Don Juan, Blue of Noon and intertextuality

Having watched the Don Juan Triumphant scene from The Phantom of the Opera over and over (I got the 25th anniversary concert for Christmas and the overwhelming passion in that scene just gets to me, especially the way Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Borgess play it, but anyway...), I remembered my cultural mobility class and started thinking about how many different ways the Don Juan myth has been adapted and appropriated over the centuries. What better example of adaptation and appropriation creating cultural bonds in Europe than a pastiche of an opera written in Italian (Don Giovanni, with lyrics by Lorenzo Da Ponte) composed by an Austrian (or Holy Roman Empire-an really... Mozart of course) based on a Spanish source text (El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra by Tirso de Molina), within an English musical based on a French novel (Gaston Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra)?

Once I got over just how many countries are linked in that one scene, I started reading the list of works which are, to varying degrees, reworkings Don Juan. There are loads, but one in particular jumped out at me, Georges Bataille's 1935 novel Le Bleu du ciel (Blue of Noon). "Wow, that'd be interesting" I thought. Interesting is the right word. Pleasant, however, certainly isn't. Given that I came to know of Bataille through Christophe Honoré's film adaptation of his novel Ma Mere, a shockingly graphic study of incest, I should have known what to expect from Blue of Noon really.

Our Don Juan in this story is Henri Troppman who is interminably drunk, depressed and depraved. While Don Giovanni famously had 'mil e tre' women in Spain (not to mention all the others around the Europe), we're not sure how many prostitutes Henri has been with exactly, but it's clearly a lot. What we do know is that the women in his life are currently the filthy rich and just plain filthy Dirty (or Dorothea), the disgustingly ugly Marxist revolutionary Lazare (based on Simone Veil), the somewhat naive Xenie, and briefly a German tourists, as well as an ex-wife who we never see, a mother-in-law who acts as housekeeper/guardian and the constant spectre of his mother lurking in his unconscious (returning to the subject matter of Ma Mere). Troppman isn't much of a lothario though - he finds himself impotent with Dirty, has Xenie play his nursemaid when he believes himself on death's door, and uses Lazare as someone to confess his sins to. In fact there's little to suggest this is an appropriation of Don Juan except for frequent references to il Commendatore, but it is those references that make all the difference.

The informed reader will recognise the character of il Commendatore as Don Juan's victim who comes back from beyond the grave to dine with our anti-hero and force him to repent or be dragged down to hell. Thus by mentioning il Commendatore, Troppman reveals that he thinks he should be made to repent for his depraved behaviour, that he senses impending doom. Given that the novel was written in 1938, and explicitly mentions the foreboding sense of war approaching, the images of hell and eternal suffering that il Commendatore conjures up seem very appropriate. Perhaps more interestingly, we can infer that this character is extremely narcissistic, as he wishes to equate himself with the greatest seducer in history, when his actions seem to pale in comparison with the 'trickster of Seville'. This certainly seems in keeping with a character who spends most of his time moping and thinking about his own death, but implicitly adds a new layer of depth to him.

Julie Sanders argues in Adaptation and Appropriation that part of the pleasure of reading comes from playing detective and piecing together the extra meaning provided by the intertexts (or bits of a text borrowed from/inspired by/reacting to other texts). That's certainly true of Blue of Noon - whilst I spent most of the book thinking "This is horrible, why am I reading this?", the Don Juan connection turned the chronicle of a man with unconventional sexual tastes and an unquenchable thirst for champagne and histrionics into a much more engaging story.