( A - Z )
Aberbach, David
McGill University / The London School of Economics
Byron and the Poetry of Hot Nationalism
Alone among the great Romantics, Byron chose to devote himself to the cause of national independence – of Greece in its war against Turkey (1821-28), and as a martyr to this cause transformed the meaning and role of the modern poet in the age of nationalism. A major underlying influence on the Romantic image of the poet as social reformer and revolutionary was the biblical prophet-poet. Byron was also inspired by the Greek nationalist poet Rigas Velestinlis (or Feraios, 1757-1798), who called for a revival of Greek and revolt against the Turks. Byron admired his Thourios (War Song), with the famous lines: ‘Better one hour of free life/ Than forty years of slavery and prison.’ Velestinlis’ murder by the Turks in 1798 ensured that he would be remembered as the first modern Greek prophet of armed revolt and martyr of independence. By going to Greece to lead the fight for Greek independence, Byron emulated the example of Velestinlis. However, as Byron was perhaps the most famous European after Napoleon, his self-sacrifice had enormous influence on poetry after his death in 1824. It effectively defined the poet as political activist ready to fight and die for the nation – to defend international ideals: above all, liberty. This talk will consider other fighter-poets and poet-martyrs for the Nation in the century after Byron’s death, including: Petofi (Hungary), Mickiewicz (Poland), Botev (Bulgaria), Marti (Cuba), and Pearse (Ireland). Other poets, such as John Cornford, followed Byron’s internationalist idealism by fighting for causes further than at home. Though national militantcy was questioned in poetry even prior to World War I (e.g. in Whitman and Tennyson) and among World War I poets such as Owen and Sassoon, the Byronesque tradition of fighting poets continued: for example, D’Annunzio (Italy), Greenberg (pre-State Israel), and Rebelo (Martinique).
Algee-Hewitt, Mark
New York University
Finding Byron in Modern Scholarship
Scholarly commentary on Byron’s socio-cultural popularity is frequently accompanied by an acknowledgement of the difficulties that he presents for literary criticism. Despite his position as one of the six “major” male Romantic poets, much of current writing discusses the problems faced when attempting to fit Byron into a canonical or traditional understanding of the Romantic period. Moreover, these problems faced by Byron criticism are related to a perceived lack of his presence in contemporary scholarship: even the call for papers for this conference references Byron’s “relative absence from critical culture.” This absence is particularly surprising given not only Byron’s present popularity, but also his infamy in the Romantic period. As William St. Clair has recently shown in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, the omnipresence of prints of Don Juan make Byron the one of most frequently read authors in the Romantic period itself, second only to Sir Walter Scott. In comparison to the other major Romantic figures, Byron’s publication-runs were orders of magnitude larger. But a closer examination of critical interest in Byron reveals that this “difficulty” or “paucity” is, in fact, a conceit of Byron scholarship itself. Even a brief search of the “MLA Bibliography” for works with Byron as the “subject” reveals that there are more articles and books published on Byron than either Shelley or Keats. How can we then explain this widely held belief in Byron’s critical absence and what does this phenomenon say about the scholarly, as well as the popular, “cult of Byron”?
This paper investigates this critical mythologizing of Byron as he has been received and repositioned by the scholarly community. This belief that Byron is a particularly problematic and under-appreciated poet, I argue, lies in not only the cultural illegitimacy that surrounded his original reception, but also in the illegal methods by which his works were distributed. The popularity of his poetry, identified by St. Clair, resulted from the wide availability of inexpensive pirated printings of Don Juan in London. Because Don Juan was legally declared obscene, it was exempt from copyright law and freely pirated. We can therefore declare the work illicit in both its subject as well as in its method of distribution. As a virtue of this illegitimacy, I argue, Byron becomes an underground figure to the generations of critics that follow him, sustaining his critical popularity through the myth of his “difficulty.” Unlike Scott who acquired his popularity through his economic legitimacy and lack of controversy and which has been translated into an actual contemporary lack of interest in his work, Byron has become a cult-figure. Scholarly work on Byron operates within the supposition that he is critically under-appreciated. It also simultaneously harbors the suspicion that his wider cultural popularity undermines the seriousness of his work. This paper traces the evolution of this critical myth, as conceived and perceived through the successive generations of literary critics, and explores the ways in which this academically validated belief has become central to our understanding of Byron
Anderson, Phillip B.
University of Central Arkansas
The Sage and the Corsair: John Ruskin’s Response to Byron
From his earliest extant essay, written in 1836, through his last important works of the 1880s, John Ruskin consistently spoke of Byron as one of the very greatest of poets, one of the two or three greatest “seers” of the nineteenth century, and one of the very greatest influences on his own work. Despite this fact, very few critics in general (or Ruskin scholars in particular) have paid any real attention to Byron’s importance for Ruskin or to Ruskin’s many and valuable commentaries on Byron.
This curious and unsatisfactory state of affairs exists in part, perhaps, because Ruskin never published an essay specifically and solely devoted to Byron, as did such contemporaries as Arnold and Swinburne. Nevertheless, Ruskin’s response to Byron is the most profound, detailed, thoughtful, and passionately illuminating to be found among the Victorians.
To appreciate what Byron meant to Ruskin and what Ruskin had to say about Byron, one must look at virtually every volume of the massive “Library Edition” of The Works of Ruskin edited by Cook and Wedderburn. In his many discussions of Byron, Ruskin touches on almost every aspect of the poet and his work, and his commentaries taken as a whole provide a brilliant if highly personal view of his great Romantic predecessor.
From his earliest schoolboy comments on Byron, Ruskin presents himself as the fierce defender of a poet whom he considers second only to Shakespeare and yet undervalued by society. His early defense of Byron also emphasizes the unique emotional qualities, prosodic genius, range, humanity, and ultimate truthfulness of the poet. These claims for Byron are defended and expanded throughout Ruskin’s career.
In the five volumes of Modern Painters and in The Stones of Venice, Ruskin treats Byron as a poet of unique power and value, but also as a writer and man flawed by sentimentality. By 1860, however, Ruskin has come to feel that Byron’s greatness is his native gift, while his flaws are the fault of the age.
In the works of Ruskin after 1860, the Victorian critic shows his extraordinary command and appreciation of Byron’s entire range of work, while defending him as a writer of great spiritual vision in an age of superficial materialism and scientific complacency.
During the 1880s, Ruskin provides some of his most powerful and provocative writing on Byron. In the Elements of English Prosody, Ruskin gives us a striking and detailed account of Byron’s prosodic practice, but his most interesting claim for Byron in this work centers on his belief that Byron combines poetic truth and rhythmic power to a virtually unique degree. In Fiction, Fair and Foul, Ruskin explains in detail what he sees as the Romantic sources of Byron’s vision, while emphasizing the special value of Byron’s engagement with the turbulent modern world. It is in Fiction, Fair and Foul that Ruskin also develops his argument for why Byron is greater than Wordsworth. Finally, in this work Ruskin gives us his most striking assessment of Byron as “the truest, sternest seer of the Nineteenth Century.” Given this view, it is not too surprising to find Ruskin in his last great work, Praeterita, telling us how Byron’s truth, forceful ease, concentration, and courage made him his master and most inspiring influence. Byron’s impact on the man whom one critic has called the “central literary intelligence of the nineteenth century” deserves to be understood.
Bachman, Clover
Carnegie Mellon University
Every Poet his own Aristotle: The Critical Subject and Creative Voice in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’
This paper discusses how “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” uses poetic, creative language as both agent and object. Focusing on the third canto of the poem, I argue that this text evokes a poetic-critical subjectivity as idealized human autonomy. In doing so, the poem attempts to become the authoritative source for its own interpretation -- and by implication exemplary of a broader theory of aesthetic engagement. First, I will discuss how Byron incorporates the critical project into the creative one and merges these into a broadly conceived, poetic-critical subjectivity. Second, I will be discussing how this subjectivity amounts to a case for the artwork as a self-contained model of absolute freedom and autonomy. By subsuming the critical voice into the poetic, “Childe Harold” attempts to exemplify radical cultural critique and pure aesthetic affect simultaneously. Rather than existing in analogy to the aesthetic experience of nature, art becomes synonymous with the aesthetic experience (even displacing the natural world as it describes that world). There is a turn inward here that is not reflective pleasure in the faculties of the mind, as a number of aesthetic theorists from Addison to Kant would have it. Rather, this is pleasure in a unique poetic-critical subjectivity that is free only so long as it originates and terminatesin artwork. Art becomes the site of genuine creative freedom and intellectual autonomy that are real-world impossibilities. Broadly speaking, this paper is concerned with Byron’s poetry as an important historical source for theories of aestheticappreciation andmodern conceptions of cultural critique.
Barnes, Katherine
University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy
Imagining Exile
The Australian poet Christopher Brennan (1870-1932) published in 1914 a
complex and fascinating work in the form of a livre composé. In writing
it, Brennan made a decisive break with the literary productions of his
Australian contemporaries, turning for his models to the literature of
nineteenth-century Europe, especially European Romanticism and French
Symbolism. Brennan chose a Byronic traveller as the central figure of a
sequence of fourteen poems which forms the fourth part of his 1914 work
(entitled simply Poems). The experience of alienation and exile
recorded by his first-person narrator is existential, expressing a
rejection particularly of settled certainty in matters of faith.
Brennan had a strong understanding of Romantic irony, and his
protagonist displays an ironic stance towards uncertainty and change:
“he knows / no ending of the way, no home, no goal”.
In making a break from Australian models, Brennan ensured a limited
reception of his work in his own country and a suspicious, even
sceptical, readership. It is somewhat ironic that he unwittingly
anticipated the tendency of so many subsequent Australian writers to
expatriate themselves from a culture they have tended to see as
unsupportive of, or antipathetic towards, their artistic aims.
Brown, Elke A.
Middle Tennessee State University
Killing the Witch: Deconstructing the Byronic Ideal in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer
In no other country have the myths of personal freedom and the worth of the individual gained as much importance as in the United States; in fact, they provide the very foundation of this country’s cultural identity. On the other hand, in no other country are the opposing drives between self-autonomy and destiny more obvious, especially in the technology-oriented, twenty-first century. The breakdown of communication, which Sherman Alexie describes so intensely in his work Indian Killer, continues despite the creation of a global village. Intriguingly, instead of advancing our humanist ideals, we allow technology to turn us into static, rigid beings. Yet, like the language we use to communicate, our selves and our histories have to be in constant change to stay alive and offer us the vital sustenance we need. What, then, has become of the Promethean spark, the power of determining and creating one’s self that Byron has promoted so avidly—not only through constantly re-creating his own public persona, but also through his works, especially in his drama Manfred?
Alexie’s novel, hauntingly postmodern and romantic at the same time, illustrates the contradictions of our modern, post-Byronic, world, not from the perspective of a privileged upper-class individual, but rather from that of a member of a minority that has been robbed of its own identity to an extent of which that identity is defined by the oppressor. As Byron’s Manfred illustrates, to find and unite ourselves, we have to know our background, our history, traditions, and myths and understand the transformative, vitalizing power of language. Without knowing where we come from, we cannot perceive where we are going; John’s example in Indian Killer illustrates that perfectly. He ends up completely isolated, longing powerlessly for the safety of the past. As John’s story indicates, the loss or invalidity of vision and the dangers of a static attitude result in the inability to adjust the past to the present, to integrate new experiences with the ancient knowledge. His experience demonstrates that a rigid self, a longing for the glories of the past, only has bearing on their present existence insofar as it contributes to the destruction of their visions and being.
Ultimately, the self expresses itself through language: Byron created himself in and through his poetry, Manfred finds awareness and his lost self Astarte through constant discourse with the Spirits, but John is a silent wanderer through the desert. His language is not his own because we do not allow him to possess “our” language as his own, and, thus, prevent him from creating, let alone re-creating himself. The Witch is ours and nobody else better claim it. Alexie’s work, hence, exposes the Byronic ideal of self-determination as a myth valid only for members of the mainstream, for the people in power, be they British Lords or twentieth century white American middle class couples adopting a Native American boy.
Byronic Reception of Jane Austen in late 20th-century film
The popular vogue for Jane Austen that crested in the 1990s but still continues is, I argue, a variation on what Lady Byron called Byromania. In 1995, the newspapers were reporting “Darcymania”—the word itself suggestively analogous—raging in England and America in the wake of Colin Firth’s performance in the BBC/A&E miniseries of Pride and Prejudice. Over half a century earlier, a similar smaller epidemic had been provoked by Laurence Olivier’s beautiful pale face when he played Darcy in the first ever Jane Austen movie (MGM, 1940). No less than seven film adaptations of the novels were released in the 1990s, and journalists chastened by feminism wrote about “Austenmania.” But “Jane-o-mania” was more precisely the thing: the maiden novelist reconceived as a personal intimate, adored--as Byron had been adored--as the heroine of a hot new sensibility. Brilliant, witty, inventively self-fashioning, and impeccably upper-crust, Jane Austen was made to match (and mock) the Byronic hero, remade—with irony, given people’s reading habits--in the Noble Poet’s literary image.
Lord Byron awoke to find himself famous in his early twenties, when his twelve-years-older contemporary Jane Austen was publishing but unknown. He made it in Hollywood before she did, languidly leaning against the mantel in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935); a year before playing Mr. Darcy, Olivier was the Byronic Heathcliff of William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights. “Not another biography of Byron?” asks a weary George Sanders, playing a book editor, when a lady presents him with a manuscript in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947). The opulent films of the turn of the twentieth century reinvented Jane Austen in Byron’s well-known image, insisting that despite her notorious starchiness and personal obscurity she was theatrical, a figure for gender bending. The movies chorused self-congratulations for the Frankensteinian feat of bringing her back to sexy life; self-consciously mocking her ubiquity, they made Jane Austen—of all people!--the kind of literary star Lord Byron had been. As in his case, you didn’t have to read a word she wrote to imagine and feel yourself one with her. It was a triumph of irony, and of the overriding, the overwriting, of sex by gender.
The Byron the new improved version of Jane Austen rewrites is not the morose guilty hero, but the poet W.H. Auden addresses in his “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937), which begins by praising the poet’s “gay and witty” muse. (Auden claims there that if Jane Austen did not intimidate him he would have written to her instead.) Her Romantic genius, her relation to her heroines, her gay muse, were celebrated by films like Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999), which portrays Fanny Price as an autobiographical self-portrait of witty, role-playing Jane Austen. If the new gender-obsessed academic criticism was behind interpretations like Rozema’s, Lord Byron was too. The paradigm of popular literary icons, the symbol of sexual athleticism and sexual ambiguity, the man of words and theatrical action, came before to show the way for the new Jane. Literary women—his wife and his mistress Lady Caroline Lamb, Germaine de Stael and the Brontes and Harriet Beecher Stowe—adored and competed with Byron, but the little she wrote about him suggests Jane Austen was not impressed. Her succession to his place in the popular imagination is a sign that the novel heroine has usurped the place of the poet-hero. It is ironic and telling, both about us and about them.
Carano, Lorrie
University of Missouri—Kansas City
Lord of Darkness: The Creation of Byron’s Gothic Persona
During his life, Lord Byron became a celebrity figure, surrounded by scandal and intrigue and this reputation has lasted beyond the grave. During the last two centuries, Byron has lost his mortality, becoming an immortal legend. His image has metamorphosed into something much darker than that of a Romantic Period poet; he has taken on the role of a mysterious gothic character. This image of Byron finds its origins in his own life, as well as his works and the works of his contemporaries. Byron is the apotheosis of the modern day celebrity. People considered Byron “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” during his lifetime, and he was only too ready to please his ever growing group of disciples and enemies. This paper will chart the development of Byron’s Gothic persona and his celebrity status during his lifetime through an analysis of Byron’s effort to perfect his public image in his works and his appearance as a character in the works of his contemporaries. Byron’s Gothic persona and celebrity image continue to develop in contemporary popular culture, including his appearance in Tom Holland’s Lord of the Dead, The Highlander television series, and the film Gothic.
Byron’s poetry, in particular the invention of the Byronic hero, adds to the “Byron myth” because many people have read his works as though they were autobiographical. In his works, Byron casts himself as powerful, but mentally tortured, gothic characters, such as Manfred. He continually allies himself with Napoleon and the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
During Byron’s lifetime, he appeared as a character in several novels, including Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenervon, Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, and John Polidori’s The Vampyre. In Polidori’s story, Byron becomes the first ‘romantic’ vampire. Polidori transforms the monster of Eastern European folklore, a hideously evil character, into a seductive, ‘human’ character, whose evil nature is a source of fascination.
