<?page no="0"?> BIBLIO 17 James F. Gaines Molière and Paradox Skepticism and Theater in the Early Modern Age <?page no="1"?> Molière and Paradox <?page no="2"?> BIBLIO 17 Volume 189 · 2010 Suppléments aux Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature Collection fondée par Wolfgang Leiner Directeur: Rainer Zaiser <?page no="3"?> James F. Gaines Molière and Paradox Skepticism and Theater in the Early Modern Age <?page no="4"?> © 2010 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG P. O. Box 2567 · D-72015 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Gedruckt auf säurefreiem und alterungsbeständigem Werkdruckpapier. Internet: http: / / www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de Satz: Informationsdesign D. Fratzke, Kirchentellinsfurt Druck und Bindung: iforuck, Bamberg Printed in Germany ISSN 1434-6397 ISBN 978-3-8233-6577-8 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 holding a Skull (Vanitas), 1626-8. Oil on canvas, 92.2 × 80.8 cm. Bought, 1980 (NG6458). © National Gallery, London/ Art Resource, NY D D <?page no="5"?> Acknowledgements Portions of this study in different formats have appeared previously in journals under the following titles: “Sagesse avec Sobriété: Skepticism, Belief, and the Limits of Knowledge in Molière,” in Le Savoir au XVII e Siècle; Actes du 34 e 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 rêverie,” in Ordre et contestation aux temps des classiques (Marseille: CMR17, 1992) 99-108. <?page no="7"?> Table of Contents C HAPTER O NE An Actor and His Paradoxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 C HAPTER T WO Schools of and for Philosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 C HAPTER T HREE L’École des femmes: The Awakening of Feeling and the Paradox of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 C HAPTER F OUR Dom Juan: A Fragile Divide Between Reverie and Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 C HAPTER F IVE Caractères, Superstition, and Idées reçues: Communicative Paradoxes in Le Misanthrope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 C HAPTER S IX Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 C HAPTER S EVEN Stage Ways and Skeptic Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 C HAPTER E IGHT Le Malade imaginaire and the Paradox of Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 <?page no="9"?> 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 Molière’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. Molière, 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 collèges (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 Molière 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 <?page no="10"?> Chapter One 10 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 Molière 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 Molière’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. Molière’s posthumous biographer Grimarest, who published a rather unreliable life of the dramatist in 1709, launched an improbable, but long-standing anecdote by relating that young Poquelin had studied with Gassendi, the prominent skeptical philosopher from Digne, in Southern France. Despite the solid debunking of this myth by Robert McBride in his ground-breaking study, The Sceptical Vision of Molière, where he cites the support 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 Collège 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 unlikelihood that Molière may have sat in on tutoring sessions allegedly given by Gassendi 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 Théâtre company. This group of thespian upstarts had tried unsuccessfully to set itself up in direct 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- <?page no="11"?> 11 An Actor and His Paradoxes 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, I 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 Academic 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, Molière 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? ’ was 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 <?page no="12"?> Chapter One 12 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, Molière 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 Molière through the family of François de La Mothe Le Vayer. La Mothe’s son was probably a classmate of Molière’s before taking orders and becoming an abbé. When young La Mothe died at an early age, Molière addressed some of his most interesting lyrics to the grieving father. Paying philosophical homage to his late friend’s family, Molière 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 Molière 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, Molière 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 had been a major intellectual event and copies were readily available in the 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 discovered 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 <?page no="13"?> 13 An Actor and His Paradoxes 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 Molière’s death, in 1674, did the Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi, edited by François 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 Molière 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, <?page no="14"?> Chapter One 14 he almost invariably assumes 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 constituted a school or movement at all, but instead pursued a lifestyle, a particularly 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 suspension 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 <?page no="15"?> 15 An Actor and His Paradoxes 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 Molière’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 describe all five more amply, just as Sextus does in his presentation, citing such <?page no="16"?> Chapter One 16 poets as Homer, Pindar, and Euripides. Suffice it to say for now that paradox plays a central role in all five Agrippan modes. Before Molière 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, Molière, 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 Molière. 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, Molière, 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. Molière’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 <?page no="17"?> 17 An Actor and His Paradoxes more prominently than in Calderon’s La Vida es Sueno, Life is a Dream. Can 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 Molière’s touring company during the 1640’s and 1650’s. 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 Molière’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. Molière’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, demanded 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 men in the audience came only to admire the charms of the chief actresses. The harangueur’s humor acted as a captatio benevolentiae, securing the good will of the assembly. His tactful scolding had to cow the rowdier elements 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 <?page no="18"?> Chapter One 18 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 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 Molière, 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 Molière 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. Molière 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 Molière got on well from the beginning, Paris boasted two other French troupes - the formerly glorious and now faltering Théâtre <?page no="19"?> 19 An Actor and His Paradoxes 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, Molière 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 Fâcheux. It was when he began to launch his most ambitious and controversial works, beginning with L’École des femmes, that Molière 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 Molière’s day, a secret society called the 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 Molière from one side and the other for years in pamphlets, books, diocesan decrees, and court actions. Molière 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 together. 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 Molière’s prefaces and in L’Impromptu de Versailles. When working directly with the court, Molière’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, Molière never stooped to the status of a mere hack or mouthpiece. His very vocation <?page no="20"?> Chapter One 20 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 Molière’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 Molière’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 hegemony and even violence that, as such critics as Larry Riggs have shown, was a central part of Louis XIV’s policies. But Molière 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 ladies 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. Molière was the first comic writer to exploit with consistency this property that Jonathan Swift would later describe in The Battle of the Books: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” Molière’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, Sextus Empiricus cogently shows <?page no="21"?> 21 An Actor and His Paradoxes on a philosophical level how such a procedure can avoid any kind of dogmatic opinion or interpretation: … 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 criterion it is necessary first to have decided the dispute about the criterion. Thus, with the reasoning falling into the circularity mode, finding a criterion becomes aporetic; for we do not allow them to adopt a criterion hypothetically and if they wish to decide about the criterion by means of a criterion we force them into an infinite regress. Further, since proof requires a criterion that has been proved, while the criterion has need of what has been determined to be a proof, they land in circularity. (The Skeptic Way, pp. 128-129) Let us assume, for example, that Molière 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. A truly opinionated anti-précieux would do so anyway. A 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, <?page no="22"?> Chapter One 22 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 forward 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, Molière’s strategy, which began forming by 1659, was being promulgated before the literary and theatrical public. <?page no="23"?> Chapter Two Schools of and for Philosophy While it is true that skepticism in and of itself is not an overt theme of Molière’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, Molière 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 distortion. 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 Molière’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 <?page no="24"?> Chapter Two 24 textbook of Mlle de Scudéry’s Le Grand Cyrus. Like Dom Juan and other figures in Molière’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 (Polyxène 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 ton père a la forme enfoncée dans la matière! ” (sc. 5). The use of “form” 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 <?page no="25"?> 25 Schools of and for Philosophy 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” (I 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 <?page no="26"?> Chapter Two 26 on his work, a pirated copy had appeared in the bookstores, forcing the author 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 himself 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 Molière” 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, Molière 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’être bernés” (evil apes who deserve to be satirized) are punished by shame when the true figures show themselves. Subsequent to Les Précieuses ridicules, Molière 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 condition and family responsibilities, Sganarelle persists through a series of plays, beginning in 1660 with the one that bears his name, 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 secondary characteristic to uphold him. <?page no="27"?> 27 Schools of and for Philosophy 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 a 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, including 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 errors 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 <?page no="28"?> Chapter Two 28 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 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 conviction 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 à mon cœur 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 misinterpreted letter and a misunderstood visit from a man, Dom Garcie 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 skeptically 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 <?page no="29"?> 29 Schools of and for Philosophy tenderness; 3) tenderness involves sexual desire and its fulfillment; 4) Elvire 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. Molière’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, Molière 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 proof 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, as Sganarelle tells Ariste, “Mon frère, s’il vous plaît, 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 systems 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, <?page no="30"?> Chapter Two 30 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 cantakerous 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 go a 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 concept of right reason, declaring, “Mon Dieu, chacun raisonne et fait comme il lui plaît.” 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-vous! ” 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 cœur vous parle net aussi? ” Sganarelle has proposed a <?page no="31"?> 31 Schools of and for Philosophy 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, après tout, que ces précautions Servent de quelque obstacle à 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 cœur 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 monde, 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 systems of philosophy. The “maximes sévères” described by his brother, a mixture of dogmatism and Stoicism, are thus personally, though not arbitrarily <?page no="32"?> Chapter Two 32 rejected by Ariste, lest the children constrained begin to count the days of 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’ouïr 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 même/ N’en viendrait pas à 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 plaît.” This is not the last time Molière will use the slogans 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 Valère 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, Molière 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. Valère can barely believe his ears. The canny Ergaste immediately judges appearances correctly and <?page no="33"?> 33 Schools of and for Philosophy knows a mystification has taken place. On the other hand, Sganarelle is so 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 selfhumiliation in delivering Isabelle’s love letter to Valère. She prevents him from opening it by appealing to his commitment to silence and obscurity, for he wishes to deny Valère 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 cœur 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 conquer, Valère and Ergaste express their admiration for the development of Isabelle’s 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, tâchez de faire en sorte/ Que de votre cerveau cette passion sorte.” Sganarelle feels the criterion of sense denial can work for anyone. When Sganarelle delivers the reassuring message of Valère’s love to Isabelle, she confirms in an a parte that she has correctly judged the ap- <?page no="34"?> Chapter Two 34 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 Valère’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 inherent 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. Molière 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 <?page no="35"?