[In the following essay, Cooper argues that the shipwreck scenes in Don Juan Canto II symbolize the author's pessimistic view of the world at large.]

“Life is, in itself and forever, shipwreck. To be shipwrecked is not to drown. … Consciousness of shipwreck, being the truth of life, constitutes salvation.”

Ortega y Gasset, “In Search of Goethe from Within”

Mazeppa, composed simultaneously with Don Juan Canto I during the late summer of 1818, constitutes in several respects a preliminary version of the shipwreck episode in Canto II. In both cases a youthful adulterer undergoes a kind of descent into Hell, finally awakens before a Nausicaa, and thereafter remains exiled from his homeland. More important, Byron's active juxtaposing of different historical contexts in Mazeppa sheds light on his considerably subtler manipulations of ottava rima in Don Juan. Mazeppa's opening stanza, alluding to the recent fall of Napoleon, introduces the poem as contemporaneous. The narrative, however, takes place immediately following the battle of Pultowa in 1709; and within that narrative, the old hetman tracks his “seventy years of memory back” to his “twentieth spring,” 1660 (lines 126-127).¹ The time-frames distance the reader from the events of Mazeppa's story, yet by forming a continuum they implicitly connect us at the far end. The effect is of a progressive historicism, as the intensely private experience standing at the core of the narrative (virtually a nonexperience, since Mazeppa loses consciousness at the nadir of his journey) is gradually subsumed into a public context, becoming transformed from, first, the original, near-solipsistic event itself, to the long stored-up memory of a single individual, to a beguiling story intended for a small “band of chiefs” (line 44), to, finally, a poem whose audience includes ourselves.

Mazeppa thus appears less a formal poetic object willed directly by an author than a naturally evolved artifact inseparable from the surrounding contours of European history. Those contours, moreover, are seen to be defined largely by chance. Contra William Marshall, who ingeniously makes Mazeppa a parody of Charles's common sense, the narrator's position is not “clearly anti-providential,” nor does Mazeppa express by contrast an “organized moral view of the universe” according to which his rescue by the Cossack maid constitutes a “providential intervention.”² Quite the opposite, the moral of Mazeppa's tale is that he was saved by an unforeseeable stroke of luck, the same luck that will perhaps save Charles now. In devising a clever torture for Mazeppa, the Count Palatine inadvertently raised him to power and so ensured his own defeat; by the same token, the defeated Charles may also live to destroy his enemies.³ The narrator's remark about “the hazard of the die” (line 15) therefore tends to support Mazeppa's affirmation of chance as a positive force. If you have hit bottom, if the odds are “ten to one at least [for] the foe” (line 114), then even random change can only help. This capacity to sustain ups and downs is what makes man more than merely animal, despite his untamed passions, which the wild horse plainly represents. Whereas the horse's unrelenting instinct for its homeland proves self-destructive, Mazeppa, whose home is simply wherever he happens to find himself (as shown in stanzas 3 and 4), survives his trek to love again. Similarly, the reason “Danger levels man and brute” (line 51) is that it brutalizes man; but of course danger is not the sole condition of human existence, and hence Mazeppa ridicules Charles for making war to the exclusion of love (lines 126-142). Indeed, the satirical thrust of his tale is its tacit advice that, since we all must suffer defeat sooner or later, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all and still to have lost.

Yet even random change has its limits; the dice may be fickle, but their permutations repeat. Thus the constant recurrence within the poem of rivers (the Borysthenes, the dark unnamed stream of fifty years past), horses (Gieta's, Mazeppa's Bucephalus, and the wild Tartarian courser), and an assortment of personal and military defeats suggests that, although meaningful causal connections between the individual occasions of experience may be impossible to determine, nevertheless life's various circumstances do unmistakably embody distinct patterns of contrast and resemblance. So the top and bottom of man's universe—paradise and death, love and brutalization—emerge from the narrative as fixed lineaments of experience without which it would lose self-differentiation and simply dissolve into the general flux. As random as an individual's life may be, it can never trespass those bounds beyond which lies the merely unimaginable: gods and dust.

Far more than even Mazeppa, Don Juan abounds with chance surprises, above all in the shipwreck episode of Canto II, where raw forces of nature solely propel the narrative. Subjugated by storms from without and starvation from within, man appears throughout the episode as a cipher lacking effective power to resist. A total newcomer to the larger world in which henceforth Don Juan takes place, Juan is here less a protagonist than just another sufferer scarcely to be distinguished from everybody else aboard ship. One recalls only his heroic stance, pistols drawn, before the rum-room (II.xxxv-xxxvi), and his tacit refusal to eat Pedrillo (II.lxxviii). The shipwreck, then, is Juan's rite of passage into “our nautical existence” (II.xii) on the sea of adventitious circumstance, the Deluge which precludes any direct return to Spain and Donna Inez. It serves to define the Stygian nadir of his new-found universe, much as the subsequent Haidée idyll defines its paradisal apex.

