Diderot`s Paradox And The Actor

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was co-founder, editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie which played a critical role in the French Enlightenment. The Encyclopédie's contribution to thought stimulated the growing discussions on what was needed to reform the 'ancien regime'. Diderot was fired by a spirit of enquiry and placed great store in his view of truth, even when it confronted mainstream opinion; in 1747 Diderot was briefly imprisoned for publishing an essay in which a character on his deathbed refused to accept belief in God. In 1754 Diderot prefigured the theory of evolution by proposing that the senses had developed over millions of years (Roach p. 121). Diderot was an investigator and provoker of debate rather than a writer of finished theories. He was the most serious mind to investigate acting (rather than dramatic writing) since Aristotle. Diderot is said to have introduced the concept of the 'fourth wall' even if he didn't live to see it implemented. Indeed there are many innovations he proposed which seem to prefigure not only future innovations in theatre, such as the desire for movable scenery, but even of film, 'The stronger the action, the simpler the language, the more I admire it.' (Diderot, p.77).

Diderot's seriousness of purpose and intellect had little time for false affected emotions. In mid-eighteenth century France people believed passionately in 'sensibility' the capacity to react emotionally, and to display their capacity for emotional reaction, to the extent that, from Diderot's distaste for it, we may understand that it had reached ridiculous levels. Diderot took exception to actors on stage affecting false and exaggerated emotions to show their 'sensibility' as we can see in his criticism below. It is Diderot's love of enquiry and truthfulness that perhaps make him so disdainful of the excesses of the fashion for sensibility, and it is this distaste which leads him to reject feeling as the basis of acting:

Sensibility.is..that disposition which accompanies organic weakness . to faintings, to recues, to flights, to exclamations, to loss of self-control, to being contemptuous, disdainful, to having no clear notion of what is true, good, and fine, to being unjust, to going mad. (Diderot, p. 56)

The man of sensibility is too much at the mercy of his diaphragm to be a great king, a great politician, a great magistrate, a just man, a close observer, and, consequently, an admirable imitator of Nature. (Diderot, p. 80)

Sensibility is by no means the distinguishing mark of a great genius.Fill the front of a theatre with tearful creatures, but I will none of them on the boards. (Diderot, p.14)

A great actor . must have a deal of judgement . and no sensibility. (Diderot, p. 7)

In other words, sensibility was a charade. A conceit shared by audience and actors.