Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics) Read Free Page A

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