Canadian Journal on Science and Engineering Mathematics Vol. 3 No. 4, May 2012
Polyphony of Don Juan: Dispersion of Genres in
Don Juan
Monireh Yarmand, Helen Ouliaei Nia
Abstract — This paper discusses the heteroglossia,
dialogism and dispersion of genres in Lord Byron's Don
Juan in the light of Bakhtinian critical theory. These terms
are drawn from Bakhtin who sees them as distinguishing
features of the novel as a genre. Byron welcomes
heteroglossia, language diversity, multiple genres and
dialogism into his own work. It is out of this stratification of
languages, speech and genre diversity, that Byron
constructs his style. The main argument is that heteroglosia
and diversity of genres enter the novel and organize
themselves within a structured artistic system. Although
Byron's poem involves the characteristics of autobiography
and epic on the surface, Don Juan is neither an
autobiography nor an epic poem. With its multiple
narration and diverse narrators, with its incorporation of
the various genres and with its different voices belonging to
different characters, Don Juan is a heteroglot, polyphonic
and dialogic poem.
Key Words — Heteroglossia, Dialogism, Polyphony,
Genre Dispersion
to create a dialogic atmosphere. The author of a novel does
not try to get rid of and purge the other genres which are
alien to him. He welcomes the diversity of the other genres
and makes use of them for his own intentions in a variety of
ways. According to Bakhtin:
There exists in addition a special group of genres that
play an especially significant role in structuring novels,
sometimes by themselves even directly determining the
structure of a novel as a whole – thus creating novel
types named after such genres. Examples of such genres
would be the confession, the diary, travel notes,
biography, the personal letter and several others. All
these genres may not only enter the novel as one of its
essential structural components, but may also determine
the form of the novel as a whole (the novel-confession,
the novel-diary, the novel-in-letters, etc.) Each of these
genres possesses its own verbal and semantic forms for
assimilating various aspects of reality. The novel;
indeed, utilizes these genres precisely because of their
capacity, as –well-worked-out forms, to assimilate
reality in words (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 320-321).
I. INTRODUCTION
This paper is an attempt to approach Byron's Don Juan
from a Bakhtinian viewpoint of the genre and also to
understand the implications of Byron's use of heteroglossia.
As another means of introducing and organizing
heteroglossia, according to Bakhtin, the novel often
incorporates other genres which even affect its form: the
confessional novel, the epistolary novel, and so on (Bakhtin,
1981, p. 323). In most novels those stemming genres:
Serve the purpose of introducing heteroglossia into the
novel, of introducing an era’s many and diverse
languages. Extraliterary genres (the everyday genres,
for example) are incorporated into the novel not in
order to “ennoble” them, to “literarize” them, but for
the sake of their very extraliterariness, for the sake of
their potential for introducing nonliterary language (or
even dialects) into the novel (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 411).
Incorporated into every novel is a multiplicity of different
genres, which play a large role in the development of that
novel. The novel is not a homogenous genre which is
composed of one pure specific generic type. Conversely, it
is a heterogeneous structure which permits the plurality and
variety of generic types. The novel’s compositional form
requires the collection of different types of genres in order
169
Another example of Bakhtin's attitude towards the nature
of narrative is expressed thus:
In an era when the novel reigns supreme, almost all the
remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent
“novelized:” drama (for example Ibsen, Hauptmann,
the whole of Naturalist drama), epic poetry (for
example, Childe Harold and especially Byron’s Don
Juan, even lyric poetry. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 5)
As a heteroglot and multi-languaged work, Don Juan is
an epic poetry, a hybrid text in which there are other genres
which are embedded in the compositional form of the poem
making it an extraordinary one. Thus, it is difficult to narrow
the scope of the poem to just one or two genres. Arising
questions such as the following ones: "Is the poem an attack
on what was current Romantic Era ideology? Is it primarily
social and political commentary and a satire on its abuse? Is
the poem a realist description of the nature of Man? What,
finally, is the poem about?" make Don Juan's interplaying
style appear not only firmly committed to its
autobiographical genre, but also almost committed to traces
of other genres such as chivalric romance, historiography,
(mock) epic, satire, picaresque legend, travelogue, gothic
and so forth. These questions, and more, are some of the
relevant issues raised when analyzing Don Juan.
Canadian Journal on Science and Engineering Mathematics Vol. 3 No. 4, May 2012
‘T is all the same to me; I ‘m fond of yielding,
And therefore leave them to the purer page
Of Smollett, Prior, Ariosto, Fielding,
Who say strange things for so correct an age;
I once had great alacrity in wielding
My pen, and liked poetic war to wage,
And recollect the time when all this cant
Would have provoked remarks which now it shan’t.
(Canto 4, 117)
deviations, cites examples, and thus attempts to impose his
views on his reader or his listener. In A Byron Chronology,
Norman Page notes that in a letter to B. W. Procter, Byron
describes Don Juan as "a satire on affection of all kinds,
mixed with some relief of serious feeling and description"
(Page, 1988, p. 85). As such, the present researcher
categorizes satiric nature of the poem on three levels:
literary, social and political.
Byron begins Don Juan with the insertion of a
Dedication, which functions as an attack on the vices, follies
and shortcomings of his age and of his contemporary
"literary" Romantic figures, "the shabby fellows- true- but
poets still" (Dedication 4) figures such as Wordsworth,
Southey and Coleridge that McGann terms them, the poets
of "the Lakist School" (McGann, 1993, p. 57), with the
intent of shaming them into improvement. Byron accuses
Wordsworth of being unintelligible: "Unless, like
Wordsworth, they prove unintelligible" (Canto 1, 21),
Coleridge misguided: "And turn’d, without perceiving his
condition, Like Coleridge, into a metaphysician" (21), Bob
Southey insolent and untalented: "You, Bob! are rather
insolent, you know" (Dedication, 3), and in his "logical"
conclusion, he wishes them to "change their lakes for ocean"
(4) thus avoiding to imitate their "petty thoughts."