For Byron himself, moreover, it seems the decision to continue the poem beyond Canto I, apparently first designed as a separate poem like Beppo, involved an embarkation similar to his hero's.⁴ The two well-known stanzas he added to the completed draft of Canto I make the parallel almost explicit:

No more—no more—Oh! never more on me
          The freshness of the heart can fall like dew,
Which out of all the lovely things we see
          Extracts emotions beautiful and new;
Hived in our bosoms like the bag o' the bee.
          Think'st thou the honey with those objects grew?
Alas! 'twas not in them, but in thy power
To double even the sweetness of a flower.

(I.ccxiv)

“Thou” evidently refers to Byron's reader. Assuming our ignorance of the melancholy truth he wishes to convey, the poet rejects the earlier first-person plural and addresses the reader directly. Yet the continuing second person of the next stanza reveals that Byron is really addressing his own heart, perhaps has been all along:

No more—no more—Oh! never more, my heart,
          Canst thou be my sole world, my universe!
Once all in all, but now a thing apart,
          Thou canst not be my blessing or my curse:
The illusion's gone for ever.

(I.ccxv)

Ultimately, however, such distinctions fail, for Byron's heart and his implied readers are one and the same. His heart can no longer be his universe, because it now must take account of the larger world outside itself, the world of concrete human life existing beyond poetry and encompassing ourselves as actual readers. Hence we become the objects out of which the disillusioned poet will extract new emotional sustenance. The series of contexts that Mazeppa deployed as a framing device, then, Don Juan Canto II actively incorporates as a method of composition. The consequent relationships between Juan's occasion of shipwreck, the author's collateral expressions of skepticism, and finally the individual reader's subsuming experience of both, supply the subject of this essay.

Unexpected as it is, the shipwreck episode starts out open-ended. Anything might happen. Yet it is almost completely closed off at the other end, and Juan seems to escape through an orifice. This development stems from the way the law of attrition at sea logically works itself out: “Famine—despair—cold, thirst and heat, had done / Their work on them by turns” (II.cii), to which one might add drowning, bad meat and delirium, over-exposure, and sharks. If the one doesn't get you, the others will. The form of the episode is therefore a vortex of diminishing possibilities. Juan's situation grows progressively more cramped and isolated as he moves from the Seville aristocracy to a ship carrying approximately 250 people to a longboat containing 30. Within the longboat, Juan's refusal to turn cannibal distinguishes him from “all save three or four” (II.lxxviii) who die anyway, leaving Juan the sole survivor. As the allusion to Dante's Ugolino suggests, cannibalism is the innermost ring of this Hell; Juan's solitary struggle with Ocean's “insatiate grave” (II.cviii) is the nadir; like Dante he squeezes through it and emerges into a new world, Haidée's island.

Byron articulates the descent as a series of small mishaps in which hopes are raised only to be dashed. The episode begins in full expectation of a safe passage; but then “at one o'clock” the ship is suddenly about to sink (II.xxvii). Then it appears the pumps will save them; but then they almost capsize in a squall (II.xxx). Then there comes “a flash of hope once more” as the wind lulls with “a glimpse of sunshine” (II.xxxviii); but then the storm renews and the boats must get out (II.xlv). Then we learn that, as “'T is very certain the desire of life / Prolongs it,” “people in an open boat [can] live upon the love of life” (II.lxiv-lxvi); but then we also learn that this will not suffice them indefinitely because “man is a carnivorous production. … He cannot live, like woodcocks, upon suction” (II.lxvii). Then arrives a sleep-inducing calm that restores the survivors' strength; but then they awake and eat all their provisions (II.lxviii). And so forth. The sequence suggests that events trick us into hope in order that we may be doubly defeated when they subsequently turn more dangerous yet. For the failure of each new promise of deliverance leaves the men not the same as before, but worse, because they have irrevocably used up on more chance for survival. “'T is best to struggle to the last,” advises the narrator, “'T is never too late to be wholly wreck'd” (II.xxxix)—good advice, surely; and yet three stanzas later one discovers its terrific irony, as the pumps give out and the dismasted ship rolls “a wreck complete” (II.xlii). It is as though the struggle to keep it afloat only led to a greater devastation (in fact, they deliberately cut away the masts to avoid broaching). This almost systematic way in which various saving possibilities only serve to become fresh defeats distinctly conveys the impression of an impersonal, casually malignant power of circumstance gradually revealing itself through the course of the episode.

