Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

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.

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