Authorship as Alchemy: Subversive Writing in Pushkin, Scott, and Hoffmann 9780804765305

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Authorship as Alchemy

Authorship as Alchemy Subversive Writing in Pushkin • Scott • Hoffmann

David Glenn Kropf

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 1994

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 1994 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

CIP data are at the end of the book

Stanford University Press publications are distributed exclusively by Stanford University Press within the United States, Canada, and Mexico; they are distributed exclusively by Cambridge University Press throughout the rest of the world.

This book is dedicated to Fernando Gurtubay, who would make a good friend of the conductor Johannes Kreisler, for they both know that coraje and coraz6n are derived from the same word.

Acknowledgments

ll

From the incipient stages of research to the process of preparing this book for publication, I have considered myself extremely fortunate to work with William Mills Todd Ill, Andrew Wachtel, and David E. Wellbery. Their abilities to single out key issues-as well as certain problems-and present them in ways that allowed me to embark on a number of organizational and stylistic solutions have proved invaluable to this study and inspiring to subsequent projects. Stephanie Sandler was one of my first teachers of Russian, and her enthusiasm for the language and literature inspired me repeatedly throughout the years that led to these pages. More specifically, I would like to thank her for the comments made on parts of an earlier draft. As the manuscript made its way to the book, Helen Tartar and Jan Spauschus Johnson of Stanford University Press offered many helpful suggestions, and Ann Klefstad polished numerous jagged edges with her editorial precision. Although not intended for this study, an IREX grant in 1991-92 permitted me to live in St. Petersburg, where the materials and helpful staff at Pushkinskii Dom facilitated the revision of Chapter 2.

viii • Acknowledgments Andrei Kazitsky's assistance and encouragement has left an imprint on the other chapters as well. My friends and especially my family have always been supportive in many ways, from late-night chats during short but wonderful visits to epistolary pep talks during the years when the distance between us spanned the Atlantic. Lastly, I am grateful to Devi, who found the courage and trusted enough to be able to give voice to what this book is really about. D.G.K.

Contents

Abbreviations

XI

Prelude One Two Three Rearticulation

The Libertine: Seduction (Introduction) The Author: Signs as Life (Pushkin) The Novelist: "To One Thing Constant Never" (Scott) A Triple Fugue in Three Parts (Hoffmann) Prelude One The Libertine: "Don Juan"

7 61 105 151 151 154

Two The Author: "Das Friiulein von Scuderi" Three The Novelist: 'Kater Murr' Coda Literary Subversions

Notes Bibliography Index

166 183 227 233 257 267

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used for the principal texts I examine. They appear parenthetically along with the appropriate page number in the form: (HVG: r89). Unless otherwise noted, all English versions of these texts are my translations. For simplicity, I refer only to the name Don Juan, regardless of the form used in a particular work (Mozart-cia Ponte's Don Giovanni, Hoffmann's Don Juan, Pushkin's Don Guan), since parts of my discussion pertain to all three characters. In cases where my argument concerns only a single Don Juan figure, the distinction is made in terms of the author or title of the work in which he appears. Likewise, I use only the Italian "Donna" when referring to women (Donna Anna, Donna Elvira). DG Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte. II Dissoluto punito, ossia II Don Giovanni (The punished libertine, or Don Giovanni). Libretto included in the recording by Herbert von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker. Berlin: Deutsche Grammophon/Polydor, 1986, 3 compact discs. DJ E. T. A. Hoffmann. "Don Juan." In Hoffmann, Fantasie- und Nachtstucke. Munich: Winkler, 1976, 67-78.

Abbreviations • xn FS HVG

J KM

LD SG

w

E. T. A. Hoffmann. "Das Fraulein von Scuderi." In Hoffmann, Werke. Frankfurt am Main: lnsel, 1967, vol. 2, 436-98. Aleksandr Pushkin. "lstoriia sela Goriukhina" (The history of the village of Goriukhino). In Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh. Moscow: Nauka, 1964, vol. 6, 171-96. D. A. F. de Sade.Justine, ou les Malheurs de Ia vertu (Justine, or the misfortunes of virtue). In Sade, Oeuvres completes. Paris: Pauvert, 1986, vol. 3, 7-313. E. T. A. Hoffmann. Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (The life and opinions ofTomcat Murr). In Hoffmann, Werke. Frankfurt am Main: lnsel, 1967, vol. 3, 127-497. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous liaisons). Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964. Aleksandr Pushkin. Kamennyi gost' (The stone guest). In Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh. Moscow: Nauka, 1964, vol. 5, 369-410. Sir Walter Scott. Waverley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

Authorship as Alchemy

Prelude

A principal concern of this study involves the attempt to answer a seemingly simple question: What is an author? In his brief but suggestive essay carrying this question as its title, Michel Foucault defines the author less as the distinct origin of a written work and more as a "function" that accounts for certain ways in which authorship is conceived and understood.' The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed numerous social changes that altered the writer's relationship to literature; two of these changes are the increased autonomy of fiction or "imaginative literature" and the establishment of copyright laws. Whereas prior to the late 1700's "literature" referred to virtually all that was written, the "truth value" that came to be applied to scientific writing slowly relegated imaginative works to a separate discipline. This led to a greater concern with criticism, which sought not only to interpret individual texts but also to delineate the writer's relationship to specific works through the study of literary influence and biography. As the number of readers grew at a phenomenal rate, publishers and writers alike became interested in the establishment of copyright laws as a means of protecting the profits from the sale of

2 •

Prelude

literature, which were frequently diminished by unauthorized reproductions. Both of these changes, however, had other, not-so-welcome effects. In the public's eye, the work came to be increasingly associated with its writer, whether through criticism, which made an interpretive link between writer and work, or by means of copyright, which made the connection legal and binding. My answer, then, to Foucault's question is that an author constitutes a social subject that emerges from such a conflation. While a writer actually writes a text, an author comes into existence only after the work's publication and reception; in other words, an author results from a socioliterary process exerted on both the work and its creator. An authorial subject has certain characteristics that pertain to actual persons (such as the possession of a proper name), yet it differs in that an author consists-partly or primarily-of textual material. The distinction between a writer as the actual creator of a text and an author as a semiotic entity constituted by society raises the following question: Would it be possible for a writer to subvert the workings of the institution of authorship and thereby write and publish in freedom from the socioliterary processes that conflate life and work? My answer to this question, which leads to a discussion of certain subversive literary strategies assumed by several writers of the Romantic period, composes the primary focus of this study. The desire to undermine the forces of social subjectivity that would bind a writer to a work strikes me as similar in many ways to certain strategies undertaken by the seducers who appear in several libertine texts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chapter r, an introduction to literary subversions by means of libertine strategies of seduction, therefore opens this study. Libertines do not accept a socially fixed definition of eroticism, such as one that relegates it to a monogamous relationship between man and woman. Instead, they subvert the fixity and singularity of marriage by defining sexual pleasure in terms of each new object of desire. Herein lies the liberty of libertinage. The confrontation between society's attempt to constitute identity as singular and the libertines' desire to ensure its multiplicity sets the stage for the discussion of authors and writers that makes up Chapters 2 and 3. The insistence on a conventional, singular relationship such as marriage finds its analogue in the "monogamous" writer-work connection that criticism and copyright ensure. Given such a constraint, various writers responded by seeking strategies-such as anonymous and pseudonymous writing-to subvert

Prelude • 3 the rigidity of the connection between themselves and their previous "deeds." Chapter 2, which focuses on Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin, works toward defining the author and the social institution of authorship. Particularly in the late I 82o's, as he turned to prose, Pushkin found himself grappling with the existence and social prominence of his own author while, paradoxically, his popularity as a writer was clearly on the decline. In the short story "The History of the Village of Goriukhino," Pushkin writes in terms of the invented persona Belkin who aspires to nothing more than becoming an author. Belkin's first-person narrative ostensibly offers Pushkin a certain distance from the text, but it will be seen that he has subtly incorporated his own author into Belkin's work, with the result that Pushkin is able to expose the author as a primarily textual or semiotic entity. While Chapter 2 outlines the forces that the institution of authorship exerts on a writer, Chapter 3 turns to the strategies that a writer can undertake in order to subvert society's attempt to constitute an author. Walter Scott published Waverley anonymously, a fact that brings to the fore the dense network of cited material making up the novel. Rather than relegating the multiplicity of allusions, references, and citations to mere source or background information, I explore ways in which the texts and language of others problematize the status of Scott as the sponsoring origin of Waverley. Similarly, the novel proceeds to call into question the convention that would designate Edward Waverley's father and king as the bases of his own identity. Just as Scott's identity seems to multiply in the network of cited material, so Waverley acquires several fathers and more than one king. I have come to define Scott's relationship to the text as being that of a novelist, but by this seemingly obvious assertion, I mean that his identity as a writer is analogous to the novel itself: a genre in which a multiplicity of discourses and languages interconnects and dialogizes. My attempt to discuss identity in ways that liberate it from the subjectivizing forces of society has been greatly aided by the book Mille Plateaux (A thousand plateaus) by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Drawing on an extremely broad range of material, they seek to unfix identity from the conventional concepts of subjectivity, signification, and the organism. 2 For my purposes, I have made use of several terms that not only pose translation difficulties but also require some further explanation. The first is "hecceity" (hecceite). John Duns Scotus uses the term

4 • Prelude "haecceity," which can also be rendered as "thisness," to define the uniqueness of a thing or person. Scotus distinguishes between a common nature that designates a similarity among things and aspects by which individuals resemble one another (a species) and an individualization of this common nature-haecceity-that points to a unique property that can characterize only one individual (this individual). 3 Charles Sanders Peirce picked up on Scotus's use of the term: "By a hecceity, I mean, some element of existence which, not merely by the likeness between its different apparitions, but by an inward force of identity, manifesting itself in the continuity of its apparition through time and space, is distinct from everything else, and is thus fit (as it can in no other way be) to receive a proper name or to be indicated as this or that."• As a more recent philosopher has written in regard to hecceities, "part of their raison d'etre is to differentiate one individual from another. " 5 Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term differs somewhat because they do not locate hecceity in a particular individual or thing, but rather in what one could call a specific constellation that connects an individual or thing to its surroundings. (I write "hecceity" instead of the more traditional "haecceity" because "hecceity" takes the emphasis off the Latin root haec [this thing].) 6 "Thisness" is not to be found in a person or thing, but in the interconnectedness of a person or thing to other things and persons (as well as to a multiplicity of other elements, such as the language one speaks, the social situation that prevails, and so on). Essentially, one would have to reverse Peirce's definition. A hecceity no longer remains constant in time and space; instead, it designates specific states that are subject to change, but insofar as they attain a certain level of consistency or recognizability, they are unique. Hecceity turns one's attention less to a responsible agent (a libertine who has seduced or writer who has written) and more to specific events. In this regard, hecceity opposes the concept of social subjectivity, which would establish a connection supported by conventions and laws between an individual and the actions he or she has committed. With events as the focus, seduction can be portrayed as a means of reindividuation in terms of a new object of desire and writing as a practice by which identity can be reconstituted in language. The second of Deleuze and Guattari's terms is agencement, which can mean ordering, layout, furnishing, arrangement (of figures in a painting or of a theatrical set), adjustment, combination, composition, liaison, and organization. In his English version of Mille Plateaux Brian Massumi translates it as "assemblage," which correctly places emphasis on specific

Prelude • 5 constellations or groupings. But I have chosen the word "adjustment," for several reasons. 7 First, an adjustment is a process: a multiplicity of things are adjusted and brought into alignment. As far as individuality and hecceity are concerned one can adjust language (the national language one speaks/writes, style, jargon, grammar, etc.), dress, gestures, countenance, gait, mannerisms, and so on. Second, an adjustment is a result-a having-adjusted-which thus describes the positioning that delineates a particular hecceity. Finally, the word "adjustment" connotes a certain instability: there is always the chance that things will "go out of whack." If changes occur, then the hecceity is altered as well. Individuality is not to be regarded as stable and permanent but as subject to change. A hecceity is determined by a multiplicity of adjustments; the various elements that are in fact adjusted constitute a milieu, also a word having a variety of significant meanings: middle or midst (mi-lieu: a middle place, a middle ground); a middle course or way; surroundings or environment; social class, group, or set; the underground (in the sense of criminal organizations). In its various senses, a milieu points to a specific place that is bordered by other places. A milieu is in-between, and the implications that being on a middle ground have for identity will play an important role in nearly all the texts I examine. Adjustments occur in milieus: countries (Spain, France), spaces (a royal court, an alchemist's laboratory), in the company of others (a rival, a lover, "the people"), times (specific centuries, years, months, minutes), and languages (elevated Russian, German slang, scientific French, English dialects). Whereas the social process of subjectification attempts to define the individual over time as the sum total of all that was said, done, or written (and therefore designates a subject), hecceity demarcates an individual only to the degree that multiple elements constitutive of a particular milieu are adjusted such that one can speak of the unique "thisness" of an event. A hecceity does not point to a body but to the relationships into which a body enters. A hecceity is determined by the multiplicity of adjustments effected within a specific milieu. The entire process is called a "becoming" (devenir). Since hecceity does not denote a constant state of being but rather an identity that must be achieved, hecceity is what one becomes, not what one is. For example, one could seduce I, 003 women in Spain, or one could write the Waverley Novels; each event denotes a new identity. I will have occasion to return to the process of becoming in the pages that follow, particularly in Chapter I, where it is introduced. The first three chapters present three specific figures: the libertine, the

6 • Prelude author, and the novelist. The final chapter, on E. T. A. Hoffmann, is distinct in that rather than merely following the preceding three, it constitutes a textual milieu of its own in which the strategies associated with the libertine, the author, and the novelist come to interconnect and reveal themselves as means of artistic production. The story "Don Juan" connects libertinage with the act of writing. "Das Fraulein vein Scuderi" reveals different ways in which authorship exerts pressure on creative production, but also ways in which the workings of authorship can be radically undermined. Finally, the novel Kater Murr connects the novelist's strategy of writing with the desires to seduce and become an author. The result is what I call "the artist" (or what Hoffmann's Johannes Kreisler calls the "true musician"): a figure who brings this study full circle, for rather than offering an answer to Foucault's question, the artist subverts it by telling us what an author is not.

