Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe

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Canto is an imprint offering a range of tides, classic and more recent, across a broad spectrum of subject areas and interests. History, literature, biography, archaeology, politics, religion, psychology, philosophy and science are all represented in Canto's specially selected list of tides, which now offers some of the best and most accessible of Cambridge publishing to a wider readership.

In their original versions, the ultimate fates of Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan reflect the anti-individualism of their time: Faust and Don Juan are punished in hellfire, and Don Quixote is mocked. The three represent the positive drive of individualism, which brings down on itself repression by social disapproval. A century later Defoe's Robinson Crusoe embodies a more favorable consideration of the individual, but only if one refuses to take seriously Defoe's statement that Crusoe's isolation is punishment for disobeying his father. In this volume Ian Watt examines these four myths of the modern world, all created in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, as distinctive products of a historically new society. He shows how the original versions of Faust (1587), Don Quixote (1605), and Don Juan (ca. 1620) presented unflattering portrayals of the three, whereas the Romantic period two centuries later re-created them as admirable and even heroic. Robinson Crusoe (1719) is seen as representative of the new religious, economic, and social attitudes. All four myths have been transformed, often by major writers (Rousseau, Goethe, Byron, Dostoevsky), and given a more universal application with a favorable view of individualism. The punitive tales were turned into popular secular myths. This change came about partly because individualism had become a cultural and political product, but equally importantly because myth itself had become a concept and was therefore capable of manipulation. At the present time, the four mythic figures have retained their prestige, but their force diminishes as the mass-entertainment industry — radio, television, movies - provides so many rivals for time and influence. The four figures reveal the problems of individualism in the modern period: solitude, narcissism, and the claims of the self versus the claims of society. None of them marries or has lasting relations with women; rather, each has as his closest friend a male servant. Mephistopheles, Sancho Panza, Catalinon, and Friday are devoted till the end and happy in their subordinate role — the perfect personal servant. This suggests the self-centeredness of the four figures. Each pursues his own view of what he should be, raising strong questions about his character as a hero and about the society whose ideals he reflects.

MYTHS OF MODERN INDIVIDUALISM

MYTHS OF MODERN INDIVIDUALISM Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe

IAN WATT Stanford University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY IOOI 1-421 I, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1996 First published 1996 Canto edition 1997 Ubrary of Congress cataloging in publication data

Watt, Ian P. Myths of modern individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe / Ian Watt. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0521 48011 6 (hardback)

1. Individualism in literature. 2. Literature and society. I. Title. PN56.157W37 1996 809'.93353 — dc2o 95-31562 CIP A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The illustrations on pages 28 and 142 are reproduced by permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library. ISBN o 521 48011 6 hardback

ISBN o 521 58564 3 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2002

Contents

Preface Introduction

page xi xiii

PART I: THREE RENAISSANCE MYTHS 1 2 3 4 5

From George Faust to Faustbuch The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus Don Quixote of La Mancha El Burlador and Don Juan Renaissance Individualism and the Counter-Reformation

3 27 48 90 120

PART II: FROM PURITAN ETHIC TO ROMANTIC APOTHEOSIS 6 7 8 9

Robinson Crusoe Crusoe, Ideology, and Theory Romantic Apotheosis of Renaissance Myths Myth and Individualism

141 172 193 228

CODA: THOUGHTS ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus Michel Tournier's Friday Some Notes on the Present

245 255 267

Appendix: The worldwide diffusion of the myths Index

277 285

IX

Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson

Crusoe was all but completed when Ian Watt's health deteriorated in 1994 after a serious operation. At the time of his hospitalization, he was working on final revisions in response to careful and discerning readings of the manuscript by M. H. Black and others. Ruth Watt and the publishers are extremely grateful to Linda Bree for her painstaking and constructive editorial work in the latter stages. Dr. Bree made possible the publication of this book in its present form.

Preface

This book, alas, began more than forty years ago. I was married and had two children, and my fellowship at St. John's College, Cambridge, was due to run out in little more than a year. I had then been working endlessly, but not very satisfactorily, on a book about the effects of the alphabet and printing. The only published result of those labors is the article in collaboration with Jack Goody entitled "The Consequences of Literacy" eventually published in Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1963). Turning thoughts of my future in other directions, I suddenly came up with the notion of no fewer than three books. The first was a reworking of my fellowship dissertation for St. John's College, "The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel": This was eventually published in 1957 as The Rise of the Novel. The second was a book about Conrad. Ever since as a boy I had cycled from Dover to Bishopsbourne to see the house where Conrad died, I'd always somehow assumed that one day I would write a book about him. That proved to be a tall order, but I published the first volume, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, in 1979. I then decided that since the myth book — I thought — was more or less complete in my mind, I would try that before doing the second volume on Conrad. My assumption was that the myth book would be easier, and quicker to finish. I was, of course, wrong. I started writing the present text around 1980, at about the time I became the first director of the Stanford.Humanities Center, and I kept working on it while in the meantime I published a study of Conrad's Nostromo and contributed a long introduction to Conrad's Almayer's Folly for the Cambridge University Press critical edition, both in 1988. What kept me going on the myth book was a sense that I was on new and fascinating terrain that had never been treated before in quite the comparative and historical fashion I intended.

Preface

That, roughly, is my story. It goes without saying that to treat the idea of the "myths of modern individualism" comprehensively would be an impossibly large task. There are many other modern myths, from Joan of Arc to Frankenstein; and quite apart from that, my chosen four have had an enormous number of versions, and have been the objects of an enormous amount of scholarship. So I have had to be highly selective, and to hurry over — even completely omit — many things. I am not trying to be definitive: The book is essentially an amateur's study, and it is addressed not to the scholar but to the general reader. I have, perhaps unnecessarily, translated all but the easiest and briefest passages from the French, German, and Spanish originals (translations, throughout, are my own unless otherwise stated); and I have provided documentation of a modest kind. Perhaps I should mention that during the writing and revision I have often groaned at the sight of excellent notes I did not think there was room to include. And I must also add that the fact that a work is not mentioned should not be taken to mean I have not read it. I think that the general idea is interesting and important, and I hope that others, especially professional comparatists and historians, will take up the tale more satisfactorily. Some of the material was given as the Alexander Lectures at University College, Toronto, or as talks to the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast, to the Third International Association of Sicilian Anthropological Studies at Palermo, or to the University of Houston, the University of Hawaii, or the National University of Australia. My thanks to the good friends who both read and helpfully criticized parts of the manuscript, notably Tom Moser, Dave Riggs, Jack Goody, Joseph Frank, Fred Crews, Tony Tanner, and Bliss Carnochan. I also received invaluable help from people who managed both to decipher the manuscript and then to type it: Virginia Schrader, Mary Lou McCourt, and Meg Minto. My greatest debt, as ever, is to my wife, Ruth Watt. Xll

Introduction

In April 1951, I published an essay called "Robinson Crusoe as a myth." It began: We do not usually think of Robinson Crusoe as a novel. Defoe's first fulllength work of fiction seems to fall more naturally into place with Faust, Don Juan, and Don Quixote, the great myths of our civilization. What these myths are about is fairly easy to say. Their basic plots, their enduring images, all exhibit a single-minded pursuit by the protagonist of one of the characteristic aspirations of Western man. Each of them embodies an arete and a hubris, an exceptional prowess and a vitiating excess, in spheres of action that are particularly important in our culture. Don Quixote, the impetuous generosity and the limiting blindness of chivalric idealism; Don Juan, pursuing and at the same time tormented by the idea of boundless experience of women; Faustus, the great knower, whose curiosity, always unsatisfied, causes him to be damned.1 I would not write about those figures in the same way now. My impression of Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Faustus in the Crusoe article was a muddled subliminal form of the Romantic reinterpretation of myths created much earlier. I no longer think that the early Faustus is damned for mere curiosity. I am not sure that Don Juan is actually tormented. I am not even certain that Don Quixote is particularly effective in his generosity. But I still see Don Quixote, Don Juan, Faust, and Robinson Crusoe as powerful myths with a particular resonance for our individualist society. Recently I discovered that the Spanish diplomat and scholar Salvador de Madariaga had hit on part of the same idea. He wrote, in The Genius of Spain (Oxford, 1923): Let the four greatest characters of European Literature be named. Hamlet and Faust will be of the number; the other two will have to come from 1 "Robinson Crusoe as a myth," Essays in Criticism 1 (1951), pp. 95 — 119.

xill

Introduction

Spain: Don Quixote and Don Juan, and they are the greatest of the four. Hamlet is too much of a dream and Faust too much of an idea. But Don Quixote and Don Juan are men of flesh and blood, and they will live and grow as long as men are moved by love of justice or love of women. It was gratifying to find someone who had put three of my four together in that perspective. But, of course, his fourth was Hamlet. This could, no doubt, be justified by the psychological wealth that Shakespeare put into his character; but in terms of a worldwide fame among all classes of people, Hamlet would not quite do. His fame was worldwide, certainly, but, I think, academic rather than popular. Robinson Crusoe seemed to fill the bill much better as a popular myth. My aim in this book is to provide a historical study. Most myths known in the Western world are based on biblical or classical figures and stones. I can still remember being excited by the fact that Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan were neither classical nor biblical, but modern creations; moreover, they had all appeared in literature during a period of some thirty or forty years — from Faustus in the 1587 Faustbuch to Don Juan in the play El Burlador, which, though published in 1630, was probably written between 1612 and 1616. This was the period historians have called the CounterReformation, when the forces of tradition and authority rallied against the new aspirations of Renaissance individualism in religion, in daily life, and in literature and art. The Counter-Reformation was especially prominent in Spain, where the medieval order continued much longer than elsewhere — and where Don Quixote and Don Juan both originated. 2 Faustus, Don Quixote, and Don Juan are all characterized by the positive, individualistic drives of the Renaissance; they wish to go their own way, regardless of others. But they find themselves in conflict, ideologically and politically, with the forces of the CounterReformation; and they are punished for it. Sinners, of course, are always more interesting than saints. 2 See Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.

xiv

Introduction

Robinson Crusoe can be seen as an articulate spokesman of the new economic, religious, and social attitudes that succeeded the Counter-Reformation; and in the context of developing individualism, his later date of creation — 1719 — strengthens the general argument of the book. The complete change in general perception of all four myths, which occurred in the Romantic period, provides a double confirmation. With the increasing dominance of the new individualism, the punitive elements in the Counter-Reformation plots were removed; and a more symbolic, indeed transcendental, view of the myths changed the way all four characters were understood. In the nineteenth century all four spread across the Western world and thus attained a universal and international status. Two comments on the nature of that status. First, it is obviously less sacred, less authoritative, and less universally accepted than myths in the societies of non-literate people. None of the four quite fits Malinowski's description of myth, which, he writes, "expresses, enhances, and codifies belief . . . it is not an idle tale, but a hardworked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation of an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wish." 3 But, second, the figures considered in this book have certainly acquired a status slightly different from that of the characters of most novels and plays: Faustus, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe all exist in a kind of limbo where they are seen not as actual historical persons perhaps but not merely as invented fictions either. In this book, I do not use the term myth in its commonest sense of a false or untrue belief - as in the "myth of the oil shortage." That sense is still enshrined as the antiquely positivist first definition of the Oxford English Dictionary: "a fictitious or imaginary person or object." At the other extreme, I do not share the apparent view of some modern anthropologists and cultural critics who jump from the correct belief that man is not a wholly rational being to the unexpressed but powerful assumption that mythological thought is 3 Myth in Primitive Psychology (London, 1926), p. 23.

Introduction

in every way superior and desirable. 4 I try to be more empirical and descriptive. Of course, I accept the view that mythical stories are in some way symbolic; that is, they stand for larger and more permanent meanings than their represented actions literally denote; but these meanings should not be above and beyond reason. Victor Turner's definition of myths as "sacred narratives" that "derive from transitions" seems a little too absolute. 5 My four myths are not "sacred" exactly, but they do derive from the transition from the social and intellectual system of the Middle Ages to the system dominated by modern individualist thought, and this transition has itself been marked by the remarkable development from their original Renaissance meanings to their present Romantic meanings. My working definition of myth, then, as this book begins, is "a traditional story that is exceptionally widely known throughout the culture, that is credited with a historical or quasi-historical belief, and that embodies or symbolizes some of the most basic values of a society." 4 See, for example, Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York, 1949)5 "Myth," International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), 10,

d.576.

xvi

Part I Three Renaissance Myths

1. From George Faust to Faustbuch

THE HISTORICAL MAGICIAN

Of our four myths, that of Faust is unique in one respect: It undoubtedly began with a real historical person. Unfortunately, although there are many contemporaneous records of his activities, they are defective in many ways, and we do not really know what kind of person the original Faust was. There was a widely known wandering magician in Germany during the first four decades of the sixteenth century who went under the name of George (in German Jorg, in Latin Georgius) Faust or Faustus; sometimes he was known merely as Doctor Faust. He was born, possibly about 1480, in the small town of Knittlingen in northern Wurttemberg; and he probably died in about 1540, possibly at Staufen, another small Wurttemberg town, not far south of Freiburg. There are some thirteen contemporaneous references to this George Faust. They can be roughly divided into five groups: letters of scholarly opponents; sundry public records; tributes from satisfied customers; other, more noncommittal memoirs; and reactions of Protestant clerical enemies.1 The fullest and earliest account of Faust is given in a letter by a 1 The most reliable account of contemporary sources is Hans Henning, "Faust als historische Gestalt," Jahrbiicber der Weimarer Goethe-Gesellschaft 21 (1959),

pp. 107—39. The main biographical documents are conveniently available in an English translation, with commentary and notes, in Philip Mason Palmer and Robert Pattison More, The Sources of the Faust Tradition from Simon Magus to

Lessing (New York, 1936), cited hereafter in the text as S. It has recently been argued that "Faustus" was the Latin pseudonym of one Georgius Helmstetter, who was awarded the degree of Master from the University of Heidelberg in 1487 - see Frank Baron, Doctor Faustus: From History to Legend (Munich, 1978), pp. 12-22 - but this view has not been widely accepted.

Three Renaissance Myths

scholarly opponent dated 1507. It was written in Latin, as most of the documents of the time were, and was addressed to Johannes Virdung, a mathematician or astrologer who was a professor at the University of Heidelberg. The writer, Johannes Tritheim, a wellknown Benedictine scholar, was at that time the abbot of a monastery at Wiirzburg. Tritheim is fiercely contemptuous of Faust: He calls him a "vagabond, a babbler and a rogue" who has shown himself "to be a fool and not a philosopher." According to Tritheim, "As soon as he heard that I was there" at an inn in Gelnhausen, Faust "fled from the inn and could not be persuaded to come into my presence." Tritheim writes that Faust claimed to be the "younger Faust, the chief of necromancers, astrologer, the second magus, palmist, diviner" (5, pp. 83—86). When he called himself a "necromancer" Faust meant a practitioner of black magic who foretold the future by communing with the spirits of the dead; an "astrologer" (then as now) meant someone who interpreted the influence of the planets and stars on human affairs. In calling himself "the younger Faust" and the "second magus," however, Faust was probably claiming to belong to a much more dangerous and heretical tradition; and this goes some way towards clarifying the reasons for the conflict between Faust and the scholarly humanists who were interested in learned magic. For the early history of magic is very relevant to a fuller understanding of the Faust myth. In Faust's day the ignorant and the learned alike believed that they inhabited a world largely governed by invisible spiritual forces. The more adventurous among the scholars of the Renaissance hoped that a better understanding of rediscovered works of the past would teach them new ways of understanding and controlling those forces. For instance, among the Greek manuscripts Cosimo de Medici collected from Byzantium, the one that most interested him dealt with magic: the Corpus Hermeticum was a miscellaneous compilation of astrological and theological writings belonging to the second or third century A.D. It was translated into Italian in 1471 by Marsilio Ficino. Ficino and his successors developed the assumption that the Corpus Hermeticum was a key to the most ancient, and therefore the

From George Faust to Faustbuch most original and authentic, wisdom of the ancients from Zoroaster to Plato; it was the prisca theologia, the uncontaminated source of pristine knowledge of God and his creation. The Christian tradition in general had proscribed the use of such powers as the work of the devil. But Ficino persuaded himself that the orthodox view was mistaken; these powers were not demonic, but should properly be seen as analogous to Platonic ideas; they would, he thought, mediate between spirit and matter, between the soul of the world and its material body.2 Later, another Italian, Pico della Mirandola, added to this tradition of learned magic, in making a rather more heretical attempt to bridge the gap between pagan and Christian learning in the practice of magic. Tritheim was a celebrated, though somewhat controversial, successor to such men. 3 But Faust does not belong to the same tradition. We do not know exactly what he had in mind in calling himself the "younger Faust" — the name was a common one, meaning "fortunate" in Latin and "fist" in German — but one possibility is a reference to the fifth-century St. Faustus who was attacked by Augustine for his allegedly Manichean heresies. 4 The heretical analogy in the second title, "second magus," however, is much clearer: it must refer to Simon Magus, Simon the Mage, or magician. Our word "magic" is derived from the Magi, an ancient tribe of Medes who were famous as diviners; 5 they are best known to the West from the three wise men of the East in St. Matthew s Gospel, whose command of judicial astrology had enabled them to foretell the birth of Christ. Simon Magus was supposedly a magician belonging to a Gnostic sect at the time of the Apostles. 6 In Samaria he was so 2 Francis A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964), pp. 12-17. 3 Yates, Bruno, pp. 11 —19, 140—45. See also Klaus Arnold, Johannes Trithemius, 1462—1516 (Wiirzburg, 1971). 4 Confessions of St. Augustine (London, 1950), pp. 80—88. 5 E. M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus (1948; Cambridge, 1993), pp. 15-20. 6 Acts 8.9 (biblical citations throughout are from the King James Version). See Butler, The Myth of the Magus, pp. 7 3 - 8 3 ; 5, pp. 12-14; Beatrice Daw Brown, "Marlowe, Faustus, and Simon Magus," PMLA 54 (1939), pp. 82—121.


impressed by the power of Peter and John to bestow the gift of the Holy Spirit by the mere laying on of hands, that he offered the two Apostles money if they would teach him how they did it. For this Simon was condemned by Peter, and thus gave his name to the sin of "simony," which is not merely a reprehensible selling of ecclesiastical offices, but, since it abuses a divine gift for personal profit, is considered to be the unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost. The opposition between Simon Magus and the Apostles marks a very significant moment in the long history of the conflict between religion and magic. The view that there were different and equally legitimate ways of controlling supernatural forces had not been challenged decisively until the advent of Hebrew monotheism. But from the time of the Apostles onwards, the Christian church increasingly laid exclusive claim to the control of the invisible world; and it is this assertion of the Christian priesthood to exclusive rights to all rituals and other magical practices that is enacted in the confrontation of Simon Magus and St. Peter. According to various apocryphal works such as The Acts of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, Simon set up his own religion, in which he was worshiped as the son of God, and attempted to rival the miracles of Jesus. His most spectacular feat was to contrive his own resurrection. A ram was bewitched to take on Simon's appearance; it was then beheaded; and three days later Simon astounded the Emperor Nero by reappearing with his top appendage intact. This put Peters monopoly of miraculous power into jeopardy; but Peter triumphed when Simon, correctly but foolishly, tried to follow up his resurrection with his ascension. Having apprised Nero of his coming apotheosis, Simon took off from the top of a specially constructed tower on the Campus Martius in Rome. Seeing this, Nero said to Peter: "This Simon is true . . . you see him going up into heaven." With the future of Christendom hanging in the balance, Peter summoned up his invisible forces: "I adjure you, ye angels of Satan, who are carrying him into the air, to deceive the hearts of the unbelievers, by the God that created all things, and by Jesus Christ, whom on the third day He raised from the dead, no longer from this hour to keep him up, but to let him go." There-

From George Faust to Faustbuch

upon, The Acts of the Holy Apostles continues, "being let go, he fell into a place called Sacra Via, that is, Holy Way, and was divided into four parts, having perished by an evil fate" (5, pp. 33-34). In the traditions of the church Simon survived as the supreme monitory example of what awaited heretics whose magic challenged the Christian priesthood's claim to an exclusive control over the supernatural world. Simon's fate, in fact, remotely foreshadowed the conflict which was ultimately to transform the foolish German conjuror who called himself the second magus into the grandly defiant protagonist of the Faust myth. Tritheim regarded Faust as an overt, though hardly serious, heretic. Faust, he reported, "said in the presence of many that the miracles of Christ the Saviour were not so wonderful [non sint miranda\ that he himself could do all the things which Christ had done, as often and whenever he wished" (S, p. 85). Tritheim was alarmed lest this indiscreet and foolish vulgarian should give the classical studies and the learned magic of the humanists a bad name among orthodox Christians. Conrad Mutianus Rufus, an eminent humanist and an influential local ecclesiastic at Erfurt, had a similar fear: in a letter of 1513 he dismisses "a certain soothsayer by the name of George Faust," as "a mere braggart and fool"; but then Rufus adds significantly: "The ignorant marvel at him. Let the theologians rise against him and not try to destroy the philosopher Reuchlin" (5, pp. 87-88). Johann Reuchlin was an eminent contemporary of Erasmus, and his biblical scholarship had fallen foul of the Dominicans, who regarded Hebrew studies as in themselves blasphemous, if not heretical. But Reuchlin was also interested in mystical and magical lore, and in the Cabala; there was, therefore, an additional reason why he and the humanist movement in general should have felt that they already had enough difficulties without being pilloried through an identification of their learning and magic with the cheap tricks of an ignorant marketplace cheat such as Faust. Tritheim reports that Faust claimed to have mastered the classical tradition of Greece and Rome: specifically, to have "acquired such knowledge of all wisdom and such a memory, that if all the books of Plato and Aristotle, together with their whole philosophy, had to-


tally passed from the memory of man, he himself, through his own genius, like another Hebrew Ezra, would be able to restore them all with increased beauty" (5, p. 85). No record exists of these professed aesthetic increments; but a later tradition reports a fine example of how Faust combined his powers as a necromancer with a smattering of classical interests. When he came to Erfurt, then one of the greatest centers of German humanism, Faust "through his boasting brought it to pass that he was allowed to lecture publicly" on Homer. The students asked him to show them the heroes of the Trojan war, and Faust did so at a later session. His Polyphemus in particular created a sensation: He wore a fiery red beard and was devouring a fellow, one of whose legs was dangling out of his mouth. The sight of him scared them so that their hair stood on end and when Dr. Faust motioned him to go out, he acted as though he did not understand but wanted to grasp a couple of them too with his teeth. And he hammered on the floor with his great iron spear so that the whole Collegium shook, and then he went away.7 Faust must have put on a first-class act of necromancy; but, quite apart from the still familiar stage pretence that the magic is so real that it has got out of control, his performance was not original. John Franciscus, Pico della Mirandola's nephew, had witnessed a similar piece of apparent necromancy in Italy; and the figure of Helen of Troy was summoned up before the Emperor Maximilian by a scholar who was possibly Tritheim himself.8 Tritheim was a published magician, a fact which helps to account for his bitter contempt of a rival who was, in his terms, uneducated. Faust probably had a smattering of learning; he may even have been to a university, but there is no extant evidence of his having taken any Jegree. It is true that the 1509 matriculation records of Heidelberg University mention that one "Johannes Faust ex Simern" was admitted a Bachelor of Theology (5, pp. 86—87); but our 7 The story is told in the seventeenth-century Thuringian Chronicle by Zacharias Hogel; it was based on another work, now lost, of the mid-sixteenth century. Quoted here from S. pp. 108-10. 8 Butler, The Myth of the Magus, pp. 126, 135.


magician was from the first known as George, and he was already making his claims to be "the chief of necromancers" in 1507, according to the Tritheim letter. It is much more likely that George Faust is now granted the appellation of Doctor only because history has posthumously ratified a courtesy title that he originally bestowed on himself for purposes of professional advertisement.9 The same wish for scholarly prestige no doubt explains why, when he attempted to break out of the fly-blown routines of conjuring and fortune-telling to try something new, it was to the classical and biblical scholarship of Renaissance humanism that he turned. Faust had also had his successes as a professional magician. There are three extant writings of satisfied customers which testify to this. The first concerns the Bishop of Bamberg, whose treasurer noted that he had paid ten guilders — then a very large fee — on February 12, 1520, to "Doctor Faust, the philosopher," for having drawn up the Bishop's "horoscope or prognostication" (5, pp. 88—89). L& ter the Waldeck Chronicle records that "Dr. Faust" had correctly "prophesied that the city of Minister would surely be captured" from its Anabaptist occupiers on "that very night," that is, June 25, 1535 (5, p. 91). There is similar testimony to Faust's skill as a prognosticator from Philipp von Hutten, cousin of the famous humanist Ulrich, and the leader of an expedition to Venezuela. He wrote to his brother Moritz early in 1540 that he "must confess that the philosopher Faust hit the nail on the head" in prophesying "a very bad year" (S9 p. 96). This would have been a distinct triumph, for a letter by the famous philologist Joachim Camerarius in 1536 records that Stibar, a Greek scholar, had been held "in suspense" by the "juggler's tricks" of "your friend Faust"; but Faust had been right to predict the bad turn of the Emperor's affairs, whereas Camerarius, both in his letters and his published works, had consistently predicted success.10 9 There is a minority tradition which argues that George Faust was a serious and learned scholar; see for example Henri Birven, Der historische Doktor Faust: Maske und Antlitz {The Historical Doctor Faust: Mask and Face] (Gelnhausen, 1963). 10 See Baron, Doctor Faustus, p. 60; the whole section on Faust and Joachim Camerarius is relevant (pp. 48—66).


Of course, by no means all of Faust's customers were satisfied. One account by a doctor, Philipp Begardi, published in 1539, speaks of Faust's "very petty and fraudulent" deeds. Begardi writes that "in taking or - to speak more accurately - in receiving money he was not slow," but "on his departure, as I have been informed, he left many to whistle for their money" (S1, p. 95). One can imagine for Faust a long life of petty chicanery, where occasional victories were hardly less ignominious than his humiliating defeats. He certainly gained notoriety for his quackery, sometimes combined with a degree of fear. Thus the city council of Ingolstadt resolved in 1528 that "a certain man who called himself Dr. George Faust of Heidelberg was told to spend his penny elsewhere and he pledged himself not to take vengeance on or make fools of the authorities for this order" (5, p. 90). Later, the city council of Nuremberg refused him admission: in 1532 it denied its "safe conduct to Doctor Faust, the great sodomite and necromancer" (S, p. 90). That Faust lived a restless and marginal life is supported by Tritheim, who wrote that at Kreuznach, Faust, having been appointed schoolmaster "through the influence of Franz von Sickingen," soon "began to indulge in the most dastardly kind of lewdness with the boys and when this was suddenly discovered, he avoided by flight the punishment that awaited him" (5, p. 86). n The scholarly tradition has been so obsessed by the grotesque inadequacy of the historical George Faust as avatar of the protagonists of Marlowe and Goethe that it has paid little attention to how he was also — in his own petty way — a fascinating symbol of the major forces out of which the Faustian myth arose. A bragging and unsavory charlatan, no doubt; but also an unrepentant individualist who went his own way in a society where a regular job and a fixed abode were increasingly required. He united old and new traditions. The old is represented by his being called a conjuror; the verbal 11 Sickingen was an important figure, the leader of the Knights movement, and a strong supporter of Luther. He has been much written about, by Marx and Engels among others.

IO

From George Faust to Faustbuch usages of a largely pre-scientific society habitually tolerated a now unthinkable latitude of meanings for conjuring, a latitude that extended from summoning devils out of hell to producing rabbits out of hats. But he was also an embodiment of the new forces making for change - the Renaissance humanists' revival of classical learning, for example, and their parallel pursuit of magical science - and he exhibited some of the Reformation's interest in biblical scholarship and the wider extension of academic learning. THE MYTH BEGINS: FAUST, LUTHER, THE DEVIL, AND WITCHCRAFT Deep in the Thuringian Forest there is a room where Satan's mockery once so infuriated Luther that he threw his inkwell at him. Time has not effaced, nor indeed did the German Democratic Republic neglect to refresh, that historic ink stain on the wall of the Wartburg Castle. One reason the stain is historical, we may say, is that the Faust of myth sprang out of that ink: first, for the general reason that the damnation of George Faust was brought about posthumously through the printer's ink of innumerable chapbooks and pamphlets; 12 and second, because the impetus for that damnation came from Luther's obsessional sense of life as a perpetual duel with Satan. Luther used the devil to explain every misfortune, temptation, and doubt in his personal life. Though he never actually saw the devil, he was intensely aware of his continual presence; if his sleep was disturbed by someone rattling walnuts in a cupboard, it was the devil; and so was the voice that asked him, "Who has commanded you to preach the Gospel?" 13 These diabolic assaults, however, merely served to fortify Luther's faith, because, as he wrote, "To take 12 See especially Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1979), especially pp. 303-11. 13 Louis Coulange [pseudonym of Joseph Turmel], trans. Stephen Haden Guest, The Life of the Devil (New York, 1930), p. 149, quoting from Luther's Tischreden (Weimar, 1916), 4.606-7.

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up the cross is voluntarily to take upon oneself and bear the hate of the Devil, of the world, of the flesh, of sin, of death." 14 Man's only safety from the devil was the stronghold of faith in God. This attitude is the theme of Luther's great hymn, "Ein' feste Burg" ["A mighty fortress is our God"]: The ancient Prince of Hell Hath risen with purpose fell; Strong mail of Craft and Power He weareth in this hour, On earth is not his fellow.15 Human society has rarely been without some systematization of a belief in an invisible world inhabited by spirits; but over most of history the beliefs have been highly pluralistic. The Faust myth arose when the development of Christian thought had polarized the human and the supernatural worlds into a conflict between good and evil, and had given their struggle a new intensity and rigor. This inevitably gave the devil and his hierarchy unprecedented theological and psychological importance. It had not always been so. The devil plays a very minor role in the Old Testament. He is, of course, Eve's serpent-tempter in the Garden of Eden and therefore the cause of man's fall, but thereafter he rarely appears. In the New Testament, however, he figures more prominently, especially when, in a scene that foreshadows the devil's pact with Faust, he tempts Christ: "the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me." The assumption that only diabolic magic will make it possible to obtain one's desires on earth is to be found again and again from this time on; and it is significant that Jesus does not contest Satan's power, but confines himself to the famous answer: "Get thee hence, Satan: 14 Cited in Marshall Fishwick, Faust Revisited: Some Thoughts on Satan (New York, 1963), p. 61. 15 Carlyle's translation. 12


for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve."16 Later, St. Paul, particularly in the Epistle to the Ephesians, played an important part in confirming the dominion of Satan over the secular world. The best that the faithful Christian could hope for was that Christ's sacrifice had imposed an eventual limit on Satan's power to that over the dead in hell; and that on judgment day hell's gates would be opened, and the elect would spend eternity in God's own kingdom, leaving the rest to burn forever. The final steps in developing the orthodox Christian demonology were taken by the fathers of the church, and especially by St. Augustine. His treatise in vindication of Christianity, De Civitate Dei [The City of God], effectively places man under a dual monarchy and, as a result of the fall and man's inherently depraved nature, allows Satan to rule over the world and over the flesh, that is, over the City of the Devil. The final doctrinal step was taken in A.D. 547, when the Council of Constantinople proclaimed Satan to be eternal, and declared belief in him and his powers to be an essential part of the Christian faith. Fortunately, the early Christian believer had a certain remedy against Satan always at hand. Christ had passed on to his disciples his power to cure "them which were vexed with unclean spirits";17 and with this supernatural power of priesthood went the duty to extirpate heretical magic. Exorcism, confession, and absolution all gave the practicing Christian some assurance that Satan's power could be curbed. But the fairly relaxed coexistence of a benevolent God and his malevolent double was brought to an end in many areas of Western civilization through a complex process which began in the late Middle Ages and reached its terrible climax after the Reformation. The main cause for a growing awareness of the devil's power seems to have been renewed attempts, in the thirteenth century and onwards, to extirpate heresy, especially that alleged against the Albi16 Matthew 4.8-9, 10. 17 Acts 5.16.


genses of southern France. At the forefront were the Dominicans, and their great leader Thomas Aquinas, who codified earlier ideas, especially those of Augustine, about the eternal warfare of God and devil. All works of magicians, he declared, were necessarily evil; men were constantly subject to the attacks of demons; 18 and "witchcraft is . . . to be considered permanent." 19 Pope Gregory IX started the Inquisition in 1229; and now that the doctrines had been established that all magical practices should be equated with a willing allegiance to the devil, and were therefore necessarily heretical, the stage had been set for the last act. In answer to the complaint of two Dominican Inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, that witchcraft was rife in Germany and that the existing authorities there did little except impede their efforts, Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 issued a Bull, known as Summis Desiderantes, in which, being "supremely desirous" of eradicating heresy, he directed all ecclesiastical authorities to assist the witch-hunting activities of the Inquisitors. Two years later Kramer and Sprenger published a vast and detailed handbook, entitled Malleus Maleficarum [The Hammer against the Witches}, which set out in detail the beliefs and practices of witches, and the ways in which they could best be recognized, caught, convicted, and burned. The book was enormously influential, and went through some fourteen editions by 1520. 20

During the early years of the Reformation all sides were too preoccupied with their own internal battles to have much time for witch-hunting; but on the issue itself there was no division between Protestants and Catholics. Despite occasional exceptions - four 18 Summa contra Gentiles, 3.2.104-6; Surnma Theologica, 3.cxiv; quoted from Alan C. Kors and Edward Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 1100-1700: A Documentary History (Philadelphia, 1972), pp. 53-62, 63-71. 19 Commentary on the Four Books of Sentences, Distinctio XXXIV, quoted from Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, p. 74. 20 See Jeffrey B. Russell, A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics and Pagans (London, 1980), p. 79. Extracts of Malleus Maleficarum are available in Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, pp. 113-87.

From George Faust to Faustbuch witches were burned in Wittenberg in 1540 21 — the persecution in Germany did not attain its full intensity until the 1560s; from then on Lutherans, Calvinists, and Roman Catholics were equally active in hunting witches, Luther himself was an intransigent foe of witchcraft: "I should have no compassion on these witches; I would burn all of them," he said. 22 In Faust's own lifetime, Luther seems to have been the first to connect Faust with the devil. Luther mentions Faust twice in his Table Talk. The first mention occurs early in 1530, "one evening at the table": "When . . . a sorcerer named Faust was mentioned, Doctor Martin said in a serious tone: 'The devil does not make use of the services of sorcerers against me. If he had been able to do me any harm he would have done it long since. To be sure he has often had me by the head but he had to let me go again.'" 23 The second reference was taken down in the course of a conversation, probably in 1537, about "magicians and the magic art and how Satan blinded men . . . Much was said about Faust, who called the devil his brother-in-law; and the remark was made: 'If I, Martin Luther, had done no more than extend my hand to him, he would have destroyed me.'" 2 4 Chronologically, the first recorded suggestion that Faust was killed by the devil was probably that made by Johannes Gast, a Protestant clergyman of Basel, who was apparently a believer in Faust's magic. He wrote in the second volume of Sermones Convivales [Convivial Remarks], published in 1548, that "the wretch was destined to come to a deplorable end, for he was strangled by the devil 21 H. R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays (New York, 1969), p. 137. 22 August 25, 1538; Tischreden, 1531-1546, 4 (Weimar, 1912), pp. 5 1 - 5 2 . See also "Of the bodily and spiritual witchcraft," in Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, cited in Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, pp. 197-201. 23 Tischreden, 1531-1546, 1 (Weimar, 1914), p. 445, cited in S, p. 93. 24 S, p. 93; June-July, 1537, Luther's Works, Table talk, ed. and trans. Theodore Tappert in Luther's Works, ed. Herbert T. Lehman, vol. 54 (Philadelphia, 1967),. p. 247.


and his body on its bier kept turning face downward even though it was five times turned on its back. God preserve us lest we become slaves of the devil [satanae mancipiaY (S, p. 98). Another early account is by Johannes Manlius, a pupil of Luther's associate and successor Melanchthon, and it is dated 1563. Manlius recalls Melanchthon saying that "this same John Faust" knew that he was to die that night, and the next day his host "found him lying near the bed with his face turned towards his back. Thus the devil had killed him" (S, pp. 101—2). Melanchthon himself mentioned Faust in terms as abusive as those employed by Luther, calling him "a vile beast and a sink of many devils" (5, p. 103). However, in the published record of his commentaries on the Bible made between 1549 and 1560, Melanchthon was less unsympathetic than Luther to magic and astrology, and he apparently believed in the devil's "strange feats of magic," one of which concerns Faust: Melanchthon tells how "Faust, the magician, devoured at Vienna another magician who was discovered a few days later in a certain cave. The devil can perform many miracles; nevertheless the church has its own miracles" (5, pp. 9 9 100). He also draws a parallel between Faust and Simon Magus. "Simon Magus," writes Melanchthon, "tried to fly to heaven, but Peter prayed that he might fall." Faust, he continues, "also tried this at Venice. But he was sorely dashed to the ground" (5, pp. 99—100). Manlius provides a somewhat fuller account of the latter incident, saying that when, imitating Simon Magus, Faust "wished to provide a spectacle at Venice he said he would fly to heaven. So the devil raised him up and then cast him down so that he was dashed to the ground and almost killed."25 Melanchthon and Manlius, then, continued the Lutheran tradition, which took an attitude to Faust almost diametrically opposed to that of the humanists such as Tritheim. Both groups were hostile to Faust; however, whereas the humanists denied that Faust actually had the magical powers he claimed, the Lutherans thought he really 25 Johannes Manlius, Locorum Communium Collectanea, cited in 5, p. 101.


had such powers, but attributed them to the devil. It was this Lutheran counter-movement that eventually transformed the historical George Faust into the legendary figure of myth, by inventing his pact with the devil and his terrible end. POPULAR DEVELOPMENT OF THE FAUST MYTH BEFORE 1587

It was Luther, Melanchthon, and their contemporary Protestant followers who were responsible for connecting Faust with the devil, and for attributing his eventual death to Satan. But the idea of the dated contract for his death was not published before the time of the Frankfurt Faustbuch in 1587. Interest in Faust had not diminished in the years following Faust's death around 1540 — indeed the number of writings about him grew steadily — but the religious and social situation soon changed enormously. The historical George Faust was fortunate not to have been among the many thousands of people who were burned as witches in Germany. It might well have been different had he lived two generations later, but there is no suggestion that any drastic action against him was contemplated during his lifetime. The Zimmerische Chronicle', in a passage dated "after 1539," noted that the "notorious sorcerer Faust . . . died in or not far from the town of Staufen in Breisgau" (S, pp. 113—15). The Chronicle gives another version of a story first told by Gast, about how Faust, annoyed that the monks in a Vosges monastery refused to put him up overnight, had sent "a spirit" that haunted the place and made it uninhabitable. This malefic poltergeist suggests a certain belief in Faust's powers, but it is also a common staple of folk tales. Such stories were also told in later memoirs: in 1568, for instance, Johannes Wier, an active enemy of witchcraft persecutions, repeated the story of Faust's death, but also recounted a comic episode in which Faust, wanting a certain chaplain to get him more wine, and being told that the chaplain had to go to town to get a shave, assured him that all he had to do was to rub his face with a magic


salve; it was arsenic and, of course, it burned off his skin and his flesh as well as his hair. 26 A fuller account of Faust's life and death is contained in a manuscript, written between 1572 and 1587, and now in the library of the Saxon town of Wolfenbiittel. A much more significant work, it adds continuity to the canon told in the earlier stories; indeed it is close enough to the Faustbuch to be considered a possible source, or, if not, another reflection of a common original. 27 The Wolfenbiittel version of the story is very close to the Faustbuch in its general development, and many incidental details are similar. Most notably of all, it introduces both the twenty-four-year pact and Faust's terrible end. The rapid growth of persecution of witches added to the interest in, and the animosity expressed towards, Faust during this period. Witch-hunting was spread by all Christian religions, but in Germany particularly by Lutherans, who had, after all, destroyed most of the intermediate fortifications against witches offered by medieval Christendom. Luther had reduced rituals to a minimum — to communion, holy water, and a few other vestiges; there were no longer guardian angels, patron saints, or the Virgin Mary to act as beneficent mediating spirits; relics, talismans, penances, masses for the dead no longer promised daily protection against fear and loss; and the Lutheran church no longer offered the ceremony of exorcism against evil spirits. Erasmus reproached Luther for having created a void between God and man; the individual was indeed left alone in a world whose demonic terrors had increased, and where recourse even to white magic was stringently forbidden. 28 26 Johannes Wier, De Praestigiis Daemonium [Of the Illusions of Devils'] (1568 edn), cited in 5", p. 106. 27 H. G. Haile, introduction to his English translation of the Faustbuch: The history of Doctor Johann Faustus (Urbana, 1965), and Haile, "Reconstruction of the Faust Book: the disputation," PMLA 78 (1963), pp. 175-89. 28 See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 58—65, 558-92; and Friedrich Heer, trans. Jonathan Steinberg, The Intellectual History of Europe (Cleveland, 1966), p. 227. 18

From George Faust to Faustbuch Luther's work for education and his development of a vernacular literature had created a vast extension of the reading public in Germany. 29 It was for this enlarged but relatively uneducated group, which had a particular need for a defense against the tireless activities of the devil, that the Faustbuch was written. The book was published in Frankfurt, Germany's ancient capital and by the 1580s both a Lutheran city and center of the book trade. Books about demonic possession already formed an established genre, and one much favored by Frankfurt printers. The subject was also particularly topical in 1587. For instance, in the principality of Trier, not very far away, the previous summer had been very late; this had had disastrous results for the crops; and so, to find scapegoats, "a hundred and eighteen women and two men, from whom the avowal had been extorted that the prolongation of the winter was the work of their incantations," had been burned to death. 30 JOHANN SPIES'S HISTORIA VON D. JOHANN FAUSTEN THE FAUSTBUCH

The main source of most later versions of the Faust myth, the socalled Faustbuch, appeared in 1587. As the custom then was, the crowded title page of the small and ill-printed Historia von D. Johann Fausten summarized the story. It may be translated: The History of Doctor Johann Faust us the notorious magician and necromancer, how he sold himself to the Devil for an appointed time, what strange adventures he saw meanwhile, bringing some about and living through others, until at last he received his well-deserved wages. For the greater part collected and prepared for the printer out of his own posthumous writings as a horrible precedent, abominable example and sincere warning to all conceited,

inquisitive and godless persons. James 4.7—8. Submit yourselves therefore 29 See, for example, Johannes Janssen, trans. A. M. Christie, History of the German People after the Close of the Middle Ages, (London, 1906), 1.1— 60. 30 George Lincoln Burr, "The fate of Dietrich Flade," in George Lincoln Burr, ed. Roland H. Bainton and L. O. Gibbons (New York, 1943), p. 207, n. 44; my translation from the Latin. Two accounts of this particular persecution are also available in Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, pp. 216—33.


to God: resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Cum gratia et privilegio. Printed in Frankfurt am Main by Johann Spies, 1587. 31 The dedication and preface enforce and amplify the pious admonitions of the title; and the moral is summed up in the book's closing quotation from the First Epistle of Peter (5.8-9): "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist steadfast in the faith." The front matter is signed by the publisher, Johann Spies; but the narrative itself is anonymous, and the identity of its author is not known, although it might well have been Spies himself.32 It is certainly unlikely that, despite what the title page professes, any part of the narrative can derive from Faust's posthumous writings, whatever they may be supposed to be; there is no evidence that such writings ever existed (though the claim undoubtedly gives the book an air of authenticity). The preface also contains an interesting tribute to Faust's fame: Everywhere, at parties and social gatherings, there is a great inquiry for a biography of this Faustus . . . I have often wondered that, as yet, no one has presented this terrible tale in an orderly fashion . . . I inquired amongst scholars and learned men . . . but was unable to discover anything for certain until recently when I received this Life through the agency of a good friend at Speyer. (HF, pp. 3-4) Nothing more is known about this "good friend," who was so conveniently in a position to acquire — and, by implication, to vouch for — the tale which was to be told. 31 Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from the Faustbuch are taken from Hans Henning's edition, Historia von D. Johann Fausten: Neudruck des Faust-Buches von

1587 (Halle, 1963); cited hereafter in the text as HF. There is a recent German critical edition, ed. Stephan Fiissel and Hans Joachim Kreutzer (Stuttgart, 1988). 32 Spies was a fairly prominent publisher of the time, a rigid Lutheran who printed mainly learned and religious works: his failure to reprint the Faustbuch more than once may have been due to its having "strongly deviated" from his usual list, but also from local clerical objections. See Harry Berger, "Johann Spies," in Nassau Lebensbilder [Nassau portraits] 4 (Wiesbaden, 1950), pp. 29—

35, for the suggestion that Spies might himself have written the Faustbuch. 2O


What Spies gives us in the Faustbuch is in fact a very miscellaneous compilation of three kinds of material: firstly, stories about George Faust that had begun to circulate during his lifetime, but which were vastly elaborated later, especially as regards his death; secondly, a collection of magic tricks, largely of a traditional farcical kind, which were attributed to Faust; and, lastly, an even more miscellaneous conflation of stories of magic from ancient and medieval times down to the sixteenth century, now also attributed to Faust.33 The first edition of the Faustbuch comprised sixty-eight very short chapters; other chapters were added later. Faust — here named Johann Faustus - is introduced as the son of poor but godly peasant folk near Weimar who is sent by his rich uncle to Wittenberg, where he studies "sufficiently," and becomes a Doctor of Divinity. But alas! as the author comments, "Whoever wills to go to the Devil cannot be stopped" (HF9 p. 13). In the company of likeminded followers of the diabolic arts, Faust gives himself wholly to necromancy and conjuration, thinking "to explore all secrets of heaven and earth" (HF, p. 14). Neither his own efforts, nor the learning and wisdom "given me from above," have been able to "bring me to my desires," and so he has "given both body and soul" to the "hellish prince of Orient" (HF, p. 29). After several meetings, and considerable bargaining, Faust writes out the compact and signs it in his own blood. The devilish spirit - Mephistopheles34 - agrees to "serve Faustus and be obedient in everything that he asked for until his death"; to bring him "anything he desired"; and to answer all his questions with nothing but the truth (HF, p. 17). In return, Faust agrees that after "twenty-four years from the date of this present letter," if his desires have been fully satisfied, the devil "may do with me whatever he wants in his manner and according to his desire, be it with body, soul, flesh, blood, or goods" (HJF, p. 22). 33 Henning, Historia, pp. xxxii—lxii, provides a full account of sources. For a brief summary in English, see E. M. Butler, Fortunes of Faust (Cambridge, 1952), pp. 4 - 1 3 . 34 I will use the modern spelling; in the Faustbuch he is actually called Mephostophiles.

21


This idea of a legal document, signed in Faust's own blood, had not been part of the story before the Wolfenbiittel manuscript, and it radically distinguishes the Faustbuch both from other earlier accounts of Faust, and from previous analogous publications. For the first time it gives a firm, indeed in effect an imperative, foreclosure of Faust's life; he is a man with no future. The contract is described in the seventh chapter; and there follows a very episodic development. Faust begins by requiring fine food and drink, which Mephistopheles steals from sundry dukes and bishops; and Faustus obtains a sumptuous wardrobe, also stolen from merchants all over Germany. The narrative continues the theme of secret knowledge, mainly through long discussions on astronomical and theological matters with Mephistopheles; Faust is particularly curious about the devil's kingdom. There is a visit to hell (HF, pp. 52-59), followed by extensive journeys in the sky and throughout the world; these travels are interspersed with demonstrations of Faust's skill as astronomer and astrologer. The second half of the narrative is mainly concerned with Faust's exploits as a necromancer in various princely courts, together with many feats of comic magic for the benefit of lower company. In his last seven or so years, Faust's thoughts of approaching damnation become more oppressive, and he begins to think seriously of repentance. Mephistopheles, however, understands what Faust is meditating, forces him to repeat his vows of loyalty to Lucifer in a second letter, and takes other measures to distract Faust from any wish to appeal to God's forgiveness. In his last year Faust makes his will, leaving his magic lore and most of his surprisingly modest estate to his former student and faithful servant, Wagner, before spending his remaining days "in a swinish and epicurean life" (HF, p. 119). He becomes thin and melancholy, avoiding Mephistopheles, and bitterly lamenting his fate. He advises the students not to follow his example, and at last, in words that echo Luther's hymn, exclaims: Fain would I renounce the heavens, if at least I could escape everlasting damnation. Ah, who will save me from the inexpressible fire of the 22

From George Faust to Faustbuch damned? Where there will be no help, where repentance of sins is useless, where there is no rest day or night, who will save me in my misery? Where is my refuge? Where is my protection, help, and shelter? Where is my hold? (HF, pp. 128-29) Faust's death is not shown directly. The students, "his trusty companions," hear "a horrible whistling and hissing, as if the house were full of snakes, adders, and other vermin"; then Faust's door "flew open," and he "began to cry for help, saying, 'Murder,' but with hardly half a voice"; and "shortly after they heard him no more." The next morning, the students go to the room where they see "nothing but the rooms besprinkled with blood, the brain was cleaving to the wall, for the Devil had beaten him from one wall to another. Also his eyes and several teeth were lying there . . . Lastly they found his body lying on the horse dung, most monstrous to look at, for his head and members were all loose" (HF, pp. 130—34). The Faustbuch ends by repeating the moral, that "every Christian may learn, but chiefly those of a conceited, proud, pert and stubborn mind, to fear God, to avoid witchcraft, and other Devilish works, as God has most seriously forbidden" (HF, p. 135). ELECTED BY HISTORY Faust did not stand for election to the pantheon of myth on his own merits; first he had to be reinvented by the wishes and fears of others. The part of the historical process that most immediately affects the timing and impact of the Faustbuch is technological: the rise of printing and the consequent spread of printed matter. In Germany, particularly, and largely as a result of Luther, there was a vast increase both in popular didactic works, and in the audience for them. The Faustbuch is one of those works; it shares not only their didactic quality, but also their attempt to make their moral lesson of topical interest, and — most importantly — to present it as literally "true." The text of the Faustbuch authenticates the promise of the title page that it is for the greater part "collected and prepared . . . out of his own posthumous writings." Faust promises Wagner a 23


diabolic familiar of his own "upon condition that thou publish my art and my deeds" (HF, p. 123); after Faust's death the students find Faust's history and merely add their account of his end. The Faustbuch, pretending to be an authentic biography, is almost entirely fictional; but very little in it was actually invented by its anonymous author. 35 Nearly everything has been traced to earlier sources, a wide variety of works, which attributed actions and opinions to a man whose own life in turn had been reinterpreted through a long collective process in the previous half-century, and arranged according to the Lutheran preoccupation concerning the devil and sorcery. On the other hand the mere process of writing an extensive and pretendedly authentic biography impelled the author towards the two essential components of the myth as it developed: both Faust and the devil had to be given characters. The invention of Mephistopheles was essential. Conjuration of spirits normally involved the intoning of a succession of outlandishly sonorous names, but diabolic familiars had rarely been characterized, or even named, until the Faustbuch. The name itself was apparently a new coinage. It is a satisfyingly suggestive polysyllable which, as one scholar has written, seems "to mean something, although no one has yet discovered what." 36 The best guesses are perhaps that the Greek-sounding meaning of the word is "no friend to light," which might be mephotophiles in Greek, 37 or Me to phos philes, "the light is not a friend." 38 The character of Faust is still relatively unfocused. The main difficulty stems from the scenes of low buffoonery: it is difficult to take anyone very seriously who amuses himself by selling five fat 35 According to Genevieve Bianquis, Faust a travers quatres siecles (Paris, 1935), pp. 18-19, 40-41. 36 Butler, The Myth of the Magus, p. 132. 37 This is the view of Charles Dedeyan, Le theme de Faust dans la litterature europeenne, vol. 1, Humanism et dasskisme: XVIe, XVIIe et XVIHe siecles (Paris, 1954), p. 15. 38 This suggestion, first made in 1926, is supported in J. H. Jones's Postscript to William Empson's Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust-Book and Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus" (Oxford, 1987), pp. 203-4.


swine to a bumpkin and then turning them into bundles of straw. Faust's drunken frolics, and his heroic deeds as a trencherman who thinks nothing of swallowing a load of hay, qualify him as a folk hero of a traditional kind; such feats, however, surely belong to a popular jest-book rather than to the biography of a mighty and tragic magician. There is, however, the beginning of something more inward and subjective; the protagonist of the Faustbuch undergoes none of the petty failures and humiliations of the historical George Faust; and, of course, his life is canonized by the terrible price he pays, which he occasionally anticipates throughout the book. Paying that price is itself the result of a process that represents many of the historical forces connected with individualism in the sixteenth century. By its insistence on the individual's responsibility for his or her own salvation, and by its fervent simplification of so many of the existing doctrinal and institutional traditions of Rome, Protestantism in effect vastly increased the general tendency of Christianity to ground the religious life on the quest of each individual soul; and that, given ordinary human weakness, entailed a powerful reinforcement of the discipline of delayed gratification: one had to make people believe that pleasure in this world must bring pain in the next. It was pressure from Lutheran Wittenberg which brought about a revision of the law of Saxony; after 1572 a witch was to be burned merely for having made a pact with the devil, "even if she has harmed nobody with her sorcery."39 The ideology of damnation was strengthened by being internalized; and the Faustbuch embodies this in two different ways. On the one hand, there was no need to show that Faust had done anyone any harm; and on the other hand the punitive force was subjectivized. In all known cases where witches or sorcerers were put to death, they were killed not by the devil but by human beings; very often, in fact, by human beings who, like the lawyers and the executioner of Treves, grew rich in the process. But in the classic narrative of the 39 Trevor-Roper, "The European witch-craze," p. 141.

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dire consequences of magic the victim meets his death directly at the devil's hands. This goes to the heart of the punitive ideology; the very mechanism of enforcement is made absolute. What had earlier been a highly ritualized but private compact between the witch and her demonic familiar is in the Faustbuch given all the force of law. The compact with Satan is drawn up with the tedious formality of legal pettifogging. Even the twenty-four years — Faust's promised good years — arose from published legal antecedents. In the sixteenth century twenty-four was, much as twenty-one is today, the canonical age of maturity: it was when a man finished his apprenticeship, when he could become a monk, or a master in a grammar school, or when he could be allowed to inherit a legacy. 40 The new emphasis on contract gives the Faustbuch its major and original difference from earlier versions of compacts with the devil. Many had been alleged before 1587, but none that were time-dated. The pact in the Faustbuch allows the devil to collect his prey himself, and on a stated day. We can see the inexorability of this punitive scheme if we compare it with earlier stories of pacts with the devil. One famous victim was Gerbert, who became Pope Sylvester II in A.D. 999; he was horribly dismembered at his death in 1003, but this mutilation was carried out at his own request, as part of his last-minute repentance for having made the pact with the devil through which he became pope. All the early versions of his life recounted that he had thus saved his soul from damnation; the later Protestant versions did not. 41 The pedestrian and complacent moralism of the author of the Faustbuch echoed the devil-haunted aspect of Lutheran Germany without probing it. As a result, the Faustbuch is a narrative reflection of the curse which the Reformation laid on magic, on worldly pleasure, on aesthetic experience, on secular knowledge — in short, on many of the optimistic aspirations of the Renaissance. 40 Keith Thomas, "Age and authority in early modern England," Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976), pp. 205-48. 41 Butler, Fortunes of Faust, pp. 111-12.

2. The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus

THE ENGLISH FAUST BOOK

The Faustbuch was a tremendous success, on an international scale. Within two years there were some sixteen German versions, including additions to the original book, and a version in verse. The story soon spread abroad, with translations into Low German, Dutch, and French. In England the story of Faust had been referred to as early as 1572. In 1592 there appeared The Historie of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus . . . according to the true Copie printed at Franckfort, and translated into English by P. F Gent.l This English Faust Book was actually a rather free adaptation, but it was to be almost the sole source of major elements of Christopher Marlowe's play The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, which was probably written later in the same year. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE Through a whole series of fortunate coincidences the cunning of history ensured that the story of Faust, unlike many other popular vagrant tales, was not relegated to the limbo of forgotten ephemera. More than anyone else it was Marlowe who established the myth; his tragic version of Faust's story lived on in the literary and theatrical tradition until Goethe finally gave it much larger scope two centuries later. The three greatest pieces of luck in this process were: first, that the English translation of the Faustbuch came out in the period when 1 That is, "P. F., Gent{leman}." A somewhat modernized version of the text is available in S, pp. 134—231. Since this chapter was written, a critical edition based on the 1592 text has been published: see The English Faust Book, ed. John Henry Jones (Cambridge, 1994).


The Tragicall Hiftory of the Life and Death of "DoBor Faujliis. Written by Qh, Matkhn.

Frontispiece to Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (London, 1616).

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Doctor Faustus the great age of the Elizabethan theatre was beginning; second, that it became known to Marlowe, then the country's greatest dramatist, in the last year of his life and at the height of his powers; and third, that Marlowe happened to be an anima naturaliter Faustiana himself. Adapting the Faust story to the stage at this time had important implications. Most obviously, the Elizabethan theatre was a popular and vital force in its own right, and heavily influenced the way the narrative was presented for the stage; moreover, the dramatic form, of its very nature, required that the story be reduced to its essentials. Although a great deal of the miscellaneous buffoonery of the Faust Books remained, Marlowe did much to elevate the central character and his life to tragic dignity. He omitted many of the more demeaning features of the story as it had come down to him: for instance, the petty aspects of Faust's magic powers are reduced — there is less of the tedious moralizing, much less of the alchemical tricks, and none of the activities as picklock, calendar-maker, and weather-forecaster to which the petit-bourgeois mind of the author of the Faustbuch made Faust turn as practical ways of using his astrological talents. And while Marlowe's Doctor Faustus no longer shows the comic cowardice Faust exhibits in the Faustbuch, the role of Helen is transformed, largely by a process of omission. Marlowe gives us the famous invocation and then she simply disappears, leaving her role as Faustus's paramour to our imaginations, whereas in the Faust Books she lives with Faust and has a son. To this process of elevation by omission must be added the more positive transformations brought about by Marlowe's poetic greatness. There is, perhaps, nothing more difficult in literature than to give reality to the three basic themes of the Faust myth — the excitement of knowledge, earthly beauty, and spiritual damnation. Marlowe triumphs in all three, and in so doing for the first time gives his protagonist a movingly sympathetic voice. One basis for this identification with Faust is personal and psychological. The evidence about the life of Christopher Marlowe is almost as puzzling, and yet richly suggestive, as that for George Faust; it allows us to infer that - for all the differences of period, education, and career — the two men had many basic intellectual 29


and moral attitudes in common. Restless, vain, ambitious, they both waged a lonely, devious, and bitter warfare against many of the established opinions of their time, and the circumstances of their own dangerous and disappointing lives.2 Marlowe seems to have gone far beyond George Faust in the boldness of his anti-religious thought and expression.3 He was suspected of heresy.4 According to his friend, the dramatist Thomas Kyd, speaking under the pressure of torture and imprisonment, Marlowe was accustomed to "iest at the devine scriptures gybe at praiers, & stryve in argument to frustrate & confute what hath byn spoke or wrytt by prophets & such holie men."5 Much the same allegations were made by a government agent, Richard Baines, who spoke of Marlowe's "damnable Judgment of Religion, and scorn of God's word." Marlowe, he said, had argued, among other things, that the human race was older than the Book of Genesis implied; that "Moyses was but a Jugler" who imposed upon "the Jewes being a rude & grosse people"; that "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest"; that the twelve disciples were "base fellowes neyther of wit nor worth"; and that "the first beginning of Religioun was only to keep men in awe."6 Marlowe's defiance of established orthodoxy was not limited to religious matters. According to Baines, he said that "all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles"; and that "St. John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ."7 There was also an interest in the occult: he was associated with a somewhat mysterious circle of 2 A succinct account of Marlowe's life is available in Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. John D. Jump (London, 1962), pp. xvii-xxi. William Urry, Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury, ed. Andrew Butcher (London, 1988), provides a study of Marlowe's family. 3 See especially Paul H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of his Thought, Learning, and Character (Chapel Hill, 1946), pp. 23-32. 4 John Bakeless, The Tragkall History of Christopher Marlowe (1942; Hamden, CT, 1964), 1.76-775 Kocher, Christopher Marlowe, pp. 24—25. 6 Kocher, Christopher Marlowe, pp. 34—35. 7 Kocher, Christopher Marlowe, p. 35.

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Doctor Faustus speculative intellectuals, sometimes known as "The School of Night," who were interested, among other things, in magic.8 Finally, he also belonged to a marginal social milieu - the London street people of tavern-brawlers, petty cheats, and daggers for hire: he apparently served as a government agent, and there are records of his being, as Kyd put it, rash "in attempting soden pryvie injuries to men."9 Marlowe's last days on earth embodied the conflicts of his life. On May 18, 1593, the Privy Council ordered his arrest, possibly because of his alleged heretical remarks; but before the matter could be taken further, he was killed in a tavern brawl with three men, none of them very reputable, and two of them government agents or spies.10 Marlowe's major contributions to the substance of the Faust myth may be summarized under three headings: individual vocational choice; academic alienation; and eternal damnation. THE ACADEMY AND VOCATIONAL CHOICE The original Faust may not have earned his self-assumed title of Dr. George Faust of Heidelberg, but he was a compulsive aspirant, if not to learning itself, at least to its prestige, and its rewards. In his later literary reincarnations the academic connection became central, no doubt because it fitted into a deep-seated tradition: the ancient punitive myths of the dangers of knowledge, like Pandora's box, or the tree of knowledge in Genesis. In the Middle Ages, this tradition took the form of assuming a necessary connection between the pursuit of knowledge and the practice of nefarious magical arts: many learned men, including the great scholar Albertus Magnus, to say nothing of all eighteen popes between John XII (965-72) and Gregory VII (1073-85), were popularly converted into practitioners 8 Kocher, Christopher Marlowe, pp. 7 - 1 8 , 138-60. 9 Doctor Faustus, ed. Jump, pp. xvii, xix. 10 Frederick S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study (Oxford, 1940), pp. 2 6 5 - 7 7 . See also Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London, 1992).


of black magic.11 The connection between learning and magic was strengthened by the fact that magic - especially astrology and alchemy, not then clearly distinguished from astronomy and chemistry - was taught in universities. Several early accounts state that the historical Faust had studied at Cracow, which was famous for its magical studies;12 and many of the practitioners of neo-Platonic magic, especially those who sought to apply it to the control of the material world, were accused of having made pacts with the devil: the charge was made against two of Faust's most famous contemporaries, Paracelsus and Agrippa, who were widely regarded as sorcerers and practitioners of black magic. There was probably another reason for strengthening Faust's academic connection. By transferring him to the most famous of the new German universities, Wittenberg (founded in 1502), and by making him a genuine doctor of divinity, a neat polar opposition was effected between Faust and the most famous of Wittenberg's teachers, Luther. The fame of Wittenberg must itself have helped to identify Faust as representative of the dangers of intellectual professions, a characteristic which was to cling to him as the myth developed. It was the Faustbuch that had definitively transferred Faust to Wittenberg, arousing indignant comment in so doing. In the third edition of his work on magicians, a distinguished alumnus of the university, Augustin Lercheimer (real name Witekind), protested that the real Faust actually "had neither house nor home at Wittenberg or elsewhere . . . lived like a vagabond, was a parasite, drunkard, and gourmand, and supported himself by his quackery" (5, p. 120). But what most aroused Lercheimer's indignation was the libel on his university: "That in such a university, a man whom 11 See Butler, The Myth of the Magus, pp. 9 4 - 9 5 . 12 5, p. 101, citing Johannes Manlius, Locorum Communium Collectanea: "When he was a student at Cracow he studied magic, for there was formerly much practice of the art in that city and in that place too there were public lectures on this art"; see also L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1934), 4.451-53, 456-57-

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Doctor Faustus Melanchthon used to call a cesspool of many devils should have been master, to say nothing of Doctor of Theology . . . would be an eternal disgrace to the degree and honourable title."13 The Faustbuch does not pay as much attention as Marlowe to the intellectual aspects of the story. Still, in its own crude and inchoate way, it presents the basic conflict: the wish to go beyond the current bounds of knowledge, which leads the hero of the Faustbuch to embrace magic because mere "men are unable to instruct me any further" {HFy p. 22). When Mephistopheles tries to close off Faust's questions about hell on the grounds that the truth will only make him unhappy, Faust rather grandly answers: "I will know, or I no longer want to go on living" (HF, p. 38). The author of the English Faust Book, unlike the original George Faust or the author of the Faustbuch, seems to have been universityeducated. He makes Faust, for the first time, a genuine intellectual: the "Rectors and sixteene Masters" who examine him find that "none for his time were able to argue with him." There is no equivalent singling out of Faust's exceptional intellectual capacity in the Faustbuch, nor in George Faust's own description of himself in the visitors' book of the University of Padua as "Doctor Faustus the unsatiable Speculator" (S, pp. 135-36, 176). Marlowe set his Faustus much more firmly in an academic environment. He added most of the scenes with the scholars, who hardly figure at all in the Faust Book; and although the play is very far from being simply a dramatized philosophical debate, it shows a much wider range of knowledge than do earlier versions. More importantly, it gives a much greater intensity to Faust's intellectual life. This is particularly evident in Marlowe's first scene, which has no model in earlier versions of the story. In this opening scene we see Faustus in his study passing all the branches of academic knowledge under a very unfavorable review: 13 Christlich Bedencken {Christian Reflections], 1597; complete version in Alexander Tille, Die Faustsplitter in der Literatur {Faust References in Literature] (Berlin,

1900), pp. 92-97-

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Three Renaissance Myths Settle thy studies Faustus, and begin To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess. (1.1.30-31) 14

He begins with logic — unmentioned in the Faustbuch — but soon decides that if its "chiefest end" is merely "to dispute well," he need "read no more" since he has learned that art already; in any case, he thinks that "A greater subject fitteth Faustus wit." Next he considers medicine; but he has already won fame as a doctor, "Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man" (1.1.53). Medicine would only be worthwhile if it would work miracles: "Coulds't thou make men to live eternally / Or being dead, raise them to life again, / Then this profession were to be esteemd." The law is a career fit only for "a mercenary drudge." Even theology, which promises so much more, ends up by demonstrating that since no human being can escape sin and the wages of sin is death, religion teaches us that "we must die, an everlasting death" (1.1.47). Only magic remains. Magic has always stood as a promise to take the individual beyond the present limits of his knowledge. More particularly, it offers the very powers in which Faustus has found orthodox knowledge to be deficient: the philosopher's stone might give immortal life; and necromancy might raise the dead. The demonic spirits will enable man to transcend the boundaries of the learning he has acquired; they will "Resolve me of all ambiguities" (1.1.87). In the famous lines Faustus loses himself in rapture at the thought of what magic will bring him: 14 Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are taken from a modernized form of the A text of Doctor Faustus, ed. W. W. Greg, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. 1604—

1616: Parallel Texts (Oxford, 1950). Act, scene, and line numbers given are from this text; as Greg gives no line numbers, I use those in Michael Keeper's 1991 edition (Peterborough, Canada). The A text is taken from thefirstpublished version of Doctor Faustus, which was printed in a black letter quarto of 1604; it is shorter, and its greater forthrightness seems to make it, on the whole, better than the longer and tidier B text of 1616. Differences between the A and B texts have caused considerable debate as to whether Marlowe intended Faustus to be damned or finally saved; see, for example, William Empson's posthumous Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust-Book and Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus" (Oxford, 1987), pp. 162-63.

