SOURCE: “Comic Theory, Molière, and the Comedy-Ballets,” in Music, Dance, and Laughter: Comic Creation in Molière's Comedy-Ballets, Biblio 17, 1995, pp. 21-43.

[In this excerpt, Fleck reviews comic theory from Aristotle to the twentieth century as a context for examining Molière's comic method in his comedy-ballets, focusing on notions of paradox and realism.]

I. MAJOR IDEAS ON THE COMIC: SOME CLASSIC VIEWS AND PROBLEMS

Comedy, the comic, and laughter constitute a famously problematic and ill-defined area of thought; one can scarcely discuss the three terms apart from each other, but each presents problems of definition. For Umberto Eco, the comic is an “umbrella term” covering a wide range of phenomena—irony and the grotesque among many others—and thus susceptible of no single definition (“Frames” 1). Western definitions of comedy as well as of the comic have generally revolved around such ideas as error and vice, superiority and inferiority, incongruity, and lack of harm. Each of these ideas is evident within a brief passage from the extant first book of Aristotle's Poetics:

Comedy is, as we said, a representation of people who are rather inferior—not, however, with respect to every [kind of] vice, but the laughable is [only] a part of what is ugly. For the laughable is a sort of error and ugliness that is not painful and destructive, just as, evidently, a laughable mask is something ugly and distorted without pain.

(1449a31-6, Janko ed. 6; emphasis added)

Despite the loss of the second book of the Poetics, intended to deal specifically with comedy, we have here in two sentences a clear if embryonic Aristotelian notion of both comedy and the comic, one which touches on the essential points developed by later commentators. Although the Poetics II is unlikely ever to reappear, both Eco and the classicist Richard Janko have recently drawn attention to the anonymous medieval Tractatus Coislinianus, which, following Lane Cooper's work of 1922, they consider a valuable guide to the substance of Poetics II. Janko's recent edition of the Poetics correlates meticulously the substance of the Tractatus with writings of Aristotle bearing on tragedy and comedy (notes, 164-70). Janko's extensive citation of similar or essentially identical points from a variety of Aristotle's writings shows convincingly that if the Tractatus does not constitute a first-hand summarization of Poetics II, at the very least it incorporates a detailed familiarity with a wide range of Aristotle's thought, and often reflects a coherence, style, and critical acumen comparable to those of Aristotle himself. The views expressed in it are therefore of very real interest.

According to the Tractatus, which Janko expands here with a closely related passage from the Prolegomena to Aristophanes (also dating from about the same period as the Tractatus), laughter in comedy arises (1) from uses of “diction” such as puns, useless repetition (“I'm here and am arrived”), verbosity, and metaphor; and (2) from “incidents” such as deceit and disguise, the improbable and the impossible, vulgar dancing and “making the characters tend to be wicked,” distension of names (“Euripidipides”), and senselessly disarticulated arguments. As opposed to simple abuse, which crudely asserts individuals' vices, comedy uses innuendo to “expose errors of soul and body.” Comic characters are “the buffoonish, the ironical and the boasters” (qtd. in Poetics 44-5 and notes, 162-5, 168, 170). The notion of “catharsis,” left undefined in Poetics I's discussion of tragic effects, is unmentioned in the Tractatus. In a striking metaphor, however, laughter is called the “mother” of comedy (Poetics 44).

Eco also states his ideas of what Aristotle's views on comedy might have been, basing them on the Poetics I, the Rhetoric, and the Tractatus Coislinianus, as well as on other sources from the post-Aristotelian Greek and Latin tradition. His “extrapolation” leans markedly toward notions of violation of a rule, a lack of harmful consequences, and a sense of superiority based on a lack of sympathy for characters dehumanized by animal-like masks (“Frames” 1-2). Other recent commentators who consider Aristotle's possible views on comedy include Elder Olson (1975) and Jules Vuillemin (1991). Because these two critics build their ideas on comedy from Aristotle's views on tragedy in Poetics I, disregarding the evidence of the Tractatus Coislinianus, their views are less interesting for the purposes of this study.

Among non-Aristotelian-oriented writings on the comic, Baudelaire's “De l'Essence du rire” distinguishes between a “comique ordinaire” or “significatif,” and a “comique absolu.” The “comique ordinaire” is based mainly on imitation (as in comédie de moeurs) and evokes a potentially savage (“féroce”) sense of superiority over one's fellow human beings (711-12). Along these lines, Baudelaire concludes: “l'essence du comique est de paraître s'ignorer lui-même,” thus provoking the spectator's joy at his own superiority over the comic figure (720). The “comique absolu” by contrast is a somewhat primitive and innocent form of “creation” provoked by the apprehension of the grotesque. Baudelaire explains the “comique absolu” thus: “Les créations fabuleuses, les êtres dont la raison, la légitimation ne peut pas être tirée du code du sens commun, excitent souvent en nous une hilarité folle, excessive” (711-12).

Baudelaire classifies most of Molière as the best French expression of the “comique significatif.” However, although stating that the “prodigieuse bonne humeur poétique nécessaire au vrai grotesque” appears primarily among French authors in Rabelais, Baudelaire takes the trouble to place “quelques intermèdes de Molière, malheureusement trop peu lus et trop peu joués, entre autres ceux du Malade imaginaire et du Bourgeois gentilhomme” alongside Rabelais in the grotesque world of the “comique absolu” (714).

After Baudelaire, the most important modern treatment of the comic in France is Bergson's Le Rire. Bergson presents a special interest for this study since he turns most readily to Molière for comic examples, and since he aims to understand essential procedures of producing the comic, rather than trying to account for the endless variety of comic effects. His ideas on the subject are by no means limited to his often-cited phrase, “du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant” (405), but touch rather on virtually all of Aristotle's stated points, as well as on other important ones. Like the Poetics and Baudelaire's essay, Bergson's work juxtaposes ideas concerning laughter, the comic in general, and comedy.

For this study, the most pertinent aspects of Le Rire are the following: comedy is a game which imitates life and which draws on the same pleasures as childhood games; the same comic elements operate in both art and life; the comic in life creates in effect a miniature spectacle (418-19, 451-2). The comic is reasonable in its own fashion, but also involves the absurd logic of dreaming (400, 474-6). Comic artifices, especially the classic vaudevillian trio of repetition, inversion, and interference of two independent series of ideas (the latter seen most clearly in comic misunderstandings, or quiproquos), involve an interpenetration and balancing of the mechanical (or a mathematical order) with verisimilitude in regard to life (404, 419, 431). Comedy is unique among arts in that it alone aims at the general, at types; establishment of comic character converts (in effect, reduces) the individual to a type, and eventually to a framework into which one can insert other characters, thus converting them into similar comic types (451-2, 457-8, 466, 471-2). As for Baudelaire, so for Bergson the comic character displays obliviousness to society and to himself, emitting unconscious or involuntary gestures which betray his distracted unsociability (455-6). Laughter humiliates the comic character for his impertinent refusal to bend to society's demands, its “bon sens;” by implication the laughter also threatens to humiliate any spectator who identifies with the character (451). I shall return to these points in Section II.

