MOLIERE AND MEDICINE: DISSECTING THE KALEIDOSCOPE (FRANCE).

Abstract

The subject of medicine in the works of Moliere has been traditionally treated as a matter of satire. While it is important to consider this view and while biographical approaches relating Moliere's personal illness to the content of his medical comedy are illuminating, this study proposes that a plurality of views offers a more complete picture. Such analysis discovers that Moliere's medical comedy is much more than satire, that it contains elements of black humor and even approaches the theater of cruelty in its treatment of sickness and death. The metaphor in this approach is in the perception of a composite image of this part of Moliere's theater, much like the pattern that a kaleidoscope discloses. As we may sort out the various elements that compose the kaleidoscopic impression--light and shadow, color, form, change of image through manipulation of the instrument--there is a similarity in the division of elements in Moliere's medical theater. Light and shadow correspond to the opposition of fact and fantasy in seventeenth-century French medicine and constitute the historical view of his work; color corresponds to the notion of Galenic humor theory and suggests that the comedy of character may be analyzed according to humoral temperaments; form corresponds to the language Moliere used in his medical plays; the change of image occurs in Moliere with the passage of time--his medical comedy being farcical at the beginning of his career and much darker towards the end of his life. The purpose of this approach is to identify these separate elements in order to better understand their function as an organic whole. For this reason, the notion of organic unity is also treated. In an effort to relate Moliere's theater to the present day, this study compares Moliere's work with Artaud's notion of the nature and function of theater, with the two meanings of semiology--sign theory and symptomatology, and using an archetypal approach, concludes with the suggestion that sexuality, death, and medicine form a hidden mythology in these plays.