One

The Libertine: Seduction (Introduction)

Introduction, seduction: the purpose of this chapter is to lead into a study of both the writer's identity and various writing strategies of the Romantic period by means of a seduction or leading astray that focuses on libertinage. This seduction allows me to introduce the concepts of hecceity and subjectivity: the two modes of individuation that make up the analytic framework with which I will examine in subsequent chapters the figures of the author and the novelist in relation to particular texts, as well as to society. In the final chapter libertinage will reappear, but less as an analogue to writing and more as a threat to textual or artistic production. In ancient times, a libertine was a freed slave. Later, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the libertine became a freethinker, a person who had rejected established religious beliefs. Finally, in the eighteenth century, libertines not only were freed from moral and religious doctrines but took part in corrupting them.' In placing emphasis on the word "libertine" (as opposed to, say, "seducer," "debaucher," or "corrupter") and thereby on the Latin root liber (free), I wish to bring to the fore a project of liberation-specifically certain strategies of liberation. I

8 • The Libertine restrict myself to literary libertines, because the central concern of this introduction is to make a connection between the tactics of libertinage and various textual strategies undertaken by particular writers during the years that bracket this study: 1780-1830. In this regard, it should not go unnoticed that liber is also associated with books: libro, livre, libretto, library. A book here is not merely an object that can be linked to a writer: the manifestation of Romantic self-expression or literary property guaranteed by copyright. Instead, the book constitutes a milieu in which libertinage takes place; it is a locus where libertines (as characters) and writers (as creators) engage in specific strategies that operate against the various social forces that would fix them as subjects. The project consists in attaining a degree of personal freedom. Consequently, I will not address matters of textual meaning or authorial intention as much as a series of adjustments and interrelationships that have implications for identity. 2 In this chapter I consider four "books" or textual milieus: Il Dissoluto pun ito, ossia Il Don Giovanni (The punished libertine, or Don Giovanni), the opera by Mozart and da Ponte, first produced in 1787; Kamennyi gost' (The stone guest), one of Pushkin's so-called Little Tragedies, written in 1830; Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous liaisons), Ladas's epistolary novel, published in 1782; and Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu (Justine, or the misfortunes of virtue), the second version of Sade's novel of 1791. In the milieu of these four texts, I map out a double pursuit. On the one hand, the libertines continually pursue a new object of desire.' They do not so much .flee from socially coded patterns of behavior as exploit them for their own pleasure. Don Juan, Merteuil, Valmont, and nearly all of Sade's libertines are aristocrats of varying degrees of social prominence who seduce, violate pacts of betrothal and friendship, and occasionally murder. The concept of hecceity is important in discussing the libertines' pursuit of personal freedom. Deleuze and Guattari define it as follows: There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, a subject, a thing, or a substance. For it, we reserve the name hecceity. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality that lacks nothing, although it is not to be confused with the individuality of a thing or subject. They are hecceities in the sense that everything about them concerns relations of movement and rest among molecules and particles, as well as the power [pouvoir] to affect and be affected.•

Hecceity defines an individual only in terms of the movements and forces exerted at a specific time and in a determined milieu. Consequently, attention must be turned to a multiplicity of elements (other persons, lan-

The Libertine • 9 guage, desires) that make up this milieu because they-not the person or body that can be isolated so easily-become the constitutive factors of individuality. Hecceities can be recognized in that they attain a certain level of consistency, but they are not permanent; as the milieu changes, so does identity, and one's life comes to be seen as a plurality of identities that exist in various places and are of different durations. With each new seduction, libertines are in pursuit of the freedom to redefine themselves and constitute identity anew. On the other hand, there is society that gathers together its forces to pursue the libertines, apprehend them, and hold them accountable for their crimes. Michel Foucault speaks of the power of society that "applies itself to immediate everyday life [and] categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects."' The verbs "apply," "mark," "attach," and "impose" underscore the degree to which society, in turn, pursues individuals in order to constitute identity in terms of a normative structure and code of behavior. Whereas hecceity allows for identities to exist as multiplicities and change over time, subjectivity is a singularizing process that gathers together experiences and actions (whether seductions or literary works) in order to attribute them to specific origins and therefore constitute identity as fixed and stable over time. The double pursuit becomes immediately apparent in the relationship between Don Juan and the statue of the Commander, two traditional rivals whose presence is most immediately apparent in the titles of two of the texts I have selected, Don Giovanni and The Stone Guest: Mozart-da Ponte's three-hour opera and Pushkin's play of "head-spinning brevity," to use Anna Akhmatova's epithet. 6 The first written DonJuan text dates back to the early seventeenth century and is attributed to Tirso de Molina. 7 El Burlador de Sevilla o el convidado de piedra (The trickster of Seville, or the stone guest) subsequently spawned hundreds of versions: not only numerous folk operas, plays, and puppet shows but also some canonized literary works, such as Dom juan ou Le Festin de pierre (Don Juan, or the stone feast; Moliere, 1665) and The Libertine (Shadwell, 1676). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the interest in Don Juan Tenorio de Sevilla resurged: in addition to the works by Mozart~da Ponte and Pushkin, there appear also those by Hoffmann, Byron, and C. D. Grabbe." The two texts I have chosen develop the conflict between libertines (Don Juan

IO •

The Libertine

is not the only one) and society particularly well, especially insofar as this conflict sheds light on the two modes of individuation. Don Juan's strategy of seduction, which allows him to lead a multiple existence in the sense that his individuality is defined in terms of the thousands of women he seduces, opposes the Commander's injunction against this multiplicity, which seeks to hold Don Juan accountable in the present for crimes of the past-multiple versus singular; hecceities versus subjectivity. Les Liaisons dangereuses and Justine hold my interest primarily for generic reasons: they are novels and not dramas. Unlike Don Juan's, most of Valmont's seductions occur in letters. How, then, to relate Valmont's body of writing to his own body? and to the woman he seduces? As for Justine, she relates her misfortunes in a long, first-person narrative from the standpoint of virtue. What effects do her style, her ceaseless metaphors of virtue, and the act of narration that recalls events of the past have on scene after scene of violent sexual crime? Further, the two novels are marked by points where it is possible to delineate strategies of writing undertaken by Laclos as an "editor" and by Sade as an "omniscient" narrator. Points such as these are the primary concern of the following chapters on Pushkin, Scott, and Hoffmann, three writers who turned to prose writing late in their careers. I am ultimately interested in ways in which prose, more specifically novel writing, presents possibilities of subverting the institution of authorship that are related to libertinage. Consequently, the two Don Juan texts provide a frame for the discussion of libertines, while Les Liaisons dangereuses and Justine will help bring these observations more in line with literary subversions: strategies of writing that allow writers to avoid becoming authors and to constitute identity as hecceities in regard to their works.

Individuation by Hecceity In her writings on The Stone Guest, Akhmatova points out a distinctive characteristic of Pushkin's Don Juan: he is a poet who has composed the lyrics for the songs that Laura sings! Yet Don Juan's artistry manifests itself in another sense as well: he is the smoothest of talkers, who "without preparation can improvise a love song" (SG: 390). In this regard, he resembles the Improviser in Pushkin's "Egyptian Nights," who composes line after line of rhythmically perfect poetry on a theme seconds after receiving it.'" Don Juan does not recite memorized lines, written sometime in the past; his act of composition coincides with the act of performance.

The Libertine •

I I

Further: Don Juan does more than offer a song or poem improvised on a given theme; he offers his whole being, which he improvises in terms of a particular woman. This requires a multiplicity of changes: a different way of walking, talking, singing, dancing, dressing; new movements of his eyes, lips, hands. Don Juan's improvisation results in a new Don Juan: he simultaneously "recreates" himself and performs this self for an audience of one. The traditional categories of "life" and "art" appear to mesh, for the artist is now his own art. Aesthetic praxis defines his everyday life in that Don Juan's identity consists of an improvised self that exists solely in terms of the woman he desires. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, life and art were far from being distinct categories. In his study of the age of Pushkin, William Mills Todd has shown how fiction and the everyday life of polite society were interconnected in a kind of "hermeneutic sphere"; while aristocratic life was aestheticized, the criterion of art was verisimilitude: "Social gatherings became aesthetic forms, and literary patterns served as models for behavior and its interpretation. Consequently, differences between the interpretive conventions that governed fiction and nonfiction tended to be less sharp than they have become in our subsequent institutionalizations of literature."" One could readily think in these terms of a writer such as Byron. While he was the creator of literary works such as Don Juan, Byron also used his own self as the raw material with which to aestheticize his existence. As Domna Stanton observes, "He enthralled with his person as others do with their works. "'2 The difference between Byron and Don juan (both "inside" and "outside" the text) no longer seems self-evident, for the borders demarcating the domains of life and art, of book and world, have become blurred. But how to define existence as art? When Don Juan improvises in terms of a desired woman, does he somehow become less "real" and more "aesthetic"? To adopt the woman's perspective: Is the Don Juan before her sincere and true-or a false and feigned one, a "clever tempter," as Pushkin's Donna Anna says (SG: 407)? We seem to be faced with what Jean Baudrillard calls the precession or primacy of simulacra, whereby "simulation threatens the difference between 'true' and 'false,' between 'real' and 'imaginary.'"" Life as art appears to be either a tautology (since the two domains achieve a certain equivalence) or a confusion (for they can no longer be distinguished). This difficulty is even more pronounced with Don Juan, who improvises continually, creating a parade of various selves. A possible solution would be to turn to the concept of imitation. One

12 •

The Libertine

could argue, for example, that Don Juan imitates a woman's lover in order to seduce her (as is the case in the opening scenes of Don Giovanni and El Burlador de Sevilla). But this raises a number of complications in that imitation forces one to examine the situation in binary terms: the real lover and the imitated one. Art becomes the imitation of life, and this does not seem right, for Don Juan does not turn into art alone. The woman he seduces is confronted with a living body that speaks to her, embraces her: a body that despite all affectations and appearances is not her lover's. In other words, imitation does not help to define the interconnectedness of art and life; it presupposes the distinctness of these domains and can account only for shifts from one to the other, such as art as life or life as art. Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of adjustment (agencement) and becoming (devenir) appear to be more fruitful, for they do not define aesthetic production in terms of fixed categories (such as art and life) or of evolution (such as imitation: the shift from X to X'). Adjustment and becoming delineate a state of affairs in which the artist, art, and the real are in flux. Deleuze and Guattari write: In its multiplicity, an adjustment necessarily operates simultaneously on semiotic fluxes, material fluxes, and social fluxes .... There is no longer a tripartition into a field of reality (the world), a field of representations (the book), and a field of subjectivity (the author). Instead, an adjustment interconnects certain multiplicities taken from each one of these orders so that a book does not have its sequel [suite] in the subsequent book, nor its object in the world, not its subject in one or several writers. In short, we believe that writing can never carry out enough in the name of the outside. 14

When Don Juan composes (creates) a new self, he in fact composes (adjusts) his entire being: composition as composure. He effects adjustments in his body and his voice in terms of a specific woman he desires. The "real"-the world in which these adjustments occur-has a decisive role to play, because multiple aspects of it (not just the woman, but the language she speaks, the social class to which she belongs, the environment she inhabits, and so on) enter the work of art Don Juan makes of himself. He does not imitate but rather interconnects with a specific situation and state of affairs. 15 As an example, let us take Don Juan's seduction of Zerlina in Act I of Don Giovanni. World: The peasant class. A small village. Wedding festivities of singing, dancing, and feasting. Zerlina, the young bride, and Masetto, the groom. Artist: Don Juan, the aristocrat. An intrusion into a world that is not his own. Work: Don Juan does not imitate the life of a peasant, nor does he imitate Masetto. Rather, he adjusts his noble status

The Libertine •

I

3

in order to seduce Zerlina; this is most apparent when Don Juan begins singing "La ci darem la mano" (There we'll take hands):

Don juan. Zerlina. Don juan.

Come. Let's not waste time: at this moment [in questa istante] I want to marry you. You? Of course, me. That villa is mine; we'll be alone, And there, my jewel, we'll be married. There we'll take hands, There you'll tell me "yes"; See, it's not far away, Let's leave, my dear, from here. (DG: I08-Io)

Don Juan invades a foreign territory, an alien zone-to use Bakhtin's term-and adjusts his nobility to make it attractive and available to Zerlina.'6 One catches sight of these adjustments in Don Juan's language that bring the two of them together. First, he speaks for the most part in the first-person plural: not "I'll take your hand," but "we'll join hands." The "we" and the "let's" linguistically "marry" Don Juan and Zerlina. Second, Don Juan employs a number of verbs that connect their lives: "I want to marry you"; "We'll be married"; "We'll take hands"; "You'll tell me 'yes'"; "We'll be alone." In a sense, these verbs are "conjunctions" in that they bring the peasant and the aristocrat together. Finally, Don Juan situates his language between two spaces-between the open space of the peasant wedding and the closed space of the aristocratic villa: "Come," "That villa," "See, it's not far away," "Let's leave from here," and herepeats the word "there" three times. Just as the duet is an alternation between two voices, so Don Juan begins "La ci darem la mano" by creating the possibility for a change of place, from there to there. He becomes her suitor in the archaic sense of"to suit" whereby Don Juan establishes a kind of harmony between his world and hers. The result is a new Don Juan: one who exists in between: he is no longer an aristocrat, but also not a peasant. For this reason, Zerlina would be wise to take literally his assertion that he wants to marry her at this moment (in questa istante), because the Don Juan who speaks to her exists only in terms of this specific time, place, and woman. He has readjusted his identity to her alone. This brings us to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "becoming" (devenir): A becoming is not a correspondence among relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or-at the limit-an identification. . . . Above all, becoming does not take place in the imagination, even when the imagination attains the

14 • The Libertine highest cosmic or dynamic level, as withJung or Bachelard.... Becoming does not produce anything but itself [Le devenir ne produit pas autre chose que lui-meme]. It is a false alternative that forces us to say: either you imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, and not the supposedly fixed factors in terms of which the becoming takes place. 17

This passage demarcates two particular spaces in terms of which becoming takes place. Returning to Don Giovanni, one could think of the space of the aristocrat and that of the peasant. Deleuze and Guattari begin by explaining in what the relationship between the two does not consist: correspondence, resemblance, imitation, identification, fantasy. Becomings do not operate like Renaissance drawing grids (such as those one sometimes sees in Durer's works) where each point on the original has a corresponding point on the copy; it is not a matter merely of "carrying over" (translating, imitating, identifying, etc.). Rather than fixing a set of stable elements and focusing on shifts from one to the other, a becoming is located in between. When Deleuze and Guattari speak of a "block of becoming" I take this to mean the multiplicity of adjustments effected in terms of the bordering reality. It is in this sense that a becoming takes place (occurs and finds a locus) in a milieu, in a middle ground. Becomings exist between or among a multiplicity of elements. Elias Canetti is right to speak of a certain fluidity of the world when he discusses metamorphosis, for the boundaries between humans and animals, between aristocrats and peasants, no longer remain distinct as adjustments are made in terms of these conventionally separate domains.'" In the final chapter, for example, I will turn to Hoffmann's Kater Murr, a cat who writes his autobiography. But becomings are not metamorphoses: Murr does not really become a human being; Don Juan never really becomes a peasant. Becoming creates instead a new identity "in terms of," such that one's surroundings constitute the determinant elements of an identity rather than comprising a kind of background for it. During Don Juan's seduction of Zerlina, he flatters her, describing her beauty as above that of a peasant (DG: 108)an adjustment in social status; he offers her his home, food, and drink for the wedding festivities (DG: 102)-an adjustment in geography, as if she were marrying him; and as they sing the duet "La. ci darem la mano" her voice follows his, and Zerlina begins to speak less of Masetto and more of her new life with Don Juan. Don Juan adjusts his life, language, and world to Zerlina's with the result that he becomes a new Don Juan composed especially for her. His becoming does not constitute a shift from aristocrat to peasant but rather an interconnection or adjustment of the two. And this becoming is perfectly real.