Yet as their situation worsens, the men hope all the more intensely. From the cannibalism to Juan's final arrival on the beach, the poem presents a series of auguries: the shower of rain, the rainbow, the white bird, the turtle. The episode begins with an objective narrative of suspenseful action telling with considerable show of authority exactly what the ocean did to the ship and what the crew is doing to save it (II.xxvii). The reality of the world “out there” is assumed; it may be inhuman and destructive, but one can still be confident of knowing how to handle an emergency. Later, however, the objective narrative virtually disappears—appropriately so, for no longer is anything taking place out there; inert, the survivors are not engaged in visible activity. The poem therefore shifts to a phenomenalistic presentation of their experience of reality, a realm in which belief, illusions, and symbolism play a vital part. Causality stands in abeyance; as the boat drifts, events seem to transpire without what Hume calls “necessary connexion,” comprising instead simply an observed succession of independent phenomena (a rainbow, a bird, a turtle). In such a world, as in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner's, there is no reason for rational, purposive action because no likelihood exists that it will produce its intended effect. Mental activity such as hope appears at least as effective.

This is not to imply that the phenomenal world of the longboat survivors is experienced directly by the reader the way the Ancient Mariner's is. “We” are not in the longboat, “they” are: we see them through the narrative presentation. But this is just what we were not conscious of doing at the outset of the episode, when the narrative appeared objective. Now it is indeed a presentation and, moreover, a skeptical one. Says Byron of the rainbow: “Our shipwreck'd seamen though it a good omen—/ It is as well to think so now and then / … And may become of great advantage when / Folks are discouraged” (II.xciii). In their helplessness the survivors have made a possibly useful interpretation, no more or less. Byron's remarks are final, but they do not dispel our appreciation of how lovely the rainbow looked to “the dim eyes of these shipwreck'd men” (II.xci). Their hope, which interprets natural phenomena as evidences of things unseen, is a tentative form of faith. Furthermore, the comparison of the rainbow to “Quite a celestial kaleidoscope” (II.xciii) suggests that such faith, under the circumstances, is inevitable. Like a kaleidoscope, a rainbow is not simply seen, but seen into, for it is an optical illusion existing as object entirely in the eye of the beholder. Being all appearance, as it were, the rainbow is thus whatever the half-dead men in the longboat perceive it to be.

If we prefer the narrator's skepticism here, it is with awareness that he stands outside the longboat and can afford to be rational. Standing in “their” shoes (which anyway they have already eaten), we might well find skepticism to be just one more discouragement. The point about the survivors' providential attitude is that it is more pragmatic than rationalism. They shrewdly anticipate a twofold benefit from the turtle and the sacred-seeming white bird: the animals are regarded as both auguries and meat, and the two viewpoints do not conflict. After all, given a boatload of starving men, how else is a turtle evidence of heavenly concern but that it may serve to sustain life? Similarly, what makes the bird a “bird of promise” is partly its promise of becoming food. Had the Ancient Mariner done the natural thing with his white bird—eaten it—he might have spared himself much grief, for the killing in that case would not have been wanton.

Such pragmatism gets its force from the way we experience the form of Don Juan's ottava rima. Much has been said on this score, with attention usually directed toward the closing couplet rhyme. Alvin Kernan has emphasized the “but then” movement of the poem, its vital unpredictability; for him, the wave-like “onward rush of life” that the poem imitates, “upward to a pause, and then a sweep away, is most consistently present in the stanza form. … The first six lines stagger forward, like the life they contain, toward the resting place of the concluding couplet and the security of its rhyme—and a very shaky resting place it most often is.”⁵ Edward Bostetter replies that the reader's expectations are not simply thwarted but renewed as curiosity; he proposes a complementary movement, “what next?” which “puts the emphasis on the anticipatory suspense.”⁶ What perusal of the poem's individual stanzas shows is that these two movements coalesce so as to deny readers an accustomed complacency. We are drawn into and then thrust out of each stanza, which thus forms a miniature vortex. We end where we began, but meantime have become consciously aware of experiencing a fiction. Then we suspend that consciousness and proceed to repeat the process by moving on to the ever-imminent next stanza. The vortex form of the Don Juan stanza is not, however, simply a stylistic version of the thematic “falling” first discerned in the poem by George Ridenour;⁷ it is less the characteristic Romantic fall into reality or experience than a freely willed descent into a specifically literary self-awareness, into what both Jerome McGann and Peter Manning, borrowing a phrase from Wallace Stevens, term “the fictions of reality.”⁸ “The actions of the poem complete themselves in [the reader's] consciousness,” says Manning;⁹ yes, and they do so by directly exercising our moral imaginations. The questions Byron raises entail active examination of ourselves as social individuals. In Canto II he is not asking, “What would you do if stuck in a longboat with thirty others without any food?”—as though unshipwrecked readers could give any answer that were not fantasy. The question lacks ballast; one wants to reply, “I would heroically save them all (but don't press me for details).” Instead Byron asks, “Exactly what does one do, having arrived at such a situation through force of circumstance?”—and what one does is, as usual in life, no one particular thing: not everybody eats Pedrillo. To repeat myself, “we” are not in the same boat as “them,” but it is conceivable we could be because clearly their world much resembles ours. This consciousness of sharing the same context of possibilities as the shipwrecked men, without sharing even vicariously in their experience, is clarified by scrutinizing the individual stanzas themselves.

