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,
