Self, Text, and Romantic Irony: The Example of Byron [Course Book ed.] 9781400859368

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Self, Text, and Romantic Irony

FREDERICK GARBER

Self, Text, and Romantic Irony THE EXAMPLE OF BYRON

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

1988

C O P Y R I G H T © 1 9 8 8 BY P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS P U B L I S H E D BY P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS, 4 1 W I L L I A M STREET P R I N C E T O N , N E W JERSEY 0 8 5 4 0 IN T H E U N I T E D K I N G D O M : P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS, G U I L D F O R D , SURREY ALL R I G H T S RESERVED

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book. Publication of this book has been aided by a grant fromThe Andrew W.Mellon Foundation. Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acidfree paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Permission to reprint material from the following essay has been granted by Peter Lang Publishing Co.: "Satire and the Making of Selves," in Literary Theory and Criticism, Festschrift in Honor ofRene Wellek, ed. Joseph Strelka (Berne: Peter Lang, 1984), 849-70. ISBN 0 - 6 9 1 - 0 6 7 3 0 - 9

P R I N T E D I N T H E U N I T E D STATES OF A M E R I C A BY P R I N C E T O N U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS P R I N C E T O N , N E W JERSEY

For Emily, Catherine, David

CONTENTS PREFACE

IX

A NOTE ON TEXTS

xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XV PART

ONE

ι. Beginning Harold

3

2. Self-Consuming Symmetries

32

3. An Oriental Twist

69

4. Continuing Manfred

102

PART

TWO

5. Lucid Contours

139

6. Irony and Organicism: Mind, Memory, and Place

171

7. Irony and Organicism: Origin and Textuality

194

8. Irony and Organicism: Figures of Relation

224

PART

THREE

9. Self and the Language of Satire

269

10. Satire and the Making of Selves

291

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

313

INDEX

319

( vii)

PREFACE T H I S STUDY takes up in considerable detail several problems

that I broached briefly in a previous book (The Autonomy of the Self from Richardson to Huysmans [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983]). A difficult, ambivalent attitude toward the self's autonomy is, it seems to me, not only characteristic of romantic literature but central to the romantic conception of what the self is and does. More specifically, and in terms of the issues that grew into this study, it is central to the question of how the selves that appear in texts gain their fullest being in and through the making of texts. For a consciousness of the romantic sort, self-making and text-making imply and implicate each other. They play off against each other and do much to determine each other's modes of being. Indeed, as texts like Werther show, they often appear to be precisely the same act seen from differing perspectives. It follows, of course, that selfand text-««making may well have the same kind of relationship, and the evidence for that is considerable. Take, again, Werther, or any other of the major texts considered in the present study. And yet, just to keep us on our toes, and to avoid simplistic equations, there are poems like Coleridge's Dejection in which the acts of self and text work in contrary ways, contradicting each other so slyly and ironically that we are given an object lesson about the need for intense attentiveness. Clearly, then, the romantics did not offer (and we ought carefully to avoid) anything like easy analogies. Still, they did offer analogies, obsessively so, and the extraordinary complexity of the sort the romantics offered has been studied in equally obsessive detail by contemporary critics as different in concern and ideology as Meyer Abrams and Paul de Man. Few analogies are denser, more intricate (and, I would argue, more difficult to bring to completion) than that of self-order and text-order. Each, after all, may well become the other because, as one comes into being, so, it seems, does the other, almost as though (ix)

χ

PREFACE

each needed to have the other in process in order to be in process itself. Figures like Byron and Hoffman show that such mutual emergence may be competitive as well as supportive. Such paradoxical mutuality is, in fact, one of the defining char­ acteristics of romantic irony. Naive biographism, then, is clearly out of place in such con­ siderations. Whatever their ultimate origins, the selves at work (worked upon, put to work) in the study that follows take much of their being, and perhaps the essential part, from their relations to the text in which they appear and in which they have that being. Indeed, that particular version of the question of origins turns up occasionally, and always with ironic force (see chapter 7 below for what happened to that version in some crucial romantic texts). And yet this is not to argue what seems to be the inverse of naive biographism, that these issues were grown in a hothouse, or that the romantics were formalists to such a degree that the issues are untouched by the reek of the human. The case is quite the opposite. Romantic selves, texts, and worlds flow into each other in ways that still dazzle, which we have still to understand fully. We approach those ways in terms as variable as the ways we approach romantic figuration. Some critics speak of figures like circular journeys that seek to close it all up—self, text, and world—in packages of desirable coherence. Others speak of romantic figuration in ways that make such packagings seem no more than gestures of delusive desire—gestures that, it is argued, the romantics fully under­ stood to be no more than acts of the self-regarding. The work of Abrams and De Man is, once again, representative. Both of these approaches (I have, of course, made them diametrical, when they are hardly quite so polar) seem to me to have much to say, which means that neither ought to be taken as, in itself, offering final understanding. Neither, of course, promotes naive biographism. If one implies more of the world, more of what that position feels to be essential human conditions, the other finds itself uneasy with equivalencies of any kind, espe­ cially those of text and world that never raise questions of rep­ resentation. If one argues, and does so by the very structure of

PREFACE

XI

its argument, that closure is not only conceivable but a goal that can be seriously pondered, and offers romantic texts that appear to argue for that possibility, the other finds closure, and the return it often implies, perhaps the most dubious of claims, romantic or otherwise. An argument for consciousness-in-theworld is, it seems to me, a way of taking in both, and thus it clearly offers the most comprehensive approach. That argument understands romantic consciousness to be so astute that it knows such a stance to be in great part a matter of the making of texts, of texts that seem to resist all our efforts to lock in that stance, any stance. Put thus in its basic form, this is the implicit understanding that underlies the following study. As the first part of the title indicates, I have chosen to work in a specific area of the larger question and to look in some detail at what goes on within it. Yet even this particular framework, which holds within itself a coherent body of issues, has to extend beyond the work of any single figure or literature. No one writer or body of texts can exemplify all the diversity involved, though some, like Byron, Goethe, Schlegel, and Wordsworth, are especially useful examples and therefore bulk more than others in my perusal of these issues. Thus, the second part of the title shows the exact position of Byron in this study: he appears as the primary instance because he seems to me to be the best single example to show precisely what happened and why it happened as it did. The tempting possibility of taking in all of Byron had to be put aside so as to include other materials. I have, in particular, sought to broaden the scope of the study of romantic irony by showing the relations of major practitioners in several different literatures to the theory of such irony, and showing also how that irony relates to the organicism that dominated the period and long dominated our study of it. This broadening takes us into other areas as well, into themes like Orientalism and into textual questions such as beginnings and endings and the ways we figure relation. It takes us, finally, into a look at how such irony relates to the satire with which it is often coupled and to which it bears a

Xll

PREFACE

duplicitous resemblance. Indeed, "duplicity" as a concept and practice comes to be of some moment in the field we have parceled off. I have profited a great deal from reading many of the best modern studies on these issues. The bibliography offers a select list. 1 would single out in particular the general studies by Abrams, De Man, McFarland, and Rajan, the studies of Byron by Gleckner and McGann, and the studies of romantic irony by Mellor and Strohschneider-Kohrs. Lilian Furst's Fictions of Romantic Irony came too late to be considered here.

A NOTE ON TEXTS I HAVE referred to the following editions throughout this book: i. The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 7 vols. (London: John Murray, 1898-1905). 2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Byron's works are taken from The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann, 5 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980-1986), abbreviated hereafter as McGann. 3. Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973-1982), abbreviated hereafter as LJ. 4. Byron's Don Juan, ed. Truman Guy Steffan and Stephen Pratt, 2d ed., 4 vols. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), abbreviated hereafter as Steffan-Pratt ed.

( xi" )

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I AM grateful to the following journals and publishers for permission to reprint materials originally published elsewhere: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag for "Byron, Schlegel and the Ironist's Lucid Contours," in English and German Romanticism: Cross-Currents and Controversies, ed. James Pipkin (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1985), 171-82; The Comparatist for "Conceiving Energy: Byron and Delacroix," 4 (1980): 3-10; Essays in Literature for "Irony and Organicism: Origin and Textuality," 10 (1983): 263-82; The University of Illinois Press for "Beckford, Delacroix and Byronic Orientalism," Comparative Literature Studies, no. 3, 18 (September 1981), copyright 1981 by The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois; Thalia for "Self and the Language of Satire in Don Juan," 5 (1983): 35-44. Early versions of this study were drafted during a Fellowship granted by the American Council of Learned Societies in 19791980.

( xv)

PART ONE

I

Beginning Harold B E F O R E we get into B y r o n ' s story of the travels of Childe

Harold we are treated not only to a Preface and an introductory p o e m but to an epigraph. It is from a book called Le Cosmopolite, ou, le Citoyen du Monde, and it begins as follows: L'univers est une espece de livre, dont on n'a lu que la premiere page quand on n'a vu que son pays. J'en ai feuillete un assez grand nombre, que j'ai trouve egalement mauvaises.1 We have, it seems, more than the Book of Nature to read: the universe itself is a kind of book, something to be perused ("feuillete"), its pages to be pondered as the traveler reads his way through the countries of the world. For Fougeret de M o n bron, author of Le Cosmopolite, the reading of places had been surprisingly instructive: Cet examen ne m'a point ete infructueux. Je hai'ssais ma patrie. Toutes les impertinences des peuples divers, parmi lesquels j'ai vecu, m'ont reconcilie avec elle. Quand je n'aurais tire d'autre benefice de mes voyages que celui-la, je n'en regretterais ni les frais ni les fatigues.2 T h e epigraph records a curious circularity, an act of reading that took the traveler back to where he began. It is an act that results 1. McGann, 2:3-186. First published in 1753, the book Byron quotes is by Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron (ca. 1720-1761). Byron refers to it in a letter to Robert Dallas of 23 September 1811 (LJ, 1:105). For a comparison of Byron's and Monbron's personalities see J. B. Broome, "Autour d' une epigraphe: Byron et Fougeret de Monbron," Revue de Litterature Comparee, 34 (i960): 337-53. "The universe is a kind of book, of which we have read only the first page if we have seen only our own country. I have perused a great number of them, and I have found them equally bad." 2. "This inspection was not fruitless. I hated my homeland. All the impertinences of the various people among whom I lived reconciled me with her. If I had gotten no other benefit from my trips than that, I would regret neither the expense nor the exhaustion." ( 3 )

4

CHAPTER ONE

in a remaking of self and a consequent reconciliation of self with its original place. The job of any reader is to seek to possess the text, to take it up within himself. Put in a different perspective, reading is like traveling in that it is based on the desire to make the foreign part of oneself. What then of a traveler like Monbron, a peripatetic reader? That which he sought to possess was "foreign" in the most common sense of the term, that is, strange, exotic, not what he saw at home. But when he sought to possess the exotic he ended by possessing that which, in the most basic sense, he had always owned. He began with a selfhood that grew out of his native land and he enriched that selfhood with a reading of the world that had a special kind of fecundity ("cet examen ne m'a point ete infructueux"). He ended with a mature view that drew the self back to the place of its pristine simplicity, possessing not only the world it had learned to read but also the place where its reading began. Epigraphs of any sort are generally sets of instructions for reading. They give us a line on what is to follow, patterns to be aware of. It is tempting to consider that possibility in the case of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. If the epigraph is to be taken as a model for subsequent action, Harold will do as Monbron did, set out from a homeland he has come to dislike. His wanderings will be as Monbron's were, acts of traveling and inspection that are, in effect, acts of reading. To accomplish such acts he must have a self with a special sort of literacy, one that is stocked with particular kinds of stuff, the kinds that are most useful in scanning the import of place. For one thing, that self will have to be able to deal with difference, not only that sense of the Other which the foreign always contains but also the perpetual play of difference among the various pages of the universe. The people among whom Monbron lived were, he tells us, diverse. They were united only in their insolence ("impertinences").3 Yet 3. With very few exceptions my comments on selfhood in this chapter, and the book as a whole, do not refer to Byron himself but to the figures within the poem (I include the narrator of Don Juan among those figures). I touch only tangentially on the question of the relations among poet, narrator, and hero. That

BEGINNING Harold

5

there is a difference not only among those people but between Monbron and Harold himself, and this too has somehow to be construed by Harold as reader. We saw how the shape of the journey Monbron took has all the wholeness and closure of a circle, for the epigraph involves not only the reading of place but the result of that reading, a return to origin. Indeed, Monbron's journey can be understood as a quest for the meaning of origin, although it did not start out to be such. Of course nothing like this return was to happen in the poem on Harold's reading. His journey takes the shape of a parabola, a nonreturning curve that never reconnects with its point of origin. Nothing like a goal is achieved, nor is there any indication that Byron would have led Harold to redemption in the additional stanzas he thought of writing in 1822.4 In fact, he told William Miller in 1811 that the poem is "on Ariosto's plan that is to say on no plan at all."5 Thus, the poem on Harold's reading will be perpetually open-ended, the shape of his journey precisely opposite from the shape of Monbron's journey. Harold will read on forever, forever construing the play of difference; but that play will never lead him to the comfort of closure. Byron's major work begins with the beginning of Harold's pilgrimage. Here, at that crucial point, there are essential instructions for reading, not only for the poem on Harold but for the canon that is to follow. But before any of this could happen there had to be a selfhood capable of reading. The primary focus of the epigraph is on the movements and tastes of a self, not on the contours of a place. Though Byron may have looked to The Castle of Indolence for question is dealt with extensively and usefully in Robert F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); Μ. K. Joseph, Byron the Poet (London: Gollancz, 1964); JeromeJ. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); and Andrew Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study (Edinburgh: Cliver & Boyd, 1965). 4. See LJ 10:69; but see also pp. 108, 126, 127, and 135. For more comment see Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1957), 3:1118, which shows that in 1823 Byron was still speaking of a continuation. 5. LJ 2:363.

6

CHAPTER ONE

some of the language and character of his poem, what he needed was not the depiction of the qualities of a place—the drowsiness of the castle area begins the tone of Thomson's poem—but the shape of an active self ready to begin the business of pilgrimage. What Byron actually did was minimal but sufficient to get the poem going: he gave his hero a set of characteristics with which he could, for a while, meet the world. The introductory stanzas (through the song "Good Night") offer a series of comments on Harold that set up the shape of a silhouette, no more than that but at least that much. He is given rank, a vague sense of ancient ties, a place from which to depart, a small family. Of the facts of his lineage, though, the narrator will only state that "it suits me not to say" (1.3.2).6 There are hints of some sort of nastiness among the Childe's actions ("one sad losel soils a name for aye" [1.3.5.]), D u t nothing we are shown of those doings, however selfish and selfindulgent, can speak to "evil deeds" or "crime." A selfhood is coming into shape, but there is little more than blankness within it, few shadings made of specifics. We hear something a bit more detailed about a lover he could not have, as well as a few attendant strokes about what he would have done to her; but that something more, in this case, is only enough to outline a condition, give the barest cause for his gloom. Sometimes he stands apart, the drops in his eye thickened by Pride; and sometimes memory makes "strange pangs flash . . . along Childe Harold's brow" (1.8.2). There are, then, pains from the past as well as the satiety of the present. There is also, to stand for a longer past, the lineage soiled by the sad losel, a lineage represented now by the Childe, his sister and mother, and perhaps his father. (We are never specifically told if the father is alive.) And there is, finally, his native land, which, like Monbron at the beginning of his travels, he has learned to loathe. Temporal and spatial ties give Harold a full set of contours, but the few 6. Unless otherwise specified, all references in citations following quotations from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are to canto and stanza, or canto, stanza, and line, as appropriate.

