“Don Juan” - the book Don Juan - the hero
Don Juan - the words “Don Juan” - the verbalization
1. “Don Juan” is unfinished.
This must be a well-known fact, but it took me by surprise. It must have landed in my information bin at some point, but never made its way onto the fabric of what I know.
In one of his asides in “Don Juan”, Byron announces that his intention is to write 100 cantos. (“Don Juan” ends with Canto XVII.) It’s not clear whether Byron seriously planned to write 100 cantos or is just making use of a big fat number that fits the meter and his flippant pose.
My Muses do not care a pinch of rosin
About what’s call’d success, or not succeeding:
Such thoughts are quite below the strain they have chosen;
’Tis a “great moral lesson” they are reading.
I thought, at setting off, about two dozen
Cantos would do; but at Apollo’s pleading,
If that my Pegasus should not be founder’d,
I think to canter gently through a hundred. (XII, 55)
When “Don Juan” ends, Don Juan is still in his twenties.
2. “Don Juan” is three syllables—not “Don Hwán” as it would be in Spanish, but “Don Joó-an”.
That bit of information, which I picked up thirty or forty years ago, flew right past my information bin and found its place in the weave of my knowledge, where the warp of linguistics meets the woof of Nineteenth Century Poetry.
Byron makes the pronunciation clear in the poem’s first stanza:
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. (I, 1)
3. Don Juan is more like Candide than he is like Don Giovanni.
Byron’s Don Juan is not a seducer; it is Don Juan’s personal qualities, starting with the fact that he is incredibly handsome, which are seductive.
However, unlike Candide, Don Juan is not naive. (Naivety can be sexually attractive, but only briefly; soon it becomes annoying.)
Don Juan, for all his glamorous good looks, is a gentleman through and through. His behavior is always exactly what is called for by the situation he finds himself in. He is as genial to the eunuch who is his keeper when he is the slave of a pasha as he is to the gentry gathered at an English country house when he is an envoy from Catherine the Great.
(Byron, incidentally, is not as genial to the English gentry as his hero is, never losing an opportunity to poke fun at, satirize, or excoriate them.)
4. “Don Juan” is Shandyesque.
Digressions about one thing or another on Byron’s mind make up at least half of “Don Juan”. They are usually, but not always, as good-humored as Sterne’s digressions.
Byron would have been unusual among 19th century writers if his work had not been affected by Sterne’s literary breakthrough in “Tristram Shandy”. The amiable attitude towards their readers typically assumed by 19th century Anglophone authors, from Austen to Carlyle—a willingness to pause the narrative for a chat, to share a felicity or vicissitude encountered while writing or, at a revelatory turn of plot or character, to take some time to opine on human nature or some more commonplace concern—is grounded in “Tristram Shandy”.
O Gold! Why call we misers miserable?
Theirs is the pleasure that can never pall;
Theirs is the best bower anchor, the chain cable
Which holds fast other pleasures great and small.
Ye who but see the saving man at table,
And scorn his temperate board, as none at all,
And wonder how the wealthy can be sparing,
Know not what visions spring from each cheeseparing.
Love or lust makes man sick, and wine much sicker;
Ambition rends, and gaming gains a loss;
But making money, slowly first, then quicker,
And adding still a little through each cross
(Which will come over things), beats love or liquor,
The gamester’s counter, or the statesman’s dross.
O Gold! I still prefer thee unto paper,
Which makes bank credit like a bark of vapour. (XII, 3,4)
5. “Don Juan” is a work of improvisation.
I don’t know that there may be much ability
Shown in this sort of desultory rhyme;
But there’s a conversational facility,
Which may round off an hour upon a time.
Of this I’m sure at least, there’s no servility
In mine irregularity of chime,
Which rings what’s uppermost of new or hoary,
Just as I feel the “Improvvisatore.” (XV, 20)
It might seem odd at first, to think of a work of 2,000 stanzas of ottava rima (ABABABCC) as improvisation. But the rigors of the form actually provide the framework which improvisation requires.
(E. g.: Improvisation exercise: Write a stanza in ottava rima which includes the line, “The General Boon [sic], back-woodsman of Kentucky”.)
Of all men, saving Sylla the man-slayer,
Who passes for in life and death most lucky,
Of the great names which in our faces stare,
The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky,
Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere;
For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he
Enjoy’d the lonely, vigorous, harmless days
Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze. (VIII, 61)
Jokey rhyming like Kentucky...buck, he, which proliferates throughout “Don Juan”, is usually found in improvisational humor.
