Customer Reviews

Jacques the Fatalist (Oxford World's Classics)

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Two centuries or so before "modern" writers began writing experimental novels, Denis Diderot, the force behind the Encyclopaedia effort, wrote this strange and indeed very "modern" novel in which the author leads a conversation with the reader, asking him where he (or she, of course) would want to go and what to do with the characters and the story. Here we see the author in the very process of creation, exposing his doubts, exploring his options, and playing with the story.

There is really no plot as such. Jacques, a man who seems to believe everything that happens is already written "up on high", but who nonetheless keeps making decisions for himself, is riding through France with his unnamed master, a man who is skeptic of Jacques's determinism but who remains rather passive throughout the book. Fate and the creator-author will put repeatedly to test Jacques's theory, through a series of more or less fortunate accidents and situations, as well as by way of numerous asides in the form of subplots or stories.

The novel is totally disjointed and these asides and subplots blurb all over the place, always interrupted themselves by other happenings. The most interesting of them is the story of Madame de Pommeroy and her bitter but ultimately ineffectual revenge on her ex-lover.

Diderot confesses to having taken much from Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" and Cervantes's "Don Quixote". This last novel's influence seems obvious at two levels: Cervantes also talks to the reader, especially in Part Two, and also reflects abundantly on the creative process. Moreover, the tone and environment of the book is very similar to the Quixote: two people engaged in an endless philosophical conversations while roaming around the countryside and facing several adventures which serve to illustrate one or antoher point of view.

Diderot's humour is bawdy and practical and the book is fun to read. The exact philosophical point is not clearcut, but it will leave the reader wondering about Destiny, Fate, and Free Will.

An entertaining encounter with one of the most fascinating men in the history of letters, Denis Diderot, the "philosophe" and encyclopedist. More of a committed intellectual rather than a conceptual philosopher, he was one of the leading personalities of the movement which was the Enlightenment, with its stress on reason, order and individual liberty. Although strongly imbued with the Enlightenment spirit of naturalistic explanation of phenomena and free enquiry, one notices, in "Jacques the Fatalist" that he was veering from the strict faith in reason (which distinguished his other colleasgues), in favour of a semi-epicurean ethic as he calls reason another of the "whims" of the human race. The novel raises many questions regarding the nature of free will and necessity: Jacques lives in a universe governed by predetermined laws (in which all outcomes are written "up on high") but he acts as though he were free. Some of the antics and stories that transpire with Jacques and the Master provide instances of hilarious, and frequently bawdy, humour. A man who was ahead of his time, Diderot's fiction anticipates, in several ways, the "Nouveau Roman" of the 1950s and the "postmodern" novels of the 1990s in its highly experimental approach to narrative techniques. Sharp-eyed exegetes will also detect pasages that reveal him to be a proto-ecologist, a forerunner of the theories behind modern linguistics and a man whose insights uncannily presaged some of the formulations of the science of sociolgy (e.g. that higher standards of living would lead to a decrease in population.)

This book is amazing. It will make many of your conceptions of where things belong in the history of the novel fall apart. Not coincidentally, that is one of the points of this book, being an exercise more than a message: that all apparent armatures of order are one more perspective away from disintegration. This book is really quite sneaky as well. In the beginning, the constant references to the inscriptive certainties in the heavens seem silly. But then little explanations come along (like the geneology of Jacques' crazy horse), and the novel heads down a dark, yet very enchanting road, into a fuzz that's every bit as modern as any you've read. This thing alternately looks like Bunuel, Zola, Stendhal, Faulkner, Kerouac. The picaresque, the uncertain narrator, the structuralists, all seem to be swimming around in this amazing book.

Surely many writers and artists from this era (like Goya) depicted the nobles as effete and incapable of carrying out the governance of the most basic requirements of existence, but here, they also appear (in the image of the 'master') as so withdrawn from the world as to be blind. If you take away all the stories that are told, the only thing that's left of a plot here is the master having his horse stolen right from under his nose while Jacques was gone and then Jacques finding it for him at the end in a beautiful, mock sort of deus ex machina.

