SOURCE: Phillipson, Mark. “Byron's Revisited Haunts.” Studies in Romanticism 39, no. 2 (summer 2000): 303-22.

[In the following essay, Phillipson explores the themes of banishment, dislocation and return in Don Juan, contending that Byron's characters often return in ghostly ways to places past and the Byronic hero is “more phantom than man.”]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(BLJ v.265-66)¹²

McGann thus follows a long tradition that reads the conversational, digressive, satirical ottava rima stanzas of Beppo and Don Juan as not only turning the gloomy vortexes of the Eastern Tales inside out,¹³ but also signaling Byron's decisive break with his past success. Despite the fact that the writing of Beppo was an extremely brief interlude during the much larger project of finishing Childe Harold,¹⁴ this initial forage into the Don Juan manner has come to signal a “process of disengagement”¹⁵ in Byron's canon, a repudiation of pre-exile modes and themes. The division of McGann's influential studies of Byron reflects an abiding fissure: Don Juan finds no real place in the fairly comprehensive Fiery Dust; it is held apart instead for the later Don Juan in Context. Ironically enough, the latter study's valuable insight that “DJ is a poem that is, in fact, always in transition”¹⁶—shuttling between engagements with biography, history, forms of rhetoric, and its own plot—seems purchased by isolation of the poem from the rest of Byron's canon. It is an isolation that opens up real explanatory gaps in studies that build on McGann's characterization of Don Juan as an “assault upon the degenerate poetical manners of his day,” an “attack upon [the] reomantic stylistic revolution,” and “Byron's practical illustration of the sort of critical stance romantic poetry ought to take toward itself” (McGann, Don Juan in Context 63, 73, 107). One sifts in vain through Jerome Christensen's ever-resourceful Lord Byron's Strength, for example, to find an indication of exactly why Byron would buck the system that had marketed him so well, why he would launch the “revolutionary text” (215) of Don Juan—a postmodern shakeup of “Byronism” and its “cultural monopoly” (220) that appears in Christensen's pages as suddenly as a rock through a shop window.¹⁷

The division of Byron's work and pre- and post- Don Juan is often justified by his letters from Venice, such as the one specifically quoted by McGann, signaling the poet's disengagement from the “wrong revolutionary poetical system.” Byron was clearly taken with this disavowal of a past revolution, repeating it several times, yet doing little to define a new program, a better revolution. In 1818 he would distance himself again from the “wrong poetical system”—a phrase so broad it could refer to the Byronic Hero as well as Wordsworth's Excursion; “I mean all (Lakers included),” Byron wrote to the also-implicated poet Thomas Moore. And yet, as usual, the longer Byron continues his repudiation, the more a complicating nostalgia enters into his writing. “‘Us youth’ were on the wrong tack,” Byron elaborates, “But I never did say that we did not sail well.” As Peter Manning has pertinently observed, the buried reference to Falstaff in Byron's letter could easily signal ulterior tactics, and certainly muddles the letter as a statement of intent.¹⁸ The next modulations of the letter to Moore suggest a simultaneous flightiness and persistence:

The next generation (from the quantity and facility of imitation) will tumble and break their necks off our Pegasus, who runs away with us. … Talking of horses, I not only get a row in my gondola, but a spanking gallop of some mile daily along a firm & solitary beach.

(Feb. 2, 1818; BLJ 6.10)

Byron's prose here plunges wildly from the nautical to the equestrian, from post-revolutionary sobriety to nostalgic pride, from poetic manifesto to the merest biographical detail which, nevertheless, refers right back to the entrance of that most hardened of early Byronic heroes, the Giaour:

Who thundering comes on blackest steed, With slacken'd bit and hoof of speed? Beneath the clattering iron's sound The cavern'd echoes wake around In lash for lash, and bound for bound; The foam that streaks the courser's side Seems gather'd from the ocean-tide. Though weary waves are sunk to rest, There's none within his rider's breast; And though to-morrow's tempest lower, 'Tis calmer than thy heart, young Giaour! (180-90) Ultimately, the challenge to Moore and any reader of Byron's “revolutionary” letter of 1818 lies in accounting for its waking echoes, the reemergence of what had seemed to be swept away.

Such evocation at the very moment of renunciation is typical of the way Byron vexes his reader with the interplay of fiction and life; it lures even critics who insist, like T. S. Eliot, that they are “not concerned” with the poet's life into scanning his writing for “honesty” or “genuine self-revelation.”¹⁹ It comes as no surprise that Leslie Marchand, still Byron's best biographer, characterizes the revolution of the Don Juan manner as a sudden turn to self-representation: “With one stroke he freed himself from the fetters of British propriety and the Childe Harold manner, and something of the careless and relaxed realism of his letters invaded his verse. Let the critics cavil; he would be himself” (Marchand 273). But often in Byron's writing—even in supposedly direct self-representations, such as the 1818 letter—the invasion runs just the other way: verse invades his letters, and the originating self is unsettled by the specter of fictional models. The Byronic hero's persistent cameo in the very statement which implies his demise should lead us to regard even the most seemingly direct pronouncement in Byron as stalked by the fiction it supposedly controls.

