Le pouvoir des fables ou la vérité selon Jacques
Abstracts
Diderot and the power of fables : the example of Jacques le fataliste
Whether one analyzes Jacques le fataliste’s subtile paradox ‘as true as a fable’ in its precise textual context or in the wider context of the narrative cycles of the work, one arrives at the same ‘moving’ conclusions : for Diderot the novel, unlike romance, is not opposed to an inquiry concerning what is true ; the ‘great scroll’ expresses a truth which, while necessary, is unknown to us who wander in the darkness of our contingent existence ; and the text maliciously confronts the powers of the verbal and the written. Thus the strange signs, misunderstandings, forebodings and premonitions which the world (or the novel) continually provides us with indicate that in Jacques the philosophical search for the true confirms fatalism (‘deterministic’ materialism) in every case but is in every case coloured with mocking irony. The reader is thus, willy nilly, the dupe, the beneficiary and the main actor of the author-creator. Truth here is what is accessible to the carefree decipherers of the unreadable, as free as possible from the idealistic illusions of free will, anthropocentric finalism and conventional morality.
References
Bibliographical reference
Pierre Chartier, “Le pouvoir des fables ou la vérité selon Jacques”, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie, 30 | 2001, 47-64.
Electronic reference
Pierre Chartier, “Le pouvoir des fables ou la vérité selon Jacques”, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie [Online], 30 | avril 2001, Online since 17 June 2006, connection on 14 September 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rde/62; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rde.62
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