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Chapter 1

Fixing the Law

Reenactment in Diderot’s Fils naturel

A New Performance for a New Time

Theater is out of the question, explains Dorval’s father, Lysimond: “The point is not to erect a stage here, but to preserve the memory of an event that touches us, and to render it just as it first happened…. Every year we would recreate it ourselves, in this house, in this living room. What we once said, we would say again.”¹ To satisfy this strange request, Dorval agrees to write Le Fils naturel, a dramatic work recounting the nascent love between Dorval and Rosalie, the wife-to-be of Clairville, Dorval’s closest friend, the two lovers’ decision to sacrifice their happiness in the name of friendship, and the startling revelation by Lysimond, returned propitiously after years abroad, that Dorval and Rosalie are actually his children and thus half-siblings. This unexpected disclosure dispels any lingering lust, jealousy, and distrust by retroactively convincing Dorval and Rosalie that their attraction for each other was little more than a sense of kinship and by binding the four main protagonists in perfectly symmetrical marital ties (Clairville is betrothed to Rosalie, Dorval’s sister, just as Dorval is to marry Constance, Clairville’s sister). The family now steadied by his presence, Lysimond demands that his children immortalize both the transgression (the incestuous love) that nearly tore them apart and his victory over it, synonymous with the restoration of the father’s law, by means of a yearly reenactment so accurate that the family members repeat the same gestures and speeches, in the same setting (Clair-ville’s living room) and in the same clothes as they had in reality. Yet Lysimond dies before the first performance, and his replacement, an old friend swaddled in his clothes, triggers such intense distress by reminding the other performers of their deceased father that they find themselves unable to continue. This incomplete performance is witnessed by a single beholder, hidden, unbeknownst to all but Dorval, behind a set of curtains. This state of concealment, together with the performance’s realism, prompts him to surrender to such a powerful illusion that, forgetting he is just a spectator, he experiences the need to interact directly with the people and events before him.

So inventive and provocative is the performance dreamed up by Diderot, the real author of Le Fils naturel, that even modern readers may be surprised at the boldness of its innovations. Several influential studies, on subjects extending from dramaturgy and scenography to acting and reception, have shown the novelty of the reforms illustrated by the fictitious performance of Le Fils naturel.² Yet one of the performance’s most striking innovations—its reenactment of very recent events—has failed to generate comparable interest, despite constituting a deliberate violation of classical dogma.³ The notion that the theater could recreate as accurately as possible a contemporary incident has usually been portrayed, with good reason, as another one of Diderot’s famous thought experiments, designed to see how close to reality one could bring the stage and its conventions. As we will see, however, reenactment soon grew into much more than just an abstract case study on the limits of realism. Over the next fifty years, there would appear countless plays reproducing current events and people on stage, as well as multiple projects seeking to go further still by turning Lysimond’s dream (including his radical rejection of professional actors, aesthetically minded spectators, and artistic invention) into a national institution. The popularity of reenactment in the second half of the eighteenth century suggests that the unusual first performance of Le Fils naturel, so easily dismissed as fantastical or purely theoretical, ought to be taken seriously and regarded as the earliest illustration of a new kind of performance, closer to ritual than theater.

Before delving deeper into Diderot’s text, it may prove worthwhile to reflect on possible contributing factors to the rise of an increasingly keen attraction for the reenactment of recent events. Without wishing to assign a single cause to a complex evolution, I contend that the interest in staging current events reflects a broader transformation in the Western world’s relationship to the past, which also took place, according to Reinhart Koselleck, in the second half of the eighteenth century.⁴ Although the bulk of Koselleck’s evidence is drawn from early modern historiography, it highlights a shift in the perception of time that is equally pertinent to a new understanding of the evolution of eighteenth-century theater.⁵ From the classical metaphor of historia magistra vitae (history is the teacher of life), as well as from other, largely semantic phenomena, Koselleck concludes that the seventeenth century experienced time as a cyclical process, comparable to the natural succession of seasons and regal dynasties. The past was understood as a vast reservoir of reiterated and reiterable events drawn from a plurality of individual histories (rather than one History) from which readers were expected to draw lessons through the recognition of parallels with their own situations. Such a model of history rested on an implicit faith in a continuous space of potential experience, as well as in the constancy of human nature, insofar as it posited a relationship between the past and the present that was less one of causality than it was one of analogy.

Starting in the middle of the eighteenth century, however, under the influence of Diderot and other Encyclopédistes, a new philosophy of history emerged, one in which the immediate past and the present were but preparations for a radically different future, unpredictable and yet predictably better. This conception of progress transformed the perception of time from a cyclical structure to a linear one. Because progress implied the existence of a driving force subjecting time itself to a constant renewal, it prompted a new relationship between the past and the future, in which the latter no longer resembled or repeated the former but opened up instead on an indeterminable horizon and a completely new experiential space. Accordingly, while the distant past lost much of its exemplary value, the immediate past acquired a new relevance, both as an indication of the accomplishments and direction of progress and as a lingering near present that needed to be worked through, its flaws highlighted, judged, and condemned, so that a new, better future could be set free. Indeed, as Koselleck notes, the Encyclopédistes often expressed the desire to “accelerate” the Enlightenment, with the result that even the most recent past became something to be exceeded, even exorcised.⁶

This shift in the conception of time appears to have influenced the representation and intended function of the past in eighteenth-century theater in much the same way it transformed the writing and meaning of historiography. Indeed, if classical rules opposed the dramatization of events taken from the nation’s history, it was because theorists such as d’Aubignac, drawing heavily on Aristotle’s Poetics,⁷ deemed the preservation of a temporal divide between the spectators and the characters to be essential to the pedagogical aims of the theater. Historical events, especially recent ones, risked eliciting from the spectators an unmediated, visceral involvement in the particularities of the story (the domain of history, according to Aristotle) likely to prevent them from extracting more universal lessons and philosophical truths (the domain of poetry). Similarly, the settings of classical plays were deliberately kept indeterminate⁸—generic even—to encourage the spectators to view the world on stage not as a reenactment of a specific historical moment but rather as a universal, timeless space.⁹ On the classical stage, as in classical historiography, events were thus never portrayed as links in a linear chain bridging the past and the present, but were depicted instead as eternal examples of political or ethical dilemmas bearing an analogical bond with those of the present. The utility of the theater (and of historiography) depended therefore on the spectators’ ability to recognize these points of contiguity, identify the universal, atemporal laws illustrated by the story and then apply this knowledge in such a way as to enhance or reduce, as the case may be, the likelihood of a repetition of the play’s outcome in their own time.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, this reflective relationship to the events on stage yielded increasingly to a more unmediated, emotional response, contingent on the spectator’s immediate recognition of a basic identity between his own world and that of the stage. To quote Alain Ménil, the spectator’s perspective shifted from “it’s the same for me” to “it is me”—in other words, from a primarily analogical experience to a more direct involvement in the world of the play.¹⁰ Promoting this experience of unity was the increasing realism of stage settings and costumes, as dramatists and decorators progressively redefined the space of representation from an atemporal, generic world to a fragment of the world inhabited by the audience. The rise of reenactments fits perfectly into that evolution, taking it, in fact, to its logical conclusion. By drawing their content from contemporary events, they achieve precisely what Mercier lamented classical tragedy, with its analogical conception of the past, could not: “History, from which the pompous tragedy emanates, is for the masses an effect without a cause; they do not see the connections.”¹¹ Unlike classical plays, reenactments reveal causal relationships between the immediate past and the present. They allow the performers to reexperience their own role in a recent event, gain new insights into its sometimes-hidden roots, and reflect on its continued impact. And when they have spectators, reenactments seek less to impart universal laws to them than to enable them to actively intervene in and pass judgment on contemporary events, and in so doing shape their meaning and assign them a place in the linear narrative of history.

