Le Fils naturel, from the tragedy of incest to the imaginary of continuity

Le Fils naturel opens with the agonizing presence of a forbidden love, the confession of which remains informal. Dorval loves Rosalie but forbids himself this love out of loyalty to his friend Clairville, who fell in love with her before him. The plot unfolds to reveal a second obstacle, far more terrible than this seemingly minor matter of conscience. Dorval, in reuniting with his father Lysimond, must recognize in Rosalie his own sister: the prohibition of incest is thus superimposed on the delicacies of friendship.

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However, this highly tragic spring of intrigue is little exploited in the play: both Dorval and Rosalie renounce their love before they know they are brother and sister. The reunion with the father, far from raising the spectre of incestuous consumption, offers a fraternal outlet for the desire that friendship alone has forbidden. There's more: Dorval's desire for Rosalie, the confession of which remains contained and only manifests itself out of speech, in all the dramaturgy of the symptom that orchestrates the opening scenes, this desire elides at the moment of writing itself, since Dorval's letter to Rosalie, left unfinished and read counterintuitively by Constance, definitively closes the possibility of verbalizing it.

Dorval's virtue is thus saved not only by having respected the duties of friendship, but also by having avoided incest; not only by having renounced forbidden desire, but also by having avoided formulating it.

Incest here is doubly the flip side of virtue, both the flip side of desire and the flip side of speech. It thus engages not only the organization of the plot, but the very scenography of the play. This relationship of inversion between incest and virtue, this denial of the desire of the same, could induce a dialectic at first sight unsuspected, playing out on three levels: structural, poetic and semiological. On a structural level, incest both triggers and inhibits a certain dynamic of desire, a dynamic that drives the plot and presides over its reversals. At the poetic level, incest precipitates speech towards confession and, at the same time, elides this confession, establishing and systematizing dialogic ellipsis and, with it, a practice of broken speech and pantomime; finally, at the semiological level, the need for an off-speech representation of the unspeakable precipitates the drama into iconicity and, from there, even more profoundly, slides the dialogic relationship towards the indiciality of a direct, silent exchange, towards the immediate, non-verbalized communication of a sensitive impression.

In the first instance, an analysis of the intertexts of Fils naturel will enable us to identify the exact nature of this incestuous desire. Then we'll show how the denial of incest reverberates, scatters throughout the work's writing to constitute a veritable poetics of melancholy. Finally, we'll ask how this denial, at a given moment, turns into a certain knowledge, this other knowledge of the feminine that engages, beyond desire, the very foundations of representation.

The economy of desire, from Goldoni to Diderot

If we strip the play of its melodramatic coloring, we're forced to admit that it's built on a hackneyed vaudeville argument: it's a story about a ménage à quatre. The authorized and avowed couple of Clairville and Rosalie is threatened by the intrusion of an impossible yet shared desire, the desire of Dorval and Rosalie. Dorval, Clairville's brother in friendship, will marry Clairville's sister Constance. Yet all these people remain in the same house: we know the tragic advantage that Goethe will draw from this apparent sweet union of four in Les Affinités électives. What are we to think of these two conjugal couples, crossed with two brother-sister couples, living in seclusion in the countryside of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and repeating the drama of their troubling genesis every year, as an expiatory gesture? Structurally, the staging of Fils naturel in what Diderot initially called the "story of the play" accomplishes what the play symbolically forbids: the entire plot is driven in the direction of the conjuration of Dorval and Rosalie's forbidden desire; but the annual repetition of this plot, at the father's behest and in a house now permanently housing both couples, institutionalizes this desire, periodically bringing Dorval's marital affair back to its incestuous origin. Without Dorval's desire for Rosalie, Dorval would never have married Constance. Incest is indeed the structural principle not only of the play, but of the device in which the Entretiens install it, even as the entire play is tended toward the conjuration of this unspeakable relationship.

Where does this theme of incest come from, and what significance should we attach to it? We know how, as early as 1757, Diderot was accused by Fréron, then by Palissot, of plagiarizing a play by Carlo Goldoni, Il vero amico, first performed in Venice in 1750 ¹. Diderot would acknowledge his debt in the Discours sur la poésie dramatique ². Yet Goldoni's comedy contains not the slightest trace of incest.

If we compare the two plays, we won't find any textual borrowing. Diderot didn't quote Goldoni, didn't recover any salient "words", any sentences. He used Goldoni as a canvas from which to build a scenography and a poetics, in the same way that he himself elaborated numerous canevas for plays never written ³. Goldoni's text can even be seen as a certain rhetorical way of carrying out the plot, with its heavy reliance on speech, which Diderot elides in favor of other, non-verbal means of expression, such as tableau and pantomime, but also as interspersed speech, speech-symptom, the use of which he promotes in the Entretiens. The enigmatic nature of the play's opening scenes is perhaps explained by this composition based on Goldoni's text, which Diderot evades, reduces to silence: Florindo's monologue in scene 1 of L'Ami véritable, where he declares his heroic resolution to leave so as not to betray his friend Lélio, becomes Dorval's interspersed silence and pantomime in scene 1 of Fils naturel. Florindo's second monologue, in scene 3 of L'Ami véritable, where he wonders how to leave without warning the beautiful Rosaura, becomes a promenade and reverie in scene 3 of Fils naturel, where Dorval's words are overrun with suspension points. The hero's speech is succeeded by a space inhabited by reverie, surveyed by "servants who tidy the salon, and collect the things that are Dorval's". The place speaks for the man.

However, the difference between the two plays is not merely scenographic. Béatrice's arrival in scene 4 of L'Ami véritable contrasts singularly with Constance's arrival in scene 4 of Fils naturel. In both cases, the confession is precipitated by the threat of the beloved's imminent departure. But everything contrasts between the burlesque confession of Béatrice, Lélio's lecherous old aunt, and the heroic confession of Constance, Clairville's sublime sister. Constance has been constructed by Diderot as Beatrice's antithesis; she turns the farcical vision of a devouring, withered woman, horrifying and fallen, into the sublime promise of another desire, purified, attuned with the desire for virtue.

