The Mode of Byron's Don Juan

Author(s): George M. Ridenour

Reviewed work(s):
Source: PMLA, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Sep., 1964), pp. 442-446
Published by: Modern Language Association
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THE MODE OF BYRON'S DON JUAN

BY GEORGE M. RIDENOUR

PROBLEM currently in our reading of

Byron's Don Juan is that of identifying the
speaker. There is a tendency to deny the presence of a single speaker, and to dissolve the
poem into a number of different voices. This,
accompanied by an emphasis on the ironic nature of statements made in the course of the work,
is intended to move us towards seeing the poem
as ultimately ironic, often with some suggestion
of the literature of the "absurd." An extreme
statement of this position is offered by William
H. Marshall, who claims that the structural basis
of the poem is "only the seeming myriad of
speakers."' It will be helpful to quote Marshall's
argument at some length:
At one moment the speaker emerging is naive,
prudish,perhapsstupid; he may be prudent to the
point of absurdity, sometimes concernedwith exasperatingdetails, elsewherefrightenedat the implications of what he recounts.At other times, however,
the speaker is worldly, indiscreet, perhaps cynical.
Frequentlythe form assumed by the speaker represents the antithesis of the nature of the action that
he recounts (in moments of intensifiedsexuality he
displaysextraordinaryprudishness),and on other occasions,as in his preparationsto describebattle in the
eighth canto, he himself imposesthe mood upon the
narrative.At the moment of tension a speakerinterrupts and comments most inappropriately:during
the scene in Donna Julia's bedroom,the shipwreck,
the touchingmomentsof Juan and Haidee. Tension
is relieved.We seek no surprises;nor do we seek answers. What was serious now appearsludicrous.On
occasiontwo speakersmay be juxtaposed:in the third
canto one makes an emphatic attack upon Wordsworth (xcviii-c), only to be followed several stanzas
later (civ-cvi) by another emerging rather unobtrusivelywho utters what must clearlybe taken as an
imitationor a parodyof Wordsworth:"My altarsare
the mountainsand the ocean, / Earth air, stars,-all
that springsfrom the great Whole, / Who hath produced, and will receivethe soul." The use of various
speakers,ironic and among each other inconsistent,
to comment upon the method and structureof the
poem is perhapstoo abundantand in many instances
too obvious to requireillustration.2
A

This is a useful list, avoiding minor discrepancies

that arise from Byron's carelessness, so I shall
use it to work from.
Readers who see the poem as "meaning"
irony-"Its irony," says Marshall, "is terminal
rather than instrumental"3-imply that it is
442

naive to define patterns in the work in terms of

statements that are at least partly comic or
ironic. (See n. 12, below.) But a glance at Marshall's list may suggest that the ironic view,
pushed to its limits, is levelling to an extent that
fails seriously to account for our experience of
the poem. In the first place, readers of the poem
have from the first been convinced that they
were becoming acquainted with a recognizable
companion who was ready to take some pains to
amuse them. They usually called this companion
"Byron," and roughly identified him with some
of the more attractive qualities of a famous
English poet of that name. Frequent allusion in
the poem to the well-publicized career of the poet
Byron suggests that this is not at least a simple
example of biographical fallacy. To ignore it is
like reading The Prelude while trying to forget
that there was ever a historical William Wordsworth outside the poem. Such austerity may not
be worth the effort. Even ironic points of contact
with the public myth are kinds of guarantee as
to the identity of the speaker-that is, that he
has one. The fact that the poet's life and personality were public property, that the poem
connects itself with this body of public information, and the fact that readers do feel they are
getting to know a real and likeable person in the
course of reading the poem all lend weight to the
notion that there may be some point in thinking
of the poem in terms of a single speaker.
This is subjective, to be sure, and so is the
second point, though perhaps less damagingly so.
I shall put it as a question. Are many people who
know the poem at all well, in looking over
Marshall's list, really likely to respond to all of
these poses, each of them ironically "undercut"
(Marshall does not use the term)-are they at all
likely to respond to them as equally ironic, or
ironic in the same way? Marshall's concept of
"romantic irony" (his term) is inherently reductive. Romantic irony, as Marshall presents it
here, operates in a world of illusion where there
I William H. Marshall, The Structureof Byron's
Major
Poems(Philadelphia,1962),p. 176.But see ErnestJ. Lovell,
and
in
Don
Image
Jr., "Irony
Juan," The Major English
RomanticPoets:A Symposiumin Reappraisal,ed. Clarence
D. Thorpe,CarlosBaker,and BennettWeaver(Carbondale,
III., 1957), pp. 129-148.
2 Marshall,pp. 176-177.
s P. 177.

