Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror

Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror Also by Matthew J. A. Green VISIONARY MATERIALISM IN THE EARLY WORKS OF ...

Author: Edited by Matthew J. A. Green and Piya Pal-Lapinski

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Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror

Also by Matthew J. A. Green VISIONARY MATERIALISM IN THE EARLY WORKS OF WILLIAM BLAKE

Also by Piya Pal-Lapinski THE EXOTIC WOMAN IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BRITISH FICTION AND CULTURE: A Reconsideration

Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror Edited by

Matthew J. A. Green Associate Professor in English Literature, University of Nottingham, UK

and

Piya Pal-Lapinski Associate Professor of English, Bowling Green State University, USA

Selection and editorial matter © Matthew J. A. Green & Piya Pal-Lapinski 2011 Individual chapters © contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–24646–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Abigail and Louise – Matthew For Jonathan – Piya

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Contents

List of Figures

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Acknowledgments

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Contributors

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Introduction: Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror Matthew J. A. Green and Piya Pal-Lapinski 1 “That lifeless thing the living fear”: Freedom, Community, and the Gothic Body in The Giaour Matthew J. A. Green 2 Sardanapalus, Spectacle, and the Empire State Andrew M. Stauffer 3 Byron’s Venetian Masque of the French Revolution: Sovereignty, Terror, and the Geopolitics of Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari Joshua David Gonsalves

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4 “Awake to Terror”: The Impact of Italy on Byron’s Depiction of Freedom’s Battles Jane Stabler

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5 “Something Not Yet Made Good”: Byron’s Cain, Godwin, and Mary Shelley’s Falkner Tilottama Rajan

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6 Manfred’s New Promethean Agon Young-ok An

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7 “Like the Sheeted Fire from Heaven”: Transcendence and Resentment in Marino Faliero Ian Dennis

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8 “And Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind”: Byron, Switzerland, and the Poetics of Freedom Simon Bainbridge

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9 Byron: Consistency, Change, and the Greek War Stephen Minta 10 “I have a penchant for black”: Race and Orphic Dismemberment in Byron’s The Deformed Transformed and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace Jonathan Gross

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11 Byronic Terror and Impossible Exchange: From Werner to Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism Piya Pal-Lapinski

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Notes

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Index

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List of Figures

2.1 “Scene from Sardanapalus—Booth’s Theater.” (September, 1876?). Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University 2.2 “Mrs. Agnes Booth, as Myrrha, in Sardanapalus.’ ” The Illustrated Sporting New Yorker 7.174 (October 7, 1876), 9 2.3 “Centennial Exhibit, Philadelphia, 1876 [Colossal hand and torch, Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty].” Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views. New York Public Library Photography Collection, Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs (Wikimedia Commons image) 2.4 Program, Booth’s Theater. September 30, 1876. (Author’s collection) 2.5 Agnes Booth and Frank C. Bangs, Cabinet card publicity photographs, 1876. Cabinet Photographs (Booth, Agnes, and Bangs, Frank C.), Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University

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38 39

40 41

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Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the contributors for their excellent and thoughtful work throughout various phases of this project, as well as each other. We are very grateful for the support and encouragement of colleagues in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham and the Department of English at Bowling Green State University. Thanks are due to Paula Kennedy and Ben Doyle, for their advice and guidance during the editing stage, as well as to the anonymous reader for the detailed and encouraging feedback. We would also like to thank the Art Institute of Chicago, for permission to reproduce “Eugène Delacroix, The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, 1826” and the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for permission to reproduce “Scene from Sardanapalus—Booth’s Theater” and “Agnes Booth and Frank C. Bangs, 1876. Cabinet Photographs (Booth, Agnes, and Bangs, Frank C.).” Additionally, we would like to thank Jonathan Gross and Louise Mullany for their ongoing and invaluable support and advice over the course of this project.

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Contributors

Young-ok An is Associate Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, where she teaches various courses in British Romantic writers, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, women’s literature, theory and literary criticism. Among her publications are studies of Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley in Criticism and Studies in Romanticism. Her book-length project, “Prometheus Unmanned: Becoming Promethea,” investigates Romantic revisions of Prometheanism in Blake, Byron, the Shelleys, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Landon, especially focusing on their regendering of the Promethean hero. She is also working on the interplay between gender and the Romantic aesthetics of Hemans and Landon. Simon Bainbridge is Professor of Romantic Studies at Lancaster University. He is the author of the monographs Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), the editor of Romanticism: A Sourcebook (Basingstoke: Palgrave, now Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and has written many essays on the writing of the Romantic period. He is a past president of the British Society for Romantic Studies. He is currently working on projects on Romanticism and mountaineering and on the continuing British response to Napoleon Bonaparte. Ian Dennis received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and is now Professor in Romantic Literature at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (St. Martin’s Press and Macmillan, 1997) and Lord Byron and the History of Desire (University of Delaware Press, 2009), and has published articles on Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and other Romantic novelists, and on Lord Byron. He is also a novelist; his most recent book of fiction is The Emperor’s Assassin (Random House, 2003), a historical murder mystery co-authored under the pseudonym “T. F. Banks.” Joshua David Gonsalves is an assistant professor of English teaching nineteenth-century British Literature at the American University of xi

xii Contributors

Beirut. His focus is Romanticism across the disciplines of geopolitics, film and animal studies, literary culture and cultural theory. He is at work on two books—Keats Goes Global: Close Reading and the Geopolitics of Cultural Production and Screening War: The Construction of “Geopolitics” in Pre-Cinematic Mass Culture: 1789–1914—and has recently published work on Wordsworth, Swinburne, and David Lynch. Matthew J. A. Green is Associate Professor in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham. His research concentrates on the relationship between literature and social change, with a particular emphasis on cultural inheritance, adaptation and appropriation. He is currently working on two books, an edited collection for Manchester University Press, Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition, and a monograph on William Blake and Alan Moore. He is also General Editor of the journal Working with English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama. Jonathan Gross is Director of the Humanities Center and Professor of English at DePaul University. He is the author of Byron: The Erotic Liberal (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and the editor of Byron’s “Corbeau Blanc”: The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne (Rice University Press, 1997), Thomas Jefferson’s Scrapbooks (2006), The Sylph (Northwestern, 2007), Emma, or the Unfortunate Attachment (SUNY, 2006), and Belmour (Northwestern University Press, 2011). His articles on William Hazlitt, Freemasonry, and British Romanticism have appeared in SEL, Philological Quarterly, European Romantic Review, and other journals. Stephen Minta is Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at the University of York. He has written on French Renaissance poetry, on Petrarch, and on the Latin American novel. In 1998, he published On a Voiceless Shore, a study of Byron and Greece. Most recently, he has published essays on Joyce and Homer, and on aspects of Byron’s relationship with Greece, Greek politics, and the War of Independence. His Aguirre (1993), the re-creation of a sixteenth-century journey across Latin America, was a New York Times Notable Book for 1994. Piya Pal-Lapinski is Associate Professor of English at Bowling Green State University, where she teaches Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Critical Theory. She is the author of The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration (University Press of New England, 2005), and her current projects include a

Contributors

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study of judicial torture and the Gothic, and a monograph on fashion, violence, and the novel. Tilottama Rajan is Distinguished University Professor and Canada Research Chair in English and Theory at the University of Western Ontario. She has published Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Cornell University Press, 1980), The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Cornell University Press, 1990), Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard (Stanford University Press, 2002), and Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). She has also edited or coedited five books, most recently After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory (University of Toronto Press, 2002) and Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture (SUNY, 2004). She is currently working on a book on encyclopedic thought and the organization of knowledge from German Idealism to deconstruction. Jane Stabler is Reader in Romantic Literature at the School of English, University of St Andrews. She is working on the Longman Annotated English Poets Edition of the Poems of Lord Byron and a monograph on the poetics of exile for Oxford University Press. Andrew M. Stauffer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he also directs the NINES federation of nineteenthcentury scholarship online (http://nines.org). He is the author of Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the editor of works by Robert Browning and H. Rider Haggard. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Byron Society of America, the Editorial Board of the Byron Journal, and the Advisory Board for the International Byron Society.

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Introduction: Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror Matthew J. A. Green and Piya Pal-Lapinski

While waiting for the Carbonari revolt to begin in 1821, the space opened up by endlessly deferred freedom leads Byron to muse on the pleasures of terror in his Ravenna journal: Why, at the very height of desire and human pleasure,—worldly, social, amorous, ambitious or even avaricious,—does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what is . . . I am not sure that Fear is not a pleasurable sensation; at least, Hope is; and what Hope is there without a deep leaven of Fear?1 In The Experience of Freedom, Jean-Luc Nancy articulates the intimate and troubled relationship between freedom and terror. The idea of freedom, Nancy maintains, cannot be “examined, specified, questioned, or above all implemented, so certain are we that this would result in Chaos or Terror.”2 For Nancy, the limits of freedom are tied to ontological questions which, when probed, have the power to shift the ground of Being itself. Nancy speaks of the need to deliver ourselves from the thought of “freedom” as a characteristic of the subjective constitution of being and as the property of an individual subject. Yet this dissolution of the ownership of freedom brings terror in its wake. The notion of a freedom shadowed by terror is implied in the trajectory of both the history and aesthetics of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the Jacobin Terror of the French Revolution parallels the aesthetic movement from libertine pleasure to Gothic anxiety. As art historian Jean Starobinski notes in his study of the pre-Revolutionary period in art, The Invention of Liberty 1700–1789, Enlightenment aesthetic ideals engendered forms of intellectual freedom which “yearned nostalgically for terror.” Starobinski reflects on 1

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the core of anxiety within the Enlightenment’s legacy: “if, instead of being mitigated by a resurrection in nature or learning, death remained irreducible . . . melancholy contemplation would develop into apprehension, into dread before an unnamed threat.”3 Kant’s vision of freedom, in Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), similarly carries with it an element of terror. Kant writes that “the idea of freedom is inscrutable and thereby precludes all positive exhibition whatever”; the “freedom” which Kant’s moral law or categorical imperative brings is an internal drive, self-sufficient and self-determined, “so that it does not even permit us to cast about for some additional determining basis.”4 This collection brings together essays which examine the ways freedom and terror manifest themselves in the work of Byron—in terms of both aesthetics and politics—from an intriguing range of theoretical perspectives, while also building upon past work on Byron’s politics of freedom.5 Our contributors situate the poet’s problematic representations of freedom, violence, and political change, his personal and financial support of Italian and Greek independence movements, and his complicated response to Napoleon as highly topical within ongoing theoretical discussions as well as our own historical moment, a moment that has witnessed the re-emergence of these two intertwined discourses, especially in the political arena. As contemporary theorists such as Marcel Hénaff have pointed out, the French Revolution inaugurated a radical shift in the meaning of “terror”—from a state of feeling or affect to a form of political behavior founded on violence. As Hénaff notes: “after 1795, ‘terror’ becomes the noun that designates not only a moment of the Revolution, but also any kind of political behavior founded on systematic, unlimited violence relative to the opposition, or those believed to be part of the opposition. After that, terror was a new idea in Europe.”6 The emergence of this term during the Revolution had profound implications for history, ethics, aesthetics, and politics, as well as philosophical investigations of freedom. Within the past decade, “terror” has resurfaced as a highly salient term in the formulation and practice of politics both locally and globally. Speaking with direct reference to the attacks on the US in September 2001, Derrida notes that “the political history of the word ‘terrorism’ is derived in large part from a reference to the Reign of Terror . . . a terror that was carried out in the name of the state and that in fact presupposed a legal monopoly on violence.”7 More recently, Slavoj Žižek has argued for a critical re-evaluation of Jacobinism in which “ruthless self-criticism should go hand in hand with a fearless admission of what . . . one is tempted to call the ‘rational kernel’ of Jacobin Terror.”8

Introduction 3

One can no longer speak of rights and freedoms without encountering the specter of the “terrorist” or without making allowances for a form of political existence which is excluded and/or excludes itself from the rule of law. The recent work of Giorgio Agamben posits sovereignty itself as an unconditional power over life and death which converts certain modes of existence into “bare life”—life which is defined through a ban, as in the case of the homo sacer (sacred man) who cannot be sacrificed, yet the act of killing him is unpunishable by law. It could be said that the life of the “terrorist” in this sense is “bare life” and represents an “extra-territorial threshold in which the human body is separated from its normal political status and abandoned . . . in a state of exception.”9 Bare life exists at the limit point of freedom and sovereignty, revealing the constitutive violence of law. Combining Agamben’s work with Emmanuel Levinas’s discussions on the face of the other, Judith Butler notes that “normative schemes of intelligibility establish what will and will not be human,” in part by producing “images of the less than human, in the guise of the human, to show how the less than human disguises itself, and threatens to deceive those of us who might think we recognize another human there.”10 The exclusion of certain persons or groups of people from the domain of the human means that, on the one hand, “they cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never ‘were,’ and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness.”11 On the other hand, while this violence at the level of ontology has clear implications for those whose reduction to a spectral or undead state renders them ineligible for protection by “universal” charters of human rights or the rule of law, the “terrorist’s” ghostly status, his or her ability to inhabit a spectral space or virtual network, is directly invoked to justify incursions into the rights and freedoms of those privileged enough to lay claim to them. The post-9/11 moment has intensified this sense of the terrorist both as spectral presence and as bare life. US-led, NATO involvement in Afghanistan in 2001 which has intensified since February 2007 has seen the extension of the arena of “the war on terror” into a chaotic struggle with a complex tribal culture both on the level of politics and on a terrain which has historically made conquest difficult.12 Paradoxically, while the phantom terrorist network seems to elude war, at the same time, the body of the captured terrorist has become the center of a refocused debate on torture. According to NYU law professor Stephen Holmes, “Torture is an emotionally satisfying (not useful) form of counterterrorism because it mirrors terrorism itself.”13 The relationship

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between torture and truth, a truth hidden in the body and only revealed through confession, as the body begins to fragment under torture, has long been considered by classical, Enlightenment and contemporary commentators to be at the center of the problem of the tortured body.14 However, there is another, more crucial relationship, that between the tortured body and the state, in particular between the “truth” that this body produces and the way that sovereignty constitutes itself. With reference to the “invisible” legal position of torture in England, William Blackstone described torture as “an engine of state, not of law.”15 Terrorism turns torture/the terrorist’s tortured body into a Gothic mirror of the modern state where, positioned between law and desire, “judicial” torture itself has an extra-legal, spectral existence which is not fully accessible to the law. With the release of important memos relating to the theory and practice of torture (the Bybee-Gonzales Memo of August 1, 2002)16 and the Justice Department Memos on CIA interrogation techniques (released April 16, 2009), issues concerning the precarious line between torture and interrogation as well as liberal justifications of torture within certain scenarios have come to the fore, highlighting the “unthinkable” and terrifying place of torture within democracy. As journalist Mark Danner puts it in a New York Review of Books article analyzing the involvement of Red Cross medical professionals in monitoring waterboarding techniques: For many in the United States, torture still stands as a marker of political commitment—of a willingness to “do anything to protect the American people,” a manly readiness to know when to abstain from “coddling terrorists” and do what needs to be done. Torture’s powerful symbolic role, like many ugly, shameful facts, is left unacknowledged and undiscussed . . . Torture is at the heart of the deadly politics of national security.17 Several of the essays in this collection touch on Byron’s preoccupation with torture. Mazeppa, published in 1819, is a narrative of mediated torture that plays itself out against the background of war. It is interesting to compare this work with his Venetian play The Two Foscari, in which Jacopo Foscari is tortured at the command of the Doge his father; however, the tortured body is never directly present as in Mazeppa. By avoiding the visual spectacle of torture in The Two Foscari, Byron comments on the way torture both inhabits and disappears from the self-constitution of sovereignty. Similarly, Delacroix’s painting based on

Introduction 5

Byron’s play evades the physical depiction of torture—Foscari’s broken body is held up on one side of the painting, while the torture chamber looms in the shadows. In contrast, Mazeppa provides an elaborately graphic description of the agonies of torture. As a punishment for committing adultery, Mazeppa is strapped on the back of a wild horse. The horse, possessed by a demonic energy, carries Mazeppa beyond the limits of the human. Byron focuses intensely on the physical impact of torture on the sentient body, that which Steven Bruhm has characterized as a Gothic body, deprived of reason, dominated by affect: “My heart turn’d sick, my brain grew sore, / And throbb’d awhile, then beat no more: / . . . / O’ertortured by that ghastly ride, / I felt the blackness come and go” (Mazeppa, l.542–50).18 However, the poem also enacts a tension between bodily disintegration and a mind which detaches itself. Here, this tortured body does not produce any truth which can be reappropriated by the instruments of the state. In Mazeppa, the hallucinatory tale of torture performs a different function: torture teases out the terror which trails in the wake of this “inhuman” experience of freedom; Mazeppa’s vision of ultimate freedom, symbolized by wild horses roaming the steppes, their bodies unscarred by the torture inflicted by humanity, is induced by the torturous ride which breaks down the barrier between human and animal: “I scarcely knew / If this were human breath I drew” (1.599–600). Byron also complicates the distinction between torture as a public act (judicial torture as defined by historians of torture always has a primarily public function)19 and torture as a private experience.20 Byron’s representations of political, aesthetic, and erotic life throughout his work, as well as his fascination with the spectral or vampiric, directly engage this sort of conjunction between sovereignty, bare life, freedom, and terror. When Jerome McGann, surveying “the Great War’s bestial floors from the vantage of Vietnam, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Kosovo,” asks, “How does one live in such a world?” he reminds us that Byron’s texts pose this question repeatedly.21 Though fully capable of consigning himself to the use of violence for the sake of liberty, as in Italy and again in Greece, Byron’s poetry eschews the glorification of war. Nowhere is this insistence upon the brutality and opprobrium of armed conflict rendered more explicitly than in the anti-war cantos of Don Juan, in which the conquest of Ismail is described as a scene of iniquity: The city’s taken—only part by part— And Death is drunk with gore: there’s not a street

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Where fights not to the last some desperate heart For those for whom it soon shall cease to beat. Here War forgot his own destructive Art In more destroying Nature; and, the heat Of Carnage, like the Nile’s sun-sodden Slime, Engendered monstrous shapes of every Crime. (8.649–56) The violence depicted in these lines extends beyond an attack on the human, to include the destruction of the natural order itself. Humanity is replaced with monstrosity and war becomes a grotesque substitute for art. The sense that the destructive forces of war and the creative impulses of the artist are somehow interlocked may strike us as an acutely modern observation, but Byron goes one step further to identify the drunken maw of Death with the insatiable appetite of a reading public: “Think how the joys of reading a Gazette / Are purchased by all agonies and crimes” (8.993–4). As well as remaining alert to the interconnectedness of violence and spectacle, Byron’s work is likewise haunted by an aporia which continues to define the space of contemporary politics, namely, the conception of terror both as freedom’s limit point and, simultaneously, as that which opens up the impossibility of freedom as a conceptual and political category. Childe Harold gives cogent expression to these difficulties. At its most existentially despondent, the poem suggests that the legacy of European culture is nothing other than a history of degeneracy which has left the current generation irretrievably corrupt: And thus they plod in sluggish misery, Rotting from sire to son, and age to age, Proud of their trampled nature, and so die, Bequeathing their hereditary rage To the new race of inborn slaves, who wage War for their chains, and rather than be free, Bleed gladiator-like, and still engage Within the same arena where they see Their fellows fall before, like leaves of the same tree. (4.838–46) This vision of political, moral, and intellectual stagnation speaks not only to Byron’s vision of post-Napoleonic Europe but also to the widespread disillusionment and sense of stasis that has come to characterize our own historical moment. But, for all that Byron diagnoses

Introduction 7

his contemporaries with a profound failure of the imagination, Childe Harold yet offers a glimmer of hope. Indeed, it is at the very moment when the possibility of freedom appears forever foreclosed that the promise of emancipation is renewed. Having announced the arrival of “the eternal thrall / Which nips life’s tree, and dooms man’s worst—his second fall” (4.872–3), the poem continues. And, the very fact that it does continue, that poetry and history can persist in the aftermath of eternal doom, suggests not only a recurrence of felix culpa but also that freedom is itself coincident with the impossibility of being: “Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, / Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind” (4.874–5; emphasis in original). This volume brings together the work of Byron scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to confront the problematic relationship between freedom and terror through essays which explore key issues and texts from within the conceptual paradigms of contemporary theory. Reading literature in a manner directly tied to the immediate socio-political situation of the reader has become rather unfashionable in recent times, due in part to a necessary recognition of the historical and cultural embeddedness of literature and in part to the drive for ever-greater specialization within the academy. Nevertheless, without invoking neo-Kantian conceptions of artistic genius nor expecting literature to open a utopian space outside ideology, it is both possible and desirable to interrogate and learn from the intellectual content of literary texts. Nowhere is this more appropriate than with works that directly orientate themselves in relation to key political and intellectual situations, not only incidents actualized in the fabric of history (the French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, Congress of Vienna) but also and especially those happenings that remain virtual, resonating in the form of imaginative and utopian art forms. Just as the new terrorism has given us a new embodiment of fear, so too it has accentuated novel or previously overlooked definitions of “liberty” within institutional discourses whose combined effect has been to curtail basic civil rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Though the imperative to shift the balance from freedom to security has been reiterated throughout a host of democratic (and nondemocratic) states the world over (as the policing strategies for the recent G20 summit have amply demonstrated), within Western democracies it has been most pronounced in the UK. Thus, Lord Carlile, the Government’s independent reviewer of anti-terror legislation, posited “two sets of civil liberties” in his discussion of the UK government’s

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controversial plans to extend the twenty-eight-day period of detention without charge: Every citizen in this country has a civil liberty which is that national security should be protected, so that their kids are not blown up in a bus in Tavistock Square . . . On the other hand, one has the extremely important civil liberties of a much smaller critical mass of people . . . who might be held in custody arbitrarily . . . for an excessive period.22 Effectively, Lord Carlile’s argument sets a longstanding legal right against a right that “is not talked about very often,”23 representing the silent majority as the underdog. It also, however, confuses rights with liberties such that freedom comes to be understood as the ability not to act or to think, but rather to remain passive and unaffected, precluding that very metanoia which Jan Patoˇcka reminds us is indissociable from freedom.24 If certain of Byron’s political comments resonate within our own epoch, part of the reason is undoubtedly a certain parallel between his situation and ours. Attempts to curtail freedom of speech in the name of preventing the incitement of hatred or terror and ongoing debates about detention without charge are reminiscent of the spirit of government pursued during the 1790s and the first 30 years of the nineteenth century. There is, however, a less obvious correlation, one which has to do with a re-evaluation of the way freedom itself has come to be conceptualized. Whereas the great liberal philosophers of the past talked of needing to strike a balance between rights and freedoms, today the two categories have been conflated in a context where preservation of the status quo becomes the aspirational ideal. Once freedom becomes a right, it not only becomes incapable of provoking change but also loses its ability to prevent difference from collapsing into similitude. As freedom comes more and more to resemble its opposite, the right to remain unchanged, so too the activities of mere life—going to work, riding the tube, sitting at home—are recoded as examples of political activism and resistance. In the aftermath of the bombings on July 7, 2005, Britons were repeatedly reminded of the historical resilience of Londoners capable of carrying on with life as usual in the face of these and similar attacks, a sentiment echoed in an article published in The New York Times travel section later that month, tellingly entitled “London After the Bombings: Life Goes On.”25

Introduction 9

The Venetian plays, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari foreground State terror and the failure of revolution. Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence plays with the idea of “divine violence” or a violence completely divorced from any connection with the law or the State which exists outside the pairing of means and ends. Benjamin imagines this “divine violence” as that “which strikes without bloodshed,” in the “absence of all lawmaking” and does not “annihilate the soul of the living”— although it may annihilate “goods, right, life.”26 Similarly, the final cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage also bring the many ambiguous evocations of freedom throughout the poem to rest in the terror of the “divine violence” of the Ocean: “I wantoned with thy breakers—they to me / Were a delight; and if the freshening sea / Made them a terror— ’twas a pleasing fear” (1651–3). In The Giaour, Byron combines elements from classical and biblical traditions to provide a meditation on freedom, desire, and terror, that engages with questions of nationality, gender, and hospitality. Although Benjamin distinguishes divine violence from revolutionary violence as the latter can merely result in the reestablishment of the State under different conditions, Žižek, in his commentary on Robespierre’s speeches, sees revolution as imbricated with divine violence; for Žižek, the “terror” of the French Revolution, or any revolution, for that matter, contains a core of excess and divine violence, where the people “strike blindly” and bring about the convergence of democracy and terror. Is there a way, Žižek asks, to rethink this convergence, “to repeat it in today’s different historical constellation, to redeem its virtual content from its actualization?”27 Given the violent excesses of revolutionary terror, how does one theorize the relationship between freedom and terror? By examining the different forms that freedom and terror take in Byron’s work, the following chapters attempt to think through this difficult position.28 One of the key objectives of this collection is to discuss a wide crosssection of Byron’s work, from major works such as Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to shorter, yet highly significant works such as The Prophecy of Dante. Thus, while both Childe Harold and Don Juan are given detailed attention in several chapters throughout, each is situated in relation to other works from Byron’s oeuvre rather than occupying the sole focus of any one chapter. The selection of other works has been largely guided by the overarching concerns of the collection, which has meant that more light-hearted works, such as Beppo, have given way to darker and, in many ways, more problematic works, such as Cain and the Prisoner of Chillon. Many of Byron’s earliest meditations on these issues

10


occur in the Turkish Tales and discussion of these works concentrates primarily on the first of these, The Giaour, a work which self-consciously foregrounds the problem of freedom in an atmosphere of terror. Byron’s work further offers insight into the relevance of tragedy and spectacle in discussions of politics and theory. Accordingly, his dramatic works figure prominently in a number of chapters and here too the reader will find a representative sample, including oft-anthologized plays like Manfred, as well as lesser-known works such as Marino Faliero, Werner, and The Deformed Transformed. Chapter 1, “‘That lifeless thing the living fear:’ Freedom, Community, and the Gothic Body in The Giaour,” develops the consideration of the aesthetics of terror, picking up on Byron’s engagement with the Gothic tradition. Concentrating on the symbolic potency as well as the theoretical potential of the Gothic body, Matthew J. A. Green discusses The Giaour’s representations of death and dismemberment in the context of recent theoretical discussions, informed by the work of Judith Butler, of the body as the site in which the subject enters into relation with community. Arguing that the poem’s significance for contemporary political critique is found not in its overt references to Ottoman occupation of Greece but rather in elements of its Gothic romance, Green draws on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to reassess the Giaour’s relationship with freedom and wickedness. Attention is then directed toward the endorsement of revolutionary violence by Žižek and Alain Badiou, a position which not only facilitates an understanding of the Giaour’s appeal but also is itself subject to revision following a close engagement with Byron’s text. Andrew M. Stauffer’s “Sardanapalus, Spectacle, and the Empire State,” meanwhile, provides a timely discussion of the intersections of literary texts, theatrical spectacle, archeological artifacts, and imperial mythmaking. In a reading informed by contemporary events such as military engagements in Iraq and the “terrorizing spectacle” of the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the essay charts a course from Sardanapalus’ ancient Assyrian empire through Victorian Britain to the post-bellum United States, paying particular attention to the role played by representations of the end of empire both in the attempt to establish a permanent sense of imperial legacy and in the national-myth making of established and newly emergent imperial powers. In addition to noting several politically salient convergences between the 1876 staging of Sardanapalus at Booth’s Theater in New York and other resonant icons from the time, Stauffer provides an informed account of the adaptation

Introduction 11

and appropriation of Byron’s Eastern play, illustrating his argument with items from this production never before reproduced. Joshua David Gonsalves, in “Byron’s Venetian Masque of the French Revolution: Sovereignty, Terror, and the Geopolitics of Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari,” argues that these two plays “question the very possibility of politics in an era traumatized by the unprecedented Terroristic and Napoleonic violence bureaucratically banalized by the French Revolution.” Gonsalves’s analysis of the state terror produced by revolution introduces the problem of locating sovereign power in a state which functions through “terror by committee.” The promise of Republican sovereignty in Byron’s Venetian plays dissolves into a “necrotic geopolitics” which provides no escape from this claustrophobic terror. The essay complicates Žižek’s call for a more positive reclamation of revolutionary terror, an issue that continues to vex contemporary politics on the left and that reappears in subsequent chapters. The impact of spectacle on Byron himself—his experience of various public presentations of terror—forms the subject of Chapter 4. Investigating the contribution of Italian contexts on Byron’s representations of terror, Jane Stabler traces the complex interactions between the aesthetic and the political in “‘Awake to Terror:’ The Impact of Italy on Byron’s Depiction of Freedom’s Battles.” The essay combines first-hand accounts from the poet, his companions and contemporaries with a consideration of Byron’s interventions in both artistic and political debates of the period, paying particular attention to the architecture and visual art of Venice. Stabler examines first the impact of terror and horror on the spectator or reader—remarking upon Byron’s insistence on the centrality of guilt to the tragic effect—before proceeding to discuss the ways in which art does not simply resist but often serves to further the ends of political terror. In Chapter 5, “‘Something Not Yet Made Good’: Cain, Godwin, and Mary Shelley’s Falkner,” Tilottama Rajan develops considerations of desire, paying particular attention to the Byronic figure in relation to the wound of Romanticism. This chapter draws on key concepts relating to transgression—including “faute,” survival, and the secret—with reference to the recent theoretical work of Kristeva, Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Rajan situates Byron in relation to three key figures who helped define the intellectual landscape of Romanticism: William Godwin, who “imagined something like the Byronic hero avant la lettre,” Mary Shelley, who “reinvented her father more glamorously as Byron, so as to keep alive . . . the scandal of Romanticism,” and the German

12


philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who “was the first to theorize freedom in terms of the energy of evil and yet also as a radical fault inseparable from autonomy.” The chapter examines the problem of transgression in Byron’s Cain and Shelley’s rewriting of the Byronic father in her last novel, Falkner, identifying a utopian space in Byron’s drama set apart from its final catastrophe. Linking “dis-ease and freedom,” Rajan interprets the Byronic twist on Schelling’s notion of a freedom and autonomy haunted by a primordial negation, an evil which exists within freedom itself. Young-Ok An probes the political implications of Manfred’s Promethean defiance in Chapter 6, “Manfred’s Promethean Agon.” Using Foucault and Lacan to interpret Manfred’s struggle for freedom from the social/religious institutions which structure the symbolic dimension of the Name of the Father, An also explores the role of the phantom of Astarte. In her reading, the terror of Astarte’s “abysmal sublimity” confronts Manfred with a version of freedom which not only “unmans” him, but carries him beyond symbolization. In Chapter 7, “‘Like the Sheeted Fire from Heaven’: Transcendence and Resentment in Marino Faliero,” the issue of transgression is examined specifically in a manner that extends the analysis of the place of desire within the political. In this chapter, Ian Dennis approaches political violence in Marino Faliero through the lens of mimetic/triangular desire as theorized by René Girard and Eric Gans. By foregrounding the “power” of resentment and its “imagined transcendence” at the heart of Byron’s articulation of political rebellion in Marino Faliero, Dennis’s reading of the play exemplifies Derrida’s concern that “we must never disassociate the question of desire and of pleasure when we treat the political.”29 Simon Bainbridge directs attention toward the specific historical context in which some of Byron’s most resonant verse was composed, works that continue to impact upon Byron’s political afterlife. Chapter 8, “‘And Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind’: Byron, Switzerland, and the Poetics of Freedom,” examines the hitherto under-investigated importance of Switzerland to developments in Byron’s thinking about, and representations of, freedom. Drawing on the notes and travel journals of Byron, Hobhouse, and their near contemporaries, this chapter explores the aesthetic, political, and historical contexts of key literary works composed during this period, including “Prometheus,” The Prisoner of Chillon, “Sonnet on Chillon,” and “Darkness,” as well as the early stages of Manfred. In addition to providing a new assessment of the centrality of Switzerland within Byron’s corpus, Bainbridge also provides

Introduction 13

a timely overview of the way in which the “poetics of freedom” developed during Byron’s time in Switzerland has been taken up in a range of subsequent discourses, from Italian Risorgimento leader Guiseppe Mazzini and American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. In Chapter 9, “Byron: Consistency, Change, and the Greek War,” Stephen Minta raises the question of Byron’s challenge to the idea of political consistency and its repercussions. By analyzing Byron’s response to change, both in the historical and political sphere, Minta departs from Kelsall’s analysis of the “failure” of Byron’s political career by demonstrating that consistency/constancy itself is a trap when applied to the complexities of the Greek struggle for independence, and that Byron was fully aware of this, implying in Childe Harold IV that “each moment of illumination might well be faulty, or in need of subsequent revision.” This is particularly interesting when read against the contemporary historical moment in the light of the “consistency” of foreign policy in the US and in Europe towards the Middle East and Afghanistan, particularly as part of the War on Terror. Jonathan Gross continues the investigation of bodily vulnerability across a number of different levels in Chapter 10, “‘I have a penchant for black’: Race and Orphic Dismemberment in Byron’s The Deformed Transformed and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” This chapter evokes the terror of the Orphic dismemberment of Byron’s body, beginning with his death in Greece and the ensuing afterlife as well as the vampiric consumption of this body. Using the figure of Orpheus as a connecting thread, Gross explores the way this dismemberment becomes implicated in the politics of both race and freedom in Byron’s play and in J. M. Coetzee’s Byronic novel set in post-apartheid South Africa. Here, Gross locates the Byronic “body,” as marked with a violence which impinges on constructions of both freedom and modernity. In the eleventh and final chapter, “Byronic Terror and Impossible Exchange: From Werner to Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism,” the exploration of spectacle, terror, and symbolic value provides the focus for reading Byron alongside Baudrillard. Piya Pal-Lapinski presents a persuasive argument that Byron’s Werner offers important insights into the symbolic interconnections amongst death, capitalist exchange, and political terror, and indeed that “Byron out-Baudrillards Baudrillard.” This chapter begins with a discussion of the way in which capitalism spectralizes death, before complicating this picture by examining historical and literary representations of the Thirty Years War, an event that not only provided Byron with source material but also occurred at the

14


juncture in European history when feudalism was giving way to capitalism. Drawing on Byron’s reading of Schiller as well as his involvement in the Carbonari, Pal-Lapinski argues that, in Werner, Byron reconceptualizes the relationship between death and exchange. Returning attention to Baudrillard, the chapter concludes by highlighting the latent Romanticism in the French philosopher’s aestheticizing of death, comparing this with an earlier stage in Byron’s thought, manifested in Manfred and The Giaour. By examining the intersection of Byron’s work with key strands of current critical and theoretical inquiry, the chapters in this volume contribute to a richer, more complex and more topical understanding of Byron’s disruptive representations of freedom and terror. In addition to offering additional insight into the cultural contexts in which Byron was writing, the following pages are also concerned with the legacy and ongoing efficacy of Byron’s work. The materials below, therefore, not only contribute to an understanding of Byron as a poet and a historical figure but also—and equally importantly—they outline key points of convergence and conversation stretching between Byron’s epoch and our own troubled times.

1 “That lifeless thing the living fear”: Freedom, Community, and the Gothic Body in The Giaour Matthew J. A. Green

Following in the same vein as Southey’s The Curse of Kehama and Thalaba, The Giaour combines Gothicism and Eastern exoticism to produce a tale of romance and revenge that clearly engages with its own socio-political context.1 While its fragmentary style and abrupt changes in narrator produce a rich if daunting readerly experience, The Giaour’s socio-political layering is equally complex, presenting a meditation on sexual freedom, set primarily in and around Athens under Ottoman rule, “indebted,” as Marilyn Butler notes, “to a current controversy” over major ideological shifts in the governing of India, heralded by the Charter Act of 1813.2 Following the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a considerable amount of scholarly attention has been directed toward the poem’s position in relation to contemporaneous Orientalist discourses.3 The present chapter builds on this work, investigating the interconnection of freedom, community, and alterity within the poem and examining the ways in which this conjunction intersects with representations of the body as an object of fear and revulsion. Byron’s works have had a considerable impact on subsequent understandings of the way in which Greece has functioned in the political and cultural imaginaries of Europe and the US, where classical Athens resonates as an ideal of freedom and of the harmonious relation of individual and community.4 But though the poem appears to wear its politics on its sleeve, its sensationalism and popular appeal can appear to undermine its gravitas and intellectual coherence.5 Moreover, while there is now a considerable amount of scholarship that does take the poem’s politics seriously, there remains a sense in which its reception 15

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as a piece of popular literature operates as an impediment to scholarly enquiry in this area.6 Though this is not the place to engage in broader discussions of the intellectual, political, and aesthetic capabilities of popular art, an engagement with such debates is implicit within my chapter’s overarching claim that a Gothic aesthetics of the body contributes significantly to The Giaour’s capacity to intervene in current theoretical critiques of freedom and community in a meaningful manner. In what follows, therefore, emphasis will be placed on key Gothic elements in The Giaour so as to bring into relief a complex set of associations between freedom and the body that continue to inform our own cultural moment.

Byron, Delacroix, and Walpole: vulnerability and dismemberment Emma McEvoy argues that “Byron’s Giaour is resolutely in the Gothic tradition,” commenting on the hero’s evil eye, “his curse, like Cain’s, written on his brow,” and the fact that “the very form of the poem – discontinuous, achronological, framed and narrated by a variety of speakers – carries on the tradition of Gothic fragmentation.”7 Her analysis not only demonstrates a confusion of signifying practices, whereby the structure of the textual body conveys a sense of its cultural lineage and the marks on the human body function as a system of signs, but also foregrounds the link between the marking or dismemberment of the body and the experience of the uncanny central to the Gothic tradition. In fact, the uncanny can itself be defined in corporeal terms, as Steven Bruhm notes, “as an experience rooted in the body, and marked by a return of the body’s repressed fragility and vulnerability.”8 That there is something acutely Byronic about the repression and return of this experience of corporeal vulnerability becomes particularly clear in the work of one of Byron’s cultural inheritors, Eugene Delacroix. Indeed, Delacroix’s 1827 painting, The Death of Sardanapalus, can be described as a prototypical example of the Gothic body in Romantic art: “[Sardanapalus] has repressed the ever-present political reality of violence . . . In the moment captured by Delacroix’s painting, that repressed violence returns, and the body – afflicted, severed, cut – proclaims its primacy, its irrepressibility, its material existence.”9 Bruhm’s discussion draws attention to the spectacle of the suffering body as a crucial element within the Gothic and Romanticism, both of which develop out of the tradition of sensibility in which the body represents a key site of sympathetic communication between self and other, a

“That lifeless thing the living fear”

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space of imaginative investment, intellectual distancing, and potential contamination. The combination of dramatic spectacle with anxieties over the legibility of material forms is an important feature within Byron’s play—the inspiration for Delacroix’s painting—as well as in subsequent stage adaptations of Sardanapalus where the costumes and posture of the actors, together with the lavish sets, are keyed into the development of the national mythos in both Britain and the United States.10 But if the body can be read as a visible sign or signifying machine, it can also become, like the decaying monuments of bygone empires, a highly politicized object invested with contested meanings. Indeed, in the mutability of the body, with its capacity for dismemberment and repositioning, we see a coincidence of the uncanny affect and the discursive effect. Thus, for example, it is possible to observe a certain resemblance between Bartholdi’s centennial exhibition of the colossal hand and torch of the statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, which as Stauffer notes intersects with the Booths’ staging of Sardanapalus, and the giant hand, foot, and helmet that make manifest the growing sense of anxiety and horror in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, arguably the first Gothic novel: “what a sight for a father’s eyes!—He beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being.”11 The dismemberment of the son’s body initiates an obsessive return to the horror of dismemberment and human butchery—the dashing to pieces or stabbing to death of victims and villains alike—that would come to characterize much Gothic fiction throughout the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Ultimately, the discrete body parts of the “casque” coalesce into “the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude,”12 a ghost which reasserts the rightful lordship of Otranto before ascending to Heaven where it is welcomed by St. Nicholas. In a similar manner, the coming together of Bartholdi’s statue is an act of resurrection, looking back to, and indeed surpassing, the colossi of ancient Egypt; of reconciliation and celebration, commemorating in part the end of slavery as well as the Franco-American alliances through two revolutionary wars; and an act of anticipation, with Liberty in many respects coming to displace Columbia as the US answer to Britannia. But if the Gothic dismemberment and reassembly of bodies can function at the level of political symbolism, the pliability of the body also has serious repercussions for conceptualizing individual identity. Bruhm draws a clear link between Byron’s ambivalent attitude to his

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own body and his politics: “For Byron, the physical body was not a metaphor for vague political principles, but rather the actual site where political principles could be expressed.”13 The cultural persistence of fears linking the permeability of the body to moral and intellectual vulnerability is attested again in the fin-de-siècle Gothic, “a genre thoroughly imbricated with biology and social medicine,” which, as Kelly Hurley remarks, is “centrally concerned with the horrific re-making of the human subject.”14 But, as Judith Butler points out, the body cannot simply be reduced to a pliable medium upon which existing power relations are discursively reproduced: As something that, by definition, yields to social crafting and force, the body is vulnerable. It is not, however, a mere surface upon which social meanings are inscribed, but that which suffers, enjoys, and responds to the exteriority of the world, an exteriority that defines its disposition, its passivity and activity. Of course, injury is one thing that can and does happen to a vulnerable body (and there are no invulnerable bodies), but that is not to say that the body’s vulnerability is reducible to its injurability. That the body invariably comes up against the outside world is a sign of the general predicament of unwilled proximity to others and to circumstances beyond one’s control.15 Insofar as this “socially ecstatic structure of the body” calls into question liberal humanist conceptions of individual autonomy, it also has important repercussions for the conceptualization of freedom in the context of current debates over how one might begin to articulate a post-humanist understanding of a woman’s freedom over her own body.16 These concerns clearly intersect with The Giaour’s depiction of Leila’s gradual loss of freedom beginning with her sexual choice, by means of which she demonstrates a certain autonomy from within Hassan’s harem, and ending in her death, in which Hassan’s jurisdiction over her body and its agency is violently imposed. Leila’s execution is represented as unjust, tied to a set of socio-political practices grounded in the belief that “woman is but dust” (489n)—a belief that Byron directly contests in his note to this section, declaring it “a vulgar error” and proclaiming that “the Koran allots at least a third of Paradise to well-behaved women; but by far the greater number of Mussulmans interpret the text their own way, and exclude their moieties from heaven.” It is hard not to hear a hint of self-irony both in this allotment of at least a third and in his subsequent explanation that


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instances of Muslim misogyny result from their “being enemies to Platonics” (ibid.). Even if we accept Byron’s account of disproportionate representation in paradise at face value, the poem forcefully makes the point that the fragility of Leila’s position has as much to do with gender as race or religion when the Giaour himself admits, “Yet did he [Hassan] but what I had done / Had she been false to more than one” (1062–3). Though the poem does not follow through on this potential for a more self-reflexive critique of the position of women in Christian nations, it does nevertheless anticipate recent developments in thirdwave Feminism. Specifically, the vulnerability exhibited by Leila prefigures the way in which a certain return to the body can concentrate our attention on the embeddedness of all human beings of whatever gender within a constitutive network of social relations. Thus, Butler writes, “the boundary of the body never fully belongs to me. Survival depends less on the established boundary to the self than on the constitutive sociality of the body.”17 Leila’s loss of life highlights the sociality of the body both because it reaffirms the dominance of the patriarchal Ottoman order and also because, in so doing, it operates metonymically for the Greek loss of spirit. Nevertheless, The Giaour’s depiction of corporeal vulnerability calls into question the legitimacy of relating freedom to violence either in terms of retribution—on the personal level of the narrative in which the battle is motivated by the violation of Leila—or in terms of national liberation—in which the contest concerns the fate of Greece. That the text at the very least depicts military intervention as ethically problematic becomes clear when compared with Delacroix’s The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan. Exhibited in support of the Greek cause, Delacroix’s work glamorizes a moment that in Byron’s poem emphasizes the savagery of the Giaour through the description of an excessive violence that does not simply kill but dismembers Hassan. Delacroix represses the true Byronic horror of the Giaour, focusing on the moment immediately before blade meets flesh. Though the figure on the lower right, poised to slice open the ankles of Hassan’s horse, hints at skullduggery and though the preponderance of reddish-brown articles of clothing anticipates the spilling of blood, the depiction of actual violence is relegated to the indistinct background, thus relieving the viewer from the abject horror of the mutilated body presented in Byron’s text: the “sever’d hand / Which quivers round that faithless brand,” the turban “cleft in twain” and the “breast with wounds unnumber’d riven” (657–67).

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Delacroix’s Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi, painted the year after The Combat, exploits the symbolic value of The Giaour’s lovetriangle by presenting “the romance of liberation” in a “simple, didactic form” that is not present in Byron’s text.18 But whereas the emotional efficacy of Greece Expiring results from the conflation of vulnerability and sexual availability (an alabaster Greece stands facing the audience with breast bared and hands outstretched in an imploring manner, whilst a turbaned Turk lurks in the background), the power of The Combat depends precisely on the refusal to portray too vividly the effects of violence on the body of Hassan. Taken together, The Combat and Greece Expiring produce a fine example of the cultural narrative of “White men saving brown women [or indeed white women] from brown men,”19 which has functioned as part of larger strategies to legitimize interventionist violence from the nineteenth century through to the ongoing war in Afghanistan.20 It is, however, a mistake to attribute this narrative to Byron’s poem. While Meyer is correct to note that both the Advertisement and the autobiographical grounding of The Giaour work to reproduce “a similar syntactic structure, although in displaced forms,”21 and while Delacroix demonstrates the ease and efficacy with which Byron’s narrative can be adapted to fit with this interventionist template, the poem itself does not tell this story. In the end, there is no rescue and no winner in the contest for readerly hearts and minds. Instead, the poem disrupts the liberal humanist conceptualizations of liberation and the body that have, since Britain’s colonial rule of India, served to underpin Western military interventions in the East.

“A new and terrifying problematics of morality” While it inflames the desire for lost liberty, The Giaour problematizes freedom by offering up not a revolutionary summons but rather “a living challenge to the comforts of undemanding and conventional ethics.”22 The Giaour is one of Byron’s most violent and disruptive figures and his ability to strike decisively serves not to liberate but to render his suffering more acute and to transport him to the very limit of human experience. So too, the poem’s association of political liberty with sexual desire exposes the contradiction at the heart of freedom itself, which can only exist in an embodied form and yet continually revolts against the limitations of materiality. On the one hand, such freedom manifests itself through an experience of landlessness that is typified in the wandering of the Giaour whose liberty to roam threatens


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to overwhelm his identity entirely, while Leila’s exercise of sexual choice and the ensuing punishment points to an indissociable bond between freedom and vulnerability. Hassan’s sovereignty, on the other hand, is underpinned by a twofold relationship with the other: sexually, his identity is bound up with the fidelity of the women in his harem, while politically his power is both sustained and threatened by his ability to offer hospitality to the stranger. The ways in which gender, violence, and human frailty intersect in considerations of the body likewise call into question the distinction between revolutionary freedom and the wickedness of repression. Significantly, although we may continue to discuss the Giaour in terms of freedom, it is untenable to consider him as an embodiment of isolated autonomy or transcendental individualism.23 In his role as foreigner, he is best understood not as the champion of freedom but as himself an expression of freedom understood as a singularity marked by “the absolute intensity that through and through ex-tends the play of differences.”24 Though bent on earth thine evil eye As meteor-like thou glidest by, Right well I view, and deem thee one Whom Othman’s sons should slay or shun. (196–9) For the Christian monks at the end of the play, the Giaour similarly stands as a thing profane—“Saint Francis! keep him from the shrine!” (909)—but, despite recurrent depictions of his isolation, his identity is clearly orientated around a series of relationships. Leila is the most central of these, but Hassan also figures here: “But place again before my eyes / . . . / The maid I love—the man I hate—” (1016–18). Finally, as if to emphasize further the sense of his connection within a network of being, the Giaour recalls in the moments leading up to his death a third mode of relation: “I had—Ah! have I now?—a friend!” (1221), he declares, revealing that throughout his travails he has borne with him the token of that friendship: “this ring—his own of old” (1251). It is this experience of being in relation that simultaneously lends nobility to the Giaour’s suffering and confirms his guilt: In pain, my faultering tongue had tried To bless his memory ere I died; But heaven in wrath would turn away, If Guilt should for the guiltless pray. (1240–3)

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Love is what opens the Giaour to the experience of freedom that exists beyond the illusions of unconditional autonomy, a freedom that directly contrasts with that extolled in the opening fragment of the poem. In contrast to the Giaour’s ecstatic freedom that emerges in “hours of love or strife” (984), the freedom attributed to the ancient Greeks results from harmony and balance: “And every charm and grace hath mixed / Within the paradise” (48–9). This pastoral, passive form of freedom, which recurs in the Giaour’s dismissive description of the friar whose “days have pass’d in peace” (971), contrasts with the more clearly Gothic freedom of Leila, the Giaour, and indeed Hassan; however, this latter mode of freedom cannot properly be said to exist at all, suspended as it is between the polarities of life and death, of the drive to act and the longing for rest. In vain would we look for the resolution or reassurance of dialectic here. For the Giaour, for the infidel denied a proper name and defined by exteriority, there is no higher synthesis but rather a state of spectrality—a ghostly half-life in which he becomes alternately the haunter, a demon from which other ghouls shrink in horror (784–6), and the haunted: “I saw her—yes—she liv’d again” (1272). The state of the unfaithful is one of agitation, of that which to the religious looks like torment and hell, but which also bears such striking resemblance to the burnings of love. Nevertheless, it is ultimately the love and loss of Leila that push the Giaour beyond the succor of law or grace: “that love was mine, / . . . / ’Tis true, I could not whine nor sigh, / I knew but to obtain or die” (1110–13). In the final analysis the Giaour’s act grants him neither love nor freedom, but rather exposes the risk attendant upon any selflegitimizing act. In Nancy’s analysis, freedom houses within itself “an initial self-hatred,” a wickedness that “withdraw[s] existence” (insofar as that is understood as the relation of singularities), and “directly executes . . . the infinite possibility of detachment that freedom is.”25 The Giaour’s guilt for his crime(s) confirms these as acts of freedom—of the freedom that can consist in the decision to do evil—and his fate represents the absolute break with being-in-common that is the objective of wickedness: “My wrath is wreak’d, the deed is done, / And now I go— but go alone” (687–8). The Giaour recognizes his embeddedness within a network of relation and yet falls into exactly the same totalitarian trap as Hassan, giving into an experience of freedom as wickedness: “wickedness . . . hates singularity as such and the singular relation of singularities. It . . . hates sharing.”26 The irony that the Giaour’s freedom, which annihilates itself along with the freedom of his lost love, is


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identical with the wickedness of Hassan is not lost upon him: “Not mine the act, though I the cause” (1061). The association of the Giaour’s crusade with a struggle for liberation can only be sustained through the conceit linking Leila to freedom, but by this very logic the Giaour’s act occurs not to save freedom but after it has already been lost. The fact of Leila’s death means that the Giaour’s act is not revolutionary but is an example of punitive—that is repressive—violence. This is borne out in the battle scene, which supplants love with hate, substituting the embrace of Hassan for union with Leila: “But Love itself could never pant / . . . / With half the fervour Hate bestows / Upon the last embrace of foes” (647–50). The Giaour’s tragedy emerges after the figurative link between Leila and Greece has ceased to be salient. If there is a link between his slaying of Hassan and armed struggle for (national) liberty, it is analogical rather than metaphoric or metonymic: just as the revolutionary is willing to forsake friends, family, and life itself for the sake of the cause, so too the Giaour’s love for Leila is the cause to which he devotes his life. However wicked we might perceive his comportment toward her, that the Giaour remains faithful to the life-changing effects of his love for Leila is left in no doubt. And it is with this fidelity that we can turn again to a consideration of how reading The Giaour can provide a basis for intervention in current debates within contemporary critical theory. The work of the text here must be clearly distinguished from the intentions and political convictions of its author such that what our present reading produces is not a response to the question, “What was Byron’s attitude toward Greek freedom circa 1813?,” but rather “How can The Giaour inform current understandings of violence, freedom, and community?” Once more, a return to the Gothic can help in the formulation of a response.

Violence, freedom, and fidelity: Byron, Badiou, and Žižek It is at the point where the Gothic romance overtakes the political posturing of the poem’s opening fragments that we can identify the political heart of the work and consider afresh the association between the Giaour and freedom. What I wish to suggest is that the dangerous appeal of the Giaour can be explained in terms of Alain Badiou’s description of subjectivation as the process through which individual human animals attain the status of immortal subjects. This claim is significant because in the field of contemporary critical theory it is Badiou’s

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thought that provides the most convincing legitimization for political violence as grounded in a non-relative truth. In reading Byron alongside Badiou and also Slavoj Žižek, two of the theorists most clearly committed to continuing the emancipatory project in our own historical moment, it becomes possible to identify the promise as well as the problems belonging to these radical politics. Let us turn first to a consideration of the concept of the subject that grounds these political perspectives. Badiou explicitly distinguishes the subject from the body vulnerable to death: The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters Man’s identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wantingto-be-animal to which circumstances may expose him. And . . . every human being is capable of being this immortal.27 The subject for Badiou cannot be equated with “the simple reality of his living being,”28 but rather emerges as the result of a decision to commit to a truth that introduces newness in a given situation as a result of an interruption occasioned by an event: “a subject is constituted by an utterance in the form of a wager,” a declaration that “this event has taken place, it is something which I can neither evaluate, nor demonstrate, but to which I shall be faithful.”29 Badiou offers four examples of evental sites, corresponding to his four “conditions” of philosophy: “the appearance, with Aeschylus, of theatrical Tragedy; the irruption, with Galileo of mathematical physics; an amorous encounter which changes a whole life; the French Revolution of 1792.”30 Significantly for our purposes, Badiou insists that such truths are universal, that in any situation it is possible to speak of a non-relative truth, which then becomes identified with freedom: “it is vain to imagine that in the absence of a principle of truth, one can oppose an existential gamble to the calculus of life, a gamble that could give rise to something that could be called liberty.”31 If it is only fidelity to a truth that raises one to the status of a subject, then “every life, including that of the human animal, is beneath Good and Evil.”32 As Žižek notes, the wager made by the subject takes him beyond moral prohibitions based on the sanctity of life: [T]o put it in Badiou’s terms, mythic violence belongs to the order of Being, while divine violence belongs to the order of Event: there are no “objective” criteria enabling us to identify an act of violence


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as divine; the same act that, to an external observer, is merely an outburst of violence can be divine for those engaged in it – there is no big Other guaranteeing its divine nature, the risk of reading and assuming it as divine is fully the subject’s own.33 Žižek here maps Badiou onto Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” which opposes “revolutionary violence” (figured as “divine violence”) to law-making and law-preserving violence (the “mythic violence” of the state).34 The fact that the revolutionary or terrorist (and for both Žižek and Badiou violence associated with the event can be associated both with Jacobinical governments and with violent anti-state insurrections) must go beyond the law in no way obviates the guilt of this position (in fact, this is precisely the wager one must make), but it does position this subject outside relationship (indeed, Badiou expends considerable energy outlining his opposition to any ethics that appeals to the rights or claims of the other).35 Fidelity supersedes conventional ethics just as justice must take precedent before the law and it is no surprise that Žižek cites Kierkegaard—with a nod toward St. Paul—as he extrapolates on the relationship between violence and love: “the notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight: the domain of pure violence . . . the domain of violence which is neither law-founding nor law-sustaining, is the domain of love.”36 My contention is that the Giaour stands as a literary representation of the sort of revolutionary subject whose acts are endorsed by Žižek and Badiou. In committing himself entirely to an immortal cause—his love for Leila—the Giaour demonstrates a disdain for animal hungers and earthly interests: My spirit shrunk not to sustain The searching throes of ceaseless pain; Nor sought the self-accorded grave Of ancient fool, and modern knave: Yet death I have not fear’d to meet, And in the field it had been sweet Had danger wooed me on to move The slave of glory, not of love. I’ve brav’d it—not for honour’s boast; I smile at laurels won or lost. — To such let others carve their way, For high renown, or hireling pay; But place again before my eyes

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Aught that I deem a worthy prize; — The maid I love—the man I hate— And I will hunt the steps of fate[.] (1004–19) The Giaour enchants us because his violence, like his love, erupts with a shattering force that speaks of a freedom whose marks endure to make their claim on the present. He excites admiration and pity precisely because he makes his choice and sticks to it: I lov’d her, friar! nay, adored — But these are words that all can use — I prov’d it more in deed than word— There’s blood upon that dinted sword— A stain its steel can never lose: ’Twas shed for her, who died for me[.] (1029–34) The Giaour bets on love and loses everything. But he persists in his belief, even though the violence of his love does not achieve its earthly objectives—it cannot bring Leila back nor compel the repentance of Hassan (1089–92)—and even though it makes him guilty not just in the eyes of the world, but in the eyes of heaven as well: “Leila . . . / My good, my guilt, my weal, my woe” (1181–2). Žižek writes, “the underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable and pathetic sentimentality, is its cruelty itself, its link with violence.”37 Sentiment, sensibility, and sexuality are all in their ways tied to the wanting-to-be-animal, but love aims at something beyond the sensual body. Žižek explains this, via Kierkegaard and Lacan, in terms of a “split in the beloved between the beloved person and the true object-cause of my love for him, that which is ‘in him more than himself’ (for Kierkegaard: God).”38 For Badiou, similarly, love is a condition of philosophy precisely as “the procedure that makes truth out of the disjunction of sexuated positions.”39 Viewing the Giaour’s love in this context allows us to make sense of the fact that his violence feels like a revolutionary act despite the breakdown of the conceit linking Leila to Greece and despite the complete absence of a political motivation on his part. Moreover, regarding his love as a non-relative truth helps us to understand how an absolute fidelity to his encounter with Leila transforms his freedom into a rejection of community that heaps scorn on any mode of being-incommon.40 Finally, it adds another dimension to feminist criticisms of


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the text that point to the absence of Leila as a precondition for an idealization of her virtue.41 The Giaour’s nobility and his tragedy are tied to the same tradition of thought as that of Badiou and Žižek, a tradition that suspects appeals to weakness and frailty as excuses for inaction or for undertaking imperial interventions under the cover of human rights;42 indeed, Benjamin describes a position similar to that advanced not only by the Giaour but also by other Byronic figures such as Manfred when he writes: “However sacred man is . . . there is no sacredness in his condition, in his bodily life vulnerable to injury by his fellow men.”43 But this is not the whole story. Despite the inexorable appeal of attempts to eschew bodily vulnerability, to map a straight gate to Eternity beyond concerns over biological life and death, it is precisely through weakness—and indeed the weakness of relation—that truth can enter the world. Byron’s near contemporary, William Blake, described matters thus: “all sects of Philosophy are from the Poetic Genius adapted to the weaknesses of every individual.”44 That Blake, like Byron, was much taken with the Gothic is not irrelevant in this context, for it is precisely the Gothic body, that which suffers and is open to piercing, which can operate as a site of shared vulnerability, as the nexus around which to organize an understanding of community. The Giaour’s love only comes about through the possession of a body—and spirit—open to penetration. In what follows, I will argue that it is because he refuses to deny the horror and inevitably of becoming “That lifeless thing the living fear” (1281) that the Giaour allows a glimpse of a world beyond that of mere life: “Alas! the breast that inly bleeds / Hath nought to dread from outward blow” (1155–6). In this respect, the reading I wish to advance here draws on and adapts Benjamin’s discussion of the ways in which the fear of death and doctrines extolling the sanctity of life are deployed in the service of mythic or repressive violence to instill passivity.45 However, whereas Benjamin, and following him Badiou and Žižek, establish an opposition between justice and vulnerability, the power of the Giaour’s love for Leila is described precisely in terms of its capacity to open him to his own vulnerability. The traumatic loss of Leila is universalized in the account given in lines 916 to 936, in which love is described both as “The wound that time can never heal” and the “mine” from which the “rugged metal” of the self is unearthed. Moreover, the penetration of Hassan’s chest by the Giaour’s blade clearly parallels the Giaour’s comparison of his own “vacant bosom’s wilderness” (939) with “the desart-bird, / Whose beak unlocks her bosom’s stream / To still her famish’d nestlings’ scream” (951–3).

