[Gossman is Scottish essayist and educator. In the following excerpt, he discusses "the comic hero's relation to the world" in Molière's plays, focusing on the themes of social class and the rejection of society.]

We tend, occasionally, to think that some of Molière's comedies are gay and light-hearted, whereas others are more somber and ambiguous. A Jourdain or a Magdelon presents audiences with no problems, but an Alceste leaves them perplexed and uncertain. Jourdain and Magdelon are figures of unalloyed fun, according to this view, pure fools as anyone can easily discern; Alceste, on the other hand, does not seem very funny and to some he even seems almost tragic. Oddly enough, Molière's contemporaries do not seem to have entertained these uncertainties. We hear, of course, of opposition to Dom Juan and to Tartuffe, but we know that there was also opposition to Les Précieuses ridicules and to L'Ecole des femmes. Most people appear to have laughed at all the comedies. As for ambiguity, there is, as we shall see, a good deal of it in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. A very sentimental reader might find Monsieur Jourdain almost as pathetic and as misunderstood as Alceste. Romantic interpretations of Le Misanthrope can easily be extended to all the plays. While it must be recognized that there is a difference between two types of comedy in Molière, between the comedies of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme type and the comedies of the Misanthrope type, if we may make a loose initial distinction, this difference cannot be perfunctorily attributed to the fact that one group is funnier than the other or less mysterious and ambiguous. We should rather try to elucidate it by examining the more or less complex form of the comic hero's relation to the world.

The final judge and the transcendence to which the tragic hero of Racine looks for the ground of his being and the value of his existence is God. The comic hero, on the other hand, looks to others to give him his value and his being. The sign of recognition that Phèdre expects from God, the Jourdains, the Cathoses, and the Alcestes expect from the world. Whereas one group of Molière's characters make no attempt to conceal their idolatry, however, another group of characters affect to despise the idols whose recognition they desire, postulating instead their own superiority and setting themselves up as idols for others to worship.

With the notable exceptions of Dom Juan and Jupiter, the majority of Molière's best known characters are bourgeois of one degree or another. Within this bourgeoisie it is nevertheless possible to distinguish an upper and a lower range. While Alceste obviously belongs to a social class very close to the nobility, perhaps even to a long established family of noblesse de robe, Jourdain is a very ordinary, if rather well-off, merchant, the son of a draper. Corresponding to this hierarchy of ranks, there is the hierarchy of Paris and the provinces. While it is not possible, as it would doubtless be in the work of later writers like Balzac or Stendhal, to identify absolutely attitudes and modes of being in Molière with social class, it is broadly speaking true to say that the "open" comic heroes, those who recognize their models and superiors without shame, are characters of the lower bourgeoisie and the provinces. The "closed" comic heroes, those whose resentment of their idols, precisely for being idols, leads them to deny their recognition of them, belong rather to the upper bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, to those groups that are close to social equality or who have social equality with their idols. The vanities and illusions of the first group, being openly avowed, have a quality of naïvety that makes comedies like Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme or Les Précieuses ridicules hilariously funny. It is not hard for us to discern and transcend the folly of Jourdain. The vanities and illusions of the second group are less easily discerned as comic, for they resemble those we ourselves conceal, those of "in-groups," courtiers, artists, professional people—"tous ces métiers dont le principal instrument est l'opinion que l'on a de soi-même, et dont la matière première est l'opinion que les autres out de vous," as Valéry describes them.

In the first case the desire to be distinguished is a desire to be distinguished from one group by being recognized as a member of a superior group, the superiority of which the aspirant himself necessarily recognizes. "Mon Dieu! ma chère," exclaims Cathos, "que ton père a la forme enfoncée dans la matière! que son intelligence est épaisse, et qu'il fait sombre dans son âme!" "Que veux-tu, machère," Cathos answers contritely. "J'en suis en confusion pour lui. J'ai peine à me persuader que je puisse véritablement être sa fille, et je crois que quelque illustre aventure, un jour, me viendra développer une naissance plus illustre" (Précieuses, sc. 5). "Lorsque je hante la noblesse, je fais paroître mon jugement," says Jourdain to his wife, "et cela est plus beau que de hanter votre bourgeoisie" (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, III, 3). A little later he accuses his good wife of having "les sentiments d'un petit esprit, de vouloir demeurer toujours dans la bassesse" (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, III, 12). There is nothing secret about the reverence these characters have for their idols, and they seek quite openly to elicit from their silent or masked or absent divinity the sign of recognition that for them is a sign of salvation. "Pour moi," says Mascarille ironically, "je tiens que hors de Paris, il n'y a point de salut pour les honnêtes gens." "C'est une vérité incontestable," answers Cathos (Précieuses, sc. 9). "Est ce que les gens de qualité apprennent aussi la musique?" asks Jourdain. "Oui, Monsieur," says the Maître de Musique. "Je l'apprendrai donc," Jourdain rejoins without hesitation (Bourgeoise Gentilhomme, I, 2).