The Libertine • r 5 Becoming may involve a disguise (Don Juan as Leporello in the opera or Don Juan as a monk in Pushkin's play), but becoming differs from mere disguise in that there is no "real" Don Juan lurking behind. Like a good actor, he must effect adjustments in voice, movement, gait, glance, smile, and touch. To the degree that he adjusts and becomes, he no longer is what he was. One can think of Laura in The Stone Guest, the actress who fulfills her roles absolutely convincingly, and concerning the theater of the period, lurii Lotman observes that "what was valued in an actor was his ability to renounce his own system of behavior and switch into the conventionally traditional behavior prescribed for the given type of character."' 9 The difficulty that the theater metaphor poses for becoming, however, is that one tends to valorize the role played and thereby forget the actor playing. Becoming defines the entity actor-role together, an entity that exists in between. Don Juan is not a monk or a peasant. How to define Olivier at the moment he "plays" Hamlet? He is a becoming-Hamlet. Because Don Juan continually situates himself at the threshold of the desired woman, one can consider becoming to be his strategy of seduction. Don Juan is never presented as successful in Don Giovanni and The Stone Guest; rather, he is always seducing, always becoming in terms of the women he desires. The final result loses its importance: not having seduced, not having become. 20 Instead, seduction attains a level of intensity that is sustained rather than resolved. Deleuze and Guattari define such a level of intensity as a plateau, expanding on Gregory Bateson's use of the term: "A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end .... Gregory Bateson uses the word 'plateau' to designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities that develops by means of avoiding any orientation toward a culminating point or toward an external end." 21 For Don Juan, a given milieu designates not only a locus where becoming and seduction take place but also a site of pleasure. His existence perpetuates the excitation, normally temporary, of being almost there. This perpetuation constitutes a plateau of pleasure. The sensual energy that animates Don Juan consists less in a series of conquests and more in a procession of becomings that sustain this plateau rather than bringing pleasure to a climax. Don Juan must repeatedly seduce, and even within a single seduction, he works to prolong the pleasure preceding the climax that would bring becoming to an end. Why else, for example, would Pushkin's Don Juan reveal himself as the murderer of Donna Anna's husband when he would so obviously have succeeded with her as Don Diego (SG: 403-5)? The revelation creates an obstacle to sexual climax, which is to say, it further intensifies the energy of

16 • The Libertine seduction that animates Don Juan's life as a series ofbecomings. Shoshana Felman writes that "speech is the true realm of eroticism, and not simply a means of access to this realm .... To seduce is thus to prolong, within desiring speech, the pleasure-taking performance of the very production of that speech." 22 This helps to explain Don Juan's nomadism: he is always in motion, moving from country to country, from woman to woman. And we nearly always find him speaking to women rather than embracing them. The presence of a woman provides Don Juan the opportunity to reindividuate himself, and his principal means of doing this is to effect adjustments in language. Pushkin's Donna Anna asks, "Who knows you?" (SG: 408). Do any of the women Don Juan seduces have knowledge of a "real" Don Juan? Yes and no, for with each becoming Don Juan is Don Juan. Each milieu is unique, and Don Juan always becomes anew, hence he is always sincere. This is what makes his language so problematic. Since he adjusts his speech to the woman he desires, his language becomes plural, inhabiting a territory demarcated by him, her, and their respective social situations. Note, for example, the "noble-peasant hybrid" that results when Don Juan speaks to Zerlina. And in the opera generally, Don Juan has no voice of his own, for he continually adjusts his voice to those of others (such as when he serenades Donna Elvira's servant). Bakhtin speaks of dialogism and heteroglossia, Deleuze and Guattari speak of the collective adjustment: the unfixity of the utterance that is interconnected to and adjusted within a given social milieu. 23 Becomings cannot be regarded as independent of a specific time and place. Don Juan's identity is defined both in terms of the women he seduces and the entire milieu in which he and she are located. He continually invades "alien territories," adjusts his being and his speech in terms of a particular "conceptual horizon," and establishes a middle ground where his world/word meets hers. 24 Don Juan's existence can be seen as a series of intrusions; while he is never presented as violating women, he repeatedly violates their spaces, reflecting the geography of the Don Juan texts as shifting among numerous bedrooms and other enclosed areas. Similarly, Don Juan frequently disrupts otherwise strictly delineated social groups. At the end of Act I of the opera, the aristocracy (Donna Anna and Ottavio), the bourgeoisie (Donna Elvira), and the peasantry (Zerlina and Masetto) are gathered together at Don Juan's villa, where the traditional dances of these three groups (the minuet, the contredanse, and the German dance, respectively) also intermix. First, the noble Don Juan dances

The Libertine • 17 the bourgeois contredanse with the peasant Zerlina-another example of his ability to create a milieu where the two of them can be together. Second, as Stefan Kunze observes, the 3/4, %, and 3/s times cross over each other: "The general order of time is thus destroyed-one can even say the moral order-and with it, the prerequisite for the unity among the characters.,5 Don Juan refuses to be fixed and defined in terms of any prescribed social or musical category; he exploits and intermixes them so as to seduce the woman he desires and sustain his own pleasure. Don Juan's identity is thus believable and at the same time enigmaticbelievable because he is perfectly adjusted to the latest woman. Yet this perfection is precisely what raises doubts; she finds no evidence of his sincerity beyond the Don Juan before her eyes and is, in fact, confronted with much counterevidence. Zerlina fears being forsaken: "I know how seldom you gentlemen [voi altri cavalieri] are honest and sincere with women" (DG: 108). The doubts of Pushkin's Donna Anna are directed specifically toward Don Juan's notorious reputation: Oh, Don Juan the smooth talker-! know. I have heard; he's a clever tempter. You are, it is said, a godless libertine, You're an absolute demon. How many poor women (SG: 407) Have you ruined?

The words of Donna Anna ("I have heard," "It is said") underscore a different, more social view of Don Juan. Sincerity would have Don Juan literally keep his word: to hold onto his utterance-for example, a promise of marriage-such that his future life would subsequently be fixed in terms of previous words. This is exactly what Don Juan refuses to do. He becomes anew with each woman, yet never stabilizes his identity in regard to a single one. Whereas Don Juan is content to see his life as a multiplicity of becomings that sustain pleasure, society would define each of these becomings as crimes that provide evidence of his insincerity. He thus comes to be called a smooth talker, a tempter, a seducer, and a demon. Later I will discuss how society constitutes this other, more singular identity and holds agents accountable for their actions. For the moment, however, I wish to bring to the fore the hermeneutic quandary in which the women Don Juan seduces find themselves. They are unable to determine therelationship between his present words, which they hear, and his past deeds, which they have heard about from others. In Les Liaisons dangereuses, La Presidente de Tourvel faces this very di-

I

8 • The Libertine

lemma as she tries to understand the Valmont presented to her in his letters. Her confidante, Madame de Volanges, warns Tourvel about Valmont (LD: 70-72), yet Tourvel herself is unable to locate any possible deception: "I should indeed confess that Monsieur de Valmont must truly be infinitely dangerous if he can at the same time feign to be what he appears here and remain such as you describe him" (LD: 82). Like Don Juan, Valmont is double: at once a sincere lover and a debauched libertine. 26 The difference lies in the distinction between the phrases "appears here" and "remains such as you describe him." On the one hand, there is a specific Valmont who is "adjusted" in his letters ("here": as a becoming, he is present in the letters), while on the other hand, there exists a more stable and social Valmont whose reputation remains fixed in terms of many past seductions; Volanges's warning stems from knowledge of this Valmont. Unlike Don Juan's becomings, however, most of Valmont's take place in letters sent to the women he desires; this points to particular strategies of writing in order to constitute identity anew. After Valmont has seduced Cecile de Volanges, Madame de Merteuil begins to initiate the young neophyte into the ways of libertinage. One of the first things for which she scolds Cecile is her childish epistolary style: "See to it that you take better care of your style. You always write like a child. I see perfectly well where this comes from; it's that you say everything you think .... You must understand that when you write to someone, it's for him and not for you: you must, then, seek to tell him less what's on your mind and more what he will find pleasing" (LD: 240). One could argue that to some degree all epistles entail the consideration of the addressee. 27 The libertine style, however, valorizes the addressee so completely that it becomes the factor in terms of which all writing must be adjusted. Joan DeJean observes that libertines take "pride in maintaining the appearance of communication while in fact revealing nothing of [themselves] beyond [their] appreciation of the joys of technique. " 28 I understand this technique as the process of becoming: the adjusting of identity in terms of a specific addressee. DeJean's comment points to a certain duplicity. On the one hand, the mere fact of sending a letter and engaging in continued correspondence allows Valmont and Merteuil to establish liaisons with numerous characters. On the other hand, these liaisons become dangerous in that they always serve as a forum to bring about desired seductions that threaten to rupture the liaison altogether. Valmont sets himself up as the helper of Cecile, the sincere lover of Tourvel, the loyal nephew of Rosemonde, and the friend of Danceny.

The Libertine • 19 Merteuil becomes the confidante of Volanges, the mother-figure and mentor of Cecile, and the lover of Danceny. These liaisons are carefully delineated in that the letters control the traffic of utterances between single writers and readers. Yet we, as readers of all the letters (actually, only 175 of them; I will discuss this issue toward the end of the chapter), are able to observe the stylistic changes that the two libertines effect in each of the relationships. First, there is the Valmont-Merteuil correspondence in which they detail their plans, victories, and difficulties. Second, there are the letters that they write to others in which their intentions are stylistically refracted against the horizon of the specific addressee. As a result, one tends to valorize the Valmont-Merteuil correspondence as the hermeneutic key with which to understand the adjustments the two libertines make vis-a-vis the others. For example, Valmont writes the following to Tourvel: Indeed, the situation in which I am writing you makes me more aware than ever of the irresistible power of love; it is only with great difficulty that I maintain sufficient self-control to put my thoughts in order; and already I foresee not being able to finish this letter without having to interrupt it .... Even the table on which I am writing you (which is being put to this use for the first time) becomes for me a sacred altar of love. How it [elle] grows more beautiful before my eyes! Upon it [elle] I will have marked the oath of my eternal love for you! (LD: 103-4)

Tourvel undoubtedly reads this letter differently than we do, for Valmont first sent it to Merteuil who, having enjoyed reading it, was to forward the letter to the intended addressee. With the same letter, Valmont enclosed a missive for Merteuil's eyes alone in which we read: The kindness on my part is the reward that she [Emilie] just received for serving as my desk upon which to write to my dear devoted one, to whom I found it pleasant to send a letter written in bed and nearly in the arms of a girl, and even interrupted for a complete infidelity [une infidelite complete], and in which I provide her with a detailed account of my situation and conduct. Emilie, who read the letter, laughed like crazy at it, and I hope you will too. (LD: 102)

The phrase "the irresistible power of love" acquires a double meaning: the desire that motivates Valmont to write Tourvel and to make love to Emilie. This doubleness corresponds to Valmont's identity as both faithful lover and debauched libertine; his singular and sincere love for the virtuous Tourvel is expressed by means of "intercourse" with the whore Emilie. The table is virginal ("which is being put to this use for the first

20 •

The Libertine

time"), and his expression of love upon it corresponds to the uniqueness of Valmont's desire to be with Tourvel alone. But insofar as the table is Emilie (itlelle), Valmont's oath of eternal love becomes a "complete infidelity." Emilie undergoes an objectification that is taken to even greater extremes in the works of Sade. 29 Nancy K. Miller observes: "Male desire, then, originates not in the 'arms' of a woman present, but in the desired absence of the woman to be written to. Would it not be possible to argue that the effacement of the woman's body in representation is here due precisely to its transformation into instrumentality? Emilie must remain invisible since her function is merely and classically to facilitate the exchange of women and/ or signs. " 30 While underscoring the importance of Tourvel's absence, this comment seems to miss the doubleness of the scene that makes Valmont's identity so problematic. Certainly, one could argue that Valmont's desire originates in the desired absence of the woman written to; this leads him to Emilie. Yet equally significant is the desired presence of Tourvel which creates distance between Emilie and Valmont (the page upon which he writes to his dear devoted one). The invisible Emilie does facilitate the exchange of women and signs, but the invisible Tourvel does so as well. While the hidden Emilie supports Valmont's writing, she is also precisely the recipient of his writing's intentions: as he moves the quill across the page to express his love for the absent Tourvel, it also caresses Emilie's body-a way of making love to her. It remains unclear whether he is adjusting his desire for Tourvel to make love to Emilie or whether he adjusts his desire for Emilie to express love for Tourvel. In either case, one thing is clear: Valmont sustains his pleasure at the threshold of both women. The letter at once unites and separates him from Tourvel. Similarly, his lovemaking to Emilie is distanced by the minute width of a sheet of paper and the length of a pen. Seeing these implements of writing as hymen and penis may be interesting, but the metaphorical connection ala Freud strikes me as rather banal, for it seems to me that what is at issue here is writing as the forestallment of the sexual act and not its metaphorical equivalent. As lover becomes writer, the act of penetration is delayed, thereby sustaining rather than resolving the excitation that precedes climax and conquest. Felman observes that language for Don Juan is a "field of enjoyment, not of knowledge."" Valmont and Merteuil also derive much of their pleasure from plotting seductions and relating their adventures to each other. Language and writing constitute a milieu in which a plateau of pleasure can be maintained. One's attention is then drawn to the numerous repetitions

The Libertine •

21

making up libertines' lives, such as Don Juan's thousands of seductions or Valmont and Merteuil's detailed letters. Repetition is one of the most characteristic features of nearly all of Sade's writing: scenes of violent sexuality and discussions of them succeed each other to the point of boredom.'2 Each of these scenes entails a multiplicity as well, in that several libertines with various predilections always end up sacrificing many victims in numerous ways. Beatrice Didier notes that this repetition and multiplicity of crime constitutes a strategy "so that a law can be scientifically established. " 33 I understand this strategy as an attempt to create a counterdiscourse: one based on crime and vice that opposes obedience and virtue. Nearly all the libertines in justine (and in most of Sade's works, such as 120 journees) are found in isolated places, sealed off from society. Consequently there is no "noise," to use Blanchot's term-no interference from other discourses. 34 In these places a dominating discourse is always reversed: the monastery of Sainte-Marie-des-Bois establishes an ecclesiastical hierarchy based on the perversions of the four monks; the same occurs with the school (Rodin), the factory (Roland), and the chateau (Bressac, Gernande). Not only do the libertines of justine exploit their social positions in order to fulfill their individual desires, they also institute them by creating monasteries, schools, factories, and families based on torture, murder, rape, betrayal, and incest. "Like colonies of ants, they secrete systems." 35 At this point, it becomes possible to make several distinctions among the libertines by taking into consideration the degree to which they intentionally oppose society. Don Juan's adjustments occur spontaneously; he is a nomadic libertine, a whirlwind of sensuality that travels across all of Europe. While it is true that his seductions cause disruption in the established social order, this is not the intended result of any reflection or planning. Nor does he subsequently dwell on or exploit the public reputation that his seductions create. S0ren Kierkegaard writes that "shrewd levelheadedness is lacking in him; his life is sparkling like the wine with which he fortifies himself; his life is turbulent like the melodies that accompany his joyous repast; he is always jubilant. He needs no preparation, no plan, no time, for he is always ready."' 6 Don Juan's seductive practice is marked by a certain innocence: perpetual and spontaneous adjustments without any concern for the social ramifications that his actions bring about. It is as if he seduces by means of a natural reflex that reindividuates his being in the presence of a desired woman. One can speak only of change, instability, unfixity; Don Juan has no single being of his own.

22 •

The Libertine

Valmont and Merteuil, however, are much more strategic; they execute adjustments with "exquisite Machiavellianism" and "diabolical lucidity. " 37 As a result, their seductions take place with calculated, military precision. Valmont and Merteuil are also less nomadic than Don Juan. Paris and its surroundings constitute a map on which they strategically plan and carry out their seductive maneuvers. Unlike Don Juan, Valmont and Merteuil take into consideration their social milieu with regard for a desired response or effect. Merteuil, for example, seeks vengeance on Gercourt. In their letters, the two calculate the danger of their liaisons and maximize it in order to intensify the pleasure they can derive from them. Sade, however, brings to the fore what other libertine texts repress: explicit representations of sexuality and adjustments that yield only to the libertines' imaginations. Clement explains this to Justine: Now, if we acknowledge that pleasure [jouissance] of the senses is always dependent on the imagination, always regulated by the imagination, it will no longer be necessary to be shocked by the numerous variations that the imagination will suggest in these pleasures, by the infinite multitude of different tastes and passions to which the different flights of this imagination will give birth .... If, then, there exist beings in the world whose tastes shock all the accepted notions, not only must one not be astonished by them, not only must one not punish or preach at them, but one must serve them, content them, remove any obstacles that hinder them, and give them, if you want to be just, all the means to satisfy themselves without risk. (J: r69)

Sexuality is not to be defined by any prescribed norm (such as monogamy in the service of procreation), but by the individual imagination. For this reason, Sadean libertines are not nomadic, nor are they integrated into society. Rather, they isolate themselves in specific enclosures that become sites of counterdiscursive and individualized sexual practice so that a new "society" will be in place to offer them the means of satisfying their imaginations without risk. Clement emphasizes the "numerous variations," an "infinite multitude," the "different tastes and passions," and the" different flights" of the imagination. In striving to realize and even institute sexuality as a multiplicity, Sade's libertines attempt to dissociate the imagination from any normative moral or social dictates. The imagination is thereby liberated to establish itself. When this occurs, Sade rarely speaks of an "act" of crime or sexuality; he prefers the word "tableau" (for example, in the dedication of Justine, Sade refers to the novel as "ces tableaux du crime" [J: r8]), because sex-