Manning has led the way in reversing the usual subordination of art to the “real” Byron in Byron studies: “the self acquires its image—not its essence—by telling tales that negotiate or, to use a more Byronic term, navigate impersonal structures” (Manning 148). The emphasis of image over essence is a promising development: it lets go of “sincerity,” never a promising quarry in literary study; it honors Byron's deep investment in character as defined by literature; and, most directly for our purposes, it frees us to read him as haunted, even knocked onto new paths, by his own verse. It is still rare to consider how Byron may have manipulated his material circumstances consistently, over the course of a tumultuous life, to play out a basic temperament, a way of generating vision, an artistic habit evident from the start. It is, in short, still unusual to think of Byron's actual exile as an imperative of fiction, one he defined in his earliest verse. By focusing on Byron's life-long interest in the effects of exile, we may be able to discover fundamental continuity, an investment in repudiation that counters—indeed prompts—all talk of revolution. And in particular we may come to regard the Byronic hero, that restless figure put to bed midway into Byron's career, as all the more ready to rise from his phantom-pillow.

As a quick survey of Byron's continuous investment in banishment, the remainder of this essay zeroes in on the repetition of a charged situation in Byron's verse: the haunting of a hero by displaced precedence. This haunting takes on two forms: direct haunting, wherein ancestral ghosts menace the hero; and what could be called meta-haunting, which occurs when this scenario repeats itself down through Byron's career, and his previous stagings of ghostly visitation are evoked. I focus on three interconnecting instances of haunting that span Byron's verse. First, I examine the struggle waged by the prototypical Byronic Hero against smothering ancestral spirits in the tale Lara (1814), published two years before the poet's exile. Second, I look at a revisiting of this struggle—the confrontation with ghostly forefathers in the post-exile play Sardanapalus (1821)—in which Lara's alienation is evoked and at the same time countered with new strategies of solace in the foreign, thereby adding to the disruption of exile a certain felicity. Finally, I turn to yet another ghostly confrontation, the entanglement of Juan with the ghost of the Black Friar in the Regency Cantos of Don Juan (1823-24), in which the transvestite corruption of a gothic legend recalls and further expels the precedence of both previous narratives. Such repeated exercises in evocation and displacement display the most enduring opposition in Byron's work: an unrelenting though ever-various haunting of precedence.

2

Lara will serve us as both a template of Byronic haunting, and as a measure of stifled expression that revisiting of this template would later amend. Everything is haunted in this tale, overshadowed by mysterious influences from the past. Byron reportedly came to regard this tale as “the most metaphysical of his works,”²⁰ dismissing it with the same term he later used to describe the blind flightiness of Coleridge in the dedication to Don Juan (“… like a hawk encumber'd with his hood,—/ Explaining metaphysics to the nation—/ I wish he would explain his explanation”). Indeed, Lara is more than a little hooded: its plot is smothered by the hero's determined blockage of past experience, of future revelation, of causality in general. The tale freezes into tableaus of an alienated hero pacing around the offended home to which he returns from unmentionable activities abroad. The cause of his alienation is eclipsed; we are left with the effects, the lingering representations of something outside the terms of expression.

Lara returns to a gothic residence that shares many attributes with Newstead Abbey, the vast crumbling cradle of Byron's adolescence. As Lara restlessly moves down freshly repossessed halls, his shadow's sweep over faded ancestral portraits represents the tale's general metaphysic of stifling opposition:

He turned within his solitary hall, And his high shadow shot along the wall: There were the painted forms of other times, 'Twas all they left of virtues or of crimes, Save vague tradition; and the gloomy vaults That hid their dust, their foibles, and their faults; And half a column of the pompous page, That speeds the specious tale from age to age; Where history's pen its praise or blame supplies, And lies like truth, and still most truly lies.

(Canto 1, lines 181-90)

Virtue and crime, praise and blame, truth and lies, presence and absence, and—especially—the living and the dead: these oppositions fall against each other on the pompous page and leave standing nothing more than mystery. It is not even clear whether the portraits are of Lara's direct ancestors, or of the monastic tenants of the Gothic hall who (presumably) preceded them. In any event, Lara's passage casts the painted forms of former times into shadow; yet his obliteration is merely finishing off what time has already rendered practically indistinguishable (virtues, crimes, who can tell). Manning has taken note of the extreme muffling of history in Byron's poem, written at the very moment of Napoleon's fall: “… individualism withdraws the Byronic hero from any concerted political involvement … Politics retreats before psychology. The reader's attention is fixed on the hero, who exists in maginificent isolation” (Manning 211). Even so, Byron's individualistic hero is well aware that his transgression prompts a reactive, if silent, hostility—an involvement with progenitors that qualifies his isolation after all. The tradition-laden wall, vague as it may be, gives no quarter: it stifles Lara—a smothering reproach, perhaps, to his debasement of heritage and country.²¹ Perhaps that debasement involves a crime committed in the land across the “bounding main” (i.12) from which he has recently returned. Perhaps: mystery envelops the text. It is appropriately midnight as Lara paces and muses in front of these recriminatory portraits; when the lone light dims “as loth to break the night,” we note its double reflection of Lara: the flame's solitude as well as its vulnerability to an aggressively engulfing darkness.

