Dom Juan and the Manifest God: Molière's Antitragic Hero

Author(s): Francis L. Lawrence

Source: PMLA, Vol. 93, No. 1 (Jan., 1978), pp. 86-94
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/461822 .
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Dom Juan and the Manifest God: Moliere'sAntitragic Hero
SINCE ITS ORIGIN more than three hun-
dred years ago, the Don Juan legend has
appeared in a tremendous number of ver-
sions, in literally hundreds of texts.1 The subject
is an adaptable one: Tirso's heedless young
trickster is the central figure in an impressive
religious drama; for Mozart's opera, as inter-
preted in a short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann,
Don Juan is transformed into a romantic idealist
and rebel, a fascinating and irresistible tragi-
comic hero; Camus creates a perfectly lucid Don
Juan, an absurd hero, conscious of his own
mortality and of the nonexistence of God.2
Moliere's protagonist, who stands near the be-
ginning of Don Juan's career in literary history,
has been open to multiple interpretations, rang-
ing from the gay, charming seducer, through the
great tragic rebel, on to the supremely valid man
asserting his will to achieve "the excellence of
humanity."3 It seems evident that the image of
Don Juan popular in the climate of the time has
had considerable influence on the interpretation
of Moliere's play.
Over the years, the Don Juan myth has lent
itself primarily to serious drama, and some crit-
ics of Moliere have been most uncomfortable
with his blend of farce and the merveilleux. To
the playwright's contemporaries, who would
have been comfortable with Tirso's miracle play,
the farce seemed impious; devotees of the ro-
mantic Don Juan were shocked at the vulgar
antics of Moliere's nobleman and his valet.4
Pious contemporaries and sensitive romantics
alike deplored, albeit from different standpoints,
Dom Juan's ignoble actions, particularly his at-
tempt to bribe the Poor Man to swear and his
descent into religious hypocrisy. They found
equally distasteful the accompaniment of Dom
Juan by the buffoonish Sganarelle, a privileged
fool who berates and debates his master with
incoherent religious arguments, ending in a prat-
fall (IIT.i). For modern critics, the farce is not
difficult to swallow. The absurd man, after all, is
86
FRANCIS L. LAWRENCE
joyful. The great embarrassment now is the
presence of God, spectacularly represented in
the specter that exhorts Dom Juan to repent and
in the statue that takes him to hell (Doolittle,
pp. 532-33; Camus, pp. 104-05). To eluci-
date Dom Juan today, to establish its consis-
tency, which I maintain is profoundly comic, we
must reexamine Moliere's hero in the light of his
relationship to the Deity, a relationship that
opposes time and eternity, action and fate, in the
play. In that reexamination, I find a Dom Juan
who is the comic inverse of the romantic or
tragic hero, a willfully self-deceived alazon,
rather than a conscious victim.5
Let us look first at some of the farcical as-
pects of the play to see how Moliere explores
the most obvious comic possibilities of the ma-
terial. His "grand seigneur mechant homme"
perfectly exemplifies Otto Rank's observation
that the Don Juan figure exposes the heroic lie.6
Moliere's Dom Juan is not the history of a great
seducer. A number of critics have pointed out
the shoddy and abortive character of the amor-
ous episodes in the play.7 The only act of seduc-
tion worthy of the legendary Don Juan took
place before the action of the play. Moliere's
hero reportedly lured a noblewoman from a
convent, married her, and quickly abandoned
her. But Moliere begins the story of his Dom
Juan at its close, where the reality of the mo-
ment is tawdry. Dom Juan's first project in the
play is an effort to disrupt the perfect happiness
of a young engaged couple. When he fails in his
efforts to seduce the bride, he proceeds rapidly
to stronger measures: "J'ai recours au dernier
remede .... Toutes choses sont preparees pour
satisfaire mon amour, et j'ai une petite barque et
des gens, avec quoi fort facilement je pretends
enlever la belle" (I.ii). Although he character-
izes this adventure as a romantic undertaking
("notre entreprise amoureuse"), Dom Juan has
obviously outlined a plot to kidnap for the pur-
pose of rape. His violent criminal scheme is
 Francis L. Lawrence
overturned, along with the boat, by a squall. The
disappointed Dom Juan turns immediately to try
his powers on the first two women who come in
view when he reaches land, a pair of peasants,
one the fiancee of his rescuer. The wooing is a
series of farcical turns. He coaxes the girl
through her paces as if she were a filly at a sale:
"Tournez-vous un peu, s'il vous plait. Ah! que
ce visage est mignon! Ouvrez vos yeux entiere-
ment. Ah! qu'elles sont amoureuses et ces levres
appetissantes!" (I.ii). Dom Juan transforms the
conventional Petrarchan list into a horse trader's
catalog. After the brief and brutal wooing, Dom
Juan meets his rustic rival and engages him in an
appropriate contest, a shoving match, climaxed
by that dependable comic bit, the blow acci-
dentally delivered to the would-be peacemaker.