The Libertine • 23 uality consists of a multiplicity of adjustments that represent the imagination. The monastery, the school, and the chateau are social forms that the libertines isolate from context and empty of content in order to repopulate them with the representations of their own imaginations. The result is a kind of" countersociety" that gives freedom to the imagination that the established social order would seek to constrain. Much of the violence of the Sadean text derives from the fact that the realization of desire is never refracted through any normative social code of behavior; desire flashes into the world with a vividness and violence like the lightning bolt that kills Justine at the novel's end. Consequently, the nomadism of Don Juan's life becomes in Justine a nomadism of the imagination: the novel is in constant motion from one tableau of crime to the next as it follows the flights of the libertines' imaginations. Justine's wanderings on the outside parallel the multiplicity of scenes that occur within the enclosed spaces that the libertines establish and inhabit. For this reason, Justine, like so many of Sade's works, is boring. To be sure, Justine differs from the other three libertine texts in both the detail and violence of depicted sexuality, but it is also distinct in terms of the repetition of the narrative. While each tableau is unique, the mode of its creation is always the same: Justine wanders from place to place while the libertines repeatedly free their imaginations at her expense. In Don Giovanni, one encounters only a few seductions of Don Juan's thousands; in justine, the number extends well into double digits, and 120 journees offers us 6oo. Sade represents a multiplicity rather than exemplifying it. While Sade provides the most explicit example, we are in various ways confronted with libertinage as repetition: libertines' lives consist of the intense pleasure that each becoming produces and helps to sustain. Don Juan continually adjusts his body and voice; Valmont and Merteuil effect stylistic adjustments in writing; and the libertines of justine repeatedly rape, torture, and murder, adjusting their bodies and the milieus that surround them to the desires suggested by their imaginations. Libertines never look back, and completion only begins the project anew-a series of becomings that moves forward toward an incomprehensible infinity. Libertinage therefore does not involve a process of totalization in order to arrive at an ideal or absolute. This has implications for the act of narration. In moving forward, the libertines flee the past, and thus it is interesting that the libertine text tends toward genres that valorize the present (the act of speaking or writing), such as the play or the epistolary novel. When narration does occur, it is frequently carried out by one such as Justine who seeks to

24 • The Libertine

hold the libertines accountable. Narration's project of bringing the past to the fore runs counter to libertinage and can be regarded as a means to undermine it. The libertines never seem to learn from the past. Marcel Henaff observes that "the Sadean narrative ... is not at all picaresque, which is to say, not a Bildungsroman. The libertine is ineducable or-if one prefersincorrigible."'" The Bildungsroman depicts change or development in terms of past experiences. The libertines, however, appear "stuck" in an endless repetition of becomings that never yield to the dictates of an external moral principle or internal conscience. And there is no remorse for past actions. La Dubois tells Justine, "Remorse is a chimera ... ; it is nothing ... but the imbecilic murmur of the soul too timid to dare to annihilate it" (J: 265). Don Juan refuses to repent at the hand of the statue, even to save his own life. The libertine text can instead be seen as a "Bilderroman": a work consisting of a plurality of tableaus (Bilder, obrazy, representations) that in their untotalized separateness ward off any psychological development over time (Bildung, obrazovanie, education). As a result, the libertines have a particular relationship to memory: they banish it so that it does not encroach on the present and function as an agency to guide their lives. This valorizes the present as the "time" of libertinage. "Becoming is an anti-memory." 39 Yet the term "antimemory" brings to the fore a particular feature of the attempt to constitute identity in the present. It is as if memory and the past were omnipresent, haunting the libertines, and consequently it must be fought against continually. The infliction of pain can be read as a project that seeks to ward off the eruption of any knowledge or pangs of conscience that would anchor libertines in the past. The violence of libertinage, particularly evident in Sade, creates a succession of breaks or ruptures that distance the past from the sustained plateau of pleasure that constitutes libertines' lives. Pleasure consists not only in the intensification of sensuality, but also in the isolation of this plateau by means of nomadism (Don Juan), isolation (the private letters of Les Liaisons dangereuses), or institutionalization (Justine). As time passes, libertines merely grow older, and the inventory of their crimes-such as Don Juan's list-only gets larger. 40 The significance of the present for the libertines is particularly evident in Laura, who dominates Scene Two of The Stone Guest. Laura is an actress, and at a gathering in her home after a play, several guests praise her ability to perform her role absolutely convincingly:

The Libertine • 25

First Guest.

Second Guest. Third Guest. Laura.

Laura, I swear, never Have you played with such perfection. You fulfilled the role so truthfully! How she developed it! with such strength! What art! Yes, I'm satisfied Today with each movement, each word. I freely gave myself over to inspiration. The words flowed forth, as if [kak budto] born Not from slavish memory, but from the heart. (SG: 380)

Laura achieves a kind of absolute: to play with perfection, to fulfill truthfully, to develop with strength. She contrasts this art with memory, which is disdained and equated with slavery. Nonetheless, Laura says the words flowed forth as if from the heart and not from memory; the implication is that they were remembered. The words are in fact Don Juan's composition (SG: 381). By attempting to distance "slavish memory" in order to live freely in the present, Laura adjusts her whole being according to the words composed by Don Juan. Rather than giving herself over to "Don Juan" as seduced woman (which would entail a kind of slavery), she takes control of the text, becomes anew in terms of it, and as a result is able to seduce her viewers/guests. The language of the three guests consists of cliches, and further, the speakers are nameless; it is as if the guests had been so captivated by Laura's performance that they lost all individuality of their own. Her strategy is brilliant: instead of losing herself to a slavish past, Laura makes slaves of those who surround her in the present. Laura later explains how it can be that she has so many lovers. After the guests leave, Don Carlos (the brother of the murdered Commander) asks her whether she still loves Don Juan. She replies: "At this moment [ V siiu minutu]? No, I don't love him. I am unable to love two at once. Now [teper'], I love you" (SG: 384). Barthes notes that the expression-or rather the word-"I-love-you" (je-t-aime) "has a meaning only at the moment I utter it; there is no other information in it but its immediate saying: no reservoir, no armory of meaning. " 41 The realization of "I-love-you" over time becomes an impossibility. Laura places emphasis on the specific moment with Don Carlos (now, as opposed to some other time). "!-loveyou" has the same temporarily unifying force as "La ci darem la mano" when Don Juan sings at "this moment" (in questa istante): a linguistic adjustment that connects two bodies, two worlds within a spatiotemporally

26 • The Libertine

specific milieu. Laura sustains the threshold of the proclamation of love by not stabilizing and singularizing it in a monogamous relationship with Don Carlos, which would result in a kind of slavery of the body (marriage) and of the mind (memory). Instead, she proceeds to repeat "!-loveyou" to different men, thus prolonging the excitation of an otherwise momentary utterance. Laura loves many men in many moments, and in some of them she loves Don Juan. After interrupting the love scene, Don Juan quickly kills Don Carlos. As the brother of the murdered Commander, Don Carlos brings Don Juan's past to the fore. The murder creates a rupture with that past, leaving Don Juan free to be, to become with Laura. He asks her:

Don Juan.

Laura.

Confess, How many times [skol'ko raz] have you deceived me In my absence? And you, libertine [povesa ]? (SG:389)

The two are lovers but have many others as well. A singular relationship is here presented as multiple, for Don Juan and Laura admittedly "deceive" each other. From this comes the puzzling nature of Don Juan's question and Laura's counterquestion. Perhaps accusations. But perhaps also literal questions, stemming from the desire to know a number ("How many times have you deceived me?" Not "Have you deceived me?"). It is as if the two were, like Don Juan in the opera, engaging in a contest to achieve a maximum quantity. Kierkegaard observes that the famous I ,003 of Don Juan's list ''is uneven and accidental, which is by no means unimportant; it gives the impression that the list is not at all final, but rather that Don Giovanni is on the move." 42 The paradox of "multiple monogamy": Don Juan and Laura do not remain fixed in terms of each other but are rather always "on the move." It is in this context that Laura's description of Don Juan as "my faithful friend, my dissolute lover [moi vernyi drug, moi vetrennyi liubovnik ]" (SG: 3 8 I) should be understood. The project consists in sustaining pleasure by striving for maximum quantity. As a result, not only does identity continually alter and change, but the two lovers repeatedly "deceive" each other; that is, they ward off all conscience and knowledge of identity as a fractured whole that would lead to a yearning for monogamy. Further, the verbs "to change," "to alter," and "to deceive" are related in Russian: izmenit'. Don Juan's question can now also

The Libertine • 27 be read as "How many times have you 'changed on me' in my absence?" Laura gives no answer but instead performs it anew; as with the three guests, she uses her skills as an actress to perform his words from her heart, adjusting herself to them, rather than merely repeating them slavishly. The process of becoming for both of them is far from completion. Each new encounter entails a new identity, and there is no fidelity over time, but only in given moments. Libertines fall in love for the first time over and over again. If memory for Laura is slavish, then for Don Juan it is equivalent to death, a fact that comes to the fore most explicitly when his refusal to repent leads to his downfall at the hands of the statue, the living memory of the Commander. The statue stands in a monastery which, in the Pushkin play, marks the only place where Don Juan remembers. There he recalls the women of Andalusia, but now they strike him as lifeless, rigid, and fixed-like wax dolls (SG: 372). Donna Inez, a woman he once seduced, now appears to him as a vision of death with morbid lips, a weak voice, and sad black eyes (SG: 373). And The Stone Guest focuses on Don Juan's seduction of a widow shrouded in death from head to foot: Donna Anna. Death (the rigidity of the body, like a statue) and memory (the fixity of the mind in the past, like a monument-a word which, in Latin, means "to remind," "to warn") constitute the limits of Don Juan's project, for they would fix and singularize his existence. Akhmatova points out the deathlike features of Donna Anna, contrasting them with Don Juan's paradoxical description of her as an angel. 43 But the paradox strikes me as completely understandable. Insofar as death constitutes the boundary of seduction as a plateau of pleasure, death and memory function as angels, for they facilitate access to another domain, the domain of eroticism. The play focuses on Don Juan's seduction of the widow whose husband he killed; he risks his own life (because her family seeks vengeance on him) in order to make a dangerous liaison the source of his own pleasure. It remains unclear whether Don Juan seduces in order to ward off death or wards off death in order to seduce. To Donna Anna he says, "For a sweet moment of an encounter, I would give up my life without a care" (SG: 408). Don Juan's moments of pleasure are also sites of death. His sword enters the bodies of men (the Commander, Don Carlos) and kills them, and his phallus robs women's bodies of their honor. The former go to the graveyard, while the latter (unless they have died from grief) are resigned to isolation in a convent. In The Stone Guest, Saint Anthony's Monastery is the site of both: the "cemetery" of Don Juan's sweet mo-

28 • The Libertine

ments of the past. But it is also the place where, encountering death in the widow Donna Anna, he begins the becoming that will distance death and offer him a kind of rebirth. 44 The relationship of Pushkin's Donna Anna to memory is unique, for · it not only makes her a kind of libertine but also sets her apart from the other libertines I have been discussing. While clearly not as active a libertine as, say, Laura, Donna Anna is not entirely a victim of Don Juan's seductive strategies. Signs of her own interest in him appear before he confronts her directly. In the opening scene, Donna Anna greets the real monk at the gate with the brusque imperative, "Father, open up" (SG: 378). But later, after Don Juan has been frequenting the monastery, she has this to say to Don Juan-the-monk upon arrival: "He's here again. Father, forgive me" (SG: 391). By showing interest in another man, Donna Anna violates the stipulations of mourning that would have her remain true to the memory of her dead husband, the Commander Don Alvaro. She transgresses with the utmost stealth, for there is the constant fear of being caught out. She checks to see whether anyone is looking and that the doors are locked. She peeps out from behind the veil but never removes it. As the play progresses, it becomes less and less clear who is seducing whom: Donna Anna regulates Don Juan's advances with the conventions of mourning, keeping him in check by claiming to be faithful to her husband's memory.

Donna Anna.

Don Juan.

Diego [Don Juan's second becoming with her], stop: I sin In listening to you, -I must not love you, A widow should be faithful even to the grave. If you only knew how Don Alvaro Loved me! Oh, Don Alvaro certainly Wouldn't receive a woman in love with him Were he a widower-He would be faithful To conjugal love. Don't torture my heart, Donna Anna, with eternal respect [vechnym

pominan'em] For your husband. (SG: 402-3) Donna Anna has done what her former husband would never do: receive a lover. Yet she keeps this lover at a distance by claiming to be true

The Libertine • 29 to Don Alvaro. The intrusion of another man into the milieu of Don Juan's seductive becoming clearly upsets him ("Don't torture my heart"), revealing a certain jealousy. Further, the other man is the Commander, whom Don Juan killed. Thus, as Don Juan attempts to become anew in terms of Donna Anna, she brings to the fore Don Juan's past deed and tortures him with pominanie (a prayer for the dead, a list of the dead, and the word is etymologically linked to memory): an eternal memory is used to keep a sweet moment in check. Although it is never explicitly presented, Donna Anna appears to know exactly what she is doing. True, she is shocked when the man before her reveals himself as Don Juan, the murderer of the husband to whom she is so seemingly faithful. Yet it does not take Donna Anna long to reactivate interest in Don Juan and even express concern for his life: "But how were you able to come here; should you be recognized, your death would be inevitable" (SG: 408). 45 Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Donna Anna's libertinage is the fact that she invites Don juan to her house, albeit with the stipulation that he swear to maintain respect for her (SG: 395). This parallels Don Juan's famous invitation of the statue of Donna Anna's murdered husband. His invitation can be regarded as the ultimate attempt to confront memory and death as he plans to seduce the widow of the man he killed. Yet her invitation carries the libertine project of valorizing the present even farther, for Donna Anna places mourning and death in the very service of seduction. Pushkin's Donna Anna liberates herself somewhat from the convention of mourning that would fix her memory in terms of the death of her husband and extend monogamy beyond the grave. She thus achieves a degree of personal freedom within an otherwise strictly defined social code of behavior. This makes Donna Anna a libertine similar in kind, although not in degree, to Merteuil, for whom the past and social conventions serve as raw material for new becomings that are precisely planned. Donna Anna's fainting at the play's end when the statue arrives can now be read as the realization that her murdered husband has returned to seek vengeance on Don Juan and on her as well. Libertines have a special relationship to space and time, because becomings and the adjustments they entail take place in specific milieus, against defined conceptual and situational horizons. Becomings are not transtemporal such that they could always define an individual. Identity comes to designate the specificity of a constellation of adjustments that are subject to change. As defined in this spatially and temporally specific milieu, identity can be called a hecceity. Deleuze and Guattari write, "One should not

30 • The Libertine

think that a hecceity consists simply of a decor or background that would situate subjects, nor of appendages that would anchor things and people to the ground. It is the whole adjustment in its individuated ensemble in which a hecceity finds itself being." 46 Whereas becoming defines the process of alteration and adjustment, hecceity designates the whole, the ensemble: the time, the place, the weather, the social situation of the individuals found there, their ages, appearances, nationalities, language, dress, and so on-in short, a multiplicity that interconnects and is identity. If any one of these factors is removed or changed, or if new ones are added, then the hecceity-which is to say, individuality-changes as well. As an example, let us turn to Leporello's aria in Don Giovanni in which he sings of Don Juan and the women he has seduced: Among them are country girls, Waiting maids, city beauties; Countesses, baronesses, Marquises, princesses, Women of every rank, Of every size, of every age .. He tends to praise a blond's gentleness, A brunette's constancy, A white-haired one's sweetness. In winter he likes them plump, In summer, slim; He calls a tall one stately, A tiny one always dainty. He seduces the elderly For the pleasure of adding her to the list; But his supreme passion Is the young beginner. (DG: 94)

I will turn shortly to the effect that this process of listing and categorizing has on Don Juan's individuality. For the moment, however, I wish to emphasize how Don Juan becomes anew in terms of a multiplicity of women. His identities are determined by, among other factors, a woman's age, hair, nationality, and social status, the seasons (winter, summer), and various places (city, country). These identities do not coalesce in a stable subjectivity, but rather remain plural and keep repeating. Hecceities designate individualities that can be dated and located; thus they can be of long or short duration. The idea is similar to the one Bakhtin develops in regard to language: "Even languages of the day exist: one could say that