The farcical dimension, totally absent from Le Fils naturel, is concentrated in Goldoni around Beatrice, but also Rosaura's father, the old miser Octavio, whose haunting, overpowering presence also contrasts with Lysimond's absence in Le Fils naturel. Half the action of L'Ami véritable takes place in Octavio's house (I, 7-15; II, 11-20; III, 1-4). In Act I, Scene 7, Octavio quarrels with Trappola, who has broken some eggs: his avarice can't stand the slightest mess. But in the iconography of the farce, the broken eggs also set the stage for Rosaura's loss of virginity, which is what the play is all about. How do you marry Rosaura without giving her a dowry, or in other words, how do you make an omelette without breaking eggs?

The beginning of Act II of L'Ami véritable is taken very faithfully from the end of Act II of Fils naturel: Trivella brings Florindo a letter from Rosaura (II, 2 // II, 6); Florindo reads Rosaura's declaration and begins a reply (II, 3 // II, 7), interrupted by Trivella who tells him that Lélio is being attacked by two brigands in the street (II, 4 // II, 8). Beatrice, alone, discovers the unfinished letter and imagines it is intended for her (II, 6 // II, 9). Lélio, informed by Beatrice, questions Florindo. Out of loyalty to his friend, Florindo is obliged to confirm Beatrice's false deductions (II, 7-9 // III, 2). Here again, Diderot condenses and elides: the burlesque scene in which Beatrice believes herself to be loved is reduced to a few sentences interspersed with Constance, who "exits the scene with some haste" ⁴. Florindo's false confession is replaced by Dorval's silence, which is content not to deny the misinterpretation of his letter.

The end of Act II and the beginning of Act III of L'Ami véritable focus on Octavio. He asks Rosaura to give up her dowry (II, 13). Perhaps Florindo would agree to marry without a dowry (II, 15)? Florindo, bound by his friendship for Lélio, refuses (II, 17). But Lélio, asked to marry Rosaura without dowry or give her up, hesitates (II, 18-19). Octavio, meanwhile, withdrawn to his room, contemplates his hidden treasure (III, 1-4).

It's in the middle of Act III that the two plots most distinguish themselves from one another. In Goldoni, Lélio cannot marry Rosaura without a dowry (III, 13). He would ruin his family. Clairville, on the other hand, has no fear of poverty, and is willing to derogate by trading if Rosalie's hand is at that price (IV, 5 ⁵). Florindo then confesses the real meaning of the unfinished letter, something Dorval does not do in Le Fils naturel. Lélio agrees to let Florindo marry Rosaura if the dowry is of no importance to him.

Octavio exploits Florindo's bourgeois generosity. He now demands a counter-dowry of six thousand ecus. Florindo protests slightly (III, 15). But then Trappola is caught by Lélio stealing the old miser's trunk (III, 18). Now that we know Rosaura is rich, there's no reason for her to marry without a dowry. So she marries Lélio as planned. To convince her, Florindo pretends he is already married to Beatrice (III, 25), then reveals his lie. The union of Dorval and Constance, which in Le Fils naturel supplants in dramatic importance that of Clairville and Rosalie, thus originates in a merely and briefly assumed union of the true friend and the mad old woman. In Goldoni's final scene Rosaura then admires, quickly to be fair, the virtue of the man who has placed his friendship above his love.

The first thing to note from this comparison is that Diderot has done more than borrow the first six scenes of his play from Goldoni: the letters, the fight, the marriage to Beatrice, the very revelation of the father's wealth are Goldoni data from which Diderot has recovered the canvas. In terms of plot, most of the differences between the two plays do not stem from Diderot's own invention, but rather from a position taken in relation to the outline, a revolt against agreed-upon data. Thus, the Goldonian presence of a father portrayed as a miserly farce is turned by Diderot into the absence of the father, idealized as a generous hero. Lysimond is not someone other than Octavio; he is the sublime reversal of Octavio. Similarly, Beatrice, Lélio's lecherous old aunt, is turned into Constance, Clairville's virtuous and touching sister. Constance is none other than Beatrice; Beatrice is the horrifying flip side of the sublime Constance. Finally, in Goldoni's work, it is the omnipresence of money that determines the course of the plot; in Diderot's, on the other hand, money is pushed offstage and only intervenes in the mode of denial: Lysimond's heroism, in André's story, is a heroism of deprivation and poverty (III, 7); Dorval will not keep his money, but will give it to Rosalie (III, 9 and 10); Clairville doesn't care about being poor; Rosalie doesn't care about being rich or ruined (IV, 1 and V, 1). But here again, denial doesn't evacuate the plot's basic data; it represses them: heroic stripping, which characterizes in common all the heroes of Fils naturel, turns around and sublimates the sordid haggling of L'Ami véritable.

Diderot has not fundamentally altered the structural economy of the plot; but he has shifted its accents and symbolic implications. In Goldoni, the entire plot is organized around two stable, fixed givens, Florindo's friendship and Octavio's money. The relationship between desire and love and these two fixed elements is the basis for all the plot twists and turns. Both Florindo's friendship and Octavio's money are objectified in the same object of desire, Rosaura, whose sordid bargaining motivates the farce's comical twists and turns. The unfolding of Goldoni's play is made up of the twists and turns of this haggling. Friendship and money are the virtuous face and ignoble reverse side of the same bourgeois virtue, confronted by the aristocratic pretensions of desire - the desire of the noble but impoverished Lélio, which must disappear if the dowry doesn't bolster the family. The fundamental opposition is not that of Florindo and Lélio: from the outset Lélio, having no money, is offside ⁶. Florindo, his eyes riveted on Lélio, faces Octavio, whose eyes are riveted on his trunk. Rosaura has no existence of her own; she is merely the condensation, or interface, of Lélio and the trunk, the friend to whom she is promised and the money that will be owed in exchange.

This balance is upset in Le Fils naturel, where Lysimond is the great absentee, where on the other hand money is constantly and systematically pushed outside the plot. Friendship, set up as the virtue par excellence of drama, has as its flip side incest and its tragic horror. The flip side of Italian comedy was the money of farce; the flip side of Diderot's drama will be the incest of tragedy.

