Le Tartuffe - Molière

I have been taking a few high school classes as a substitute teacher. One subject is French literature, which I have been giving to a small group of 14-year-olds. We have been going through Tartuffe, the famous play about a religious hypocrite that got its author Molière into so much trouble with Louis XIV.

I saw the play when in England a few years ago, done with Tartuffe as a Brahmin. The play has been done transcontextualized into Islam and other religions as well: religious hypocrisy is a universal fact of life. Though Tartuffe's breast-beating show of prayerfulness would be treated with ridicule today, sanctimoniousness is still present in different forms. Surely Siddhanta Saraswati rebelled against the Tartuffes of his day, and we feel the same repulsion towards those who similarly play the cards of saintliness and morality to establish their own superiority and win the adulation of others.

Yet, I found the passages in which Tartuffe attempts to seduce Elmire, the wife of his patron Orgon, truly moving. Tartuffe is a master of religious language, all the more to hide his true motivations.

L'amour qui nous attache aux beautés éternelles
N'étouffe pas en nous l'amour des temporelles ;
Nos sens facilement peuvent être charmés
Des ouvrages parfaits que le Ciel a formés.
Ses attraits réfléchis brillent dans vos pareilles ;
Mais il étale en vous ses plus rares merveilles ;
Il a sur votre face épanché des beautés
Dont les yeux sont surpris, et les coeurs transportés,
Et je n'ai pu vous voir, parfaite créature,
Sans admirer en vous l'auteur de la nature,
Et d'une ardente amour sentir mon coeur atteint,
Au plus beau des portraits où lui-même il s'est peint.
D'abord j'appréhendai que cette ardeur secrète
Ne fût du noir esprit une surprise adroite ;
Et même à fuir vos yeux mon coeur se résolut,
Vous croyant un obstacle à faire mon salut.
Mais enfin je connus, ô beauté toute aimable,
Que cette passion peut n'être point coupable,
Que je puis l'ajuster avecque la pudeur,
Et c'est ce qui m'y fait abandonner mon coeur.
Ce m'est, je le confesse, une audace bien grande
Que d'oser de ce coeur vous adresser l'offrande ;
Mais j'attends en mes voeux tout de votre bonté,
Et rien des vains efforts de mon infirmité ;
En vous est mon espoir, mon bien, ma quiétude,
De vous dépend ma peine ou ma béatitude,
Et je vais être enfin, par votre seul arrêt,
Heureux si vous voulez, malheureux s'il vous plaît.

This passage, of course, is the emblem of Tartuffe's hypocrisy, because on the one hand he claims to despise all the things of the flesh, and yet here, he says (again, beautifully)

Ah ! pour être dévot, je n'en suis pas moins homme ;
Et lorsqu'on vient à voir vos célestes appas,
Un coeur se laisse prendre, et ne raisonne pas.

The sage Cléante, Orgon's brother-in-law, is the voice of moderated and sane spirituality. He detests Tartuffe's excesses, which have so duped Orgon and his mother.

The children watched the film today, and at least half of them were mesmerized. Some of the boys found it a little hard to understand and were restless. The subject is a bit distant to most people in today's world. The subject is not distant to mine, however, though God knows I would crush my inner hypocrite.

Il est de faux dévots ainsi que de faux braves ;
Et comme on ne voit pas qu'où l'honneur les conduit
Les vrais braves soient ceux qui font beaucoup de bruit,
Les bons et vrais dévots, qu'on doit suivre à la trace,
Ne sont pas ceux aussi qui font tant de grimace.

Jagatji,

Radhe!

Thanks for the review. I liked what I could read. Any chance you could translate the French into English? Is this play available in English?

Thanks.

Ys,

NMd

A source for a full translation:


http://www.alibris.com/search/search.cfm?q...s*listing*title

The following page has a portion of what I believe is the above passage by three translators for comparison:

http://www.erudit.org/revue/ttr/2001/v14/n1/000528ar.html

You can get the gist:



The only link I found for an online translation was broken...

I guess we English speakers have to buy the book.

Jagat,

I don't mean to derail the spirit of this topic, but you did bring this up, and it has been on my mind now for days. So I decided to go ahead and ask you to clarify who in fact are you referring to when you say "Siddhanta Saraswati rebelled against the Tartuffes of his day"?

Surely you don't mean RadhaRaman Charan Das, Ramakrishna Das Pandit Baba or Bepin Behari Gosvami, whom in fact Siddhanta Saraswati did have strong disagreements with do you?

