Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature
pfscl
0343-0758
2941-086X
Narr Verlag Tübingen
61
2010
3772
Is the Ending to your Taste? Dissonant Dénouements and Audience Reception in Molière’s Tartuffe
61
2010
Barbara Woshinsky
pfscl37720025
PFSCL XXXVII, 72 (2010) Is the Ending to your Taste? Dissonant Dénouements and Audience Reception in Molière’s Tartuffe B ARBARA R . W OSHINSKY “Happy ending, nice and tidy; it’s a rule we learned in school”: so goes the ironic maxim from Berthold Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera, in Marc Blitztein’s pointed translation. However, self-consciously problematic endings are not just an innovation of modern times. Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well deliberately plays on its title; and Brecht’s satirical musical adapts its plot, and its implausible resolution, from John Gay’s eighteenth-century Beggar’s Opera. While clashing dénouements may announce themselves less blatantly in French classical literature, they are none the less present. In Le Cid, the “happy ending” of traditional comedy leaves previous issues unresolved; similarly, La Princesse de Clèves refuses to follow the expected “marriage plot” to the consummation desired by most readers. How should we interpret such dissonant dénouements? Does the ending, happy or not, weigh too heavily upon our appreciation of literary works? Concentrating on Molière’s controversial Tartuffe, I will approach these questions from the closelylinked dual perspectives of early modern audience reception and reading beyond the end. I will begin by placing Molière’s comic dénouements in the context of classical dramatic theory and structure. As we know, Aristotle’s alleged treatise on comedy was lost; his views on the topic are mostly deduced from a few remarks interspersed in his analysis of tragedy. 1 Thus, for example, Aristotle states in passing that the poet who adds a happy ending to a tragedy (or in this case, tragicomedy) serves “the wishes of his audiences” that the deadliest enemies “quit the stage as friends at the close and no one 1 More broadly, while Aristotle’s Poetics defined dramatic structure through reference to tragedy, French classical theorists extended his comments to theater in general, including comedy. We generally use the same categories to treat classical comedy today. Barbara R. Woshinsky 26 slays or is slain.” In The Happy End, Zwi Jagendorf infers from Aristotle’s brief remarks that while the tragic ending is determined by a necessity inherent in the plot, the comic dénouement is purely formal and conventional: however you get there, “you must have a happy ending” (Jagendorf, 13). From a structural point of view, the dénouement is particularly important in theater because it arrives at a moment of passage from stage to life - a moment when the dramatic illusion is already wearing thin, when people are looking for their coats or assessing their chances of avoiding a parking garage line if they leave promptly. It is time for the dramatist to wrap things up quickly. Among the tricks used to untie the knot, perhaps the best-known is the Aristotelian convention of recognition or unmasking, which is often simultaneous with reversal of fortune: Oedipus recognizes himself as his father’s murderer, or, more happily, the lowly servant is revealed as the long-lost heir who can now marry his sweetheart. In Molière’s plays, however, the technique of discovery is often subverted or rendered ineffective. As Paul Scott shows, George Dandin enacts a repetition of false discovery, leading to a stalled dénouement. Similarly, Dom Juan’s villainy would have gone unpunished were it not for the otherworldly intervention of the Commander’s statue; and in Molière’s most famous and most problematic play, Tartuffe’s repeated unmaskings make things worse, not better. Thus in act III, scene 5, when Orgon is informed by Damis that Tartuffe has tried to seduce his wife, the blindly besotted Orgon chooses to believe Tartuffe - “le pauvre homme” - rather than his own son, recalling the Tartuffian lessons in inhumanity Orgon had recounted in Act I: the true Christian “comme du fumier regarde tout le monde… De toutes amitiés il détache mon âme ; / Et je verrois mourir frère, enfants, mère et femme,/ Que je m’en soucierois autant que de cela” (I. 274.277-79). In III. 7, Orgon dramatically demonstrates his indifference to family: not content with making Tartuffe his heir, he hands over his property to the imposter then and there: “Je ne veux point avoir d’autre héritier que vous,/ Et je vais de ce pas, en fort bonne manière,/ Vous faire de mon bien donation entière./ Un bon et franc ami, que pour gendre je prends,/ M’est bien plus cher que fils, que femme, et que parents” ( 1176-1180). When the Tartuffe- Elmire tête à tête is reprised before Orgon’s very eyes in IV.6, Orgon is finally convinced of his protégé’s villainy. Tartuffe’s unmasking indeed leads to reversal, but in the unexpected direction of heightened disaster rather than resolution. In response to Orgon’s order: “Il faut, tout sur-le-champ, sortir de la maison,” Tartuffe ripostes: “C’est à vous d’en sortir, vous qui parlez en maître: / La maison m’appartient” (IV.7. 