The tragic attraction: Racine

To pull Goldoni's comedy towards what he calls the serious genre, which he explicitly situates between comedy and tragedy ⁷, Diderot has subjected the canvas of L'Ami véritable to the attraction of a tragic model, as it were. This attraction is to be understood as a kind of anamorphosis, the idea of which Dorval gives in the Troisième Entretien, when he mentions the existence of a parodic version of the third act of Fils naturel, written and burned by Clairville, and that he gives to read the outline of a tragic outcome of the play ⁸.

The presence of the incest theme in Le Fils naturel immediately brings to mind Phèdre, and all the more so as the first theatrical quotation from the Entretiens is borrowed from it. In the Second Interview, Dorval gives an example of complex declamation, where the actor's voice must simultaneously translate heterogeneous feelings and meanings. Phèdre tells œnone that she has a rival, Aricie:

"Who could describe the declamation of these two verses?Have they often been seen talking to each other? looking for each other?
In the depths of the forests would they hide ⁹ ?
It's a mixture of curiosity, worry, pain, love, and shame, that the worst picture would paint me better than the best speech ¹⁰."

This evocation of Phèdre's desire is succeeded, in the Third Interview, by the evocation of Hippolyte's death ¹¹, which Dorval parallels with the sacrifice of Iphigénie, another Racinian model.

Why evoke Phèdre? Certainly Racine had become, by the time Diderot was writing, a classic, a natural reference for anyone seeking to theorize about theater. But why, more specifically, Phèdre?

Comparing the two plays reveals some unsettling echoes. Phèdre was not used as a canvas. So this time it's no longer a question of comparing plots, but of spotting imaginary resonances, i.e. above all resonances of words, situations, atmospheres.

First, there's the beginning of Phèdre, "The purpose is made: I am leaving, dear Theramene". Hippolyte seeks to leave; the suffocating atmosphere of the play is dominated by this departure constantly delayed, prevented until the final disaster. Similarly, Le Fils naturel opens, in the early morning darkness, with the agonizing necessity of a departure that, at the same time, cannot be made: "We must get out of here," Dorval exclaims as if in a nightmare, and in scene 2, in response to Charles, "I've heard everything. You're right. But I'm leaving."

Before leaving, Hippolyte must announce his departure to Aricie, thus insidiously precipitating the admission of his love: "Madame, avant que de partir, / J'ai cru de votre sort vous devoir avertir" (II, 2; vv. 463-464 ¹²). Similarly, also in Act II, Scene 2, Dorval announces his departure to Rosalie and provokes the confession:

"DORVAL (in a somewhat emotional tone) - Permit me, Mademoiselle, that before my departure (at these words Rosalie appears astonished), I obey a friend, and seek to repay him with you for a service he believes to be important ¹³. "

Dorval shelters behind Clairville's commission just as Hippolyte shelters behind the need to revoke Theseus' unjust rulings. In both cases, the virtuous mission of good offices suffers the attraction of desire, which turns it into self-interested exposure to the desire of the other. Here again, beyond stories and plots that are totally foreign to each other, Diderot recovers a certain heaviness of atmosphere, a movement of attraction of discourse by desire, a movement of revolt of virtue, of turning departure into confession.

In the same vein, we can relate Thésée's absence until the middle of Act III of Phèdre with Lysimond's absence until the last scene of Fils naturel. Thésée's suffering, the rumors of his death, constitute a heroic background to the suffering father that Diderot recovers in his play, giving it its tragic coloration.

We also know how Phèdre swings around the sword scene (II, 5), a confession scene that misses its goal, where the scenic object, the sword, is given to see in place of a failing discourse. But the sight of the sword gives rise to a false interpretation, since, through Oenone's artifice, Phaedra's real declaration to Hippolytus is turned before Theseus into Hippolytus' supposed declaration to Phaedra. The sword Phaedra snatches from Hippolytus' hands, instead of accusing the incestuous mother, accuses Hippolytus, the virtuous son. This tragic turnaround around an object whose out-of-place presence elicits visual horror and misleads interpretation is reminiscent of the dramatic reversal of the letter in Fils naturel, especially considering the content of Dorval's letter, which like the sword declares an incestuous love. In a way, Diderot recovers the retour effect of incest, this turning of the mother's fault onto the son, this irruption of the guilt of the one who suffers. Dorval, like Hippolyte, undergoes the confession of the woman pursuing him; through the scenic object, he incorporates the fault.

But more than anything else, albeit more diffusely, it is in the demand for speech that Diderot's recovery of the tragic heaviness of Phèdre best manifests itself. We must speak: Charles reminds Dorval as early as Act 1, Scene 2, that he can't "go away without speaking to anyone". Constance, faced with Dorval's imminent departure, is confronted with the same requirement:

"CONSTANCE (after walking around for a moment)- So this moment is the only one I have left. We must speak. (a pause)" (I, 4; DPV X 23; Versini 1086)

When Clairville asks Dorval for his mediation with Rosalie, it's always the same demand:

"CLAIRVILLE - You must speak to Rosalie.
DORVAL - Let me talk to her!" (I, 6; DPV X 28; Versini 1090.)

Immediately after the interview, Clairville "asks to speak" to Dorval (II, 2) and is met with an ominous silence:

"CLAIRVILLE - You are troubled! You won't speak to me!
[...]
DORVAL - What shall I tell you?... I fear to speak." (II,4; DPV X 34; Versini 1094.)

Then comes the battle of Clairville and the backbiting neighbors. Dorval, at the start of Act III, inquires about the subject of the quarrel:

"DORVAL - [...] Why should I keep silent about something that everyone is now talking about, and that I must learn?
CLAIRVILLE - I'd rather someone else told you.
DORVAL - I only want to believe you.
CLAIRVILLE - Since you absolutely want me to speak; it was about you." (III, 1; DPV X 40; Versini 1098.)

Not long after, Charles introduces "a stranger who asks to speak to someone" (III, 6). This is André, whose terrible tale is also marked by the injunction to speak, by the face-to-face discourse with the unspeakable.

ANDRE - [...] I will instruct you in everything, if I have the strength, and if you have the goodness to hear me.
CLAIRVILLE - Speak.
[...](André pauses here for a moment to weep)
However we arrive in the enemy port.... Dispense me from telling you the rest.... No, I can never.
CLAIRVILLE - André, continue." (III, 7; DPV X 47 and 49; Versini 1103-1104.)

