SOURCE: Resina, Joan Ramon. “What Sort of Wedding? The Orders of Discourse in El burlador de Sevilla.” Modern Language Quarterly 57, No. 4 (December 1996): 545-78.

[In the following essay, Resina argues that El burlador de Sevilla reflects the growing social instability of early seventeenth-century Spain.]

As an age of transition between social paradigms, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were eminently characterized by destabilization and efforts at containment. At the beginning of the period early bourgeois individualism set off internal wars and revolts that shook all of European society. The growing emphasis on order and integration revealed the limitations of power and the contradictions between new social forces and inherited patterns of meaning. In Spain, however, the core of the absolutist state preserved the structures of a society based on privilege. The dominant class's attempt to suppress a radical transformation of society gave rise to the absolute monarchy, a protonational political framework that retained the seigniorial values of caste and honor while it abandoned feudal relations of personal dependence. To ward off the new social forces, the ruling class aimed such measures as the Inquisition, clean-blood statutes, and selective taxation at the carriers of the “new subjectivity”: the upcoming commercial and juristic bourgeoisie, the reform-oriented humanists, and especially the “new Christians.” As the sixteenth century drew to a close, this social group, which often overlapped with the other two, was ever more vehemently defined by an obliterated past and by an unsuccessful “naturalization” in the traditional Christian caste. But its upward thrust for social mobility was blunted by a racial-religious ideology supported by the conservative, largely rural population and implemented by the Inquisition. Ostensibly concerned about the contamination of the Christian faith, the inquisitors were in fact bent on eradicating a more palpable danger. Their enemy could not yet be given positive attributes, and so it was indexed by traditional stigmata such as racial or religious identity traits. But the Inquisition was right to suspect that the new subjectivity would take root more readily among groups that, having lost their traditional identities, were receptive to the new possibilities offered by the crisis of feudalism.¹ The disaffection of such groups predisposed them to seek reform.

Besides downright repression, the pressure for social reorganization was met with the idealization of the medieval axiology. Good Christians were old Christians; the caste system was preserved in the newly erected racial statutes; and the values of the feudal elite were reinvigorated by the obsession with honor that now gripped society. Heroism, romance, and the higher imperative of honor were the forms in which these values were articulated, and the theater was the medium through which they were popularized. Redeploying obsolete forms and drawing its materials from medieval chronicles and ballads, the comedia circumvented the contradictions of the times and fulfilled a decisive ideological function. It was not a state apparatus, however, as Melveena McKendrick takes pains to point out, but a powerful reflector of dominant values, as all ideologies are.²

Of the large corpus of works in the Spanish drama of the baroque, Tirso's El Burlador de Sevilla is often singled out because of its irregularity. Juan Carlos Rodríguez observes that the comedia reacts to the penetration of art by Neoplatonic erotics (which he associates, somewhat problematically, with a “bourgeois matrix”)³ by translating this erotics into the blood-and-honor principle of feudal ideology.⁴ He notes, however, that in Tirso the deployment of feudal motifs is interrupted by the presence of the erotic dialectic, “like a strange value embedded in the habitual ‘tangle’ of the plot, muddling the sense of the play” (108). Following Rodríguez, Malcolm K. Read notes: “In Don Juan the old organicist consolations of essence and identity are replaced by an endless becoming. This explains the strange, otherwise contradictory reactions of the State, which moves quickly to defend Don Juan as its own even as it condemns him for subverting its law and order.”⁵ For these critics, Tirso's El Burlador appears to reevaluate feudal conventions, even if the challenge posed by the suspension of the traditional decorum is finally repulsed by the authoritarian principle.

However, it may be more accurate to say that Tirso distorts the transmitted semantic structures only to reaffirm them more radically. He voices the internal contradictions of a society organized by the honor principle while lifting this principle not only above feudatory contingencies but also above the intervention of the king, who in the comedia is always the arbiter and guarantor of the social order. Expressing these conflicting impulses in generic terms, Anthony J. Cascardi notes that the play's resolution sets it squarely within the dramatic conventions of the comedia: “As an anti-narrative, El Burlador de Sevilla threatens to dissolve into the simply repetitious and potentially gratuitous actions of Don Juan. And yet Tirso encloses this anti-narrative within a framework that, by virtue of the telos of divine justice and punishment, subsumes Don Juan within the most orthodox of theocentric paradigms.”⁶ Elsewhere Cascardi points out that the satisfactions offered by the play depend on the “highly contrary generic expectations” it develops in the audience and adds that its closural strength must be accounted for by the intensity of the antecedent pleasures, “notwithstanding the fact that those pleasures must also be repressed.”⁷ Thus repression can be the source of a counterpleasure insofar as it confirms formal expectations and reconstitutes an order that has been tantalizingly disrupted by one of its beneficiaries. Such a counterpleasure is the key to consent on the part of a populace that is co-opted by its participation in the honor ideology while it is portrayed as the chief victim of transgressions against the order that this ideology supports.

For all its persuasiveness, Cascardi's interpretation inevitably raises objections because it is based on the primacy of caste distinctions. According to Cascardi, Don Juan's transgression of bloodlines undermines “the very basis on which divisions of caste are founded” (“Don Juan and the Discourse of Modernism,” 154). Yet Don Juan refuses to bind himself to a different bloodline. Even when he lures victims by promising to abolish the social gap between himself and them, he quickly distances himself again afterward. When Tisbea objects to his offer (“Soy desigual / a tu ser” [But I'm not your equal]), Don Juan supports his demand with a revolutionary erotics (“Amor es Rey / que iguala con justa ley / la seda con el sayal” [Love is a King ruling us all—silk or sackcloth—at the same level (932-5)]).⁸ Yet the appeal to love's authority in the figure of the monarch reveals that for members of the lower classes participation in the aristocratic value of love requires, like actual ennoblement, the extraordinary intervention of the highest social instance. But having teasingly proposed it, the play preempts this intervention through an even more extraordinary power. In the end social boundaries remain undisturbed.

Furthermore, Don Juan belongs to a social group, the nobility, that has been “contaminated” by racial intermarriage far more than the old-stock peasantry.⁹ Thus his apparent lack of concern for the lineage of his victims challenges neither caste stratification nor the prejudices of the seventeenth-century audience. Aminta expresses the popular sentiment when she says, “La desvergüenza en España / se ha hecho caballería” [Shamelessness has become nobility in Spain (1969-70)]. As a matter of fact, caste is never in question, since honor, which is incompatible with a blemished lineage, always reposes in Don Juan's victims. As he puts it:

el mayor
gusto que en mí puede haber
es burlar una mujer
y dejarla sin honor.

(1308-11)

[My greatest pleasure is to seduce and abandon women and leave them without honor.]

Tirso's play is devoid of allusions to the caste system or to the racial anxiety that Cascardi, following Castro, posits as the social background of the comedia. One cannot question the pure-blood ideology without exposing the class divisions whose formulation it is designed to prevent. As Cascardi himself points out, “A caste society is overtly moral in its evaluations, but only covertly economic” (“The Old and the New,” 6). Such a society moralizes economics by disguising it in archaic categories that are already moralized. Wealth is the effective social engine, but it is subsumed under traditional principles like honor or blood so that potential disruptions to the vertical social organization can be controlled. In El Burlador the only reference to caste appears in Gaseno's appeal to honor as a principle that overrides class boundaries and justifies his daughter's marriage to a nobleman:

Doña Aminta es muy honrada
cuando se casen los dos,
que cristiana vieja es
hasta los huesos.

(2663-6)

[Doña Aminta has much honor if the two marry, because she is an old Christian down to her bones.]

Of course, Gaseno means that his daughter, being an “old Christian,” shares the blood privilege of the dominant class; however, what he actually says, in a telling hyperbaton, is that she will be honored to marry Don Juan. The assertion rings comically true, because Don Juan has dishonored her. Gaseno's linguistic awkwardness is fully intentional, and it is not an isolated case. Noël Salomon points out that Tirso's peasants are often confused and speak foolishly in the presence of the king.¹⁰ If Gaseno's words are meant to be humorous, as they seem to be, then Tirso's position vis-à-vis the caste axiology takes on a different perspective. Apparently subordinating racial division to class stratification, Tirso shows that a social identity based on caste underlies Don Juan's abuses. The comic intent is reinforced by the legal inadequacy of Gaseno's claim that Don Juan must marry his daughter. Since the middle of the sixteenth century such claims had been voided by a theological franchise granted the nobility in the case of a broken promise of marriage.¹¹

Tirso's assessment of the ideological function of caste within a class society is even clearer in a different context. In La villana de la Sagra a nobleman decides to marry the daughter of a wealthy peasant. Though economically motivated, the bridegroom countenances the socially disadvantageous match by telling himself that the bride is racially unimpeachable:

No es igual el casamiento;
pero tampoco seré
el primer noble que esposa
llame a una aldeana hermosa,
ni mi sangre afrentaré;
que al fin es cristiana vieja
de todos cuatro costados.

