In Le Salon, for example, the author encounters “a woman as beautiful as an angel … I want to go to bed with her; I go: I have four children.”
Diderot’s novels do not depend on the verisimilitude or psychological autonomy of the characters. They depend on the author’s capacity to draft (the expression is Kempf’s) the reader as co-creator of the work.
The author (and how!) is already present in the book. Diderot is not coy about it; he does not disguise his authority; he makes it evident. He demands that the writer — Diderot — be recognized as the creator and not as the mediator of the narration. The conventional narrator supplies facts for the narration. But the iconoclastic narrator, such as Diderot, supplies the narrative itself. He refuses to answer the reader’s questions about the characters. “What are they called, how did they meet?” asks the reader. And the author, because he is such, answers: “By chance”; or: “None of your business.”
Yet this authorial presence, fulsome as it may seem, will need another presence: that of the reader. Diderot introduces the reader into the narrative with as much brio as he introduced the author, transforming the reader into the interlocutor of the author. In Jacques le Fataliste, the servant and his master travel the length of the roads of France, from inn to inn. This is the classical form of the pilgrimage, and literature has not been able to exhaust it: from the Odyssey to Lolita, passing through Cervantes and Lesage. It has also become one of the preferred formulas of the movies, from Chaplin’s Pilgrim to Buñuel’s Milky Way, with a stop at the lunch counters, motels, and highways of Capra’s It Happened One Night. Histories of the road, marching histories, they are full of a sort of kinetic felicity. I underline the traditional character of the situation in Diderot so as to see clearly the novelty of the movement he then impresses on the form of movement itself: the ludicrous odyssey of Jacques and his master.
It so happens that this master has lost his watch, his tobacco pouch, and his horse, the three things that keep him going in life and, of course, on this trip. He is thus obliged, along with his servant, to occupy the time of the trip looking for what he lost during the trip itself, so that the loss of the objects becomes the object of the trip. But the interesting fact is that to this search for things Jacques and his master add, as a way of passing their time, a search for the narration. The master, who, in the narrator’s words, is an obsessive and boring man, wants to hear the story of “The Loves of Jacques.”
The search for the lost object thus becomes the search for the lost narrative. Over this double operation, yet another one hovers: the search for an abbreviated time so that desires can be fulfilled.
“What about your loves, Jacques?”
This question becomes the novel’s ritornello: “Let us go back to your loves, Jacques.” [Revenons à tes amours.]
Certainly this, the announced theme of the novel, is evaded, postponed, and constantly disguised, because, in the first place, the theme of Jacques’s loves cannot be separated from the author’s whim; second, it cannot be separated from the author’s will as it confronts the reader’s presence; and, finally, it cannot be separated from the variety and energy of movement which determine the duration that both author and reader are a part of.
The extraordinary thing about this situation is that Diderot should raise such obstacles with the purpose of hastening the meeting of desire and its object. The irony of the “Loves of Jacques” theme, of course, is that it is not the real theme or the real object of the narrative, but only the pretext for the author and the reader to show themselves naked, radically an Author and radically a Reader, bereft of the realistic, psychological, or melodramatic disguises that they should wear if the subject of Jacques le Fataliste truly were the “Loves of Jacques.”
The author, then, presents himself as such and validates his most authoritarian rights. “It would depend only on me to make you wait for a year, or two or three, before you hear the story of the loves of Jacques,” the author warns the reader, adding: “What would prevent me?” “I could send Jacques off to the islands,” he concludes, only to exclaim later on: “Ah, imagine what this story could become in my hands, if only I felt like exasperating you, reader!”
The author’s gleeful, playful, mocking exclamation would push us to ask him, wielding the sword of the reader’s defense; Yes, tell us, what would you transform this story into, dear writer?
For this author who would have the reader wait three years while he sends Jacques off to the islands; this author who would drive the reader crazy out of sheer whim; this author, finally, can only exercise his irritating caprice by addressing himself to you: to the reader, the interlocutor. Indeed, Diderot constantly instates the reader within the book and finds in the book the common ground (the common-place) between author and reader. Baudelaire’s hypocritical reader, brother, and fellow creature is in Diderot
A passionate man such as you, reader
A curious man such as you, reader
A man as indiscreet as you are, reader
A questioning man like you, reader
Diderot is telling us that the author’s freedom is inseparable from the freedom of a reader recruited so as to give relief (relieve-relive), with his presence, to the presence of the writing: to its immediacy. This is the boundary of the author’s whim: the reader’s co-creation of the narrative, the engagement of another presence so that the author’s presence may not vanish and become a whimsical redundancy: a false freedom. Without the reader, the author would speak to Nothing. Yet this does not mean (far from it; he is stubborn, indeed) that the author renounces his capriciousness. The reader is bound to win his own rights, fighting the author, not receive them as a gracious concession from him. Diderot establishes an agreement between the arbitrary possibilities of the writer and the narrative expectations of the reader. At a given moment, the narrator offers the following self-criticism of his authorial freedom as it meets the requirements of the reader.
Author addresses reader: “You are going to believe that now a bloody battle will ensue, with many wounded, etc.”
The author proceeds to describe the battle. Then he adds: “And it would depend only on me for this to really occur; but if I did so, we would have to bid farewell to this story, which is the story of the loves of Jacques.”
In this manner, Diderot confronts his right as an author with the reader’s rights, but he also introduces the story of the battle and minutely relates it, while promising that he will do no such thing so as not to frustrate what he has in fact constantly frustrated: the continuation of a story that has yet to begin: “The Loves of Jacques.” He proposes, by the way, the profoundest theme posed by the author’s freedom: the author has to choose among several themes, and in so doing he is free, but he sacrifices the freedom to follow the other roads. We can only be free by constantly sacrificing other possibilities of freedom; freedom is made of the choices we do not or cannot make, as much as of those we do make.
The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And this game, Milan Kundera warns us in his theatrical adaptation of Diderot’s novel Jacques et Son, Maître, is one of the greatest inventions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.