High School
First Year
First Year
The Imaginary Invalid
Medicine
Definitions
1. Molière uses the resources of farce and scatology: he reduces medicine to issues of intestinal transit in a series of sketches taken straight from farce: scatology aims to ridicule doctors and their patients. How can one talk about medicine without showcasing the body? Molière places it at the forefront with all its comic strength.
Example: scenes where Argan hurriedly exits to go to the bathroom, or asks Toinette to examine the appearance and smell of his stools (see cross-sectional study, I, 1). Quite crude sketches, inspired by the world of farce, but they inevitably make people laugh. Argan's digestive troubles and the laxative treatments he receives lead to strong comedic effects, with rushed exits from the scene. This farcical display of the uncontrollable and tyrannical body reduces the patient to a puppet at the mercy of his entrails. Under these conditions, medical practice is neither noble nor prestigious: it is reduced to repugnant yet hilarious interventions, as suggested by the evocative names of M. Purgon, M. Diafoirus, and M. Fleurant. The patient is king, but his throne is a chamber pot, and the doctors are at the service of his intestines.
2. Molière transforms the art of medicine into a grand carnival. Anyone can be a doctor; you just need the outfit, the disguise: doctors are impostors pretending to be what they are not. (Refer to the caricatured remarks of Toinette and Béralde in the last scene discussed in class). Medical practice is nothing but a misleading staging that lends itself to all parodies. Molière engages in a sort of overstatement, a parodic exaggeration of the masquerade that doctors enjoy putting on a show.
Example: see the scene of the false consultation in Act III where Toinette dresses as a doctor and grossly imitates the consultation given by the Diafoirus in Act II.
3. Molière uses all the resources of comedy-ballet to defuse the false pretenses and ridicule the medical profession, its venality, its incompetence, and the power struggles that run through it.
Example: the final interlude where the faculty of medicine, performed by a theater troupe, comes to award a diploma to Argan. See a quick analysis of the introductory stage directions and the progression of the ceremony in the explanation of the denouement. This ceremony is truly an apotheosis, to borrow an important term from the subject, a particularly intense moment due to the spectacular effects that are deployed.
To remember:
The originality of The Imaginary Invalid is that this satire gives rise to a spectacle full of fantasy and variety that provokes a range of emotions in the spectator.
High School
First Year
First Year
The Imaginary Invalid
Medicine
Definitions
1. Molière uses the resources of farce and scatology: he reduces medicine to issues of intestinal transit in a series of sketches taken straight from farce: scatology aims to ridicule doctors and their patients. How can one talk about medicine without showcasing the body? Molière places it at the forefront with all its comic strength.
Example: scenes where Argan hurriedly exits to go to the bathroom, or asks Toinette to examine the appearance and smell of his stools (see cross-sectional study, I, 1). Quite crude sketches, inspired by the world of farce, but they inevitably make people laugh. Argan's digestive troubles and the laxative treatments he receives lead to strong comedic effects, with rushed exits from the scene. This farcical display of the uncontrollable and tyrannical body reduces the patient to a puppet at the mercy of his entrails. Under these conditions, medical practice is neither noble nor prestigious: it is reduced to repugnant yet hilarious interventions, as suggested by the evocative names of M. Purgon, M. Diafoirus, and M. Fleurant. The patient is king, but his throne is a chamber pot, and the doctors are at the service of his intestines.
2. Molière transforms the art of medicine into a grand carnival. Anyone can be a doctor; you just need the outfit, the disguise: doctors are impostors pretending to be what they are not. (Refer to the caricatured remarks of Toinette and Béralde in the last scene discussed in class). Medical practice is nothing but a misleading staging that lends itself to all parodies. Molière engages in a sort of overstatement, a parodic exaggeration of the masquerade that doctors enjoy putting on a show.
Example: see the scene of the false consultation in Act III where Toinette dresses as a doctor and grossly imitates the consultation given by the Diafoirus in Act II.
3. Molière uses all the resources of comedy-ballet to defuse the false pretenses and ridicule the medical profession, its venality, its incompetence, and the power struggles that run through it.
Example: the final interlude where the faculty of medicine, performed by a theater troupe, comes to award a diploma to Argan. See a quick analysis of the introductory stage directions and the progression of the ceremony in the explanation of the denouement. This ceremony is truly an apotheosis, to borrow an important term from the subject, a particularly intense moment due to the spectacular effects that are deployed.
To remember:
The originality of The Imaginary Invalid is that this satire gives rise to a spectacle full of fantasy and variety that provokes a range of emotions in the spectator.