With the possible exceptions of Baudelaire's and Bergson's work, ideas on the comic postdating the period of the Tractatus Coislinianus are generally even less complete than the extremely fragmentary authenticated remarks of Aristotle. As Harry Levin observes, most ideas concerning the comic are based on superiority, incongruity, or both (11), and thus echo Aristotle's “inferiority” and “distorted” qualities. Hobbes's “sudden glory” at the spectacle of one's superiority in relation to “some deformed thing in another” (36), and incongruity for Hazlitt, Schopenhauer and Kant, for instance, may all be related to Aristotelian thought cited above (Hazlitt 7; Schopenhauer 2: 91; Kant 5: 409). George Meredith's idea of the comic as deflation of disproportionate behavior achieves a balance of both incongruity and superiority (47-8); Pirandello's linking of the comic with the “perception of the opposite” can similarly be analyzed in terms of incongruity (113). Levin observes that Bergson's formula, “du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant,” constitutes yet another variety of incongruity, and that Freud's cathartic release of aggression through jokes implies a kind of superiority (11). Among recent writers on the subject, Scott Shershow echoes a very long tradition in stating that comedy “as genre, spirit, or experience, is specifically about the clash of incongruous modes of thought and feeling” (53).

An obvious problem arises with the idea of incongruity: incongruous in relation to what? Like the sociologist Jean Duvignaud (22) and many other writers on the subject, Levin posits an “implicit norm of congruence” (11). The nature of such an implied norm, however, raises other questions. Why for instance should deviance from a norm be comic per se, rather than unpleasant or even tragic? Is it not supremely incongruous with the idea of royalty, for instance, that a king should discover himself to be guilty of parricide and incest, and punish himself as a criminal? Incongruity by itself, then, need not have any particular comic nature.

The notion of superiority also raises problems. If a sense of superiority is involved in the comic, what is the nature of the relationship of superior to inferior—psychological, social, or other? How stable is the relationship, and for how long does it last? A more important problem with the idea of superiority concerns the possibility of joining in laughter with comic figures, not (or not just) laughing at them. Bakhtin points out the joyously all-encompassing laughter to be found in Rabelais's work—Baudelaire's “comique absolu,” in effect—in comparison with which later comic genres embody a “reduced laughter” implying a substantially narrowed view of the world (120). Superiority, then, may not be necessary for comic effects, and like incongruity, explains little if anything by itself.

Jean Emelina's Le comique: essai d'interprétation générale, attempts a synthesis of ideas on the comic, for which the author proposes three conditions:

Un phénomène considéré comme anormal, une position de distance, l'absence de conséquences ou l'absence de prise en considération de ses conséquences, le plus souvent dangereuses: telle est la triple condition qui permet de produire l'effet comique.

(69)

Of these three conditions, the first is the most important, since “l'anormalité est au coeur du comique” (81). Despite the neat formulation, we are still very much in Aristotelian territory: the abnormal, distance permitting an attitude of superiority, and lack of harmful consequences.

Some recent commentators have tried to advance beyond the confines of these categories. Levin suggests that superiority and incongruity be regarded as complementary views, superiority being “a subjective satisfaction with oneself over the infirmities or the misfortunes of others,” and incongruity embodying a situation of contraried expectation. He proposes a “dialectical interplay” of both sorts of comic elements in the form of “killjoys,” ridiculous figures at whom one laughs derisively, and of “playboys,” ludicrous figures with whom one nonetheless joins in laughter (11-13). Concerning comic laughter, Marcel Gutwirth proposes a five-part synthesis of ideas involving the combination of affective and cerebral elements; surprise; painless deformity; freedom; and reversal (Laughing Matter 100-16). I shall touch on some of these points in Section II.

Another line of thought concerning comic questions, in neither the superiority nor the incongruity mold, deserves mention. In contrast to the social conformism, mechanicality, and repetition involved in Bergson's version of comic laughter, Duvignaud notes the metamorphic possibilities of thoroughgoing, carnavalesque laughter: “une contestation des hiérarchies par l'image d'un monde à l'envers” (27; cf. Bakhtin 10-11). Jonathan Miller similarly offers a view to the imaginative future: “In my view, the value of humour may lie in the fact that it involves the rehearsal of alternative categories and classifications of the world in which we find ourselves” (11).

There are two major defects of the ideas presented thus far: they are generally unrelated to each other (superiority, incongruity, lack of harm: what do these no doubt indispensable notions have in common?), and they tend to be static. Of the ideas presented above, only Bergson's notions of the production of comic types, of the interference of two mathematical series, and of the “snowball” effect touch on the building of comic laughter (especially 423-35). In my view, however, his ideas categorize but do not sufficiently explain the repeatability, extension, and heightening of comic effects. As formulated above, they are also unable to account for the passage from one sort of comedy to another which I see as characterizing the finest of comedy-ballets.

We have scarcely touched the surface of the most widespread notions of the comic in a handful of writers. Clearly, if Emelina is correct that “le comique n'est pas un ‘genre’, mais l'envers de tous les autres” (171), then no one definition of the comic could possibly apply to all comic phenomena. In Duvignaud's view, however, the disparateness of ideas on the comic may cover a basic convergence of ideas; yet he believes that a complete convergence remains always out of reach, “comme si les éléments d'interprétation s'approchaient d'un concept perpétuellement en fuite …” (41).

II. A FRAMEWORK FOR IDEAS ON THE COMIC

I would like to suggest that in spite of their diversity, the above-mentioned views concerning comedy and the comic stand to gain in clarity if refocused in terms of two closely related ideas, namely paradoxicality operating within a context of play. This perspective derives generally from W. G. Moore's assertion of the importance of paradox to understanding the esthetics of comedy (“Molière: The Comic Paradox” 771); and more specifically from work of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson published as “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” “The Message This is Play” and “The Position of Humor in Human Communication.” Although mentioned on occasion by critics such as Eco, Eric Gans, Marcel Gutwirth, Edith Kern, Larry Riggs, Richard Schechner, and Susan Rubin Suleiman, Bateson's ideas remain on the whole very little used (even by most of these writers), and are largely unknown to dramatic criticism in general. I shall therefore summarize the theory in question (and beg the reader's indulgence for several pages of apparent digression) before considering its relevance to the comic generally—which, drawing on Bergson and Bateson, I regard as a form of play—and then to Molière in particular. In order to clarify the problems of comic theory presented by the comedy-ballets in contrast to the grandes comédies, I shall try to bring together ideas drawn from several different domains.

