The Word Made Flesh: Staging Pornography in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Abstract

The mid-eighteenth-century French théâtre clandestin, comprising more than a score of plays of foul language and obscene subject matter, presents a number of problems. It is not clear if they were actually performed and, if so, how and before what audiences. Did they serve the purpose of pornography, arousing their consumer? The language in which the plays are couched is conventional both in its literary form and its scurrility; it needed to be supplemented by pantomime and elaborate tableaux. Those elements are remarkably similar to theatrical innovations suggested by Diderot in a different context. Ultimately, however, the mere presentation of bodies in action cannot incarnate desire except superficially. The distancing element of performance as well as the communal presence of a coterie at an organized spectacle were probably counterproductive to achieving the pornographic aim.