About the Myth of Don Juan and Zorrilla’s “El Tenorio”: Psychoanalytical Considerations with Reference to The Rhetoric(s) of Masculinity

THE DON JUAN MYTH AND ZORRILLA’S “TENORIO”: Some Psychoanalytical Reflections Concerning the Rhetoric(s) of Masculinity[1].

JOSÉ GUILLERMO MARTÍNEZ VERDÚ[2].

“Don Juan decides against morality because morality had previously rebelled against life. Only when there exists an ethic which would count, as its first premise, the fullness of life, will Don Juan be able to submit”.

(José Ortega y Gasset).

INTRODUCTION TO THE FILM[3]

Francisco Nieva said, in 1995, that “few things excited Dalí as much as the theatrical visualisation of Zorrilla’s drama. His daubs, to Ortega’s way of thinking and feeling, were the calligraphy of another language”. It is precisely because of these features which so many critics, even Zorrilla himself, have described as errors in the formal and internal composition of the work, that Nieva describes Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio as a “visionary work” whose dreamlike aspect takes it close to surrealism. “All the bad choices of precept—in other words the clumsiness of the Tenorio—are clear exponents of the pre-logical state which the work of art presents to our eyes today. There is in The Tenorio, nonetheless, a closed order, an ‘invented verisimilitude’ and a sense to the emblematic character which fully justifies this. It offers a game with the transvestite images of dreams, more accurate in their delineation of primary instincts... The supposedly nonsensical verse forms[4]—almost a form of tongue-twister—are incontrovertible proof of an informal delirium existing within the formal one and the ludic transgression of the serious theme... The carelessness, the gaps, the curious superimpositions of images and uneven tempo are not so much ‘defects’ nowadays—concludes Nieva— but constitute the roughness of texture which reveals the flavour of the drama”.

Might this “surrealistic” aspect of Zorrilla’s Tenorio have been what appealed to Dalí so much? We cannot know for certain, but whatever the case, his predilection for it was long-standing, since during their time at the Students’ Residence in Madrid, Buñuel, Lorca and Dalí used to enjoy performing the work, even modifying the dialogues to suit themselves.

The movie we are going to see is the filming made by Alejandro Perla in 1952 of a stage performance of José Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio, staged for the first time in 1949 by the María Guerrero National Theatre Company, directed by Luis Escobar and Humberto Pérez.

“The particular interest of this theatrical production”—claims the introduction in the Film Archives—“lies in the fact that the sets and costumes are the work of Salvador Dalí. They provide a major visual shock in the context of a classic which has been performed a thousand times. There is no doubt that the film is of important documentary value since it enables us to appreciate a part of Dalí’s work as well as that of the Spanish theatre, since some of the great theatrical talents of the age are brought together in this performance”, talents such as Enrique Diosdado, Mª Carmen Díaz., José M. Rodero, Carmen Seco, Rafael Alonso, and so on.

It is said that the cinema is a compendium of all the arts, literature, theatre, music, painting, sculpture, architecture.... Many questions come to mind, but let us focus on just one. Is what we are about to watch theatre or cinema?

Alfred Hitchcock said that a truly cinematographic technique came into being the moment cinema became independent of the theatre, “when D.W.Griffith took the camera away from the place where his predecessors had set it up, somewhere under the proscenium arch, and put it as close to the actors as possible” (quoted by Truffaut, 1966). On the other hand, the very fact of filming makes a fundamental difference, which is, that however much the camera claims merely “to photograph” the performance of the work, that performance, just as happens with painting, becomes a definitive, unalterable reality, identical to itself each time it is seen whilst the essence of theatre, as with music, is that each performance is unique.

We can conclude, therefore, that what we are going to watch is cinema because cinema is the filming of a dramatic performance, which, however much it might claim to be like all those others staged since its première in 1949, had the particular feature of being staged in 1952 for the camera of Alejandro Perla, that is, to be performed for the cinema.

Thanks to the recent recovery and restoration work carried out by the Film Institute of the Generalitat of Valencia, we can now sit back and watch a film in which the genius of Zorrilla and Dalí converge in this rare, not to say strange and shocking, yet original and truly authentic work of baroque, romantic, surrealist art.

LECTURE.

