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Yet Another Last Word on Molière's Raisonneur

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Harold C. Knutson
Harold C. Knutson
Affiliation:
Professor of French at the University of British Columbia.
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Extract

To review in detail the history of scholarship on the raisonneur in Molière would be to incur the charge of tedium often levelled against the character. In general, criticism in the last thirty years has steered a middle course between Michaut and Bray, between a well-filled gallery of spokesmen and a categorical: “il n'y a pas de raisonneurs dans le Théâtre de Molière” (“there are no raisonneurs in Molière's theatre”). Most of Michaut's raisonneurs have gone the way of Saint Christopher, and few commentators still heed the authorial voice Michaut so often heard.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 22 , Issue 1: French Theatre , May 1981 , pp. 17 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1981

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References

NOTES

1 Bray, René, Molière homme de Théâtre (Paris, 1954), p. 28Google Scholar. This translation and all succeeding ones in this paper arc my own.

2 “Don Juan est-il comique?” La Cohérence intérieure: Etudes sur la littérature française présentées en hommage à judd D. Hubert (Paris, 1977), p. 41.Google Scholar

3 “The Function of the Raisonneur in Molière's Comedy,” Modern Language Notes 90 (1975), 571, 574.Google Scholar

4 The Skeptical Vision of Molière: A Study in Paradox (New York, 1977), pp. 214–16.Google Scholar

5 For a more specific appraisal of various approaches to the question, as well as for a brief bibliography, see my “Molière's raisonneur: A Critical Assessment,” Oeuvres et Critiques I, 2 (1976), 129–131.Google Scholar

6 Bray, p. 32.

7 Herzel.p. 565.

8 Fargher, R., “Molière and his Reasoners,” Studies in French Literature presented to H. W. Lawton by colleagues, pupils and friends (Manchester, 1968), p. 107.Google Scholar

9 Quotations from Molière will be identified by act, scene, and verse numbers in the case of plays in verse, by act and scene designation in the case of prose plays.

10 The synonym given is ‘parlet.’

11 Quoted in Patricia Topliss, The Rhetoric of Pascal (Leicester, 1966), p. 25.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., p. 17.

13 As attested by the Dictionnaire Roben.

14 For specific data of this kind I am indebted to Professor Bryant Freeman who was kind enough to provide me with sections of his Concordance of Molière, as yet unpublished. To him my sincere thanks for making my task so much easier.

15 The variant of 1674 and 1682 raisonnez seems an error. The subject is clearly “flegme,” not “Monsieur [vous] qui…,” as is confirmed by the next verse, “ce flegme, ne pour-ait-il….”

16 Herzel.p. 567.

17 Monsieur de Pourceaugnac was the role played by Molière, who once again made comic capital of his ill health.

18 McBride's solemn analyses in The Skeptical Vision of Molière seem to miss this point (passim but especially pp. 91–94).

19 Moliére: An Archetypal Approach (Toronto, 1976), p. 177.Google Scholar