Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics)

by Denis Diderot

  The questions of how we ‘act’ in society, how we influence and interact with one another, are at the heart of this dialogue. Behind the humour of the music lesson, for example, or the hilarious scene at Bertin’s dinner table, lie serious questions about human conduct. Philosophical questions: to what extent are a man’s actions materially, even mechanistically, determined? Thus, if the Nephew is reluctant to educate his son, that is because if he is ‘destined’ to make good, it will happen anyway. In the early 1770s, following the publication in 1770 of D’Holbach’s hard-line determinist manifesto The System of Nature (Système de la nature), Diderot became increasingly concerned (for example, in Jacques the Fatalist and the Refutation of Helvétius) to argue against hard and simplistic determinism. Ethical questions: what are the moral bases for our actions? If the new empirical spirit of enquiry entitles us to question the assumptions of religious faith, why should we not also question the sense of terms like ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’? And aesthetic questions: is ‘genius’ the most exalted form of human expression? Or the most disruptive? Diderot in the 1760s and 1770s was concerned to bring together ethical and aesthetic principles: as he famously wrote, ‘a beautiful life is like a beautiful concert’. The apparently shapeless form of this dialogue permits Diderot to make and test connections between different ideas which would have been difficult in another genre.

  These ideas are aired in exchanges between two speakers, and critics have understandably sought to weigh up the individual contributions of each. Some have argued that ‘Me’ gradually reveals the inconsistencies of ‘Him’ ’s position, while others have seen ‘Him’ as the central character. Or one can choose to view the exchange as taking place between the rival tensions of one and the same person (as Hegel famously saw ‘Him’ as a spirit alienated from itself, in dialectical tension with ‘Me’). ‘Me’, the initial narrator, seems sympathetic to begin with, then gradually grows more complacent; while ‘Him’, seductive at times, appears at other times frankly objectionable. But even if the two interlocutors do seem to resemble the chess-players sitting alongside them in the café, locked in a struggle of strategic moves, it is not clear that we can or should try to empathize with either, let alone declare a winner. Nor can we judge the arguments on the basis of words and reason alone, for the exchange is not conducted simply at the level of language. The extraordinary scenes in which ‘Me’ describes the Nephew miming a piece of music, for example, seem to suggest that human language is not sufficient, and that human beings need other channels through which to express themselves. The discussions about music, which could seem irrelevant to the other concerns of the dialogue, are at root an argument about expressivity: between French and Italian music, which most closely mimics the passions? And which therefore is the most moving? At the heart of all the exchanges between ‘Me’ and ‘Him’ is a debate about expressivity and performance.

  Precisely what sort of book is this? To what literary genre does it belong? Many modern editions, including the most recent Pléiade version (2004), lump this text together with the other works of fiction (and so separate it from the First Satire). But this is no novel in any conventional sense of the term, even if Jules Janin, a nineteenth-century journalist, did publish a continuation of the dialogue which tries to assimilate Diderot’s form into the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction.2 We might be tempted to think of the work as a play: it creates drama out of the contrast of two characters, and the action takes place over a defined period in a defined place. The role of the Nephew, with its elements of mime and impersonation, offers great potential to an actor, so it is no surprise that the work was performed on stage in France as early as 1860, and has been frequently staged in recent years, following an enormously successful production in Paris in 1963.3 But again, this is no play in any conventional sense. Perhaps the best we can do is to fall back on the description of the work as a dialogue: the dialogue was a well-established literary genre in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more familiar to Diderot’s contemporaries than to us. But Rameau’s Nephew scarcely resembles these contemporary models (any more than it resembles the classical model of, say, Plato), so if it is a dialogue, it is an innovative dialogue which seemingly owes little to tradition. It is nonetheless instructive to look more closely at how this work distinguishes itself from other works in dialogue form.