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Vulnerability and the beauty of death The vulnerability opened up by the body as the primary site of interaction with others is a recurrent theme throughout The Giaour. The text makes explicit the connection between the incursions into individual identity and the state of the material environment. Thus, the intrusion of absence within Hassan’s identity, an intrusion that mirrors the appearance of the “stranger in his native land” (736) and which precipitates his death, is likewise reflected in the emptiness of his deserted estate—“The steed is vanished from the stall” (288)—and in the gore spread across the local fauna: “A stain on every bush that bore / A fragment of his palampore” (665–6). The anchor that binds both freedom and wickedness to relationship is the body, which persists even after death has collapsed the singularity’s interiority. Thus, the freedom of those who are radically disempowered (as through incarceration and murder) is experienced as “the very existence of [the] body” and can persist after death so long as that relation is maintained; such situations help us to understand the occurrence of freedom prior to the formation of a subject and therefore before the subjective experience of choosing—freedom, in other words, is experienced as “the force of the thing as such, or as the force of the act of existing.”46 Conceptualizing freedom in this way offers a fresh perspective from which to assess Leila’s centrality to The Giaour. Had Leila lived to enjoy the life which the text frames for her, the problematic dimensions of the Giaour’s freedom and his exercise of violence would be far less evident—indeed, had Leila escaped, the narrative would collapse into the imperial/interventionist template of the white man saving the woman from the brown man. This would fundamentally alter the way in which the poem engages with its historical context, transforming it perhaps into a naively utopian call to arms supported by a narrative of the valiant rescue of the object of desire. But the poem does not do this. Instead, it rather disturbingly places an aesthetic premium on the dead female body: Hers is the loveliness in death, That parts not quite with parting breath; But beauty with that fearful bloom, That hue which haunts it to the tomb[.] (94–7) Byron’s note draws deliberate attention to these lines, announcing the intention to evoke the “painful remembrance of that singular beauty


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which pervades . . . the features of the dead, a few hours, and but for a few hours after ‘the spirit is not there’” (416n). The beauty of this evocation not only affects us far more deeply than the paradisial representations of harmony and ease that have come before, but in so doing the text allows for a momentary overcoming of the terror associated with the dead corpse and allows us to glimpse a world beyond that of mere life. This brief flicker from the mythic to the divine allows for an understanding of community as concerned with singularities rather than individual or collective subjectivities and can concentrate attention on real existing networks of relation above and beyond the governance of subjects.47 In rendering horror familiar, this shift in perspective works to resist the political deployment of terror derived from the purportedly primordial drive for biological self-preservation. Insofar as the Giaour’s fidelity is articulated in terms of his (self-)extraction from relationship, however, it transforms him from hero to monster as evidenced by the curse of vampirism. In this context, the Giaour takes his place at, or at least very near, the source of a long line of Gothic figures “doomed to feed off the mere mortals who surround them, to sustain their sense of overlordship.”48 Although there is no indication that the Giaour ever marries or has a family, the image of him draining “the stream of life” from “daughter, sister, wife” (759–60) provides an apt metaphor for the destruction of relation. Vampirism thus can be read as the replacing of being-in-common with an unholy communion in whom difference is collapsed in a horrific perversion of community;49 thus, the Giaour’s place within the symbolic order becomes dependent upon the dying recognition of his victims who “Shall know the daemon for their sire” and “Shall bless thee with a father’s name” (764, 769). The taboo of vampirism lies not only in the violation of familial and social relations but also in the spread of its contagion, an evil likewise associated with the Giaour: “He came, he went, like the Simoom, / That harbinger of fate and gloom” (282–3). Of course nothing would be easier than to imagine a community defined in such a way as to include and normalize this excluded figure—indeed the cultural legacy stretching from Anne Rice to Charlaine Harris demonstrates nothing if not the drive to rehabilitate the vampire as a fully-fledged member of the community; however, in bringing the Giaour in, it is impossible to keep Hassan out. Though there were precedents for stories about “good” vampires, the genre-defining move made by Rice was the shear scope she gave the monster to speak his own tale.50 In contrast to this opening-up of dialogue, a resistance to humanizing the monstrous other functions

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as a constituent part of Žižek’s argument against the current privileging of multiple perspectives over assertions of universal truths: “Are we ready to affirm that Hitler was an enemy because his story hadn’t been heard?”51 Žižek, following Badiou, argues that “only an ‘inhuman’ ethics . . . addressing a human subject, not a fellow person, can sustain true universality.”52 The mistrust of the other’s story is thus part and parcel of the attempt to overcome the vulnerability of the human body; but it relies on a prior decision that distinguishes friend from enemy, a decision that is ultimately a question of framing. With its provision of fragmentary narratives focalized through multiple perspectives, The Giaour serves to demonstrate not only the power of the frame but also the flexibility able to entertain radically opposed framing procedures without suspending ethical judgments. Hassan is definitely the “bad guy” throughout, but the poem’s presentation of his life, as well as Leila’s, as one that is grievable—“the very voice of Grief / Might wake an Echo like relief” (330–1)—clearly focuses readerly attention upon the vulnerability of individual human beings over and against Badiou’s sense that “the world we live in is a vulnerable, precarious world.”53 Certainly the world we live in is vulnerable and precarious, but one of the key lessons to be gleaned from The Giaour is that, as Badiou notes elsewhere, if we want to move to “a single world of human subjects,” we need to avoid fixation on topics such as integration and cultural difference: “the single world is precisely the place where an unlimited set of differences exist.”54 What my reading of The Giaour suggests is that attempting to actualize Badiou’s communist hypothesis requires a “hard, rigorous, relativism” open to the sort of disjunctive narrative strategies evident in Byron’s poem.55 The horrific vampirism of the Giaour contrasts with the seductive spectrality of Leila, who returns near the end of the poem as a phantasm: “’tis there—in silence stands, / And beckons with beseeching hands! / With braided hair, and bright-black eye” (1298–1300). Speaking of the constitutive frames that determine which lives count as grievable, Butler writes, “if a life is produced according to the norms by which life is recognized . . . there is a remainder of ‘life’—suspended and spectral— that limns and haunts every normative instance of life.”56 Whether we believe that Leila has reappeared or that the apparition is a figment of the Giaour’s dying brain, her phantasmal status is the direct result of a regulatory framework that denies her full human status, rendering her “A soulless toy for tyrant’s lust” (490). In depicting a legal system in which the law may determine a priori or a posteriori whether a given being ought to be considered as anything more than a base-level


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existence (in which, that is, a woman may be subject to summary execution either because her sex is declared soulless or because she has forfeited her life through a violation of another’s property rights), The Giaour offers an opportunity to reflect again on the horror attendant upon the reduction of a living being to the status of a thing: “I gaz’d, till vanishing from view, / Like lessening pebble it withdrew” (380–1). Neither the fisherman who witnesses this diminution of freedom nor the Giaour who arrives too late to avert it are free from the guilt of Hassan’s act; however, Leila does receive posthumous recognition from an unlikely source, an Ottoman loyal to Hassan but prepared to contest the terms of the regulatory framework which legitimates his master’s claim to power: “should our prophet say / That form was nought but breathing clay, / By Alla! I would answer nay” (480–2). That the poem locates this assertion in the mouth of a Muslim speaker complicates the significance of Leila’s death. One the one hand, Leila’s execution demonstrates the barbarity and baseness of those complicit with the Ottoman regime; on the other hand, however, it offers an occasion of dissension from within such that the text’s fragmentary form reinforces the heterogeneity of the Ottoman community itself. Rather than regarding it as something to be disavowed by those whose objectives extend beyond the preservation of the status quo, the body can perform a central function in the articulation of a coherent response to governmental, military and media discourses that invoke the threat to life as part of an argument in favor of an escalation of state violence. This is precisely the move that precedes Butler’s subsequent work on grievability and framing. Writing in response to the increasingly militarized politics initiated by the declaration of the “War on Terror,” she reconceptualizes the body as that which makes explicit the existence of each and every human being within a network of relation: Constituted as a social phenomenon . . . my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, it bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life; only later, and with some uncertainty, do I lay claim to my body as my own, if, in fact, I ever do.57 In this way, Butler’s meditations on the material aspect of the self, of the embodiment of the individual within a body that is both physically and socially vulnerable, draws attention to the difficulties attendant on assertions of autonomy derived from “the claim of bodily integrity and self-determination.”58 More than this, however, it allows for a

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recognition of the primary vulnerability that links each individual in the network of being as that which is closer to me than my own soul. That this weakness is synonymous with the opening to alterity is clear from the fundamental role it plays in determining both the motivation and the risk of hospitality. The allure of the Giaour can be understood, as McGann suggests, in terms of a fascination with a figure who risks and bears the suffering that comes from going beyond the simple morality of the day. Equally captivating and infinitely more significant, however, is the figure of Leila, whose fate serves as a powerful reminder of the brutal fact of human weakness at the heart of freedom itself: “And she was lost—and yet I breathed, / But not the breath of human life” (1192–3).

2 Sardanapalus, Spectacle, and the Empire State Andrew M. Stauffer

As the drama draws to a close, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra imagines with horror the Roman theatrical sequels that will spring up in mockery of her Egyptian majesty. As she tells her handmaiden Iras, “scald rhymers” will “ballad us out o’ tune,” and . . . quick comedians Extemporally will stage us, and present Our Alexandrian revels; Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’ th’ posture of a whore.1 Cleopatra expresses her fears of burlesque imitation in nouns that become verbs—“ballad,” “stage,” and “boy”—a rhetorical tendency typified in her reaction to Caesar’s promises a few lines earlier: “He words me, girls, he words me” (5.2.192). In each case, the anxiety conveyed by Cleopatra’s verbing concerns an imagined subjugation to a reductive and captivating incarnation: I will become a ballad, my life equated with what a stage can hold, my greatness confined in the body of a boy. The noun–verb oscillation allows her to convey such fears of objectification (that is, of becoming an “Egyptian puppet . . . shown / In Rome” (209–10) simultaneously with fears of a narrative controlled by others, of the import of the dismissive phrase, “you’re history.” The theatrical record of Byron’s Assyrian drama Sardanapalus provides an instance of a related movement of throne room to imperial stage, with particular regard to the issues of incarnation, spectacle, and legacy that Cleopatra’s words here invoke and that also lie at the heart of Byron’s concerns in his Eastern play. Like a number of Byron’s dramatic 33

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works, Sardanapalus was frequently performed during the Victorian era, both in England and America.2 The critical conversation about these performances has focused almost exclusively on Charles Kean’s 1853 London staging (at the Royal Princess’s Theatre), in part because of the production’s priority in drawing on Austen Henry Layard’s Assyrian mid-century archaeological finds to furnish the stage.3 Once Layard had hauled ancient Assyrian artifacts and monuments back to the British Museum and published illustrated accounts of his adventures and discoveries, Byron’s play became a ready-made excuse for creating elaborate panoramas of Nineveh, and then—what was even more exciting—presenting their destruction. Kean remarks that his production was based on the “wonderful discoveries made within the last few years . . . on the site of ancient Nineveh” in order “to convey to the Stage an accurate portraiture and a living picture of an age long since passed away, but once as famous as our own country for its civilization and power.”4 Already the chain of empires is being emphasized, as Sardanapalus is being made over into an allegorical touchstone for Victorian Britain. However, it was the 1876 New York City production, based on Charles Calvert’s arrangement, that was the culmination of the play’s nineteenth-century theatrical history: in the longest-running performance of any of Byron’s dramas ever, Sardanapalus played at Booth’s Theater in Manhattan for 113 nights.5 Even more so than Kean’s production, the Booth’s show was a triumph of spectacle, with great attention paid to creating the marvelous funeral pyre as the grand finale. Accordingly, Byron’s text was radically cut in order to emphasize visual and technological displays; the drama was set amidst ‘authentic’ ancient Assyrian scenery and featuring a “Grand Ballet” of at least eight different dances. The details of this history reveal connections between Sardanapalus’ own sense of his spectacular legacy and its eventual realization in the Empire State in 1876—that is, at the urban heart of a burgeoning imperial nation celebrating its centennial year in the wake of a Civil War. There are levels of coincident irony in the convergence of techno-spectacle, imperialism, and the looting of relics represented by this production, plotted along an axis connecting New York City and the place we now call Iraq. In addition, the 1876 New York show takes place under the auspices of the Booth family, whose most infamous member had assassinated President Abraham Lincoln as he sat in a theater watching a play: sic semper tyrannis. Byron’s drama becomes involved in the mythic history of the United States, constructed by means of spectacle and the rehearsal of certain spectacular events as if they were keys to understanding the

Sardanapalus, Spectacle, and the Empire State

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nation proper. As Megan Sanborn Jones writes of this production, “The success of the production can be attributed . . . to the theatrical presentation of the exotic East. The setting for Sardanapalus . . . created for them the shape and style of lands beyond their borders and reaffirmed their place as American.”6 The 1876 Sardanapalus brings to the surface both the ideological work of national definition in America at its centennial and the play’s own concern with issues of nation, reputation and inheritance. Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Byron’s monarch expresses a strong sense of his own legacy. Indeed, Sardanapalus is centrally concerned with the struggles of the last Assyrian monarch to determine what his reign will mean to future eras. The king is a pacifistic hedonist who says he has intended to make mine inoffensive rule An era of sweet peace ’midst bloody annals, A green spot amidst desert centuries, On which the future would turn back and smile, And cultivate, or sigh when it could not Recal Sardanapalus’ golden reign.7 Coming where it does in this passage, that imagined “green spot” morphs from written sign (a spot of green ink on the pages of those blood-stained annals) to a temporal paradise (an oasis-like spot of time “amidst desert centuries”), serving in both cases as an emblem or hieroglyph to be read by “the future.” And yet the king’s language here suggests a concern that this verdant record may, in time, be forgotten: the world would “sigh when it could not / Recal Sardanapalus’ golden reign.” “Recal” here means “call back,” of course, but it also means “remember,” and that “sigh” becomes the wordless breath of future generations no longer able to read Sardanapalus’ “green spot” on the page of history. It is worth noting that Byron was writing all of this just prior to the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphics by Champollion and Young in the 1820s—that is, at a time when the written records of the ancient Near East were still ciphers to the modern world. Indeed, fears of illegibility animate the drama, which ends with Sardanapalus and his beloved slave, Myrrha, atop a suicidal pyre meant to destroy the palace as the rebellious satraps close in—and also meant to be the king’s final monument, the act by which posterity will remember him. Indeed, he imagines his flaming destruction will produce “a light / To lesson ages, rebel nations, and / Voluptuous princes,” even

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though “Time shall quench full many / A people’s records, and a hero’s acts; / Sweep empire after empire, like this first / Of empires, into nothing” (5.1.440–5). In the event, Sardanapalus’ last words on the matter come in the form of a satire on the Egyptian pyramids, those proud Ozymandian monuments which time has turned into sites of confusion: In this blazing palace, And its enormous walls of reeking ruin, We leave a nobler monument than Egypt Hath piled in her brick mountains, o’er dead kings, Or kine—for none know whether those proud piles Be for their monarch, or their ox-god Apis: So much for monuments that have forgotten Their very record! (5.1.480–7) Physical monuments forget their record, cows may be mistaken for kings, and Time may erase “full many / A people’s records”: Sardanapalus fears that, like the “green spot” which can no longer be recalled or read on the pages of “bloody annals,” material relics always tend towards illegibility. So he chooses to arrange instead for his story to be passed on, staging his own grand finale and telling a faithful servant to “fly,— / And as you sail, turn back” and, upon arriving in Paphlagonia, “Say what you saw at parting” (5.1.390–4). In Sardanapalus’ final gamble, then, the records of Assyria are burned to stoke the fires of memorable spectacle. In fact, the nineteenth-century theatrical fortunes of Byron’s play confirm this spectacular tendency adumbrated in the last act of Sardanapalus: synoptic studies by Taborski and Margaret Howell, and recent work by Edward Ziter, make it clear that every Victorian performance of the play subordinated text to special effects, particularly after Charles Kean’s famous 1853 London version. As Ziter puts it, “the tried and true practice of the closing conflagration” was “used to illustrate the popular view that ancient Eastern civilizations collapsed with spectacular speed under the weight of their own decadence.”8 In Sardanapalus, the great conflagration is literally the show-stopper, and this special effect became more elaborate and realistic with each revival until it reached a kind of culmination in the 1876 New York production. Sardanapalus played at Booth’s Theater (under the management of Henry Jarrett and Harry Palmer) from August 15 until December 2. This


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production was based on a condensed, four-act version of the play by Charles Calvert, who said beforehand that Sardanapalus “is a poem over the heads of the people, but the ‘conflagration’ will make it a financial success.”9 In the competition for stage time between poem and scenic effects, the latter took decided precedence, as the theater program demonstrates: “scenery,” “costumes,” “regalia,” “the simulated conflagration,” “the machinery and mechanical appliances,” and “the calciums and other marvelous stage lights” receive near-top billing (see Figure 2.4).10 Of the 1876 Jarrett and Palmer production, the New York Herald wrote scathingly, [T]he play was hacked to pieces . . . We read of the gypsy child stealers who used to capture children and turn them into monsters by rude surgery. Mr Calvert has done the same for Lord Byron . . . What we had, from beginning to end, was spectacle and ballet. It was the “Black Crook” or the “White Fawn” woven together with fragments of Byron’s rhetoric.11 At the same time, the Illustrated Sporting New Yorker called it “the most effective and complete spectacular illustration of dramatic and scenic art ever before seen in this country.”12 According to the latter publication, an average of three thousand people were going to Booth’s each night by mid-September; they reasserted that Jarrett and Palmer’s Sardanapalus “far surpasses any spectacular effort ever made in this country.”13 Those playgoers in Booth’s Theater in 1876 would have seen something like the images presented in Figures 2.1 and 2.2. Published in the illustrated journals of the day, these engravings of the New York finale of Sardanapalus have never been reproduced. In both of the images, one can see the Assyrian winged bull colossi looming in the background. In Figure 2.2, from the Illustrated Sporting New Yorker of 1876, we can see Agnes Booth as Myrrha striking a pose strangely similar to that of the new colossus, Liberty, which Frederic Bartholdi had designed for the New York harbor in that same centennial year. Indeed, the upper right arm and torch of the incipient Statue of Liberty were on display at the Centenntial Exposition in Philadelphia, a display used to raise money for the construction of the rest of the statue (Figure 2.3). That is, the Booth’s Theater performance of Sardanapalus seems to have converged fortuitously upon a number of resonant iconic images—the raised arm, the flaming brand, the monumental sculpture, the blazing pyre—that circulated as part of the American national myth-making of

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Figure 2.1 “Scene from Sardanapalus—Booth’s Theater.” (September, 1876?). Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

1876. That the whole production centered on the fall of Assyria and the self-destructive end of an imperial state—the empire dying—suggests that any mature mythic narrative of nationhood will include a fantasy of its own ending. In 1840, Thomas Babington Macaulay had famously imagined a future epoch “when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.”14 The rapidity and extent to which Macaulay’s image circulated in Victorian England provides a counterpart here, from the English perspective. In parsing the developing relationship of their nation and empire, Englishmen had frequent recourse to this icon of ruin. In a similar way, the popularity of the performance suggests that Byron’s play, Calvert’s adaptive revisions, and the stagecraft at Booth’s came together to provide a kind of symbolic narrative of empire that Americans found compelling at this point in their history. The theater program itself (Figure 2.4) offers a curious coincidence in the lower-right hand corner: the fortuitous advertisement headed “The Empire Dyeing.” I like to imagine that advertisement catching the eye, in the lurid light of the play’s concluding fires, of an American


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Figure 2.2 “Mrs. Agnes Booth, as Myrrha, in Sardanapalus.’ ” The Illustrated Sporting New Yorker 7.174 (October 7, 1876), 9.

theater-goer, perhaps recently up on the train from Philadelphia and a visit to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition halls, in which the cultural and commercial wonders of the world were displayed as a kind of congratulation and promise to the Empire State and its united brethren who were rising as a nation from the ashes of their own civil war. “Work Surpassed by None,” the advertisement promises, echoing the “Ozymandias” inscription as Byron and Shelley found it in Diodorus Siculus (who was also Byron’s source for Sardanapalus), “If anyone would know how great I am, and where I lie, / Let him surpass me in any of my works.”15 From a certain angle, one sees in these columns of

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Figure 2.3 “Centennial Exhibit, Philadelphia, 1876 [Colossal hand and torch, Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty].” Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views. New York Public Library Photography Collection, Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs (Wikimedia Commons image).

advertisements—for hats, safes, refrigerators, toothpaste, and carriages— the pillars of the brashly confident consumer capitalism that would come to support the United States in its world-beating character, twin trade towers flanking an invitation to watch the flaming destruction of a Near Eastern potentate and his civilization.16 The lead roles in the Booth’s production—Sardanapalus and Myrrha— were played by Frank C. Bangs and Agnes Booth, respectively (Figure 2.5). Agnes Booth (formerly Rookes) had in 1867 married Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., brother of Edwin and John Wilkes; so she was an insider, chosen presumably because of her connections to the family. And indeed, the play itself must have resonated with memories of Booth’s assassination of Lincoln, as the conspirators led by Salamenes plot rebellion and death for Sardanapalus—just as Julius Caesar must have done when it was played at Booth’s earlier in that same year.17 Booth’s Theater itself was a prodigious showplace begun in 1869 by Edmund Booth, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and the death of Lincoln and John Wilkes. One theater historian calls it “perhaps the most innovative, opulent, and technically advanced American theatre of the Nineteenth Century.”18 In the year of its opening in 1872, a contemporary called it “one of the architectural jewels of the city”19 and Harper’s Weekly reported, “Mr. Booth designs that it shall become, as doubtless it will, the best theater in this country, both as an edifice and on account of its stage representations . . . [The building] offers a majestic and imposing presence, and forms one of the architectural and artistic gems of our city.”20 The Sardanapalus production was meant as a showcase production for this wondrous structure. In these cabinet photos (Figure 2.5) from the Harvard Theater collection, we see


Figure 2.4

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Program, Booth’s Theater. September 30, 1876. (Author’s collection.)

the actors standing separately in front of a painted backdrop representing the throne room, unlike the actual stage which was built out to allow movement within the space. Throughout, the winged, humanheaded bulls and other Assyrian bas-reliefs demonstrate the influence of Layard’s archaeological discoveries on the set, and on souvenirs such as

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Figure 2.5 Agnes Booth and Frank C. Bangs, Cabinet card publicity photographs, 1876. Cabinet Photographs (Booth, Agnes, and Bangs, Frank C.), Harvard Theater Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

these photos which usually dispense with background. As the program states, [T]he spectator in “Sardanapalus” may fairly believe he is witnessing a page of ancient history as it really occurred 2500 years ago, so faithfully have the manners and customs of the people, the elaborate and gorgeous scenery and mountings, and the interesting details of costumes and ornamentation been carried out. After a break, the next line of the column reads, “Sardanapalus neckties are advertised.” That is, as signs of authenticity, the program offers souvenirs (“I was there!”) and recreated relics (“It felt like I was really there!”): material objects as agents of memory for these latecomer Americans. The Booth’s Theater Sardnapalus was popular enough to spawn at least two parodies, in the form of burlesque performances running concurrently with the Jarrett and Palmer show. In October and November of 1876, the new Eagle Theater (also in Manhattan, at Broadway and 33rd Street) presented “Sardine-Apples! King of Ninnyvah & Astoria, L.I.” with


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Mr. A.H. Shelton (who composed the parody) starring as Sardine-Apples, “A King who ‘BANGS’ his subjects about,’ ” referring to his counterpart Frank Bangs in the Booth’s production.21 The synopsis includes such incidents as The Sunset and Moon Effects incidental to this Scene cost $5,000!!! Pania bothered by Tramps. Arrival of Salamander bearing his “Whisky Ring.” The Terrific Sword Combat. A PRIZE FIGHT INTRODUCED IN LORD BYRON’S TRAGEDY!! Arbabeces and Beleses banished from Long Island. A DANGEROUS BALLON ASCENSION! Departure of Sardine-Apples for the Hall of Ramrod in the Royal Canal Boat. Realistic Scenic Display! The MAGIC SHOWER of PEARLS AND DIAMONDS!! (3) This must have been a particularly lively spectacle, especially as all of that occurred in only one scene out of seven. Equally outrageous must have been “Sir Dan O’Pallas, Chief of the Assyrian Jim Jams,” a parody first mounted on September 2, 1876, by Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels and Burlesque Opera Troupe and performed somewhere close to Booth’s Theater.22 “Leon” was the stage name of Patrick Francis Glassey (b. 1840), a famous female impersonator from New York who teamed up with Edwin Kelly (b. 1835), an Irish vocalist and actor. Rice calls Leon “the dean of minstrel female impersonators,” and he played the role of Myrrha, who is described in the program as “a sweet scented young lady, and a copy of the original Greek Slave invented by Mr. Powers, who has captivated Sir Dan and introduced domestic broils into the O’Pallas household, which eventually end at the stake.”23 The proliferation of these burlesque shows demonstrates the prominence of the Jarrett & Palmer production on the New York theatrical scene in the fall of 1876; the parodies are part of a total cultural phenomenon that centered on the spectacular entertainment provided at Booth’s Theater. We are a long way from Byron here, but I want to return now to a consideration of the competition that the Booth performance of Sardanapalus engages between relic and spectacle, and between text and performance. Indeed, this competition structures Byron’s own original Sardanapalus as well. We already know that the monarch distrusts physical monuments, dismissing the Egyptian pyramids and the stone markers left by Bacchus, “a few columns / Which . . . might be mine, if I / Thought them worth purchase and conveyance” (1.2.168–70), and favoring instead Bacchus’ invention of wine, which, like poetry, is reproducible and variable. Byron was living in one of the great eras

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of archaeological progress, inaugurated by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, and Byron’s written works are filled with meditations on their own relationship to the ancient monuments coming then so clearly into European view. An example from Don Juan is worth citing in full: What is the end of Fame? ’tis but to fill A certain portion of uncertain paper: Some liken it to climbing up a hill, Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour; For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill, And bards burn what they call their “midnight taper,” To have, when the original is dust, A name, a wretched picture and worse bust. What are the hopes of man? Old Egypt’s King Cheops erected the first Pyramid And largest, thinking it was just the thing To keep his memory whole, and mummy hid; But somebody or other rummaging, Burglariously broke his coffin’s lid: Let not a monument give you or me hopes, Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops. (Canto 1, stanzas 218–19) According to Byron here, relics—papers, pictures, busts, and pyramids— do not function reliably as agents preservative of one’s identity. Remains turn to dust, and monuments preserve only the memory of loss: such homilies were being brought home with vivid force in the Egyptological nineteenth century, when once-venerated things were being unburied and admired with blank or mistaken wonder—an experience repeated at mid-century with Layard’s discoveries in Sardanapalus’ Nineveh. My point is that Byron’s mockery of ancient Near Eastern monuments literally sets the stage for the Victorian emphasis on spectacle in their performances of Sardanapalus, in which Assyrian artifacts are lovingly displayed and even more lovingly destroyed. The priorities of Byron’s Assyrian monarch and of Jarrett and Palmer at Booth’s Theater converge in the conflagration that, on the one hand, consumes Sardanapalus’ relics and, on the other, requires the radical cutting of Byron’s text. Sardanapalus himself shows a good deal of interest in the technology of his pyre, directing his soldiers to pile “Faggots, pine-nuts, and wither’d leaves . . . cedar, too, and precious drugs, and spices, / And


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mighty planks” so that the throne will “form the core of it.” Sounding like a stagecraft designer, he commands them to arrange the conflagration so that “the foundation / Be such as will not speedily exhaust / Its own subtle flame; nor yet be quench’d / With aught officious aid would bring to quell it” (5.1). Against the looming coup d’etat, Sardanapalus composes a coup d’theatre that will become his summative legacy, confirmed by the play’s theatrical history as much as by Delacroix’s famous painting of the scene. For the Victorians, staging this spectacle so that it “form[ed] the core” of Sardanapalus meant Byron’s words had to give way. In an actor’s prompt book for the New York production, one can observe that the case is even more extreme than editions of the Calvert adaptation indicate: the promptbook reveals over 150 lines cut by hand from a version already radically thinned. The nightmare Sardanapalus has of his ancestors is slashed, along with the scene where Sardanapalus calls for the mirror before battle, the discussion of his famous inscription, “Eat, drink, and love,” many of the soliloquies, and much of Myrrha’s dialogue. Remember Sardanapalus’ imagined “green spot,” at once oasis and verdant, inky record on the “bloody annals” of history? One can see the page from the Booth’s Theater promptbook upon which its erasure is literalized. The “green spot” speech—already truncated and conflated— is excised, a cut that resonates with Sardnapalus’ concern that future ages would not be able to recall his reign.24 Of course, the play had to be reduced from its estimated four-and-a-half-hour running time in its entirety; but the unprecedented extent of these cuts—far beyond Kean’s in 1853 or even Calvert’s own in the printed text—suggests a new low in the priority of Byron’s words just as the play’s techno-spectacle was peaking. In short, in a way at once typical of Victorian melodramatic theater and yet also surprising in its extremity and resonances, the conflagration consumed the literary text, and people took home souvenirs.25 When Shakespeare’s Cleopatra predicts that she will be an “Egyptian puppet . . . shown / In Rome,” she anticipates events like the New York production of a British play about an Assyrian monarch; that is, the stage history of Byron’s play tells us something about the history of empire, about how imperial states are entertained by spectacles of their ancestors’ destruction, seen through a glass darkly. The Booth’s Theater Sardanapalus claims our attention as part of this story, but it also illuminates Byron’s own imagination of the legacy as involving a struggle between material relics and spectacular scenes, or between verbal and visual narratives. In a sense, Byron’s own reception has always involved a species of this competition, particularly between his literary works

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and the scenes of his biography—a competition that he intentionally aggravated in his choices of subject and his framing of narrators. By the Victorian era, “Byron” had become increasingly stylized, as the biographies and letters seeped more fully into the bedrock imagination of European and American culture, and technological advancements in book illustration and stagecraft gave rise to elaborate visions of the Byronic. In this way, the 1876 New York Sardanapalus may be said to embody the contradictions of Byron’s play and its legacy. Tragic and carnivalesque, faithfully historic and aggressively contemporary, full of soliloquies and spectacles, Sardanapalus calls forth the kind of production it received at Booth’s Theater, and, perhaps even more aptly, in the various parodies that sprung up around it (“quick comedians / Extemporally will stage us,” says Cleopatra). ‘SardineApples’ and ‘Sir Dan O’Pallas’ are the burlesque mirrors of the Byronic hero, which is to say that they best expose the broadly comic nature of the play and Byron’s vision of human life that it conveys. As Jerome McGann has written of the Byronic figure, Redemption comes to this hero when his tragic sense calls him to don a comic mask. This theatrical move informs the entirety of Don Juan, whose comical adventures are shadowed by a finale Byron did not live to complete: the death of Juan on the guillotine in the Reign of Terror. The life and death of Byron’s Sardanapalus suggest how that scene would have played out in Byron’s poem. Perhaps not exactly like the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but something along those lines.26 From such a perspective, Byron’s drama is finally illuminated by the culture of Victorian melodrama and theatrical spectacle which the 1876 Sardanapalus so fully represents. Produced in the Empire State, in a defining year for the American nation, it evokes the contradictions of Byron’s own legacy, the spectacular terror of modern imperial culture, and the tragic-comic nature of the Byronic hero, puppet, and redeemer.

3 Byron’s Venetian Masque of the French Revolution: Sovereignty, Terror, and the Geopolitics of Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari Joshua David Gonsalves

The appearance of the anachronistic term “Geopolitics” in my title is intentional. The concept of geopolitics emerges, properly speaking, at the end of the nineteenth century via geographer Friedrich Ratzel’s Politische Geographie (1897) and Der Lebensraum (1901) and was popularized by contemporary political scientist-journalist Rudolf Kjellén’s term Geopolitik. A theoretical conception of “geo-politics” and the “geopolitical” enters the English language in 1904 and 1902, respectively,1 is provoked by the so-called Scramble for Africa between imperial powers in the latter half of the nineteenth century and is motivated by the European anxiety that the territorial availability of the world is on the brink of exhaustion. This narrowly conceived notion of geopolitics informs, in turn, the Nazi project to conquer a progressive global depletion of livable space, or what Ratzel called Lebensraum. The practical application of geopolitics does, however, emerge in the Romantic era during the seemingly endless French Revolutionary wars: 1792–1815. Gearóid Ó Tuathail defines “geopolitics” by extending Foucault’s analyses of biopower and biopolitics, governmentality and discipline (in the penitentiary and epistemic, or disciplinary, sense of knowledge formation and production),2 as eighteenth-century knowledge–power discourses for mapping, managing, and maximizing national “wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.” in the interests of waging war.3 The emergence of the geopolitical is indivisible from the Terroristic and Napoleonic violence administered by the French 47

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Revolution and theorized by Carl von Clausewitz as an argument for total war. The geopolitical can be summarized by a sense that the world is finite in its exploitability and that the resources of the home front, nature, and subdued nations—including people, animals, and biological life as such—are to be mobilized in the furtherance of total war— meaning the civil, logistical, and military domination of the enemy (ideological propaganda against the ancien régimes, the Continental blockade against England and her allies, and the annihilation of the enemy on the battlefield in the case of Napoleon, respectively) as well as the invasive mobilization of a nation’s available resources in order to master a newly expanded “habitable globe” as a finite, and hence ultra-competitive, site of struggle.4 Geopolitical mobilization is jumpstarted by the French levée en masse, a conscription of men into the military, and of other able-bodied citizens (male and female, young and old) into war-directed economic production in 1793. Napoleon’s mass-mobilized Grande Armeé—600,000 strong, for instance, at the beginning of the invasion of Russia, including 200,000 animals and over 200,000 troops requisitioned from subject and allied states5 —typifies this total geopolitics in that Napoleon’s armies fed on the resources of other territories, rather than relying on the slow-moving supply trains of the eighteenth century (one of the multiple reasons for the failure of the Russian campaign was a dependence on pre-1789 logistics combined with an unforgiving climate and terrain, including wolves, extremities of heat and cold, resistant peasants, and a deadly Cossack cavalry). Two recent critical concepts are relevant to the emergence of Romantic geopolitics. First, Foucault’s notion of biopower, an eighteenthcentury historical mutation in which governments and institutions of social discipline became hyper-invested in controlling the bodies of their subjects as resources in the prosecution of internal and external wars.6 Education, medicine, statistics, sexual, and reproductive policy all extend power into the household and into the interstices of the body so as to preserve and protect life (bios), the crucial factor in maintaining a nation’s international position. Biopower signifies control from “‘above’” while biopolitics denotes “internalization of social control,”7 and, if both seem to affirm life, this affirmation depends on the power to decide who lives and who dies, as is stressed by another critical concept, necropolitics. Achille Mbembe’s explication of necropolitics complicates Foucault by arguing that the French Revolution displayed not only an obsessive

Byron’s Venetian Masque of the French Revolution 49

concern with governing the citizen body on a subject-by-subject basis, but also an organizational politics of the social that administrates death instead of being driven by a desire to preserve life. The “ultimate expression of sovereignty resides,” as Mbembe writes in the wake of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben,8 “in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” Necropolitics depends on the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations. Such figures of sovereignty are far from a piece of prodigious insanity or an expression of a rupture between the impulses and interests of the body and those of the mind. Indeed, they, like the death camps, are what constitute the nomos of the political space in which we still live.9 The struggle of the Paris-based French Revolution against the counterrevolutionary provinces anticipates the Nazi death camps as a result of the systematic destruction of between “220,000 and 250,000” people in the Vendée, mass drownings at Nantes, and countless other atrocities in 1793–4:10 “Republican troops” had “the explicit mission of burning every dwelling and exterminating the population, including women and children.”11 The exemplary apparatus of revolutionary power as the sovereign exercise of the power to arbitrate life and death is the guillotine (whose Reign of Terror claimed at least 15,000 lives and inspired fantasies of multi-bladed killing machines as mobile enforcers of revolutionary sovereignty) and the transformation this coolly cruel machine effected in the socialization of state violence. What differentiates the French revolutionary state from the ancien régime’s spectacular execution of the regicide Damiens is, in fact, a veritable lack of spectacle. Daniel Arasse has traced how the cold efficiency, formal abstraction, and medico-enlightenment genealogy of the guillotine transformed enemies of the state into rational proofs of the state’s impartial sovereignty.12 This enlightened fiction of an almost instantaneous or painless death was, however, no more than a theoretical postulate often belied in practice when, for example, the blade failed to cut through the neck the first time around and had to be painfully and repeatedly reapplied. The revolutionary state-form had the uncontested right to put to death, then, only when it delegated this violence to a fantasy: the impartiality of the guillotine’s class-indifferent democracy. What was once the aristocratic

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privilege of a painless slice was now the threat of an “instant death,” as a member of the committee of the Ten calls it in Marino Faliero, applicable to all bodies within the purview or survol of state surveillance (5.1.89).13 The death-soaked reign of a clinical machine named after a doctor was born in the French Revolution as an inaccessible abstraction, a sovereign state resacralized by blood, fervid nationalism, and the aesthetic rearticulation of regal spectacle, a transcendent revolutionary sovereignty known at the time as Sainte Guillotine. The problem I wish to address is not sovereignty per se but the practical representation and application of the bioreproductive state’s right to let live in lieu of the classical right of the sovereign to put to death. Who is to represent state sovereignty if the king—unitary representative par excellence—has been decapitated? French revolutionary sovereignty rests on decapitation, since any representative is immediately subject to death by guillotine if he or she is named as an enemy of the Revolution, the people, or what you will. He or she is, in other words, already dead, or, to rephrase, the activist citizen is, while alive and empowered, already anonymous as a member of committees from the ever-radicalizing Parisian sections and political clubs to the secret enclaves of absolute power. As the Revolution grew more extreme and radical, sovereign violence was delegated to Terroristic committees for Public Safety and General Security. Byron’s Venetian plays are often read as records of his troubles dealing with the deadended post-Napoleonic situation in England (liberal reform) or Italy (the anti-Austrian Carbonari), yet Venice complicates this consensus-reading by signifying the dangers, contradictions, and possibilities of republican violence. Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari register the imprint of Byron’s politics abroad and at home, or his external and internal warfare—that is, his “activ[e] plotting with the Carbonari,” a revolutionary Italian secret society,14 and his reinvigorated disgust with Parliamentary Old Corruption in England as a result of the killing of unarmed demonstrators at Manchester (dubbed the Peterloo massacre in ironic homage to the selfcongratulatory spectacle of Waterloo), the execution and transportation of the Cato Street conspirators, and the evisceration of the already tenuous public authority of the Prince Regent by the Queen Caroline affair.15 In his letters Byron grants that Marino Faliero, a play written on “the eve of evolutions and revolutions” is “full of republicanism,” yet he also insists that “it is not a political play.”16 This refusal of an overt politicization of his drama is motivated by Byron’s rejection of popular politics in the name of Faliero, a Doge as proud as Byron of both his nobility and


his contempt for the masses, in Faliero’s case, his plebian co-conspirators against a corrupt aristocratic state:17 Deem’st thou the souls of such a race as mine Can rest, when he, their last descendant chief, Stands plotting on the brink of their pure graves With stung plebeians? (3.1.99–102) I want to ask, however, how the Venetian plays might be “no[n]”“political” in another sense. Indeed, I want to propose that Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari question the very possibility of politics in an era traumatized by the unprecedented Terroristic and Napoleonic violence bureaucratically banalized by the French Revolution. Venice was a republican codeword for England as an insular emporium and imperial sea power. James Harrington’s influential Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) celebrates Venice as a stable constitution preserving the system of checks and balances between democracy, monarchy, and aristocracy he derived from Polybius’ Histories. Harrington regarded Venice as a republican “commonwealth for conservation” rather than “increase,” as was the case for EnglandOceana, and it was this reputation for a perpetual republic that attracted French revolutionary constitution-writers, such as Sieyès, to his work.18 In 1792, Theodore Lesueur drafted a French Constitution modeled on Oceana, and in 1795, a new French translation of Oceana appeared after the Terror ended—that is to say, at a transitional moment when putting a stop to the Revolution through the instauration of a permanent government was the order of the day. Byron’s influence by neo-Harringtonianism is well-known, yet the reputation of Venice as an epitome of rule by terror is consolidated by Napoleon’s propagandistic justifications for the toppling of the republic and by Byron’s internalization of this dark representation of Serenissima through his main historical source, a Histoire de la republique de Venise (1821), written by the pro-Napoleonic soldier-politician Pierre Daru. By 1797 the Serene republic was dead. Napoleon plundered the citystate of art, gold, and cash only to indifferently annex her to the Austrian empire. Venice emerges in the wake of its fall as a warning to Britons concerning the sheer contingency of a sea-borne empire.19 Yet what if the staging of sovereignty-in-crisis exemplified by the beheading of a sovereign Doge becomes, for Byron, an encoding of a postrevolutionary sea change in regard to the possibility of a republican state in the aftermath of the American and French revolutions?20 I will

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argue that Byron was provoked to write the play by a sovereign power to administer death that is difficult to mistake as anything other than an allegorization of the uncontested if brief reign of the guillotine, a decapitating power he imaginatively witnessed in propria persona when he saw Faliero’s effaced image in the ducal portrait gallery in the Doge’s Palace. In place of the erased figurehead there is an oval frame with a death-black veil Flung over these dim words engraved beneath,— This place is of Marino Faliero, Decapitated for his crimes. (5.1.496–9) If the sovereign power of the Venetian state over life and death is inseparable from neo-Harringtonian notions of sovereignty, or a revolutionary republicanism, as I will soon propose, then the play and its double, The Two Foscari, can be read as a querying of republican politics, or as an anatomy of what makes republicanism possible in Byron’s time: the revolutionary state-form. The power of the state to decide who lives is no longer disguised in France by the pomp of any ancien régime. Sovereignty is propagated by a necropolitics that relies on rule by committee (the Committee of Public Safety was soon supplemented by the Committee of General Security to manage the Terror more efficiently) so as to obviate the otherwise insurmountable challenge of democratically ruling a state under combined attack from without (an Anglo-continental coalition) and within (collaborationist Royalist émigrés). The seeming impregnability of Venetian sovereignty that fascinated Harrington and inspired French attempts to reincarnate it by repeatedly striving to create a perfect constitution was also centralized by anti-democratic “committees and councils.”21 The Council of Ten was formed after the Querini conspiracy sought to replace the Doge and was dedicated to preventing subversion before it happened through the deployment of spies, secret meetings, covert assassinations, the murder or pardon of exiles or émigrés insofar as they were judged to be threats to state security, the confiscation of the resources of the condemned, and torture (the sublime dread of the interrogation chambers in the Doge’s Palace is confirmed by their décor, Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings of hell). The Ten function, for Byron, as a way of figuring the rule by committee installed on a nation-wide scale during the Reign of Terror (citizens of the Vendée were exterminated on the presupposition that everyone in the area was automatically a Royalist) and extended beyond national borders to the French armies via


the vicious surveillance and intervention of committee representatives, such as the ruthless Saint Just. The Doge is a contradictory figure of terror by committee and republicanism, for he is against both the Ten and the patrician suppression of the people as a basis for a revolutionary sovereignty. For Faliero, these contradictions are encapsulated by “the ducal cap” he reluctantly places on his head: How my brain aches beneath thee! and my temples Throb feverish under thy dishonest weight. Could I not turn thee to a diadem? Could I not shatter the Briarean sceptre Which in this hundred-handed senate rules, Making the people nothing, and the pri[n]ce A pageant? (1.2.265–71) Sovereignty is awash in a precarious swirl of representations. Is it truly represented by diadem or scepter, Senate or Prince? Yet the real rule is, in any case, by committees that commit the people as well as the Doge to being no more than mere representations. They are spoken for by others and reduced to a “pageant” made of “nothing.” The Doge reacts to this general state of disenfranchisement by entering a plebian conspiracy against the state, and in doing so he not only betrays his class but also begins to resemble the secret committee he is ostensibly warring against. He plans to kill every aristocrat in a Frenchstyled oligocide: “So, as they let me wither, let them perish!” (3.2.312), yet another retrospective echo of French Revolutionary necropolitics— to wit, the spectacle of the king’s cousin, the Duc D’Orléans, who, like many a sublime class traitor of the era, restyled himself a republican (“Egalité” in the case of the Duke, so too, a certain Marquis renamed himself Citizen Sade for reasons other than merely evading the sainted blade)22 and voted for his relative’s death by guillotine. Bertram, a conspirator sympathetic to the patrician class, identifies this class-consuming and self-annihilating plan as “indiscriminate murder” (3.2.65), yet Byron’s insistence on representing the Doge as a bloody reincarnation of French Revolutionary hope against the state is indexed by Faliero’s citation of Mirabeau: “true words are things” (5.1.288). Such is the utopia Byron imagines, a world where republican rhetoric would be akin to a worldly thing and have real effects in history. Doge Faliero forms a revolutionary committee (“a council in the dark / With common ruffians leagued to ruin states” ruled by an anonymous

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unanimity: “‘Decreed in council, without one dissenting voice”’) and is beheaded for his efforts (1.2.581–2; 1.2.58). Yet is revolution futile, or has Byron anatomized the possibility of revolution by sketching how revolutionary promise is historically limited to death by secret committee? I have argued elsewhere for Byron’s recognition of the nihilistic dominance of the guillotine as paradigmatic for secularized state violence23 and now wish to address how Byron’s “specific application” of what Malcolm Kelsall calls “local, party-political advantage” on behalf of the secret Carbonari society testifies to the contradictory double bind of revolutionary sovereignty in Marino Faliero24 —namely, the paradox that an epitome of republicanism—the Doge—is a codeword for terror by committee. The fearsome “Council of Ten” (DRAMATIS PERSONA, 307), formed in reaction to the failed Querini rebellion of 1310, play a tyrannical role in Byron’s Venetian plays. They embody the secrecy, coercion and black ops at the heart of rule by committee, yet in Byron’s “Venice: An Ode” the republican spirit is figured as a power that transcends negative incarnations and is able to pass “unconquer’d and sublime . . . o’er the deep” to a newly born American republic (143, 157). How, then, are we to understand the two plays once they are re-envisioned as a sustained negotiation with the contradiction Venice forces to the surface—namely, that revolutionary republican geopolitics becomes, in practice, the exact opposite: rule by Terroristic violence. Perhaps the most salient difference between the two plays is the lack of a moment or “sense of crisis” in The Two Foscari.25 The Foscari in question refer to a father, the Doge, and his son Jacopo, a confirmed conspirator. Doge Foscari remains stubbornly attached to his duty as a representative of state sovereignty and refuses to extricate his son from the threat of death, violence, torture, and exile that the Ten hold over him. He supports the necropolitical nihilism of the state over the filial “sympathy” that his son’s wife, Marina, implores him to “fee[l]” (2.1.141, 127). The Doge embodies the stoic impassiveness represented by a painting that became iconic for French Revolutionary self-sacrifice to the state-form, J.-L. David’s neo-republican The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789), in which Lucius Junius Brutus apathetically looks away while his sons are marched off to be killed on his order for betraying Rome. Phillip Martin has pointed out how Byron’s Venetian dramas call on the heroic attitudes of David to fix in place an image of civil republicanism in which he can no longer believe. Martin’s Eliotic reading emphasizes Byron’s pretense to “a formally rehearsed attitude[e],”26 or a pose in the absence of an actually existing ethos, ethic, or politics,


or, as Keats phrases it, “Lord Byron cuts a figure—but he is not figurative” (2: 67). My re-examination of the overburdened figurative, formal, and literal language of the plays will show, however, that this excess of heroic representation is the result of the unbearable question the historical plays attempt to answer: how to represent the possibility of sovereignty via Venice in relation to the geopolitical situation that has reduced Venice to an anachronism, if not to a by-word for Terror. In contrast to The Two Foscari, Marino Faliero has a moment of crisis premised on the key generator of dramatic suspense in the play: Will the conspiracy of the Doge, the people, and the revolutionary state-form succeed? Now in both cases the viewer knows the historical result so the suspense of Marino Faliero is purely aesthetic, while that of The Two Foscari is similarly a fait accompli. Both plays are post-Napoleonic in that they assume the failure of a revolutionary republicanism, or of any other attempt at political innovation, as is underlined by the negative associations of the word “engine” with “torture” machines, or, by extension, guillotines (Foscari, 1.1.155; Faliero, 5.1.46, 70, 299, 303), whereas the root of “engine” is ingenium, ingenuity, or the innovative inspiration that empowers political speech and signifies the younger Byron’s belief that rhetorical invention enables citizens to break the state monopoly on sovereign power.27 Faliero, in fact, cites this earlier Byronic belief once his revolutionary efforts have ended in disaster by echoing the monarchist revolutionary Mirabeau’s desire that “true words” be as real as “things.” By the 1820s all has changed. “Cant” rules Byron’s horizon of possibility as “a thing of words—without the smallest influence on human actions.”28 Both plays transpire, then, in the shadow of a Byronic recognition that republican sovereignty is doomed to the slaughterhouse of history, a recognition recorded by his lines on the disaster of Napoleon’s peninsular agon against a Spanish guerrilla war machine: Flows there a tear of pity for the dead? Look o’er the ravage of the reeking plain; Look on the hands with female slaughter red; Then to the dogs resign the unburied slain, Then to the vulture let each corse remain; Albeit unworthy of the prey-bird’s maw; Let their bleach’d bones, and blood’s unbleaching stain, Long mark the battle-field with hideous awe: Thus only may our sons conceive the scenes we saw! (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1: 900–8)

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The Peninsular War was especially bloody, with atrocities committed liberally on both sides. This war of a revolutionary French sovereignty against an imperial British sovereignty in league with a Spanish guerrilla nationalist network makes all three embodiments of liberty seem equally rapacious.29 True “words” threaten to remain mere words, or “bywords,” a recurrent noun in Marino Faliero that encapsulates the contradictions involved, since “by-word” signifies a “proverb” or “proverbial saying,” while also signifying “an object of scorn or contempt,” “a trick of speech,” or a “pet phrase,” as well as obscure significations inactive in Byron’s time, yet suggestive of both conspiracy and irrelevance—that is, “a watchword, signal” (Faliero, 3.2.244) and “a word beside the matter in hand” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. byword). Faliero wants to preserve liberty, but thinks, like a good committee man, in terms of “security” and is as constantly “wakeful,” vigilant,” and “watchful” as the all-seeing eye that symbolized rule by the Committee of Public Safety in Robespierre’s Paris (3.2.494, 389, 390). He adamantly articulates a necropolitical sovereignty based on the power to decide that Steno, a calumniator of the Doge’s wife, no longer has the right to live: And what redress Did you expect as his fit punishment? DOGE. Death! Was I not the Sovereign of the state [?] (1.2.190–2) Yet the Doge is made to submit, in the end, to the “general will,” a Rousseauvian byword for a sovereign people that became increasing prevalent as the revolution radicalized itself, leaving the people no role except as representations. The ostensible sovereign must wait for the committee, or the practical embodiment of sovereign power, to admit his wife: BENINTENDE: Say, conscript fathers, shall she be admitted? ONE OF THE GIUNTA: She may have revelations of importance Unto the state, to justify compliance With her request. Is this the general will? BENINTENDE: ALL: It is. (5.1.306–9) The “general will” is foregrounded as what it was during the French Revolution: a committee standing in for the sovereignty of the people, a sovereignty that cannot, on principle, be represented. And so the people


are represented by those that have, in the words of Doge Faliero, “no private life” (3.2.382), a phrase that recalls the stereotype of Robespierre as a man with no private life, so transparent was he to the all-seeing surveillance of an abstract state of emergency.30 Byron’s relationship to a revolutionary “general will” was impaired by a repulsion for the people, a disdain the Doge ventriloquizes when he must “stoop,” as he phrases it, to a “busy plot” with “mechanic[s]” (3.2.220; 3.1.112). The Doge’s conspiracy leads him to the truth of necropolitics by way of words: BENINTENDE: Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice, Count of Val di Marino, Senator, And some time General of the Fleet and Army, Noble Venetian, many times and oft Entrusted by the state with high employments, Even to the highest, listen to the sentence. Convict by many witnesses and proofs, And by thine own confession, of the guilt Of treachery and treason, yet unheard of Until this trial—the decree is death. Thy goods are confiscate unto the state[.] (5.1.475–85) “[G]oods” have trumped the republican good. The state exists but to feed on bodies, gold, commodities, artworks, and other unnatural resources. Marino Faliero does not escape the contradiction of either the irrepresentability, and hence impracticality, of popular sovereignty, or the self-contradictory status of Venice as a figuration for republicanism. To be in contradiction is to exist in the dead-ended state responsible for the oppressive lack of tension or crisis in The Two Foscari, where the viewer witnesses Jacopo being repeatedly tortured as his father impassively looks on like a Brutus Recidivus. In Faliero, the Doge’s oath to join the conspiracy makes him appear as an active citizen in Harrington’s ideal republic, a state where the subject is sovereign—“For here,” as Faliero says in regard to Venice, “the sovereign is a citizen”—yet it also results in his downfall before the Ten as “A Prince who fain would be a citizen / Or nothing, and who has left his throne to be so” (2.1.219; 3.2.209–10). Doge Foscari, in contrast, is brought down by his unfeeling oath to serve the state. His neglect of an active citizenship opposed to state abuses leads to his death by mourning for a son killed by an equally mournful exile. Faliero’s excess of feeling for the public slight he received from Steno is represented as his tragic flaw, whereas Foscari’s

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lack of filial feeling is represented as his hubristic act of impaired intimacy. One “historical tragedy”—the generic subtitle of each drama—is too private, the other too public. Both plays engage the political viability of affect, feeling, and passion while exhibiting a suspicion of private grief writ large as public vendetta, whether it be Faliero’s hate against Steno, or the vengeance against the Foscari displayed by Loredano, a member of the Ten. A key moment in the humanist narrative of the emergence of rule by law based on communication, codification, and democratization is the triumph of legalism over vendetta, for example, the internecine battles between the Guelfs and Ghibellines as what the centralization of a strong state must overcome. Sentimental affect was a resource French Revolutionary organizers of festivals, including artists such as David, exploited for galvanizing the public. Faliero’s republicanism, in contradistinction, fails to persuade the affects of the patricians, or the plebeians (or Byron’s British audience when the play was staged at Drury Lane in 1821), and ends up as no more than mere wording. A prefiguration of Romantic era Gag Acts supplements this situation by forever silencing his comrades: “Guards! let their mouths be gagged, even in the act / Of execution” (5.1.101–2). Republican rhetoric ends up speechless in Byron’s Venetian plays, while melodramatic affect is exposed as a bluster that only serves to hide the paralysis of revolutionary sovereignty at the core of Romantic geopolitics. Another name for this blustery wind of sound and fury signifying anything but a revolutionary republicanism is Napoleon, a masterful organizer of propaganda, secret police and illegitimate killings under the banners militant of republican attitudes, poses and imagery. David, appointed imperial court painter in 1804, comes to mind once again as an exemplar of the pragmatic nihilism of art in an age of geopolitical domination. The figure of Napoleon is central to the geopolitics of Byron’s Venetian dramas, for Bonaparte beheaded the Serene Republic in 1797. Yet he was also behind the propagandistic depictions of Venice as an oligarchical tyranny that Byron called on to stage his Venetian plays. This contradiction suggests that Napoleon’s reign as a master of European geopolitical resources functions, for Byron, as a highly ambivalent staging ground for the possibility of a republican revolutionary state-form, as is evident in Byron’s hopelessly contradictory representations of Bonaparte. Napoleon incarnates the death of republicanism by annexing Venice to Austria after plundering it of available resources, yet he initiated beneficial public works in Venice and other conquered territories while also fostering projects of national


liberation that turned against his own regime. His first Italian campaign, for example, led to the replacement of the Venetian Republic by a municipality typical of the radical dreams (and bloodthirsty committees) elicited by French victories in the Revolutionary Wars. Contradiction upon contradiction accumulates, in sum, when Venice is represented as a site for questioning the possibility of republican violence in the aftermath of the irreversible sociohistorical mutations generated by Romantic geopolitics. A transformation in military history I wish to draw attention to is the mobility of Napoleon’s mass-mobilized Grande Armée as an anticipatory figuration for our old friend, Byronic mobility. Each of the four corps making up this army was a self-contained or all-arms unit—complete with artillery, cavalry, infantry, skirmishers, sharpshooters—that was so formidable it could usually pin down a far stronger or numerous force until reinforcements arrived from the other corps. One corps out of the four would then be held back as the reserve once the enemy was found by the ranging, fourfold army. Engaging the enemy was one of the hardest things to predict with certainty, since eighteenth-century strategists preferred maneuver over battle, and, once engaged, tried to evade a fight to the last man. Napoleon, in contrast, stressed engagement and the total annihilation of the enemy (a general at Austerlitz even went so far as to bombard the ice away from under the feet of Russian soldiers retreating from the battle).31 Napoleon’s strategic thinking was supplemented by the marching “speed and mobility” that his supply train-free infantry were able to achieve in that the corps-system required that the two nearest corps be a day’s forced march from the foremost corps as the fourfold army prowled in search of the enemy.32 The genius of the allarms corps-system was that, wherever the enemy happened to be, the corps closest to the adversary became the lead army and the farthest the reserve. Once the enemy was engaged the lead corps would pin them down while two of the others supplemented this frontal assault so as to stretch the front line of the enemy in preparation for a move against the flank or rear of the enemy that would cut his communications and further weaken his line. Once the line was thinned to breaking point by forcing him to redeploy troops against Napoleon’s encroaching assault of fresh troops on his rear or flanks, the reserve would be poured into the breach (often at a sacrificial cost that necessitated expendable troops enthused with nationalistic élan) until enemy forces were routed. The ideal end of Napoleonic mobility is to pin the enemy with as few men as feasible so as to free as many men as possible for a quick movement into the

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vulnerable rear of the enemy formation, producing the famous maneoevre sur les derrières (maneuver on the rear). Both Napoleon and Byron were partial, in other words, to figurations of sodomy from the active or dominant position favored by the Greco-Roman masculinist tradition, an analogy that cannot be pursued here. The geopolitic alterity of Russia led, however, to a decimation of this formidably mobile army.33 The failure of Napoleon’s geopolitical mobility34 dooms Byronic sovereignty to self-deflation as is witnessed by his self-presentation as a once triumphant “grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme” in Don Juan (11.440). Venice emerges out of this catastrophe as the site of a republicanism stillborn from the ashes of Napoleon. Vincenzo Dandolo was an ardent supporter of the French Revolutionary Municipality briefly established in Venice, a name reincarnated in Marino Faliero as Enrico Dandolo, a Doge who declined the Byzantine crown after contributing to the defeat of Constantinople in 1204. Doge Dandalo functions as a Napoleonic model of imperial sovereignty minus the crimes of Bonaparte and his imperial will to dominate space. Faliero calls on Venice’s imaginary Roman ancestry to mark the difference between pre-modern sovereignty and the mere byword sovereignty has become in an age of new Dandolos. What is it that a Roman would not suffer, That a Venetian Prince must bear? Old Dandolo Refused the diadem of all the Caesars, And wore the ducal cap I trample on, Because ’tis now degraded[.] (1.2.171–5) This degradation of the civic republican ideal of Venice—as contradictorily represented both by the Ducal and not Imperial Dandolo, and by the enthusiastic revolutionary Dandolo’s support for the shortlived Municipality—into a “by-word” is akin to Steno’s degradation of the name “Faliero” by the calumnies he hurled at the Dogaressa’s chastity: A wretch like this may leave upon the wall The blighting venom of his sweltering heart, And this shall spread itself in general poison; And woman’s innocence, man’s honour, pass Into a by-word[.] (2.1.426–30)


This violation strikes at the heart of a deeply invested psychic ideal— that is, of the ingénue as Byron’s favored self-presentation for his imagined social role as a sovereign poet, a Grande Napoléon, or an army of rhyme.35 The same ideal impels the Doge to transgress his duty to the state, as is stressed by his response to the pragmatic advice of his nephew, Bertuccio Faliero: If you forget Your office, and its dignity and duty, Remember that of man, and curb this passion. The Duke of Venice— DOGE: [interrupting him]. There is no such thing— It is a word—nay, worse—a worthless by-word[.] (1.2.96–100) The public ideal of Venetian republicanism is, then, the violated ingénue—Serenissima—motivating both Byron and Faliero, or, so, at least, is suggested by yet another Byronic figuration of the angelic ingénue, the Doge’s wife. “What is’t you feel so deeply, then, even now?,” the “innocent creature,” Angiolina, asks her husband, only to receive the reply: “The violated majesty of Venice, / At once insulted in her lord and laws” (1.2.171–5; 2.1.407–8). The public and the private are confounded. Faliero mistakes his private body for the body of the sovereign and his wife’s honor for the majesty of his name, state, and sovereignty. He forgets that there is “no such thing” as “The Duke of Venice” except as “a worthless by-word.” Faliero mistakes words for things, which is, according to Freud, the malaise of the schizophrenic.36 This madness is, in turn, identified with the madness motivating the revolutionary Terror and its melancholy double, the mere possibility of republican sovereignty, by Faliero’s citation of Mirabeau’s desire that words be things. Yet the byword is also a word for Byron, a writer who lives by words alone once the amateur pose of not writing for the market is no longer available, caught as he is in the rhetorical sleight of hand that republican rhetoric can be as real as geopolitics. Think of the conflation, in Childe Harold, “of Wisdom and of Wit,” where wit conflates, as a result of the nostalgia for “[t]he warrior’s weapon and the sophist’s stole,” rhetoric and martial virtue, inventive strength and ethical political action (Childe Harold 2.51, 16). If the byword is a keyword for Byron’s facility with literary rhetoric and his tendency to mistake words for things, the double bind of this tendency is legible in one of the formal bywords, or tricks

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of speech, he borrows from a sentimental passage in Otway’s Venice Preserved: the anaphora.37 Byron repeats himself by words in the words of Bertram, a plebian class conspirator who betrays the plot because of his ineradicable sympathy for the patrician class. Bertram is in the process of warning his patrician patron Leoni to leave Venice but will not tell him why: By all thou hast of blest in hope or memory— By all thou hast to fear here or hereafter— By all the good deeds thou hast done to me, Good I would now repay with greater good, Remain within—trust to thy household gods, And to my word for safety, if thou dost, As I now counsel—but if not, thou art lost! (4.1.175–81) Bertram’s “safety” is not safe and he is forced, when he refuses to name names, to confess under torture. The Ten, retroactively acting here on the model of the French Revolutionary committees, seize him in the name of an anonymous state. The “Good,” or the summum bonum of an ethical Greco-Roman tradition of politics, has become a by-word to those like Bertram, whose betrayal ruins Faliero as an image of that all-too-illusive Harringtonian ideal—the citizen sovereign intent on producing a republican revolution. Byron’s patrician sympathies do not emerge undegraded. They too are but words, Byron by words, without end, except the closing cut of death, say, of the guillotine to which his Lordship destined Don Juan to meet his untimely end by words alone before Don Juan the literary work ever came to be: “I meant to take him the tour of Europe—with a proper mixture of siege—battle—and adventure—and to make him finish as Anacharsis Cloots—in the French Revolution.”38 Siege, battle, all the adventures of Romantic geopolitics finish in a death that has already taken place, be it of Faliero or Bonaparte, Byron or Juan, a post-Napoleonic site of mourning where the aesthetic, the literary, and other imaginative blusteration (liberty, republican sovereignty, the people, revolution) serve as a retreat from the nihilism of necropolitical life: “Poor Juan shall be guillotined in the French Revolution.”39 What seems to offer an escape from the state is, in conclusion, anything but. Marina’s repeated insistence on Jacopo’s “innocen[ce]” in The Two Foscari voices a displaced desire to be an ingénue (2.1.181; 1.1.272), to be or save someone innocent of necropolitical evil in spite of Jacopo’s admission that he is guilty (a confession resulting from the biopolitical


internalization of bio-power?). This desire translates into a desire to save the state from viol through violence that is, however, the result of a necrotic geopolitics in which sentimental affects are indistinguishable from those driving conspiratorial committees. In resigning himself to a post-Napoleonic melancholy vis-à-vis the “‘hopeless’” conflicts of his world,40 Byron regresses to an eighteenth-century strategy of endless maneuver over giving decisive battle to the legions of Cant. Or does he? A forthcoming analysis of how effectively Byron applied Napoleonic geopolitics to his war for Greek independence will have to address this issue.

