Right, so we are now recording, but there is nobody here, but from us, so
do you have any questions about Don Juan? Maybe we can say that Don Juan
was something that, you know, the real poet, the violinist, so he was right
across from the great violin, that's him, do you know what I mean? Yes.
Because he was like, he was very, very famous in, if that's true, right?
Yes. He was a figure of the heroes to create in the conscious life, and I
think he was a consumer with that feature, right? Right. Okay, so the first
thing, and the most important thing, if the most important thing in the
last course was not to misinterpret the title of The Rake of Time. The most
important thing in this course probably is to not to realize that, come on,
help me to move. Is to realize that Don Juan is not a Byronic hero. Okay.
Okay? So there is an element to which the Byronic hero is produced.
produced from gothic poetry to some extent. It has its genesis a little bit
in the overreacher of Marlowe and people like that, and it reaches its full
fruit, as it were, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Guillaumard, Manfred, the
previous poems of Byron. But we shouldn't just think that any hero or any
protagonist of a poem by Byron is a Byronic hero. It's a very specific case
of this type of individual who is very much an individual, so somebody who
does not go with the crowd. And that's quite important. It's important at
this time because you don't have, I mean, this is the beginning of mass
culture, if you will. So there's the whole concept of celebrity, of
consumerism, of social mass movements, et cetera, et cetera. So for within
bourgeois culture, the idea of the individual becomes increasingly
important because the individual is increasingly less important in reality,
if you will. So, yes. I mean, and I think it's sort of, it's very easy to
think that, well, first of all, to confuse the character with the person. A
little bit sort of like, a little bit like, for example, confusing Woody
Allen in all of his films with Woody Allen as a real person. I have
actually no idea. I don't know. In this particular case, I think we can
say, hang on, my microphone is a long way away. Can you hear me OK? My
microphone was pointing in the other direction. Yes. Yes, perfectly. OK.
Fair enough. I'm surprised. So we're doing better than last time. So in
that situation, you could say that there's a lot of change going on. The
author is just a victim of that. We're going to see a case of that where
somebody might confuse the character of somebody like Robert Browning with
the Duke in My Last Duchess, which is something we're going to soon. And
Robert Browning is radically different to this evil Machiavellian
antagonist. In this case, I think it's very much that Varun invented the
character. And I played up to the image of the Byronic hero. I think he
enjoyed that, and he also enjoyed frustrating people's expectations in Don
Juan. So it's it's I think it's much more conscious, if you like, than
maybe in other other works of literature, etc. But there is very much that
that that process. But yes, we should not. We should not talk about a
Byronic hero. We're talking about this particular. Did you have any
questions? Yeah, so if you want to get a question. I mean, what? A
brilliant question. I'll just give you a clue here, if you put it off end.
A brilliant question to separate the sheep from the goats in the exam would
be discuss a Byronic hero in a piece of literature that you've read. And
everybody who's just sort of looked at the titles of the course is going to
write about Don Juan, when it would be much more obvious, for example, to
write about Rochester in Jane Eyre, or even Jane Eyre, to some extent.
We'll talk about that. But there's possibly elements of a Byronic hero in
the Duke. The Duke of Ferrara in My Last Duchess, as we will see. I've
never seen that question asked. I mean, it would be a little bit cruelty.
But I mean, it could perfectly easily. I mean, it would be interesting to,
if you've got a question about Jane Eyre and given that the Peck is about
the Romantics and about Pride and Prejudice, there's a very big chance that
you're going to have an exam question about Jane Eyre. In the exam, do you
have a choice? Or you have just one? Sorry, I should know. Did you do the
previous exam on me? You don't remember? You don't have any choice? That's
quite harsh. Yeah, no, I will. I mean, I will certainly do this. I mean, if
I don't, just remind me, I will give you some material on what I call the
magic word questions. So you have all of those definitions. A lot of them
actually are taking things from the Norton. I haven't taken very many from
the Norton. But I mean, it's quite helpful just in terms of it gives you
vocabulary to just chuck into your answers, which makes it sound more
literary. But yes, definitely. Definitely, that is the essay question.
Yeah, but I mean, again, given that we've had a general question about the
Romantic poets, I would, I mean, you know, you can't take it to the back.
And I mean, if you, I don't know if any of you saw the, or any of you,
sorry, there's two of you on that. If any of you saw my model answer to the
previous Peck, which was a general question. That's again, I mean, there's
a very similar, in some sense, sorts of questions. Obviously, they're not
the same answer. The idea of making generalizations about the Romantics is
obviously something that the people really like to do, like to look at
things in those questions. I mean, and it's a little bit unfair if you just
get a question about the Griechen Urn and that's the one poem you haven't
seen. I mean, yeah, it makes sense. And the Peck, you know, it makes sense
relatively. But for the Peck, you have a month so that if you haven't
looked at the Griechen Urn or whatever it is, then you have an opportunity
to do so. In the sound, that would be very unfair, I think. I mean, it's a
really good question. OK, so my first question. Any questions, Antonio? Any
questions, Paola? Nope. Nope. Paola? Nope. OK, right. My first question
now. What type of poem is Don Juan? I've never done a poem. Right, OK, so
that's a good start. How does Byron describe it? It's definitely a
narrative poem, yes. How does Byron describe it? Byron says that his poem
is an epic, yes. So Byron describes Don Juan as an epic in canto one and
promises... and promises love, war and a heavy gale at sea. And that is
alluding to the Odyssey or the Aeneid. He says specifically, my poem's an
epic and is meant to be divided in 12 books, classic epic stuff. Each book
containing with love and war, a heavy gale at sea, a list of ships and
captains and kings reigning, new characters. The episodes are three, a
panorama view of hell in training after the style of Virgil and of Homer so
that my name of epics was no man. Now, this makes sense as a definition,
because we know that Byron was enormously excited by epic poetry. As a
child, he was enraptured by Pope's translation of Homer and later by
reading it in Greek. So I mean, he had read all of the major epics of Greek
and Latin literature and presumably I'm sure he had read Paradise Lost as
well. Don Juan is an epic to the extent that the narrative poem is a
vehicle to present the author's world view. However, Byron uses the medium
to express his strongly held views that were antithetical to those of
traditional epic. Milton did the same, though most of his views were very
different from Byron's. So let's have a look at the characteristics of an
epic to see if we can call this an epic. What is the tone of epic poetry?
