دون ژوان اتو رنک بخشهای ۲و۳
CHAPTER 2
DON JUAN AND LEPORELLO
FOLLOWING our orientation, we direct our gaze away from the surpassing figure of Don Juan. Our attention is then drawn to a striking characteristic of his no less famous servant Leporello, a characteristic that, after a short digression, leads back again to the hero. On the one hand, this servant is really a friend and confidant in every love intrigue; yet on the other hand, he is certainly not a willing companion and helper, but rather a cowardly, anxious, cringing soul who is concerned only for his own interest. In his first aspect, he permits himself unbounded critical observations ("The life that you are leading is that of a good-for-nothing!"). He demands—and perhaps also gets—a share in kind of the prey of his master.1 In his second aspect, he fearfully tries to avoid every danger. Very often he refuses further service* and is kept on only with money and threats. To complete the picture of the servant, he nibbles scraps from the banquet table even while he is serving.
One could say, "Like servant, like master," and thus point out that Don Juan permits him these liberties because he needs him. For example, just before the famous "catalogue" aria,3 when Donna Elvira demands an explanation from the hero, he evades this painful situation and pushes forward Leporello. Even before she is aware of what is happening, the adroit adventurer has disappeared and in his place Leporello reads to her the list of abandoned women, with the proper servant's pride that comes from identification with the power [Herrschaft] of the master.
This touches on a motif that is more clearly developed in the course of the action, but one which is already present as a motto in Leporello's first words at the beginning of the opera: "I want to be a gentleman, and I don't want to serve any more." The tragedy of Leporello is that he is permitted to represent his master only in the painful and critical situations. Thus a second time, during the vain attempt to seduce Zerlina, Don Juan would punish his servant as the guilty one. In what seems to Leporello to promise a delightful adventure, Don Juan next exchanges cloak and hat with him in order to seduce Donna Elvira's chambermaid, while Leporello is to take the abandoned lady for himself. Though amusing at the outset, this adventure only leads to his harm; for in the meantime the steadily increasing band of those bent on revenge (Donna Anna, Octavio, Masetto, Zerlina) have pursued Don Juan to Donna Elvira's house, where they seize the presumed criminal, who finally turns out to be Leporello, protesting his innocence and begging for mercy.
The adroitness with whichh he frees himself from this dangerous situation, by suddenly disappearing, gives us a clue that he is more than a mere pupil of his master, that he is perhaps identical with him. But before we can explain what this might mean, we shall refer to the scene just before this one and the scene that follows it; both clearly confirm the identity of master and servant. They demonstrate not only that Leporello represents his master on occasions when a personal appearance would be painful, but that Don Juan plays the role of Leporello—as with Donna Elvira's chambermaid, and in a subsequent episode (which is only recounted) that leads on to the banquet, which is the second part of the Don Juan drama. As master and servant meet again in the cemetery after the episode of exchanging garments, something they were lucky to survive, Don Juan tells of another adventure that he has had in the meantime, an adventure which he owes to the switch of identity with his servant. Leporello at once supposes that the adventure could only have been with his wife, and reproaches his master for finding this SJ amusing.4 Don Juan observes that "I have only got even for what you did to me"5—thus betraying a deep motive of revenge in his behavior, and clearly illuminating the interchangeability of master and servant.
At this moment the voice from the statue of the Commander sounds ("Audacious one, let the dead rest in peace!"), and the second theme of the banquet of the dead begins—a theme that apparently is only loosely added on to the Don Juan material. We shall postpone discussion of it in order to ask ourselves what this identity of the two figures of Don Juan and Leporello means, and what it can contribute to the understanding of the plot, the development of the Don Juan figure, and the psychology of the poet and the audience.
CHAPTER 3
LEPORELLO AS EGO IDEAL
WE must above all be clear that, in expressing such a formulation involving the identity of Don Juan and Leporello, we have already departed from the basis of the usual literary-aesthetic considerations in favor of a psychological interpretation that completely disregards the overt meaning of the figures. Thus, for example, in Heckel's description of the striking characteristic of Leporello we have not so much the portrait of a whole personality, but rather an intimation of the close psychological connection between these two figures (1915, p. 24):1
As this negative hero is bound to the audacious seducer, who does not tremble before death and the devil; as he always wishes to be free from him and yet cannot extricate himself from the spell of the stronger personality;2 as he time and again becomes the scapegoat for the tricks of his master, tricks of which he is entirely innocent·, that has, in the deepest sense, an almost tragic effect.
We cannot imagine Don Juan without his servant and helper Leporello. This is not only a consequence of their actual dependence on each other as expressed in the plot, but is much more an intuitive sense of their psychological connection as a poetic effect. By this we mean that the poet has neither taken this "negative hero" from real life, nor invented him for the purpose of enlivenment or contrast in the plot; rather, that the figure of Leporello is a necessary part of the artistic presentation of the hero himself. It would be an agreeable task to demonstrate the generality of this mechanism of poetic creation in a whole series of works, for in doing so one could show that the most elegant examples are to be found in the greatest writers of world literature. For our purposes it is sufficient that one such example has been pointed out in the psychoanalytic literature—and indeed, by Freud himself (1916, in connection with an observation by Jekels, 1917), who believed that Shakespeare often split up one character into two persons, each of which appeared incompletely comprehensible as long as one did not put the one together with the other into a unity. We find the same fashioning of mutually complementary characters in all great literary art; from its elementary expression in a Cervantes, Balzac, Goethe, or Dostoevski up through the modern "psychologizing" literature, which has sought to give a more or less conscious account of this artistic problem of form. We are not concerned with the notion that the poet projects a part of his own ego on to the figures of his fantasy—a notion which has already become psychologically banal, and which Leon Daudet, for example, has recently tried to substantiate again in his book UHeredo: Essai sur Ie Drame lnterieur (1916) by use of the heredity doctrines of the French psychiatrists.8 Rather, we are here concerned with a very special, secondary division (as it were) of one form into two figures, who together constitute a complete, understandable, and unified character —as for example Tasso and Antonio in Goethe, or Shakespeare's Othello, who can be so naive and credulous because his jealousy is split off in the figure of Iago.