George M. Ridenour
are no patterns, where there is nothing to be sure
of, nothing that can be made sense of, no terms
even for arranging our perplexities. But this is
not quite what everyone finds in Don Juan. If
everything is an illusion for Byron, and we will
suppose it is, everything need not be equally
illusory, or in the same way, or to the same effect. I should suppose that what we find in Don
Juan and in Byron as a whole is less definition
of kinds of illusion than an attempt at discriminating between them. This means a system
of ironies, to be sure, but of multiple ironies in
different relations to each other, to serve special
purposes. The ironies are, in other words, in an
important sense instrumental rather than terminal..
The first two items on Marshall's list may be
dealt with quickly. There is no such contradiction in being at once "naive, prudish, perhaps
stupid" and "prudent to the point of absurdity"
as to demand the assumption of separate
speakers. The qualities go together well enough
and no one is seriously going to attach them to
the speaker of the poem. The point of most of
this posing is precisely that of course no one will
believe it. (The sexual prudishness mentioned
later is a version of this.) It resembles another
item in the list, the deflating or cynical comments in moments of tension. Insofar as these
refer to the speaker, they are methods of dramatizing his sophistication, and this, though
qualified, is a major theme of the poem. Only a
very sophisticated person, we are to suppose,
can afford to make fun of his own sophistication.
Such passages are effective only if the reader is
not so naive as to be taken in by them. So there
is no necessary contradiction at all between any
of these "speakers" and the one who is "worldly,
indiscreet, sometimes cynical." Only persons of
that sort play the fool in this way. And, most
important, the ironic depiction of a worldly
speaker is not on the same level as the ironic
depiction of a naive one. The first could have
written the poem, while the second could not
have, and in hearing the second we hear him as
a mood of the first. Both may be illusions, but
both are not equally illusory. Both attitudes may
be of limited value, but they are not limited in
the same way or to the same extent. The point is
not the illusion or limitation but the relations
that exist between different kinds of illusion or
limitation.
Finally, two items on the list are perhaps in
implied contrast: the concern with exasperating
detail and the imposition of mood on the narra-

443

tive in the eighth canto. But the play with detail is part of that concern with getting things
"just right," of telling the truth about them,
which Byron inherited (as a literary motif) from
his Italian models and (especially) from Cervantes' Don Quixote, and in Canto viii he is
eager, since his poem is to some extent epic, to
tell the truth about one of those wars that are
characteristic of the genre. And the truth of the
matter, as Byron sees it, is conveyed in the tone
he "imposes." These two speakers, then, do not
seem to be irreconcilably at odds with each other
or with the other speakers of the poem.4 And
while it is true that in theory such versatility
might have the effect of an endless series of contradictory spreakers, it would have to be
handled differently.
The ease with which these separate speakers
can fit together into a self-consistent speaker is
striking, and it is related to an important aspect
of Byron's poem: its extremely limited range.
The illusion of Don Juan is to some extent the
variety and diversity the poem seems to offer.5
The limiting factor is not that everything is
treated ironically but that the same concerns are
treated in so many different forms in an inventive diversity of a limited number of ways, and
these ways are often ironic. But the quality of
the poem, it seems to me, its special flavor or
tonality, comes from this particular blend of the
predictable and unpredictable, mysterious and
prosaic, frightening and reassuring. That is the
truth of things, if you will, or part of it. And one
of the ways of expressing this state of affairs is
through a multitude of voices which we always
recognize as manifestations of one voice, and
through a great variety of attitudes that shape
themselves into a limited number of related,
recurrent ones, which we attach to the one
speaker. Andras Horn has recently observed that
the subjectivism of Byron and Sterne both
widens and restricts their range, is an element
both of dispersal and of unity in their works:
"their subjectivism in one respect, namely as
manifest in the arbitrariness of their will, is restricted only by their subjectivism in another
4 I have considered neither the "fright at the implications
of what he recounts," because it is hard to pin down, nor the
juxtaposition of speakers with different views of Wordsworth,
since even if the second passage does refer to Wordsworth,
which is not certain, it is to a different aspect of him from
that which is attacked in the earlier section.
5 Truman Guy Steffan has observed that Don Juan does
not offer us "God's plenty." The Making of a Masterpiece,
Vol. I of Byron's Don Juan: A Variorum Edition, ed. Steffan
and Willis W. Pratt (Austin, Texas, 1957), p. 130.

