Author-Reader Dialogue, a Dialogue Saying a lot and Making Itself Heard

Abstract

Of the various voices that contribute to the polyphony of a literary work, that of the author and his reader are the most important, despite them being often less manifest than those of the characters. The modalities of the engagement of this dialogue between the author and the reader are highly diverse and are subjected to a pragmatic protocol that is being negotiated – implicitly or explicitly – in accordance to each author’s writing project, but also to the horizon of the readers’ expectations. As such, certain authors choose to attenuate the distinction between the different levels of narrative instances, while others, on the contrary, complexify the enunciative architecture by multiplicating the differences between them. To illustrate such a strategy, we will focus on the novel Jacques le Fataliste et son maître by Diderot, which uncontestably remains one of the most striking examples of a writer exploiting and ironically playing with the hiatus between the different narrative instances. But this ludic stance doesn’t mean that Diderot is not pursuing a very serious aim, namely crafting a model reader whose reading grid is no longer dependent on the referential fallacy.