BEGINNING Harold

7 strokes of personality give him only the barest semblance of a self. To do more with Harold's condition would only delay the start of the poem. To do less would give him too little of the substance he needs to perform his function in the poem, that of a peripatetic point of view. Yet that function has more than its immediate business to perform. The outline established at the beginning shows a self in a state of serious disturbance, with so much pain from so many places that it has to break from place in order to see where it is. From the self's own point of view, then, the journey it is to take has to do with self-understanding and ultimately with the curing of self. Harold does not set out to establish a morality—though that is one of the effects of his travels—but to seek for the sort of healing that place and its history can offer. But other benefits will accrue, for those acts of self-curing should, at the same time, give substance to the skimpy selfhood with which the poem began. The self will constitute itself even as (and to the degree that) it works out a relationship to the places it passes through. To put it differently, the development of the text of the poem coincides with the thickening of the self of its hero. Self-making and text-making will be seen to be parallel acts; indeed, to be precisely the same act viewed from differing perspectives. There are several more qualities of self that emerge as Byron begins Harold, and they too are predictive of future concerns. (It would not be too strong to call them, even at this point, obsessions.) The relations of self and text take more forms than the ones we have seen. For one thing, they focus intensely and with precision on the question of artifice, and they do so in the matter of language as well as in the matter of self. The outline of self set up at the beginning of the canto is especially factitious. It is tenuous, tentative, and skimpy, designed simply to get the self into place and about its business. At this stage in the poem it is no more than a medium that reads. The order of self is that of a faqade or a theatrical flat, a property whose content is deliberately minimal, a property that, in performing its function, calls attention to its status as artifice. Further, the facti-

8

CHAPTER ONE

tiousness of self echoes, reinforces, and continues the qualities of the language in which it is described, that neo-Spenserian diction, part of whose reason for being is its patent artifice. Though the diction is used largely to build the faqade of self it always speaks of its own life as well, its status as a system of language, its complex but well-charted origins. It goes back through Thomson, Shenstone, and Beattie to Spenser himself, that is, through the history of a literary language that cannot help but recall where it came from even as it activates itself. And here the relation takes an especially interesting turn. The sense of artifice cannot, in these early lines, be separated from the poem's sense of itself as a self-reflexive fiction. Indeed, these two senses have been linked from the time of the epigraph. The epigraph about traveling as reading is succeeded by the two parts of the Preface; and those parts add up, finally, to an apologia for the content of the poem we are about to read. "To Ianthe," which stands between the Preface and the first canto, appears to point outside this system of mirrors. In fact, though, it is nothing more than a conventional introductory poem with a lament on the insufficiency of language and an entwining of Ianthe's name with the verse. By the time we get to the canto itself and the beginning of the hero we have been drawn deeply into the poem's vision of itself as self-reflexive artifice. The establishment of Harold's selfhood is bound up with that sense and also with the concomitant, inevitable awareness of the poet as maker. These early lines speak of the poet as witness of himself as well as his witnessing of what he has made. Self takes in other issues as well, all, once again, predicting future moves in the canon. Though what we learn of Harold in these lines is especially skimpy on substance, what we do learn about him is that he is himself especially full, stuffed with pleasures to the point of satiety. The satiety is packed into a container that refuses to unfasten itself sufficiently to relieve the pressures of fullness: "For his was not that open, artless soul / That feels relief by bidding sorrow flow" (1.8.6). There are, it seems, no safety valves in this system of self. There does appear to be a moment of openness, almost immediately after these lines, in

BEGINNING Harold

9

the song "Good Night," which Harold sings on the ship. Yet he is not singing his woes to others but only to himself ("When deem'd he no strange ear was listening" [i. 13.16]), so that the opening-out is no more (and no less) than an opening-out of self to itself. More precisely, it is an opening-out into an external framework, the song, which is accessible only to himself. Harold has circumscribed his world so that it encloses only himself and those agents of his self (in this case that aspect of consciousness which has made the song) which speak for him. The world of self is self-contained (the circumscription ensures that), and it certainly seems sufficient for the moment. Harold succeeds in turning himself into his own cul-de-sac. Of course some paradoxes emerge immediately, and Byron will play with them regularly throughout the cantos. A poem that begins with the self as the slimmest of faqades offers as one of that self's characteristics a crowded, pressing past—not only the fullness of immediate pleasures but also those dense and obsessive memories which will always haunt such heroes. From one point of view the self is quite skimpy; from another it is only too full. And then, intensifying the danger of that fullness, there is the order of the circumscribed self, where Harold sings only to himself, speaks only to himself, and sends all the energies of selfhood, ultimately, back into the corners of self. There is a strange circularity in the way Harold's self works. All of the agents of consciousness ensure that their acts are finally— whether he wants them to be so or not—for consciousness' sake. Putting that heightened, self-directed activity into the confines of a circumscribed self puts that self in particular danger. Finally, that curious curving of energy implicit in the conditions of the self's activity is an instance of an unusual gesture that informs this entire sequence and gives it much of its essential character. The gesture is seen in all the doubling and mirroring that make up the lines: the foreignness of the epigraph about foreignness, the text about traveling as the reading of texts, the diction that recalls its own history, and the poet as witness of himself. Each of these elements involves a turning

ro

CHAPTER ONE

back upon oneself, an act of recoil. That impulse is so basic that it underlies all manner of phenomena, not only in these lines but in the poem as a whole. In fact, it takes in more than Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: we shall see that recoil emerging as a primary and pervasive gesture in the canon that is to follow, all the way to the cutoff ending that concludes what we have of Don Juan. It lies at the center of Byron's experience and, in a powerful and radical way, writes out the history of his poems. •

Yet with all this business about the making of self it is clear that the poem is also concerned with various kinds of unmaking. To begin with there is the fact that, after the first few stanzas, Harold is no longer at home. The pilgrimage commences with a clear and acknowledged fracture. As the self moves out there are no familiar surroundings in which to locate it, surroundings of the sort that, in earlier times, helped it to gain definition. His self has been compelled to find or make other contexts in which to accomplish its business. In effect, his is a consciousness afloat. For the time being (though in fact for the whole of the poem we have) Harold's home is in consciousness; indeed, his home is his consciousness. Deprived of all that Albion could do for it, consciousness must seek out a new place of work. That place turns out to be consciousness itself: it becomes its own arena, its own place of employment. Francis Jeffrey spoke of Harold as a "Satanic personage" because his personality is "gloomy and misanthropic," his sentiments "dark and disdainful."7 But Harold is also satanic in more intricate ways as he lives out the satanic insistence that the mind can be its own context, its own autonomous place. Consciousness will be for Harold what Manfred will argue that it is for himself, independent and self-sustaining, as sufficient and self-contained as the boat on which he embarks. 7. From a review of the first two cantos in the Edinburgh Review, February 1812. See Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 39.

B E G I N N I N G Harold

II

What that boat begins for Harold is a pilgrimage in which the time the body inhabits is only one of the kinds of time that inhabit the mind. Satan's arrogant pairing of the freedoms of place and time is fully enacted in Harold, though in a far different tonality. O n e of the j o b s of Harold's mind is to touch, obviously and in full display, at every dimension of time it can reach. It has to demonstrate unmistakably that the mind can do better than the body because it can counter the linearity to which the b o d y is forever subject. T h e fracturing of self and place with which the poem begins is therefore paralleled— quickly, as though he were unable to wait—by a struggle between self and the hold of time. T h e mind does its part t h r o u g h a repeated, apparently effortless, and quite extraordinary bit ofjuggling: places that were and still are (their presence as permanent as their contents are fragile), are seen as though they were holding within themselves, at one and the same time, all that used to be in them and all that is there now. T h e time that took Chivalry from Spain is countered by the mind that can recall the "ancient Goddess" and put her out there in the land again, if only in a melodramatic vision: Awake, ye Sons of Spain! awake! advance! Lo! Chivalry, your ancient Goddess, cries, But wields not, as of old, her thirsty lance, Nor shakes her crimson plumage in the skies: Now on the smoke of blazing bolts she flies, And speaks in thunder through yon engine's roar: In every peal she calls—"Awake! arise!" Say, is her voice more feeble than of yore, When her war-song was heard on Andalusia's shore?

(137)

O f course the mind itself can be threatened by the linearity that takes the body. T h e introductory stanzas have told, with extravagance, of the ravages of linearity, of what seems to be (for certain personalities, at least) the inevitable cost of so highpitched a passage through the world. There is nothing in those stanzas about physical exhaustion but much about exhausted spirit. What the p o e m as a whole argues, in both the first and

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CHAPTER ONE

the second pair of cantos, is that those acts in which the mind blends times and places are acts of attempted self-restoration. Harold's long and varied reading of the world is an effort to cure his exhausted spirit, an incomplete effort, obviously, but one that may well be effective enough for him to continue his pilgrimage and even make some profit at it. The curing (to the degree that it occurs) will be not only a knitting of the fracture of self and place but an easing of that corrosiveness which brought consciousness to this pass. Consciousness tries to heal itself by doing what it alone can do with the times and spaces of the world. In yet another version of that gesture of recoil which permeates this text, consciousness turns back upon itself and seeks to become self-curative. Thus, Harold's mind is its own time in the sense that it takes in all times and deals with them as it wishes. It is its own place not only because of its autonomy (he is subject to no laws but time's and his own) but also because of its ability to work as it wishes with the places that it sees. This poem dwells on deaths and transfigurations, on what places used to be like and what they are now. In that dwelling it shows how the mind can undo those changes by fusing the places that lie within it with the places that it reads. The mind can do more of what it pleases than "the body can." The mind can please itself in regard to place and time, and it can do so as long as the body has time. But that last point, of course, is the kicker. If the mind can do a great deal it can do no better, last no longer, than the minds whose past it considers. Harold never argues, as Manfred was to do, that the mind is an immortal spark. Manfred was to carry the satanic argument for the mind's ultimate power to a final illogic, but Harold could never do that. Though the acts of consciousness seem marvelously free, this pilgrimage begins with the hurts of linearity, and their ultimate ascendancy is never forgotten. Places take hold of Harold in still other ways. He is fascinated by the way bodies occupy space, even when they are no longer literally in it. They never cease to occupy the spaces of his mind, their place within those spaces as firm and certain as any-

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13

thing in this world. With that base available and dependable— as dependable as Harold's hold on himself—he can increase the scope of those bodies' occupation, the places in which he can make them work. Thus, he rarely looks out at the places of the world without populating those places, without putting men out there if he cannot see any, or putting men of old out there to share places with the new. It is not that Harold abhors a vacuum but that he rarely envisions a space that has not been demarcated by men; indeed, it is the traces of old demarcations that he sees with special vividness when he looks at places. Place for Harold—Spain, Waterloo, even Albion—is a vast palimpsest, all the layers of which are still visible, so that he can, if he chooses to adjust his vision, see them all at once. What this means, of course, is that in his readings of scenes the bodies that occupy the spaces of the mind come to occupy the spaces of the world. He puts the complex together into a mode that only his mind can fashion. If the world is forever subject to dislocation, the mind of a Harold, corroded but stocked with the world's history, can put the pieces together in that persistent relocation, that coalescence of old and current readings, which seems to be part of his mind's essential business. Some cautions are necessary at this point. If there is a sense in which Harold can use both place and the larder of memory to fashion a kind of wholeness known only to the mind, that wholeness does not exempt Harold himself from all sorts of fracture. The unmaking that the cantos uncover is not only the culture's but Harold's own, as witness comments like the following: "And lately had he learn'd with truth to deem / Love has no gift so grateful as his wings" (1.82.5-6); "But Harold felt not as in other times, / And left without a sigh the land of war and crimes" (2.16.8-9). The acts of Harold's consciousness are acts of consciousness designed to save consciousness from itself. But remarks of the sort I have just quoted show that the efficacy of Harold's acts will always remain in question. It will always be open-ended, just as his journey is, just as the poem is. The pilgrimage, the text, and his acts will always refuse, or never achieve, the fullest closure.

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Still—to return to the matter of place—though his relation to temporality can never be more than open-ended, there are passages where he seems to achieve a tangential relation to place, achieving, in that relation, a fragile and tentative condition that has to be seen, though only for as long as it lasts, as a sort of closure. It seems possible for his selfhood to touch lightly but meaningfully at certain of the world's places, to find within those places a reference for the self if not a full continuity with them. In canto 2 he sails past Sappho's h o m e area and ponders the landscape, particularly the height from which she was reputed to have t h r o w n herself: But when he saw the evening star above Leucadia's far-projecting rock of woe, And hail'd the last resort of fruitless love, He felt, or deem'd he felt, no common glow: And as the stately vessel glided slow Beneath the shadow of that ancient mount, He watch'd the billows' melancholy flow, And, sunk albeit in thought as he was wont, More placid seem'd his eye, and smooth his pallid front. (2.41) Harold is rarely as contiguous with the world as he is at this m o m e n t . T h e last lines argue that his consciousness tends to be centripetal, confirming our sense that it spends most of its time within its o w n confines. Here, however, it turns from its usual centering, its energies more widely distributed, more d e m o cratic in their directions. T h e compass needle of the self spins more freely, although ("albeit") Harold is as far within as ever ("as was his w o n t " ) . We can make a very safe guess as to w h y this landscape leads him to feel " n o c o m m o n glow." Harold's o w n luckless love was touched on early in the poem: " t h o u g h he loved but one . . . that loved one, alas! could ne'er be his" (1.5.3-4). T h e kind of reading of the world that brought fecundity to M o n b r o n brings to Harold a singular instance—perhaps the model—of "fruitless

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love." His earlier speculations were general, tuned to the meaning of all this unmaking for all mankind. Leucadia's "rock of woe" is something more private, relevant to the specificities of this wandering consciousness. That explains the glow and the attendant placidity, the smoothing of his "pallid front," the easing of his usually nervous eye. Harold sees in Leucadia a reflection of the content of consciousness, not one that he puts there (his acts are never simply self-projective) but one that he finds there and that, in its way, finds him as well. The glow and placidity come from a momentary recognition of kinship with a spirit profounder than his own, one who did what he might have done if he had had the strength to do it. The previous stanza spoke of his loathing of war, and, as the stanza shows, the "scenes of vanish'd war, I Actium, Lepanto, fatal Trafalgar," left him unmoved. The cape of Leucadia touches him, with its memory of a single death, because that personality was so extraordinary and because he, though less extraordinary, has partaken of the same sort of feeling that moved her. His vessel glides "beneath the shadow of that ancient mount," down near the billows that had taken in Sappho. He meets her spirit at that place, finding an exalted counterpart there. The scene also answers a question that we saw at the beginning of the canto and whose contours emerge decisively at many points in the poem: What kind of participation in the world is possible in such self-reflexiveness? Is it the same kind of participation we get when we look at our reflections in a mirror? In a mirror we can see not only ourselves but some parts of ourselves that we cannot see otherwise, our faces for example; and we can also see the surrounding context with far more fullness and a richer perspective than would be possible without that instrument. Further, we can see ourselves within that context, a placement that comes to much more than the sum of its parts. The act of mirroring takes us out of our wonted introspection, as it did for Harold, and what it shows us is not only more of ourselves and our contexts but more of ourselves as contextual beings than we can see on this side of the mirror. Harold is not a Leucadian but Leucadia enlarges the

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context in which Harold can see himself. It therefore enlarges him as well, giving him not only a greater range of self-refer­ ence but, because of that increase, a greater range of self. Harold is more Harold for having passed Leucadia. And that is so even if he sees what he cannot, can never, do. Sappho is his counterpart and his superior, his predecessor and a model so exalted that he looks with both empathy and awe at the places where she had been and where she stopped being. Sappho is not himself nor he Sappho: he feels some of her feelings though not with her range and sublimity. Leucadia is a mirror where he sees what he is not as well as more of what he is. Of course there are opportunities for duplicity here, and the narrator is well aware of them. He has his suspicions about Harold who "felt, or deem'd he felt, no common glow." Per­ haps Harold is making it all up, perhaps he wants badly to have such feelings and therefore deems he has them. Perhaps he wants an outlet for the feelings backed up in his closed-off soul. At any rate the narrator had similar suspicions near the end of the first canto, where it was pointed out that "oft had Harold lov'd, / Or dream'd he lov'd, since Rapture is a dream" (1.82.12). Yet finally the question is both revelatory and irrelevant. It is irrelevant because, whatever the actuality of Harold's feel­ ings, the trip to Leucadia had the requisite effect, resulting in an expansion of self. It is revelatory because this narrator is now beginning to wonder—and he is the first of Byron's narrators to do so—whether doubling and duplicity are as akin in their actions as they are in their roots, whether likening and lying are so intimately linked that each brings on the other. For now the question is only broached and—since it will bulk large with later narrators—we need not do more with it here than this nar­ rator does. Other issues are more immediately pertinent to the matter of Harold's travels, such as the demarcations that have to be made among his various relations to place. Not all the places where he finds reference are as reflexive as the cape of Leucadia. Some, for example, are self-referential without being self-reflexive. They take up the cause of the self in a localized way but they do

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not cause the self to find its likeness there. This stanza toward the end of canto 2 ponders issues of self and place but does not find place to be a mirror for the self: The parted bosom clings to wonted home, If aught that's kindred cheer the welcome hearth; He that is lonely hither let him roam, And gaze complacent on congenial earth. Greece is no lightsome land of social mirth; But he whom Sadness sootheth may abide, And scarce regret the region of his birth, When wandering slow by Delphi's sacred side, Or gazing o'er the plains where Greek and Persian died. (2.92) T h e original manuscript ended with this stanza, bringing the text to rest by speaking of resting places. If we dig d o w n through the bathos we can come to a further understanding of h o w Harold is in his world. This place involves Harold without ever echoing him. It is a place of "congenial earth," its genius loci one in which Harold can share, though this land is nothing like h o m e . In fact, its differences from h o m e are made quite explicit: "Greece is no lightsome land of social mirth." Greece does not mirror Albion as Harold knew it, so there is not even a semblance of the comfort, however cold, of origin. Greece is far from his place of beginning and tonally other, its present condition permitting nothing like the celebrations that Harold lived through (however glum his attitude toward them) in Albion. And it is not only Albion that is different from what he n o w sees. T h e n e w Greece celebrates, unwittingly and indirectly, that which it is too decayed to understand, the quality of the old times at places like Delphi. The sadness that soothes the traveler comes, therefore, from the contrast of old and new: the n e w can only be seen stereoscopically, its past not behind or beside it but fused intricately, somberly, congenially, with its present. Harold is reading the old Greece and the new simultaneously, his text not only the landscape but its history as well. T h u s , his relation to the Greece he can see is, to a certain degree, tangential and indirect, however congenial its earth, however

