[In the following essay, Schlossman evaluates Molière's approach to portraying Dom Juan indirectly through other character interpretations of him.]

Quel diable de style! Ceci est bien pis que le reste.

(Molière, Dom Juan, V, iv)

Molière's Dom Juan ou le festin de pierre begins after Dom Juan's disappearing act. His absence in the first scene allows other characters to allude to his flight, and to present a ‘disembodied’ version of his rhetoric of seduction. Molière subtracts the initial seduction scenes from the Spanish and Italian theatres of Don Juan's desire. He suspends the lover's intrigues and presents Dom Juan indirectly, through Sganarelle's representation of him. Sganarelle offers an oblique representation of Dom Juan's fictions, his beautiful rhetoric, and his stylistic effects.

SGANARELLE

Under the comic mask of the harlequin valet, the libertine Seducer first appears as the vanishing point of his beautiful rhetoric. The identity of the courtly intriguer is shifted from sword and mask to the verbal fictional performances of love; these performances are anticipated and seconded by the valet Sganarelle, who must speak for his master. Shortly before Molière invented the valet, Dominique Biancolelli performed his commedia dell'arte version of Don Juan in the theater that he shared with Molière's company. Like Dominique, Molière played the role of the valet rather than the Seducer.

Although there were several models for Dom Juan's harlequin valet, Molière chose to enter the scene in the new voice of one of his own characters. Sganarelle had appeared in his earliest farces; in Dom Juan, however, he resembles the type of Arlecchino-Arlequin, who constantly shifts his positions and allegiances without developing as a character.¹ Sganarelle's judgment of his master in the speeches that end the play is identical with the opinion he presents to Gusman in the first scene: “Ah! Monsieur, c'est le Ciel qui vous parle, et c'est un avis qu'il vous donne … Ah! Monsieur, rendezvous à tant de preuves, et jetez-vous vite dans le repentir [Ah! my lord, Heaven speaks to you, and gives you warning … Ah! my lord, surrender before so much evidence, and make haste to repent]” (V, iv; V, V).² In his role as Dom Juan's valet, Sganarelle emerges as a commedia dell'arte type, invented and signed by Molière.

More than any love object, Sganarelle is Dom Juan's destined partner; despite Sganarelle's ambivalence, he remains faithful to Dom Juan. Molière's transformation of the Italian Harlequin figures brings Sganarelle closer to the rhetorical edge of his master. Leporello will owe his status to him; it is an indirect tribute to Sganarelle's importance that Da Ponte's Don Giovanni pleads with Leporello not to leave him. Leporello warns his master: “non credeste di sedurre i miei pari, Come le donne, a forza di danari [don't think you can seduce men of my type like women, with money].” Leporello's surrender to Don Giovanni's pleading (and bribery) comically underlines the parallel between the dire mastery that Don Giovanni exercises over him and over women: the valet cannot resist the seductions of his master.

This exchange between the disgusted Leporello and his libertine master in Don Giovanni II, i, continues a dialogue that was broken off at Dona Elvira's appearance in I, iv. The dialogue parallels the scene between master and valet in Molière's I, ii: Dom Juan describes his plot for kidnapping the fiancée he saw earlier, and Don Giovanni evokes his new passion for a lady who has promised to meet him that evening (I, iv). Da Ponte echoes Molière's motif of flight. In both works, the valet guesses that the reason for their recent journey (away from Done Elvire, in both cases) is a new conquest.

In these scenes, Don Juan explains to his dismayed valet his notion of loving all women: “je me sens un coeur à aimer toute la terre; et comme Alexandre, je souhaiterais qu'il y eût d'autres mondes, pour y pouvoir étendre mes conquêtes amoureuses [I feel within me a heart for loving the whole earth; and like Alexander, I would desire the existence of other worlds, for the power to extend to them my amorous conquests” (I, ii). In Don Giovanni Act II, scene i, Da Ponte recalls Molière's “comme Alexandre” speech: “Io, che in me sento sí esteso sentimento, Vo'bene a tutte quante [I, who feel in myself so great a feeling, I love them all].” Da Ponte's unrecognized and unacknowledged source is Molière's Dom Juan.

SPANISH FLAMES

Don Juan: Vite, adoréte, abraséme, tanto que tu amor me anima a que contigo me case. (Tirso de Molina, El Burlador)³

Before the Italian commedia dell'arte, the mediocre French renderings of Villiers and Dorimon, and the vanished text of Giliberto, a monk (and a popular playwright) who wrote under the pseudonym of Tirso de Molina created the first Don Juan in El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra. The popularity of El Burlador and certain textual coincidences with Dom Juan indicate the probability that Molière knew Tirso's text.