As though a caricatural duel were not enough to
demonstrate the ineptitude of this particular
seducer, Dom Juan next finds himself the em-
barrassed apex of a classic triangle. His two
peasant loves challenge each other, and Dom
Juan, caught between them, soothes them alter-
nately sotto voce until he is forced to flee before
their demands for a public declaration. These
three successive attempts and their failures are
played in a tone of comedy descending from
romanesque piracy to barnyard squabble, but
Dom Juan's final gesture of seduction has a
melodramatic setting. The noblewoman he has
dishonored by marrying and abandoning comes
veiled at night in order to exhort him to reform.
Even though her family demands that she live
with her husband and she admits that she loves
him, Dom Juan fails to convince Elvire that she
ought to remain with him. At best, this man who
cannot persuade his own wife to spend the night
with him acts out a parody of the Don Juan
legend. In one sense, Moliere's play is a Dom
Juan travesti. It has the authentic comic rhythm,
the repeated action of mounting passion and
deflation in a well-defined cycle of frustration.8
I d'un tel amour, si quelque objet nouveau ne vient
Nevertheless, Moliere's play does deal with
an urgent and fundamental problem of existence
in concrete terms. Passion is the common
ground of tragedy and of comedy. Moliere's
hero asserts his will with as much panache as
any Cornelian hero. The story ends with the
87
proper mythic formula: the guilty hero suffers a
fall, in this case a literal descent into hell. De-
spite this patent use of the very recipe for trag-
edy, Moliere's work remains a comedy because
its hero refuses to accept his guilt or to acknowl-
edge his destiny. Since he is incapable of inner
suffering, either by regret or by anticipation,
Dom Juan does not inspire pity or admiration.
His repeated failures in seduction demonstrate
his essential comic nature, the isolation that
makes him a great, grotesque exemplar of the
inhuman seducer.
Dom Juan is the story of a man who believes
that he can live exclusively in the present mo-
ment. It does not really matter to the hero
whether he is successful or not in pursuing the
objects of his passion.9 All that matters is that
he should be free to yield to every attraction that
crosses his path:
Quoi? tu veux qu'on se lie a demeurerau premier
objet qui nous prend, qu'on renonce au monde pour
lui, et qu'on n'ait plus d'yeux pour personne? La
belle chose de vouloir se piquer d'un faux honneur
d'etre fidele, de s'ensevelirpour toujours dans une
passion, et d'etre mort des sa jeunesse a toutes les
autres beautes qui nous peuvent frapper les yeux!
(I.ii)
The life of the faithful lover is worse than slav-
ery: it is a living death. Dom Juan lives in dis-
continuous moments of actual passion.10 He
asserts and completes himself in a series of
transcendent moments. To be himself, to affirm
the unity of his being, does not require continu-
ity. On the contrary, it seems to abhor continu-
ity. Dom Juan experiences himself in transcend-
ing the very moments of the past that were
transcendent moments when they were present
moments:
On goute une douceur extreme a reduire, par cent
hommages, le cceur d'une jeune beaut. . . . Mais
lorsqu'onen est maitre une fois, il n'y a plus rien a
dire ni rien a souhaiter;tout le beau de la passion
est fini; et nous nous endormonsdans la tranquillite
reveiller nos desirs, et presenter a notre cceur les
charmesattrayantsd'une conquetea faire. (I.ii)
Even in his most despicable acts, Dom Juan
escapes the usual classifications of the conven-
tional villain. He is simply a being incapable of
nostalgia or remorse. The past has no power
88 Dom Juan and the Manifest God
over him, and the future holds no terrors: "Ah!
n'allons point songer au mal qui nous peut ar-
river, et songeons seulement a ce qui nous peut
donner du plaisir" (I.ii). In the naked and in-
tense present in which he lives, Dom Juan's
every act is directly dependent on what can give
him pleasure now. Although he regrets the
necessity of being embroiled in a life-or-death
quarrel with Elvire's brother, whom he likes, he
refuses to take his wife back because "Ma pas-
sion est usee pour Done Elvire et l'engagement
ne compatit point avec mon humeur" (iII.v).
But when Elvire comes to his rooms at a late
hour, in dishabille and in tears, begging him to
repent, the strange, unexpected intrusion awak-
ens in Dom Juan "quelques petits restes d'un feu
eteint," and he urges her to stay the night, with a
polite double entendre: "Madame, vous me
ferez plaisir de demeurer, je vous assure" (iv.vi).
Dom Juan is always capable of reversal, but
only for a motive that springs from his own rad-
ical actuality: "J'ai une pente naturelle a me
laisser aller a tout ce qui m'attire" (III.v).
