[In the following excerpt, Riggs explores the role of the individual in society as presented in Molière's Dom Juan.]

In Molière's comedy, the desire to eliminate or avoid the risks in social and sexual relationships is a fundamental theme. The issue of debt, or obligation, is explicitly central in some of the plays, and it serves as a metaphor for the cohesiveness of society itself.¹Dom Juan is a play in which this theme is particularly important, and whose progress explores the social implications of debt, risk, ethics, and identity. Like Le Tartuffe, whose interdiction forced Molière to write Dom Juan in order to have a new play to produce, Dom Juan studies the relationship between gestures and meaning as that relationship either supports and renews, or exploits and exhausts, social beliefs and ethical significances. A nobleman's effort to make himself independent of the very network of meanings and obligations that is the basis of his status as nobleman is an excellent vehicle for exploring the issue of identity and the ineluctably social ground of individuality.

Dom Juan dramatizes the refusal of ethical risk in such a way as to show that society can be either a stagnant, ceremonial game, circling toward total disillusionment, or a collective effort to conceive and realize values. It can be the latter only if the interdependence of identities and the primacy of ethically significant exchanges are recognized. As Dom Juan's deception reduces others' respect for him to the level of superstition, he becomes a phantom analogous to the loup-garou of Sganarelle's fantasies. Ethical meaning and social value can exist only in a context of substantial exchanges involving both risk and mutual benefit, and individual identity can be expressed and preserved only in ethically meaningful relationships.

The play begins with a burlesque praise of generous social gestures that states, in quasi-absurd fashion, the basic themes of the play. Molière does full justice to the complexities of his subject by having this overture performed by a character whose egotism is showing: Sganarelle illustrates the benefits of generous gestures by distributing imaginary pinches of someone else's snuff.² Indeed, the social consequences of gestures intended to create an impressive appearance of generosity without actually giving anything of substance are a principal preoccupation of this play. Gestures whose purpose ought to be to establish meaningful linkages among persons can be used to deceive and manipulate. This destroys both social cohesiveness and individual identity.

Sganarelle's burlesque “praise of tobacco” gives a brief glimpse of honnête society as, like any social group, a system of linkages established and preserved by gestures whose commonly accepted meanings express shared values. Immediately after his speech about the merits of tobacco, Sganarelle explains to Done Elvire's servant, Gusman, that Dom Juan has no respect for social gestures and institutions, nor for the meanings they reflect.

Marriage, as an institution and as a system of gestures reflecting obligation and benefit, is a major theme in Dom Juan.³ Dom Juan tries to remove all risk and obligation from this most fundamental of social relationships. However, he does not try to avoid marriage. On the contrary, he attempts to empty marriage—as gesture and as institution—of its significance and its power to obligate him by repeating and thereby trivializing it. Sganarelle describes the situation perfectly when he says: “Un mariage ne lui coûte rien à contracter” (Act I, sc. i). Dom Juan, despite the superficial differences, resembles the protagonists in Molière's other major comedies in that he destroys his own substance by destroying that of his relationships.⁴

The contradiction at the center of Dom Juan's effort to transcend the social network is that his successes in escaping from obligation depend largely on his social status. Even—or perhaps especially—the nobility is inextricably embedded in the context of social perceptions and meanings.⁵ At least as much as Molière's other ridicules, Dom Juan is deluded: he believes that he can retain his identity while avoiding the risks of social interchange. The status of gentilhomme is meaningful only within a given context, and its possession, as Dom Louis forcefully reminds Dom Juan in Act IV, sc. iv, is a debt as well as a privilege: “Et qu'avez-vous fait dans le monde pour être gentilhomme? Croyez-vous qu'il suffise d'en porter le nom et les armes, et que ce nous soit une gloire d'être sortis d'un sang noble lorsque nous vivons en infâmes? Non, non, la naissance n'est rien où la vertu n'est pas.”

By this definition, nobility is a dramatic quality: it exists in and depends on social interaction. It is a quality of relationships, not a static attribute permanently possessed by totally self-sufficient individuals. Thus, Dom Juan's principal advantage in dominating others is itself a debt and obligation. His identity is created and limited by the social meanings and expectations associated with his status. Like Molière's other comic leads, Dom Juan needs to have the authenticity and power of his identity confirmed by the same people whom he tries to reduce to a state of ethical nonexistence.⁶ The very nature of his enterprise underlines the importance of others and of what they give to him, even as he tries to avoid all obligations to them. The inescapably social basis of Dom Juan's identity is emphasized by the fact that the peasant girl, Charlotte, is first attracted to Dom Juan by Pierrot's description of the nobleman's clothes. She is “softened up” for seduction, before she has seen Dom Juan's person, by an evocation of his costume (Act II, sc. i).