> 35 Schools of and for Philosophy an unfaithful woman must cover herself up) to complete the process of liberation. Sganarelle could have dismantled the whole plot by lifting the mantel from the girl, but by doing so he would negate the whole process of reason and inference he has built up during the course of the play. To be proven right, he must prove himself 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, Molière would move on to his extraordinary string of five-act comedies: L’École 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’École <?page no="36"?> Chapter Two 36 des femmes to Philaminte’s feminine coterie in Les Femmes savantes, is rudely lambasted for his presumptuousness. Given Molière’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 plaît, 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 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 se pourrait, la chose est faisable; il n’y a pas d’impossibilité; je ne sais, ce qui 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 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 <?page no="37"?> 37 Schools of and for Philosophy 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 Molière, 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 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 Molière 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, Molière 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. Molière 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. But Molière’s skepticism had another, more formal grounding than le bon sens bourgeois, for its epistemological deferral was joined to a powerful ethical tendency toward Epicurean thought. This fusion is suggested to some extent by Sextus Empiricus himself, for he lists as one of four ground rules for the 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 Éliante’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. <?page no="39"?> 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 Molière’s leading man Lagrange lists several other lost farces Molière 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 Benêt de Fils Aussi Sot que Son Père may have also contributed 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’École 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 Molière’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 <?page no="40"?> Chapter Three 40 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 catalogue. What is new in this play is that the spectator gets a glimpse of what does manage to succeed: the nascent emotional consciousness that must always prevail over imposed schemes and plots. Arnolphe, the protagonist, is full of feeling, so full he could practically pop. Despite his facade of prudishness, he eventually declares to Agnès, the object of his passion, “I’ll 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 with his sequestered ward, he murmurs in an angry aside, “Oh, I could just burst! ” Actually he alternately rages and bursts with emotion again and again. The stupidity of the servants Alain and Georgette reduces him almost 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.” <?page no="41"?> 41 L’École des femmes Nevertheless, despite the display of so much raw emotion, the word “feelings” can only be applied to Arnolphe with the greatest difficulty. Not only is this ultra-jealous martinet incapable of eliciting the abject faith and adoration 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. Agnès 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 Molière’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 learn 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 hand with knowledge of the important Ones in one’s vicinity. On another level, Arnolphe is the first of Molière’s monomaniacs to attempt to set up what the skeptics would term an unacceptable set of 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. Her counter-education in submissive obscurity was designed as a self-fulfilling prophecy: because “Agnès will oblige and obey Arnolphe,” therefore “Arnolphe desires Agnès.” Sextus, Charron, or Gassendi would point out that this reasoning is false, since a proposition cannot serve as its own premise. 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 Arnolphe’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 years … contemplating from the standpoint of wise philosophy that sad destiny that <?page no="42"?> Chapter Three 42 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 rationalism and in his powers of omniscience and prediction, he is convinced he is in the position 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 the minds of the young lovers. Asked to explain her unpredictable feelings, Agnès cries, “How can I help myself? ” unable to find a reasonable motive for her inclinations. As for Horace, his first descriptions of “this young star of love” emphasize the involuntary nature of his passion. He finds Agnès 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 Agnès’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, Agnès’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 Agnès 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 Agnès 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- <?page no="43"?> 43 L’École des femmes 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 intends to apply his laws very scientifically and despotically to his own marital happiness. According to these cynical principles, a young man as handsome as Horace is “made to make cuckolds” and a girl as winsome as Agnès 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 consciousness which enables infallible predictions (Horace will seduce women) and efficient precautions (Agnès will never be seduced if she is kept in stupidity and isolation). What strikes one most about all of Arnolphe’s ideas is that they are 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 everything in 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 pain, dominance and submission, Arnolphe thinks he can protect himself against any negative outcome by following his own rules. Little does it matter to him 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 weakens and kills the imagination. That is nothing in comparison with what he sees himself gaining, namely, a strategy of irresistible victory. He will always have a plan, where his opponents have none. Perhaps he is right, perched on his materialistic Gibraltar, to call himself a righteous philosopher, against whom the young and the restless have no logical chance of triumph. But why then does this man both superior and primitive, like the conscienceless hunters described in Rousseau’s “Second Discourse” and in The Social Contract, find it so difficult to describe and to express his 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 give 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 she threw at her admirer. And why, after all, does he try to shut up this anger, why does <?page no="44"?> Chapter Three 44 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 Agnès’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 hesitations 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). <?page no="45"?> 45 L’École des femmes In French, the pronominal verb s’aimer is usually expressed in a reciprocal rather than a reflexive sense, “loving each other” rather than “loving 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 so many other Molière monomaniacs because he wants to “play the game while insuring himself against any chance of loss”. One notices for example the link 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 conditions that they aspire to, namely those of gentleman and irreproachable husband. Yet they fail to grasp that no abstract knowledge is useful without the articulating qualities, which can here be called grace for want of another word, that permit it to be applied in the real world. In a similar manner, Dom Juan 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 Célimène’s guests try to criticize everyone else without having to endure criticism themselves. The sexual, financial, and aesthetic abstractions of Molière’s other plays resound with this same off-key note, which the Music Master of le Bourgeois gentilhomme would probably call a lack of harmonic sense. This monstrous and paradoxical solipsism encountered in Molière’s monomaniacs surpasses even the limits of the traditional “dramaturgy of oxymoron,” as Max Vernet calls it. Obviously, the bourgeois gentleman, the amorous grouch, and the high-born courtier with gutter behavior take their place in the seventeenth century with such familiar figures as the living dead, seducers of their own wives, tricksters tricked, and other such creatures who frequented the stage during that period. But beyond the superficial resemblance, which is so often backed by the rhetorical device of antonomasia, what goes on to typify Molière’s characters is that they are not only aware of the paradoxical situations in which they find themselves, but that they try to appropriate for themselves the wisdom and power associated with paradox itself. For example, Arnolphe has always appreciated the irony of his fellow burghers who amass wealth only to have their wives spend it on their frivolous lovers, a case he describes among other domestic foibles in his conversation with Chrysalde at the opening of Act One. Strengthened, he thinks, by his studies, his notes, and his logic, he designs his idealized marital relationship with Agnès specifically in terms of a paradox: “Epouser une sotte est pour n’être point sot” (82). “One weds a fool to avoid becoming foolish” does not <?page no="46"?> Chapter Three 46 quite pick up all the nuances of the French, for sot means not only a fool, but a victim, and for Arnolphe the ultimate victim is the cuckold. In this sense, he tries to transform the paradoxical entanglement with foolishness into a strictly transitive and agressive action, “one 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 always 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 Agnès, 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 Agnès 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 <?page no="47"?> 47 L’École des femmes inanimate, erotic sculpture). But another of Molière’s characters, Dom Juan, 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. This 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 at 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 Agnès’ 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 husband 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 completely 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 Agnès’s presence can be taken in a purely figurative 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). <?page no="48"?> Chapter Three 48 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 necessitate “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 Molière’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 grâce 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! <?page no="49"?> 49 L’École des femmes 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 testimony 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 Molière’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 pretending 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’École des femmes is a grand portrait where Molière permits himself his first great explorations in the deeper kind of dramatic paradox, showing that the awakening of feelings revolves not around the <?page no="50"?> Chapter Three 50 éblouissement of one’s own emotions, but rather around one’s sensitivity 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 Agnès 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 scène de reconnaissance that follows or the constipated “Ouf! ” that he utters in frustration as Agnès 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 enterprise 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 spectacular 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 Molière 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 repugnance, it is because, as Vernet suggests, “contradiction is simply the only means that we moderns have of construing difference (109).” <?page no="51"?> Chapter Four Dom Juan: A Fragile Divide Between Reverie and Reality It is astonishing to find that Molière’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, Molière’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 Molière canon on existing dramatic tradition. Don Juan’s legend began in late Golden Age Spain with Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador 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 Molière 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 program 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- <?page no="52"?> Chapter Four 52 tion when the troupe was deprived of a sure box office hit. In an article in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, I presented considerable evidence to refute this view, based on an examination of Molière’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 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 Molière’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. Molière’s Dom Juan owes much to a source usually considered non-dramatic, Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. Like his cultural predecessor, Molière’s Dom Juan confuses real life and dream world, conventional existence 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 Molière’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 Miss Toboso, but they are even further in some respects from the world of the court nobility than a prostitute would be. Dom Juan’s erotic dreams can only settle fleetingly on any one object of desire and they become more and 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 in philosophical discourse and to lead him back to the safe path of morality. <?page no="53"?> 53 Dom Juan For the clearest understanding of the most unusual scenes in this bizarre 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 Molière’s own Palais-Royal company. 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 Pança is even more important to Dom Juan. Not only does the servant character Sancho, played by Molière 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, Molière 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 Molière 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 de la Barca, but in the moralistic writings of Francisco de Quevedo. Calderon’s classic, La Vida es sueno, is completely dissimilar to Molière’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 Molière’s protagonist when he tosses a courtier from the balcony on a whim. His callous words to his father regarding the necessity for the old to make way for youth prefigure Dom Juan’s parting remarks to Dom Louis in the admonition scene of Act Four. For his part, Basilio resembles Dom Louis in his overweaning concern for royal codes <?page no="54"?> Chapter Four 54 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 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 additional shared qualities in Calderon’s characters of the spurned wife Rosaura and her unknown father Clotaldo. Like Elvire in Molière’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, just as Elvire tries to forestall Dom Juan’s philandering campaigns. 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 Molière’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 Clarín. 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. Clarín’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 immediately 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. Molière 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 <?page no="55"?> 55 Dom Juan of the Latin philosopher: “Having read, either to soothe my feelings or to alleviate my melancholy, those verses that Lucretius wrote in such spirited 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 comùn opiniòn 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). Molière 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 Molière. 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 Molière’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 <?page no="56"?