SOURCE: “Caractères, Superstition and Paradoxes in Le Misanthrope,” in Alteratives, edited by Warren Motte and Gerald Prince, French Forum Publishers, 1993, pp. 71-84.

[In this essay, Gaines argues that the series of oppositions and dualities in The Misanthrope comprise a deliberate pattern of paradoxes.]

Beginning with Rousseau's Lettre à d'Alembert and continuing through modern studies by Jules Brody and others,¹ 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 esthetic principles, homme de bien versus honnêtes hommes. This tradition of analysis by antinomies is carried to a ridiculous extreme in Fabre d'Eglantine's drama of the revolutionary era, Le Philinte de Molière, where the evil aristocrat Philinte is righteously chastised for his dissembling by an anti-establishment Alceste.²

From the perspective of language, however, the binary tradition does not provide an adequate entry into the text.³ Philinte and Eliante, 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 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 caused by his own outwardly-motivated verbal and physical behavior. Philinte knows that the Misanthrope automatically distrusts linguistic and gestural signs that are designed to effect a change in the interlocutor rather than to express the non-contingent personal feelings 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. However, one finds on reflection that her circle's apparent objectivity in social judgment is actually false. For instance, when she describes Damon's boring rationalizations or Géralde's nobiliary babble, all the emphasis 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.

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 that the ultimate example of this brand of character sketch is Acaste's fatuous self-description in Act III, Scene i.⁴ 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 suffisance. 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 her tell-tale letter, Célimène distills 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 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, canons, rhingrave, blond wig, and mandarin-like nails. Later, when he thinks he has proof of Célimène's infidelity in her 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” (l. 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.⁵

Célimène's deterministic type of caractère conforms closely to the externalism that Brody sees at work in La Bruyère's texts.⁶ 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 view-point. 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, because it supplies a needed focus to their otherwise insubstantial universe; she seems to occupy what Jean-Marie Apostolidès so rightly calls la place du roi, the central ocular and hierarchical location from which all the details of society assume their highest meaning.⁷

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 a multiplicity 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 esthetic powers, monopolizing and valorizing the field of vision, she can manipulate all her suitors, especially Alceste, whose moral fond can never assert itself in an environment of infinitely changeable forme.

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.⁸ 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 auratic glow of their petty-nobiliary world. Neither Célimène nor Alceste fully realizes the futility of their discourse. It is only the privileged spectator, having full understanding of dramatic polyphony, who 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 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 generic 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 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.

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, which serves as subtitle for the play, underlines his contradictory nature.

When the 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 might seem merely to provide a hearty dose of comic relief from Alceste's gloomy philosophizing. But beneath the surface of this lazzo lies a truth-content 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 (“un papier griffonné”), 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.

The misanthrope's contradictory attitude towards this cosmic surveillance is at the root of much of his own paradoxical behavior. From the first scene to the last, he is constantly threatening to flee the presence of others: Philinte, Oronte, Célimène, the marquesses, the Maréchaussée, the entire civilized world. Yet, he cannot tear himself away from the lady's eminently social lodgings, nor can he in the least resist the temptation to make himself the center of attention by fulminating against even the most trivial abuses against Sincerity. Critics have long been accustomed to stating that Alceste is a comic character heavily burdened with a tragic consciousness, and his sense of being under surveillance certainly bears out that analysis, for his closest parallels are to be found in tragic figures such as Corneille's Léontine and Racine's Néron, who are always uncomfortably aware of being fixed by the gaze of some unknown entity.⁹

Another indication of this haunting presence in Alceste's psyche is his tendency to curse, a habit that cannot be ascribed to social conventions which 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 them for 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.