This rise of the word which, from outside, from Constance, from Rosalie, from Clairville, from André himself, encircles Dorval and oppresses her in her face-to-face confrontation with her terrible secret, drives her to the brink of confession, in Act IV, scene 3:

"DORVAL - Madame, please allow me to speak freely; that in confiding my most secret thoughts to you, Dorval may strive to be worthy of what you did for him, and that at least he may be pitied and regretted.
CONSTANCE - What, Dorval! But speak.
DORVAL - I'll speak. I owe it to you. I owe it to your brother. I owe it to myself.... " (IV, 3; DPV X 60; Versini 1111.)

Yet the confession so solemnly announced does not come. Constance stops the word at the edge of its overflow and turns it back into assent to the other liaison, to the virtuous union: the discourse of virtue is the reversal of the word of incest, a reversal of which Constance is the worker.

Yet we must speak again, this time convincing Rosalie:

"DORVAL alone - [...] But why shouldn't I obtain over this tender, flexible soul, the same ascendancy that Constance was able to take over me? Since when has virtue lost its empire?... Let's see her, let's talk to her" (IV, 7; DPV X 69; Versini 1118).

The demand for speech then culminates in scene 3 of Act V, in which the forbidden confession, which is still not verbalized, becomes the object of discourse, crystallizes and necroses into an abjection that is certainly unspeakable, but which is now being pointed out:

"(Clairville gets up, and walks away like a wandering man. Rosalie follows him with her eyes; and Dorval, after daydreaming a little, continues in a low tone, without looking at Rosalie:)
[...] And we, ashamed of our feelings, dare not confide them to anyone; we hide them from ourselves... Dorval and Rosalie, content to escape suspicion, are perhaps vile enough to applaud each other for it in secret..... (here he suddenly turns to Rosalie).... Ah, Mademoiselle, are we made for so much humiliation? Will we want such an abject life ¹⁴ any longer? [...] So I'm going to tell you about the only way to reconcile with you [...].
ROSALIE - Speak, I'm listening." (V, 3; DPV X 73-74; Versini 1120-1121.)

As in the scene with Constance, speech is turned inside out, the hidden speech that one dares not confide to anyone, by exhibiting itself, is transmuted into the speech of virtue.

There is, of course, no trace in Goldoni of this demand for speech that revolves around a confession in which forbidden desire is expressed; on the other hand, it constitutes the dramaturgical framework of Phèdre. As early as Act 1, Scene 3, when Oenone urges Phaedra to tell her what's tormenting her, Phaedra replies with the famous lines:

"PHEDRE. I die not to make so fatal a confession.
[...] You will shudder with horror if I break my silence.
[...] When you know my crime, and the fate that has befallen me,
I won't die less, I'll die guiltier.
[You want it. Get up.
ŒNONE. Speak, I am listening." (III, 1; vv. 226-246.)

Phèdre then manages to elide the confession, compensating through the theatricality of the gesture ("You want it. Get up.") for the absence of the name ¹⁵. Hippolytus' name is spoken by oenone, who symbolically takes on the guilt:

ŒNONE. Hippolytus? Good heavens!
PHEDRUS. It was you who named him." (V. 264.)

Diderot here captures Racine's experience of the limit of discourse, with tragic speech situated beyond, in the unspeakable and forbidden. Phèdre carries within her this reentrant speech that devours her from within like a poison. The silence of discourse is then compensated for by language and the symptoms of her suffering body.

But the demand for speech, in Racine as in Diderot, must not be restricted to the character who bears the desire for incest alone. It is diffused, disseminated throughout the play. Phèdre's contained confession is answered by Hippolyte's contained confession to Aricie:

"Since I have begun to break the silence,
Madame, we must go on: we must inform you
Of a secret my heart can no longer enclose." (II, 2, vv. 526-528.)

Diderot will take up this formula of impersonal injunction, "il faut", not "je dois", this properly tragic necessity that weighs down on the space of the scene as it were outside the characters themselves.

Théramène, in Act II, Scene 3, informs Hippolyte that "Phèdre wants to speak to you before you leave" (v. 564). The announcement of Hippolyte's departure precipitates Phèdre's confession, just as the announcement of Dorval's departure precipitates Constance's confession. As for the sword scene, it is again characterized by a delayed and elided confession, with Hippolyte bearing the responsibility of having "heard" a word that cannot come out of Phèdre's mouth:

"HIPPOLYTE. Madame, forgive me. I confess with a blush,
That I wrongly accused an innocent speech.
My shame can no longer support your sight,
And I will...
PHEDRA. Ah! cruel, you've heard me too much.
I've told you enough to put you out of your misery." (II, 5, v. 667-670.)

From Act III onwards, the demand for speech turns, from the beloved to the father, from the expression of desire to accusation and justification to Theseus. This reversal of the demand preludes the Diderotian reversal of desiring speech into a discourse of virtue ¹⁶. œnone proposes to speak to Theseus and accuse Hippolytus, because "Everything speaks against him" (v. 888). Theseus summons Hippolytus and instructs him to speak: "Speak. Phaedra complains that I am outraged." (III, 5, v. 979.) But the two protagonists of the incestuous desire remain silent, and their silence precipitates them towards death. The tragic space here manifests itself as the dwelling of this silence ¹⁷ which refrains, represses the forbidden word:

"HIPPOLYTE. So many unexpected blows overwhelm me at once,
That they take away my speech and choke my voice." (IV, 2, vv. 1079-1080.)

But whereas in Racine this prohibition of speech leads not only to tragic death, but to the end of theater, to coming face to face with the impossibility of writing after Phèdre, in Diderot it opens up, on the contrary, to dramaturgy proper, i.e. to what, on stage, manifests itself in the semiological irreducibility of a theatrical play outside discourse. Diderot's response to the collapse of virtue in Racine, precipitated into the abyss of the neantization of speech, is the trials and triumph of virtue, installing on stage not only another semiological game, but also a new symbolic framework. If Goldoni served as the canvas for Fils naturel, it's with Racine that Diderot dialogues here, both in terms of theatrical practice, and ideological content.

