Cain: Lord Byron's sincerity.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-02

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BYRON'S 1821 CAIN: A MYSTERY ASKS SOME OBVIOUS AND IMPORTANT questions. At least, they are obvious and important if one takes the book of Genesis literally, as some of his readers then did, and a few still do. Why are the children of Adam and Eve condemned to die for sins they didn't commit? Wouldn't they have resented that? If Adam and Eve were the first people, who could their sons marry except their own sisters? (Was that all right, then? Why isn't it now?) Why did God reject Cain's offering? Why does God like animals being killed for sacrifice anyway? And was it really necessary for everybody to suffer, when God could prevent it? Why should knowledge be forbidden, really? It is possible to imagine, that is, that such questions might be disarming, or even liberating, for certain readers, confronting as they do gnawing problems these readers have been unable or unwilling ever to put into words. Such readers are not offended, exactly. Byron, for them, is a surrogate, an ally, almost a priest of a kind, mediating their experience of the increasingly troubling mysteries of their sacred book. (1) But for a range of fairly obvious reasons, amongst them embarrassment and the very inarticulateness that Byron was assuaging, these readers tend to be fairly quiet.

To believers with a somewhat more figurative idea of their Bible, however, to be this obvious is to be naive, irksomely or suspiciously so. In a child, such queries might be endearing or irritating. In an intellectual-especially the author of such poems as Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement--one suspects irony, sarcasm, disingenuousness. Or a lapse into (or revelation of) culpable stupidity. From publication to the present the poem has often been characterized, by the relatively sophisticated, as a crude or wicked or calculating provocation, a "blundering frontal assault" on orthodoxy (2) or a mischievous taunt at belief with "nothing behind it other than a rather frivolous impulse to be offensive." (3) These readers are considerably more voluble. They feel they can see through Byron's game. They are the ones--they feel--to whom offense is really intended. (Although this too is different from being offended, exactly.)

These, at any rate, are two possibilities broadly described. The complexity of the poem's relationship with its doctrinally and otherwise plural audience does not even begin to end here, though. Audiences in any kind of pluralistic field, for example, are deeply interested in how other audiences are being addressed, and with what effect. The spokesmen of the religious establishment certainly worried that Byron was indeed usurping their own priestly function; as Peter T. Murphy notes, most reviewers feared not for themselves but for the "always-vulnerable people," (4) and the many pulpit denunciations (5) suggest an attempt on the part of the parsons to seize back their role, a project perhaps shared by more recent critics who speak contemptuously of Byron's incapacity to deal with the theological and philosophical issues he raises. This objection--that Byron was crude, unequal to the task, and that his simplifications might seduce the ignorant and embarrass or appall the wise--in fact precedes and may be more important than any criticisms of Cain's dogmatic content. It was and still is unclear whether that content really did constitute a kind of "theodicy-in-reverse." Sophisticated readers continued to quibble, deep into the twentieth century, about whether the poem is pious or not, orthodox or otherwise. (6)

Certainly for liberals or atheists the poem's satisfactions would not arise from any priestly mediation. For them too the imagined discomfiture of enemies or the enlightenment of the darkling masses are what matter, not the posing of personally meaningful or troubling questions. The Shelleys, Leigh Hunt and others produced immediate and hyperbolic praise that now sounds suspiciously glib. Almost always their approbation included hints that this was what other people needed to hear. Radicals, believing this literally, pirated the text.

Another enduring feature of the hostile intellectual response, meanwhile, is the accusation that Byron is, indeed, attempting to be a priest, but for his usual sect: the cult of his Byronic self. The poem's questioning posture is not about Genesis or the human dilemma at all. Cain, many reviewers complain, is just like Conrad and Manfred and Prometheus and the rest, and thus, just like the poet. (7) The writing and publishing of Cain, like some of Cain's behavior within it, is a new instance of Byronic defiance, for an audience that is susceptible to this kind of thing (we are not). We detect, that is, the usual attempt to engage readerly desires, to seize centrality--and having detected it, feel we have successfully resisted it.

And there are certainly many more imaginable responses, from many other groups or subgroups of readers, reflecting not just upon the poem but upon each other. The fictitiousness of the literary "audience" was long ago pointed out by Walter J Ong, (8) but it is valuable to remind ourselves just how difficult it is to capture the full range of relations amongst poets and publics. Ong spoke mainly of the necessary imagining done by writers themselves and reflected in their texts, but the question is of course equally acute for audiences--including critics--imagining other audiences and their desires and responses. We have noted the likelihood that certain readers of Cain will have been more loquacious than others. Perhaps we should add that certain kinds of response are less likely or even able to be communicated than others. The problem is very apparent in Byron studies, where a garrulous self-preoccupied author is coupled with a vast, fascinated and (in combination) even more garrulous public; it seems particularly important to deal with the whole structure as one, as we sense that the relationship itself is a central topic for all concerned. Reviews and other printed or handwritten remarks can be dug up, and of course must be, both for the immediate period of publication and subsequently. Authorial letters, journal entries, and reported conversations are likewise mustered with a view to reinforcing impressions given by the published work as to purposes, desires, intended audiences. But these are all texts themselves, with different audiences and purposes, variably informed or misinformed, inarticulate or otherwise, angry, sly, imitative or rivalrously original, and are in addition only a tiny sample of all that has been written, let alone spoken, let alone felt or thought as part of the total "event" that has at its center Byron's published poem. Thanks to the good work of scholars like Jerome McGann we have all of Cain, but we have only the tiniest fragment of the much larger dialogue that surrounds it. How does one substantiate vivid calumnies that Byron was "playing the vandal" with Cain and inflicting "wanton damage" on "literary decorum" out of an "infatuation with his own impertinence"? (Martin 153). How does one really know that Byron felt "'victimized' ... by the early 1820s in relation to the now unstoppable machine of literary production" while his audience, in general, "persisted in its fantasy of the young poet as a 'basilisk' who... 'lures into its snares' its prey"--even if one can turn up a clearly fascinated reader who says such interesting things? (9) And what sort of evidence would support a claim that "'Byron' [was] a cultural denominator capable of abstracting individuals from their concrete concerns and traditional relationships and inducting them into a network of exchange and competition"? (10)

Various methodologies have been deployed in the analysis of what is, after all, a fairly important phenomenon called "Byron," and have produced a body of variously suggestive results to be built upon. But all have worked, and must, from preconceptions of psychological or cultural and social plausibility, and the argument of the present article is no exception. What I aspire to do slightly better here, in the instance of Cain, is probe the obviously interactive psychological-cultural situation suggested by words like "provocation" or "defiance," by making use of the conceptual framework offered by the theory of imitative desire. At its core this theory, or cluster of ideas, articulated initially by Rene Girard, but developed and modified by others, posits a pre-representational impulse of mimesis at the level of desire, for which the Aristotelian mimesis of representation is both a temporary means of alleviation, and a further incitement. (11) An awareness of the desires, the attention or indifference of other human beings thus operates at the very basis of all motivation not merely appetitive, of the transcendent realm of spirit, or consciousness itself, and of identity. Human culture must provide means of at least minimally satisfying mimetic desire, and of deferring the violence it engenders (through the inevitable reaching of more than...

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