Fall 2002
Volume 29, Number 1
The new awareness of the difficulty of remembering often obscures the prior societal process on which memory work depends. In the mid-1660s the writer now generally held to be the greatest in the French tradition, Molière, was on the contrary all too conscious of le travail de l'oubli, the tortuous process by which events and phenomena were becoming contained within the collective unconscious of seventeenth-century France.1 He translated his awareness of the work of forgetting going on around him into the plays that now form the foundation of his reputation, Dom Juan and Le Tartuffe, plays that may well be, quite simply, the greatest in the entire French tradition. The original version of the play now referred to as Dom Juan and even that title was chosen by the work's censors rather than its author, was completely suppressed.
I will consider the censorship of the play that, at the time of Molière's death in 1673, had been completely eliminated from his oeuvre I will try to explain this, the most extraordinary case of censorial passion in the French tradition, as a response to the work of forgetting Molière denounces in his version of the legendary Don Juan in particular, his denunciation of the shifting balance of power among three forces: religion, commerce, and sexuality.
Every period has tacit knowledge that is in some way publicly available even though it is not openly expressed. In its simplest form, tacit knowledge means the type of political information of which everyone is aware but of which no one speaks publicly either because it concerns events still so recent that they are too painful for a society to confront or because the information is the object of some form of official repression and are thus confined to a zone outside of representation.
Because so much was done to facilitate their acceptance, the new values that inspired the French colonial enterprise in particular, the belief that the kind of quick and easy riches that trade with the Indies seemed guaranteed to provide would create a new Golden Age in France easily worked their way into the fabric of society. Volumes soon began to appear advising the French on the new mercantile economy and practical matters ranging from how to assign value to goods from the colonies circulating in France for the first time to how to tell which of one's children might become successful merchants.10
From the representations that the period has left us, we would be hard pressed to guess that mercantilism and the new goods and values that it brought along with it were invading French society. French painting never knows the overwhelmingly prominent display of riches that marks Netherlandish art. In similar fashion, the literature of France's Golden Age is very nearly silent on the new presence of luxury items in French households. It is in relation to that strange representational void that I would like to position the censorship of the only major work of seventeenth-century literature that French censors succeeded in permanently suppressing during the author's lifetime Molière's vision of the archetypal seducer, Don Juan.Molière's Don Juan is easily the least sexy of that character's incarnations and he never expresses more than a passing interest in them [unlike] Dom Juan13 [who maintains] carefully drawn up lists of women seduced maintained by Mozart's Don Giovanni. Molière's creation is obsessed with establishing a completely different type of account book: a ledger that would tabulate, for example, how much a woman is worth to her fiancé, or how much of one's debt to a merchant can be paid off with compliments and flattery, or even the value of a human soul. Molière's masterpiece displaces energy away from sexuality and onto money and mercantile concerns.