The shift toward a perception of time as linear and unpredictable thus likely contributed to the emergence of reenactments in one obvious way: by making the immediate past seem of the utmost relevance and worthy therefore of being dramatized. Yet the popularity of reenactments may also be linked to this shift in a different way—less as a symptom of it than as a remedy against it. The linear conception of time inevitably induces a certain anxiety, for it presents the future as experientially different from anything that preceded it, and for that reason, as impossible to predict and prepare. Transgressions become all the more alarming in light of the future’s uncertainty. They belie the narrative of progress and raise the possibility that the perception of time as a force of constant and accelerating renewal will weaken longstanding laws and beliefs, leading to social chaos and collapse. Lysimond’s reenactment is a response to precisely such a threat (incest) to his family’s unity. Its aim is permanence: an end to the mercurial movement of time, synonymous with loss and difference (hence Lysimond’s request that there be no acting, artistic invention, or outside spectators—nothing that could differentiate the reenactment from the event). By renewing year after year the judicial act (the prohibition of incest) through which Lysimond founded a united family, the reenactment seeks to bestow immortality to the patriarch and his law, thereby providing his descendants with the security of an everlasting stillness. Diderot deliberately pushes Lysimond’s project beyond the limits of tenability, however, less to discredit it than to allow another conception of reenactment to emerge from its collapse. In this alternative model, reenactment ceases to be an instrument of fixity, wielded by a patriarch to enact his law, and becomes the very opposite: a way for members of a community to confront a recent transgression, reassess it, and gain control over it by playing (with) and amending their own roles within it, in an attempt to find forgiveness, or at least understanding and resolution. This second type of reenactment is easier to reconcile with the notions of linear time and progress, for it seeks to move beyond a transgression once and for all, not through the constant renewal of it and of its prohibition, but by the collective elaboration of new rules and values best able to free a new future from the shackles of the past. Through a single performance, then, Diderot identifies two very different kinds of reenactment, with nearly opposite views on the passage of both time and laws.

Fixing the Father’s Law: Making It (and Him) Eternal

Let us begin by examining the first type of reenactment, as envisioned by Lysimond. From the start, the project bears witness both to his awareness of the looming specter of death (though he misjudges its proximity, promising that he would participate in the reenactment “once before dying”) and to his refusal to surrender quietly to this fate.¹² Thanks to the reenactment, he tells Dorval, “I would survive myself, and go on and converse thus, generation after generation, with all of my descendants.”¹³ In Lysimond’s vision, Dorval’s and Rosalie’s children, and their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children, and so on ad infinitum will grow up watching the yearly reenactment—indeed, they will be its only spectators—until they are old enough to assume the role of their ancestors. More than simply, as Lysimond first suggests, preserving the memory of an important event, an objective that concedes implicitly the existence of a “before” and “after,” the reenactment thus seeks to abolish time itself by bringing together the present members of the family and their posterity. It aims to continually reactivate the past in the present, precluding the possibility of a future in which Lysimond has ceased to exist and to rule.

This spectral quality of mimesis—its ability to give an otherworldly intransience to that which it represents—was primarily associated in the eighteenth century with the art of painting, which was deemed to possess, of all art forms, the closest relationship to the things themselves and therefore the greatest capacity to immortalize them. Many of the most influential aesthetic thinkers of the eighteenth century, including Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Edmund Burke, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, agreed that painting came closest to an unmediated transposition of reality, because it employed natural signs, affecting the senses of the beholder directly and requiring therefore little interpretative or imaginative exertion. Diderot largely agreed with such views, drawing heavily in his Salons from Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, although only after Burke had himself borrowed several ideas in his Philosophical Enquiry from Diderot’s own Lettre sur les sourds et muets.¹⁴ This letter is important, as it marks the first time that Diderot reflected on the differences between the visual and discursive arts, noting that if the former benefited from being straightforwardly representational (“painting shows the object itself”), this could also prove limiting, both for the artists, who unlike poets were restricted to the depiction of a unique moment, and for the beholders, who risked finding that such a precise art hampered their imaginations.¹⁵ Hence, even before turning his attention to Le Fils naturel, Diderot had already discerned the principal elements in the opposition between painting and poetry on which Lessing’s famous Laocoon would rest.

Diderot was thus well aware of the failings of painting as a support for a true reactivation of the past. To be sure, painting’s spatiality afforded it a clear advantage over poetry, in that it rendered possible the resurrection of a given individual in a single image, thereby allowing its beholders to experience a multiplicity of characteristics, from distinct body parts to accouterment and stature, as they would in reality: all at once. Yet if poetry, limited in its descriptions by the successiveness of speech, could offer no such synchronicity, it could in return express the passage of time and seemed therefore better suited to the portrayal of the changing moral and physical states that together constitute a human life. Moreover, the greatest strength of painting—its ability to fix in tangible signs the outward appearance of a deceased being—also represented one of its principal weaknesses, as it struggled to match the capacity of poetry to convey through abstract signs the temperament and inner life of its subjects. Diderot attempted to address the first failing of painting (its inability to express time) in the opening pages of his Essais sur la peinture by advocating the creation of an academy in which aspiring painters could become acquainted with real people of various rank, wealth, and age, in lieu of paid models playing the part, as actors do, of priests, peasants, and noblemen. The painters would then be trained to identify and replicate the diverse marks on the body that signal their subjects’ experiences: “the professor will take care to point out the accidents that daily functions, lifestyle, condition, and age have introduced in these forms.”¹⁶ This proposed amendment to portraiture, both in terms of the selection of its subjects and the realism of their portrayal, is reminiscent of Diderot’s recommendation that the theater aspire to the faithful representation of “conditions”—that is, a character’s profession, rank, or domestic role—in lieu of the generic personality traits that traditionally defined the protagonists of classical comedy. These proposals testify to Diderot’s desire for artistic forms able to communicate the diverse ways in which one’s identity is constructed in time—a diachronic conception of being at odds with the more deterministic interpretation of identity implied by classical comedy’s fascination with immutable character traits. Indeed, Diderot suggested that reforming the art of portraiture might one day allow it to capture not only a unique moment but an entire life, to the extent that the mere sight of a body part would be enough for a connoisseur not only to identify the present occupation and age of the depicted individual but also to intuit his or her past experiences, joys, and sufferings.¹⁷