(quoted in Salomon, 795)

[The wedding is not between equals, but I will not be the first nobleman to call a beautiful peasant his wife, nor will I debase my blood. She is after all an old Christian on the side of all her ancestors.]

The monologue throws into relief how caste appears to be the basis of social mobility, when in fact money is.

In its baroque origins Don Juan's dynamism, later mythicized as an inexhaustible energy or as the power that is always in him,¹² is based on class distinction. His boundless arrogance is a distortion of the courage on which the nobility's privileges are allegedly founded. So shrill an assertion of the ancestral axiology reveals that the nobility is conscious of being no longer the unquestioned repository of social values. The rift between these values and their actualization fosters the sense of incongruity that pervades the baroque and the comedia. In El Burlador this rift motivates the action through a dramatic technique that Everett W. Hesse calls “situational irony.”¹³ Don Juan enjoys the privileges of his rank yet falls short of its requirements. Don Gonzalo condemns him for his essential flaw:

Seguirále mi furor,
que es traidor, y el que es traidor
es traidor porque es cobarde.

(1592-4)

[My fury will pursue you, traitor! A traitor is a traitor out of cowardice.]¹⁴

But as the play shows, it is less a question of cowardice than of insecurity. Don Juan's feelings of inadequacy are historically motivated; his restlessness stems from the anxiety of not measuring up to his precursors: “Podrá el muerto / llamarme a voces infame” [The dead man could proclaim that I am vile (2734-5)]. The past, personified in the dead, judges him on the sore point of aristocratic virtue:

D. Juan:
                    ¿Me tienes
en opinión de cobarde?
D. Gonzalo:
Sí, que aquella noche huíste
de mí, cuando me mataste.
D. Juan:
Huí de ser conocido.

(2754-8)

[D. Juan:
                    Do you think I am a coward?
D. Gonzalo:
Yes. You fled the night you killed me.
D. Juan:
I fled so I wouldn't be recognized.]

In an aristocratic society courage is inseparable from class identity. To be known, to be in good opinión, is to reflect the values of the nobility. Only then is the individual acknowledged as a social entity. From a class point of view, Don Juan's attempt to excuse an axiological failure (“Huí” [I fled]) through social ambiguity (“de ser conocido” [so I wouldn't be recognized]) is hardly acceptable. In a society ruled by honor, such ambiguity signals a lack of being. That is why Don Juan counters Don Gonzalo's ironic quip, “Valiente estás” [You're spirited, aren't you?], with the only indisputable advantage that the epigone can boast of: the possession of a body. “Tengo brío / y corazón en las carnes” [I have valor and a heart in my body (2769-70)], says Don Juan to the statue.

For Don Juan, the living body is the proof of presence. It guarantees the permanence of value in the vertiginous vanishing of the world and thus itself becomes the only value. Through the body Don Juan seeks to overcome the axiological skepticism of his class. He does not so much transgress social norms as reverse their relation to the body. Honor, which feudal convention conceives as the antithesis of the body, especially the bodies of women, fades under Don Juan's breath.¹⁵ But the bodies linger as enduring proof of his having been there. Reversing the precedence of the law over the senses, of social over corporeal reality, Don Juan's actions point to an incipient epistemological change, which appears in a modified relation to language. Aware of the evanescence of words, Don Juan embraces nominalism. For him, the law no longer has ontological primacy; words only mediate, and thus bridge, the distance to the body. If Don Gonzalo exclaims, “Muerto honor” [Dead honor (1571)], before he dies, then in Don Juan's language the same image anticipates the fullness of a body: “Muerto voy / por la hermosa pescadora” [I'm dying for that gorgeous fisherwoman (685-6)]. In both cases the metaphor expresses a subjective truth, but the speakers rely on entirely different semantic authorities.¹⁶ Don Gonzalo's speech is ruled by the father's authority, which circumscribes bodies with an identity circle that may be crossed only under the most extraordinary circumstances if social being is to survive the ingress of sensual, organic reality. Societies legitimate such crossings through various “rites of institution,” which stage transgression of the social order that they are meant to safeguard.¹⁷ By multiplying the transgressions without heeding the institutional limits, Don Juan threatens to erase the lines that the rite of marriage consecrates: the line of sexual difference, which he endangers by encouraging the sexual autonomy of women, but above all the class line, maintained by the system of honor and by the father's authority over the marriage contract.¹⁸

Don Juan does not disown the father's authority but turns it against itself. He makes a rite out of the rite, dissociating it from its intended function. The paternal world is derealized, and the urge to certify the body's truth ironically speeds its phantasmatization.¹⁹ Batricio alludes to eternal pleasure with Aminta—“Gózala, señor, mil años” [Enjoy her a thousand years (1935)]—but Don Juan knows that the illusion will last only until dawn and has his horses ready. As Camus remarks, he “does not think about ‘collecting’ women. He exhausts their number and with them his life opportunities.”²⁰ The instability of pleasure, as of the body, goes apace with Don Juan's consumption. Caducity awaits him at the end of every adventure; it transfigures every return. His question “¿Qué hay de Sevilla?” [So what's new in Seville?] must always beget the answer “Está ya / toda esta Corte mudada” [The whole court has changed (1204-5)]. Mutability, which the seventeenth century experienced chiefly as decomposition, goads desire and sets the stage for the cynical eroticism of the baroque. Mota's report on the physical deterioration of women is strongly reminiscent of Quevedo's or Góngora's bitter-gay descriptions of the aging body. A creature of the times, Don Juan reacts to the prevailing sense of extinction by attempting to ride the crest of the flood. Since engaño is the essence of the world, he strives to accomplish “la burla más escogida” [the best joke yet (1998)].²¹

It would be inexact to say that Don Juan takes his authority from desire. Desire, as the modern age understands it, that is, as a positive, autonomous force capable of blasting social constraints, does not possess authority yet. Its role as a legitimate agent is only beginning to emerge in Tirso's day. In the meantime, it must draw on the commonplace, on what commands public consent.²² Don Juan speaks the language of the law with the voice of desire; his authority over his victims stems from the appropriation of the principle of order by an asocial urge. He draws on the law as if it were personal funds:

Si es mi padre
el dueño de la justicia
…
… ¿qué temes?

(2001-4)

[What are you afraid of? Isn't my father the owner of justice?]

In doing so, Don Juan threatens the law with the desire that it ignores, but at the same time he shows that it has always been inscribed by desire.²³ His impersonations of Duke Octavio and the Marquis de la Mota reveal the presence of desire in “lawful” relations,²⁴ while Aminta's seduction exposes the ambiguity of marriage vows.

Don Juan shows that deception (decipere, “to take in, to catch”) is at the root of the law. Using authoritative discourse illegitimately, he collapses the distinction between law and desire, exposing their common origin in arbitrary power. Honor becomes law; that is, it commands allegiance, insofar as it is sanctioned by the distribution of enjoyment as a class privilege. (This is why Don Juan had to be an aristocrat.)²⁵ Honor is a disciplinary instrument for the monopoly of pleasure and the subjection of bodies. Predating the internalization of the law and the development of inner discipline, it guarantees domination through punishment.²⁶ To a large degree the comedia fine-tunes this system. Although the plays represent time and again the punishment of aristocrats, honor remains the possession of the master class, which stakes out the pleasure domain with taboos or interdictions.²⁷ So Don Juan resorts to the law as a means of deceit. By “impersonating” a socially authorized voice, he not only evades social control but turns its symbols into facilitators.²⁸ Through his engaño the death of honor yields the truth of pleasure. Thus honor can be enjoyed through its death and transfiguration into a sensual body:

D. Juan:
Que ha muchos días, Batricio,
que a Arminta el alma le di,
y he gozado …
BATRICIO:
                                                                                ¿Su honor?
D. Juan:
                                                                                                    Sí.

(1899-1901)

[D. Juan:
It's been some time, Batricio,
since I've given my soul to Aminta,
and I've enjoyed …
BATRICIO:
                                                                                Her honor?
D. Juan:
                                                                                                    Yes.]

