Dramatic Justice. Yann Robert

conception of progress transformed the perception of time from a cyclical structure to a linear one. Because progress implied the existence of a driving force subjecting time itself to a constant renewal, it prompted a new relationship between the past and the future, in which the latter no longer resembled or repeated the former but opened up instead on an indeterminable horizon and a completely new experiential space. Accordingly, while the distant past lost much of its exemplary value, the immediate past acquired a new relevance, both as an indication of the accomplishments and direction of progress and as a lingering near present that needed to be worked through, its flaws highlighted, judged, and condemned, so that a new, better future could be set free. Indeed, as Koselleck notes, the Encyclopédistes often expressed the desire to “accelerate” the Enlightenment, with the result that even the most recent past became something to be exceeded, even exorcised.⁶

      This shift in the conception of time appears to have influenced the representation and intended function of the past in eighteenth-century theater in much the same way it transformed the writing and meaning of historiography. Indeed, if classical rules opposed the dramatization of events taken from the nation’s history, it was because theorists such as d’Aubignac, drawing heavily on Aristotle’s Poetics,⁷ deemed the preservation of a temporal divide between the spectators and the characters to be essential to the pedagogical aims of the theater. Historical events, especially recent ones, risked eliciting from the spectators an unmediated, visceral involvement in the particularities of the story (the domain of history, according to Aristotle) likely to prevent them from extracting more universal lessons and philosophical truths (the domain of poetry). Similarly, the settings of classical plays were deliberately kept indeterminate⁸—generic even—to encourage the spectators to view the world on stage not as a reenactment of a specific historical moment but rather as a universal, timeless space.⁹ On the classical stage, as in classical historiography, events were thus never portrayed as links in a linear chain bridging the past and the present, but were depicted instead as eternal examples of political or ethical dilemmas bearing an analogical bond with those of the present. The utility of the theater (and of historiography) depended therefore on the spectators’ ability to recognize these points of contiguity, identify the universal, atemporal laws illustrated by the story and then apply this knowledge in such a way as to enhance or reduce, as the case may be, the likelihood of a repetition of the play’s outcome in their own time.

      In the middle of the eighteenth century, this reflective relationship to the events on stage yielded increasingly to a more unmediated, emotional response, contingent on the spectator’s immediate recognition of a basic identity between his own world and that of the stage. To quote Alain Ménil, the spectator’s perspective shifted from “it’s the same for me” to “it is me”—in other words, from a primarily analogical experience to a more direct involvement in the world of the play.¹⁰ Promoting this experience of unity was the increasing realism of stage settings and costumes, as dramatists and decorators progressively redefined the space of representation from an atemporal, generic world to a fragment of the world inhabited by the audience. The rise of reenactments fits perfectly into that evolution, taking it, in fact, to its logical conclusion. By drawing their content from contemporary events, they achieve precisely what Mercier lamented classical tragedy, with its analogical conception of the past, could not: “History, from which the pompous tragedy emanates, is for the masses an effect without a cause; they do not see the connections.”¹¹ Unlike classical plays, reenactments reveal causal relationships between the immediate past and the present. They allow the performers to reexperience their own role in a recent event, gain new insights into its sometimes-hidden roots, and reflect on its continued impact. And when they have spectators, reenactments seek less to impart universal laws to them than to enable them to actively intervene in and pass judgment on contemporary events, and in so doing shape their meaning and assign them a place in the linear narrative of history.

      The shift toward a perception of time as linear and unpredictable thus likely contributed to the emergence of reenactments in one obvious way: by making the immediate past seem of the utmost relevance and worthy therefore of being dramatized. Yet the popularity of reenactments may also be linked to this shift in a different way—less as a symptom of it than as a remedy against it. The linear conception of time inevitably induces a certain anxiety, for it presents the future as experientially different from anything that preceded it, and for that reason, as impossible to predict and prepare. Transgressions become all the more alarming in light of the future’s uncertainty. They belie the narrative of progress and raise the possibility that the perception of time as a force of constant and accelerating renewal will weaken longstanding laws and beliefs, leading to social chaos and collapse. Lysimond’s reenactment is a response to precisely such a threat (incest) to his family’s unity. Its aim is permanence: an end to the mercurial movement of time, synonymous with loss and difference (hence Lysimond’s request that there be no acting, artistic invention, or outside spectators—nothing that could differentiate the reenactment from the event). By renewing year after year the judicial act (the prohibition of incest) through which Lysimond founded a united family, the reenactment seeks to bestow immortality to the patriarch and his law, thereby providing his descendants with the security of an everlasting stillness. Diderot deliberately pushes Lysimond’s project beyond the limits of tenability, however, less to discredit it than to allow another conception of reenactment to emerge from its collapse. In this alternative model, reenactment ceases to be an instrument of fixity, wielded by a patriarch to enact his law, and becomes the very opposite: a way for members of a community to confront a recent transgression, reassess it, and gain control over it by playing (with) and amending their own roles within it, in an attempt to find forgiveness, or at least understanding and resolution. This second type of reenactment is easier to reconcile with the notions of linear time and progress, for it seeks to move beyond a transgression once and for all, not through the constant renewal of it and of its prohibition, but by the collective elaboration of new rules and values best able to free a new future from the shackles of the past. Through a single performance, then, Diderot identifies two very different kinds of reenactment, with nearly opposite views on the passage of both time and laws.

      Fixing the Father’s Law: Making It (and Him) Eternal

      Let us begin by examining the first type of reenactment, as envisioned by Lysimond. From the start, the project bears witness both to his awareness of the looming specter of death (though he misjudges its proximity, promising that he would participate in the reenactment “once before dying”) and to his refusal to surrender 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