The Gothic image of Byron remains intact to this day. Tom Holland, a Byron scholar, continues the Polidori transformation by morphing the real Byron into a vampire in his novel Lord of the Dead. In the story, a descendent of Byron is in search of the original manuscript of Byron’s memoirs, supposedly burnt, when she finds that her ancestor is still alive, masquerading as Lord Ruthvan, the part he played in Polidori’s story. Byron’s gothic persona is further developed in an episode of the The Highlander television series, in which Byron is an immortal, who has regained his former fame in the present day as a Gothic rock star. On the big screen, Byron solidifies his dark celebrity status in Gothic. The film tends to take the ‘Byron Legend’ literally, with Byron living up to his reputation as a libertine.
Chowdhury, Ahsan
University of Alberta
Fragments Poetic and Imperial in Byron's "Eastern Tales"
Byron’s so-called “eastern tales” such as The Giaour (1813) are no longer read as mere exotic tales of adventure that serve as colorful, narcissistic locales for the Byronic hero to brood over. Jerome McGann, among others, has pointed out that Byron taught his public to read his eastern poetry as “much more than textually autonomous poetic fragments.” According to McGann, these poems demanded that the reader make “elaborate referential connections: political, biographical, and historical” (16).
Following McGann’s lead, Joseph Lew has made a useful connection between the fragment as a verse form in The Giaour and the historical disintegration of the Ottoman Empire on whose soil the action of the verse narrative takes place. Drawing upon Lord Eversley, an influential historian of the Ottoman Empire during Byron’s actual forays into the beleaguered eastern polity, Lew writes, “Thus, by 1813, there was ample ground for Byron and his readers to make political and historical ‘referential connections’ between a disintegrating empire and the fragment as a verse form" (178).
I propose to build further on Lew’s valuable insight and argue that in the eastern tales in general and in The Giaour in particular Byron anticipates the problematic and often disjunctive transition from traditional “dynastic realms” to modern nation-states noted by such twentieth-century theorists of nationalism and the nation-state as Benedict Anderson, E. J. Hobsbawm, Anthony Giddens, and Daniel Goffman. Few other shifts in human history so radically mark the break between a traditional world view and modernity as that between the modern nation-state and the older composite empires like the Ottoman Empire. I contend that Byron captures the often ambiguous results of this watershed event in The Giaour and other eastern tales.
Works Cited
Lew, Joseph. "The Necessary Orientalist? The Giaour and Nineteenth Century Misogyny."
Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834. Eds. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996: 173-202.
McGann, Jerome J. "Byron and the Truth in Masqurade." Rereading Byron: Essays Selected From the Hofstra University’s Byron Bicentennial Conference. Eds. Alice Levine and Robert N. keane. New York: Garland, 1993. 1-19.
Clifton, Glenn
University of Toronto
The Hero Without Content: Subjectivity in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I &II
Byron’s philosophy of subjectivity is frequently treated as an ironic or incomplete version of a general Romantic philosophy of subjectivity. As a result, Byron is sometimes seen as celebrating the free, postmodern play of a subject that is not tied down to a Romantic unity with the world. Less attention, however, has been paid to how Byron’s philosophy of subjectivity relates to his immense popularity, and to the phenomenon of Byronism. This paper argues for a link between the popularity of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I & II and the depiction of subjectivity in that text. I confront the issue of “Byron and Modernity” by developing the claim that the subject position that caught the attention of so many readers in 1812 is reflective of the subject position of the modern consumer herself.
Byron has often been understood as the first celebrity writer, and many have pointed out that he arrived at the “ideal moment,” in terms of the development of advertising, to become a consumer phenomenon. But the lasting popularity of the work in the 19th century also suggests that the subjectivity of the hero Harold – or, possibly, the dynamic interaction of the subjectivity of the narrator and the subjectivity of the hero – generated a work that was perfectly suited to be the centre of brand “Byron.” I examine Byronic subjectivity in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I & II in the light of Giorgio Agamben’s description of “Romantic irony” in his book The Man Without Content. Romantic irony for Agamben is a kind of crisis of the content of the self; the Romantic ironist cannot find seriousness in any content, and so can only represent “the negative potentiality of the poetic I” (Agamben 55). I argue that we find the same crisis lurking behind the erotic attraction of Byron’s text. The interplay of the subject position of the impassioned narrator and the subject position of the supposedly detached and gloomy hero whose pilgrimage he describes forms an erotic space in which readers are simultaneously excited by external stimuli and thrown back upon themselves. The Byronic subject (as represented in the dynamic between Harold and the narrator) is not simply satiated like Harold; rather, he or she is erotically drawn to things, but finds them, as Byron’s addition to the preface suggests, disappointing. If the erotic valuation engine of the subject is really the source of all value, then the attempt to be really satisfied with the objects of attraction is bound to be just that – disappointing. Passionate reactions to things, meant to stage the power of the subject’s valuation, become, in themselves, the evidence that nothing is of inherent value.
This is the perfect dynamic for an exciting consumer item, because it echoes an element of consumerism itself; the relationship between intense reactions to external stimuli and the lurking ghost of indifference is, I suggest, a part of the experience of both consumers and tourists from Byron’s day until our own.
Dennis, Ian
University of Ottawa
Irony and Alliance in a Market World: The Lessons and Comforts of Byron’s Don Juan
The proposed paper will study Byron’s relationship to modernity in terms of his effective interventions in a world increasingly structured by the rivalries and emulations of what Rene Girard designates as “internally mediated” mimetic desire, and Eric Gans (Girard’s most important recent intellectual heir) speaks of as a “public scene,” which, “from a ritual centre ... has been degraded to a locus of intersubjective exchange: a market.” Don Juan, it will be argued, is a masterful survey of the effects and tactics on display in this world. But the poem also offers its readers two kinds of more direct benefit: the modelling of strategies that work well under such conditions, and an inspiriting and comforting alliance with the authorial persona. The strategies modeled involve the two most significant modes of value in a modern market, namely authenticity and irony, and the paper will try to use its theoretical base to define these with precision and show how the poem allows its readers to imitate without resenting Byron’s own hard-won techniques and the attitudes which support them. A concept of alliances–as partial refuges from mimetic rivalry–will then be developed, and the kind of alliance Byron offers through the fascinating companionship of his famous narrator evaluated for its innovative combination of supportiveness and minimally violent distinction from others. Girard’s now classic theories of mimetic and metaphysical desire, scapegoating, and the historical movement towards internal mediation will be supplemented by insights about market society and resentment drawn from Gans’s remarkable and still developing “Generative Anthropology”. Brilliant and amusing quotations will be provided from Byron. A few tentative generalizations about representations of desire in market culture will be extrapolated.
Derbyshire, Nancy M
City University New York
“Wandering outlaw of his own dark mind”: Modern Incarnations of Byron
Byronism champions the role of mystery and satire in the life and work of the artist outcast. This formulation, present in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” accounts for several modern forces or events, including mobility, travel, individualization, change, transfer or trespass, and globalization. Byron, the writer and celebrity figure, is a literary Prometheus of sorts. An itinerant ex-patriot and egoist, he becomes England’s first major cultural export of the modern era. As the fifth stanza of Canto III in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” relates, experience and creation empower the artist; this artist also, according to the speaker, tends to be “unfit” for the company of men yet he remains a friend of the earth. This prescription seems to augur future manifestations of the Byronic artist or hero. In the wake of Byron’s celebrity, two notable literary incarnations of the Byronic figure occur. John Clare, the ‘peasant poet’ internalizes and produces the experiences of trespassing as a result of his love of earth and nature. The child of landless laborers, whose love of the landscape is beset by parliamentary enclosure of lands, Clare declines into madness and nominates [identifies] himself as Byron in his poetic compositions while an inmate at the High Beach and Northampton General Lunatic Asylums. He produces a sonnet on Byron in 1835, and after an escape attempt in 1841, Clare completes his own drafts of “Child Harold” and “Don Juan.” His ‘collation of identity’ with Byron’s is a telling aspect of his itinerant, ‘homeless’ lifestyle. Born over one century later, Bob Dylan also experiences ‘collation of identity’—particularly with Byron’s. Dylan seems to enact a deliberate self-nomination [obfuscation] as a means of forming his own creative identity. A master of self-invention, he represents the Byronic wanderer, self-promoter, and cultural importer (and rewriter). In his gift of a Penguin edition of Byron’s verse to Suze Rotolo, Dylan inscribes the title page with the signature “Lord Byron Dylan.” Both Clare and Dylan, in their imaginative discourse with Byron, enact, through a process of reading and response, incarnations of Byron. Both men call themselves “Byron.” This paper seeks to elucidate the significance of self-nomination as a feature of Byronism and modern aesthetic pretension. To play or pretend one’s identity—though it has a strong precedent in the pre-modern—is a practice that comes to define the modern. Somehow this play of identity is associated (perhaps not causally) with the act of trespass and transport. Byron’s poem of pilgrimage, as well as its inheritance of the Miltonic paradigm, will be used a base text from which to analyze the trope of movement and its questionable relation to the formation or structure of identity.
Diggory, Terence
Skidmore College
Byron’s Double Legacy in New York School Poetry
The critic who has used Byron most extensively to read a New York School poet—Geoffrey Ward, in his reading of Frank O’Hara—insists that “O’Hara was not influenced by Byron: rather they are both poets for whom the comedy and wit they exhibit so habitually is powered by pressures of mortality” (Ward 49)—in other words, they are alike by temperament and circumstance, perhaps, but not by lineage. With regard to circumstance, Ward further suggests that the characteristics shared by Byron and O’Hara “set each apart from his contemporaries,” which would seem to defeat any attempt to read the Byronic aspect of O’Hara as symptomatic of modernity. In contrast, in this paper I identify as symptomatic of modernity a bifurcation of Byron’s influence into two separate channels, which rejoin in the postmodernism of the New York School poets.
The two channels of Byron’s influence correlate with the characteristics that Ward identifies as “comedy and wit,” on the one hand, and “pressures of mortality,” on the other hand. They may not be easily traceable as lines of influence between Byron and O’Hara because two important intermediary figures intervene: on the one hand, the English poet W. H. Auden, and on the other hand, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron” (1937) reintroduced “comedy and wit” into modern English poetry in the specifically Byronic mode that was later taken up, for instance, by the New York School poet Kenneth Koch in Ko; or a Season on Earth (1959), a comic epic in the ottava rima stanza of Don Juan. Even more important to New York School poetry, however, was the stance that permitted the comedy and wit, a stance that I call “epistolary,” following the example of Auden’s “Letter.” The assumption of this stance brings to poetry the casual, intimate tone of a letter between close friends. In contrast, Mayakovsky’s response to Byron’s monumental presence in nineteenth century Russian literature has an emphatically public dimension that I call “revolutionary.”
That the promised revolution seems doomed to failure is one of its most Byronic features, and certainly the feature most closely related to the “pressures of mortality” sensed in both Byron and O’Hara, as Geoffrey Ward reads them. Yet the promise of revolution persists beyond individual death in the “larger-than-life” dimension of the “theatrical ‘I,’” the basis of Lytle Shaw’s recent comparison of O’Hara and Mayakovsky (126), to which Byron could readily be added. Although critics, and even the poet themselves, have been reluctant to acknowledge that the “theatrical ‘I’” in New York School poetry is also political—hence “revolutionary” in Mayakovsky’s sense-- that reluctance is an artifact of the rigid separation of art and life, public and private spheres drawn by High Modernism. The full legacy of Byron received by the New York School poets undoes that separation. In John Ashbery’s “Houseboat Days” (1976), “the clear dark blue / Eyes of Harold in Italy” reflect the “vast dream / Of having that can topple governments” (39).
Works Cited
Ashbery, John. “Houseboat Days.” In Ashbery, Houseboat Days. New York: Penguin, 1977. 38-40.
Shaw, Lytle. Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2006.
Ward, Geoffrey. Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets. Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1993.
Ehland, Christoph
University of Würzburg
Bloodsucking and Scandalous: The Reincarnations of Byron in Modernity
Keats, Shelley and then Byron: the writers of the second generation of romantic poets died before their time. All of them, each in his own way, came to embody the idea of the genius destined to die young. But why is the process of dying and death such an allusive discourse in the afterlife of these poets? And why is there such a marked tendency to represent this particular group of romantic poets as dead men?
When Byron died, according to Tennyson, the news of the poet’s death shook the British public like an “earthquake” and “the whole world seemed to be in darkness” (one may assume that the biblical allusions are not coincidental). Byron had dreamt to be buried in “a marble tomb in Westminster Abbey”. Like Keats and Shelley he had fantasised about his own death and afterlife. But even for a man as famous or notorious as Byron the dream came to nothing because until 1969 the successive Deans of Westminster Abbey refused to have him commemorated on their premises. When finally a memorial stone was placed in the church the public gesture indicated not only a change of attitude towards the poet but also that his commemorative image had been transformed over the years.
The reincarnations of Byron in modern culture have been manifold and varied. It is the aim of this paper to shed light on the representational traditions in which his image is revived. In the case of Lord Byron the question arises: how does death as a romantic trope translate into modern celebrity culture?
Looking at death and in particular at the imagined death of a writer in the context of British Romanticism, the paper will attempt to trace the roots of the problem, look at the darker side of romantic imagination and search for the points of contact between the literary trope of death in romantic poetry and its reflection in the images of the poet in commemorative culture. Byron’s case as no other reveals the violent side of the imagery of death and dying which erupts at the intersection between poetic discourse and biographical myth. And yet, there seems a remarkable gulf between the images of the scandalous poet in fiction and his tamed effigies in the realm of material culture. The question has to be asked whether his ascent not only into the canon of English Literature but also and especially into that of British memorial culture served to domesticate the poet’s image. What is left of the scandalous, brave and untamed poet in his sculptural representation in Hydepark? Who is the Byron remembered in Rome or Athens?
Broadening the perspective on the cult and culture of biographical representations in the twentieth century, the topic is traced back to its initial point of impact on the literary imagination. Tom Holland’s bio-fictional gothic tale The Vampyre: The Secret History of Lord Byron (1995) lends a postmodern twist to the idea of the dead or rather undead poet. Looking at Holland’s gruesome reincarnation of Lord Byron as a vampire, the paper will conclude with a glance at the potential which lies in this fictional opening of the biographical frameworks of memory and place it in the contexts of the epistemological concerns of the postmodern genre of the bio-fictional novel.
Esterhammer, Angela
University of Western Ontario / University of Zurich
Cosmopolitan Identity, Contact Zones, and Byron’s Hybrid Word
In a now-classic essay entitled “Don Juan and Byron’s Imperceptiveness to the English Word,” Peter J. Manning rebuts T. S. Eliot’s claim, in 1937, that Byron “added nothing to the [English] language.” Manning sets this claim in the context of Eliot’s prejudice toward a high-modernist ideal of language as dense, intense, full, and almost magical; he then shows that Don Juan also recognizes this ideal of a meaning-saturated language, but exposes it as a dangerous illusion. Manning focuses on the intense but wordless communication between Juan and the Greek maiden Haidee in Canto 2 of Don Juan, which he reads as an infantile, pre-linguistic form of communication wherein the child’s identity risks being annihilated through fusion with the mother.
Despite the prominent adjective in Eliot’s phrase (and Manning’s title) “Byron’s imperceptiveness to the English word,” Manning does not take up the dichotomy of native and foreign that runs throughout Eliot’s essay on Byron. “I cannot think of any other poet of his distinction,” Eliot wrote, “who might so easily have been an accomplished foreigner writing English”; moreover, he proposes to consider Byron primarily as a Scottish poet, mentions his adaptation of Italian verse-forms, highlights French criticism of Byron, and ascribes Byron’s success in satirizing English society to his, and Juan’s, “alien” perspective. I therefore propose to re-read the Juan-Haidee episode as a nodal point for communication, language, identity, and cosmopolitanism. Focusing on the categories of the foreign, the native (speaker), and the (linguistic) community, I read Juan’s communication with Haidee less in terms of infantile language acquisition (as Manning does) than as a scene of second-language acquisition that results in what linguists term an improvised Acontact language.” Here and elsewhere in Don Juan, Byron dramatizes the way language both reflects and constructs identity within intersubjective relationships and multicultural encounters. Writing Don Juan as a British expatriate in southern Europe, and addressing a readership in his repudiated and repudiating homeland, Byron is simultaneously enacting these issues of cosmopolitan identity-construction within a linguistic and cultural contact zone.