Don Juan's promiscuity with bodies is introduced by the promiscuity of discourse. His transgressions are first and foremost transgressions of linguistic boundaries. Jean-Yves Masson says it trenchantly: “That's what is scandalous about his conduct: the sin of Don Juan is not a sin against the flesh [sic] but against the word.”²⁹ The burlador's discourse fuses two socially incompatible languages, using the signifiers of the honor system for the benefit of a sensuality that cannot be named in this system. As Beryl Schlossman remarks, in El Burlador “the simultaneous unfolding of elaborately coded emblematics and an antieuphemistic literalness about the body challenges the refined idiom of the courtier.”³⁰ Endowed with opposite linguistic values, signifiers open the abyss of meaning in which seduction consists. The lady's hand, which Don Juan never fails to request, is a synecdochic fetish in the system of desire, but it is also a symbol with performative force in the system that regulates social exchanges.³¹ Giving and accepting it seal a marital contract. Don Juan collapses the two systems, applying the symbolic force of words to deregulated, asocial exchanges. The resulting indifferentiation mines the semantic field. Aminta's predicament points to the breakdown of language and reveals the inability of traditional discourse to express the subjectivity of desire:

No sé qué diga,
que se encubren tus verdades
con retóricas mentiras.

(2100-2)

[I do not know what to say. You wind your truths in poetical lies.]

Linguistic failure marks the moment of Don Juan's triumph (Felman, 28). He masters his victims by locking them in undecidability. Since it depends on illusionism, undecidability is pregnant with dramatic force, and a coup de théâtre is needed to underscore its semantic circularity. Molière achieves the effect brilliantly by confronting his deceiver with the irreconcilable claims of Charlotte and Mathurine to his love (Don Juan 2.2). His Don Juan, a master of rhetoric, is forced to admit that “tous les discours n'avancent point les choses” [argument leads nowhere] and must refer the truth to a mute subjectivity: “Est-ce que chacune de vous ne sait pas ce qui en est, sans qu'il soit nécessaire que je m'explique davantage?” [Isn't it sufficient that each of you knows the truth, without my having to say anything further? (53)].³² Don Juan's “truths” lack social authority, and so he tries to legitimate them rhetorically.

Tirso's play points to the limits of discourse and implies the need for a new linguistic order. This need is fully articulated by Francis Bacon in his tract Temporis partus masculus [The masculine birth of time] (c. 1603), which attempts to legitimate the new discourse—just as Don Juan does—by invoking paternal authority and the rite of marriage. “My dear, dear boy,” says the father in Bacon's tract, “what I propose is to unite you with things themselves in a chaste, holy, and legal wedlock.”³³ Bacon is at one with Don Juan not just in his rhetorical appeal to traditional forms of legitimation but also in the object of discourse: “things themselves,” natural bodies, the very objects of desire. The scientist and the libertine differ only in the effect of their strategies. Whereas Bacon aims to wed discourse to things and aspires to a new legitimacy, Don Juan emphasizes the disparity between words and things, language and being, seeking not truth but engaño. He misappropriates socially authorized discourse and transgresses against the emerging epistemology, based on the univocal correspondence between words and things.³⁴ Illegitimate discourse, in Bacon's view, is promiscuous; it “piles fantasy on fact without distinction” and “fails to differentiate between types of discourse in respect of their ‘lawful’ objects” (Reiss, 220). But this indistinctness is the source of Don Juan's opportunities in a world “compuesto de errores” [made of errors (1549)], a world that Bacon's master of discourse describes as “universal madness” (Reiss, 221).

Don Juan confuses different types of discourse to produce illusory communication. Tampering with codes, he creates a parodic effect that both dissembles and achieves his purpose, as when he plans Aminta's seduction: “A su padre voy a hablar, / para autorizar mi engaño” [I'll go speak with her father to authorize my deception (1949-50)]. He wields words against scruples just as he wields his rapier to get past the Comendador's body, which stands before him like a set of conceits. Both of Don Juan's weapons, rhetoric and sword, have performative equivalences in the honor code. The sword endorses the nobleman's every utterance and can be unsheathed by a single word. But the dramatization of honor in the cloak-and-sword plays evinces an ideological function. In other words, the code can be represented because it has lost its unquestioned immediacy. If one can use it to spellbind an audience (or a victim), that is, if one can deflect it from its performative function and turn it into a performance, it is because the code has lost its historical necessity. Tirso himself helps us to this insight. Is not the Comendador's high-flown rhetoric undermined by his appearing onstage as a half-naked, maladroit fencer? His threadbare military metaphors—barbacana caída [fallen barbican], torre del honor [tower of honor], alcaide la vida [life the warden (1575-8)]—are as superannuated as his figure, which is devoid of knightly virtues.³⁵

Nevertheless, at the end of the sixteenth century the old aristocratic values fulfilled an integrating role by co-opting large segments of the population to support the traditional social structure. In Moreto's play Primero es la honra a peasant woman remarks the promotion of such values among the peasantry:

Muy bien sé lo que es honor,
que también allá en el pueblo,
el cura nos lo predica.

(quoted in Maravall, 39 n. 29)

[I know quite well what honor is, because the priest preaches it to us in the village.]

El Burlador reflects the same development. The peasant Batricio's naive identification with the system of domination that victimizes him ensures Don Juan's triumph over him: “Con el honor le vencí” [I won, using his own sense of honor against him (1939)]. In surrendering to an abstract value, Batricio is a counterpart of Don Gonzalo. Certainly, both are victims of Don Juan, but the analogy points, more profoundly, to the linguistic conditions of deceit. Batricio and Don Gonzalo share a common discourse and sacrifice their desire to it. Batricio responds to the alleged loss of Aminta's honor with a death wish (“Que yo quiero resistir, / desengañar, y morir” [I want to resist, be undeceived and die (1936-7)]), just as Don Gonzalo consents to his own death (D. Juan: “Morirás.” D. Gonzalo: “No importa nada” [D. Juan: “I'll kill you.” D. Gonzalo: “No matter” (1581)]) after hearing of the loss of his daughter's honor:

“Muerto honor,” dijo, ¡ay de mí!;
y es su lengua tan liviana,
que aquí sirve de campana.

(1571-3)

[“Dead honor,” she says. God, her tongue's so loose—a bell ringing out the news.]

The parallel between the two men shows that Batricio's desengaño and symbolic death, like the Comendador's actual death, are decided by a discourse based on the authority of public appellation. Such authority is expressed by the metaphor of the bell:

BATRICIO:
La mujer en opinión,
siempre más pierde que gana,
que son como la campana
que se estima por el son.
Y así es cosa averiguada,
que opinión viene a perder,
cuando cualquiera mujer
suena a campana quebrada.

(1923-30)

[BATRICIO:
Honor and women are bad
when gossiped about.
Women are like bells,
judged by their sound.
Everyone knows
a woman's value goes down
when she sounds damaged.]

In contrast to his victims, Don Juan resists the appellation. He is “un hombre sin nombre” [a nameless man], flees from “ser conocido” [being recognized], and takes the names of others. He rejects the limits of identity, just as he defies the authorities' attempts to confine him (first Don Pedro's order that he keep a low profile in Sicily or Milan [109] and later his banishment to Lebrija by the King [1080-4]). Don Juan's resistance to avowing his name suggests not the anonymity of the sexual drive, as Gregorio Marañón speculates, but a revolt against the authority inscribed in the name.³⁶ Hence the provisional nature of his resistance and also its theatricality, the masking and unmasking of the subject struggling with the forces engaged in its socialization. In the end these forces triumph. As Don Juan asserts his name—“Soy Tenorio” [I'm Tenorio (2521)]—he is met by a counteridentity: “Y yo soy / Ulloa” [And I'm Ulloa (2521-2)]. The names are fateful. They designate not individual subjects but lineages and thus underscore the gravity of the speakers' actions. It befits Don Juan's inconstancy that his socialization is accomplished by a statue. A form of poetic justice, the irony of his fate evinces the gap between subjectivity and the social code.³⁷ It puts an end to the trickster's shifting between two different registers by trapping him in an ancestral code appropriately embodied by a dead father.

As soon as Don Juan avows his lineage, he finds himself attached to the signifier. The father's name brings with it the entire code of aristocratic values, which Don Juan must ratify:

Honor
tengo, y las palabras cumplo,
porque caballero soy.

(2503-5)

[I'm a nobleman. I'm honorable and keep my word.]

He must also ratify the alleged virtues of his class, above all courage. Courage, not religious faith, is the subject under debate between Don Juan and the dead.³⁸ But the knight's steadfastness does not betoken a flourish of individualism; rather, it substantiates his class credentials. Contrary to an accepted interpretation, his death completes his socialization, not his revolt.³⁹ Promising to obey the statue—“Que mi palabra te doy / de hacer todo lo que ordenes” [I give you my word, I'll do whatever you ask (2495-6)]—Don Juan is as good as his word: first he keeps his appointment at the church; then, as directed by the dead man, he sits, eats, and gives out his hand.