444

The Mode of Byron's "Don Juan"

respect, by their all-pervading presence."6 Byron's presence in his poem is a serious limiting
factor not only as a voice or personality (which is
what Horn has mostly in mind), but in restricting
the number of things dealt with, how they are
dealt with, and the ways in which they are related to each other. In order to be more specific
about the ordering of ironies in Don Juan, I shall
look briefly at two cantos, the fifth and the
eleventh.
The fifth canto begins with what I suppose we
will agree is irony.
1.
When amatorypoets sing their loves
In liquid lines mellifluouslybland,
And pair their rhymes as Venus yokes her doves,
They little think what mischiefis in hand;
The greatertheir successthe worseit proves,
As Ovid'sverse may give to understand;
Even Petrarch'sself, if judged with due severity,
Is the Platonicpimp of all posterity.
2.
I thereforedo denounceall amorouswriting,
Except in such a way as not to attract;
Plain-simple-short, and by no means inviting,
But with a moralto each errortacked,
Formed rather for instructing than delighting,
And with all passions in their turn attacked;
Now, if my Pegasusshould not be shod ill,
This poem will becomea moralmodel.
3.
The Europeanwith the Asianshore
Sprinkledwith palaces-the Ocean stream
Here and there studdedwith a seventy-four,
Sophia's Cupola with golden gleam,
The cypressgroves, Olympushigh and hoar,
The twelve isles, and the morethan I coulddream,
Far less describe,present the very view
Whichcharmedthe charmingMaryMontagu.
4.
I have a passionfor the name of "Mary,"
For once it was a magicsoundto me;
And still it half calls up the realmsof Fairy,
WhereI beheldwhat neverwas to be;
All feelingschanged,but this was last to vary,
A spell from which even yet I am not quite free:
But I growsad-and let a tale growcold,
Whichmust not be patheticallytold.
5.
The wind swept down the Euxine, and the wave
Broke foaming o'er the blue Symplegades;
'T is a grand sight from off "the Giant's Grave"
To watch the progressof those rollingseas
Between the Bosphorus,as they lash and lave
Europeand Asia, you being quite at ease:
There'snot a sea the passengere'er pukes in,
Turns up more dangerousbreakersthan the Euxine.

6.

'T was a raw day of Autumn'sbleak beginning,

When nights are equal, but not so the days;
The Parcaethen cut short the furtherspinning
Of seamen'sfates, and the loud tempestsraise
The waters,and repentancefor past sinning
In all, who o'er the great deep take their ways:
They vow to amend their lives, and yet they don't;
Becauseif drowned,they can't-if spared,they won't.7
When the poet calls attention to the practical
dangers of erotic poetry and says that this poem
is designed to "denounce all amorous writing,"
it is precisely the irony that protects the integrity of the speaker, who really means this in a
way, but only in a way. The irony is more Horatian than romantic in Marshall's sense, and is
developed in a version of the Horatian urbane
style, which with all its range of tone and manner
presents itself as plain. A reference to Mary
Montagu reminds Byron (or somebody) of a
Mary he had known: "All feelings changed, but
this was last to vary, / A spell from which even
yet I am not quite free" (st. 4). These lines show
retrospective irony in their indulgence in the
"amorous writing" already condemned, and
irony by anticipation, in speaking favorably of a
state of "slavery," to be denounced later in the
canto; but in neither case is there serious question
as to the poet's value and allegiances, no collapse
into a terminal irony. If there were, the section
would lose its point-of letting the values of
poetry, love, and freedom establish themselves as
values in spite of the contradictions that become
apparent when we consider them in terms of each
other. An account of youthful loves, for example,
displays itself as valuable in spite of the cynicism
by which it is surrounded (more accurately, it
can display its value because of the demonstrated
sophistication of the speaker), and presents a
kind of slavery that will still be "good" at the end
of a canto devoted to an attack on slavery. For
the slavery is to a dream of the possibility of a
fully human relationship between men and
women, and it is what makes it possible, in the
course of the canto, to assert the possibility of
freedom. (It is characteristic of Byron that the
value be held "just barely.") This freedom is
endangered largely by the kind of helplessness
before physical agency that we find in the equation of repentance and high water in stanza 6, an
irony which is developed throughout the canto so
6 AndrAsHorn, Byron's"Don Juan" and the Eighteenth
CenturyEnglish Novel, Swiss Studies in English, No. 51
(Bern,1962),p. 46.
7 The Worksof LordByron,Poetry,ed. E. H. Coleridge
(Clouders,1898-1905),Vol. vi.