Well, elevator would more be the diction. I haven't got the diction yet.
But the tone is serious, solemn, majestic and sublime. Our chance to use
the word sublime, which we are using in this course. What is the tone of
Don Juan? Comic. So that is a point against. What about the setting of
epic? When is epic set? Necessarily? Beowulf? OK. There's a lot of written
references. Gilgamesh? It doesn't have to be. So what is the characteristic
of the setting? It's all the same. It's bright, but when? Right. That is a
very remote time. It is a long time ago and often in a setting which is not
really historical. So it's a remote age, often a golden age. What is the
setting of Don Juan? No, it's not. The setting of Don Juan? that would have
been a concern in the 1500s, 1600s. And 1700s and 1800s in Spain, yes.
Yeah, yeah. The idea of marranos and sort of casual racism was still going
on in Spain in the 18th century. The setting is what we would call
contemporary in the sense that it is a reference to about 30 years before
the publication. And we know that the idea of one of the ideas of ending
the poem, if he ever did end it, I mean, if he had lived, was to end it in
the French Revolution. Or he was going to either die guillotined in the
French Revolution or married. And Byron said, I don't know which fate is
worse. Byronic style. So, yes, I mean, that we would consider contemporary
in that it's sort of during his lifetime, a generation before if you like.
Very much like sort of Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre or something like
that. It's the recent past, so that character is contemporary. So what
about the diction? Elevated, good. The diction is elevated in the epic and
in Don Juan? Brings its tone consciously around. Right. The point of the
point of epic is that it is uniformly elevated, whereas this the diction is
diverse and he even uses slang on occasions. You see, I mean, you quite
often he is making rhymes using phrasal verbs and things like that. So it's
a lot of it's quite colloquial and occasionally it's actually slang, which
of course is completely out of place in epic. What about the mood? Mode,
not mood mode. OK, mode by mode, I mean how how the action is represented.
So the mode in epic poetry is dialogue and narration. So you have somebody
saying these things are happening and then you have a little bit of
dialogue and speeches and this type of thing. The mode in Don Juan is
commentary. Commentary is a lot of it is commentary, commentary. And the
commentary actually threatens to overpower the action. Where does that come
from? Where does that use of commentary come from? Where would that have
been made familiar? No, not that you've read it. It's not necessarily that
you've read it, although you should do because it's jolly good. It's
typical of tongue turns. It's typical of failure in general, but I mean, if
you read Tom Jones or you read Barry Lyndon or if you read even Sir Charles
Granderson, there is constant commentary on the part of building and he
often just gets lost and starts talking about something else and eventually
comes back to the story. That was really taken to the extreme, if you like,
by I believe once I give it just a second while I try to use my memory, my
56 year old memory by Laurence Stern. Thank you. Right. By Laurence Stern
and Tristan Shandy, there is basically no story. It's just the sort of
postmodern 200 years before postmodernism was invented. If you have an
opportunity to read one thing over the summer, if you haven't read it, read
Tristan Shandy. You read it and you think, how could this person be writing
in the 18th century? It's really, really modern in the way that it deals
with things. And it's very funny as well. It is actually enjoyable to read.
Also, in terms of mode, the epic is impersonal. Homer was praised for
keeping himself out of his work. We really learn very, very, very little
about Homer's character from reading the Iliad or the Odyssey. Maybe
because Homer never existed, that's another possibility. But in something
like the early novel, life, Jones, for example, the personality of the
author is continually intruding on the story, and that is certainly the
case here in this verse novel, if you like. You could almost call it a
verse novel. I think it's very useful to understand this as an attempt,
quite a glorious attempt, if slightly failed in one sense, because it
didn't stop anything, as poetry's response to the advent of the novel. By
this stage, the novels are becoming quite established. Not that, for
example, Jane Austen is hugely highly acclaimed at this point, or during
her lifetime at all, but we do have a situation where novels generally are
becoming quite established. And the idea that what's happening in novels
could influence poetry, as we've seen here with Tom Jones, etc.,
influencing Don Juan, is very new. I mean, this is a little, I suppose the
nearest thing we might be able to conceive of it as is pop music
influencing serious classical music. For most people in the world of
classical music, the idea that there was an influence from pop music or
electric music would be to the core. Yeah, but it's that sort of situation.
So what can we say about the beginning of epic, typically? How does epic
begin, typically? Right. But what's the story? I mean, not the... Oh, let's
give you comments on it. The press and the action, but I'm not going to do
that. You see the four, and it's mum, and it's dad, and it's the four, and
it's dad, and it's the four. So typically it is in media rest. What do we
call it when it starts at the beginning? Do you know? Ab-obble. Ab-obble,
from the egg, literally. And that can happen in epic poetry. That happens,
for example, in a poem called Beowulf. So it's not impossible for it to
happen, but it is more typical for epics to begin in media rest. What about
the action? What can we say about the action in epic poetry? Often war,
often fighting. What are our options of the action in theatre? What is the
theatrical equivalent of epic poetry? Yes, OK. And what would we expect of
the action in tragedy, in any sort of classic sense? Right. And describing
the action? Very often there's some sort of supernatural element to it.