Byron begins Don Juan with the insertion of a
Dedication, which functions as an attack on the vices, follies
and shortcomings of his age and of his contemporary
"literary" Romantic figures, "the shabby fellows- true- but
poets still" (Dedication 4) figures such as Wordsworth,
Southey and Coleridge that McGann terms them, the poets
of "the Lakist School" (McGann, 1993, p. 57), with the
intent of shaming them into improvement. Byron accuses
Wordsworth of being unintelligible: "Unless, like
Wordsworth, they prove unintelligible" (Canto 1, 21),
Coleridge misguided: "And turn’d, without perceiving his
condition, Like Coleridge, into a metaphysician" (21), Bob
Southey insolent and untalented: "You, Bob! are rather
insolent, you know" (Dedication, 3), and in his "logical"
conclusion, he wishes them to "change their lakes for ocean"
(4) thus avoiding to imitate their "petty thoughts."
Byron's poetic idol was Pope (Bloom, 2005, p. 1) and he
felt that by attacking Pope, his Romantic contemporaries
made such a neglect in the traditional rules of poetry and its
sublime values. The same way that Pope in The Rape of the
Lock (1712) satirizes his illicit society, McGann states,
Byron satirizes his society too, but whereas Pope's satire
attacks lack of seriousness, Byron's laughter is aimed at
pompous seriousness. He compares the two poets:
According to Gerald Carl Wood, Don Juan is
fundamentally a satire because the narrative (1) consistently
prefers freedom (especially as reflected in the license of its
form) to social tyranny and personal inhibition, and at the
same time (2) gives a fictive representation of the "real"
world (Wood, 1973, p. 190). Through the thin mask of
different narratorial voices, Byron states his view of the
Pope's mock epic reminds his audience of the true
values embodied in the serious epic; Byron's comic epic
laughs at the high expectations and ideals embodied in
the epic, seeing them as excessive and unrealistic, at
least for his time. The decline of poetry, he (Byron)
felt, was "but a function of the decline of public
values." (McGann, 1993, p. 70-71)
Byron mixes different genres and types of words and
glossary to create a heteroglossic milieu. Bakhtin notes:
"Insertion of journals, newspaper reports and so forth is the
way to disrupt literary realism and monolithic narration"
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 320). It, in addition, connects the fictional
text with the contemporary social context. In Bakhtin's view
"novelization" is a term shaking the hierarchy of genres and
rejecting the generic monologue (Bakhtin, 1981, p. XXXI).
Likewise, Byron integrates a lot of cultural materials, low/
high cultures, literary/social texts into his poem and alludes
in the course of his work to numerous other genres and
subgenres that Drummond Bone lists them as: histories,
account of manners, holy books, moral treaties, laws and
travelogues (Bone, 2004, p. 11).
II. THINLY VEILED MASK: SATIRE
Don Juan does not give into easy categorization. It has
some specific peculiarities connecting it first of all to the
most obvious issue raised by the poem: Byron's harsh satire.
As Caroline Franklin states "the influence of the satiric
tradition of the Roman poets Horace can be traced in Don
Juan: "Thus Horace wrote we all know long ago/ And thus
Pope quotes the precept to re-teach/ From his translation;
but had none admired," Juvenal: "I can’t help thinking
Juvenal was wrong/ Although no doubt his real intent was
good/ For speaking out so plainly in his song/ So much
indeed as to be downright rude;" and Persius may often be
seen in the rhetoric of individual passages in Canto 5.
However, as a Romantic writer, Byron was unable to appeal
to a moral and literary consensus, as the Augustan or
classical satirists did (Franklin, 2007, p. 63). The poem's
satire though harshly targets the abuses of the society, is a
kind of experiment adapting a dialogic, colloquial and
improvisatory tone (Bottrall, 2003, p. 220) to narrate a large
amount of material, and in this way Byron acknowledges
Smollet, Ariosto and Prior as forefathers having developed
such a mixed style:
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Canadian Journal on Science and Engineering Mathematics Vol. 3 No. 4, May 2012
In some fragments like "That is the usual method, but not
mine / My way is to begin with the beginning" (Canto 1, 7),
or "There ‘s only one slight difference between/ Me and my
epic brethren gone before/ And here the advantage is my
own, I ween" (Canto 1, 40) and also "And epic, if plain truth
should prove no bar/ For I have drawn much less with a long
bow/ Than my forerunners" (Canto 8, 207) support the idea
that Byron's epic is an innovation of its own, designed not to
immortalize the Illiadic or Odysseus warriors of the classical
epic, but to portray the ridiculous and the folly of its own
time, its vanity and its hypocrisy. In this way, Byron hoped
that by ridiculing and criticizing his contemporaries, he
could suggest a return to the classical canon of poetry, the
one which was practiced by the traditional poets. The
objective of Don Juan's satire, then, as McGann remarks, is
to:
Clarify the nature of poetry in an age where obscurity
on the subject, both in theory and practice, was
becoming rampant. This obscurity had developed from
the increasing emphasis upon privacy and individual
talent in Romantic verse. (McGann, 1993, p. 78)
In the researcher's opinion, Byron expresses his attitude
towards his fellow-poets thus:
I would not imitate the petty thought,
Nor coin my self-love to so base a vice,
For all the glory your conversion brought,
Since gold alone should not have been its price.
You have your salary; was ‘t for that you wrought?
And Wordsworth has his place in the Excise.