In El Burlador, Tirso invented Don Juan as a Baroque Christian “myth,” as a dramatic representation, and as an example of the inconstant lover masquerading under the rhetorical banner of courtly love. During the late 1650's a series of successful and popular Don Juan portrayals derived from Tirso by the French and the Italians were staged in Paris. The extensive transcriptions and take-offs on the popular Spanish comedia set the scene for Molière's inventive use of the tradition: in addition to shifts in tone, genre, and ideology, the interpretive developments that he proposes in his approach to the subject reveal changes in the mode of representation that shapes his text.

The spectator of Tirso's El Burlador is both a voyeur and a witness: he is assailed by the unmediated and brutal visual evidence of Don Juan's seductions and acts of trickery. Tirso's play focuses on a repeated demand for Don Juan's repentance within the Catholic frame of the Spanish Baroque; this exhortation is combined with a morbid insistence on the vicissitudes of human flesh that is characteristic of Trauerspiel. Within a highly emblematic discourse, the topos of repentance and the theme of the flesh alternate with intrigue, seduction, and the Golden Age refinements of courtly love rhetoric.

Compared with Molière's writing, the Baroque “précieux” style of Tirso's play seems antiquarian. In Le Dom Juan de Molière, Jacques Arnavon refers to Tirso in the following terms: “the play gives off a very mixed odor … A dramatic fantasy on ‘sin' … with … copious developments about the aforementioned sin, very complacently explained and detailed … the style, when it is not weakened by preciousness, … remains beautifully elevated. Tisbea, Catalinon, the valet, are not lacking in veracity despite faults of taste” (20-21).⁴ Although Arnavon's negative reaction to it preceded the revalorization of the Baroque, it is indirectly substantiated by Benjamin's emphasis on the antiquarian element in his concept of Baroque dramatic representation as Trauerspiel.

Tirso's graphic and occasionally lurid vocabulary of sexuality provides a startling contrast to Dom Juan. El Burlador confirms its direct visual mode with a similar violence on the level of language: the simultaneous unfolding of elaborately coded emblematics and an anti-euphemistic literalness about the body challenges the refined idiom of the courtier. This could be described as one of the great paradoxes of Trauerspiel representation and Baroque art. In Tirso's play, an idiom of literal and unmediated eroticism infiltrates the refined conceits of love. Through the intrusions that he effects as skillfully as the best political intriguer, the Spanish forerunner of Molière's Dom Juan prefigures the knots of his rhetoric. In Sganarelle's words, Dom Juan proposed the most conventional knot—marriage: “Il ne se sert point d'autres pièges pour attraper les belles, et c'est un épouseur à toutes mains [He does not use any other traps to catch beautiful women, and he is a bridegroom ready for anything]” (I, i).

Act III of El Burlador condenses Don Juan's strategy in the following conventional terms: “I saw you, I adored you, I burned with so great a flame that my love for you urges me to marry you” (III, 246-48). This speech to the peasant Aminta captures the essence of the Seducer's rhetoric of beautiful lies. The Don Juans of Molière, Mozart, and the earlier commedia dell'arte versions could have made this speech. Its effect and its content mark the origin of Don Juan's poetics of desire presented in the conventional terms of love.

The result is a representation of love as “true” (desire) and “false” (the promise of marriage). It is precisely because Tirso's play uses a conventional idiom of love to tell the scandalous truth of eroticism that the fictional Don Juan became a central figure at the crossroads of Baroque literary tradition. Truth and falsehood are knotted together in the conceits of courtly love discourse, but Tirso's idiom of desire preserves its metaphoric power through the explicit contrast in Don Juan's discourse between the metaphoric and the literal. The oblique Molière uses the comic-dramatic ambivalence and the commedia dell'arte nuances of Sganarelle's portrayal to articulate this contrast and to filter Dom Juan's “beaux mystères” of transgression through the beautiful mysteries of his rhetoric. The rhetorical veil that is essential to Dom Juan's effects in the play is preserved by Sganarelle's discordances and the skillfully projected incoherences of his discourse.

Between Tirso and Molière, a major rhetorical shift has taken place. Its effects on Dom Juan are articulated in the relation between eroticism and poetic language, and in the new importance of aesthetics within the play. A new subversion is at work: “quel diable de style! [what a diabolical style!].” Molière's reshaping of the tradition into a vehicle for an oblique portrayal of desire and an emphasis on rhetoric makes of Dom Juan a stylist. Dom Juan's libertinage becomes an art form: aesthetics unfolds its charms before the horrified gaze of ethics.

