دون ژوان اثر اتو رنک بخش ۸
CHAPTER 8
WOMEN IN THE DON JUAN LEGEND
We are about to cite the poets themselves as evidence for our psychoanalytic interpretation, but first it is necessary to give a very general account of the extent to which this is both permissible and fruitful. In the creations of significant artists, psychoanalysis has repeatedly found ample confirmation of its interpretations of psychic events—interpretations that the poet often senses, or feels intuitively, and then puts in artistic form. One of the first problems of applied analysis was to study the deeper conditions of this relationship (Rank, 1907), and since then it has on occasion investigated them in detail. To our surprise, it is evident that poetic fantasy ranges much less freely than we might expect; in creations that are apparently very individualized, poetic fantasy still remains attached to certain unconscious images that could better be called primal images. Thus it is not unusual for later poets to discover the original psychological sense of a motif through elaborating and intensifying it. To some extent, they become thereby unintentional and unwilling precursors of psychoanalysis. The greatest poets, who in the context of their creative work elevate the consistency and astuteness of psychological motivation above all other demands, thus span the latency period (to use a striking phrase of Ferenczi) in humanity's development. Through its overvaluation of the materialistic world-view, such a period of human social development arises between primitive animism and our analytic psychology. This feature of the psychology of the artist is only slightly different from the analytic approach. In his gradual pushing back to the origin of the distorted motif, the artist at the same time presents it in his own original synthetic form; while our psychology, in line with its analytic tendency, is concerned to distinguish between these two factors and to understand them in their mutual interdependence—i.e., to distinguish motif and interpretation with scientific dispassion.
In the concluding chapter we shall have to consider what important psychic and social functions are thus fulfilled by poetic art. At this point we will pursue the real "donjuanesque" character of the hero, namely his relation to women. What interpretations have the poets given to this motif, in the course of the artistic development of the material? Only the hero's wanton playing with the hearts of women is prominent in the Burlador:
There is no talk of love. The driving force is the ambitious striving to seduce or to outdo someone else. He does not know pity for the dishonored ones. . . . The ways in which he tries to accomplish his goal are certainly not very refined. With the Duchess Isabella and Donna Anna de Ulloa, he insinuates his way by night in the disguise of their beloved; with Tisbea and Aminta1 the children of nature, he succeeds by the pretense of later marriage. He is truly loved by none of the women. (Heckel, 1915, pp. 9-10)
This original and social Don Juan role, which in the form of its fantasy is closest to the situation of a primal horde of women, has been gradually falsified in a sentimental way by the later poets. To them, such a character evidently seemed too cruel and inhuman, and so they introduced love and even marriage. The first step in this process of "civilizing" the hero was Moliere's play (1665) in which Don Juan was changed from a figure of heroic wickedness into a dissolute French nobleman of the times. To be sure, he knows love as little as does the Burlador, but he did abduct Elvira from the convent and marry her. After he left her, she pursues him, and though she is continually deceived, she tries as an earnest admonisher to turn him from the path of depravity:
Above all, this trait of calm, contented love raises Elvira far above all the other victims of the seducer, even above the Duchess Isabella in the Burlador, in whom one would see a precursor of Elvira. (Heckel, 1915, p. 16)
As Heckel further remarked, it is in Moli£re "that for the first time Don Juan meets such proud, majestic women face-to-face;" the first time, we may emphasize, that one woman is at all elevated out of the series of women who are in his mind equal—or equally inferior.
