Jacques Diderot

Diderot was a writer of encyclopedias in 18th century France, as well as a novelist in secret – writers could be publicly executed for what the works they had written during this era. Jacques is, in its own way, a true encyclopedia of narrative possibility, in which no story is predetermined and every tale in danger of being cut off. The book was written over a 30 years period and yet it was not published as full version until 12 years after the author died in 1784. It is one of the most well structured and most inspired novels of the Modern European mind that had a strong influence on 20th century writers as diverse as Milan Kundera and Philip Roth. Every authentic monument (that is to say, every monument that is both memory and reflection) must carry carved on its portal the words Diderot has us read on the wall of one of those castles: "I belong to no one and to everyone; before entering, you were already here; here you will remain after departing."

As well as being a rather ambivalent examination of philosophical determinism, this novel is notable for the remarkably modern way in which Diderot engages the active participation of the reader in the recounting of the episodes, through authorial harangues, questions, puzzles, alternative versions, and ascribed reactions. He borrows a lot of writing approach from Sterne and Cervantes to create an amusing tale that takes a look at the debate between free will and determinism. Jacques the Fatalist is also interesting in its style.

Diderot uses stream of consciousness, disjointed subplots, lack of an overall plot, narrator interruptions and a lot of other abnormal tools to create a novel that questions its very form and despises traditional style pretty much wholesale. Like the author himself, Jacques is a discursive talker and a fatalist. Recounting the story of his love adventures to his master as they move from inn to inn, Jacques is continually interrupted by the intrusion of events, casual encounters, conversational digressions which, together with the thread of the main story, serve to expand on Diderot's central thesis of fatalism. Jacques in Jacques the Fatalist is a mixture of intellectual superiority and social inferiority. The work named after him is a hybrid of dialogue and narration.

The middle-class drama which Diderot advocated is in reality the bastard child of comedy (which was thought a low genre) and tragedy (which until then had been considered the only theatrical genre capable of attaining the sublime). It is no accident that Diderot's first stage hero is a natural son. Nor should we forget that Diderot's nun is an illegitimate daughter and that by having her write her life story in the first person Diderot is attempting the interesting experiment of identifying himself with the tormented existence of a woman's mind and body. Thus, the principle of hybridization inevitably leads to literary androgyny. To think of man as an aggregate of living molecules; to admit the possibility of each organ having its own autonomous existence; to reduce the diversity between living beings simply to differences of physical structure: are those not the prerequisites to conveying a doctrine of hardhearted determinism?

In this scheme of things man becomes the play, thing of the various elements which make up his bodyand of the chance which brought them together. If we read it to the bitter end, doesn't Diderot's inside story lead us to an outside story where everything depends on the laws of chance? Denis Diderot takes up the issue of determinism real solid in Jacques the Fatalist. Jacques believes all is foreordained, and the notion of free will does not have much meaning. When questioned why he decides to act as he does in any given situation, Jacques replies: "Why? My God, I don’t know. Without knowing what is written above, none of us knows what we want or what we are doing, and we follow our whims which we call reason, or our reason which is often nothing but a dangerous whim which sometimes turns out well, sometimes badly. What man is capable of correctly assessing the circumstances in which he finds himself? The calculation which we make in our heads and the one recorded on the register up above are two very different calculations. How many wisely conceived projects have failed and will fail in the future! How many insane projects have succeeded and will succeed!"

Enlightenment materialists and atheists tended to be strict determinists, because they regarded the issue of free will in terms of the possibility or the impossibility of an uncaused event. Because they saw thought and will as behaviors of the human organism, to speak of "free will" for them would mean to posit uncaused events. It was a position they were uneasy with, however, given their experience of their own minds and their experience of human psychology. Perhaps that is why the most striking work on the subject is once again, Jacques the Fatalist, in which Jacques, who is a deep and whimsical determinist, discovers that he cannot act consistently with his determinism. In any moral dilemma that occurs, he finds himself aware of the necessity of making a conscious choice. So, he concludes that it is impossible to live consistently with a deterministic philosophy, but that it is equally impossible not to think of a world of physical cause and effect, of which volitional phenomena are one set of effects. In fact, Jacques and his Master, say they are on a journey to "nowhere." Obviously, this not a philosophy that the court can rest so easy with, and yet, looking into the future, Jove points out that some will continue to hold such fatalistic beliefs well into the twentieth century.