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Doctor Faustus O, what a world of profit and delight, Of power, of honour, of omnipotence Is promised to the studious artisan! All things that move between the quiet poles Shall be at my command, Emperors and Kings, Are but obey'd in their several provinces: Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds; But his dominion that exceeds in this, Stretcheth as far as does the mind of man. A sound Magician is a mighty god: Here Faustus try thy brains to gain a deity. (i. i. 54-64)

Here we feel we are in touch with a consciousness very typical of the conception of the Faustian man as the myth later established him, a universalist view of knowledge, and an absolutist view of the primacy of the individual ego. The particular role Faustus gives to magic is very close to the equation of knowledge and power that inspired Marlowe's contemporary, Francis Bacon: in the development of applied knowledge, the divinization of man and the complementary displacement of God are immanent. It is significant that, whereas Faustus's assertion that "A sound Magician is a mighty god" ("Demi-god" in the 1616 text) has no equivalent in the Faustbuch, Marlowe — presumably by accident — makes him echo George Faust's claim to be "the demigod of Heidelberg" (S, P. 87). From a historical perspective, the particular situation in the opening scene of Doctor Faustus can be seen as a symbolic enactment of a crucial rite of passage in modern society: the problem of choosing an intellectual or academic specialty, with all its momentous importance for the individual's future life. Here again Marlowe is closer than the Faust Books to what we can suppose to be the motives of the original George Faust. In the Faust Book the pact with the devil clearly manifests a wicked pride that is not content "with that vocation whereunto it hath pleased God to call them" (5, p. 142); the closest Marlowe comes to this orthodox warning against trying to better one's station in the social 35


order is when the chorus concludes the play with the reflection that Faustus's "hellish fall" should warn the wise against unlawful knowledge, "whose deepness doth entice such forward wits, / To practice more than heavenly power permits" (Epilogue, lines 7-8). ACADEMIC ALIENATION The medieval idea that it was the individual's religious and moral duty to stay within his assigned place in the social hierarchy was directly contrary to the ideology of modern individualist society, which supposes that each individual should have the same equal opportunity both to make a free choice of career and to attempt to realize it as best he or she can. The social and academic systems are supposed to provide equality of opportunity in preparing each individual for a vocational choice, with all its fateful consequences. Theoretical support for this egalitarian attitude had already been latent in the ideas of both the Renaissance and the Reformation, and a real, though uneven, expansion of educational opportunity had occurred, especially in Protestant countries. One probable basis for the development of the Faust story, indeed, was the popular response to the enormous spread of university education. Wittenberg was but one of the many new universities that proliferated in Germany during the sixteenth century. A similar expansion occurred in England, where admissions to Oxford and Cambridge apparently tripled in the three decades between 1560 and 1590.13 The need for educated ministers of the new Church of England was one reason for this: such primarily religious motives led to the foundation or expansion of several colleges, and created many scholarships to send poor boys to university. In this Christopher Marlowe was a typical case. Son of a Canterbury shoemaker, he went to King's School Canterbury on a scholarship, and then to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on money 15 Lawrence Stone, "The size and composition of the Oxford student body 15801910," in The University in Society, Volume 1, Oxford and Cambridge from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century, ed. Lawrence Stone (Princeton, 1974), pp. vii, 5-7, 82-83.

Doctor Faustus given by the humanist Archbishop Parker. Marlowe was intending to take holy orders, but when he left Cambridge in 1587 it was to make his living as a writer. He belonged to a group of writers, the "University Wits," who, as their title indicates, represented some kind of collective reaction to the disparity between the vast expectations that the academy aroused and the meager opportunities of realizing them that society afforded. The careers and achievements of the University Wits - who included Thomas Lodge, George Peele, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe - were various, but had some traits in common, two of which are particularly important for our theme. First, though the Wits had been formed by classical humanistic studies, and most of them were considerable translators from Latin literature, they were necessarily interested in the more popular vernacular literary forms - drama, topical pamphlets, and prose fiction - which had a larger audience. Second, they were restless, "Bohemian," unsatisfied, and scornful: angry young men who found no satisfactory position. Perhaps coincidentally, most of them died young. The University Wits were not an isolated historical phenomenon. For instance, the incompatibility between the hopes aroused by university learning and the lack of vocational opportunities available to realize them are the subject of the Parnassus Plays, produced in about the year 1600 by the students of St. John's College, Cambridge. These plays dramatize the dusty answers that the two main characters - Philomusus, a lover of the Muses, and Studioso, a lover of learning - encounter as they make their way through the academic curriculum, and, even more dispiritingly, after they go out to face the world.16 They discover, of course, that the actual occupational choices open to students are derisory: humiliating dependence on a patron, or casual and demeaning jobs. The academic employment crisis that resulted from the great expansion of university education in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was not merely sociological; it had - or was thought to have — ideological implications. Thus Thomas Hobbes 16 J. B. Leishman, The Three Parnassus Plays, 1598-1601

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(London, 1949).


blamed the revolt against Charles I on the universities, whose Greek and Roman history made people admire "the glorious name of liberty," and therefore see monarchy as "tyranny." "The core of rebellion . . . are the universities," Hobbes wrote, "For it is a hard matter for men, who do all think highly of their own wits, when they have also acquired the learning of the university, to be persuaded that they want any ability requisite for the government of a commonwealth." 17 Mark H. Curtis finds Hobbes's view exaggerated; he argues rather that "the universities were dangerous . . . because they prepared too many men for too few places." Thus in the early seventeenth century the two universities were graduating more than 400 students every year, which Curtis calculates as 100 more than there were vacancies in the church. This is only one aspect of a more general process by which the lack of "opportunities to use their training and talents to the full" led to the formation of "an insoluble group of alienated intellectuals who individually and collectively became troublemakers in a period of growing discontent with the Stuart regime." 18 There is, then, good circumstantial evidence for seeing Marlowe as a particular - and very early - case of a more general modern phenomenon: the growth of an alienated class of intellectuals or, as they were then called, "malcontents." Many of the emotional and ideological tendencies of that class find their expression in Doctor Faustus.

For the intellectual elites of the Renaissance, Greece, and Rome were not important merely as a stimulus to popular and republican political ideas; they also provided liberating ideals of artistic achievement, pagan sensuousness, and heroic example. It is significant that the only experience Marlowe's Faustus seems to regard as wholly living up to his ideal expectations is the appearance of Helen. He first summons her up for his students, who have decided that "Helen of Greece was the admirablest lady that ever lived" 17 Behemoth, English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth (London, 1840), 6.168, 192-96, 236-37. 18 Mark H. Curtis, "The alienated intellectuals of early Stuart England," Past and Present 23 (1962), pp. 27, 28.

Doctor Faustus (5.1.10); later, to prevent Faustus from repenting and thus escaping from his clutches, Mephistopheles decides to let him have "heavenly Helen" as his "paramour." This is the devil's supreme recourse, and when she appears, between two Cupids, Faustus's rapture is transcendent: Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships? And burnt the topless Towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss; Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies! (5.1.91-94) Seeing her also inspires him to imagine a glorious role for himself: I will be Paris, and for love of thee, Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sack'd, And I will combat with weak Menelaus And wear thy colours on my plumed crest; Yea I will wound Achilles in the heel, And then return to Helen for a kiss. (5.1.98-103) Of course, the supreme possibilities of life are derived from the literature of the past; it is through reading that Faustus can imagine for himself a heroic lover's role so fulfilling that for Helen's glory he will be happy to sack — is it even, or especially — Wittenberg? All that is precious for Faustus is derived from books; transcendental aspirations belong to the imagined past; what lies ahead is the hell of the real world, unless some magic miracle occurs. The opening scene of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, then, enacts the fateful moment when the individual attempts to make a vocational choice that can satisfy the expectations that learning and literature have opened up to his imagination. Of course the vast discrepancy between theory and practice, between what education professes to achieve and what it can actually bring about, has been both an evident fact and a philosophical issue since the days of Plato; but what gives the moment when the student "sounds the depths of what thou wilt profess" an even greater importance in modern 39


society is the wide range of choices offered, and their determining role in the individual's whole economic and social future. Behind the play's simple antithesis of sin and punishment we can discern the inevitable contradiction between transcendental hopes that, at least since the Renaissance, education has awakened in the invidual mind, and subsequent disappointment with the world as it is. Faust is very particularly the intellectual's myth; how many, since Marlowe's Faustus, have in their various ways "tried their brains to get a deity," so that they can realize their book-born expectations? In this, Marlowe's Faustus can reasonably stand as a prototype of one of the central, and rather unreal, assumptions of modern secular individualism. This individualism has retained some of the transcendental aspirations of both the Renaissance and the Reformation, but it cannot find or create a world in which they can be carried out; only magic can do that. So we may say that, although he could not know it, Marlowe's Faustus is damned not only by Protestantism, but by a larger force which Protestantism had done much to bring to birth; he is damned as a result of modern individualism; he damns himself forever so that he can escape from the hell of its unrealized aspirations, which is all he can find in the here and now. PERPETUAL DAMNATION The effect of Marlowe's play does not much depend on our belief in the wickedness of black magic or in the actual existence of the devil. However heretical Marlowe's general views may have been, in Doctor Faustus there is no dissent from orthodoxy in these doctrinal matters. The play's dramatic effect largely depends on its presentation of issues which were central to the Counter-Reformation's war on secular hedonism and antinomian individualism: the reality of the terrors of hell, the immortality of the soul, and the possibility of eternal damnation. After the fatal contract is signed, hell is the first subject Faustus raises. Initially he does not believe in eternal torment. "This word 'damnation' terrifies not him," he declares of himself; for he "confounds hell in Elysium," the pagan afterlife where he hopes his 40

Doctor Faustus ghost will "be with the old philosophers" (1.3.61). Mephistopheles soon, however, disabuses Faustus of his belief that "hells a fable," remarking, "Aye think so still, till experience change thy mind" (2.1.128—29). By the end of the play Faustus knows how wrong he was to think that hell is a "mere old wives' tale," and that "after this life" there is no "pain" (2.1.135—36). The last scene, like the first, has no real equivalent in the sources. It is Marlowe who for the first time dramatizes the force of Faustus's damnation by presenting the death directly. Through Faustus's great soliloquy the experience is rendered subjectively. As we hear the clock strike the stages of Faustus's last hour on earth, the true nature of the conflict is enacted: it is the solitary ego against time. When Faustus fails to stop the clock — "The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike" (5.2.68) — and then when the clock strikes twelve - "O, it strikes, it strikes, now body turn to air / Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell!" (5.2.108-9) - we experience with him the terrifying reality of the temporal clause of the original compact. "Ugly hell gape not, come not Lucifer, / I'll burn my books, ah Mephistopheles," Faustus cries (5.2.114-15); and then he is carried into the gaping jaws of the hell-mouth, an appropriately backward-looking piece of stage furniture from the morality plays. Alas! the soul is not part of the temporal order. The question of the immortality of the soul is raised explicitly both at the beginning and at the end of the play. Before signing the compact, Faustus justifies binding his "soul" to Lucifer (2.1.50) by saying that he has the right to dispose of it as he wishes (2.1.68). But the contract, of course, would not be worth Lucifer's while if he was not going to have Faustus's soul for an immeasurably longer time than the twenty-four years specified. This becomes a central issue in the penultimate section of the soliloquy, where Faustus develops what was only a brief reference in the Faustbuch into a final plea that Christ should Impose some end to my incessant pain: Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd. (5.2.93-95)


The reflection that this is impossible makes Faustus inveigh against the immortality of the soul as a heavy and unjust burden that God has placed on man. He continues: O, no end is limited to damned souls, Why were thou not a creature wanting soul? Or, why is this immortal that thou hast? Ah Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd Unto some brutish beast. All beasts are happy, for when they die, Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements, But mine must live still to be plagu'd in hell. Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me! (5.2.96-105) Man's unique exposure to endless torment makes Faustus ache to be only an animal — and thus reject what was commonly supposed to be God's supreme favor to man in putting him at the top of the hierarchical order of creation; and it may be that it is in this final curse that Marlowe makes his most heretical personal statement. It was certainly on the issue of the eternity of damnation that the individualist intellectual tradition of the seventeenth century fought its most tenacious, though still very cautious, battle against traditional Christian eschatology. Dissent from the doctrine that the majority of souls would be eternally damned, and that watching their torments was one of the pleasures of the saved, was a dangerous heresy. The Socinians tried to mitigate the orthodox doctrine by maintaining that only the souls of the blessed had eternal life, and that at some distant date God might mercifully annihilate the wicked; but the Socinians were not tolerated in most countries, and it was equally inadvisable to hold Origen's view that God had the power to save any soul, even that of Satan. 19 Logically, of course, the idea that the soul is an independent entity that is not subject to the ego's direction contradicts the r9 On Marlowe and the Socinian or Arian heresies, see Boas, Marlowe, pp. 110—12, 257-

Doctor Faustus central assumption of individualism; the derivation of that word means "that which cannot be further divided." Even a century after Marlowe the immortality of damned souls was a doctrine dangerous to contest openly, so that notable dissenters from orthodoxy on this point - including John Locke and Isaac Newton - did not express their opinion in public. Locke, however, wrote a private treatise in which he deduced from the Bible that there were two different resurrections: the just would be resurrected as spiritual bodies, the unjust would be resurrected as ordinary bodies to "be cast into hell fire to be tormented there" for a suitable period. However, he argued, the unjust "shall not live forever" because that would be contrary to the biblical assertion that the wages of sin is death. 20 Marlowe's personal beliefs were probably close to complete atheism; but in Doctor Faustus he does not seem to have attempted to challenge Christian doctrine directly; and Locke's reluctance to make a public challenge to the eternity of hell-fire suggests one strong reason why. MARLOWE AND THE MYTH: SOME CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS Martyrdom is the test of faith, and the old-fashioned view of Marlowe's Faustus is that, as George Santayana put it, he is "a martyr to everything that the Renaissance prized, — power, curious knowledge, enterprise, wealth, and beauty." 21 A martyr? Isn't that straining matters rather? Admittedly, Faustus is decent enough; he is loyal to his emperor, revered by his students, generous to his servant; but there is no suggestion of any wish to serve others, or to sacrifice anything for them, that we can see. Moreover, apart from the moments of regret or fear of the future, the course of his life between the fateful compact and the dreadful reckoning passes before us like something no more guilty than an exceptionally extended post-doctoral sabbatical: he just has the extra 20 D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago, 1964), pp. 94—95. 21 George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets (1910; New York, 1953), p. 135.

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luck to be able to include hell, Olympus, and the starry skies on his tour, as well as Venice and Rome; and the students, surprisingly enough, make no objection, and remain loyal to the end. So when it is all finished, and Faustus in stark terror cries out for divine mercy, we feel that, although his end may be legally fair and theologically orthodox, it is not just. It is unjust for the same reasons that most of us find life unjust: because the punishments seem greater than our crimes; because we do not really feel we have committed "crimes"; or perhaps because from childhood on we have never been wholly persuaded that our demands on life are unreasonable. Unless we too believe in hell and the immortality of the soul, Faustus stands in the imagination as the man who is punished just for wanting to have everything — like everybody else.

Nicholas Brooke has written that "all the positive statements of the play, supported by the finest verse, are against the declared Christian moral."22 From the first and last scenes, together with the intervening discussions of hell and the apostrophe to Helen of Troy, we can reasonably conclude that Marlowe's main contribution to the Faust myth was to give a new scope and intensity to the basic conflicts of emerging individualism. Thus the opening scene, in which the discovery of the vanity of orthodox knowledge prepares the way for the specious promises of magic, can be considered a particular historical manifestation of a much more general and enduring complementarity: the infinite expectations and chilling disillusionments that characterize the educational system in a society where freedom of belief and vocation are regarded as the right of every individual. What Marlowe thought about hell we do not know; but we can surmise that bitter experience of the world had led him to concur with Mephistopheles's contrast of the "eternal joys of heaven" with sublunary existence: "Why this is hell, nor am 22 Nicholas Brooke, "The moral tragedy of Doctor Faustus," Cambridge Journal 5 (1952), cited from Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, a Casebook ed. J. D. Jump (London, 1969), p. 109.

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Doctor Faustus I out of it" (1.3.76). One hell, in short, is indubitably real — that of daily existence: as Mephistopheles says, "where we are is hell / And where hell is must we ever be" (2.1.123—24). As for the doctrine of eternal damnation, it was a problem which Marlowe could neither resolve nor dismiss. On the one hand Counter-Reformation society had made the eternal punishment of sinners one of its primary weapons for maintaining any sort of moral and social order; and — as the many plays of the period about rebels, malcontents, and atheists show — it equated heresy with every kind of criminal and treasonable behavior. Marlowe had lived his life under that shadow; and yet it was too dangerous for him to declare publicly, as Locke was later to imply, that the autonomy of the individual cannot co-exist with the possibility of eternal damnation, in theory - or in practice, unless the individual is willing to pay the ultimate price. In the later days of individualism, of course, being willing to go to hell was a standard notion of the price individualists must pay. This is attested by such contemporaneous youths as Arthur Rimbaud, who wrote A Season in Hell (1873), and Huckleberry Finn, who decided in 1884 that to be true to his feelings about what he ought to do was to affirm "All right, then, 1*11 go to hell." 23 When Faustus is about to sign away "both body and soul to Lucifer" (2.1.132-33), his blood congeals; he takes this as a warning portent against writing the words "Faustus gives to thee his soul," but then reflects "Why shouldst thou not? Is not thy soul thine own?" (2.1.68-69). He learns that it is not. Whatever may have been Marlowe's own personal beliefs we can be sure that he was correct in assuming that his audience would have accepted the validity of this discovery. Like the witches of the period who confessed because they really believed that they did the devil's bidding, so Faustus and his audience really believed that the unalterable terms of the individual's life included the soul - an invisible but immortal stranger within, God's hostage, with the devil permanently in waiting. 23 Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Leo Marx (Indianapolis, 1967), p. 244.

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Which is why we must see the sixteenth-century Faust not as the martyr of individualism but as its scapegoat. During a period of great ideological tension he became the symbolic figure upon whom were projected the fears of the anarchic and individualistic tendencies of the Renaissance and the Reformation; his damnation was the Counter-Reformation's attempt to anathematize the hopes that a more optimistic generation had cherished and that history had disappointed. The anathema, finally, was itself to fail; but it left behind the myth of Faust, which was itself a new form of a more ancient and punitive mythological pattern that made knowledge and immortality a threat to the divine power: when Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, "the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil"; the expulsion is necessary "lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever."24 The legal form of the obligation that Faustus signs in his own blood gives the punishment a highly modern form; for, as Henry Sumner Maine wrote, "society . . . is mainly distinguished from preceding generations by the largeness of the sphere which is occupied in it by Contract."25 Whether the historical George Faust, or the heroes of the Faust Books, or Marlowe's Faustus, made knowledge their primary goal is another matter; certainly Marlowe's Faustus soon loses sight of his intellectual quest. We also notice that none of his grand early ideas of working for the general good, such as walling "all Germany with brass" (1.1.39), are carried out. More seriously, perhaps, we observe that the scope of the play, as it proceeds, shrinks from the whole world and the heavens into the narrow locality of Wittenberg and nearby Anhalt. Such is what W. W. Greg describes as "the progressive fatuity of Faustus's career."26 The themes of knowledge and damnation are present, but they do not dominate a text that also contains miscellaneous adventures and farcical tricks: these have their own kind of dramatic effect, and even human truth, but they 24 Genesis 3.22. 25 Ancient law, (1861; London, 1887), p. 304. 26 W. W. Greg, "The damnation of Faust," Modern Language Review 41 (1946), p. 103.

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Doctor Faustus undeniably represent a comedown from the heights of ambition, pact, and punishment. We cannot, then, say that Faustus sells his soul for any one thing: knowledge is one thing; the right of the individual to damn himself if he chooses is another; but there is also much persisting concern with commoner matters: power, pleasure, jests, and winning the acclamation of the great. All these are contained in Marlowe's Faustus, a fact which justifies us in echoing Cleanth Brooks's conclusion that Faustus's retention of his individuality is "at once his glory and his damnation."27 27 Cleanth Brooks, "The unity of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus" cited from Jump, ed., Marlowe, p. 221.

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3. Don Quixote of La Mancha

Unlike Faust, the character Don Quixote was not based on an actual historical person. There has been a little talk of real-life originals, such as Alonso Quijada, Cervantes's wife's uncle, who may have believed that the romances of chivalry were true. But there has been no agreement among scholars, and any firm identification is improbable. The hero of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha — The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha — published in

1605 a n d 1615, almost certainly had no real-life original;1 and yet, like all myths, that of Don Quixote has taken on a very simple form in the popular consciousness. It is mainly with how this form reflects some of the major values and conflicts of modern Western civilization that we are concerned. THE FIRST EXPEDITION

A poor hidalgo (that is, a member of the lowest order of the Spanish nobility), whose surname is Quixada, Quesada, Quexana, or Quixano - the narrator claims not to know - and whose age is "bordering on fifty," lives in a village in La Mancha. In the times when he has nothing else to do, "which was mostly all the year round," we are told, he gives himself up "to reading of books of chivalry."2 It 1 El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Justo Garcia Soriano and Justo Garcia Morales (Madrid: Aguilar, 1973), p. 32; cited hereafter in the text as SM. See also William Byron, Cervantes: A Biography (New York, 1978), p. 305. 2 Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, trans. John Ormsby, revised Joseph R. Jones and Kenneth Douglas, Norton Critical Edition (New York and London, 1981), p. 25. The Ormsby translation, though old (1885), is accurate and of considerable literary quality. Quotations and references are to this edition, and are cited hereafter, by page numbers, in the text. I have also consulted the translation by Samuel Putnam, 2 vols. (New York, 1949).

Don Quixote of La Mancha

Tony Johannot, wood engraving, illustration in L'ingenieux hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche (Paris, 1836-37).

becomes an obsession. He sells off "many an acre of tillage land to buy books of chivalry" and so deeply commits his imagination to the belief that all these inventions and fancies are true that "to him no history in the world was better substantiated" (p. 26). Finally, he "hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon"; he decides, for both "his own greater renown" and "the service of his country," that he will "make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armor and on horseback in quest of adventures." So he tries to "put into practice all that he had read of as being the usual practice of knights-errant." First, he refurbishes some rusty and mildewed armor left him by his ancestors, that had "for ages been lying forgotten in a corner" (p. 27). Next, he spends four days ruminating about what highsounding and distinctive name he should confer on his old and very emaciated horse, before deciding on Rocinante, combining rocin, the 49


word for a hack, with the suitably sonorous ending of "ante," meaning "formerly" or "foremost." Next, eight whole days are passed in devising a name for himself, until he finally hits on Don Quixote: this combines Don, the proper appellative for a man in a high rank of the nobility, with a lofty-sounding variation on his own surname. But it is still not lofty enough for him, until, remembering that the prime model of knight-errantry, Amadis of Gaul, had "added the name of his kingdom and country to make it famous," Don Quixote adds "de la Mancha" (p. 28). The province of La Mancha, south of Madrid, was something of a byword for poverty and remoteness, and quijote is the word for thigh armor, so the name as a whole embodies a parodic intention which is suggested by some modern equivalent as Lord Greaves of the Badlands. Armor, steed, heroic name; only one more thing is necessary to complete the requirements of the chivalric hero - "Nothing more was needed now but to look for a lady to be in love with." Don Quixote fixes on a "very good-looking farm-girl" from the nearby village of Toboso (p. 29). He decides that a suitable, though somewhat remote, variant on her baptismal name of Aldonza Lorenzo would be Dulcinea: so she becomes, for him, Dulcinea del Toboso. Spurred on by "the thought of how much the world would suffer because of his tardiness," Don Quixote sets out before dawn one July day "without anybody seeing him." He takes the way "which his horse chose," in the belief that in this "lay the essence of adventures" (p. 30). Nothing whatever happens all day, and by nightfall Don Quixote is tired and hungry. But since "everything our adventurer thought, saw, or imagined seemed to him to be fashioned and to happen on the same lines as what he had been reading" (p. 31), when he comes to an inn he takes it for a splendid castle. As readers we might well expect that the end to his adventure, and his delusion, must come now, at his first contact with the outside world. But no; the innkeeper, afraid of Don Quixote's contentiousness and his arms, finds it more prudent to humor the visitor's folly. Don Quixote is received according to the role he has assumed, and, after being fed, spends the night with his arms piled on the watertrough, his version of the ritual night s vigil of an aspirant to


knighthood. Next morning he successfully assaults two muledrivers who innocently try to move his armor from the water-trough; and then the innkeeper, in a hurry to get rid of him, mimics the ceremonial of dubbing him a knight. So Don Quixote, feeling himself at last a properly qualified knight-errant, hurries forth; the innkeeper is so glad to get rid of the troublemaker that he demands no payment for the food and lodging given man and horse. The second day brings two adventures. First, Don Quixote stops a farmer from flogging his young shepherd, Andres, for not watching his sheep properly; he makes the farmer promise to pay the boy his wages, and rides off very pleased with himself. The farmer, as soon as his back is turned, almost flays Andres alive; and the narrator ironically comments "Thus did the valiant Don Quixote right that wrong" (p. 41). Later, he falls in with a train of Toledo merchants; he decides he must force them to admit the peerless beauty of Dulcinea; but he falls off his horse and is brutally beaten by one of the muleteers. Left on the ground, unable to move, Don Quixote comforts himself by singing a mournful "romance" or ballad about Baldwin, one of Charlemagne's paladins, who had been wounded and left alone in the mountains. Fortunately a kindly man from his own village happens along, hoists him up on to his donkey, and discreetly takes him home. Cervantes's main intention in the five chapters which comprise Don Quixote's first expedition is very evidently a direct burlesque of the chivalric romances. The idea was by no means new when Cervantes started to write Don Quixote in about the year 1597. A century earlier, the great Italian poets of the Renaissance had already treated the chivalric heroes in a spirit of sophisticated comedy most notably in poetic narratives about the love and madness of the paladin Orlando by Boiardo {Orlando innamorato) and Ariosto {Orlando furioso), works Cervantes knew and admired.3 More recently, and 3 There had been a closer anticipation of the Quixote theme even earlier; the Italian short-story writer Franco Sacchetti (c. 13 30-1400) had pictured a seventy-year-old Florentine gentleman so crazed by the ideal of chivalry that he sets out to a local tournament on a lean nag, hoping to gain great honor but only making himself ridiculous. See especially Ramon Menendez-Pidal, trans. George


nearer home, there had been a short farcical dramatic treatment of the theme in the anonymous Spanish Entremes de los romances [Interlude of the Ballads] (1592). 4 In this work a peasant called Bartolo, who has heard too many popular ballads about knightly exploits, goes mad and imagines himself to be a romance hero. He puts on some ridiculous old armor and sets forth in quest of adventures. Trying to rescue what he imagines to be a persecuted maiden he stumbles into what is actually a lovers' quarrel; the angry gallant wounds him, and he is taken back home declaiming appropriately mournful ballads. Like the English and Scottish Border ballads, the Spanish romances dealt with heroic and tragic events of love and war, and were often based, like the song Don Quixote sings, on parts of the traditional Carolingian cycle of stories dealing with Charlemagne and his twelve famous knights, the paladins. 5 The satiric targets of the Entremes are obviously the same as those of Don Quixote. Moreover, there is a further parallel in that neither work operates through the usual methods of parody or burlesque, but through an essentially realistic dramatic treatment of a comic psychological idea: to show the ridiculous results that ensue when a devotee of romance totally confounds his fictional world with the real one, and tries to maintain his imagined ideal against the cruel batterings of quotidian reality. How can so simple an idea be made capable of convincing narrative development? In the Entremes the contradiction between Bartolo's idea and reality is so brutal and unqualified that it can hardly go on for any longer than one confrontation. Cervantes realized this; his Don Quixote is not always the loser - a fact vividly illustrated by Vladimir Nabokov in an elaborate listing of Quixote's "Victories and Defeats," which shows that in the total of Don Quixote's enI. Dale, "The genesis of Don Quixote" in Cervantes across the Centuries, ed. Angel Flores and M. J. Benardete (New York, 1747), pp. 3 2 - 5 5 . 4 The Entremes is contained in the Norton edition of Don Quixote. 5 The term "paladin" originally meant an officer of the palace; it was Charlemagne's "paladins" who gave the term its modern meaning of heroic champion.


counters there are twenty victories, perfectly balanced by twenty defeats.6 Cervantes certainly brings a great many mediating psychological factors into play so that the contradiction between the real and the ideal is not total: some people, like the innkeeper, go along with Quixote's fantasies because they do not want any trouble, and are afraid of his sword and lance. On other occasions, Quixote unconsciously summons his own psychological defense mechanisms into play. Usually any defeat can be rationalized in terms that protect and even fortify his original delusion: for instance, when he has been beaten by the muleteer it seems to Quixote that "this was a real knight-errant's mishap"; his failure is due entirely "to the fault of his horse" (p. 44). Later, he attributes his defeats to various magical enchanters whom he believes to be his enemies. There is, then, a continuing dialectic between Quixote's mind and the realities he encounters, a dialectic which is capable of infinite variety and complexity, and which gives Don Quixote a place of unique importance in the history of the novel. What transforms Don Quixote into a myth is a development of this idea. As Cervantes went along, he discovered that Don Quixote's obsessional mania is, after all, not a wholly private one; everyone Quixote comes into contact with already knows something about the chivalric romances, and they usually prove to have complex and often contradictory attitudes towards them. It is true that in the Prologue Cervantes's friend advises him to keep his "aim fixed on the destruction of that ill-founded edifice of the books of chivalry \invectiva contra los libros de caballeriasy SM, p. 185] hated by

so many yet praised by many more" (p. 13); and at the end of the story Cervantes claims that his "desire has been no other than to cause mankind to abhor the false and foolish tales of the books of chivalry [las fingidas y disparatadas historias de los libros de caballerias,

SM, p. 593]." But, of course, many others praised knight-errantry as

6 Lectures on Don Quixote, ed. Fredson Bowers (London, 1983), p. n o . Nabokov charmingly ascribes this balance to "the harmonizing intuition of the artist."

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an admirable ideal; and the widespread support for the chivalric romances, and their embodiment - however problematic - in Don Quixote, no doubt lay in their being a fictional expression of many of the most essential values in both the classical and the Christian heritage of Western civilization. THE ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY The term chivalry, like the analogous words for a knight or gentleman in French, Italian, and Spanish, chevalier, cavaliere, and caballero, of course starts with the idea of "riders of horses." Mans taming of the horse gave the human possessor a power, height, and mobility that became both the actual and the symbolic basis of a military and social elite. In the dark ages of Europe the feudal horsemen, the original knights, pillaged the countryside and preyed on the weak; to counter this threat the Christian church attempted to civilize knighthood. The results were most spectacular during the period of the Crusades, from 1096 to 1291. The Crusades themselves, with participants vowing on the cross to follow the ethic of the gospels, were a way of bringing the warrior caste under some control by the church; and there soon arose the great military orders, such as the Knights Hospitallers (Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, founded c. 1099), the Knights Templars (Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, founded c. 1119), and the Teutonic Knights (German Order of the Hospital of St. Mary, founded 1190). Originally inspired by the monastic ideal of life, and devoted to tending the sick and protecting pilgrims, the knightly orders soon became powerful and exclusive fraternities with great financial and territorial possessions; they exemplify, at least in theory, the general pattern by which the military class as a whole, which held the exclusive right to bear arms, was converted both to the social ideals of honor, abnegation, and courtesy, and to the Christian virtues of charity and succoring the weak. Knighthood, with its elaborate chivalric code, reached its fullest development in the twelfth century; and with it there arose an associated literature, the whole tradition of romance, which consti54


tutes the first body of original writing in the vernaculars of medieval Europe. Our word "romance" derives from the Old French romanz, originally meaning the "roman" language of popular speech, as opposed to classical Latin in which nearly all written literature had previously been composed. The word romanz soon came to mean the very varied stories for which the written vernacular was mainly used, and especially the vast international cycles of tales concerning Charlemagne, and King Arthur, and their knights. These cycles of romances share several features with Don Quixote; most generally, they contain very much the same, not necessarily conscious, conflict between the Christian ideals of the culture and its secular values. This division is well expressed in two of the main groups of Arthurian legends. On the one hand there is the evangelizing Christian theme, which dominates the legends of the quest for the Holy Grail. After the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have kept Christ's blood in the Grail; and the knights of the Round Table vow to seek it. The quest can only be accomplished by a knight who, true to his knightly vows, is pure in spirit and cleansed from sin; Galahad and two exemplary companions achieve a vision of Christ, and receive the Grail from him. But on the other hand there are many knights of the Round Table who are concerned with secular, more specifically with adulterous, love. Lancelot, for instance, is the lover of Queen Guinevere, Arthur's wife; and Galahad himself is the fruit of Lancelot's amours with the princess Elaine, whom he had believed to be Guinevere as the result of an enchantment. The two narrative elements combined here, the idealized religious and the quotidian erotic, became standard features of the romances. The use of supernatural enchantment — that is, of nOnChristian magic - in both elements is significant: it accounts for much of the church's hostility to romances; it constitutes the most obviously ridiculous aspect of traditional chivalric narrative in Don Quixote; and it also underlies our current usage of the term "romance" for an unrealistic and far-fetched kind of story. Meanwhile, it was the erotic which occasioned the church's most explicit,


though never very concerted or effective, opposition to the new literary genre and its sexual ideology. Love in the romances means religious adoration; and it is this tradition that requires Don Quixote not to stir until he has his Lady Dulcinea to whom, as is the proper service of a knight, he can dedicate all his glorious actions. It is also the treatment of love in the Arthurian and Carolingian romances that gives us our daily-life meaning of the term "romance," as a love affair, or a story about one. In general the medieval romances, like the poems of the troubadours, were produced with a special audience in view, that of the queen or great noble lady at her feudal court. There had arisen in southern France, and rather earlier than the romances, the now famous, though still controversial, code of courtly love.7 This was essentially an application of the feudal service that the knight owed his lord; but it took the form of the male's complementary poetic, or possibly sexual, adoration of his lady love. The French romances, and particularly those of the greatest and most influential of the writers of the late twelfth century, Chretien de Troyes, did much to spread the cult of courtly love, whether in the form of tragic faithfulness unto death, as in the Tristan stories, or in a lighter vein of skeptical sophistication, as in Lancelot. Both Tristan and Lancelot deal with adulterous love, but present that love as lifelong, faithful, and, at least in theory, chaste. The concept of courtly love was not confined to France, but was taken up in different ways in Italy, most famously by Petrarch and Dante, and in Germany, by the Minnesingers. In the course of time its literary expression tended to become more idealized, and the element of adultery was subordinated either to a wholly platonic 7 On the history and ideology of courtly love, see the now classic works by Denis de Rougement and C. S. Lewis. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (London, 1936), formulates the convenient summary that courtly love has four elements: humility, courtesy, adultery, and the religion of love. De Rougement, L'amour et VOccident (Paris, 1939), has been translated in England as Passion in Society (London, 1950) and in the USA as hove in the Western World (New York, 1956). For a less favorable view, see Alexander J. Denomy, The Heresy of Courtly Love (New York, 1947), and for a more recent scholarly summary see Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love: A Critical Study of European Scholarship (Manchester, 1977).


love, or to the developing ideal of a romantic monogamous marriage. But whatever the differences of literary treatment, courtly love gave chivalry and its literature the theme of an idealized love for an unattainable lady; this, of course, is the model for Don Quixote's adoration of his unattainable and indeed nonexistent Dulcinea. By the fourteenth century many of the active military functions of knighthood had begun to decay. The Crusades were over; and new military techniques, weapons, and organization were making the heavily-armored horseman a relic of the past. Foot soldiers using the pike, the longbow, and the crossbow proved their effectiveness against mounted knights during the Hundred Years War; and the use of gunpowder, most spectacularly at the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453, ended the power of the castle, the home of feudal knighthood, as well as of the military dominance of cavalry. Don Quixote bewails the "diabolic invention" of gunpowder (p. 303); it had destroyed forever the chivalric phase of warfare, as Cervantes knew. In Cervantes's own time the great Spanish conquests of Charles V both in the Old World and in the New had been won, not by noblemen, but by professional and enlisted soldiers who wielded a new and relatively light firearm, the arquebus, a matchlock gun. Having lost its monopoly of military power, chivalry for the most part became a ceremonial and social institution connected with royal and princely courts. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the old warrior code was gradually adapted to the purposes of leisure and social display in the elaboration of highly complicated rules of honor, dueling, and jousting at tournaments. New, and largely honorific, orders of knighthood were created, such as the English Order of the Garter in 1344, and the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece in 1429; at the same time the increasingly centralized power of kings diminished the military and political autonomy of the knightly class. Royalty took control of such matters as precedence and armorial bearings — in England by the foundation of the College of Arms, a royal corporation, in 1433; and kings became the heads of the old chivalric orders: since 1489, for instance, the kings 57


of Spain have been Grand Masters of the ancient crusading Order of Calatrava. One of Cervantes's major themes in Don Quixote is whether chivalry and its ideal values can ever be an operative force in the real world. Historically it seems clear that medieval knighthood's ideals of honor and courtesy had some occasional effects even on the actual conduct of war as late as the sixteenth century, and gave a distinctive character to the lives of a good many people. The point of honor against taking unfair advantage led the Castilian Don Henri de Trastamara to give up the advantages of terrain, and thus lose the battle of Navarrete to the Black Prince in 1367; the idea of saving lives through individual trial by combat actually operated in the famous duel of Bayard and Sotomajor in 1503, and was twice proposed by Emperor Charles V to the King of France, in 1526 and 1536. 8 One obvious escape from the decline in the functions of organized knighthood was offered by the ideal of knight-errantry. This is the extreme example of chivalry, to use Johan Huizinga's description of it as "a sublime form of secular life" that was essentially "an aesthetic ideal assuming the appearance of an ethical ideal."9 The idea of a freelance - the medieval reference of the term is telling - and footloose style of life for the individual knight was in part literary, and remained so. The chivalric romances as they developed in the early sixteenth century had knights-errant as their heroes. These heroes, unlike those of epics or chansons de geste}0 inhabit a world largely free of national, political, or geographical constraints; they fight, not for their liege lord, but for the purpose each knight-errant has individually chosen, most typically the winning of his lady, and the overcoming of the various obstacles which that involves: enemies, rivals, giants, and enchantments. The pattern of action in the chivalric romance is not collective but individual; and its climax is 8 Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924; New York, 1954), pp. 100, 97. 9 Huizinga, Waning of the Middle Ages, p. 69. 10 That is, the group of medieval "adventure poems" mainly concerning Charlemagne and his circle.

Don Quixote of La Mancha not the battle but the adventure - the danger or opportunity that comes along the road by chance. Apparently the first occurrence of the term "knight-errant" in English is in the greatest English poem of Arthurian chivalry, the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There were, however, actual knights-errant, or chevaliers errans, long before,11 such as William Marshall in the days of Richard I of England ("the Lion-Hearted"), or even as early as the tenth century; 12 and they were common later. 13 Spain, for example, had real knights-errant during the fifteenth century and many writings about them, historical or fictionalized, have survived. 14 Of course, by the very nature of its separateness from economic and social institutions, knight-errantry in real life can only have been embodied in a relatively occasional and fragmentary way. Still, the idea of an individual quest for glory clearly survived in the countries of western Europe. The most famous of all the later real-life knights-errant was Pierre du Terrail Bayart (c. 1473—1524), the celebrated chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.15 He was a soldier of incredible courage who was also famous for his devoutness, generosity, and gentleness to the weak. The continuity between medieval chivalry and the humanism of the Renaissance is neatly illustrated by the fact that Francois I of France, the great patron of art and letters, chose to be dubbed a knight by the Chevalier Bayart. 16 11 See Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, 1984), pp. 2 0 - 2 2 . Keen's is an excellent survey with fine illustrations. 12 See the classic study by George Duby, trans. Cynthia Postan, The Chivalrous Society (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 156-57. 13 Examples include Nuno Alvares Pereira in the fourteenth and George Von Ehingen in the fifteenth century. See, respectively, Edgar Prestage, ed., Chivalry: A Series of Studies to Illustrate its Historical Significance and Civilizing Influence (New York, 1928), pp. 153-54, and El Viaje de Jorge de Ehingen, in Libros de Antano 8, pp. 3 7 - 3 8 . 14 See Martin de Riquer, "Cervantes and the romances of chivalry," and its bibliography, in Suma cervantina, ed. J. B. Avalle-Arce and E. C. Riley (London, 1973), pp. 273-92; reprinted in the Norton edition of Don Quixote, pp. 895-913. 15 Keen, Chivalry, p. 78. 16 Keen, Chivalry, p. 238.

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The most complete literary example of the fusion of the old chivalric and the new humanistic ideals was the romance most dear to Don Quixote, Amadis de Gaula. The figure of Amadis dates back to a fourteenth-century or earlier Spanish or Portuguese original; but the Amadts in its earliest extant version, by the Spaniard Garcia Ordonez (possibly Rodriguez) de Montalvo, was published in 1508. The hero, Amadis, is the son of the King of Wales; he falls in love with Oriana, a British princess, and after a long series of incredible sufferings and triumphs finally wins her hand. The romance contains most of the standard Arthurian characters and situations, including wicked enchanters, and the tutelary fairy, Urganda; but, despite the vast number of characters and adventures, the narrative is carefully organized, and the most refined spirit of courtesy, verbal elegance, and idealized love pervades, not only in the paragon Amadis, but in the language, atmosphere, and sentiments of the whole work. Amadts was tremendously popular, not only in Spain but throughout western Europe, and especially in France. It had innumerable continuations and descendants, of which Palmerin of England is the only book of chivalry that, along with Amadts, is spared from the flames when the priest and the barber carry out their ruthless destruction of Don Quixote's library (pp. 48—54). The popularity of Amadis and its successors stimulated general interest in the chivalric romances, and many of them filtered down to a larger public through abbreviated chapbook versions, plays, and ballads. The books of chivalry were not merely popular; they were also a powerful cultural force. In its own time Amadis was certainly not regarded merely as a work of entertainment. It numbered Francois I of France and the devout Charles V of Spain, as well as eminent scholars and moralists such as Montaigne, Juan de Valdes, Luis Vives, and Fray Luis de Granada, among its admirers; it was widely regarded both as a manual of courtly deportment, and as a work that could inspire its readers to glorious achievements. There are a good many testimonies as to its actual effects on human behavior. For instance, when the Conquistadores under Cortes first saw Te60

Don Quixote of La Mancha nochtitlan, the Aztec capital, they likened it to the enchanted city in Amadis'}1 and the name "California," which they wrote on the map of the New World, was derived from a Utopian island in Esplandidn, the first continuation of Amadis.ls Even more convincing evidence comes from the two greatest religious figures of sixteenth-century Spain. Both Ignatius de Loyola and Santa Teresa recorded the appeal that Amadis made to their youthful imaginations: it was reading chivalric romances that spurred them to rise above the pettiness of the self and the mundane world. At the same time, we should recall that Don Quixote was by no means the first attack on the romance of chivalry — Riquer lists thirty-five written in sixteenth-century Spain; 19 nor should we forget that the chivalric romances remained very popular long after the publication of Don Quixote. THE SECOND EXPEDITION On almost every page of Don Quixote there are allusions, usually unexplained, which show that Cervantes assumed that his readers were familiar with the main characters and situations of many of the chivalric romances. There is no doubt that in its own time the work was regarded as primarily a comic, and in some sense a satirical, attack on chivalric romances; but that in itself is not enough to create a myth. How could Don Quixote have attained mythical proportions in later generations, for whom chivalric romance had ceased to be topical or even familiar? One reason, certainly, is that although the setting in time and place is that of Spain in Cervantes's own time, the novel retains much of the freedom from the particularities of real life that characterizes the world of romances (and also the worlds of modern adven17 Cited in R. O. Jones, The Golden Age: Prose and Poetry, in A Literary History of Spain (London, 1971), p. 54. 18 Erwin G. Gudde, California Place Names (Berkeley, 1962), "California." 19 Riquer, "Cervantes and the romances of chivalry," Norton edition, pp. 9 0 1 - 5 . For a close analysis of Cervantes's imitation of this tradition, see Howard Mancing, The Chivalric World of Don Quijote: Style, Structure, and Narrative Technique (Columbia, MO, 1982).


ture fiction or Western movies). Don Quixote traverses the arid Spanish tableland where the people and places that he encounters are wholly devoted to the ordinary purposes of daily life, and where the heat and dust are real. In another sense, however, time and place are less real than is usual in the modern novel; as in the chivalric romances, cause and effect have none of the intractable and imperative quality of real life. Anything can happen in Don Quixote, and in more or less any order; the whims of the hero - and the caprices of his horse - seem to be the main determinants of the course of the action. The narrative also shares with that of the chivalric romances the greatest possible simplicity of situation with the greatest possible capacity for variation and expansion. It is this that makes Don Quixote in some ways like other mythical tales such as those of Faust, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe: the protagonist sets out on a course of action with a very simple idea in mind, whose realization can involve an infinite number of adventures. Moreover, Cervantes also takes up the interest in individual psychology that had distinguished the chivalric romances from the earlier chansons de geste, and that had been further developed in the articulate self-consciousness which had formed one of the more innovative aspects of the Amadis hero. As a result, Cervantes's infinite expansion of the narrative action is complemented by an equal degree of expansion in psychological internalization of the action. As in romance, we start with a noble hero who goes out to face a world that is apparently neatly divided into good and evil. But very soon the question of what is good or bad, or real or unreal, in that world, and in Don Quixote's perception of it, makes everything seem problematic. The contradictions and mysteries and riddles that are resolved in romance remain largely unresolved in Don Quixote; and they remain unresolved because they deal in a new way with problems that have always puzzled mankind, and that continue to puzzle the thought and the fiction - of the modern world. Several of the basic mythic elements of Don Quixote, of course, are absent in the first expedition. Quixote's own motives at this point are somewhat grosser than later: for instance, he particularly ad62


mires Reinaldos of Montalban in Orlando innamorato for "sallying forth from his castle and robbing everyone he met"; and he particularly itches to "have a bout of kicking" Ganelon, the villain in the Charlemagne cycle (p. 27). Cervantes's early effects are very broad: after Don Quixote is beaten by the muleteer, he actually imagines that he is one of the heroes of the ballads - Baldwin or Abindarraez (pp. 44-45); and this parodic exaggeration tends to reduce his psychology to mere lunacy. In the second expedition, however, which occupies the remaining forty-seven chapters of the first part of Don Quixote, a much subtler and more complicated psychological pattern emerges. The transition between the first and second expeditions is introduced by a lengthy discussion of the books in Don Quixote's library; his niece, his housekeeper, the village barber, and the curate resolve to destroy the books that they blame for Quixote's madness, and most are burned. Quixote is undeterred. He sees, however, that in his earlier venture he had failed to provide himself with one essential appanage of a knight, a trusty squire. So he now enlists a neighboring peasant, Sancho Panza, promising him that, as Amadis had done for his squire, so he, Don Quixote, will bestow some island won by his sword on his squire as recompense for his services. Sancho Panza is not, of course, a squire of the traditional kind, such as the nobly-born apprentice to knighthood in Chaucer's Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, or Gandalin in Amadis. Instead - and this is essential to the story and its meaning - Sancho is a comic bumpkin who begins his career as squire with the idea that he can profit by it. But Quixote is in a hurry, and takes him because he happens to be at hand. After raising what money he can, patching his helmet, and borrowing a shield from a friend, Don Quixote finally rides out with Sancho Panza one evening, secretly - presumably for fear of being prevented or brought back. The first part of the story, which, like the original Amadis, came out in four separate volumes, is increasingly occupied by interpolated stories and complicated subplots concerning various characters Quixote meets on his way. Much of this incidental matter is still interesting, and is arranged in a way that has an indirect but cu63


mulative bearing on the themes and incidents of the main narrative, while some of the interpolations are fine examples of complicated baroque plotting.20 But the stories and subplots are not really part of the myth; after all, very few people remember Cardenio and Don Fernando, Leonela and Anselmo, Dorotea and Dona Clara, or even the captive's tale of his life and adventures. The myth centers on the long series of Don Quixote's personal encounters; and it is one of these which finally brings his second expedition to a close. First the Holy Brotherhood, a kind of mobile police, present a writ for his arrest as a result of one of his greatest apparent triumphs, when he forced the release of some galley slaves. Then the curate and barber from the village, having finally caught up with him, persuade him that his destiny - through the pronouncement of a great magician commands that he go home as a prisoner in a cage. So poor Don Quixote is taken home in a cart; and as he arrives at midday on a Sunday, his return this time is both public and humiliating. Don Quixote's adventures in his second expedition usually follow a pattern of action that in itself is very simple: a visual stimulus; a misinterpretation of the stimulus by Quixote in terms of his chivalric compulsions; a realistic correction by Sancho Panza, overridden by his master's complacent imaginative expertise; a challenge; a battle and its result; and a conclusion, in the form of a highly entertaining discussion between Quixote and Sancho, that the reader gets into the habit of eagerly awaiting. Both the pattern of the action, and the conversations the action provokes, are usually related to the chivalric theme on the one hand, and the more general perspectives concerning human life on the other. The best-known episode, as far as the myth is concerned, largely follows this standard pattern of narrative and theme. Don Quixote sees the windmills on the plain of Montiel; he is sure that they are "thirty or more monstrous giants"; by slaying them all he hopes to enrich both Sancho and himself from the spoils; moreover 20 See especially the illuminating article of Joaquin Casalduero, "La composicion del Quijote," Rivista de Filologica Hispanka 2 (1940), trans. Esther Sylvia as "The composition of Don Quixote" in Flores and Benardete, Cervantes across the Centuries, pp. 56—93.


"it is God's good service" for him to "sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth." Sancho patiently explains that the windmills are windmills, but Quixote replies contemptuously: "It is easy to see . . . that you are not used to this business of adventures." He shouts his defiance at the windmills, commends himself and his cause to Dulcinea, and charges the nearest windmill at full gallop. He succeeds in thrusting his lance into the sail, but, alas! "the wind whirled it around with such force that it shivered the lance to pieces," dragging horse and rider with it, and sending the knight rolling, badly injured, across the plain. Sancho ventures an "I told you so," but Quixote silences him with an instant rationalization: "that same sage Freston who carried off my study and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them" (pp. 59—60). We have entered a world of selfperpetuating delusion that no reality can destroy; and on the whole we are very glad to do so, for it means that our hero will be miraculously immune from the greatest of all humiliations, knowing that he has made a fool of himself. The jousting with the windmills is unique in one respect, because it involves inanimate objects which are so huge and unmistakable that the encounter provides a starkly representative pictorial image for the myth; its emblematic quality is shown in the adoption of the common phrase, "tilting at windmills." The phrase presumably denotes an enterprise whose total impracticality derives from the ridiculous disparity between an imagined individual purpose and the powerful imperviousness of its object. In popular usage the phrase also has a specifically idealistic connotation: the individual is not seeking any personal advantage; he is inspired by a noble but illusory idea of helping humanity. The disparity between individual desires on the one hand, and reality on the other, is not, of course, peculiar to Don Quixote; the confusion of romantic wishes with historical truth is a universal tendency. In essence, Don Quixote unconsciously responds to the same imaginative pressures as the romances themselves: he personifies the attempt to redress the actual course of history since the golden days of a heroic past. Miguel de Unamuno defiantly articu65


lates this aspect of Quixote's quest: "Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase in the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance."21 That transition, of course, includes science as one of its modern elements. In his book on Quixote, Ortega y Gasset wrote: When the vision of the world which myth supplies is deprived of its command over human souls by its hostile sister, science, the epic loses its religious gravity and dashes forth in search of adventures. The libros de caballerias . . . were the last great sprouting from the old epic trunk . . . The book of chivalry retains the epic characteristics, except the belief in the reality of what is told.22 The belief in that reality is a necessity for Don Quixote, and it makes him see the general course of history as one of decline. He holds this view with conviction and consistency, as we see in his famous discourse to the goatherds on the golden age: in that blessed age all was held in common, concord and friendship reigned, justice was not perverted by favor and self-interest, and maiden modesty could roam freely without fear. It is that ideal of civilization which has made Quixote turn to his present vocation. "In this hateful age of ours," he continues (calling it "the iron age"), as "wickedness increased, the order of knights-errant was instituted, to defend maidens, to protect widows, and to succor the orphans and the needy" (pp. 74-75). In this context knight-errantry, indeed, serves a vital religious function. The monks profession, Don Quixote later argues, may well be as austere as the knight's, "but I am very much inclined to doubt whether the world is equally in need of it." Churchmen may "pray heaven for the world's welfare," but they do it "in peace and quiet": knights-errant, on the other hand, not only have to endure severe privation and danger, but in their deeds they perform what the monks only pray for; knights-errant, in fact, are "God's ministers on earth and the arms that implement his justice" (p. 85). 21 Trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch, The Tragic Sense of Life (1912; New York, 1954), p.

322.

22 Ortega y Gasset (1914), trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin, Meditations on Quixote (New York, 1963), p. 130.

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Both the narrator, who remarks that the discourse on the golden age "might very well have been omitted" (p. 75), and the people to whom Quixote addresses himself, see his views as patent nonsense; Don Vivaldo, for instance, pretends to take them seriously only to give "the occasion for him to utter further absurdities" (p. 85). Later Cervantes has his hero suggest, in all seriousness, that the best way for the King of Spain to defend himself against a threatened Turkish invasion would be "to command, by public proclamation, the knights-errant scattered all over Spain to assemble on a fixed day in the capital. Even if no more than half a dozen come, there may be one among them who alone will suffice to destroy the entire might of the Turk" (p. 427). Absurd, indeed: and yet, though Quixote's military and political sense is wanting, his idea has an irrefutable imaginative logic. In the present degenerate state of the world we need all the admirable values of the past: those of pastoral and the golden age, those of the Christian knights of romance and the Greek and Roman heroes who were often equated with them in medieval and Renaissance thought; and we therefore need people - knightserrant — who will attempt to make those values live again in a world that lacks all their virtues. THE THIRD EXPEDITION The first part of Don Quixote was an instant and enormous success: there were four authorized and three pirated editions in its first year alone;23 further editions followed, including two in Brussels and one in Milan; very soon there were translations into French and English. In 1613 Cervantes announced that he was bringing out a sequel, a possibility which had been hinted at in the last chapter of Part I. In 1614, however, he was anticipated: a spurious continuation written by a still unidentified author using the pseudonym Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda was published in Tarragona.24 Cer23 William Byron, Cervantes: A Biography (New York, 1978), p. 444. 24 This work is amusingly discussed by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the fifty-ninth chapter of Cervantes's sequel, while the narrator pursues Avellaneda with obsessive and rather rancorous mockery throughout.


vantes's own continuation came out at the end of 1615. Since 1617 both parts have normally been published together, and are justly considered to form a single work. Part II of the story concerns the third and last expedition of Don Quixote. This expedition is considerably longer than both the earlier forays combined; and yet it is more unified, for it contains fewer stories and episodes not directly concerned with the main protagonists. It begins with Don Quixote determining that he must get Dulcinea's blessing on his new adventure. Sancho Panza cannot find her in Toboso, and so he persuades Don Quixote that one of three village girls he meets by chance is really Dulcinea in the form given her by a wicked enchanter. This claim is maintained by a later trick in which someone impersonating the great Arthurian wizard Merlin announces that Dulcinea can only be restored to her own shape when Sancho shall "On his own sturdy buttocks bared to heaven / Three thousand and three hundred lashes lay" (p. 623). The main adventure that Quixote has in mind for his third sortie is to win renown at a ceremonial tournament to be held at Saragossa. In fact he never reaches the tournament. Instead the narrative describes the encounters which occur to Quixote and Sancho on the way. Don Quixote begins with a real success: he defeats the Knight of the Mirrors in single combat. The Knight, however, is actually one Sanson Carrasco, a student who, in collusion with the barber and the chaplain from Quixote's native village, had hoped to get Quixote home by defeating him in battle and requiring his return as a penance; Quixote's unexpected victory frustrates the plan. The central portion of the expedition is spent with a duke and duchess who, bizarrely, have read Part I of Don Quixote; they entertain themselves by contriving diversions at the expense of Quixote and Sancho, culminating in an arrangement for Sancho to become temporary governor, if not of the promised island, at least of a town in the duke's dominions. At the conclusion of this episode, Sancho and Quixote journey to Barcelona where, through the initiative of a bandit chief, Roque Guinart, who is also a devotee of the first part of Don Quixote, they make a triumphal entry. But the end is in sight. Don Quixote is challenged to combat by the Knight of the White 68

Don Quixote of La Mancha Moon, who is actually Sanson Carrasco making a return appearance. This time Sanson's trick is successful: Don Quixote is defeated; he agrees to go back home and promises to give up knight-errantry for at least a year. The greater part of the third expedition is kept going through the deliberate pretenses of characters who actually know Don Quixote's earlier story. To that extent it obviously has less narrative excitement for the reader than the earlier expeditions; but if the game-playing element is much more obtrusive, it also gives Part II many rich intellectual and literary qualities of a new depth and complexity. Most obviously, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have already become mythical figures, to themselves and to others; and we now see these legendary persons acting in the real world. The relationship between fiction and history has been given a new twist. The romances had turned quasi-historical persons into fictitious characters; Cervantes has turned his fictional characters into authentic historical celebrities. DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO PANZA Any attempt to evaluate Cervantes's achievement in Don Quixote must begin with the apparent contradictions in the hero's character. As soon as Don Quixote sets out on his first expedition many people call him mad, and no one seriously disagrees - least of all the narrator, who continually and ostentatiously obtrudes a total contempt for the evident lunacy of Quixote in taking romances seriously. It is hardly credible, however, that Don Quixote should have become so universally popular a figure if he were indeed mad in the modern sense. In Cervantes's time madness, or lunacy, was not regarded as creating an absolute separation of kind between one person and another; 25 according to the prevailing theory of humors, any exceptional mental or imaginative power was regarded as the result of an excess of one physical component in the body, which 25 See R. O. Jones, The Golden Age, pp. 177-78, and E. C. Riley, Don Quixote (London, 1986), pp. 48-57, 62-63.


was likely to produce corresponding excesses in thought and behavior. This is quite consistent with most of what we observe in Quixote. He is a beloved figure in his village, where he is known as Alonso Quixano the Good (p. 829). He often astonishes his hearers by his learning and eloquence - indeed, some of his speeches, notably those on the golden age, and on arms and letters, have since become classics of the Spanish schoolroom. Broadly speaking, Quixote is mad only in the colloquial sense of "crazy"; his behavior is markedly obsessional, but only on a defined and limited range of matters. More specifically, one might say that Quixote manifests a single extreme but highly localized interpretative mania; and that mania is entirely concerned with romances and knight-errantry. As the narrator tells us, "he only talked nonsense when he touched on chivalry, and in discussing all other subjects he showed that he had a clear and unbiased understanding" (p. 657). There are difficulties in going much further than this in any attempt to analyze Quixote's sanity, or the lack of it. The dry and often critical objectivity of the narrator does not take us deeply or authoritatively into his hero's mind; Quixote is obviously thoughtful and reflective, but we can only surmise the nature of his introspections from his words and actions. Both of these, however, suggest that he is in fact very self-conscious on the question of madness. For instance, to show his desperation at how Dulcinea has spurned him, he goes mad as a penance. He speaks of this with a nice combination of logic and obsession, as a conscious literary imitation: No thanks, he says, are due to a "knight-errant for going mad when he has cause"; in the present case he acts thus "to let my lady know, if I do this without any excuse, what I would do if I had one" (p. 179). This sophisticated awareness of the problem of madness is soon given a further complication when Quixote says that if Dulcinea is not overcome by the tribute of his madness, "I shall become mad in earnest. Being so, I shall suffer no more." Freud would no doubt have agreed with this view of the therapeutic function of neuroses and psychoses. Don Quixote seems to negotiate a very fine balance between truth and his darling fictions. In the second part of Don Quixote

Don Quixote of La Mancba

there is a discussion of how truthfully his actions were reported in the first part. Initially what Quixote says seems to show an unequivocal allegiance to literal truth: "History is to some extent a sacred thing, for it should be true, and where the truth is, there God is" (p. 442). But when Sanson Carrasco reports that some readers wish that the narrator had left out some of the beatings Quixote received, the knight s comment shows a fine mastery of defensive skepticism: "There is no need [to] record events which do not change or affect the truth of a history, if they tend to bring the hero of it into contempt. Aeneas was not in truth and earnest so pious as Virgil represents him, nor Ulysses so wise as Homer describes him" (pp. 439-40). There are other occasions when Don Quixote rejects a blind devotion to the romance pattern: for instance, he decides that on grounds of common-sense realism he will "improve" on the customary practice of the romances by rewarding his squire with a governorship as soon as possible, and not so late that Sancho will be too old to enjoy it (p. 58). Quixote also has moments of real doubt: when the duchess wonders whether Dulcinea may not be a creation of his imagination, he answers: "God knows whether there is any Dulcinea or not in the world, or whether she is imaginary or not imaginary. These are things the proof of which must not be pushed to extreme lengths" (pp. 606-7). There are many other ways in which Cervantes qualifies his picture of Don Quixote as an insanely literal imitator of the chivalric model. For one thing, Quixote retains many ordinary human characteristics that are quite independent of that model: he is not always sanguine, impatient, and enthusiastic, but can also be sober, skeptical, and matter-of-fact. On several occasions Don Quixote also falls short of the chivalric ideal of exemplary courage and selflessness. At the inn, when Sancho is tossed in a blanket, Quixote is too "bruised and battered" even to dismount and try to defend his squire (p. 116). Later, when the villagers knock Sancho unconscious because they think he is mocking them with his realistic imitation of asses braying, Quixote flees in terror from their crossbows and muskets, and "every minute he took a deep breath to see whether he still could" (p. 581).


