Don Juan

Les Exploits d’un jeune Don Juan (1987) – Gianfranco Mingozzi, after a novel by Guillaume Apollinaire

After the Death of Don Juan (1939) – Sylvia Townsend Warner
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Don Juan is a legendary fictional libertine, whose story has been told many times by different authors. The name is sometimes used figuratively, as a synonym for “seducer”. The best known version of this tale is probably Mozart’s 1787 Don Giovanni opera.

The Don Juan legend

The legend says that Don Juan seduced, raped or killed a young girl of noble family, and killed her father. Later, he came across a statue of the father in a cemetery and impiously invited it home to dine with him, an invitation which the statue gladly accepted. The ghost of the father arrived for dinner as the harbinger of Don Juan’s death. The Statue asked to shake Don Juan’s hand, and when he extended his arm, he was dragged away to Hell.

Most authorities agree that the first recorded tale of Don Juan is El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Playboy of Seville and Guest of Stone) by Tirso de Molina. Dates vary for the first publication of this, from 1620 to 1635, depending upon the source, although it appeared in Spain as early as 1615. In it, Don Juan is an unrepentant womanizer who seduces women by disguising himself as their actual lovers, or by promising marriage. He leaves a trail of broken hearts and angry husbands and fathers behind him, finally slaying a certain Don Gonzalo. When later he is invited to dinner in the cathedral by Don Gonzalo’s ghost, he accepts, not wanting to appear a coward.

Depending upon the particular rendition of the legend, Don Juan’s character may be presented in one of two perspectives, or somewhere in between: According to some, Don Juan was a simple, lustful womanizer, a cruel seducer who simply gets sex wherever he can. Others, however, see Don Juan as a man who genuinely loves every woman he seduces, and it is his gift to see the true beauty and intrinsic value which exist within every woman. The early versions of the legend always portray him in the former light.

Other Don Juan literature

Another more recent version of the legend of Don Juan is that presented in José Zorilla’s (1817-1893) “Don Juan Tenorio” (1844). The version is formatted as a play in which Don Juan is depicted quite villainously. The action starts off with Don Juan meeting with his old friend Don Luis and the two men recounting their conquests and vile deeds of the last year. In terms of the number of murders and of conquests (i.e. seductions), Don Juan out-scores his friend Don Luis. Outdone, Don Luis replies that his friend has never had a woman pure of soul, planting in Don Juan a new tantalizing desire to sleep with a woman of God. Also, Don Juan informs his friend Don Luis that he plans to seduce his future wife. Don Juan manages to seduce both his friend’s wife and Doña Ines. Incensed, Doña Ines’s father and Don Luis come to try and avenge their lost pride, but Don Juan kills them both, though Don Juan begs them not to attack, for he claims that Doña Ines has shown him the true way. Don Juan gets a little nervous when he is visited by the ghosts of Doña Ines and her father, and the book concludes with a very interesting scene of a veritable tug of war between Doña Ines and her father, with the daughter eventually winning and pulling Don Juan up into Heaven.

In Aleksandr Blok’s poetic depiction, the statue is only mentioned as a fearful approaching figure, while a deceased Donna Anna (“Anna, Anna, is it sweet to sleep in the grave? Is it sweet to dream unearthly dreams” ) is waiting to return to him in the fast-approaching hour of his death.

In the novel “La Gitanilla” (the she-gipsy) by Miguel de Cervantes, the character who falls in love with the Gitanilla is named Don Juan de Cárcamo, possibly related with the popular legend.

A play called Don Juan (Don Giovanni Tenorio, ossia Il Disoluto) was written in 1736 by Carlo Goldoni, famous Italian comic playwright.

In the novel The Phantom of the Opera, the name of the opera written by the Phantom is “Don Juan Triumphant.”

The famous Romantic Lord Byron wrote an epic version of Don Juan that is considered to be his masterpiece. It was left unfinished upon his death, but portrays Don Juan as the innocent victim of a repressive Catholic upbringing who unwittingly stumbles into love time and time again. In Canto II, for example,he is washed up shipwrecked on an island and is rescued by the beautiful daughter of a Greek pirate, who nurses him back to health: a love relationship develops. When her father returns from his journey, however, he is angry and sells Juan into slavery, where he is bought by a Sultan’s wife for her pleasure. Byron’s don Juan is less the seducer than the victim of women’s desire and his unfortunate circumstances. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan [Oct 2006]

Persona (1966) – Ingmar Bergman

Persona (1966) – Ingmar Bergman [Amazon.com]

The first time an erect penis appeared in a non-pornographic film was in 1966, when Ingmar Bergman included a brief image of an erection in Persona, though the offending image was censored from all British prints of the film for over thirty years. –Matthew Hunt

Regarding Matthew Hunt’s comments, I was looking for the erect penis in this Youtube footage, but could not spot it, maybe this is the censored version. Anyone? I dislike Bergman instinctively (but have only seen maybe two or three of his films) but I liked this opening sequence. I wonder who did the music.