> Chapter Four 56 reality. But even if Dom Juan succeeds in both types of deception Descartes defines in the Fourth Meditation, commissive and omissive, he is ultimately unable to transcend his own contradictions, leaving in his wake a multitude of humans (family, servant, creditors, wives, partners used and 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 Baïf 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 Molière 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 façade 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 paintings 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 controversial substance in Molière’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 <?page no="57"?> 57 Dom Juan 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. Molière 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 entire apparatus of mercantilist economics, colonial capitalism, and the absolute monarchical states promoting and increasingly dependent on them. Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Havana were poles of the tobacco trade that fueled the English, Dutch, and Spanish colonial enterprises. While Louis XIV’s France lacked, for the time being, a major North American source of tobacco, the need for its commercial control as a state monopoly (that still exists today) was abundantly clear. By the end of the Sun King’s reign, the Louisiana and Saint-Domingue ventures would expand the empire that commenced in Canada. Within the mercantile system (or the modern corporate system, for that matter), tobacco is in many respects an ideal consumer product, since it is addictive and therefore ensures a stable, but manipulable demand market, just like cocaine, heroin, or any other such substance. Sganarelle’s speeches suggest an even more insidious role for this stupéfiant, for tobacco creates a world of false appearances. Its distribution produces the appearances of civility, while paradoxically causing its users to sneeze and spatter all over their interlocutors, an opportunity which the gesturally-minded Molière no doubt exploited on stage. Furthermore, Sganarelle explicitly mentions that it produces a special feeling. The nicotine high he refers to is at once a sense perception, always suspect to skeptical minds, and a false appearance. In fact, Sganarelle’s use of tobacco suggests a system of false appearances parallel to the reveries that beset his master. Man and servant thus represent opposite poles or extremes on a scale of mental awareness where the middle is occupied by a skeptical epoche that avoids misled opinions. Sganarelle is just as full of opinons as Dom Juan, even if they differ in particulars. More paradoxically, we find in this first scene that the very character who will attempt to set himself up as a spokesman for rational free will later in the play is nothing but a tobacco junkie, as hooked on his appetites as Dom Juan. In his context, the play opens under the aegis of the first Agrippan mode, that of contrasting opinions that, in and of themselves, cannot lay claim to any criterion of truth. In the “tobacco scene,” Molière harks back to the very ancient model of the rhetorical paradox. Rosalie Colie credits the Greek Gorgias, in his homage to Helen of Troy, with establishing the basis of this tradition that combines erudition and burlesque. His praise for a beauty who brought disaster in <?page no="58"?> Chapter Four 58 her wake was followed by a series of Classical works immortalizing the advantages of baldness, flies, nuts, and mosquitoes. Lucien and Ovid, among the ancients, made contributions to this tradition. Later, so did Renaissance humanists, such as Ulrich von Hutten and Erasmus, whose Encomion moriae gained fame throughout Europe. Sir John Harrington’s encomium to a toilet became extremely famous, as did John Donne’s “The Flea.” George Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie, used the term “wondrer” to refer to this type of dream-generating discourse. Sganarelle adopts the formal organization 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 Molière plays, including Alceste’s flight in Le Misanthrope, 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 à ce que mon âme 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 confiance avec franchise… mais s’il fallait qu’il en vînt quelque chose à ses oreilles, je dirais hautement que tu aurais menti” (I’ve confided this to you freely… but if by chance he should come to hear of it, I will declare loudly that you have lied). This statement could 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 Epimenides 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 Aristotelian in contrast to the supposedly skeptical Dom Juan, the master-servant 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 Célimène, 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 <?page no="59"?> 59 Dom Juan 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 man who had been agonizing for six days. When Dom Juan casually mentions that it must have cured him, Sganarelle contradicts him and admits, “He died.” The reasonable would-be physician thus comes to identify with one of Molière’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 ataraxia, or 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. Molière’s Dom Juan, unlike his brutish precursors, lives in a world of elegant infinite regression that recalls the third Agrippan mode evoked 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 beneficial. This passive “right” to become a target for the amorous inseminations of the rake corresponds to the “false honor of fidelity” that all men must avoid at any price. There is a simple strategy to this linguistic and ideological chaos: to create the maximum possible disorder between the sexes and take advantage of it. Like Alexander, who conquered the world but took little 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 <?page no="60"?> Chapter Four 60 well to remember that his unhinged ego involves the corporal as well as the 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 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 only evasion expressions that resemble what Sextus calls the pronouncements 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 hints at a total materialism, 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 ultimately irreconcilable with material reality itself. The ambiguity of both central characters only reinforces the inherent limitations 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 extremes, the formula “two and two make four,” instead of a libertine manifesto on the part of Molière, recalls Dostoevski’s Underground Man, who 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 principle, however tacitly, that human actions are subject to a dominant exterior force, perhaps providential, in other words, a god! The atheist seems 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. <?page no="61"?> 61 Dom Juan Curiously, as Molière begins to examine this walking paradox, he drains the entire first act of dramatic imbroglio. Where his predecessors had dwelt on the aristocrat’s pursuit of a maiden into a convent, her abduction, and the murder of her father, Molière places a series of discussions that includes 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 order to take advantage of a lady he desires. Sganarelle claims that Dom Juan is “a husband 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 of laying out a theory of seduction from his own mouth, Dom Juan remains 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 demise. This has the result of driving a wedge between verbal promises and the commitments supposed to accompany them. As in Tartuffe, deception here has two requisites: the person willing to manipulate and the person willing to be manipulated. Elvire is not entirely an innocent victim, since she has chosen to attach belief to the appearances offered by Dom Juan, rather than skeptically suspending judgment on his proffers. She explicitly admits, “J’ai été assez bonne, je le confesse, ou plutôt assez sotte pour me vouloir tromper moi-même et travailler à démentir mes yeux et mon jugement” (I was so good, I admit, or rather so foolish as to want to trick myself and to disagree with my eyes and my good judgment). Allowing an ethical imperative (goodness) to replace epistemological ones, Elvire had willfully (vouloir) and actively (travailler) contradicted her own instinctive doubts about Dom Juan and even those appearances (mes yeux) that argued against accepting him. In vain does Elvire try to find an explanation for her husbands actions by reciting a list of increasingly lame excuses he could use if he cared; he refuses her any cause for her fate other than her own credulity. The infinite regression of Dom Juan’s love proves his words untrue, but only because an infinite progression of ladies is willing to take him at his word. It is true that he has a sadistic streak and particularly enjoys the spectacle of his wife displaying “the wrath of a wronged lady.” But Dom Juan’s one attempt at rape in the play, the maritime abduction of a lady already married, comes to nought because of a storm, showing pure violence to be ridiculously ineffective. Aristocrats are not the only ones in this play to be afflicted by the paradoxes of feeling. In the second act, after Dom Juan and Sganarelle wash up like jetsam on a beach in the provinces, Molière shows glimpses of a peasant <?page no="62"?> Chapter Four 62 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 preoccupied 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 represented 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 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. Molière finds an ingenious way to stage this in the second act, where two unconsummated 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 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 <?page no="63"?> 63 Dom Juan same woman 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 character: Dom Juan’s enslavement to the senses has been seen as providing a comic 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, Epicureanism may look like an ideal rubric for him. Indeed, Sganarelle refers to him as “un pourceau d’Épicure” (an Epicurean hog) in the first act. However, the Epicurean blade cut two ways, also stipulating the avoidance of pain. In contrast, Dom Juan relishes pain, at least as it is inflicted on others, as he shows by his repeated 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 thought 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 Dom Juan. The infinite regression of his desire suggests that he is really not even able to identify pleasure as fulfillment, but only as a partial and ephemeral step in an unending quest, his equivalent of what a later, musical Quixote calls, “the impossible dream, the unreachable star.” Though Dom Juan voluntarily takes on certain outward semblances of skepticism and epicureanism, he is as far from them as Tartuffe is from orthodox piety. As long as Dom Juan is engaged in this infinite regression of warped epicureanism, he will refuse to admit any self-contradiction. So it is Sganarelle the Aristotelian who is portrayed in constant conflict with himself. His try at converting his master in Act Three, scene 1 through a wild meditation in sequential proofs turns into a mixed-up galimatias, and the gestures accompanying the rhetoric become so dizzy that the lecturer falls on his nose. Such sequential proofs, on a more serious level, were the stock and trade of traditional Scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy. Mc Bride notes that La Mothe <?page no="64"?> Chapter Four 64 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 <?page no="65"?> 65 Dom Juan 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. 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 ultimate demonstration of the inevitability of blasphemy. Far from inviting punishment, it will bestow on the sinner all the advantages of a louis d’or, the 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 world, 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 so 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 Molière’s day. The concept of sheer space devoid of matter was <?page no="66"?> Chapter Four 66 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 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 immanence 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 a man 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 Carlos, who has so far acted strictly in concern for his sister’s, hence his family’s, wounded honor. Yet the same system of values that causes him to put his own life at risk for the sake of the collective in search of reconciliation or satisfaction deprives him of the 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 <?page no="67"?> 67 Dom Juan 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 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 makes all the issues explicit. Prevented by Carlos from attacking Dom Juan, Alonse gives eloquent reasons for an immediate battle: 1) services rendered 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. <?page no="68"?> 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, une pente naturelle). The intervention of spiritual values, in the form of the Commander’s statue, a virtual totem of the continuing creation of miracles that Christian Pyrrhonists linked to their fideism, again sends Dom Juan and 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 symbolically 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 paradoxical: 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 <?page no="69"?> 69 Dom Juan contemporaries of Molière as the Coadjutor, later Cardinal, de Retz, who resolved to lead a charitable and superficially correct life, while privately indulging his sexual desires. Even for a churchman, rendering unto Caesar was not always as facile as it seemed. We shall see in the section on Tartuffe that Molière had already begun to elaborate other aspects of this problem in the theme of casuistry. The Commander’s statue merely nods its head in acceptance of Dom Juan’s invitation to dinner. Such a physical sign should be sufficient for one so imbued with materialism. The proof is so strong for Sganarelle that not for one hundred livres would he touch it. At first, Dom Juan’s response is also to flee from its presence. But by the beginning of the next act, he has found an apt excuse in the form of optical illusion or disturbed vision, exactly the type of sense-deception evoked by Descartes in the Discours de la méthode. His answer to the sensory proof is simply to remove his senses from it and pretend it doesn’t exist. Dom Juan is retreating into the world of reverie, the dream argument mentioned in Descartes’s Fourth Meditation, thus engaging in a kind of self-induced solipsism (Curley, pp. 46-69). Moreover, in the face of Sganarelle’s continued reference to the proof of the statue, he is willing to enforce his solipsism with sadistic punishment. The threat of a bullwhip is enough to reduce the servant to silence and to remove the last unpleasant echoes of a truth he does not choose to accept. Dom Juan’s efforts to enforce his fantasy on the rest of the world continues through the rest of the fourth act, as he sends his creditor packing with no payment, tries to neutralize his irate father with a comfortable chair, attempts to re-seduce his abandonned wife and indulges in a quiet supper with Sganarelle and his supernatural invitee. Monsieur Dimanche, the money-lender, provides almost farcical comic relief in an increasingly dark play. At the same time, his concerns fit in perfectly with those of other characters who are trying to re-engage Dom Juan in the real world. Quixote put off his re-engagers by refusing to speak their language and substituting a discourse of chivalry to which they were unable to respond. Molière could well have imitated Cervantes, since he had mastered the satire of novelistic language in Les Précieuses ridicules and would do so again later in Les Femmes savantes. In this play, he brilliantly changes the register by substituting a different kind of courtly discourse, that of the new honnêteté that Louis XIV’s generation was using to replace feudal ways. The formality of seating and polite conversation comes to the forefront in this new behavioral code, and Dom Juan uses it to place Dimanche in a position where he is unable to demand the simple repayment of his loans. Dom Juan mobilizes his lackeys to bring first a stool, then a folding chair, then, most considerate of all, an armchair for Dimanche. He insists that his guest be seated, and seated in the <?page no="70"?