You’re shabby fellows — true — but poets still,
And duly seated on the immortal hill. (Dedication, 4)
Satire, as employed by Byron, enables him to address
other serious issues such as "social" anomalies throughout
the poem. First, it becomes an effective vehicle for
criticizing the family "manners" in particular and the system
of "education" and "matrimony" of the 19th century England
in general. In canto 1, Byron criticizes Don Jose's and
Donna Inez's wrong attitudes toward education. Rigidly
virtuous Donna Inez gives extraordinary training in the arts
and sciences to Juan, but also takes great care that he should
learn nothing about the basic facts of life, thus calculating to
repress Juan's instincts and passions toward life. Incautious
Don Jose's roving eye has no love for learning and education
but for women. Thus in half playful and mocking and half
serious tone, Byron introduces the eccentric Juan as a
miserable creature with whom Byron says has some far
familiar acquaintance:
A little curly-headed, good-for-nothing,
And mischief-making monkey from his birth;
His parents ne’er agreed except in doting
Upon the most unquiet imp on earth;
Instead of quarrelling, had they been but both in
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Their senses, they ‘d have sent young master forth
To school, or had him soundly whipp’d at home,
To teach him manners for the time to come. (10)
Second, as Edward E. Bostetter believes, satire serves as
Byron's qualifying device for his theme of "appearance
versus reality" (Bostetter, 1969, p. 21). As such; much of the
poem’s sharpest satire was aimed at pompous individuals
and their social prestige. The researcher draws the reader's
attention to a stanza and matrimonial commitment of Don
Alfonso, who is escorted with torches, friends and servants
in great number, yet cuckold, void of honor, love, and virtue
and incapable of engaging his wife's attention:
Yes, Don Alfonso! husband now no more,
If ever you indeed deserved the name,
Is ‘t worthy of your years? you have threescore
Fifty, or sixty, it is all the same
Is ‘t wise or fitting, causeless to explore
For facts against a virtuous woman’s fame?
Ungrateful, perjured, barbarous Don Alfonso,
How dare you think your lady would go on so? (Canto
1, 30)
There are also some fragments in the poem which
function as satire on Byron's "political" opponents. Bostetter
brings an example that Byron parodies the Duke of
Wellington, who has won the Battle of Waterloo and has
been richly rewarded by England for his victory. Byron
thinks he should not have accepted the gifts his country
lavished on him (Bostetter, 1969, p. 21). He points out to
this fragment in Canto 9, 208:
You are ‘the best of cut-throats:’— do not start;
The phrase is Shakspeare’s, and not misapplied:
War ‘s a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art,
Unless her cause by right be sanctified.
If you have acted once a generous part,
The world, not the world’s masters, will decide,
And I shall be delighted to learn who,
Save you and yours, have gain’d by Waterloo?
To the above, one can add the beginning stanza of the
same canto, which renders the satiric way Byron refers to
Wellington's villainous nature by the use of such words as
"Villainton," with exaggeration like "heroic," "your great
name," "Glory" and "Humanity would rise:"
Oh, Wellington! (or ‘Villainton’ — for Fame
Sounds the heroic syllables both ways;
France could not even conquer your great name,
But punn’d it down to this facetious phrase—
Beating or beaten she will laugh the same),
You have obtain’d great pensions and much praise:
Glory like yours should any dare gainsay,
Humanity would rise, and thunder ‘Nay!
Canadian Journal on Science and Engineering Mathematics Vol. 3 No. 4, May 2012
Examples mentioned above lead us to the tone of a
satirist, and of a master who though imitating classical
models, is perfectly willing and able to subordinate imitation
to his own free invention. Byron's Don Juan criticizes many
issues and it does not confine itself to one specific deviation.
It is heir to all the satirists, can use his attack on any literary
references or philosophical and political ideas, any fact or
mood that is not compatible with his own standpoints.
Elizabeth F. Boyd notes that:
Byron thought of his coming adventures in Greece as
material for Don Juan provided they were comic; but he
seriously declared that "Don Juan will be known by and
bye. For what, it is intended as a satire on abuses of the
present state of Society. And not a eulogy of vice..."
(Boyd, 1958, p. 33)
III. ROMANCE OF ROGUERY: THE
PICARESQUE DON JUAN
Don Juan represents an obvious difference from Byron's
romantic contemporaries, but it is not a neo-classical
descendant, either. Attempting to categorize its multiple
genres, literary critics have suggested such precedents and
influences as the picaresque novel. Our understanding of
Byron's place in the picaresque tradition is indebted to
George M. Ridenour who identified Don Juan with the
picaresque qualities in Fielding's works. He seems to
consider Tom Jones a picaresque novel, for he writes:
"Fielding's Tom Jones is a book Byron knew well and with
which, as with the picaresque tradition in general, Byron's
poem has evident connection" (Stephenson, 1973, p. 9).
Beginning probably as a burlesque of the Spanish legend
of Don Juan, the poem grew under Byron's hand into the
great picaresque picture of modern society that it is. "You
ask me." Byron wrote to Murray, August 12, 1819, "For the
plan of Donny Johnny I have no plan... Do you suppose that
I could have any intention but to giggle and make giggle?"
(Parini, 2004, p. 83).
Juan’s picaresque adventures in a wide variety of
European contexts see him constantly dealing with
bewilderment, eccentricity, vogue ideas in the first cantos to
disappointment and disillusionment in the last ones. From
his first moment of exile with Donna Inez in canto 1 to his
projected death at the hands of the French revolutionaries
and through his war experiences in Turkey, Russia, and
England, Juan becomes increasingly the pawn of forces over
which he has no control. In Canto 1, for example, Byron
explains about the picaresque nature of Juan in his rogue and
ingenious manner once he is informed about Don Alfonzo's
sudden arrival and forced to hide in Julia's chamber in
distress and haste:
172
Young Juan slipp’d half-smother’d, from the bed.
He had been hid—I don’t pretend to say
How, nor can I indeed describe the where—
Young, slender, and pack’d easily, he lay,
No doubt, in little compass, round or square;
But pity him I neither must nor may
His suffocation by that pretty pair;
‘T were better, sure, to die so, than be shut
With maudlin Clarence in his Malmsey butt. (34)
Don Juan is like The Odyssey (8th C. BC); however,
Byron turned his picaresque Odysseus a little inside-out. In
generic terms of its picaresque, some examples like "pack'd
easily," "compass," "round or square" and "suffocation"
give the idea that Juan is nothing but a powerless,
manipulated by women and rogue adventurer, not brave and
virile. Instead of facing the embarrassment, he hides from it,
so he is not genius, though clever, he is not intelligent, and
thus an outcast, because of his flaws not because of his
courage. He is witty but stupid at the same time; and finally
condemned to go through the same adventure all over again
because he learns nothing from it.