But the night is broken, suddenly, by “A sound—a voice—a shriek—a fearful call! / A long, loud shriek—and silence”; the “frantic echo” wakes up the servants, who rush in to find their master in a dead faint (I.204-6). Lara in all likelihood has been the one to scream, but we have no exact idea why. Something he has confronted in the hall has caused him to half-draw his saber, to half-form a threat, to assume the satanic position of “despairing pride,” and to faint away “in horrible repose”—but our hero, reviving, offers no clarification (I.220, 224). Instead, he babbles “In terms that seem not of his native tongue,” “meant to meet an ear / That hears him not—alas! that cannot hear!” (I.234). This adventure in obscurity predicts this tale's ultimate degeneration into baffled mystery. A mysterious challenge to Lara's honor, launched by one Lord Ezzelin and based on yet another unexplained episode of the past, is followed by the mysterious disappearance of that provocateur; suspicious raised by this disappearance end up sweeping Lara into a popular uprising for which he feels nothing but indifference. Struck by an arrow in that fight, the hero speaks muffled words to his page Kaled, “Their import those who heard could judge alone”; “from [Lara's] visage little could we guess,” and his last gesture is cryptic: pointing to the East (II.455, 462).

All quite mysterious, but this we know: a sense of outside, even otherworldly influence is impinging on present existence. Ezzelin's accusation is based on far away transgression; Lara is haunted by a suspiciously oriental event; and most fundamentally, he dies a mystery. Nobody gets the answers to questions that swirl around since his return home: “What had he been? what was he, thus unknown, / Who walk'd their world, his lineage only known?” (I.295-96). Lineage fixes Lara's position, but it is also beside the point: this hero, like all of his predecessors in Byron's narrative poetry—whether it be melancholy Harold, or his more adventurous cousins, the Giaour, Selim, or Conrad—is burdened with a mysterious identity that sets him apart from paternal and patriotic allegiance. As Leslie Brisman has written of such characters, “[t]he fatherland seems less one's own than some other land one has made one's own, for natural and spiritual paternities seldom correspond.”²² Lara paces under the frowning portraits of his ancestral home with a burden of self formed far away; conflicting claims of the native and the alien thus overshadow each other, and the result is introversion, solitude, and estrangement from the most basic activities of life. “He stood a stranger in this breathing world,” we're told of Lara, “An erring spirit from another hurled” (I.315-16): whatever and wherever that other world is, its formidable claims bring it into irreconcilable competition with this one. Exile, as prefigured by Milton's headlong-hurled Satan, readily offers itself as the standard metaphor for such psychological alienation, as character and setting inevitably reject each other²³—and even within themselves, characters fail to find a sense of unity that does not degenerate into the devastating struggle of oppositions.

On every level here, dualities block each other out, or, to cite Frederick Garber's useful characterization of the process, feed into a deadly “recoil”: “that which is wonderfully consonant is also that which locks one in, which causes the bitterest sort of entrapment.”²⁴ And this entrapment, we might add, ensures a failure of expression. This is true about Lara wherever one looks at dualities: the disastrous confrontation of Ezzelin and Lara, for example (Ezzelin introduces himself to Lara as “one, who, wert thou noble, were thy peer” [I.450]; both die and with them the explanation of that taunt), or the smothered love of Kaled for Lara (the late revelation of Kaled as a woman is made only after Lara's death—“What now to her was Womanhood?”—and at the tale's conclusion “she lies by him she lov'd; / Her tale untold—her truth too dearly prov'd” [II.626-27]). Nothing escapes the vortex of negation and, finally, silence. Even the setting of the tale, the “wide domain” to which “the long self-exiled chieftain” returns (I.1, 4), gets caught up in his alienation: presided over and ignored by that “Lord of himself … / That fearful empire which the human breast / But holds to rob the heart within of rest!” (I.15-16), it similarly collapses into a troubled, mysterious, and finally placeless place.²⁵

One way to understand the progression of Byron's work after his actual exile in 1816 is as the aversion from such constant devastation: paradoxically enough, a physical rejection of England imbued his narratives with a revisionary toleration—if not real reconciliation—of self and ancestry, past and present, body and spirit. This impulse led him to revisit previously portrayed situations, in simultaneous displays of contradiction and continuity. Lara's strange encounter with the ghosts of the past, for example, is echoed in the opening of Act IV of Sardanapalus, in which the heretofore passive king dreams a nightmare encounter with bloody progenitors whose line, through a spectacular and enfeebling indulgence in pleasures, he has betrayed.²⁶ We find out much more about this dream than about Lara's midnight vigil, yet the similarities are notable: the two dreamers similarly cry out, react with some kind of defiance, and confide their experience to foreign women. Sardanapalus' cry, on first waking, has in it a satanically charged rejection of heritage that marks him as a direct descendent of earlier Byronic heroes: “Not so—although ye multiplied the stars, / And gave them to me as a realm to share / From you and with you! I would not so purchase / The empire of eternity” (IV.i.24-27). Sardanapalus will not give in to his ancestors, not for all the empire of eternity: the 1821 drama sounds the metaphysical alienation of the 1814 tale.