> 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 personally, 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, Dom Louis, seeks to impose a different kind of a priori obligation, 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 by La Mothe Le Vayer on the essence of nobility, particularly in the emphasis 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 Corneille’s Le Menteur, a piece of metatheatricality that Molière subtly underlines by renaming Dom Juan’s father Dom Louis, in honor of the actor who played both parts for the troupe, Molière’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 <?page no="71"?> 71 Dom Juan presentation, however, has not gone unnoticed. It serves as a model for Dom Juan’s hypocritical and false conversion in the final act. The short-lived dominance of this ludic strategy of mastering appearances is put in question in the subsequent supper scene, where Sganarelle becomes the dupe. After trying to steal a juicy morsel he spied on his master’s plate, only to be forced to cough it up at knife-point, the valet sits down to what promises to be a sumptuous meal of his own. The service, however, is so overzealously rapid that he doesn’t even manage to taste the dishes before they are taken away. This scene is based on Act Four, scene 2 of Le Gouvernement de Sanche Pansa by Guérin de Bouscal, where Molière had played the role of Sancho. Quixote’s servant is summoned to a banquet prepared in his honor by the citizens of Fortunate Island. Yet Sancho is prevented from tasting the food by a disguised doctor, who assures him that each entrée is bad for his health. In both cases, the presumptuous valets are prevented from enjoying the consumerism linked to their masters’ unhinged sense of glory. The inedible feast comes to serve as a symbol for the inherent contradictions of the material continuum. Equally unable to consume is the Commander’s statue, which appears at the end of the act. Dom Juan cannot defer the specter with a seat, a plate of food, a toast, or a song, the kind of superficial effects that disarmed Dimanche, nor can he adopt a silent stance and let the guest fill up the scene with words, as he did with Elvire. His only recourse is to accept the Commander’s invitation to supper on the morrow. On the receiving end of civility, he is trapped in an obligation he can’t easily escape. Dom Juan’s superficial successes in the final act add relief to his eventual punishment by Heaven. Adopting the dress and discourse of a penitent, he manages to fool both Sganarelle and his father Dom Louis into thinking that he has given up his evil ways. The devotional disguise easily deceives a father and a valet too eager to take credit for the success of their reasoning in earlier acts. Dom Carlos, less gullible, is nevertheless frustrated by his inability to deal with Dom Juan’s bogus civility in a diplomatic manner. Carlos can assuage the demands of honor only by agreeing to meet Dom Juan in what promises to be an unfair ambush for him. Dom Juan is now part of a band of devout hypocrites that, as he describes to Sganarelle, is nearly all-powerful in worldly affairs and quite capable of hushing up such future bloodshed. Having achieved success in mimetically appropriating the codes of spiritual and worldly salvation, Dom Juan is by that very act forced to make concessions to them. Simultaneously, he reveals the weak points in his materialist system of pious rakishness, for he can only survive by ostensibly defending the principles he inwardly detests. He gains a reprieve from punishment rather than a pardon, and his reckoning will come sooner than he imagines. Once more, he had evoked the weakness of human understanding, <?page no="72"?> Chapter Four 72 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 à 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 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 appearances 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 immolation 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 Molière’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 ashes by a stone that literally came to life, in the form of the Commander’s Statue. Interestingly, Dom Juan’s final infernal punishment is presented not in absolute and abstract terms, but as sensory appearance within the skeptical register: he describes the sense of heat as his body is enveloped in flames. Failed Aristotelian to the end, Sganarelle cannot understand why he has no <?page no="73"?> 73 Dom Juan 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 materialism 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 Molière’s work than in Hispanic authors such as Quevedo and Calderón, 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. Molière 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 up again - not in the hands of determined negative dogmatists like Dom 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. <?page no="75"?> Chapter Five Caractères, Superstition, and Idées reçues: Communicative Paradoxes in Le Misanthrope It is well known that during the months that followed the smashing box office triumph of L’École des femmes, a storm of controversy broke out about the play, as Molière was attacked in print, on the stage, in the salons, and, if one dubious anecdote has any foundation in truth, in person on the streets by enemies who accused him of two main offenses. The first of these is that the playwright crossed the boundary between religion and theater by exposing to public ridicule certain phrases of a spiritual tone that are put in the mouth of Arnolphe and by mocking the “Maximes du mariage.” The latter was, in fact, essentially the same as a text being used by confessors, spiritual advisors, and others in ultra-devout circles to instruct women on the duties of a faithful spouse. In essence, these critics were saying that Molière was being too direct and not covering such matters with the requisite masks of dramatic convention. The second criticism really runs quite counter to the first, for Molière was also accused of “equivocating” in his play. The term équivoque in seventeenth century French denoted both falsifying and scurrilous joking; the charges in the latter domain centered around several sexual puns in conversations between Arnolphe and his “naive” ward, especially a little joke on the children’s game of corbillon, involving a quasi-anatomical reference to a cream pie that is so innocuous that English students have to strain to find the offensive content. Such vulgar equivocation, one said, was unworthy of Molière’s status as a playwright in the service of the royal family (he was still attached to the king’s brother, Monsieur, rather than to Louis XIV himself). This is a rather bizarre accusation if one takes into account the less tasteful comedies being produced at the same time by Molière’s rivals. It appears all the stranger since it implies he was being both too artificial and, in the case of the previous, devout argument, not artificial enough in his use of language. Clearly, the audience had entered the play world - not necessarily the audience Molière was used to at the Palais Royal, but a larger audience that did not always focus attention on the plays themselves. So Molière counterat- <?page no="76"?> Chapter Five 76 tacked, not in the usual form of a vitriolic polemic “letter” to the opponents, 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 grouch” (to roughly translate the subtitle, L’Atrabilaire amoureux), Molière 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 Molière 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 commune façon de parler: N’avoir pas le sens commun and other opuscules to the field 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 Célimène’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 <?page no="77"?> 77 Caractères, Superstition, and Idées reçues interest of the play, as it always has. Furthermore, analysis will make it clear that he is not the only source of problems in this communicative universe. If his own opposition makes the usual kind of social intercourse difficult, his very dissidence points to inherent inadequacies in some of the communicative strategies of his contemporaries and directs other characters toward a very paradoxical solution. Beginning with Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert and continuing through modern studies by Jules Brody and others, it has been common critical practice to analyze Le Misanthrope as a system of conflicting dualities: Alceste against the rest of the characters, sincerity versus dissimulation, ethical versus aesthetic principles, homme de bien versus honnêtes hommes. This tradition of analysis by antinomies is carried to a ridiculous extreme in Fabre d’Eglantine’s post-Revolution drama, Le Philinte de Molière, where the evil aristocrat Philinte is righteously chastised for his dissembling by an anti-establishment Alceste. There is a certain poetic irony in the fact that the author-politician Fabre d’Eglantine, who had burgled the works of the great playwright, dismembered his characters’ social relationships, and violated common sense, met his own end on the “deconstructive” guillotine! This did little, though, to reorient the debate on the significance of the original play. It remains troubling that, from the perspective of language, the binary tradition does not provide for an entirely adequate entry to the text. Philinte and Eliante, Alceste’s well-meaning friends who function as mediators, cannot be conveniently grouped either with Alceste or with the other members of Célimène’s clique, for their tendency to form their discourse around the object of conversation rather than the subject clashes decisively with the self-centered speech of the others. Philinte’s explanation in the opening scene of how a conventional embrace will affect the emotions of one’s peers thoroughly displays his other-directedness. This master of salon etiquette makes every effort to distract Alceste from the solipsistic angst that such outwardly motivated expressions trigger in him. Philinte knows that the Misanthrope automatically distrusts linguistic and gestural signs that are designed to effect a change in the interlocutor rather than to expose the noncontingent sentiments of the speaker-actor. One may object at this point that Célimène’s favorite parlor sport of character sketches (or should we say character assassination? ) is just as externally directed and as objective as Philinte’s language and behavior. Neither she nor Molière invented the fashionable salon fascination with portraits or caractères, but she and her cronies carry it to a new and somewhat misleading extreme. One finds on reflection that her circle’s purported objectivity in social judgment is actually false. For instance, when she describes Damon’s boring rationalizations or Géralde’s nobiliary babble, all the emotional emphasis <?page no="78"?> Chapter Five 78 really falls on the portraitist herself rather than on the target personality. In the portrait of Géralde, for instance, Célimène’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 judgment 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. Célimène 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 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 character sketch is Acaste’s fatuous self-description in Act III, Scene 1. In this auto-caractère, 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 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. The reductive strategy of Célimène’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, Célimène 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 Célimène’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 mandarinlike nails. Later, when he thinks he has proof of Célimène’s infidelity in her <?page no="79"?> 79 Caractères, Superstition, and Idées reçues 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 representation of Célimène’s entire personality. Célimène’s deterministic type of caractère conforms closely to the externalism that Jules Brody sees at work in La Bruyère’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. Customarily, Célimène’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 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 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 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 of love are thus contingent on temporal intention, and Célimène is enough of a casuist to realize that intention can be directed or occulted by the subject. For an absolute nominalist like Alceste, who wants words to be invested with immanent and immutable meaning, any valorization of relativity causes complete disorientation and abject collapse. Incapable 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 forgiveness. As long as Célimène 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 of infinitely changeable forme. <?page no="80"?> Chapter Five 80 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 Benjamin calls “das Immergleiche.” Benjamin implies that this void can be redeemed only by the recognition of its complete pointlessness, thus allowing 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. Célimène’s discourse contains no such self-consciousness and her creatures remain trapped in the glow or aura of their petty-nobiliary world. Neither Célimène 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, Célimène 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 Célimène 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 caractère 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 Bruyère strives to show, the two do not match: what is is never what should be, and paradox, rather than materialistic determinism, rules the universe. Alceste is just as deterministic as Célimène, but in a different manner, for 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 Célimène 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. <?page no="81"?> 81 Caractères, Superstition, and Idées reçues Alceste, the rationalist, the truth-seeker, a slave to superstition? The idea 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 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 contradictory nature. Part of the fascination of Molière’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 Éliante 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 contest 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 reliable 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 predatory spirit. Philinte says that Alceste’s desires for absolute human virtue are equivalent to expecting wolves, tigers, or vultures to act against their own natures. In doing so, he exposes his friend’s vision of perfect nature as a mere opinion, and a specious one at that. Later in the Dialogues, Nicot states that law is nature brought to its highest perfection (Morphos 69). Clearly, Molière stops short of this rationalist backswing, preferring to allow nature to surpass human classification in the elaboration of its own order. Through the juxtaposition of Alceste and Philinte, one can draw the inference that the appearance of atavistic vices in human institutions should be taken and accepted for what it is, without expectations of imposing a more perfect standard <?page no="82"?> Chapter Five 82 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 expediency is a surer guide. Nicot mentions this expediency criterion in the Dialogues within the framework of the state (Morphos 67). However, he can 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 Molière is imitating to some extent this strategy of misdirection to make his point. Molière 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 mysterious 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 lazzo lies a truthcontent that cannot be ignored. The seventeenth century had a proverb for it: tel maître, 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 supernatural explanations. His reluctance in the opening scene to give any sign of affection that does not stem from a gush of heart-felt sentiment hints at a suspicion that he is being watched, that some unearthly judge can see into his soul and will 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 “cœur 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 <?page no="83"?