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,