In contrast to Lara's frenzied, involuntary, and muffled relation of his dream to Kaled, however, Sardanapalus gives a deliberate, explicit description of his own nightmare to his attendant lover, the exiled slave Myrrha. The content of this nightmare also stands apart from Lara's in two notable ways. Lara's dream, as we noted, is never divulged to the reader, but the unresolved fashion in which it haunts him suggests that he is never able to face his tormentors with the spontaneous aplomb with which Sardanapalus counters his ghosts. “A desperate courage crept through every limb,” Sardanapalus tells Myrrha, “And at the last I fear'd them not, but laugh'd / Full in their phantom faces” (IV.i.140-42). If Sardanapalus is able to modulate horror with this laughter, the world of spirits is no less able to come up with a modified threat, the second major distinction of this dream from Lara's: a sexual, indeed incestuous, embrace. Directly after Sardanapalus' laugh, which dispels the ghost of his paternal ancestors, the remaining maternal figure “flew upon me, / And burnt my lips up with her noisome kisses” (IV.i.149-50). Sardanapalus in turn repels this incestuous assault by waking up to the foreign Myrrha. This dream, then, becomes the site of a succession of negotiations with intrusive ancestry, and Sardanapalus' defensive strategies—disruptive laughter, taking deliberate solace in the foreign—display, in a way that Lara's more suicidal “seeming of forgetfulness” (I.269) never does—the oppositional innovations of Byron's post-exile period.

Sardanapalus' words to Myrrha, after he concludes the description to her of his dream, are balanced and resolute: “Now that I see thee once more, what was seen / Seems nothing” (IV.i.172-73). The comforting of an Assyrian king by an Ionian slave is reflected by the otherwise odd distortions of homonyms and typographical fluctuations: illustrations of the adjacency of what is nonetheless different. The lurking pun of the foreign Myrrha's name is much to the point here. The use of the phrase “once more” is suggestive as well: it occurs, in the slightly modified forms “Once more” and “once more,” at the very start of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto III (1816), when the poet awakes “with a start” to find himself sailing away from his native shore (III.10).²⁷ The once-more evocation of a scene from Lara in Sardanapalus both underscores continuity in Byron's career and marks important points of departure.²⁸ The unfortunate Kaled, for example, is evoked by the similarly foreign and illicitly amorous Myrrha, and at the same time isolated (or made “once”) even more by the erotic and mutual death that Myrrha enjoys with her lover.

Sardanapalus, like Lara, does not survive the end of his drama; yet if Lara “sleeps not where his fathers sleep” (II.520), Sardanapalus fully expects to rejoin his fathers, after sacrificing himself in the face of treason. “I have not kept your inheritance / As ye bequeath'd it,” he admits to these fathers, yet the sacrificial fire he builds will carry the “bright part” of that inheritance to them anyway:

Your treasure, your abode, your sacred relics Of arms, and records, monuments, and spoils, In which they would have revell'd, I bear with me To you in that absorbing element, Which most personifies the soul as leaving The least of matter unconsumed before Its fiery workings. …

(V.i.428-36)

The paradoxical “consummation” (V.i.449) of this ending is an intricate balancing of destruction and preservation, made even more resonant by Myrrha's co-participation in this death. If Myrrha's erotic consolations have provided a bulwark against the stony and horrible demands of ancestry, her joining of Sardanapalus' suicide (“'Tis fired! I come” [V.i.498]) matches his paradoxical gesture of faithful abandon. Throughout the play she has urged on the king greater attention to omens and self-preservation and revenge, even as she must embody, as his mistress, the ideal of pleasure that acts as distraction to the bloody preservation of rule. Lighting the pyre of Nimrod's line, she confirms her oxymoronic function as the faithful foreigner; her love is as all-consuming as Sardanapalus' attempts to preserve the line on his own terms, loyal to the very material it destroys.

Sardanapalus' consummation, then, can be read simultaneously as disaster and triumph, a creative act of destruction and fidelity that operates even more powerfully when we recognize its revisionary mirroring of previous moments in the Byronic canon. The fertility of such an act stems from the finally unresolved property of such climactic moments.²⁹ Lara's mysterious eclipses swallow up expression; Sardanapalus' paradoxical mirrorings sustain commentary and comparison. When Lara dies, his contradictory characteristics, having warred against each other, die with him; “all unknown [are] his glory and his guilt” (II.546). Sardanapalus, in defining his sacrificial pyre as “a light / To lesson ages, rebel nations, and / Voluptuous princes” (V.i.440-42), offers up the ambiguities of his relationship with the past to posthumous appraisal. The unresolved devotion of his life to the unknown realm of the future resonates with his concurrent decision to die in the arms of a foreign woman: in both cases a full interplay of disruption and integrity is thrown open to the outside.³⁰ Sardanapalus dies with the knowledge that his peculiar struggle with integration will in turn be integrated into other contexts, other stories and other historical vantages, and that knowledge counters his suicide.