However, if we return to the structural level of the plot, the comparison of Phèdre and Fils naturel reveals a troubling relationship to incest, which cannot be explained by the attraction of the tragic model alone. Indeed, in Le Fils naturel, the explicit threat of brother-sister incest is averted, with Dorval diverting forbidden desire to Constance's virtuous one, and Rosalie to Clairville's. But the somewhat forced union of Dorval and Constance finds itself, through Racine's attraction, covering Phèdre's desire for Hippolyte. It should also be remembered that the young, virtuous and beautiful Constance was constructed as a reversal of Goldoni's old, ugly and lecherous Beatrice, not the sister but the aunt of Lélio, i.e. of the father's generation. Constance, alias Béatrice, hides Phèdre, who in Racine's work obsessively refers to herself as a monster. Thus, the conjuration of brother-sister incest between Rosalie and Dorval precipitates Dorval into son-mother incest with Constance. For Diderot, the virtuous conjugal liaison par excellence concentrates and symbolizes the social bond in its universality: Constance leads Dorval from solitary melancholy to social usefulness. But Constance's sublime liaison conceals the worst kind of incest, that which confuses the order of generations from mother to son, and returns desire to the archaic constellations of primary narcissism. We are dealing here typically with the phenomenon of condensation and displacement, analyzed by Freud as the phenomenon that betrays above all the work of the unconscious: Constance condenses and masks Beatrice and Phaedra, while the horror of incest is displaced towards Rosalie-Aricie, that is, towards a more acceptable, more roundabout representation of the forbidden.

Lyrical attraction: Rameau and melancholy

Our aim here, through this highlighting of a second incest beneath the first, is not to identify a kind of imaginary core of perversion from which Diderotian creation would run. We would like to show, through this double figure of incest, that a poetic and semiological revolution is at work, which not only engages a mutation in the forms of theatrical writing but, more generally, a displacement in the relationship of ideology with representation.

This shift manifests itself in the attraction of a second model to the play, no longer the Racinian model, but the model of lyric tragedy, which Diderot evokes several times in the Entretiens.

In the second Entretien, Dorval compares the actor's declamation with the cantabile of the lyric singer, whom the composer never forces to adhere to a fixed score ¹⁸:

"In the cantabile, the musician allows a great singer a free exercise of his taste and talent. He is content to mark for him the principal intervals of a beautiful song. The poet should do the same, when he knows his actor well. What affects us in the spectacle of a man animated by a few great passions? Is it his speeches? Sometimes. But what always moves us are cries, inarticulate words, broken voices, a few monosyllables that escape at intervals, I don't know what murmur in the throat, between the teeth." (DPV X 102; Versini 1144.)

Diderot treats the actor's speech like song, detaching himself from the rhetorical articulation of the tirade to focus the drama's entire emphasis on the inarticulate complaint, the cry, on breaking through the discursive gangue and releasing the grain of the voice. Just as, in opera, the actor's singing disarticulates the text, scattering it in the sinuosities of the air, to shift the message from the content of the words to the emotional communication conveyed by the music, so, in Diderotian drama, the improvisation of the cry, the gush of gestus at the edge of silence signify what cannot be verbalized.

.

This other language can only be expressed in another space. Dorval first demands a larger space for the theatrical stage, still crowded with spectators before Lauraguais' reform. But this is only to immediately compare the settings of the drama with those of the lyric tragedy:

"Consider that the French spectacle has as many decorations as the lyric theater; and that it would offer more pleasant ones, because the enchanted world can amuse children, and there is only the real world that pleases reason.... For want of a scene, we won't imagine anything." (DPV X 110; Versini 1151.)

The public was accustomed to the baroque splendor of opera sets, which are traditionally contrasted with the stripped-down simplicity of the tragic stage. Admittedly, drama does not evolve in the "enchanted world" of the marvellous ¹⁹ lyric; but it is also demanding in terms of variety of spaces, of imaginary solicitations. For Diderot, the space of drama is not opposed to lyrical space; he transfigures its puerile amusements into pleasures of reason, in the same way that Constance transfigured Beatrice, and Lysimond Octavio. The thematic and generic reversal is basically secondary, compared with the semiological affinity between the multiple spaces of lyric tragedy and the simultaneous actions that Diderot claims to stage. Is it really possible, Dorval's interlocutor wonders, not to chain together, but to bring together simultaneously, or as much as to confuse on stage a silent scene and a spoken scene?

""Two scenes alternately silent and spoken. I hear what you're saying. But the confusion?"
A silent scene is a tableau, it's an animated decoration. In lyric theater, does the pleasure of seeing interfere with the pleasure of hearing?"(DPV X 112; Versini 1152-1153.)

The given to be seen on stage constitutes the setting for a given to be heard, itself identified not with a text, but with the grain of the voice, with the musical disarticulation of the complaint, the sigh, the cry.

The lyrical model is again summoned in the Third Interview. For Dorval, once transfused into the serious genre, the dramaturgical means of opera can do without the marvellous and submit to the imitation of nature, the opposition of Italian opera and lyric tragedy constituting a minor debate in view of this poetic revolution (DPV X 150; Versini 1182). Diderot then reverses his comparison: it is no longer lyric tragedy that provides the means and models for the new dramaturgy he calls for, but Racine's own verses in Iphigénie, which contain all the seeds of a lyrical deployment of the theatrical stage. From the verses of Iphigénie, Dorval composes an operatic piece in the manner of Lulli, in the same way that Diderot composed his Fils naturel from the color of Phèdre. This time, it's no longer speech or space, it's images whose dissemination triggers the theatrical dynamic. Dorval first evokes Clytemnestra "troubled by these images"; the musician can only compose "when he feels pressed by the terrible images that obsessed Clytemnestra". He concludes, "What a variety of feelings and images" (DPV X 156-158; Versini 1186-1187).

Through these references to lyrical tragedy, we can almost follow the intellectual path of the Entretiens, first with the musical disarticulation of the statement, then with the demultiplication of scenic space, and finally with the dissemination of images, which constitute, as it were, the three essential elements of the Diderotian poetic and dramaturgical revolution.