Bateson's thought, informed by ethology, analytic philosophy, and information theory, deals with issues of communication and consciousness in widely different settings. In “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” he relates that while watching young monkeys playfully nipping at each other, he asked himself how they knew that they were playing rather than fighting. Following what he conceived to be logically necessary for the monkeys' awareness, he hypothesized that a playful bite conveys a message such as “This is play,” which must (1) refer implicitly to the existence of a real bite, but (2) not imply what a real bite would imply.

The message “This is play,” in Bateson's view, therefore necessarily involves first denial of present reality, a message such as: “this playful bite is not a real bite;” and second, it also involves fantasy—the presence of the non-present, in the form of a message such as: “this non-real bite could turn into a real bite in the future.” One can say that the playful bite, then, in a sense both is and is not a bite; or more exactly, that it is not precisely a bite, but that it also is not a non-bite. Partly erasing the distinction between the individual example (the nip) and the class to which the example belongs (the class of non-bites), the playful bite mixes at least two logical levels, being simultaneously communication (the nip itself) and metacommunication (“this is play, not a real bite”).

Bateson notes the analogy of the playful bite to Epimenides's celebrated paradox, “I am lying,” which if true, is false and if false, true, as well as to Russell's paradox of the barber who shaves all those and only those who do not shave themselves (if he does not shave himself, then he shaves himself, and vice versa). Bateson recalls Russell's and Whitehead's attempt to resolve such paradoxes through their theory of logical types or hierarchies, which states that members of a defined class must be of the same logical type—the same logical degree of abstraction—as nonmembers of the class. However, a problem occurs in attempting so to define classes: if one defines the class of bites by excluding the class of nonbites, then the class of nonbites (which is also not a bite) is so defined as to be a member of itself (“Theory” 188).

The playful bite, then, by its very nature violates Russell's and Whitehead's theory of logical types. A serious bite is an unmistakable, logically simple phenomenon; the playful bite cannot exist without implying the existence of a class of ordinary bites while denying its actual exemplification, and is therefore logically more complex—in fact, paradoxical. Furthermore, Bateson points out (following Wittgenstein) that the Russell and Whitehead rule is broken in its very enunciation because it fails to distinguish adequately between the concepts of class and member of a class (“Message” 146-7). Furthermore, in Bateson's view:

Paradox is doubly present in the signals which are exchanged in the context of play, threat, fantasy, etc. Not only does the playful nip not denote what would be denoted by the bite for which it stands, but in addition, the bite is fictional. Not only do the playing animals not quite mean what they say [so that their messages are in a sense untrue], but also, they are communicating about something which does not exist.

(“Theory” 182-3)

If Bateson's hypotheses are correct, then paradox is doubly present in the very idea of play, first through its defining message “This is play” which establishes a paradoxical frame of “not-real” and “not-not-real” for all phenomena within it, and second through its reference to something nonexistent (“Theory” 184). The framework implied by the message “This is play” temporarily changes the reality-status of all messages within it, making them not precisely true, but not precisely false either. In his view, play alludes to, but is not the same as, everyday reality. The frame itself is of a labile nature, and thus quite subject to change: Bateson cites the example of Andaman islanders who conclude peace with ritual blows which, however, can sometimes slip out of playfulness into serious violence (“Theory” 182). The historian Johan Huizinga similarly notes the fluid boundaries between play and serious activities (8). Even within a general play framework, then, events can be enacted with varying degrees of certainty as to their play status, and can furthermore change the status of the frame itself (“Theory” 182).

Bateson points out that play involves the coexistence of (1) the rationality of everyday life, or “secondary process” discriminations in Freudian terms; and (2) a logic of the unconscious or “primary process,” which (as in dreaming) abolishes rational distinctions like “all/some” and “not all/none,” and also renders the frame itself as well as the messages framed within it liable to sudden change (“Theory” 182, 184-6). Bateson concludes that a quasi-mathematical schema like the Russell-Whitehead theory is therefore simply inadequate to deal with the complexities of human communication in general and of play in particular, since these activities take place on various levels of abstraction at once.

In a related discussion, Bateson also hypothesizes that paradox is the “prototypic paradigm for humor,” which in making its point completes a “circuit of contradictory notions” (“Position” 3-4), a position in line with ideas of incongruity generally. If we accept that humor—and with it the explicitly performed humor of the comic—are varieties of play (along with Bergson 419 and Huizinga 6), then following Bateson we may infer a double paradoxicality in their workings.

Bateson's work uses the term in the logical sense of self-contradictoriness, but another sense of it also needs particular acknowledgment. In Molière's time, “paradoxe” meant something which contradicts or even “shocks” accepted opinion, its chief meaning in ancient Greece also (Dictionaries of Furetière and the Acadèmie; Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon). Among the various senses of “paradox” are the following:

1. a. A statement or tenet contrary to received opinion or belief; often with the implication that it is marvelous or incredible [etc.]

2. a. A statement or proposition which on the face of it seems self-contradictory, absurd, or at variance with common sense, though, on investigation or when explained, it may prove to be well-founded (or, according to some, though it is essentially true). [etc.]

2.b. Often applied to a proposition or statement that is actually self-contradictory, or contradictory to reason or ascertained truth, and so, essentially absurd and false.

2.c. Logic. A statement or proposition which from an acceptable premise and despite sound reasoning, leads to a conclusion that is against sense, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory; [etc.].

(Oxford English Dictionary)

Paradox, then, may apply to statements which cover a gamut from the mildest, simple heterodoxies, to the strongest, which are logically absurd and unacceptable. Paradox thus involves (1.a.) what ought not to exist or happen according to normal opinion; (2.a.) that of which one must doubt the reality or well-foundedness; and (2. b., 2. c.) what one must reject as logically absurd, if not outright impossible. The various lexical senses of paradox cited are however by no means entirely separable: the strongest sense clearly includes the mildest, since that which is logically unacceptable is necessarily also “contrary to received opinion;” and heterodox opinion, the mildest sense, can be so farfetched as to attain the logically unacceptable. There is thus reason for seeing a necessary element of continuity among the various senses of the term.

If paradox is brought into a context of play, then the continuity among the various lexical senses of the term is much stronger; it may even be impossible to distinguish among them. The unlikely—Scapin's ruses, for instance—may become the cornerstone of our perceptions; the impossibly absurd—Argan's induction as a doctor—may happen before our eyes; and all partakes of elusive truth-value. Ordinary reality may appear to penetrate the frame momentarily—Dorante's promise to pay his debts to the realistically account-keeping Jourdain—but may then become subject to the extra-ordinary rules of play: the gentilhomme continues to fleece the bourgeois effortlessly under the nose of the latter's bitterly realistic wife. Within the labile frame of the play context, all phenomena partake of a different, more slippery status than in ordinary life, and may shuttle back and forth between apparent truth and falsity like Epimenides's statement.

