They [other epic poets] so embellish that ‘tis quite a bore
Their labyrinth of fables to thread through,
Whereas this story’s actually true. (Don
Juan, I.1609-10, 1614-16)
…she
[Haidee] was one
Fit for the model of a statuary
(A race of mere imposters, when all’s done;
(A race of mere imposters, when all’s done;
I’ve seen much finer women, ripe and real,
Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal). (Don Juan, II.940-44)
On Don Juan: “[I]t is the sublime of that there sort of writing. It may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world?” (letter from Byron to Douglas Kinnard, 26 October 1819)
Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal). (Don Juan, II.940-44)
On Don Juan: “[I]t is the sublime of that there sort of writing. It may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world?” (letter from Byron to Douglas Kinnard, 26 October 1819)
Hello Romanticists,
Throughout both the first two cantos of Don Juan, Byron denies that his poem is only a matter of aesthetic
convention. The narrative, unlike
the twists and turns of classical epics, “is actually true”; Haidee is, unlike
idealized sculpture, “ripe and real.”
Moreover, the whole of the poem, Byron argues, bears witness to the
realities of everyday lived experience.
This may seem a ludicrous claim about a poem whose stanzaic and rhyme
schemes are so carefully crafted and whose eponymous character is a legendary
rather than real-life figure. On
the other hand, we know that all of Byron’s works flagrantly defy social
convention. In Canto II, as Juan’s
erotic adventures continue, you’ll see Byron puncturing familiar, idealistic
views of love and devotion.
Less expectedly, he will also turn his focus to the depiction
of disaster at sea. Like love
stories, shipwrecks are common literary tropes, but keep in mind that Byron’s
shipwreck is both an artistic convention and a ripped-from-the-headlines
reality. Two years before Byron began Canto II, a
French frigate called the Medusa ran aground off the coast of Africa. Nearly 150 of its crew and passengers
escaped on a raft, but with little food or water. For 13 days they starved, raved, killed each other, ate
their dead, and despaired. By the
time they were rescued, only 15 people were left alive. The disaster garnered international
attention. In an era of radical
instability, the story of the raft of the Medusa crystallized fears about the
decay of civilization and the horrors that humans are capable of when pushed to
the extreme.
This is the story in the background of Byron’s depiction of Juan and his comrades lost at sea. You might consider what the poet’s characteristically irreverent portrayal says about this real-life event. You might also compare it to the other famous artistic rendering of event: Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, a painting that was first displayed for the public in 1819, the same year in which the first two Cantos of Don Juan were published.
Remember to post your response to canto II by noon on Monday.
Happy reading,
This is the story in the background of Byron’s depiction of Juan and his comrades lost at sea. You might consider what the poet’s characteristically irreverent portrayal says about this real-life event. You might also compare it to the other famous artistic rendering of event: Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, a painting that was first displayed for the public in 1819, the same year in which the first two Cantos of Don Juan were published.
Remember to post your response to canto II by noon on Monday.
Happy reading,
Prof. M.
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Géricault, Le Radeau de la Méduse
On the 20th stanza:
ReplyDeleteThe classic outpouring of longing by a smitten lover sick with woeful love is deliciously mocked; Don Juan is sick with love, but, more to point, he is literally and disgustingly ill. He can't complete a solid thought, not one full evocation of his love-sickness, without having to cut himself off to demand his servant bring his some relief from the vomiting.
"'Sooner shall heaven kiss earth' - (Here he fell sicker)" As if the physical contact between "heaven" and "earth," man and woman, makes the lovers contract some terrible disease, immediately upon first contact, as the dash represents. Byron's use of parentheses in the first line is also notably uncommon and cheeky. The poet, as usual, also sets himself for a more difficult rhyming task with "sicker," a double rhyme that he follows through on.
"Oh Julia, what is every other woe?" - this is a stunningly typical expression, copy-and-pasted from any chivalric love poem. But, Byron mocks the convention by immediately showing that, in fact, there is an "other woe" that does indeed take precedence, as Don Juan must, again, cut himself off with
"(For God's sake let me have a glass of liquor,/Pedro, Battista, help me down below!)"
So, right when the still-faithful, jilted lover is singing his hail, oh beloved one, his bodily functions rise up.
Byron then doesn't even bother anymore with the parentheses; Don Juan is no longer making asides about his physical ailment as he tries to focus his attentions on going on about Oh Julia. No, now, interspersed straight into the line, we find Don Juan schizophrenically yelling, "Julia!" "Pedro! "Julia!" "Pedro!." The juxtaposition of "my love" with "you rascal" is appreciated, as is that of "Oh Julia!" - a prayerful beseech-ment if ever there was one - with the "cursed vessel," the exact opposite effect.
The crowning, ironic jewel is the couplet
"Beloved Julia, hear me still beseeching!/(Here he grew inarticulate with reaching.)"
Don Juan's two outpourings - of "beseeching" love and desire and "reaching" - have finally officially melded into one. There is no separation between the chivalric love and vomiting. The effect is something along the lines of a preteen boy dragged to a romantic comedy movie by his older sister, sitting in the back of the theater making "reaching" noises at the gooey kissing on screen.
I've read a lot of books which describe shipwrecks, and in one of them (maybe in the Bloody Jack series) the characters describe a certain pact they would make if it came to it, although it didn't: They would draw lots to eat a leg, not kill a person. This seemed to be a common pact among shipwrecked sailors, so I was horrified when they killed Pedrillo. They should have just waited until someone died a natural death.
ReplyDeleteStanza 78: Poor Juan had such a moral dilemma. Personally, I don't know if I would eat my teacher to survive. I actually read a story in the Reader's Digest about a plane crash in which the survivor's ate from the dead bodies of the people they didn't know. (I Googled it: It was the 1972 crash in the Andes.) The key point is that they only ate from the people they didn't know. On the other hand, in stanza 76, it seems that Pedrillo is resigned to his fate. It would have been kind of him to specifically tell Juan he could eat him. I read a book (in the Bloody Jack) series, in which Jackie thinks is dying, so she tells the girls on the raft with her to eat her liver, I think, because it has the most nutrients. My science teacher, who happens to be English, told us (in seventh grade?) that if stranded without water, a mammal's eyeball contains intraocular fluid or aqueous humor (Google), which I suppose goes for both humans and animals. Jewish sources for eating dead bodies during a famine include references to terrible curses and during a terrible period of war, people ate the animals and then ate their dead, probably.
So is it true that "'Twas not to be expected that he should, / Even in extremity of their disaster, / Dine with them on his pastor and his master"? Because the entire story is written in rhyme, I kept laughing and then saying, "Ew" when I absorbed what I read. I also noticed that not only is the couplet rhyming, "disaster" and "master," but there is an additional rhyme word "pastor" in the middle of the last line. It brings a religious element into the equation, as Juan was taught not only practical things which made him indebted to Pedrillo, but also about murder and other moral ideas, which made him even more reluctant to kill him. It is obvious from stanza 76 that Pedrillo is a religious Catholic, although the couplet at the end of stanza 76 is a sarcastic joke which undermines that idea, though I don't really understand it.
Another interesting thing about stanza 78 is when Byron calls Pedrillo "animal food." This could mean that the sailors who won't eat "animal food" feel vegetarian as opposed to cannibalistic. Or it could mean that normally animals eat people, like the sharks in this case, or the FBI (fungus, bacteria, and insects--also from that science teacher) in most cases. The desperate sailors who eat "animal food" seems to become like animals, and die after "howling, screeching" and, most significantly, "with hyena laughter."