Molière and paradox : skepticism and theater in the early modern age 9783823365778

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BIBLIO 17

ul James F. Gaines

Molière and Paradox Skepticism and Theater in the Early Modern Age

narr

VERLAG

BIBLIO

17

Volume 189 - 2010

James F. Gaines

Suppléments aux Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature Collection fondée par Wolfgang Leiner Directeur: Rainer Zaiser

Molière and Paradox Skepticism and Theater in

the Early Modern Age

narr

VERLAG

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Cover image: Hals, Frans (1580-1666). Young Man Oil on canvas, 92.2 x 80.8 cm. Bought,

holding a Skull (Vanitas),

1626-8.

1980 (NG6458).

© National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

Acknowledgements Portions journals Belief,

and

of this study in different formats have appeared previously in under the following titles: “Sagesse avec Sobriété: Skepticism, the

Limits

of Knowledge

in Molière,”

in Le Savoir au XVIF

Siècle;

Actes du 34° congrès annuel de la North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French

Literature,

Biblio

17,

(147)

2003,

161-171;

“Le

Malade

imaginaire

et

le

paradoxe de la mort,” in Le Labyrinthe de Versailles, ed. Martine Debaisieux (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 73-84; “L'Éveil des sentiments et le paradoxe de la conscience,” French Review, 41 (1997) 407-15; “Tartuffe et les paradoxes de la foi,” Dix-septième Siècle 180 (1993) 537-49; “Caractères, Superstition and Paradoxes in Le Misanthrope,” in Alteratives: Studies in Honor of Jean Alter (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1993) 72-84; and “Dom Juan et les paradoxes de la réverie,” in Ordre et contestation aux temps des classiques (Marseille: CMR17, 1992) 99-108.

© 2010 : Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH P.O. Box 2567

- D-72015

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Satz: Informationsdesign D. Fratzke, Kirchentellinsféét) : Druck und Bindung: Difo-Druck, Bamberg te Printed in Germany Θ 6

ISSN 1434-6397

ISBN 978-3-8233-6577-8

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Chapter One An Actor and His Paradoxes

At first glance, it may seem that the ground of seventeenth-century comedy is

much too shallow a place to search for the treasure of philosophical wisdom, and this attitude is hardly confined to our age, for drama has long been viewed as the least serious of genres, and comedy the “lightest” and most

frivolous form of drama. In fact, it was during Moliére’s own lifetime, 1622 to 1673, one of the golden ages of the theater, that this prejudice was ironically

institutionalized by the Académie Française, which took great pains not to include playwrights, and comic playwrights in particular. This does not mean that some exceptions, like the great Corneille and his rival Pierre Du Ryer,

did not penetrate its ranks, but they only succeeded by producing esteemed translations that established their expertise in that august domain and cleansed them somewhat of the stain of the stage. A few dramatists, such as Boisrobert, owed their academic robes directly to political toadying, but none among the early generations to the stage alone. Moliére, of all the French Classical dramatists, seems one of the least qualified as a philosopher, since his real-life counterpart, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, middle-class son of an upholsterer to the king, left a very meager paper trail in the course of his education, compared to contemporaries such

as Corneille or Racine. That he attended one of the best Parisian colléges (then pre-university institutions) between approximately 1635 and 1640 appears to be firmly established on the basis of the biography by Lagrange and Vivot published with his 1682 collected works. Lagrange, though much younger, knew the adult Moliére intimately and was very conservative in reporting the facts as he knew them. It also appears likely, both from biographies and from textual evidence, that Poquelin studied some law, but here the facts are elusive and one quickly slips over the fence into pure anecdote and speculation. There is no reason to doubt the report that at a later age he translated at least part of Lucretius’s De rerum natura,

perhaps

in an effort to follow

Corneille and Du Ryer along the translator’s path into the Academy. Whether he abandoned this heavy topic because of its controversial subject matter or because of a lack of stylistic success before salon audiences we will never

10

Chapter One

An Actor and His Paradoxes

know, but the choice of Lucretius was most interesting and we shall return to it in discussing several of the plays.

It has become almost commonplace for critics to say that Moliére acquired a philosophical status through the influence of the French skeptic Pierre Gassendi, and even that he was a pupil of his at school, but this cliché is based on the shakiest of evidence. In order to approach Moliére’s philosophical implications honestly and directly, it is necessary at the outset to examine and dismiss this idea that he was simply “inoculated” by Gassendian thought, which then proceeded to flow out into his literary works passively and unmediated. Moliére’s posthumous biographer Grimarest, who published a rather

unreliable

life

of

the

dramatist

in

long-standing anecdote by relating Gassendi, the prominent skeptical France. Despite the solid debunking ground-breaking study, The Sceptical

1709,

launched

an

improbable,

but

that young Poquelin had studied with philosopher from Digne, in Southern of this myth by Robert McBride in his Vision of Molière, where he cites the sup-

port of researchers such as Michaut, Pintard, Mongrédien,

and Adam

(p. x),

the story was relayed by generations of critics unfortunate enough to take Grimarest at his word, and the latter continues to be accepted by some at face value. Actually, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin would have finished his studies at the Collége de Clermont before Gassendi came from Digne to take up his teaching post in 1645. This is even allowing for the likelihood that Poquelin, son of a bourgeois who had gained admittance despite a lackluster preparation, was probably about two years older than his class mates when he began his stretch at the college. One should also consider that Gassendi would not

have lectured to his Parisian classes about skepticism, at least not directly,

since he held the chair of mathematics. There is slightly less unlikeliho od that Moliére may have sat in on tutoring sessions allegedly given by Gas-

sendi to the future dramatist’s adolescent chum,

Chapelle, at the behest of

Lhuillier, who was Chapelle’s father and Gassendi’s friend. Gassendi made trips to Paris to visit such philosophical friends before taking up residence there. In fact, though, any evidence of such private lessons is not sufficient to be entirely convincing as far as Poquelin’s attendance is concerned. Besides,

the young man would have had other fish to fry in 1645, for by then he was

already deeply embroiled in the adventure of the Illustre Théatre company. This group of thespian upstarts had tried unsuccessfully to set itself up in di-

tect competition to Paris’s two great resident troupes, the Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Théâtre du Marais. The Illustre Théâtre’s main assets, the beautiful

and accomplished

actress Madeleine

Béjart and a good selection of new

scripts by eager playwrights, were not enough to overcome bad management

and the rigors of particularly terrible weather that coincided with their open-

11

ings. Young Poquelin, who had countersigned some of their bad loans, was briefly jailed for debts during the summer of 1645 and fled Paris by October to join Charles Dufresne’s touring provincial troupe, outside the jurisdiction

of the Paris courts. It was with these wanderers and as a wanted man that he would assume the name of Molière. But having said this, 1 must emphasize that Molière did not need to sit

in as Gassendi’s student to gain an acquaintance with skeptical philosophy. Through the canonical Cicero (chiefly the Paradoxa Stoicorum, the Academica

and De natura deorum), almost any school child in seventeenth century France would have gained at least a passing awareness of some aspects of the Aca-

demic branch of skepticism, represented by Arciselaus and Carneades. It was Cicero’s Academica and its powerful rhetoric that provided an ongoing influence for Gassendi’s treatment of skepticism (Kroll, 115). Notable references to skepticism are also found in the well-known Latin works of Diogenes Laertius and Philo the Jew. Other less common texts, such as pseudo-Plutarch’s De

Placitis Philosophorum and the writings of Strobaeus, provided preliminary material for skeptics (Morphos 74-75). Guy de Brués’s 1557 Dialogues also provide an entry point, though a curiously ambiguous one, for those curious

about skeptical ideas. As for the particular branch of Pyrrhonism, Moliére could have absorbed elements of the philosophy from Montaigne, who utilized most of the salient aspects of Pyrrhonism in his Essais, especially in the “Apologie de Raimond de Sebond.” | Montaigne, for his part, had made his contribution to a growing tradition of Renaissance skepticism tracing back through Guy de Brués and the

counter-Reformer Gentian Hervet to Italian philosophers, such as Pico de la Mirandola

and

Giordano

Bruno.

Montaigne’s

distant cousin,

Francisco

Sanches, who taught at the nearby University of Toulouse, had also tapped into this line of thought in writing his 1575 treatise Quod nihil scitur. Richard Popkin gives a vivid picture of Montaigne’s involvement with skepticism at this time: “a large part of the Apologie was written in 1575-76, when Montaigne, through studying the writings of Sextus Empiricus, was experiencing the extreme trauma of seeing his entire intellectual world dissolve into complete doubt. Slogans and phrases from Sextus were carved into the rafter beams of his study so that he could brood on them as he composed his Apologie. It was in this period that his motto, ‘Que sais-je?’ mace adopted” (History of Scepticism, p. 47). Montaigne’s text was at the disposition of anyone literate. Young Molière could also have easily consulted Pierre Charron's 1601 treatise, De la sagesse, which likewise exploits skeptical arguments against rationalist approaches to religion. After meeting Montaigne in 1589 and later becoming his adoptive son, Charron set Montaigne’s ideas into a fashion

12

Chapter One

An Actor and His Paradoxes

that could be studied and transmitted in the schools. If the Parisian student Poquelin did not encounter Charron’s text in his student days, he would certainly have been prompted to do so during his years with itinerant acting troupes, since he regularly performed in cities such as Agen, Cahors, and Bordeaux, where Charron had earlier worked and written. In

addition,

Moliére

may

have

had

access

to

Jean-Pierre

Camus’s

Essai

sceptique. This piece was not published until 1610, but was written about 1603, when the future bishop was only nineteen. Like Charron, the young Camus was an ardent follower of Montaigne. There was a link between him and Moliére through the family of François de La Mothe Le Vayer. La Mothe’s son was probably a classmate of Moliére’s before taking orders and becoming an abbé. When young La Mothe died at an early age, Moliére addressed some of his most interesting lyrics to the grieving father. Paying philosoph ical homage

to his

late

friend’s

family,

Moliére

urges

old

La

Mothe

to abandon

the Stoical stance toward death that poets such as Malherbe had advocated and give full vent to his feelings in a healthful purge of tears. Camus was a good enough friend of La Mothe Le Vayer to appear as one of the interlocutors in La Mothe’s Hexaméron rustique, which will be discussed in more detail

later.

Interesting

echoes

of

Camus’s

arguments

would

later

appear

in

the

Moliére canon, especially the use of the formula 2+2=4 in both Camus’s refutation of rational proofs and Dom Juan’s profession de foi libertine. However, Moliére did not even need to rely on readily available French texts or firmly established networks of friendship: he could easily have gone to the source, for the works of Sextus Empiricus, the most eminent skeptic of Greco-Roman antiquity, had been available in a fine Latin edition since 1562,

thanks

to the great

humanist

Henri

Estienne.

The man

who

undertook

to render Lucretius’s De Rerum natura into French certainly possessed the Latin skills to approach Sextus, whose style is actually more straightforward and genial than that of Gassendi. A reprinting of the Estienne edition of

Sextus in 1621 available

in

the

had been a major intellectual event and copies were readily capital.

Indeed,

it

may

be

said

that

this

book

had

been

reborn just before the birth of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. The very manner in which Estienne became attracted to Sextus’s Hypotyposes in 1562 could not have failed to capture the attention of the young Poquelin, who must have been strongly drawn to the theater from the time of his school days. Richard Popkin relates that Estienne “explains how he came to find Sextus, reporting that the previous year he had been quite sick and during his illness developed a great distaste for belles-lettres. One day, by chance, he discovere d Sextus in a collection of manuscripts in his library. Reading the work made him laugh and alleviated his illness (somewhat, apparently as Sextus claimed, by scepticism being a purge). He saw how inane all learning was, and this cured his

13

antagonism to scholarly matters by allowing him to take them less seriously. By uncovering the temerity of dogmatism, Estienne discovered the dangers of philosophers trying to judge all matters, especially theological ones, by their own standards. The sceptics appeared superior to the philosophers, whose reasoning finally culminated in dangerous and atheistic views” (History of Scepticism, p. 36) As for Gassendi, most of his printed works were not readily available until after his death in 1655. Before 1658, only the first book of his Exercitationes Paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos was in print, though most of the more interesting theoretical passages would appear later in the posthumous second book. Not until a year after Moliére’s death, in 1674, did the Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi, edited by Francois Bernier, put at the disposition of the French public an easily accessible compendium of the philosopher’s ideas. Nevertheless, the first book of the Exercitaciones had already made quite a stir in 1624 and Moliére could hardly ignore the appearance in 1658, the date of his return to Paris, of a sequel volume loaded with examples of all the modes of argument that Sextus had passed on from his predecessor Agrippa. This was especially true because by this time Gassendi had emerged as a major opponent to the rationalist philosophy of René Descartes and their debates on the nature of knowledge were still “front page” considerations. It is necessary at this time to make a few points about the philosophical tradition of skepticism that Molière may have come into contact with, whether during his studies, in the course of his travels, or after his return to Paris as a full-fledged actor-director-author. This background is easiest to understand if one begins by getting rid of many of the notions or opinions about skepticism one has picked up here and there, which is exactly what the skeptics themselves recommend as a first step. Unfamiliar with the historical development of skepticism, some people may be tempted to think of it as simply a tendency toward universal doubt, which is a dangerous oversimplification represented in the seventeenth century by Descartes in his First Meditation. In speaking of the role of skepticism in religious fideism, Terence Penelhum has pointed out that this Cartesian prejudice has made it very hard for post-seventeenth-century thinkers to avoid this error (p. 7). Furthermore, the terms skeptic or skepticism were used rather rarely in the seventeenth century, when the school was known more often as Pyrrhonism, after Pyrrho of Elis, the legendary founder of the movement. The latter designation took on a distinctly pejorative connotation in the works of popular opponents, such as Pascal. Actually, Pyrrhonism should apply mainly to a particular wing of skeptical thought. The dominant form today referred to as mitigated skepticism realized that doubt could not be applied universally, nor should it be. As Richard Kroll explains: “when Gassendi introduces the sceptical postulate,

14

Chapter One

he almost

invariably assumes

An Actor and His Paradoxes

the impossibility of sustaining the complete

suspension of judgment within the conduct of ordinary life. Even Pyrrhonians, he implies, must behave as if appearances were sufficiently reliable in order minimally to function (115).” Finally, other enemies of the movement

habitually referred to skeptics as libertins. The English equivalent, libertine, has moral implications that have nothing to do with the philosophical bases of skepticism, which was, in fact, quite popular among Catholic churchmen

such

as Hervet,

Camus,

and

Charron.

As shall be shown

in the course of

this study, skeptical thought was never inherently hostile to religion or to

its advocates; on the contrary, it was a major element of spiritual discourse during the period. Skeptically-based fideism was such a major trend in early

modern religion that Penelhum organizes it into two branches: conformist and evangelical. Even the French term libertin, though commonly used in polemic, is not a very good match for “skeptic,” since the skeptics did not consider themselves to be the ones taking liberty with truth, but rather saw

themselves as its most energetic preservers.

What, then, did seventeenth-century skeptics stand for? In the Humanist tradition, they were re-discoverers and re-interpreters of a great Classical heritage. This is in keeping with the original meaning of the term skeptic. The Greek etymology of skepsis derives not from “doubt,” but from “investigation” or “discovery.” Pyrrhonists tended to deny that they constitute d a school or movement at all, but instead pursued a lifestyle, a particularl y

healthy approach to the universe akin to the Asian notion of tao. It is a movement that was less well-known than other philosophical movements,

such as Aristotelianism, Stoicism, or Epicureanism, largely because its texts were more limited and more erudite, being restricted almost entirely to Greek writings that had almost

totally disappeared

in the West

during the Dark

Ages and Middle Ages, except in clipped, anecdotal form. Indeed, many of the revered figures of the skeptical tradition left little in the way of writings

at all, and the main body of literature on the movement was restricted to the

Hypotyposes of Sextus. The key element of skeptic philosophy, as exposed by Sextus Empiricus, is not simply random doubt, or negation of a specific body of traditional truth, but rather the healthy cultivation of an approach called acatalepsia , or freedom from opinions, which in turn is based on the suspensio n of judgment, or epoche. Skepticism does not deny a priori that it is impossible to establish any truth, but does argue that in practical terms it is nearly impossible to escape the errors induced by unproven opinion. It thus does tend to

stand in opposition to the Aristotelian dogmatism

inherited from medieval

thought, with its emphasis on the syllogistic method of argument, and to

the strong trend of Stoicism revived by the Renaissance. But it is also hostile

15

to most efforts at more modern rationalism, and it is no accident that Gassendi and La Mothe Le Vayer defined their thought largely in opposition to Descartes. One must not assume, however, that this polemical engagement was a precept of their thought or that there was something inherently retrograde about seventeenth-century skepticism. Writers employed elements of

skepticism all across the religious and political spectrum. Because skepticism

reorients thought away from the Aristotelian and Cartesian concern with what must be true and toward the question of what can be true, it stands as a necessary precursor to the emergence of experimental empiricism and the

scientific method. Indeed, Popkin credits Gassendi with setting an important precedent for the development of eighteenth-century British empiricism in a way that would long go unnoticed, by allying epistemological skepticism with the physics of Epicurean atomism (History of Scepticism, p. 91). Since skepticism defines itself fundamentally in contrast to systems of self-evident or essential truth, Sextus Empiricus speaks of it largely in terms of modes of argument. Those who are inherently uncomfortable with the indefinite will thus often tend to consider it as a “parasitic” philosophy that can boast no principles of its own. On the other hand, acatalepsia offers a

welcome prospect to those who tend to see thought as being already too confused or disrupted by unnecessary errors or misjudgments. What is certain is that the five so-called Agrippan modes, or tropes, which Sextus credits to a dimly-known predecessor, offer an important rhetorical arsenal to the writer in the early modern period, just as important perhaps as the rhetorical canon recently highlighted so successfully by the work of Marc Fumaroli. And central to this skeptical rhetoric was the use of paradox as a literary figure.

In the Hypotyposes, or Outlines of Skepticism, Sextus proposes several ways of organizing its main methods of analysis. The ten tropes or modes attributed to the more ancient Skeptics are organized thematically, according to the point of departure of the argument. Since many of these concern comparisons of humans and animals, a point that is not very relevant to Moliére’s

plays, these will not play a major role in our discussion. Sextus also speaks of an overall organization of tropes into two large categories. This scheme does not offer quite the level of detail desired in applying the modes to drama.

Therefore, for the purpose of our analysis, we will speak mainly in terms of the Agrippan system of five modes based on the strategy of the argument employed: “the first is the mode based on diasagreement; the second is that based on infinite regression; the third, that based on relativity; the fourth on hypothesis; and the fifth is the circularity mode” (The Skeptic Way, 110). Keeping in mind that these five modes are not always mutually exclusive, we shall examine examples of them in the context of the plays in an effort to de-

scribe all five more amply, just as Sextus does in his presentation, citing such

16

Chapter One

An Actor and His Paradoxes

poets as Homer, Pindar, and Euripides. Suffice it to say for now that paradox plays a central role in all five Agrippan modes. Before Moliére could fully exploit this arsenal of skeptical paradox, however, he needed to work out a personal approach to some very practical paradoxes inherent in the dramatic profession he had chosen. The very name, Moliére, is an example. In accepting a livelihood that required the

free adopting

of identities

other

than

one’s

own,

one

sacrificed,

in early

modern France, the very identity to which one normally had a claim. Actors were not normal members of society. Upon launching their careers, they adopted a nom de tréteau, an alias that would mediate the rest of their

earthly existence. Jean-Baptiste

Poquelin

did not completely

cease to exist

in the civil sense once the man chose to use the stage name of Moliére. In

fact, he signed documents sometimes with his Christian name, sometimes with his theatrical one, and often with a combination of the two. But a new being, Moliére, appeared, who was the person recognized by the public, apart from certain family members and others who had known him before the

professional transformation. In some ways this transformation was like that

which affected people going into religious orders. Moliére’s sister, Jacqueline, upon joining the Order of the Visitation, became a nun known by her newly adopted sisterly name. In other ways, actors’ identities were a reverse image of the religious renaming, for actors were officially excommunicated by virtue of their work. Despite this decree, most actors continued in practice to take part in religious services, in rare cases even becoming notably devout

and conspicuous. The local religious authorities, particularly in the “Actors’ Church” of St-Germain-l’Auxerrois, seem to have developed the habit of overlooking their parishioners’ professions, at least so far as to let them participate in the sacraments of baptism and marriage, if not in all the others. The work of the stage had other paradoxes that added to those of the actor’s personal identity. A skeptic’s task is to cultivate the willing suspension of opinion, or unsustained belief. An actor’s job is to cultivate the willing suspension of disbelief, to invite the spectator into a temporary, conditional world that is entirely composed of illusion and appearances. To be a skeptical actor, then, involves an attempt to reconcile right thinking with pure fantasy.

This seems to be a fascinating contradiction, and one which did not escape the great writers of the early modern period. In Hamlet, the Danish prince

marvels at a speech by one of his favorite players. “What's Hecuba to he or he to Hecuba?” Despite the unreality of the actor’s formal, de casibus tirade, it stirs the speaker’s emotions to real tears and awakens Hamlet’s innermost feelings that the reality of his mundane court life had stifled, In the Spanish Golden Age, the oxymorons of the theater appear frequently, and nowhere

more Can

17

prominently than in Calderon’s La Vida es Sueno, Life is a Dream. one

dream

the

fantasy

of the

theater,

lead the

audience

to become

aware of the dream-like qualities of their day to day existence? Calderon’s masterpiece argues strongly in the affirmative. In the French seventeenth century, playwrights approached

this fragile boundary of appearances from

both sides, that of the actor as well as that of the spectator. Pierre Corneille’s Illusion comique was a play that probably figured in the repertory of Moliére’s touring company

during

the

1640’s and

1650.

In it, actors playing

“real

people” who become actors in a play-within-a-play manipulate the troubled perceptions of one of the characters to heal his “real life” through a fantasy. This pleasing fantsy seems real to the subject, so real that it becomes a reality that the spectators are invited to accept as such, though they are aware that it is doubly

illusionary.

In Rotrou’s

Véritable Saint Genest,

an actor playing

an actor presenting a play onstage becomes so convinced with the reality of his role that he abandons his profession and becomes a Christian martyr. Here, the audience is asked to accept the reality of the illusionary conversion

based on an interior illusion-become-reality. The games of truth and illusion became traditional by the time of Moliére’s return to Paris, with numerous well-known and popular plays based on the trope of la comédie des comédiens, the playing of the players. Moliére’s place within the touring company

placed added

emphasis

on

this delicate, contradictory relationship, for as the group’s leader, Charles Dufresne, approached retirement, he recruited the young man to take his place as harangueur. This job, without an equivalent in our modern playhouses, de-

manded an ability to go onstage before the beginning of the performance to prepare the crowd for the plays to follow. It was no mean task, since touring companies put on their performances in a variety of makeshift conditions. Sometimes they acted in the château of a relatively sophisticated noble and his friends, sometimes in relatively comfortable tennis courts on jerry-built stages before ticket-buying crowds, sometimes in the court of a coaching inn filled with a rabble of common townspeople, soldiers, and intoxicated travelers. The harangueur was part stand-up comedian, part sergeant-at-arms,

part schoolmaster, even part pimp. After all, it was accepted that many in the audience came only to admire the charms of the chief actresses. harangueur’s humor acted as a captatio benevolentiae, securing the good of the assembly. His tactful scolding had to cow the rowdier elements

men The will into

submission by shaming them in front of their comrades. His erudition had to bring the yobbish folk to understand the rudiments of dramatic structure

embodied in the play they were about to see. His unctuous side had to tempt

and excite the crowd with the attributes that most of the males had really come to see — the sex appeal of the actresses. As harangueur, Molière became

Chapter One

An Actor and His Paradoxes

the dimensional portal through which a more or less random collection of townspeople entered, often for the first time, the world of theatrical illusion. Even after Molière had taken over management of the troupe upon Dufresne’s retirement, he spent several years preparing his return to Paris. Having played for years to audiences whose main component had been the legislators of Bordeaux and Languedoc, he moved the base of operations

du Marais and the troupe of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, who cherished the time-honored title of Comédiens du Roi. For the first few years of his Parisian career, Moliére managed to avoid many entanglements and built a formidable reputation in both the court and the town. His group mixed an established repertory of tragic works with comedies mainly of his own composition. He had endeared the public to his personnages of Mascarille and Sganarelle, as well as initiating a more timely and much envied form of contemporary satire of manners with one-act productions such as Les Précieuses ridicules and Les Facheux. It was when he began to launch his most ambitious and controversial works, beginning with L'École des femmes, that Moliére began to attract the kind of attention he didn’t want. The slightest hint of irreverence for religious rules or public decency led to a scathing blast of wild ad hominem denunciations from a wide range of enemies. Some of these came from predictable professional rivals attached to the Hôtel de Bourgogne, such as young Montfleury, the son of its head tragedian, and writers such as Boursault and Donneau de Visé. Others emanated from a more shadowy network of quasi-religious personalities, many apparently affiliated with the Opus Dei of Moliére’s day, a secret society called the

18

to the Rhone Valley, then to Rouen, and finally back to the capital. As this

traveling was going on, he and his actors put their legal affairs in order to facilitate the relocation. For Moliére, this meant clearing up his old problems with the Parisian courts, which required the help of his father. The return to

Paris was not to be a repeat of the Illustre Théâtre experiment thirteen years

earlier, for this time Moliére was determined to secure adequate patronage for his troupe. Going to the top of the chain of protection, he arranged for a command performance before the young king and his brother. The result was that the company became attached to Philippe, or Monsieur, as the king’s brother was called. They were given use of a theater in the Palais-Bourbon, next

to

the

east

walls

of

the

Louvre,

which

they

were

to

share

with

the

resident Italian players on alternate days of the week. Emerging from the chrysalis of provincial performance, the former jailbird had risen to become a distant part of the royal household. Moliére had now become a prototype of the social climber he would later embody on the stage, a real-life bourgeois gentilhomme. Of course, he did

not foolishly assume, like Monsieur Jourdain, that the outward trappings of nobility would bring him recognition as a true aristocrat. Nevertheless, it was now necessary for him to live in the margins of such people’s lives, which meant acquiring a profound understanding of their ways and preferences.

His father’s work as upholsterer to the king had probably conferred a solid

beginning in this training, especially if it is true, as related in some anecdotes, that he actually took over some of the functions of the office and accompanied the court on a progress through rural France. It may be said that, as a royal player, he had many of the obligations of noble behavior and few

of the advantages. Increased living expenses, worldly luxuries, and clothing

for court were physical necessities. Even more important were the demands of behavior amid the complex hierarachy of court officers and their families. No longer a member of the merchant class that could shelter its modest comforts under anonymous black clothing in solid gabled houses near the Place Maubert or Les Halles, the

former Jean-Baptiste Poquelin now

became

subject

to public scrutiny and intense rivalry on the professional level. Besides the Italians, with whom Moliére got on well from the beginning, Paris boasted two other French troupes — the formerly glorious and now faltering Théâtre

19

Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. The two sources of criticism may well have

had some covert connections. In any case, they formed a dangerous tag-team that battered Moliére from one side and the other for years in pamphlets, books, diocesan decrees, and court actions. Moliére could take some protection from his status as a royal servant, making much of the pleasure that his works gave to eminent aristocrats. However, his status involved internal contradictions that would emerge as

more and more paradoxical factors in his professional life and in his writings.

As a court entertainer (the way the royal family saw him), he was undoubtedly a cog in the vast new cultural machine that Louis XIV was putting to-

gether. Court entertainments had a very serious side as part of the apparatus

affecting the distribution of power, the conduct of international relations, and even the sexual economy of the royal family. Without question, Molière was expected to support the ideologies and agendas of the crown, both as comedian to Monsieur and later to the king himself, when Louis XIV adopted the troupe as his own. Louis’s fondness for taking a personal hand in the production of court events and imposing a rigorous, sometimes impossible

schedule is documented some of Moliére’s prefaces and in L’Impromptu de Versailles. When working directly with the court, Moliére’s work was closely regimented by the king’s cultural czars, especially Charles Lebrun. Despite this degree of intergration in Louis XIV’s scheme for bringing all intellectual activity in France under the sway of royal direction, Moliére never stooped to the status of a mere hack or mouthpiece. His very vocation

20

Chapter One

An Actor and His Paradoxes

as a comic writer and satirist stood opposed to much of what was happening in Louis XIV’s new society, even as he was required to praise it. How to give vent to these subversive tendencies became the main concern of Moliére’s career as he entered into what Gustave Michaut identified as his period of

struggle,

from

1662

to 1668.

These

six years saw

the controversies

that arose

over L’école des femmes and Dom Juan, the accompanying attacks on himself and his young wife, the critical acclaim and relative financial disappointment of Le Misanthrope, and the evolution of Tartuffe through three stages despite clerical and legislative opposition. The fact that Tartuffe was only able to triumph over entrenched civil and religious bans by the power of the crown underlined Moliére’s delicately balanced position as, essentially, a satirist to the king. He was well aware of all the negative aspects of absolute monarchy, of which foppish fashions and grands canons were merely the most minor manifestation. His works show a consistant consciousness of the ruthless

drive towards

have shown,

hegemony

and even

violence that, as such

critics as Larry Riggs

was a central part of Louis XIV’s policies. But Moliére could

only engage these subjects in the most careful and delicate ways if he was to escape from less institutionalized enemies. ; The dramatist’s main answer to this dilemma was provided in part by skepticism, that is, the construction of epistemological puzzles in the body of his theater. His very first venture into topical satire in Les Précieuses ridicules demonstrates an early form of this technique. In order to satirize the affected

manners of préciosité, as embodied especially in the works of Mlle de Scudéry, Molière

creates

as a target,

not the

real

personalities,

but

a pair of young

la-

dies who imitate the movement to an obviously ridiculous extreme.He could thus implicitly deny he was criticising living individuals, some of them high ladies of the court, by claiming to denounce instead their false and inept imitaters. Where real préciosité stopped, if anywhere, and false began was left to the spectator to determine. The epistemological refusal to identify a criterion of truth persists throughout his work. Many a character takes refuge

behing

the

statement,

“Je

ne dis pas

cela,”

as does

Alceste

in

his equivocal

critique of Oronte’s bad verses. Sganarelle will rail against his master with the disclaimer, “I’m talking about that other great noble.” Medical quacks are often false doctors as in Le Médecin malgré lui. Most notably, Tartuffe is not a sincere religious fanatic, but simply pretending to be one. Moliére was

the first comic writer to exploit with consistency this property that Jonathan would later describe in The Battle of the Books: “Satire is a sort of glass,

Swift

wherein i beholders do generally discover everybt )dy's f ace but their own.” Moliére’s satire can be defined as mockery that Operates according the skeptical principle of the suspension of judgment on the criterion of truth. In the first book of the Outlines of Skepticism, Se xtus Empiricus cogently shows

21

on a philosophical level how such a procedure can avoid matic opinion or interpretation:

any

kind of dog-

. in order to decide the dispute that has arisen about the criterion, we have need of an agreed-upon criterion by means of which we shall decide it; and

in order

to have

an

agreed-upon

have decided the dispute about falling into the circularity mode, we do not allow them to adopt a to decide about the criterion by an

infinite

proved,

regress.

Further,

while the criterion

since

criterion

it is necessary

first

to

the criterion. Thus, with the reasoning finding a criterion becomes aporetic; for criterion hypothetically and if they wish means of a criterion we force them into proof

requires

has need of what

proof, they land in circularity. (The Skeptic

a criterion

that

has been

has been determined

to be a

Way, pp. 128-129)

Let us assume, for example, that Moliére is mocking the real précieuses under the mask of false précieuses, and withholding a criterion for determining what true préciosité is. The unopinionated spectator can simply fix a criterion as he or she sees fit and participate in the mockery of real and false préciosité. À truly opinionated anti-précieux would do so anyway. À person identifying herself as a précieuse could publicly maintain her identity and either agree or disagree with the portrayal of préciosité in the play. Either way, she would have to provide some criterion for doing so. This again would entail either admitting that the ridiculous behavior in the play was true of précieuses or finding some counter-argument to prove it wasn’t and thereby to abjure the

behaviors mocked

in the play. While the latter strategy might result in the

playwright being proved “wrong,” it might be at the cost of affiliations the précieuse found attractive or even indispensible. It would also put the onus of defending précieux behavior strictly on the self-admitted précieuse. Should the self-identifying précieuse not choose to maintain her public identity, and should she disagree with the portrayal of préciosité in the play, she would be forced to move her précieux behavior “underground” somehow. Should she agree that the portrayal of the behavior is both ridiculous and accurate, she would be forced to change. This highly desirable result would fulfill the Concept of castigat ridendo mores (correct manners through laughter) referred to by Molière

in the theoretical

sections of his Placets written

on

the

Tartuffe

affair. In this philosophical paradigm, the comic writer thus faces a very high possibility of success by adopting the skeptical strategy. Paradox offers a natural rhetorical vehicle for implementing the skeptical deferral of judgment on the criterion. Throughout his works, paradox Signifies for Molière an unstable but fruitful contrariety that defies general Opinion, thus justifying the Greek etymology of para-doxa. The avoidance Of unsupported opinion is the very basis of the skeptical goals of epoche, acatalepsia,

and

ataraxia.

Despite

the

pulls

of

positive

or

negative

idealism,

22

Chapter One

absolute materialism or absolute spirituality, good paradox is irreducible either to utilitarianism or to theodocy. It is disconvenient in the sense that it suspends, rather than resists, conformity to any a priori values. McBride shows in his recent, definitive edition of the Lettre sur l’Imposteur that the

idea of disconvenance as a behavioral basis for theatrical paradox was put for-

Chapter Two

ward eloquently in this document, probably written by La Mothe Le Vayer, himself an experienced purveyor of paradox. Thus we can appreciate that as early as 1665, Moliére’s strategy, which began forming by 1659, was being

Schools of and for Philosophy

promulgated before the literary and theatrical public.

While it is true that skepticism in and of itself is not an overt theme of Moliére’s comedies, its importance is perhaps more obvious if one considers

the theme of schools, which are quite frequent and prominent. Besides L'École des maris and L'École des femmes, we have a school by women in Les Femmes savantes, as well as a rare glimpse of a younger schoolboy, albeit a poor one, in La Comtesse d’Escarbagnas. A most burlesque product of the educational system emerges in Le Malade imaginaire in the form of Thomas Diafoirus. Then there are the numerous lessons in the plays: music in the case of Le Médecin malgré lui and Le Malade imaginaire; painting in Le Sicilien; all the arts in turn in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.

None of these educational endeavors is straightforward. Unlike La Mothe Le Vayer, whose various monographs on learning for the education of the young Monsieur, Philippe, actually bore the title of Scuole de prencipi in Italian

translation, Moliére did not seek to produce a textbook or even to sketch out a direct curriculum. Nor did he reduce his comedies to the strict satire of pedantry, as occurred in such contemporary texts as Le Parasite Mormon. Each

lesson in his plays relates to extra-curricular activities in civic life and is complicated by disguise, miscommunication,

failure, or some other kind of dis-

tortion. Of course, this presentation in negative is just the stuff of skepticism, which rarely presents any question except by its weak points and foibles. Instead of setting forth a series of explanations, the skeptical master Gassendi organizes his Exercitationes against Aristotelianism in the form of paradoxes, inviting his readers to enter with him into his epistemological puzzles. One of the earliest instances of a putative school of thinking in Moliére’s

theatre occurs in Les Précieuses ridicules, where the spurned bourgeois suitors La Grange and Du Croisy seek to teach a lesson to the affected young ladies who rejected them. Here already, the lesson takes a negative form: they will teach the girls the limits of their vaunted intelligence by showing them that they can’t tell the difference between real courtiers and spurious ones.

Predictably for a skeptical test, all parties fail. On the one hand, Cathos and Magdelon recite a series of ridiculous speeches badly learned in the faulty

Ἐν

24

Chapter Two

Schools of and for Philosophy

textbook of Mlle de Scudéry’s Le Grand Cyrus. Like Dom Juan and other figures in Moliére’s later plays, they try to “speak like books” and fail, since they

do not fundamentally

understand

what they are talking about.

The world

of préciosité, of ultra-refined manners in a novelistic parallel dimension, functions in the play like the “other world” of dogmatism that Pyrrhonean

thought consistently rejects. The false précieuses illustrate a true side of Préciosité, like Gongorism in Spain and Euphuism in Britain, as an extention of

Renaissance neo-Platonism carried to a ridiculous extreme. From their first appearance on stage, the girls line up with the forces of dogmatism, as Cathos refers to herself as “une fille un peu raisonnable” (sc. 4). Magdelon echoes this alignment later in the play in referring to anything non-Parisian as “l’antipode de la raison” (sc. 9). When their father Gorgibus

cannot

understand

their

un-bourgeois

approach

to

marriage,

Magdelon tells him he needs to be better schooled on préciosité: “vous devriez vous faire apprendre le bel air des choses.” When Gorgibus unwittingly puns on bel air, assuming she is talking about a musical air, he opens the semantic field of the word enough to remind the reader of other possible meanings, including the foggy Stoical concept of pneuma in the physical world. The bel air of the précieuses is even more filled with gobbledegook, as Cathos and Magdelon explain its romanesque principles to the old burgher. The fact

that the girls insist on a new system of names derived from novels (Polyxéne and Aminte for them, Almanzor for their little serving-boy) reinforces the

other-worldliness of their beliefs. They reject the appearances of a chair or a mirror to consider it as a “commodity of conversation” or a “counselor of grace.” Their idealized world identifies with novels even more explicitly through Magdelon’s reference to her father’s workaday world as another kind of novel, presumably comical, and her later mention of “le tissu de notre roman” (the fabric of our novel) to stand for their everyday lives. If earlier statements had evoked Stoicism, Cathos’s appraisal of Gorgibus’s intelligence

recalls Aristotelian terminology: “Mon Dieu! Ma chère, que forme enfoncée dans la matiére!” (sc. 5). The use of “form”

ton pére a la for body and

“matter” for physical reality is emblematic of both the Peripatetic (properly Aristotelian) and Platonic systems of philosophy. The girls waste a good deal of time trying to give language lessons to the maid Marotte, who refuses to understand them unless they can “parler chrétien.” Predictably, a maid is busy enough to accept appearances at face value if they concern her duties, rather than ascending to the realm of the abstract and mishandling them. More than mere foils to the girls, le marquis de Mascarille and le vicomte de Jodelet are even more ludicrous in their attempts to speak the language of the fencing academy and the palace corridors. The fact that they use language playfully, including “in jokes” exchanged between them, rather than

25

seriously, as the girls do, increases their comic power, as well as their ability to control the salon’s discourse. In earlier plays, Mascarille had called himself “the emperor of tricksters” and had exalted in his ability to play with appearances and false inferences in order to manipulate both his masters and their antagonists. On the other hand, the eventual degrading of these false nobles takes a very concrete form, stripping and whipping, while the girls suffer embarrassment and discredit. The skeptical undercurrent of this little play becomes

clearer when

one

considers it is all a matter of appearances, and appearances are the byword of Gassendi in particular. Following Sextus, the philosopher of Digne had stipulated that, lacking either evident first principles or a solid set of selfsustaining criteria to judge them with, the truth-seeker is reduced to dealing with the world as a realm of appearances that cannot be taken as more than appearances. In the face of these confusing and often contradictory appearances, the skeptic embraces epoche, or the suspension of judgment. Cathos and Magdelon cannot master the suspension of judgment necessary to deal with appearances, for they feel that certain characteristics, such as one’s

tailor or the location of one’s beauty spots, must inevitably and directly denote true values of merit. The deployment of foppery by the fake aristocrats is thus enough to fool the girls all the more easily. Mascarille and Jodelet fall into the same trap of appearances themselves, for despite their awareness of participating in a ruse, they feel that their half-baked witticisms and

supposed battle scars succeed well enough in this sham polite conversation actually to become the equivalent of social standing and military valor. Yet,

they manage to fool their betters, the would-be précieuses, most thoroughly.

They even learn a bit of a Pyrrhonean

lesson at the end of the play, when

Mascarille, still clinging to his illusions of nobility, states, “je vois bien qu’on n'aime ici que la vaine apparence, et qu’on n'y considère point la vertu toute nue” (1 perceive people here only like superficial appearances, and they care not at all for naked virtue). He is more truthful than he knows: even though

his merit was fake, the girls did not know real merit when they saw it, in the form of the masters La Grange and Du Croisy. The pun on “naked virtue” by a shame-faced protagonist reduced to his underwear only drives this home with greater comic force.