1. The feeling of authentic ritual which until very recently surrounded the performance of Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio on stages throughout Spain, is well known. Without fail, around the time of the festivities associated with All Saints and All Souls’ Day in the early days of November, nobody missed their appointment with Don Juan, Doña Inés and the statue of the Knight Commander, even if it was only on television. What is not so well known is that it was a centuries-old custom. Practically since the character of the Tenorio first saw the light of day in the Seducer of Seville and the Stone Guest (El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra), apparently written by the Mercedarian Friar Gabriel Tellez, better known as Tirso de Molina, in 1630. This play was subsequently replaced by Antonio de Zamora’s entitled There is no deadline left unmet and no debt left unpaid and the Stone Guest (1714), a work practically forgotten nowadays, but which was ritually performed on the appointed dates throughout the 18th century and the early years of the19th. The spectacular success of José Zorrilla’s Tenorio in its first performances in 1844 immediately caused the Zamora version to be replaced by Zorrilla’s for the remainder of the 19th century and up to the present day.

Beyond our borders, special mention must be made of Molière’s 1664 prose version, Don Juan or the Stone Feast which was turned into verse in 1673 by Thomas Corneille. There is also the long poem by Lord Byron (1819-1824) and between these two works, the extraordinary opera by Mozart, Don Giovanni, with libretto by the Italian Lorenzo Da Ponte, first performed in Prague in 1787.

There are two common motifs from Tirso’s time to Zorrilla’s: the themes of the Seducer and of the Stone Guest, the return of the offended dead man in the shape of the statue of the Knight Commander. This second theme is missing in the version by Byron, who puts a quite different complexion on the traditional character.

Both motifs are present before Tirso in legends in popular circulation, and a long time before that they were already part of the Spanish collection of ballads known as the romancero. Thanks to the research and compilation work of Said Armesto and other scholars we know of numerous ballads collected throughout the peninsula. In all of these, both the theme of seduction and the double invitation are mentioned, although in some the guest is a skull and in others he is already a statue as such. You may have heard of the ballad found in Riello, in the province of León which begins:

In Molière’s Don Juan, who is, by the way, an atheistic Don Juan, there is a certain rationalist philosophy which Don Juan uses to try to reason and justify his behaviour, a frequent feature, moreover, in this author who deals with human “foibles” through his characters (as in The Miser, Tartuffe, The Misanthrope and so on). This philosophical reasoning would be comparable to all the justifications of the will to pleasure (jouissance) made by libertine authors such as Laclos or de Sade. This does not appear in the Spanish authors. There is no treatment of the will to pleasure (jouissance) in the Sade mode in Tirso, let alone Zorrilla. Tirso’s Tenorio, like the one we have just seen is not a libertine, but a baroque character devoid of rationalism. He is a subject in act, that is, in a state of realization where he does not think; there is no place for Cartesian doubt. Nor does he doubt for a moment the existence of God, but simply responds with his famous cry:

“You’re giving me plenty of rope!!”

And this is how Zorrilla presents him from the beginning of the work. Don Juan’s list, like that of Don Luis—who appears as a mirror image of Don Juan and against whom he must measure himself—is a succession of actions (duels and conquests) which literally leave no time for anything else, let alone mental space for reflection or any type of psychological development. This is shown by Dalí through the costumes which give the characters a certain air of effeminate cockerels, strutting about. And it is not a coincidence that Dalí radically modifies the wardrobe in the second part, in which, after five years have elapsed, we are shown a Don Juan who is also radically different, more thoughtful and humane. But for this to happen, he had to have loved and lost Doña Inés and assumed a burden of sorrow (work of mourning) of which we shall speak later on.

2. There has been a good deal of speculation about the ritualistic nature of the performance of Tenorio and its effect on the audience. Let us listen to the well-founded and, at the same time, elegantly expressed comments of Gonzalo Torrente Ballester in 1965:

