ABSTRACT
This chapter examines more closely how the theoretical models outlined in the previous chapter can inform our reading of a fictional text. Jacques le fataliste et son maître (1796) is not a neutral choice of testing ground for interactions between theoretical models. The generic instability of this text, which shares many characteristics with the novels discussed, suggests that generic identity is not an inherent and solid quality of texts, but something to be constructed. Its circumstances of initial production and subsequent circulation allow discussion of the relationship between a pragmatics based on explicit contexts of situation and the pragmatics of written texts divorced from such a stable context. The overt play between inside and outside, cause and effect, text and intertexts and spoken and written, facilitates the testing of theoretical models. The negotiation of authority in the course of interaction is more explicitly staged through a narratornarratee relationship in Jacques le fataliste than in the other texts discussed. However, this apparent appeal to a stable sender-message-receiver pattern of interaction founded on co-presence is counteracted by signals of a more complex dynamic of interaction in which the construction of an originating voice and a singular reader position are unsustainable.