Given the international and cosmopolitan concerns of Don Juan, on both the thematic and the authorial level, Eliot’s reliance on the foreign/native axis in Byron’s poetic language merits specific attention as part of the modernist response to Byron. To explore this topic, I will set the Juan-Haidee encounter in the context of Byron=s theory and practice regarding the agency of language, including his use of idioms, dialects, and codes that situate the speaker or writer differently in relation to different publics (an issue most recently taken up in Gary Dyer’s work on Byron’s use of criminal slang). My paper will also draw on recent work on by K. Anthony Appiah and Reingard Nethersole in order to broach a comparison among the components and mechanisms of “Romantic cosmopolitanism” (especially the identity-construction of the Romantic expatriate writer), Eliot’s modernist perspective on nationality and language, and present-day globalized identities.
Works Cited
Dyer, Gary. “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets: Being Flash to Byron=s Don Juan.” PMLA 116 (2001): 562-78.
Eliot, T. S. “Byron.” On Poetry and Poets. New York: Noonday Press, 1943.
Manning, Peter J. “Don Juan and Byron's Imperceptiveness to the English Word.” Studies in Romanticism 18 (1979): 207‑33.
Felluga, Dino Franco
Purdue University
George Eliot, Lord Byron, and the Dangers of Influence
When Lady Caroline Lamb called Byron “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” she anticipated a cultural diagnosis that would plague Byron throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. While previous critics have considered what this pathologization of Byron means for Romantic and Victorian poetry, a more interesting story remains to be told: how the figure of Byron as melancholic poet enables the formation of the very genre to which this figure seems most inimical—the nineteenth-century realist novel. So successful was the nineteenth century’s sensationalizing dismissal of Byron that the only novels one might imagine him inspiring would be pornographic (and, indeed, there were many of those). But, as I show in my current manuscript, Byron and the Constitution of the British Novel, “serious” novels took Byron, if not seriously, then at least anxiously, dealing with his figure over and over again. This need to repeat, seen in novels from across the nineteenth century, is symptomatic of more than just a sick fascination with Byronic romanticism; it is, I will argue, an indication of the deep generic threat that Byron’s opus poses to smooth functioning of the novel and the ideological threat that his corpus poses to the routines of “respectable” nineteenth-century life. For novels of the nineteenth century, however, Byron is more than a mere negative example around which they might constitute their own generic boundaries. His is also the model of romantic sensibility and political engagement that Victorian novelists needed to adapt—indeed, to reform—in order to produce their own version of the bourgeois subject, a subject marked by both its supposed “interiority” and its commitment to social reform. More than just an easy dismissal of Byron, then, nineteenth-century novels perform a complex negotiation with his figure and ideas.
In my essay for this conference, I turn to George Eliot’s Felix Holt, which can be read as an extended essay on Byron and on his legacy for the Victorian novel and the bourgeois subject. Rather than treat Byron directly, however, Eliot splits him into two: the romance idealism of his poetry, which Esther Lyon must learn to reject in order to become a responsible English citizen and mother; and the extreme skepticism of Byron’s politics, which is represented by the thinly veiled analog for Byron, Harold Transome, newly returned from his travels in Greece. We are thus presented with the same dialectical terms offered by Michael McKeon in his analysis of the eighteenth-century novel (romance idealism and extreme skepticism); we also return to McKeon’s opposition between questions of truth and questions of virtue, but rethought in terms of the nineteenth-century novel and nationalist ideology. The sublation of McKeon’s dialectic is the very novelistic form that we are in the process of reading: the high Victorian realism of Eliot’s own novel. Eliot thus negotiates not only the aesthetic and radical legacy of Byron but also the competing sub-genres of the respectable novel: domestic, historical, and political fiction. Eliot establishes a transcendent, universal notion of aesthetic and ethical truth by dividing and conquering Byron, undercutting Byron’s earlier critique of such naturalizing maneuvers in the ideologies of his own day. Eliot’s notion of a class-less ideology of duty thus legitimizes bourgeois ideology while disposing of her competitors for the labels of truth and virtue: the radicalism of the lower classes, the chivalric pretensions of the aristocracy, the anti-nationalist globalism of the cosmopolitan; and the ideological critique inherent in Byron’s corpus.
Fleming, James R.
University of Florida
Reading and Misreading Byron in Joyce’s ‘A Little Cloud’ and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The presence of Lord Byron looms large over James Joyce’s short story ‘A Little Cloud’ and the second chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Little Chandler (in ‘A Little Cloud’) and Stephen Dedalus (in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) both identify Byron as a role model and representative of a particular state of being to which they aspire to reach. For Little Chandler and Stephen Dedalus, Byron stands as a highly potent and pertinent symbol of freedom and of life lived unencumbered by the pressures of daily existence and local circumstances. But the Byron that is envied and admired by Little Chandler and the Byron that is celebrated and imitated by the young Stephen Dedalus are two separate and dichotomous figures, each of which represents decidedly conceptions of Byron in the early Modern public imagination. Little Chandler recognizes Byron not as a Romantic poet or political revolutionary, but rather as a melancholic figure capable of garnering public recognition and sympathy through his melodramatic verses. For Stephen Dedalus, Byron serves as something of a counter-cultural icon, a symbol of exile and escape, and serves to signify Stephen Dedalus’s ability at even a relatively young age to think beyond the confines of his personal and local circumstances, not to mention standard literary discourses, and, suggests, in a decidedly Byronic fashion, his need to look away toward Europe for true freedom and intellectual enlightenment.
In this paper I argue that Joyce’s use of Byron in both ‘A Little Cloud and in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man signifies the ways in which English literary opinions swayed the popular conception of both Byron and Romanticism at large in the developing modern imagination. Joyce uses Little Chandler’s simplistic conception of Byron serves to signify the significance of his intellectual and cultural limitations, as well as the measure to which he is inculcated in the standard English conceptions of Byron and Romantic poetry of the early twentieth century. On the other hand, it is not the melancholic and degenerate Byron of popular conception that Stephen Dedalus admires and imitates, but the ideal of the Byronic hero, the Byron whose presence loomed so largely throughout Europe and was praised
for his heroism and boldness of thought and revolutionary capabilities.
Galloway, Stan
Bridgewater College
Manfred of the Jungle: Tarzan as Byronic Hero
The Byronic hero, like Nietzsche's Superman which followed, bore a number of identifiable characteristics, which appealed to the disenchanted Modernists of the early twentieth century. Many Modernists, led by T.S. Eliot, explored the fragmentation of the perceived world, which could not be escaped. Yet escape from the confines of the "civilized" world is exactly what the Byronic hero, especially Manfred, sought. The premier character in the spirit of Byron in the Modernist age, often overlooked, is that of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan.
Like Manfred, the reader finds the literary Tarzan moody and passionate. The "alien, mysterious, and gloomy spirit" identified by M.H. Abrams, et al., is as characteristic of Manfred as it is of Tarzan. And as Abrams, et al., continue, both are "immensely superior in [their] passions and powers to the common run of humanity, whom [they] regard with disdain." Manfred flees society and attains a self-reliance and personal code that defies the society that he has separated himself from. Likewise, Tarzan, who is outside society through circumstance of birth, develops a similar self-reliance and personal code through which he rises above his world. He becomes a sort of wanderer in his later years, having tacitly left his family for the indeterminate call of the self.
Some ennobling variations that Burroughs introduces into the Byronic hero are the type of secret from the past that each explores, the attitude of rebellion that is diminished in Burroughs' character, and the love of woman ennobles rather than destroys. Rather than the damning memory of Manfred's sister, Tarzan's lost memory of parentage motivates much of his search for meaning. Manfred does not ever master the memory, while Tarzan does come to accept the meaning of his secret past. Manfred defies the code of his upbringing, making him a self-exile and a false creator, while Tarzan operates from ignorance rather than defiance, allowing him to adapt without being assimilated. Manfred's relationship with his sister leads to his heroic downfall, while Tarzan's relationship with Jane brings a sense of fulfillment.
The impulse of Byronic hero is strong, seminal for the Modernist mind. Burroughs employs that impulse as well as adapting it to create a twentieth-century hero that Byron would have understood.
Gross, Jonathan
DePaul University
Byron’s “When We Two Parted” in Cather’s Lucy Gayheart
My essay explores how Byron, “the idea,” haunts Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart, as both a cautionary tale and a sign of artistic integrity. Taking her cue from John Stuart Mill’s contrast between Wordsworth and Byron as competing artistic impulses, and Nietzsche’s comments in Daybreak on romanticism as a disease, I explore the figure of Clement Sebastian, a tenor who Lucy Gayheart falls in love with during his musical engagement in Chicago. Byron’s lyric, “When We Two Parted,” is performed in a musical setting by Clement Sebastian that casts him in the role of Byronic hero, a man who both undoes and enables Lucy’s erotic and artistic life. Various versions of the Byron legend emerge in this important novel, alternately played by Sebastian himself, but also by his lame accompanist, James Mockford, whose envious, homoerotic relationship to Clement Sebastian complicates Lucy’s infatuation. Lucy drowns in a lake shortly before committing herself to an artistic life. The sense of fatality and doom that haunts Cather’s novel derives its inspiration from an “idea” of Byron that made him an iconic figure in the early 19th century. I explore how Trelawny’s Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author serves as an ur-text for Cather. She draws on this semi-factual biography to paint a portrait of Byron that disfigures the life and verse Byron actually wrote. Cather’s use of the lyric, “When We Two Parted”, might also suggest that Byron influenced American modernists and pre-modernists as much through his lyrical effusions as through his more avante-garde work in Don Juan, which appears to have had relatively little influence on Cather.
Shortly after her first meeting with Byron in 1812, Caroline Lamb described “That beautiful pale face” as her “fate” (Marchand 1:331) and summed up Byron as “mad-bad-and dangerous to know” (1:328). Lucy senses a similar danger when she encounters Clement Sebastian:
At last the baritone came back, his coat on his arm and his hat in his hand. He bowed to his colleague, the bass, then turned aside and spoke through the stage door. The lame boy appeared; they had a word together under the applause. Sebastian walked to the front of the stage in the half-darkness and began to sing an old setting of Byron’s When We Two Parted; a sad, simple old air which required little from the singer, yet probably noone who heard it that night will ever forget it. Lucy had come home and up the stairs into this room, tired and frightened, with a feeling that some protecting barrier was gone: a window had been broken that let in the cold and darkness of the night.
Byron’s ephemeral lyric becomes a metonymy for the “cold and darkness” that Lucy experiences, and provides insight into Cather’s interpretation of the meaning of Byron’s example for American modernists.
Guimarães, Paula Alexandra
Universidade do Minho
Representations of Power and Transgression: The Idea of Byron and the Byronic Character in the Poetry of the Brontës
According to Bertrand Russell, “Byron gripped the soul of Western society as no other literary man, stamping the entire 19th century with his own image as the idol and embodiment of Romanticism”. George Gordon’s unrestrained individualism, and the opposites that made him so puzzling and disturbing as a man and so contradictory as an author, probably sprang from an internal conflict: cruelty and benevolence, sincerity and posturing, seriousness and flippancy, conformity and revolt, courage and self-pity, faith and cynicism. His rich personality has suggested many different responses. Byron’s influence in Victorian writers went from fashion and posture to literary moods (Disraeli, Carlyle, Tennyson and Wilde) and, as Elfenbein argues, “defining oneself against Byron, through fictions of personal development, became a ritual of the Victorian authorial career.”
One of the strongest and most original responses to Byron, though, has come from a couple of reclusive young women who, basing themselves in the dashing personalities of the day, created their own ‘myths of power’ (Eagleton) and representations of transgression (often, in the feminine). Harold Bloom noted that “between them, the Brontës can be said to have invented a relatively new genre, a kind of northern romance, deeply influenced both by Byron’s poetry and by his myth and personality […]”. When Byron died at the age of thirty-six in 1824, Charlotte was but eight years old and Emily six. Their youthful age, however, did not preclude Byron and his works from having a profound effect on them and their writing; indeed, the cult of Lord Byron flourished shortly after his death “dominating [the Brontës’] girlhood and their young womanhood” (Bloom).
Tom Winnifrith comments that a study of the Brontës’ juvenilia “provides confirmatory evidence of the sisters’ preoccupation with the aristocracy, their emancipation from Victorian prudery, and the attraction of the Byronic hero, beautiful but damned”. One such example in Charlotte’s early poetry is the character of Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Zamorna and one of her poetic personas), which is based in Childe Harold, but also Alexander Percy, an obvious imitation of Byron’s Conrad (she even calls him a ‘Corsair’). As Elfenbein specifies, “Whereas Byron’s Turkish Tales flirted with the possibility that the inner self might belong to a woman as much to a man, Charlotte’s and Branwell’s Byronic mode gave it exclusively to men”. Only later would the author of Jane Eyre decisively assert that this individuality could be ascribed equally to women and men.
In this respect, Emily Brontë differs substantially from her sister because she was from the beginning faithful to Byron’s ideal of equality. In fact, the most charismatic figure in the fictional poetry derived from her myth of Gondal is a woman, the proud and tragic Augusta Geraldine Almeda. Besides being an imitation of Mary, Queen of Scots and a preview of Queen Victoria herself, A.G.A is perhaps the first prototype of the Byronic Woman and one of the most important poetic personas of Emily. On the other hand, and like Byron himself and his most famed heroes (Harold, Manfred, etc.), Emily seems to have had a peculiar and “profound experience of the abyss of Evil” (Bataille). She felt familiar with Byron’s own background, including his violent ancestry, his sense of sin and damnation, derived from early indoctrination in Scottish Calvinism. Yet, unlike her predecessor, she managed to keep her moral purity intact while fathoming those very depths.
According to Bataille, Emily had the sort of knowledge which links love not only with clarity, but also with violence and death. For this author, what we call vice is based in “this profound implication of death”. It is not surprising, therefore, that the subject of Emily’s only novel is the revolt of the man accursed, whom fate has banished from his kingdom and who will stop at nothing to regain it. “There is no law or force, no convention or restraining pity which can curb Heathcliff’s fury for a single instant – not even death itself. Like in Greek tragedy, the subject is transgression: the tragic violation of the law”. For Bataille, Emily’s poems similarly “express an infinitely profound, infinitely violent experience of sadness or of the joys of solitude”.
Johnston, Richard
Harvard University
Byron, Cain, and Catastrophism
Architecturally, Byron’s mystery drama Cain is a continuation of Paradise Lost. Milton writes about the fall of the first generation of man; Byron dramatizes a fresh lapse within the second generation. The domestic tale at the center of Paradise Lost takes place inside Paradise; Cain is set just outside its walls. Connecting the two works is an overarching concern with death. In Paradise Lost, the punishment for Adam and Eve’s disobedience is mortality. Before they can experience death, however, they must see it perpetrated by one of their children upon another. Cain, of course, is Byron’s account of that murder. Yet death also marks the point of divergence between the two works. Whereas Milton presents death as a temporary state for a special, redeemable race of creatures, Byron suggests that it is a universal and eternal condition, and his vehicle for this insinuation is a contemporaneous geological theory whose ideas, images, and predictions continue to haunt the modern world. This theory is Catastrophism.
In a note appended to the “Preface” to Cain, Byron writes: “The reader will perceive that the author has partly adopted in this poem the notion of Cuvier.” Georges Cuvier was a proponent of Catastrophism, a late eighteenth-century geological theory which held that “the world had been destroyed several times before the creation of man.” Byron read about Catastrophism in an 1813 translation of some of Cuvier’s early work. We see its influence in Act 2, where Lucifer introduces Cain to the idea of death by unfolding a catastrophic vision of the earth’s natural history.
