What defines the philosophe and his various nemeses, then, is as much the positions they adopt in society as those they adopt on religion or politics. One highly original engagement with the conflicted constructions of the figures of the philosophe, the gueux, and the pauvre diable is to be found in Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau. Not the least of its originality is that, unlike the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Palissot, Fréron, and Moreau, it is a work that would be read only by posterity.
Le neveu de Rameau nearly didn’t survive at all. Many of Diderot’s works were unpublished in his lifetime, but they were nonetheless available to a select group of elite readers, including Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great, who subscribed to Grimm’s manuscript journal, Correspondence littéraire, and who made up a kind of virtual salon. Le neveu de Rameau, by contrast, seems not to have circulated at all. Indeed, its very existence seems to have been a secret: there is no reference to it in Diderot’s correspondence, no evidence that it was read in a real salon (such as d’Holbach’s, of which Diderot was a member), and although Diderot’s friend and literary executor, Naigeon, does seem to have had a copy in his possession, he chose not to include it in his posthumous edition of Diderot’s “complete” works (1798). That posterity had access to it, which it did, finally, in 1891, involves a tale that would not be out of place in a picaresque novel, involving as it does journeys crisscrossing Europe, forgery, a pair of bastardizing translators, a censorious son-in-law, and manuscripts that pop up and disappear again without a trace.
The story, in brief, is as follows: In Paris in 1821, a work titled Le neveu de Rameau was published, claiming to be a newly discovered and hitherto unknown work by Diderot. It was not, however, quite what it seemed, and the publisher was certainly protesting too much when he said he would “pursue any forgers using the full force of the law.” The work was itself a kind of forgery; it was not by Diderot, or, at least, not by him in any straightforward sense. It was, instead, a translation or, more accurately, a retranslation back into French—and a rather spiced-up one at that—of a German translation from French that had appeared in Leipzig in 1805, rendered by none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. His Rameaus Neffe was, by contrast, no forgery; it was based on a manuscript that had been handed to him by Friedrich Schiller, whose brother-in-law had acquired it from a German army officer and dramatist by the name of Klinger, who had himself obtained it while posted in St. Petersburg, which is where a large number of Diderot’s papers had been sent from Paris after his death in 1784 because Catherine the Great had advance-purchased them in 1765, thereby ensuring him an income following the completion of the Encyclopédie and, most important, ensuring herself a permanent association with a philosophe (she would also buy Voltaire’s library).
Goethe’s translation completed, the manuscript vanished. Nearly twenty years later, back in Paris, the spiced-up French retranslation was quickly denounced as a fraud, and in 1823, another Neveu de Rameau appeared, this one based on another manuscript that was in the possession of Diderot’s daughter, whose husband had been so offended by his father-in-law’s writing that he had taken it upon himself to tone down the manuscript, with the result that the text’s second outing in French was not much less of a travesty than the first. Perhaps it is fitting that a work, the central character of which is described not in terms of the direct paternal line but instead in those of the sideways offshoot that is a nephew, would itself produce such lateral literary offspring. Yet in 1890, more than one hundred years after the author’s death, and by which time Goethe’s Neffe had had a formative effect on no less a figure than G.W.F. Hegel, and the 1823 edition had been read and admired by Karl Marx, who also sent a copy to Friedrich Engels, an autograph copy appeared. It was found by the librarian of the Comédie-Française, Georges Monval, not in a library but, as if by chance, in a Parisian bookstall on the Quai Voltaire. Moreover, it was not called Le neveu de Rameau; instead, and intriguingly, it bore the title of Satire seconde (Second satire). Diderot may not make use anywhere in his work of the standard literary trope of the lost-and-found manuscript, but the story of his own manuscript easily surpasses even the most elaborate example of it.
