- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks; New edition edition (29 April 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0192838741
- ISBN-13: 978-0192838742
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 13 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,048,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Jacques the Fatalist: And His Master (Classics)
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Product Description
Product Description
'Your Jacques is a tasteless mishmash of things that happen, some of them true, others made up, written without style and served up like a dog's breakfast.' Jacques the Fatalist is Diderot's answer to the problem of existence. If human beings are determined by their genes and their environment, how can they claim to be free to want or do anything? Where are Jacques and his Master going? Are they simply occupying space, living mechanically until they die, believing erroneously that they are in charge of their Destiny? Diderot intervenes to cheat our expectations of what fiction should be and do, and behaves like a provocative, ironic and unfailingly entertaining master of revels who finally show why Fate is not to be equated with doom. In the introduction to this brilliant new translation, David Coward explains the philosophical basis of Diderot's fascination with Fate and shows why Jacques the Fatalist pioneers techniques of fiction which, two centuries on, novelists still regard as experimental.
About the Author
David Coward is Senior Fellow and Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Leeds.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
`JTF' is a picaresque novel written at the end of the 18th century. It follows the travels of Jacques and his master, as both recount stories of their pasts and attempt to answer the philosophical implications of their existences. In trying to tell his master about his love-life, Jacques provides a framework from which many other narratives spring, concerning the loves, fights and childhoods of many of the other characters. Jacques' philosophy is that all the events on earth are pre-ordained in heaven, so there is very little point in worrying about what is happening (or going to happen) to him.
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.
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.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
An excellent, esay-to-read translation of this 18th-century classic which, in fact, sets new trends for the novel with its reader interactivity.
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.
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.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
9 reviews
35 of 35 people found the following review helpful
An interactive literary device
6 Jan 2003
Format:Paperback
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.
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
An Enlightened vision
20 Nov 2000
Format:Paperback
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.)
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Burning Read
29 Dec 2001
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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