A particularly important aspect of Dom Juan's manipulation of obligations is that he tries to evade or “repay” real debts with empty gestures. The Scène du Pauvre (Act III, sc. ii) and Dom Juan's meeting with his bourgeois creditor, Monsieur Dimanche (Act IV, sc. iii), are excellent examples of his manipulation of gestures. In the Scène du Pauvre, Dom Juan and Sganarelle have just discovered that they are lost in the forest. Dom Juan has Sganarelle ask a passing man for directions. Significantly, it is Sganarelle who must contract the obligation, while Dom Juan reserves for himself the privilege of thanking the Pauvre, and thus discharging the debt. The poor man shows them their way and warns them of the presence of bandits in the forest. Having offered real assistance, he asks for thanks in a form more tangible than Dom Juan's “je te rends grâce de tout mon coeur.” Dom Juan feigns surprise at the poor man's venality and offers him a gold coin if he will use God's name in vain.

Here, Dom Juan is trying to nullify the other's ethical substance and set himself up as the rival of God by showing that material self-interest governs even the hermit's behavior. At least as important, however, is Dom Juan's desire to escape from an obligation by obscuring the whole issue of mutuality. His efforts to reduce others to ethical nullity is, ultimately, self-destructive: he attempts to empty his relationships of meaning by merely “miming” gestures of generosity and commitment and in the process reduces himself to the level of Sganarelle's feigned distribution of snuff. By trying to extricate his identity and his freedom from the network of social dependencies, Dom Juan makes himself a phantom—a kind of dangerous clown. His only resource in this deluded deception is an advantage whose meaning and potency are social creations. Dom Juan “borrows” his status and gestures from the collective fund of meanings, but he does not replenish that fund by confirming the meanings. He exhausts trust as a social resource by overexploiting it. He wastes both personal and social resources and, thereby, undermines the ground of his own identity.

Dom Juan owes a financial debt to Monsieur Dimanche. However, he avoids paying it by overwhelming the creditor with purely formal gestures. Because he is a nobleman, the fund of impressive gestures is easily accessible to him. The very chairs in his house can be used to flatter Monsieur Dimanche and to make him feel indebted to Dom Juan. Monsieur Dimanche finds it impossible to mention Dom Juan's debt: “Il est vrai; il me fait tant de civilités et tant de compliments, que je ne saurais jamais lui demander de l'argent.”

Again, as with his female conquests, Dom Juan exploits the advantages of his position in the system of social meanings as a way of gaining independence from those meanings. This independence is, ultimately, illusory. He intends to destroy the ethical significance of his relationships—their place in a context of debts or obligations—but his enterprise depends on gestures and reactions drawn from the collective fund of ethical significances. His entire identity is a form of debt, in that it is constructed of materials belonging to the collective realm.⁷ As his father tells him, Dom Juan's nobility is a social resource which must be renewed often by authentically noble acts. Dom Louis speaks of his son's behavior as a waste of valuable resources: “… cette suite continuelle de méchantes affaires, qui nous réduisent, à toutes heures, à lasser les bontés du Souverain, et qui ont épuisé auprès de lui le mérite de mes services et le crédit de mes amis?” (Act IV, sc. iv).

Throughout this speech, Dom Louis makes it clear that noble status is, in a sense, borrowed from the ancestors who earned it and from the contemporaries who acknowledge and thus confirm it, and that it can be exhausted by overexploitation. Without noble acts, Dom Juan's status and therefore his identity are as phantasmagoric as Sganarelle's loup-garou. A grand seigneur méchant homme reduces nobility to a mere social superstition—the commoners' naive belief in the veracity of gestures and trappings without substance. Dom Juan is destroying his own and his family's credibility and converting himself into a phantom.

In the final analysis, Dom Juan refuses to acknowledge limits. His thirst for transcendent freedom rejects limits, and yet only limited entities can be valuable elements in meaningful exchanges. The statue of the slain Commander represents the ineluctability of limits. The statue is made of stone, and it commemorates a death, thus serving as a reminder of the materiality and finitude of life. At the same time, since it represents a man whom Dom Juan has killed, the statue symbolizes the inescapability of consequences in a human world which is a closed system, or network. Indeed, acts and persons have ethical significance precisely because the social world is a finite system. Dom Juan's hypocrisy, too, shows his attachment to the social world; he, like the other ridicules, wants to triumph over, and therefore in, the group.

