Comédien– Actor –Paradoxe : The Anglo-French Sources of Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien

Abstract

The ideas at the heart of Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien have extraordinary conceptual reach. It is my contention that they owe this reach, in part, to the work's sources. Although some research has been done into the origins of the Paradoxe, it is dwarfed by the quantity of writing which deals with the work's reception or its broader implications. After all, the Paradoxe, an open-ended dialogue that Diderot wrote and re-wrote for almost a decade, invites such treatment. Specifically, the thoughts of this text extend themselves in two ways. Firstly, beyond the figure of the actor, comparing the performer to the author or the statesman, so that it is now almost as common to find writing about the socio-political dimensions of the Paradoxe as it is to see it discussed as acting theory. 1 Diderot's ideas, however, also possess a second kind of scope, one that is now harder to appreciate in a world where theories of performance, be they Brecht's or Stanislavski's, are used by companies and critics all over the world, but which soon becomes clear when we look at the work's predecessors. Diderot's Paradoxe is remarkable as a piece of eighteenth-century writing about acting which aims to give an authoritative account of both the importance of a nation's own theatrical culture and those qualities common to great actors that precede localisation. To speak, in other words, as clearly about the mental processes of David Garrick at Drury Lane as it does about those of La Clairon (Claire Josèphe Hippolyte de La Tude) at the Comédie française. This is different from the comparisons between the English and French stages that predate the Paradoxe, one of which constitutes the work's starting point.Premier begins the dialogue by being coaxed into naming the flaws of Antoine-Fabio Sticotti's Garrick, ou les acteurs anglois, first published in 1769, and dismantled by Diderot for the Correspondance littéraire in his 'Observations sur Garrick...' (1770), a short piece that would grow through the 1770s into the full Paradoxe. What Diderot soon shows with Sticotti's text is that its way of comparing English and French acting is inadequate, since it has failed to find a language for describing the actor's craft that takes into account the differences between the two countries' theatrical cultures. As Premier puts it, Sticotti was blind to the fact that "the technical terms of the stage are so broad and so vague that men of judgment, and of diametrically opposite views, yet find in them the light of conviction." 2 The new ideas of the Paradoxethat the best actors have "no sensibility" and that they perform according to a modèle idéal of their rôleare announced soon after this passage and represent not only a departure from the idea that the best actors are the most feeling but also a higher order approach to the question of how a performer performs, one that avoids the errors of Sticotti. Thinking in terms of emotional constitution and the reflexivity it permits reveals to the reader that while Garrick and Clairon do not act in the s...

What James Boswell tells us about 18th‐century acting theory

“…Boswell's essay has a more complex approach to identity than this, and is closer in spirit to Diderot's (1975Diderot's ( [c. 1773Diderot's ( -1777) Paradoxe and its recognition of the power of cold calculation over unmediated expressions of sentimental fire (Fumaroli, 1993). Diderot's argument inspired Sennett's (1977, p. 107) claim that, in the 18th century, actors were 'the kind of men who inhabited the public realm', and Sennett's work lies behind both Worthen's and more recent studies, like Goring's (2005) Rhetoric of Sensibility and Leichman's (2015) Acting Up.…”

“…Further to this, however, Hill's work also exemplifies the international circulation of ideas about acting. The first edition of The Actor (in 1750) was a close translation of Rémond de Saint‐Albine's Le Comédien (1747), and the extensive alterations made by Hill for his second version of the text (1755) do not fully obscure the debt to his French source (Harriman‐Smith, 2015). More than the details of such debt, I wish instead to emphasise here the extent to which ideas about acting moved between different countries in the 18th century.…”

Criar um Fantasma do Sujeito: Diderot, Lacoue-Labarthe e o paradoxo do ator

“…1 For a discussion on the Anglo-French sources that informed the Paradoxe, see Harriman-Smith (2015).…”