  A conventional literary dialogue, in the style, say, of Fontenelle, took place between two characters with token names and personalities—in effect, an encounter between two talking heads. Diderot turns this tradition around by creating a dialogue between real people, who are of course not real. ‘Me’ refers, in some sense, to Diderot, just as ‘Him’ refers to Jean-François Rameau, the bohemian nephew of the great French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. Yet ‘Him’ is not of course presented as a real-life portrait of Rameau: to take only the most glaring example, ‘Him’ in the dialogue defends the view (which is also Rousseau’s) that the Italian language is more suited to music than French, whereas the (real) J.-F. Rameau maintained the opposite view. Other real-life characters, like the Abbé Galiani, have also left their mark on the character of ‘Him’. To maintain, as some critics have done, that ‘Him’ is a parodic or stylized portrait of Rousseau is misleading and unhelpful. And for all that the Nephew is an extraordinary literary creation based on a real person, he is also an example of a specific contemporary type, the Grub Street hack, memorably celebrated in Dr Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage (1744). The number of books printed, and so the number of individuals who could style themselves writers, grew enormously in the eighteenth century, and Robert Darnton has contrasted the High Enlightenment of the philosophes (Voltaire, Diderot, and the like) with the low life of the scribblers who scraped a living with journalism or other forms of hack writing.4 The Nephew thus represents a specific phenomenon of the contemporary literary scene. Other writers of the period create such characters—Marivaux’s The Indigent Philosopher (L’Indigent philosophe, 1727), Voltaire’s The Poor Devil (Le Pauvre diable, 1760)—though none rival the exuberance of Diderot’s creation.

  The setting of the dialogue is also interesting. In earlier French dialogues the exchanges generally took place in a stylized and closed setting, either outside in an elegant (and conveniently empty) park, or inside in a study, where there was no chance of disturbance. In such cases, the abstract sense of place was entirely fitting for the equally abstract exchange of ideas: the whole intention was to transcend the everyday. Diderot’s purpose is radically different: he sets his dialogue in a café, and not just any café, but the Café de la Régence, in the Place du Palais-Royal in the heart of Paris, and a favourite haunt of Diderot himself. The Narrator explains in the opening lines that he likes to walk in the Palais-Royal gardens around five in the afternoon, and that he takes refuge in the café when it is cold or wet. His picture of the chess-players seated in the café describes a reality of mid-eighteenth-century Paris. Then, at the end of the dialogue, ‘Him’ leaves to attend the Opéra, where performances began in that period at six. The building—it had been Molière’s theatre until his death, when it was taken over by Lully—was situated just opposite the Café de la Régence, and reached down a narrow street from the gardens of the Palais-Royal. Thus the entire dialogue is played out in a precisely defined part of the city (now occupied by the Comédie-Française and the Place du Palais-Royal), and to that extent we may say that the setting is ‘realistic’ in a way unprecedented in a philosophical dialogue.

  But what is noteworthy here is not so much the ‘realism’ of this setting as its rich symbolic significance. Already in the eighteenth century the café was associated with philosophical and literary debate and dispute, for example in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (letter 36), and it was no coincidence that the most influential periodical of the Italian Enlightenment, founded by the Verri brothers in 1764, was called The Café (Il Caffé). Much recent work on the Enlightenment has been inspired by Habermas’s notion of public space and his
suggestion that Enlightenment discourse was facilitated by the emergence of what he termed the ‘bourgeois public sphere’.5 The café, like the inn or the Masonic lodge, fostered a new form of sociability, and, in conjunction with the newspapers and brochures made possible by the burgeoning print culture, provided forums for the emergence of public opinion. (Public opinion could be said to be an eighteenth-century invention, and it is fitting that the word ‘opinion’ occurs in this sense in the French text of Rameau’s Nephew.)

  Thus the drama of Rameau’s Nephew is played out entirely in the public urban spaces of mid-eighteenth-century Paris. The Palais-Royal gardens are an open and public space, where people go to walk, to think, to meet friends, and, in the Allée de Foy, to meet prostitutes. It is the very freedom that this space permits which allows the Narrator to ponder in the opening lines that ‘my thoughts are my little flirts’; and later the Nephew recalls Carmontelle’s image of his famous uncle walking, bent over, in the gardens (p. 17; see frontispiece). The Café de la Régence is another such public space, as is the Opéra, to which the Nephew hurries at the end, summoned by the bell. The full significance of the Nephew’s extravagant outbursts can only be understood in this context of public space; his eccentric behaviour, unthinkable in a salon, is at least permissible in a café, whose clientèle is more mixed, and more querulous.