In a like manner, it would be impossible to create the Don Juan figure, the frivolous knight without conscience and without fear of death or the devil, if a part of that Don Juan were not thereby split off in Leporello, who represents the inner criticism, the anxiety, and the conscience of the hero. With this key we can at last understand why Leporello must represent his master precisely in all the painful situations, and why he is permitted to criticize him and, as it were, to take the place of the conscience that the hero lacks. We can understand, moreover, that the enormity of Don Juan's wickedness is due to the splitting off of the inhibiting element of his personality.
If we consider the plot from this perspective, then we see not only that Leporello clearly represents his master in the scenes already mentioned, but also that he stands for the criticizing and anxiety-oriented conscience of the hero in general. In the first act of the opera he appears as the criticizing agency [of the superego], condemning the dissolute life of his master and acquiescing in it only against his will. Beginning with the scene in the house of Donna Elvira (Act II), where master and servant are at the same time mortally threatened, the guilt feeling comes to the fore. In the cemetery scene and further in the banquet scene, this feeling increases to a terrible anxiety about the ghost of the dead and an unbearable torment of conscience which finally leads to death. If we recognize in Leporello a manifestation —certainly an extraordinarily formed one—of Don Juan's ego ideal, we shall not only be using a formulation of Freud (1914b, 1921), but also approaching a deeper understanding of the whole psychic mechanism.
NOTES
1 [Leporello's direct participation in the conquests of his master is brought out by Mozart; in the Burlador, it is present but only in a vicarious form.]
2 He is dissatisfied even the first time he sings: "Toiling day and night . . . sleeping badly"; the second time, "Don't count on me, master!"; a little later, "If I could only get away from here"; and so forth. [The second quotation is not in Da Ponte's original libretto; it is a modification introduced in the German translation by Rochlitz. See note 5 in this chapter. Version B has only the first nine words of this footnote.] .
3 [Act I, Scene 2: Leporello sings, "This is a catalogue of beauties my master has loved. . . . In Italy, six hundred forty; in Germany, two hundred thirty-one, . . . but in Spain there are already a thousand and three," etc. Some productions of Don Giovanni suggest that in this aria Leporello is not so much the proud servant as he is, momentarily, the split-off conscience of Donna Elvira.]
4 [Version G has "reproaches his master for this abuse."]
5 [Rank's analysis is based on a German translation of Don Giovanni that departs in some respects from the original Italian libretto of Da Ponte. The translation of Friedrich Rochlitz (Don Juan oder der Steinerne Gast, Leipzig, Breitkopf u. Hartelschen Musikhandlung, 1801) was the source of most of the productions—actually adaptations—of the opera that were performed in Austria and Germany during the nineteenth century, and the version that Rank saw in Vienna in 1921 was almost certainly based on it. (A copy of the program for that performance, in the Rank papers, does not indicate the translation that was used, but the title, Don Juan, does suggest that it was a German-language version.) The Rochlitz translation has numerous alterations and additions, especially in the recitatives, which are relevant to Rank's analysis. The last part of the dialogue between Leporello and Don Juan, to which Rank refers here, is reproduced fully in the 1903 German version by Carl F. Wittman (Braunschweig: Henry LitolfFs Verlag). I have italicized those words not in Da Ponte's libretto as reproduced in the version of Bleiler (1964):
Leporello: Why not? How can you ask that! If it had been my wife?
Don Juan: All the better! I have only got even for what you did to me. One could die with laughter. Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Statue: Audacious one, let the dead rest in peace!
The Da Ponte libretto has the statue's first words as "Your laughter will cease before dawn!", with the other words occurring after Don Juan and Leporello express surprised curiosity; but the Wittman version simply uses the "Audacious one" remark twice.]
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1 Emphases mine [Rank's].
2 [In version B, a question mark in brackets—i.e., Rank's own insertion—was added here.]
3 Occasionally a real poet also succeeds at this; for example, Alphonse Daudet, who has his most famous heroes conduct an excellent self-dialogue, between Tartarin-Quijote and Tartarin-Sancho. This psychic mechanism is also clear in Balzac's poetic figures, and Balzac was fully conscious of this. Even at the age of twenty-three, he wrote to his sister thus: "Laure, Laure, my two solitary and immense desires, to be celebrated and to be loved, shall they ever be satisfied?" [The last two sentences of this paragraph were added in version C. The quotation is from an article, "Feuilleton—Balzac und die Leidenschaft," by E. Curtius, in the Neue Freie Presse, April 5, 1922, p. 2. The article is preserved in the Rank papers.] In a novel by Alexander Arndt that appeared in 1921, Ti und Tea, the author not only consciously presents his ego in two independent personalities, but demonstrates himself even more in the subjective connection between these two contrasting figures (see the discussion by Ewald, 1922). [This entire footnote occurs at the end of the previous sentence in Rank's text, but the present location seems more appropriate to me.]