It's gods and anyone who wants to be inside. That's not a good question.
It's aggressive. It's just fighting to get over it, seeking glory. So
action is... I'm not directing you down. I don't want to take you down. The
action is single and great. Right. So you're allowed to have subplots in
comedy. You're not meant to interact with it. Obviously, we have examples
like King Lear where there is a sort of subplot. It's a sort of subplot,
probably a real subplot, really, because it is intimately connected from
the beginning and at the end. But it is described as a subplot. But that is
what we would expect. And so somebody who is serious about literature, like
Ben Johnson, when he writes tragedies and he writes tragic plays, there is
a single action. Like in something like Othello, you don't get a double
action or you shouldn't have a double action or a secondary subplot in
tragic theatre or in epic. Whereas here we have... What can we say about
the action in Don Juan? Given that we've been in so little of a reaction,
it goes all over the place, right? It travels across the world. There's
lots of things, conferences, test flights, tours. So it's episodic. It's
episodic and often low. So it's often embarrassing situations. Yeah. I
mean, if you want a classic example, it's when Juan has to dress up as a
woman in the Sultan's hurry. I mean, you could not have that action in an
epic that's far too funny. Of course, I'm not suggesting that men dressing
up as women or whatever is necessarily funny, but that has been the
attitude of humanity for most of history. Not necessarily now. Yeah. What
can we say about the hero of epic? Louder than life, good. Man of action,
man of destiny. Constance to some great design or mission is a man on a
mission. He's very much a man, so it tends to be an expression of virility
and tends to be virtuous. Remember that virtue and virile and all of those
words are actually related to ver in Latin meaning man. So it's all about
sort of masculine qualities. OK. Whereas the hero in Don Juan is he's
average, he's not particularly good and he's not particularly bad. He's
well-meaning but weak. Yeah. I mean, it's actually, if you like here again,
the opposite of a Byron Akira. The Byron Akira can behave bad, but he's
never weak. He's always there to take action rather than see what happens.
Juan is drifting and has absolutely no mission. That is just a sort of
victim of circumstance, which is very, very un-epic. And interestingly, Don
Juan, the legendary figure, Don Giovanni, is a man with an evil reputation
who becomes an innocent, a norm against which to see the absurdities and
the unreason of the world. Don Juan, Don Giovanni is a sort of evil
character. But an individual. An individual and a man of action. Don Juan,
Byron's Don Juan is an innocent in a world of dangers, if you like. We
could say that Don Juan has very, very feminine attributes, obviously,
according to the values of the time, not making any statement about people
today. What are the values of epic? What does epic poetry value? OK, so a
glorious death, no doubt. Heroism in combat. And physical prowess. It's all
about being strong and brave. Especially in battle or battling monsters,
perhaps. In Don Juan, does Don Juan value those things? By a second. Right.
So heroism, war and glory are endlessly ridiculed in this poem. War is made
synonymous with murder. It is described as brain-splattering,
windpipe-slitting art. Heroism cannot exist in an age of facts. Basically,
to write an epic poem in a modern context would just come out as
ridiculous. Tell me about the cosmos of the epic. What is the cosmological
superstructure of epics? What is the... What can we say about the powers
beyond humanity? It's a very interesting reaction. But I'll be gone in a
moment and everything is failing. What? Embarrassing? We have a monster,
but it's considered to be the most powerful. What controls Daoist universe?
Is it the gods? OK, there's... people have relationships. But what
determines what happens? The gods? No, the gods, no. If not the gods, what?
Chance? What decides the action? What? Fate? What's it called? What's it
called in Beowulf? Oh, I've got something here. Yeah, weird. OK, so it
doesn't have to be... To have a supernatural structure, it doesn't have to
be personified gods. I mean, weird was originally the personified god, but
by the time of the writing of Beowulf, or the first iteration of Beowulf,
what you have is fate as a sort of abstract power in the world. It's not
sort of... It decides what the weather is going to be like and this type of
thing. It's not personified, but it is something beyond humanity. So there
is an organising principle. That's the important thing. The organising
principle can be the gods. Or it can just be fate in whatever form, fate,
fates in that particular society. Humanity is important enough to concern
the gods, to concern fate. If people were like insects, like it says in
King Lear, which is one of the reasons why King Lear is a very atypical
tragedy, where gods can't be bothered to exist. If you're walking through a
park and there's a line of ants you're probably not going to consciously
step on them, but you're probably not going to be consciously looking at
the ground trying not to step on them. They're just of no concern. Yeah?
That would be an attitude in a world completely by chaos where we are not
important. That is not the case in tragedy. King Lear is the exception
there. The fact that one of the tragedies in King Lear is that the gods
don't intervene. They just don't care. What is the cosmos of Don Drago? I
don't believe that's what I'm saying. Right, but I mean, what controls
human action? Epics. Okay. But I mean, he specifically said that he was
going to write a poem, an epic poem, without your worn out machinery. So
there was not going to be, in contrast, for example, to The Wraith of the
Lock, there was not going to be the divine interventions or this type of
thing. And so Byron, what he is presenting us with is a very modern world
in the sense that it's essentially purposeless and meaningless. There is no
meaning to life in Don Drago. Life is just something that happens. It's a
sort of very secular, almost Darwinian world where you're just the victim
of fate in the sense of coincidence and circumstance, not fate as a sort of
driving force in the sense of life. So that's fundamentally different from
epic. The world of epic is a world of moral absolutes. People are divided
into the more or less acceptable and the thoroughly evil. The world of Don
Drago is sceptical and relativistic. It's even perhaps nihilistic. The poem
speaks of the nothingness of life. Life has no meaning, has no purpose, has
no, is basically amoral. There is an element to which we can call Don
Drago, a mock epic. However, I mean, there's sort of how do you say, how
would we say genius in the metaphorical sense? There are sort of
references, there are comic references to allusions, not comic allusions to
mock epic in Don Drago, for example, in canto three begins hail, muse, et
cetera. We left Dwan sleeping. However, a mock epic does not usually
challenge the whole epic genre. It's satire is comparatively superficial.