The next clear step in this development can be seen in the figure created by Mozart's librettist Da Ponte, who:
made Donna Anna a strong female opposing force, and thus presented Mozart with the opportunity of creating his most complete female figure. . . . In the Burlador and also in Gazzaniga (1787), she disappears from the stage forever after her father's death. Mozart was the first to make her into a great personality—the equal of Don Giovanni, although she is as unlike Giovanni as is possible. She is the true champion and avengeress of the violated sense of honor and love for the murdered father; to her, sensual passion is entirely alien.... (Heckel, pp. 22, 24-25 [Rank's emphasisl)
In the service of a tightly constructed plot, later versions gradually satisfied themselves with fewer and fewer loves. Grabbe (1829) even had a single one, while Tolstoi (i860) only presented the relationship with Donna Anna, and Rittner (1909) even personified the most faithful husband in his adversary Leporello.1
Thus we see that the original Don Juan type, in the course of its poetic development, moves from the ruthless seducer of women to a romantic and finally a civilized lover, and ends at a point where the heroic lie is given up in favor of a romantic explanation. In the course of this process, however, the character of the real Don Juan is also effaced. As Lenau's (1851) version best shows, the hero himself is:
no longer a genial offender, but rather one who struggles and fights for his ideal; no longer one who in disillusion and boredom has given up striving for the highest goal, but rather one who seeks it all his life. (Heckel, p. 82)
"My Don Juan," Lenau himself said, "could not be a hot-blooded man eternally chasing after women. It is his yearning to find a woman who is the incarnation of womanhood, and through whom he could enjoy all the women of the world, although he cannot possess them individually."
When the poets, in the original situation of the serial form [of seduced women], introduced the mother figure into the material out of the psychological need for denial, they destroyed the hero characterologically; often they even had him destroyed physically by the single beloved woman. The many later versions in which Don Juan meets death at the hand of an abandoned beloved woman also belong here. Such an end is as unsuited to his character as could be, but it repeats an important motif of our reconstructed prehistory: namely that the jealousy of the individual woman makes impossible [any simple] repetition of the polygamous original type. We can easily recognize the mother figure who replaces the inhibiting father in the admonishing role of Donna Elvira, who as champion of the violated moral law walks in the footsteps of the mother who avenges the murder of the father. In the figure of Donna Anna a fragment of the original motivation is still clear. This fragment is the ambivalent attitude of the daughter to the murdered primal father, so that she partly welcomes the murderer as a liberator and a new beloved, and partly scorns and persecutes him as a weaker substitute for the lost primal object. In the prehistorical sense, the daughter becomes not only the bad mother, but also the faithless mother— a characteristic that perhaps may have been passed on to the Don Juan type itself. Traces of this untrue mother are found in the later versions, as in Holtei (1834) and Byron (1819-24), who gave the hero a fickle mother, or in Pushkin (1830), where Laura is as faithless and wanton as the hero himself.
The whole primal historical role of the bad mother and the hero who is deceived by her appears in one of the newest, but also most profound, Don Juan versions, Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman" (1903). In the disguise of an anti-romantic play turned into caricature, this role reaches its final flowering. The hero, an English gentleman and theoretical revolutionary, struggles with all the means of modern ideas and technology against a fate which he cannot avert—to be married against his will to Donna Anna. In the end, his philosophy, which is based on the evil and danger of woman, cannot protect him from this earthly hell—in comparison with which the real hell of the ancient Don Juan, which he sees in a dream, is more acceptable than even a sojourn in heaven. He knows that woman aspires to domination over man and achieves it, and he is clear that she uses man only as the instrument of her natural purposes. He outdoes himself in the multitude of his really strange and primitive comparisons of woman: with a spider, who entices man into a web in order to suck out his blood; with a boa constrictor, who inextricably embraces him; and with a wild beast, who swallows him up as a defenseless prey.
Perhaps one will not think it justified to draw conclusions of so far-reaching a kind from such indications of poetry that was apparently intended for wholly different purposes. Still one must consider that we are concerned with the ramifications of overlapping lines of development. While we are inclined to trace these back to the operation of definite, far-reaching mental principles, it would lead us too far away from the scope of the present study to discuss and establish these processes fully. Our interest now lies more in another direction: namely to pursue the dynamic processes that run parallel to the poetic preservation and progressive clarification of the motif. These processes furnish the actual instinctual force for artistic production, and their affective consequence constitutes one of the most important social functions of the poetic art.
NOTES
1 [As the secretary to the Baron (Don Juan), Leporello refuses to let his wife, whom he loves tenderly, have any contact with the seducer, and even goes so far as to kill Don Juan to prevent it.]