Speaking as Sganarelle, Molière articulates Dom Juan's ultimate role, as a literary stylist. The complete passage reads: “Quel diable de style! Ceci est bien pis que le reste, et je vous aimerais bien mieux encore comme vous étiez auparavant [What a diabolical style! This is much worse than the rest, and I would like you so much better the way you were before]” (V, iv). The remark is directed at a Dom Juan who disguises his black intentions in the Tartuffian trappings of piety. The implacable logic of this choice is partly masked by Sganarelle's shocked reaction to the “new” Dom Juan, but the first act already revealed a Dom Juan who claimed God (“le Ciel”) as his alibi for abandoning the dishonored Done Elvire, torn from her convent by his seductive discourse (I, iii).

When Dom Juan returns to this form of argument in Act V, Molière assimilates an eloquent explanation of religious hypocrisy and its negative powers within his portrait of the libertine. At this moment, Dom Juan comes dangerously close to an identification with the author (and the authority) of Tartuffe, who speaks out against the “dévots”: the writer places himself for a few minutes under the banner of libertine rhetoric.

The valet's complaint about a diabolical style that is even worse than the rest can be taken literally; Sganarelle's allusion to Dom Juan's disguise can be read as an unconscious comment on the version of libertine “noirceur” that appears in Dom Juan ou le festin de pierre. More eloquent than the Don Juans of Tirso and the Italians, Molière's character emerges in the diabolical power of his style, in the tropes that bear the blackness of his fictions. The constant displacements of rhetoric drive the libertine Master into an endless “changement” of love objects. Style subsumes the real; Dom Juan's tropes carry out the fictions of the libertine and carry language over into the realm of consummated desire.

Dom Juan's ongoing “diable de style” claims mastery over the Real (Lacan's “Réel”) until the end, when diabolical style leads to his infernal and unredeemable death. The supernatural elements of the play recast the rhetorical displacements of eroticism (the invitation, the offering of the hand, the inner flames of desire), in the allegorical encounter between the monument of the Commandeur and the condemned libertine.

Tirso's Don Juan expresses his desire on two rhetorical levels: the gallant “caballero” evokes the common poetic image of flames aroused by the object, and the great lord of noble blood and “pagñola arrogancia [Spanish arrogance]” (III, 745) demands that his object offer her hand to him in a gesture of solemn juridical and religious value. When Don Juan encounters the statue of the man he has murdered, he utters the first invitation. The Statue echoes Don Juan's motifs of erotic trickery and returns the invitation. He asks for Don Juan's hand, and transforms the lover's rhetorical flames into hellfire:

Don Gonzale: Dame esa mano, no temas, la mano dame.

Don Juan: Eso dices? Yo, temor? Que me abraso! No me abrases con tu fuego!

Don Gonzale: Este es poco para el fuego que buscaste [Give me your hand, do not be afraid, give me your hand. What did you say? I, afraid? I am burning! Don't burn me with your fire! It is nothing compared to the fire you sought]

(III, 944-49)

Molière's play maintains these parallel terms of seduction and punishment. The sacred overtones resonate retroactively when the Commandeur repeats Dom Juan's erotic motifs in the service of Heaven rather than the desires of the libertine. After Dom Juan repeats Sganarelle's invitation (“Le Seigneur Commandeur voudrait-il venir souper avec moi? [Would it please the Lord Commander to come dine with me?]” [III, v]) the Statue lowers his head in a sign of assent. Within the Stone Guest tradition, the impious young man who mocks the dead and the boundary between the living and the dead by uttering an invitation may still alter his fate, but in Molière's version, when the Statue comes at the appointed time to Dom Juan's table, he indicates that Dom Juan's time is up: “Dom Juan, c'est assez. Je vous invite à venir demain souper avec moi. En aurez-vous le courage? [Dom Juan, that is enough. I invite you to come tomorrow and dine with me. Will you have the courage?]” (IV, viii).

While Molière subtly uses his innovations—Done Elvire, Sganarelle, and the veil of rhetoric—to introduce art and the sublime into Tirso's framework of seduction, he preserves the three-fold structure of seduction in “El Burlador”: the invitation or the gift of the word (“‘la promesse que je vous ai donnée [the promise that I made to you]’” [III, iii]), the giving of the hand in return for the promise of marriage (“‘abandonnez-moi seulement votre main [give me only your hand]’” [III, ii]), and the flames of love (“une ardeur sans égale [a passion without equal],” “le ravissement où je suis [the rapture that is mine]”, [I, ii; II, ii]) that Pierrot comically describes when he finds Dom Juan kissing Charlotte's hand: “Tout doucement, Monsieur, tenez-vous, s'il vous plaît. Vous vous échauffez trop [Take it easy, my lord, behave yourself, please. You are getting much too overheated]” (III, iii).

