The Hypochondriac or The Imaginary Invalid by Molière

Molière is a delight after the gory plays by Seneca! (Funnily enough, last time I read Molière was after the dark and repulsive revenge plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries).

I read the translation by Alan Drury, for the National Theatre in 1981, who devised the Prologue, Interludes, and Epilogues “in parallel to Molière’s rather than being a direct translation.” 

1/ The play is very funny. 

“ARGAN If a husband cannot leave anything to the wife he loves so tenderly, to the wife who has taken such great care of him, then precedent’s an ass. I’ll have to consult my lawyer to see what I can do. 

[…] 

ARGAN I shall have to make my will, my love, way Monsieur tells me to; but to be on the safe side, I’m going to give you twenty thousand francs in gold I have behind a secret panel next to my bed, and two bills payable to the bearer, one from Monsieur Damon and one from Monsieur Gérante. 

BELINE No, no, I’ll have none of it. How much did you say was behind the secret panel? 

ARGAN Twenty thousand francs, my love. 

BELINE Do not talk to me of riches, I pray you. How much are those two bills worth?” 

(Act 1) 

Some of his plays are different, such as Don Juan, but Molière’s plays—I mean the ones I know—tend to have the same format: the protagonist as the main object of satire; a hindered marriage; some charlatan/ trickster/ fraud (in this case, Beline the wife); a clever servant. 

“DIAFOIRUS SENIOR […] What’s irritating about the great is that when they are ill they absolutely insist their doctors cure them. 

TOINETTE How very presumptuous. You aren’t there for that. You’re there to issue prescriptions and to collect your fees. It’s up to them to get better if they can.” 

In this play, Molière lampoons hypochondriacs (like Argan) and quack doctors (like Diafoirus Senior, M. Purgon, M. Fleurant) and mercenaries (like Beline).

Between Act 2 and Act 3, Argan, his brother Beralde, and Argan’s servant Toinette go see a Molière play together—a play within a play I’ve seen many times but this is new—Molière’s characters go see a Molière play! 

“BERALDE […] That Molière play we’ve just seen; I would have thought that would have put you in the right track as well as given you something to laugh at. 

ARGAN Your Molière is an impertinent fellow with his so-called comedies. It’s a fine thing to make fun of honest men, like doctors.” 

(Act 3) 

The disturbing part however is that Molière collapsed onstage during his fourth performance and died soon after. Imagine being in the first audience watching the doctors curse Argan (played by Molière) and then seeing that Molière actually died! 

2/ Alan Drury is funny; another thing I like is that I can spot Shakespeare references in his translation. 

“ARGAN Listen, my girl, there’s no compromise. You have four days to make a choice. Either you marry Monsieur or get thee to a nunnery.” 

(Act 2) 

The same line in Charles Heron Wall’s translation is “Either you will marry this gentleman or you will go into a convent.” Drury’s choice is much funnier. 

“TOINETTE (crying out) Oh, my God, oh woe is me, what an untoward accident. 

BELINE What is it, Toinette? 

TOINETTE Ah, Madame. 

BELINE What is it? 

TOINETTE Your husband is dead. 

BELINE My husband is dead? 

TOINETTE Alas, yes. He’s shuffled off his mortal coil.” 

(Act 3) 

Again, Hamlet. 

I’m a simple girl—I get excited when spotting a Shakespeare reference. One of the pleasures of knowing Shakespeare is that you not only see his influence on playwrights, novelists, and short story writers, but also come across references by translators. E. D. A. Morshead’s translation of Prometheus Bound, for instance, has “More kin than kind” (evoking Hamlet’s “A little more than kin, and less than kind”) and “wild and whirling words” (again, Hamlet). Both are Morshead’s additions—at least that’s what I think when I compare this translation and the one by Theodore Alois Buckley.  

In these cases, it’s obvious, but sometimes it can be confusing—I saw “the dogs of war” and “’Tis I for whom the bell shall toll” in Philip Wayne’s translation of Faust, Part 1, but is it Goethe or the translator who references Shakespeare and Donne? 

3/ I love the light touch, the warmth and humour of Molière. A couple of months ago, I also read but didn’t blog about The School for Wives (translated by Richard Wilbur). 

Apart from Shakespeare, I would probably say my favourite writer of tragedies is Sophocles and favourite writer of comedies is Molière. 

Goethe’s Faust, Part 1

I read the verse translation by Philip Wayne. 

1/ The first interesting thing to observe is that in Goethe’s play, Faust doesn’t appear first. In Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, we do have the character of Chorus introducing the main character and providing us the context, but right afterwards Marlowe brings us into Faustus’ study. That is not the case in Goethe’s play. Goethe’s Faust begins in a “meta” way—the director, the poet, and the comedian talk about the play and its writing—then we have a scene in Heaven and see Mephistopheles and his intentions before meeting Faust. That shifts the focus.   