In defense of the play against its detractors, Molière added a further twist to the appearances by claiming that his Précieuses were ridiculous because they were false, inviting the public to judge for themselves whether the faults of his characters extended also to the real Précieuses in Parisian society, and not just to a pair of pecques provinciales. The author seized on an unusual opportunity presented by the circumstances of the play’s publication. As he explains in the preface to Les Précieuses ridicules, one of his rare commentaries

26

Chapter Two

Schools of and for Philosophy

on his work, a pirated copy had appeared in the bookstores, forcing the au-

thor to publish his own, legitimate version in order to forestall a lawsuit that

might deprive him of the use of his own text! In other words he found him-

self in a position akin to the one where Sosie will find himself much

later,

in Amphitryon: he stood in danger of being deprived of his own identity. The only way he could affirm himself as the true writer of the play was to publicly

assume his authorship, dispelling the “false Moliére” who had leaked the text

to the pirate editor. Realizing the philosophical implications of this situation, he likens himself to the Roman Cato by crying out, “O temps! O mœurs!”

Finding himself in the guise of an auteur malgré lui, he extends this to the

logical counterpart of the patron: “quelque grand seigneur que j'aurais été prendre malgré lui pour protecteur de mon ouvrage et dont j'aurais tenté la

libéralité par une épître dédicatoire bien fleurie.

j'aurais tâché de faire une

belle et docte préface...” (some great lord that I would have latched onto as the protector for my work and whose generosity I would have tempted by a flowery dedication...I would have tried to compose an elegant and learned preface). This ingenious disclaimer underlines the fact that, instead of protecteurs malgré eux, he does have very willing patrons, since his troupe is in

the service of the king’s brother, Monsieur. Without boasting of this directly,

Moliére reminds his readers of it by mentioning that real princes and kings do not make the mistake of seeing themselves as the satirical targets of a “Trivelin” who portrays ridiculous princes or kings on the stage. The true

patron thus emerges from the shadows just as the true author does, since true

appearances can correct false ones, and the “mauvais singes, qui méritent d’étre bernés” (evil apes who deserve to be satirized) are punished by shame when the true figures show themselves.

Subsequent to Les Précieuses ridicules, Moliére abandoned the character of

Mascarille in favor of a new state identity, Sganarelle. Perhaps the stripping of Mascarille at the end of the play had shown the defects of the audacious trickster and would-be emperor so clearly that a new stance was needed.

Varying

in the

particulars

of social

Sganarelle persists through a

one that bears his name,

condition

and

family

responsibilities,

series of plays, beginning in 1660 with the

and culminating in Le Médecin malgré lui in 1666.

Sganarelle differs from Mascarille in more than his costume. Lacking the brio of his predecessor, Sganarelle is more of a poltroon, often conscious of his own limitations, beset with grand and petty fears, indulgent of his appetites to a fault, but quick to impute reverses to dimly perceived forces beyond the senses. If Sganarelle aspires to power, it is less through his imposed personality than through some secured attribute, such as male authority or right reason. Thus, he is a natural dogmatic, depending on a seconda ry characteristic to uphold him.

27

Robert McBride has shown how Sganarelle, ou le Cocu imaginaire revolves around

a double incidence of false appearances, as both Sganarelle and his

wife think the other has been unfaithful (The Sceptical Vision, pp. 15-21). The wife has seen the husband administering to a fainted young lady and thinks he is carrying

her off for his pleasure,

while

he spies her with

the locket

portrait of a handsome young man that she has actually picked up in the street. Each mistake could be easily cleared up with a few simply questions.

However, husband and wife both fail to consider this experimental method

and instead build a “reasonable,” but false set of ideas, each connected to the other, though resting on an invalid foundation. One item at stake

here is the more than the widespread philosophical problem that Charles Landesman calls “the great deception of sense” (p. 20). Sganarelle and his wife both exemplify Landesman’s concept of projection, “the mind’s activity of bringing it about that secondary qualities appear to have a location where they are not” (p. 21). The initial mistake is sweeping in its importance, for it

involves not just taking the appearances for what they are (a man helping ἃ young lady, a women with a jewel), but rather for a secondary characteristic of cuckoldry. Projection was already a concern for philosophers of Molière's age; Thomas

Hobbes went so far as to attempt a physiological explanation

for it. Molière directs his analysis in another direction. This projection, in turn, is possible because of an unstated but common fear of a hidden order, that of cuckoldry. Cuckoldry already in this early play is suggested on the scale of a “hidden world” not unlike the Platonic hidden worlds that drew the attention of the earliest Pyrrhonians. This anti-ideal of rampant infidelity

replaces the neo-Platonic ideals of the précieuses as the focus of Pyrrhonean

interest in the comedy. Molière will later explore more deeply the haunting superstitions that lurk in the consciousness of characters in Dom Juan and Le Misanthrope.

To return to Sextus himself, we may also consider the plot of Le Cocu imaginaire in terms of the problem of signs. Sganarelle and his wife both rely on signs to deduce that the spouse has been unfaithful. “If he is carrying the lady, he must be carrying on an affair,” assumes the wife. “If she stares at

the portrait in the locket, it must represent her lover,” thinks the husband.

The second book of the Hypotoposes devotes a large section to the examination of the relevance of signs in logical thinking, a major element of Stoical philosophy. Using some very effective logic of his own, nn false sign interpretations such as “If the earth is flying, it must have wings,” he demolishes the Stoical chain of inference (The Skeptic Way, 142). Moreover, Sextus

cleverly shows that the Stoics are necessarily led into such es by the very use of signs, whether or not individual propositions, such as “the earth is flying,” are valid or not. Robert McBride’s minute investigation of Dom Garcie

28

Chapter Two

Schools of and for Philosophy

de Navarre, like his study of Sganarelle, shows the sophistication of the use of paradox at this early stage of Molière’s career. An examination of the notions of truth and proof in the play affirms his conclusions and links them

tenderness; 3) tenderness involves sexual desire and its fulfillment; 4) Elvire

directly to the brand of Pyrrhonism illustrated by Sextus Empiricus. The first

three Agrippan modes concern disproof by challenge to the premise, disproof by demonstration of reciprocity, and disproof by infinite regression. Let us consider just two central episodes in this flawed comédie héroïque that Molière

will resurrect in Le Misanthrope.

In Act One, scene three, the jealous prince Dom Garcie confronts his beloved Done Elvire over a letter that has come into her possession and that Garcie believes to come from a secret beau. His jealousy is based on discernible truth (that Elvire has a letter) and on several false opinions (that the letter must be a love letter, that the letter is addressed to Elvire, that the writer is someone she is secretly in love with). This, in turn, is based on the false opinion that Elvire is of a character capable of tricking Garcie and

loving someone else. The first three false opinions are easily dispelled by the reading of the letter, and Dom Garcie feels relieved to know that he is wrong.

But Elvire warns him that this solution is strictly temporary and accidental unless he does something about the underlying false opinion regarding her character. This false opinion involves a point for which no easy demonstration, no discernible criterion, exists, and which therefore, like religious con-

viction for the skeptical fideist, must be taken on faith. The only proof that can exist lies in Garcie’s own behavior, on his resistance to jealousy, which is why she warns him, “de mes avis conservez la mémoire;/Et s’il est vrai pour

moi que votre amour soit grand,/Donnez-en 4 mon cceur les preuves qu’il attend” (Remember my warning well;/And if it is true that your love for me

is great,/Give my heart the proof of it that it expects). Having

failed to learn not only this lesson, but also those of a second letter and a misunderstood visit from a man, Dom Garcie

misinterpreted

forms the wrong opinion again in the fourth act when he spies Elvire in the

arms of another person he takes to be a man,

not knowing that it is Done

Ignès in disguise. This time phantastike seems to have given the prince the proof he thinks he needs of Elvire’s disloyalty. He fails to realize that, given the existance of that false underlying opinion, any sense impression can give a false proof. Using disloyalty as a criterion will automatically lead to a situation of cocuage imaginaire. A good physical disguise is meant to trick the viewer, so in this case the error was inevitable, unless Garcie could skepti-

cally suspend judgment and abandon the criterion. His doubt was wrongly directed towards Elvire’s pathe rather than toward his own reasoning. This caused him to push his implicit regressions to a point that he thought was solid: 1) he saw Elvire embracing someone; 2) the act of embracing involves

29

would seek such fulfillment with a man; 5) the person she was embracing was

a man; ergo Elvire has a lover. However, the fifth element of the regression is

proved false when Done Ignès is revealed to be the person embraced. Garcie’s chain of reason, while not quite infinite, thus falls victim to a variant of the third Agrippan mode. Moliére’s arguably over-systematic application of these

set pieces of proof and disproof may supply some clues about Dom Garcie de

Navarre's unusual structure and its failure to please the Parisian public.

With the advent of a School for Husbands (L'École des maris), forerunner

of the School for Wives, Moliére further interacts with his audience, inviting them to determine if the schools are on stage or in the theater itself, whether

Sganarelle and his brother Ariste are pupils, or simply part of a larger lesson presented for the more discerning spectators. The play presents contrasting theories of education. Ariste believes in moderately exposing his ward Léonor to the elements of the social world and letting her use her senses to become used to the diversity of appearances, so as to make her choices sensibly in life. This implies a mastery of appearances similar to the wisdom evoked by Gassendi, La Mothe Le Vayer, and other skeptics. On the other hand, Sganarelle imposes education arbitrarily, based on uncontestable first principles

of confinement,

deprivation,

and

stupidity.

This heavy-handed

Aristotelianism will later manifest itself most blatantly in the “Maximes du mariage” of L'École des femmes, which Arnolphe forces Agnès to read and recite. The education of denial is presented as axiomatic, unswerving, and unassailable, depending on no premises other than the word of the father/ husband/god, just the type of first principles that skeptics abhor. Sextus and his followers would use the first mode of argument to attack such principles, pointing that they are merely conjecture and that opposite views would be at least as good. If proof were offered in support of them, the skeptic would turn the tables, arguing that first principles are supposed to require no ptoof and that any attempts to do so would disqualify them. The defender of this system, since he is too stupid to come up with a supporting argument on the spot, defers discussion and always ends the lesson prematurely. In fact,

the first words of the play represent such a pre-emptive end to the lesson, at Sganarelle tells Ariste, “Mon frère, s’il vous plait, ne discourons point tant : (My brother, please, let’s not debate so much).

By the rhetorical trick of using a disclaimer against discourse, Molière

cues the spectator to the fact that the first act of L'École des maris is very

unique, not only in his canon, but also in that of the entire century. It presents not a development of intrigue but a development of opposing raté

of thought. Sganarelle quickly begins to elaborate this discourse, implying that his brother’s greater age has not given him greater wisdom. For his part,

PNR

30

Chapter Two

Schools of and for Philosophy

Sganarelle has reasoned his way to a superior system of thought. Ironically he admits that the basis of this system is his “fantaisie,” a word loaded with connotation for those aware of its Greek etymology, since it designates thought generated directly from sense perception. Skeptical thinking would say that such “phantastike” is inherently attached to prejudicial opinions and should

be tempered accordingly in order to reach the intellectual freedom of acatalepsia. Yet Sganarelle places himself in diametric opposition to acatalepsia. At Ariste’s suggestion that Sganarelle conform to fashions, one of Sextus’s behavioral guidelines, the protagonist unleashes a devastating and cantakerou s

critique of contemporary foppery. In principle, none of Sganarelle’s points about the silliness of mid-seventeenth-century fashion is untrue. But taken as a whole and put in context, his speech is off the mark. It is a case of the

discrepancy that Jules Brody brilliantly discussed in reference to Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, where Monsieur Jourdain is objectively justified in his opinions,

but wrong in terms of contemporary aesthetic consciousness. One can goa Step further in discussing this, for the error is more than aesthetic in Sganarelle’s case. His rejection of fashion is not limited to a sartorial evaluation per se, as he suggests, but to a much wider network of opinions regarding hierarchy and pleasure. As the debate continues into the second

scene, where

the brothers are

joined by their young wards, Sganarelle once again aligns himself with a con-

cept of right reason, declaring, “Mon Dieu, chacun raisonne et fait comme il

lui plait.” He intends that his girl should live according to his own fantaisie, and not hers, confident that only this claustral upbringing will render her “bien sage.” His primary connotation here is proper behavior, rather than

wisdom,

but the pun reinforces the fact that, for him,

female wisdom

can

only consist in good, submissive conduct, such as patching his underwear or darning his socks. However, within this dogmatic logic lurks the hidden, secret world of suspicious opinion: “Enfin la chair est faible, et j’entends tous les bruits.” The rumor of universal female infidelity haunts and informs his putatively logical dictates. Thus, he always tries to cut off his interlocutors. Ariste barely manages to enunciate a typically skeptical “Il me semble...” before Sganarelle shouts him down. He silences Isabelle with a “Taisez-vo us!”

and Léonor with a “Sans langage!”

Even

as he does so, though,

he tacitly

acknowledges that Léonor represents a different, powerful approach to thought, because she is qualified as “trop sage,” in the sense of “too clever.” Sganarelle claims to express a univocal truth within the household, since he purports to “parler net,” to speak clearly. Yet Léonor evokes the first Agrippan mode of criticism by claiming that his opinion is no better

than hers; she too can speak clearly, and from unconcealed feeling (pathe):

“Voulez-vous que mon cceur vous parle net aussi?” Sganarelle has proposed a

31

series of criteria to govern behavior: 1) social exposure entails corruption; 2) confinement avoids corruption; therefore, 3) confining Isabelle will preserve

her from corruption. Léonor, reasoning like a skeptic in the form of a question (Sextus calls it zetetic definition of the skeptic way), she shows that Sganarelle’s wisdom can easily be turned to foolishness by feminine wiles: Pensez-vous, aprés tout, que ces précautions

Servent de quelque obstacle a nos intentions, Et quand nous nous mettons quelque chose à la tête, Que l’homme le plus fin ne soit pas une bête?

(I, 2, 249-252)

Having mentioned the well-seasoned theatrical oxymoron of the précaution inutile, she evokes another stage tradition, represented by Desmarets de Saint

Sorlin’s famous comedy, Les Visionnaires, by calling Sganarelle’s ideas “visions de fous.” Léonor’s cogent arguments cause Sganarelle to back off from confronting her line of thought, but he refuses to give up the debate, turning to ridicule his brother as a “beau précepteur,” who has inculcated erroneous thinking in his ward. Ariste responds by further probing the link between feelings and truth that Sganarelle has taken for granted. First, he affirms that he agrees with what Léonor has just said, “Elle a quelque raison en ce qu’elle veut dire.” Then, characterizing Sganarelle’s criterion of behavior as an “étrange chose” at odds with custom, he rejects his brother’s over-reliance on Stoical constraint and evokes a line of thought that at least acknowledges the pathe and the appearances associated with it: “En vain sur tous ses pas nous prétendons régner;/Je trouve que le coeur est ce qu’il faut gagner.” It is instructive here to cite Sextus’s description of the skeptical criterion in the first book of the Hypotyposes: “Holding to the appearances, then, we live without beliefs, but in accordance with the ordinary regimen of life, since we cannot be wholly inactive. And the ordinary regimen of life seems to be fourfold: one part has to do with the guidance of nature, another with the compulsion of the pathe, another with the handing

down

of laws and customs,

and a fourth with

instruction in the arts and crafts. (The Skeptic Way, p. 92)

For Ariste, the key to this coherence in life is to use a pleasant, Democritan approach to truth, “en riant instruire la jeunesse.” The Pyrrhonean “maximes” of acceptance are thus the key to discovery: “Et l'école du noms, en l’air dont il faut vivre/Instruit mieux, à mon gré, que ne fait aucun livre.’ This statement implicity echoes what the skeptic Montaigne had said about learning in “the great book of the world,” rather than through abstract sys-

tems of philosophy. The “maximes sévéres” described by his brother, a mixture of dogmatism and Stoicism, are thus personally, though not arbitrarily

32

Chapter Two

Schools of and for Philosophy

rejected by Ariste, lest the children constrained begin to count the days of

knows a mystification has taken place. On the other hand, Sganarelle is so

their fathers. When Sganarelle insists on the necessity of altering the influences of Nature and pathe (“Il faudra changer sa manière de vie”), Ariste falls back on the simplest zetetic question (“Et pourquoi la changer?”), to which

the dogmatic can only answer “Je ne sais.” Sganarelle’s only answer is the fear of cuckoldry, the reversion to the secret world of obscure

ideas supposedly

ruling reality. This occult determinism is evoked by his mention of “mon astre” and “my destiny.” This absconse criterion can only resist skeptical inquiry if it remains secret and unchallenged,

so he forces his ward Isabelle

to retire “pour n’ouir point.” Unbelievers can only be disregarded as “mal apprises,” dunces in the school of dogmatism. Yet it is significant that at the end of the second scene, left alone on stage, he can only apostrophize the spirit of Wisdom in private, acknowledging that his version of truth cannot stand up to skeptical investigation: “Non, la Sagesse méme/N’en viendrait pas a bout, perdrait sens et raison.” Dogmatic reason, failing the test of discourse with skepticism, can only rely on authority to impose itself on an enslaved world, deprived of free thought. By this point the spectator may be ready to concede game, point, and match to Ariste and company, adopting the late nineteenth-century view that Molière simply puts Reason into the mouth of a character chosen as the Reasoner. Nevertheless, the dramatist is far more subtle, and he will remind

his audience throughout the play that the skeptic view is a dynamic one,

opposed

to a priori conclusions.

Thus,

in Act One,

Scene Three,

when

the

young male lover Valère tries to ingratiate himself, Sganarelle replies with a series of brusque replies that ironically embody what Sextus calls the skeptic slogans: “cela se peut... soit... je le crois. c’est bien fait... que m’importe?... si je veux... ce qui me plait.” This is not the last time Molière will use the slo-

gans playfully to remind the spectator of the inherent ambiguity of skeptical thought in the midst of comic imbroglio. The schooling is not finished, for the valet Ergaste invites Valére to take advantage of another type of learning: “Apprenez,

pour avoir votre esprit raffermi,/Qu’une femme

qu’on garde est

gagnée à demi.” The schemer recognizes right away that Sganarelle’s criterion

of precaution is “sans raison ni suite.” The second act will teach Valère if his profers of love have been effective, for as Ergaste realizes, his master can only

win the love of Isabelle if he can master appearances and make his intentions emerge clearly from obscurity.

As it happens, Moliére fashions a gem of dramatic irony, as Sganarelle himself paradoxically delivers the hoped-for avowal of love to his rival, under the false inference that he can drive off all opposition. False politeness on both sides calls attention to this contradiction. Valére can barely believe his ears. The canny Ergaste immediately judges appearances correctly and

33

set in his opinion that he delivers another ironic soliloquy, congratulating himself on the success of his school of thought: Appelons Isabelle. Elle montre le fruit Que l'éducation dans une âme produit: La vertu fait ses soins, et son cœur s'y consomme Jusques à s’offenser des seuls regards d'un homme. (II, 2, 445-448)

In reality, Isabelle’s pathe is quite in line with her thinking and her actions, instead of being stoically sacrificed, and her sentimental education is proceeding apace, while dogmatism has had an effect opposite to its intention, driving her into the arms of Valère. Sganarelle completes the process of ironic informing by telling Isabelle about her beau’s reactions, convincing her that her stratagem

has had the desired effect. He is induced into a further self-

humiliation in delivering Isabelle’s love letter to Valére. She prevents him from opening it by appealing to his commitment to silence and obscurity, for he wishes to deny Valére the pleasure of knowing she may have received

his pledge. To drive home the irony further, she reminds him that one gets a secret pleasure from knowing one’s words are favorably received; of course,

that is just what Sganarelle is assuring by delivering the package to the young man. Sganarelle’s delighted responses reveal that his brand of reasoning has set him up for such a fall: “Certes, elle a raison quand elle parle ainsi...hélas,

tes raisons sont trop bonnes... Dans quel ravissement est-ce que mon coeur nage,/Lorsque je vois en elle une fille si sage!”

The love lettre produces a somewhat unusual reaction on the part of the seducer. Unlike many lovers in parallel situations, who can only drool with pleasure over the physical attributes of the women they are about to copies Valère and Ergaste express their admiration for the development of 156 0163 intelligence. Ergaste concedes, “Pour une jeune fille, elle n'en sait pas mal! Valère points out that “Ce trait de son esprit et de son amitié/Accroît pour elle encor mon amour de moitié.” Thought and pathe are working hand in hand for both the young lovers, while Sganarelle's dogmatism leads him deeper and deeper into a cuckoldry far greater than in the previous play, for here it is not imagined. He is so blinded by his opinion that, when Valère arranges for him to deliver a response cloaked as a farewell, he undertakes to teach his lessons to the young man, as well: “... si vous me croyez, tachez de

faire en sorte/Que de votre cerveau cette passion sorte.” Sganarelle feels the ‘abe criterion of sense denial can work for anyone. When Sganarelle delivers the reassuring message of Valére’s love to Isabelle, she confirms in an a parte that she has correctly judged the ap-

34

Chapter Two

pearances: “Ses feux ne trompent point ma secrète croyance/Et , toujours ses regards m’en ont dit l'innocence.” In contrast, Sganarelle is so completely deceived by his own runaway feelings, revealed in his constant references to “mon cœur,” that even when he arranges for the two lovers to meet,

thinking to provoke a definitive rejection on the part of Isabelle, he cannot

perceive the obvious appearances of mutual attraction in both the literal text of their speech and their implicit reactions. His unreason has reached the point where he becomes susceptible not merely to being tricked by the senses, against which both Cartesian and skeptical method warn, but to tricking his own senses into accepting untruth. Thus, by the beginning of Act Three, Sganarelle has lost the theoretical

debate in Act One and the practical application of its ideas in Act Two. It only

remains for him to trick himself by delivering Isabelle into Valére’s waiting hands. In effect, he not only becomes a cuckold, but cuckolds himself. This

is possible because of an extension of his dogmatic logic from Isabelle to Léonor. He assumes 1) that Isabelle has given proof of her indoctrination in

his method; 2) Léonor has been raised with contrasting methods, which will

yield a contrasting result and therefore, 3) that Léonor will be unfaithful at the first opportunity, thus proving that Sganarelle was right all along. The dogmatic craves proof to uphold his lengthening chain of inferences. Conversely, the skeptic warns against the temptation of proof, which is almost always illusory. Before dissecting the faults of syllogisms in Book Two of the Hypotyposes, Sextus devotes one of his most extensive sections to the in-

herent problems of proofs, even beginning with such simple and apparently obvious premises as “If it is day, then it is light.” Skeptical analysis hinges on the lack of simultaneous connectedness between propositions in a proof. He completes his demonstration by reducing dogmatic procedures to the following absurd set of statements: If there is a proof, there is a proof.

If there is no proof, there is a proof. Either there is a proof or there is no proof.

Therefore, there is a proof.

(The Skeptic Way, pp. 148-158)

In seeking to prove that he is right, Sganarelle must prove that Ariste is wrong, and for Ariste to be wrong, Léonor must deceive him; therefore, by helping Léonor deceive Ariste, Sganarelle is ensuring that he is proven right. Beware of circular logic! So states the fifth Agrippan mode. Moliére ingeniously shows that Sganarelle is wrong both through formal analysis and through the practical matter of judging appearances. The girls have only to substitute Isabelle for Léonor beneath a cloak (for right Reason dictates that

Schools of and for Philosophy an unfaithful woman

35

must cover herself up) to complete the process of liber-

ation. Sganarelle could have from the girl, but by doing and inference he has built right, he must prove himself

dismantled the whole plot by lifting the mantel so he would negate the whole process of reason up during the course of the play. To be proven wrong, if necessary. We can almost imagine him

shouting, as Alceste later will, “J’enrage d’avoir tort lorsque j'ai raison!” This flawed lesson plan shows that the dramatist, in true skeptical fashion, exposes the putative truths of Sganarelle as leading to unending selfcontradiction. In his haste to refute his brother’s indulgent ways, Sganarelle misjudges appearances at almost every turn because of the narrowness of

his imposed first principles: the superiority of male authority and the inherent infidelity of the liberated woman. He personally becomes a willing accomplice to the elopement of his ward with her sweetheart, destroying his own marital aspirations and giving gain de cause to his brother Ariste in their dispute over social education. Opinions antithetical to Sganarelle’s, the inferiority of male hegemony and the reasonableness of the liberated female, are shown to be not only equal, but better than his, thus returning to the first

Agrippan mode of skepticism. L'École des maris having laid the groundwork in many ways for greater

things, Moliére would move on to his extraordinary string of five-act comedies: L’Ecole des femmes, Tartuffe, Dom Juan, Le Misanthrope. Simultaneously,

he would continue to develop the second great strand of his theatrical innovation, the comédie-ballet, blending drama with music and dance to produce multi-dimensional forms of spectacle. The two strands would find a very harmonious union in two major plays of his last period, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire. But he had not quite finished with the character of Sganarelle or his logical and epistemological conundrums. In one of the experimental comédies-ballets, he places another avatar of Sganarelle in juxtaposition with two of only three professional philosophers depicted

in his work (the other being Monsieur Jourdain’s philosophy teacher in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme). The two philosophers of Le Mariage forcé, Pancrace and Marphurius, revive the concerns of skepticism in a most interesting

context. Neither the Aristotelian Pancrace, nor the apparent Pyrrhonist MarPhurius comes off looking very positive. Pancrace and Marphurius are so dogmatic and impractical in their advice to the confused Sganarelle that he becomes infuriated with both and chases them from the stage after they

utter only a few lines of drivel. This is scarcely a respectable attitude to the science of thought as it existed in his time. Moreover, amateur philosophers do not fare any better under the playwright’s microscope. Almost anyone who lays claim to the title of philosopher, from the bully Arnolphe in L’Ecole

Chapter Two

Schools of and for Philosophy

des femmes to Philaminte’s feminine coterie in Les Femmes savantes, is rudely

to Dorimène’s family, and he is too cowardly to take up a point of honor with her bullying brother Alcidas. Here we must ask ourselves if Marphurius is really a Pyrrhonist or if Moliére, in one of his typical dramatic illusions, is not presenting a false spectre of skepticism. A true Pyrrhonist should, after all, be willing to accept the appearance that Sganarelle is present, without such quibbling, especially since there is no secondary conclusion to be drawn. While giving lip service

36

lambasted for his presumptuousness. Given Moliére’s already evident inclination toward skepticism, however, one is a bit surprised to find that the Pyrrhonist Marphurius comes off at least as ridiculously as his Aristotelian enemy. Pyrrhonists typically rejected other philosophical approaches as lacking in practicality. They themselves could fall into the same trap, as Sganarelle finds when he consults Marphurius in Scene 5. Marphurius begins on a ridiculous note, by contesting the

proposition Sganarelle has just uttered by way of explanation: “je suis venu ici.” The philosopher gives a brief capsule of the notion of epoche, as well as the Gassendian approach to appearances when he explains: Changez, s’il vous plait, cette façon de parler. Notre philosophie ordonne de ne point énoncer de proposition décisive, de parler de tout avec incertitude, de suspendre toujours son jugement, et, par cette raison, vous ne devez pas dire: ‘Je suis venu’; mais: ‘Il me semble que je suis venu’...il peut vous sembler, sans que la chose soit véritable.” When Marphurius concedes that, at most, it does seem to him that Sganarelle

is there, the bourgeois goes on to explain his intention of getting advice on whether or not to marry. To this, the philosopher responds with a maddening

37

to the suspension of judgment, Marphurius is forgetting the goal of ataraxia

that underlies it. In fact, he is doing the opposite by provoking social friction. Marphurius’s dogmatism suggests that is not really a follower of Sextus, but rather an adherent of Academic Skepticism. He is, in fact, a faux pyrrhonien. Could Moliére be laughing at the very philosophy he espoused, taken to the extreme? Surely this seems to be the case, and it would not conflict with the dramatist’s ability to laugh at himself in other situations. Through this reductio ad absurdum in Le Mariage forcé, Moliére is not so much rejecting the

elegance of Pyrrhonist epistemology as seeking to ground it in a certain notion of common

sense, an idea that La Mothe Le Vayer also took up in one

of his dialogues. Moliére never espoused universal doubt, but like Gassendi, Charron, and La Mothe, sought a mitigated form of Pyrrhonism that would be compatible with practical applications and Christian faith.

series of noncommittal answers: “Je n’en sais rien; il peut se faire; il n’est pas impossible; l’un ou l’autre; selon la rencontre; par aventure; cela peut être, il

But Moliére’s skepticism had another, more formal grounding than le bon sens bourgeois, for its epistemological deferral was joined to a powerful ethical

vous plaira, je m’en lave les mains, il en sera ce qui pourra” (I don’t know; it could happen; it’s not impossible; it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other; according to the case; as chance will have it; it could be; that might be possible; that’s doable; there’s nothing to prevent it; I don’t know; whatever you will; I wash my hands of it; what will be, will be). Such wishy-washy

by Sextus Empiricus himself, for he lists as one of four ground rules for the

se pourrait, la chose est faisable; il n'y a pas d’impossibilité; je ne sais, ce qui

replies to the impending horror of cuckoldry finally drive Sganarelle to turn the tables and beat his advisor. When Marphurius complains, Sganarelle shows that he has been at the school of skepticism long enough to learn some vocabulary himself: “Corrigez, s’il vous plaît, cette manière de parler. Il faut douter de toutes choses, et vous ne devez pas dire que je vous ai battu, mais qu’il vous semble que je vous ai battu” (Please correct your manner of

speaking. You must doubt everything and, rather than saying, “You beat me

up,” say “It seems to me that you beat me up.”) When Marphurius threatens

to file a complaint with the police, Sganarelle goes on to turn each of his vague replies against him in the manner of railing rhymes. Of course, this quick course in philosophy does not save Sganarelle from the dreaded fate, for he has already given in to a combination of pathe (unregulated feeling) and phantastike (unregulated thought). He has made an irrevocable promise

tendency toward Epicurean thought. This fusion is suggested to some extent skeptic way that it respect Nature. It was the Epicurean Lucretius who delved

profoundly into the relation between the four levels of aestheseis (sensation),

prolepseis (concept), pathe (feelings) and phantastike (flights of the imagination). One perceives a clear expression of these thoughts in Eliante’s speech in Le Misanthrope where she parrots De Rerum natura by explaining how

lovers’ emotional inclinations (pathe) skew their perceptions (aestheseis) of the objects of desire, turning blemishes into beauty marks and defects into perfection.

Chapter Three L'École des femmes: The Awakening of Feeling and the Paradox of Consciousness This was the play that really established Molière in the public eye as a dramatic author of importance. When he returned to Paris from his long tour of the provinces in 1658, he had already published two Italian-style comedies

in five acts, L’étourdi and Dépit amoureux. There is evidence that he had also compiled a stock of farce material based on existing French and Italian stage tradition, such as La Jalousie du Barbouillé and Le Médecin volant, whose manuscripts were not discovered until the eighteenth century. The Régistre

carefully kept by Moliére’s leading man Lagrange lists several other lost farces Moliére either composed or adapted. Some of these would be recycled into material for longer plays. Just as La Jalousie du Barbouillé supplied scenes for George Dandin and Le Médecin volant for Le Malade imaginaire, it has been suggested that Le Grand Benét de Fils Aussi Sot que Son Père may have also con-

tributed to the latter comedy, and that Gorgibus dans le Sac almost certainly prefigured the memorable beating-in-a-sack scene in Les Fourberies de Scapin.

The dramaturgical innovation in such early short plays as Les Précieuses ridicules, Le Cocu imaginaire, ou Sganarelle, and L’Ecole des maris established Molière as a force to be reckoned with by such rivals as Jean Chevalier, who

quickly began to imitate features of his work. While these shorter plays gave hints of Moliére’s ability to bring a more serious analytical dimension to the comedy of his time, it was his first five-act play in a new French manner, L'École des Femmes, that really proved the power of his comic theater. A huge commercial and critical success that had all Paris buzzing, it also inevitably stirred a great amount of controversy and a bitter and increasingly personal polemic within the stage world. L'École des femmes centers around the contradictions of love’s emotional context, the fact that powerful desire springing from within the individual

corresponds neither to the ability to express such desire on the exterior social level nor to the propensity of the object of love to respond in kind. Love is neither completely appearance nor completely inner being, but a confusing blend of the two. It depends on a superficial stimulus that can easily be

40

Chapter Three

L'École des femmes

deceiving, but that elusive stimulus is ironically its most reliable touchstone of authenticity. Like the Italian-style comedies before it, L'École des femmes is about obstacles, but the stress here, perhaps for the first time in seventeenthcentury comedy, shifts fully from exterior obstacles to interior ones, as Arnolphe’s ruses and traps, foolproof in theory, fail with the predicable regularity of Wile E. Coyote’s equally rational devices ordered from the Acme Company

Nevertheless, despite the display of so much raw emotion, the word “feelings” can only be applied to Arnolphe with the greatest difficulty. Not only

catalogue.

What

is new

what does manage

in this play is that the spectator gets a glimpse of

to succeed: the nascent emotional

must always prevail over imposed schemes and plots.

consciousness that

Arnolphe, the protagonist, is full of feeling, so full he could practically pop. Despite his facade of prudishness, he eventually declares to Agnés, the object of his passion, “111 fill you up, I’ll cover you with kisses, I’ll eat you up!” finally exclaiming, “How far can passion make me go?” In vain

he pinches himself, constrains himself, recites his alphabet to restore his patience (following the advice of Athenodorus the Stoic to the emperor

Augustus). His emotions are always on the point of bursting out. In propitious moments, it is his satirical joy that imposes itself, as he undertakes

to correct

his

many

fellow

countrymen

who

are cuckolds,

lashing

them

verbally for their complacency and cowardice. This happiness is based on a frank sentiment of superiority, as in the first scene of the play, where he lambastes poor Chrysalde, or at the beginning of Act Three, when the obvious distress of his young adversaries causes him to cry out, “My joy knows no bounds!” But this overwhelmingly sanguine self-content gives way quickly to frustration and anger. Already in the second scene of the play, when his

lingering servants make him wait on the doorstep of the house where they are guarding Agnès (truly a “safe house” in terms of Arnolphe’s secret intelligence system), Arnolphe can scarcely contain his rage and he remarks to

himself, “Now in these situations I must give proof of my serene mind!” But

this patience is not long-lasting and ataraxia escapes him, for moments after

learning from Horace that the young man has already succeeded in speaking

41

is this ultra-jealous martinet incapable of eliciting the abject faith and ado-

ration he demands from others, but he is also unable to discern the hopes,

the yearning, the weaknesses, and the affinities hidden in the breasts of his

neighbors. Agnés quickly admits the superiority of Horace when it comes to

sensitivity: “Truly he knows more about it than you, for he can make me love

him effortlessly.” This crisis of emotion, as it appears in Arnolphe, underlines the phenomenological complexity of Moliére’s theater. In these dramas, the awakening of sentiment in the loving couple is closely linked to the problem of the paradox of consciousness. Despite the fact that feelings seem to be born and

nurtured in the individual consciousness, one needs others (or an Other) for

the feelings to take place. The individual needs company in order to im how to feel. As Max Vernet states, “One is only really oneself in society. This pithy notion acts and reacts on several different dramatic levels. First of all, the terms consciousness and conscience appear to be closely linked in meaning; one presupposes the other, with all the accompanying moral and psychological associations. A subjective doubling takes place, both on the axis of the Self and the Other, and on that of the individual perceived

by himself. In both cases, there takes place a psychic reconstruction of surrounding individuals, where the Self imagines itself in the place of a singular or plural Other. From the earliest steps, the sense of selfhood goes hand in i hand with knowledge of the important Ones in one’s vicinity. On another level, Arnolphe is the first of Molière's monomaniacs ἴο attempt to set up what the skeptics would term an unacceptable set us reciprocal proofs. From the premise “Arnolphe desires Agnès,” he deduces Agnès will oblige and obey Arnolphe.” Of course, he had already chosen this girl from among all eligible parties for marriage specifically because she is supposed to be the one female dumb enough to allow no chance of cuckoldry.

in an angry aside, “Oh, I could just

Her counter-education in submissive obscurity was designed as a self-fulfilling prophecy: because “Agnès will oblige and obey Arnolphe,” therefore

again. The stupidity of the servants Alain and Georgette reduces him almost

this reasoning is false, since a proposition cannot serve vi its own premise:

with his sequestered ward, he murmurs

burst!” Actually he alternately rages and bursts with emotion

again and

to the state of a wild man: “Ouf! I’m so mortified I can hardly speak! I’m so stifled I could tear my clothes off!” This fury, which one could expect from

a charging gorilla or a vicious cave man, frightens the servants so much that

they are worried he is literally going to devour them. As it passes, it leaves him in a state of profound exhaustion and debility, as though he has had a heart attack. “I’m covered with sweat. Let’s stop for a little breath of air. I’ve

got to cool down and walk back and forth a bit.”

“Arnolphe desires Agnés.” Sextus, Charron, or Gassendi would point out that

This type of demonstration by reciprocity shows that Molière Was as familiar with the second Agrippan mode of skepticism as he was with the first. With this in mind, let us attempt to seize the differences between Ar nolphe’s emotional character and that of the young lovers. One realizes quite quickly that Arnolphe has spared no pains in trying to pre-arrange all the possible outcomes

in his little world. Having spent

twenty ri

contemplating from the standpoint of wise philosophy that sad destiny tha

42

Chapter Three

L'École des femmes

awaits most husbands,” and striven to “learn from the misfortunes that make

even the most prudent of them fall into disgrace,” he thinks he has finally invented the means to guarantee himself against even the tiniest possibility

of marital failure. He has been busy taking names and adding up the sums of cuckoldry, and now, absolutely confident in his rationa lism and in his powers

of omniscience

and

prediction,

he is convinced

he is in the posi-

tion to reduce all the Protean forms of sentiment into “a lump of wax to be

molded in my hands.”

This ruthless will to power is entirely absent in lovers. Asked to explain her unpredictable feelings, I help myself?” unable to find a reasonable motive for Horace, his first descriptions of “this young star

the minds of the young Agnès cries, “How can for her inclinations. As of love” emphasize the

involuntary nature of his passion. He finds Agnés is endowed

with sublime

charms, “a totally ravishing appearance, a tender je ne sais quoi that renders any heart defenseless.” He acknowledges that, without the merest hint of “intelligence,” preparation, or artifice on either part, he is engaged by Agnés’s

being. The on-stage account given by Agnès of their first acquaintance, with

a veritable battle of bowing and politeness between the two, recalls Pierre Corneille’s

tragedies

of the

previous

generation,

where

characters

sought

continually to outdo each other in shows of bravery and magnanimity. It also innocently prefigures and announces the symmetrical coupling of the sexual act itself, rather like the courtship dances of some types of birds, but different in that it appears to be totally spontaneous: if the genes are talking here, they are doing it in the most subtle of whispers. Resounding to this same urgent and obligatory note, Agnés’s consent to cure Horace of the “mortal wound” he had received from her “without her thinking of it” provides for a reward so

pleasant and surprising that she cannot discern its sources or its limits: “I feel

some kind of sweet ticklishness down there, moving ... some what-you-call-it that has me all excited.” How better to describe the sudden awareness of the

necessary Other? Getting to know

each other, and themselves,

Horace and

Agnés cannot fathom the causes and effects of what they are experiencing, but are acutely aware of the immense mystery that they have opened up.

Whereas Arnolphe, proud of his all-knowing (know-it-all) reason, studies

the behavior of his neighbors from a sage distance and remains removed and Clinically sterilized from the feelings that push them to their often ludicrous extremes, a would-be scientist seeking to profit from the anguish of the creatures that he sagely sorts and categorizes, the youngsters throw themselves

to the caprices of chance under the impulse of unfettered altruism. Horace will do anything, risk anything to deliver Agnés from her captivity, and she

will refuse nothing to assure that he is “cured.” In this pivotal comedy that

seems to predict the primary conflicts of the Age of Reason, it is the reason-

43

able Arnolphe who seems to hold all the trumps. He has, after all, devoted his life to the most serious observation of the behavior of others with a view to benefiting from their mistakes. Without ever falling victim to the Little God, whose arrows he has notably deflected several times when marriages were proposed, he thinks he has reduced human intercourse to a series of abstract equations to which he alone holds the key, and he eus to apply his cars very scientifically and despotically to his own marital happiness. mure or to these cynical principles, a young man as handsome as Horace is “made to make cuckolds” and a girl as winsome as Agnés can only conserve her honor - or rather, that of her husband - is she is withdrawn completely from normal civil commerce.