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palpable its presence. If he was tied to Albion as a place of origin he found self-reference in Leucadia because it used to hold lives that were something like his own. Here in the Greece of the new Delphi there is nothing directly filial. The Greece that is most immediate, the one where he is most at home, is not the one he sees but the one possessed by consciousness, the one that finds its life only as the content of consciousness. Yet the Greece Harold can see still has some meaning for him, still functions as a special locale for the self. There are certain palpable places, like this Greece of congenial earth, that he can possess in a spe­ cial way during the time that he passes through them. They are supplemental stations for the self, not homes but abiding places. As passing locales for the self they link, for the passing moment, with locales within the self. Harold does not find echoes of self in such places. Indeed, the Greece of the new Delphi is significant largely because it is, in myriad ways, a land of «nlikeness. As such it can only be a resting place: one is bidden to stop at Delphi, not to stay there. This is an abiding place for the placeless, not as intimate as Harold's Leucadia nor yet as distant as a place where there is nothing at all to hold him, no locale where the self can halt, for a while, its incessant mobility. The pattern that is beginning to emerge reveals a radical mode of organization in Harold's reading of the world and in Byron's poem on Harold's reading. The pattern sketches a spectrum of degrees of intimacy in the relations of self and place. At one end is Albion, the wonted home; next to that is Leucadia; and then, in succession, the old Greece and the new. At the furthest end of the spectrum there would have to be something that is all unlikeness, or else likened to Harold only in the way that all men are likened to each other. It would have to offer all sorts of fascination but no place that can be said to have a specific counterpart in consciousness. Byron completes the spectrum by setting up a section in canto 2 where Harold is the fully detached observer, pleased because what he sees is so very different from what he has known. At midnight, having

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worked his way through a threatening countryside, Harold watches some wild Albanians at their dance: Childe Harold at a little distance stood, And view'd, but not displeas'd, the revelrie, Nor hated harmless mirth, however rude: In sooth, it was no vulgar sight to see Their barbarous, yet their not indecent, glee, And, as the flames along their faces gleam'd, Their gestures nimble, dark eyes flashing free, The long wild locks that to their girdles stream'd, While thus in concert they this lay half sang, half scream'd. (2.72) And then they go into their war song, chanting of the sabers they have just put aside. Here, even more than in Greece, unlikeness is the essence of the relationship. N e w Greece had been fused with the old so that one served to bring on the other, the n e w leading him to touch at those places in the self where the old still lived. But there is no place in the self that is kindred to the hairy Albanians, and that is precisely the point of the passage. In fact, Byron is careful to press the point by calling in some old and distant echoes. Before the stanza introducing "Albania's fierce children," Byron shows Harold wearied with "Moslem luxury . . . that spacious seat I O f Wealth and Wantonness, the choice retreat I O f sated Grandeur from the city's noise" (2.64.3-5). T h o u g h the transition from sated decadence to virtuous barbarism is blunt and heavy handed, this echo of the beginning of the poem, where "Wealth and Wantonness" led Harold to despair, is more carefully managed. Harold has come some way if he can so quickly weary of "artificial joys, I And Pleasure, leagued with P o m p " (2.64.8-9). Those are his old ways, n o w only briefly tolerable. Both ends of the spectrum of likeness are encompassed in back-to-back stanzas, Harold going from a reminder of what he used to be to a vision of all he is not. But that is not all of the spectrum encompassed by this section of the poem. As though to flesh out the spectrum to its fullest, the lay the Albanians "half sang, half scream'd" is

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followed immediately by the anthem of romantic Hellenism, "Fair Greece, sad relic of departed worth," a recollection of all that was neither decadent nor barbaric but the model of the rich middle way. Thus, stanzas 64-73, from Muslim decadence through Albanian barbarism to the Grecian paradigm, hold the range of Harold's reading of the texts of the world. Though there is nothing here of Cintra or Waterloo, there are places for each of them in the spectrum these stanzas enfold. It is along and by means of the spectrum that the thickening of Harold's selfhood takes place. If part of the spectrum lives through selfreflexiveness, the point of other parts is that there is nowhere in them where the self can find likeness—and yet those other parts, the parts devoted to strangeness, show how the self uncovers much of what it is by watching all that it emphatically is not. Unlikeness is as capacious as likeness in what it can offer the self. Unlikeness, too, can instruct the self in the subtleties of the self's own constitution. In effect it gives substance to the self through denial and negation, which turn out to be surprisingly fit instruments for that probing of the contents of the world which is necessary to flesh out a self. (Here too there is a broaching—no more than that—of what is to come forth in the canon.)

Fougeret de Monbron did not make a spectrum on which to string his reading of the world. The only distinctions he makes in the epigraph are between Origin and Otherness: his perusal of the pages of the world shows him that all the places he takes in are "egalement mauvaises," and his home looks the better for that. There is none of that kind of likening which draws the self into an alien place, none of those degrees of difference which distinguish the Hellenism of Delphi from that of Leucadia. In the Other there is only rebuff, the arrogance ("toutes les impertinences") of the diverse peoples of the world. At every point in Harold's spectrum there is a seeking for the sake of seeing, a search for that which the self will instantly recognize as significant to itself. It seeks out that against which it can test itself,

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probing the world for places to possess. Both Harold and Fougeret de Monbron are dispossessed and displaced, and their cosmopolitan travels are attempts at a repossessing of self through a reading of place. Yet there are possibilities in Harold's repossessing that are not found in Fougeret: in the epigraph he makes no gradations, seeing only that which is wholly repellent and that which is (once again) wholly receptive. He has limited, simple alternatives, Harold an extended spectrum of them. Monbron's world is binary, a small system of absolutes. Harold's offers a set of subtle alternatives where only the ends are precisely opposite. For Fougeret there is nothing between the ends; for Harold the middle contains almost everything. No wonder that Byron came to see that the poem might well never end: the making of distinctions became an autotelic task rather than the method of getting Harold home. Indeed, we may well want to argue that the search for such distinctions is—or became—the true quest of this pilgrimage. Still, there are other modes of demarcation aside from the binary sort seen in Monbron or the far more complex version that Harold performs. Consider, for example, Tintem Abbey: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration.8 The distinction in quality between what the speaker saw in the past and what he sees and hears in the present is absolute. There is no contest between them when it comes to the giving of pleasure. Still, this is not nearly as harsh as Monbron, though the Wordsworth of The Prelude would complain, as Monbron did, of the "impertinences des peuples divers," and his relation to them was as fruitful as Monbron's in sending him back to 8. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selmcourt, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 2:259-63.

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the places of origin. The room in the dinful city is an enclosure in a land of unlikeness. It is a place to which the speaker retreats and within which he retreats even further, deep into the content of consciousness, the place where the larder lies, the current home of the "beauteous forms" that can still evoke "sensations sweet." This move is a version of a radical gesture in Wordsworth, a gesture that is always a drive from a periphery to a center. It pervades his entire canon in various forms, and it affects not only his reading of landscape (he always looks into landscape for a gesture of that sort) but his reading of the place and business of consciousness. The move toward the center of consciousness reveals that consciousness is always a larder, whatever else it might be. In fact, the move is made because it is always a larder, because everything leads toward that center and is finally taken up within it. Thus, as we ponder the point of the gesture in Tintem Abbey it becomes clear that the demarcations the poem makes are trinary, not binary: not only does it mention the home of the beauteous forms and the city that has no such forms but also the place that holds them forever and holds them more purely than any other can do. The mind is more of its own place than we suspected. Put another way, it has to act as its own place when it is placed in a land of unlikeness. Only thus can it develop the trinary structure that is essential to the spirit's health, that keeps the spirit going when the world goes dead or noisy. The storehouse of the mind is as health-giving in Tintem Abbey as it is in Childe Harold. As Harold draws on the content and activities of consciousness to restore a semblance of health, so too does the speaker in Tintem Abbey. But there is a distinction that, in effect, makes all the difference. Harold draws on the stock within to counter the corrosiveness of consciousness, while the speaker in Tintem Abbey draws on his own to enliven his present situation. Harold's consciousness seeks to cure what it has done to itself, the self-curative powers at work on the self-corrosive. The speaker in Wordsworth's poem says nothing about a sickening of the self. He speaks, rather, of loneliness (an unproductive solitude) and noisiness. The sickness is outside; within him is only the

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emptiness caused by that sickness. The sickness is generated by the world upon itself, not by him upon himself. He is, in effect, the world's unwitting victim, an indirect casualty. He draws on his larder to counter the world and the weariness it has brought him. Harold draws on his own to counter himself and the corrosion he has brought upon himself. Which is to say that the speaker in Tintern Abbey presents himself as more stable and healthy than most, in tune with time however dissonant the world. He is able to counter the world's current dissonance with the interaction of (in the beginning) self and world, then (in the city) of self and its storehouse. As the rest of Tintern Abbey makes clear, the filling of the larder is a process that begins quite early and in which the old stock is not simply used but added to. The old is fused with the new to set up a process defined by its continuity, its seamlessness. For Wordsworth that seamlessness is health, guaranteeing the accessibility of the larder. For the Byron of the early Harold seamlessness is the source of present pain, the reminder of present sickness: None are so desolate but something dear, Dearer than self, possesses or possess'd A thought, and claims the homage of a tear; Aflashingpang! of which the weary breast Would still, albeit in vain, the heavy heart divest. (2.24.5-9) The ironies are bitter indeed. Harold was never so desolate as to have been without something dear, something that took over the content of consciousness ("possesses or possess'd I A thought"); yet it is the presence of those thoughts, which still own a part of the storehouse, that makes for his current misery. The continuity of the past in the present makes pangs, not delights, puts tears into motion and not "feelings too / Of unremembered pleasure." Continuity, then, is devoutly to be wished away, not to be drawn on for sustenance but drawn away from. If the old feelings can send the speaker of Tintern Abbey into a "blessed mood" in which "the weary weight I Of all this unintelligible world, I Is lightened," feelings perhaps

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equally old have pressed upon Harold some weighty pangs that cannot be lightened or appeased, "of which the weary breast I Would still, albeit in vain, the heavy heart divest." In both poems there is a curious relation between continuity and the pressure of weight: in the one, continuity guarantees the easing of pressure, becoming both the cause of the easing and the framework in which it occurs; in the other continuity both causes unease and becomes the framework in which that occurs. There is no more significant difference between these poems than the desire in the one to cut off continuity, to undo all its seams, and the desire in the other not only to reinforce it but to return to the source of the feelings and continue to renew them. Harold wants to drive forward to places he can take into himself and make into that which eases old pressures. If he cannot accomplish that easing (he wishes "albeit in vain") then he will have to go on toward other places that can be taken in and made part of the attempt, all with the hope that such making will undo continuity. An older and wiser Harold, were he to exist, would undo enough of the seams to make continuity endurable. Only then could he return to the source of those feelings, make the circuit made in he Cosmopolite and Tintern Abbey. Only when he loosened continuity (rupturing is too much to be wished for) could he turn back to the source of continuity. Until then the rhythm of his acts will have to be linear, an incessant forward drive. Of course there is never an older and wiser Harold, not, at least, to the degree that would close the circuit. There is only the Harold whose movements go on in that making of self which, we now see, is also an attempt to subvert continuity. But continuity can never be fully subverted: the pressures that occur within it are simply too weighty to be undone. The pain of the past can never be mitigated, never quite put away. One answer is to do as Harold did with Sappho, find a place within his culture for those pains which will not go away. That content of consciousness which will not be undone can be brought into relation with counterpart places in history. Yet even that act is no final appeasement. Harold will continue to

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suffer as old thoughts pop up to the surface and continuity is made patent. Those thoughts will claim their homage and then Harold will go on in his continuing attempts at subversion. Indeed, subversion itself will go on and become, eventually, part of all that autotelic making which carries Harold forever forward. It becomes part of that complex of acts—the relocating of the self in space, the discovery of ever more subtle distinctions in the ties of self and world—which come to be done for their own sake, as their own reward.

The question of openings and closings takes on all sorts of intricate forms in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. It also encloses some curious relations as well as an especially complex attitude toward valorization. Parallels and parodies occur throughout the text, turning it, at several levels, into a series of sardonic mirrors. Take, for example, the shape of Monbron's pilgrimage. Much that we noticed in Tintern Abbey about matters of continuity and closure occurs in the epigraph from Monbron. The continuity that means health for Wordsworth means joy for Monbron, resulting in a final and eager embrace of the wholeness continuity brings. Yet it is precisely such wholeness that Harold abhors, because it carries along a past that will never go away. (We shall see an especially complex version of the same essential paradox at the beginning of the third canto of Harold. See chapter 4 below.) Though there are fractures that bring him pain this is one he would eagerly wish for, and there seems no chance for it to happen. Thus, the concept of continuity has contradictory valorizations. No one position is sufficient to contain all that it does in the text, all that is thought about it. It cannot, in any sense, be called an absolute good, for if it brings to Monbron the ultimate pleasure it brings to Harold continual pain. Value is not merely a property of what we look at but the result of a condition as well, one that also includes what we are. The same relations occur when we consider the shape of Monbron's journey, that curve which begins with his emergence from his homeland and carries him back to where

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he began. T h e circling return home, a prime example of closure, is in fact a version of recoil, that curving of energy back to its source which makes up so much of the business of this poem. T h e examples we looked at earlier (see page 9 above)— the diction that ponders its own history, the foreign text about foreignness—are essentially neutral in value, their function primarily to point to the text's status as artifice. T h e example we see from M o n b r o n is clearly a positive one: the gesture is a sign of his health as well as a cause of it. But that curving of energy back to its origin takes on other tones in Harold's condition, affirming what the text led us to suspect early on, that the assigning of value is a terribly difficult act, that categories and pigeonholes are lies about the world. H o w can we speak with sweeping confidence of gestures such as recoil when the curve seen in homecoming, the shape that promises joy, is seen in another gesture as well, the self's consuming of itself? Harold's song " T o Inez" sets up that process of self-consumption sketchily but unmistakably. The importance of this song for the canon as a whole cannot be overestimated. Much of what is to follow will elaborate on what it begins: And dost thou ask, what secret woe I bear, corroding joy and youth? And wilt thou vainly seek to know A pang, ev'n thou must fail to soothe? What Exile from himself can flee? To Zones, though more and more remote, Still, still pursues, where-e'er I be, The blight of life—the demon, Thought. What is that worst? Nay do not ask— In pity from the search forbear: Smile on—nor venture to unmask Man's heart, and view the Hell that's there. (McGann, 2:39-40)

This too, it seems, is part of the making of self. All those acts which show Harold seeking to possess the world, to take it up

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within himself in the process of reading it, serve in the end to show him possessing more of a self. Seeking is by nature intentional, relational. It is committed in its working to demanding much from the self. In putting that much to work it forces the self to bring more of itself into play, put more of itself out on the surface, speak in more complex terms of what it contains. The development of selfhood charted at one level of the text is therefore a mode of mining, though the treasures Harold turns up are not always as desirable in their effect on the self as was his visit to the wild Albanians. "To Inez" shows that in his seeking to possess the world he has turned up that which possesses him. "What Exile from himself can flee?" Quartered comfortably within the confines of the self is that which is, at the same time, oneself and one's antagonist. That mirroring which takes place at so many levels within the text takes place here too. And so too does the act of recoil, not only in the process of mirroring but in the process of self-devouring, the corrosion of self by self, which the lyric sets forth as one of Harold's radical gestures. We have seen that one of the ways the text links reading and traveling is through the attempt each performs to take up the foreign within oneself. That which is other than the self becomes, through those acts, a part of the self. Here, ironically, the seeking to possess has uncovered an Other within the self, Harold's private contrary, yet it is not the sort he saw in the wild Albanians. The latter sort was sought because it was strange and unparalleled ("The scene was savage but the scene was new" [2.43.7]), because the self needs to find unlikeness so that it can realize itself more fully. But the Other within Harold, though contrary to himself, is as much a part of himself as anything else within him. The result is a pursuit in which Harold acts as his own quarry—a most Coleridgean gesture. And when he catches up with himself the ironies multiply in a manifold, mirroring way. He sought to possess the world in order to put off being possessed by the world, devoured by it. But as it turns out he has been carrying with him all along the capacity for self-devouring. There are other effects as well. We

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observed, in the section on Sappho, how a mirror shows us more of ourselves than we can otherwise see, including, in particular, how we look in our surroundings. The act of mirroring recorded in "To Inez" has precisely the same effect, though we treat it with much more ambivalence. It increases the content and context of the self but increases the self's woes as well, adding to its agony in the act of adding to its substance. No simple valorization can handle such complex gestures. Some of these issues of self-, word-, and world-making come out in this well-known passage from Byron's journal of 1813: To withdraw myself from myself (oh that cursed selfishness!) has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all; and publishing is also the continuance of the same object, by the action it affords to the mind, which else recoils upon itself.9 It is not merely scribbling that does the job but scribbling so that others may read; that is, publishing. Withdrawing oneself from oneself means fighting the act of recoil by projecting the self into words and then putting those words out into the world. The self must be withdrawn from itself or else there will result that curious decreation, that sad and acid unmaking, which is self-corrosion. Possessing words and sending them out into the world for the world to possess means that one is possessing oneself in a safe and healthy way. Words are the antidote to acidulousness. Language and artifice are benefactors of the self, shapers of redemptive acts. Harold, an occasional poet, creates under the same impulse, seeking to use words as instruments for countering self-corrosion, for withdrawing himself from himself. In the stanza before "To Inez" (1.84) we are told that he would like to take part in the world's merriment ("Fain would he now have join'd the dance, the song") but that he cannot get out from under his fate. Still, he tries. "To Inez" is a corrective foil to the song that 9. LJ 3:225. See also 246 ("and yet my heart and head have stood many a crash, and what should ail them now? They prey upon themselves") and 256 ("I must set about some employment soon; my heart begins to eat ifsei/'again").