4 “Awake to Terror”: The Impact of Italy on Byron’s Depiction of Freedom’s Battles Jane Stabler

Writing to John Murray from Venice in May 1820, Byron affirmed his hatred of the English “as a race” and detailed his sight-seeing in Rome where he had been “poring over churches & antiquities”:

The day before I left Rome I saw three robbers guillotined – the ceremony – including the masqued priests – the half-naked executioners – the bandaged criminals – the black Christ & his banner – the scaffold – the soldiery – the slow procession – & the quick rattle and heavy fall of the axe – the splash of the blood – & the ghastliness of the exposed heads – is altogether more impressive than the vulgar and ungentlemanly dirty “new drop” & dog-like agony of infliction upon the sufferers of the English sentence. Two of these men – behaved calmly enough – but the first of the three – died with great terror and reluctance – which was very horrible – . . . – The pain seems little – & yet the effect to the spectator – & the preparation to the criminal – is very striking & chilling. – The first turned me quite hot and thirsty – & made me shake so that I could hardly hold the operaglass (I was close – but was determined to see – as one should see every thing once – with attention) the second and third (which shows how dreadfully soon things grow indifferent) I am ashamed to say had no effect on me – as a horror – though I would have saved them if I could.1

In May 1821 in Ravenna, Byron wrote a postscript to Hodgson about the operation of terror in a literary context. Disagreeing with Hodgson’s moralistic reading of Childe Harold and tragedy, Byron 64

“Awake to Terror”

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invoked Aristotelian literary theory, the military history of the Ottoman Empire and a vigorous debate between John Dryden and Thomas Rymer: In answer to yr. note of page 90, I must remark from Aristotle and Rymer, that the hero of tragedy and (I add meo periculo) a tragic poem must be guilty, to excite “terror and pity,” the end of tragic poetry. But hear not me, but my betters. “The pity which the poet is to labour for is for the criminal – not for those or him he has murdered – as who have been the occasion of the Tragedy. The terror is likewise in the punishment of the said criminal, who, if he be represented too great an offender, will not be pitied; if altogether innocent his punishment will be unjust. In the Greek tragedy Innocence is unhappy often, and the Offender escapes.” . . . Who is the hero of “Paradise lost”? Why Satan, – and Macbeth, and Richard, & Othello and Pierre, and Lothario, & Zanga? If you talk so I shall “cut you up like a gourd,” as the Mamelukes say. But never mind. (BLJ, 8: 115) Leslie Marchand attributes the quotation to “Dryden’s Life” in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, but it is actually from Dryden’s “Heads of an Answer to Rymer,” notes Dryden made in his copy of Rymer’s The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered (1678) (printed from the manuscript by Johnson with his Life of Dryden [1779]). Byron quotes Dryden’s development of Rymer’s point about bloodshed on stage: The truth is, the Poets were to move pitty; and this pitty was to be mov’d for the living, who remain’d; and not for the dead. And they found in nature, than (sic) men could not so easily pardon a crime committed before their faces; and consequently could not be so easily dispos’d to bestow that pitty on the Criminal which the Poets labour’d for. The Poets, I say, found that the sight of the fact made so strong an impression, as no art of theirs could afterwards fully conquer.2 Despite his Aristotelian allegiance to the principle of interest on behalf of the criminal in tragedy, I shall argue that Byron’s various experiences of atrocity and violence in Italy—his “sight of the fact”—mean that his poetry after 1816 is increasingly involved with the effects of terror on the many and also with questions of aesthetic distance. Byron’s two letters were written at an interval of five years during which time he had become less of a tourist (the sort of person who takes an opera-glass to an execution) and more of a member of an Italian household. His being “almost inoculated into a family,” as he called it, however, did

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not blunt his sense of the unique texture of Italian life or death, and his perspective was always filtered by a sense of the “almost” (BLJ, 7: 171). This essay focuses on the contribution of Italian visual aesthetic and historical contexts to Byron’s perspective on terror. In France the idea of the “Terror” is synonymous with the secular regime of Maximilian Robespierre who famously redefined terror in Year II (1794) to justify the “despotism of liberty”: “La terreur n’est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible; elle est donc une emanation de la vertue.”3 In pre-unification Italy, no one held a monopoly on terror. English accounts of Italy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries present terror as the mainspring of “despotism” or “tyranny”— the terms used by English commentators to describe the reign of various Roman emperors, the effects of Catholicism, Napoleon and finally the Austrians.4 Lady Morgan’s Italy (1821), which was a proscribed book in Italy because of its anti-Austrian bias, gives a flavor of the simultaneous English aversion to Catholic rule: On the fall of the Roman empire . . . arose a system to govern the minds of men, remote alike from the divine revelation of Jehovah, as from the splendid rites of Jove. Founded in sacrifice, enforced by persecution, with terror for its object, dark, despotic, exclusive, and sanguinary, it arose above all temporal power; and arrogating a divine origin, called itself – THE CHURCH.5 Byron was less hostile to Catholicism which he came to see as reassuringly “tangible”: “It is by far the most elegant worship, hardly excepting the Greek mythology. What with incense, pictures, statues, altars, shrines, relics, and the real presence . . . there is something sensible to grasp at,” but he used the word “Inquisition” to describe Austrian rule (BLJ, 9: 123). The executions Byron saw in Rome were embodiments of judicial and religious aspects of terror. While he was in Italy, his writing about violent death encompasses the battlefield, human judicial process, and the operation of divine judgment. Military, judicial, and divine authority prompt terror when the subject has the mental ability to imagine himself or herself on the receiving end of physical punishment; where identification with the person being punished is not present (as Byron observed with the second and third robbers and where he felt Hodgson’s literary criticism missed the mark), the spectacle slides into horror of “no effect.” Ann Radcliffe’s well-known distinction between terror and horror is helpful here: “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands


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the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.”6 Terror must leave something to the imagination whereas horror is a more visceral experience (Byron at the execution, we recall, is both “chilled” and “hot”). Byron’s first robber died “with great terror” because he was anticipating what was to follow (either the axe blow or the judgment of his God, or both); as a spectator, Byron’s own response is more suggestive of horror except that his description of the “ceremony” and “ghastliness” and “impressive” elements of the spectacle verge on an experience of the terrific or sublime. Categories of terror and horror come into dialogue when Byron worries over the level of his own involvement and moral affect.7 His anxiety about mental distance replays standard eighteenth-century discussions of the effects of tragedy. Addison, for example, argues that “if the Object presses too close upon our Senses, and bears too hard upon us . . . it does not give us time or leisure to reflect on our Selves”; whereas “when we read of Torments, Wounds, Deaths, and the like dismal Accidents,” aesthetic pleasure can flow.8 Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) worries that the hurried plots of “sickly and stupid German Tragedies” would also “blunt the discriminating powers of the mind” and desensitize the viewer.9 Byron’s response to Regency theater, as we shall see, is an attempt to reform tragedy and restore the correct degree of aesthetic distance, but this happens in the context of political events in which Byron could not sit still “with my hands in my breeches’ pockets” (see BLJ, 8: 114). Following Addison, Burke agreed on the principle of non-involvement to ensure aesthetic pleasure: “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible.”10 The context of real and present danger always threatened to impair the enjoyment of picturesque tours of Italy and we can hear the political inflection of terror in the period when the word is applied in an aesthetic context by the Swiss commentator James Galiffe. Describing the spectacle of lava flows on the active Mount Vesuvius, Galiffe observes, The boundless and irresistible power of destruction, which is here seen at work, conveys no lessons of instruction to mankind. It can do nothing but terrify: and terror is one of those ignoble, worthless emotions, which tend to debase the soul. The idea of God does not naturally associate itself with this tremendous spectacle . . . the power which is here displayed seems wicked, cruel, malignant, and full of caprice.11

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Galiffe’s aesthetic theory is non-Burkean in its disparagement of terror and we can see that his view of power as volatile or “full of caprice” is predicated on mentally unstable dictatorship rather than Burke’s misty view of the divinity of kings, whether the majesty of France or Death in Paradise Lost. While he lived in Italy, Byron saw, at first hand, both the horrible and terrible aspects of political terror. To examine the difference between remote aesthetic appreciation and an instance of the “Object pressing too close upon our Senses” in a religious context, we can turn to John Cam Hobhouse’s observations of a mass scourging in St Peter’s. Having accompanied Byron from Switzerland to Venice in the autumn of 1816, Hobhouse went on a tour of Italy, meeting up with Byron to see Rome in May 1817. Ritual scourging was part of the celebrations of Easter week (which fell in the first week of April in 1817), and always excited attention from English visitors to Rome.12 Hobhouse remarks that the ceremony had been discontinued for a time, but that it had been reintroduced “as a salutary corrective of an age of atheism”: The flagellation begins. The darkness, the tumultuous sound of blows in every direction – “Blessed Virgin Mary, pray for us!” bursting out at intervals – the persuasion that you are surrounded by atrocious culprits and maniacs, who know of an absolution for every crime – the whole situation has the effect of witchery, and so far from exciting a smile, fixes you to the spot in a trance of restless horror, prolonged beyond expectation or bearing.13 Hobhouse’s “trance of restless horror” represents a failed aesthetic experience in that he had gone to the ceremony as a spectator, safely positioning himself in the seating area and expecting to “smile,” but finding instead the Radcliffean experience of horror or petrified faculties. Hobhouse was a tourist; Byron’s situation as an exile was more complicated. During his residence in Italy, Byron moves between being a detached spectator and keen participant as terror moves from the realm of the aesthetic into one of shared political experience. When Byron arrived in Venice in November 1816, he arrived in a city marked by a succession of despotic rulers. Venice was “a fine monument of aristocratic power,” as Percy Shelley remarked, while visiting the Doge’s Palace and “the dungeons, where these scoundrels used to torment their victims.”14 Venice’s last doge died in 1802, but even before this Napoleon had declared his intention to be “an Attila to the State of Venice.”15 While Napoleon initiated archeological excavation of ancient


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Rome, his ambitions in Venice were much less sensitive to the history of the city; he demolished the south side of St Mark’s square to build a new palace, tore down several churches in the process of removing works of art to Paris and planned to fill in all the canals. Murray’s Hand-Book for Travellers in Northern Italy (1843) reminds readers of the “infuriate Vandalism of the French”: no city of Italy . . . suffered so fatally as Venice. One hundred and sixtysix noble churches were demolished . . . The monuments were broken to pieces; the marbles sold as rubbish, and the bronzes as old metal; the libraries and galleries plundered, the archives destroyed, the subsisting buildings damaged and degraded and defaced out of mere wantonness and the city reduced to what it now is, a mere shadow of its ancient splendour.16 The systematic ruin of a city inflicts terror by undoing time, as Burke reflected: “rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in an hundred years.”17 Of course Venice had acquired some of its treasures through plunder as well as deliberation and foresight: the four bronze horses over the entrance of St Mark’s had been pillaged from Constantinople in 1204 and were taken down in turn by Napoleon in 1797 for display on the Champs Elysées. They were returned to St Mark’s in 1815 when Napoleon’s despoiling of Venice ceased and the Congress of Vienna gave the Lombardy–Veneto Kingdom to Austria, ushering in a new system of repression—or an old one, as many historians likened the Austrians to the Barbarian Huns who had driven the founders of Venice out of northern Italy in the fifth and sixth centuries. The Austrians of the nineteenth century saved the canals, but through intimidation and menace they recreated a climate of terror. In a prose note to the play Marino Faliero Byron claims, “none could describe the actual state into which the more than infernal tyranny of Austria has plunged this unhappy city.”18 It was to combat this force that Byron joined the Carbonari. In Ravenna (November, 1820) he recorded that “Here all is suspicion and terrorism – bullying – arming – and disarming – the Priests scared – the people gloomy” (BLJ, 7: 236). In February, 1821, Count Alborgehetti, the Secretary General of Lower Romagna, reported that a false alarm “spread the terror in the city,” but an Austrian force marched south to crush the Neapolitans and in May 1821, Byron wrote bitterly about the “Hun” who “will trample” Italy (it is significant, I think, that Byron uses the verb “trample” to refer to political tyranny

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and his treatment by an English audience).19 He also wrote about spies, assassination plots, and the intimidation of his servants.20 This experience of political terror collided in interesting ways with the visual context of aestheticized religious terror. Byron was familiar with biblical terror through immersion in the pleasures of the Old Testament “before I was eight years old” (BLJ, 8: 238). Both Calvinists and Catholics believe in hell, but for Calvinists, predestination means that hell has an inevitability (or not), which it does not exercise over the mind of a Catholic, for whom the possibility of forgiveness is almost infinitely extended. Calvin argued that the severity of divine vengeance could not be expressed except through corporeal figures so that “whenever the prophets strike terror by means of corporeal figures”; these are “preludes of future judgment”: Hence unhappy consciences find no rest, but are vexed and driven about by a dire whirlwind, feeling as if torn by an angry God, pierced with deadly darts, terrified by his thunderbolt and crushed by the weight of his hand; so that it was easier to plunge into abysses and whirlpools than endure these terrors for a moment.21 In Catholic countries, these terrors were visible in the late medieval tradition of religious painting; for Calvinists, terror was administered almost exclusively through the word. One of the most well known of Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” which was drafted in February, 1815, draws on the account in Isaiah and II Kings of the invasion of Judah by Sennacherib, his threatened sacking of Jerusalem and the slaying of an army of “an hundred four score and five thousand” overnight by God’s angel.22 Using pulsing anapests, Byron creates incantatory power from the narrative of violent and sudden destruction: The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue waves roll nightly on deep Galilee. (1–4) Synonymous with cruelty, the Assyrians were one of the most feared armies in the ancient world. According to Randall Law, they were one of the first civilizations to publicize acts of symbolic violence in order to intimidate enemies: “The military was organized to terrify . . . using large formations of chariots and cavalry, designed to awe as much as to


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destroy”; God’s instantaneous annihilation of this force (“unsmote by the sword / . . . melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!” [24–5]) gives us Old Testament terror at its zenith.23 McGann suggests that Byron “probably means to draw a comparison with Buonaparte in his poem” (CPW, 3: 472). It is certainly a declamatory expression of overwhelming power in which massive military force is undone (“The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown” [20]). The poem rides the crest of a wave of devastation and the pace of the verse means that the poet remains at a remove from the wailing “widows of Ashur” (21). By contrast, the blank verse of Manfred interrogates the state of one who sees himself as a blight terrorizing others. In Act 3 (the act Byron rewrote after his visit to Rome), the Abbot asks why Manfred cannot “live and act with other men,” and Manfred responds: Because my nature was averse from life; And yet not cruel; for I would not make, But find a desolation: – like the wind, The red-hot breath of the most lone Simoom, Which dwells but in the desart, . . . such hath been The course of my existence; but there came Things in my path which are no more (3.1.125–35) Byron had used the Simoom image for the Giaour and glossed it as “The blast of the desart, fatal to every thing living, and often alluded to in eastern poetry” (CPW, 3: 417). The last two lines hold an oblique, if not evasive, account of the Romantic hero’s collateral damage. The single syllables “yet” and “but” are the only sounds that hold at bay the terror of “an awful spirit” (Manfred, 2.4.162) who cannot imagine another’s pain.24 There is biblical and military terror in Manfred, as Byron adapts Tacitus’ summary of Roman invasion in Agricola 30.3: “atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant,” only Manfred does not make a desolation, but “finds” it.25 He is detached from his own effect, but insists that “averse” is not “cruel.” I want to suggest that this shift is not just the result of a change of form, but that Byron’s understanding of terror was sharpened by residence in Catholic Italy and first-hand encounters with the biblical art on display in churches and palaces—the “hues of hell,” as he described Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel in The Prophecy of Dante (4.63). “I know no other situation except Hell which I should feel inclined to participate with them,” Byron wrote

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of English tourists in Italy; he was always less “averse” to the Italians with whom he shared the pains of punishment and exile after the failed revolution (BLJ, 5:229). The owner of Newstead Abbey is not likely to have been unprepared for the vast interiors of Milan Cathedral, St Mark’s, and St Peter’s, but the decoration of those spaces would have been quite different from the ecclesiastical architecture Byron was used to in St Paul’s Episcopal Chapel in Aberdeen or the chapel of Harrow School or the Tudor simplicity of Trinity College Cambridge.26 Trinity College had an altarpiece of St Michael overcoming Satan, by Benjamin West (1777), which was influenced by his study in Italy, but the walls were otherwise undecorated. There was no tradition of art in English public buildings until the later nineteenth century; the Calvinist mentality, in particular, remained hostile to graven images of any kind.27 Previous critics have suggested that the sublime vistas imagined in Manfred and Cain come from Byron’s enjoyment of the vast Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres: without disputing the importance of these secular spaces, I would like to highlight the aesthetic impact of Catholic interiors.28 English travelers to Italy found the sight of Catholic art magnificent and disturbing. Joseph Forsyth, for example, refers to “ecclesiastical farrago” and a “slaughter-house of saints painted round the wall” of St Paul’s in Rome.29 Percy Shelley objected to the cumulative effect of religious art: “One gets very tired indeed whatever may be the conception and execution of it of seeing that monotonous and agonized form for ever exhibited in one prescriptive attitude of torture.”30 Byron also recorded a scornful reaction to Catholic art early in his Italian exile: You must recollect however – that I know nothing of painting – & that I detest it – unless it reminds me of something I have seen . . . – for which [reason] I spit upon & abhor all the saints & subjects of one half the impostures I see in the churches & palaces[.] (BLJ, 5:213) Nevertheless, he continued to go “picture-gazing” as he referred to it in June 1819 and he looked on at least one “famous dead Christ” in the Manfrini Palace in Venice (BLJ, 6: 148; 5: 213). Without claiming too much about which artists’ work Byron did or did not see, I suggest that his general remarks on Italian art show that he was aware of it as part of the architectural fabric of Italy, and that he grew accustomed to it to the extent of expecting it to be there (he commissioned copies of “Titian, &c” for a fresco in one of his rooms in Ravenna; BLJ, 8: 19). From a necessarily selective survey of two buildings in Venice


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that Byron knew well, we can gather an idea of the pictures that he could not miss, whether or not he gave them prolonged attention. One subject of paintings to which Byron often alludes is female beauty; the other most obvious subject of Italian painting and memorials is the exposition of political and religious violence. When Samuel Rogers visited Venice two years before Byron, the walls and ceiling of the senate rooms of the Doge’s Palace were “full of splendid paintings of the history of the republic by Titian, Paul Veronese, Tintoret, Bassan &c, the atchievements of Dandalo, the submission of Barbarossa, the taking of Constantinople &c.”31 The swarming violence and terror of the battle scenes such as Tintoretto’s Conquest of Zara, and Pietro Liberi’s Victory over the Turks in the Dardanelles is remarkable. Byron does not mention these images in letters from Italy, but the ducal interiors, especially the portrait of Faliero, impressed him: The black veil which is painted over the place of Marino Faliero amongst the doges, and the Giant’s Staircase where he was crowned, and discrowned, and decapitated, struck forcibly upon my imagination. (CPW, 4:303) Other artworks inside the Doge’s palace provide a visual index to the wholesale slaughter described in the siege cantos of Don Juan, which Byron wrote while living in Pisa in 1822. Attention to the technologies of terror (such as the construction of siege batteries at Ismail and the “engines, gorged with pangs” in Marino Faliero, 5.1.46), therefore, is found not only in Byron’s literary and historical sources, but also in the painting and sculpture that surrounded him in Italy.32 Byron satirizes epic conventions in Don Juan when he tells readers that his “panorama view of hell” (1.200) will be fulfilled by scenes of modern warfare. In the Doge’s Palace and almost any other Italian palace or church Byron could walk into, we find a juxtaposition of frescos of military conquest and panels of religious damnation. The Magistrato alle Leggi in the Doge’s Palace, for example, holds three works by Hieronymus Bosch which were placed there to intimidate with medieval terrors those summoned before the state inquisitors: Heaven and Hell, The Triptych of the Hermits, and The Martyrdom of St Liberata. The “hell” panel, in particular, depicts grotesque scenes of damnation and torture. Works like these, I suggest, supplement the literary sources informing the hell of Ismail where “the heat / Of Carnage, like the Nile’s sun-sodden Slime, / Engendered monstrous shapes of every Crime” (8.82).33

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Byron tells us that he went more than once in 1819 to look for the tomb of Marino Faliero in San Giovanni e San Paolo (or San Zanipolo) (CPW, 4: 303). The main altarpiece is a vast crucifixion by Tintoretto with his distinctive twisted, leaning figure of Christ; in Byron’s time there was also Titian’s Peter Martyr with his companion who is escaping from the assassin, which had been looted by Napoleon, returned, and was subsequently lost in a fire later in the nineteenth century. Both paintings freeze moments of human terror. San Zanipolo also holds one of the most gruesome records of military terror in Venetian history—the flayed remains of Marco Antonio Bragadin, commander of the Venetian garrison at the Cypriot post of Famagusta that was besieged by the Turks in 1571. Having lost most of his men, Bragadin was forced to surrender and was seized and tortured. Chained to a stake on a public scaffold, he was flayed alive before his skin was stuffed with straw and set astride an ox to be paraded around in triumph. The skin puppet was taken to Constantinople as a trophy but eventually returned to Venice where Bragadin was regarded as a martyr for Venetian liberty. His receptacle is placed prominently above the Mocenigo tombs that Byron examined as he looked for Faliero. As an example of horrific violence publicized to enhance the fearsome reputation of the Turks, Bragadin’s classical urn contains a mixture of horror and terror for different audiences. Before we look at the Venetian plays in more detail, I want to suggest that encounters with such memorials allowed Byron to re-approach the accounts of battles he had given in the early cantos of Childe Harold and the Turkish tales, which used material from Gibbon and classical history. Byron’s famous verse narratives adapted the history of the early Ottoman Empire, but a part of him always objected to the “wretched and glittering detail of a confused mass of conquests and battles”: coming to live in Venice allowed him to see that history from another perspective.34 A good point of comparison is the violence of The Siege of Corinth, which has disturbed many readers by what Peter Kitson calls “a cosmopolitanism established through destruction and death.”35 Byron began The Siege of Corinth in 1812, worked on it intermittently during his ‘Years of Fame’ and published it in February 1816. The narrative was based on oral accounts of an episode in the wars between Venice and the Ottoman Empire in which the Venetian fort of Corinth was captured by the besieging Turkish force, before the explosion of a gunpowder store killed many on both sides.36 Focusing on the figures of Alp, the Venetian exile and renegade fighting with the Turks, and Minotti, the commander of the garrison, Byron does not dwell on the mental


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condition of the other soldiers. Like “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” the poem is driven forward by the pace of battle: Many a bosom, sheathed in brass, Strewed the earth like broken glass, Shivered by the shot, that tore The ground whereon they moved no more: Even as they fell, in files that lay, Like the mower’s grass at the close of day (23.686–91) Apart from the leaders, men appear only as mutilated corpses when the dogs “lazily mumbled the bones of the dead” beneath the walls (16.417), and as “ashes shower like rain” (33.991) on the shore and the isthmus after the explosion. With almost cynical objectivity, the narrator speculates that the mothers of those who lost their lives in the siege of Corinth would never be able to recognize their own children or indeed tell Christian or Moslem apart; human form is cancelled at a stroke and the poem ends with the nonverbal cries of wild birds and wild dogs. In the siege cantos of Don Juan, by contrast, the horrors of war are registered not only by those fighting on both sides but also by the group of women and children amongst whom Juan discovers Leila “transfixed / With infant terrors” (8.96). We know, of course, that this “refreshing” episode (8.90) is located in Byron’s source literature, but the choice of source literature is also determined by contextual pressures and Byron approaches the contingencies and cost of battle in a different way in Don Juan. The sacking of cities and the plight of refugees now have a place on the poetic canvas; the “end of Ismail” is recorded: “Far flashed her burning towers o’er Danube’s stream, / And redly ran his blushing waters down” (8.127). While history can only record things “in the gross” (8.3), the paintings of Tintoretto in the Doge’s palace depict refugees streaming out of conquered cities and capture the agony and terror of individual faces. The images of stripped forests and corn beneath the sickle borrow from Old Testament prophecy, but after tracing the sweep of the scythe Byron also gives the terrible aftermath: the “burning towers” (8.127) of Ismail recall the myriad scenes of smoke and confusion which cover the walls of the Sala dello Scrutinio. By 1822 Byron was well aware of the exodus of people that followed any military defeat: he was shocked by the powerlessness of his Italian friends in the face of Austrian reprisals in 1821: “You have no idea what a state of oppression this country is in,” he wrote to Richard Hoppner,

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“they arrested above a thousand of high & low – throughout Romagna – banished some – & confined others – without trial – process– or even accusation!! . . . every one of my acquaintance to the amount of hundreds almost have been exiled” (BLJ, 8: 157; see also 8: 154, 156, 165). The dayto-day reality of life in Italy under Austrian rule encouraged a revision of the history of imperial power in Europe, and of the writing of history itself. Hobhouse stayed with Byron in Venice while he was composing the notes for Childe Harold Canto IV: they were rereading Gibbon and pondering the fall of empire and the “terrors of a sinking nation” that Gibbon believed might explain “the mad prodigality which prevails in the confusion of a shipwreck or a siege,”37 terrors that Byron explored in Don Juan. Byron’s turn to drama in the 1820s is a different formal attempt to redress history. His aim, he told Murray in 1821, was “to dramatize like the Greeks (a modest phrase!) striking passages of history, as they did of history & mythology.”38 Byron was also determined to get away from the rhetorical excesses of the English stage and write a play with “neither . . . –mistakes – nor starts – nor outrageous ranting villains – nor melodrame”: It has been my object to be as simple and severe as Alfieri – & I have broken down the poetry as nearly as I could to common language. – The hardship is that in these times one can neither speak – of kings or Queens without suspicion of politics or personalities . . . I write in the midst of unpleasant scenes here – . . . – it is a kind of thing which cannot be described without equal pain as in beholding it. – – (BLJ, 8: 78, 152) The immediate context of this reform of the English stage with “suppressed passions—rather than the rant of the present day” was the stifled Italian revolution and Byron’s dashes here are a graphic attempt to describe the unspeakable (BLJ, 8: 218). While the death sentence is the ultimate weapon of arbitrary power, banishment is a way of removing a person geographically, and the ability to make people “disappear” in this way is a peculiar resource of terror. Even before it happened to his Italian friends, Byron would have been aware of its effects on Madame de Staël, whom he visited in the summer of 1816 while staying by Lake Geneva. De Staël had been banished from Paris by Napoleon: “One of my friends warned me that a gendarme would come within a few days to notify me that I must leave,” Madame de Staël wrote. “One has no idea, at least in countries where individuals


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are routinely protected against injustice, of the state one is thrown into by sudden news of arbitrary acts.”39 Italy (Venice in particular) supplied Byron with ample evidence of the capability of arbitrary power to end life in an instant, or prolong that ending through torture or even to terrorize an individual beyond the grave. Faliero’s disappearance from the portraits of the doges moves Byron because his identity has been annulled in addition to the taking of his life, and the place retains the terror of that act of obliteration. One of Byron’s most powerful resources in Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari is the oppressive threat of judicial violence gained from adhering to the unity of place and setting the plays in and around the Doge’s Palace. This building’s architectural connection with the neighboring prison enthralled eighteenth-century travelers and symbolized—perhaps more than the Bastille—the power of the ancien régime with its use of torture as part of an organized system of terror. William Beckford’s response to the Ducal palace and the Ponte dei Sospiri in the early 1780s elaborates the dichotomy between “majestic architecture” and “dismal prospects.” Beneath these fatal waters, the dungeons . . . are situated. There, the wretches lie marking the sound of the oars, and counting the free passage of every gondola. Above, a marble bridge, of bold, majestic architecture, joins the highest part of the prisons to the secret galleries of the palace; from whence criminals are conducted over the arch, to a cruel and mysterious death. I shuddered whilst passing below . . . Horrors and dismal prospects haunted my fancy upon my return. I could not dine in peace, so strongly was my imagination affected; but snatching my pencil, I drew chasms and subterraneous hollows, the domain of fear and torture, with chains, r[a]cks, wheels, and dreadful engines, in the style of Piranesi.40 The terror of the prisons is heightened by Beckford’s sense of a secret yet inevitable process. Samuel Rogers recorded a similar response to the proximity of death and muffled suffering: “What a scene of magnificence & horror was Venice in the old time! Who could pass along the Canal of the Palace, whatever his schemes of pleasure might be, & not think of his fellow-beings under that black & sluggish stream.”41 The open secret of the torture that was inflicted within one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe is anatomized in the opening of Childe Harold IV—

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I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand: I saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand[.] (1–4) Nineteenth-century reviewers frequently complained that it should have been “either” not “each,” but Byron’s famous grammatical crux introduces the double aspect of the beauties of Venice. Venice is here conjured into being in a mirror image of the way that those in power made their enemies disappear beneath the wave. Byron’s manuscript draft reminds the reader of the doubleness of the Bridge of Sighs with a prose note: The “Bridge of Sighs” (il Ponte dei Sospiri) divides the Doge’s Palace from the state prison. – It is roofed and divided by a wall into two passages. – By the one – the prisoner was conveyed to judgment – by the other he returned to death, being generally strangled in an adjoining chamber. (CPW, 2: 319) Hobhouse lengthened this note into a detailed description of the pozzi and the mental response to “so terrific a solitude”: [T]he inmates of the dungeons beneath had left traces of their repentance, or of their despair, which are still visible . . . Some of the detained appear to have offended against, and others to have belonged to, the sacred body, not only from their signatures, but from the churches and belfries which they have scratched upon the walls. (CPW, 2: 218) The dialogue between verse and prose in Childe Harold IV draws attention to the gulf between the aesthetic surface and submerged historical horror. Byron was to return to the writing on the wall of the pozzi in the soliloquy of Jacopo Foscari as he reads the signatures on the “inexorable” dungeon wall and inscribes his own footnote to Venetian history: This stone page Holds like an epitaph their history, And the poor captive’s tale is graven on His dungeon barrier, like the lover’s record


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Upon the bark of some tall tree, which bears His own and his beloved’s name. (The Two Foscari, 3.1.19–24) His mention of love reminds us (as Marina has intuited) that it is his love for Venice that enthralls him. Jacopo’s sensual memory of the sea canals supporting his limbs as he swam (The Two Foscari, 1.1.94–121) has its exact counterpart in the rack that holds him in the opening scenes. Although the view of the “tortured” lover is one readily associated with the Byronic hero, Byron was sparing in his metaphoric use of torture before 1816. The Corsair’s brief contemplation of the torture in his turret cell, and the 1806 poems “To M.S.G” and “Translation from Anacreon” are almost the only places where we find a reference to the “tortur’d heart” (“To M.S.G.,” 25; “Anacreon,” 44). Once he arrives in Venice, however, we see a marked increase in Byron’s frequency of reference to literal and metaphoric tortures that are likely to have been encouraged by the historical presence of torture chambers at the heart of the city and his visit to the cell in Ferrara where Tasso had been confined.42 The Two Foscari makes use of off-stage torture to great dramatic effect and, written in the midst of the Austrian suppression of the Italian uprising, this is also Byron’s most explicit protest against state-sanctioned terror. Marina’s outburst is directed at the man who has overseen the “infernal / Process” of her own flesh and who, as doge and father, embodies the rule of law: Keep Those maxims for your mass of scared mechanics, Your merchants, your Dalmatian and Greek slaves, Your tributaries, your dumb citizens, Your mask’d nobility, your sbirri, and Your spies, your galley and your other slaves, To whom your midnight carryings off and drownings, Your dungeons next the palace roofs, or under The water’s level; your mysterious meetings, And unknown dooms, and sudden executions, Your “Bridge of Sighs,” your strangling chamber, and Your torturing instruments, have made ye seem The beings of another and worse world! (2.1.299–313). Although it is directed at the rulers of old Venice and, according to Malcolm Kelsall, to contemporary England, a third level of relevance

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in Byron’s day accuses the “tribunals, reprisals, censorship [and] executions” used by the Austrians to control Italy.43 It is the suffocation of Marina’s protest and the claustrophobia of a closed structure that means her voice will never be heard in which Byron locates the terror of the Venetian plays. Marina’s likening the aristocratic rulers of Venice to “beings of another world” recalls the earlier moment in the first scene when she insists on entering the chamber in which the younger Foscari is being tortured and, on being told that it is the officers’ duty to stop her, retorts, ’Tis their duty To trample on all human feelings, all Ties which bind man to man, to emulate The fiends, who will one day requite them in Variety of torturing! (1.1.261–5) In the process of dramatizing fifteenth-century Venetian history, Byron’s drama brings medieval images of the tortures of hell into contact with the immediate pressure of Austrian atrocities. Bound into the historical tragedy is the question of the spectator’s aesthetic distance. Foscari has to assume the position of detached observer as his own son is put on the rack; Marina’s vain efforts to articulate the nature of the tyranny that enfolds her family play out, at some level, Byron’s feelings of helplessness as he watched Italy lose the struggle for freedom and self-determination once again and sink back under a tyrannical oppressor. If we look at the Venetian historical tragedies in the context of “the infamous tyranny” of the troops Byron called “those Barbarians,” we gain another perspective on Byron’s argument for the publication of The Prophecy of Dante with Marino Faliero (BLJ, 7: 211; BLJ, 8: 69). He sent the poem to England in March 1820; Murray was full of praise, but delayed publication. On August 17, Byron wrote, “The time for the Dante would be now – (did not her Majesty occupy all nonsense) as Italy is on the Eve of great things”(BLJ, 7: 158). Murray floated the possibility of adding the poem to a miscellaneous volume or a volume with Marino Faliero, but then pulled back from this and proposed publishing the play alone.44 Byron replied in January 1821, “I differ from you about the Dante – which I think should be published with the tragedy” (BLJ, 8: 69). Murray finally published the works together on April 21, 1821; in early June Byron began work on The Two Foscari, his “third tragedy in twelve months” (BLJ, 8: 147).


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The Prophecy of Dante is sometimes seen as an anomalous part of Byron’s achievement and his attachment to it slightly embarrassing, like his pride in Hints from Horace or his veneration of Rogers and Campbell. I want to argue, however, that the Prophecy plays a vital part in the matrix of Byron’s Venetian aesthetics. We can see its intersection with the concerns of Don Juan and the Venetian plays in its indictment of political terror, its use of the language of biblical terror and its testing of the aesthetic distance of the speaker. Like Tasso, Byron’s Dante has to fight to keep his tendency to “rant” under control but unlike The Lament of Tasso, the terza rima verse form of The Prophecy of Dante is “inexorable,” in keeping with the formal discipline of the tragic histories. The Turkish Tales exert a terrific forward momentum but The Prophecy pulls backwards in rhyming terms, emphasizing the repetitions of history. Dante is a tragic hero who both repudiates and sympathizes with the crowd; his prophecy, therefore, bridges the schism we find in Byron’s poetry at this time. As an exile, Dante is “Ripp’d from all kindred” (1.164), and one of a kind: “saddest of all prisoners” (4.131). Whereas Manfred insists that he could not “tame [his] nature down,” Dante has had to wither thus – to tame My mind down from its own infinity – To live in narrow ways with little men, A common sight to every common eye, A wanderer, while even wolves can find a den. ( 1.159–63) His “withering” is aligned with the fate of his country who must “wither to each tyrant’s will” and “each tyrant” suggests a wearying succession of oppressors; a litany of terror that extends from classical times to the present. Canto II offers a palimpsest of Italy’s violent history—what Dante sees stretching ahead of him and what is the more immediate past for Byron: the hue Of human sacrifice and Roman slaughter Troubles the clotted air, of late so blue, And deepens into red the saffron water Of Tiber, thick with dead; . . . the nations take their prey, Iberian, Almain, Lombard, and the beast And bird, wolf, vulture, more humane than they

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Are; these but gorge the flesh and lap the gore Of the departed, and then go their way; But those, the human savages, explore All paths of torture, and insatiate yet, With Ugolino hunger prowl for more. (2.76–90) The Prophecy of Dante therefore reflects on the inhumanity exhibited in The Siege of Corinth by suggesting that the eye of the beholder might be a greater source of terror than anything recorded by “bloody chronicles” (2.58). Taken as a group, the Venetian plays and The Prophecy of Dante meditate on the internal and external conflicts that make Italy “the martyr’d nation” (3.14), and turn a critical eye on the figure who feeds on (as in Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”) and survives the “sight of the fact”:—the artist. The final canto attempts to determine a morally acceptable distance for art from suffering and from power. Contemplating the grandeur of “Grecian forms” (4.45) and “rank oppression in its rudest shape” (4.125), Byron’s Dante condemns Art’s “mistaken” service to tyrants “who mar / All beauty upon earth” (4.81–4), and defines as “free” the man of genius who “toils for nations” (3.91). As an exile, Dante is more trampled upon than trampling except in his desire to be remote from all men and nations: That destiny austere, and yet serene, Were prouder than more dazzling flame unblest; The Alp’s snow summit nearer heaven is seen Than the volcano’s fierce eruptive crest, Whose splendour from the black abyss is flung, While the scorch’d mountain, from whose burning breast A temporary torturing flame is wrung, Shines for a night of terror, then repels Its fire back to the hell from whence it sprung, The hell which in its entrails ever dwells. (3.184–93) The volcano metaphor had been applied to poetic sublimity by Francis Jeffrey in his review of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III, just before he questioned Byron’s celebration of human ferocity: A great living poet . . . is a volcano in the heart of our land . . . and we have some cause to complain, if . . . he darkens and inflames our atmosphere with perpetual explosions of fiery torrents and pitchy


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vapours . . . Now, though an artist may draw fighting tygers and hungry lions in as lively and natural a way as he can, without giving any encouragement to human ferocity . . . the case is somewhat different, when a poet represents men with tygerlike dispositions – and yet more so, when he exhausts the resources of his genius to make this terrible being interesting and attractive.45 Byron would joke about volcanic metaphors in Don Juan XIII.36, but he usually heeded Jeffrey’s criticism. Terror in a tragic poem, he had told Hodgson, was in the punishment of the criminal: “Innocence is unhappy often, and the Offender escapes.” The poet has the power to obscure “sight of the fact” and to enthrall the crowd. A growing suspicion that the poetic genius and the wanton despot had something in common in “his want of all community of feeling” may have been one of the factors that impelled Byron to abandon the amused detachment of narrating Don Juan XVII and to embroil himself for the last time in one of Freedom’s battles.

5 “Something Not Yet Made Good”: Byron’s Cain, Godwin, and Mary Shelley’s Falkner Tilottama Rajan

i In 1837 Mary Shelley published her last novel, Falkner, laying to rest the wound of a Byronic Romanticism, in which Byron figures and is inextricably linked to her father, William Godwin.1 For Godwin had already invented Byron in misanthropic, brooding personalities like Falkland and Fleetwood. Shelley’s novel does not follow the Victorian turn against Byron detailed by Andrew Elfenbein, in which the development from an “immature Byronic phase to a sober, adult, ‘Victorian’ phase” becomes one of the century’s “master narratives” of transition.2 She wants to make her peace with the inoperative community of Romanticism as part of a care of the self, a care of her self, evident in her editing and archiving of its male celebrities: Godwin, Shelley, Byron. In Falkner, she therefore revisits both her bitter dis-figuration of the father–daughter relationship as incest in Mathilda (1819),3 and Godwin’s exposure of the “wounded masculine” of patriarchy in Deloraine (1833). Just as Deloraine responds to Mathilda, Falkner responds to Deloraine, written when Shelley and her father were again in daily contact. Rupert Falkner is the Byronic lover of Alithea, the occasion if not direct cause of her death, nursing the secret of his terrible crime towards a woman who had been his almost-sister in childhood. Like Deloraine he is an exile and wanderer, driven from England by his crime; but he is also everything the Father in Mathilda was not, and that Godwin’s novel of confession and atonement cannot make Deloraine be. Deloraine flees England with his devoted daughter, the child of his first marriage, having precipitated—by murdering her childhood love—the death of his second wife, who is just four years older than his daughter. More 84

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obscurely, the Father’s exile and wandering in Mathilda after his wife’s death in childbirth also bears the trace of a crime: a crime he has not committed, but which is inscribed in the very fabric of existence as selfconsciousness. This crime must then be posited, brought out into the open as the crime of incest. Yet the Father never actually commits incest, even though he is, in some unspecifiable sense, profoundly guilty. For Byronic crime is always more or less than its accounting, unfolding as a missed encounter with its cause, not warranting the blame assigned to it, yet also surviving any possible exoneration. Godwin, as we have said, had already imagined something like the Byronic hero avant la lettre. But if Godwin is the condition of possibility for Byron, it was Shelley who reinvented her father more glamourously as Byron, so as to keep alive, after the Regency period and Godwin’s own retreat into middle-class propriety, the scandal of Romanticism as a profound disordering and unfinished revolution of the socio-metaphysical family. For it is Shelley’s texts, from Mathilda through her short story “The Mourner” (1829) to Falkner, that knit together Godwin and Byron by linking the Godwinian tropes of crime and misanthropy to the further Byronic figures of incest and exile. In Mathilda Shelley casts her father as a Byronic wanderer: the “unhappy wandering father” who is the “idol of my imagination” (186). When Mathilda writes these words, just before being reunited with her lost father, she is sixteen, close to Shelley’s age when she eloped with Percy. Her father is still young: not fifty-eight, as Godwin was at the time of the elopement, but thirtyseven (179–80), closer to Godwin’s age when he married Wollstonecraft. In Falkner, Elizabeth Raby, Falkner’s adopted daughter, is also around sixteen when her relationship with Gerard Neville, the son of the woman whose death Falkner has caused, begins to germinate. But Falkner himself is still young, no more than twenty-seven, when as a child Elizabeth stops him from killing himself out of remorse for the death of Alithea. Falkner clearly revisits Falkland. As in Caleb Williams there is a trunk containing Falkner’s narrative and confession, and the novel culminates in a trial that raises issues of judgment and the relation between morality and justice. But Falkner is also linked to Byron, as Shelley’s hero tries to expiate his guilt by dying in Greece, yet, unlike the Byronic Raymond in The Last Man, is forced to live on beyond the end of Romanticism. The power, and one could say queerness, of Godwin’s novels lies in what I have elsewhere called the perverse identification we experience with characters who represent the obscenity of power, yet also the aporia and enigma of “being what [they are] not” and “not being what [they are].”4 Fleetwood and Deloraine are hardly admirable: the first marries a

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woman young enough to be his daughter, who is driven to her death by his insane jealousy, while the second actually replaces his young wife with his daughter. Yet because these narratives are written in the first person, we are forced to suspend judgment on their protagonists. Shelley’s eroticization of Godwin as Byron, symptomatic in Mathilda but deliberate in Falkner, responds to this perverse identification embedded in Godwin’s narrative strategy. Her (con)fusion of Godwin with Byron marks her refusal to see the misanthropy of the Godwinian hero as merely sordid. Shelley, in other words, does what Godwin himself did not: she “romanticizes” the Godwinian hero, in Novalis’ sense of the word as “a qualitative raising to the powers (Potenzirung),” wherein the “lower self is identified with a better self.”5 Shelley’s last novel thus revisits a Romanticism about to be cured by the Victorians. But it both opens and closes off the question of this Romanticism’s modernity, what it passes on to us that remains unthought. Falkner is, at the same time, very different from its more successful precursor Lodore (1835), whose eponymous hero is killed off early in the novel. By contrast Falkner’s Byronic hero is the central problem of the text, although wounded and wasted like Godwin’s Falkland. That Falkner does not die in Greece marks the novel as concerned with survival: the survival of a Romanticism that had seemed exhausted in the unexpected, violent deaths of Lodore and Raymond. Survival –survivre or living on– as described by Jacques Derrida is not legacy but a kind of haunting, in Sara Guyer’s words, “a state of non-closure, division”: a “position of disturbance, torsion” and “the endurance of that which cannot exist.”6 What lives on in Falkner, as a figure for Byron or Godwin, is the space for a “peculiar” thinking of the relation to society, one whose strength lies in having “no future,” as Lee Edelman puts it in questioning a culture constituted by the family. For Edelman the heteronormative family configured around the child “shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought” in terms of “reproductive futurism.” No future, by contrast, would not be the exhaustion of Romanticism, but its survival as a “negativity” that is not invested in a “form of social viability.”7 In Mathilda, her most radical text, Shelley turns inward to a desire that has no future in a romantic relationship with the Shelleyan Woodville, and is a transference of the Father’s desire, which had also failed to find either a future or past in a love that restlessly survives his dead wife. In their twisting onto each other, Mathilda’s desire and that of her father become the tropological space for an (im)possible thinking of something else: her desire for her father’s


desire as a desire for herself, his desire in turn being a desire not so much for her as for himself through her. Falkner is more composed, but can be understood only in an asymmetrical dialogue with the earlier text. If Mathilda eroticizes the Father as Byron, causing him to survive after being killed off, Falkner sanitizes Byron as the imaginary father Godwin could not create so as to revisit Mathilda more safely. With Falkner, Elizabeth travels over the world as Mathilda did not. He has her educated in needlework but also in more “masculine studies” (50). In Falkner the more disturbing aspects of the father–daughter bond in Mathilda are mitigated by the fact that Falkner is not Elizabeth’s father; nor does he seek to possess her; rather she devotes herself unconditionally to him. Falkner, or at least the idol of imagination that Elizabeth constructs of him, is Kristeva’s Imaginary Father: an “archaic unity” or conglomeration of the two parents, whom Kristeva describes as the “father of individual prehistory.”8 In Falkner, then, there is no accusation of incest. Yet in Mathilda, unlike The Cenci, incest was also never literally enacted, and remained a trope for the dangerous obscurity of a relation, including a relation to the self, that cannot be coded within available social and familial models. Incest is, as it also is for Byron, the narcissistic transference of the desire for the other onto the desire for oneself: a self that is not oneself but profoundly other. That incestuous relation, albeit idealized, lives on in Falkner as the trace underlying Elizabeth’s excessive devotion to her father. For her devotion, even at the cost of giving up Neville, is not submissive or timid; it is rather what Slavoj Žižek, drawing on Lacan, calls a refusal to cede the Real of her desire.9 The further scandal of Mathilda, which recurs in Falkner, lies in the transference onto the Father of a desire that, feminism tells us, should be reserved for the mother. For apart from Lodore, which itself notes “a peculiarity in the education of a daughter, brought up by a father only,”10 mothers are killed off at the inception of her stories, surviving only as daughters. These daughters, then, form a community with their fathers, like Shelley and Godwin themselves in the 1830s. A “peculiar” community, in that the daughter’s bond with the Byronic father is the closet within which her own transgression of normative femininity is generated as a radical but groundless autonomy. Falkner, then, is a deeply unconventional novel. To be sure, it ends with a restoration of the family and the future, as Elizabeth marries Neville and is reconciled with the remnants of her biological family. Yet the novel’s subtitle is “a tale of three orphans.” And its lines of filiation twist and turn back on themselves to create a family bound by

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(im)possible differences and constituted by adoption, as Neville goes back into the past to find that the “father” of the woman he loves is his mother’s destroyer, while Elizabeth gives him the power to destroy Falkner at the cost of ending their relationship. The sacrifices around which this family is constituted recall the sacrifice that Woodville would not make to Mathilda, and are the ground for what Jean-Luc Nancy calls an unavowable or “inoperative community” (communauté désouevrée), built around rupture rather than communion.11 Nevertheless, in this novel written in the year after Godwin’s death, Shelley retrieves the potential of the Byronic-Godwinian complex at the cost of finally closing off the restless negativity of Byronic crime. For the trunk is opened, the narrative read, and in the end Falkner is found not guilty. Incredibly Falkner himself, whose existence has been constituted by living his guilt, starts insisting on his innocence, which he seems to mean in a narrowly legal sense. No matter that his mad seizure of Alithea from her dysfunctional family has precipitated her drowning as she tries to flee back home. And no matter that he has buried her body and fled to the Continent. The last part of the novel wants to pardon Godwin, Byron, and the scandal of such texts as Caleb Williams; The Giaour, which is also haunted by an unreadable crime passionel as the phantasmatic symptom of something else; and Cain, to which Shelley alludes at the end (320), but in an almost obligatory manner. In pardoning the scandal of these texts, Shelley also wants to pardon herself for her own crime in killing off her father in Mathilda. But this pardon does not so much replace guilt with innocence as close off the enigma of not being one with oneself that these texts disclose. In Caleb Williams, and almost until the end in Falkner, the crime is not legally established even though we know it to have occurred; and this is because in a more fundamental sense the crime does not consist in what it seems to be. In Mathilda too the Father’s incestuous desire materializes, almost crudely, a guilt that cannot speak its name. This desire is transgressive, not just in denying the prohibition of the law but in transgressing the borders of the self, even to the point that we do not know whose transgression is at issue: whose guilt the text unfolds, the Father’s or Mathilda’s. Guilt, crime and their attribution exist in an elliptical relationship that cannot be grasped, en-closed. This in turn is why Byronic crime and the guilt associated with it are so often “secret.” For the secret, as Abraham and Torok argue, “designates an internal psychic splitting,” something unknown even to oneself and “consigned to internal silence,”12 something that cannot be unlocked. The particular structure of this secret is figured in Caleb Williams through the trunk


whose contents are never divulged, but whose secret is shared by Caleb and Falkland. That the trunk is never unlocked, even though we “know” that it contains Falkland’s confession, means that what we think we know will not tell us what we want to know. As disturbing is that what we do not know is shared with another, for “all secrets are shared at the start,”13 otherwise they would not be secrets. This is what makes the secret, and the relationship constituted around it, so transgressive: that one shares oneself, and what one does not know about oneself, with someone other than oneself. But in Falkner pardon marks the end of the secret and its disturbing mixture of strangeness and intimacy, reconstituting the daughter who pardons as a full ethical subject. To forgive, as Sara Guyer says, “is to render an injury knowable and contained, to turn an incalculable violence into an event whose effects can be . . . accounted for, brought to light.”14 As at(one)ment Falkner thus pardons Falkland in Caleb Williams and with him the Godwinian hero. It also closes off the trauma of Mathilda, whose protagonist survives, if only in writing, at the cost of bearing with her the secret of the Father’s death. Encrypting this secret in Mathilda’s melancholia, Shelley was compelled to revisit it in her later story, “The Mourner.” For “The Mourner” is the other side of Mathilda, a secret penance for its ancestor. Haunted by her father’s death during a shipwreck, for which she bears the blame, Clarice changes her name and disappears as who she was. Like Mathilda, but more passively, her life becomes a life with no future: a being-towards-death, from which she cannot be wooed back by Horace Neville, who interestingly bears the same surname as Elizabeth’s lover Gerard in Falkner. But Clarice is not the occasion of her father’s death, except in the sense of knowing the cruel equation that also underlies Mathilda: that “if she were saved, he would remain and die.”15 In their secret sharing, Mathilda and “The Mourner” confront what Georges Bataille calls the “inner experience” of “transgression,” which is also at the centre of Byron’s Cain. Their avowal of crime, or rather of what Blanchot calls “faute,” discloses the traumatic core of autonomy, of sur-vival on one’s own terms, that fantasies of emancipatory politics neglect. This fault, of which crime is a hypostasis, is also the psychoanalytic secret of Caleb Williams, whose narrator is guilty of no crime but comes to share with Falkland a symmetrical, and thus structural, guilt. For in Godwin’s novel politics is a shell around the kernel we approach through Caleb’s excessive curiosity. Politics is almost an accident of this curiosity, which is transgressive not just in disturbing things as they are but also in violating, in transgressing, the very core of each

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character’s being. In Falkner too Shelley revisits this troubled scene of a self constituted by its transgression of itself. She returns to it as her own debt to, and implication within, the Romanticism that she acknowledges through the transgressive bond between the surviving daughter and the past that survives within her. But in the atmosphere of truth and reconciliation that characterizes the end of this novel, it seems that Falkner’s “guilt” is domesticated by being attributed to a single, finite action that can be accounted for in social rather than ontological terms. The result is that Shelley’s gesture of recovering the radicality of a Byronic-Godwinian Romanticism—a gesture that, I suggest, is of enormous historical significance—can occur only by virtue of a repression, or perhaps by virtue of a self-protection that allows her to revisit the past without revisiting the trauma that necessitated its burial.

ii In what remains I suggest that Byron himself in Cain16 provides a more complete etiology of the Byronic-Godwinian Romanticism whose survival Shelley did not quite know how to mediate. Cain is unusual among the texts discussed, in that its action takes place almost entirely before and not after the crime is committed. It is also a deeply speculative play in which the restlessness of the negative elaborates itself in thought rather than exhausting itself in action. In general critics see Byron’s portrayal of his protagonist as sympathetic. Yet Paul Cantor, while describing Cain’s deed as “what Camus calls a metaphysical rebellion,” still concludes moralistically that it is “the Lucifer principle in Cain that leads him to kill Abel.”17 I suggest, by contrast, that what we take from the play is not Abel’s murder but the utter discrepancy between this action and what emerges in the second act: a scientific rather than Christian account of what Friedrich Schelling in 1815 calls the “ages of the world,” but a scientific account that is deeply Romantic, not just naturalistic. In line with this Romanticism, both in Cain’s questioning of JudeoChristian ideology and his response to the vision of devolution that Lucifer shows him, “something not yet made good pushes its essence forward,” which does not find expression in his murder of Abel. Habermas uses this phrase in discussing the Romanticism of Ernst Bloch and Bloch’s affective connection to the work of Friedrich Schelling, who was the first to theorize freedom in terms of the energy of evil and yet also as a radical fault inseparable from autonomy. Cain’s deed, like those of Falkland, Falkner and other Byronic heroes, is an assertion of


freedom in Schelling’s complex sense of a freedom impulsively, compulsively entwined with necessity. In Schelling’s analogy for this difficult freedom, “the individual member, such as the eye, is possible only in the whole of an organism . . . [but] has a life for itself . . . [a] freedom, the obvious proof of which is disease.”18 Schelling’s account of the part’s withdrawal from the body politic into its own irritable selfhood equates evil with disease, but also links dis-ease to freedom. Thus in his conception of freedom what is disastrous in human being, what we call evil, is “submit[ted] . . . to a utopian treatment,” insofar as within it “something not yet made good pushes its essence forward.”19 Or, as Schelling says, the positive and negative potencies “are infinitely far from each other and infinitely near. Far, because what is affirmed and manifest in one of them is posited in the other as negated and in the dark. Near because it only requires an inversion, a turning out of what was “concealed” to “transpose” and “transform, the one into the other.”20 In pardoning the father, despite all the evasions that attend the rhetoric of pardon, Shelley likewise wants to submit Godwin’s and Byron’s Romanticism to a utopian treatment. And it is in Cain, more than Byron’s other works, that we find a similar utopianism, though bracketed from the concluding catastrophe. But it is a utopianism that emerges, not positively, but as something ungrounded, in the space of a lacuna. A sense of something not brought forward emerges first in the disconnection between motive and act in the murder, which has an almost unreal quality, perhaps because Abel is a symbolic position more than a person, or perhaps because the crime is already decreed in the biblical plot and cannot not happen. Like Joseph K. in Kafka’s The Trial Cain never has a chance to be not guilty but is guilty before being guilty. This prolepsis, wherein the effect anticipates and produces the cause, lets us speak of Cain’s crime as a fantasy. This is not to say that Cain does not kill Abel but that Christianity must fantasize a primal crime in order to uphold the law. And Cain too must fantasize a crime as the condition of his autonomy and the fault, in Blanchot’s sense, that autonomy always entails. Next, this utopianism of disaster also emerges in Cain’s journey through the cosmos in Act 2, in which he constantly responds as if there is more in the world’s past and its disasters than can be summed up in Lucifer’s vision of entropic decline. Thus not only does the journey affect us with something not expressed in the Manichean discourse of Jehovah versus Lucifer. We also see that there have been worlds before Adam’s, that Adamic man, to adapt Michel Foucault, is an “invention of recent date.” For by an “inexorable / Destruction and disorder of the

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elements,” these earlier worlds have been wiped out as if they have never been (2.2.80–4, 120–1), “erased” “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”21 This finitude, instead of being crushing, liberates us to see the play’s outcome as culturally specific, and a missed encounter with the questions opened by Byron’s text. The play begins at a unique moment: after the fall, but before anything has been done to justify it, since the simple eating of an apple is hardly a transgression. Indeed, in this still innocent world incest too is harmless. Crucially, then, Cain is not yet guilty, though we know he will be. Cain’s questions raise precisely this issue of the superstitiousness of Judeo-Christian ideology. Cain asks why man should not eat of a tree deliberately placed near him (1.71–3), and why if “knowledge is good, and life is good” both are deemed “evil” (1.1.36–8). Building on such questions, which even Zillah and Adam have (1.18–21, 32), Cain asks why his father did not complete what he had begun by eating from the tree of life as well as the tree of knowledge (1.33–4). Almost as a phantasmatic effect of Cain’s questions, Lucifer has appeared during this scene, which begins with “Cain solus” (1.64). Lucifer is “that proud spirit,” a phantasm or drive within Cain himself, “who withdr[aws]” Cain from his community (3.45), as part of what Schelling calls freedom. But as such the spirit, an incoherent affective cluster figured as “Lucifer,” catalyses something that unfolds beyond the play’s terminus, for which Byron himself does not have a discourse. As part of this process Cain seeks a knowledge impossible within a biblical, or even Gnostic, framework. Indeed what he seeks calls in question the very meaning of the term knowledge, which, as Georges Bataille will say, conventionally means “servility, the acceptation of a way of life,” and a restriction to the “stability” of “ the known,” where one is interpellated and “recovers oneself,” even if negatively, as Adam and Abel do.22 In contrast Cain seeks knowledge of the unthought, through a dialogue with the other that “extends from a part of himself not reflected in a cogito to the act of thought by which he apprehends this part.” The description is Foucault’s, in his account of what “transcendental reflection” means to the “modern cogito,” which must “traverse, duplicate, and reactivate . . . the articulation of thought on everything within it, around it, and beneath it which is not thought” but is “not foreign to thought.”23 The name that the play gives to this “non-knowledge”24 is a curiously modern one: death. As Lucifer says, “It may be death leads to the highest knowledge” (2.1.164). Only when he has left his innocence and “past / The gates of death,” will Cain be “fit” for the more profound “dwelling” in thought that he traverses in his journey through


the cosmos, where he beholds through the filter of “vision that which is reality” (2.2.110–14). In the aftermath of this journey, Cain does indeed come to know death, and yet in a way that reduces our understanding of the term to morality, forgetting the play’s subtitle as a “mystery play” concerned with “the mysteries of death” and being (2.1.140). As the ex-centric centre of the play, the journey in the second act is interesting for several reasons, including that it is not accounted for in the play’s subsequent action. Correspondingly performances of Cain, many in the former Soviet Union, often omit this act, which displaces an ethical with a metaphysical framework, yet also disallows us from heroizing Cain as a romantic rebel in the line of Manfred. In the journey Lucifer presents Cain with a vast panorama of everything beneath, before and after his particular world: the pre-Adamite worlds of which his own is only the last in a long series. The journey has two parts: the first set in “the abyss of space” (2.1), and the second in “the realm / Of death” (2.2.13–14). Throughout their dialogue Lucifer claims the position of subject presumed to know. But this does not mean Cain should be equated with him. Importantly, Lucifer’s positions are not coherently sustained. Thus he claims to see through Jehovah but often sounds oddly like him. For instance, when Cain asks Lucifer why animals must pay for man’s alleged sin, and why the entire earth must be considered fallen when man is only a small part of it, Lucifer responds with the anthropo-theological justification: “Your maker told you they were made for you / As you for him” (2.2.152–7). Indeed the Christian “Lucifer,” as the only means Cain has to question God’s knowledge, is a blunt instrument for exploring the realm of death to which Byron gives the more ancient name of Hades. Cain senses that Lucifer is a mirror effect of Jehovah. Thus when Lucifer offers him absolute knowledge if he “fall[s] down and worship[s]” him, Cain asks why he should bow to Lucifer when he has “never / As yet . . . bowed unto” his father’s god (1.301–14). Lucifer materializes outside Cain precisely because he is not identical with Cain. Lucifer is also an external phantasm because he has achieved a degree of cultural explicitness which allows him to be seen, even if the seeing also marks a kind of error. By contrast, the “mighty phantoms” of prior worlds, “Some fully shown, some indistinct” (2.2.32, 44), are internal phantasms which remain obscure because they have yet to be fully grasped in consciousness and exceed the discourses available to Byron. Lucifer’s two agendas can be surmised, even if they are not entirely coherent. First, by showing Cain that the world “has been destroyed several times before the creation of man,” Lucifer exposes Jehovah as a

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regional deity of recent invention. Yet by the same token, “Lucifer” too looks like a superstitious remnant, especially when he claims a theological status for himself while expounding the theories of Cuvier and the philosophes. Lucifer’s further agenda is the one Byron describes in a letter: to humiliate and depress Cain, hoping he will lash out against the order of things in an immaturely rebellious fashion. With this in mind, Lucifer emphasizes the infinite series of past worlds, all destined for extinction, each more degenerate than the last (2.2.67–73). Cain, however, continually sees more in what Lucifer shows him than the latter’s vision of “Reptiles engendered out of the subsiding / Slime of a mighty universe” (2.2.97–8). Thus when asked what he would think “if there should be / Worlds greater than” his, “inhabited / By greater things,” yet “doomed to death,” Cain replies: “I should be proud of thought / Which knew such things” (2.1.43–50). In contrast to Lucifer’s Lucretian nihilism, Cain sees an “aerial universe of endless / Expansion,” where “atoms die / (If that they die),” but where the “works or accidents” of creation are still beautiful (2.1.107–14). In the first part of his journey, Cain views the cosmos through the lens of space, while in the second it is schematized in terms of time, culminating in death. The first vision, consisting of worlds “begirt with light” and “full of life ev’n when their atmosphere / Of light gave way,” seems to be unworked by the second, which is “dark and dreadful” (2.1.182–90), giving no sign of life, no access to the future (2.2.241 ). But even here Cain holds on to an unformulated sense of potentiality as the affective core of his vision of the plurality of worlds.25 A plurality of worlds, it is important to note following Leibniz, is not the same as a series, each subject to absolute epistemic destruction. Within a temporal series, there is only one narrative outcome; but within a plurality there are many possible worlds, meaning that other outcomes are not impossible but merely “incompossible” with things as we know them. “Incompossible” means that another outcome, though actually incompatible with the narrative series, is possible, within the virtual complementarity of another world.26 Nor is it clear, even within the framework of a series, that Lucifer’s vision of decline is accurate (2.2.68–73). For among the “mighty phantoms” Cain sees in Hades, those who came later in the pre-Adamite series may have risen “higher than the first” (2.2.51–3), to be displaced by the cruder “mammoth[s]” and “leviathans” of neolithic time (2.2.143, 190), in relation to which the human race once again rises higher. The connection between this journey and the play’s fatal outcome in the limited time and space of Cain’s world is obscure. In fact the


dis-connection between the two is fundamental to the play’s structure as a missed encounter: between science and theology, morality and metaphysics, Cain and himself, since for much of the play Cain is not an actor but a spectator of himself. Byron offers an explanation of the link between the second and third acts which has been generally accepted. But in fact the interruption effected by the second act puts under erasure any link we might make. According to Byron: if Lucifer promised [Cain] kingdoms, it would elate him: the object of the Demon is to depress him still further in his own estimation than he was before, by showing him infinite things and his own abasement, till he falls into the frame of mind that leads to the Catastrophe, from mere internal irritation, not premeditation, or envy of Abel (which would have made him contemptible), but from the rage and fury against the inadequacy of his state to his conceptions, and which discharges itself rather against Life, and the Author of Life, than the mere living.27 But Cain’s sudden irritation at Abel, which is the culmination of questions he has had about his family’s slave morality, does not occur because he is depressed by man’s insignificance. It goes back to a question he poses to Lucifer, when Cain asks why animals must die when they have not broken God’s command, a command all the more arbitrary in that it affects those outside its jurisdiction. To speak of Cain as pushed into resentment by man’s insignificance is to assume that he puts man at the center of things; but Cain (unlike Manfred) does not assume an anthropological perspective. In fact it is Lucifer who assumes this perspective when, in response to Cain’s question about why animals must pay for man’s error, he replies with an anthropo-theological justification: “Your maker told ye, they were made for you / As you for him” (2.2.152–7). When Cain says, “I seem / Nothing” (2.2.20–1), it is with a Pascalian wonder at the infinite in relation to which he is nothing. When he repeats this characterization to Adah it is to make a significant distinction. The journey through “the immemorial works of endless beings” and “extinguished worlds” has made him feel his “littleness,” but in contrast to this sublimity that makes him feel he is “nothing” because other beings have been so much more, Jehovah finds a satisfaction in “making us the nothing which we are” (3.45, 63–4, 69–71). Abasement, then is God’s agenda, repeated in the ressentiment that goads the politics of resistance for which Lucifer as God’s reversed mirror-image stands.

