Études sur ‘Dom Juan’ de Molière (review)

Renowned for his refreshing willingness to pinpoint in other critics’ arguments those elements that are weak to the point of absurdity, Pommier uses simple, elegant prose like secateurs to cut through the undergrowth of divergent interpretations that has attached itself most recently to the most studied and ambiguous of Molière’s plays. Pommier’s shrewd, detailed assessments of recent Dom Juan criticism, along with his own analysis of the opening scene between Pierrot and Charlotte, will bear up under repeated readings (unlike the glue attempting to hold together the pages of this otherwise attractive volume, which fails to withstand even a first reading). He applauds Patrick Dandrey, who has faulted late twentieth-century critics with forcing the play to fit readings that fail to serve Molière’s text. However, questioning the auto-referential nature of the play and its status as an attempt to calm Molière’s pious critics, he fustigates Dandrey’s contention that the play is nothing less than a critique of comic reason through its use of l’éloge paradoxal and Antony McKenna’s claim that Dom Juan is a libertine worthy of a seventeenth-century Christian apologist’s description, for he sees both as providing further examples of erroneous interpretations that only validate Dandrey’s pessimistic assessment. As for Georges Forrestier’s attempt to see typically moliéresque comic behaviour—blindness to the evidence of reality—in Dom Juan’s refusal to accept the signs sent by le Ciel, Pommier objects, ‘En refusant d’admettre le miracle, Dom Juan ne refuse pas de s’incliner devant les faits: il refuse d’admettre qu’il puisse y avoir des faits surnaturels’ (p. 44). Indeed, much of Pommier’s subsequent contribution to re-reading key scenes in the play rests on the evidence he gleans from the text in support of Dom Juan’s status as a rationalist when confronting both religion and Sganarelle, including the scène du pauvre and the scenes leading up to Dom Juan’s invitation to the statue to dine. He recognizes that the Don Juan legend was not an ideal vehicle for giving theatrical voice to Molière’s grievances, however powerfully subversive many scenes may be, since there was no way of avoiding the anti-rationalist encounter with the statue, which he views as carrying the final act into the realms of the ‘parfaitement invraisemblable’ (p. 94). Nevertheless, he clearly overstates his case when he claims that there is no point in seeking coherence in a play which has resisted coherent interpretation for 300 years. Coherence may be difficult to find in Dom Juan, but for much of that 300-year span, the play was known only through Thomas Corneille’s edulcorated version, while massive critical attention has only been brought to bear in the last 60 years, after Jouvet revived Molière’s original version. Pommier’s book offers an excellent starting place for further research, for nothing proves we have exhausted every possible manner of seeking coherence in the play, especially since few critics have yet attempted to study it from the viewpoint of its roots in farce and the commedia dell’arte.