Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics) (3 page)

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 more 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.

These allusions to animals take us to the heart of the satirical tradition. At one point in the
First Satire
the narrator excuses himself for writing almost in the manner of the Roman satirist Persius, whose poems had a hard edge, rather than explaining a passage of Horace, whose milder satire was tinged with epicureanism. Both of Diderot’s
Satires
begin with epigraphs from the
Satires
of Horace; and the ‘post-scriptum’ to the
First Satire
, which is a discussion of certain passages in Horace, seems to be the continuation in print of a debate which Diderot was conducting with his friend Naigeon, a learned Latinist. The epigraph of the
First Satire
is taken from Horace,
Satires
, 11. i: the line in question, ‘For every thousand living souls, there are as many thousand tastes’, straightforwardly sets the tone for what is to follow. But the dedication to Naigeon which comes after, and which quotes the opening lines of the poem, seems to suggest that Diderot is also alluding to the poem as a whole. Horace opens his second book of
Satires
with a reflection on the nature of satire itself; his opening poem is cast in the form of a dialogue between the poet and a famous lawyer. Horace pretends to ask for legal advice about how to write satire, the lawyer unhelpfully advises him to write something safer, like epic (the same advice would have held good for Diderot in the eighteenth century). Horace accepts that it would be illegal to publish libellous verses; and the lawyer accepts that even libellous verses, if they are well written and win Caesar’s approval, are safe from prosecution. Horace, secure in his position as a writer, can afford to be ironical, but beneath the surface is a serious discussion about the freedom of speech which a poet can legitimately enjoy; this is a theme which is all too pertinent for Diderot and his fellow philosophes writing in the shadow of the
ancien régime’s
arcane censorship practices.