2/ I don’t know how close the translation is, but I enjoyed it—I liked that there’s rhyme.  

“FAUST […] The spirit’s splendour, in the soul unfurled, 

Is ever stifled with a stranger stuff. 

High values, matched with good things of this world, 

Mocking recede, and seem an airy bluff. 

Our nobler veins, the true, life-giving springs, 

Are choked with all the dust of earthy things.

[…] Shall I then rank with gods? Too well I feel 

My kinship with the worm, who bores the soil, 

Who feeds on dust until the wanderer’s heel 

Gives sepulture to all his care and toil…” (p.52 in my Penguin copy)  

Faust gets the best lines, naturally: 

“… But let not mortal troubles cast their shades, 

Before this hour of sweet content has run. 

Mark, now, the glimmering in the leafy glades, 

Of dwellings gilded by the setting sun. 

Now slants the fiery god towards the west, 

Hasting away, but seeking in his round 

New life afar: I long to join his quest, 

On tireless wings uplifted from the ground. 

[…] And now at length the sun-god seems to sink, 

Yet stirs my heart with new-awakened might, 

The streams of quenchless light I long to drink, 

Before me day, and, far behind, the night, 

The heavens above me, and the waves below: 

A lovely dream, but gone with set of sun…” (p.66) 

I couldn’t help thinking however that Faust felt like it’s meant to be read more than seen. Many long speeches—like some speeches in Spanish Golden Age plays—would feel rather awkward for the stage. This is very different from Shakespeare. As I noted before in my blog post about Tirso de Molina, the long speeches in Shakespeare are either rhetoric (a character trying to persuade another character or a group), or streams of thoughts showing the character’s process of thinking. In other (pre-Ibsen, pre-Chekhov) playwrights I have read including Goethe, the long speeches are often just the playwright writing some poetry. Some speeches in Faust are indeed him doing some thinking (such as his pondering over the line “In the beginning of the Word” before Mephistopheles’s appearance), but a lot of the long speeches are basically just Goethe writing poetry. 

(A side note: it’s when you read plays that are great poetically but undramatic and unstageable that you realise how stupid it is to believe that Shakespeare, who combined such great poetic and dramatic gifts, was an aristocrat sitting at court rather than, as Shakespeare was, a theatre man). 

3/ One problem with reading Faust in translation is that I cannot see its influence—I do not know which lines and phrases have entered the German language. Another problem is that when I come across something like “the dogs of war” (p.59) or “’Tis I for whom the bell shall toll” (p.87), I have no idea if it’s Goethe or the translator who is referencing Shakespeare and Donne. I know Goethe loves Shakespeare, but it may just be a “remembrance of things past” situation. 

4/ Faust goes in a direction I didn’t expect. 

“FAUST […] I have, I grant, outdistanced all the others, 

Doctors, pedants, clergy and lay-brothers; 

All plague of doubts and scruples I can quell, 

And have no fear of devil or of hell, 

And in return am destitute of pleasure, 

Knowing that knowledge tricks us beyond measure, 

That man’s conversion is beyond my reach, 

Knowing the emptiness of what I teach…” (p.43) 

That’s Faust when we see him the first time, bemoaning the emptiness of his knowledge. He is depressed: 

“FAUST […] And shall I wonder why my heart 

Is lamed and frightened in my breast, 

Why all the springs of life that start 

Are strangely smothered and oppressed? 

Instead of all that life can hold 

Of Nature’s free, god-given breath, 

I take to me the smoke and mould

Of skeletons and dust and death…” (p.45) 

Why does he make a pact with the devil? 

“FAUST Have you not heard?—I do not ask for joy. 

I take the way of turmoil’s bitterest gain, 

Of love-sick hate, of quickening bought with pain. 

My heart, from learning’s tyranny set free, 

Shall no more shun distress, but take its toll 

Of all the hazards of humanity, 

And nourish mortal sadness in my soul. 

I’ll sound the heights and depths that men can know, 

Their very souls shall be with mine entwined, 

I’ll load my bosom with their weal and woe, 

And share with them the shipwreck of mankind.” (p.89-90) 

But once he has power, as Mephistopheles does whatever he wants, the thing he wants is a lover—Margareta (or Gretchen). 

“FAUST […] To cut the story short, I tell you plain, 

Unless her sweet young loveliness has lain 

Within my arms’ embrace this very night, 

The stroke of twelve shall end our pact outright.” (p.122) 

That could very well be the effect of the potion Mephistopheles previously gave Faust, as part of the plan to corrupt and destroy him—my surprise is that the affair with Margareta dominates the play, that love and lust are Mephistopheles’s way of ruining Faust—it’s very different from Marlowe’s version.  

