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1 " men never really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a universal purpose—fighting for an idea, as they call it. Why was the Crusader braver than the pirate? Because he fought, not for himself, but for the Cross. "
― George Bernard Shaw , Don Juan in Hell
2 " THE STATUE. Ah, you outlived that weakness, my daughter: you must be nearly 80 by this time. I was cut off (by an accident) in my 64th year, and am considerably your junior in consequence. Besides, my child, in this place, what our libertine friend here would call the farce of parental wisdom is dropped. Regard me, I beg, as a fellow creature, not as a father. ANA. You speak as this villain speaks. THE STATUE. Juan is a sound thinker, Ana. A bad fencer, but a sound thinker. ANA [horror creeping upon her] I begin to understand. These are devils, mocking me. I had better pray. THE STATUE [consoling her] No, no, no, my child: do not pray. If you do, you will throw away the main advantage of this place. Written over the gate here are the words “Leave every hope behind, ye who enter.” Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself. [Don Juan sighs deeply]. You sigh, friend Juan; but if you dwelt in heaven, as I do, you would realize your advantages. "
3 " ANA. Thank you: I am going to heaven for happiness. I have had quite enough of reality on earth. DON JUAN. Then you must stay here; for hell is the home of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness. It is the only refuge from heaven, which is, as I tell you, the home of the masters of reality, and from earth, which is the home of the slaves of reality. The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool’s paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century anew generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer “Make me a healthy animal.” But here you escape this tyranny of the flesh; for here you are not an animal at all: you are a ghost, an appearance, an illusion, a convention, deathless, ageless: in a word, bodiless. There are no social questions here, no political questions, no religious questions, best of all, perhaps, no sanitary questions. Here you call your appearance beauty, your emotions love, your sentiments heroism, your aspirations virtue, just as you did on earth; but here there are no hard facts to contradict you, no ironic contrast of your needs with your pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance, a universal melodrama. As our German friend put it in his poem, “the poetically nonsensical here is good sense; and the Eternal Feminine draws us ever upward and on”—without getting us a step farther. And yet you want to leave this paradise! "
4 " DON JUAN. In Heaven, as I picture it, dear lady, you live and work instead of playing and pretending. You face things as they are; you escape nothing but glamor; and your steadfastness and your peril are your glory. If the play still goes on here and on earth, and all the world is a stage, Heaven is at least behind the scenes. But Heaven cannot be described by metaphor. Thither I shall go presently, because there I hope to escape at last from lies and from the tedious, vulgar pursuit of happiness, to spend my eons in contemplation—THE STATUE. Ugh! DON JUAN. Señor Commander: I do not blame your disgust: a picture gallery is a dull place for a blind man. But even as you enjoy the contemplation of such romantic mirages as beauty and pleasure; so would I enjoy the contemplation of that which interests me above all things: namely, Life: the force that ever strives to attain greater power of contemplating itself. "
5 " Señor Commander: you know the way to the frontier of hell and heaven. Be good enough to direct me. THE STATUE. Oh, the frontier is only the difference between two ways of looking at things. Any road will take you across it if you really want to get there. DON JUAN. Good. [Saluting Doña Ana] Señora: your servant. ANA. But I am going with you. DON JUAN. I can find my own way to heaven, Ana; not yours [he vanishes]. ANA. How annoying! THE STATUE [calling after him] Bon voyage, Juan! [He wafts a final blast of his great rolling chords after him as a parting salute. A faint echo of the, first ghostly melody comes back in acknowledgment]. Ah ! there he goes. [Puffing a long breath out through his lips] Whew ! How he does talk! Theyll never stand it in heaven. THE DEVIL [gloomily] His going is a political defeat. I cannot keep these Life Worshippers: they all go. This is the greatest loss I have had since that Dutch painter went: a fellow who would paint a hag of 70 with as much enjoyment as a Venus of 20. THE STATUE. I remember: he came to heaven. Rembrandt. THE DEVIL. Ay, Rembrandt. There is something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Señor Commander: it is dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. "
6 " ANA. Stop! [The trap stops]. THE DEVIL. You, Señora, cannot come this way. You will have an apotheosis. But you will be at the palace before us. ANA. That is not what I stopped you for. Tell me: where can I find the Superman? THE DEVIL. He is not yet created, Senora. THE STATUE. And never will be, probably. Let us proceed: the red fire will make me sneeze. [They descend]. ANA. Not yet created! Then my work is not yet done. [Crossing herself devoutly] I believe in the Life to Come. [Crying to the universe] A father! a father for the Superman! She vanishes into the void; and again there is nothing: all existence seems suspended infinitely. Then, vaguely, there is a live human voice crying somewhere. One sees, with a shock, a mountain peak shewing faintly against a lighter background. The sky has returned from afar; and we suddenly remember where we were. "
7 " Shaw’s employment of the language proves no less self-sufficient in this uncostumed and unset “reading” of “Don Juan in Hell.” Yet there is a striking difference. Shaw has no interest in conjuring images to evoke a physical setting. He makes fun of Dante for having described hell as a place of mud, frost, filth, fire, and venomous serpents. He is equally contemptuous of Milton for having introduced cannon and gunpowder as a means of expelling the Devil from heaven. Shaw’s hell is visually nonexistent. In his own words “there is nothing; omnipresent nothing. No sky, no peaks, no light, no sound, no time nor space, utter void.” There is only somewhere the faint throbbing buzz of a Mozartian strain and a pallor which “reveals a man in the void, an incorporeal but visible man, seated, absurdly enough, on nothing. "
8 " Don Juan once made love to a woman called Donna Ana. Donna Ana was married to a man called Ottavio. You will read about him in this piece. He does not appear. So when Don Juan made love to Donna Ana, Donna Ana screamed, and her father came to her rescue to defend her virtue. Donna Ana’s father got into a sword fight with Don Juan, and in the sword fight Don Juan killed Donna Ana’s father. Then the story cuts to some time later. There was a statue erected to the memory of Donna Ana’s father, and in a high mood one day Don Juan invited the Statue to come and have supper with him, and lo and behold, the Statue stepped down from its pedestal and came and had supper with Don Juan. And in return the Statue invited Don Juan to supper with it, and on this occasion the Statue took Don Juan down into Hell, where, according to Shaw, Ana joins them and they talk with the Devil. —CHARLES LAUGHTON "
9 " ANA. Has even death failed to refine your soul, Juan? Has the terrible judgment of which my father’s statue was the minister taught you no reverence? DON JUAN. How is that very flattering statue, by the way? Does it still come to supper with naughty people and cast them into this bottomless pit? ANA. It has been a great expense to me. The boys in the monastery school would not let it alone: the mischievous ones broke it; and the studious ones wrote their names on it. Three new noses in two years, and fingers without end. I had to leave it to its fate at last; and now I fear it is shockingly mutilated. My poor father! DON JUAN. Hush! Listen! [Two great chords rolling on syncopated waves of sound break forth: D minor and its dominant: a sound of dreadful joy to all musicians]. Ha! Mozart’s statue music. It is your father. You had better disappear until I prepare him. [She vanishes]. "