> 83 Caractères, Superstition, and Idées reçues them for their their failure to apply the internal scourge of virtue with which misanthropes mortify themselves. He even goes so far as to damn the entire human race for their sinful tendency to disregard gloominess and seek joy. 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 “Sois-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. Whenever 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, <?page no="84"?> Chapter Five 84 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 Célimène in the final act, he cannot bring himself to give her an unconditional pardon. Thus, he winds up as a Christ in reverse, heading off into the desert instead of bringing his minstry into the world. By the same token, Alceste’s wooing of Célimène becomes a test of the destiny of all human love - one which must be utterly disengaged from the 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 à 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 Célimène 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. Célimène’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, Molière, 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 reçues. It has often been observed that Philinte seems to parrot the superficial codes of honnêteté, 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- <?page no="85"?> 85 Caractères, Superstition, and Idées reçues 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 first involves going through). As such, it stands in contrast both to Célimène’s mechanistic orthodoxy and to Alceste’s pachycephalous heterodoxy. Philinte is willing to adorn Oronte’s sonnet with such posies as “jolie, amoureuse, admirable” strictly because he knows their repetitive emptiness, 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 désespère,/ Alors qu’on espère 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 disruptive 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). Molière constructs a clever 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 honnêteté. 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 underlying 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. 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 <?page no="86"?> Chapter Five 86 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 caractères and extols the human being’s ability to turn paradox into happiness. Lovers see the objects of their passion not only wrongly, but also as conventional opposites of the satirical viewpoint. Rather than being doomed to loneliness and failure by excessive height or shortness, love removes from women the deterministic 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 conveyed through language. Daniella Dalla Valle has shown that Éliante’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 reçue. As a philosophical idée reçue passed on by the wise woman Éliante 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 blâme, ni qu’on loue.” Eliante, on the other hand, accepts the profane function of human life and the diversity that naturally occurs within it. Célimène 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, <?page no="87"?> 87 Caractères, Superstition, and Idées reçues standards of social behavior must draw their validity from a context. Eliante 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 paradoxical wisdom is established at the opening of the play by Philinte’s defense of ostentatious civility. Seen in retrospect, Philinte’s apology for effusiveness becomes a theory for the necessity of social armor, which is brilliant enough to please the eye of the beholder, but strong enough to preserve the wearer from sudden assaults or untimely examinations. Noel Peacock convincingly demonstrates that this sort of protection is necessary throughout the text. In an age when neither lineage, nor feats of arms, nor feudal bonds can serve any longer as effective bulwarks against the erosion of identities and relationships, politesse provides the established aristocracy and the ascendant elements of the bourgeoisie with a cuirasse both aesthetic and useful. The process continues in Act IV, scene 2, when Eliante, faced with Alceste’s ridiculous proposal, answers him with a series of suggestions and warnings that are both proverbial and paradoxical in nature: “On a beau voir, pour rompre, une raison puissante,/ Une coupable aimée est bientôt innocente.” It supercedes the mechanistic reason of Célimène’s circle, much as Pascal’s vrais habiles transcend rationalistic demi-habiles by sensing and accepting the in-dwelling contradictions and paradoxes of human existence. Like Pascal’s truly clever thinkers, Philinte and Eliante are prepared to acknowledge la raison des effets, despite the commonplace nature of unoriginal idées reçues. Cliché is consensus, but it is also a form of personal accommodation to the apparently senseless organization of a universe where putative absolutes, at least human ones, are always disappointingly flawed. The couple’s indirect courtship and eventual vows of love are clichés, so much so that they scarcely need to be pronounced. However, the cliché is the key to happiness and it cuts short Alceste’s supernatural perorations with remarkable ease. The cliché or idée reçue is the paradoxical blending place of the rational and the irrational, of the excessively rigid and the impossibly fluid. Molière had loved it during his entire career. He had certainly grown to appreciate the comic properties in its deceptive humility when he played the role of <?page no="88"?> Chapter Five 88 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 Molière’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 commonplace 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, Molière’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, Molière also relies heavily on the tropes of false criteria and regression, as well. For the idée reçue 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 Célimène’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 le bon to le vrai and Célimène 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 affection for an apparently unlikely mate in a universe that otherwise offers only condemnation or raillery for such an act of trust. <?page no="89"?> 89 Caractères, Superstition, and Idées reçues The triumph of communication based on idées reçues has further implications for the concept of knowledge itself. Alceste’s quest for an absolutely “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 dismissal of Oronte’s sonnet, his preference for a maudlin, “from-the-heart” ditty, his anger over the discrepancy between Célimène’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 symptomatic 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 access to linguistic intention (and thus ideal reference) than we do to the inward 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 from Célimène represents a classic skeptical approach to these problems. Indeed, 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 is likewise warranted by Epicurean atomism, which postulates that “as knowing creatures, we inescapably operate at an epistemological and perceptual remove from unfiltered sensation” (Kroll 119). By embodying this philosophical idea in artistic form, The Misanthrope justifies its position as a canonical text, not just in the developing debate on human politeness and sentimentality, but also in the unfolding history of knowledge as Classical literature approached the Enlightenment. <?page no="91"?> Chapter Six Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith How is it that Monsieur Orgon, who seems to be such a sincere Christian, becomes a willing dupe to the least sincere spiritual director in the world? How is it that a family that prides itself on sociability fails to understand its own head? How is it that Tartuffe, a scoundrel among scoundrels and confident seducer, allows himself to be tricked and seduced by his own erstwhile victim? Paradoxes abound in this comedy where generations of critics, from ultramontain Catholics to crypto-Stalinists, have painstakingly tried to find no more than a straightforward critique of religious institutions, no matter how hazy or insubstantial they may be in the text. Ralph Albanese Jr. has shown in his recent study Molière à l’école républicaine that the more nineteenth-century Catholics persisted in regarding Tartuffe as a dangerous work, the more secular French Republicans claimed its supposedly anticlerical author as a political hero. For despite the numerous ratiocinations by Cléante or the burlesque sermons concocted by Tartuffe, it is so difficult to discern any coherent religious mentality in this play that one is often tempted to give up and to conclude with Molière’s friend Boileau, whose correspondance states that Tartuffe is essentially nothing more than a domestic comedy (516-17). To use a paradoxical perspective, one must first of all pay attention to the inherent oppositions and contradictions in a literary work. But each opposition does not necessarily deserve to be considered as a paradox on its own, because as distinguished from simple juxtaposition of opposites or antithesis, paradox must add a dimension of surprise. The etymology of the word (para/ doxa = against the common opinion or teaching) expresses, after all, a sense of the unexpected. Paradox is thus in some measure always nonconformist. Literary language, which seeks to distance itself from ordinary discourse through figurative enrichment, accords a privileged place to paradox as a poetic strategy, and in the poetic drama that is Tartuffe, certain verses of a particularly paradoxical nature stand out for the spectator. In addition, one must consider on a more philosophical level the existence of a particular type of paradox of situation that engulfs the characters in their ethical struggles. The study of contradiction would prove itself an endless succession of Chinese <?page no="92"?> Chapter Six 92 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 social and moral direction. Molière’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 Lemaître only confirms an inclination already apparent in the Classical Age itself, for, as has been shown, Molière’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. <?page no="93"?> 93 Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith 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 by Dorine makes it clear that Orgon is something of a perceptual and epistemological monster, a man with an innate, hence “natural,” tendency to misjudge that which Nature makes evident to most of her creatures. The existence of such monsters conforms quite well with the views of Lucretius so cherished by the playwright, for the Roman philosopher had explained that Nature paradoxically creates her own exceptions. Hence, the play becomes a putative École de la Vérité for Orgon, for his co-dependents, and for anyone who chooses to identify with him or with his family. It follows that this scene is an important liminary lesson in which the “average” character learns not only that he should practice careful observation of appearances, but also that he can rely on them, for even the “ordinary,” relatively unschooled Dorine has drawn the correct conclusions. If her perceptions are better than those of the ultra-learned Orgon, it is because sophistication in this domain is obtained not from abstract “book learning,” but from the experience that Montaigne likened to reading in the Great Book of the World. However, opaqueness alone does not explain all facets of Orgon’s attitude; one must dig a little deeper to discover the motives of this apparently self-satisfied paterfamilias. It is Orgon himself who puts us on the trail when he paraphrases Philippians 3, 8-13: “Whoever follows his [Tartuffe’s] precepts finds inner peace, and regards the rest of society as a dunghill.” This revealing reference to the spiritual advisor’s secret practices betrays both Tartuffe’s craftiness and Orgon’s religious naïveté. It is clear on the one hand that the “directeur” is only revealing to his novice those parts of Holy Scripture that seem to teach disdain for human society, for he has certainly avoided giving Orgon the context of the verses cited. Ironically, this same passage is preceeded by two warnings against the evil influence of false preachers, who seek to stir up divisions among Christians. In Philippians 2, Paul exhorts the faithful to practice humility and to consider themselves the inferiors of their neighbors, following the example Jesus himself - a bit of advice that Tartuffe conveniently neglects. In the course of that epistle, Paul meditates on the possibility of abandonning the life of the body entirely, in order to live uniquely “in the spirit,” but in spite of the temptations that such a sublime life offers, he assures his followers that he will nevertheless persevere in the life of the body for the welfare of the Church as a whole. Tartuffe relegates this whole context to silence in order to imbue Orgon with the doctrine of worldly renunciation, and the gullible novice seems to know no better, even <?page no="94"?> Chapter Six 94 though 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 favorite 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 Molière’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 <?page no="95"?> 95 Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith youth, Orgon can only consider his current life of sexual and political compromise 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 exiled his friend Argas, whose incriminating chest full of secret papers remains concealed in his house. If a shadowy part of Orgon’s soul is still faithful to his dear departed and his banished comrade, he would certainly be attracted to yet another verse from Philippians, which expresses the desire to live simply and blamelessly as a Child of God, irreproachable 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 Molière’s Cléante says, “L’apparence du mal a chez eu peu d’appui” (v, 395), Charron defines the character of a type he calls the superstitieux: “Il tremble de peur, il ne peut se fier n’y s’assûrer, craignant d’avoir jamais assez bien fait et d’avoir omis 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 of guilty self-doubt that the memory of his first wife and the presence of his second (both unavoidable in a household still filled with relatives) could only aggravate. Guilty conscience protrudes everywhere in the dialogue of Orgon and his mother, Madame Pernelle. Mother and son live in fear of a celestial anger that could strike at any moment a household unjustly happy. This explains the desire to hide their good fortune, to flee dances and public assemblies, to wear the dark clothing of repentence. This paradox of guilty success, of funereal gladness and lusty mourning (remember Hamlet! ), stirs fitfully in Orgon’s troubled spirit. It is doubtlessly at the root of all the other paradoxes that develop within the beset family and around the malignant presence of Tartuffe. On another level, the equivalence that Orgon establishes between spiritual salvation and social order (of a kind) is directly linked to his status as a judge in the monarchical regime. Throughout the ages judges, and early modern French magistrates in particular, have presented themselves as a moral elite rather than simply as a contingent political body; thus, the lifetime, qualitative status of their appointments. In their official pronouncements, judges of Molière’s time seldom let slip an opportunity to defend the metaphysical notion of their character; Pierre Zobermann, for instance, finds <?page no="96"?> Chapter Six 96 that while their proximity to the king’s administrative machine is the real 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 reasons 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 Molière 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 prevents 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 <?page no="97"?> 97 Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith 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 pleasure 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 Célimène’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 (“Plaît-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 <?page no="98"?