I believe that Diderot understood this dimension of the novelist’s work perfectly. His author, so sovereignly capricious, knows nevertheless that he owns only a small parcel of truth and is fully conscious that his rights, whatever these may be, would not exist without the reader (you). That is why the author, in the middle of the adventures of Jacques le Fataliste, can say to the reader:
Reader, you treat me like an automat, and that is not correct … Enough!.. Doubtlessly, it is sometimes necessary that I address your fancy, but it is also necessary that, at times, I address my own fancy.
Diderot’s game is extremely serious. He wants to offer us our time as a synonym of our freedom. Jacques, the fatalist, constantly informs us that, when all is said and done, nothing is of any importance whatsoever, because “everything is written up there.” But precisely because there are far too many things already written “up there,” Jacques and his author, far from resigning themselves, multiply what is written “down here.” Their writing is unforeseen, capricious, demanding, playful, free. This freedom becomes real in literature because Diderot presents it with a literary technique which is a technique of freedom: we are all in time, but we all have or should obtain the right to choose our time. This is an obligation, but also a right. It is a fatality, but also the freedom which transcends it. We choose to tell a story by sacrificing all the other stories we might tell. We do not have twenty mouths. We have only the comical, the humble, the superb possibilities of the mouth of fiction. These are its limits, but also its potentialities.
The impetus of movement in Jacques le Fataliste breaks through all expectations. If ever there was a revolutionary work of fiction, it is this: Diderot’s novel offers the servant a Tabulating gift which frees him from mental servitude, while obligating the master to yield authority as he loses himself in the interminable web of Jacques’s stories. The author displays in all this an extraordinary freedom, but the reader, constantly, must exercise his own liberty vis-à-vis the author and decide, among the several versions proposed by the latter, “that one which suits you best, reader” [celle qui vous conviendra la mieux]. The reader, on receiving the work, shall be faced with the same dilemma that the author faced when writing it: he must choose.
V
Perhaps this is the very center of Diderot’s narrative challenge: he writes the novel as a repertory of possibilities for the reader’s freedom. The reader thus becomes the elector. (Again, the Spanish pun is clearer: the Reader, El Lector, is also Elector, the person who elects).
These possibilities are inscribed in time. Diderot’s time is a repertory of possibilities: time is duration plus its possibilities. Time is movement, it is rhythm, it is an interrupted story, it is a postponed story; it is even, at times, a repeated story.
An example:
(First) We hear a story about what happened to a comrade of Jacques’s captain when the servant served in the armies of France.
(Second) This story is interrupted and repeated exactly as it occurred to another person, a French officer called de Guerchy.
(Third) Both stories are postponed and the speakers (Jacques and his master) go back to the story of the loves of Jacques, in itself an eternally interrupted and postponed story.
But then (four) Diderot gives us an immediate synthesis of all three previous narrative moments, asking us: “But why could not the story of the loves of Jacques have happened to his captain, since it actually occurred to the French officer de Guerchy?”
Diderot’s narrative syllogism presents us with a series of different events that sometimes coincide and sometimes do not, so that
(A) The interrupted stories
(B) The repeated stories and
(C) The stories postponed
become all together
(E) The simultaneous stories
The perimeter of our freedom, like these stories themselves, is both the reduced space of a cell and the highest heaven. Diderot tells us that the texts of his stories were written one alongside the other: these are contiguous stories. Let me offer two examples of Diderot’s technique of narrative simultaneity.
The first consists of the use of narrative within narrative, a technique invented by the first novelist, Scheherazade, in The Thousand and One Nights. Diderot sees to it that this interpretation takes place physically:
Jacques tells us that three thugs threw themselves at him, struck him down, and robbed him …
The servant then interrupts his own narration of the mugging — he looks at his master and asks him, “But, my Master, what is the matter with you? Why do you clench your teeth, why do you tremble so … as if you faced an enemy?”
To which the master responds that he does in effect confront an enemy. “My sword is in my hand; I attack the villains (who have attacked you) and revenge you,” the master tells Jacques, physically participating in the action set off by Jacques, with as much conviction as Don Quixote when he attacks the Moorish puppets in Master Pedro’s theater. Their motivations are similar: they make the narrative present, they make us believe in it, they liberate the past (what is evoked) by making it present. Or perhaps they are only approaching an abyss imagined by Coleridge, like Diderot a disciple of Sterne, the great juggler of the Enlightenment. Coleridge proposes an essay on “someone who lived, not in time, past, present or future, but alongside time; collaterally to time” (Table Talk, 1833).
In a way, Diderot invites us into this contiguity when he employs the techniques of montage to narrate the most celebrated novel within a novel in Jacques le Fataliste: the story of Madame de la Pommeraye.
Jacques and his master find themselves in an inn, where they listen to the innkeeper as she tells the story of Mme de la Pommeraye and her vengeance on the Marquis des Arcis, while, throughout, she copes with administrative details: she is interrupted, she gives orders, she looks after other guests, she takes care of food and drink. She may ask, “What will you have for dessert?” but she never skips a beat in her narration of Mme de la Pommeraye’s story.
The narrator, with a wink, gives a realistic tinge to this comedy. It is not uncommon, he says, that “when we tell a tale … brief as it may be … the narrator may be interrupted at times by his listener.” In truth, Diderot is creating a new poetics of time and space in which narrator and listener are obligated to relate, to act in front of each other, to recognize that their text is not a definitive text but only a potential text.
Diderot creates a space-time continuum in which space-time A (the innkeeper’s) fuses with space-time B (Mme de la Pommeraye’s). He achieves this through successive cuts, overlaps, voices-off, flashbacks, and flashforwards. We read a flux of signs and feel as if Diderot, in the eighteenth century, had invented the cinema. It is not strange, indeed, that Robert Bresson should have filmed an adaptation of this section of Jacques le Fataliste. The film, called Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, found in Maria Casares the perfect actress to play Mme de la Pommeraye, the passionate lady who, abandoned by her lover the Marquis des Arcis, drafts two lowly con women, mother and daughter, prostitutes and gamblers, and introduces them to the Marquis as examples, among other virtues, of piety and chastity. When the deluded Marquis marries the young woman (who won’t accede to his advances otherwise), Mme de la Pommeraye reveals the truth and wreaks revenge on the dissolute though enlightened macho.