Byron's Revisited Haunts.(19th-century poet, Lord Byron)(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-00

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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University

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BEFORE HE LEFT ENGLAND IN A FLURRY OF SCANDAL, AND BEFORE HE created that most disillusioned of expatriates, Childe Harold, Lord Byron was irresistibly drawn to self-exile. In particular he paid close attention to the example of Shakespeare's misanthropic exile, Timon of Athens. Not only did Byron fashion Harold in the mold of Timon, arranging for his character to escape, like the disillusioned Athenian, from the "heartless parasites of present cheer" (Canto I, line 75);(1) three years before the splashy publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Cantos I & II (1812), the young Lord Byron was looking in the mirror and seeing Timon. "Weary of love, of life, devour'd with spleen, / I rest a perfect Timon, not nineteen,"(2) Byron wrote in Childish Recollections (1806)--though, perhaps to his credit, he later canceled the line. Thanks to the tumultuous events of his life, Byron, like Timon, indeed became an "archetype of all towering persons whose stature forces a severance from their community."(3) But years before his actual departure from England, Byron's verse followed Shakespeare's king in discovering, within the process of self-exile, displaced relics of the past.

Timon, digging for roots in the woods, instead unearths gold, which he hails ironically as the "visible god, / That solder'st close impossibilities / And mak'st them kiss" (Timon of Athens IV.iii.391-93). As an improbable reminder of the power and corruption he fled from in Athens, Timon's new gold is a glitteringly paradoxical discovery: a disruptive presence, at once a return of the past and a measure of its displacement. As such, it acts as a ghostly incarnation of Timon's past, a "revenant" as defined by Jacques Derrida in his study of `hauntology': "There is something disappeared, departed in the apparition itself as reapparition of the departed."(4) Byron's verse likewise embraces departure only to be haunted by ghosts, who recall the past even as they embody its disruption.

At the similarly tender age of twenty, in another poem entitled "To a Lady, on being asked my reasons for quitting England in the spring," Byron set the double movement of banishment--its charged, liminal, past-and-present interchange--into the fundamental terms of Genesis: "When man expell'd from Eden's bowers, / A moment linger'd near the gate, / Each scene recall'd the vanish'd hours...."(5) Such lingering would actually last much longer than a minute for Byron; one only has to recall the gate-shadowed action of Cain (1821), taking place in "The Land without Paradise," to realize the constancy of this setting in his canon--after thirteen years still giving rise to "melancholy yearnings o'er the past," (III.i.36) still prompting spectral walk-ons. Cain's lingering by "the inhibited walls" (I.i.80) of Eden attracts Lucifer, the slippery "Master of Spirits," (I.i.98) whose proud alienation ("I dwell apart; but I am great" [I.i.308]) evokes a long line of scowling and once wildly popular Byronic heroes. Such figures, whose impact had faded to cliche long before Cain, nonetheless prove surprisingly trenchant haunters of Byron's later verse, liable at any time to come back from the world of spirits. Selim, doomed hero of The Bride of Abydos (1813), specifically waits to reemerge on the shoreline of his lover's cypress grove: "And there by night, reclin'd, `tis said, / Is seen a ghastly turban'd head-- / And hence extended by the billow, / "Tis named the `Pirate-phantom's pillow'!" (II.725-28).

Even before he was cast aside by his author, left to haunt Byron's later verse as the relic of an abandoned mode, the Byronic hero had been more phantom than man. In the series of narratives often referred to as Byron's Eastern Tales--best-sellers dashed off during his London Years of Fame (1812-1816)--this breed of hero lives and dies amid unsettling recollections of what has vanished; expelled by force or temperament from his homeland, he moves within a purgatory of specters. His world is an uncomfortable blend of spectral disenchantment: Childe Harold's death-in-life Greece ("In all save form alone, how changed!" he observes of a land populated by "Shades of the Helots" (II.711, 726) defines the general climate of the Tales. The Giaour (1813), the first Eastern Tale, is set in the same dead Greece ("`T is Greece, but living Greece no more! / So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, / We start, for soul is wanting there" [91-93]); like Childe Harold, the Giaour wends through this wasteland bereft of love, of soul, constantly nostalgic, and doomed by a curse to origin-haunting displacement ("on earth as Vampire sent, / Thy course shall from its tomb be rent: / Then ghastly haunt thy native place, / And suck the blood of all thy race" [755-58]). Byron's later texts, even as they take sharp turns away from the Eastern Tales in format and tone, build on this early obsession with perpetual dislocation and its attendant hauntings; they teem with corrupted settings and uprooted evocations of a figure who, from the beginning, had been presented to the reader as irretrievably alienated.

As such, Byron's canon, however it may seem to repudiate itself, stays faithful to his early insight that the unsettling passage away from the familiar, from a point of origin, gives rise to uncanny emergence of what has been left behind. Stocking his later texts with references to outmoded protagonists, Byron was not mocking his earlier career, or even ironically "exploit[ing] a winning formula."(6) Instead he was preserving a sense of disrupted origins that, ultimately, drives the vast carnival of displacement comprising Don Juan (1818-24): the open-ended unhousing emblematic of what Edward Said has called "interpretive series."(7) The movement of Byron's career is from vortexes of disenchantment into the paradoxical vision that was already apparent to him as a youth on the brink of Eden's bowers: the improbable rise of close impossibilities. In later texts, Byron's exilic haunting gives rise to double visions important and sustaining enough to exemplify what Michael G. Cooke has called "the force of coincidentia oppositorum, an identification or interpresence between phenomena that seem to deny each other."(8) The awareness of displacement blooms into particularly charged acts of binding in Byron's work as his canon turns back on itself: continual confrontations of the past with what is replacing, even repudiating it.

Paul Elledge has characterized the promiscuity of Beppo (1818)--its digressive presentation of an adulterous affair--as "a strategy by which departure need not entail division, or separation necessarily forfeit attachment."(9) We can push that formula further: Byron's embrace of exile was commitment to a strategy of writing whereby departure multiplies possibilities, division leads to unlikely reemergence. The confrontation of a (nostalgic) present with an (uprooted) past is bristling and unpredictable; the anachronism alone (in Derrida's terms, "a dis-located time of the present ... the joining of a radically dis-jointed time, without certain conjunction" [17]) is a disruptive challenge to the haunted work. By attuning his later verse to evocations of the Byronic Hero, Byron avidly pursued such disruption--a power beyond control, a roiling adjacency of the past that operates despite and because of banishment.

I emphasize continuity in Byron's poetic career, an essential interactivity between late and early in his canon, in order to counter the standard characterization of Byron's later verse as a revolutionary repudiation of his past work. This late mode of Byron's--sometimes termed the Don Juan "manner"(10) or "effect"(11)--is usually said to be test-driven by the playful Beppo, which anticipates Don Juan's ottava rima form, insouciant narrator, and digressive tendencies. Jerome McGann's commentary to CPW stands as the authoritative characterization of a crucial turn in Byron's poetry:

Beppo is one of the most important poems in the canon because it inaugurates the verse project which was to reach fulfillment in Don Juan. Like the latter, Beppo was written in conscious reaction to the `monotony and mannerism' (BLJ vi.25) of his own earlier Romantic work, and to the `wrong revolutionary poetical system--or systems' of the entire Romantic Movement (BLJ v.265-66).(12)

McGann thus follows a long tradition that reads the conversational, digressive, satirical ottava rima stanzas of Beppo and Don Juan as not only turning the gloomy vortexes of the Eastern Tales inside out,(13) but also signaling Byron's decisive break with his past success. Despite the fact that the writing of Beppo was an...

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