More complex and less immediately comic in their desire to achieve distinction are those who will not share it with anybody, who refuse the models that everyone else accepts and who, far from recognizing their idols, go to great lengths to conceal their mediation by others. They make a point of loudly scorning the ways of the world, those very ways that a Jourdain and a Cathos revere so unquestioningly. Madame Pernelle in Tartuffe refuses the courtesies of her daughter-in-law: "Ce sont (…) façons dont je n'ai pas besoin" (I, 1, 4). Harpagon likewise condemns the manners of the world. He reproaches his son with the very imitation that is the butt of Molière's satire in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme: "Je vous l'ai dit cent fois, mon fils, toutes vos manières me déplaisent fort: vous donnez furieusement dans le marquis (…) Je voudrois bien savoir, sans parler du reste, à quoi servent tous ces rubans dont vous voilà lardé depuis les pieds jusqu'à la tête, et si une demi-douzaine d'aiguillettes ne suffit pas pour attacher un haut-de-chausses? II est bien nécessaire d'employer de l'argent à des perruques, lorsque l'on peut porter des cheveux de son cru, qui ne coûtent rien" (L'Avare, I, 4). Arnolphe has his own taste in women and it is not that of everyone else:

Moi, j'irois me charger d'une spirituelle
Qui ne parleroit rien que cercle et que ruelle,
Qui de prose et de vers ferait de doux écrits,
Et que visiteroient marquis et beaux esprits!
(L'Ecole des femmes, I, 1, 87-90)

Sganarelle, like Harpagon, refuses the fashions of his contemporaries. His brother, he complains, would have him ape the manners of the "jeunes muguets." But he will have none of

(…) ces petits chapeaux
Qui laissent éventer leurs débiles cerveaux,
Et de ces blonds cheveux, de qui la vaste enflure
Des visages humains offusque la figure.
De ces petits pourpoints sous les bras se perdants,
Et de ces grands collets, jusqu'au nombril pendants.
De ces manches qu'à table on voit tâter les sauces,
Et de ces cotillons appelés hauts-de-chausses.
De ces souliers mignons, de rubans revêtus,
Qui vous font ressembler à des pigeons pattus … etc., etc.
(L'Ecole des maris I, 1, 25-34)

No, Sganarelle will follow his own fashion in complete indifference to everyone else—"Et qui me trouve mal, n'a qu'à fermer les yeux" (ibid., 74).