What lyrical tragedies could Diderot have had in mind? As we have seen, he cites Lulli, founder of the genre in its French version, and very allusively mentions his Roland, composed to a libretto by Quinaut, libretto that Diderot would cite again in the Salon de 1765 in connection with Boucher's Angélique et Médor ²⁰. But to speak of tragédie lyrique in the 1750s is first to speak of Rameau ²¹ whose presence is recurrent in Diderot's work, from Les Bijoux indiscrets to Rêve de D'Alembert ²². Rameau's first and most famous opera being Hippolyte et Aricie, premiered in 1733 to a libretto by Abbé Pellegrin, revived in 1742 and 1743, then in 1757, the year of the publication of Fils naturel, we suddenly see by this means the filiation from Racine to Diderot tightened. In Rameau's opera, the whole of Act II is devoted to Theseus' descent into the Underworld out of friendship for Pirithoüs. The suffering and constancy of Thésée imprisoned for having served his friend's guilty loves finds its echo, in Diderot, in André's account of the suffering and constancy of Lysimond imprisoned with the English; this service of friendship, which was not emphasized in Racine, is reflected on Dorval in Le Fils naturel.

On the other hand, the sword scene in Abbé Pellegrin's version comes much closer to what Diderot is looking for in his drama. Whereas Racine spares five scenes and introduces the deceptive mediation of œnone for the sword to produce Thésée's tragic misunderstanding, the visual effect of the scenic object is immediate and striking in Rameau's opera as Thésée catches Phèdre and Hippolyte red-handed:

"PHÈDRE. You're swinging again?
Choke in my blood a love I abhor!
I cannot obtain this fatal help.
Cruel, what extreme rigor!
You hate me as much as I love you,
But, to cut my sad days,
I only need myself.
Give ²³ !(Phèdre draws the sword from Hippolyte, who instantly snatches it from her hand.)
HIPPOLYTE. What are you doing?
PHEDRUS. Are you tearing this iron from me?

SCENE 4
THESEUS. What do I see? What an awful sight?
HIPPOLYTE. My father!
PHEDRUS. My husband.
THESEUS. O too fatal oracle." (III, 3-4.)

The sword is turned against Hippolyte by the mere return effect of the object's presence, just as Dorval's unfinished letter is turned against him not for what it says, but precisely as the properly incomprehensible object that catches Constance's eye.

Rameau's second opera is Castor et Pollux, composed to a libretto by Pierre-Joseph Bernard, known as Gentil-Bernard because of a sobriquet coined by Voltaire. First performed on October 24, 1737, it was given again in 1754 to counter the effect of Pergolesi's La Serva padrona, and thus played a central role in the Querelle des Bouffons. His most famous aria, Télaïre's "Tristes apprêts, pâles flambeaux", would be the aria intoned by Suzanne Simonin in La Religieuse as she entered the convent at Longchamp. Dorval alludes briefly to Castor at the start of the Troisième Entretien (DPV X 130; Versini 1166).

In Bernard's version, the story of Castor and Pollux is above all the story of two brothers who are rivals for a woman, Télaïre, just as Clairville and Dorval, whom he calls his brother in passing ²⁴, are rivals in front of Rosalie. Lincée, a rival jealous of Télaïre and Castor's love, has killed the latter. Pollux, Castor's immortal half-brother, kills Lincée and declares his love for Télaïre (I, 5). But she puts his virtue to the test: he must fetch Castor from the dead and bring him back to her. Here we find the struggle between fraternal friendship and love:

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"POLLUX. Friendship burns to obtain.
What love shudders to hear;
And whatever judgment heaven may make,
He will speak to punish ²⁵
The most faithful friend, or the most tender lover." (II, 1.)

Despite Jupiter's defense, Pollux renouncing his immortality descends to the Underworld to seek Castor:

"My sincere friendship prefers
The glory that follows me, to the honors I lose.
[...] When I lose you both,
When I lose myself,
Of the two objects I love,
I make at least two fortunate lovers." (III, 2.)

Pollux's heroic sacrifice is superimposed on Dorval's, whose virtue proceeds from the same choice of brother against beloved. Castor returns to Télaïre, but in despair as Pollux has confessed his love and sacrifice. Jupiter intercedes and allows Pollux to rejoin Castor and Télaïre, who will live together happily and united:

"CASTOR. My brother, oh heaven!
POLLUX. Gods! I find together
All the objects of my love!
[...] Castor, you have vanquished me, I shall vanquish myself;
Be happy! I am immortal only at this price.
TÉLAÏRE and CASTOR. What a generous effort! what a supreme virtue!" (V, 6.)

While Pollux briefly evokes his renunciation of sexual desire, it is indeed on the fusional image of a threesome that the lyrical tragedy concludes.

The highlighting of these intertexts underscores the shift that takes place, in the first half of the eighteenth century, from the tragedy of passion to the drama of friendship. This shift is not merely thematic. It involves the very economy of representation. What's at stake here is the crisis of the semiotic cut: classical tragedy emphasized the suffering of an impossible passion, splitting the tragic hero in two, reasoning head versus suffering body, the limpid necessity of the signified versus the revolt of the signifier. On the contrary, the drama of the Enlightenment revokes this split: the test of virtue leads to the triumph of the gentle, desexualized bond of friendship, powerfully repressing the confrontation with the Other. The repressed desire, the repressed, forbidden cut, then manifests itself in all the possible forms of a fusional imaginary: Castor and Pollux's dream of a fraternal double, echoed by Florindo and Lélio, Dorval and Clairville; incest fantasies between Hippolyte and Phèdre, Dorval and Rosalie or, more insidiously, Dorval and Constance; agglomerations of twin couples, Castor, Pollux and Télaïre, or Clairville, Rosalie, Dorval and Constance. Each time, these liaisons offer a paradoxical symbolic refoundation, based on the avoidance of the Other, on this avoidance, in desire, of the cut that otherness implies.

In Le Fils naturel, where the theme of incest is avoided, covered over, where fraternal duplication is only suggested, where the agglomeration of twin couples certainly sets up the device but discreetly, this imaginary of continuity is thematized differently, and first in Dorval's melancholy.

Le Fils naturel and the Entretiens revert repeatedly to Dorval's melancholy. In Act III, Scene 2, handing Dorval's letter to Clairville, Constance says:

Constance is a melancholy woman.

"Hold my brother, here is his secret, mine, and the subject apparently of his melancholy." (DPV X 43; Versini 1100.)

