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, it also erases his character from the text, a second, symbolic death that indicates a 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