Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master Read online

  2. Rivalry

  The second theme of rivalry, like that of jealousy, is frequently illustrated in the context of sexual relations but throughout Jacques there recurs a particularly bizarre figure of rivalry in the form of the compulsive duellists. The rivalry motif involves a succession of couples hardly distinguishable the one from the next and offers the reader a haunting image of inexplicability – two men closely attached to one another, unable to live apart and at the same time impelled to fight bloody and dangerous duels.

  3. Bizarreness of Human Nature

  The inexplicability of human nature, as illustrated by the duellists, is a constant preoccupation in Jacques which clearly reflects Diderot’s fascination with the ‘outsize’ human character in Madame de La Pommeraye, Father Hudson and Jacques himself even. These figures, whose counterparts can be found in other works of Diderot, are distinguished by their unity of character, a hardness and autonomy which separates them from their fellows. They are those whose control over their fiery nature allows them to channel their exceptional energy into far-reaching and ambitious designs. It is not so much their contradictoriness that seems to fascinate Diderot as their irreducibility to any easy moral judgement. Admirable in certain respects they are also marked by a certain amoralism, often made manifest in their ruthless destruction of those who cross or oppose them. In the end, as in the case of the duellists, it is to the acceptance of the diversity of human nature that the reader is led.

  4. Deceit and Duplicity

  Hudson himself is the supreme deceiver, who manages not only to sustain an image of industry, piety and austerity while leading a life of debauchery but also manages to turn the tables on those sent to establish his guilt, to such effect that they, and not he, end up accused and punished. Hudson’s tale is only the most striking and elaborate illustration of a theme which pervades the novel. The deceiver may end up deceived, as in the case of the Steward who sleeps with the pastry-cook’s wife and ends up suffering the fate he had himself intended for the pastry-cook. Jacques’ love life and that of his master offer other examples of complex permutations of deceit. This group of themes is particularly recalcitrant to explanation and interpretation. It offers recurrent images of reversal, of artifice, of the opposition of appearance and reality. It may also perhaps offer a loose symbol of the opposition of truth and fiction so insistently referred to by the Narrator throughout the novel.

  SERVANT AND MASTER

  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.

  JACQUES THE FATALIST

  The title tells us that Jacques is a fatalist, but what does this mean? Many critics have assumed that Jacques is about fatalism, that it is an exploration in fictional terms of philosophical issues raised by Diderot’s materialist view of the world – a view which requi
res the universe to be explained exclusively in terms of matter, its properties and activity. Diderot was led from this position to a commitment to determinism which propounded that if the universe is explicable exclusively in terms of the organization and activity of matter, then there is no room for any ‘play’ in the system. Nothing is chance: all is determined.

  At the same time, Diderot was intensely preoccupied by ethical problems and concerns. Resolutely hostile to what he saw as the unnatural and stultifying effects of Christian ethical teaching, he remained equally resolute in seeking some alternative foundation to ethics. But this was where Diderot’s problems began, because the philosophical position he held seemed to deny any possibility of establishing a secure basis for ethics except as a form of utilitarian social engineering: if everything is determined, the argument will run, free will is a nonsense and, if this is the case, although we may attempt by means of an appropriate system of incentives and deterrents to make man what is socially desirable, we cannot make him a moral being.

  Freedom or determinism? This becomes the starting-point for a philosophical reading of Jacques. The fatalistic Jacques is committed to a form of determinism, believing that all is foreordained, ‘written up above’, in his own words, yet he constantly contradicts his own viewpoint by actions and feelings which are the behaviour of a moral being. The novel can then be read as an elaboration in fictional form of the philosophical dilemma in which Diderot found himself, committed to a philosophical doctrine which denied his need for a universe in which moral choice was meaningful.

  An interpretation of Jacques along these lines is plausible, and finds justification both in the text and in Diderot’s practice as a writer (Jacques is not the only one of Diderot’s works to explore dilemmas and unresolved tensions of his thought and personality). However, there are dangers in this line of interpretation.

  First, it would be wrong to explain this strange and complicated novel simply in terms of its exposition of some philosophical doctrine. Jacques’ fatalism is not really philosophical determinism but is more closely related to certain popular ideas and expressions (the idea of every bullet having its address on it, for instance, and the notion of everything being ‘written up above’) than to any philosophical doctrine. In so far as it relates to any philosophical doctrine the link is a tenuous one whose fallibility is underlined. Jacques’ ‘philosophical’ ideas are derived from his Captain, who in turn derives them from Spinoza. From Spinoza to ‘It’s written up above’ is not a route that is either obvious or direct.