Don Quixote is even further from the chivalric ideal in the matter of selfless altruism. He has some of the self-centeredness of a solitary old man, and this often makes him capricious and domineering. This is especially - and unpleasantly - obtrusive for the reader in his repeated insistence that Sancho should give himself the number of lashes supposed necessary before Dulcinea can be disenchanted; on the other hand he is too kind and sympathetic to be able to stand by when Sancho (who is actually merely lashing the trees) produces a particularly convincing cry of pain (pp. 815—16). Other, and more general, egotistic motives may be surmised from Don Quixote's turning knight-errant: that in fact it advances his own psychological and social interests; that it is a projection of a more gratifying image of the self than that forced upon him by the constricting dullness of village life; and that it assumes a rise in the social scale from the by no means exclusive gentility implied by the term hidalgo26 to the much more prestigious rank of caballero. Thus Sancho Panza reports to him about the local reaction to the first part of the novel: "The hidalgos say that, not content with being a gentleman, you have assumed the 'Don,' and made a knight of yourself when all you own is a few vines and a couple of acres of land and the shirt on your back" (p. 436). But, on the whole, Don Quixote has no more faults and weaknesses than are needed to make him seem real and human. We notice that he wins over not only his readers but also almost every character he comes into contact with in the novel. Those characters who mock him - and Quixote's character is nowhere more psychologically convincing than in his fear of mockery - in the end make the ordinary mental and social norms by which they live seem dull, cautious, and selfish. When the duke plays his last farcical trick on Quixote, the narrator comes much closer than elsewhere to siding with Quixote's madness, commenting "that personally he considers the concocters of the joke as crazy as the victims of it, and that the 26 According to Antonio Domingues Ortiz, about a tenth of the families in Castile towards the end of the sixteenth century were noble. See The Golden Age of Spain 1516-1659 (New York, 1971), p. 114.


duke and duchess came very close to looking like fools themselves when they took such pains to make fun of a pair of fools" (p. 810). The duke and duchess are only two among the innumerable characters in the novel who pay inadvertent tribute to one remarkable quality of Don Quixote's folly: it is highly contagious. Reality is, after all, what our personal vision perceives; and though we are schooled in hiding that vision from public scorn or obloquy, we cannot but admire those who do not. This makes us sympathize with the casuistry that Don Quixote often needs to protect his personal vision from the rebuffs of reality. Thus when he is making his helmet he spends a week improvising a visor out of cardboard; it is immediately demolished by his first testing sword thrust; he makes a stronger one; but then, "not caring to try any more experiments with it, he accepted and commissioned it as a helmet of the most perfect construction" (p. 28). This is a familiar kind of foolish protective strategy; most of us would prefer to risk disaster at a later date rather than expose as uselsss something on which we have invested our best efforts. Much of the comedy of Don Quixote comes from observing the various devious strategies whereby the hero tries to protect his delusions from the realities that would expose them. We identify with Don Quixote, hope that he will triumph over reality, and are both relieved and envious when he succeeds, time and time again, in making everybody else play his own game merely by his obstinate refusal to play any other. At the same time, we find the narrator's mockery of Quixote gratifying, because it helps us acknowledge the feeble caution of our own irresolute attempts to live the life of our dreams. Another aspect of the enduring universality of the myth arises from the fact that Cervantes creates not one but two convincingly rounded characters; he presents the relationship of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in a way that is both psychologically authentic and also an enactment of many of the book's larger themes. If we should ever see a stick and a ball advancing together side by side down a road, we would immediately recognize them as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Their visual appearances evoke so many 73


oppositions that they seem to encompass everything: Quixote, ramrod stiff, like a dilapidated Gothic spire trying to reach the heavens; and Sancho, short and squat, looking down on his big belly and wondering what will come its way next. Their mounts complete the comic double dyad: Rocinante, the skeletal horse, and Dapple, the globular ass, two beasts who are, like their masters, ridiculously mismatched and yet inseparable. That Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, unlike Faust or Don Juan, should have become visual myths, is no doubt partly due to the way they are characterized by Cervantes. Their physical features are etched with a pitiless clarity of outline that matches the harsh light of the Castilian landscape; and Cervantes seems to have anticipated what the future would bring, for he makes many references to the pictorial rendering of his work. At the beginning of Part I, the narrator explains that the source of his story is an old Arabic manuscript that he found in Toledo, and that on the first notebook "an artist had depicted the battle between Don Quixote and the Biscayan to the very life" (p. 67); there follows a fairly detailed description, not only of the fight, but also of the knight, the squire, and Rocinante. In the second part of the novel, Sancho remarks prophetically: "I'll bet . . . that before long there won't be a tavern, roadside inn, hostelry, or barbershop where there isn't a picture of our deeds" (p. 817). Their visual images embody many of the contrasts between the ideas for which they stand. These contrasts begin in basic physical differences - thin and fat, tall and short - but they extend into some of the most general and symbolic dualities. Psychologically Quixote and Sancho stand for the polarities of spirit and flesh, brain and belly, heaven and earth, dream and reality, past and present, literature and life; in the social domain there is the dichotomy of the knight and the peasant, the proclaimed hero and the professed coward, the introvert and the extrovert, the solitary and the gregarious, the bachelor and the husband. George Orwell has written very well of their connection, arguing that between the two of them Don Quixote and Sancho Panza represent many of the dualities that compose humanity as a whole: 74

Don Quixote of La Mancha Two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul . . . it is simply a lie to say that he is not part of you, just as it is a lie to say that Don Quixote is not part of you either.27 Orwell surely expresses here one of the main psychological reasons for the appeal of the myth, and for our sense of its wisdom. However, the emphasis of his formulation involves two kinds of simplification: it takes no account of the extent to which the characters of Quixote and Sancho are not polar opposites, but themselves both share some elements of that complex mixture that Orwell finds in "nearly every human being"; and it neglects the way in which that human complexity develops and changes in the course of their association. Sancho Panza is no doubt earthy and animal; panza is the Spanish word for "paunch," and Sancho's saddlebags are as conspicuous in our visual memory as Don Quixote's armor. Sancho is — to use the Spanish term — a gracioso: not a buffoon or clown, but a droll fellow worthy of being taken seriously.28 He is not, of course, a Dionysian figure:29 in the Sierra Morena, Quixote, wanting to demonstrate the proper madness of a chivalric lover, says to his squire, "I should like you, I say, to see me stripped to the skin and performing a dozen or two insanities" (p. 186). Sancho seems genuinely shocked at this: "For the love of God, master . . . don't let me see your worship stripped. It will upset me, and I won't be able to keep from tears" (p. 187). The closest Sancho gets to indecency occurs in an amusing interchange when Quixote is being taken home at the end of the second expedition. Sancho, with infinite precaution, asks how his 27 George Orwell, "The art of Donald McGill," in A Collection of Essays (New York, 1954), p. 120. 28 See Samuel Putnam's note 16 to chapter 59 in the Norton edition. 29 See Arthur Efron, "Don Quixote" and the Dulrineated World (Austin, TX, 1971).

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master manages his bodily functions when he is shut up in a cage: "This is what in my heart and soul I was longing to know" (p. 381). Sancho Panza, then, is earthy but very decent. He is also said to be a coward. In general there is, no doubt, a consistent contrast between Don Quixote's reckless pursuit of danger, with consequent suffering bravely borne, and his squire's pitifully comic fear of danger, with his unabashed refusal to maintain a stiff upper lip when he gets hurt. Still, Sancho freely chooses to continue a life of danger and hardship with Quixote; he sometimes fights well; and although he often finds his circumstances incomprehensible, perhaps mad, he goes on risking his skin to the end. He is illiterate, but he has a fine sense of the oral tradition — a tradition which, especially in the form of popular proverbs, proves rich enough to enable him easily to hold his own in any discussion with his master, for all Quixote's knowledge of history and literature. Sancho is also extremely intelligent, not only in practical and prudential things, but in his quick understanding of logical and analogical matters, as we see with his resourceful use of rhetorical skills to maintain his own point of view in argument. When Sancho becomes the governor of Barataria, he forgets his original idea of making it a profitable source of wealth and comfort for himself; indeed, he hardly seems to need Quixote's lectures, so spontaneous is his disinterested sense of equity and justice. One must, then, so far qualify the various polarities in which Sancho is allotted the physical, the material, and the selfish side of things by adding that, as against these tendencies of his temperament and his situation, there is behind Cervantes's conception of his character a settled belief in natural law and right reason as powers available to guide all human beings, whatever their station. Sancho is clearly entitled to say "I don't understand those philosophies," and yet be rightly confident that "I have as much soul as another" (p. 389). Don Quixote is a different matter. Though he falls short of his ideal on occasion, as we have seen, we must surely view the physical and mental rigidity of his posture as the necessary defenses of his foolish idealism in its battle against the destructive powers of reality. Nevertheless he is very aware of the material realities, as we can

Don Quixote of La Mancha see in the very practical and understanding way in which he handles Sancho's departures from the chivalric standard in such matters as money, food, and drink, his constant complaining about ill-usage, and his groaning when in pain. We must therefore assume a richly human and realistic substratum in Quixote's consciousness; it is this substratum that, despite the domination of the doctrines of knighterrantry, enables him to relish Sancho, and even his humor — a quality which Quixote himself completely lacks. It is this side of Quixote's character which provides a bridge to the world of his squire, and enables him to pay Sancho a very handsome tribute: Sancho Panza is one of the most amusing squires that ever served knighterrant. Sometimes there is a simplicity about him so shrewd that it is an amusement to try and make out whether he is simple or sharp; he has mischievous tricks that show him to be a rogue, and blundering ways that prove him to be a fool. He doubts everything and believes everything; when I think he is about to fall headlong from sheer stupidity, he comes out with something shrewd that raises him up to the skies. Finally, I would not exchange him for another squire, though I were given a city to boot. (p. 609) The many dualities that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza represent are not, then, absolute and monolithic. In fact, the book's general intellectual perspective is fairly close to that of Erasmus's In Praise of Folly or Rabelais's Gargantua andPantagruel\ the wisdom of Sancho's folly is the perfect complement to the folly of Quixote's wisdom. The more we look and listen the clearer it becomes that, contrary to the various simplifications of their relationship that are implicit in the popular view as expressed by Orwell, Cervantes actually represents Quixote and Sancho with such invincible and humorous concreteness that they cannot be reduced to any set of social, moral, or psychological opposites. One of the most explicit and compelling expressions of this view is that of the critic Salvador de Madariaga: he argues that the characteristics of the two men cannot be "converted into two series of antagonistic values," whereby from "Don Quixote is drawn the series Valour-faith-idealism-utopia-liberalism-progress', while the Sancho series is made to develop in the opposite direction as 77

Three Renaissance

Myths

'cowardice-skepticism-realism-practical-sense-reaction.' " 30 For one thing, their characters are too densely human to exhibit any unmixed elements. Quixote's "faith," for instance, is by no means absolute and assured, as we observe from his frequent rationalizations, and the many occasions on which he shrinks from putting his beliefs to the test. As for Sancho's cowardice, he can actually be belligerent and hot-headed, when the occasion demands it, as with the goatherd (pp. 174—75), o r t n e Squire of the Grove (pp. 495— 97)Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, then, are not opposites; more than that, they adopt each other's traits in the course of their association. The sad veracity of the whole third expedition, especially, can be seen as a dialectical process whereby Sancho's faith in his chivalric role slowly rises, while Quixote's assurance in it declines; this decline is accompanied by the knight's adoption of the realistic and skeptical attitudes that his squire has progressively abandoned through the influence of his master's earlier credulity. By the end, one can say with Madariaga that Sancho has been largely "quixotized," while Quixote has been sufficiently "sanchified" to be ready to abandon the dream by which he had come to live. When the duchess argues that "If Don Quixote is mad, crazy, and cracked, and Sancho Panza his squire knows it, and notwithstanding, serves and follows him, and believes his empty promises, there can be no doubt he must be even madder and sillier than his master" (p. 612), she is unanswerable, but not finally correct, at least as far as Sancho is concerned. For, as the book proceeds, Sancho's thinking is more and more dominated by his role as squire; it becomes a second nature in which he finds more satisfaction than he had ever before experienced as a peasant farmer. But the change in Don Quixote is more ambiguous; it owes less to Sancho and more to the way in which his own increasing doubts about himself are reinforced by his failures. Don Quixote's differences from the world at large remain unchanged and unmediated; there must be no neat dialectical resolu30 Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology (Oxford, 1935), pp. 8 2 - 8 3 .

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tion of his quarrel with reality. In his relationship with Sancho, however, it seems likely that by exaggerating the already great differences between the two men at the moral and intellectual level, Cervantes has reinforced their kinship at the emotional and human level. The mere sharing of a life of adventure far away from the normal stabilities and confinements of ordinary existence gives their relationship an unexampled intimacy; and this helps to isolate Sancho Panza and Don Quixote into a representative image of a human pair. Of course, there is no question of the heroic equality of a Roland and Oliver; they remain master and squire; they keep many of their other original differences of character; and they continue their comic role in mocking or abusing each other on occasion almost to the end — for instance when Quixote abuses Sancho for his impudence in venturing to defend his master's sanity in public (p. 748), or when Sancho rudely wonders how Altisidora can possibly be in love with Don Quixote when "in truth often I stop to look at your worship from the sole of your foot to the topmost hair of your head, and I see more to frighten a person than to make one fall in love" (p. 745). Still, their mutual loyalty and devotion are boundless. Don Quixote records it in his will: "If, as when I was mad I had a share in giving him the government of an island, now that I am in my senses, I could give him that of a kingdom, it should be his, for the simplicity of his character and the fidelity of his conduct deserves it" (p. 828). Sancho is characteristically more emotional and unrestrained. There are many occasions when he expresses his affection and loyalty, as when he says to the duchess: "If I were wise I would have left my master long ago. But . . . I can't help it; I must follow him. We're from the same village, I've eaten his bread, I'm fond of him, I'm grateful, he gave me his ass-colts, and above all I'm faithful. So it's quite impossible for anything to separate us, except the pick and shovel" (p. 612). If Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, with all their differences, seem, as the priest says, to be "cast in the same mold" (p. 434), so equally do their mounts. Cervantes delights in reminding us of the friendly constancy of the two animals, and in one elaborate passage 79


recounts "how eagerly the two beasts would scratch one another when they were together and how, when they were tired or full, Rocinante would lay his neck across Dapple's, stretching half a yard or more on the other side. The pair would stand thus, gazing thoughtfully on the ground, for three days" (pp. 484-85). The narrator even claims that in the original version the author of the story "devoted some special chapters" to the two beasts, and recorded that their friendship was "so unequaled and so strong that it is handed down by tradition from father to son." Moreover, "the author left it on record that he likened their friendship to that of Nisus and Euryalus, and Pylades and Orestes. If that is so it may be perceived, to the admiration of mankind, how firm the friendship must have been between these two peaceful animals, shaming men, who preserve friendships with one another so badly." PUZZLES OF INTERPRETATION After his defeat by the Knight of the White Moon, Don Quixote feels beaten, and beaten by his own fault - by his unwillingness to recognize unpleasant realities: "Each of us is the maker of his own Fortune," he tells Sancho, and adds, "my presumption has therefore made me pay dearly; for I ought to have realized that Rocinante s feeble strength could not resist the power and size of the Knight of the White Moon's horse" (p. 792). On the way back home Quixote talks with Sancho about how they will employ the coming year. Quixote must, according to his promise, abandon knight-errantry; but he is unwilling to give up their companionship. Perhaps they will live as shepherds, according to the models of the pastoral romance: "I under the name of the shepherd Quixotiz and you as the shepherd Pancino, we will roam the woods and groves and meadows singing songs here, lamenting in elegies there, drinking the crystal waters of the springs or limpid brooks or flowing rivers" (p. 797). But the old buoyancy has gone from his fantasies, especially after he and Sancho meet their most ignominious encounter yet, when they are overrun by a drove of pigs (pp. 801—2). Then, as they enter the

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village, two incidents strike Quixote as bad omens; hearing a boy's chance remark about a stolen cage of crickets — "you'll never see it again as long as you live" — Quixote thinks it refers to Dulcinea; watching a hunted hare take temporary shelter under Dapple, Quixote is convinced that "I am never to see Dulcinea again" (p. 822). Once home, Don Quixote takes to his bed with a fever brought on, we are told, either "from the melancholy his defeat produced, or by heaven's will that so ordered it" (p. 825). After a six-hour sleep, he awakens and cries out: "Blessed be Almighty God, who has shown me such goodness" (p. 826). The blessing, he explains, is that "My reason is now free and clear, rid of the dark shadows of ignorance that my deplorable constant study of those detestable books of chivalry cast over it." Don Quixote is worried that he "should be remembered as a madman; for though I have been one, I would not like to perpetuate that fact with my death." He goes on to confess to the priest, draw up his will, receive all the sacraments; this done, we see him "dying in his bed so calmly and so like a Christian" (p. 829). Sancho is heartbroken. He has previously tried every device, including reporting that Dulcinea is no longer enchanted, in an attempt to rally his master's chivalric spirit. Then he urges that "the most foolish thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die without rhyme or reason, without anybody killing him or any hands but melancholy's doing him in" (p. 828). To this Don Quixote returns, in Sancho's own proverbial style, the saddest of life's permanent truths: "In last year's nests there are no birds this year.' I was mad, now I am in my senses." The unqualified severity of this deathbed disavowal, carrying with it, as it does, Don Quixote's own emphatic support to the narrator's repeated anathematizing of the chivalric romances as models of action, has disappointed many modern readers. In earlier times there was no particular difficulty about the ending, since Don Quixote was usually taken at its face value as a comic exposure of the folly of the books of chivalry. The difficulty arises when we interpret Don Quixote and his values in a primarily serious, sympathetic, and

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symbolic way, and therefore wish to find an excuse for disregarding the overt and repeated disavowals of the chivalric romances by the narrator. In pursuing any challenge to the narrator it is relevant to point out various discrepancies in the authority of the text itself. At the moment of crisis in his fight with the Biscayan, early in Part I, Don Quixote is left with his sword held aloft over his enemy while the narrator announces: "At this suspensefiil point the delightful history came to a stop and remained curtailed with no indication from the author where the missing part could be found" (p. 65). There follows, first, the comment of the narrator that "I could not bring myself to believe that such a gallant tale had been left maimed and mutilated." Then the narrator goes on to tell us how he happened to come across some papers that were being sold for wrapping in the marketplace of Toledo; one parchment book turned out to be The History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by "Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian." The narrator describes how he commissioned a Moor to translate the text faithfully into Castilian, for "fifty pounds of raisins and two bushels of wheat" (p. 67); it is this translation, according to the narrator, which provides the basis of the text for all the rest of the narrative. If we waive the unlikely coincidence of the narrator having chanced to find the continuation of the manuscript just at the place where the first source had stopped, several other puzzles remain: especially, the key question of Cide Hamete's own veracity. The narrator remarks that lying is very common among Arabs, and that Cide Hamete, "where he could and should have licensed his pen to praise so worthy a knight, he seems to me deliberately to have written nothing" (p. 68). The narrator, in fact, claims that the Arab was motivated by racial malice towards a Spaniard. Later, when Cide Hamete writes, "I swear as a Catholic Christian" (p. 576), the narrator comments on the dubious nature of any such authentication, coming, as it does, from a Moor. We may add that there is a logical impossibility in the time scheme of the novel as a whole, since a chance document by a presumably dead author turns out to have anticipated history, and supplied a continuation of the story in 82


which all the world has read the first part published ten years before. These doubts are raised even while the narrator pretends to be authenticating the literal truth of his history. There are many other complex narrative devices or apparent inconsistencies which seem to show that Cervantes was amusing himself with an elaborately gratuitous hide-and-seek game between the reliable (that is, the real and authentic) and the unreliable (that is, the unreal and imagined) portions of the history. In a larger critical view this seemingly conscious play of multiple literary perspectives31 raises complicated semiotic and philosophical problems;32 but although we will consider one aspect of this later, we can, for the moment, conclude that while Cervantes's inmost intentions, if any, are lost to us in the infinite regress of his multiplying ironies, we should not take any overt comment made either by the narrator in his own voice or by "Cide Hamete Benengeli" as being necessarily of an unqualified reliability. It may be that the underlying reason for the ironic contradictions in the way Cervantes presents his narrative is related, not so much to the possibility that the Inquisition forced Cervantes into very devious modes of expressing his bitter criticism of the life of his time, 33 as to the lack of any antecedents for what, in essence, Cervantes was trying to do in this work. There is, first of all, Don Quixote's "need to escape from the harsh oppression of immediate circumstances";34 consequently, his "efforts and energy were concentrated and drained in the creation of his new being" \ and this brings about an unprecedented conflict: "The quixotic character and a world that is not quixotic are going to confront one another."35 These are modern problems, at least as far as literary consciousness 31 See Leo Spitzer, "On the significance of Don Quijote" and E. C. Riley, "Literature and life in Don Quixote" both reprinted in Cervantes: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lowry Nelson, Jr. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969). 32 See Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness (Princeton, 1984), pp. 187-94, and notes. 33 See Americo Castro, Hacia Cervantes (Madrid, 1957), pp. 271, 159-66. 34 Americo Castro, Cervantes y los casticismos espanoles (Madrid, 1966), p. 57. 35 Castro, Cervantes y los casticismos espanoles, p. 62.


is concerned; and they involve not only the end of such standard fixed oppositions as good and evil, truth and illusion, knowledge and folly, but also a new kind of complexity in the relation between the actual writer, Cervantes, and his narrative. It is difficult to formulate such ideas without excessive abstraction; 36 but they can perhaps be illustrated in one of the subtlest episodes in the second part, Don Quixote's visit to the cave of Montesinos. According to the Carolingian ballads, Durandarte, one of Charlemagne's paladins, fled after Roland's defeat at Roncevalles. Before he died he asked his friend Montesinos, who had followed the trail of his blood, to cut out his heart and take it to his love, Belerma; when Montesinos did this, she, not surprisingly, fainted, and then, more unexpectedly, shed tears of blood. The cave of Montesinos is famous because of its connection with the story, and Don Quixote decides to explore it. He is lowered down on a rope, in circumstances of comic fear, but half an hour later he is pulled up again as if in a deep sleep. After eating, he recounts his vision, which is mysterious, poetic, ridiculous, and infinitely problematic. He found himself, he says, "in the midst of the most beautiful, delightful meadow that nature could produce or the most lively human imagination conceive" (p. 550). The first problem raised is about the reality of this pastoral paradise, and, therefore, of his own identity. Did he really see it? I opened my eyes, I rubbed them, and found I was not asleep but thoroughly awake. Nevertheless, I felt my head and breast to satisfy myself whether I myself was there, or some empty delusive phantom. But touch, feeling, and the collected thoughts that passed through my mind all convinced me that I was the same then and there as I am at this moment. Here, surely, we have Don Quixote revealing the extent to which in 36 For example, Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things (London, 1970), writes that, on linguistic grounds, "Don Quixote is the first modern work of literature . . . because in it language breaks off its old kinship with things and enters into that lovely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in its separated state, only as literature" (pp. 48-49).


his inner being he wonders whether he can believe either in the identity of his self, or in the reality of how it sees the world. The narrator reports Cide Hamete's comment that he cannot believe that the cave of Montesinos episode really happened, and yet it is "impossible for me to believe that Don Quixote could lie" (p. 558). Much of what Quixote reports is certainly convincing, down to the most trivial unheroic details: enchanted beings, he reports, neither eat nor defecate, "though it is thought that their nails, beards, and hair grow" (p. 555). This last is confirmed by the appearance of Montesinos, who acts as Quixote's guide, and who has a white beard down to his waist; but Quixote's testimony is rendered suspect, if only by his answer to Sancho's characteristic question, "Do the enchanted sleep?" "Certainly not," Quixote replies, "At least, during the three days I was with them not one of them closed an eye, nor did I either." But Sancho knows that his master was actually only down in the cave for "little better than an hour" at most (p. 554), and both on Quixote's arrival there (p. 550) and on his return (p. 549) we are told he was in a deep sleep. These are direct and obvious contradictions. Beyond such epistemological perplexities, the episode turns both inwards and outwards on many general themes. Outwardly, Don Quixote gets into an amusing but characteristic altercation with Montesinos, who has dared to prefer the beauty of Belerma to that of Dulcinea; whereas, Quixote reports, in reality Belerma has bad teeth, a sickly complexion, and dark rings around her eyes — disadvantages not caused, we are assured, by the menstrual cycle, which she has not experienced for "many months and even years," but from "the grief her own heart suffers for the heart she ceaselessly holds in her hand," her lover's withered relic (p. 504). The macabre sadness of this description has its own evocative power; but we can surely see it as part of Don Quixote's wish to translate the fictional Belerma into the same disappointing reality as his own imaginary Dulcinea, originally seen as a village girl. Dulcinea, too, reappears in his vision in the cave; she is with her maidens, gamboling in the field like she-goats, along with Guinevere and other ladies of past times. Quixote is disappointed that


she will not answer him when he calls; instead she runs off too fast for him to catch up. Then two curious things happen. First, one of the maidens comes back to ask on behalf of her mistress for six reals, giving as deposit a new cotton skirt. This sounds like a disguised version of a commoner kind of transaction between poor girls and old men, and one wonders what may be vaguely present in Don Quixote's mind about the true nature of his Dulcinea. In any case, he gives the maiden what he has — only four reals. And then there comes the second surprise: "instead of making me a curtsy she cut a caper, springing two full yards into the air" (p. 557). We are reminded that when Quixote tried to help Aldonza, the village girl from Toboso, to remount after she had fallen off her ass, "the lady, getting up from the ground saved him the trouble . . . going back a few paces, she took a short run, and putting both hands on the croup of the ass, she vaulted into the saddle more lightly than a falcon" (p. 476). What Quixote sees in the cave of Montesinos seems to be a delicately fanciful and yet severely comic echo of this equestrian feat; and the gloomy direction of his unconscious thought which again casts a rather demeaning light on Dulcinea - may well be strengthened by the vastly more experienced Montesinos's argument that there is nothing surprising about the request for money, since "need is to be met with everywhere. It penetrates all quarters and reaches everyone, and does not spare even the enchanted" (P- 557)The climax of this disillusioning dream occurs when Don Quixote comes upon Durandarte, "of actual flesh and bone" (p. 551). His right hand "lay on the side of his heart," and he lies stretched out on a marble sepulcher under the enchantment of Merlin. Montesinos gives a few apologetic details of how much care he took when he cut the heart out, but Durandarte still occasionally complains and sighs, and cries out one of the stanzas of the ballad that made him famous. Montesinos is much affected, but he finally tells Durandarte to "open your eyes and you will see" Don Quixote, "of whom the sage Merlin has prophesied such great things . . . With his intervention and aid it may come about that we shall be disenchanted, for great

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deeds are reserved for great men" (p. 553). Here the report of Quixote's vision of his self is flattering, but not very convincing; and then comes the paladin's laconic reply: "And if that may not be, said the wretched Durandarte in a low and feeble voice, if that may not be, then, O cousin, I say 'patience and shuffle the cards.'" It is a stunning reversal of tone and topic. The homely colloquialism makes one wonder. Are the rats gnawing at the foundations of the castle of romance? Although in his dream Don Quixote still feels himself to be a great man, the heroic peer of Roland is as grotesquely sad and disillusioned a figure as his beloved Belerma. Durandarte can find a strong voice in which to intone the ballad of his fame, but even he is really whistling in the dark; as far as the future is concerned, he is resigned to a diet of minimal expectations with only card games to pass the time. Together, the dislocating discrepancies of this episode form a distillation of the clash between the past and the present, the grandiose and the petty, the touching and the ridiculous: the contradictions embodied in Don Quixote's own experience, and the endless counterpoint of myth. "The Knight of the Mournful Countenance" was originally the title of a character in one of the Amadts romances; but it is appropriated for Quixote by Sancho Panza because "hunger and the loss of your teeth have given you such an ugly face" (p. 130). We may think of Quixote as mournful because, on his long via dolorosa, he never encounters the Dulcinea of his dreams, but the Spanish phrase tristefigura has less dignified and more derisory connotations: it may mean that to those who are not initiates he has a miserable-looking face. There is the same mixture in what he tells us of his visit to the cave. We do not know if the Montesinos episode is a vision or a reality. We do not see Quixote in the cave directly, but only through his later account of it. Is it a continued and contradictory presentation by the narrator? Is the disjunction between the inner subjective and outer objective worlds intended by Cide Hamete? Or the narrator? Or Cervantes? In general, as E. C. Riley has suggested, the message "of Don Quixote surely is what most readers have always


taken it to be: that personal visions must be accommodated to the eternal facts of living." 37 Of course, this begs the question of priorities. But, as Riley also points out, despite Don Quixote's sadness and defeats, "he is admirable . . . in that he never quite gives up." 3 8 The extreme of this position is that of W. H. Auden, who sees Quixote as "A Christian Saint." 39 But is Don Quixote a saint because he "suffers himself intentionally," or because he finally becomes sane? Quixote himself informs us, after the first part of the novel has been published, that "my history . . . will require a commentary to make it intelligible" (p. 461); Cervantes has neglected to supply a reliable one. He is the least confessional of writers, much too proud to give us any notion of his own personal experiences of humiliation and defeat. We may possibly think that we are given an avowal of personal identification between Cervantes and his hero at the end of the last book, as he hangs up his quill pen for ever: "For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him; it was his to act, mine to write; we two together make but one" (p. 830). But, ironically, the voice is that of Cide Hamete; the final words, "solos los dos somos para en uno" represent his claim to secret and exclusive kinship with Quixote, while Cervantes witholds his endorsement. On the basis of this evasion Leo Spitzer has ingeniously inverted the usual terms of the problem. "It is not so much," he writes, "that Cervantes' nature is split in two (critic and narrator) because this is required by the nature of Don Quijote, but rather that Don Quijote is a split character because his creator was a critic-poet who felt with almost equal strength the need of illusionary beauty and that of pellucid clarity."40 Cide Hamete ends the novel with an already familiar claim: that his desire has been "to cause mankind to abhor the false and foolish tales of the books of chivalry" (p. 830). This final reassertion is 37 Riley, Don Quixote, p. 172. 38 Riley, Don Quixote, p. 147. 39 "The ironic hero: some reflections on Don Quixote," in Cervantes, ed. Nelson, PP- 75, 7740 "On the significance of Don Quijote" in Cervantes, ed. Nelson, p. 95.

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contrary both to his alleged spiritual kinship with his hero, and to the reader's general feeling that some of the more positive chivalric virtues in the myth of Don Quixote — and indeed in the romances themselves — cannot have been wholly alien to Cervantes. Indeed it has even been argued that Don Quixote is the "definitive and perfect" book of chivalry, although Ramon Menendez-Pidal prefers to give this tribute to Cervantes's last work, The Wanderings of Persiks and Sigismunda.41 Cervantes surely shared Don Quixotes nostalgia for the golden age and the heroic past, the triumph of good over evil, the exciting life over quotidian boredom, inspirational dream over everyday reality, madness over prudence. How these contradictions and ambiguities could be expressed was no easy matter to resolve; and Cervantes apparently found nothing better to offer than the foolish but shared enterprise of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and their ungainly but lovable quadrupeds in a real modern world. The complexity of the narrative suggests that it was, perhaps, no more than a dream, or a game; but it answered the need to express how the association of values of a long-gone world with the rewards of human fellowship in a common purpose could endure even amid the insoluble contradictions and brutalities of their contemporary world. As the myth still does in ours. 41 "The genesis of Don Quixote," in Cervantes across the Centuries, ed. Flores and Benardete, p. 55.

4. El Burlador and Don Juan

Like Don Quixote, Don Juan was created complete in a seventeenthcentury literary masterpiece from Spain.1 The play in which he made his debut was, almost certainly, written by a Spanish monk, Fray Gabriel Tellez (i 581?-1648), using the professional name of Tirso de Molina. This pseudonym — he had others, including Paracuellos de Cabanas and Gil Berrugo de Texares2 — combines "thyrsus," the wand of Dionysus, with molino, a grain mill. Tirso's play about Don Juan is called El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and His Guest of Stone). There is considerable confusion about the play's date. El Burlador was not published until 1630 (and then only in a collection of twelve plays by various authors),3 but it clearly existed earlier. The earliest possible date that has been mentioned is 1607; the latest, 1629. The most plausible guess is that the original version of the 1 There have been many studies identifying possible models for the fictional Don Juan. The most interesting is perhaps that of Gregorio Maranon, who suggested, in Biologia de Don Juan (Mexico, 1924), that Don Juan was based on an Italian libertine Don Juan de Tessis, Count of Villamediana. Many others, including Americo Castro, have proposed a non-Spanish model for Don Juan; see "Don Juan de Austria en el Napoles historico y en el poetico," Quaderni lbero-Americani 3 (1955), pp. 1-3. But Spain does not lack candidates; see Gerald E. Wade's edition of El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (New York, 1969), pp. 20-26. 2 Tirso de Molina, I'abuseur de Seville, ed. Pierre Guenoun (Paris, 1962), p. 14. 3 The collection was entitled Doze comedias nuevas de Lope de Vega Carpio, y otros autores {Twelve New Comedies by Lope de Vega Carpio, and Other Authors}. On the problem of authorship and dating of El Burlador, see especially the extensive introduction to Gerald E. Wade's edition of the play, pp. 3—17, and his somewhat fuller article, "Hacia una comprension del tema de Don Juan y 'El burlador,"' Revista de archivos, bibliotecas y museos 77 (1974), pp. 6 6 5 - 7 0 8 . The standard modern Spanish edition of El Burlador is that of Blanca de los Rfos, in volume 2 of Obras dramaticas comp/etas, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1947-58). The play has been translated into English by Roy Campbell.

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El Burlador and Don Juan

Scene from Moliere's Dom Juan, directed by Bernard Sobel, Theatre de Gennevilliers, 1973. Photograph by Paul Bricage. play was first produced in 1616, when Tirso is known to have been in Seville. In any case, the play certainly belongs to a period about a generation later than the various early printed versions of Faust, and shortly after the publication of Don Quixote. The 1630 collection of plays attributes El Burlador to Tirso. The


play is not among those published in the five collected volumes of Tirso's plays that came out during his lifetime, but this cannot be taken as evidence against Tirso's authorship. For one thing, Tirso is thought to have written perhaps four hundred plays of which only eighty-three survive; for another, while the Spanish comedia (a word meaning drama rather than comedy) was very popular in performance, its authors - even more than Shakespeare in England - paid little attention to publication of the text. Like Marlowe, Tirso did show some slight interest in publication, but he was certainly not concerned with ensuring that he left behind him a faithful textual reproduction of his works. It is unlikely that El Burlador as it has come down to us is exclusively by Tirso — it may well have been revised by a second, less gifted playwright, Andres de Claramonte, in 1617 or 1618 - and the extant version of the play is certainly neither accurately nor carefully presented. The play that survives, however, is nevertheless one of the most powerful dramas of the theatre of the golden age of Spain; Gerald Brenan, indeed, calls it "the greatest of all Spanish plays."4 Something of this greatness comes across even in translation, notably in the version of the distinguished South African poet Roy Campbell. Compared with that of his better-known contemporaries Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca, Tirso's distinctive quality is the stark analytic ruthlessness with which he creates characters and situations that embody the most elemental psychological and religious contradictions in life as he saw it. This comfortless power heavily influenced the original form of the myth of Don Juan. It also makes Tirso's protagonist very different from the later embodiments of Don Juan — so different, indeed, that Tirso's original play requires a fairly extended account here. THE PLAY El Burlador has three acts; its many scenes were played without interruption, and with virtually no scenery, in the open-air theater 4 Gerald Brenan, The Literature of the Spanish People (Cambridge, 1951), p. 218. 92

El Burlador and Don Juan for which it was originally written. The action moves rapidly from Naples to the Spanish seashore, and then to various other places before settling in Seville, which was (according to Tirso's rather imaginative geography and history of fourteenth-century Spain) the site of the King of Castile's palace. The play opens at night in the royal palace at Naples. Don Juan Tenorio, wearing a mask, is leaving Dona Isabel. To convince herself of the vows of eternal troth made by the masked man whom she believes to be her affianced lover, Don Octavio, she suggests fetching a lamp so that she can see him. Don Juan forbids her; she asks who he is; and when he replies, "I am a man without a name," 5 she raises the alarm. The King of Naples orders Don Juan's uncle, Don Pedro Tenorio, who is the Spanish ambassador at the court, to arrest them both, but to do it secretly so as to avoid scandal to Dona Isabel's honor. Don Juan unmasks himself and reveals that it is he who has enjoyed Dona Isabel, under the pretense of being Don Octavio. Don Pedro, fearing that he will be held responsible both for the outrage against Dona Isabel, and for the desecration of the king's palace, challenges his nephew to a duel. Don Juan, however, deftly refuses: "My blood's yours — for you to take" (p. 237). This puts Don Pedro in a quandary, and he finally helps Don Juan to escape, instructing him to go to Milan or Sicily. Don Pedro then gives the King a graphic and, of course, false account of the desperate struggle in which the intruder managed to get away. Orders are given for the arrest of Dona Isabel and Don Octavio; Don Pedro tells the King that Isabel admitted the intruder was Don Octavio, anticipating the wedding rites; Don Octavio, who knows this to be false, flees to Spain with Don Pedro's connivance. The next scenes deal with Tisbea, a beautiful fisher-girl who drives men into a frenzy by her cold indifference to their love. Catalinon, Don Juan's servant, carries his master ashore after they have been shipwrecked on their way back to Spain near Tarragona. 5 Tirso de Molina, The Trickster of Seville and his Guest of Stone, in The Classic

Theatre, Volume 3: Six Spanish Plays, ed. Eric Bentley (New York, 1959), p. 235. Subsequent quotations are taken from this edition, and page numbers only are cited in the text. In a few cases I have translated direct from the Spanish.

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Tisbea tends the handsome but apparently lifeless corpse, and falls in love. As soon as Don Juan recovers, he makes passionate protestations of eternal devotion. When he adds repeated vows of marriage, Tisbea submits "beneath the hand and word / Of husband" (p. 259). As the two retire to her cabin to anticipate their conjugal joys, Tisbea prays: if Don Juan's soul does not compel him to honor his vows, "may God above / Chastise you." In the next scene Don Juan, having made love to Tisbea, sets her cabin on fire to create a diversion, and escapes on her horses, which Catalinon has saddled and waiting. Tisbea vows revenge. Between the two scenes with Tisbea, there is one set in the Alcazar, the royal palace at Seville. We are introduced to Tirso's other main protagonist, the venerable Don Gonzalo de Ulloa, who has, since Mozart's Don Giovanni, been better known under the name of the Commendatore, because he is the Comendador, or Commander, of the very important knightly Order of Calatrava. The Commander reports to the King of Castile that his mission to Portugal has been successful; and as reward the King says that he will give the Commander's beloved and beautiful only child, Dona Ana, a dowry and marry her to Don Juan Tenorio. In the second act Don Diego Tenorio, Don Juan's father, a great nobleman and chief justice of Castile, reports to the King on his son's wrongdoings at Naples. The King has to change his plans. He now decrees that Don Juan must marry the wronged Dona Isabel, and is to be banished from the court until the wedding takes place; and he tries to placate the Commander by promoting him to be major-domo of the palace. Meanwhile, Don Octavio has arrived from Naples, and the much-harassed King tries to assuage his resentment by giving him the just-vacated hand of Dona Ana. But nothing can patch up Don Juan's next outrage. A new character appears, Don Juan's old friend the Marquis de la Mota. De la Mota welcomes Don Juan's return to Seville, and reveals that he is in love with Dona Ana, who loves him in return, but (as we already know) has just been betrothed to Don Octavio. Don Juan is much excited by what de la Mota tells him of Dona Ana: "the greatest beauty / The King has seen in all his state" (p. 268). Very soon Don 94

El Burlador and Don Juan Juan is lucky enough to get his hands on a private letter addressed to de la Mota which makes a secret assignation with Dona Ana at eleven o'clock that night. Don Juan delivers the message orally to de la Mota, but alters the stated time to midnight. His plan, of course, is to reserve the eleventh hour for himself. Don Juan gains entry to Dona Ana's room, but she soon discovers that he is not her lover, and cries for help. Her father appears and bars the passage of Don Juan, "the murderer of my honor," as Dona Ana calls him (p. 275). Don Juan unhesitatingly runs the Commander through with his sword and kills him. When de la Mota arrives to keep his midnight tryst, he is arrested for the murder of the Commander, and the King orders his execution. The second act ends with Don Juan beginning the fourth and last of his seductions in the play. On his way to Lebriga, the town in Andalusia to which he has been banished for the outrage to Isabel, he comes across the wedding celebrations of two young countryfolk, Batricio and Aminta. He gets himself invited to the festivities, and at once starts courting Aminta. Even on her wedding night Aminta's chaste scruples are fairly soon overcome by Don Juan's usual vows of marriage and eternal love; he swears that "If in my word and faith / I fail, I pray to God that by foul treason / I be murdered by a man!"; and he adds what is to prove a doubly ironic aside: "I mean a dead one, / For living man, may God forbid!" (p. 290). Meanwhile, the forces of retribution are gathering. On her way to Seville Dona Isabel has met Tisbea; Don Octavio is breathing his desire for revenge; and Aminta, with her father and bridegroom, arrive at court demanding that the King force Don Juan to marry the country girl he has wronged. However, scenes describing these confusions - presented for the most part in a highly artificial and stock comic way — are intermingled with others in which Don Juan's punishment is determined on very different lines from those envisaged by the living characters. Don Juan has now defied the King's order, and returned secretly to Seville. There he happens to go into the church where the murdered Commander is buried, under a very rapidly produced stone effigy of himself. Don Juan 95


reads its inscription: "Here, trusting in the Lord for vengeance on a traitor, the most loyal of all true knights lies buried." "What a joke," Don Juan comments, "So you think you'll avenge yourself on me?" (p. 295). He then offers the statue a supreme insult, by pulling its beard, and adds, "Tonight I will await you at my inn / For supper. There we can arrange a duel" (p. 296). That night at the inn everyone is thrown into consternation by a loud knock on the door. Catalinon is terrified at the thought that all his master's victims "have arrived / To have their final vengeance" (p. 297). Don Juan goes to the door, and is met by the stone statue, which advances slowly and silently towards him. Don Juan, though shaken, invites the statue to sit down and eat. It does so, but says little until the meal is over; then it signals to be left alone with Don Juan. It makes Don Juan give it his hand as a pledge that he will keep his word, and invites him to supper the following night — at the Commander's tomb. Don Juan resolves to go, partly because "to fear the dead is baseness," and partly because "all of Seville" will "make a living legend of my valor" (p. 302). When he keeps his appointment there is a black table laid inside the tomb; man and statue sit down, and two black figures serve them tarantulas and vipers washed down with vinegar, frost, and ice. At the earlier supper at the inn there had been a ghostly choir singing offstage; it now sounds again, and more ominously: Let all those know who judge God's ways And treat his punishments with scorn There is no debt but that he pays, No date but it is bound to dawn While in the world one's flesh is lusting It is most wrong for men to say: "A long long time in me you're trusting" For very shortly dawns the day. (p. 310) When Don Juan and the statue have finished their supper with a fricassee of fingernails, the statue asks Don Juan if he is afraid to 96

El Burlador and Don Juan give his hand again. The earlier contact had frozen Don Juan's heart and made him think he was in hell, but he replies, indignantly, "Afraid, you say. Me frightened?" (p. 310). Then he gives the stone statue his hand. At once Don Juan feels he is burning in the fires of God's justice. He asks for a confessor, "To absolve my soul before I die." The statue refuses, laconically: "You've thought of it too late"; and when Don Juan falls dead to the ground, the statue makes the moral lesson clear: "Such is God's justice. What is done is paid for" (p. 3 " ) The tomb then sinks into the ground, along with Don Juan and the statue, to the sound of rumbling thunder; Catalinon creeps out from the wreckage and goes off to tell the court of his master's death. The King is hearing the charges of Tisbea, Aminta, and de la Mota against Don Juan; Catalinon's report makes possible a happy denouement. For one thing, it appears that Don Juan had not in fact had time to deflower Dona Ana, so de la Mota can now wed her; and, since the other ladies have now been avenged, the remaining couples can also get married: Dona Isabel to Don Octavio, Aminta to Batricio, and, we may presume, Tisbea to her faithful adorer, the fisherman Anfriso. "TAN LARGO ME LO FlAlS"

This summary inevitably exaggerates the mechanical quality of the plot, its rather forced succession of intrigues, disguises, false accusations, arranged marriages, dishonored maids, and last-minute changes of direction. These are standard components of the Spanish comedia, but they are much less noticeable in El Burlador than in other plays of the period, partly because they are interspersed with scenes of farcical comedy centering on the activities of Catalinon, and partly because they are presented in a wide variety of poetical and linguistic styles — there are eleven different verse forms altogether — which often cut across expected divisions6: for example, both the peasant girls use the highest and most sophisticated style of amo6 Wade, ed., El Burlador\ pp. 53-55. 97


rous rhetoric during their courtships with Don Juan. In addition, Tirso subordinates a rather skeletal treatment of plot and character to a complex, consistent and very powerful thematic structure. Two of the play's major themes are suggested by its title: this is a play about a trickster who deceives four women (and, incidentally, all his friends and relatives); and it is also a play about a stone statue of a dead man that is insultingly invited to supper, and returns the compliment with deadly interest. But there is also a third overarching theme that is expressed by the title of an earlier version of Tirso's play: Tan largo me lofidis. This version was discovered only in 1878. It had been printed in Seville, probably after Tirso's death, but at that stage had been attributed to Calderon. It is, however, almost certainly by Tirso: more than half the lines are identical to those in El Burlador, and the play as a whole covers much the same ground. The title, Tan largo me lo fidis, is a stock Spanish phrase that means "What a long credit you're trusting me with," or "The day of settlement is far off yet," or "There's much to be done before it comes to that." The phrase is used — with minor variations according to the occasion - a dozen or so times in El Burlador. Don Juan takes it to mean that while he is young he can safely go on with his misdeeds, before repenting in old age; at the end of the play, the chorus turns the saying against him in the passage quoted above. The tan largo me lo fidis theme serves to connect the punishment of the trickster with the revenge of the stone statue. Tirso's Don Juan is a man who wants to become a legend in his own lifetime - in this respect, at least, he bears some resemblance to Don Quixote. The fame Don Juan seeks, however, is far from that of a knight-errant. Indeed, it is not even that of a great lover; Tirso presents Don Juan as someone who is not primarily interested in love. It is surely significant that all four of Don Juan's sexual encounters presented in the play occur under his false pretenses. In the cases of Dona Isabel and Dona Ana, Don Juan is received not as himself but as Don Octavio and de la Mota respectively; in the cases of Tisbea and Aminta - where he is not disguised, and he makes good use of amorous rhetoric — the lady only yields after being

El Burlador and Don Juan given the most solemn and repeated protestations of prompt marriage. None of this suggests that the essence of Don Juan's activities is a genuine love for women. There have even been suggestions by modern critics that Don Juan's impulses have homosexual or bestial tendencies.7 Being loved is as distant from Don Juan s thoughts as is loving. There are two common factors in Juan's sexual encounters: first, his choice of female partner is purely a matter of circumstance — he happens to be able to get access to a particular woman; second, the relationship is never intended to last more than whatever time it takes to achieve sexual satisfaction — in the cases of both Tisbea and Aminta, Don Juan orders Catalinon, even before the sexual encounter occurs, to make the horses ready for a quick getaway. In identifying Don Juan as a Burlador, the play's title indicates a very different emphasis from that which the legend of Don Juan was later to take. For Tirso's protagonist, achieving fame as the trickster of Seville is the chief motive for his actions. Of course, the rapidity and complexity of the play's action allow little time for a full psychological portrayal of Don Juan's affairs with women; but the pattern is made clear enough in the two encounters we see most fully: those with Tisbea and Aminta. With Tisbea, Don Juan talks much of the strength of his feelings for her, and he says twice to Catalinon (with whom he presumably says what he really feels) that he is "on the verge of dying . . . for her love" (p. 251); of course what Don Juan means by "love" is suggested when he immediately adds: "I must have her tonight (Esta nocbe he de gozdlla)" The idea 7 See Gerald E. Wade, "El Burlador de Sevilla as metaphor," in Studies in Honor of William C. McCrary, ed. Robert Fiore et al. (Lincoln, NE, 1986), note 13, pp. 2 2 3 - 3 4 . I* has to be said that the basis for these suggestions, three short and by no means decisive passages, seems slight. When de la Mota is delirious with joy at learning that Dona Ana will meet him, he embraces Don Juan, who pointedly replies that he is not Dona Ana and disengages himself (p. 271); later, Batricio complains that Don Juan's behavior to him and to Aminta is a "worse one (in my eyes) than that of Sodom" (p. 284); Catalinon, to express faithfulness to his master, says that, at Don Juan's side, he would "force the flesh off a tiger or an elephant" (p. 270). On this, see also note to lines 1370-79 in El Burlador, ed. Luis Vazques (Madrid, 1989), p. 192.

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that he will flee immediately afterwards, and set fire to Tisbea's cottage, is all part of the plan (pp. 251, 257). In the case of Aminta, Don Juan tells Catalinon that her "lovely eyes and spotless hands" are burning him "with flaming torches" (p. 283); but when Catalinon asks when he must have the horses saddled for their getaway, Don Juan replies: "For dawn, and when the sun, half-dead with laughter, / Rises to see the hoax" (p. 287). When Don Juan talks of dying for love, then, he means only that the excitement of his loins demands instant relief. In this, his desire differs little from the more or less constant sexual appetite that could be regarded as characteristic of a certain kind of upper-class youth with little else to do. Certainly Don Juan's sexual attitudes and appetites differ mainly in the degree of their brutality and cunning from those of the other aristocratic gallants in the play. It is true that both Don Octavio and de la Mota profess to be in love with their mistresses. But Don Octavio's excuse that marriage is only "for lackeys, slaves, / And laundry wenches" (p. 241) puts his affection for Dona Isabel in a less than ideal light. The sexual duplicity of de la Mota is even clearer. In the conversation Don Juan has with him about the various mistresses and prostitutes they formerly knew — how this one is getting too old, and that one has had syphilis — their talk epitomizes callow cruelty: they are nothing more than adolescents in heat, displaying a typical mixture of contempt, cruelty, and resentment. De la Mota and Don Juan laugh at the thought that they have left their whores unpaid; and although de la Mota says his "heart is buried deep in care," he and a friend have yet had time and energy to plan "a better hoax" than their "cruel fraud last night" (p. 267). That hoax is an assignation with a woman, before the proposed later encounter with Dona Ana. Don Juan, it seems, is merely a more ruthless and successful deceiver and exploiter than his friends. As he says after de la Mota has left him: "In Seville / I ' m called the Trickster; and my greatest pleasure / Is to trick women, leaving them dishonored" (p. 269). When he has read Dona Ana's note making the assignation with de la Mota, Don Juan exclaims: "Oh, I could roar with laughter! I'll enjoy her / By

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El Burlador and Don Juan the same trick that limed the other one, / Isabel, back in Naples" (p. 269). Many cultures, and not only primitive ones, have glorified the successful liar and cheat;8 Ulysses is a famous Greek example. It seems to have been the Christian, and especially the Protestant, tradition that made truthfulness a universal obligation, as opposed to the more tribal notion that it is only within the family or tribe that one must keep faith. The historical Samson, for instance, seems to have been a trickster folk hero originally; but this is not part of his place in the Christian tradition - Milton, for example, says nothing in Samson Agonistes about ruses and deceits on the part of his protagonist. Of course, "trickster" is only one possible translation of burlador: "jester" or "playboy" are two others. The word "trickster," however, is closest to the Spanish word's meaning, the essence of which lies in the pleasure of "tricking" people. Don Juan has a deep amoral delight in getting his way by whatever method he can, and then becoming famous for the trick itself: he wants to have "burla de fama" We see this in his pride when Catalinon says that "Towns should be warned: 'Here comes the plague / Of women in a single man / Who is their cheater and Betrayer, / The greatest trickster in all Spain'" (p. 273). The fame Don Juan craves is the exact opposite of that professed by the honor-based ideologies of chivalry and of courtly love. It violates not only the superficial decorum of the royal court, but also the more moral and bourgeois codes of family and marriage that are represented by the fishermen and farmers associated with Tisbea and Aminta, and to some extent by the valets and servants, including Catalinon. Juan's rejection of all these codes is summed up by one of his servants, who calls him "The ace of all disorder" (p. 296). Don Juan enjoys the deceptions of trickery, but he inhabits a world where, like almost everyone else, he pays lip-service to universally accepted moral, social, and religious codes. Later Don Juans — 8 See, for example, Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (London, 1956).

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notably Moliere's - were to be conscious skeptics, atheists, and rebels: the first Don Juan was not, and for reasons that are tributes to Tirso's human understanding as well as to his moral intransigence. There are surely a hundred human beings who secretly break the accepted laws of church and state and family for every one who more-or-less openly proclaims opposition to them. Don Juan is deeply representative: lying is nothing to him; he wants what he wants, and as long as he gets it he sees no point in quarreling with the world and its laws. He assumes that other people share this split between public and private attitudes; while some, like his father and Catalinon, are genuinely scandalized by his immorality, he glories in the triumphs of his egoism. Thus, when Don Juan reveals his plans for Tisbea, and Catalinon asks him: "But surely, sir, you won't abuse her, / Who saved your life?" Don Juan answers, "As a seducer / You've always known me. Why, then, ask me / And with my own true nature task me?" (p. 257). Don Juan is not a rebel against law on principle, and he is no skeptic about Christianity; he is merely confident that he can defer their operation in his own case. This is where the idea behind tan largo me lo fidis connects the trickster theme and that of the stone guest. On the first occasion when the leitmotif'of "a long, long time in me you're trusting" occurs, it is because Catalinon, seeing no signs of compunction, or even embarrassment, in his master, invokes divine retribution. Don Juan, he warns, is "tempting] the thunderbolt," and "Those who cheat women with base sham / In the long run their crime will damn." To this, Don Juan flaunts the successes he has already amassed without any punishment: he is young and still "well on the credit side . . . If you extend my debt till then / You'll wait till death to punish me" (pp. 257-58). Don Juan's defense is psychologically effective for two reasons. First, it is wholly consistent with youth's sense of a boundless present, of death as something that only exists as a word, of a future that will allow lots of time for reforming, repenting, and settling down, just as Octavio and de la Mota are already in the process of doing at the end of the play. Second, it is another example of the way in which Don Juan simply seems to be engaging more recklessly than the rest 102

El Burlador and Don Juan of us in a silent but virtually universal war against society's norms, and as such he cannot help but attract a certain amount of envy and admiration. It is, in any case, natural that a trickster who "adores cheating" should accept the norms of society as an essential condition for being able to exploit them to his own advantage. He is much too wholly engaged in the immediate, the present, to give a thought to how far he ultimately believes in the social, ethical, and religious rules by which his society operates. In the same way he is confident that the problems of divine retribution and hellfire can be postponed for the foreseeable future. He has already received many warnings — from his uncle and his father as well as from Catalinon and the women he has seduced — but none has had the slightest effect. As the son of the King's chief adviser, Don Juan feels socially invulnerable. When he returns secretly to Seville and reads the statue's inscription about trusting God to avenge the Commander, Don Juan is furious: his prestige as a successful trickster is being publicly challenged. He extends the invitation to dinner because the gesture will add to his glory as an unrepentant trickster: he obviously does not expect the statue to be able to accept. So Don Juan jokes about offering to duel with an effigy bearing a granite rapier. Behind his sardonic taunts is his dual assumption that both his own future and the other world are equally distant: How long this vengeance seems to be in coming Especially if you are going to wreak it! You mustn't be so motionless and sleepy! And if you're willing still to wait till death, Why, what a lot of chance you are wasting That for so long a time you give me credit! (p. 296) When the statue actually turns up at the inn for supper, Don Juan is naturally somewhat flustered, but he pretends not to be; he clearly regards it as an act of lower-class credulity to believe in spirits coming back from the dead. Still, he is no disbeliever in an after-life, and when he and the statue are left together, his first questions suggest genuine concern: 103

Three Renaissance Myths If your soul Is travailing in pain, if you await Some satisfaction or relief, then tell me, And I will give my word to do whatever You should command me. Are you in the grace Of God? Or was it that I killed you recklessly In a state of mortal sin? Speak! I am anxious, (p. 301) The statue deigns no reply; but when Don Juan politely offers to light it to the door, the stone embodiment of the Commander proclaims its freedom from such necessities: "My soul requires no light. I am in grace" (p. 302). Don Juan accepts the statue's return engagement to dinner. He is actually very troubled at the prospect, but his brash devotion to his own reputation has the final word: "Tomorrow I will go there to the chapel / Where it invited me, that all of Seville / May make a living legend of my valor" (p. 302). Ironically, it is Don Juan's death that is soon to become his "living legend"; and its meaning is total defeat. The denouement neatly turns the tables on what Don Juan has been most proud of; the trickster is tricked by the will of heaven, and tricked for ever. It is important that Don Juan is shown to believe in hell and in the eternity of hell's punishment. Before dying, Don Juan knows what his fate is going to be. This is emphasized by the statue's stern rejection of Don Juan's dying request for a confessor "to absolve my soul before I die"; "impossible," the statue replies, "You've thought of it too late" (p. 311). Don Juan's credit note, like Faust's, must be paid in full; it cannot be negotiated away by the final repentance which he has counted on to discharge his debts. El Burlador derives much of its strength from the connections between the two themes of the trickster and the deferred payment; but it is the stone guest who locks the themes together. This intervention, in a way like that of Marlowe's Mephistopheles, both seizes the audience's imagination, and acts as an embodiment of the only force apparently capable of dealing with the challenge the uncontrolled egoist offers to the world; and that force is a supernatural one. 104

El Burlador and Don Juan THE STONE STATUE AND ITS IDEOLOGICAL TRADITIONS

In one of the earliest detailed studies of the Don Juan legend, Georges Gendarme de Bevotte offers a basic historical hypothesis for the essentially modern nature of both the Don Juan and the Faust myths: The world of antiquity, being as favorable to the demands of the flesh as to the aspirations of the intellect, was not to know Don Juan any more than it was to know Faust. One incarnates the body, the other the mind, in rebellion against being stifled. As long as this double constraint and the double revolt which is its consequence did not exist, there could not be either intellectual or moral libertinism; Faust and Don Juan are inconceivable. Both of them, and for similar reasons, are born of Christianity.9 As far as Don Juan is concerned, the primary agencies whereby these constraints on the flesh were mediated were, no doubt, the codes of courtly love and of chivalry. In El Burlador both are treated in a way very different from that of Cervantes in Don Quixote. Since the days of the biblical King David, royal and aristocratic power has no doubt been accustomed to remove any incidental obstacle in the path of the privileged male to the possession of the woman he desired. But the modes of wooing, and the rhetoric of sexual encounter, changed after the codification of courtly love by the twelfth-century writer Andre le Chapelain in a treatise entitled The Book of the Art of Loving Nobly and the Reprobation of Dishonorable

Love. The spiritual quality of the lover's worship of his mistress was later reinforced by neo-Platonic ideas according to which the love of earthly beauty was only a preparation for a higher form of heavenly love; but by the early seventeenth century platonic love had become a routinized verbal game from which any underlying belief had gone. In this respect El Burlador is very much of its time. The main change in Tirso's handling of the courtly love convention seems to affect the role of the female in courtship. His noble 9 Georges Gendarme de Bevotte, La legende de Don Juan (1906; Paris, 1929), p. 7. There had been several earlier comparisons between Don Juan and Faust; see, for example, J. G. Magnabal, Don Juan et la critique espagnole (Paris, 1893), pp. 8 - 9 . 105


ladies are more avowedly sexual than those of the romance (or of Don Quixote): Dona Isabel welcomes a gallant into her bedchamber before she is married, while Dona Ana, in revolt against the arranged marriage trumped up by her father, invites her faithful, but until then unrewarded, wooer to her house and, presumably, her bed. Even the girls of humbler origin allow the marriage ceremony to be anticipated, acknowledging the appeal of sexual activities: "Now to repay you I shall not be coy," says Tisbea to Don Juan (p. 259), while Aminta promises, "I am yours alone" (p. 291). All four women, it seems, treat the marriage ceremony as a necessary formality, but one which can be deferred. And yet the language of courtly love remains a powerful rhetorical instrument in the courtship process. Don Juan tells Tisbea that "I live solely in you / And ever so to serve you will continue" (p. 258); and he claims to Aminta that their marriage was carried out by "Your eyes" (p. 289), that he is "Dying with love for you alone," and that his love is of the spirit: "My very soul / I offer you between my outstretched arms" (p. 290). In practice, of course, Don Juan "serves" these women only in the farmyard sense; and his love, far from being eternal, is begun, achieved, and terminated with unimaginable rapidity. Don Juan may use the forms of courtly love, but he is actually in diametrical opposition to its code. His sexual practice is, of course, not without illustrious precedent; it is in accord with such pagan models as the Olympian gods. 10 On one occasion Don Juan openly invokes this tradition, although he distorts it in the process: when Catalinon waxes indignant about his master's proposed seduction of Tisbea, Don Juan cites the classical precedent of Aeneas's actually very different desertion of Dido (p. 257). The general ethos of El Burlador, and the argument implied in Don Juan's use of the tan largo me lo fidis theme, really depend on non-Christian models of behavior; and they are particularly necessary to counter the assumptions of courtly love. Don Juan must lie, if he is to get around the 10 See, for example, the cuckolding of Amphitryon, and innumerable others, by Zeus.

