Jacques the fatalist and his master

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Frontispiece, 1797

Jacques the Fatalist and His Lord (the original title was Jacques le fataliste et son maître in French ) is a novel by the French author Denis Diderot . Written and written between 1765 and 1784, the year the author died, it was only published after Diderot's death.

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“How did they find each other? By chance, like everyone else in the world. How was her name? What do you care? Where did they come from From the next place. Where did your journey go? Do you ever know where to go? What did you say? The gentleman said nothing, and Jacques said that his captain had always said that everything that happened to us, good and bad, was written up there. "

The servant Jacques and his noble lord, who is not mentioned by name in the novel, travel through France for nine days. For entertainment, they exchange anecdotes, discuss philosophical issues, free will and predestination , and Jacques tells his love story. He is repeatedly interrupted by unfortunate events, which give rise to new stories told by chance acquaintances who are in turn interrupted by unforeseen events. In addition, the narrator argues about the possibilities that he has to change the plot of the novel, lined up bullet points on how he could steer events in a different direction, and finally involved the fictional reader in discussions about the novel, its protagonists, etc. .

Towards the end of the novel, the reader incidentally learns that the payment of a wet nurse who looked after a child who had been foisted on the master was the reason for this trip, that Jacques finds his lost love again and that, true to the course of the novel so far, new confusions are looming.

Composition of the novel

Right at the beginning of the novel, the phrase "Do you ever know where you are going?" Is struck. This applies to the journey of the two protagonists, can also refer to human life in general - is it free to decide or is everything written “up there”? - and on the course of the narrative itself. Diderot's novel is not told linearly, but is a confusing web of narrative threads that are laid aside, broken off, the loose ends of which are unexpectedly knotted together, and which, astonishingly, repeatedly from all apparent deviations from the Return to the “red thread”, the story of Jacques' love affair. The impetus for this framework comes from the 22nd chapter in book 8 of the novel Life and Views of Tristram Shandy, gentleman of Laurence Sterne , from which Diderot takes entire passages verbatim.

Four main threads intertwine and disentangle each other: The picaresque journey, Jacques' love story with Denise, the digressions through stories that random people tell each other or Jacques and the Lord, and finally all kinds of reflections on the part of the narrator about his fictional characters, about freedom and fatalism, about the truth in poetry, about the talent of the poet, about the spirit of chivalry and about the possibility of telling a story in general. The thread of the story is interrupted around 180 times, taken up again and expanded by more or less completed pieces, over 20 in number.

Jacques 'love story is not brought to an end, the text of the novel breaks off suddenly after Jacques' imprisonment, and Diderot justifies the abrupt end with the fact that it is written in the “role up there”.

Lord and servant

"A Jacques, sir, is a person like any other"

At the time of Diderot, the master and servant couple is a fixed motif in comedy, only to be remembered here are Molière's Don Juan and Sganarell or Beaumarchais ' Almaviva and Figaro . Diderot himself explicitly refers to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the novel . In society the servant is seen as a lower being, at the mercy of the Lord. With his comedy colleagues, Jacques shares their social background, their existential dependence on the master, but also their wit and ability to live. Unlike his colleagues, however, Jacques claims a status of equality in the awareness of the mutual dependence of master and servant. "Jacques was made for you and he for you" . The different distribution of roles is justified by the determination of the human being by birth in a certain social class and situation, precisely “because it is written up there” . However, the real driver of the team is the servant, and the master has to come to terms with it. “It was determined that you should hold the title and I should have the cause. You should call yourselves my master while I am yours. "

In Diderot's master and servant couple, the social changes in France on the eve of the revolution seem to be emerging. Diderot proposes a new relationship between master and servant based on mutual respect, which is more cordial and humane than it could be according to the old understanding of roles. The narrator takes a debate between the two as an opportunity to reflect on the principle of rule and dependency of people. “Every master has his dog” proclaims Jacques, and since every person has the desire to rule and to command, “the weak are the dogs of the strong” .

