Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
Is it possible to be a Don Juan today? I do not mean that Don Juan impure and simple such as I described last week (who embodies plain sexual gluttony) but the Don Juan of literature and philosophy and psy- chology. The Don Juan created by Tirso de Molina in Spain in 1630 and who is
revived on the stage in Moliere, in Shadwell, in Da Ponte and Mozart, in Grabbe, in Moncrieff, in Zorilla, in Shaw, in Rostand, in Montherlant, in Obey, in Ghel- derode, in Frisch. (This display of scholarship, impressive as I hope it looks, derives entirely from one book—Oscar Mandel's The Theatre of Don Juan—which reprints most of these in full or in part.) The Don Juan discussed and analysed by Stendhal and Hoffman and Kierkegaard and Shaw and Freud and Rank and Maetzu and Maranon and Grau and Madariaga and Camus, and, of course, Mandel.
It is impossible that all these commentators and dramatisers should agree with each other. It is also undesirable—otherwise why bother to read more than one of them? There are, how- ever, some conclusions which are generally accepted. Don Juan appeared with the Renais- sance. There were seducers, womanisers, love- for-lovers in Greek and Roman literature—in- deed, their Gods were adulterers and their heroes seducers. The methods of Don Juan, kidnapping, impersonation, bribery, lies, were all technical innovations of Zeus himself. But Zeus was not above or below the law—he was the law and he sanctified a custom.
Don Juan began as a champion of natural, in- stinctive rights against moral and religious pro- hibitions. He rebels with his genitals and needs to be opposed by priests and magistrates. Like Faust, with whom he is often compared and occasionally identified, he is the bastard son of Christianity, or rather of the Paulin: Church. /sjo one has really explained to my satisfaction why he should have slept so long, tormented only by guilty, slippery dreams, throughout the Middle Ages. But there seems a peculiar appropriateness in his awakening in the Spain of the Inquisition. Don Juan is often docketed as an atheist. And in Moliere and Shadwell, he certainly seems more concerned to defy God the Father than My Lord the Husband and he flaunts his contempt of the supernatural. It has been pointed out that this is incidental rather than essential to his role— even a hundred years ago it was difficult for be- lievers to imagine an innocent atheist. He does not breaks the rules because he is an atheist, he is called an atheist because he breaks the rules.
What has not so often been understood is that he is not an infidel but a blasphemer. He does not deny that the stone statue can come to dinner, or that it can drag him off to hell. Pascal argued that trust in the existence of God was a wager. You lose nothing by living the moral life if you bet your soul and are wrong; but if you are right, you are paid off, at colossal odds, with im- mortality in heaven. You cannot lose. Ikon Juan does not accept Pascal's calculus. A short burst of earthly ecstasy, repeated as often as possible, seems to him more valuable than an eternity of ethereal blisses.
Don Juan, then, needs a society where un- married lovers are lodged in one of the circles of hell. He also needs a society where honour is sufficiently prized to be worth stealing. Profes- sor Mandel argues that in the Middle Ages
honour was still won on the battlefield. Don Juan appears when it can be risked in bed. 'When a man can obtain in the boudoir glory, victory, admiration, in addition to erotic pleasure,' he claims, 'then the times are ripe for Don Juans.' (He also notes an interesting and significant semantic change in the word gallantry from mili- tary to sexual accomplishment.) In a world where divorce is not a disqualification for any position ---even that of second husband -and cuckolds dine out with their betrayers, Don Juan no longer risks much more than a cold on the kidneys.
The Don Juan of tradition is also an aristocrat by birth and instinct. He is born to be a predator. He will fight for his right to escape punishment. He has unlimited leisure, a regular supply of cash, and a retinue of bribed servants, coach- men, ladies' maids and sea captains to play bit parts in his plots. He is essentially a man of power, always on the move. He has no other occupation. Today he must have one ear cocked for the division bell, or one eye on the deadline for his copy. Even the millionaire must sign cheques and attend board meetings. Even the Duke must turn up to be glimpsed by the trip- pers who have paid their half-crowns at the door.
The decline in the virile, aggressive, dominat- ing Don Juan has been noted by nearly all scholars, and the effect can be observed, for those who have eyes for such nuances, all round us. The lady-killers now barely leave bruises—they are as much concerned to defend themselves as to assault others. Since Nora slammed the door of Ibsen's doll's house, there has been less and less need for the roaming bachelor to learn how to climb up the ivy. The time is very near when Don Juan will possess only the name (and .women are often more attracted by a man's reputation than the man's person) and, like Lord Byron, find himself accepting, rather than de- manding, surrender. He will become the prize instead of the competitor. Donna Juanita may be ready to step from life into literature.
Few commentators and students can look the vanishing Don Juan of tradition honestly in the eyes. Beneath their scholarly objectivity and scientific detachment, there can be seen gleams of envy and resentment. They decry him as the worshipper of quantity over quality, as a sub- merged homosexual, as the unhappy Oedipal revenger of his father's potency, as a failed man hiding his insecurity among the wcmen. One of his rare defenders is Salvador de Madariaga who describes him as `masculinity incarnate, the symbol of the force which in nature attacks, subdues, enjoys and abandons.' Dictators, he asserts, are always bad lovers. 'Caesarism is the substitte which the insufficient male takes to console himself.' It is not entirely an unmixed compliment. But in the days of the disappearing Don Juan, it would be cruel to leave him without that last consolation.
'You know it makes me mad when you won't argue with me.'
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