Nevertheless, Diderot remained skeptical of painting’s ability to condense an entire lifetime into a single image, in part due to its limitations when contending with the subtle, ever-changing inner life of its subjects. Staring at his own portrait by Louis-Michel van Loo in 1767, he regretfully acknowledged that the artist had failed to satisfy the very same ideal that Lysimond had set for his own artistic commission—to serve as a medium for a conversation between himself and his descendants: “But what will my grandchildren say, when they come to compare my drab works with this cheerful, charming, effeminate, old dandy? I warn you, my children, it isn’t me.”¹⁸ Diderot added that this failed attempt at intergenerational communication grew less from the painter’s ineptitude than from the art of painting itself, which could not faithfully recreate the hundreds of fleeting emotions and the resulting physiognomies that together constitute a person. To communicate the changeability at the center of his being, Diderot felt it necessary to supplement van Loo’s static representation with a discursive description of the characteristics (his energy, temperament, and sensibility) he perceived to be lacking from the portrait. Hence, while Diderot the reformer pursued the dream of a form of painting capable of conveying the passage of time, Diderot the art critic seemingly reached the conclusion that only a synthesis of visual and discursive elements could successfully spark in its beholder the genuine experience of knowing a person, insofar as such knowledge depends as much on visual as on linguistic cues.

This conclusion lies at the very center of Lysimond’s project. Indeed, immediately after declaring his desire for immortality, Lysimond calls attention to the benefits of a multifaceted representation, in contrast with the more limited resources of portraiture: “Do you not think, Dorval, that a work that would pass down our own ideas, our true sentiments, the speeches we made during one of the most important occasions in our lives, would be more valuable than family portraits, who show of us but one moment of our face.”¹⁹ Although Lysimond’s argument reiterates the standard opposition between poetry and painting, it simultaneously undercuts it by introducing a third term, the theater, an art form occupying at once the domain of painting (space) and of poetry (time) and consisting therefore of a hitherto unex-ploited medium through which to preserve the past. In so doing, Lysimond echoes a vital, if undeveloped, insight of Remond de Sainte-Albine, perhaps the first Frenchman to assign drama a resurrective mission. Indeed, in his Comédien of 1747, Sainte-Albine praises the theater for its ability to breathe life into family portraits by lending them the exercise of speech and action, the two pillars of poetry: “In vain does painting boast of making canvas breathe. Only inanimate creations emerge from its hands. By contrast, dramatic poetry gives ideas and sentiments to the beings it engenders, and, with the help of playacting, lends them speech and action.”²⁰ Such a synthesis of painting and poetry improves upon both art forms by providing the spectators with a truly lifelike experience, insofar as it appeals to all their senses: “Our imagination is almost always forced to compensate for the powerlessness of the other imitative arts. Only the actor’s art demands no supplement from us.”²¹

This understanding of the theater as a sequence of animated paintings constitutes a significant rupture with the classical model, one that Sainte-Albine intuits but leaves largely unexplored.²² Diderot pursues this insight further, identifying the tableau as one of the keystones of an improved, resurrective theater. As Dorval puts it, “if a play were well made and performed, the stage would offer the spectator as many real tableaux as there are for a painter favorable moments in the story.”²³ In these favorable (read: poignant) moments, Dorval proposes that speech and action be suspended, so as to compel the audience to focus its attention on the performers’ bodies, on which can be seen the physical signs of the sincerity and intensity of their emotions (in Diderot’s examples, almost always anguish at a witnessed or anticipated loss). Such signs, ranging from tears and groans to outright convulsions, incarnate for Diderot the last surviving examples of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s langage d’action, a set of gestures and unarticulated sounds that precede the appearance of speech in both the development of the individual and of the species.²⁴ Because such gestures and sounds are universal and natural, they communicate emotions directly, without the mediation and sequentiality imposed by language. Frozen, like a tableau, in a state prior to articulation, such transparent signs possess the ability to bridge the gap between the characters’ and the spectators’ respective times, insofar as they trigger an emotional experience in the audience that is at once simultaneous and identical to the one felt by the characters on stage. Indeed, for Dorval, such is the superiority of the theater over both the visual and discursive arts that it can realistically convey, through the exercise of speech and action, the passage of time within the space of representation, even as it negates, through the inclusion of poignant tableaux, the effects of time outside of it. This dual relationship to time increases the likelihood that the spectators will experience the past events recreated before them as actually happening in the present—an experience that is precisely the aim of a reenactment.

Its aim, but also its precondition—indeed, for a reenactment to be successful, its creator must first undergo the very same experience. Dorval discovers this upon attempting to compose one of the most poignant scenes in Le Fils naturel. Drawing upon his theatrical erudition, he produces a string of grandiloquent homilies so deeply lacking in truth and emotion that they prompt Clairville to propose a new creative process: “all that’s needed is to place oneself back in the situation and then listen to oneself.”²⁵ By casting himself back into the past, Clairville yields to a genuine emotion, prompting him to uncover the primitive, unarticulated language of gestures, approvingly described by Dorval as “nature’s tone.”²⁶ The resulting scene, consisting of a tableau and a lengthy pantomime, is almost entirely lacking in speech, save for some monosyllabic exclamations and a few halting declarations. Clairville’s self-resurrection thus ensures that lived experiences dictate both the spoken and the body language of the participants, in accordance with Lysimond’s request for a performance indistinguishable from the event it reenacts. It would be difficult if not impossible to overstate the impact and originality of Diderot’s promotion of lived experiences as an acting method, at a time when rigid conventions forbade players from kneeling, running, throwing themselves on the floor, raising their hands above their heads, turning their backs to the audience, or even exiting the small lighted space in the foreground of the stage.²⁷ Thanks to its proximity to actual events, still fresh in the memory of its participants, a reenactment is more likely than other types of performances, according to Diderot, to instill both writers and performers with the insight and the confidence necessary to break free from the unnatural conventions of classical theater.