Founded

on rock-ribbed materialism, the universal

laws represent for Arnolphe a kind of pure conscipushess which enables infallible predictions (Horace will seduce women) and efficient ‘precautions (Agnés will never be seduced if she is kept in stupidity and isolation). What strikes one most about all of Arnolphe’s ideas is that theyrare so prefabricated, so “ready-to-think.” Forbidden from adjustment to individual tastes, his assessments are all “off the rack” and his thoughts a kind of mental fast food, where one can never hold the pickle. Predict, preview, precaution,

prevention — the very linguistic qualities of these nouns and verbs betray Arnolphe’s effort to anticipate life through experiencing aR: advance in his little cerebral realm. Having reduced the whole of existence to a nice, flat graph where everything can be plotted on the axes of pleasure and ne dominance and submission, Arnolphe thinks he can protect

himself ge

any negative outcome by following his own rules. Little 4065 it matter to + if the life that results is only half a life, if the overlay of private over public strangles human relations, if the preponderance of ‘lurid fantasy et

and kills the imagination. That is nothing in comparisan with what himself gaining, namely, a strategy of irresistible victory» He will —

a plan, where his opponents have none. Perhaps he is right, perche

he —

on

sa

hi

materialistic Gibraltar, to call himself a righteous philosopher, against whom

the young and the restless have no logical chance of triumph. ae But why then does this man both superior and primitive, ᾿ e the = scienceless hunters described in Rousseau’s “Second Discourse” and in : Social Contract, find it so difficult to describe and to express ints emotions?

“Oh, me, how I suffered during that conversation!” he exclaims after Horace’s description of his first meeting with Agnès. He admits in an aside that he “was tormented like the damned” while listening to the young lady ae her version of the events. “What a torture to hide my burning rage — I m on the rack, I’m furious!” he cries when he hears in the third act that his “schoolgirl” has contrived to send a billet doux attached to a rock Le = at her admirer. And why, after all, does he try to shut up this anger, why doe

Chapter Three

L'École des femmes

he insist on listening to these mortifying accounts “without disclosing his pain,” when a single word would have warned Horace of his erstwhile claims and probably sent the helpless fellow reeling in retreat? The answer touches, for one thing, on Arnolphe’s double being, for this sociopath’s presumptions have led him ironically to establish two formal identities, as the waspish commoner Arnolphe and the irreproachable nobleman Monsieur de la Souche (literally and unflatteringly translated as “Milord Stump,” though one must also take into account that the French phrase faire souche means to set up a household). Horace only knows Agnés’s captor by the latter name, and by unveiling the connection, Arnolphe risks making public not only Milord’s ignoble origins, but also his sexual uncertainties. But apart from these hesita-

In French, the pronominal verb s'aimer is usually expressed in ἃ reciprocal rather than a reflexive sense, “loving each other” rather than loving

44

tions of a social and legal nature, there exists a further motive that relates to

the character’s psychological paradoxes, for he cannot permit himself the slightest external admission of distress without destabilizing the whole of his system of thought: “Actually if the overwhelming trouble that gnaws at my heart had not completely succeeded in hiding from his eyes, it would have made my devouring pain explode.” Thus the persistence of outward respect for civil proprieties gives rise to great comic enjoyment for the audience. Reversing the roles of afflicted dupe and sarcastic observer that Arnolphe himself had established in the first scene, as he criticized Chrysalde, the spectators are treated to redoubled laughter at the protagonist’s discomfiture and at this thundering voice that must meekly stifle itself. More at ease and better informed than Horace confined in the closet in Act Four, Scene Six, they are

able to fully comprehend the powerlessness that forces Arnolphe to focus his anger On smashing the china cabinet, and they grasp the wasted violence that he sacrifices to the gods of silence. It is increasingly clear during the progress of the play that the great advantage Arnolphe claimed over his rivals in terms of well-ordered and philosophical thought is really worth next to nothing to him, since jealousy hopelessly short-circuits his amorous imagination. His systematic campaign of precaution, that sought to preview and pre-live every eventuality blinds him to the element of surprise which, in this imperfect life, is always lurking

around the next corner. Self-deprived of contact with the changeable and contingent conditions of social living, Arnolphe’s machine-like emotions turn on themselves, creating the ridiculous desire for self-punishment, at first symobolic but then more and more physical, which express themselves in the third act, as the budding masochist chides himself yet again: “Fool, aren’t you ashamed? Oh, I’m so angry I could burst! I feel like punching myself in the nose” Aborted feelings degenerate and transform themselves into pure resentment in an uncontrollable affective reflex, in what Max Vernet calls “a

kind of philautia of the faculty of knowledge” (202).

45

oneself,” but for Arnolphe self-love becomes more and more attractive as an alternative, since it seems to entail so few risks, compared to interpersonal

emotions. As Vernet has pointed out, this charming fellow is similar to 30 many other Molière monomaniacs because he wants ἴο “play the game ΜΠ insuring himself against any chance of loss”. One notices for example the lin between Arnolphe and Monsieur Jourdain in le Bourgeois gentilhomme, who thinks that his fencing lessons will allow him to fight in duels without any

risk of being killed. The two men believe that they find in abstract knowledge the key to avoiding the vulnerability inherent to the honorable oe that they aspire to, namely those of gentleman and irreproachable husban ; Yet they fail to grasp that no abstract knowledge is useful without the arncxàlating qualities, which can here be called grace foe vo of another word, that permit it to be applied in the real world. In a similar manner, Dom μὰ seeks to couple continually and irresponsibly with a series of interchangeable women who constitute for him a single inexhaustible Virgin, Harpagon seeks to marry off children without dowries, and Céliméne’s guests try to se everyone else without having to endure criticism themselves. The sexual, “ nancial, and aesthetic abstractions of Moliére’s other plays resound with this same off-key note, which the Music Master of le Bourgeois gentilhomme would

all a lack of harmonic sense. Moliére’s in εποουπίειοα solipsism and paradoxical PTOÌ;ÎÌÌ;LY one monomaniacs surpasses even the limits of the traditional “dramaturgy τ

: oxymoron,” as Max Vernet calls it. Obviously, the bourgeois gentleman, "

amorous grouch, and the high-born courtier with gutter behavior take ἡ leir place in the seventeenth century with such familiar figures as the living dead, seducers of their own wives, tricksters tricked, and other such reset

τε: who frequented the stage during that period. But beyond the superficia , antonomasia of device rhetorical the by semblance, which is so often backed ad aware only not are they that is what goes on to typify Moliére’s characters ὃ Ἐν they that but themselves, find they which in the paradoxical situations parado with associated power and wisdom the appropriate for themselves pen example, Arnolphe has always appreciated the irony of his fellow θην ghers who amass wealth only to have their wives spend at on their frivolous lovers, a case he describes among other domestic foibles in his marie with Chrysalde at the opening of Act One. Strengthened, he thinks, à studies, his notes, and his logic, he designs his idealized marital relationship with Agnès specifically in terms of a paradox: “Epouser une us sr _

n’étre point sot” (82). “One weds a fool to avoid becoming foolish”

does n

2= |

Chapter Three

L'École des femmes

quite pick up all the nuances of the French, for sot means not only a fool, but

inanimate, erotic sculpture). But another of Moliére’s characters, Dom Juan,

46

a victim, and for Arnolphe the ultimate victim is the cuckold. In this sense,

he tries to transform the paradoxical entanglement

a strictly transitive and agressive action,

“one

with foolishness into

victimizes another

to avoid

being a victim.” But foolishness is like the Tar Baby in Joel Chandler Harris’s

Brer Rabbitt tale: one cannot touch it, force it, “mess with it,” “fool around

with it,” without succombing to its adhering, enveloping qualities, and soon one is properly immobilized. Nevertheless, Arnolphe did not simply stumble across his paradoxical

marriage method. As Ronald Tobin has pointed out, his formula suggests a certain amount of literary investigation into the matter, since many in the

audience would have picked up the allusion to Rabelais’s Third Book, where

Pantagruel and Panurge discuss the matter in depth during their debate on marriage. Tobin goes on to mention the complementary paradoxes in Arnolphe’s odd “pillow book,” the Maximes du mariage, which contains among

other gems the adage that “to truly please her husband, a good wife should

please no one at all!” This maxim

is made all the more ludicrous when one

considers that Arnolphe, horny as he seems to be, does not consider himself to be included in the pronoun “no one!” He does not realize that he desires

the impossible

(or at least totally impractical), which

is a wife who

will al-

ways be a virgin. How could a man is such need of a healthy outlet for his “bursting” emotions ever come up with so bizarre a contradiction? Essentially, it is because he intends to refuse his wife-to-be the least knowledge of the sexual act, thus locking her up in a symbolic virginity to which he alone will have access when he wants it. No wonder why, during the reading of the Maxims of Marriage, he “puts off till later” any description of physical possession. Within the secrecy of the married couple, Arnolphe will then have all delectation of

sexuality completely to himself. He will make

it into his own

little private

joke, as he suggests to Agnés, complaining about the fleas in her bed, “Aha!

you'll soon have someone to chase them away!”

(I, 3, 237) - a line that we

can only imagine accompanied with a sort of snickering laughter. When the girl innocently replies, “You will make me happy,” her guardian answers “Je le puis bien penser,” a statement that could on one level be translated by an

ambiguous rejoinder such as “Yet bet!”, but which is completely in the first

person in French, emphasizing Arnolphe’s intention of keeping all enjoyment of pleasure in his own mind. He intends to double his fun by repressing

any fun Agnés could derive from their union, rather like a creditor devouring

the wealth of his debtor. With a monopoly on sexual joy, he will reduce his partner to the status of a pornographic puppet (which lends a certain lewdness to his favorite image of her as “a lump of wax in my hands,” a bit of

47

could perhaps have warned Arnolphe about sculptures, which are sometimes more animated and more dangerous than they seem. Certainly, the plans of this provincial upstart lack the range of the great seducer’s visions, which contemplate the pleasures of deflowering campaign unlimited by earthly geography or even interplanetary space! But, at bottom, the reasoned fantasies that both men try to project on reality are not so different, since they both involve the same idealized Virgin, unknowing victim of their desires, a fleeting dream appropriate to an Age of Absolutism that was trying to free

itself of the contingencies of ordinary life. For their part, the young lovers are serendipitously conscious of the fundamental paradox of interpersonal relations: that one needs others to truly feel and to express oneself. As the primary organs of reciprocal activity, the eyes reveal a capacity both to sense and to express simultaneously. Τα is why Arnolphe is so afraid to look other people in the eyes (consider his repeated excuses on this matter to Horace) or to have others look af him. The

famous “Là, regardez-moi là” (“Here, focus your eyes here,” pointing to his forehead) that opens the Maxims sequence betrays this same horror of visual confrontation that one normally associates with tragic figures, such as Racine’s Phaedra or Nero. By fixing Agnés’ eyes on the point that Arnolphe considers his strongest, the forehead, opaque throne of his philosophy, he never imagines that he provokes the spectators’ laughter, for this supposed bulwark is actually his weak point, and the audience can perhaps already imagine

sprouting there the horns of the cuckold. (It is worth remembering, too, that Athena, the idealized Virgin divinity of the Greeks, sprang fully armed from Zeus’s forehead). In the sermonette which precedes the reading of the

Maxims, Arnolphe specifically prohibits any wife from looking her Heed

directly in the eyes, unless she is authorized by his smile of approval, when he graciously makes her a present of a sweet look.” Young studs like Horace, who let themselves be wounded or charmed by the eyes, are in this regard

no better than “éventés,” of which a good American synonym is “airheads” - those whose crania are open to the breeze, instead of being soenpleasly impenetrable like Arnolphe’s. The Maxims’ explicit reference to being “hit in the eyes” shows that neither Horace’s complaints about being wounded nor the healing powers of Agnés’s presence can be taken in a purely figura-

tive sense. When the young lady says that Horace “lost his illness as soon as

I saw him,” the only one who misinterprets this sentence in a vulgar way is Arnolphe. The reciprocity of loving sight permits the young lovers to cross over the boundaries of individual experience. On the other hand, to quote Max Vernet, “to see poorly is to be alone... mutual recognition reestablishes couples” (229).

48

Chapter Three

Arnolphe’s pince sans rire personality, in contrast with the young lovers’ adaptability to each other, evokes an important area of philosophical inquiry into laughter and performing in the early seventeenth century. In his critiques of both the Aristotelians and Descartes, Gassendi discussed the faculty of laughter as a measure of human rationality, since it had often been cited by philosophers as one of the sole actions that distinguishes humans from animals. The difference between human laughter and the braying of a horse was considered an important proof of innateness. But Gassendi brilliantly

points out that such distinctions, made by human observers, are necessary contingent on the context of outer behavior and can only give at best an

approximate estimate of inner intention, thus making judgment depend on perceived absence rather than on what is. Such restrictions tend to limit human control over the system of differences to a great extent (Kroll 125). Rather than simply observing clear standards of meaning in the external

world, human

life becomes

“a matter of learning to negotiate and interpret

external forms or operations” (Kroll 128). This is precisely what the young lovers achieve throughout their courtship. The understanding that action is an image of the nature of a being and that language will distinguish that being from an irrational animal is central to the emotional education embodied in the play. Words, too, must be appreciated and apprehended not as direct references to reality, but as a system of acting that requires mature interpretation (Kroll 129). Moreover, Gassendian notions of language neces-

sitate “the activity of assent or dissent,” through a process that Kroll likens

to the physics of Epicurean atomism, with its concept of physical bodies

moving freely in a void (130). This notion of language based on choice and

free movement obviously contradicts the deterministic idea of language that Arnolphe demonstrates. The Gassendian concept of language and acting dovetails perfectly with the actions or restrictions of Moliére’s characters in

L'École des femmes.

In the long run, the paradox of amorous consciousness gives rise to lasting

relationships and sets up the denouement of the play by exercising a sort of

involuntary and decisive grace over the lovers, not unlike Pascal’s notion of la grace efficace. Under its influence, Horace abandons the materialism of the

seducer and puts no more faith in the artificial power of gold, “that sweet

metal causes so many heads to fall, in love as in war” (I, 4, 347-8). Instead he

places himself under the sign of Nature, paraphrasing Lucretius to describe it as a great master who teaches its pupils all they need to know, for the birth of passion has already affected great changes, not only in his beloved, but also in himself. It is the “great master” Nature, impervious to rationalist theories, that transforms the naive child into a feeling woman, and makes her into a good writer in the process, for he has just received her missive tied to a rock!

L'École des femmes

49

It is significant that the spectator does not see the loving pair together until Act Five, Scene Three, hearing, up until that moment,

only individual testi-

mony about their emotional development. When we finally see the couple, it is evident that their destinies are already intertwined. The reciprocity of politeness has led to an exchange of love vows. Agnès says, “When I don’t see you, I’m not happy.” Horace responds, “Away from your presence, I am equally sad.” There is nothing elegant or contrived about these statements because they spring from the urgings of simplicity-loving Nature. As plainspoken as it is, this exchange risks becoming a kind of contest, perhaps maybe even one of Moliére’s trademark dépit amoureux scenes, where the individual

lovers’ insistence on the strength of their own passions leads to a quarrel over which one loves better. This is because love’s flame, to burn bright, needs a steady supply of its combustible, which is the mutual expression of feelings. Without this continual replenishing, the imagination becomes stifled by the over-contemplation of what was once felt and is no more, the “could have, would have, should have” of sentiment. By nature love depends on a renewal of images, which are overwhelmingly visual. The youngsters’ advantage lies not in the pressure of the flesh, so often evoked by Arnolphe and represented by him physically in scene 3, as the putative accomplice hides his face in his cloak and pushes the lovers irresistably apart. Rather, it is the freshness of their imaginations, which remain still uncorroded by the notions of fraud, deception, and failure that preoccupy Arnolphe and his ilk. Despite the anguish of separation which makes Agnès suffer so in the following scene, after Horace leaves, she prooves in the dialogue with her persecutor that the image, the “object” of her love stays foremost in her thoughts, and actually becomes stronger in the face of repression. Arnolphe

even

more

blatantly works against his own

interests by pre-

tending to confide in young Horace, only to be forced time and again to hear

first-hand accounts of how the lovers met and wooed each other, despite all

his precautions. His case, like that of Sganarelle in L'École des maris shows

that tyrants richly

deserve

the fate of cuckoldry

which

they

had

sought

desperately to avoid. Tacitly conceding to this conclusion, Arnolphe finally abandons all he had professed to believe in by Act V, groveling before Agnès in a humiliating attempt to produce the pleasure he had previously renounced. His self-refutation is even more abject than Sganarelle’s, heralding that of George Dandin in years to come. Of course, both Sganarelle and Arnolphe are also acting in contradiction to nature, which Horace reminds

us is the actual teacher in this class. If L'École des maris is a well-crafted philsosophical miniature, L’Ecole des femmes is a grand portrait where Moliére permits himself his first great explorations in the deeper kind of dramatic paradox, showing that the awakening of feelings revolves not around the

50

Chapter Three

éblouissement of one’s own emotions, but rather around one’s sensitivi ty to the emotions of others. Arnolphe is forced to admit the failure of his attempt to usurp the power of paradox. Having tried to turn the tables by transforming the instant of liberation into the beginning of harsher captivity, he fails to break the spirit of his victim. He recognizes that “a foolish girl knows more about it than

the cleverest man.”

Finally closing his School

for Wives

and

preparing to

force Agnés into a convent that will not only observe the rules of his penal system, but do it under the aegis of God, he can only rely on raw power to punish others for his own failure to reach perfection. It is this admission of paradoxical failure that really seals his defeat, more than the dizzying scéne de reconnaissance that follows or the constipated “Ouf!” that he utters in frus-

tration as Agnés is delivered from his clutches. Joseph Pineau has suggested that a good sub-title for this play would have been taken from scripture: qui aime sa vie la perdra (p. 39). His point is well taken, since Arnolphe’s attempt

to rely on authoritarian religion to enforce his private morality neglects the charitable morality of religion itself, thus dooming his enterpris e to failure. The moral victory of natural love is established before everyone learns that Agnès is the daughter of the exiled Enrique who had already pledged her to Oronte’s son and who finally arrives out of the blue in Act Five to fulfill

his promise. The unlikely declarations and fantastic affiliations that pile up

during the recognition scene are nothing less than the spectacu lar and symbolic victory of imagination itself, which has held such a central place in the

play of Nature’s values and which, one way or another, would have overcome

the blind force applied by Arnolphe and his inept jailors. If one is tempted to dismiss this admittedly convenient ending simply as an element “exterior”

to the play’s action, it is because one is taking too seriously the heritage of

Cartesian dualism, which Moliére unfailingly questions, and failing to notice that the real struggle for the imagination is already over. If the spectacle of

paradox triumphant has the power to shock a modern audience, accustomed

to regarding any “contradiction” with anxiety and repugnan ce, it is because, as Vernet suggests, “contradiction is simply the only means that we moderns

have of construing difference ( 109).”

Chapter Four Dom Juan: A Fragile Divide Between Reverie and Reality It is astonishing to find that Moliére’s most paradoxical play, Dom Juan, has

seldom been studied from the point of view of paradox itself. At the heart of this baroque intrigue lies a prolonged meditation on the contradictions of noble identity and the obligations it imposes. Dom Juan Tenorio, Moliére’s “great lord, base man,” embodies the crisis of the quickly evolving hierarchy

at the turning point of the feudal and early modern eras. The play depends more than most of the Moliére canon on existing dramatic tradition. Don

Juan’s legend began in late Golden Age Spain with Tirso de Molina’s El Bur-

lador de Sevilla. During the interval between the dramatist’s return to Paris and the 1664 premiere, Parisian audiences had been treated to two earlier French versions of the subject matter by Dorimond and Villiers, prominent actors in other troupes. In addition, audiences had witnessed in recent times at least one Italian commedia dell’arte version. Earlier scholars have shown that Moliére knew all these forerunners very well and drew on them in turn. In some respects he is closest to the flippant Italian approach, for the others were more moralistic plays, showing the Don Juan character to be powerful and skillful, but rather dogmatically evil - a man carrying out a sinful pro-

gram who justifies his exemplary punishment as a pawn of the devil. Filling

the play with comic lazzi, Molière follows the Italian lead, adding ambiguity

everywhere and forcing the spectator to develop an entirely new orientation.

One of the problems in discussing Dom Juan is how to put it in context with the other plays in the canon. Immediately before it in chronological order lies the first version of Tartuffe. Since we cannot be sure whether that version was a finished play or not, or even how many acts were envisioned at that stage, it seems more convenient for the purpose of this study to treat it later, in roughly the chronological position its final five-act form assumed. However,

it is imperative to remember

that Dom Juan came to exist in the

shadow of a production that had been banned for impiety. A long critical tradition sees it as a slap-dash replacement for Tartuffe, hurried into produc-

52

Chapter Four

Dom Juan

tion when the troupe was deprived of a sure box office hit. In an article in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 1 presented considerable evidence to refute this view, based on an examination of Moliére’s repertory, and particularly his use of Pierre Corneille’s Le Menteur. In Le Menteur as in Dom Juan, the same three actors (Molière, La Grange, and Louis Béjart) played the roles of dissipated

play, one should reach beyond the textual tradition of the Don Juan character, as represented by the tragicomedies of Dorimon and Villiers and Tirso de Molina’s comedia. Rather, his sources are to be found in a series of lesserknown works from within the repertory of Moliére’s own Palais-Royal com-

son,

honorable

father,

and

meddlesome

valet. The

timing

of Le Menteur's

temporary withdrawal from the troupe’s repertory, as well as its reinclusion

after Dom

Juan's brief but triumphant

run,

shows

that the latter play was

not a hasty, last-minute expedient. This repertorial evidence,

along with

other factors such as the expense of mounting a play with complicated stage machinery, points to a stronger strategic position for Dom Juan within the

ideological structure of Moliére’s œuvre. Just as important is the fact that it articulates thematically with the central concerns of Tartuffe: the aims and practices of religious hypocrisy, the susceptibility of apparently reasonable humans to deception, and the social dangers of extending fideism into everyday life. Moliére’s Dom Juan owes much

to a source usually considered non-dra-

matic, Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. Like his cultural predecessor,

Moliére’s Dom Juan confuses real life and dream

world, conventional

exis-

tence and longed-for utopia. But whereas the disorientation of the Spanish hidalgo springs from a refusal to accept the everyday world as it is (bringing on a series of failures as grotesque as they are pitiful), the dream world of

Moliére’s protagonist emanates from his own extraordinary successes. It is because he does not fail to seduce all the women he desires, or at least to obtain

their consent to marriage and then their favors, that he always feels himself impelled toward new horizons of amorous fantasy. Having exhausted all the wide possibilities entailed by his advantageous social condition, he is driven to search the world in order to satisfy his pleasure in the least likely places, even among those “extraterrestrial” women who lived in the impoverished

countryside. These village Dulcineas may not have the professional mastery

of sexuality shown in Cervantes’s some respects from the world of be. Dom Juan’s erotic dreams can desire and they become more and

Miss Toboso, but they are even further in the court nobility than a prostitute would only settle fleetingly on any one object of more momentary as his conquests, instead

of resulting in supreme satisfaction, extend into an infinity of vain searching.

If Quixote renounces the superficial aspects of material life to better follow his ideals, Dom Juan accepts no principles at all in order to concentrate on an even more quixotic quest for practical fulfillment. Where Sancho Panza seeks to recall his master to the comfortable realm of a full belly and a warm

fireside, Sganarelle, Dom Juan’s valet, undertakes to outdo his master philosophical discourse and to lead him back to the safe path of morality.

in

53

For the clearest understanding of the most unusual scenes in this bizarre

pany. Besides Corneille’s Le Menteur, already mentioned, are plays concerning the Don Quixote subject matter. One was even written by a member of the company, Madeleine Béjart, though her Don Guichot ou les enchantements de Merlin was not a stage success. Daniel Guérin de Bouscal’s La Gouvernance de Sanche Panga is even more important to Dom Juan. Not only does the servant

character Sancho, played by Moliére himself, dominate the action, but he does so while living in an imaginary universe. The play develops the incidents where Sancho is appointed governor of a non-existant island, giving him a chance to exercise all his pretensions on the social and philosophical fronts. For Cervantes, the episode constitutes an important counterpoint

to Quixote’s lurid imagination and shows that the condition of his mind is not entirely personal and exceptional. It makes the point that reverie is intimately linked to the displacement of early modern society, which disconnected people from the predictable privileges and responsibilities of feudal ages. Clearly, Moliére explores in Le Menteur and the Quixote-associated plays a

lasting juxtaposition of dramatic values. The valet seeks to set an example for his master, the father scolds his son for his social trespasses, and the “risen”

commoner fails to enjoy the apparent benefits of his change of station. These primordial scenes were rich in gestural lazzi and remained memorable for the public. Understanding their importance restores to the Moliére repertoire an intertextual amplitude that binds it to the rich associative field of the Spanish sueno tradition,

not only on stage in the drama

of Calderon

Barca, but in the moralistic writings of Francisco de Quevedo.

de la

Calderon’s classic, La Vida es sueno, is completely dissimilar to Moliére’s

Dom Juan in plot, but reveals a number of interesting parallels in its individual characters. The protagonist, Segismundo, is most like Dom Juan in his troubled relationship with his father, Basilio. As king of Poland, Basilio has had his son cruelly imprisoned because he feared an astrological prediction

that the boy would unseat him. The illusory restoration to power is meant to test Segismundo’s aptitude to rule, and he predictably fails. He shows as little respect for life as Moliére’s protagonist when he tosses a courtier from the balcony on a whim. necessity for the old to make

remarks to Dom

His callous words to his father regarding the way for youth prefigure Dom Juan’s parting

Louis in the admonition scene of Act Four. For his part,

Basilio resembles

Dom

in his overweaning

Louis

concern

for royal codes

Chapter Four

Dom Juan

and protocol that takes precedence over considerations of personal love. His denunciation of the son’s tested behavior in Act Two of Calderon’s play finds

of the Latin philosopher: “Having read, either to soothe my feelings or to alleviate my melancholy, those verses that Lucretius wrote in such spirited

54

many echoes in Dom

Louis’s reproof to Dom Juan. Of course, he is quick to

change tone at the end of the play when Segismundo makes an overture of mercy, just as Dom Louis is when he thinks his son has undergone a religious conversion. Segismundo’s realization in the last act that it is imperative for him to achieve a victory over himself is a step higher in idealism than Dom Juan is ever willing or able to reach. Besides the father and son, there are ad-

ditional shared qualities in Calderon’s characters of the spurned wife Rosaura

and her unknown father Clotaldo. Like Elvire in Moliére’s play, Rosaura appears in the first act in a “traveling costume” so wretched that Segismundo

at first takes her for a man. She has been pursuing her unfaithful spouse, Astolpho, Duke of Muscovy, in order to prevent him from taking Estrella in a second

marriage,

campaigns.

just as Elvire tries to forestall Dom

Juan’s philandering

In the final act, Rosaura appears in another unusual costume,

featuring both women’s wear and armor, as she makes an effort to restore her

honor at sword’s point. It is true that this is quite different in its particulars from Elvire’s quasi-religious attire in Act Five of Moliére’s play, but no less disconcerting in its effect on the audience. Elvire’s appearance sets the stage for the arrival of a ghostly phantom, which also has a parallel in Calderon's play, though

earlier in the action. Clotaldo also has a familiar situation in

which he recalls Dom Carlos, Elvire’s brother. Having had his life saved accidentally by Dom Juan, Carlos is unwilling to proceed directly to a duel in order to reclaim Elvire’s lost honor, while Clotaldo rejects Rosaura’s urging that he perform a similar service for her, since Astolpho had done as much for him earlier in Calderon’s drama. The two debates over the relative weight

of honorable vengeance and courtly reconnaissance are remarkably alike in many respects. Finally, there is even a prefiguration of the valet Sganarelle in Calderon’s gracioso Clarin. Both undergo disguises that lift them out of their social stations for a time, both are muzzled by their superiors when they

attempt to offer reasonably advice, and both are punished rather arbitrarily at the end of the plays. Clarin’s fate of death from a stray bullet in a battle may seem to be more serious than Sganarelle’s lost wages, but within the parameters of Molière’s play, the valet’s pitiful condition is, if anything, more thought-provoking. As for Quevedo,

his Dreams became

available in French almost immedi-

ately after the author’s death, for the Rouen edition of 1645 was followed by others in 1647 and 1655. New editions in 1664 and 1665 coincided with the composition of Dom Juan. Moliére could have been attracted to Quevedo

by their common

interest in Lucretius. At the beginning of the Visita de las

chistes or Visit of the Jests, Quevedo

attributes its composition

to a perusal

§5

words [De rerum natura, Book III, Denique si vocem rerum natura repente...],

my imagination overcame me” (Dreams, 123). The Spanish author had earlier penned a Defensa de epicuro contra la comün opinion where paradox figures already in the title. In some ways, the appearance of the lady Death in the Visit of the Jests seems to prefigure the ghostly figure of Molière’s play. Her words to the dreamer about the skeletons he sees seem to strike a familiar message; “This is not death, but dead people, or what is left of the living. These bones are the outline upon which the body of man is elaborated. You didn’t even know what death is, and you yourselves are your own death” (Dreams, 134). Moliére did not have to look far for suggestions of a theatrical application, since Quevedo, appreciating the theatrical quality of his own fiction, remarks, “Thus did my faculties present it in the dark, while I was both theater and audience for my fantasies’ (Dreams, 125). Molière shared many of Quevedo’s opinions about the ridicules of contemporary professionals, such as barristers, tailors, pedants,

and especially doctors and apothicaries,

to whom he devotes a particularly biting and lengthy diatribe (Dreams, 128). Moreover, many of the characters appearing in the Visit of the Jests play on the skeptical

theme

of appearances. Juan

de la Encina

asks, for example,

“Have I believed the outward appearances of fortune?” (Dreams, 142) and the

dreamer concedes to the loquacious seer Pero Grullo, “This prophecy and the

rest of them... contain more truths than they first appear to” (Dreams, 159). Even Quevedo’s approach to language would have found favor with Moliére. Quevedo’s

brand

of culturanismo

was

fascinated

with

the popular

lexicon

and fiercely opposed Gongora’s précieux style in a way similar to La Mothe Le Vayer’s stand against Vaugelas’s perceived over-purification of French vocabulary. On the French front, the importance of reverie as a possible standpoint for evaluating reality had greatly increased in importance with the publication of Descartes’s Méditations in 1641, followed by a revised edition with commentary by Hobbes, Mersenne, and other important thinkers the following

year. In the Méditations, Descartes advanced what philosophers often refer to as the Dream Argument, pointing out that dream perceptions can seem so real that it is difficult to tell if waking reality is more real than the dream, or even if it exists. Should the latter case be possible, the philosopher would be trapped in a solipsistic dilemma. Descartes’s failure to produce a totally convincing solution to the Dream Argument using the tools of rationalism alone has caused much ink to be spilt. One can read Dom Juan as Moliére’s investigation of a man so obsessed with his dreams and the opinions they generate that, like Quixote, he manages to some extent to impose them on

56

reality. But even if Dom Juan succeeds in both types of deception defines in the Fourth Meditation, commissive and omissive, he is unable to transcend his own contradictions, leaving in his wake a of humans (family, servant, creditors, wives, partners used and

Descartes ultimately multitude potential)

who can only ask questions about what he actually meant. The concept of reverie had a particular importance for skeptics, tracing back through Guy de Brués’s Dialogues. In that work, Jean-Antoine de Baïf serves as one of the spokesmen for the skeptical position, arguing against the more Aristotelian Pierre de Ronsard. The character Baif refers several times to reverie in a context very close to the Pyrrhonian notion of “opinion.” He claims that a thorough study of conventional philosophy has left him with the conclusion that its ideas represent only reverie and confusion, or reverie and imagination (Morphos 37). The equation of reverie with an especially non-skeptical philosophical position, implicitly contrasted to the epoche sought by the Pyrrhonian thinker, casts a new light on Dom Juan the play and its protagonist. Instead of serving as a mouthpiece for skepticism, Dom Juan becomes instead a subject of Pyrrhonian critique, and a very precious one, for he may be considered a faux pyrrhonien in the long line of false précieuses, spiritual directors, gentlemen, and other bogus figures in the Moliére canon. The valet Sganarelle functions as one end of the paradoxal axis. Although

he tends as much to reverie as his master, it is for very different reasons. In his case, servitude and hopefulness, instead of tangible pleasure, give rise to his extravagance. He inherits from Sancho Panza the role of the indulgent, but

stubborn manservant. Yet, he goes farther in attempting to raise to the level of transcendental ideal a noble ideology that is no more than a hypocritical facade for the aristocrats of the time. An actor by choice, he acts rather badly,

falling victim to a dizzy meliorism that he cannot control. Sganarelle’s introduction in the first scene of the play, the famous “tobacco scene,” lays important groundwork for the character. Apparently disconnected from any action and containing only a modicum of development information, this scene shows Sganarelle lying about with some inconsequential companions discussing the merits of tobacco, which at that time was taken in the form of snuff. Twentieth-century productions of the play have often replaced the original snuff with clouds of smoke from pipes, cigars, or cigarettes, in imitation of seventeenth-century genre paint-

ings of tabagies, or tobacco-orgies, in Holland. Some post-60’s productions have gone farther and suggested that what is being smoked is not standard tobacco, but marijuana. This anachronism is actually in keeping with the spirit of the play, for tobacco was an extremely

57

Dom Juan

Chapter Four

controversial substance in

Moliére’s time. Sganarelle reels off its supposed medical benefits and adds

a social function: it is, he maintains, the basis of polite behavior in le beau

monde. The valet who assumes the trappings of his masters in an attempt to project at least a simulacrum of social mobility is a theme brought up at least as early as Les Précieuses ridicules, and we can easily imagine Mascarille and Jodelet joining Sganarelle and Gusman for a pinch of the finest. Moliére suggests in this scene, however, that this apery relates to a series of deeper social phenomena. Tobacco

was,

in seventeenth-century

Europe,

an apt metaphor

for the

the entire apparatus of mercantilist economics, colonial capitalism, and them. on dependent ly increasing and promoting states al absolute monarchic trade Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Havana were poles of the tobacco Louis While . that fueled the English, Dutch, and Spanish colonial enterprises of XIV’s France lacked, for the time being, a major North American source tobacco, the need for its commercial

control as a state monopoly

(that still

the exists today) was abundantly clear. By the end of the Sun King’s reign, comthat empire the expand would ventures Louisiana and Saint-Domingue corporate menced in Canada. Within the mercantile system (or the modern ideal consumer system, for that matter), tobacco is in many respects an but manipulable stable, a ensures therefore and addictive is it since product,

demand market, just like cocaine, heroin, or any other such substance. for this stuSganarelle’s speeches suggest an even more insidious role distribution Its s. appearance false péfiant, for tobacco creates a world of its users to causing lly paradoxica while produces the appearances of civility, the geswhich y opportunit an rs, interlocuto their sneeze and spatter all over Sganarelle e, Furthermor stage. on exploited doubt no turally-minded Moliére nicotine high he explicitly mentions that it produces a special feeling. The skeptical minds, to refers to is at once a sense perception, always suspect a system suggests tobacco and a false appearance. In fact, Sganarelle’s use of and Man master. his beset that of false appearances parallel to the reveries aware: mental of scale a on extremes or poles servant thus represent opposite misled ness where the middle is occupied by a skeptical epoche that avoids

even if they differ opinions. Sganarelle is just as full of opinons as Dom Juan,

first scene that the very in particulars. More paradoxically, we find in this for rational character who will attempt to set himself up as a spokesman on his hooked as junkie, free will later in the play is nothing but a tobacco under the aegis of the appetites as Dom Juan. In his context, the play opens in and of themselves, that, opinions g first Agrippan mode, that of contrastin

cannot lay claim to any criterion of truth. very ancient model of In the “tobacco scene,” Moliére harks back to the in his homage the rhetorical paradox. Rosalie Colie credits the Greek Gorgias, combine that to Helen of Troy, with establishing the basis of this tradition in disaster brought who erudition and burlesque. His praise for a beauty

58

Chapter Four

her wake was followed

by a

Dom Juan

series of Classical works

immortalizing

the ad-

vantages of baldness, flies, nuts, and mosquitoes. Lucien and Ovid, among

the ancients, made contributions to this tradition. Later, so did Renaissan ce

humanists,

such

as Ulrich

von

Hutten

and

Erasmus,

whose

Encomion

gained fame throughout Europe. Sir John Harrington’s encomium became

extremely

famous,

as

did

John

Donne’s

“The

Flea.”

to a

George

moriae

toilet Put-

tenham, in his Arte of English Poesie, used the term “wondrer” to refer to this type of dream-generating discourse. Sganarelle adopts the formal organiza-

tion of the genre, first by tracing the internal effects of tobacco and then

by enumerating the various social benefits the drug offers. Like many other

initial vignettes in Moliére plays, including Alceste’s flight in Le Misanthrop e, Madame Pernelle’s departure in Tartuffe, and Argan’s preoccupation with his

apothecary bills in Le Malade imaginaire, the scene presents the public with the main contradictions that will develop over the course of the action. It

ends as paradoxically as it opens. Having denounced

at length the moral

failures of his master, Sganarelle freely admits that his own good service is due strictly to his cowardice: “la crainte en moi fait l'office de zèle, bride mes

sentiments et me réduit d’applaudir bien souvent a ce que mon ame déteste” (Fear, in me, does the work of zeal, bridles my feelings, and forces me often to

applaud what my soul detests). Incapable of sustaining his good intentions

by his actions, he raises the veil on truth only to let it fall again. He tells

Gusman, “je t'ai fait cette vint quelque chose à ses (I’ve confided this to you of it, I will declare loudly

confiance avec franchise... mais s’il oreilles, je dirais hautement que tu freely... but if by chance he should that you have lied). This statement

fallait aurais come could

qu'il en menti” to hear not fail

to remind the audience of one of the most famous paradoxes of antiquity, known to many a schoolboy from logic classes — that of Epimenide s the Cretan, who affirmed that all Cretans were liars, thus putting his own statement, as well as the veracity of his countrymen, into eternal doubt. No wonder that each time Sganarelle tries to play the sage Aristoteli an in contrast to the supposedly skeptical Dom Juan, the master-se rvant couple comes to resemble the purveyors of false reason represented by the Pancrace-

Marphurius pair in Le Mariage forcé. It may seem strange to consider Dom Juan as a case of philosophical schooling because no one learns anything

in the course of the action. But in the case of Sganarelle, it is not for lack of

trying. Just as Le Misanthrope is viewed as a series of unsuccessful attempts by Alceste to deliver an ultimatum to Céliméne, Dom Juan can be seen as a

series of fruitless efforts by the valet to reason with his master, efforts that are

continually cut short by arrivals, departures, and coups de théâtre.

In Act Three, scene 1, for example, Sganarelle feels emboldened by a doctor’s robe he has donned to escape from a posse that is pursuing Dom

59

Juan. One of the reasonable examples he cites to impress his master concerns medicine.

He explains how emetic wine was ordered as a remedy for a me

who had been agonizing for six days. When that it must

have

cured

him,

Sganarelle

Dom Juan casually mentions

contradicts

him

and

admits,

“He

died.” The reasonable would-be physician thus comes to identify with one of Moliére’s most familiar stage paradoxes, the deadly doctor. As Dom Juan amusedly observes,

“The effect is admirable.”

