspicions are alerted they will notice more and more instances in which the seemingly secure structures of the narrative start to look shaky. Contradictions and logical impossibilities begin to crop up with alarming frequency. A widow is mourned by her husband. Jacques takes up a point made by the Narrator. A character’s death is fixed by two incompatible time sequences.

As a true story
Jacques
doesn’t work, it doesn’t fit together. Parts of the novel may maintain an internal coherence, but even these tend to look like exercises in style and rhetoric when replaced in their context. The story of Madame de La Pommeraye and the Marquis des Arcis is the most important instance of this. Taken by itself (and it has frequently been published as an autonomous novella), the story is convincing and moving. Replaced in the inn, where it is told to Jacques and his master by the innkeeper’s wife, its implausibility is easily demonstrated by two questions: Who is this innkeeper’s wife who speaks so eloquently? How has she learnt the story? What might, in one perspective, seem like a true story, becomes, in another, a fictional construct.

It gradually becomes apparent that what could initially have seemed mistakes – contradiction, incoherence, incompatibility – are ‘deliberate mistakes’, part of a strategy of disruption and subversion that seems designed to deny the reader any easy retreat into fictional illusion.
Jacques
not only points the finger of scorn at the inadequacies and artificialities of conventional fiction, but also points to its own fictional nature. When, for the umpteenth time, the Narrator asks us what is to prevent him from giving
us whatever fictional continuation he chooses, we may well cease to take this as part of a rhetorical protestation of truthfulness, take the question literally and answer ‘nothing’. The reference to truth is finally self-defeating. We cannot read
Jacques
straightforwardly as a chronicle of events, but must call into question our own expectations in reading fiction.

‘When someone tells a tale, to a listener, and assuming that the tale goes on for some length of time, it’s unusual for the teller not to be interrupted by his listener.’ These lines, which open one of Diderot’s short-stories, might serve as the epigraph to
Jacques
, a novel that is remarkable not merely by the quantity of tales and anecdotes that it contains but also by its dramatization of the relationship between the teller of a story and the listener or reader.

As we read
Jacques
, we are constantly made aware that the tales we are reading are being told by one person to another. Nor is this a point which we can simply take note of and then ignore: the circumstances surrounding the telling of a story almost always serve as an intrusive reminder. The innkeeper’s wife, for example, finds her attempts to begin her story repeatedly thwarted by the interruptions of her husband, customers and staff. Jacques’ efforts to continue the story of his loves are frustrated by the distressing tendency of his horse to bolt. At another point, he is physically prevented from continuing by a sore throat.

Stories are not received in silence, but interrupted, commented upon, interpreted and judged. The Narrator wages a running battle with the Reader over the stories he relates, provoking, teasing and bullying him to the point where the convention of authorial address to the reader ceases to be a mere convention and becomes the means to explore the complex dynamics of the story-telling relationship.

This exploration is most fully and subtly worked out in the relationship of Jacques and his master. The underlying symbiosis of the couple is expressed in the one’s need to talk and the other’s need to listen. At the same time, the latant antagonism of master and servant also finds expression in story-telling. Jacques is irritated at his master’s interruptions and exasperated at his demands to side-track to other issues. His master in turn seeks to make of his servant an almost mechanical furnisher of tales for his satisfaction. Jacques frets and worries over the difficulties and ambiguities of story-telling, while his master, with characteristic complacency, simply tells
Jacques that the important thing is that one should tell stories and the other listen.

The dramatization of the story-telling relationship fulfils another important function: it highlights the quest for significance or meaning which the stories are intended to provoke. For instance, Jacques and his master are fascinated by the story that the innkeeper’s wife tells them. They argue about the psychological coherence of the characters and how to interpret their behaviour; they argue about the morality of this behaviour and what judgement to pass on it. The Narrator then intrudes to provoke the Reader into discussion. The story has generated what might become an endless series of debates and discussions. The world of
Jacques
is not a fixed and settled one in which incidents and behaviour are easily assessed and interpreted. On the contrary, it is a world of dizzying variety and unpredictability, one which beckons its readers to embark on their own search for meaning rather than offering them ready-made answers.

Is there any ordering principle to be discerned in the welter of anecdotes that make up such a large part of the novel? Certainly, readers may initially be inclined to think that they are being offered a representation of the sprawling untidiness and inconclusiveness of life itself. However, it is fair to say that, besides the major themes of master–servant relations and fatalism dealt with below, there are four other important thematic areas which can be discerned emerging from the confusion.