George M. Ridenour
as to be instrumental to the poet's testing of the
notion of human freedom by pitting it against
forms of slavery.8
For simplicity, I shall notice how this is
worked out in two passages. In the first (sts. 3339), the poet is brooding over the frailty of the
human mind in its dependence on the body. The
exemplum is the death of an Italian military commandant (someone is in Italy), and the moral is
that slavery of spirit to matter makes life ultimately inexplicable. But there are values in the
passage that are not ironically reduced. Two
stand out. There is the courage of the commandant himself, an old soldier in Napoleon's wars,
which survives irony, and there is the circumstance of the anecdote's being introduced as "a
fact, and no poetic fable" (st. 33). For while
Byron may play with the limitation of any version of truth, including his own, it hardly occurs
to him to doubt that kinds of truth are to be
had-on the whole enough truth for man, it appears. And if his own vision is sometimes awkward and inconsistent, why that is the truth of
it. It may be sometimes a near thing, but there is
no final collapse into absurdity. Byron's skeptical
attitude towards truth has the effect of putting a
special emphasis on the truth he claims to tell.
The second passage (sts. 126-143) is the climax
of the canto. Here Juan, in reply to the attempt
of the Sultana to coerce love, testifies nobly to the
freedom of the human spirit. Then she begins to
cry and his resolution begins to weaken, and he is
apparently saved from giving in only by Baba's
sudden entrance. Does this mean that freedom is
an illusion? The irony certainly suggests that it is
frail, but is this terminal irony? Two things must
be considered. In the first place, the Sultana's
weeping has in fact changed the nature of the
relationship in important ways. She is now coercing like a woman, through her weakness. In the
second place, to put it grimly, if Juan is "saved"
by accident, it was his profession of freedom that
delayed the capitulation long enough so that accident could effect salvation. T. G. Steffan recognizes that the canto is Shelleyan, and this last
point in fact recalls the relationship between
mind and circumstance in Prometheus Unbound.
After exposure to the most ruthless ironies, then,
the concept of human freedom is still a compelling ideal. There is not much freedom, it appears,
and what there is is weak; but there is just
enough for man's needs, and that is enough. That
is the kind of statement he makes, I think, about
love and truth. Both are tricky and bear watching, but they can be attained, and they can be
worth the risk. These values and the imaginative

445

terms that present them are treated ironically, to

be sure, but do we really confuse these ironies
with those applied to war or tyranny?9 And if the
ironies of Don Juan are really terminal, they
must all be equally terminal, and discrimination
will then be impossible. None of these ironies
and poses seem to me incompatible with a single
speaker and a single, rather simple selection and
arrangement of attitudes.
That Byron's ironies cannot be ends in themselves is suggested by the fact that when they are
traced they do not define an endless series, dissolving into nothingness. The effect is more often
that of circularity, and circular structures have at
least rudimentary intelligibility. A thorough-going irony would send out disconnected lines of
thought in different directions, never to meet.
But what Byron creates are interrelated sets of
antitheses. In his almost Blakean Vision of Judgment he sets up antithetical terms, Angel and
Devil, and shows that while Southey (and Milton) had taken them for evaluative concepts,
they are in fact at least largely descriptive, kinds
of persons or ways of being, each of which is both
good and bad in different ways. The Vision gives
us a view of Byron's ability to make distinctions
of value between (and within) alternatives each
in important ways illusory. In the earlier cantos
of Don Juan Byron establishes an active relationship between his poles, showing them as productive of each other.10 In the later cantos these
relationships are worked out less schematically,
with more refinement, though the statement as
such remains much the same. What impresses one
here is less Byron's ironic gaze demolishing illusions than his desire to distinguish between illu8 This account parallels that by Steffan, pp. 208-215.
9 "Apart from the obvious moral passion in many passages,
we are in no doubt as we read that Byron admires courage,
generosity, compassion and honesty, and that he dislikes
brutality, meanness, and above all self-importance, hypocrisy and priggery." " 'Chequered as is seen our human lot',
it is still better to be alive than dead, better to be young than
old, better to be generous than cautious, and better to be
compassionate than censorious." Helen Gardner, "Don
Juan." London Magazine, v (July 1958), 58-65, 64, 65.
10See Horn (above n. 6), p. 12. Horn cites G. Wilson
Knight, Lord Byron: Christian Virtues (London, 1952), p.
78. See also Lovell (above, n. 1), pp. 139-140 (on Adeline);
also my The Style of Don Juan (New Haven, Conn., 1960).
See also Byron's letter to John Murray, 8 Oct. 1820 (on the
possibility of revolution in Italy): "We are all looking at one
another, like wolves on their prey in pursuit, only waiting
for the first faller on, to do unutterable things. They are a
great world in Chaos, or Angels in Hell, which you please; but
out of Chaos came Paradise, and out of Hell-I don't know
what; but the Devil went in there, and he was a fine fellow
once, you know." Letters and Journals, ed. R. E. Prothero
(London, 1901), v, 92.