The slippery lack of precise discreteness inherent to paradoxicality most easily suggests playfulness, whether in the form of brainteasers or of the comic. For Suzanne Langer, however, real paradoxes (as in definitions 2.b., 2.c. above) pose serious philosophical challenges (16). Bateson points out that Epimenides's paradox “has bothered philosophers since 600 B.C.,” and that both Russell and Wittgenstein devoted considerable thought to it (“Message” 146). More emphatically, Eco sees this paradox as having “haunted Western thought for two thousand years” (“Semiotics” 115); and W. V. O. Quine sees paradox as capable of provoking “crises of thought” (cited among the O.E.D. examples). Enduring paradoxes, then, mark out certain limits to our logical understanding.

If it is correct that paradoxicality is inextricably, and multifariously, involved in the comic—and as Moore observes, “paradox is everywhere in comedy” (“Molière: The Comic Paradox” 771)—then we may little wonder at the latter's protean nature; and incidentally, these considerations alone reveal comedy and the comic as a far more substantial topic of inquiry than its traditional status as a “minor question” allows. Bateson's analysis of play's paradoxicality, which I accept as a working hypothesis, provides an explicit, strong, and flexible framework for ordering and focusing ideas about the comic and comedy.

How do the ideas stated earlier concerning the comic fit into Bateson's ideas about paradox and play? The varieties of incongruity may easily be seen to relate to paradox. Since the idea of incongruity implies a contraried norm, any incongruity must run counter to received opinion and thus partake of at least the mildest sense of paradox. Abnormality (Emelina) and deviation from common sense (Baudelaire and Bergson, among many others) likewise demonstrate this sense of paradox. For Emelina, the comic occurs in direct proportion to the degree of anomaly (71). Taking Bakhtin's contrasting pairs of a very fat and a very thin man (201), for instance, it is evident that we have two deviations from a normal physical build, and thus an example of abnormality reinforced by doubling, with the norm often implied somewhere in between the two abnormalities (Gutwirth, Laughing Matter 140-1). We may note in this respect that Aristotle himself evidently enjoyed inventing specifically incongruous, in fact oxymoronic terms for comic character types: “thrasydeilos” or “bold-craven” for a sort of blusterer (alazon) and “baukopanourgos” or “prudish-knavish” for a sort of dissembler (“eiron;” Nicomachaean Ethics 1109b, in Works 2: 1749-50). He clearly recognized the comic value of a doubling of abnormality, and thus of paradox in the mild sense.

Bergson's “inversion” or reversal is a specialized form of incongruity, and therefore of paradox: a wife in real life, for instance, is not ordinarily supposed to be strong enough physically to administer beatings to a husband; nor is an earthbound bird normally able to visit havoc upon a coyote. In a play frame such as farce or one of the “Roadrunner” cartoons, however, such things are the order of the day: the situation's paradoxicality is heightened, and may continue to be heightened almost indefinitely. Roadrunner will turn back against Wile E. Coyote his own elaborately laid plans to crush the bird. Comic action may thus very easily slip, through processes such as highly incongruous reversals, from the mildest to the strongest senses of “paradox”: it is not normally thus—could it possibly be?—it could not possibly be so—yet there it is before our eyes! If we delight at the sight of a simple playful abnormality, we may delight even more in the spectacle of that abnormality visibly growing into outright impossibility—a “real” impossibility. That “real impossibility,” moreover, can be repeatedly demonstrated, virtually ad infinitum. The scheming coyote will predictably return from his comic pulverization, start his plans again, and again be outwitted by the insouciantly beep-beeping roadrunner.

Following Bateson's line of thought, we may state that any incongruity (which involves, at a minimum, paradox's mildest sense) brought into an overt play context—a comedy, for our purposes—will inevitably touch on paradox in two additional ways, because of the doubly paradoxical nature of the play frame (events within it being not real/not-not-real, and also imaginary). Incongruity in comedy may thus be considered to involve paradox in at least three different ways.

As for the interrelated ideas of the observer's superiority, distancing (Emelina), and the sensation of being present at a spectacle (Bergson), one may apply both the “play” and the “paradox” side of the equation. Paradoxicality may inform superiority via a character's incongruously abnormal, or rather subnormal, inferiority. Distancing implies the maintenance of a manifest or implicit frame around the events observed (an actual proscenium arch, for instance, or simply the quality of emotional detachment which Bergson believes necessary for the comic). The frame usually enables and safeguards the spectator's sense of superiority in relation to the circumstances and actions of his or her “inferiors.” This enabling and safeguarding may happen in any of various ways, from the partial distancing of the comic action from everyday life (the “not real/not-not real” aspect of the play frame), to its resulting guarantee of harmlessness, to the spectacle of the comic character's paradoxical obliviousness of self (Bergson) or of the play frame's existence, to (one further paradoxical twist) that character's helpless knowledge of the play frame's existence. The frame's own paradoxicality may thus be reinforced by events within it, or it may be weakened, even apparently dissolved. The labile quality of the play frame (Bateson, “Theory” 182; similarly Huizinga 8, 21) may allow us to be drawn into it sympathetically, to the point that the affective distance collapses as the frame drops from our awareness, and we are allowed to laugh along with a comic character. We would then be enmeshed in a different sort of comic phenomenon than those which Bergson discusses, as will be taken up in Section IV.

A related point occurs in Richard Schechner's study Between Theater and Anthropology. His idea of “transformative doubling” in acting among other activities, drawn partly from Bateson's work on play, expresses the paradoxicality of play phenomena in a different sense. Actors are not the characters they play, but they are not entirely different either; therefore their activity, a process of both “finding” and “inventing” their characters, challenges the logical law of identity and non-contradiction (6, 111). All theater, surely, participates in this paradoxicality to some extent. Both Eco, who draws marginally on Bateson's thought in his analysis, and Anne Ubersfeld, another leading student of the semiotics of theater, place paradox at the heart of theater since it partakes of both the real and the imaginary (Eco, “Semiotics” 107, 113; Ubersfeld 13).

If all theater participates in paradoxicality, comedy nonetheless makes it very overt, and—even more—often incorporates that overt play on theater's paradoxicality as the very substance of its actions: witness Monsieur de Pourceaugnac's questioning of his unasked-for medical intervention team, “Est-ce que nous jouons une comédie?” (I, 8). Such paradoxical self-designation, in fact, is ubiquitous in comedy, as Auld (“Lully's Comic Art” 19) and Hubert observe (“Playwright as Protagonist” 362; see also Hubert's Metadrama 138-9). Recalling Bergson's calling theater a form of play, we may call comedy an explicitly playful form of play. In this sense, one could regard all comedy as “metatheater,” although I prefer to discuss it in terms of explicit theatricality. Recast in Bateson's terms, in any case, such self-referential signaling is analogous to the message “this is play,” and serves to maintain the comic play frame's explicitness. Bateson's work on play, then, offers a fairly systematic framework for employing these critics' observations.