Dom Juan, having sought to escape from ethical entanglements, can only disappear from the scene where ethical implications are explored. Sganarelle's anguished cry—“Mes gages, mes gages, mes gages”—serves as a final commentary on Dom Juan in two ways: first, it is a reminder that Dom Juan always avoided paying real debts; secondly, it confirms the suggestion in the play that those who refuse obligations can only be “phantoms” and reveals that Sganarelle's expectation of a reward for his loyal service has, in effect, been mere superstition. To the extent that Sganarelle has been an admirer and small-time imitator of Dom Juan, his desperation is poetic justice.

Dom Juan is, then, a play which dramatizes the perception that without the acknowledgement of mutual need and benefit, the human world would fly apart. The social world can have neither practical cohesiveness nor ethical significance without the acceptance of mutual indebtedness. Risk and limitation are inescapable, and Dom Juan's quest is futile. Marriage in Dom Juan represents the fundamental social reality which is composed of risk, limitation, benefit, and obligation.

Dom Juan's spurious transcendence depends on the perceptions, motivations, and reactions of his victims, and these depend on Dom Juan's ostensible place in the web of social meanings. His very successes in his chosen avenue of individuation confirm the contingency of his identity. He tries to individuate himself radically by escaping from risk and debt.⁸ Virtually every scene in the play, however, brings proof that both risk and debt are inescapable. The grand seigneur méchant homme destroys the ethical substance of interactions by exploiting his status without renewing and legitimating its basis. Like Alceste in Le Misanthrope, Dom Juan hopes to receive all the benefits of social existence without paying its price. This is abundantly clear in Act V, wherein Dom Juan has explicitly chosen to become a hypocrite. All meaning would eventually evaporate from a system of purely manipulative gestures, and mutual respect would be reduced to a foolish superstition. Hypocrites choose and, little by little, create an ethically sterile world of dupes and phantoms. In such a world there can be only superstitious, irresponsible credulity, or nihilism. A world without lenders and debtors would lose its principle of coherence and meaningfulness. By virtue of his self-undermining egotism, Dom Juan clearly belongs in the gallery of Molièresque ridicules.

The critics who treat Dom Juan as a metaphysical rebel beating against the limits of human possibility, or as a lucid witness of the disintegration of his class fighting nobly for free individuality, miss two key points: first, Dom Juan is fundamentally similar to Molière's other egotists; and, secondly, Dom Juan's means of escaping from obligations and limiting others' freedom are social tricks permitted him by his status. The twentieth-century tendency to see in Dom Juan a hero of anti-conventional “authenticity” is anachronistic: in an elaborate, hierarchical social structure such as that of seventeenth-century France, the self is not separable from its roles and accoutrements. Honor, nobility, and ethical veracity depend on deserving to be oneself—on meriting one's “costume.” We, on the other hand, tend to regard all structures and roles as mystifications and only the “naked” self as authentic. Thus, in our zeal to discover the truth of the unrelated self, we demand the abandonment of all that which actually sustains the identity. This is, of course, a version of the very predicament Molière warns against.⁹

Notes

1. Nathan Gross, From Gesture to Idea: Esthetics and Ethics in Molière's Comedy (Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 11.

2. Gross, p. 43.

3. G.J. Watson, Drama: An Introduction (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), p. 83. Professor Watson discusses the link between marriage as a traditional theme in comedy and as the fundamental social institution.

4. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (University of California Press, 1966), p. 18.

5. Bruce Wilshire, Role-Playing and Identity (Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 44.

6. Wilshire, p. 185. On the decline of the nobility as an ethical entity, see Erica Harth, Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 46ff; and Davis Bitton, The French Nobility in Crisis (Stanford University Press, 1969), pp. 78ff.

7. See my “Context and Convergence in the Comedy of Le Misanthrope,” Romance Notes, 25 (1984), 65-69.

8. Of course, Dom Juan shows no fear of physical risk. It is the ethical risk of real social interaction that he rejects.

9. For an example of what I regard as an anachronistic view of the issue of freedom in the play, see Laurent Romero, “Dom Juan ou les périls de la liberté: pour une critique dramatique intégrale,” Revue d'histoire du théâtre, 31 (1979): 81-88.