446

The Mode of Byron's "Don Juan"

sions: to arrange them, establish patterns among

them, judge them. It is this skill at finding his
way among illusions, at perceiving (or creating)
kinds of intelligibility in them, that seems to me
the real strength of Don Juan.
But though Byron's handling of the antinomies of freedom is more refined in the eleventh
canto than in the fifth, though the late cantos are
less simple, and their terms more radical than is
the case with the earlier cantos, they seem at the
same time to settle for less, humanly, or to tend
to do so. Already in the eleventh canto the poet's
admiration of his hero's social success makes it
hard for the poem to hold to even its qualified
acceptance of the romantic vision of human possibility, while the more explicitly satiric treatment of the society that gives Juan his triumph
has the effect of making us all the more discontented with high social address as a human goal.
(This is not fair to Byron, since the poem is unfinished, but this is what the late cantos seem to
point towards.) But in its framework, at least,
the canto is still romantic.
He begins the eleventh canto by playing with
philosophical idealism and philosophical skepticism, ending in a profession of bafflement which
leads into his famous claim to have picked up
Christian orthodoxy a dogma at a time, with
each attack of illness. I suppose it could be
argued, but the two jokes do not seem to be
funny in the same way or to the same effect. The
world view implied by the first joke includes the
second, as the second does not include the first.
The impression of radical agnosticism as to ultimate questions has not been discredited by the
new version of the mind's subjection to the flesh
in matters of conviction. (It should, if we are
reading "ironically.") The indeterminateness of
human existence can serve in fact as a kind of
grounding for the profession of mental freedom
that concludes the canto, a freedom which is
asserted both out of and against the swift passage
of time presented in the great ubi sunt stanzas.
This is skepticism, indeed, but it is hardly terminal irony, unless Shelley's "Mont Blanc" is to be
called ironic in this sense. There are ironies and
ironies, and Byron tells the difference between
them.
Perhaps one way of expressing the kind of dispute involved here would be to call attention to
the neutral word "comic." We might find it useful to call Don Juan a comic vision,1 and find
that we are less tempted to reduce it to satire or
to irony-not, after all, the only choices. At the
same time, while it is desirable to play down the
notion of Don Juan as satire, it is important to

notice the ways in which it claims to be one and

the kinds of statement it attempts through this
claim. More important, we can see that it is in
fact a satire in the real sense; that is, it points out
qualities in men and societies that keep both from
being wholly and satisfyingly human, which is
about as much as traditional satire actually
achieves. The main qualifying factor in the case
of Don Juan is that the deficiencies of men and
society are so related to attributes of the nature
of things that this last is in a sense the object of
attack. But against this unpromising background
and to some extent out of it, Byron traces various
possibilities of human life, in every case limited,
but in general, one gathers, enough for human
purposes. Enough so that it will not be necessary
to comfort ourselves with what Byron thinks of
as lies, which is one way in which Don Juan
would tell the truth.
The difference between this point of view and
that of those who read Don Juan as ironic in the
sense I have been discussing may be largely a
matter of emphasis, but emphasis is important
here. It is important also to establish useful
terms, or the possibility of there being useful
terms, and to define with some accuracy that
skepticism we all find central to the poem.12It is
important to resist the notion that all skepticisms
are alike, all ironies equally corrosive. Don Juan
is no doubt a relativistic poem, but in the sense
that, given the situation, some things, relatively
to others, are seen as desirable or undesirable,
beneficial or harmful; terms are more or less
adequate, more or less useful. For while Byron's
vision corresponds in important ways with that
of the literature of the absurd, what he is imagining is in effect an alternative to that vision.
HAVERFORD COLLEGE

Haverford, Penn.
n As does Gardner, p. 64.
12One problem in reading Don Juan comes from resistance
to the notion that images or ideas with ideological content
can be used as terms in an argument which does not on the
one hand simply "mean" the ideology they suggest or on the
other simply negate it. Byron's use of the Christian myth
of the Fall in Don Juan, for example, is analogous to "Catholicism" as a term in Federico Fellini's film "8i." The
Catholic system acts in the film as a term that helps us grasp
the implications of what it means to be making the film,
though it is not what the film means. The myth of the Fall
serves Byron as a term for expressing a kind of thing he finds
happening in experience, including the experience of writing
the poem. By using it metaphorically he can state senses in
which experience is and is not coherent for him, and something of what this implies. It does not have to come up often
in order to do this. It need only present itself as the radical
form of a particular kind of event which is constantly enacted in the poem.