In Don Juan, Byron's most sustained effort to define an exiled voice, it is hardly surprising to find, yet once more, a hero negotiating with specters. Thanks to teasing echoes of Byron's sensational life, these specters often float over from the author's legend; many a critic, responding to Byron's prompts, has for example traced the attributes of Juan's mother, Donna Inez, back to Lady Byron, and evaluated his depiction of Inez, the “walking calculation” (Don Juan Canto I, line 121), accordingly. However, as Manning does well to remind us, the free play of this legend puts it to the service not of self-representation but revision: “Liberated from any fidelity to autobiographical actuality, Byron's past becomes the stuff for endless fictional revision.”³¹ A less slippery way of measuring the full flowering of Byron's revisionary impulses, one that avoids the biographical pitfalls of determining how sincerely Byron treated his life, is to track evocation in his canon of itself. To do so is not to insist that “the poetry operates in a space of disinterestedness and autonomy,” the way of reading that Jerome McGann finds “intolerable”; it is merely to measure Byron's allusive irony—the same treatment his epic brings to bear on his public persona as well as the “social and institutional resources of the day”—on a delimited field, the self-mutating ground of his poetic oeuvre.³² Whether we talk of Don Juan's retrieval of Byron's legend or of its hearkening back to previous narrative situations in his poetry (not to mention its often distorting allusions to other poems), we can see at work Byron's abiding awareness that, in the words of Edward Said, “what is taken from a place ultimately violates its habitual way of being: there is constant transposition” (Said 8). The repeated engagement with actual ghosts in Byron's work, the oft-invoked affect of haunting violation or betrayal, shows a full understanding of such transposition. It is a process of uprooting, in which a defamiliarized engagement with precedence launches (to lift another phrase from Said) an “invitation to unforeseen estrangements from the habitual” (9). In the end, Don Juan relies on ghosts of the past in order to attack calcifications such as habit and cant. The Regency England it heads back to in its final cantos seems so spectral, it's hardly surprising that Byron accidentally dated the manuscript of Canto XIV “1814” instead of “1823.”³³

By the time Juan meets the ghost of the Black Friar in Canto XVI (1824), this familiar Byronic confrontation is informed by an almost overwhelming blend of invocation and recombination. Juan's sojourn in Norman Abbey, yet another “Gothic Babel of a thousand years” (XIII.396), gives rise to yet another negotiation with the imposing past. Restlessly pacing late at night, Juan finds himself treading in Lara's footsteps: “… he threw / His chamber door wide open—and went forth / Into a gallery, of a somber hue, / Long, furnished with old pictures of great worth …” (XVI.129-32). This time it is the narrative echo, not any direct ancestral claim, that lends the scene an uneasy tension: when the foreign and practically naked Juan walks down this hall, he both embodies and displaces the psychological alienation of Lara. The intricacies multiply: now our hero is alienated from a heritage of alienation—the cult-like and aging ancestry of the Byronic hero. This dual treatment of Lara's precedence invokes it all the more furiously, as Juan takes on the role at the same time as he opposes it. We balance the contention that “A picture is the past; even ere its frame / Be gilt, who sate hath ceased to be the same” (XVI.151-52) with the suggestions that, by pacing restlessly down a gothic hall, Juan has stepped into Lara's guilty frame. Thus the paradox is in place: “As Juan mused on mutability” (XVI.153), he is startled by an apparition of the past—a creature who, most like Lara, “sweeps along in his dusky pall” (XVI.363) and “still retains his sway” (XVI.354).

The preternatural synchronicity of change and reoccurrence is reinforced the next morning, when Byron leaves it to Lady Adeline to explain the legend of the Black Friar. Adeline is the most spectacularly ambiguous of Byron's heroines, the mistress of “mobility” whose skillful negotiation of affect often suggests she represents nothing less than irony personified (Garber 191). When Adeline “in a careless way” (XVI.377) sings of the Black Friar—“Say nought to him as he walks the hall, / And he'll say nought to you” (XVI.361-62)—she is not only reversing the pattern we've traced of the hero confiding his experience to the sympathetic foreign woman; the sheer indeterminacy of her motive (“'Twere difficult to say what was the object / Of Adeline … [XVI.449-50]) upends the general framework of real and unreal. It is not long after the song that Juan starts to regard the skeptical Adeline as herself some kind of specter:

          … Juan, when he cast a glance
On Adeline while playing her grand role,
          Which she went through as though it were a dance,
(Betraying only now and then her soul
          By a look scarce perceptibly askance
Of weariness or scorn) began to feel
Some doubt how much of Adeline was real …

(XVI.810-16)

