638
DONALD SUTHERLAND
forms, but its potential for pornographic episodes throughout society and
over the wide world is immense. The Mozart opera announced one thousand
and three seductions in Spain alone.
Mr. Gardner, however, concentrates, on a relatively few but prodigiously
varied episodes, enriching them with fine sensuous detail and especially a
style. He does not simply write a historical novel of early seventeenth century
Spain-the time and place of the first Don Juan play and, the book plausibly
has it, of a real Don Juan-but makes it a picaresque novel in the manner of
that time and place, much as if it were by Quevedo. Though the style has the
headlong vehemence, the crepitation, and the rhetorical agility of Quevedo, it
is rather more than a clever pastiche of the baroque prose of that period.
It
seems to me to draw on the more sensuous luxuriating prose of the older
picaresque tradition, on Petroni us and Apuleius, and also on some modern
styles, like that of Valle-Inclan. At any rate its most appreciative audience
should be the Spanish majors in universities, where it really deserves a semi–
nar, with Octavio Paz perhaps as moderator. Taken unacademically, as a
modern work in English, it may seem, for all its verve, just a terrible debauch
of vocabulary, images, and rhetorical pranks. Still, there is an audience for
contemporary prose of that kind.
The book is Spanish, or very nearly, in spirit as well, and that may make
for difficulties. One has to try to feel the inordinate religiosity of the period,
the full weight of the Church and its Inquisition, and the visions of the saints.
For equilibrium against that excess of sanctity the Spanish mind commonly
uses an extreme of obscenity, which has the force of desecration. Mr. Gardner
keeps the sanctities as present and powerful as he can, quite properly, but
to
a
reader with a weak sense of religion the concomitant erotic passages may
seem arbitrarily forced. They are nauseating-at their best, macabre, as when
the hero finds himself in bed with his cancerous grandmother-but they are
true
to
the terms and motives of the culture.
The desecration which may most bother the reader is that of the Don
Juan legend itself. This Don Juan is neither the absolute macho nor the
pleasure principle incarnate, he is exceptional rather for his failures and an
inability to enjoy either himself or women at all fully. The antiheroic switch
may be amusing, provided the prime legend is also present, as a foil. In a way
it is, for the first Don Juan play is supposed to
be
in process of being written,
by Tirso de Molina on the basis of some fantastic memoirs of the real Don
Juan. But I think the presence of the heroic legend
is
not strong or constant
enough to keep the comedy of the antiheroic pointed or from being depressing
in the long run. Mr. Gardner may still be right: how much of the heroic
can the picaresque novel accommodate? That is one for the seminar.