Counter-Clock World (1967) – Philip K. Dick

Counter-Clock World (1967) – Philip K. Dick
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While the 1991 Time’s Arrow is very much the best-known example of reverse chronology literature, the idea had been explored previously by Philip K. Dick’s 1967 Counter-Clock World. [Oct 2006]

“Dick’s best books always describe a future that is both entirely recognizable and utterly unimaginable.” –The New York Times Book Review

Counter-Clock World is a 1967 science fiction novel by author Phillip K. Dick, in which time has started to move in reverse, resulting in the dead reviving in their own graves, living their lives in reverse, eventually ending in returning to the womb, and splitting into an egg and a sperm during copulation between the receiving woman and a man. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Clock_World [Oct 2006]

See also: reverse chronology in fiction – 1967 – sf-literature

The Man of the Crowd (1840) – E. A. Poe

Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul. —La Bruyère.

IT was well said of a certain German book that “er lasst sich nicht lesen” – it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors and looking them piteously in the eyes — die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged. —http://poe.thefreelibrary.com/Man-of-the-Crowd [Oct 2006]

The Man of the Crowd, telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. –H. P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1924-1927)

See also: 1840 – E. A. Poe – flâneur – crowd

Hopscotch (1963) – Julio Cortázar

Hopscotch (1963) – Julio Cortázar
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Rayuela (1963), translated into English as Hopscotch, is the most famous novel by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar.

Hopscotch is a dazzling literary experiment that ranks among the most important novels written in Spanish in the 20th century. It has been highly praised by other Latin American writers including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa or José Lezama Lima. The novel has an open-ended structure that invites the reader to choose between a linear reading or a non-linear one that interpolates additional chapters. Cortázar’s employment of interior monologue, punning, slang, and his use of different languages is reminiscent of Modernist writers like Joyce, although his main influences were Surrealism and the French New Novel, as well as the “riffing” aesthetic of jazz. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayuela [Oct 2006]

Biography —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio Cortázar [Oct 2006]

List of superlatives:
“The most powerful encyclopedia of emotions and visions to emerge from the postwar generation of international writers.” — New Republic

“A work of the most exhilarating talent and interest.” — Elizabeth Hardwick

“Cortazar’s masterpiece…the first great novel of Spanish America.”– Times Literary Supplement

“The most powerful encyclopedia of emotions and visions to emerge from the postwar generation of international writers.” — New Republic

In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn

In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great European æsthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the “advanced intelligentsia” to minimize his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state. –H. P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1924-1927) via http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Supernatural_Horror_in_Literature/Edgar_Allan_Poe [Oct 2006]

Love needs closeness, desire needs distance

Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic (2006) – Esther Perel
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“Love,” says Perel, “needs closeness and intimacy and familiarity to flourish. Desire does not. Desire needs distance, insecurity, novelty and surprise. Desire needs tension, breaches and repairs.”

“Love is not comfortable with fights, but desire needs fights,” says Perel. “Fights generate energy, erotic energy – and this is not just desire for sex, but a general exuberance and vitality, an élan, an aliveness! We often judge couples on the amount they fight, like: “Oh, they have such a good relationship! They never fight!” And yes, I know of couples who never fight and do have a very good relationship – but they also have a sex life that is somewhat flat. Desire needs fights! Intimacy – that is, emotional intimacy – inhibits erotic expression. Desire needs edge!”

“Love needs absence of sexual threat, but desire? Desire needs to know there are other options out there for your partner, that your partner moves out there in a sexual world when they are not with you, a world of other people who look at them, sexually. Love needs talk. Desire needs not to talk. Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. In order to maintain a sexual edge in our relationships, we must learn to tolerate this void, these uncertainties.”

“I wrote this book,” she says, “because, in 22 years of practice in six different languages, I’ve met couples over and over again who were having a good relationship, who love each other, but who have no sex, no tingle! I met couples who had a bad relationship, and who I helped to have a good relationship again, and the expectation was that the sex would just come back – but it didn’t. I began to think there’s something in this premise – that if sex is wrong, the relationship is wrong; and equally that more talk, intimacy and closeness will equal more sex, better sex – that just doesn’t work.”

“Fantasy… is never politically correct, it’s transgressive and about power, which is why it’s so hot. It’s about surrender, revenge, aggression, abandonment. You can transcend moral and social boundaries. But this idea that you should share your fantasy with your partner… I think that’s very risky.”

“Talking is overrated. Especially talking to just one person”.

“I cannot stand this tendency to identify a victim and a perpetrator in an affair.”

“This idea that tenderness and emotional intimacy leads to good sex – I’m afraid it became current when women came into my profession.” –via Click Opera [Oct 2006]