Mimesis (62 page)

It is not a philosophy; it is no didactic purpose; it is not even a being stirred by the uncertainty of human existence or by the power of destiny, as in the case of Montaigne and Shakespeare. It is an attitude—an attitude toward the world, and hence also toward the subject matter of his art—in which bravery and equanimity play a major part. Together with the delight he takes in the multifariousness of his sensory play there is in him a certain Southern reticence and pride. This prevents him from taking the play very seriously. He looks at it; he shapes it; he finds it diverting; it is also intended to afford the reader refined intellectual diversion.

But he does not take sides (except against badly written books); he remains neutral. It is not enough to say that he does not judge and
draws no conclusions: the case is not even called, the questions are not even asked. No one and nothing (except bad books and plays) is condemned in the book: neither Ginés de Pasamonte nor Roque Guinart, neither Maritornes nor Zoraida. For us Zoraida’s behavior toward her father becomes a moral problem which we cannot help pondering; but Cervantes tells the story without giving a hint of his thoughts on the subject. Or rather, it is not Cervantes himself who tells the story, but the prisoner—who naturally finds Zoraida’s behavior commendable. And that settles the matter. There are a few caricatures in the book—the Biscayan, the priest at the duke’s castle, Doña Rodriguez; but these raise no ethical problems and imply no basic judgments.

On the other hand no one is praised as exemplary either. Here one might think of the Knight of the Green Caftan, Don Diego de Miranda, who in part 2, chapter 16, gives a description of his temperate style of life and thereby makes such a profound impression upon Sancho. He is temperate and inclined to rational deliberation; in dealing with both Don Quijote and Sancho he finds the right tone of benevolent, modest, and yet self-assured politeness. His attempts to confute or mitigate Don Quijote’s madness are friendly and understanding. He must not be put with the narrow-minded and intolerant priest at the duke’s court (as has been done by the distinguished Spanish scholar, Américo Castro). Don Diego is a paragon of his class, the Spanish variety of the humanist nobleman:
otium cum dignitate
. But he certainly is no more than that. He is no absolute model. For that, after all, he is too cautious and too mediocre, and it is quite possible (so far Castro may be right) that there is a shade of irony in the manner in which Cervantes describes his style of life, his manner of hunting, and his views on his son’s literary inclinations.

Cervantes’ attitude is such that his world becomes play in which every participating figure is justified by the simple fact of living in a given place. Only Don Quijote in his madness is not justified, is wrong. He is also wrong, absolutely speaking, as against the temperate and peaceable Don Diego, whom Cervantes—“with inspired perversity,” as Castro puts it—makes the witness of the adventure with the lion. It would be forcing things if one sought to see here a glorification of adventurous heroism as against calculating, petty, and mediocre caution. If there is possibly an undertone of irony in the portrait of Don Diego, Don Quijote is not possibly but unqualifiedly conceived not with an undertone of ridicule but as ridiculous through and through. The chapter is introduced by a description of the absurd pride he takes in
his victory over Carrasco (disguised as a knight) and a conversation on this theme with Sancho. The passage bears rereading for the sake of the realization it affords that there is hardly another instance in the entire book where Don Quijote is ridiculed—also in ethical terms—as he is here. The description of himself with which he introduces himself to Don Diego is foolish and turgid. It is in this state of mind that he takes on the adventure with the lion. And the lion does nothing but turn its back on Don Quijote! This is pure parody. And the additional details are fit for parody too: Don Quijote’s request that the guard should give him a written testimonial to his heroism; the way he receives Sancho; his decision to change his name (henceforth he will be the Knight of the Lion), and many others.

Don Quijote alone is wrong as long as he is mad. He alone is wrong in a well-ordered world in which everybody else has his right place. He himself comes to see this in the end when, dying, he finds his way back into the order of the world. But is it true that the world is well-ordered? The question is not raised. Certain it is that in the light of Don Quijote’s madness and confronted with it, the world appears well-ordered and even as merry play. There may be a great deal of wretchedness, injustice, and disorder in it. We meet harlots, criminals as galley slaves, seduced girls, hanged bandits, and much more of the same sort. But all that does not perturb us. Don Quijote’s appearance, which corrects nothing and helps no one, changes good and bad fortune into play.