If one truly forgets oneself, one tends in the direction of ultimately losing one's identity. A comic spectacle of self-forgetfulness alludes to this ultimate possibility in a temporary, playful framework. Baudelaire's formula, “l'essence du comique est de paraître s'ignorer,” bears an important similarity to Epimenides's paradox: if one voluntarily seems to forget oneself, then one must actually be remembering oneself, since only if one involuntarily forgets oneself can one escape the self-consciousness necessary to seeming. One seems, therefore, to do what “seeming” itself renders impossible. If, however, one in fact forgets oneself, one may unintentionally offer a comic spectacle to an observer by “not being oneself.” In either case, one expresses a different sort of paradoxicality: one close to that of Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien in the first case, since the most complete seeming will require a maximum of self-consciousness; or one falling simply within the mildest dictionary sense of “paradox” in the second case, doing what one normally should not do. The play frame's paradoxicality is thus inherent in Baudelaire's formula taken in either sense.

Eco's article on theatrical performance employs two observations of other critics which are effectively the same as two of Bateson's points. Eco cites Luis Prieto to the effect that a sign on stage implies a “class of sign-vehicles” rather than a single, unequivocal meaning, and thus according to Eco is referentially “opaque” (“Semiotics” 115). Eco also cites the Prague structuralist Petr Bogatyrev's observation that objects on stage are “signs of signs” of objects, and that in certain circumstances an object may refer to a class which refers to an idea (116). In both cases, the points made fit in precisely with Bateson's observations concerning the playful nip: it is not an actual bite, but rather refers to an imaginary bite (that is, to a class of possible bites), without implying what a real bite would imply. The actor beaten in a farce, for instance, refers implicitly to the possibility of a real beating, but that reference does not mean that the actor is really suffering the pain which a real beating would carry. Recast in Bateson's terms, instead of Eco's “opacity of reference” and Bogatyrev's “signs of signs of objects,” we obtain the more specific and usable concept of multiple Russellian paradoxes: the beating is not real, but does refer to the possibility of a real beating (and thus is not entirely unreal); yet it is, finally, fantasy. Bateson's explanation of the paradoxicality involved furnishes a clearer and more general analysis of the problems of individual vs. class, and of imaginary reference and self-reference which are operative in theatrical play than does either Prieto's or Bogatyrev's observation.

Bergson believes that comedy, uniquely among the arts, aims at the establishment of general types. This process operates through individual comic characters' traits, words, or situations which via repetition take on the nature of types, and thus become frames into which other comic phenomena come to fit. Bateson points out the logical problems inherent in establishing classes, and the difficulty if not impossibility of avoiding paradox, as for instance in the “class of classes” problem in Russell's paradox. Bateson thus deals explicitly with the paradoxes which are implicit in Bergson's view of comedy's workings. In comedy, we face the same sort of problem as did Russell in his paradox: are we watching an individual phenomenon, or a class of phenomena (how can Chaplin's utterly unique tramp stand for Everyman? could my bourgeois neighbors ever be as blind as Jourdain to his real status?)—and how can we define either concept without generating paradox? Perhaps Robinet recognized this aspect of comedy when he wrote of Molière: “Hélas! c'est un étrange drôle: / Il faut qu'il exerce son rôle / Sur le Particulier et sur le Général” (Mongrédien, Recueil 1: 282). If comic phenomena are both individual, and also classes or types, then in Bateson's terms, their status mixes logical levels, and therefore generates paradox—indeed, multiple paradoxes—at every step. The blurring of individual and class distinctions, I believe, is central to comic processes, which are thus seen to play, paradoxically, on questions of identity.

The individual/class question is paralleled by the different logics at work in comic phenomena, that is, both everyday logic and the logic of dreams. Again, Bergson and Bateson state the same ideas independently. Since for Bergson comedy is a form of play, we may appropriately use Bateson's ideas about play in order to reformulate the earlier observations in Le Rire. The comic has often been observed to call forth a doubling of consciousness, as noted for example by Peter Nurse (“Essai” 180); Bateson's analysis of the play-frame offers at least a usable explanation of the shortcomings of a single-mindedly “logical” approach to the comic. In this respect we may cite also the views of Duvignaud and Miller, which fit in well with Bateson's identification of the possibilities for transformation of perception through paradoxicality—an upsetting of conventional logical hierarchies altogether.

The major points concerning the comic discussed thus far fit rather easily, then, into the paradox-and-play framework of Bateson's ideas. I wish to avoid using these ideas as a reductionistic model, however, or merely to identify the presence of paradox. For Bateson, after all, paradox is virtually the “stuff of human communication” (“Position” 4), and for Moore, as indicated previously, paradox is to be found everywhere in comedy. Rather, I hope to employ Bateson's ideas concerning play heuristically, first for whatever light they may shed on the comic within Molière, and second as a potentially enlightening way to integrate various writers' views about comedy and the comic. None of those views is new—quite the contrary—but in view of the disorder and partiality prevalent in analysis of the comic (the overall insufficiency noted earlier), a reordering may prove useful to a clearer understanding.

Furthermore, the markedly formal nature of Bateson's ideas particularly suits them to a consideration of the comic aspects of music and dance, because of the highly formal nature of these arts (as Auld recognizes in “Lully's Comic Art” 18-19). The organizing notion which I draw from writers on the comic and from Bateson is that both the comic in general and also comedy in any of its forms, play overtly on paradoxicality for the spectator's pleasure—which is only a slightly more formalized version of Dorante's calling the comic protagonist's predicament “une confusion à réjouir les spectateurs” (Critique de L'École des femmes 6). In the next two sections, I wish to shift the focus to the comic specifically within Molière's work.

III. THE “LETTRE SUR LA COMéDIE DE L'IMPOSTEUR” AND MOLIèRE'S GRANDES COMéDIES

French seventeenth-century literature offers myriad commentaries on tragedy, but a mere handful on the far less prestigious genre of comedy. Of these few works, the anonymous “Lettre sur la Comédie de l'Imposteur” is generally considered by Molière specialists to be the single most important commentary on Molière's comic art. Moore evidently considers this defense of Tartuffe—L'Imposteur in its interim incarnation—to be the work of Molière himself (“Molière's Theory of Comedy”). Other writers are more circumspect, often considering it likely to have been written by Donneau de Visé, perhaps with help from Molière, or La Mothe Le Vayer (McBride, in his 1994 edition of the “Lettre”). Whatever its authorship, in Gérard Defaux's view the letter constitutes the most valuable guide to Molière's “comédie première manière,” before the upheavals surrounding Tartuffe and Don Juan fundamentally altered his approach to comedy (115). Examination of its arguments, reinterpreted in the light of Bateson's ideas, should help us frame more clearly the related but separate question of the comedy-ballet's comic nature.