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What then is Cain’s motive in killing Abel? Like Caleb Williams or Falkner, Cain is more interested in how the crime comes about than in its commission. For, as Godwin argues, man is made of two parts, the external and the internal. “The form which his actions assume” can be known, but “the principle from which they flow” cannot, and is the subject of an “unlimited” analysis.28 Cain has just been shown a vision of the pre-Adamite worlds, whose implications are that Jehovah is a merely regional God who presides over a finite order of things, and that in the many worlds that have preceded his there have been catastrophes, but in a strange way also survivals. At this crucial point where Cain has seen both the potential and the disaster that is life, Abel begins his sacrifice to God, in which Cain does not want to take part. Pressed to participate, Cain again tries to withdraw, but is compelled by Abel to continue (3, 105, 206–7). Because he is not a shepherd but “a tiller of the ground” he offers up fruits, and because Abel’s sacrifice contains animal fat it catches fire, while Cain’s fruits are scattered by the wind. Abel then ignorantly concludes that Jehovah is displeased with Cain. Cain’s increasingly angry response sums up the clash of ideologies between them, as he tries to argue, not in the language of science but in terms Abel might understand, that God has different ways of accepting different people: Thy fruits are scattered on the earth. ABEL: CAIN: From earth they came, to earth let them return; Their seed will bear fresh fruit there ere the summer. Thy burnt flesh-off’ring prospers better; see How heav’n licks up the flames when thick with blood. (3.281–5) Although Cain begins by searching for common ground with Abel within a rhetoric of respect for God, his indignation prevails as he assails Christianity’s logic of sacrifice, evident in its treatment of animals, and man himself in the substitutionary sacrifice of the Atonement and the psychopolitics it founds (3.86–92). Pushed to the edge when Abel insists that Cain offer another sacrifice, Cain still wants only to destroy Abel’s altar, his ideology of “carnivorous virility,”29 not to kill Abel himself. Abel stands between Cain and the altar, and Cain lashes out and impulsively kills him. But Cain’s deed is an accident that misses its target. For the dialogue that precedes the murder, and the complex exploration of finitude in the second act, invite that probing of the difference between justice and law that is the burden of much of Godwin’s work. And this difference requires both that we take account of what Cain has done


and that we do not judge the play’s outcome purely in terms of what Godwin calls the external action. Cain’s murder of Abel is disastrous not only from a moral but also from an ethical perspective. For in killing Abel in the name of life, Cain violates the very life he wants to protect. Yet there is a metaphysical and existential necessity to the deed, the symptom of which is that he never has the choice not to kill Abel. Only when he kills Abel does Cain, a fledgling character who has hitherto only asked questions, achieve the autonomy of action. Only in killing Abel can he challenge the order of things, and yet not triumphally, since it is Lucifer rather than Cain who plays the Byronic hero, in echoing Manfred when he exhorts Cain to “Think and endure and form an inner world / In your own bosom when the outward fails” (2.2.463–4). With the killing of Abel Cain is cast out into autonomy, but not in the sense that Habermas gives this word in associating it with modernity as self-grounding and legitimation, nor in the defiant way modelled by Lucifer, who in the end is a mere satellite of Jehovah. For the killing of Abel is at once the necessary outcome and deconstructive consequence of Cain’s metaphysical journey, the act that initiates him into the knowledge of death and marks him as separate, both abject and sacred. Death in this sense is finitude, the failure that marks all human projects. Before he kills Abel, Cain exemplifies a positive Prometheanism: a belief in man’s radical innocence, a belief that “Everything that lives is holy,” even a worm (2.1.197). This Romanticism, in the most naive sense, is the ground on which Cain reclaims Eden as his “just inheritance.” Lucifer, by contrast, exemplifies a negative Prometheanism that preserves this claim in the mode of resistant nihilism. Death, however, is the deconstruction of both these phantasms. Byron’s extended, profoundly contemporary reflection on death in the second part of Cain’s journey is a development of Shelley’s suggestion in Prometheus Unbound that there are “two worlds,” two relations of “life and death” (1.195). One is the empirical world where life and death are separate. Here, as Blanchot says, “death circulates in the language of . . . liberty,” the “freedom” to define and grasp one’s death, as Manfred does. But the other, in Shelley’s words, is “underneath the grave / Where do inhabit the shadows of all forms that think and live” (1.197–8). The grave, called Hades in Cain, figures a strange spectrality in which death is life’s double: not its culmination or negation, but that which is throughout life as its limit. In this realm death, as Blanchot writes, is “what is not linked to me by any relation of any sort. It is that which never comes and toward which I do not direct myself,” the unthought.30 Importantly,

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this realm is not death but a kind of life-death. For while Lucifer claims that he will show Cain “things which have died,” what Cain actually sees are “phantoms, which / Are beings past and shadows still to come” (2.1.141, 174–5). Death therefore is not nothingness, as Lucifer would have it, but what Derrida calls survival –living-on–, in which the empirical being is depotentialized and returned to its potentiality as shadow. And the endurance of and with this death is what Keats, confronting the phantasms of past gods in The Fall of Hyperion, describes as immortality: an “immortal sickness which kills not,” “deathwards progressing / To no death” (3.493–7).31 Death transgresses the boundaries of life from within, opening it to its other. Cain’s deed, by which he encounters the death within life, can indeed be described as transgressive, but only in the way explored by Bataille. For Bataille, who thinks transgression after “the death of God,” this word must be “liberated” from anything so simple as revolution or opposition to the law, which would substitute one ethical absolute for another. Transgression is “an action which involves the limit,” but it is “not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful.” For it is at once the crossing and the experience of the limit. Not the limit which has been crossed and which is reimposed as law, which Eve invokes at the end in her curse (3.430–43), but the internal limit of a finitude that is all the more radical because there is no longer any God, any external infinite.32 Transgression, in short, is what Bataille calls “inner experience”: the “limit-experience . . . that man encounters when he has decided to put himself radically in question.”33 Foucault describes this experience of the limit in commenting on Bataille: “By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign.”34 Cain achieves autonomy as “sovereignty” through the knowledge of death. And Cain, in this respect, exceeds Lucifer, who reveals death yet does not know it, because he relies on the phantasm of a tyrannical God to affirm his Manichean co-autonomy. But Cain achieves sovereignty only on condition of facing the death of God disclosed by his journey to the pre-Adamite worlds. And the death of God is not the birth of secularization or the science of the philosophes. As Foucault says, it “does not restore us to a limited and positivistic world, but to a world exposed by the experience of its limits, made and unmade [by what] transgresses it.”35 To think Cain’s deed as transgression is to see it as what Blanchot calls faute rather than through the more definite juridico-legal category of


“crime.” Fault, faute, connotes at once a wrong, an ethical failure, and an injury done to oneself: a transgression of one’s own integrity. Hence the fact that in Byron’s texts, The Giaour for instance, crime is a wound as much as an offense. The texts we have been discussing all focus on crime, like other Romantic works such as Kleist’s Michael Kolhaas and Büchner’s Woyzeck. But what they share is the disclosure that crime is the cultural fantasy projected to explain fault as the wound at the heart of autonomy.36 This is perhaps clearest in Mathilda, where the term incest names a fault crudely posited as a crime to avoid the inner experience of transgression that in the end does become Mathilda’s death sentence. Moreover, the fault, transgressively shared as desire by Mathilda and the Father, is also the site of a potentiality: something not yet made good that pushes its essence forward in Mathilda’s impossible act of writing a memoir that can have no readers. But we also see the hypostasis of fault as crime in Caleb Williams, where the detection of Falkland’s guilt, and even his commission of the crime, are oddly belated. For not only does establishing Falkland’s guilt tell us nothing that we do not already know but also his crime itself is inexplicable and superfluous, since Tyrrel has already been publicly shamed. Nevertheless, on the one hand, Falkland must commit a crime to disclose the “fault” in him that was always already there. On the other hand, his crime is the cultural fantasy that the text needs to justify Caleb’s curiosity—a fantasy whose hysterical structure the text psychoanalyzes. That Falkland’s guilt is not empirically proven even though we know it to be so, or that Falkner is exonerated even though he is guilty, marks the porous border between crime and fault. Again, in Byron’s play, Cain does kill Abel, since to describe something as fantasy is not to deny its occurrence. But, as in Falkner, the crime does not happen in the way and for the reasons we might think. The crime as written in biblical history is a fantasy in a double sense. On the one hand, the fantasy of a primal crime is the necessary ground for the institution of a repressive epistemo-ethical order founded on prohibition; without Cain’s crime, there would be no reason to deny man access to the tree of knowledge, no reason for things as they are. This structure holds regardless of whose law is at issue. For in Cain Christianity fantasizes the crime to uphold God’s law, but in Caleb Williams it is the discourse of resistance that must fantasize a primal crime so as to ground itself through the attribution of guilt to Falkland. But, on the other hand, if Christianity fantasizes Cain’s crime, Cain himself must also commit the crime to deconstruct the fantasy in which he indulges to that point: the fantasy, also evident in Caleb’s and Mathilda’s curiosity, that questioning, transgression, and

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autonomy are without consequence, that “Knowledge is good, / And life is good” (1.1.137–8). Act 2 unfolds as a psychoanalytic scene, although in a metaphysical mode, the delayed result of which is what Žižek calls a “traversal of the phantasm.”37 Before Melanie Klein, before Abraham and Torok, Byron places at the core of his play the figure of the “phantasm,” which Shelley had invented in a psychoanalytic as well as Gothic form in Prometheus Unbound and St. Irvyne. Already in Act I Lucifer seems a phantasm rather than a character, uncannily materializing after Cain’s questions in his first soliloquy (1.1.101–2). Indeed Lucifer himself says that the serpent was no “demon” and “but woke one / In those he spake to” (1.1.229–30). Lucifer, as the psychodiscursive form taken by Cain’s doubts about Judeo-Christian ideology, is a projection he must work through, in working towards something else that is still incomplete. Given everything that precedes the murder, including the disconnection or syncope between Acts II and III, “Lucifer” as an explanation for this deed is all the more a hysterical fiction. God likewise is a fantasy of Abel, especially given the more scientific explanation for why Cain’s offering fails to catch fire. Indeed, insofar as the characters in the play are archetypal rather than historical, the phantasms of Act 2 have a topological role to play within the larger text, in displacing it from mimesis to analysis. The analysand in this process is at once Cain, Lucifer who is subjected to Cain’s probing questions, and the reader or spectator. This is to say that the play, especially in its phylogenetic return to beginnings, is the closet within which we ourselves must remember and work through the cultural fantasies that inform and veil our understanding of good and evil, and of a primal fault which is finally inexplicable. But it is also the closet outside which we continue to work through the demon or drive that Lucifer awakes and which can produce itself only in the culturally distorted form of evil. Cain ends with a catastrophic action after which there is seemingly no future. No future as Edelman elaborates it against the “reproductive futurism” that Godwin’s texts also shun names the death drive of the queer text, a disastrous negativity that cannot be economized within family or social relations. Cain tries to contain this negativity, juridically through Eve’s curse which brings the plot to a moral conclusion and affectively through Adah’s forgiveness of Cain which restores him to a family. But there remains something unabsorbed in the play that disturbs any transference of the present into these conventional futures, Judaic in the one case and Christian in the other.


In Fleetwood and The Giaour too there is no katharsis and no exit. Yet Cain is different from The Giaour, whose entire action culminating in the deaths of Leila and Hassan is retold in the past, and occurs oppressively before the text. In The Giaour good and evil, Christian and Muslim, change places around the effaced figure of the woman as token of exchange. As the psychoanalysis of an empty symbolic order founded on mimetic desire, and of the larger geo- and bio-political attempt to ground this order in race, The Giaour cannot liberate us from the cultural phantasms it restages and circulates amongst its narrators. In The Giaour access to the future is thus foreclosed. But in Cain the past survives into the future as the realm of “phantoms, which / Are beings past, and shadows still to come” (2.1.174–5). These shapes, disembodied and unrealized, unfinished like Cain himself, are the “gigantic shadows that futurity casts upon the present.”38 For the play is linear in its external action, but elliptical in its affective structure, forming a line that returns on itself or a circle that is not closed. Thus even as the plot moves irreversibly forward, Cain’s journey pushes us back to a potentiality that remains unconnected to what follows. The disconnection between this spectral potentiality and what actually happens marks the hermeneutic of closet drama as a mise en abyme of its external action, the phantasmatic performance of which always leaves something unacted. Unlike Byron’s and Godwin’s texts, Mary Shelley’s return to Romanticism’s queer past in Falkner is all about the future, inasmuch as it ends with a restoration of the family. Arguably her pardoning of the Byronic hero and binding up of loose ends represses, and indeed closets, the radicality of the Byronic-Godwinian Romanticism that the novel revisits. But this utopianism of the family may be the heuristic fiction necessary to push Romanticism forward on the Regency threshold of a Victorianism that consolidates the turn against Romanticism. For the family is composed of “three orphans,” inscribing the novel within a relation to the past that is very different from the Victorian narrative of transition, since its movement forward conceals an elliptical return to the shadows of the past.

6 Manfred’s New Promethean Agon Young-ok An

To say that Manfred is a Byronic hero in the Promethean mold is not new: not only the text of Manfred but also Byron himself, as well as literary critics from his time until now, suggest it. But what Manfred’s Promethean struggles amount to is still open to discussion. One might highlight Byron’s revision of Prometheus into Manfred, or one might pursue the philosophical dimension of the Promethean worldview suggested by Manfred’s strife—that is, the new, humanistic perspective which breaks away from the theocentric one. Or, one could probe the political dimension of Prometheus’ quest for freedom from Zeus’ “tyrannical” regime. While these readings are not mutually exclusive, most critical analyses so far have focused on either mythical or philosophical aspects of Prometheanism, considering the play as more metaphysical or psychological than political.1 Yet, the political implications of Manfred, especially those arising from Manfred’s struggle for freedom, need to be further investigated. Taking the political imperative of Prometheanism as its starting point, this chapter analyzes the political dimensions of the “metaphysical” questions Manfred faces, situating his Promethean struggles within his historical context.2 As we begin to explore the political dimensions of Manfred’s Promethean struggles, two key questions arise. What is the nature of the freedom Manfred seeks? And who or what forces constitute the antagonist(s) in his Promethean struggles? Since the sources of his “oppression” remain somewhat obscure or diffuse, and since Manfred occupies a privileged social position as an aristocrat and a magus, such questions lead us to investigate the intricate mechanisms of power. Significantly, Manfred has internalized the limits on the boundaries of his freedom as his own “fate” or “curse,” rather than a political condition. Thus Manfred’s predicament calls for a theoretical elucidation of 102

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the relationship between power and subjectivity. Michel Foucault offers insights through his analysis of eighteenth-century “pastoral power” that worked as the state apparatus of individualization at the moral, religious, and political levels; power was diffused through the social network, and no subject could become the sole locus of power. Foucault’s formulation will help us see Manfred resisting pastoral power and seeking freedom from its apparatuses. Another strand of our examination of the political ramifications of Manfred’s struggle concerns his libidinal struggle against paternal authorities and the impact of his encounter with Astarte. Lacan’s theories on paternal law and the incest taboo will help us analyze Manfred’s “lawless passion,” his refusal to make a death-bed confession. Further, the Lacanian formulation of the sublime as “an object raised to the level of the Thing” explains the role the Phantom of Astarte plays for Manfred, which leads him to relinquish his male subjectivity and follow her desire. Thus Manfred’s libidinal struggle is not just an individualistic, “private” one but a “political” one that resists the internalized logic of subjugation and that gestures towards a new subjectivity. Around the time Byron was writing Manfred (the summer of 1816 through May 1817),3 his appreciation of Prometheus reached a high point. Upon Manfred’s publication in May 1817, the reviewer of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine highlighted its resonances with Aeschylus’ Prometheus: “In the tone and pitch of the composition, as well as in the character of the diction in the more solemn parts, Manfred reminds us more of the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus than of any more modern performance.”4 After reading the Blackwood review, Byron acknowledged Prometheus’ role in his writing: “The Prometheus—if not exactly in my plan—has always been so much in my head—that I can easily conceive its influence over all or any thing that I have written[.]”5 The same year 1817 saw Byron’s explicit poetic homage, “Prometheus,” in which he constructs an in-between being of half dust (humanity) and half divinity who struggles unceasingly for independence and freedom. In The Prophecy of Dante (1819), Byron sees the poet as “the new Prometheus of new men” (4.14). In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the Greek hero defiantly asserts his independence in the face of torture and boasts of his role in humanity’s empowerment.6 When Manfred famously describes himself to the Spirits, he clearly identifies himself as a rebellious Promethean figure: The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark, The lightning of my being, is as bright,


Pervading, and far-darting as your own, And shall not yield to yours, though coop’d in clay! (1.1.154–7) Manfred’s similarities to Prometheus are confirmed by The First Destiny in similar terms: This man [Manfred] Is of no common order, as his port And presence here denote; his sufferings Have been of an immortal nature, like Our own[.] (2.4.51–5) The First Destiny emphasizes, for Manfred’s singularity, his sufferings, and then acknowledges his knowledge, powers, will, and aspirations (55, 58). With all his exceptional knowledge and superior powers, then, what is the “deeper” truth Manfred is seeking? Why does he declare that “[s]orrow is knowledge” (1.1.10) and suffer so intensely? If his knowledge and powers are not based on normative values or reason, what are the implications, especially the political implications, of his truth-seeking? Addressing some of these questions from a modern perspective, Peter Thorslev firmly establishes Manfred as a Promethean hero: “[i]t is to the figure of Prometheus . . . that we owe the more mature conception of the Byronic Hero as he exists in the dramas.”7 In explaining the heroic qualities of Prometheus, Thorslev highlights “Promethean individualism,” which values the enlightened mind over the theocentric one. Thorslev’s positive assessment of the Byronic hero’s “Promethean individualism”8 endorses liberal individualism based on Kantian enlightened reason. Forming the core of liberal individualism, notions of the individual self and “self-sufficiency” propelled the rise of the modern state.9 Tracing Descartes’, Locke’s, and Kant’s philosophical discourses on reason and individuality, Charles Taylor formulates the rational, inward-looking (“reflexive”) liberal subject of modernity as one that relies on reason for self-mastery. Taylor sums up the enlightenment notion of reason as follows: “The inner light is the one which shines in our presence to ourselves; it is the one inseparable from our being creatures with a first-person standpoint.” Through reason, the individual becomes disengaged enough for self-reflection, thereby developing the ironic, doubled consciousness of the modern subject.10 Reason regulates desire and its agent, the imagination, by


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asserting its priority over earlier tendencies to surrender the self and its agency to external forces. As seen in Thorslev’s exposition, the philosophical discourse of individualism provided the basis for the literary critical discourse of the Romantic self. Romantic scholarship of the 1960s focused on the multilayered “I,” with an emphasis on the interiority of the self (the self that Keats called the “egotistical sublime”), as the crux of Romantic subjectivism. Lionel Trilling, for example, suggested that self-contradiction was evidence of the new Romantic subjectivity: There have always been selves, or at least ever since the oracle at Delphi began to advise every man to know his own. And whoever has read any European history at all knows that the self emerges (as the historians say) at pretty frequent intervals. Yet the self that makes itself manifest at the end of the eighteenth century is different in kind, in effect, from any self that had ever before emerged.11 Trilling’s assertion accords with the philosophical treatment of the liberal subject or modern self. This notion of Romantic individualism or subjectivism—of the liberal subject—has become part of the standard understanding of Romanticism and post-Romanticism. Yet, critics of the political delimitation of this “modern” self (or Romantic subjectivism) point to its bourgeois ideology, which makes it complicit with hegemonic power, and to its transcendentalism, which amounts to a retreat from social and political engagement into solitary introspection (ahistorical escapism).12 From a perspective critical of Romantic subjectivism, Manfred’s pursuit of “Oblivion, self-oblivion” (I.144) rather than social engagement is troubling. In The Romantic Ideology (1972), McGann argues that Romantic privileging of interiority tends to arrive at an imaginary resolution of political conflict through detachment from the world.13 According to McGann, Byron, like other Romantics, reaches for imaginary resolutions to real (material, economic, or political) contradictions. McGann criticizes Byron’s yearning for “the deep truth” and his detachment from the satirized follies of the world as imaginary and illusory, because they lead him to assume superiority and transcendence, quintessential aspects of the Romantic ideology. In what seems like a particularly pertinent critique of Manfred, McGann situates Byron firmly within “the world’s contradictions” despite Byron’s attempts to defy them (144): Byron “has triumphed over nothing, been superior to nothing” (145).


Other critics, such as Peter Manning and Caroline Franklin, who scrutinize the political ramifications of Manfred’s struggle, suggest that Manfred’s “individualist” struggle demonstrates a kind of devolution from Prometheus’ fight for all of humanity. Manning differentiates Manfred’s “individualism” and his orientation towards solitary, personal, inner struggle from Prometheus’ selfless desire.14 Manning notes, Like Prometheus, [Manfred] contrives to surmount his oppressive situation. [But Manfred] is no Prometheus seeking a boon for mankind, but a ceaseless self-tormentor whose most insistent desire is absolution from the painful self-consciousness which is the Promethean heritage . . . Manfred’s sorrows are private, not the paradigm of an unjust human condition. (72) Caroline Franklin echoes Manning’s critical approach to Promethean individualism.15 Focusing on the sexual and gender politics of Byron’s characters, Franklin characterizes Manfred and Byron’s other heroes as masculine, narcissistic, and solipsistic embodiments of “Promethean individualism.” From such a perspective, both Franklin and Pamela Boker,16 characterize the Manfred–Astarte relationship as one of narcissistic male ego-projection. As this tension between the Promethean politics of radical freedom and Romantic individualism is explored, it may be helpful to recognize that Byron used language similar to that of modern critics when he contrasted Napoleon with Prometheus.17 In 1814, Byron juxtaposed the original Prometheus with the contemporary hero, noting Unlike the offence, though like would be the fate, His to give life, but thine to desolate; He stole from Heaven the flame, for which he fell, Whilst thine was stolen from thy native Hell ([Prometheus and Napoleon], 3.231, 1–4) Byron contrasts Prometheus’ renunciation of divine power for humanity’s sake with Napoleon’s ambition for worldly power. In Manfred, Byron uses the voice of Destiny to mock Napoleon’s struggle for power (2.3.16–25). If indeed Byron was fully aware in 1814 that Napoleon, who had been touted as a new Prometheus, was limited by his tendency toward self-aggrandizement and ambition, he did not go on to create a character with the same flaws. Rather, Manfred’s Promethean struggle reveals


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resistance to power—or the network of power that situates and subjugates self and freedom. It illustrates a response to, even a political engagement with, the historical condition of individualization. Manfred’s “doubt” and skepticism are less the signs of individualistic retreat from the political than a gesture of resistance against the pervading condition of the network of power that consolidates bourgeois individualism. Manfred’s struggle for freedom, from himself and from unnamable sources of oppression, correlates with the modern subject’s political struggle in the evolving modern European state, which was undergoing profound changes. Manfred’s remark to the First Destiny that “knowledge is not happiness, and science / But an exchange of ignorance for that / Which is another kind of ignorance” (2.4.61–3) illustrates the depth of his insight into the condition of “modern” subjectivity. It recalls Pascal’s famous remark on the modern subject in Pensées (1670): “Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would only be another turn [tour; twist, trick] of madness.”18 Commenting on Pascal’s statement, Lacan notes the element of “madness-within-subjectivity”: “Not only can man’s being not be understood without madness, it would not be man’s being if it did not bear madness within itself as the limit of his freedom.”19 Ignorance and knowledge, blindness and insight, or madness and normalcy are all related to the contours of individual freedom. Instead of disavowing the inevitable element—the madness within subjectivity—Manfred embraces it outright and calls it his curse and fate, even while struggling to be free from its oppression. Because freedom has both political and philosophical dimensions, and because Manfred deals with a deeply internalized sense of oppression, we need to examine how the network of power operates to subjugate him in both the libidinal and political economies. Michel Foucault suggests that while the interplay between power and freedom was once viewed as a rather clear-cut antagonism, the eighteenth century saw their relationship become more complex and multi-layered. Aligning his ideas with Althusserian formulations of the “ideological state apparatus,” Foucault argues that modern governments exercise power upon seemingly “free” subjects. Foucault explains that by the eighteenth century a new form of “pastoral power,” welded to the political operations of the state, grew and diversified into a system of social “networks” and “institutions.”20 Such social disciplining “mastered” the people’s minds as it permeated each highly individuated conscience.21 Under such conditions, the most significant problem facing the modern subject is not its individualism per se but its


susceptibility to state governing power and control through individualization. This analysis clarifies the problem with Romantic subjectivism, that is, its ideological blind spot. Its political challenge is not so much to “liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions” as to “liberate [the individual] both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state” (“Afterword,” 216; emphasis added). From this perspective, freedom-seeking must aim at “promot[ing] new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on” people (216). Manfred can be seen struggling towards the opposite of individualization through which the dominant moral, religious, and political authorities retain mastery. While Prometheus and Manfred both struggle against subjection, Manfred must seek a new form of subjectivity vis-à-vis the encroachment of “pastoral powers.” His resistance can be seen as a “permanent agon,” according to Foucault’s argument that at the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an “agonism”—of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation. (“Afterword,” 221–2) Foucault argues, then, that resistance to power should form knots of “agonistic” refusal to submit to power. Manfred forges a series of struggles with various forms of power, including internalized guilt and “Spiritual” forces that attempt to make him submit. McGann, even while critical of Manfred’s disengagement from the political, detects his struggle for intellectual freedom. Noting that Byron’s heroes follow Milton’s in their championing of intellectual freedom, McGann points out that, around the time Byron wrote Manfred, his “mind turn[ed] more and more on Milton,” seeing “a broad but clear parallel between the trials, betrayals, and goals of Milton’s life and the similar circumstances of his own.”22 In Manfred, the protagonist “learns to avoid the last infirmity of his own evil nature not only by recalling ‘Lycidas’ but even more by invoking the history of Milton Agonistes.”23 McGann’s analysis suggests the convergence of intellectual and political freedom, resonating with Foucault’s notion of the “agonistic refusal.” Manfred’s following speech synthesizes the Miltonic Satan and the Byronic Prometheus:


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The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts— Is its own origin of ill and end— And its own place and time— (3.4.129–32) Indeed, this passage encapsulates Manfred’s challenges to the network of governing legal, religious, and moral values that interpellate the individual “conscience.” Manfred’s refusal to become enmeshed in the network of power crystallizes around his struggle against paternal authority of all kinds. He steadfastly rejects paternal mastery over his mind, whether it is spiritual, moral, religious, or political authority. Throughout the play, he persists in refusing to submit: to his “enemies,” even in his melancholic state following Astarte’s death; to the Chamois Hunter, even when he owes his life and health to him; to supernatural powers, including Arimanes, even when he asks Arimanes to bring back the Phantom of Astarte; and to the Abbot, even as he lies dying. Manfred’s rejection of the Abbot’s plea to repent and confess upon his death-bed constitutes his last symbolic “act.” Here, the Abbot not only exemplifies pastoral power—religious, moral codes are crucial parts of the network of power—but also the symbolic father, the primary authority of the libidinal economy. Lacan’s theorization of the name of the father also sheds light on Manfred’s “lawless passion” that transgresses paternal law (which is displaced as the “clankless chain” [1.1.259] in Manfred’s internal struggle) and the incest taboo. Manfred’s transgressive relationship with Astarte—what he calls “lawless passion”—is inseparable from his resistance to paternal authority. However, both the writer who persists in inscribing the motif of sibling incest and the character who engages in incest have been subjected to the charge of narcissism. Thorslev not only notes the subversive and antinomian undercurrents of Romantic incest but also criticizes its proneness to the “dangers of narcissism and solipsism.”24 Certainly, Manfred’s depiction of Astarte reflects a narcissistic identification with a female other who functions as his idealized self-image: She was like me in lineaments—her eyes, Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone Even of her voice, they said were like mine; (2.2.105–7). Before “the nameless hour,” Astarte, as Manfred’s love object, provided him a source of jouissance vis-à-vis paternal authority. Lacan


explains how narcissism works in such dynamics: “narcissistic identification is the identification with [the love object]: she is the other who enables one to locate his imaginary and libidinal relation to the world at large.”25 The subject not only identifies with the love object but also idealizes the object which, “without any alteration in its nature, is aggrandized and exalted in the [subject’s] mind.” Thus “[i]dealization is possible in the sphere of the ego-libido as well as that of the objectlibido” (Freud 74).26 One might suggest that this idealization of the love object can be traced to the yearning for the idealized primordial love object, Mother. For Manfred, Astarte fills in for the primordial love object, who understands and does not judge, who gives herself without condition, and who embraces and forgives. Astarte was an answer to his symptomatic yearning, serving as “that precious object that arouses [the subject’s] desire.”27 Manning suggests that Byron’s intense libidinal investment in the maternal is at the core of his whole opus, and that it takes the form of the search for the eternal feminine, which plays off against the search for the maternal other.28 Despite the fact that Manfred’s relationship with Astarte is overlaid with narcissism, it also demonstrates his resistance to paternal law. According to Lacan, “the name of the father” intervenes and subjects narcissistic relations to symbolic law. In explaining a subject in the matrix of the Symbolic Order, Lacan states: It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law. This conception allows us to clearly distinguish, in the analysis of a case, the unconscious effects of this function from the narcissistic relations, or even real relations, that the subject has with the image and actions of the person who embodies this function[.] (Écrits 66–7; emphasis in the original) Paternal law, the Symbolic Order of kinship designations, forms the foundational grid for Manfred’s “clankless chain.” The force of the law is evidenced precisely in his internalization of the paternal injunction as his own—that is, as his personal, cursed fate. Throughout his pursuit of knowledge and his insistence on his “narcissistic” relation with Astarte, Manfred competes with the paternal authority of the symbolic law. Disobeying the chain of the kinship network (and insisting on “selecting” his love as his fate), he deepens his self-division. What is at stake in Manfred’s incestuous desire, in terms of his libidinal resistance to paternal authority? According to Lacan’s formulation of


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the link between the structure of the subject’s desire and the signifying chain of a libidinal—or symbolic—economy based on kinship designations, the contour of the subject’s choice of his love object is always already marked by the very signifying chain governed by the name of the father: The primordial Law is therefore the Law which, in regulating marriage ties, superimposes the reign of culture over the reign of nature, the latter being subject to the law of mating. The prohibition of incest is merely the subjective pivot of that Law, laid bare by the modern tendency to reduce the objects the subject is forbidden to choose to the mother and sisters, full license, moreover, not yet being entirely granted beyond them. This law, then, reveals itself clearly enough as identical to a language order. For without names for kinship relations, no power can institute the order of preferences and taboos that knot and braid the thread of lineage through the generations. (Écrits, 65–6) The primordial law of the symbolic economy (the order of language) sets a limit on the subject’s choice of his love object, in terms of “what the subject can know of his unconscious participation in the movement of the complex structures of marriage ties” (66). Indeed, kinship nominations regulate and verify their effects on an individual in his or her “tangential movement towards incest” even while incest has manifested itself “ever since the coming of a universal community” (66). Born out of Byron’s existential crisis, Manfred can be seen as a sustained, intense expression of Byron’s incestuous desire. Byron calls this libidinal, uncontrollable force that violates social and religious taboos “unlawful passions,” and his fate and curse. Manfred certainly betrays Byron’s anxiety and self-division on the subject: on the one hand, he chose the Persian deity’s name for Manfred’s beloved; on the other, Manfred has already internalized the modern codes against incest: “The deadliest sin [was] to love as we have loved” (2.4.124). Manfred’s selfdivision in the face of his “unlawful passions” fuels his quest—at once a quest for self-oblivion and for “the tree of life,” which is to say, the possibility of a new way of life or new subjectivity. Nemesis equates the desire for freedom with “the forbidden fruit” (2.3.71), and Manfred compels the Phantom of Astarte to speak in the name of passion (2.4.135–49). The intensity of the internalized, individualized passion that becomes Manfred’s own chain attests to the power of the symbolic chain and its law. Byron further suggests the political dimension of the unlawful passions when he later comments on an unacceptable Romantic passion in


discussing The Two Foscari: “What I seek to show in The Two Foscari is the suppressed passions—rather than the rant of the present day” (Sept. 20, 1821; BLJ, 8.218]). For Byron, literary exploration of suppressed feeling has a deeper political dimension than political commentary on current events. That means we need to analyze fully the libidinal economy, as well as the political economy, of the “unlawful passion.” The existential crisis Byron experienced pervades Manfred. Exiled from England in the midst of a crisis with his social identity and painfully separated from his eternal beloved (whose “soft heart refused to discover / The faults which so many could find” [“Stanzas to [Augusta],” 4.299.3–4]), he projects his internal struggle onto the Alpine landscape. Descending from the Alps, Byron notes in his journal: neither the music of the Shepherd—the crashing of the Avalanche— nor the torrent—the mountain—the Glacier—the Forest—nor the Cloud—have for one moment—lightened the weight upon my heart— nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty & the power of the Glory—around—above—& beneath me—I am past reproaches—and there is a time for all things—I am past the wish of vengeance—and I know of none like for what I have suffered—but the hour will come—when what I feel must be felt—& the— — but enough. — — (Sept. 29 [28], 1817; BLJ, 5: 105]; emphasis added) This passage reveals Byron’s continued struggle for freedom from “the clankless chain,” the dominant logic of power/knowledge he has internalized. In the same way, seeking “oblivion, self-oblivion,” and oblivion to the world, Manfred wants to forget what the world is not forgetting; he wishes to shed the self-consciousness that oppresses rather than enlightens. The trigger for Manfred’s melancholic bouts is Astarte’s death—the loss of his beloved object, which causes depletion of his ego. Her death recalls the trauma of the fundamental loss, separation from the maternal. Now isolated, not only from the world of conventional values, which he defies, but also from the only person with whom he steadily identified, Manfred spirals into a state of disequilibrium, his “all-nameless hour.” That phrase, the “all-nameless hour,” though it evokes the loss of Manfred’s love object, his desire and enjoyment, is ambiguous and blurs the exact cause of his despair. Manfred’s bottomless despair drives him to a melancholic crisis. After the Chamois Hunter saves him from suicide, however, Manfred recognizes the difference between what he seeks and what the Hunter


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offers. He makes clear that his own worldview (“Beyond the fitting medium of desire”) cannot be reconciled with the Hunter’s. If we link the Hunter to “pastoral power,” his parting words to Manfred illustrate that power’s ideological content, and, indeed, they preface the Abbot’s plea: “Heaven give thee rest! / And penitence restore thee to thyself” (2.1.88–9). The “deeper truth” Manfred seeks cannot be provided by the Hunter, who represents the “pious” (2.1.65) brethren and who exercises “humble virtues” (2.1.64) and inhabits patriarchal days. He cannot understand Manfred’s “permanent agon” and thus unequivocally declares him “mad” (2.1.59). Contrary to the Hunter, Manfred does not consider himself mad, though he wishes he were. In the scene that follows the Hunter’s declaration, Manfred laments to the Witch of the Alps: “I have pray’d / For madness as a blessing— ’tis denied me” (2.2.133–4). Manfred’s rejection of the Wordsworthian, nature-loving Chamois Hunter indicates the latter’s philosophical and political limitations. John Wilson’s pithy remark captures the impact of the scene: “[Byron] came into competition with Wordsworth upon his own ground, and with his own weapons; and in the first encounter he vanquished and overthrew him.”29 The exaggerated theatricality of the Hunter’s heroic verse may suggest Byron’s parody on Wordsworth’s avowed innovation in poetic language in Lyrical Ballads.30 Politically, Byron inscribes his rejection of the Wordsworthian Hunter’s contented life, thereby registering an awareness of what McGann would later call “Romantic ideology.” What does it mean, then, that while Manfred relentlessly opposes every authority, he readily strips himself of his will in the wake of his interaction with the Phantom of Astarte? When Manfred steps into the realm of the other, of uncertainty, he approaches “the deep[er] truth” (or, the “fatal truth” [1.1.11]) by excavating Astarte’s desire. While the phantasmic figure of Astarte is “nothing” but a residual figure, she soon frustrates the demands of more powerful forces, including those of Nemesis, Arimanes, and Manfred. Even when present (2.4.), Astarte’s Phantom is marked by silence and defiance of the other spirits’ orders. Nemesis notes her silence: “She is not of our order, but belongs / To the other powers. Mortal! thy quest is in vain, / And we are baffled also” (2.4.115–17). Before their encounter, Manfred had experienced narcissistic bouts with the death-wish, but Astarte’s Phantom initiates in him something deeper and more paradoxical. No longer does his struggle involve “a negative escape from guilt,”31 because Astarte’s Phantom stirs within him a dimension deeper than guilt. Until this point, Manfred has been the center of their relationship, and even his determination to


wake the dead may have been motivated by his desire to consolidate his own wishes with hers. But now Astarte plays a pivotal role in unmaking the male subject, paving the way for his transformation by challenging him to renounce male subjectivity altogether. In his efforts to induce Astarte to speak, he suspends his former subjectivity, which was based on his knowing self and articulates his own ignorance: “I cannot rest. / I know not what I ask, nor what I seek: / I feel but what thou art—and what I am” (2.4.131–3). At this juncture, the play turns on its head: Manfred declares, “I live but in the sound—it is thy voice!” (2.4.151). Astarte’s answer (or lack thereof) to Manfred’s demand (“One word for mercy! Say, thou lovest me”; 2.4.155) thus profoundly changes the subject–object dynamic between them. Even though she is an otherworldly form, she is aligned with the “tree of life” and with freedom. Manfred realizes, hitherto all hateful things conspire To bind me in existence—in a life Which makes me shrink from Immortality— A future like the past. I cannot rest (2.4.128–31) As Astarte’s Phantom elliptically suggests he should do, Manfred enacts freedom from the “clankless chain” and moves towards countermemory and the erasure of consciousness. Having perished outside the frame of the play, Astarte is brought back to Manfred only to demonstrate by her elusive presence that she is beyond his control. Philip Cox notes that Astarte’s Phantom produces something akin to terror in Manfred: “a gross physicality which rehearses in miniature the tension revealed within both between the mysterious/supernatural and the physical/horrible—and it also repeats in different terms Manfred’s own ‘mix’d essence’ of ‘deity’ and ‘dust.’ ”32 In the aftermath of returning the dead to life, Manfred faces the uncanny of his beloved, the terrifying other that eludes his identification (“She was like me . . . but with . . . gentler powers than mine”; 2.2.105, 112). Once the object of his desire and the point of his narcissistic identification, Astarte’s Phantom emerges as a sublime figure (“the Thing”) which defies his desperate plea to satisfy his wishes. The abysmal sublimity of Astarte’s Phantom and her refusal to grant Manfred’s wishes (“Forgive me or condemn me”; 2.4.105) strike a decisive blow to the male subject in control of himself and turns him into the locus of the object, who adopts her mode of being and who seeks the realm beyond knowledge or symbolization.33


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After Manfred encounters Astarte’s Phantom, his final moments are characterized by a new mode of being as well as a steadfast refusal to submit to moral and religious valorization, echoing his earlier “lawless passion” and rejection of pastoral power. Manfred’s desire to transform is intimated throughout the play: he espouses a kind of bodiless enjoyment (1.2.55) of the realm of the inanimate, becoming “[e]ndless, and all alike, as sands on the shore, / Innumerable atoms” (2.1.54–5); and he declares, “I had no sympathy with breathing flesh” (2.2.57). Simultaneously with this becoming, Manfred confronts another figure of paternal power. The Abbot, assuming the role of the symbolic father, offers Manfred the ultimate consolation in the face of death, confession and absolution. Manfred, however, rejects the symbolic valorization of repentance: by the rite of confession, the Christian church implies “the soul’s continuous struggle with the evil within it.”34 For Manfred, obeying a confessor or doing penance means relinquishing the freedom of his immortal mind. His stance anticipates, and preempts, the one Robert Southey takes when he pronounces in the “Preface” to “A Vision of Judgment” (1821) that “It [the publication of a lascivious book] is a sin, to the consequences of which no limits can be assigned, and those consequences no after repentance in the writer can counteract. Whatever remorse of conscience he may feel when his hour comes (and come it must!) will be of no avail.”35 Byron radically challenges Southey’s moralism and repressive logic by at once delving into taboo topics and rejecting the cyclical formula of committing “sins” and repenting of them. As Manfred engages the Abbot—who espouses a more sympathetic version of Southey’s logic—in discussion, he extends his critique to the limitations of the enlightener’s logic and ambition: Ay–father! I have had those early visions And noble aspirations in my youth, To make my own the mind of other men, The enlightener of nations[.] (3.1.104–7) Such self-critique goes hand in hand with his profound recognition of the other within himself: “I could not tame my nature down; for he / Must serve who fain would sway” (3.1.116–17). And this insight, which once again demonstrates the depth of his investigation into modern subjectivity, leads him to intimate poetically the kernel of his being, which resists symbolization. Manfred’s unflinching refusal to repent allows the cause of his desire to remain unsymbolized and unsubjugated.


Instead of turning to a confessor for absolution, Manfred tells the Abbot that he is turning away from human interactions. While he resembles more and more an inanimate thing, his final state is far from dejected or escapist. For instance, he takes an express stance against the Spirit of Death: Thou has no power upon me, that I feel; Thou never shalt possess me, that I know; What I have done is done; I bear within A torture which could nothing gain from thine[.] (3.4.125–8) Unswayed by external forces that want to tame and harness his mind, Manfred resolves to “make [of] death a victory”: he declares, “I am prepared for all things, but deny / The power which summons me” (3.4.82–3). This Byronic-Promethean stance reinforces Manfred’s earlier refusal to yield to greater powers, including supernatural powers (the Destinies, Nemesis, and Arimanes). Manfred struggles “against the forms of subjection—against the submission of subjectivity” (Foucault, “Afterword” 213) as he rejects the call for his death by the spirits and demons: “I stand / Upon my strength—I do defy—deny— / Spurn back, and scorn ye!—” (3.4.119–21). Manfred’s dying words to the Abbot, “Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die” (3.4.151),36 also capture the spirit of his struggle. In addressing the abbot informally, Manfred nullifies social and religious codes and points to the realm beyond the symbolic hierarchy structured by the Name of the Father. The epigraph to the play, which Byron added after sending the manuscript to Murray, bears Hamlet’s famous utterance, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.168–9). Evoking the “fatal truth” (1.1.11) of the tree of life, the epigraph suggests Manfred’s criticism of the logic of enlightenment when it leads to privileged knowledge. Manfred, instead, turns to the inhuman realm, determined to seek a place in the eyes of the dead. He radically resigns himself to enact Astarte’s prophecy (“Tomorrow ends thine earthly ills” [2.4.152]) and to become “nothing,” or to become something akin to what Astarte’s Phantom desires and prophesizes. Manfred is a poetic inquiry into the male protagonist’s binding by “clankless chains.” As it illustrates the ways in which religious and moral codes are enforced by libidinal boundaries and paternal authorities, it reveals their political and philosophical implications. Byron’s unflinching search for freedom from these precedes his plunge into


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more pronounced political struggles in the years that followed Manfred’s publication. The political dimension of Manfred’s rejection of the demands of the Chamois Hunter, the Abbot, and supernatural forces, not to mention those of his “enemies,” can be explained through a Promethean “permanent agon” against subjection to their logic and mastery. Manfred’s Promethean defiance culminates in his response to Arimanes, whom Nemesis identifies as the “Sovereign of Sovereigns” (2.4.23): “And yet ye see I kneel not” (36). At the same time, his interaction with Astarte’s Phantom leads him to recognize his male ego, which wishes to fill up his lack of the desired object. Faced with the Phantom’s stern sublimity, Manfred yields to her desire. His Promethean agon reaches a new level; Manfred becomes the modern Prometheus unbound and unmanned.

7 “Like the Sheeted Fire from Heaven”: Transcendence and Resentment in Marino Faliero Ian Dennis

Doubtless as a result of his personal transit through the vortex of celebrity, Lord Byron was acutely aware of the operation of what René Girard would later call imitative or triangular desire.1 By the time he turned to writing tragedies in 1820 and 1821, the poet’s understanding of imitative processes—in their individual, social, and political dimensions—had matured. His late plays are a highly qualified observer’s fullest meditation on the powers and dangers of the phase of mimetic desire we may call resentment, of which the foremost modern theorist is Girard’s leading intellectual heir, Eric Gans. To explore human desire and the ways in which social structure and indeed culture itself accommodate it—or fail to—is to ask questions sufficiently fundamental to justify the use of the term “anthropological,” and the invocation of the two modern thinkers just mentioned.2 Such at any rate is the premise of the current essay, which will look closely at the presentation of the very basic problem of human resentment in the first of these works, Marino Faliero. Girard’s idea of tragedy is certainly informed, as is all his criticism, by his anthropology and in particular by his vision of the crisis of escalating mimetic panic and violence at the very origin of the human. Desire directs many hands towards the same objects, raises a multitude of mirroring obstacles, dissolves all differences into a furious primal mob. Such a crisis—it will be repeated many times—can only be resolved by the scapegoat mechanism. A fundamental difference is created or restored: between him (or often her) and us. Human sacrifice, a founding murder, creates peace. And then, obeying an equal imperative, the transaction is obscured by mythology, because mankind cannot bear too much truth, because the mechanism of unanimous compensatory violence directed 118

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towards an arbitrarily chosen victim does not work if it is seen for what it is.3 Tragedy, however, despite its intuitively obvious affinities to myth, works in quite the opposite way. It brings the general, “sacrificial” crisis “back to life,” it “whistles up a storm of violent reciprocity,” revealing again what had been hidden.4 Reciprocity, the breakdown of the sacrally guaranteed differences that maintain social order, the ever-more-intense imitative violence that destroys identity, is for Girard the salient feature, the terrifying message of tragedy, a genre that emerges in times of cultural instability and incipient sacrificial crisis. Gans, however, distinguishes resentment from Girard’s contagious fury of mimesis by situating it, as he does all fundamental aspects of the human, on a “scene,” a geometry of center and periphery not functional in Girard’s picture of shapeless flux, the conflict of all against all.5 The first or “originary” scene can be deduced only in its most fundamental components, but amongst these, Gans argues, is some arrangement of proto-humans around a common object of desire: a circle with a center. Centrality exists as soon and as long as there are signs, representations, to designate it and to create fully human desire for it, that is, to generate transcendental significance from the ground of appetite. Centrality, representation, and the human, that is, originate simultaneously. Gans hypothesizes at the origin and basis of humanity a center occupied only by an object of appetitive desire that has been designated as sacred, immune to appropriation, by a unanimously mimicked “aborted gesture of appropriation”—a sign, a representation.6 The virtual and thus equal sharing of the sign defers the violence of competitive, literal appropriation, at least to the crucial degree or over the crucial interval that permits a more peaceful sharing, a sparagmos or ritual feast, to take place. In this feast, this ripping apart of the object, the desires and resentments built up in the scene are discharged. What is made sacred is not the object, however, but the space, centrality itself. And this centrality is a function of the desiring attention directed towards it by those on the periphery of the circle. Resentment is the sentiment of exclusion from centrality experienced by those on the periphery of any such human scene. Primal resentment is directed towards the inanimate object of desire at the center, and only much later, after the rise of hierarchy offends the original intimation of equality in that shared sign, does resentment fix upon a human being, who must always thus be felt a usurper. Human centrality, thereafter, can be produced in many ways. Wealth, beauty, or what is called in a worldly sense “power,” are amongst the familiar vehicles. But the term “centrality” in Gans’s work and the present essay minimally designates a phenomenon in which a human being


attracts—models—the desire of another or others, over some interval of time. Those who do so occupy the center of a scene of human attention. This is power, as must be remembered even when the centrality in question by—chance or aesthetic design—happens to be political in character. In principle—the principle of resentment—the center, like the sacred, should be empty, non-human. Next best, and as a holdover from the original configuration, it should be occupied reluctantly, disinterestedly, from duty or, in the romantic variation which still regulates most modern resentment, naturally, which is to say, unconsciously, without (detectable) intent. Even Edmund Burke, defender of the ancien régime, would speak of “a natural aristocracy.”7 To defuse accusations of usurpation by holding centrality naturally, we may say, is currently the best protection against the ever-threatened violence of resentment, the sacrificial violence of the sparagmos in its infinite variety of forms. But all protections can and do eventually fail, and need to be replaced with new ones. The audience of classical tragedy, for Gans, “identifies with the centrality [it] resents and [is] alienated from the centrality it desires . . . The protagonist’s suffering is experienced as the price of worldly centrality.”8 The audience response is double, a kind of oscillation, which is characteristic of aesthetic experience. Oedipus was the object of both resentment and admiration among the Thebans [and the audience is] both relieved and saddened by his downfall. These emotions are not simply correlated to “pity” and “terror.” The crux posed by Aristotle’s famous sentence results from the fact that the two emotions are not really on the same plane of esthetic experience. What terrifies us is that resentment, our own resentment has succeeded; we pity its victim. But in the act of pity, the fallen protagonist is no longer an object of resentment; he is a human being like ourselves.9 The ethical lesson of classical tragedy is therefore ne quid nimis, which is familiarly “moderation in all things” but that Gans renders as “avoid centrality.” You do not want to be there. But the situation has changed by Byron’s day. “The romantic equivalent of tragedy is not the . . . chastisement of a tyrant but the victimization of a superior individual, who is in at least unconscious complicity with the operation.” What Romantic tragedy—or call it melodrama—teaches is “the infinite value of self-centered subjectivity . . . [which] at any price can never be sold too dear in the marketplace.” You want it, and here is how to get


it.10 All esthetic experience has the same structure, but melodrama is “popular” art, in that its emphasis is on the appropriative, or “sparagmatic” phase of the oscillation, while tragedy holds us longer on the contemplation of the sign itself, rather than its desirable referent. Byron’s tragedies—which he was consciously trying to make classical or neo-classical—all grapple with the inevitability of resentment, including that felt by the tragic hero-victims themselves. They reflect on the implications of the apotheosis, or centralization, of the resentful interior self. This is familiar enough in Byron’s oeuvre, but these late works figure heroic alienation differently than did his earlier poems: as the victimhood, not of a superior sensibility or transgressive difference, but of those who attempt, usually in the name of the public good, to transcend or control violent desire, but are betrayed by their own human lack of immunity to it. In short, by the fact they are not gods, and would resent other human beings in the same position themselves. They thus express a pre- or anti-romantic warning to “avoid centrality,” but also a modern, or post-romantic awareness that the advice really can’t be followed. An awareness, that is, of the suffering and disorder occasioned for both individual and community by the paradoxical impossibility of a transcendence it is equally impossible for the modern self not to desire. This recognition of the paradoxicality of desire—in its social and political dimension, as it were—complicates assessments of Byron’s “essentially aristocratic” sympathies in these plays.11 No one understood better than Byron the challenge to any form of instituted centrality or status presented by that modern self whose dramatic appearance in world culture is most notably announced in the opening scenes of Hamlet, where a rival centrality— an “equivalent center of self” in George Eliot’s phrase12 —appears crucially on stage with the traditional one, darkly resentful, interiorized, violent, dangerous, unstable. Byron and everything Byronic of course are heir to this manifestation, and to its slightly later form as Milton’s Satan. Everywhere the periphery proclaims itself to be, as periphery, the virtual, the moral, the authentic, the unjustly excluded center. But Byron’s late plays in effect ask what happens when, as is inevitable, this new centrality does actually replace the old one. They put Hamlet at the center and give him the job of governing a society of other Hamlets (or Byrons)—or at least of trying to preserve such a society from itself. A society of Hamlets, in fact, who are even more hostile than he was because they resent the fact that he is Hamlet, and thus rather too like them. Byron, after all, is the student of Rousseau who, for Gans, recognizes “that modern society’s principled rejection of sacrificial exclusion”—of


what happens to the classical tragic protagonist—offers modern individuals “a permanent basis for blackmail.” Although in the world of the literary imagination, Moliere’s Misanthrope (and before him, Hamlet at Claudius’ court) preceded Rousseau in this strategy, he was the first to apply it openly in the real world, translating the noble’s disdain for bourgeois reality into a democratic, universally accessible attitude. Individual resentment at real or imaginary exclusion fueled a rhetoric of social injustice that flourished in the romantic era but that has truly come into its own in the victimary rhetoric of the postmodern age.13 What merits exploration in Byron’s plays is the possibility that, contra Gans’s generalized relegation of such works to melodrama, they understand the operation of desire in ways similar to those sketched above. They might have something to say about this attitude now saturating the postmodern world, a world to which resentments of real or imagined exclusion and victimary blackmail on an unprecedented global scale, not to mention the paroxysms of violent rhetoric—or rhetorical violence—we call terrorism, are intimately familiar features.

Marino Faliero An attitude of noble disdain, of fierce resentment, that allies itself with the demos to mount a passionate attack on an intermediate order of society, is certainly what Byron’s first Venetian play dramatizes. Doge Faliero, incensed by perceived insults to the dignity of his person and office, conspires with commoners to massacre, not the bourgeois perhaps (unrepresented as such in the play) but the city’s oligarchy, its aristocrats. A young aristocrat, Steno, has scrawled a crude libel about Faliero and his young wife on the ducal throne. The council has given the offender but a month’s imprisonment as punishment, when the Doge wanted him put to death. On hearing of the light sentence, the eighty-year-old ruler dashes down his ducal bonnet, “offering to trample upon it” (1.2.87, stage direction) and wildly wishing his city violated by the Saracens or Genoese or Huns. Such a reaction is potentially comic, even already sad. It conditions our sense of the Doge from this point onwards (albeit perhaps more so in stage performance than in mental theater). And there are other signs of personal instability, of passionate excess, inconsistent thinking, erratic motivation, that disrupt easy identification with his


victimary status. Byron, as he tells us in his preface, is working conscientiously from the historical record of a man of “ungovernable temper.”14 But ultimately the play does not pathologize this behavior so much as anthropologize it,15 expanding and generalizing its significance, in ironic counterpoint to the Doge’s own attempt to perform the parallel operation of dignifying and justifying his resentments. For the latter there is need. The Dogaressa herself cannot countenance so harsh a response, and the aristocrats too, once the plot is uncovered, marvel that he could be mastered by “such / A provocation as a young man’s petulance” (5.1.242–3). It was the last straw, the Doge replies, the “spark [that] creates the flame” (5.1.244). There have been many offences, from Steno’s class, before this. Venice herself is infected with a “patrician pestilence” (3.1.12). Yet it matters considerably that it is not a material injury, but rather a revelation of the attitude of another person, that person’s lack of respect, which is ultimately intolerable. His attitude and that of others: the Doge envisions, perhaps rightly, the contagion of disrespect that the unreproved gesture will provoke in “loose mechanics” and “sneering nobles” (1.2.161–3). Centrality, this implies, like identity itself (which Gans suggestively defines as “a local monopoly of attention”),16 can only ultimately be conferred, or denied, by the desires of other people. The most virulent resentment is motivated not by the desirability of what other people have or are, but by their corollary refusal to attend to, to desire, the resenter, or, as Girard would call him or her, the “subject.”17 One can own things, one can be someone worthy, beautiful, strong—at least in principle, in one’s own view. But these attributes mean nothing if they have not the power to command respect, to attract desire. Where the Romantic famously builds centrality—as Byron himself did—by claiming the opposite, by advertising exile, autonomy, and mimetically seductive self-desire, Faliero is unable, it seems, either to adopt such a strategy or imagine that it could work. He cannot or will not embrace his alienation and victimhood, turn them to account—at least not yet. What have the aristocrats actually done? What is wrong in Venice? The Doge mainly complains in metaphor, in dark insinuations and bitter asides. It is difficult to discern many specific actions, deadly crimes, although it certainly seems that he is unable to wield the practical power he apparently expected when he ascended the throne. And, as a successful soldier in the service of the state, he frequent implies this represents a kind of ingratitude. Later, when talking to the plebeian conspirators he speaks of the services to them he has been prevented from performing.