Don Juan - the words “Don Juan” - the verbalization
1. “Don Juan” is unfinished.
This must be a well-known fact, but it took me by surprise. It must have landed in my information bin at some point, but never made its way onto the fabric of what I know.
In one of his asides in “Don Juan”, Byron announces that his intention is to write 100 cantos. (“Don Juan” ends with Canto XVII.) It’s not clear whether Byron seriously planned to write 100 cantos or is just making use of a big fat number that fits the meter and his flippant pose.
My Muses do not care a pinch of rosin
About what’s call’d success, or not succeeding:
Such thoughts are quite below the strain they have chosen;
’Tis a “great moral lesson” they are reading.
I thought, at setting off, about two dozen
Cantos would do; but at Apollo’s pleading,
If that my Pegasus should not be founder’d,
I think to canter gently through a hundred. (XII, 55)
When “Don Juan” ends, Don Juan is still in his twenties.
2. “Don Juan” is three syllables—not “Don Hwán” as it would be in Spanish, but “Don Joó-an”.
That bit of information, which I picked up thirty or forty years ago, flew right past my information bin and found its place in the weave of my knowledge, where the warp of linguistics meets the woof of Nineteenth Century Poetry.
Byron makes the pronunciation clear in the poem’s first stanza:
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. (I, 1)
3. Don Juan is more like Candide than he is like Don Giovanni.
Byron’s Don Juan is not a seducer; it is Don Juan’s personal qualities, starting with the fact that he is incredibly handsome, which are seductive.
However, unlike Candide, Don Juan is not naive. (Naivety can be sexually attractive, but only briefly; soon it becomes annoying.)
Don Juan, for all his glamorous good looks, is a gentleman through and through. His behavior is always exactly what is called for by the situation he finds himself in. He is as genial to the eunuch who is his keeper when he is the slave of a pasha as he is to the gentry gathered at an English country house when he is an envoy from Catherine the Great.
(Byron, incidentally, is not as genial to the English gentry as his hero is, never losing an opportunity to poke fun at, satirize, or excoriate them.)
4. “Don Juan” is Shandyesque.
Digressions about one thing or another on Byron’s mind make up at least half of “Don Juan”. They are usually, but not always, as good-humored as Sterne’s digressions.
Byron would have been unusual among 19th century writers if his work had not been affected by Sterne’s literary breakthrough in “Tristram Shandy”. The amiable attitude towards their readers typically assumed by 19th century Anglophone authors, from Austen to Carlyle—a willingness to pause the narrative for a chat, to share a felicity or vicissitude encountered while writing or, at a revelatory turn of plot or character, to take some time to opine on human nature or some more commonplace concern—is grounded in “Tristram Shandy”.
O Gold! Why call we misers miserable?
Theirs is the pleasure that can never pall;
Theirs is the best bower anchor, the chain cable
Which holds fast other pleasures great and small.
Ye who but see the saving man at table,
And scorn his temperate board, as none at all,
And wonder how the wealthy can be sparing,
Know not what visions spring from each cheeseparing.
Love or lust makes man sick, and wine much sicker;
Ambition rends, and gaming gains a loss;
But making money, slowly first, then quicker,
And adding still a little through each cross
(Which will come over things), beats love or liquor,
The gamester’s counter, or the statesman’s dross.
O Gold! I still prefer thee unto paper,
Which makes bank credit like a bark of vapour. (XII, 3,4)
5. “Don Juan” is a work of improvisation.
I don’t know that there may be much ability
Shown in this sort of desultory rhyme;
But there’s a conversational facility,
Which may round off an hour upon a time.
Of this I’m sure at least, there’s no servility
In mine irregularity of chime,
Which rings what’s uppermost of new or hoary,
Just as I feel the “Improvvisatore.” (XV, 20)
It might seem odd at first, to think of a work of 2,000 stanzas of ottava rima (ABABABCC) as improvisation. But the rigors of the form actually provide the framework which improvisation requires.
(E. g.: Improvisation exercise: Write a stanza in ottava rima which includes the line, “The General Boon [sic], back-woodsman of Kentucky”.)
Of all men, saving Sylla the man-slayer,
Who passes for in life and death most lucky,
Of the great names which in our faces stare,
The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky,
Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere;
For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he
Enjoy’d the lonely, vigorous, harmless days
Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze. (VIII, 61)
Jokey rhyming like Kentucky...buck, he, which proliferates throughout “Don Juan”, is usually found in improvisational humor.
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