  If the Nephew’s mad behaviour can be situated in the public space of the contemporary city, it is also underpinned by a number of literary models, many of them more familiar to an eighteenth-century readership than to a modern one. Prime among these is Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1509), which was well known to Diderot: there were at least half-a-dozen editions in the eighteenth century, and Diderot quotes the work in his Salon of 1767. The Nephew is in one sense a modern reincarnation of Erasmus’s fool, and the theme of folly is central to Diderot’s text too: the word fou (mad/madman) occurs twenty-seven times, the word folie (madness) six times. This archetype of the fool whose role is to bring forth the truth is not, of course, limited to Erasmus; it is significant that Diderot cites Rabelais in the text, and he may have in mind in particular the Third Book, in which Pantagruel reminds Panurge of the proverbial ‘A madman teaches a wise man well.’6

  Beyond the specific model of the fool, Diderot draws on the broader tradition of carnivalesque writing. Carnival is the name given to that moment in medieval and Renaissance societies when, for a limited period, the world was turned upside-down, and the pagan could dress as a priest, the beggar as a king; the carnival mask gave temporary festive immunity and allowed everyone to say the unsayable. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin has argued that even as this social phenomenon went into decline after the sixteenth century, ‘the carnival spirit and grotesque imagery continued to live and was transmitted as a now purely literary tradition’.7 In this context, Bakhtin has written in particular about the sixteenth-century writer Rabelais as an exemplar of literary carnival, focusing on his emphasis on different linguistic registers, from obscene to learned, on his banquet imagery, and on his use of the grotesque body. Elements of this carnival culture survive in the eighteenth century, for example, in the fairs held in Paris—some of the theatrical works referred to in the text were performed at these fairs. The Narrator’s initial description of the Nephew’s ‘type’ makes clear that he is to be situated in a carnival context:

  I hold such eccentrics in low esteem … maybe once a year I like to stop and spend time with them, because their character contrasts sharply with other men’s, and they break with that tedious uniformity which our education, our social conventions, and our customary proprieties have produced. If one of them appears in a group, he’s like a grain of yeast that ferments, and restores to each of us his natural individuality. He shocks us, he stirs us up; he forces us to praise or blame, he brings out the truth … (p. 4)

  The text will go on to present the Nephew as a true king of Carnival, someone who, for a strictly limited period, is allowed to act without check, the Fool who is allowed to speak the truth; and the very fact that the Narrator likes to spend time with the Nephew ‘once a year’ seems to point to a calendar of carnival. In the best carnival tradition, this entire text becomes a ceremonious dethroning of philosophy.8 In this context, another model for Diderot is the second-century Greek satirist Lucian, whose philosophical dialogues include, for example, several on the theme of the poor man in the rich man’s house.9 It is not surprising, therefore, that Bakhtin includes Diderot’s philosophical narratives in his history of carnivalesque literature.10

  The autograph manuscript of Rameau’s Nephew bears the simple title, in Diderot’s hand, Second Satire. The further title, ‘Rameau’s Nephew’, is added in another hand, and while one can understand that editors and publishers have always preferred this more racy form (used in every printed edition, from the 1805 German version onwards), there are good reasons for keeping in mind Diderot’s title, as expressed in the only authentic manuscript. Not least, the Second Satire usefully reminds us of the shorter and less well-known First Satire. Written in 1773, the First Satire was initially published in 1778, in the limited manuscript circulation of the Correspondance littéraire (where it was entitled simply Satire); the work was first printed posthumously, in the so-called Naigeon edition of Diderot’s works, in 1798, where for the first time it acquired its title First Satire.