For the Spanish male the annual presence of the Tenorio is a kind of catharsis to which we yield ourselves out of pleasure and necessity and with which we deliver ourselves, as in any act of catharsis, from that which any one of us has in common with the Seducer of Seville, which is not usually a light burden and which gives us more heartache and contrition than pleasures. Don Juan Tenorio is a cleansing and curative rite which we generally forget when November has passed but which we wish to repeat the following autumn. However, not every Spaniard forgets Don Juan, not everyone is thoroughly cured by it dramatic pace, nor cleansed in the shower of Zorrilla’s lines. Don Juan is a source of concern, often deep-seated, and those who share it do not usually ignore it. Don Juan is something more than a dramatic character. He is what many dramatic characters have managed to become: a myth. As such, because of his deep meaning, we think of him even to the point of passion. We wish to grasp and express the modest human reality beneath the elegant pen, we want to discover the secret locked away inside the glib heart of Don Juan. Because, ever since he appeared in poetry, Don Juan has held a secret the nature of which we do not always agree about. Succeeding generations search it out, and think they have found it, and what they do is to deposit a good deal of their own secrets in Don Juan’s soul.

These reflections of Torrente are quite Freudian, since Freud (1905), once he had reformulated it psychoanalytically, appeals to the concept of catharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics to explain the aesthetic emotion of the spectator.

In the same way, Ortega y Gasset said that “with few exceptions, men divide into three groups: those who think they are Don Juan, those who think they were him and those who think they could have been, but did not want to be”.

What seems obvious to us is that to produce Don Juan, women are needed. And the view of Gregorio Marañón in 1936 is no different:

Tirso de Molina, inferior to Lope de Vega in creative power and inspiration; inferior to Calderón in depth, was better than both of them in direct knowledge of human passions, and particularly of female ones. His work is full of admirable women figures. His play, Don Juan, fully enters into the series, in part because of the character’s ambiguous sexuality, but above all because his silhouette is like a negative of the one that his women form around him. Without them, Don Juan would disappear. This is why only a great expert in the female soul would have been capable of creating the soul of Don Juan.

We do not know if Jacques Lacan (1963,1972) read the works of Marañón, but it is only a short step to go from this to saying that Don Juan is a “female fantasy”. On the other hand, Marañón preceded him by several decades when he removed the determiner in front of “woman”:

It very often happens in the present phase of human progress that man remains arrested in cynicism his whole life and so runs from woman to woman because the object of his attraction is not “a particular woman” (“una mujer”) but “woman” (“la mujer”), the sex as such (Inverted commas by Marañón). This is the situation with Don Juan, stranded on the threshold of womanhood and unable to focus his attraction on any of the infinite lovers who pass through his hands.

Even though “woman is a symptom of man”, the reverse does not hold true. According to Lacan (1975): “With respect to her function as a symptom, she stands in exactly the same position as her man.” We cannot say that man is a symptom of woman, rather, that woman would also be a symptom of women, to the extent that both for men and women, woman is always the “Other sex”.

Neither can it be said of Don Juan that he is the symptom of women. Rather, what Lacan says is that he is their dream, their fantasy, their myth...

3. But firstly, let us see if that works in Freud. Freud constructs his etiologic theory of the trauma on what his hysterical patients tell him. And what did they tell him? That they had been seduced. So that the neurosis struck because of a sexual trauma suffered in childhood, the “paternal aetiology” as valid for females as for males. “I no longer believe in my ‘neurotic’ (female) ... the solution is that sexual fantasy regularly takes over the subject of the parents,” he wrote to W. Fliess on 21st September 1897 (Letter 139). “Also I have discovered within me that I was in love with my mother and jealous of my father,” he wrote a little later, “and now I think it is a universal event of early childhood... If this is the case, you can understand the captivating power of Oedipus Rex” (Letter 142, 15/10/1897).

So that by looking in Freud for this question of Don Juan as a woman’s dream, we not only find him in seduction fantasies but also in the Oedipus complex. At the same time as he gives up his theory of trauma (and without forgetting that Freud was mourning the death of his father), he answers the question “What does a woman want?” in this way: a father, but not any father, the father of the Oedipus whose existence she has verified in him. For Freud, the inventor of the Oedipus Complex, there would still be many years and the experience of grief at the death of his mother before he would re-pose the question, “What does a woman want?”, underlying female sexuality and reply by returning to the theory of trauma, on this occasion in the figure of the mother as the first seducer.

