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A READING of BYRON's DON JUAN by CATHERINE

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A READING of BYRON's DON JUAN by CATHERINE ) "ADVENTUROUS AND CONTEMPLATIVE" A READING OF BYRON'S DON JUAN by CATHERINE ANNE ADDISON A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA 4 October 1987 © CATHERINE ANNE ADDISON, 1987 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia 1956 Main Mall Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Y3 ABSTRACT This dissertation on Byron's Don Juan begins with a history and analysis of the stanza form. Since ottava rima is a two-fold structure, comprising an alternately rhyming sestet followed by an independent couplet, it encourages the expression of dialectical ideas. Byron's prosodic virtuosity uses this potential to create a multivalent tissue of tones which is essentially—and almost infinitely—ironic. A view of prosody is developed here which is unique in its perception of the poem's existence in terms of a reading that unfolds in "real time." For various reasons, "reader-response" critics have not yet taken much cognizance of prosody. Don Juan is a good testing-ground for their approach because its narrator constantly addresses his reader, insisting on a present time which actively accumulates a past and projects a future, as a reader's consciousness moves sequentially forward through the text. The present time of the verse rhythms is the present time of the discourse, which is often most self-reflexive in the famous "digressions." Some of these begin with an epic simile whose vehicle grows out of proportion to its tenor; others are triggered by an interruption of the story, as the narrator—like a Renaissance improvisor in ottava rima— suddenly addresses his audience directly. Still other digressions are not metaleptic leaps from a fictional to a "real" world, or from one fictional world to another, however; they are the result of the narrator's tendency to linger too long in one world, elaborating descriptions until his story is forgotten. Despite the poem's many-voiced, digressive insouciance, an investigation of its moral and metaphysical components reveals that its irony has limits. Maugre those critics who would claim Don Juan as the paradigmatic work of unlimited, infinitely regressive Romantic irony, the issue of political liberty is not to be joked about, unlike the problem of erotic love. At this stable point in an otherwise absurd universe, Byron reveals a non-ironic self under the ironic mask. More effectively than traditional autobiography, because it is enacted rather than reported, this poem recreates its author dramatically, in terms of a shifting triangular relationship between narrator, protagonist and reader. The temporal locus of this relationship is a fictional present tense grounded in the "real" present time of a reading of the poem. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii INTRODUCTION iv Chapter I OTTAVA RIM A: A SURVEY 1 Chapter II OTTAVA RIM A IN DON JUAN 38 Chapter III SIMILE 90 Chapter IV DIGRESSION 128 Chapter V THE POET AS TRANSGRESSOR 170 Chapter VI NARRATOR, READER, PROTAGONIST 212 WORKS CONSULTED 273 iii INTRODUCTION Structuralist approaches to literary and non-literary texts, as well as to other artefacts,, instititions and natural phenomena have characterized much academic research and thinking in the second half of the twentieth century. Their world geometry projects a binary system as the prototype of structure, which may have become popular because it is the basic principle of the computer. Clearly, a system which simplifies the multiple and labyrinthine complexities of artistic construction to a series of comprehensible either-or categories is an extremely useful tool. What I, like many of the recent reader-response critics, feel to be frequently lacking, however, is a follow-up to the idealizing activity of structuralist approaches—a kind of return to the thing itself, after directions, positions and place-names have been studied on the map. This is not to advocate a romantic recapturing of primitive experience. Instead, I suggest a return which is not a regression, but a going back armed with as much knowledge and theory as possible—which is a return only insofar as it is a movement toward a closer observation of experience and the experiencing consciousness's acceptance or rejection of learned models. The binary system, or the world-as-exclusive-choices, has a simplicity of form which is favoured by human perception, but a point exists at which only the most stolid or brain-washed consciousness will not reject its limitations in the face of sheer diversity and complexity of phenomena. Byron's Don Juan has been most usefully divided by critics into two modes of utterance: narrative and digression. The poem appears to have two "protagonists": the hero and the narrator, who are the principal subjects of the narrative and the digressive modes respectively. Ottava rima, the stanza form Byron employs, falls into two parts: an alternately rhyming sestet and a couplet iv which does not rhyme with any line of the sestet. Clearly, the sestet lends itself to the forward-leaning movement of a story, whereas the couplet tends to produce more epigrammatic, less narrative utterances. The stanza allows this regular pulsation of narration and digression a formal metrical container with two differently shaped compartments in which the two separate utterances can be held. This structure, or critical outline, is a good one for a reading of Don Juan. An "innocent" reader will probably not make much sense of the poem until he or she has constructed something like the above, either consciously or unconsciously. However, no good reading will sustain these particular dichotomies all the time throughout its passage through the text. A reader will encounter not merely an occasional exception to the rule, or Barthes' tissue of conflicting patterns of unruliness, but recurring episodes of rule-breaking which contradict the rule in consistent ways and which demand, in fact, a change in the rule which makes it less simple and prescriptive and more complex and descriptive. Most informed readers' experience of Don Juan— and, naturally, of many other texts as well—occurs somewhere in between chaos and binary mathematical order. Without trying to dislodge or undermine what are, in pre-critical readings of the poem (Frye's term), such useful structures, this dissertation is an attempt to account for a critical reading of Don Juan in some, at least, of its complexity, and to provide from this account certain amendments to structural models which make them indeed less elegant, but perhaps more finely adjusted to their environment and uses. In order to keep critical attention on the continuous present time of a sequential reading instead of on the fragmented atemporal experiences of a critic v with the text in hand, I create a fictional reader who performs and perceives the text in a fictional present tense. A narration of this reader's critical reading of Don Juan, as a single, finite event, is the basis of the dissertation—though, of course, following Byron's example, much digression and commentary is also included. Close observation and detailed description of the perceptual and active choices of a reader possessing the credibility of a "living fiction" reveals many shortcomings, or insufficiencies of detail, in theories of prosody, irony and narrative. Among the phenomena which elude the current structure's confines are narrative and digression. They are experienced by the reader as neither single nor mutually exclusive in Don Juan, since narration is frequently "digressive" and digressions sometimes narrative. Also, the hero and the narrator are not the only "protagonists," even excluding the other characters in the poem: the reader is frequently co-opted to play a part in the unfolding drama of the dialogue. And the three-fold structure of hero, narrator and reader is unstable, because all three of its members are protean and many-faced. The narrative—or, at least, the main story—is not the exclusive domain of the hero, Juan, for the narrator transgressively enters this story on occasion; the digressions, conversely, do not exclude Juan, but often comprise relevant discussion of him and his story, sometimes taking the form of over-elaboration of the narration. Byron's ottava rima does indeed generally divide into two along the line of its change in rhyme-scheme (between lines 6 and 7); but the divided sections are not necessarily a narrative sestet and a digressive couplet. At times, whole blocks of stanzas, including couplets, narrate or digress; furthermore, the stanzaic turn is used for widely various purposes. This turn can also be—at least, vi partly—overridden by other effects. Predictably, the couplet is often used for irony of tone, but irony is not confined to couplets and much of the poem's irony is not tonal at all, but more subtle and comprehensive Romantic irony. Passages occur which are not ironic at all, and these, intoned in the vatic, single voice of the visionary lyric, are perhaps the most disturbing, when the reader considers them in context with the profound and cosmic ironies manifested elsewhere. These contradictions have led critics such as Mellor and Thorslev to regard Don Juan as an extreme example of Romantic irony: its antitheses are perceived as eternally unresolved, its ironies infinitely regressive.
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