top of page
Blog: Blog2

Jacques The Fatalist And His Master by Denis Diderot

Writer's picture: David ZasloffDavid Zasloff



Denis Diderot was a critical thinker and writer immediately before the French Revolution, though not as well-known as Voltaire and Rousseau, say. There's plenty of theorizing as to why this should be, of course. One possibility is that he spent much of his professional life editing the Encyclopedie, or Encyclopedia, a compendium of knowledge intended to free the thinking of those who consulted it. A project like that, as important as it was, left less time for Diderot's own work; he still produced so much of that that it hasn't all been published to this day, but editing the work of others must have been a huge distraction of sorts.


Which brings us to Jacques The Fatalist And His Master, Diderot completed it in 1780, and it was published posthumously in 1796. Unlike the Encyclopedia, which Diderot completed work on in 1764, this a work of fiction. I found it rather scattered, and I was ready to attribute that to the attention Diderot needed to devote to the Encyclopedia, but that obviously wasn't the case. Let's see if we can find anything within Jacques The Fatalist itself to explain that scattered quality.


The story, as the title says, concerns a man named Jacques who is the servant of a man whose name we never learn. They're on their way somewhere, the name and nature of which we likewise don't learn much about. To pass the time, the master instructs Jacques to talk about his love affairs. Jacques does this with reluctance, for reasons which also aren't clear. Get the idea?


This vagueness is scarcely important, because on the journey Jacques is constantly interrupted. Sometimes the interruptions come through people they meet on the road, sometimes through other stories that passersby tell them, sometimes simply by the fact that Jacques gets a sore throat and can't speak anymore. This is part of what scatters the story; the tales that interrupt Jacques don't have much to do with what came before.


Having said that, the various tales are generally pretty funny. One of them, for instance, has to do with two officers in the army. They are great friends, but look so much alike that they frequently find themselves fighting duels. Why those similar looks cause the duels is yet another vague, unexplained phenomenon, but at least it's funny.


So why the title “Jacques The Fatalist”? Here, at last, we have a kind of explanation. Right from the start of this piece, and periodically throughout the book, Jacques proclaims that whatever happens “down here” is written on a big scroll “up there”. There's no further specific explanation, but even if we don't assume that “up there” means Heaven specifically, it seems that Jacques is no great believer in free will. Rather, he seems to assume that everything that happens, to him or anyone else, was predicted long ago, or at any rate unavoidable. Whatever happens to him, his master, or the people they encounter, was meant to be that way. If that's not fatalistic, I don't know what would be.


Jacques' master seems a little dubious about this, but rarely bothers to argue the point. As for Diderot, I have been unable to find any indication as to whether he took a fatalistic apptoach to life or not. I doubt it; remember he spent considerable time editing a huge work intended to provide people with as much information as they could get, to make it possible to live the freest life they could.


Then, too, in “Jacques The Fatalist,” the narrator – presumably Diderot himself – occasionally interrupts his tale to discuss where the story and characters might go next. Many of these interruptions include an invitation for readers to make up their own minds as to the next developments. Those invitations are a lot of things, but hardly fatalistic.


Benshlomo says, There's more to storytelling than leading your readers around by the nose.

6 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

コメント


©2019 by 1001 Must Read Books. Proudly created with Wix.com

bottom of page