The rejection of society is not, clearly, confined to articles of clothing and a few superficial customs. It is the entire way of life of everybody else that these characters ostensibly reject. People enjoy company, entertainment, balls, receptions, conversations? Madame Pernelle will have none of them. On the contrary she will make a virtue of solitude, abstention, and even brusqueness. Money is spent on carriages, fine clothes, amusements? Harpagon will not spend it at all. Instead he will treasure and revere it for itself. Everybody wants an entertaining, witty, and sociable wife? Arnolphe and Sganarelle will choose a "bête," and they will value precisely that in her which nobody else seems to admire, her ignorance and simplicity. The world is full of flattery and soft with compromise? Alceste will be brusque, frank, and scrupulously uncompromising. Society observes certain codes of behavior, of decency, and of propriety? Dom Juan will flout them and will be blatantly indecent and immoral. These characters—Harpagon, Arnolphe, Sganarelle, Alceste, Dom Juan, Madame Pernelle, Orgon—refuse to recognize that they are mediated by others; the almost childlike guilelessness of Jourdain's fascination with the nobility gives way in them to a subtle concealment by the character of his true desires, and of their source. Far from recognizing their mediators, these characters pretend they have none. Several of them appear to be in thrall to idols; Orgon and Madame Pernelle to Tartuffe, Philaminte and her daughter to their Trissotin, Harpagon to his "cassette." The last example reveals these idolatries for what they are, however. As we pointed out in our chapter on Tartuffe, Orgon is bent on using Tartuffe as much as Tartuffe is bent on using him. The femmes savantes, like the dévot, see in their idols an instrument for asserting their superiority to the world around them, and it is on this world that their eyes are really turned. "Nul n'aura de l'esprit hors nous et nos amis" declares Armande: "Nous chercherons partout à trouver à redire, / Et ne verrons que nous qui sache bien écrire". Likewise Orgon sets himself up against society as the only true Christian in it. The function of Tartuffe is to guarantee Orgon's superiority to everybody else. In the case of Harpagon the idolatry of the instrument has reached its climax in total alienation and fetishism. In all three plays the idol is used to assert an opposition to society, a distinction from it and a superiority to it. Philaminte and her daughters do not really care about science, Orgon and his mother do not really care about religion (both texts illustrate this amply), and Harpagon does not really care about wealth—on the contrary, his wealth is used to keep him poor. What these characters want above all is to be distinguished, but they refuse to adopt the usual method of social advancement and privilege, since this method offers only a relative superiority to others, whereas the superiority they desire is absolute. They are comic not only because there is a constant contradiction between what they are and what they affect to be, but because their attempt to transcend all social superiorities and to reach an absolute superiority misfires. La Cour et la ville will not be convinced that stringent devoutness or erudition are more desirable than social advantage and worldly success. They are no more envious of the spiritual insights of Orgon and the telescopes of Philaminte than they are of Harpagon's beloved "cassette." Philaminte, Orgon, and Harpagon do not see this of course. Harpagon imagines that everyone is after his cassette, that there is a vast plot to deprive him of this mark of his superiority. Likewise Orgon imagines that his whole family is plotting to remove Tartuffe out of jealousy. Arnolphe and Sganarelle, convinced that the eyes of the entire universe are upon them and that everybody desires to corrupt the virtuous young persons, in the possession of whom they find the mark of their superiority, shut them up and guard them as jealously as Harpagon guards his cassette. While choosing to be different from everybody else, while turning away from what they castigate as the vain ambitions of the world in order to devote themselves to "authentic" values, these characters nevertheless have to believe that they are envied by everybody else. Thus while Orgon raves that the world in its corruption does not appreciate the saintliness of his Tartuffe, he also imagines that everyone is jealous of his special relation with Tartuffe; while Arnolphe prefers une bête, who will interest no one, to an elegant society girl who would be the object of everybody's attention, he still imagines that the entire universe is pursuing his Agnès.

Underlying the apparent indifference of the Arnolphes and the Orgons there is in reality the same fascination with others that we find among the Jourdains or the Cathoses. Orgon could after all practice his devotions quietly, without ostentation. Arnolphe and Sganarelle could avoid being made cuckold by remaining bachelors. But they never entertain this notion. The true object of their craving is not a faithful wife—or in Orgon's case salvation through Christ—but the recognition by others of their superiority. The goals which they choose to pursue are not after all pursued for themselves, nor do they themselves select them as they imagine they do. They are determined for them by their very opposition to society. Arnolphe and Sganarelle are not content to do without a wife; on the contrary; but she must be the opposite of all other wives. Orgon is not content to withdraw inwardly from public life; on the contrary, he continues to live a remarkably public life, but one which is the opposite of the life everyone else leads. Harpagon is not content to renounce material riches; he continues to pursue them but he gives them a meaning and a value absolutely opposed to the meaning and value they have for everyone else. All the posing of the Orgons and the Arnolphes and the Harpagons—though in this last instance it must be admitted that the pose has become truly the only reality of the man; Harpagon has so completely alienated himself that he can even run after his own body (cf. L'Avare, IV, 7)—cannot conceal that they are as dependent on others and as mediated by them, whatever claims to independence they may make, as simple fools like Jourdain and Cathos or Magdelon. Their basic folly is the same and all their cleverness is used not to eradicate it, but to disguise it from themselves and others. This becomes particularly clear in La Comtesse d'Escarbagnas. At the end of this play the Countess, having failed to distinguish herself in her little provincial society by aping the noble ladies of the Court, decides to distinguish herself by inverting this imitation, by seeming to reject it in favor of a superiority all her own. She marries Monsieur Tibaudier just to prove her absolute superiority to everyone. "Oui, Monsieur Tibaudier," she says, "Je vous épouse pour faire enrager tout le monde" (sc. 9). Unable to attract the gaze of the world by acting with it, the Countess resolves in desperation to attract the attention she craves by acting against it. The world and not Monsieur Tibaudier remains, however, the object of her fascination.

