“Don Juan in the Ottoman East: Dis/continuities in Cantos V-VIII”

As with the English cantos, those set in Constantinople and Ismail constitute a discrete narrative sequence within Don Juan, one whose apparently seamless plot progression is criss-crossed by continuities and discontinuities in relation to the poem’s previous instalments. Discontinuities particularly concern the position of these cantos in the poem’s compositional history during the fraught period of 1821-22, as well as a representation of the Ottoman East which knowingly reprises and relentlessly subverts familiar orientalist topoi. In keeping with Don Juan’s pervasive medley mode, cantos V-VIII are built on an interplay of dis/continuities forcing readers uninterruptedly to identify and decode multiple, ever-varying lines of argument about excess, consumption, eroticism and war, and held together by a central thread of reflections on power. Investigating the thematic and structural peculiarities of this section of Don Juan, this chapter suggests that we read it as a unit within the poem, which consistently engages questions of authority and control through a distinctive interweaving of figurative protocols, historical-ideological materials, and metaliterary references.