But this, if not exactly an afterthought, is clearly not crucial. Something else is. Once he became Doge, “the Doge THEY made me,” his fellow patricians are no longer friendly, no longer kind to him, no longer, somehow, allow him “privacy of life.” They came not near me, such approach gave umbrage; They could not love me, such was not the law; They thwarted me, ’twas a patrician’s duty; They wrong’d me, for such was to right the state; They could not right me, that would give suspicion; So that I was a slave to my own subjects; So that I was a foe to my own friends; Begirt with spies for guards—with robes for power— With pomp for freedom—gaolers for a council— Inquisitors for friends—and hell for life! (3.2.346–60) One might wonder how much of this is not the common fate of any ruler. What is the “law”— that is, what does the “legislative” owe to the executive in fourteenth-century Venice? And does this bluff soldier Faliero not understand its operation? Can he be so disappointed not to be loved in power? Is this what has hurt him so, has “crush’d” his “feelings” (3.2.372), as he says a few lines later? But what is this curious “umbrage,” hovering in an uncertain grammar even, that “such approach” gives? They were given umbrage by their own coming close to him, the line seems to say. Its logic is opaque, but one feature is clear enough. They resented him first. They resented— perversely!— the very centrality they had conferred upon him. And he resents, of course, their resentment. The way they began it. When made Doge, “I died to all that had been, or rather they to me,” he corrects himself (3.2.348). Their umbrage has drained away all human value, love, friendship. It has robbed the world of legitimate power, legitimate centrality. That centrality, they have usurped. Faliero’s explicit lament is thus a familiar one: the loss of an ancient, ultimately sacral order of hierarchy that implies the immunity of ostensibly undesiring Dogeship itself. This is precisely what Girard means by sacrificial crisis, a term which, if applied consistently, in the end must be applied to the whole of what we call modernity. At the very least, such an event must be viewed in terms of a very large, tectonic shift in social organization, rather than as a more localized development of “politics” or “ideology.” Such a large-scale shift is what Byron’s play is about. The Doge protests the selfishness, the lack of respect given to sacral order


by the jealous others, and the resultant fall into mere rivalry of the distinctions that order anchored. But the meaning of the resentment he experiences seems at the same time to bring him to an unbearable recognition of the arbitrary, human source of that centrality. It is against this too that he rages, and to which he returns over and over throughout the play. He is their creation, and thus their “slave.” They had the initiative. He was lured into the role, made false promises, entrapped and then stripped of everything of value. The aristocrats “made a sovereign, as boys make / Playthings, to do their pleasure and be broken!” (3.2.375–6). But in King Lear, which these lines echo, it was of course not men but gods who did this, who killed for their sport.18 Faliero’s fury is a measure of the shift from what Girard calls “external mediation,” imitation of the desires of a distant model with whom no rivalry is possible or imaginable, to “internal mediation,” in which the model is nearby, rivalrous, or at least susceptible to reciprocal effects of desire. Faliero’s project now for the Dogeship is to “redeem it back to its antique lustre in our annals, / By sweet revenge on all that’s base in Venice” (1.2.590–1); he “would rather yield to gods than men” (5.2.67). Honor is the obsession, needless to say, of all ancien régimes, to be replaced in the market world—Gans’s preferred denomination of Girard’s internal mediation or endless crisis of vanishing differences—by the more widely available but more unstable centralities offered by identity, status, celebrity, even love. By seeking to punish Steno’s words by death, warning of a perilous “general poison” (2.1.428) in such words, the Doge is reaching for the kind of violent censorship that many a military junta or extremist sect has since made standard practice, and with similar justifications. This is not, shall we say, very forward-looking, as Byron was surely enough of a believer in Whig history to see. The Doge longs for the feudal retainers from his estate, “my peasants” (4.2.33), whose blind, violent loyalty seems so much more reliable than the self-interested resolve of his urban plebeian allies. When in another context his nephew Bertuccio tries gently to remind him that “those days” (1.2.170) are gone, he is cut off with an abruptness that one might, again, find dryly amusing. It seems, in fact, a problem less of 1355 than of 1820 and after. Only an idealized identification with the historical Republic of Venice could object with indignant surprise that “the people” lack power and are “mere machines” to serve the existing political order. The real point, the genuine novelty of the situation, is the availability of sufficient popular resentment to challenge that order, to demand and perhaps get a share of that power.19 The Doge starts thinking about politics, about building


new alliances. Perhaps the others did start it, and his accusations are true. The claims, vague as they are, never seem to be contradicted in the play, even by the aristocrats. Perhaps Byron felt the historical record supported Faliero, or that its analogy to present times was strong enough to accept such a premise for dramatic purposes. The authentic historical narrative could indeed be of a genuine failure of law, of resentful, selfish aggression beating down the strength of the Venetian Republic’s political institutions—although it might be wondered why it seems so unusual in this particular instance, with a reputedly strong Doge on the ducal throne. But the salient and most interesting feature of the situation, and what clearly attracted the dramatist, is still the incongruously personal, and at least ostensibly trivial, provocation. If it might at first appear that we are simply to accept the claims of the Doge, as the play progresses and as the prospective results of those claims emerge, the ethical status as well as the “truth” of Faliero’s and his allies’ resentment becomes our central interpretative problem, a problem that Byron never really allows to go away. A few moments after stamping on his bonnet, the Doge cools and says he is ashamed of his own anger now (1.2.237). But he merely means he is going to nurture it, the way the speaker of Blake’s “The Poison Tree” does. He is meditating revenge. Philip J. Skerry strikingly builds a structure of concentric circles for the play from this initial “stone in the pond,” radiating outward from the personal to the political, the historical and the eternal.20 This is accurate, but what the structure in turn represents is the ever more elaborate attempt of Faliero himself to rationalize his resentment, to transcend its personal torments by spreading and elevating it. The violence of his feelings ripples outwards, surely enough, requiring ever-more-desperate justifications and measures, or measures as justifications. I will kill you to show you how much you have harmed me, and how wrong you were, how unjust. I will massacre you all to prove to you (and the world) that the reason I do it is not trivial. We hear from the Doge a highly wrought strain of abusive rhetoric, collectivizing, dehumanizing, “othering” his foes. They are insects or reptiles—pestilential, toxic, contagious.21 “All this is straightforward enough,” comments Jerome McGann in his important 1968 evaluation of the play, and forms a part of Byron’s defiant fatalism. Straightforward, and familiar. Metaphors of corruption, tainting and disease operating in some unknown or unspecified way, and attributed to other human beings as a pretext for killing them, may perhaps be described as an aspect of a universal human “death impulse.” But an anthropological rather than a Freudian or psychoanalytic reading would tend to hear the


classic language of scapegoating, of the witch hunt.22 Faliero feverishly details the “poison” that is “fatal . . . to the springs of life, / To human ties, and all that’s good and dear” (3.2.316–17), as he resolves to murder all the men who were my friends; I loved them, they Requited honourably my regards; We served and fought; we smiled and wept in concert; We revell’d or we sorrow’d side by side; We made alliances of blood and marriage[.] (3.2.319–23) Who indeed is destroying human ties? As even the Doge is clear-sighted enough to see, the violence he contemplates is a kind of self-destruction, a “suicide” (3.2.472) as he several times calls it. The key point is his experience of the aristocrats’ parodic doubling of himself, their creation of spectral, insubstantial copies of every solidity of identity and institution to which he clings. It is “this monster of a state, this mockery of a government, this spectre, which must be exorcised with blood” (3.2.165–7). In such a looking-glass world, he, like them, was “great / Before he was degraded to a Doge” (3.2.201–2). He catalogues “their” injurious motives in terms exactly like those he adopts to support his own plans to destroy them. His role has been reduced to an imitation, a “pageant” (1.2.271), but this ultimately is a function of the initial insult, that starts the “whisper’d . . . tale” that “made me look like them” (1.2.165). His problem is the loss of difference. The planned rebellion is many times justified in terms of the “freedom” it will bring. The political form this will take remains largely unspecified. There will be established a “fair free commonwealth” that the Doge describes in an attractively persuasive architectural metaphor: “proportion’d like the columns of the temple, / Giving and taking strength reciprocal” (3.2.169, 171–2). This new civic dwelling, as elaborated, sounds as if it embodies an instituted balance of powers—a new balance, that is. But it seems it will have no executive—at least, Faliero himself cannot “stoop” to that, for the unstated but obvious reason that to accept the offered leadership of the plebeians would have the same demeaning implications that allowing himself to be made Doge by the aristocrats did, but more so. (Still, it is an awkward, perhaps comic moment, as he clears his throat and corrects himself to say, “—that is, I am not fit / To lead a band of—patriots” [3.2.220–1]). Presumably, though, his new friends and, well, followers, will love him, and not having created him, will not control him.23 But the Doge’s


condition now is entirely unfree, as by the end of the third act he explicitly concedes, in an extraordinary and nearly incoherent speech. The other conspirators “feel not” remorse for the murders they are to commit, “nor do I,” and yet a few lines later he is bitterly claiming his superiority to them because “in this surpassing massacre” he alone shall indeed “see and feel.” oh God! oh God! ’Tis true, And thou dost well to answer that it was ‘My own free will and act,’ and yet you err, For I will do this! Doubt not—fear not; I Will be your most unmerciful accomplice! And yet I act no more on my own free will, Nor my own feelings—both compel me back; But there is hell within me and around, And like the demon who believes and trembles Must I abhor and do. (3.2.504–21) One might cynically reflect here on the parallel and no doubt related incoherence of Byron’s own political program.24 But these lines are much more useful for their analysis of resentment as a force experienced both within and “around” the individual whose very selfhood and humanity is threatened by its power, a force beyond choice, even beyond or oblivious to feeling itself. The allusion to Milton’s Satan is entirely apt, as the problem is precisely the same.25 Divinely sanctioned fatality is an alibi in so relentlessly human and social a world as the one the play has conceded the Doge inhabits. Resentment is this hell, and the ironies of its towering claims of autonomy are surely no more lost on Byron than they were on the author of Paradise Lost. Resentment, indeed desire itself, is incompatible with freedom, and Faliero sees this, just as he sees the inevitability of an all-consuming violence as resentment’s final argument against its own torments, as its ultimate promise of transcendence. I cannot pause on individual hate, In the absorbing, sweeping, whole revenge, Which, like the sheeted fire from heaven, must blast Without distinction [.] (3.2.419–22) From hell, from heaven, indifferently. For René Girard, violence beyond intention is the sacred itself. The “freedom” that Faliero’s general


massacre, his class war aspires to create, is freedom from his very humanity, from the desires and resentments that have made him their plaything far more than have his human rivals. Only as god or demon can he escape. As the drama progresses, the now-familiar phrases come tumbling out, the remorseless political logic. Those we resent cannot be treated with, but must be utterly destroyed. “They cannot co-exist with Venice’ freedom!” (3.2.313). The rebellion will produce “not rash equality” as this can no more be imagined than can a circle with more than one center, and is thus fundamentally at odds with resentment’s project. No, in the utopia the violent elimination of their rivals will create the more benign-sounding (but for the moment utterly irrelevant) “equal rights” will prevail (3.2.170). And most tellingly, “though the laws sleep, justice wakes, and injured souls / Oft do a public right with private wrong” (4.2.105–6). Laws are pragmatic, they temporarily and imperfectly solve ethical problems; “justice,” though, appeals to a fundamental morality present from the origin, fueling resentment endlessly. Morality is a goal, the laws are tools for preserving peace while the goal is pursued. It is hard not to feel that the poet who puts such words in his characters’ mouths gives them deep and full value. Surely resentment as much as desire itself is the motor of human progress as well, of human achievement, the very life of a true republic. The temple of an equitable, balanced state, in which all may pursue their desires and have some chance of achieving them, temporarily and in reciprocal exchange with others, and are thus “free” from the most intolerable forms of resentful frustration—this is attractive, and the play surely intends it to be. But it will presumably be a temple built on impersonal laws. Where ethical mechanisms falter and laws fail to forestall vengeance, where “justice” is measured out in maddened individual souls, and private wrongs are licensed on grounds of public safety, the republic teeters at the abyss. Byron’s politics have retrospectively been dismissed from both the right and the left. Several modern commentators condescendingly point out almost as an inconsistency his repugnance at the Cato Street conspiracy in the year of the play’s composition. Is it? (On analogy, would a modern proponent of global human development and equity be inconsistent in his or her horror at the idea of a high-jacked aircraft hitting the White House and killing the American president and his cabinet? Would such delicacy be sneered at in terms of the race or nationality the proponent shared with the prospective victims?) Arguably, there is a sophisticated, tragic, and finally pragmatic vision in Marino Faliero. Beneath the inevitability of the overthrow of absolute sacral kingship


and all that it sustained is the inevitability, paradox, and dilemma of democratic resentment. Betrayed, defeated, tortured, awaiting execution, the plebeian conspirators are better men, even happier men. Their politics, at least tactically, start to make more sense. Stirring speeches are delivered. And, more plausibly now, the central accusation is again leveled: it was not our resentment, or our violence, it was yours! The judges are judged. The conspirators play directly to us, to the audience and its doubts. “Our blood” will “more testify / To their atrocities” than volumes of words (5.1.117–20). The worse they do to us the better! One of the conspirators has already given voice to what is surely the timeless motto of such politics: “They never fail who die / In a great cause” (2.2.93–4). And this much we can surely see is true. Perhaps the question of the greatness of the cause will only be resolved well after the dying, but another familiar strategy has certainly taken form here: the sequence of provocation and reprisal, the rhetoric of violence and victimhood that argues in blood, that persuades by its extremity. Suicide is purposeful now— blackmail indeed—not some maddened attack on one’s own distorted reflection. The aristocrats respond with necessarily unilateral and thus apparently disproportionate violence. Predictably, they betray their own standards, their own legitimacy (assuming they had not done so before, which of course now seems more likely): in “great emergencies,” they cry, “the law must be remodell’d or amended” (5.1.183–4). Guantanamo Bay unavailable, they opt for summary execution. It is a theatrical strategy and Byron’s play conveys it in the fullness of its power. The Doge has every trapping of the sacrificial victim. Again, were this all, this would be a “popular” art, like melodrama, or terrorism itself, concentrating not on the deferring and beautiful sign but on the glutting of desire, the discharging of righteous resentment. Freedom would be here, in the individual inner self, utterly independent of the establishments of society or law. But it is not quite all. Perhaps the audience has learned too much. Faliero’s self-consciousness in his role makes us uneasy, for one thing. He should occupy his place more naturally, without this hint of passive aggression, of self-justification. He sees himself quite literally as the sacrifice, helpless, occupying the fatal center entirely without choice. To his judges he cries: You singled me out like a victim to Stand crown’d, but bound and helpless, at the altar Where you alone could minister.


I knew not—I sought not—wish’d not—dream’d not the election[.] (5.1.206–9) It is well enough for the modern self to hint darkly of “that within” itself which “shall tire / Torture and Time,” as the earlier Byron does in the fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.26 That sounded something like boasting, but it was effective. It sounds even more like it when the Doge confronts and defies judicial torture: “there’s that within my heart shall strain your engines!” (5.1.302). And it is less potent, sadder. Where Harold was bold but vague, we have seen only too clearly what is within Faliero. Where Harold was fundamentally passive, letting rejection (and then later love) come to him, Faliero has no such confidence and has lapsed into pre-emptive and vengeful action. And that is weaker. This is the man, we recall, who saw clearly the contagious nature of violence, who knew that once the first stroke was struck, the mere instinct of the first-born Cain Which ever lurks somewhere in human hearts, Though circumstances may keep it in abeyance, Will urge the rest on like to wolves; the sight Of blood to crowds begets the thirst for more[.] (4.2.56–60) But he was also the one eager to strike that stroke, to alter those circumstances, and we see how it returns upon him, as his own. It seems very much a rationalization then, when Faliero fondly attributes his fall not to human foes but to impersonal forces.27 It is disingenuous for him to wax stoical and say, “It is in vain to war with Fortune” (4.2.272). And the inadequacy of his posture is even clearer in the almost indiscriminate bitterness of his outburst when asked if he confesses: I confess to have fail’d; Fortune is female: from my youth her favours Were not withheld, the fault was mine to hope Her smiles again at this late hour. (5.1.265–8) This smacks not just of self-pity, but even of misogyny, as the subtext of an old man’s sexual rejection has appeared several other times in his speeches. It must seem particularly grating to an audience who has witnessed the peerless loyalty of his long-suffering young wife. When Angiolina comes then to comfort him she both demonstrates


the inviolate honor and nobility of her marital support of him, and explicitly undermines his broader rationalizations. The entire disaster, she cries, is due to “Steno’s lie, couch’d in two worthless lines.” It is this which Hath decimated Venice, put in peril A senate which hath stood eight hundred years, Discrown’d a prince, cut off his crownless head, And forged new fetters for a groaning people! (5.1.443–7) (It is perhaps a bit insensitive, though, to mention the cutting off of a head that still sits on her husband’s shoulders.) She then labels Steno a “reptile,” which if not exactly comic—although one wonders a little if Byron’s well-known “spoiler’s art” is operative here—certainly returns the focus to the shabby triviality of the original provocation. The Doge has tried to lift his project above this level, and his wife’s loyal denunciation brings it back down to apoplectic name-calling. In private, just before he leaves her for that decapitation, the Doge also recalls the long-ago foretelling of his doom by a bishop whom the young Faliero had knocked to the ground for being “sluggish” carrying the Host. This offended personage predicted not only his worldly “overthrow” but also that “in the best maturity of mind / A madness in the heart shall seize upon thee” (5.2.20–34). The purpose and effect of these penultimate scenes, then, is to remind us, even as he is most trying to widen the significance of his fall to matters historical and eternal, of the entirely personal origins of Faliero’s crisis, of the provocation and his temperament. Has that madness of the heart, that hell within abated now? Had it done so, Faliero might have risen to the desirable stature of a Manfred, driving away the ineffectual demons of socially mediated guilt, making death a victory, and reassuring his ostensible comforters that it is not so difficult to do so.28 Calm of this kind is the most powerful rhetoric for heroic victimhood. But to the still fiercely fulminating old man it is clearly unavailable. “Employ the minutes left in aspirations / Of a more healing nature,” his wife urges him, “in peace / Even with these wretches take thy flight to Heaven” (5.2.75–7). One imagines his memorable response almost as a shout: “I am at peace!” Peace, he fumes, at the certainty of the ruin of Venice, the “proud city” reduced to being hissed and scoffed at by other nations! The fondest dream of resentment: pride taking its fall. Pride experiencing its fall. It is the inner experience of other people that resentment most imagines and covets. If there is a last word


on this dream in the play, it may come in the Dogaressa’s desperate response: Speak not thus now; the surge of passion still Sweeps oe’r thee to the last; thou dost deceive Thyself, and canst not injure them—be calmer. (5.2.85–7) It is in the context of these words that we listen to the Doge’s grand, heartbreaking curse on his own city, before execution. He speaks to time and eternity, and to nature, by blasting Venice and predicting its ruin. Injuring it, at least in vivid imagination. Deceiving himself. But his most pregnant utterance is surely this: “I am not innocent—but are these guiltless?” (5.3.40). This says, and not to this putatively Christian man’s “gods,” if you do not admire me, still you cannot admire them! At the point of death he is still preoccupied with, dependent upon, what others are thinking, their attitudes, towards himself, towards his enemies. He is still obsessed with the centrality denied him and usurped by them, the centrality created by his auditors. What better or sadder expression of the resenter’s dilemma, so nearly pathetic in its concession of reciprocity? Indeed, the whole speech is full of the pathos of high rhetoric and low desire, of dust and deity as Byron says elsewhere,29 of the truly horrific disconnect between his seething animosity towards the city he clearly loves, and that love. We have been well prepared to see his rage this way. He has seen the problem himself, has tried and failed to transcend his own personal resentment. The attempt has driven him only to grander and larger and more destructive means. Venice must be cursed, it must be afflicted by a larger, political, historical, even eternal or apocalyptic contagion! We do not want to be this Doge. We pity him. The citizens who were, somehow, to be the beneficiaries of his sweet revenge upon the usurped center watch from afar. The aristocrats have kept them back, cruel deniers of centrality that they are (good resenters themselves, they know how this game works). The people long to bear flattering witness, but the Doge’s “words are inarticulate” (5.4.12). “‘The gory head rolls down the Giants’ Steps!’”(5.4.28). Whatever the abandoned proletariat may feel, the wider audience of the play has too clearly seen what the Doge has been forced to concede: that the structure of resentment is common to all participants. As he has said himself, “’tis but a game of mutual homicides” (4.2.289). No revenge is sweeter than another. The gods do nothing. Men do everything, and for the same reasons.


What really has happened? The institutional status quo, the inviolability of the political center, has been revealed to be unsustainable. But resentment by itself has been unable to change anything, to find any way forward. It has met a symmetrical and equal response. To those who, in such unsettling times, have put morality before ethics, who have said, in effect, no peace without justice, the baffling answer has been: no justice without law. In the play’s tragic action, in its human failures, there has been a glimpse, only that, of the structures or powers which might defer, manage or even redirect its violence to productive ends. One certainly is law, law adequate to the strains of sociality without sacrality. Love is another. There are a number of expressions of love in the play and they are not all mere fodder for resentment. Love of a wife for her husband, love of the Doge for the companions and sharers of his life, the other men and women of his class. Even more significant, love between classes, that binds the reluctant conspirator Bertram and his aristocratic patron and friend Lioni. These private feelings—and in good modern, totalitarian30 style the Doge has fiercely denied the categories, has proclaimed the private public, the personal political—these ultimately betray the conspiracy, as Bertram tries to warn and save his friend, inadvertently revealing the whole plan. Love, then, and law. The plays that follow, Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari, explore the potentialities of these restraints on human violence, while Cain takes the anthropological tendencies of the previous work to its logical conclusion and dramatizes the act of exemplary resentment, the first murder. Byron knows, as we do, that there will be many more murders, and that they will all share fundamental features with their original. What Marino Faliero dramatizes, without really theorizing it and certainly not proposing a “solution,” is the pervasive power of resentment in modern political and social life. It shows its typical operations and tendencies, its tactics and blindnesses, and the difficulties it creates for itself. But it also provides access to its visions, its modes of imagined transcendence: revenge, freedom, rage, victimhood, prophecy. It does not, that is, simply undermine or satirize resentment. At times there are ironic or comic touches, but more prominent is a deep human sympathy with a fundamental human experience. There is no tragic effect without it. The play models, indeed performs for an audience who is affected by it, the aesthetic function of genuine tragedy, by inducing attention to linger on the sign, at the temporary expense—the distancing,


or deferral—of gratified resentment and desire. It makes us fear the violence of such desire, contemplate its paradoxes, and pity the (other) man in its thrall. Ne quid nimis, indeed. On such terms and while the moment lasts, the centrality of heroic victimhood looks as futile as it does terrible.

8 “And Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind”: Byron, Switzerland, and the Poetics of Freedom Simon Bainbridge

Byron’s stay in Switzerland from May to October 1816 has long been seen as a key period in his life and in his writing. A six-month sojourn during the poet’s self-exiling journey from England to Italy, Byron’s time in Switzerland saw the initial meeting with Percy Shelley and the rapid growth of their friendship, the engagement with the circle of Mme de Staël at Coppet, the literary tour of Lake Geneva, visiting the sites described in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse as well as the homes of the great Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire and Gibbon, and the aesthetic tours of the mountain regions of Chamonix and the Bernese Oberland. During his residence, Byron composed much of the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, wrote many important works such as “Prometheus,” The Prisoner of Chillon, the “Sonnet on Chillon,” and “Darkness,” and began the dramatic poem Manfred. However, unlike the attention given to Byron’s time in Italy and Greece, and particularly to his involvement with the Carbonari and the Greek fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire, there has been very little critical consideration of the poet’s engagement with either the contemporary politics of the Swiss Confederation or with the idea of Switzerland as the home of freedom. In this essay, I want to argue that Switzerland as a place, an idea, and a location for writing plays an important role in both the Byronic conception of freedom and its legacy. It was during this crucial period in Switzerland that Byron wrote what for many readers has been (and remains) his most important political poetry, creating a poetics of freedom in response to his own exile and psychological suffering and his sense of living in an age that had seen the defeat of liberty and the triumph of the forces of oppression. This poetics of Freedom has remained 136

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remarkably influential, not only through the power of its language and style and its association with the charismatic poet who lost his life in pursuit of a political cause, but also because by its very nature it can be appropriated to support a wide range of ideological positions. As I hope to show, Byron’s poetry has been central to the articulation of freedom during the last two centuries and remains so in the present epoch. At the time of Byron’s residence, the Swiss Confederation was a grouping of Cantons whose independence and perpetual neutrality had been recognized by the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, the same year in which the Federal pact was enlarged to include Geneva, Neuchâtel, and Valois.1 Switzerland was a complex political and cultural organization, and most critics argue that Byron had at best a very limited interest in the issues of governance, economics, or national identity related to the Swiss Confederation, an argument seemingly supported by the poet’s own disparaging and dismissive comments.2 Byron famously described Switzerland as “a curst selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world,” adding, “I could never bear the inhabitants,” and he characterized it as “perhaps the dearest country in Europe for foreigners, its people being the most canny and rascally in the world about all that has to do with money – and deceitfulness – and avarice,” concluding that the present government of Geneva was “under the yoke of the anti-liberals.”3 However, these oft-quoted comments need to be seen within their specific context rather than taken as representative; Byron made them in 1821 after he had been considering moving to Switzerland with the Guicciolis, and he had suffered a last minute change of mind. His epistolary attacks on Switzerland were part of his justification of this volte face. Contrary to the dominant conception of Byron’s repugnance at Switzerland, its national character, and its inhabitants, represented by these later comments, I want to argue that during his time in the region, and particularly during his Alpine tour of September 1816, Byron came to value Switzerland as an image of a political ideal and a possibility of freedom within the tyranny of postWaterloo Europe. Moreover, in the writing that he produced while in Switzerland, Byron created a poetics of freedom that has been widely appropriated in the following two centuries.

“. . . a spot should not be passed in vain”: Byron and Swiss history During the period of his residence in Switzerland, as well as in later life, Byron pointed to the history of the Confederation as an important


example of the narrative of freedom winning its battle over tyranny. Byron’s characteristic tendency to transform the materials of Swiss history into symbols of freedom’s triumph is seen in his responses to the battlefield of Morat, which he visited on May 18, 1816. It was here in 1476 that a Swiss army had defeated the invading forces of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Judging by his letter to John Cam Hobhouse of May 26, Byron’s immediate reaction to the battlefield was that of a tourist and hunter of rather grisly souvenirs: From Morat I brought away the leg and wing of a Burgundian: – the descendants of the vanquished – when last here in the service of France buried or carried away the greater part of the heap – except what the Swiss had made into knife-handles – but there are still a few left – and with some of these relics I made free though for a less sordid purpose. (BLJ, 5.78) At Morat Byron seems to have shown none of the “silent, pensive and . . . musing mood” reported at his visit to Waterloo earlier in the month, the historic Swiss victory lacking the immediacy and personal significance of the site of his idol Napoleon’s defeat.4 In the prose note on the battle of Morat in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron maintained the ironic detachment of the letter to Hobhouse, again focusing on the materiality of the battlefield and the peculiar fate awaiting the remains of the slaughtered: A few [bones of the Burgundian legion] still remain notwithstanding the pains taken by the Burgundians for ages, (all who passed that way removing a bone to their own country) and the less justifiable larcenies of the Swiss postillions, who carried them off to sell for knife-handles, a purpose for which the whiteness imbibed by the bleaching of years had rendered them in great request. Of these relics I ventured to bring away as much as may have made the quarter of a hero, for which the sole excuse is, that if I had not, the next passer by might have perverted them to worse uses than the careful preservation which I intend for them.5 Both sets of prose comments anticipate the anti-heroic burlesques of Don Juan rather than fitting the more sentimental strains of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, particularly in their portioning up of the hero. There is no sense in either comment of the battlefield as historically significant. Yet in the verse of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Byron transforms Morat into a key station in the history of freedom, a place at which the


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viewer must stop if she or he is to properly understand the true meaning of history: There is a spot should not be pass’d in vain, – Morat! the proud, the patriot field! where man May gaze on ghastly trophies of the slain, Nor blush for those who conquered on that plain; Here Burgundy bequeath’d his tombless host, A bony heap, through ages to remain, Themselves their monument; – the Stygian coast Unsepulchred they roam’d, and shriek’d each wandering ghost. While Waterloo with Cannae’s carnage vies, Morat and Marathon twin names shall stand; They were true Glory’s stainless victories, Won by the unambitious heart and hand Of a proud, brotherly, and civic band, All unbought champions in no princely cause Of vice-entail’d Corruption; they no land Doom’d to bewail the blasphemy of laws Making kings’ rights divine, by some Draconic clause. (CHP III. 600–16)

Byron’s reference to the “bony heap” restores to the battlefield the pyramid made from the remains of the twenty thousand slaughtered Burgundians, of which he says in his note only a few remain. While Byron’s reference echoes the interest in the materiality of the site in his prose, it also elevates the “spot” into a historical monument, and what in the letter appeared nothing more than ghoulish souvenir hunting now becomes an ethically imperative exercise in historical understanding. Morat “is a spot should not be pass’d in vain,” and its significance as a “patriot field” justifies what would otherwise be a voyeuristic indulgence in battlefield gothic. What becomes clear in the second stanza on Morat is that the battle’s real significance for Byron is as an antithesis to Waterloo; Morat can serve along with Marathon as an image of an ideal triumph, both of which are defined by what they are not (“stainless victories,” “won by the unambitious heart,” “unbought champions,” “no princely cause,” “they no land / Doom’d”). While Byron does praise both the Swiss and the Greeks as “a proud, brotherly, and civic band,” the main force of the stanza lies in its continuation of the attack on Waterloo from earlier in the canto.


Byron’s treatment of the battle of Morat in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is characteristic of his use of Swiss history to illustrate broader political principles or exemplify teleological narratives. For example, in “Detached Thoughts” of 1821, the poet included Switzerland as one of a number of examples of his favored narrative of freedom winning its battle over tyranny: As to political slavery – so general – it is men’s own fault – if they will be slaves let them! – – yet it is but “a word and a blow” – see how England formerly – France – Spain – Portugal – America – Switzerland – freed themselves! – there is no one instance of a long contest in which men did not triumph over Systems. – If Tyranny misses her first spring she is cowardly as the tiger and retires to be hunted. (BLJ, 9.41) Swiss history here provides support for one of Byron’s most deeply held political principles, and it was also part of the storehouse of historical examples to which Byron turned for inspiration. In January 1821, for example, he commented of the Austrian army as follows: “Let it still be a hope to see their bones piled like those of the human dogs at Morat, in Switzerland, which I have seen” (BLJ, 8.20). In February of the same year while awaiting the Carbonari uprising, he invoked the legendary Swiss national hero William Tell who had supposedly led his country to freedom from Austrian dominion: The war approaches nearer and nearer. Oh those scoundrel sovereigns! Let us but see them beaten – let the Neapolitans but have the pluck of the Dutch of old, or the Spaniards of now, or of the German protestants, the Scotch presbyterians, the Swiss under Tell, or the Greeks under Themistocles – all small and solitary nations . . . and there is yet a resurrection for Italy, and a hope for the world. (BLJ, 8.48) The history of Switzerland has an important place in Byron’s writing about freedom, then, but the examples examined so far do not suggest it was particularly influential in the development of his thinking in this area. Byron’s ideas about freedom in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were already well established by the time his protagonist reached Morat, and in his later thinking the presence of Switzerland among two long lists of examples, while seeking to support the general principles proposed, suggests a degree of interchangeable generality. However, in the next two


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sections of this essay, I want to suggest that Byron’s stay in Switzerland was particularly important to his poetics of freedom in two ways: first, it was in the texts written here that he created what has become his most influential political poetry; second, in Switzerland Byron did encounter an environment and a population that came to represent for him a possibility of freedom.

“Eternal spirit”: the Byronic poetics of freedom and their legacy It was while Byron was in Switzerland that he wrote what for many readers has been his most important and influential political poetry— The Prisoner of Chillon, the accompanying sonnet beginning “Eternal spirit of the chainless mind” and “Prometheus.” Though the first two of these texts are ostensibly about a historical person, and all three can be seen to be biographically informed, the poems have become important politically precisely because they transcend their historical and biographical origins to provide myths and phrases that can be appropriated and reappropriated by different causes (something suggested by Byron’s subtitle “A Fable” for The Prisoner of Chillon). One such appropriation is the description of Byron given by the Italian Risorgimento leader Guiseppe Mazzini in his 1831 essay “Byron and Goethe,” which draws on the “Sonnet on Chillon” and “Prometheus,” conflating the historical (Bonivard), with the mythical (Prometheus) and the biographical (Byron): Never did “the eternal spirit of the chainless mind” make a brighter apparition amongst us. He seems at times a transformation of that immortal Prometheus, of whom he has written so nobly; whose cry of agony, yet of futurity, sounded above the cradle of the European world; and whose grand and mysterious form, transfigured by time, reappears from age to age, between the entombment of one epoch and the accession of another; to wail forth the lament of genius, tortured by the presentment of things it will not see realized in its time. Byron, too, had the “firm will” and the “deep sense”; he too, made of “death a victory.” When he heard the cry of nationality and liberty burst forth in the land he loved and sung in his early youth, he broke his harp and set forth.6 Mazzini’s eulogy powerfully illustrates the role that Byron would continue to play as an inspiring force in continental European politics even


after, and in part because of, his death. It also shows how it was in the poetry of the Swiss period that Byron created a political poetics of defiance, freedom, and liberty out of his own tortured psychology and sense of living in an age of oppression that could be widely used across time to support very different ideologies. In his polemical study, Byron’s Politics, Malcolm Kelsall has argued that the power of Byron’s rhetoric of freedom is in large part a product of its vagueness. He comments that “the word ‘freedom’ urgently uttered without context can be made to mean almost anything” and that it is “by not defining” freedom that Byron “achieves the widest possible support among opposition forces whether traditional revolutionary Whig, liberal Carbonari, or even radical: that is anyone who supports ‘liberty’ against ‘tyranny.’ The poetry works most successfully, therefore, by retaining an intense vagueness as to the present.”7 While there have been a number of forceful replies to Kelsall’s comments that seek to show how Byron’s language of freedom is meaningful within its own context, what Kelsall identifies as its vagueness does make it particularly available to later writers (though, of course, it should be noted that Byron is frequently seeking to define human qualities that he himself sees as “eternal”). In 1831, for example, when the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison published his account of the trial that led to his imprisonment, he concluded his introduction as follows: Is the inquiry made, how do I bear up under my adversities? I answer – like the oak – like the Alps – unshaken, storm-proof. Opposition, and abuse, and slander, and prejudice, and judicial tyranny, are like oil to the flame of my zeal. I am not discouraged: I am not dismayed; but bolder and more confident than ever. I say to my persecutors, – “I bid you defiance.” Let the courts condemn me to fine and imprisonment for denouncing oppression: Am I to be frightened by dungeons and chains? can they humble my spirit? do I not remember that I am an American citizen? and as a citizen, a freeman, and what is more, a being accountable to God? I will not hold my peace on the subject of African oppression. If need be, who would not die a martyr to such a cause? Eternal spirit of the chainless mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art, For there thy habitation is the heart, – The heart, which love of thee alone can bind; And when thy sons to fetters are consigned, To fetters, and the damp vault’s dayless gloom,


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Their country conquers with their martyrdom, And Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind.8 While the passage culminates with the octet of “Sonnet on Chillon,” even in the preceding paragraph Garrison presents both his possible imprisonment (“dungeons and chains”) and his mental strength in Byronic terms. Though the sonnet in particular continues to be invoked in writing about political prisoners,9 the nature of Byron’s poetics of freedom is such that it can also be invoked by and on behalf of those whom the poet would perhaps have considered as representative of tyranny rather than its opposite. For example, on March 1, 2002, retired British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, addressed a dinner held in honor of retired American President Ronald Reagan by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Talking on the topic of “A Tribute to Freedom,” she concluded as follows: President Reagan didn’t just abhor communism, mistrust socialism and dislike bureaucracy, he truly loved liberty – he loved it with a passion which went beyond anything else in his political life. It was what brought moral grandeur to his vision of America and to his dreams for a better world. It was directed not mainly at earthly powers and principalities but rather at the infinitely precious, utterly unique human being, wherever he or she was yearning to breathe free. The thought is memorably expressed by the poet Byron: Eternal spirit of the chainless mind! Brightest in Dungeons, Liberty! Thou art, For there thy habitation is the heart – The heart which love of thee alone can bind; And when thy sons to fetters are consigned – To fetters, and the damp vault’s dayless gloom, Their country conquers with their martyrdom; And freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind. My friends, God Bless Ronnie. God Bless America!10 Thatcher’s appropriation of Byron’s celebration of Liberty illustrates the extent to which the language he deploys in 1816 can be widely applied, enabling a yoking together of the Byronic abstractions of Liberty and Freedom with the more specific targeted attacks on communism, socialism and (rather bathetically) bureaucracy. Like William Lloyd Garrison, by quoting only the octet of the sonnet, Thatcher removes any specific


reference to time or place, making the extract a timeless and universal celebration of an abstract power, an eternal statement of an eternal spirit. Mazzini’s, Garrison’s, and Thatcher’s use of the Swiss-period poetry all illustrate how Byron has come to represent and be made to speak for a politics of optimism in the survival of Liberty and Freedom rather than despair at their defeat or destruction, even though his poetry could be used equally powerfully to endorse a more pessimistic position. While we have already seen some characteristic Byronic expressions of his faith in the eventual triumph of Freedom in his writings of 1821, it was during his time in Switzerland that Byron wrote one of his most nihilistic poems, The Prisoner of Chillon, his dramatic monologue about the sixteenth-century figure of François Bonivard, imprisoned in Chillon castle by Charles III of Savoy. The despair of this poem has frequently been misread due to Byron’s prefacing of it with the “Sonnet of Chillon” which he wrote at a slightly later date.11 Even Leslie Marchand conflates not only these two texts but also Byron’s “Prometheus” when he describes Byron composing The Prisoner of Chillon: With dramatic simplicity and deftness in phrasing, he poured out the pathetic story of the Promethean figure of Bonivard, chained to his dungeon pillar and watching his brothers die in their shackles. It became for him as he wrote, and has remained for countless readers since, the embodiment of the “chainless mind” that defies intolerance and tyranny and of the defiant courage of a man willing to suffer for a principle.12 In The Prisoner of Chillon, Bonivard, though chained for much of his recounted history, is by no means Promethean. Lacking the “firm will” of Byron’s lyric-hero so admired by Mazzini, Bonivard is presented as psychologically broken by imprisonment and the deaths of his brothers (a Dantean touch added by Byron). Bonivard has “learned to love Despair” and regards death not as a “victory,” as Byron’s Prometheus does, but as something that “would set me free” (374, 125).13 The final lines of Bonivard’s account suggest a state of mind very different from the triumphal, hard-won defiance of the Titan: My very chains and I grew friends, So much a long communion tends To make us what we are: – even I Regain’d my freedom with a sigh. (391–4)


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As Byron confessed when publishing The Prisoner of Chillon, “When this poem was composed, I was not sufficiently aware of the history of Bonnivard.”14 His “fable” is much more an imaginative study of the psychological effects of imprisonment than a historical account, heavily influenced by the Gothic architecture of the “dungeons deep and old” that shocked him and Shelley on their visit to the castle.15 The latter commented of the dungeon that “I never saw a monument more terrible of that cold and inhuman tyranny, which it has been the delight of man to exercise over man.”16 Shelley’s response to the dungeon is to understand it in historical terms, a “monument” of past events; as he comments earlier in the same letter: “At the commencement of the Reformation, and indeed long after that period, this dungeon was the receptacle of those who shook, or denied the system of idolatry, from the effects of which mankind is even now slowly emerging.”17 For Shelley, the dungeon becomes a symbol of past tyranny and of enlightenment progress. While Byron would make the same point in more jocular vein when revisiting the castle in September with Hobhouse, commenting that after their visit they “returned to Clarens with more freedom than belonged to the 15th Century” (BLJ, 5.98), in The Prisoner of Chillon he makes no attempt to locate Bonivard’s suffering within a wider historical context or narrative, transforming his prisoner into a timeless symbol of the victim of incarceration. Neither Byron nor many of his subsequent readers seem to have been able to allow this unqualified depiction of the breaking of the human spirit through incarceration to remain unqualified. Byron wrote in his note to the poem that, had he known more of Bonivard’s history, “I should have endeavoured to dignify the subject by an attempt to celebrate his courage and virtues.”18 It is this impulse which seems to have informed Byron’s composition of the “Sonnet on Chillon,” as we have seen a poem which has been central to the development of a discourse of freedom and liberty that celebrates the ability of the mind to survive imprisonment, the very opposite of the process described in The Prisoner of Chillon. The sonnet is modeled in part on Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” of 1802, another poem about a political prisoner, the concluding phrase of which—“Man’s unconquerable mind”—Byron echoes in his “chainless mind.”19 Like Wordsworth, Byron finds in the Petrachan sonnet an equivalent for the physical imprisonment that his celebration of mental strength seeks to transcend. It is in this sonnet that Byron makes Bonivard a specifically representative figure. Mentioning him by name only in line 13 of the sonnet, Byron uses Bonivard as an example of a universal and timeless


type, one of the “sons” of “Liberty” whose “martyrdom” “conquers” (2–7). In this celebration of the “Eternal spirit of the chainless mind,” Byron creates a language and lineage for freedom that does indeed find “wings in every wind,” be those wings the writings of Mazzini or Garrison or the speeches of Margaret Thatcher.

The politics of Swiss pastoral and the limits of freedom In his Swiss-period writing, Byron developed a poetics of Freedom that transformed historical remains into fable and personal biography into myth. Much of the continuing political power of the poems he wrote in Switzerland is derived from these modes of representation, with Byron’s conscious construction of the qualities he admires as eternal making them particularly available to later readers and writers. Yet in the final section of this essay, I want to argue that in Switzerland Byron does encounter a possibility of Freedom, albeit one that remains almost entirely personal and that at this period in his life is unable to overcome his sense of despair. The character of Byron’s thinking about the Swiss Confederation in 1816 becomes particularly evident if we contrast his own “Alpine Journal” with the journal of the same tour kept by his friend and travelling companion, John Cam Hobhouse. Byron’s entries occasionally, though very rarely, make reference to the political nature of the territory through which the two friends travelled. For example, on September 20, he comments: “Past the boundaries – out of Vaud – & into Bern Canton – French exchanged for a bad German – the district famous for Cheese – liberty – property – & no taxes” (BLJ, 5.100). Byron’s entry raises a number of interesting issues, not least those of the different languages spoken in different Cantons and the traditional association of Switzerland with liberty, but he takes them no further, concluding, “H[obhouse] went to fish – caught none” (BLJ, 5.100). There is certainly nothing in Byron’s journal to compare with the specific observations about contemporary Switzerland with which Hobhouse peppers his diary, noting, for example, that the Chateau of Chillon is now “a small store for arms & a few cannon & powder belongs to the canton of Vaud,” that “the language of the pays Gesenai of the pay[s] de Vaud is patois French,” and that costumes worn change immediately as one crosses a bridge from the Canton of Bern into Fribourg.20 Hobhouse’s interest in the political specifics of modern Switzerland is best illustrated by his account of a conversation he had with the Swiss guide, Berger, when the two dined without Byron on September 28.


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Berger was from the Canton of Vaud, and it was about the political history of the district that he talked with Hobhouse. Vaud had attained its independence from Bern in 1798 when, influenced by the French Revolution, its people had overthrown the Bernese governor and established the Lemanic Republic. Vaudois leaders such as Frédérick-César de La Harpe welcomed French intervention in Switzerland, and worked with the French to create the Helvetic Republic. Hobhouse describes the conversation as follows: I supped alone & Berger told me about the former state of Pays de Vaud when under the government of Berne. he owned the g[overnment]. to be paternal & attentive to the wants & distresses of the people but keeping up its authority by perpetual & intolerable perquisites – a peasant was not allowed to salt a pig without leave – so that in 1814 when it was supposed Berne would make an attempt to recover her dominions – the very children and women were ready to fight – Napoleon’s arrival prevented the insurrection as probably did it that of the canton of Arg [ :Aargau]. (58) This passage not only illustrates the complexities and potential conflicts within Switzerland but also presents an alternative history of the country to those that stress the destructive role of the French invasion in 1798. As is well known, for many British writers and observers it was this invasion, when “France tainted the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer” as Coleridge put it,21 that became the symbol of the Revolution’s fall from freedom to imperialism. But Berger offers an alternative interpretation of the relationship between France, the Revolution and Switzerland. He argues that, rather than seeing France as a conquering power, its revolutionary influence led to the Canton of Vaud gaining its independence from Bern, and moreover this liberating influence was repeated in 1814 when Napoleon’s return from exile prevents Bern “recovering her dominions.” Berger’s is an account of Swiss history in which Napoleon operates as the guarantor of local identity and desires, rather than as their destroyer. In the “Alpine Journal,” Byron does engage with the issue of Swiss political identity, but he does so in a very different way from Hobhouse’s concern with the linguistic divisions and specific cultural differences between the various Cantons. Rather Byron revives the myth of Switzerland as the natural home of liberty, an idea with a long heritage and an important place in the tradition of British Republican thinking, seen for example in Milton’s reference to “the mountain nymph,


sweet Liberty” in L’Allegro.22 Switzerland held a significant place in Whig thinking; Charles James Fox had visited Switzerland and described it as the natural home of Freedom,23 an idea he may have derived from the Whig travel writer William Coxe who in his Sketches of the Natural, Civic, and Political State of Swisserland (first published in 1779) commented that “Nature designed Switzerland for the seat of freedom” and observed of the characteristics of its inhabitants that “a general simplicity of manners, an open and unaffected frankness, together with an invincible spirit of freedom, may justly be mentioned in the number of these peculiar qualities which dignify the public character of the people, and distinguish them with honour among the nations of Europe.”24 Similarly, Helen Maria Williams in her A Tour of Switzerland presented the country as a kind of spiritual as well as geographical fortress for freedom: [H]ow delightful a transition shall I find in the picture of social happiness which Switzerland presents! I shall no longer see liberty profaned and violated; here she smiles upon the hills, and decorates the vallies, and finds in the uncorrupted simplicity of this people, a firmer barrier than in the cragginess of their rocks, or the snows of their Glaciers.25 Williams’s Tour was published in 1798, the year that saw a significant shift in the meaning of Switzerland in Britain because of the French invasion. Rather than signifying freedom, Switzerland now came to symbolize the imperialism and the aggression of the revolutionary cause. As Patrick Vincent has argued, by the turn of the nineteenth century, the “Swiss idea of Freedom” had become increasingly contested and was an idea through which Cox, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others could negotiate their turn away from their democratic youth.26 Vincent cites the telling example of Coxe, who he shows didn’t update his 1801 edition of Sketches to cover the events of 1798 and after, leaving it as “a memorial of Switzerland in a state of independence, freedom and prosperity, and a contrast to its present state of subjugation and misery.”27 Similarly Wordsworth in his “Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland” of 1806–7 celebrates the Two Voices of the English Sea and the Swiss Mountains as Liberty’s “chosen Music,” before lamenting that the “Tyrant” had driven “Freedom” from “thy Alpine Holds.”28 The examples of Coxe and Wordsworth lend strong support to Ernest Giddey’s claim that at the time of Byron’s residence in Switzerland, “the secular image of a popular and democratic Switzerland . . . is a myth belonging to the past.”29 However, in the “Alpine Journal” Byron writes as if 1798 had never happened, reviving the myth of Switzerland as the


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land of Freedom. In doing so, he follows the structure of his own lines in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, “to me / High mountains are a feeling, but the hum / Of human cities torture” (CHP, 3.103), setting the high emotions and political possibilities of the mountain regions against the humdrum everyday realities of the valley. On September 26, for example, he writes: “Being out of the mountains my journal must be as flat as my journey. – – From Thoun to Bern good roads – hedges – villages – industry – prosperity – and all sorts of tokens of insipid civilization” (BLJ, 5.103). Byron’s sense of the potential alternative to the “tokens of insipid civilization” is well illustrated by his account of climbing to the highest point on the route to Montbovon on September 19. Again Hobhouse’s diary provides a useful context for Byron’s account. For both, the ascent to the summit (or in Byron’s case, to within twenty yards of the summit) produces a sense of vision. For Hobhouse, this vision is essentially geographical and political; he writes “from the top had a view of the lake of Geneva & particularly the north shore with the canton of Vaud laid out like a map – saw the two branches of the Rhone – the mountains of Savoy – the Alps of the Canton of Berne” (42). Byron’s response to the same scene goes beyond this identification of territory to something more like a revelation: The whole of the Mountain superb – the shepherd on a very steep & high cliff playing upon his pipe – very different from Arcadia – (where I saw the pastors with a long Musquet instead of a Crook – and pistols in their Girdles) – our Swiss Shepherd’s pipe was sweet – & his time agreeable. (BLJ, 5.99) Byron develops this vision of Switzerland as more Arcadian than the actual Arcadia in the Greek Peloponnes he had visited in 1810 later in the same paragraph: The music of the Cows’ bells (for their wealth like the Patriarchs is cattle) in the pastures (which reach to a height far above any mountains in Britain –) and the Shepherds’ shouting to us from crag to crag & playing on their reeds where the steeps appeared almost inaccessible, with the surrounding scenery – realized all that I have ever heard or imagined of a pastoral existence – much more so than Greece or Asia Minor – for there we are a little too much of the sabre & musquet order – and if there is a Crook in one hand, you are sure to see a gun in the other – but this was pure and unmixed – solitary – savage and patriarchal. (BLJ, 5.99)


Byron’s sense of the mountain regions of Switzerland as a pastoral idyll, registered primarily as a series of sounds (cow bells, shepherds’ shouts, reeds) is linked to his sense of the political possibility offered by Switzerland; as he comments on the inhabitants of the valley he travels through the following day: “The people looked free and happy and rich (which last implies neither of the former)” (BLJ, 5.100). Byron embodies this vision of Switzerland as uncorrupted and innocent in his descriptions of the women he meets, such as the “very pretty” girl from whom he buys fruit on September 22—“blues eyes – good teeth – very fair – long but good features . . . the expression of her face very mild – but good – and not at all coquettish” (BLJ, 5.100–1). The juxtaposition of Byron’s and Hobhouse’s journals illustrates the extent to which the poet idealizes the inhabitants. For example, Byron describes how, on September 24, “In the evening four Swiss Peasant Girls of Oberhasli came & sang the airs of their country – two of the voices beautiful – the tunes also – they also sing that Tyrolese air and song which you love . . . the airs are so wild & original & at the same time of great sweetness” (BLJ, 5.102). Byron’s rather moving description of a community spontaneously giving voice to its national identity contrasts strongly with Hobhouse’s observations that “one song was about a big belly – this singing was usual as the payment was fixed at 7 francs 10 sous & we heard there was a better singing party at Interlaken”(53–4). In the “Alpine Journal,” Byron idealizes the regions of Switzerland he visits and the people he meets there, embodying what he sees as the country’s pastoral innocence and political identity in its female inhabitants, recalling Helen Maria Williams’s account of the “uncorrupted simplicity of the people” as Switzerland’s greatest protection. Byron makes the politics of this representation of Switzerland as the natural home of freedom explicit in the work which grows out of the Alpine Journal, Manfred. In this lyrical drama, he draws on a number of the journal passages, as when in Act 1 scene 2 Manfred responds to the noise of the “Shepherd’s pipe” as follows: The natural music of the mountain reed – For here the patriarchal days are not A pastoral fable – pipes in the liberal air, Mix’d with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd[.]30 It is through the figure of the Chamois Hunter that Byron articulates the politics of Swiss pastoral; the Hunter describes Manfred’s air as “Proud as a free-born peasant’s” and comments that he would not be of Manfred’s


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order “for the free fame / Of William Tell.”31 In both the “Alpine Journal” and Manfred, then, Switzerland represents a political ideal, yet in neither of these texts is a political vision, no matter how ideal, enough to heal a tortured psychology. In the final entry of the “Alpine Journal,” Byron writes of how the sublime landscape of Switzerland has failed to console him in the face of “the recollections of bitterness” and “home desolation” that drove him from England: neither the music of the Shepherd – the crashing of the Avalanche – nor the torrent – the mountain – the Glacier – the Forest – nor the Cloud – have for one moment – lightened the weight upon my heart – nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty & the power and the Glory – around – above & beneath me. (BLJ, 5.105) For neither Manfred nor Byron is the vision of free-born pastoral existence embodied by the Chamois Hunter enough to lighten the weight upon their hearts or lose their own wretched identity. For Manfred, these aims are perhaps achieved by his death at the drama’s ambivalent end. For Byron, it would require his commitment to the Greek cause, seven years after his sojourn in Switzerland, to enable him to lose his self in the cause of a “Freedom” that his writings and his death would do so much to popularize, finding, in their own way, wings on every wind.

9 Byron: Consistency, Change, and the Greek War Stephen Minta

Meantime, Sir Laureate, I proceed to dedicate In honest, simple verse, this song to you; And if in flattering strains I do not predicate, ’Tis that I still retain my “buff and blue.” (Don Juan, Dedication, lines 129–32)1 The satirical Dedication of Don Juan to Robert Southey was never published in Byron’s lifetime. T. S. Eliot thought it “one of the most exhilarating pieces of abuse in the language.”2 But since the poem was to appear anonymously, Byron agreed to withdraw the Dedication, writing to his publisher, John Murray, on May 6, 1819: “I won’t attack the dog [Southey] so fiercely without putting my name.”3 The above lines, ironically poised (“I make no flattering assertions”), constitute a self-consciously parodic affirmation of political consistency that is yet not without a sense of pride. Buff and blue, the colors of Washington’s army, were associated in England with the Whig Club and the cover of the Edinburgh Review, and they signal the poet’s claim to an unchanging political affiliation, contrasted with what he saw as the political treachery of Southey. The lines, written from Byron’s self-imposed exile in Venice, thus hint both at the internationalism of a revolutionary movement and the parochialism of a national politics. Consistency in politics is a curious desideratum, widely proclaimed and often ferociously defended. It is a quality that often appears to be hostage to unique conventions and expectations, to be, along with the fantasy of romantic love, one of those few areas of human aspiration which escape from the commonsensical view that, since people and situations change, so opinions and feelings must logically change with them. At the age of twenty-five, in a letter to John Murray of 152

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December 27, 1813, Byron had already laid claim to the exceptional nature of his political beliefs: “I never was consistent in anything but my politics . . . my redemption depends on that solitary virtue” (BLJ, 3: 204). Political consistency remains today a privileged arena, one in which getting it right from the start, and apparently never varying, is a sign not of rigidity of mind but integrity of judgement. A couple of lines further on in the Dedication to Don Juan, Byron remarks that, in the contemporary world, “Apostasy’s so fashionable”; and that “to keep one creed’s a task grown quite Herculean,” while in another letter to Murray, written from Rome on May 9, 1817, he explored his antipathy to apostasy, as the basis of his real objections to Southey: I hate all intolerance—but most the intolerance of Apostacy—& the wretched vehemence with which a miserable creature who has contradicted himself—lies to his own heart—& endeavours to establish his sincerity by proving himself a rascal—not for changing his opinions—but for persecuting those who are of less malleable matter—it is no disgrace to Mr. Southey to have written Wat Tyler—& afterwards to have written his birthday or Victory Odes . . . but it is something for which I have no words for this man to have endeavoured to bring to the stake . . . men who think as he thought—& for no reason but because they think so still, when he has found it convenient to think otherwise.—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 . . . I am all for moderation which profession of faith I beg leave to conclude by wishing Mr. Southey damned—not as a poet—but as a politician. (BLJ, 5: 220–1) This is characteristically Byronic. The mind flows on, apparently without effort, without concern for contradiction. He affirms the importance of being able to change one’s opinions, stressing the commonsense view (“or how is truth to be got at?”); at the same time, he expresses his hatred of men like Southey who, in changing their opinions, come to persecute those who do not change, those who are, by implication, superior because of that fact (“who are of less malleable matter”). He concludes the passage with an ironic protestation (“I am all for moderation”), then proceeds to damn Southey as a political animal. Byron’s claims to political consistency are often dismissed, and it is clear that they are, in some senses, only loosely founded. The essay that follows seeks to show, however, that behind his protestations of


an unchanging politics is an evolving pragmatism that is more interesting than consistency; and that, from a twenty-first-century perspective, his temperamental resistance to ideologically driven forms of political action can be seen as productive, not least in terms of the historical conditions in which he made his eventual commitment to the cause of Greece. This essay takes a different line from that of Malcolm Kelsall,4 who summarizes his view of Byron’s political career in entirely negative terms: “[It] is a record of failure ending in inarticulateness . . . He was not fit for the long haul.”5 In Kelsall’s judgment, Byronic myth-building was pure escape, “a form of self-fashioning developed as a compensation for the utter failure, in the real world,” of his political ambition (51). Often implicit or explicit in such negative responses to Byron’s politics is a sense that he was too closely identified, by class and by temperament, with the Whig tradition. The weakness of the Whigs, in the period after the accession of George III, is reflected in the fact that, from 1760 to 1830, they were almost always out of office, as Byron memorably noted in Don Juan: “Nought’s permanent among the human race, / Except the Whigs not getting into place” (DJ, Canto 11, 655–6). The “Whig” argument against any attempt to portray Byron’s politics as progressive can be briefly summarized under three headings. First, that, as with the Whigs in general, the Byronic commitment to an idea of freedom failed to engage with the rise of democratic ideas in the nineteenth century. In this sense, his attitude towards liberty was grounded, in a way that was increasingly anachronistic, in a discourse of freedom that went back to the role of the Whigs in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Whigs saw themselves, self-consciously, as the guarantors of parliamentary liberties, liberties which they firmly believed were inseparable from the ownership of property. The Whig dilemma, from the perspective of hindsight, at least, is well expressed by Leslie Mitchell: As very specialised animals, they [the Whigs] needed a parliamentary environment free of democratic constraints. There was a moment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between autocracy and democracy that might be called the parliamentary period. It alone provided the oxygen which Whigs could breathe freely.6 Byron’s own resistance to the democratic idea is well known. It is rooted instinctually in class and history. In a journal entry, he noted: It is difficult to say whether hereditary right—or popular choice produce the worse Sovereigns . . . It is still more difficult to say which


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form of Government is the worst—all are so bad.—As for democracy it is the worst of the whole—for what is (in fact) democracy? An Aristocracy of Blackguards. (BLJ, 8: 107) As an entry in a private diary (rather than a letter), this insight into Byron’s thinking, just two years before he left Italy for Greece, has authenticity. It explains his desire to read the Greek Revolution in terms that are constitutionalist and nationalist, rather than populist. Next, and closely related to the previous point, it can be said that Byron’s claims to consistency in political matters are unremarkable, given that the Whig position in the period after the French Revolution was only loosely underpinned ideologically. Walter Bagehot noted in 1855 that “[a] great deal of philosophy has been expended in endeavouring to fix and express theoretically the creed of that party [the Whigs] . . . In truth Whiggism is not a creed, it is a character.”7 The Whigs adhered, he suggested, to “a steady belief that the present world can, and should be, quietly improved.” But this is a very diffuse political position. Byron’s commitment to freedom can appear equally diffuse, and always potentially problematic.8 Finally, it can be argued that Byron, sharing again a general Whig perspective, was inherently oppositional in his politics.9 His claim to have been “born for opposition” (DJ, 15.176) would have, in this view, more negative implications than he may have recognized. Reading Byron through the Whig lens can be productive. It helps to situate a range of issues in a distinctive historical context. His defence of Pope,10 for example, is entirely consonant with Whig preferences in literature. At the same time, to see Byron’s cultural and political aspirations as simple extensions of Whig views about the world is unnecessarily reductive.11 Byron approached the idea of change from a variety of perspectives. Change could be a source of simple anxiety, but it was an anxiety that could be potentially tamed by ironic distancing, or by a moreor-less reluctant pragmatism. Finally, in the case of Greece, it could be transformed into a disabused sense of political conviction. The value to be placed on ideological consistency is obviously dependent on historical circumstance. On December 12, 1957, the French/Algerian writer Albert Camus, in Stockholm for the award of the Nobel Prize for literature, addressed a group of students at the university. In the course of a confused debate about the situation in Algeria, he made a remark that was immediately and widely quoted: “Je crois à la justice, mais je défendrai ma Mere avant la justice.”12 In the context of widespread terrorism in Algeria, analyzed by most on the European


Left as the inevitable result of a struggle against French colonial policy, Camus was clearly resistant, willing to place the claims of his own family ahead of the more abstract issue of justice for an entire people. His remark inevitably attracted widespread disdain, for its apparent naivety, or worse. More recently, and very noticeably in the wake of the 9/11 events, the quotation has been frequently repeated, but now with implications that are overwhelmingly favorable. The privileging of the personal over the abstract now reflects a common suspicion with forms of knowledge that appear overly systematic, and this is particularly true at the political level. Byron, like Camus, was not politically naive, but can easily seem so from certain perspectives. He writes, for example, to Douglas Kinnaird, in a letter from Pisa of September 12, 1822: “I want to get a sum together to go amongst the Greeks or Americans—and do some good” (BLJ, 9: 207–8), which seems like the very antithesis of a political position. It is true that Byron’s commitment to Greece was slow to develop and that he never expressed it in anything but the most general terms. But to “do some good” is a language which, by its self-conscious simplicity, offers fewer hostages to fortune than a more abstract, all-encompassing aspiration. By contrast, to “go and fight for freedom in the Greek War of Independence” is a form of expression in which all the key terms (freedom, Greek, War, Independence) are slippery, even though it appears to indicate a seriousness of purpose, an adherence to something outside and beyond the individual, which “doing good” expressly refuses. The fact is that Byron in the end did make a commitment to an idea of Greece, a commitment to change at the political level, which his Whig inheritance made both possible and unlikely. Framing any consideration of political change in Byron’s time was, of course, the inescapable legacy of the French Revolution. There are a number of obvious points to be made here. First, the Revolution, for those who experienced it or who grew up in its aftermath, was unshakeable proof that change is not only something that happens, as part of the inevitability of time’s action, but a force which can be instigated or accelerated by human agency. Change becomes inevitably politicized from the moment it ceases to be mere immutable abstraction. Second, the Revolution demonstrated, for many, an alarming connection between thought and action: what men such as Voltaire or Rousseau said or wrote appeared to have an impact on the streets of Paris. Thought mattered, could not be conceived as separate from any of the other workings of the world.13


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Finally, the psychological aftermath of Revolution colored the writings of a generation. The sense of rootlessness, or of cynical withdrawal, in the face of the attempt by the European powers, after 1815, to reestablish the pre-Revolutionary world order, is everywhere palpable. Alfred de Musset called it “la maladie du siècle.” It surfaces in the dull, reactionary world of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir; in Byron’s “I want a hero”; or in Nerval’s Sylvie: “Ambition . . . did not belong to our age . . . The only refuge that remained for us was that poetic ivory tower, where we climbed ever higher in order to isolate ourselves from the crowd.”14 In the sense of a complete overthrow of the established government of a country, the word “revolution” had been in the English language since the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was immediately applied to the events in France in 1789,15 with a clear sense of the horror of those events, their unusual nature, and the unpredictable future which they implied: The disputes which have for some time past convulsed this neighbouring kingdom, have at length been brought to a crisis, which no man could have foreseen or supposed. The relation of what Paris has been during last week, fills the mind with horror . . . no one can judge where it will have an end.16 The Times here gives the standard view of what Revolution entails: insecurity, fear, blood; all the perils of violent change, the world of the unknown. Reactions to the events in Paris could, however, be radically different. In a letter written at almost the same moment, the Whig leader Charles James Fox expressed the following view: “I say nothing of French News but if I were to begin I should never finish. It is I think by much the greatest Event that has ever happened in the world, and will in all human probability have the most extensive good consequences.”17 Fox had described George Washington in 1800 as his “illustrious friend.” Buff and blue was the uniform of the Fox club.18 Fox believed, at first, that what was at stake in France in 1789 could be compared to the situation in America in 1776, or England in 1688. Though, by 1792, events in France had made such a position untenable, Fox remained convinced that liberty was more threatened by the enemies of the French Revolution than by the Revolution itself; that if freedom abroad were not defended, freedom at home would be the more threatened. It was a view that effectively marginalized him for the rest of his political life.


