Satire and Sensibility: Rameau's Nephew

Abstract

Abstract: This essay offers a new interpretation of Rameau's Nephew , often regarded as one of the most perplexing pieces by Denis Diderot, that attends to the interconnectedness of his works. When considered in light of Paradox of Actor which reads as a companion piece to Rameau's Nephew alongside Elements of Physiology and Diderot's political writing, LUI's tearful behaviours reveal a sensibility sensitive to the suffering that took place in mid-eighteenth-century France. This sensibility helps reveal LUI as an exemplar of both the clavecin-philosophe discussed in D'Alembert's Dream and the "fanatical philosophe" in Observations on the Nakaz . Hovering between genius and mediocrity, LUI also emerges as a pretended fool who fools his spectators with theatrical illusions: despite showing an antihero appearance, he ironically, by unmasking falsehood, comes closer to resembling a sentimental bourgeois hero (albeit one with a satirical spirit) in a tyrannical society where no one triumphs as a truth-telling hero. Living in the shadow of his famed uncle, he also demonstrates that the basis of noble sensibility lies not in noble titles. Rameau's Nephew ultimately unfolds as not just a satire but also a comédie larmoyante , for it, as Paradox puts it, deals not only "with a tartufe" but "with the Tartufe," an idea that can be traced back to Molière's play Tartuffe which presents Tartuffe as an archetypal figure who epitomises moral and religious hypocrisy.