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