Alceste “inherits” his cursing tongue and his superstition from comic predecessors such as Arnolphe and Dom Garcie. Besides blasting friend and foe alike with every imaginable oath, both of these prototypes were ever ready to impute their failures to “l'astre qui s'obstine à me désespérer” (L'Ecole des femmes IV, vii, ll. 1183-84), “le sort” (IV, vii, l. 1199 and V, i, l. 1358), or “le ciel, dont la sourde menace / Présageait à mon cœur quelque horrible disgrâce” (Dom Garcie de Navarre IV, vii, ll. 1228-29). Similarly, Alceste is not merely joking when he refers to his mauvaise étoile. He could easily cry out, as did Arnolphe, “Ciel, faites que mon front soit exempt de disgrâce!” (III, v, l. 1004). Like Dom Garcie, he is constantly on the lookout for negative signals, and innocent blushes, sighs, or silences are apt to be taken for admissions of dire guilt.¹⁰

Alceste's 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. 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. A victory would establish the capacity of man's intelligence and institutions to determine right and wrong and would oblige Alceste to consider his responsibilities of gratitude and mercy, but a defeat places him in the role of privileged tragic martyr, holding both the key 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.”

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” (l. 1294). 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. Though the circle and its peculiar form of deflective, deflating discourse typify the Pascalian notion of morally irresponsible divertissement, 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 commonplace 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.¹¹

Philinte is willing to adorn Oronte's sonnet with such posies as “jolie, amoureuse, admirable” strictly because he knows their repetitive emptiness, but also because he is aware of the lingering aura of importance that they hold for the weaker-minded.¹² 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.

Whereas Alceste can only judge clichés to be an insincere, hence devalued form of pseudo-communication, Philinte perceives that they are idioms as tightly affixed to the various types of speakers as other personality traits. To expect mankind to do without them is as unthinkable as to expect a massive and total conversion to virtue in social intercourse, and Philinte draws attention early in the play to the fact that each individual has particular faults in his nature, just as vultures are bloodthirsty, monkeys mischievous, and wolves savage (I, i, ll. 173-78). Philinte's analogy of commonplace human flaws to animal qualities bears comparison with a well-known quotation from a noted English non-conformist, the Earl of Rochester: “Man differs more from man, than man from beast.” While both Philinte and Rochester anticipate the vogue of late seventeenth-century fables by comparing man's behavior to that of animals, the former's emphasis on human fraud, injustice, and self-interest draws a distinction between the errors particular to the human race, on the one hand, and those of lower life-forms on the other. Rochester stresses the fundamental bestiality of the species, while Philinte, faithful to the concept of the great chain of being, identifies special foibles reserved for distinct sub-groups of people. His speech proves that he is so familiar with the conventional man-animal analogy that he is able to adapt it to his own sophisticated outlook.

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 her virtuous counterpart Eliante. In her description of how lovers distort the imperfections of their sweethearts (ll. 711-30), 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 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, language repairs the deformities of appearance by endowing them with positive connotative value.

Daniella Dalla Valle has pointed out that this speech is largely a paraphrase of a passage in Lucretius's De rerum natura (IV, 1153ff).¹³ As a philosophical idée reçue passed on by the wise woman 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 upbraid Emilie publicly for her face-painting and Dorilas for his rodomontades, thus polarizing society and eventually leveling 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.¹⁴ 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 brilliant essay on the standards of beauty promulgated by Nicole, Méré, and especially Pascal, Jean Mesnard raises an issue that supports Éliante's view: beauty is not absolute, but is dependant on the contingent conditions of human nature. Thus, Pascal concludes, a beauty that overloads itself with ornament degrades itself to the status of “reine de village,” and that which insists too much on itself, and even succeeds too well, rapidly becomes insupportable. Since the same concept applies to rhetorical as well as physical beauty (“la vraie éloquence se moque de l'éloquence”), it follows that the epithet of “habile en poésie,” which Philinte is delighted to confer on Oronte, passes for a criticism, while the invitation to judge a poem, which Alceste mistakes for a plea for true evaluation on the part of Oronte, is no more than a conventional acknowledgment of the status of honnête homme. Philinte, as the master of paradox, recognizes and manipulates these signs, castigating through laughter in a way that Molière's partisans would have to admire, but Alceste, despite his railing against artificiality in poetry, brings chaos to art and society because he unknowingly incarnates the basis of false beauty, “une discordance entre la nature humaine et l'objet jugé beau.”¹⁵

In a similar manner, 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” (ll. 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.¹⁶ 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 esthetic and useful. The process continues in IV, ii 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 supersedes the mechanistic reason of Célimène's circle, much as Pascal's vrais habiles transcend rationalistic demi-habiles by sensing and accepting the indwelling 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 Sancho Panza. 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 esthetic superficiality from the universal “now” of interpersonal understanding.¹⁷

For the idée reçue is after all a necessary means for homologous beings to communicate and thus to propagate comprehension—one that outlives and outperforms Alceste's ultimata 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.