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Harold sang as he was leaving Albion. He put forth "Good Night" when he was certain that he was alone, "when deem'd he no strange ear was listening." It never left the landscape of the self since its only audience was the elements. It was not, in any real sense, published. "To Inez" is both a corrective and a foil because, by means of the lyric, he publishes the dark contours of his selfhood, putting them forth to an audience who is quite possibly Inez herself: "Pour'd forth this unpremeditated lay, I To charms as fair as those that sooth'd his happier day." (If this episode were in Don Juan we would be certain who the audience was.) The last lyric in the canto takes the first one a step further, and that step is a step outward, an opening-up of that circling-back which is recoil. This, we have to note, takes place in the performing of the poem and not in the poem itself. Within the poem there is only recoil, that devouring of self by self that follows Harold all through his exile. The poem argues that there is no place to hide because he carries with him that dark Other which seeks incessantly to do him in. But in the performing of this poem he seeks to negate that baleful twin which the poem says he cannot avoid. The act of making public, putting the poem out into the world, is designed to be the counteracting force to the state he describes. The relation between poem and performance is therefore oddly dialectical. Put another way, the poem and the performance, taken together as a single gesture, can be seen as an oxymoron, that figure in which contraries meet to make a tense but productive complex. Oxymora take their energy from the pull of the oppositions within them. Their life as functioning figures lasts only so long as the pull is balanced, so long as neither of the contraries succeeds in outdoing the other. From Harold's point of view, then, the oxymoron must come apart: the outward push must be able to outdo that pull back to the source which defines recoil. But the Pilgrimage never shows evidence that the outward push succeeded and the oxymoron came apart. What he does in performing "To Inez" may, in fact, be the best he can do.

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CHAPTER ONE

The paradoxes of Harold's experience are multiple. They are also, sometimes, malevolent. Since he is tied, in any permanent way, only to time and to himself, Harold possesses unusual freedom, its primary purpose all that business subsumed in the idea of reading. Yet even though he is free, the tying to himself involves, in one of its facets, a special sort of bondage. He is as free as Manfred was to be, as free as Milton's Satan was free. "What Exile from himself can flee" echoes Satan's "Which way I fly is Hell," and the last line of "To Inez," urging the listener not to unmask the hell that is in man's heart, recalls the rest of Satan's statement, his point that "Myself am Hell."10 The result of Satan's freedom is an ironic self-sufficiency that needs nothing outside of itself in order to be hellishly miserable. The same is true of Harold, however different the degree. Harold's acts of reading involve a rich mode of making, most of it confined to his mind. That persistent relocation of place, the stubborn shuffling of place between past and present, between the content of the mind and the content of the landscape, belies the impression of shallow passiveness with which the poem begins. "Full swiftly Harold wends his lonely way"; "Childe Harold sail'd . . . Childe Harold saw . . . He pass'd . . . survey'd . . . view'd." In the Preface Byron said that he had introduced Harold "for the sake of giving some connection to the piece," but the early Harold is himself a maker of elaborate connections. Yet he is dogged by that self-unmaking referred to regularly in the early cantos and confirmed in "To Inez," and this plays off against his other activities in such a way that neither can be said to be dominant, neither to determine unequivocally the shape and tonality of his condition. A dialectic of making and unmaking is one of the ground rhythms of these early cantos, and it leaves Harold in a hovering state, his condition forever unresolved. The texts that succeed the early Harold elabio. See McGann for other echoes. The echoes in Manfred of related remarks by Satan are well known.

BEGINNING Harold

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orate on that dialectic and seek, at the same time, to control the hovering caused by the dialectic. This study will explore that seeking, the feints and false starts that led to the dead end of Manfred and then the more supple and malleable mode of Don fuan.

2

Self-Consuming Symmetries Lacan tells us, are sites of self-making, though they are also, at the same time, sources of self-division.1 With them the self of the child comes to constitute itself, to see itself in that act in which it regards itself as itself and also Other. To identify with another that is, at once, both Other and oneself, makes for the symmetry of opposing forces one gets in an oxymoron, the kind whose energy comes from a dialectic of likeness and unlikeness. We have seen versions of that dialectic broached in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. We have also seen a pondering of what the dialectic can do for the business of making a self. Seeing himself in Sappho, Harold saw also that she would remain Other to him not only for reasons of history and gender but for matters of character as well—seeing, in effect, that to be Harold means also to be and not to be Sappho. From one point of view this becomes a matter of infinite deferral, the defining of self depending, in part, on its relation to another (an Other), which is also partly dependent for its definition on others (its own Other). That approach would in fact be consistent with what happens later in Byron. From another point of view, that of the mirror, the issue becomes a matter of totalization: the facing off against another that is and is not oneself turns into an act that discovers an unexpected wholeness whose elements can never be homogeneous. Because of that discovery there is one more irony to add to the many the Pilgrimage fosters. The wholeness sought (made, discovered, fabricated) by this radical dialectic creates a wellpacked microcosm that is totally self-enclosed. Putting the new and the old Greece together, or the new and the old Spain, makes for a fully symmetrical shape that needs nothing from MIRRORS,

I. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I," in Ecrits, A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1-7. ( 32 )

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outside itself to complete itself, the sort of symmetry that would be made by myself and my image in a mirror. The same can be said for the encounter of Harold with Sappho as well as the various encounters of Harold with the spectrum of place. The symmetries click into position, likeness and unlikeness working together to shape a seamless enclosure. Such shapes, of course, offer a special sort of gratification, the kind that comes from observing wholeness and completion, the satisfaction of resolution. And in fact they are the main places in the text where such satisfaction is offered. The poem begins with a fracture, the primary scene of Harold's severance from the places of home, and for many of the poem's readers that act sets the poem's essential tonality. Harold remains, even for our contemporaries, "the wandering Outlaw of his own dark mind," a shard of society. And so, of course, he is. Yet that massive and possibly irreparable rupture, however much it defines the poem, finds points of counterstructure in those shapes and conditions of symmetry which appear in the poem with regular frequency. This is not to say that the symmetries offer pleasure to counter pain, good feelings to offset the bad: indeed, the reverse is most often true. The symmetries are rarely without ambivalence and all its attendant discomforts. (Only the scene where Harold watches the wild Albanians seems to be without such strains of uneasiness.) What the shapes do offer is a contrary of the fracture that begins the poem, a precise and welldefined opposite whose opposition would remain even if the poem had finally been finished. Yet, since the poem was never finished, since Harold, like DonJuan, was to remain open-ended, the shape of the Pilgrimage is itself a radical contrary to the symmetries it enfolds. The images of enclosed wholeness so essential to the poem's import find their place within a poem whose status rejects closure, whose ever-finer gradations in the relations of self and place make the possibility of conclusion dim and distant at best. That opposition is necessary because, when all the elements are put together, they act out the dialectic the poem describes throughout. This means that the poem, taken as a whole, is itself the site of such interplay. Here too it is self-

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reflexive, pondering its essential condition in the conditions it describes, for it too is an oxymoron, the macrocosm holding them all. Indeed, we now can see that the epigraph from Monbron has an ironical relation to the text, that it offers a sort of symmetry that counters the mode of the text that follows it, just as the other symmetries do. The relation of the epigraph to the poem echoes the interplay of likeness and unlikeness that seems to be everywhere in the text. Of course these comments consider the poem in all of its extant cantos, not only the initial ones. Yet Byron's interest in open-endedness emerged quite early in his work: we saw in the previous chapter that, in a letter of 1811, Byron remarked that the poem on Harold's pilgrimage has "no plan at all" (LJ 2:63). And there is the far more telling evidence of the manner of the poem itself, which, even in its early cantos, worked its way into a mode that holds images of ironical enclosure within a form that is unlikely to close, whatever its extent. Even when he considered additional cantos as late as 1822 there was no indication that they would bring the poem to a conclusion. His comments make it clear that he was planning to continue the mode he had developed early in the poem. But the most important evidence of his early interest in these issues appears in the qualities of what follows in the canon, the next major poem after the first two cantos of the Pilgrimage. The oxymoronic pairing of openness and symmetry appears with even more extraordinary force in The Giaour. He saw other possibilities for the pairing, wanted to play with it at least once more to test where it would take him. It took him, in The Giaour, to a textuality of a sort essentially related to that of the Pilgrimage, though with its own very special properties. There is, for example, the matter of the narrative line. The story of the Giaour, Leila, and Hassan has an ending, even a climax and a turning point, but it has no palpable beginning. We know little of where the Giaour came from: the Advertisement says that he is a "young Venetian," while the poem says

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2

nothing at all. We know nothing about how or when he arrived or what his essential business was. In a sense we begin the poem much as we begin the ideal neoclassical drama, quite near to the point of climax; but in the ideal drama we would know how the action got to that point, and we have no comparable knowledge in Byron's first Oriental tale. If the Pilgrimage is open-ended then The Giaour is open-fronted. In fact it initiates Byron's experiments with the question of origin. But there is more to the poem's textuality than this uncertainty of narrative origin or even the careful flouting of expectations. Readers as early as Scott and Crabb Robinson responded to The Giaour's fragmentary structure in very different ways, and later readers continue to do so. Byron, Crabb Robinson says, mistakenly supposes that "a few broken parts of a tale, wanting on that account the gross material interest of a story . . . can be in any way worth the attention of cultivated minds." Scott, canny as always, told Byron in a letter that "every real lover of the art is obliged to you for condensing the narrative, by giving us only those striking scenes which you have shown to be so susceptible of poetic ornament, and leaving to imagination the says I's an says he's, and all the minutiae of detail which might be proper in giving evidence before a court of justice."3 Students of the poem like to point to its praise by T. S. Eliot who, whatever the holes in the poem, found it and Byron's other narratives quiet readable.4 W. H. Marshall, in a well-known essay on the poem's progress, argued that Byron's building of the poem by a series of scattered accretions spoiled what had begun as a good 2. McGann, 3:39-82. Unless otherwise specified, all references in citations following quotations from The Giaour are to line. 3. Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (London: J M. Dent, 1938), 1:129 (26June 1813); The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H.J.C. Gnerson (London. Constable), 3:374 (6 November 1813). Scott goes on with what may well be a sly dig when he remarks that "it requires most uncommon powers to support a direct and downright narration." 4. "Byron," in From Anne to Victoria, ed. Bonamy Dobree (London: Cassell, 1937), 605-608

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tale: the fragments "do not constitute a whole that can be pieced together," while the Giaour's character grows inconsistent as the accretions are added to the poem. Jerome McGann and Robert Gleckner disagree sharply with Marshall on the question of the poem's coherence. For McGann the poem is consistent because the singer who recites it assumes all of the roles within it. (A similar point is made by Frederick Shilstone.) For Gleckner the essence of the poem's wholeness comes from the poet's success in managing converging points of view. Michael Sundell also argues for the ultimate coherence of the poem, showing how it grew from the parochial to the universal as the character of the Giaour developed. The result, as Sundell shows, is a sad moral tale about the combined necessity and futility of heroic behavior.5 This is one of those cases (the sort Byron would have understood well) in which validity lies on both sides and the poem shows itself rich and complex enough to encompass elements of both. Take, for example, the matter of the Advertisement. Its relation to The Giaour has many of the same elements seen in the relation of the epigraph from Fougeret de Monbron to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. But this Advertisement has some elements that are new to the canon. In it the poet tells us of a story we cannot get at, the whole and original story on which the poem is based: The story, when entire, contained the adventures of a female slave, who was thrown, in the Mussulman manner, into the sea, for infidelity, and avenged by a young Venetian, her lover, at the time the 5. W. H. Marshall, "The Accretive Structure of The Giaour," MLN 17 (1961): 502-509; McGann, Fiery Dust, 144; Gleckner, Ruins of Paradise, 116; Michael Sundell, "The Development of The Giaour," SEL 9 (1969): 587-99; Frederick Shilstone, "Byron's The Giaour: Narrative Tradition and Romantic Cognitive Theory," Washington State University Research Studies 48 (1980): 94-104. For other comments on the poem see Peter B. Wilson, " 'Galvanism upon Mutton'. Byron's Conjuring Trick in The Giaour," Keats-Shelley Journal 24 (1975): 118— 27. See also my essay, "Byron's Giaour and the Mark of Cain," Etudes Anglaises 27 (1973): 150-59, several comments from which appear in this and the following chapter.

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Seven Islands were possessed by the Republic of Venice, and soon after the Arnauts were beaten back from the Morea, which they had ravaged for some time subsequent to the Russian invasion. (McGann, 3:39-40) The Giaour, as I have said, is the first of Byron's major experiments with questions of origin.6 Yet, even though only the first, it shows a particular complexity that takes in more than its open-frontedness. All that we can touch at in the Advertisement is an echo of the original story, so bare and so skimpy that origin can stand only at considerable distance, perceptible only in a minimal completeness. Still, whatever its minimal status the completeness is Aristotelian: unlike the tale itself the Advertisement has its beginning, middle, and end set out in coherent relation, a relation of the tiniest sufficiency but an effective one all the same. Further, it tells us the necessary detail of time and place, so that we know not only what happened but when and (generally) where it happened. Of course this sketch tells us nothing of the Giaour's remorse, his self-exile and death, but we can think of those as a supplement to the essential story, "the story, when entire," the tale of Leila's death and her lover's revenge. Part of the importance of the sketch lies in the fact that it stands in an intermediate position between the condition of origin and the tale as we finally have it. As such it is as close to origin as we are likely to get. Origin, for most of us, can never be more than a hypothesis, that which we take on trust but can never confirm by actual contact. What then of the relation of this Advertisement to the epigraph from Monbron? To begin with, the epigraph offers the same scanty sufficiency but with one essential difference. The epigraph to the Pilgrimage does not outline the action that follows: it deals with a parallel matter and not with the action itself. But the Advertisement to The Giaour has the most direct sort of relation to the tale it heads, telling the gist of what is to happen, if no more than that. Yet with that directness there comes an irony that brings the later closer to the earlier. Pref6. See McGann, 3:415, for specifics about the date, which is shortly after 1779.

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CHAPTER T W O

aces of any sort offer all manner of promises. They are places of surmise, where conditions give rise to surmise because we take t h e m as sources of signals, pointers that steer and say the equivalent of "here be monsters." The casual reader of the Pilgrimage assumes that the tale will have an ending, if only because pilgrimages always have a goal. And then this surmise is confirmed for that reader because the epigraph is aggressive about endings, arguing that the point of the pilgrimage it depicts was to take M o n b r o n home, wiser about origin. Further, it quotes from the source directly, offering that sort of authenticity which comes from hearing the original voice in its own language. Seen in this light the epigraph is an enticing trap, a trap of much the same sort set by the voice in Don Juan that acts out Byronic manners. Pointing both backward and to itself the epigraph says "here be origin." Pointing forward it seems to say "here be completion," and that same casual reader believes completion will be there because he hears authentic origin say that it will. T h e Advertisement to The Giaour has a related kind of canniness. T h o u g h it proffers no fragment of actual origin (that immediate touch of the true), it echoes, even in its brief compass, some of the texture and tonality of origin. Those sounds are a sure source of Western shudders: The desertion of the Mainotes, on being refused the plunder of Misitra, led to the abandonment of that enterprise, and to the desolation of the Morea, during which the cruelty exercised on all sides was unparalleled even in the annals of the faithful. (McGann, 3:40) We are there in the way that we are when we read an especially vivid dispatch. Yet we are reminded of distance in kind as well as space, not only by the exotic names but by the remark on "the annals of the faithful." Placed in that context the remark brings in the tones of an impassioned strangeness that speaks of a world very different from our own. We play at games of nearness and distance, involvement of a spectator's sort but with places and acts plainly detached from our own habits and habitats. (The passage holds within itself the essence of Byronic Orientalism.) And it continues to play those games in the way

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39

it handles matters of origin. The completeness of the outline of the story takes us several steps toward the source, yet the flagrant sketchiness of that outline rubs in our irrevocable distance. We can go that far back but we can never go any further. The result is an extraordinary interplay of totalization and incompletion. The ground and model of totalization, the source of any wholeness that exists, is "the story, when entire," that which we hear of but never hear. Its offspring, the outline in the Advertisement, shares in its wholeness but little else. Thus, the outline relates to the source from which it draws in a curiously mixed way: in one sense the outline is exact and entire, a precise reproduction of the source's seamlessness; in another it is inadequate and incomplete, lacking the source's density and detail, most of its informativeness. Then, to reverse direction, there is the relation of the outline (and of course of the ghost that haunts it and us) to the text that follows. The relation is telegraphed in the Advertisement itself, which, before it gets to the tiny but complete outline, speaks of that which follows as "these disjointed fragments." However skimpy the prefatory discourse, however elaborate the text that follows, the most important difference between them—the cause of their irreconcilability—has nothing to do with questions of quantity but, rather, with those of shape and order: the two can never balance off because of the flagrant incompleteness of the tale. (Their relation, like others we have seen in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, turns out to be that of an oxymoron.) If it takes a casual reader to assume that the Pilgrimage will match its epigraph in matters of narrative completeness, even the most perfunctory perusal of this first Oriental tale shows that it has no plans for such completeness, for the filling in of those gaps which would make it a seamless enclosure. One more instance of this interplay of the total and the forever unenclosed remains to be considered, and it is, in several ways, the most significant for our understanding of the text. The Giaour and Hassan stand to each other not only as enemies but echoes, as several readers of the poem have recognized. Peter Manning, for example, points out "the multiplication and

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CHAPTER T W O

duplication to which both the feminine and masculine figures are subject." 7 Yet the extent of that structure of echoes turns out to be broader, its texture more intricate and richer, than we have realized. O f course the Giaour and Hassan begin and end their relationship as lovers of Leila and haters of each other. Those emotions get the mirroring going, but they are by no means its only content. From that basis come a series of assertions that could have been made by either antagonist, though they always come from the Giaour. Here is the Giaour in the monastery: But place again before my eyes Aught that I deem a worthy prize;— The maid I love—the man I hate— And I will hunt the steps of fate, (To save or slay—as these require) Through rending steel, and rolling fire.

