«Rameau’s Nephew»,

Or The Harpist and His Diaphragm

Avec cet mot de nature, on a tout perdu.

Chateaubriand, Atala

1. Premiss

The subject of my lecture is Rameau’s Nephew (le Neveu de Rameau), the dialogue written by Denis Diderot between 1761 and 1780 that he did not publish. I would like to read Diderot’s dialogue through a metaphor—the metaphor of man as a musical instrument—that recurs throughout many of Diderot’s writings: for instance, in his Elements of Physiology and first and foremost in D’Alembert’s Dream.

In Diderot’s metaphor of man as a sensitive harpsichord, music, medicine and philosophy cooperate in the construction of man: music sets in tune the living strings and nervous fibres that medicine scrutinizes, while philosophy seals this organic unity of spirit and matter with thought and words.

But unfortunately, the instrument is not always in tune, and Diderot himself is well aware of the imperfection of human nature:

“on the whole of the earth’s surface there is not one single perfectly constituted, perfectly sane man. The human species is nothing but a mass of individuals more or less counterfait, more or less ill.” (EP, p.1317)

Actually, in Rameau’s Nephew the instrument doubles, two opposite voices resonate, Me and the Nephew, or the Harpist and his Diaphgram, which is another, more elegant label used by Diderot for the musical analogy I started with.

To Jean Mayer, Jacques Proust, Mirko Gremk, Jamie Kassler, who have traced the intellectual traditions of Diderot’s metaphor, I am indebted for the attempt to read Rameau’s Nephew as a literary representation of the madness of a sensitive harpsichord.

2. The madness of a sensitive harpsichord

It is in the Elements of Physiology that Diderot introduces the image of the “little harpist” (le petit harpeur) to represent man.

Whoever demarcates the harpist from the instrument, says Diderot, has in mind the “ideal man”, l’homme idéal, a disembodied observer from outside. On the contrary, conjunction of harpist and instrument suggests the “real man”, l’homme réel, a bundle of fibres originating in the brain (“Instead of the soul, Diderot writes, I say the origin of the bundles or man, je dis l’origine des faisceaux ou l’homme).

In the Entretien to D’Alembert’s Dream the argument is set in motion by the Mathematician:

“You consider the philosopher as something distinct from the instrument, a sort of musician who lends his ear to the vibrating strings and passes judgment on their consonance or dissonance.”

Diderot replies to D’Alembert that “the philosopher-instrument is sensitive, he is musician and instrument at one and the same time.”

This materialistic view of the mind-body relationship perturbs D’Alembert, and causes the night-time delirium to which doctor Bourdeu is summoned by M.lle De L’Espinasse: “…it had all the look of a delirium,” she observes, “it was a gibberish of vibrating strings and sensitive fibres, c’était un galimatias de cordes vibrantes et de fibres sensibles.”

Something similar to D’Alembert’s delirium recurs in Rameau’s Nephew: at the Café de la Regence the gibberish of vibrating strings and sensitive fibres now becomes a full orchestra, sounding the entire harmony of the universe. The instrument breaks all its bounds, and whereas D’Alembert was attended by Bourdeu the doctor, the mad Nephew is now restrained by Me,the Philosopher.

I cling to Diderot’s musical metaphor since I would wish to make it the premiss for other levels of meaning in the Nephew. The aesthetic, moral and social questions that the dialogue gives rise to have their roots in the real man, and, as we have seen, Diderot is well aware of the imperfection of human nature. The musical metaphor provides precisely a statement of the problem of the unity of man, of the cohesion and tuning of his conflicting parts: on the one hand, diaphgram and its keys: instinct, sensitivity, dreams, deliria, madness and prophecy; on the other, the harpist or brain, and its overtones: coolness, rationality, understanding and sane judgment. While up to Newton music is the model with which to conceive the tuning of the world, for Diderot music is the model to portray man, to install the dialectic between the normal and the pathological which underlies the doubling-up in Diderot’s dialogues and satires.