For Byron, writing only seven months after Fox’s death, the Whig leader appears to be already simply a great name from the past: “Sheridan & Fox . . . these are great names, I may imitate, I can never equal them” (April 2, 1807; BLJ 1:13).19 Byron’s attitude towards the French Revolution in these years is unremarkable. He never engages with the Fox position. For the Byron of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, there is simply a lesson to be learned from the past: But France got drunk with blood to vomit crime, And fatal have her Saturnalia been To Freedom’s cause, in every age and clime[.]20 The term “Saturnalia” is key. It is the lack of constraint that concerns Byron, the sense that judgment has been replaced by a process that refuses any limitation. The language is extreme (“blood,” “vomit,” crime”). A manuscript variant confirms Byron’s conviction here that the example of the French Revolution would never cease to be destructive to the cause of freedom: “And fatal have her Saturnalia been / To that of every coming age and clime”21 For him, it is “vile Ambition” (line 869) that lies at the heart of the problem, along with the very nature of Revolution itself. This is the unpromising context which, for many of Byron’s critics, underlines the limitations of his political thinking. Or, rather, perhaps, suggests that, in relation to the greatest event of the age, Byron did not think politically at all. Radical change, as he reflected on the French experience in Childe Harold, was simply problematic. It is true that he never loses sight of the eventual victory of freedom: “Yet, Freedom! Yet thy banner, torn, but flying / Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind” (CHP, 4.874–5). But unless, by chance, some moderating savior like Washington arises (CHP, 4.860–4), political change seems destined merely to replace one tyranny with another. What freedom might be, still less how it might be achieved, are questions that are not expressed in ways that can be interpreted politically. Liberty is something felt, passionately desired and affirmed. Just as the fear of change is also expressed in a language of passionate anxiety. Speaking again of events in France, in Canto III of Childe Harold, Byron writes: They made themselves a fearful monument! The wreck of old opinions—things which grew Breathed from the birth of time[.] (CHP, 3.770–2)


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The voice is one of deeply committed conservatism. The enemy is, once again, ambition (line 778), the force that invariably destroys and sets in motion an endlessly circular process, the endless renewal of “[d]ungeons and thrones” (line 777). It is only an apparent irony that the passionate intensity of this stanza from Canto III belongs in the context of Byron’s thinking about “wild Rousseau” (line 725) and of Byron’s famously ambiguous attitude towards the man who “knew / How to make madness beautiful” (CHP, 3.729–30). J. Macleod notes that “[f]or Byron, Rousseauian eloquence impassions and brings to life, but ultimately destroys.”22 Byron was well aware of these tendencies in himself and, as Jerome McGann suggests, his search in Canto III is for forms of imaginative vitality and renewal that are not subject to “the destructive and self-lacerating tendencies exemplified in Napoleon and Rousseau.”23 McGann’s resistance, in Fiery Dust, to the idea that Byron’s is a poetry of “radical despair” remains important, not least because of the recognition that there is a “natural development of Byron’s poetry,” from Childe Harold to Don Juan.24 From the perspective of Byron’s politics, there is also a natural development and one whose relationship with the poetry is often ignored. If we pass from the agitated lines of the Rousseau stanzas in Childe Harold, with their accent on the “self-torturing sophist” and “[t]he apostle of affliction” (lines 725–6), to the world of Lambro in Canto III of Don Juan, the change is instructive. Rousseau, Byron acknowledges, acted as he did for the good of his native land: “Did he not this for France? which lay before / Bowed to the inborn tyranny of years?” (CHP, 3.765–6). The tyranny under which France lay was real, the country “[b]roken and trembling” (line 767). The problem was that Rousseau and his contemporaries had overdone it, had roused the nation “to too much wrath” (line 769). In Don Juan, Byron describes Lambro as moving through comparable mental and political space. The implied results are equally problematic, but the anguish is gone, and the self-identification, which is so clear in the Rousseau stanzas, is gone too, to be replaced by the distancing of an irony which is not yet all ironic: “His country’s wrongs and his despair to save her / Had stung him from a slave to an enslaver” (DJ, 3.423–4). The reader here is not invited to dwell too long on the implications of what it means to move from being slave to enslaver, to have been transformed by the effects of your country’s wrongs into a monster. The rhyme “save her / enslaver” is placed to amuse the reader with the recognition of art and artifice; the horror of the truth is still contained within the lines, but the poetry denies the


reader the full natural expression of indignation, pulls back from the brink of “too much wrath.” As Byron reaches in Don Juan towards the greater inclusiveness of epic, one of the issues that is implicitly under review is the very nature of emotion itself and its relationship to action and decision. Here all the complexities of consistency and commitment are in play. The paradox to be confronted is simple: on the one hand, consistency is hard to envisage divorced from some systematic mode of thought capable of validating everyday acts. On the other hand, Byron’s natural temperament is mistrustful of the systematic, unwilling to privilege it over the emotions. The tensions can be well observed in the area that Byron calls “passion.” “Passion,” as Byron had become well aware, “punishes him who feels it, more than those whom the Passionate would excruciate”25 At the same time, “poetry is in itself passion—and does not systematize.— It assails—but does not argue—it may be wrong—but it does not assume pretensions to Optimism.—” (“Observations,” 178–9). Passion, like poetry, is directness, and by its directness moves ahead of the rational mind’s desire for the illusory coherence of the systematic. Part of what makes the world as it is, for good and bad, is its irreducibility, its refusal to be known in its entirety. While poetry can hint at a kind of theoretical entirety, as Byron suggests in Childe Harold IV: “Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break / To separate contemplation, the great whole” (CHP, 4.1405–6), it is implicit that each moment of illumination might well be faulty, or in need of subsequent revision, in an extending hall of mirrors. As McGann suggests: “The basic issue of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is how . . . to wed imagination to objective reality”.26 In some famous lines from Don Juan XVI, we find Byron still thinking about this potential impasse, but the tone is, again, wry, witty, displacing the apparent authorial intimacy of Childe Harold with the disconcerting challenge of a poet who has already acknowledged that he is dealing in what is “false— though true.” Half playfully, half seriously, Byron offers a way out of the impasse: “for surely they’re sincerest, / Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest” (DJ, 16.23–4). But of course, this could only be a way out if the emotions could be trusted. To this stanza from Don Juan (no. 97), Byron added a note that is equally famous, on the subject of “mobility.” E. H. Coleridge commented that “mobility” for Byron was “the capability of being moved by many and various impressions, of responding to an everrenewed succession of impulses.” Byron, he suggested, was, “defending


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the enthusiastic temperament from the charge of inconstancy and insincerity.”27 In the note, Byron himself defined “mobility” as “an excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions” (CPW, 5.769). He says the word is borrowed from French and “is expressive of a quality which rather belongs to other climates.” In Byron’s usage, “mobilité” is now archaic in French. The sense is well represented in the following passage, dated March 1, 1805, from the Intimate Journals of Benjamin Constant: “Il y a certainement une sorte de mobilité d’imagination, de susceptibilité d’impressions vagues et mélancoliques, qui n’appartient pas au commun des hommes et dans laquelle le commun des hommes ne peut voir que de l’affectation.”28 Constant says that he himself has this quality of imagination, but keeps it carefully hidden (“je la cache soigneusement”), while Byron counts the possession of mobility “a most painful and unhappy attribute.” Thomas Moore was clear about the relationship between the reflections on mobility and Byron’s politics. Byron, he wrote, “was fully aware not only of the abundance of this quality in his own nature, but of the danger in which it placed consistency and singleness of character . . . The consciousness . . . of his own natural tendency to yield thus to every chance impression . . . had the effect of keeping him in that general line of consistency, on certain great subjects, which . . . he continued to preserve throughout life (CPW, 5.769). This is as shrewd a comment on Byron’s politics as any. It is no surprise that Byron’s companion in Greece, Pietro Gamba, reported that Byron had “a great dread of being taken for a searcher after adventures.”29 Byron understood the attraction, even the necessity, of experience directly mediated: “poetry . . . is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earth-quake” (BLJ, 3:179). He also understood that life could not be lived as a continuum of intense sense impressions: “I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake or an eternal fever” (BLJ, 8:146). What happens between the gaps, in the spaces between moments of lived intensity, is the Byronic challenge. Here the problem of consistency is implicitly raised in radical terms. What might consistency be, how could it survive, under the pressure of the momentary sensation, the mind and body’s spontaneous response to external stimuli? Behind it all, there is the constant fear of “inaction’s sluggish yoke,” which, as Robert Gleckner noted, haunts many of Byron’s poetic personae.30 In political terms, there is an obvious paradox. Without the directness


of sensation, an immediate openness to the claims of others, and the passionate ability to empathize, there is no beginning of political consciousness in the Byronic sense. Immediacy is the insurance against inaction. But that same sensibility which enables identification with the pain of others is potentially promiscuous and unanchored. When Byron faced the House of Lords in February 1812 and made his speech on the Frame Work Bill, he found an easy language of outrage: “is there not blood enough upon your penal code? that more must be poured forth to ascend to heaven & testify against you?” (CMP, 26). While in his enthusiasm for Italian political change in 1821, he found a similar language of passionate engagement in the pure moment of a political present: “The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end” (BLJ, 8: 26).31 By the time of his return to Greece, Byron had almost completely divorced himself from that kind of language, while in the most famous lines he ever wrote on Greece, he shows full awareness of the unreliability of sentiment in relation to political consistency. The “isles of Greece” passage (DJ, 3, lines 689–784) is undeniably moving. It is entirely self-contained, internally consistent, as its appearance in numerous anthologies confirms. It is eloquent in its commitment to an idea of Greek freedom (“I dream’d that Greece might still be free”), and the political advice that it offers is sound: “Trust not for freedom to the Franks—[.]” When put back into its context in the poem, however, the political insecurity of the passage is immediately clear. The lines are, ostensibly, sung by a poet who is steeped in the art of a nationalist poetics: Thus, usually, when he was ask’d to sing, He gave the different nations something national; ’Twas all the same to him—“God save the king,” Or “Ça ira,” according to the fashion all; His muse made increment of any thing . . . (DJ, 3.673–7) “Increment” here has the sense of “profit” (Oxford English Dictionary, “increment” 4.a). The ability to move an audience, to offer political advice and a consistent view, are real achievements, but they are also talents available for hire. The Muse can serve any cause so long as the technique is sound and the price is right. There ought to be a vast gulf between “God save the king” and “Ça ira,” but the internal evidence of the poem will not necessarily reveal it.


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This recognition could lead in various directions. Towards ironic detachment or a defensive cynicism; or towards political disenchantment or despair. There are elements of all these reactions in Byron, but the predominant resolution he seeks is through pragmatism and a resistance to the temptations of ideological sophistication. It is in this sense that we can understand the apparent naivety of his idea about going to “do some good” in Greece. In wider terms, it enables us to understand the development of his attitude towards revolutionary change. From the dark lamentations of Childe Harold III in 1816 (“They made themselves a fearful monument!”) to the disabused acceptance of revolution in the “Appendix” to The Two Foscari of 1821: Acts—acts on the part of government . . . have caused the past convulsions, and are tending to the future. I look upon such as inevitable, though no revolutionist . . . Born an aristocrat, and naturally one by temper, with the greater part of my present property in the funds, what have I to gain by a revolution? . . . But that a revolution is inevitable, I repeat. The government may exult over the repression of petty tumults; these are but the advancing waves repulsed and broken for a moment on the shore, while the great tide is still rolling on and gaining ground with every breaker. (CPW, 6.223–4). What governments do, Byron argues, leads to inevitable consequences, which is, of course, untrue. But he comes close here to accepting, in a way that Camus never did, the existence of a tide of history and the importance of not being overtaken by it. Tyranny in England, he believed, could only be brought to an end by radical change. “I certainly lean towards a republic—all history—and experience is in it’s favour even the French” (BLJ, 8: 240). He had deep reservations about what radical change might entail, and a continuing anxiety about the kinds of people associated with it (“I can’t approve of the ways of the radicals—they seem such very low imitations of the Jacobins” (ibid.).32 But such change is no longer linked to a sense of its inevitably tragic consequences. In an interesting, blustering letter to Augusta Leigh of January 2, 1820, Byron gives a context to his ideas about action in a time of crisis. He talks about a potential economic collapse in Britain, which would threaten the security of his investment in government funds: [I]f I can believe the papers, the very members of government are transferring property to the French funds . . . if the funds were to go,


you do not suppose that I would sit down quietly under it: no, in that case I will make one amongst them, if we are to come to civil buffeting . . . if I do take a part, it will be such a one as my opinion of mankind, a temper not softened by what it has seen and undergone, a mind grown indifferent to pursuits and results . . . without ambition, because it looks upon all human attempts as conducting to no rational or practicable advantage, would induce me to adopt. (BLJ, 7: 14–15) This is driven by a commitment, explicitly stated later in the same letter, “to preserve what remains of the fortunes of our house.” Byron recognizes, implicitly, the logic of a passionate defence of self-interest, in situations where a man is “forced to act from necessity.” But he adds, revealingly: “There is nothing which I should dread more than to trust to my own temper.” Action in defence of self-interest is notoriously unreadable by the actor. Action on behalf of others, where there is no “necessity” to act—as in the case of Byron’s intervention in Greece—is potentially no less problematic, and Byron appears to have believed that the only reliable approach to the Greek situation was to maintain that pragmatic and sceptical attitude of a man “without ambition.” The Greek War of Independence began in March, 1821. In Greek, the event or process is called the Ellinikí Epanástasi (the Hellenic Revolution). Before the outbreak of war, “there was no clearly defined concept of the nation state among Greeks.”33 The uprising was influenced or driven by different groups, both from within Greece and from the Greek Diaspora. Often these groups had little in common. Where some may have fought for an idea of a national state, others did so on a much more local or regional basis, to rid themselves of Turkish oppression, with no clear sense of what might lie beyond that. Inevitably, given the circumstances of the war, there was always going to be a contradiction between the aim that Byron set himself when he returned to Greece and the realities he found there. “I did not come here to join a faction but a nation,” he wrote in his Kefalonia Journal (BLJ, 11: 32). What he encountered was a nation in the process of constructing itself, not a nation achieved. The problems he was to face in Greece stemmed entirely from this situation and were compounded by the fact that from November, 1823, to June, 1824, the country was engaged in civil war.34 Malcolm Kelsall’s view, one that is widely shared, is that Byron’s return to Greece is of little interest. He minimizes Byron’s Greek contribution by decoupling it from the work: since Byron produced almost no poetry in the final months in Greece, “the tragic adventure


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is of little concern.” Politically, too, Byron’s arrival in Greece in 1823 should be considered as “of no intrinsic importance.”35 Clearly it is possible to construct a narrative of Byron’s return to Greece that stresses the quixotic, the chance, the misinformed. The first mention in his correspondence of the idea of a return is in the postscript to a letter to Lady Byron of September 14, 1821. It could hardly be called politically committed: “At present I am going into Tuscany—and if the Greek business is not settled soon—shall perhaps go up that way” (BLJ, 8: 211). It took him almost two years to go “up that way,” and the chain of events that finally brought him there was dependent as much on coincidence as volition. He arrived with little sense of what he had come to do and, as soon as he reached Kefalonia, early in August, 1823, he realized that there was almost certainly nothing that he could do, given the deteriorating political situation on the Greek mainland. To Charles Napier, on September 9, 1823, he wrote: “I believed myself on a fool’s errand from the outset” (BLJ, 11: 20). None of this is promising. At the same time, the ability to play a poor hand is a significant one and Byron, once he had overcome his initial sense of despair, got most of the important political issues right. His natural inclination towards a constitutional settlement for Greece was sound. Such a solution was always likely to be more plausible than a military one. He recognized the importance of the international context in securing Greek freedom, saw that the Greeks themselves could never win their struggle unaided. As a corollary, he understood the importance of presenting the Greek uprising as nationalist, rather than revolutionary. He had recognized, before he returned to Greece, that the key problem for the nascent state was the insolvency of the centre and he had voiced his support for a raising of a loan on the London market.36 The first installment of the eventual loan arrived after Byron’s death, but it was the crucial element in bringing to an end the first Greek civil war. Finally, while some have argued that he merely prevaricated in the five months after arriving in Kefalonia, the long period of waiting finally enabled him to join forces with the Greek leader Mavrokordatos in Mesolongi. Mavrokordatos, for all his failings, was the Greek political leader who most closely mirrored Byron’s political aspirations. There is much, therefore, in Byron’s response to the Greek situation that represented the natural evolution of his politics. When he was first in Greece, in 1809–11, his views on Greek freedom were clear: “The Greeks will never be independent; they will never be sovereigns as heretofore, and God forbid they ever should! but they may be subjects without being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they


are free and industrious, and such may Greece be hereafter” (CPW, 2: 201). By 1823, he had shifted his views on colonies in general and Greece’s freedom in particular. He had moved towards an acceptance of republicanism.37 Above all, he had been able to respond to ideas of change; not necessarily with enthusiasm, but with a recognition of their importance and, perhaps, their inevitability. The correspondence from Greece is notable for its lack of abstraction. Byron was concerned with local issues, humanitarian and administrative, while he and Mavrokordatos waited on larger events. He often calls the Greek War the “Cause,”38 but the vocabulary of freedom, independence, still less of triumphalism, almost never intrudes. Moreover, Byron’s position is the more impressive given the immense pressures he faced: he was able to resist the ideological blandishments of men like Leicester Stanhope39 and the wild hagiography of men as different from each other as Mavrokordatos40 and Frank Hastings.41 His approach is, finally, pragmatic, without illusion, but it is also fundamentally committed, politically: “[W]hile I can stand at all—I must stand by the Cause.— —When I say this—I am at the same time aware of the difficulties—and dissensions—and defects of the Greeks themselves— but allowances must be made for them by all reasonable people” (BLJ, 11: 131).

10 “I have a penchant for black”: Race and Orphic Dismemberment in Byron’s The Deformed Transformed and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace Jonathan Gross

“I should like to know ‘who’ has been carried off except poor dear ‘me,’ ” Byron wrote to his publisher, when accused of mistreating women. “—I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan war.”1 The comparison is suggestive, for it links him to a tradition of men pursued and even dismembered by women, especially Pentheus in The Bacchae and Orpheus in Virgil’s Georgics. In Don Juan, Byron continued the Orphic theme. He depicted his hero not as the legendary seducer but as the passive medium of female desire. Thus Juan is ravished by Don Alfonso’s wife, procured by Gulbeyaz, and man-handled by Catherine. Long after Byron dies, his head continues its song. Byron is dead, Tennyson carves on a rock.2 Long live Byron. The proof of Byron’s ability to live beyond those who destroyed him is too obvious to be rehearsed here. In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus defends Byron’s reputation, offering only one example of how “Byron” (the man, the word, the hero) became a talisman for rebellion, resistance, and death. If one looks at his plays, it is remarkable how many metamorphoses Byron’s hero undergoes. In Manfred, he stages not one but two suicides; in Sardanapalus, the hero leaps into a funeral pyre to be followed, one presumes, by Myrrha. Byron’s heroes, like Arnold in The Deformed Transformed, long to return to the dust from which they came, to “Pour forth . . . This hateful compound of her atoms” (1.1.61).3 167


*** We begin then, with the ending: dismemberment. The Greek term is sparagmos4 (literally tearing, rending). It relates directly to the Orpheus legend. Virgil’s Georgics provides a poetic account of how Orpheus, punished by the Maenads for disrupting their rites, was torn apart. But Thracian women, riled by his heedlessness invading their nocturnal rites, their god-drunken revels, ripped his young body to pieces and flung them hither and yon. Virgil, Georgics (523–5)5 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Orpheus is also torn limb from limb. The Maenads punish him for his musical gift, his preference for young boys, his faithfulness to his wife. Perhaps all three. In any case, The poet’s limbs lay scattered Where they were flung in cruelty or madness, But Hebrus River took the head and lyre.6 Ovid, Metamorphoses (11.48–50) Orpheus’ sparagmos is the necessary condition for his song: “the tongue murmured / In mournful harmony, and the banks echoed / The strains of mourning” (Metamorphoses 11.53–5). This process of echoing back becomes an important part of the Orpheus legend. From this act of violence, Orpheus emerges as a gifted lyric poet, who lives on after his death. In the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke answers Ovid in two sonnet “series” that capture the importance of sparagmos to the Byron story. Oh you lost god! You everlasting clue! Because hate finally dismembered, scattered You, now we’re merely nature’s mouth and ears.7 Worshippers of nature become an audience to Nature’s song, an aural reminder of Orpheus’ dismemberment, a term whose Latin etymology (dis = “apart”; member = “limb”) evokes exactly the fate of Orpheus at the hands of the Maenads. For Byron, the acts of ritualized violence that beset Orpheus were equally important.8

“I have a penchant for black” 169

Byron’s Sparagmos Byron’s sparagmos is such a compelling part of his “life and legend” that Fiona McCarthy’s most recent biography of the poet reintroduces a story rejected by previous writers as apocryphal.9 On June 15, 1938, a group professing concern that the remains of the sixth Lord Byron “were no longer there, but had been mysteriously spirited away” (among other allegations), allegedly visited the Byron family vault at Hucknall Torkard, near Nottingham, with crowbars in hand. After opening the last of the three coffins in which the embalmed body had been placed, they were able to look upon the well-preserved corpse of Shelley’s “pilgrim of eternity,” lying defenseless in his shroud, and to take excited notes, one churchwarden being particularly struck by what seemed to him the “abnormal” size of the dead poet’s “sexual organ.” Taking stock of Byron’s “member,” the visitors re-member his body, viewing that which was dis-membered. Fame leads to dismemberment. A person’s reputation is built up by gazettes which are “cloyed with cant,” to use Byron’s phrase, only to be destroyed by these same newspapers, the Moniteur and Courier. Dismembered. To be torn apart, oddly enough, is a strange way to be “remembered.” The theme emerges early in his correspondence. Byron wrote about how “Lord Guilford died of an inflammation of the bowels; so they took them out, and sent them (on account of their discrepancies), separately from the carcass, to England. Conceive a man going one way, and his intestines another, and his immortal soul a third! was there ever such a distribution?” (April 11, 1817; BLJ, 5: 210). Two years later, on June 7, 1819, he wrote to Hobhouse that “I trust they won’t think of ‘pickling, and bringing me home to clod or Blunderbuss Hall’. I am sure my Bones would not rest in an English grave—or my Clay mix with the earth of that Country:—I believe the thought would drive me mad on my death-bed, could I suppose that any of my friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back to your soil.—I would not even feed your worms—if I could help it” (BLJ, 6: 149). Prepared to sacrifice his life for the Greek cause, he found mostly selfish individuals clamoring after the remains of his dismembered estate. The hacking and hewing of his body by physicians, the separation of his body into compartments and tins,


fulfills his prophecy that he would undergo a divine dismemberment. That this dismemberment was inevitable is my point; its Orphic quality is inseparable from the poet’s view of his vocation. Byron’s sparagmos, after all, was as literary as it was literal: a spate of Byronic imitators and puritanical censors rended him like modern maenads. Their novels, plays, and biographies fail to do justice to the poet, whose Orphic head sings on despite the best efforts of his friends and publisher to silence him. Byron wrote to John Murray, You are right—Gifford is right—Crabbe is right—Hobhouse is right— you are all right—and I am all wrong—but do pray let me have that pleasure.—Cut me up root and branch—quarter me in the Quarterly—send round my “disjecti membra poetae” like those of the Levite’s Concubine—make—if you will—a spectacle to men and angels—but don’t ask me to alter for I can’t. (August 12, 1819; BLJ, 6: 207) Byron imagines himself as the Levite’s concubine, a woman who has been violated (literally gang-raped), and whose poem/body is distributed in twelve pieces throughout Israel (Judges 19:10–20:48). Byron begins with a reference to scattered literary remains, from Horace’s disjecti membra poetae (“limbs of a dismembered poet”), but quickly switches to the biblical, thus merging medieval (“quarter me in the Quarterly”), Roman (Horace), Greek (Orpheus), and biblical (Levite’s concubine) acts of dismemberment, though no literal cannibalism is suggested in the biblical passage. As Byron sees it, his critics try to violate him (as Judges would have it), but he refuses to be so dominated and substitutes his whore of a poem instead, offering to parcel it out to his London critics in place of his own body. The allusion to Orpheus’ “disjecti membra poetae” underscores the poetic allegory. Invoking a Hebraic (and rather salty) source, Byron refuses to let his Christian critics make “Canticles” of his cantos (April 6, 1819; BLJ, 6: 105). Byron’s proffered (then rescinded) selfmutilation is even evident in the manuscript history of The Deformed Transformed, the first draft of which Byron allegedly threw into the fire upon hearing Shelley’s critique (CPW, 6: 726). Byron commented upon his own sparagmos before it happened. He worried about the fate of “old Egypt’s King / Cheops [who] erected the first pyramid” and how “somebody or other rummaging, / Burglariously broke his coffin’s lid: / Let not a monument give you or me hopes, / Since not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops” (DJ, 1.219; see BLJ, 6: 99). As he continued the poem, he wondered whether “a man’s name in a bulletin / May


make up for a bullet in his body?” (CPW DJ, 7:21:lns. 161–2). And even then posterity was uncertain: “I knew a man whose loss / Was printed Grove, although his name was Grose” (8:18:lns. 143–4). Byron’s narrator acknowledges that the gazettes dismember language itself, omitting letters and thereby altering historical memory. Letters circulate through the medium of what Andrew Stauffer has described as “uncertain paper.”10 Posthumous obits inspire Byron to contemplate his own Orphic destiny. In the underworld, after all, one attains an Orphic perspective.

Byron and Sartre’s Black Orpheus Byron anticipated Sartre and distinguished himself from his Romantic contemporaries by imagining an Orphic-like role he might play in Africa, rescuing oppressed Eurydices in Pluto’s realm. “I sometimes wish I was the Owner of Africa,” Byron wrote in Detached Thoughts, “to do at once, what Wilberforce will do in time, viz—sweep Slavery from her desarts, and look upon the first dance of their Freedom.”11 According to Sartre’s Black Orpheus, it would not be a pretty sight. “What would you expect to find, when the muzzle that has silenced the voices of black men is removed?” Sartre asks. “That they would thunder your praise? When these heads that our fathers have forced to the very ground are risen, do you expect to read adoration in their eyes?”12 In Black Orpheus, Sartre argues that it is the black man’s search within himself that makes him Orphic. Sartre compares him to Orpheus rescuing Eurydice. “And I shall name this poetry ‘Orphic’ because this untiring descent of the Negro into himself causes me to think of Orpheus going to reclaim Eurydice from Pluto,” he writes.13 This inwardness, this existential journey, allows Sartre’s Africans, Haitians, and other groups to overcome the discrimination they have suffered. For Sartre, blackness is the new authenticity, born of postcolonial struggle. “Being is black, being is of fire, we are accidental and remote,” he writes.14 “We have to justify for ourselves our customs, our techniques, our ‘undercooked’ paleness, our verdigris vegetation.” But Sartre suggests that this sense of privilege must be surrendered. “If we wish to escape this fate which closes in upon us, we can no longer count upon the privilege of our race, of our color, of our techniques. We shall be able to rejoin the human hegemony only in tearing off our white underclothing and in attempting simply to be men.”15 Sartre used his introduction to Black Orpheus to shape his readers’ response to black writers subjected to colonialism. “If, these poems give


us shame, it is not with that conscious purpose; they have not been written for us.”16 There are other instances of plays and poems that have been written for white readers, but whose very subject has somehow become invisible.

Byron’s Deformed Transformed Critics have avoided any discussion of the racial subject of Byron’s The Deformed Transformed. Even the standard edition of his works does not gloss the racial reference in Byron’s stage directions: “a tall black man comes towards him” (DT, 1.1.81; CPW, 6: 734).17 Recent studies mention Joshua Pickersgill’s The Three Brothers, M. G. Lewis’s “The Wood-Demon,” Goethe’s Faust, Plutarch’s life of Caesar, Calderon’s The Magician Prodigioso, and The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini as sources for Byron’s drama, but they do not account for what Byron invents. In fact, Byron’s black Mephistopheles represents an entirely new use of the Faust legend, combining it in interesting ways with Shakespeare’s Tempest and Caliban (another slavish wood gatherer, like the wood demon in M. G. Lewis’s play).18 In doing so, he turns his play into an untold history of race in the New and Old World, whose ships of commerce and human cargo all connect back to Africa. “The habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous liberal gesture,” Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark, but “a criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal’ but also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist.”19 In the opening scene of The Deformed Transformed, Byron uses Arnold’s suicide attempt to highlight racial themes. By calling himself a “reptile,” and anticipating a self-induced sparagmos that “new worms” can feed upon, Arnold indulges in a form of self-loathing: “take / The shape of any reptile save myself, / And make a world for myriads of new worms!” (60–1), he says. At this point, “a tall black man comes towards him” (1.1.81), emerging from a fountain which recalls M. G. Lewis’s The Wood Demon (1.2). Daniel Watkins correctly points out that “this entire scene is farcical, a devil–man encounter only because Arnold insists on making it one.”20 More than Goethe, Byron humanizes Mephistopheles, historicizing him as a racial type, all too used to be called the devil when he is no such thing. Arnold is a racist, though a hunchback, and his tendency to judge by appearances makes him every bit his mother’s son, abusing others as she abused him. Arnold’s backtracking is familiar to anyone accused of racism (“I said not / You were the demon,” he tells


the insulted party, “but that your approach / Was like one.”) but the stranger astutely questions Arnold’s assumption. STRANGER: look upon the fountain, And then on me, and judge which of us twain Looks likest what the boors believe to be Their cloven-footed terror. (DT, 1.1.96–101) The devil facetiously reminds Arnold that he is made in God’s image. Even the buffalo and camel bear their deformities with greater grace than Arnold. After Arnold unwisely chooses Achilles’ form to substitute for his own, he urges the stranger to make a similarly superficial choice: “Surely he who can command all forms will choose the highest, / Something superior even to that which was / Pelides now before us” (363–5). But the stranger does not think like Arnold. “Less will content me”; he says, “Your aspect is dusky,” Arnold responds gratuitously, “but not uncomely” (368–71). STRANGER. If I chose, I might be whiter; but I have a penchant For black—it is so honest, and besides Can neither blush with shame nor pale with fear: But I have worn it long enough of late, And now I’ll take your figure. (DT, 1.1.368–77) The Stranger chooses his color deliberately, even though Arnold thinks Paris and Apollo are “still higher” choices: “it is so honest,” as he puts it. There are numerous, almost overdetermined, references to blackness throughout the play. “Let him alone,” Charles Bourbon says of Caesar, the hunchback; “he’s brave, and he has / Been first, with that swart face and mountain shoulder, / In field or storm, and patient in starvation” (1.2.251–4). For some reason the hunchback bears a double figure of blackness and deformity, for Caesar is described as “swart” (252) even after he assumes Arnold’s presumably white if deformed body.21 Is Caesar/Arnold’s swart appearance an oversight on Byron’s part, or a clever suggestion that one’s identity, not to mention one’s race, can never be entirely disowned—by Arnold or by the black “Stranger”? By making Caesar “swart,” by taking on the forms of hunchbacks but retaining his black appearance, the devil shows how the burden of the negative, that which is cancelled, is nevertheless preserved.22


Arnold and the Stranger mount their horses, ready to begin their adventures, and they name their steeds Huon and Memnon. Charles Robinson notes that “Byron certainly recognized that the Ethiopian, Memnon, a son of Eos and brother of Phosphor or ‘Lucifer’, was slain by Achilles in the Trojan War. Thus this allusion to Memnon (an oblique reflection of the diabolical Caesar with the ‘swart face’) who had been slain by Achilles prepares for the destruction of Caesar (and consequently Arnold) by the new Achilles, Arnold himself.”23 Later the “black swans” who sing inspire Caesar to praise Arnold’s learned reference in equally racial terms: “And why should they not sing as well as swans?” Caesar asks, “They are black ones, to be sure” (1.2.97–8). In a third reference to color, Byron underscores the fact that the soldiers were called the “black bands” after the “Black banditti.” The point is not simply the historical reference to the “Black Bands of Giovanni de’Medici,” though the subject of mercenary soldiers underscores Byron’s theme of self-betrayal. Byron also uses metonymy as a poetic figure to contrast “The Black Bands” with the white “Alps” they cross. The Black Bands came over The Alps and their snow, With Bourbon, the Rover, They past the broad Po. We have beaten all foemen, We have captured a king, We have turned back on no men, And so let us sing! (DT, 1.2.123–30) The puns on black, back, and mountain are central to the verbal play of the drama and underscore the stranger’s race. The word “back,” for example, echoes Arnold’s mother’s complaint that he is a burden on her back; even her name, Bertha, underscores the burden she bore in bearing Arnold (and the load of wood he now carries as her degenerate offspring and slave). Later Caesar boasts of his broad back, his swart face and mountain back, which Bourbon always sees because he is rarely the first in the fray. Arnold’s deformity, decried by his abusive mother, is transformed into a symbol of his heroism when worn proudly by the Stranger. In vain does Bourbon try to imitate Caesar. Charles Bourbon is mowed down by the artillery, with his white scarf a symbol both of his race and of his ostentation to be the first to climb the ladder to storm the castle. The racial drama of white and black—the “white scarf” he wears “over his armour” (DT, 2.1. stage direction CPW, 6: 552) that becomes a bloody tourniquet for Arnold (2.2.54; CPW, 6: 561), Olympia’s virginal


appearance by the white altar where she embraces a “massive crucifix” which she uses to dash a man’s brains out (2.3.64) while taunting him to “Respect your God!” (61), and the white carrara marble sculpted by Benvenuto Cellini (DT, 2.2.40)—continues throughout the drama.24 In the second scene of The Deformed Transformed, Caesar links Arnold to a naive American view of itself as part of the new world, free of the scourge of racism. Like Arnold, the new world mistakenly believes it can throw off the racism of the old: a new world order to use George H. Bush’s term, or a post-racial society to use a term applied to explain Barack Obama’s election.25 When Caesar calls France, “Lady of the Old World,” Arnold, anxious to know everything, jumps to attention. “How old?” he asks, “What! Are there New worlds?” “To you,” Caesar replies. “You’ll find there are such shortly, By its rich harvests, new disease, and gold”; (DT, 1.2.8–10) The bitter truth of Byron’s play is that the New World is nothing more than “new disease, and gold” (12) transported from England and Europe. The theme of racism and reversal continues when Arnold calls the Stranger a slave, echoing the words his mother used to describe him (2.3.134–9). When Caesar tries to revive Olimpia and Arnold becomes jealous, Arnold calls him a “Slave!,” and Caesar responds by reminding him that In the victor’s Chariot—when Rome triumph’d— There was a Slave of yore—to tell him truth— You are a Conqueror—command your Slave.— (3.577.90–2) Caesar was a name used for dog, so when Arnold calls him “dog” earlier in the play it is with this verbal play in mind (1.2.19). In Don Juan, Byron presents slaves as those of every shivering nation; in Don Juan Baba, a black eunuch, procures Juan as a sex slave for a woman Gulbeyaz (another reversal). Similarly, in The Deformed Transformed, Byron shows that Lutherans are no better than the Catholics they massacre (DT, 2.3.45–51), nor are the Goths like Alaric superior to the Romans whose city they sacked. The walls of Rome contain a circus of conquerors who think that they are practicing statecraft which, from Caesar’s perspective, is nothing more than bloodshed. As Toni Morrison notes, “black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them.”26 This


is certainly true of Byron’s “stranger” in The Deformed Transformed. The African, the hunchback, the deformed become transformed in Byron’s play into heroic figures whose actions have been left out of history’s lying record. In this sense, Byron’s The Deformed Transformed shows him to be postcolonial avant la lettre. Like Orpheus, Byron gave voice to the silenced and his muse gives them life. Byron’s historical dramas performed that work admirably, even if some of their racial inflections have not always been noticed.

“Byron,” Byron, and Lurie in Disgrace One place where Byron’s relationship to race is evident is J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Though the novel has received much attention, few have discussed how Byron functions in the context of South Africa. “Why—in this many-storied novel—are critics not turning to Byron as the focus of their attention?” Kai Easton asks.27 What did Coetzee gain by having his hero align himself with Byron? In one sense, “Byron,” in Coetzee’s text, comes to stand for English literature itself, which is obsolete in the modern, technical university. English departments have given way to Communications programs. David Lurie’s dismissal from his job is part of this process. His replacement hangs a poster of Lois Lane berating Superman, a symbol of his emasculation in the new academy. In another sense, Byron is a byword not for romanticism so much as for rebellion. David Lurie’s views about eros and love, his disrespect for institutions and procedures, or “parliamentary mummeries” [November 14, 1813; BLJ, 3: 206]) as Byron put it, is clearly evident in his dismissal by the academic board, and his self-destructive behavior echoes Byron’s manner when haranguing the House of Lords (March 5, 1812; BLJ, 3: 24). As Byron left England, his wife, and daughter, Lurie abandons Cape Town, his ex-wife Rosalind, and his daughter surrogate Melanie (who he sleeps with, on the second occasion, in Lucy’s old room). For Byron, a self-imposed exile helped him achieve greatness in his art (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, III and IV, and Don Juan, Cantos 1 and 2); for Lurie, it is less promising. Lurie’s opera that began as a celebration of Byron’s love for Teresa Guiccioli turns into a grim, slapstick routine. Though it is tempting to see Lurie as Byron, the fact remains that they have very little in common.28 Lurie’s distance from Byron is obvious in the scene in which he teaches Lara: He stood a stranger in this breathing world, An erring spirit from another hurled;


A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped By choice the perils he by chance escaped.29 Though Lurie would like to keep the part of Byron to himself in this drama, Coetzee cleverly shifts perspectives on Lurie, inviting readers to view first the stranger, then Lurie, then Melanie’s leather-clad boyfriend as “stranger[s] in this breathing world” (a word repeated four times in two pages; Disgrace, 32–3). Ironically, Byron also describes Lucifer as a “stranger” in The Deformed Transformed, a reference with particular significance in South Africa, where race is so contested. The next passage Lurie glosses is no less suggestive in showing Lurie’s distance from Byron, for it foretells Lurie’s path of repentance: He could At times resign his own for others’ good, But not in pity, not because he ought, But in some strange perversity of thought, That swayed him onward with a secret pride To do what few or none would do beside; And this same impulse would in tempting time Mislead his spirit equally to crime.30 Lurie’s “crime[s]” are committed against his own point of view, inspired (though with tragic-comic results more reminiscent of Beckett than Byron) by “a secret pride / To do what few or none would do beside”: he sleeps with Bev Shaw, whose appearance he mocks; rearranges the corpses of incinerated dogs, whose value he questions; apologizes to Melanie’s father, who he earlier ridiculed. Even Melanie’s father knows Lurie’s contrition is disingenuous, a “strange perversity of thought.” Had he never taught Byron’s “Lara” in this overcharged classroom, it would have been clear that Lurie is not worthy of Byron: neither as lover, writer, or man. Recent biographers often take for granted that Byron and the Byronic hero are morally compromised figures, like Lurie himself.31 In fact, the heroes of The Giaour and Manfred have a finer insight into life’s ironies, into the passion of love, than those who would advise them. The contrast between Byron and Lurie is even more stark. Byron, who built a monument to honor the untimely death of his beloved Newfoundland, Boatswain, would never have dispatched an animal to an early death because he saw that death as inevitable. Byron used his Orphic song to celebrate animals, and kept, at various times, a parakeet, a macaw, a bear, and several bulldogs, one of which accompanied his


dismembered corpse back to England.32 David Lurie, by contrast, is an angel of death. He betrays his best instincts by allowing himself to believe that he, with Bev Shaw, kills animals in order to preserve them. His sophomoric behavior with Soraya, the departmental secretary, and Melanie, his racist attitude towards Petrus and Pollux (who as leering voyeur is his spiritual double),33 makes him not Byronic but foolish. He merely exchanges a dunce-cap/garbage can for a skull cap in moving from Cape Town to the West cape. Lurie’s repentance, prostrating himself before Melanie’s mother and sister, is precisely what Byron resisted in his life and writings: a conversion of Orpheus’ pain into a doctrine, Orphism, a ritualized practice. Traditional repentance, conversion, and forgiveness is not what the Byronic hero undergoes (this refusal is why Byron is so important to Stephen Dedalus). Lurie has disgraced himself as an unworthy disciple of his masters, Wordsworth and Byron, who he has tried, unsuccessfully, to usurp. Confronted by monumental experiences such as love, rape, and death, he finds he has nothing to say. South Africa and apartheid, among other circumstances, have twisted and mis-shaped Lurie as a man and as an artist.34 To tease out the similarities and differences between Lurie and Byron, Coetzee presents Lurie struggling to compose an opera about Byron with an Orphic theme. In treating Orpheus’ sparagmos, however, Plato suggested that he deserved his fate, for he was a coward who did not love Eurydice enough to pursue her into the underworld without conditions.35 Virgil’s view was more romantic. “Orpheus, strumming his hollow-shell lyre to soothe his torn heart, / sang you, sweet wife, sang you to himself on the lonely shore, / day in, day out, sang you at sunrise, sang you at sunset” ( Georgics 4.465–7). Ovid represents Orpheus as a scorner of women. Maurice Blanchot’s “The Gaze of Orpheus” views the Orpheus legend in a fourth way as an allegory about art. Blanchot describes Eurydice as that ever-vanishing point which the artist cannot face, lest he lose, forever, his work. Eurydice is the work of art which must forever be out of reach.36 “He is only Orpheus in his song, he could have no relationship with Eurydice except within the hymn, he has life and actuality only after the poem and through the poem, and Eurydice represents nothing more than that magical dependence which makes him into a shade when he is not singing and only allows him to be free, alive, and powerful within the space of the Orphic measure.”37 David Lurie points out that Byron’s relationship with Teresa was equally divided.38 There is the love story Teresa is bent on preserving and there is the counter-narrative, Byron’s cynical letters to his friends


indicating how suffocated he felt in the relationship.39 At first, Lurie tries to capture the two at the height of their passion for one another. Sensing that he has this wrong, Lurie tries another track . . . he tries to pick Teresa up in middle age . . . Byron, in the new version is long dead; Teresa’s sole remaining claim to immortality, and the solace of her lonely nights, is the chestful of letters and memorabilia she keeps under her bed, what she calls her reliquie, which her grand-nieces are meant to open after her death and peruse with awe.40 Already Byron has become a memory, a dismembered corpse that must be resuscitated through documents, letters, and papers (something like Henry James’s Aspern Papers). The chestful of “memorabilia” is part of Byron’s sparagmos, his mutilation at the hands of the woman who worships him. For Teresa, Byron has disappeared, and she pursues him. Where is he, her Byron? Byron is lost, that is the answer. Byron wanders among the shades. And she is lost too . . . Mio Byron, she sings a third time; and from somewhere, from the caverns of the underworld, a voice sings back, wavering and disembodied, the voice of a ghost, the voice of Byron. Where are you? He sings; and then a word she does not want to hear: Secca, dry. It has dried up. The source of everything.41 Ultimately it is Teresa’s voice, not Byron’s, that Lurie is able to recover (as he did with the quotation from Lara, however, Coetzee does not allow a single character to claim the Orphic or Byronic role). “With the aid of the banjo he begins to notate the music that Teresa, now mournful, now angry, will sing to her dead lover, and that pale-voiced Byron will sing back to her from the land of the shades.”42 Like Orpheus, Lurie pursues Teresa to retrieve her, forgoing the lush orchestration he had planned in favor of the plain seven-stringed banjo he bought for Lucy on the streets of KwaMashu.43 The truth is that Lurie is retrieving his daughter every bit as much as he retrieves Teresa (or Melanie, or Rosalind, or the Eternal Feminine which has “enriched” him, as he puts it in answer to a student reporter’s question).44 If Lurie’s daughter has become a kind of Philomela to him, silent in the face of her rape—unwilling and unable to communicate its meaning—then he turns her into the true Orphic figure, giving her back the banjo he gave her as a father, to allow her to sing the song


of her rape, which she cannot speak. In the Greek legend, Philomela weaves a tapestry to point the story. As an erstwhile composer, Lurie struggles to hear Lucy’s song (though, unlike Wordsworth, he lacks the lyric voice). Lurie transforms himself into a man “gifted with hearing”45 (to use Rilke’s term), something he could not do before, even though his ear, significantly, has been damaged, and degenerated, Van Gogh style, into a burned mollusk. It is through this mollusk-like ear, as it is through the tiny banjo, that Lurie will finally hear, however faintly, Gluck’s Orphée and transform it into something worthy of South Africa. He marvels at the creative process: “so this is art, he thinks, and this is how it does its work! How strange! How fascinating!”46 If it is true that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,”47 is it also true that it aspires towards the kind of music that Lurie creates? That would be hard to say. The sad truth of South Africa turns “what was once romantic to burlesque” (DJ, 4:3:7–8). “Six months ago he had thought his ghostly place in Byron in Italy would be somewhere between Teresa’s and Byron’s,” Lurie writes. “But he was wrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic.”48 Now Lurie realizes, “He is in the opera neither as Teresa nor as Byron, nor even as some blending of the two: he is held in the music itself,” the silly plonking of the banjo. Byron, Lurie, and the Byronic have become obsolete: postliterate, postchristian, postmodern. To return to that historical time period, to retrieve Byron as Orpheus tried to retrieve Eurydice, one must remain within what Blanchot called the “Orphic measure.” As we contemplate Lurie playing his opera for a dog that barks back his approval (a dog he will euthanize before its time), it is well to remember how Byron has inverted the Orpheus legend in Monk Lewis’s The Wood Demon. Lurie, like Orpheus, plays for animals. “Besides, when Orpheus brought out the first grand ballet that ever was produced,” Guelpho notes, “who were his actors and actresses, pray? Birds and beasts, every soul of them!” (Act 1: p. 17).49 Lewis understood that ritualized violence was somehow intimately linked to the beauty of Orpheus’ song. If Byron read the play in its original form, as seems likely since he dined with Lewis frequently (BLJ, 3: 230), he may have stressed the dismembered body of Arnold, his desire to return himself to the elements, as a way of recalling the Orphic theme that Monk Lewis so effectively tied to the Faust legend (In Part 2 of Goethe’s drama, after all, Byron appears as Euphorion, the offspring of Helen). Why should music be tied to Faustian striving, if not because Faust’s desire to destroy himself is an effort to return his atoms to the earth, in a gesture of Orphic sparagmos.


In the hands of Monk Lewis, the Orpheus story was rendered into a song describing the death of Leolyn, a prototype for Byron’s Arnold in The Deformed Transformed. Now rage inflames The Thracian dames! Though he brings such charming strains out, They lay him low With his own fiddle-bow, And uncivilly batter his brains out, Than he possest No musical breast More taste or genius riper; Yet in spite of his harp, And his flat and his sharp, Poor Orphy at last paid the piper. Sing tweedle-dum, &C. (Act 1, p. 18)50 Byron picked up the Orphic theme of Monk Lewis’s “pantomime” and also inserted a racial element, hitherto ignored, that made his work far more original than even Goethe and his subsequent critics allowed. For J. M. Coetzee, David Lurie surrenders the title of pompous professor to become a “dog-man,” with greater compassion though less racial awareness than Petrus, who originally adopted that title. Lurie accepts a reduced place in the world as a condition of his disgrace. For art to renew itself, it must return to silence, to the elements from which it sprang, like Orpheus dismembered, who plays, as Ihab Hassan put it, on “a lyre without strings.”51

11 Byronic Terror and Impossible Exchange: From Werner to Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism Piya Pal-Lapinski

“In this vertiginous cycle of the impossible exchange of death, the death of the terrorist is an infinitesimal point, but one that creates a gigantic . . . void.”1 This is from Baudrillard’s response to the events of September 11, 2001, the first in a series of four short essays published under the title The Spirit of Terrorism in 2002. Reviewing the essays in 2002, the New York Times wrote: First prize for cerebral coldbloodedness goes to the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in his slim little book THE SPIRIT OF TERRORISM AND REQUIEM FOR THE TWIN TOWERS (Verso, paper, $13). “In terms of collective drama,” he writes, “we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them—the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel.” It takes a rare, demonic genius to brush off the slaughter of thousands on the grounds that they were suffering from severe ennui brought about by boring modern architecture.2 Understandably caught up in mourning the tragedy of 9/11, the reviewer misses the point: Baudrillard is not necessarily commenting on the “boredom” of “modern architecture” here, nor is he casually “brushing off the slaughter of thousands” as the reviewer suggests. Elsewhere in The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard explicitly states that in avoiding a moral overdetermination of both the suicide bombers’ “voluntary martyrdom” and the victims’ “involuntary martyrdom,” he does not intend to “deny the . . . suffering and death (of the victims)” (24). However, there is something in this passage that is both disturbing, 182

Byronic Terror and Impossible Exchange

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and “demonic” in a broader sense, if the demonic is the element of contingency, terror, or catastrophe in the historical process that Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” evokes. Benjamin’s 1940 essay, “On the Concept of History,” sees history as dominated by a single, arresting gaze. The gaze of Benjamin’s “angel of history” is essentially a demonic gaze which converts history into catastrophe. “His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread . . . His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe.”3 The angel wishes to “awaken the dead” but is powerless to do so. In its “demonic” reading of this particular catastrophe,4 The Spirit of Terrorism evokes a very specific relationship between life and death first articulated in a previous work, Symbolic Exchange and Death (L’échange symbolique et la mort, 1976). The demonic void in the passage derives not only from the act of terrorism itself but also from what Baudrillard calls the “challenge to the system by the symbolic gift of death,”5 the terrorists’ suicide. Although cultural and literary theorists have been quick to embrace Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum as a fashionable critical tool in the analysis of mass culture, his ideas on death have undergone a sort of repression. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard argues that capitalism tries to eliminate death through accumulation and turns it into a phantasm. Within the “nascent system of political economy, death . . . is cast in the image of material goods” and comes “under the sign of a general equivalent.”6 The uniqueness of death within a symbolic culture is lost, and replaced by a dual movement characterized by a simultaneous “obsession with death” and “the will to abolish death through accumulation” (146). Both life and death become subordinated to the law of value, of equivalence: “Value, in particular time as value, is accumulated in the phantasm of death deferred” (146). Because of its spectral presence within a capitalist system, the value placed on its deferral, death no longer has the resonance or richness of a symbolic act, and loses its “ludic terror” or ritualistic significance. Hence our fascination with violent accidents: We, for our part, no longer have an effective rite for reabsorbing death and its rupturing energies; there remains the phantasm of sacrifice, the violent artifice of death . . . In the fatal accident, the artificiality of death fascinates us. (165) The accident invokes a collective response to death similar to that of a sacrifice. Baudrillard’s characterization of the function of the sacrifice recalls René Girard’s exploration of the ritualization of sacrifice.


For Girard, the link between violence and sacrifice is crucial: the “surrogate” victim of sacrifice always takes upon him or herself the violence or desire for vengeance inherent within culture. Girard claims that “death” which “is the ultimate violence that can be inflicted on a living being” has to be “quarantined” through funeral and other types of rituals, including sacrifice.7 As sacrificial systems evolve into judicial systems, sacrificial death turns into a phantasm; judicial machinery “conceals— even as it also reveals—its resemblance to vengeance.”8 Therefore the law both enacts and disavows its connections with sacrifice. Similarly, in The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida also speaks of death and sacrifice as “secrets” at the heart of political and ethical responsibility, a secret “calculation” that somehow struggles to “exceed” an economy of exchange.9 For Girard and Derrida, as for Baudrillard, death, while being the “secret” that drives history, functions also as a spectral presence within historicity.10 Ironically, readings of Baudrillard’s work have tended to spectralize the place of death within his own thought. However, as some commentaries on The Spirit of Terrorism essays have noted,11 ideas from Baudrillard’s earlier texts, especially Symbolic Exchange and Death, reemerge here, death becoming the point of suction, the vortex around which terror, capital, globalization, and freedom circulate. Baudrillard’s vision of death, of returning death to an arbitrary, ritualistic, symbolic system of exchange dominated by a reciprocity between life and death (in which each can be exchanged for the other although they are not necessarily equivalent) is central to his theory of terror. For Baudrillard, the specter of death and of terrorism stalks a global system which is obsessed with generalized exchange, with finding equivalencies. “Terrorism” thus becomes an act that “restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of” this system.12 Mirroring each other too exactly, the Twin Towers had signified a closed system of doubling, of perfect exchange or equivalence, creating the temptation to restore asymmetry through violence.13 By moving death into the sphere of symbolic seduction, Baudrillard dreams of breaking its connection with an ideology of desire within capitalism. This process of takeover, from the “seduction” of death to its “production,” begins, for Baudrillard, in the sixteenth century, when the collective, symbolic presence of death, the medieval iconography of “the Dance of Death,” is eroded by industrialization and capitalism and gradually absorbed into the accumulation of time as value and the preservation of life as absolute value.


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In Baudrillard’s rethinking of seduction, there is no connection, causal or otherwise, between seduction and sex, particularly productive or reproductive sex and desire; whereas sex has a “quick, banal end,” seduction instead opens up an arena of infinite challenge where signs reverse themselves. Death is no longer the object of (repressed) desire; it can no longer be measured in terms of “bio-power” or the value of “life”—by stripping life of the value assigned to it, the terrorist’s own death as well as those of the victims removes death from the sphere of equivalencies. The term “impossible exchange,” which Baudrillard uses to refer to death in this context, indicates a lack of equivalence, an “exiled, foreclosed uncertainty.”14 The nineteenth century both complicates and provides its own twist on this arc of the spectralization of death. As Elizabeth Bronfen notes, for Romantic and Victorian writers, death was an aesthetic problem: the beauty of the dead female body became the marker of death as beautiful phantasm. Even as the figuration of death through the female corpse becomes a central trope in many nineteenth-century texts (for example, in Byron’s The Giaour and Manfred), the actual traces of death (decay and decomposition) are simultaneously effaced through representation.15 Yet beauty itself is enhanced by the fact that it contains its own death, its potential dismemberment into parts. In The Giaour and Manfred, major acts of signification take place “over” the dead bodies of Leila and Astarte. Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage grapple with the problem of representing death within war: the aesthetics of violence. In Childe Harold IV aesthetics and violence are entwined in a demonic reversibility. Lake Thrasimene, the site of Rome’s defeat by Carthage during the Second Punic War, turns into a sheet of silver from a river of gore. Beauty is what it is because of a violence erupting from within. History does not need to be purged of violence; in fact, it is the gap between the material violence of history and its aesthetic signs which generates an “other” violence, which, as Benjamin would say, “blasts open the continuum of history.”16 The relationship to aesthetics is a violent one; Byron is a prisoner-of-war—“Dazzled and drunk with beauty” he is “Chain’d to the chariot of triumphal Art.”17 The material violence of history is not accessed in Byron as in Sade through bodies being ripped open; yet the erotic terror of these bodies haunts the aesthetic objects in Childe Harold. And it is precisely this kind of erotic/aesthetic terrorism that prevents the “Byronic ruin” in Childe Harold from being easily appropriated into the discourse of Italian nationalism in which the violence of history could be subordinated to a national narrative.