The Libertine • 3 1 today's and yesterday's socio-ideological and political 'day' do not, in a certain sense, share the same language; every day represents another socioideological semantic 'state of affairs,' another vocabulary, another accentual system, with its own slogans, its own ways of assigning blame and praise." 47 Such days (or hours, or seasons) of language have an individuality all their own. Bakhtin seeks to delineate the specificity of "languages" as interconnected with certain social situations. Rather than a transtemporal, universal language (such as what Saussure would calllangue),'8 there is a multiplicity of languages, each with its own temporal and situational specificity. With the concept of hecceity, I wish to define identity in a similar way: not a subject, the entity that is valorized over time and apart from the milieus in which it is found, but a hecceity: an identity as constituted by the interconnectedness of the individual to specific milieus. It would appear possible that a proper name could be used to identify each hecceity. Deleuze and Guattari write: "The proper name designates above all something on the order of an event, becoming, or hecceity. And it is military men and meteorologists who possess the secret of proper names when they give them to a strategic operation or hurricane. " 49 Meteorologists assign proper names to hurricanes (Andrew, Jane); military men give them to strategic operations (Desert Storm, Restore Hope). Proper names designate an absolutely specific event that occurs in a particular milieu. In both of these cases, the range of difference does not seem to be especially great (from one hurricane or battle to the next) but in the time, place, and interconnections of each occurrence, each individuality is always distinct. It is a matter of specific movements and forces within a milieu. The purpose of the name is to demarcate (mark off, plot, isolate) this hurricane, this operation, this seduction (the "thisness,'' the hecceity) from other ones. In The Stone Guest, Don Juan keeps changing his name: "I'm not Diego, I'm Juan" (SG: 405). The new name points to a new hecceity, because the milieu is changed as Donna Anna reacts to his confession. Even though most of the libertines keep the same name in several hecceities-over time and in many places-the name, too, must be liberated and come to refer to a multiplicity. "The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity. " 50 This is primarily why I have been referring to the libertines in the plural: not just Don Juan, Merteuil, Valmont, but the Don Juans, the Merteuils, the Valmonts. Mozart and da Ponte understood this when they assigned a proper name to their opera: II Dissoluto pun ito, ossia II Don Giovanni, Don Juan as dissolution, disin-

32 • The Libertine tegration, dispersion, dissemination. The "place of residence" that a state bureaucracy would use to fix and stabilize an individual changes with the libertines every night: a new object of desire, a new space and time, a new hecceity. The proper name must apprehend-comprehend-this multiplicity. But there is another meaning of the verb "to apprehend": to arrest. And this offers a new reading of the assertion that "the proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity." The libertines are not without opponents. They live in societies that would hold them accountable for the crimes they have committed. The proper name, then, becomes less a means of designation (to designate a hecceity: to specify this and not that) and more a means of identification (to identify a present individual as the same one in the past: to link this to that). In the penultimate scene of the opera, the statue's first words are "Don Giovanni." The Commander identifies the one who must be held accountable for past crimes. From hecceities where becomings take place in terms of a multiplicity of elements, an entity is now isolated and marked as a responsible agent. This entity is a subject.

Individuation by Subjectivity "There are two meanings of the word subject," writes Foucault, "subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to."" In the first sense, libertines liberate themselves from external control and dependence. Don Juan lives a nomadic life that disperses identity and banishes memory; Merteuil and Valmont exploit the conventions of Parisian society in order to calculate and execute their plans for sustained pleasure; and the libertines of Justine isolate and empty social forms only to realize within them the desires suggested by their own imaginations. In the second sense, libertines are not bound to a fixed identity, nor are they tied to conscience, selfknowledge, or remorse. The violence of their crimes works to distance the past from the present so that the pleasure of "now" can be fully realized. Within the four texts I have been examining, however, there exist forces that attempt to individuate the libertines in a different way, through subjectivity. The double pursuit comes into view: whereas the libertines are

The Libertine • 33 continually in pursuit of a new object of desire and the freedom of identity, society gathers together its forces in order to pursue and apprehend the libertines and confront them with their criminal past. The process of imposing past upon present is, I will argue, one way of constituting a social subject. Unlike hecceities, which define the individual only in terms of a particular becoming, social subjectivity calls for a fixed identity that extends over time. The difference between hecceity and subject at first seems somewhat similar to the distinction John Locke makes between "man" and "person" in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). "Man" refers to the physical body that has contact with the world over time, whereas "person" designates a moral agent that can, for example, be held accountable for a crime. What is essential as far as a person is concerned is memory in the present of having committed a crime in the past. But yet possibly it will still be objected, suppose I wholly lose the memory of some parts of my Life, beyond the possibility of retrieving them, so that perhaps I shall never be conscious of them again; yet am I not the same Person, that did those Actions, had those Thoughts, that I was once conscious of, though I now forgot them? To which I answer, that we must here take notice what the Word I is applied to, which in this case is the Man only. And the same Man being presumed to be the same Person, I is easily here supposed to stand also for the same Person. But if it be possible for the same Man to have distinct incommunicable consciousness at different times, it is past doubt the same Man would at different times make different Persons; which, we see, is the Sense of Mankind in the solemnest Declaration of their Opinions, Humane Laws not punishing the Mad Man for the Sober Man's Actions, nor the Sober Man for what the Mad Man did, thereby making them two Persons; which is somewhat explained by our way of speaking in English, when we say such a one is not himself, or is besides himself; in which Phrases it is insinuated, as if those who now, or, at least, first used them, thought, that self was changed, the self same Person was no longer in that Man. 5 2

As individuated hecceities, the libertine "man" is continually not himself, continually beside himself. It is as if the libertines were (to follow Locke's example) always entering new states of madness, such that no single person ever emerges that could have consciousness of a past one. Yet society tends to see to it that the same man is held accountable for the deeds of various persons. Even Locke comes to note that it really works this way in practice, that "drunkenness or sleep is not admitted as a plea," yet he insists on maintaining the distinction by adding that "in the great Day, wherein the Secrets of all Hearts shall be laid open, it may be

34 • The Libertine reasonable to think, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of; but shall receive his Doom, his Conscience accusing or excusing him. " 53 The connection between the person and the man is not something given, but rather the effect of a process carried out by society. One example would be the court system that does not accept drunkenness as a plea. Another example concerns the use of the pronoun "I." On the one hand, "I" can be seen always to refer to the same man-the same physical body that inhabits the world. On the other hand, "I" also designates numerous persons. In this regard, it truly is a shifter: not just a pronoun used by different people (for example, between two speakers), but also a word that shifts among the many persons of which a single man may consist. The "I" of a man is not necessarily the same "I" that refers to the person. Society, however, joins the two, such that a subject emerges as the result of this conflation. The process is, above all, singularizing. Whereas hecceity allows for identity to be constituted as multiple, subjectivity concerns the formation of a single social subject to whom past actions can be ascribed. I will now return to the four libertine texts to pin down some of the ways in which society attempts to restore memory to the libertines and thereby hold them accountable for their crimes. First, there is bureaucracy-a kind of social memory that keeps track of the actions of all "men." Second, evidence can be gathered that incriminates the libertines; it documents links between present and past. Finally, there are witnesses who are able to identify in the present the one who committed a crime in the past: they can recount what took place; this allows me to make a connection between the constitution of a social subject and the act of narration. The result of these procedures is a "machine" of social subjectivity that seeks to singularize persons in the present in terms of actions in the past. To return to the citation from Foucault: these procedures subject the libertines to external control and to an identity that extends over time. In the Mozart-cia Ponte opera, Don Juan's memory is not altogether absent. Leporello keeps a volume that records Don Juan's seductions and sings it to the distressed Donna Elvira, who is the most recent entry: In Italy six hundred and forty, In Germany two hundred and thirty-one, A hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one, But in Spain there are already a thousand and three. (DG: 94)

The Libertine • 35 This is one of the most famous arias in the opera, a fame that perhaps comes from the ease of memorizing it. The numbers function as a mnemonic device that sums up Don Juan, and as a whole the list forms Don Juan's missing memory that, nonetheless, remains external to him. The women in front of Don Juan are always new, and he becomes anew in terms of them. But the servant behind Don Juan is always the same; Leporello the lister keeps watch and keeps track, which relegates memory to the position of a hired servant who is not to interfere with the activities of the master. One can recall here Pushkin's Laura for whom memory is "slavish." Three aspects of Don Juan's list strike me as significant. First, the list establishes a very particular relationship between Don Juan's present and his past. Elaborating on Husserl's model, Deleuze and Guattari develop a graphic representation of memory that is helpful in understanding the function of the list in regard to time. 54

A

B

c

Flow of Time

Order of Time

The upper horizontal line indicates the flow of time, while the vertical lines mark the order of time. Husserl respectively defines these two as the "series of now-points" (Reihe der Jetztpunkte) and the "continuum of phases (now-point with horizon of the past)" (Phasenkontinuum: Jetztpunkt mit Vergangenheitshorizont). 55 Since seduction occurs at the threshold of the

36 • The Libertine other, hecceities are to be found not at the "now-points" but on the lines between them. Don Juan and the other libertines are continually becoming in the present: lives/lines of becoming that take place with the flow of time, that is, along the top horizontal line. Considered temporally, the project of libertinage strives to liberate the flow of time from the order of time, which "weighs" the libertines down with the burden of memory, conscience, remorse, and repentance. As memory, however, the list records only the completed acts, the committed crimes. The linearity that characterizes becomings is put out of focus, and emphasis turns to a series of points. Husserl describes how this happens: "Since a new now [ein neues ]etzt] is always presenting itself, each now is changed into a past [ein Vergangen], and thus the entire continuity of the running-off of the pasts of the preceding points moves uniformly "downward" into the depths of the past. " 56 The list organizes vertically; it constitutes the "depths" of Don Juan's past. As he moves forward in time, the list gets longer, "deeper," "heavier," and it increasingly serves as a document that can be held against him. The list becomes a police dossier, the name "Don Juan" a file heading. The name does apprehend a multiplicity, but now in the sense of "to seize," "to arrest." Don Juan's becomings come to be bureaucratically recorded, for bureaucracy constitutes a social memory external to the individual. By erasing the lines and gathering the points, society creates a coherent subject that can be held accountable over time. Society can mark a point of origin, for example, or what Husserl calls a "source-point" (Quellpunkt) which could be the date and place of birth; 57 an endpoint: a date and place of death; and a point that marks the present, a "now-point": a place of employment and a permanent residence. It can record points that mark changes in civil status (marriages, divorces, widowhood) and those that mark criminal actions (such as murder). The social subject is an entity made up mostly of the past, yet like the statue of the dead Commander, it is "alive." The "living past" is attached to the present and weighs it down, and the downward shifts that Husserl mentions can be likened to the downfall of Don Juan as the statue seizes ("apprehends") his hand and sinks down with him into the depths of hell. The second important aspect of the list concerns the way in which it classifies Don Juan's seductions. When Don Juan speaks of the list, healways thinks of adding to it ("Ah! by tomorrow morning my list should be another ten to the good" [DG: I 38]). It is not a matter of re-collection, but of addition; pleasure consists in constant augmentation. It is therefore

The Libertine • 37 significant that the total number of seductions (2,065) is never given but can be arrived at only by adding up the numbers that appear in the various subdivisions that categorize Don Juan's crimes according to the women's nationalities. Whereas Kierkegaard locates the incomprehensibility of Don Juan's seductive project in the uneven 1,003, I would prefer to see it in 2,065: a quantity so beyond conception that it remains unsung.'" The number 1,003 that has become so well known is only part of an attempt to account for Don Juan's seductions by establishing a fixed range of possibility: Spain, France, Turkey, blond, brunette, and so on. As with the Neoclassical generic organization of literature, Don Juan's crimes are classified into various "genres" or parameters, particularly that of nationality. In this regard, it is worth noting that "list" also means a narrow strip or boundary: Don Juan's seductions must pass within a specified conceptual field. He is no longer a hurricane that spontaneously wreaks destruction on social order from out of nowhere; rather, his past seductions are classified according to nationality so that they can be understood, if not predicted. The infinite project of libertinage becomes a predictable phenomenon of crime. Third, the list makes a connection between the process of subjectification and writing. Jack Goody's observations take us in this direction: [Lists] do not represent speech directly.... They stand opposed to the continuity, the flux, the connectedness of the usual speech forms, that is, conversation, oratory, etc., and substitute an arrangement in which concepts, verbal items, are separated not only from the wider context in which speech always, or almost always takes place, but separated too from one another, as in the inventory of an estate, that runs: cows, s; donkeys, 14; land, 5 dunams; chairs, 8; tables, 2." 59

Leporello reads off a written document that in its very physicality opposes the joy with which Don Juan speaks, or rather sings. DonJuan's becomings mark a flux, a flow of identity. If Don Juan has Leporello keep a list, it is because he derives pleasure from witnessing its constant augmentation. Further, his hecceities have a certain connectedness: not only to each other, but also to the various milieus in which becoming takes place. For Don Juan the word "list" still retains the archaic meaning of "lust" in that it documents a project to sustain the present moments of pleasure, which are otherwise ephemeral. For society, however, the list has the function of fixing his past crimes. The "wider contexts" (the milieus of his becomings) designate scenes not where identity is constituted, but where identity can be isolated and fixed: Italy, 640; Germany, 23 1; France, 100; Turkey,

38 • The Libertine 91; Spain, 1,003. The continuous line of becoming is divided into anumber of points all connected to the body of Don Juan in the present. Social subjectivity comes to be associated with the physicality of writing that re-presents the past. Like the statue, the list serves as a monument (reminder, or warning) that the past is never far off. Writing could therefore be used as evidence to incriminate libertines; this is the second way in which the social machinery of subjectification imposes a past deed on an individual in the present. Pleasurable epistolary liaisons can become truly dangerous, for example: the letters in which so much of Merteuil's and Valmont's pleasure takes place end up as legal documents. Before dying, Valmont turns over Merteuil's letters to Danceny, who, in turn, publishes two of them (8 1 and 85). This tactic parallels the editor's intention in publishing 175 letters of the correspondence: to expose the diabolical ways of libertines. Letter 81 depicts Merteuil as a woman who for years engaged in intrigues and crimes to procure wealth and satisfy her desires; 60 the other reveals her as a skilled planner who intentionally brought about Prevan's downfall. In addition to being ostracized from Parisian society, Merteuilloses all her fortune in a court decision. The process/trial (le proces) of subjectification: the letters link Merteuil to past "points" (crimes), establishing the order of time and, thereby, a social subject that comes to be "processed." Valmont's and Danceny's revelation of the two letters underscores the results of publication. Whereas the letters once circulated solely in a private sphere between writer and addressee, they now enter the public domain. They no longer function as sites of pleasure; instead, a public reading has grave consequences for their writer, who is censured. The texts become "attached" to Merteuil in that she is held accountable for them. At one point, Danceny writes to Merteuil, asserting that "a letter is the portrait of the soul" (LD: 338). Merteuil probably dismissed the comment, for it runs counter to everything that she teaches Cecile about the art of epistolary writing. Later, however, the Marquise de*** remarks on Merteuil's downfall and the disease that disfigures her by observing that "at present her soul was on her face" (LD: 378). The letters of the past come to mark and distort the part of Merteuil's body where identity is most easily constituted, as if they had been seared upon her face. 6 ' She is subjected to her texts not only by the conventions of social propriety (the disdain of the crowd at the theater) but also by the legal system (the courts that deprive her of her fortune). The difference between the private circulation of letters and their subsequent publication parallels a shift in the

The Libertine • 39 field of literature during the time Les Liaisons dangereuses was published. Previously, the number of readers was closer to the number of writers (a more "epistolary" literary situation), but as the readership came to outnumber writers, the latter increasingly found themselves defined solely in terms of the texts they published!2 The third means of constituting a social subject entails the accounts of witnesses. Seduction or rape is one of the few crimes that, in most cases, requires testimony for prosecution, because there rarely is evidence (such as incriminating letters) to link crime to criminal. In speaking of Don Giovanni, Kierkegaard says that the seduced woman is of a "higher sphere. " 63 I think he means by this that she is of an ethical sphere in that she can bring a moral charge against Don Juan for having left her. In the opera, both Donna Anna and Donna Elvira level charges against Don Juan in order to be avenged, while justine consists almost entirely of Justine's tale of misfortune that seeks to uphold virtue. In all three cases, the tactic is similar: they narrate. These narratives reconstruct the past by re-presenting it, by making it present once again so as to hold libertines accountable. Throughout the opera Donna Anna remains a rather enigmatic figure. She is the Commander's daughter who in the opening scene pursues Don Juan as he tries to escape. Yet in E. T. A. Hoffmann's story "Don Juan" (which I will discuss in the final chapter), the traveling enthusiast raises several interesting questions in regard to this scene: "Don Juan tries in vain to free himself-but does he want to? Why doesn't he shove the woman away with his mighty fist and escape? Has the evil deed rendered him powerless or is the battle between love and hate within him such that it robs him of courage and strength?" (DJ: 68). Further, how did Don Juan gain access to Donna Anna? What in fact did occur? Why Donna Anna's fierce desire to pursue her assailant rather than secure her own safety? Much later, when Donna Anna is alone with her betrothed, Don Ottavio, she clarifies some of these questions: Donna Anna.