Later in the scene, Dom Juan

ironically sums up their conversation when he says, “I think that in reasoning we have become lost.” Contemporary spectators could not fail to be reminded of a famous passage in Descartes’s Discours de la méthode. The philosopher uses the image of a man lost in the forest to illustrate the ability of reason to correct misdirection, stating that he can inevitably find his way out

of the woods by going straight in any chosen direction. On the other hand,

Sganarelle’s attempts at right reason actually lead him into deep confusion. Just as ironically, Sganarelle never realizes that it is useless to try to move a

roué toward goodness with reason. Christian Pyrrhonists like Charron had

argued that faith alone can lead to such understanding, whereas Dom Juan is

clearly untouched by any gracious impulses from God and already claims to possess total understanding and control through his own rationalism. This rationalism dovetails with an unmediated epicureanism that dissolves into pure debauchery. Instead of seeking Epicurus’ notion of αἰαγαχία, oF freedom from care and pain, Dom Juan must be constantly prodding himself and others into new sado-masochistic extremes of feeling that have long since departed the realms of pleasure. There are, Epicurus warned, many pleasures

that ultimately cause too much pain to be worthwhile. Moliére’s

Dom

Juan,

unlike

his brutish

precursors,

lives in a world

of

elegant infinite regression that recalls the third Agrippan mode ἐνοκεά by

Sextus Empiricus. As soon as the character arrives on stage, he begins to describe an ideal effervescent world, where the role of the male is to encounter

- and then immediately abandon - the maximum number of females. “Toutes les belles ont droit de nous charmer” (All women have the right to please us), he states, as if this so-called right were truly voluntary and benefi-

cial. This passive “right” to become a target for the amorous inseminations of the rake corresponds to the “false honor of fidelity” that all en a avoid at any price. There is a simple strategy to this linguistic and ideologica chaos: to create the maximum possible disorder between the sexes and take advantage

of it. Like Alexander,

who

conquered

the world

but took

kr

care to govern it, Dom Juan does not limit his pretention of conquest to the known female world. He would gladly pass on to the most remote regions, even other planets, in order to extend his glory. Lest one take his mention

of interplanetary seduction before Star Trek as a sure sign of madness, it is

Chapter Four

Dom Juan

well to remember that his unhinged ego involves the corporal as well as the

Curiously, as Moliére begins to examine this walking paradox, he drains the entire first act of dramatic imbroglio. Where his predecessors had dwelt

60

mental realm. He is not, like Bélise in Les Femmes savantes, a pure imaginer

whose lovers are invisible and who exists entirely in a universe of words. On the contrary, Dom Juan may be called an “imaginer of the concrete,” for his

61

on the aristocrat’s pursuit of a maiden into a convent, her abduction, and the murder of her father, Moliére places a series of discussions that includes

preoccupation with costumes, gestures, and facial expressions shows that he is a close student of the appearances of reality. He attaches little importance to words per se and is happy to use them any way that seems expedient, regardless of the meanings others impute to them. His reverie postulates a world of total reification. To borrow a phrase from Baudelaire, it is a “stone dream” that can only be truly shaken when stone itself confronts it. Part of Dom Juan’s fascination is his ability, already shown by other Molière characters, to adopt part of the language of skepticism to his own ends. When Sganarelle repeatedly prods him to name his beliefs, he gives

the tobacco scene, Dom Juan’s earliest exchange with Sganarelle, and a brief encounter with Elvire, one of several wives he has accumulated. This Dom Juan does not completely disdain rape and abduction, but sees it more as a last resort. Sganarelle explains that his master’s usual tactic is not only to promise marriage, but also to carry through with it, in sue take advantage of a lady he desires. Sganarelle claims that Dom Juan is “a husband

ments of skepticism. In professing to believe only that two and two make four, he goes even farther, beyond the epoche or suspension of belief, into a radical disbelief in, as Sganarelle puts it, everything but arithmetic. This is not the Pyrrhonist stance of accepting appearances as appearances. It is closer to the “hyperbolic doubt” of Descartes. Although the 2+2=4 formula is associated with actual quotes from some noted libertines, such as Maurice of Nassau, it was also used by Camus in support of skeptical fideism, so one cannot classify Dom Juan strictly on the basis of this one statement. It

silent, allowing Elvire the victim to describe the effects of his actions. His hypocritical politeness to her reinforces the irony of her account of her own and demise. This has the result of driving a wedge between verbal promises deception Tartuffe, in As the commitments supposed to accompany them. here has two requisites: the person willing to manipulate anid the ors willing to be manipulated. Elvire is not entirely an innocent victim, since she rathet has chosen to attach belief to the appearances offered by Dom Juan, oe explicitly She proffers. his on judgment than skeptically suspending “J'ai été assez bonne, je le confesse, ou plutôt assez sotte pour me oo tromper moi-même et travailler à démentir mes yeux εἴ mon aaa was so good, I admit, or rather so foolish as to want ἴο trick myself end to πὶ ir a agree with my eyes and my good judgment). Allowing as ethical

only

evasion

expressions

that resemble

hints at a total materialism,

what

Sextus

calls the pronounce-

but at the same time carries enigmatic echoes

of systems as un-materialistic as Pythagoreanism, which turns the equation around and sees all reality as a projection of hidden mathematical truths. Dom Juan’s materialism is haunted by a persistent erotic fantasy that is ulti-

mately irreconcilable with material reality itself. The ambiguity of both central characters only reinforces the inherent lim-

itations of a priori thought, whether it is directed positively, as in Sganarelle’s dogmatism, or negatively, as in Dom Juan’s denial. Considering these two

for all comers.”

This has been

the case with Elvire, whom

he took from a

convent, wedded, and bedded. Her brief appearance in Act One reveals less of her own psychology than of the amazing practices of her husband. Instead remains of laying out a theory of seduction from his own mouth, Dom Juan

willfully (vouloir) st (goodness) to replace epistemological ones, Elvire had about sen πα doubts instinctive own actively (travailler) contradicted her ἮΝ accepting against argued that yeux) (mes and even those appearances

extremes, the formula “two and two make four,” instead of a libertine manifesto on the part of Moliére, recalls Dostoevski’s Underground Man, who

y In vain does Elvire try to find an explanation for her Lusbands — se re he reciting a list of increasingly lame excuses he could use if he cared; ne her any cause for her fate other than her own credulity. The infinite

principle, however tacitly, that human actions are subject to a dominant exterior force, perhaps providential, in other words, a god! The atheist seems

a sadistic streak and particularly enjoys the spectacle of his wife “the wrath of a wronged lady.” But Dom Juan’s one μὰν ὦ at rape in

uses is to express a deterministic challenge to the notion of free will. If Dom Juan is setting himself on the side of determinism, he must acknowledge in to risk proving the existence of the very force he set out to deny, as he will do

more explicitly through his devout travesty in the final act. Thereby lies the

irresistible impulse to provoke and to insult a deity whose existence he had sought to disprove. This paradoxically deterministic aspect of Dom Juan’s

character coincides with other problematic passages in the text.

an 2 ss sion of Dom Juan’s love proves his words untrue, but only bees xs i that true is It word. progression of ladies is willing to take him at his

play, the maritime

abduction

of a lady already married,

comes

-

to noug

because of a storm, showing pure violence to be ridiculously ineffective. by the νι» Aristocrats are not the only ones in this play to be afflicted

sue ke doxes of feeling. In the second act, after Dom Juan and — pe a of glimpses shows like jetsam on a beach in the provinces, Molière

62

Chapter Four

world unexplored by Tirso, Dorimon, or Villiers. A rural couple, Pierrot and Charlotte, demonstrate for the spectators the disorders of the heart in the

heart of the country. Pierrot complains that his sweetheart never gives him a proof of her passion by engaging in “a little monkey business ” or by giving him “a little pinch, a little nudge, or the slightest little bash.” Just like Dom Juan, he cannot stand being left at rest and would rather be “laid flat out on the ground” than to do without stimulus. This hayseed cannot appreciate the irony of his superficial description of the half-drowned castaways by their clothes. He accurately enumerates their rayment, showing that he is as preoc-

cupied as any other character by the world of appearances, but those appearances in country terms are laughably different from the way they are seen

by courtiers. It is the kind of cultural defamiliarization achieved in modern times by The Beverly Hillbillies, for example, when Jed or Jethro describe the finery of their Beverly Hills neighbors in sartorial terms that appear bizarre outside Bugtussle, Tennessee. The irony is raised when Pierrot, who minutes

before had asked Charlotte to pound him, flees behind her skirts as Dom Juan threatens him with real blows, and then runs off to cry to his auntie. Yet Dom Juan’s loves are equally self-conflicted. A prince who stoops to caress the filthy hands of a barnyard belle creates a huge cognitive dissonance. Furthermore, the strangeness rises exponentially when Charlotte’s village rival, Mathurine, arrives and reveals that Dom Juan has already made the same offers of marriage to her. Dom Juan’s desire displays a pattern of infinite regression, the third mode of skeptical disproof. Where desirable womanhood is represen ted by F, Dom Juan’s desire for F1 is both sustained and limited by his love for F2. Desire for woman can only hold value and meaning if it continues to progress and increment, assuming an F3 after F2, and so forth. Dom Juan himself explains

Dom Juan

same woman

63

demonstrates the absurdity of Dom Juan’s reason as no other

:

example could.

It is worth citing at this point a passage where Robert Mc Bride, commenting on Act Two, shows great insight into Dom Juan’s paradoxical char-

acter: Dom Juan’s enslavement to the senses has been seen as providing acomic contrast with his self-confessed awareness of what he is doing. This is in fact yet another facet of the paradox of lucidity and cecity which make up his nature; but whereas the contrast may be said to exist in theory in this scene, in the theatre we have at this point an overwhelming sense of his ability to appear simultaneously as what he is and what he is not. It is this total paradox underlying his nature which is emphasized here, rather than one particular aspect of it. For Dom Juan is so much

a prisoner of his

paradoxical nature, that he must be sincere and insincere at one and the same time. (The Sceptical Vision of Molière, p. 90)

Dom Juan’s insincere sincerity may explain why he cannot properly be called an Epicurean. Seen simply as a pursuit of pleasure, seems may look like an ideal rubric for him. Indeed, Sganarelle refers to him as “un pourceau d’Epicure” (an Epicurean hog) in the first act. However, the Epicurean blade cut two ways, also stipulating the avoidance of pain. In contrast, Dom sem relishes pain, at least as it is inflicted on others, as he shows by his repeate

threats of beatings to Sganarelle, his bullying of Pierrot, and his eager participation in a swordfight in the third act. His treatment of women seems no less sadistic, if more subtle. It is when Elvire is most desperate and tormented

that she is most appealing to his desire. Furthermore,

Epicurean heen

goes on to examine in minute detail how it is necessary to renounce or defer some pleasures in order to enjoy others, an idea utterly alien to —

in the first act that the proof of what he calls love is the fact that he extends it to the infinite set of all women on Earth, and if that set should prove less than infinite, he is willing to include other planets as well. If Dom Juan’s desire should ever fail to regenerate, it would vanish and cease to exist. Moliére

The infinite regression of his desire suggests that he is really not even able to

mated desires appear simultaneously on stage in the form of the peasant girls Charlotte and Mathurine. Paradoxically, Dom Juan seeks to prove his love to F1 by denying F2 and vice versa, a tactic that actually succeeds to a

from them as Tartuffe is from orthodox piety. — epiAs long as Dom Juan is engaged in this infinite regression of-watpe

finds an ingenious Way to stage this in the second act, where two unconsum-

certain degree because it plays to the girls’ existing village rivalry. Of course, this putative love will regress as soon as an F3 appears. In fact, later in the play, Dom Juan demonstrates this by developing desire and beginning an

attempted seduction of a woman he has already abandoned, his wife Elvire. It is the disheveled and desperate appearance of the rejected Elvire, F1, that provokes interest in the desirable, vulnerable Elvire, F2. The regression of the

identify pleasure as fulfillment, but only as a partial and per

=

an unending quest, his equivalent of what a later, musical Quixote dre . 4 impossible dream, the unreachable star.” Though Dom Juan molintatl y take on certain outward semblances of skepticism and epicureanism, he is as far cureanism, he will refuse to admit any self-contradiction. So it is Sganarelle the Aristotelian who is portrayed in constant conflict with himself. His ty

at converting his master in Act Three, scene 1 through a wild meditation ἐμᾷ

sequential proofs turns into ἃ mixed-up galimatias, and the gestures ~ i panying the rhetoric become so dizzy that the lecturer falls on his ips aa

à sequential proofs, on a more serious level, were the atock and trade o tional Scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy. Mc Bride notes that La Mothe

64

Chapter Four

Dom Juan

Le Vayer had in at least one work, the Petit Discours chrétien sur l’immortalité

de l’âme, used similar demonstrations in a burlesque fashion (p. 93). Both Sganarelle and Dom Juan are quite sure of their positions and disinclined to

seek a skeptical suspension of judgment, or epoche, in the face of the obvious epistemological problems posed by self-contradictory social roles and definitions, as well as an infinite regression of mates. Dom Juan’s erotic dream,

which can only localize itself momentarily in the person of a particular woman, becomes more and more elusive as his conquests multiply. Instead of fulfillment, he faces infinite deferment. Theorists of early modern love as

diverse as John Donne and Pico de la Mirandola have identified in the interlocking contradictions of emotion a chance for transcendance, for as Donne puts it, “To enter in these bonds is to be free” (Elegy XIX). But Dom Juan uses

the sensual stimulation of desire uniquely to arouse himself and thus to give himself the only proof of existence that he is capable of appreciating. His is the solipsism of masturbation, even if it is realized in the necessary presence of another human body. While Don Quixote renounces the surfaces of material

life the better to follow his ideals, Dom Juan gives up all principles in order to

concentrate on the practice. Sancho Panza exerts himself to call the Knight

of the Woeful Countenance back to the pleasures of a warm hearth and a full stomach; in contrast, Sganarelle ascends into the realms of the philosophical to reason with his master and to restore him to the path of morality. The third act of the play introduces the central characters to new contexts that test their ideas and actions in unanticipated contexts. Following Sganarelle’s botched attempt at right reasoning, he and his master meet several people in the countryside: a pauper, Elvire’s brother Dom

Carlos, and

the re-animated statue of the murdered Commander who was mentioned in Act One. These encounters profoundly alter both the way the audience perceives the heretofore triumphant rake and the strategies he adopts in his own fantasy-filled quest. The pauper identifies himself as a religious hermit who spends his days in the deserted forest praying for others. After asking directions of him, Dom Juan refuses to grant the man a gratuity unless he will blaspheme. Sganarelle, instead of demonstrating an example of ethical action, doubles the temptation by urging the man to to along with the proposal and minimizing the sin. Indeed, the stakes seem low in a material

sense, a gold coin for a single oath. The implications, though, are much larger, for Dom Juan sets up a syllogistic proof that affects his entire being:

1) the pauper is needy because God has not answered his prayers with material reward; 2) blasphemy will result in tangible material reward; therefore 3) the pauper must blaspheme.

The Pauper Scene revolves around a Biblical precedent in a passage of the Gospel of Matthew where a pharisee tries to trick Jesus by asking if Jews

65

should be obliged to pay their taxes to the Roman

Empire. The question is

a clever paradoxical trap, for if Jesus says no, he implicitly takes the side of the zealots who refused to recognize the symbols polytheistic Rome sought to impose on them, but if he avoids this radical solution by responding in the affirmative,

he compromises

himself as a Jew, by accepting tacitly the

metaphysics of the infidel conquerors. In the first case, he trades spiritual imperatives for the war cry of a civil sedition the authorities will not hesitate to quash, and in the latter case, he sooner or later will lose the confidence of all

Hebrews who are fundamentally hostile to Rome and its civic-spiritual practices. Jesus responds to the pharisee’s paradox by one of his own. Showing his interlocutor a coin engraved with the emperor's likeness, he asks whose face it is. He knows in advance that the pharisee must answer with the name of Caesar,

syllables that to Jews were

devoid

of any religious importance.

Since Caesar is thus reduced to the level of a concrete object, and a puny one at that, it is easy to Jesus to recommend

to his disciples that they continue

to contribute to the empire those miserable pieces of metal belonging to it, while reserving for God alone the veneration due Him. en: By inducing the Pauper into temptation, Dom Juan reverses the Biblical

situation to put Christianity to the test of concrete expediency. Never as original as his greatest admirers make him out to be, Dom Juan borrows an anecdote from Malherbe when he comments that the most pious hermit would

certainly go better shod and better nourished if God listened attentively to his numerous prayers. By evoking human frailty in the face of the physical universe, he prepares the Pauper, and the spectator Sganarelle, for the uate timate demonstration of the inevitability of blasphemy. Far from inviting punishment, it will bestow on the sinner all the advantages of a louis d'or, τὰν

coin representing omnipotence within the earthly realm. If the protagonist's “dream of stone” is valid for the whole human race, free will must bow to

the needs of corporal existence. But here, as in the Gospel, the experiment produces

a result the modern

pharisee

had

not expected,

for the

Pauper,

motivated by a line of thought that owes nothing to the material woud, is finally capable of mastering the body’s impulses and refusing material determinism. He thus verifies the existence of a supernatural force liberating man from the slavery of immediate appetite. Perhaps in this instance Molière is not 50 far from certain passages of Claudel or Huysmans. According to Blaise Pascal’s famous wager on faith in God, the individual who realizes he has everything to gain through faith is able to reject “something” offered by the

tempter. The emptiness of the Pauper and his outstretched hand affirms the presence of the Beyond. The paradox that emptiness implied for the baroque mind was front-page material in Moliére’s day. The concept of sheer space devoid of matter was

Chapter Four

Dom Juan

difficult to verify from the point of view of contemporary science and even more controversial from that of the morals of the day. Pascal’s experiments with barometers had not dispelled all philosophical questions sustained by the shocking idea of a space with nothing at all in it. In the dispute between Pascal and his Jesuit opponent, Père Noël, the latter attacked the Expériences

own honor by dying in the attempt. Dom Juan, whose taste for bloodshed had not been stanched by the encounter with the bandits, is only too willing

66

nouvelles by denying that an absolute void was possible. According to dualistic thinking, in a universe where everything is composed either of matter

or of spirit, a space evacuated of all traces of matter would automatically fill with pure spirit, which is tantamount to God. The nothingness resulting from the theoretic absence of all material being paradoxically reveals the im-

manence of the divine. As attached as he was to the scientific effectiveness of the concept of vacuum, Pascal arrives at such a conclusion in Pensée number 84: le fini s’anéanit en présence de l'infini, et devient pur néant.” In other words, space normally occupied by objective matter can only give way to the experimentally demonstrable void by the influence of an Infinite surpassing

all limitations of the material world. On the metaphysical level, nothing responds so well to the conditions of this omnipresent infinity as the notion of Heaven.

Sganarelle adopts the stance of a casuist in the Pauper Scene by trying

to convince the mendicant that blasphemy is no sin in times of hunger. The following scenes, involving Dom Juan’s interaction with Dom Carlos, Elvire’s courtly brother, relate to casuistry in a slightly different context that revolves around aristocratic codes instead of religious ones. Seeing a nearby fight breaking out, Dom

Juan rushes to join. In doing so, he states

that the conflict is not fair, because it involves several men attacking a single swordsman. Lest one assume that Dom Juan’s intervention springs from pure

generosity, it should be pointed out that he still knows nothing of the nature of the quarrel or which side might be in the right. His eagerness stems rather from an innate attraction to violence and the chances for bloodshed it offers him, as well as to his mathematical assessment of the situation. It is totally

fortuitous and extremely ironic that he happens to save the life of aman who had been seeking his. The randomness of the swordfight causes no problems for Dom Juan’s approach

to life, but it poses terrible difficulties for Dom

so far acted strictly honor. Yet the same tisk for the sake of deprives him of the

Carlos,

who

has

in concern for his sister’s, hence his family’s, wounded system of values that causes him to put his own life at the collective in search of reconciliation or satisfaction means to do so. Unable to take back the gift of life that

Dom Juan accidentally but obligatorily made to him, Carlos finds himself in

a lose-lose situation. He would like to preserve family honor by forcing Dom

Juan at swordpoint to take back his abandoned

wife, or at least to save his

67

to give him the chance. But preservation of family honor would entail loss of his personal

honor

by failing to recognize

Dom

Juan’s générosité, albeit

unintentional.

The arrival of Dom

Alonse, Carlos’s brother, gives rise to a debate that Prevented by Carlos from attacking Dom Juan, explicit. makes all the issues for an immediate battle: 1) services rendered reasons eloquent gives Alonse

by an enemy hand impose no obligation of repayment; 2) if one measures the obligation against the offense, the proportion is ridiculously one-sided; 3) since honor is more precious than life, the theft of honor outweighs the gift of life. This is casuistry of the first order for excusing vengeful murder. Carlos tacitly rejects the first two items since they are relativistic and would therefore deny ipso facto the imperative nature of honor. He mainly organizes his answer around the third, involving the relationship of honor to life. Honor involves not simply the taking of a life, but doing so under the right conditions, which is all that separates it from mere homicide. He points out that he is not proposing to cancel Dom Juan’s offense, but simply deferring

the moment of reckoning, and in the process eliminating any complicating

obligation on his part, thus avoiding a relativistic undermining of the noble

codes. He recognizes that Alonse’s reasoning, which says that Heaven has granted an opportunity not to be put off, is potentially as blasphemous as Dom Juan’s.

In vain does Alonse

call his brother’s life-debt chimerical,

for

Carlos points out that the deferral of punishment will only make the rest of society recognize their cause as just.

Critics are sometimes puzzled because the Dom Carlos episode seems to

put Dom

Juan,

fresh from

his embarrassment

at the hands of the Pauper,

back in a privileged position, as he snickers in the background at Dom Carlos’s predicament. But one should remember that these third and fourth scenes of Act Three are used to add ethical relief to what has largely appeared so far as an epistemological problem. Carlos appeals to reason not as pure rationality, but as a way of presenting ethics in an orderly manner. He pleads

with Alonse, “Brother, let’s show moderation in a legitimate action and avoid avenging our honor by getting carried away as you're doing. Let’s show that we are the masters of our courage, bravery that’s not blood-thirsty, that

goes forth with the pure guidance of our reason, instead of rushing about in blind anger.” Alonse’s argument, featuring a kind of reason at the service of uncontrollable pathe, is just the kind of opinion that the skeptic way seeks to avoid. Carlos’s hesitation thus is recognizable not as flawed rationalism or out-of-place stoicism, but as skepticism put to the test of action in a most extreme circumstance.

Dom Juan

Chapter Four

68

Impressed by his brother-in-law’s thought, Dom Juan is forced to concede his ethical superiority and even to express admiration for the man. But he admits that this admiration does not extend to imitation, for he intends to continue to be guided by pathe (ma passion, mon humeur, turelle). The intervention of spiritual values, in the form of the statue, a virtual totem of the continuing creation of miracles Pyrrhonists linked to their fideism, again sends Dom Juan and

une pente naCommander's that Christian Sganarelle, the

contrasting “philosophers,” reeling away to different extremes. Sganarelle collapses into an abject, exaggerated superstition, blathering about a formidable bogeyman called le moine bourru. Dom Juan, for his part, refuses to treat the statue as a spiritual phenomenon at all, instead inviting it to cross swords or come to dinner, as if the Commander

had never died.

One must ask oneself when Dom Juan launches his challenge to the Commandeur’s Statue if it is this infinity that he is aiming at. When he first contemplates

the monumental

tomb

and statue, he contents

himself with

admiring their superficial aspects and avoiding all possibility of existence beyond the limits of the material. It is the cowardly Sganarelle who raises the stakes of Heaven in this chance encounter. The servant is terrified by the

existence of another Commandeur, not the one who was “well dispatched ... as well as one could be killed,” but a being persisting beyond the skin and bones. Having already assured the physical destruction of the enemy body, Dom Juan considers it useless to insult remains that are for him only piles of inert matter. But to him the Statue can serve as a kind of anti-barometer, allowing him to prove experimentally the non-existence of any spiritual entity beyond the concrete. If he can succeed in pumping all possible spirit out of a place, matter will rush in to fill this anti-void. Thus,

he would

symboli-

cally reverse the Pauper Scene and regain the philosophical upper hand in the play. Typically, Dom Juan chooses a test of consumption

for the vector

of his experiment, inviting the Statue to dinner. This ostentatious but false politeness shows his true contempt for the spiritual, which does not even deserve insult, since it does not exist. Consumption is the way he thinks about women, other people, and the rest of the world that has meaning for him.

Marble, which has no appetite, seems the ideal substance to demonstrate the non-meaning of anything outside his system. Of course, the bad joke of offering food to a rival who is nothing but food for worms backfires against the protagonist. It will be Dom Juan who is visibly devoured, by flames instead of worms, in the last scene of the play. Poetic justice at its best is often para-

doxical: the trickster is ultimately tricked. The scene of the statue come to life affirms that the separation of sacred and profane by Jesus sketched out in Matthew’s Gospel was at the forefront of consciousness in the seventeenth century. The problem preoccupied such

69

who contemporaries of Moliére as the Coadjutor, later Cardinal, de Retz, privately while life, correct ally superfici and e charitabl a resolved to lead indulging his sexual desires. Even for a churchman,

rendering unto Caesar

Tartuffe was not always as facile as it seemed. We shall see in the section on problem this of aspects that Moliére had already begun to elaborate other its head in in the theme of casuistry. The Commander’s statue merely nods should sign physical a Such dinner. to acceptance of Dom Juan’s invitation for strong so is proof The ism. material with be sufficient for one so imbued

it. At first, Dom Sganarelle that not for one hundred livres would he touch beginning of the by But presence. its from flee to also is Juan’s response

illusion or the next act, he has found an apt excuse in the form of optical Descartes by evoked disturbed vision, exactly the type of sense-deception in the Discours de la méthode.

His answer to the sensory proof is simply to

Juan is retreating remove his senses from it and pretend it doesn’t exist. Dom in Descartes’s ed mention argument into the world of reverie, the dream (Curley, solipsism ced self-indu of kind a in Fourth Meditation, thus engaging pp. 46-69). Moreover,

the in the face of Sganarelle’s continued reference to

sadistic punishproof of the statue, he is willing to enforce his solipsism with to silence servant the ment. The threat of a bullwhip is enough to reduce choose to not does he and to remove the last unpleasant echoes of a truth accept.

rest of the world conDom Juan’s efforts to enforce his fantasy on the

tinues through

the rest of the fourth act, as he sends his creditor packing

with a comfortable with no payment, tries to neutralize his irate father indulges in a quiet and wife ned abandon his re-seduce chair, attempts to Monsieur Dimanche, supper with Sganarelle and his supernatural invitee. the money-lender,

provides

almost

farcical comic

relief in an increasingly

those of other dark play. At the same time, his concerns fit in perfectly with Quixote world. real the in Juan characters who are trying to re-engage Dom

and substituting put off his re-engagers by refusing to speak their language

Moliére could a discourse of chivalry to which they were unable to respond. of novelistic satire the mastered had he since s, Cervante well have imitated do so again later in Les Femmes language in Les Précieuses ridicules and would

substituting a difsavantes. In this play, he brilliantly changes the register by that Louis XIV’s honnéteté new ferent kind of courtly discourse, that of the of seating and formality The generation was using to replace feudal ways. al code, and behavior new this in forefront the polite conversation comes to is unable to he where position a in Dom Juan uses it to place Dimanche his lackeys demand the simple repayment of his loans. Dom Juan mobilizes

considerate of all, an to bring first a stool, then a folding chair, then, most and seated in the seated, armchair for Dimanche. He insists that his guest be

Chapter Four

70

most honored fashion and position. He compliments him on his health, inquires after his wife, his family, and even his nasty little dog. He shakes his hand and professes intimacy in every superficial way imaginable, invites him

to dinner, sends servants to light his way

home,

offers to escort him

per-

sonally, embraces him, but pays not a penny. Dimanche is completely agog in this third scene, but when he tries to salvage a bit of a profit by asking Sganarelle to repay a few coins, the servant treats him roughly, but with the same result. Sganarelle thus openly mocks the banker for letting himself be taken in by the appearances that Dom Juan manipulates so well. That will teach him to approach their house with nothing but the authority of the law on his side! Dom

Juan’s father,

Louis, seeks to impose

Dom

a different

kind

of a priori

unnoticed. It serves as a model for Dom presentation, however, has not gone in the final act. Juan’s hypocritical and false conversion strategy of mastering appearances ludic this of ance domin lived The shortsupper scene, where Sganarelle ae is put in question in the subsequent morsel he spied on us master’s plate, the dupe. After trying to steal a juicy

point, the valet sits down to what only to be forced to cough it up at knifeÌ er, is 5 SO Over- i meal of his own. The service, howev promises to be a sumptuous manage to taste the dishes before they zealously rapid that he doesn't even nt on Act Four, scene 2 of Le Gouverneme are taken awav. This scene is based of role the played had e l, where Molièr de Sanche Pansa by Guérin de Bousca honor his in ed prepar t banque a ned to Sancho. Quixote’s servant is summo the Yet Sancho is prevented from tasting Island. ate Fortun of s citizen by the for his by a disguised

doctor,

who

assures

him

each

that

is bad

entrée

that of nobility, when he shows up unexpectedly to upbraid his son. McBride has shown that Dom Louis’s eloquent tirade on his frustration with Dom Juan’s failure to conform to aristocratic norms echoes an opuscule

food

on the point that the prerogative of noble birth must be sustained by noble action. In fact, the similarity is so close that one wonders whether Molière may not be teasing La Mothe with this scene. It closely parallels a scene in

Dom Juan cannot defer which appears at the end of the act. that song, the kind of superficial effects a seat, a plate of food, a toast, or a fill up

obligation,

by La Mothe Le Vayer on the essence of nobility, particularly in the emphasis

Corneille’s Le Menteur,

a piece of metatheatricality that Moliére subtly un-

derlines by renaming Dom Juan’s father Dom Louis, in honor of the actor who played both parts for the troupe, Moliére’s brother-in-law Louis Béjart. While Dom Louis’s nobiliary speech, flailing away at his son’s degeneracy, is sometimes seen as a curmudgeonly and impotent effort that reaffirms Dom Juan’s supremacy, two serious points reaffirm themselves. One is that the interest in degeneration from noble standards could bring actual social and financial sanctions in the days of Louis XIV’s re-examination of noble titles. The other is that Dom Juan’s reaction to his father’s visit is uncharacteristically wild: “Ah! Die as soon as you can. It's the best you can do. Everyone

should

have

his turn

and

I’m

sick of seeing

fathers

who

outlive

their

sons!”

Done Elvire’s visit in the fourth act serves a twofold purpose. On the one

hand, it continues the treatment of appearances that has been going on, this time allowing Dom Juan to participate as a spectator rather than an actor. AS Elvire delivers a moving account of her conversion and the purification of her formally carnal and possessive love into a saintlike agape, he makes no direct response to her. In the meantime,

he observes the effects of the speech

on Sganarelle, who is driven to tears. To prove that he is impervious to such sentimentality,

he

turns

his

own

back

to

her

final,

emotional

appeal.

He

must remain the master of appearances in order to deal with the imminent reappearance of the Commander. But on a second plane, the power of Elvire’s

"+

71

Dom Juan

ng us valets are prevented from enjoyi health. In both cases, the presumptuo inedThe glory. s’ unhinged sense of the consumerism linked to their master

for the inherent contradictions of the ible feast comes to serve as a symbol consume is the Commander's statue, material continuum. Equally unable to the Apr with a silent stance and let the guest disarmed Dimanche, nor can he adopt His only recourse is to nl Elvire. he did with the scene with words, as Commander’s

invitation

on

to supper

the

morrow.

On

the

receiving

he can’t easily escape. civility, he is trapped in an obligation

end

the of

oo

the final act add relief to his — Dom Juan’s superficial successes in ne the dress and discourse of a penitent, punishment by Heaven. Adopting eae wees

his father Dom Louis into manages to fool both Sganarelle and — devotional disguise easily deceives he has given up his evil ways. The ing in ones season their of s succes the for and a valet too eager to take credit inability is nevertheless frustrated by his lier acts. Dom Carlos, less gullible, er Carlos . manner y in a diplomatic to deal with Dom Juan’s bogus civilit

ng to meet Dom Juan in ver assuage the demands of honor only by agreei a se ο him. Dom Juan is now part of

for promises to be an unfair ambush in bes to Sganarelle, is nearly ses re descri he as that, ites devout hypocr ers : ee e of hushing up such future blend worldly affairs and

Having

quite capabl

achieved

success

in

mimetically

appropriating — ἐμέ

codes

οι

to ma Ἐ Dom Juan is by that very act forced spiritual and worldly salvation, set points weak aneously, he reveals the concessions to them. Simult rs ὃν e surviv rakishness, for he can only materialist system of pious

μῶν ἀρ ly detests. He gains a reprieve defending the principles he inward μ cen ὑπ ishment

rather than

a pardon,

and

his reckoning

will come

g, the weakness of human understandin imagines. Once more, he had evoked

Chapter Four

Dom Juan

admitting, “Il y a bien quelque chose là-dedans que je ne comprends pas; mais quoi que ce puisse être, cela n’est pas capable, ni de convaincre mon esprit, ni d’ébranler mon âme.” Mentally and spiritually, Dom Juan resolves to reject even the appearances of proof. Carlos had left him with the remark, “We'll see, in truth, we'll see.” When a veiled ghost appears, Sganarelle comically suggests to his master that he should take the appearance seriously as an appearance. Noting that it has no feet, he says paradoxically, “I can tell it’s a ghost by the way it walks.” Dom Juan grasps at Cartesian dualism to try to attack ths troubling vision: “I’ll prove with my sword whether it’s body or spirit.” When it provides its own proof by flying off, Sganarelle begs his master, “Rendez-vous a tant de preuves.” Is Dom Juan, by professing a radical disbelief in all truth or proof, becoming a skeptic at this point? Not if we go by Sextus’s analysis, for the philosopher stops short of such a statement in Book Two of The Outlines of Pyrrhonism: “It must be understood that we have no intention of asserting that a criterion for truth does not exist, for that would be dogmatic” (The Skeptic Way, p. 138). Dom Juan’s reduction of all

wages, since he assumes a causal relationship between them and the premise of his service as valet. Throughout his works, paradox signifies for Molière an unstable but fruitful contrariety that defies general opinion, thus justifying the Greek para-doxa. Despite the pulls of positive or negative idealism, absolute mate-

appearances to the status of inconsiderable bagatelles is not the Skeptic Way.

Sextus points out in Book One, “Those who claim that the Skeptics deny appearanices seem to me not to have heard what we say...we do not reject things that lead us involuntarily to assent in accord with a passively received phantasia |sense perception] and these have appearances. And when we question whether the external object is such as it appears, we grant that it does appear, and we are not raising a question about the appearance, but rather about what is said about the appearance” (92). It is ironic that his final words describing the torment of Dom Juan’s im-

molation are remarkably close to the carnal violence of his desires: “An invisible fire is burning me, I can’t resist and my body becomes...” The orgasmic moment of conquest Dom Juan had lived for in vain finally realizes itself in the instant of his physical destruction. Some modern productions of the play pass up the traditional cauldron of flames that originally accompanied this scene, causing Moliére’s company to pay a great deal for the special effects and for two Dominican fire-monks to avoid igniting the theater. Instead, modern directors often choose to accentuate the distress of the body itself as it confronts the perspective of infinity. Having refused to consider humans in the Christian tradition as “living stones,” Dom Juan finds himself reduced to sa by a stone that literally came to life, in the form of the Commander's atue. Interestingly, Dom Juan’s final infernal punishment is presented not in — “she abstract terms, but as sensory appearance within the skeptical : δια Μὴ he describes the sense of heat as his body is enveloped in flames. ailed Aristotelian to the end, Sganarelle cannot unders tand why he has no

rialism or absolute spirituality, it is irreducible either to utilitarianism or to

theodocy. Dom Juan and Sganarelle seek to escape the horns of their dilemma each by proposing an absolute definition of happiness. The master sees it as an all-powerful fantasy associated with humanist virtu, the servant as a “right of man” proclaimed by an abstract and unrealized notion of morality. Nevertheless, these two complimentary versions of ideal life cannot articulate themselves without becoming embroiled in their own inner contradictions. Life is finally a dream whose key, whether illusory prerogative or unclaimable wage, can only be known through its absence. This conclusion obviously has a close affinity to the theological stance of skeptical fideism. Though less explicit in Moliére’s work than in Hispanic

authors such as Quevedo and Calderon, the dream-like nature of earthly life contrasts with the absolute nature of the soul. Dom Juan is right in the sense

that a mysterious gap separates Man from ultimate truth and forces him to make decisions in an environment of unstable appearances. He is comically wrong in assuming that there is no absolute criterion and that therefore all human

decisions are necessarily equal in value. His attempt to put the lie

to faith is thus premature and presumptuous, for judgment on any Truth accepted through faith can only be deferred and not dismissed. Sganarelle’s insistence on an immanent proof of the efficacy of faith through reason is equally doomed. Moliére effectively clears the field of all but the suspension

of judgment. Still, the epoche of Dom Juan is not the last word of the dramatist on issues of spiritual epistemology. In a sense, this play is best understood as a kind of entr’acte in the ongoing battle of Tartuffe, where most of the issues will rear Dom up again - not in the hands of determined negative dogmatists like

Juan

and demi-habile reasoners like Sganarelle,

but in the environment

of

everyday French society of the times. Without this larger context, it is best perhaps to adopt a suspension of judgment on the suspension of judgment, and to accept only those appearances that have so far revealed themselves.

T

73

—

72

Chapter Five Caractères, Superstition, and /dées reçues:

Communicative Paradoxes in Le Misanthrope It is well known that during the months that followed the smashing box office triumph of L’Ecole des femmes, a storm of controversy broke out about if the play, as Moliére was attacked in print, on the stage, in the salons, and, streets the on person in truth, in one dubious anecdote has any foundation these is that by enemies who accused him of two main offenses. The first of

expothe playwright crossed the boundary between religion and theater by the in put are that tone spiritual a of phrases certain ridicule sing to public latter The mouth of Arnolphe and by mocking the “Maximes du mariage.” , spiritual was, in fact, essentially the same as a text being used by confessors the duties on women advisors, and others in ultra-devout circles to instruct was Molière that saying were of a faithful spouse. In essence, these critics of masks requisite the with matters such being too direct and not covering the to counter quite runs really criticism second dramatic convention. The his play. The term first, for Moliére was also accused of “equivocating” in and scurriéquivoque in seventeenth century French denoted both falsifying sexual several around lous joking; the charges in the latter domain centered

“naive” ward, especially a puns in conversations between Arnolphe and his

a quasi-anatomical little joke on the children’s game of corbillon, involving students have to English that innocuous reference to a cream pie that is so one said, was ion, equivocat vulgar Such content. strain to find the offensive royal family the of service the in t playwrigh a as status unworthy of Moliére’s to Louis than rather (he was still attached to the king’s brother, Monsieur, if one takes into account the XIV himself). This is a rather bizarre accusation

time by Moliére’s rivals. It less tasteful comedies being produced at the same both too artificial and, being was appears all the stranger since it implies he enough in his use artificial not argument, in the case of the previous, devout of language. - not necessarily the auClearly, the audience had entered the play world but a larger audience that did dience Moliére was used to at the Palais Royal, s. So Moliére counteratnot always focus attention on the plays themselve

77

Chapter Five

Caractères, Superstition, and /dées reçues

tacked, not in the usual form of a vitriolic polemic “letter” to the opponents,

make it clear interest of the play, as it always has. Furthermore, analysis will universe. cative communi this in s problem of source only that he is not the

76

but on the stage itself. First he “played” the audience (just about the worst

audience he could imagine!) in the Critique de l'École des femmes, setting up and knocking down the side-splitting images of his critics in the intimacy of a rather stuffy aristocratic salon. Then he “played” the players themselves, as they played the audience once again, in the ingeniously meta-theatrical Impromptu de Versailles. Here Molière sharpened his dramatic caricatures of dim-witted

marquises

and

bigoted

ladies,

while

defending

his own

art in

most modest terms and allowing the spectator a “real” glimpse behind the rehearsal curtain, into the intimacy of a dramatic company. Despite the satirical effectiveness of these two little gems, the battle raged on, and claimed the earliest version of Tartuffe as its victim, or rather its hostage, since the play would be banned from public representation until 1669. With Tartuffe reduced to the status of a prisoner of war, the playwright's

next five-act comedy is (not surprisingly) one that again “plays” the audience and aims directly at the problems of sincerity and criticism that lay at the heart of the battles. Le Misanthrope portrays a day in the life of the gentleman Alceste, as he spreads his Gospel of absolute sincerity in the unlikely precincts of an upper-class Parisian salon, while desperately trying to extricate a profession of love from the circle’s leader, the elusive and sarcastic flirt, Célimène.

Within

the paradox

of this “amorous

subtitle, L’Atrabilaire amoureux),

grouch”

(to roughly translate the

Moliére addresses much

wider issues of the

freedom and danger of expression, whose apparent contradictions he once again managaes to reconcile into a larger vision of the human condition.