The theme of the mad country gentleman who undertakes to revive knight-errantry gave Cervantes an opportunity to present the world as play in that spirit of multiple, perspective, non-judging, and even nonquestioning neutrality which is a brave form of wisdom. It could very simply be expressed in the words of Don Quijote which have already been quoted:
allá se lo haya cada uno con su pecado, Dios hay en el cielo que no se descuida de castigar al malo, ni de premiar al bueno
. Or else in the words which he addresses to Sancho in part 2, chapter 8, at the end of the conversation about monks and knights:
muchos son los caminos por donde lleva Dios a los suyos al cielo
. This is as much as to say that in the last analysis it is a devout wisdom. It is not unrelated to the neutral attitude which Gustave Flaubert strove so hard to attain, and yet it is very different from it: Flaubert wanted to transform reality through style; transform it so that it would appear as God sees it, so that the divine order—insofar as it concerns the fragment of reality treated in a particular work—would perforce be incarnated
in the author’s style. For Cervantes, a good novel serves no other purpose than to afford refined recreation,
honesto entretenimiento
. No one has expressed this more convincingly in recent times than W. J. Entwistle in his book on Cervantes (1940) where he speaks of recreation and connects it very beautifully with re-creation. It would never have occurred to Cervantes that the style of a novel—be it the best of novels—could reveal the order of the universe. On the other hand, for him too the phenomena of reality had come to be difficult to survey and no longer possible to arrange in an unambiguous and traditional manner. Elsewhere in Europe men had long since begun to question and to doubt, and even to begin building anew with their own materials. But that was in keeping neither with the spirit of his country nor with his own temperament, nor finally with his conception of the office of a writer. He found the order of reality in play. It is no longer the play of Everyman, which provides fixed norms for the judgment of good and evil. That was still so in
La Celestina
. Now things are no longer so simple. Cervantes undertakes to pass judgment only in matters concerning his profession as a writer. So far as the secular world is concerned, we are all sinners; God will see to it that evil is punished and good rewarded. Here on earth the order of the unsurveyable is to be found in play. However arduous it may be to survey and judge phenomena, before the mad knight of La Mancha they turn into a dance of gay and diverting confusion.

This, it seems to me, is the function of Don Quijote’s madness. When the theme—the mad hidalgo who sets forth to realize the ideal of the
caballero andante
—began to kindle Cervantes’ imagination, he also perceived a vision of how, confronted with such madness, contemporary reality might be portrayed. And the vision pleased him, both by reason of its multifariousness and by reason of the neutral gaiety which the knight’s madness spreads over everything which comes in contact with it. That it is a heroic and idealized form of madness, that it leaves room for wisdom and humanity, was no doubt equally pleasing to him. But to conceive of Don Quijote’s madness in symbolic and tragic terms seems to me forced. That can be read into the text; it is not there of itself. So universal and multilayered, so noncritical and nonproblematic a gaiety in the portrayal of everyday reality has not been attempted again in European letters. I cannot imagine where and when it might have been attempted.

15

THE FAUX DEVOT

T
HE PORTRAIT
of the
faux dévot
in the chapter
De la mode
in La Bruyère’s
Caractères
contains a number of polemic allusions to Molière’s
Tartuffe
. The
faux dévot
, La Bruyère says at once, does not speak of “
my hair shirt and my scourge
; on the contrary; he would pass for what he is, for a hypocrite, and he wants to pass for what he is not, for a devout man: it is true that he behaves in a way which makes people believe, without his saying so, that he wears a hair shirt and scourges himself.” Later he criticizes Tartuffe’s behavior in Orgon’s house:

S’il se trouve bien d’un homme opulent, à qui il a su imposer, dont il est le parasite, et dont il peut tirer de grands secours, il ne cajole point sa femme, il ne lui fait du moins ni avance ni déclaration; il s’enfuira, il lui laissera son manteau, s’il n’est aussi sûr d’elle que de lui-même. Il est encore plus éloigné d’employer pour la flatter et pour la séduire le jargon de la dévotion; ce n’est point par habitude qu’il le parle, mais avec dessin, et selon qu’il lui est utile, et jamais quand il ne serviroit qu’à la rendre très-ridicule. … Il ne pense point à profiter de toute sa succession, ni s’attirer une donation générale de tous ses biens, s’il s’agit surtout de les enlever à un fils, le légitime héritier: un homme dévot n’est ni avare, ni violent, ni injuste, ni même intéressé; Onuphre n’est pas dévot, mais il veut être cru tel, et par une parfaite, quoique fausse imitation de la piété, ménager sourdement ses intérêts: aussi ne se joue-t-il pas à la ligne directe, et il ne s’insinue jamais dans une famille où se trouvent tout à la fois une fille à pourvoir et un fils à établir; il y a là des droits trop forts et trop inviolables: on ne les traverse point sans faire de l’éclat (et il l’appréhende), sans qu’une pareille entreprise vienne aux oreilles du Prince, à qui il dérobe sa marche, par la crainte qu’il a d’être découvert et de paraître ce qu’il est. Il en veut à la ligne collatérale: on l’attaque plus impunément; il est la terreur des cousins et des cousines, du neveu et de la nièce, le flatteur et l’ami déclaré de tous les oncles qui ont fait fortune; il se donne pour l’héritier légitime de tout vieillard qui meurt riche et sans enfants. …