  1. The creation of the harpsichord

Something – an excess of sensitivity, the contractions of the diaphgram – engenders kinship between D’Alembert the mathematician and the Nephew the madman: namely, “the affinity between dream, delirium and madness”. In a dream as in a delirium, Diderot notes in the Elements of Physiology, the organs are travellers who separate, one still walking while the other, perturbed, comes to a halt: hence the succession of images, sounds, tastes and sensations that are disconnected from the brain. The dream is precisely “the action and reaction of the fibres upon one another…it ascends from the strands to their origin, or descends from the origin to the strands…il monte des filets à l’origine, ou descend de l’origine aux filets.

Movements, strands, fibres, bundles of fibres; centre and periphery; then dreams, deliria, images, sounds, visions: we are inside the living organism, somewhere within the animate harpsichord. The excitations travel along the network structures of the living subject, they run through the tissue of fibres, nerves, strings and bundles of strings that make up the sensitivity of life. The motions of the fibres pass from periphery to centre, from centre to periphery: “If the organ destined for the act of love is excited, the image of a woman will arise in the brain; if the image is awaken in the brain, the organ destined for pleasure will be aroused.” (1297) In this way, in D’Alembert’s Dream Diderot imposes an orgasm on his friend. As a dreamer, D’Alembert is simply an adolescent, “un être abandoné à la discretion du diaphragme.” (RA, 170) Diaphragme and brain double up: here he lies prone on his bed, the infant D’Alembert, un galimatias de cordes vibrantes et de fibres sensibles; there, apart, in conversation with M.lle De L’Espinasse, is doctor Bourdeu, the harpist detachedly observing the excitement of the diaghfram:

“it is to this calm, cool being like myself that it is given to say: this is true, this is good, this is beautiful…c’est a l’etre tranquille et froid comme moi qu’il appartient de dire: cela est vrai, cela est bon, cela est beau… Let us strengthen the network at its origin, that is the best we can do…Fortifions l’origine du reéseau, c’est tout ce que nous avons de mieux à faire.” (RA, 174)

This image of man in Diderot was formed from his studies of musical acoustics and his readings in physiology: on the one hand, vibrating strings and resonance, on the other, nerve fibres and animal sensitivity. From these investigations and readings Diderot took what he needed to shape his own metaphor of man as a musical instrument, and place it among the cluster of other musical machines of eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe, from Athanasius Kircher to Ernst Hoffmann, from Vaucasson to Lamettrie: A Pygmalion effect in the field of acoustics and music.

Evidence for Diderot’s interest in musical acoustics is documented in the Principes généraux d’acoustique (1748). The sources he quotes come from the mathematicians, physicists and musical theorists who mapped out the field of acoustics and music theory in the terms of the modern Newtonian scientific paradigm: as well as Mersenne, there are Robert Taylor’s equations on vibrating strings, Newton’s studies on the propagation of sound, the acoustic experiments of Sauveur, the harmonic theories of Rameau, and the mathematical demonstrations of musical pleasure of Euler, whose Tentamen novae theoriae musicae is constantly present in Diderot’s mind.

The vibrating string is a dynamic centre of forces and energy: a small impulse suffices to set the system in oscillation, to produce a continuous, periodic motion with accumulation of energy. In oscillation, the vibrating string divides into portions producing simultaneous oscillations, and the total vibration is the sum of all the simultaneous partial vibrations. The isochronism of the strings is the cause of the pleasure experienced and supplies the link between acoustics and physiology, and between physiology and musical aesthetics. The string instrument is a complex resonator, made up of several separate but interdependent resonators.

There is nothing new in all this, but what is new is the association of acoustics with medicine, vibrating strings and sensitive fibres, mechanics and sensitivity.

Animal fibre is sensitive, extensible, resistant, elastic or irritable; it possesses a radical force that gives rise to changes in form and in the vital phenomena. The fibre has a vis insita (inherent force) that gives it its tone or tension, it is an elastic force or that of a spring (vis elastica, elater: Baglivi). The nerves are bundles of fibres made up of a great number of tiny, invisible fibres: “At the end of the seventeenth century anatomists concurred in regarding the fibre as the principal, if not the only, element constituting the human or animal body” (Grmek, p. 310). Bonnet’s writings on les facultes de l’âme and Haller’s authorithy, both well known to Diderot, confirmed the achievements of nervous anatomy. To Diderot, the elementary properties of fibres, namely recollection and association, helped the transition from the living being to the thinking being, to man as an organized clavecin: He explains the association and comparison between two sensations or ideas as a proportion between the vibrations of fibres and their resonance in the organism.