IV: THE MISGUIDED HERO: (MOCK) EPIC
In addition to having a satiric style with picaresque
elements, most generic studies of Don Juan have focused
upon the epic or "mock epic" aspects of this poem
(Robertson, 2009, P. 332). Byron calls his poem epic and
bows to Horace, Aristotle, Milton, Dryden, Pope, and
invokes a muse to give him liberty and a poetic license in his
design and deviation from the classical epic:
Here my chaste Muse a liberty must take
Start not! still chaster reader she ‘ll be nice hence
Forward, and there is no great cause to quake;
This liberty is a poetic licence,
Which some irregularity may make
In the design, and as I have a high sense
Of Aristotle and the Rules, ‘t is fit
To beg his pardon when I err a bit. (Canto 1, 26)
For writing a great poem, Byron chose epic that was still
the top genre of poetry. But to make it accord with his
design, he concluded that his should be an epic with a
difference; that is it would have an ordinary, faulty human
being for hero. Thus it belongs clearly to the tradition of
mock epic. Ritchie Robertson brings an evidence of Byron's
acknowledgement about his mock epic as: "it is a satirical
mock-epic, an epic as much in the spirit of our day as the
Iliad was in that of Homer" (Robertson, 2009, P. 332).
Byron thought brave heroes, are not true to life, he also
believed for an author who thought at the possibility of
satire and ridicule, Don Juan should combine the elevated
manner of the Italian epics with the picaresque advantages
Canadian Journal on Science and Engineering Mathematics Vol. 3 No. 4, May 2012
of the best in satiric prose romance of his past generations
that Robertson lists as Lucian, Rabelais, Don Quixote, Gil
Blas, Gulliver's Travels, Candide, Tom Jones and Tristram
Shandy (Robertson, 2009, P. 84). As the researcher
perceives, Byron provides a variety of the hero's experiences
through different social stages in his travels and openly
displays the ironical representation of the hero as the
mockery of classical epics:
Reader! I have kept my word,— at least so far
As the first Canto promised. You have now
Had sketches of love, tempest, travel, war—
All very accurate, you must allow,
And epic, if plain truth should prove no bar;
For I have drawn much less with a long bow
Than my forerunners. Carelessly I sing,
But Phoebus lends me now and then a string. (Canto 8,
207)
Related to this matter, Bakhtin presents in The Dialogic
Imagination a list of criteria determining the characteristics
of the mock heroic novel that can be applied to the
“novelised” Don Juan. A novel should have a hero who is
not:
Heroic in either the epic or the tragic sense of the
word: he should combine in himself negative as well as
positive features, low as well as lofty, ridiculous as well
as serious. And, most importantly: the hero should not
be portrayed as an already completed and unchanging
person but as one who is evolving and developing, a
person who learns from life. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 10)
V: EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUEST FROM SOUTH
TO NORTH: DON JUAN AS A TRAVELOGUE
In order to establish values in the poem on the basis of an
essential voyage, Leonard W. Deen is quoted that:
Byron's imagination returned to the myth of climatic
determinism. In the late eighteenth century climate was
understood to be the major cause of racial and national
differences. According to this view, the light and heat of the
south is associated with freedom, movement, and a
passionate participation in life: while the northern darkness
and cold is identified with an inhibited nature. (Wood, 1973,
p. 190)
The myth of climatic determinism is central to Byron's
explanation of the nature of his work in particular and of
173
man in general. According to this view, although Don Juan
is not uniformly a travelogue, its constructing elements have
a definable order with a voyage map in the poem. As the
researcher believes, at almost every point, the narrators'
explicit and implicit references of the southern and northern
life styles suggest that the journey represents a structurally
epistemological voyage from innocent, picaresque and
inexperienced freedom of Juan's Spain to feared and
experienced restraint of Baronial England.
Thus, since the narrative of Juan's life begins in the south
and moves gradually northward, it simultaneously forms a
movement from freedom to restraint, or innocence to
maturity with a corresponding deterioration in human
values. The geographic elements of the poem are thus
structured by the gradual transformation of the early
freedom and picaresque comedy into real repression and
correspondent seriousness at the conclusion. Although
literary, the poem's scope is from the warm lands of free
South to icy and rainy restrained North, the poem
epistemologically and metaphorically takes Juan from heart
to head or from a sexually-oriented picaro to a confidant and
loquacious gentleman of worldly experience.
