The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Imagination in Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio

Emphasizing its modernity, recent reappraisals of Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio have replied to a long tradition of negative criticism that has perceived the play as flawed. ¹ According to these positions, Zorrilla’s masterpiece anticipates historical developments on a number of fronts which advances in contemporary critical theory are only now making apparent. Although such arguments make a substantial case for a deeper level of appreciation, the present study considers that a more productive line of inquiry resides in the play’s relation to the ongoing dialogue during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries throughout Europe on the sublime and the beautiful. In order to contextualize more fully Zorrilla’s position in the play, it will be useful to examine the most significant modernity arguments in relation to the principal aesthetic theories at the time of the play’s premiere.

Gustavo Pérez Firmat portrays Don Juan Tenorio as the prototype of a parodic, “festive” mode that emerges in an atmosphere of carnival excess (see also ter Horst). By means of the destructive trajectory of Don Juan’s letter to Inés, which assumes a disproportionate role, empirical cause and effect in the play are undermined. The letter’s disruptions are central to a deeper understanding premised on a radical indeterminacy of meaning, a position that Pérez Firmat claims “one should not dismiss” because the play “is quite a modern text” (4). Carlos Feal emphasizes Don Juan’s theatricality, the self-consciousness that he represents “el tipo que antes de él otros hombres, otros don Juanes, han contribuido a crear” (40). Don Juan’s transgressive theatrical imagination confronts a confining authority principle that prevents him from continuing to play his role. According to Feal, his salvation at the play’s conclusion brings him more to limbo than to paradise. Don Juan and Inés escape earthly pain and disillusionment but cannot freely partake of their love: “Así la muerte los salva . . . de los desengaños que sobre su amor, mundano amor, se cernían” (48). Don Juan’s theatricality is ultimately another disturbing symptom of modernity, the tragic dissolution of the defiant autonomous subjectivity that he epitomizes.

Luis Fernández Cifuentes emphasizes the role of language in relation to Don Juan’s profession of repentance disbelieved by his counterparts, a breakdown of communication also traceable to the letter: “La carta . . . es la prueba decisiva del pecado moderno de Don Juan: haber roto la unidad del lenguaje, la integridad del signo y su referente; haber establecido entre las palabras y los números una jerarquía profana” (82). Carnival excess is replaced by a secular concept of sin and profanation that coincides with the nonreferential premises of contemporary semiotics, and modern consciousness. Don Juan thus exposes the arbitrariness of signification and the separation of language and consciousness from referential reality: the modern age’s incapacity to “restaurar la unidad del lenguaje” (98). ²

The modernity arguments are plausible, however, only if Zorrilla is advocating a position similar to the European dialectic on aesthetics during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that reinterprets the nature of mimesis, subjectivity, and language along the lines invoked by these critics. Through the elaboration of systematic treatises by Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful), Immanuel Kant (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and The Critique of Judgment), G. E. Lessing (Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) and others on the sublime, the beautiful, and the role of the imagination in these experiences, a genuinely modern aesthetic emerges. This is especially evident in Burke’s and Lessing’s advocacy of the superiority of poetry as an expressive medium and in Burke’s assertion—in contradistinction to John Locke’s empiricist tenets in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that words in the mind necessarily correspond to some previous idea or image imprinted upon the consciousness—that language does not have to raise mental images in the production of poetry (Enquiry 167–72). Language...