Clairville’s creative process is indeed just as applicable to performance as it is to composition. According to Diderot, performers, like writers, should draw simplicity and truth from an innate sensibility, as well as from a related talent without which “one cannot do anything worthwhile”: the gift of self-alienation.²⁸ In later texts, notably his Paradoxe sur le comédien, Diderot would famously disavow the theory of creative self-alienation, at least with regards to theatrical performances, during which actors are not to feel but only feign.²⁹ In fact, Le Paradoxe also includes a repudiation of reenactments, when one of the protagonists defends the “protocol of the old Aeschylus,” according to which a play must never draw its subject matter from a recent event, for fear that it might stir too intense an emotion.³⁰ When he wrote Les Entretiens, however, and for several years afterward, Diderot still valued creative self-alienation as an acting method, as evidenced by his praise of the young actress Mademoiselle Jodin for having been blessed with “a soul prone to alienation, that feels deeply, that transports itself to the play’s setting, that becomes such and such, that sees and speaks to this or that character.”³¹ This gift makes it possible for performers like Mademoiselle Jodin to forget themselves as actors and identify completely with their characters—a feat that would be even easier, naturally, were they asked, like participants in a reenactment, to play themselves. Indeed, just as there is no artistic invention, no playwriting (understood as a technical, mediated act), but instead the transparent transcription of a lived experience, there is no acting in Le Fils naturel. Dorval and his kin identify with their former selves, losing sight of their current situation and causing the coincidence between past and present that Lysimond so desired. Sainte-Albine had intuited this—“The painter can only represent events. The actor, in a way, repeats and reproduces them”—but Lysimond goes further still.³² In his eyes, in the same way that bread and wine do not stand for flesh and blood during a Catholic mass but actually become them, Dorval and his family are genuinely transformed into their former selves for the duration of the performance. Hence, for Lysimond, reenactments do more than simply repeat or reproduce a recent event (two concepts that distinguish between an original and a replica and thus implicitly concede the existence of time and difference), they truly resurrect it, halting thereby the very movement of time.

This sacramental conception of performance explains why the standard practice of holding repetitions is wholly absent from Le Fils naturel and the ensuing Entretiens. Truth be told, theatrical “repetitions” are improperly named, for while the term suggests sameness and stillness, the practice actually rests on a belief in progress, since it connects the achievement of mastery over body and text to a series, not of identical performances, but of steadily improving ones. Such an evolutive framework puts repetition at odds with Clairville’s definition of artistic creation as a spontaneous, unmediated resurrection.³³ In fact, self-alienation stands at the very opposite extreme from self-mastery, the former relying on sensibility and identity, the latter, on reflection and difference. Accordingly, Diderot instructs Mademoiselle Jodin to forego private repetitions in front of a mirror, on the grounds that they are likely to direct her attention onto her exterior, thereby prompting her to attempt to exercise a rational mastery over her body, when it is her innate ability to achieve an internal coincidence with the character that ought to dictate her every movement.³⁴ Not only does repetition presume a faith in progress in strict opposition with spontaneity and fixity, the two principal characteristics, according to Lysimond, of the reenactive paradigm, it also promotes a fragmenting of the self—precisely that which Le Fils naturel seeks to prevent. Indeed, just as Dorval and his kin need not, in Lysimond’s eyes, hold any repetitions in preparation for their roles, the performance is itself not a repetition, but a resurrection of the original event, with the result that the participants’ experience is one not of division but of fusion with their former selves. It is clear, therefore, that Le Fils naturel does not originate from Lysimond’s longing for repetition, as is commonly believed, but from the very opposite emotion, his dread of repetition—synonymous, in his mind, with change and fragmentation.

Nowhere is Lysimond’s fear of repetition more evident than in the second justification he offers for his reenactment (the first being his desire for immortality): “Ah! my son, I never look at Rosalie without shuddering at the danger you faced. The more I see her, the more honest and beautiful I find her, and the more this danger seems grave to me. But the heavens that watch over us today may abandon us tomorrow.”³⁵ Repetition thus poses a grave threat to the family, for several reasons. It cultivates and spreads illicit desires, as evidenced by Lysimond’s use of the iterative “more” to describe the progression within him of a feeling toward his daughter alarmingly close to Dorval’s own incestuous longings (the more he sees her, the more beautiful he finds her). As James Creech has noted, in fact, the incest within the play is itself the product of a love of repetition—more specifically, Dorval and Rosalie’s desire to find in the other a mirror image of themselves.³⁶ Lastly—and Lysimond makes clear that this is the greatest danger—the concept of repetition opens up the possibility, if the classical perception of time is to be believed, that old conflicts and divisive desires (such as incest) will return in the future.

In view of Lysimond’s fear of repetition, his decision to stage the past anew, notably by forcing future generations of innocent children to recreate the forbidden love between Dorval and Rosalie, may seem illogical. As Mona Ozouf has observed about the commemorative festivals of the French Revolution, however, ritualized reactivations of the past always constitute, along with an homage, a form of exorcism.³⁷ Commemorations often celebrate a foundational event, a fabled instance of harmony at the start of a new society. The event to be honored only works as a foundation, however, if it marks a rupture with a prior state of imperfection. Hence, for a commemoration to truly revive such an event, it must replicate the moment of rupture itself—a difficult feat it achieves by summoning the specter of past threats, but only in order to exorcize them promptly. Commemorations therefore provide a means to gain mastery over a distressful past, since they resurrect the precise event by which it was made past and thus denied persistence in the present. The same can be said of Lysimond’s reenactment of the birth of a united family. Future generations will be compelled to experience incestuous desires vicariously, in the controlled setting of a ritualistic performance, so that Lysimond, whose absence nearly let an incestuous relationship occur in real life, may be eternally present, thanks to the reenactment, to forbid such perilous desires—thereby punishing and purging the very threat that he himself has revived. Indeed, as Lysimond reveals when he portrays his reenactment less as a celebration of unity than as a safeguard against past disunity, the act of resurrecting the foundation of a community is always partly synonymous with the transmission of a prohibition, that is, with the imposition of an external order on which the survival of the community depends.

In addition to the disunity that preceded the father’s prohibition (the family’s past, which continues, from the margins of history, to threaten its harmony), the performance of Le Fils naturel also seeks to exorcise the inevitable decline that will follow (the family’s future) when the current state of domestic concord is rocked by the loss of the legislator responsible for engendering it: Lysimond. Indeed, as we saw earlier, Lysimond presents the reenactment as a way to triumph over his imminent death. In Framed Narratives: Diderot’s Genealogy of the Beholder, Jay Caplan argues that the tableau operates in Diderot’s aesthetics in much the same way a fetish does in psychoanalysis, insofar as both seek to suspend a painful loss by freezing the final moments before it in a fixed image: “the tableau in Diderot is a sort of fetishistic snapshot in which the transitoriness of the real world is magically transformed into an ideal fixity.”³⁸ This particular operation is also at work in the first performance of Le Fils naturel, which seeks to exorcise the specter of death and disorder by ceaselessly resurrecting the state of domestic totality and equilibrium that preceded it. For Lysimond, reenactments are thus meant to serve two functions—first, to forestall the future, and second, to exorcize the past—with the result that their participants are left with an eternally fixed present, a state of harmony in which the father and his law reign supreme.