Jacques is, in terms of subject matter and narrative voice, the most modern work to come from the Enlightenment. It is a hilarious and thoughtful work from an author who found the acceptance of current literary traditions generally ridiculous. Diderot is amazingly adept at building up ominous situations which unnaturally trigger the reader's foreshadowing sensors, only to destroy all of one's expectations, laughingly, with a hammer. Truly a great work, full of wonderful philosophy and revolutionary expression.

Yeah. Believe all the reviews below. This book really is amazing. It would feel like it was written yesterday, if it was more derivative -- but it's fresh! The language is incisive, no waste, and the pacing and structure are brilliantly fluid. It's smart and funny, too, and completely unpredictable, filled with weird offhand bursts of bewildering narrativity. And yet balanced, apparently sane. I truly enjoyed reading it. It's great.

Anyone who thrilled at Calvino's 'If on a winter's night a traveller...', but despaired at ever finding another book like it (uniqueness DOES have its price), need fear no longer. 'Jacques', acknowledged by Calvino himself as a major influence, is one of the great precursors of post-modern literature. Like 'If on', the book is crammed with stories unfinished or interrupted by digressions, accidents, more interesting stories. Whereas the 19th centruy novelist generally talked down to his audience and explained everything, Diderot gives his reader a lot of freedom, and one of the dialogues of this book, a la Calvino, is between author and reader. Each story, incomplete or no, is a masterpiece of narrative (cinephiles might recognise the story of Madame de la Pommeraye as the basis of Robert Bresson's 'Les Dames du bois du Boulogne'); the formal experimentation does not mean blindness to a panorama of 18th century society - soldiers, peasants, thieves, innkeepers, aristocrats, prostitutes - and place (country, city, foreign climes) in a France on the cusp of Revolution.

It may be your destiny to read and adore the pithy wit of Diderot. At a time when the novel was new as a genre as a contemporary of Sterne and Richardson, Diderot confronts the religion and philosophy of his day entrenched in the idea that man's fate was written on a scroll on high and that man only acted out a bit part devoid of real choice in his slavery to destiny. Pre-destination did not sit well with Diderot and Jacques is the novelist in this "dog's breakfast" he has served up railing aginst his own genre to assert his humanity and freedom on his picaresque journey to nowhere. "Does anyone know where they're going?" certainly sounds like Beckett who lived in France and may well have read Diderot. Jacques is forced to conclude that people think they are in charge of their destiny when their destiny is in charge of them. What choice does the fatalist really have except to resign to his fate? Because life is a series of endless misunderstandings, it isn't easy to be captain of one's own soul. The epigrams are deliciously well phrased: "Virtue is an excellent thing. Both good people and wicked people speak highly of it." Or this: "I think there are some very odd things written up there on high." The wicked fable of the Sheath and the Knife is certainly memorable. Jacques is genuinely hilarious in many places and despite Diderot's scathing complaints of the early novel, he wrote wrote an enduring classic beloved because of its pure wit, audacity, irony and uncanny phrasing. I urge you to read this great early novel destined to foretell the promise bound to follow for the genre.

I'm making my way through the classics of 18th century lit via the "1001 Books to Read Before you Die" (I know, I know, I'm embarrassed.) Anyway- it's been a mixed back. I've enjoyed books like Tom Jones, suffered through books like Pamela & puzzled through but ultimately enjoyed books like Tristram Shandy.

The point of the preamble is that Jacques the Fatalist is the first of these 18th century books that I've really, really loved. I agree with all of the other reviewers- this is a true five star read. Not just because of its endurance over the centuries, but because, frankly, it's a fun read. Check it out- there is humor and bawdiness to keep you enthralled all the way through.

THis book is awesome mix of "Don Quixote," "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy," and the "Colloquies of Erasmus." ... With a dash of Rabelais and Boccaccio for good measure.

In other words: playful bawdy post modern meta narrative where carnivalesque stories weave in and out of each other. Ive read a few things by Diderot and this is my fav so far.

I'm a big fan of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - so its shocking to learn that it leans so heavily on Jacques. I found Jacques to be more entertaining than Sterne's work.

Similar to Voltaire's "Candide", this book examines the exploits of the Spinozan Jacques, and his adventures in a world he considers predetermined. The book is a cunning statement on the absurdity of human affairs, and mocks the value of metaphysical thought.