In granting “legitimacy” to the father's discourse, Don Juan becomes a counterpart to his own victims. He is deceived by the rhetoric of the dead man, who exploits semantic ambiguity by drawing on the code of the organic, living body. The handshake, as the executive symbol of a gentlemen's pact, is voided by the elementary fact that Don Gonzalo has no hand to offer. The statue is purely semiotic; its words are literally no more than a figure of speech. Yet Don Juan's anxiety about the nature (i.e., the trustworthiness) of his own word occasions a contest that is resolved in the body. Only this space is in dispute between the subject and the law. Don Juan has misappropriated the discourse of the law to procure sensual bodies; now the law turns the tables on him, honoring his word in exchange for his body. He is symbolically subjected before he is physically annihilated, but the two acts are really one, since the logic of honor implies physical sanction: “Bajo esa palabra y mano” [By these words and your hand (2510)], which Don Juan simultaneously holds out, the Comendador is already certain of his counterblow.

Though ostensibly charged with an edifying message, the scene with the statue is oddly mute about transcendental issues. In the epic tradition the hero asks the dead weighty questions concerning the afterlife and the fate of the living. El Burlador adopts this topos, too, as the epic tradition flares up for the last time in the casuistry of the comedia. But here the dead man refuses to answer the knight's questions, because an answer would amount to a (metaphysical) pronouncement on values that the comedia buttresses and propagates. Whereas Anchises assures Aeneas that the empire will have no end,⁴⁰ Don Juan's question about the Comendador's transcendental fate remains unanswered.⁴¹ From the point of view of the aristocracy's legitimation, the issue is hardly trivial, but the statue focuses instead on the moot question of Don Juan's class comportment. In a world shaken by skepticism and threatened by the rise of subjectivity,⁴² the dead are themselves uncertain about the link between past and present and are anxious lest their successors break it. Therefore they demand the permanence of the codes and the arrest of the signifiers. The word must be attached to the system of values, Don Juan's discourse to the ancestral discourse. With the question “¿Cumplirásme una palabra / como caballero?” [Will you give me your word as a gentleman? (2502-3)], the statue solicits not a constative statement but a performative one. It demands a binding acknowledgment that subjects the living body to a historical paradigm. The word must be not only given but kept, fastened, held static in a meaning determined by a class imperative.

Thus the statue's demeanor seems compromised by the mendacity that a number of critics have detected in its words.⁴³ From a religious point of view, the burla of the beyond presents problems. It is hardly surprising that efforts have been made to explain it away.⁴⁴ But the difficulty is not dispelled by assuming that Don Juan misunderstands the statue⁴⁵ or by considering the dead man a projection of his psyche.⁴⁶ As a “representative of the moral conscience” of Don Juan, the Comendador would still be at odds with his behavior (Feal, 34). The problem may be approached more fruitfully from the perspective of conflicting discourses. The question is not whether the statue says what it seems to say or whether Don Juan is hearing an echo of his own mind but, rather, in what discursive order and on what authority the statue's intervention is justified. Is it legitimated by the paternal authority that once pitted Don Gonzalo against Don Juan? This authority has already proved disingenuous. As a father Don Gonzalo has been accused of bad faith by his daughter:

Mi padre infiel
en secreto me ha casado,
sin poderme resistir,
no sé si podré vivir,
porque la muerte me ha dado.

(1319-23)

[My faithless father has married me off behind my back, so there's nothing I can do. I can't live like this, it's death sentence.]

The father is unsafe ground for the semantics of desire, a treacherous figure of speech that alienates meaning in a transcendent system of signification. Skeptical of symbolic systems, Don Juan has nevertheless anticipated Don Gonzalo's treachery by calling on himself a punishment commensurate with his transgression against the word:

Si acaso
la palabra, y la fe mía
te faltaré, ruego a Dios
que a traición y [a] alevosía,
me dé muerte un hombre, (muerto,
que vivo, Dios no permita).

(2123-8)

[If by chance I fail in my word and don't keep faith with you, I pray to God that I be killed treacherously by a man [aside] who is dead. Not a live one, heaven forbid!]

Don Juan's linguistic duplicity can be checked only by the treachery of the signs. Having used symbolic codes in bad faith, that is, without faith in the transcendent ground of the signifier, he is punished by the return of the symbolic.

Don Juan operates in a system of strict referentiality, reducing symbolic terms to body semantics. When he says to Aminta, “El alma mía / entre los brazos te ofrezco” [I offer you my soul in my arms (2130-1)], he truncates the symbolic code to an appendage of the physical communication taking place as he speaks. For this reason he can be “taken in” by a reversal of the paradigm. From the point of view of Don Juan's empirical discourse, the statue is insidious, because it puts the semiotics of immediacy at the service of a second order of discourse, which substitutes honor for the body, self-control for pleasure. Catalinón notices this restraint: “Poco beben por allá, / yo beberé por los dos” [They don't drink much there, do they? I'll drink for both of us (2450-1)]. The allusion to the servant's fondness of drinking befits the comedia's decorum, which retains the classical convention of assigning base bodily interests to the lower class. But Catalinón himself points out the implications of the honor-body conflict in a remark hardly suited to his role of gracioso:

Hombre es [Don Gonzalo] de mucho valor,
que él es piedra, tú eres carne,
no es buena resolución.

(2477-9)

[Don Gonzalo is a superior man. He is stone, you're flesh, the outcome can't be good.]

The heterogeneity of the signs makes their discourses incompatible: flesh and stone cannot be resolved in one meaning. Furthermore, worth (valor) is assigned to the symbolic system and pitted against empirical reality. The King commissioned the statue, ordering that it be done “en Mosaicas / labores, góticas letras” [in mosaic work and Gothic script (1674-5)]. It is a reminder of the transience of life and the permanence of the law, which the script identifies with the medieval (Visigothic) jus based on honor and retribution.⁴⁷

The body is inscribed by the law as soon as it falls into the sphere of power, from which the statue's discourse is seen as perfectly coherent with its intention. It redresses the autonomy of the signifiers and affirms the permanence of the signified. The statue's reassurance to Don Juan—“Dame esa mano, / no temas, la mano dame” [Give me your hand. Don't be afraid. The hand. Give it to me (2811-2)]—does not detract from the awe of power, nor is it meant to. Rather, it concerns the binding force of honor and the worth (valor) of its symbols. The law empowers the statue, making its words equivalent to the gesture they name. Those words, like the outstretched hand, have executive force. In the contest between discourses of different worth (valor), the injunction not to fear refers to the binding nature of the pact that hands Don Juan over to the law. Don Juan has anxiously asserted his aristocratic integrity and the value of his word. Now the statue assures him that his word and his hand are honored. In other words, they are encoded by the law as soon as the signifier is resolved in the pledge: “Bajo esa palabra y mano” [By these words and your hand (2510)]. But Don Juan's semiotic system is still of the flesh, and he reaches out his hand as one who can slip away with the signifier. He translates the statue's words, an inscription in stone, into the code of the body without discerning the annihilating force of symbolic transcendence. Here too, though in reverse, the metaphor of death mediates the transition between law and pleasure.

Interpreted in a single register (whether traditional morality or eschatology), the play's inescapable lesson is that the dead cheat the living. Life is relentlessly inscribed, turned into the medium for a transcendence that negates it. Projected against a baroque background of disillusion and nothingness, Don Juan's materialism does not resolve itself in the purposive action of bourgeois reason. The sepulcher dissolves it, and death turns it into an exemplum of life's futility and the endurance of order. For all the talk about God and the beyond, this death has no transcendence. On this side of the grave Don Juan's actions are gnawed at the core by the worm of futility. His behavior is redundant because it is purposeless; it stems from his wish to avoid a goal that is nevertheless inscribed in each of his actions. His assault on women's honor is an assault on the paternal world. Yet each assault takes the form of an honorable pledge that announces Don Juan's transformation into a father figure. He refuses the transformation because the father is an image of time and an anticipation of death. He responds to reminders of death by stretching time until it stands still. When his father warns him “que es juez fuerte / Dios en la muerte” [that God is a stern judge after death], he replies: “¿En la muerte? / ¿Tan largo me lo fiáis? / De aquí allá hay larga jornada” [After death? So much time before it's due? The journey there is long (1441-4)]. But in the end death comes to Don Juan in the form of a father.

In El Burlador the father is an ineffectual figure; that is why there are so many of them.⁴⁸ Don Diego is a weak father who leaves punishment to God:

Pues no te venzo y castigo
con cuanto hago y cuanto digo,
a Dios tu castigo dejo.

(1461-3)

[Since I cannot subdue or punish you with what I do or say, may God punish you.]

The irony of the deferral is apparent: Don Diego is the King's minister of justice—“el dueño de la justicia” [the owner of justice (2002)], in Don Juan's words. The King steps into the father's role by declaring Don Juan to be of his own making:

Gentilhombre de mi Cámara
es Don Juan, y hechura mía,
y de aqueste tronco rama.