Free will and Jacques' fatalism

The novel reflects one of the most discussed philosophical topics of the European Enlightenment : the question of the free will of humans and of human action determined exclusively by natural laws. In his novel, Diderot illuminates this paradox of human existence in an ironic and playful way.

Jacques' Herr takes the position of an advocate for free will, but in practice he is driven. Awkward, clumsy, without any drive of its own are “the real sources of his life” , as the narrator puts it, “sniffing, checking the time and questioning Jacques.” He is an “automaton” and “... lets himself live, that is his ordinary business ” .

Jacques, on the other hand, as his attributive epithet suggests, is a fatalist . Today one would describe Jacques' attitude with determinism , a philosophical term that only found its way into the technical vocabulary of the philosophical guild after Diderot's death. Jacques believes that all events have a specific cause and that they follow fixed laws. There is no divine providence, no “blind doom”, but only value-neutral causes, no causes at all towards a goal. The captain, from whom Jacques draws his theses, is a follower of Spinoza , who in his teaching a. a. has passed from the Aristotelian purpose causes . There are no coincidences or miracles . Jacques' thesis is confirmed by the course of the novel, in which new, randomly appearing directions are constantly taken, which then turn out to be necessary consequences of unknown causes.

To prove his theses, Jacques literally shows his master by demonstrating in a dangerous prank that none of the following reactions resulted from a free decision of the master, but were rather provoked and controlled by Jacques: “ Were you not my puppet and would have been Wouldn't you be my buffoon if I had made up my mind? ” That the Lord was not harmed, “ was written ” , said Jacques, “ up there and in my provision ” .

Jacques' fatalism is by no means free from contradictions. Contrary to what one might expect from a fatalist who is devoted to fate, Jacques is an energetic and considerate person, even if he keeps his saying that everything is written up there on his lips (around 60 times).

Excursus on Jacques' morals

"Every virtue and every vice comes and goes with fashion"

Jacques' fatalistic attitude has an impact on his ethical and moral attitude. He acts sovereignly without considering rules of society and the church about law, custom and morality. Time and again in his life it has been found that actions with the best of intentions do nothing but harm, while rascals, actions committed with low motives, have proven to be beneficial. “The good leads to the bad, the bad leads to the good” . A distinction between a physical world and a moral world seems to him to be meaningless. In his opinion there is neither virtue nor vice, since life is nothing but a chain of unknown causes and effects that determine a person's life from birth. As a result, he cannot be held responsible for his actions.

However, Jacques himself acts cautiously, taking into account the circumstances and the caution required in each case. As he says, he does not love the lie "unless it is useful and the circumstances dictate it . " He said his prayers, “just in case” . He considers vows to be so binding and firm, "like a rock that fell into dust" . He is wise, although he despises prudence, he gets angry about injustice, is grateful for benefits, is happy and mourned like every other person, so under no circumstances accepts his fate with stoic devotion . And otherwise he is, as the narrator says, "a brave fellow, frank, honorable, courageous, affectionate, loyal ..."

Diderot gives no answers to the dialectical tension between freedom and determinism, the question remains open. The antinomy remains, rather it is integrated into an ironic view of human life in a novel that does not want to lecture its reader, does not want to convert him to materialism , but is supposed to entertain and amuse him.

Playing with the reader

"But for God's sake, tell me at last, Mr. Author, where you were going ..."

Diderot's narrator plays himself in the foreground in an almost intrusive way. He argues with the reader, accuses him of “unbearable curiosity” , lures his imagination on paths that quickly turn out to be wrong ways, suggests different versions of a story, gives his reader the choice, and then demonstrates that his choice is nothing but Boredom provokes and discusses whether the protagonists express themselves according to their status or rather in the diction of the author, at the same time insists that he is not telling a novel here, but that everything is based on the "truth" of reliable sources, on trustworthy eyewitness reports, etc. .