Combine the above with a little imagination (and Diderot had plenty) and a little experience of the world (by no means lacking in Diderot) and there you have man as a sensitive harpsichord, Rameau’s nephew.

  1. L’homme passioné and the aesthetics of mimesis

Vertumnis, quotquot sunt, natus iniquis (Horace, Satires, Book II, 6): “Born under the untuned everchanging influence of all the Vertumni together”: the stamp is the device of the nephew, his literary inscription. While for Charles Bonnet the Nephew is a bundle of sounding strings and nerve fibres, for Horace and the Ancients the quintessence of the Nephew would seem to be the tenuous pneuma that fills the spaces: neither cold nor hot, neither heavy nor light, devoid of a determinate form because, being ble to assume all forms, he preserves none (PdA, p. 115). The art of the nephew lies precisely in his capacity to take on the most disparate shapes. His body is capable of any movement whatever, his face of any expression, his voice of any modulation: he is the incarnation of mimesis, and in his pantomimes the philosopher witnesses the playing-out of the passions in all their ample range in the theatre of life.

At this point, it may not be inappropriate to remark on something not entirely out of place in this Meeting. The word emotion and its derivatives do not occur in the Neveu (see further Entretiens sur “Le Neveu de Rameau”. Préface de Jean Fabre, Paris, Nizet, 1967, “Index”, pp. 287-402), either in relation to music or in other contexts. As against that, we often read, with regard to music and in other connections, of passion and its derivatives passioné, (se) passioner (ibid, p. 361). Diderot’s conception of the ‘life of the mind’ differs from ours: there is no interior world, the invisible and indivisible soul to draw the strings of the machine. The interior world is made up of organs that move (EP, p. 1296), the passions are observed outside, in the movements of the body. Diderot’s ‘psychology’ finds the passions in the signs of the face, in the tones of voice, in gestures, looks, facial colours and expressions, sounds, accents, interjections, body movements; this is physiognomy, a section of mechanics as universal science of motion. The talent recognized by the philosopher in the nephew consists precisely in his knowledge of the external symptoms of the spirit he borrows: “for it is impossible to judge what happens within us in any other way…Thus whoever best knows and best reproduces these external signs…he is the greatest actor” (PdA 124). The nephew is, in effect, the “sketch of an actor”, a comédien of whom he provides a wonderful embodiment of the paradox: “nothing is more unlike him than his own self” (Prologue).

“I have certain subdued notes that I accompany with a smile: an endless variety of signs of approval; here the nose, the mouth, the brow, the eyes are brought into play. I have a suppleness of the loins, a way of arching my spine, of lifting or dropping my shoulders, of extending my fingers, inclining my head, closing my eyes, and looking wonderstruck as if I had heard a divine angelic voice descending from heaven…” (p. 42).

If the Neveu is the maximum expression of the science of movement, the Philosopher, on the contrary, is a motor without motion, located at the centre of his brain: the movement is slow and saturnine, the man is monotonous in his gestures as in his words. Diogenes’ tub in which he takes refuge at the end of the dialogue amazingly houses that body wrapped up in its own staticness.

The personages of the well-to-do household frequented by the Nephew — they, too, are protrayed by their movement, by the outward signs of their character. For example, the financier Bertin:

“My hypochondriac, with his head muffled in a nightcap that droops over his eyes, has the look of a moveless idol, with a string stuck to his chin that descends beneath the chair. One might expect the string to be pulled, but no such thing occurs; and if his jaw should happen to open, it is to utter some desolating word, that tells you that you have not even been noticed, and that all your simulations have been wasted” (p. 40).

