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,