In truth, Dom Juan is less seducer than se-
duced. His awareness is strictly limited to the
knowledge of the self by the self in the incessant
revolutions of the life of the senses. He can do
little more than surrender to each successive at-
traction. He raises passivity to the status of prin-
ciple: "Pour moi, la beaute me ravit partout ou
je la trouve, et je cede facilement a cette douce
violence dont elle nous entraine. ... Je ne puis
refuser mon coeura tout ce que je vois d'aimable;
et des qu'un beau visage me le demande, si j'en
avais dix mille, je les donnerais tous" (I.ii). Al-
though more attention has been given to the ac-
tive imagery contained in the same speech (Dom
Juan's comparison of himself to the conqueror
Alexarrder), the passive imagery more accu-
rately reflects the drifting, abortive seduction
attempts of the play's action.
If Dom Juan has deserted his wife, it is not
because he feels hostile toward her but because
"un autre objet a chasse Elvire de ma pensee"
(i.ii). His passion of the moment renders him
powerless. He only follows where it takes him:
"Une beaute me tient au cceur et . . . entraine
par ses appas, je l'ai suivie jusques en cette ville"
(I.ii). While the women he pursues are not per-
sons but only playthings to Dom Juan, it is
equally true that he conceives his own role as
that of a toy in the hands of a succession of
acquisitive children: "Mon coeur est a toutes les
belles, et c'est a elles a le prendre tour a tour,
et a le garder tant qu'elles le pourront" (II.v).
II
The central conflict of Moliere's play is the
struggle between Dom Juan and God, a struggle
at once extraordinarily visible and curiously
veiled. The famous scene du Pauvre, in which
Dom Juan tries unsuccessfully to get the Poor
Man to curse, is, as Jacques Guicharnaud points
out, an attempt at intellectual temptation pre-
cisely parallel to the scenes of sexual temptation
(pp. 254-61). Dom Juan is a libertine of both
the flesh and the spirit. In Moliere, we are far
from the Racinian God, the hidden spectator
who has abandoned the world.1l Racine's God
is present only in the anguished consciousness of
the principal character. The tragic hero knows
how far short he has fallen of God's impossible
standards and anticipates an implacably harsh
judgment. In contrast to the silent God who
never intervenes in Racine's tragedies, God is
manifest everywhere in Moliere's play, often in
direct physical signs. Only Dom Juan is purpose-
fully and persistently unaware of God's pres-
ence. He plays the classic role of the hardened
sinner, he who has eyes but cannot see, ears but
will not hear.12
All the other characters are supremely aware
of God. Before them is the spectacle of discon-
nected moments of sensory experience, which
constitute Dom Juan's consciousness of life, but
superimposed on that random, repetitious field is
God's Providence. From a being whose existence
is not circumscribed by time comes the pattern
that lifts men out of the discontinuity inherent in
human reality. In Moliere's play, the design and
the continuity of purpose God imposes on
human existence are epitomized by marriage.
Sganarelle characterizes it as "un mystere sacre"
(I.ii). A permanent contract is meaningful only
in relation to the celestial will. Dom Juan is per-
fectly consistent with himself, "un heretique, qui
ne croit ni Ciel, ni enfer ... Un mariage ne lui
coute rien a contracter; il ne se sert point
d'autres pieges pour attraper les belles, et c'est
un epouseur a toutes mains" (I.i).
The tone of Dom Juan toward God is one of
 Francis L. Lawrence
genial contempt. Warnings of Divine retribution
meet an exaggerated, mocking condescension
that reduces them to children's fables: "Va, va,
c'est une affaire entre le Ciel et moi, et nous la
demelerons bien ensemble, sans que tu t'en
mettes en peine" (I.i). And again, "Va, va, le
Ciel n'est pas si exact que tu penses, et, si toutes
les fois que les hommes . . ." (v.iv). Dom Juan
would infect heaven itself with his corruption.
The horror Dom Juan inspires in the other char-
acters depends very largely on precisely this
possibility: that God is his crony. If evil goes
unpunished, then what of the eternal laws that
we imagined to exist and to give meaning to the
short, painful lives of men?13Dom Juan's claim
that he and God understand each other, his
claim that God does not judge by the standards
of traditional religion but by a code He holds in
common with Dom Juan, makes concrete the
fearful question Poulet discerns in Racinian
tragedy:
11s'agit de savoir, non plus si la passion est passion,
non plus meme si le mal est mal, mais si les dieux
ne sont pas malfaisantsou atteints eux-memes par
le mal; . . .ce monde eternel serait a son tour con-
tamin6 ou corrompu,serait un simple reflet projete
dans les nuages,de notre tragiquecondition.14
That is the awful vision Elvire confronts when
Dom Juan justifies his abandonment of her:
Je ne vous dirai point que je suis toujours dans les
m mes sentiments pour vous, et que je brule de
vous rejoindre,puisque enfin il est assure que je ne
suis parti que pour vous fuir; non point par les
raisons que vous pouvez vous figurer,mais par un
pur motif de conscience, et pour ne croire pas
qu'avec vous davantageje puisse vivre sans peche.