So what can posterity read in this work? There is no simple answer to this question. That is in part because of the complexity of the work, which is far greater than any of those mentioned so far, and which is the result of its generic indeterminacy and dynamic structure. The novel is tricksy, like all of Diderot’s unpublished works, which is not to say that the published ones are perfectly straightforward, far from it, but the unpublished ones, in addition to being more risqué in content (some of the jokes in Le neveu de Rameau may be obscene, but Le rêve de d’Alembert contains a discussion of the benefits of sex with goats) are also formally and stylistically more intricate. Le neveu de Rameau has elements of all of the following but is not consistently any of them: a novel, a philosophical dialogue (which is what Goethe called it) and a play; it also contains a series of descriptions of mimes, not dissimilar in their ekphrastic quality to some of Diderot’s art criticism, which requires the reader to imagine paintings no less difficult to realize on canvas than the mimes in Le neveu de Rameau would be for any actor to perform, the latter involving as they do such things as “birds falling silent as the sun sets, a brook babbling in a cool, isolated spot, or a waterfall crashing down from the mountains.” And although the autograph manuscript calls it a “satire,” that may be as much owing to this formal heterogeneity as to its content, which does savage by name any number of historical individuals—and we should note that Rameau really did have a nephew. Certainly the work exacts a delayed revenge on Palissot and his cronies, showing them as vain, vulgar, and venal, and it does so in an exposé supplied, in a deliciously malicious twist, by a former member of their own team, a pauvre diable, the nephew of the famous French baroque composer. Yet Le neveu de Rameau also works more discreetly, and perhaps thereby more successfully, to sabotage the figure of the philosophe, who turns out to be not quite as different and distanced from the pauvre diable as one might think. Indeed, it is as much an intervention in the debate between Voltaire and Rousseau over the social codes to be obeyed by the man of letters, as it is Diderot’s belated (and today rather unnecessary) revenge on Palissot. As Goethe put it, the work “exploded like a bomb at the heart of French literature, and you have to really concentrate to work out what it hits, and how.”
Le neveu de Rameau has been the subject of any number of biographical and autobiographical readings, none of which is satisfactory, and which will be set aside here in favor of an analysis of the ways in which the characters position and reposition themselves in relation to each other and society. The work opens with a framing narrative, in which an unnamed first-person narrator presents himself to the reader as a dependable creature of habit and common sense in a changing world that contains many bizarre individuals, and one in particular, whom the narrator claims to observe from a suitably detached perspective:
He’s a mixture of the lofty and the sordid, of good sense and unreason. The notions of what’s decent and what’s indecent must be strangely mixed up in his head since he displays the good qualities that nature has given him unostentatiously and the bad ones shamelessly. … I have no respect for such oddballs. Other people make close acquaintances out of them, even friends. But they do stop me in my tracks once a year when I meet them because their character is so unlike other people’s: they disrupt that annoying uniformity which our education, social conventions, and codes of conduct have inculcated in us. If such a man is present in a group, he acts like a pinch of yeast, fermenting and giving a portion of each person’s natural individuality back to them. He stirs things up, shakes them about, provokes approval or blame; he makes the truth come out; he reveals who’s genuinely good, he unmasks villains; and that’s when a man of good sense pricks up his ears and sees the world for what it is.
The narrator’s project of exploiting this unnamed oddball for his own heuristic purp
oses, a project not dissimilar to that announced in the prefaces of many eighteenth-century novels—the Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (1731), for instance—will, however, soon be undermined, for he is unable to contain him within the narrative frame. Not only does the oddball’s name escape the narrator’s lips while he was trying to withhold it, but he escapes the frame and addresses the narrator directly. Ironically, it is while he is telling the story of how the oddball was only invited to dinner parties on the strict condition that he would not say anything, that the narrator lets his name slip: “If ever he got it into his head to break the agreement and open his mouth, no sooner had he uttered a word than everyone round the table would shout: Oh Rameau! … You were curious to know the man’s name, and now you do. He’s the nephew of that famous musician.” Surely this suggests that “Rameau’s nephew” cannot have been Diderot’s intended title, as it would give away the name-game too soon. And shortly afterward, Rameau’s nephew himself upsets the narrative frame by interjecting, “Aha! There you are Monsieur le Philosophe”—a direct apostrophe that turns the tables on the narrator, positioning and framing him in what is now the observational field of the nephew, who applies the label philosophe to the narrator in a rather mocking fashion, as if to suggest he had overheard what had been said about him.
