Jacques and his master, p.1
Jacques and his Master, page 1
MILAN KUNDERA
Jacques and His Master
CONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction to a variation
Jacques and his Master
Characters
Act one
Act two
Act three
Homage to translator
About the author
Also by the author
Copyright
INTRODUCTION TO A VARIATION
1
When, in 1968, the Russians occupied my little country, I lost, at a stroke, any possible means of earning a living. Many people wanted to help me: one day, a theatre director came to see me to suggest that I write, under his name, an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
I therefore re-read The Idiot and I saw that even if I was to die of hunger, I couldn’t do the job. This world of excessive gestures, of obscure profundities and of aggressive sentimentality repelled me. Suddenly, inexplicably, I felt a burst of nostalgia for Jacques le Fataliste.
‘Wouldn’t you prefer a Diderot to a Dostoevsky?’
He didn’t prefer; but I couldn’t rid myself of the curious notion, so in order to spend as long a time as I could in the company of Jacques and his master, I began to imagine them as characters in a play of my own.
2
Why this sudden aversion to Dostoevsky?
The anti-Russian reflex of a Czech traumatized by his country’s invasion? No, because I never stopped loving Chekhov. Doubts about the aesthetic value of his work? No, because my aversion, which had taken me by surprise, had no pretensions to any objectivity.
What annoyed me about Dostoevsky was the climate of his books: that world where everything becomes feeling; put another way: where feeling is elevated to the level of value and of truth.
It was the third day of the Occupation. I was in my car between Prague and Budejovice (the town where Camus set Cross Purposes). On the roads, in the fields, in the forests, everywhere, foot-soldiers were camping. My car was stopped. Three soldiers started searching it. At the end of the operation, the officer who had ordered it asked me in Russian: ‘Kak chuvstvuetes?’ which means ‘How do you feel? What are your feelings?’ The question was neither unkind nor ironic. On the contrary: the officer continued ‘All this is a big misunderstanding. But it will sort itself out. You’ll see that we love Czechs. We love you!’
The landscape devastated by thousands of tanks; the future of the country compromised for centuries; Czech statesmen arrested and taken away; and an officer of the occupying army makes you a declaration of love. Understand clearly: he didn’t wish to express disagreement with the invasion; far from it. They were speaking, more or less, just like him: their attitude was based, not on the sadistic pleasure of the rapist, but on another archetype: wounded love. Why don’t these Czechs (whom we love so much!) want to live with us, and like us? How sad we have to use tanks to teach them what love is!
3
Feelings are indispensable to man, but they become terrible the moment they see themselves as values, as criteria of truth, as justifications for behaviour. The noblest national sentiments are used to justfy the worst horrors; and, breast swollen with lyrical feelings, man commits the foulest acts in the sacred name of love.
When feelings replace rational thought they become the very foundation of non-understanding and intolerance; they become, as Jung says, ‘the superstructure of brutality’.
The elevation of sentiment to the level of value goes back a long way, perhaps to the moment when Christianity separated from Judaism. ‘Love God and do as you like’ said St Augustine. The famous phrase is revealing: the criterion of truth is removed thus from the exterior to the interior: into the arbitrary realm of the subjective. A vague feeling of love (‘Love God’ – the Christian imperative) replaces the clarity of law (the imperative of Judaism) and becomes the criterion (oh, how blurred) of morality.
The history of Christian society is a thousand year school of feelings: Christ on the cross teaches us to worship suffering; knightly poetry discovered love; the bourgeois family makes us feel a longing for the hearth; political demagogy has succeeded in sentimentalizing the will to power. This whole long story has shaped the richness, the strength and the beauty of our feelings.
But from the Renaissance, Western sensibility has been balanced by a complementary spirit: that of reason and of doubt, of play, and of the relativity of human things. Thus the West came to its full self. When the heavy Russian irrationality fell on my country, I felt an instinctive need to breathe deeply of that spirit. And it seemed to me that nowhere was it to be found more densely concentrated than in that banquet of intelligence, humour and fantasy, Jacques le Fataliste.
4
If I had to define myself, I’d say that I was a hedonist trapped in a world politicized to extremes. That’s the situation described in my Laughable Loves, which I love more than all my other books because it reflects the happiest period of my life. Curious coincidence: I finished the last of these stories (I wrote them at the thin edge of the sixties) three days before the Russians arrived.
When the French edition of the book appeared, in 1970, it was spoken of as belonging to the tradition of the century of the Lumières. Moved by the comparison, I then repeated, with slightly childish eagerness, how much I loved the eighteenth century. In fact, I don’t particularly like the eighteenth century, I like Diderot. To be frank: I like Diderot’s novels. To be absolutely precise, I like Jacques le Fataliste.
This vision of Diderot’s work is certainly far too personal, but perhaps not altogether unjustified: it is, in fact, possible to bypass Diderot the playwright; it is possible, strictly speaking, to understand the history of philosophy without knowing the great encyclopaedist’s essays; but I insist: the history of the novel would be ununderstood and incomplete without Jacques le Fataliste. I would go so far as to say that the book suffers from being considered exclusively in the context of the Diderot oeuvre, rather than in that of the novel worldwide; its real greatness can only be seen when it’s put side by side with Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Ulysses or Ferdydurke.