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El Burlador and Don Juan preliminary requirement of the plighting of eternal troth. This larger conflict between the individual's hedonism and the theoretical codes of love is the subject of the song that the choir sings at Don Juan's supper for the stone guest: If you expect it of us men That our deserts shall find adjusting But not till after death, why then A long, long time you are for trusting.11 (p. 3°°) Honor was both the great theme of the comedia and the characteristic code of Spanish society. Don Juan is very free with his protestations of honor to men and women alike, although in fact he proves faithless to everyone; he manipulates the code of honor to his own advantage as adroitly as the codes of family loyalty or courtly love. Thus he takes advantage of Batricio's refusal to consummate his marriage to Aminta because of her flirtation with Don Juan. Batricio says "when rumor breathes abroad, / Honor and women suffer worst of all" (p. 285); Don Juan reflects: "Through his honor / I conquered him," and goes off to conquer Aminta. It is an irony which does not go unnoticed by Don Juan that he is able to depend so securely on the honor of a peasant; and it is wholly appropriate that Don Juan should use the occasion as an opportunity to complain of a decline in general standards of behavior. It is only among the peasants of the countryside, he says, that the word "honor" has retained its force: "always, with these peasants / They hold their honor in both hands, and look / To their own honor first. For honor / was forced by so much falsity and fraud, / to leave the city for the countryside" (p. 286). Soon afterwards, Aminta makes the same point: chivalry itself, she says, lost its chief mark of distinction long ago, "Since Shamelessness was made a knight of Spain." I1 "Si de mi amor aguardais, senora, de aquesta suerte — el galardon en la muerte, — que largo me lo fiais!" (lines 2383-86) 107


Don Juan, it is true, has an ambiguous residual allegiance to the code of honor, but his version of the code is much more archaic and individualistic than are the laws of Christian chivalry. It is mainly a matter of his determination to maintain his public posture, and allow nothing to be said or done that will derogate from that public face. And it is this version of honor, the pund'honor, which becomes the instrument of Don Juan's death. When the statue of the Commander wants to make sure that Don Juan will come for the second supper, it challenges him: "And as a gentleman you'll keep your word?" Don Juan replies: "I keep my word with men, being a knight" (p. 301). At the second supper it is a handshake - the very gesture used to plight knightly troth — that becomes the instrument of Don Juan's damnation. The statue in effect achieves its purpose by relying on Don Juan's public allegiance to the pagan and individual notion of troth, as opposed to the more modern Christian and universalist conception embodied in the word truth. 12 Don Juan's antinomian egocentricity brings him into conflict with his elders and betters, the representatives of social, moral, and religious authority. However, these figures do not themselves provide an adequate counterbalance to Don Juan; and this raises questions in our minds about the nature of a society of which they are the chief upholders. The older noblemen are all, without exception, unimpressive and devious figures. Even the Commander, when alive, does little that is in any way effective, except perhaps to deliver a splendid panegyric to the King on the prosperity and piety of Lisbon. The Kings of Naples and Castile are feeble, only capable of prudent temporizing and face-saving maneuvering. This note is struck very early in the play when the King of Naples, not wanting to be known to have discovered Dona Isabel in her scandalous 12 Both words, "troth" and "truth," derive from the same Old English word, but its earliest meanings of "faithfulness" or "one's plighted word" were only replaced by the meanings of "truthfulness," "veracity," or "conformity with fact" in the later fourteenth century. See Oxford English Dictionary, "truth," meanings 1 to 3, and then 4 to 11; it is interesting to note that the two authors whose names recur in examples of the early universalist senses of "truth" should be Langland and Wyclif, both proto-Protestants. 108

El Burlador and Don Juan predicament, discreetly retires, with the aside: "Prudence in this would seem the better plan" (p. 235). Juan's father and uncle are no better: Don Pedro allows Don Juan to escape, and then lies about it to the King at the cost of incriminating both Don Octavio and Dona Isabel: "Isabel, whom I name to your surprise, / Says it was Duke Octavio in disguise." None of those in authority do more than react to circumstances, and try to keep up appearances; and this moral weakness and selfishness reaches its climax when Don Juan's father, seeing his son's cause is lost, tells the King, with odious selfflattering hypocrisy: Sire, to reward my services to you, Let him be made to expiate his crime So that the heavens themselves don't shoot their lightning At me, for having bred so foul a son. (P- 313) Such weakness and egoism is unredeemed. Don Pedro's remark, "Arch-enemies of sunlight are the great" (p. 242), may stand for the rulers of Spain as they appear in El Burlador. They are much more corrupt than the people of the open air, the fisherfolk and farmers. The rural characters, it is true, are at times rather silly, and in any case they are as powerless as everyone else against the charms and deceptions of Don Juan; but they manifest simple and direct personal and moral allegiances. Their essential role in the play is to emphasize, by contrast, the sterile falsities of the court, and the depravity of its product, Don Juan. The conflict also has a generational aspect for Don Juan. When he confronts his uncle over the dishonoring of Isabel in the King of Naples's own palace, Don Juan scorns to ask for pardon (p. 237); he assumes that the difference between them is merely a question of age: "I'm still a lad, / As you were once. Such youthful loves you had." Don Juan is equally contemptuous with his own father: when Don Diego asks, "Can it be possible you wish to kill me / With your behavior?" (p. 271), Don Juan insolently responds with a pretense of puzzlement: "Why in such a state?" The insolence of youth to age occurs elsewhere in the play - Don Octavio, for 109


example, refuses to fight Don Diego because he is "far too old," and " 'I was once' is nothing / To: 'I am now'" (p. 304). That Don Juan should recklessly kill the Commander, with a harsh jest on his lips — "This is the way I die" (p. 276) — is therefore only an extreme example of the play's more general picture of the contempt of youth for age; and it is therefore an ironically appropriate redress of the balance that, at the end, Don Juan's punishment should come as the just revenge of an old man. The Commander is killed while engaged in the traditional task of fathers in Spanish plays: defending their daughter's honor. The defense of female honor - with its paraphernalia of duennas and locked doors — was a favorite theme of Spanish drama: since women were regarded as the repository of men's honor, so it was understood that the father's responsibility for his daughter's honor was vital for the reputation of the family as a whole. Don Juan thoroughly enjoys his role as a dedicated threat to the honor of families, ruthlessly exploiting the greatness of his own family in the process. For instance, he knows that his uncle cannot kill him, especially in cold blood, and so he offers "My lifeblood and my sword" (p. 237), fully expecting the result which actually occurs: that Don Pedro will help his escape from Naples. Meanwhile the hands of Don Juan's father, and even of the King, are tied by two considerations: first, Don Juan belongs to the old and powerful Tenorio family, whose own honor would be tarnished if his deeds were exposed as criminal; and second, they believe that the honors of Dona Isabel and Dona Ana can best be defended by hushing the matter up, or buying the wronged party off. There is, then, no way of life in the society depicted in El Burlador against which Don Juan can be measured and found wanting. To put it very broadly, he is more wicked, more conscienceless, and also more adroit, more active, and more courageous, than the people around him; but he is not essentially different from them, either in his aims or his methods. His creator, Tirso, was a writer whose moral vision of the life of his time reflected both his disgust with the decadence of the period of Philip III (1598-1621) and Philip IV (1621-65), and his contempt for the world in general. no

El Burlador and Don Juan Cervantes had been born in 1547, and although he had written Don Quixote during the inglorious reign of Philip III, he had known something of Spain's earlier greatness, and had himself played a hero's part in the victory against the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. Tirso was born a generation later; he was only a child when the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 signalled the end of his country's dream of imperial power; and he lived his adult life in a bankrupt kingdom whose monarch left the direction of policy to his favorites, notably the Duke of Lerma, whose profligacy and extravagance made the court of Spain notorious throughout Europe. Such a situation could only fortify the doctrinal and ethical rigor, and the condemnation of the secular world, that was a strong feature of the Counter-Reformation in Spain. This attitude is not altogether typical of Tirso's plays; but El Burlador is in any case not very typical of Tirso. He was a monk and something of a theologian, and his general attitude to life can be summarized by the expression suggested by his surviving portrait: his eyes are those of an intrepid and initiated expert in human depravity; and his tight mouth is hard set against the temptations of the world.13 El Burlador may be seen to typify the inner meaning of the history of its time; as one historian has put it, "Immorality, beginning at the top and seeping downwards through the whole fabric of society, becomes the dominant mark of this age of retribution."14 In some of his other plays Tirso is not unsympathetic to the idea of Platonized romantic love;15 and in El Burlador Tirso's animus is not directed against love, nor even against sexual pleasure, as such; his aim seems to be much more general - to show that a world of complete moral and social vacuity necessarily produces, in a young man of exceptional ability, energy, and social advantages, a more or 13 See Fr. Gumersindo Placer, "Un nuevo retrato de Tirso," Essays on the Biography and Works of Tirso de Molina, Revista estudios (Madrid, 1949), pp. 7 2 1 - 2 4 . See also Guenoun, Tirso, p. 12. 14 William C. Atkinson, A History of Spain and Portugal (Harmonds worth, i960), p. 168. 15 See Otis H. Green, Spain and the Western Tradition (Madison, 1963), 1.240-49, 267.


less unthinking contempt not only of the established social codes, but of all other human beings; he lives for himself alone and without fear of retribution. The problem of the play, then, is to know what power, if any, can confront the challenge Don Juan poses to the moral order. The conventional dramatic answer would have been brought about through the human representatives of that order, and in particular through the actions of those whom Don Juan has wronged; but neither the kings nor their ministers, nor the wronged women and their outraged lovers, have the strength or the moral authority to match Don Juan's schemes. Any conventional happy ending involving the hero's last-minute reform, and a repentance acceptable to God, is out of the question here, since it would amount to an endorsement of Don Juan's conscious strategy of deferred moral responsibility. Nor did the civilization of the time offer any secular model for just retribution. The ruling grandees of the Spanish court and its gilded youth devoted themselves to personal advancement and callow lechery in complete immunity from redress. The fruitless quest for a historical original for Don Juan has produced considerable evidence that in the Spain of the period there was a profusion of people who were notorious for behaving much as Don Juan does (some of whom even bore the name of Juan or de Tenorio); none of them was ever called to account. In the face of such problems, Tirso found a special kind of dramatic resolution: a character of sufficient archaic potency to counter the challenge of Don Juan's pagan demonism, and to provide a starkly orthodox Christian response to the tan largo me lofidis theme. It seems likely that Tirso based his account of Don Juan's final adventure on one or more of the Spanish versions of an ancient and very widely distributed European folk tale known as The Double Invitation. An early Spanish student of the Don Juan legend, Victor Said Armesto, long ago drew attention to a body of folk tales in the European oral tradition which seemed to be a Christianized version of more archaic burial customs and beliefs.16 The essence of the 16 Victor Said Armesto, La leyenda de Don Juan (Madrid, 1908), pp. 123-82.

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El Burlador and Don Juan story is that someone, usually a young man, is so flushed with the pride of life that he insults a dead man, usually in the form of a skull, and then invites him to come and eat with him; the dead man unexpectedly keeps the appointment, and extends a return invitation; at the second meal the representative of the dead and the world of spirits either terrifies the youthful sinner into repentance, or occasionally punishes him more severely by death or madness. In an important study, Dorothy Epplen MacKay has collected eighty-one examples of these Double Invitation folk tales, many of them in the form of ballads. They vary a good deal as to locale, psychological motive, and denouement. The Spanish versions are distinctive in several respects; and these bring them closer to Tirso's treatment of the stone guest. Thus, of the thirteen European versions where the locale is a church, or a road to a church, eleven are Spanish; out of the six versions where the young man s churchgoing is only for the secular purpose of looking at the ladies, five are Spanish; and of the four versions in which the dead man is a statue, three are Spanish (the fourth is Portuguese).17 Tirso, however, departs from the characteristic Spanish pattern of the folk tale in one very significant respect. In the Double Invitation group as a whole, death is the commonest punishment — it occurs in forty-six of the eighty-one tales; but twelve of the fifteen Spanish versions allow the protagonist to save himself from eternal damnation by some religious observance such as confessing or obeying the instruction of the priest.18 Tirso's Don Juan is not saved. There are some grounds for believing that Tirso knew one of the early Latin versions of the tale, and that the general story in its Spanish form was familiar both to him and to many of his audience. However, Tirso gave the story a quite new resonance. To the stock elements of the young gallant, the church setting, and the stone statue, he added a fullness, complexity, and dramatic power not found anywhere in the folk versions; in making the statue a repre17 Dorothy Epplen MacKay, The Double Invitation in the Legend of Don Juan (Stan-

ford, 1943), pp. 102-3, 105. 18 MacKay, The Double Invitation, pp. 78, 107-10. 113


sentation of the wronged father, and the offending young gallant the man who first killed him and then gratuitously insulted him, Tirso gave the tale a powerful inner moral logic. Tirso and his audience would probably have placed the scenes with the stone guest in a general perspective of meanings that mingled pagan and Christian attitudes toward the dead. "Man," Miguel de Unamuno has written, is distinctively the animal "whose strange custom it is to store up . . . and guard its dead."19 In human societies the welfare of the living is widely thought to be in the hands of their dead ancestors; and with this belief goes a fear that the ghosts of the dead may rise from the grave to harm the living who have offended them. Against such occurrences, the giving of food is the commonest act of propitiation; many peoples all over the world attempt to ensure their own welfare by offering food and drink to the dead, either at the burial ceremony, or on an anniversary or some other ritual occasion. This practice was institutionalized by the Christian church in All Souls' Day, on November 2, which commemorates the souls of the baptized and faithful who are in purgatory; three masses are said, including the famous Dies Irae.20 In many Catholic countries today All Souls' Day, together with All Saints' Day, which immediately precedes it, is still the main religious celebration of the continuity of the family, in which the living members remember their dead. The old custom of bringing food and drink to sustain the souls of the dead when they return to earth still continues; and in sixteenth-century Spain the practice of bringing this food and drink into the church itself was apparently sufficiently widespread to have been prohibited in 1541.21 These beliefs and customs make it easier to understand why Don Juan's invitation to the statue, which after all symbolizes the Commander's body buried beneath it, was so serious an offense; it would have been seen by the audience as a sacrilegious defiance not only of the church, but of the family as well, and of the dead. Furthermore, 19 Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life (New York, 1954), pp. 20, 41. 20 MacKay, The Double Invitation, p. 114. All Souls' Day is mentioned as the occasion of one of the Spanish versions of the folk tale. 21 Wade, ed., El Burlador, p. 40. 114

El Burlador and Don Juan the statue's return, and its treatment of Don Juan, would have supported the audience's belief in the power of the dead; the long hand of the ancestor is seen reaching mysteriously from the grave to mete out justice to the unworthy living. The statue of the Commander, it is true, does not speak or act primarily as the avenger of family honor, although Don Juan seems to assume that this is its intention. Tirso presents it mainly as the agent of God's righteous punishment. This is made clear in the song that the ghostly choir in the church sings: Let all those know who judge God's ways And treat his punishments with scorn There is no debt but that he pays, No date but it is bound to dawn, (p. 3io) The statue certainly sees itself as a divine agent: it feels authorized to refuse Don Juan's plea for a confessor, and to assert that the young man's fate "is God's justice" (p. 311). Tirso used the supernatural a good deal in his plays. In El Burlador it does much more than provide theatrical excitement; by bringing the reality of the world beyond the grave onto the stage, Tirso enacts the orthodox religious answer to the tan largo theme, and thereby validates the traditional argument, articulated in the play by Catalinon, that "Even the longest life is until death! / And there's a hell behind the gates of death" (p. 288). The only convincing refutation of the assumptions behind Don Juan's way of life is to make real and visible the idea that, behind the "little time" of human life, there is the "great time" of eternity, the sacred time in which gods, spirits, and all the undying traditions of human faith have their being, and in which the rewards of heaven and the punishments of hell are made real to the souls of the departed. The subject of mortality is rather uncongenial for those who, like myself, and Lord Chesterfield, make their main concern about death not "to be buried alive." 22 But the full force of El Burlador, as also 22 Lord Chesterfield to Mrs. Stanhope, at Paris, March 16, 1769, in Letters of Chesterfield, ed. Bonamy Dobree (London, 1932), 6.2880.


of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, depends upon an awed preoccupation with what death may bring; and this, in turn, depends on a context of belief in the literal existence of hell, and in its consignment of sinners to eternal and irredeemable torment. This may seem to us one of the less palatable features of the Christian orthodoxy; but the original audiences of Doctor Faustus and El Burlador would have seen the endless punishments of hellfire as an essential part both of moral order in this world and of that "great time" in which God and the souls of his creatures had their real being. Doctor Faustus tries to buy twenty-four years of the "little time" of earthly existence; and his fatal miscalculation is punished according to the characteristic emphasis of Lutheranism on the power of the devil: Satan is no joke. Don Juan thinks that he can safely break man's secular laws for the duration of his "little time" on earth; he suffers for all eternity when, in accordance with the doctrines of the Counter-Reformation, the stone guest gives a dramatic demonstration that God may not be mocked. AN INNER LIFE?

El Burlador de Sevilla combines many elements of popular entertainment and folk belief with a severely logical working out of some of humanity's most enduring moral conflicts. How aware Tirso was of them we do not know. The nature of the drama of the period certainly militated against Tirso's giving any very extended psychological analysis of his characters; and though his protagonist, Don Juan, is convincing and consistent, there is a great deal about him that we do not know. How, for example, did he get to be the man he has become? Has he any conscious purpose beyond his avowed one of being the most famous trickster ever? Is he as happy and carefree as he suggests when he tells Catalinon: "That day alone's unlucky, cursed and foul / When I run out of money; Other days, / All other days, are revelry and laughter" (p. 307)? We certainly never see Don Juan having second thoughts about how good is a good time. While there is little in the play to suggest that his career is one of "pure sensuality," as Oscar Mandel has 116

El Burlador and Don Juan suggested, 23 he is unthinkingly cheerful most of the time. There is certainly not the faintest indication that he feels any qualms of conscience for the sufferings he causes. When he says of the seduction of Dona Isabel, "Though I may be to blame, I'm well content" (p. 238), we believe him. Even the killing of the Commander does not provoke Don Juan's compunction. His usual "conquering insolence," to quote Camus, 24 vanishes at the appearance of the statue; but even here the change is caused by Don Juan's selfish fear at the armed majesty of death: we see no sign whatever of guilt or remorse. Don Juan's total imperviousness to the impact of his actions on other people, together with his total absence of self-doubt, certainly make him a human anomaly. How can someone like that actually exist? We can admire his happy assurance, and envy so unthinking a celebration of the life of egoistic impulse; but we also find it inconceivable that anybody should be so unproblematic to himself. It is, no doubt, one aspect of youth to be as imperturbably egocentric as Don Juan is when he complacently tells Catalinon that it is foolish to task him with his "own true nature" (p. 257); and even his uncle tends to see Don Juan's exploits as the ordinary excesses of his stage in life - he is "led astray by youth" (p. 238). But there is another side to the youthful self that, having before it so wide a spectrum of possible choices, finds it difficult to know what personal self it really is, or wants to be. In that respect, Tirso's Don Juan is too certain of himself to be wholly plausible; he seems never to have had any choice to make, any possibilities in his consciousness to be other than what he is; in that sense, to quote Camus again, morally "Don Juan has chosen to be nothing." 2 5 In ordinary life individual experience always has a dialectical component. Whether in the terms of modern psychology, or of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit, consciousness of the self, as opposed to that mere sentiment of one's own being that the child 23 Oscar Mandel, ed., The Theatre of Don Juan: A Collection of Plays and Views, 1630-1963 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1963), pp. 12, 14, 16. 24 Albert Camus, trans. Justin O'Brien, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York, 1955), p. 52. 25 Myth of Sisyphusy p. 54.


presumably shares with the animal, emerges out of the individual's relationships with others. In Hegel's terms, the self emerges when the individual's desires are no longer as simple as those for food, drink, or any other animal need, but have so deeply incorporated the reality of other persons into the self that it develops a need to be desired by those other persons.26 Tirso's Don Juan has apparently no such desire; as a burlador he needs the existence of other people only so that he can enjoy tricking them and relish his pleasure in their pain. More generally, he needs the laws and codes of behavior in the world outside only so that there is something significant for him to outwit. Apart from these external presences that give him something to assert himself against, Tirso's Don Juan is essentially autonomous. It seems unlikely that Tirso shared any such notions as these, or even any sense that the character of Don Juan is a problem. Neither Tirso himself, nor the dramatic forms within which he worked, were much concerned with the psychology of character as such. A. A. Parker has argued that, of the five principles of Spanish comedia, the first was "the primacy of action over character drawing," and the second "the primacy of theme over action."27 Tirso was creating not a psychological puzzle but a moral emblem. His play was to be based on the conventions of poetic justice. From this point of view, the story of Don Juan is a simple one. Tirso's Don Juan is not a comic rogue but an unredeemed villain; not a single good act or generous reflection can be laid to his charge. Tirso's aim was to force his audience to face corrective conclusions from the pitiless punishment God meted out to Don Juan's soul. Perhaps indeed Tirso genuinely had too little faith in the current rulers of the state and the church not to rely for hope on supernatural means. The secular world was impotent to uphold the moral law; its agents were too corrupt; but the Church and its God would occasionally remind men 26 G. W . F. Hegel, trans. A. V. Miller, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 1977), pp. 109-11.

27 A. A. Parker, The Approach to the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age (London, 1957), p. 27.

El Burlador and Don Juan of their duty. Tirso's view is consistent, no doubt, but it leaves little room for individualism, or the individual. Tirso is their enemy. And yet the success of the play largely depends on the ambiguous attitude of the secular world, which publicly condemns and yet secretly admires and even envies the successful amoral fornicator. Moreover, the inherent psychological interest of Don Juan as protagonist makes it fatally easy for an audience to subsume Tirso's stern morality into larger, and much more open, questions about the power of the human sexual drive, the nature of human aspiration, and the limits placed on the individual human ego in the interests of society.

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5. Renaissance Individualism and the Counter-Reformation

A NOTE ON INDIVIDUALISM

The terms individual and individuality derive from the Latin individuus, meaning "undivided" or "undividable." They came to English via medieval French and were apparently first used in the early seventeenth century. Under its definition of "individual" as "characteristic of a single human being," the Oxford English Dictionary quotes Francis Bacon: "As touching the Manners of learned men, it is a thing personall and individuall." 1 The first important discussion of the concepts involved in the terms individual and individuality occurs in the still classic study by Jacob Burckhardt Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien [The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy] (i860). 2 The second of six parts of that work, entitled "The Development of the Individual," focuses on the contrast between, on the one hand, the people of earlier societies and, on the other, an unprecedented flowering of the "free personality" in Renaissance Italy, particularly in Florence. Before the Renaissance, Burckhardt proposes, man was "conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation — only through some general category."3 It was in Italy that this "veil first melted into air. An objective treatment of the state and of all things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself, with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such." Burckhardt s support1 The term "individualism" came to England much later - the Oxford English Dictionary records its first use in 1835 - and it will be considered in more detail in Chapter 9. 2 Jacob Burckhardt, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Phaidon Press, Vienna and London, 1937). 3 Burckhardt, Civilization, p. 70. I2O

Individualism and the Counter-Reformation ing arguments here are certainly open to objection in the light of later scholarship, but his theory is amply fleshed out in the book as a whole. He suggests that in Italy both the despotic states and the republics created a personal desire for eminence across a wide range of aesthetic and scholarly subject areas, and also fostered a new emphasis on the values of private life. Leon Battista Alberti, for instance, was a great architect, a musician, a mathematician, and an inventor; he wrote Latin novels and poems - to say nothing of a funeral oration on his dog - and a Tratto del governo della famiglia. Many others — Dante, Petrarch, Pietro Aretino, Leonardo da Vinci — equally aspired to the glory of educating the self to become a universal man proficient in all the arts and sciences.4 These men were all, of course, aristocratic in their social background; but few, if any, societies have produced so many who lived up to their belief that self-perfection was the supreme human aim, and who succeeded in achieving it to so large a degree. The period also saw a strong vein of satirical attitudes, of comic and scandalous jesting. Such writers as Pulci, Boiardo, and especially Pietro Aretino clearly acquired the personal freedom to say whatever they wanted to, however scurrilous and negative that might be. 5 The same individualist tendency can be seen in great paintings of the period, and in increased admiration for great men of the past and present, evidenced in the Renaissance's new reverence for the tombs of Virgil and Dante. 6 The modern phrase "Renaissance Man," which has become an ironic cliche, in fact celebrates a basic change in direction of Western civilization. FAUST, DON QUIXOTE, AND DON JUAN: THREE SIMILAR INDIVIDUALS? Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan are obviously very disparate characters; but they all embody the Oxford English Dictionary's first definition of individualism: "self-centered feeling or conduct as a 4 Burckhardt, Civilization, pp. 72—75. 5 Burckhardt, Civilization, pp. 81-88. 6 Burckhardt, Civilization, pp. 77—79. 121


principle . . . free and independent individual action or thought; egoism." All three of them have exorbitant egos; what all three of them decide to try to do is something no one else has done; it is entirely their own free choice; and they pursue their choice at any cost - in the cases of Faust and Don Juan it is at the cost not only of their lives, but of eternal damnation. At least two of them, Don Quixote and Don Juan, seek personal fame or glory; all three operate without any regard whatsoever to "race, people, party, family or corporation," to use Burckhardt's phrase. There had, of course, been ego-dominated men before: Socrates, or Julius Caesar, for example. But our three protagonists are incredibly single-minded; they concentrate all their psychological resources on one basic line of distinction, whether it is magic, chivalry, or sexual trickery; they are all ideological monomaniacs. Of course Don Quixote is not as indifferent to others as Faust, nor as monstrously predatory as Don Juan. But all three adopt the posture of ego contra mundum. Moreover, they live out their lives unaffected by, and hardly even noticing, the normative intermediaries between themselves and the existential social and intellectual realities around them. Let us look at their choices of a way of life. Significantly they are all three, by their own free wish, travellers. Previous traditions had made leaving home a punishment. Aristotle wrote in Politics that the man "who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god." 7 Among the Greeks and the Jews, banishment from the social group was regarded as a personal catastrophe. It is the curse of Cain, who found being a "fugitive and a vagabond . . . a punishment greater than I can bear."8 Against this perspective, Faust, as we have seen, travelled the whole wide world, and even to hell; the first act of Don Quixote's adventures is to leave home, and then let chance and Rocinante determine his path; while Don Juan travels to Naples and back, and then to various parts of Spain. Faust has no paternal 7 Aristotle, Politics, Book i, chapter 2. 8 Genesis, 4.12-14.

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home; Don Quixote has a home, but returning to it is a punishment and an admission of failure; while Don Juan has no home that we know about, and he is always restlessly seeking greener pastures. The three are more than dedicated travellers; they are to a great extent solitary nomads. Our protagonists are largely stripped of any family connection: either they have no recorded parents, siblings, wives or children, or they are alienated from other family members; and none undertakes a conventional marriage. The Faustbuch Faust was born of peasant stock, and educated by a kinsman, but we do not see them; later, when Faust asks Mephistopheles for a wife, he does not persist in his demand when substitutes are supplied or promised; in the Faust Books Faustus has a child by Helen of Troy, but Helen and the child disappear before his death; while Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is, if anything, an even more isolated figure. There is no mention of any father, mother, or wife for Don Quixote. He lives in what is presumably an old family house, and he has a niece, though they are by no means close; it is true that he hopes to win his Dulcinea, but after all she does not exist. His "real" life is on the road. Don Juan has a very influential father, and ruthlessly exploits him; but there is no sign that he considers anywhere as "home," and his whole approach to life is based on the assumption that he will not be tied to a single sexual partner. We may also note that, unlike other successful amorists, he apparently has not impregnated any of his women, and so has no offspring. Effectively, then, all three of our protagonists exist in a domestic vacuum. Nor, indeed, do any of them have close and trusting relationships with like-minded men or women. All of them form their only close tie with a male servant. This is a striking coincidence. The servantfoil is, of course, a very useful literary device, to the extent that it has long been a staple of the drama and the novel. It provides the hero with someone to talk to, and enables the presentation of an additional — and often quite different — perspective on events. But, in the present context, it also allows the hero to retain a strong degree of isolation from the wider world around him. The servants of Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan, and their relations to their masters, are very different from each other, varying 123


from the stereotype in different ways. Mephistopheles is a slightly ambiguous version of the magic helper in folk tales:9 ambiguous because we sometimes forget he is not human, and also because we can never be absolutely sure whether or not he is telling the truth in claiming that he is conveying definite instructions from Lucifer. For example, when Doctor Faustus's proposed marriage, or the answering of particular questions on such matters as "who made the world," are vetoed by Mephistopheles, we do not know whether they are really "against our kingdom," or, if they are, whether the decision is that of Mephistopheles alone.10 Still, we notice that out of the five conditions for signing away his soul, four concern Faustus s rights over Mephistopheles. Sancho Panza is a very different matter: beginning as a traditional comic bumpkin, he develops surprisingly as the story progresses. Unlike Marlowe or Tirso, Cervantes has created a servant's character, and a relationship with his master, which is three-dimensional, lifelike, developing, and subtle. Still, in all formal business Sancho Panza remains the respectful and devoted servant to the end. Catalinon is lively enough, but basically just the typical loyal, mistreated lackey, the gracioso who was a common feature of baroque culture, in literature as in life.11 He is used by Tirso for comic effect, but also as a representative spokesman for moral, social, and religious norms of the period and the play. If we ask why Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan make their chief friend a servant, a number of answers proffer themselves. There seems no evidence whatever to regard any of these three heroes as being sexually attracted to their servants as men. But Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan are all difficult and demanding people. For them, family or even friends might seem to threaten their selfregarding personalities; by contrast, a servant adds to their self9 Although Marlowe's Doctor Faustus has a manservant, Wagner, his only close bond is formed with Mephistopheles, whom he sees as serving his desires. 10 Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, 1604-1616: Parallel Texts, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford, 1950), 2.1.587-605, 5.1.694-99. 11 See Margaret Wilson, Spanish Drama of the Golden Age (Oxford, 1969), pp. 5 1 52. 124


importance. And then there is the practical matter of their continual travels: for that, they need someone who is ready to do all the innumerable difficult or boring tasks involved - and that someone needs to be both subordinate, and male. It will not have escaped anybody's attention that the three protagonists, and their servants, are all male. It is a striking fact that there is no female in the modern Western pantheon of myth: no Athena or Aphrodite, no Eve or Virgin Mary, no Beatrice or Joan of Arc. This suggests a degree of misogyny in modern myth-making which is in strong contrast to pre-Renaissance thought. If we seek to explain it, one important consideration is surely the way in which the Christian tradition developed through and beyond the Renaissance. The Trinity is all male, and so are the powers of hell; the exclusion of women is ultimately, no doubt, a relic of the curse of Eve. This brief treatment of the similarities betwen Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan has surely established one broad area of convergence: their similarities are analytically related to the concept of individualism. Further, many of these similarities would have been regarded by earlier societies as deprivations; they are essentially negative features; the three heroes are defined by their lacks. Marlowe, Cervantes, and Tirso would not, probably, have disagreed with this interpretation: the endings of all three of the stories, as they wrote them, have a punitive element; in this the writers were also, no doubt, reflecting some of the basic conflicts of their societies. We must, then, look at the anti-individualist notions of the period in which all three myths arose, which was the period of the CounterReformation. THE COUNTER-REFORMATION

Somewhat like the term "Renaissance," the term "CounterReformation" was invented long after the historical period to which it applies.12 The term attempts to give a degree of thematic unity 12 It is dated 1840 in the Oxford English Dictionary, Mrs. Austin's translation of Ranke's History of the Popes is cited. 125


to the intellectual history of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The relevant volume of The New Cambridge Modern History, for example, specifies the period of the CounterReformation as 1559—1610; many would put the final date later, perhaps at the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. The term "Counter-Reformation" denotes the countermovement to the Protestant Reformation of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, a countermovement which was led, with remarkable success, by a reawakened Roman Catholic church. The most obvious agency of the work of the CounterReformation was the Council of Trent, which, with two long intermissions, met for eighteen years, between 1545 and 1563. It was summoned by Pope Paul III in an attempt to reform the Catholic church, and to see whether some accommodation could still be made with the Protestants. Complicated religious and political conflicts made accommodation impossible to achieve, although later the Council, under Pope Pius IV, and with the strong leadership of his nephew, Carlo Borromeo, issued the Professio Fidei Tridentinum in 1564,13 a profession of faith which agreed to abolish or curtail many of the Roman Catholic practices which had been attacked by the Protestants. However, under the dominant pressure of the Jesuit movement, the main emphasis of the Council as a whole was on the restatement and clarification of the traditional doctrines of the church, accompanied by a modernizing and centralizing of the papal administration. In the event, it came to define both the faith and the actual practice of the Catholic church for the following three centuries. Under Paul IV, the power of the Inquisition was expanded, and the first Index of forbidden books was drawn up in 1559, to make allegedly heretical books forbidden reading for the faithful. Other administrative measures included many reforms for improving clerical education; bish13 The main authorities used in this section are: The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 3, The Counter-Reformation and Price Revolution 1559-1610, ed. R. B. Wernham (Cambridge, 1968, reprinted 1971); A. G. Dickens, The Counter Reformation (London, 1968); H. Outram Evennett, ed. John Bossy, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge, 1968). 126


ops were ordered to spend more of their time in their dioceses; and orthodoxy was spread by new breviaries, missals, and catechisms, all of which were prepared and issued by 1570. In the 1540s, the Council had expressed some sympathy for the view of Erasmus and his followers, who wanted to reduce the number of beliefs down to the minimum which were to be regarded as essential to any ordinary Christian's faith.14 As time went on, however, the emphasis in doctrinal matters became more severe and scholastic. The doctrine of transubstantiation, the belief in the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, was affirmed; and only the priest officiating at the Eucharist actually received communion. Two other notable doctrines differed from the Protestant belief: the view that marriage is a Christian sacrament was reaffirmed; and belief in the existence of purgatory was made a part of the Catholic faith.15 The positive achievements of the Council of Trent, both political and spiritual, should not be underestimated. The Protestant tide was stayed, notably in Poland and Bohemia; while in the Netherlands the Duke of Alva fought hard to keep the Roman Catholic faith in power. The kings of France and Spain were inclined to take the Erastian view of royalty's special powers in religious matters, and they were slow in adopting the Tridentine decisions. Nevertheless, the Erasmian tendencies of the Spanish church, and the power of the Protestants in France, were eventually conquered. These political successes led to an increase in the power and control of the Papacy; but at the same time a great number of Catholic churchmen and churchwomen brought an urgent faith to the fore. Among those leading the great revival of Catholic faith in western Europe were St. Philip Neri and St. Robert Bellarmine in Italy, Peter Canisius in Germany, St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross in Spain, and St. Francis de Sales and St. Vincent de Paul in France.16 On the other hand, wherever we look we also see an 14 Dickens, Counter Reformation, p. 132. 15 Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H. J. Shroeder (St. Louis, 1941), pp. 181-85, 246. 16 Dickens, Counter Reformation, pp. 135-41. 127


increase in authoritarian repression of heresy throughout Europe, by Protestants as well as Catholics; and this increase in the severity of religious dissension culminated in the disastrous Thirty Years' War of 1618 to 1648. The general intellectual climate - as opposed to the nature of specifically religious thought - of the period was very different from that of the heyday of the Renaissance in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The outlook of many writers, in particular, became less sanguine; their minds were skeptical, or disenchanted with the ideas of the Renaissance. This change in intellectual atmosphere is the subject of Hiram Haydn's still important book, The Counter-Renaissance.11 Haydn argues that the common themes of writings of the period include a degree of disappointment, often bitter, at the vanity of karning; a disbelief in the universal efficacy of general political, social or religious laws; and a marked pessimism about the actual condition of man, together with a metaphysical ache for some absolute belief. The main problem for the thinkers of the Counter-Renaissance was not that the positive ideology of the Renaissance was no longer believed to be valid; it was, rather, that those who continued to try to achieve its values ended up disappointed and perplexed. Marlowe and Cervantes certainly shared some of these disappointments, and convey a sense of hopelessness about man's condition which makes them figures of CounterRenaissance thought; while Tirso de Molina is a prime example of the operation of the spirit of the Counter-Reformation. Henry W. Sullivan has, indeed, devoted a whole book to the relationship between Tirso's thought and the Counter-Reformation.18 Sullivan's most specific example is doctrinal. Tirso, a friar of the Mercedarian order, and a man with considerable theological training, took a moderate view of the possibility of reconciling human freedom with a belief in the efficacy of divine grace. The issue of justification by faith alone had been raised by Luther, and the 17 New York, 1950. 18 Henry W. Sullivan, Tirso de Molina and the Drama of the Counter Reformation (Amsterdam, 1976). 128

Individualism and the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent had dealt with the matter at length. 19 Nevertheless, questions of interpretation remained acute. One particular controversy began when a Spanish Dominican friar, Domingo Banez, accused a Jesuit, Prudencio de Montemayor, of a heretical belief in the too easy terms by which divine grace could be made available to the believer.20 The debate soon involved others, and was finally sent to be resolved by the Pope; in 1607 Pop e Paul V made the ruling that both sides could continue to hold their own beliefs, but that they were both forbidden to accuse the other side of heresy. (Not surprisingly, this ruling failed to resolve the problem, which Jesuits and Dominicans still disagree about today.) Tirso, Sullivan argues, was probably a supporter of Banez, and his Mercedarian follower Francisco Zumel, whom Tirso later eulogized. 21 Tirso followed Zumel in allowing that a sinner who seems to have been "antecedently reproved," or predestined to damnation, can still be saved by God's will. This is a common theme in Tirso's plays, especially in El condenado por desconfiado [The man damned for lack of faith], where the wicked Enrico is eventually saved because of his faith in God, while the virtuous and deserving hermit Paula is damned for asking God for a sign that he is to be among the happy elect. Man's natural wish for certain knowledge of God's intentions for his future was specifically condemned by the Council of Trent. 22 Don Juan, of course, constitutes an opposite case: he has faith that in the end he will be saved by his belief in God; but he obviously fails in the good works category, so he cannot benefit from his belief in the sufficiency of faith — indeed, it can be said that he is damned for excessive reliance on that belief. There are many other ways in which we can see how Tirso concentrates his intention on the problem of the efficacy of faith versus 19 Canons and Decrees\ trans. Shroeder, pp. 2 9 - 4 6 . 20 Sullivan, Tirso de Molina, pp. 3 0 - 3 9 . 21 General History of the Order of Mercy (1639), ed. P. Penedo Rey, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1973), i.cclix, xxlxiii, 2.259-63. 22 Sullivan, Tirso de Molina, p. 38. Canon 26 says that "the just ought not for the good works done in God to expect and hope for an eternal reward . . . let him be anathema" {Canons and Decrees, trans. Shroeder, p. 45).

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good works to bring about damnation or salvation. For instance, Tirso is the only writer of the Spanish comedias who consigns at least three of his characters to eternal damnation in hell. 23 More broadly, we can conclude that Tirso is typical of the Counter-Reformation in the general way that his realistic and skeptical mind is overborne by strict theological considerations. Sullivan comments that Tirso "questioned," "faulted," and even "mocked" the higher ideals of the Renaissance, believing that free will existed but making Don Juan a most striking example of the casualties of choice.24 Cervantes not only belonged to an earlier generation, but also had a very different cast of mind. He grew up when Erasmian humanism was still a confident force within the Spanish church; and he may well have been influenced by his presumably Erasmian teacher, Juan Lopes de Hoyos, in his Madrid school, the Estudios de la Villa.25 Cervantes certainly sympathized with the humanist poets of Italy, and although his works show no particular interest in specific theological doctrines, he certainly in his later years acceded to the religious emphasis of his times. In 1609 he joined the Confraternity of Slaves of the Most Blessed Sacrament, a fashionable religious brotherhood under royal patronage,26 and in 1613 he became a member of the Third Order of St. Francis, at Alcala de Henares. It was in those final years that Cervantes wrote the second part of Don Quixote. The emphasis on the perfect recovery of the hero's sanity, and his dying in full conformity with the rites of the church and of his social obligations, may well disappoint the wishes of many modern individualist readers; but it certainly supplies an ending whose punitive force would make it acceptable to the spirit of the Counter-Reformation in Spain under Philip II and Philip III. There is a similar punitive emphasis, as already noted, in Faust's death. The Faust Books and Doctor Faustus are in full agreement with Luther's doctrine. Luther died in 1546, the year after the first meeting of the Council of Trent; his emphasis on the genuine power 23 24 25 26

Sullivan, Tirso de Molina, p. 67. Sullivan, Tirso de Molina, pp. 119, 172. William Byron, Cervantes: A Biography (New York, 1978), pp. 7 6 - 7 8 . Melveena McKendrick, Cervantes (Boston, 1980), pp. 261-62. 130


of the devil, and on the terrible reality of eternal damnation, was in conformity with the emphasis of the Council of Trent on the punishment of sin. Marlowe, atheist and revolutionary as he was in his personal beliefs, supported religious orthodoxy in Doctor Faustus. THE ALIENATION OF THE THREE AUTHORS Marlowe, Cervantes, and Tirso de Molina were clearly three very different individuals, and yet their lives share a remarkable number of common elements. Notably, none of them fully spoke out about the disgust with the life of their times which we sense in their works. This apparent orthodoxy was not so much, one feels, the result of a direct fear of censorship or the punishments of the Inquisition, influential as such considerations must have been; it was rather because all three writers hardly knew what ideological replacement for the conventional outlook was possible, or even conceivable. And yet they were all clearly alienated in some way from the society in which they lived. Let us look briefly at the alienating factors in their lives. Cervantes seems at first sight one of the mildest, most conciliatory, and equable-tempered of men, yet his life was ridden by conflict and misfortune: his prison experiences, affrays with the law, constant financial difficulties, and other misfortunes - including a stammer27 - were inextricably intertwined with the rest of his life. In 1569, when Cervantes was in his early 20s, he was involved in a fight. If he had been caught, the penalty would have involved exile, and the cutting off of his right hand.28 He escaped on this occasion, but this sign of good luck proved to be illusory. Two years later, his left hand was badly maimed at the great Spanish victory of Lepanto, 29 putting an abrupt end to his new career as a soldier. He fathered an illegitimate son in Naples;30 and in 1575 a ship which was carrying him from Naples back to Spain was captured by pri27 28 29 30

William Byron, Cervantes•, p. 52. McKendrick, Cervantes, pp. 3 6 - 4 0 . McKendrick, Cervantes, pp. 46—49. McKendrick, Cervantes, p. 52.

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vateers. Cervantes was imprisoned in Algiers for several years; and when he did get back to Spain he was jobless and penniless, and still had the costs of his release to pay off.31 It was 1587 before he got a post which seemed secure, as government commissary requisitioning supplies. 32 But this task involved many difficulties. When he inadvertently took some supplies which actually belonged to the Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral at Seville, he was excommunicated. Various charges were brought against him, which had to be fought. 33 Cervantes could not always get his pay, and was reduced to borrowing from friends. 34 Finally, a reorganization of his department in 1594 meant that he lost his job. He eventually found another position, as collector of taxes in Andalucia; but more financial irregularities there - not, apparently, involving any criminality on Cervantes *s part — led to his being imprisoned in 1597. He was only released in order to go to Malaga to find legal evidence for another government case. 35 He had been writing intermittently for many years: plays, poems, and a prose romance, the Galatea?6 By now he was engaged on Don Quixote. Unlike his earlier work, Don Quixote was a great success; but his urgent need for money forced him to sell the copyright for a small lump sum, so the financial reward went to others. In 1605, questions were raised about the moral behavior of Cervantes and his family, and they were briefly imprisoned. Once again Cervantes was exposed to humiliation. 37 But it was for the last time. In his remaining ten or so years Cervantes finally found some patrons, and was able to live in comfort, if not luxury. Cervantes's life, then, was in three parts: soldier, government official, and writer. He was justifiably proud of his military record, but it left him a cripple; his attempt to make a career in govern31 32 33 34 35 36 37

McKendrick, Cervantes, pp. 90, 94. McKendrick, Cervantes, pp. 112-17. McKendrick, Cervantes, pp. 123-25, 127. Byron, Cervantes, p. 365. McKendrick, Cervantes, pp. 173-77. Byron, Cervantes, pp. 172-83. Byron, Cervantes, pp. 4 4 7 - 5 3 . 132

Individualism and the Counter-Reformation ment service lasted most of his life, but he was conspicuously unsuccessful; as a writer he never gained the financial reward, or indeed the honorable recognition, he deserved. As his biographer McKendrick puts it, he "never became an accepted member of the literary establishment, remaining always on the fringe of fashionable literary activity." 38 Like Cervantes, Christopher Marlowe spent time in government employment; but Marlowe's dealings with the government of Elizabeth I remain obscure. There are two significant pieces of extant evidence. The first occurs when the university authorities at Cambridge were making difficulties about granting his Master's degree: Marlowe had been at Rheims, which had a Roman Catholic English seminary, and so he was suspected of Roman Catholic sympathies. The Privy Council intervened on Marlowe's behalf, stating that "in all his accions he had behaved him selfe orderlie and discreetlie whereby he had done her Majestie good service, and deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealinge." Marlowe should be given the degree, "Because it was not her Majesties pleasure that anie one emploied as he had been in matters touching the benefitt of his Countrie should be defamed by those that are ignorant in th'affaires he went about." 39 Marlowe, then — at the age of twenty-three — had already been on some kind of confidential mission for the government. The other piece of evidence about Marlowe's connection with the government is the more general one of the company he kept. He is known to have associated with powerful aristocrats, including Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Thomas Walsingham (a young relative of the former Secretary of State); while the people who supped with Marlowe before his violent death included at least one government spy.40 Marlowe wrote successful plays, but he was not also an actor, and therefore the stage could not offer him a steady income. Secret 38 McKendrick, Cervantes, p. 250. 39 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. John D. Jump (London, 1962), pp. xvii-xviii. 40 Frederick S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and Critical Study (Oxford, 1940), pp. 103, 112-14, 165—83.

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government service was a potentially lucrative form of employment, which might well be attractive to someone of his individualist and reckless temperament. At the same time, as has already been noted, Marlowe had his troubles with the law. In 1589 he was concerned in a sword-fight, when his friend Thomas Watson killed a man; Watson was acquitted of murder, but in the course of the investigation Marlowe was arrested and spent nearly two weeks in Newgate gaol;41 three years later & legal warrant was taken out against him, binding him to keep the peace, and to appear at the next general session of the year;42 and just before his death Marlowe had been ordered to appear before the Privy Council in the course of another legal case.43 Details of the life of Gabriel Tellez, or Tirso de Molina, are even more difficult to ascertain. There is no satisfactory biography, and the information about him provided by the greatest of Tirso scholars, Blanca de Los Rios, is sometimes unreliable or injudicious. The most reliable account of Tirso's life is that of Manuel Penedo Rey, in the introduction to his 1973-74 edition of Tellez's history of the Mercedarians; its main findings are conveniently available in English in Margaret Wilson's study of Tirso.44 And it is clear from these accounts that Tirso too — while not being in the pay of the government — clashed with the law. Tirso was probably born in 1580 or 1581, and first comes to notice in 1600 as a monk of the long-established Mercedarian Order in Madrid. There are records of his studies from 1601 to 1607 at various places, especially at Toledo, where he was apparently still a student in 1614.45 In 1615 came Tellez's main recorded brush with the law. On March 25, the important Junta for the Reformation of Manners denounced "Master Tellez, also called Tirso, who writes plays." There had, the Junta reported, 41 42 43 44 45

Boas, Marlowe, pp. 101-4. Boas, Marlowe, p. 236. Boas, Marlowe, p. 243. Margaret Wilson, Tirso de Molina (Boston, 1977), p. 21. Wilson, Tirso, pp. 21—22.

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Individualism and the Counter-Reformation been talk of the scandal [concerning] a monk of the Mercedarians . . . whose plays are profane, pernicious and setting a bad example. It being understood that the case is notorious, it has been recommended that his Majesty ask his confessor to take the matter up with Papal nuncio that he [Tirso] be sent immediately to a remote house of his religious order and be excommunicated, latae sententiae [for the duration of his sentence], so that he ceases to produce plays for the theatre, or any kind of profane verses.46 The Junta was under the control of the king's favorite, the Count of Olivares, whose hostility to Tirso probably had as one motive Tirso's attacks on Philip IV.47 Tirso was probably singled out, rather than Lope de Vega, whose plays were open to similar moral objections, because Lope was better established; moreover, Olivares was a determined enemy of the Mercedarians.48 The Mercedarians, in any case, seem to have rallied round the accused member of their Order; and though he may have suffered somewhat, we know that he was neither excommunicated, nor even sent to a particularly remote convent. Nor did he completely stop writing poems and plays, at least until 1630, when he published a long poem expressing his contrition and affirming his religious devotion.49 By this time Tellez had risen to a senior position in the Order.50 However, even his nomination as chronicler of the Order in 1632 did not place him beyond controversy. In 1640 there was an order forbidding plays and other secular works to be kept in Mercedarian convents; later in that year Tellez was arrested and exiled to the convent of Cuenca. The official reason was that he had retained profane books in his library, contrary to the regulations of the order;51 but an edict of the same period forbade any Mercedarian to write satires against the 46 Wilson, Tirso, pp. 25-27. See also Ruth Lee Kennedy, Studies in Tirso I: The Dramatist and his Competitors, 1620-26 (Chapel Hill, 1974), p. 85, and pp. 86— 115 for a detailed discussion of the episode. 47 Kennedy, Tirso, p. 61. 48 Kennedy, Tirso, p. 24. 49 Wilson, Tirso, p. 27; Penedo, General History, Appendix III, 2.647-51. 50 Wilson, Tirso, p. 27. 51 Wilson, Tirso, pp. 2 8 - 2 9 .

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government, so Tellez may also have been paying the penalty again for his opposition to Philip IV and Olivares. This exile probably did not last long; but in 1642 the new general of the Mercedarians rejected Tellez s unobjectionable history of the Order, and banished him to another remote location. Only in 1645 — three years before his death — did Tellez become Commander of an important Mercedarian convent and out of reach of further punishment. These religious and political setbacks were not the only kinds of reverse he suffered. He spent a good deal of time trying to advance his career in literature, but he had a reckless way of attacking those he thought were inferior writers, and ran into difficulties trying to get his collected plays published. 32 He later attempted, despite his "anti-establishment" position, to get various literary positions at the court, such as the king's first secretary or royal chronicler; none of these attempts was successful.53 Like Marlowe, then, Tirso's combative temperament got him into trouble: he too was fearless (or reckless) in his talk, and — if his plays are any guide - fascinated with the seamy side of life. Despite his fairly successful career as a cleric, it seems likely that Tirso, like Marlowe, was a man divided. Tirso's combative nature invites comparison with Marlowe, but his career bears more resemblance to that of Cervantes. Cervantes was more or less continuously in government service; Tirso devoted his chief career to a rather similar bureaucratic occupation. At this time a large proportion of the Spanish population were professional members, in one or another sense, of the church — it was a recognized way of life, and did not require any great religious vocation — and so Tirso may well be thought to have made a career similar to that which Cervantes sought. 54 52 Kennedy, Tirsoy p. 353. 53 Kennedy, Tirso, pp. 146—47. 54 The cases of Tirso and Cervantes were not unique in the Spain of the golden age. Quevedo, Aleman, Lope de Vega, and Calderon all accepted the social and religious order without substantial demur; and yet their works also contained substantially skeptical challenges to ideological orthodoxy. There is a sense in

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Individualism and the Counter-Reformation All three men, then, had in common, not only a dual career as writers and officials of their governments, but also conflict with the law, including periods of imprisonment. We cannot but wonder whether these experiences conditioned their confirmation of the strong punitive tendencies of the Counter-Reformation, exemplified so starkly in the death and damnation of Don Juan, the orthodox Christian death of Don Quixote, and the terrible fate of Doctor Faustus. The final emblematic punishment of all three protagonists can be seen as the unpalatable lesson which the Counter-Reformation attempted to teach to the individualism of the Renaissance. It is at least undeniable that Tirso, Cervantes, and Marlowe all experienced hardship and difficulty; that they were all solitary men, and they all knew alienation of various kinds; and that they all produced, in their main work, a hero who was an emblem of an individualism which fails. which a "personal absolutism," as Americo Castro calls it, was seen as a desirable doctrine. But it was dangerous to affirm it openly.

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Part II From Puritan Ethic to Romantic Apotheosis

6. Robinson Crusoe

The novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe perhaps contains the most widely familiar of our four myths. But since the idea of a man stuck all alone on a desert island for a long time may be all that can be assumed to remain in the reader's memory of the story, I shall rehearse its bare bones here. THE STORY Robinson Crusoe's father is a successful German merchant called Kreutznaer, who settled in Hull and later in York. The hero of the novel is Kreutznaer's third son; his surname is oddly corrupted to Crusoe, and he is called Robinson after his mother's maiden name. Even as a youth, Crusoe feels he has to go to sea. "There seemed," he writes, "something fatal in that propension of nature tending directly to the life of misery which was to befal me."1 Crusoe's father argues, with eloquence and deep conviction, that his son's "meer wandering inclination" will certainly lead to disaster. The "upper station of low life" is assuredly "the best state in the world" (p. 28), and if Robinson "goes abroad he will be the miserablest wretch that was ever born" (p. 30). This deadlock between father and son is broken when Crusoe, aged about nineteen, commits what he later describes as his "original sin" (p. 198) and ships with a friend at Hull. It is September 1, 1651. Soon a storm arises, and Crusoe begins to reflect that he is being "justly . . . overtaken by the judgment of Heaven for my wicked leaving my father's house, and abandoning my duty" (p. 31). He decides that if he survives he will, like a true repenting prodigal, go 1 I quote from the slightly modernized Penguin edition, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, 1985),

p. 27, cited hereafter in the text by page number. 141

Frontispiece to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (London, 1719).

Robinson Crusoe "directly home to my father." But the storm subsides, and in a night's drunkenness Crusoe "drowned all my repentance" (p. 32). Later in the voyage a worse storm blows up; once again Crusoe's mind is full of horror; the ship founders, but all on board are saved. Still, despite the "loud calls from my reason and my more composed judgment to go home" Crusoe encounters a "secret overruling decree that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction" (p. 37). Once in London, Crusoe boards a ship bound for Africa. It turns out to be a satisfactory venture — he makes £300 on an investment of £40 - so he tries again. This time, however, he is captured by Turkish pirates and taken as a prisoner to the Moroccan port of Sallee. After two years he escapes with a young Moor, Xury, and is finally picked up by a Portuguese ship, which takes him to Brazil. There Crusoe sells what little he has, and buys land to grow sugar and tobacco. He is, however, dissatisfied to reflect that he has, even now, barely achieved the "middle station" that his father had praised; and he is so lonely that he has become used to saying that he "lived just like a man cast away upon some desolate island" (P. 56). After about four years of hard work Crusoe becomes more prosperous; but then he sees an opportunity of more rapid gain, and with excitement too; he volunteers to take a ship to Africa to collect slaves for himself and the other plantation owners. There is a storm, the ship is wrecked, and Crusoe is washed up on an island, the only survivor. This introductory section accounts for only thirty-eight pages of the 283 in the novel; its main emphasis is on Crusoe's "rambling" tendencies, and how he suffers for his sins against his father and his God. On the island, Crusoe is transported with joy at having been saved, but he is exhausted, forlorn, bereft of everything, and he runs "about like a madman" (p. 66). Next morning, he has the happiness to observe that his ship has been lifted closer to shore by the winds. He swims out to the wreck, builds a raft from spars, loads it with provisions, chests, tools, and firearms, and manages to get it ashore. That night, he sleeps in a temporary hut made of the chests and 143

Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis

boards from the ship. Several days are spent making a total of twelve immensely valuable trips to the ship before it is blown away by the wind. Crusoe then moves to a higher and drier position, protected by rising ground; there he settles in, makes a fence, enlarges a small cave behind, and learns to keep his possessions in an orderly fashion. He keeps a record of time by cutting notches in a post, with longer notches for Sundays and the first day of the month, and begins to keep a journal. He improves his domestic arrangements: makes a chair, a table, a wooden shovel, and even a string contraption for turning a grindstone. He lives on fish, and later a turtle and its eggs, the biscuit from the ship, and goats and pigeons which he shoots. Before long, more misfortunes occur: notably, an earthquake, and a bad fever. Crusoe becomes terrified of death, and, he tells us, "the tears burst out of my eyes" when he remembers his neglect of his father's warning (p. 105). But once again he recovers. He explores more of the island, and discovers a beautiful valley rich in grapes, melons, lemons, and limes; there he builds himself another little habitation, which he calls his "bower." Gradually he learns more domestic tasks: to bake bread, and to make simple pottery, which he trains himself to fire. He makes the famous umbrella out of skins (it can retract, though we are not told how). He even builds a boat out of a great cedar trunk, but it is too heavy to get to the sea. On one expedition Crusoe discovers that land is visible, a long way away. Having learned the folly of trying to build a large boat, he constructs a little canoe or "periagua," not big enough to take him to the mainland, but enough to attempt a circuit of the island, braving the dangerously strong currents. Crusoe is delighted to find he can make a clay pipe; and he gives us a complacent summary of his domestic arrangements during this stage of his stay on the island. In his fifteenth year there, however, the situation changes. Crusoe sees "the print of a mans naked foot on the shore" (p. 162). He is "terrify'd to the last degree," and passes a sleepless night. He further increases the strength of his defenses, takes much more care when going beyond these boundaries, and, thinking much on the meaning of the footprint, he loses his complete confidence in God's 144

Robinson Crusoe sustaining presence. A few years later he receives another shock: he sees the "shore spread with skulls, hands, feet, and other bones of humane bodies" (p. 172). Again he retreats "within my own circle" (p. 173); he goes out heavily armed, but does not use his musket for food, in case the noise of the report attracts attention; he is even afraid of making the sound of banging a nail (p. 182). After another couple of years Crusoe sees five canoes of cannibals come ashore, bringing with them two victims for slaughter; and he helps one of the victims to escape. It is the first human voice he has heard for "above twenty five years" (p. 207). Friday — the name given to him by Crusoe, whose servant he becomes — is a "comely handsome fellow, perfectly well made." Crusoe has to teach him, to his bewildered discomfort, to wear trousers; but in this and all other respects Friday is a wonderful pupil. It transpires that Friday knows of white men living with Friday's own tribe on the mainland. Crusoe decides that he and his servant will make a large enough boat with masts and sails, to go to the mainland themselves. Before they can attempt their escape, however, six boatloads of intruders land on the island; in a masterly military operation Crusoe and Friday kill most of them. One of the survivors is a Spaniard, and another is Friday's father. Now the plan of escape is deferred, to allow Crusoe time to grow sufficient supplies: barley, rice, raisins, and so on. But, soon after, a large European ship arrives, sending men and prisoners ashore. Crusoe kills or captures the men, and rescues the prisoners; for a time, he even captures the ship, thanks to a mutiny on board. After many complicated arrangements, with Crusoe making his own terms — including a free passage — Crusoe (in lovely new clothes), Friday, and their goods set out for England. Crusoe arrives on June 11, 1687, "having been thirty and five years absent" (p. 274). The remainder of the novel, some twenty-five pages of the modern text, concerns Crusoe's finding out that none of his family is left but two sisters and "two children of one of his brothers" (p. 274). Then Crusoe goes to Lisbon to hear that his plantation and his other financial affairs are in very good shape. He is rich. He marries, and has two sons and a daughter (p. 298). But his wife dies, and he gets 145


ready to go on another voyage. The novel ends with Crusoe promising a further account of his return to the island and more "surprising adventures."2 DEFOE AND ROBINSON CRUSOE

The first volume's title was very long, as the custom then was: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years all alone in an uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque [Orinoco}; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself, With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver}d by Pirates. Written by himself It appeared in April,

1719. But Defoe was as good as his word in promising a speedy sequel. As early as August of that year the first volume was succeeded by The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Being the Second

and Last Part of his Life. Defoe, one might have thought, had now finished with Crusoe; but this was not the case. In August 1720 there appeared Serious Reflections during the Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World?

The titles are not altogether accurate descriptions. For instance, the "Pirates" who saved Crusoe were actually mutineers, who had merely planned to become pirates, until the rest of the crew, assisted by Crusoe, took them over. Nor did Defoe pay any attention to the fact that the "Life" which was promised in the first volume had a "Life" of further surprises in the second. The three volumes, however, have hardly ever been considered as a trilogy; the second volume is on the same lines of narrative as the first, but without the island solitude it is much less interesting; while the third volume, though it has fascinating passages, is a miscellaneous farrago of 2 It is worth mentioning here two of the innumerable works on Defoe. A generally authentic text of Robinson Crusoe, together with much criticism, is available in the Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York, 1975). There is an excellent study of Robinson Crusoe by Pat Rogers (London, 1979). 3 For these two volumes I quote from the edition of George A. Aitken (1902, 1899), cited hereafter in the text by volume and page number.

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Robinson Crusoe materials which has no narrative line, and which very soon drops the pretense of being written or experienced by Crusoe. The truth seems to be that Defoe, as he finished the first volume, and knowing more Crusoe adventures would sell, thought of a second part; and then calculated that the odd scraps of writing from his desk could be turned to profit if they were attributed to Crusoe in a third. These were the days before authors received royalty payments, that is, a percentage on every copy sold; they earned money from their writing by selling the copyright outright to the bookseller, as publishers were then usually called. Defoe was given a lump sum, probably £50 or so per volume, possibly with small bonus payments for good sales or in the event of a further edition. Even that, however, was worth Defoe's while. He was not a Grub-Street hack writer; but he did write for money; and he had already written a great deal. Some 548 separate volumes are listed in John Robert Moore's bibliography of Defoe's work; the first volume of Robinson Crusoe is number 412. 4 It had a very considerable success — some eight editions in Defoe's lifetime, plus five pirated editions and a serial version in the Original London Post.5 There were several reprints of the second volume, and rather fewer of the third. Defoe was the son of a tallow chandler, James Foe - the honorific "De-" was added by Daniel himself in the 1690s.6 The family was dissenting, of the Presbyterian persuasion. Daniel was born in 1660 and after some formal schooling began his working life in trade as a hose factor, a middleman between the manufacturers and the shops, dealing in various items of domestic clothing, not merely socks. He married well; his wife brought him the considerable dowry of £3700, and bore him seven children. When William III became king of England in 1689, Defoe, an enthusiastic supporter, got various government jobs, and began a writing career, mainly as a poet. However, he kept on his business enterprises and, having 4 John Robert Moore, A Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (1948; Hamden, CN, 1971). 5 H. C. Hutchins, Robinson Crusoe and Its Printing, 1719-31 (New York, 1925). 6 The most readable biography of Defoe is still James Sutherland, Defoe (1937, 1950).