Fixing the Father’s Law: Correcting It and the Future

Diderot does not, however, share Lysimond’s faith in the capacity of reenactments to grant immortality to the father and his law. Indeed, as the epilogue teaches us, the father’s prohibition against incest is never decreed during the first performance of Le Fils naturel, as the appearance of the old man tasked with replacing the defunct Lysimond provokes a stream of tears and prompts the play to be suspended before Lysimond (the character) has the opportunity to speak. This interruption has traditionally been interpreted as evidence of Diderot’s awareness that no performance, however lifelike, can ever truly bridge the gap between reality and fiction.³⁹ As the sole “actor” in the performance, Lysimond’s stand-in inadvertently reveals to Dorval and his kin that they too are participating in a fiction, with the result that they find themselves cast back into a fatherless reality—a disillusion rendered all the more upsetting by the fact that it closely follows a brief instant in which the family members, having identified with their characters, sincerely believed that the real Lysimond had entered the room. For many scholars, Béatrice Didier among them, the suspension of the performance signals Diderot’s abandonment of the reenactive dream and foreshadows the central arguments of Le Paradoxe: “Le Fils naturel, like Le Paradoxe, are demonstrations of the need for a distanciation: the actors cannot be the individuals who lived through the tragedy.”⁴⁰ Incompleteness need not signify failure, however, and certainly was unlikely to carry such a stigma for Diderot, a lifelong advocate, as we will see, of the indeterminate and non finito in art. While the first performance of Le Fils naturel calls into question the achievability of the principal qualities—permanence, stability, and order—attributed by Lysimond to reenactments, in no way does it indicate that Diderot had, by the end of Le Fils naturel, lost faith in the value of proximity, be it between actors and characters or between staged and current events. In fact, in his description of the play’s first performance, Diderot not only draws attention to the incapacity of reenactments to halt the movement of time, he also transforms this apparent weakness into one of their greatest strengths—the capacity to exhibit time itself and in so doing interact with it.

Indeed, it is paradoxically the act of reenacting, intended to negate the passage of time, that ultimately gives it its visibility, in the same way that a sign always points to the absence it is meant to fill. The appearance of the faux father leads the participants to experience the passage of time directly, prompting them to discover the nonidentity of their present and former selves, as well as the impossibility of resurrecting the past. They are forced to confront, as never before, their own historicity. This experience of the world’s and of one’s own mutability is impressed all the more effectively on Dorval and his family because it belongs to the very essence of the theater. Unlike a portrait, a play exists only in the moment of its performance, each time in a unique form, as every production inevitably differs from the previous ones—a fluidity that becomes particularly apparent when a performer dies, as in Le Fils naturel. Those who, like Lysimond, value reenactments as a means of reviving the past naturally seek to reduce this variability, which they regard as the price to pay for the unsurpassed physicality and “presentness” of the theater. Yet such mutability need not be perceived in strictly negative terms, as it makes it possible for dramatic works to evolve with the passage of time, to an extent unmatched by any other art forms. In the actors’ eyes, as well as in the spectators’, never is a play complete in the way that a painting or a poem is. This principle holds especially true for Diderot’s time, when it was still standard practice for members of the parterre to interrupt the play with boos, along with more specific instructions (such as the cry, “cut, cut”), so as to indicate to the playwright and actors the alterations required before the next performance.⁴¹ Such a direct involvement reveals, in addition to the spectators’ awareness of the theater’s mutability, their embrace of it as a means to adapt dramatic performances to their present needs and desires. In the eighteenth century, far more than today, theater lovers—not only spectators but also actors, dramatists, and theorists—simply did not regard plays (understood here as both a written text and a performance) as fixed and finalized works of art, like a painting, but rather as constantly evolving, collaborative creations. Perhaps the best expression of this can be found in the widely praised (albeit never realized) proposal by the abbé de Saint-Pierre to devise a formal process through which old plays could be continually rewritten to reflect the customs and expectations of each new generation.⁴²

Indeed, if the theater’s changeability makes it more vulnerable to loss (such as the disappearance of a beloved performer), it also makes it more susceptible to revision. Even in the absence of spectators, the performance of a play can fundamentally alter its content and meaning. For instance, from a celebration of plenitude and constancy, Le Fils naturel becomes, before the end of its first performance, a mourning ritual. In its new function, it memorializes the recently deceased in much the same way a funeral rite does—less in hope of preserving the deceased’s presence in the here and now than in order to draw a clear distinction between the dead and the living and thus between the past and the present. Indeed, the first performance of Le Fils naturel not only displays Lysimond’s absence as a performer, it also erases his character from the text, a second, symbolic death that indicates a broader repudiation of the values the father incarnates—law, order, and fixity. Moreover, the absence of Lysimond’s character transforms the meaning of the performance from a dogmatic prohibition of incest to a moving illustration of the power of friendship and virtue to overcome perilous passions (since Dorval and Rosalie triumphed over their feelings before even knowing their love was incestuous—a shocking truth they never discover in the abridged performance). Le Fils naturel thus exemplifies in a single work a more general evolution in the second half of the eighteenth century, which saw the standard fictional plot (notably in novels) shift from a narrative built around the father and his law to one in which a family of equals is created through love and self-sacrifice—what Lynn Hunt has called “the family romance of fraternity.”⁴³ This transformation in the reenactment’s content—from the fixed law of the father to the collective and fluid virtue of the family—brings about a similar change in its function. Lysimond’s Fils naturel sought to enforce a strict obedience to timeless laws and as a result prohibited artistic creation, outside participation, and any other attempts to alter the performance and its meaning. By contrast, in the abridged version, the unity and purity of future generations depend on convincing individuals through a moral exemplar (like that of Dorval and Rosalie) to willingly sacrifice their own desires to the common good. The focus is not on permanence but on personal and collective growth—in other words, on an understanding of change as progress, rather than as a deviation from a fixed ideal. As a result, whereas Lysimond longed for the flawless resurrection in the present of a moment from the family’s past, thus erasing all that preceded and followed it, Diderot comes to value reenactments as a way for participants and spectators alike to reexperience past actions and transgressive desires, acquire moral insights into them, and collectively rewrite their own pasts to better fit the needs and values of the present.

The extraordinary premiere that Diderot invents for his Fils naturel thus brings to light a conception of reenactment so markedly different from Lysimond’s that their principal features stand in perfect opposition. As noted earlier, Lysimond’s project springs from his belief that his family’s unity is threatened by an absence (his imminent demise). This fear causes him to try to negate the lack through a reenactment that is not only fixed but also complete, thanks to the theater’s unique ability to unfold in space as well as in time. In this alleged totality, Lysimond hopes to find a sanctuary from the incompleteness and inconsistency of the real world. The first performance of Le Fils naturel demonstrates, however, that the theater is itself inhabited by the same lack, that it is, in fact, the art form least conducive to permanence. A dramatic performance can never fully negate the passage of time, because it too is altered by it, with the result that it always points, far more explicitly than a painting or a poem, to the very absence it seeks to fill. This is especially true of reenactments, whose proximity to reality has the paradoxical effect of accentuating the inevitable disparity between the past and the present. In fact, in foregrounding its own variability and indeterminacy, a reenactment reflects, better than any other art form, the nascent perception of time as a process of constant and unpredictable renewal. In many instances, as in Le Fils naturel, it even cultivates this perception in its participants, by prompting them to experience the recent past as a constitutive yet irretrievable part of the present, needing to be understood, judged, and worked through, before one can move forward. In this conception of reenactments, a lack is not perceived solely as a loss, but also as an invitation for both participants and spectators to complete the performance themselves by altering and rearranging elements of the past, and in so doing create a different performance—and a different future.

