Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics) (2 page)

To begin with, when did Diderot write
Rameau’s Nephew
? Since there are no references to the work in Diderot’s lifetime, we are thrown back on the internal evidence of the text itself, which is of course crowded with specific incidents and anecdotes. Many of these are datable with some precision, though here too the work continues to baffle us. Its overall satirical thrust is aimed at the enemies of Diderot and his fellow encyclopedists who were active in the early 1760s, and one whole group of references—the liaison between Bertin and Mlle Hus, for example, or the allusion to the Opéra in the Rue Saint-Honoré, which burned down in 1763—all point to a date for the action somewhere between 1760 and 1762. But many other allusions belong to a later date: the reference to Voltaire’s defence of Maupeou, for example, is to an event of 1771; a reference to Sabatier’s
Three Centuries
to a work of 1772. All we can say with certainty is that there is no clear
allusion to any incident before 1760, and none to any later than 1774. The chronological references are, moreover, inconsistent. The celebrated composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, uncle of ‘Him’, died in Paris in 1764: at one point in the text he is referred to as having already died, at another point as being alive. A mistake on the part of Diderot? Perhaps. Or perhaps a deliberate inconsistency designed to jolt the reader into realizing that all is not what it seems.

There are broadly two views about how and when the text was written. Jean Fabre, the scholar who produced the first modern scholarly edition of this work in 1950, dates its beginnings to around 1761, and considers that Diderot went on adding to it over the years until it reached its final form around 1774. More recently, Henri Coulet has argued against this view, suggesting that the dialogue was composed in one creative burst around 1773. He maintains that the organized structure of the book precludes the possibility of its having been composed piecemeal over an extended period, and argues that the multiplicity of allusions to events in the early 1760s are part of a self-consciously nostalgic attempt to re-create in the 1770s the atmosphere of the earlier period. These arguments about genesis are important insofar as they provide clues for the interpretation of this baffling work.

In the first place, what is at issue here is a view of the work’s ‘unity’. It was long fashionable to speak of a disorderly and chaotic text, a reflection, so the argument ran, of Diderot’s own expansive and exuberant personality. He was famously a great talker (as Boswell, among others, noted), and so it seemed natural that he should have created a work featuring two great talkers. For critics to argue in this way seems to suggest a need to excuse what is seen as the incoherence and muddle of the work, and it is also to succumb to a nineteenth-century stereotype of Diderot as a confused and flawed thinker. Coulet’s bold assertion that this is a coherent and artfully crafted work challenges us to read it afresh.

Secondly, the arguments about chronology help us to identify the events which stimulated Diderot to write this work, and to place it in his career. Diderot arrived in Paris as a young man to
pursue his studies, and began to earn a living by translating books from English. His first original piece of writing was a small, anonymous work entitled
Philosophical Thoughts (Pensées philosophiques
), in which he attacked the Christian critique of passion, and hinted darkly at atheism and materialism. The work predictably aroused a furore, and three years later another controversial work, his
Letter on the Blind (Lettre sur les aveugles
), led to his imprisonment at Vincennes for four months. Thereafter he was preoccupied for many years with the editing of the
Encyclopedia (Encyclopédie
), and throughout that period he was obliged to struggle with the authorities to keep the project alive. Voltaire, from the safe distance of Ferney, near Geneva, advised Diderot to leave Paris, but he stuck it out, publishing the volumes in defiance of the threat of censorship and the risk of further imprisonment.

The royal road to literary respectability in eighteenth-century France was through the theatre, and Diderot’s first play,
The Natural Son (Le Fils naturel
), performed in 1757, landed him in hot water: first Jean-Jacques Rousseau took public offence at a line in the play that he felt was critical of him and ended their friendship, then Diderot found himself accused of having plagiarized the Italian dramatist Goldoni. Prominent among his critics was Charles Palissot, and worse was to come in 1760 when Palissot parodied all the philosophes and encyclopedists in his play
The Philosophes (Les Philosophes
), which enjoyed a noisy success at the Comédie-Française. Diderot was singled out in this play for heavy-handed satirical treatment, but, given the delicacy of his situation regarding the
Encyclopédie
, he was effectively powerless to reply. The ever-present danger of censorship meant that Diderot had to lead a double literary life, with the result that at the time of his death, in 1784, he was remembered first and foremost as the editor of the
Encyclopédie
. Many of his other works, those which today we regard as his masterpieces—
Jacques the Fatalist (Jacques le fataliste), The Nun (La Religieuse
), his art criticism—had been ‘published’ only in a limited number of manuscript copies in the
Correspondance littéraire
, and remained therefore unknown to a wider reading public until
the nineteenth century. (The
Correspondance littéraire
was a manuscript journal containing cultural and other news, halfway between a private letter and a printed periodical, which was produced fortnightly and circulated exclusively to a limited number of the crowned heads of Europe.) And then there was
Rameau’s Nephew
, which was not published in any form whatsoever, but which Diderot carefully copied and preserved for the readers of a future generation.

The work is many things, but at one level it is clearly Diderot’s settling of accounts with Palissot, his revenge on those enemies of the
Encyclopédie
who continued to harass him all his working life. Jean Fabre believed that the work was an intimate affair, written by Diderot purely for his own private pleasure. Certainly it is true that the text is crammed with elusive references to people and events, and despite the heroic efforts of editors (in particular Fabre, whose pioneering edition has 334 notes), we will never understand fully all the allusions. But does this matter? The very fact that we cannot grasp every last detail of the gossip powerfully conveys to us the confined atmosphere of the literary underworld that Diderot is describing. But Fabre’s view that this is a private work should not encourage us to read it only as some sort of autobiographical or confessional text, concerned simply with Diderot’s recollections of the opponents of Enlightenment.

Rameau’s Nephew
also, more importantly, addresses and questions some of the fundamental values of the Enlightenment. That it does so with such a light touch and so elusively makes its enquiry more, not less, complex. Two men sit in a café and talk; they discuss morals and music, and they tell stories. The whole exchange is deceptively casual, notwithstanding the extraordinary physical outbursts of ‘Him’ when he finds himself, literally, at a loss for words. At the heart of these seemingly aimless discussions is a preoccupation with man as a creature of society. ‘Man is said to be a Sociable Animal …’: so begins one of Addison’s
Spectator
essays (no. 9, 1711). The expression is borrowed from Aristotle’s
Politics
, but Addison develops the idea in a way characteristic of his century: ‘… and, as an Instance of it, we may observe, that we
take all Occasions and Pretences of forming our selves into those little Nocturnal Assemblies, which are commonly known by the Name of
Clubs
.’
¹
We think of the Enlightenment as an era of empirical enquiry, in which long-standing beliefs in science and religion were subjected to rational scrutiny. This emphasis on the triumph of reason over superstition can make the period seem a dry one—that at least was the caricature that would be fostered by the Romantic generation. But beyond this fresh emphasis on the power of reason, the ideas of the Enlightenment give to the men and women of the eighteenth century a reinvigorated sense of what it means to be ‘human’. Addison’s whimsical excursus on the nature of clubs recognizes an important form of sociability, and sets the tone for much of the rest of the century: works like Adam Ferguson’s
Essay on the History of Civil Society
(1767) or Adam Smith’s
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776) signal the beginnings of study of what we would now call the ‘human’ sciences, the study of man’s social relationships with his fellow man (and so, by implication, a shift away from theology, and the study of man’s metaphysical relationship with God).

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.