We can say that, for example, in Pope's The Road to the Lock, which is
largely just mock epic. I mean, it doesn't go very much further than that.
But there is an element of satirizing society, as Byron does. The Pope's
satire attacks a lack of seriousness. Byron's laughter is aimed at
pretentious seriousness. So if you like, Pope is ultimately aiming at sort
of moral reform with his satire. Whereas Byron is much more sort of
revolutionary in the sense that he's trying to bring everything, the whole
moral structure down. Good, weird, correct, Anthony. 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.
So you could, you know, it's perfectly fine to have epic poetry about a
distant past when people lived in a different sort of way. But in the
modern world, it's just a little bit silly and over the top to be espoused
with epic values. They don't have any bigotry in their words. By the late
18th century, it's become impossible to write epic poetry because of the
rise of the novel and realism. People were expecting realism. Our old
friend Horace Walpole had observed epic poetry is the art of being as long
as possible in telling an uninteresting story. So he also contends the
absurdities of the species. Comic epic prose is a term that was often used
to describe Fielding's works, such as Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, to the
extent that these works, along with Tristan Shandy, are the closest we have
to Don Duran. Then comic epic seems like the best description. Although be
aware that comic epic is an oxymoron. Yeah, it's not something you could
really attempt, you have to use inverted commas at least. These
similarities mean that Don Duran can also be categorised as a comic verse
novel. However, in contrast to the typical Bildungsroman, Baroness Duran
remains an essentially static figure, not moulded by his environment or
maturing. So in Bildungsroman we see Lizzie maturing during the process. In
Jane Eyre, you can very much see Jane maturing over the process. In
Nicholas Nickleby or in Great Expectations or whatever, you can see these
characters changing over time, learning, often very much again in the
romantic mode, becoming sadder and wiser, if you like. I mean, there's a
lot of innocence that's painful. And we see that. I mean, it's very, I
think we don't have a, we don't take a very extensive look outside Jane
Eyre at the, at the Victorian novel. But I think what we can very much say
is that what it involves is the incorporation of Gothic values and romantic
values into the novel format. So whereas the processes of neoclassical
novels, so basically Fielding and Richardson are very much externals, a lot
of the interest in the Victorian novel is psychological. And so it's
therefore internal. It's about people being scared and how that those
extreme emotions affect your perception of reality. And you could not have
done that without the existence of Gothic literature. Gothic literature
tends to be very unsubtle, not high art, but it is absolutely essential to
the development of what we understand as the modern novel. OK, so John
Joanne became an exercise or process for Byron. If he had lived another 13
years, he probably would not have finished it because it had no plan and as
he freely admitted. So on occasions he said, well, maybe I'm going to
finish it in the second edition or maybe Joanne is eventually going to get
married. But there wasn't like a set plan. It was just, at least this could
happen, this could happen, etc. I mean, you could almost see it as an
exercise in social commentary and self-analysis, getting ideas out of the
system. So it's very much that sort of process. So the next question is
about Byron Leheras, which we talked about very much at the beginning.
Notice that Joanne is presented as somewhat androgynous, which is
definitely not an aspect of the Byronic hero. Julia's maid, Antonia,
despises this pretty gentleman with his half girlish face. So that idea of
androgyny is very important in the figure of John Joanne who turns out is
another reason why we can't see him as a Byronic hero. What world view is
presented in the poem? Is there a way to write an anthology where this guy
is part of the poem and Joanne is mentioned in that page? Yeah, we will
come to that. But that's not quite the point I was asking. The point here
is contingency. So if a lot of literature, if Judeo-Christian culture is
about teleology, it's about the idea that there is an end and we are
progressing towards that end. And that end is specified, if you like. This
is very much outside that category. Contingency basically meaning things
happen and they don't happen for a reason. Things just happen. And so I
mean, this I think possibly there is a biographical or autobiographical
element in this. Byron went from being just some sort of minor aristocrat
of no importance to being the world's first celebrity in many senses. I
mean, OK, you could say Napoleon was a celebrity before him, but this is a
different type of celebrity. Byron was the most famous man in Europe apart
from Napoleon. Almost overnight because of Charles Harris Brinkman. And
that has to affect you. And that was so this idea that this idea of
relativity in human affairs and the idea that just things just happen is
quite important. So in the dizzying world of Don Juan, uncertainty is so
endemic that flippancy and paradox seem our only response. So little do we
know what we're about in this world. I doubt if doubt itself is doubting,
he says. Yes, yes. The only option is to be flippant. Do you understand
flippant? Flippant, do you understand? No. It's not flippant. Flippant.