The first cantos of the story of Juan take place in an
environment that is poles apart from the world of either the
satirical English Dedication or the last cantos. Seville,
Cadiz, the ocean voyage, and isles of Greece all represent
the southern life of freedom and the Haidee episode is a
perfect atmosphere of prehistory: sea, cage, pagan feasts and
love:
And every day by daybreak rather early
For Juan, who was somewhat fond of rest
She came into the cave, but it was merely
To see her bird reposing in his nest;
And she would softly stir his locks so curly,
Without disturbing her yet slumbering guest,
Breathing all gently o’er his cheek and mouth,
As o’er a bed of roses the sweet south. (Canto 2, 72)
As the journey continues northward in the middle cantos,
the natural freedoms of the south come under the control of
repressive social forces. By the middle cantos Juan is
pursued by tyranny and oppression of the Royal Powers in
Turkey: Gulbeyaz and the Sultan seek to reduce Juan to a
pawn of the social forces. Through these episodes, Juan is
warned of the disillusionment and strictness in the north and
finds himself repeatedly bound, disguised and caged in the
seraglio:
Don Juan in his feminine disguise,
With all the damsels in their long array,
Had bow’d themselves before th’ imperial eyes,
And at the usual signal ta’en their way
Back to their chambers, those long galleries
In the seraglio, where the ladies lay
Canadian Journal on Science and Engineering Mathematics Vol. 3 No. 4, May 2012
Their delicate limbs; a thousand bosoms there
Beating for love, as the caged bird’s for air. (Canto 6
,152)
The war cantos reveal the loss of the personal dignity; and
Juan finally freezes under the control of Catherine and the
ice and snows of Russia:
The climate was too cold, they said, for him,
Meridian-born, to bloom in. This opinion
Made the chaste Catherine look a little grim,
Who did not like at first to lose her minion:
But when she saw his dazzling eye wax dim,
And drooping like an eagle’s with clipt pinion,
She then resolved to send him on a mission,
But in a style becoming his condition. (Canto 10, 229)
The English cantos complete the voyage into ice and
restraint. Since Byron's England is always wintry, cloudy,
and sunless, it also constitutes the most choking
environment. The Amundevilles, The Fitz-Fulkes, the
metaphysician and the mathematician, the great race winner
and the boring chess games make it hard to create any
interesting story. And the English roads, gothic mansions,
and English autumn and winter seem bent on destroying the
little natural order left in that country. The ice and bonds of
the north have control over Juan's reasoning and so complete
the voyage structure of Juan from heart to head in an English
"sober reason" which, as Byron mentions, believes:
Some rumour also of some strange adventures
Had gone before him, and his wars and loves;
And as romantic heads are pretty painters,
And, above all, an Englishwoman’s roves
Into the excursive, breaking the indentures
Of sober reason wheresoe’er it moves,
He found himself extremely in the fashion,
Which serves our thinking people for a passion. (Canto
11, 243)
VI: GROTESQUE HORROR: THE GOTHIC DON
JUAN
Although Don Juan is by no means a true Gothic poem, it
does embrace numerous features of what we might coin the
Gothic convention. Byron biography has frequently
employed the devices of Gothic melodrama, for Byron
encouraged his readers to imagine him as a composite of the
heroes of such novels as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto, William Beckford’s Vathek, and Ann Radcliffe’s
The Italian, all of which he read when he was young. He
knew the character he must portray, modeling them on
himself as a fallen angel who was able to dash off a brilliant
poem in minutes but was haunted by a secret past (Bone,
2004, p. 8).
174
Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is
a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both
horror and romance. It is intimately associated with the
Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. In Cambridge
Companion to Gothic Fiction, Jerrold E. Hogle states that:
in a way similar to the Gothic revivalists' rejection of
the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of
the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic
embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme
emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in
the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere. (Hogle, 2002,
p. 32)
For the purposes of the generic analysis, the researcher
takes note only of those relevant issues raised in the poem
which can be attributed to Gothic theme such as distortions
of human form, demonic ghosts and cannibals, deteriorating
misty, rainy and stormy weather, old and exorcised
mansions in various grotesque situations. The gothic hero,
that insipid creature, who possesses as little of the natural as
of the supernatural wit, is in fact unable to notice the
deformed antagonists who are well and truly capable of
exorcising him.
Under the repression of his plagued mother, the barbarity
of Lambro the commerce preyer and the psychic pursue of
the women-seducers in Turkey, Russia and England, Juan is
constantly twisting between the nightmarish and darker side
of the satanic aspect and of the rational though rare side of
humanity. There is no need to encounter the supernatural
elements in the poem; the people mentioned above;
characters, who are the epitome of evil, either due to fall
from grace or innate malevolence, are made as devices
merely to provoke fear and horror.
Bearing in mind that we are dealing with the darker sides
in Don Juan, the first purpose of Gothic serves to deal with
the "duality of superstition and rationality" in human nature
where the former demonstrates the absence of control and
the latter the presence of control (Hogle, 2002, p. 63). It is
actually a representation of the deeper conflict between
Juan's fiery temper and the socially-advised as well as self
acknowledged need for self-discipline.
Juan is lonely and lost and left to wander in perpetual
exile. As such, one element of Gothic in Juan is his ripe
promiscuity which put him in horrific situations and enslaves
him accordingly. Fragments like: "Young Juan wander’d by
the glassy brooks/ Thinking unutterable things; he threw/
Himself at length within the leafy nooks/ Where the wild
branch of the cork forest grew" (Canto 1, 21), when Juan
escapes the rumors and bad reputation of his affair with
Julia, and also "‘T was a raw day of Autumn’s bleak
beginning/ When nights are equal, but not so the days/ The
Parcae then cut short the further spinning/ Of seamen’s fates,
and the loud tempests raise/ The waters, and repentance for
past sinning" (Canto 5, 122), when Juan is sent away on a
ship and ends up at a slave market in Turkey, are examples
of Juan's indulgence in affairs in which the words such as
Canadian Journal on Science and Engineering Mathematics Vol. 3 No. 4, May 2012
"wild branch" and "the loud tempests" represent the
darkness of vice and promiscuity in his nature.
On creating the feeling of "fear" as the second purpose
(Hogle, 2002, p. 82), Byron applies the notion of horror
which works as another main ingredient of the Gothic.
Features such as vampires or cannibals and ghosts are the
tools for arosuing the psychological fear in Don Juan.
In canto 2, Byron brings the horror of "cannibalism" when
Juan's tutor; Pedrillo is chosen to be eaten by a hungry crew
after his dog has also been eaten:
The sailors ate him, all save three or four
Who were not quite so fond of animal food […]
‘T was better that he did not; for, in fact
The consequence was awful in the extreme
For they, who were most ravenous in the act
Went raging mad—Lord! how they did blaspheme.
(57)
By the use of words such as "animal food" describing his
tutor and "awful in the extreme," Juan calls his attackers as
blasphemous and mad cannibals who provoke the
atmosphere of horror.
In the hands of a serious and genuinely imaginative poet
such as Byron, not only the cannibals, but also the "ghost"
story explores the limits of what people are capable of doing
and experiencing in an ironically grotesque way. He
penetrates into the realms of psychological chaos, emotional
waste-lands and abysses opened up by the imagination, thus
analyzing the dark side of the mind; what transcendent the
consciousness to the concepts of horror and terror.