Such framing and counterframing continues in the ensuing exchange, in which the two men are designated by the narrator using the relational pronouns, “Him” and “Me,” and which is conducted in a café, a space the connotations of which we know from Voltaire’s play (the Encyclopédie entry, “Café,” says that cafés are “wit factories, some good, some bad”):
Aha! There you are, Mister Philosopher, and what are you doing hanging around here with this bunch of layabouts? Don’t tell me you too are wasting your time pushing pawns about a board? (That’s what people mockingly call playing chess or draughts.)
ME.—No, but when I’ve got nothing better to do, I enjoy spending a few moments watching people doing a good job of it.
HIM.—In that case, you don’t enjoy yourself very often; apart from Legal and Philidor, the rest of them don’t have a clue.
Such an exchange is typical: “Him” is forever putting “Me” on the back foot, pulling the rug from under his feet. Here, when “Him” says that “Me” “do[es]n’t enjoy [him]self very often,” “Me” might have thought (as might we) he was suggesting that “Me” would usually have far better things to do, what with his being a philosophe; but it soon turns out that “Him” was referring instead to the scarcity of good chess players, with the implication that “Me” is indeed wasting his time after all, that he might therefore be what “Him” said he was, namely, a layabout. Moreover, since the nephew is in the café too, that makes two time-wasters, and so the distance and opposition that the narrator wished to establish between himself and the oddball as the necessary condition for his detached observations and moralizing interpretations collapses, and it will keep collapsing.
So once “Him” has a voice, how does he present himself to the narrator-“Me,” whom he designates as a philosophe? He is, by his own admission, a failed musician and, consequently, a hanger-on, parasite, pauvre diable, and consummate social actor or hypocrite, who has found himself some protection in the household of Monsieur Bertin and Mademoiselle Hus, known collectively as “Bertinhus”—she an overweight, talentless actress, whom it is the nephew’s role to flatter and applaud, closing his eyes and pretending to be “dumbfounded, as if he had heard the voice of an angel,” and he a humorless, hypochondriac financier, whom the nephew is tasked with distracting by generally playing the fool and by vilifying the Great and the Good, among them Voltaire, Buffon, Montesquieu, d’Alembert, and Diderot. Bertinhus is thus clearly an anti-philosophe stronghold, and indeed “Him” claims that it was there that Palissot’s play was conceived, and, moreover, that he was himself responsible for a scene in which “Me” was attacked along with the other philosophes. In return for being agreeable and useful to his masters, “Him” is fed, watered, and generally spoiled, “like a pig in clover,” as he puts it to “Me,” who modestly replies to the mention of the attack on him in Palissot’s play by saying, “Good! … I’d be mortified if those people who say bad things about so many clever and honourable men took it upon themselves to say good things about me.”
However, the nephew is now in a café instead of the Bertinhus anti-philosophe anti-salon because his pig-in-clover days are over. One of his dinner-table jokes backfired: acting the host, he had explained to a newcomer, named as the Abbé de la Porte (a journalist), that although the parvenu had been given the “honour” of being seated at the head of the table, where other sycophants were also seated, he would soon be dislodged from that position, and eventually relegated to the bottom of the table, where he would find himself, like the nephew, sitting “como un maestoso cazzo fra duoi coglioni,” that is to say (the Italian dialect both masking the obscenity of the phrase and drawing attention to it) “a majestic dick between two balls.” Everyone fell about laughing at his vulgar witticism, except Bertin, who was furious and dismissed him, with the result that the nephew has nothing better to do and is reduced to hanging out in the Café de la Régence with the other layabouts, wondering where his next meal is coming from.