First consider stanza xxvii, the beginning of the end for all but Juan:

At one o'clock the wind with sudden shift
          Threw the ship right into the trough of the sea,
Which struck her aft, and made an awkward rift,
          Started the stern-post, also shattered the
Whole of her stern-frame, and, ere she could lift
          Herself from out her present jeopardy,
The rudder tore away: 'twas time to sound
The pumps, and there were four feet water found.

In poetry, the prototype for such a nautical tour de force was William Falconer's The Shipwreck (1762), an exciting first-hand account in which numerous professional-sounding marine terms are casually retailed in rhyming couplets. But Byron's stanza is effective as much by what it does not do as by what it does. It is all objective narrative, a sudden accumulation of events without any development. The wind shifts, and then no less than six violently active verbs happen to the ship one after the other; even the syntax, perfectly unextraordinary in itself, appears jerked about to fit the ottava rima. One realizes the helplessness of the ship, and the immense arbitrary power of the ocean that has evidently cuffed it. Appropriately, therefore, we find the birthday-snapper in the couplet rhyme is too damp to explode except matter-of-factly. Events have so overwhelmed the crew that it is not until line 7 that it manages to take defensive action; but even then, all the men do is discover still another way in which Ocean has anticipated them. So by forcibly failing to meet our expectations, this unusual stanza serves to reveal what, in fact, we expect of the usual Don Juan stanza: namely, that it begin with an objective narrative of events leading to description of an active human response, leading in turn to commentary by the narrator himself. Not coincidentally, this is the same pattern of development we saw take place within the episode overall: Canto II moves from an impersonal narrative of the sinking ship implying confidence in the reality of the world “out there,” to a presentation of the survivors' subjective construing of that world, to Byron's disinterested but sympathetic statements of skepticism.

Stanza l I take to be the ottava rima model on which Byron elsewhere plays changes. It is a manipulation of narrative, but not to make any particular point. However, the manipulation involves several distinct shifts of perspective. We can enumerate them.

Some trial had been making at a raft,
          With little hope in such a rolling sea,
A sort of thing at which one would have laugh'd,
          If any laughter at such times could be,
Unless with people who too much have quaff'd,
          And have a kind of wild and horrid glee,
Half epileptical, and half hysterical:—
Their preservation would have been a miracle.

Lines 1-2) Objectively speaking, the raft is a futile effort. 3) So futile, the reader might find it ridiculous. 4) Now, however, we are grimly reminded that under the circumstances a raft is better than nothing. 5-7) And yet there is room for compromise between the two points of view: if you want to laugh, laugh with them, the hideous despairing drunks. 8) This line cuts off the lurid description of the laughter, itself slightly hysterical, by giving a blunt assessment of the raftsmen's chances. It thus repeats lines 1-2, only now it is the colloquial Byron speaking, not the impersonal narrative (“a miracle,” not “little hope”). The stanza bends into the reader, challenging us directly with the “If” of line 4. Then, with the concessional “Unless,” it turns back toward the fictive scene, which however now seems real in that it ironically subsumes our own response to it; with the introduction of “wild and horrid glee,” the reader is forced to recognize that, under the pressure of actual shipwreck, his armchair amusement at the raft could well become something less pleasant. The intervention of Byron in line 8 completes the proof that we are not entitled to judge these people, only their chances for survival.

