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Dom Juan and the Manifest God: Molière's Antitragic Hero

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Francis L. Lawrence
Francis L. Lawrence*
Affiliation:
Newcomb College, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana
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Abstract

Molière’s Dom Juan goes beyond surface travesty of the legend to develop its profound comic sense. The hero’s failures in action are farcical; his failures in consciousness are antitragic. Dom Juan limits himself to the sensual perceptions of the present moment, thus becoming incapable of remorse or dread. The obvious presence and the repeated warnings of Divine Providence he ignores or treats with contempt. His willful continuation of a life of error, carried to the point of offering God as a scapegoat for his crimes, cuts him off from his virtuous ancestry and from the possibility of conversion. A series of miracles confirms his rejection of anagnorisis. The catastrophe of Dom Juan’s damnation includes the entire comic vision of the work in a mixture of the burlesque and the grotesque.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 1 , January 1978 , pp. 86 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 Critics agree that the legend was given its form and popular impetus by a Spanish monk, Gabriel Téllez, better known as Tirso de Molina, whose El Bwlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra appeared in print in 1630. For a list of some treatments of the legend, consult Armand E. Singer, A Bibliography of the Don Juan Theme: Versions and Criticism, West Virginia University Bulletin, 54th Ser. (April 1954), and Everett W. Hesse, “Catâlogo bibliogrâfico de Tirso de Molina (1648–1948), incluyendo una secciôn sobre la influen-cia del tema de Don Juan,” Estudios, 5 (1949), 781–889. For an excellent study of the permutations of the theme, see Leo Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1959). A good essay contrasting the varied embodiments of the legend prefaces The Theatre of Don Juan: A Collection of Plays and Views, ed. with a commentary by Oscar Mandel (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1963).

2 E. T. A. Hoffmanns scimtliche Werke (Munich: Georg Miiller, 1912), I, 87–103; Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 28th ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), pp. 97–106.

3 The gay seducer was the interpretation favored by several successive actors when Molière's original text was finally played again in 1841, after a lapse of a century and a half. From 1677 to 1841, it had appeared only in the versified adaptation of Thomas Corneille. Maurice Descotes sketches the history of the French theatrical presentations of Doin Juan in his Les Grands Rôles du théâtre de Molière (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960), pp. 59–89, which includes an account of the great Jouvet's 1948 portrayal of the hero as tragic rebel (pp. 74–77). In “The Humanity of Molière's Dom Juan,” PMLA, 68 (1953), 509–34, James Doolittle celebrates a lucid rebel who lives in order to realize his individual freedom in defiance of religious and social conventions. I find it difficult to recognize the fully conscious hero of Camus and Doolittle in Molière's Dom Juan, who is incapable of visualizing the old age and death that Camus' hero awaits in grim certainty.

4 For the opinions of those upset by Molière's impiety see Prince de Conti, Sentiments des Pères de l'Eglise sur la comédie et les spectacles, and B. A. Sieur de Rochemont, Observations sur une comédie de Molière intitulée Le Festin de pierre, rpt. in Œuvres de Molière, ed. Eugène Despois and Paul Mesnard (Paris: Hachette, 1880), v, 217–32. All quotations from Dom Juan are taken from this edition, and act and scene references are incorporated in the text. For the romantics' views see S0ren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian M. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1944), i, 89–93, and Lorenzi de Bradi, Don Juan, la légende et l'histoire (Paris: Librairie de France, 1930), pp. 47–50.

5 The main thrust of my study is a contrast between Dom Juan and tragic conventions. For a well-drawn comparison of the plot and hero of Molière's play to the romantic mythos, as it is defined by Northrop Frye, see Harold Knutson, Molière: An Archetypal Approach (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 167–72.

6 The Don Juan Legend, trans. David G. Winter (“Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 87–88.

7 Lionel Gossman, Men and Masks: A Study of Molière (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), pp. 42–44; Alvin Eustis, Molière as Ironic Contempla-tor (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), pp. 162–63; Marcel Gutwirth, Molière ou l'invention comique (Paris: Minard, 1966), pp. 186–89; and Francis L. Lawrence, “The Ironie Commentator in Molière's Dom Juan” Studi Francesi, 12 (1968), p. 204. For a study of Dom Juan as a parody of the legendary hero and a burlesque of the seventeenth-century concept of authentic heroism, see Joann Kling, “Mock Heroism in Molière” (Diss. Tulane Univ. 1975), pp. 102–24.

8 It is by this repetitive process that Molière's characters continually manifest themselves in time, according to Georges Poulet, Etudes sur le temps humain (Paris: Pion, 1950), pp. 85–86. The present study is obviously much indebted to Poulet's insights on the interior experience of time in seventeenth-century French drama.

9 Poulet (p. 106) observes that the belief that he can free himself from the past is the delusion of Créon in Racine's Thébaide. Dom Juan's illusion, which includes a willful disregard of the future, is even more comprehensive and powerful than Créon's. Although his conclusions are different from mine, James Doolittle also observes that “accomplishment is less significant than function” for Dom Juan (pp. 531–32).

10 As Jacques Guicharnaud points out, Dom Juan's blind enslavement to the satisfaction of his appetite is similar to, but greater than, the monomania of Molière's other comic heroes (Molière, une aventure théâtrale [Paris: Gallimard, 1963], pp. 199–200).

11 See Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu caché (Paris: Gallimard, 1955).

12 The theme runs from the Old Testament through the New Testament and is reiterated in Pascal: Isa. vi.9; Matt. xiii. 14; Mark iv.12; Luke viii.10; John xii.40; Acts xxviii.26; Rom. xi.8; Pascal, Pensées et opuscules, ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Hachette, 1917), No. 573.

13 According to Jules Brody, the fact that it is God who must ultimately defeat Dom Juan proves the power of Dom Juan and the corruption of the world: “Dom Juan and Le Misanthrope, or the Esthetics of Individualism in Molière,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 567–68.

14 Etudes sur le temps humain (Paris: Pion, 1950), p. 117.

15 Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. David Grene, in Greek Tragedies, Vol. I (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), vv.1116–17. I have relied on Oedipus as a prototypal tragic hero. All quotations in English are from this classic, and the verse references are made in the text.

16 Quotations are taken from Théâtre complet, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Gamier, 1960).

17 Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1963), pp. 48–50. 18 Robert J. Nelson, “The Unreconstructed Heroes of Molière,” Tulane Drama Review, 4 (1960), 14–37.

19 Cf. Dom Juan's final speech to the last exit of Arnolphe in L'Ecole des femmes v.ix:

Arnolphe, s'en allant tout transporté, et ne pouvant
parler. Oh!
Oronte
D'où vient qu'il s'enfuit sans rien dire?

The earlier play is, as Judd Hubert has ably demonstrated, a burlesque tragedy, complete with elaborate indications of suffering, despair, guilt, knowledge, and the malign influence of destiny (The Comedy of Intellect [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press; London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962], pp. 62–85). Arnolphe's mental torment is exaggerated to the point of being inexpressible; Dom Juan's physical pain is couched in elegant metaphor. The contrast epitomizes the difference between the trivialization of tragic conventions for parody in one play and the contradiction of tragic conventions for high comedy in the other.

20 Lettre sur la comédie de L'Imposteur, Œuvres de Molière, iv, 562. This contemporary anonymous defense of Tartuffe is thought to have been written by Donneau de Visé with Molière's approval and, probably, under his direction. See W. G. Moore, “Molière's Theory of Comedy,” L'Esprit Créateur, 6 (1966), 137—44.