> Chapter Six 98 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 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 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 ostensibly 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 personnelle distinct from the magistrate’s position. He would be the first of his family to be invested with a type of nobility considered to be inborn, rather than contingent upon a particular form of service and the financial payment 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 over his father, who might be in his eyes no more than a mere anobli still reeking of recent proximity to the merchant classes. Such condescension permeates the very first words he says on stage: “I, shall I suffer that a carping 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, <?page no="99"?> 99 Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith a dwelling whose nobility derives not from his father’s magisterial function, but from his own presence. The reference to the usurpation of tyrannical power resembles the language of the aristocracy during the Fronde revolts of 1648-1652. It is not the father’s simple prerogatives that the impostor threatens to usurp, but Damis’s personal glory. That is why it is Damis who raises social issues by referring to Tartuffe as “ce monsieur-là” and later as “ce pied plat” (I, 1, 48 and 59). The latter term, based on the fact that the commoner Tartuffe wears shoes without the noble high heel, once again draws comparison between his individual superiority and the intruder’s low status. Damis explicitly denies that his father’s authority extends over him: “Neither my father nor anything else can force me to wish him [Tartuffe] well” (I, 1, 56). The juxtaposition of père and rien in this speech is not accidental. And in the following verse, if he says, “Je trahirais mon cœur de parler d’autre sorte,” it is not merely the authenticity of his emotions that he is designating by cœur, but rather the type of aristocratic courage that the theater-goer would associate with Le Cid or other noble heroes. Couched in this context of heroic tragedy, pronouncements like “à tous coups je m’emporte” or “Il faudra que j’en vienne à quelque grand éclat” (I, 1, 58 and 60) are hardly surprising. Damis recalls the young men of Sorel’s Francion who imitate the grand dukes and think themselves authorized to punish their inferiors at will with cudgel or sword. This attitude does not fade, for he declares anew in Act Three that there is no power or authority on Earth that can restrain his will. As for Mariane, Orgon’s silent daughter who utters only two syllables during the first act, her lack of expression is certainly linked to the circumstances that have destabilized her family. There is something a bit too formal in this father-daughter relationship. Though she recognizes that she is “beholding” (redevable) to Orgon, this word can be understood in two quite different ways. The paterfamilias would certainly interpret it in the manner most flattering to him, as a compliment for the far-sighted parent who has provided for all the needs of a compliant child. But perhaps Mariane intends a different message as well, for this orphan probably holds her father responsible for the loss of her mother. If a father is “absolute,” after all, it goes without saying that he has no legitimate partner, at least in the eyes of his children. When troubled, Mariane turns neither towards her father, nor towards the stepmother Elmire, but instead towards Dorine, a last vestige, perhaps, of former domestic tranquility. She is visibly afraid to engage in dialogue with her father in order to discuss a prior loss that he is doing everything he can to stifle. Like co-dependants in a family afflicted with alcoholism or madness, Mariane and Dorine have consciously or unconsciously developed defensive strategies, adapting into their roles as obedient daughter and maternal servant. Let us not forget the first description given of Mariane <?page no="100"?> Chapter Six 100 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 Valère, 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 company without any personal obligation or reward is above and beyond 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 Molière from the necessity of putting 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 honnête homme familiar 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 characters on stage and the audience are equally ignorant of his true criminal identity, which will only be revealed at the conclusion. This hypocrite thus may operate under the “paradox of the actor” identified in the eighteenth century by Denis Diderot: the less emotionally involved he is, the more he <?page no="101"?> 101 Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith is able to excite emotion. By extension, we may say that the less he believes, the more he may give the impression of believing. As a person searching for a reason to believe, Orgon is easy prey for this performance. If his family does not succumb to the lure, it is because they remain stuck in their material universe, completely preoccupied by the quest for pleasure. Tartuffe’s conduct towards Orgon is regulated by the principle of division. Max Vernet points out that this is really a reciprocal relationship, since in most of Molière’s plays, and especially in L’École des femmes and Amphitryon, trickster and dupe have a tendency to imitate each other (91-115). Of all things, the division of Right from Wrong is the most precious gift he can offer to a magistrate hungry for spiritual direction, for it is something Orgon already had without realizing it. To divide the good from the bad is not only the fundamental duty of a “king’s man,” but it also provides for the resolution of Orgon’s personal dilemma by attenuating his own struggles with differentiation. Tartuffe therefore hides from Orgon the spirit of sharing that dominates Paul’s Epistle to the Phillipians in order to teach radical separation from the world and especially from familial attachments. Having effected this detachment, he is free to manipulate the judge’s latent sense of guilt and to go on to a more active strategy. If the carefree joy of others bothers Orgon, he can offer himself a shameful but justified pleasure in provoking the displeasure of his fellow men. Tartuffe is not only the theorist of this policy, he becomes as well its active agent, the scourge of joyful “vices.” Orgon actually tries to explain this paradoxical force to Damis before banishing the blockheaded young man: “plus on fait d’effort afin de l’en bannir,/ Plus j’en veux employer à l’y mieux retenir” (The more trouble you take to banish him from the household, the more I intend to take to keep him here; 1303-1304) It is only when Tartuffe ceases to divide and tries to accommodate that he becomes vulnerable. Beginning with the famous confession of desire, “Ah pour être dévot, je n’en suis pas moins homme” (966), he attempts to excuse his concupiscence by arguing that physical beauty is a figure of divine beauty. This phrase has a definite allure reminiscent of François de Sales. However this in no way diminishes the inherent contradiction between the weakness of the flesh and the rigor of virtue, an antinomy that only the person of Christ himself can resolve in Christian thinking. According to Tartuffe’s casuistry, Elmire’s “more than human splendor” authorizes his erotic “tribulations” and the “unparalleled devotion” of his adulterous attraction. He can offer the object of his desire the deliciously paradoxical perspective of “love without scandal and pleasure without fear” (1000). Even as Tartuffe claims that heaven is the source of his feelings, he is donning a mask that will adhere a little too well to his hypocritical face. Like Dom Juan jokingly playing at devotion, Tartuffe reveals one aspect of <?page no="102"?> Chapter Six 102 piety that he had never suspected. As he cynically exploits the “myth” of transcendence to facilitate the success of his amorous conquests, he unceasingly 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). Molière’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 Valère. The reusing of this stock scene in the play is not simply comic custom for Molière, 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 Molière 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 <?page no="103"?> 103 Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith 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 repentance of a scoundrel who admits he is one with the intention of continuing to do so. The strategy of false appearances is all the more clever since it resembles perfectly benign behavior, such as the lovers’ quarrel that takes place in the second act. Human nature is susceptible to the gesture of repentance 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 itself, since, as François Lagarde points out, all desire proceeds best under the mask of indifference, for the desiring party may hide his true sentiments in order to stimulate the interest of the one he desires (39-40). It is the plan to defer the avowal of desire on Tartuffe’s part, rather than the simple fear of discovery, that explains his careful behavior in private with Elmire. Like most seventeenth-century lovers, Tartuffe hesitates to place himself in the vulnerable position of one who loves more than he is loved. He is especially sensitive to such problems after the stinging rejection he received earlier from Dorine, who told him that she could see him naked from top to bottom without being stirred by “his hide” in the very least (867-868). Tartuffe’s status as a directeur de conscience rests precariously on the mask of piety that hides his desires. The moment he lifts the mask, he risks losing his power to trick others. Curiously, this makes him a forerunner of Amphitryon’s Jupiter, who can only receive Alcmène’s affection when and because he takes the form of her legitimate husband. As a prisoner of his own mask, Tartuffe fails to realize that Elmire excels, and even exceeds him, in the art of stirring a lover’s interest and finding the sometimes perverse key that will excite his passion. Her acumen emerges most completely in their second conversation, where her discourse resembles the cape work of a skilled toreador. In this case, it is all the more admirable, since she is really fighting two bulls at the same time: Tartuffe in front of her and Orgon hidden under the table. The moment of truth will come as she presents them to each other. This moment of confrontation, subject of the illustrations of the play, is significant above all because it marks Tartuffe’s transformation from a manipulating meneur du jeu to a potential comic outcast or pharmakos. Lagarde points out that the pharmakos has a double function as both poison and cure for the ills set forth in the play (92). He is a poison to be expelled because he has become the collective repository of all the tensions and transgressions that have troubled the characters. At the same time, the very act of gathering these qualities into himself assures that his immolation will purify the comic <?page no="104"?> Chapter Six 104 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 possession for Orgon’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 unmasked 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 appearances 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 continues 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 devaluing 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 sainthood 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- <?page no="105"?> 105 Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith portant is the fact that Tartuffe “sets the hook” in Orgon 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 lie 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 level of credulity with the presupposition that any strong impression furnishes an irrefutable proof. Just as legislators and judges presuppose that eloquence is the reliable appearance of underlying virtue and truth, Orgon accepts the 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 reality through optical or auditory illusions, for example. Nor does this error spring from a notion of Pyrrhonean materialism, since such radical skepticism 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 fractures and ready to fall apart. But it is undeniable that his errors are also consistent with the specific, officially-endorsed program of piety promulgated by the Church of his age, for official Counter-Reformation practices regarding the “seduction” of the public to belief through the effect of sensory spectacle encounter the same contradictory problems. Elmire goes directly to the heart of the dilemma. Her exclamation, “Je veux une vertu qui ne soit point diablesse” (I want a virtue that is not devilish, IV, 3, 1334) is most revealing. Intertextually, it recalls the frustrated Sosie in Amphitryon, who complains about “un dieu si diable” when Jupiter’s deceptive intervention in human affairs causes widespread chaos. Elmire is outraged similarly over the diabolical confusion of the divine and the human by Tartuffe’s treachery. Her knowledge of the ways of desire allows her an active role that Amphitryon’s queen Alcmène could not achieve, for since she can excite the desire of the hypocrite at will, she will be capable of dislodging the mask of false divinity. <?page no="106"?> Chapter Six 106 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 justification 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 rest on the tricky appearances of the physical world, but only on the will to believe in that which cannot be physically shown. It is true that he runs the risk of simply substituting the “grace” of a divinely inspired monarch for that 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 <?page no="107"?> 107 Tartuffe and the Paradoxes of Faith final act, where he takes part in suffering and joy with his fellow humans, putting off till later the metaphysical certitude of divine salvation, which he sees can now be accepted only on faith. <?page no="109"?> Chapter Seven Stage Ways and Skeptic Way The tradition of paradox as a major element in comedy was already strong when Molière was growing up. Tabarin, the master of farcical entertainment 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, published in 1622. This document mentions his paradoxes on the very first page, along with “fantaisies, dialogues, […] farces, rencontres, et conceptions.” But the winds of paradox blew from many quarters. The Spanish comedia which had exerted an important influence on the entire theatrical production of Corneille’s age is filled with paradoxes. Among them figure prominently the paradox of reality as a dream and of reality that appears to be unreal, which characterize some of the most important works of Calderon and Alarcón. This is hardly surprising, given that both themes coincide with the programs of the baroque and the Counter-Reformation that obsessed Spain, in particular. In the schools, where rhetoric still occupied a privileged place, paradox almost always figured in the curriculum that was imposed on students of the 1630’s. Add to this the tradition of what Max Vernet has called the “dramaturgy of the oxymoron” (181), evoking trompeurs trompés, comédies des comédiens, comédies sans comédie, maris amants de leurs femmes, femmes juges et parties, etc. Most of these oxymorons were actually the titles of plays by Molière’s models, rivals, or emulators. Following the composition of his great tetralogy including L’École des femmes, Dom Juan, Le Misanthrope, and Tartuffe and onward through the rest of his career, Molière’s diverse works continued to be informed by the ways of skeptical paradox. Though chronological order is not a primary concern in this part of the study, since Molière’s experiments with paradox emanate from a central hub of interests rather than following a strict developmental path, it is perhaps most convenient at this point to discuss Amphitryon. Robert McBride’s work on this play constitutes an excellent foundation from which to depart. He cogently sets the parameters for further research in a number of ways: first by highlighting the importance of the beginning act in framing the skeptical concerns, then by pointing out that Amphitryon and <?page no="110"?