1556-7). In act V, an explosive series of further disclosures deepens the disastrous situation. Breaking with the Aristotelian dramatic structure of exposition, Dissonant Dénouements and Audience Reception in Molière’s Tartuffe 27 development and dénouement by which most new material is presented in the first two acts, Act V witnesses the surprise entrance of four characters, two of whom we have never seen before. All bear unexpected news. First, M. Loyal gives the family one night to vacate the house with all their belongings. Then Valère precipitately arrives to warn Orgon he must flee because his dealings with a supporter of the Fronde have been disclosed to the King. Before Orgon can escape, however, Tartuffe himself appears in his new guise of loyal subject. It is only the last surprise arrival of the Exempt, a member of the King’s personal guard, that reverses catastrophe by imposing a deus ex machina happy ending on the play. Instead of Orgon, Tartuffe himself is carried off to prison. As we know, this ending was late in coming - arrived at six years after the play’s first performance and interdiction. 2 Not having the text of the original version put on at Versailles, we can only imagine it to have been shocking enough to provoke its banning. However, from a detailed resume contained in the Lettre sur l’Imposteur, we do know the content of the second version of the play, performed on August 5, 1657. The situation leading up to the ending is far from happy. Not only is the family dispossessed, but its head, Orgon, is bound for prison, a fate that moves the play over the brink of tragedy, defined by Corneille in a noble register as banishment and loss of estates. What are we to make of these events? According to some, they prove that Tartuffe is not a comedy, but a dark drama. Certainly Gerard Depardieu’s 1984 film version of the play presents it in this light: the staging is completely stark; the characters, dressed in simple white robes, huddle together at the end like refugees awaiting deportation. While this view eliminates some difficulties, it puts others in their place: in an effort to rescue the ending, the central comic scenes with Dorine and the young lovers, or Orgon hidden under the table, are rendered incongruous. I will argue that Tartuffe is indeed a comedy, not a drama. To better understand 2 Critical controversy about the play’s ending starts with the earliest version: scholars alternately claim it to have been a complete three-act play or the first three acts of an incomplete work, as recorded in Grimarest’s register. This latter view is also supported by a letter of October 1665 from the Duc d’Engien to M. de Ricous, asking if Molière had finished the 4 th act of his Imposteur. Other critics, including John Cairncross and Jacques Guicharnaud, argue for a complete first version. According to Robert McBride, “le contenu et la forme du premier Tartuffe ne passionnent plus les moliéristes comme ils passionnaient leur prédecesseurs voici cinquante ans” (2) ; yet a recent book by two historians returns to this question from a somewhat different perspective (François Rey and Jean La Couture, Molière et le roi: L’affaire Tartuffe [2007]). Short of the discovery of a lost manuscript, this fascinating issue remains a matter for speculation. Barbara R. Woshinsky 28 its contradictions, we need to look more closely at the play’s reception in the social and esthetic context of the seventeenth century. Reception theory, or Rezeptionästhetik, is a product of its own time and place, Germany of the late 1960’s. Drawing on Reinhard Kuhn’s theory of discontinuous scientific revolutions, its proponents argue that cultural history, like scientific discovery, displays ruptures which create new paradigms in taste. According to Hans Robert Jauss, “This specific accomplishment [of a literary paradigm]... is the ability to wrest works of art from the past by means of new interpretations...” (quoted in Holub 3). As well as helping us appreciate (goûter) works from our own perspective, reception analysis makes past art more accessible by revealing how it was understood during its time. In Jauss’s terms, each reader, each historical moment has its own “horizon of expectations” which shapes how a work will be received and judged. Jauss continues: “the understanding of the first reader will be sustained and enriched in a chain of receptions from generation to generation” (Holub 59). To determine whether this approach can help clarify the vexed reception of Tartuffe, we will briefly review the play’s performance history as recorded in contemporary documents: notably Molière’s prefaces, his two placets to the King and the Lettre sur la comédie de l’Imposteur. A first version of the play was presented as part of the Fetes de l’Ile enchantée on May 12, 1664, under the description “une comédie nommée Tartuffe, que le sieur Molière avait faite contre les hypocrites” (Jouanny 621). Conscious of its dangerous implications, Molière had read his play to the King in advance, who had approved it. But the “partie” or “cabale dévot” weighed in against the comedy, causing Louis to ban it after its first public performance. However, it is important to note that even after this interdiction, Molière presented several readings or private performances of Tartuffe before the duc d’Orleans, the King, and other nobles of the court. 