During the brief final scene (V, vi), the Statue speaks: “Arrêtez, Dom Juan: vous m'avez hier donné parole de venir manger avec moi [Stop, Dom Juan: yesterday you gave me your word to come and eat with me],” and Dom Juan agrees: “Oui.” The heavenly “foudre [thunder]” that is aroused by a Luciferian refusal to repent in the preceding scene (V, v) when the feminine Spectre announced that only a minute remained for Dom Juan to save his soul (“S'il ne se repent ici, sa perte est résolue [if he does not repent here, his downfall is certain]”) burns Dom Juan with an intimate fire that consumes him. “Le Ciel” repeats the “ardeur” of Dom Juan's burning passion (“l'impétuosité de mes désirs [the impetuousness of my desires]” [I, ii]); it displaces (seducere) or “translates” the power of metaphor. This sacred “translation” or “seduction” is encoded as the invisible: in the final interiority of the play, the inner fire that assails Dom Juan is no longer identified with his desire. The hand of the Other—“le Ciel”—is supernaturally dramatized in the last scenes through several allegorical forms.

BAROQUE IMAGES

In Molière's text, these allegorical forms progressively lose their object-like character, their materiality and opacity; they become more elusive, ethereal, and evanescent. Spiritual and sublime, they enter the pure present tense. Modernist descendants include the Mallarmean point of a poetic enunciation and the mystical instant of ecstacy invoked by Benjamin's reading of Proust.⁵ This present occurs in the fleeting moment of Dom Juan's fictions, in the artful instant staged by the Baroque image.

The allegorical progression that leads to the supreme vanishing point, the instant of representation bequeathed to modernity by the Baroque, begins in the beautiful “tombeau” (described by Dom Juan as a “magnifique demeure [magnificent dwelling]”) that contains a “superbe mausolée” and the imposing marble likeness of the Commandeur's Statue. The appearance of this monumental representation is followed by a disembodied apparition of the feminine and suggestively Done Elvire-like Spectre. It appears first “en femme voilée [in the form of a veiled woman],” and then as a completely allegorical “figure” of “le Temps avec sa faux [Time with its scythe],” before it disappears completely (“s'envole”) to return to the realm of sacred signs, “le Ciel.” In the final instants of the play, the Spectre evaporates into the thin air of allegory, and the sacred receives its most minimal figure as the “invisible” of divine retribution, interiorized within the libertine body.

The feminine figure fades away; her ethical message arrives at the last moment, to guarantee the subtle allegorization of the invisible. The materiality of the libertine object implies the libertine doctrine of materialism that fled the spiritual element as Dom Juan eluded Done Elvire; at the end of Molière's play, the material opacity of the object approaches the zero point.

What remains after the sacrifice has been consummated? The process of allegorization that points toward the meaning and end of jouissance is figured in a synesthetic finale on stage, when the libertine body disappears. The terms are reversed: the “invisible fire” inside Dom Juan appears on stage, and suddenly it is Dom Juan who leaves the visible realm. All that remains before the spectator is the tableau of the last Baroque image of the “invisible”: Heaven's “tonnerre [thunder],” the substanceless “éclairs [lightning bolts]” and “grands feux [great fires]” and the empty space of the abyss (“la terre s'ouvre et l'abîme [the earth opens and engulfs him]”). The uncensored edition of 1682, quoted by Couton, reveals Molière's intentions for the final overturning of Dom Juan's desire. This version completes Dom Juan's final sentence and stages the concluding fireworks with a Baroque flourish in the character of Molière's court “impromptus” and “divertissements”:

Dom Juan: O Ciel! que sens-je? Un feu invisible me brûle, je n'en puis plus et tout mon corps devient un brasier ardent. Ah!

(Le tonnerre tombe avec un grand bruit et de grands éclairs sur Dom Juan; la terre s'ouvre et l'abîme; et il sort de grands feux à l'endroit où il est tombé)

Dom Juan: [O Heaven! what do I feel? An invisible fire burns me, I can no longer bear it and my whole body becomes a burning blaze. Ah!

(Thunder falls with a great noise and great strokes of lighting on Dom Juan; the earth opens and engulfs him; and great fires come from the spot where he fell)]

(V, vi).⁶

Hellfire ends Molière's Night play of libertinage and “noirceur.”

