Moliere on the U Bahn

After starting The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann, Gulliver's Travels in German, finishing Jan Morris's A Writer's World and a collection of Voltaire's fiction (Zadig, Candide, etc.), and putting a collected works of Alexander Pope as well as Erec et Enide by Chrétien de Troyes into the bag I take to work, I am well into reading Molière's play Le Tartuffe.

Tartuffe has an aftertaste of homework for me. It was part of the reading for a literature course at UBC. But I have found it surprisingly pleasing. It's reassuring that the villain is shut up in the hemispherically sealed world of the play and not running free in reality. At the same time it has also become apposite to foreign affairs. Perhaps it is far-fetched, but as Molière's figure of Tartuffe faces the challenge of pretending to be what people think him to be in order to gain his own ends, and of expressing indignation at the deeds of others while not thereby condemning his own deeds, his challenge seems to me like that of Donald Trump. I don't mean that as an insult, although the implications of it are frankly unflattering. I don't think that Donald Trump is the only politician, by far, who uses hypocrisy to further his career and perhaps to obey the wishes of his supporters. The supporters need to justify their preference for their candidate by pointing to his outward display of virtue. But more than with most politicians, perhaps, it is less his political history and actions, less his qualifications and less his devotion to statecraft of any sort, than his façade, which is relevant to the public.

The play's plot is that a well-to-do father and his mother are both approached by an ostentatiously pious man, whom the father invites into his own home. The family, aside from the two admirers of Tartuffe, abhors the man. But the father of the household is so taken with Tartuffe that he evens disowns his own son in the ostensibly saintly guest's favour. The plot and the conflict are not out of date, I think, when sects (religious and secular as well, I suppose) still prey on people, and fissures still grow in families as a result. In Tartuffe, it's clear to me that the villain's appeal to the father of the central family is less based on piety than on a kind of midlife crisis. Orgon, the father, wants someone to admire and spoil him more than his own wife, children, and servant do. He wants to assert his authority, too. The idea that taking friends, family, etc. for granted is a reciprocal concept — for instance, at the beginning of the play his manners are so bad or his feelings so self-absorbed that it appears that his wife's brief illness could hardly interest him less — is beyond his understanding.

In a complex way, I like that Molière points out how, in fact, all of his dramatis personae are irritating. Orgon for the reasons mentioned above; his brother Cléante for his air of mental and moral superiority and his uninterest in tactfulness to accommodate Orgon's sense of pride; his daughter Marianne for her flightiness and her inexperience with independent thinking; his servant Dorine for being pushy and aggressively critical (she is critical with good reason, but even the best of persons has some feelings that might be injured), and his son Damis for his hotheadedness and his lack of subtlety. Perhaps it is all the worse for Orgon's feelings that despite these shortcomings of judgment or manner, they are all right where he is wrong.

I still think that Tartuffe is the really interesting character, although well described as utterly loathsome, and I wondered how I'd portray him if I were an actor. How slimy? how essentially gloomy? how evidently fake? self-admiring or, more likely, self-despising? And what did he do before he tried 'grifting' for money and shelter with the pretence of religious feeling?