In the previous stanza, xlix, the same pattern was used first to suggest the existence of an evil Deity hidden in matter, then skeptically to show that people aboard a storm-beaten ship at least have good reason to believe so. The first four lines, with their hint of a reversed Genesis, present the uncreating God of Byron's “Darkness.” (What makes the last line of stanza l so potent is partly its suggestion that the raftsmen need two miracles, one to save them, plus one to create the good God who might bother to do so.) But then this vision is attributed to “hopeless eyes” looking only at “the night.” Yet there is no cynicism here, for it next appears that the night these people saw really did “grimly darkle o'er the faces pale, / And the dim desolate deep.” The horror they imagined therefore was not all illusion, a point the narrator reinforces by affirming that “now Death was here.” The skepticism cuts too deep to be cynical.

Too deep, perhaps, for those who see in stanza lv only a failure of good taste. Even Andrew Rutherford, author of the tough-minded “Don Juan: War and Realism,” hits upon this stanza as “the only one … in which Byron lapses into a flippant derisive tone which would have been perfectly appropriate in Beppo but which constitutes a blemish, a breach of decorum, in his wonderful description of the wreck.”¹⁰

All the rest perish'd; near two hundred souls
          Had left their bodies; and what's worse, alas!
When over Catholics the Ocean rolls,
          They must wait several weeks before a mass
Takes off one peak of purgatorial coals,
          Because, till people know what's come to pass,
They won't lay out their money on the dead—
It costs three francs for every mass that's said.

Certainly the lapse is there; yet in a sense it belongs as much to the reader as to Byron. For consider the context. As early as stanza xxxiv, the ship presents the spectacle of a Walpurgisnacht: “Some plundered, some drank spirits, some sung psalms / … Strange sounds of wailing, blasphemy, devotion, / Clamoured in chorus to the roaring Ocean.” The spectacle intensifies once the sinking commences. We now become witnesses to a microcosm revealing the various ways in which men prepare to meet death: “Some went to prayers … / … Some looked o'er the bow; / Some hoisted out the boats,” “Some lashed them in their hammocks; some put on / Their best clothes, as if going to a fair; / Some cursed the day on which they saw the Sun, / And gnashed their teeth,” “Some trial had been making at a raft” (II.xliv-l). The ship sinks in a virtual apocalypse: “the sea yawn'd round her like a hell,” “And first one universal shriek there rush'd, / Louder than the loud Ocean … / … and then all was hush'd” (II.lii-liii). Or almost all: wind and ocean continue, and “at intervals there gush'd, / Accompanied with a convulsive splash, / A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry / Of some strong swimmer in his agony.” In retrospect, an instant and utter apocalypse would have been a relief. Instead of anything so final, one ship went down. The point of Byron's bringing in the agonized drowning castaway of William Cowper's poem here is to provide some distance from this disaster, which is absolute in itself but limited; he shifts our perspective to the survivors in the longboat (II.liv).

To read the limpid elegiac opening of stanza lv, then, is to prepare for a eulogy: “All the rest perish'd; near two hundred souls / Had left their bodies.” The second phrase is taken as a pathetic restatement of the first, recalling as it does the Ancient Mariner's “Four times fifty living men” whose “souls did from their bodies fly … / Like the whizz of my crossbow.”¹¹ But it becomes a trick, for Byron proceeds, in a travesty of Coleridge's literalism, to belabor theological assumptions hidden in the phrase. The result is a satire of the eulogy we expected. For plainly the “leavetaking” of these men's souls was not the graceful affair such a formula implies. After so horrific a spectacle, what remains to say? Only “cant.” If we realize this, then the circumspection with which we read that “Nine souls more went” in the cutter will steady us to accept lines otherwise unacceptable:

They grieved for those who perish'd with the cutter,
And also for the biscuit-casks and butter.

(II.lxi)

“High thought / Link'd to a servile mass of matter” is Lucifer's Hamletlike description of man in Cain.¹² Here the couplet performs the linkage.

We began this perusal with stanza xxvii, an objective account telling precisely what happened to the ship the moment the wind shifted. We end with lovely, allusive stanza lxxxiv:

And that same night there fell a shower of rain,
          For which their mouths gaped, like the cracks of earth
When dried to summer's dust; till taught by pain,
          Men really know not what good water's worth;
If you had been in Turkey or in Spain,
          Or with a famish'd boat's-crew had your berth,
Or in the desert heard the camel's bell,
You'd wish yourself where Truth is—in a well.