  The question of the relationship of the First Satire to the Second is a tricky one. If we assume the traditional view that Diderot began Rameau’s Nephew in the early 1760s, then the title Second Satire must represent an addition to the evolving work made after the composition of the First Satire. But if we accept Coulet’s more recent thesis that Rameau’s Nephew was composed in one creative spurt around 1773–4, then it becomes entirely possible that he wrote the two Satires in numerical order, as it were, and within a short space of time. In June 1773 Diderot left Paris to travel to Russia by way of Holland; it was the one great journey of his life, and he would not return to Paris until October the following year. On his way to St Petersburg he wrote to his friend Mme d’Épinay from Holland that he had enjoyed himself writing ‘a small satire’ which he had already planned before leaving Paris: this must refer to the First Satire. Near the end of the work he asks Naigeon to remember him to his friends in Paris, so he is clearly writing from abroad; and he earlier refers to a conversation he had had with the historian and poet Rulhiére shortly before his departure for Russia. This being the case, it is entirely possible that the First Satire was written in Holland in 1773, and that the Second Satire was begun soon thereafter. Those who have argued for the composition of Rameau’s Nephew over a prolonged period have pointed to the date of the various anecdotes, stretching from around 1760 to 1774; in this connection, it is worth noting that the stories told in the First Satire similarly stretch from 1746 to 1773, and we can be certain in this case that the work was written in one go. It seems that both works, with their celebratory frescos of Parisian literary life, were written with the nostalgia of the exile.

  The First Satire is cast in the form of a letter addressed by Diderot to his friend and disciple Jacques-André Naigeon, a militant atheist, and like the Second Satire, it employs dialogue, with Naigeon seemingly as interlocutor as well as addressee. An obvious link between the two Satires is that they have an overlapping cast of characters: Sophie Arnould appears in both works, as does the Abbé de Canaye. There is a further evident link in Diderot’s interest in what he calls ‘the word of character’, that is, the telling phrase or expression which sums up a whole person. This interest is hardly new, for he had hinted at it twenty years earlier, in his article ‘Encyclopedia’ in the Encyclopédie (vol. 5, 1755):

  It is important sometimes to mention absurd things, but it must be done lightly and in passing, simply for the history of the human soul, which reveals itself better in certain odd incidents than in some eminently reasonable action. These incidents are for moralists what the dissection of a monster is for the natural historian: it is mor
e useful to him than the study of a hundred identical individuals. There are certain words which describe more powerfully and more completely than an entire speech.

  Such ‘words of character’ make up the substantial part of the First Satire, and at the same time pave the way for Rameau’s Nephew, Second Satire, in which they recur as a constituent part of the characterization of ‘Him’. Diderot’s interest in these forms of expression goes beyond his liking for a good story; they are central to his philosophy of man and to his attempt to bring together ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic concerns.

  When considering Aristotle’s ‘sociable animal’ from the standpoint of the Enlightenment, we tend to focus, naturally enough, on sociability. Such is Montesquieu’s emphasis in the Persian Letters (letter 87). Diderot, almost uniquely among his contemporaries (but in the best tradition of satire), invites us to focus also on the other side of the coin, that is to say, on animality. The First Satire begins with a bravura account of a human bestiary: in the manner of classical satire, all men can be classified by animal types. The overt treatment of this theme here makes us reread the Second Satire in a different light, for it is one of the striking characteristics of the Nephew that he uses forceful animal imagery throughout. He likens himself and others to dogs, he is ‘cock of the roost’ in the Bertin household, and a worm when he is expelled from it; on other occasions he compares himself and his like to wolves and to tigers, while he describes others as monkeys, geese, and so forth. For the Nephew, the world is a jungle, and ‘in nature all the species prey on one another; in society all the classes do the same’ (p. 31)—this does not sound much like Addison’s ‘sociable animal’. Addison was taking his cue from Locke, for whom man is by nature social. But Diderot has in mind perhaps an earlier English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who held a mechanistic view of life as simply the movements of the organism; since man was a selfishly individualistic animal at constant war with all other men, society could exist only by the power of the state. In the clash between ‘Me’ and ‘Him’, Addison’s comfortable view of man as sociable animal is exploded as Diderot stages for us the clash between Locke and Hobbes.