Dramatic Justice. Yann Robert
of Le Fils naturel—the desire to become a character (“to play a role”) by participating in the dramatic recreation of an important event (“a scene they can recount”). In fact, Diderot highlights this impulse again in his Salon of 1767, once more in response to an execution: “A spectator will leave Cato dying on stage to watch the execution of Lally. Mere matter of curiosity. If Lally were beheaded every day, one would stay with Cato…. The common man becomes upon his return the neighborhood Demosthenes. Eight days straight he perorates, all listen. He is a character.”66 Why are executions more effective than theatrical performances (even death-filled tragedies) at inspiring their spectators to take on a more active role, to become a “character,” as both Le Fils naturel and the passage above put it? The difference lies, Diderot suggests, in the singularity of capital punishment. The spectators’ impulse to participate depends upon their perception of the spectacle as a unique, unpredictable happening, deserving of their curiosity and that of their future listeners, unlike a staged production, such as Cato’s death, which feels controlled, finished, reiterated, and reiterable. As we have seen, this provision need not disqualify the dramatic arts altogether, but it means that, for a performance to most effectively cultivate among its viewers the desire to become participants, it must foreground its own incompleteness and extemporaneity—that which makes it malleable, open to revision and change, as through the addition of new “characters.”
Dorval’s indeterminate, unfinished reenactment achieves this effect, and indeed, Diderot calls attention to the successful transformation of its sole spectator into a participant by ending Les Entretiens with an intimate dinner involving Dorval, his family, and the hidden spectator, who, despite being unknown to nearly everyone, observes that “in an instant [he] was one of the family.”67 Thanks to Dorval’s reenactment, the spectator becomes a part of the family and of its story outside of the scenic space, just as he had previously imagined himself to be inside of it. Indeed, he credits the ease of his integration to the knowledge he garnered from watching the reenactment, as he identifies the family members he meets through the traits of their characters: “I recognized always the personality that Dorval had given to each of his characters. His tone was melancholic; Constance’s, reasonable; Rosalie’s, candid; Clairville’s, passionate; and mine, amiable.”68 Reality is thus understood through its reenactment, but more significantly, it is also transformed by it, as evidenced by the spectator’s self-inclusion among the list of characters, a sign that he has truly become, as he had wished during the performance, “a real character.”69 Dorval’s reenactment makes the family accessible to new members; it opens up a new future, one in which performers and spectators participate equally. This marks a radical departure from Lysimond’s vision of reenactment, which allowed neither spectators nor alterations. In fact, as Diderot reveals through his ending, reenactments can also function as instruments of change by encouraging their spectators to become participants, to interact with a defining event and rewrite it from their own present perspectives, thereby transforming not just the past but the future as well.
This holds true for the spectators-turned-participants and even truer for the performers, whose direct involvement in both the original event and its reenactment means they have the most to gain (and lose) from any revisions. Indeed, as time passes, and, with it, the fears and sufferings caused by the initial event, the cheerful and mercurial Clairville comes to regard the tale as “an everyday occurrence” and decides to rewrite the family’s past as a comedy. Irritated, less by the act of rewriting itself than by the ridicule the resulting parody casts on him, the moody and austere Dorval takes his revenge by reworking the play once more, this time into a suicide-filled tragedy, exaggerating the perils faced by the family and causing great fright as to what might have been.70 The same event thus takes on a different meaning with each revision, reflecting not only the personalities of their creators but also their different approaches to working through the past (whether by mitigating the severity of a peril until it is easier to dismiss, or by imagining and confronting its worst possible outcome).
As a matter of fact, a subtler yet even more significant and lasting act of rewriting had already taken place. Upon completing the script of Le Fils naturel, Dorval had passed it on to the other members of his family, so that they could, in accordance with Lysimond’s request for a perfectly accurate reenactment, make any adjustments they felt necessary toward enhancing its truthfulness. To his surprise, however, “more to their present state than to their past situation, here they softened an expression; there, they moderated a sentiment; elsewhere, they explained away an incident. Rosalie wished to appear less guilty to Clairville; Clairville, to show an even greater passion for Rosalie; Constance, to display a little more tenderness for a man who is now her husband; and the veracity of the characters suffered from this in a few places.”71 As illustrated by the nature of their revisions, Clairville, Rosalie, and Constance do not consider Dorval’s reenactment a fixed account, anchored to a unique “truth” defined by the past, but regard it rather as an incomplete and thus modifiable performance, in need of their input and participation. In aspiring toward less culpability, more passion, and more tenderness (for the right recipients), their alterations seek to bring about a cathartic resolution by erasing at the source any lingering incestuous and guilty feelings. Indeed, such revisions create a past that is easier to integrate into a historical narrative because, as Dorval notes, it reflects the present situation of the family members (their current happiness, values, and love interests) rather than a truth they no longer recognize. Hence, whereas Lysimond had hoped, through the constant, static resurrection of a prohibition, to protect the family from its shameful past, Clairville, Rosalie, and Constance seek to mobilize that past, revising it in such a way that its performance serves as a catalyst for the collective elaboration of a more harmonious future.
In this, they are successful. As we saw earlier, Diderot’s book ends on the traditional scene of a family reunion, one achieved through a reenactment, as Lysimond had wanted, yet in no way similar to the limited, immutable gathering he had envisioned. Thanks to the incomplete reenactment of its birth, the family is actually able to expand, to redefine itself, with the departed father losing his place to a newcomer, the hidden spectator. Indeed, whereas Lysimond praises reenactments as the best example of the hardening and preserving faculties of the theater, the family’s first performance shows the inverse attribute—the fragility of life—to be just as significant. In a single text, therefore, Diderot identifies the two principal kinds of reenactment, each associated with a different conception of theater and justice. The first holds performances and laws to be fixed, permanent, and single-authored; the second, to be fluid, evolving, and collaborative. The first—Lysimond’s ideal reenactment—seeks to immortalize the laws of a patriarch as the foundation for a stable, legitimate, and autocratic order. It sets out to create a performance without actors, playwrights, and spectators, because they, as agents outside of the father’s control, risk introducing individual creativity and artistic innovations, resulting in the very change and difference that the patriarch fears. The second—the reenactment as it actually transpires—includes actors, playwrights, and spectators, but blurs the distinction between them, insofar as they all become participants. Unpredictable, collective, more cathartic than punitive, this kind of reenactment allows its participants to interact with a transgression, judge and even revise it according to present values and beliefs (not eternal laws), and in so doing move beyond it. Diderot’s brilliant work thus establishes the framework that for the rest of the century would shape the many attempts at creating a judicial theater, reenacting, like Le Fils naturel, real-life transgressions—but on a much larger scale.
Chapter 2
The Many Faces of Aristophanes
The Rise of a Judicial Theater
Diderot: Pioneer, Model, Victim?
Be careful what you wish for. Just three years after imagining a more topical, judicial brand of theater in Le Fils naturel, Diderot became one of its first victims. On May 2, 1760, Palissot’s Les Philosophes had one of the best attended premieres in the history of the Comédie-Française.1 As its critics stressed again and again, this prodigious success had less to do with its artistic merit (consisting as it did of an unimaginative rewriting of Molière’s Les Femmes savantes) than