Could you please be specific as to who you are referring to that 'Siddhanta Saraswati' rebelled against in this statement? Who were those 'Tartuffes of his day'?

namaskar,

jijaji

Can I get an answer on this above question Jagat..?

come on I'm not 'chopped eggplant' bro...

namaskar,

jijaji

Sorry. No I wasn't really refering to anyone specific. You can go overboard on criticism also. What I was thinking, even as I went through Tartuffe, was that there must have been an element of sincerity at some time or another, or even the hypocrite would not be able to fool the gullible. He wouldn't know what to do or say. It is just that due to aparadh, at some time an element of cynicism enters and one says "What the hell."

Sorry I called you on this,

I asked an honest question without malice and you say.."You can go overboard on criticism also" I dont get it.

have a nice day,

jijaji

Again the problem of misunderstanding. I was not refering to you in the slightest. I was getting back to the whole problem of faultfinding and hypocrisy. Just like Cléante says in Molière's play, "There are false devotees just like there are false heroes." But does a devotee have to keep silent when the emperor has no clothes for fear of committing offenses?

The most exalted devotees do not see fault anywhere. But even the madhyama devotee should recognize that there is still merit in the facsimile, or in the simulation of devotion. There must have been a grain of genuine devotion somewhere at some time for it to be able to manifest even in shadow form.

Yet there is always the risk that the kanishtha will lose faith in devotion entirely if those whom they consider to be true devotees are nothing more than Tartuffes. Like in the play, Orgon is totally disillusioned when he realizes that Tartuffe has just been leading him around "by the nose" and is ready to take him for everything he has.

The problem with a caricature like Tartuffe is that many apparent hypocrites are self-conflicted. Evil often creeps up on the weakhearted by accident, unintentionally. Even a Hitler or Hussein may have been well-intentioned at one point, but allowed politics, power, necessity and expediency to eat away at their resistence to evil until they were finally transformed into monsters. This is where Simone Weil's famous phrase, "the banality of evil," comes from. Such persons can go on hiding themselves behind the mask of their original sincerity even when it has long since ceased to have any meaning.

A devotee is kind and pays his respects to the mask, even when seeing the distorted face behind it. But is it kind of him to allow others to accept the mask for the real? Once again, as Cléante says:

Hé quoi! vous ne ferez nulle distinction
Entre l'hypocrisie, et la dévotion?
Vous les voulez traiter d'un semblable langage,
Et rendre même honneur au masque qu'au visage?
Egaler l'artifice, à la sincérité;
Confondre l'apparence, avec la vérité;
Estimer le fantôme, autant que la personne;
Et la fausse monnaie, à l'égal de la bonne?
Les hommes, la plupart, sont étrangement faits!
Dans la juste nature on ne les voit jamais.
La raison a pour eux des bornes trop petites.
En chaque caractère ils passent ses limites,
Et la plus noble chose, ils la gâtent souvent,
Pour la vouloir outrer, et pousser trop avant.
Que cela vous soit dit en passant, mon beau-frère.

The point being that pure devotion is not an easy thing and it's not always the whistle blower who is wrong.

(Excuse me for not translating.)

"The Banality of Evil"

- Hannah Arendt in

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...836167?v=glance

An important book by an important writer. I think what she really meant was that Eichman committed his acts without thinking or reflection, as part of everyday bureaucratic bourgeois life. 'Just following orders'.

Simone Weill?

***

"A devotee is kind and pays his respects to the mask, even when seeing the distorted face behind it. But is it kind of him to allow others to accept the mask for the real? "

Yes, that is an excellent observation, Jagatji, probably very much in harmony with Arendt's point.

No no Jan! Rimbaud and Baudelaire and yes Verlaine as well!

I was a wee tad even when I read them all. no more then 14-15 years old searching for meaning in words... 'A season in Hell', 'LES FLEURS DU MAL'....Classics! I ended up going to school for this. but then the Beats came into my bookbag and that changed it all.

They were all insane to a degree but my gosh, the literature produced that turned the tide of French Literature that was getting old and grungy until these young lads came into the picture with their mighty pens! "The pen is indeed sharper than the sword!" (A. Rimbaud).

I`m gald you are teaching Jagat

Brian

À la recherche du temps perdu...

Mais quand vous avez 14 ans vous devez au moins explorer les 'profondeurs avant que vous puissiez sauter lui.

Sorry, for some reason I keep getting Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt's names mixed up.

And teaching? Barely worth the name...