After analyzing L'Imposteur, the “Lettre” offers a closely argued justification of the work's moral utility, and thus implicitly of the moral status of comedy in general. In the following discussion, I will quote salient passages of the “Lettre” dealing with key terms—especially “la raison,” “la disconvenance,” and “le ridicule”—and mention briefly how paradoxicality and play are implicit in the ideas expressed.

The “Lettre” assumes explicit human rationality:

Personne n'agissant irraisonnablement à son su, nous jugeons que l'homme [qui a fait une action ridicule] ignore qu'elle soit déraisonnable et la croit raisonnable, donc qu'il est dans l'erreur et dans l'ignorance. …

(qtd. in Couton I: 1178-9)

According to the “Lettre,” since no one knowingly acts unreasonably, one who so acts must be ignorant of his irrationality (such as Orgon), for such ignorant error exposes him to the joyful contempt of others:

Comme la raison produit dans l'âme une joie mêlée d'estime, le ridicule y produit une joie mêlée de mépris … Le ridicule est donc la forme extérieure et sensible que la providence de la nature a attachée à tout ce qui est déraisonnable … Pour connaître ce ridicule il faut connaître la raison dont il signifie le défaut … ce qui sied bien est toujours fondé sur quelque raison de convenance, comme l'indécence sur quelque disconvenance, c'est-à-dire le ridicule sur quelque manque de raison … la disconvenance est l'essence du ridicule … ce qui manque extrêmement de raison.

(1173-4; emphasis added)

We may resume this briefly as: the ridiculous is based on a lack of “raison,” that is, on deviation from a norm accepted as reasonable. The author thus implies at least the mildest sense of “paradox.” The more extreme the lack of reason, the sharper will be the deviation, the greater will be the degree of improbability, and the stronger will be the sense of paradox.

Si le ridicule consiste dans quelque disconvenance, il s'ensuit que tout mensonge, déguisement, fourberie, dissimulation, toute apparence différente du fond, enfin toute contrariété entre actions qui procèdent d'un même principe, est essentiellement ridicule.

(1178; emphasis added)

Disguise, trickery, and dissimulation (such as Tartuffe's) all involve an obvious basis in play. In addition, the latter part of the passage bears considerable resemblance to the strongest sense of “paradox,” that is, an outright contradiction proceeding logically from a single proposition.

The “Lettre” sets forth three psychological observations of importance: first, feeling oneself to be ridiculous is “le plus choquant, le plus rebutant, et le plus odieux de tous les sentiments de l'âme” (1176-7). Judging another to be ridiculous is a “pur jugement plaisant et enjoué d'une chose proposée,” a “plaisir spirituel” (1176). From one's own most repulsive sentiment, then, may spring another's coldly intellectual mirth. The one enjoying the spectacle has no doubt of being situated outside the comic frame, secure in a position of distanced superiority.

Second, writing of the power of pleasurable first impressions (specifically the enjoyment of observing the ridiculous) on our imagination, “le réceptacle naturel du ridicule,” a power able to disrupt the mind's reasoning capacities so that the mind may perpetuate its own avidly-sought pleasure (1175, 1177), the author observes:

Nous sommes d'abord frappés d'un souvenir de cette première fois, si elle a fait une impression extraordinaire, lequel, se mêlant mal à propos avec l'occasion présente et partageant l'âme à force de plaisir qu'il lui donne, confond les deux occasions en une, et transporte dans la dernière tout ce qui nous a charmés et nous a donné de la joie dans la première: ce qui n'est autre que le ridicule de cette première.

(1175-6)

We may discern in these lines first the association of the comic with the imagination, much like play with fantasy in Bateson's analysis; and second, Bergson's principle of propagation of the comic by means of a frame which converts the pleasurable memory of a comic event into similar but new comic events. In Bateson's terms, this procedure blurs the logical categories of example and class, and thus generates paradox.

The third psychological observation states the condition for determining the actual emotions attributed to individuals:

C'est seulement que l'on fait des actes qui supposent nécessairement qu'on [a certains sentiments]; et c'est la manière d'agir naturelle et générale de notre âme qui ne s'avoue jamais à soi-même la moitié de ses propres mouvements.

(1179; emphasis added)

We have thus an observation which we may relate closely to Baudelaire's and Bergson's ideas of comic obliviousness of oneself (“De l'Essence” 720; Le Rire 455-6), as well as to the Freudian unconscious. The comic—and paradoxical—implications scarcely need elaboration: making the paradoxicality of self-forgetting explicit within a play context—Harpagon's predicament, for instance (“Rends-moi mon argent, coquin … [Il se prend lui-même le bras.] Ah! c'est moi. Mon esprit est troublé, et j'ignore où je suis, qui je suis …” L'Avare IV, 7)—affords proven occasion for laughter. We may note more specifically that in this celebrated scene, (1) Harpagon's self-forgetting does indeed attack his identity, with his “j'ignore … qui je suis” remark and his attempted arrest of his own arm (cf. Schechner's remark about acting undermining the law of “identity and non-contradiction”); (2) he tests out the distancing play frame by addressing the audience directly; and (3) he displays particularly prominently the jostling of a quasi-dreaming logic and an everyday logic.

Numerous other examples of highly explicit paradoxicality in Molière's theater can easily be adduced: Sosie's “Et puis-je cesser d'être moi?” (Amphitryon I, 2, line 427), for example, or George Dandin's “J'enrage de bon coeur d'avoir tort, lorsque j'ai raison” (I, 6). Sosie even offers a virtual definition of the term's mildest sense: “Cela choque le sens commun; Mais cela ne laisse pas d'être” (Amphitryon II, 1, lines 775-6). Furetière's definition reads in part: “Proposition surprenante & difficile à croire, à cause qu'elle choque les opinions communes & receues.” McBride's subtitle to his first major study of Molière, “A Study in Paradox,” is eminently justified.