Notes

1. “Dom Juan and Le Misanthrope, or the Esthetics of Individualism in Molière,” PMLA 84 (1969) 559-76; and “Esthétique et société chez Molière,” Colloque des Sciences Humaines: dramaturgie et société au XVI^e et XVII^e siècles (Paris: CNRS, 1968) 1: 307-26.

2. There is a certain poetic irony in the fact that the author-politician Fabre d'Eglantine, who had burgled the works of a great playwright, dismembered his characters' social relationships, and violated the honor of common sense, met his own end on the “deconstructive” guillotine!

3. For a broad-based debunking of binary thinking in and about Molière, see Larry W. Riggs's book on Molière and Plurality: The Deconstruction of the Classical Self (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 1989).

4. Judd Hubert, Molière and the Comedy of Intellect (Berkeley: U of California P, 1962) 142-51.

5. All quotations refer to the edition of the Œuvres complètes by Georges Couton (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) 141-218.

6. Jules Brody, Du style à la pensée: trois études sur les Caractères de La Bruyère, French Forum Monographs 20 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980) 18-21.

7. Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi-Machine (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984) 21-39.

8. This question is treated in my article, “Material Base and Mutability: ‘Des Biens de fortune,’” in Actes de Davis, ed. Claude Abraham, Biblio 17 40 (1988) 97-104. Another important viewpoint on mutability in La Bruyère is to be found in Carla Pellandra's “La Bruyère: Fungibilità negativa dei ritratti,” in Seicento francese e strategie di compensazione (Pisa: Goliardica, 1983) 131-52.

9. See Antoine Soare's forthcoming article, “Antiochus, Héraclius, Brittanicus,” in Ordre et contestation au temps des classiques (Marseille: Centre Méridionale de Rencontres) for penetrating remarks on these tragic figures.

10. See Albert Bermel, Molière's Theatrical Bounty (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990) 48.

11. It is in this linguistic and discursive model of paradox that one can find the richest meaning in the play, rather than through the somewhat frustrating examination of contradictory individual opinions; see, as an example of the latter, Patrick Henry, “Paradox in Le Misanthrope,” Philogical Quarterly 65 (1986) 187-95.

12. On this positive notion of aura, as explored by Walter Benjamin, see James L. Rolleston, “The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project,” PMLA 104 (1989) 13-27.

13. Daniella Dalla Valle, De Théophile a Molière: aspectos de una continuidad (Santiago: Prensas de la Editorial Universitaria, 1968) 2: 84-85. Gaston Hall, in his edition of the play (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) 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.

14. It is necessary to take issue here with critics such as J. P. Short, who hold that Alceste merely wants to reform society. In fact, the medication he prescribes is so drastic as to kill the patient. As Philinte pointed out in II, iv, Alceste's aim is not to improve, but to criticize for criticism's sake, and he has 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.” See Short's “The Comic Worlds of Molière,” Studi Francesi 88 (1986) 30-37.

15. See Jean Mesnard, “Vraie et Fausse Beauté dans l'esthétique au dix-septième siècle,” Convergences: Rhetoric and Poetic in Seventeenth-Century France—Essays for Hugh M. Davidson (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989) 3-33.

16. As Noel Peacock convincingly demonstrates, this sort of protection is necessary in many places in the text; see “Verbal Costume in Le Misanthrope,” Seventeenth-Century Notes 9 (1987) 74-93.

17. On these concepts, see Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia UP, 1982) 29-43. One can even go further to say that the employment of paradox in this text functions, like the Benjaminian Jetztzeit, to liberate the spectator from false consciousness. See Terry Eagleton, Walterr Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1981) 33.