(i.iii)
At certain moments, Moliere's comic villain
parodies the authentic horror of the tragic hero
confronted with his destiny. A direct threat, "le
meme Ciel dont tu te joues me saura venger de
ta perfidie" (I.iii), is countered with feigned ter-
ror, "Sganarelle, le Ciel!" (i.iii). The tragic hero
recoils before his guilt: "Madness and stabbing
pain and memory of evil deeds I have done!"15
He reflects upon himself in the past, a past in
which his character was irrevocably fixed: "I
who first saw the light bred of a match / ac-
cursed and accursed in my living / with them I
lived with, cursed in my killing" (vv.1183-85).
89
Even before the moment of recognition, he lives
in the future by fearful anticipation: "If it hap-
pened there was any tie / of kinship twixt this
man and Laius / who is then now more miser-
able than I, / what man on earth so hated by the
Gods . . .?" (vv.813-16). This miserable web
of remorse for possible transgressions in the past
and these premonitions of God's wrath to be
loosed in good time are the way the tragic ch'ar-
acter mounts to his destiny, a zone of terrible
dignity where the creature will submit directly to
the Divine Will. The prerecognition conscious-
ness of the process by which things become fatal
and the sudden fear of attracting Divine pun-
ishment furnish Dom Juan with a moment of
elaborately rhetorical amusement. He apes
tragic convention with a smirk at the expense of
his victim, Elvire, and of God. Dom Juan sus-
pects himself of a sin that rivals the fault of
Oedipus. To get Elvire, he forced "l'obstacle
sacre d'un convent" (i.i); though Moliere
lightly skirts the outright designation of Elvire as
a religious, the indications are clear. She has
broken vows that engaged her elsewhere, and "le
Ciel est fort jaloux de ces sortes de choses"
(I.iii). Dom Juan has fled Elvire's bed, pursued
by a gigantic caricature, the Divine Cuckold:
"J'ai ouvert les yeux de l'ame sur ce que je
faisois. J'ai fait reflexion que, pour vous epouser,
je vous ai derobee a la cloture d'un convent....
Le repentir m'a puis et j'ai craint le courroux
celeste; j'ai cru que notre mariage n'etoit qu'un
adultere deguise .. .." (I.iii). Oedipus only dis-
honored the bed of his natural father; Dom
Juan has sullied the bride of Christ. In tragedy,
such dawning awareness of the nature of his past
action brings the hero to the edge of despair. He
realizes that, should this crime be proved, should
it be true that his actions must bear the evil in-
terpretation in which his imagination has cast
them, then he is condemned: "O holy majesty /
of God on high, may I not see that day! / May
I be gone out of men's sight before / I see the
deadly taint of this disaster / come upon me"
(vv.830-35). The dark comic reversal of Dom
Juan places the entire weight of the recognition
and the punishment not on the criminal but on
his victim. While Dom Juan vaunts his mock
recognition as "une si sainte pensee" (I.iii), it is
Elvire who comes to bitter knowledge concern-
ing the fatal irreversibilityof her seduction: "Ah!
90 Dom Juan and the Manifest God
scoelrat, c'est maintenant que je te connois tout
entier; et, pour mon malheur, je te connois lors-
qu'il n'en est plus temps, et qu'une telle connais-
sance ne peut plus me servir qu'a me deses-
perer" (I.iii).
The past pursues Dom Juan not only in the
form of his deeds, represented by Elvire, but
also in his ancestry, embodied by his father,
Dom Louis. Tragic heroes repeat the crimes of
their fathers. They consummate in the present a
curse placed on them by their very birth. Iden-
tity is destiny. Hollow boasts to the contrary-
"I account myself a child of fortune / beneficent
Fortune, and I shall not be / dishonored" (w.
1080-82)-end in terrible disillusionment: "If
you are / the man he says you are, you're bred
to misery" (vv. 1181-82). And in Racinian
tragedy as in ancient tragedy the children con-
tinue to be what their parents have been:
Tu sais qu'ils sont sortis d'un sang incestueux
Et tu t'etonneraiss'ils etaient vertueux.
(La Thebaide I.i)
.. je lis sur son visage
Des fiers Domitius l'humeurtriste et sauvage;
II mele avec l'orgueilqu'il a pris dans leur sang
La fiertedes Nerons qu'il puisa dans mon flanc.
(Britannicus I.i)
Reconnais l'heritieret le vrai fils d'Atree
(Iphigenie v.iv)
... de ce sang deplorable
Je peris la derniereet la plus miserable.
(Phedre i.iii)
Conformea son aieul, a son pere semblable
On verra de David l'heritierdetestable
Abolir tes honneurs,profanerton autel
Et venger Athalie, Achab et Jezabel.
(A thalie v.vi) 16
Dom Juan's comic monstrosity does not carry
a weight of such epic proportions. It is not the
culmination of poetic myth. The story owes
nothing to anterior persons or their actions. It is
deliberately reduced to the bare, brutal reality of
the moment. Dom Louis evokes a family history
that is the very antithesis of his son's life: "la
gloire de nos ancetres . . leurs vertus" (iv.iv).