The “Lettre sur la comédie de l'Imposteur” aims at justifying the comedy's moral utility on the grounds that it scourges vice through the force of ridicule. Molière's era demanded such a publicly moralizing argument; but Molière also needed to defend himself against the dévots' power, and we have no means of knowing to what extent Molière truly believed in the argument, since he carefully guarded his personal beliefs. His artistic success in any case depended far less on moral justifications than on a fortuitous historical circumstance, as Peter Nurse points out in connection with the “Lettre”:

Si avec Molière la comédie de caractère atteint en France un niveau de perfection qui depuis n'a jamais été égalé, cela s'explique en grande partie par le fait qu'à aucune autre époque il n'a existé de société plus pénétrée de l'importance de cette notion de bienséance qui incarne, pour notre théoricien de 1667, “la raison apparente” dans le domaine des actions humaines. Partout, et notamment dans les salons, on s'efforçait d'appliquer aux problèmes que pose la vie en société cette même raison, ce même bon sens que Descartes, dans son Discours sur la méthode, qualifiait de “puissance de bien juger et distinguer le vrai d'avec le faux.”

(“Essai” 180)

The unique power of social norms, conceived as a basic “raison essentielle” the force of which was tantamount to a natural law (see the “Lettre” 1170, 1173-4, and Nurse, “Essai” 183), and their estheticized incarnation (“la raison apparente” or “la bienséance,” the appropriate appearances of everyday life) in Molière's time made the possibilities for portrayal of deviance, and thus the potential for paradox, both infinite and infinitely delicate. These circumstances dovetailed with the aristocratic ideal of life as an elegant and exclusive form of play to produce an unlimited amount of condescension toward nonconformists. The genius of Louis XIV's absolutism—bringing the upper layers of society to heel by forcing them into an esthetically defined conformity—necessarily threw an unprecedentedly clear light upon social deviation, now potentially a matter of a misstep in dancing or a handkerchief of the wrong tint, and thus enlarged the possibilities for castigating any such deviance.

This greatly heightened esthetic expression of social norms (Defaux 286) enabled their transposition onto the stage with a large dose of realism, and thus enabled the creation of characters such as Alceste and Philinte, Madelon and Cathos, and Dorante and Dorimène. As the Dorante of La Critique de L'École des femmes states, “Vous n'avez rien fait, si vous n'y faites reconnaître les gens de votre siècle” (Scene 6), and for once the precise polemical context allows us to take a character's words as probably reflecting Molière's thought. The impression of realism, however, so effective as to gain Molière his epithet as “le peintre,” is employed not in the service of realism per se, but of comic exaggeration. Once one has “recognized” one's contemporaries, one may enjoy the spectacle of seeing them do what one knows one ought not (e.g., indulge in greed), probably would not (intend to marry precisely the young woman with whom one's son is in love), or scarcely could be imagined to do (try to arrest one's own arm)—in other words, of seeing them act out various degrees of paradoxicality.

In Molière's grandes comédies, the laughter elicited resolves a certain level of contradiction by setting an exclusionary, literally derisive frame around mankind's follies in order to banish them. We are invited to laugh at Alceste because he is egregiously incapable of even recognizing, much less changing his folly, which we see so clearly. In an imaginary future, he could only seek out another Célimène to attract and plague him—all the while deluding himself that she is outrée, and he the very soul of reason. Here, comedy's workings write finis to the plot by reaffirming the supremacy of reality and implicitly bidding it resume its normal course unchanged, whatever the protestations of the monomane. The conventional real world of the raisonneurs wins out, as Defaux observes (273); the spectator is confirmed in a position of superiority, enjoying the spectacle of others' follies and their properly deserved punishment.

Recalling Bateson's schema, one may say that in these comedies, vraisemblance helps keep the play frame intact. The rare examples of explicit questioning of the frame's integrity, as in Harpagon's accusing the audience after exonerating his arm—“N'est-il point caché là parmi vous? Ils me regardent tous, et se mettent à rire. Vous verrez qu'ils ont part sans doute au vol que l'on m'a fait” (L'Avare IV, 7)—finally confirm the frame's function of safeguarding the audience's position of distanced superiority relative to the comic monomane with his absurd accusations, and thus safeguarding its self-gratifying “rire de bonne conscience” (Defaux 124). Like many critics, Morel concludes that there is never complicity with Molière's protagonists, who are seen as “radically different” from their audience (“Molière et le comique” 12). The conclusion holds true enough as long as we stay within the domain of the grandes comédies.

IV. THE COMEDY-BALLET'S NOVELTY

Molière however did not leave the matter simply where the curtain rang down on the chastised, ridiculed monomane of grande comédie. Following the implications of Dorante's musing—“Je voudrais bien savoir si la grande règle de toutes les règles n'est pas de plaire” (Critique de l'École des femmes, Scene 6)—comedy-ballet evolves away from the derisive, socially conformist laughter characteristic of grande comédie. Recent critics, especially Auld, Defaux, and Abraham, have defined better than their predecessors the special character of the comedy-ballets' evolution.

In Defaux's view, there exists no critical guide for the comedy-ballets comparable to the “Lettre sur la comédie de l'Imposteur” for the grandes comédies (Molière 115). However, the most frequently presumed author of the “Lettre,” Donneau de Visé, provides a starting-point in an observation made in the Mercure galant shortly after Molière's death:

Il a le premier inventé la manière de mêler des scènes de musique et des ballets dans les comédies, et il avait trouvé par là un nouveau secret de plaire, qui avait été jusqu'alors inconnu, et qui a donné lieu en France à ces fameux opéras, qui font aujourd'hui tant de bruit. …

(qtd. in Mélèse, Donneau 112; emphasis added)

Molière's preface to Les Fâcheux strikes a clear note of pride over his innovation: “C'est un mélange qui est quelque chose de nouveau pour nos théâtres, et dont on pourrait chercher quelques autorités dans l'antiquité … il peut servir d'idée à d'autres choses qui pourraient être méditées avec plus de loisir” (Couton I: 484).

In the same preface, Molière mocks the idea of laughing “according to the rules” (“Ce n'est pas mon dessein d'examiner maintenant … si tous ceux qui s'y sont divertis ont ri selon les règles,” Couton I: 483). The “rules”—to the degree they have ever existed in comedy's anarchic realm—might hold sway in critics' minds, but Molière was capable as was no other contemporary of rewriting the rules completely. Auld notes the unique structure of each comedy-ballet (“Comic Art” 20). It is arguable that the comedy-ballets' constant experimentation results in an even wider range than is found in Molière's other works—and this from a playwright who never repeated himself, as Hubert points out (Molière 268). In the decade of inventing and developing the comedy-ballet along with Lully and Beauchamp, Molière proceeded to evolve his own rules; and this newly perfected manner of pleasing produces the difficulty of analyzing style which Hubert observes in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (Molière 225).

Since it incorporates the means and esthetics of ballet de cour, comedy-ballet has less rational roots than grande comédie—but at its best, more complex results. These results, however, have proven highly vulnerable to the historical vagaries of productions which remove the “ornements,” and are therefore more difficult to judge. If Defaux is correct, for instance, that “contrairement aux ‘grandes comédies’ du début qui sont, par l'importance même de leur texte, capables de survivre à leur représentation, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme est essentiellement et d'abord un spectacle que sa représentation épuise” (Molière 267), then it is clear that we need to imagine far more than the verbal text—music, dance, acting, staging—to begin to “read” even a work presumed to be so well-known, yet largely composed of the most ephemeral and elusive of arts, music and dance.