(1016-21)

This interchangeability occurs throughout the poem, taking the matter of mutuality so far that it starts to curve and then to turn upon itself—a point I shall take up shortly. Here is another instance of it at work: Yet did he but what I had done Had she been false to more than one; Faithless to him—he gave the blow, But true to me—I laid him low.

(1062-65)

These lines could have been spoken by either antagonist. Indeed, the Giaour himself recognizes and enforces the mutuality ("yet did he but what I had done"), showing an awareness of an axis of substitution that was to turn up later, under other circumstances, in Manfred. O t h e r passages in the text take in the Giaour's recognition not only of his motivation but of the qualities of responsibility that make the relations of the Giaour and Hassan a labyrinth of mirrors. T h e Giaour knows that Leila's death is as much his o w n doing as Hassan's. Neither was the immediate instrument 7 Byron and his Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), 37.

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(the fisherman-narrator, w h o was on the boat that carried her to her death and watched the sack slip into the water, has a greater immediacy on that score than either of her lovers); yet they were each, together and separately, the effective cause of her death. T h e Giaour's awareness of that fact, as well as his equally pained awareness of other aspects of his linking to Hassan, come out in his quest for images to define the shape of his condition: She died—I dare not tell thee how, But look—'tis written on my brow! There read of Cain the curse and crime, In characters unworn by time: Still, ere thou dost condemn me—pause— Not mine the act, though I the cause.

(1056-61)

T h e relations a m o n g this trio create a set of unusual ironies in the image the Giaour assumes. In one sense the analogy to Cain would make Leila his Abel, and that cannot work: all that we k n o w of Cain shows no special love for his brother before the Lord's rejection of Cain's offering. At most it can be said that Cain slew what he ought to have loved. Yet other features are at w o r k in this seemingly muddled analogy. In fact it makes excellent sense when taken in another way, in terms of the Giaour's slaying of Hassan, his double and Other. T h o u g h the image appears to be unstable it shows the subtlety of the Giaour's understanding of his relation to Leila and Hassan. It also shows h o w he has taken both deaths upon himself. T h e deaths of Hassan and Leila blend into each other in the Giaour's mind, pasha and mistress linked more fully than they had ever been in life. What ought to have come from one source comes from another, showing that they had come to be the same for the sole survivor. Their melding in the Giaour's consciousness causes the muddling in his handling of myth. Another sort of melding (more precisely, an attempt to make melding happen) comes out at the m o m e n t of Hassan's slaughter. There, in a shift of myth, the Giaour shows himself as an aspiring Narcissus:

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I gazed upon him where he lay, And watch'd his spirit ebb away; Though pierced like Pard by hunters' steel He felt not half that now I feel. I search'd, but vainly search'd to find The workings of a wounded mind; Each feature of that sullen corse Betray'd his rage but no remorse. Oh, what had Vengeance given to trace Despair upon his dying face! The late repentance of that hour, When Penitence hath lost her power To tear one terror from the grave— And will not soothe, and can not save.

(1085-98)

He wanted Hassan to feel all the maddening, fruitless bitterness and hatred of self he himself was coming to feel, for if Hassan felt that way then the Giaour would have succeeded in killing a repentant killer of Leila. In the completest sort of mirroring, the sort he wanted to bring about here, the slaughter of Hassan would also be the Giaour's self-slaughter, a suicide on the axis of substitution. In a gross parody of the Eucharist, Hassan's blood and body would stand for his own; and, not coincidentally, he and Hassan would be even closer, that much more brothers in blood. T h e Giaour would triumph over his enemy and punish himself with all the fullness permitted on the axis of substitution. O f course that did not work: Hassan could feel no more at that point than the rage of losing. T h e Giaour is left with a mirroring that, though vast, is not quite as complete as he wished. T h e play of all those symmetries, added to the play of likeness and unlikeness in the relations of the Giaour and Hassan, contributes to the making of a very tight o x y m o r o n . The Giaour has spots of clumsiness, moments of near-comic melodrama, the sense of a half-thought-out idea that never grew clear in Byron's mind. Yet its dialectical play leads to places of

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considerable, if flawed, achievement. Part of that achievement appears in the relations among the personalities involved. Another part appears in the contrast between the closed structure of those personal relations (those labyrinthine mirrors which take in Leila and both of her lovers) and the pervasive openness of the text. But the text was not always so open. The initial version of the poem, as Michael Sundell has observed, told a clear and rapid story, put together in a series of scenes that moved directly toward the Giaour's death.8 In effect it fleshed out the outline put forth in the Advertisement—no more substance than the basic story needed, yet enough to fulfill the promise the Advertisement made. With the development of the Giaour's character there also developed, in a corollary movement, his intricate relation to Hassan, his double and Other. As the later versions emerged the emphasis shifted from story to protagonist. The oxymoron that would enfold them both began to take shape. At the same time the relative neatness of the original version began to come apart. Concurrently with the development of character, and in a gesture that goes in precisely the opposite direction, the form of the tale began opening up, its initial relative settledness growing more and more unsettled as the accretions continued. The enclosing of the selves and the opening of the text began to take place together. Self-making and text-making became parallel operations, each, it now is clear, reacting to the other in open opposition. Indeed, it can be argued that self-making and textmaking are essentially the same operation; or, if we choose not to go that far at this point, that they cannot be separated from each other, at least as this canon seems to be going. Hints of their inseparability appeared in the poem on Harold. Here their relation takes the form of an organized interplay that, whatever the clumsiness of its context, prefigures the greatness that was to come. 8. Sundell, "Development of The Giaour," 509.

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CHAPTER T W O •

Childe Harold is a poem of self as well as place. To carry that point further, it is a poem of places for the self as well as places of the self. The former are those where the self seeks location, the latter the locations within the self Those places outside the self can never be more than tentatively met, though Harold can, if only for the moment, meet some of them with relative success: "But he whom Sadness sootheth may abide, / And scarce regret the region of his birth, I When wandering slow by Delphi's sacred side, I Or gazing o'er the plains where Greek and Persian died" (2.92.6-9). To locate the self in that way, however tenuous and transient the result, is, as we have seen, an act of self-making, Harold becoming more than he was by that mutual taking-in. The other sort of location, the places within the self, the larders within which he holds his own and the world's history, come to us already well established. The contours of that aspect of his geography are fixed as part of the faqade with which Harold begins, and they are never essentially changed as he goes along. On these two sorts of self-location are based the relations of self and place in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The Giaour carries these sorts and processes further and, in so doing, causes a radical reshuffling of the basis. If it discards none of the past, it adds other ways of conceiving the relations of self and place that, when added to those established in the Pilgrimage, take the canon into new complexities. The poem begins with a bit of history that may be no more than a bit of fable. The high, gleaming tomb that "first greets the homeward-veering skiff [4]" (just as it greets us and leads us into the poem) is, as Byron points out in a note, "by some supposed the sepulchre of Themistocles" (McGann, p. 416). The image makes a political point ("when shall such hero live again?" [6]) but image and note, when taken together, cause some uneasiness—about histories and fictions, about the relations of self and place (are those relations no more than suppositious?), and about the congruence of desire and actuality. After this dubiety

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we move into a picture of place and the benignant, of "Edens of the eastern wave" (15), and then into that which is patently a fable, the tale of the Nightingale's love for the Rose. The image of the tomb of Themistocles raises questions of disharmony and incongruence; but in this veritable fable the essence is harmony. It is a tale of desire (the desire of self for another self, for the concord of the two) expressed harmonically: "The maid for whom his melody— I His thousand songs are heard on high, I Blooms blushing to her lover's tale" (23-25). The rose, in her turn, "returns the sweets by nature given I In softest incense back to heaven" (30-31), a relation of reciprocity and symmetry harmonious in its completeness of gesture and response. More harmony follows in the succeeding scene, coming from the mariner's guitar and roundelay. But then the predictable irruption occurs. The openness of the mariner's sounds is countered by the muffling of the sounds of the oar as the pirate steals upon him and "turns to groans his roundelay [45]." (The roundelay, with its continued repetitions, is a song that keeps returning to where it was before. As such it stands in an emphatic way for acts of symmetrical closure.) The attack of the pirate on the mariner takes the singer's harmonies apart—those of his song, then, finally, those of his life. In fact this action carries to a pitch the sort of misuse men make of such surroundings: the grotto, "meant for rest," hides the pirate. The introduction as a whole holds a spectrum of possibilities in the relations of self and place, all manner of varieties on the scale of congruence and consonance. Consider what this means for the relations of the Giaour and Hassan, where the issues of consonance and continuity come to their most complicated pitch. The misuse of man and nature means that man and nature have become discontinuous. In rejecting the harmony nature proffers, the pirate cuts himself off from nature as he cuts into the mariner's roundelay. He rejects the sort of reciprocity seen when the Rose returns her sweets to heaven, and in so doing he rejects the symmetry of the relations of Rose, nature, and heaven. The encounters of the Giaour and Hassan take part in this man-made discontinuity through their stress

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on violence and also, with incisive irony, their stress on separation: the Giaour severs Hassan's hand and cleaves through his turban as though he wanted to separate his enemy from the wholeness that holds them together. He puts Hassan away, acting out, in this ultimate revenge, the discontinuities inscribed in this landscape. And yet the passage that describes the severing of the hand and the cleaving of the turban ends with one more instance of harmony, showing how fruitless it is for the Giaour to seek to cut himself off from Hassan by cutting Hassan apart. In a scene that Delacroix put into a lithograph in 1827 the battle ends in bitter symmetry: "And o'er him bends that foe with brow I As dark as his that bled below" (673-74). If man and nature are often incongruent, their relation a system of radical discontinuity, if man and man are often incongruent, visiting discontinuities on each other with a passion only death can mitigate, the Giaour and Hassan share a linkage so profound that it makes and unmakes their lives. These makers of discontinuity have made for each other a continuity so stubborn that their survivor carries it with him even when he thinks he has cleared it away. In a world rife with man-made disharmonies they have found a finely tuned consonance, as pure as that of the Rose and heaven, though far more deadly. And that consonance continues to the end of each, with Hassan to the moment of cleavage, with the Giaour to the time of his confession and death in the monastery. So locked are these antagonists in the ironies of consonance and continuity that the Giaour bears those ironies until the grave. Byron is wonderfully canny here, using an image of severance to show how every attempt at severance was in vain: On cliff he hath been known to stand, And rave as to some bloody hand Fresh sever'd from its parent limb, Invisible to all but him, Which beckons onward to his grave, And lures to leap into the wave.

(826-31)

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And Leila cannot be cut out of this group, for the hand that beckons him on leads him to a death exactly like her own. What we are coming to see at this juncture is a crucial understanding at which Byron arrived quite early in the development of his canon, one that had an effect so radical that it did as much as any single factor to affect (and effect) the shape of that canon. Hints of that understanding appeared as early as "To Inez." There, we recall, Harold confessed to the presence of an Other within the self that was and was not himself. The result of that Other's presence was self-corrosion. Thus, the act of mirroring performed so often in the early cantos turns up in "To Inez" as well, though with an effect quite different from that which resulted when Harold linked himself to Sappho. Those two instances share in the fact that, when the self is positioned before the Other it grows in substance, taking in more by seeing more of that which it is and also (so important in selfdefinition) that which it surely is not. But those instances do not share the same result: the cost of having that increase happen is different in each. Though we cannot call the scene about Sappho salutary it did not leave Harold damaged. He ended with a sense of kinship with that which he admired, toward which he felt a species of awe. But in the acts recorded in "To Inez" that same gesture of mirroring leads only to extraordinary damage, ending with the threat of self-consumption. Mirroring always looks the same but it has many tonalities and possible results. The testing of those tonalities began in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. It continued with particular vigor in The Giaour, the clumsiest and most exploratory of the Oriental tales. The Giaour takes the business of recoil a good deal further, tying it in, through analogy, to all the images of wholeness we have inspected, showing how recoil relates to the oxymora those images so often create. It takes the business of recoil furthest in the relations of the Giaour and Hassan. Here is the richest mirroring yet, far denser and more complex than that with Sappho or the Other in "To Inez," so intense that it even comes to the surface of the Giaour's consciousness ("yet did he

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but what I had done"), so ironic because it makes for the most subtle consonance in the poem. But consider what this means in terms of the acts recorded in "To Inez." T h e Giaour and Hassan do to each other what the O t h e r in "To Inez" threatens to do to Harold, consume him utterly. The Giaour causes that death to Hassan which Hassan sought to cause to him; yet the Giaour can never get rid of Hassan, carrying him around at all levels of consciousness until his o w n severance from life. It is for reasons of this sort that the encounter of the Giaour and Hassan is especially instructive about Byron's understanding of the shape of such meetings, that mode of their being through which we come to possess them, to figure them for ourselves. T h e encounter of these antagonists reveals that the act of d o u bling has a structure homologous with that of recoil, making that sort of enclosed wholeness which recoil makes. It also shows that doubling may well have the effect that recoil has— more precisely, all of the effects of recoil, all of its tonalities. That circling in upon oneself which recoil performs so well can result, therefore, in the sort of self-consumption threatened in "To Inez" and carried out in The Giaour. Locked into a structure that permits no outlet from itself, from the self, the Giaour turns upon images of himself and therefore turns upon himself. Like Manfred, w h o m he prefigures precisely, he cannot get out of that structure until death. Totally enclosed, totally determinate (and determining), the shape of recoil comes to be suffocating and claustrophobic. That which is wonderfully consonant is also that which locks one in, which causes the bitterest sort of entrapment. O f such are the harmonies of recoil made. T h e famous image of the scorpion shows its fullest ironies only at this point, when we see all the meaning that recoil has for the Giaour and his Other: The Mind, that broods o'er guilty woes, Is like the Scorpion girt by fire, In circle narrowing as it glows The flames around their captive close, Till inly search'd by thousand throes,

SELF-CONSUMING SYMMETRIES

And maddening in her ire, One sad and sole relief she knows, The sting she nourish'd for her foes, Whose venom never yet was vain, Gives but one pang and cures all pain, And darts into her desperate brain.— So do the dark in soul expire, Or live like Scorpion girt by fire; So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven, Unfit for earth, undoom'd for heaven, Darkness above, despair beneath, Around it flame, within it death!—

49

(422-38)

Consonance and self-consumption stand together in extraordinary interplay. There is nothing in The Giaour that permits the outlet seen in "To Inez" where, whatever the poem shows of recoil, the enclosure is opened up by the publishing of that poem: Harold breaks the entrapment by putting the poem and his selfhood out there, if only to Inez herself. N o w we see that totalization can become a self-made ambush, a parthenogenetic trap. N o wonder that this poet came to be leery of it, suspicious of it, and, finally, a formidable opponent of a n u m b e r of its romantic versions. Yet such totalization is itself the product of sui generis actions, in particular the process of self-making that began when the Pilgrimage began. That such acts of self-making continued in The Giaour shows that these were not merely the practices of a single p o e m but, in fact, canonical acts—acts generated by and within the canon, acts to be accomplished as the canon worked itself out. Indeed, the acts of reading through which Harold sought to possess the world hint that learning h o w to possess it will itself become canonical. T h e practice of self-making that will continue throughout the canon has to be seen as an aspect of that learning, one of the ways in which possession is accomplished, and perhaps the most significant way. Put in terms of what happens in The Giaour, this means that the gesture of doubling, of putting something out there which is and is not the

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self, is a gesture toward the making of self, toward giving it that density and substance it has needed since the establishment of Harold's f^ade. That lending of density and substance is, of course, one of the points of the mirroring process. The Giaour is especially useful in showing that this process is not a Fichtelike business of the self splitting its original unity in order to realize itself more fully; nor is it a Blake-like business of the cracking of a primal unity that split while performing the Fall. The idea of an original unity implies a self already made, one that comes to be divided and—in a variant of the greatest Western fable—seeks to repair that primal fracture. But the self we see emerging in the Byronic canon has, at its origin in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, no more than the wholeness of a theatrical flat, which means that any wholeness it appears to have is no more than two-dimensional and therefore illusory; and in fact when we first come upon that self it is already fractured, miserable, and separate, seeking for that which, we now can see, will mean more fullness for itself. Whatever genuine wholeness that self comes to have will not be an ancient unity recovered (it never really had one) but that sort which comes into being as the self moves along in the world, seeking to possess the world. Further, that gesture in which the Other is seen to be all that it is requires an acknowledgment of division as well as connection. If the Giaour would have done all that Hassan did, if each is a lover of Leila and also the cause of her death, they are still irrevocably different and divided, the Giaour always a Venetian infidel, Hassan always one of the faithful. Whatever the move toward unity it can never be complete, never involve the recovery of a dreamed-of Oneness. Oxymoron can never become metaphor, never take part in union with the One. Thus, the wholeness that comes into being through the encounter of the Giaour and Hassan, that bitter and paradoxical unity to which they arrive as their encounter works out, is a step in that process of self-making which the canon carries forth, and it is the densest step yet. Further, since acts of selfmaking are also acts of world-possessing, the encounter of the Giaour and Hassan is also a stage in the canon's experiments