The errors of tragic heroes confirm their blood,
but, as for Dom Juan, "Vous descendez en vain
des aieux dont vous etes n': ils vous desavouent
pour leur sang" (Iv.iv). Appropriately, as a
being who exists in and for the moment, Dom
Juan is isolated in time, severed from his fore-
bears.
Dom Louis recalls not only Dom Juan's an-
cestry but also the struggle between Dom Juan
and God. In a sense, the conflict of father and son
is, as Barthes says, a representation of the rela-
tionship between the Creator and His crea-
ture.17 This "monstre dans la nature" owes his
birth to the indefatigable prayer with which
Dom Louis besieged Heaven. And now, revers-
ing his petition, Dom Louis asks God to remove
His gift: "Je saurai . . . prevenir sur toi le cour-
roux du Ciel, et laver par ta punition la honte de
t'avoir fait naitre" (iv.iv). Dom Louis invokes
the creative and destructive powers of God with
equal ease. His ferocious curse sets Dom Juan
face to face with his destiny, but Dom Juan is
consistently incapable of recognizing it. He can
only wish for his father's death in order to enjoy
the present more fully.
III
Between despair and death, the religious an-
guish and the vendetta law that Elvire and Dom
Louis represent, there is an alternative. Sgana-
relle, Dom Juan's confidant, offers his master
escape (thus fulfilling the same function that
Barthes notes for the confidant of tragedy, pp.
62-63). His running commentary, moral and
ironic, on Dom Juan's actions keeps them below
the tragic zone (see Lawrence, "Ironic Com-
mentator"). Sganarelle himself, though he is
linked to Dom Juan, is capable not only of con-
tradicting him but of leaving. The privilege
Barthes claims for Racinian confidants also be-
longs to Sganarelle: "Pour le confident, le
monde existe; sortant de la scene, il peut entrer
dans le reel et en revenir" (p. 61). Sganarelle
does literally exit from the scene when Dom
Juan is in danger and returns with a scatological
excuse. The servant's enslavement to crude
physical urges is a low comic echo of the mas-
ter's bondage to passion. Sganarelle flaunts his
indulgence of the impulse to void himself with
the same lack of propriety and inattention to
duty as Dom Juan shows in his antic pursuit of
every passing female. And the servant's gluttony
(comically displayed in the supper scene in Act
iv) offers an obvious parallel to his master's
 Francis L. Lawrence
sexual appetite. But, while Dom Juan raises his
desires to the level of an absolute-"II n'est rien
qui puisse arreter l'impetuosite de mes desirs"
(I.ii)-the cravings of his confidant stay on the
plane of physical realism.
The escape that Sganarelle offers Dom Juan is
not in the same register as the one that the confi-
dant of tragedy offers the hero. Sganarelle is not
sympathetic to Dom Juan's sins; he does not try
to minimize his master's responsibility. On the
contrary, he is the very shadow of reproach, a
choral accompaniment of moral disapproval:
Tu vois en Dom Juan, mon maitre, le plus grand
sc6leratque la terre ait jamaisporte.
(I.i)
Monsieur, je vous dirai franchement que je n'ap-
prouve point votre methode. (I.ii)
Mon maitre est un fourbe, il n'a dessein que de
vous abuser,et en a bien abuse d'autres. (ii.iv)
Monsieur,vous avez tort.
(IV.v)
CccJlrde tigre! (Iv.vi)
Faites-moi tout ce qu'il vous plaira, battez-moi, as-
sommez-moide coups, tuez-moi,si vous voulez;
il faut que je dechargemon cceuret qu'envalet
fidele je vous dise ce que je dois. . . . Vous
serez damne a tous les diables. (v.ii)
Nor does Sganarelle willingly submit himself
to be his master's tool. He refuses to make facile
excuses for Dom Juan's conduct. Although he is
capable of considerable flights of eloquence in
sketching his master's character (I.i), Sganarelle
falls nearly mute when Dom Juan requires him
to fabricate some plausible reason for the se-
ducer's abandonment of Elvire. In fact, Dom
Juan is, in Sganarelle's eyes, always potentially
guilty of additional betrayals of women, and the
confidant does his best to foil his master's de-
signs by warning the victims covertly. Sganarelle
also refuses to suffer in his master's place. Dom
Juan has a simple plan to evade the murderous
pursuit of Elvire's brothers: "Je veux que
Sganarelle se revete de mes habits. . . . Bien
heureux est le valet qui peut avoir la gloire de
mourir pour son maitre" (II.v). The confidant
declines the role of Dom Juan's surrogate to as-
sume, instead, the costume of a doctor. In this
guise of learned man and healer, Sganarelle tries
to teach Dom Juan simple religious faith, to cure
him by conversion. Despite his intimate knowl-
edge of Dom Juan's evil life, Sganarelle never
91
despairs of producing an illumination and chang-
ing Dom Juan so that his master can evade
damnation. That is to say, Sganarelle continues
to hope until Dom Juan embraces yet another
alternative in his effort to escape the conflict.