The serio-comical nature of this play at once alerted seventeenth-century audiences to the importance of its paradoxes. Early critics, such as Donneau de Visé, were quick to grasp and appreciate the fact that Moliére had pushed back the boundaries of psychology and philosophy in theater in a bold new way. It was not until René Jasinski’s work and his discovery of parallels with La Mothe Le Vayer’s Prose chagrine that philosophical texts were directly applied to the interpretation of the play. Robert McBride pushed Jasinski’s inquiries much

further, adding La Mothe’s Petit Traité sceptique sur cette com-

rse difficult, his If his own opposition makes the usual kind of social intercou

the communicavery dissidence points to inherent inadequacies in some of tive strategies of his contemporaries

very paradoxical solution. Beginning

modern

with

Rousseau’s

and directs other characters toward a

τ

continuing

Lettre à d’Alembert and

through

studies by Jules Brody and others, it has been common

critical

ing dualities: Alceste practice to analyze Le Misanthrope as a system of conflict dissimulation, ethical against the rest of the characters, sincerity versus

hommes. This versus aesthetic principles, homme de bien versus honnétes extreme in us ridiculo a to tradition of analysis by antinomies is carried seni the Molière, de Philinte Le Fabre d’Eglantine’s post-Revolution drama, by an ling dissemb his for d chastise sly evil aristocrat Philinte is righteou the that fact the in irony poetic certain a is There anti-establishment Alceste.

the suenhe of {86 great author-politician Fabre d’Eglantine, who had burgled relationships, and violated playwright, dismembered his characters’ social ructive” guillotine! This did common sense, met his own end on the “deconst

of the original play. little, though, to reorient the debate on the significance language, the binary of ive It remains troubling that, from the perspect to the text. Philinte entry e adequat tradition does not provide for an entirely and

Eliante,

Alceste’s

well-meaning

friends

who

function

as

mediators,

or with the other memcannot be conveniently grouped either with Alceste form their discourse around bers of Célimène’s clique, for their tendency to subject clashes decisively with the object of conversation rather than the explanation in the les the self-centered speech of the others. Philinte’s

affect the emotions of one’s peers scene of how a conventional embrace will

master οἱ salon —— thoroughly displays his other-directedness. This suc makes

every effort to distract Alceste from

the solipsistic angst that

Philinte knows that the outwardly motivated expressions trigger in him. and gestural signs that are Misanthrope automatically distrusts linguistic rather than to expose the nondesigned to effect a change in the interlocutor i

i

mune façon de parler: N’avoir pas le sens commun and other opuscules to the field

contingent sentiments of the speaker-actor.

of comparison. However, La Mothe’s texts are extremely introspective and non-dialogical. They tend to reinforce the neo-Romantic tendency to focus uniquely on Alceste’s motives and moods, almost to the point of making

assassination?) is just a external acter sketches (or should we say character nor

Céliméne’s salon into a kind of dream projection of his. One does well to remember that Alceste finds himself, malgré lui, in a social network. He is called

on to react, however reluctantly, to lawsuits, literary proffers, prospects of marriage, and numerous other interpersonal situations. It is his unusual way of dealing with all these communicative functions that constitutes the comic

favorite pure sport of charOne may object at this point that Célimène's ly

and behavior. Neither she directed and as objective as Philinte’s language with portraits or caracteres, ion fascinat salon Moliére invented the fashionable somewhat misleading extreme: but she and her cronies carry it to a new and judged objectivity in — One finds on reflection that her circle’s purport boring panes s describe she ment is actually false. For instance, when the emotional emphasis rationalizations or Géralde’s nobiliary babble, all

|

at

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Chapter Five

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really falls on the portraitist herself rather than on the target personality. In

letter to Oronte, the misanthrope himself seeks to use a reductive, exterior portrayal of personality. When he holds the letter before her and says, “Jetez ici les yeux, et connaissez vos traits” (1324), the word traits takes on a double meaning, signifying not only the peculiarities of handwriting, but also the

the portrait of Géralde, for instance, Céliméne’s impressions of exasperated

incomprehension

or disconnected

words — chevaux,

équipages,

chiens, ducs,

tu — are substituted for the object himself. No effort is made to probe deeper

into his personality or actions, since they have been completely effaced by the speaker’s reactions. On the other hand, the consistantly negative judg-

ment in the portrait falls directly on an identified individual. This violates the spirit of the parlor game, which generally separated the abstracted character traits from any specific person, thus inviting the members of the circle

to guess at the identity. Such indirection also allowed a vital measure of play to both the portraitist and the object, permitting each to deny a direct link

that could prove embarrassing. Céliméne

and

her gang are engaged

in a complex

game

of oral-optical

deception and substitution. It is a small step from her distortion of subjects like Géralde to the complete absorption of discourse by a portraitist who

79

representation of Céliméne’s entire personality. Céliméne’s deterministic type of caractére conforms closely to the externalism that Jules Brody sees at work in La Bruyére’s texts (Du Style à la pensée, 18-21). But unlike the moralist, she refuses to admit any dichotomy between

essence and existence. She remains firmly rooted in a visible, material reality that draws its shape from her relative viewpoint. When Célimène sketches Bélise’s boring visit, she encapsulates her guest in the physical silence of a “sec entretien,” described through effects such as the hostess’s yawning and her glances at her clock. No curiosity is shown about the state of mind - tranquil or troubled — which led Bélise to seek out the coquette’s company, Cus-

character sketch is Acaste’s fatuous self-description in Act III, Scene 1. In this

tomarily, Céliméne’s verbal victims are assimilated to a single detail of laideur that contrasts with her own radiance. Acaste and Clitandre are fascinated by the prospect of obtaining Célimène’s approval, just as they are with attending the king’s lever ceremony. Both events supply a needed focus to their

in a stage performance at Yale several years ago, an excellent student actor succeeded in playing Acaste and Clitandre simultaneously with the aid of a mirror mounted on a jester’s wand.

assume their highest meaning. The mistress of the clique, who aspires to complete mastery of the baroque surfaces that surround her, keeps Alceste at bay by denying him a fixed

takes on the roles of subject, object, and audience or destinataire. Judd Hubert

has pointed out (pp. 142-151) that the ultimate example of this brand of

auto-caractére, Acaste, so preoccupied by his own reflection that he barely notices his fellow marquis Clitandre, tries to justify his pretensions as noble and suitor by a superficial examination that reeks of conceit. No wonder that

The reductive strategy of Céliméne’s clique is governed by a deterministic world-view founded on the total valorization of appearance and the manipulation of perspective. In this materialistic, but strangely shifting

universe,

a single part or aspect easily comes

to represent a whole

organic

being. Thus in the famous portraits sequence of Act II synecdoche triumphs as Timante is reduced to his shifty eyes and Cléon to his well-set table. Later, in a tell-tale letter, Céliméne distills another friend, the “grand flandrin de vicomte” into a freeze-frame impression of his act of spitting to make circles in a well, neglecting, or perhaps occulting the man’s psychological motivations, which undoubtedly had something to do with waiting to see the lady herself. Even Céliméne’s Basque footman shows that he has absorbed the

superficial semiotic rules of the household

when

he introduces

the Guard

of the Maréchaussée (roughly the equivalent of one of our FBI agents) by a description of his clothes. Alceste parodies the salon’s discourse when he draws Clitandre’s portrait through the external details of his falsetto laugh,

lace canons on his hose, billowing rhingrave pants, blond wig, and mandarin-

like nails. Later, when he thinks he has proof of Céliméne’s infidelity in her

otherwise insubstantial universe. Célimène, for her part, comes to occupy what Jean-Marie Apostolidès so rightly calls la place du roi (pp. 21-39), the central ocular and hierarchical location from which all the details of society

perspective on reality and suggesting plausible alternatives to his fatalistic vision of her coquetry. When he criticizes her commerce in love letters, she confuses him by declaring that a letter, like any sign, can have an infinity of meanings.

As a token of exchange, which can be destined for anyone, its

words have no ontological status outside of the specific context of incidental expression. Words

Céliméne is or occulted wants words valorization Incapable

of love are thus contingent on temporal

intention, and

enough of a casuist to realize that intention can be directed by the subject. For an absolute nominalist like Alceste, who to be invested with immanent and immutable meaning, any of relativity causes complete disorientation and abject collapse.

of sorting out the odds to find a most

likely explanation,

he is

soon fawning over his mistress like a fallen Hercules and begging her forgive-

ness. As long as Céliméne can stand as author and authority in the world of caractères, vested with full aesthetic powers, monopolizing and manipulating the field of vision at will, she can control all her suitors, especially Alceste,

whose moral fond can never assert itself in an environment changeable forme.

of infinitely

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Here, however, Célimène parts ways with La Bruyère, for the moralist's texts lead ineluctably to the conclusion that society is pointless and empty, condemned to a round of endlessly meaningless repetition — what Walter

may appear absurd at first glance, but let us not forget that Alceste himself is absurd, that his putative cult of unadorned Reason is a sham that becomes all

Benjamin

calls

“das

Immergleiche.”

Benjamin

implies

that

this void

can

be redeemed only by the recognition of its complete pointlessness, thus al-

lowing the intellectual to achieve a state of transcendence, or “Jetztzeit,” as a superior, if bitter, knowledge rushes in to fill the vacuum of deconstructed

human relations. Céliméne’s discourse contains no such self-consciousness and her creatures remain trapped in the glow or aura of their petty-nobiliary world. Neither Céliméne nor Alceste fully realizes the futility of their discourse. It is only the privileged spectator who, having fully understood

dramatic polyphony, can reconstrue meaning and thus occupy the real place

du roi. And only Philinte and Eliante, of all the self-styled spectators on stage, master that art of understanding. Ultimately, Céliméne and her discourse must paradoxically fail. By dint of reifying others, she eventually reifies herself in the telltale caractères inscribed in her own letters. In doing so, she gives up her claim to the visual power point. As soon as she can be situated in the continuum of social ridicule, as

the object of a deterministic portrait instead of the creator, she can no longer

govern perspective. Her discursive system does not absolutely disappear, but is relativistically displaced into the other salons where Acaste and Clitandre will bring her letters, the objects which have come to represent and encapsulate her, robbing her of life and liberty. Determinism

and relativism are incompatible,

since it is impossible to

reify living individuals to the extent that Céliméne demands. Thus, when the coquette’s texts escape her control and the ridiculous marquis can begin a relativistic comparison of their own, the discursive conventions that govern her salon are nullified and abandoned. Perhaps they were bound to fail for other reasons as well, since the one-dimensional, satirical employment of the caractere fails to exploit the genre’s full ironic range, which draws its greatest power from the dichotomy (and also dialectic) of appearance and reality. As the frustrated idealist La Bruyére strives to show, the two do not match:

81

Alceste, the rationalist, the truth-seeker, a slave to superstition? The idea

the more obvious as he grovels at the feet of the most unreasonable coquette in all of Paris. His epithet, l’atrabilaire amoureux, underlines this contradic-

tory nature. Part of the fascination of Moliére’s misanthrope is that he is at least partly conscious of the contradiction. Each time Philinte points to the irony and suggests methods

for resolving it, Alceste insists on his own

willful desire to stand as a living contradiction. Although he complains, “It makes me boiling mad to be wrong when I am in the right,” he would have it no other way. Whenever anyone says anything good about him, he is the first to negate it. If the compliments come from malicious flatterers like the poetaster Oronte or the prude Arsinoé, such deflections count to his credit

and make the spectator agree with Eliante that there is something noble in Alceste’s character. Yet this virtue loses some of its gloss as the audience sees that it is actually the result of a reflex action. In the portrait scene, even as he attains his highest moral ground in the play, he is quick to concede to his enemies, “The laughers are with you.” As soon as he begins to win a content or an argument, he will arrange for himself to lose, since this is his ultimate

goal and the essence of his identity as he would have it.

The flaws in Alceste’s rationalism are subtle ones, and closely linked to

historically skeptical concerns. For instance, his rejection of law, as manifested in his refusal to solicit or even to pay attention to the courts in the matter of the lawsuit filed against him, seems at first glance to be tied to a Pyrrhonist position. In the Dialogues of Guy de Brués, Aubert says that laws are not needed in the superior animal world, where creatures do not seek to establish articifial dominance over each other. Moreover, they are inherently

fraudulent and tyrannical. Magistrates are likened to wolves instead of seliable watchdogs (Morphos 62). This line of thinking, perhaps more nihilistic than purely skeptical,

appears

to match

Alceste’s conclusions.

Yet Molière

has Philinte remind Alceste of an important aspect of nature — its preda-

what is is never what should be, and paradox, rather than materialistic deter-

tory spirit. Philinte says that Alceste’s desires for absolute human viene are equivalent to expecting wolves, tigers, or vultures to act against their own

Alceste is just as deterministic as Céliméne, but in a different manner, for

Opinion, and a specious one at that. Later in the Dialogues, Nicot states that

minism, rules the universe.

whereas her language and thought are preoccupied with the material surfaces of the universe, his are haunted instead by the love and fear of what may lie behind them. While Céliméne tries to persuade her flock that goodness is a function of beauty, Alceste strives ludicrously to assure them that it is derived instead from Truth. The dread of an unseen epistemological authority fills his every word and act.

natures. In doing so, he exposes his friend’s vision of perfect Hatuee as a mere

law is nature brought to its highest perfection (Morphos 69). Clearly, Molière stops short of this rationalist backswing, preferring to allow nature to suEpass human classification in the elaboration of its own order. Through the juxtaposition of Alceste and Philinte, one can draw the inference that the appear-

ance of atavistic vices in human institutions should be taken and accepted for what it is, without expectations of imposing a more perfect standard

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offered by reason. Instead, if a criterion must be used, or at least provisionally adopted (as is most common in ethical situations), it would appear that

them for their their failure to apply the internal scourge of virtue with which

expediency is a surer guide. Nicot mentions this expediency criterion in the Dialogues within the framework of the state (Morphos 67). However, he can

human race for their sinful tendency to disregard gloominess and seek joy.

only illustrate it adequately by using examples of individual expediency. Guy de Brués often seems to present the best skeptical arguments paradoxically from the mouth of his rationalists, and it may be that Moliére is imitating to some extent this strategy of misdirection to make his point. Moliére enhances Alceste’s superstitious withdrawal from communication in a number of subtle ways. For instance, when Alceste’s bumbling valet Du Bois appears in Act IV spouting nonsense

about the arrival of a myste-

rious messenger with diabolic papers (in reality an officer of the court with a writ regarding Alceste’s lawsuit), the audience is tempted to dismiss such silly confusion. The servant's burlesque search for the documents merely seems

to swell the comic relief. But beneath the surface of this /azzo lies a truthcontent that cannot be ignored. The seventeenth century had a proverb for it: tel maitre, tel valet. Du Bois’s babble, like Sganarelle’s obsession with le moine bourru in Dom Juan, is the key to a superstitious dimension in the play, and the valet’s foibles reveal much about the master’s mentality. There is a pattern in the servant’s speech that moves from the description of the messenger’s ominous black clothes and threatening countenance (“un homme noir et d’habit et de mine”) to the document itself (“un papier griffoné”), which contains writing that can only be deciphered by one “pis que démon,” and where “le diable d’enfer n’y verrait goutte.” In a curious way, Alceste is as superstitious as his man, for he is apt to disregard rational analyses of human behavior in favor of sweeping super-

natural explanations. of affection that does at a suspicion that he into his soul and will

His reluctance in the opening scene to give any sign not stem from a gush of heart-felt sentiment hints is being watched, that some unearthly judge can see immediately punish him for any superficial deed that

does not match his internal spectrum of emotions. Thus he warns Philinte:

“Courez vous cacher!” — so as to hide himself from the deity who might wish to chastise his “coeur corrompu,” his pure shame, his inexcusable sentimental prostitution, which a cosmic judge would find worthy of hanging. Another indication of this haunting presence in Alceste’s psyche is his tendency to curse, a habit that cannot be ascribed to social conventions that mean nothing to him. Words like morbleu, sangbleu, têtebleu, parbleu - where bleu fearfully displaces the unmentionably omnipotent, omniscient dieu --

evoke a veiled, otherworldly presence that Alceste imagines is witnessing his moral drama. Time and again he explicitly calls for some supernatural force

to strike the unworthy with suffering in retribution for their stupidity, to flail

83

misanthropes mortify themselves. He even goes 80 far as to damn the entire His language and thinking are so permeated by concerns of Fate that he searches beneath each phenomenon for obscure signs of extra-human purpose. In the process, he becomes semiotically conditioned to a type of morbid synecdoche, akin to that of Célimène, but shifted so that the pleasure principle is replaced by masochistic phantasm, a kind of self-imposed Purgatory. His pied plat opponent in the lawsuit becomes a symbol for pandemic human

treason and the court’s unfavorable verdict becomes a reverse Last Judgment on human vice. Alceste’s perverse attraction to losing the lawsuit can only be explained by la hantise du surnaturel. In fact, there may be a supernatural literary precedent for this confrontation. In Quevedo’s Visit of the Jests one garrulous spirit mentions just such a Pyrrhic sacrifice: “What sort of idiotic things could Jean de la Encina do, he who went naked to avoid dealings with

tailors, who let his estate be taken away so as to have no need of lawyers?” (Dreams, 143). A victory in court would establish the capacity of man’s intelligence and institutions to determine right and wrong, thus obliging Alceste to consider his responsibilities of gratitude and mercy. But a defeat places him in the role of privileged tragic martyr, holding both the keys to heaven and complete authorization to indulge in his customary bitterness. Fatalism

is an excellent buffer against social engagement. Alceste will only consent to be judged by totally non-empirical criteria, on the intrinsic, idealized merit that can never be shown in the real world. It is hardly surprising that Du Bois can only refer to the affair in demonic terms.

Anyone in Alceste’s proximity who even hints at superstition risks falling

into a metaphysical confrontation. Oronte invites the oncoming argument over his sonnet when he vows friendship to the loner with the oath “sais-je

du ciel écrasé, si je mens!” Mentioning the Heavens and Truth to Alceste in the same sentence is like waving a red cape in the corrida. Proof that Alceste has been provoked by this casual reference lies in his superstitiously worded rejoinder: “L'amitié demande un peu plus de mystère,” literally, “Friendship

demands a bit more mystery.” One may go so far as to see Alceste’s behavior as a Christ complex. He takes it upon himself to suffer for society’s sins. He must descend into his private Hell to purge mankind of its failings. If he approaches a woman, it must be a Magdelene-like flirt who welcomes all men to the intimacy of her chambers. But he lacks the one quality that made it possible for Mary Magdelene to approach Jesus — forgiveness. Méheneres given

a shred

of evidence

that Célimène

has

misbehaved,

be it Oronte’s

sonnet, Arsinoé’s letter, or the more damning documents produced by Acaste

and Clitandre, Alceste is always ready to throw the first stone. No wonder,

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since his entire logic is construed to show him as being without sin! When he at last gets a perfect chance to achieve reconciliation with Céliméne in the final act, he cannot bring himself to give her an unconditional pardon.

monplace carried to the second power, and harks back to the etymological roots of the word paradox — “para-doxa” or “beyond common opinion” (in this case, going beyond

of bringing his minstry into the world. By the same token, Alceste’s wooing of Céliméne becomes a test of the destiny of all human love — one which must be utterly disengaged from the

Philinte is willing to adorn Oronte’s sonnet with such posies as “jolie, amoureuse, admirable” strictly because he knows their repetitive emptiness,

Thus, he winds up as a Christ in reverse, heading off into the desert instead

worldly cause and effect of sentiment

if it is to have

any meaning

in the

Misanthrope’s supernatural order. He refuses to caress her, even verbally, in order to produce the pleasant sensations that seduce and lead to personal commitment. Instead, his pointed questions and aggressive accusations attempt brutally to pierce and pry open her social armor and outer self, as he drives like a rapist in search of some unseen, yet delicious sin. Furthermore, he wishes to place her in a sort of sexual-social bondage in which she will be utterly dependent on his male “generosity.” When thwarted in his desires, he refuses to acknowledge a behavioral cause for his failure, but instead quickly

ascribes it to the fatal workings of a dimly perceived destiny: “Mon astre me

disait ce que j’avais a craindre” (1294), “My stars told me what I had to fear.”

Whether or not one takes literally this allusion to astrology, it is not hard to see that Alceste elevates his impending suffering to a level of planetary significance.

But as Hubert points out (144), part of Alceste’s own paradox is that ultimately Céliméne and her world do serve him as a diversion from his haunting

self-judgment. She allows him to exteriorize at least some of his destructive energy and in that context actually provides an odd sort of healthy outlet for his spiritual disease. Céliméne’s circle and its peculiar form of deflective, deflating discourse typify the Pascalian notion of morally irresponsible divertissement. While conceding the reprehensible side of their activity, Moliére, the ultimate partisan of therapeutic play, reaffirms the paradoxical effect (in the medical sense) of Alceste’s exposure in this worldly arena as a diversion, or perhaps a counter-irritant, from a more dangerous sort of psychic distraction. This explains why Philinte and Eliante are so eager to reintegrate him into their salon world at the conclusion of the play, rather than allow him to flee into his désert. What

permits

Philinte

and

Eliante

to achieve

such

benevolence

and

separates them from the language-patterns of both the clique and the loner is above all their unique attitude toward the banal, conventional formulas of idées recues. It has often been observed that Philinte seems to parrot the superficial codes of honnéteté, but he does so in a manner which openly admits and exploits the limitations of that same discourse, thus producing a type of language which is self-consciously figurative and paradoxical. It is com-

85

first involves going through). As such, it stands in

contrast both to Céliméne’s mechanistic orthodoxy and to Alceste’s pachycephalous heterodoxy.

but also is aware of the lingering aura of importance that they hold for the weaker-minded. What makes Oronte’s sonnet so unacceptable to Alceste is not its banality, which is matched or exceeded by his own little ditty, “Si le Roi m’avait donné Paris,” but its thoroughly paradoxical conceit: “Belle Philis, on désespére,/Alors qu’on espére toujours.” This typically baroque feature is utterly incompatible with the misanthrope’s rigidly Manichean view of the universe. For Alceste, a love poem must involve a brutally binary choice: Paris or ma

mie. Moreover,

the erotic choice must entail suffering,

in the deprivation of Parisian culture, and indeed, probably all civilization.

Oronte’s sonnet, as a not altogether successful effort to reconcile hope and hopelessness, desire and fulfillment, also points uncomfortably to Alceste’s own repressed ambiguities. However, Philinte, who knows the uses of

paradox, is unbothered. If he is unable to explain fully his politics of praise to his embattled friend, it is because he hesitates to raise once more the disrup-

tive issue of masochism. Robert McBride points to the philosophical gist of the sonnet scene when he observes that in it Alceste explicitly elevates Truth to the status of an objective criterion for all human conduct (122). Moliére constructs a Gaver skeptical trope of regression in the play to undercut Alceste’s reasoning. Truth, as Alceste describes to Philinte, must not be mediated by any social process of honnéteté. Nor must

it take into consideration,

as Philinte does,

the basic animal nature of Man, who is still beset with all sorts of primitive instincts. Rather, it must spring from Sincerity. For a Pyrrhonist, this already shatters the criterion of Truth, since no criterion is supposed to have under-

lying criteria. But Le Misanthrope pushes the analysis farther still, to another

level of regression: Sincerity is itself subjective, being rooted in an absolute

unity of feeling and expression. Now it becomes clear why Alceste chooses his old-fashioned song in what otherwise appears to be clear violation of aesthetic procedure. “Si le roi me donnait Paris” represents for him an exemplum of Sincerity. His ridicule lies in the fact that only he is incapable of understanding such maudlin emotional caterwauling as a reductio ad absurdam. gi It now becomes possible to confront the odd fact that it is not Célimène who composes the best, most durable character sketch in the play, but rather

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her virtuous counterpart Eliante. In her description of how lovers distort the imperfections of their sweethearts (ll. 711-730), she rejects the deterministic construct of satirical caractéres and extols the human being’s ability

standards of social behavior must draw their validity from a context. Eliante

86

to turn paradox into happiness. Lovers see the objects only wrongly, but also as conventional opposites of the Rather than being doomed to loneliness and failure by shortness, love removes from women the deterministic

of their passion not satirical viewpoint. excessive height or labels of slob, giant,

or dwarf and turns them into “beautés négligées,” “déesses,” or “abrégés des merveilles des cieux.” Rather than reducing itself to a code of disfigurement, affective language repairs the deformities of appearance by endowing them with

positive connotative value. The

lover can know

no single Truth con-

veyed through language. Daniella Dalla Valle has shown that Eliante’s speech is largely a paraphrase

of a passage in Part Four of Lucretius’s De Rerum natura, beginning with verse 1153. Gaston Hall, in his edition of the play (202), considers that the passage

in question derives more directly from Montaigne than from Lucretius. While guarding some reservations about his well-presented hypothesis, one can still appreciate that such similarities only enhance the spectatorial impression that Eliante is delivering an idée recue. As a philosophical idée recue passed on by the wise woman Eliante to her less enlightened comrades, the concept of paradoxical

praise already carries an

implicit

stamp

of commonplace,

but

Eliante goes even further in establishing its credentials as a commonly shared social yardstick. In an effort to destroy all social masking early in the play, Alceste wished to publicly upbraid Emilie for her face-painting and Dorilas for his rodomontades, thus polarizing society and eventually levelling it with a universally applicable measure of truth. Unveiled in this harsh light, most

people would be forced to admit their nullity and collapse into a state of penitential withdrawal, thus realizing Alceste’s desire of creating an earthly

Hell, or at the very least a Purgatory. All flesh would be equally abominable.

Some critics, such as J. P. Short, hold that Alceste merely wants to reform society, like a good doctor healing a patient. In fact, the medication Alceste

prescribes here is so drastic as to kill the patient. As Philinte observes in Act II,

scene 4, Alceste’s aim is not to improve, but to criticize for criticism’s sake. He

has cultivated the reputation of disregarding the issues at stake as long as they

afford him the ability to argue against someone:

“Il ne sauroit souffrir qu’on

blame, ni qu’on loue.” Eliante, on the other hand, accepts the profane function of human life and the diversity that naturally occurs within it. Céliméne notwithstanding,

ideal beauty cannot exist in isolation from the variations of quality (height, thickness, length, quickness, etc.) which serve to describe and define it. Seen in this light, beauty is more an average than an absolute. In a similar manner,

is just as capable as Philinte of saying, “Oui, je vois ces défauts dont votre

âme murmure/Comme vices unis à l’humaine nature” (173-74). In order to cope with the demands of human existence, it is necessary to relegate

Final Judgment to the afterlife, and to accept, rather than annihilate, the irregularities and excentricities of everyday behavior. Eliante believes in the wisdom of the compliment as a social mask that is a virtual prerequisite for the exchange that leads to happiness. It is fitting that she enacts the principle of conventional paradox by expressing what most of the audience would recognize as an idée reçue, which the author, in a rare suspension of his protocol of originality, transmits fairly explicitly from the Latin original. This

Philinte’s

paradoxical

defense

wisdom

is established

of ostentatious

civility.

at the opening

Seen

of the play by

in retrospect,

Philinte’s

armor, apology for effusiveness becomes a theory for the necessity of social

which is brilliant enough to please the eye of the beholder, but strong enough to preserve the wearer from sudden assaults or untimely examina: 1s tions. Noel Peacock convincingly demonstrates that this sort of protection of feats nor lineage, neither when age an In text. the necessary throughout arms, nor feudal bonds can serve any longer as effective bulwarks against the erosion of identities and relationships, politesse provides the established cuirasse aristocracy and the ascendant elements of the bourgeoisie with a when 2, scene IV, Act in both aesthetic and useful. The process continues of series a with him answers proposal, Eliante, faced with Alceste’s ridiculous nature: in paradoxical and proverbial both are suggestions and warnings that aime “On a beau voir, pour rompre, une raison puissante,/Une coupable Célimene’s of reason mechanistic the supercedes It est bientôt innocente.” circle, much

as Pascal’s vrais habiles transcend

rationalistic demi-habiles

by

of sensing and accepting the in-dwelling contradictions and paradoxes are Eliante and Philinte human existence. Like Pascal's truly clever thinkers, e nature prepared to acknowledge la raison des effets, despite the commonplac of personal of unoriginal idées recues. Cliché is consensus, but it is also a form

where accommodation to the apparently senseless organization of a universe flawed. ngly disappointi always are ones, human least at putative absolutes, so The couple’s indirect courtship and eventual vows of love are clichés, is cliché the much so that they scarcely need to be pronounced. However, with perorations the key to happiness and it cuts short Alceste’s supernatural remarkable ease. place of the rational The cliché or idée recue is the paradoxical blending fluid. Moliére and the irrational, of the excessively rigid and the impossibly

had loved it during his entire career. He had certainly grown to appreciate role of the comic properties in its deceptive humility when he played the

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Sancho Pansa. In Daniel Guérin de Bouscal’s Gouvernement de Sanche Pansa, Don Quixote’s sidekick has a remarkable scene where he generates scores of proverbs set in paradoxical juxtaposition. Located in a play which marked

The triumph of communication based on idées reçues has further implications for the concept of knowledge itself. Alceste’s quest for an absolutely

Moliére’s passage from the mastery of existing dramatic idioms into a new watershed of comic innovation, this crucial sequence may well have induced his ideas of commonplace and paradox to coalesce into a remarkable alliance

that would

finally find expression

in Le Misanthrope.

When

the common-

place recognizes itself as such and uses that perception as a dialectical synthesis in an otherwise discontinuous world, it takes on special significance and leads to heightened consciousness. Thus paradox can rise out of and beyond the matrix of simply restated language to become what the young

Walter Benjamin called “das Schein des Scheinlos,” the threshold separating aesthetic superficiality from the universal “now” of interpersonal understanding (Wolin, 29-43.) One can even go further to say that the employment

of paradox in this text functions, like Terry Eagleton’s conception of the Benjaminian Jetztzeit, to liberate the spectator from false consciousness (33).

This comic liberation does not take the form of an alternate idealism to replace Alceste’s conceptions. As we have already shown in the case of Dom Juan, Moliére’s theater consistently rejects the idea of a theodicy, an immanent realization of God’s providence or paradise on earth. Robert McBride is right to argue that, through Philinte’s juxtaposition with Alceste, the play is able to

lead to the perception that folly and reason are ultimately identical and that personal decision-making is best rooted in the absurdity of human existence (Sceptical Vision, 143-147). This results in a situation much like Sextus’s second trope: my proposition B disagrees with your proposition A, but it proves at least

as valid in practice. Tactically, Moliére also relies heavily on the tropes of false

criteria and regression, as well. For the idée recue constitutes on the communicative level what La Mothe’s

notion of le sens commun represents on the abstract ontological level. It is after all a necessary means for homologous beings to communicate and thus to propagate comprehension

— one that outlives and outperforms

Alceste’s

ultimatums and Céliméne’s verbal pyrotechnics. The former strip away human initiative in an impersonal space ruled by le sort, the latter reduce man to a bi-product of mutable objets (in the physical and painterly senses

of the word). Furthermore, it offers a means for the resurrection of moral guidelines in a play where Alceste wishes to subordinate Je bon to le vrai and

Céliméne seeks to equate it with le beau. Only by remaining open to the expression and use of social commonplaces can one preserve enough liberty

to befriend a boorish atrabilaire, to tolerate an acerbic flirt, or to declare affec-

tion for an apparently unlikely mate in a universe that otherwise offers only condemnation or raillery for such an act of trust.

89

“sincere,” referential sort of language and his rejection of image-based communication as false and unworthy recall the attitude of the rationalist Descartes:

Descartes’s strange hesitancies between his convictions of certain, intuitive, essential, simple knowledge on the one hand, and his usually grudging admission of contingent and probable forms of knowledge and behavior on the other, register an eloquent and lifelong ambivalence toward the accommodation of writing and rhetorical figuration. Because for him certain knowledge is demonstrative, it denotes a direct, unmediated apprehension of simple natures, and language, symbolized variously by images, fables, and riddles, denotes a radical and analogical displacement

of knowledge from its true focus. (Kroll 126)

Alceste’s fit of pique over Philinte’s conventional greetings, his ee Oronte’s

sonnet,

his preference

for a maudlin,

“from-the-heart

ditty,

of his

anger over the discrepancy between Céliméne’s portraits and the social natures of their targets, his reading of Arsinoé’s letter, his ridiculous proposal to Éliante, all testify to the same Cartesian nostalgia for simple knowledge. Awkwardness with the exchange of images in conventional language is symptom-

atic of the philosophical inability to deal with appearances as appearances, a central concern of the skeptical way. Thus, despite his suspiciousness, Alceste is certainly no skeptic. Gassendi had realized that “we have no more ae

to linguistic intention (and thus ideal reference) than we do to the inwar essences of bodies” (Kroll 127). Philinte tries to make this same point with his friend in reference both to the lawsuit and to courtship possibilities.

His insistence on the unlikelihood of finding a judge able to acknowledge Alceste’s moral superiority or of obtaining a sincere declaration of love ke Céliméne represents a classic skeptical approach to these problems. Inc ox his own confession of finding much of human nature closer to wild animals like wolves reveals that he is, if anything, pessimistic - and therefore all the more careful — about the negotiation of images. This caution ip cimewise Warranted by Epicurean atomism, which postulates that “as knowing ahaa

we inescapably operate at an epistemological and perceptual ΤΕΠΊΟΝΕ

unfiltered sensation”

(Kroll

119). By embodying

this philosophical

rom

idea in

artistic form, The Misanthrope justifies its position as a canonical text, not eed in the developing debate on human politeness and sentimentality, eA ὖ the in the unfolding history of knowledge as Classical literature approached Enlightenment.

Chapter Six Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith How

is it that Monsieur

Orgon,

who

seems to be such a sincere Christian,

in the world? becomes a willing dupe to the least sincere spiritual director nd its understa to fails ty sociabili on itself prides that How is it that a family ls and confiown head? How is it that Tartuffe, a scoundrel among scoundre erstwhile own by his dent seducer, allows himself to be tricked and seduced

of critics, from victim? Paradoxes abound in this comedy where generations tried to find ingly painstak ultramontain Catholics to crypto-Stalinists, have no more than a

matter straightforward critique of religious institutions, no

how hazy or insubstantial they may be in the text. à l'école répubRalph Albanese Jr. has shown in his recent study Molière licaine that

the

more

nineteenth-century

Catholics

persisted

in regarding

claimed its Tartuffe as a dangerous work, the more secular French Republicans

supposedly anticlerical author as a political hero.

or the burlesque serFor despite the numerous ratiocinations by Cléante coherent religious any discern to mons concocted by Tartuffe, it is so difficult and to conclude up give to tempted mentality in this play that one is often with Moliére’s friend

Boileau, whose

correspondance

states that Tartuffe is

essentially nothing more than a domestic comedy (516-17).

first of all pay attention to the To use a paradoxical perspective, one must

each opposiinherent oppositions and contradictions in a literary work. But on its own, paradox a as ed tion does not necessarily deserve to be consider antithesis, or opposites of ition because as distinguished from simple juxtapos

etymology of the word (para/ paradox must add a dimension of surprise. The

doxa = against the of the unexpected. Literary language, through figurative

common opinion or teaching) expresses, after all, a sense Paradox is thus in some measure always nonconformist. which seeks to distance itself from ordinary discourse enrichment, accords a privileged place to paradox as a po-

certain verses of a paretic strategy, and in the poetic drama that is Tartuffe, In addition, one must . spectator ticularly paradoxical nature stand out for the

a particular type of consider on a more philosophical level the existence of struggles. The ethical their in s character the paradox of situation that engulfs of Chinese n successio endless an itself prove would study of contradiction

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Chapter Six

Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith

boxes if it were not for the element of surprise, which always tries to catch the reading and viewing public off-guard in reference to its own prejudices, thus linking the degree of inevitable linguistic ambiguity with a sense of

The scene serves contextually to present the hypocrite in an important error. It shows that Orgon is victim to a double distortion of reality. He fails to judge appearances correctly both by over-valuing certain desirable impressions of piety and by under-valuing human sensitivities obvious to most other humans. The juxtaposition of the appearances of Tartuffe and Elmire episby Dorine makes it clear that Orgon is something of a Ῥεϊζερίια! and

92

social and moral direction. Moliére’s development of paradox thus surpasses the level of an inclination to abstraction that Alex Szogyi finds (31-48) or

the philosophical shock effect discussed by Patrick Henry. To understand and analyze paradox requires an acute sensitivity to the expectations of the literary public, closer to the notion of German Rezeptionstheorie. In studying the appropriation of Tartuffe by secular French Republicans in the late nineteenth-century, Albanese found a basis for a paradoxical reading

of the play, whose eponym has traits that are at once so repugnant and so powerful (129). This tendency on the part of Positivists like Jules Lemaitre only confirms an inclination already apparent in the Classical Age itself, for, as has been shown, Moliére’s dramatic contemporaries had a definite taste for the surprisingly incongrous, finding nothing wrong with its omnipresence in comedy. The same is not necessarily true for enemies of the theater, whose

very basic attacks centered on the difficulty — for them, at least — in dealing

with moral incongruity. The first reaction of the reader on encountering Orgon is often a mixture of astonishment and distaste for his opacity. Georges Forestier is right to classify him, along with Monsieur Jourdain and Harpagon of L’Avare, as three of the most impenetrable blockheads who ignore what is evident to the eyes of all the other characters. Act One, Scene Four is expressly constructed to present the protagonist, as soon as he arrives on stage, as an unfeeling man

who rejects all the reports of his wife’s illnesses with not so much as a shrug, while he repeatedly replies to Dorine “And what about Tartuffe?” When the maid traces a faithful portait of the rubicond charlatan quaffing his wine and dining with gusto, Orgon can only remark, again and again, “Oh, the poor

man!” — no matter how ill-suited the epithet seems in the occasion. Against

all odds,

Elmire’s

headaches,

her lack of appetite,

her insomnia,

and

her

eventual bleeding as a remedy elicit little attention from a man who has not so long ago lost one wife, and who might normally be expected to be alert to symptoms of disease or pregnancy in his new one. On the other hand, the physical exuberance and gluttony of a supposed ascetic seem to excite his profound sympathy. This surprisingly inappropriate behavior perplexes Cléante and the other members of the household. This brother-in-law had only lingered to say a few words of greeting and perhaps to diplomatically slide in some encouraging remarks about the impending marriage of Mariane, but he is so shocked to hear Orgon’s words that he loses his composure completely and cannot restrain himself from upbraiding the burgher about his infatuation for Tartuffe.

tendency to temological monster, a man with an innate, hence “natural,” ΤΗΣ excreatures. her of most misjudge that which Nature makes evident to

so istence of such monsters conforms quite well with the views of Lucretius that explained had er philosoph Roman the for cherished by the playwright,

play becomes a Nature paradoxically creates her own exceptions. Hence, the for anyone and ents, co-depend his for Orgon, for Vérité la putative École de

that this who chooses to identify with him or with his family. It follows learns character scene is an important liminary lesson in which the “average” we but es, appearanc of not only that he should practice careful observation unschoole relatively ” “ordinary, that he can rely on them, for even the are better than Dorine has drawn the correct conclusions. If her perceptions this domain in tion sophistica because is it those of the ultra-learned Orgon, e that experienc the from but learning,” “book abstract from not is obtained “ὧν Montaigne likened to reading in the Great Book of the World. alOrgon’s of However, opaqueness alone does not explain all facets motives of this — titude; one must dig a little deeper to discover the

WwW 7 self-satisfied paterfamilias. It is Orgon himself who puts us on Horton he paraphrases Philippians 3, 8-13: “Whoever follows his en

y

er

revea τε ξ finds inner peace, and regards the rest of society as a dunghill.” This te are both betrays practices secret advisor's spiritual reference to the ἣν hand one the on clear is It naiveté. religious Orgon’s and craftiness Scripi 2 the “directeur” is only revealing to his novice those parts of Holy avoide certainly has he that seem to teach disdain for human society, for Ironically, this same A giving Orgon the context of the verses cited.

preceeded by two warnings against the evil influence of false = Paul ε seek to stir up divisions among Christians. In Philippians 2, En the s themselve consider to and faithful to practice humility

oe

= ond = wow

that = rew neighbors, following the example Jesus himself — a bit of advice Sib sa ἐμ conveniently neglects. In the course of that epistle, Paul 2 τε er «a in possibility of abandonning the life of the body entirely, the temptations that such uniquely “in the spirit,” but in spite of

a sul

:

persevere in the life offers, he assures his followers that he will nevertheless sve a Tartuffe whole. a as Church the of life of the body for the welfare with the doctrine 0: this whole context to silence in order to imbue Orgon

no better, even worldly renunciation, and the gullible novice seems to know

94 though

Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith

Chapter Six Paul specifically admonishes his listeners in the epistle by saying,

“May your moderation by known by everyone!” By explicitly referring to the Pauline Epistles, Molière is engaging his play

directly within a sceptical tradition that passes through Montaigne. In the “Apologie de Raimond de Sebond,” Montaigne struggled with the controversial notions of natural religion Sebond had advocated. Conceding that Sebond’s reasoning was sometimes faulty, Montaigne excuses this flaw because that is the case for every human being. A comparison of man and beast

shows that humans are not much better off mentally or morally. Montaigne

then extols the simple morality of the Brazilian savages, before going on to cite a passage from I Corinthians 1: 19-21 which exhorts the Christian to “destroy the wisdom of the wise.” To Paul, it was foolish, faith-based preaching

which offered a road to salvation, not the reason of the philosophers. Richard Popkin explains that this Pauline-based thinking, important for 200 years of early modern religious debate, differed from medieval attempts to examine the paradoxes of god’s omnipotence. Montaigne turns the page, according to Popkin, by stressing human frailty, not the theological properties of God (History of Scepticism, p. 48). This same reference to Pauline scripture was a fa-

vorite theme of La Mothe Le Vayer, who united it with Tertullian’s credo quia absurdum and the views of negative theologians, overtly linking them with the “golden books” of Sextus Empiricus (Popkin, History of Scepticism, p. 83). It remains to be shown why the renunciation of the world holds so many delights for Orgon, since Tartuffe has only chosen to exploit a tendency that

existed in his host long before he became acquainted with him. The key lies in the very verse that Orgon paraphrases, since in French the Biblical word he renders as fumier (dung hill) also can be translated as ordures (garbage) or déchets (waste), in other words, the remains of an all-too-brief corporal

pleasure that becomes futile in the perspective of destiny. Actually, in the

preceding verse of Philippians, Paul explicitly evokes the notion of a previous existence, by noting that all that had enriched his life before conversion constitutes for him so much loss in the eyes of God. I have noted in my book, Social Structures in Moliére’s Theater (199-204), that the playwright

invites the audience to speculate to some degree on the nature of Orgon in

his “pre-Tartuffe state” by having the family discuss, in Act One, Scene Two,

the changes in his conduct since the hypocrite’s influence made itself felt. The text mentions two types of disruption in Orgon’s life that are associated with feelings of guilt and with his sudden penchant for religious devotion. These disruptions concern, for one thing, there is the loss of his first wife, and for another, the man’s rise in the political hierarchy during the Fronde revolt of 1648-52, discretely called “these late troubles” in the play. Deprived forever of the innocence of the honeymoon and the ideals of uncorrupted

95

youth, Orgon can only consider his current life of sexual and political com-

promise among the ruins of an earlier household and earlier institutions as the leftover waste of a fleeting experience that one tries to forget because one can no longer bring it to life. He experiences the guilty conscience of a man who too quickly forgot the woman who had given him Damis and Mariane, in order to wed the appetizing Elmire. Moreover, the compromised magistrate continued to serve the (unjust?) central government that had εχ:

iled his friend Argas, whose incriminating chest full concealed in his house. If a shadowy part of Orgon’s dear departed and his banished comrade, he would yet another verse from Philippians, which expresses and blamelessly as a Child of God, irreproachable

of secret papers remains soul is still faithful to his certainly be attracted to the desire to live simply amongst a corrupt and

perverted nation.