If Adeline dances on the verge of the unreal, the Black Friar in due time reveals itself to be a lot more real than might be seemly. “The ghost, if ghost it were” turns out to be nothing more or less than the “full, voluptuous” and amorous Lady Fitz-Fulke on the prowl (XVI.1025, 1032), and demystification melts what had seemed just a moment ago—when the narrator had wondered, “what is substance to a Spirit?” (XVI.975)—to be a fundamental dichotomy. The revision of horror with eroticism, so operative in Saradanapalus' own confrontation with the unknown, evolves here into sheer fecundity: “Wonder upon wonder!” (XVI.1018). Fitz-Fulke's Black Friar is an erring spirit that evokes and replaces erring spirits, just as she is a woman in the form of a man; and while she too breathes in a transposed realm, like Lara, the breath is “remarkably sweet breath” (XVI.1012). A Christabel-like ornamentation of this ghost's carnality, complete with the moon peeping from behind clouds and the prudish interjection of a narrative “alas!” in the midst of disrobing, broadens the parodic corruption of precedence, heightens the distortion of what turns out to be yet one more instance of innocent ravishing for Don Juan.³⁴

Yet an ominous note of enervation creeps into the final written scene of Byron's epic, suggesting that, despite all comedic revision of Lara's condition, and despite an echoing of Sardanapalus' sexual consummation, Don Juan is heading to new confrontations, if not with Lara's brooding spirit, then with the erotic transgression that has exiled that spirit to the province of legend and lampoon. Any work, after all, whose rallying cry is “I was born for opposition” (XV.176) will not resolve for long. The two lovers, in the light of day, take on a ghostliness that brings them closer in line to Adeline:

Which best is to encounter—Ghost, or none,
          'Twere difficult to say—but Juan looked
As if he had combated with more than one,
          Being wan and worn, with eyes that hardly brooked
The light, that through the Gothic windows shone:
          Her Grace, too, had a sort of air rebuked—
Seemed pale and shivered, as if she had kept
A vigil, or dreamt rather more than slept.

(XVII.105-12)

This delicately phrased hint of ghostly reemergence, very end of Don Juan, is the poem's final revisionary haunting. The indeterminate Adeline haunts the restless Fitz-Fulke; the over-experienced Lara haunts the light-shy Juan; enervating demystification haunts Sardanapalus' ghost-banishing pleasure; Christabel haunts Don Juan; and life, however free and various, does not escape the ever-present past. The inexorable movement of Don Juan towards the starting point of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage—the “vast and venerable pile” (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 1.56) of a gothic ancestral house, from whence Harold twice departs—displays the enduring magnetism of opposition in Byron's post-exile work: in the end is its beginning.³⁵

Unrelenting impositions of the past in Don Juan do not stifle; they liberate, as is made quite clear in a passage of Byron's epic where the narrator celebrates the existence of ghostly settings:

Ye glorious Gothic scenes! how much ye strike
          All phantasies, not even excepting mine:
A grey wall, a green ruin, rusty pike,
          Make my soul pass the equinoctial line
Between the present and past worlds, and hover
Upon their airy confine, half-seas-over.

(X.483-88)

An overriding paradox that attends Byron's post-exile development of romance stands out here: the insistence on simultaneous confinement and freedom, rendered in the oxymoronic phrase “airy confine.” The wall that so oppressed Lara here “make[s] my soul pass,” not simply into a different time, but into a different land as well, vaguely designated as “half-seasover.” The displaced revisitation of place, thanks to exile, leads into new transpositions of the past and the present—“change appears as a consequence of exile and seeks to revise the terms that gave rise to separation.”³⁶ A fundamental conflation of temporal and spatial revisitation, endemic to exiled nostalgia, ensures that the Byronic canon will constantly cite and resituate itself: old tropes and settings will be transported, trailing roots of origination, into new realms.

The “rusty pike” is a case in point; not only is this image a color-contrast example of green ruin, it also recalls, especially to those familiar with Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto III, the good old Byronic hero—those self-tortured wretches who, like Napoleon or Lara or Harold, “aspire / Beyond the fitting medium of desire” (III.374), only to consume themselves like “a sword laid by / Which eats into itself, and rusts ingloriously” (III.395-96).³⁷ The reemployment of rust in Don Juan is thus a displacement giving rise to a host of revisionary negotiations with the past, none of them definitive. The rusty pike, propped up against a wall, remains as ruined as Lara ever was, as cast aside as Lara was fated to be; its current appearance does not redeem or transform it, so much as imbue it with the hovering energies of revision. The pike's evocation of bygone days is overlaid by surface rust, which does not tarnish the pike's already spoiled glory so much as it charges Byron's lines into unresolved shuttling between the past and its current distortion.

It seems no accident that Don Juan's pike stands like a signpost on the hero's road back to England. Its location in the Rhine, “Which Drachenfels frowns over like a spectre / Of the good feudal times for ever gone” (x.490-91), situates it within the poem on the brink of England, the narrator's land of birth, a similarly outmoded land for which he feels “a mixed regret and veneration / For its decaying fame and former worth” (x.524-25). More suggestively, in terms of the Byronic canon, the rusty gothic image carries with it a “transient trace” (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III.468) of Childe Harold, who had been ditched by his narrator in the Rhineland, among the same “grey but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells” (III.414). The song Harold sings, when the earlier poem abandons him, is a solipsistic and terminally sentimental hymn to the setting's “proud decay” (III.512), yet it haunts any subsequent traveler through what Harold had termed “a scene, which I should see / With double joy wert thou with me!” (III.504-5). The initially innocent Juan, “seasoned as he well might be / By former voyages” (DJ x.510-11), and on his way towards a rendezvous with a displaced specter of the Byronic hero at the site of its origin, must, in suitably reverse order, first pass through that figure's point of demise—the Harold-haunted landscape.

