Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître: Ex-Centricity and the "Novel"

Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître: Ex-Centricity and the "Novel"Marie-Hélène Chabut Critical studies of all kinds have consistently failed to define Diderot's work and Jacques le Fataliste in particular. In recent years, the failure of a unifying discourse on Diderot has become, and rightly so, an indicator of his success as an artist and creator. Many readings ??Jacques see it as no more than a dogmatic "meta" discourse, which questions the existence of "novel" as a literary genre1 or which challenges the philosophical concept of narrative mimesis.2 In this essay I intend to show that Jacques cannot be reduced to a mere commentary on institutionalized conventions. In order to do so I will introduce the term "ex-centric" when speaking of Jacques le Fataliste. I will keep the Latin prefix which designates the idea of being "out of." The interest of this word lies in the complexity of its meanings, mathematical and spatial on the one hand (off-centre), moral and censorious on the other. In the first group of meanings , the word is mostly descriptive; in the second group, it constitutes a generally negative judgment (abnormal, foolish, humorous, irregular, odd, queer, off-balance, and so forth). If we merely consider the etymology of the word, it is very close to Bakhtin's notion of the "centrifugal." According to Bakhtin the dialogic or "centrifugal" force in language is what escapes canonization, what makes every text "new." It is constantly 1 See for example Robert Mauzi, "La parodie romanesque dans Jacques le Fataliste," Diderot Studies, 6 (1964), 89-132. 2 See Thomas Kavanagh, The Vacant Mirror: A Study ofMimesis through Diderot's "Jacques Ie Fataliste," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 104 (1973). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 2, Number 1, October 1989 54 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION checked and concealed, however, by the "centripetal" or centralizing force in language. The second force tends to prevail in everyday "correct language " as well as in the genres of the literary canon. It tends to hide the ideological and historical nature of discourse, to unify it, in a word, to "enslave" it.3 One may notice a major difference, however, between the terms "centrifugal" and "ex-centric": Bakhtin uses a word which sounds neutral, or "scientific," and he gives it a positive connotation. Let us not forget that Bakhtin is not concerned with a particular text but is rather trying to develop a theory of "discursive genres," which explains the choice of such a term. The word "ex-centric," on the contrary, is obviously impregnated with ideology: if an object, text, person, is off-centre, it is excluded from normality, from the canon, literary or otherwise. It is interesting to note that ex-centricity is associated with humour, oddity, and foolishness. Now, like the word "ex-centric" itself, no word or text can have a univocal meaning, although some texts tend to make us believe that their "message" is obvious. I believe that Jacques le Fataliste engages in a systematic exposition of the diversity of voices from which it is built. It reveals itself as intertextual rather than metatextual, or, in Bakhtinian terms, as dialogical. "The dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is ... a property oíany discourse. It is the natural orientation of any living discourse .... The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it."4 Bakhtin asserts in this way the "dialogic" character of any text, or in other words the fact that meaning never is, never can be, "pure" and settled once and for all. Any discourse is always in a dialogical relationship with the language—or languages—of an other—or others. Hence, "my" discourse does not belong to me. It springs from a complex historical system of conventions that it cannot transcend: "Language , for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other" (p. 293). This dialogism "does not assume any external compositional forms of dialogue" (p. 279). It is independent from what we generally call dialogue, which supposes an explicit interaction between an "I" and a "you." In artistic expression, and more precisely in what Bakhtin calls "artistic...