But by comparison with Diderot’s other activities, wasn’t Jacques le Fataliste merely an entertainment? And wasn’t he strongly influenced by his great model, Tristram Shandy?
5
I often hear it said that the novel has exhausted all its possibilities. I have the contrary impression: during the four hundred years of its history, the novel has missed many of the possibilities; it has left opportunities unexploited, roads unexplored and calls unheard.
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne is one of these great lost directions. The history of the novel has exploited to its very limits the example of Samuel Richardson, who, in the form of the correspondence-novel, discovered the psychological possibilities of the novelist’s art. It has, in compensation, paid scant attention to the perspective contained in Sterne’s enterprise.
Tristram Shandy is the novel-as-game. Sterne dwells lengthily on the conception and birth of his hero, only to drop him shamelessly and more or less for good the moment he’s born: he chats with his reader and loses himself in unending digressions; he starts relating an episode without ever finishing it; he inserts the dedication and the preface in the middle of the book; etc., etc., etc.
In short: Sterne does not fashion his tale according to unity of action, a principle deemed inherent in the very idea of the novel. The novel, that wonderful game with made-up characters, means for him unlimited freedom of formal invention.
An American critic, trying to defend Laurence Sterne, writes ‘Tristram Shandy, although it is a comedy, is a serious work, and it is serious throughout.’ God almighty, would someone please explain to me what a serious comedy is, and what is one that isn’t? The sentence I quoted is devoid of sense, but it betrays to perfection the panic that seizes literary criticism in the face of anything that doesn’t seem serious.
I wish to make a categorical statement: no novel worthy of the name takes the world seriously. But what does ‘taking the world seriously’ actually mean? What it most definitely does mean is: believing what the world wants us to believe. From Don Quixote to Ulysses the novel challenges what the world wants us to believe.
It could be objected that a novel can refuse to believe what the world wants us to believe while at the same time keeping faith with its own truth; it can refuse to take the world seriously, but still be serious itself.
But what is this ‘being serious’? Serious is what someone is who believes what he makes others believe.
This is really not the case with Tristram Shandy; the book, to allude once more to the American critic, is non-serious throughout; it doesn’t make us believe in anything: neither in the truth of the characters, the truth of the author, nor the truth of the novel as a literary genre: everything is put in question, everything is put in doubt, everything is a game, everything is entertainment (with no shame at being entertaining) and all of this with all the consequences implied for the form of the novel.
Yes: just like Jacques le Fataliste, Tristram Shandy is intended, in the most deliberate possible sense, to be an entertainment. Which is precisely how the novel was born at the dawn of the Modern Age. Its wisdom and its beauty are essentially connected to its ludic origins. Sterne rediscovered in them immense possibilities which could be used to open up new paths in the development of the novel. But nobody heard his invitation au voyage. No one followed him. No one – except Diderot.
He alone was responsiv
6
The differences between Tristram Shandy and Jacques le Fataliste are, in fact, quite as important as the similarities.
To start with, there is a difference of temperament: Sterne is slow; his method is deceleration; his optic is the microscope (he can stop time and isolate a single second of life the way Joyce later does).
Diderot, on the other hand, is swift; his method is acceleration; his optic is the telescope (I know of no more fascinating beginning to a novel than that of Jacques le Fataliste: the virtuoso change of registers; the sense of rhythm; the prestissimo of the first sentences).
Next there is a difference of structure: Tristram Shandy is a monologue by a single narrator, Tristram himself. Sterne minutely follows all the caprices of his bizarre mind.
In Diderot, five narrators, interrupting each other, tell the stories in the novel: the author himself (in conversation with his reader); the Master (in conversation with Jacques); Jacques (in conversation with his master); the innkeeper (in conversation with her audience); and the Marquis des Arcis. The basic method of each individual story is dialogue (of unequalled virtuosity). But the narrators recount these dialogues within dialogues (the dialogues are encased in dialogue) in such a way that the whole novel is nothing but a vast, very loud, conversation.
Again, there is a difference of spirit: the Reverend Sterne’s book is a compromise between the freethinking spirit and the sentimental spirit, a nostalgic memory of Rabelaisian gaiety in the prudish antechamber of the Victorian Age.
Diderot’s novel is an explosion of impertinent unself-censoring freedom and eroticism unjustified by sentimental excuses.
Finally, there is a difference in the degree of realistic illusion: Sterne stands chronology on its head, but the events of the novel are firmly anchored in time and place. The characters are bizarre, but equipped with everything that we need to be able to believe in their real existence.
Diderot creates a space never before glimpsed in the history of the novel: a stage without scenery: where do they come from? We don’t know. What are their names? None of our business. How old are they? No, Diderot does nothing to make us believe that the characters really exist at a specified moment in time. In the entire world-wide history of the novel, Jacques le Fataliste is the most radical rejection of both the illusion of realism and the aesthetic of the so-called psychological novel.
