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Molière's Amphitryon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Lionel Gossman
Lionel Gossman*
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore 18, Md.
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Extract

Lui-(. . . ) Il n'y a dans tout un royaume qu'un homme qui marche, c'est le souverain; tout le reste prend des positions.

Moi.-Le souverain? Encore y a-t-il quelque chose a dire. Et croyez-vous qu'il ne se trouve pas, de temps en temps, a cote de lui, un petit pied, un petit chignon, un petit nez qui lui fasse faire un peu de la pantomime? Quiconque a besoin d'un autre est indigent et prend une position.

Diderot, Le N even de Rameau

As a foreword to Amphitryon Molière might have selected the famous passage from Descartes's first Méditation: “Je supposerai donc qu'il y a non point un vrai Dieu, qui est la souveraine source de vérité, mais un certain mauvais génie, non moins rusé et trompeur que puissant, qui a employé toute son industrie à me tromper” (Œuvres et Lettres, Pléiade, p. 272). The play is in large measure a working out of this hypothesis. Examination of the dramatic and symbolic functions of Jupiter reveals, however, that the wicked genius of Amphitryon is no spirit, but reason itself. Jupiter is not a hidden puppet-master, but an active participant in human affairs, seeking human ends and not just the pleasure of deluding people. His descent into the world of ordinary mortals provides the occasion for the dramatic action of the comedy: a world which has been well and securely ordered until then suddenly cracks open. Everything in it becomes potential illusion; nothing can be relied on any more; a man is no longer even sure if he is himself or what he is. Jupiter is a liberating force, dramatically and symbolically. His presence dissolves the world of conventional realities and reveals a new world of possibilities, but these possibilities never achieve substance or consistency, and in the end there is no brave new world, only the old one with all its patterns destroyed. The colorful kingdom of fantasy is suddenly abandoned at the end of the play and we find ourselves back in the world of everyday empirical reality. Jupiter, the brilliant magician, turns out to be an ordinary grand seigneur. All that has happened after all is that a false order has been exposed, vanquished, and replaced by blatant disorder. The rule of Amphitryon has yielded to the rule of Jupiter. But whereas Amphitryon ruled in the firm conviction that the order of things, which happened to suit him very well, was a necessary and just order, Jupiter is without illusions. There is no rational order, no just rule for him. There is only the right of the strongest. Jupiter's justification of his own violence at the end of the play is an obvious and deliberate piece of irony on the part of the author.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , June 1963 , pp. 201 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

1 The me is a transcendent object of consciousness because it is the ideal unity and sum of all my states of consciousness. The I is a transcendental subject because it is the ideal unity and source of all my acts of consciousness. The transcendental subject for Kant determines the possibility of experience and has a proper place within the limits of the Kantian system. For Descartes, however, it was a reality.

2 It would be understandable if someone objected that Gassendi's criticism of Descartes has been given an anachronistically modern twist here. Gassendi could not and did not formulate his objections to his great contemporary in terms of twentieth-century philosophy. What concerns us, however, is not so much the terms Gassendi used, or the philosophical position from which he criticized Descartes, or even the philosophical validity of his criticism, as the historical import of his criticism. Why did Gassendi, like Hobbes, adopt a negative attitude to certain essential aspects of Cartesianism? Surely because he perceived the insufficiency of Descartes's idealism, and, in the instance we are discussing, of his disincarnated transcendental ego. Most probably it was for the same reason that he protested vigorously and obstinately against even a provisional and methodological rejection of all sense experience and objected that the hypothesis of the malus genius was unnecessary and unreasonable. The materialism of Hobbes and Gassendi is the—equally inadequate—counterpart of Descartes's idealism. It is justified not in itself, but by its critical relation to this idealism, by its refusal to sacrifice matter, particular existence or particular experience, to a totally abstract and disincarnated spiritualism. A case in some ways similar to Gassendi's attack on Descartes is Goethe's attack on New-tonianism a century and a half later. Goethe's criticism of Newton is virtually unintelligible without a historical perspective capable of embracing a larger area than Goethe's own time or the actual reasoning and arguments he employed against Newton (see Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind, Cambridge, 1952).

3 The use of allegory as an artistic device seems to be closely related to general acceptance of a philosophy of essences. Without such a philosophy allegory loses all its inner meaning and acquires a purely decorative function. The history of allegory from the Middle Ages down to the eighteenth century seems to confirm this.

4 Cf. a pertinent comment by Sartre in his Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York, 1957), p. 59: “Reflection ‘poisons’ desire. On the unreflected level I bring Peter help because Peter is ‘having to be helped.’ But if my state is suddenly transformed into a reflected state, then I am watching myself act, in the sense in which one says of someone that he listens to himself talk. It is no longer Peter who attracts me, it is my helpful consciousness which appears to me as having to be perpetuated. Even if I only think that I must pursue my action because ‘that is good,’ the good qualifies my conduct, my pity, etc. The psychology of La Rochefoucauld has its place. And yet this psychology is not true: it is not my fault if my reflective life poisons ‘by its very essence’ my spontaneous life. Before being ‘poisoned’ my desires were pure. It is the point of view that I have taken toward them which has poisoned them. The psychology of La Rochefoucauld is true only for particular emotions which have their origin in reflective life, which are given first as my emotions, instead of first transcending themselves toward an object.”

5 This reference to the Gods is itself profoundly ironical and underlines the problematic nature of Alcmène's position. She grounds the absoluteness and essentiality of her relation with her husband-lover in a transcendence, but this transcendence turns out to be no good and loving God; it is, on the contrary, a fraudulent malus genius.