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis speculated too freely in various projects — including raising civet cats for perfume - went bankrupt in 1692 for the impressively large sum of £17,000. He spent some time in the Fleet prison, but made determined, and largely successful, efforts to repay his creditors. Unfortunately for Defoe, King William died in 1702. His successor, Queen Anne, supported the High Church party, and talked about strengthening the already harsh laws against dissenters. This led Defoe to publish a vigorous ironic pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. The administration disliked it, and Defoe was put in the stocks for his pains. Soon he went bankrupt again, and was imprisoned for a second time. He was released by the help of Robert Harley, a Tory minister who knew he could use a man of Defoe's skills as writer, journalist, and observer of political life. Defoe became a kind of secret government agent. He reported confidentially to the minister, and carried out important political projects as a journalist; he wrote The Review\ a thrice-weekly journal of comment, entirely himself from 1704 to 1713. After the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Defoe continued to write copiously - journalism on political and religious affairs, as well as such didactic works as The Family Instructor (1715). Robinson Crusoe was only one among sixteen publications for the year 1719. Defoe wrote several other more-or-less fictional prose narratives, including Memoirs of a Cavalier and Captain Singleton in 1720, Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, and Colonel Jack in 1721, and The Fortunate Mistress; or, Roxana in 1724. But those five years — 1719-24 - were all that he devoted to fiction. He then turned mainly to long serious works such as The Complete English Tradesman (1725, 1727), The Political History of the Devil (1726), and A Plan of the English Commerce (1728). He died on April 24, 1731. A few obituaries were published; one identified him as a leader among the Dunces that Pope had attacked in his famous poem; another acknowledged his command of business affairs; but his novels, including Robinson Crusoe, were not mentioned. This must seem odd to us, especially since Defoe was a fairly well-known figure. One reason is that most of his works, including the novels, were published anonymously; another is that Defoe himself proba148

Robinson Crusoe bly did not think that Robinson Crusoe was of any special importance (although the first edition bore his portrait). We still do not know how, in detail, Defoe regarded this novel, which was to become his most famous work; there are however at least two useful clues. The first is his repeated insistence that the work should be regarded as historically true; that it was not a work of fiction. Thus in the preface to the Farther Adventures Defoe indignantly rejects those who "pretend, that the Author has supply'd the Story out of his Invention"; such a charge, he writes, is the same as "Robbing on the highway, or breaking open a house" (II, viii). Defoe returns to this theme in the preface to the Serious Reflections, attacking those who say that "all the story is feigned, that the names are borrowed, and that it is all a romance . . . formed and embellished by invention to impose upon the world" (III, ix). Robinson Crusoe (who is supposed to have written the preface) himself affirms that this "Objection is an invention scandalous in design, and false in fact; and [1} do affirm, that the story, though allegorical, is also historical." Defoe was an experienced controversialist, and long skilled in waxing defiant by answering charges somewhat different from those that had actually been made. Crusoe claims "that there is a Man alive, and well known too, the actions of whose life are the just Subject of these volumes, and to whom all or most part of the story most directly alludes; this may be depended upon for truth, and to this I set my name" (III, x). These remarks seem to employ a crazy logic. What is the value of setting an invented name to verify the literal truth of an invented story? And what is the point of asserting that various parts of the tale - the parrot, Man Friday, and so on - are "all litterally true" (III, xi), when the writer also concedes the important qualification that every "Circumstance" in the imaginary story has its just allusion to "a real event." His "state of forced confinement," he asserts, "is represented by a confined retreat in an island"; for, as the writer continues his apologia for the allegorical method, "it is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent any thing that really exists, by that which exists not" (III, xii). Does the island, then, "exist not"? Defoe certainly muddies counsel; 149


but we are entitled to assume that there is some truth in Crusoe's assertion that there is a "Man alive, and well known too"; the man is Defoe himself, and he is in some sense the subject of Robinson Crusoe.1

The second important clue to Defoe's thought is offered by the first chapter of the Serious Reflections. This is entitled "Of solitude," and although, again, it is supposed to have been written by Crusoe, its emphatic eloquence conveys an overpowering sense of the reality of its feeling to Defoe himself. This would differentiate Robinson Crusoe from our earlier three myths; for it means that, however infuriatingly difficult it is to interpret with abolute certainty, we have some reason to believe that Defoe thought of his work both as a representation of his personal experiences of life, and at the same time as a text with a larger symbolic meaning. "Of solitude" begins on a personal note: "Sometimes," Crusoe writes, he has wondered how his solitary life on the island "could be supported"; but he then reflects: "it seems to me that life in general is, or ought to be, but one universal act of solitude" (HI, 2). He points out that solitude is not "afflicting, while a man has the voice of his soul to speak to God, and to himself" (III, 3); and he goes on to affirm that "I enjoy much more solitude in the middle of the greatest collection of mankind in the world, I mean, at London, while I am writing this, than ever I could say that I enjoy'd in eight and twenty years confinement to a desolate island" (III, 4). Defoe may be seen here as endorsing the Puritan quest for the "retired soul"; but much of this essay is not specifically spiritual. Crusoe also speaks of solitude as an expression of the individualism which is at the center of his psychology. "Everything," he writes, "revolves in our minds by innumerable circular motions all centring in ourselves. We judge of prosperity and of affliction, joy and sorrow, poverty, riches, and all the various scenes of life: I say, we judge 7 Many of Defoe's contemporaries would have been aware of another "Man, and well known too," whose adventures, at the very least, provided source material for Robinson Crusoe. Alexander Selkirk was a Scottish sailor, rescued in 1709 after living for four years on an uninhabited island, whose story was widely circulated. But Defoe is certainly not alluding to him here. 150

Robinson Crusoe of them by our selves . . . our dear self is, in one respect, the end of living" (III, 2). This assertion of a necessary solipsism in the human condition continues: What are the sorrows of other men to us, and what their joy? Something we may be touch'd indeed with, by the power of sympathy, and a secret turn of the affections; but all the solid reflection is directed to ourselves . . . we love, we hate, we covet, we enjoy, all in privacy and solitude: All that we communicate of those things to any other, is but for their assistance in the pursuit of our desires; the end is at home; the enjoyment, the contemplation, is all solitude and retirement; it is for ourselves we enjoy, and for ourselves we suffer. (Ill, 2—3) Defoe's language, we notice, combines various different kinds of motive, as in "we covet, we enjoy," and in "it is for ourselves we enjoy." It will therefore be useful here to consider solitude in economic, in religious, and in moral terms, at greater length. ECONOMIC INDIVIDUALISM The myth of Robinson Crusoe is generally agreed to be almost entirely based on what happens on the island, which takes up two-thirds of the first volume. The story shows how an ordinary man, quite alone, is able to subdue nature to his own material purposes, and eventually to triumph over his physical environment. In the context of Crusoe's life on the island, rational ecological and economic labor can be seen as the moral premise which underlies his character. When Crusoe is first cast ashore he is tired and miserable, but his first act is "to see if I could find any fresh water to drink, which I did to my great joy" (p. 66); he cuts himself a short stick "for my defence"; and that night he sleeps up a tree. Next day he realizes that there is no immediate danger, and so he sleeps on the ground, surrounded by the chests and wooden boards that he has begun collecting from the wreck. On the third night he sleeps in a tent, again surrounded by his supplies. Later, when the wreck has been blown away by the storm, there is more time to work on his abode. He finds the cave, and fortifies it with a half-circle of two rows of stakes. Later still, he elaborates his accommodation by excavating

Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis safe and dry room for storage. Crusoe's enthusiasm for home-making seems limitless; 8 he is continually improving his cave; and he does the same with two other residences: the country estate or "bower," where he keeps his goats, and the vast cave in a wood, which is so hidden away that his goods will be safe there if any enemies should seek him. This progression exemplifies the ecological development of history. Crusoe begins with a casual accommodation of opportunity; he proceeds to a more organized use of caves and walled defenses; and he finally arrives at the notions of the main house, the country retreat, and the specialized storage area. The same stages of human history are exemplified in Crusoe's arrangements for food, tools, and furniture. Crusoe begins as a collector, a hunter, and a fisherman; but he soon turns to pastoral, and later to agricultural, activities. He domesticates wild goats, begins to milk them, and eventually to make butter and cheese. Then he provides himself with a steady supply of cereals. These improvements involve the making of tools, storage vessels, implements, and furniture. Soon he has assembled the most ample stocks of daily necessities and comforts, from spades and pots and sieves, to pestle and mortar, and table and chairs. Crusoe has few failures, and many successes. From this he draws a heartening moral: As reason is the substance and original of the mathematics, so by stating and squaring everything by reason, and by making the most rational judgement of things, every man may be in time master of every mechanick art. I had never handled a tool in my life, and yet in time, by labour, application and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it, and especially if I had had the tools, (p. 85) This, of course, is a discovery which would not have surprised primitive peoples; the surprise comes for readers who are used to a developed and complex economic system, which is based on the discovery of what Adam Smith was to call the division of labor. Manufacture, trade, and commerce had made the main processes 8 See, for example, Pat Rogers, "Crusoe's home," Essays in Criticism vol. 24 (1974), PP- 375-"9o; Rogers calls Crusoe "the epic of home-making and housekeeping." 152

Robinson Crusoe whereby man secures shelter, food, and clothing become alien to the everyday knowledge of Defoe's contemporaries. Primitive peoples would never have needed to be told what Crusoe announces in tones of one making a triumphant discovery: "It might be truly said, that now I worked for my bread; 'tis a little wonderful, and what I believe few people have thought much upon, viz. the strange multitude of little things necessary in the providing, procuring, curing, dressing, making, and finishing this one article of bread" (p. 130). Crusoe then gives us a lengthy and detailed description of the operation: digging the ground; sowing; protecting the seed from birds and animals; mowing; curing; threshing; removing the chaff; making the pots to store the grain; making a suitable oven; making a mortar out of hard wood; sieving the meal; and making the pottery dishes for baking. Nor is his life purely a mechanical series of laboring operations. Crusoe enjoys what he is doing — or, at least, enjoys its results. He writes, "had my cave been to be seen, it looked like a general magazine of all necessary things, and I had everything so ready at my hand, that it was a great pleasure to me to see all my goods in such order, and especially to find my stock of necessaries so great" (p. 86). He is similarly delighted to find "everything standing as I left it" when he returns to his bower; "for I always kept it in good order, being, as I said before, my country house" (p. 151). After an exploring trip he is very pleased to be home: "this little wandering journey, without settled place of abode, had been so unpleasant to me, that my own house, as I called it to my self, was a perfect settlement to me, compared to that; and it rendered everything about me so comfortable, that I resolved I would never go a great way from it again" (p. 124). The pleasures of these home-making operations are real: one element in the success of Robinson Crusoe was surely the extent to which it provided a model by which the basic economic processes are turned into therapeutic recreations. In gardening, home-weaving, woodwork — not to mention the keeping of pets - children and adults, boy scouts and grown-ups, can all partake of Crusoe's character-forming economic and ecological satisfactions. 153

Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis The basic economic pursuits would earlier have seemed purely contingent, if not deplorable, aspects of human experience; but whereas Genesis had presented labor as a curse for Adam and Eve's disobedience to God's command, the Protestant ethic taught that untiring stewardship of the gifts of God was a paramount ethical and religious obligation. Defoe in his own way agrees with the Protestants, although in Robinson Crusoe it is the ethical rather than the religious obligation which attracts the most emphasis. In The Complete English Tradesman Defoe proposes very long hours of work, and insists that leisure activities, even an interest in sermons, should be kept severely in check.9 Such phrases as "laborious and tedious," "infinite labour," "inexpressible labour," and "indefatigable labour" - all requiring "invincible patience" - are very common in Robinson Crusoe. One reason for this is no doubt to stress the heroism of Crusoe's achievements, but it also gives a realistic view of how hard work, though it has its rewards, is not a pleasant pastime, but a duty requiring endless diligence. One should not, of course, pretend that Crusoe is only that ideal type, Homo economicus: for one thing, he contrives some little diversions and amusements, which make the time on the island pass more pleasantly. He teaches his parrot to speak "so articulately and plain, that it was very pleasant" (pp. 185-86). He also has cats, "two or three household kids about me, who I taught to feed out of my hand," and "several tame sea-fowls" (p. 186). Crusoe does not go so far as his avatar, Alexander Selkirk, who sang and danced with his cats and goats; still, Crusoe is something between homo economicus and the ordinary man; and it is the ordinary man who has most interested many subsequent critics of the novel, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. From Coleridge's marginalian commentary on Robinson Crusoe, the following passage is particularly interesting: One excellence of De Foe among many is his sacrifice of lesser interest to the greater because more universal. Had he (as without any improbability 9 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, ed. Walter Scott (London, 1841), PP- 33-34-

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Robinson Crusoe he might have done) given his Robinson Crusoe any of the turn for natural history which forms so striking and delightful a feature in the equally uneducated Dampier - had he made him find out qualities and uses in the before (to him) unknown plants of the island, discover a substitute for hops, for instance, or described birds, etc. - many delightful pages and incidents might have enriched the book; but then Crusoe would cease to be the universal representative, the person for whom every reader could substitute himself. But no, nothing is done, thought, or suffered, or desired, but what every man can imagine himself doing, thinking, feeling, or wishing for.10 Coleridge goes on to point out that Crusoe's various skills are no more than "what will answer his purpose, and those are confined to needs that all men have, and comforts all men desire." Crusoe's life, then, is confined to fulfilling his ordinary needs; he is, as Coleridge points out, "merely a representative of humanity in general." For instance, Crusoe sees no point in amassing more than he will be able to use: it is one of the blessings of his life on the island that "I had nothing to covet; for I had all that I was now capable of enjoying" (p. 140). He sums up his realistic and utilitarian philosophy as follows: "The nature and experience of things dictated to me, upon just reflection, that all the good things of this world are no farther good to us than they are for our own use; and that whatever we may heap up indeed to give others, we enjoy just as much as we can use and no more." Much has been written on Defoe's economic thought, and I agree with the general finding that Defoe usually adopts a fairly oldfashioned mercantile position: he is interested in short-term profit rather than the capitalization of production along the lines of classic economic theory. Crusoe wants the immediate profits from trading, whether it is for the cheap goods that he exchanges, or for the African slaves he hopes to sell when he returns to Brazil. Maximilian Novak goes further, arguing that Crusoe's commitment to 10 Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London, 1936), pp. 299-300.

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis the concept of religious "calling" constitutes an outright attack upon economic individualism. 11 However, even granting the force of Novak's arguments, it cannot be denied that Crusoe works hard, not out of his sense of "calling," but out of necessity, together with a liking for the results. Crusoe's dominant motive is his own economic advantage. His character certainly illustrates the psychology which Defoe had earlier described in Jure Divino: "Self-love's the Ground of all we do." 12 Crusoe, of course, is not personally responsible for being on his island. The shipwreck accidentally bestows upon him freehold land, and the supplies from the wreck provide the working capital which he can use to exploit it. The wrecking of the ship is treated as though it was a disastrous misfortune; but of course it is really not so much divine retribution for Crusoe's sin in disobeying his father, as it is a miraculous gift of the means of production, rendered particularly fortunate by the death of all potential rivals. Crusoe complains that he is "reduced to a meer state of nature" (p. 130); and so he is, in one sense. But the wreck, after all, affords him "the biggest magazine of all kinds . . . that ever were laid up . . . for one man" (p. 74). In addition to this luck, Crusoe has at least one characteristic which is probably not shared by the average man. He exhibits a more than usual degree of rational business method. We notice, for example, that he gives an itemized listing of the loads he takes off the wreck: "three Dutch cheeses, five pieces of dry'd goat's flesh . . . five or six gallons of rack" (p. 69). There is the famous balance sheet of the "evils" and the "goods" of his situation on the island (pp. 83-84). Even after he has left the island this habit remains: although he is moved to tears by the faithfulness of the Portuguese's trustee, and will only accept 100 moidores from him, Crusoe sticks to proper principles of accountancy, and "called for a pen and ink to give him a receipt for them" (p. 278). There can be little question that although Crusoe is not complete 11 Maximilian E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley, 1962), p. 42. 12 Jure Divino (London, 1706), Book 4, p. 8.

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Robinson Crusoe Homo economkus and no more, he is nevertheless very alive to, if not governed by, the economic motive. His sensibility is concerned with material things; he is businesslike; he works effectively; and he keeps excellent account of the results. RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALISM I treated the religious aspect of Robinson Crusoe in my book The Rise of the Novel (1957), and several scholars rapped my knuckles for suggesting that Crusoe's was only "a Sunday religion." But an important consideration was involved: the extent to which Defoe reflects the great secularization of thought which had occurred by the time that he wrote Robinson Crusoe. Puritanism in 1719 was long past its heroic days: there were no more Luthers or Calvins, no Cromwells or Miltons. Defoe, in his youth, had been a "great Admirer and constant Hearer" of the great dissenting divine, Samuel Annesley, 13 and had indeed planned to join the ministry himself. But instead he chose business and the secular life. By 1719, dissent was much weakened: one clear example of this was the controversy caused by the meeting of dissenting ministers at the Salter's Hall to debate the heretical views of an aspirant to the priesthood, one Hubert Stogdon, who would not accept the orthodox view of the Trinity. 14 Defoe's next publication after Robinson Crusoe was actually a Letter to the Dissenters, which deplored the adverse effect the Salter's Hall controversy was having on the dissenting interest in general. In the section of the Serious Reflections on "The proportion between the Christian and Pagan World," Crusoe is sadly convinced that "zeal to the Christian religion" is now grievously lacking, and that the time of "obedience to King Jesus" is something "of which I heard nothing in all my travels and illuminations, no, not one word" (III, 235). The two main works which argue for a more strictly religious interpretation of Robinson Crusoe are those of George Starr and J. 13 Paula A. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore, 1989), p. 10. 14 Backscheider, Defoe, pp. 4 0 1 - 2 . See also Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978), esp. pp. 3 7 4 - 7 5 .

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Paul Hunter. Starr argues that Defoe followed a long and popular tradition in both Anglican and dissenting works, in which the autobiographical writer revealed a rather conventional pattern of sin followed by repentance and regeneration.15 This pattern, that of the "providence book," is traceable in all Defoe's fiction, but especially in Robinson Crusoe. Starr deals with a broad religious tradition, including the large Puritan element in the Anglican church. Hunter, however, concentrates on Robinson Crusoe and its specifically dissenting antecedents. Hunter is not reductive; he admits that Robinson Crusoe "is not adequately defined as a providence book"; but, he asserts, Defoe does "rely upon providence literature in a manner which Defoe could expect his contemporaries to recognize."16 There is some support for Hunter's view in reactions from Defoe's contemporaries. An enemy of Defoe's, Charles Gildon, wrote a comic attack on Robinson Crusoe, in which he makes Defoe say to Crusoe that "there is not an old Woman that can go to the price of it, but buys thy life and adventures, and leaves it as a legacy, with The Pilgrim's Progress, the Practice of Piety, and God's Revenge against Mur-

ther, to her posterity."17 Defoe's readers were familiar with the Puritan autobiographical tradition; and without embracing any excessive devotional, symbolic, or emblematic interpretation, we may concede that many elements in the story make a spiritual interpretation mandatory. The first overt and extended treatment of religion occurs when Crusoe discovers the growing sprouts of rice and barley. He begins to think "that God had miraculously caused this grain to grow without any help of seed sown, and that it was so directed purely for my sustenance in that wild miserable place." This, he records, "touched my heart a little" (p. 94); but then he remembers that he had shaken out a bag of grain used on the ship to feed chickens "in that place, and then the wonder began to cease; and I must confess,

15 G. A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton, 1965), pp. 4 - 2 0 . 16 J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in "Robinson Crusoe" (Baltimore, 1966), pp. 7 4 - 7 5 . 17 Charles Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing adventures of Mr. D De F (London, 1719) ed. Paul Dottin (London, 1923), pp. 71-72.

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Robinson Crusoe my religious thankfulness to God's providence began to abate too, upon the discovering that all this was nothing but what was common." He realizes later that he ought to have been as grateful for this "so strange and unforeseen providence, as if it had been miraculous" (p. 95). Next there is the earthquake, which makes Crusoe "terribly frightened." He does not, however, see it as a divine warning: "I had not the least religious thought, nothing but the common Lord ha' mercy upon me\ and when the danger was over that went away too" (p. 97). We may choose to see this as a grim irony about human nature, but it is more probably intended as Crusoe's retrospective reproach for his wicked heedlessness of divine warnings. Not long after, there is a very cold and rainy day, and next morning Crusoe is very ill. It is an ague - presumably malaria and he suffers so much that he "prayed to God for the first time since the storm off of Hull" (p 102); but his thoughts are confused. Then he has a dream. A man descends from "a great black cloud, in a bright flame of fire"; "his countenance was most inexpressibly dreadful." The earth trembles, as it did before in the earthquake; then Crusoe hears a terrible voice say: "Seeing all these things have not brought thee to repentance, now thou shalt die." The spirit lifts up his spear "to kill me." When Crusoe awakes, the "terrible vision" remains in his mind, even though he realizes it was only a dream. There follows a lacerating stock-taking of his past. He "had, alas! no divine knowledge." His eight years of "seafaring wickedness, and a constant conversation with nothing but such as were like myself, wicked and prophane to the last degree," had worn out his father's "good instruction." Through all his miseries he had "never had so much as one thought of it being the hand of God, or that it was a just punishment for my sin; my rebellious behaviour against my father, or my present sins which were great; or so much as a punishment for the general course of my wicked life" (pp. 102—3). Crusoe is horror-struck to realize how he had refused his parent's help, and "cry'd out, 'Lord, be my help, for I am in great distress'" (p. 106). After these powerful reflections, Crusoe eats "the first bit of meat I had ever asked God's blessing to, even as I cou'd remember, in my 159

Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis whole life." There follows a long rumination on his past irreligion; and then, "directed by Heaven, no doubt," he lights on a good "cure both for body and soul" (p. 108). He happens to look in a chest, and there finds both tobacco and a Bible. The tobacco, taken in rum, helps to cure his body, and in the Bible his spirit receives a most apposite command: "Call on me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me." That night, before he lies down to sleep, "I did what I had never done in all my life, I kneeled down and prayed to God to fulfil the promise to me, that if I called upon him in the day of trouble, He would deliver me" (p. 109). Crusoe recovers, and thanks God for his delivery from sickness. He then reads the New Testament; his heart is "deeply affected and in a kind of extasy of joy, I cry'd out aloud, Jesus thou son of David, thou exalted Prince and Saviour, give me repentance'" (pp. 110-11). This, he comments, "was the first time that I could say, in the true sense of the word, that I prayed in all my life." It is convincing enough; but a skeptic may notice that Defoe claims a little too easily that he is praying for the first time. He does not seem to recall how, before the wreck, "we committed our souls to God in the most earnest manner" (p. 63); nor does he consider that when he landed on the island, he "began to look up and thank God that my life was saved" (p. 65). We do not necessarily question Crusoe's belief; but we must surely wonder how deeply and thoroughly Defoe had incorporated his own religious thinking throughout the text. Defoe was certainly not much given to the process of revision. The anonymous editor of the 1738 reprint of Defoe's Complete English Tradesman wrote that "to have a complete copy come off his hands, it was necessary to give him so much per sheet to write it in his own way; and half as much afterwards to lop off its excrescences or abstract it." We can reasonably conclude that Defoe worked by somewhat exaggerated statements, which are sometimes, presumably unconsciously, undercut by other statements or actions. In his fifteenth year on the island, Crusoe discovers the footprint in the sand (p. 163); he is terrified, thinks it may be the work of Satan, and worries that "my fear banished all my religious hope"

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Robinson Crusoe (p. 164). He then reflects that he is a sinner, and that he is in the hands of God. He prays, and reads the Bible; he also strengthens his fortifications "to above ten foot thick" (p. 168), and takes other measures to secure his livestock and improve his military defenses. When he first sees that a party of cannibals has arrived, he is torn by doubt as to what he should do. But the visit passes peacefully; and at the next visit he does not forget to commend himself to "the divine protection" (p. 187). The boatload of Spaniards, whose ship is wrecked, all die — to Crusoe's bitter regret, when he realizes "the comfort which the conversation of one of my fellow-Christians would have been to me" (p. 193). That night he dreams of another cannibal visit, in which one of the victims runs away and is saved by Crusoe. This causes him great joy, and he determines that he must "get one of those savages into my hands" (p. 203). A year and a half later there is another visit from the cannibals, and this time one of their intended victims does run away; Crusoe reflects "that now was my time to get me a servant, and perhaps a companion or assistant; and that I was called plainly by Providence to save this poor creature's life" (p. 206). As soon as the "savage" sees him, he puts Crusoe's foot on his head, which "was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever" (p. 207). All goes well; Friday is a heaven-sent help in every way; he is fed, clothed, turned away from cannibalism; and then Crusoe begins "to instruct him in the knowledge of the true God." Teaching Friday about the devil is more difficult; but after praying to God that "he would enable him to instruct savingly this poor savage" (p. 221), Crusoe succeeds eventually in turning Friday into someone who "was now a good Christian, a much better than I" (p.

222).

It is an edifying story, but we may notice that there is no later reference to religious matters in the rest of the volume (or in the Farther Adventures, for that matter): for instance, Crusoe makes no attempt to convert Friday's father, or the papist Spaniard, when they arrive. Indeed, Crusoe jokes that "I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions" (p. 241). We need not agree completely with Irving Howe's argument that Crusoe is "exactly the same

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creature when he leaves the island as when he stepped on to it."18 But we observe that when he finally leaves the island Crusoe does not thank God for the culminating providential mercy; nor does he give any signs of his redeemed religious status for the rest of the volume. This is one major difference between Defoe's novel and Puritan works in the recognized religious tradition; we cannot forget Bunyan's religious intention at the conclusion of Grace Abounding, say, as we easily can in the concluding twenty-five pages of Robinson Crusoe.

This is not to argue that Crusoe's redeemed state does not continue; only that it is no longer evident. Defoe's pious intentions are no doubt sincere, but they are rather occasional, and in that sense we need not altogether withdraw the charge that there is an element of "Sunday religion" in the novel. What, then, can we conclude about the role of religion in Robinson Crusoe} Crusoe is nowhere described as a dissenter; but his religion is not untypical of the Puritan attitude. The emphasis is on a religion which Crusoe arrives at largely through his personal enquiries as to God's intentions towards him in critical moments; that, and in the reading of Scripture, "which I constantly set apart some time for thrice every day" (p. 126). Crusoe's religion is individualist in the central Protestant sense: it is a purposeful individual concentration of the believer on discovering God's intentions, by trying to see how the most minute or unnoticed event of daily life may contribute to his place in the divine scheme of reprobation or salvation. The collective and sacramental side of the church is nonexistent for Crusoe. There is no mass and no confession, as in Roman Catholicism; there is none of the theocratic absolutism of Calvin's Geneva; and there is no community of believers. There is also very little about charity; though Crusoe gives lavish presents to the good widow and the Portuguese captain, he is in general devoid of any pretense of "loving thy neighbor as thyself," or indeed of any civic spirit whatever. 18 Irving Howe, "Robinson Crusoe: epic of the middle class," Tomorrow 7 (1949), p. 32. 162

Robinson Crusoe It makes sense to see Crusoe in the light of Ernst Troeltsch's claim that "the really permanent attainment of individualism was due to a religious, and not a secular movement, to the Reformation and not the Renaissance."19 Nevertheless, we should not be blind to the considerable extent to which Defoe's Puritanism had been influenced by the secular spirit. R. H. Tawney has written that "in all countries alike, in Holland, in America, in Scotland, in Geneva itself, the social theory of Calvinism went through the same process of development. It had begun by being the very soul of authoritarian regimentation. It ended by being the vehicle of an almost Utilitarian individualism."20 Tawney also writes that the "distinctive note of Puritan teaching was . . . individual responsibility, not social obligation . . . the qualities which arm the spiritual athlete for his solitary contest with a hostile world."21 And he adds that it was "characteristic of Puritanism" to place great "emphasis on the life of business enterprise as the appropriate field for Christian endeavour"; "these qualities, and the admiration of them, remained, when the religious reference, and the restraints which it imposed, had weakened or disappeared." Tawney's account very much agrees with how most people have read Robinson Crusoe. It is not, like the works of Pepys, Boswell, and Rousseau, the direct autobiographical record of a writer who had been trained in Calvinist theory in his youth. Certainly Defoe, like the other writers mentioned, intended to preach how the casual events of daily life were filled with possible direct significance both for the individual's life and for the future fate of his soul; the inward consciousness is there, and so is the search for God's providence as a guiding force. But Defoe also had the story of a busy life to tell and sell. These mainly secular matters were to some extent separate from the religious views; they were parallel, not functionally and inseparably related. And so we may conclude that Crusoe's Puritan intentions were important, but intermittent. It is certainly not clearly or unambiguously evident that 19 Ernst Troeltsch, trans. Wyon, Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (London, 1931), 1.119.

20 R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (West Drayton, 1943), p. 226. 21 Tawney, Religion, p. 270.

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis Defoe's Puritanism was the primary shaping element of Crusoe's character and actions. THE MEANINGS OF THE MYTH

Defoe once wrote of what he called his "Mythological Manner," 22 and Robinson Crusoe stimulated him to affirm his strongest claim for the primacy of moral over matter. "Robinson Crusoe's preface" to the Serious Reflections opens by explaining that, contrary to our initial assumption, the Strange Surprising Adventures and the Farther Adventures may rather be called the product of the Serious Reflections than vice versa. For, Crusoe states, "The fable is always made for the moral, not the moral for the fable" (III, ix). Crusoe also calls Robinson Crusoe allegorical, and even claims that it is "an emblematick history," just as — he argues — Don Quixote is really about the celebrated Duke of Medina Sidonia (III, x). We need not believe either of these assertions; but they prompt us to ask just what "moral" Defoe intended Robinson Crusoe to embody. Robinson Crusoe, Defoe writes in "The publisher's introduction" to the Serious Reflections, is a tale of "moral and religious improvement"; and he goes on to specify: "Here is invincible patience recommended under the worst of misery, indefatigable application and undaunted resolution under the greatest and most discouraging circumstance" (III, xii). These are rather general terms; and we get very little help on the moral from most of the Serious Reflections. We have already noted the moving eloquence of the opening essay, "Of solitude," and there are other essays, such as "Of listening to the voice of Providence," which bear some thematic reference to the moral content of the first volumes; but there is little attempt at any detailed demonstration of their relevance to Robinson Crusoe as a whole. We can begin by noting the emphasis on Crusoe's "unexampled misfortunes" (III, ix). This would suggest that, like our other three myths, Crusoe's is essentially punitive; Crusoe is punished for his 22 He used the term about his writing in The Review in 1704. See Maximilian E. Novak, Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe's Fiction (London, 1983), pp. 16, 149.

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Robinson Crusoe rambling tendency, his wish for a more adventurous life than the one he would have had if he had obeyed his father and stayed at home. Crusoe confesses on a later visit to the island that "Every shore, every hill, nay, I must say, every tree on this island, is witness to the anguish of my soul for my ingratitude and base usage of a good tender father" (II, 149-50). But few readers, surely, take Crusoe's leaving home as a significant trespass; for individualism has established as one of its conditions that everyone is entitled to his own choice of a career; and leaving home is now accepted as one of the normal conditions of economic, moral, and psychological improvement for the individual. In any case, the punitive aspect of Robinson Crusoe, though it is clearly intentional, is largely contrary to the book's operative moral: we are not convinced that Crusoe suffers all that much, or that his decision has not turned out for the best. Crusoe works hard to achieve a fairly enviable condition of life; and then he comes home a rich man. Moreover, even after his return home, when he is no longer spurred by economic need since he "already had sufficient for me" (II, 2), Crusoe still wishes for "foreign adventure." Crusoe's main punishment, in fact, turns out to be a stroke of luck. The storm which brings him to the island is presented as a disaster, but it is really the essential deus ex machina which makes the myth plausible. His "Island of Despair" (p. 87) is really a businessman's Utopia. There he finds none of the kind of inequities which, for example, had deprived Defoe of his full financial benefits for writing Robinson Crusoe — what he refers to as "the good fortune of the bookseller" (III, xv). On the island Crusoe is forced into ceaseless individual activity; but he also obtains the full rewards of his labor. As he writes: I was removed from all the wickedness of the world here. I had neither the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, or the pride of life. I had nothing to covet; for I had

all that I was now capable of enjoying. I was lord of the whole manor; or if I pleased I could call my self king or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of. There were no rivals; I had no competitor, (p. 139) Crusoe "earns" his rewards by his activity, and on the whole we can conclude that Robinson Crusoe fastens upon our imaginative life 165

Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis the notion that untiring labor is somehow redemptive; one could even claim that part of the popularity of the Crusoe myth is grounded on its support for the idea of the dignity of labor. Economic pursuits are described in such a way that we find ourselves fascinated by the ordinary occupations of daily life. Older cultural traditions might well have regarded Robinson Crusoe as a glorification of the purely contingent, if not positively deplorable, aspects of human life; the Golden Fleece and the Rheingold, for example, are concerned not at all with the ordinary economic processes by which people manage to subsist, but with such fortunate seizures of wealth as will make it unnecessary ever to have to work again. Crusoe happens to find himself on the island, essentially, because he had wanted to get rich quick. There, however, he is forced to learn a harder lesson: the value of labor. We can appreciate this better if we consider how Virgil's words on labor have been misinterpreted. Samuel Smiles used Labor omnia vincit as the epigraph of his nicely titled Life and Labour; or, Characteristics of Men of Industry, Culture and Genius (1871). But that is not what Virgil wrote. In the Georgics (1.145-46) he uses the past tense, vicit. Thus there is no sense that we are being exhorted to believe that work will always conquer; Virgil meant only that, at the coming of the age of iron, Labor omnia vicit I Improbus et duris urgens in rebus egestas: "Toil conquered the world, unrelenting toil and want that pinches when life is hard," to quote the Loeb translation. Virgil regards it as a lamentable change. By contrast, Defoe's more modern approach is relatively cheerful. He comes closer, at least, to Adam's view of the loss of paradise: "Idleness had been worse."23 Crusoe, when he is about to venture forth again in the Farther Adventures, expresses the opinion that "A state of idleness is the very dregs of life" (II, 9)Defoe's values and attitudes are difficult to interpret with any degree of certainty. He was in many ways the most reasonable and cautious of people, but he loved talking like an extremist; he liked shocking people. James Sutherland explains that he had a "streak of 23 John Milton, Paradise Lost, 10.1055.

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Robinson Crusoe restlessness . . . (a legacy perhaps from his puritan ancestry)." 24 Another major Defoe critic, Martin Price, in a chapter entitled "The divided heart," stresses the conflict in Defoe between "the adventurous spirit and the old piety"; "the conflicts are settled in Defoe or for him, not by him"; Defoe "imposes little thematic unity on his materials." 25 This lack of unity, no doubt, contributes to the overpowering sense of reality we get from Defoe's writing: the most convinced religious notions are treated on just the same level of speech as the most trivial material details. So it is not surprising that Defoe should have left it to us to make up our minds as to whether Crusoe's religious conversion is permanent or not. It is a little the same with the punitive scheme. Defoe intended it to be central to the story's, and therefore to the myth's, meaning; but I confess I am not convinced. Where then do we turn? First, to the universal appeal of solitude, and therefore to the desert island. That is part of the book's appeal to the imagination. Second, we should consider whether Crusoe is not a model to us all in how he learns to manage his desolated state. Here, surely, the theme of the dignity of labor is one aspect of Defoe's moral: not perhaps one that he designed, but one prophetically embodied in the tale. However, Defoe's realism, and his aversion to imposing thematic unity, also gave other meanings to the tale which were probably not only unconscious, but also actively contrary to his intentions. This can be seen in some matters on which, if he had noticed them, Defoe might well have had second thoughts. One is Crusoe's tendency to judge his friends and acquaintances not as persons in themselves, but as objects he may be able to use for his own personal advantage. Consider, for example, Crusoe's treatment of Xury, the Moorish boy with whom he escapes from Sallee. Crusoe promises Xury that "if you will be faithful to me I'll make you a great man" 24 James Sutherland, Daniel Defoe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 48. 25 Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom (Garden City, N.J., 1964), pp. 264, 266, 274-

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(p. 45); later, Xury's admirable service and great affection lead Crusoe to "love him ever after." But when they are both saved by the Portuguese captain, and Crusoe is settling his accounts, the captain offers Crusoe sixty pieces of eight for Xury - twice Judas's figure. Crusoe is momentarily "loath to sell the poor boy's liberty, who had assisted me so faithfully in procuring my own" (p. 54); but in the end he cannot resist the money, and makes only the facesaving stipulation that the boy be set free "in ten years, if he turn Christian." Crusoe comes to regret the sale, but only because Xury would have been a useful helper to him on the island. One of the objections to the capitalist system is that it tends to treat other people, and especially workers, as marketable commodities; this tendency is found, in quite uncritical form, in Crusoe's behavior. When Friday arrives, he at once answers Crusoe's prayers by "swearing to be my slave for ever" (p. 207). The unsolicited promise is as prophetic as the development of the relationship between the two men is instructive. Crusoe does not ask Friday his name, but simply gives him one. There is throughout a remarkable lack of interest in Friday as someone worth trying to understand or converse with. Even in language - the medium whereby human beings achieve something more than animal relationships with each other Crusoe is a strict utilitarian. "I likewise taught him to say yes and no" (p. 209), he tells us (though, as Defoe's contemporary Charles Gildon not unjustly remarked, Friday still speaks pidgin English at the end of their long association26). Crusoe regards the relationship as ideal. Apparently a functional silence, broken only by an occasional "No, Friday" or an abject "Yes, master," adds to the charms of the idyll. Man's social nature seems to be satisfied by the righteous bestowal, or grateful receipt, of benevolent but not undemanding patronage. Only one doubt ruffles Crusoe's proprietary equanimity. He becomes obsessed with the fear that Friday may be harboring an ungrateful wish to return to his father and his tribe. But the fear proves groundless, and they leave the island together, leaving Fri26 Gildon, "Robinson Crusoe examined," p. 71.

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Robinson Crusoe day's father behind on the mainland, without giving the matter even a moment's thought. Crusoe later avoids any possible qualms about keeping Friday in servitude by the deferred altruism of a resolution "to do something considerable for him, if he outlived me" (II, 133). Fortunately, no such sacrifice is called for, since Friday, faithful to the end, actually dies from the arrows of his fellow countrymen. Crusoe is "the most disconsolate creature alive" (II, 179); and he gives "poor honest Friday" a decent and solemn burial in a coffin at sea, with a salute of eleven guns (II, 180). Crusoe's attitude to women is also marked by an extreme inhibition of what we now consider to be normal human feelings. There are, of course, no women on the island, and their absence is not deplored. When Crusoe does notice lack of "society," he prays for the company only of a male slave. With Friday he is fully satisfied by an idyll without benefit of woman. It is an interesting break from the traditional expectations aroused by desert islands, from the Odyssey to the New Yorker. Crusoe is too completely dominated by the rational pursuit of material self-interest to allow any scope either for natural instinct or for higher emotional needs. Even when he returns to civilization, sex is strictly subordinated to business. Only after his financial position has been fully secured by a further voyage does he marry, "and that not either to my disadvantage or dissatisfaction" (p. 298). Some of Crusoe's colonists have the same attitude. He tells how they draw lots for five women, and he strongly approves of the outcome: "He that drew to choose first . . . took her that was reckoned the homeliest and oldest of the five, which made mirth enough among the rest . . . but the fellow considered better than any of them, that it was application and business that they were to expect assistance in as much as anything else; and she proved the best wife of all the parcel" (II, 77). The conflict is put very much in Weber's terms.27 Sex is seen as a dangerously irrational factor in life which interferes with the pursuit 27 Max Weber, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Essays in Sociology (New York, 1946), p. 350.

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of rational self-interest; and the merits of a male do not guarantee him a profitable matrimonial investment. In his colony "as it often happens in the world (what the wise ends of God's Providence are in such a disposition of things I cannot say), the two honest fellows had the two worst wives; and the three reprobates, that were scarce worth hanging . . . had three clever, diligent, careful and ingenious wives" (II, 78). The jest at the wisdom of providence is characteristic; but it is surely no accident that love plays a very minor part in Crusoe's own life, and is eliminated from the scene of his greatest triumphs. This is no doubt to exaggerate the negative, the largely unconscious side of Crusoe's individualism. He is not always completely egocentric; there is, on occasion, something approaching real affection for others. But Defoe's own egocentricity cannot help but make his hero — like his later heroes and heroines — someone who is conspicuously lucky to find other people who want to devote themselves to his personal advantage: people like the Portuguese captain and the English widow as well as Friday, who seem to exist only to be the perfectly reliable and wholly devoted servants of Crusoe's interests. Of course, we would all like to have perfect personal servants who also love us; but Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Roxana all effortlessly attract the most faithful friends and servants, for no obvious reason. That is apparently what Defoe wanted, too, though not what life gave him. The faithfulness of Crusoe's friends at home for some thirty or so years is surely quite as much a wishful projection of the needs which the ideology of individual self-sufficiency brings in its train as is the solitude of Crusoe on his island. Defoe's disinclination to challenge the adequacy of his hero's character and values in these respects sheds some light on the ethical and psychological bases of Robinson Crusoe.

But we must remember something else. Crusoe is also a hero. He is a man who survives ordeals which most of us could not. We cannot deny him his claim to "undaunted resolution." We must accept and admire the simple fact that Crusoe somehow manages to survive his twenty-eight years of solitude and near-solitude on the island, and even turns them into a triumph. We cannot help asking 170

Robinson Crusoe whether we could have done as well. There is a remarkable strength of character in Crusoe's survival. Crusoe, as created by Defoe, is not only a tribute to the basis of individualism in the Puritan psychology, or in the ethos of developing capitalism; he is also a reflection of the virtues and vices of the English character. As James Joyce wrote in his 1912 lecture on Defoe: "The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity." 28 Robinson Crusoe, we may conclude, is, for good or for ill, the epic of the stiff upper lip. It is not a collective lip; it is, for the most part, uncritically egocentric; and it flourishes exceptionally well on a desert island. 28 Cited in Crusoe, Norton edition, pp. 356-57.

7. Crusoe, Ideology, and Theory

In the Romantic period all four of our myths were widely recognized as having a universal importance, partly at least because they presented individualism as the most desirable human quality. As far as Faust, Don Quixote, and Don Juan are concerned, the original punitive tenor of the Counter-Reformation was transformed into a positive and admiring view of the hero. In this changed form their stories, together with Crusoe's, became main myths of the modern world. The prophet of this vast ideological transformation was, appropriately enough, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. CRUSOE AND ROUSSEAU Defoe himself had argued, in a way, for a symbolic interpretation of Robinson Crusoe, but his contemporaries were in general contemptuous of his larger claims: Swift, for instance, sneered that Defoe was "so grave, sententious, dogmatical a rogue, that there is no enduring him." 1 By the mid-century, however, there was a new note of respect for Defoe's work. The author of The Lives of the Poets (1753), possibly Theophilus Cibber, singled out Robinson Crusoe as "written in so natural a manner, and with so many probable incidents, that, for some time after its publication, it was judged by most people to be a true story."2 Later Samuel Johnson delivered the memorable tribute: "Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and The Pilgrim's Progress."?*

Such uninhibited praise shows a surprising degree of recognition of the power of Crusoe's story; but this is nothing to the extent of 1 Defoe: The Critical Heritage, ed. Pat Rogers (London, 1972), pp. 38-39. 2 Critical Heritage, pp. 49-50. 3 Critical Heritage, pp. 58-59. 172

Crusoe, Ideology, and Theory Rousseau's obsession with the novel. He probably read it in the 1720 translation, or rather in the free adaptation to French literary taste, written by Saint Hyacinthe and Justus Van Effen.4 A French scholar, Georges Pire, has argued that Rousseau knew Crusoe before he had started to be a writer.5 His later admiration of the story is demonstrated by his numerous references to it: in Reveries of a Solitary Walker alone there are six allusions.6 He even thought of making his own "translation" into French (presumably an adaptation from the various published French versions).7 But Rousseau's most important reference is in Emile; ou, De I'education (1762), a work which contains his philosophy of education for life, and which he called "the best and most important of my writings." 8 The reference occurs in the Third Book, when the boy, Emile, is about fourteen years old. At this point Rousseau announces that he "hates books" on the grounds that "they teach one only to speak of things one doesn't really know"; but if one really needs a book, there is one which "in my opinion . . . furnishes the best possible treatise on natural education." 9 "The book will be the first that my Emile reads"; it "will compose the whole of his library for a long time"; they will refer to it often, and it "will always please us. What then is this marvellous book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny? Is it Buffon? No; it is Robinson Crusoe" 4 W. J. B. Pienaar, English Influences in Dutch Literature and Justus Van Effen as Intermediary (Cambridge, 1929), pp. 248—49. See also Philip Babcock Gove, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction (New York, 1941), p. 36; William-Edward Mann, Robinson Crusoe en France (Paris, 1916), pp. 5 1 - 5 5 . 5 Georges Pire, "Jean Jacques Rousseau et Robinson Crusoe," Revue de litterature comparee, pp. 4 9 3 - 9 5 ; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. J. M. Cohen, The Confessions (Harmondsworth, 1953), pp. 47—48. I am indebted to Mary L. Bellhouse, "On understanding Rousseau's praise of Robinson Crusoe," Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory 6 (1982), pp. 120-37. 6 Rousseau, Oeuvres completes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris, 1959-

), 1.1015, 1048,

1040,

1071.

7 Oeuvres completes, 3.354; 1.812, 826; 2.413, 471. 8 The Confessions, pp. 529—30; Oeuvres completes, 1.812, 816. 9 Emile, ou de I'education, ed. Francois & Pierre Richard (Paris, 1939), pp. 210—11. My translation.

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Why? we must ask, perhaps somewhat taken aback by Crusoe's keeping such unexpectedly illustrious company. The answer, says Rousseau, is that Robinson Crusoe on his island, alone, deprived of the help of his fellows and of the instruments of all the arts, yet nevertheless looking after his own subsistence, and his security, and even procuring himself a kind of well-being, that surely is an object of interest for all ages, and of which one has a thousand ways to make agreeable to children. That will be how we make real the desert island which I first used as a comparison. That state, I must agree, is not that of social man; and in fact it is not to be that of Emile: but it is on that very state that he must evaluate all the others. The most certain way to raise oneself above prejudices, and order one's judgments on the real relationships of things, is to put oneself in the position of an isolated man, and to judge everything as that man should judge it himself, as regards its usefulness to him. For Rousseau, then, the solitary man on a desert island was the soundest judge of the usefulness of everything; and so Rousseau's ideal student must learn proper judgment by identifying himself with Robinson Crusoe. Rousseau continues: I want his mind to be absolutely overwhelmed by him, that he should busy himself ceaselessly with his castle, his goats, his plantations; that he should learn in detail, not from books, but from things themselves, everything that he needs to know in similar circumstances; that he should think he is Robinson himself; that he should see himself dressed in skins, wearing a large bonnet, a great sabre, all the grotesque get-up of that figure, almost to the point of the umbrella which he won't need. I want him to worry about what steps to take, if this or that should be found lacking, I want him to examine the conduct of his hero, to search if he has forgotten anything, or if there was anything that he could have done better; he must note his errors carefully and learn from them not to fall into the same situation himself, for you mustn't doubt that he plans to make himself a similar establishment; it's the real castle in Spain for that happy age, where one doesn't know any other happiness except one's needs and one's freedom. 10 10 Emile, pp. 211 —12.

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Crusoe, Ideology, and Theory

There are four main points here. First, Rousseau explicitly makes Robinson Crusoe a book for "that happy age" of childhood, a position it has since maintained for obvious reasons: no sex; no complicated plot; no sophisticated conversations — only a man in the position of a child, imagining how he can secure his daily needs all on his own. Second, Rousseau proposes Crusoe as a figure for continual and total identification by Emile. In that sense he demands of his ideal boy-student the kind of intense personal commitment that the mythical hero himself displays. Rousseau wants a genuine imitatio Robinsoni, on the lines of a secular Thomas a Kempis's imitatio Christi. Third, it is clear that for Rousseau the moral subject of the myth is essentially solitude: he unwittingly echoed Defoe when he wrote in Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques that he was "more alone in the middle of Paris than Robinson was on his island."11 The island solitude is the real essence of what Rousseau preaches in Emile; there the boy will, to quote a later passage, "only want to know things that are useful, and only things that are useful; industry and the mechanical arts."12 In addition to this utilitarian theme Rousseau also argues that the "most certain way of rising above prejudice and to order one's judgments on the real relations of things" is to be on an island, alone. Therefore Emile will draw endless important judgments on the falsities of conventional opinions from Crusoe (Rousseau goes on to cite as "falsities" the bad effects of luxury and the division of labor).13 The fourth point to note is that since only the desert island section of the novel deals with the isolated individual, Rousseau wants the Crusoe text — as he writes, contemptuously — to be "stripped of all its odds and ends [fatras]"', it should begin with the shipwreck and end with the rescue.14 This alteration, of course, largely removes the religious and punitive aspects of Defoe's tale; as a true forerunner of the Romantics, Rousseau rejected the idea that obedience to the father, and to God's will, were merits. For 11 12 13 14

Second dialogue, Oeuvres completes\ 1.186. Emile, p. 212. Emile, p. 216. Emile, p. 211.

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis Rousseau, the emphasis must be on the individuals being true to his own feelings, and the supreme human duty was antinomian subjectivism. When Rousseau argues that Defoe, in Crusoe, offers "the happiest possible treatise on natural education" 15 we must ask just what is meant by "natural"? Rousseau uses the term to express the same kind of link to nature as in "natural history": Crusoe on his island, placed in an environment completely unspoiled by man, is inevitably brought close to zoological and botanical life. But here Rousseau's interpretation of Defoe is conditioned by the French version of the story. The translation which Rousseau presumably read is much more formal in its prose and its attitudes than Defoe's original. At one point, for instance, when Crusoe discovers the corn, the French translation makes him cry out with joy, and exclaim, "Oh Nature!" 16 Defoe's Crusoe is quite different: he is a seedmerchant, not a botanist — still less an Encyclopedist, a Romantic, or a humanist. For the original Crusoe, "nature" is appealing not for adoration but for exploitation; his acres cry out for improvement; and he will not be satisfied until, in the Farther Adventures, his island has been stocked with an adequate labor force, and he can rejoice that "never was there such a little city in a wood" (II, 118). Defoe was no islomaniac; his basic ecological ideal was, alas, not nature and the natural life, but the urbanization of the countryside. Rousseau's view, then, is actually a betrayal of Defoe's; but although Rousseau may have been obsessed by Robinson Crusoe, he did not necessarily consult its text either often or with care; it was only the basic idea that appealed to his imagination. Rousseau was an islomaniac; his own values are reflected in his view of Robinson Crusoe\ he wants, not economic laisser faire, but the individual psychology of laissez-moi faire, experienced in natural scenery which is assumed, a priori, to be beautiful in itself. That psychology was shrewdly aimed, from an educational point of view. For Rousseau wants Emile to avoid the falsity of conven15 Emile, p. 211. 16 Emile, pp. 2 1 0 - 1 1 .

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tional social opinions and values; Emile should have lots of amour de soi-meme, the instinctive self-esteem of the natural self, but he must be protected from amour-propre, the poisonous sense of vanity or pride that comes from making the esteem of other people one's basic value in life.17 Rousseau's purely social ethic, in turn, was the result of the division of labor; one reason for the importance of Crusoe's solitude to Rousseau was that competitors were absent. That Rousseau identified the basic philosophy of individualism is not to be contested; its classic announcement is made at the beginning of The Confessions, which were published posthumously in 1781: I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different. Whether Nature did well or ill in breaking the mould in which she formed me, is a question which can only be resolved after the reading of my book.18 We may today not find Rousseau's oracular self-satisfaction, together with his claim that it is "natural," altogether attractive; we have heard much too often lately from people who claim to be especially privileged on the odd grounds that they are "different" from other people. I once heard an eminent devotee of Augustan literature comment on the passage, "Isn't it enough to ruin your whole day?" Nevertheless, the claim to the historical uniqueness of the hypertrophie du moi had never been pronounced so fully and unequivocally before, and it was, and still is, vastly influential. 19 CRUSOE AND MARX

Rousseau's message found many hearers. Johann Heinrich Campe, the headmaster of a Philanthropium in Dessau, produced a Nouveau 17 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Roger D. and Judith R. Masters, Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality (New York, 1964), p. 130, and Rousseau's note, pp. 221—26. 18 The Confessions, p. 17. 19 Joseph Texte, trans. J. W. Matthews, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan

Spirit in Literature (New York, 1899), pp. 127-28.

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis Robinson which took account of Rousseau's objections as expressed in Emile; only the desert island portion of Defoe's narrative was retained; and even the stock of tools from the wreck was dispensed with. 20 The revised tale may impose even more of a strain on our credulity than the original, at least if we have not had the luck to be born in a Philanthropium; but Campe's version was a best-seller, and at the time it almost ousted Defoe's version on mainland Europe. Other imitations followed, most notably the Swiss Family Robinson, published 1812—27 by a philosopher from Bern, Johann Rudolf Wyss. These two versions of Robinson Crusoe became a model for many readers, including economists, who often used Campe's Nouveau Robinson as their illustrative text, imagining it to be the original version. Such ignorance was scornfully attacked by Karl Marx. He had read Robinson Crusoe, and several of Defoe's other works, in English; so he was not taken in by the economists who based themselves on the mistaken versions of Campe and others. Marx first commented on Robinson Crusoe in two early works, The Poverty of Philosophy, and the recently published manuscript known as the Grundrisse21 In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx attacks Crusoe as a hermit who produces only for himself, and who cannot, therefore, be a true representative of the process of production, which Marx sees as essentially social. But in a fuller discussion in the Grundrisse, Marx insists that "the isolated hunter and fisherman with whom Smith and Ricardo begin" belongs not to Defoe's original Crusoe but "to the unimaginative conceits of eighteenth-century Robinson-Crusoe-stories [Robinsonaderi]."22 Thus for Marx, "Robinsonaden" of the professional economists are misleading, but not Defoe's original novel. As S. S. Prawer writes, "what Marx really attacks" is "the myth of Robinson Crusoe, not the book itself."23 This is most clearly and completely argued in Marx's 20 21 22 23

Mann, Robinson Crusoe en France, pp. 85—101. S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford, 1976), pp. 133-34. Prawer, Marx, p. 273. Prawer, Marx, p. 274.

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most detailed comments on Crusoe, which appear in the first book of Das Kapital. Here is a part: Since political economists love Robinson-Crusoe-stories, let Robinson appear before us on his island . . . there are some wants he has to satisfy; he must therefore do useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fishing, hunting, and so on. Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since our Robinson takes pleasure in them and regards such activity as recreation. In spite of the value of his productive function he knows that his labour, whatever its nature, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson, and that it therefore consists of nothing but different modes of human labour . . . our friend Robinson . . . having rescued a watch, ledger, pen, and ink from the wreck, he commences as a true-born Englishman, to keep a book about himself. His inventory contains a list of useful objects that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production, and (lastly) of the labour-time that given quantities of these different products tend to cost him. All the relations between Robinson and the things which form this wealth he has himself created are so simple and perspicuous as to be intelligible without special exertion . . . And yet these relations contain all that is essential to the determination of value.24 We may well not recall Crusoe's having had a watch; we may not be sure that the methodical nature of Crusoe's calculations was quite as Marx describes it; but there is no doubting that Marx sees Crusoe as clearly exemplifying his main point about the labor theory of value. And Marx goes on to supply an equivalent illustration of the theory in the case of the social group: "All the characteristics of Robinson Crusoe's labours are here repeated, but with the important difference that they are social, instead of individual."25 Marx, like Rousseau (and Campe and Wyss) before him, made Robinson Crusoe a myth. Both Marx and Rousseau saw in Crusoe's situation on the island a basic, almost elemental, situation, which they interpreted in the light of their own philosophies of life. Moreover, both Marx and Rousseau contributed to the internationaliza24 Prawer, Marx, p. 335. 25 Prawer, Marx, p. 336.

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis tion of the Crusoe myth. Many aspects of Defoe's original had been particularly applicable to the English character (Marx himself, in the passage quoted above, acknowledged this). Swiss-French Rousseau and German Marx - not to mention Swiss Wyss and Germanspeaker Campe - brought different perspectives to bear on the basic tale. Rousseau praised Robinson Crusoe for the wrong reasons, or at least reasons unintended by Defoe, in favor of his chosen Romantic preconceptions of himself and the nature of the self in general. Marx favored Crusoe from his own quite different point of view, which would have been equally disconcerting to Defoe. But both Rousseau and Marx played an essential part in securing the continued popularity of Crusoe as a mythical figure in the nineteenth century. Romantic solitude became popular; the natural world became its proper setting; the virtue of work under the individual's free control became an established ideal. The appropriation of Crusoe for different, and indeed often contradictory, ideological purposes itself contributed to the form which the Crusoe myth — and the myth of modern individualism in general - was to take in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ROMANTICISM AND MYTH: VICO AND HERDER Even before Rousseau developed his own personal version of the Crusoe myth to forward Emile's education, a theoretical sense of the whole nature of myth had begun to develop elsewhere. Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) is generally thought to have established the notion that myth is an essential key to our sociological and historical understanding of man. 26 His chief work, the Scienza nuova (1725, 1730, 1744), is full of wry and personal writing. For example, Vico observes that Homer's "heroes are like boys in the frivolity of their minds . . . therefore it is impossible that a philoso26 The main work on the general topic of myth in this period is Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology: 1680—1860 (Bloomington, Ind., 1972). It contains selections from the work of eighty-three authors, with useful introductions and headnotes. Here, pp. 4 9 - 5 5 and 224-28. 180


pher should have conceived them so naturally and felicitously."27 Vico regards Homer as a primitive poet, who "wandered through the market places of Greece singing his own poems" (Vico adds that "it is a property of human nature that the blind have marvellously retentive memories" [p. 322]). In comments such as these, Vico shows informal and convincing insight; unfortunately his thought was so rapid, diverse, ambitious, and often strange that it is impossible to attempt more than a very basic summary of his general ideas about myth here. Vico's general aim is nothing less than to provide a reliable basis for a systematic understanding of human thought and behavior, on principles exactly similar to those which had recently, in Harvey, Galileo, and Newton, laid a new basis for the natural sciences. In his chapter on "Principles," Vico begins: Now since this world of nations has been made by men, let us see in what institutions all men agree and always have agreed. For these institutions will be able to give us the universal and eternal principles such as every science must have. . . . We observe that all nations, barbarous as well as civilized . . . keep these three human customs: all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury their dead. (p. 97) These "three universal and eternal customs," Vico writes, are "the three first principles of this Science." Vico also finds three basic stages in history, which he identifies as the theological, the heroic, and the human. At first mankind sees everything in terms of its gods; then man begins to see himself as one of the gods, or at least as a mixture of god and human being; and then there is a secular age, where men are only men (p. 20). Vico's view of religion is suggested by his treatment of the greatest god in the classical pantheon, Zeus, Jupiter, or Jove. "Every gentile nation had its Jove," he asserts; the Thunderer who "hurled lightning bolts" was understood to be the king of all nature; he arose from, and ruled by, human fear (pp. 118—19). For, Vico ar27 The New Science of Giambattista Vicoy trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, 1991), p. 315. Page numbers are taken from this edition and are cited hereafter in the text. 181


gues, it was "fear which created Gods in the world; not fear awakened in men by other men, but fear awakened in men by themselves" (p. 120). The same motive, fear, is connected with other human institutions. Marriage, for instance, is the result of primitive people's "mortal terror" of their sexual intercourse being seen by heaven; it restrained a then "barbarous people" from showing their "bestial lust" to others; so, he picturesquely writes, a man "would drag one woman into his cave and keep her there in perpetual company for the duration of their lives. Thus the act of human love was performed under cover, in hiding, that is to say, in shame" (p. 96). Vico writes: "In the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind" (p. 171). He points out that nearly all the evidence for the study of early societies necessarily comes from their myths; since the epics, tragedies, romances, legends, and fables are all based on the lives of gods or of semi-divine beings or of heroes, Vico summarily classifies them all as mythical. The earliest poetry was largely religious; and the people created poems "directly, easily and naturally" (p. 105). Mythologies "must have been the proper languages of the fables," and there "must have been allegories corresponding to them" (p. 128). These allegorical meanings, Vico further assumes, must have been essentially truthful: "since the first men. of the gentile world had the simplicity of children, who are truthful by nature, the first fables could not feign anything false; they must therefore have been . . . true narrations" (p. 131). Vico was very little read in his own lifetime, but by the end of the eighteenth century he had a few well-known admirers, including Goethe and Coleridge. In a sense, the ideas of Vico were like our four myths: they could only be understood, and become influential, when society had changed enough for people to be able to see myths as, in some sense, true, real, and important. This was the direction taken by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744182


1803), who initiated much new thinking about myth. Herder, incidentally, had certainly read some Vico, although it is not clear when, or how much. 28 It is difficult to give a brief account of Herder's thought. He was a copious and fairly repetitive writer: his collected works, 1805—20, comprise forty-five substantial volumes, and he left many of his works unfinished. We may well deplore, in the ironic words Henry James used about Balzac, that "it was not given him to flower, for our convenience, into a single supreme felicity."29 Indeed, as Hans Georg Gadamer wrote in 1942, Herder is the only great German mind of Goethe's period who is no longer much read. 30 Herder studied at the university of Koenigsberg under Kant and the original German Pietist thinker, Johann Georg Hamann. He began writing early, and at the age of twenty acquired an important teaching position at the Cathedral School of nearby Riga. But he was restless and ambitious, and left to go by sea to Nantes, and then on to Paris.31 The journal of his voyage in 1769 is an attractive example of the empirical yet imaginative cast of his mind. 32 He notes with nice psychological understanding, for instance, that seafaring men "still remain particularly attached to superstition and the marvellous. Since they have to attend to wind and weather, to small signs and portents, since their fate depends on phenomena of 28 "An earlier knowledge of Vico by Herder than has been documented must be presumed" - Wulf Koepke, Johann Gottfried Herder (Boston, 1987), p. 57 and n. 7, p. 130. See also Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1976), pp. 167-68; and Robert T. Clarke, Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley, Calif., 1955) pp. 24, 179-80, 314, 3 8 0 - 8 1 . Clarke's is the main comprehensive study of Herder in English. There is a good, more recent account of Herder's influence in Peter Burke, Vico (Oxford, 1985), pp. 89—95. 29 "The lesson of Balzac," in Literary Criticism: French Writers, etc.y Library of America (New York, 1984), p. 120. 30 Koepke, p. viii, citing Gadamer, Volk und Geschichte im Denken Herders (Frankfurt, 1942), p. 6. 31 Clarke, Herder, pp. 3 9 - 4 5 , 6 0 - 6 1 , 74, 8 6 - 8 8 . 32 Herder, Journal miner Reise imjahr 1769, ed. Katharina Mommsen (Stuttgart, 1976). The translation is that of F. M. Barnard in his edition of/. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge, 1969).

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis the upper atmosphere, they have good reason to heed such signs, to look upon them with a kind of reverend wonder and to develop as it were a science of portents." 33 Herder then develops analytically and historically what he has learned from life on shipboard: The reveille, the calling of the hours, is therefore framed in pious stock phrases and is as solemn as a chant from the bowels of the ship itself. - In all this lie data which explain the earliest ages of mythology. When man in his ignorance of nature listened to signs, nay, had to listen to them, it is scarce surprising that for sailors coming to Greece, unfamiliar with the waters, the flight of a bird was a solemn matter - as indeed it still is in the vast expanse of air and on the desolate sea. Likewise the lightning of Jupiter gave cause for anguish and fright — as lightning still does at sea. Zeus thundered through the sky and forged bolts to strike sinful groves and waters. With what awe did men worship the silent silver moon, which stands so huge and solitary and so powerfully affects the air, the seas and the seasons. With what avidity did men look to certain help-bringing stars, to Castor and Pollux, Venus etc., as seamen still do on a foggy night. 34 Herder then explains how differently he sees these things since he has been to sea, and goes on to reflect that: A thousand new and more natural explanations of mythology, a thousand more profound appreciations of its most ancient poets, come to mind when one reads Orpheus, Homer, Pindar - and especially the first - on shipboard. Sailors brought the Greeks their earliest religion; all Greece was a colony on the sea coast.35 There is some naivete in this passage, but we must surely be impressed by how his experience of the sea had helped Herder both to discern the larger meaning in the mythologies of Greece, and to appreciate the deeper significance of the geographical fact that the Greeks were a people of the sea. We must now consider two of the most characteristic aspects of 33 Barnard, Herder, p. 71. 34 Barnard, Herder, p. 71. 35 Barnard, Herder, p. 72.

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Herder's mode of thought — empiricism and feeling — and also three of his main topics of interest: the Volk or folk culture, organicism, and mythology. All of these, the mode of thought and the interests, are typical of the Romantic movement as a whole, and all played their part in transforming understanding of our four myths. Herder proceeds empirically. In the passages quoted he tells his own direct personal experience; this is contrary to the rational world of the Aufkldrung, the Enlightenment, where the observer does not arrive at thought unassisted by books. Herder also brings feeling into his notion of understanding; in a sense he rejects the separation of the two. Herder believed that a direct sensory experience cannot exist as a mere mechanical percept; it is always simultaneously accompanied in the individual consciousness by feeling, and by reflection. In On the Cognition and Feeling of the Human Soul (1778), Herder argues that cognition and knowledge are one with sensation and feeling; when sensations rise to a certain level of lucidity, they become apperception, or thought. 36 More generally, everything human is for Herder mutually related: for instance, the feeling of the self is at the same time associated with Mitgefuhl, feeling with others. Herder also used the term Einfuhlung, and indeed is said to have introduced the term into the German language.37 The nearest translation is "empathy"; the word really means "feeling into something." Einfuhlung is an actual human sense, like touch; it gives us an immediate awareness of the real object, whatever it may be, whether a simple object like a spoon or a more complex one, like the Greek seamen feeling thunder as the work of Zeus. "One must feel oneself \sich einfilhlen] into everything." It is only when we have felt this kind of empathy with ordinary people that we can possibly "decide about the character of nations."38 The most important area of Herder's stress on feeling is his conception of what he calls the Volk. Herder was in his own way 36 Koepke, Herder, pp. 43, 4 8 - 4 9 . 37 Isaiah Berlin, "Herder and the Enlightenment," in Aspects of the Enlightenment, ed. Earl R. Wasserman (Baltimore, 1965), p. 69. 38 Berlin, Herder, p. 193.

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democratic in attitude: he was opposed to the despotism of Frederick the Great, and he was, at least briefly, sympathetic to the French Revolution. 39 He was also opposed to the ideas of the European literati, with their rationalism, their categories and critical systems, and the priority they gave to book-learning. Herder would have none of this. Instead he built up, on the basis of Einfuhlung, a whole new theory of feeling in relation to the Volk. There had, of course, already been philosophers of feeling, such as the Earl of Shaftesbury in England, whom Herder admired. 40 Herder, however, put feeling into a much larger social context; he tried to think himself sympathetically into the common range of feelings which ordinary people have experienced from the beginning of time. This approach enabled Herder to take deeper account of many of the most commonplace facts of experience: how we learn language through our natal group; and how, therefore, our characters are, without our necessarily understanding or even being aware of the process, given an internal, and, in a sense, preemptive and dominant set of beliefs and assumptions, skills, feelings, and experiences, which we must inevitably share with those of our family background, our local community, and our nation. The thinkers of the Enlightenment had been cosmopolitan; they had believed in a universal world of reason and progress. Herder was not entirely hostile to this belief, but he insisted that our understanding must start with, and build up from, the realities of our immediate folk inheritance. Herder probably coined the term Nationalismus,41 but he was not a political or racist nationalist; he merely wanted people to understand the basic facts - as he saw them - of the human past. The Volk was in some sense an ideal concept: it included the worthy majority of the people — peasants, craftsmen, fishermen, farmers, tradesmen — but it excluded the aristocracy, and the mere rabble (Pobel). Herder thinks of the Volk tradition, especially in its early forms, 39 Clarke, Herder, pp. 3 6 6 - 7 0 . 40 Clarke, Herder, pp. 8 3 - 8 5 . 41 Berlin, "Herder," p. 75.

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as basically oral; for him, the popular lyric merely reflects, and rather directly, the "imprint of perceptions."42 The style of this early poetry was immediate, sensuous, passionate; its content was a magical, divine, or symbolic expression of the Volk's primitive way of thought (Denkart). Herder even believed that folk song was a prerequisite for the existence of national character.43 Herder had long pursued the theme of the Volk, and the examples of folk culture which had been recorded. There had, of course, been important anticipations of Herder's interest: for instance, Bishop Percy's Reliques of English Poesy in 1765. But Herders collection of folk songs, the first one-volume edition of Volkslieder in 1774, and the larger and more important two-volume edition in 1778, was much larger in scope, more original, and incomparably more influential than anything of the kind which had gone before. Herder's anthology contained a much wider selection of countries and periods than Percy's; there were Greek and medieval folk songs; specimens also of Inca, Icelandic, Norse, as well as French, Italian, Spanish, Latvian, and Estonian literature; and also of modern German, including some of Goethe's best-known folk songs — "Heidenroslein," "Erl Konig" and the Songs of the Fisherman.44 These last, incidentally, were partly inspired by the influence on Goethe of Herder's enthusiasm for collecting folk songs. In general, Herder's emphasis on the Volk was surely a giant step in the right direction. One understands why Benedetto Croce wrote that Herder, not Vico, "can claim to be the founder of the philosophy of history," on the grounds that his work offers a true "procedure" for "universal history."45 Herder's historical, like his epistemological and his sociological, approach was characteristically organic. The term "organic" usually depends on the understanding that a whole is different from, and in some sense larger than, its constituent parts. The opposite is obviously the mechanical view; there, each part is separate, and each 42 43 44 45

Clarke, Herder, p. 252. Barnard, Herder, p. 63, n. 40. A. Gillies, Herder (1945), pp. 5 1 - 5 2 , 56-57; Clarke, Herder, pp. 251, 158. Clarke, Herder, p. 179.