In the Second Entretien, Dorval commenting on his irreverent rejoinder to André's story states:

"It's a word of mood. It escapes a melancholic who has practiced virtue all his life, who has not yet had a moment's happiness, and to whom one recounts the misfortunes of a good man." (DPV X 109; Versini 1149.)

First provided as an excuse and presented as weakness, melancholy returns a few pages later as the prerogative of "great taste", the only one capable of conceiving and appreciating noble and elevated genres:

"Great taste presupposes great sense, long experience, an honest and sensitive soul, an elevated mind, a somewhat melancholy temperament, and delicate organs....." (DPV X 111; Versini 1151.)

Melancholy is then presented as the force that pulls the theatrical performance towards tragedy. Melancholy is the principle of tragic attraction:

"While Dorval was talking like that, I was making a singular reflection. It was how on the occasion of a domestic adventure he had set in comedy, he established precepts common to all dramatic genres, and was always driven by his melancholy, to apply them only to tragedy." (DPV X 115; Versini 1154.)

Finally, in the last lines of the Third Interview, Dorval's interlocutor invited to supper at Clairville's recognizes in each of the guests the tone of the characters in the play:

"I always recognized the character Dorval had given to each of his characters. He had the tone of melancholy; Constance the tone of reason; Rosalie that of ingenuity; Clairville, that of passion; I that of bonhomie." (DPV X 162; Versini 1190.)

Comparing melancholia to mourning, Freud ²⁶ defines the latter as suffering due to the loss of or renunciation of the beloved object. Unlike in mourning, the melancholic turns this loss against himself. The loss of the object becomes self-deprecation. This reversal, this introjection of the loss that opens up an inner emptiness, can only take place insofar as the object relationship was narcissistic: because the subject had initially projected himself into the beloved object, losing this object becomes for him like losing a part of himself.

The object of Dorval's desire is indeed narcissistic, since Rosalie is his sister, i.e. his feminine double. The renunciation of Rosalie should therefore not be interpreted solely as a virtuous renunciation of incest, but also as an evidencing of the relationship to the father, which is what brother and sister have in common. This renunciation of the father manifests itself violently in the Fils naturel and in the Entretiens, first through Dorval's refusal to carry out Lysimond's will in writing the play, and then through the impossibility of performing the last scene, i.e., the impossibility of representing the father: to stage the loss of the narcissistic object of desire, the renunciation of Rosalie, is to hollow out the figure of the father, to circumscribe around this figure the hole of unrepresentability that inhabits melancholy.

However, Dorval's melancholy doesn't exactly correspond to the ordinary pathology described by Freud: instead of efatigating the world with his despairing palinodies, eternally rehashing the same discourse of self-deprecation, Dorval remains silent in Le Fils naturel, or at least shows himself threatened by silence, whereas in the Entretiens, while he remains silent about himself, he theorizes profusely about theater. The work certainly appears worked by a dissemination linked to the loss of object: we saw how the Entretiens organized their theoretical program around the triple dissemination of discourse, space and images. But this dissemination is at the same time a refoundation; this mourning for classical discourse, poetics and semiotics marks at the same time the promise of a refoundation.

Semiology and knowledge of the feminine

Melancholy is the work of turning incest into the triumph of Dorval's virtue and Diderot's dramaturgy. This reversal is made possible, we believe, by the redoubling of the denial of incest. Dorval does not simply renounce Rosalie, as Pollux renounces Télaïre, as Florimond renounces Rosaura. Before him lies the paradoxical alternative of another incest, the prospect of a symbolic refoundation by Constance. Constance is the refusal of Rosalie, who is the refusal of the father. For Dorval, Constance is a refusal of refusals, opening the way to what will take the place of the father's law. If she takes his place, Constance's law has nothing to do with the doubly denied law of the father. She is the knowledge of the feminine, opening the way to Diderot's symbolic splitting. In Act IV, Scene 3, where Dorval's speech-program unfolds, Constance highlights a law other than the father's, relegated to the spectre of fanaticism. The dialogue shifts from a masculine speech marked by the father's spectral prohibition ("You are obsessed with ghosts" DPV X 63; Versini 113) to a feminine speech opening up to another system of the world, to another law, ordered according to a model of liaison.

This is first and foremost the social liaison, which will oppose the melancholic's solitude. The play's most famous words then resound:

So, it's the social liaison that will oppose the melancholic's solitude.

"It's up to Constance to keep oppressed virtue a support; arrogant vice a scourge; a brother to all good people; so many unfortunates a father they're waiting for; humankind its friend; a thousand honest, useful and great projects, that mind free of prejudice, and that strong soul they demand and you have... You, renounce society! I appeal to your heart, ask it, and it will tell you that the good man is in society, and that only the bad man is alone." (DPV X 62; Versini 1112-1113.)

Syntax itself betrays semiotically what discourse refounds symbolically. The extension of the paradigm into a syntagm, by which the enumeration, eliding the verbs, takes the place of discourse, also tells of the triumph of the bond in Constance's name, the refoundation of society, supported by the tutelary figure of this mother who does not reveal herself as such.

Then comes the happy filiation, scandalized by this sentence that Dorval underlines with admiration in the Second Entretien:

"Your daughters will be honest and decent. Your sons will be noble and proud. All your children will be charming." (DPV X 63 and 121; Versini 1113 and 1159.)

Sonship bypasses the evocation of sexual desire and its phallic economy; it substitutes the parent-child bond for the erotic cut.

Finally, the Law of Constance colonizes time, unfolding above the atemporal chaos of barbarism the happy promise of Enlightenment progress and the civilization of mankind:

"But the times of barbarism are over. The century has become enlightened. Reason has purified itself. Its precepts fill the nation's works. Those in which general benevolence is inspired in men are almost the only ones that are read." (DPV X 65; Versini 1114.)

General benevolence is the principle of Constance's law, which spreads and reverberates, as her word is spread in the play, which Dorval reverberates on Rosalie.