NIGHT SHADOWS

Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla begins with the following stage setting: “Room in the palace of the king of Naples. Night. There is no light.” The curtain rises on the concluding moments of a consummated seduction: a typical victory for Don Juan is illustrated in the undisguised satisfaction that is articulated and displayed by Don Juan's love object, the duchess Isabela. In the first lines of the play, Tirso indicates the motives for her surrender. Don Juan says: “Duquesa, de nuevo os juro de cumplir el dulce sí”; Isabela answers with an anticipation of the legality of jouissance: “Mis glorias serán verdades,” and Don Juan assures her: “Sí, mi bien” [“again I swear to give you the sweet consent; my raptures will be true / truly enjoyed; yes my treasure”] (I: 3-8). Isabela's turn of phrase (“mis glorias”) conflates an image of sacred light with an image of theatrical and visible public presence in the resonance of a typical Baroque metaphor. She seems to be saying that the transient delights of jouissance, described as her “glories,” will be made “true” (or permanent) when her lover marries her.

In this first instance of the infamous broken promise, the man to whom the duchess Isabela has given her sexual favors (upon receiving an assurance of the “sweet yes” of marriage) is disguised as the duke Octavio, her fiancé. The evanescence of Don Juan's proposal and the undisguised blackness of his motives are dramatically highlighted by the verbal exchange that follows and its interplay of literal sexual language and emblematically coded metaphoric imagery. Eroticism unfolds through a strategy of artifice and falsehood, compounded by an assumed identity, and the ubiquitous broken promise of marriage. Isabela's happiness leads her to the terrible discovery that sets the plot in motion: she wants to light up the dark room (“Quiero sacar una luz” [9]) and when the alarmed (although masked) Don Juan asks her why she wants light, she answers: “Para que el alma dé fe del bien que llego a gozar [In order that the soul/heart may show the enjoyment (jouissance) that I reach]” (11-12). The figures of speech that Isabela uses in this first scene refer to a sexual enjoyment that is inseparable from the honorable enjoyments of marriage. Don Juan replies: “Mataréte la luz yo” [I will put out the light]” (13). His refusal plunges her in the horrible darkness of sin and dishonor, when his “engaño” is discovered. Her good (“bien”) turns to evil: her praises turn to lament. She begins by invoking heaven (“Ah, cielo!”), and asking the disguised (“embozado”) Don Juan who he is.

Isabela's “glory” and the light she wants to illuminate it secretly resonate within a vocabulary of Baroque aesthetics, where the Glory is a Catholic representation of the halo of light that surrounds the Holy Spirit or its presence in manifestations of the Trinity, the Transfiguration, or the Resurrection. Isabela's “glory” seems to echo the hieratic and aristocratic overtones of Corneille's concept of “gloire,” but the erotic and Christian contexts of her statement (and Tirso's play) locate the text of El Burlador and its descendants in the field of Baroque representation elaborated by Bernini rather than in the texts of French Classicism. Neither Molière nor Tirso can be understood according to Corneille's vocabulary, but the pervasive theme of “glorias” and the melancholic evanescence evoked by the scene between Isabela and the masked Don Juan who claims to be Octavio share a certain rhetorical power with Bernini's vision of the Gloria Petri. Bernini designed and sculpted the Glory in Saint Peter's Cathedral, a work that is considered by art historians to mark definitively the high point of the Baroque, during the time when Molière was writing and staging Dom Juan.

The first lines of Tirso's play set up the opposition between light and dark, good and evil, heaven and hell. Don Juan's discursive technique of “engaño” is presented as a discourse of courtly love; it projects a fantasmatic unity of desire and marriage before the eyes of Don Juan's objects. In Tirso's portrayals of women, it is the feminine fantasy that shimmers on the distant horizon of distinguished ladies as well as peasants and fisher girls. Tirso illustrates it in the figures of Isabela's speech.

The discourse of love in the play is a balancing act or a counterpoint between Don Juan's undecidable mixture of punishment and pleasure and a projected feminine version of courtly love rhetoric. The feminine version surrenders to the evanescence and violence of eroticism Baroque style by dissolving it in the “happy ending” of the Law. Tirso typecasts his Baroque oppositions of love as masculine and feminine, but the black portrait of desire that is under the rhetorical masks of courtly love—Don Juan's sweet nothings and his victims' fantasies of wedding glory—seems to challenge any discourse of sexual unity with the hair-raising vision of the drives.