The reader, on the other hand, confronts the narrator with his constant digressions, imputing him to flee in allegories - "the last rescue of barren heads" - when nothing more occurs.

The (fictional) reader and the narrator together form just as inseparable as Jacques and his master.

An anti-novel, a meta-novel?

"Tell the story to the end yourself."

In literary studies, Diderots Jacques is often given the label anti-novel or - according to more recent terminology - metaroman .

Diderot's tale is indeed full of polemics and ironic peaks against the novel as such. The narrator persistently claims that he is by no means writing a novel, in order to write a novel you have to lie, and he does not love lies. His intention is to be “true”, he rejects the usual means of novelists.

The fictional narrator argues with his reader in order to maintain the appearance that he is part of the genesis of the novel. The fact that this is a novel is denied at the same time: "Obviously, I am not making a novel, since I ignore means that a novelist would inevitably use" .

There are no traditional narrative conventions in the novel, however: there is no division into chapters, the narration is not straightforward from beginning to end, the position of the omniscient narrator does not exist, and therefore also not the usual character images of the protagonists , designed from a higher point of view , for which the Narrator has only got rid of it. The narrators, the narrative perspectives and thus also the narrative styles, which can change from the trivial, satirical, anecdotal to the sophisticated and elaborate, are constantly changing. It is not the intention of our narrator to consider a congruence of narrative time and narrated time derived from Aristotelian poetics . The resulting narrative speed could be characterized by the musical term of a presto con brio . The reader is fooled in the novel by disappointing the usual expectations of a novel. Movens of the stories is exclusively chance, only chance can "choose any of the infinite number of possibilities and link them to a completely unexpected event" . Chance is the cause of all the bizarre places in the novel and in life.

A theoretician of Nouveau Roman , Michel Butor , has seen in the novel an early predecessor. Diderot's Jacques is an anti- novel in the sense that he overrides the traditional rules of epic storytelling for himself and, as Hinterhäuser puts it, that the novel “historically ... is a work that, breaking frozen things, underscores the line draws outdated orders; which does not yet create "new values" (unless those of the critical mind) ”.

What is surprisingly modern, however, is that Diderot has made the problem of narration the subject of his novel, which makes the novel perceived by today's readers trained in Joyce or Proust as extraordinarily modern.

Editions

German-language editions

Large parts of the novel were published between November 1778 and June 1780 in Grimm's exclusive magazine Correspondance littéraire , a magazine whose subscribers mainly sat at the European courts, which was not printed but handwritten, sent by diplomatic mail and thus escaped censorship.

The first French edition was published by Buisson in Paris in 1796 under the title Jacques le fataliste et son maître . Around nine other editions appeared by 1800, including an inexpensive pocket edition.

The first German - very free - partial translation of the Pommeraye episode of the novel by Friedrich Schiller was published as early as 1785 under the title Strange Example of a Female Vengeance in the first and only issue of his journal Rheinische Thalia . An anonymous translation back into French of this Schiller text was printed in Paris in 1793. 1792 came under the title Jacob and his Lord. A two-volume translation by Wilhelm Christhelf Sigmund Mylius published by Johann Friedrich Unger in Berlin from Diderot's unprinted estate and was published only one year later in Dutch translation. Both editions preceded the French first edition. Mylius' translation is the basis for all later German translations to this day. However, the edition is not complete, as individual passages have fallen victim to censorship. The first English translation appeared in 1797.

The first complete German edition is the two-volume translation by Hanns Floerke published by Georg Müller in Munich in 1921 under the title Jakob und seine Herr .

reception

To this day, the novel has repeatedly encouraged philosophers, artists and writers to engage in intellectual and artistic debate.

Literature and philosophy

Goethe read Jacques the Fatalist and his master on Schiller's recommendation with great pleasure. Karl Marx recommended it to his friend Engels and pointed out the dialectic between master and servant. The romantic ETA Hoffmann valued the book as much as the two Irish James Joyce and Samuel Beckett . In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel developed the dialectic of domination and servitude based on the example of Diderot's novel.