(2639-41)

[Don Juan is a Gentleman of my chamber, a creation of mine, and a branch of my tree.]

But he himself is incapable of asserting his authority. Don Juan makes light of his banishment, and when the King finally condemns him to death, the sentence comes too late to do more than keep up the appearance of justice rendered.

No sooner has the King pronounced the death sentence on Don Juan than Don Diego asks for it. Both the sentence and the request are redundant, but they make sense as a compensatory display of authority. The proclivity to delay, which so resembles Don Juan's adjournments, indicates neither that social powers are incapable of reconstituting order nor that Don Juan eludes human justice permanently.⁴⁹ What is the statue if not the quintessence of social power and a baroque table of the law? Certainly, Don Juan's behavior casts doubts on this authority, but his very existence is based on the discrepancy between mediate social forms and direct experience. And fathers are unequal to their role in their corporeal immediacy, not in their symbolic authority. In the end the social powers do take action against Don Juan, but they do it mediately, through the violence of symbols.

The comedia harks back to medieval themes and values in part because it aims to neutralize the changes that have taken place since the Renaissance. To stamp them out, the renewed seigniorial power requires a view of social life that treats history as if the previous crises had never been. Likewise, in El Burlador the reconstituted order is oblivious of any effects left by the crisis just surmounted. As the King puts it, “La causa es muerta, / vida de tantos desastres” [The cause that gave life to so many disasters is now dead (2997-8)]. So the marriages resume as if the shadow of lust had not drifted between intention and meaning, because, as Alexander A. Parker notes, “this symbolizes the restoration of the social order.”⁵⁰ Again discourse is reduced to a single register.⁵¹ The arrangement of the couples reinstates the exclusionary boundary under the pretense of a symbolic exchange. The partners are sorted out in socially restrictive combinations under the pretense of a natural (i.e., uncompelled) affinity.⁵² Since the affinity cannot be erotic attraction—the principle of disorder that has just been repressed—the play introduces an anachronistic regulatory principle: kinship. Members of the younger generation marry their cousins, with the exception of Octavio, whose marriage to Isabela is dignified by the construing of her post-Don Juan status as “widowhood.” Kinship unites Doña Ana with the Marquis de la Mota, as well as Batricio with Aminta and Anfriso with Tisbea, although the family ties between the peasants have not been mentioned previously. Indeed, since Batricio uses the plural form nosotros when he announces multiple marriages between cousins, it seems clear that he speaks for a well-defined social group. In his phrase, marriage between cousins stands catachrestically for class endogamy. Thus, although the social order is reconstituted, its next crisis is already announced by what this order represses: social mobility.

Although the play ends with the King ordering the preservation of memory, the archive turns out to be a baroque memento mori, the very image of futility:

Y el sepulcro se traslade
en San Francisco en Madrid,
para memoria más grande.

(2934-6)

[Transfer the tomb to St. Francis in Madrid so the world will remember.]

Missing from the restored order is the awareness that it comes in the wake of Don Juan's lightning passage. Missing, too, is an understanding that this passage leaves unexpungeable traces. Don Gonzalo is dead, Tisbea deflowered, and though the living and the dead may be appeased through revenge, they cannot be restored to their former condition. Tisbea, on the other hand, cannot be fully claimed by the renewed order, because her experience contains traces of a libidinal discourse that the social code will not admit. This discourse is not that of history, which Don Juan represses just as keenly as the defenders of honor. His refusal to become a father prevents him from fulfilling the conditions necessary for a new social discourse: opening theocentric time onto a historical future, an event that Bacon called the “masculine birth of time.” There is a strong link between Don Juan's relation to time and his affront and final submission to the honor code. If honor, as Hans J. Jacobs thinks, is the vehicle for a principle that produces temporality as a correlative of “virtue,” then the time involved can only be theocentric time, a static time that fulfills an ahistorical order.⁵³ But the etymon of virtue must not be lost sight of, because what Don Juan spurns, along with virtue, is the generative power of the vir, the mature man. His affront to paternal morality involves a refusal of time.

Don Juan rules out not the static time of preordained experience, however, but the time of difference and irreversible transformations.⁵⁴ This is why death bursts on him with the force of the unexpected (Jacobs, 32). Don Juan lives in a continuous present; his life, as Hans Mayer observes, is a series of fulfilled moments in which past and future reflect each other, casting the same image of pleasure.⁵⁵ This present is the shadow of a life that has already been acted out. When the play begins in the darkness of the Duchess's antechamber, Don Juan is already a copy of himself, Isabela a replica of a previous victim. Tisbea, too, reproduces a paradigm. She is another, somewhat humbler Queen Dido:

Mi pobre edificio queda
hecho otra Troya en las llamas,
que después que faltan Troyas,
quiere amor quemar cabañas.

(992-5)

[My poor hut's another Troy in flames. But there are no more Troys to take, so love stoops to burning huts.]

Don Juan also takes his cue from an epic hero: “Necio, lo mismo hizo Eneas / con la Reina de Cartago” [Fool, Aeneas did the same with the Queen of Carthage (902-3)]. Models, it turns out, determine other characters, too: not only the Comendador as a rash avenger of his daughter's honor but old Tenorio as well. To be a father is also to be trapped in the logic of a model. When Catalinón alludes to Don Diego's paternal feelings—“Fuese el viejo enternecido” [He's crying]—Don Juan snaps back: “Luego las lágrimas copia, / condición de viejos propia” [Those tears follow a pattern, that's what old men do (1464-6)].

Since life is a series of repetitions for Don Juan, he must be an unreflective character, a pure gesture culminating in the stage effect, exactly like the Comendador, his counterimage. From the moment of his conception Don Juan has been destined for the stage, where interiority, if it plays a role at all, is externalized in the aside.⁵⁶ By projecting the past into a future that is permanently postponed, Don Juan transforms the present into a bad eternity. His time is also the time of the statue, a frozen present ruled by the dead. All the same, the discourse of desire leaves traces of time in the gaps of this eternity. Even the contraption that freezes the present, the memento mori, leaves a margin for desire, which Don Juan converts into intimations of future time: “De aquí allá hay larga jornada” [It's quite a stretch until I'm gone (1444)]; “Tiempo mañana nos queda” [There will be time for that tomorrow (1987)]. Yet he cannot develop this margin into a coherent, self-sufficient space. Lacking coherence, Don Juan's truth turns into deceit. By supporting desire with the socially authorized discourse, he can produce only a dichotomy:

AMINTA:
Vete, que vendrá mi esposo.
D. Juan:
Yo lo soy. ¿De qué te admiras?
AMINTA:
¿Desde cuándo?
D. Juan:
                                                            Desde ahora.
AMINTA:
¿Quién lo ha tratado?
D. Juan:
                                                            Mi dicha.
AMINTA:
¿Y quién nos casó?
D. Juan:
                                                            Tus ojos.
AMINTA:
¿Con qué poder?
D. Juan:
                                                            Con la vista.

(2057-62)

[AMINTA:
Leave. My husband will come.
D. Juan:
I am your husband. Why are you so surprised?
AMINTA:
Since when?
D. Juan:
                                                            Since now.
AMINTA:
Who arranged it?
D. Juan:
                                                            My happiness.
AMINTA:
And who married us?
D. Juan:
                                                            Your eyes.
AMINTA:
With what authority?
D. Juan:
                                                            With a glance.]

If Don Juan could triumph over the statue, he would overcome the confusion of discourses in favor of a univocal discourse of the senses. Bacon tried to do it by establishing a discourse based on natural law, which would raise the discreet truths of intuition to the status of legitimate knowledge (Reiss, 221). But Don Juan is at odds with the laws of nature. He partakes of contrary principles and thus calls forth the monstrous, which Tisbea employs to explain her unnatural metamorphosis under his influence:

En sus pajas me dieron
corazón de fortísimo diamante,
mas las obras me hicieron
de este monstruo que ves tan arrogante
ablandarme, de suerte
que al sol la cera es más robusta y fuerte.

(2215-20)

[Among those thatched rooms, I was given a heart as strong as diamond. But the deeds of this arrogant monster have softened me to the point where wax melting in the sun is even more robust and strong than I am.]

Although she refers ostensibly to the sea, from which Don Juan emerged, she clearly has the latter in mind: a monster in whom “the status of ‘nature’ is ambiguous” and who “represents the disorder of the elements” (Masson, 49). Tisbea expresses the confusion of the elements with a mythological image:

Parecéis caballo Griego,
que el mar a mis pies desagua,
pues venís formado de agua,
y estáis preñado de fuego.

(616-9)

[You seem so much like a Greek horse that the tides have deposited at my feet. You're drenched in water, and yet you carry fire inside you.]