In fact, of course, the world is not the least bit enragé. The play closes with the Viscount's ironical: "Souffrez, Madame, qu'en enrageant, nous puissions voir ici le reste du spectacle" (italics added). The countess has failed absolutely to fix the world's attention on herself in the way she wanted. On the contrary, it has watched her as it would watch a comedy—which the Countess' behavior in fact is—and it is now off to watch another comedy, another stage play. The truth is that it is not the comic heroes who are indifferent to the world, it is the world that is indifferent to them. It is not they who fascinate the world; they are fascinated by it.

The world, indeed, has to be forced by the hero to give him its attention. It is only when Harpagon tries to impose the rules of his crazy universe on others that they begin to be seriously concerned with him. It is only because Philaminte, Armande, and Bélise are not content to be "blue-stockings" quietly on their own, but insist on organizing the lives of Chrysale and Henriette around their own obsessions that father and daughter find themselves forced to take note of them. If Arnolphe had not forcibly embroiled Agnès in his plans, Horace and everyone else would simply have regarded him as an eccentric misogynist and would not have given him a second thought. This seemingly inevitably imposition of themselves on others is a revealing characteristic of the comic heroes of Molière. It confirms that their professed indifference to others is a sham. Far from seeking to live the good life himself, Alceste is concerned only to impress on others that they are not living it and that they do not have his superior moral vision…. [The] hero's withdrawal to his desert at the end of the play is itself a spectacular gesture, and it is for this reason one that will constantly have to be renewed and revived. It is by no means final. Dom Juan is not simply indifferent to the world: he has to arouse its wrath—and thereby its attention—by perpetually flouting its rules, seducing its virgins and wives, blaspheming against its God. The sadism of Orgon has already been alluded to; it is in no way exceptional in the work of Molière. Orgon's relation to Mariane has its counterpart in the relation of Harpagon to Elise or Cléante, of Argan to Angélique or little Louison, of Monsieur Jourdain to Lucile.

In the comedies of Molière the hero's transcendence is the world of others. The silence of this world is intolerable to him, but he is obliged to force it to speak and recognize his existence. In the early tragedies of Racine, as we have already suggested, the hero's transcendence is also the world of others and he too has to resort to violence in order to have himself recognized. It is not surprising, therefore, that sadism is a characteristic shared by comic and tragic heroes alike. This parallel of the early Racinian heroes and of the comic heroes of Molière can be pursued in some detail.

Almost all Molière's comedies oppose ruse to ruse, hypocrisy to hypocrisy, violence to violence: how are we to choose between Jupiter and Amphitryon, Alceste and the two marquis. Orgon and Tartuffe, Dandin and Angélique, Argan and Béline? Likewise how are we to choose between Pyrrhus and Hermione or between Hermione and Oreste or between Nero and Agrippine? That salvation and purity are impossible in the world forms part of the tragic vision of Racine. In Molière also participation involves compromise. In a world in which fathers brutalize their children, mothers are jealous of their sons, guardians stultify their wards, no one who participates can be innocent. The only weapon against violence and blackmail is ruse and hypocrisy. "La sincérité souffre un peu au métier que je fais," Valère admits; "mais quand on a besoin des hommes il faut bien s'ajuster à eux; et puisqu'on ne saurait les gagner que par là, ce n'est pas la faute de ceux qui flattent mais de ceux qui veulent être flattés" (L'Avare, I, 1). Lamenting the fact that sons have to get into debt on account of "la maudite avarice des pères," Cléante protests: "et on s'étonne après cela que les fils souhaitent qu'ils meurent" (L'Avare, II, 1). Covielle in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme mocks his master for the naïve honesty of his dealings with Jourdain: "Ne voyezvous pas qu'il est fou? et vous coûtoit-il quelque chose de vous accommoder à ses chimères?". In a world in which the only law is willfulness and the only authority is tyranny, no one can remain pure without becoming a victim. Elmire, Horace, and Valère do not seek out ruse and hypocrisy, but they cannot escape them either, for these are the instruments of survival. Even little Louison in Le Malade Imaginaire has to learn how to deal with her father's tyranny and violence by cunning and deceit. Those who remain pure and innocent risk becoming victims, like Mariane in Tartuffe or Angélique in Le Malade Imaginaire, and if they escape this fate it is only because someone more energetic and less scrupulous has intervened in their behalf. Sometimes they do indeed become victims, as Alcmène does, and sometimes they preserve their innocence through an enigmatic absence or abnegation of desire which places them outside the world, like Eliante in Le Misanthrope or Elvire in Dom Juan, after her conversion. These characters are as peripheral in Molière's comedies as Racine's Junie, whom Goldmann adjudges the sole tragic character in Britannicus. Goldmann saw—rightly it seems to me—that the innocent stratagème by which Andromaque hoped to foil Pyrrhus' attempt at blackmail seriously compromises her tragic stature. A similar problem was encountered by Molière in L'Ecole des femmes, where Agnès has to be at the same time desiring, active, and innocent. If we look closely at the text, we find that Agnès never consciously disobeys Arnolphe. Both her desire for Horace and her active participation in the plot against Arnolphe are conceived entirely on the level of instinct. Only in this way could Molière preserve the innocence of his heroine, while at the same time allowing her to act in pursuit of her own desires.

