There seems to be a manuscript somewhere which is the basis of the Narrator’s claim to be telling a true story. At the same time, there appears to be direct contact between Jacques and the Narrator (‘Jacques told me…’). In the final pages, however, this apparatus is thrown into doubt by the sudden intervention of an ‘Editor’ who inevitably reduces the Narrator from being a powerful authenticatory voice to a mere fictional device.

Once the readers’ suspicions are alerted they will notice more and more instances in which the seemingly secure structures of the narrative start to look shaky. Contradictions and logical impossibilities begin to crop up with alarming frequency. A widow is mourned by her husband. Jacques takes up a point made by the Narrator. A character’s death is fixed by two incompatible time sequences.

As a true story Jacques doesn’t work, it doesn’t fit together. Parts of the novel may maintain an internal coherence, but even these tend to look like exercises in style and rhetoric when replaced in their context. The story of Madame de La Pommeraye and the Marquis des Arcis is the most important instance of this. Taken by itself (and it has frequently been published as an autonomous novella), the story is convincing and moving. Replaced in the inn, where it is told to Jacques and his master by the innkeeper’s wife, its implausibility is easily demonstrated by two questions: Who is this innkeeper’s wife who speaks so eloquently? How has she learnt the story? What might, in one perspective, seem like a true story, becomes, in another, a fictional construct.

It gradually becomes apparent that what could initially have seemed mistakes – contradiction, incoherence, incompatibility – are ‘deliberate mistakes’, part of a strategy of disruption and subversion that seems designed to deny the reader any easy retreat into fictional illusion. Jacques not only points the finger of scorn at the inadequacies and artificialities of conventional fiction, but also points to its own fictional nature. When, for the umpteenth time, the Narrator asks us what is to prevent him from giving us whatever fictional continuation he chooses, we may well cease to take this as part of a rhetorical protestation of truthfulness, take the question literally and answer ‘nothing’. The reference to truth is finally self-defeating. We cannot read Jacques straightforwardly as a chronicle of events, but must call into question our own expectations in reading fiction.

STORIES AND STORY-TELLING

‘When someone tells a tale, to a listener, and assuming that the tale goes on for some length of time, it’s unusual for the teller not to be interrupted by his listener.’ These lines, which open one of Diderot’s short-stories, might serve as the epigraph to Jacques, a novel that is remarkable not merely by the quantity of tales and anecdotes that it contains but also by its dramatization of the relationship between the teller of a story and the listener or reader.

As we read Jacques, we are constantly made aware that the tales we are reading are being told by one person to another. Nor is this a point which we can simply take note of and then ignore: the circumstances surrounding the telling of a story almost always serve as an intrusive reminder. The innkeeper’s wife, for example, finds her attempts to begin her story repeatedly thwarted by the interruptions of her husband, customers and staff. Jacques’ efforts to continue the story of his loves are frustrated by the distressing tendency of his horse to bolt. At another point, he is physically prevented from continuing by a sore throat.

Stories are not received in silence, but interrupted, commented upon, interpreted and judged. The Narrator wages a running battle with the Reader over the stories he relates, provoking, teasing and bullying him to the point where the convention of authorial address to the reader ceases to be a mere convention and becomes the means to explore the complex dynamics of the story-telling relationship.

This exploration is most fully and subtly worked out in the relationship of Jacques and his master. The underlying symbiosis of the couple is expressed in the one’s need to talk and the other’s need to listen. At the same time, the latant antagonism of master and servant also finds expression in story-telling. Jacques is irritated at his master’s interruptions and exasperated at his demands to side-track to other issues. His master in turn seeks to make of his servant an almost mechanical furnisher of tales for his satisfaction. Jacques frets and worries over the difficulties and ambiguities of story-telling, while his master, with characteristic complacency, simply tells Jacques that the important thing is that one should tell stories and the other listen.

The dramatization of the story-telling relationship fulfils another important function: it highlights the quest for significance or meaning which the stories are intended to provoke. For instance, Jacques and his master are fascinated by the story that the innkeeper’s wife tells them. They argue about the psychological coherence of the characters and how to interpret their behaviour; they argue about the morality of this behaviour and what judgement to pass on it. The Narrator then intrudes to provoke the Reader into discussion. The story has generated what might become an endless series of debates and discussions. The world of Jacques is not a fixed and settled one in which incidents and behaviour are easily assessed and interpreted.