It is a passage that seems at once liberating and claustrophobic. The succession of displacement and revisitation, which could be another way of describing Don Juan's famous “mobility,” is heady business that nevertheless always involves a price, an unsettling negotiation with unsettled sources and precedents. Juan speeds back to Byron's homeland, and his narrator observes, with an allusion to Book IV of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, “What a delightful thing's a turnpike road! / … but onward as we roll, / ‘Surgit amari aliquid’—the toll!” (x.623-24). Byron's allusion to something bitter rising up, something unsettled, is itself displaced from a previous quotation in his canon: self-exiled Harold had thought it in translation in the beginning of Byron's career, pondering the inevitable collapse of love: “Full from the fount of Joy's delicious springs / Some bitter o'er the flowers its bubbling venom flings” (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 1.817-18). In the process of exiled revision, it would seem, consistency lies in displaced resonance, and even Lucretius, that most adamant of materialists, lends himself to the haunting persistence of the Byronic Hero.

Notes

1. Quotations of Byron's poetry in this article are taken from Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann., 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980-93), henceforth abbreviated as CPW.

2. These discarded lines are reprinted in CPW 1.158.

3. G. Wilson Knight, Byron and Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) 198.

4. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994) 6. Derrida, later in this study, follows Marx in focusing on Timon's gold as “the bodiless body of money … a life without personal life or individual property” (42).

5. From “The Farewell to a Lady,” originally contained in an 1808 letter to Francis Hodgson. Included in CPW 1.225-26.

6. Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 79.

7. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 175. Said's exploration of the modern text as self-consciously affiliative, rather than fathered by pure intention, resonates with the self-conscious disruptions of the past played out in Byronic haunting. Said bolsters his theory with Freud's redefinition of the analyst as “brother, interlocutor, discursive partner” (174): the Freudian transfiguration of “vocation” into the “career” of constant reinterpretation (176). Beginnings does not take up Byron's work, but it is fertile theoretical ground for framing the poet's interest in displacement as motivation of poetic career. Byron's linkage of exile with supernatural visitation specifically anticipated Freud's definition of “unheimlich,” the uncanny, as meaning literally “unhoused.”

8. Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Romanticism (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979) xii-xiii.

9. W. Paul Elledge, “Divorce Italian Style: Byron's Beppo,” Modern Language Quarterly 46 (March 1985): 40. See also Elledge's article “Parting Shots: Byron Ending Don Juan 1,” Studies in Romanticism 27.4 (Winter 1988): 563-77, for an exploration of Don Juan's strategy for “clutch[ing] the subject to which it bids farewell” (564). Elledge's identification of “the equivocation symptomatic of Byron's disjunctive moments,” wherein “his dissociative gestures almost always activate his impulses to connect, his embraces those to disengage” (566) resonates with my emphasis on Byron's exiled revisions.

10. Jerome McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 280.

11. Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 214.

12. CPW 4.485. McGann follows the usual custom in this quote of using BLJ to refer to Byron's Letters & Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973-82).

13. A seminal observation by M. K. Joseph in Byron The Poet (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964) 135.

14. Beppo was probably written in two nights (McGann deduces October 9 & 10, 1817) and published in February 1818. Byron finished Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in January 1818. See CPW 4.482-83, 493, and Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970) 276.

15. Hermann Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative: The History of a Genre, trans. Sue Bollans (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 159.

16. Jerome McGann, Don Juan in Context (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1976) 95.

17. Christensen 215, 220. Though he maintains that the disruptive “tactics” of Juan are evident in “spasms” of work that preceded it, Christensen still leaves in doubt what might have prompted the poet to explicitly launch an ethical challenge to the marketing that had packaged his best-selling Tales.

18. In Manning's words: “A manifesto that alludes to the ceaselessly devious Falstaff does not so much clarify as fruitfully mystify Byron's poetic program.” Manning's reading of pseudo-repudiation here resonates with my own. “The new Byron to succeed the repudiated one,” he continues, “would be not the true voice of feeling so much as it was another modulation in the relations existing between the historical Byron, his reading, his publisher, and the audience and critics of this and his prior texts.” Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990) 147-48.

19. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957) 206, 202, 203. Such biographical reading leads Eliot to dismiss an Eastern Tale like Lara “as a masterpiece of self-analysis, but of a self that is largely a deliberate fabrication”; and valorize Don Juan on the grounds that the young hero “exhibits a kind of physical courage and capacity for heroism which we are quite willing to attribute to Byron himself” (203). The subordination of Byron's verse to his life is a remarkably persistent note in Byronic criticism: thirty years later, Jerome McGann is still able to maintain, “He wrote about himself, and … his books, like God's human creatures, are all made in his image and likeness” (“The Book of Byron and the Book of a World,” in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory, ed. Jerome McGann [Oxford: Clarendon, 1985] 264, 257).