7
The method of the Reader’s Digest faithfully reflects the deepest tendencies of our times and makes me think that one day the whole of our cultural heritage will be completely rewritten and completely forgotten underneath its rewriting. Movie versions and stage versions of great novels are nothing more than a kind of Reader’s Digest.
It’s not a question of defending the untouchable virginity of works of art. Obviously, Shakespeare, as much as anyone, rewrote other people’s work. But he didn’t adapt them; he used a work as a theme to make his own variation, of which he was sovereign author. Diderot borrowed from Sterne the whole story of Jacques wounded in the knee, transported by cart and looked after by a beautiful woman. That done, he neither imitated nor adapted. He wrote a variation on Sterne’s theme.
On the other hand, movie and theatre transpositions of Anna Karenina are adaptations: that is, reductions. The more the adapter attempts to conceal himself discreetly behind the novel, the more he betrays it. By reducing it he deprives it not only of charm but also of sense.
To stay with Tolstoy: in a way radically new in the history of the novel, he posed the question of human action: he discovered the fatal importance in a decision of causes impossible to grasp rationally. Why did Anna kill herself? Tolstoy goes so far as to use an almost Joycean interior monologue to demonstrate the tissue of irrational motivations which guide his heroine. Every adaptation of this novel, inevitably, by the very nature of the Reader’s Digest, tries to make the causes of Anna’s behaviour clear and logical, to rationalize them; the adaptation thus becomes quite simply the negation of the novel’s originality.
The reverse is also true: if the sense of a novel survives rewriting, that indirectly proves its mediocrity. In world literature, there are two novels which are absolutely irreducible, totally unrewriteable: Tristram Shandy and Jacques le Fataliste. How can their masterly disorder be simplified in such a way that something remains? And what should remain?
It is possible, of course, to detach the story of Mme de La Pommeraye and make a play or a film out of it (it’s been done). But all that is left is a banal anecdote stripped of all its charm. In fact, the beauty of the story is inseparable from the way in which Diderot tells it: i) a working-class women recounts events which occur in a milieu to which she is a complete stranger; ii) any melodramatic identification with the characters is impossible, given that the telling is constantly and incongruously interrupted with other stories and speeches and also iii) incessantly commented on, analysed, discussed but iv) each commentator draws a different conclusion, the story of Mme de La Pommeraye being an antimorality.
Why do I allow this to exercise me so much? Because I wish to cry, with Jacques and his master, ‘Death to those who rewrite what has already been written! May their balls and their ears be cut off!’
8
And, naturally, to state that Jacques and his Master is not an adaptation; it’s my own play, my own ‘variation on Diderot’, or rather, since it was conceived in admiration, my Homage to Diderot.
This ‘variation-homage’ is a multiple meeting: between the writers, but also between the centuries. And between the novel and the theatre. The form of a dramatic piece has always been much more rigid and rule-bound than that of the novel. The theatre has never had its Laurence Sterne. I have written not merely a Homage to Diderot, but also a Homage to the Novel, trying to lend my comedy the formal liberty that Diderot-the-novelist found, but which Diderot-the-theatre-writer never knew.
The construction is this: on the fragile structure of Jacques’s voyage with his master are based three love stories: the master’s; Jacques’s; and Mme de La Pommeraye’s. While the first two are lightly linked (the second one very lightly) to the outcome of the voyage, the third, which occupies the whole of the second act, is, from the technical point of view, an episode, pure and simple (it has no integral connection with the main action). It’s an obvious flouting of what are known as the laws of dramatic construction. But that’s precisely where I saw my opportunity: to renounce strict unity of action and create coherence of the whole by more subtle means: by the technique of polyphony (the three stories are not told one after another, but intermingled) and by the technique of variations (each story is in fact the variation of the others). Thus this play which is a ‘variation on Diderot’ is at the same time a ‘homage to variation form’, just as was, seven years later, my novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
9
For a Czech author in the seventies, it was strange to think that Jacques le Fataliste (also written in the seventies!) was never printed during its author’s life and that only manuscript copies could be distributed to a limited and confidential public. What in Diderot’s time was an exception has become, two hundred years later in Prague, the common lot of all important Czech writers who, barred from the printing presses, can only see their work in typescript. This started with the Russian invasion, it continues, and there is every likelihood that it will continue.
I wrote Jacques and his Master for my private pleasure and perhaps with the vague notion that one day it might be allowed to play in a Czech theatre under an assumed name. As a signature, I spread through the text (another game, another variation!) memories of my earlier work: the Jacques and his master evoke the couple from The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire (Laughable Loves): a few phrases are quotations from my farce (Ptakovina) put on in Prague in 1968 and 1969 and then banned; there’s an allusion to Life is Elsewhere and another to The Farewell Party. Yes, they were memories; the whole play was a farewell to my life as a writer, ‘farewell in the form of an entertainment’. The Farewell Party, which I completed at more or less the same time, was to have been my last novel. However, I lived through this time without having the bitter taste of personal defeat, because of the degree to which the private farewell was part of another, huge one, which concerned me.