Don Juan cannot be represented empirically, much less allegorically. Neither scientific nor legal language can express him. Only a fable, a discourse lacking social legitimation, may apprehend the strange, because the strange evades both the univocity of scientific discourse and the conceptual and moral oppositions of socially authorized discourse. From the point of view of either code, mythology is a linguistic scandal. Hence it can signify the scandal of Don Juan.

Tisbea's resorting to the category of the strange is emblematic of Tirso's response to the epistemological crisis of the seventeenth century. Tirso, like other playwrights, confronts the sensual realism of the emerging bourgeois world with the honor metaphysics of feudalism. He settles for the traditional order but does so through unconventional, highly spectacular means, which is of course the essence of the baroque. Tisbea's choice of the Trojan horse as a rhetorical image bears out Tirso's technique. For the horse is not only an image of seduction but also the most theatrical moment in the entire Greek epic. A stage prop designed to overpower the Trojans through illusion, it anticipates Tirso's use of stage machinery to contrive an image of the strange. The two images, the larger-than-life horse and the larger-than-life statue, stand for the treachery of signs and are linked through the awe they inspire in audiences. The category of the strange mediates a historicizing insight, though admittedly in a tacit, unformulated way. In defamiliarizing experience, it presses against the limits of cognition and thus posits the need for a different code. The Greek horse exposes the weakness of a worldview that can be overthrown by an ambiguous sign. In El Burlador the statue is treacherous only at the moment that Don Juan grasps for conventional meaning in a situation ruled by the ambiguity of the signs.

The frequently debated issue of Tirso's attitude toward the traditional order must be pondered in relation to the emergence of concrete realities that presuppose a new relation to signs. From the point of view of the semiotic paradigm at work, the idea that Tirso condemns the nobility and the honor code is not quite correct (cf. Fernández Turienzo, 46; Molho, “Sur le discours idéologique,” 339). Such a critique requires the identification of a new paradigm according to which the traditional values appear superseded.⁵⁷ This paradigm is implicit in the materialist perspective of the novel, especially the picaresque, but is lacking in the comedia. Tirso himself has no vision of a new order and thus can only present it negatively and from the point of view of the old. For him, it does not open fresh possibilities but is a futile transgression that exhausts itself in blind rehearsals of the same. Tirso's singularity among authors who contributed to the comedia lies in his thematization of the historical crisis as a linguistic impasse. While the comedia stages a reaction in defense of established meanings, he rises in El Burlador to a consciousness of the anxiety brought on by this crisis and to a metadramatic reflection on the strategies for its containment. He rises, that is, to an awareness of the social function of the comedia.

This awareness may explain Tirso's grasp of dramatic resources. It is remarkable that the literary slackness of the play does not detract from its dramatic force, which arises largely from the tension between discursive orders that is built into the dramatic structure in the form of competing plays. In its double title, El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra announces a historical sequel of revisions and variations based on the alternatives inherent in the initial dramatic collision. Tirso does not invite the spectator to choose between the order of feudal society and the new order, as Masson proposes (39-40). His own choice is clear enough. Significantly, however, Tirso's work thematizes the need to choose and does so with full consciousness of the function of signs. But the urgency of the choice does not make Don Juan a utopian figure (Feal, 5). To the extent that he threatens traditional boundaries, pointing to a beyond that is nonetheless kept in abeyance, he is better described by Ernst Bloch as a “figure of venturing beyond the limits.”⁵⁸ But since the limits remain implicit in the venture, which has no goal except repetition, it seems more fitting to designate Don Juan a figure of excess. Because he exceeds the consensual paradigm, he points to a world off-limits, a world that, when it comes, will hardly prove utopian. But the sense of that future is hidden from him, since the stone block thrown across his path converts historical experience into blind compulsion and the infinite series.

Notes

1. The signal presence of these groups in activities and professions linked to the evolving loci of ideological struggle is shown exhaustively by Américo Castro. Unfortunately, Castro, for all his use of phenomenological concepts like morada vital and vividura, remains bound to the essentialist categories he depicts.

2. McKendrick's objection to Maravall's ideological analysis of the comedia confuses state apparatus and ideological function (“Values and Motives in the Comedia: A Revisionist View of the Maravallian Orthodoxy,” Journal of Hispanic Research 1 [1992-93]: 263).

3. José Antonio Maravall considers it indisputable that Platonism functioned as an ideological mechanism for the conservation of the medieval social structure (Teatro y literatura en la sociedad barroca [Madrid: Seminarios y ediciones, 1972], 114).

4. Rodríguez, Teoría e historia de la producción ideológica: Las primeras literaturas burguesas (siglo XVI), 2d ed., Akal universitaria, 143 (Madrid: Akal, 1990), 107. Translations of quotations from secondary texts are mine.

5. Read, “The Ideological Transformations of Tirso's Don Juan: Laws of Change and Traces of Desire in Baroque Linguistics,” Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literature 1 (1992): 151.

6. Cascardi, “The Old and the New: The Spanish Comedia and the Resistance to Historical Change,” in Renaissance Drama 17 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies, 1986), 12.

7. Cascardi, “Don Juan and the Discourse of Modernism,” in Tirso's Don Juan: The Metamorphosis of a Theme, ed. Josep M. Sola-Solé and George E. Gingras (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 154.

8. El Burlador de Sevilla, ed. Alfredo Rodríguez López-Vázquez (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1987); Tirso, Don Juan of Seville, trans. Lynne Alvarez, Plays in Process, 10, no. 6 (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1989). Occasionally I alter Alvarez's translation when accuracy requires it.

9. As Américo Castro points out, the comedia reflects popular resentment against the nobility by alluding to the racial impurity of this class (De la edad conflictiva: El drama de la honra en España y en su literatura [Madrid: Taurus, 1961], 206).

10. Salomon, Recherches sur le thème paysan dans la “comedia” au temps de Lope de Vega (Bordeaux: Féret et Fils, 1965), 82.

11. Martín de Azpilcueta (1491-1586) states in his Manual de confesores y penitentes that if a nobleman stands accused of having seduced a peasant woman, it can be surmised that she is pretending to have been deceived, and therefore he is not bound by his word but can end the proceedings with a monetary settlement (Américo Castro, “El Don Juan de Tirso y el de Molière como personajes barrocos,” in Hommage à Ernest Martinenche [Paris: Editions d'Artrey, 1939], 100). After the Council of Trent (1545-63) this position was held generally. In his Suma de casos de conciencia (1595) Manuel Rodríguez similarly holds that the nobleman is not obliged to marry a lower-class woman, even if she was a virgin, because she should have known that he did not mean to keep his word (Francisco Rico, “La salvación de Don Juan,” in Breve biblioteca de autores españoles, Biblioteca breve [Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990], 251).

12. Ramiro Maeztu, Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1938), 90; Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kirkegaard's Writings, 3-4, vol. 1. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 101.

13. Hesse, The Comedia and Points of View (Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1984), 87.

14. The indictment of cowardice has been seized by some critics. See Robert ter Horst, “On the Character of Don Juan in El Burlador de Sevilla,” Segismundo 9, nos. 17-8 (1973): 37; Everett W. Hesse, “Tirso's Don Juan and the Opposing Self,” in Theology, Sex, and the Comedia, and Other Essays, Studia humanitatis (Madrid: Turanzas, 1982), 64-9; and Hesse, The Comedia and Points of View, 91, 158-61. These critics do not take into consideration Don Juan's dauntlessness when he defies the royal guard in Naples, saves his drowning servant, or keeps his appointment with the dead after he has had a foretaste of the encounter. The imputation of cowardice must be understood in the circumstances under which it is made. Since the betrayal of which Don Gonzalo speaks can only refer to Don Juan's breach of honor, the charge of cowardice is intrinsic to this breach and does not prejudge Don Juan's resolve in dangerous situations. In the feudal code honor and courage are deemed inseparable; when the code is not upheld, cowardice is presumed.

15. “Que la mujer corresponde / a su sangre y no a su ser” [Woman belongs to her blood, not to her being], says Lope de Vega in El Duque de Viseo (quoted in Maravall, 98).

16. Doña Ana also resorts to the metaphor. First, after Don Gonzalo has secretly arranged her marriage, she experiences the law as the death of desire (1319-23). But after her desire transgresses the law, it becomes a “fiero enemigo” [fierce enemy (1565)]. Doña Ana demands the death of the body of desire, inverting the metaphor to express the change in her social status: “¿No hay quien mate este traidor / homicida de mi honor?” [Won't someone kill this traitor, my honor's murderer? (1568-9)].

17. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 118.