Flippant is when you are in light and casual distances. You're sort of in
light and casual distances. Ah, OK, so flippantly said, whatever, it
doesn't matter what it's going to be. You know, you don't take things
seriously. But as a defensive mechanism, very much do. And of course, I'm
sort of recognizing and perhaps enjoying the paradox of life is part of
that as well. For Byron, I mean, it's very, it's very, to be honest, it's
very British. That whole attitude of irony towards everything. Just living
irony. Yeah. So for Byron, the reality of the human condition debars man
from heroism or even significance, we're really not that important in the
universe. Is Don Juan an anti-romantic work? Is Don Juan anti-romantic? It
has not been. I don't know, but on the other hand, he's managed all the
time by love. It's his wife, I don't know, but it is anti-romantic. First
of all, he's a very religious one, which was against a lot of what the
person was doing at the time. At least in so much as deep red, nature is
not. And we don't have really internal psychological views into the
characters in which he's the narrator, but he's the running sarcastic
commentator. So it's not these kinds of teachings of feeling, sentiment,
deep emotion or reflection that we would call big sex. Good. OK. So there's
a certain amount of movement from innocence to experience, but it tends to
ironize that process. There is satirizing directly of romantic poets, the
people who've done before. Yeah, there is satirizing with the grand tour.
So there's to some extent, there's almost a satirizing of, I mean, the
grand tour in the 18th century was largely aristocratic. And in the 19th
century it became a much more bourgeois thing. You had people who were
very, a bourgeois origin doing the grand tour, especially obviously after
the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it wasn't a good idea before that. And to
the extent that Byron was to some extent participating in this tradition,
although obviously doing a very unconventional grand tour because you do
not go to Albania on your grand tour. There's a certain amount of
satirizing against himself as well. This idea of sort of finding yourself
when you're young. I mean, it's very much the sort of, if you like, the
logic of, in my day, it was very common for students, British students at
least, to have a gap year. So they would have a year when they would go
around the world. And if they were American, they would maybe work in the
Peace Corps in Bolivia or something like that, sort of discover yourself
and do something sort of heroic and adventurous, et cetera, et cetera. And
so there's an element of sort of love, of laughing at himself in that
sense. There is a satirizing of the idea of beneficence, nature. Nature is
not just beneficent in this poem. And there is a satirizing of the innate
goodness of man. The idea, the Romantics tended to see men, mankind in
their simplest form as ultimately good. And that is not reflected in the
poem. Jonathan Bates, who's one of my favourite writers about the Romantic
period, says the paradox of Byron is that he is both the most romantic and
the most anti-romantic of poets. And I think that captures that quite well
there to the point. Byron ridicules the supposedly high-minded aims of
poetry by stating at the end of the first canto, now it's hard for me to
read, that whether he continues with Glantz's adventure or not, dependent
on how well the public buys the first instalment. And that's a completely
false claim. I mean, if you like, if... Sorry? Yeah, no, yeah. It is,
again, it's a little bit of a way of sort of laughing at people like
Wordsworth. You know, Wordsworth is very high and mighty, you know, high,
high elevated ideas, but then you have a situation where ultimately, the
lyrical balance was written to finance a holiday to Joan. It was written to
earn money. And so, you know, can you really be talking in those sort of
highfalutin terms if you're ultimately trying to make money? There's huge
problems in poetry always that, you know, if you're trying to talk about
elevated values, are they elevated if you're making money out of it? Which
goes back, of course, to all of these ideas about gentlemen don't work, you
know, the idea that nobility means not working, which of course is
absolutely ridiculous for us, but was absolutely standard values at this
time, as we saw a lot in Precious, et cetera. OK, so. Don Duran has more in
common with Tom Jones and Tristan Shandy than with epic or romantic
literature. Again, comic romanticism is a bit of an oxymoron. There is very
little humour in romanticism. Basically, romantics take themselves far too
seriously to have very much comedy going on. What is the relationship
between the story and the digressions? So if you're Sophie to allow the
direction of the commentary. OK, so as I said earlier, there's this danger,
constant of the digressions overwhelming the story. Good. As we were
saying, when we contrasted with the idea of the epic Barron's presences
felt at a personal level as storyteller and commentator throughout. So it's
we're never really allowed to take to get involved in the story, to take
the story seriously because it's much more important our conversation, if
you like, with Barron around it. Once more, we sense his affiliation to the
18th century and to writers like Fielding who sit at the reader's side and
chatter in his ear. Yes, sir. I mean, again, with Fielding, if you haven't
read any, you very much get the feeling that's just somebody sort of, look
at this. And I know this reminds me of being taken away from the thing.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the commentary track, if you like this, very much that.
That becomes much more measured in something like Jane Eyre. You have Jane
Eyre saying, dear reader, I married him, things like this. Blah, blah,
blah. But again, even in that case, it's within the story. And she is a
later version of what might be the self-perceiving voice. Yeah, exactly.
And of course, in the sort of fiction to begin with, that this is somebody
who knows Swann and is somebody living the story. It seems to be a
geogenetic or whatever the word is. That becomes impossible to maintain
because Swann goes all over the place, goes to the Mediterranean, goes to
Turkey, goes to Russia, et cetera. So that is impossible to maintain. And
we end up with a situation where he doesn't. He makes the attempt to
pretend that this is somebody who was there as it were, somebody seeing the
action. He is just the writer of the story. The digressions, not the
narrative, are the life and soul of Don Juan. These two come from Fielding,
who had warned readers that he intended to digress, as often as I see
occasions. Fielding said, I'm going to digress as much as I like. But he
warned his readers beforehand and Byron does the same sort of thing. Byron
interrupts his story to shake his head over his useful character's
innocence and inexperience, to lament his older characters' tantrums and
deceits, to comment wryly and sarcastically on events of Kant and
hypocrisy, to add parathetical observations to his publisher, Murray, to
digress and bring the mockery of the world's, sorry, of worlds of wisdom to
bear on human foolishness. I'm having all sorts of noises today. What is
that? Anyway, to indulge in personal reminiscences, to insert remarks about
the problems of composition, spelling, grammar, rhyme and scansion, and
even to mock a simile that he has just coined and he's just used. So it was
like a constant commentary on the text and very much undermining the text,
if you like. The poem has the air of a sustained monologue by a very
skilful improviser. That's a little bit like stand-up comedy. And of
course, the best stand-up comedy is, I think that Richard Nixon said,
off-the-cuff speeches are really difficult to write. So creating the
illusion that you were just talking, when it takes a lot of preparation.