Much indicates, indeed, that Diderot neither desired nor deemed possible a truly complete art form, even going so far as to argue that “a poet who finishes everything … turns his back on nature.”⁴⁴ Even before Le Fils naturel, he had tempered his praise for the visual arts with the warning that too flawless a reproduction risked hindering the spectator’s imagination: “How is it possible that of the three arts that imitate nature, the one with the most arbitrary and least precise expression speaks the most intensely to the soul? Could it be that, showing objects less, it leaves more freedom to our imagination?”⁴⁵ Such a warning must have seemed particularly pertinent to the theater, the sole art form with the capacity to show objects as they appear in reality—at once in space and in time. As we saw, it was this very capacity that appealed to early advocates of reenactments, for it strengthened their faith in the possibility of a transition from imitation to reality, as illustrated in the following, sequential praise of the theater: “It is no longer an image, it is a portrait; it is even more: it is the object itself, the original.”⁴⁶ A performance of this type, insofar as it claims to present reality, rather than represent it, demands of its spectators nothing less than complete belief, thus restricting the exercise of their creative faculties. Sainte-Albine had embraced precisely this unimaginative response when he noted approvingly that only the theater required no “supplement” from its viewers.⁴⁷ Diderot, however, condemns it, on the grounds that without imagination “one is neither a poet, nor a philosopher, nor a man of culture, nor a reasonable being, nor even a man.”⁴⁸ Evidently, imagination consists for Diderot of a faculty with tremendous range, to such a degree, in fact, that he provides a vast array of definitions, reflecting the diversity of his interests (physiology, aesthetics, and sensationalist philosophy, to name only a few). Among these definitions, Margaret Gilman has identified several common traits, which taken together reveal a largely coherent vision of imagination as an active process of image combination, in contrast with memory, which Diderot defines as a purely reproductive and thus passive faculty.⁴⁹ The principal attribute of imagination is therefore its creativity, as it brings forth unique productions, unlike even the objects that inspired them, solely by combining, rearranging, and augmenting preexisting sensory images.

Hence, if indefinite or unfinished works of art most effectively stimulate the imagination, as Diderot believed, it is because they stir in the spectators the desire to construct a complete picture from the fragment they perceive, a task requiring the exercise of the very intellectual operations specific to imagination—combination, rearrangement, and augmentation. Accordingly, Diderot, more than any other French critic of his time, was drawn to incompleteness, particularly in painting, where it served to offset the visual arts’ predisposition toward undue precision. In his Salons, he regularly praises the emotional impact of sketches,⁵⁰ which he credits to the imaginative freedom they allow: “What attaches us so strongly to sketches is perhaps that, being indeterminate, they leave more freedom to our imagination, which sees in them anything it pleases.”⁵¹ In the presence of a sketch, the beholder works in concert with the artist to create as stirring a work of art as possible. For Diderot, art is at its most powerful when collaborative, if only because, as he observes in his description of a sketch by Greuze, “I know better than anyone how to move myself by the experience I have of my own heart.”⁵² Moreover, a spectator’s imaginative involvement heightens the emotional impact of a work of art because, while building upon the framework provided by the sketch, it creates an image that knows none of the formal limitations and conventions of art. In the words of Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Diderot’s friend and admirer, “the most sublime genius cannot execute as well as the most mediocre imagination; the latter creates and invents as it pleases, whereas art finds, in the execution of its thoughts, hurdles at every step.”⁵³ For Grimm as for Diderot, the execution of an idea or image into a work of art requires a series of concessions to the formal restrictions of one’s art—a technical adaptation leading inevitably to a diminution of the image’s emotional impact. A sketch partly succeeds in eluding this process of attenuation because its indeterminacy alludes to a forceful image unspoiled by execution, thereby prompting its beholders to recreate it in their imaginations, the sole canvas where fantasy is truly unchecked by artistic technique.

As a result, Diderot concludes in his Salons that a sketch, unlike a finished painting, has the power to transmit the artist’s mental state without the alterations produced by reflection and artistic technique: “[A sketch] is the artist’s moment of fervor and heat, pure verve, unadulterated by the artifice that reflection adds to everything.”⁵⁴ A sketch remains necessarily incomplete, because it originates from an emotion so sincere and overwhelming as to be only expressible in the manner the artist experiences it—suddenly, impulsively, and transiently. Accordingly, for Diderot, a sketch’s effectiveness as a creative catalyst derives less, as one might expect, from its spatial fragmentariness than it does from its temporal incompleteness. Indeed, a finished painting, a corner of which has been erased after being accidently covered in white paint, does not as a result become a sketch, because, in the absence of short, choppy strokes and other signs of precipitation, it fails to expose the movement of its own creation. By contrast, a blank in a true sketch is likely to be perceived as a space “in waiting,” rather than as a loss or as an accident, because the sketch as a whole cultivates in its beholders the sense that they are witnessing the coming into being of a work of art rather than simply its fixed and final form.

For Diderot, therefore, a sketch is to a painting what a reenactment is to classical theater. Indeed, a clear parallel exists between the incompleteness of a sketch and the suspension of Le Fils naturel. As Clairville describes it, a reenactment, like a sketch, arises from the experience (indeed, the reliving) of an emotion so intense that it expresses itself instantly and artlessly—notably through interrupted gestures and unarticulated accents that are analogous to the halted, uneven strokes of a sketch. Insofar as a reenactment serves as a medium for genuine emotions incompatible with artistic technique, it always risks leading, like a sketch, to its own suspension. Lastly and most significantly, a reenactment, again like a sketch, encourages its spectators to become participants by convincing them that they are beholding an improvised spectacle, subject to modification. To be sure, the theater always operates, in the words of Jean-Christophe Bailly, “as a fragile coming-into-being, not something that is held or holds itself whole, like a painting, nor something that unfolds purely and simply, like a film, but something unstable, only holding by a thread.”⁵⁵ Nevertheless, many dramatic genres neither embrace nor even recognize this essential instability in the way that a reenactment does. To grow convinced of this, one need only look at classical tragedies and comedies, in which strict rules governing acting and playwriting, along with the weight of tradition and the existence of character types, enforced a relative constancy, both between distinct plays and between individual performances of a given play. By contrast, a reenactment, like a sketch, openly presents itself as incomplete and indeterminate, as well as, crucially, as always coming into existence for the very first time.

Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in the epistolary exchange between Diderot and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, a famed novelist and actress. In a letter to Diderot, Riccoboni criticizes the reforms outlined in Le Fils naturel and Les Entretiens, largely on the basis that they contravene the classical ideals of clarity and constancy. Drawing on her experience of the stage, she offers, time and again, the same basic argument against Diderot’s diverse proposals, namely that the theater should not become a space of indeterminacy and incompleteness. Whether in relation to sight (she claims that actors who turn their backs to the spectators or who recite from the center of the stage, rather than the foreground, are scarcely visible and thus ineffectual), or in relation to hearing (she argues that actors, were they to turn their heads while speaking, would not be heard by a quarter of the audience), she repeatedly displays an understanding of the theater as a totality, that is, as an art subjugated to an ideal of complete visibility and audibility. In his response, Diderot defends his vision of an indeterminate theater by arguing that situations in which the spectators lack a visual or textual element actually produce a greater emotional impact, because, like a sketch, they awaken the imagination: “Each actor is lost in his suffering, follows its impression, and the one whose movements I can barely see, bringing my imagination into play, pulls me in, strikes me, and saddens me, more than another whose action I can fully see.”⁵⁶ Diderot’s exchange with Riccoboni thus reveals the distance that separates his conception of theater not only from the classical model but also from the kind of reenactment envisioned by Lysimond. For Lysimond, a flawless portrayal of reality is essential to capturing the integrality of a past event, thus giving it the unity and fixity necessary for it to be infinitely reiterable. In his letter to Riccoboni, Diderot likewise promotes anchoring the stage to reality, but for the inverse reason—because to do so recreates the imprecision and mutability of life itself. Both Lysimond and Diderot thus seek a greater proximity between the dramatic arts and reality, but whereas Lysimond looks to the dramatic arts to invest reality with permanence, Diderot turns to reality to endow the dramatic arts with impermanence.

Diderot’s desire to stage the fluidity of reality leads him to praise improvisation, notably as it was practiced in the commedia dell’arte. In a chapter on pantomime, he applauds the actors of the Comédie-Italienne for surrendering to the fervor of their imagination, since “that which is impromptu has a character that the rehearsed work will never have.”⁵⁷ The absence of a fixed script makes it easier for the actors to identify with their characters to the degree that they forget the spectators entirely and simply act as they would in reality.⁵⁸ Likewise, in Les Entretiens, Diderot argues that there exist in every performance moments that ought to be left largely unwritten, so that the participants on stage may produce their own text, one displaying all the characteristics of a sketch, since unrehearsed, undefined, and, crucially, unfinished: “screams, inarticulate sounds, broken voices, a few monosyllabic words that escape sporadically … the man jumps from one idea to another; he starts a multitude of speeches, none of which he finishes.”⁵⁹ The emotional impact of such an improvised text stems first and foremost from its sincerity—in the 1750s, Diderot, like many of his contemporaries, believed heartfelt passions to be contagious—but it springs as well from the text’s volatility and indefiniteness, which cultivate the spectators’ sense that they are witnessing a truly unique, unpredictable happening. Indeed, if Diderot, in Le Fils naturel and Les Entretiens, accentuates the visuality of the theater, often at the expense of its textuality, it is partly because the script consists of the most invariable element of the theater, as well as the sole permanent one, and as such always threatens to remind the audience of the significant part played by meticulous planning and repetition in almost all performances.

In this regard, Diderot’s conception of the dramatic arts constitutes the very inverse of classical theater. In the latter, the setting is kept deliberately indeterminate, a lack that, in concert with the contrasting clarity and precision of the text, incites the spectators to imagine a complete world on stage, thus achieving the ideal of hypotyposis. Conversely, in Diderot’s ideal performance, the setting is carefully constructed, with the aim of depicting a real space, whereas the text frequently exhibits signs of opacity and incompletion, such as fractured sentences and ellipses, pointing, like a sketch, to something left unarticulated. The determinacy of the setting and the indeterminacy of the text operate jointly to inspire a new mode of reception, one in which the spectators imagine themselves within the scenic space, where they are free to converse with the play’s characters and thereby “complete” the text of the play. In his seminal Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Michael Fried studies Diderot’s reiterated descriptions in his Salons of the very same experience, wherein the philosophe enters the world of a painting and engages in a conversation with its characters.⁶⁰ Fried notes that this fantasy of an absorption into the fiction rests on two main criteria. First, the fictional world must appear to the beholders sufficiently similar to their own that they may conceive themselves in it. This criterion explains Diderot’s fondness for reenactments, the closest performance to reality and the most likely therefore to serve as a catalyst and support for the beholders’ imaginations. Second, for the viewers to enter the scenic or pictorial space as characters, they must first be made to experience their exclusion from it as spectators. To that end, the world of the fiction must never acknowledge their presence, but must instead present itself as entirely self-contained, be it through the institution of the fourth wall or through the portrayal of characters so absorbed in their passions that they seem to ignore the beholders. Reenactments best fulfill this second criterion as well, insofar as they prompt the complete absorption of their participants, who identify so closely with their characters that they forget the spectators’ presence. Moreover, by accentuating their own indeterminacy and unpredictability, particularly in relation to the script, reenactments not only stimulate the spectators’ imaginations, as a sketch does, they also make it more likely that this imaginative act will consist of the self-projection identified by Fried, insofar as they induce the spectators to believe that they are the unknown observers of a chance event, rather than the intended addressees of a finished work of art.

Not surprisingly, this is precisely the experience of the lone spectator in Le Fils naturel: “the performance had been so true that, forgetting I was a spectator, and an unknown spectator, at various points I had been on the verge of leaving my place and adding a real character to the stage.”⁶¹ It is important to note that this experience differs from “sympathetic identification,” the type of reception usually associated with Diderot and bourgeois drama, in which a spectator puts him or herself in the place of a suffering protagonist.⁶² This mode of reception is indeed common in Diderot’s writings, as evidenced by his advocacy of ordinary protagonists (who are easier to identify with) and his unreserved praise for compassion (which, he argues, guarantees that a spectator will always take the place of the innocent sufferer and never the villain’s).⁶³ This makes it all the more significant, then, that when faced with a reenactment, not a bourgeois drama in an official theater, the spectator of Le Fils naturel reacts differently. Rather than entering the world of the stage through a preexisting character, he is moved to do so as himself, to interact with it and its inhabitants directly, in lieu of experiencing it vicariously. The veracity of the scenic world, as well as its seeming extemporaneity, kindles in the spectator a desire to add a new character and original dialogue to the story, effectively rewriting it. Such an imaginative, participative act differs from sympathetic identification, in which the spectators’ experience is filtered through, and hence constricted by, the object of their compassion. Like Diderot in his Salons, the spectator of Le Fils naturel thus enjoys, in addition to the emotional gratification of being a character, the intellectual freedom and agency of being a participant.