We were speaking of woman as a symptom of man. But what about the hysterical woman as a symptom of Freud? Fortunately, he was no Brewer, as he himself used to say in order to calm the jealousy of Martha, his fiancée at the time. Nor did he flee terrified, as his colleague had done from Anna O, when, in mid-hysterical birth, she said to him, “Here comes Brewer’s child”. On the contrary, he could have put himself in the position of Don Juan, sustaining a woman’s fantasy, returned her desire to her and tempered her pleasure (jouissance). Or wasn’t it thanks to tolerating Emmy’s fantasy that Freud let himself go, giving up suggestion and mutating from the position of hypnotist to that of psychoanalyst? Was it not Emmy who made Freud a psychoanalyst when she said to him, “Be quiet, you’re interrupting me!” which gave rise to the “free association technique”? (Michelena 1996). As if there had been an inversion of what we might call Pygmalion’s desire...

When, on the 25th May 1897, Freud sent Fliess the Summary of Scientific Works he wrote: “With this letter I am enclosing ‘il catalogo delle belle’ (the catalogue of beauties)”. This summary was prepared by Freud as a necessary part of the paperwork to obtain the title of professor. While this allusion to the catalogue of Don Giovanni’s conquests reveals something of Freud’s own Don Juanlike traits, the important thing here is that, in some way, he compares his own scientific output to Don Juan’s list. That is to say, that he established a very close relationship between the creative act and the catalogue of women, women created, then, by Don Juan.

References to Don Juan are relatively scarce in Freud’s work but enough to confirm that he knew the character well. Mozart’s opera was one of his favourites and he went to many performances of it. In Manuscript H, the appendix to the letter to Fliess, 24th Jan. 1895, there is an explicit reference:

When the old maid becomes attached to a dog or the confirmed bachelor collects cigarette cases, the first is substituting her need for conjugal community and the second his need for numerous conquests. Every collector is a Don Juan Tenorio substitute, as is the climber of mountain peaks, the sportsman, or whatever. They are erotic equivalents. Women are familiar with them too. Gynaecological treatment comes under this heading. There are two classes of sick women: those who are as faithful to their doctors as to their husbands, and those who change doctors as they do lovers.

This shows us that Freud was highly conscious that in his own collecting, he was “a Don Juan Tenorio substitute”. On the other hand, as Dubcovsky points out: “Both Schur and Roazen state that the epithet ‘conqueror’ which Freud attached to himself, has the double meaning of epic and sexual. Through his knowledge of Spanish he considered himself a true ‘conqueror’ of new territories, and he was well aware of his violent sexual fantasies”.

Another Freudian reference to the figure of Don Juan is found in Formulations of the Two Principles of the Psychic Process (1911). There he quotes Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw, who put the words “to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of giving way to the line of least resistance” into the mouth of Don Juan.

The curious thing at first sight is that Freud makes our hero a representative of the reality-ego not of the pleasure-ego. In effect if we follow the logic of the text at the moment of this quote, we find that:

1. “the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle does not imply the dethroning of the first, but is its guarantee. A momentary pleasure, uncertain in its consequences, is given up, only to gain certain pleasure by the new path, which will come later.”

2. After this, Freud shows how this substitution is reflected in “the religious myth of the reward in the hereafter”.

3. It is found also in science which “offers intellectual pleasure during the work and promises a final practical gain”.

4. In education too.

5. And, finally, in art which “manages the reconciliation of the two principles by its own particular route”.

And here, we have Don Juan being put on a par with religion and science and related to education and art. He does not defer pleasure as much as religion (the hereafter) or as much as science (whose practical gain is available in a less distant future than the religious one), but there is a certain deferral (“tonight I shall enjoy her” says Don Juan) which links our hero with the artist of whom Freud says that “he cannot adjust to that renunciation of impulsive satisfaction ... and gives free rein in his fantasy life to his erotic desires and ambition”. Except that Don Juan’s deferral only encompasses the time and space necessary to carry out his sublimatory act and to realise, through seduction, his own strange creation. So, what’s it all about? Why, Woman of course!

4. The episode of the seduction of Tisbea, the fisherwoman from Tarragona (in Tirso’s The Seducer), shows us better than any other this dimension of the pure creative act where the three logical levels (of seeing, understanding and concluding) are simultaneously deployed from a state of real unconsciousness which, through all the humour that it displays, leads the spectator to the conviction that he has come up against the ‘real’ Don Juan. “That is the authentic Don Juan!” one might exclaim. This would be equivalent to exclaiming that he is a real man each and every time we conclude that, in his imposture, he is responding to the male imagination corresponding to a certain female fantasy that goes beyond the Spanish baroque era.