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis must be consciously engineered to fit together into a whole. Herder objected to this mechanical view; for him, will or judgment were not to be separated from thought, feeling, or pleasure; they were all part of an indivisible whole. Everything was organically related, and to understand meant to see that the Sinnliche, the immediate perceptual awareness of something, was essentially connected with the Ganzheit, the oneness of all. 46 Herders literary style is full of organic metaphors; he often uses such couplings as the tree and the leaf, the family and its members, the church and its congregation, and youth and age. Herder was quite learned in many of the branches of natural science:47 he refers, for instance, to "the ascending series" of biological organisms. 48 He concedes that no doubt every single object and event is einmalig49 - unique: it only occurs once. But it is connected with everything else, as the individual person is connected to his or her Volk. Like Vico, Herder thought that poetry came before prose; he believed that it began as the expression of feeling, and was the natural voice of the Volk, "the dictionary of the soul." 50 Hence the supreme value Herder attached to the familiar, the emotional, the primitive, the simple - all qualities that he found in epic, in heroic plays, and in folk song. His fine sense of the historical setting of human life made him see the dependence of literature on the particular period in which it was created: to Herder must go the credit — if that is the word — for inventing the term Zeitgeist (spirit of the time). 51 It is widely agreed that the whole Romantic movement shared Herder's emphasis on the organic interconnectedness of all: one 46 See Edgar B. Schick, Metaphorical Organicism in Herder's Early Works (The 47 48 49 50 51

Hague, 1971). Clarke, Herder, pp. 300-307. Clarke, Herder, p. 306. Clarke, Herder, pp. 2 5 3 - 5 4 . Gillies, Herder, p. 37. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Worterbuch, "Zeitgeist." The date of the first quotation cited is 1773.

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thinks of Wordsworth and Burke, or of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo. Herder's contribution to mythology as such is less specific. His belief in the Volk and its natural poetic inspiration, as well as in organic form, supplied a doctrinal and psychological basis for myth; but he gave the matter no systematic exposition. In The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, a skeptic, Alaphron, who regards the Old Testament as "ancient rubbish," is brought to believe that it is at least an "interesting mythology."52 The basic argument is that "I am not here using the word poetry to mean falsehood; for in the realm of understanding, the significance of the poetically composed symbol is truth."53 Herder is deeply hostile to the Voltairean mockery of superstition, such as the miracles of the Bible; instead he expresses a profound belief in the insight of the popular mind. "There is," he wrote, "a symbolism common to all people — a great treasure vault in which is preserved the knowledge belonging to the whole human race."54 What this popular symbolism amounts to for Herder is a new and more open view of truth: a rejection of literal and rational truth and a preference for the truth of poetry, of imagination, and of symbolism. Here Herder expresses the new Romantic view of the truth of myth: the Greeks had thought, no doubt, that myths were established traditional stories; but they must have understood that the actions of these stories could not have happened, nor their characters have actually existed. In the sixth to fifth century B.C. the Greek philosopher and poet Xenophanes had indeed objected to Homer's view of the gods on the grounds that it was both incredible and immoral; and this negative, literalistic, view of the truth of poetry, or epic, was supported by Plato in the Republic. The opposing assumption - that myths were not exactly true, yet they had a special kind of validity — was more widely held even in the emerging modern world. This 52 Clarke, Herder, p. 296. 53 Clarke, Herder, p. 297. 54 Michael Morton, Herder and the Poetics of Thought (University Park, Pa., 1989), P- 133-

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position, however, had rarely, if ever, encountered so strong and reasoned a defence as Herder's; he believed that the ballads and epics were true, in the sense that they, and they only, expressed the essential beliefs of their religion, of their history, and of their Volk. A fully developed theory of myth was to come in the generation after Herder's. Herder was born in 1744, Goethe in 1749; the major German founders of the new school of mythical study were born in the 1760s, 1770s, or later: the writers "Novalis" (Baron Friedrich von Hardenberg) and Johann Holderlin; the critics and philosophers August Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling; the famous systematizers, the Grimm brothers; and Karl Ottfried Muller, the author ofIntroduction to a Scientific System of Mythology (1825).

There was a collective effort to acquire the missing link between ancient myth and modern poetry; almost every well-known German writer of the period wrote on the subject. It was Friedrich Schlegel who made the complete statement of the program, when he wrote in 1800: "Our poetry lacks a center, such as mythology was for the ancients, and the essential shortcomings of modern poetry in relation to that of antiquity may be summed up in these words: we have no mythology. But let me add that we are close to acquiring one."55 And when Madame de Stael published her De VAllemagne (181013) as a way of conveying to a French-reading public (and, in translation, to the English too) the importance of the new literary movements in Germany, she gave considerable importance to myth. Her friend August Schlegel, naturally, was featured as one of the main German writers; in On Literature and the Fine Arts (1801-4) he had written that myth has a higher wisdom than, and incorporates the meaning of, history; Schlegel saw Christianity, and the Reformation, as leading to a renewal of the deep, magical sense of nature and man; and he thought that this was expressed, for example, in Goethe's Faust. The use of myth to express spiritual, or at least non-empirical, ideas is one of the most characteristic features of Romantic poetry. 55 Friedrich Schlegel, trans. Irving Wohlfarth, "Dialogue on poetry," in Richard Elman and Charles Feidelson, Jr., The Modern Tradition (New York, 1965). 190


Many of the Romantic poets, from William Blake {The Book of Urizeri) to Lord Byron {Don Juan), Percy Bysshe Shelley {Prometheus Unbound, a subject already tackled by Herder),56 and John Keats {Hyperion, and some of the Odes), used classical myths to symbolize their understanding of the true nature of man, nature, and history. Blake was also bold enough to appropriate the Jewish and Christian myths of the Old and New Testaments. There is a similar universalizing of a basically religious kind in France. Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme (1802) is a very personal and fervent tribute to the contribution of Christianity to poetry, art, freedom, and science; while, later in the nineteenth century, Hugo, in his novels and poems - notably in La legende des siecles (1859-83) - built up a partly mythological history glorifying his native country. In the Romantic period there arose, largely out of the formal study of ancient myths, an apotheosis of the idea that there is a boundless validity in certain narrative fictions. Such fictions are not literally true, but are in some sense regarded as being true, and as important to society, as Homer had been for the Greeks. Nor is this all: the two characteristic methods and the three main areas of Herder's thought were typical of Romantic writers in general. The empirical notation of facts, and its basis in personal observation and feeling, is typical, for instance, of Wordsworth; he also made the folk tradition his model for poetry; he was preoccupied with the imagination; and he claimed the organic view of poetry for his own. There are, of course, two important differences: unlike the myths of Greece, the new Romantic myths were conscious inventions; and they were the product of single individuals. Still, the Romantics chose myth as a superior mode of knowing and expressing essential realities which could not be expressed literally or directly. All these developments are causally connected with the new status acquired in this period by our four myths. Faust and Don Juan were actually rewritten to give an individualist message a new originality, authority, and approval; Rousseau and Marx, as we have 56 Clarke, Herder, pp. 427-28. 191

Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis seen, reinterpreted Robinson Crusoe towards the same end; Dostoevsky did the same for Cervantes. All four myths were thus transformed to give them a significance beyond anything their original authors could have conceived.

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8. Romantic Apotheosis of Renaissance Myths

GOETHE'S FAUST

Herder persuaded intellectuals that myth was a creative product of the Volk, an authentic expression of the latent imaginative powers of humanity. It was, therefore, a symbolic moment when, in 1770, Goethe, who was then beginning to study law at Strassburg, met Herder. Incredibly, but appropriately, the meeting took place at an inn called Zum Geist, which may be colloquially translated as "At the spirit's place." Herder became an inspiration to Goethe, who was only twenty-one (an age lacking the authority of Herder's twenty-six) but was already reacting against the Gallic rationalism of the University of Leipzig, where he had studied earlier. Herder, it has been said, "taught Goethe to be himself."1 It was perhaps in that very year, 1770, that Goethe decided to write his version of the Faust story. He already had projects for plays on other historical and mythological topics — Prometheus, Mohammed, Julius Caesar, and The Wandering Jew were considered — but the 1587 Faustbuchy and its vast progeny of popular versions and puppet plays, had the double advantage both of being German and of belonging to the folk tradition. Goethe did not then know Marlowe's version of the story, which he seems to have read only in Wilhelm Muller's translation of 1818; but Marlowe's play had already contributed to German perceptions of Faust, through the performances of English strolling actors as early as 1608. 2 Goethe did know Lessing's well-known published letter of February 16, 1 A. Gillies, Herder (1945), p. 19. On the meeting, see Goethe's autobiography, Dicbtung und Warheit, trans. R. O. Moon (Washington, 1949), pp. 310, 3 5 1 - 6 3 . 2 Since these actors had no German, they had to perform a reduced version of their plays, presumably with much sign-language and miming; and so their version of the Faust story would have emphasized situation, attitude, and gesture.

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1759, which had attacked the French-inspired drama of the time and proclaimed the need for something more national, more folkish. Lessing had ended his letter with an exemplary specimen - a scene he wrote, along Shakespearean lines, on the subject of Faust. Some sections of Faust were certainly written by 1775, when Goethe gave readings from it; and an early draft — now known as the Ur-Faust — existed, a transcript of which was published much later, in 1887. Between 1788 and 1790 Goethe wrote and rewrote the whole of Part I, which was published as Faust: A Fragment in 1790. After several years, he took the manuscript up again, worked up a new Part I, and published it in 1806; its final form was published in Goethe's collected works as Faust: The Tragedy in 1808. In this form, the play covers most of the ground established by the Faustbuch and Marlowe's play, as well as much that is new. But Goethe went on to write a second part, which represents a radical departure from earlier versions of the Faust story. He did most of the writing on Part II between 1825 and 1831; it was completed in July 1831, and published posthumously the following year.3 Goethe, then, was working at Faust off and on for sixty years, almost the whole of his writing life. It is a unique circumstance, and does much to explain both the difficulties of the work, and the rich variety of its treatment of the Faust legend. Let us look briefly at some of the most interesting aspects of the play, from our point of view: how Goethe departs from earlier versions of the tale, and especially how his hero embodies the notion of individualism. Part I opens with the "Prologue in heaven." The Lord asks Mephistopheles if he knows Faust, and the two then proceed to make a wager: will Faust remain true to the Lord's service, or will he not? The Lord gives Mephistopheles his "full permission" to "Divert this Soul from its primal source / And carry it, if you can seize it, / Down with you upon your course."4 We are then given two scenes 3 These facts of composition and publication are taken from Faust: A Tragedy, ed. Walter Arndt and Cyrus Hamlin, Norton Critical Edition (New York, 1976), pp. 346-48. This edition is cited in the text as A&H. 4 Louis MacNeice, Goethe's Faust: Parts I and II, An Abridged Version (New York, 1951), lines 324-26. Despite its many cuts, I prefer to use the MacNeice

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introducing us to Faust. In the first, "Night," he is in a state of morbid dissatisfaction with his lifetime of academic learning; nothing has ever lived up to his wishes; his hopes of understanding nature have been dashed; and he has failed to experience the common joys of life. In the second scene, Faust's spirits rise when he mingles with happy crowds at the Easter holiday celebrations. He notices a black poodle, and, remembering the legendary use of a dog as a familiar spirit attending human beings, he conjures the spirit to appear. The spirit is of course Mephistopheles; he appears, dressed as a traveling scholar, a common disguise among medieval rogueaventurers. Faust asks him his name; at first Mephistopheles refuses to give it, as a "petty" matter; but later he explains: "I am the Spirit which always denies. / And quite rightly; whatever has a beginning / Deserves to have an undoing" (lines 1338—40). After much comic reluctance by Mephistopheles, and ironic jesting by Faust, Mephistopheles eventually agrees to teach Faust "What it means to live" (line 1543). Mephistopheles is joined by the Spirits, who sing of "beauty rare," "lifelong loves," and the "high / Joy of existence."5 Faust hopes to transcend ordinary life: "I am too old for mere amusement, / Too young to be without desire. / How can the world dispel my doubt?" He is tired of the old negative refrain, "You must do without, you must do without" (lines 1546—49). Asked by Faust to specify his duties, Mephistopheles answers: "I will bind myself to your service in this world, / To be at your beck and never rest nor slack; / When we meet again on the other side / In the same coin you shall pay me back" (lines 1656-59). Faust responds, undismayed, that: "The other side gives me little trouble; / First batter this present world to rubble, / Then the other may rise - if that's the plan" (lines 1660-62). version, for the most part, because of its poetic qualities. Later quotations are cited in the text; since MacNeice gives no line number, the above and subsequent line numbers are from A&H. 5 MacNeice does not give this passage fully. I therefore quote Charles E. Passage's translation from his excellent and complete edition of Faust Part One and Two (Indianapolis, 1965), hereafter abbreviated in the text as P, with the line numbers. Here, lines 1458-1503.

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis Faust clearly has no belief in the reality of any different sphere of existence, any "Below or Above." The idea of eternal damnation is never raised. Mephistopheles asks Faust to "sign on the line"; Faust jokingly answers that if ever he can have absolute satisfaction, "Then let that day be my last." Mephistopheles says "Done!" and Faust speaks the famous words: Let's shake on it! If ever I say to the passing moment "Linger a while! Thou art so fair!" Then you may cast me into fetters, I will gladly perish then and there. Then you may set the death-bell tolling, Then from my service you are free, The clock may stop, its hand may fall, And that be the end of time for me! (lines 1699-1706) Goethe's Faust, then, is very unlike Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. There is none of the fascination with magic; nor is there any desire for the demi-God status that magic can bring. Goethe's hero, it is true, has some of the same dissatisfaction with his life as Marlowe's. Faust is bored by medicine, despite his fame, and tired of booklearning - which is merely to Sit there for ever with scissors and paste! Gather men's leavings for a rehash And blow a little paltry flicker Out of youf own heap of ash. (lines 554-57) Faust has spent ten years in professorial teaching, only to discover the "impossibility of knowledge" (line 364), and a total disgust with "the junk of centuries" (line 408). What he really wants is a full capacity for feeling. At the Easter holiday he feels deep sympathy for the "plain man's real heaven"; he longs to be able to say, and feel, "Here I'm a man, and dare be one" (line 940); he yearns to "extend myself to embrace all human-selves" (line 1774). What does Mephistopheles want for granting this? Only to trou196


ble Faust for a line or two in writing, committing himself to Mephistopheles. Faust jests at the devil's conventional bourgeois nature, with its trust in "written forms"; Mephistopheles answers "Any little snippet is quite good; / And you sign it with one little drop of blood" (lines 1736- 37). Faust agrees to this, adding, "What is allotted to the whole of mankind / That will I sample in my inmost heart" (lines 1770—71). But Mephistopheles tries to caution Faust against such excessive expectations: "You will remain just what you are" (line 1809). The next scene is a deliberate anticlimax. A flying carpet can do no better than to take the two to Auerbach's Tavern in Leipzig, because Mephistopheles wants to take Faust into the "jolly company" (P, line 2159) of some happy-go-lucky drinking cronies. There Mephistopheles amuses himself, but not Faust: he remains distant; and later he says, "I would prefer to go away" (P, line 2296). The next scene, "Witch's Kitchen," is comic in a more macabre way; it serves the important dramatic purpose of giving Faust back his youth, as thirty from his fifty years are taken away. Faust is disgusted with "this most distasteful conjuring trick" (line 2534), but the witch's conjuration works, and Mephistopheles promises Faust a splendid sexual rejuvenation, saying, "You'll soon see Helens everywhere" (line 2604). There logically ensues the meeting with Gretchen, Faust's great love, the results of which take up most of the rest of Part I. Faust happens to see a beautiful and innocent young girl in the street, and accosts her. He is rebuffed, but confesses his desire to Mephistopheles: "Get me that girl" (line 2619). Faust meets Gretchen again at a neighbor's, and loads her with praise and gorgeous jewels. Gretchen is flattered by her "noble" and "clever" friend; and although she recognizes that he has "no Christianity" (line 3468), she lets him into her house, and listens to his lover's plea. Tragedy follows. Faust has told Gretchen that a sleeping draught will safely send her mother to sleep, but it actually kills her. Gretchen's brother, knowing of his sister's fall, is killed by Mephistopheles. Later, Gretchen drowns her baby; and in the last scene of Part I we see her in prison. She is to be executed the next day, but still loves Faust. 197


We never really know just what Faust's motives are, as far as Gretchen and her family are concerned. He certainly feels love for Gretchen, saying when he thinks of her coming death, "I wish I had never been born" (line 4596); but the two are not often seen together, and Mephistopheles keeps Faust away from Gretchen at her end. Part II is totally different from Part I, in style and content. It begins at the Emperor's court; there follows a Mardi Gras masquerade, with a long sequence of participants: various German characters, allegorical figures (including fauns and satyrs), and a boycharioteer allegorically representing poetry. Next comes a scene with the Emperor, who asks that Helen and Paris appear at his court. Mephistopheles says that this is beyond his powers; but he then concedes that he can do it if they first approach the Mothers — mysterious maternal deities. Eventually Paris and Helen appear, and Faust is at once deeply enamored of Helen. Henceforth the main enduring narrative thread of Part II concerns Faust's love for Helen; the birth and death of their son, Euphorion; and Helen's return to the Underworld - with the cautionary remark to Faust that "Happiness and Beauty are not mated long."6 Faust and Mephistopheles help the Emperor defeat his enemies, and in return he bestows high rewards and honors on Faust. What are we to make of this as a plot? In the whole play Faust and Mephistopheles appear more often apart than together; they are together thirty-two times on stage, but Faust appears separately seventeen times, and Mephistopheles twenty-four. For almost half of Part II, when they are both present, they are merely spectators, or playing parts in disguise. Nor, when they are together, do they really exchange ideas; Mephistopheles is always cynical and comic, Faust dignified and aloof; there is no real contact. They never speak about the terms of the wager, once agreed,7 or about Faust's aspira6 Goethe, Faust, Parts I and II, trans. Philip Wayne (Harmondsworth, 1949, 1959), hereafter abbreviated in the text as W, with the line numbers. Here, line 9940. I use this translation when it seems more felicitous than MacNeice or Passage. 7 Herman Weigand, "Goethe's Faust: an introduction for students and teachers of general literature," 1964, 1965; reproduced in A&H, p. 471.

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tions; Mephistopheles is far from tempting Faust to evil, 8 and never even invokes the devil in person9 as Marlowe's Mephistopheles did. There are many differences between the two parts in style and method, as well as in content. Part I has as its center, in the FaustGretchen story, a realistic domestic drama of the kind approved by the Sturm und Drang writers; whereas Part II has an essentially different technique and much wider interests. It takes place in the Great World rather than the Small — the actions are set in Greece as well as Germany, and cover some thirty centuries. In addition, many of its scenes deal with more or less abstract or allegorical figures, who only appear once or twice. Most of these scenes are lyrical, rather than narrative; and some are not directly concerned with either Faust or Mephistopheles. Yet a leading critic of Goethe's Faust, Stuart Atkins, argues that "Faust is primarily drama; that, as drama, it is action; and that the action of Faust is neither more nor less than the development of its protagonist's dramatic character."10 Atkins's definition, we observe, starts in an Aristotelean fashion, with the emphasis on action; but he ends with an assertion that it is the development of Faust himself that gives the play its essential unity - thus giving character an importance contrary to the priority which Aristotle, in the Poetics, gives to action. Atkins acknowledges that his view is "unconventional." In any case, I find his assertion that Goethe's main interest is in character difficult to accept. In the play, Faust lives for eighty years; and no doubt he changes. The enthusiastic youth who loves Gretchen is different in speech and attitude from the more objective observer of the later acts of Part II; but throughout the play he is essentially consistent in his singleminded, and indeed egotistical, search for wider experience. This egotism makes him impervious to criticism; we cannot but wonder, for example, at his betrayal of Gretchen, and the cavalier manner with which he speaks to her and of her. Goethe's 8 Wilhelm Emrick, "The enigma of Faust, Part //," 1971, reproduced in A&H, p. 589. 9 Eudo C. Mason, "The Erdgeist and Mephisto," 1967, reproduced in A&H, pp. 4 8 4 - 5 0 4 . 10 Stuart Atkins, Goethe's Faust: A Literary Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), p. 7.

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technique seems in part based on a determination to avoid the commonplace: we notice that, for all the talk about it, we never see Faust sign the compact - surely an indication of Goethe's fastidious rejection of the obvious. It is the same with Faust's love for Gretchen: there are many scenes devoted to it, but the consummation itself is given little attention; it is not even prepared for, and afterwards Faust is immediately whisked away by Mephistopheles, who pretends that he must avoid the danger of being caught for having killed Gretchen's brother. In his wish to avoid bourgeois realism, and detailed naturalistic presentation, Goethe fails to give a full sense of Faust's character either in Part I or, more particularly, in Part II; Faust is objective, ironic, and remote for much of the time, and he lacks any appreciable moral sense. Whenever an important event occurs — the loss of Helen, say, or his becoming blind, or even his death — little is shown dramatically; the events take place all more or less casually, and the emphasis in the text is on quite different matters. Of course, we should not impose on drama requirements either of unified action or of consistent character. Jane K. Brown has argued that Faust was not meant to obey either the Aristotelean stress on action or the modern dramatic prescription of consistently developing characters. For her, Faust rather follows the pattern of Calderon's Great Theatre of the Worlds or other non-illusionist pageant-dramas, and has affinities with the Indian Kalidasa's play Sakuntala (which was admired by Goethe), masque, and opera.11 Goethe was certainly seeking a free-flowing kind of form, in which he could introduce whatever large general subjects or ideas he wanted, without being dominated by the need for a central action or the development of characters. He also wanted to allow himself to play with, or at least not to take wholly seriously, the actions of the characters. I certainly think that the concept of theatrum mundi helps the reader to be more sympathetic to Part II, which cannot, for much of the time, even pretend to be importantly connected with Faust's story; indeed it comes closer to the miscellaneous freedom of ancient myth. i i Jane K. Brown, Goethe's "Faust": The German Tragedy (Ithaca, 1986).

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Romantic Apotheosis of Renaissance

Myths

Another critic sees Faust as essentially dialogue, and not drama at all. For Liselotte Dieckmann, Goethe's play is symbolic and mystical: thus the marriage between Faust and Helen, between a "real" character and a mythological one, is itself not a dramatic action at all but, rather, a symbolic "myth of art."12 Certainly Part II is, on the whole, closer to epic or myth than to stage drama.

In the last two scenes of the fourth act in Part II, Faust and Mephistopheles give the Emperor a great victory, and Faust is rewarded by a vast grant of land. Characteristically, we only know this from the Archbishop's insistence that Faust must not be excused the levies of the church on this domain, once it has been reclaimed from the sea (P, lines 11035—41). Faust does not appear in the scene. Act 5 begins with two new characters, the good old couple from classical legend Baucis and Philemon. They talk about what they regard as Faust's rapid - and worthless - development of his land. Next, Faust is exasperated that the cottage of the couple spoils his view, and he tells Mephistopheles to deal with them. Mephistopheles and his henchmen burn their cottage and the nearby chapel, and kill the old couple. Faust protests that he only wanted to buy them out, but the text does not support this. He then gives Mephistopheles orders about the need to build dikes to secure his land from the sea. At the age, apparently, of one hundred, Faust is in a hurry to start his great new colony. But in the "Midnight" scene four women in grey come to visit Faust in his palace. Three of them are turned away, but the fourth, Care, slips through the keyhole at the gate. She wants to turn Faust from his course of secular activity to a more suitable concern with his death, and preparing his soul for eternity. Faust answers that he is proud to have "stormed through my life" (P, line 11439); he has no care for the afterlife — "What he knows here is certainty" (P, line 11447). Care argues against his emphasis on the concerns of this world, but Faust refuses to recognize her power. 12 Liselotte Dieckmann, Goethe's "Faust": A Critical Reading (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972), p. 18.

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis Care thereupon breathes on him, and blinds him: "The human race are blind their whole life through; / Now, Faust, let you be blind at last" (lines 11497-98). In the next scene, "Great forecourt of the palace," Mephistopheles leads lemurs, night-walking spirits of the dead, into the courtyard. Faust thinks the lemurs are workmen to dig trenches, not his grave; he is excited to think that once the swamp is drained, it will open to millions living space, Not danger-proof, but free to run their race. Green fields and fruitful . . . Oh to see such activity, Treading free ground with people that are free! Congratulating himself on his selfless devotion to the Volk, Faust continues: Then could I bid the passing moment: "Linger a while, thou art so fair!" And I, who feel ahead such heights of bliss, At last enjoy my highest moment - this, (lines 11562-86) Faust dies, and Mephistopheles should now collect his due: Here lies the corpse and if the soul would flee At once I show the bond, the blood-signed scroll; Though now, alas, they have so many means To cheat the devil of a soul, (lines 11611-14) Mephistopheles treats Faust with contempt, calls him "the poor wretch," and summons devils to produce the jaws of hell. But Mephistopheles is foiled, and it is the Hosts of Heaven, and the Chorus of Angels, which carry away Faust's soul - his "immortal part" (line 11824). Defeated by the might of heaven, Mephistopheles does not even appear in the last scene. There, various allegorical voices announce that Faust's soul is saved because, as the angels proclaim, "Should a man strive with all his heart, / Heaven 202


can foil the devil" (lines 11936-37). One of the penitents' voices is Gretchen's; and she, affirming her deathless love for him, is glad to see how Faust "sheds his earthly leaven" (line 12088). Finally, in the plays last lines, the Chorus Mysticus announces that "Das ewigWeibliche I Zieht uns hinan" — "Eternal Womanhood / Leads us on high" (lines 12 n o - 1 1 ) . This brings us back to the Gretchen story of Part I. The woman's total devotion to her love unto death reflects a notion common in popular culture, as we have learned in the movies; but Goethe's is the first of our myths to give romantic love an important place. We can see this as an essential part of the Romantics' absolute quarrel with reality; Goethe follows the bourgeois male code by awarding woman the consolation prize of spiritual salvation in return for the domestic drudgery that is her common lot on earth. Goethe's treatment of the theme has considerable pathos; but there is surely a certain psychological unreality in the characterization of Gretchen's family, with the successive deaths of her brother, her mother, her child, and eventually herself. These cast Faust in the role of a selfish and irresponsible seducer, a situation hardly remedied by the fact that Mephistopheles must take much of the blame. The final generosity of Gretchen's forgiveness, issued from heaven long after the offenses against her, seems unconvincing; but it is not untypical of Goethe's procedure in general. He prefers to be unclear rather than too clear; he is not trying for psychological realism, but for imaginative and symbolic effects. This lack of realistic detail also applies to the compact between Mephistopheles and Faust. The Lord allows Mephistopheles to do his worst to Faust only "So long as he walks the earth alive" (line 315). Faust is committed to his promise "let that be the last of time for me" (line 1697) if he ever surrenders to "self-complacency." It is difficult to imagine any operative legal contract based on Faust's promise that he will be happy to die if he can ever experience the supreme moment, the hochster Augenblick. It is very unlikely that Faust will ever achieve that goal; Mephistopheles, we may say, should have been more careful before he accepted the wager on these terms. 203


It would, of course, have been a more moral tale if, as in Marlowe, Mephistopheles had been allowed to win his wager — as Goethe no doubt knew. But Goethe was aiming at a more ideal kind of representation. This is most obviously true in Part II; there we find an evolving pattern of allegorical figures, beginning with the German grotesques, proceeding to the serenely classical personages, and concluding with the atmosphere of dream, which supplies another kind of structure at an ideal or symbolic level. I may well have betrayed the fact that Goethe is not one of my elective affinities. I was never blessed with an anima naturaliter Goetheana\ and I can happily agree with Tzvetan Todorov's ironically assumed difficulty when he writes, "It isn't easy to like Goethe. I should perhaps add to this assertion (constatation) to render it at the same time less general and more just: 'today'; or, 'if one hasn't been brought up in the Germanic culture'; or perhaps even, and still more modestly: 'for me.' " 13 We must nevertheless face the fact that Goethe's Faust is, among other things, probably the single most significant achievement among the works of modern individualism. Why? Most obviously, because of its extreme popularity: it is the best known single work of German literature, and one enthusiastically adoped by the literati even before the work was completed. We must concede that Faust's popularity is not necessarily due to the character of its hero: the astonishing power and variety of the poetry, and a great deal of interesting historical, psychological, and scientific matter, are all relatively independent of Faust. Nevertheless it is surely true that the character of Faust is a signal example of individualism as we have defined it, and in both its favorable and unfavorable aspects. Consider, first of all, the negative aspects of individualism - all the things which Faust does not have. He is certainly free of family ties: his father is briefly mentioned, but only as a medical doctor as unsatisfied as Faust himself, while both his loves, Gretchen and Helen, and their children, die before any lasting relationship with them has been formed. Faust is indisputably a great traveller - in 13 Tzvetan Todorov, Goethe: ecrits sur I'art (Paris, 1983), preface, p. 7. 204


time as well as in space; and, at least until the final scenes of Part II, he has no home. Ideologically, he is free of national or local loyalties, although he does incidentally help the Emperor. As regards religion he does not, we notice, concern himself with the fate of his soul, as Marlowe's Doctor Faustus did. And though his talk uses religious, and even on occasion Christian, terms, they are probably to be understood as imagery or symbol; he never prays or goes to church; the Lord calls him a servant, but he never serves; indeed, one can imagine him as skeptical and embarrassed at the high tributes he wins at the end from the church fathers, the angels who bear his immortal essence to heaven, and various others. The angels' main tribute is somewhat individualist, and curiously secular: "Who strives forever with a will, / By us can be redeemed" (P, lines 11936—37). Psychologically, the antinomian and secular individualism of Faust's character makes him something of an antisocial nay-sayer. The wager is essentially made so that he can experience the common joys and sorrows of mankind; so at first sight he seems to have what may be called broadly democratic and affirmative attitudes. But in practice he scorns the people: at Auerbach's tavern, for example, he is offended by what he sees as the indecent carnality of Mephistopheles and his companions. As one critic has written, Faust is never "close to any human being."14 His love of his fellow-men is, indeed, of a familiar kind among do-good intellectuals: it is impersonal and theoretical. We notice, for instance, that his final enthusiasm is kindled by the thought of the happy freedom which millions will know once his dike to hold off the sea is built; it is his first sign of a social conscience, a wish to better the lot of his fellows. Still, the land is his own, and the workers are conscripted: "Oh how this clink of spades rejoices me! / For that is my conscripted labour" (lines 11539-40). He speaks with the self-satisfaction of a capitalist entrepreneur: as he says, "That this vast work completion find, / A thousand hands need but one mind" (lines 11509—10). Positively, it must be conceded that Faust shows considerable tenacity in retaining his own point of view. He has, almost to the 14 Weigand, "Goethe's Faust" A&H, p. 470. 205


end, an ironic consistency: he sees virtually everything as humanly unworthy, or at best subject to endless and bewildering change. Yet he continues to search for some worthwhile kind of happiness, and rarely admits defeat or discouragement. Faust thinks like a pessimist, but acts like an optimist. Of course, this is part of his nature; he is, apparently quite unconsciously, an autocratic egoist; and he completely lacks either a capacity for self-criticism or a sense of humor. In this he resembles his author. Goethe had a general theory that contraries of every kind are ultimately a necessary part of an ultimate unity; in his Faust we notice that there is no real opposition, even between Faust and Mephistopheles, or between good and evil. Faust is only "A part of that Power / Which always wills evil, always procures good" (lines 1336-37). In short, Faust, like Goethe, is an unrepentant elitist; he has to condemn or ignore all those less than cosmic ethical distinctions which stand for morality or the good in ordinary life for most people. The earlier Faust tradition stood for the idea of the Fall having occurred because man yielded to the temptation to eat of the fruit of forbidden knowledge of good and evil; but in Goethe all the fruit on that tree has become good, if rather tasteless; all a man needs is the energy to pluck the fruit, and a powerful digestion. A secular salvation is apparently available for anyone who keeps active and keeps on looking. The order and plenitude which had in previous centuries been ascribed to the Great Chain of Being is now, in the usual Romantic style, being sought only in the individual's personal life; there are no fixed virtues and vices, no fixed standards. The only operative principle of value is endless motion, a quality it shares with modern physics, the Protestant ethic, jogging, and the Marquis de Sade. In that sense Faust's individualism is merely a ceaseless and active search for experience, for the deed; he knows there is no final peace in sight, and apparently welcomes this sad fact. Erich Heller has asked: "What is Faust's sin? Restlessness of spirit. What is Faust's salvation? Restlessness of spirit."15 Faust's promised reception in 15 Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (New York, 1971), p. 61. 206


heaven is in effect a transcendental apotheosis of unexamined bustle. Is not this, possibly, the final sentence on all modern individualism? Does not our culture operate on the principle, "Even if the court is unmarked and there's no final tape, keep running and you will win something in the end"? But what? DON JUAN: MOLlfiRE, MOZART, BYRON, AND ZORILLA Among our four myths, many of the most popular, and perhaps the best, versions were of the Don Juan story. Tirso's El Burlador had a considerable, though not apparently an exceptional, success in Spain. But elsewhere, and within a generation, there appeared at least five different new dramatic versions of the tale. Moliere, who certainly knew some of these plays, was attracted to the popular theme, and wrote Domjuan; ou, Le festin de pierre [Don Juan; or, The Feast of Stone] in 1665. 1 6

Judged from the point of view of the financial takings for its first fifteen performances, Domjuan was the most successful of Moliere's plays; but unluckily it was caught up in his quarrel with the cabale des devots, a religious group which had caused Tartujfe to be banned in the preceding year; and so, probably under the pressure of clerical attacks on its religious skepticism, Moliere withdrew the play, and it was not performed again in his lifetime; nor was it published until ten years after his death.17 For a long time the general critical opinion of the play was hostile; the prefatory note to the standard edition of 1683 complains 16 Oscar Mandel, ed., The Theatre of Don Juan: A Collection of Plays and Views, 1630-1963 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1963), contains El Burlador, extracts from Dom Juan (in Ozell's adaptation), and the Da Ponte libretto of Don Giovanni, together with other relevant extracts, and useful and historical headnotes. See also the standard study of the Don Juan tale, Leo Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan (1959; New York, 1967). 17 See the edition of Dom Juan ed. W. D. Howarth (Oxford, 1958), pp. xxxiixxxix, and the edition in the Pleiade Oeuvres completes, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris, 1947), 1.767-822. For quotations from Dom Juan I use Don Juan and Other Plays, trans. George Gravely and Ian Maclean (Oxford, 1989), hereafter given in the text, abbreviated to G&M, with the page number.

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis that its composition was "badly carried out." But in recent years, and especially since the famous production in Paris in 1947 by the great actor Louis Jouvet, 18 it has become the most discussed of Moliere's plays. There appeared, for example, at least twenty-seven separate works on Dom Juan between 1961 and 1993, compared with thirty-two for the whole period between 1802 and 1961. 1 9 The differences from Tirso are striking. As regards the plot, Moliere reduces the cast of persecuted ladies from four to one; and that one, Elvire, is apparently Dom Juan s legal wife. But Dom Juan has used marriage only as a bait, and he also has a new love, although she escapes his designs when Juan's boat capsizes at sea. There are also two country girls whom Dom Juan promises to marry, but he has to intermit prosecuting these affairs when two new characters, Elvire's brothers, appear and threaten to avenge their sister's honor. In general, Moliere's treatment is casual and episodic; compared to El Burlador, there is no strong forward drive in the action. The second act is largely concerned with the conventional comic treatment of the country girls and their rustic suitors; the third act deals with the avenging efforts of the two brothers; the fourth exhibits how cleverly Dom Juan baffles a tradesman who wants to collect a debt. As regards the central drama, the Commander's death is merely reported, not presented on stage; Dom Juan then happens to see his statue, and invites it to supper; in the fifth act the statue comes to remind Dom Juan of his invitation. When it gives Dom Juan its hand, Juan is engulfed in flames, with thunder and lightning, while the statue pronounces the moral: "Dom Juan, the wages of sin is death. He who rejects God's mercy stands defenseless before His wrath" (G&M, p. 91). Moliere, then, keeps to the central episode of Tirso's story, but we do not have the same sense of remorseless retributary powers converging on the hero as we do in Tirso. The interest of the play, in 18 Michel Blain, "Les mises en scenes francaises du Dom Juan de Moliere," in Marcel Desportes et al., Analyses et reflexions sur le Dom Juan de Moliere: le defi (Paris, 1981), pp. 178-213. 19 See Serafino Pizzari, he mythe de Don Juan et la comedie de Moliere (Paris, 1986),

pp. 178—80, plus six later additions. 208


fact, depends largely on the presence of Juan's comic valet, Sganarelle (originally played by Moliere himself), who is much more important than Tirso's Catalinon. Sganarelle represents the orthodox moral reasoner who opposes Juan's apparent atheism. He challenges Juan to say whether he believes in heaven and hell; at first Juan says "Drop it," and then "enough," to Sganarelle's questioning. But to the next question, whether Juan believes in the devil, he answers, "Of course." On the fourth question, however, "Does Dom Juan believe in the afterlife?" Juan merely laughs: "Ha! Ha! Ha!" (G&M, p. 61). Undaunted by this casual insult to orthodoxy, Sganarelle argues that everyone has to have some kind of belief; to this Juan curtly answers only that "I believe that two and two make four . . . and four and four make eight." The issue of belief is also raised by Elvire, by Dom Louis (Juan's father), and by others, but Juan always declines to commit himself convincingly; instead he remains unperturbed, refusing to heed the warnings of Sganarelle and others that his disbelief will surely be punished by God. Unlike Tirso's protagonist, then, Moliere's Dom Juan is an unbeliever. But it is difficult to say whether he is a genuine atheist, or whether he merely adopts the nay-sayer role as his darling act in society. Louis Jouvet, for example, made Juan's secret fear of God the major emphasis of Moliere's play.20 Dom Juan certainly acts as a convinced unbeliever. Yet if we seek a psychological answer to the subjective question of his basic personal beliefs, we must see him as having a rather capricious personal investment in the denial of God. We can see this when he tempts a poor man with the offer of a "gold guinea, if you'll utter a blasphemy." The poor man bravely answers that he "would rather die of starvation," and at once Juan yields him the guinea, to save his own face; and he then gives the implausible rationalization that he does it "for the love . . . of humanity" (G&M, pp. 63-64). In such episodes Juan is patently insincere; but he also uses his skepticism to rationalize what seems to be a psychological compulsion to be an outsider. He delights in showing off his separateness from the other people of his world. He uses politeness as a 20 Blain, "Dom Juan," pp. 85-86. 209


weapon for self-defense; when his father delivers a tirade against his misdeeds, Juan's only answer is an impudent irrelevance: "Won't you take a chair, Sir? You could talk much more comfortably if you were sitting down" (G&M, p. 78). Juan always wants to be one up. Indeed his downfall is, in effect, the result of this egocentric urge. It is simply not true that when he invites the Commander's statue to supper it is because, as he claims, "I would like to pay him the compliment" (G&M, p. 70). It is rather another piece of skeptical levity. Juan's death, then, is really the punishment of a frivolous game of using the conventions of society only to undermine them. But it may also have a larger and more inward meaning. For, we may ask, what reasonable and sensitive person today does not, at least in practice, live his or her life and speak his or her words without some awareness of a perpetual duality between professed belief and actual skepticism? In that sense Moliere's Juan, as Michel Serre has written, can be seen as a "hero of modernity."21 Roland Barthes has said that Dom Juan is a man for whom "merely to do wrong is to know that he is, irremediably, isolated and free."22 Tirso's protagonist does not seem to challenge any of society's beliefs; Moliere's can be seen to challenge them all. He is, in fact, an unheroic, though not unattractive, hero of modern individualism. The Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni wrote a rather undistinguished Don Giovanni Tenorio in 1736; and there were musical versions by Purcell and Gluck. Don Juan was becoming very well known. Mozart's Don Giovanni was the third opera on the topic to be produced in the year 1787. It was an immediate success, and was later acclaimed by S0ren Kierkegaard as an opera which "ought to stand highest . . . among all classic works."23 21 "Don Juan, apparition d'Hermes," Hermes 1 (Paris, 1986), p. 243. 22 Cited by Blain, "Dom Juan," p. 191. 23 Eitber-Or, vol. 1, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, revised Howard A. Johnson (Princeton, N.J., 1971), p. 134; hereafter cited by page reference in the text.

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The tribute comes from an essay entitled "The immediate stages of the erotic, or, the musical erotic," published in 1843. D°n Giovanni, Kierkegaard writes, is the supreme example of "the absolutely reciprocal interpenetration" of form and subject-matter (51). The subject - to simplify Kierkegaard - is "the sensuous-erotic as principle" (62). This, Kierkegaard argues, is a topic that came into being only with Christianity, which, by attempting to "exclude [the flesh] from the world" (59) had in fact unleashed sensuousness as a rival power to spirit. In this context, while Faust can be seen as "an idea which is . . . essentially individual" (91), Don Juan is not so much a conscious individual as "flesh incarnate," or "the inspiration of the flesh by the spirit of the flesh" (87); existing where "language has no place, nor sober-minded thought" (88), he is "the energy of sensual desire" (98). That is why, for Kierkegaard, Mozart's opera is the "best" of all operas (80), because in it Mozart has fully expressed the power of sensual desire, which is really a musical rather than a verbal experience. "Sensuousness," Kierkegaard asserts, is "the essential potency of music" (72). In the realm of music, Kierkegaard was an avowed amateur (54), and we need not accept his views as authoritative. Still, he surely expresses something of the essence of Don Giovanni's greatness, in pointing out the irresistible combination of its music and its subject-matter. Musically, the first of the two acts is immensely impressive in its dramatic drive forward, and its perfect interlinking of the themes and other musical aspects of the opera. But in the second act Mozart had to modify the libretto as some additional arias were wanted by the singers of Don Ottavio and Elvira. These arias do not contribute to either the progress of the action or the development of character. Still, the later part of the second act is a supreme success, and the engulfment in fire and darkness of the unrepentant Don Juan has an overpowering finality.24 Dramatically, Da Ponte's libretto has many faults; he had had to 24 See, for example, Andrew Steptoe, The Mozart Da Ponte Operas (Oxford, 1988), pp. 186-89.

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write two-and-a-half opera libretti in only two months, so it is not surprising that he followed, and in some ways confused, an earlier version of the story.25 Nevertheless, Don Juan's vengeful former mistress Elvira, in particular, is a fine developing character. Don Juan himself is an equivocal figure. He is capable, sophisticated, powerful, and unscrupulous - but he is hardly a "character" at all in himself, because he is always playing a role: not merely in pretending to be other people as an aid to seduction, as had Tirso's Don Juan, but even in "playing" himself, as charming man, great gentleman, generous host, protector, musician — and lover. This essential lability later made it possible for watchers, listeners, and readers to people Juan's internal void with their favorite romantic dreams. We must agree that he "is an unaware person for a Mozartian hero," as Joseph Kerman writes.26 On the other hand, as Kerman also points out, when Don Juan finally meets the stone guest he rises "magnificently to the occasion, fearless and true to himself in a crisis which is past praise"27 - his most bravura performance is transformed into a howl of despair.

Another celebrated work gave further impetus to the spread of the Don Juan legend. Byron's Don Juan is one of the greatest long English poems of the Romantic period; Goethe called it "a work of infinite genius."28 Whether Byron made a real contribution to the Don Juan story, however, is quite another matter. Most critics would agree that he did not even try;29 instead he turned the story inside-out and upside-down by making his Juan a passive charmer 25 The earlier version was by Bertati. See Ernest Newman, "Don Giovanni," in Great Operas, vol. 2 (New York, 1958), pp. 146-64, 169-72. 26 Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama: New and Revised Edition (Berkeley, 1988), p.

102.

27 Kerman, Opera, pp. 102-3. 28 "Byron's Don Juan," in Goethe's Literary Essays, ed. J. E. Spingarn (1921; New York, 1964), p. 205. 29 Lord Byron, Don Juan, and Other Satirical Poems, ed. Louis I. Bredvold (New York, 1935), p. xxv.

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who is seduced by a succession of women. Byron probably chose "Don Juan" as an ironic name for his hero, making use of the already established term for a notorious womanizer — a gesture in itself a tribute to the extent that Don Juan was already well known as a myth. Byron's Juan, compared with most of his predecessors, has only a modest number of affairs. He is limited to the married, and forward, Dona Julia; the beautiful Haidee; the sultana Gulbeyaz, whose amorous orders he refuses at the risk of his death; and Catherine the Great, to whose sexual desires he yields, having first undergone the necessary preliminary testing for the imperial lady by her tester or Eprouveuse. In the case of Haidee, their love is innocent and mutual; elsewhere the ladies are the aggressors. Byron's Don Juan is an innocent: he is youthful throughout - sixteen years old when initiated into sexual activity by Dona Julia, and still a "boy" to Catherine - in contrast to the usual portrayal of Don Juan as an experienced man (Kierkegaard estimated Mozart's Don Giovanni to be thirty-three years old [101]). As a result there is an unbridgeable gap, in experience and in moral attitude, between Byron's very youthful, innocent, and sympathetic hero, and the other portrayals of Don Juan. Most of the rest of the traditional trappings of the story are omitted: there is no suggestion of a comic servant, like Catalinon or Leporello, no signs of a stone guest, or of the possibility of moral retribution for sin. There is, however, a narrator, and it is in this satiric and worldly-wise voice that a shrewd reader might discern the real Don Juan, now a voyeur rather than a participant in the story.

There were many other treatments of the Don Juan story during the Romantic period, especially in Germany and France. The German poet Christian Dietrich Gabbe wrote a Don Juan und Faust, a work of considerable merit and interest, with Don Juan figuring as a selfsatisfied and lively contrast to the gloomy and pessimistic Faust. Other versions included Pushkin's The Stone Guest (1830), a good example of the tendency, which had developed in the Romantic era, 213


to redeem Don Juan; Musset also took this view in the poem Namouna (1832). In 1834, Prosper Merimee introduced the claims of another possible "original" of Don Juan, in his novella Les ames du purgatoire. There had actually been a well-known Spaniard, Miguel Manara, born in Seville in 1625, who, after a life of reckless profligacy, was reformed, at the canonical age of thirty, by falling in love and marrying. When his wife died, he entered a monastery, and lived so saintly a life that, a year after his death in 1679, he was recommended for canonization. In 1778 he achieved the title of Venerable; and further promotion is pending, with the list of the requisite four attested miracles yet to be supplied. Merimee called his Manara, Juan; and this started a major confusion, which was multiplied in 1836 by Alexander Dumas's play Don Juan de Manara: La chute d'un ange. Dumas added considerably to the story (including the personal appearance of the Virgin Mary); his version was entirely melodramatic, very popular, and may, in its turn, have influenced Jose Zorilla y Moral's play, Don Juan Tenorio (1844). Zorilla's story is also melodramatic. The action opens with Don Juan Tenorio meeting his equally wild rival, Don Luis Mejia. Their business is to settle their accounts as to who has done the most harm in the previous year. Of course, Don Juan defeats his rival: he has killed thirty-two people as against Don Luis's mere twentythree, and he has seduced seventy-two women as against his rival's pitiful fifty-six. Don Luis is furious to have lost the wager, and so Don Juan placates him by a further challenge: in the next six days he will seduce both "a novice on the eve of taking her vows," and "the bride of a friend who is about to marry."30 Juan begins his task by conquering Luis's lady, Dona Ana, by the stratagem of pretending to be Don Luis. Next, he carries off to his own house Dona Inez, 30 This and later quotations are taken from William I. Oliver's translation, in Mandel, ed., The Theatre of Don Juan, p. 484. Later references are cited in the text by page reference. The standard Spanish edition of the play is that of Aniano Pena, Don Juan Tenorio (Madrid, 1984). See also the treatment in Narciso Alonso Cortes, Zorilla: su vida y sus obras, 3 vols. (Valladolid, 191720),

1.405-42.

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the Commander's daughter; Juan saves her from her burning convent, where he just happened to be "walking about . . . at the time" (p. 509)But — and here is a total, typically Romantic, change in the character — Don Juan falls in love with Inez. He wants to marry her, and "bends his pride" to beg the Commander, Don Gonzalo, to give him her hand. Juan has argued that God hopes "to win me to Him through your love" (p. 512); Inez's goodness will "make an angel of one who was a devil" (p. 516). But Don Gonzalo is insulting, and impervious to Juan's pleas; so Don Juan shoots him, then kills Don Luis in a duel, and escapes to Italy. End of Part One. But there is also a three-act Part Two; and it features a second process of implausible redemption for the hero. Five years later, Don Juan returns, and finds that his father, Don Diego, has spent his fortune converting the family burial ground into a graveyard for all his son's victims. The cemetery is dominated by statues of the Commander, Don Luis, and Dona Inez; and soon we have not one living statue but at least three. Dona Inez, we are told, died of her sufferings when she returned to the convent, "abandoned by Juan" (p. 522); now she comes back as a ghost. She had earlier "offered . . . God my soul in ransom for your sinful one." She tells Juan he is certain to die next day, and promises that, if he is true to his "hell-inspired love," then he will "find me at your side; but if your choice is evil, you'll bring us both eternal ruin" (p. 524). At this point two of Don Juan's old friends pass by, and he invites them to dinner at his house; as an ironic afterthought he invites the three statues as well, and makes a special plea to that of the Commander: "because you can tell me whether there is another world beyond the one I live . . . another life, in which, to tell the truth, I have never believed" (p. 527). At a grand dinner the next day, after ominous preparatory sounds, the Commander's statue emerges through the door. Juan's friends fall in a faint, and the statue proceeds to tell Juan to "prepare your soul" for death the next day; at the same time, it invites Don Juan "to return my call" (p. 532). In the last act, entitled "The mercy of God and the apotheosis of love," the Commander's table is deco215

Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis rated with snakes and bones; the fare is "a large platter of ashes," and a "goblet of fire" (p. 535). The statue, a remorseless doctrina ex machina, promises Don Juan that "a single act of contrition assures the soul's salvation" (p. 536). Juan is incredulous; how can "thirty years of crime and sin" be erased "in a single moment"? The service for the dead sounds; ghosts, skeletons, and spirits rise out of their graves to attend. The statue offers its hand "in token of farewell," but Don Juan hesitates. Very soon, however, he learns that God's mercy is not for him. The skeletons and ghosts are about to fall on him; and the statue grimly asserts, "It is too late" (p. 537). Surprise! Surprise! That is not the end. Dona Inez emerges from her tomb, and pronounces that "God forgives Don Juan at the foot of my grave." Don Juan then exclaims: "Almighty God, I believe in you" (p. 537). The service for the dead stops; the funeral bells cease tolling; the spirits of the dead return to their funeral urns; and Inez, followed by Don Juan, falls on the carpet of flowers which has replaced her tomb. As Juan dies, he says: "The God of Don Juan is the God of mercy." The memorable last sentence of the stage direction is: "Their souls issue from their mouths in the shape of flames that rise and disappear into space to the accompaniment of music" (p. 538). One could well imagine a Hollywood version of this extravagant conclusion. But this brief account of the plot does not, alas, give any sense of the play's merits. Zorilla is a gifted poet, not subtle but melodious, energetic, full of effective and colorful images. The subject, of course, is very much what the public wanted, with lots of action and splendid rhetorical speeches. Poor Zorilla had sold the play outright for its first performance; and he was agonized, when he fell on relatively evil days, to see the play performed so regularly without any financial benefit to himself. Still, he had some rewards; he was crowned poet laureate in a great ceremony in Granada in 1889; and when he died in 1893 n * s splendid funeral was given a day of national mourning, and was said to have been attended by 200,000 people. 31 31 Miguel Ramos Carrion, "A Zorilla en su entierro," El Impartial, January 26, 1893. 2l6


All the imitations of the original Don Juan have some features in common with Tirso's protagonist. They are like him in being unthinkingly, one might even say unconsciously, egocentric: other people do not exist as other people for them. They may or may not be disbelievers in the commonly accepted religious sytems of the time, but they certainly do not put these systems into practice, except for last-minute attempts at repentance, as in the case, for example, of Zorilla's Juan. They are all great travellers (if only because they have imperative reasons for getting away from where they currently are), all happy masters of the art of trickery, deceit, and lying. They all have a single personal servant, although only some of these servants — Moliere's Sganarelle and Da Ponte's Leporello, for example - are as important and amusing as Tirso's Catalinon; Zorilla's servant, Ciutti, is just an instrument of Juan's, affording no criticism, and providing little humor. As to their sex lives, which are our main interest as well as theirs, all the Don Juans we have considered are apparently effective performers; but there are important differences. Moliere's hero is possibly the least obsessive about women. He has more of the old meaning of libertin, "freethinker," in his nature: he attacks religious and moral hypocrisy with relish, but he has only one amorous affair during the course of the play, and that is with his wife, Elvire. Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni is an insatiable seducer, according to Leporello's list of his past conquests; but this hero, too, is comparatively unsuccessful in his amorous performances onstage. Indeed, he has been called the "professionally most futile" lover of any Don Juan.32 Zorilla's Don Juan may not be very plausible, but he too has a very respectable total of reported successes with the ladies. Zorilla, however, is also a Romantic, and in his way a modern writer: so, although Zorilla's Juan has, in the manner of his predecessors, completely heartless designs on Dona Inez, this all changes when he sees and speaks to her: he falls in love at first sight, and as a result is, essentially, reformed. Both Don Luis and Don Gonzalo put them32 Newman, "Don Giovanni," p. 116. 217


selves in the wrong, and more or less force Juan to kill them; so it is not really his fault, the play implies, and we must forgive him. Furthermore, Juan's love is reciprocated by Inez, both in life and beyond the grave. She revokes the doom already pronounced by the Commander, and Juan and Inez go together to a glorious life after death. Mozart and Da Ponte would have none of this: their bold bad man goes down to hell, shouting; and his human pursuers, left behind to the conventionality of their happy endings, are diminished by his absence. But the last-minute forgiveness of Zorilla's Don Juan is very similar to that in Goethe's Faust; both Goethe and Zorilla change the original punitive ending of the story they have inherited, and undercut its moral, so that they can support the modern system of monogamous romantic love, which is the pillar of the individualist system of the nuclear family; they sabotage the punitive schemes of Marlowe and Tirso respectively, so that they can endorse the Romantic pieties of love the redeemer. THE ROMANTIC DON QUIXOTE Don Quixote has had many imitations in many languages; but of all our four myths it is the one which has probably been most read in its original version, whether in Spanish or in translation, and the one which has most influenced other writers in their own work. Don Quixote was rather slower in its diffusion than Robinson Crusoe, the only other of our myths which made its entrance as a work of prose fiction. Robinson Crusoe was translated into French, German, and Dutch within a single year of its original appearance.33 Don Quixote took longer. Its first translation was into English: Thomas Shelton's version of Part I came out in 1612, and Part II in 1620; there was another translation by John Phillips in 1687. 34 But the total number of English editions in the seventeenth 33 Paula A. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore, 1989), p. 412. 34 Edwin C. Knowles, "Cervantes and English literature," in Cervantes across the Centuries, ed. Angel Flores and M. J. Benardete (New York, 1947), pp. 266-68.

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century was less than in France. There, Part I was translated in 1614, and Part II in 1615; and by the end of the century there had been at least fourteen editions of the work. Readers throughout the seventeenth century saw Don Quixote primarily as a comic and satiric figure; it is significant that the term "quixotism" came into the English language at this time. 35 The eighteenth century took Cervantes more seriously. Between 1700 and 1750 there were eighteen or nineteen editions, and, according to Jerry Beasley, the work is "crucially important . . . to any understanding of the age's tastes in fiction." 36 There were a growing number of serious admirers of Cervantes among writers of new realist fiction in England. Perhaps the most influential was Henry Fielding, who announced on the title page of his novel Joseph Andrews that his "History" was "Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, / Author of Don Quixote"^ Other novels of the time include Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752) and Richard Graves's The Spiritual Quixote (1773). Tobias Smollett's The Life and Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves (1760-61) is openly based on Cervantes s story; Smollett even published his own translation of Don Quixote. Samuel Johnson clearly assumed that readers not only knew but identified with Don Quixote; he wrote in The Rambler (No. 2, 1750), that "Very few writers can deny that they have admitted visions of the same kind," and added: "when we pity him we reflect on our own disappointments." The Romantic period completely transformed the general view of Don Quixote and adopted the knight as a much less equivocal personal ideal for poets as well as prose writers. In his autobiographical poem The Prelude, William Wordsworth acknowledges the powerful appeal of "The famous history of the errant knight / Recorded by Cervantes," and tells how the book once prompted a dream of a 35 "Quixotism" is first cited in the Oxford English Dictionary at 1688. 36 Jerry C. Beasley, Novels of the 1740s (Athens, Ga., 1982), p. 10. 37 See facsimile title page of first edition (1742) in Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Harmondsworth, 1977, 1988).

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis "semi-Quixote," a figure to whom the dreamer Wordsworth has given A substance, fancied him a living man, A gentle dweller in the desert, crazed By love and feeling, and internal thought Protracted among endless solitudes; Have shaped him wandering upon this quest! Nor have I pitied him; but rather felt Reverence was due to a being thus employed; And thought that, in the blind and awful lair Of such a madness, reason did lie couched.38 Byron, too, clearly admired Cervantes's work. Although he wrote the howler that "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away," 39 he made amends in this earlier stanza of Don Juan: Of all tales 'tis the saddest, and more sad, Because he makes us smile. His hero's right And still pursues the right: to curb the bad His only object, and 'gainst odds to fight His guerdon. Tis his virtue makes him mad. But his adventures form a sorry sight; A sorrier still is the great moral taught By that real epic unto all who have thought. 40 Poetically, the lines are by no means Byron at his best; but although he was not always the most serious man in the world, he was deadly serious here in envisioning the poet - h i m s e l f - as a Quixote, a foredoomed hero. There is also something new in Coleridge's attitude to Don Quixote, "the master work of Cervantes and his country's genius." Quix38 William Wordsworth, The Prelude; Or, Growth of a Poet's Mind (1850), reproduced in Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, revised Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1969), 5.60-61, 143-52. 39 Don Juan, ed. T. G. Staffan, E. StefFan, and W. W. Pratt (Harmondsworth, 1982, 1987), canto XIII, stanza n . 40 Don Juan, canto XIII, stanza 9.

22O


ote, he memorably writes, "is reason divested of the judgement and understanding," whereas Sancho Panza "is common sense without reason or imagination . . . put him and his master together and they form a perfect intellect. These two characters possess the world, alternately and interchangeably the cheater and the cheated. To impersonate them, and to combine the permanent with the individual, is one of the highest creations of genius, and has been achieved by Shakespeare and Cervantes, almost alone." 41 Coleridge was here participating, in his own characteristically subtle manner, in a general change in the way that Europe now saw Cervantes. This change has been effectively documented by Anthony Close; 42 Close sees the main contribution to have come from Germany. There Don Quixote was translated early - Part I in 1648, and both parts in 1683 — from French translations. There were several adaptations in novels, and a veritable obsession with dramatic and pictoral versions of the story in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a development partly related, curiously enough, to the widespread German admiration for Fielding. 43 Herder was a lifelong student of Don Quixote. At first he disliked Cervantes's mockery of the hero, "who possesses so many great and noble traits"; later he came to appreciate the realism of Sancho Panza, and saw Don Quixote as one of the "Pucks of history who are still riding in broad daylight without realizing that their hour is past." This historical view of Quixote was very influential. 44 Close finds echoes of Herder's thought in nearly all the German Romantic writers: in Goethe (who was a lifetime student, and read Don Quixote in his amateurish Spanish); in his friend Schiller; in 41 Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas M. Raysor (London, 1936), pp. 98, 102. 42 Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to "Don Quixote" (1918; Cambridge,

1978). 43 Lienhard Bergel, "Cervantes in Germany," in ed. Flores and Benardete, Cervantes across the Centuries, pp. 309—10. 44 Bergel, "Cervantes in Germany," pp. 313-15. Bergel mentions that Herder also anticipated the later notion that Don Quixote was "the national novel" of Spain. 221

Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis Schelling; in the Schlegel brothers; in Tieck; in Heine; and in Jean Paul Richter. Schiller played a particularly important role in setting the general critical standards which would affect the approach of the later Romantic writers in Germany. Cervantes's admirable and kindly brigand, Roque Guinart, gave Schiller the psychological idea for Karl Moor, the hero of his play The Robbers. Schiller wrote that "his bitterness against the world" helps us to understand "the strange Don Quixote whom we abhor and love, admire and pity in the robber Karl Moor."45 Schelling wrote, in his Philosophy and Art (1802-5), t n a t " t n e mythical saga" of Don Quixote is "the inevitable struggle between the Real and the Ideal." 46 This idea was also pursued by Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel is particularly important in the development of attitudes towards Don Quixote because of his general critical theory that art is a form of higher play which consoles the soul by raising it above the cares of quotidian realities. The "higher play" of Don Quixote, he writes, is a portrait of "the original chaos of human nature." 47 Quixote is "more symbolical than individual"; and his adventures present a "grotesque comedy" in which "the Ideal, crazed and bemused, succumbs in exhaustion," but nevertheless "emerges as morally superior to its vulgar adversaries." 48 The other Romantic writers mentioned by Close were also deeply affected by Cervantes. Heine wrote that Don Quixote, along with Goethe's Faust, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, is the favored Romantic text: "all of our knights who fight and suffer for ideas appear . . . as so many Don Quixotes." 49 For Jean Paul Richter, Quixote and Sancho Panza are "twin stages of Folly [who] shine over the fate of humanity as a whole." 50 Tieck translated Don Quixote, wrote an interesting introduction for it, and also wrote his own quixotic novel, Eine Sommerreise. Tieck explains the alleged disparity between 45 46 47 48 49 50

Bergel, "Cervantes in Germany," Bergel, "Cervantes in Germany," Bergel, "Cervantes in Germany," Close, The Romantic Approach, p. Bergel, "Cervantes in Germany," Bergel, "Cervantes in Germany,"

p. 321. p. 322. p. 324. 36. pp. 3 3 0 - 3 2 . pp. 326-28.

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the "poetical" and the "unpoetical" aspects of Don Quixote on the grounds that there is no fundamental opposition: Don Quixote "is deserving of both veneration and laughter."51 Friedrich Hegel took a somewhat less favorable tack. For him, Don Quixote is "the subjective character in its extreme form," comic because of "the contrast between a rationally organised world and an isolated individual who tries to create for himself order and stability." "Young people are the modern Don Quixotes," Hegel continues, because of their failure to appreciate "the established laws of state and society, by the police, the courts and the army."52 In France, writers were almost all enthusiastic about Cervantes. Voltaire, on one occasion, even identified himself with Don Quixote. Arriving at the German city of Hertford, he was challenged by a sentry: "Who goes there?" Voltaire self-mockingly answered: "Don Quichotte."53 Rousseau saw Quixote as a fighter for human rights. In a poem to a friend, he wondered if he really wanted to be "the great ranter," the new Don Quixote, in a doomed battle for social equality.54 Chateaubriand spoke of the "cruel gaiety" of Don Quixote, and Balzac claimed to be like Quixote in that he "likes to take the defense of the weak against the strong."55 Alfred de Vigny, in his Journal d'un poete (February-March, 1840), imagined that on his deathbed Cervantes, asked what he wanted to show in Don Quixote, answered "Me." Vigny continued, "It is the misfortune of the imagination and of enthusiasm to be misplaced in a vulgar and materialistic society." His generation were all, he wrote, "perpetual Don Quixotes."56 To sum up, English, French, and German Romantic writers read 51 Bergel, "Cervantes in Germany," pp. 325—26. 52 Bergel, "Cervantes in Germany," pp. 328-30; Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art (New York, 1975), 2.373-75. 53 Jean Orieux, trans. Bray and Lane, Voltaire (New York, 1979), p. 150. 54 Jean Girchenn, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. John and Doreen Weightman, vol. 1 (London, 1966), p. m . 55 Crooks, "Translation of Cervantes into French," in ed. Flores and Benardete, Cervantes across the Centuries, p. 302. 56 Alfred de Vigny, Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1968), 2.112, 1129. 223

Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis Cervantes with a new seriousness and sympathy, and saw Don Quixote as a pure and genuine fighter for social equality and for an ideal. But it was in Russia that Cervantes received his finest accolade. Don Quixote did not get its first Russian translation from the original Spanish until 1838; but there had previously been at least four versions of the novel translated into Russian from French, 37 and Cervantes was appreciated in Russia at least from the time of Catherine the Great. Pushkin based the heroine of Yevgeni Onegin on Don Quixote (with a little dash of Don Juan) — though in her case Tatyana has been reading too many modern sentimental novels rather than chivalric romances. 38 But by far the most important admirer of Cervantes in Russia was Dostoevsky. He wrote that if this world ended and people in some other "were asked whether they understood their life on earth and what conclusion they had come to about it, a man could just present the volume of Don Quixote and say: 'Here is my conclusion on life. Can you condemn me for it?'" 3 9 In two letters of December 1867 Dostoevsky described an original idea he had had for a novel. The first letter was to his editor, Maikov; Dostoevsky wrote, on December 4, that he was going to tackle "a fascinating idea, and one I am in love with." He continued: "The idea is — to portray a perfectly good man. I believe there can be nothing more difficult than this, especially in our time." 60 The following day, Dostoevsky wrote to his niece, Sofia Ivanovna, along similar lines: The main idea of the novel is to portray a positively good man . . . There is only one positively good figure in the world — Christ — so that the phenomenon of that boundlessly, infinitely good figure is already in itself an infinite miracle . . . of the figures in Christian literature, the most complete is Don Quixote. But he is good only because at the same time he is ridiculous, and that's the only reason it succeeds. Compassion for a good 57 Ludmilla B. Turkevich, "Cervantes in Russia," in ed. Flores and Benardete, Cervantes across the Centuries, pp. 343—44. 58 Turkevich, "Cervantes in Russia," pp. 348-50. 59 Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, ed. Joseph Frank and Darrel Goldstein, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New Brunswick, 1987), p. 272, n. 72. 60 Selected Letters, p. 262.