Don Ottavio.

It was already somewhat late at night, When, as misfortune would have it, I found myself alone in my room and Saw a man come in With his cloak about him Who I at first took to be you: But I soon realized that I was mistaken .. . Horror! Go on .. .

40 • The Libertine Donna Anna.

Don Ottavio. Donna Anna.

Don Ottavio. Donna Anna.

Silently he draws near me, And wants to embrace me: I try to free myself, He holds me tighter; I scream: No one comes. With one hand he tries To stifle my cries, And with the other, he holds me So tight, that I think all is already lost. Horrible! and then? At last the pain, the horror Of this vile attack Lends me the strength so that After struggling, writhing, and twisting, I break free from him. Thank God. I breathe again. I redouble my cries and call for help, The criminal flees, boldly I pursue him Into the street to stop him, and I am now The assailant's assailant [e sono assalitrice d'assalita]. My father Hastens to the scene, seeks to identify him, and the wretch, Who was stronger than my poor, old father, Rounds off his crime by killing him. Now you know who wanted To steal my honor, Who was my betrayer And my father's murderer; I ask vengeance of you, Your heart asks it too. Remember the wound Gaping in his breast, Recall the blood that Covered the earth, If ever the wrath of a just fury Should weaken in you.

(DG: I26-JO)

Don Juan was apparently disguised as Don Ottavio (which parallels the opening in Tirso's drama). 64 All he was able to do was embrace Donna Anna, and finally pain and horror gave her the strength to break loose and

The Libertine • 41 become the assailant herself. I have quoted this long passage in order to call attention to Donna Anna's ability to narrate these events through the incorporation of three highlights: mistaken identity, impending rape, and breaking free. The music follows this triadic structure with slow, suspenseful rhythms, and Don Ottavio interrupts at each of the three points. But now, after Donna Anna has supposedly clarified Don Juan's intrusion, new questions arise. For example, it is odd that she would not have told Don Ottavio this story earlier, more specifically, just after the event itself. Further, why in her narrative does she switch to the present tense at the moment when she realizes that the intruder is not Don Ottavio, her betrothed? Donna Anna waits until later to tell Don Ottavio what happened; with the lapse of time, she can re-present it before his eyes and thus spur him on to vengeance against his friend Don Juan. She concludes with two imperatives: remember, recall. The past crime is brought into the present, and avenging it will make up the final chapter (the future tense) of the story. Donna Anna constructs her narrative specifically in terms of her interlocutor-lover, Don Ottavio. It is odd that her initial motivation for narrating the events to Ottavio is her recognition of Don Juan's voice ("There is.no further doubt. The last words I heard the villain utter, his whole voice awakens in my heart the words of the intruder spoken to me in my chamber" [DG: 126]), yet she fails to mention anything of Don Juan's speaking in her highly detailed narrative. Further, the penultimate stanza begins with "Now you know who wanted to steal my honor," but Donna Anna never mentions actually recognizing Don Juan, nor does she mention his name. It seems that Donna Anna has adjusted the events in order to spur Don Ottavio on to avenge a deed that remains shrouded in mystery. One could categorize Donna Anna with someone like Merteuil who is also motivated by a desire for revenge (against Gercourt). Yet while Donna Anna's manipulation-the skillful narrative adjustments she makes in terms of both the event and Don Ottavio-might characterize a becoming, her ultimate project is fixed in the past. Rather than attempting to subvert established conventions, Donna Anna is intent on restoring them; she is determined to hold Don Juan accountable and to reestablish a preexisting social order. A different kind of seduction comes into view: narrative seduction. Ross Chambers writes that "seduction as a narrative tactic takes the form of recruiting the desires of the other in the interest of maintaining narrative authority." 65 Donna Anna's story culminates in a dramatic reversal: "I am now the assailant's assailant." Just as Donna

42 • The Libertine

Anna as victim becomes victimizer, so she also assumes narrative control. Donna Anna skillfully guides Don Ottavio from her initial identification of Don Juan as Don Ottavio; as soon as she is aware of her mistake, she begins to narrate in the present, which allows the listener Don Ottavio now to participate in the scene where he should have been. Donna Anna's narrative allows her lover to take the place of Don Juan on the night of the seduction. His desire for vengeance, then, stems from the realization that Don Juan committed a crime not only against Donna Anna but also against him. In Donna Elvira we also hear a voice seeking to hold Don Juan accountable and to restore a preexisting order; she would have him fulfill the promise he made to marry her. To do this, Donna Elvira has pursued him from Burgos, where Don Juan entered her house and seduced her. As a "prima donna in the singing society of the deceived," 66 Donna Elvira is a furious Mnemosyne: a living, speaking memory. Don Juan won't even get involved with her; instead, he substitutes Leporello-his hired memoryto deal with this voice from the past. Donna Elvira, however, steps forward to tell her story: You stealthily Enter my house, and with the force of Eloquence, vows, and flattery, you manage To seduce my heart; I fall in love, oh cruel one, You declare me your wife, and then casting aside The most sacred rite of heaven and earth, You leave Burgos three days later, Leaving me burdened with guilt. You abandon me, flee from me, and leave me forsaken, prey To remorse and tears As the punishment for having loved you so much! (DG: 88) Unlike Laura in The Stone Guest, Donna Elvira does not "renew" herself when she reencounters Don Juan. Instead, she is fixed in the past; she is not a continual "about to happen" but a constant "has happened." Donna Elvira's narration of past events in the present (tense) underscores the degree to which the past dominates her existence. Just after she fin-

The Libertine • 43 ishes, Leporello comments, "Pare un libro stampato" (She resembles a printed book [DG: 90]). Donna Elvira speaks as many others before her have spoken and thereby inscribes the specificity of her case into a larger, more general discourse. There is a time (the recent past), yet what happens there has taken place many times before: a stealthy entry ... fair words and vows . . . flattery . . . seducing the heart . . . declaring marriage ... casting aside ... a prey to tears. This tale contrasts sharply with the extreme specificity of Donna Anna's narrative to Don Ottavio. Donna Elvira uses cliches; her language is in quotation marks, to use Bakhtin's phrase, such that we can hear the voices of other seduced women as well. 67 Leporello's reference to the printed book recalls the physicality of the list: the spontaneity of DonJuan's singing isreduced to "printed," "fixed" language that situates his becoming with Donna Elvira in a conventional discourse, just as the list categorizes his hecceities into predictable phenomena. This use of previously written "books" differs from the way in which Valmont approaches them. He writes to Merteuil regarding the difficulties he has in seducing Tourvel: "For a week now I have been running in vain through all the known methods-all those of novels and of my secret memories; I find none that are:appropriate for the ciwumstances of the adventure or for the character ,of the heroine" (LD: 252). Whereas Donna Elvira inscribes herself into rthe already written so as to spea'k like a printed book, Valmont uses the past (memories, the already written) to create his own "novel": a new adventure, complete with its heroine. Bakhtin writes, "The prose writer makes use of words that are already populated with the social intentions of others and compels them to serve his own'intentions, to serve a second master. " 68 The novelist seeks out different languages in order to have them serve his own purposes. Valmont does not merely repeat the past; nor does he fix himself in terms of it. Instead of falling prey to remorse and tears, he compels already ;constituted discourses to become his prey. His strategy is not "to make a new Clarissa, .... to drag myself slavishly along the ltrack of others, and to triumph without glory!" (LD: 252), but to:take control ofJinguistic raw material and become its "second master." To triumph with ;glory entails writing a new novel, adjusting language in order to make a seduction unique. Each seduction is an original work. Donna Elvira, however, ·engages in the opposite strategy. Rather than manipulating .existing discourses, she seeks to incorporate herself into one; far from becoming a second master, she is subject to, submits to, the language of others. The specificity of her story is lost in The Tale of the

44 • The Libertine Seduced Woman. Donna Elvira attempts to bring the forces of society against Don Juan in order to hold him accountable: either to have him fulfill the promise of marriage he made to her or to have him punished for abandoning her. In both cases, the "person" of Don Juan's crime is to be attached to the "man." Donna Elvira calls the voices of many others to her defense: a chorus demanding revenge. And as soon as she hears of Don Juan's death, she is content to submit to the role prescribed for her: "I will enter a convent, there to end my life" (DG: 266). It is Justine, however, who reigns supreme in the ability to narrate the past. In the third version of the novel (La Nouvelle justine, 1797), Justine is no longer a solitary narrator; the voices of the libertines are heard among her endless laments. But in the second version, which I have been discussing, practically the entire novel consists of Justine's voice. With the exception of the very beginning, a few interruptions, and the final pages, justine is nothing but her act of enunciation: the time it takes to read the novel is the time it takes her to tell Juliette and Corville her life story, which, in the dedication, is referred to as memoirs (J: 17). And within her story, she tells her tale again and again, as if confessing, and twice, in fact, Justine actually does her narrating in the confessional. Each new experience-the violence her "confessors" subsequently inflict upon her-only adds a new chapter. The libertines thus destroy the possibility for any communion/ communication between speaker and listener. The violence they inflict upon her body is also directed toward her tale: the narrative is never allowed to reach a conclusion, leaving Justine no choice but to begin agam. Justine resembles the libertines in that she, too, learns nothing from her experiences. Despite many years of traveling and suffering, Justine attains no new knowledge of herself or the world. As Barthes points out, "the Sadean voyage teaches nothing. " 69 But there is an important difference. Instead of allowing themselves to be subjected to an external moral principle, the libertines pursue in the present the dictates of their imaginations. Justine's repeated misfortunes appear to extend to infinity, much like the inconceivable number of seductions toward which Don Juan is striving, but Don Juan constitutes his identity as multiple: he does not lament, but rather delights in the dissolution that results. Rather than becoming a dissoluta (in the senses of being free from a moral code and of constituting identity as multiple), Justine repeatedly strives to retain the integrity (the virtuousness and the wholeness) of identity that the libertines dismember. Justine forgets nothing: she receives a tremendous quantity of tortures and

The Libertine • 45 violations that lacerate her body, yet like the brand Rodin inflicts upon her, these crimes are seared on her memory. This is why it is so essential for her to tell her tale continually; she responds to the libertines' crimes that would make her a dissoluta with counteracts of narration that re-member the wholeness of her body. 70 Justine's life consists of her entire past compacted into the present. Recalling the graphic representation of time, it is as if the moments of the past never sink into the order of time, because Justine repeatedly retrieves them in the present flow of time. Her narrative acts of compaction, of re-membering, constitute reaffirmations both of her belief in virtue and of the integrity of her identity. In this regard, it is worth noting what happens in language as she narrates her misfortunes. Justine always "translates" the brutality and violence of her adventures into the language of virtue. Every institution that could lend her aid (such as the church or the police) is corrupt; libertinage is everywhere, it surrounds her. As a result, Justine constitutes, as it were, a society of one: a solitary, singularizing social force that attempts to reaffirm virtue and hold the libertines accountable in the eyes of Providence. Since she narrates in the first person, the libertines who torture her never appear in the novel without her mediation, either in their sexual acts, which Justine describes, or in their justifying discourses, which she cites: necrophilia (Roland), bloodletting (Gernande), hanging (Roland), torture (Cardoville, the four monks of Sainte-Marie-des-Bois), arson (la Dubois), avarice (le Harpin), poisoning (Bressac). A certain uniformity emerges when it comes to the actions of these libertines-not in terms of what they do, but in terms of how what they do gets represented. Her strategy for doing this is to metaphorize (carry over, translate) scenes of even the most horrifying sexual violence. At one point in her narrative to Juliette and Carville, Justine says, "1'11 hold my tongue .... It was an impure reptile defiling a rose; my metaphor [comparaison] tells you all" (J: 187). Telling everything-tout dire-is precisely what Justine's metaphors do not do. 71 While her meaning is conveyed, her metaphors shift this meaning-translate it-from one "language" to another. In the above example, the violence of rape is represented in the language of nature. Most often, Justine's metaphors are ecclesiastical; for example, the orifices of the body become "temples," "altars," and "sanctuaries." The architecture of the body becomes a religious edifice. By metaphorically shifting the parts of the body into parts of the church, Justine metonymically re-members the wholeness of the virtuous body/church; the act of narration is an attempt at communion with God. The libertines do just the opposite: their imagi-

46 • The Libertine nations direct multiple desires to parts of the body and dismember it, the most brutal example being pleasure in decapitation (J: 279). Justine's narrative project is, above all, one of massive censorship. Given the wide range of perversions in Justine, there are virtually no obscenities. If they appear in the libertines' speeches, she censors them outright with ellipses ("Ah! s... ! dit Clement" [J: I 3 I], or "Prenez cette g ... , dit Severino en fureur" [J: I36]), and at other times she cuts her story short to avoid bringing too excessive violence into language (J: 136, I6I, 279). The libertines subject her body to the multiplicity of their predilections; Justine counters by subjecting the representation of their crimes to virtuous language. In this regard, the connection between "Justine" and "justice" should not be overlooked. 72 Justine is eager to tell her story repeatedly, because in doing so, she not only brings the libertines to justice in language, but also avenges herself, if not in the eyes of her interlocutors, who always seem to end up abusing her, then in the eyes of God. Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Justine use their memories in an attempt to bring authority down on the libertines. Narration offers a means for the victims to become assailants. In writing about historical narration, Hayden White observes that "narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine. " 73 This certainly appears to be the case with Justine, who narrates in order to place the crimes of which she is witness and victim under the moral rubric of ecclesiastical virtue. Donna Anna narrates to have her betrothed avenge her; the man with whom she intends to seal a pact of marriage is spurred on to kill him who sought to violate the sanctity of that pact. And Donna Elvira narrates to inscribe her "case" within the discourse of The Seduced Woman in an appeal for a legal precedent. What for the libertines was a scene of becoming wherein individuality was defined by numerous intercorporeal and interlinguis.tic connections comes to be narrated as an act in which criminal, crime, and victim ("speaker," "message," and "addressee"r• are clearly delineated; the milieu of a hecceity is broken apart, and agents and actions are identified. Narration invokes the forces of society to take action, isolate individuals, and hold them accountable for past deeds. It is a call to arms: May the libertines be subjected. The most awesome figure of memory, revenge, and justice is the living statue of the Commander. In the opera, however, the Commander differs significantly from his counterpart in the Pushkin play. The Commander