By stressing the importance of Cuvier’s Catastrophism for Byron’s Cain, we can perceive the operation in the text of two peculiarly modern manifestations of the sublime, the experience of which, for Burke, was fundamentally based on an awareness of mortality. The geological equivalent of a John Martin canvas, Catastrophism posits tremendous geophysical upheavals and paints a picture of the universe as a place loaded with death. It participates effortlessly in the natural sublime. However, the true sublimity of Cain’s vision is intellectual. In a letter to Murray, Byron explained that Cain was overwhelmed by “infinite things.” During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, natural historians were challenging traditional estimates of the earth’s age based on scripture. I argue that the eerily modern infinitude at the core of Cain’s anxiety is the profundity of geological time. When Cain beholds all the worlds that have preceded his own, he comes to realize that the earth is an unimaginably old place, and this amplifies his fear that he, his family, and his race live only to die. Faced with a genealogy of death reaching into both of time’s directions, Cain is also left without any spiritual support or consolation. To Cuvier, a devout Christian, Catastrophism offered a way to reconcile geological time with Christian time. In Cain, however, Lucifer presents the Creation as just another page in God’s Catastrophist history. Cain’s personal anxiety about mortality thus becomes universal in scope, and this resonates with our concerns today about the fragility of the biosphere and the power of man to accelerate its destruction.
Jokic, Olivera
University of Michigan
“The Giaour” and the Poetics of Knowledge
This paper will examine “The Giaour” as a poetic project that investigated how readers of the Romantic age could critically engage with formal claims to authenticity and realist representation.
I am interested in investigating how Byron’s peculiar status in literary scholarship and the persistent emphasis on the singularity of his biography have limited discussions about the formal innovation in this fragment poem. I will ask, for instance, in what way (or to what degree) “The Giaour” obeys the critical dictum that Byron’s was “poetry of experience.” I will argue that this was a poem by a known informant about the Orient, who had previously shared (under a thin guise) his empirical experience of the fascinating region; but it is also a poem about Byron’s role in the shaping of poetry as the most acute critical discourse about Europe’s shifting political horizon.
I am interested in investigating how we could think about Byron’s text as a formal provocation to readers to face the implications of modern reading practices (e.g., multiple viewpoints, temporalities, and rhetorical traditions), now commonly associated with historiography and novelistic prose. “The Giaour” offers intriguing invitations to consider the ways authenticity and facts could be produced and circulated through reading and writing practices, and its form suggested these were honed by reading poetry through texts in other, seemingly separate, genres.
I will specifically address Byron’s use of footnotes as one of explicit and seldom addressed formal signals to readers that the poet was meeting demands for “authentic” reportage and serving as a competent informant (e.g., about “Mussulmans” and their opprobrious treatment of women). At the same time, these referential anchors teased careful readers to hone critical faculties, laugh at dubious clarifications, and to notice the tension in which they existed with the verse text.
This is why I would like to consider how the “empirical experience” of the Orient shared in “The Giaour”— disjointed and constantly expanding—constituted poetry as a sort of empirical experience, and not as its means of expression. The presentation I am proposing for the conference is excerpted from a larger project in which I trace the emergence of reading and writing practices during the Romantic period, e.g. the emergent distinction between history and novels, and how they continue to shape our ideas about the textual form of fact, evidence and experience, and to segregate the disciplines that can study them.
Thinking about how these practices, perfectly normalized by now, command how we imagine and match texts that can illuminate one another, I am hoping to suggest an approach to textual scholarship that seeks to revive our understanding of the relationship between writing and modernity in which writing was permitted to substantiate empirical experience shared among readers. My approach to Byron’s work therefore seeks to place his poetry in the wider context of literary history and challenge the domination of prose genres in the narratives about the ascendance of realist representation.
Karkoulis, Dimitri
University of Western Ontario
Byron’s Postmodern Post-apocalypticism
But let it go:—it will one day be found
With other relics of “a former world,”
When this world shall be former, underground,
Thrown topsy-turvy, twisted, crisped, and curled,
Baked, fried, or burnt, turned inside-out, or drowned,
Like all the worlds before, which have been hurled
First out of and then back again to Chaos,
The Superstratum which will overlay us.
So Cuvier says.
(Lord Byron, Don Juan 9.289-97)
In defending his comic vision of the end of the world, the narrator of Byron’s Don Juan appeals, perhaps surprisingly, not to the Book of Revelation but rather to the findings of French geologist Georges Cuvier. That science in the early nineteenth century was supplanting revealed religion as the locus of authority in matters of earth history is evidenced by a similar reference to Cuvier made in the preface to Byron’s ostensibly theological drama Cain, where Byron explains that “the notion . . . that the world had been destroyed several times before the creation of man” has been “partly adopted” from Cuvier. Byron’s citation of Cuvier situates his drama within the early-nineteenth-century controversy surrounding the theological implications of the emergent geological sciences, and, more particularly, the catastrophism of which Cuvier was possibly the most prominent figure (that is, the theory that geologic time is punctuated by sudden and cataclysmic upheavals, or “revolutions,” potentially leading to mass extinctions).
Such an allusion to what may be called “apocalyptic geology” is particularly appropriate to Cain, set as it is in a distinctly post-apocalyptic world—the world beyond the borders of Eden following the biblical fall of humanity. Heaven and Earth, the unfinished companion piece to Cain, is likewise situated on the edge of apocalypse, in this case preceding the imminent Deluge of Genesis. In this paper I suggest that Byron’s apocalypticism—as represented in Cain, Heaven and Earth, and the end-of the-world poem “Darkness”—is uncannily postmodern, both because it emerges in response to upheavals in the contemporary sciences and because apocalypse, for Byron, is always post-apocalypse. Byron anticipates theorists of postmodernity such as Baudrillard and Jameson who characterise the postmodern world as one in which the end is something that has always already happened, where an apocalyptic unveiling reveals not the plenitude of the Logos but rather the “desert of the real,” the catastrophe that has already taken place. Just as, for Jameson, the postmodern world means the end of narrative forms of representing history, the Byronic world resists narrative progression. Rather, it is a palimpsest, constantly being written over by apocalypse after apocalypse, “Like all the worlds before, which have been hurled / First out of and then back again to Chaos.” Thus, Byron’s rewriting of biblical (linear) history through the discourse of the earth sciences in his mystery plays produces not a Hegelian synthesis between the sacred and the scientific but rather an apocalyptic and traumatic break with “a former world” that resists recuperation. That Cain’s journey through space and time effects this unsettling rupture with the past, resulting in both his murder of Abel and the drama’s lack of resolution, suggests that Byron could not successfully incorporate scientific theories of non-teleological apocalypse into the text of sacred history. In Heaven and Earth, Byron would return to the subject of earth’s revolutions, but again fail to narrativise them in any fruitful way, leaving the drama in fragmentary form and thus enacting himself the returns and repetitions found in Cain.
Kinzel, Till
Technical University, Berlin
Byron’s Manfred, Nietzsche, and philosophy’s fatal truth
Byron as an icon of modernity and modernity’s subjectivism will be explored in this paper with respect to a lineage pointed out succinctly by Carl Schmitt in his seminal book on Politische Romantik. Schmitt exemplifies the crucial tenets and implications of Romanticism’s modernity by claiming that at its core one finds the notion of the private priesthood of the individual, rejecting the church’s sovereignty over the human soul. As the high priests of this private priesthood Schmitt regards the trinity of Byron, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche, whom he sees as heirs to or representatives of the non-idyllic face of Romanticism. I will look at the different ways that especially Nietzsche appropriates, develops and engages crucial elements of Byron’s outlook on man and the world. For Nietzsche’s philosophical Byronism aims at overcoming a narrow conception of Romanticism by turning towards a positive understanding of the ‘superhuman’ dimensions depicted, e. g., in Byron’s Manfred. Nietzsche’s appropriation of Manfred’s words to the effect that „sorrow is knowledge: those who know the most/ Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth:/ The tree of knowledge is not that of life“, highlight the ambivalent nature of modernity’s valorization of knowledge, and more particularly, the ‚effectual truth’ in Machiavelli’s sense.
In the context of Nietzsche’s view of the salutary caracter of illusions, particularly of a religious character, at least for the many, the question needs to be addressed whether the quest for philosophical knowledge as a crucial element of the private priesthood of the individual does indeed hide a deep despair, as Schmitt claims and Byron’s Manfred, for one, seems amply to demonstrate.
Nietzsche’s confrontation with the philosophical richness of Byron’s works leads to a wide-ranging engagement with „the religious life“ as such, in the context of which Nietzsche explicitly quotes some of Byron’s most memorable lines. The theological and moral implications of the religious life come under Nietzsche’s thorough scrutiny. The opposition of salutary lies and errors and deadly or fatal truths that is alien to Biblical religion but forms a major component of Byron’s and Nietzsche’s world view implies an understanding of the nature and necessity of pain as well as of the question of the ‘truth value’ and ‘life value’ of religion as such. By looking closely at the context of Nietzsche’s appropriation of Byronic sentiments and reflections, I will offer some tentative conclusions about how Nietzsche tried to resolve the conflict between the concepts of knowledge and life, taking into account the shift implied in first stating that “sorrow is knowledge” and then pointing out that the fruit of the tree of knowledge is not knowledge but probability, the illusion of truth (‘Wahrscheinlichkeit’), and not freedom but the illusion of freedom. Nietzsche, it appears, starts out from the depths of his Romantic despair akin to that of Manfred, but complements this in such a way as to integrate the Byronic criticism of knowledge into his notion of the serenity or festive frivolity of the philosopher for whom there is no possibility of a Romantic return to Christianity.
Kipperman, Mark
Department of English, Northern Illinois University
Is there a Byron in the House?: Fox’s Bad-Boy Healer
Attractive transgression is, of course, one enduring mark of the Byronic figure in literary culture. The type is older than Byron or his creations, traceable at least to Milton’s Satan or Richardson’s Lovelace. Only in the nineteenth century did Byron’s immense appeal and poetic fame bring to a mass readership the inner torments of a wounded aristocratic outlaw, bringing into the cultural center a figure associated mostly with readers harboring a guilty or secretive fondness for lurid gothic tales or confessions. With Byron came an extravagant and overt magnetism. The transgressive Byronic hero breaks his taboos both within his narrative and also across the restrictions and borders of cultural genres and markets.
In our own day, say the television era of the last twenty years, such shock and novelty have lost a lot of their power. Most of the reasons for this are well-known, but in the case of the brooding Byronic loner one traditional element works against instant popularity. Both Byron and his heroes are aristocrats, or in the case of his brigands, natural and aloof elites. Modern popular culture would find it hard to locate an aristocracy whose claims of blood and breeding could generate its own dashing heroic rebels. The Byronic loner cherishes a sense of exceptionalism as he immures himself in his crushed idealism and secret pain or guilt. Few television heroes originate in an aristocracy whose inner life would much interest a mass audience.1
Now, however, Fox Television has given us a wounded healer, a member of a modern elite, a lonely outlaw physician, Gregory House. House overturns a long tradition of celebrating the wisdom and compassion of TV doctors. Though television shows have had a few surly rebel doctors like Ben Casey, none has probed such a Byronic figure’s place in a modern setting like Hugh Laurie’s House. The portrait is likely consciously drawn: the Cambridge-educated Laurie worked on the BBC’s historical comedy Blackadder series, and the allusiveness of his character is slyly literary, as in the pun in the detective-doctor’s name, House/Holmes. But the Byronic trappings are also floridly realized: the obsessive introverted isolation; the mental anguish; the physical pain of a Byronic limp; addiction to opiates; a dark, charismatic and oddly attractive personality, especially to his loyal band of followers; brooding over a lost and impossible love; a commitment to his own superhuman powers of mind and a healing power almost magical.
The interest of this character is in the collision of such a literary type with a modern realistic utterly rationalized workplace, the elite hospital. And within this setting, Laurie’s character enacts an ideology of nineteenth-century individualist heroism confronting contemporary issues of race and gender equality in his endlessly conflictual relations with his specialist team.2 To be sure, some of the commercial motive for dramatizing this conflict is the Fox Network’s anti-liberalism. But the character’s pain and isolation do not argue that a Byronic hero has much to gain in our world from the exceptionalism he believes is the source of his magic.
Endnotes
1 The J. R. Ewings of pop culture may have a wicked charm, but their greed and arrogance run no deeper than that; and in any case the medium enters millions of living-rooms with the aim of promoting the aspirations of a bourgeoisie whose hope for success and happiness lies in the marketplace of commodities and the world of work, not in the world of the super-rich. No, TV’s privileged elites are its cops, lawyers, doctors.
2 In his structural analysis of television’s characterization, John Fiske points out that, unlike cinema, television creates consistent, serially realized characters who may represent broad ideological conflicts and anxieties. Often, what on one level appears as psychological character conflicts and similarities can be read as coding specific socio-political ideologies and discourses: Television Culture (1987; London: Routledge, 1999) 149-164.
Laxer, Christopher
University of Toronto
In Worship of an Echo: the Branding of Byron
Shortly after the publication of John Polidori’s The Vampyre, Goethe rather curiously declared it to be Lord Byron’s “greatest masterpiece”. The misattribution is telling, precisely because The Vampyre does not even remotely resemble any of the poet’s other works. It does however, in the character of Lord Ruthven, capture the image of the poet perfectly. This episode demonstrates that by 1819 Byron’s name and iconic image had become a fully autonomous media construct, capable of producing literary success regardless of literary quality; as such, it arguably counts as the first incarnation in history of that most modern form of immortality: celebrity.
Drawing upon Naomi Klein’s No Logo and the subsequent explosion of critical interest in the subject, my paper argues that Byron’s career is best understood through the prism of branding. John Murray’s innovative advertising techniques, a rapidly expanding literary marketplace, and the scandalous life and poems of the poet himself all conspired to create BYRON the brand-name.
BYRON became a tool of self-expression, a fashion accessory as well as a marker of counter-cultural status among one of the first genuine subcultures. Later, as Andrew Elfenbein has argued, BYRON was to haunt the primary vehicle of Victorian identity-formation: the bildungsroman. In its wake, the reverberations of which we feel even now, BYRON became the bridge by which the elitist, anti-bourgeois attitudes of the old aristocracy became the elitist, anti-bourgeois attitudes of the new artist-ocracy or avant-garde. With Byron’s meteoric success, the culture industry learned a valuable lesson, characteristic of modernity: transgression sells.
BYRON was so successful that it grew into an industry, one that quickly realized that the demand for all things Byron far outstripped the poet’s authentic productions, and gleefully began producing Byronic forgeries. Eventually, BYRON came to brand Byron in a different sense – marking him with infamy, like a criminal – arguably triggering his divorce and eventual exile from England. The latter half of Byron’s career saw the poet attempt ever-more radical gestures to regain control of his own (brand) name and identity: from his adoption of a new, satiric mode in Don Juan, to his increasing political radicalization and the obsession with freedom that ultimately led him to find his glorious death at Messolonghi.
In The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell places Byron between Hegel and Schopenhauer, crediting the poet with being the spokesman and symbol of ‘aristocratic rebellion’ – a legacy that has “inspired a long series of revolutionary movements, from the Carbonari after the fall of Napoleon to Hitler’s coup in 1933.” Russell argues that the peculiar circumstances of Byron’s childhood – his controlling mother, early poverty, and his physical deformation – led the poet to such a stance. My paper contends that his rebellion was as much the product of his years of fame and infamy. It was a product of brand BYRON – the sum of his own shed images – that echo of himself that he alternatively embraced, rejected, or tried to recapture in vain; that echo of himself that Russell saw stalking modernity like a curse.
Leach, Nat
Cape Breton University
Byronic Performances and the “Transformation” of the Subject
If Byron the poet and public persona is a foundational figure for the invention of the modern conception of the “self,” Byron the dramatist is equally foundational for the contemporary rethinking of the embodied subject. Byron’s plays, on the one hand, depict identity as performative, while on the other hand, they expose the physical grounds of identity that limit and disrupt such performances of self. Byron’s historical tragedies, for example, serve to dramatize the crucial role of place and body in the construction of the subject; while their protagonists performatively identify themselves with their social roles, these performances are circumscribed by the susceptibility of the body to the forces of violence and of time. It is in the late fragment, The Deformed Transformed, however, that Byron most radically stages the problem of the body for the thinking of subjectivity. Martyn Corbett has observed that the play has more affinities with the age of Brecht and Beckett than with the Romantic period, and my particular interest here is with the implications of this proto-avant-garde drama for Byron’s reworking of Romantic discourses of identity. In this paper, I will argue that The Deformed Transformed stages, and thus holds up for scrutiny, the process of performing the self in order to show the limitations and contingencies involved in any such performance. In this way, Byron’s modernity can be seen not simply in his construction of a highly mobile concept of self, but in his insistence that this subject is one that can never be fully performed. Byron stages identity as a necessarily spectral performance, reducible neither to an ideal, nor to its materiality.
