critics
If, as Ridenour suggests, Don Juan is a poem concerned with the Fall of Man, and if, as McGann suggests, the Fall is not inherently negative, what type of viewpoint is Byron expressing? We have seen that Byron’s vicious use of satire against his peers is not a trivial matter of personality differences, but rather a violent extension of his own poetic philosophy. He is trying to show the error of what was current Romantic ideology and lead his contemporaries back to a more traditional (righteous?) viewpoint and way of writing. This seems to be an admirable, if not idealistic goal. We have seen how Byron’s repressed Calvinistic upbringing led to a(n unconscious) cycle of use/be used, retreat, and escape, and how this pattern is initially manifested in Canto 1 to parallel Byron’s own life. Now, finally, can it be said that Byron is holding either a truly nihilistic outlook or a truly moral outlook? Brian Wilkie states emphatically:
in Don Juan Byron wanted to create a poem that was deliberately and in every sense inconclusive, since he wanted to show life itself as ultimately without meaning…. The central fact about Don Juan is that he has no mission (and his) failure to have a mission is, rather, part of Byron’s attempt to depict realistically the actual conditions of all heroism, the fact that although a hero may be admirable and do some impressive things, his deeds cannot lead to any meaningful result. (73-4)
However, while Wilkie seems to just be looking at the surface and going no further, even he admits «one of the most striking facts about Juan is his ability to live in the world while somehow remaining unaffected by it» (74). Elizabeth F. Boyd goes on to state, «Don Juan, for all its negations, is fundamentally an affirmative poem…. (Byron’s) cynicism, if at bottom he has any, springs from his ideal of perfection in human nature which he sees everywhere betrayed by frailty and ignorance» (98-9). Edward E. Bostetter continues in this vein:
Byron has an evident fondness for the human condition he so castigates and deplores. If he doubts the ultimate meaningfulness of man in the universe, he at the same time believes in man’s capacity to improve his lot here. The very tone in which he writes in his attack on war and the cant of society indicates that he finds life sufficiently worth while to expose the fundamental evils that stand in the way of realizing human potentialities. He holds certain implicit views for social improvement, and the need for social action…. It is his conviction that life is better if we live without illusions about ourselves. Man is a comic animal and should see himself as such. (14)
Yet, a major tendency of much criticism «is to emphasize the negative, indeed the nihilistic, character of Byron’s view of life- the extent to which he seems to anticipate and fit in with the existentialist and absurdist trends in modern literature- in Sartre, Becket, Genet, for example…. ironically, Don Juan is (often) taken with great and even morbid seriousness — it is found ‘grim,’ ‘despairing,’ ‘sad and frightening,’ ‘terrifying'» (Bostetter 13-4). Wilkie also notes the similarity with twentieth-century existentialism, but he contends that Byron «differs from many, perhaps most, of them in that he feels sadness rather than anger at man’s lonely meaninglesness,» (83) and that sadness is the key to Byron.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron#Don_Juan