And that is very much, I think, the case here. Obviously, even less than
with a Wordsworth poem, you know, with spontaneous emotion and nonsense.
Wordsworth, here, if you're writing in Tessera Rima, it takes a lot of
planning, a lot of, I mean, you can imagine him working out in a very sort
of calculating way how to get his pathos, how to get his comic deflation
from the Tessera Rima. What is Byron's attitude to women in Don Juan? Is
that? Oh! I think possibly that is more important. I mean, a certain level
of misogyny is to be expected in almost anything written by men or women
before the 20th century. The important thing here is that Don Juan is
outstanding among English long poems for the great gallery of female
characters which it presents. You just do not get so many important women
in any other type of poetry. Do you think of sort of Emily in the character
in Returns, sorry, in The Knight's Tale? I mean, she's Florella, which
doesn't really exist. She's just sort of there. Or I don't think, or in the
case of something like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, there's a woman
getting married and that's how it is. There are no other female human
beings, that's life and death and things like that. But I mean, there's not
female human beings in that entire narrative poem. So it is quite
exceptional in that. For instance, in Seville, we have been reading, Byron
is far more interested in the wives than in the husbands. The husbands are
passive and smart. The interests of the wives are psychologically complex.
The social order of the poem presents in canton one is effectively a
matriarchy. In the first canton, all of the women, Ines, Julia, Fultonia
are active while the men, Alfonso, Jose and Joanne are passive. Seville is
presented as a garden of oranges and women. Some contemporary theologians
were suggesting that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden might have
been an orange. So, I mean, there's the idea of this is could be
conceptually a place of innocence where once innocence is lost, where the
fall takes place, drawing any parallels with either biblical contexts or
with Genesis or with Paradise Lost, then Seville could be seen as the
paradise which is lost by Joanne. Doña Ines is a compound of Byron's
mother and his wife, with some features derived from Lady Caroline Lamb and
Clare Claremont too. Like Annabella, Doña Ines calls on lawyers and
physicians to prove her loving Lord was mad. Failing in this, she next
decided he was only bad. She starts divorce proceedings against Don José,
but her husband obligingly dies first. Ines is cold of calculating. She
cultivates a friendship with Doña Julia in order to stay in touch with
Julia's husband, Don Alfonso. Indeed, there is the suggestion that Ines
schemes to break up Alonso's marriage in order to marry him herself. Why is
Doña Julia called Julia? This is almost certainly a parody of the
sentimental heroine of Rousseau's, Julia ou la nouvelle Elise. So Julia is
a very Rousseovian name. This is the sort of ultimate sentimental heroine
of Rousseau, and so Byron is parodying that. It's almost impossible to
overestimate the importance of Rousseau in for the romantic or maybe other.
In her comic attempts to cherish only platonic feelings for her lover,
remaining faithful to the elderly husband of an arranged marriage is what
happens in Julia, in Rousseau's Julia. So Julia tries to sublimate her
feelings about Joan, unable to admit their sexual origins. This is comical,
but Byron also empathizes with her tragic frustration. So she is humanized.
It's not just ridiculous, she is humanized. But this sort of image of
Rousseau is, to some extent, very difficult. Byron saw romantic love as a
means of personal liberation, whereas Wollstonecraft argued for women to
develop their rationalism, Byron argued for the liberation of women's
sexuality. Of course, that liberation of women's sexuality is very much
motivated by somebody like Byron. Byron supposedly, for example, when he
was in Venice, was meant to have slept with 200 women in 200 days. So
basically slept with a different woman every night for most of the year,
over half a year. So it's not a sort of very feminist concept of women's
sexuality being liberated. And of course, it's impossible really to
conceive of the sexual liberation of women until there is effective birth
control. It's not really meaningful to talk in those terms. It may be
convenient if you are a womanizing man, but it's just not realistic. Byron
ridicules the rationalist pretensions of the Blue Stockings asking, ye
lords of ladies intellectual, inform us truly, have they not hempectual? So
I mean, that's a typical observation of Byron's bathos to rhyme
intellectually with a single word with hempectual. Do you understand
hempect? To hempect means like, literally it's like a hemp pecking at. When
two chickens don't get on with each other, they will sort of attack each
other with their beaks. And so if a husband is typically sort of hassling
and his wife is very nagging, in misogynistic parlance in English, we say
that the man is hempecked. And so Byron is sort of using that concept here.
Yes. Yeah. I mean, basically, I think Byron expected to be allowed to
behave like an aristocrat, like sort of the Earl of Rochester, I think it
was. And she was not very keen on this for some strange reason. And so,
yes, that there was not a meeting of minds. He considers the sensual
passions of Mediterranean women more natural than the closeness of North
European women. Is it more that he's saying that the wordage should be more
like that or is his way of excusing and allowing his audience to not feel
like they are being... I think he was equating English bourgeois values
with this very strict concept of moral control, et cetera, et cetera.
