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About the Author
Denis Diderot was born at Langres in eastern France in 1713. After graduating in Paris in 1732, he was nominally a law student for ten years, but was actually leading a precarious bohemian but studious existence. In the early 1740s he met three contemporaries who were of great significance to him and to the age: a'Alembert, Condillac and Rousseau, who assisted Diderot in the compilation of the Encyclopedie, which he worked on until its completion in 1773. Interested in the mind-body dichotomy, his work was a bold mixture of science and philosophy. He died in 1784.
Translated by Michael Henry with an introduction and notes by Martin Hall
How did they meet? Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Picaresque novels, with their many loosely connected stories, usually lose my interest easily, but this didn't happen with `JTF'. The book is very funny, and the stories are punctuated with witty dialogues between Jacques and his master, or Q&A sessions by the author. Although this is a `philosophical' novel, the philosophy is not laid on with a trowel, and is also integral to the stories. Consequently the whole thing was a jaunty, enjoyable and easy read. Diderot also tips a wink to contemporaries, especially Laurence Sterne, adding to the don't-take-me-too-seriously feel of the whole thing. If the words `picaresque', `18th century' or `philosophical novel' usually put you off, `JTF' is still worth a read. It is funny and clever, and its hero is a truly memorable character.
Modern-day readers may find the constant authorial digressions a little wearing; our contemporary wish to "Get On With It" needs to be re-considered in the context of its time, when readers were of the leisured class and had many hours to fill.
Students of the evolution of the novel will enjoy noting the similarities and differences between this work and the other classic Master/Servant novel: Don Quixote.
To be read slowly and thus enjoyed.
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.
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.
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