In effect, once Don Juan and his manservant Catalinón have embarked for Spain, they are shipwrecked and both miraculously arrive at the coast where the beautiful Tisbea lives. In a long monologue, she narcissistically rejoices and boasts of her disdain for the young fishermen who are smitten with her, including Anfrisio who lavishes his most ardent attentions on her:

Don Juan has saved Catalinón by swimming with him on his shoulders. Out of breath, he reaches the shore and faints. The manservant takes him in his arms believing him dead from exhaustion: “No, he’s still breathing,” says Tisbea, who has witnessed the whole scene. After informing her of his lord’s name and his noble origins, Catalinón hurries off to seek help from the fishermen, bringing us to scene 12 of the first day, which begins when Tisbea nurses Don Juan in her lap and he begins to seduce her as soon as he has recovered consciousness:

I live in you, if I die in the sea.

I have already lost all fear

That it might overwhelm me,

Since from the hell of the sea

I escape to your clear heaven.

A terrible hurricane

Broke my ship asunder

To throw me at those feet

That give me shelter and harbour.

And in your divine east

I am reborn. No need for fear

Since you see that between loving and living [5]

There is but one letter.

Instantly in love, Tisbea’s reply gives us a clue to her ‘ardent’ passion.

You look like a Greek horse

Washed up at my feet from the sea,

For you come shaped by the water

And are full of fire

And if wet, you are so scorching

Being dry what will you do?

... However icy you are

You have so much fire in you

That in mine you are ablaze.

It would be better to say that seduction even precedes recovery of consciousness, particularly if we adhere to the classical symbolism, that being saved from the waters is like being born. In any case, even exhausted and half dead, Don Juan is up to the task: “a man who is perfectly identical to himself” says Lacan (1963). And he adds: “Don Juan’s prestige is tied to the acceptance of that imposture. He is always there in another’s place: that is to say, the absolute object”.

5. “With what kind of force does Don Juan seduce?” wonders Kierkegaard (1843):

He is the energy of desire, the energy of sensual desire. He desires in each woman all her femininity, and this constitutes the sexually idealising force with which, at a stroke, he can beautify and capture his prey. The reflection of this gigantic passion beautifies and aggrandises that which is desired, sets it alight and augments its beauty with his reflection ... he illuminates every maiden since his relation with her is essential. For this reason, before him, spiritual differences fade away in comparison with the principal question, being a woman.

He rejuvenates older women in the beautiful half of their womanhood; young girls he brings to maturity almost in a moment. Anything that is woman is his prey... Don Juan is not only successful with women, but he makes them happy... and unhappy... He desires, and this desire is seen as seductive and it is on this basis that he seduces. He enjoys the satisfaction of desire and as soon as he has satisfied it he seeks a new object, and so on to infinity. This is the reason why he is so good at deceiving, but not to the point where he prepares his deception beforehand; it is the force of sensuality itself which deceives the women he seduces.

To return to the clinic, if seduction ends up being traumatic, it is because the seducer has also been seduced. This is where we find the great value of the Freudian theory of trauma, the fact that the father needs seduction for his enjoyment means that she has previously seduced him. If the father is seduced, then he falls from his place and no longer serves as wooer, with the result that incest with the mother is made present.

One specific item of interest about Don Juan as a female myth¾and here fantasy’s typical function of placing a limit on pleasure (jouissance) is revealed to us¾is that he does not allow himself to be seduced. Don Juan is always the seducer, never the seduced. That is the difference with Casanova, who is seduced and the plaything of women, or with some Romantic Don Juan, like Byron’s whom women seduce, seek out, and compete for. And we do well to ask whether, by falling in love with Doña Inés in Zorrilla’s version, Don Juan is still being Don Juan.

At the beginning of Tirso’s work, Tenorio answers Isabella:

Who am I? A man with no name.

Later he will declaim:

These are questions about pleasure (jouissance) posed by our hero to that return of the real embodied in the statue of the Knight Commander.

6. Taking up again the question of the power of seduction, there is one important aspect which should not be overlooked. Don Juan is supposedly knowledgeable in one area and, in this case, the supposition is a universal one. “He is supposed to be able to give a response to the question what is a woman?” (Szpirco, 1996). What every seduced woman believes is that Don Juan is going to produce the signifier of Woman, that is, that he is going to confer identity on her.