Dom Juan's final attempt to evade the pun-
ishment due his crimes is a pretended conver-
sion. As Guicharnaud points out, hypocrisy is
not incompatible with Dom Juan's character. He
has always fled pursuit, always lied to attain his
ends: religious hypocrisy is simply his last
means for escape (pp. 296-99). It is the comic
equivalent of the mauvaise foi that Racine used
to solve the conflict in his four tragedies with
happy endings (Barthes, pp. 60-61). But, in-
stead of offering a minor character like Eriphile
as a scapegoat, Dom Juan splits himself. He
casts out his openly evil mode of life so that the
reborn convert can bypass the vengeance of his
father, of Elvire's brothers, and of every other
pursuer. The ruse is completely successful in
turning Dom Louis from vindictive executioner
into indulgent, forgiving parent, but Elvire's
brother refuses to accept the false victim. He
continues to demand that the new saint satisfy
the obligations incurred by the old sinner. Dom
Juan counters with another false victim, a
transcendent scapegoat:
J'obeisa la voix du Ciel
C'est le Ciel qui le veut ainsi.
Le Ciel l'ordonnede la sorte
Prenez-vous-enau Ciel. (v.iii)
God, direct divine inspiration, is now answerable
for all Dom Juan's actions.
IV
Moliere does not have Racine's audacity.
Dom Juan's bad faith is his alone, not the
dramatist's, so it cannot provide a solution to
the conflict. Moliere frequently arrives at happy
endings by miracles that defeat or circumvent
the guilty comic hero, but he never offers a
marginal character as a substitute victim: all
Moliere's heroes remain unconverted.18 Dom
Juan is unrepentant and he is spectacularly pun-
ished, cast into hell in front of the audience. No
92 Dom Juan and the Manifest God
tragic hero ever suffered a more devastating fall.
Nevertheless, Dom Juan is consistently a comic
character, not only because he is an undignified
opportunist dogged by an ironic fool, but also
because he refuses to experience anagnorisis.
Illumination is offered Dom Juan; it is pressed
upon him. Enlightenment surrounds him, but
he rejects it firmly. The reproaches and the dire
warnings of his father, wife, and servant con-
front Dom Juan with his past guilt and offer him
future salvation or damnation. The miracles put
the final touches to the complete portrait of an
unbeliever. They function in precisely the way
Pascal darkly asserts that they do: "Les miracles
ne se servent pas a convertir mais a condamner"
(Pensees, No. 825). Dom Juan is oblivious to
their supernatural message. He meets each mani-
festation with all the incomprehension and
bravado possible at the moment. The statue
that nodded its head may have been an illusion;
the stone guest who came to dinner is inexpli-
cable but it cannot frighten him; the materializa-
tion of a veiled woman that changes into the
figure of Time is attacked to prove whether it is
matter or spirit. The veiled woman is irresistibly
reminiscent of Elvire's last appearance. In the
specter, all Dom Juan's betrayed wives return
to reproach him. The metamorphosis of the
woman into Time with its scythe is a graphic
representation of the inevitable resolution. Time
has arrived to cut down the comic hero and his
mad delusion of living in and for the present
moment of intense passion.
As a creature who lives in the present, Dom
Juan cannot afford to accept Pascal's wager for
libertines (Pensees, No. 233). The miraculous
reformation that resolves bourgeois drama is
impossible for Dom Juan. He cannot sacrifice
ephemeral pleasures in exchange for the hope
of eternal gains: "Non, non, il ne sera pas dit,
quoi qu'il arrive, que je sois capable de me
repentir" (v.v). But equally impossible to him
are despair and tragic heroism. Dom Juan's
courage is as cold and inhuman as his sensuality.
His final gesture as he gives his hand to the
statue is not, in any sense, acceptance of his des-
tiny but only his customary acceptance of the
challenge offered in the instant. There is no il-
lumination for Dom Juan. Even the moment of
his death has no meaning for him beyond the
immediate sense experience: "O Ciel! que sens-
je? Un feu invisible me brule, je n'en puis
plus, et tout mon corps devient un brasier
ardent. Ah!" (v.vi).19 Dom Juan's first and
last complaint is a searingly vivid descrip-
tion of physical torture, the only suffering of
which he is capable. Sganarelle's cry, "Ah! mes
gages! mes gages!" immediately expresses the
alienation of the spectator from the fate of this
grotesque figure, the failed seducer. Great
drama, but the seeker of tragedy or melodrama
must look elsewhere. There is just enough sen-
timent here to justify Sganarelle's rueful glee di-
rected against Dom Juan. Racine's Phedre her-
self furnishes the essential commentary on the
completed action of Providence in the play: "Et
la mort, a mes yeux derobant la clarte, / Rend
au jour qu'ils souillaient toute sa purete" (v.vii).