In fact, as Marie-Hélène Huet argues in Rehearsing the Revolution, Diderot believed that people like to attend spectacles partly because they perceive in them the possibility of a transmutation from spectator to participant.⁶⁴ As evidence, Huet quotes a passage from Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste: “The masses flock to executions to find a scene they can recount upon returning to their district. This scene or another, it matters not, so long as they get to play a role, assemble their neighbors around them, and make themselves heard.”⁶⁵ Public executions thus trigger in their viewers an impulse similar to the one experienced by the hidden spectator of Le Fils naturel—the desire to become a character (“to play a role”) by participating in the dramatic recreation of an important event (“a scene they can recount”). In fact, Diderot highlights this impulse again in his Salon of 1767, once more in response to an execution: “A spectator will leave Cato dying on stage to watch the execution of Lally. Mere matter of curiosity. If Lally were beheaded every day, one would stay with Cato…. The common man becomes upon his return the neighborhood Demosthenes. Eight days straight he perorates, all listen. He is a character.”⁶⁶ Why are executions more effective than theatrical performances (even death-filled tragedies) at inspiring their spectators to take on a more active role, to become a “character,” as both Le Fils naturel and the passage above put it? The difference lies, Diderot suggests, in the singularity of capital punishment. The spectators’ impulse to participate depends upon their perception of the spectacle as a unique, unpredictable happening, deserving of their curiosity and that of their future listeners, unlike a staged production, such as Cato’s death, which feels controlled, finished, reiterated, and reiterable. As we have seen, this provision need not disqualify the dramatic arts altogether, but it means that, for a performance to most effectively cultivate among its viewers the desire to become participants, it must foreground its own incompleteness and extemporaneity—that which makes it malleable, open to revision and change, as through the addition of new “characters.”

Dorval’s indeterminate, unfinished reenactment achieves this effect, and indeed, Diderot calls attention to the successful transformation of its sole spectator into a participant by ending Les Entretiens with an intimate dinner involving Dorval, his family, and the hidden spectator, who, despite being unknown to nearly everyone, observes that “in an instant [he] was one of the family.”⁶⁷ Thanks to Dorval’s reenactment, the spectator becomes a part of the family and of its story outside of the scenic space, just as he had previously imagined himself to be inside of it. Indeed, he credits the ease of his integration to the knowledge he garnered from watching the reenactment, as he identifies the family members he meets through the traits of their characters: “I recognized always the personality that Dorval had given to each of his characters. His tone was melancholic; Constance’s, reasonable; Rosalie’s, candid; Clairville’s, passionate; and mine, amiable.”⁶⁸ Reality is thus understood through its reenactment, but more significantly, it is also transformed by it, as evidenced by the spectator’s self-inclusion among the list of characters, a sign that he has truly become, as he had wished during the performance, “a real character.”⁶⁹ Dorval’s reenactment makes the family accessible to new members; it opens up a new future, one in which performers and spectators participate equally. This marks a radical departure from Lysimond’s vision of reenactment, which allowed neither spectators nor alterations. In fact, as Diderot reveals through his ending, reenactments can also function as instruments of change by encouraging their spectators to become participants, to interact with a defining event and rewrite it from their own present perspectives, thereby transforming not just the past but the future as well.

This holds true for the spectators-turned-participants and even truer for the performers, whose direct involvement in both the original event and its reenactment means they have the most to gain (and lose) from any revisions. Indeed, as time passes, and, with it, the fears and sufferings caused by the initial event, the cheerful and mercurial Clairville comes to regard the tale as “an everyday occurrence” and decides to rewrite the family’s past as a comedy. Irritated, less by the act of rewriting itself than by the ridicule the resulting parody casts on him, the moody and austere Dorval takes his revenge by reworking the play once more, this time into a suicide-filled tragedy, exaggerating the perils faced by the family and causing great fright as to what might have been.⁷⁰ The same event thus takes on a different meaning with each revision, reflecting not only the personalities of their creators but also their different approaches to working through the past (whether by mitigating the severity of a peril until it is easier to dismiss, or by imagining and confronting its worst possible outcome).

As a matter of fact, a subtler yet even more significant and lasting act of rewriting had already taken place. Upon completing the script of Le Fils naturel, Dorval had passed it on to the other members of his family, so that they could, in accordance with Lysimond’s request for a perfectly accurate reenactment, make any adjustments they felt necessary toward enhancing its truthfulness. To his surprise, however, “more to their present state than to their past situation, here they softened an expression; there, they moderated a sentiment; elsewhere, they explained away an incident. Rosalie wished to appear less guilty to Clairville; Clairville, to show an even greater passion for Rosalie; Constance, to display a little more tenderness for a man who is now her husband; and the veracity of the characters suffered from this in a few places.”⁷¹ As illustrated by the nature of their revisions, Clairville, Rosalie, and Constance do not consider Dorval’s reenactment a fixed account, anchored to a unique “truth” defined by the past, but regard it rather as an incomplete and thus modifiable performance, in need of their input and participation. In aspiring toward less culpability, more passion, and more tenderness (for the right recipients), their alterations seek to bring about a cathartic resolution by erasing at the source any lingering incestuous and guilty feelings. Indeed, such revisions create a past that is easier to integrate into a historical narrative because, as Dorval notes, it reflects the present situation of the family members (their current happiness, values, and love interests) rather than a truth they no longer recognize. Hence, whereas Lysimond had hoped, through the constant, static resurrection of a prohibition, to protect the family from its shameful past, Clairville, Rosalie, and Constance seek to mobilize that past, revising it in such a way that its performance serves as a catalyst for the collective elaboration of a more harmonious future.

In this, they are successful. As we saw earlier, Diderot’s book ends on the traditional scene of a family reunion, one achieved through a reenactment, as Lysimond had wanted, yet in no way similar to the limited, immutable gathering he had envisioned. Thanks to the incomplete reenactment of its birth, the family is actually able to expand, to redefine itself, with the departed father losing his place to a newcomer, the hidden spectator. Indeed, whereas Lysimond praises reenactments as the best example of the hardening and preserving faculties of the theater, the family’s first performance shows the inverse attribute—the fragility of life—to be just as significant. In a single text, therefore, Diderot identifies the two principal kinds of reenactment, each associated with a different conception of theater and justice. The first holds performances and laws to be fixed, permanent, and single-authored; the second, to be fluid, evolving, and collaborative. The first—Lysimond’s ideal reenactment—seeks to immortalize the laws of a patriarch as the foundation for a stable, legitimate, and autocratic order. It sets out to create a performance without actors, playwrights, and spectators, because they, as agents outside of the father’s control, risk introducing individual creativity and artistic innovations, resulting in the very change and difference that the patriarch fears. The second—the reenactment as it actually transpires—includes actors, playwrights, and spectators, but blurs the distinction between them, insofar as they all become participants. Unpredictable, collective, more cathartic than punitive, this kind of reenactment allows its participants to interact with a transgression, judge and even revise it according to present values and beliefs (not eternal laws), and in so doing move beyond it. Diderot’s brilliant work thus establishes the framework that for the rest of the century would shape the many attempts at creating a judicial theater, reenacting, like Le Fils naturel, real-life transgressions—but on a much larger scale.