20. According to Lord Lovelace, quoted in His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell Jr. (New York: Macmillan, 1954) 112. Byron's distaste for metaphysics is continually on evidence in Don Juan, not only in the attacks on Coleridge, but also in passages such as IX.41 when the narrator rebukes himself for being “apt to grow too metaphysical” and swears off “deviat [ing] into matters rather dry.” Dismissals of overarching system can be also found in work more contemporaneous with Lara, such as in the Hebrew Melody, “When Coldness Wraps This Suffering Clay” (1815; CPW 3.301-2), a meditation on the fate of the soul once “sun is quench'd or system breaks.” That poem's interest in broken system signals Byron's concern and interest in afterlife, however dry the construct may have been. Consider too, in this light, the parody of young Juan's first bout of love in Don Juan I.91: “And turn'd, without perceiving his condition, / Like Coleridge, into a metaphysician.”

21. The Newstead Abbey poems in the Hours of Idleness collection (1808) offer a telling contrast to such implicit reproach. “On Leaving Newstead Abbey” has the speaker vowing:

    Though a tear dim his eye at this sad separation,
              'Tis nature, not fear, that excites his regret;
    Far distant he goes, with the same emulation,
              The fame of his fathers he ne'er can forget.
    That fame, and that memory, still will he cherish;
              He vows that he ne'er will disgrace your renown;
    Like you will he live, or like you will he perish;
              When decay'd, may he mingle his dust with your own!

    The 1806 “Elegy on Newstead Abbey” confers onto the Abbey itself some intimation of the Byronic hero: “Proudly majestic frowns thy vaulted hall, / Scowling defiance on the blasts of fate”—but it is made clear that the hall epitomizes piety and innocence, defiled by the “lawless plunder” of tyrants and the “slow decay” of time. The poem closes with another vow of the poet's fidelity to the past: “Pride, hope, and love forbid him to forget, / But warm his bosom with impassion'd glow.”

22. Leslie Brisman, “Byron: Troubled Stream from a Pure Source,” in English Romantic Poets, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986) 232.

23. For a pertinent discussion of Lara's “separation from tradition,” see Frederick Shilstone, Byron and the Myth of Tradition (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988) 85-88.

24. Frederick Garber, Self, Text, and Romantic Irony (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988) 48.

25. Here is a measure of the evolution of Byron's Eastern Tales, which, with The Giaour, had started out brimming with exotic place names and explanatory footnotes. Lara, Byron insisted in letters, was written with “no country whatever in my view” (BLJ 4.143); or, in another formulation, “the country is not Spain but the Moon” (BLJ 4.146).

26. For a resourceful discussion of this dream, centered around a reading of Sardanapalus as defending his highly idealistic conception of pleasure against, and ultimately with, the grim bloody necessities of his ancestry, see Lynn Byrd, “Old Myths for the New Age,” in History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990) 166-87.

27. Milton's famous employment of this phrase at the beginning of “Lycidas” would not be lost on Byron. The watery regeneration of that lyric is a convenient trope for a poet who, thanks to geographical circumstances, would regard a move to the adjacent foreign as a passage over water. For a contrasting treatment of Byron's “once more” beginnings as “the repression of repetitiveness as a dynamic independent of conscious control,” see Christensen 153.

28. A similar tactic can be found in Byron's stodgy use of classical dramatic unities—his choice of “the more regular formation of a structure, however feeble, to an entire abandonment of all rules whatsoever” (Preface to the play, CPW 6.16)—to present the life of a king who admires Bacchus and terms himself “the very slave of circumstance / and impulse” (IV.330-31). Here and so often in Byronic texts, stylistic counterpoint offers a silent ironic cross-current to the subject at hand.

29. Emphasized, with correlations to Schlegelean theory, in Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980) 4-24.

30. For an application of this openness to the gloss of the future to Dante, in many ways Byron's model in poetical exile, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Dante and the Virtues of Exile” in Exile in Literature, ed. Maria-Ines Lagos-Pope (London and Toronto: Associated UP, 1988) 51 ff.

31. Peter Manning, “Don Juan and the Revisionary Self,” in Romantic Revisions, Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 218.

32. Jerome McGann, “Byron and ‘The Truth in Masquerade,’” in Romantic Revisions 200.

33. Lord Byron, Volume X: ‘Don Juan’ Cantos XIV and XV, ed. Andrew Nicholson (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1995) 2.

34. For an indication of how much Coleridge's Christabel (1816) was on Byron's mind as the latter left England, see Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1957) 629, which details the famous ghost story session at the Villa Diodati with the Shelleys in the dark summer of 1816. Once the group “really began to talk ghostly,” in the words of Dr. Polidori, Byron recited Christabel by heart—to such effect that Percy Shelley ran screaming from the room.

35. For an emphasis of Don Juan as a reversal of the movement of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, see Bernard Blackstone, Byron: A Survey (London: Longman, 1975) 278, 293.

36. See Robert Edwards, “Exile, Self, and Society,” in Exile in Literature 23.

37. Byron's “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte” (1814) contains the same rhetoric of mortification, as the poet addresses the “The Desolator desolate! / The Victor overthrown!” (37-38), now exiled on “thy sullen Isle” (118): “thou must eat thy heart away!” (54).