3 As Jouanny wryly observes, “c’était devenu une mode que d’inviter Molière pour l’entendre lire la pièce interdite ” (624) - an audience reaction to banned art which remains familiar to us, whether through Salman Rushdie’s novels or Marc 3 The play received several private performances in 1664: first for the marquis de Villandry, then on Sept 25 for the King’s brother, Monsieur (according to Brossette, Molière was supported by Monsieur’s first wife, Madame Henriette d’Angleterre [McBride 187, Mongredien Recueil I, 290]). The comedy was also performed “parfaite, entiere et achevee en cinq actes” at the chateau du Raincy, a property belonging to the princesse palatine, on November 29, 1664. In 1665-6, additional private readings took place at the residences of the duchesse de Longueville and the academician Habert among others (see McBride 187, Mongredien I.319). Dissonant Dénouements and Audience Reception in Molière’s Tartuffe 29 Quinn’s meat sculptures. Was Tartuffe really to the taste of contemporary audiences, or merely a succès de scandale? We will return to this question later. In 1667, Molière again tested the waters by publicly staging a revised version of his comedy under the title of L’Imposteur. From the detailed summary published in the Lettre sur l’Imposteur (probably penned by La Mothe Le Vayer,) the last two acts are quite similar to the play we now know as Tartuffe. At its first performance, L’Imposteur earned a good profit; but in the absence of the king, who was away at war, the play was banned by the President of the Paris Parliament. The archbishop of Paris, Monseigneur Péréfixe, who had been instrumental in the interdiction of the first Tartuffe, then imposed a much stricter ban which forbade not only public performance of the play, but reading or even listening to it. In response, Molière sent two actors/ messengers to Lille, where the King was besieging the town. According to their account, they were well received, and told that Louis would look into the matter upon his return. In fact, it took over a year for the play to be performed again privately, and another year before it could be staged in public. When Tartuffe finally opened at the Palais-Royal on February 5, 1669, it earned the highest profits recorded in La Grange’s register: 2,860 pounds, in comparison to 750 for a performance of the proper and intellectual Misanthrope put on a few days before. This time, Tartuffe received 44 consecutive performances, a very long run indeed by seventeenth-century standards. In a larger context, Tartuffe serves as a test case for attempts to discredit theater altogether. As Molière states in the preface to the 1669 version, published at his expense, “… condamner généralement toutes les comédies. […] C’est à quoi l’on s’attache furieusement depuis un temps; et jamais on ne s’était si fort déchaîné contre le théâtre.” In his defense, Molière underlines the pains that he took in the first two acts to portray his imposter as a villain and hypocrite: at his arrival, “il ne tient pas un seul moment l’auditeur en balance; on le connaît d’abord aux marques que je lui donne” (629). Thus, while defending the innocence of his project, Molière also reveals how he deliberately set out to direct the reader’s reception of the main character. If the controversy over the play’s religious content has long been calmed, its dissonant ending still arouses the ire of some readers. According to Robert Jouanny, the editor of the Garnier edition of Molière’s theater, this ending is sans aucune vraisemblance, ... médiocre and full of platitudes (note 849, p. 926). But the play’s seventeenth-century reception suggests that the dénouement was not a main cause of controversy. While the religious implications were fully aired in contemporary journals, pamphlets and letters, I have only been able to find two contemporary critiques of the Barbara R. Woshinsky 30 ending, neither of which really emphasizes the issue of vraisemblance. The first, in the anonymous Critique de l’imposteur, satirizes Molière as a hapless author who is unable to construct an ending according to Aristotelian rules: “Le cinquiéme Acte vient, et nous fait avoüer/ Qu’il en tranche le noeud qu’il n’a sçeu dénoüer” (Mongrédien 175). According to Mongrédien, this is the first critique of the “dénouements-postiches de Molière” later taken up by Voltaire and other neo-classical critics. Boileau’s friendlier objection is based not on the grounds of vraisemblance but rather on the social principle of separation of styles: Boileau would have preferred a more farcelike dénouement, rather than one that “laisse le spectateur dans le tragique” (McBride 93). On the other hand, Le