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with ways of taking hold of experience—showing, in this case, that the shape of the oxymoron is one of those ways of taking hold, of learning how to be in the world. Still, that oxymoron is not only a way of giving this aspect of experience a shape and therefore a form that can be related to, placed, as it were, in the space of experience; that shape is also a place for the self to be, within which it can locate itself, give itself a palpable point in the geography of experience. The oxymoron seen in these texts is a form of that magic circle which turns up now and then in romanticism, an enclosure which not only protects the self but gives it a space in which to be and therefore to achieve definition. In fact, it achieves that definition in part by having a place to be. We are seeing a key and unusual instance of the relations of self and place. The oxymoron figured in The Giaour occupies a special, privileged position on the spectrum of the relations of self and place established in the early Pilgrimage. But more has to be considered here, matters of the sort that found the wholeness in the relations of the Giaour and Hassan to be a deadly one. If totalization is to become all that it claims to be, an unmaking of self must ensue parallel to, and derived from, all that making of self seen in these early poems. Only thus can genuine completeness occur; and of course it does occur. If the magic circle establishes a place for the self to be, it also, as a result of the same act, shows that place to be one where the self is threatened with undoing (the Giaour) or actually undone (Hassan). It is as though in making the magic circle one has trapped within that circle a demonic element whose major business is to undo, to destroy, to bring chaos back into being where a sort of order had been established. Here the parallels with Faust are quite illuminating. Early in part 1 of Goethe's poem Faust finds that he has, quite unwittingly, created a magic circle of a particularly supple sort. Because of a slightly cracked image of a pentagrammatic Druid's claw the devil has managed to enter Faust's study in the form of a poodle, but he cannot leave the study until the claw is altered. Faust—caught up in the beginnings of the process of remaking his self—chooses to tease and test his nemesis but falls

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asleep in a spell of deceit cast by Mephisto's attendant spirits. That which seeks to undo the self is caught within the walls of the self's home place, trapped within the selfsame order it seeks to take apart. Mephisto manages to get out, the process of undoing the self well begun. But in The Giaour there is no such egress, no rat to nibble a hole in the pentagram, no Inez to whom to sing in order to open the enclosure's walls.9 Selfmaking and self-unmaking have become allied acts, their workings inextricable. All the ironies inherent in this order come to their culmination at this point: there is, after all, a certain equity involved (undoing must have its due, the Other must have its own) as well as, once again, the need to fill out totalization, to make it as complete as possible. To possess a counterpart is, it seems, also to be possessed by it. In seeking to possess the world we come to possess an Other and then, in our turn, to be that which is possessed. Acts whose business is to make a self turn out not only to be insufficient but to be symbols for selfconsumption, that final destructive wholeness in which we gobble ourselves up. Does this mean, then, that another dialectic has emerged? Not quite. For a dialectic to work there has to be repetition of the sequence, which would mean, in this case, that unmaking would have to be followed by a new mode of making, one that would, in its turn, eventually defer to its Other. There is no such repetition in the order designed in The Giaour, though there is some of the effect of one. The unmaking of Hassan does not really undo the wholeness but puts it into another key, where the Giaour carries within him all that fullness which had once been both objective and subjective, out there in the world as well as in there within himself. That fullness stays within him until his own ultimate undoing. For the sequence to be purely dialectical there would have to be doing and undoing, making and unmaking, the establishment of order and the return of 9. The magic circle referred to at the end ofKubla Khan is of still another kind, designed to keep its inhabitant inside and away from those who regard him with holy dread. Yet it shares with those in Faust and The Giaour the sense of the magic circle as a place of entrapment.

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53

chaos, carried on in a cycle that never ends in a poem without end. Here too the poet went as far as he knew how with the materials he had at hand. He had to make the encirclement complete before he saw what there was to do with it. Yet what Byron did with it here, whatever the clumsiness and occasional melodrama, has extraordinary significance for our understanding of his canon, not only in these matters of doing and undoing but in what those matters are shown to be tied to in the most fruitful fashion, the relations of self-making and text-making. Situations are set up in which selfhood admits of its opposite, creating a whole composed of variety. If we have stressed the element of likeness in that variety, we ought to give the proper balance by putting at least equivalent stress on the element of unlikeness—that which makes aspects of the oxymoron speak in different voices, offer perspectives upon the whole that can never be quite reconciled. The Giaour will never interpret the world in the way Hassan does. Thus, the oxymoron they make holds within itself a form of perspectivism. It offers varying slants upon the same set of facts, variations brought about because of the ways in which the canon approaches, at this point, the business of the making of selves. There was no such variety of slants in the early Pilgrimage. Indeed, the purpose, as we recall, was to establish a peripatetic point of view out of which the texts of the world were to be interpreted. The multiplicity was seen in the variety of places Harold passed through and in the self's relation to them, not in the ways the reading occurred or in what the readings concluded. The Giaour, then, was a trial of yet another way, shifting the unitary readings of the Pilgrimage to the binary mode of the oxymoron, adding the element of perspectivism to the effect of the whole. The poem's play with the making of selves brought along, as a requisite corollary, the making of multiple readings. And this making of multiplicity carried over to another aspect of the experiment—the way the poem gets told. Here, more clearly than anywhere and in a striking breakthrough for the canon, the ways of self-making and text-making are shown

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to be parallel ways, and perhaps even the same way emergent in different modalities. The perspectivism in the oxymoron finds a precise and reverberative echo in the perspectivism in the narration, the story that is getting told by the Giaour himself, a coffeehouse bard, a Moslem fisherman, and a priest. None of them sees the material precisely as the others do (could the bard telling the coffeehouse version really see it as the priest sees it?). None of them approaches it with the others' preoccupations.10 The cranky comments by Crabb Robinson about the difficulty of putting it all together are, in fact, precisely to the point. It is not that the reader has difficulty assembling the poem in an essential way (Marshall's argument against the coherence of the poem is not as convincing as those of his opponents), but that the events come to us out of a multiplicity of voices, each of which necessarily colors what we see, none of which can do more than contribute its own reading of the scene and what it means. Self-making and text-making have essentially the same texture. Together they contribute to the poem more of that sense of final unfixedness which is essential to its character. We can, ourselves, shift perspective to get another reading of those relationships. The initial stage of the poem told a quite straightforward story, and it is only as the accretions continued that the full potential of the tale began to emerge. With the adding of those bits and pieces the matter of self-making grew in intricacy; and so, concurrently, did that multiplicity of selves and voices which had been there, if only in an inchoate state, from the beginning. As Byron saw more in the story he had to add on more accretions in order to define that seeing more preio. This is not to say that each of the narrators takes an unequivocal position toward what he sees. Through every stage of the poem, but most clearly in its early phases, the fisherman is more sensitive and aware, more detached and uneasy in his sympathies, than critics have allowed. His prejudice toward the Giaour has to share room with a tense fascination with the infidel's fervor. And his pride in Hassan's power blends with his simultaneous awareness that the Moslem chief has sinned, and that his wages arejust ahead- "The curse for Hassan's sin was sent / To turn a palace to a tomb" (280-81). Whatever his feelings toward the Giaour the fisherman knows the Venetian to be an agent of retribution, sent to right a balance that Hassan has disturbed.

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cisely, to give it depth and focus. And as he added on more he saw that these would not be enough: the new ones, in an inevitable way, brought in still more to see and therefore brought along the need for even more of their kind. This was a process that could well become endlessly self-begetting, much as Harold's finer tuning of the relations of self and place served to create the need for still more of such tunings, in a process that saw no end and indeed had no need of one. When we speak of the accretive structure of The Giaour we seem to imply a finished product. Yet here as well as elsewhere this text could have begotten more of itself, made more of its own finer tunings and finer seeings. The rhythms of making and unmaking that did in Hassan and finally the Giaour had, as we saw, a necessary end. But of the making of accretions there need not have been any end. The decision to end at this point was not a matter of exhaustion but, rather, one of strategy. Other versions of the basic issues had now to be tested. •

Byron's next major poem, The Bride ofAbydos, has, as he told Lady Melbourne on 4 November 1813, "something of the Giaour cast—but not so sombre though rather more villainous" (LJ 3:157).11 Though its villain is apparent, his role has its less apparent ambiguities. Giaffir, the paternal image (the Freudian cast of the text is as clear as its echoes of Hamlet), keeps Selim around as a substitute for the son he never had, as Selim himself is aware (see 2.264-67).12 Yet at the same time Giaffir seeks, perhaps unconsciously, to keep Selim weak; or, more accurately, he seeks to convince himself that Selim is weak and inef11. Literature on The Bride ofAbydos is surprisingly sparse, though the poem has far more to offer than either The Corsair or Lara. Gleckner has some useful pages in Ruins of Paradise, responding, in part, to William H. Marshall's simplifying comments on this surprisingly intricate poem in The Structure of Byron's Major Poems (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962). See also note 12 below. 12. McGann, 3:107-147. Unless otherwise specified, all references in citations following quotations from The Bride ofAbydos are to canto and line.

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fectual, and he reinforces that wish with continual open scorn of Selim's supposed inadequacies. Yet the process is not quite successful, for an unmistakable nervousness shows through in Giaffir's meditations: "Much I misdoubt this wayward boy I Will one day work me more annoy" (i. 132-33). The OED uses these lines to gloss the meaning of "misdoubt" as "to fear or suspect (that something is or will be the case)." But the word, as the total entry shows, can also mean "to have doubts as to the existence, truth, or reality of (a thing)," a meaning it held well through the nineteenth century. Both of these meanings are at play in the context of Byron's poem. Together they help shape the ambivalence in Giaffir's attitude toward Selim. However little is shown of Giaffir, that little is sufficient to bring out a character of considerable complexity, one to whom ironies and a form of recoil will—given the canon he finds himself in— inevitably occur. At the end Giaffir has killed not only the surrogate son but, indirectly though with perfect effect, his real and only daughter. Each of these extensions of himself, the actual and the fictive, becomes his victim, reifying the curse visited on the Giaour but never actually carried out in that poem. That curse would have involved the Giaour in the deaths of his "daughter, sister, wife" (759), its pain culminating when "the youngest—most belov'd of all, I Shall bless thee with a father's name— / That word shall wrap thy heart in flame!" (768-70). Hassan was one sort of extension of the Giaour but not the sort that reproduces one's flesh, carrying on the touch of oneself in a special mode of mirroring, one that puts oneself out there in the world in a way that no other mirroring can. To cause the deaths of one's own extensions, actual and/or fictive, is to bring into being a mode of recoil whose special pain was predicted in the curse actualized in Giaffir and was to be carried to its culmination in Don Juan's Lambro, an older version of the pirate that Selim would have become had he survived. That the self could fashion its own trap had, by the time of The Bride of Abydos, become especially clear. The enclosing shape of that trap, broached in the Pilgrimage and elaborated in The Giaour, takes on, in The Bride of Abydos, new kinds of irony based on a

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play of the actual and the fictive. The self-consuming symmetries reach out, through those ironies, for new kinds of victims. Those symmetries had been growing obsessive, appearing in the making of the poems as well as in the poems themselves. Byron's sense of poetry as release has often been noticed, but that sense has to be viewed in the greater context of the obsessions with recoil, encirclement, and self-consumption. We saw at the end of the previous chapter how publishing can become an act of consciousness that saves consciousness from itself "by the action it affords to the mind, which else recoils upon itself." That awareness of writing as an undoer of recoil comes out of a journal entry of 27 November 1813, some three weeks after he wrote the letter to Lady Melbourne, some two weeks after he finished the fair copy of The Bride o/Abydos (LJ 2:225). An entry in the journal of 16 November speaks of his sending Lord Holland the proofs of that poem as well as those of The Giaour. Holland, Byron says, will not like the new poem, and he himself will probably not like it for long. Yet the writing of The Bride had been necessary: "had I not done something at that time, I must have gone mad, by eating my own heart,—bitter diet!" (LJ 3:208). Still, if the attempt to fend off self-consumption worked that time it did not suffice for subsequent times. The diet of self upon itself continues through this difficult period. On 27 February 1814: "my heart and head have stood many a crash, and what should ail them now? They prey upon themselves" (LJ 3:246). On 28 March: "I must set about some employment soon; my heart begins to eat itself again" (LJ 3:256). The act of writing, the making of texts, takes on, in Byron's practice, all sorts of curious duties. It becomes a way of causing fractures that leads the heart to other dinners than itself, away from that odd and costly banquet at which the heart is both guest and menu. Giaffir was not so fortunate. Unlike Harold he had no texts with which he could open the trap of self-encirclement. Selim, more sensitive than his surrogate father, more aware than the older Turk of the play of fracture and feast, finds his own ways of opening such circles, ways that are new to the canon and promise a great deal of possibility.

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Consider, for example, the third stanza of the first canto. Selim's remarks to Giaffir are subtle and canny, the comments of one who has long mulled over the relations of self and context, and whose words show that he is and knows far more than his auditors know. Indeed, the pressure of all that he knows pokes up through those words willy-nilly, as though that knowing were so intense that it needed to give in to the pressure and relieve the tension by releasing a part of itself. Selim begins his speech by putting himself into the context of a group— father, sister, sable guide—his own place in the group having been established in a comment by the narrator that led like a prelude into his own: "For son of Moslem must expire, I Ere dare to sit before his sire!" (1.51-52). His selfhood has a place in a publicly acknowledged context, a point that Selim is careful to stress in putting the opening of his speech as he does. Yet he is no less careful in setting himself apart from that context, distinguishing himself from at least some of the group: "let the old and weary sleep— 11 could not" (1.58—59). The dig is sly and not well hidden, though there is no indication in Giaffir's reply that he has noticed it. If Selim is part of that group he is not like the other males within it, Giaffir and the sable guide, both far older than he is. Still, if he separates himself from them he is not a party of one by choice. Solitude is irksome and unlovable; some kind of grouping is preferable. If he rejects the symmetries of palace order, breaking that enclosure open by separating out from the crowd, he does not reject such symmetries for the sake of a symmetry of one, as Harold did, as the Giaour sought unsuccessfully to do. The symmetries he seeks are far more intricate, as the handling of his comments makes clear. The stanza as a whole holds a carefully ordered argument about self and context, an argument put in the shape of a precisely designed narrative. At its beginning Selim fractures the symmetries of his public context, but then he quickly confesses that the results are not quite satisfying. Seeking the symmetries of a new context he wakes Zuleika and they fly to the cypress groves to make "earth, main, and heaven our own!" (1.70). At the turning point of the action he hears the deep tambour calling

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him back to Giaffir's circle, and he returns to his wonted context, "to thee and to my duty true" (1.75). This tiny narrative tells a tale of desire fulfilled at all sorts of levels, the self having it all ways at once, in and out of contexts as it wills, playing games with all manner of symmetries, even that of a wellordered narrative. What the narrative does not tell, what the first-time reader does not see and Giaffir does not yet know, is the full extent of Selim's play with matters of symmetry; that is, his irony. The narrative has a classically Aristotelian completeness, even a moment of anagnorisis (Selim recognizes his duty and acts on that recognition). Such narratives have always served as paradigms of that symmetry and wholeness which come with perfect order. This one finds its parallel within the tale it tells, for the shape of Giaffir's circle has its own version of those qualities. Further, the tale takes toward those qualities a kind of reverence, offering them all the obeisance they are due, showing how duty and propriety are to be found in the proper deference to that order and in fulfilling one's place within it. And, not surprisingly, the order serves to define the contours of the self: "to thee and to my duty true" tells what Selim is by telling how he feels about what he does. But there is more. Because the narrative shares with Giaffir's court an order whose central qualities are symmetry and completeness, because it tells a tale of the obeisance due to those qualities, it takes on in its own right, as aspects of its own existence, the tonality associated with the qualities described in the tale. It brings into the realm of narrative order that aura of respectability associated with the order of Giaffir's court. If following the one is a moral matter, a question of rectitude and integrity, so too is following the other. The classical Aristotelian narrative, itself one of the archetypes of closure, ties its completeness and rationality to a system that does in politics what that narrative does in texts. For the first time in Byron's canon we can speak of the politics of textuality. Yet Selim unmakes what he makes even in the process of making it work. Part of Selim's purpose in putting these facts

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as he does is to offer a semblance of totality. His narrative estab­ lishes a spectrum of contexts whose gradations go from the most public to the most private, with the ecstasy of Selim and Zuleika standing as the middle state, sheltered in the cypress groves. Selim's auditors (as well as the first-time reader) hear what appears to be the completest picture, that spectrum offering an image of closure precisely parallel to the shape of Giaffir's circle and the order of the story Selim has told. Changes on closure and totality ring all through the stanza, with Selim as the active totalizer. Yet the spectrum's effect of completeness is in fact thoroughly deceptive, a fiction shaped by this budding artificer. It appears to define all possible con­ texts for Selim's self, even that context of solitude with which he is not quite at home, and that appearance is false. Nothing is said, or could be said, about Selim and the pirate band. In its status as a carrier of deception the spectrum offers the most interesting connections with the face put on by rhetorical irony, which appears to be telling one thing, the thing supposed to be all of the truth, but actually intends quite another, that which, abiding underneath, shows the face to be only a mask and by no means the entire story. That story, to be entire, has to con­ tain both the mask and the substance underneath, that which appears to be the truth but is only partly so, and that which continues the truth and is needed to make it complete. We could distinguish mask and substance by calling them, as is usually done, appearance and reality; but it is more useful in this con­ text to consider the mask as a partial truth (it is, after all, truly a mask), asserting that only with the addition of substance do we get closer to completing the truth. Either way of putting the point makes sense of Selim's case. Both Giaffir and the reader come to know the entire story in the second canto, which means that the reader will be prepared for a multilayered reading of the stanza whenever he reenters the text. That sea­ soned reader can see not only the incompleteness of the spec­ trum but its pretended completeness as well. And if the spec­ trum is in fact incomplete, in fact a fashioned illusion, those other images of completeness may well themselves be incom-