The Deformed Transformed, like Don Juan, emerges at least partly in response to Coleridge’s discussion of the Don Juan figure in his critique of Charles Maturin’s Bertram (which Byron championed at Drury Lane). Coleridge condemns Maturin’s glorification of the “insane wish” to be loved as a self entirely separate from one’s qualities, and it is precisely this desire that Byron dramatizes in The Deformed Transformed. The protagonist, Arnold, typifies this desire, but Byron’s drama critically stages his attempt to escape from his body in a way that demonstrates the inherently fragmentary nature of the self. The body-changing sequence represents this mobility of selfhood quite literally, as Arnold rejects his physical form in favour of that of Achilles, but, just as crucially, he cannot fully escape his old self, which is adopted by the devil figure, Caesar. The physical body is thus presented as neither an inessential corporeality nor an ideal signifier of the self, but as the site of an irreducible tension between the material and the ideal. Byron here dramatizes the perils of self-fashioning, and stages a fable of identity that shows both the performative nature of the modern subject, and the irreducible materiality in which these performances are necessarily grounded. Byron thus stages a modern “subject” by exposing the act by which it constitutes itself, re-presenting the construction of the self in order to show the gaps that inhere within every performance of identity.
Levy, Michelle
Simon Fraser University
Byron’s Libels
This paper will locate Byron’s modernity in his insistence upon naming specific individuals, in his willingness, throughout his career, to court prosecution for libel. From English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) through to Don Juan (1819-24), Byron persisted in identifying and, more often than not, scandalizing specific individuals. Whether he was addressing public matters of state or his own private affairs, Byron steadfastly eschewed more traditional and acceptable forms of narrative disguise. As he set out to shame specific critics who had spurned him, poets who had betrayed their calling, politicians who had wronged the nation, and the wife who had abandoned him, Byron rejected most of the strategies that had been developed by satirists over centuries to protect themselves from legal charges of defamation. Specifically, he repudiated the legal refuge of innuendo, by which satirists were safe as long as they “used only the victim’s initials or substituted a fictitious name for the victim’s real one.”1
This is not to say that Byron was without restraint. He would come to regret the loss of favor that accompanied his name-dropping spree in English Bards, attempting to suppress later editions of the poem, and would accede to a degree of censorship in Don Juan, particularly out of fear that a finding of obscene libel could be used to deny him guardianship of his daughter (as had happened to Shelley). Nevertheless, in many poems and particularly Don Juan, Byron named his enemies, vehemently expressing his loathing of Southey and his disgust at the Duke of Wellington. Even the recent suicides of Castlereagh and Romilly only emboldened him further. On the domestic front, Byron was hardly less chastened; from the scandalous references to his wife in Poems on his Domestic Circumstances to the outrage he felt over Murray’s censorship of allusions to Byron’s wife in Canto I of Don Juan, the poet persisted in incorporating his family directly into his writing. Indeed much of the harshest criticism that Byron would endure was because of his indelicacy with respect to his own family. In his refusal to conform to well-established satirical modes, and by refusing to keep his domestic affairs private, Byron broke radically with contemporary practices and standards.
Byron in Don Juan also openly ridiculed the strategies then coming into fashion for disguising referents to the real even beyond proper names. He takes issue, for example, with the fictional habit of “making squares and streets anonymous” (13.26). By refusing to specify “Blank-Blank Square;--for we will break no squares / By naming streets” (13.25), Byron mocks the fictional habits of his contemporaries, a strategy perhaps most familiar to us from Austen’s novels. In particular, Byron mocks the use of syncopation, which had a long tradition in the political roman-a-clef of the Restoration (as recently discussed by Michael McKeon) but the use of which was, as he implied, being taken to illogical extremes. Though Byron acknowledged that the age in which he lived was a “censorious” one (13.25) and made many concessions to it, he nevertheless demonstrated his commitment to veracity over verisimilitude, to narrative that not merely seemed but “actually [was] true” (1.202.1616). This paper will argue that he did so in part, of course, to shock his readers, but also to achieve a more serious purpose, in the belief that the efficacy of social, poetical, and political critique was lost if one hid behind “blanks” or other fictive placeholders.
Endnotes
1 Carl R. Kropf, “Libel and Satire in the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8 (1974): 153-68, 159.
Lofdahl, William
Marquette University
A Lad Insane: Lord Byron and the Youth Counter Culture
In 1973 a character arose out of the British Glam Rock movement whose flamboyant mannerisms and strong, bi-lateral sex appeal propelled him to the forefront of a revolutionary, sexual counter-culture. David Bowie’s alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, exerted an influence so pervasive that today the image, readily associated with hedonism and sexual democracy has permeated into and is recognizable to most mainstream media. In a very concrete way, David Bowie, through Ziggy Stardust and his subsequent character creation, Aladin Sane, was the inheritor of a tradition of sexual revolution begun in early nineteenth-century Britain. The early 1970’s in Britain and, subsequently, America saw a rupture in the youth counter-culture movement which closely parallels the disruption caused by the satanic school of Romanticism in its reaction against the Lake poets. The Glam-rock movement sought to reinvigorate Britain’s youth from the perceived complacency it had found in Bob Dylan and other bluesy-folk music of the hippie movement.
Ziggy Stardust became the icon for this new counter-culture movement. In this role, Bowie took up the sword that was passed to him by such figures as Oscar Wilde who, in-turn, inherited the iconography that started with Lord Byron who was, himself, the icon of a youth driven sexual counter-culture in Romantic Europe. The foundations of modern sexual revolution which seek to create subjectivity for all sexualities and gender constructions as expressed in the Stardust icon were laid by Byron’s carefully self-constructed image and the legend which grew beyond his control in the hands of the youthful Byromaniacs. This image of elegant depravity or unconstrained vice or free spirited sexuality—depending on one’s point of view—gave of the youth of Britain the hero-figure needed to bolster their socio-political movement. The fanaticism of Stardust’s followers is analogous to the Byromania of the nineteenth-century. In fact, one of the arguments presented in this essay is that David Bowie was consciously aware that he was the product of Byronic influences and that he deliberately drew from modern Byronism in the production of some of his most memorable characters. Rather than being their own phenomena, Ziggy-mania and the similar reactions to Aladin Sane are simply extensions or modern manifestations of the nineteenth-century counter-cultural Byronism, an idea that Bowie himself jokingly attests to in his parody of his own fame, “Jazzin’ for Blue Jean” where a self-centered Screamin’ Lord Byron relished in his mesmerized fans’ devotion.
Lokke, Kari
UC Davis
Isak Dinesen’s Lord Byron and the Art of Storytelling
For women writers of the nineteenth century, Lord Byron, as both man and poet, constitutes the quintessential Romantic subject. Whether as representative of camaraderie and challenge for Germaine de Staël, erotic and political tension and striving for Mary Shelley or professional competition for Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon, Byron embodies the Romantic poet against whom these women writers measure themselves and from whom they seek to free themselves. Indeed, George Sand, termed the French Lord Byron by her fellow poet Lamartine, struggled with the honor of this mantle only to reject it vehemently in Lettres d’un Voyageur as contaminated by a Napoleonic taint: “Repose is the most precious gift it is in God’s power to bestow; God alone can bear the burden of glory deservedly, and simple men who seek to do good are greater in his eyes than great men who do evil.”
This poetic struggle culminates in the twentieth century with the Danish modernist Isak Dinesen (1885-1962) as she seeks, in her gothic and decadent tales, to come to terms with the significance of Byron’s legacy, now compounded by its transformation and intensification at the hands of his descendant, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings Dinesen came to know as a young woman through the work of the Danish intellectual historian Georg Brandes. Dinesen, in fact, styled herself as Lord Byron in a youthful correspondence with a close female friend who answered as his betrothed Annabella Milbanke. And in the last years of her life, Dinesen wrote an artistic manifesto, a tale entitled “Second Meeting” whose only characters are Lord Byron and his double named Pipistrello, the obscure director of an Italian marionette theater, a manifesto that seeks, through the figure of the storyteller, to define the relationship between Romantic, heroic subjectivity and modernist disinterest.
In this paper I read “Second Meeting” as a modernist, feminist response to myths of Byronic subjectivity in which the ideal artist is defined as anonymous storyteller against the backdrop of the seductive but ultimately failed effort of the larger than life Byronic hero. Dinesen herself refused the title of writer, novelist or poet, repeatedly and insistently identifying herself as a storyteller. Like her contemporary Walter Benjamin, however, Dinesen feared that storytelling was an all but lost art. But whereas Benjamin, in his classic essay The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, announces that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end,” Dinesen seeks, in her own tales, first and foremost, to renew and enliven the venerable tradition of Scheherazade and her many nameless female descendants.
Dinesen encapsulates this effort in the character of the Byronic double Pipistrello who embodies the storyteller precisely as Benjamin defines him. First, he shares counsel or wisdom, rather than conveying information. Thus, he guarantees the indefinite perpetuation of the tale, for as Benjamin writes, “counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding.” Second, death sanctions the words of Benjamin’s storyteller. As Byron’s double, who once saved his life and then appears fourteen years hence to announce his imminent death, Pipistrello borrows his authority from that knowledge to create a story from the “small self-inflicted defeats” that have constituted Byron’s life up to that point: “What you need now to round off all these sad details of fourteen years, is one great and deadly defeat, brought on by no fault of your own. That is going to make a unity of the disintegrating elements.” And finally, just as Benjamin’s storyteller is a figure of consummate detachment, “the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed by the gentle flame of his story,” so Dinesen’s obscure and dispassionate artist announces that he has “forfeited [his] claim to a real human life” so that everything that has happened to him since his first meeting with Byron could be turned into an unending story. Byron’s poetry, on the other hand, he explains to the renowned author, will “collect dust on the shelves” of the future; only one book of Byron’s will be rewritten and reread, appearing in new editions every year: The Life of Lord Byron.
McNeilly, Kevin
University of British Columbia
Late Rhapsody: Tyrone Power Reading Byron
In late 1953, Hollywood social swashbuckler and leading man Tyrone Power found himself in New York City, and agreed to tape a short programme of Byron’s poetry for the fledgling Caedmon Records label. Caedmon had emerged in 1950 with the success of its first issue, an LP of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales and five poems; this latter record arguably established the spoken word record market, and set a precedent for a nascent form of domestic American bardic recital, a slickly modernistic, technologically-mediated equivalent to some ancient rhapsode’s ecstatic performances. By the time Power had recorded his brief selection of Byron poems – the whole recording, in keeping with the LP format, runs under 40 minutes – Caedmon had evolved something of a literary performance style, employing screenwriter, poet and dramatist Howard O. Sackler – who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1971 – as its house voice director. Sackler’s collaboration with Power is more than generic, however; Power’s Byron reading is self-consciously selected and structured to exploit both the two-sided form of the vinyl LP, and Sackler’s direction clearly informs the nuanced duplicity of Power’s delivery, shaped by the artificial intimacies of microphone and studio.
Expanding on Theodor Adorno’s reading of “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” this paper interrogates the latter-day – or in Adorno’s terminology (recently taken up by Edward Said), the late – refigurations of Romantic bardic style in mid-century America as a culturally and critically viable instance of anachrony, of historical displacement. The excerpts from Byron that constitute Power’s repertoire (and he would deliver a comparable roster of Byron’s poems in a reading on NBC radio in February 1956, suggesting the durability of his late-career image as latter-day Byronic hero) combine the first canto of Don Juan – the work of Byron the Romantic ironist – with lyric chestnuts of quavering sensuality (“She Walks in Beauty”) and adumbrations of Wertherian sensibility (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage). While little is new in recognizing the contradictions of the Byronic persona in these texts, what remains significant are the means by which this rich contrariety transposes itself, re-voiced and virtually re-embodied, into Power’s media- and image-saturated present. The collaboratively-penned sleeve-notes to the LP assert that Byron “cannot be recited – he must be played,” but immediately admit that Byron “played Byron himself,” that the duplicity of performance, of rhapsodic work, inform not just Power’s reading but the poetry too, as textual performance. Although it might be tempting to see the Caedmon recording as an instance of nostalgic sentimentalism – as one of the American cultural establishment’s responses to the then-notorious countercultural forces of bebop and Beat poetry (of which Sackler, for example, openly admitted reactive awareness) – in fact the recording works in a much more complex manner, as Adorno’s reading of the record’s form suggests, to open a critical interrogation into the modern American cultural function, at once ironic and iconic, of recording itself.
Minta, Stephen
University of York
The Modernity of Byron's Politics: Reflections from the Greek Archives
'I never was consistent in anything but my politics...'
(Byron to Murray, 27 December 1813)
'If I live ten years longer, you will see...that it is not over with
me--I don't mean in literature, for that is nothing...But you will see that I will do something or other--the times and fortune permitting--that, "like the cosmogony, or creation of the world, will puzzle the philosophers of all ages"'.
(Byron to Moore, 28 February 1817)
'Opinions are made to be changed--or how is truth to be got at? we don't arrive at it by standing on one leg? or on the first day of our setting out...'
(Byron to Murray, 9 May 1817)
My research over the past five years has been in the area of Byron' politics. Most of my work has been with Greek archival material in the National Library of Athens and some idea of the range of sources involved can be gained from the notes to my recent article, 'Lord Byron and Mavrokordatos', published in Romanticism, 12.2 (2006), 126-142, and in a forthcoming article for Studies in Romanticism on 'Byron and Mesolongi'. For the present proposal, that list of sources is complemented by the evidence of two important archives that were not available to me previously: those of the Koundouriotis brothers and the Metropolitan Ignatios, as well as additional material from the papers of the London Greek Committee, also held at Athens.
It has been my assumption that a rewriting of Byron's politics, particularly in the context of his experiences in Greece in 1823-4, requires, at the very least, two conditions: (1) the existence of sufficient evidence from the Greek side to nuance the largely anecdotal
and inevitably personal accounts available in English from those who were with Byron in Greece; and (2) a political climate within which Byron's scepticism or pragmatism could be revealed as something further than mere improvisation or, indeed, desperation.
My work thus addresses some long-standing tendencies in critical writing about Byron. F. Rosen, in Bentham, Byron, and Greece (1992), puts a traditional view in its most unforgiving form: '[Byron] lacked', he writes, 'ideological commitment in a setting that required it, if any progress (of whatever value) was to be made' (193). While M. Kelsall, in Byron's Politics (1987), minimises Byron's final Greek contribution by decoupling it from the work. Since Byron produced almost no poetry in the final months in Greece, 'the tragic adventure is of little concern'. Politically also, Byron's arrival in Greece in 1823 could be considered as 'of no intrinsic importance' (194-5).
That such positions could have been held over so long a period is unsurprising. Byron's own language of 'commitment' is self-consciously unengaged ideologically and can be read as simple naivety. It is easy to take him at only face value when he writes, for example, of his plan 'to go amongst the Greeks or Americans--and do some good' (September 1822).
In any age where the idea of commitment is necessarily dependent on a systematic world view that alone could underpin it, there is little space to argue for a Byronic politics in any sustained sense of the term. Divorced from ideology, there can apparently be only drift, confusion, and misapplied zeal.
That the Greek side has never supported such positions as those highlighted above is instructive. Less emotionally concerned with the death of a famous man, the Greek archival material--nearly all of it in the form of official correspondence between leading Greek political figures--suggests very different possibilities of reading Byron's politics. There is an unsystematic coherence about his political commitment, one that can be fruitfully linked to the literary work. It is perhaps possible now to do justice to Byron's own views about what he was doing in Greece, within a modern political environment willing to engage with its apparent paradoxes.
Murrah, Erin
University of New Mexico
Shedding Light on Byron’s “Darkness”: The Importance of Signifying Nothing
In his poem “Darkness,” Byron presents stark images of chaos, and oblivion. The Earth’s guiding source of illumination, the sun, is inexplicably extinguished, and humankind resorts to building massive bonfires, which ultimately destroy what they are supposed to be illuminating. Byron adds to this sense of chaos by presenting words with antithetical definitions; stars are “rayless” and morning does not bring day. Darkness becomes the natural state of the universe and light is presented as a violent, man-made atrocity that consumes both civilization and nature. Ruin, death, and oblivion are recurring themes in Byron’s poetry, and “Darkness” clearly articulates these themes as the result of our attempt to create illumination, or meaning. As such, the poem is a key to exploring Byron’s struggle with meaning and purpose.