By contrast with meat, which must be hunted and killed, the rain shower comes spontaneously as a gift. Like Truth, water is valuable essentially; it is free, yet under the circumstances it makes these men “rich” (II.lxxxvi). Chiefly, though, it is the biblical quality of the poetry that makes the rain so much resemble grace or manna. Lines 2-3 echo the thought that man is dust of the earth, his life a summer's day; there is a deep, melancholy sympathy for this fiery dust who feels his thirst so urgently. Almost immediately, however, this developing awareness of the boatcrew's universality begins to become rationalized by the philosophy of suffering introduced in lines 3-4. Line 5 goes a step further and addresses us directly; taking us outside the narrative, it establishes a global context for thirst in which “a famish'd boat's-crew” is but a local instance. Their predicament is not essentially different from that of others whose thirst we find small difficulty in imagining. The joke at the end becomes effective by our recognizing that it is our universal experience of water's preciousness that makes us identify it with Truth in the first place. This is the same pragmatism we met with earlier in the providential turtle. The allusiveness that functions as pathos in lines 1-3 thus becomes an explicit intellectual point in line 8—almost, but not quite, the butt of a joke. The rain shower has really seemed like grace; but it is no wonder that it should.

Clearly, Byron's skepticism is less a definite philosophic rationalism than a perpetual process of pragmatic adjustment. Hence it completes itself only in the reader's mind (not the narrator's, whose thought, however various, remains determined by what Byron actually wrote), as over and over we are made to confront, examine, and revise our own prior responses to the poem. To a skepticism so paradoxically thoroughgoing in its tentativeness, an affirmation any less indirect is bound to appear merely self-approving. As Peter Manning points out:

Don Juan baffled contemporaries and incurred accusations of cynicism because its first readers did not realize that Byron had transferred the locus of meaning from within the poem outside to them. Pope draws his audience into a compact of solidarity against the fools he presents—the Dunces, the Timons, the Sir Balaams. In Byron, however, the object of satire is not a fictive, representative character, but the false assumptions in the individual reader that his reactions to the poem bring to the surface.¹³

So with regard to the shipwreck episode, what is most striking about first readers' reactions is not their horror, but specifically their mortification, as though they felt Byron had personally duped them somehow. All protest their excruciated “consciousness of the insulting deceit which has been practised upon us. … Every high thought that was ever kindled in our hearts by the muse of Byron … every remembered moment of admiration and enthusiasm is up in arms against him”—thus the Blackwood's reviewer.¹⁴ Keats—whom Blackwood's held anathema—less prissily expresses the same sense of betrayal; in Severn's report he flung the book down, exclaiming that Byron had evidently grown so jaded “that there was nothing left for him but to laugh & gloat over the most solemn & heart-rending scenes of human misery; this storm of his is one of the most diabolical attempts ever made upon our sympathies. …”¹⁵ Such reactions are quite accurate in their way. Most of the stanzas just examined contain a development whose challenge to the reader could easily be construed as mockery or betrayal. As stanza l shows no less than lxxxiv, Don Juan elicits pathos not for the sake of pathos alone, but in order that we may consider its appropriateness within a particular context. Normally, this entails the intervention of the narrator whose irony, as in the stanza Rutherford singled out, can seem even to unmoralizing modern readers like the devilish laughing and gloating Keats imagined. Among contemporaries it appears that only Shelley, applying the arguments of Areopagitica, was able to grasp how the poem locates its meanings within the individual reader, thus making his response a direct moral act. “You unveil & present in its true deformity what is worst in human nature,” he wrote Byron, “& it is this what the witlings of the age murmur at, conscious of their want of power to endure the scrutiny of such a light.”¹⁶

Byron's implicit rejection of the cannibalism, the aspect of the shipwreck it remains to consider, follows from the premium Don Juan places upon the socialized individual. That the cannibalism is to be regarded as a moral issue appears from the fact that somebody is killed. Nevertheless the reader is not allowed to pass judgment, and the narrator judges the event only by its consequences.

          'T was not to be expected that [Juan] should,
Even in extremity of their disaster,
Dine with them on his pastor and his master.
'T was better that he did not; for, in fact,
          The consequence was awful in the extreme;
For they, who were most ravenous in the act,
          Went ranging mad—Lord! how they did blaspheme!
And foam, and roll, with strange convulsions rack'd,
          Drinking salt-water like a mountain stream,
Tearing, and grinning, howling, screeching, swearing,
And, with hyæna-laughter, died despairing.