The question is whether Don Juan will confuse himself with this semblance and take himself as such. There are passages in Zorrilla¾Torrente Ballester has counted eighteen in all¾ in which he speaks of himself in the third person (as psychoanalysts do occasionally). We can think of him speaking in the third person as establishing a difference between himself and what the signifier ‘Don Juan Tenorio’ may represent.

Anyone who thought of himself as an expert in women would be as much an impostor as any analyst would be who thought of himself as an expert in the unconscious. So-called Don Juans are impostors who take themselves to be Don Juan, and who, in claiming to meet the requirements, affirm that they are experts and have responses for everything to do with women whether it is their souls or their bodies. As an example, consider the speeches in Tigre Juan (Tiger John) by Pérez de Ayala which are so full of certainty about women.

We believe that Miguel de Unamuno managed to capture that dimension of appearance when he wrote:

All the ideal greatness, all the universal and eternal reality is this: the historical reality of Don Juan Tenorio consists in his being the most eminently theatrical, representative, historical character, in that he is always represented, that is, representing himself. If Don Quixote says “I know who I am!” Don Juan says the same but in another way: “I know what I represent! I know that I represent!” Just as Segismundo knows that he is dreaming himself into being, which is also representing himself. The three of them dream themselves and know that they are dreaming themselves. Don Juan always knows that he is on-stage, always dreaming himself into being and always making himself be dreamt into being, always dreamt into being by his lovers. And dreaming himself into being in them.

If we compare Spanish literary productions with those of northern European Romanticism, Ramiro de Maetzu says:

... the Spanish Don Juan does not seek happiness, but the pleasure of the moment; he is not in love, but proud and sensual, and this is the cause of his consistency and his strength... And what radically differentiates the Spanish Don Juan from the northern Don Juan is that ours lacks loftier desires. He is, by definition, the man of appetites but without ideals.

On the other hand, the foreign Don Juans of Romanticism strive in their search for an idealised woman. In this respect, Maetzu points out that:

... whoever searches for the ideal woman is not a soul charged with love but a selfish Romantic whose exaggerated vanity has made him believe in the existence, or the possible existence in some part of the world, of a woman who, as soon as he meets her, will only see perfections in him and will forget herself in order to do nothing but worship him, and will be at one and the same time mother, sister, mistress and the echo of his voice and the reflection of his soul and will live solely for him.

7. We mentioned that we would talk about the question of grief in Don Juan and Dalí’s sets. In order to do so, let us have a look at Melanie Klein (1937):

The typical Don Juan feels beset by fear of the death of the women he has loved, a fear which would open up the way to and bring about depression and much mental suffering if it were not for his specific defence: infidelity. In this way he is constantly proving to himself that his ‘one’ and very much loved object (originally his mother, whose death he feared because his love for her was voracious and destructive) is not after all indispensable, since he will always be able to lavish passionate, if superficial, feelings on another woman... When he abandons and rejects some women, he is unconsciously distancing himself from his mother, saving her from his dangerous desires and freeing himself from his burdensome dependence on her whilst, in seeking out other women and supplying them with pleasure and love, in his unconscious he retains the beloved mother or re-creates her once more... In unconscious fantasy, he re-creates or repairs his mother by means of sexual gratifications (which he really offers to other women) since only in one respect does he feel that his sexuality is dangerous; in another, he feels it is reparative and likely to make her happy.

So, Don Juan does the same as Ruth Kjär (Klein 1929): he tries to fill that empty space that the work of art re-creates by repairing the devastation wrought inside the mother’s body, a subject which Lacan takes up again in his seminar on Ethics as that real thing in the mother’s body to which sublimation points, elevating the object to the dignity of the Thing (Das Ding).

Carlos Alberto Paz (1993) says:

... without exaggeration, we could say that the task of greatest scope in current psychoanalysis would be to contribute to the avoidance of loss and useless suffering, devastating for mental health; to help us to accept our own losses and unnecessary sufferings, to help us as much as possible to cure the harmful effects of unknown losses or denied losses. And it may be one of the supports which help us face up to and tolerate our own aggressiveness and other people’s, the rational and mature acceptance of inevitable griefs, and the repeated experience of emerging from them profoundly changed, even enriched.