Byron plays with the role of language, our main conduit for meaning, in many of his poems. In Childe Harold he famously wrote “I do believe,/ Though I have found them not, that there may be/ Words which are things” (114.1054961). The use of qualifiers “may” and “believe” compounded with the fact that he has not actually seen these words exposes Byron’s doubt about the ability of language to represent “things” even as he attempts to proclaim his belief in “words.” Byron’s ability to play on the duplicitous nature of language in order to reveal the absence that lies beneath meaning prefigures Nietzsche, Modernism, and Post-Modernism. “Darkness” in particular explores some of the ideas about language, and meaning that would later be articulated by these schools of thought—the demise of a metaphysical center, a disconnection between words and what they claim to signify, the possibility and problems of misreading, etc. Byron’s repeated attempts to articulate oblivion ultimately fail to signify Nothing—his void is always filled with words and thus can never truly be a void—yet the attempt itself troubles ideas of truth and presence in a way that shakes the very foundations of Western thought.
Though Byron never articulated a specific poetic philosophy the way Wordsworth or Shelly did, he demonstrated an exceptional understanding of language and it may be said that his philosophy is in the poetry itself. His writing is constantly on the brink, between satire and sentiment, hero and villain, Romanticism and Classicism. “Darkness” with Byron on the brink between meaning and oblivion.
Murray, Padmini Ray
University of Edinburgh
“Tis no slight task to write on common things” : Byron’s material world
Robert Burton, in his seminal work of modernity, The Anatomy of Melancholy writes that he is: “A mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures, and how they act their parts, which methinks are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene.” Byron echoes these words in Don Juan, as he portrays himself, unlike Juan, as one who looks on as “a mere spectator” (a phrase that he repeats in XIII.7.54) or even “as a mourner or a scorner” (XI.69.550-551). This melancholia is an outcome of commodity culture, a culture, that, as Guinn Batten has pointed out: “denies its origins even as its desires bespeak its unconscious attachment to what it claims to have relinquished.” The isolation felt by both Burton and Byron is a consequence of the increasing status of the thing, the material object, that simultaneously devalues yet appeals to humankind.
In the Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron personifies this seductive appeal of the commodity as feminine, embodied by the statue of Venus de Milo that causes one to both “gaze and turn away” (line 442) and his engagement with this culture of consumption finds its ultimate expression in Don Juan, that poem that at its outset declares its concerns with “common things”. Common things and domestic objects are important to the action of the poem, such as Inez’s ornamented Missal that is considered a potent instrument of corruption, or Juan’s shoes that expose his presence to the cuckolded Alfonso demonstrating how, in Bill Brown’s words, it is the “occasions of contingency—the chance interruption—that disclose a physicality of things”. Juan is a body, “a thing among things” (Merleau-Ponty) whose worth is his capacity to make love, which is “a marketable vice” (I.64.512), his somatic value (as well as the poem’s theme) emblematized by the epigraph and is designated with all those hallmarks of the early nineteenth century commodity, fetishised by virgins and married women alike.
It is Byron’s concern with the “common thing” that I will argue marks him as a pivotal figure of modernity, his concerns not only with the material object, but also with the embodied body in space that moderates his voice as a Romantic subject, yet sets him apart from his contemporaries. In today’s world of contradictions that simultaneously endorses personalisation (as demonstrated by RSS feeds, blogs, ipod shuffles), depersonalisation (as online personas begin to flourish independently of their creators), and communication (social networking websites, mobile telephony and the internet), we can find echoes of the tensions exerted on Byron by technology and commerce. Byron bemoans “The unusual quickness of these common changes” (XI.81.648) in Don Juan, these “common changes” inseparable from those “common things” that wreak them. It is this anxiety too, I will demonstrate, that makes Byron a problematic figure for critical scrutiny within the academy, for he embodies the uneasy relationship that still exists between technology and the humanities, which is itself a symptom of the modern condition.
Nadel, Ira
University of British Columbia
Byron in Performance
Byron in Performance will explore the multiple roles of Byron on-stage and off in recent drama, opera, film and fiction. Through work by Virgil Thomson, Tennessee Williams, Ken Russell, Romulus Linney and Benjamin Markovits, contemporary reconfigurations of Byron will be examined from the perspective of performance theory. The paper will consider how each artist envisions Byron in response to the demands of individual genres. In short, what does it mean to perform Byron and how do the requirements of genre renew, revise or reconfirm his image for modern audiences?
Byron’s life and work, of course, have long appealed to composers, dramatists and novelists from Verdi (Il corsaro) and Tchaikovsky (Manfred) to Thomas Love Peacock, Disraeli, and Prokosch. Among dramatists, he appears in work by Tennessee Williams, Howard Brenton and Tom Stoppard. But what similarities, if any, exist in Byron’s performance in these works? Are there any parallels with, for example, the Byron in Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real and Romulus Linney’s Childe Byron – or in film, between Bad Lord Byron (1949) and Ken Russell’s Gothic (1986)? And do actors make a difference? Byron has been variously played by Dennis Price (The Bad Lord Byron), Gabriele Bryne (Gothic), Hugh Grant (Rowing with the Wind) and Johnny Lee Miller (Byron). Christopher Isherwood acted Byron in 1965 and Johnny Depp was to play him in a 2001 film (after Jude Law turned down the role).
Given Byron’s own slippery sense of self, there should be no surprise at his multi- representational character. In his journal, he wrote that he has been compared to “Rousseau – Goethe – Young – Aretine – Timon of Athens . . . Shakespeare, Bonaparte – Tiberius . . . to Milton, - to Pope – to Dryden – to Burns to Savage” and others. It is no surprise, then, that he has been represented as a vampire, Prime Minister, lover, ghost, revolutionary and even poet. The vogue for re-interpreting Byron has not stopped.
While there have been ballets and books about Byron, there has been little attempt to assess his representation as aspects of the peformative. This paper will analyze the manifestations of Byronic performances as exhibited by the various and often contradictory portraits of the poet in an effort to explain both his appeal and manipulation. Of particular importance will be his presentation in work by Tennessee Williams, Virgil Thomson, Romulus Linney and Benjamin Markovits. Visual and verbal examples of Byron in performance will supplement the presentation.
Nicholson, Mervyn
Thompson Rivers University
Byron Envy
It is taken for granted that Byron is an autobiographical poet—indeed, the autobiographical poet par excellence. There are many problems with this assumption, but it has been standard since Byron was a young man. A curious result is that much of what is written about him is actually moral judgments on him as a person. Thus when Phyllis Grosskurth in her biography of Byron remarks casually that Byron was inveterately lazy, she is only a latecomer in a long line of commentators who feel free to moralize on the poet’s shortcomings. A need to sneer at Byron has always been a factor in dealing with Byron. The history of personal attack begins in his lifetime, with books like Glenarvon—a hostile satire on Byron—and The Vampyre, also a hostile satire on Byron (and not the last treatment of Byron as vampire, by the way). Hate books about Byron continue with Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. And since Byron was famous, good-looking, sexually magnetic, rich (at times), and widely read, therefore he can not also be a significant writer or thinker: a view that continues through Matthew Arnold and Carlyle, and continues to the present. For example, Philip Martin informs us that Cain “is as potent an affirmation of Byron’s bankruptcy as a philosophical poet as we are likely to find” (the poem that Percy Shelley declared to be a “revelation not before communicated to man”). Michael Kelsall announces that Byron had no influence to speak of on politics. Drawing on the analysis of my book Male Envy, this paper investigates the logic of denigration in the case of Lord Byron.
Oueijan, Naji
Notre Dame University, Lebanon
Byron’s Virtual Tour of Lebanon
There is no doubt that the countries Byron visited during his first uncompleted Oriental pilgrimage had a notable impact on his personality and poetic career. Especially remarkable and influential were his visits to Greece and Turkey, both of which rendered him “a citizen of the world” and contributed enormously to his poetic career after his composition of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the Oriental tales. But Byron’s initial plan for his Eastern tour also included regions like Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Persia and India. In a letter to John Cam Hobhouse, from Athens, in early February, 1811, Byron writes: “Dear Cam,—My firman for Syria & Egypt being arrived I am off in Spring for Mount Sion, Damascus, Tyre & Sidon, Cairo & Thebes”. Byron, however, could not fulfill his travel wishes for lack of funds and for personal problems in his homeland. In this presentation, I create a Byronic virtual tour of, Lebanon, which had during the time been visited by eminent British and Western travelers and scholars, some of whom Byron was acquainted with. I will base this virtual tour on Byron’s knowledge of and interest in this region which is frequently referred to in his major works. I will construct the route which he could have taken by referring to the actual routes taken by contemporary famous travelers to Lebanon like Lady Hester Stanhope, whom Byron met briefly in Athens, and John Lewis Burckhardt, the Swiss Orientalist whose works were well know by Byron. This Byronic virtual tour will reinforce my assumption that had Byron visited this region his major works, especially the travelogues and his Oriental tales, would have undoubtedly undergone a tremendous expansion and change.
Petrova, Erma
University of Ottawa
The Seduction of Hyper-evil: The Byronic Vampire and the Binaries of Moral Law
As part of the Gothic convention of blurring boundaries, the Byronic vampire exists in a state of constant transgression or erasure of binary oppositions, such as life/death, human/animal, or high/low culture. Interestingly, one of the romantic fantasies associated with the aristocrat, as early as fairy tales, is that the he or she is not confined to being an aristocrat, but has the freedom to defy even that category (often wearing common clothes and moving freely among the lower classes). And the reverse is also true—while the folkloric Nosferatu inhabiting a medieval history of superstitions is only capable of being categorized as sub-human and feral, the Byronic vampire straddles the categories of extreme bestiality and refined humanity, a nocturnal beast that can merge effortlessly into the human world. In this way, he challenges the binary categories that seek to contain and confine his free movement between life and death, or between freedom and necessity—the casual freedom of high society and the animal need for blood.
This paper will aim to show that the Byronic vampire does not violate any specific norms or laws of society, but rather threatens the notion of norm itself. For instance, in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula himself takes care not to break the law, while his human adversaries commit burglary, bribing, falsification of a death certificate, desecration of corpses, and other unlawful acts in an effort to destroy the vampire, in the belief that breaking the law is immeasurably preferable to the greater threat of rendering the law obsolete and meaningless, as human law remains irrelevant and helpless against the supernatural threat of the vampire—and in fact breaking the law becomes for these characters a form of invoking and thus reinforcing the law.
The seduction of the Byronic vampire, his irresistible attraction, is grounded in this rebellion against binary oppositions, a rebellion which seeks to make the categories of good and evil obsolete, posing an equal threat to both sides of the equation. This state of compromised binaries associated with the aristocratic vampire (or any other form of seductive evil) can be seen as a state similar to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality. In “The Precession of Simulacra,” Baudrillard illustrates the lengths to which we would go to defend the reality principle, arguing that, for example, “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real” (12), and that nourishing the imaginary in fact serves to support the fiction that reality exists somewhere else. The Byronic vampire can be seen to perform a similar kind of function for the binaries of good and evil. He is never entirely evil, or completely good, but can rather be termed “hyper-evil”—a kind of evil that threatens the very category of evil, so that committing unlawful acts designated as evil (known to be the opposite of good) becomes a form of fighting the greater evil of the vampire, as it reinforces the moral categories he threatens to destroy. Fighting this kind of evil takes the form of maintaining the binary fiction that good exists somewhere else, while the Byronic vampire embodies a freedom from any binary category (including that of evil itself, or aristocracy itself), a freedom which is the source of his seduction and power.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The U of Michigan P, 1994.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997.
Robinson, David M.
Oregon State University
Green Byron: Jeffers, Snyder, and the Environmental Anti-Hero
Byron has several claims to "modernity," but perhaps his most influential modern gesture is the transformation of the hero from an affirmative figure of ocial authority to a maverick and troublesome exemplar of rebellion and social critique. One line of that influence can be traced in a Thoreauvian tradition of critical environmental discourse, in which a disaffected prophet turns away from society through a return to its imagined antithesis in the natural world. Thoreau’s retreat to the simplified life in a cabin near Walden Pond is a paradigmatic version of this enactment, although the figure of the outcast--the wandering seeker and prophet or the hermit—-is alive throughout the Romantic movement and still vital in modernity. Thoreau’s Walden experiment was both a withdrawal from society and its oppressive demands, and a search for a vantage point from which those societal norms could be convincingly weighed and condemned. Of particular importance was Thoreau’s insistence that "we need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander" through an encounter with the non-human, recognizing something larger and more compelling than human social imperatives.
Thoreau’s acknowledgement of the importance of the non-human became in the twentieth century a crucial principle of environmental thinking, one which was woven into a critique of modern economic and social systems. Robinson Jeffers’s articulation of a philosophy of "inhumanism" and Gary Snyder’s development of a "biocentric" ethic are two of the most representative and important modern versions of this strand of environmental thinking. For each poet embrace of nature requires a somewhat aggressive rejection of the "human," at least as it is culturally defined, transforming the poet into a somewhat threatening and outcast anti-hero, a champion of forces that inevitably seem to diminish human achievement and human desires as they are culturally defined. In assuming this persona of the outcast prophet to the requirements of environmental awareness, Jeffers and Snyder, like Thoreau, refashioned the trope of homeless wandering into one of rooted isolation. By fixing a place of strategic withdrawal—-Thoreau’s Walden cabin, Jeffers’s Tor House and Hawk Tower, or Snyder’s Sierra foothills homestead—-the poets both intensified a connection to the earth and its cycles, and established a vantage from which they could call the "perishing republic" back to economic sanity and ethical principle. Stepping away from the direction of society, an apparent form of retreat, became instead an act of dissent and resistance. As modernity’s environmental crisis continues to build, this tradition of dissent assumes a growing importance.
Sachs, Jonathan
Concordia University, Montréal
Byron, Modernity, and the Decline of Literature
In a much quoted 1817 letter to John Murray, Byron suggests that Romantic writers, “all of us—Scott—Southey—Wordsworth—Moore—Campbell—I—are all in the wrong…we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system.” He continues and explains that having compared the writings of this group to Pope, he was “mortified” to discover the distance “between the little Queen Anne’s Man—& us of the lower Empire—depend upon it [it] is all Horace then, and Claudian now amongst us—and if I had to begin again—I would model myself accordingly.” If Byron’s reference here to a “wrong revolutionary poetical system” raises a number of questions—what is the state or “system” of modern poetry? can revolutions occur in the field of poetry comparable to the way they occur in politics?—then his reference to “us of the lower Empire” and the transition from Horace to Claudian suggests a tentative response. It places his perceived change of poetical systems in explicitly Roman terms, and shows how Rome serves as the model for Byron’s understanding of literary decline, a decline that he associates with Romantic literary modernity more broadly.
This paper briefly surveys the close relationship between Byron’s sense of Roman literary history and his understanding of literary decline with reference to works including “English Bards,” “Hints from Horace,” Childe Harold IV, and Don Juan. It focuses most closely, however, on Byron’s prose contribution to the Pope/Bowles controversy, the “Letter to [John Murray].” I argue that the claims Byron makes in this piece about the state of contemporary British poetry and the standards by which we can assess that state constitute the most explicit statement we have about Byron’s poetic principles. While critics such as James Chandler, Robert Griffin and Jane Stabler have all recognized the importance of Byron’s contribution to the Pope Controversy, they have not paid sufficient attention to Byron’s use of ancient Roman precedents. Byron uses the transition from republic to empire to construct a model of literary decline, one which he then applies to contemporary poetic practice as part of an argument that the poets we call “Romantic” have taken a wrong turn. The “Letter to Murray,” in other words, shows the importance of ancient Rome for evaluating Byron’s attempts to shape poetic modernity through his very resistance to that modernity, and, more generally, it forces us to consider how attention to the relevance of ancient Rome complicates our understanding of Romanticism. In this sense, the Roman example is a challenge for how we understand Romantic modernity not just in Byron’s case, but also for contemporary scholars looking to understand the relevance of classical antiquity for the construction of Romantic modernity.
Salvato, Nick
Cornell University
“I Think of Byron”: Gertrude Stein’s Dramatic Theory
In a 1935 interview with John Hyde Preston, Gertrude Stein said, as she ruminated on passion and its meaning to the artist, “I think of Byron. Now Byron had a passion.”