Associated with the gothic ghost in canto 16, Juan hears the
tiptoe of footsteps of a ghost in shape of a sable friar
concealed in his solemn hood in the full moon, when
ironically at the end; it becomes revealed that the friar is
indeed the voluptuous Duchess of Fitz-Fulke:
The ghost, if ghost it were, seem’d a sweet soul
As ever lurk’d beneath a holy hood:
A dimpled chin, a neck of ivory, stole
Forth into something much like flesh and blood;
Back fell the sable frock and dreary cowl,
And they reveal’d—alas! that e’er they should!
In full, voluptuous, but not o’ergrown bulk,
The phantom of her frolic Grace—Fitz-Fulke! (342)
Besides cannibalism and the appearance of the ghost in
the poem which speak loudly in terms of Gothic, the setting
of Don Juan's story seems to take place in Gothic-styled
architecture, mainly mansions and abbeys. It not only evokes
a dreadful atmosphere, but also portrays the deterioration of
the world and human values. On the night of the great
supper, for example, restless, perplexed and contemplative
Juan walks under the full moon into the gallery of the old
knights where the Gothic mood and atmosphere of
deterioration adds to his pensive mood:
175
Then, as the night was clear though cold, he threw
His chamber door wide open—and went forth
Into a gallery, of a sombre hue,
Long, furnish’d with old pictures of great worth,
Of knights and dames heroic and chaste too,
As doubtless should be people of high birth.
But by dim lights the portraits of the dead
Have something ghastly, desolate, and dread. (Canto
16, 323)
As such, the decaying, ruined sceneries of the Baronial
mansions with their "ghastly, desolate and dreadful" images
of the old chivalry implies the ruined world in its dealings
with Juan's fall from innocence as he confronts the horror in
the artificiality, wrong fashions and the tedious manners of
the English society.
VII: EXEMPLARY HISTORY: THE
HISTORIOGRAPHY
In a polyphonic novel the author does not speak in one
language but through heteroglossia of his/her epoch
(Dialogic Imagination, 1981, p. 307). For Bakhtin the true
novel is the novel that realizes its full potential as a genre,
which is to embody and represent the ongoing dialogue of
real life. Such a novel speaks through the major voices of its
epoch and thereby exhibits the epoch’s historical,
unrepeatable particularity and complexity and not just one
(that of the dominant class) of its facets (Dialogic
Imagination, 1981, p. 411). This potential in the novelistic
genre is what Bakhtin terms "novelness," that is, the novel as
a genre strives for "more complex modeling of the world"
(Morson and Emerson, 1990, p. 306).
According to Paul Graham Trueblood, there is no writer
in nineteenth-century Europe who crossed geographical
borders more than George Gordon Byron; nor is there any
writer who did more to break down boundaries (Trueblood,
1981, p. xi). This is particularly the case in relation to the
manner in which Byron’s poetry was appropriated and
adapted to suit revolutionary ideas in the history of England
during the Romantic period.
As Lawrence Stone notes, the narrative form has
traditionally been the main rhetorical device used by
historians and in defining the narrative form for its
applicability in historiography, he states that:
It (narrative form) is organized chronologically; it is
focused on a single coherent story; it is descriptive
rather than analytical; it is concerned with people not
abstract circumstances; and it deals with the particular
and specific rather than the collective and statistical.
(Stone, 1979, p. 13)
In this way, as a realist account of human capacity and
chronologically ordered poem describing a young Spaniard's
adventures into several remote nations of the world, Don
Juan's narrative can be used as a model for reading the poem
Canadian Journal on Science and Engineering Mathematics Vol. 3 No. 4, May 2012
in terms of its historiography. Some common features like 1:
reliability of the sources used in terms of authorship,
credibility of the author, and the authenticity or corruption
of the text 2: historiographical tradition such as Marxist or
political history 3: moral issues, guilt or praise assignments
4: revisionism vs. orthodox interpretations and 5: historical
metanarratives (Warren, 1998, p. 67-68) are the topics
studied in historiography whose very example can be
applied to the narrative of Byron's poem.
To be compatible with the above-mentioned features, as
the first feature of historiography, Byron's Don Juan is
regarded as largely autobiographical in nature and can be
traced to a wide range of literary and traditional influences.
It is a poem concerning the travels of a young man across
the Europe and the East that Byron himself had travelled
through: Spain, the Mediterranean, Greece, Italy and
Turkey. In art of composition, in addition to the Italian
poets, Byron borrowed from the epics of Virgil and Homer;
the satire of Juvenal, Horace, Persius, Alexander Pope, and
the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding,
and Laurence Sterne. Thus incorporated into his poem is a
broad selection of credible nonfiction, including real
passages from historical past and present. At the end, the
result is a work which is harshly realistic and factobservative in its portrayal of human behavior and his
surrounding events. As Byron believes:
If any person doubt it, I appeal
To history, tradition, and to facts,
To newspapers, whose truth all know and feel,
To plays in five, and operas in three acts;
All these confirm my statement a good deal. (Canto 1,
40)
Byron’s observations of the "political" history capture the
tone of the poem well as the second feature of
historiography, and expose the hypocrisy and the superficial
and worn out values of Regency England. Peter Graham
suggests: "Don Juan, in spite, and because, of its whole
exploration of Europe is always about England and never
more so than at its most exotic." Thus, Spanish bedrooms,
fantasy islands, imperial courts, and Turkish harems, which
all await Juan, can be seen as comments on English
hypocritical practice and manner (Graham, 1990, p. 4).
