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YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY TEXTUAL HARMONIES IN LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME STEPHEN BOLD BLESSED – or cursed – with a joyously insane happy ending, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme seems only recently to be receiving the proper respect that is its due. As Gabriel Conesa has noted, “Loin d’être une pièce mineure, comme on l’a parfois pensé [. . .] – à la lumière de critères aristotéliciens ou de règles peu pertinents pour estimer la poétique originale que Molière a conçue – Le Bourgeois gentilhomme est le chefd ’œuvre de la comédie-ballet.” This renewed favor is certainly related to the greater interest given to the comédie-ballet in general by recent scholars (Claude Abraham, Stephen Fleck and Charles Mazouer, among others) and performers, as part of a growing recognition of the role played by the baroque in the culture of the grand siècle. Staging Le Bourgeois was long a matter of finding a suitable buffoon to play Jourdain as a topsy-turvy, would-be sun king around whom orbit artists and artisans retained by the gravitational pull of his louis d’or. Antoine Adam’s discussion of Le Bourgeois is frequently cited as an example of both aspects of this narrow critical vision: “La pièce est bâtie à la diable. Les deux premiers actes ne sont rien qu’une série de lazzi. L ’action ne commence qu’au IIIe acte” (3: 383). Though he does, a bit condescendingly , allow that this play may be permitted its faults since it’s not a “grande comédie” and, with this in mind, should be counted as “une des œuvres les plus heureuses de Molière,” this is “surtout [par] la vie prodigieuse de Monsieur Jourdain” (3: 383-4).1 Conversely, the “parti pris” of a recent historical recreation of the play by “Le Poème har1 See also René Bray’s treatment of Le Bourgeois as a farce-ballet, formally inferior to Le Mariage forcé (326). YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 23 monique” – down to the candle-lit illumination of the stage and the adoption of historically reconstructed pronunciation – was to decenter the performance in order to illuminate the artistic proportions of the work.2 The dramatic representation of these aesthetic dimensions forms a central dialectic – a dynamic (though not necessarily conflictual) paradigm of creative possibilities – that has always been recognized in this play but which remains, in my view, méconnue. Representation of elements in this dialectic or paradigm ranges from the explicit (particularly in the first act) to the implicit (in the two famous set pieces: the Cérémonie turque and the concluding Ballet des nations). Both of these representational poles have been amply discussed in the critical literature and I will refer to these discussions in the following pages. But my primary interest is in figural representation situated between the verbal and non-verbal abstracts of pure theory and of balletic or musical expression . This intermediate realm is, to my mind, the true locus of literary creation and theatrical rhetoric: verbal figuration (in dramatic discourse and stage directions) and discourses of debate and seduction.3 Even if we limit ourselves at the start to the most overt level of artistic representation in the play – the representation of the artists themselves – this new light on Le Bourgeois reveals much about the play’s aesthetic perspective, as not exactly a thorough reflection on art, but at least a projection of contemporary artistic practice and attitudes. Among the critics who have attempted to draw up a balance sheet from this snapshot of classical French culture, Odette de Mourgues has said: “whatever the grace and subtlety of a civilized society, its values may be questioned and are questioned more than once in the play” (178). One of the most important answers she finds to this questioning can be summa24 ROMANCE NOTES 2 As one of the cast members, Serge Goubiaud, describes in a “making of” documentary : “Depuis des décennies, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, ça se passait autour d’un comédien d’un certain âge qui se mettait à butiner et du coup on oubliait tout le reste. [Notre] parti pris d’avoir un Bourgeois absolument naïf et qui découvre, comme nous, cette...

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