Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature

Don Juan 245

humor gradually took over the tenor of his life,
and his youthful indiscretions led to outrage and
disgrace. As an artist, he stood halfway between the
Augustan and the romantic but appeared to favor
neither.
Byron had an incorrigible sense of fun, was
capable of irrepressible laughter, and tried his best to
turn life’s ups and downs—and he had many—into
many a sort of comic opera. Facetious, humorous,
droll, exuberant, spirited, and witty all at once, Byron
had his own demons to deal with. He had ideals,
hopes, and incorrigible faith in the ability of man-
kind to achieve those ideals. Augustan commitment
to order, harmony, justice, and fair play motivated
his thinking. In life, he moved from crisis to crisis,
but nothing dimmed his faith in radical endeavors.
While this account of Byron’s life and character
is commonly known, there is another side to his
personality that has not been paid adequate atten-
tion. Though he was certainly not a misanthrope, he
certainly was disillusioned. “That all is vanity” rep-
resents a strong and noticeable current in Don Juan:
“Must I restrain me, through the fear of strife, /
From holding up the nothingness of life?” (7.6.7–8).
He quotes Socrates: “To know that nothing could
be known” (7.5.2)
The hero here, Don Juan, is a precursor to
modern existentialists, who argue that the feelings,
thoughts, and emotions of the individual are where
meaning is to be found. An existentialist worldview
can lead to a nihilistic one—in other words, a world-
view in which nothing has meaning. In Don Juan,
for instance, Byron seems to believe that humans
constantly live under the burdens of despair, empti-
ness, and futility. When he seeks in the poem to
analyze, for instance, the horrors of war, he can come
to no other conclusion than to lay the blame for this
horror squarely on the shoulders of the men who
create war. For Byron, it seems to be a circle: man
creates war; only man can stop war. Thus, it is futile.
Byron defends himself against the charge of
misanthropy thus: “I say no more than hath been
said in Dante’s / Verse,... / By Fenelon, by Luther,
and by Plato; / By Tillotson, and Wesley, and Rous-
seau, / Who knew this life was not worth a potato”
(7.3.7–8, 4.2–4).

One can see and draw connections to modernism

through Byron’s disillusionment with existentialistic

despair: He “voices insights of a disillusioned...

man of the world with a zest and vitality,” which

compares well with the arid and defeatist attitude of

the generation “waiting for Godot.” Toward the end

of canto 1, he writes:

What are the hopes of man? Old Egypt’s

King

Cheops erected the first pyramid

And largest, thinking it was just the thing

To keep his memory whole, and mummy

hid,

But somebody or other rummaging,

Burgalariously broke his coffin’s lid:

Let not a monument give you or me hopes,

Since not a pinch of dust remains of Che-

ops. (1.219.1–8)

And:

What is the end of fame? ’tis but to fill

A certain portion of uncertain paper:

...
For this men write, speak, preach, and
heroes kill,
And bards burn what they call their “mid-
night taper,”
To have when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.
(1.218.1–8)

In viewing life as an embodiment of nothing but

pointlessness and futility, Byron expresses himself

with telling force.

Gulshan Taneja

individual and sOciety in Don Juan

Despite Byron’s epic ambitions, Don Juan remains a

work uniquely individual in form and design. In its

rambling, episodic structure, Don Juan and his life

and adventures remain in many ways incidental to

the poet’s endless digressions on innumerable sub-

jects. Essentially and avowedly a satire as Don Juan

is, chivalric traditions of romance are ridiculed. The

satirical treatments of love, sex and sexuality,