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plete, defective images of order. That is what Selim's ironies do to the shape of Giaffir's circle. The truth, like the truth of the rhetorical ironist, turns out to be greater than its auditors know when they first encounter the tale. Closure comes apart because of the pirates' ghostly presence. The context of Giaffir's circle has a parallel to itself—what we could call a shadow-context—in the shape of the pirate band, the group in which Selim performs the role that Giaffir does within his own circle. The shadow-context destroys the orderliness of the public spectrum. It shows that spectrum to be actually open-ended, unable to resolve itself, compelled to find a place for that which has an overt place only in its own world, the shadow-world. Only Selim and the seasoned reader are aware of the spectrum's incompleteness, its open-endedness, its inability to contain all the truths of his world. Indeed, those truths can be contained only in open-endedness. Closure of the sort imaged in the spectrum is thus false and duplicitous, the work of an artificer who is, at once, both maker and unmaker. As for that other image of closure seen in the circle that Giaffir commands, only Selim and the seasoned reader know, at this point in the text, of its falsity, its inaccuracy, its inability to control the shape of Giaffir's world and thus the contours of his self. (The sufficiency, the accuracy, the truth of the Aristotelian mode of closure are not directly questioned in this text, though they cannot escape the implications. They were overtly questioned in The Giaour, the poem preceding this one.) The locale of truth has shifted, though only Selim knows where it is and sees all that it contains. It is the pressure of all that knowledge that pushes up through this stanza, compelling Selim to fashion a speech whose ironies are apparent to no one else in the circle. Selim knows that his words are deceptive, not simply when he says "to thee and to my duty true" (he cannot be true to both) but in the impression that his words leave. He is a rhetorical ironist because the face of his speech does not tell the entire truth. He is also the budding practitioner of another sort of irony, one that finds narratives to be true only when they do

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not pretend to completeness, only when they give themselves to duplicity in many senses of the word. For if symmetry is an obsession informing the canon at this point so too are the senses of duplicity. As could be expected, those obsessions take diverse relations to each other, at some points intertwining, at others establishing antagonisms by seeking to undo each other. To be duplicitous means, first of all and essentially, to be double in one's way of being: the Latin root, duplex, refers to that which is double or twofold. The radical sense of the term applies with particular cogency to The Giaour through the relations of its primary males. That kind of twinning takes in all the mirrorings on which the poem reflects and, in so doing, goes back, as we have seen, to situations in the early Pilgrimage. Yet if there is that sort of doubleness in The Giaour it has nothing to do with double-dealing, however much it deals with doubles. There is nothing in the poem of deception or disguise, nothing of the need for a mask in order to make such duplicities work. The enemies are open in their hatred. The only concealment in the poem comes with the Giaour's ambush of Hassan, which does not involve double-dealing but taking advantage of some rocks so as to do one's enemy in with more efficiency. The poem holds nothing of the deceitful but everything of the duplex as a way of selves in their radical encounter. In The Giaour's sense of the term, to be duplicitous means that one has duplicated oneself. To be duplicitous in the most common sense means establishing a system of self in which the face that meets the world is no more than the surface of a complex that may well hold a multiplicity. That is what happens to duplicity in The Bride ofAbydos. The poem continues the canon's obsession with the duplex but takes up those aspects of duplicity which did not appear in The Giaour. Byron seems to have sensed some of the impulses driving his canon and to have wanted to carry them further, working with all of their implications. The Bride ofAbydos plays down, but never erases, the basic idea of twinning, playing up, in its turn, the business of the mask with which those other implications work. The essen-

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tial deception, of course, is the one practiced by Selim, a twofaced double-dealer who acts out narratives of the mildest rebellion that return at the end to duty; but he never lets on to the circle that his duty is not where it seems. It would not, however, be accurate to state that there is a twinning of Selim's self in the sense that he is split between his places in the court and the pirate band. That would imply, if not equality, at least the possibility of ambivalence, and there is none in Selim's selfhood, at least along those particular lines. In a ragged and rudimentary way he prefigures his greatest successor, Julien Sorel. Julien's selfhood has to be seen as a system of strata. To put crudely what the novel puts with incomparable finesse, he meets the world with the face of a priest, while just beneath that stratum is the energy of the Napoleonic eagle. Under both priest and eagle, and poking through at key moments in the novel, is the essential Julien Sorel, that stratum of selfhood which emerges in all its fullness when Julien has nothing left that he wants to conceal.13 It is Selim's counterpart of that system of the self's duplicity that maneuvers the intricacies of his narrative. It alone can relish the ironies that run through the tale. Indeed, those ironies have to be relished alone because if revealed in any way they would do the system in. Selim turns out to be an ironist with a very limited audience, for rhetorical irony works only when it is seen as irony, only when its auditors know that surface and substance conflict. The truth of the face is only a partial truth, only a faqade under which lies a very different reality. It is as though there were an opening from which the rest of the truth peeks through, appearing to the light and the ironist's audience. To disguise that remainder fully is to keep the irony from being noticed by anyone more than oneself and thus to keep it from being irony to anyone more than oneself. But duplicitous systems of the sort built by Selim and Julian Sorel can have no openings. They have to be airtight or 13. For more elaborate discussion of the structure of self in Julien see my chapter on the novel in The Autonomy of the Selffrom Richardson to Huysmans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

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they collapse, as Julien's system did when he shot Mme. de Renal. Selim is a rhetorical ironist but he is also the extent of his audience. Only thus could he lead his double-dealing life, working with duplicity in all of its senses as his way of being in the world. But Selim is not the only deceiver in Giaffir's court. Giaffir has concealed from Selim his nephew's actual lineage, hiding from his surrogate son the latter's true status in the circle, the fact that he belongs in the extended family but not in the immediate one. Giaffir, as much as Selim, is a maker of fictions. There is the one about Selim's status and therefore about Giaffir's as well. And there is the more subtle and dangerous one that Giaffir has also fashioned, the one of which he is only partly aware, the one that would be responsible for doing his own lineage in; that is, the fiction of Selim's weakness, which Giaffir works at and worries about with equal passion. Here, as clearly as elsewhere, duplicity makes its way into the relations of self and context, the obsession with the duplex and the obsession with all sorts of symmetry coming together to shape a text. When the obsessions get together they create a perfect interface, each positive facing a negative to make a masterly balance: Selim is not Giaffir's son, which Giaffir knew and Selim did not; Selim is not a weakling but a pirate chief, which Selim knew and Giaffir did not. This structure is one more proof of the deadliness of such symmetries, of their way of drawing one in so deeply that one can get free from their embrace only through the severest unmaking; here and elsewhere, only through death. (As we shall see in the following chapter it is precisely that sort of symmetry that Delacroix perceived in Byron's Oriental tales, and he put it to elaborate use in his paintings of the Giaour and Hassan.) Yet the symmetries that enfold Selim and his surrogate father have still more to do. They show how The Bride ofAbydos continues, in a subdued and subtle tonality, that twinning which was central to the workings of The Giaour, the echoes of self in another self. Selim and Giaffir, parallel makers of fictions (makers of parallel fictions), stand off against each other in equal but opposite mixtures of

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knowing and unknowing. In fact that stance is reified when, after Giaffir questions his strength, Selim's eye "returned him glance for glance" (1.128), as though each were standing at a mirror, seeing his own ferocity within it. T h e twinning continues in still another of this poem's symmetrical relations, that in which Giaffir acts as stand-in for Abdullah, Selim's true father. Brother echoes brother, the dead self in the quick one, with Giaffir (the Cain of this poem) living out the fatherhood of the brother he has killed. Such sleek and vicious shapes of relation echo all through The Bride of Abydos, touching it at every angle and level, dominating all aspects of the poem until some deaths pry the symmetries apart. And yet that terminal prying is not the only prying in the p o e m but the last of a series of such acts, all of them focused on Selim and the varied contexts of his selfhood. Part of that prying, in fact, partakes of a fiction, the semblance of an undoing, which Zuleika mistakes for actuality. The total context of Selim's selfhood includes all of the roles he plays, his duplicitous image in the divan, his true image in the grotto. O n e of the primary actions in the poem is the undoing of that complex, a performance that involves the putting aside of a disguise. That putting aside begins with Selim's m u r k y statement to Zuleika that he is not what he seems: "Think not I am what I appear" (1.3 81). Zuleika takes his statement to mean that his selfhood has suffered division and he is n o w no longer in touch with his essential being: Think not thou art what thou appearest! My Selim, thou art sadly changed; This morn I saw thee gentlest, dearest, But now thou'rt from thyself estranged.

(1.383-86)

What she thinks she sees in Selim is the prying apart of a selfhood, the division of self from self becoming an estrangement that ends in fragmentation. What she thinks she sees is a kind of doubling of self in which Selim becomes his o w n O t h e r — the same kind of doubling found in Harold's final song at the end of the early Pilgrimage, with the same threat of the self's

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disjunction. Zuleika is partly right and partly wrong, as least as Selim would construe the situation. What she witnesses is the first stage in an undoing. But what she does not know is that it is the undoing of a complex that has supported a fiction, and the undoing, from Selim's point of view, will not lead to an estrangement of self from self but to the purification of self, so that self can show its true contours to the world, what it really has been all along. To put it another way: what is undone is not his true self but a complex that includes the true and the false. Thus, the undoing Selim sees is not a true undoing of self (the undoing of his true self) but only the semblance of such an undoing. For him it means something quite different, since the result will be a revealing of self, its apotheosis. As he sees it, the Other he faces is a fictional Other, that on which the fiction centers. Insofar as he plays along with that Other's fiction, plays that Other in the performance he lives out in the divan, to that extent he remains estranged from the purity of self. He is trading a false wholeness for a true one. The charade of self is nearly over. And so, indeed, is Selim's life, the final dissolution of self following rapidly upon the dissolution of the fiction. Whatever the extent of her mistakes Zuleika is very clear about the differences between herself and Selim on the matter of stability. Troubled by all the changes she sees happening to her world, finding that Selim is not only not what he seems but also not her brother, she sees herself as quite possibly abandoned and yet the only sure point of stability: "God! am I left alone on earth . . . ? . . . but know me all I was before" (2.166, 2.171). Before she saw the series of changes in Selim she was certain that change could never undo the radical wholeness that held her life together. Telling Selim of her feelings about her impending betrothal she says that she could not "learn to halve [her] heart" (1.318), that when the Angel of Death destroys them he "shall doom for ever I [Their] hearts to undivided dust!" (1.325-26). Now she sees that the only wholeness she shares in is fully within herself, and that inconstancy is everywhere but within the confines of her self. She is consistent and dependable, never

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varying from her ways. But Selim is all change, metamorphosis, instability.14 The wholeness she knew in him breaks up and takes along with it the wholeness of his relation to her. Those wonderfully enclosed contexts which made the tight circle of her life have now been broken open, their seals shattered. Despite Selim's promise of a new context in which they will "do all but disunite" (2.245), s n e is t o ° dazed to do more than look at the fractured present and quietly die. The poem ends with a vast unmaking. Selim's desire to bring his selfhood to its purest state, a condition of unqualified, fictionless truth, leads to the undoing of all relation and finally of his newfound symmetry of self. Here, as in The Giaour, there can be no dialectic, no rhythm of doing and undoing that permits perpetual renewal. There are only the shreds and shards of undone selves and contexts, that incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin which Thomas McFarland sees as endemic to romanticism.15 The Bride ofAbydos shares obsessions with The Giaour, but it also shares the knowledge of what such obsessions can lead to, their ultimate, intolerable cost.16 14. Robert B. Ogle has studied aspects of Selim's changes in "The Metamorphosis of Selim: Ovidian Myth in The Bride ofAbydos II," Studies in Romanticism 20 (1981): 2 1 - 3 1 .

15. See Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). McFarland regards these elements as "the diasparactive triad" (5) and argues that diasparaction constitutes "the deepest underlying truth of Romanticism's experience of reality" (338). He speaks elsewhere of "the opposed conceptions of organic form and diasparactive form" (54), a point related to my argument in chapters 6-8 of this book. For further comment see below, chapter 8, note 17. 16. Though neither The Corsair nor Lara has the interest or imaginative intensity of The Giaour and The Bride ofAbydos, there are times within those poems when the text comes briefly to life. The Corsair plays lightly with some fertile possibilities in the structure of self. It draws on the sense of the face of self as a surface where subliminal forces pop through at occasional times and flimsy places, and it links the possibility of the release of those forces to ideas of the self's freedom. Lacking that possibility the self is not entirely free, even if one is at the head of a band of pirates beholden only to their dour chief. One can be self-possessed in the sense of self-control, the business seen in the Byronic hero from the time of Harold's faqade. One can also be self-possessed in the sense

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developed in this chapter, so that one is possessed by that Other within the self which one has sought actively to possess. Both senses occur in The Corsair and—in an even less developed form though, again, with considerable potential—in Lara. In both poems the event of release does occur, but only when one is alone or fully entrapped (compare Juhen Sorel alone in the cave and, later, in his prison cell). The prison scene in the third canto of The Corsair has particular relevance for these issues (which are picked up later in The Prisoner qfChillon). Lara touches on versions of them at several points in the text, for example in the scene of Lara's nightmare in canto I. In that scene all sorts of words and phrases beginning with "half" show the play of surface and substance actively at work: half-lit tapers, half drawn sabers, half form'd threat, half told, half withheld (see also phrasmgs such as "his eye was almost seal'd"). But little else in the poem picks up on those possibilities. All these issues are closely connected to their counterparts in The Bride of Abydos, but neither Conrad nor Lara shares in Sehm's proto-irony or his elaborate explorations of self

3 An Oriental Twist B Y R O N ENDS The Giaour with a long and characteristic footnote. "The circumstance to which the above story relates," he says, "was not very uncommon in Turkey" (McGann, 3:422). He goes on to cite a particularly outlandish example and then to say that he had once, "by accident," heard the story in his text "recited by one of the coffee-house story-tellers who abound in the Levant, and sing or recite their narratives." In effect Byron is saying that the events in the story have all the authenticity of the milieu in which he heard them. This is not a library Orientalism but one that has the firsthand genuineness and immediacy of its source. Further, since he was there and heard the story, the authenticity is transferred to his retelling of the tale, even though when he was there he was, himself, a giaour, an outsider. Still, however much he shares in authenticity, his position in relation to the material is of a special, outsider's kind. His own authenticity is clearly of a different sort than that of the Levantine storyteller. Byron speaks of himself as a translator—already a secondary role in relation to the text— and points out that his "additions and interpolations . . . will be easily distinguished from the rest, by the want of Eastern imagery." This is a maker who knows all the intricacies of his position and knows precisely what he wants to do with his text. He has a relationship to the story that is both involved and detached; he is drawn in by his connection to the milieu yet kept off by his status as a giaour. Going along with that curious balance is what the note implies of his handling of the text: he seeks for authenticity in the narrative rather than the texture, in a set of events to which all men can respond rather than the details of an exotic place. It seems likely that his sense of his secondary status, of the profound Otherness of the events he describes, leads him to put the stress where he does. Who and where he is

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has the profoundest, most effective relation to the mode of his text and the tones of the voice through which it comes. Elsewhere in the note Byron refers to Vathek, from which he drew some of the material in his other notes, and he offers Beckford's story the most lavish praise: for correctness of costume, beauty of description, and power of imagination, it far surpasses all European imitations, and bears such marks of originality that those who have visited the East will find some difficulty in believing it to be more than a translation. Those travelers who have touched at the authenticity of the East will think of Beckford's text as a derivation from the source rather than as a story made up by an outsider. Yet Beckford is, like Byron, a secondary, detached figure. Indeed, he is even more detached than Byron because, as the latter knew, Beckford's work was based on a library Orientalism whose touch at authenticity, however impressive, had to be mediated through the experience of others. The result, for Byron, is a curious ambivalence about the varieties of stance Europeans can take in their relations to Orientalism. The translator, such as Byron describes himself in the note, stands somewhat apart from the Otherness of the East, yet he is closer to the source than a writer like Beckford. Beckford's authenticity is secondhand, his Orientalism parthenogenetic. Still, Byron goes on to argue that Beckford's imagination of the East is more original, his Orientalism more beautiful and more exciting, than that of anyone else in his time. Finally, ironically, his work cannot be surpassed for its "correctness of costume."1 Beckford is correct in such details because he became what Coleridge was to call a "library Cormorant," a devourer of all sorts of texts about the East, from fables to dictionaries. Commentators have made much of his early reading in such literature, which he absorbed with care and avidity, and the result of that reading was the thickening of both text and notes with a plethora of finely realized details about Oriental matters. There I. For the facts about Byron's relationship to Beckford see Robert J. Gemmett, William Beckford (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 139-42.

