Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy

Emilia Wilton-Godberfforde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367879945
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317097419
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

The first book-length study devoted to this topic, Mendacity and the Figure of the Liar in Seventeenth-Century French Comedy offers an important contribution to scholarship on the theatre as well as on early modern attitudes in France, specifically on the subject of lying and deception. Unusually for a scholarly work on seventeenth-century theatre, it is particularly alert to plays as performed pieces and not simply printed texts. The study also distinguishes itself by offering original readings of Molière alongside innovative analyses of other playwrights. The chapters offer fresh insights on well-known plays by Molière and Pierre Corneille but also invite readers to discover lesser-known works of the time (by writers such as Benserade, Thomas Corneille, Dufresny and Rotrou). Through comparative and sustained close readings, including a linguistic and speech act approach, a historical survey of texts with an analysis of different versions and a study of irony, the reader is shown the manifest ways in which different playwrights incorporate the comedic tropes of lying and scheming, confusion and unmasking. Drawing particular attention to the levels of communicative or mis-communicative exchanges on the character-to-character axis and the character-to-audience axis, this work examines the process whereby characters in the comedies construct narratives designed to trick, misdirect, dazzle, confuse or exploit their interlocutors. In the different incarnations of seducer, parasite, cross-dresser, duplicitous narrator/messenger and deluded mythomaniac, the author underscores the way in which the figure of the liar both entertains and troubles, making it a fascinating subject worthy of detailed investigation.

1 Perspectives on lying

Perspectives

Man is born a liar: truth is simple and ingenuous and yet the liar wants disguise and ornament […] and man is fond of nothing but his own works, fables and fictions.

[L’Homme est né menteur, la vérité est simple et ingénue et il veut du spécieux et de l’ornement […] et l’homme n’aime que son propre ouvrage, la fiction et la fable.]

(La Bruyère, Les Caractères (Des Esprits forts, vii)¹

The early modern period reveals itself to be a time when the aesthetic, moral, and epistemological issues revolving around deception were a key concern and were endlessly debated and explored from a number of perspectives to distinguish between ‘acceptable and unacceptable, pleasant and unpleasant, wicked and virtuous forms of deceit’.² Mendacity (or active simulation) was feared and condemned from a moral and religious standpoint. However, in a society in which controlled self-representation was so central, dissimulation, or the calculated disguising of one’s inner heart and mind, was often celebrated as a necessary defensive strategy and legitimised as an art (with its own set of rules).³ A good example of this self-fashioning can be seen in the figure of the honnête homme with his artful demonstration of social graces and good taste.⁴ The ideal of this aristocratic individual, elaborated for an established nobility of the ancient regime, was born in the salons, and as studies of politeness in court and salon cultures of the early to mid-seventeenth century have underlined, great emphasis was placed within these mondain milieus on the spoken word, and particularly on the art of conversation.⁵ The honnête homme, therefore, not only mastered the codes of social behaviour but also adopted the necessary discourse.⁶ Although his performance was a polished one, like his predecessor the courtier, the honnête homme had to work at adopting a natural air, inheriting the traits of sprezzatura⁷ (which involved making the artificial and the crafted look natural and effortless).⁸ Furthermore, the honnête homme can be seen as an actor on the social stage. Chevalier de Méré underscores this parallel, advising one that it is useful ‘to look upon what you are doing as if it were a play and to imagine that you are playing a dramatic role’ [‘[i]l n’est pas inutile de regarder ce qu’on fait comme une Comédie, et de s’imaginer qu’on joue un personnage de théâtre’].⁹ The honnête homme was adept at the semiotics of his performance, as La Bruyère points out:

A man who knows the court is master of his gesture, his eyes and his face; he is deep and impenetrable; he dissimulates bad deeds done to him, smiles at his enemies, controls his temper, disguises his passions, denies his heart, and speaks and acts against his own feelings.