A precisely parallel function in both structure
and significance is provided for Moliere's com-
edy by the final speech of Sganarelle:
Voila par sa mort un chacun satisfait: Ciel offense,
lois violees, filles seduites, familles deshonorees,
parentsoutrages,femmes mises a mal, marispousses
a bout, tout le monde est content. II n'y a que moi
seul de malheureux, qui, apres tant d'annees de
service, n'ai point d'autre recompense que de voir
a mes yeux l'impiete de mon maitre punie par le
plus epouvantablechatimentdu monde. (Mes gages!
mes gages!mes gages!) (v.vi)
The servant's plaint for his unpaid wages fills the
place of the classic closing lament for the linger-
ing evil effects of the hero's deeds. It is surely
cold comfort to Dom Juan's victims to know
that he is punished by God, but ridicule is, as
Moliere says, the coldest of all human emo-
tions.20 Dom Juan is brought low in his turn, le
trompeur trompe, victim of a cosmic joke. Hav-
ing tested the truth of Pascal's observation that
we must all, of necessity, wager, the atheist has
lost.
Moliere's Dom Juan takes comedy to the
limit of its possibilities, but its hero does not
escape the genre. His monomania, his contempt
for the rest of humanity, his refusal of every
effort to enlighten him differ from the character-
istics of Moliere's other comic heroes in degree,
not in kind. Dom Juan is a comic Leviathan, the
antithesis of a romanesque or tragic hero. Nei-
ther circumstance nor malevolent gods are re-
sponsible for his defeat. He himself provides the
irreversible element in the comedy. He is a
 Francis L. Lawrence
human parody of the demonic: a member of the
ruling class whose sadistic lust for power is in-
satiable, a seducer whose wiles are in theory ir-
resistible. His ambition is inhuman. He wills to
abolish time in order to live like an angel or a
beast in a perpetual now. His antagonist is not
the tragic hidden God, wily, unjust, and relent-
less, but a salvific Deity who repeatedly offers
Notes
1 Critics agree that the legend was given its form and
popular impetus by a Spanish monk, Gabriel T6llez,
better known as Tirso de Molina, whose El Burlador de
Sevilla y convidado de piedra appeared in print in 1630.
For a list of some treatments of the legend, consult
Armand E. Singer, A Bibliography of the Don Juan
Theme: Versions and Criticism, West Virginia Univer-
sity Bulletin, 54th Ser. (April 1954), and Everett W.
Hesse, "Catalogo bibliografico de Tirso de Molina
(1648-1948), incluyendo una secci6n sobre la influen-
cia del tema de Don Juan," Estudios, 5 (1949), 781-
889. For an excellent study of the permutations of the
theme, see Leo Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don
Juan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1959). A
good essay contrasting the varied embodiments of the
legend prefaces The Theatre of Don Juan: A Collec-
tion of Plays and Views, ed. with a commentary by
Oscar Mandel (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press,
1963).
2 E. T. A. Hoffmanns siimtliche Werke (Munich:
Georg Muller, 1912), I, 87-103; Camus, Le Mythe de
Sisyphe, 28th ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), pp. 97-106.
3 The
gay seducer was the interpretation favored by
several successive actors when Moliere's original text
was finally played again in 1841, after a lapse of a
century and a half. From 1677 to 1841, it had appeared
only in the versified adaptation of Thomas Corneille.
Maurice Descotes sketches the history of the French
theatrical presentations of Dom Juan in his Les Grands
Roles du thdetre de Moliere (Paris: Presses Univer-
sitaires de France, 1960), pp. 59-89, which includes an
account of the great Jouvet's 1948 portrayal of the
hero as tragic rebel (pp. 74-77). In "The Humanity of
Moliere's Dom Juan," PMLA, 68 (1953), 509-34,
James Doolittle celebrates a lucid rebel who lives in
order to realize his individual freedom in defiance of
religious and social conventions. I find it difficult to
recognize the fully conscious hero of Camus and Doo-
little in Moliere's Dom Juan, who is incapable of
visualizing the old age and death that Camus' hero
awaits in grim certainty.
4 For the opinions of those upset by Moliere's im-
piety see Prince de Conti, Sentiments des Peres de
l'Eglise sur la comedie et les spectacles, and B. A. Sieur
de Rochemont, Observations sur une comedie de Moliere
intitulee Le Festin de pierre, rpt. in CEuvres de Moliere,
93
forgiveness and escape. As the resolution of
tragedy couples pity and fear, the ending of
Moliere's comedy brings together laughter and
revulsion. Sganarelle's cry is ridiculous; Dom
Juan's damnation is grotesque.
Newcomb College, Tulane University
New Orleans, Louisiana
ed. Eugene Despois and Paul Mesnard (Paris: Hachette,
1880), v, 217-32. All quotations from Dom Juan are
taken from this edition, and act and scene references
are incorporated in the text. For the romantics' views
see S0ren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David F.
