Satyre seconde: le neveu de Rameau by Denis Diderot (review)

This new edition (its title, Satyre seconde, reminds us that the more familiar title cannot be traced to Diderot) is distinguished by its lively style of commentary. Framing an edition of the text that modernizes spelling and punctuation (but that respects the absence of signs distinguishing citation or address within each character’s speeches) are an Introduction offering an overview of the main thematic issues, and a series of notices devoted to key topics including satire, music, theatre, the plumitifs referred to in the dialogue, as well to Diderot’s relationship with Rousseau and to les ennemis des philosophes. The Introduction (somewhat confusingly referred to in the notices as the Preface) includes useful remarks on the particulier as an intermediary notion between the general and the individual, appealing to a Kantian and Hegelian heuristic the editor has applied to good effect in a number of studies on Enlightenment aesthetics. The notices are particularly rich in two respects. The first is the editor’s persuasive argument, based on her deep knowledge of the period and her cross-referencing of a wide variety of sources, that the divide between partisans and adversaries of the philosophes was a shifting and sometimes permeable boundary. This fits with the satire’s own subversion of simple dualisms. Like Diderot in this text, Hobson focuses on the details of lives lived as much as on theoretical constructs. The second is the invitation to engage directly with the music mentioned in the text. The notes provide links to performances one can access on the internet, connections more conveniently made by using the multimedia translation of the edition available for free consultation online (Rameau’s Nephew: A Multi-Media Edition, ed. by Hobson, trans. by Kate E. Tunstall and Caroline Warman (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2014); reviewed in FS, 69.2 (2015), 246–47). Hobson is very good on the musical life of the period, emphasizing for example Philidor’s significance as a composer, notably of the 1767 ‘reformed’ opera Ernelinde princesse de Norvège, and not just as the chess-player named in the introductory pages of the dialogue. I was not quite persuaded by Hobson’s argument that Diderot’s interest in the style nouveau introduced by the Italians extended to purely instrumental compositions (symphonies) as well as to vocal music; the case for it (and for its interpretive significance) needs to be made in more detail. The explanatory notes are helpful, though necessarily selective given the profusion of references and allusions in the text that might be elucidated. Serious readers will still want to consult other modern critical editions, including that of 1950 in the same collection by Jean Fabre, whose alphabetical lexique is of enduring value. More might have been said about the various attempts to discern a structure in this apparently freewheeling dialogue, and the bibliography of modern reception and criticism is surprisingly patchy (no Jauss, Rex, Werner, for example; only one of Starobinski’s essays mentioned; and few recent French works), but Hobson’s lively and well-informed engagement with the text in its cultural and intellectual context makes this edition a valuable contribution to Diderot and to French eighteenth-century studies generally.