This chapter brings Byron’s troubling play Werner into dialogue with the kind of convergence of death, terror, and exchange which is explored in The Spirit of Terrorism. Recent reassessments of the play, notably by Martin Prochazka and Peter Manning, are significant in the way they foreground the play’s political implications: Manning’s interpretation draws attention to the “utter amorality” of the figure of Ulric in Werner, emphasizing that “the forces that drive him rise from depths of the personality untouchable by the persuasions of morality” and the fact that the final vision of the play turns on the “insistence that society’s outlaws and heroes are identical.” Prochazka sees “the transformation heralded by Ulric” as symptomatic of the “downfall of . . . sovereignty” and its “replacement by the strategic power of terrorists, blackmailers and mafias,”—a movement towards more “diffuse” forms of war.18 While the play’s historical setting (the close of the Thirty Years War in Germany, 1618–48) maps the transitional moment between feudalism and capitalism that Baudrillard mentions in Symbolic Exchange and Death, it’s also important to remember that Byron’s plays were conceived after the emergence of French revolutionary Terror, in the shadow of a historical moment in which the symbolic articulation of death became imbricated with the political resonance of the term “Terror.” Marcel Hénaff discusses the complex evolution of this term in his analysis of the work of Sade: after 1795, two versions of terror emerged. The official discourse of the Revolution inaugurated a form of terror driven by narratives of political legitimacy and self-justification. In the discourse of Robespierre and Saint-Just, Hénaff finds that “Terror becomes co-extensive with juridical order . . . Political terror is thus conceivable only if it is never separated from its justification, only if it is the executor of a higher necessity. It is blinded by this very legitimacy.” To this Hénaff opposes another version of terror: that which is “gratuitous” in the sense that it cannot be appropriated by the state; terror which does not masquerade as legitimate or “just.” “It calls itself what it is . . . A terror without political foundation . . . pure violation of a desire which rejects all mediation, respite, and taboo.” This is “libertine terror.”19 As in The Spirit of Terrorism, Byron’s Werner explores the slippage between political terror and a terror which is beyond politics, stripped of discursive legitimacy, whose limits cannot be fathomed. At the heart of the play there is an act of murder which drives the play’s engagement with terror. My intention, in bringing these two texts together, is to pose the question: how does reading Byron’s Werner through Baudrillard’s theory of terror alter our reading of both Byron and Baudrillard? Reading


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them both against each other reveals that whereas a Byronic/Romantic desire and longing for death dominates Baudrillard’s thinking, Byron’s postmodern impulse in Werner leaves this behind: in other words, Byron out-Baudrillards Baudrillard. Byron’s fascination with the source for Werner, “Kruitzner or the German’s Tale,” by Harriet and Sophia Lee (1801), has been extensively commented on by biographers and critics. Both Jerome McGann and Peter Manning note the letter that Byron wrote to Murray when he resumed work on Werner in 1821 in which he instructed Murray to cut out “The German’s Tale” and send it along with the first draft of the play, begun in 1815 and subsequently abandoned because of his separation.20 While “The German’s Tale” is an obvious influence, what has been less noticed is Byron’s reading of Schiller: The Robbers, Fiesco, or the Genoese Conspiracy and Wallenstein (1798–9). In his 1813 Journal, Byron mentions having read both The Robbers and Fiesco: “redde the Robbers. Fine,—but Fiesco is better.” (Elsewhere also, Byron refers to his artistic debt to Schiller).21 In “On the Sublime” (1801), Schiller speaks of death as the “single terror” which interrupts man’s “vaunted freedom” and which will “haunt him like a specter.”22 Schiller’s plays bring death into a special relationship with exchange. In The Robbers, the outlaw Karl Moor recognizes that terror is never commensurate with its political goals: “oh fool that I was, to suppose that I could make the world a fairer place through terror.”23 His final act of violence, that of sacrificing his lover Amalia by stabbing her to death, is an attempt to both repay a debt and, through the sacrifice, remove her death—“I have slaughtered an angel for you”—from an economy of exchange (5.2).24 Fiesco, which Byron preferred, is based on historical events occurring in sixteenth-century Genoa: the failed plot against Andreas Doria, ruler of Genoa, and his corrupt nephew Gianettino, headed by Giovanni Luigi di Fieschi, Count of Lavagna.25 Schiller’s Fiesco is a libertine whose dissipated lifestyle gives way to political rebellion. Fiesco imagines political leadership as a form of sovereignty which, in the process of remaking the state through violence and terror, remains simultaneously above and outside it. In his speeches, he confronts the ultimate futility of political change, meditating on the corruption of Genoa’s republican government and the “abandonment” of democracy (2.8). Exchange rules political destinies and is also racialized; interestingly, Fiesco hires a Moor to purchase his favor with the people: “Here’s money—lavish it among the manufacturers” (2.9). The conspiracy to assassinate the Dorias culminates in the accidental killing of Fiesco’s wife Leonora; as she wears the cloak of Fiesco’s political enemy Gianettino Doria,


she literally changes places with him, and so invites her own death at her husband’s hands. Here, the “exchange” of bodies produces a death which becomes an absolute “gift,” one for which there is no equivalent (5.11).26 While these two plays present the conflation of terror, death, and the idea of a political existence outside or on the margins of the state (themes central to Werner), Wallenstein is based on actual events and figures which dominated the Thirty Years War.27 Werner was the closest Byron came to exploring the spirit of terrorism. Since work on the play was begun in late 1821, let us not forget that, immediately prior to this, Byron had been involved with the Ravenna Carbonari. A secret revolutionary society with elaborate initiatory rituals and a belief in effecting violent, catastrophic change in politics and government, the Carbonari or “charcoal burners” emphasized the liberation of Italy from Austria. Given this history, the play represents a meditation on and culmination of his experience with forms of political terrorism/insurgency—which also took shape in Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari, but found its most explicit formulation in Werner. What Byron got through his Carbonari adventure, though, was a teaser—the postponement of terrorist violence, a violence which failed to materialize. In the Ravenna journal which describes Byron’s “terrorist” activities while he was waiting for the Carbonari revolt to begin, the actual physical violence of revolution is perpetually deferred in favor of its signs. On February 18, 1821, Byron wrote: Today I have had no communication with my Carbonari cronies; but, in the mean time, my lower apartments are full of their bayonets, fusils, cartridges, and what not. I suppose that they consider me as a depôt, to be sacrificed, in case of accidents. It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed.28 Death, sacrifice, violence, all are perpetually deferred as Byron waits, overcome by ennui, and the Carbonari movement falls apart; by the summer of 1821 the revolt had failed as the Neapolitan rebels surrendered to the Austrian army and several of the Carbonari were arrested. Like Schiller’s The Robbers and Fiesco, Werner wrestles with this sense of failure through the figure of the “terrorist” leader who flirts with the “impossible exchange” of death through a single act of violence. The play opens during the aftermath of the Thirty Years War; Werner, also known as Kruitzner and Siegendorf, has been disinherited because of a vaguely dissolute past and is living in abject poverty in a decaying Gothic palace. “Are we not pennyless?” asks Werner of his


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wife Josephine in the opening scenes of the play (1.1.76). The 1815 unfinished draft of Werner had emphasized the language of economic exchange: in this version Werner speaks of abdicating his paternal role and surrendering his infant son to his father in exchange for “a scanty stipend.” “Since—my hard father half relenting sent / The offer of a scanty stipend—which / I needs must earn by rendering up my son—” (1.1.114–17). In the 1821 version, his son Ulric, brought up by his grandfather, has disappeared and is rumored to have connections with “the Black Bands,” disbanded soldiers turned into banditti: That in the wild exuberance of his nature, He had join’d the black bands, who lay waste Lusatia, The mountains of Bohemia and Silesia, Since the last years of war had dwindled into A kind of general condottiero system Of bandit warfare; each troop with its chief, And all against mankind. (2.1.123–9) Werner’s dilemma focuses on how to escape the pursuit of his relative Stralenheim, who stands between him and his inheritance. At this point, Werner re-encounters his son Ulric who first saves Stralenheim’s life and immediately after kills him with detachment and efficiency, leaving the way open for Werner to reclaim his inheritance. In the last two acts of the play, Ulric’s relationship with his father gradually disintegrates, as the former increasingly identifies himself with a political existence excluded from the state. The historical contexts of Werner form a series of intertwining strands which resonate on several different levels. The play is set against the background of the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In this war, which began with the Defenestration of Prague and the Protestant Bohemian revolt against the Catholic Habsburg monarchy, the center of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, the religious conflict between Protestant and Catholic rulers was fraught with political and dynastic interests. Historians have debated as to whether the Peace consolidated the territorial sovereignty of the absolutist dynastic state on the brink of its encounter with capitalism, or whether it signified a transitional moment marked by conflicting shifts in the monopoly over the means of violence. War had emerged as a capitalist enterprise, as military entrepreneurs and commanders like Wallenstein raised armies of mercenaries and amassed wealth. Peter Wilson, in a recent historical study of the war, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (2009), reassesses


conflicting interpretations of the Westphalian settlement.29 According to Wilson, the implications of the settlement and the end of the war were complex. Rather than unproblematically reflecting the beginning of a “new international order,” as several historians claim, the war inaugurated “a lengthy process” in which the dissolution of the German Empire and the development of “a secular order based on more equal, sovereign states” was complicated by the fact that, to a certain extent, territorial rulers remained constrained by imperial law. The idea of “territorial sovereignty” and the “well-demarcated, non porous” borders of the “classic Westphalian state,” Wilson argues, were undermined both by the material cost and destructiveness of the war as well as a destabilized economic and monetary system.30 The mint consortium crisis of 1621–2,where the unregulated circulation of debased silver coinage caused inflation and rioting, represented a crisis in systems of financial exchange. In addition, the demobilization of almost 160,000 soldiers at the close of the war created displacement and acts of random violence. The threat of this excess of violence, which could not be reabsorbed into either a military framework or into the social fabric, shadows the action of Werner. During the war, accounts of extreme, “inhuman” acts of terror such as cannibalism surfaced, for instance, at the siege of Breisach in 1638, where the imperial fortress of Breisach above the Rhine was besieged by Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar with French assistance. When Breisach fell, Bernhard discovered that thirty of his prisoners of war had not only starved to death but had also “allegedly” eaten the corpses of their fellow prisoners in an attempt to survive. These narratives of Gothic horror, including those of rape and torture, as Wilson points out, were often used as Protestant propaganda and ascribed to the “foreignness” of the soldiers.31 The war seemingly generated its own forms of terror, detached from the economies of exchange that it simultaneously developed; cannibalism marked the extreme limit of this. In Schiller’s Wallenstein, money cannibalizes the entire war, lives become exchangeable for “payment.” Wallenstein, who has accrued vast estates through military entrepreneurship, is brutally murdered by hired assassins in the pay of the Emperor. Death by cannibalism is thus the repressed phantom double, the mirror image of accumulation. Byron’s treatment of the terror produced by the aftermath of the war in Werner, focused through the figure of Ulric, completely undermines narratives of the war as Protestant triumph presented in the works of nineteenth-century historians like Frances Hare-Naylor, with whose History of Germany Byron was familiar.32


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In this sense Ulric and his “black bands” in Werner do not simply represent revolutionary terror but a terror “in excess of” any definite political or military objective, a random, “unlimited” form of terror connected both with the rise of the modern state and the relationship between capital, terror, and sovereignty. Byron’s black bands, however, are an interesting composite of the disbanded soldiers of the Thirty Years War and the sixteenth century Italian mercenaries organized into a cohesive unit by the famous condottiere Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Giovanni of the Black Bands, 1498–1526). Giovanni’s black bands were not only known for their expertise in the skirmish and assault tactics that were changing the nature of warfare in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe, making the outcome of battles “less decisive,” but also for their lack of discipline, tendency to outbreaks of violence, and demands for payment. Their conflicts with the Florentine republican authority had earned them the title of “huomini indiavolati” (men possessed by the devil). In Werner, Ulric’s influence over his men is “attributed to witchcraft” (601), and his demonic nature is repeatedly emphasized in the play.33 Byron began the first draft of Werner in 1815, the year of Waterloo. As Philip Shaw asks of Byron’s reflections on Waterloo in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto 3, “What, then, can Byron do for the dead of Waterloo?” Shaw argues that Byron resists both the nationalistic appropriation of heroic deaths on the battlefield as well as what Žižek has called “the obscenity of numbers” to focus on the instability of commemorating the individual life; however, this reading ties Byron to the same equivalency of life and redemption that both Werner and The Spirit of Terrorism seek to dismantle. In fact, Shaw argues that “Byron is able to redeem a poetics that skirts dangerously close to the undifferentiated matter of death.”34 By the time he drafted the final version of Werner in 1821–2, Byron was ready to bring death into a new relationship with exchange, which marks terror both as a site of alternative desire and as a viable mode of political being. More than any other work by Byron, Werner recognizes that by removing death from the system of equivalencies a politics of terror can interrupt capitalism’s production and control of the idea of “the human” as well as the “inhuman.” Guinn Batten suggests in her study of English commodity culture and Byron’s poetry that elsewhere Byron is also aware of the “endless exchanges” that are ruled by similitudes of “general equivalency” and “effectively subverts the intentions of an economy and an aesthetics founded on the operation of general equivalence.”35 How far does this go in Werner?


Through the “inhuman” murder of Stralenheim, impossible exchange structures the dynamics of terror in Werner. The (imagined) death of Stralenheim takes the form of the substance of Werner’s repressed desire; Werner himself visits Stralenheim while asleep but cannot carry out the murder, instead he ends up stealing a gold coin. Money thus becomes a substitute for death: as Werner exchanges the act of murder for that of petty theft, death is literally converted into gold. It is left to Ulric to position Stralenheim’s death within a complex system of symbolic exchange where the act is detached both from causality or from any transcendental referent. Again, to invoke Žižek, emancipatory terror has to continually refer to “a pure transcendental subject . . . unaffected by catastrophe . . . which, although non-existing in reality, is operative as a virtual point of reference.”36 It is hard to locate such a point of reference for Ulric; instead death itself usurps the space of the transcendental subject. Ulric is aware that death positions the subject in relation to something impossible, a “gift” which is outside the circuit of generalized exchange.37 So Ulric tells Stralenheim, “The dead, who feel nought, can lose nothing, / Nor e’er be robb’d: their spoils are a bequest—” (2.2.426–7). To Ulric, life is seductively reversible. His act of saving Stralenheim from the river is merely that, an act divorced from signification and value. Furthermore, if Stralenheim becomes indebted to Ulric for saving his life, by killing him Ulric creates the perfect symbolic reciprocity between life and death, and cancels the debt, simultaneously extricating himself from a system of capitalistic exchange. The language of economic transactions is deeply embedded in the play. When Ulric refuses to accept anything in return for saving Stralenheim’s life, the latter accuses him of allowing the interest on the debt to build up: Why, this is mere usury! I owe my life to you, and you refuse The acquittance of the interest of the debt, To heap more obligations on me, till I bow beneath them. (2.1.183–7) For Ulric, Stralenheim’s death has, to use Baudrillard’s terms, no referential or structural value. Baudrillard uses the term “referential value” to indicate an excess of value over the indeterminacy of the “structural value” of capital where each sign becomes the equivalent of the other. Ulric has no interest in regaining his inheritance in terms of his own succession, and his ultimate choice, made clear in the final act, is to


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locate himself outside family, law, and state. He distances himself from his lineage twice—initially, when he abandons his grandfather for the “Black Bands” and, in the latter half of the play, when he vacillates over the marriage his father arranges for him with Stralenheim’s daughter, while admitting its dynastic expediency. Therefore, other than translating Werner’s phantasmatic desire into literal reality (in the same way that Baudrillard claims that 9/11 was the translation of a repressed desire), Stralenheim’s death becomes the opaque center of the play, one which is “not susceptible of exchange” either in terms of linking it to an easily identifiable revolutionary or material purpose, or specifically in terms of regaining Werner’s inheritance, although the latter is a by-product of the act. The singularity of the act as well as the perpetrator resides in its detachment. Baudrillard comes close to this idea of detachment when he speaks of a terror which remains in excess of ideology: “this is terror against terror . . . We are far behind ideology and politics now. No ideology—no cause, not even the Islamic cause—can account for the energy which fuels terror.”38 Which is why Ulric is conceptualized along the fragile boundary which separates revolutionary terror from fascism, and also from state terror. In the end, he compares himself to Wallenstein. It seems that the “war machine” which Deleuze and Guattari suggest remains exterior and irreducible to the state, despite the state’s appropriation of it, exerts a peculiar seduction for Ulric; that there is something about the impersonal inhumanity of this war machine which allows for the possibility of separating death from exchange in order to effect a shift in the balance of power. In Schiller’s Wallenstein, war is what unleashes the moral ambivalence of personality, its singularity, its refusal to be subordinated to a sovereign state. Wallenstein switches from the Catholic to the Protestant side without specific reasons; like Ulric, he is said to be in league with the devil, “frozen, sealed with the devil’s arts,”39 his very skin impenetrable (“his skin cannot be pierced”), embodying the random flows of the war machine and the state’s inability to be fully in control of them.40 Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century theorist of war reiterates this sense of the arbitrary, impersonal center of war in his On War (1832): “War is the realm of chance. No other human activity gives it greater scope: no other has such incessant and varied dealings with this intruder. Chance makes everything more uncertain and interferes with the whole course of events.” The resistant element in war, that which makes “the apparently easy so difficult,” Clausewitz calls “friction.”41 Deleuze and Guattari also contend that war is essentially opposed to state formation; “far from deriving from exchange . . . war is


what limits exchanges.”42 Ulric describes his “army” in relation to the dead: Go tell Your senators that they look well to Prague; Their feast of peace was early for the Times; There are more spirits abroad than have been laid With Wallenstein! (5.2.48–52) More than ever, Byron, like Schiller, is aware of the cost of “the smiling fields of peace,”43 the consolidation of sovereignty over the bodies of the dead. “Peace” is achieved at the cost of repressing the dead.

Romantic Baudrillard? If then, reading Byron’s Werner through Baudrillard reveals the former’s postmodernism, especially with respect to revolutionary terror, can we say that the spectral presence of an earlier, possibly more Romantic Byron, the Byron of The Giaour and Manfred, haunts Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism? This text is filled with a yearning for the seductiveness of death, and particularly an aesthetic and erotic fetishization of self-destruction.44 The terrorists’ suicide converts death from mere extinction (which is its signified within global capitalism) into “a symbolic stake and gift” which becomes an “absolute weapon.” The Twin Towers also “commit suicide” by collapsing in response to the terrorists’ death; (like lovers mirroring each other) both the towers and the terrorists enter the aesthetics of the sublime specifically through an act driven by an internal logic of self-destruction, in which death cannot be “exchanged” for either redemption or ideology: “by the grace of terrorism,” the Twin Towers have become the “world’s most beautiful building.”45 However, although The Spirit of Terrorism claims that the terrorist act is not reducible to a historical or political rationale (if it were reducible to this it would be marginalized as the discourse of the oppressed and would re-enter the system of exchange), a split in Baudrillard’s thinking appears at this point, a split similar to the Byronic deaths in Manfred and The Giaour. Baudrillard’s assertion that there is no equivalent for the terrorist act (which involves both self-destruction and the destruction of other lives) in some “transcendent truth” is undermined by the references to sacrifice. Repeatedly, throughout the four essays Baudrillard refers to it as “a sacrificial obligation,” “a destiny, a cause,


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a form of pride or sacrifice . . . symbolic stakes which far exceed existence and freedom.”46 Just as Symbolic Exchange and Death comes close to a Rousseauistic fetishizing of “primitive” cultures, it seems here that Baudrillard comes dangerously close to the very acts of signification from which he claims that the terrorist act is able to free death. This longing for a pure, aestheticized death which, through a spectacular, transcendental act signifies only itself, thereby extricating itself from exchange, but continually struggles against the seductive trap of value, of being measured against an “equivalent” transcendental cause or subject, recalls the death of Manfred and the final isolation of the Giaour, who, though both are in love with death and communing with specters, undergo a similar struggle, resulting in an ambivalent outcome. In The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard maintains that the world has already been devastated; what terror undertakes is a new form of symbolic destruction. In Werner, Byron has moved beyond his two earlier works (and the nostalgic primitivism/romanticism of Baudrillard), from the idealization of self-destruction, towards a form of political terror, a war-machine whose only hope of freedom, of extricating itself, even momentarily, from a system of generalized exchange and the reproductive logic of capitalism, depends on its pragmatic commitment to the destruction of the sovereign state. A terror which instead of remaking the world, unmakes it.

Notes Introduction: Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror 1. See Leslie Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978), 8:37. The rebellion of the Naples Carbonari eventually dissolved in the face of the combined forces of the Austrian army and the Church. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 2. 3. Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty, 1700–1789 (Geneva: Skira, 1964), 188. 4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 135–6. 5. See Drummond Bone, “The Rhetoric of Freedom,” in Byron: Wrath and Rhyme, ed. Alan Bold (London: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 166–85, and “Political Choices: The Prophecy of Dante and Werner,” in Byron, Poetry and Politics, ed. Erwin A. Sturzl and James Hogg (Salzburg: Inst. fur Anglistik & Amerikanistik, University of Salzburg, 1981), 152–65; Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987); Richard Cronin, The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 128–44 and 166–75; Jonathan Gross, Byron: The Erotic Liberal (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); and Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe, and Charles E. Robinson, eds., Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on Byron (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008). For a recent study of Byron’s involvement in Italian politics, see Arnold Anthony Schmidt, Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 6. Marcel Hénaff, “Naked Terror: Political Violence, Libertine Violence,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 27.2 [86] (1998), 27: 5–32. 7. Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85–136 (103). 8. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 160. Žižek here provides an extended discussion of Robespierre’s defense of revolutionary violence, engaging with Claude Lefort’s “The Revolutionary Terror,” in Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 50–88. 9. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 159. 10. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 146. 11. Ibid., 33. 12. See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 7–11. 196

Notes to pp. 3–9

197

13. See Stephen Holmes, “Is Defiance of Law a Proof of Success? Magical Thinking in the War on Terror,” in The Torture Debate in America, ed. Karen J. Greenberg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 132. 14. For a discussion of the classical approach to torture, see Page Dubois, Torture and Truth (New York: Routledge, 1991). See also Darius Rejali, Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994); and Michel Foucault, “Torture,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977). For a cross-section of Enlightenment and modern views on torture, see William F. Schulz, ed., The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 15. Quoted in John Langbein, “The Legal History of Torture,” in Sanford Levinson, ed., Torture: A Collection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 100. 16. See The Torture Debate in America, ed. Greenberg, 317–60 (317, 318), for the full text of this memo which sets out “standards of conduct for interrogation” and degrees of intensity “necessary to meet the definition of torture” in interrogation techniques. 17. Mark Danner, “The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means,” The New York Review of Books, April 30, 2009. 18. All references to Byron’s poems in this chapter are to The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–91); references to other editions are made in other chapters as appropriate and as indicated throughout. See also Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennyslvania Press, 1994). 19. Edward Peters, Torture (New York: Blackwell, 1985). Darius Rejali has challenged this dichotomy between private and public torture: see Torture and Modernity, 13. 20. For a provocative reading of the connections between torture, terror, and the sublime in Byron’s Manfred, see Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology and Coercion as Theater History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991). 21. Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 11. 22. Select Committee on Home Affairs Minutes of Evidence: Examination of Witnesses, October 9, 2007, Q65 . 23. Ibid. 24. See Jan Patoˇcka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. James Dodd, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 75–6: “The possibility of a metanoesis of historic proportions depends essentially on this: is that part of humanity which is capable of understanding what was and is the point of history . . . also capable of the discipline and self-denial demanded by a stance of uprootedness in which alone a meaningfulness, both absolute and accessible to humans, because it is problematic, might be realized?” 25. ‘London After the Bombings: Life Goes On’, The New York Times, July 17, 2005.

198 Notes to pp. 9–16 26. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 250. 27. Slavoj Žižek, Virtue and Terror, xii–xiii. 28. For previous studies of Byron’s complex attitude to revolutionary violence, see Ian Haywood, Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 198–205; and John Farrell, Revolution as Tragedy: The Dilemma of the Moderate from Scott to Arnold (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 133–85. Farrell examines the “incompatibility” of the “ethical protest of rebellion” and the “political violence of revolution” in Byron’s dramas. 29. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 15. Moreover, as Gross’s work on Byron has shown, Byron’s politics are deeply linked to his intellectual and physical investment in desire and eroticism (see Gross, Byron: The Erotic Liberal).

1 “That lifeless thing the living fear”: Freedom, Community, and the Gothic Body in The Giaour 1. All references to The Giaour are to The Complete Poetical Works, eds. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), III. 2. Marilyn Butler, “The Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour,” in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), 78–96 (85–6). 3. Marilyn Butler notes that, though the poem demonstrates that the Turkish rule is ethically unacceptable, the real targets of the work are “Christianity and Islam, comparable instruments of personal control over the lives of men and women, and potentially of political control by the great powers over the destiny of small nations” (Butler, “Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour,” 91). For further discussion of The Giaour in relation to Orientalism, see Eric Meyer, “ ‘I Know Thee Not, I Loathe Thy Race:’ Romantic Orientalism in the Eye of the Other,” ELH 58 (1991): 657–99; Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Caroline Franklin, “‘Some Samples of the Finest Orientalism:’ Byronic Philhellenism and Proto-Zionism at the Time of the Congress of Vienna,” in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 221–60. Though they differ in consideration of the extent to which both the poem and its author resist hegemonic discourses of imperialism from the period, all share the sense that the text is heterogeneous in this respect. 4. David Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 5. For further discussion of the ways that the poem’s connection with popular fiction has historically led to it being dismissed as lacking aesthetic merit and intellectual substance, see Ghislaine McDayter, Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), 71. 6. A prime example of this is Naji B. Oueijan’s claim that the nineteenthcentury identification of the Orient with the exotic leads to a confusion,

Notes to pp. 16–24

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

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in Said and subsequent scholars, of exoticism with Orientalism which “ravaged the scholarship of genuine Oriental scholars like Lord Byron” (Naji B. Oueijan, “Western Exoticism and Byron’s Orientalism,” Prism(s) 6 (1998): 36). While a detailed critique of this argument is beyond the scope of the present discussion, it is notable that Oueijan identifies this confusion at the outset as a contamination of the scholarly by the popular: “Nineteenthcentury understanding of exoticism and Orientalism is problematic; indeed, the immediate and enormous popularity of Byron’s Oriental tales pertains most to Western readers’ thirst for the exotic experience rather than to their sense of Byron’s real knowledge of the Orient” (Ibid., 28). Emma McEvoy, “Gothic and the Romantics,” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London: Routledge, 2007), 24. Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), xv. Ibid. See Andrew Stauffer, “Sardanapalus, Spectacle, and the Empire State,” Chapter 2, below. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 19. Ibid., 112. Bruhm, Gothic Bodies, 138. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 33–4. Ibid., 15–23. Ibid., 54. Roessel, In Byron’s Shadow, 62. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 297; quoted in Meyer, “Romantic Orientalism,” 669. As Tariq Ali summarizes, “for the German Greens, as for Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, it was a war for the liberation of the women of Afghanistan” (“Afghanistan: Mirage of the Good War,” NLR 50 [March–April 2008]: 5). See also, Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed about America (London: Atlantic Books, 2007), 39–41. Meyer, “Romantic Orientalism,” 669. My argument here summarises McGann’s discussion of the Byronic hero, from which the title of this section is also drawn. Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 26. See Daniel Watkins, “Social Relations in Byron’s The Giaour,” ELH 52 (1985): 880: “the Giaour represents a living portion of a specific social reality . . . he does not in any way stand apart from the world he inhabits.” These terms are those of Jean-Luc Nancy; see The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 104. Ibid., 126, 128. Ibid., 128. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 12.

200 Notes to pp. 24–7 28. Ibid. 29. Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003), 62. 30. Ibid. For more on the conditions of philosophy, see Badiou, “The Definition of Philosophy”, in Infinite Thought, 165–8. 31. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 49. My reading here draws directly on Peter Hallward’s discussion in Badiou: A Subject of Truth (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xxxi: “Truth is nothing other than the local production of a freedom from all relation . . . True subjects . . . are first and foremost free of relation as such, and are justified by nothing other than the integrity of their own affirmations.” 32. Badiou, Ethics, 59. 33. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2008), 169. 34. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1: 248–52. 35. See Badiou, Ethics, 18–29. 36. Žižek, Violence, 173. Prior to this commentary, Žižek quotes from Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 114. 37. Žižek, Violence, 173. 38. Ibid. 39. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 165. 40. Though it is commonplace to discuss the encounter resulting from reciprocated love as a “relationship,” for Badiou the truth of love is, as Hallward explains, one of unrelation: “What truth, then, does love pronounce? Certainly not the truth of a romantic fusion, of two become one . . . Love proclaims the truth of sexual difference, or, in other words, love effects the axiomatic disjunction of sexual positions. Through love, as through every form of truth, what we normally know as related is thought as unrelated” (Hallward, Badiou, 186). Though both lovers can thus become part of the unified subject that is faithful to their love, this fidelity does not imply any mode of relation between them and, moreover, this subject is itself disjoined from the wider community who are incapable of affirming the truth of this love. 41. See McDayter, Byromania, 71–85. 42. See Badiou, Ethics, 8–14; for further discussion, see Jacques Ranciére, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 297–310. 43. Benjamin, Critique, 251. 44. “All Religions Are One,” in William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. edn (London: Doubleday, 1988), 1. 45. See Benjamin, Critique, 251: “the proposition that existence stands higher than a just existence is false and ignominious, if existence is to mean nothing other than mere life . . . It contains a mighty truth, however, if ‘existence,’ or, better, ‘life’ . . . is intended to mean that the nonexistence of man is something more terrible than the . . . not-yet-attained condition of the just man.” While I do think that it is possible to read the Giaour’s love for Leila as taking him some way toward a condition of justice, I would emphasise both


46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

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that this love is experienced as a form of vulnerability and that it remains problematic for the reasons outlined above. Nancy, Experience, 102. The poem’s depiction of death can facilitate a move away from a concentration on the subject (in Badiou’s sense) and toward an understanding of the importance, within emancipatory politics, of recognizing singularity in the sense outlined by Nancy, which avoids valorizing individual animal instincts or interests while at the same time emphasizing the relationship between vulnerability and community: “[S]ingularity never has the nature or the structure of individuality. Singularity never takes place at the level of atoms, those identifiable if not identical identities; rather it takes place at the level of the clinamen, which is unidentifiable. It is linked to ecstasy: one could not properly say that the singular being is the subject of ecstasy, for ecstasy has no ‘subject’—but one must say that ecstasy (community) happens to the singular being” (Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 6–7. McEvoy, “Gothic and the Romantics,” 26. In the shift from local ghoul to cosmopolitan charmer, descriptions of vampirism as a perversion of relationship become universalised into, among other things, a parody of Christian Communion. Thus, we move from John Polidori’s depiction of Strongmore/Ruthven’s seduction of Miss Aubrey (in which the brother is inadvertently complicit in his sister’s corruption) to the verbal torment that accompanies Dracula’s violation of Mina Harker: “And you . . . are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press” (Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron [Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1998], 328). See also, The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2008). Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (London: Raven Books, 1976). Rice is clearly operating in the same sort of tradition as Mary Shelley, herself influenced by Romantic receptions of Milton’s Satan; however, unlike Shelley and Milton, Rice does not position Louis’s narrative within a larger frame that undermines readerly sympathy for him. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 12. Ibid., 16. Badiou, Infinite Thought, 55. Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” NLR 49 (January–February 2008): 38–9. This phrase is borrowed from W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 38: “I am arguing for a hard, rigorous, relativism that regards knowledge as a social product, a matter of dialogue between different versions of the world, including different languages, ideologies, and modes of representations.” Butler, Frames, 7. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 26. Ibid., 25.

202 Notes to pp. 33–7

2


1. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 5.2.216–22 (2: 1433). 2. See Margaret J. Howell, Byron Tonight: A Poet’s Plays on the Nineteenth-Century Stage (Windlesham, Surrey: Springwood Books, 1982). 3. See, for example, Edward Ziter, “The Sacred Museum: Azael, Sardanapalus, and Exotic Display in Victorian England,” Theater Survey 42:1 (May, 2001): 25–51; Boleslaw Taborski, Byron and the Theatre (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1972); Howell, Byron Tonight. On the culture of Victorian spectacle of which the 1876 production of Sardanapalus was a central phenomenon, see Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theater, 1850–1910 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), especially Chapter 1, “The Taste for Spectacle.” Charles Kean had first produced a much less elaborate version of Sardanapalus in Edinburgh in 1838 (one that nevertheless made use of fireworks in staging the final conflagration); see Martin K. Nurmi, “The Prompt Copy of Charles Kean’s 1838 Production of Byron’s Sardanapalus,” The Serif: Kent State University Library Quarterly 5 (1968): 3–13. The best recent work, at the time of writing, on Layard’s discoveries in Mesopotamia is Frederick Bohrer’s Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Mogens Trolle Larsen, The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land, 1840–1860 (New York: Routledge, 1996). 4. Charles Kean, “Remarks,” in George Gordon, Lord Byron, Sardanapalus, King of Assyria. A Tragedy in Five Acts. By Lord Byron. Adapted for Representation by Charles Kean. Modern Standard Drama series (New York, [1853?]). 5. Taborski, Byron and the Theater, 202. See also T. Allston Brown, A History of the New-York Stage, 3 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1903), 3:119. After its New York run, the production moved to the Boston Theater for three weeks, and thence to Philadelphia; see Eugene Tompkins and Quincy Kilby, The History of the Boston Theater, 1854–1901 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 236–7. 6. Megan Sanborn Jones, Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama (New York: Routledge, 2009), 132–3. Maurice Smith makes a similar point about the use of spectacle to construct the post-revolutionary political regime in France; see his The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 7. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Sardanapalus, in Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980–93), 6: 15–128; 4.1.512–7; hereafter cited in text by act, scene, and line number. 8. Ziter, “The Sacred Museum,” 27. 9. Darbyshire, Art of the Victorian Stage (London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1907), 49–50. The Calvert adaptation had first opened at the Alexandra Theatre in Liverpool in September 1875; see Lord Byron’s Historical Tragedy of Sardanapalus, arranged for representation by Charles Calvert (Manchester: John Heywood [1877?]). It came to Duke’s Theatre in London in 1877, and thence


10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

203

to other English cities, such as Nottingham (1877, 1878) and Bristol (1879); see Taborski, Byron and the Theatre. Program, Booth’s Theater (September 30, 1876), 1. [author’s collection]. “ ‘Sardanapalus’ at Booth’s Theater,” New York Herald (August 15, 1876); partially quoted in George Clinton Densmore Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 15 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–63), 6: 175. In Susan Sontag, In America: A Novel (New York: Picador, 2000), the narrator (based on Helena Modjeska) reports on her experience of the 1876 production: “[T]he play has been turned into a vast and ingenious spectacle. Loud music, towering décor, a hundred performers milling about an immense stage—that’s what the public here most appreciates . . . The last act ended with a stupendous conflagration, which the audience appreciated mightily, as did we” (140). Illustrated Sporting New Yorker 7:169 (August 26, 1876): 6. Illustrated Sporting New Yorker 7:172 (September 17, 1876): 6. T. B. Macaulay, review of Leopold von Ranke’s The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries [Die römische Papste] trans. S. Austin (London, 1840); Edinburgh Review 72 (October 1840): 227–58 (228). Diodorus Siculus, quoted in Brian Fagan, The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Westview, 2004), 17. As John Malcolm Russell has shown, the 1991 Iraq War and its aftermath has contributed to the destruction of the remains of ancient Nineveh; he calls it “a world heritage disaster of the first magnitude.” As he writes, the archive of Assyrian stones and monuments “endured largely intact for millennia, until 1991, when we began to destroy it, unread . . . To the age-old question, ‘Where do I come from?’ we will at last be able to provide a final answer: ‘I don’t know – we burned the library’ ” (see Russell, The Final Sack of Nineveh: The Discovery, Documentation, and Destruction of King Sennacherib’s Throne Room at Nineveh, Iraq (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 49, 51. More recent is Lawrence Rothfield’s The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). The terrorizing spectacle of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center towers also informs my reading here. William Winter, Brief Chronicles (New York: Dunlap Society, 1889), 239. Loren Hufstetler, “A Physical Description of Booth’s Theater, New York, 1869–1883,” Theater Design and Technology (Winter 1975): 9–19 (9). William L. Stone, A History of New York City (New York: Virtue and Yorston, 1872), 611. Harper’s Weekly (January 9, 1869): 21–2, 29. The Eagle Programme (New York) 8 (October 14, 1876): 1–3. Harvard Theater Collection. The Eagle Programme was “the exclusive house-bill in the Eagle Theater,” “with a circulation of 1,500 at each performance, eight performances a week” (2). [Program], Kelley & Leon’s Minstrels and Burlesque Opera Troupe (September 9, 1876), 1 page. Harvard Theater Collection. The New York Times reported on August 12, 1876, that rehearsals for this burlesque had begun, only a week or two after rehearsals began for the production at Booth’s, which opened August 15.

204 Notes to pp. 43–9 23. Edward Le Roy Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy, from ‘Daddy’ Rice to Date (New York: Kenney Publishing, 1911), 123. An undated picture of Leon in the New York Public Library theater collection shows him dancing ballet in full female costume with flowers in his hair. 24. [Actor’s promptbook: “Beleses”], Lord Byron’s Historical Tragedy Sardanapalus . . . as performed at Booth’s Theater, New York . . . and first produced 14th August, 1876 (Jarrett and Palmer, 1876), 40. Harvard Theater Collection. 25. Three days after the Sardanapalus production closed at Booth’s, the Brooklyn Theater burned to the ground, killing hundreds in the third-worst theater fire in American history. For a contemporary attempt to convert this in turn to spectacular melodrama (“Three hundred men, women, and children buried in the blazing ruins!”): see Brooklyn’s Horror: Wholesale Holocaust at the Brooklyn, New York, Theater (Philadelphia: Barclay & Co., 1877). 26. Jerome McGann, “Afterword,” Byron’s Manfred (Stratford, Ontario: Pasdeloup Press, 2009), 31.

3

Byron’s Venetian Masque of the French Revolution

1. See the Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. 2. See Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 7–9. Ó Tuathail traces the concept of geopolitics back to England’s war against Ireland and the emergence of “reason of state” discourses in the sixteenth century. Cf. for a genealogy of geopolitics vis-à-vis the centrality of the work of Halford J. Mackinder, see Christopher L. GoGwilt, The Fiction of Geopolitics: Afterimages of Culture, from Wilkie Collins to Alfred Hitchcock (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 17–53. 3. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 93. 4. Byron’s contemporary, John Keats (1795–1821), whose entire life was played out amidst a total war and its immediate after effects, expresses this Romantic conflation of existential finitude with an expansive spatialization of temporal contraction as a global theater of geopolitical operations: “[T]here is ever the same quantity of matter constituting this habitable globe—as the oceans notwithstanding the enormous changes and revolutions taking place in some or other of its demesnes . . . Look at the poles and at the sands of Africa, Whirlpools and volcanoes—Let men exterminate them and I will say that they may arrive at earthly Happiness” (John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958], 1: 255, 2: 101). 5. David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (London: Macmillan, 1973), 758. 6. See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). 7. Aglaia Kiarina Kordela, “Marx’s Update of Cultural Theory,” Cultural Critique 65 (Fall, 2007): 51. 8. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Carl


9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

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Schmitt, La Dictature, trans. Mira Koeller and Dominique Seglard (Paris: Seuil, 2000). Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11, 14. David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 156. For a scandal-mongering reiteration of research on the Vendée, see Reynald Secher, Le génocide francofrançais: La Vendée-Vengé (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986). François Furet, The French Revolution, 1770–1814, trans. Antonia Nevill (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 139. See Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. Christopher Miller (New York: Penguin, 1989). All references to Byron’s poems are to George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980–93). Edward D. H. Johnson, “A Political Interpretation of Byron’s Marino Faliero,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 3 (1942): 418. Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 180–91. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1973–82), 7: 37, 190, 184. Johnson, “Political Interpretation of Byron’s Marino Faliero,” 423. James Harrington, ‘The Commonwealth of Oceana’ and ‘A System of Politics’, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 7. See Malcolm Kelsall, “ ‘Once Did She Hold the Gorgeous East in Fee . . . ’: Byron’s Venice and Oriental Empire,” in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, eds. Timothy Fulford and Peter Kitson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 243–61. In Byron’s “Venice: An Ode” the American Revolution fulfils the failed promise of the Venetian Republic. Frederic Chapin Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 94. Liberal aristocrats were so intoxicated by Enlightenment idealism that they consciously turned against their class privileges, as Simon Schama argues in his otherwise problematic Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990). Citizen Sade’s case is, of course, more complicated, given his perpetual refusal to be ideologically pinned down, and is beyond the scope of this essay. For a comprehensive intervention in the historiographical politics of interpreting the French Revolution (and the reactionary tendencies canonized by Furet), see Steven L. Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution: The Historians’ Feud, France, 1789/1989 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); in regard to Schama’s orrery of bévues, see Alan B. Spitzer, “Narrative’s Problems: The Case of Simon Schama,” Journal of Modern History, 65.1 (1993): 176–92. See my “Byron—In-Between Sade, Lautréamont, and Foucault: Situating the Canon of ‘Evil’ in the Nineteenth-Century,” Romanticism on the Net: An International Refereed Electronic Journal 43 (August, 2006): 19 pars, . On the centrality of decapitation to the play, see Richard Lansdown, Byron’s Historical Dramas


24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 102–3; and Melynda Nuss, “‘The Gory Head Rolls Down the Giants’ Steps!’: The Return of the Physical in Byron’s Marino Faliero,” European Romantic Review 12.2 (2001): 226–36. Kelsall, “ ‘Once Did She Hold the Gorgeous East in Fee . . . ’ ” 244. Lansdown, Byron’s Historical Dramas, 198. Philip W. Martin, Byron: A Poet before His Public (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 147. See Joshua D. Gonsalves, “What Makes Lord Byron Go? Strong Determinations—Public/Private—of Imperial Errancy,” Studies in Romanticism 42.1 (2002): 33–64. George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 128. For example, “victims of the guerillas with their eyes plucked out, their genitals cut off and stuffed in their mouths. French troops recounted seeing comrades literally nailed to barn doors and left to die.” Major Joseph-Leopold Hugo “called it a guerre assasine (an assassin’s war) and explicitly likened it to the Vendée” (Bell, First Total War, 290, 289). For a critique of the post-Terror stereotype that “Robespierre had no private life. Politics was everything,” see Doyle and Haydon’s analysis of the Furetian repetition of the doxa that “the Revolution” was “locked from the start in a discourse of popular sovereignty whose only possible and logical outcome was terror” (William Doyle and Colin Haydon, “Robespierre: After Two Hundred Years,” in Robespierre, eds. William Doyle and Colin Haydon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 12–13. Robert Goetz, 1805 Austerlitz: Napoleon and the Destruction of the Third Coalition (London: Greenhill Books, 2005), 267. “[T]he Emperor has discovered a new way of waging war; he makes use of our legs instead of our bayonets,” cited in Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon, 148. For an argument that imperial geopolitics was resisted by “an anti-imperial geopolitics” that focused on local advantages against foreign incursion, see Wright on the relationship between an Irish geopolitical focus on “the materiality of geography as a discipline concerned with natural resources and local particulars as well as spatial relationships” vis-à-vis the British empire’s homogenization of space (Julia M. Wright, “ ‘The Policy of Geography’: Cavour’s Considerations, European Geopolitics, and Ireland in the 1840s,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 48 (November, 2007): 19 pars, ). In the case of Russia, the harsh summer and winter weather and the obstacles it offered Napoleon’s army (for example, the muddy impassibility and washed-out state of premodern roads inimical to heavy artillery and supply trains) would be paradigmatic for this geopolitical alterity that the Russian irregular cavalry and local guerilla forces were so efficient in exploiting to the infinite misery of Napoleon’s troops. The fact, however, that Russia was an imperial power modifies Wright’s argument. Compare Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that imperial states are traversed by war machines only nominally tied to empire and in a symbio(s)tic relation to local flows, speeds and slownesses, smooth and striated spaces (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

Notes to pp. 60–6

34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

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Vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 351–452). Napoleon’s horses were almost entirely obliterated by the Russian debacle, contributing to the inevitability of his defeat in 1812–15. For a magisterial yet nuanced survey on how French, British, and German territorial pissings (a.k.a. nationalist historiographical politics) have obscured the centrality of Russia to the defeat of Napoleon in 1812–15, see D. C. B. Lieven, “Russia and the Defeat of Napoleon (1812–14),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7.2 (Spring 2006): 288n15; “A Swedish historian who recently convened a meeting of British and French historians of the Napoleonic era commented that the two sides appeared scarcely to have budged from the positions adopted by their countries in the early 19th century” (Steven Englund, “Un regard américain,” in Napoléon et l’Europe: Regards sur une politique . . ., ed. Thierry Lentz [Paris: Fayard, 2005], 359–65). See Gonsalves, “What Makes Lord Byron Go?,” 46–56. See Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vols. 1–24, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 14: 200–4. “By all the power that’s given thee over my soul, / By thy resistless tears and conquering smiles, / By the victorious love that still waits on thee” (Thomas Otway, Venice Preserved, ed. Malcolm Kelsall [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969], 4.2.420–2). Byron, Letters and Journals, 8: 78. Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 165. Thomas L. Ashton, “Marino Faliero: Byron’s ‘Poetry of Politics,’ ” Studies in Romanticism 13 (1974): 13.

4 “Awake to Terror”: The Impact of Italy on Byron’s Depiction of Freedom’s Battles 1. Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, 13 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973–94), 6: 229–31; hereafter cited in text as BLJ with volume and page number. 2. Curt A. Zimansky, The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971), 28. 3. See Daniel P. Jordan, “The Robespierre Problem,” in Robespierre, ed. Colin Haydon and William Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29. 4. Byron owned a copy of the political romance by Isaac D’Israeli, Despotism, or the Fall of the Jesuits (1811), and Dallas’s Detection of the Conspiracy against the Jesuits (1815). His interest in the Jesuit order continued while abroad and Processo contro li Gesuiti (1760) is recorded amongst his Italian library. Under the heading “Probable Effects of Despotism in Italy,” Hobhouse considers the suppression of the Jesuits and writes that “if the present depression shall continue to weigh upon the Italians,” evidence of native genius will be gradually extinguished: “All the elements which, under the creative encouragement of a free, or even an independent government, might compose a great and


5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

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13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

enlightened nation, will mingle into their primitive confusion, and sedate ignorance establish, upon the inert mass, her leaden throne.” See John Cam Hobhouse, Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold (London: John Murray 1818), viii, 325–6. Lady Morgan, Italy (London: Henry Colburn, 1824), 1: 5. Byron praised it as “fearless and excellent” (BLJ, 8: 189). Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” New Monthly Magazine 16 (1826): 149. For a discussion of the use of term “horror” and “terribilità” in seventeenthand eighteenth-century art commentaries, see Chloe Chard, “Horror on the Grand Tour,” Oxford Art Journal 6.2 (1983): 12. Joseph Addison, Spectator, 418 (June 30, 1712). William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 1991), 249. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 36. James Aug. Galiffe, Italy and its Inhabitants; An Account of a Tour in that Country in 1816 and 1817, 2 vols. (London: John Murray 1818), 2: 265. Byron owned a copy of this book in Italy. For a discussion of the response to scenes of violence by eighteenth-century travelers, see Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1699–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 93–5. John Hobhouse, Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold (London: John Murray, 1818), 320–1. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 10 vols. (London: Ernest Benn, 1926), 9: 335. Shelley also recorded “the inexpressible brutalities which degrade human nature” in the Austrian treatment of the Venetians. See Margaret Anne Doody, Tropic of Venice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 93. Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (London: John Murray, 1843), 328. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 2nd edn. (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), 247. Napoleon also ended the practices of the Inquisition. All references to Byron’s poetry are to Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann and Barry Weller, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), 4: 562; hereafter cited in text as CPW with volume and page number for prose commentary/notes, title plus canto and/or line number for poetry, or title plus act, scene, and line number for drama. Leslie A. Marchand, “Byron and Count Alborghetti,” PMLA 64 (December, 1949): 994–5; BLJ, 8: 106; CPW, 4: 305. For Byron’s resistance to Barbarian bullying, see BLJ, 8: 125–6. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (London: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), 2: 629–30. 2 Kings 19: 35 (King James Version). Randall D. Law, Terrorism: A History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 11–12. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III, Byron suggests that Napoleon’s flaw was “a continued obtrusion on mankind of his want of all community of

Notes to pp. 71–7

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26.

27.

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30. 31. 32.

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feeling for or with them; perhaps more offensive to human vanity than the active cruelty of more trembling and suspicious tyranny” (CPW, 2: 304). The association between political terror and the British government is made in Byron’s speech on the Framework Bill: “will you erect a gibbet in every field & hang up men like scarecrows? or will you proceed (as you must to bring this measure into effect) by decimation, place the country under martial law, depopulate & lay waste all around you.” George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 26; hereafter cited in text as CMP. For Byron’s experience of St Paul’s, see Christine Kenyon Jones, “Byron, Thomas Chalmers and the Scottish Religious Heritage,” in Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens, ed. Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 107–20. But for the tradition of naturalist craftsmanship in Dutch landscape art, for example, see Paul Corby Finney, ed., Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). See, for example, Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 20–1. Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an excursion in Italy in the Years 1802 and 1803, ed. Keith Crook (London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 91. Shelley, Complete Works, 9: 434–44. Samuel Rogers, The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, ed. J. R. Hale (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), 173. Philip Martin suggests the importance of the different artistic tradition of exempla virtutis and the paintings of David for these historical tragedies. See Philip W. Martin, Byron: A Poet before His Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 138–48. The Hieronymus Bosch paintings were given to the Ducal Palace by Cardinal Domenico Grimani in 1523: I have not been able to establish conclusively whether or not they were on display to visitors in Byron’s time. Note to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III, stanza 66 (CPW II: 308). For the importance of the exact “spot” to Byron’s imagination, see Stephen Cheeke, Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For Byron as a war poet, see Simon Bainbridge, “ ‘Of war and taking towns’: Byron’s siege poems,” in Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822, ed. Philip Shaw (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 161–84. Peter J. Kitson, “Byron and Post-Colonial Criticism,” in Byron Studies, ed. Jane Stabler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 125. See CPW III: 481–2. See the entry for September 28, 1817, in Peter Cochran’s transcription of the diary . BLJ, 8: 152. For Byron’s reaction against the English stage, particularly Shakespeare, see Richard Lansdown, Byron’s Historical Dramas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Germaine de Staël, Ten Years of Exile, trans. Avriel H. Goldberger (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 69.

210 Notes to pp. 77–87 40. William Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, ed. Robert J. Gemmett (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2006), 102–3. 41. Rogers’s account of his visit suggests that the tour was much the same as in Beckford’s time. See Rogers, Italian Journal, ed. Hale, 180. 42. See CPW 4: 116. In the notes to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto II, Byron referred light heartedly to the Venetian dramatist Carlo Goldoni (“His life is also one of the best specimens of autobiography, and, as Gibbon has observed, ‘more dramatic than any of his plays’ ”; CPW 2: 296). Goldoni was a legal interrogator whose job was to record what was confessed under torture. His memoirs record the interest of criminal interrogation to “unriddle character.” See Doody, Tropic of Venice, 76–8. 43. Doody, Tropic of Venice, 94. Malcolm Kelsall observes, “Taken together the two plays are indicative of a total impasse producing, in Venice, decline and eventual extinction. What moral might that offer for Britain?” See Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 91. 44. See Andrew Nicholson, ed., The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 319, 343, 360, 371. 45. Andrew Rutherford, ed., Byron: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 101.

5 “Something Not Yet Made Good”: Byron’s Cain, Godwin, and Mary Shelley’s Falkner 1. Parenthetical references are to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Falkner: A Tale of Three Orphans (Doylestown, Pennsylvania: Wildside Press, n.d.). 2. Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 89. 3. References are to Mary Shelley, Mathilda, in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 173–246. 4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956). On the issue of judgment and the relation between ethics and morality in Caleb Williams, as well as on perverse identification, see Chapter 4 of my book, Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 5. Quoted in David Farrell Krell, Contagion: Sexuality, Disease and Death in German Idealism and Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 47. 6. Sara Guyer, “The Rhetoric of Survival and the Possibility of Romanticism,” Studies in Romanticism 46.2 (2007): 251–2. 7. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2, 9. 8. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 41–3. 9. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 62–3. By contrast, Jane Blumberg claims that Shelley’s women “are praised for their timidity, docility . . . [and]


10. 11. 12.

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14. 15. 16.

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fidelity to a man. They are . . . completely in thrall—by choice—to the men who control their lives” (Mary Shelley’s Early Novels: “This Child of Imagination and Misery” [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993], 222). Anne Mellor also complains that Shelley’s women have an “identity constructed entirely in relational terms” and do not achieve autonomy (Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters [New York: Routledge, 1988], 205). Hence Mellor sees Shelley as idealizing the bourgeois family, which “only reproduces the patriarchal structure of bourgeois capitalism.” Her novels “uncomfortably suggest that the female raised within the bourgeois family may never be able to escape the father’s seduction,” even though they “support a feminist position” to the limited extent that they see female culture as “superior to male culture” (217–18). A different reading of the family in Falkner is provided by Kate Ferguson Ellis in “Subversive Surfaces: The Limits of Domestic Affection in Mary Shelley’s Later Fiction,” in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne Mellor, and Esther Schor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 231–2. Mary Shelley, Lodore, ed. Lisa Vargo (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997), 62. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxxvii. Nicholas Rand, “Editor’s Note,” in Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Volume 1, ed. and trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 99–100. Abraham and Torok, Shell and the Kernel, 158. On the secret as constituting an unavowable community, see Christopher Bundock, “The (Inoperative) Epistolary Community in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy,” European Romantic Review 5.20 (2009): 709–13. Sara Guyer, “The Pardon of the Disaster,” SubStance 35.1 (2006): 91. Mary Shelley, “The Mourner,” in Collected Tales and Stories, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 93. References to Cain: A Mystery are to the text in Lord Byron’s Cain: Twelve Essays and a Text with Variants and Annotations, ed. Truman Guy Steffan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 153–258. Paul Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 143, 151. Friedrich Schelling, Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters (1809), trans. Diana Behler, in Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), 228. Jürgen Habermas, “Ernst Bloch: A Marxist Schelling,” in PhilosophicalPolitical Profiles (1971), trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 71. Schelling, Ages of the World (1815), trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 18. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, n.trans. (New York: Vintage, 1973), 387. Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, ed. and trans. Michelle Kendall and Stewart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 129, 133. Foucault, Order of Things, 322–4.

212 Notes to pp. 92–102 24. Bataille, Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, 111–14. 25. See for instance 2.2.187–9, 241–5, 358–65. 26. For a discussion of Leibniz’s theory of possible worlds, contingency, and incompossibility, see my article, “Between Romance and History: Possibility and Contingency in Godwin, Leibniz, and Mary Shelley’s Valperga,” in Mary Shelley in Her Times, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 88–102. 27. Byron, letter to John Murray, November 3, 1821. See Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, 6 vols. (rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 5: 470. 28. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, ed. F. E. L. Priestley, 3 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946), 2: 348–51. 29. The phrase is Jacques Derrida’s in “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Points . . . Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 278–82. 30. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (1955), trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 104; see also 94–100. 31. John Keats, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 1.258–61. The paradoxical pun in “death sentence” is in the title of Blanchot’s novel, L’Arrêt du Mort, meaning both a sentence of death and a stopping of death. 32. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 35. 33. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 203. 34. Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” 32. 35. Ibid. 36. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1986), 53. On the word “faute” see Guyer, “Pardon of the Disaster,” 90. 37. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 74, 124–8. 38. Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Reiman and Fraistat, 535.

6


1. Among those who stress the Promethean trait in Byron’s heroes, Peter Thorslev explores the philosophical dimension of the Promethean Manfred in depth in The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962). Byron scholars have explored Manfred’s struggle in terms of skepticism, anti-idealism, and solipsism. See Charles Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 2, 5–8, 18, 42; Stephen Behrendt, “Manfred and Skepticism,” in Approaches to Teaching Byron’s Poetry, ed. Frederick W. Shilstone (New York: MLA, 1991), 120–5; Terence Hoagwood, Byron’s Dialectic: Skepticism and the Critique of Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1992), 41. In “Manfred’s Mental Theater and the


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Construction of Knowledge,” Emily Jackson argues Manfred displays “radical skepticism,” that is, a textual suspicion of positing any truth (SEL 47.4 [Autumn, 2007], 799–824). Byron called Manfred a “metaphysical” play or “a sort of mad Drama” with “[a]lmost all the dram. pers.” being “spirits, ghosts, or magicians” (Letter to Thomas Moore, March 25, 1817, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand [hereafter cited in text as BLJ] [Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 1973], 5.188) and of a “wild—metaphysical—and inexplicable kind” (Letter to John Murray, Feb. 15, 1817, BLJ, 5.170). The “Invocation,” later incorporated into Manfred, was written in June 1816, and published with The Prisoner of Chillon on December 5, 1816. “The Alpine journal,” addressed to Augusta Leigh, was written in late September. Byron wrote the first two acts of Manfred between September and October of 1816 and finished the play between January and February of 1817, but rewrote the third act, finishing it May 5 of that year. In July 1817, the reviewer John Wilson, a.k.a. Christopher North, of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, also compares Marlowe’s Faustus with Manfred (388–95). He criticizes Manfred, however, as one who “comes at last to have no fixed principles of belief on any subject” (Donald Reiman, ed., The Romantics Reviewed, part B. 5 vols. [New York and London 1972], I. 119). Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review, too, compares Marlowe’s Faustus and Manfred and defends Manfred’s originality, depth, and force ([August 1817], 430–1). Byron seemed particularly heartened by Jeffrey’s review and stated that he had not read Marlowe (BLJ, 5.268). Letter to John Murray dated October 12, 1817 (BLJ, 5.268). Byron’s first English exercise at Harrow was to translate a chorus from the Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. James Scully and C. J. Herington (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), l.461. Thorslev, Byronic Hero, 124. Thorslev then conflates the Promethean Byronic hero with Byron himself: “For Prometheus was an individualist, a skeptic, and a rebel, and all of those things Byron was too” (Byronic Hero, 124). Indeed, Thorslev’s emphasis on the freedom-seeking aspects of the Promethean and the Byronic hero provides a foundation for Faustian, Nietzschean, existentialist, and Heideggerian perspectives. Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 131, 389. Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (New York: Viking Press, 1959), ix. Taylor’s notion of the inner self emphasizes reason, which determines one’s social and political positions. This Kantian conceptualization of reason is criticized by Georg Lukács as the core of bourgeois ideology in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971). Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

214 Notes to pp. 106–13 14. Peter Manning, Byron and His Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978). 15. Caroline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 16. Pamela Boker, “Byron’s Psychic Prometheus: Narcissism and SelfTransformation in the Dramatic Poem Manfred,” Literature and Psychology 38.1–2 (1992): 1–37. Also see Atara Stein, who states: “Manfred can love only an idealized reflection of himself: he destroys Astarte rather than discover her flaws and mortal nature . . . As a human being, Astarte cannot fill the roles Manfred wants her to, and he must destroy her to preserve her in her ideal state” (“ ‘I Loved Her and Destroyed Her’: Love and Narcissism in Byron’s Manfred,” PQ 69.2 [Spring 1990]), 200. 17. Critics such as Jerome McGann (Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968]) and Simon Bainbridge (Napoleon and English Romanticism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995]) examine Byron’s interest in Napoleon in general and more specifically his comparison between Napoleon and Prometheus. 18. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Michel Le Guern (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade ed., 1964). This famous aphorism is numbered 31. See Pensées and Other Writings, ed. Anthony Levi, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 9. 19. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2002), 204. 20. James W. Bernauer and Michael Mahon, “The Ethics of Michel Foucault,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). “Pastoral power” emphasized obedience as the paramount virtue and generated a struggle with one’s desires, with oneself (145). 21. Foucault, “Afterword,” 221–2. 22. Jerome McGann, Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30. 23. Ibid., 30. 24. Thorslev notes that Shelley and Byron were influenced by Christoph Martin Wieland’s Agathon to use brother-and-sister love to epitomize the relationship between the hero and his psyche (“Incest as Romantic Symbol,” Comparative Literature Studies, 2 [1965]: 41–58). 25. Jacques Lacan, Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and the Techniques of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1991), 125. 26. Sigmund Freud, “Narcissism,” General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 74. 27. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 121. 28. See Manning, Byron and His Fictions, 79. From this viewpoint, Manning considers Byron’s poetic career as a progress towards a single, consistent literary voice—a poetic identity—which culminates in Don Juan. Manfred seems to call into question the notion of poetic identity itself, which is also inseparable from the masculine libidinal economy. 29. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, June 1, 1817, 289–95 (289) (BLJ, 5.249).


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30. Jerome McGann, “Byron and Wordsworth,” The Byron Foundation Lecture May 27, 1998 (Nottingham: The University of Nottingham, 1998), 52. Also see Ch. 9, “Byron and Wordsworth,” of Byron and Romanticism, 173–201. 31. Andrew Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Survey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), 79. 32. Philip Cox, Gender, Genre and the Romantic Poets (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1996), 126. 33. The Lacanian formulation of the sublime suggests how the beautiful and the sublime, traditionally discreet concepts in Kantian and Burkean definitions, can converge in a terrifying effect. See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 202–3. 34. Bernauer and Mahon, “The Ethics of Michel Foucault,” 151. 35. George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Works of Lord Byron: A New, Revised and Enlarged Edition with Illustrations, ed. Rowland E. Prothero (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 385. 36. John Murray cut this line from the play’s first edition, infuriating Byron, who demanded its reinstatement (BLJ, 5.257).

7 “Like the Sheeted Fire from Heaven”: Transcendence and Resentment in Marino Faliero 1. Mimetic or “suggested” desire (the latter term is Shakespeare’s) is the desire a subject imitates or borrows from a “model,” singular or plural. A triangular geometry is thus implied, with the object of desire, the subject who desires it, and the model(s) whose desires have designated it at the three angles. For Girard this structure is inherent to all human desire; non-mimetic desire is mere appetite. The case for the claim that Byron understands desire in much this way is made in more depth in the present author’s Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009). 2. The present discussion also thus follows Daniel P. Watkins, for whom the plays “are meant to be read as studies in the fundamental values which bind society.” “Violence, Class Consciousness, and Ideology in Byron’s History Plays,” ELH (Winter, 1981): 799. 3. Of Girard’s many works, perhaps the most complete statement of his system is Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). 4. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 64–5. 5. For Gans, a reader might begin with Originary Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), Signs of Paradox (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), or The Scenic Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 6. Gans, Originary Thinking, 9. 7. As, for example, in “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs” (1791), Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. Peter J. Stanlis (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 542–3. 8. Gans, Originary Thinking, 137. 9. Ibid., 140.