Vayer’s Lettre sur la comédie de l’Imposteur not only presents the play positively, but arguably supplies the most interesting analysis of its ending. He directly confronts the deus ex machina issue, invoking Aristotle to present it not as a defect but a necessity: “il parait que c’est une affaire sans ressource dans les formes; de sorte qu’à moins de quelque Dieu qui y mette la main, c’estadire de la Machine, comme parle Aristote, tout est deploré” (156). Molière’s impulsion to expose hypocrisy leads him to create a monster neither he nor his characters can control: in the words of one of my undergraduate students, “il s’ecrit dans un coin.” Only the deus ex machina ending allows Molière to get out of the impasse in which he has trapped himself. Further, Le Vayer’s defense indissolubly combines esthetic and moral arguments: he praises the device of royal intervention because it shows the discernment of the King. Le Vayer wraps the king’s perceptiveness and the play’s ending in the same set of superlatives : “... on peut dire que dans ce dénouëment il s’est surpassé luy-mesme, n’y ayant rien de plus grand de plus magnifique et de plus merveilleux, et cependant rien de plus naturel, de plus heureux et de plus juste. ...” (156). The ending is vraisemblable because it is based on the magnificent, marvelous and natural “plenitude de lumiere” of the king; and the superlatives addressed to Louis in both play and pamphlet do not offend propriety (bienséance) because it is a priori impossible to praise the king too much. As McBride points out, Le Vayer’s thesis echoes the argument of a work he wrote as the king’s tutor, De L’instruction de Mgr le Dauphin. In the section entitled « De la justice, » we read : “les Princes ne participant en rien tant de cette Divinité qu’ils nous représentent ici bas, qu’en l’exercise de la Justice par la distribution des peines et des recompenses” (De L’instruction de Mgr le Dauphin, De la justice I [1 e partie] vol. 1 32. In Œuvres de Francois de La Mothe Le Vayer, conseiller d’Etat ordinaire. [Dresde : M. Groell, 1756-59]. McBride 190.) Thus, the ending of Tartuffe is assimilated to the traditional justice-rendering role of kings which requires a near-divine Dissonant Dénouements and Audience Reception in Molière’s Tartuffe 31 clairvoyance. In his second placet to the King, Molière also foreshadows the play’s dénouement: “où trouver, Sire, une protection qu’au lieu où je la viens chercher? Et qui puis-je solliciter contre l’autorité de la puissance qui m’accable, que la source de la puissance et de l’autorité, que le juste dispensateur des ordres absolus, que le souverain juge et le maître de toutes choses? ” (Théâtre complet 634). These flattering words are typical of those who write to kings; but they also parallel the situation of Orgon who is only rescued by the « souverain juge » who can tell truth from falsehood. Thus, seventeenth-century readers were familiar with the claim for royal clairvoyance across diverse discourses. 4 In tentative conclusion to this complex discussion, like the order of Pascal’s Pensées, the “problem” of Tartuffe’s dissonant dénouement is perhaps more of a problem, or a different kind of problem, for modern readers and critics than it was for its contemporary audience. In modern English parlance, the purpose of a dissonant element in a work is to “make us think; ” but Tartuffe’s ending - apparently sanctioned by his audience - licenses them not to think - rather, to accept a solution sanctioned by their ideological framework, which allows them to enjoy a long-beleaguered work. In other words, Tartuffe’s original audience may have been reading - or seeing - beyond the lines of what we now define as French classical esthetics. Their “horizon of expectations,” in Jauss’s term, extended beyond the work itself to encompass the power of the monarchy as well as the influence of the dévots. Does this mean that we must approach classical literature with seventeenth-century minds and eyes, and stop inviting students to question the ending of Tartuffe? Certainly not; but it is sometimes useful and enlightening to develop a bifocal vision. Works Cited Comédies et pamphlets sur Molière. Ed. Georges Mongredien. Paris: Nizet, 1986. Hokenson, Jan. The Idea of Comedy: History, Theory, Critique. Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984. Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Methuen, 1984. Jagendorf, Zvi. The Happy End of Comedy: Johnson, Molière and Shakespeare. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984. McBride, Robert. Molière et son premier Tartuffe: Genèse d’une pièce à scandale. Durham: University of Durham, 2005. Durham Modern Languages Series. Molière. Théâtre complet. Ed. Robert Jouanny. Paris: Garnier, 1962. v. II. 4 Corneille’s dénouements in Le Cid and Cinna also capitalize on this traditional role of the King. Barbara R. Woshinsky 32 Mongredien, Georges. Molière. Recueil des textes et des documents du XVII e siecle. 2 vols. Paris : CNRS, 1973. Rey, François and Jean LaCouture. Molière et le roi: l’affaire Tartuffe. Paris : Seuil, 2007.