The key forces newly present, or operating far more prominently in the last, greatest comedy-ballets than in the grandes comédies, are (1) the inspirational reaching-out of comic folie to grasp the whole world in its embrace, and (2) the greatly increased presence of music and dance, eventually integrated with the comic aspects in a festively inclusive spectacle.

In regard to the first point, we have seen the inflexible nature of grande comédie's protagonists. In Tartuffe, for instance, Orgon does not change in the slightest through his comic chastisement. Simply reversing his manie, he will obviously be easy prey for some dubious anti-dévot (“je renonce à tous les gens de bien” etc., V, 1). He is deflated, however, both by Tartuffe and by the Prince's timely intervention, which saves the fool from the consequences of his folly.

Molière structures these ultimate comedy-ballets so that the protagonists evolve in a quite opposite fashion to that of their counterparts rigidly confined within grande comédie. In Georges Forestier's view, the aggrandizement of the comic monomane's folie in the Bourgeois and the Malade exceeds all previous proportions (Esthétique de l'identité 558-60). The irrepressibly buoyant Jourdain, whose desires imply no less than imitation of the king himself, is crowned upon the very throne of his folie. Argan too has his fondest desires granted by being inducted into the society of medicators, whence he may legitimately—joyfully—continue to view the whole world through the merrily Rabelaisian fluctuations of his gastrointestinal processes.

These protagonists' enormous folly allows them to be as easily manipulated by well-intentioned as by potentially dangerous characters; any possible harm is thus easily obviated. Jourdain's greatest threat, for instance—to make his daughter a duchess—is nearly as impossible to credit as her marriage to the “son of the Grand Turk.” Seeing their basic harmlessness, we willingly grant them their mania, and quickly begin to enjoy it with them; using Bateson's terms, we can say that the comically derisive frame initially surrounding them—a frame, however, already more fluid than in comedy—dissolves in these works to allow general rejoicing. Our easy initial sense of superiority to M. Jourdain soon begins to yield to the “rire complice” discerned by Catherine Kintzler. In similar fashion, McBride observes Jourdain's transformation from being “rationally exploited” at first like a comic monomane to being the “subject of a ballet” in a transcendent irreality (“Triumph” 127; Triumph 213). Whatever their degree of initial resemblance to citizens of a more ordinary-seeming world such as Orgon or Harpagon, therefore, Jourdain and Argan increasingly leave any semblance of the ordinary world behind for a world tailored to the size of their comic folly.

The contrast of the late comedy-ballets' sung and danced finales with the endings of Le Misanthrope or Tartuffe could scarcely be more evident. Alceste's desires, for instance, fail to reshape the bodily reality of the world, but in the ultimate comedy-ballets, Jourdain and Argan do see the world consent to embody their deepest, most fantastic desires when they step into that topsy-turvy, “madcap world” where all is delight (Abraham, Structure 89).

Vraisemblance, then, be damned—or rather laughed, sung, and danced away from its tenuous initial grip on the stage. For the second key aspect of the comedy-ballets is that the means of dissolving the initial comic frame and of building the festive magnification of folly are musical and choreographic to an unprecedently high degree. Lila Maurice-Amour speaks of “l'osmose des scènes de comédie en musique, en chant et en danse” within the Bourgeois, the “point culminant” of the genre (“Rythme” 125-6). Anthony likewise asserts “the fusion of music, dance and verse, best seen in Le Sicilien and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme” (Lully 26).

Even more than being “total theater” composed of various media, the comedy-ballet at its best is multisensory. Although the “Lettre” claimed “le ridicule” for the intellect, and comedy's official, moralizing justification lay in the castigation of vice, laughter in seventeenth-century France was also acknowledged as an eminently physical, not purely mental response to the comic (Morel, “Molière et le comique” 12). The comedy-ballets are built on a choreographic and musical expansion of comic physicality, a continuum often beginning in farce and ending in dance (Auld, “Music of the Spheres” 179), even amalgamating farce and ballet into a new comic alloy (Abraham, “Farce and Ballet”). Structuring comic doings in conjunction with music and dance allows the extension of the audience's abruptly physical, intellectually superior laughing reaction to the stage into a more sustained, more intimate complicity of rhythmic and visual delight. Along with a sumptuousness of spectacle available only with princely outlays of money, the fantasy world of the best comedy-ballets is replete with musical and choreographic rhythms which help constitute that world for us through visceral, not just intellectual pleasures. Maurice-Amour notes the “joie physique des acteurs et de leur public” at the comedy-ballets' rhythmic values and corporal movements (“Rythme” 118). In Marie-Françoise Christout's formulation, “Le ballet cherche essentiellement à séduire” (Ballet de Cour 186); comedy-ballet too seeks no less.

These qualities must have been all the more telling for the original audiences, composed mainly of aristocrats trained from early youth in dancing, and thus able to participate on a kinesthetic level (Hilton, Dance 38). This dimension is almost completely lost to modern audiences, but was essential to the comedy-ballets' original design and reception. Dance was so basic to aristocratic self-presentation in the seventeenth century that in Philippe Beaussant's expression of the male ideal, “l'homme baroque ne marche pas; il se pavane” (Versailles, Opéra 33). In a century thoroughly enamored of display and self-display—male attire being more elaborate than female—dance remained a supreme opportunity for spectacle. Capitalizing upon these circumstances, Lully's music and Beauchamp's choreography were undoubtedly intended to inspire the audience's desire to dance.

A framework based only on grande comédie therefore will prove decisively inadequate for comedy-ballet's “monde en folie,” Defaux's subtitle. In such a world, both the paradoxicality and the play aspects of spectacle run deeper than in the world of grande comédie. In the comedy-ballets, Molière eventually questions the entire world by turning it upside-down into a source of musical and danced rejoicing—much like carnaval; and in the best of these works, this transformation occurs before our eyes. Bakhtin's observations about fête, therefore, especially as applied to comedy-ballet by Defaux, are far more pertinent than views based narrowly on comedy—a genre of “reduced laughter” for the Russian critic (120). Although Bakhtin notes Molière's exceptional status, carrying on a tradition of “grotesque realism” which passed through the commedia dell' arte, he unfortunately leaves his view unelaborated (34, 116).

Bibliography

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———. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Georges Couton. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.

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Secondary Works

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———. “More faces than Proteus. Lully's Ballet des muses.” Early Music 15.3 (Aug. 1987): 336-44.

———. “The Musical Structure of Lully's Operatic Airs.” In de La Gorce and Schneider, eds. 65-76.

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