In the GDR , Volker Braun's 1985 Hinze Kunze novel took up Diderot's work. He transferred the constellation in which master and servant are on the move on aimless trips to the GDR present, whereby the party secretary's chauffeur is by no means encouraged to chatter freely during business trips like Jacques. The influential GDR Germanist Anneliese Löffler rejected the novel as “absurd” and “anarchistic”; the deputy minister for culture, Klaus Höpcke , had to justify himself in disciplinary proceedings for having given permission to print the Hinze-Kunze novel .

The latest homage to Diderot and his novel comes from the Alsatian author Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt . He dedicated his piece La tectonique des sentiments (2008), which varies the Pommeraye story of the novel, to Diderot.

Visual arts

The French edition of 1922 was illustrated by Joseph Hémard. The Maximilian Society in Hamburg published a bibliophile edition of Die Rache einer Frau (the Pommeraye episode) with linocuts by Svato Zapletal.

Frank Stella painted the picture entitled Jacques le Fataliste (1974) in his Diderot series .

performing Arts

Diderot was particularly fruitful as a stimulus for works of the performing arts, especially since he himself preferred dialogue as a stylistic device.

In 1870 the French theater poet Victorien Sardou wrote the play Fernand , which deals with the Pommeraye episode. Carl Sternheim also edited the Pommeraye episode into a piece entitled The Marquise von Arcis , which adheres closely to Diderot's text and which was printed by Kurt Wolff in Leipzig in 1918 . Milan Kundera wrote a theater version in the Czech language in 1971 as “homage to Diderot” . The text, which has also been translated into English and into French by Kundera himself, was published in German in 2004 under the title Jacques und seine Herr .

In 1975 the French composer Georges Aperghis wrote a chamber opera in three acts under the title Jacques le Fataliste .

As early as 1921, a film was made based on the Pommeraye episode by Fritz Wendhausen under the title Die Intrigen der Madame la Pommeraye . The film Die Damen vom Bois de Boulogne (1945) by Robert Bresson with dialogues by Jean Cocteau is also based on this episode. Another film adaptation of the book is Jacques le fataliste from 1993 by French director Antoine Douchet, in which the plot is transferred to contemporary France.

In 2005, the Portuguese-French film O fatalista by the director Joao Botelho was shown at the Venice Biennale , which sticks closely to the novel, but transports the story of master and servant, of chauffeur Tiago and his patron, to the Portugal of today.

Two television versions were shown on French television: the 1984 film Jacques le fataliste et son maître , directed by Claude Santelli and in 1991 Les amours de Jacques le fataliste, based on the theatrical version at the Théâtre du 8e in Lyon and directed by Jacques Ordines.

The French feature film The Temptation Prize (2018) by Emmanuel Mouret, starring Cécile de France , was also inspired by the Pommeraye episode in Diderot's novel.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger , who also published a bibliophile edition of the Mylius translation in his series The Other Library , edited the text under the title Diderot's Shadow. Conversations, scenes, essays on a so-called radio novel published in 1994 by Suhrkamp in Frankfurt.

Text output

  • Jacques le fataliste et son maître . In: Contes et romans , ed. by Michel Delon . Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2004. ISBN 2-07-011595-X .
  • Jacob and his Lord . Translated by W. Chr. S. Mylius . Looked through, supplemented and provided with an afterword by Horst Günther. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1999. ISBN 3-8218-4178-8 .
  • Jacques the fatalist and his master . From the French and with an afterword by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel . With five conversations from Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2014. ISBN 978-3-88221-058-3 .