The Libertine • 47 of Don Giovanni appears in the beginning as Donna Anna's father; he steps out as patriarch, armed and ready to protect the security of his household and the honor of his daughter. Don Juan succeeds in murdering him, and the Commander does not appear again until the end, but this time as a statue who seeks revenge: "Here I await vengeance upon the vile assassin who slew me" (DG: 228). In The Stone Guest, the Commander appears only at the end as a statue, for the murder occurs before the play begins. Further, the statue is a monument to Donna Anna's husband, not her father. Consequently, his presence at the end not only avenges the murder but also ensures the sanctity of marriage. First, he seeks to ward off the violation of Donna Anna's mourning and thereby preserve a monogamous relationship, even beyond death. Second, he "weds" Don Juan the "man" to Don Juan the "person" who committed murder, thus ensuring a union between agent and action. In both works, the statue operates as a powerful singularizing force. Whereas for Don Juan, memory is equivalent to death, the Commander is a living death, a past that lives on in the present. 75 The statue marks the continuity of the subject over time. Memories and the present now cohere in a living chunk of stone: a "now-point" encompassing the entire horizon of the past. As a supernatural force, the Commander imposes memory on Don Juan, thereby compelling him to retain awareness of his crimes and to confront them in the present. In the opera, the statue calls upon Don Juan to repent, a confrontation that underscores how far becoming is from mere dissimulation. If it were merely the latter, then why not simply feign repentance and be done with the threatening statue? The living statue carries out a final judgment: the extension of his hand (mano, desnitsa) brings death to Don Juan and restores social order. The rigidity of this final seizing makes for a sharp contrast to the joy that characterizes Don Juan's singing of "Ut ci darem la mano." Don Juan sings of joining hands as a way to become anew in terms of Zerlina by creating a milieu in which the two of them can be temporally united, but as the living memory of Don Juan's crimes, the statue of the Commander extends his hand to freeze the libertine and bring an end to his repeated becomings. With this final act of vengeance, disrupted class structures and social order are reestablished, and the individuals who remain alive become fixed in terms of their prescribed social roles. Donna Anna goes into mourning; Donna Elvira enters a convent; Masetto and Zerlina plan their marriage; and Leporello goes off in search of a new master. Don Juan has been done away with, yet all the remaining characters also appear "frozen" at the hand of the

48 • The Libertine statue in terms of stable, social identities. The spontaneous animation of Don Juan's repeated becomings has been made static: the statue reinstates the status quo of the State (stat means to stand, whereas Don Juan is always in motion). The endings of Les Liaisons dangereuses and Justine also quickly and surprisingly bring about moral closure and social stability. After turning Merteuil's letters over to Danceny, Valmont dies, and-as discussed above-the publication of two of them leads to Merteuil's downfall. She flees to Holland (the place, incidentally, where Sade'sJustine was published in 1791) completely bankrupt and a victim of smallpox. The conclusion of Justine is also exaggerated. Virtuous Justine, who at last managed to find compassionate interlocutors, is suddenly impaled by a bolt of lightning in her sister's salon. 76 Juliette, shaken by this fate, quickly decides to abandon libertine ways and resign herself to a convent. Like the appearance of the living statue, these endings rapidly restore moral and social order. The most extreme measures are needed to confront extreme threats: the supernatural statue (Don Giovanni and The Stone Guest), Paris society (Les Liaisons dangereuses), and Providence (Justine). I regard these surprising and artificial endings as examples of "gods" from "machines" (deus ex machina); that is, they quickly and suddenly intensify the mechanistic functioning of various social forces and institutions that work to "weld" past deeds to an agent in the present. Some of these include bureaucracy in order to preserve memory (the list), evidence gathering as a way to document crimes and indict criminals (the letters), and the use of witnesses who can re-present a past event (Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Justine). Toward the end of the four texts, these social forces intensify to the point where all matter (marble), places (Paris), and natural elements (lightning) become animated to carry out the process of subjectification. Subjectivity isolates a responsible agent within a given hecceity. I have been focusing on events that are regarded as crimes (the libertines' seductions, rapes, and murders) in order to clarify the distinction between individuation by hecceity and by subjectivity. But a hecceity need not necessarily involve such a radical transgression of a social code; it merely delineates an ensemble or milieu that defines a becoming, whether it be a libertine seducing, a speaker speaking, or-the focus in the following pages-a writer writing. Being au milieu (in the middle, on a middle ground) can prevent actions, words, and works from being strictly assigned to a single agent, because the identity of such would-be agents is

The Libertine • 49 interconnected with the surroundings in which actions, speech, and writing take place. Subjectification effects and maintains a link between an action and its agent; the agent is no longer a hecceity that defines an individuality in terms of a specific scene, but a subject that designates an individuality within a specific scene. Acts are linked to an identifiable doer, which places emphasis on a point instead of a line. Points sink deep into the past, yet they are always connected to the present, to a "now-point." A subject, then, coheres over time; it can always be identified. And should individuals attempt to liberate themselves from this identification, society gathers together its forces in order to stabilize it.

From Libertines to Writers By refusing to be subjected to memory and a fixed identity, the libertines attempt to free themselves from that which would singularize and fix their identities (monogamy and memory). It is in this sense that I understand Don Juan's proclamation "Viva la liberta" (DG: r6o). Instead of submitting, the libertines subvert. But at this point, it is possible to make another distinction among the libertines, one that will play an important role in connecting libertines and writers: the distinction between the male and the female libertines. Merteuil, Laura, and Pushkin's Donna Anna differ sharply from men such as Don Juan and Valmont. Put most simply, the men operate in the public domain, while the women proceed to (or, more accurately, are forced to) conduct libertinage in a more private sphere. Both Don Juans, as well as Valmont, have reputations as libertines. In the opera, Zerlina is cautious in her initial association with Don Juan, and Volanges warns Tourvel in regard to Valmont. But the public aspect that characterizes male libertinage is most evident in The Stone Guest. The play opens with the approach of night, which, like the cloak that Don Juan is wearing, covers him, and he asks Leporello if he will be recognized. While it seems that Don Juan fears being caught out, the progress of the play makes it evident that he in fact delights in recognition: not only does Don Juan encourage the monk to speak of his notorious deeds but twice reveals himself to Donna Anna (once as Don Diego, and later as DonJuan). 77 Yet one catches sight of the extent of Don Juan's reputation most readily in his very name, for it produces reactions among several of the characters. Don Carlos cannot even hear the name indifferently, while the libertine

50 • The Libertine

Laura finds herself uttering it incessantly (SG: 382). As for Donna Anna, she is seemingly shocked to hear the name of the man who killed her husband, and she proceeds to speak of his reputation as a smooth talker, clever tempter, godless libertine, and absolute demon (SG: 407). Valmont is also well known for his libertinage. Nancy K. Miller comments that "Valmont is publicly sexual, a conqueror of women. ms The difficulty he encounters in the seduction of Tourvel consists in trying to convince her that she is unique and that he is sincere; in other words, Valmont must make Tourvel believe that he has cast aside his former ways out of genuine love for her. In Don Giovanni, Don Juan seduces in public spaces: at Zerlina's wedding or outside the window of Donna Elvira's servant. But as soon as he enters a private space, it is as if he needs his public reputation to guard him: Leporello stands watch with the list, and the statue comes to the door as a living monument to Don Juan's notorious reputation. And in The Stone Guest, Don Juan arrives at Donna Anna's house with great confidence. Knowing that the statue of the man he murdered, the husband of the woman he intends to seduce, is standing just outside the door, Don Juan situtates death at the outer limit of his becoming with Donna Anna. The statue is not in the room but outside, at the threshold. The strategy ostensibly is to keep out in-truders, but Don Juan also succeeds in surrounding his scene of becoming with his own public reputation, and he delights in revealing this reputation to Donna Anna. As a result, subjectivity is always one step behind hecceity. It may even be that much of Don Juan's lightness and joy stem from the fact that he knows he can always get away; while society may scorn the libertine reputation, neither Don Juan nor Valmont seems to encounter any real resistance from social forces such as the police or the church. In the end, they are stopped only by the sudden intervention of subjectivizing forces. 79 The women, however, pursue libertinage in a different manner. Laura is a well-known actress; Merteuil presents herself as a confidante and mother-figure; and Pushkin's Donna Anna is a faithful widow in mourning. They are publicly visible but appear before society in prescribed roles. These social identities are precisely that: roles. Although Laura is an actress, she in fact plays the role of an actress, which allows her to live behind the scenes. She can love many men in many moments. Like the veil behind which Donna Anna lives, a socially prescribed code of behavior functions merely as a covering/pretext (prikrytie) for a private project of seduction. Speaking of Merteuil and the fact that she must resort to pretexts that put a veil between her private existence and her public standing, Miller writes:

The Libertine • 51 "The precaution is necessary in a culture where the double standard prevails, and a woman cannot afford the luxury of being revealed publicly as a sexual being .... Her real strength, then, belongs to her archetypal feminine behavior: psychological penetration of private vulnerability.""" I see this strength manifesting itself in two ways: first, in a profound awareness of the double standard and of the specific roles that a woman is expected to play; and second, an extraordinary ability to perceive a difference between these roles and her own desires and identity. The result is more than a kind of dual existence. Rather, Laura, Merteuil, and Donna Anna exploit the public roles prescribed for them in an effort to achieve a degree of personal freedom in social situations that would otherwise prove constricting. Given that men can at once live with a libertine reputation and continue to seduce, Don Juan and Valmont are able to enjoy the freedom to realize their desires. Women libertines must achieve this freedom by subverting normative social codes of behavior that do not allow them to constitute themselves as publicly sexual beings. While a supernatural manifestation is necessary to do away with Don Juan, Merteuil need merely attend the theater in order to meet complete downfall. The conflict between hecceity and subjectivity manifests itself most acutely in the tactics of the women. In the opening scene of the Pushkin play, Don Juan merely waits for night, as if waiting for death I memory I the statue to surround him before he seduces. Donna Anna, however, must cover her body and veil her face in death I memory I "night." She is a woman in mourning, and her husband's death defines her life. Subjectivity is not just behind, at the limit of existence, but rather it envelops her whole being. For this reason, she-and the other women-must operate within closed spaces: not just in private chambers, but also within prescribed social structures. But it is here, where subjectivity ostensibly seems most powerful, that radical subversions of the forces that would constitute a social subject take place. While the women must veil their becomings from the public eye, they put these forces to their own uses in order to achieve a degree of personal freedom. They may enjoy acceptance or even prominence within society, but their libertinage as a project of freeing identity remains unsigned. Male libertinage goes hand in hand with a notorious reputation; the women operate anonymously. It is in this regard that I see a connection between libertinage-more specifically, female libertinage-and writing. In the chapters that follow, certain writers will be seen undertaking strategies similar to those of libertines to avoid being constituted as the socioliterary subject produced in

52 • The Libertine the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the author. An author exists only in terms of already written and published works with which the actual writer is identified and held accountable. The emerging institution of copyright is one of the most obvious means by which this was done. While some Romantic writers were content to have their identities constituted as authors (Goethe, for instance), others felt uncomfortable being forced to live in terms of the texts they produced. Alexander Pushkin appears to have been increasingly haunted by his own author as a poet, particularly in the late 182o's, when works that deviated from the verse the public had come to love met with little or no success. As is well known, Walter Scott published the Waverley Novels anonymously, and one of his reasons for doing this was to protect his reputation as Poet and Clerk of Session. And many of the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann problematize his own authorship in that he locates identity-both of himself as a writer and of his characters-in constellations or milieus that extend beyond a body or a signature. In his essay "What Is an Author?" Foucault asks "how the author was individualized in a culture such as ours." 8 ' I am concerned less with the individuation of "the author" and more with the subversive tactics undertaken by the writers Pushkin, Scott, and Hoffmann to liberate themselves precisely from such authorial individuation. In this chapter, I have detailed a double pursuit: the libertines' attempt to constitute identity as multiple and free it from a conflation with past actions opposes society's project to constitute a fixed identity precisely in terms of the past. In the next two chapters, I associate subjectivity with the socioliterary entity called "the author" and hecceity with the identity of the novelist. Libertinage will reappear in the final chapter in regard to textual and artistic production. In my analysis of three works by Hoffmann, a ternary relationship of libertinage, subjectivity, and hecceity delineates an attempt to define strategies of writing that constitute identity, particularly the writer's identity, as hecceity. In order to exemplify some of these "literary subversions" and by way of conclusion to this initial chapter, I would like to return once again briefly to the libertine texts. The three short readings that follow shift the individuation of libertines to that of writers and are intended only as a means of introducing a number of issues that will play a significant role in the following chapters. The function of titles and authors' names, the various personas of the writer, the relationship between writer and work, and the concept of literary influence comprise here several textual milieus in which freedom from authorial subjectivity can be achieved.

The Libertine • 53

C ..... deL. .. Les Liaisons dangereuses opens with a publisher's notice cautioning readers who are about to plunge into the letters: "We believe it necessary to warn the public that, despite the title of this work and the editor's comments in his preface, we do not guarantee the authenticity of this collection and that we have good reason to believe that it is only a novel" (LD: r4). The publisher believes that the letters may be only a novel because the excessive immorality of the correspondence has no points of reference in all the honest men and modest women of Enlightenment France ("tous les hommes si honnetes et toutes les femmes si modestes et si reservees" [LD: r4; emphasis added]). The publisher, then, does not accuse the editor (whose name is given as C ..... deL. .. ) of making up the letters, but of shifting them in time and place into the present. Surprisingly, the publisher accuses the editor of seduction: "We very much blame the author [auteur, not redacteur] who apparently seduces in the hope of arousing greater interest by nearing his own century and country" (LD: r4). The publisher would seem to locate the shift from editor to writer in the shift of the letters of the past into the present. And a novel consists in the "shifting" or adjusting of the language of others. The project of libertinage relates to novel writing through the desire to seduce others by manipulating language so as to make it "sincere." In the editor's preface, however, C ..... deL. .. seems to counter the publisher's charge (although it was actually-or apparently-written before the publisher wrote his notice). The editor denies any claim to being a second master: "But I wasn't the master and I submitted" (LD: r6). This act of submission entails leaving the letters more or less as they are and publishing I75 of them with the design of exposing the tactics of libertinage in order to uphold moral values. We come, then, to rely on the editor as an authority both in the textological sense because he has control over the work (these I75letters, and not others), and in the moral sense because the letters he has in fact selected and organized drive home a didactic project of virtue. And the editor certainly has undertaken great labors with the letters, underscoring their authenticity. There are footnotes throughout that detail editorial decisions, indicate the sources of citations, and provide cross-references; we are told that he has suppressed or changed certain names; he discusses various errors and faults in the letters themselves; finally, he points to the variety of styles of the various writers: "It would be as much against verisimilitude as against truth were the eight to ten persons who contribute to this correspondence all to write with an equal

54 • The Libertine purity" (LD: 17). The editor is intent on achieving a certain distance between himself and the letters. They are in no way his. Consequently, the preface not only serves to provide us with background information about the collection we are about to read, it also reinforces the identity of C. .... deL. .. as an editor who approaches the letters from the outside. The letters are real, and the actual writers are to be held responsible for their content. Here we see a more subjectivizing approach to the correspondence. Due to their morally questionable content, the letters are scandalous if not outright criminal, and the editor wants to see to it that these works (deeds) are a-scribed to the responsible agents; by conflating the letters with their actual writers, social subjects can be isolated and held accountable. But how, then, are we to approach Les Liaisons dangereuses when from the outset the two authorities of the socioliterary system responsible for making the letters public are at odds as to their origin? The publisher accuses the editor of engaging in a becoming by creating a novel through the adjustment of the language of others, while the editor locates authorship in the actual letter-writers and holds them accountable for their deeds. The dilemma becomes more pronounced with the editor's epigraph to the correspondence, which he takes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise: "I saw the morals of my time and published these letters." Just what does he mean by the epigraph? Were the morals of his time so pure and virtuous that the publication of the letters comprises an attempt to ward off any possible corruption, or were they already corrupt, so that the letters serve only to make the presence of libertine vice more apparent? It is odd that C ..... de L. .. would take Rousseau as a spokesman for Les Liaisons dangereuses when the variety of styles, which the editor points out in defense of the collection's verisimilitude, runs counter to the uniformity of the epistolary styles of La Nouvelle Heloise. The epigraph is cited from the preface, in which it is debated whether Rousseau is the writer or the editor of the letters (particularly the second preface, the so-called "Discourse on Novels"). 82 It could well be that C ..... deL. .. has "signed" his own relationship to the correspondence with another writer-editor's relationship to his; perhaps this is the significance of the title Les Liaisons dangereuses. One now begins to wonder about the "slip" that the "editor" makes at his preface's beginning: "This work [ouvrage], or rather, this collection [receuil]" (LD: rs). And just why would C. .... deL. .. conceal his name if he in fact bears no responsibility for actually writing the letters? The evidence increasingly points to C. .... deL. .. as the creator of a novel. Tourvel is in a dilemma as to how to determine the veracity, the sin-

