Hooked on Literature - Part 4

My students were more than willing to accept the play’s action/narrative until the dénouement. Then they balked. They felt the King of France’s intervention in extremis through the intermediary of his Exempt de Police was completely implausible.

Those who are familiar with the play will recall that just as Orgon and his family are about to be despoiled and Orgon apprehended as an enemy of the state, Louis XIV, acting through his Police Inspector, unmasks Tartuffe as a dangerous criminal, orders him seized and thrown into prison, and restores Orgon’s wealth and honour. I could understand my students’ reaction. In fact, I was expecting it. The conclusion of the play is too good to be true since the king intervenes as a deus ex machina to save the family from a dreadful fate and to punish an obnoxious evil-doer.

But, as I told my students, this is the point Molière wants to make and he makes it with this artificial ending. Through this fairy-tale conclusion, the playwright implies that in real life Virtue and justice would not necessarily have triumphed, and crime would not necessarily have been punished. We have been witnessing a comedy, and so the ending had to be a happy one. If Molière had conceived his play as a serious drama, however, the action could have ended in a very different way. I added that although Molière wanted his audiences to laugh at our human foibles, he also wanted them to think of the dreadful consequences resulting from stupid behaviour. And my students agreed with me that he did succeed brilliantly.  

During the course of our discussions, my students noticed that there were among themselves differences of interpretation of the play as well as of the characters. And they were struck by the fact that their views did not always or necessarily coincide with mine. I told them not to worry about it. Great literature, I assured them, is characterized by its polyvalence of expression. A text like Tartuffe explores a region of the human condition so complex and ambivalent that there cannot be one single, definitive assessment of it. And thank goodness for that, otherwise what would be the point of reading works written several hundred years ago?

It is perfectly legitimate, I told them, to extend a given text provided one does not reach conclusions that contradict it. I then referred to the French director, Roger Planchon’s famous setting of Molière’s play. He imagines Tartuffe and his adulator, Orgon, in a homosexual relationship. Granted, there is nothing in the play that explicitly corroborates this angle. On the other hand, there is absolutely nothing in the text that contradicts it.