Edits

  • Jacob and his Lord: radio play . Based on the novel by Denis Diderot, adaptation by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, directed by Manfred Marchfelder. Speaker: Otto Sander, Lothar Blumhagen, Christian Brückner. A production by Saarländischer Rundfunk, recording from 1979. Rottenburg: Diderot Verlag , 2006 (2 CDs). ISBN 978-3-936088-34-2 .

literature

  • Hans Hinterhäuser: Diderot as the narrator . Epilogue to Diderot: The complete narrative work . Edited by Michel Butor , Vol. 4. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1987 a. ö. (most recently 1991) ISBN 3-548-37145-0 , pp. 203-246.
  • Erich Köhler : Est-ce que l'on sait où l'on va? On the structural unity of “Jacques le fataliste et son maître”. In Jochen Schlobach, Ed .: Denis Diderot. WBG , Darmstadt 1992 ISBN 3-534-09097-7 , pp. 245-273.
Original article published in: Romanistisches Jahrbuch 16 (1965), pp. 128–148 full text
  • S. Albertan-Coppola: Diderot . In: Dictionnaire des lettres françaises . Ed. rev. Paris 1995, pp. 403-412.
  • S. Albertan-Coppola: Jacques le fataliste et son maître . In: Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires de la langue française . Ed. de Jean-Pierre de Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty. Vol. 2. Paris 1994, pp. 992-994. ISBN 2-04-018552-6
  • Line Carpentier: Jacques le Fataliste. Series: Balises œuvres. Fernand Nathan, Paris 2007 ISBN 2-09-182616-2 (first edition 1989 ISBN 2-09-188603-3 ) In Frz.
  • Jean Firges : "Jacques le Fataliste et son maître", in dsb .: Denis Diderot: The philosophical and literary genius of the French Enlightenment. Biography and work interpretations. Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2013, ISBN 9783933264756 , pp. 142–206 (origin and interpretation)

Web links

Text output

Wikisource: Strange example of a female revenge (First passage of the novel published in print. Translated by Friedrich Schiller)  - Sources and full texts

Analysis and Comments

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ All text quotations from the Ullstein edition in 4 volumes. 3rd volume. Berlin 1987.
  2. ↑ p. 152.
  3. ↑ p. 152.
  4. ↑ Christof Rudek: Diderot's sense of possibility. Notes on “Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître”, in: Literaturkritik.de, accessed on July 1, 2018
  5. ↑ p. 25.
  6. ^ For the first time under the title About Determinism and Moral Freedom , Offenbach a. M. 1789, of the philosopher and Kant follower Christian Wilhelm Snell .
  7. ↑ pp. 254-255
  8. ↑ p. 63.
  9. ↑ Diderot and his complete works were on the Catholic index .
  10. ↑ p. 76.
  11. ↑ p. 57.
  12. ↑ p. 151.
  13. ↑ p. 163.
  14. ↑ p. 41.
  15. ↑ Erich Köhler: Est-ce que l'on sait où l'on va? On the structural unity of “Jacques le fataliste et son maître”. In Jochen Schlobach (ed.): Denis Diderot. WBG, Darmstadt 1992. ISBN 3-534-09097-7 , p. 249.
  16. ↑ p. 15.
  17. ↑ Köhler 1992. p. 265.
  18. ↑ Hinterhäuser: Diderot as the narrator . In: Diderot: The complete narrative work . Vol. 4. 1987. pp. 237f.
  19. ↑ Wolf Lepenies: The white tyrant . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , February 17, 2003.
  20. ↑ See full text on Wikisource .
  21. ↑ Isabella von Treskow: French Enlightenment and Socialist Reality. Dennis Diderot's “Jacques le fataliste” as a model for Volker Braun's Hinze-Kunze novel . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1996.
  22. ↑ Anneliese Löffler: When content and form coagulate into a farce . In: Neues Deutschland , October 9, 1985, p. 4.
  23. ↑ Cf. York-Gothart Mix: A 'Oberkunze must not appear'. Materials on the publication history and censorship of the Hinze Kunze novel by Volker Braun . Wiesbaden 1993; Wolfgang Emmerich: Small literary history of the GDR . Berlin 2000, p. 52.
  24. ↑ Figure and short comment , accessed on November 21, 2019
  25. ↑ [1] , accessed April 24, 2020.