[Un homme qui sait la cour est maître de son geste, de ses yeux et de son visage; il est profond, impénetrable, dissimule les mauvais offices, sourit à ses ennemis, constraint son humeur, déguise ses passions, dément son cœur, parle, agit contre ses sentiments.]¹⁰

In this respect, the public space in society and the choreographed world of theatrical performers are not so dissimilar from one another. It should be noted, however, that my study is firmly focused on exploring fictional representations of artifice. I do not intend to concentrate on extra-literary documents, but rather use them as a way of contextualising the mendacity depicted in the selected comedies. In so doing, I aim to illustrate parallels but also underline the strikingly different ways in which comedies often deal with this subject. Additionally, I show how some playwrights do incorporate the moral, philosophical, and religious dimensions of lying, thereby revealing an appreciation of its perceived attributes in other more serious discourses.

As this chapter points out, the early modern period not only demonstrates a fascination with the subject but possesses a rich vocabulary for speaking about veracity and mendacity, rendering it most fertile as a field of inquiry.¹¹ Having underlined contemporary definitions, I focus on lying in relation to the codified art of persuasion, otherwise known as rhetoric, and consider how the latter can be employed by a speaker to better manipulate his interlocutor. An examination of the mendacious characters’ employment of rhetorical techniques can show us not only how the period was fascinated by the power of the spoken voice to express and elicit passion (docere, movere, and delectare) but also how rhetoric was central to the way in which playwrights showcased their skill. Furthermore, such a study can also be a fruitful way of breaking down the various strategies given to the character to convince his/her interlocutor of the untruths. Moving on from discussing language in traditional rhetorical terms, I examine language in terms of pragmatics, assessing lying in terms of speech act theory. Such a linguistic analysis is a useful way for thinking about operative codes at work when communicating (or miscommunicating) information. Following on from this, I draw attention to the way in which lying operates within a more general sociological context and is viewed with suspicion, particularly within a moral and theological framework.

The second section examines aesthetic concerns and considers the figure of the liar on the stage, the focus of the following chapters. I end this section (and begin my case studies) by turning to examine Pierre Corneille’s Le Menteur and its sequel, La Suite du Menteur. The third section focuses on deception on the stage more broadly, by examining disruptions of straightforward communication and by examining how characters and the audience are presented with truth or falsehood. The final sub-section on Mendacious messages examines a variety of modes of miscommunication that can be differentiated from and linked with more deliberate deceptions.

Language

In discussions of mendacity, there is very often slippage between terms such as lying, deception, hypocrisy, and trickery. Of course, they have in common the enterprise of deliberately proliferating falsehoods, but it is important to differentiate between them. Deception is an act of masking one’s identity or one’s true intentions. It can be executed through gesture, disguise, and action. It can also involve giving a false message through speech, which means lying is a form of deception. Deception is therefore a larger category of which lying forms a part, restricted as lying is to discursive messages. Hypocrisy is a form of deception, but, as I show in chapter 4, it originally had specific religious connotations but eventually becomes a more inclusive term to refer to duplicitous or two-faced behaviour more generally. Trickery, likewise, is a form of deceptive behaviour but is more mischievous and playful, with the trickster revelling in the charade and in the duping of his victim. A more detailed look at the different nuances of such terms as defined by seventeenth-century dictionaries provides a richer understanding of the lexical field of deception in the period, illustrating the range and categorisation of different types of dissembling.

This book is primarily interested in examining verbal modes of deception in the form of lying, but inevitably also addresses other ways of masking the truth (ways of frustrating any outside attempts to link outward display to a true inner state such as the employment of physical disguise, usurping of identity, illusory displays, and irony), since these devices are often intertwined with mendacity.

The words ‘mensonges’ [‘lies’], ‘mentir’ [‘to lie’], ‘menteur(euse)’ [‘liar’], and ‘menterie’ [‘lie/fib’] in the three major monolingual dictionaries of Pierre Richelet (1680), Antoine Furetière (1690), and the Académie Française (1694) portray lying as a vice.¹² The Académie, on the other hand, does provide a more pragmatic and less condemnatory view of the lie, with the term ‘mensonge officieux’ [‘white lie’] defined as useful or agreeable to someone [‘utile ou agréable à quel-qu’un’]. Other than this single mention of the pleasant consequence of lying, none of the definitions allude to a lie that is positive or entertaining. Although ‘menterie’ in the Académie is defined in less serious terms, the other dictionaries do not suggest that ‘menterie’ holds any less moral weight. Overall, lying is defined as a nefarious action, in opposition to the virtuous truth. Synonyms such as ‘fourbe’ [‘trick’] or ‘tromperie’ [‘ruse’] are less harsh but the word ‘tromperie’ across the three dictionaries does not convey any positive attribute to the activity of deception. The Furetière definition for trick, ‘fourbe’ evokes the impressive skill of the deceiver, describing it as a disguising of the truth adeptly undertaken [‘déguisement de la vérité fait avec adresse’]. Both the Académie and Furetière, however, present lying as a base ruse and imply no playful or spirited quality.