A further property is attributed to the passions in Diderot’s anthropology: repetition. Descartes, art. 27, “Definition of the passions of the soul”: “[the passions of the soul] can be defined, in general, as perceptions, or sentiments or emotions of the soul, that refer to it in particular and are caused, maintained and reinforced by some movement of the spirits.” The central point in this Cartesian definition is that the passions are “caused, maintained and reinforced by some movement of the spirits”. Unlike the sentiments and the emotions, which are the nuances of the affective life, overpower the soul through their character of joyfulness, coerciveness, duration: they are not passing states of mind, imaginations of the soul in which it sometimes takes delight to indulge itself. The passions leave traces in the brain and signs on the face, for they harry without cease. They generate characters, masks that roam the world and that theatrical imitation draws upon in order to stage life. Human characters (the Nephew reads Theophrastus) are the subjects of plays, comedy, tragedy, painting, sculpture, music, the fine arts that replicate the passions and, taken all together, constitute the sciences of man in society. (“L’homme sans physionomie n’est rien”[1], EP, p. 1273). In skillfully imitating and representing l’homme passioné, the imitative arts put a mask on man, make a puppet of him: this is the financier Bertin’s string that is never pulled. The more the representation substitutes life, the more the mythological man of art resembles a machine, a theatrical device that interacts with the other devices and the other machines that produce the wonderful. Through the diffraction of the passions in the spectrum of the diaphragm art imitates life, by a pleasing deception art draws man closer to his natural basis, to reconnect him with himself and to tell him who he is.

  1. Music and prophecy

I feel, yes, I feel (p. 82) — the nephew’s diaphragm is the resonating pneuma that reiterates the cry of the Pythian at the approach of the god: “Je le sens, je le sens, le voilà le dieu”[2] (Diderot, Sur les femmes, p. 950). The Nephew has the excessive sensitivity of the woman: “Sa tête parle encore le langage de ses sens, lorsqu’ils sont muets”[3] (p. 952); within he is a savage, like women: “elles sont restées de vraies sauvages en dedans”[4] (p. 958); like them, he is a being at the behest of the diaphragm: “a touching word has fallen on his ear, and behold the inner tumult arises, “tous les brins du faisceau qui s’agitent, le frisson qui se répand, l’horreur qui saisit, les larmes qui coulent, les soupirs qui suffoquent, la voix qui s’intérrompt, l’origine du faisceau qui ne sait ce qu’il devient”[5] (RA, p. 172). If the priestess of Apollo is the echo of the god’s voice that makes the breath of the Pythian its wind instrument, a spirit blown by the divine afflatus, the Nephew is the Aeolian harp stirred by all the Vertumni in the world, coerced resonance, mechanic of pure sensitivity: “I feel, I feel… Here its comes, here is what it means to find a midwife who knows how to stimulate, to accelerate the pains and to deliver the child. When I am alone, I take up my pen with the idea of writing. I bite my nails, I ravage my brow. Your servant! Good evening! The god is not at home.”

The philosopher finds it impossible to accept this agitation, to restrain this suffering within the temperate compass of the octave: “Better to place a curtain between me and this man to hide him from me, rather than witness the torture of a patient” (p. 23). The two parts of the instrument are discordant, and the dissonance generates the asymmetric tree of knowledge: at the centre, where the trunk is too thick and lush, stand the imaginative arts, the poets, the artists… and the insane; at the summit, where the branches rise harmoniously, stands philosophy, reason that puts the curtain in place. “Is the beginning, the trunk, too vigorous with respect to the branches? Behold the poets, the artists, the men of imagination…the insane. Is the whole energetic, harmonious, well ordered (“énergique, bien d’accord, bien ordonné”)? Behold the good thinkers, the philosophers, the wise” (RA, p. 168). Music takes its place in the great trunk where, far from the brain, the diaphragm throbs, vibrates, resounds. An aesthetic of the diaphragm replaces the apollinian aesthetic of his previous writings: what a distance we have come from the principle of the perception des rapports, the perception of relations, with which in the Principes d’acoustique (1748) and in the Traitè du beau (1752) Diderot had mapped out a science of man along the lines of the Newtonian science of nature!