(II.lxxviii-lxxix)

The “extremity” to which they resort is repaid in kind by the consequence being “awful in the extreme”; but holier-than-thou readers who believe the cannibals got what they deserve must immediately confront a mock-serious distortion of themselves: “Lord! how they did blaspheme!” The narrator here is holier than anybody, and as a result seems merely hypocritical: “Kill and eat people if you must, but swearing like that is an affront to society.” Cannibalism thus appears as “man's worst—his second fall,” the fall of civilized man into barbarism;¹⁷ the last two lines describe primarily the behavior of monkeys. This is Byron's societal version of Coleridge's Death-in-Life. Yet the Ancient Mariner sucked only his own blood, whereas Byron's boatcrew in much the same situation—compare the calm at stanza lxxii with that in The Rime Part II—choose to sacrifice a victim to their vampiric surgeon.¹⁸

Leading as it does to madness and “a species of self-slaughter” (II.cii), the cannibalism is seen to be a socialized form of suicide. Unlike hope, “the desire of life [that] / Prolongs it” by binding “people in an open boat” into a hardy little community (II.lxvi), the killing and eating of Pedrillo is an act of cynicism. It is the individual's capitulation to his instinct for self-preservation at any cost, a desire of life murderous in the event. In the boat the men “lay like carcasses; and hope was none, / … They glared upon each other … And you might see / The longings of the cannibal arise / (Although they spoke not) in their wolfish eyes” (II.lxxii). Like original sin, the longings arise and intensify from within; motionless, the men are visibly regressing into barbarism (apparently they have lost the power of speech); “like carcasses” is how they now perceive one another. It would appear that Byron's survivors see only the low half of what Lucifer saw, the “servile [and serviceable] mass of matter.” Moreover, having consumed Pedrillo, “as if not warned sufficiently,” the men next dispense with democratic lottery and like a wolfpack fix upon the master's mate “As fattest” (II.lxxx-lxxxi). Their dehumanization emerges vividly in the next stanza: “At length they caught two Boobies and a Noddy, / And then they left off eating the dead body” (II.lxxxii). Previously the feast possessed a certain macabre gusto (II.lxxvii); now it seems genuinely necrophilic, an impression heightened by the ensuing reference to Dante's Ugolino. With the reappearance of normal food sources, normal standards of edibility resurface, and the other meat is recognized with horror as the damaged corpse of Pedrillo.

Cannibalism, then, represents the furthest reach from Spanish society, the barbaric inner ring of Hell below which lies the merely animal, Juan's struggle with Ocean. In a parody of the Genesis God's prolificness, Byron shows the survivors' day-by-day exhausting of their provisions; finally on “the seventh day” (I.lxxii), the day God created man and gave him life, the boatcrew kills the Christly Pedrillo and consumes him. Yet this Hell opens up within a group of ordinary, civilized Europeans. The reader looks down into it from the circle of his own values, which are the same—hence the encapsulated quality of the whole episode. The cannibalism is barbarism localized as an unlikely but genuine possibility occurring within a broader social context that, though it usually escapes barbarism, nevertheless cannot control the force of circumstance that makes barbarism always a danger. Pedrillo's skillful euthanasia by a doctor we may regard as Byron's reductio of a runaway principle of enlightened rational self-interest, his own Modest Proposal to the Malthusians in the audience.

Juan's heroism in the shipwreck is his Promethean persistence in civilized values that he knows, implicitly, to be greater than his own personal annihilation or suffering. “‘No! / 'T is true that death awaits both you and me, / But let us die like men, not sink / Below like brutes” (II.xxxvi), he tells the whiskey-craving crew, and silently proves his credo in the nasty crucible of the longboat. Unlike the others, he resists “the savage hunger which demanded, / Like the Promethean vulture” (II.lxxv), the sacrifice of Pedrillo. For Byron, civilized man is a Prometheus who internalizes the vulture that gnaws him. Barbarism occurs when the individual looses his personal vulture to gnaw upon somebody else; inside and outside then merge, and the individual actually becomes his vulture. The cannibalism is Byron's literalization of this myth of the modern Prometheus; the bestial deaths that result, simply the natural penalty for so uncivil a “pollution” (II.lxxv; the word translates the Aeschylean miasma, or blood-guilt, which as E. R. Dodds remarks, “is the automatic consequence of an action, belongs to the world of external events, and operates with the same ruthless indifference to motive as a typhoid germ”¹⁹). No matter then that “None in particular had sought or planned it,” the cannibalism is inevitably self-defeating.

Admittedly, Juan's persistence may be ingenuous, but it reflects nonetheless a vigilant sensitivity to the possibilities for true, unspecious survival—that is, for Byron, survival “like a gentleman,” without compromise. The change of mind whereby Juan finally eats his favorite spaniel shows not only that his forbearance of Pedrillo is something more than fastidiousness; it also attests his moral continence under even the most trying conditions. When it comes to the crunch, we see, the profligate Juan is able to make the crucial discriminations between the moral and the sentimental, the human and the merely animal, seeing which of them is inessential and expendable and which not. It is no coincidence that Byron's manipulation of his readers through the ottava rima involves us in discriminations of the same kind. Not that Juan is therefore a directly exemplary figure, but his behavior during the shipwreck does illustrate the same resolute pragmatism we discovered in stanzas l-lxxxiv. This we may summarize as follows. Hope for the best, and act accordingly, but do not expect this or that consequence to follow or you will soon despair. To doubt something, on the other hand, is not to believe it is impossible, but only unlikely; far from necessarily conducing to despair, every doubt thus contains in itself the hopeful germ of a possibility. Or as bold Mazeppa put it, the battle lost, his forces routed, and himself surrounded by an enemy “ten to one at least”: “What mortal his own doom may guess? / Let none despond, let none despair.”²⁰ The shipwreck episode of Don Juan represents Byron's exploration of the ellipsis between these two statements, the first skeptical, the second affirmative, and his laying bare the moral fabric that connects them.

