'Tis more than what is called mobility': Structure and a Development towards Understanding in Byron's Don Juan

A reader perusing Byron's Don Juan in search of traditional indications of surface structure is doomed to disappointment. The ottava rima epic replete with digressions and whimseys is peppered with plot twists in no way coherent with the Don Juan myth extant in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The main character, Don Juan, neither achieves salvation nor is he damned. Byron's views on literary and political figures of his day (notably Southey, Wordsworth, and Wellington) intrude at random points throughout the epic, and disparaging social commentary, both implicit and explicit, frequently displaces narration. Byron's mental lability or his "mobility" both fascinates and repels the reader. In view of the seeming disorder of the poem, the casual reader might be forgiven for concluding that Byron had composed Don Juan in the same way as he admittedly composed his letters, eschewing caution and "generally say[ing] what comes uppermost at the moment." Byron spoke about Don Juan as if the epic were plotless and unplanned, and as if he could and would abandon it in midstream should it prove to be unpopular. He also emphasized the humour in the work, and disparagingly opposed any suggestion that he should work to a grand plan in producing a "'great work' an Epic poem I suppose or some such pyramid". However, Byron energetically defended his approach to Don Juan, suggesting that the scenes in it were real, that the whole was a sublime representation of life, and that the poem would be eventually be known for what it was "a satire on abuses of the present states of Society." The fact that Don Juan was "now and then voluptuous" was incidental to the aim of the poem. Byron's own words allow for the inference that he refused to impose a traditional or surface structure on the epic, but they strongly suggest that he did have a commitment to Don Juan which involved something more than the production of a bouquet of bawdy and amusing episodes written and published over a period of several years (1818-1824). It has been suggested that this commitment to fact or realism which stand, in Byron's work, in opposition to romanticism or idealism. In view of the inconsistencies and seeming structural deficiencies noted in the epic, and in view of hints provided by the author himself, a search for structure in Don Juan could only be successful if it went beyond traditional or surface dimensions in its scope. This essay describes such a search which was conducted on two levels, the emotional and the philosophic. Results of numerical analyses performed at the broad emotional level led to the conclusion that there was clear evidence of emotional structure within each of the three subdivisions of the poem. Inquiries addressing a deeper level of meaning led to the description of a logical interrelationship among the three subdivisions. They also led to the conclusion that far from being planless and unstructured, the poem was a model of logical development or intellectual growth as defined by Hegel's dialectic. Emotion is a less obvious form of structure than plot, but it is, nevertheless, a form. It is possible to demonstrate that as Don Juan unfolds, the emotions engendered in the reader by the words Byron employs rise and fall in a patterned rather than a random manner. A passage containing many pleasant words has the power to induce a pleasant emotion in the reader, and one containing many unpleasant words the power to encourage the dominance of a correspondingly unpleasant affect. Passages bedecked with blood, thunder, and wounds (Canto VIII, for example) leave behind a very …