Robert McBride brilliantly evokes a passage from Pierre Charron’s De la sagesse that offers precious insight to Orgon’s state of mind (72). In contrast to truly pious Christians, about whom

Moliére’s Cléante says, “L'apparence

du mal a chez eu peu d'appui” (v, 395), Charron defines the character οἱ a type

he calls the superstitieux:

“Il tremble

de peur, il ne peut

fier n'y

s'assûrer, craignant d’avoir jamais assez bien fait et d'avoir penis quelque chose, pour laquelle omission tout peut-être ne vaudra rien.” Thus, too minute a psycho-analysis of Orgon’s first marriage is hardly necessary, for one realizes his fundamental personality already predisposed him to a type his of guilty self-doubt that the memory of his first wife and the presence of could relatives) with filled still household a in second (both unavoidable

only

aggravate. Orgon and Guilty conscience protrudes everywhere in the dialogue of

anger his mother, Madame Pernelle. Mother and son live in fear of a celestial explains This happy. that could strike at any moment a household unjustly

the desire to hide their good fortune, to flee dances and public assemblies, to of pine wear the dark clothing of repentence. This paradox of guilty success, Orgon’s in fitfully stirs Hamlet!), (remember mourning lusty real gladness and a that paradoxes other the all of root the at doubtlessly is It spirit. troubled velop within the beset family and around the malignant presence of Tartuf e. Lermeun spiriOn another level, the equivalence that Orgon establishes

as tual salvation and social order (of a kind) is directly linked to his status a judge in the monarchical

regime. Throughout

the ages judges, and early

as modern French magistrates in particular, have presented themselves the thus, body; political contingent a as a moral elite rather than simply lifetime, qualitative status of their appointments. In their official re

ments, judges of Moliére’s time seldom let slip an opportunity to "ὼς i instance, metaphysical notion of their character; Pierre Zobermann, for

finds

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Chapter Six

Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith

that while their proximity to the king’s administrative machine is the real

the sarcastic attitude of the family jesters is to be found in the subject of their pleasure. Whether it be a question of sartorial expenses, jokes, gadding about town, dancing, or sophisticated chit-chat, Madame Pernelle lumps all such frivolity under the influence of the Prince of Darkness, “le malin esprit.” This thinking is not far from Pascal, who would classify these pastimes as forms of “diversion” serving to distract the soul from the contemplation of its own worldly misery and heavenly glory. So it is in the name of the worldly plea-

source of their power, seventeenth-century magistrates prefer to insist that

their authority is due to their personal virtue.

Orgon only lays claim to the status ordinarily accorded to magistrates in the official pronouncements of the mercuriales and other solemn assemblies. “A judge is one of the elect, in an almost theological sense,” explains Pierre

Zoberman (267). Yet this superior status assumes an exact correspondence between the character’s appearance and the depths of his moral character. In Orgon’s case, the very sentiment of superiority that guarantees his power in town and family tends to make him introspective and to invite him to examine his soul. Instead of finding there the faithful reflection of his hierarchical good fortune, as in the case of the ideal magistrate imagined by Zoberman, Orgon sees an image tarnished by the personal losses of his first wife, his best friend Argan, and the obedience of his children. Only the type of detachment preached by Tartuffe allows him to temporarily resolve this distress, although such flights from reality are strictly a short-term relief that will entail greater and greater payments in the course of the play. Why

do Orgon’s fellow characters fail to understand more fully the rea-

sons that make him vulnerable to hypocritical manipulation? It is fitting to go back to examine more closely the first scene of the play in which Moliére sketches the household in the absence of the paterfamilias. This mannerist, asymmetrical scene juxtaposes one character too serious to be taken seriously, Madame Pernelle, with a group of jesters so light-hearted that their frivolity raises questions. Why does the family not try harder to stop Madame Pernelle from departing in outrage against their Epicurean social life? Elmire is the only one of them who makes the slightest attempt to do so, while the others cannot stop baiting her. It is true that the old lady is an easy target and becomes a sort of lightning rod for the criticism that Damis, Mariane, Dorine, and Cléante do not dare to raise so openly with Orgon. At the same time, this

deflected satire spares Orgon,

for a while, in the audience’s mind

and pre-

vents him from becoming too farcical a protagonist. The barbs are directed against an actor, Hubert, who was famous for cross-dressing and specialized

in taking old lady parts; his disguise added another element of deflection to

the audience's laughter, both on stage and off. Madame Pernelle’s entrance is simultaneously a departure, a visual paradox which, like Alceste’s first appearance in Le Misanthrope, serves to announce more subtle paradoxes that will soon follow. In tableau form, it introduces the enigma that the spectators will have to confront throughout the action. Admittedly, Madame Pernelle is an off-putting person who attacks in turn each member of the family as

though they constituted a court of carnival misrule, “la cour du roi Pétaut.”

But her insults are too laughable to wound their targets. The real motive for

97

sure of social intercourse that Damis, Mariane, Cléante, Dorine, and Elmire

seek to laugh down the old dévote. Instead of reflecting on the moral causes of her outrage, the jesters respond ad hominem to the sources of disagreeable moral discourse, whether

it be Pernelle herself, Tartuffe, or neighbors

like Daphné and Orante. They render insult for insult in a way that recalls Céliméne’s salon and its obsession with character portraits. They somewhat naively ask: How could a person who opposes innocent and general social happiness be wrong? In vain does Madame Pernelle point out to them that “All your reasoning is irrelevant to the question” (I, 1, 118). The jesters are prepared to declare open season (“pleine license”) for all the activities without which, in their

opinion, society cannot function, offering the greatest opportunity for individual satisfaction. Echoes of this facile Epicureanism resonate throughout the play. For example, in Act Three Damis refuses to follow Elmire’s sage and diplomatic advice with regard to unveiling Tartuffe’s indiscretion with her. He insists on tasting the “pleasure” of his revenge (III, 4, 1052). Another telling instance is Mariane’s startled reaction (“Plait-il?”11, 1, 444) to her father’s mention of a marriage with Tartuffe. It is more than simply an expression of ordinary surprise or of the need to verify that she had heard correctly. Her inability to challenge her father more directly than “Excuse me?” stems from the fact that she cannot even imagine a marriage that is not based on simple pleasure. This lapse temporarily eclipses her visceral revulsion for Tartuffe and the immanent danger of Orgon’s plans. As obtuse as he can be, Orgon is conscious of this pleasure-driven reflex in his children that prevents them from considering the larger issues of a problem. He even makes fun of it when he promises to draw up a marriage contract that is bound to “give them something to laugh about” (IV, 3, 1277). Faced with the radical incomprehension of her family, Madame Pernelle, who is only, after all, a person of limited wit, can do nothing. The reader,

recognizing in her name printed in the character list a proof of ordinary

bourgeois origin, is all the more conscious of her limitations. But Madame Pernelle’s verbal defeat, which manifests itself in the slap she gives to poor Flipote, should recall another scene of vain reasoning that also ends with a sore nose in Dom Juan. In Act Three, Scene One of that play, Sganarelle, a

ial function, a dwelling whose nobility derives not from his father’s magister

commoner just as inept as Madame Pernelle, failed in his attempt to preach to his master and literally fell on his face. Yet the Great Lord and Wretched Man, Dom Juan, did not eventually carry the day, for the dramatist had arranged a subtle “raison des effets,” as Pascal would say, that paradoxically gave Sganarelle’s dizzy, burlesque ravings a hidden and irresistible force that the master could not discern. So it is, to a certain extent, with Madame Pernelle, reminding the spectator once again that foolishness should never be

on of tyrannical but from his own presence. The reference to the usurpati Fronde revolts the during acy aristocr the power resembles the language of the impostor that ives prerogat simple father’s the of 1648-1652. It is not Damis who is it why is That glory. personal Damis’s but threatens to usurp, r-la” and later as “ce raises social issues by referring to Tartuffe as “ce monsieu the fact that the compied plat” (I, 1, 48 and 59). The latter term, based on once again draws heel, moner Tartuffe wears shoes without the noble high s low status. intruder’ the and comparison between his individual superiority

dismissed off-handedly.

In the final analysis, the raillery to which Madame Pernelle is exposed invites the spectator to ask certain questions about Orgon’s absence. Had he run a similar gauntlet when he left for his country house? One can infer that the tone of the scene might have been quite different, but the relief of the

over him: “Neither Damis explicitly denies that his father’s authority extends

him [Tartuffe] well” (1, 1, my father nor anything else can force me to wish is not accidental. And in speech this in rien and 56). The juxtaposition of père de parler d’autre sorte,” the following verse, if he says, “Je trahirais mon coeur that he is designating by it is not merely the authenticity of his emotions that the theater-goer would ceeur, but rather the type of aristocratic courage in this context of heCouched associate with Le Cid or other noble heroes. te” or “II faudra m’empor je coups tous roic tragedy, pronouncements like “a surprising. hardly are 60) and 58 1, (I, que j'en vienne à quelque grand éclat”

jesters no less tangible at the departure of a moralistic dragon of restraint. Is

this why Elmire insists on receiving her husband in her boudoir, hoping perhaps to play a conciliatory role on the turf she best controls? She alone seems to realize that the jesters are not always innocent, that instead of soothing bruised egos and bringing peace to the strife of urban living, they often provoke unnecessary rifts in the all-too-fragile social fabric. Damis, with his pesky spying, shows that even the best laid plans can be disrupted by osten-

the grand dukes Damis recalls the young men of Sorel’s Francion who imitate

their inferiors at will with cudgel and think themselves authorized to punish he declares anew in Act Three that or sword. This attitude does not fade, for his will. there is no power or authority on Earth that can restrain only two syllables utters who As for Mariane, Orgon’s silent daughter to the circumlinked y certainl is on during the first act, her lack of expressi bit too formal a ng somethi is There family. her stances that have destabilized

sibly innocent intentions when he barges into Elmire’s first tête-à-tête with

Tartuffe. Even though her own gaudy life style fuels the pious campaign that is disrupting the household, Elmire is wise in the detours of desire and she

tries to use her erotic acumen to bridle the vanity of the opposing party and

bring them under her influence. Damis’s critical attitude towards his father is complicated by a hierarchical gap that adds to the normal separation of generations. Orgon seems to be the son of a court officer, if we are to believe Monsieur Loyal’s testimony in the final act. Damis is in all likelihood the third in his line to benefit from the nobility of office conferred on the family’s charges. Thus, his claim to nobility would be more direct, since he would be entitled to be possessed of noblesse

in this father-daughter

relationship.

provided

for all the needs

a different

message

of a compliant

goes without saying his children. When troubled,

pertaining to the purchase of the office. Freed forever in this way from the onus of the bourgeoisie and the administrative burdens of his forbears, this young, sword-wielding noble could permit himself a feeling of superiority

towards

classes.

Such

But

perhaps

probably

Mariane

in-

her father

holds

the

stepmother

nor Mariane turns neither towards her father,

Elmire,

instead

but

towards

Dorine,

a last vestige,

visibly afraid to engage in perhaps, of former domestic tranquility. She is

dialogue

over his father, who might be in his eyes no more than a mere anobli still merchant

she i is

If a father is “absolute,” after all, it responsible for the loss of her mother. te partner, at least in the eyes of legitima no has that he

family to be invested with a type of nobility considered to be inborn, rather

to the

child.

for this orphan

as well,

than contingent upon a particular form of service and the financial payment

proximity

that

recognizes

she

ted parent who has most flattering to him, as a compliment for the far-sigh tends

of recent

Though

be understood in two quite “beholding” (redevable) to Orgon, this word can y interpret it in the manner different ways. The paterfamilias would certainl

personnelle distinct from the magistrate’s position. He would be the first of his

reeking

99

Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith

Chapter Six

98

with

her

father

in

order

to

discuss

a prior

loss

that

he

is doing

in a family afflicted with alcoeverything he can to stifle. Like co-dependants consciously or unconsciously have holism or madness, Mariane and Dorine

condescension

permeates the very first words he says on stage: “I, shall I suffer that a carping

as obedient daughter developed defensive strategies, adapting into their roles

bigot should, in this house, usurp tyrannical power?” The term used for the house, céans, is so lofty that it does not fit anything below a noble dwelling,

description given of Mariane and maternal servant. Let us not forget the first

|

by the departing Madame Pernelle: “Il n’est pire eau que l’eau qui dort.” This aquatic proverb might be translated as “It’s the quiet ones you really have to watch out for.” It is no accident that this judgment is followed only fives verses later by a mention of Mariane’s late mother. Although Cléante attempts to serve as a champion for the interests of Mariane

and

her suitor Valére,

his intervention

is ineffective and

his role in

the play might be deemed superfluous, were it not that he serves as a means of articulating certain skeptical concerns especially prevalent in the thought of La Mothe Le Vayer. Robert McBride has thoroughly analyzed how such opuscules as Du mensonge, De la fortune, Des habitudes vertueuses, De la vertu des païens, and Des pères et des enfants present parallels to the play, especially in speeches and situations involving Cléante. This does not mean that he functions as a mechanical Raisonneur mouthing the unvarnished ideas of the author or that he plays the role of a professional philosopher of the skeptic or any other school. Instead, he is a learned conversational foil who can bring up concepts in a fairly non-partisan way. This does not mean that

he has all the right answers or that he is a paragon or possesses an infallible

criterion of truth, as Orgon

purports to do. Yet his own

status as

a man

of

good will is certainly established by his actions even more than by his words, for frequenting Orgon’s house and the man’s own personal obligation or reward is above and beyond

company without any any call of duty. He is

too modest to point this out to Orgon or to try to asssume the position of an anti-Tartuffe, but Orgon’s tendency to silence, stifle, and blot out anything but his narrow

view of reality would

doom

such

efforts to failure anyway.

Cléante’s versatile presence on stage frees Moliére from the necessity of put-

ting philosophical mouthpieces on stage, as he did in L’Amour médecin with Pancrace and Marphurius. This crude form of representation was fine for

farce and comédie-ballet, but would be awkward and unharmonious in such

a grand comedy. Imagine how difficult it would have been if Molière had followed the conventional comic practices and put in the midst of the action a Stoic, a Jansenist, a Salesian devout humanist, and the whole panoply

of moral and philosophical experts, instead of one honnéte homme familiat enough with the ideas of his times to allow all schools to be considered!

As long as Tartuffe can remain impassive to the emotions that stir the

family disputes swirling around him, he can occupy an ideal spot to exploit the weaknesses and private taboos of the others. As Georges Forestier shows (195-196), Tartuffe is operating through a disguise in absentia, for the char-

acters on stage and the audience are equally ignorant of his true criminal identity, which may

operate

will only be revealed at the conclusion. This hypocrite thus

under

the

“paradox

of the

101

Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith

Chapter Six

100

actor”

century by Denis Diderot: the less emotionally

identified

involved

in

the

eighteenth

he is, the more

he

say that the less he believes, is able to excite emotion. By extension, we may ng. As a person searching for a the more he may give the impression of believi performance. If his family does reason to believe, Orgon is easy prey for this remain stuck in their material not succumb to the lure, it is because they for pleasure. universe, completely preoccupied by the quest by the principle of division. ed Tartuffe’s conduct towards Orgon is regulat cal relationship, since in recipro a really Max Vernet points out that this is

des femmes and Amphitryon, most of Moliére’s plays, and especially in L'École each other (91-115). Of all trickster and dupe have a tendency to imitate can the division

things,

of Right

from

Wrong

is the most

precious gift he

on, for it is something Orgon offer to a magistrate hungry for spiritual directi only the good from the bad is not already had without realizing it. To divide

it also provides for the resoluthe fundamental duty of a “king’s man,” but ting his own struggles with attenua tion of Orgon’s personal dilemma by the spirit of sharing that Orgon from hides differentiation. Tartuffe therefore order to teach radical separation dominates Paul's Epistle to the Phillipians in

familial attachments. Having effected from the world and especially from the judge’s latent sense of guilt and this detachment, he is free to manipulate carefree joy of others bothers Orgon, to go on to a more active strategy. If the justified pleasure in provoking the dishe can offer himself a shameful but not only the theorist of this policy, he is pleasure of his fellow men. Tartuffe of joyful “vices.” Orgon actually scourge becomes as well its active agent, the to Damis before banishing μὲ blocktries to explain this paradoxical force afin de l'en bannir,/Plus j en veux headed young man: “plus on fait d'effort trouble you take to banish him from employer à l'y mieux retenir” (The more to keep him here; 1303-1304) the household, the more I intend to take that divide and tries to accommodate It is only when Tartuffe ceases to

the famous confession of desire, “Ah he becomes vulnerable. Beginning with ” (966), he attempts to sos homme pour être dévot, je n’en suis pas moins beauty. l beauty is a figure PRE his concupiscence by arguing that physica

scent of Francois de Sales. However This phrase has a definite allure remini between the weakthis

in

no

way

diminishes

the

inherent

contradiction

an antinomy that only the soup ness of the flesh and the rigor of virtue, an thinking. According to Tartuffe’s of Christ himself can resolve in Christi

his eratic “tribuhuman splendor” authorizes casuistry, Elmire’s “more than ion. we can attract ous adulter his of on” lations” and the “unparalleled devoti

usly paradoxical perspective of love offer the object of his desire the delicio (1000). without scandal and pleasure without fear” the source of his feelings, he is is heaven Even as Tartuffe claims that too well to his hy pocritical face. i donning a mask that will adhere a little

n, Tartuffe reveals one aspect of Like Dom Juan jokingly playing at devotio

102

Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith

Chapter Six

piety that he had never suspected. As he cynically exploits the “myth” of transcendence to facilitate the success of his amorous conquests, he unceas-

ingly evokes and eventually conjures up the actual influence of the sacred, as manifested in the intervention of the divine-right monarch at the end of the

play. The exempt, as the official messenger of the throne, explicitly attributes Louis’s unmasking of Tartuffe to the supernormal powers of insight conferred upon him along with his right to the throne. As René Girard explains, “In effect, everything in desire is false, everything is theatrical and artificial with the exception of the over-riding hunger for the sacred” (85). Moliére’s treatment of the unmasking of desire subtly raises the issue of divine love in the only possible human context, that of royalty. In this instance, he seems to go beyond Pascal’s assumption that all human love is a form of diversion that is both result and cause of the absence of the sacred. The playwright

concedes

the false nature of human

desire based solely on

artifice, but only if the artifice lacks an underlying spirit of benevolence and

generosity, such as appears in the dépit amoureux scene between Mariane and

Valere. The reusing of this stock scene in the play is not simply comic custom

for Moliére, but an important counterpoint to Tartuffe’s seduction sequences.

The dépit amoureux embodies a form of natural transcendance, faithful to the Lucretian theories Éliante expressed in Le Misanthrope, that figures divine grace, permitting fallible human lovers to rise above their egotism and fear. One might even say that love triumphs over love. This paradoxical process is

much more important for Moliére than the customary satisfaction of sensual desire that accompanied most contemporary comedy. It must be admitted that the theories of love prevalent in the seventeenth century lend themselves particularly well to the type of trickery in which Tartuffe specializes. Mademoiselle de Scudéry, the most discreet of précieuses, favors after all the rewarding of love on the basis of esteem or gratefulness just as much as on the basis of pure attraction. In this complacent universe,

an expert hypocrite may expect to profit from many opportunities where he

will be offered a carnal reward for his putative spiritual efforts. For Tartuffe, the physical enjoyment of sexuality becomes almost a by-product of the process, for what he really craves is the power it confers. Like a good chess player, he knows the ruses of the gambit, the most paradoxical of moves, where one

succeeds while seeming to fail. This explains why, in Act III, scene 3, at the moment when Damis surprises him in the middle of a seduction, Tartuffe tricks both Damis and his father with ease. He tells the truth, knowing that by expressing the truth it will seem false, inducing Orgon to take what is patently false for true. This is such a unique example of discursive strategy that it merits special mention

in Georges

Forestier’s monumental

study of

dramatic disguise (277-78). In the eyes of a pious believer, a Christian who

103

accuses himself cannot be entirely guilty, since the very act of self-accusation constitutes a proof of repentance from the sin in question. The weakness of this system is that it obviously has difficulty discerning the false repeiitance to do of a scoundrel who admits he is one with the intention of continuing

so.

The strategy of false appearances is all the more clever since it resembles

in perfectly benign behavior, such as the lovers’ quarrel that takes place repentance of gesture the second act. Human nature is susceptible to the and inclines toward forgiveness and subsequent tenderness. Tartuffe’s fake confession is thus an efficient tool to manipulate Orgon as long as the trickster gives no indication of his true future plans. It also serves the seduction the itself, since, as Francois Lagarde points out, all desire proceeds best under in sentiments true his hide may party desiring the for e, mask of indifferenc It is the plan order to stimulate the interest of the one he desires (39-40).

simple fear to defer the avowal of desire on Tartuffe’s part, rather than the Like Elmire. with private in of discovery, that explains his careful behavior the in himself place to hesitates most seventeenth-century lovers, Tartuffe loved. He is especially vulnerable position of one who loves more than he is

earlier sensitive to such problems after the stinging rejection he received top to bottom from Dorine, who told him that she could see him naked from

without being stirred by “his hide” in the very least (867-868). on the mask Tartuffe’s status as a directeur de conscience rests precariously of piety that hides his desires. The moment

he lifts the mask, he risks >

forerunner of Amphihis power to trick others. Curiously, this makes him ἃ when and — affection Alcméne’s tryon's Jupiter, who can only receive of his own mask, prisoner a As husband. legitimate he takes the form of her

him, in the μὴ Tartuffe fails to realize that Elmire excels, and even exceeds

key se wil of stirring a lover’s interest and finding the sometimes pere second contheir in excite his passion. Her acumen emerges most completely

a skilled toreador. versation, where her discourse resembles the cape work of two bulls fighting really is she since In this case, it is all the more admirable, table. the under hidden Orgon and her of at the same time: Tartuffe in front

The moment of truth will come as she presents them to each other. This moment

play, is of confrontation, subject of the illustrations of the

wee a με significant above all because it marks Tartuffe’s transformation pharmakos. ote nipulating meneur du jeu to a potential comic outcast or

. both poison an points out that the pharmakos has a double function as e because expelled be to poison for the ills set forth in the play (92). He is a ions transgress and tensions the all of has become the collective repository the very act of gathering that have troubled the characters. At the same time,

purify the comic these qualities into himself assures that his immolation will

104

Chapter Six

Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith

community and restore order and peace. Therefore it is at this moment that

Tartuffe acquires his true status as a Girardian monstre sacré. Paradoxically, Tartuffe becomes sacred in spite of himself. The fact that the playwright

defers the expulsion of the pharmakos through the means of Tartuffe’s secret

trump cards (connections with the devote cabale, a writ of possessi on for Or-

gon’s goods, and the incriminating evidence in Argan’s secret chest) actually heightens the sense of sacrifice by augmenting dramatic suspense.

Stunned by Elmire’s surprise, Tartuffe finds himself unmaske d and can no longer pass for a saintly believer. Thus, in the fifth act, where Dom Juan

had been able to dupe his father and Sganarelle with the appearan ces of devotion, Tartuffe takes a different tack. While Dom Juan changed from the secular garb of a playboy to the trappings of a convert, Tartuffe continue s to wear his uniform and to recite many of the same formulae, but this time emphasizes the secular side of religious power. He intends to use religion’s links to the state and the courts to ruin his hosts and devour their fortune. The playful confidence of his approach is evident when he paraphrases his earlier lessons to Orgon, for he says that to protect the earthly spoils of heaven, he

would sacrifice to such pre-eminent interests friends, wife, family, and even

himself (1883-84). Putting the state in place of God means devaluin g all true divine sovereignty, as Dorine realizes when she says that Tartuffe has made

himself a fine mantle of all that is sacred (1836). Elmire’s feigned seduction forces Orgon to lift his own

masks

of piety.

Until the fourth act, her husband had been parading as a saintly believer despite the evidence of his words and actions. It is perhaps the most crucial paradox of the comedy that Orgon is a believer who doesn’t really believe, one of the faithful who had no deep down faith. As a judge and a “man of the King,” he claimed a special status and a type of lay sainthoo d through his profession. In conformity with the doctrines of the Church after the Council of Trent, he professes belief in miracles as the signs and wonders that externally reveal God’s will. He willingly accepts a magnificent cult

based on spectacle that amazes the senses before overwhelming the soul. Small wonder, then, that he becomes the victim of a master of spectacle, for

criminal that Tartuffe is, he nevertheless shamelessly frequents the churches, studies the rituals that take place on both sides of the altar rail. He then deploys the whole gamut of visible signs associated with piety: theatrical genuflection, ardent prayers, loud sighs, physical distress, kissing the ground, passing around the holy water. All of these gestures belong to the legitimate ceremonial of baroque Roman Catholicism, which encouraged an emotional

relationship with the sacred that should be deep, manifest, and communal.

The passing of the holy water is a particularly significant act, for it imitates the distribution by the priest of the host during the Eucharist. Equally im-

portant is the fact that Tartuffe “sets the hook”

in Orgon

105 through another

holy gesture that is paradoxical. When he receives the gift of alms offered by Orgon (and “secretly” requested beforehand through the associate Laurent), Tartuffe reverses the exchange and pretends to hand it back to Orgon before giving it, supposed, to “the poor.” This visible one-upmanship cannot fail to capture Orgon’s attention. It makes him accept all the more easily the He that

Tartuffe is a walking paradox, a noble whose coat, according to Dorine, is not worth a dime, a paragon of virtue who has been ill treated by the world, a skilled extrovert who preaches to others that they should lock themselves in seclusion. | Yet even as he follows this Counter-Reformation program that exploits spectacle as an overwhelming influence on the mind, Orgon overlooks a flaw

in his quasi-Orthodox theory. By deferring the mind’s conscious, deliberate engagement with faith, the mechanism of ostentation and involuntary éblouissement short-circuits the process of believing. Belief degenerates to the Ἰενεὶῖ of credulity with the presupposition that any strong impression furnishes an irrefutable proof. Just as legislators and judges presuppose that cen

is the reliable appearance of underlying virtue and truth, Omon accepts : e appearances of piety as the manifestations of salvation. This is not simply a Cartesian error, for even the rationalist Descartes warns

his readers against

the possible tricks that can be played by the senses and that can distort teality through optical or auditory illusions, for example. Nor does τὴ ἐπῶν

Spring from a notion of Pyrrhonean materialism, since such radica 3 epti cism would doubt the existence of anything not directly manifest in the

observations of the senses. As with many of Molière’s obsessive characters, Orgon’s system of understanding is an ill-assorted composite, full of pene and ready to fall apart. But it is undeniable that his eters are also eae æ With the specific, officially-endorsed program of piety RM y =

Church of his age, for official Counter-Reformation practices regar = se “seduction” of the public to belief through the effect of sensory spectac encounter the same contradictory problems. 3 Ἢ vs Elmire goes directly to the heart of the dilemma. Her ad ον. veux une vertu qui ne soit point diablesse” (I want a virtue that is no ilish, IV, 3, 1334) is most revealing. Intertextually, it sans the frustra εἰ Sosie in Amphitryon, who complains about “un dieu si diable i deceptive intervention in human affairs causes widespread poses ἣν "δ Outraged similarly over the diabolical confusion of the divine and the : ve

by Tartuffe’s treachery. Her knowledge of the ways of desire ioe ss active role that Amphitryon’s queen Alcméne could not achieve, for ΜΆ εἰσὶ

can excite the desire of the hypocrite at will, she will be capable of dislodging

the mask of false divinity.

106

Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith

Chapter Six

In order to win over her husband’s mind, Elmire can count neither on his reason, nor on abstract qualities. She specifically tells him that she does not expect him to accept anything she says as a matter of faith, for having seen what happened when Damis attempted that, she knows that Orgon’s credulousness is hardly a reliable foundation for rebuilding the household. Instead she proposes to make him physically see the real Tartuffe, cleverly unhinging appearances from metaphysical matters and putting them back in contact with concrete reality. This is an offer that Orgon cannot refuse, for everything in his magistrate mentality convinces him that reality and appearances must coincide under the aegis of his dignity. The possibility of demonstrating his certitude is irresistible. But rather than finding that observation establishes

the

truth

of his beliefs,

he will

encounter

a negative

disproof

of

his false preconceptions. In accepting to hide himself under the table, the tablecloth assumes the function of a mask, the first that he is successfully able to wear. It is no accident that the illustrations of the play feature him lifting the tablecloth to confront a shocked Tartuffe. The mask of the secret observer effectively supplants the mask of true believer that kept slipping from his face. So it is that Tartuffe and Orgon are unmasked by the same

ruse.

The conclusion of the play constitutes an ambiguous solution to the paradoxes of faith. It lies closer to the attitudes of Pascal or of Calvinist justi-

fication by faith than to the orthodox Catholic position. Orgon is unable to

depend on a direct relationship of proof between sense observations and the

certitude of salvation, such as conventional piety at first seemed to offer him. He is finally ready to discover that faith cannot of the physical world, but only on the will to be physically shown. It is true that he runs the “grace” of a divinely inspired monarch for that

rest on the tricky appearances believe in that which cannot risk of simply substituting the of the divinity, but one must

be careful not to misinterpret the somewhat exaggerated portrait traced by the exempt. At the beginning of the fifth act, Orgon finds himself in much the same position as Alceste in Le Misanthrope: as the object of unjust persecution by his former director, he is enraged to be in the wrong when he

feels he is right. The intervention of royal justice in pardoning Orgon and prosecuting Tartuffe is an exception, rather than the application of an ordinary rule. Apart from the propagandizing policeman, the only one who had

evoked a parallel between the King and God was, ironically, Tartuffe himself, just before his arrest. The paradoxes of faith in the play have the result of destabilizing and subverting any rationalistic link between heaven and the State. Like the apostle Paul, Orgon,

who

had once possessed

all “according to

the law,” loses all and reaches the point of renouncing his past, worldly life.

If there is a future for him, it lies in the process of sharing introduced in the

final act, where

107

his fellow humans, he takes part in suffering and joy with

ude of divine salvation, which he putting off till later the metaphysical certit sees can now be accepted only on faith.

Chapter Seven

Stage Ways and Skeptic Way

when

as a major

of paradox

tradition

The

was

Molière

growing

in comedy was already strong the master of farcical entertainment

element

up. Tabarin,

who regaled the subjects of Henry IV and Louis XIII with all sorts of comic delights, leaves a solid testimony

of this in the Inventaire universel of his works,

first published in 1622. This document mentions his paradoxes on the very page,

along

with

dialogues,

“fantaisies,

tions.” But the winds of paradox comedia

which

production

had

exerted

of Corneille’s

an

[...] farces,

blew from

many

influence

important

et concep-

rencontres,

quarters. The Spanish the entire

on

Among

age is filled with paradoxes.

theatrical

them

figure

appears to prominently the paradox of reality as a dream and of reality that

works of Calderon be unreal, which characterize some of the most important coincide with themes both that given , surprising hardly is This and Alarcôn. obsessed that eformation the programs of the baroque and the Counter-R

a privileged Spain, in particular. In the schools, where rhetoric still occupied place, on

paradox

students

almost

of the

always

1630’s.

Add

figured in the curriculum

“ maturgy of the oxymoron” d the > “dra ù calle

comédies des comédiens,

that was imposed

to this the tradition of what }

Max

Vernet

has ”

è (181), evoking trompeurs trompes,

femmes, comédies sans comé die, maris amants de leurs

rons were actua lly the titles femmes juges et parties, etc. Most of these oxymo

of plays by Moliére’s models, rivals, or emulators. tetralogy including L'École des i Following the composition of his great e and onward through the rest femmes, Dom Juan, Le Misanthrope, and Tartuff

ued to be informed by the ways of his career, Moliére’s diverse works contin y concern of skeptical paradox. Though

chronological order is not a primar

experiments with paradox emanate in this part of the study, since Moliére’s ing a strict developmental from a central hub of interests rather than follow path, it is perhaps most conve nient at this point Robert McBride’s work

on this play constitutes an exce

to discuss Amphitryon.

llent foundation from

h in a

which to depart. He cogently sets the paramete rs for further researc beginning act in number of ways: first by highlighting the importance of the and framing the skeptical concerns, then by pointing out th at Amphitryon

110

Chapter

Seven

Stage Ways and Skeptic Way

Sosie make specific reference to a range of pertinent terms, further by noting that two important Cartesian concepts (the “dream argume nt” and the “evil genius argument”) come into play, and finally by tracing many of the philosophical ambiguities faced by the mortals at the conclus ion of the action. The blending and entwining of identities begins with the first words of the prologue, as Mercure adopts a jocular tone ill-suite d to a god and La Nuit addresses him in the bourgeois fashion as “Seigne ur Mercure.” Thus, she proves no more reliable than he as a criterion of divinity, despite her pleas for superhuman decorum. In fact, she appears as little more than a kind of précieuse when she urges her counterpart to avoid coarse mortal language: “II est de certains

mots

dont

l’usage

rabaisse”

(Prologue,

15).

Mercure

raises the

stakes by calling her “ma belle” and comparing her chariot to the “chaise roulante” that might convey a rich Parisienne. He points out that he has no such tide, being left afoot “comme un messager de village” (Prologue, 32). Finally, Mercure goes on to explain that Jupiter's expedie nt disguise as Alcméne’s absent husband has allowed the king of the gods to enjoy the pleasures of a fresh young mortal bride, rather as Dom Juan sought to do at the end of Act One in his play. Although at first Mercure paints Jupiter’s deception in

glowing

terms,

he descends

to a reductio

in short

time,

lauding

the pleasures

of bestial sexuality in excuse for the god’s previou s transformations to cavort with Leda, Europa, and others. La Nuit carries this ironic flattening even further by pointing out that the complicity Jupiter asks of her makes her little better than a procuress: “Voila sans doute un bel emploi/...Et l’on donne un nom fort honnéte/Au service qu'il veut de moi” (Prologue 120-123). Wisely, La Nuit points out that gods should not expose themselves to human laughter by revealing their hidden, true natures. Implicitly, these natures are no better than those of their erstwhile inferiors. The highly ambiguous identities unveiled in the prologue set the tone for the ensuing action. Just as Mercure has announced he will be playing the role of Sosie, Sosie immediately unhitches himself from the humble identity of valet, and a cowardly one at that, who drank his way through a tough battle. Instead, he will presume to be a hero and to recount Amphit ryon’s deeds as though he were an ocular witness, This role-playing facilitates a double slippage of

identity,

family identify

as Moliére’s

fellow

by encomiastic with

Sosie.

writers,

poems

Moreover,

about Sosie

who

ingratiated

battles will

also

never

themselves

attended,

furnish

the

to the

are

voice

royal

invited for

his

to ac-

111

literal point of view. Spinning out the metaphors, he traces the battlefield on the ground and uses his own body to play “the body of the troops,” resulting in the

hilarious

line,

uttered

at the

first rustling

he

hears

in the

bushes,

“Le

corps d'armée a peur” (I, 1, 259). The failure of Sosie’s representational strategy is made even more obvious by the comic exchange that takes place between him and the disguised Mer-

cure:

“Qui

va 1a? ... Moi

... Qui,

moi?

... Moi”

(I, 2, 309). Just as objects and

Sosie?”

(I, 2,

spaces proved inadequate to convey signs of identity, words prove even less reliable. Both characters are entitled to use the pronoun moi, but the fact that its relative status reduces its reliability as an identifier to zero prefigures the ultimate inability of all characters in the play to assume their selves with any degree of success. The highly slapstick beating scene that ensues is very much on the level of The Three Stooges. Sosie worsens his plight by responding badly when Mercure asks him to justify his identity: “Qui te donne, dis-moi,

cette

témérité/De

prendre

le nom

de

354-55).

By

answering,

“Moi, je ne le prends point, je l'ai toujours porté,” Sosie relinquishes any voluntary claim to his identity and asserts that the process of self is entirely passive, a condition imposed by the gods, or by mere convention. Mercure promptly imposes a few more blows on his body to show him the cost of such passivity. The highly significant language of this exchange, repeating the devalued “moi” and establishing the link to self-consciousness through the verb “porter,” the same one used for clothing, reinforces the notion that selfhood is merely an appearance or an opinion, rather than a fact. Indeed, Mercure’s ability, during the subsequent discussion, to lay

claim successfully to Sosie’s entire identity falls within the realm of the first

Agrippan mode of skepticism. Sosie lays claim awkwardly to a criterion of selfhood, but Mercure’s opinion of self is at least at good as Sosie’s, so the valet’s criterion proves worthless and truth is beyond his ability to establish. Moreover, this skeptical assault implicates Descartes very early on, for Mercure convinces Sosie of the validity of his opinion by knowing what Sosie knows. In other words, Moliére raises the issue of the cogito and of the duality of mind

Through knows

his

and

body;

clever

better than

implicitly he states “I know,

manipulation Sosie

himself and

of information

therefore I am — You!”

and

therefore asserts

language,

a more

Mercure

powerful

claim

to the identity. Indeed, as Sosie observes, “la raison à ce qu’on voit s’oppose”

2/518).

count’s audience, the queen Alcmène, physica lly represented by a lantern. Of all things, this symbol is hardly appropriate for a monarch, since the term lanterne still designated a prostitute in the sevente enth-century language of

As the second act draws Amphitryon into the confusion with Sosie, both master and servant seek to probe the conditions that could make such

indeed,

what

the street. Ironically, Sosie has hit upon a central ambigui ty of the play, for the queen

has already made

her husband

a cuckold

from

the most

uncertainty closely

possible

appears related

to

be

“evil

They

explicitly

happening genius”

may

cite be

argument

Descartes’ a dream (that

what

“dream

instead appears

argument”

of reality) to be

and

(that the

happening

112

Stage

Chapter Seven

may be the result of reality distorted by a powerful evil genius into a series of illusions). In the second and third Méditations, Descartes uses the cogito to dispel conveniently both of these arguments in favor of a conscience-based criterion. One can go beyond this observation of McBride’s to consider that Moliére does not accept Descartes’s facile dismissal. Sosie’s “Révé-je” recalls the dilemma of characters in Dom Juan, unable to establish a solid boundary to reality in the presence of the sueno. Even though Mercure has used rationalism to usurp Sosie’s identity, Sosie’s body remains onstage, still imbued with

a consciousness

which,

according

to the

sixth

Méditation

should

have

already been neatly amputated. Furthermore, Epicurean physics begin to play a role contrary to Cartesianism, since the body is continually in pain from all possible sources: the bullying usurper Mercure, the enraged master Amphitryon, and the dissatisfied wife Cléanthis. This undeniably dolorous pathe cannot be easily dismissed as a sensory illusion. Thus, it becomes clear that Mercure’s efforts to use Cartesian hyperbolic doubt to rob Sosie’s identity have been effective only in so far as physical pain and terror can keep him in submission. As the paradox of identity becomes a matter of group discussion in the second act, matters do not become any clearer. When Amphitryon, confused by Sosie’s report of his meeting with his double, presents himself to his wife Alcméne, he refuses stubbornly to acknowledge identity with the loving Amphitryon who had just spent the night with her. Seen by Alcmène, this puzzling conjugal

reluctance

identity

on the part

is faulty

and

of the husband

inexplicable

by

to assume

normal

his legitimate

causes.

Thus,

delving

into skeptical modes, she mentions illness (“une vapeur”) as a possible reason for his apparent sensory derangement. She then suggests the dream argument

(“un songe”)

as a possible factor.