> Chapter Seven 110 Sosie make specific reference to a range of pertinent terms, further by noting that two important Cartesian concepts (the “dream argument” and the “evil genius argument”) come into play, and finally by tracing many of the philosophical ambiguities faced by the mortals at the conclusion of the action. The blending and entwining of identities begins with the first words of the prologue, as Mercure adopts a jocular tone ill-suited to a god and La Nuit addresses him in the bourgeois fashion as “Seigneur 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: “Il 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 ride, being left afoot “comme un messager de village” (Prologue, 32). Finally, Mercure goes on to explain that Jupiter’s expedient disguise as Alcmène’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 previous 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: “Voilà sans doute un bel emploi/ …Et l’on donne un nom fort honnête/ 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 Amphitryon’s deeds as though he were an ocular witness. This role-playing facilitates a double slippage of identity, as Molière’s fellow writers, who ingratiated themselves to the royal family by encomiastic poems about battles never attended, are invited to identify with Sosie. Moreover, Sosie will also furnish the voice for his account’s audience, the queen Alcmène, physically 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 seventeenth-century language of the street. Ironically, Sosie has hit upon a central ambiguity of the play, for indeed, the queen has already made her husband a cuckold from the most <?page no="111"?> 111 Stage Ways and Skeptic Way 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 Mercure: “Qui va là? … Moi … Qui, moi? … Moi” (I, 2, 309). Just as objects and 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 Sosie? ” (I, 2, 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, Molière raises the issue of the cogito and of the duality of mind and body; implicitly he states “I know, therefore I am - You! ” Through his clever manipulation of information and language, Mercure knows better than Sosie himself and therefore asserts a more powerful claim to the identity. Indeed, as Sosie observes, “la raison à ce qu’on voit s’oppose” (I, 2, 518). As the second act draws Amphitryon into the confusion with Sosie, both master and servant seek to probe the conditions that could make such uncertainty possible They explicitly cite Descartes’ “dream argument” (that what appears to be happening may be a dream instead of reality) and the closely related “evil genius” argument (that what appears to be happening <?page no="112"?> Chapter Seven 112 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 Molière does not accept Descartes’s facile dismissal. Sosie’s “Rêvé-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 Alcmène, he refuses stubbornly to acknowledge identity with the loving Amphitryon who had just spent the night with her. Seen by Alcmène, this puzzling reluctance on the part of the husband to assume his legitimate conjugal identity is faulty and inexplicable by normal 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’être prouvée S’il était vrai qu’on pût ne s’en souvenir pas, De qui puis-je tenir, que de vous, la nouvelle Du dernier de tous vos combats, Et les cinq 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) <?page no="113"?> 113 Stage Ways and Skeptic Way 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 Alcmène’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 the supernatural, he obliges his wife to give him an account of his own cuckolding, which throws him into a genuine mental distress. 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 Alcmène, 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 “evil genius” argument of Descartes. Of all Molière’s cuckolds, he makes it 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 be wrong. Ultimately, this over-inflation of the ego and its criterion, the cogito, lie at the root of Amphitryon’s torture and will reduce him to George Dandin-like impotence by the conclusion of the third act. But before this “ultima affronta,” as Monsieur Jourdain’s quasi-Turkish initiators might call it, Amphitryon will try one more ploy, belatedly ap- <?page no="114"?> Chapter Seven 114 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, Naucratès and his fellow Thebans can supply Amphitryon 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. Molière 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 proofs and cannot expect to obtain gain de cause in his on-stage universe. 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 Alcmène’s favors without obstacle. However, he realizes that he has short-circuited the ultimate seduction he had envisioned. He wishes that Alcmène’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; he has not, after all, appeared as himself, but in a borrowed personality, and he has arranged it so that Alcmène’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 <?page no="115"?> 115 Stage Ways and Skeptic Way away from a clinging Cléanthis whom 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 Alcmène 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 Alcmène 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 argument, and an extremely clever one at that, to try to blame the husband-personality for any offense, keeping the lover-personality intact. Alcmène 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 Alcmène, 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 Alcmène 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. Naucratès, 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 <?page no="116"?> Chapter Seven 116 action concludes with a pronouncement of silence that evokes what Sextus calls the skeptic slogans. The first of these, “No more,” is equivalent to Sosie’s recommendation that everyone go home and say no more. The second slogan Sextus mentions, non-assertion, is also involved, 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 withhold 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 may add another of the slogans, “I do not apprehend.” The self-certainty based on assumptions and opinions supposedly emanating from a supreme consciousness is suspended, along with all other judgment. Those things that still depend on human pronouncements, especially Alcmène’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 Molière 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, Molière begins with the love-exchange, devoting the first two scenes to sentimental discussions between Élise and her disguised suitor, Valère, 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 Molière 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 <?page no="117"?> 117 Stage Ways and Skeptic Way to accept an identity with its contingencies: 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 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 concerned with the in-kind universal consumption of food, clothes, shelter, and other forms of bodily comfort. His master Cléante approaches wealth 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 a monetary form of the id, doing what comes naturally without much 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. Molière takes care to justify La Flèche’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 Flèche brands this behavior with the obvious label of avarice, Harpagon tries to stifle this appearance-based association. But La Flèche 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 Molière’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 Flèche 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 même 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 only reinforce what is obvious. The miser himself tries to impose a 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 <?page no="118"?> Chapter Seven 118 it. And as we have seen in the case of sentiment, wealth cannot really be enjoyed alone. Even Harpagon’s attempt in the second act to invest some of his money in a loan, involving illegal interest rates and the provisions of the dreaded Mohatra Contract lambasted by Pascal in the fifth of the Lettres provinciales, results in failure. It may be argued that this is because he attempts unknowingly to deal with his own son. Yet it is Molière’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 complex 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 Élise from putting all their dispos- <?page no="119"?> 119 Stage Ways and Skeptic Way 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 Maître 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 Rabelais’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 himself to blame because the only one who can really reduce his wealth is the miser himself. His cries of “Ah, c’est moi! ” as he grasps his own suspicious hand underline this solipsism. Naturally, the speech ends with a promise of self-destruction: “Je me pendrai moi-même après.” Of course, Harpagon stops short of self-recognition at the end of the 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 <?page no="120"?> Chapter Seven 120 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 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. 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 La Bruyère. He not only wishes his wealth to show forth, but insists on it. 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 tailor, and 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 à souhaiter que tout le monde lui ressamblât,” 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 some clients pay, like Dorante, only in the verbal “caresses” of approval that the dancing master values above all else, others, while withholding this aesthetic tribute, make up for it by paying in coin of the realm, without which no artistic activity can thrive. The musician goes on to point out that by suspending judgment on the inappropriateness of Jourdain’s stu- <?page no="121"?> 121 Stage Ways and Skeptic Way 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 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 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. 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 Molière systematically, if subtly, attacks. First, we return to the level of the Schools in earlier plays. When the musician proposes a tune composed 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-même pour cette besogne-là.” 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 music master lauds his students, comparing them to the greatest masters and saying that the composition is of the finest that could be done by anyone (including, presumably, himself). He is right to be generous in his praise, since by acknowledging the ability of the student to equal the perfection of the teacher, he has at the same time accomplished the highest distinction of the teacher by passing on this level of perfection. With this epistemological stone in place, Molière goes on to expose Jourdain’s approach to acquiring new learning for himself. After the dancing master ironically praises Jourdain’s vocal rendition of his foolish favorite song about Janneton and the sheep, he pokes his fellow artist the music 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 que les gens de qualité apprennent aussi la musique? ” Receiving a positive response, he resolves, “Je l’apprendrai donc.” Yet, just as he misunderstood <?page no="122"?> Chapter Seven 122 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. While Proposition A may be conditionally true (some noblemen may, in fact, not be able to learn music), Proposition B is so 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 economistphilosopher 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 word “fallibility.” (26) Certainly Jourdain demonstrates most adequately this condition of human epistemological fallibility. Soros goes on to distinguish between two types of mental functions, cognitive and manipulative. The former can remain strictly in the objective realm since it concerns itself with determining the truth independently of any individual intention to use that truth to affect 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. 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 <?page no="123"?> 123 Stage Ways and Skeptic Way of the drapier’s trade some time ago. Clearly, all his manipulative 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 philosophy 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 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 mamamouchi trickery in the later acts of the play, since only by over satisfying 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 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 pouty behavior that rather quickly reduces the men to despair. Finally, Lucile reveals the reason for the apparent slight: Si vous aviez voulu m’écouter, ne vous aurais-je pas dit que l’aventure dont vous vous plaignez a été causée ce matin par la présence d’une vieille tante, qui veut que la seule approche d’un homme déshonore une fille? qui perpétuellement nous sermonne sur ce chapitre, et nous figure tous les hommes comme des diables qu’il faut fuir? <?page no="124"?> Chapter Seven 124 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 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 mechanistically 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 Molière’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 provides Henriette with a perfect pretext for combining Epicurean moral attitudes with Pyrrhonist epistemology. In a typically skeptical fashion, Henriette never seeks to justify her interest in Clitandre directly as sensual 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- <?page no="125"?> 125 Stage Ways and Skeptic Way 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 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 Molière’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 salonnières, which swells when Martine uses the popular conjugation “je parlons” and then mistakes grammaire for the near-homonym grand’mère. 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 <?page no="126"?> Chapter Seven 126 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. Molière’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. Molière, 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. <?page no="127"?> 127 Stage Ways and Skeptic Way 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 style that flows spontaneously, for I am no more painstaking with words than with other things” (Kroll 127). Elsewhere, Gassendi explains that words perform “the same function for our ears that fingers perform for the eyes when we point at those things for the same purpose” (Kroll 128). Just as Molière’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 instance of such 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. Molière 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 <?page no="128"?> Chapter Seven 128 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 Trissotin from the other side, as a true intellectual who can expose the demihabile. The pedantic Trissotin pompously proclaims: “Pour moi, je ne tiens pas, quelque effet qu’on suppose,/ Que la science soit pour gâter quelque 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.” <?page no="129"?> Chapter Eight Le Malade imaginaire and the Paradox of Death 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 Molière’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? Molière’s brilliant contribution to this rich weave of theatrical tradition is to pass beyond the limits of plot <?page no="130"?> Chapter Eight 130 contrivance and to probe the topic’s philosophical depths, both pagan and Christian, in the innovative guise of a very earthy comedy. Molière 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. Molière moved this cuckold figure into the new genre of the comédie-ballet in the person of Dom Pèdre 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 “cinq 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 Molière’s final play, Le Malade imaginaire. It is no accident that the new medical skepticism demonstrated by Molière 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 <?page no="131"?