(If he finds himself on a good footing with a wealthy man, whom he has been able to take in, whose parasite he is, and from whom he can draw great assistance, he does not cajole his wife, at least he does not make advances nor a declaration to her; he will run away, he will leave his cloak in her hands, if he is not as sure of her as of himself. Still less will he employ the jargon of devotion to flatter her and seduce her; he does not speak it from habit, but from design and according as it is useful to him, and never when it would serve only to make him extremely ridiculous. … He has no idea of becoming his sole heir, nor of getting him to give him his entire estate, especially if it is a case of taking it away from a son, the legitimate heir: a devout man is neither avaricious nor violent nor unjust nor even interested: Onuphre is not devout, but he wants to be thought so and, by a perfect, though false, imitation of piety, to take care of his interests secretly: hence he never ventures to confront the direct line and he never insinuates himself into a family where there are both a daughter to be provided for and a son to be set up in the world; such rights are too strong and too inviolable: they cannot be infringed without scandal (and he dreads scandal), without such an attempt coming to the ears of the Prince, from whom he hides his course because he fears to be exposed and to appear as what he is. He has designs on the collateral line: it is more safely to be attacked; he is the terror of cousins male and female, of nephew and niece, the flatterer and declared friend of all uncles who have acquired fortunes; he claims to be the legitimate heir of every old man who dies wealthy and childless. …)

Here La Bruyère is apparently thinking of the perfect, one might say, the ideal, type of the
faux dévot
, who is nothing but a hypocrite and who, without any human weakness or inconsistency, constantly vigilant, constantly rational, steadily pursues the coolly premeditated plan which goes with his part. But Molière cannot possibly have intended to bring a perfect incarnation of the term
faux dévot
on the stage. He needed strong comic effects for the stage, and he found them, most ingeniously, by contrasting the part played by his Tartuffe with the man’s natural character. This strong, healthy fellow (
gros et gras, le teint frais, et la bouche vermeille
), with his big appetite (
deux perdrix avec une moitié de gigot en hachis
for supper) and his other no less strongly developed physical needs, has not the
slightest talent for piety, not even for a feigned piety. Everywhere the ass looks out from under the lion’s skin. He plays his part execrably by exaggerating it beyond all reason; and he loses control over himself as soon as his senses are aroused. His intrigues are crude and simple-minded, and no one except Orgon and his mother can be taken in by him even for a moment—neither the other actors in the play nor the audience. Tartuffe is not at all the embodiment of an intelligent self-disciplined hypocrite, but a coarse-grained fellow with strong, crude instincts who tries to assume the attitude of a bigot because it seems to promise results and despite the fact that it is not becoming to him at all and clashes with his inner nature and outward appearance. And this is precisely what impresses us as overwhelmingly comic. The critics of the seventeenth century who, like La Bruyère, accepted only the rationally plausible as probable would naturally wonder how it was possible that even Orgon and Madame Pernelle should be taken in by him. However, experience teaches us that even the crudest deception and the silliest temptation will succeed at times if they flatter the habits and instincts of their victims and satisfy their secret cravings. Orgon’s most deeply instinctive and secret craving, which he can indulge precisely by selling himself and his soul to Tartuffe, is the sadism of a family tyrant. What he would never dare to do without piety making it legitimate, for he is as sentimental and uncertain of himself as he is choleric, he can now give himself up to with a clear conscience:
faire enrager le monde est ma plus grande joie!
(3, 7; cf. also 4, 3:
je porte en ce contrat de quoi vous faire rire
). He loves Tartuffe and lets himself be duped by him because Tartuffe makes it possible for him to satisfy his instinctive urge to tyrannize over and torment his family. This further weakens his power of judgment, which in itself is not too highly developed. A very similar psychological process takes place in Madame Pernelle. And again it is extremely ingenious how Molière makes use of piety itself to remove the obstacles which impede the free development of Orgon’s sadism.