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

their lasting fascination and their continuing influence. The
First Satire
has left a clear trace in the fiction of Balzac. 11 As for the
Second Satire
, it is extraordinary how so many readers, from Goethe and Hegel to Foucault, have been inspired by
Rameau’s Nephew
. It is a text which, precisely because of its mystery, seems able to inspire different readers to write wholly different texts. Thomas Bernhard, in
Wittgenstein’s Nephew (Wittgensteins Neffe
, 1983), uses the model of Diderot’s work to provide a framework for an autobiographical narration about his meeting in an asylum with Paul Wittgenstein, grand-nephew of the famous philosopher. Meanwhile Jacques-Alain Miller has recently published a psychoanalytical rewriting of the text (
Le Neveu de Lacan, satire
, 2003). Alberto Moravia’s novel
Me and Him (Io e lui
, 1971), in which a man dialogues with his penis, may or may not be indebted to Diderot, but there is a clear influence on Saul Bellow’s first novel,
Dangling Man
(1944), which describes the isolation of an intellectual in wartime, as he passes the time while waiting to be called up by studying Diderot and other Enlightenment writers: Diderot’s dialogue provides astructural and philosophical model for Bellow’s novel, and there are evident similarities between the hero Joseph and Rameau’s Nephew. 12
    If Diderot’s
Satires
continue to fascinate, it is surely because they continue to amuse as well as disturb us. For one critic,
Rameau’s Nephew
‘is a moral and aesthetic experiment, one which disturbs complacency at every moment and leads to no restful conclusion’. 13 At one point, halfway through the work, ‘Me’ stops ‘Him’ and says: ‘What do you mean, exactly? Are you being ironic, or sincere?’ (p. 44). ‘Him’ continues with his paradoxical defence of wrongdoing, and ‘Me’ again exclaims: ‘I confess that I can’t tell whether what you’re saying is sincere or spiteful. I’m a simple soul: I wish you’d say what you mean to me and not bother about being clever.’ If we feel confused by this, so did Goethe. On 21 December 1804 he wrote to Schiller: ‘This dialogue explodes like a bomb in the middle of French literature, and it takes considerable skill to know what precisely is touched by the fall-out, and how…’

NOTE ON THE TEXT
    Rameau’s Nephew
    This work (
Le Neveu de Rameau
) remained unpublished and unknown in Diderot’s lifetime. Various editions appeared in the course of the nineteenth century, all of them based on unreliable manuscripts (see Introduction for details). An autograph manuscript, entitled ‘Seconde Satire’ (‘Second Satire’), was discovered in the late nineteenth century and is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. This manuscript, edited and published for the first time by Georges Monval in 1891, has provided the base text of all modern editions. It remains the only known autograph manuscript, and the other extant non-autograph manuscripts are probably derived from it. The first translation based on the autograph manuscript was by Sylvia Margaret Bell, published in London by Longmans, Green & Co. in 1897. The present translation is based on the edition by Henri Coulet in
Œuvres complètes
, vol. 12 (Paris: Hermann, 1989), which emends earlier readings of the Pierpont Morgan Library manuscript in some instances.
First Satire
    This work (
Satire première
) first appeared in the October 1778 issue of the manuscript journal
Correspondance littéraire
. It was first printed in the Naigeon edition of Diderot’s works (1798). The present translation is based on the Coulet edition (see above), which takes as its base text one of the Gotha manuscripts of the
Correspondance littéraire
.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Critical Editions
Le Neveu de Rameau
    ed. Jean Fabre (Geneva: Droz, 1950): a pioneering edition, with extensive notes, and a useful ‘Lexique’ to the language of the text.
    ed. Roland Desné (Paris: Éditions sociales,