18. In the comedia the class line is the significant one. Thus rakes who limit themselves to women without honor (such as prostitutes) do not provoke the indignation of the social authority. What distinguishes Don Juan is that “he has extended his deceits to any woman he encounters” (Leo Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan [1959; rpt. New York: AMS, 1967], 14).

19. This is why the final encounter with the revenant, far from being extrinsic to the play, is such an effective coup de théâtre.

20. Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), 101.

21. The baroque intuition of universal deceit is conveniently expressed by a choruslike figure. In the second act a musician says, “Todo este mundo es errar, / que está compuesto de errores” [To be in this world is to err, because it is made of errors (1548-9)].

22. As Peter Evans points out in an article that otherwise supports an anachronistic concept of desire, Don Juan's loco amor [sexual frenzy] “stems as much from doctrina … as from his own idiosyncratic personality, which in any case is a composite of living and literary ideals and commonplaces” (“The Roots of Desire in El Burlador de Sevilla,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 22 [1986]: 234).

23. Paul Julian Smith, on the other hand, emphasizes the priority of social determinants: “All desire is underwritten by social inscription and no passion uncompromised by cultural and historical determinants” (Writing in the Margin: Spanish Literature of the Golden Age [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], 150). But cultural forms are derivative constructions whose force and direction depend on the highly unstable and fundamentally asocial primum mobile of desire. Nevertheless, I agree with Smith regarding the symbiotic relation between the two principles in Tirso's play.

24. In a very different context Raymond Conlon points out the existence of a link between all of these men, but whereas Conlon thinks that the link is fear of the female sexual role, the play supports the view that Don Juan's impersonations “work” because his desire undermines the law (“The Burlador and the Burlados: A Sinister Connection,” Boletín de los comediantes 42 [1990]: 8).

25. The historical foundation of the myth cannot be fully grasped if one relativizes Don Juan's class membership or subordinates it to mythic discourse, as Maurice Molho does (“Trois mythologiques sur Don Juan,” Cahiers de Fontenay, nos. 9-10 [1978]: 42). Elsewhere Molho concedes but considers fortuitous the relation between the myth and its historical conditions: “Don Juan Tenorio is a member of the highest nobility. From the point of view of the mythical structure this need not be so: one may perfectly conceive a conqueror of women who is a peasant, a craftsman, a soldier, or a sailor. It happens however that when the myth first arises, the conquest of women is linked to power” (“Sur le discours idéologique du Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra,” in L'Idéologique dans le texte, Actes du IIème colloque du Séminaire d'études littéraires de l'Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail [Toulouse: Publications de l'Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1978], 321). Not only is the procurement of women attached to power, but it is power itself. Julia Kristeva puts it trenchantly: “That jouissance is not a jouissance of subjects, it is the jouissance of One master” (Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1987], 200). Gonzalo Torrente Ballester perceives that Don Juan must be an aristocrat, but he confuses the meaning of this social category by considering Don Juan a stranger to the “class [sic] del homo oeconomicus” and affirming “su indiferencia por el juego de la riqueza” [his indifference toward the game of wealth] (Teatro español contemporáneo, 2d ed. [Madrid: Guadarrama, 1968], 286). Oscar Mandel also notes that Don Juan “must be an aristocrat,” although for reasons entirely different from Torrente's. While Torrente invokes the realism of the conception, Mandel thinks of Don Juan as a literary symbol casually endowed with verisimilitude (The Theatre of Don Juan: A Collection of Plays and Views, 1630-1963 [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963], 13 n. 8).

26. In the seventeenth century a new pattern of domination began to emerge. Henceforth the subject was policed through internal censorship. In Calderón's La vida es sueño (ed. Griaco Morón Arroyo [Madrid: Catedra, 1985]), which in some ways can be considered an anti-Burlador, Segismundo checks his desire with considerations that Don Juan represses at every point: “Rosaura está en mi poder; / su hermosura el alma adora; / gocemos, pues, la ocasión; / … Mas ¡con mis razones propias / vuelvo a convencerme a mí! / Si es sueño, si es vanagloria, / ¿quién, por vanagloria humana, / pierde una divina gloria?” [Rosaura is in my hands; my soul worships her beauty; let's enjoy the occasion. … But with my own arguments I dissuade myself! If it is all a dream, if life is vainglory, who would lose divine glory to run after human vainglory? (2954-67)]. The comedia reflects the rise of subjective discipline. That it still sanctions traditional forms of control can be understood in light of the feudal-religious resistance to the emergence of a civil society based on the idea of a private sphere.

27. Thus women are the repositories of honor and men its effective owners. Men stand to gain or lose from the conduct of the (female) bodies that permanently threaten to evade their control.

28. “Mientras el suceso pasa / la voz y el habla fingid” [While you're at it, disguise your voice (1530-1)], recommends the Marquis de la Mota to Don Juan. That the latter does not need his advice, the Marquis learns only too soon.

29. Masson, “L'Abuseur de Séville [Tirso de Molina],” in Don Juan, ou Le Refus de la dette, by Sarah Kofman and Jean-Yves Masson, Collection Débats (Paris: Galilée. 1991), 16-7. James Mandrell repeats Masson's words almost verbatim: “Don Juan's sins against society are not so much sins of carnality as they are sins of linguistic perversion” (Don Juan and the Point of Honor: Seduction, Patriarchal Society, and Literary Tradition, Penn State Studies in Romance Literatures [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992], 76).

30. Schlossman, “Disappearing Acts: Style, Seduction, and Performance in Dom Juan,” MLN 106 (1991): 1033.

31. The linguistic confrontation is more elaborate than Shoshana Felman envisions in her interpretation of the linguistic performative as a strictly self-referential speech act. In her view, Don Juan avoids truth conditions by deserting the referential field. Thus there would be no grounds for deceit. Don Juan's promises would merely refer to their own self-constitution. Seduction would consist in the exploitation of the “referential illusion” carried over to a register set off from extralinguistic reality (Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin; or, Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983], 31). Felman's treatment of the performative speech act is faulty, however, in its neglect of the social dimension of speech acts and especially of their actantial nature. As acts conditioned by an authority (Benveniste, quoted in Felman, 21), they mark a changed state of affairs in the world. In other words, they imply the consequences that may be imputed to the social agency represented by this authority. It can be objected that if the seducer in Tirso's drama “is doing no more than playing on the self-referential property of these performative utterances” (Felman, 31), then he has no business altering their conditions of validity unbeknownst to his victims, as he does in his oath to Aminta (2123-8). In the domain of self-referentiality, the inclusion of a clause in small print is patently absurd. Strictly self-referential acts exclude any reference to acts other than those that coincide with the utterance. If Don Juan adulterates his oath in order to alter Aminta's status (i.e., in order to dishonor her), the reason for it lies in the transitiveness of language, which in Tirso's play is never in question. In fact, the register of pleasure, which Felman associates with linguistic self-referentiality (31), demands this very transitiveness. Don Juan may be a consummate rhetorician, but he insists on consummating his seductions.

32. Molière, “Don Juan” and Other Plays, trans. George Graveley and Ian Maclean, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

33. Quoted in Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 220.

34. Molho also detects in El Burlador two competing discourses, but he thinks that Don Juan exploits a discourse that is no longer authoritative. This discourse, which had conferred sacramental validity on the promise of marriage, was repealed by the Council of Trent. In Molho's view, Don Juan takes advantage of the confusion during the transition to a new discourse that defines marriage as a public ritual set squarely within the paternal jurisdiction (“Sur le discours idéologique,” 330-1). However accurate Molho's depiction of this conflict may be historically, it is important to note that Don Juan relies on words that are socially sanctioned. Antonio Gómez-Moriana sees clearly that Don Juan's success depends on his use of a language validated by a social ritual (“Pragmática del discurso y reciprocidad de perspectivas: Los juramentos de Juan Haldudo [Quijote I, 4] y de don Juan,” Nueva revista de filología hispánica 36 [1988]: 1060).

35. Tirso's portrayal of the Comendador reflects the seventeenth century's general disregard for the titles of the military orders. In his Voyage en Espagne (1603-1604), written two decades before El Burlador, Barthélemy Joly describes their decadence by drawing a portrait of their members that agrees with Tirso's depiction of Don Gonzalo. Pointing to the relaxation of the vow of celibacy, mandated by the orders' charters, Joly says, “A présent, ce ne sont plus que de gros messieurs mariés, engraissant leur marmite du revenu de leurs commanderies … sans servir ou mettre la main à la besogne, contre l'intention des fondateurs” [At present they are no more than fat married men, who line their pockets with the revenue from their offices … without fulfilling any service or engaging in any work, against the intention of the founders] (quoted in Salomon, 863 n. 38 [see n. 10 above]).

36. Marañón, “Gloria y nideria del Conde de Villanediana,” in Don Juan (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1967), 76-7.