(But then this is the man who wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, which I recently read). 

5/ I don’t have much to say about Faust, as I don’t think I got much out of it in my first reading. 

Philip Wayne makes a good point though, when he says: 

“[Goethe’s Mephistopheles] is the world’s most convincing portrait of Satan, and cynicism, scoffing, negation, is the key-note of his intellectuality.” (Introduction) 

Brief thoughts on The Sorrows of Young Werther

I don’t have a lot to say about The Sorrows of Young Werther, my first encounter with Goethe. I’m a Jane Austen girl; Werther—what can I say—is annoying. But I’d like to note that Goethe does something unusual and odd with the form. The epistolary novel can do different things: it could be personal letters depicting the characters’ different perspectives and contradictory accounts of the same things (Richardson, Dangerous Liaisons, Lady Susan…); it could be a series of documents and testimonies (Dracula, The Moonstone…). Unlike these novels, The Sorrows of Young Werther only has Werther’s letters—there is a correspondence but we never hear the other side—Werther’s letters, mostly to his friend Wilhelm, function as a journal like Pamela’s unsent letters to her parents during her imprisonment. We’re stuck in his over-sensitive and neurotic and obsessive mind the same way we’re stuck in the claustrophobic and exhausting mind of the narrator in In Search of Lost Time. It is only towards the end that we get some different perspectives, when the editor of the letters, from the beginning of the book, reappears and narrates Werther’s last days. But if Werther’s letters are a device for realism—these texts exist because Werther writes letters to his best friend and other people—the editor/ narrator at the end breaks that realism—how does he know not only the actions but also Lotte’s thoughts and feelings of guilt? In a way, it’s rather awkward. But at the same time, I can see what Goethe is doing: he does not let us see Lotte till the end, just a short while before Werther kills himself over her. And that is interesting. 

Tolstoy's embodiment of a kind of universal physical existence

In Tolstoy and the Novel, John Bayley writes:

“... Indeed we might make a distinction, in the context of Russian and Western literature, between the author who writes about himself and his experiences, and the author who exists. Gide writes about himself: Tolstoy writes about himself: but with the former we feel the will to create and impose upon us the idea of a unique and significant person; with the latter, only the transparent statement of an existence. It is the same with the comparison, made by Thomas Mann and others, between Goethe and Tolstoy. Both are supreme egotists. But Goethe is absorbed by himself because he is a national genius, a god-like apparition; Tolstoy, because he finds himself experiencing what all other human beings experience. Goethe’s self-preoccupation strikes us as perpetually narcissistic, incapable of disturbing its own image; Tolstoy’s is the egotism of a man like any other, but immensely more so.
[…] For surely the collapse of the sense of existence in Tolstoy is the surest proof both of how superb and how universal it had been? All of us are subject to such a temporary collapse: Tolstoy experienced it on an overwhelming scale. Tolstoy’s embodiment of a kind of universal physical existence would be nothing if it had not been so continually haunted and obsessed by the question of what there was, what there might be, outside himself. A Tolstoy who continued to write novels of the same kind would be an intolerable phenomenon, for his egotism seems to encompass all physical existence. But what grows with it, haunts it, and finally dominates it, is the admission of its limitations, the confrontation of self with what is not self, of life with death. Tolstoy is not ill, not perverse; he plays out in himself, and on his scale, the most universal and inevitable of human dramas. He is the state of our existence: he does not, like Goethe, attempt to conquer it and to put himself above it. Ultimately, as Thomas Mann comes near to admitting, Goethe cared for nothing but himself. Tolstoy was nothing but himself, and his sense of what awaited him, and what was outside him, is correspondingly more intimate to us all, and more moving...”

At the same time, I’ve been reading The Cossacks, because of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which I think applies to most readers. It is very much a Tolstoy novel (I would not use the word “Tolstoyan”, which refers more to Tolstoy's philosophical and religious ideas and the social movement): cold description and hot interiority, an obsession with death and the meaning of life and happiness and love. Dmitri Andreich Olenin is a complex, susceptible, self-contradictory young man torn between pleasures and his own idealism, a socially awkward man fed up with the artificiality and hypocrisy of his own class but unable to cut himself off from that world because he belongs nowhere else even while feeling that he doesn’t quite fit in with people of his class. His struggle to find meaning and to give his life meaning makes him feel even more alienated, because his motives are unknown and his efforts are therefore misunderstood, and because he’s uncertain. Like Pierre in War and Peace. Like Levin in Anna Karenina. Like Tolstoy himself. And in a way, like us, in our musings about life and struggle to make life meaningful and pursuit of happiness—just “larger”, more complex, more self-contradictory.