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
