Moliere's machines: Comedy, narrative, and politics (France)

“C'est bien une espèce d'automatisme qui nous fait rire,” says Henri Bergson in his essay Le rire, “un automatisme très voisin de la simple distraction (absentmindedness).” Comedy is in fact born of the cooperation between this willful absentmindedness on the part of the robot-like character and the easy distractibility of the diversion-seeking audience member, who has come only to be entertained. Absentmindedness and automatism are therefore synonyms, in the Bergsonian sense, for susceptibility—a simple willingness to be taken in. The feigned lack of awareness on the part of the actor, when viewed through the comic-attentive eye of the beholder, results in a comedy so automatic that Bernadette Rey-Flaud calls it “la machine à rire.”; This comic machine is the essential mechanism behind Molière's comedies. The seventeenth century, however, loved a particular kind of comic machinery, specifically the elaborate props and settings in vogue at the time. Hence the machine is a metaphor for the theater in its entirety; the stage as well as the text recited upon the stage. Indeed, the text may engage the audience exactly inasmuch as it makes use of literary mechanisms.; As a devout subscriber to this practice of textual mechanization, Molière often ensnared audiences in his verbal world without any physical machines. However, as for theatrical politics, the playwright's role is much more ambiguous. It is hard to tell whether the controversy of plays such as Tartuffe boldly challenges absolute monarchical power, or if the absolutism of that power gave the playwright a kind of leeway for scandal. And even if we cannot readily answer such a quandary, it does indeed seem that this theatrical turmoil helped in an important way to uphold the idea of a blissfully ordered and stable monarchical order in the world outside the theater. The chaotic space of the Moliéresque stage can therefore be interpreted as a kind of backwards, upside-down funhouse mirror for the performance of absolutist monarchical power, and vice-versa.