Notes

1. Byron: Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 341-342. All subsequent quotations of Byron's poetry are from this edition.

2. William H. Marshall, The Structure of Byron's Major Poems (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), pp. 120-124.

3. Comparison of Mazeppa lines 417-422 (“For time at last sets all things even. …”) with the letter to Lady Byron of 5 March 1817 suggests Byron identified his own position after the separation with that of Mazeppa: “For myself I have a confidence in my Fortune which will yet bear me through—[‘Chance is more just than we are’]—the reverses which have occurred—were what I should have expected. …—However I shall live to have to pity you all … time & Nemesis will do that which I would not—even were it in my power remote or immediate.—You will smile at this piece of prophecy—do so—but recollect it.—it is justified by all human experience—no one was ever even the involuntary cause of great evils to others—without a requital—I have paid and am paying for mine—so will you.” Letters & Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1976), V, 181. See also the letter to Lady Byron of 18 November 1818.

4. See Jerome McGann, Don Juan in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 59-61. The fullest account of Don Juan's composition is Truman Guy Steffan's in The Making of a Masterpiece: Byron's Don Juan, Vol. I of Byron's Don Juan: A Variorum Edition, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971). See esp. pp. 362, 365-367.

5. Alvin Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 176-179.

6. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Don Juan, ed. Edward E. Bostetter (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 14.

7. George Ridenour, The Style of Don Juan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960).

8. Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), Chapter 7; and Jerome McGann, Don Juan in Context, pp. 111-112, 156, Chapter 8 passim. The reader's cyclical experience of Don Juan's stanzas resembles William James's account of the process by which truths become verified: “Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth, and so on indefinitely. The facts themselves are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.” Pragmatism: A New Name For Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 108.

9. Manning, Byron and His Fictions, p. 260.

10. Andrew Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 172. Rpt. in Twentieth Century Interpretations, pp. 51-62.

11. Coleridge: Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (1912; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 196.

12. Cain II.i.50-51.

13. Manning, Byron and His Fictions, p. 260.

14. “Remarks on Don Juan,” Blackwood's Magazine, 5 (August 1819), 512-518. Rpt. in Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), pp. 166-172.

15. The Critical Heritage, p. 163.

16. Letter of Shelley to Byron, 21 October 1821, in The Critical Heritage, p. 197. Compare Byron's letter to Murray of 1 February 1819: “I maintain that it is the most moral of poems—but if people won't discover the moral that is their fault not mine.” Letters & Journals, VI, 99.

17. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage IV.97; cited in McGann, Don Juan in Context, pp. 146-147.

18. Pedrillo's death is a comment on the earlier assertion that “the desire of life / Prolongs it”:

              … this is obvious to physicians,
    When patients, neither plagued with friends nor wife,
              Survive through very desperate conditions,
    Because they still can hope, nor shines the knife
              Nor shears of Atropos before their visions:
    Despair of all recovery spoils longevity,
    And makes men's miseries of alarming brevity.

    (II.lxiv)

    For Pedrillo, it was not the knife of Atropos that shone before his vision, but the surgeon's scalpel that glimmered before his eyes: the men have tried to take fate into their own hands. It is hard to know what McGann means when he claims of the stanza that “even in the doctor/patient context one is forced to concede the virtues of despair. As Byron suggests, it ‘makes men's miseries of alarming brevity. …’ In Byron's view, if anything is human—like hope and despair, for example—it will serve human ends, sometimes well, sometimes equivocally, sometimes badly” (Don Juan in Context, pp. 164-165). But something that serves human ends badly does not really serve human ends at all. Thus for the cannibals the “virtues of despair” are nonvirtues. Far from simply offering the men relief from a painful existence, the cannibalism gives them the worst of both worlds: more suffering (despair, insanity, and convulsions rolled into one), and death as well. Such misery is “alarming” indeed.

19. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), p. 36.

20. Mazeppa, lines 114, 853-854.