Rameau's Nephew / D'alembert's Dream: AND D'Alembert's Dream (Classics) [Paperback]

In the first book, Rameau, who is an actual historical figure, the nephew of the famed composer, runs into the narrator (Diderot) in a parisian cafe where games of chess are going on around them. Rameau is one of the great comic creations of 18th century French literature. He is a cross between Lear's fool and Dostoevsky's Underground Man. Like the fool, he gets away (until recently) with saying outrageous things to his benefactors' faces, because they tend to regard him as a buffoon. Like the underground man, he is constantly vacillating in terms of his self-image. For the most part he excoriates himself and even seems to revel in the fact that he has brought his misery upon himself. This is in fact a rather ennobling trait, and probably part of the reason that Diderot doesn't dismiss him out of hand. Rameau really doesn't blame others. He accepts resposibility for getting himself kicked out of his rich sponsor's household. He also blames himself for the loss of his attractive young wife.

Diderot's descriptions of Rameau's japery is hilarious. Rameau is an accomplished mimic. He performs an entire opera there in the cafe, singing all the parts and providing his own unorthodox instrumental accompaniment. Diderot writes: "What didn't he do? He wept, laughed, sighed, his gaze was tender, soft or furious: a woman swooning with grief, a poor wretch abandoned in the depth of despair, a temple rising into view, birds falling silent at eventide, waters murmuring in a cool, solitary place or tumbling in torrents down the mountainside, a thunderstorm, a hurricane, the shrieks of the dying mingled with the howling of the tempest and the crash of thunder; night with its shadows, darkness and silence, for even silence itself can be depicted in sound. By now he was quite beside himself. Knocked up with fatigue, like a man coming out of a deep sleep or a long trance, he stood there motionless, dazed, astonished, looking about him and trying to recognize his surroundings."

Yet, as Diderot the narrator acknowledges, there is method to Rameau's madness. Again like Lear's fool, truth is to be mined beneath the jester's antics. Within the context of the flippant diologue, Diderot addresses many of the philophical concerns that were coming to the fore at the time of the enlightenment. There is a groping towards a definition of evolution that predates Darwin in some respects. There is even a brief discussion of social, vs. gentetic engineering (sustitute "gene: for Diderot's "molecule").

On man's natural state, which was so integral to Rousseu's optimistic philosophy, here is what Diderot has to say: "If the little brute were left to himself and kept in his native ignorance, combining the undeveloped mind with the violent passions of a man of thirty, he would wring his father's neck and sleep with his mother." Remind you of any 20th century father of psychology?

D'Alembert's Dream , the companion-piece in this edition, is less entertaining than Rameau's Nephew, but still worth reading. The conceit doesn't work quite as well and the dialogue tends to get bogged down at times. For students of the history of philosophy it makes for a lot less dry reading than Hobbes or Descartes however. I was surprised at what a big influence Lucretius must have had on Diderot (something I missed when I first read this work 20 years ago - but then I hadn't read Lucretius "On the Nature of the Universe" at that point).

I would definitely recommend reading Leonard Tancock's introduction to both these works, not only for an overview of the subjects that Diderot is tackling, but for the intersting family backgrounds of D'Alembert (who was a revered mathematician and a contributor, along with Diderot and Voltaire to the monumental "Encyclopedie")and Mademoiselle L'Espinasse.

If you enjoy this volume, you might next want to read Diderot's other most widely translated works, The Nun, Jaques the Fatalist and his Master (both the original Diderot text and the Milan Kundera play) and his Selected Writings on Art and Literature.