At the edge of the sculpted folds of Bernini's most hieratic and important tomb monuments, madcap skeletons are poised ready to reach out for the viewer, or hold up an hourglass emblem. The mystery that Freud found in the drives, those odd couples, was registered in the books of the Baroque as the mysterious proximity of death and love. The emblems of Trauerspiel marry them together … Y'a de l'Un. There is one. The Baroque found that union at the end of the line, in the figures of sex and death, or marriage and resurrection. Love is the ultimate conflation; it plays on both sides. Death and love, hearts and bones, are the end-points of Trauerspiel emblematics. Hamlet tells the truth: his father's life-line ultimately ends with the end of weddings. Tisbea also speaks the truth when she lovingly reminds Don Juan that he must think of his own death.

Isabela's thinly veiled rhetoric of erotic satisfaction confirms and counterpoints Don Juan's language: he is distinguished by his success, his sadism, and his sexual punishment of women, rendered inseparable from the ambiguities of jouissance in Tirso's representation. These elements of Tirso's first scene form the background of the tradition. The discourse of love is twofold, in Tirso's play and in the tradition of love stories that he enters, disrupts, and begins again in the name of Don Juan Tenorio. Tirso sets the masculine against the feminine; he portrays love as a battlefield of desire against marriage. On another level, he makes Don Juan into a disruptor of couples on the verge of blissful unity in marriage. In this sense, Don Juan figures the importunity of desire, its refusal to be domesticated in the house of marriage, and its inherent transgression. Tirso inscribes the figure of desire with the name of Lucifer.

Don Juan's negativity maintains a constant separation between his desire and the object: social and spiritual harmony are not on his agenda. The figure of Don Juan originates in the mythical stature of the fantasy of sexual harmony that Lacan designates in the statement “Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel [there is no sexual relation]”: the Don Juan tradition confirms this separation or disharmony by matching the terms of Don Juan's seductions and the motifs of his punishment. When the sweet talk of sexual harmony reaches its final destination, the “Other” as the ear of the heavenly Father, the Stone Guest—a monumental image of a powerful earthly father—is sent to arrange for the Seducer's disappearance into a fiery abyss.

Don Juan's negativity (his erotic powers of destruction) designates the black realities behind the discourse of courtly love. Catalinón tells his master: “Ya sé que eres castigo de las mujeres [I know that you are the punishment of women]” (I:894). When Don Juan pretends to be Mota in order to trick his friend's beloved cousin Ana, the musicians sing: “Todo este mundo es errar [This world is all illusion]” but the play clearly indicates that he, Don Juan, is the source of illusion. When Dona Ana realizes that the disguised Don Juan is not Mota, she condemns his misuse of a lover's language: “Falso!, [Liar!]” (II:507, 510). The Baroque motifs of illusion and inconstancy are tailor-made for Don Juan. They inform and motivate his erotics of trickery, his destruction of honor, and his violations of sanctity, chastity, and virginity.

Throughout the course of Tirso's play, however, it is the unfaithful and cavalier (!) attitude of women that is emphasized, rather than the dubious practices of the male nobility.⁷ The social status of women condemns them to the punishments inflicted by Don Juan's irresistible seductions, but the consequences condemn them long after the sadistic Don Juan has been plunged into the fiery abyss, in spite of the happy ending that is provided when a patriarchal figure like a King or a “Commander” smooths things over with a lot of weddings. Molière does not include Tirso's happy ending; later versions, including the Mozart-Da Ponte opera, do not return to Tirso's final solution. After writing Mozart's libretto for Don Giovanni, Da Ponte knew what the implications of libertinage meant for the social continuity of the “non-rapport sexuel [sexual non-relation]”; his tragicomic unveiling of the “truth” of love in Cosí Fan Tutte, a late collaboration with Mozart, resonates with a tone of detached understanding that does not sound any less feminist for being the product of Da Ponte's identification with libertinage. The lighthearted yet melancholy conclusion of the opera shows the realism of the aging Don Alfonso, the “Philosopher” who has played all of the characters like marionettes after his two friends set the plot in motion by making a bet with him on the virtue of their fiancées. Their outrage at his initial insinuations is matched only by their fury when they realize that they have tricked their fiancées into being unfaithful to them. When they ask the “Philosopher” how they can punish the women they still love, he replies: “Marry them!”

