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

(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 namegiven 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