It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do.
- Molière (nom de theater of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 1622-1673, French dramatist and playwright
Image source: Biography of Molière
The Rules of Comedy: Molière and the Art of Depiction
by Larry F. Norman
The same tensions that define the aesthetics of literary imitation are at play in the imitation of life. If one simply copies one's contemporaries, is one an artist? Is the resulting "copy" a work of art? These are the questions raised by Molière's critics when they attack his alleged use of amateur transcriptions of real persons and events. The debate around the mémoires' artless descriptions invokes the widest issues concerning poetic representation: what is the "Nature" to be reproduced? The Aristotelian ideal of imitating a universalized nature--"what should be"--as opposed to the historical singularities of "what is" (Poetics ch. 9) is largely adopted in the seventeenth century with the preference for the lifelike, the verisimilar (le vraisemblable), to life itself, truth (le vrai). Pierre Pasquier has shown how French classical treatises on dramatic mimesis continually valorize "selection and correction" (25-37) above "duplication." The artist's genius is reassuringly at work when constructing a generalized portrait; copying singularities of nature, on the other hand, is at best the work of a historian rather than a poet. The radicalness of Molière vaunting his use of transcriptions of the real can perhaps best be understood today by analogy with the first appearances early in the twentieth century of "found objects" in art exhibitions. The transposition of the real into a framework supposedly assigned to artistic craftsmanship and transcendence breaks with all existing rules concerning the selective and transformative role of the artist. In both cases the eruption of the real provokes a storm of critical opposition.
Here's a link to continue reading The Rules of Comedy: Molière and the Art of Depiction at the Fathom Archive at the University of Chicago
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