Moderation and all of this. I mean, for somebody like Byron, the value of
moderation is very difficult to say if it doesn't exist. So, yes. But I
mean, it was very, very common at this time. So sort of the idea, and I
think probably is still relatively common, the idea that people are more
passionate in normal climates. Now, whether that's actually true or not, I
don't know. But I mean, there's certainly... It's certainly not absolutely
ridiculous to suggest that people are less clothed, they are more likely,
more likely to Yeah, I mean, it's probably quite difficult to argue
psychologically. But it is very, very common trope certainly in Britain at
this time. So, yeah. Well, then, for Calum speaking about adultery, it's
not for Calum, it depends on him. OK. Of course, right, so we've talked
about that. What is Byron's attitude to marriage and family in Don Juan?
Right. So Byron savagely denounces the bourgeois hagiography of family,
very much like, I think, to some extent in large parts of Spanish society
now. At this time in bourgeois society, there was very much this idea of
the family being a sacred unit. And there seems to me to be probably very
unfair, and you can reject this as much as you like. I generally get the
feeling that most Spanish people have the idea that families are sacred.
There's a sort of concept of Sagrada Familia except for, you know, which
goes against their real personal experience. But certainly in, I think,
Britain these days, people idealize the family much more. Much less than
they do in Spain. And British families, and I think probably American
families too, are far less united than Spanish families. Yeah, but I mean,
part of the American situation is just because people move around the
country so much. And they do this in Britain as well. Whereas it's far more
common for people to stay put, as it were, and certainly keep that concept
of equilibrium. I mean, it's even probably that this, I mean, Americans
tend to go home for Thanksgiving to have a family argument every year. But
I mean, there isn't even really that much of that in Britain. It just, I
mean, families are, you know, families are, yeah, but not necessarily. I
mean, again, Thanksgiving is still largely a nicer time of year than
Christmas. Christmas in Britain is pretty horrible. It's just cold and dark
and wet. I mean, I prefer to go back to Britain any time of year apart from
Christmas. Not because I have a particularly particular problem with
Christmas. It's just not a very nice time of year. So, you know, whatever.
The story opens with two unhappy marriages. Donia and Giulia and Alfonso
are mismatched in terms of age. Donia Ines and Giulia are mismatched in
terms of age. And Don Jose are mismatched by incompatibility of character.
Byron suggests the human nature and society work against the possibility of
a happy marriage. Indeed, she suggests that failure in marriage is all but
inevitable. He says, tis melancholy and a fearful sign of human frailty.
Folly also crying that love and marriage rarely can combine. Yeah, so he
basically just says marriage is pretty unlikely to be happy, which is. That
is I'm not sure when I haven't actually put the reference in. But I mean,
if you plug me, you'll have to have this. And if you plug it into Google, I
will find it. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
no. You're not going to find the right word for it. I'll tell you what. So
which canter are we talking about? Are you going to tell me which canter?
Are you just going to say, oh, byron? No. I'm going to find it. You've
challenged me. I will find it. Canter tres. So it's about line thirty five,
thirty to thirty five. OK, apparently. How do I get back to where it was?
No. Oh, no, no, no. Where was I? Yeah. I'm lost. There we are. Back. OK. So
canter tres. He even asks again in canter tres, line five. Think you if
Laura had been Petrarch's wife, he could have written sonnets all his life.
So it is the aspiration to love that men find romanticism not in these
films. Comments on Joana's education. I have since I've been teaching this
course for many, many years. I have always wanted and expected a question
comparing Juan's education with our release education. We will see how long
I will be soon and I've never had it. So maybe one day we will have this.
It seems to me a very obvious question, but it hasn't arisen yet. So I
believe so. What can you say about Juan's education? It is what I try to
prevent him of learning about things by some part of the history that he
was learning like the British history in the English. And that kind of
thing. Right. OK, so this is very much. Like David Wishfort with Arabella
Farwell a long time ago. In the way of the world, you have this concept of
educating a girl, a young woman in ignorance as a way of protecting her,
which is pretty stupid, let's be honest. And certainly from the point of
view of both Congreve and Lord Byron, it is going to be counterproductive.
Basically, Byron's position was only those whose desires have been
thwarted, have been frustrated, feel the need to speak of values that are
higher than desire. So people whose desires have been fulfilled value
desire. People whose values and all whose desires have been frustrated say
that you should fight against your desires, etc. etc. So the moralizing
mother polices amorous conduct as an instrument of the establishment and
the church. It's the the the mother, if you like, is a placeholder for the
establishment, for bourgeois values and for the church. Very much in the
tradition of Hannah Moore, who is still alive at this time, still growing
strong. Hannah Moore and other conservative blue stockings promoted the
idea of women as the guardians of morality. The portrait of Ines is a
thorough, a thorough attack on this figure. After Byron leaves Spain, she
focuses on teaching poor children to suppress their vice and URIs. So
there's this idea that the concept there is continence, continence
referring to controlling your bodily functions, both in a sexual sense and
in a whatever we say, toiletry sense. So that this is sort of her great
mission in life after Joanne has left. Byron rejects the idea of policing
young people's sexuality. Joanna has been kept sexually ignorant and
isolated from women, except old servants. As a result, he falls in love
with the only young woman he's in contact with, Julia, despite the
inappropriateness of the relationship. Similarly, Heide has been isolated
from all men by her father, the pirate captain, except for his servants.