He

hurls this element

back

at her,

showing that, between them, they have fallen into the third Agrippan mode of relativity, since their diverse views of experience cannot seem to find a common criterion of truth. This situation gives rise to an extended passage of stychomythia, underlining the impasse at which they have arrived. It is the woman who breaks out of this impasse by suggesting a new logical proof: Mais si la chose avait besoin d’étre prouvée S'il était vrai qu’on pit ne s’en souvenir pas, De qui puis-je tenir, que de vous, la nouvelle Du dernier de tous vos combats,

Et les cing diamants que portait Ptérélas, Qu’a

fait dans

la nuit

éternelle

Tomber l'effort de votre bras? En pourrait-on vouloir un plus sûr témoignage? (II, 2, 949-56)

Ways

and

Skeptic

Way

113

It is indeed interesting that Molière, not infrequently accused of antifeminism, should put this brilliant speech in the mouth of a woman. In fact, Alcmène offers an empirical criterion for proof, one that is literally diamond-hard

and

not subject to disagreement

through

sensory

distortion or

disorientation of consciousness. The empirical proof furnished by Alcméne’s diamonds puts Amphitryon in an unusual situation. His consciousness, the ultimate Cartesian criterion for truth, tells him it is evident that he did not spend the night with his wife. Yet he cannot deny the objective proof that the diamonds are no longer in his sealed gift box, but already in the possession of Alcmène. Sosie provides him with a cause totally acceptable to men of the ancient world to reconcile this apparent disagreement: magic. Ironically, the dim-witted Sosie is exactly right, for all that has taken place has occurred through supernatural intervention. Yet Amphitryon clings too insistently to his Cartesian criterion of rational intelligence to accept this compromise with imagination. Dismissing supernatural,

the

cuckolding,

which

he

obliges

his

him

throws

wife

to

give

a genuine

into

him

an

mental

account

distress.

Οἱ

own

his

This

is the

diametrical opposite of the state of peace of mind, acatalepsia, sought by the skeptic way. Unable to suspend judgment, Amphitryon's judgment falls harshly on both himself, as cuckold, and Alcmene, as adulteress. The soliloquy Amphitryon pronounces at the beginning of the third act sums up his confusion. He first makes clear his similarity to Alceste in trying to attribute his dilemma to “le sort,” a cruel destiny that implicitly raises the it “evil genius” argument of Descartes. Of all Moliere’s cuckolds, he makes clear how the feelings of jealousy are entirely consciousness-based. All his fellow citizens are saluting him as a great hero, yet he alone sees himself as a victim, thanks to his private vision of dishonor, which turns the sweetness of fame and good reputation to bitterness. He is totally unable to get out of himself, to view his situation from a more detached and comically successful standpoint. In fact, his own senses are dulled to the adulation he is receiving by an emotional obsession he cannot even publicly express. Acknowledging Sosie’s magical explanation, he realizes that it might be possible to attribute the weird discrepancies to “les charmes de Thessalie” a conventional notion But it is his individual stubbornness, which has always denied this popular

opinion, coupled with his unshakable sense of pride, that prevent him from admitting that he might its criterion,

and

the

be wrong.

cogito,

Ultimately, this ov er-inflation of the ego

lie at the

root

of

reduce him to George Dandin-like impotence

Amphitryon's

torture

act. But è

affronta,”

before this “ultima 1 might call it, Amphitryon

initiators

Monsieur Jourdain’s mm will1 try one more > ploy as

and

will

by the conclusion of the third : quasi-Turkish > ve afaDpbelatedly

aid

114

Chapter Seven

Stage Ways and Skeptic Way

pealing to other humans, his impartial neighbors, to furnish his criterion of proof. The uselessness of this tactic should be obvious because of the fact that Amphitryon can no longer depend on control of his own servant, as the false Sosie, played by Mercure, addresses his “master” insultingly and asks

what tavern he has visited to fill his head with such drunken ideas. Though less malicious in intent, Naucratés and his fellow Thebans can supply Am-

phitryon with no more reliable proof of identity. In fact, having viewed the

real and false kings face to face, they are forced to conclude that Jupiter's personality is more reasonably and plausibly like that of the king they knew than Amphitryon’s desperate and deranged demeanor. Moliére here applies the “old Skeptical” modes of argument based on position and admixture, the fifth and sixth categories of Sextus’s ten-mode system. According to the

fifth, the differing point of view of another person will necessarily produce a somewhat different conclusion that may not be counted upon to be the “same” as that of a third person, therefore an unreliable proof. As for the sixth, Sextus specifically mentions in discussing admixtures that the brain, when malfunctioning, emits types of noxious vapors that make even the simplest sensory proofs less than convincing. It truly takes what McBride defines as the “double vision” of comic understanding to comprehend that

even though Amphitryon is objectively right (from the audience’s privileged

sensory standpoint) in many of his conclusions, he is also wrong because he

is subject to his own faulty, conscience-based obtain gain de cause in his on-stage universe.

proofs and cannot

expect to

It is worthwhile to extend the skeptical analysis of the play in one more direction, looking at the paradoxes that befall the gods themselves. Jupiter’s success in his venture is a fait accompli even before the play begins. As the false Amphitryon, he is able to enjoy Alcméne’s favors without obstacle. However, he realizes that he has short-circuited the ultimate seduction he

had envisioned. He wishes that Alcméne’s (admittedly) enthusiastic response

had been due not to her sense of marital duty, but solely to his personal qualities and to purely spontaneous inclinations. Obviously, by attaching

such a condition, he is dooming himself to failure; appeared as himself, but in a borrowed personality,

he has not, after all, and he has arranged

it so that Alcméne’s response could not be a spontaneous one given to an individual appearing in the role of lover. Given the apparent pointlessness of Jupiter's post-coital queries, Alcmène dismisses them as a trifling “nouveau scrupule” (I, 4, 379). But the king of the gods will persist in his egocentric quest as doggedly as Amphitryon, because the implication is that Jupiter has made a cocu of himself by arranging that Amphitryon’s image should receive the queen’s caresses instead of his godly self. The absurdity of Jupiter’s mission is mirrored in the subsequent scene, where Mercure tries to tear himself

away from a clinging Cléanthis whom

115

he has succeeded in arousing a bit too

well for his own good. When even the matronly wife of Sosie can lecture the retreating Mercure about the priorities of “une femme d’honneur” (I, 5, 660),

it is clear that the glory of seduction is heavily tarnished. Jupiter’s paradox is related to the paradox of sentiment encountered in

L'École des femmes. If feelings of love can only be truly apprehended through

mutual confirmation with another person, even the joy of a god needs a second. The perfection of Jupiter's talents for disguise imposes a kind of

duress

on

mortals

that

makes

true

acknowledgement

unobtainable.

Had

Alcméne been able consciously to somehow dissociate the lover-personality

from the husband-personality before the fact of copulation, Jupiter might have been able to furnish some grounds for comparison. Trying to impose this dichotomy after the fact will force Alcmène to deny both personalities as

flawed and criminal, unworthy of her gifts. Consequently, Jupiter’s next confrontation with Alcméne is nothing less than disastrous. Angered by the real Amphitryon’s behavior, she blasts the

god in a way to which he is totally unaccustomed: “Oui, je vous vois comme un monstre effoyable” (II, 6, 1325). In vain does Jupiter use a casuist’s argu-

ment, and an extremely clever one at that, to try to blame the husband-personality for any offense, keeping the lover-personality intact. Alcméne insists that both are guilty and worthy of her hatred for having offended her. Thus, Jupiter finds that his success has turned to failure, a worse failure than having simply failed to seduce Alcméne, for he has managed to gain her favors and still be found wanting, both as a lover and as a husband, even though he had sought to avoid all the encumbrances of the latter role. The mask of Amphitryon fit him a bit too well and cannot be conveniently removed. Only by removing himself from Earth and rising ex machina into the clouds can he again appear, and then, not before Alcméne herself. Among males, Jupiter can impose an offer that cannot be refused, causing Sosie to

remark ironically, “Le seigneur Jupiter sait dorer la pillule” (III, 10, 1913). But this appearance is only enough to put him at peace with the cuckold, though it is an imposed peace, followed by a hasty retreat. It is perhaps just barely convincing in its attempt to confirm and to some extent justify Amphitryon’s conscience-imposed identity. Nor is it entirely enough to salvage

Jupiter’s pride as a lover. It is enough to satisfy the divine raison d'état and the public need for reconciliation. Naucratés, the symbol of vox populi, is about to follow through at the end of the play and second the vox dei that has declared victory before fleeing from the field of battle, yet Sosie insures that the play will end somewhat differently. The servant has learned through his humbling final encounter with Mercure that any persistence in affirming his cogito, even

in the reduced

form

of a mere shadow,

is impossible. The

huit

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Chapter Seven

action concludes with a pronouncement of silence that calls the skeptic slogans. The first of these, “No more,” is recommendation that everyone go home and say no slogan Sextus mentions, non-assertion, is also involved,

Stage Ways and Skeptic Way

evokes what Sextus equivalent to Sosie’s more. The second for in the skeptic’s

own words: “We grant the things that stir our pathe and drive us by force to

assent” (The Skeptic Way 115). The next two slogans, “Perhaps” and “I with-

to accept

an

identity

with

its contingencies:

117

a lover

or husband

cannot

exist without the contingency of infidelity, nor can a capitalist without the contingency of financial loss. The very presence of a sum as huge as eighteen thousand livres, roughly the equivalent of a yearly income for nine small

bourgeois

households,

indicates

that

Harpagon

distrusts

the

usual

may add

mechanisms of investment common to his times, when almost all wealth was represented by lettres de change and other paper obligations, rather than by rare liquid cash. La Flèche is a necessary element in the equation, since he comes to represent a type of natural financial consumption. La Flèche is

assumptions and opinions supposedly emanating from a supreme conscious-

concerned with the in-kind universal consumption of food, clothes, shelter, and other forms of bodily comfort. His master Cléante approaches wealth

hold assent,” are also implicit, for Sosie notes that it is all well and good that

benefits may accrue to society as Jupiter promised, but that such matters are

now

beyond

the realm of further human

action or intention. We

another of the slogans, “I do not apprehend.” The self-certainty based on

ness is suspended, along with all other judgment. Those things that still depend on human pronouncements, especially Alcméne’s reactions, remain indeterminate and unknowable at this arbitrary point of cessation. Pushing experimentation in different stylistic and thematic directions, Molière turns in L’Avare from Amphitryon's form of vers libre to that of fulllength prose and from the social register of kings and gods to that of the commercial bourgeoisie. His central skeptical concerns remain attached throughout this time to the paradoxes of identity and their relationship to stage traditions. Plautus’s Aulularia, which provides the spark, if not the whole model, for L’Avare, is just as grounded in Classical literature as the Amphitryon matter. Yet once again it is significant that Moliére fundamentally adapts the existing patterns to his own purposes. Plautus’s play concerns itself with the Roman practice of hoarding, which stops far short of early modern notions of capitalism, and the relationship between this financial secret and the love-exchange is strictly in keeping with ancient conventions. In refiguring this arrangement, Moliére begins with the love-exchange, de-

voting the first two scenes to sentimental discussions between Elise and her disguised suitor, Valére, and then her brother Cléante. The motive for this

is not dramaturgically obvious, but will soon enough become clear: miserliness is simply the capitalistic expression of jealousy. The naturalness of the young people’s emotions is demonstrated before the shocking introduction

of Harpagon’s aberrant emotions. Thus, unlike Tartuffe or Le Misanthrope, the

expulsion scene, where the deranged master dismisses the conventionallyminded servant, is delayed until the third scene. Originally involving Euclio and his maid, the confrontation is now expressed through the persons of Harpagon and La Flèche.

Like so many previous cocus imaginaires in the Moliére universe, Harpagon’s approach to everything in life is influenced by his secret and selfassigned role of dévalisé imaginaire, the victim of an imaginary robbery that

has never taken place. In turn, this paranoid fantasy is rooted in his failure

through a generosity containing certain mechanisms of indirection, but it, too, has already been established as essentially healthy for his own life and

productive of charity for Mariane. It tinkers with nature without supplanting it. Harpagon, on the other hand, incarnates a kind of twisted superego in a rationalist financial system with rules that flout the laws of nature. So La Flèche becomes

without

much

a monetary form of the id, doing what comes naturally

concern

for moderation;

he is the only person who

can

logically perform the much-anticipated robbery that will re-distribute the unnaturally non-circulating wealth and provide for a supply-and-demand solution to the family’s needs.

Moliére takes care to justify La Fléche’s function in negative by contrasting him to Harpagon’s frenzied efforts to brand him as a spy and a thief in Act One, scene three. When La Fléche brands this behavior with the obvious label of avarice, Harpagon tries to stifle this appearance-based association. But La Fléche points out naturally that it is Harpagon himself who is adopting the title: “Qui se sent morveux,

qu’il se mouche.”

As so often in Moliére’s

theater, proverb here represents the acceptance of appearance as appearance, the fundamental axiom in skeptical thought. As for Harpagon’s other stifled identity, that of a rich capitalist with plenty of money, La Fléche points out that it is pointless to discuss it as long as Harpagon refuses to acknowledge appearances by providing suitable benefits for his servants, “Hé! Que nous importe que vous en ayez ou que vous n’en ayez pas, si c’est pour nous la méme chose?” Even the domestics are aware of the gap between the accepted appearance of Harpagon’s fortune and the bizarre appearances of miserly behavior, which

impose a

only reinforce what is obvious. The miser himself tries to

rationalistic syllogism that denies this: H behaves like someone

who has no money, therefore H has no money, therefore H will not be robbed (and clandestinely, H will continue to “enjoy” his money in privacy). But therein lies the rub. Many are the proverbs that say, in different ways, that the essence of wealth lies not in the amassing, but in the enjoying of

118

Stage Ways and Skeptic Way

Chapter Seven

it. And as we have seen in the case of sentiment, wealth cannot really be enjoyed

alone.

Even

Harpagon’s

of his money in a loan, of the dreaded Mohatra Lettres provinciales, results attempts unknowingly to

attempt

involving Contract in failure. deal with

in the second

act to invest some

illegal interest rates and the provisions lambasted by Pascal in the fifth of the It may be argued that this is because he his own son. Yet it is Moliére’s point in

this demonstration that the lender and the borrower are necessarily linked in

a relationship not unlike that of the father and son in the family. The lender can only truly succeed if the borrower also succeeds and pays him back at the

agreed rate. This success in turn generates more loans and greater capitalistic success. In Harpagon’s case, the lender doesn’t really want this to happen: he

is betting against his own loan in a contrarian fashion, hoping the unknown

young man will fail so that he can attach himself to his inheritance. In the

shortest term, this predecessor to short-selling seems like a plausible mechanism for enrichment,

but it goes against the grain of capitalism in its early

modern form. Since so much wealth in early modern France was not liquid, or even easily converted to cash, the entire credit structure relied on a com-

plex network of interlocking obligations, the failure of which could entail a massive domino effect of bankruptcy. So all the sub rosa dealings favored by Harpagon

and his henchmen

are more a

parasitic aberration

of capitalism

than any type of standard practice. There is also an implicit Christian warning against Harpagon’s attitude toward hoarding. The miser’s insistence on hiding his gold, rather than putting it into action to marry off his children, recalls the parable of the nobleman in Luke 19: 12-26. Having placed his wealth with three servants when he departed to take care of other business, the rich man returns and demands a reckoning. The first two servants, who had risked and invested the money in their care, are rewarded with the entire sum, but the one servant who wrapped the wealth in a cloth and hid it is stripped of all and punished. Another rich man parable in Luke 12: 15-22 supports the injunction against

non-circulating wealth, even though the rich man in this case privately enjoyed the fruits of his hoarding for a while. Harpagon’s decision to remove

the strongbox from the house, where it was hidden in the Roman Aulularia,

and bury it in the garden underground, like the servant in Luke 19, subtly evokes a Biblical example well known to the advocates of skeptical fideism. Despite his tendency to engage in dangerous credit practices, the attitude of Harpagon’s son Cléante is actually closer to the spirit of the early modern economic system than his father’s. Cléante depends on a certain degree of conspicuous consumption to fuel the still-undeveloped motor of consumerism. Louis XIV’s many attempts at sumptuary legislation did not prevent young bourgeois people like Cléante and Elise from putting all their dispos-

119

able money (and then some) on their bodies, in imitation of the fashions of the court. The well-known equestrian portrait of Chancellor Séguier, clad splendidly and surrounded by liveried servants, set a tone for conspicuous consumption among the bourgeoisie. Even Harpagon’s servants, desirous of

a decent livery, subscribe in their way to this trickle-down theory of luxury.

So does the multi-functioning Maitre Jacques in his plans for a meal to regale

Mariane. Anyone reasonable understands the desirability of such a multicourse feast in preference to Harpagon’s plans for fatty mystery meat and clotted chestnuts, the fare of famine and extreme need. Skeptical ethics, such

as they can be imputed from Sextus, authorize just such a type of consumerism by imitation, depending on the prevailing sense of taste, to establish the proper limits of sensual indulgence. Harpagon’s creed actually amounts to a negative standard of the extreme,

non-conspicuous non-consumption, as is clear in his interview with Frosine and his constitution of a dowry for Mariane based not on what she will

spend, but on what she will not. If extreme consumerism, represented by Ra-

belais’s Panurge mangeant son blé en herbe, is to be avoided, so is the anorexic alternative of Harpagon’s plan, since he can only enjoy what he never allows himself to experience. Panurge-like spending tries to convert wealth to pleasure before the fact, and Harpagon’s defers such conversion indefinitely. In both cases, the correspondence between appearance-of-enjoyment and capacity-for-enjoyment is thrown

out of balance. To ensure this balance of

early modern capitalism, the appearance and movement of money is as irresistible as that of water. When the dam finally breaks and Harpagon’s money moves in the fourth act (by theft, as he himself ensures), it is clear that the miser has only him-

self to blame because the only one who can really reduce his wealth is the miser himself. His cries of “Ah, c’est moi!” as hand underline this solipsism. Naturally, the of self-destruction: “Je me pendrai moi-méme stops short of self-recognition at the end of the

he grasps his own suspicious speech ends with a promise aprés.” Of course, Harpagon play. Having summoned the

police to apprehend his robber, he is dumbfounded when they have trouble accepting his presentation of the identities involved in the crime of robbery. Though flawed and corrupt, the police still represent average practices to which one has to accede in civil society. Even they, the agents of hanging, cannot adopt Harpagon’s inquisitorial approach to the preservation of private property, since Harpagon’s property has been kept so private that he has difficulty establishing a civil claim to it. Even when his steward appears to confess to the theft, Harpagon cannot reach the obvious conclusion that the theft is that of a person, Harpagon’s daughter, rather than a disengaged

object representing wealth, the strongbox. And it is with the strongbox itself

Chapter Seven

Stage Ways and Skeptic Way

that Harpagon must in the end be fused, reifying him and dissociating him from kith and kin. Even Disney’s Uncle Scrooge, wallowing in his money vault, has some indissoluble link with his three nephews, but Harpagon and

pidity, the professionals can arrive at a typically skeptical compromise with the real world by working to improve him, if possible. The circumstances of the original staging of this play as a court comédieballet performed at Chambord must not be forgotten. Just as the “tradesmen

120

his dream of wealth can only exist in isolation. Even his wedding suit, the appearance of his attachment to the socio-economic system, must be provided by the new surrogate father who will take over the extended family and its pattern of consumerism.

121

of culture” on stage formed a primary audience for Jourdain’s social playacting, so the nobles pressed in on all sides at Chambord formed a necessary

La Bruyère. He not only wishes his wealth to show forth, but insists on it.

counterpart to the would-be gentleman’s buffoonery. Their own immaculate tailoring, graceful dancing (led by Louis XIV himself), perfect vocal expression, witty dialogue, and vaunted martial skills stood out in stark contrast to Jourdain’s every clumsy attempt at self-elevation. The ballet interludes only heightened this harmonious dissonance, as the stage was literally invaded by the ethos and tastes of the court itself.

tailor, and

the Schools in earlier plays. When the musician proposes a tune composed

No discussion of paradox in Molière would be complete without consideration of Monsieur Jourdain, the eponymous bourgeois gentilhomme. In many ways he is the obverse of Harpagon, since he is totally preoccupied with the realm of appearances, the paraître that so fascinated moralists like Hence the importance of the entire first act of the play, which can be said to contain almost nothing but psychological exposition. Jourdain must not only consult and study with his singing, dancing, and fencing masters, his his hired philosopher,

but

must

do so simultaneously,

so that

all can acknowledge his status together, forming a primary audience on stage. Ironically, of course, none of the “tradesmen of culture” are taken in, and all engage in a flood of sarcastic remarks about their client’s misguided ostentation, keeping their comments

barely beyond

the level of Jourdain’s

comprehension. Even before he makes his dramatically belated entrance, the client's oxymoronic nature forms the body of a protracted discussion between the music master and the dancing master. When

the former avers “votre danse

et ma musique auraient a souhaiter que tout le monde lui ressamblat,” the dancer takes exception, saying, “je voudrais pour lui qu'il se connût mieux qu'il ne fait aux choses que nous lui donnons.” The conversation moves out of the imperfect subjunctive of ideal conditions to the present indicative of hard reality. As they assess the situation, both teachers come

to agree that

Jourdain’s money is welcome and necessary. In fact, they learn to appreciate that it functions as a sort of paradoxical compensation:

Son argent redresse les jugements de son esprit; il a du discernement dans

sa bourse; ses louanges sont monnayées; et ce bourgeois ignorant nous

vaut mieux, comme vous voyez, que le grand seigneur éclairé qui nous a introduits ici.

Thus, if approval holding without out that

some clients pay, like Dorante, only in the verbal “caresses” of that the dancing master values above all else, others, while withthis aesthetic tribute, make up for it by paying in coin of the realm, which no artistic activity can thrive. The musician goes on to point by suspending judgment on the inappropriateness of Jourdain’s stu-

Jourdain’s repeated questions to the professionals about whether the court does things in such-and-such a way amount to a syllogistic program that Moliére systematically, if subtly, attacks. First, we return to the level of by one of his écoliers, Jourdain objects to this on a literalist level: “il ne fallait

pas faire faire cela par un écolier, et vous n’étiez pas trop bon vous-méme pour cette besogne-la.” The would-be gentleman assumes that a student is lower in the hierarchical order than a teacher and therefore less perfect, with the implication

that someone

labeled

as “student”

cannot,

by definition,

have the quality of understanding of a professor. But his basic notion of education is flawed because it is likened to a mere task or chore, requiring little more than simple mechanical achievement. Jourdain apparently subscribes to the “triage” school of education, based on measuring supposedly

immutable hierarchies of incremental knowledge. Correcting Jourdain, the and music master lauds his students, comparing them to the greatest masters anyone by done be saying that the composition is of the finest that could

(including, presumably, himself). He is right to be generous in his praise, of since by acknowledging the ability of the student to equal the perfection of distinction highest the accomplished time the teacher, he has at the same perfection. of level this on the teacher by passing With this epistemological stone in place, Moliére goes on to expose dancing Jourdain’s approach to acquiring new learning for himself. After the favorite foolish master ironically praises Jourdain’s vocal rendition of his music the artist fellow song about Janneton and the sheep, he pokes his master

in

the

ribs

again

by

recommending

that Jourdain

learn

to

read

music and compose on his own, since this activity is closely related to his would-be terpsichorean endeavors. Jourdain replies with a question: “Est-ce a positive que les gens de qualité apprennent aussi la musique?” Receiving

response, he resolves, “Je l’apprendrai donc.” Yet, just as he misunderstood

122

Stage Ways and Skeptic Way

Chapter Seven

the relationship between student and teacher, Jourdain misunderstands the

relation between studying and learning, assuming that they are the same. He can study as much as his purse can afford, but it remains to be seen if this oaf is capable of actually learning anything. Moreover, it is all the more questionable whether he can presume to learn what people of quality can learn, though he once again postulates that no difference exists. His reasoning goes:

A) Noblemen can learn music; B) Jourdain can learn music; thus, C) Jourdain

can become a nobleman. (some noblemen

While Proposition

A may be conditionally true

may, in fact, not be able to learn music),

Proposition B is

50 far demonstrably false, thus also negating Proposition C. But by equating “learn” with “acquire,” Jourdain has constructed a whole system of false

logic, always arriving at the same conclusion: that he can become noble. A most appropriate perspective on Jourdain’s thinking can be found in a

text related to the very latest developments in twenty-first century capitalism,

George Soros’s The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, where the economist-

philosopher discusses his theory of reflexivity. According to Soros:

People are participants, not just observers, and the knowledge they can acquire is not sufficient to guide them in their actions. They cannot base their decisions on knowledge alone. That is the condition I describe by the

of the drapier’s trade some

time ago. Clearly,

all his manipulative

123 effort is

concentrated on occulting his shameful origins and assuming the identity of a person of quality. But the more passionately he pursues this goal with his bourgeois mind, the more he is likely to be betrayed into error by his manipulative functions. This same manipulative perspective can be applied to characters as diverse as Arnolphe, Alceste, Dom Juan, and Orgon, thus showing that it is not dependent on the condition of bourgeois thinking, however much this market mindset seems to coincide with the fallibility.

Soros complains at some length that twenty-first century academic phi-

losophy and social science have failed to grant recognition to his thought. He might find some consolation in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, which demonstrates

that a Master of Philosophy is just as prone to succomb to the manipulative

function as a businessman.

Instead of objectively harmonizing the different

fields of learning, he panders even more obsequiously than his peers to the manipulative interests of his client, selling instruction in mere phonology and spelling in place of true philosophy. Moreover, he not only falls into the same sectarian argument that divides the other masters, but manages to get the worst of it by assuming his bailiwick is superior to all of theirs, thus pitting himself against the entire corps of masters and taking an exemplary beating

two types

as the price of his arrogance. Even in the age of Descartes and Pascal, the most incisive philosophy was not always recognized by the public, as ingratiating “talking heads” peddled their wares with some success to the uninitiated. Jourdain’s pig-headedness leads directly to the application of the ma-

strictly in the objective realm since it concerns itself with determining the truth independently of any individual intention to use that truth to affect

his manipulative desire for nobility can the rest of the family disengage him from the ways he has already devised to manipulate them as part of his

word “fallibility.” (26)

Certainly Jourdain demonstrates most adequately this condition of human

epistemological

fallibility. Soros goes on to distinguish between

of mental functions, cognitive and manipulative. The former can remain

behavior. However, this largely theoretical function is usually superceded by some intention, obvious or not, of doing just that, which pushes the determination of truth into the next function, the manipulative. As a simultaneous judge and participant in the process of truth generation, the individual thus

falls victim to a kind of behavioral Heisenberg principle, for he cannot objectively judge the truth while he is manipulating it with the overt or hidden intention of producing a given outcome. i Soros's system, which is very close in many respects to classical skepticism, suggests that Jourdain, as a man who still thinks in bourgeois terms, is particularly fallible in respect to reflexivity. After all, he is so shop-conscious

that he reproaches the music master for “cheating” on a composition by relegating it to the equivalent of a craftsman’s “valet.” He also is suspicious

of the tailor for purloining some of the cloth for his suit, which he recognizes instantly.

It is evident that he knows

the measure

and value

of the cloth

by heart, even though he has apparently left the inherited daily practice

mamouchi trickery in the later acts of the play, since only by over satisfying

scheme. In contrast to this, the dépit amoureux sequence in Act Three, scenes

eight through ten, offers a skeptical counterpoint. Having observed certain reactions during the morning, Cléonte and his valet Covielle have mistakenly inferred that Lucile and her maid Nicole have been unfaithful to them in love. The women repeatedly offer contrary evidence to the men’s conclusion, asking them to “look” and “listen,” but to no avail. Their skeptical appeal to the nature of appearances has no affect on the men’s emotional pique. When the women have had enough of this treatment, they adopt a similar Lucile pouty behavior that rather quickly reduces the men to despair. Finally,

reveals the reason for the apparent slight:

l'aventure Si vous aviez voulu m’écouter, ne vous aurais-je pas dit que dont vous vous plaignez a été causée ce matin par la présence d’une vieille une fille? tante, qui veut que la seule approche d’un homme déshonore tous les figure nous et chapitre, ce sur sermonne nous qui perpétuellement hommes comme des diables qu’il faut fuir?

Chapter Seven

Stage Ways and Skeptic Way

Given this secret detail, the young men learn the benefit of the doubt. They realize suspended judgment would have been better than their hasty rationalization and quickly excuse themselves. Though young people might be

nations by rapidly obtaining familial consent to their marriage. Henriette shows paradoxically that, while rejecting the Stoical-Cartesian dogma of her sister, she is the one who in practice is able to maintain better balance and

124

expected to be more unstable in their judgment than their parents, these two couples, from different social registers, show that they are instinctively and happily inclined to privilege skeptical suspension of judgment over a mecha-

nistically contrived system of manipulative reason. So strong is the tendency to rush to judgment on the basis of syllogistic conclusions of appearances like clothes, facial expression, or odd language, that even Madame Jourdain, the

natural ally of the young couples, is caught during the final act as she tries to oppose the Turkish intruders. Covielle and Cleonte must literally pull off their fake beards to prove their true identities. Only then can she realize that the greater the gap between appearance and perceived reality, the greater the need for suspension of judgment to determine the true properties of the situation. While fulfilling the king’s desire that Le Bourgeois gentilhomme should satirize the Turks in return for their recent diplomatic haughtiness, Moliere does not pass up the chance to use this comedie-ballet to develop some of his

favorite philosophical points in a new direction. One of the most extensive and amusing applications of skepticism is found

towards

the end

of Moliére’s

career in Les Femmes

savantes,

where

the playwright reopens the interface between skepticism and esthetics. The opening debate in the play between

Armande

and

Henriette is more

than

just a quarrel between sisters who are rivals in love or even an analysis of the value of love itself, for it inevitably becomes a trial of Armande’s notion of reason

as a proper

moderator

of the senses.

The

prudish

and précieuse

Armande takes the position that marriage is an indulgence in the animalistic gratification of the senses and therefore should be avoided through the imposition of a higher order of thought. Her position is at once Stoical and

Cartesian, which Epicurean moral skeptical fashion, directly as sensual

provides Henriette with a perfect pretext for combining attitudes with Pyrrhonist epistemology. In a typically Henriette never seeks to justify her interest in Clitandre gratification, acting as a counterfoil to the inconsistencies

of her sister’s dogma.

Thus,

Henriette will make

up for Armande’s

sterility

by bringing new philosophers into the world, take up the debased creature drudgery that her sibling rejects, and compensate Clitandre for the lack of affection that he received when offering his love to Armande. Her avoidance of mentioning her personal sensual pleasure in marriage is justified by Armande’s concealment of her own repressed desire for gratification under the cover of rationalist criteria. Later, when in the presence of her future husband, Henriette appropriately concedes that pathe have indeed developed quite a hold over her and urges Clitandre to legitimize these “lower” incli-

125

control over her emotions. Her fusion of Epicurean and skeptical elements is

perfectly in line with the philosophical tendancies of both Gassendi and La Mothe Le Vayer. This becomes all the more evident in contrast to her aunt Bélise, an imaginaire addicted to her false opinions, who has drifted into an

existence of complete phantastike that deforms every male into another of her imaginary lovers. Bélise implicitly represents a possible end-state of the evolution of Stoical-Cartesian thought. The Learned Ladies go on to align themselves with two important enemies of the Pyrrhonists: Vaugelas and Cotin. Vaugelas was certainly not a philosopher, and this linguist’s confrontation with skepticism stems accidentally from

La Mothe

Le Vayer’s role in the Académie

Française, where

Moliére’s older friend was particularly involved with lexicology. It is known that the opinions of the Savoyard Vaugelas were especially repugnant to La Mothe, who was forced to redo much of his academic work on word choice

or to dispute with the “foreigner.” Thus, when Philaminte reveals that she has tried to train her servants in Vaugelasian French, the spectator is immediately thrown into the opposite camp. Her rebuke to Martine is as follows: Elle a, d’une insolence à nulle autre pareille Après trente leçons, insulté mon

oreille

Par l’impropreté d’un mot sauvage et bas Qu’en termes décisifs condamne Vaugelas. (II, 6, 459-462)

The chiasmus of the last verse is no accident, for Molière is indeed seeking in a roundabout way to condemn Vaugelas. Martine retorts that she cannot learn the new “jargon” and that “Quand on se fait entendre, on parle toujours bien,/Et tous vos biaux dictons ne servent pas de rien” (477-478). This

apparent double negative unleashes a torrent of criticism from the salon-

nières, which swells when Martine uses the popular conjugation “je parlons”

and then mistakes grammaire for the near-homonym grand’mere. La Mothe had a place in his heart for pithy old French terms that were being challenged by Vaugelas and other reformist linguists, who were rooted in what they considered rational derivations from Classical languages. La Mothe’s stodgy patriotism is evident in Martine’s answer to Philaminte’s statement that she has taught her many times where grammar comes from: Qu’il vient de Chaillot, d’Auteuil, ou de Pontoise, Cela ne me fait rien. (495-496)

The poor cook exacerbates her employers’ wrath when she takes verbs, nominatives, adjectives, and substantives to be the titles of people. In fact, they

wed

126

Stage Ways and Skeptic Way

Chapter Seven

do all resemble Aristotelian categories. When Bélise superciliously informs her that they are the names of words and that those words must never clash with one another, Martine says, “Qu'ils s'accordent entre eux, ou se gourment, qu'importe?” (503). After Martine’s departure, Bélise remarks that “Elle

y met Vaugelas en pièces tous les jours” (522). This ostensible insult can also be taken by the audience as an unwitting compliment, since in fact mettre en pièces or “demolish” is most often used positively in the military sense: Martine has beaten Vaugelas to a pulp. Chrysale,

Martine’s master, adds depth

to the antithesis between skeptics and their enemies in the play. As he goes on to speak of the importance of good cooking over elegant language, he associates Vaugelas with two other enemies of La Mothe Le Vayer, one philosophical, the Stoical Malherbe, and the other polemical, the anti-Pyrrhonist

Guez de Balzac. But by far the greatest target for the Pyrrhonists in Les Femmes savantes is the abbé Cotin, model for the effete salon fly Trissotin. In his youth, Cotin had penned a tract against the skeptics, one of several that attempted to refute the first volume of Gassendi’s Exercitationes. Cotin had long since ceased to dabble openly in philosophical disputes, so this play fittingly concentrates on his insipid poetry and flawed intellectual pretensions. The effects of his teachings are evident in his female pupils, who swoon not only for his smattering of Greek, but also for Cartesian vortices and for telescopic visions of men in the moon. The radically Cartesian and rationalist anchoring of the salon can be set in relief by considering that the playwright was acquainted through his circle of friends, if not directly, with a different tendency in what we now consider the physical sciences. Moliére’s friend François Bernier was

especially and intimately acquainted with Gassendi’s physics and devoted a major part of his Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi to the subject. Gassendi exposed the ideas of Galileo, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe along with the orthodox Ptolemaic system, but constructed his analysis in such a way as to favor the moderns. However, he did not approve of Descartes’s physics any more than other elements of his philosophy,

for he

considered it too deductive, along the lines of the old Aristotelianism. Gassendi was inching towards a scientific method, though it would be left to René Mersenne to actually coin this term, and to the English empiricists of the subsequent generation to work out its details. Against the phantastike of neophytes counting the church spires on the Moon, he would certainly raise the objection of the classic skeptical epoche. Moliére,

a devotee of La Mothe’s

common sense, shows the positive side of doubt in Les Femmes savantes, where the same suspension of belief that he had flouted in exaggerated circumstances in Le Mariage forcé is now restored to value as a counter measure

to brazen scientific speculation.

127

An anti-Cartesian stand is also implicated in the plans of Philaminte’s academy for imperialistic language. Descartes’s system, elaborated in the Discours de la méthode and the Méditations, implies that “an idea can be unmediated in character, operating perfectly as the unified content and form of knowledge” (Kroll 123). This immanence of the idea in the word explains

Philaminte’s sensitivity to the “bad syllables” in Martine’s language; in the absence of a Saussurean gap between signfier and signified, phonological elements like “con” or “vit” could not help lead directly to the idea of “vulgar” sexual organs, no matter what their discursive context. In critiquing this Cartesian notion, Gassendi took up a long-established philosophical tradition, for Lucretius had in ancient times established a sustained analogy

between atoms and letters of the alphabet in order to discuss the concept of freedom of association. Insisting on the role of linguistic elements as appearances, Gassendi states that verbal representations are by nature partial and

arbitrary imges of material reality, “serving as a means of distinguishing it from other objects, but in no way capturing its essence” (Kroll 123). Thus, it

is no accident that the pragmatic pronouncements of Martine and Chrysale on language recall Gassendi’s own statement in the Exercitationes: “I am neither Ciceronian,

nor the least bit scolastic. I favor an unaffected prose

perform

“the same

function

instance

of such

style that flows spontaneously, for I am no more painstaking with words than with other things” (Kroll 127). Elsewhere, Gassendi explains that words for our ears that fingers perform

for the eyes

when we point at those things for the same purpose” (Kroll 128). Just as Moliére’s populist characters confront Philaminte’s overly contrived empire of language and as La Mothe Le Vayer battled Vaugelas’s restrictive treatment of the lexicon, “Gassendi offers the loquens vulgaris as a criterion of what we mean by what we say, and converts his own philosophical delivery into an socially circumscribed

use”

(Kroll

129). The

philosopher

from Digne had cleverly inferred that this approach was absolutely necessary in confronting Cartesian reationalism's claims, since it was important for him to problematize

the distinction between

opining and knowing,

or

between representing and showing, if he were to devalue the idea of reliably direct access to knowledge.

Finally, Les Femmes savantes serves to attack the very notion of science as a positivistic and melioristic institution that purports to bring nothing but

good to the world. Moliére anticipates the re-evaluation of medicine in Le Malade imaginaire by calling into question the value of any science that demands large scale social change as a prerequisite, or that postulates universal social control as a result. Philaminte’s cultural revolution is reconsidered in the final act, when family survival, héritage, and procreation are threatened. But by the time Ariste’s ruse of faked family bankruptcy for Philaminte’s clan

128

Chapter Seven

is brought to fruition, the actual debate between skepticism and dogmatism

has already been won. It is up to the skeptically inclined suitor Clitandre to

weigh in with the irresistible verdict of the royal court when Trissotin derides both it and the skeptics in the play. Martine could only argue against the rationalists from the stance of a personne simple, but Clitandre can attack

Chapter Eight

Trissotin from the other side, as a true intellectual who can expose the demi-

habile. The pedantic Trissotin pompously proclaims: “Pour moi, je ne tiens

pas,

quelque

effet qu’on

suppose,/Que

la science

soit pour

gater quelque

Le Malade imaginaire and the Paradox of Death

chose” (IV, 3, 1281-1282). Without condemning the practical potential of science, and guarding the important Pyrrhonist distinction between reality

and supposition, Clitandre answers, “Et c’est mon sentiment qu'en faits, comme en propos,/La science est sujette à faire de grands sots.” Trissotin is

unable to offer any reply other than to pout, “Le paradoxe est bien fort.” To which we scholars in the audience can say, “Il ne savait pas si bien dire.”

The oxymoronic theatre of France in the Classical Age had already given much testimony of its fascination with the contradictory blending of life and death long before Molière took up the topic. For instance, one can cite

near the time when Molière began his Paris productions Nicole's Phantosme

in 1652, Quinault’s Fantôme amoureux in 1656, Brécourt’s Feinte mort de Jodelet in 1659, Chasteauneuf’s Feinte mort de Pancrace in 1662 and Boursault’s Mort vivant in 1661. The theme of living death was coin of the realm both to enemies such as Boursault, the author of some of the most bitter invectives against the dramatist, and to allies like Brécourt, who eventually

left the Marais to join Moliére’s troupe. The woof and warp of influences traces far back in literary history and

across national

and

linguistic lines.

