Là ci darem la mano
Là ci darem la mano
In Brief
In response to Bloom's question in Calypso, Molly
names two songs that she will be singing on the "programme"
that Hugh Boylan has put together for their upcoming concert
tour. The first is "Là ci darem," a
duet for baritone and soprano from Mozart's Don Giovanni.
This delicious song of sexual seduction comments in many ways
on the Blooms' marriage and Boylan's intrusion into it. Bloom
thinks of several phrases from the duet, all of them
discouraging, in subsequent chapters. The other number that
Molly will be performing, Love's
Old Sweet Song, carries more positive
associations.
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Don Giovanni (1787) is a version of the Don Juan story penned by librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. The anti-hero is a nobleman who takes advantage of his social position to seduce or rape many hundreds of women and girls (the current count, according to his servant Leporello, is 2,065) in Italy, Germany, France, Turkey, and Spain. Early in the opera, Giovanni comes upon a procession celebrating the upcoming marriage of two peasants named Masetto and Zerlina, and sets his sights on the bride. He gets rid of all the others and begins seducing Zerlina, who is tempted by his attentions but fears that he will leave when he has had his way with her. He promises that in his nearby casinetto (little villa) he will change her sorte (fate), by making her a nobleman's wife:
Don Giovanni |
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There is nothing "innocent" about Giovanni's pangs, and
"Blazes" Boylan seems cast very much in the same mold of the
heartless seducer, but Molly is hardly innocent herself. She
sees how the song bears on her marital situation and feels
justified in taking some pleasure outside of a marriage
lacking in sexual satisfaction: "I know what Ill do Ill go
about rather gay not too much singing a bit now and then mi
fa pieta Masetto then Ill start dressing myself to go
out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best
shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to
make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what
he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked
too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times...serve him
right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress as the
thing in the gallery said O much about it if thats all the
harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not
much doesnt everybody only they hide it."
Although Molly finds much to dislike about Boylan after spending intimate time with him, she does not seem to have experienced any of Zerlina's hesitation before. When Bloom recalls Zerlina's first line in Calypso he misremembers it in a way that emphasizes his wife's very active participation in the adulterous liaison: "Voglio e non vorrei. Wonder if she pronounces that right: voglio." Substituting the present indicative voglio ("I want") for the conditional vorrei ("I would like") calls the reader's attention to Molly's very active desire. In the next chapter, Lotus Eaters, even the one conditional verb has dropped out: "Voglio e non." But one chapter after that Bloom does recall the line correctly: "voglio e non vorrei. No: vorrei e non."
It is a joke with multiple layers. Not only is Molly's
pronunciation of the word irrelevant, since it does not
appear in the duet, but voglio has a particular,
unflattering application to Bloom himself. His counterpart
in the seduction scene is the subjugated Masetto, and he
outdoes Masetto in abjectness. Masetto in fact stands up for
himself, trying in vain to stop the rapacious nobleman from
exercising his droit de seigneur. Bloom never
does, and his substitution of voglio connects him
with Don Giovanni's servant Leporello, as Robert M. Adams
has suggested (Surface and Symbol, 71). In a
deliciously mock-heroic aria at the beginning of the opera,
"Notte e giornio faticar," Leporello dreams of
throwing off the yoke of servitude and becoming a master
himself. The rousing central declaration of this aria is "Voglio
far il gentiluomo, / E non voglio più servir":
"I want to play the gentleman, / And I don't want to serve
anymore." But at the end of the opera, after Giovanni has
died, he goes looking for "a better master," as much a
servant as ever.
It makes perfect sense for Bloom to identify with Leporello, as with Masetto. Calypso shows him to be a servant to his wife, and in Circe his failure to stand up to the violator of his marriage is enacted by having him serve Boylan as a butler, showing him into the house and conducting him to the room where Molly is stepping naked out of her bathtub. A phrase in Ithaca, "supraracial prerogative," suggests that he acquiesces in the violation of his marriage in part because his Jewish heritage puts him in an inferior position to the ethnically Irish Boylan, like a peasant displaced by an aristocrat.
Bloom tries to turn the tables, in fantasy, when he woos
his former flame Josie Breen in Circe. With "his
fingers and thumb passing slowly down to her soft moist
meaty palm which she surrenders gently," he places on
her finger a ring that signifies domination
more than betrothal, and says, "Là ci darem la
mano." She replies with the same
misremembered phrase that implied sexual excitement in Lotus
Eaters: "Voglio e non.
You're hot! You're scalding!" But, as Stephen says of
Shakespeare's whoring in London, such "Assumed
dongiovannism" cannot dispel the pain of being
betrayed. In his introduction to Hades in James
Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays, Adams observes that
Bloom's recollection of another line from the song, "Mi
trema un poco," stops just short of
articulating "il core," the
heart, which would add romantic heartbreak to all the
other thoughts of broken hearts in the chapter (105).
Other threads from Don Giovanni weave their way
into Ulysses starting in Lestrygonians,
when Bloom recalls the scene from the end of the opera in
which the seducer is finally caught and punished. These
details center on the image of feasting.