Regarding the moral issues, guilt and praise assignments
as the third feature in historiography, the poem is considered
as an eclectic picture of the sharpest social criticism of the
English method and morality. Byron utilized criticism on a
wide range of concerns, including liberty, tyranny, war, love,
sexuality, hypocrisy, and the customs of high society. The
poet's satiric observations and his sarcastic portrayal of
human weaknesses are the account of true deviations and
follies in real characters in Byron's life. Accordingly, Donna
Julia and Donna Inez in their promiscuity and penance are
derived from Byron's real mother the Scottish heiress
Catherine Gordon and the handsome but feckless Don Jose
176
is the same Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron and
conclusively, Lord Byron's life seemed destined from birth
to tragedy like the one he projects for his hero Juan. Going
through the same levels of education and training in the
High Arts: "as young Don Juan knew well: sermons he read,
and lectures he endured, / And homilies, and lives of all the
Saints" (Canto 1, 14) under the tyrannical suppression of his
only parent, Byron knew this education would do Juan no
good:
For there one learns — ‘t is not for me to boast,
Though I acquired — but I pass over that,
As well as all the Greek I since have lost:
I say that there ‘s the place — but ‘Verbum sat.’
I think I pick’d up too, as well as most,
Knowledge of matters — but no matter what —
I never married — but, I think, I know
That sons should not be educated so. (15)
Revisionist historiography in the poem, as the fourth
feature, contests the mainstream or traditional story of
historical Don Juan, and it raises views either in addition to
or in contrast with the previous versions, which must be
strongly justified. In terms of historiography, according to
Michelle R. Warren, historical revisionism is the
reinterpretation of orthodox views on evidence, motivations,
and decision-making processes surrounding a historical
event (Warren, 2000, p. 16). Thus Byron's version calls to
rewrite and in some ways, challenge the status quo of works
like Ei burlador de Sevilla (1630) by Tirso de Molina, Don
Juan, ou le festin de Pierre (I665) by Moliere and The
Libertine Destroyed (1676) by Thomas Shadwell
(Stephanson, 1965, p. 7, 17, 24), which have equally
recurrent motifs in the literature of Spain, France, Italy, and
England. The theme of these works is almost the same, but
perhaps different from these stories which originally depict a
villain, an archetype of the heartless, remorseless seducer,
Byron's Don Juan, according to Stephanson, has become a
symbol of antithetical, even contradictory, traits of
character: the seducer and the seduced, the reprobate
indifferent to repentance and the repentant sinner, the
libertine and the apostle of liberty (Stephenson, 1965, p. 4).
Thus in contrast with his predecessors, Byron's application
of various elements which reflect both autobiographical and
Romantic ideas, make the production look like a world that
had not previously been seen (Stephenson, 1965, p. 1). And
in addition to the previous versions, Don Juan makes three
important contributions to its traditional past. First, his epic
structure is unique in its detailed development of Juan's
childhood and youth. Second, Byron was the first to insist
upon a sympathetic presentation of his hero. Finally, he was
first to suppose that Don Juan was not necessarily an
aggressive figure: his Juan is charming, but passive
(Stephenson, 1965, p. 50).
Besides observation of the political atmosphere of
England, Byron had enough knowledge of the deteriorating
politics and the manner to perceive the conventional laws
Canadian Journal on Science and Engineering Mathematics Vol. 3 No. 4, May 2012
and history of Greece, Russia and Turkey that made him
attractive to these countries, hence the historical
metanarrative as the fifth feature . In addition to the sources
of Byron's knowledge about history of Greece and Turkey
which came in the previous chapter, the raw material of what
is counted as Byron's knowledge about Russia and its
political history comes from Histoire de la Nouvelle Russie
(1820) by Marquis Gabriel de Castlenau (Walker, 2003, p.
151):
But oh, thou grand legitimate Alexander!
Her son’s son, let not this last phrase offend
Thine ear, if it should reach, and now rhymes wander
Almost as far as Petersburgh and lend
A dreadful impulse to each loud meander
Of murmuring Liberty’s wide waves, which blend
Their roar even with the Baltic’s. So you be
Your father’s son, ’tis quite enough for me. (Canto 6,
164)
As David Walker notes, the ironic words such as "grand
legitimate" and "Your father’s son, ’tis quite enough for me"
with which Byron addresses Alexander, the grandson of
Catherine The Great, is used in high ambiguity which means
at once both legitimacy by birth and the legal right to rule
(Walker, 2003, p. 152). Byron knows that Alexander is one
offspring among the many that Catherine had in her affairs
with numerous lovers and therefore he is illegitimate.
In the same way, the researcher believes that Byron’s
relentless fight against Turkish tyrants, especially in the
Greek Independence war corresponds to Juan's fight against
the Ottoman Empire, and to his appreciation and praise of
the courage and heroism of Turkish soldiers who died in the
defense of their homes. As in Byron's real war accounts, he
makes Juan his hero and risks his life for the sake of his
fellow-warriors, insisting the accounts he is narrating are
based on actual facts:
It is an actual fact, that he, commander
In chief, in proper person deign’d to drill
The awkward squad, and could afford to squander
His time, a corporal’s duty to fulfil:
Just as you ‘d break a sucking salamander
To swallow flame, and never take it ill:
He show’d them how to mount a ladder (which
Was not like Jacob’s) or to cross a ditch. (Canto 7, 177)
As a result of analyzing Don Juan in terms of its
historiography, according to the featured mentioned and
applied above, we can get a veritable view of the history of
not only the English nation in the 19th century up to the
Victorian era (1837), but also of the history of other nations
as well. It is to be noted that each one of these features
nationally and internationally has a correspondence in Juan’s
history, and the two are intertwined so that in telling one the
other is also accounted for. We hear histories rather than a
177
single history and as such, the poem can be called a
historiography of its time.
VIII: CONCLUSION
Bakhtin's perception of the novel and novelized works
clearly rests upon a vision of the world as essentially
heteroglot, polyphonic and dialogic (Dialogic Imagination,
1981, p. 92). Therefore, his way of looking at this world is
in terms of multi-languages, multi-voices, pluralism,
dialogism, multiple genres as we experience it, rather than a
single centre, a single language, and a single kind of voice.
Bakhtin believes the world is a harmony of the languages,
voices and styles which are the basic principles of dialogue
rather than monologue. Actually what Bakhtin seeks is a
representation of different voices and different genres in a
harmonious way and a representation of dialogical
characteristic of these voices and genres. He believes heroes
in Dostoevsky are not exposed to the domination of an
omniscient narrator and assumes characters as subjects
rather than treating them as objects that are bound to a
dominating narrator.