Supported by this model of symbolic refoundation, the very writing of Fils naturel is indeed felt by this other knowledge to which another semiology is articulated. As the alexandrine breaks down, as the dialogue threatened by silence stalls, as monologues and tirades appear pierced by those points of suspension that materialize in the text the dissemination peculiar to the work of melancholy, another dramatic dynamic is put in place, based on the repercussion, the inner reversal of the "word". The interlocutors crystallize and fetishize in the word of the Other a "word" that they will repeat, comment on and internalize. The painful introjection of the "word" represents the reversal and melancholic suffering, but at the same time it refounds the dialogue. At the start of Act II, Rosalie's repeated "Non, Justine" is echoed in the servant's comment: "Oh, for that one, you wouldn't expect it." (DPV X 31; Versini 1091.) Rosalie's double no is the scene's crystallization and reversal point. It exceeds logic: if Rosalie no longer loves Clairville, she should love someone else. Instead of a discourse, the crystallization on the "no", incorporated into "that one" by Justine, betrays the passage from comedy to drama, from the comic love canvas to a face-to-face confrontation with the ethical requirement. The objective announcement of Dorval's arrival, "Oh ciel! c'est Dorval" ("Oh heavens! it's Dorval"), caught up in this mechanics of juxtaposition, serves as a confession of the one Rosalie not only failed to name, but whose existence she failed to recognize. In Justine's "on ne s'y attend pas", "y" refers grammatically to Rosalie's "Non", but connects by signifiance with the mention of Dorval's name.

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The juxtaposition, the repercussion, the return-effect of the "word" is found at the end of Act II, Scene 2, which Rosalie concludes as follows:

"Rosalie. - Adieu, Dorval. (She holds out a hand; Dorval takes it, and sadly drops his mouth on it, and Rosalie adds,) Farewell, what a word!" (DPV X 33; Versini 1093.)

Rosalie has just half-confessed her love to Dorval. Rosalie's word, "Dorval, you know it" is echoed from the very next scene in Dorval's inner monologue:

"Dorval alone - In her pain, how beautiful she seemed to me! How touching her charms were! I would have given my life to collect one of the tears that flowed from her eyes... "Dorval, you know it"... Those words still ring in the depths of my heart..." (II, 3; DPV X 34; Versini 1093.)

The word is the instrument by which the scene tips over into iconicity. Identified with the loved one's tear preciously collected by the lover, when it is incorporated by Dorval, the word ceases to signify as an articulation of discourse to work suffering as a fetish designating the loss of an object: Dorval collects the word as he would collect Rosalie's tear, a fetish taking the place of the object he must mourn. The resonance of Dorval's word corresponds to the moment when Rosalie paints a picture: "In her pain, how beautiful she seemed to me!" The injunction to speak is answered by the irruption of the visible.

In scenes 7 and 8, the letters also become "word". Discourse turned ambivalent image and offered to the incorporation of whoever will appropriate it, the letter becomes fetishized. Reading Rosalie's letter, Dorval, who intersperses it with his comments, his own speech in which he incorporates the word of his beloved, ends up exclaiming:

Dorval's letter becomes a "word".

"...O Rosalie! o virtue! o torment!" (DPV X 38; Versini 1097.)

The "word" is properly reversible: the letter is Rosalie, and Rosalie is both virtue and its flip side, torment. In the same way, Dorval's letter, in its incompleteness, which takes her from object to fetish, proves to be fragilely reversible: the declaration to Rosalie will turn into a declaration to Constance.

The incorporation of the "word" translates into physical suffering, the very suffering inflicted by the work of melancholy. In Act III, Scene 2, Constance explains to Dorval in front of Clairville the meaning she ascribes to the letter:

"Constance - [...] You loved me!... You were writing to me!... You were running away!...(At each of these words, Dorval becomes agitated and tormented.) (DPV X 43; Versini 1100.)

Constance's words turn into Dorval's contortions, the speech of one translates into the suffering of the other.

But the play's most terrible word is Rosalie's cry of hatred to Clairville, "Laissez-moi.... je vous hais....", when he tells her what she believes to be Dorval's betrayal. Clairville is left alone to face the pain of the "word":

"Clairville - Is this enough?.... Voilà donc le prix de mes inquiétudes! Here is the fruit of all my tenderness! Leave me alone. I hate you. Ah! (He pushes the inarticulate accent of despair; he walks about restlessly; and he repeats under various kinds of violent declamations, leave me, I hate you. He throws himself into an armchair. He remains there for a moment in silence. Then he says in a low, dull tone:) she hates me!... and what have I done to make her hate me? I loved her too much." (III, 5; DPV X 46; Versini 1102.)

This dramaturgy of the "word" goes beyond the hieroglyphic theory developed in the Lettre sur les sourds²⁷. Not only does the "word" concentrate and fetishize meaning, tipping discourse into the iconicity of the painting and its signifiers, but it is also introjected into the body of the other, transmuted into the work of melancholic suffering, which Diderot turns upside down and positive into pantomime. We have seen how Diderot diverted melancholic introjection by means of a double denial of incest, enabling him to turn the hollowing-out of the father figure into the installation of another knowledge of the feminine, which we might refer to here as the Law of Constance. In the same way, the transition from "word" to pantomime cannot be reduced to the defection of the suffering body; on the contrary, it constitutes the actor's entire body as an organ of feminine jouissance, whose agitation, inarticulate cries introduce another word, this very word of the jewels that Diderot symbolically situated at the entrance to his work.

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Analysis of the intertextual network in which Le Fils naturel is caught has enabled us to identify the economy of desire that governs the play: the apparent structure, which conjures brother-sister incest through trials and the triumph of virtue, covers an unconscious structure, which reduces the conjuring of brother-sister incest to the legitimization of mother-son incest.

In the first instance, the renunciation of incestuous desire explains and orchestrates a veritable poetics of melancholy, which is characterized by a triple dissemination: the theatrical discourse unravels, disarticulates itself; the space of the stage bursts into concomitant scenes, in a confusion of a given-to-see and a given-to-hear; finally, by becoming musicalized, enunciation elicits contradictory images that disseminate the meaning of speech.

However, a second approach to these phenomena reveals a veritable work of symbolic and semiological refoundation. Not only are the deconstruction of discourse and the hollowing-out of the father figure replaced by Constance's word, which brings another, feminine, desire and knowledge of the world, but the dramatic dynamic of the text is recomposed around a system of repercussion of the "word", which articulates speech, image and the work of the body. This recomposition is made possible by the double-play of incest, which reverses the negativity and deconstructive suffering of the first introjection through the denial of the second incestuous structure.

Notes