Les Morts vivants, penned by d’Ouville in 1646, is based on Sforza d’Oddi’s I morti vivi of 1576,

which

is based on Achilles Tatius’s Greek romance

of

Clitophon and Leucippe. Not to forget the Spanish comedia, Lope wrote a Muertos vivos and Paredes also had his Muerto vivo. Faked deaths, walking corpses, reappearing ghosts, and such devices figure in numerous comedies that pre-date Le Malade imaginiare, making the notion of “le mort vivant” a

theatrical commonplace, and not just in comedy. One need only look as far as Corneille’s masterpieces, Le Cid and Horace, where the false deaths of both eponyms (thrice in the case of Rodrigue) test the reactions of the “surviving”

characters. Indeed,

heroic tragedy virtually demands

the figurative death

of a former, private self, in order that the greater self can come into being,

which is obvious not only in the two cases just cited, but also in those of the martyred

Polyeucte

who

replaces Pauline’s tender suitor and the radiantly

imperial Auguste who supplants his former politically conniving self. Nor is the use of the “mort vivant” figure limited to the heroic play, for how would Phèdre unfold if Thésée were not literally resurrected from Hell to topple both

the idealistic designs of his son and the incestuous ones of his spouse? And doesn’t the dead Hector hold a greater sway over the events of Andromaque than either the living Pyrrhus or Oreste? Moliére’s brilliant contribution to this rich weave

of theatrical tradition is to pass beyond

the limits of plot

130

Chapter Eight

Le Malade imaginaire and the Paradox of Death

contrivance and to probe the topic’s philosophical depths, both pagan and Christian, in the innovative guise of a very earthy comedy.

is true that the most common and effective cure for syphilis was massive doses of the heavy metal mercury, which had the effect of producing a miraculous short-term cure and usually a fairly rapid death due to poisoning. It is significant that the Sganarelles of both Dom Juan and Le Médecin malgré

Moliére was no stranger to the medical play long before he composed Le

Malade imaginaire. Le Médecin malgré lui revolves around an age-old paradox

tracing back to the fabliau of Le Vilain mire in the Middle Ages, namely the case of a very ordinary man who must perform as a doctor even though he does not want to. This introduces a larger theme of the human who resists against a role which fate insists that he must adopt. On the most passive level, Arnolphe and all other cuckolds obviously find themselves duped against their own wishes and precautions. Moliére moved this cuckold figure

into the new genre of the comédie-ballet in the person of Dom Pédre in Le Sicilien. One can go further and easily see in Alceste the figure of a lover despite himself. While Dom Juan and Harpagon of L’Avare are quite happy to be, respectively, a great lord and a rich man, each tries stubbornly to jettison

certain aspects of his role and to redefine his fate. Along with Le Médecin malgré lui, L'Amour médecin, investigates the foundations of an approach to medecine that will culminate in Le Malade imaginaire. Following the early farce of Le Médecin volant, Dom

Juan

had

already

explored this territory in the first scene of Act Three, where Sganarelle takes advantage of his temporary medical disguise to trick “cing ou six paysans et

paysannes” by offering false cures for their maladies. In practical terms, then,

Sganarelle is just as “impie en médecine” as his master. Indeed, it is clear that

the credulity of the ordinary folk invites charlatans like Sganarelle to abuse their stupidity. In this respect, the powerful characters in Le Médecin malgré lui are just as gullible as the peasants. When Lucile faked a case of laryngitis or aphasia to defer her marriage, her father Géronte, who has many servants, and her intended husband, the absent Horace (“qui est libéral” I, 4) are both

willing to accept any solution that furthers their financial and matrimonial

plans. The body must be made to conform to the balance sheet. Their search

for a quick and expedient cure shows that fallibility is not limited or determined strictly by class or education. Above all, the short medical plays serve to open a distinction between superstition and suspension of judgment that will be crucial to Moliére’s final play, Le Malade imaginaire. It is no accident that the new medical skepticism demonstrated by Moliére follows hard on the heels of two other early modern

phenomena;

the spread of diseases resulting from the new colonial order and the birth of pharmaceutics. The dissemination of the pox and the followers of Paracelsus had a strange symbiotic relationship. Venereal diseases spread like wildfire almost as soon as Europeans had discovered the Americas and remained a serious scourge for centuries. The Englishman Boswell put it well when he observed that one night with Venus entailed a lifetime with Mercury. It

lui are interested

above

all in pharmacological

cures,

rather than

131

the still

more common practices of bleeding and purging. In the latter play, Lucas mentions “l'or potable,” a popular panacea of the day, and Sganarelle has Valère carry his bottle of alcohol, explaining “Voila où je mets mes juleps” (I, 5). Géronte rejects the popular homeopathic cures of rhubarb and senna

suggested by the old nurse Jacqueline, trusting only in a newer, more technological form of medecine. Later, when Sganarelle encounters a peasant whose wife is apparently suffering from a form of dropsy, this Thibaut reveals that he has already tried le vin émétique, a fashionable but dangerous solution containing the poison antimony. Sganarelle succeeds in giving him the less dangerous remedy of a piece of old cheese only by convincing the farmer that it contains gold, coral, pearls, and other wonder drugs. In the third act, as he entertains Géronte while Lucinde and Léandre elope, Sganarelle

mystifies the old man by telling him that he has prescribed “a purgative fugue” along with “two drams of matrimonium in pills.” Still believing in the efficacy of chemotherapy, Géronte asks, “Quelles drogues, Monsieur, sont celles que vous venez de dire?” (III, 7). He can only think of cures in terms of

pharmacological devices. When

Moliére

crowns

his theatrical

career with

the production

of Le

Malade imaginaire, he quickly renews the emphasis on new medical technology. The first scene of the play introduces us to a man who is pathetically trying to account for his health by incrementation of chemically-induced

vomit and enema, assuming that these unnatural ejections will somehow free him of a dimly perceived evil. It is significant that Moliére creates in Argan a kind of superstitious “waste engine” that can’t wait to present its “products”

to even the most

unwilling observer, the sensible Toinette, be-

cause of the assumption that one can only become purer and more intact through elimination. Argan is only interested in ingesting “cleansing” en-

emas and emetics because these cause other things to come out. This violates the oldest of Biblical wisdom, for as Jesus points out in Mark 7:15 “There is

nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him; but the things which come out of him, they are they that defile him.” Lost in the

figures, for his pharmaceutical bills have become his only livre de raison in all senses of the term, Argan cannot see the irony of his mistake, and naively

assumes that the more defiling treatments he receives, the better he will be: “Si bien donc que, de ce mois, j'ai pris une, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six, sept et huit médecines,

et un, deux, trois, quatre, cing, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix,

132 onze

Le Malade imaginaire and the Paradox of Death

Chapter Eight et douze

lavements,

et l’autre mois

il y avait douze

médecines

et vingt

lavements. Je ne m'étonne pas si je ne me porte pas si bien ce mois-ci que l’autre” (I, i).

The person most directly involved in serving Argan, Toinette, rejects the notion of defilement both aesthetically and moraly: “Ma foi, je ne me méle point de ces affaires-là; c'est à Monsieur Fleurant à y mettre le nez, puisqu'il en a le profit” (I, 2). Indeed, it is the doctors, Diafoirus père et fils, Purgon,

and their minion living out of the patients who are everyone should else would be a willing to stoke

Fleurant who emerge as dealers in defilement, sniffing their contents of bedpans and chamber pots. Instead of curing susceptible to improvement, they are more concerned that die according to the rules of the Medical School. Anything crime of “lèse faculté.” Consequently, they are more than the fires of Argan’s hypochondria, but we must recognize

that the urge comes

first from within Argan

himself,

from

his exaggerated

fear of death, and this phenomenon deserves our attention. From the viewpoint of Epicurean philosophy, the fear of death

is a

dangerous and nagging problem, akin to spiritual superstition. Lucretius observed: “There is no wretched Tantalus, as the myth relates, transfixed

with groundless terror at the huge boulder poised above him in the air. But in this life there really are mortals oppressed by unfounded fear of the gods and trembling at the impending doom that may fall upon any of them at the whim of chance” (126). Impending doom from the gods at first glance seems to have little in common with one’s waste products, but it was common in the seventeenth century to speak of “peccant humors” and to impute a definite spiritual malaise to the production of excessive or unusual urine and

stool. Sganarelle had mentioned them clumsily during his macaronic rants in Le Médecin malgré lui. It is these very “mauvaises humeurs” that Purgon offers to evacuate with his marvelous homemade enema (III, 5). The quack’s babble

gling night and day with unstinted effort to scale the pinnacles of wealth. These running sores of life are fed in no small measure by the fear of death.

For abject ignominy and irksome poverty seem far indeed from the joy and assurance of life, and in effect loiter already at the gateway of death” (97-98).

Argan’s bedpan statistics suggest a perverted form of pleonexia, the excessive

attachment to material possessions — in this sense, possessions that can only be counted when he ceases to possess them within his body, which trans-

forms his bowel movements into a sort of messy potlatch. Montaigne had taught, in good Stoical fashion, that to live is always to prepare for death, but Argan seems to have exaggerated Stoicism and transformed sane preparation

into a ridiculous course of précautions inutiles, always the stuff of comedy. Of course, Montaigne would have been the first to point out the unfoundedness

of Argan’s abject terror, since for Stoic and Epicuran alike, there was no need

to fear what could be overcome with good thinking. Moliére, who admired both schools, often seems very close to the Lucretian riposte to the Stoics: if there is no reason to fear death, why waste a lot of effort preparing for it? This would be consistent with the anti-Stoical stance he adopted in his

poem to La Mothe Le Vayer on the death of his son, which urges the old philosopher to reject Stoical self-constraint, to cease trying to manage his body’s reactions, and allow his personality to express naturally what it must under the sad circumstances. Though skepticism in general did not concern itself much with matters of natural science and physiology, it adopted ideas very close to Lucretius when forced by argument to deal with these topics. Thus, in Guy de Brués’s Dialogues, Guillaume Aubert and Jean Nicot, taking over a discussion begun

earlier in the work by Ronsard and Baif, make such a rapprochement in the

context of a debate about law (Morphos 69-70). They discuss certain “sick-

nesses of the soul,” such as avarice, tyranny, hypocrisy, and rebelliousness,

about Argan’s “mauvaise constitution” and “corruption de sang” has a meta-

akin to the manias

physical accent, and his abandonment of the patient in Act Three resembles nothing more than an evil spell. Béralde sarcastically compares Purgon to

pleasure

“un oracle.” Argan’s hysteria over the possibility of imminent demise hardly speaks well for his state of spiritual confidence in God’s grace, since he apparently wants to put off any last judgment

as long as possible. It is the

doctors who assure Argan that he may be on the verge of such a reckoning:

“Monsieur Purgon dit que je succomberais s’il était seulement trois jours sans prendre soin de moi” (III, 3).

In another passage, Lucretius associates the fear of death with pyschosocial disorders of the personality, such as avarice and tyranny: “Consider too the greed and blind lust of power that drive unhappy

men

to overstep the

bounds of right and may even turn them into accomplices of crime, strug-

133

of Harpagon,

Arnolphe, Tartuffe, and Dom Juan. These

unbalances emanate from an inability to balance appetites and desires for in the

equilibrium

favored

by

nature.

Nicot,

arguing

from

the

Aristotelian standpoint, avers that only strong laws can provide the expert he medicine necessary to hold such derangements in check. But in doing so, obthe as such mania, of analysis concedes many points of the Moliéresque servation that it is useless to expect those afflicted to cure themselves when they are blind to the causes and effects of their condition. For all practical purposes,

the Lucretian

approach

to medicine

may

be identified subtly in

Brués’s dialogue with that of the Pyrrhonian.

not prevent But Lucretius’s tendency to pull the sting from death does

him from making more serious observations that pertain to Argan’s dilemma. of Anticipating Pascal, the Classical philosopher makes this fear the source

me

>

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at heart

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have failed to think curious

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It is the first time

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It is only at this point

of Mark 9: passage,

often

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implicitly

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indeed

easily have

echoeda

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by external harm or dismemberment. His third chapter speaks reaction of the individual w hen deprived of various b« dy parts and

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physical

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In

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us.

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and

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Christ’s

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merely the

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sly one of

Of

el

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a

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Didn’t

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genuinely on

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that

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of

of the

death,

D

reverts consistently Isn’t

physiology whole

places

mouth

surprising

a Lucretian

pain-deadening

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dramatist

Aristotelianism

that has little to do with tliat id teachings:

aft

Argan’s

and which

have

no

need

situa-

recalls of

the

(2:17)?

Argan’s cheating wife Béline specifically seeks to make her husband a little less whole es him in pillows so that he cannot hear Toinette’s saracastic warnings or see her own flirtations with a dishonest notary who is intent on dismantling the hypochondriac’s fortunes. She is simultane-

ously depriving him of his physical senses and his financial good sense. The

qu’ il

et manchot about

}

deter-

himself

“Je ne veux puts an end to Sganarelle’s fiddling with her body by saying, point faire de mon corps un boutique d’apx ticaire” (II, 4). regs Lucretius had also noticed a tendency in the body to rally itself when

threatened

some

but

also on

so powerful,

bien

borgne

that he is willing to draw

inclination to technological manipulation

could

aignes

ridiculous

i t

which of course, few of these debonair sinners were eager to do, only then discovering that spiritual strength may indeed be effective in overcoming their physical inclinations. Similarly, Argan is in the habit of complaining about his body parts until it becomes a question of losing them - at that point they suddenly seem to be not so defective after all: “Me couper un bras,

ne se porte pas si t

Lucas.

philosophy

to sinners who would impute their spiritual weakness to the weakness of the flesh: their eyes, arms, and legs were ir resistibly leering, grasping, and carrying them toward the unholy. In his customary style of provocation, Jesus

invites them

h

choolmaster

cut it off

defective

Prosper

mankind

ries mav ms.

2 should

Letourneau

5

philosophy

to survive, few in the audience “And

enougn 2.1 PU

cc

is sick

-hristianity. It is ps Decause Of an establishment and h nan defilement that Ti able to so surprise Argan by quoting another +

va

i

complex third-party property transfers that the notary concocts in Act One Scene Seven not only seem to circumvent adroitly the heirship provisions of the coutume de Paris, but they also insulate Béline and himself from any attempt to trace or regain Argan’s money. In this instance, Moliére prefigues famous financial scams in later French literature, such as the straw-man scheme developed by Nucingen in Balzac’s César Birotteau or the fraud in Pagnol’s Topaze. Moreover, the supervision by an evil stepmother like Béline of so many potentially dangerous médecines would carry a very sinister suggestion

for an audience

come the Affaire des when she reveals to of dismemberment faithful servant from

still reeling

from

the first disclosures

of

what would

be-

Poisons. Toinette reinforces this contemporary scandal Angélique that Béline has been operating a similar policy in the household staff, by attempting to alienate the the interests of the family.

136

Chapter Eight

Le Malade imaginaire and the Paradox of Death

Although Lucretius plays a large role in the philosophical dialogue of Le Malade imaginaire, it is sigificant that Molière recognized the inability of the Epicurean scientist fully to address certain of the more paradoxical sides of human nature and of medecine itself. Béralde, the kindly uncle in the play who tries to promote Angélique’s marriage and to reform Argan’s views on health, was often portrayed by nineteenth-century critics, and some more recently, as a raisonneur proclaiming the Gospel of materialism. But this view does not offer a clear reading of the ideas he explains. What could be less materialistically Lucretian than his views on the efficacy of earthly therapeutics: “...les ressorts de notre machine sont des mystéres, jusques ici, ou les hommes ne voient goute, et que la nature nous a mis au-devant des yeux des voiles trop épais pour y connaitre quelque chose” (III, 3)? Lucretius’s assertions about the joys of existence may appear somewhat short-sighted in this perspective. The flippant “tant pis” that the pagan philosopher hurls at death, based solely on the interests of a theoretically enlightened individual, do not quite square with Argan’s haunted conscience or his contorted but enduring responsibilities as a family man. Argan dresses, complains, and behaves as though he were already at death’s doorstep from the very beginning of the play. Nowhere is Argan revealed as more of a mort vivant than in the two scenes of faked death, the first performed by his younger daughter Louison in Act Two and the second

“Me voila délivrée d’un grand fardeau. Que tu est sotte, Toinette, de t’affliger de cette mort” (III, 12). This sounds suspiciously like Lucretius’s blunt sendoff to a withered old man hesitating on the edge of oblivion. By contrast, Angélique is not only overwhelmed by her father’s demise, but worries over the fact that he departed the earth without pardoning her. Thus, she vows a retreat from the world all too close to the nun’s vows that Argan had sought to force on her: “Après la perte de mon père, je ne veux plus être du monde, et j'y renonce pour jamais.” When Argan, revived, calls Angélique “mon vrai sang” and talks of recovering “ton bon naturel,” he has gotten a second lease on life, a glimpse of spiritual freedom that prepares him to approve her marriage and the regeneration of life it promises for the whole family. But even after this enlightenment, he demonstrates an abiding dependency on the trappings of medecine that have rooted themselves too deeply in his psyche to be supplanted entirely. What then of the famous medical investiture ceremony that literally Moliére died to perform? If Argan is simply being drawn into a world of innocuous illusion, as so many critics have claimed, why is he given a ludic license to kill, manifested in the rather grim refrain of “Seignat et tuat” that punctuates the performance? He is told, after all, that the reason for

by

Argan

himself,

at the

behest

of the

disguised

Toinette,

in Act

Three.

Up

until these points in the play, we have often seen him weak, as when he is pillow-pelted by Toinette or when he hastily retreats rather than intervene in his daughter’s quarrel with Béline, but we have not seen him truly vulnerable. It takes only the ludicrous reaction of Louison to a few whacks with the switches (“Vous m’avez blessée; attendez, je suis morte” II, 8) to reduce Argan to a grief so genuine that it reminds us of Toinette’s affirmation that Argan really is, often despite himself, a good man at heart. Faced with the appearance of real death, no matter how comically implausible it might be,

he can no longer be his instance, when Toinette lie to Béralde’s negative jolt he got from Louison

obsessed self. He is no less surprised in the second cajoles him into playing dead in order to put the assessment of Béline. He has been prepared by the and now stands ready to learn the great paradox of

death, for as Christ says in Mark 8:35 “Whosoever will save his life shall lose

it.” Christian faith presumes that if one clings too tightly to the things that

are changeable and mortal, one will die both physically and spiritually, but that if one be willing to confront the prospect of death, one may discover a life over and above that of mutable matter. What Argan learns from his brief sojourn in death is well worth the risk. Béline’s materialistic “panégyrique” of her husband, begins with elation:

the

charade

is so that

he will

henceforth

be able

to look

137

after himself,

and

who should be better able to do it than a physician? Fortunately Argan has reached the stage where he clings only to the aura of security that accompanies a doctor’s robe and bonnet, for Béralde perceives that it will take only these fetishes to allow his brother to step back into contact with true

life. If Argan is to exercise some discrimination and to control the impulses

toward suspicion and superstition that have made him the dupe of his gang of quacks, he must become capable of self-discipline and put an end to the deceptive coddling in which Béline specialized. Pascal puts it very well in his liasse devoted to “Contrariétés” (119/413) when he prescribes the proper attitude of Christian self-assessment: “... Qu'il se haisse, qu'il s'aime: il a en lui la capacité de connaître la vérité et d’être heureux; mais il n’a point de vérité, ou constante,

ou satisfaisante. Je voudrais donc porter l'homme

à désirer d'en

trouver, à être pret et dégagé des passions, pour la suivre où il la trouvera, sachant combien sa connaissance s’est obscurcie par les passions; je voudrais

bien qu'il hait en soi la concupiscence qui le détermine d’elle-meme, afin qu’elle ne l’aveuglât point pour faire son choix, et qu’elle ne l’arretât point quand il aura choisi.” If the investiture ceremony

is actually a healing process,

it can furnish

the kind of beginning envisioned by Pascal, a readiness and disengagement

from obsessive passions that allows him to follow and perhaps to recognize truths that are not inherent in his individual nature. The investiture is more

τὰ

138

Chapter Eight

than simply a bigger and better pillow of deception inasmuch as it produces a change in the attitude of the participant. This approach to therapy is also in keeping with the spirit of Lucretius, who states: “... we see that the mind, like a sick body, can be healed and directed by medicine. This too is a presage that

Conclusion

its life is mortal” (111). Oh, brave mortality, that can find such consolation

in the very proof of its own frailty! This conclusion demonstrates the fusion of pagan and Christian thinking in the types of paradox that operates in Moliére’s plays. It is completely consistent with paradoxical considerations in the reste of the corpus. If reason isn’t always reasonable (which we learn in L’Ecole des femmes) and nature isn’t always natural (one of the lessons of Dom Juan), there are no grounds

for inferring that death will always lead away from life. The paradox of death is perhaps one of the most important to the development of the dramatist’s optimistic skepticism, allowing just enough suppleness in the role of Mother

Nature to avoid the fatalism that inevitably threatens to accompany her in her philosophical journeys. The prospect of betterment implied in the

formula castigat ridendo mores can thus coexist with Moliére’s extreme reluctance to take human institutions at face value, and the dramatist can identify problems in a kind and comic way, so as not to bring dispair to Lucretius’s

fragile human animal.

Having examined a great many instances of paradox in the works of Molière

and how they correlate with features of skepticism as it was understood in his time, even a skilled professional philosopher might have some difficulty in characterizing

these thoughts

as a whole.

It remains,

then,

to examine

the final question of just how to define Moliére’s skepticism. An obvious point of departure is to repeat the observation, frequently made during the nineteenth-century

debates on Moliére’s

morality,

that the playwright did

not aspire to be a systematic philosopher. This is very appropriate in that skepticism itself usually spurned systems and methods. Sextus Empiricus returns again and again to the theme

of skepticism

as a pragmatic way of

thinking that resists systematic organization. The skeptic way of epoché and the anxiety-free state of ataraxia that was its goal seem to avoid the impulse to account for everything in the universe all at once in terms of an integrated system. If Sextus highlights circular logic and infinite regression as two of the most important Agrippan tropes, it is to show the desirability of avoiding the pitfalls of universal accountability. In adopting skeptical tactics into the scientific method, the eighteenth-century empiricists would stipulate that to put a hypothesis into question, it was not necessary to offer universal disproofs or

conclusive reasons for why it does not work, but merely to show that, under

given conditions, it does not, and therefore cannot be assumed to be universally true. Skepticism and the scientific method privilege the benefit of the

doubt in this negative sense. By the same token, any assertion based on an experimental proof that could not be reproduced was disqualified on those very grounds, without the need to establish a hierarchy of authority based on any other criteria. From that point, the process of inquiry could continue

openly. Precociously, Molière suggests much the same way of thinking. For instance, Orgon’s family, having survived the danger of Tartuffe’s false ideas, does not depart immediately in search of the ideal religious approach hinted

at by Cléante, but defaults to an acceptable and traditional form of civility in offering thanks to the merciful king, as a first step to working out their problems. On the other hand, in Le Misanthrope, Philinte and Eliante imme-

diately act to counter Alceste’s radical departure in quest of idealism and try to reintegrate him into their society without attacking his conclusions about overall human nature or even the specific faults of Céliméne.

140

Conclusion

Conclusion

McBride was certainly correct in situating La Mothe Le Vayer, among contemporary philosophers, as perhaps the closest to Moliére’s positions in a number of ways. Chief among these is undoubtedly La Mothe’s tendency to resist systemic philosophical thinking. Reading La Mothe is so difficult and so fascinating precisely because he frames philosophy not only as a game, but as one where the rules can be altered as the play progresses. Resistance to closure

in almost any sense is one of his fundamental

characteristics, both in those

relatively few works to which he assigned his legal name and in the myriad of dialogues and other pieces published under various noms de plume or simply anonymously. Though supported with a hefty and sometimes baffling array of quotations from all quarters of Classical and modern learning, La Mothe’s works, generally quite short, are organized around particular themes or questions that are seldom abstract. If salons consisted only of super-educated doctors of philosophy, their discourse might well resemble La Mothe’s, provided that they also possessed the verbal nimbleness of the habitués of Madame de Sablé’s gatherings. Moliére could hardly be ignorant of this body of thought, assembled for publication by La Mothe’s son, the only man whom Molière honored with a poetic eulogy that pointedly addresses philosophical attitudes. One could argue endlessly about whether Moliére deserves the formal tag of Pyrrhonian, or even that of libertin érudit. But one of Moliére’s earliest examples of philosophical analysis warns us against the impracticality of such

nomenclature.

In La Jalousie du Barbouillé, when

the drunken

central

character consults a passing docteur about how he should solve the problems of his marriage, the philosopher never gets past the stumbling block of names. When Le Barbouillé compliments him as being a gallant homme, the Docteur goes into a ridiculous etymological dissection of the term. When the blockhead explains, “Je vous prends pour un docteur,” the philosopher is not satisfied until he proves he is ten times a doctor, mixing Aristotelian

sayings, bogus Pythagorean numerology, and even mythology into his justifications. Nevertheless, the philosopher's final statement, at the end of a long

thetorical demonstration en boite chinoise, is to pull up his robe and show Le Barbouillé his learned behind. It doesn’t take long for even the farcical characters of this play to learn the impracticality of such pretended systems of thought, for when the Docteur reappears in the last scene and offers to edify the neighbors by reading a sixty-page chapter of Aristotle on the theme that the parts of the universe can coexist because they are in agreement, Gorgibus and Villebrequin bid him a quick thanks and goodbye. The immediate problem of Le Barbouillé’s domestic behavior seems tangential or even impossibly remote from this kind of abstract philosophy. The nature of doubt as expressed in Moliére’s works occupies a subtle but distinct position among the philosophical figures of his time. It is extremely

141

important to distinguish it from the radical, hyperbolic doubt that underlies the work of Descartes. In discussing the relationship between Charron’s De la

sagesse and Descartes works, including the Discours de la méthode, the Médita-

tions, and the Recherche de la vérité, José Maia Neto brings up several pertinent

issues. One of the most central is that of disphonia, the skeptical principle that stresses the basic equivalency of diverse human opinions (90-92). In the

plays, this diaphonia is closely related to Moliére’s notion of individual nature and humeur, which coincides largely with ideas he admired in Lucretius, though in a less fatalistic way. The existence of a great diversity of voices puts Descartes’s cogito itself in doubt. The paradoxical inability of a human subject to make permanent contact with his own identity and to use such

self-orientation as a reliable point de départ in social thinking has been examined in several works, such as L'École des femmes, Dom Juan and Amphitryon.

In the latter two plays, the instability of the cogito in central characters brings up an even more troubling question of the reliability of reality itself. If the

self becomes a badly-defined point in a dreamscape of uncertain symbols and

values, how can any systematic philosophy function with certitude? Here, the modesty of skepticism comes to the rescue, for in accepting suspension

of judgment on the most troubling questions and putting the most practical considerations in the forefront, it allows a differential approach to existence that is well within the Lucretian conception of material and mental health which so fascinated Moliére. Brian Ribeiro has recently raised the question of whether it is psychologi-

cally possible for one to be a skeptic. There is ample evidence that this issue concerned

Moliére

to some

degree,

as well. The

character of Marphurius,

the Pyrrhonist philosopher in Le Mariage forcé, leads his listeners to total distraction by his inability to get to the point of the conversation. He is so finicky about terms that he will not allow the proposition even to be expressed without attacking it with swarms of cavillations. Can Moliére really be classified as an official proponent of Pyrrhonism, or even a fellow

traveler, when he was so obviously aware of some of its limitations? The key to this problem is to be found in the very source of Marphurius’s discourse, for he employs a verbal form of hyperbolic doubt that is actually closer to the doubt examined in Descartes’s Discours de la methode than to the works of Sextus. Marphurius would thus appear to be a false Pyrrhonist, somewhat akin to the false précieuses Cathos and Magdelon or to the false wit Trissotin or the falsely pious Tartuffe. His “method” is just as abstract and useless as arbitrary Aristotelian categories. Marphurius is not a practitioner of a Skeptic Way in the same sense that we see in Ariste in L’Ecole des maris, Béralde in Le Malade imaginaire, or even Philinte. One would have to conclude on the basis

of those characters that Moliére envisions the Skeptic Way and the peace

=

142

Conclusion

Conclusion

of mind embodied in ataraxia as both possible and desirable, though too much of this particularly powerful spice might make for a rather unpalatable comedy. Molière suggests that only by avoiding the hyperbolic doubt of a Marphurius, who functions as a kind of Cartesian straw man, can one hope to be a successful Pyrrhonist. Associated with Pyrrhonist philosophy is the religious concept of fideism, which holds that reason is not, and perhaps cannot be sufficient to constitute a basis for belief in God, and that a faith based on beliefs unsupported by reason is necessary for the Christian. Most scholars concede that the principal Skeptics of seventeenth-century France, such as Charron, Gassendi, and La Mothe Le Vayer, at least offered lip service to this concept. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of disagreement over how sincerely their professions of fideism

may be taken. J.-P. Cavaillé has recently done a masterly analysis of the early modern skeptical movement in which he argues with considerable elegance that La Mothe Le Vayer is not truly a skeptical fideist, but rather a pseudo-fideist and crypto-agnostic or perhaps crypto-deist. Fundamental to Cavaillé’s case is the trend of benevolent dissimulation that he traces at least as far back in European philosophy as Thomas Aquinas. Since the works where Moliére

most overtly mentions religion involve the notion of skeptical fideism, this question deserves some discussion in light of the body of his comedy. The presentation of skeptical ideas in Tartuffe has already been discussed at some length, so let us consider the case of Dom Juan. In the eponym

we

discover a character who professes a type of “religion of arithmetic” that recalls to some degree Descartes’s insistence on geometry as a basis for the methodology of thinking. Dom Juan comes closer than any other character

in the œuvre to expressing hyperbolic doubt. Sganarelle assumes that he believes in nothing at all, neither common dogmas nor superstition. Dom Louis, his father, and Done Elvire, one of his wives, confirm this impression

from their own self-interested viewpoints. Up to a point, Dom Juan seems to triumph in the victory of his crypto-atheistic thinking, since it manages to provide him with what he feels to be a maximum of pleasure (not only Epicurean, but trans-Epicurean in its excesses) and allows him to defeat codes of

honor and the legalities of marriage, debt, and homicide. To all indications, he might continue in this happy trend until the minute he himself engages the issue of faith and theology by provoking the statue of the murdered

commander. Once again, Moliére unveils a paradoxical truth, since no one needs religion so much as the atheist; only its existence justifies his way of

life, albeit by contradiction. Dom Juan cannot be content with suspending judgment about the supernatural. Instead, he must undertake to prove universally that it does not exist. Oddly enough, at his own instigation, something happens that he cannot explain with his mathematically-based reason.

The movement

143

of the commander’s statue renders Dom Juan’s hypothesis

null and void, as if by scientific method. Even more oddly,

Dom Juan himself

furnishes the final proof in the experiment in remarkably skeptical terms by saying, as he descends apparently into Hell, that he senses the burning of the flames around him. “Who can argue with appearances?” Sextus and La Mothe might well argue. It is not our place in this study to undertake a thorough

examination of Cavaillé’s opinions about La Mothe’s sincerity or insincerity and the sources for its motivation. However, it is difficult to conceive how Moliére, as a pseudo-fideist and crypto-agnostic of the type Cavaillé suggests, could have constructed an ending so distinct amid the tradition of Dom Juan plays and so ambiguous in its implications for methodological doubt. This is more than enough evidence to dissociate him from pseudo-fideism on the basis of any affinity with La Mothe Le Vayer.

To return to the realm of formal philosophy, some light can be shed on this matter by reconsidering the practical applications of doubt in the lives of seventeenth century skeptics and their fellow travelers. Though classified in retrospect as card-carrying libertines, La Mothe Le Vayer and his older colleagues Charron and Gassendi were all fairly closely involved in their lives with the Catholic church, being associated either personally or through their family with ecclesiastical positions and with established rites and ceremonies. In this respect, Moliére lies only a bit farther off, since his personal inclinations in religion are unknown, but his family’s piety is well-established through

several

female

relatives

who

entered

religious

orders,

and

rather

austere ones at that. Moliére’s contact with Charron would presumably have been strictly through

reading De la sagesse, although

some

have suggested

that his provincial wanderings through Gascony and Languedoc may have permitted him to encounter personally some people who had known the late grand vicar of Cahors. Gassendi’s possible influences on Moliére have probably been over-estimated, since the unlikelihood of the young dramatist having taken classes from the cleric of Digne has been demonstrated. Furthermore, Gassendi’s most controversial works were published posthumously

in rather turgid Latin, which Moliére certainly could have read in some cases, but which would have been a far cry from his beloved Lucretius. It was not until 1669 that Gassendi’s most noted proponent and Moliére’s friend François Bernier returned from India and not until 1674, the year after the dramatist’s death, that Bernier published his popular abbreviation of Gassendi’s works. In a general way, Gassendi’s commitment to skeptical fideism is just as strong or stronger than Charron’s and would certainly not have pushed

Moliére away from a fideist stance. Lest one think that a fideist standpoint would be incompatible with Moliére’s

Lucretian

tendencies,

one

need

only

consult

for

purposes

of

uy

144

Conclusion

comparison Pascal's liasse on “Contrariétés,” which contains the Jansenist’s position on paradox. It allows one to appreciate that a great deal of what

la il um

_

is normally considered Epicurean thought was grist for the mill of even the strictest religious convictions. In item number 99, for instance, Pascal accepts, in contradistinction to Descartes, a very Lucretian notion of the organic association of the intellect with the body: “First, I maintain that the mind, which we often call the intellect, the seat of the guidance and control of life, is part of a man, no less than hand or foot or eyes are parts of a living

creature.” Pascal goes on to specify in fragment 110 that the corresponding aspects of this united being are subject to parallel sorts of disturbances: “Fur-

thermore, as the body suffers the horrors of disease and the pangs of pain, so we see the mind stabbed with anguish, grief and fear.” Finally, Pascal concedes in number 119 his own version of the Great Chain of Being: “There is a determined and allotted place for the growth and presence of everything.” The question of death allows deeper insight into the care with which Molière adapted elements of Skepticism, Epicureanism, and even Stoicism, to craft his own synthesis. In Montaigne’s popular works, also associated with a part of the country he came to know intimately in his travels, Moliére prob-

ably found the most eloquent and best-known statement of the Stoical prin-

ciple of the necessity always to be prepared for death, “Vivre, c’est apprendre

à mourir.” Of course, Epicureans short-circuit the Stoic representation of the problem by stressing that death is a natural, inevitable process that should not elicit much undue anxiety. Lucretius’s approach is essentiallly to say that since we don’t exist after death, what’s the worry? Death is no longer our

problem as individual consciences. In this sense, he approaches an almost Buddhist variation on ataraxia, since he implies death relieves us of what Buddhists would consider karmatic suffering. Lucretius might conclude, if there is nothing to fear, what is there to prepare? Moliére might be expected to voice exactly this same thought if he were merely a slavish follower of

Lucretius and the Epicureans, but here skeptic thought offered him a caveat forged in a most surprising way. The dramatist anticipates a weakness in the Lucretian argument, for Epicureans are playing both ends of the issue of sensual pleasure since they stress the pleasure to be derived from proper living but do not seem to miss that pleasure in death, only stressing the lack of negative implications that death has. Dom Juan might be the character most likely to voice this argument. Of all Moliére’s figures, Dom Juan is the

one who apparently fears death the least, and the dramatist reserves an exemplary fate for him; he is the only one of his characters to suffer death on stage and perhaps, by the implication of the roué himself, even worse. Dom

Juan’s insensitivity to the Heavens is based on a counter-worldliness just as

bad as the otherworldliness he openly deplores. Moliére alluded in his Placets

Conclusion

145

au roi sur Tartuffe to the doctrine of castigat ridendo mores

(setting morals

right through ridicule). In contrast, Dom Juan’s motto would be closer to

negat mores ridendo (contradicting morals through laughter). Death represents

something that cannot be contradicted (except by Christian theology, which Moliére is content not to discuss on stage). It can be approached successfully, as he shows in Le Malade imaginaire, through the suspension of opinion, which is effective if not in stopping death, at least in removing the subject’s fear of it, even if the Skeptical epoché must be inoculated into Argan’s stubborn character through the phantastike of medical control. Having examined this instance of Moliére’s synthesis of skeptical tropes with elements of the nearest “schools” of Classical philosophy, it is perhaps appropriate

to return

to the issue of comic

character

and

some

insights

offered in Le Misanthrope. What are we to make of the fact that Lucretius’s approach to the phenomenon of “lover's distortion” as described in De rerum

natura is so different from the dramatist’s? Lucretius cites lover’s distortion to show the morbid effects of infatuation. His examples show how an overly optimistic imagination diverts the male from more wholesome pursuits and

considerations (philosophical, or at least economic, one assumes) by making him the slave of unworthy women. The lover exaggerates the physical characteristics of the object of his desire out of all proportion and deceives

himself thoroughly, even without the influence of feminine wiles. Moliére, through his character Eliante, cites lover's distortion as a rather benign effect that allows flawed humanity to make the most of a disagreeable paucity of real perfection in the world, turning defects into sources of pleasure. Is she

implicitly criticizing or praising Alceste’s individual love for Céliméne or rather attacking the validity of sincerity itself, which condemns all forms of distortion, benign or malignant? Here, Moliére seems to invite the reader/ spectator to apply the Agrippan trope of equivalency of views. The fact that one individual sees a dwarf where another sees a tiny summary of nature’s beauty does not ultimately privilege either view as truth, but leads to suspension of judgment: à chacun son gout. It is significant that, as Eliante points out, Alceste’s bad choice owes itself not to active lies or distortion on the part

of Céliméne, but more to a kind of reverie propagated in his own imagination. Thus, the skeptical approach to appearances holds firm, even when appearances seem logically and in the specific instance to be so deceiving. The necessity for the philosophical mind to confront this double nature

of appearance as both a physical and an imaginative phenomenon, rather than trying to radically separate and mutilate it in the dualistic Cartesian

system, also explains the curious role of superstition and man’s seemingly innate susceptibility to it. To a Cartesian, Dom Juan may seem totally illogical, since Moliére both causes the audience to laugh at Sganarelle’s superstition

146

Conclusion

Conclusion

and, ultimately, at Dom Juan's lack of it. Both characters together resolve this contradiction by transcending it. Dom Juan’s grasp of appearances is equally

way that preceded Brecht or Artaud by centuries. That he should succeed in directing this confrontation with the audience toward rather sophisticated

as bad

as Sganarelle’s

(perhaps

even

worse),

which

means

that

both

are

equally correct and equally incorrect. Therefore, the supernatural function must remain out of contact with human comprehension except through the default of fideism. This realization causes one to rethink the all-too-standard explanation of the raisonneur in Moliére’s theatre. Can it be possible that the Chrysaldes, Cléantes, and Philintes owe their relative sanity not to the heroic triumph of right reason over temperament but rather to the accident that they were simply born with a more phlegmatic temperament than the maniacs and thus were not blinded to the processes of the epoche? Perhaps, but we must also consider the insight of plays such as L’Ecole des maris, where the two brothers respond to the problem of living with a younger woman in very different ways. The opinions of Ariste and Sganarelle appear through the trope

of equivalency to be equally good or bad. However, the distinction between the brothers is not simply one of opinion, like the one in Pygmalion between the Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, but one that involves the will. So-

ros's manipulative function is hard at work in Sganarelle’s scheme of control and the element of intent is stressed in his “aberrant” solution of female containment to assure masculine pleasure. The analysis goes further in L'École des femmes, where Chrysalde repeatedly inquires why Arnolphe has gone to such lengths of manipulative theorizing to avoid the normal approach to marriage. Ultimately, Moliére suggests, the willful, projected, imagined appearance will generally confound the ordinary, external appearance provided that the function of the will is strong enough. Ultimately, one returns to a variation of the paradox of the actor which

opened

this study.

How

can

one

seriously embrace,

yea

advocate,

a phi-

losophy of skepticism while living by the production and diffusion of appearances intended to please, but also to seduce and perhaps in some way to change, a public audience? It has been demonstrated that Moliére was

more than a mere vulgarizer of ideas, a second-hand disseminator of the thought of La Mothe Le Vayer, Gassendi, or any other formal philosopher

of his times. His treatment of paradox embodies a suppleness and ability to adapt and synthesize diverse currents of contemporary thinking. Yet his theater is also more than merely a vehicle for his own refined cogitations in the way Voltaire’s or Diderot’s plays functioned as pièces à thèses. He comes much closer than Charron, La Mothe, Gassendi or even Montaigne to being

a skeptic for the masses, and it is paradox precisely which allows him to

achieve this by suggestion rather than by didactic lessons. Precociously, he

sensed the innate confrontational and provocative nature of theater in a

147

thought rather than toward a more visceral reaction should not be surprising.

Pascal’s Pensées once again stand as a proof that no one should underestimate the optimism of seventeenth century writers in appealing to the mental powers of the public. More so than Pascal, who aimed at the hypothetical honnéte homme of his age, Moliére also appeals to the women in the audience, across the barriers of gender, status, and religious profession. He appreciated that Descartes had stolen the initiative by publishing philosophy in the vernacular and that already many

“false” ideas, Cartesian or pseudo-Cartesian,

were infiltrating into salons where people like the ladies in Les Femmes savantes hallucinated about vortices or about belfries on the moon. Without deriding La Mothe’s erudite and abstruse message to an elite of cognoscenti,

Moliére invited his contemporaries to inquire into the relevance of existing philosophical authorities and, if necessary, to chase them away by clanging

bells in their ears. Paradox for him meant not confounding good sense and making it kneel in reverence to elitist revelation, even to one with the label

of Pyrrhonism or skepticism, but inciting the individual consciousness to stand up on his or her own two feet and account for itself in a world that to this day remains confused by contradictory appearances.

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