Scholars have paid little attention to Stein’s play Byron, written almost contemporaneously with this interview. This oversight is not surprising, given the difficulty of the text, yet it constitutes a major critical omission. Far from marginal to Stein’s corpus, Byron is the locus of some of her most extended—and passionate—meditations on playmaking, which ought to be of interest not only to Stein enthusiasts but also and more generally to theorists and historians of modern theatre. With a curiously obsessive fixity of focus, discussions of Stein’s ideas about the theatre almost invariably settle on her essay “Plays,” in which her likening of the play to a landscape has led critics to describe her drama—and her theory of drama—with the term “landscape play.” “Plays” is an important essay, and Stein’s landscape metaphor provides one useful angle from which to approach her drama, but an overemphasis on the importance of the landscape obscures the other theoretical observations that Stein makes about plays—and their helpfulness in interpreting her work.
In Byron, Stein asks insistently and repeatedly, “What is a play.” As she posits a variety of answers to this question, she also introduces us circuitously to Byron, the ostensible subject of the play. One speaker says, “Byron is a queen,” to which another responds, “Indeed but two.” Indeed, whenever “Byron” appears in the play, he is “two.” As a “queen,” one of the Byrons in question is undoubtedly Lord Byron, whose flamboyant dress, arch witticisms, and bisexual exploits certainly qualify him for this slang attribution. Though less immediately discernible to readers unfamiliar with Stein’s life, the other “queen” is her spoiled and temperamental chihuahua puppy Byron, whom she describes at length in Everybody’s Autobiography.
I argue that Stein’s representation of the conjoined figures of Byron and Byron is inseparable from her philosophical meditations on drama. Just as one Byron is always haunted by the other, so too is any one of Stein’s aphoristic statements about playwriting always matched by a related, often contradictory statement. This suturing together of “misfit” elements defines the particular kind of modern(ist) drama that Stein creates and seeks to promote; and her structural strategy is one, I contend, that she perceives as inherited from and continuous with Byron’s artistic program.
Of equal importance, Stein takes full advantage of the nominal identity of poet and dog to imbue Byron’s repeated mentions of “coming,” “playing,” “lying,” and “resting” with overtones of both (human) sexual spontaneity and (canine) ritualized domesticity. At least one effect of this imbrication is the suggestion that sexual spontaneity can inhere in ritualized domesticity—a suggestion that Stein elaborates through reference to her own domestic and sexual life. As I will demonstrate through a reading of Byron alongside love notes exchanged between Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Stein uses the play as an occasion to blur, if not erase, the differences between public and private forms of discourse—and thus develops a species of “closet drama” indebted to but distinct from Byron’s own verse plays.
Schwartz, Sam
University of Arizona
Revisiting Byron’s Erotic Battlefields: The Late Romance of “Modern” Warfare in three American Novels
Of all the political, social, and cultural developments that mark and characterize “modernity,” World War I has long held the critical imagination captive. When it is not described as one of the signal events that ushers in some type of original way of seeing the world, especially because the Great War introduced newly vast possibilities for human self-destruction, then it is at least given its due as a good reason for the ambivalence that many expressed, during and after the war, toward the Enlightenment teleology of moral and intellectual advancement. As the industrial revolution culminated in exciting developments like the mass production of the automobile, which would transform the urban and rural landscape, and perhaps even the experience of time and space itself, it also ushered in new possibilities for death on an unprecedented scale. The introduction of chemical warfare, especially, represented the ruthlessness of Total War, and the double edge of scientific “progress.”
World War I is also cited as one of the main reasons for much of the “disillusionment” evident in modernist literature. And yet the war was also considered by some artists, Hemingway and F.T. Marinetti, to name a couple, as vital to the experience of modernity. Many paradoxical attitudes toward the war, which ranged from unbridled enthusiasm to outright condemnation, and their more subtle variants in between, make World War I and its relation to modern art perhaps a more complex topic than is often assumed.
For my presentation at Byron and Modernity, I would like to begin to introduce a vocabulary of literature and modern war that reconsiders the fault lines that separate modernism from Romanticism, especially in relation to each period’s portrayal of wandering protagonists who encounter war, and more particularly, Byronic heroes and their modernist progeny. The presentation will mainly focus on Canto I of Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which contains “Harold’s” experiences witnessing the Peninsular War, and three characters from twentieth century, American “war” novels: Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises, William Slothrop from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and Yossarian from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
The connections I wish to make between these works center upon how each of these characters experience war as a series of events that imbricate violence and sex. My chief claim will be that this is a “Byronic” experience, hence the “late Romance” of my title; a secondary claim will be that the prevalent tones of disillusionment and absurdity (which putatively mark modernism and postmodernism, respectively) in these novels do not result solely from witnessing war’s underside, but from the paradoxes that result from attempting to negotiate and resolve two seemingly disparate acts—of creation (sex) and destruction (violence)—that so often constitute the reality of war for these characters. Finally, the task of tracing these paradoxes back to Byron’s work insists upon interrogating the assumption that ruptures in artistic practice (Romanticism/Modernism) occur like they do in history (pre- and post-World War I).
Sitter, Zak
Xavier University
Byron’s Commanding Art: “Fixing” the Orient in Lara
Between 1812 and 1816, Byron’s phenomenal celebrity was inseparable from his relationship to the East. His idiosyncratic “Grand Tour” of the Mediterranean periphery between 1809 and 1811 provided him with both a rich source of poetic material and the authority to depict the exotic locales of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the “Eastern Tales.” In contrast to earlier purveyors of literary orientalism, who relied on textual sources to authorize their fictions, Byron could assert, as he did in the preface to Childe Harold, that “[t]he following poem was written, for the most part, amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe.” Byron’s readers were offered a sense of privileged access to the “real” Byron through the figure of the Byronic hero, a figure that came into focus against the Eastern backdrop of these early writings. Since Byron’s readers were encouraged to view his heroes as stand-ins for the poet himself, it hardly surprising to find these characters endowed with a mastery of form that figuratively encodes the Romantic poet’s. The Byronic hero withholds his own form from view, but sees clearly the forms of others and molds them to his will. In The Corsair, the third and most popular of the Eastern Tales, its hero Conrad’s absolute authority over his pirate band derives from what Byron terms his “commanding art,” a combination of aristocratic and administrative technique summarized in the maxim “He, who would see, must be himself unseen.”
This paper focuses on Lara, the Eastern Tale written immediately after The Corsair, whose hero possesses a power analogous to Conrad’s commanding art, “an art / Of fixing memory on another’s heart,” that is enhanced by the very difficulty of “fixing” Lara himself. In Lara, I argue, the writerly aspect of the art of command is much more fully elaborated than in The Corsair. Although Lara’s doom is no less inevitable than Conrad’s, he leaves behind him a monument that has no parallel in The Corsair: his page, Kaled, rooted to the scene of Lara’s death, endlessly repeating the forms imprinted by his/her master’s art. Occupying the same position in the poem’s literal and figurative dimensions—that of the page—Kaled forms the necessary supplement to Lara’s writerly art of fixing. In the figure of Kaled, I argue, an entire tropology of the Orient is condensed; her amoral ferocity, her idolatrous dedication to Lara, even the ambiguity of her gender: all of these have precedents in the orientalist tradition on which the Eastern Tales drew and to which they contributed. But it is the drastic effect of Lara’s words, spoken in a language inaccessible to the reader, on Kaled, that most irreducibly invokes the sign of the oriental. This subjection to the pure signifier makes Kaled a fitter monument than Conrad’s Medora, who also perishes for love of a Byronic hero; in predeceasing Conrad, however, she deprives him of a durable substrate in which to inscribe himself. In contrast to Medora, who both fades from view and usurps Conrad’s masculine privilege by being memorialized in his place, Kaled remains locked in a cycle of repetition after Lara’s death. The Orient offers something up to inscription that femininity alone cannot.
Somers, Sean
University of British Columbia
Byron’s Devils: Kitamura Tôkoku and a Theodicy out of Translation
Kitamura Tôkoku (1868-1894), known by his first name Tôkoku was a Japanese poet who emulated Romantic blank verse. He had more than a passing fascination for Byron. Indeed, any discussion of Byron’s influence on Japanese modernity must begin with Tôkoku. This Japanese poet helped to pioneer the shintaishi (new romantic) style of poetry, which modeled itself largely on European conventions. And through this style of adaptation, Tôkoku’s debt to Byron, at first glance, seems more plagiarism than homage. After all, the parallels are extensive. The major poetic works from Tôkoku’s small oeuvre readily find Byronic companions: “Soshû no shi” [The Prisoner’s Poem] is clearly based upon “The Prisoner of Chillon”; and “Hôraikyoku” [A Drama upon Mt Horai] is strongly derived from “Manfred.”
Stauffer, Andrew
Boston University
Byron and the Career of 'To the Po'
This paper considers Byron's modernity as a function of particular scenes of documentary transmission, an ongoing process called forth by his celebrity and his own manipulation of his textual record. I am particularly interested in the large family of Byron's variously- published lyrics, ones whose circulation was driven by the poet's fame, his early death, and the (preferably scandalous) biographical application of the works themselves. Particularly after the memoirs were burned in the grate at John Murray's, the Byron industry began in earnest: legions of posthumous memoirists, collectors, editors, pseudepigraphers, and forgers shaped the canon of Byron's works in ways both trivial and profound, a process that in fact began very early in the poet's career. Like many critics of Byron, I am interested the exceptionally social constitution of his career and legacy, a process enacted primarily through various textual and editorial interventions. Some of these were salutary and some scurrilous; but they had the effect of distributing Byronism across a wide array of institutions and persons who were not only reading Byron, but writing him as well. Unlike his less-celebrated contemporaries Keats and Shelley, Byron cut a public figure and left an extensive public paper trail; he inspired ventriloquists, conjurers, and reanimators as a basic function of his artistic procedures.
The career of "To the Po" is emblematic in this regard. As the poem moved out of the private circle of Byron and Teresa towards a larger reading public, it was conveyed by half-measures (including a vacillation over publishing with Murray and a casual communication to Thomas Medwin) that called forth interventions and produced a scattering of texts that remain incompletely gathered. In this paper, I present a new history of the transmission of "To the Po" (including its newly-discovered first appearance in print) as a way into the subject of Byronic transmission, a mode in which authority moves from writer to the social nexus in a peculiarly modern way. Jerome Christensen has analyzed Byron's resistance to this process, itself an offshoot of modern political economy and its devaluation of the individual agent; and Jerome McGann's social theory of editing modern texts (with Byron as its great example) is also germane to my thinking here. My aims are both to provide new information on the specific case of "To the Po" and also to give us a new way of thinking about the Byron canon – broadly conceived – as determined by its transmission ina modern culture of celebrity.
Stein, Lisa K.
Ohio University-Zanesville
A Genre’s Progenitor: Byron and the Modern Celebrity Travel Confessional
It was the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage on March 10, 1812 which effectively launched Byron’s career in the direction of the poetic travelogue, as Childe Harold has come to be known, and it is this text and the persona Byron creates within it that effectively combats earlier “bad press” regarding works such as Hours of Idleness and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Through Childe Harold and other poetic travelogues, Byron’s public persona became conflated with the fictional heroic ones of his poems. Allan Massie, in fact, argues that Childe Harold is “Byron dressed up for show. He told his mother that he had acquired ‘a most superb uniform as a court dress, indispensable for travelling,’ and it is as if he wore that uniform to write Childe Harold” (31). An alternative reading of the poem arrives at a similar conclusion: Stephen Cheeke asserts that from the beginning of Byron’s life as a writer, “the place, or more specifically, the ‘spot’ which stands for the essence of the place, simultaneously speaks for itself and for Byron, so that geo-history and self-identity are interchangeable, or assumed to be so” (22), an assertion which again shows the wisdom in Byron’s choice of the poetic travelogue as a preferred genre.
Byron employs a rhetoric of authenticity in works like Childe Harold, then, through the first-hand experience behind the lines of the poem, an aspect which is, for instance, highlighted by the opening sentence of the poem’s preface: “The following poem was written, for the most part, amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe” (4). Childe Harold developed from an actual two-year journey which was mostly without a plan or consistent itinerary, an element of the real-life journey that becomes an organizational principal for the poem and, in one reading of the poem, for the growth of the poet’s mind (McGann Fiery Dust 40). Cheeke suggests that “as we read the wanderings of Harold, a sense of the author Lord Byron emerges, a powerful individual shaping his materials to the strong contours of his own masculine self” (40). If the poem has no particular plan, much as the journey preceding it had no plan, then, Cheeke asserts, it must be considered to have a destination—Byron’s own mind or personality (40). And so the celebrity travel confessional if not born is certainly facilitated, for Byron effectively utilizes the travel book/poetic travelogue as a vehicle for promoting his preferred public persona. This presentation will outline his role as progenitor of the genre and engage two modern benefactors, Gertrude Stein and Charlie Chaplin, who build on Byron’s example by employing a rhetoric of authenticity which addresses each writer’s celebrity status more directly, an element of these travel confessionals (Everybody’s Autobiography (1935) and “A Comedian Sees the World” (1933-4) respectively) most easily elucidated through the lens of Dean MacCannell’s theory of the tourist attraction encounter in The Tourist and Joshua Gamson’s theory of the celebrity encounter in Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America.
Stratham, Christopher
Case Western Reserve University
Orpheus Rising: Byron and Literary Modernism
It is now a commonplace that many of the most influential theorists of British romanticism have had trouble finding room in their paradigms for Byron.1 While M. H. Abrams’ omission of Byron from his Natural Supernaturalism (1971) is probably the best-known example of such an oversight,2 close readings of Byron’s work seeking to integrate it into the larger drama of romantic poetry and poetics are remarkably hard to find.3 In my own book Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative (2006), I have tried to show how Byron might be located closer to the mainstream of romantic tradition by reading his major works from the standpoint of his experimentation with what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “novelistic discourse,” a phrase I take to be a loose translation of Friedrich Schlegel’s influential conception of “romantic poetry.”4 Nevertheless, Byron seems to be the poet -- certainly the major British romantic poet -- who, as a poet, inspires in his readers the least amount of confidence. If Wordsworth, P. B. Shelley, and Keats, or Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Hölderlin, and Rilke, or even Stevens, Pound, and Williams call for sustained attention from our best critics, Byron is all too often regarded as a poet of his time, “the ultimate romantic,” as the ad copy on the back cover of the paperback edition of the Oxford Major Works has it, “whose name has entered the language to describe a man of brooding passion.”5 In spite of his “ultimate” status, Byron’s reputation continues to be plagued by the fact that many readers suspect the “man of brooding passion” to be none other than the dark lord himself.6 Indeed, the renowned Byron scholar Jerome J. McGann has spent much of his career transforming this vice into an apparent virtue, focusing on the historical and textual contexts that have helped to shape the poet’s work.7 But even such an effort, to the extent that it focuses on the power of contexts to give shape to, and confer meaning on, Byron’s poetical works, inadvertently contributes to the view that Byron’s poetry is by itself not quite good enough by throwing light on external factors exerting pressure on the verses, rather than illuminating the internal forces that energize and sustain them.8
In what follows I wish to advance two claims in support of the idea that Byron deserves a place at the head table of modern poetical tradition. I will argue, first, that his best poems can be read as romantic period re-inscriptions of the venerable tradition recounted in Ovid, whereby the death of a loved one (or simply the loss of one’s own innocence) inspires poetic composition as a sort of fragmentary compensation. One might call this, with proper qualification, Byron’s Orphic poetics.9 Such a reading overlaps with, but is not simply reducible to, readings of Byron such as Harold Bloom’s, which are predicated upon the poet’s use of the myth of Prometheus.10 Nor does such a reading necessarily collapse into McGann’s more recent, but in some ways related, interpretation of Byron as a poet whose center of gravity lies in his Satanism.11 Rather, Byron’s deep psychic attachment to what I am calling an Orphic sensibility can be traced in his nearly obsessive fascination with the moment of saying good-bye or taking leave -- his well-known compulsion for saying “Fare Thee Well!”12
Second, it is my contention, in contrast to T. S. Eliot’s famous dismissal, that Byron’s poetical works have inspired and sustained some of the greatest writers and works of literary modernism, including, but not limited to, the early poems by Pound collected in Personae (1926), Joyce’s short stories found in Dubliners (1914) and his coming-of-age novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922), and the quasi-mystical poetics of Yeats’ A Vision (1925, 1937). Indeed, Hazard Adams has shown how Byron’s influence is so central as to be almost unavoidable in an informed reading of the works of modernist giants like Yeats and Joyce.13 But one can also see Byron’s significance for late Victorians like Shaw and Wilde, as well as on avant-garde modernists like Pound and the young Eliot himself. More precisely, Byron’s influence is recognizable at three critical junctures within the discourse of literary modernism. It can be observed, first, in modernist acknowledgements of the historical situation as one of widespread decay, destruction, dilapidation, and waste -- a prolonged moment of crisis in the life of the culture; second, it can be seen in the tendency of modernist authors to fashion elaborate alter egos, masks, narrators, personae, and fictions of self in order to distance themselves from some of their more controversial insights; and, third and finally, it is registered in their often radical experiments with literary language itself.