And she, Miranda Light, falls in love with the first man she meets, in this
case, Joanne. When Juan is hired, he's hiding in the bed between Antonia
and Julia. He is almost suffocated by sense, represented by Antonia, and
sensibility, represented by Julia, representing the conflicting claims of
judgment and passion. Comments on the use of irony in Don Joel. Well, one
of the elements of irony, I mean, there's quite a lot of irony going on,
although they are classics, right? Right. I mean, for example, using the
love letter to draw lots about who they go to eat and this type of thing,
you know, in the boat. But specifically, Byron, who spoke good Spanish,
loves using English-Mish pronunciations of Spanish in his poetry. We have
words like capote rhyming with boat. Yeah, so the end rhyme we have an
expectation created, and so we were forced to rhyme it to the pronunciation
of capote, or Joanne is rhymed with buoy. And wonderfully, Guadalquivir is
rhymed with river. Guadalquivir is rhymed with the English word river. So I
mean, that is a sort of faux ignorance. That is spelling very much in the
tradition of the a la ronde of somebody pretending to be more ignorant than
they really are. How does the poem relate to contemporary society? So it's
protected above for some, and it doesn't even get to these different
continents because they're considered immoral, and that's, you know,
theory, the question of the question of the culture. So do you know what
we're saying about this? That we're not quite yet necessarily a historian.
So there isn't quite so much. But it's written that way, quite fitly. But
in the contemporary society, conservative acceptance was a reaction to the
fears of tyrannicalism and revolution. It's taking hold here. So I've been
writing this by this point and notes for the especially Monarchies and
Monarchies of Harvard. So it is essentially Victorian society. It is very
much on the way to being a Christian society. And that is sort of part of
the point there. I mean, there are lots of contemporary references,
references to contemporary politicians like Castleman and people like that.
There's some references to the contemporary pirates. Yeah, there's quite a
lot of references to the regime which have just been re-installed across
Europe. So, you know, we have the sort of countries where there was no
revolution, like the Ottoman Empire, Turkey or Spain, and the sort of
comparison with how things are organised there. And what all of that
basically means. Spain is very much a focus for exoticism in the same way
that maybe now people in Europe might go to Morocco because it's sort of
seen as otherworldly, maybe slightly safe, but slightly dangerous. I mean,
it's not, you know, it's not really dangerous, but that exoticism very much
exists about travelling to Spain at this time. Spain is sort of coming out
of a situation of direct persecution of people for being Protestant and
things like that. I mean, we talked in this class about what happened to
Protestants who died in Spain in 1824. Yes, that sort of thing. And so
there's I mean, there's people like this. There's a painter called Philip,
I can't remember. He was known as Philip of Spain. His name was Philip. And
he basically dedicated a large part of his career. He came on holiday to
Spain for a couple of weeks and dedicated a large part of his career to
painting typical Spanish scenes of women leaving out of windows with
flowers and, you know, sort of, and this stuff. All of those sort of
bullfights and nonsense that are the stereotype of Spain were very much
created in this time, and people were really quite excited by all of that.
We also have, I mean, what's very interesting at this time is people like
José María Blanco, do you know José María Blanco White? José María
Blanco White was half Spanish, half Irish. And he wrote an account of his
time in Spain, which was very popular at the time. The book under Pacito,
under Franco, José María Blanco White's travels were illegal in Spain.
Somebody writing at the beginning of the 19th century, they were still
illegal. They were made legal again with the restoration of democracy,
which is completely bizarre. But again, I mean, it's like saying the, you
know, the apartheid regime bans Frankenstein, how can you feel threatened
by a science fiction novel written in another country 200 years ago? About
500, 200 years ago, 150 years ago. But I mean, and that was very, very
popular. I mean, so it's, it's slightly critical of the Catholic Church,
but not vehemently, not viciously. He was he was a Protestant, José María
Blanco White. But again, if you're interested. Yeah, well, he was an Irish
Protestant. There were quite a lot of Irish Protestants. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah. It's comical that he was called Blanco White. I mean, that is his
real name. But so, yeah, I mean, it's very, very interesting to read what
he had to write about Spain at the time. I'm sure you can find texts
directly on the internet, but I didn't happen to go over them. But it's
quite, quite interesting. So there's been quite a lot of interest in Spain
at this time. Washington Irving is one of us this time. Your friend. But I
mean, it's all part of the same sort of thing of Spain being sort of seen
as a society. It's a lost in the past and not modernized in the same
industrialized in the same way as the West of Europe. And so there's quite
a lot of nostalgia that good things and sort of less good things. Right. My
other questions, how does Byron Parody work? OK, I think I talked quite a
lot about this in the. In the notes that I've already given you, but yes, I
mean, there is quite an obvious comment to just be nasty about Wordsworth
directly. But there's quite a lot of between the lines, if you know the
words that's going on, especially in terms of attacking the excursion,
which is a very, very silly by Wordsworth. So I mean, it's largely fair, I
think. But anyway, so next week I think what we will do is I will give you
one more week to finish. Jaina, just in case you haven't. We have more to
read. Yeah. Just you haven't started yet. Get reading. Yeah. But. For my
justification in doing that is that. Marian and hello, Marian Mariana,
Mariana and the Lady of Charlotte are both 20 years earlier for most, but
most of us, we can do things like that. It makes sense. Not that they, not
that Jane Eyre is influenced by that, but it does mean you have one more
week to read that, which doesn't involve more effort, if you like. So next
week, tennis. Will you be better than us, the Lady of Charlotte in general?
My attitude towards the Lady of Charlotte will probably be somewhat
different to what you heard in Jane Eyre. No? It doesn't rhyme. It has to
rhyme with Camelot. Quite regularly in that ridiculous book. I don't like
it. Great. Well, anyway. Mariana and the Lady of Charlotte. I'm not. I may
focus more on one than the other. So, but tennis, in any case. but i mean i
will tonight i will post come on yes and my notes of course are titled our
entire