216 Notes to pp. 121–31 10. Ibid., 167. Such ideas of tragedy are not incompatible with certain other approaches, but imply a different valuation and function. The Hegelian dialectic is structurally similar, and many theorists of the genre have seen the struggle of binaries—individuality and generality, fate and freedom, Dionysian and Apollonian, chaos and order, hubris and nemesis, and so forth—moving towards destruction, restoration if not of synthesis or unity but at least of peace or stasis or balance. Containment or redirection of the dynamism of resentment is the central cultural and social problem, in Gans’s view, a problem that re-figures itself in new forms as constantly as it is always temporarily “solved.” 11. Jerome J. McGann, “Literary and Historical Background” to Marino Faliero, in George Gordon, Lord Byron, Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, Vol. 2 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986), 526. 12. George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book 2, Chapter 21. 13. Gans, Scenic Imagination, 48. 14. Byron quotations are from Jerome J. McGann, ed., Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), vol. 4, 300. Quotations from Marino Faliero cite act, scene, and line numbers. 15. “Characterization is itself subordinate to the religious and symbolic spectacle whose first intention is to unfold meaning” (Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968], 206). 16. Gans, Originary Thinking, 128. 17. In Girard’s terminology, this is “metaphysical desire,” where objects of desire have fallen away and the subject is locked into an obsession with the model. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 294–325. 18. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport” (4.1.36–7). This is a good example of what Anne Barton rightly characterizes as the “riddling and intellectually provocative” use of Shakespearean reference in the play. “ ‘A Light to Lesson Ages’ ”: Byron’s Political Plays,” in John D. Jump, ed., Byron: A Symposium (London: Macmillan, 1975), 145. 19. Faliero himself notes the lack of precedents for his action, finding only Agis, King of Sparta, and himself in the entire historical record. 5.3.16–22. 20. Philip J. Skerry, “Concentric Structures in Marino Faliero,” Keats-Shelley Journal 32 (1983): 82. 21. These are also well analysed by Skerry, 86–107. 22. McGann, Fiery Dust, 209, 214. For a discussion of the language of persecution and scapegoating, see René Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Or, for a shorter treatment, see “Stereotypes of Persecution,” Chapter 8 of The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 107–17. 23. A. B. England argues that the play in fact centrally concerns, even celebrates, the Doge’s pursuit and even accomplishment of agency, autonomy. “Byron pays tribute here to the energy and élan inherent in Faliero’s act of choice” (“Byron’s Marino Faliero and the Force of Individual Agency,” Keats-Shelley Journal 39 [1990]: 122). 24. See the assessments, for example, of Carl Woodring in Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Harvard: Cambridge University Press, 1970), or Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987). 25. As at Paradise Lost, 9.467, “the hot Hell that always in him burns.” 26. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Stanza 137.


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27. England elides the human and impersonal in a formulation telling for what it does not quite say: “It is rather the inevitability in the pattern of Venetian and perhaps all human life . . . and it causes the behaviour of human beings to degenerate into brutalism. It is thus not a force that Faliero would quite be able to define for himself. But even though it appears to derive its life from the behavior of particular human beings, this force is consistent with Faliero’s ‘Fate’ in that it deprives human beings of the power of choice and is describable as something other than human” (England, “Byron’s Marino Faliero and the Force of Individual Agency”: 114). This “force” sounds very much like a somewhat mythologized form of what the present analysis understands by the term resentment. 28. See Manfred, 3.4. 29. Manfred, 1.2.40. 30. To adopt Kelsall’s useful distinction for left-wing ideologies of the time, between “liberal” and “totalitarian.” “The Slave-Woman in the Harem,” Studies in Romanticism 31 (Fall, 1992), 318.

8 “And Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind”: Byron, Switzerland, and the Poetics of Freedom 1. Clarissa Cambell Orr, “Romanticism in Switzerland,” in Romanticism in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 185. 2. See, for example, Ernest Giddey, “1816: Switzerland and the Revival of the ‘Grand Tour,’ ” The Byron Journal 19 (1991): 23. 3. Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973–1982), 8.214 and 175–6. All quotations from Byron’s letters will be taken from this edition, hereafter cited within the text as BLJ. Ernest Giddey cites the first of these quotations as evidence of “the true nature of [Byron’s] feelings” in “Byron and Switzerland,” in Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe: A Symposium, ed. Paul Graham Trueblood (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1981), 180. 4. Leslie Marchand quoting Byron’s guide, Pryse Lockhart Gordon, in Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1957), 2.611. 5. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron’s note to line 607, Canto III. Hereafter references to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage will be cited in parentheses in the text as CHP and the relevant canto and number line. All quotations from Byron’s poetry are taken from The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), hereafter referred to as CPW. 6. Giuseppe Mazzini, Essays, ed. William Clarke (London: Walter Scott, 1887), 106–7. 7. Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 72–3. 8. William Lloyd Garrison, “My Second Baltimore Trial,” The Liberator 1.1 (January 1, 1831): 2. 9. See, for example, Amelia Fletcher’s article on the imprisoned Lori Berenson, “Through Many Bridges: A Modern Application of Byron’s Sonnet,” The Pelican (Baldwin County, Alabama), August 25, 1999.

218 Notes to pp. 143–51 10. Margaret Thatcher, “Speech Paying Tribute to Ronald Regan.” Address, “Tribute to Freedom” dinner, Washington DC, March 1, 2002 (The Margaret Thatcher Foundation, 2010), . 11. McGann argues that Byron probably composed the sonnet after Claire Clairmont had completed copying The Prisoner of Chillon, CPW 4.449. 12. Marchand, Byron, 2.632. 13. All quotations from The Prisoner of Chillon are taken from CPW 4, and cited by line reference in parenthesis in the text. 14. George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 7 vols. (London: John Murray, 1901), 4.9. 15. For a reading of the poem that presents the prisoner as “a paradigm of the eternal human condition,” tracing “the decay of the human mind in the dungeon of its being,” see Robert F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 191. Alan Rawes argues that “the prisoner is a reworking of Byron’s own experience as it is represented in Childe Harold III,” in Byron’s Poetic Experimentation: Childe Harold, The Tales and the Quest for Comedy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 82. 16. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 1.485. 17. Ibid. 18. Byron, Works, ed. Coleridge, 4.9. 19. William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 282. 20. Hobhouse’s journal is quoted from “Byron in the Alps: The Journal of John Cam Hobhouse, 17–29 September 1816,” ed. John Clubbe, in John Clubbe and Ernest Giddey, Byron et La Suisse: Deux Études (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1982), 40, 44, 55–6. Further quotations are cited in parentheses in the text. 21. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 246. 22. John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London and New York: Longman, 1971), 134. I am particularly grateful to Patrick Vincent for alerting me to the importance of this tradition during what for me was very valuable correspondence about Byron and Switzerland. 23. See Giddey, “1816,” 23. 24. William Coxe, Sketches of the Natural, Civic, and Political State of Swisserland; in a series of letters to William Melmoth, Esq, 2nd ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1780), 470. 25. Helen Maria Williams, A Tour of Switzerland; or, a view of the present state of the governments and manners of these cantons; with comparative sketches of the present state of Paris (London: G. G. Robinson, 1798), 4–5. 26. Patrick Vincent, “Revising Republicanism: Metamorphoses of Liberty in Revolutionary-era Swiss Travel Narratives,” Republican Exchanges c.1550–c.1850, Conference, Newcastle University, July 16–18, 2009. 27. Ibid. 28. Wordsworth, Major Works, 330. 29. Giddey, “1816,” 23. 30. CPW 4.64. 31. Ibid., 4.64, 68.


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9 Byron: Consistency, Change, and the Greek War 1. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), vol. V. All references to Don Juan are to this edition, henceforth cited in text as DJ. Complete Poetical Works henceforth cited as CPW. 2. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), 206. 3. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973–94), 6: 123. Hereafter cited in text as BLJ. 4. Malcolm Kelsall, Byron’s Politics (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987); and, more recently, “Byron’s Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge: University Press, 2004), 44–55. 5. Kelsall, “Byron’s Politics,” 50. 6. Leslie Mitchell, The Whig World, 1760–1837 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2005), xi. 7. Walter Bagehot, “The First Edinburgh Reviewers,” National Review, October, 1855, 253–84 (262). 8. So, for example, on Byron’s situation in Mesolongi, F. Rosen, Bentham, Byron and Greece: Constitutionalism, Nationalism, and Early Liberal Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992): “Byron was vulnerable . . . He lacked ideological commitment in a setting that required it, if any progress (of whatever value) was to be made” (193). 9. Mitchell, Whig World: “Between 1760 and 1830, Whiggery learnt to become an oppositional creed” (8). 10. “I look upon a proper appreciation of Pope as a touchstone of taste” (BLJ, 8: 200). 11. Mitchell, for example, draws attention to the “harmony and consistency” in reading Pope in a Whig neo-classical house (Whig World, 29). 12. “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice” (Le Monde, December 14, 1957). 13. Byron explicitly denied the connection: “[T]he French Revolution was not occasioned by any writings whatsoever, but must have occurred had no such writers [as Voltaire and Rousseau] ever existed,” CPW, VI, 223 (Note to The Two Foscari). Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanza 81, however, expresses the opposite view. 14. Gérard de Nerval, Oeuvres, ed. H. Lemaitre (Paris : Garnier, 1966), 591. “L’ambition n’était . . . pas ne notre âge . . . Il ne nous restait pour asile que cette tour d’ivoire des poètes, où nous montions toujours plus haut pour nous isoler de la foule.” 15. “In a Revolution, such as is now agitating in France . . . ” (The Times, Tuesday, July 14, 1789: 3, col. A). 16. The Times, Monday, July 20, 1789: 2, col. C. 17. Charles James Fox to T. Grenville, August, 1789, quoted in Leslie Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 110. 18. Mitchell, Charles James Fox, 25. 19. Cf. Byron’s reference to having dinner with Richard Sharp, “a man of elegant mind, and who has lived much with the best—Fox, Horne Tooke, Windham, Fitzpatrick, and all the agitators of other times and tongues” (BLJ, 3: 219,

220 Notes to pp. 158–66

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

Journal entry for November 24, 1813). There is a brief critical mention of “coalitioner Fox” in a letter of June 1, 1818, a reference to Fox’s membership of the Talents Ministry of 1806; interestingly, this is in the course of Byron’s celebration of Sheridan “as a man of principle” (BLJ, 6: 48). Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, lines 865–7, in CPW, vol. II. All references are to this edition, henceforth CHP. CPW, II, 156n. Jock Macleod, “Misreading Writing: Rousseau, Byron, and Childe Harold III,” Comparative Literature 43, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 260–79 (274). Jerome McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Development (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 92. McGann, Fiery Dust, viii–ix. “Observations upon Observations,” Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 176. Hereafter cited in text as CMP. McGann, Fiery Dust, 85. Cited in CPW, 5, 769. Benjamin Constant, Journaux intimes (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 212. “There is certainly [in him, sc. Fouché] a kind of mobility of imagination, a susceptibility to vague and melancholy impressions, which does not belong to the majority of men and in which the majority of men can see only affectation.” Count Peter Gamba, A Narrative of Lord Byron’s Last Journey to Greece (Paris: Galignani, 1825), 33. Robert Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 132. The expression is from The Bride of Abydos, Canto II, 338. Compare the language of the letter to Lady Byron of March 1, 1821: “It is a war of men with monarchs, and will spread like a spark on the dry, rank grass of the vegetable desert” (BLJ, 8: 89). Compare Byron’s comments in a letter to John Cam Hobhouse of April 22, 1820: “Upon reform you have long known my opinion—but radical is a new word since my time—it was not in the political vocabulary in 1816—when I left England—and I don’t know what it means—is it uprooting? . . . I protest, not against reform—but my most thorough contempt and abhorrence—of all that I have seen, heard, or heard of the persons calling themselves reformers, radicals, and such other names,—-I should look upon being free with such men, as much the same as being in bonds with felons” (BLJ, 7: 81). Roderick Beaton, “Romanticism in Greece,” in Romanticism in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 92–108 (94). I have set out the detail of the context in “Lord Byron and Mavrokordatos,” Romanticism 12.2 (2006): 126–42; “Letters to Lord Byron,” Romanticism on the Net, 45 (February, 2007); and “Byron and Mesolongi,” Literature Compass (July, 2007). Kelsall, Byron’s Politics, 194–5. See, for example, the letter to John Bowring of July 7, 1823 (BLJ, 10: 210). “There must be an universal republic,--and there ought to be” (BLJ, 8: 15). See, for example, the letters of October 6, 1823 (BLJ, 11: 42), December 11, 1823 (ibid., 76), January 27, 1824 (ibid., 100).


221

39. See Rosen, Bentham, Byron and Greece, 144–63. 40. “Immortal works will testify, even to the most distant posterity, the extent to which you have . . . contributed to the regeneration of Greece” (Letter from Mavrokordatos to Byron, July 2/14, 1823. London Greek Committee papers, vol. v, fo. J). 41. “[A]ll men of information and patriotism . . . look up to your Lordship as likely to be the interior pacificator of the country— —the liberator of Greece” (Letter from Hastings to Byron, October 20, 1823, London Greek Committee papers, vol. v, fo. K5A).

10 “I have a penchant for black”: Race and Orphic Dismemberment in Byron’s The Deformed Transformed and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace 1. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (New York: Belknap Press, 1974), 6: 237. Hereafter cited in text as BLJ. 2. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Tennyson: The Major Works, ed. Adam Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 541. 3. George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Deformed Transformed, in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, 6 vols., ed. Jerome McGann and Barry Weller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 6: 517–77. Hereafter cited in text as DT and CPW. 4. Oxford English Dictionary: Gr. σ παραγ μós, tearing, rending. 5. Virgil, Virgil’s Georgics, trans. Janet Lembke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 75. 6. Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Rolf Humphries (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1956), 11: 48–86. 7. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. A. Poulin, Jr. (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), First Series: Sonnet #26, lines 11–13, p. 135. 8. For dismemberment in Milton’s “Lycidas,” see William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 179. 9. Anne Barton, “Byron: The Poetry of It All: Review of The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons, by David Crane, and Byron: Life and Legend, by Fiona Maccarthy,” New York Review of Books 49.20 (December 19, 2002). 10. Andrew Stauffer, “Byron, the Pyramids, and ‘Uncertain Paper,’ ” Wordsworth Circle 36.1 (Winter, 2005): 11–15. 11. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (New York: Belknap Press, 1974); Detached Thoughts, 1821–2. 12. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Introduction,” Black Orpheus, trans. S. W. Allen (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 1; for a contemporary version of this argument, see Mothobi Mutloatse, “Introduction,” in M. Mutloatse, ed., Forced Landing: Africa South, Contemporary Writings (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980). 13. Sartre, Black Orpheus, 21. 14. Ibid., 10.

222 Notes to pp. 171–6 15. Ibid., 11. 16. Ibid., 11 17. Charles E. Robinson, “The Devil as Doppelganger in The Deformed Transformed: The Sources and Meaning of Byron’s Unfinished Drama,” in The Plays of Lord Byron: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Gleckner and Bernard Beatty (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997). Imke Heuer, “Shadows of Beauty, Shadows of Power: Heroism, Deformity, and Classical Allusion in Joshua Pickersgill’s The Three Brothers and Byron’s The Deformed Transformed” . George Steiner, in The Death of Tragedy (New York: Knopf, 1961), G. Wilson Knight in Byron and Shakespeare (London: Routledge 1966), Bernard Blackstone in Byron: A Survey (London: Longman, 1975), and Martyn Corbett in Byron and Tragedy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, now Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), and Alan Richardson, A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Modern Age (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988) do not consider the importance of the race of Byron’s Stranger. 18. Daniel Watkins, “The Ideological Dimensions of Byron’s The Deformed Transformed,” in Plays of Lord Byron, ed. Gleckner and Beatty, 353. 19. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 12. 20. Watkins, “Ideological Dimensions,” 353. 21. Watkins, “Ideological Dimensions,” 353–4. Watkins states that the Stranger’s blackness is only an “initial appearance” (353) and that Arnold is the first in the fray (351). In fact, Charles Bourbon is first; the swart Caesar watches, bemusedly, as Bourbon and Arnold fight to gain undeserved recognition for their acts. 22. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller, with an introduction by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 23. Robinson, “Devil as Doppelganger,” 345, n. 23. 24. See Nell Irvin Painter, The History of the White Race (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 25. For an astute critique of this viewpoint, see Houston A. Baker, Jr., Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 26. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, viii. 27. See Kai Easton, “Coetzee’s Disgrace: Byron in Italy and the Eastern Cape c. 1820,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42.3 (September, 1007): 113–30; and Easton’s essay, “J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: Rereading Race/Reading Scandal,” in Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere, ed. Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); also, Colleen M. Sheils, “Opera, Byron, and a South African Psyche in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 15.1 (2003): 38–50. Encountering Disgrace: Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, ed. Bill McDonald (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2009); as well as essays in Interventions 4.3 (2001), focussing on the alleged racism of the novel, on rape and questions of gender, and political themes. Laurence Wright, “David Lurie’s Learning and the Meaning of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” in Africa in Literature: The 15th International Conference of the English Academy


28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

223

of Southern Africa, University of Cape Town, 10–13 July, 2005, 22, mentions Lurie as Orpheus, and Jonathan Gross explores political themes in “Slaves of Passion: Byron and Stael on Liberty,” in Liberty and Poetic License: New Essays on Byron, ed. Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe, and Charles E. Robinson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 193–205. For an interesting reference to blackness in the “Song of Solomon” see Stuart Peterfreund, “The Problematic of Embodiment,” European Romantic Review 12.3 (Summer, 2001): 284–301 (287). James Woods reviews the novel without mentioning Byron (New Republic, October 10, 2001); reprinted in “Coetzee’s Disgrace: A Few Skeptical Thoughts,” in The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); advanced publicity for the novel omitted mention that Lurie was a Byron scholar (Easton, “Coetzee’s Disgrace,” 124). J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Viking, 1999), 33. Ibid., 33. Jacques Barzun distinguishes between Byron and the Byronic in his “Introduction,” in George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Selected Letters of Lord Byron (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Young, 1953), 7–41. For a Byron less criminal than modern biographers portray, see “Introduction” to Teresa Guiccioli, Lord Byron’s Life in Italy, trans. Michael Rees and ed. Peter Cochran (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 49. See Christine Kenyon Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-era Writing (London: Ashgate, 2001). As a disciple of Wordsworth, Lurie treats animals as part of a lower realm. For a treatment of lameness by Byron’s biographers, see Jones, “Deformity Transformed: Byron and His Biographers on the Subject of His Lameness,” European Romantic Review 12.3 (Summer, 2001): 249–67. Castor and Pollux both wear skullcaps, like Lurie’s (reminiscent from the egg from which they hatched). Both Pollux and Lurie stare at Lucy’s naked body (207). Lurie calls Pollux “mentally deficient” but Lurie is himself in need of re-education and this links them both as reprobates. For other connections, see Wright, “Plenary Address,” 23. My thanks to Piya Pal-Lapinski whose insights into Disgrace influenced my argument here. “The deformed and stunted relations between human beings” “applies to myself and my own writing as much as to anyone else,” Coetzee states in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 98. Charles Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 17. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Hackett Publications, 1989), 179D–E. Maurice Blanchot, “The Gaze of Orpheus,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, trans. Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, and Robert Lamberton (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1999), 437–42. Blanchot, “Gaze of Orpheus,” 438. Peter Quennell’s book of that title, Byron in Italy (New York: Viking Press, 1941), may well have served as a source for Coetzee (and for his character Lurie) Laurence Wright argues persuasively in “David Lurie’s Learning and the Meaning of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” 18. Guiccioli, Lord Byron’s Life in Italy, 547–8. J. M. Cotzee, Disgrace (New York: Viking, 1999), 181.

224 Notes to pp. 179–84 41. Ibid., 183. 42. Ibid., 184. 43. In its use of folk instruments, Lurie’s opera recalls Virgil Thompson’s. John Rockwell, “Opera: Thompson’s ‘Byron,’ ” New York Times, December 9, 1985. 44. Elleke Boehmer, “Not Saying Sorry, Not Speaking Pain: Gender Implications in Disgrace,” Interventions 4.3 (2001): 342–51. 45. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, First Series: Sonnet #26, line 14. 46. Coetzee, Disgrace, 185. 47. Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877) (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005), 130–54. See also, Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1969). 48. Coetzee, Disgrace, 185. 49. M. G. Lewis, “One O’Clock: or, the Knight and the Wood Demon. A Grand Operatic romance, in three acts,” in John Dicks, British Drama (London: 1871), 5: 207–24, omits the songs; “One O’Clock! Or, the Knight and the Wood-Daemon: a Grand Musical romance, in three acts, by M. G. Lewis; from the first London edition, of 1811” ( New York: D. Longworth, 1813) includes them. I quote from the 1813 edition, Act 1, p. 17. 50. Lewis, “One O’Clock!” Act 1, p. 18. 51. Ihab Habib Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 4 (quotation from 1982 revised edition).

11 Byronic Terror and Impossible Exchange: From Werner to Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism 1. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002), 18. 2. Walter Kirn, “Notes on the Darkest Day,” The New York Times, Sunday, September 8, 2002. 3. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W Jennings (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. Benjamin speaks of the angel of history wishing to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” But the angel cannot stop the “storm” of progress. 4. Interestingly, Jean-Luc Nancy, in The Experience of Freedom, quotes a fragment from E. M. Cioran which connects the demonic to freedom: “Freedom is an ethical principle of demonic essence” (Nancy, The Experience of Freedom [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], 170). 5. Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, 57. 6. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993). 7. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 255. 8. Ibid., 22. 9. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 109.


225

10. Derrida’s meditation on death and sacrifice in this work is a fascinating examination of the place of death in relation to both religion and the circuit of economic exchange within history and culture. Derrida argues that both Platonism and Christianity arrive at a notion of responsibility through disciplining or “repressing” the orgiastic or demonic. At the same time, every absolute sacrifice, even if it involves suicide, can never be free from an economy of exchange because there is always an internal contradiction, a “secret” involved, a calculation which leads to the expectation of some form of recognition or reward under the “gaze of the other,” who is God. Here Derrida poses the aporia that no gift, not even the gift of death, can entirely free itself from exchange. This is interesting also when one considers that acts of terror which implode capitalism are also, in some ways, themselves a product of capitalism and make use of its modes of exchange to proliferate. See John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (New York: New Press, 2003). 11. See Nick Hanlon, “Death, Subjectivity, Temporality in Baudrillard and Heidegger,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 58.4 (October, 2004): 513–25; and Leonard Wilcox, “Baudrillard, September 11, and the Haunting Abyss of Reversal,” Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism 14.1 (September, 2003) : 38 pars. 12. Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, 9. 13. Ibid., 42. 14. Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange (London: Verso, 2001), 6. Here Baudrillard explores the idea that although there is no exact equivalent for the world, this lack of equivalence or “impossible exchange” generates a radical uncertainty which “haunts systems” and leads them into “incoherence, hypertrophy” and self-extinction in an effort to “double” themselves and find equivalence. 15. Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), 4–13. Jonathan Dollimore, in Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), critiques what he calls Baudrillard’s “almost megalomaniac wish to penetrate the truth of death” and argues that “in philosophical and literary terms there has never been a denial of death” (126). However, Baudrillard is not talking specifically about literature or philosophy but about capitalism, which neither can escape completely. Moreover, Baudrillard’s analysis focuses less on the outright denial of death within modernity than the place it occupies within systems of exchange. Bronfen, who does focus on literature, speaks to the ways in which acts of signification occur “over” the dead woman’s body, leading to “the recognition of being irrevocably marked by a knowledge of death that always again recedes, to remain just beyond reach” (11). 16. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395. 17. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto 4, in George Gordon, Lord Byron, Lord Byron: Selected Poems, ed. Susan Wolfson and Peter Manning (London: Penguin, 1996), lines 443–45. For the description of Lake Thrasimene, see lines 550–80. 18. See Peter J. Manning, Byron and His Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), 159–70 (169); and Martin Prochazka, ‘Byron’s

226 Notes to pp. 186–91

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

Werner: Redrawing Moral, Political and Aesthetic Boundaries,” in Re-Mapping Romanticism: Gender-Text-Context, eds. Christophe Bode and Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann (Essen: Verlag Die Blaue Eule, 2001), 79–89 (89). Marcel Hénaff, “Naked Terror: Political Violence, Libertine Violence,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism 27.2 (86) (1998): 5–32 (11). See Manning, Byron and His Fictions, 159; and George Gordon, Lord Byron, Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, Volume 6, ed. Jerome McGann and Barry Weller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 694–5. All references to drafts of Werner hereafter cited in text are from this edition. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, Vol 3 1813–14, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974), 245 and 196, and 1816–17 (1976), 5: 203. Friedrich Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays, trans. Julius Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 194. Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers/Wallenstein (London: Penguin, 1979), 5.2 (159). Schiller, Robbers, 158. See Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35. Schiller, Fiesco or the Genoese Conspiracy: A Tragedy (London: J. Johnson, R. Edwards, and Cadell and Davies, 1796). For the critical reception and performance history of Fiesco in England, see Frederic Ewen, The Prestige of Schiller in England 1788–1859 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932). The British Critic in 1797 praised its “ardent and copious imagination . . . the vigour of thought, and the richness of expression” (Vol. 10, October, 1797; quoted in Ewen, 15). Byron was familiar with a translation of Schiller’s own History of the Thirty Years War (1793). See George Gordon, Lord Byron, Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 4. Jerome McGann also points out that the Wallenstein trilogy, which probably “reinforced Byron’s attraction to the subject of Werner,” was an important influence on the politics of its setting (Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 696). See Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals Volume 8 (Marchand): 1821, 47. Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009). For a detailed account of the aftermath of the war, see Wilson, Thirty Years War, 751–4 and 779–98. See also David J. Sturdy, Fractured Europe 1600– 1721 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 72–3; and Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648 (London: Verso, 2003). Wilson, Thirty Years War, 611, 780. Francis Hare-Naylor, The Civil and Military History of Germany, from the landing of Gustavus to the conclusion of the treaty of Westphalia Volume 2 (London: John Murray, 1816), 656–7. This work appears in Byron’s 1816 Sale Catalogue. See Byron, Complete Miscellaneous Prose (Nicholson), 240. Maurizio Arfaioli, The Black Bands of Giovanni: Infantry and Diplomacy During the Italian Wars (1526–8) (Pisa: Edizioni Plus-Pisa University Press, 2005). Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 186–9. See also Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of


35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

227

the Real (London: Verso, 2002), 52. Žižek speaks of “the obscene mathematics of guilt” which takes over when wars/catastrophes are compared in terms of numbers of dead, obscuring the individual death—the fact that “the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable.” Guinn Batten, The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 56. Slavoj Žižek, Introduction to Virtue and Terror: Maximilien Robespierre (London: Verso, 2007), xviii. See Derrida, Gift of Death, 3. Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, 10. Schiller, Wallenstein’s Death, Act 5, Scene 2, 451. Schiller, in his History of the Thirty Years War, uses the word “terror” in his description of Wallenstein: “The virtues of the ruler and of the hero, prudence, justice, firmness and courage, are strikingly prominent features in his character; but . . . Terror was the talisman with which he worked; extreme in his punishments as in his rewards, he knew how to keep alive the zeal of his followers.” See Schiller, The History of the Thirty Years War (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1912), 292. See Carl Von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 101 and 121. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 356–7. Although this idea is not completely developed in their analysis, here Deleuze and Guattari imply that the “alliances,” bands or packs that are formed as part of the war-machine, function in such a way so as to alter or limit the structures of exchange which govern a “centralized State apparatus.” Schiller, Wallenstein, 3.15, 396. This is missing for instance in contemporary filmic representations of terrorism, such as the recent film Day Night Day Night (dir. Julia Loktev, 2007), where the moments leading up to a female terrorist’s suicide mission to bomb Times Square are marked by her almost cannibalistic devouring of food, and the moment of death inevitably postponed—as also in Paradise Now (dir. Hany Abu-Assad, 2005), where two Palestinian suicide bombers plan to bomb Tel Aviv—as being outside representation or narrative time. Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism, 48. Ibid., 68.

Index

Note: The endnotes are indexed by page and note number, as 203(n16). 7/7, 8, 197(n25) 9/11, 3, 156, 182, 193, 199(n20), 203(n16) Abraham, Nicolas, 88, 100, 211(n11) Abu-Assad, Hany, 227(n44) Addison, Joseph, 67, 208(n4) Aeschylus, 103, 213(n6) aesthetics, 1–2, 5, 10–12, 14, 16, 28–9, 50, 62, 65–72, 78–81, 120, 134–5, 136, 185, 191, 194–5 Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 49 agonism, 12, 55, 102, 107–8, 113 agony, 5–6, 64, 72, 75, 141 Ali, Tariq, 199(n20) Alps, 112–13, 142, 149, 174, 218(n20) ancien régime, 48–9, 52, 77, 120, 125 Arasse, Daniel, 49, 205(n12) architecture, 11, 40–2, 68–73, 77–9, 127, 145, 182 Arfaioli, Maurizio, 226(n33) Aristotle, 65, 120 Art, visual, 1–2, 4–5, 11, 16–20, 37–46, 52, 54, 58, 69–77, 178, 209(nn32, 33) Ashton, Thomas L., 207(n40) Assyria, 10, 33–45, 70, 202(n3), 203(n16) Astarte, 12, 103, 106, 109–17, 185, 214(n16) authority, 50, 66, 109–10, 147, 191 autonomy, 12, 18, 21–2, 31–2, 87–91, 97–100, 123, 128, 211(n9), 216(n23) Badiou, Alain, 10, 23–32, 199(n27), 200(nn29, 31, 32, 35, 40, 42), 201(nn47, 54) Bagehot, Walter, 155, 219(n7) Bainbridge, Simon, 214(n17)

Baker, Houston, 222(n25) banditti, 174, 189 Bangs, Frank C., vii–viii, 40–3 Barton, Anne, 216(n18), 221(n9) Bataille, Georges, 89, 92, 98, 211(n21) Batten, Guinn, 191, 227(n35) Baudrillard, Jean, 13–14, 182–95, 225(nn14, 15) Beaton, Roderick, 220(n33) Beatty, Bernard, 196(n5), 198(n2), 222(n17), 223(n27) beauty, 28–32, 73, 82, 119, 130, 180, 185, 215(n33) Beckford, William, 77, 210(nn40, 41) Behrendt, Stephen, 212(n1) Bell, David A., 205(n10), 206(n29) Benjamin, Walter, 9, 25–7, 183, 185, 197(n26), 200(nn34, 43, 45), 220(n28), 224(n3), 225(n16) Bernauer, James W., and Michael Mahon, 214(n20), 215(n34) Bible, 9, 70–1, 81, 91–2, 99, 170 biopolitics, 47–8 Blackstone, Bernard, 4, 222(n17) Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 103, 213(n4), 214(n29) Blake, William, 27, 126, 200(n44) Blanchot, Maurice, 11, 89–91, 97–8, 178–80, 212(nn29, 30, 32, 35), 223(nn36, 37) the body, 3–5, 10, 13, 15–32, 33, 48–9, 61, 78, 88, 91, 161, 167–73, 180, 185, 193, 223(n33), 225(n15); see also the corpse Boehmer, Elleke, 224(n44) Bohrer, Frederick, 202(n3) Boker, Pamela, 106, 214(n16) Bone, Drummond, 196(n5), 219(n4) Booth, Agnes, vii, viii, 37, 39–43 228

Index Booth’s Theater, vii–viii, 10, 17, 34, 36–46, 203(nn10, 22), 204(n25) Borradori, Giovanna, 196(n7) Bosch, Hieronymus, 52, 73, 209(n33) Britain, 8, 10, 13, 17, 20, 34, 51, 58, 143, 147–9, 163, 209(n25); see also empire, British British Critic, 226(n26) Bronfen, Elizabeth, 185, 225(n15) Bruhm, Steven, 5, 16–18, 197(n18), 199(nn8, 13) Büchner, Georg, 99 Bundock, Christopher, 211(n12) Burke, Edmund, 67–9, 120, 208(nn10, 17), 215(n7) Butler, Judith, 3, 10, 18–19, 30–1, 196(n10), 199(n15), 201(n56) Butler, Marilyn, 15, 198(nn2, 3) Byron, Lady, 165, 220(n31) Byron, George Gordon, Lord aesthetic engagements, 5, 10–11, 64–73, 76–8, 81, 103, 113–15, 121–3, 146, 185, 195 body, 13, 168–71, 177–9 image, reputation and afterlife, 12–13, 46, 84–8, 141–4, 167, 176–81, 194 political engagements, 13–14, 51–2, 67–9, 72, 80, 136, 141, 152–66, 188, 221(nn40, 41) political imaginary, 2, 5–8, 12–14, 15–32, 51–5, 58–63, 64, 76–8, 80, 105–6, 111–12, 125–8, 134, 137–9, 142, 144–51, 152–66, 181, 188, 191, 194–5, 198 travels, 12–13, 68–76, 112, 136–51, 162, 164–6, 176, 179 works: adaptations, 10–11, 17, 33–46, 176–81, 202(n3); Beppo, 9; Cain, 9, 11–12, 72, 84, 88–101, 134, 211(n15); Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 6–7, 9, 13, 55, 61, 64, 74–8, 82, 131, 136–40, 149, 158–63, 176, 185, 191, 208(n24), 209(n30), 210(n42), 216(n26), 217(n5), 219(n13), 220(n20), 225(n17); “Darkness”, 136; The Deformed

229

Transformed, 10, 13, 167–81, 221(n3), 222(n17); Don Juan, 5, 9, 44, 46, 60–2, 73–6, 81, 83, 138, 152–4, 159–60, 162, 167, 170–1, 175–6, 180, 185, 214(n28), 219(n1); The Giaour, 9–10, 14, 15–32, 71, 88, 99, 101, 177, 185, 194–5, 198(n3), 199(n23), 200(n45); Hebrew Melodies, 70–1; Hints from Horace, 81; The Lament of Tasso, 81; Lara, 176, 177, 179; letters and journals, 1, 12, 50, 64–73, 76, 80, 83, 94–5, 112, 116, 138, 140, 145–51, 152–8, 161–6, 169–70, 176, 180, 188, 209(n37), 212(n26), 213(nn2, 5), 219(n3), 219–20(n19), 220(nn32, 36, 38), 226(nn21, 28); Manfred, 12, 71, 72, 93, 97, 102–17, 132, 136, 150–1, 167, 177, 185, 194–5, 212–13(n1), 213(nn2, 4), 217(nn28, 29); Marino Faliero, 9, 11, 47, 50–6, 60–1, 69, 73, 77, 80, 118–35, 188, 216(nn18, 19, 23), 217(n27); Mazeppa, 4; The Prisoner of Chillon, 12, 136, 141, 144–5, 218(nn11, 13); “Prometheus” , 12, 136, 141; “Prometheus and Napoleon”, 106; The Prophecy of Dante, 71, 80–2; Sardanapalus, 17, 33–46, 134, 167, 202(nn2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9), 203(nn11, 22), 204(nn24, 25); The Siege of Corinth, 74, 82; “Sonnet on Chillon”, 12, 136, 141, 143, 144–5; “Stanzas to Augusta”, 112; The Turkish Tales, 10, 74, 81; The Two Foscari, 4, 11, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 62, 77, 79, 80, 112, 134, 163, 188; “Venice: An Ode”, 54; Werner, 13, 182, 186, 188, 189–93 Calvert, Charles, 34, 37–8, 45, 202(n9) Calvinism, 70, 72 Cantor, Paul, 90, 211(n16)

230 Index capitalism, 13–14, 40, 183–6, 189–91, 194–5, 211(n9), 225(n10) Carbonari, 1, 14, 50, 54, 69, 136, 140, 142, 188, 196(n1) Carlile, Lord, 7–8 Catholicism, 66, 70–2, 175 Chandler, David G., 204(n5), 206(n32) Chard, Chloe, 208(n7) Cheeke, Stephen, 209(n34) Christianity, 19, 21, 75, 90–3, 96, 99–101, 115, 133, 170, 180, 198(n3), 225(n10); see also Calvinism; Catholicism Clairmont, Claire, 218(n11) classical tradition, 9, 13, 15, 22, 33, 45, 54, 60–2, 66, 71, 74–6, 81, 103, 120–2, 140, 167–71, 175–81 , 197(n4), 222(n17) Clubbe, John, 218(n20) Coetzee, J. M., 13, 176–81, 222(n27), 223(nn28, 29, 34, 38) Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 147–8, 208(n9), 218(n21) community, 10, 15–16, 23, 26–9, 31, 83, 84, 87–8, 92, 111, 121, 150, 200(n40), 201(n47), 208(n24), 211(n12) consistency/inconsistency, 13, 122, 129, 152–66, 219(n11) Constant, Benjamin, 161, 220(n28) Constantinople, 60, 69, 73, 74 Corbett, Martyn, 222 corpse, the, 29, 75, 169, 177–9, 185, 190; see also the body Cox, Philip, 114, 215(n32) Coxe, William, 148, 218(n24) crime, 6, 22, 52, 64–5, 68, 73, 77, 84–5, 88–91, 96, 99, 123, 158, 177, 223 Cronin, Richard, 196(n5) curse, 16, 29, 98, 100, 102, 107, 110–11, 133 Dallas, R. C., 207(n4) Danner, Mark, 4, 197(n17) Darbyshire, Alfred, 202(n9) David, Jacques-Louis, 54, 58, 209(n32)

death, 2–3, 5–6, 10, 13–14, 22–31, 49–58, 62, 66–8, 76–8, 89, 92–4, 97–100, 115–16, 126, 132–3, 141–2, 144, 167–8, 177–8, 182–95, 201(n47), 212(n30), 224–5(n10), 227(nn34, 44), 225(n15) decapitations, 50–2, 73, 132, 205(n23) deconstruction, 97 Delacroix, Eugene, viii, 4, 16–20, 45 The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, viii, 19–20 The Death of Sardanapalus, 16, 45 Greece Expiring, 20 Deleuze, Gilles, 193, 206(n33), 227(n42) democracy, 4, 7, 9, 49–52, 58, 122, 129–30, 148, 154–5 the demonic, 5, 22, 95, 100, 128–9, 182–3, 185, 187, 191, 224(n4), 225(n10) Derrida, Jacques, 11, 12, 86, 98, 184, 196(n7), 198(n30), 212(n38), 224–5(n10), 227(n37) desire, 1, 4, 9, 11–12, 20, 28, 62–3, 86–8, 99, 101–6, 110–17, 118–25, 128–30, 133–5, 147, 158, 160, 167, 180, 184–7, 191–3, 198(n30), 214(n20), 215(n1), 216(n17), 225(n15) despotism, 66, 68, 83, 207 devil, 172–3, 191, 193; see also Satanic D’Israeli, Isaac, 207(n4) Dicks John, 224(n49) difference, 8, 21, 29–30, 96–7, 118–19, 121, 125, 127, 147, 200(n40) Diodorus Siculus, 39 disease, 12, 91, 126, 175 dismemberment, 10, 13, 16–20, 167–71, 177–81, 185, 221(n8) Dollimore, Jonathan, 225(n15) Doody, Margaret Anne, 208(n15), 210(nn42, 43) Doyle, William, 206(n30), 207(n3) Dryden, John, 65 Dubois, Page, 197(n14) Easton, Kai, 176, 222(n27), 223(n28) ecstatic/ecstasy, 18, 22, 201(n47)

Index Edelman, Lee, 86, 100, 210(n7) Egypt, 17, 33–6, 43–5, 170 Elfenbein, Andrew, 84, 210(n2) Eliot, George, 121, 216(n12) Eliot, T. S., 152, 219(n2) Ellis, Kate Ferguson, 211(n9) emancipation, 7, 9, 24, 89, 192, 201(n47) embodiment, 7, 20–1, 31, 54, 56, 66, 79, 106, 110, 127, 144, 150–1, 193 empire, and empires, 10, 17, 27–8, 33–46, 47, 76, 206(n33) American, 33–46, 175 Assyrian, 10, 33–8, 41, 44–5, 70, 203(n16) Austrian, 51, 66, 69, 75–6, 79–80, 140, 188, 196(n1), 208(n14) British, 20, 33–4, 47, 50–1, 56, 58, 207(n34) French, 138, 147–8, 175 Holy Roman, 189–90 Ottoman, 10, 15, 19, 31, 65, 74, 136 Roman, 33, 45, 54, 66, 71, 76, 81, 175, 185 Venetian, 4, 9, 11, 51–63, 69, 74, 77–80, 123–6, 129–33 England, 4, 34, 38, 48, 50–1, 79–80, 84, 112, 136, 140, 151, 152, 157, 163, 169, 175–8, 204(n2), 220(n32); see also Britain; empire, and empires, British England, A. B., 216(n23), 217(n27) Englund, Steven, 207(n34) Enlightenment, 1–2, 4, 49, 104, 116, 136, 146, 197(n14), 205(n22) eroticism, 5, 86–7, 176, 180, 185, 194, 198(n30) Europe, 2, 6, 13–5, 44–7, 58, 62, 76–8, 105, 107, 137, 141–2, 148, 155–7, 175, 189, 191 evil, 12, 22, 24, 29, 62, 90–2, 100–1, 108–9, 115; see also wickedness exchange financial, 13, 189–90, 192, 195, 225(n10) psychic/symbolic, 13–14, 101, 129, 182–95, 225(nn14, 15), 227(n42)

231

execution, 18, 31, 49–50, 58, 64–7, 72, 79–80, 130, 133 the existential, 6, 24, 97, 111–12, 171, 204(n4), 213(n8) exoticism, 15, 35, 198–9(n6) exteriority, 18, 22, 98, 193 Fagan, Brian, 203(n15) Faludi, Susan, 199(n20) fantasy, 30, 38, 49, 88–93, 97–101, 113, 152, 183–5, 193 Farrell, John, 198(n29) father–daughter relationship, 11–12, 29, 84–91, 99, 176–80, 211(n9) father–son relationship, 17, 54, 57, 79, 92–3, 189, 193 Faust, 172, 180, 213(n4) faute, 11, 89–90, 98–9, 212(n35) fear, 1, 7, 9–10, 15, 18, 27–8, 33–6, 54, 70, 77, 135, 157–8, 161, 163 Feminism, 19, 28, 30–2, 87, 185, 211(n9) Fenwick, Eliza, 211(n12) fetish, 194–5 fidelity, 21–7, 29, 153, 168, 200(n40), 210–11(n9); see also consistency Fink, Bruce, 214(nn 19, 27) Finney, Paul Corby, 209(n27) Fletcher, Amelia, 217(n9) Forsyth, Joseph, 72, 209(n29) Foucault, Michel, 11–12, 47–8, 91–2, 98, 103, 107–8, 116, 197(n14), 204(nn3, 6), 205(n23), 211(nn20, 22), 212(nn31, 33), 213(n9), 214(nn20, 21), 215(n34) Fox, Charles James, 148, 157–8, 219(n17), 219–20(n19) France, see empire, and empires, French; French Revolution Franklin, Caroline, 106, 198(n3), 214(n15) French Revolution, 66, 140, 147, 157–9 Freud, Sigmund, 61, 110, 126, 207(n36), 214(n214) Fulford, Tim, 198(n3), 205(n19) Furet, François, 205(nn11, 22), 206(n30)

232 Index Galiffe, James, 67–8, 208(n11) Gamba, P., 161, 220(n29) Gans, Eric, 12, 118–25, 215(nn 5, 8), 216(n6) Garrison, William Lloyd, 13, 142–6, 217(n8) the gaze, 138–9, 178, 183, 225(n10) gender, 9, 19–21, 60, 84, 87, 106, 110, 179, 222(n27) general will, the, 56–7 geopolitics, 11, 47–8, 54–5, 58–63, 204(nn2, 4), 206(n33) Giddey, Ernest, 148, 217(nn2, 3), 218(nn20, 23, 29) Girard, René, 12, 118–19, 123–5, 128–9, 183–4, 215(nn1, 3, 4), 216(nn17, 22), 224(n7) Gleckner, Robert, 161, 218(n15), 220(n30) God, 26, 67, 70–1, 93, 95–100, 128–9, 142–3, 162, 173, 175, 225(n10) Godwin, William, 11, 84–101, 212(n27) Caleb Williams, 85, 88–9, 96, 99, 210(n4) Deloraine, 84–6 Fleetwood, 84–6, 101 Goetz, Robert, 206(n31) Goldoni, Carlo, 210(n42) Gonsalves, Joshua, 206(n27), 207(n35) good, 9, 24, 26, 29, 57, 62, 92, 99–101, 109, 121, 156–60, 163, 177 the Gothic, 1, 4–5, 10, 15–32, 100, 139, 145, 188, 190 Gross, Jonathan, 196(n5), 198(n30), 222–3(n27) Guattari, Félix, 193, 206(n33), 227(n42) Guiccioli, Teresa, 137, 176, 223(nn31, 39) guilt, 11, 21–2, 25–6, 31, 57, 62–3, 65, 85, 88–92, 99, 108, 113, 132–3, 227(n34) Guyer, Sara, 86, 89, 210(n6), 211(n13), 212(n35) Habermas, Jürgen, 90, 97, 211(n18) Hades, 93–4, 97 Hanlon, Nick, 225(n11)

Hare–Naylor, Frances, History of Germany, 190, 226(n32) Harper’s Weekly, 203(n20) Harrington, James, 51, 52, 57, 62, 205(n18) Harris, Charlaine, 29 Harrow, 72 Hassan, Ihab Habib, 181, 224(n51) Hastings, Frank, 166 Haywood, Ian, 198(n29) Hegel, G. W. F., 216(n10), 222(n22) Heidegger, Martin, 213(n8) Hénaff, Marcel , 2, 186, 196(n6), 226(n19) Heuer, Imke, 222(n17) Hoagwood, Terence, 212(n1) Hobhouse, John Cam, 12, 68, 76, 78, 138, 145, 146–7, 149, 150, 169, 170, 207(n4), 218(n20), 220(n32) Hodgson, Francis, 64, 66, 83 Holmes, Stephen, 197(n13) Hoppner, Richard, 75 Horace,170 House of Lords, 162, 176 Howell, Margaret, 36, 202(nn2, 3) Hucknall Torkard, 169 Hufstetler, Loren, 203(n18) Hurley, Kelly, 18, 199(n14) Illustrated Sporting New Yorker, 37, 203(nn12, 13) incest, 84, 85, 87, 88, 92, 99, 103, 109–111: see also father–daughter relationship inconsistency/consistency, 13, 122, 129, 152–66, 219(n11) India, 15 Iraq, 10, 34, 203(n16) Israel, 170 Italy, 5, 11, 50, 64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 136, 140, 155: see also Venice Jackson, Emily, 212(n1) Jacobins, 1–2, 163 James, Henry, 179 Jarrett, Henry, 36, 37 Jeffrey, Francis, 82–3 Jerusalem, 70

Index Johnson, Edward, 205(nn14, 17) Johnson , Samuel, 65 Jones, Christine Kenyon, 209(n26), 223(n32) Jones, Megan Sanborn, 35, 202(n6) Jordan, Daniel P., 207(n3) Joyce, James, 167 Kafka, Franz, 91 Kaplan, Steven, 205(n22) Kant, Immanuel, 2, 7, 104, 196(n4), 213(n12), 215(n33) Kean, Charles, 34, 36, 43, 45, 202(nn3, 4 ) Keats, John, 55, 98, 105, 204(n4), 212(n30) Kefalonia, 165 Kelly, Edwin, 43 Kelsall, Malcolm, 13, 54, 79, 142, 154, 164, 196(n5), 205(n19), 206(n24), 207(n37), 210(n43), 217(n30), 219(nn4, 5, 35) Kerrigan, William, 221(n8) Kierkegaard, Søren, 25, 26 Kirn, Walter, 224(n2) Kitson, Peter, 74, 209(n35) Kjellén, Rudolf, 47 Klein, Melanie, 100 Kleist, Heinrich von, 99 Knight, G. Wilson, 222(n17) Kordela, Aglaia, 204(n7) Krell, David Farrell, 210(n5) Kristeva, Julia, 11, 87, 210(n8) Kubiak, Antony, 197(n20) La Harpe, Frédérick-César de, 147 Lacan, Jacques, 12, 26, 87, 103, 107, 109 “name of the father”, 110 Lane, Frederic Chapin, 205(n21) Langbein, John, 197(n15) Lansdown, Richard, 205–6(n23), 206(n25), 209(n38) Larsen, Mogens Trolle, 202(n3) Law, Randall, 70, 208(n23) Layard, Austen Henry, 34, 41, 44, 202(n3) Leask, Nigel, 198(n3) Lee, Harriet, 187

233

Lee, Sophia, 187 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 94, 212(n25) Leigh, Augusta, 163, 213(n3) Lesueur, Theodore, 51 Levite’s concubine, 170 Lewis, M. G., 172, 180–1, 224(nn49, 50) Lincoln, Abraham, 34, 40 Locke, John, 104 Loktev, Julia, 227(n44) London bombings, 8 Covent Garden, 72 Drury Lane, 58, 72 London Bridge, 38 Royal Princess’s Theatre, 34, 165, 170 St Paul’s Cathedral, 38 London Greek Committee, 221(n40) Lucretius, 94 Lucifer, 91–5, 97, 98 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 38, 203(n14) McCarthy, Fiona, 169 McDayter, Ghislaine, 198(n5), 200(n41) McEvoy, Emma, 16, 199(n7), 201(n41) McGann, Jerome, 5, 32, 46, 71, 105, 108, 126, 159, 160, 187, 197(nn18, 21), 198(n1), 199(n22), 202(n7), 204(n26), 205(n13), 208(n18), 213(n13), 214(n17, 22), 215(n30), 216(nn11, 14, 15, 22), 217(n5), 218(n11), 220(nn23, 24, 26), 226(n27) Mackinder, Halford J., 204(n2) Macleod, Jock, 159, 220(n22) maenads, 168, 170 Manning, Peter, 106, 186–7, 214(nn14, 28), 225–6(nn17, 18, 20) Marathon, 139 Marchand, Leslie, 65, 144, 196(n1), 207(n1), 208(n19), 213(n2), 217(nn3, 4), 218(n12), 219(n3), 221(nn1, 11), 226(nn21, 28) Marino Faliero (Doge), 74, 77,

234 Index Marlowe, Christopher, 213(n4) Martin, Philip, 54, 206(n26), 209(n32) Mavrokordatos, 165–6, 221(n40) Mazzini, Giuseppe, 13, 141, 144, 146, 217(n6) Mbembe, Achille, 48, 205(n9) Medwin, Thomas, 207(n39) Mellor, Anne, 211(n9) Mephistopheles, 172 Mesolongi, 165, 219(n8) Meyer, Eric, 20, 198(n3), 199(n19) Milan Cathedral, 72 Milton, John, 108, 128, 218(n22) L’Allegro, 147–8 Lycidas, 221(n8) Paradise Lost, 68, 128 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de, 53, 55, 61 Mitchell, Leslie, 219(nn6, 9, 11, 17) Mitchell, W. J. T., 201(n55) Moliere (Jean Baptiste Poquelin), 122 Montbovon (Switzerland), 149 Moore, Thomas, 161, 213(n2) Morat, battlefield of, 138, 140 Morgan, Sydney Owenson, Lady, 66, 208(n5) Morrison, Toni, 172, 176, 222(nn19, 26) Murray, John, 64, 76, 80, 116, 152, 153, 170, 187, 212(n26), 213(nn2, 5), 215(n36) Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy, 69, 208(n16) Musset, Alfred de, 157 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 1, 10, 22, 88, 196(n2), 199(n23), 201(nn46, 47), 211(n10), 224(n4) Nantes, 49 Napier, Charles, 165 Napoleon Bonaparte, 2, 6, 7, 11, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 58–60, 62–3, 66, 68–9, 71, 74, 76, 106, 138, 147, 159, 206(nn32, 33), 207(n34), 208(nn17, 24), 214(n17) narcissism, 109–10, 113, 114, 214(n16) Nazis, 49

necropolitics, 48, 49, 52–4, 56–7, 62–3 Nerval, Gerard de, 157, 219(n14) Newstead Abbey, 72 New York City, 10, 34, 36–7, 42, 45 New York Herald, 37, 203(n11) New York Times, 182, 197(n25), 224(nn: ch. 10: 43; ch. 11: 2) New Zealand, 38 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 213(n8) Nineveh, 34, 44 Nurmi, Martin K., 202(n3) Ó Tuathail, Gearóid, 4, 7, 204(n2) Obama, Barack, 175 Oedipus, 120 Orientalism, 15, 198(nn2, 3), 209(n6) Orpheus/Orphic, 13, 167–8, 170–1, 176, 178–9, 180–1 Orphism, 178 Otway, Thomas, 62 Oueijan, Naji B., 198(n6) Ovid, 168, 178, 221(n6) “Ozymandias”, 36, 39, 82 Painter, Nell Irvin, 222(n24) Palmer, Harry, 36, 37 Paris (city), 50, 56, 69, 157 Paris (mythical character), 173 Pascal, Blaise, 107, 214(n18) Pater, Walter, 224(n47) Patoˇcka, Jan, 8, 197(n24) Paul, St., 25 Peninsular War, 56 Peterfreund, Stuart, 223(n27) Peterloo massacre, 50 Philadelphia, 37–8 Philomela, 179, 180 Pickersgill, Joshua, 172 picturesque, 67 Piranesi, Giambattista, 77 Pisa, 73, 156 Plato, 178 Plutarch, 172 Polidori, John, 201(n49) Polybius, 51 Portugal, 140 Prince Regent, 50 Prochazka, Martin, 186, 225(n18)

Index Prometheanism, 97, 102–17, 108, 144, 212(n1) Prometheus (in Greek myth), 103, 106, 116, 141 Queen Caroline affair, 50 Quennell, Peter, 223(n38) Radcliffe, Ann, 66, 68, 208(n6) Ranke, Leopold von, 203(n14) Rashid, Ahmed, 196(n12) Ratzel, Friedrich, 47 Ravenna, 1, 64, 69,72 Reagan, Ronald, 143 Reformation, 145 Reign of Terror 2, 49, 51, 52, 55, 61, 66 Regency, 67, 85 Rejali, Darius, 197(n14) resentment , 118–20, 121, 123–6, 128–30, 132–4 Rice, Anne, 29, 201(n50) Richardson, Alan, 222(n17) Rilke, Rainer Maria, 168, 180, 221(n7), 224(n45) Risorgimento, 13, 141 Robespierre, Maximilien, 56, 57, 66, 186, 196(n8), 206(n30) Robinson, Charles, 174, 212(n1), 222(nn17, 23), 223(n27) Rockwell, John, 224(n43) Roessel, David, 198(n4), 199(n18) Rogers, Samuel, 73, 77, 81, 209(n31), 210(n41) Rome, 54, 64, 66 St Peter’s, 68, 69, 72 Sistine Chapel, 71, 153 Rosen, F., 219(n8), 221(n31) Rothfield, Lawrence, 203(n16) Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 56, 121, 122, 136, 156, 158 Russell, John Malcolm, 203(n16) Russia, 48, 59, 60, 206(n33) Rutherford,Andrew, 215(n31) Rymer, Thomas, 65 sacrifice, 118, 119, 124, 130, 183–4 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de, 53, 185, 205(n22) Said, Edward, 15

235

St Paul’s Episcopal Chapel (Aberdeen), 72 Saint-Just, Louis Antoine Léon Florelle de, 53 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Black Orpheus, 171, 210(n4), 221(n12) Satanic, 108, 121, 128; see also devil Schama, Simon, 205(n22) Schelling, Friedrich, 12, 90–2, 211(nn17, 18, 19) Schiller, Friedrich, 14, 187–8, 194, 226(nn22, 23, 24) Fiesco, or, the Genoese Conspiracy, 187, 226(n22) History of the Thirty Years War, 226(n27), 227(n40) The Robbers, 187 Wallenstein trilogy, 187–8,189, 193, 226(nn23, 27), 227(nn39, 43) Schmidt, Arnold Anthony, 196(n5) Schmitt, Carl, 49 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 224(n47) Scramble for Africa, 47 Segal, Charles, 223(n35) Shakespeare, William, Antony and Cleopatra, 33, 35, 45, 202(n1) Hamlet, 116, 121, 122 King Lear, 125 Macbeth, 65 Othello, 65 The Tempest, 172 Sharpe, Lesley, 226(n25) Shaw, Philip, 191, 226(n25) Sheils, Colleen, 222(n27) Shelley, Mary, 11, 84–91, 99, 101, 201(n50), 210–11(nn9) Falkner, 84–90, 99, 101, 210(nn1, 3) The Last Man, 85 Lodore, 86 Mathilda, 84–9, 99, 210(n3) “The Mourner”, 85, 89, 211(n14) Valperga, 212(n25) Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 39, 68, 72, 84, 97, 100, 136, 145, 169, 170, 208(n14), 209(n30), 212(n37), 214(n24), 218(n16) Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 220(n19) Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph Comte, 51

236 Index Skerry, Philip, 126 Sontag, Susan, 203(n11) sovereignty and “bare life”, 3 and torture, 4, 11, 21, 47, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 98 Soviet Union, 93 South Africa 13, 176–8, 180 Southey, Robert, 15, 115, 152–3 Spain, 55, 56, 140 sparagmos, 119–120, 121, 168, 169–170, 172, 178–80 Spivak, Gayatri, 199(n19) Staël, Germaine de, 76, 136, 209(n39) Stanhope, Leicester, 166 Stauffer, Andrew, 171, 199(n10), 221(n10) Starobinski, Jean, 1–2, 196(n3) Statue of Liberty, 37 Steiner, George, 222(n17) Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), 157 Stockholm, 155 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 201(n49) Stone, William L., 203(n19) Swiss Confederation, 137 Switzerland, 12–13, 68, 136, 140–1, 144, 146–8, 150, 151 sublime, 67, 103, 105, 114, 117, 151, 215(n3) Taborski, Boleslaw, 36, 202(nn3, 5) Tacitus, 71 Tasso, 81 Taylor, Charles, 104, 213(nn10, 11, 12) Tell, William, 140 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 221(n2) terrorism, 2 and capitalism, 13, 47, 51, 182–95 by committee, 50, 54, 69, 130, 155–6, 184, 193 and suicide, 194–5 Thatcher, Margaret, Baronness, 13, 143, 146, 218(n10) Thirty Years War, 13, 186, 188, 189, 191 Thompson, Virgil, 224(n43) Thorslev, Peter , 105, 109, 144, 212(n1), 213(nn7, 8), 214(n24)

The Times, 219(nn15, 16) Tintoretto, 73, 74, 75 Titian, 72, 73, 74 Torok, Maria, 88, 100, 211(n11) torture, 3, 4 and body, 5, 52, 54, 55, 57, 62, 72, 73, 74, 77, 79, 80, 103, 131, 197(nn13, 14, 16) Trilling, Lionel, 105 Trinity College, Cambridge, 72 Turkey, 164 Twin Towers, 182, 184, 194 uncanny, 16–17 United States of America, 34, 40 vampirism, 29, 30 Van Gogh, Vincent, 180 Vaud, Canton of, 146–7, 149 Vendée, 49, 52, 206(n29) Venice, 11, 47, 50, 51, 52 Bridge of Sighs, 77–8 Doge’s Palace 73, 75, 77–8, 209(n33) Manfrini Palace, 72 Querini conspiracy, 52, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 64, 68 St Mark’s Square, 69, 72 San Giovanni e San Paolo, 74 Veronese, Paolo, 73 Vesuvius, 67 Victorian era, 34, 36, 38, 44, 45, 46, 86 Vienna, Treaty of, 137 Vincent, Patrick, 148, 218(nn22, 26) Virgil, 168, 178, 221n5 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 136, 156 Walpole, Sir Horace, 16–17, 199(n11) war, 6, 47, 48, 73, 138–9 and war machine, 193–4, 206(n33), 227(n42) War on Terror, 13, 31 Washington, George, 157–8 Waterloo, 50, 137, 138–9 Watkins, Daniel, 172, 199(n23), 215(n2), 222(nn18, 20, 21) West, Benjamin, 72 Westphalia, Peace of, 189–90

Index Whig party, 125, 142, 148, 152, 154, 155–8, 219(nn9, 11) wickedness, 21–3, 28 Wilberforce, William, 171 Wilcox, Leonard, 225(n11) Williams, Helen Maria, 148, 150, 218(n25) Wilson, Peter H., 189–90, 226(nn29, 30, 31) Wilson, Tom, 113 Winter, William, 203(n17) Wollestonecraft, Mary, 85 Wood, Gillen D’Arcy, 209(n28) Woodring, Carl, 205(n15), 216(n24) Woods, James, 223(n28)

237

Wordsworth, William, 67, 113, 145, 148, 178, 180, 208(n9), 218(n19) World Trade Center, 10, 203(n16); see also Twin Towers Wright, Julia, 206(n33) Wright, Laurence, 222(n27), 223(n38) Ziter, Edward, 36, 202(nn3, 8) Žižek, Slavoj, 2, 9, 11, 23–6, 27, 30, 87, 100, 191–2, 196(n8), 198(n28), 200(nn33, 36, 37), 201(n51), 210(n9), 212(n36), 215(n33), 226–7(n34), 227(n36)

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