The Libertine • 55 cerity of the Valmont she encounters in his letters to her. Likewise, we are troubled by the figure of C. .... de L. ... On the one hand, he seems to be a sincere and dutiful editor who faithfully carries out his task. Just as Danceny publishes two letters to bring the subjectivizing forces of Paris society down on Merteuil, so C. .... de L. .. sees the morals of his time and seeks to expose vice-ridden libertine ways by publishing 175 of them. Verisimilitude consists in the relationship between the collapse of libertinage that takes place in the correspondence and the collapse that is subsequently to occur in reality as well. On the other hand, C. .... deL. .. becomes a kind of libertine himself. In the hope of a literary success, the editor may very well have put the writing of others to his own personal use; further, he may actually have written them (making him the auteur of an ouvrage). In this case, the "editor's" novelistic project would bear striking resemblance to Valmont's. The figure of the "editor" could well be a "character" among the others, and once this is accepted, it is not difficult to begin to see the ~'publisher," too, as an invented persona. The result is a different kind of verisimilitude: C. .... de L. . .'s identity becomes multiple, and we find him engaging in a series of stylistic adjustments in the creation of Les Liaisons dangereuses that equals-if not surpasses-those of Valmont and Merteuil. The "publisher's" and the "editor's" comments now serve as literary milieus in which C ..... de L. .. can talk about these stylistic adjustments (the great advantages of a variety of styles), just as Merteuil and Valmont take pleasure in discussing theirs. How to resolve the dilemma of whether C ..... deL. .. is editor or writer? My edition of Les Liaisons dangereuses (and others as well) has two title pages."' The first follows the original edition and carries the lengthy title: Les Liaisons dangereuses, ou Lettres recueillies dans une Societe, et publiees pour ['instruction de quelques autres par M. C. .... de L. .. (Dangerous liaisons, or letters collected within a society and published for the instruction of certain others by M. C ..... deL. .. ). The second title page, however, reads: "Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses, Chronologie et preface par Rene Pomeau, professeur ala Sorbonne, Garnier-Flammarion." While the original leads to the difficulties of identity I have been discussing, the second unquestionably posits Laclos as writer: the ellipses have been filled in, and a professor at the Sorbonne gets the credit for any editing. Further, library catalogues, literary histories, and the convention of reference by Author, Title, and Date of Publication also announce Laclos as writer. Through various aspects of the institution of Literature, the writer has come to be held accountable for his work, just as Merteuil and

56 • The Libertine Don Juan are ultimately seized by a god of the social machine that subjects them to the consequences of their seductions. Rather than designating a multiplicity, the author's name "arrests" it and thereby fixes and stabilizes a singular sponsoring source of Les Liaisons dangereuses, while the text itself is intent precisely on making the identity of this source problematic. 84

Sa de justine opens with a single narrator telling the story of the two sisters Justine and Juliette. Early on, however, the two separate, the former taking the path of virtue and the latter that of vice. Many years later, the sisters meet up again, and Justine sets about telling Juliette and Carville of her misfortunes. As the teller of the tale of both sisters, the narrator splits himself in two: the speaker Justine and the listener Juliette. Yet Justine as narrator splits herself in two as well. The two sisters do not immediately recognize each other, and their recognition is further hindered by Justine's use of a pseudonym. She adopts the name "Therese" and this Therese is just as stubborn as the one we encounter in Rousseau's Confessions. 85 But unlike Rousseau's Therese, who cannot tell time, follow the order of the months, or count money, Justine-Therese has unusual mnemonic abilities and can narrate her past with incredible chronological precision. Consequently, it is as if Justine had never moved away from her honest and virtuous point of origin (a convent), while Therese constitutes the story of Justine's life as an appendage/appendix: the encyclopedia of libertine vice that Justine narrates. 86 Therese, then, is the message or tale that the speaker Justine narrates to the listener Juliette. As a result, the general narrator manages in the early pages of the novel to gain control of the three aspects of the text's communicative schema, which has the result of imposing certain interpretive constraints on the reader. As we are confronted with the details of Therese's miserable life (the message that makes up 272 of the novel's 297 pages), two options present themselves. First, we can adopt Justine's perspective, which is not difficult, since she uses the first person. While Justine and Therese are easily conflated, especially when Justine utters "1," the sujet d'enonciation and the sujet d'enonce remain distinct: the "I" of Justine narrating to Juliette and the "I" of Therese which is Justine's utterance, her narration. We begin to align ourselves as virtuous witnesses along with Justine to scenes of sexual violence. She voyeuristically describes with tremendous detail, for instance, the scene between Bressac and his servant or when she and Rosa-

The Libertine • 57 lie look through the peephole to watch Rodin "discipline" his pupils. The second option would have us align ourselves with Juliette as listeners to Justine's tale. We know that Juliette abandoned her virtuous sister early on, that she is a successful libertine, and-what is reinforced in the course of Justine's narrative-that libertines have no compassion, charitable feelings, or respect for family relations. We begin to expect the worst as Justine nears the end of her story, which seems to be leading toward a new beginning: Juliette and Corville are to be her next victimizers. As we center on the story of Therese, we vacillate between virtue's view of vice (Justine telling) and vice's view of virtue (Juliette listening). These poles are radically demarcated and emphasized within the text in the dialogues that take place between Therese and the libertines, who speak at length from their respective standpoints of virtue and vice but never manage to convince each other. Either the final reunion between the two sisters will be a happy one, or else Juliette will add another chapter to Justine's life story. The text renders impossible the attempt to establish an interpretive approach that would valorize one option over the other. But when we finally do read the end, and it looks as if it is going to be a happy one, both alliances that we have been establishing separately with the two sisters are destroyed. Justine (virtue) is blasted by a bolt oflightning, while Juliette (vice), who counters all expectations with feelings of pity, makes a sudden decision to repent and enter a convent, the place where the novel begins. This circularity of the novel's geography, which encloses the multiplicity of vice within the walls of virtue, is reinforced by the opening dedication that parallels the affirmation of virtue with which the narrator concludes the novel: "May you convince yourselves, along with [Juliette], that true happiness is found only at the breast of Virtue" (J: 313). Sade dedicates Justine to his "bonne amie" Constance. He speculates on the response of his dear friend: "Will I have succeeded, Constance? Will a tear from your eyes determine my triumph? In short, after having read Justine will you say, 'Oh, how these tableaus of Crime make me proud to love Virtue! Is it not sublime in one's tears? How misfortune renders it more beautiful!' " (J: r 8). Of the two options of reading that the text establishes, the dedication steers us in the direction of virtue. Significantly, both Constance and Justine are in italics, as if to designate two eponymous heroines. The novel begins and ends within the walls of a convent, and the dedication summons up forces from the outside to strengthen the power of virtue.

58 • The Libertine But the entirety of the tale within the convent walls-within the binding of the book-takes all possible steps to affirm and reaffirm vice. The complex interrelationships between writer and reader (the dedication) and between teller and listener (narrator/reader, Justine/Juliette) are developed only to be destroyed. The incredible violence that is characteristic ofJustine is indicative above all of an action against the instrumentalization of the text as a means to interpret the work or localize the position of the writer. Georges Bataille's observation seems valid here: "The essence of [Sade's] works is to destroy: not only the objects and victims represented . . . , but also the author and the work itself.""' A kind ofliterary sadism emerges: a libertinage of writing that takes pleasure not in fostering communicative relationships but in controlling them and ultimately destroying their very possibility. Sade seems to have erected yet another wall, this time around the book itself. Justine becomes a kind of negative text within the field of Literature: it frees itself from, and resists, all interpretive constraints that would seek to delineate a singular perspective from which to "read" the text. This, I believe, is what Sade means when he asserts in the dedication that Justine is not so much a novel as one would think (]:17).

Pushkin et al. Unlike other Don Juan texts whose double titles refer both to the statue of the Commander and to Don Juan, Pushkin gave only a single title to his.flay: The Stone Guest."" It is curious that Don Juan, who figures so prominently in the play, gets no mention. I would argue, however, that the title is significant less for what it denotes and more for the particular function it fulfills. Within the play, the statue seeks to singularize Don Juan: the multiplicity that characterizes his life vanishes in the final scene when the statue "freezes" the libertine, fixing his fate in terms of past actions. But the statue first appears at the very beginning as the play's title, The Stone Guest. The rigidity, singularity, and prominence of the statue are features of a title as well: its placement is fixed at the top of the first page (often it is even granted its own page) like a monument. The isolation of just a few words that are not spoken but inscribed (nadpis ': written, above, as if staring down like a statue) opposes the flow of the text that follows, which consists of dialogue. Further, those few isolated words are "stone" and "guest" (kamennyi gost'): the hardness of stone counters the lightness of Don Juan's existence, while the implication of "guest" seems

The Libertine • 59 to be that the rigid title may have simply been "invited" to come to "visit" the text, most likely to act upon it in ways similar to the statue's dealings with Don Juan. And indeed, as the work's proper name, it gathers together the four scenes into an identifiable genre (a drama or, to use Pushkin's term, a little tragedy), lest the text become a dissoluto within the field of literature. While The Stone Guest has connections to the other three little tragedies, the title serves to mark the play's external borders and to designate an individual, coherent work. 89 As if to subvert the power that The Stone Guest has on the play, Pushkin placed an epigraph and another title between The Stone Guest and the openmg scene: Leporello.

0 statua gentilissima Del gran' Commendatore!. .. ... Ah, Padrone! Don Giovanni (SG: 369)

If one can read the main title as a nadpis' (inscription: literally "written above"), then there are two ways in which one can understand the epigraph as a podpis' (caption or signature: literally, "written under"). Leporello and Don Juan find themselves "under" The Stone Guest: the title is followed by the epigraph, a situation recalling the scenes in both the opera and the play in which Don Juan invites the statue beneath which he is standing. 90 This further supports the idea that the title may just be visiting or standing guard" outside at the door" -at the threshold of the text; consequently, despite all initial appearances, Don Juan does in fact play a significant role in the overall title of Pushkin's play. Second, the epigraph serves as a kind of signature that marks onto Pushkin's text the identity of a previous work. The epigraph therefore introduces new material into the play that the title may not be able to handle, for The Stone Guest is now cast into the interpretive framework of Don Giovanni. Many of Pushkin's innovations are directed toward the opera by means of a number of reversals. Father-daughter becomes husband-wife (Commander-Donna Anna); the revenge of the seduced woman becomes libertinage (Donna Elvira versus Laura); the submission to mourning becomes a strategy of seduction (the two Donna Annas). Also, the encounter between Don Juan and Donna Anna does not open the story but concludes it (Don Juan pursued versus Don Juan pursuing). In the opera, the statue does, in a way, begin the work in terms of the overture, the first notes of which anticipate

6o • The Libertine the thundering "Don Giovanni" at the start of the penultimate scene when the Commander reappears. Pushkin appears to have reworked this idea by making the statue figure as the title of the play. One final, important difference: Pushkin writes "Don Guan." He does not transliterate "Don Giovanni," nor does he opt for the more usual Russian "Don Zhuan," which is based on French, presumably following Moliere. "Don Guan" is closest to Spanish, the language in which Don Juan originated in El Burlador de Sevilla. The authorship of this play is disputed. 91 While the writer of the first Don Juan text remains unknown (although it is generally held to be Tirso de Molina), the identity of the writer of The Stone Guest comes to share in this anonymity; the play establishes a connection to the Spanish drama in a way more specific than mere subject matter. And the authorship of Pushkin's play is multiple, establishing a connection with Don Giovanni by means of various interpretive gestures (reversals, juxtapositions, transformations). One faces difficulties in delineating Pushkin alone as the sponsoring source of the play. Authorship begins to expand into a multiplicity of various Don Juan versions. But the institution of literature has come to treat these versions in a particular way. As an example, it may be helpful to turn to some field work done by Alfons Rosenberg, who has discovered that there are 94 Spanish versions, I I 2 French versions, 56 English versions, 8 5 German versions, 22 Slavic versions. 92 Would anyone care to sing this? The similarity between this listing project and Leporello's in Don Giovanni is astounding (for some reason the Italians, among others, have been left out). Don Juan and Don juan are kept track of and contained by the bureaucratic process of listing. Literature, too, is interested not only in number but also in place: the list provides us with a record of Don Juan's seductions by nationality, and criticism develops a conception of Don Juan texts according to national literature. Just as the statue holds Don Juan accountable and just as a title creates a coherent work and marks off its borders, so the subjectivizing forces of the institution of literature can keep track of the various Don Juans as they appear. 93 Yet with his particular use of the title and epigraph, Pushkin is able to subvert the conventions that would have a title refer to a single text, which in turn is to have a single point of origin in an identifiable writer. The "original" is placed in question because its boundaries (so easily taken to be marked off by a title) begin to extend outward, with the result that the writer begins to become individuated in terms of adjustments made in relation to other works and writers. The copyright of The Stone Guest belongs to Pushkin et al.

Two

The Author: Signs as Life (Pushkin)

A precise date is difficult to determine, but with reasonable accuracy it can be asserted that the Russian author Pushkin was born in the early 182o's, shortly after the publication of the narrative poem Ruslan and Liudmila. Right off, I intend to distinguish between the author Pushkin and Pushkin the writer, whose biography from 1799 to 1837 is well known. An author is born after a work is published, while a writer actually writes one. "The writer" refers to a biological body (corpus), while "the author" signifies primarily a textual one. The writer is born, in some way educated, at one point takes pen in hand, and eventually dies. The author comes after the work, is produced by its readers, and lives on in the words written and spoken about it. The two nouns call to mind Roland Barthes's essay "Ecrivains et ecrivants," translated into English as "Authors and Writers. " 1 For Barthes, the author identifies with language, has no goal, produces ambiguities, and is intransitive, while the writer uses language naively, sets about a goal, resolves ambiguities, and is transitive. The difference resides in the relation to language: the author (ecrivain) labors with language, the writer (ecri vant)

62 • The Author

uses it to support a praxis; "the author carries out a function, the writer an activity. " 2 In this chapter, I will be more concerned with the writer's relations to the work, as well as to the reading public and to society in general. The writer as the producer of a text is to be distinguished from the socially produced author, which is more like the figure Michel Foucault has in mind in his essay "What Is an Author?": The author explains the presence of certain events within a text, as well as their transformations, distortions, and their various modifications (and this through an author's biography or by reference to his particular point of view, in the analysis of his social preferences and his positions within a class or by delineating his fundamental objectives). The author also constitutes a principle of unity in writing where any unevenness of production is ascribed to changes caused by evolution, maturation, or outside influence. In addition, the author serves to neutralize the contradictions that are found in a series of texts. 3

This passage underscores the degree to which the author is constructed in terms of two components: the writer and the work. On the one hand, readers can turn to the biography of a writer as a way of delineating a point of origin for the work. The association with other writers (correspondence, literary circles, journalistic activity, and so on), social position, influence (from other works, the fine arts, music, politics, etc.), and travels are just some of the biographical elements that can be used to arrive at an understanding of a given work. On the other hand, there is a particular text, which can be analyzed and made coherent in terms of its genre (traditional use, mixing, innovations), thematic scope, style, literaryhistorical period, and so on. As a result, one comes to speak of the evolution of a group of texts that parallels the maturation of the writer. Writer and work come to be interconnected to establish an interpretive framework that offers coherence. This framework is the author. The author can be seen as a social entity constituted according to various socioliterary conventions. This process began to take place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the individual subject became increasingly inscribed within social institutions. Documents of individual rights were drafted; the nuclear family became more prominent; institutions of education were founded. In "literature," which itself emerged as distinct from other kinds of writing, Neoclassical genres gave way to more hybrid forms that came to be regarded as unique expressions of individual writers. The novel, which according to Ian Watt "most fully reflects this individualist and innovating reorientation," was on the rise.