Don Juan

BBAW Thursday topic: A book that should get more attention.

I suggest Lord Byron's poem Don Juan. Byron was the famous bad boy of his day, and his long verse poem is full of jokes, ideas, and adventure. He said that it was "meant to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing" and soothed would-be moralists by adding that it would not encourage anyone to admire the legendary figure of Don Juan: "I had not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest. The Spanish tradition says Hell: but it is probably only an Allegory of the other state."

Beginning an epic poem in an era in which they were no longer in fashion, Byron forces a rhyme to differentiate his comic hero from the romantic figure of yore:

I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one.
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan--
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the Devil somewhat ere his time.

Rather than the traditional (and correctly Spanish) pronunciation, in which "Juan" is one syllable rhyming with "Don," Byron requires us to pronounce the name as "Jew-on" to rhyme with "true one" and "new one." This is just the beginning of the silliness.

Although "most epic poets plunge 'in medias res,'" Byron tells us,

That is the usual method, but not mine--
My way is to begin with the beginning;
The regularity of my design
Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning

Then, of course, he proceeds to digress in true epic fashion for seventeen cantos (457 pages in my Riverside Edition).

Don Juan's first lover, in Byron's version of the story, is a virtuous Spanish matron named Julia who falls in love and is sorely tempted to enjoy the sins of the flesh with 16-year-old Juan:

Her plan she deemed both innocent and feasible,
And, surely, with a stripling of sixteen
Not Scandal's fangs could fix on much that's seizable,
Or if they did so, satisfied to mean
Nothing but what was good, her breast was peaceable--
A quiet conscience makes one so serene!
Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded
That all the Apostles would have done as they did.

In other words, she is rationalizing what she wants to do--sleep with Juan--in terms of the end (true love!) justifying the means (unfaithfulness to her husband), with a arrow at hypocritical but pious-seeming Christians let loose on the way.

The sixteen-year-old Juan is discovered with Julia and flees for his life, finding beautiful women and adventure wherever he goes in the world. At one point when he has been enslaved, he thinks:

But after all, what is our present state?
'T is bad, and may be better--all men's lot:
Most men are slaves, non more so than the great,
To their own whims and passions, and what not;
Society itself, which should create
Kindness, destroys what little we had got:
To feel for none is the true social art
Of the world's Stoics--men without a heart.

I love the comic touches like "and what not" in otherwise serious-seeming passages like this one. Don't you?

The speaker of the poem--Byron in his public "bad boy" persona--wonders how much the man who has just sold Don Juan as a slave enjoys his dinner afterwards:

I wonder if his appetite was good?
Or, if it were, if also his digestion?
Methinks at meals some odd thoughts might intrude,
And Conscience ask a curious sort of question,
About the right divine how far we should
Sell flesh and blood. When dinner has oppressed one,
I think it is perhaps the gloomiest hour
Which turns up out of the sad twenty-four.

Isn't this so much more fun than criticizing the guy for selling his fellow man? Pretending to sympathize with him gets the satiric point across more effectively, since it's the reader who must say "wait...".

By the time you get to Canto the Eleventh, you are reminded that this is not supposed to be a deep piece of literature, rife with symbolism and other things your high school English teacher forced you to pick out of poems. It is "only fiction," Byron says:

Though every scribe, in some slight turn of diction,
Will hint allusions never meant. Ne'er doubt
This--when I speak, I don't hint, but speak out.

The speaker of the poem is continually immodest and rude, calling attention to how well-made his poem is and refusing to respect (much less venerate) his reader--as many more traditional epics do:

Whether Don Juan and chaste Adeline
Grew friends in this or any other sense,
Will be discussed hereafter, I opine:
At present I am glad of a pretence
To leave them hovering, as the effect is fine,
And keeps the atrocious reader in suspence:
The surest way--for ladies and for books--
To bait their tender--or their tenter--hooks.

I particularly like the play on words for the cliche--"on tenter-hooks"--because it's one that people sometimes misspell these days. Since few people know what a "tenter-hook" is anymore, they hear the expression phonetically as "tender-hooks," unwittingly re-creating Byron's joke.

The final joke is that this epic does not end, with either hell or marriage:

Our Hero was, in Canto the Sixteenth,
Left in a tender moonlight situation,
Such as enables Man to show his strength
Moral or physical: on this occasion
Whether his virtue triumphed--or, at length,
His vice--for he was of a kindling nation--
Is more than I shall venture to describe;--
Unless some Beauty with a kiss should bribe.

One of the many pleasures of this long poem, as Byron continually inserts himself to remind us, is thinking about conventional morality from the rogue's point of view, not seeing the hero conventionally rewarded or punished.

Byron is a poet who doesn't like to play by the rules. He successfully flouted the rules of his society all his life (this was made easier by his title), and Don Juan, besides being a romp, is one of his symbolic middle fingers to the increasing moralism of the nineteenth century.