In both Molière's comedies and Racine's early tragedies the main characters are moved primarily by their desire to force the world to recognize them. In both, the instruments of this desire are imposture and sadism. In both, the heroes fail to make the world break its silence. Racine's characters find themselves refused in the very suffering they inflict on those whose recognition they demand. The comic hero's victims defend themselves against his tyranny by ruse and hypocrisy, and he thereby becomes for them not the transcendent subject of his intention but an object to be tricked and manipulated. The mock-recognition of Jourdain at the end of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme or of Argan at the end of Le Malade Imaginaire has its counterpart in the mock recognition of Oreste by Hermione in Andromaque or in the scenes between Nero and Agrippine in Britannicus. If we look up the scale in Andromaque from Oreste to Andromaque herself we find that for every character the character above is a transcendent subject who is adored and yet at the same time resented precisely on account of this transcendence, which negates the transcendence that the idolator desires and claims for himself. If we look down the scale, we discover that for every character the character below is an object to be manipulated and used. The refusal of the "upper" character to recognize the "lower" one confirms the "lower" character in his adoration and at the same time intensifies his desire to reverse the positions. The same pattern is found in the comedies of Molière, though in less schematic form. The verbal battles that make up almost the whole of Andromaque have their counterpart in innumerable scenes in Molière's comedies.

If we examine some of the structural elements of Andromaque and Britannicus in particular, it is impossible not to see in them the ingredients of comedy. The celebrated ladder structure of Andromaque, to which we have already alluded, is in fact a characteristically and traditionally comic one from Shakespeare to Marivaux. In As You Like It, the folly and illusion of love-vanity is emphasized by the travesties: Silvius loves Phebe who loves Rosalind—Ganymede who loves "no woman," but Orlando. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the illusory prestige of the beloved idol is delightfully exposed by means of the spell which inverts all the previous relations while maintaining and even intensifying the passions that inform them. Helena loves Demetrius who loves Hermia who loves and is loved by Lysander. Under the spell the situation alters: Hermia loves Lysander who loves Helena who loves and is loved by Demetrius. The meaning of the comedy is revealed by the infatuation of Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, for Bottom, the weaver, in his ass's costume. The same structure appears again, much later, in Proust: Saint-Loup loves Rachel who loves the polo player who loves André. (Note how they travesty element in Shakespeare is taken up again by Proust in the last of these relations. The meaning of all the infatuations is revealed by the homosexual relation that crowns them just as the key to all the infatuations in A Midsummer Night's Dream lies in Titania's love for an ass, and not even a real one at that!) Without making his situation blatantly comic, Proust does emphasize the sameness of these enslavements. They constitute a tiresome ronde of futility and illusion. If we not laugh, we can at least smile at the stupidity and blindness of these characters as they pursue the will o' the wisps that they have themselves invested with reality. Oreste loves Hermione, who ignores him and loves Pyrrhus, who ignores her and loves Andromaque, who ignores him and remains faithful to her dead husband. The situation is strikingly similar to those we find in Shakespeare or Proust, and Goldmann has rightly underlined the utter futility and inauthenticity of all these characters:

Avec Hermione, Oreste, Pyrrhus, nous sommes dans le monde de la fausse conscience, du bavardage. Les paroles ne signifient jamais ce qu'elles disent; ce ne sont pas des moyens d'exprimer l'essence intérieure et authentique de celui qui les prononce, mais des instruments qu'il emploie pour tromper les autres et se tromper lui même. C'est le monde faux et sauvage de la non-essentialité, de la différence entre l'essence et l'apparence.

Now this world is precisely the world of the comedies of Molière, a world of vain words and names and appearances, a world in which the characters pursue empty titles and hollow forms.