Le neveu de Rameau thus unsettles and multiplies the positions available: the nephew seems to be an anti-anti-philosophe or, rather, the anti-philosophes are also opponents of the nephew. And “Me” advises him to go back and apologize, or, as the nephew puts it, “kiss arse.” This is a suggestion that is rather surprising from a man labeled a philosophe, unless, of course, arse-kissing is, as the anti-philosophes believe, precisely what a philosophe does. By contrast, the nephew’s refusal to kiss arse (though he does perform a hilarious mime of it) suggests that he, a pauvre diable, perhaps now a Rousseauian outsider, is the one behaving as the philosophes claim a philosophe does, that is to say, with some dignity. “Him” explains: “Should people be able to say to me: Crawl, and I should have to crawl? That’s what worms do, it’s what I do, and it’s what we both do when we’re left to our own devices, but we rear up when people step on our tails. And I have had my tail stepped on, and so I shall rear up.” Of course, the nephew has already asserted his dignity and reared up—but as a maestoso cazzo. So “Him” constantly pulls “Me” into his orbit, undermining the philosophe’s attempts to distance himself.
There are some things on which “Him” and “Me” agree, if only briefly, the most important of which is that all the world’s a stage on which a “vile pantomime” is acted out, with everyone playing a part in accordance with his or her own self-interest in order to try and get ahead—everyone except the king, or so the upwardly aspirational (if downwardly mobile) nephew asserts, a claim that “Me” disputes, reserving such a distinction for the philosophe, on the grounds that he alone depends on nothing and no one. Yet “Me”’s counterclaim will have some unfortunate consequences for the image of the philosophe: “Him” backs “Me” into a corner in the ensuing discussion, from which the philosophe emerges as neither the Rousseauian gueux nor as d’Alembert’s Diogenes, the daringly critical socialite, but instead as the outrageously lewd anti-socialite Diogenes of antiquity, alone in his barrel, indulging in a bit of solitary pleasure. And moreover, the counterclaim itself contradicts the narrator’s own presentation of the nephew as the oddball by showing that from the nephew’s point of view, the real oddball is Monsieur le Philosophe, or “Me.”
Moreover, insofar as “Me” might self-identify as a philosophe, his claim to be autonomous is rather undercut by his self-designation as “Me,” a relational pronoun that depends for its meaning on the existence of a “You” or, more problematically in this case, of course, a “Him.” And, furthermore, it is not absolutely clear that “Me” has not, from the nephew’s perspective, stepped into the shoes of Bertin, for although the nephew tells his story as one of failure, the story is also a great success when told to “Me,” who buys the
nephew a drink, and in so doing, repays him for being entertaining, flattering “Me” by satirizing others, and providing useful material for “Me”’s narrative. As “Him” puts it: “There’s no better role to play in the company of great men than the fool. The title of King’s Fool was in existence for a long time, you know, whereas the title King’s Wise Man never was. I myself am Bertin’s fool, and lots of other people’s fool too, maybe yours at the moment”—although, as is characteristic of this work that never stays still, he immediately adds, “or perhaps you’re mine.”
It would be a mistake then to read Le neveu de Rameau simply as piece of localized polemic directed at the anti-philosophes, not least because the philosophe does not himself emerge entirely unscathed; and it would be reductive to read the work in purely biographical, autobiographical, or confessional terms. Yet there can be little doubt that the text’s dynamics, in which every position is liable at any moment to slip or flip, offer a vision of the complexity and the competitive nature of the socioeconomic, moral, political, and cultural milieu of mid-eighteenth-century Paris, and of the precarious nature of any actor’s constructions and projections of both himself and his opponents within it. And the satirical energies of that vision have afforded the text a complex afterlife, not least by way of Hegel, who read the work in Goethe’s translation and incorporated parts of it into the very fabric of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), thereby ensuring its importance to Marx, Foucault, Alasdair MacIntyre, and beyond.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 47