Historical bodies in a "mental theatre": Byron's ethics of history.(George Gordon)(Critical essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-07

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BYRON'S VENETIAN TRAGEDIES, MARINO FALIERO AND THE TWO FOSCARI with their almost obsessive adherence to the neo-classical unities and their minute attention to historical detail, seem to be his least adventurous dramatic projects and have thus been taken as evidence that, despite his protestations to the contrary, Byron was indeed interested in writing plays that would be amenable to the contemporary theater. While these plays clearly do refute the outworn claim of Byron's (or, more generally, Romanticism's) anti-theatrical tendencies, they cannot be simply understood as being designed for the stage any more than they can be seen as simply anti-theatrical. Despite their formal regularity, these historical tragedies explore the limits of performance by staging bodies that question and resist their own theatrical performance. Moreover, while these plays direct themselves theatrically towards an (at least potential) audience, they also signal their awareness that such performances cannot guarantee their connection to an audience. Byron thus problematizes the seemingly stable genetic label of "historical tragedy" that he gives these plays by presenting "history" and "tragedy" in conflicting rather than complementary ways; he does not simply treat history as a static background for the tragic action, but shows that history exceeds the conventions of dramatic representation. These plays perform the problematic nature of performance, both giving a physical representation to history and acknowledging that historical experience is irreducible to such representation.

Byron's recognition of the seemingly paradoxical nature of performance is succinctly suggested by his famous claim to want to "make a regular English drama no matter whether for the stage or not, which is not my object--but a mental theatre." (1) While this desire to write for a "mental theatre" used to be narrowly conceived as a sign of Romantic anti-theatricality, critics such as Thomas C. Crochunis have more recently insisted that the term is "deliberately paradoxical and unresolved" and that it cannot be simply understood as a valorization of poetic, closet drama. (2) Indeed, Byron does not absolutely reject the possibility of performance and his insistence on "regularity" shows that the conception of dramatic performance remains important to him, regardless of whether or not he actually wanted his plays to be staged. Claiming that without the unities, "there may be poetry but no drama," Byron continues to think of his plays in terms of their performance, even as he locates this performance in a "mental" space, which seems to invite its audience/readers to rethink the supposed immediacy of theatrical action. (3) A "mental theatre" would not entirely remove the body from dramatic representation, since to "mentally" conceive of a theatrical performance is still to posit the action of a physical body, but this performance would be mediated by the action of the mind. The body ceases to be a guarantee of presence, but is staged if a this "mental theatre" as a way of sigmaling an absence within performance; it makes its readers/audience aware that theatrical bodies are not inherently meaningful, but are given meaning by an act of mental projection and interpretation. "Mental theatre" in this sense does riot seek to escape the problem of theatricality, but rather poses precisely this problem by calling attention to its staging of the body.

Byron's historical tragedies exemplify this understanding of "mental theatre," dramatizing bodies in crisis that raise interpretive problems both for the other characters in the plays and for their readers/audience. Both plays represent octogenarian Doges of the medieval republic of Venice whose feeble bodies are made into theatrical signifiers on a public stage and who struggle against the roles they are forced to perform. Bodies in these plays are always being rendered theatrical and subjected to public scrutiny and interpretation, but these bodies ultimately become unreadable, as they perform in ways that fail to realize concretely the meanings conceptualized by either the performers or their observers. Byron uses his "mental theatre" to raise the question of the relation between body and mind and shows that this relation is historically contingent and unresolved; each body is interpreted in different ways that are shown to depend on the particular perspective of the viewer. The fundamental incompletion of these theatricalized historical bodies invites resolution in the minds of the audience/ readers of works of "mental theatre," who would thereby become active participants. Many critics have therefore read Byron's plays as attempts at raising the consciousness of their audiences/readers; Anne Barton, for example, has interpreted Byron's drama as a proto-Brechtian political theatre. (4) At the same time, however, these plays also dramatize the disjunction between mind and body, suggesting that the mental work involved in this process can never entirely resolve the meaning of the theatrical body.

Thus, beyond the political implications of this "mental theatre," I would suggest that Byron's plays stage their historical bodies in a way that recognizes the radical alterity at the heart of their performance. Byron's approach to history can be usefully conceived in the terms of the contemporary philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who defines the ethical as a relation to the Other, a response not to any determinate "other" or group of others, but to an impersonal and infinite Other that is irreducible to any totalizing framework of rational knowledge. Byron's conception of a "mental theatre" would be ethical insofar as it entails the disruption of its own representations; it does not reduce history to knowledge, but calls attention to the inter-subjective processes of theatricality and of history through which its representations are produced.

Moreover, for Levinas, the body stands as a resistance to idealist philosophies of the mind, much as recent criticism of Romantic drama has argued for the significance of the theatrical body within plays so often interpreted in terms of idealist poetry. Levinas defines the body as "a localization of consciousness, which is not in turn reabsorbed into consciousness, into knowing." (5) From this point of view, the body cannot be reduced to an abstract interpretation because it is in fact the condition for such mental activity; "the spirituality of the body does not lie in [its] power to express what is inward. By its position it realizes the condition necessary for any inwardness" (70). For Levinas, the body is not merely a signifier of the mind, but is itself"an event," the emergence of a position out of what he calls "anonymous being" or the "there is" (82). He defines the "there is" as that which "returns in the heart of every negation . . . the universality of existence even in its annihilation" (56). The "there is" thus signals the impossibility of escaping from the fact of being, but while the body's "position" in the world produces an 'T' or "self" out of "anonymous being," this condition is not simply transcended because the I is "forever bound to the existence it has taken up ... it is riveted to its own being" (84). Thus, the impossibility...

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