Tirso's scene of eroticism is masked in the blackness of Night—the hours sacrificed to criminals, libertines, Specters, visions, and dreams—and the literary blackness of the unlit Spanish stage. Don Juan begins the play by extinguishing the light of Isabela's faith, honor, and “glories”: her lamentation of libertine blackness resonates in the gap between Don Juan's two discourses of love, the courtly idiom of love that he uses to mask his identity and the “other” discourse of undisguised desire and conquest: “yo engañé y gocé a Isabela la duquesa [I tricked the duchess Isabela and enjoyed her flesh]” (I: 67-68). The double darkness of night and literary artifice leads to Molière's representation of libertine desire in Dom Juan: the discrepancy between the figured and the literal idioms of eroticism (elaborate Trauerspiel emblematics and the “man-to-man” dialogue that Tirso moves from the royal palace of Naples to the sleaziest alley of Seville without changing a word) disappears in Molière's play. The new role of Sganarelle is associated with an oblique account of eroticism, the highlighting of seduction rather than trickery, and Molière's aesthetic investment in the rhetoric of desire. It is possible that Molière's subtlety and “délicatesse”—a notion that is a masterpiece of libertine strategy, because it implies that the Seducer has aesthetic principles that never allow him to use language unworthy of the courtier—brought out a possibility for “noirceur” (independently pursued in the eighteenth century) that made his play for more subversive than all the lurid potential of Tirso's several hundred works for the stage. The libertine is neither a pagan nor a hero; he is empowered to tell lies precisely because “la vérité du language est chrétienne [the truth of language is Christian].” Neither Molière nor Marguérite de Navarre made this declaration: several hundred years later, it was written by Georges Bataille,⁸ another writer preoccupied with Dom Juan and the impossibility of truly domesticating eroticism. Through transgression and obscenity, revelation and the ineffable, the philosopher in the boudoir cannot get rid of language.

In El Burlador, when Don Juan enters the bedroom of a peasant bride, Aminta, she laments: “Ay de mí! yo soy perdida! En mi aposento a estas horas? [Woe is me! I am lost! In my room at such hours?]” (III: 205-06). He speaks for all his donjuanesque descendants when he replies: “Estas son las horas mías [Such are my hours]” (207). Don Juan tells her that he burned with a love that impels him to marry her; she gives herself to him, the self-styled “Burlador de Sevilla” who triumphantly names himself in an aside to the audience. Isabela's laments are heard in the lines that follow this episode; they are addressed to the Night, as if the horror and loss that were caused by Don Juan's gallantries and sealed in the metaphorics of light and darkness at the beginning of the play had expanded beyond the constellations of language to the impersonal and voiceless source of blackness: “Oh, máscara del día! Noche al fin tenebrosa, antípoda del sol, del sueño esposa! [Oh, mask of day! tenebrous shadowed Night, antipode of the sun, bride of sleep!]” (III: 303-305). Molière's emphasis on rhetoric moves in the opposite direction; the blackness of Night and flames of Hell shape Don Juan's libertine turns of phrase.

MASKS AND HEARTS

At the beginning of Molière's play, Sganarelle puffs himself up with comically serious pronouncements about virtue designed to distract his interlocutor's attention from Don Juan. Gusman continues to question him about his master's “heart,” however, and Sganarelle attempts to excuse Don Juan's behavior for reasons of “youth” and “nobility” (“sa qualité”). When Gusman responds to Sganarelle's cautious references to “l'autre” (his Master) and his euphemisms about his own “experience” by invoking “les saints noeuds du mariage [the holy knots of marriage],” Sganarelle trades mystery for mystery: “tu ne sais pas encore … quel homme est Dom Juan [you do not know yet … who Dom Juan is].” Gusman tries another tactic to gain information; he offers an explicit narration of Dom Juan's seduction of his mistress. The rhetorical parity continues; Sganarelle suddenly abandons his euphemisms and tells the “whole story” of his master's libertine practices. The rhetorical display that began with detachment and understatement concludes with hyperbole in an explosion of graphic epithets. Sganarelle provides a final affirmation of his word with his declared intent to deny the truth of what he has just announced.

Sganarelle's speech takes the form of a rhetorical abstract of the play: the valet's commentary conceals Dom Juan behind the blackness of his own masks and illuminates him with an infernal “portrait.” Sganarelle paints his master as a libertine on the edge of eternal damnation: “Suffit qu'il faut que le courroux du Ciel l'accable quelque jour … [It suffices to say that heavenly wrath must descend on him some day]” (I, i).

Molière constructs Sganarelle's conversation in the first scene as the “stage” for an oblique and decisive performance: the absent Don Juan is masked and then revealed. But unlike the beginning of Tirso's play, the “light” shed on Dom Juan by Sganarelle turns into another mask—the rhetorical inflation of Dom Juan's evil powers through a series of titles: “un Diable, un Turc, un Hérétique, qui ne croit ni Ciel, ni loup-garou, qui passe cette vie en véritable bête brute, en pourceau d'Epicure, en vrai Sardanapale … [a Devil, a Turk, a Heretic, who does not believe in Heaven or werewolf, who spends this life as a truly untamed animal, as an Epicurean boar, as a true Sardanapalus].” This description combines the sacred and the comic in mock-heroic epithets of emblematic hyperbole: Sganarelle's version of the truth provides another smokescreen. The scene ends with Sganarelle's denial: “écoute, au moins je t'ai fait cette confidence avec franchise … mais s'il fallait qu'il en vînt quelque chose à ses oreilles, je dirais hautement que tu aurais menti [listen, at least I spoke to you in frank confidence … but if some part of it happened to reach his ear, I would say out loud that you had lied].” Sganarelle's series of negations and denegations conceals and reveals the truth about Dom Juan; after all, Sganarelle gives Gusman anything but a straight answer. Like other skilled illusionists of Baroque art, Sganarelle transfigures his subject and portrays him in a mythical and theatrical framework that stuns the viewer and stops him in his tracks.