Endnotes
1 See Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 17-31.
2 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. ix.
3 A notable exception is Susan J. Wolfson’s “Heroic Form: Couplets, ‘Self,’ and Byron’s Corsair,” pp. 133-63 in Formal Charges: The Shaping Spirit of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
4 Christopher A. Strathman, Romantic Poetics and the Fragmentary Imperative: Schlegel, Byron, Joyce, Blanchot (Albany: State University of New Press, 2005), esp. pp. 57-104.
5 Lord Byron, Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (1986; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Quotations from Byron’s poetical works are taken from Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980-86). Citations of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage refer to canto and stanza number(s), citations of Manfred refer to act, scene, and line number(s) and citations of Don Juan refer to canto and stanza number(s). All other citations from the poetry refer to CPW volume and page number(s), unless otherwise indicated.
6 Northrop Frye, for example, wrote, “The main appeal of Byron’s poetry is in the fact that it is Byron’s.” Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963), p. 174.
7 First articulated within the context of ordinary language philosophy in Don Juan in Context (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), McGann’s fascination with the power of context to shape textual content has drawn him firmly into Marxian and materialist-historicist territory in The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (1985; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), and The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). At the same time, in more recent work such as Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), as well as in The Textual Condition (esp. pp. 153-76), he has returned to a critical genre he explored early in his career in Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971): the form of critical-philosophical dialogue.
8 Philip W. Martin’s Byron: A Poet before his Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) is one of the great attempts to face up to this question.
9 See Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (1960; New York, Harpers, 1971). One of the best accounts of the Orphic tradition in German and French literature is Walter A. Strauss, Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
10 See Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company, pp. 238-81. The stakes of the distinction between Orphic and Promethean romanticism are briefly discussed by Walter A. Strauss in Descent and Return, pp. 10-18. See also Frye, A Study of Romanticism, pp. 87-124.
11 See McGann, “Byron and the Anonymous Lyric,” esp. pp. 100-101.
12 See Lord Byron, “Fare Thee Well!”, in Major Works, in pp. 261-62. See also Jerome J. McGann, “Byron and the Anonymous Lyric,” in which McGann argues that the send-off to his wife “Fare Thee Well!” exhibits “deliberate hypocrisy” (95) and is a lynchpin to his mature reading of Byron.
13 Hazard Adams, “Byron, Yeats, and Joyce: Heroism and Technic,” in Hazard Adams, Antithetical Essays in Literary Criticism and Liberal Education (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1989), pp. 76-89.
Byron and Fan Culture
Although fandom is generally understood to be a twentieth-century
phenomenon, the collective enthusiasm of Byron’s readers indicates an
emerging fan culture of the Romantic period. This paper will examine
the way readers both responded to, and in turn created, Lord Byron’s
unprecedented fame in the early nineteenth century. The historical
moment of Byron’s career coincided with a shift in literary production
away from an earlier system of private patronage and subscription
towards a fully industrialized form of print capitalism. Works of
literature were no longer produced for small and specific audiences,
but for a vast anonymous body, “the reading public.” As numbers of
readers were increasing drastically in the Romantic period, and the gap
between reader and author became ever more substantial, so individual
readers began to desire a closer relationship to the author. Byron
consciously created an intimate dialogue with his largely female
readership in order to satisfy the public’s increasing desire to be
familiarly acquainted with the poet. In his poems, Byron both reveals
and conceals himself in a way that playfully encourages his readers to
think they “know” Byron through the medium of his poetry. The
personality Byron created in this flirtation with the reader became a
commodity in itself, produced for public consumption, identification
and imitation.
This paper will focus on an early form of fan activity: the commonplace
book. These scrapbooks of poems and paraphernalia were personal objects
passed around among close friends and family, who would in turn
transcribe their favourite poems. I have examined a sample of over 200
of these books and Byron appears more than any other author; many women
dedicated their book solely to him. The books include not only poems
but portraits and other Byron-related texts. They appear to be both a
means of “owning” Byron through a personal, fetishized object and also
of sharing his work and image in a community of like-minded fans. The
meetings in which the books were circulated could be seen as a
precursor to the modern fan club, as readers both consumed and produced“Byron” in a self-perpetuating system of celebrity culture.
Topalova, Victoriya
University of British Columbia
Post-Soviet Readings of Byronism in Russian Culture: Observations
No, I'm not Byron; I am, yet,
Another choice for the sacred dole,
Like him - a persecuted soul,
But only of the Russian set.
- Mikhail Lermontov 1
In Alexey Balabanov’s sequel to his cult movie Brother (1997), immortal Lermontov’s lines voiced by a “new Russian” hero of the 1990s open the first episode of Brother 2 (2000). To the viewer raised on the classical matrix of national literature, it is a challenge to accept the bold director’s interpretations of the traditional images of a romantic Hero in Russian culture that are deeply rooted in the idea of “Russian Byronism” as presented in Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov’s works. A century later, it has become apparent that national debates framed in Lermontov’s terms of “heroes of our times” continue, with Byronism re-emerging in them as a tuning fork for the building of the post-Soviet paradigm of new national Heroes. No matter how impressive both Brothers are they leave a deep sense of discontent about a director’s answer to the question of the day: Who are the “heroes of our time” in today’s Russia? The disagreement of an educated viewer with Balabanov’s choice can be explained not only by the fact that the director offers a strikingly simplistic versions of romantic types anchored, however, to the classical literary tradition of Russian romanticism, but also because the viewer can intuitively identify a breaking point in the structure of a Hero’s image at which the whole idea of Russian Byronism goes to pieces. Is this simplification an inevitable consequence of the end of modernity in Russia, the time which can be called the “Epoch of an Ominous “Post”? Indeed, an amorphous Russian “post-modern” that arguably arrived in national literature long before the actual collapse of 1991 has re-played in the catastrophic “post-Soviet” 1990s leading to the “post-traumatic” today. In this societal chaos, major questions with regard to the fate of Russian Byronism in the post-Soviet culture can be put as following: Is Byronism becoming a too heavy burden for contemporary Russian artists? What does this fact inform us about? Has the Russian version of Byronism built in a national culture by Pushkin and Lermontov as a direct link to the pulse of modernity corrupted? If so, then the authority of Russian classics has to be questioned too, sooner or later. But, has it? Central to the argument here is the idea that debating Byronism as a certain frame of mind in modern Russian culture is a relatively safe way to revise national classics that have remained sacred cows for both scholars and ideologues as well as the object of post-Soviet reconstruction for “workers of culture”2 of all stripes.
This paper examines major tendencies in cultural readings of Byronism that have developed in Russian society since 1991 in response to a Soviet collapse. The view taken in this paper is that Byronism as the key characteristics of a romantic tradition in modern Russian literature has been evoked in the course of post-Soviet transformations to secure a return to the past, i.e. pre-revolutionary, ideals. That has never actually happened. The lesson of the 1990s reads as follows: reclaiming the idea of Byronism does not have a magic power to guarantee a safe return to traditional cultural roots. The post-Soviet context, I argue, is burdened with a vital task of national survival within which Byronism reinforces not the traditional, but the new. I also argue that the post-Soviet forms of Russian Byronism are emerging to cement a new Russian idea thus unwillingly shaking the whole edifice of Russian modern literature. In the first part of the paper, I will briefly describe the concept of Byronism as articulated in the works of Russian romanticists of the early 19th century. The second part will analyze the most pronounced tendencies in the cultural representations of those new types of Russian romantic heroes whose Byronic roots are explicit. The final part of my paper will illuminate major points made by scholars in their attempts to rewrite the classical agenda of Russian Byronism. Here, I will offer my response to their arguments and my own answers to the questions posed in this paper.
Endnotes
1 Lermontov, Mikhail. “No, I’m not Byron…” Trans. Yevgeny Bonver, ed. Dmitry Karshtedt, May, 2001 http://www.poetryloverspage.com
2 A Soviet term
Verdun, Todd
Washington & Jefferson College
Byron, Larkin, and the Rhythmic Press of Modernity
Recent discussions of Byron’s poetics have veered from his reinvigorating of received forms like ottava rima to his stylistic digressions and disruptions, as exemplified by Jane Stabler’s Byron, Poetics, and History (Cambridge, 2002). Stabler models a dialogic criticism between author and reader and argues effectively for local attention to form and the “pleasure and surprise engendered by reading Romantic poems” (17). Yet what effects this “pleasure and surprise,” what unites the temporalities of the historical moment of writing and the future moment of reading is rhythm, the ancient force that is equally lifeblood and organizer of both the poet’s and the reader’s experience of the modern. Byron’s power as a poet cannot be located only in his masterful ironies and discursive style when it is rhythm—both in the abstract and in his particularly fluid, forceful iambic and anapestic rhythms—that actuates his language and brings his voice and persona to life.
In this paper I wish to bring together several divergent lines of formalist, historicist, and cultural criticisms to assess how Byron’s Don Juan employs rhythm not so much to dramatize perceptions of modernity as to be the primary expression that his grappling with modernity engenders. This argument draws from Amittai Aviram’s proposition in Telling Rhythm (Michigan, 1994) that poetic images attempt to get at the mystery of rhythm, rendering a more provocative interpretation of prosody than using form to underscore content allows. For Byron, however, such a strategy has more physical than metaphysical origins and ends. Byron’s attention in Don Juan is on “the thing,” on “life,” on the experience, but communicating this object involves not only “good English,” as described in his now legendary letter to Kinnaird of October 26, 1819, but also the way rhythm enacts a forward and reflective “mobility,” a term of psychological and social consequence from Canto XVI. For Byron, rhythm animates and complicates what Jerome McGann has shown to be the poet’s dynamic “truth in masquerade,” especially as effected in a poem that continually presses onward. Sensual and intellectual, rhythm is both an active player in this forward motion and constitutive of the play that continues to move, the play to which all questions of truth and fiction must be referred.
It is here that Philip Larkin becomes an unwitting ally in my argument. Larkin’s identification of “the less deceived” as a necessary approach to truth in modernity—as well as his own use of rhythm and rhyme to explore the valences of such self-inquiry in a poetic medium—helps illuminate nuances of Byron’s poetics, even if Larkin in many ways cuts an un-Byronic figure. Listening to the way Byron and Larkin use rhythm to communicate the physical press and pressures of modernity advances our assessment of Byron’s craft and its centrality to understanding the Romantic entanglements of nature and artifice.
Ward, Jay A.
Thiel College
Don Juan and Ulysses: Byron and the Modernist Novel
Byron described Don Juan as a “versified Aurora Borealis,” and from its publication onward, it has baffled readers and critics unable to attach a genre label to it and mystified by its digressive narrative structure. But despite Byron’s skillful employment of the ottava rima stanza, the poem from early on was identified both by readers and by Byron himself in his correspondence as having strong affinities with such novels as Tom Jones and especially Tristram Shandy, perhaps the two most “pre-modernist” of eighteenth-century works, and the label “verse novel,” among other attempts at genre classification, has come to be attached to it by some critics.
Almost exactly a century after Byron completed Don Juan, James Joyce published Ulysses, both works appearing in the aftermath of major international cataclysms, and I wish to argue that Byron’s “verse novel” shares a number of characteristics not only with the eighteenth-century works that preceded it but especially with Joyce’s avant-garde novel that followed it. The most obvious similarity is in the two writers’ utilization but also simultaneous debunking of the epic tradition. Byron’s poem opens with the familiar “I want a hero” invocation and then proceeds to mock the heroic through the character of the largely passive titular protagonist; Joyce famously undercuts the epic by reducing the Odyssey to one day in the life of the distinctly unheroic Leopold Bloom. In addition, Byron’s narrative structure, using his own voice as that of the intrusive, digressing narrator of Juan’s adventures, produces a parallel, inexact to be sure, to the relationship between Stephen Dedalus’s rejection of Ireland and Bloom’s peripatetic Dublin wanderings. Whereas Don Juan’s wanderings take him to Mediterranean islands, Turkey, Ismael, Russia, and England, Joyce’s characters visit a public bath, a funeral, a newspaper office, a library, pubs, a maternity hospital, and a brothel, both works employing variations on epic adventure.
Although Byron employed a traditional verse form in Don Juan, the poem is, in fact, just as radical in its departure from the expected as was Joyce’s novel and, thus, just as misunderstood by its initial readers, reviewers, and critics, who were accustomed to certain expectations for long, narrative poetry just as readers in the 1920s were for the novel. Don Juan was a “literary manifesto to its age,” as Byron described it, in the same sense that Ulysses was for its age a hundred years later; thus, while Byron professed the conservative position of rejecting the contemporary poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey in favor of the traditional works of Pope, he was well aware that he was creating something “entirely new and different,” just as Joyce was conscious of how radical his own rejection of the past was.
Therefore, what I propose to do in my presentation is to identify especially the relationships between Don Juan and Ulysses and to examine the various ways in which Byron’s poem, viewed as a verse novel, may be regarded as a precursor or prototype of the major work of High Modern fiction.
Yao, Gu
Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Utterance of Modern Anxiety: Canonizing Byron in China on her route to Modernity
“The greatest Romantic writer” “a freedom fighter” and “the liberator of the oppressed” are but a few exemplary titles which can illustrate Lord Byron’s orthodox image in China. Numerous evidences as such can be found in the textbooks from primary to tertiary levels, popular magazines and youth journals. Byronic halo can be perceived as the inevitable product of the canonical process which lasted more than eighty years; Byron’s image with distinctive Chinese coloring underlies the tension which Chinese people, especially elite intellectuals had to endure when being forced into modernity.
When Lord Byron was first introduced into Chinese intellectual scene as early as 1902, China was undergoing dramatic transformation in which her deep-rooted chauvinistic and empirical outlook has been greatly challenged. Her actual position of ethnic and cultural backwater in the global context was so alarming that the elites among Chinese intellectuals had to address the severe issues of national survival brought about by China’s forced modern identity.
Substantial scholarship has been contributed to analyze why Lord Byron could strike great resonance in the nation. CHU Chih-yu’s scrutiny, as a fine sample of current critique, is a detailed analysis of China’s reception of Byron till the 1980’s. It explores how the dominant cultural and political climate in specific period would shape and influence the critical attitude towards Byron. His conclusion that Byron’s literary fortune in China has been a macro process of selection and rejection, however, does not offer an adequate reply to the deeper question arising within the broader context of imperial and colonial discourse. For instance what role does the individual’s modern/national consciousness play in the personal interpretation of Byronic complexities? How does Byronic image, both at textual and personal level, contribute to the spiritual cultivation of modern intellectual? How is the sense of cultural submissiveness embedded in the canonizing process of Byron?
This paper, with reference to several pedagogical anecdotes, undertakes first to elucidate that Byron’s popular image in China wrought by the institutional endeavor is a far cry from how Byron is perceived in Europe which does not function as a criterion, though. Furthermore by focusing on three key literary figures who were also chief Byronic enthusiasts during May Fourth Movement, namely Liang Qichao, Su Manshu and Lu Xun, the writer ventures to examine the intriguing relation between their respective vista of China’s modernity and their individual emphasis on Byronic heritage. Liang’s acclaim of Byron as the pivotal power for national liberty manifests his concern to relieve the national trauma. Su’s obsessive zeal with the translation of The Isles of Greece is indicative of his poetical sentimentality over the loss of love and motherland. Lu’s definition of Byronic spirit as a rebel, an egoist and an intellectual represents a rough sketch of modern Chinaman. Their respective perspectives eventually affect our current mode to perceive Byron and his creations. Last but not the least, Byron’s works and correspondences reveal that he actually viewed Chinese as a ridiculous and contemptible people and that his exotic depiction of the Orient, including India, does not speak of his true sentiments toward the weak and the oppressed. In this sense Byron’s virtues ---devotion to liberty and compassion for the oppressed and the disadvantaged--- turn out to be our fanciful thinking too good to be true. The disparity between a canonized Byron and an imperialist Byron demonstrates a new need to negotiate a local and centralized perspective with the global context.
