Locating Byron: languages, voices, and displaced utterances.

Exhausted and excited after crossing the Alps and sailing on Lake Maggiore, Byron arrived in Milan on 12 October 1816 and, the following day, wrote to his half-sister Augusta with no small degree of satisfaction: "I have got to Milan." (1) He had finally reached Italy. Soon after his arrival, he devoted himself to some seriously intensive sightseeing, and, in his next letter to Augusta dated 15 October 1816, listed everything he had seen: "I have been at Churches, Theatres, libraries, and picture galleries." If Byron has not much to say to her about the art galleries (he would provide a more expansive account of them to John Murray a few days later), he describes in some detail the "manuscript collection (preserved in the Ambrosian library), of original love-letters and verses of Lucretia de Borgia & Cardinal Bembo" (BLJ 5:114). And, at this very point in his account, a curious shift occurs, one in which an elaborate interweaving of different places and times suddenly germinates out of his geographical and cultural position in Milan in late 1816. For the manuscripts offer him the opportunity to leave the Lombard capital behind and move on to other geographies and different times. Inspired by Lucretia and Bembo's epistles, his imagination takes him back to England and his relationship with Augusta (one of Lucretia's signatures is a cross, just like those his sister had used in her correspondence with him), to Renaissance Rome and Ferrara (crucial cities in Lucretia's biography), and to a virtual place of multilingual interaction, a zone of polyglottic exchange, between the Spanish of the verses and the Italian of the letters (BLJ 5:115).

Based on a pattern established during Byron's Mediterranean Grand Tour, this sudden departure from a specific situation towards one or more different spatio-temporal locations manifests itself each time he arrives in a new city during his peregrinations around the Italian peninsula. What begins as the description of a specific urban landscape for the benefit of family and friends at home mutates into a game of references to other places and times, a projection towards other geographies and cultures. For the poet, each location has the potential to unleash a geo-cultural phantasmagoria.

Indeed, it is hardly a controversial statement to observe that Byron's life was deeply embedded in questions of place and location or that his works draw on a "poetics of movement," to borrow Philip Shaw's term. (2) Yet, Byron's first encounters with Milan and other Italian cities point up some further, usually overlooked, aspects of his geo-cultural imagination that deserve closer inspection. If, for him, place is a palimpsest interweaving past and present stories and identities, at the same time each location is also an unstable dimension projected towards other places. The sites of his experience and imagination are simultaneously here and somewhere else. As a result, Byron's poetics of place and movement functions through a relentless multiplication of sites that makes it oscillate between a strong sense of emplacement, the awareness of being somewhere ("I have got to Milan"), and the coincident experience of being propelled towards a multiplicity of other places embedded within one's own initial coordinates.

A few days after his return to England from his early travels in the Mediterranean (he landed at Sheerness in Kent on 14 July 1811), Byron wrote to Augusta on 30 August: "I shall leave England & all it's clouds for the East again,--I am sick of it already" (BLJ 2:85). Following his prolonged and wholehearted exposure to other lands and cultures during his Grand Tour, home and the action of returning home had become disorientating experiences for the young poet. As a reaction to this loss of bearings, he started to pattern language so as to escape from home and relocate himself where he was not at the time of speaking or writing--an attempt at evading place that left significant traces on his life, his myth, and his works. In this essay, I intend to explore the ways in which Byron regularly removes himself and his texts from their initial sites to other destinations, a process that consistently affects his acts of self-presentation, the identities of his characters, and the nature of his writings. Working from within the familiar notion of Byron's mobilite, I wish to examine how the poet employs effects of language and voice to convey this geo-cultural multiplicity and its disorientating effects, as well as to delineate a poetics of place that doubles as one based on displacement. As this essay aims to show, Byron repeatedly positions himself and his works by addressing places that are outside his actual location--referring to, writing about, or motioning towards, something outside the present geo-cultural frame--in pursuit of a simultaneously (dis)located utterance.

SPEAKING ROMAIC, SINGING ALBANIAN

In his Life of Lord Byron (1830) the Scottish novelist and travel writer John Galt, who had met the young poet during his tour of the Mediterranean and made much of the coincidence, recurred to the evocative image of a dark enigma, literally "a mystery in a winding-sheet, crowned with a halo," to refer to the many inexplicable traits of Byron's personality. (3) Byron's fellow-poet and biographer Thomas Moore agreed with this notion of his mutable character and, in his life of the poet published in 1830-1, drew attention to "all that varied spectacle which his life exhibited" (HVS, 240-1). Later, in her Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron first published in parts in the New Monthly Magazine between July 1832 and December 1833, Marguerite, Countess of Blessington famously described Byron as "a perfect chameleon," adding that the poet himself was aware of this quality and attributed it to "the extreme mobilite of his nature." (4) If such multiple coincidental testimonies seem to suggest some solid truth about Byron's personality and nature, they also risk portraying a subject that borders at worst on mere volatility and inconstancy, and at best on a form of "restlessness and rootlessness" that translates into what James Soderholm has termed the poet's distinctive "nomadic imperative." (5) Other commentators, such as the poet's Eton acquaintance anal correspondent William Harness, even saw these elusive moves on his part as stratagems "to keep himself unknown to the great body of his fellow creatures" (HVS, 45). As they strive to make sense of Byron's elusiveness, these observations collectively point to the possibility of his "not belonging," as remarked by the poet's friend and literary agent Robert Charles Dallas in 1809 in an attempt to capture his inability to fit comfortably into any specific social group at a specific rime and place (HVS, 21).

Anecdotes from the same period yield further instances of Byron's early attempts at placing himself in multiple locations. A revealing episode dates from the autumn of 1810, when the adventurous Lady Hester Stanhope met the young aristocrat in Athens anal mockingly reported how "he had picked up a few sentences of the Romaic, with which he affected to give orders to his Greek servant" (HVS, 36). Indeed, the scene may be little more than the picture of a young British milord abroad trying desperately to appear well-traveled and cosmopolitan in the midst of a more sophisticated ser. Yet, her ladyship's humorous portrait also affords an insight into the young poet's desire to step momentarily beyond the boundaries of his English-language identity and place himself somewhere else. And this is just the beginning, for Byron's need for displacement becomes even stronger after his return from the Levant, when he starts to affect foreign forms of behavior that qualify him as an exotic figure among his contemporaries. (6) Together with his desire to return to the East, such manners indicate Byron's resistance to a complete identification with his mother country and culture. Later, in the summer of 1816, it is this need to move elsewhere through a displacing utterance that also motivates Byron's breaking into an Albanian song while sailing on the choppy waters of Lake Geneva. As reported by Mary Shelley, surrounded by "high and inspiriting" waves, the poet launches into "a strange, wild howl," "an exact imitation of the savage Albanian mode--laughing, the while, at our disappointment, who had expected a wild Eastern melody" (HVS, 183). Through this uber-exotic and unsettling song, Byron displaces himself and, by the same token, frustrates his audience's desire for a familiarly other experience, since he transports them not ...