From Spinoza to ‘It’s written up above’ is not a route that is either obvious or direct.

Secondly, if the novel were straightforwardly ‘about’ fatalism one might expect that there would be some developed argument, even perhaps a conclusion reached. This is not the case. Jacques may score points off his master – as when they become involved in the question of free will – but nowhere is there any conventional elaboration and exploration of issues. In pursuing this line, one might ask whether, apart from in the amount of time and space allocated to them, there is any difference between the discussion on fatalism and that on the subject of women which the Narrator tells us could go on interminably without getting anywhere. This is not to deny the importance of the discussion, but to underline the fact that the issue of fatalism is presented in Jacques as part of a work of fiction.

CONCLUSIONS

If there is no conclusion offered to the alternative of freedom or determinism, it is because the novel as a whole tends towards the representation of such alternatives as fundamentally irresoluble. Indeed the figure of what might be called alternativity runs throughout Jacques. Do the duellists love or hate each other? Is Gousse good or bad? Is Jacques servant or master? In each case the alternative does not allow a simple resolution. We cannot decide but have to cope as best we can with the answer: ‘Both at once’.

Like the great comic works that it avows as its inspiration – Rabelais’ novels, Molière’s comedies, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – Jacques is above all a celebratory work. It proclaims its delight in diversity and difference, and a fascination with the quirkiness and bizarreness of human life. Like these masterpieces it is irreducible to any fixed and limiting scheme of interpretation. Jacques has been interpreted as a novel of moral experience, as a critique of the eighteenth-century novel, as an attack on the ancien régime, and as a philosophical exploration. It is all of these things but none of them exclusively. The worst misreading of Jacques would consist precisely in thinking that one could offer an exhaustive interpretation of it. With due regard to the Narrator’s strictures concerning allegory, we might say that Jacques is like the ‘château’ where Jacques and his master spend (or don’t spend) a night. It belongs to everybody and to nobody. Jacques calls to the intelligent reader – not the doctrinaire one – and invites us all to write our own conclusion.

How did they meet? By chance like everyone else. What were their names? What’s that got to do with you? Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going to? Does anyone ever really know where they are going to? What were they saying? The master wasn’t saying anything and Jacques was saying that his Captain used to say that everything which happens to us on this earth, both good and bad, is written up above.

MASTER: That’s very profound.

JACQUES: My Captain used to add that every shot fired from a gun had someone’s name on it.

MASTER: And he was right…

(After a short pause Jacques cried out:) May the devil take that innkeeper and his inn!

MASTER: Why consign one’s neighbour to the devil? That’s not Christian.

JACQUES: Because while I was getting drunk on his bad wine I forgot to water our horses. My father noticed and got angry. I shook my head at him and he took a stick and hit me rather hard across the shoulders. There was a regiment passing through on its way to camp at Fontenoy,1 and so out of pique I joined up. We arrived. The battle started…

MASTER: And you stopped the bullet with your name on it?

JACQUES: You’ve guessed it. Shot in the knee. And God knows the good and bad fortunes that were brought about by that shot. They are linked together exactly like the links of a fob-chain. Were it not for that shot, for example, I don’t think I would ever have fallen in love, or had a limp.

MASTER: So you’ve been in love then?

JACQUES: Have I been in love!

MASTER: And all because of a shot?

JACQUES: Because of a shot.

MASTER: You never said a word of this to me before.

JACQUES: Very likely.

MASTER: And why is that?

JACQUES: That is because it is something that could not be told a moment sooner or a moment later.

MASTER: And has the moment come for hearing about these loves?

JACQUES: Who knows?

MASTER: Well, on the off-chance, begin anyway…

Jacques began the story of his loves. It was after lunch. The weather was very close, and his master fell asleep. Nightfall surprised them in the middle of nowhere.