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Romantic Apotheosis of Renaissance Myths man who is ridiculed and is unaware of his own worth generates sympathy in the reader. And this ability to arouse compassion is the very secret of humor.61 Dostoevsky's novel, of course, was The Idiot. To have seen Quixote as a positively good man was recognition indeed; but to place him on more or less the same level as Christ is an extraordinary tribute. The parallel between Quixote and Myshkin, the hero of The Idiot; is neither close nor detailed; but Dostoevsky's "idiot," as a Romantic transformation of quixotic qualities, is a fascinating and original character. Myshkin is sometimes rather ridiculous, but in a way that arises out of his strength; his lack of practical social sense comes from his admirable lack of concern with any material or prudential motive; he totally refuses to think anything but good of people, even of those who try to cheat or abuse him. Dostoevsky clearly intended Myshkin to be humorous; but Dostoevsky's deeply realistic psychology hardly allows it. In fact, the portrayal of Myshkin in The Idiot is complicated by the fact that Dostoevsky is himself an ideological presence in the novel. Myshkin's tirade about how superior the Russian religious orthodoxy is to Roman Catholicism (pp. 523—28)62 may strike us as an indication of extreme, even comic, exaggeration; but it actually represents Dostoevsky's own thinking. This has wider implications: Dostoevsky could not be objective, ironic, or comic about Myshkin because he was personally committed to show how Myshkin, despite his childishness and folly, was indeed a "perfectly good man." Dostoevsky wants to give a striking example of what Jesus meant when he quoted the Commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," and when he said, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." 63 (Not surprisingly, these Christian truths are just as difficult to demonstrate in a novel as they are in real life; hence continued critical argument as to whether or not Myshkin is a "comic" creation.) 61 Selected Letters, p. 269-70. 62 The Idiot, trans. Eva M. Martin (London, 1948), pp. 523-28. I call the prince "Myshkin" throughout, rather than Martin's romanization "Muishkin." 63 Matthew 19.19; Matthew 7.1.

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Myshkin is an extreme individualist; and the analogy with Don Quixote is representative of the Romantic transformation of all four of our mythical heroes. Myshkin is a genuine prince, and very rich, and thus has the luck to be able to live an unplanned and casual existence, as his whims dictate. He is a great traveller, is more or less free of family ties, and is not locked into institutional or social arrangements. But as an allegedly "holy" man, unlike Cervantes's Quixote, he is not open to the author's criticism. He is, in short, a fine example of the Romantic reinterpretation of Don Quixote as an ego-ideal: a figure that, though defeated by the demands of real life, still suggests a finer model of human aspiration than does mere adaptation to the demands of ordinary existence. Myshkin, like Don Quixote, is not really an enemy of quotidian reality; rather, he wholly ignores its demands for the sake of his own elevated idea of the self. More generally, when de Vigny identified Don Quixote as a "Me," he spoke, not for Cervantes, but for the whole Romantic movement, with its characteristic emphasis on the subjective, the individual's inner consciousness. Dostoevsky's Myshkin is a late but extreme version of the Romantic apotheosis of its mythical heroes. What finer apotheosis could be imagined than to have the hero celebrated as an "infinitely good figure," and placed on the same level as Don Quixote and Jesus Christ? Dostoevsky, as we have seen, quite consciously intended his hero to be Christlike; but the term "apotheosis" may seem somewhat exaggerated when applied to Faust, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe. Yet the redemption accorded to Faust and Don Juan by the Romantics is striking and uniform in at least two respects: first, that the traces of the punitive theme have been virtually eliminated - Faust and Don Juan no longer go to hell - and second, that their characters, as well as those of the other two mythical heroes, are seen in a much more favorable light than before. Many of the wellestablished trappings of the myths, including the heroes' exclusion from family and social ties, and their essentially nomadic lives, are left unchanged. But the spirit is entirely different: the feeling is positive, and on the whole admiring. The authors of the original 226


versions of the myths may well have felt identification with their heroes, but their personal feelings were checked by the constraints of society, and each provided an orthodox moral ending. It may even be true that the feelings of their readers or audience were equally divided. But in the Romantic period the punitive conclusions were largely abandoned, and moral outrage was completely transformed into a fascinated admiration for all four mythical heroes.

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9. Myth and Individualism

Although terms such as mythology and mythical have been part of the English language since the seventeenth century, both myth and individualism are post-Romantic terms. The word "myth" apparently first appeared in English in 1830. Its sense is given by the Oxford English Dictionary as "a purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions, or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena." The word comes from the Latin mythus via the French mythe. Its exact meaning, as the OED definition suggests, is elusive: Claude Levi-Strauss, in his classic essay "The Structural Study of Myth," complains that even today thinking about myth means thinking about "a picture of chaos."1 I shall merely characterize very briefly the main modern ways of thinking about myth in an attempt to clarify how the term can properly be used in the sense we have been employing in this study. I shall lean heavily on the fine empirical summary given by Percy S. Cohen in his 1969 Malinowski Memorial Lecture, "Theories of Myth," which distinguishes seven main types of myth interpretation. 2 The first and earliest type assumes that myths try to answer more or less factual or rational questions. Edward Burnett-Tylor and Sir James Frazer, author of the highly influential book The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890), both assumed that early man had "characteristics of intellectual curiosity not unlike those of nineteenth-century anthropologists"; thus Frazer used the story of the Tower of Babel as an attempt to explain the variety of human languages.3 1 In Myth: A Symposium, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington, Ind., 1965), p. 82. 2 Reproduced in Man 4 (1969), pp. 337-53. 3 Folklore in the Old Testament, vol. 1 (London, 1919), pp. 362-87. 228

Myth and Individualism

Cohen's second group has the advantage - not without dangers of assuming that myths should not be interpreted literally. Its adherents presuppose that there existed specifically mythological forms of language and thought. Thus the main exponent of the school, Ernst Cassirer, saw myths as symbolic projections of human reality: "mythical thinking," he wrote, "is a mode of symbolically structuring the world."4 The third mode of myth interpretation is the psychoanalytic offshoot. It finds the symbolic meanings of myths by translating them into the analogous processes of man's unconscious life. For instance, Oedipus's killing his father and marrying his mother was identified by Freud as "the Oedipus complex," which he considered to be one of the basic features of man's early psychological development. One of Freud's closest disciples, Otto Rank, wrote a booklength study of the Don Juan legend, arguing that Juan's ceaseless quest for women had its origin in his own Oedipal love for his mother, that the killing of the Commander was a symbolic parricide, and that Tirso's Catalinon (or Mozart's Leporello) was Don Juan's ego-ideal.5 This seems to me to be a rather too obvious fitting of the story into a predetermined psychological pattern, materially assisted by the easy compliance of any symbolic mode of interpretation to the demands of a larger theory. The same objection can be made to Jung, who was much more concerned with myth than Freud was. Jung developed a theory of the collective unconscious which gave a social rather than an individual basis to his thought; his system of myth presumes some kind of collective ancestral inheritance in the unconscious mind. Joseph Campbell is in many ways a Jungian thinker, as we can see from the title of his famous book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). When analyzed by Jung, all the heroes of myth, and indeed of history, turn out to have many similar patterns of thought and action. There is in general, then, a reductive tendency in psychoanalytic myth criticism. 4 Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities (New Haven, 1961), pp. 9 4 - 9 6 ; see also Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, 1955). 5 Otto Rank, trans, and ed. David G. Winter, The Don Juan Legend (Princeton, I975)» PP- 4 0 - 4 1 , 5 1 - 5 2 , 57229


The fourth type of myth criticism differs from the first three in that it is basically sociological in emphasis. Its main figures are Emile Durkheim and Bronislaw Malinowski. For Durkheim, the main function of myth was to maintain and strengthen social solidarity. For instance, totemic animals strengthen each group's quasireligious identity as opposed to that of other groups; in that sense myth and ritual have parallel functions. The more fieldworkoriented anthropologist Malinowski was equally concerned with how myths maintain group solidarity; but he increased the range of such explanations by showing how myths ratify and render sacred the institutions of society, from property rights to magic.6 The fifth and sixth kinds of myth interpretation give it a similar social function, and also relate it to ritual. Thus Lord Raglan, whose chief work was on the hero, believed that research would probably discover that myth and ritual are always related.7 But we must object that many myths are not actually told or enacted at rituals, and when they are, the two are sometimes unrelated. The sixth group is more modern and somewhat broader. The poet and novelist Robert Graves wrote that "true myth may be defined as the reduction to narrative shorthand of ritual mime performed on public festivals"; but his own interpretations were less strict than his theory suggests. The story of Athene springing from the head of Zeus, for instance, is interpreted by Graves as symbolizing the suppression of the earth-mother rituals of early Greece by the new patriarchal worship of Zeus.8 Edmund Leach is a professional anthropologist of this group: he sees both myth and ritual as being equally symbolic and containing cryptic statements about social structures.9 Cohen's seventh type of myth interpretation is that of Claude Levi-Strauss, who has found interesting structural regularities in the 6 Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Psychology (London, 1926), especially pp. 2 1 - 2 3 , 56-58. 7 Raglan, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama (1936; New York, 1956). 8 The Greek Myths, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, 1955), pp. 10, 2 0 - 2 1 . 9 E. R. Leach, "Levi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden," Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 23 (1961), pp. 386-96. 230

Myth and Individualism collective representations of primitive societies. Let us look at a small part of his essay dealing with Oedipus. 10 To reduce yet further the simplified version of the story which Levi-Strauss gives, we can itemize four basic elements: (i) Oedipus marries his mother, Jocasta; (2) Oedipus kills his father, Laios; (3) one son of Oedipus, Eteocles, kills another, Polynices; (4) Oedipus s daughter, Antigone, buries her brother, Polynices, despite its being strictly forbidden. Levi-Strauss then analyzes these elements. Groups 1 and 4, he argues, have as a common feature the "overrating of blood relationships" by Oedipus and Antigone; groups 2 and 3 have as their common but opposite feature the "underrating of blood-relationships" by Oedipus and Eteocles.11 Both sets have two relationships: as Levi-Strauss wittily puts it, there is a "positive statement that contradictory relationships are identical inasmuch as they are both self-contradictory in a similar way."12 Behind them both is the further general idea; each of them somehow contains the puzzle of whether man is born from one or two persons. Even this simplified account surely suggests that Levi-Strauss's categorizing involves a certain conceptual strain; both Oedipus s incest and his parricide are highly "understated," as Cohen puts it, by being interpreted merely as examples of "attitudes to bloodrelationships." There is much more to say about kinds of myth interpretation; but I will only mention one other area, that of the literary amateurs - that is, the non-anthropological writers. The literary approach to myth has not been fashionable recently; but it has been very influ10 Levi-Strauss, "Study of myth," in Myth, ed. Sebeok, pp. 81-106. 11 There is also a fifth element: Oedipus kills the Sphinx, as his ancestor Kadmos had long ago killed the dragon; this suggests to Levi-Strauss that, since the dragon and the Sphinx do not want men to live, Oedipus and Kadmos are denying the autochthonous, meaning indigenous or self-created, origin of man. But, the names of various members of Oedipus's family - from Oedipus himself, meaning "swollen-footed," to his father, Laios, meaning "left-sided," and his grandfather Labdacos, meaning "lame" - refer to man's early mastering of the difficulties of walking, and thus support the view that man is born autochthonously. 12 "Study of myth," in Myth, ed. Sebeok, p. 91. 231

Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis ential, with such works as Douglas Bush's Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (1937), and Northrop Frye's Anatomy of

Criticism (1957). The dangers of this approach were pointed out as early as 1953 in Philip Rahv's essay, "The myth and the powerhouse."13 The literary myth critics, Rahv points out, tend to confuse poetry with philosophy; he suggests that their vague religiosity is really an attempt to escape from the domination of the mechanistic obsessions of modern society; they are essentially expressing a nostalgia for a simpler, primitivistic, and Romantic world of the imagination. Despite such warnings, however, we can still accept Mark Schorer's more positive general view of myth: "even a loose definition, however, does not include the current journalistic sense of falsehood, nor does it imply anti-intellectualism or any other such pejorative . . . Myth is a large, controlling image that gives philosophical meaning to the facts of ordinary life." Schorer goes on to consider its relation to religion, citing Durkheim's view that myth is sacred rather than profane; and he chillingly adds that myth helps us to see modern conflict-ridden society as "the result of a number of antithetical and competing mythologies that fail to adjust themselves."14 Cohen's own definition of the chief characteristics of myth is as follows: it "is a narrative of events; the narrative has a sacred quality; the sacred communication is made in symbolic form; at least some of the events and objects which occur in the myth neither occur nor exist in the world other than that of the myth itself; and the narrative refers in dramatic form to origins or transformations."15 And so we ask: "In what sense can we call our four stories myths?" We should certainly be able to adopt much of the thought of Cassirer, who sees myth as symbolical, and also that of Durkheim and Malinowski, who see it in relation to social structure. LeviStrauss's structural emphasis is also acceptable. Cohen's emphasis on the "sacred" and non-realist elements do not apply; but his main 13 Philip Rahv, The Myth and the Powerhouse (1953; New York, 1965), pp. 3-22. 14 "The necessity of myth," from William Blake, quoted in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (Boston, i960), pp. 355-56. 15 Cohen, "Theories of myth," p. 337. 232


point, though simple, is central. Myths, including our four, are all stories, all narratives; and this simple fact, as he points out, gives them a special quality. Any narrative must have a beginning in time; and this implies that "one of the most important functions of myth is that it anchors the present in the past."16 We know that the

heroes of our four myths existed long ago, and that they are in that sense past; but we also regard them as in some sense present. One could say this, I suppose, of the characters in any novel or play; but there is surely a special quality in the "presentness" of the heroes of our myths. This is in part a question of the conditions of performance. The earliest myths of our culture began as oral literature; they must be considered as based on non-literate groups; and their first audience treated them as tales of real, or at least once-existent and historical, people. (How far they were actually believed to be true is, of course, a different matter.) The four figures of our myths have an analogous kind of reality: they are not completely real, historical persons; yet their audience yields to them a kind of genuine existence. This is shown by the way that many scholars have attempted to discover who was the "original" Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, or Robinson Crusoe. All four have been attributed a reality of a special kind — they are not treated as wholly invented fictions. Similarly, it is obvious that although our four figures are not sacred, or seen as gods or demi-gods, they still have a special quality about them; they persist in our memories, and in some sense even become a part of us; they are, in some subtle way, larger than life. Why? One possibility is that, as is not the case with most novels and plays, we remember the chief character, rather than the whole cast of characters, or the author who created them. This is partly because all four of our figures happen to be monomaniacs; they are not particularly interested in other people; they are completely engaged in their own individual enterprise; they are defined by whatever they have somehow decided to do or be. Faust, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe are essentially solitaries; and as Sancho Panza be16 Cohen, "Theories of myth," p. 349. 233


comes infected with his master's ideas and adopts them as part of his own self, Don Quixote and Sancho form a duality of solitaries. Another reason for our identification is that, like the rest of us, presumably, the four protagonists all have an undefined kind of ideal, but do not succeed in reaching it. They are not, in any obvious sense, achievers, but rather emblematic failures. Moreover, they are either punished for their attempt to realize their aspirations — as Faust, Don Juan, or even Don Quixote are — or like Robinson Crusoe they merely survive in a kind of eventless posthumous existence, possibly licking their remembered wounds. As to the other characteristics of myth, it is clear that all our four stories in some sense communicate in symbolic form. They do not, of course, do it in exactly the same way as do traditional myths, since our modern myths give a much more detailed and realistic presentation: we obviously know more about our four heroes than we do about Oedipus or Adam and Eve because of the nature of the dramas and novels in which they appear. Their larger representativeness, however, is fairly obvious to most of us; we may not entirely agree about just what they represent, but they do strike us as standing for larger general ideas. They can, for instance, easily be seen in Levi-Strauss's terms, as containing a contradiction to be mediated: the contradiction being in all four cases, to put it as generally as possible, an opposition between individuals on one side, and their society and its norms on the other. Here we must concede that our four modern myths differ from primitive ones in that they pay less attention to "the cosmic solidarity of life"17 found there, and more to the individual's efforts to realize personal goals. Finally, as far as Cohen's own definition of myth is concerned, it is clear that in his sense our modern myths do not literally treat of "origins or transformations." This is obvious from the mere fact that our myths were created as individual, not social, achievements. They are not essentially concerned with the collective life of communities: all four are, without being directly autobiographical, representations of individual life experiences — experiences directly of 17 David Bidney, "Myth, symbolism and truth," in Myth, ed. Sebeok, p. 16.

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their heroes, and less directly of their authors. In that sense we can, and indeed must, interpret them as representations of the "origins" and the "transformations" of the individualist attitude. Each of these myths began with an unfavorable view of individualism, but the punitive aspect was softened in the Romantic period; they were all transformed into positive models of individuals, and have been so read in our present individualistic culture. We can, therefore, conclude that, despite significant differences between them, we can rightly call all four of our stories "myths," as long as the term is preceded by the word "modern."

"Individualism" is as difficult to define as "myth." As Max Weber wrote: "a thorough analysis of these concepts [individuality and individualism] in historical terms would at the present time be highly valuable to science."18 This is still true: but no such thoroughness can be attempted here. We can at least, however, look a little more closely at the historical process whereby modern individualism emerged. We need, first of all, to know if "individualism" is a modern — meaning, a Renaissance, or a post-Renaissance - phenomenon that is peculiar to the Western world. Or is it a larger phenomenon which is also found in other times and places? Many psychological definitions of the term "individualism" equate it with egoism, with a single individual's inward independence of other people or institutions; and in this case it would surely be difficult to deny the appellation "individualist" to the Athenian Socrates, for example, or to China's Mao Tse-tung. But individualism was not originally or primarily a psychological term; it was and is essentially a social description; if people are aware of being individualists, it must be because the concept is familiar and established in their society. We must concede that various countries and historical periods have been claimed as individualist. Colin Morris, for instance, ar18 Max Weber, trans. Talcott Parsons, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, 1958), p. 222, n. 22.

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gues that individualist structures were established in western Europe from 1050 to 1200 A.D.19 But this is not accepted by the most convincing treatment of the topic known to me, Louis Dumont s Essais sur I'individualisme: 20

Une perspective anthropologique sur Videologie

moderne. Dumont had already written a major study about Indian caste society.21 There, he described how the great majority of people participate in and accept the densely constraining features of their extended family, caste, and religion, and can therefore be seen as "individuals-in-the-world." Christianity, however, produced a new social form, the fraternity of believers in Christ; it was a society supposedly based on the equality of all believers, a society whose members could be called "individuals-in-relation-to-God." St. Paul writes of the justified Christian believer: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Jesus Christ."22 The dominance of the medieval church in civil life was later continued by Calvin. For him, man was utterly impotent before the omnipotence of God; he can only live by divine Grace. Hence arose the doctrine of what Troeltsche and Weber called "this-world asceticism."23 Such asceticism, however, was active in the world of affairs; and so the secular application of Protestant doctrine led to the new social world of capitalist individualism. Dumont, in short, sees the institutionalization of individualism as having started from a Christian base, and having developed from the general idea of a secular society which professed to be a spiritual union of all believers, a union in which each individual was a moral autonomous entity. This society had confined historical and geo19 Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050-1200 (London, 1972). 20 (Paris, 1983), especially pp. 33-114. The Essais were translated into English in 1986. An earlier symposium on The Status of the Individual in East and West, ed. Charles A. Moore and Aldyth V. Morris (Honolulu, 1968), somewhat qualifies, but does not materially affect, Dumont's thesis. I am indebted here to Daniel Shanahan's Towards a Genealogy of Individualism (Amherst, Mass., 1992). 21 Homo hierarchies (Paris, 1967). 22 Galatians, 3.28. 23 Dumont, Individualisme, pp. 30, 264. 236

Myth and Individualism graphical limits; it would not be found in India or China. It is a phenomenon of the Western world; it began with Christianity, and was developed by the Reformation and Calvin. 24 We have already seen how, as a result of the Renaissance and the Reformation, the primacy of the individual over the collective became the defining characteristic of modern Western society as a whole. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we can cite four famous ideological examples who significantly helped the individualist cause. Descartes based his thought on what idea he personally could be sure was real without any doubt; and his solution was "cogito ergo sum." "/" think, we note, not "u>e"; it is not "cogitamus ergo sumus." Later, John Locke also started with the individual as the basis of his psychological, political, and epistemological thought. 25 He laid the basis for much of the thought of the Enlightenment. The two great precursors and models of individualist ideas in the Romantic period are Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau is a writer of "absolutely universal significance," 26 who always held one idea at the center of his thought. This idea was expressed in the Second Discourse, "On the Origin of Inequality" (1755), and is also prominent in Emile: it is, essentially, Rousseau's basic conviction that the individual is naturally good but is made bad by society. Goethe wrote much about the problems of the individual self, most notably in the various parts of his long novel cycle Wilhelm Meister, and in Dichtung und Warheit [Poetry and Truth] (1832). 24 Joseph Campbell has made a similar point about the development of Western myth. He sees how "formerly - but in archaic cultures still - the way was to subordinate all individual judgment, will, and capacities absolutely to the social order: the principle of ego . . . was to be suppressed"; but now the new "humanistic individual has released powers of creativity that have brought about in a mere two centuries changes in the weal and woe of man such as no two millenniums before had ever worked." The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York, 1964), pp. 521-22. 25 See Crawford B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962). 26 Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1932), trans. Peter Gay (Bloomington, Ind., 1956), p. 128.

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Goethe offers no shocking confessions in Dichtung und Warheit. What he does essentially give us is the cultural history of his own being: for instance, the book is wonderfully rich in giving the places (for example, his boyhood homes, and Strassburg Cathedral) and the people — the many friends — who were the formative influences on his developing character. He did not want to "worry" his friends "with confessions of how we feel";27 for it was through the observation of the world beyond the self that Goethe hoped "at the same time to reveal . . . myself, my inner life, my manner of being."28 Man's individuality could not be directly described; but it could, perhaps, be almost endlessly surprised in its concrete circumstances. Rousseau and Goethe in their different ways revealed more about their lives and their own private selves than anyone before; they both exhibited an almost religious dedication to their own individual inwardness. Still, we must remember, they thought of the self with the French or German equivalent of the word "individuality"; to give one definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, individuality is "the sum of the attributes which distinguish an object from others of the same kind." Neither Rousseau nor Goethe, nor any other writers of their period or before, used the more programmatic term, "individualism." It had not yet been invented. We must therefore consider how the new term came into being, and how it developed its present range of meanings. When the word "individualism" came to England in the 1830s it was dyslogistic — it carried an invidious or a hostile sense: it put the individual person in implied opposition to human solidarity in the form of a properly collectivist or group view of social, economic, or religious phenomena. This invidious sense of individualism was, very appropriately, created and adopted in the period of the French Revolution and the Romantic movement. As Steven Lukes has shown in his excellent study of the term, the French Revolution 27 Quoted in Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago, 1978), p. 345. 28 Quoted in Weintraub, Value of the Individual, p. 369.

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gave rise to the conservative fear that, as Edmund Burke put it, "the commonwealth itself would . . . crumble away, be disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality."29 In fact, it was French writers and thinkers who first began to disseminate terms related to individualism. The first recorded usage of "individualist" is attributed to the reactionary Catholic thinker Joseph de Maistre; he employed it to castigate the new intellectual and political climate of revolutionary democracy. He condemned this "deep and frightening division of minds, this infinite fragmentation of all doctrines, political protestantism carried to the most absolute individualism." 30 Lammenais also attacked "Individualism" because, he wrote, it "destroys the very idea of obedience and duty, thereby destroying both power and law."31 Another conservative, the novelist Balzac, also frequently made derogatory use of the word individualism: he wrote in 1839 that modern society had "created the most horrible of all the evils: individualism."32 There were also opponents of individualism on the other side of the political fence: people who opposed individualism because they wanted a socialist or collectivist form of government. Saint Simon and his followers, for instance, emphasized the need for "universal association"; for them, the concept of "individualisme" was negative and pernicious, as it also was for the early commmunist August Blanqui, who claimed that "Communism is the protector of the individual, individualism his extermination."33 It was left to yet another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, to be chiefly responsible for the first relatively favorable use of the term in England. In his L'ancien regime et la Revolution (1856) he wrote of "the word 'individualism,' which we have coined for our own requirements"; the term, he writes, was completely "unknown to our ancestors, for the good reason that in their days every individual 29 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; London, 1910), p. 94; cited Steven Lukes, Individualism (New York and London, 1973), p. 3. 30 "Extract d'une conversation," cited Lukes, Individualism, p. 4. 31 "Des progres de la Revolution," cited Lukes, Individualism, p. 6. 32 Balzac, Unefille d'Eve, La condition bumaine, Pleiade edition (Paris, 1956), 2.69. 33 Lukes, Individualism, pp. 6—7, 11.

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Puritan Ethic and Romantic Apotheosis necessarily belonged to a group." 34 But Tocqueville himself had already used the term in On Democracy in America (1835); his translator, Henry Reeve, in 1840, with a characteristic British dislike of neologisms, apologized for the word in a note: "I adopt the expression of the original [individualism], however strange it may sound to an English ear, partly because . . . I know of no English word exactly equivalent to the expression." 35 The passage, in chapter two of the second book, which is entitled "Of individualism in democratic countries," runs as follows: Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted with egoisme (selfishness). Selfishness is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with himself and to prefer himself to everything in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends. Democracy, Tocqueville adds, may not only "make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart." In previous times the aristocratic form of government had made all the citizens into "a chain of all the members reaching from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks that chain and severs every link of it." 36 Tocqueville s somewhat derogatory view of the anti-traditional aspects of individualism was, however, softened by his admiration of the strength of America's "democratic institutions," its free press, and its developing sense of a larger understanding of the principle of self-interest; for him, individualism and democratic institutions were complementary; in 34 Trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1955), p. 96. 35 Alexis de Tocqueville, On Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York, 1945), i.vi n.i. See also Jean-Claude Lamberti, La notion d} individualism chez Tocqueville (Paris, 1970). 36 De Tocqueville, On Democracy in America, pp. 104—6.

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Myth and Individualism effect, he was able to make individualism a favorable term by invoking the concrete example of American democracy. The term individualism, however, remained derogatory for many other writers of the period, such as Robert Owen, who called for "attractive union, instead of repulsive individualism"^*1 and John Stuart Mill, who saw individualism as essentially competitive, "each for himself and against all the rest." 38 Gradually, however, individualism took on a more favorable meaning in England. William McCall, a Unitarian minister, wrote various popular books, such as The Elements of Individualism (1847), which argued the case for individualism. Later, there came more powerful proponents of individualism, such as Samuel Smiles, whose very popular Self Help appeared in 1859. Smiles preached the virtues of the Manchester School of political economy, with its emphasis on laisser faire: no barriers should be placed on the individuals freedom of economic effort. This opposition to all forms of collectivism was also supported by the very different ideology of the "rugged individualists" of the businessmen of the last decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the increasing needs of the people for educational and social services led to a compromise position adopted by liberal thinkers such as T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse. Hobhouse argued, in Liberalism (1911), that the government, to "maintain individual freedom and equality," should "extend the sphere of social control"; 39 this, however, should only be used when government interference was clearly necessary. This, no doubt, is still the consensus today, although there are many loud voices, arguing on the one side against the increasing interference of the government in private matters, and on the other for more collective action by the government. In the political sense, the dyslogistic sense of individualism has been weakened, while its meaning has been broadened to mean the generally assumed endorsement of the primacy of the individual in political thought. 37 Lukes, Individualism, p. 32. 38 John Stuart Mill, Chapters on Socialism (1879), cited Lukes, Individualism, p. 33. 39 Cited Lukes, Individualism, pp. 35—38.

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The gradual extension of the general public approval given to individualism is obviously relevant to the changes in our myths. The second definition of "individualism" in the Oxford English Dictionary is very clear: it is "self-centered feeling or conduct as a principle; free and independent individual action or thought; egoism." We cannot, it seems, avoid the contradiction between the social and ideological view of individualism on the one hand, and the psychological and ethical view on the other. The sociological view, of course, ties in with the historical; it is allied to the view that "individualism" is an ideological characteristic which is a relatively modern development in history, and one substantially limited to Western societies. Our four myths, then, were historically new; and in this they reflected their period's new emphasis on the social and political primacy of the individual.

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Coda Thoughts on the Twentieth Century

THOMAS MANN'S DOCTOR FAUSTUS

There are many reasons for choosing Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus (1947) as our first example of a modern version of the myths of individualism. It is, to begin with, an undoubted masterpiece; it raises several basic problems concerning individualism in the modern period; and it represents a newly self-conscious approach to myth — Mann has himself written other, more formal studies of mythology.1 As the novel's subtitle — The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkiihn as Told by a Friend — indicates, there are two main characters. The "friend," Serenus Zeitblom, is telling the story in the later years of the Second World War, after Adrian's death in 1940. The equivalent to Faust's compact with the devil (although in this version of the myth it is disassociated from the Mephistopheles figure) occurs in a brothel. Normally chaste and inhibited, Adrian is first enticed there by a diabolic guide; at the third visit, although the woman warns him of the risk, he makes love to her and is infected with syphilis. 2 His evil fate then deprives him of the services of two doctors: Erasmi mysteriously dies, and Zimbalist is arrested. So Adrian gives up the search for a cure; he has always, he says, felt that he was "born for hell" (p. 499). In the final scene, which is the counterpart of the one in the Faustbuch, he tells his friends that "the Evil One hath strengthened his words in good faith 1 For example, Mythology and Humanism: The Correspondence of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerenyi, trans. Alexander Gelley (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975); and "Freud and the future," in Essays, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York, 1957). 2 Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London, 1969), pp. 141-42, 145-48, 153-58. Later quotations will be cited from this edition, by page number, in the

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Coda through four-and-twenty years and all is finished up till the last" (p. 502). He "will no longer hide . . . that already since my twentyfirst year I am wedded to Satan and with due knowing of peril, out of well-considered courage, pride, and presumption because I would win glory in this world, I made with him a bond and vow, so that all which during the term of four-and-twenty years I brought forth . . . is devil's work, infused by the angel of death" (p. 497). Adrian is up-tight; his look, Serenus says, is usually "mute, veiled, musing, aloof to the point of offensiveness, full of a chilling melancholy, it ended in a smile with closed lips, not unfriendly, yet mocking, and with that gesture of turning away, so habitual, so long familiar to me" (p. 163). Serenus observes very early on that Adrian "did not love personal glances, he altogether refused to entertain them or respond to them" (p. 93). Adrian feels embarrassed and humiliated by engaging in any personal commitment, and he has to fall back on using other people, even in the most significant personal matters. For instance, he asks his close friend Rudi Schwerdtfeger to woo the artist and stage-designer Marie Godeau on his behalf; and this has disastrous results — Rudi finally woos her for himself, whereupon his established adulterous lover, Inez Institoris, kills him (pp. 442-49). Adrian, then, cannot express his emotional needs directly; and although his surname, Leverkiihn, suggests "to live audaciously,"3 all his relationships are difficult and turn out badly. Nevertheless he wins much affection, mainly of a quasi-parental kind. There is his mother, Elsbeth; and in his nineteen years at Pfeiffering he finds himself another mother-figure who loves him, Else Schweigestill. When two other women admirers move out to be with him at Pfeiffering, Serenus, himself something of a father-figure to Adrian, comments on his friend's "painful lack of response" to them; but Adrian nevertheless accepts the "devotion of these followers of his with the utter heedlessness of his nature" (p. 314). Adrian is self-absorbed; he is also rigid and pessimistic in his beliefs, and tries to force his ideas on his friends. During their high3 Erich Heller, The Ironic German: A Study of Thomas Mann (Boston, 1958), p. 259.

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school days Adrian explains his love of mathematics to Serenus: "You are a lout . . . not to like it. . . . Order is everything. Romans XIII." Adrian adds: "The powers that be are ordained of God." Serenus "looked at him large-eyed. It turned out that he was religious" (p. 45). We can see the vital importance of religion to Adrian when Nepomuk, his beautiful angelic nephew, is dying; Serenus reports that Adrian, in a frenzy of remorse and guilt for having disregarded the devil's warning that "Thou maist not love" (p. 248), begs the devil "to take [Nepomuk s} body," stricken with cerebrospiral meningitis; "but," he adds, "you'll have to put up with leaving me his soul, his sweet and precious soul, that is where you lose out and make yourself a laughing-stock - and for that I will laugh you to scorn, aeons on end" (p. 477). Serenus is horrified, and tries to calm him; but Adrian replies, defeatedly, that "the good and noble . . . is not to be." Adrian's character and situation are of special significance: he has a very different social and intellectual background from the earlier Fausts; more obviously still, he is, unlike his predecessors, a great musician. This is for three main reasons: first, music is generally agreed to be the form of art in which Germany has been supreme; it is taken to be typical of the German spirit and character, including its tendency to the demonic. Second, from Buddenbrooks to Felix Krull, Mann was fascinated, if not obsessed, by the problematic nature of the relationship between the artist, on the one hand, and the sick and criminal, on the other. Lastly, music was one of Mann's major personal interests: he himself played the violin; he was very close to the great German conductor Bruno Walter and the celebrated music theorist Theodor Adorno; and he also knew Arnold Schoenberg, on whose work Adrian's new music system is largely based.4 Mann's handling of music in the novel shows a fine general command; the descriptions of particular pieces, such as Beethoven's last piano sonata, opus i n , or Adrian's own compositions, such as the Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, are remarkably 4 Walter E. Berendsohn, trans. George C. Buck, Thomas Mann: Artist and Partisan in Troubled Times (Birmingham, Ala., 1973), p. 144.

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successful in the infinitely difficult genre of the literary treatment of music.5 Adrian's attitude to music reflects his personality. He beleves in what he calls the "direct style," where every note is part of a predetermined total pattern, "where there would no longer be a free note" (p. 191). There is an amusing example of Adrian's mania for a strict musical order in his defense of a foolish self-taught Seventh Day Adventist, Beisel; cleverly, Adrian says that "at least he had a sense of order, and even a silly order is better than none at all" (p. 68). Another important aspect of Adrian's personality is his use of archaic German, exemplified in the final confession to his friends quoted above. Serenus refers to Adrian's "old-fashioned phrases and spellings" (p. 129), and makes apologetic excuses for it; he later claims that this "sort of elder German, with its defects and open sentence-structure," is a relic of "the barbaric," which the German language has long since outgrown (pp. 495—96). Mann, of course, took it from the Faustbuch, as he took much else, including proper names, and actual quotations.6 For instance, Mann writes, "O homo fuge" (p. 132), a phrase that occurs both in the Faustbuch and in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.1 Mann also uses the final quotation from the Faustbuch, the warning in the Epistle to Peter to "be sober, to be vigilant; because your adversary, as a roaring lion, seeks whom he may devour" (p. 135). The director of Adrian's school, Dr. Stoientin, uses it when he warns Adrian against the devil, "a roaring lion who goes about seeking whom he may devour" (p. 83). Another reason for Mann's use of the Faustbuch was to make his Faust "stand with one foot in the German sixteenth century."8 It 5 See, for example, Berendsohn, Thomas Mann, p. 158. For a more critical view, see T. E. Apter, Thomas Mann: The Devil's Advocate (London, 1978), pp. 138-55. 6 See Gunilla Bergsten, Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus": The Sources and Structure of the Novel (1963; Chicago, 1969), pp. 33-41. 7 Historia von D. Johann Fausten: Neudruck des Faust-Buches von 1587, ed. Hans Henning (Halle, 1963), p. 21; Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. W. W. Greg (Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, 1604-1616: Parallel Texts [Oxford, 1950]), 2.1.76, 80. 8 Mann to Kerenyi, September 23, 1945; Mythology and Humanism, p. 123.

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was not just a matter of the antique flavor; more significantly, it established the mid-sixteenth century as one of the three main timeframes in the novel — the other two being that of Adrian's life (1885-1940), and the present period of Serenus's writing (May 27, 1943, to some time after May 8, 1945). But the main reason for Mann's use of the Faustbuch was probably that he wanted to go back to its firm moral outlook; he wanted, and not wholly ironically, to imitate its punitive emphasis. Venereal disease is a modern equivalent to the death in the original compact, and Adrian's final ten years of life as a mere vegetable — an appalling fate, ironically similar to that of Friedrich Nietzsche — is a kind of mortal punishment. Mann's Doctor Faustus, as Erich Heller writes, "is the tragic parody of the first Frankfurt Faustbook of 1587." 9 The personality of Adrian exerted a tremendous fascination not only on the other characters in the novel, but also on the author, Mann himself. When a friend asked him if he had any model for Adrian, Mann said no; and then explained that Adrian was a kind of ideal figure, a "hero of our time," a person who bore the suffering of the epoch. I went further, however, and confessed that I had never loved a creature of my imagination - neither Thomas Buddenbrook, nor Hans Castorp, nor Aschenbach, nor Joseph, nor the Goethe of The beloved returns - as I did Adrian. The only exception, perhaps, was Hanno Buddenbrook. I was telling the truth. Quite literally I shared good Serenus' feeling for him, was painfully in love with him from his days as an arrogant schoolboy, was infatuated with his "coldness," his remoteness from life, his lack of "soul" - that mediator and conciliator between spirit and instinct with his "inhumanity" and his "despairing heart," with his conviction that he was damned.10 Mann's own "love" of Adrian is surprising, given that Mann shares with "good Serenus" many aspects of ideology which are clearly opposed by Adrian: love of the classical tradition; political humanism; tolerance and understanding; and scorn of the reactionary with9 Heller, Ironic German, p. 274. 10 Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus (1949), trans. R. and C.

Winston (New York, 1961), pp. 88-89.

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itness of the anti-cultural scholar, Breisacher. Serenus is a Roman Catholic, and a professional classical philologist; temperamentally the opposite of Adrian, he is rational, sensible, and responsible, and possesses a considerable degree of skepticism; he is also somewhat simple-minded. He is terrified by Adrian's tendency to orgiastic laughter, and deeply alarmed by his diabolism, suspecting that Adrian has given himself to the "Great Adversary." His friendship is filled with "fear and dread" (p. 286). But the character of Adrian, Serenus confesses, still "at bottom interested me more than my own" (p. 87); and, as a very loyal friend, he struggles to be fair to him. Their impossibly unreciprocal relationship, indeed, is one of the great satisfactions of the book, although not without much irony, particularly at Serenus s expense. The name of Serenus Zeitblom suggests "serenity" and "the flower of time"; but this is partly ironical. Serenus is, in his way, deeply pessimistic in his historical perspective. The Reformation arouses his total antipathy: it was, he thinks, "an invasion of subjective arbitrariness into the objective statutes and ordinances of the Church" (p. 87); and he approvingly reports Adrian's argument that "Luther's Reformation was only an offshoot and ethical by-path of the Renaissance, its application to the field of religion" (p. 118). Adrian sees the church as a defense against "subjectivist demoralization," and against the "chaos of divine and daemonic powers" (p. 119). Serenus agrees. With the Russians returning across the river Dnieper, and the Western Allies advancing in Sicily, Serenus writes: "We are lost: our character, our cause, our hope, our history. It is all up with Germany." Hitler had promised a "national new birth . . . ten years ago"; but the "seemingly religious intoxication" brought only "crudity, vulgarity, gangsterism, sadism, degradation, filthiness . . . liars and lickspittles mixed us a poison draught and took away our senses. We drank — for we Germans perennially yearn for intoxication" (p. 175). Mann's own punitive convictions were shown when, on the news of the destruction by British bombs of the Buddenbrookhaus in his native Liibeck, he announced bluntly that it was a just repayment for what his own Germany had perpetrated on others: "I have no 250


objections to the lesson that everything must be paid for."11 So Serenus speaks for Mann when he says: "I have always been told: 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay'" (pp. 332—33). And Mann surely agreed with Serenus's judgment when, at the time that the Allies controlled most of Germany, Serenus declares that "Justice is done," and wonders "how Germany . . . can ever presume to open her mouth in human affairs?" (p. 481). Writing in the 1990s, it is easy to find this rather exaggerated. But it is, surely, the essential conclusion of Mann's Doctor Faustus, and one which expresses the views not only of Mann himself, but also of countless others in the immediate postwar period. There is surely much to be said — and it is hardly denied in recent German historiography — to support Serenus's insistence that his nation had been set on the wrong path since the Reformation. The present "era of national collapse," Serenus feels, is like the Old Testaments sentence, "such as once fell on Sodom and Gomorrah" (p. 336). How farcical it is to pretend now that the "sacred soil" of Germany must not be made to suffer. Serenus counters, unanswerably: "as though there were anything still sacred about it, as though it were not long since deconsecrate over and over again, through uncounted crimes against law and justice and both morally and de facto laid upon to judgment and enforcement" (p. 338). How disgusting, Serenus finds it, that the present regime still "seems not to understand . . . that it must disappear, laden with the curse of having made itself, us, Germany, the Reich, I go further and say all that is German, intolerable to the world." There is similar emphasis on punitive fatality in Mann's treatment of Adrian. Most obvious is the fact that Adrian, a believer, is irredeemably damned to hell. Many modern readers, of course, do not believe in hell or eternal damnation,12 but Mann apparently 11 Thomas Mann, Listen, Germany! (New York, 1963), p. 86. 12 Bertrand Russell put the case against it with his characteristic defiant clarity. He found "one very serious defect . . . in Christ's moral character . . . that he believed in Hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment." Why I am not a Christian . . . (London, 1957), p. 22. 251

Coda oscillated. Goethe had been sympathetic to his hero's endless assaults on human experience, whereas Mann made his completely opposite view very clear. Adrian — Mann's Faust-figure — needs the devil's help for all his musical compositions (here is where Mann's Mephistopheles finally appears);13 and whereas Goethe's Mephistopheles is the spirit of the negative, of cynical and destructive views, Mann reverses the roles. Adrian is the cynic, and his tempter, in their fateful interview, is the odious Romantic optimist; what he promises is what the public wants, a "shining, sparkling, vainglorious unreflectiveness" (p. 237). He will give it "a genuine inspiration, immediate, absolute, unquestioned, ravishing, where there is no choice, no tinkering, no possible improvement . . . it comes but from the devil, the true master and giver of such rapture." As Heller comments: "Such is the thoroughness with which Thomas Mann 'unwrites' Goethe's Faust."14 Our difficulty lies in knowing how deeply Mann is committed to the punitive beliefs of the Faustbuch. As regards the basic plot, the matter is clear. Goethe's Faust assumes a secret harmony between the world order and Faust; whatever he does wrong is bound, ultimately, to be forgiven. But in the modern world Mann's hero receives no such grace; he dies for his sins. Still, Mann also wrote that Serenus "tries not to believe" in the "reality" of the devil, and added "So do I." 15 Mann was delighted, too, when his friend Karl Kerenyi found a "religious, Christian character" in the novel. 16 Indeed, Mann had even toyed with the idea of giving his Faustus a happy ending. He invoked "our greatest poem," Goethe's Faust, which even "allowed the devil to be cheated out of his hero's 'soul'"; and he wrote that "Divine grace surpasses any signature in blood. I believe in it and I believe in Germany's future." 17 This weakening of the punitive theme even affected the original text. Mann tried out on Adorno an early draft, "in which a ray of hope, the possibility 13 14 15 16 17

As Erich Heller points out; see Ironic German, pp. 271—72. Heller, Ironic German, p. 272. Bergsten, Mann's Faustus, p. 203, n. 11. Mythology and Humanism, p. 178. Bergsten, Mann's Faustus, p. 212. 252

Thoughts on the Twentieth Century of grace appears." Adorno did not approve; Mann removed the passage, confessing later that he "had been too optimistic, too kindly, too pat, had kindled too much light, had been too lavish with the consolation."18 Yet both on the historical and on the psychological level, the dominant perspective of Mann's Doctor Faustus, as we have it, leaves little room for hope. In his final confession, Mann's Faust says that "perhaps through Grace good can come of what was created in evil," because he "laboured might and main"; but, he says, he lacks "courage to hope for it." He had "carried on an atrocious competition with the Goodness above," and believes that his "sin is greater than that it can be forgiven me" (p. 502). Mann makes much of the parallel between the history of Germany and the fate of his Faust. Adrian's attitude to individualism is, like his country's, somewhat ambiguous. His student friends at Halle find him to be basically antisocial. They reproach him that when "you manage to say 'we' . . . you obviously find it very difficult, you hard-boiled individualist!" (p. 116). Adrian rejects the charge: "he was no individualist, he entirely accepted the community"; but neither the friends nor the reader is convinced. During the interwar years the same charge is made against the Munich circle of Sextus Kridwiss. Serenus finds the good humor of this group "distressing" (p. 366), when they are making "derogatory judgments . . . about the position of the individual and all individualism in the world" (p. 372). They see Germany's attempts at democracy "as a bad joke" (p. 365), and Serenus correctly interprets this as a preparation for the "despotic tyranny over the masses" (p. 366) of the Nazi regime. They cheapen and devalue "both truth and the individual"; and Serenus, of course, is staunchly opposed to this violation of "the values bound up with the idea of the individual — shall we say truth, freedom, law, reason?" (p. 368). Some recent critics have seen Mann as siding with Adrian, and supporting the enemies of Serenus and his conventional bourgeois liberalism; some have even suggested that Serenus has "caused" the 18 Mann, Story of a Novel, pp. 222-23.

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Coda rise of National Socialism.19 It seems much more probable that Mann, although not without doubts, and always with irony, sees the parallel damnation of Germany and Adrian in the perspective of tragedy. Serenus is the everyday voice of reason; he may be treated ironically; but his judgments, although limited no doubt (like those of Sancho Panza), are humane and true; and he sees and makes us see Adrian's compact with the devil, like that of the German people with Hitler, as a fatal deception. We must surely see Adrian Leverkiihn as an unnervingly egocentric bearer of all the most negative and unpleasant forms of individualism. He takes little account of family; he has no wife or child; nor does he ever have his own home. He has little attachment to, or concern with, the main forms of social organization — the army, the church, the administration, the universities, politics. Unlike Serenus, he is exempted from war service - perhaps because of his "narrow-chestedness, or his habitual headaches" (p. 136). He views his musical public, and the world in general, with corrosive skepticism, or at best with ironic detachment. His music rigorously obeys what he regards as an autonomous and obligatory rule of order which is actually arbitrary, and theoretically excludes individual emotional expression. He is, in short, Romantic in his absolute view of the rights of genius, but demonic in his music and his life. He is, as Serenus writes, one of those who "instead of shrewdly concerning themselves with what is needful upon earth that it may be better there . . . playeth the truant" (p. 500). The character of Mann's Faust, in short, has many individualist features, but they serve antiindividualist creeds and attitudes; and for this, surely justly, Adrian is condemned to eternal damnation, if such exists. And not just Adrian: the identification of Mann's Faust with Germany20 is clearly made by Serenus in the novel's moving last 19 For instance, Virgil Nemoianu, A Theory of the Secondary: Literature, Progress and Reaction (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 44, 56. 20 The identification of Faust with Germany and Hitler is persistent in Mann's thought; see, for example, his lecture, "Germany and the Germans," given on June 6, 1945, when he was finishing Doctor Faustus.

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words: "God be merciful to thy poor soul, my friend, my fatherland" (p. 510). MICHEL TOURNIER'S FRIDAY

Michel Tournier's first novel came out in 1967. Its full French title is Vendredi; ou, Les limbes du pacifique\ the subtitle has been translated

into English as The Other Island, no doubt to avoid the belletristic word "limbo." "Limbo," strictly speaking, denotes the area on the borders of hell where unbaptized souls dwell, especially those born before the coming of Christ the Redeemer, who, if they had had the chance of being baptized, would have gone to heaven. Tournier probably wants to suggest this theological sense, but his emphasis is more on the general idea of the unformed, special, or marginal nature of the island itself, as well as the imagined "other" island. Friday\ of course, is but one of innumerable modern versions of Defoe's story, such as Muriel Sparks Robinson (1958) and J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986); but Tournier's version has a particular interest, partly because of its remarkable literary quality, and partly because Tournier is exceptionally explicit both about his changes from Defoe and about his general view of myth. 21 Tournier takes account of Rousseau's objections to Defoe's story; he begins with the wreck and ends with the offered escape. More important, he gives us a new attitude to the character of Friday. "What did Friday mean for Defoe?" Tournier asks, and answers indignantly: "Nothing: an animal, a being at any rate who waited to receive his human qualities from Robinson, from Western man." 22 Tournier's main aim, we presume, is to correct Defoe's complacent 21 Tournier's view of myth is mainly expressed in his autobiography, Le vent paraclet (1977), translated as The Wind Spirit (although a more literal translation, "The Wind of Intercession," would have had the advantage of catching Tournier's reference to the Holy Spirit). 22 Le vent paraclet, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, The wind spirit (1988), p. 188. Page references, hereafter in the text, are to this book, although the translation is often mine, from the French original. The title is abbreviated to T.

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words: "God be merciful to thy poor soul, my friend, my fatherland" (p. 510). MICHEL TOURNIER'S FRIDAY

Michel Tournier's first novel came out in 1967. Its full French title is Vendredi; ou, Les limbes du pacifique\ the subtitle has been translated

into English as The Other Island, no doubt to avoid the belletristic word "limbo." "Limbo," strictly speaking, denotes the area on the borders of hell where unbaptized souls dwell, especially those born before the coming of Christ the Redeemer, who, if they had had the chance of being baptized, would have gone to heaven. Tournier probably wants to suggest this theological sense, but his emphasis is more on the general idea of the unformed, special, or marginal nature of the island itself, as well as the imagined "other" island. Friday\ of course, is but one of innumerable modern versions of Defoe's story, such as Muriel Sparks Robinson (1958) and J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986); but Tournier's version has a particular interest, partly because of its remarkable literary quality, and partly because Tournier is exceptionally explicit both about his changes from Defoe and about his general view of myth. 21 Tournier takes account of Rousseau's objections to Defoe's story; he begins with the wreck and ends with the offered escape. More important, he gives us a new attitude to the character of Friday. "What did Friday mean for Defoe?" Tournier asks, and answers indignantly: "Nothing: an animal, a being at any rate who waited to receive his human qualities from Robinson, from Western man." 22 Tournier's main aim, we presume, is to correct Defoe's complacent 21 Tournier's view of myth is mainly expressed in his autobiography, Le vent paraclet (1977), translated as The Wind Spirit (although a more literal translation, "The Wind of Intercession," would have had the advantage of catching Tournier's reference to the Holy Spirit). 22 Le vent paraclet, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, The wind spirit (1988), p. 188. Page references, hereafter in the text, are to this book, although the translation is often mine, from the French original. The title is abbreviated to T.

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colonialism in his treatment of Friday. There are other important differences. Tournier alters the chronology, and sets it a hundred years on: Defoe's Crusoe is washed up on the island on September 30, 1659,23 and leaves on December 19, 1686; Tournier's Crusoe lands on September 30, 1759,24 and his Friday leaves it on December 2, 1787. The day of rescue is put forward a little over a year, presumably to correct Defoe's computational error - Defoe claimed that Crusoe was cast away for more than twenty-eight years, but his December 1686 date makes it almost a year less. There are many other factual changes. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is from dissenting stock, unmarried, and twenty-seven years old; Tournier's protagonist is a Quaker, married, and with two children, though only twenty-two years old. Defoe's island is in the Caribbean, north of the Orinoco estuary; in Tournier's view this is because Defoe, "hoping for a popular success," made the island a relatively close and familiar place for his audience (T, p. 180); Tournier makes the island one of the much more distant Juan Fernandez group, off Chile in the Pacific, where the possible original for Defoe, Alexander Selkirk, had actually been stranded. Tournier also makes significant changes in the character of his hero. Defoe's Crusoe is rational, careful, conventionally religious, highly organized; he develops very little, and is not introspective. Tournier's Crusoe is more emotional, more introspective. Furthermore, there are definite stages in his development: by the end, his whole physical and moral being has changed totally. He is also very thoughtful, and much given to asking himself big philosophical questions. This very different conception of the character is made 23 Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 87, hereafter cited, by C and page number, in the text. 24 Michel Tournier, trans. Norman Denny, Friday, or The Other Island (1969; New York, 1984), pp. 10, 217, hereafter cited in the text by page number. Anthony Purdy, in his article "From Defoe's Crusoe to Tournier's Vendredi: the metamorphosis of a myth," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 11 (1984), p. 224, notes that Tournier's Crusoe arrives at exactly the time that Rousseau started writing Emile.


possible by the narrative point of view used by Tournier. Defoe uses a first person voice, but his narrative is not very intimate, and the sequence of events is fairly loose; Tournier, on the other hand, uses a third person narrator with an omniscient command of Crusoe's inner life; and he supplements this by quoting a good deal from the hero's very personal and intimate journal. From the beginning, the stories of the two Crusoes are very different. For instance, on his first night on the island Defoe's Crusoe seems nervous, even terrified, and sleeps up a tree; Tournier's hero is not afraid, and casually sleeps "in the shadow of a boulder" (p. 20). As a prudent person who thinks ahead, Defoe's Crusoe at once strips everything he can from the shipwreck; Tournier's goes to the shipwreck only because he wants to escape, he therefore must build a boat, and he realizes that he needs tools. Then Tournier's Crusoe nearly goes "out of his senses" (p. 39) at not being able to drag his boat to water; and he soon falls to pieces, lapsing into an animal condition, naked and on all fours, relieving himself wherever he happens to be. He goes to a swamp and there, like the peccaries or wild pigs, immerses himself totally, apart from eyes, nose, and mouth, in the muddy slime. Completely losing his self-command, he has the delusion that a fine Spanish galleon is approaching, and imagines that his sister is on board. This is a turning point. Feeling horrified when he realizes how completely fantasy has taken over his mind, he gradually comes to see that he "must once again take his life in hand"; this means he must work, and thereby "consummate his marriage with solitude, his implacable bride" (p. 44). He goes to work with a vengeance, far outstripping Defoe's Crusoe in the scale of his operations. He does not merely till the island, he surveys it; he takes stock of its goods; he names it "Esperanza," or "Hope"; he invents and writes down a constitutional charter for it; and he constructs all the customary necessities of his civilization, including a conservatory of weights and measures, a palace of justice, and a religious meeting house. But he is still haunted by a sense of unreality; something is missing. He knows that the "strait-jacket of conventions and prescriptions" is necessary "in order to stay upright" (p. 79); but he 257

Coda finds he cannot help doubting "the evidence of my senses" (p. 55). One day, though, his water clock stops; he welcomes his "holiday," and experiences "a moment of innocence" (p. 90); and then, in "inexpressible happiness," he "seemed to discern another island behind the one where he had labored so long in solitude." Later, he explores a deep cave, and is much struck by how, at its very end, there is a snug little hole (p. 101); in his newly aroused psychological state, Crusoe ruminates on his relation to Esperanza, together with memories of his mother. This emotional personification of the island leads him to have sexual intercourse with the mossy crevice of a soap bark tree, although he comes to fear that this "Vegetable way' might be no more than a dangerous blind alley" (p. 116). Then he discovers a combe of pink sand, and continually makes love to it; mandrake flowers and roots spring from the sexual embrace. Crusoe is still not quite satisfied, but there soon comes a great change. A landing of natives occurs, and one captive, who is about to be sacrificed, manages to escape, and is saved by Crusoe. This is Vendredi — Friday. Tournier's Friday is very young, only fifteen, as opposed to Defoe's, who is twenty-six. He is quick, intelligent, and faithful, yet Crusoe feels "mortified" that his God should have selected him a servant "from the lowest stratum of humanity" (p. 138). Crusoe reflects that "I must fit my slave into the system which I have perfected" - that is, he must try to impose on the boy his own remorselessly methodical way of life; Crusoe has no notion whatever that Friday will be able to teach him anything. Crusoe keeps the boy busy; Friday does most of the outside work, and also looks after his masters clothes, and waits on him at table. Still, Crusoe finds Friday too reserved; despite all that he has done for him, Friday fails to love his master. Crusoe is infuriated when Friday shows any independence. One occasion is typical. Crusoe as religious teacher has just made Friday repeat his lesson that "God is an allpowerful, omniscient master, infinitely good, merciful and just, the Creator of Man and of All Things"; then, we are told, "Friday's laugh rang out, irrepressible, lyrical and blasphemous," only to be "extinguished like a snuffed candle by a resounding blow on the cheek" from Crusoe (p. 140). Crusoe becomes furious when, already 258


jealous of Friday's reciprocated friendship with Crusoe's dog, he discovers to his horror that Friday has been imitating his master and fornicating with the earth in the pink combe (pp. 166-70). The whole sexual aspect of Tournier's version is, of course, a great change from the total avoidance of sexual feelings in Defoe.25 The relation between Crusoe and Friday soon changes, however. One day, when Crusoe is away, Friday takes his master's pipe and smokes it in the cave. Crusoe discovers him there, and raises his whip over the boy's head. Friday, terrified, throws the pipe away into the cave; it ignites the stored barrels of gunpowder, and there is a terrible explosion. Crusoe awakens to find Friday looking down on him, and trying to get him to swallow some water. All the buildings are destroyed, and much else is lost; but Crusoe realizes that Friday had not intended any harm. So Crusoe makes no protest, for instance, when Friday, in their efforts at tidying up, throws away some handfuls of wheat. Crusoe gradually comes to understand that this companion belongs to "some quite other order, wholly opposed to that order of earth and husbandry" which Crusoe has lived by (p. 180). Crusoe is slowly converted to that other order. It is, he finds, a kind of relief; the old order has "begun to oppress him almost as much as it had Friday." As Crusoe meditates, a giant cedar tree by the cave comes crashing down. But Friday pulls Crusoe to safety. With the loss of the cedar, the symbol of the old order, Crusoe feels that his certitudes have been betrayed; and he decides that he "would never let go the hand that had reached down to save him" (p. 181). Henceforth, he thinks, his future will be as "a wanderer, footloose and timorous, in the sole company of Friday." He watches his servant now "with a passionate interest in his every act" (p. 182).26 Friday always lives for the moment; he converts work into games; he invents all kinds of diversions; he is a spirit of the air. Friday's 25 The issue is discussed in David Bevan's Michel Tournier (Amsterdam, 1986), pp. 3 0 - 3 2 , 54-56. 26 It is, in its way, an ironical variation on Hegel's view of the interpenetration of the roles of master and servant. See Jacques Poirier, Approches de . . . Vendredi, ou Us limbes du pacifique (Dijon, 1985), p. 19.

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Aeolian aspect is shown by his mastery of the blowpipe, and the bow and arrow. Most striking are his dealings with the huge and rank old goat Andoar. First Friday fights it and is badly hurt; but then he kills it, and turns Andoar 's skin into a wonderfully successful kite, while the skull is converted into an "Aeolian harp" that plays celestial music in the wind (p. 210). Friday is very happy now, but very considerate of Crusoe. For instance, when Crusoe finds two unused volumes for his journal, Friday brings him a pen made from albatross quills, and blue ink from leaves of wood, commenting simply on Crusoe's earlier practice: "Albatross is better than vulture . . . and blue is better than red" (p. 199). Crusoe is humbled but happy. By now, Friday has taught him not to fear the sun, and he goes naked; he lets his hair grow, but shaves and trims his beard so that he looks "ten years younger" (p. 182); and he is proud to see in his tanned body "a sturdy and loyal companion" (p. 183). Crusoe becomes a happy sun-worshiper; and he prays that the sun "instruct me in humour . . . the smiling acceptance of the day's gifts." He also wishes that he can resemble Friday: "Give me Friday's smiling countenance, his face shaped for laughter" (p. 202). As a final reward, Crusoe even finds that his new mood of happy acceptance has "transported" him to "that other Speranza" (p. 205). Tournier's novel, we can see from this very simplified summary, has a developing story which expresses his thematic and symbolic concerns; and this continues to the ending. There are none of Defoe's complicated fights and plans for getting supplies; we merely have a schooner arrive, the Heron, which offers to save Crusoe and Friday. But there is a new twist. Friday, Crusoe's "Aeolian comrade" (p. 203), goes off on the Heron', he is excited by the idea of exercising his skills in the ship's tall rigging, and is young and curious enough to want the risk of new adventures. But Crusoe, even at the cost of losing Friday, decides to stay on the island. His brief contacts with the Heron have shown him too much of the heartlessness, calculation, and complacency of his compatriots; he cannot, he realizes, face his own civilization again. He had once regarded it as an ideal order, but now he sees that he would become "a greybeard with creaking bones" if he returned to Europe; like Matthew Ar260

Thoughts on the Twentieth Century nold's Scholar-Gypsy he must "Fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!" In the event, Crusoe is not left in solitude. The cook's boy has been unhappy on the Heron and has taken refuge on Speranza. Crusoe calls him "Sunday" in the English version, "Jeudi" in the original French; in either case it is a tribute to his solar god (in French jeudi is Jove's day, jovis dies). We leave Crusoe "filled with the sense of utter contentment" (p. 234). How different from Defoe!27

What is Tournier's own understanding of the myth he has created? In The Wind Spirit he gives us a stunningly simplified view: "Man is nothing but a mythological animal" (T, p. 158). 28 Elsewhere he writes that a myth is "a fundamental story," by which he means a tale with wide enough interest to appeal both to a philosopher and to a child; he was proud himself to have made a fine children's picture book from Friday's story (T, p. 157). 29 Tournier offers another definition, which is amusing, but surely true: "A myth is a story that everybody already knows" (T, p. 157). This, he explains, is because the "mythical hero" is unlike the hero of a novel in one crucial respect: he is not imprisoned in the novel which creates him. The hero of a novel, Tournier argues, is less famous than his author - Julien Sorel, for example, is less well-known than Stendhal. It is quite different with myth; nobody knows Tirso de Molina, but everybody "has heard of Don Juan." Tournier continues: "There are Don Juans in all of us, and within." Don Juan "is one of the fundamental models who enable us to give a contour, a form, an effigy that serves as a reference point for our aspirations and our moods" (T, p. 158). This "effigy" is like "Tristan, Don Juan, Faust," because "it engages us in what I like to call autohagiography"; they 27 It has been argued that Tournier misreads Defoe's Crusoe; see Colin Davis, Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction (Oxford, 1988), p. 94, and n. 21. 28 This view has some connection with that of Herder, whose museum Tournier had visited (T, pp. 116-17). 29 Vendredi, ou la vie sauvage (Paris, 1971). 261

Coda are all mythical heroes with whom we identify, and who make us feel good: "How tall I am, how strong, how melancholy! the reader cries . . . I really didn't know I was so fine" (T, p. 188). Tournier insists that it was the study of myth which furnished him with the tools, from his own previous interest and training in philosophy, for writing Friday. His conception of Friday, for example, was the result of long hours of study in the Museum of Man in Paris, under the direction of Claude Levi-Strauss (T, p. 189). The debt is not, he acknowledges, such that he would claim his novel to have done justice to the ethnocentric contrast between modern Western civilization (Crusoe) and a primitive Araucanian (Friday); that, he concedes, would have been a great subject, but it is not his. His focus is, rather, on "the destruction of every last trace of civilization in a man subjected to the scouring operation of an inhuman solitude"; there is "the unveiling of the foundations of being and life," and then the need "to create a new world, under the form of attempts, soundings, discoveries, of evidences and of ecstasies" (T, pp. 190—91). Tournier wanted his version to be unlike Defoe's. He sees Defoe's story as "purely retrospective, the restoration of a civilization lost with the means available" (T, p. 191), whereas Tournier wanted to be "both inventive and prospective." Friday certainly has a more lively tone, the authentic voice of pastoral's picnic happiness, which justifies the comment from the Times, reprinted on the back cover of the Penguin edition, that Tournier interprets Robinson Crusoe "in the light of Freud, Jung, Sartre . . . with just a dash of the Club Mediterranee." Not that Tournier's genuine interest in psychoanalysis and existentialism can be doubted: his tributes to his teacher, Bachelard, and his account of the "meteor" in his life produced by Sartre's Being and Nothingness (T, p. 131) are touchingly convincing. One of Sartre's central themes is the problem of the "other"; and Tournier's friend, Gilles Deleuze, supplied a Postface to Friday which is an extended analysis of Tournier's treatment of the "world without others." Such large philosophical issues meet the reader of Friday at every turn. Tournier discusses one of them in The Wind Spirit. The stages of his novel, he points out, correspond to the three stages of 262

Thoughts on the Twentieth Century knowledge in Spinoza's Ethics, a work whose importance for Tournier is second only to the gospels (T, p. 196). First, there is the individual's direct sensual encounter with his environment, an encounter whose climax in the novel is Crusoe's animal regression to wallowing in the swamp. Next, there is the rational, and in a sense utilitarian, knowledge of a superficial kind, demonstrated in Crusoe's organization of his food stocks, and his construction of administrative buildings. Last, there is the order based on trying to intuit the absolute: Crusoe's cult of the sun. The same triad for society in general might be the quest for physical pleasure: first, in alcohol or drugs; next, in the attempt to achieve recognized success through work and social organization; and last, in the contemplative life, the artistic or religious vocation. Of course, we can read Friday without being aware of this or other larger schemes. In a sense, that is another basic quality of myth: "a dead myth," Tournier writes, "is called an allegory" (T, p. 160). Tournier keeps his myth alive in Friday largely by means of his narrative's sensory detail and vivid psychological particularity. The figure of Crusoe, Tournier argues, is "not only the victim of solitude, he is also its hero" (T, p. 187). Tournier amplified this view in an interview with a newspaper correspondent in 1967: I was much struck to see how far [Defoe's] Robinson is a character of the present day. Of all the heroes who have become myths — Don Juan, Don Quixote, Faust, many others — it is Robinson who is the most modern. The basis of his novel is, of course, solitude — and solitude is a very real problem today; it is expressed in minor aspects; the odd-job man, Robinson, the model of the do-it-yourself type, does on a large scale what we all do, more or less, in our houses; because we can hardly find tradesmen, we arrange, we fix up holes, we manage on our own. Another minor aspect: the problem of holidays. That "Club Mediterranee" aspect, that people take more and more. We dream of a blue sea, of sandy beaches, of palm trees, of sun, of solitude.30 Tournier knows that nowadays people do not really like solitude; "Man," he writes, "suffers more and more in solitude because he 30 Gilles Dutreix, "Michel Tournier," Nice-matin, April 23, 1967.