Swenson and Lillian M. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1944), I, 89-93, and Lorenzi de Bradi,
Don Juan, la hlgende et l'histoire (Paris: Librairie de
France, 1930), pp. 47-50.
>The main thrust of my study is a contrast between
Dom Juan and tragic conventions. For a well-drawn
comparison of the plot and hero of Moliere's play to
the romantic mythos, as it is defined by Northrop Frye,
see Harold Knutson, Moliere: An Archetypal Approach
(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 167-72.
6 The Don Juan Legend, trans. David G. Winter
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 87-88.
7 Lionel
Gossman, Men and Masks: A Study of
Moliere (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963),
pp. 42-44; Alvin Eustis, Moliere as Ironic Contempla-
tor (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), pp. 162-63; Marcel
Gutwirth, Moliere ou l'invention comique (Paris:
Minard, 1966), pp. 186-89; and Francis L. Lawrence,
"The Ironic Commentator in Moliere's Dom Juan,"
Studi Francesi, 12 (1968), p. 204. For a study of Dom
Juan as a parody of the legendary hero and a burlesque
of the seventeenth-century concept of authentic hero-
ism, see Joann Kling, "Mock Heroism in Moliere"
(Diss. Tulane Univ. 1975), pp. 102-24.
8 It is by this repetitive process that Moliere's char-
acters continually manifest themselves in time, ac-
cording to Georges Poulet, Etudes sur le temps humain
(Paris: Plon, 1950), pp. 85-86. The present study is
obviously much indebted to Poulet's insights on the
interior experience of time in seventeenth-century
French drama.
9 Poulet (p. 106) observes that the belief that he can
free himself from the past is the delusion of Cr6on in
Racine's Thebaide. Dom Juan's illusion, which includes
a willful disregard of the future, is even more com-
prehensive and powerful than Creon's. Although his
conclusions are different from mine, James Doolittle
also observes that "accomplishment is less significant
than function" for Dom Juan (pp. 531-32).
10 As Jacques Guicharnaud points out, Dom Juan's
blind enslavement to the satisfaction of his appetite is
94 Dom Juan and the Manifest God
similar to, but greaterthan, the monomania of Moliere's
other comic heroes (Moliere, une aventure thedtrale
[Paris: Gallimard, 1963], pp. 199-200).
11 See Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu cache (Paris:
Gallimard, 1955).
12The theme runs from the Old Testament through
the New Testament and is reiterated in Pascal: Isa.
vi.9; Matt. xiii.14; Mark iv.12; Luke viii.10; John xii.40;
Acts xxviii.26; Rom. xi.8; Pascal, Pensees et opuscules,
ed. L6on Brunschvicg (Paris: Hachette, 1917), No. 573.
13 According to Jules Brody, the fact that it is God
who must ultimately defeat Dom Juan proves the
power of Dom Juan and the corruption of the world:
"Dom Juan and Le Misanthrope, or the Esthetics of
Individualismin Moliere,"PMLA, 84 (1969), 567-68.
14 Etudes sur le temps humain (Paris: Plon, 1950),
p. 117.
1) Sophocles, Oedipus the King, trans. David Grene,
in Greek Tragedies, Vol. I (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1960), vv.1116-17. I have relied on Oedipus as
a prototypal tragic hero. All quotations in English
are from this classic, and the verse references are
made in the text.
16 Quotations are taken from Theatre complet, ed.
Maurice Rat (Paris: Garnier, 1960).
17 Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1963),
pp. 48-50.
18 Robert J. Nelson, "The UnreconstructedHeroes of
Moliere," Tulane Drama Review, 4 (1960), 14-37.
19 Cf. Dom Juan's final speech to the last exit of
Arnolphe in L'Ecole des femmes v.ix:
Arnolphe, s'en allant tout transporte,et ne pouvant
parler.
Oh!
Oronte
D'oi vient qu'il s'enfuit sans rien dire?
The earlier play is, as Judd Hubert has ably demon-
strated, a burlesque tragedy, complete with elaborate
indications of suffering, despair, guilt, knowledge, and
the malign influence of destiny (The Comedy of Intel-
lect [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press; London:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962], pp. 62-85). Arnolphe's
mental torment is exaggerated to the point of being
inexpressible; Dom Juan's physical pain is couched
in elegant metaphor. The contrast epitomizes the
difference between the trivialization of tragic conven-
tions for parody in one play and the contradiction of
tragic conventions for high comedy in the other.
20 Lettre sur la comedie de L'Imposteur, CEuvres de
Moliere, iv, 562. This contemporary anonymous de-
fense of Tartuffe is thought to have been written by
Donneau de Vise with Moliere'sapprovaland, probably,
under his direction. See W. G. Moore, "Moliere's
Theory of Comedy," L'Esprit Createur,6 (1966), 137-
44.