Sganarelle gives Gusman an image of the “transported” lover (“tant d'transports enfin et tant d'emportements qu'il a fait paraître” [I, i]) that lingers as a fixed monument to libertine inconstancy. Gusman already knows that Dom Juan is a master of rhetoric: Sganarelle's answer instructs the squire in the pleasures and horrors of libertine desire that are the heart of Dom Juan's rhetoric, and the only heart of the libertine artificer. The “cruel and heartless” Burlador enters Molière's text in Sganarelle's words as the “coeur de tigre [tiger's heart]” (IV, vi) or the seduction-loving “coeur” of the “plus grand coureur du monde [the greatest chaser in the world]”; Dom Juan's heart is enchanted only by the allegorically impersonal otherness of Beauty. He states: “la beauté me ravit partout où je la trouve [beauty ravishes me everywhere I find it],” but allegory fades away for Dom Juan until later, when the sacred intervenes in the forms of statues, a veiled feminine specter, and so on.

Beauty is represented by one woman after another, and the “heart” of Dom Juan's calculating hommage to courtly love rhetoric covers up the unsentimental reality of desire: “une beauté me tient au coeur [a beauty occupies my heart]” (I, ii). Dom Juan's “impétuosité” anticipates the focus on the ceaselessness of the drives in Freud's metapsychology; the “heart” of courtly love talk masks the heartlessness of the burning flames of desire. In Don Giovanni (II, xiv), Da Ponte restages the “festin” scene between Done Elvire and Dom Juan, shortly before the arrival of the Statue. Parallel to Sganarelle's exclamation of “coeur de tigre!” (IV, vi), Leporello utters the revealing epithet of “cor di sasso [heart of stone].” In Molière, the reader has been prepared by Sganarelle's account of his master to understand that the nameless “beauty” will be in Dom Juan's “heart” only until her name can be inscribed in the list of his erotic acquisitions. Like the translated form of the murdered Commendatore, the monument of the Stone Guest, Don Juan's heart is made of stone.

Notes

1. A good example of this type is in Goldoni's Il servitore di due padrone, a play that documents commedia dell'arte in written form, according to Goldoni's explanation in his preface.

2. All translations are my own.

3. “I saw you, I adored you, I burned with so great a flame that my love for you urges me to marry you” (III: 246-48).

4. “la pièce dégage une odeur fort mêlée … Une fantaisie dramatique sur le ‘péché’ … avec … de copieux développements sur ledit péché, fort complaisamment expliqué et détaillé … le style, lorsqu'il ne s'affadit pas en préciosité, … y demeure d'une belle élévation. Tisbea, Catalinon, le valet, ne manquent pas de vérité malgré des fautes de goût.”

5. See the discussion of this question in Schlossman, The Orient of Style and “Proust and Benjamin: The Invisible Image.”

6. See Molière, OC vol. 2, p. 1319. This variant is confirmed by Mahelot's Mémoire about the stage sets ordered by Molière for the play; the props for the “foudroiement” of Act V included resin for the “éclairs” and a trap door (ibid., pp. 1299-1300).

7. In his introduction to Tirso's play, Pierre Guénoun makes a somewhat surprising attempt to justify—in the name of history—the misogynistic clichés and emblems piously uttered by most of the male characters: “Pour ne pas commettre d'erreur à ce sujet, il faut bien voir que l'Espagne du XVIIe siècle était un corps à tradition patriarcale qui craquait de toutes parts sous une poussée matriarcale particulièrement vive. Les pères avaient, théoriquement, à la romaine, droit de vie et de mort sur les mères et sur les filles qui se montraient légères. En fait, les mères et les filles étaient si délurées que les pères n'avaient aucune autorité” (my underlining). Guénoun presents Tirso's Spain as a threatened masculine body, a patriarch menaced by sexually provocative women. El Burlador, 11.

8. “Fragment sur le christianisme,” 382.

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