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enjoys greater wealth and freedom" (T, p. 184). So Tournier follows Defoe in making his Crusoe a hero of the handyman, and of the solitary. But what of Friday? For Defoe, Friday is just a capable primitive, who incidentally supplies some comic relief. Tournier, as we have seen, gives him a much more important role. He is the teacher of Crusoe, and becomes the leader of the couple on the island; but he does not stay, succumbing to the technological lures of the Herons splendid rigging. It is difficult to be sure quite what this outcome represents. One clue may be given by Tournier's essay on Tristan and Isolde in Le vol du vampire (1981). The immortal lovers, Tournier argues, belong with Faust, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, and Don Quixote (a pleasantly confirmatory duplication of my chosen four) in embodying "the Western pantheon of the imagination."31 All five of these myths "take the responsibility for one sin"; for, Tournier asks, who "will dare to pretend that, if they live in us, it is to help us better to integrate ourselves into the body of society?" Tournier affirms quite the opposite; on the contrary, they are "all different ways of saying no, of breaking up the social order." Social scientists, Tournier continues, always pretend that all human resources are rightly intended to help the individual integrate into society; it is difficult to persuade minds so convinced that there can also exist "mechanisms with the task of safeguarding a certain lack of adaptation of the individual to society." This oppositional role of myths, Tournier explains, "has as its social function to be an individual protest against society." Tournier's sense of this oppositional meaning of myth is very different from that of Roland Barthes, for example. Barthes opposes myth because, whether consciously or unconsciously, it supports what he regards as the immoral falsities of the capitalist intellectual superstructure;32 whereas Tournier is much more on the side of the individual. The function of myth, for him, is not at all to make us 31 Tournier, Le vol du vampire [The flight of the vampire} (Paris, 1981), pp. 3132. 32 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris, 1957), pp. 192-247.

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Thoughts on the Twentieth Century submit to "reasons of state," which education, power, the police have arrayed against the individual, but on the contrary to furnish us with arms against them. Myth is not a recall to order, but much more a recall to disorder. . . . Man is so constituted that, if he is deprived of his faculty to say no . . . he never does anything worth while. . . . What is Don Juan? He is the refusal to submit the male sex to order, to all the orders, conjugal, social, political, religious . . . he is the revolt of liberty against fidelity.^

We can very easily see the application of this oppositional Romantic individualism to Tournier's Crusoe; he stays on the island because, in his achieved liberty, he has learned to reject his fidelity to the incurable pettiness of his own civilization as it is now. And, of course, Crusoe sees that Friday's throwing in his lot with Western civilization may well bring him to slavery. In the Vendredi for children, Tournier visualizes Friday locked up and chained in the hold,34 having been seduced by a new toy, which "represented a supreme conquest of the air" (p. 222). We could thus see him as a negative example, an allegorical representation of the sufferings of the three million third-world laborers working in present-day France, having succumbed to the appeal of Western technology. But Friday's fate is contrary, not only to our wishes, but to our sense of his intelligence as presented in the novel. True, it could be argued that someone of the age of fifteen might be likely to accept anything that looks new and exciting; but we have come to expect more from the titular protagonist of the novel. Here, of course, we must admit that the title is deceptive; Friday is not really Tournier's protagonist. As Gerard Genette has pointed out, we do not know Friday inwardly; he is not given any introspection, of the kind we get so much of from Crusoe; and the narrative is never presented from Friday's point of view.35 It is an odd asymmetry, one which somewhat undercuts Tournier's anti-racist stance, and makes the final paradox — Friday leaving the island while Crusoe stays — seem glib. 33 Vol du vampire\ pp. 32-33. 34 Vendredi, ou la vie sauvage, p. 181. 35 Genette, Palimpsestes: la litterature au second degre (Paris, 1982), pp. 4 1 8 - 2 5 .

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Tournier's original plan did not, apparently, include the arrival of the Friday-substitute, Sunday. The present ending is "more novelistic, more surprising," no doubt; but what was originally intended was logically more "rigorous." In his solitude, Crusoe would have "become a sort of stylite standing upright immobilized on a column to the sun."36 This would have foreshadowed a kind of eternal youth for Crusoe; every new day would have been a solar limbo devoid of work, or words, or ageing, or history. It is a static ending, and might well not have satisfied the reader. With Sunday, Crusoe will pass on what he has learned from Friday, and they will play the same games in harmony with Esperanza. This gives a certain thematic unity to the novel. But it does leave some basic questions unanswered. After all, both primitive and civilized men have, alas, an irrevocable need for some degree of practical activity to keep things going. Tournier's vision of Crusoe's future on the island can be seen — like other Utopias — as a wildly improbable fantasy. As a character, Tournier's Crusoe is a very modern kind of man, and in some ways distinctively French. Defoe had been a conscious, and perhaps inordinate, admirer of his own civilization; he had made his hero realize a triumphant imitation of it on the island; but that optimistic view was grimly framed by the moral-religious system which made Crusoe suffer because he had disobeyed his father. Tournier's general plan is almost the opposite. There is no punishment, and therefore no lesson; and when the Heron arrives, the thought of returning to his wife and children never occurs to Crusoe. Tournier's Crusoe, like his author, is an unqualified individualist. Not that he is at all like Defoe's economic individualist: the labors of Tournier's Crusoe, his building and organizing zeal, show the reactions instilled into him by his society; they prove temporary. Tournier's Crusoe uses his intellectual and philosophical discoveries 36 To judge by Daniel Bougnoux and Andre Clavel's "Entretien avec Michel Tournier," p. 14, reported in Davis, Michel Tournier, p. 30. It may be useful to mention here that a passage of several pages is, without notice, dropped on p. 199 of the English translation oiVendredi (pp. 2 0 9 - 1 3 of the French 1972 edition). There are other silent changes (e.g., calling the schooner Heron, the Whitebird).

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Thoughts on the Twentieth Century to broaden his sense of the possibilities of life in areas which Defoe had never dreamed of. That is the "human quality" he learns from Friday. It is a kind of primitivism. There is no need for the impedimenta of civilization, for the hats, umbrellas, and heavy clothes. Tournier's Crusoe can welcome the sun: indeed, he becomes a kind of solar mystic. Friday teaches him to experience life as a natural thing: that work can and should be converted into play; and that we ought to use our ingenuity and our imagination to enrich each moment of our existence. It is from Friday — the character who in Defoe's novel was a contemptible, uneducated savage - that Tournier's Crusoe learns the possibilities of a rewarding life in the here and now. This Crusoe will continue on that road, with his altered "foundation of being," even when Friday has left him. In one sense, Tournier's Crusoe is a true "drop-out" hero of the 1960s; but in another, he represents the phenomenological impulse which increasingly dominates a distinctively twentieth-century reaction against the utilitarianism, rationalism, and collectivism on which our society is built. From the point of view of our theme, the way Tournier's hero masters his fate is deeply disturbing. Certainly, he reconstructs a self after the disintegration of his individuality brought on by the loneliness of life on the island; but his achieved maturity teaches him, above all, not to return to his — and our — civilization. SOME NOTES ON THE PRESENT John Stuart Mill wrote in his Autobiography in 1873 that his father, James, relied so much on the influence of reason over the minds of mankind, whenever it is allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all would be gained if the whole population were taught to read, if all sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word and in writing, and if by means of the suffrage they could nominate a legislature to give effect to the opinions they adopted.37 37 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (New York, 1969), p. 54. 267

Thoughts on the Twentieth Century to broaden his sense of the possibilities of life in areas which Defoe had never dreamed of. That is the "human quality" he learns from Friday. It is a kind of primitivism. There is no need for the impedimenta of civilization, for the hats, umbrellas, and heavy clothes. Tournier's Crusoe can welcome the sun: indeed, he becomes a kind of solar mystic. Friday teaches him to experience life as a natural thing: that work can and should be converted into play; and that we ought to use our ingenuity and our imagination to enrich each moment of our existence. It is from Friday — the character who in Defoe's novel was a contemptible, uneducated savage - that Tournier's Crusoe learns the possibilities of a rewarding life in the here and now. This Crusoe will continue on that road, with his altered "foundation of being," even when Friday has left him. In one sense, Tournier's Crusoe is a true "drop-out" hero of the 1960s; but in another, he represents the phenomenological impulse which increasingly dominates a distinctively twentieth-century reaction against the utilitarianism, rationalism, and collectivism on which our society is built. From the point of view of our theme, the way Tournier's hero masters his fate is deeply disturbing. Certainly, he reconstructs a self after the disintegration of his individuality brought on by the loneliness of life on the island; but his achieved maturity teaches him, above all, not to return to his — and our — civilization. SOME NOTES ON THE PRESENT John Stuart Mill wrote in his Autobiography in 1873 that his father, James, relied so much on the influence of reason over the minds of mankind, whenever it is allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all would be gained if the whole population were taught to read, if all sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word and in writing, and if by means of the suffrage they could nominate a legislature to give effect to the opinions they adopted.37 37 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (New York, 1969), p. 54. 267

Coda John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty is one of the few canonical texts among the gospels of individualism; but as regards politics, John Stuart was less sanguine than his father. And so are we, no doubt: in the USA and Britain, school education has been compulsory, and the franchise has been extended to cover the whole population, since early in the twentieth century; but "all" has not, alas, "been gained." The reasons are, no doubt, innumerable; but two are particularly relevant to our concern. The first is James Mill's enormous over-estimate of the power of reason in both the individual and the collective life. The enemy of reason, of course, is what used to be called "the passions"; and more recently the power of "the passions" has been strengthened by our new awareness of the vast influence of the unconscious in human life. Freud, most notably, 38 showed how our thoughts, feelings, and actions were largely determined by the psychological patterns set up by the accidents of our personal past. These patterns can be exploited. Mann's Serenus Zeitblom attributes to Georges Sorel the idea that in the future the masses would have to be "provided with mythical fictions . . . to release and activate political energies." 39 It was, no doubt, the power of man's unconscious drives which allowed Hitler to appeal to the inner impulse of his Volk through a new kind of political myth. As Ernst Cassirer wrote, largely unconscious needs and feelings were harnessed to "a new type of completely rationalized myth . . . which has changed the whole face of our modern political life." 40 The rationalizations were made, not only through Hitler's speeches and writings, but by the conscious manipulations of Joseph Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl. A second major reason for the disappointment of James Mill's hopes is closely related: it is the partial replacement of reading through the rise of the new systems of persuasion by the mass media. The movies effectively began their history with Edison's 38 For example, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (London, 1921). 39 Mann, Doctor Faustus, p. 366. 40 "The technique of our modern political myths," in Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer, 1935-1945, ed. Donald Phillip Verene

(New Haven and London, 1979), p. 253.

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Kinetoscope in 1894; the first moving-picture public entertainment was shown by the Lumiere brothers in 1898; color movies began with Kinemacolor in 1906; and talkies were introduced in 1926, following the success of a "transitional" movie — John Barrymore acting in Don Juan. The first practical radio system had been patented by Marconi in 1896; but it was developed commercially only in the 1920s, with the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Columbia Broadcasting Corporation both being founded in 1927. Television, though technically developed in the 1930s, made little progress until after the Second World War; but by the mid-1950s TV networks were well-established throughout the world. In general, then, the mass media, although beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, were basically a twentieth-century development, with their effects only fully manifested during the past few decades. Much has been written against the mass media, and their capacity to corrupt human values has no doubt been exaggerated, but - we may think - not by a great deal. At any rate, three characteristics of their operation seem indisputable. First, there is the simple fact that the more time people spend listening to the radio or watching films and television, the less time they will spend reading. Compared with the difficulty of learning to read, the mass media obviously require no preliminary learning process: everything is very easy; you just turn on a switch, or buy a movie ticket, and it is all laid on; you only have to see and hear. The media have, of course, not displaced reading entirely, but they have surely reduced the proportion of time spent on it. A recent survey showed that between April 1990 and March 1991 only 40 percent of households in the USA bought one book or more; and another count showed that people older than 65 were the largest single group of book buyers, accounting for 16 percent of the sales.41 The poll suggested dispiriting conclusions: that reading is very much a minority occupation; and that it is practiced particularly among older people. Perhaps there has been a net decline of the reading habit among the young. This would certainly be supported by my 41 San Francisco Chronicle, January 1 1 , 1 9 9 2 .

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Coda own experience as a college teacher; I find that one can no longer rely on any student having read any particular book, however wellknown - Don Quixote, say, or Robinson Crusoe - and those who have read it have always done so because of a college course. The second effect of the mass media is more directly related to the fate of our four myths in the modern world. The emphasis is always on the new: or, rather, not on the genuinely new (which would be revolutionary and disturbing), but on something that is not exactly the same as what one has seen before, that will provide entertainment for the thousands of TV networks, and for most of the time, day and night. This kind of novelty simply produces too much. Nothing remains: there are too many pictures, stories, characters, for anything to stand out sufficiently to be remembered. We may recall a few shows for a time, but not as a permanent possession of the mind. Of course, old films can be given reruns, or be played over on the VCR; but this is very different from owning a book. A book is somehow more permanent; it can become part of a library, and it can be read or reread whenever we wish. In the mass media, anything is quickly propagated, and much more widely than ever before; but it is equally quickly forgotten or replaced. The third effect of the mass media concerns their dependence on advertising. Dr. Johnson gutted the secret of advertising long ago: "Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement."42 Every advertising spot plays its role in promising that, if one buys the product, one's dream - of the ideal house, the ideal car, the ideal soap, the ideal self - will somehow be realized. Of course, one does not really believe it; but it is nice to be made the center of attention, to think one belongs to a world of happy consumers. One's imagination is not asked to join some collective enterprise, as - for example - epic implicitly demands; the commercial is a direct appeal to you as an individual consumer; it proclaims, in Emerson's words, that "things are in the saddle / and ride mankind."43 What is the net cultural effect of the decline in reading, the 42 The Idler, no. 4. 43 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Ode, to W. H. Channing." 270


endless novelty of the media, and their flattering deification of the consumer? One extreme answer is given by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing

Expectations (1979). Just as Freud had used narcissism to recapitulate the psychological effects of the kind of self-image suggested by the Greek myth about the boy who fell in love with his own image in a pool of water, so Lasch suggests that the modern form of narcissism is the society where everyone assumes that his or her own personal interests and pleasures are and ought to be centered on him- or herself. That person, Lasch asserts, is incapable of loving another person as a real object; all the collective forces of society seem equally unreal; anything which contradicts his or her personal wishes does not really exist. One of Lasch s sections is entitled "From Horatio Alger to the Happy Hooker"; his basic idea here is to contrast the puritan work ethic of Horatio Alger with the current idea of merely "making it" in the world, without regard to anyone else. The whole book is a kind of shopping list of the main current perversions of modern individualism. They include the lack of any historical sense, the cult of popular books which claim they will cheer you up, the new illiteracy, the collapse of authority, the flight from feeling, and so on. If we ask what we should replace these items with, the alternatives all turn out to be anti-individualist: a sense of history, an absolute ethic of right and wrong, awareness of the rights and feelings of others, discipline in the family and the school, cultural elitism. Such choices represent the need, finally, to replace — quoting David Riesman — our "present-oriented hedonism."44 Talcott Parsons supports the views of Louis Dumont, and of Parsons s own master, Max Weber, in seeing modern culture as historically unique. 45 They do not however - Dumont, Weber, or Parsons - examine the incidental disadvantages which Lasch (and I) are inclined to think have accompanied the process. Perhaps the sense of 44 Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, p. 127. 45 Parsons, The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), pp. 138— 39271

Coda disillusion with modern civilization has crystallized fairly recently; when Kingsley Amis said "More will mean worse," 46 he scandalized people more then, in i960, than he would have done now. Today we are beginning to learn that the more society gives each of us what we want, the heavier will be the price we will have to pay for it later; and part of the price is narcissism. It seems that in general, if society — in the family, the school, and political life — does not impose complementary duties in return for what it gives, the less happy and the less satisfactory both the society and the individual will turn out to be. History perhaps suggests the paradox that it is frustration which creates desire. Our four individualist myths would all seem to depend on the protagonist being forced to fight the power of the negative; individualism, it seems, depends on the strength and complexity of the internal and external constraints on our freedom; in other words, if there is no net, no lines on the court, and no rules, then it's not tennis. As I considered this harsh conclusion on modern progress, I must confess that a dialogue from King hear arose unbidden out of my memory. Kent asks Edgar, "Is this the promis'd end?" and Edgar sadly answers, "Or image of that horror?" 47 Enough of that horror. What, finally, of our four myths today? Very few people, I suppose, make any of our four heroes a useful alter ego to help them on their journey through life. But a substantial minority of the population have at least heard of their names, and have some vague notion of what the names represent; as Tournier wrote, "A myth is a story that everybody knows." Our four are all very familiar; perhaps especially Don Juan, the superstar of inveterate male sexuality. Of the other three, Don Quixote has achieved a kind of folk status; I remember in the 1960s seeing that he was memorialized, along with Sancho Panza of course, in recognizable statues which had been made out of discarded junk, scraps of wood and metal, and motor tires, in the salt flats of Oakland. Something a little similar had happened to Robinson Crusoe in 1848, when an 46 Encounter•, July, i960. 47 5.3.263-64. 272

Thoughts on the Twentieth Century enterprising Frenchman called Gueusquin started a restaurant up on the branches of a particularly fine chestnut tree in the suburbs of Paris; he called it "Robinson"; more recently our hero has also given his name to the French town of Robinson. 48 Faust has a special appeal to intellectuals. He has, for instance, become famous as one of the two basic human types in Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1928), where the Faustian is opposed to the Apollonian type. The latter is characterized by the spatial painting of Claude Lorrain, and the light and dark art of Rembrandt; Faustian man, on the other hand, is a conscious individualist, led by a "deep consciousness of the ego," his "idea of the individual" resting upon a previously mistrusted "individual judgment." The Faustian type is also said to be enamoured of "Galilean dynamics" 49 ; and it is this aspect of Faust that informed what is the dominant view of him today as the dedicated scientist, an avocation hardly recognizable in the Faustbuch, in Marlowe, or even in Goethe. This new type is reflected in Karl Shapiro's poem, "The Progress of Faust": Backwardsly tolerant, Faustus was expelled From the Third Reich in Nineteen Thirty-nine. His exit caused the breaching of the Rhine, Except for which the frontier might have held. Five years unknown to enemy and friend He hid, appearing on the sixth to pose In an American desert at war's end Where, at his back, a dome of atoms rose. The poem is no doubt a gratifying testimony to the need to attribute a new invention to an established mythical name of the past, but it seems a shame that poor Faust must take the blame for the bomb! Paul Valery gives us an interesting twentieth-century perspective on Faust. Around 1940 he wrote two fragmentary plays entitled, with characteristic wry panache, "Mon Faust." "The soul," his Faust says, "has now sunk in value. The individual is dying. He is drown48 Rene Pottier, Histoire d'un village: le Plessis-Robinson (Paris, 1941), pp. 171-73. 49 Decline of the West (1928; New York, 1950), 2.183-85.

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Coda ing in numbers. The accumulation of human beings is effacing all distinction."50 Modern agnosticism, he continues, cannot abide by the "eternal guarantee" that Mephistopheles will retain his privileged eminence; for that would require a guarantee that there is someone "Up there." Valery adds that death, which once had a "classic meaning," has lost its power, since it depended on the conception of the "immortality of the soul." It was that immortality which had given death its transcendental meaning, its "infinite significance and value." If we look back at Marlowe's version of the Faust myth, we can see Valery's point. The plays of Vale*ry, by contrast, are a verbal game; they provide us with a comic epilogue to our tragic story. This is not to say that, despite the ebbing of religious faith, our four myths have lost all their force as far as the educated elite is concerned. For one thing, the need for myth has long been a common preoccupation among modern writers. W. B. Yeats used the old Irish myths, and his poems gave his own life, and the lives of his friends, a kind of mythic resonance. James Joyce made a more ironical use of myth in his Ulysses; and T. S. Eliot, in a review, wrote a famous defense of Joyce's method: "Ulysses," he wrote, "has the importance of a scientific discovery. . . . It is a simple way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . . Instead of the narrative method we may now use the mythical method."51 A similar interest in myth and mythical method can be found in many other modern writers. Mann and Tournier both use the mythical analogy to give larger perspectives to their narratives. Of course they are both relatively highbrow writers, unlike the authors of the myths in their original form. It is significant that the content of their works is no longer an endorsement of individualism: Mann's hero is a cheerless villain, 50 Collected Works of Paul Valery, vol. 3, Plays, trans. David Paul and Robert Fitzgerald (New York, i960), p. 38. 51 "Ulysses, order, and myth," The Dial 75 (1923), pp. 282-83.

274


and, by an interesting switch, it is now his Mephistopheles who voices the wishes of the mass public. (Mann ironically calls the devil "the true master" of their wish for direct and "genuine inspiration" [p. 237].) Tournier's hero prefers his individual solitude on the island, and refuses the chance of rejoining his civilization. Mann goes back beyond Goethe to the comfortless moral of the Faustbuch: Adrian Leverkiihn is damned from the start by his egocentricity; we do not suffer when he pays the price for his pact with the devil, and no one would set out to follow his example. There is a little more hopefulness in Tournier's Friday — it is a more light-hearted book — but the eventual verdict is equally damning: Crusoe chooses solitude on the desert island to avoid the sordid littleness of his fellow human beings back home. There is, incidentally, a similarly inglorious view of the character of a modern Don Juan. George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman (1903), specifically based on the Don Juan story, gives us a hero, John Tanner, who is pursued by a determined woman, and eventually agrees to marry her. But it is, apparently, out of mere fatigue: he does not really want the stale old business of marriage and children in the present hell of existence, but yearns for a different life in heaven where he can be at the service of what Shaw's characters call the "Life Force." Faust, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe are not nice or friendly people; we would not want any of them as our companions on a desert island. The exception to the unattractiveness of our four mythical heroes is Don Quixote. His modern imitations, such as Graham Greene's Monsieur Quixote (1982), are respectful and admiring. We may feel that his modern critics take inadequate account of Cervantes s original comic and burlesque intentions; but we must still find him admirable. He is, in his own way, a "do-gooder," and although he is often defeated, his example makes us feel better about the human lot. He has a further positive aspect; his relationship with Sancho Panza demonstrates his capacity, uniquely among our four, for a friendship which, however asymmetrical it might be, is devoted and enduring.

275

Coda Our four myths, then, survive; but with less force, and for fewer people. Two further brief concluding comments come to mind. First, there is the high literary quality of the original myths: they are all literary masterpieces. Moreover, their special literary status, their inherent force, seems to be connected in some way with the probable identification of their authors with their individualist heroes. However, such identification leaves us with a puzzle: individualism itself gives us the same insoluble conflict — how can we resolve the eternal and many-sided struggle between the claims of the self and those of its social group? A dispassionate student of our four myths, after taking a hard look at our quartet, might well feel constrained to vote for the claims of society. Second, there is the related difficulty that we do not have all the information we neejd even to decide on the relation of our four heroes to their societies. We can only suggest that all four are inherently fascinating characters whose fortunes wholly absorb our initially reluctant interest: reluctant, just because none of them shows much real sense of being part of society. It is the same with their modern counterparts, who do not seem to belong to their communities. This radical separateness of our mythical heroes from their fellows does not seem to be their conscious or willed decision; they merely opt out; and we like their stories, perhaps, because — to use Tournier's terms — at least they show us men who have had the courage to say no. So if we regard them as heroes of individualism, we must see them as individualists of a very negative and essentially egotistic kind. They make no overt pitch for any individualist idea; they do not support individualism ideologically or politically; they merely assume it for themselves. So their message, if they have one, must surely, in the last analysis, be that of the low and anti-social but self-knowing rogue Parolles, in All's Well That Ends Well: "Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live." 52 If Faust, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe have a credo, it must be that; and although Don Quixote does not belong in their company, and wouldn't really want to, it is probably his motto too. 52 4.3.310-11.

276

Appendix: The Worldwide Diffusion of the Myths

There are bibliographies of all our myths; but unfortunately they vary so much, both in their degree of completeness and in their modes of classifying the works, that no accurate numerical comparison is possible. This note will, therefore, merely report some rough estimates from what is available. As we would expect, it is Faust which has received the fullest treatment. There are two bibliographies. The first is Engel's Bibliotheca Faustiana, published in 1885.1 It lists 2,714 titles, of which quite a few might have been omitted, such as the 11 listings of Don Juan, from Tirso on.2 But the major work is the fine four-volume Faust-Bibliographie by Hans Henning. The first volume deals with the period up to 1790, the second and third volumes deal with Goethe's Faust, and the last volume takes the story up to 1975. Henning reports 22 editions of the 1587 Faustbuch in the 50 years following its publication, and 19 editions thereafter.3 There were 24 foreign language translations or adaptations in the first 50 years, and 90 later; as regards works about the Faustbuch, what Henning calls "Sekunddrliteratur" 98 were published up to 1966. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus had 11 editions in the 50 years after its first publication in 1604, and a total of 105 by 1975. There were no 1 Karl Dietrich Leonard Engel, Bibliotheca Faustiana: Zusammenstellung der FaustSchriften von 16. Jahrhundert bis Mitte 1884 [A Classification of Faust Writings from the Sixteenth Century to the Middle of 1884) (Darmstadt, 1885; Hildesheim, 1970). 2 Engel, items 2704 to 2714. 3 Hans Henning, Faust-Bibliographie, Part I (Berlin and Weimar, 1966), Part II, 2 vols. (Berlin and Weimar, 1968, 1970); Part III (Berlin and Weimar, 1976). Among the various difficulties of computation we mention two: reprints are usually listed under the original publication number, and may contain seven or more items; and some items should not be listed (e.g., the ninety numbered entries for Byron's Manfred).

Appendix

translations in the first 50 years, but 46 later. As to works about Marlowe's play, there were none in the first 50 years, but 242 later. For Goethe's Faust, there were no fewer than 230 editions in the first 50 years, out of a total of 766 editions; there were 277 translations in the first 50 years and 676 translated versions later; and there were no fewer than 3,410 works about Goethe's version of the myth. These huge figures, incidentally, are underestimates; Henning affirms, for instance, that there were probably at least 4,000 editions of Faust overall.4 His own bibliography includes more than 10,000 works about the various versions of the Faust story, while his total number of entries, including precursors, studies, operas, and museum exhibits, is 13,211. For the other three myths, the numbers are considerably smaller, partly because the bibliographies are less complete; but the numbers are still very large. Don Quixote had 22 Spanish editions in the 50 years after 1615, the date of the publication of the second part; the total of Spanish editions up to 1937 was 441. 5 There were no fewer than 29 translated versions in the first 50 years, and an overall total of 928. The total number of writings about Don Quixote, up to 1990, was 3J83. 6 Don Juan began much more slowly. There were only 4 editions of 4 Faust-Bibliographie, Part II, vol. 1, p. v. 5 Jeremiah D. M. Ford and Ruth Lancing, Cervantes: A Bibliography (Cambridge, MA, 1931). I have also consulted two earlier bibliographies: Raymond L. Grismer, Cervantes: A Bibliography, 2 vols. (New York, 1946 and Minneapolis, 1963), and Don Leopoldo Rius, Bibliografa critica de las obras de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1895). For editions of Don Quixote, I have used Don Quixote Bibliographia critica de ediciones del Quixote impresas desde 1605 hasta 1917, by Juan Sune Benages and Juan Sune Funbuena, continued to 1937 by J. D. M. Ford and C. T. Keller (Cambridge, MA, 1939). 6 Dana B. Drake, Don Quixote (1894-19J0): A Selective Annotated Bibliography, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill, 1974; Miami, 1978; New York, 1980). To Drake's total of 1,178 I have added, to represent earlier works, the listings under "Celebrations," "Biographical and bibliographical," and "Special topics," where Don Quixote is specifically suggested, a total of 2,205, from Ford and Lancing, Cervantes, and also the 400 items from "Biographies and biographical notes," and "Notes and commentaries" in Leopoldo Rius, Bibliografia critica, 2.1-148, 169-246.

278

Appendix

El Burlador in its first 50 years, taking 1630 as the date of the first edition.7 But the international interest was early and considerable. There were 17 foreign language translations or adaptations, in four languages - Dutch, Italian, French, and English - during the same period.8 A total of 37 later Spanish versions, and 1,727 in other languages, have appeared.9 It is with these relatively recent versions in foreign languages that the diffusion swells enormously.10 There is no separate classification for each foreign language in Singer's bibliography, but Leo Weinstein, in his less complete account, lists 101 French versions, 90 German, 47 English, and 27 Italian, a total of 265 versions.11 Of these, 42 in Spanish, 47 in French, 20 in English, and 12 in Italian, are plays; there are also many operas, ballets, poems, novels, and short stories among the imitations. As to writings about the book, Singer affirms that he knows of a total of some 4,600. 12 Robinson Crusoe has been less well served by bibliographers. There is, it is true, a whole book called Robinson Crusoe and its 7 Tirso de Molina, El Burlador, ed. Luis Vasquez (Madrid, 1989), p. 91. 8 Everett W. Hesse, Catalogo bibliograftca de Tirso de Molina, in Revista estudios (Madrid, 1949), pp. 781-889; Leo Weinstein, Metamorphoses of Don Juan (1959; New York, 1967), pp. 192, 193, 199, 207; Armand Edwards Singer, A Bibliography of the Don Juan Theme, Versions and Criticism (Morgantown, W.Va., 1954, with Supplements), p. 353. 9 Singer, Bibliography (1965), p. 172, and the whole "Versions" section. On the spread of the Don Juan story, see especially Georges Gendarme de Bevotte, La legende de Don Juan (Paris, 1906), pp. 9 5 - 1 3 9 , and Oscar Mandel, ed., The Theatre of Don Juan: A Collection of Plays and Views, 1630-1963 (Lincoln, Nebr., 1963), pp. 41, 100-110.

10 Singer, Bibliography (1965), pp. 29-191 is the basis of my doubtless peccable count. 11 Weinstein, Metamorphoses, pp. 2 2 - 2 6 . 12 From the 1,372 items in Vern G. Williamsen, ed., and Walter Poesse, compiler, An Annotated Analytical Bibliography of Tirso de Molina Studies, 1627I 977 (Columbia, Mo., and London, 1979). Singer wrote in 1988 that, in addition to the 2,600 books and articles listed in his Bibliography, he knew of "another 2000 or so" that he had listed since, "or is about to"; see Singer, "The present state of studies on the Don Juan theme," in Tirso's Don Juan: The Metamorphosis of a Theme, ed. Josep M. Sola-Sole and George E. Gingras (Washington, 1988), p. 2.

279

Appendix Printing^ and there is a recent account of critical studies of Defoe by Spiro Peterson;14 but the main international listing for editions of Crusoe is still Hermann Ullrich's Robinson and Robinsonaden, printed in 1898; 15 there is also a minor supplement. 16 Ullrich shows that Crusoe had a great success from its earliest years. There were no less than 7 English editions in its first 2 years, and a total of 13 in the first 50 years. Of translations, there were 3 editions in the first 2 years of publication in France, and also 3 in Germany; and there were no less than 27 translations between 1719 and 1769, This total of 40 editions in the first 50 years is surpassed only by Don Quixote with 51. The number of later editions of Crusoe is also quite impressive; a total of 196 English editions are recorded, and n o translations, up to 1898. 17 The actual figures are certainly greater. There were countless abbreviated or simplified editions for children; these, like abridgements and rewritten versions, were not usually recorded, or even held by libraries. Even so, no less than 392 abridged or adapted versions are listed. Moreover, Ullrich counts as one any single edition, even if it had many reprints; in one case there were as many as 18. 18 As regards works about Robinson Crusoe, John Stoler's Daniel Defoe: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1900—1990 lists 223 works in English and 238 translations. 19 To supplement this, we can add 20 books and articles from the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, towards filling the gap before 1900. 20 The total is therefore 481. 13 14 15 16

Ed. Henry Clinton Hutchins (1925; New York, 1967). Daniel Defoe, A Reference Guide 1731—1924 (Boston, 1987). Teil 1: Bibliographie (Weimar, 1898). Hermann Ullrich, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe: die Geschichte eines Weltbuches (Leipzig, 1924).

17 Ullrich, Bibliographie, pp. 3 - 6 1 . 18 Ullrich, Bibliographie, pp. 148-151. He devotes 122 of the 248 pages of the Bibliographie to "genuinely serious" (Wirkliche Robinsonaden) later original works based on Robinson Crusoe. 19 Stoler, Defoe: Bibliography (New York, 1986). The foreign language items are not actually categorized as dealing with Robinson Crusoe, but are in fact very largely so. 20 Ed. George Watson, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1971). 280

Appendix

The numerical estimates are not strictly comparable, but we can venture a few general observations. For example, the most reprinted and widely-discussed story was that of Faust, though there was a falling-off in interest from the mid-seventeenth century until the Romantic period; it was Goethe's Faust which put that myth back on top; and its popularity is largely German. There was very little interest in Don Juan, especially in Spain, until its revived renown with Moliere and Mozart. The story also had less appeal for scholars. It is certainly significant that the first translation of Tirso's El Burlador into English (by Harry Kemp) was only in 1923; it was not until 1955 that a translation of Zorilla's play was published — and then it was in Buenos Aires, at the translator's (Walter Owen's) own expense. But as regards exposure to the public, Don Juan is nevertheless probably the most widely known mythical figure throughout the Western world, partly because of the huge number of musical, cinematic, and dramatic versions. There is certainly ample evidence to show that all our four myths had a vast circulation, especially in the nineteenth century. That period witnessed vast increases in population, in literacy, in wealth, and in leisure; and there was a corresponding increase in the total production of books. Other books, of course - beginning with the Bible - had incomparably wider circulations during that period; and in any case the diffusion of reading was by no means universal. Asia and Africa lagged far behind in wealth and education, as well as in publication and reading. Robinson Crusoe was perhaps the leader in the extent of its diffusion in different countries and social classes. We note translations into Coptic, Armenian, and Bengali during the nineteenth century.21 Don Quixote also had early international publication; there were translations into Celtic and Tibetan, and the Spanish scholar, Astrana Marin, claims that it has been translated, at least in part, into no less than sixty-eight languages.22 We must not forget that for most of the period under discussion the mass of the population in the Western world and beyond has 21 Pat Rogers, Defoe: The Critical Heritage (London, 1972), p. 24. 22 E. C. Riley, Don Quixote (London, 1986), p. 176. 281

Appendix

been largely illiterate; but with that omission accepted, we can surely apply to all four of the myths the phrase which August Kippenberg used in 1892 of Robinson Crusoe: an "allbekanntes Werk" - a work known by all.23 We can support this tribute by the story of one rather ordinary young reader, George Borrow. He records in Lavengro (1851) that, having discovered at the age of six a book whose illustrations aroused his "raging curiosity," he did not rest until he had scrambled through the whole text; it was thus that he "first took the paths of knowledge" - by slowly picking his way through Robinson Crusoe. England, he commented, "has better bards than either Greece or Rome, yet I could spare them easier far than Defoe."24 Of course, movable-type publication was not the only means by which the myths were spread; there were also pictorial and dramatic versions. Don Quixote is probably pre-eminent in the number and quality of its pictorial representations. Starting with the illustrations in its first editions, it included, through the centuries, such distinguished artists as Hogarth and Fragonard, Daumier and Dore, Picasso and Dali.25 At a much more popular level, I should estimate, on the basis of my own experience as a tourist, that wooden simulacra of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Spain must far surpass those of Christ and the Virgin Mother in number and variety. Visually, then, Don Quixote takes the lead. Being also a novel with illustrations, the first edition of Robinson Crusoe settled the hero's appearance forever. Faust and Don Juan have no known faces; or at least their appearances are not canonical, as those established by the pictures in the printed novels are. The diffusion of the myths through the performed word in dra23 August Kippenberg, Robinson in Deutschland, 1731—1743 (Hanover, 1892). Kippenberg wrote that Crusoe had exerted "as extraordinary an influence on world literature as any book, either before or since" (cited Rogers, Critical Heritagey p. 23). 24 Cited Rogers, Critical Heritage, pp. 123-25. 25 See Ford and Lancing, Cervantes Bibliographyy pp. 238—39. 282

Appendix

ma, opera, and movies has been very great, particularly in the case of Don Juan. Moliere's play and Mozart's opera still hold the stage, while Zorilla's public is vastly greater. His version is the basis for the annual celebrations still held throughout the Spanish-speaking world on All Saints' Day. They are usually comical or farcical adaptations of Zorilla, with topical additions; but there must be hundreds or even thousands of productions every year; and the tradition continues. Thus the reviewer of the 1990 Madrid production complained that "the old veterans who have already seen dozens of the Tenorio in our lives, plus readings, studies and re-creations of the myth, are longing for another reminder of the constitutive elements of this tradition: romanticism, declamation, impetus, the real fire of the play, and the red cape of Don Juan." The audience, alas, was offered a production with a "naturalist point of view." The reviewer is disapppointed with the "general dull, slow tone of the direction." He openly acknowledges that his expectations, and those of other "old veterans," were shocked when the established tradition for presenting the myth was not honored.26 26 Review by Edouardo Haro Tecglen, El pats, November 1, 1990.

283

Index

Abindarraez, 63 Acts of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul,

The, 6, 7, 67 Adorno, Theodor, 247 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The

(Twain), 45 Agrippa, 32 Alberti, Leon Battista, 121

Barrymore, John, 269 Barthes, Roland, 210, 264 Bartolo, 52 Bayart, Pierre du Terrail, 59 Beasley, Jerry, 219 Begardi, Philipp, 10 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 262

Benengeli, Cide Hamete, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88 Bevotte, Georges Gendarme de, 105

All's Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 276

Alva, Duke of, 127 Amadts de Gaula (Ordonez de Montalvo), 60-63, 87 Amadfs of Gaul, 50, 60, 63

Bibliotheca Faustiana (Engel), 277

Ames du purgatoire, Les (Merimee), 214

Aminta, 95, 97-101, 106, 107

Black Prince, 58 Blake, William, 191 Blanca de Los Rios, 134 Blanqui, August, 239 Boiardo, 51, 63, 121 Book of the Art of Loving Nobly and the Reprobation of Dishonorable Love, The

Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 232

Andres, 51 Anne, queen of England, 148 Annesley, Samuel, 157 Aretino, Pietro, 121 Ariosto, 51 Aristotle, 7, 122, 199 Armesto, Victor Said, 112 Arthur, king of the Britons, 55 Atkins, Stuart, 199 Auden, W. H., 88 Autobiography (J. S. Mill), 267 Avellaneda, Alonso Fernandez de, 67

(Chapelain), 105 Book of Urizen, The (Blake), 191

Borromeo, Carlo, 126 Borrow, George, 282 Boswell, James, 163 Brooke, Nicholas, 44 Brooks, Cleanth, 47 Brown, Jane K., 200 Buddenbrooks (Mann), 247

Bunyan, John, 158, 162, 172 Burckhardt, Jacob, 120-122 Burke, Edmund, 239

Bacon, Francis, 35, 120 Baines, Richard, 30 Baldwin, 63 Balzac, Honore de, 183, 223, 239 Bamberg, Bishop of, 9 Banez, Domingo, 129

Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra,

El (Tirso de Molina), 90-111, 115, 116, 191, 207, 208, 277-279, 281, 282 Burnett-Taylor, Edward, 228 Bush, Douglas, 232

285

Index Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 191, 212, 213, 220 Cabala, 7 Cabanas, Paracuellos de. See Tirso de Molina Caesar, Julius, 122 Cain, 122 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 92, 98, 200 Calvin, John, 126 Camerarius, Joachim, 9 Campbell, Joseph, 229 Campbell, Roy, 900, 92 Campe, Johann Heinrich, 177-180 Camus, Albert, 117 Canisius, Peter, 127 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 63 Captain Singleton (Defoe), 148 Cassirer, Ernst, 229, 232, 237, 268 Castro, Americo, 9O» Catalinon, 93, 94, 96, 97, 9 9 - 1 0 3 , 106, 115-117, 124, 209, 213, 217, 224

Cervantes, Miguel de, 48, 51-53, 57, 58, 61, 62, 67-69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77> 79> 83, 84, 87-89, 105, i n , 124, 125, 128, 130-133, 136, 137, 192, 219-224, 226, 275 Chapelain, Andre le, 105 Charlemagne, 63 Charles I, king of England, 38 Charles V, king of Spain, 57, 58, 60 Chateaubriand, Francois-Auguste-Rene de, 191, 223 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 63 Chesterfield, Lord, 115 Chretien de Troyes, 56 Cibber, Theophilus, 172 Ciutti, 217 Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, The (Burckhardt), 120-121 Claramonte, Andres de, 92 Close, Anthony, 221, 222 Coetzee, J. M., 255 Cohen, Percy S., 228-232, 234

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 182, 220, 221 Colonel Jack, 148 Commander (Don Gonzalo de Ulloa), 94-96, 103, 104, 108, n o , 115, 117, 208, 210, 215, 218, 229 Complete English Tradesman, The (Defoe), 148, 154, 160 Condenado por desconftado, El (The Man Damned for Lack of Faith) (Tirso de Molina), 129 Confessions, The (Rousseau), 177 Confessions of St. Augustine, $n Corpus Hermeticum, 4 Cortes, Hernando, 60 Council of Trent, 126 Counter-Renaissance, The (Hadyn), 128 Croce, Benedetto, 187 Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, The (Lasch), 271 Curtis, Mark H., 38 Dali, Salvador, 282 Daniel Defoe: An Annotated Bibliography of Modem Criticism (Stoler), 280 Dante Alighieri, 56, 121 Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 211, 217, 218 Daumier, Honore, 282 De Civitate Dei {The City of God) (Augustine), 13 De I'Allemagne (Stael), 190 Decline of the West, The (Spengler), 273

Defoe, Daniel, 141, 146-151, 153158, 160, 163-172, 175-178, 180, 255-259, 262, 264, 266, 280 Deleuse, Gilles, 262 Descartes, Rene, 237 Development of the Individual, The (Burckhardt), 120 Dichtung und Warheit (Goethe), 237, 238 Dieckmann, Liselotte, 201 Dies Irae, 114 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 35, 3 8 - 4 0 , 43, 116, 130, 131, 248, 277, 278

286

Index Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend (Mann), 245-254 Dom Juan; ou, Le festin de pierre

(Moliere), 207-210 Don Diego Tenorio, 94, 109, n o , 214, 215

Emile', ou, De Veducation (Rousseau),

I73-I75* 178 Engels, Friedrich, 10

Don Giovanni (Mozart), 94, 210, 213 Don Giovanni Tenorio (Goldoni), 210

Don Gonzalo de Ulloa. See Commander Don Juan, 62, 74, 90-119, 121-125, 129, 130, 137, 172, 207, 210-214, 224, 226, 229, 261, 272, 275, 276 Don Juan (Byron), 191, 212, 213, 220 Don Juan de Manara: La chute d'un ange (Dumas), 214 Don Juan Tenorio (Zorilla), 2 1 4 - 2 1 8 Don Juan und Faust (Gabbe), 213

Don Luis Mejfa, 214, 215, 217 Don Octavio, 93-98, 100, 102, 109 Don Pedro Tenorio, 93, 109, n o Don Quixote, 48-53, 57, 60, 62-90, 98, 121-125, 137, 172, 219, 221226, 233, 234, 272 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 48, 51—55,

58, 61-89, 91, 105, 106, i n , 130, 131, 164, 172, 218-224, 2 7° Dona Ana, 94-98, 100, 106, n o , 214 Dona Inez, 214-218 Dona Isabel, 93-98, 100, 101, 106, 108-110, 117 Dore, Gustave, 282 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 192, 224-226 Double Invitation,

Elvire, 208, 209, 212, 217 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 270 Emile, 173-177, 180, 237

The (MacKay), 113

Dulcinea (Aldonza Lorenzo), 50, 56, 57, 65, 68, 70-72, 81, 85-87, 123 Dumas, Alexander, 214 Dumont, Louis, 236, 271 Durkheim, Emile, 230, 232 Elaine, 55 Elements of Individualism, The (McCall),

241 Eliot, T. S., 274

287

English Faust Book, The, iqn, 33, 35 Entremes de los romances {Interlude of the Ballads) (Cervantes), 52 Epistle to the Ephesians (Paul), 13 Erasmi, 235 Erasmus, Desiderius, 7, 18, 77, 127 Essals sur Vindividualisme: Une perspective anthropologique sur I'ideologie modeme (Dumont), 236 Ethics (Spinoza), 263 Ezra, 8 Family Instructor, The (Defoe), 148 Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,

The (Defoe), 146, 149, 161, 164166, 176 Faust, 3, 12, 15-25, 29, 32, 46, 62, 74, 91, 105, 121-125, 130, 172, 211, 226, 233, 234, 261, 273-277 Faust (Goethe), 190-207, 218, 222, 252, 278, 281 Faust: A Fragment (Goethe), 194 Faust: The Tragedy (Goethe), 194

Faust, George, 3-5, 7—11, 15, 17, 25, 3O-33, 35 Faust, Johann, 8, 16, 19-25, 32-35, 123 Faust, John, 27, 123 Faust-Bibliographie (Henning), 277

Faustbuch, 17-27, 29, 32-35, 41, 123, 130, 193, 194, 245, 248, 249, 273, 275, 277 Faustus, Doctor, 27, 29, 32-35, 3 8 47, 116, 123, 124, 137, 196, 205, 274 Felix Krull (Mann), 247 Female Quixote, The (Lennox), 219 Ficino, Marsilio, 4, 5 Fielding, Henry, 219, 221 Finn, Huckleberry, 45

Index Flanders, Moll, 170 Foe (Coetzee), 255 Foe, James, 147 Fortunate Mistress; or, Roxana, The (Defoe), 148, 170 Fragonard, Jean-Honore, 282 Franciscus, John, 8 Francois I, king of France, 59, 60 Frazer, James, 228 Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, 186 Freud, Sigmund, 70, 229, 271 Friday, 145, 149, 161, 168-170, 255-267, 275 Friday (Tournier), 255-267, 275 Frye, Northrop, 232

Great Theatre of the World (Calderon), 200

Greaves, Lord (of the Badlands), 50 Green, T. H., 241 Greene, Graham, 275 Greene, Robert, 37 Greg, W. W , 46 Gregory VII, Pope, 31 Gregory IX, Pope, 14 Gretchen, 197-200, 203, 204 Grundrisse (Marx), 178 Guinart, Roque, 222 Guinevere, 55

Gabbe, Christian Dietrich, 213 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 183 Galahad, 55 Galatea (Cervantes), 132 Galileo, 181 Gandalin, 63 Ganelon, 63 Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais), 77 Gast, Johannes, 15, 16 Genette, Gerard, 265 Genie du Christianisme, Le (Chateaubriand), 191 Georgics (Virgil), 166 Gerbert, 26 Gildon, Charles, 158, 168 God's Revenge against Murther, 158 Goebbels, Joseph, 268 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 10, 27, 182, 183, 187, 190, 193, 194, 196, 199-20^, . ^6, 212, 218, 221, 222, 237, 238, 252, 273

Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, The (Frazer), 228 Goldoni, Carlo, 210 Grace Abounding (Bunyan), 162 Granada, Fray Luis de, 60 Graves, Richard, 219 Graves, Robert, 230

Hamann, Johann Georg, 183 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 222 Hardenberg, Baron Friedrich von, 190 Harley, Robert, 148 Harvey, William, 181 Haydn, Hiram, 128 Hegel, G. W F., 117, 118, 223 Heine, Heinrich, 222 Helen of Troy, 8, 29, 38, 39, 44, 123, 198, 201, 204

Heller, Erich, 206, 249 Henning, Hans, $n, 19, 2on, 2 1 - 2 4 , 33, 277 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 182-191, 193, 221

Hero with a Thousand Faces, The

(J. Campbell), 229 Historia von D. Johann Fausten (Henning), 19, 2O», 21-24,

33 Historie of the Damnable Life, The (Marlowe), 27 Hitler, Adolph, 250, 254, 268 Hobbes, Thomas, 37, 38 Hobhouse, L. T., 241 Hogarth, William, 282 Hogel, Zacharias, 8» Holderlin, Johann, 190 Homer, 71, 180, 181, 189, 191 Howe, Irving, 161, 162 Hugo, Victor, 191 Huizinga, Johan, 58

288

Index Hunter, J. Paul, 158 Hutten, Philipp von, 9 Hyperion (Keats), 191

Leporello, 217, 229 Lercheimer (Witekind), Augustin, 32 Lessing, Gotthold, 193, 194 Letter to the Dissenters (Defoe), 157 Leverkiihn, Adrian, 245-254, 275 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 228, 230-234, 262 Liberalism (Hobhouse), 241 Life and Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves, The (Smollett), 219 Life and Labour; or, Characteristics of Men of Industry, Culture and Genius (Smiles), 166 Lives of the Poets, The (Cibber), 172 Locke, John, 43, 45, 237 Lodge, Thomas, 37 Lopes de Hoyos, Juan, 130 Lorrain, Claude, 273 Lukes, Steven, 238 Luther, Martin, 10-12, 15-19, 22, 23, 32, 126, 128, 130

Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), 225 In Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 77 Innocent VIII, Pope, 14 Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology (K. Muller), 190 Ivanovna, Sofia, 224 James, Henry, 183 John XII, Pope, 31 Johnson, Samuel, 172, 219, 270 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 219 Joseph of Arimathea, 55 Journal d'un poete (Vigny), 223 Journal of the Plague Year, A (Defoe), 148 Jouvet, Louis, 208, 209 Joyce, James, 171, 274 Jung, Carl, 229 Jure Divino (Defoe), 156

McCall, William, 241 MacKay, Dorothy Epplen, 113, 114^ McKendrick, Melveena, 1300, 133 Madariaga, Salvador de, 77, 78 Magus, Simon (Simon the Mage), 5—7, 16 Maikov, 224 Maine, Henry Sumner, 46 Maistre, Joseph de, 239 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 230, 232 Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer against the Witches), 14 Manara, Miguel, 214 Mandel, Oscar, 116, 117 Manlius, Johannes, 16 Man and Superman (Shaw), 275 Mann, Thomas, 245—254, 268, 274,

Kalidasa, 200 Kant, Immanuel, 183 Kapital, Das (Marx), 179 Keats, John, 191 Kerenyi, Karl, 252 Kerman, Joseph, 212 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 210, 211, 213 King Lear (Shakespeare), 272 Kippenberg, August, 282 Kramer, Heinrich, 14 Kreutznaer, 141 Kyd, Thomas, 30, 31 Lammenais, 239 Lancelot, 55 Lancelot, 56 Uancien regime et la Revolution (Tocqueville), 239 Lasch, Christopher, 271 Lavengro (Borrow), 282 Leach, Edmund, 230 Lennox, Charlotte, 219

275 Mao Tse-tung, 235 Maranon, Gregorio, 90 Marlowe, Christopher, 10, 27, 2 9 - 3 1 , 33> 35~47> 92, 104, 116, 123-125, 128, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 193, 194, 196, 199, 204, 205, 218, 273

289

Index Marshall, William, 59 Marx, Karl, 10, 178, 179, 180, 191 Maximilian I, Holy Roman emperor, 8 Medici, Cosimo de, 4 Medina Sidonia, Duke, 164 Melanchthon, Philip, 16, 17, 33 Memories of a Cavalier (Defoe), 148 Menendez-Pidal, Ramon, 89 Mephistopheles (Faustbuch), 2 1 - 2 4 , 33 Mephistopheles (Goethe), 194-206, 252 Mephistopheles (Mann), 245, 252, 275 Mephistopheles (Marlowe), 39, 41, 44, 45, 104, 123,

124

Mephistopheles (Valery), 274 Merimee, Prosper, 214 "Mighty fortress is our God, A" (Luther), 12 Mill, James, 268 Mill, John Stuart, 241, 267, 268 Milton, John, 101 Moliere, 102, 207-210, 217 Moll Flanders (Defoe), 148, 170 "Mon Faust" (Valery), 273 Monsieur Quixote (Greene), 275 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 60 Montalvo, Garcia Ordonez (Rodrigues) de, 6 0 - 6 3 , 8 7 Montemayor, Prudencio de, 129 Montesinos, cave of, 8 4 - 8 7 Moor, Karl, 222 Moore, John Robert, 147 Morris, Colin, 235, 236 Mota, Marquis de la, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100,

102

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 94, 210, 211, 213, 217, 218,

229

Muller, Karl Ottfried, 190 Muller, Wilhelm, 193 Musset, Alfred de, 214 Myshkin, 225, 226 "Myth and the Powerhouse, The" (Rahv), 232 Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Bush), 232

Nabokov, Vladimir, 52 Namouna (Musset), 214 Nashe, Thomas, 37 Nero, 6 New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 280 Newton, Isaac, 43, 181 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 249 Nouveau Robinson (Campe), 178 Novak, Maximilian, 155, 156 Oedipus, 229, 231, 234 Olivares, Count, 135, 136 Oliver, 79 On Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 240

On Liberty (J. S. Mill), 268 On Literature and the Fine Arts (Schlegel), 190 On the Cognition and Feeling of the Human Soul (Herder), 185 Origen, 42 Original London Post, 147 Orlando furioso (Ariosto), 51 Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 51, 63 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 66 Orwell, George, 74, 75, 77 Owen, Robert, 241 Oxford English Dictionary, 121, 228, 238, 242 Palmerin of England, 60 Panza, Sancho, 6 3 - 6 5 , 68, 69, 7 1 - 8 0 , 87, 89, 124, 221-234, 2 7 2 » 2 75 Paracelsus, 32 Parker, A. A., 118 Parker, Archbishop, 37 Parnassus Plays, 37 Parsons, Talcott, 271 Paul III, Pope, 126 Paul V, Pope, 129 Peele, George, 37 Pepys, Samuel, 163 Percy, Bishop, 187 Peterson, Spiro, 280 Petrarch, 56, 121

290

Index Phenomenology of the Spirit (Hegel), 117

Philip HI, king of Spain, n o , i n Philip IV, king of Spain, n o , 135, 136 Phillips, John, 218 Philomusus, 37 Philosophy and Art (Schelling), 222 Picasso, Pablo, 282 Pico della Mirandola, 5, 8 Pilgrim's Progress, The (Bunyan), 158,

172 Pire, George, 173 Pius IV, Pope, 126 Plan of the English Commerce, A (Defoe), 148 Plato, 5, 7, 39, 189 Poetics (Aristotle), 199 Political History of the Devil, A (Defoe), 148 Politics (Aristotle), 122 Poverty of Philosophy, The (Marx), 178 Practice of Piety, 158 Prawer, S. S., 178 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 219 Price, Martin, 167 Professio Fidei Tridentinum (Council of Trent), 126 "Progress of Faust, The" (Shapiro), 273 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 191 Pulci, 121 Pushkin, Alexander, 213, 224

Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Rousseau), 173 Review, The (Defoe), 148 Rey, Manuel Penedo, 134 Ricardo, David, 178 Richard I ("the Lion-Hearted"), king of England, 59 Richter, Jean Paul, 222 Riefenstahl, Leni, 268 Riesman, David, 271 Riley, E. C , 87, 88 Rimbaud, Arthur, 45 Riquer, Martin de, 590, 61 Rise of the Novel, The (Watt), 157 Robbers, The (Schiller), 222 Robinson (Spark), 255 Robinson and Robinsonaden (Ullrich),

280 Robinson Crusoe, 62, 141, 143-147, 149-157, 159-172, 174-180, 226, 233, 234, 255-267, 272, 275, 276, 279 Robinson Crusoe (The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) (Defoe), 141, 143-149, 151, 153, 154, 157, 158, 162-166, 170-173, 176, 178, 180, 192, 218, 270, 279, 282 Roland, 79 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 163, 1 7 2 180, 191, 223, 237, 238, 255 Roxana, 170 Rufiis, Conrad Murianus, 7

Quijada, Alonso, 48 Sade, Marquis de, 206 St. Albertus Magnus, 31 St. Augustine, 5, 13, 14 St. Faustus, 5 St. Francis de Sales, 127 St. Hyacinthe, 173 St. Ignatius de Loyola, 61 St. John, 6 St. John of the Cross, 127 St. Paul, 13, 236 St. Peter, 6 St. Philip Neri, 127

Rabelais, Francois, 77 Raglan, Lord, 230 Rahv, Philip, 232 Raleigh, Walter, 133 Rambler, The (Johnson), 219 Rank, Otto, 229 Reeve, Henry, 240 Reinaldos of Montalban, 63 Reliques of English Poesy (Percy), 187 Republic (Plato), 189 Reuchlin, Johann, 7

291

Index St. Robert Bellarmine, 127 St. Simon, 239 St. Teresa, 61, 127 St. Thomas Aquinas, 14 St. Vincent de Paul, 127 Sakuntala (Kalidasa), 200 Samson, 101

Sources of the Faust Tradition from Simon Magus to Lessing, The (Palmer and

More), 3», 4, 7-10, 16, 17, 27, 32, 35 Spark, Muriel, 255 Spengler, Oswald, 273 Spies, Johann, 19-21 Spinoza, Baruch, 263

Samson Agonistes (Milton), 101

Santayana, George, 43 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 262 Schelling, Friedrich von, 190, 222 Schiller, Friedrich von, 221, 222 Schlegel, August von, 190, 222 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 190, 222 Schoenberg, Arnold, 247 Schorer, Mark, 232

Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, The (Herder), 189 Spiritual Quixote, The (Richard Graves),

Scienza nuova (Vico), 180 Season in Hell, A (Rimbaud), 45 Second Discourse, "On the Origin of Inequality" (Rousseau), 237 Self Help (Smiles), 241 Selkirk, Alexander, 15072, 154, 256 Serious Reflections during the Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World (Defoe), 146, 149, 151, 157, 164 Sermones Convivales (Convivial Remarks)

(Gast), 15 Serre, Michel, 210 Sganarelle, 209, 217 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 186 Shakespeare, William, 222, 272 Shapiro, Karl, 273 Shaw, George Bernard, 275 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 191 Shortest Way with the Dissenters, The

(Defoe), 148 Sickingen, Franz von, 10 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 59

Smiles, Samuel, 166, 241 Smith, Adam, 152, 178 Smollett, Tobias, 219 Socrates, 122, 235 Sommerreise, Eine (Tieck), 222

219 Spitzer, Leo, 88 Sprenger, Jacob, 14 Stael, Madame de, 190 Starr, George, 157 Stibar, 9 Stogdon, Hubert, 157 Stoler, John, 280 Stone Guest, The (Pushkin), 213

"Structural Study of Myth, The" (Levi-Strauss), 228 Studioso, 37 Sullivan, Henry W., 128, 129, 130 Summis Desiderantes (Innocent VIII), 14

Sutherland, James, 166 Swift, Jonathan, 172 Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss), 178 Sylvester II, Pope, 26

Table Talk (Luther), 15 Tan largo me lo fidis (Tirso de Molina),

98, 102, 106, 112, 115 Tartuffe (Moliere), 207 Tatyana, 224 Tawney, R. H., 163 Taylor, Samuel Coleridge, 154, 155 Tellez, Fray Gabriel. See Tirso de Molina Texares, Gil Berrugo de. See Tirso de Molina "Theories of Myth" (Cohen), 228 Thomas a Kempis, 175 Thuringian Chronicle (Hogel), 8n

Tieck, Ludwig, 222

292

Index Tirso de Molina (Gabriel Tellez), 90— 93, 98, 99, 102, 105, 110-119, 124, 125, 128-131, 134-137, 207-210, 212, 217, 218, 224, 261,

277 Tisbea, 93-95, 97-102, 106 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 239, 240 Todorov, Tzvetan, 204 Tournier, Michael, 255-267, 274-276 Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, The (Marlowe), 27

Trastamara, Henri de, 58

Vives, Luis, 60 Vol du vampire, Le (Tournier), 264

Volk (Herder), 185-188 Volkslieder (Herder), 187 Voltaire, 223 Wade, Gerald E., 90 Wagner, 22, 23, 12477 Waldeck Chronicle, 9

Walsingham, Thomas, 133 Walter, Bruno, 247 Wanderings of Persiles and Sigismunda,

The (Cervantes), 89 Watson, Thomas, 134 Weber, Max, 169, 235, 236, 271 Weinstein, Leo, 279 Wier, Johannes, 17

Tratto del governo delta famiglia

(Alberti), 121 Tristan, 56

Tritheim, Johannes, 4, 5, 7-10, 16 Troeltsch, Ernst, 163, 236 Twain, Mark, 45

Wilhelm Meister (Goethe), 237

William III, king of England, 147, 148 Wilson, Margaret, 134 Wind Spirit, The (Tournier), 261, 262 Wordsworth, William, 191, 219, 220 Wyss, Johann Rudolf, 178, 179, 180

Ullrich, Hermann, 280 Ulysses, 71, 101 Ulysses (Joyce), 274 Unamuno, Miguel de, 65, 114 Ur-Faust (Goethe), 194

Xenophanes, 189 Xury, 167, 168

Valdes, Juan de, 60 Valery, Paul, 273, 274 Van Effen, Justus, 173 Vega, Lope de, 92, 135

Yeats, William Butler, 274 Yevgeni Onegin (Pushkin), 224

Vendredi; ou, Les limbes du pacifique

(Tournier), 255-267, 275 Vico, Giambattista, 180-183, 187, 188 "Victories and Defeats" (Nabokov), 52 Vigny, Alfred de, 223, 226 Vinci, Leonardo da, 121 Virdung, Johannes, 4 Virgil, 71, 121, 166

Zeitblom, Serenus, 245-254, 268 Zimbalist, 245 Zimmerische Chronicle, 17

Zorilla, Jose y Moral, 214-218, 281 Zoroaster, 5 Zumel, Francisco, 129 Zwingli, Ulrich, 125

293

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