37. It does not stand for the opposition between “the World's falsity” and “la verdad verdadera, la eterna,” as Joaquín Casalduero claims (Estudios sobre el teatro español [Madrid: Gredos, 1967], 126).

38. This fact alone proves that the play's significance is not primarily theological. Tirso's theological motivation is advocated by many critics, among them Américo Castro, “Prólogo,” in Obras, by Tirso de Molina, Clásicos castellanos, vol. 1 (Madrid: Ediciones de “La Lectura,” 1910), xiii-xiv; Castro, “Don Juan en la literatura española,” in Cinco ensayos sobre Don Juan, by Gregorio Marañón, Ramiro de Maeztu, José Ingenieros, Azorín, and Ramón Pérez de Ayala (Santiago: Editorial “Cultura,” 1937), 12; Charles Vincent Aubrun, La Comédie espagnole (1600-1680) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1966), 68; Casalduero, 139; and Mario F. Trubiano, Libertad, gracia y destino en el teatro de Tirso de Molina (Madrid: Alcalá, 1985), 204. The religious background that Tirso invokes, in accordance with the spirit of the Counter Reformation, is merely an emphatic frame for worldly issues.

39. The notion of a defiant Don Juan is commonplace. It has been formulated by, among others, Castro (“Don Juan en la literatura española,” 15). More accurately, Jean-Louis Backès observes the progressive melding of Don Juan and the statue: “The statue is not the other, but the same. … The opposition between the adversaries is no more than a nuance which gradually disappears until Don Juan becomes that which he's always been, the Comendador” (“L'Entrée du Commandeur,” Obliques 5 [1974]: 52).

40. “En huius, nate, auspiciis, illa incluta Roma / imperium terris, animos aequabit Olympo” [Under his auspices, my son, illustrious Rome will make its empire equal to the earth, its spirit equal to Olympus] (Aeneid, ed. Jacques Perret, 3 vols. [Paris: Société d'Edition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1977-80], 6.781-2). Previously Jupiter has revealed the temporal boundlessness of this empire: “His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono: / imperium sine fine dedi” [For these I do not set limits either material or temporal: I gave them an endless empire (1.278-9)]. Castro notes the relation between Don Juan and Aeneas, although he fails to point out this important parallelism (“El Don Juan de Tirso y el Eneas de Virgilio,” in Semblanzas y estudios españoles, ed. Juan Marichal [Princeton, N.J.: n.p., 1956], 399).

41. “¿Eres alma condenada / o de la eterna región?” [Is your soul among the damned or in the eternal region? (2498-9)].

42. See Joan Ramon Resina, “Cervantes's Confidence Games and the Refashioning of Totality,” MLN 111 (1996): 218-53.

43. Castro, remarking the contradiction between Don Gonzalo's behavior and his apparent role as a delegate from heaven, notes that the statue's intervention is dishonest (“El Don Juan de Tirso y el de Molière,” 96). Similarly, Weinstein suggests that the contradiction may be due to the difficulty of finding an alternative dramatic solution (19).

44. Archimede Marni tries to do so through the concept of counterpassion, which expresses a homology between sin and divine retribution that is manifested in the play's tit-for-tat morality (“Esta es justicia de Dios, / quien tal hace, que tal pague” [This is God's justice. Whoever acts like this must pay for it (2839-40)]). The Comendador's deceit would be fit retribution for Don Juan's own deceitfulness. Marni, however, overdetermines his case. To the concept of counterpassion he adds the idea that Don Juan is already in hell. Don Gonzalo's false assurances are then merely symbolic, a theatrical effect “solely for the benefit of the un-indoctrinated spectator” (Marni, “Did Tirso Employ Counterpassion in His Burlador de Sevilla?” Hispanic Review 20 [1952]: 127-9). But surely the theatrical effect depends on the clash between different ontological domains, and symbolic or not, Don Gonzalo's ruse is still a ruse.

45. Francisco Fernández Turienzo thinks that Don Juan misunderstands God's intentions in the words of the statue (“El Convidado de Piedra: Don Juan pierde el juego,” Hispanic Review 45 [1977]: 55). The issue of the misleading message is thus translated into a problem of reception.

46. See Carlos Feal, En nombre de don Juan: Estructura de un mito literario, Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, 16 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1984), 32-4. Feal assumes that the Comendador, as the representative of an unjust social order, is condemned by a moral principle. Yet if Don Gonzalo is condemned on moral grounds, he cannot represent the moral consciousness in Don Juan's mind, as Feal proposes.

47. A bolder reading might interpret “Mosaicas labores” in relation to the foundational lawgiving act of the Judeo-Christian tradition (the inscription of the Mosaic tables by God). Although the context permits this speculation, the expression clearly refers to the sculpturing technique. On the other hand, the archaic Gothic script alludes to the ancient law regulating the uses of the aristocracy. Mandrell sees the nature of deceit in a manipulation of the differences between the spoken and the written word, and Don Juan's dishonesty in his undue preference for the latter (78). In Mandrell's view, the libertine would be punished by a sternly unliterary divinity. But in the play Don Juan is punished literally, by an inscription. His given (i.e., spoken) word is measured against the logos petrified in the statue and found wanting To confront the historical limitations of feudal metaphysics in the form of phonocentrism, Mandrell projects Don Juan as a deconstructor avant la lettre.

48. As Jean-Yves Masson remarks, if the play could conceive of a true father, one would suffice (“L'Abuseur,” 28).

49. Bruce W. Wardropper, “El tema central de El Burlador de Sevilla,” Segismundo 9, nos. 17-8 (1973): 15; Francisco Ruiz Ramón, Historia del teatro español (desde sus orígenes hasta 1900) (Madrid: Cátedra, 1979), 209.

50. Parker, “Aproximación al drama español del Siglo de Oro,” in Calderón y la crítica: Historia y antología, ed. Manuel Duran and Roberto González Echevarría, Biblioteca románica hispánica, 238, vol. 1 (Madrid: Gredos, 1976), 342.

51. Aubrun notes that “the king, after all, weds the other characters, not according to their inclinations but according to the needs of the social and moral order that is finally restored” (68).

52. Wardropper is mistaken when he asserts that the King does not care who marries whom (14). That the sorting out of partners coincides with the extant social boundaries reveals that chaos has been superseded by order—a specific social order. Up to this point, as Wardropper points out, the King has been at pains to arrange and rearrange marriages, but without succeeding in re-creating a semblance of justice (12-3). Once the principle of the Law is set in motion by divine fiat, however, the King no longer needs to concern himself with matchmaking. A preestablished social harmony automatically ensues on the annihilation of the competing principle.

53. Jacobs, Don Juan heute: Die Don Juan-Figur im Drama des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts: Mythos und Konfiguration, Bonner Untersuchungen zur vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 4 (Rheinbach-Merzbach: CMZ, 1989), 33.

54. Angel Berenguer notes that Don Juan's refusal to countenance the future is related to the historical situation of the aristocracy (“Don Juan, o la inviabilidad del tiempo presente,” Segismundo 9, nos. 17-8 [1973]: 46). On the other hand, Micheline Sauvage, in a vein more philosophical than historically sensitive, claims that the seducer takes the part of the future and chooses renewal against permanence, the moment of change over that of exhaustion (Le Cas Don Juan [Paris: Seuil, 1953], 104-5). That Don Juan flees forward is true enough, but what he renews, or rather replaces, is something external to the self. The paradox of Don Juan is precisely that his inconstancy is rooted in the passion to remain constant in relation to himself.

55. “Don Juan Tenorio lives only in the present. Life as permanent alignment of fulfilled moments. The past: an experienced pleasure. Future? Tomorrow's present. To reflect would be to rationalize the irrational: the seducer leaves that to Catalinón or Sganarelle or Leporello” (Mayer, Doktor Faust und Don Juan [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979], 105-6).

56. “The established type of Don Juan … is intended for the drama” (Hiltrud Gnüg, Don Juans theatralische Existenz: Typ und Gattung [Munich: Fink, 1974], 5).

57. Molho posits one such alternative, but it would not have superseded the historical impasse. In his view, Tirso condemns both the nobility and the absolute monarchy, pleading for a theocratic regime in which the church would reclaim its secular power (“Sur le discours idéologique,” 337). This thesis does not seem unfounded, considering the role of the Inquisition after the crisis of the feudal order. But it depends on Don Gonzalo's identification as an ecclesiastical figure. Membership in a military order had religious implications in the Middle Ages but no longer did in Tirso's day. And despite the play's fourteenth-century setting, Tirso's Comendador is a seventeenth-century courtier, with no resemblance to a warrior-monk. That he lives in the Calle de la Sierpe [Serpent street], a center of prostitution in Seville, emphasizes his secularism.

58. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 1009.