The importance of the central relationship of the novel is signalled in the very title of the book,
Jacques the Fatalist and his Master
, as are its subversive implications: Jacques takes precedence over his master, Jacques has a name and his master has none. This reversal of the usual social order relates
Jacques
to a long tradition stretching back at least as far as Latin comedy, which explores the dramatic possibilities offered by bringing together two individuals, one the social superior, the other the intellectual superior. The literature of the French eighteenth century explores this relationship with particular zest and constitutes a veritable ‘Golden Age’ of the clever servant, whose two outstanding figures are Jacques and his first cousin and near contemporary, Beaumarchais’ Figaro. The similarities between the two are numerous and significant. Like Beaumarchais’ hero, Jacques is conscious of his worth and ready to assert his conviction that he is the equal, if not the superior of his master. More importantly, Jacques and Figaro both demand out of self-respect that this equality be recognized. It is no coincidence that for both men the cause of outright conflict with their master should be sexual rivalry. When Jacques’ master expresses his disbelief at the idea that a woman could prefer Jacques to himself, he formulates this in a particularly offensive manner, referring to Jacques as ‘A Jacques’, a contemptuous and dismissive term for a peasant. What he is saying is that Jacques is not an individual and cannot be taken seriously even in something as fundamental as his sexual aspirations. A servant, a peasant, is not a man. Jacques’ response is to assert the contrary, to claim equality and demand to be treated with appropriate respect. The context may seem trivial but the issue is not, and the figure of the servant asserts (as does Beaumarchais’ Figaro) a rejection of any social order which defines an individual’s worth by his social position.

This quarrel between Jacques and his master constitutes a high point in the novel, where the fundamental rejection of the
ancien régime
is most
apparent. The subsequent patching up of the quarrel (which as the Narrator points out has occurred a hundred times before) is just as significant. The intervention of the innkeeper’s wife restores the equality between Jacques and his master which constitutes the
de facto
reality of their day-to-day existence. Indeed equality is perhaps too mild a term since, as Jacques points out, he exercises effective control in the relationship, while his master has a merely titular authority. This pragmatic solution (by no means the only one of its kind in Diderot’s works) leaves certain fundamental contradictions unresolved, but it does have the virtue of effectiveness; it works. It also underlines the fact that while the master/servant relationship is, in some respects, a conflictual one, it is also a profoundly symbiotic one. Much has been made by some critics of the ineptness and stupidity of Jacques’ master, who appears to them the embodiment of an effete and parasitic aristocracy, while Jacques is the symbol of the valorous Third Estate. This is an exaggeration and a simplification: Jacques’ master, for all his limitations, is presented as an amiable and good-natured man, genuinely fond of his servant, and capable, for most of the time, of recognizing Jacques’ peculiar gifts and accepting his natural superiority. Indeed, as their relationship of story-teller and listener illustrates, each man needs the other. What characterizes Diderot’s treatment of the master/servant theme is the subtlety with which he brings out both the inevitably exploitative side of the relationship and its profoundly symbiotic nature.

Jacques is the hero of the novel not simply by virtue of his dominant position in his relationship with his master, but also by the fact that it is his past, the story of his loves, that provide the principal element of continuity in the work. This means that a considerable part of the novel focuses on a social setting that was comparatively rare in the French novel of the eighteenth century, the village and the countryside. Diderot had read extensively the work of English novelists of the century and had been struck by the relative broadness of scope the English novel allowed. Defoe, Fielding and Richardson could paint on a wider canvas and represent a greater variety of manners, customs and classes than could their French counterparts, who were bound, Diderot felt, by the rather restricted range of their public’s taste. In this respect
Jacques
is one of the most adventurous French novels of the century in its insistent reference to what might be termed scenes of everyday life in the village and the countryside, the traditional domain of the peasant, a social setting found only rarely in the French novel of this time. Often the episodes recounted come from an old stock of popular images and references – the farcical scene with the little village priest, the bawdy episodes of sexual
initiation and the career of Brother Jean – which cannot be said to be of Diderot’s invention. They belong to a popular tradition of tales, fables and jokes which after a considerable period of absence come back into the mainstream of prose fiction through
Jacques
. Indeed, it is arguable that
Jacques
is truly Rabelaisian not in its rather clumsy attempts at a literal reworking of Rabelais (as in the reference to the sacred gourd) but in a much more fundamental sense. With
Jacques
, Diderot reintroduces popular elements into the serious novel with an effect that is as liberating as it was in Rabelais’ time. The egalitarian message of
Jacques
lies as much in its re-introduction of popular forms into the novel as in its celebration of the clever servant.