  Secondly, if the novel were straightforwardly ‘about’ fatalism one might expect that there would be some developed argument, even perhaps a conclusion reached. This is not the case. Jacques may score points off his master – as when they become involved in the question of free will – but nowhere is there any conventional elaboration and exploration of issues. In pursuing this line, one might ask whether, apart from in the amount of time and space allocated to them, there is any difference between the discussion on fatalism and that on the subject of women which the Narrator tells us could go on interminably without getting anywhere. This is not to deny the importance of the discussion, but to underline the fact that the issue of fatalism is presented in Jacques as part of a work of fiction.

  CONCLUSIONS

  If there is no conclusion offered to the alternative of freedom or determinism, it is because the novel as a whole tends towards the representation of such alternatives as fundamentally irresoluble. Indeed the figure of what might be called alternativity runs throughout Jacques. Do the duellists love or hate each other? Is Gousse good or bad? Is Jacques servant or master? In each case the alternative does not allow a simple resolution. We cannot decide but have to cope as best we can with the answer: ‘Both at once’.

  Like the great comic works that it avows as its inspiration – Rabelais’ novels, Molière’s comedies, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – Jacques is above all a celebratory work. It proclaims its delight in diversity and difference, and a fascination with the quirkiness and bizarreness of human life. Like these masterpieces it is irreducible to any fixed and limiting scheme of interpretation. Jacques has been interpreted as a novel of moral experience, as a critique of the eighteenth-century novel, as an attack on the ancien régime, and as a philosophical exploration. It is all of these things but none of them exclusively. The worst misreading of Jacques would consist precisely in thinking that one could offer an exhaustive interpretation of it. With due regard to the Narrator’s strictures concerning allegory, we might say that Jacques is like the ‘château’ where Jacques and his master spend (or don’t spend) a night. It belongs to everybody and to nobody. Jacques calls to the intelligent reader – not the doctrinaire one – and invites us all to write our own conclusion.

  How did they meet? By chance like everyone else. What were their names? What’s that got to do with you? Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going to? Does anyone ever really know where they are going to? What were they saying? The master wasn’t saying anything and Jacques was saying that his Captain used to say that everything which happens to us on this earth, both good and bad, is written up above.

  MASTER: That’s very profound.

  JACQUES: My Captain used to add that every shot fired from a gun had someone’s name on it.

  MASTER: And he was right…

  (After a short pause Jacques cried out:) May the devil take that innkeeper and his inn!

  MASTER: Why consign one’s neighbour to the devil? That’s not Christian.

  JACQUES: Because while I was getting drunk on his bad wine I forgot to water our horses. My father noticed and got angry. I shook my head at him and he took a stick and hit me rather hard across the shoulders. There was a regiment passing through on its way to camp at Fontenoy,1 and so out of pique I joined up. We arrived. The battle started…

  MASTER: And you stopped the bullet with your name on it?

  JACQUES: You’ve guessed it. Shot in the knee. And God knows the good and bad fortunes that were brought about by that shot. They are linked together exactly like the links of a fob-chain. Were it not for that shot, for example, I don’t think I would ever have fallen in love, or had a limp.

  MASTER: So you’ve been in love then?

  JACQUES: Have I been in love!

  MASTER: And all because of a shot?

  JACQUES: Because of a shot.

  MASTER: You never said a word of this to me before.

  JACQUES: Very likely.

  MASTER: And why is that?

  JACQUES: That is because it is something that could not be told a moment sooner or a moment later.

  MASTER: And has the moment come for hearing about these loves?

  JACQUES: Who knows?

  MASTER: Well, on the off-chance, begin anyway…

  Jacques began the story of his loves. It was after lunch. The weather was very close, and his master fell asleep. Nightfall surprised them in the middle of nowhere. There they were, lost, and there was the master in a terrible temper, raining huge blows from his horsewhip on to his valet and at every blow the poor devil cried out: ‘That must also have been written up above!’

  So you can see, Reader, that I’m well away and it’s entirely within my power to make you wait a year, or two, or even three years for the story of Jacques’ loves, by separating him from his master and exposing each of them to whatever perils I liked. What is there to prevent me from marrying off the master and having him cuckolded? Or sending Jacques off to the Indies? And leading his master there? And bringing them both back to France on the same vessel? How easy it is to make up stories! But I will let the two of them off with a bad night’s sleep and you with this delay.

  Dawn broke. There they were back on their horses carrying on their way.

  – And where were they going?

  That is the second time you have asked me that question and for the second time I ask you, what has that got to do with you? If I begin the story of their jou
rney then it’s goodbye to Jacques’ loves… They went on for a little while in silence. When they had both recovered a little from their annoyance the master said to his valet: ‘Well then, Jacques, where did we get to in your loves?’

  JACQUES: We had, I believe, got to the rout of the enemy army. Everyone was running away and being chased and it was every man for himself. I was left on the battlefield, buried under the prodigious number of dead and dying bodies. The next day I was thrown onto a cart along with a dozen or so others to be taken to one of our hospitals. Ah! Monsieur, I do not believe there is any wound more painful than a wound in the knee.

  MASTER: Come along, Jacques, you’re joking.