Metamorfosis de un mito. Don Juan en las reescrituras españolas contemporáneas

This research work aims to study the transformations and reconstruction of the myth of Don Juan in Spanish literature, theatre and cinema from the 1960s up to the present, analyzing and systematizing these transformations in the context of current cultural trends. The study is based on an interdisciplinary, as well as an intertextual and a myth-critical approach. The work takes into account those texts and movies that illustrate the presence of the three “invariants” of the myth of Don Juan, as noted by Jean Rousset, such as: Don Juan himself as protagonist; the apparition of the death (or the supernatural); and the group of women he seduces. The thesis is structured in three parts, the first focuses on critical methodology; the second reconstructs the path of the myth from what is considered as the founding text, Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, up to the first half of the twentieth century. The third part deals with the most recent rewritings, some of whom little known and in general not yet studied sufficiently, trying to identify in the latter a series of trend lines, which in turn reflect the cultural circumstances of our day. Although the study focuses on Spanish-language production, the many important versions of the myth that arose in other geographical and linguistic contexts were also taken into account in the discussion. The third part of the work is the most innovative and original. By analyzing the extensive corpus of the new works eight dramas, three movies, two novels and a short story it was possible to trace five thematic and formal lines, to each of which is dedicated a chapter. We therefore shift from the rewritings of the myth in the last years of the Spanish republican exile, in particular by analyzing the dramas Don Juan en la mancebía (1968), by Ramón J. Sender and José Ricardo Morales’ Ardor con ardor se apaga (1987). In general, these texts emphasize the transgressive and libertarian personality of the protagonist, giving his events a decidedly political value; leading to the versions in which the metafictional construction stands out, such as the plays D.J. (1987), by Jerónimo López Mozo and José Luis Alonso de Santos’ La sombra del Tenorio (1994), as well as the movies Don Juan, mi querido fantasma (1990), by Antonio Mercero and Io, Don Giovanni (2009), by Carlos Saura. We also explore those works where an introspective and self-reflective nature is offered, such as Vicente Molina Foix’s drama Don Juan último (1992), as well as Paloma Díaz-Mas’ short story titled «La visita del comendador» (2008), and Tomás Segovia’s novel Cartas de un jubilado (2010). Finally, the last two chapters respectively focus on dramas in which the seducer who takes on the characters of the mythical protagonist is female, as it occurs in Juan José Alonso Millán’s La vil seducción (1967), and in Jesús Campos García’s d.juan@simetrico.es (La burladora de Sevilla y el Tenorio del siglo XXI) (2008), and on the experimental rewritings which are difficult to classify, such as Luis Riaza’s drama Representación del Don Juan Tenorio por el carro de las meretrices ambulantes (1973), Julián Ríos’ novel Larva / Babel de una noche de San Juan (1983), and Gonzalo Suárez’s movie Don Juan en los infiernos (1991). The thesis ends with an appendix in which we present the interviews to some of the authors whose works have been the subject of our study, namely Jerónimo López Mozo, José Luis Alonso de Santos, Vicente Molina Foix, Paloma Díaz-Mas, Jesús Campos and Gonzalo Suárez. In addition, our work is enriched by the contribution of some and representative images related to the works that have been analysed in our study.