Accordingly, Don Juan transcends the traditional
monologic view of the novel form. Byron has a deep interest
in the question of multiple genres. Through this question, he
leaves his readers in ambiguity about the nature of the reality
which cannot be reached and which cannot be represented
fully through the language. Thus he insists that his readers
find out their own mediums in their search of reality: "That‘s
your affair, not mine" and understand that they no longer
depend upon homogenous, monologous stories:
Here the twelfth Canto of our introduction
Ends. When the body of the book ‘s begun,
You ‘ll find it of a different construction
From what some people say ‘t will be when done:
The plan at present ‘s simply in concoction,
I can’t oblige you, reader, to read on;
That ‘s your affair, not mine: a real spirit
Should neither court neglect, nor dread to bear it.
(Canto 12, 267)
Through his multiple generic methods, Byron introduces a
great uncertainty and a complex relationship within his work
that suggests new possibilities for the narrative works. With
its shifting narratorial voices and multiplicity of genres, Don
Juan is a representation of the distinguishing features of the
novel and welcomes heteroglossia, genre diversity, and
different voices, combining them as a whole to form a
structured artistic system.
Byron had always been interested in finding a form in
which, while telling a story, he could also pass political and
social comments, digress, philosophize, be facetious, insult
his publisher, insult his enemies, compliment his friends,
insult the reader, insult his wife, and so on (Cochran, 2009,
p. 201).
Canadian Journal on Science and Engineering Mathematics Vol. 3 No. 4, May 2012
In short, the nature of Don Juan is as complex as Byron's
own personality: enquiring "upon all notes, no matter what,
or whose," blending the influences of life and literature,
attempting to reconcile morality and amorality, and
reflecting a spirit both realistically Neo-classic and ideally
Romantic:
Therefore I would solicit free discussion
Upon all points—no matter what, or whose—
Because as Ages upon Ages push on,
The last is apt the former to accuse
Of pillowing its head on a pin-cushion,
Heedless of pricks because it was obtuse:
What was a paradox becomes a truth or
A something like it—witness Luther! (Canto 17, 343)
9. Franklin, Caroline. Byron. New York: Routledge,
2007.
10. Graham, Peter W. Don Juan and Regency England.
Charlottesville and London: University Press of
Virginia, 1990.
11. Hogle, Jerrold E. The Cambridge Companion to
Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
12. McGann, Jerome, (ed). Lord Byron: The Complete
Poetical Works. 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993.
13. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail
Bakhtin: creation of a prosaics. California: Stanford
UP, 1990.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Clear and inspiring comments and sincere thanks to all
professors and well-wishers during the process of both
writing and editing this article.
14. Page, Norman. A Byron Chronology. Macmillan
Author Chronologies. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press,
1988.
15. Parini, Jay. BRITISH WRITERS Classics. Volume II.
New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 2004.
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1. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed &
Trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981.
2. ---. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed & Trans.
Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984.
3. Bloom, Harold. Poets and Poems. Harvard: Chelsea
House Publication, 2005.
4. Bone, Drummond. The Cambridge Companion to
Byron. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
5. Bostetter, Edward Everett. Twentieth Century
Interpretations of Don Juan. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Princeton-Hall Inc, 1969.
Bottrall, Ronald. “Byron and the Colloquial Tradition in
English Literature.” English Romantic Poets:
Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. M. H. Abrams.
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6. Boyd, Elizabeth French. Byron's Don Juan: A Critical
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7. Byron, George. Don Juan. The Pennsylvania State
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16. Robertson, Ritchie. Mock Epic Poetry from Pope to
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17. Stephenson, JR. William A. Henry Fielding's
Influence on Lord Byron_ Diss. Texas Technological
College, 1973.
18. ---. The Influence of Byron's Don Juan on the Don
Juan Tradition in Western Literature_ Diss. Texas
Technological College, 1965.
19. Stone, Lawrence. “The Revival of Narrative:
Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Present
85 (Nov 1979): 3-24.
20. Trueblood, Paul Graham, ed. Byron's Political and
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Symposium. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities
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Game”: Byron’s Don Juan and Russian History.
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Volume XXXVI,
Number 2, 2003. 151-152.
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23. Warren, Michelle R. History on the edge: Excalibur
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BIOGRAPHIES
Monireh Yarmand was born in Yazd in 1983. She received her
BA in English Literature at University of Yazd and her MA at
University of Isfahan.
Helen Ouliaeinia, was born in Esfahan in 1953, spent her
education up to graduate level in Iran. She received her BA in
English literature in Jundi Shapur University, Ahvaz, Iran.
Then she was granted, as the top student, a scholarship, went
to the US, and finished her M.A. and passed most of
Wisconsin Ph.D program courses at the university of
Wisconsin-Madison. After the revolution in Iran, she was
summoned back to the country and started her teaching career
first in Jundi Shapur, present Shahisd Chamran University, and
then in Esfahan. It is for thirty years that she teaches at state
and private universities. In 2001, she was promoted as an
assistant professor based on her research activities and
publications. So far she has written, edited, and translated 14
books, four of which are under print and four of which are
taught at colleges and universities, like A Trip to the
Wonderland of Poetry, A Guide to the Analysis of the Short
Story, The Short Story in the Mirror of Criticism (In Persian)
and Simple Prose Text (a joint work). She has collaborated
with two research projects in comparative literature and has
conducted individually two research projects, one completed
entitled a Comparative Study of Saadi's Golestan and
Johnson's Rasselas, and the other one, which is in progress, is
entitled A Study of the Motif of Letters in Shakespeare's
Major Tragedies. Since her main interest is the analysis and
criticism of literary works, she has had over 160 articles
published in Persian bulletins and journals on English,
American and Persian literature and on film-scripts of Iranian
movies which have won awards in film festivals.
179