Even though a specifically playful aspect of lying does not emerge from the definitions, the creative and imaginative process of telling a lie is emphasised in describing the mendacious craft of poets and writers. Moreover, Furetière states that ‘lots of authors want to make their lies pass for truths’ [‘beaucoup d’Auteurs veulent faire passer leurs mensonges pour des veritez’]. The poet is the quintessential liar and poetry ‘lives on lies’ [‘vit de mensonges’] (Académie). Nevertheless, understood in moral terms, this is in fact a condemnation of the fallacious status of art (a concern which is specifically addressed by those writing against the theatre). I examine the antitheatricalists’ attitude in more detail later in this chapter.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric or the craft of communicating a message, and persuading one’s interlocutor of this message in the most effective manner possible (involving both the ‘art of persuading’ [‘l’art de persuader’] and ‘the art of speaking well’ [l’art de bien dire’]) has long been associated with dissimulation, since the speaker, although encouraged to hold the appearance of sincerity, employs artifices and figures in such a way as to create a particularly strong impression on the listener and best convince him/her of the argument. As Peter France points out, ‘the orator may be an honest man, but he will know how to clothe his honesty in the appropriate costume, how to wear a mask if need be’.¹³ These ‘masks’ of words, including for instance rhetorical questions, feigned hesitations or loss of syntactic control, simulated exclamations, impersonations, and interruptions, are all examples of deliberate devices that can be used to suggest a particular emotion in the speaker and generate specific reactions from the interlocutor.¹⁴ This is not the place for an extensive analysis of rhetorical devices, or for the history of attitudes to rhetoric and its relationship to the truth.¹⁵ However, it is important to take into consideration the way in which lying on the stage can be understood as a crafted rhetorical process.¹⁶

Since rhetoric teaches a calculated performance to impress an audience, the orator can be paralleled with the actor (who simulates emotion) and with the figure of the liar who adopts an array of techniques and a mode of delivery to win over the listener. In some sense, the orator can also be linked with the playwright who, obviously, constructs the speech through which his characters communicate. Given that I am dealing with liars in the theatrical sphere, and given the seventeenth-century’s keen interest and employment in the art of rhetoric,¹⁷ this study engages with the way in which playwrights were writing in a context in which the communicative strategies of their characters fitted into a system firmly intent on codifying and examining this process. That said, the chapters, driven by other thematic concerns, do not focus solely on the characters’ communication with each other since such an approach would require lengthy citations of text followed by a taxonomy of the rhetorical devices at work and runs the risk of becoming a dry and repetitive exercise. Nevertheless, the chapters do incorporate illustrative analyses of the way in which the mendacious characters seek to persuade their interlocutors (in chapter 1, I consider different layers and addresses of the communicative and mis-communicative exchange; in chapter 2, I examine the way the Matamore’s speech reflects Bernard Lamy’s comparison with the orator and the soldier; in chapter 3, Dom Juan’s response to Elmire and the way he reappropriates others’ discourse is scrutunised, and in chapter 4, I examine Tartuffe’s deceptive use of sincerity, or ‘chleuasmos’). Across the chapters, I am attentive to elocutio and actio in order to better identify the craft of the mendacious characters.¹⁸

Speech acts

Philosophers have long debated theories of lying.¹⁹ Traditional theories relating to verbal communication in the philosophy of language suggest that a verbal ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Perspectives on lying
• 2 Fantastical lies and the figure of the braggart soldier
• 3 Molière’s Dom Juan: The evolution of the character
• 4 The parasitical nature of lying: A study of Le Tartuffe
• 5 Mendacity and metamorphosis: The case of Benserade’s Iphis et Iante
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index