> 131 Le Malade imaginaire and the Paradox of Death 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 lui are interested above all in pharmacological cures, rather than 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 “Voilà 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 Molière 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 Molière 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, because of the assumption that one can only become purer and more intact through elimination. Argan is only interested in ingesting “cleansing” enemas 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, cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf, dix, <?page no="132"?> Chapter Eight 132 onze 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 mêle 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 Fleurant who emerge as dealers in defilement, sniffing their living out of the contents of bedpans and chamber pots. Instead of curing patients who are susceptible to improvement, they are more concerned that everyone should die according to the rules of the Medical School. Anything else would be a crime of “lèse faculté.” Consequently, they are more than willing to stoke 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 about Argan’s “mauvaise constitution” and “corruption de sang” has a metaphysical accent, and his abandonment of the patient in Act Three resembles nothing more than an evil spell. Béralde sarcastically compares Purgon to “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- <?page no="133"?> 133 Le Malade imaginaire and the Paradox of Death 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 transforms 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. Molière, 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 Baïf, make such a rapprochement in the context of a debate about law (Morphos 69-70). They discuss certain “sicknesses of the soul,” such as avarice, tyranny, hypocrisy, and rebelliousness, akin to the manias of Harpagon, Arnolphe, Tartuffe, and Dom Juan. These unbalances emanate from an inability to balance appetites and desires for pleasure in the equilibrium favored by nature. Nicot, arguing from the Aristotelian standpoint, avers that only strong laws can provide the expert medicine necessary to hold such derangements in check. But in doing so, he concedes many points of the Moliéresque analysis of mania, such as the observation 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. But Lucretius’s tendency to pull the sting from death does not prevent him from making more serious observations that pertain to Argan’s dilemma. Anticipating Pascal, the Classical philosopher makes this fear the source of <?page no="134"?> Chapter Eight 134 an ennui that causes people to be unaccountably restless and changeable: “In [fearing death] the individual is really running away from himself. Since he remains reluctantly wedded to the self whom he cannot of course escape, he grows to hate him, because he is a sick man ignorant of the cause of his malady” (128-29). If there is anything more pathetic than this truly sick and ignorant man, it is an equally ignorant man who strangely imagines himself to be sick. The paradoxical lack of coordination between illness and bodily appearance is noted in another case when Lucretius says: “Often enough the visible body is obviously ill, while in some other unseen part we are enjoying ourselves. No less often the reverse happens: one who is sick at heart enjoys bodily well-being” (99). Le Malade imaginaire presents a surprising and recurrent parallelism between Lucretius’s pagan philosophy and certain elements of traditional Christianity. It is perhaps because of an established link between the medical establishment and human defilement that Toinette, disguised as a doctor, is able to so surprise Argan by quoting another Biblical passage in Act Three. When she suggests that her patient should lose an eye and an arm, the better to survive, few in the audience could have failed to think of Mark 9: 43-47 (“And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off …). That curious passage, often misinterpreted, pertains to Argan’s habit of blaming his behavior on the determinism of his supposedly defective body. Jesus implicitly addresses himself to sinners who would impute their spiritual weakness to the weakness of the flesh: their eyes, arms, and legs were irresistibly leering, grasping, and carrying them toward the unholy. In his customary style of provocation, Jesus invites them to lop off the offending organs if they are indeed so powerful, 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, me crever un oeil, afin que l’autre se porte mieux! J’aime bien mieux qu’il ne se porte pas si bien. La belle opération de me rendre borgne et manchot! ” (III, 10). It is the first time he trusts himself to make a choice about his own health. It is only at this point that he is willing to draw a line limiting his inclination to technological manipulation of the natural human body. He could easily have echoed a line from Le Médecin malgré lui where Jacqueline puts an end to Sganarelle’s fiddling with her body by saying, “Je ne veux point faire de mon corps un boutique d’apoticaire” (II, 4). Lucretius had also noticed a tendency in the body to rally itself when threatened by external harm or dismemberment. His third chapter speaks of the reaction of the individual when deprived of various body parts and <?page no="135"?> 135 Le Malade imaginaire and the Paradox of Death their functions and closes by noting that the human body demonstrates an extreme willingness to preserve itself intact. Molière’s devotion to Lucretius and his translation of De rerum natura are the stuff of legend, one of the rare details on the dramatist’s philosophical leaning given in the brief biography that accompanies the 1682 edition of his works by La Grange and Vivot. But for all that admiration, it would be wrong to assume that Molière adopted the words of the Latin philosopher as uncritically as Zola swallowed the deterministic theories of Charles Letourneau or Prosper Lucas. Lucretius’s Epicurean arguments about the capacity of death to deliver mankind from life’s worries may have seconded the elements that Molière found to admire in Montaigne’s sometimes stoical philosophy, but he was aware of their limitations. Didn’t he choose to poke fun sometimes at the dean of all Pyrrhonian philosophy, Gassendi (according to some spectulations, a former schoolmaster of Molière)? In Le Mariage forcé, after all, the dramatist places formal, but impractical, refutations of Aristotelianism in the mouth of the ridiculous pedant Marfurius. What is genuinely surprising is that Molière based Le Malade imaginaire not merely on a Lucretian demonstration of the joys of physical existence and the pain-deadening consolation of death, but also on a wholly different line of Christian thinking that reverts consistently to that legendary doctor of doctors, the apostle Mark. Isn’t Argan’s situation ultimately one that has little to do with physiology and which recalls another of Christ’s teachings: “They that are whole have no need of the physician” (2: 17)? Argan’s cheating wife Béline specifically seeks to make her husband a little less whole, swaddling 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 simultaneously depriving him of his physical senses and his financial good sense. The 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, Molière 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 still reeling from the first disclosures of what would become the Affaire des Poisons. Toinette reinforces this contemporary scandal when she reveals to Angélique that Béline has been operating a similar policy of dismemberment in the household staff, by attempting to alienate the faithful servant from the interests of the family. <?page no="136"?> Chapter Eight 136 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 mystères, jusques ici, où les hommes ne voient goute, et que la nature nous a mis au-devant des yeux des voiles trop épais pour y connaître 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 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 obsessed self. He is no less surprised in the second instance, when Toinette cajoles him into playing dead in order to put the lie to Béralde’s negative assessment of Béline. He has been prepared by the jolt he got from Louison 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: <?page no="137"?> 137 Le Malade imaginaire and the Paradox of Death “Me voilà 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 Molière 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 the charade is so that he will henceforth be able to look 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 haïsse, 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 <?page no="138"?> Chapter Eight 138 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 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 Molière’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’École 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 Molière’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. <?page no="139"?> Conclusion 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 Molière’s skepticism. An obvious point of departure is to repeat the observation, frequently made during the nineteenth-century debates on Molière’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 Éliante immediately 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 Célimène. <?page no="140"?> 140 Conclusion McBride was certainly correct in situating La Mothe Le Vayer, among contemporary philosophers, as perhaps the closest to Molière’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. Molière 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 Molière deserves the formal tag of Pyrrhonian, or even that of libertin érudit. But one of Molière’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 rhetorical demonstration en boîte 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 Molière’s works occupies a subtle but distinct position among the philosophical figures of his time. It is extremely <?page no="141"?> 141 Conclusion 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 Méditations, 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 Molière’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 Molière. Brian Ribeiro has recently raised the question of whether it is psychologically possible for one to be a skeptic. There is ample evidence that this issue concerned Molière 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 Molière 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’École des maris, Béralde in Le Malade imaginaire, or even Philinte. One would have to conclude on the basis of those characters that Molière envisions the Skeptic Way and the peace <?page no="142"?> 142 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 Molière 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, Molière 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. <?page no="143"?> 143 Conclusion The movement 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 Molière, 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, Molière 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. Molière’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 Molière 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 Molière 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 Molière’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 Molière away from a fideist stance. Lest one think that a fideist standpoint would be incompatible with Molière’s Lucretian tendencies, one need only consult for purposes of <?page no="144"?> 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 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: “Furthermore, 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, Molière probably found the most eloquent and best-known statement of the Stoical principle 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? Molière 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 Molière’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. Molière alluded in his Placets <?page no="145"?> 145 Conclusion 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 Molière 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 Molière’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. Molière, through his character Éliante, 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 Célimène or rather attacking the validity of sincerity itself, which condemns all forms of distortion, benign or malignant? Here, Molière 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 Éliante points out, Alceste’s bad choice owes itself not to active lies or distortion on the part of Célimène, 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 Molière both causes the audience to laugh at Sganarelle’s superstition <?page no="146"?> 146 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 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 Molière’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’École 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. Soros’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, Molière 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 philosophy 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 Molière 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 <?page no="147"?> 147 Conclusion way that preceded Brecht or Artaud by centuries. That he should succeed in directing this confrontation with the audience toward rather sophisticated 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 honnête homme of his age, Molière 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, Molière 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. <?page no="149"?> Bibliography Albanese, Ralph, Jr. Molière à l’école républicaine: de la critique universitaire aux manuels scolaires (1870-1914). Saratoga, California: Anma Libri, 1992. Annas, Julia and Jonathan Barnes. The Modes of Scepticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Annas, Julia and Jonathan Barnes, trans. Sextus Empiricus Outlines of Scepticism. Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press, 1994. Apostolidès, Jean-Marie. Le Roi-Machine. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984. Bianchi, Lorenzo. “Sorbière’s Scepticism: Between Naturalism and Absolutism,” in Paganini, The Return of Scepticism, 267-282. Brahami, Frédéric. 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Zoberman, Pierre. “Éloquence d’apparat et représentation institutionnelle: pouvoir du magistrat et autorité del’orateur.” Romanic Review 79 (1988) 262-268. <?page no="152"?> Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de L’univers poétique de La Fontaine se joue sous les bannières de l’illusion et de la tromperie. Si, dans les Fables et les Contes , son approche aux énigmes de la vie est ludique, cela ne l ’e m p ê c h e p a s d ’é v o q u e r d a n s s e s v e r s l ’a m b i a n c e d’incertitude, de méfiance et de scepticisme qui déstabilise son époque. Pour bien comprendre son œuvre, il est essentiel de reconnaître ses racines intellectuelles. Des découvertes scientifiques menacent de bouleverser les idées reçues sur le monde physique et la culture environnante. Une multiplicité de perspectives devient alors possible; La Fontaine incorpore toutes ces notions dans sa propre esthétique. Dans le monde animalier des Fables, tout comme dans le monde humain des Contes, les démarches séductrices du mensonge, de la casuistique et des fausses promesses révèlent un langage qui fonctionne comme leurre. La parole devient elle-même séduction. Transformant les récits d’Ésope, de Marguerite de Navarre, de Rabelais et de Boccace à ses propres fins, La Fontaine crée donc son propre theatrum mundi mettant en scène le sobre spectacle de la vanité humaine, mais filtré à travers le regard amusé du poète. Catherine Grisé Jean de La Fontaine : Tromperies et illusions Biblio 17, Band 187 2010, 251 Seiten, €[D] 58,00/ SFr 90,90 ISBN 978-3-8233-6573-0 060010 Auslieferung Juli 2010.indd 9 26.07.10 10: 35