In what M. Klein proposes there would be no working out of grief in Don Juan. This working out of grief is only attained by facing the pain of recognition of loss. If this were not so, we would have a denial of loss thanks to manic repair mechanisms. Maybe it would be applicable to other versions of the myth in which this modification and enrichment which Carlos Paz spoke of does not take place. And, after all, rather than talking of myth, Klein is talking of certain real characters of the so-called Don Juan variety who fear facing up to their internal conflicts and have recourse to seduction as a counterphobic technique with which to completely control the object, that is, the woman they fear deep down as a possible source of frustration and retaliation for that aspect of Don Juan’s own sexuality which is felt to be damaging and destructive. Moreover, they flee from their desires for dependence and deny them by rapidly addressing themselves to a new object.

In the second part of the drama, several years of suffering have passed for Don Juan, living out the loss of Doña Inés. This is a grief that he has never felt before, simply because his manic donjuanesque attitude had acted as a defence mechanism against the possibility of experiencing any loss and as a form of guilt denial. Now, on the contrary, full of sorrow before the tomb of Doña Inés, Don Juan recites:

And, as C. Padrón says (1985), “we can oppose the spectre of the risk of loss involved in the relationship with the other, with that affirmation of creative realization ... But to reach that heaven of love it is, of course, necessary to be mad about the other.”

8. “Woman doesn’t exist” and “There is no sexual relationship or proportion”. These Lacanian expressions take into account the impossibility of there being an ontology of the sexes or a symmetrical and harmonious relationship between them within the human condition. The so-called natural existence of a male and a female essence, or, what amounts to the same thing, a male and a female soul which could come and install itself in a man’s and woman’s body respectively, simply constitutes the illusion of identity and complementarity of the sexes established by nature (whether this is expressed in religious, philosophical, biological or psychological terms). After Freud, male and female traits can no longer be thought of as the point of departure, but the always incomplete result of a complex structuring process. Every age offers a few identifying models which give rise to different representations of gender. In the case of masculinity, this is something which can be clearly appreciated following the variations in the historical evolution of Don Juan through the innumerable literary, theatrical, or film versions of the character from the 17th century to the present day.

“I want to find, I want to meet a real man!” sang Alaska a few years ago. If, as Lacan states, Don Juan is a women’s fantasy, he is so in mythical form, a female myth of masculinity, a female dream of a “real man”. But, who would claim to meet such requirements if not at the expense of an imposture?

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

BARGALLO, J. (1989): ”Introducción” (a Don Juan). En MONTHERLANT, H.: Don Juan. Hijo de nadie Ed. Cátedra.

Madrid, 1989.

DUBCOVSKY, S. (1986): La triple vida sexual de Sigmund Freud. Ed. Muchnik. Barcelona, 1986.

FREUD, S. (1887‑1904): Cartas a Wilhelm Fliess (1887‑1904). Amorrortu. B.Aires, 1994.

-- (1905): Personajes psicopáticos en el escenario. O.C. T. 7. Amorrortu. B.Aires,1978.

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[1]Film projection and Lecture made in Seville, in the context of the Journeys about The Rhetoric(s) of masculinity, organized by “Grupo de Estudios Estilísticos y Culturales” from The University of Seville, during March 2nd, 3rd and 4th of 2000.

English translation: Janet Dawson. Department of English and North-American Literature. University of Sevilla. e-mail: janet@cica.es

[2] José Guillermo Martínez Verdú. (A.P.M) Address: Dr. Gómez Ferrer, 13-19a, 46010 Valencia. Spain. Tel.: 963614594. e-mail: martiver@correo.cop.es

[3] Film shown: “Don Juan Tenorio by José Zorrilla”. Made in 1952 by Alejandro Perla; with set and costume design by Salvador Dalí.

[4] These are ‘ovillejos’: rhyme scheme: aabbcccddc. See ll. 1142-1201 and 1366-1425.

[5] The text actually says:

pues veis que hay de amar a mar

una letra solamente.

i.e. the only difference between love (amar) and sea (mar) is one letter.

[6] The text actually says: Sevilla a voces me llama el Burlador, / y el mayor gusto que en mí puede haber / es burlar a una mujer / y dejalla sin honor.