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was nothing in him of the assumed humility of Byron's note on Vathek, nothing of the diffidence about a "want of Eastern imagery." In fact, Beckford took toward his material the same attitude that Vathek took toward the world: nothing succeeds like excess; the world is full of things, tastes and textures, and in order to realize ourselves most fully within it we have to make contact with all its minutiae. Establishing that contact was one of the aims of Beckford's book. The tale begins with an account of the palaces of the five senses and continues through a series of scenes designed not only to lead Vathek inexorably to hell but also to study the surfaces of his world as he wanders through it to his doom. Every rift is loaded with ore and none of them escapes Vathek's greedy attention. This is not simply a matter of countering neoclassical ideas about generality, though Beckford was clearly a rebel against that as well as every other Establishment doctrine he could uncover. Byron thought that Vathek rivaled even Rasselas as an Eastern tale, but he saw that the world Beckford renders has nothing to do with the bare surfaces of Johnson's generalized landscape. Further, Beckford is as neoclassical as anyone in the clarity of his text, the lucidity of the densely packed world that emerges from his book. Vathek has been called a counterpart of the Gothic but it shows none of that calculated fuzziness through which the Gothic exposed the uncertainty of our daily perceptions of experience. Beckford's world is clear and extravagant, lush and lucid, his passion for tangibility realized in a context that is as explicit about its contours as it is about every detail within them. That combination of precision and profusion is definitive Beckford, the key to his tonality. It is there partly for the sake of parody: Beckford was the only important English writer who mocked the stylistic excesses of the Oriental tale, mimicking its melodrama and grotesquerie with a fine eye for its potential for silliness.2 Yet he is not entirely parodic because the 2. See Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), 70.

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lushness is as much moral as textual, the way to understanding a state of soul as well as a literary mode. The road of excess leads, not to the Palace of Wisdom but to the Halls of Eblis, a dark, limitless place that Borges has called the first really atrocious hell in literature.3 Yet the extravagance is there for its own sake as well, welcomed for the opportunity to enumerate the details of elaborate contexts. Beckford's description of an Edenic plain on the summit of a mountain has all the paraphernalia of an Oriental paradise, the kind of self-sufficient lushness that was there to be touched by the inner senses as well as to define the qualities of a place. But there is a profounder reason for the tonality of Beckford's work, a purpose that is at once richer and more encompassing than any of those I have so far outlined. It has to do not only with the use of Orientalism but with the meaning of it; or rather, with the inseparability of meaning and use. For Beckford, for Byron, for Delacroix, for Chasseriau, the Oriental is the Other, that which takes most of its import from its difference. The Oriental is a version of that which stands over against us and, by virtue of its unlikeness, helps us to understand what we are in ourselves. It is a curious, magic mirror in which, by staring at Otherness, we come to see ourselves more clearly. In the age of Beckford and Byron the need for such clarity was compelling, as we have long recognized, but some commentators on our relation to the exotic feel that the need is not only Beckfordian or Byronic but endemic to all such relations. Edward Said has argued that the Orient is one of Europe's "deepest and most recurring images of the Other." "The Orient," he says, "has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience."4 The concept was put even more succinctly and pointedly by Vincent Crapanzano in the New York Times Book Review: the exotic, he says, is "a sort of antiworld against which we pit ourselves for 3 "Yo afirmo que se trata del primer Infierno realmente atroz de la literatim." See "Sobre el 'Vathek' de William Beckford," in El Aleph (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1957), 190. 4. Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979), 1-2.

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definition." Orientalism, then, is not only about the Other but about Us, and about the Other in its relation to Us. It is, finally, part of the process of self-making, an element in our most essential activity, and it is in that light that Orientalism gains a large part of its meaning for Beckford and his romantic successors. The place it takes in the process is that of a context, a field in which consciousness can seek out its opposite and thereby make it possible for the self to realize itself. The qualities of the context, as well as the tonality that emerges from it, go far toward making the self what it is; but on the other hand, those qualities and tonalities are so closely related to a way of seeing that they are as much a product of the individual self as it is of them. Beckford made out of the world of Vathek a context that is perspicuous and dense with detail, lavish, sensuous, and ironic, a place in which we are always as conscious of where the characters are as of what they are doing in their damnable business. As the narrative moves from one moment of melodrama to another the context moves along and supports those moments, contributing by its own intensity of surface to the concentrated force of the text. The world of Vathek is densely and intensely Other, parading its difference with a mock solemnity that is remarkable for its deftness of touch. For the self in the making, the combination of density and detail means that there is that much more Otherness to deal with, that much more for the self to devour and grow fat on as it seeks out its necessary opposite. Beckford's is a world based on the desire for repletion, on a craving for concreteness that is so ravenous that it cannot be appeased in this life. There is never any danger of satiety, of saying (with Blake) "Enough! or Too much." Hunger and thirst are the impelling forces of Vathek's personality, and all the feasts, the women, the craving for knowledge, are finally instances of his desire to touch at his world in every possible way, from every possible angle. Beckford infused that world with specificity because the more concreteness there is in it the 5. March 11, 1979, p. 12.

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m o r e points there are at which the self can make contact with Otherness and come to realize itself more fully. For the observers of this context, for Beckford as well as his readers, the Caliph Vathek is himself part of that Otherness. He is the object of Beckford's (and our) devouring, as well as being, in himself, the apostle of ingestion. In this elaborate and garish narrative Beckford created a mythology of the self in its absolute hunger, but he also created a mythology for the self in which it could do its essential work. The clarity for which he is admired is designed for that species of consciousness which must always k n o w where it is and what it is about. T h o u g h the text shows a radical uncertainty about the delights of damnation there is never any question about its understanding that the only viable world is an opulent one. Still, there is more to the craving than the quest for some ultimate opulence. T h e intertextual life of Vathek is allied with that of Rasselas, which preceded it by twenty-seven years and stands, if only by contrast, as an eerily accurate guess at what a Beckford would be like. Toward the end of Johnson's text, during a tour through the chambers of a pyramid, Imlac c o m ments on the reasons for the pyramid's existence and concludes that there is no reasonable one: It seems to have been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must always be appeased by some employment. Those who have already all that they can enjoy, must enlarge their desires. He that has built for use, till use is supplied, must begin to build for vanity, and extend his plan to the utmost power of human performance, that he may not be soon reduced to form another wish.6 Johnson was a shrewd observer of the imagination's hungers. The sort he describes here is unceasingly expansive, necessarily so since admitting satisfaction would be a defeat for the imagination. A n u m b e r of pages later, in a chapter entitled " T h e dan6. The History of Rasselas Prince ofAbissinia, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson and Brian Jenkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 85. Subsequent parenthetical text references are to page number.

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gerous prevalence of imagination," he speaks of one of those "disorders of intellect" in which the imagination dominates over reason and the mind is led into the dangerous entertainments of daydreaming: "He who has nothing external that can divert him, must find pleasure in his own thoughts"; that is, he must turn in upon himself, recoil upon himself (114). In so turning he lights upon "some particular train of ideas [that] fixes the attention" and that he learns to love. Eventually, whenever his mind is "offended with the bitterness of truth" it "feasts on the luscious falsehood," devouring that which is of its own making. Thus, the preying of the imagination upon life takes two forms. In one it moves outward incessantly, pillaging all it can find in order to satisfy its intolerable hunger. In the other it turns in upon itself, finding its pleasure in feasting on its own illusions. Yet of course these drives are precisely the same: the feasting within is no different in kind than the feasting without; that which is sui generis is as much a potential prey as that which has been generated by generations of slaves. Rasselas, his sister, and her favorite all confess to an indulgence in daydreaming, to having pondered what it would be like to repress "the pride of the powerful" and realize "the possibility of a perfect government" (115). If there was never any danger of their extending themselves outward and ingesting the opulence of the world, there was clearly the danger of unproductive speculation, of feasting upon the illusory fruits of the mind, and that they quickly renounced. Vathek, of course, renounced nothing before he reached the Halls of Eblis. There, he and his consort Nouronihar find pavements strewn with gold dust and saffron, and they come upon "tables; each spread with a profusion of viands; and wines, of every species, sparkling in vases of crystal."7 But neither they nor the multitudes who wander by with their right hands on their hearts pay any attention to that opulence. Eblis, Beckford's tainted angel, promises them "sufficient objects to 7. Vathek, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 109. Subsequent parenthetical text references are to page number.

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gratify" their curiosity, and in fact Eblis is not lying; the objects are there if they want them ( i n ) . Yet there is no longer a reaching outward in insatiate devouring but, instead, a total concentration on a turning within, a gross and frightening realization ofJohnson's vision of feasting upon the luscious dreams of the self. The famous image of the flaming hearts is a classic rendering of that hunger for consumption which has gone so far in its devouring that there is only self-consumption, hot, agonizing, and inextinguishable, as a residue. Johnson's remarkable guess has behind it Milton's understanding of the meaning of "Myself am Hell," but it took Beckford to objectify it with a literalness whose garishness is part of its accuracy and fascination. The self is never more authentic, more realized and more fully itself, than in this bitter parody of narcissism. But despite all the ingestion Beckford insists that he is not completely taken in by what he has made. If Vathek is addicted to excess Beckford is always aware of the potential for slapstick in that addiction. He is always ready to push the situation too far, partly for the sheer fun of it but partly also to show us, with a nasty grin, that he knows precisely what he is about. There is, of course, the wonderful episode of the Giaour-as-ball, kicked through the palace and the streets by, eventually, most of the people in Vathek's city. The scene is as excessive as any of Vathek's desires, but with its object an ugly and dislikable stranger, and with the magnitude of the people's involvement (only those who cannot walk escape the temptation to kick the ball), it turns into an indulgence in excess for its own sake, an event that is so obviously too much that it becomes comic as much for its too-muchness as for the image of the living ball in its wild parade. At the end of the scene Beckford brings out a heavy handed moralism, showing the sweaty and ragged inhabitants becoming solemn and confused, returning home in embarrassment and self-reproach (20). But that moralism is an excrescence, an unnecessary belaboring; the scene itself was sufficient to make the point. More subtle, with tongue more firmly in cheek, there is this from the first paragraph of the novel:

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[Vathek's] figure was pleasing and majestic; but when he was angry, one of his eyes became so terrible, that no person could bear to behold it; and the wretch upon whom it was fixed, instantly fell backward, and sometimes expired. For fear, however, of depopulating his dominions and making his palace desolate, he but rarely gave way to his anger, (i) T h e mockery of extravagance is so neatly interwoven with the expression of extravagance that each sustains and intensifies the other in a cooperative antagonism. What we see in these instances is not only the range of Beckford's comedy (the area between these extremes is exceedingly rich) but also the way in which he plays with excess to make a variety of points. P r o m inent a m o n g them is his need to make certain that we understand h o w he can distance himself from the extravagances he depicts. T h e result is a vital order that implies a variety of strata or levels within the text. There is one in which the self is bathed in the lusciousness of excess, another in which the self stands detached from all such extremities, fully in possession of itself as well as the material which it has made into excess. Beckford's handling of this order of strata is not always as clean and finely balanced as it is in the examples we have inspected: his ambivalence about the moral issues makes for one of the essentia] tensions in the text, and it also makes clear that the self's detachment was not always accomplished with such neatness. But in those aspects of Vathek which are parodic or mocking—and they bulk large in the novel as a whole—there is generally a carefully established balance between involvement and aloofness that is designed, in part at least, to show that Beckford is no dupe, that he can resist self-consumption. A satire of the tale from within the tale—a satire of excess from within a system of excess—is also a circling of the text upon itself, that kind of recoil which is self-scrutiny. Yet here the point of such a turning is not to devour oneself but, quite the opposite, to prevent a devouring. It is a self-returning gesture that does not consume but creates. It builds a more balanced order in which there is criticism and indulgence, correction and compulsion. Put still

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another way, this intricate balancing act is the gratifying result of a process of self-testing. The self has set out a project for itself that will show if it is so made that it can manipulate a bundle of conflicting desires to the full satisfaction of each. The intensity of Beckford's mockery (which is directed toward us as much as toward the materials of his text) shows his pride in his success. The episode of the Giaour-as-ball is finally a kind of braggadocio, an elaborate flexing of the self's capabilities. So, too, but with a far more reserved tonality, is that gibe in the first paragraph of the text that shows how Beckford can revel in excess and laugh at it at the same time. But he could not, finally, laugh away Eblis. The story ends with the figure of Gulchenrouz, the text's image of the unrealized self. Though there are a few decent characters who turn up in the story, the last paragraph offers only Gulchenrouz and Vathek, a kind of Ur-being and a thoroughly damned one. We cannot escape the conclusion that, with rare exceptions, the fullness of being results in damnation. To realize the self is to send it, almost inevitably, to hell. By this point we have gone beyond Orientalism and are somewhere in that labyrinth of selfhood that led Borges to compare Beckford to Piranesi; yet it is Orientalism that has brought us to that level of understanding. For Beckford, clearly, the traffic with exotica is more than a means of erecting fantasies for the reader and himself. At the end there is a frisson, a shudder of recognition and acknowledgment. Orientalism has permitted the self to show off its glories but it has also linked the luxuriance of surface with the sad opulence of the condemned soul. Thus, the high order of attentiveness to detail that characterizes Beckford's text is more than a matter of that correctness of costume which so impressed Byron. Correctness in those terms means accuracy and authenticity in the rendering of what is seen. But the more significant and encompassing task, the one that gets closest to the center of the life of the text, is a rendering of a way of seeing, and in that Beckford succeeds admirably. Though the elaborate extravaganzas that make up the matter of

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his text tell something about the conventions of Orientalism, they are most eloquent in telling of a way of reading the world. If the elaborate surface of his text is not the product of direct seeing but, instead, of the perusal of other texts, we have to conclude that self-making in Beckford is, in great part, the product of intertextuality. Byron's note on Beckford is very clear and very subtle about the effects of surface and the distinction between mediation and immediacy. Though he too had to depend on a kind of mediation, the tale told by the coffeehouse narrator, he was, after all, there in the Levantine coffeehouse to hear it. All Byron can say of Beckford is that he does not know "from what source the author of that singular volume may have drawn his materials." Yet Byron's insistence on authenticity takes some curious turns, and they lead him into a modality that makes his own Orientalism very different from that of Beckford. In a letter of 15 December 1813, just after The Bride ofAbydos was published, Byron asked Edward Clarke, an experienced Eastern traveler, for his observations on the fidelity of the "manners & dresses" in the new poem. There is, Byron says, "an Oriental twist in my imagination," and he combines it with memory to get his work as close to authenticity as possible. One would expect, then, that The Bride ofAbydos would be as studded with intricacies of detail as Vathek is, and for much the same reasons: since we in the West are so different from that Other which faces us we have to approach it through what we can touch, that is, enter it through its surface. Byron's obsession with authenticity would seem to be based on his desire for a true entering, to make certain that what we touch at with the senses of the mind is genuine in its strangeness. Only thus can he ensure the authenticity of that which is more awesome than any apparel, his vision of the radically Other. When Byron asks an experienced traveler to pronounce on the correctness of his costume he seeks to affirm not only the validity of his facts but the legitimacy of the seeing that makes a context for those facts. This is, he seems to argue, the actually Other; you can believe in all that I say and see because you can believe in these elements

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of texture. T h a t which is ineffably strange can be made acces­ sible t h r o u g h the minutiae of its life. And indeed the introductory stanza of The Bride is rich in its evocation of the immediacies of a Turkish context: Know ye the land of the cedar and vine, Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine, Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppress'd with perfume, Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gul in her bloom; Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit, And the voice of the nightingale never is mute; Where the tints of the earth, and the hues of the sky, In colour though varied, in beauty may vie, And the purple of Ocean is deepest in die. (1.9—13) T h e story begins just after this with an image of gallant slaves and an old despot in his divan. O t h e r bits and pieces of exotic lore follow quickly, their purpose to stress local colors and practices. But once these have been taken into the text their appearance becomes irregular and occasional, and the p o e m shifts its emphasis to personal conflict. Thus, we do not get far into the text before we realize that this p o e m is m o r e interested in personalities and their relationships than it is in the specifici­ ties of their surroundings. In fact, those lush introductory lines have hinted at that special interest. They begin with an echo of Goethe's Kennst du das Land that has nothing in it of Goethe's sense of the Orient as refuge and everything of this land as an image of h u m a n evil: Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime, Where the rage of the vulture—the love of the turtle— Now melt into sorrow—now madden to crime?8 B y r o n is as quick as Beckford in establishing the surface, the milieu of Otherness, but his surfaces press beyond themselves even as they are being established, their liveliness the result not 8. The echo of Goethe was pointed out in the Ε Η. Coleridge edition, 3:157.

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only of their elaborate qualities but of the way those qualities link up with the activities of exotic people. Ruskin said of Byron that he "spoke only of what he had seen, and known; and spoke without exaggeration, without mystery, without enmity, and without mercy."9 We ought to take these comments of Ruskin more seriously than we have, especially when we speculate on Byron's Orientalism and its relation to the modes of managing that material in figures like Beckford and Delacroix. Though he was fascinated by Beckford's correctness and the uniqueness of his imagination there is nothing in Byron of Beckford's grossness or gross exaggeration, nothing of that Orientalist tradition which sought to dazzle through every sort of extremism. The slapstick that makes for some of the finest comedy in Vathek has no place in the tonality of Byron's Oriental tales. Beckford was less a model of demeanor than a source of incident and, more generally, an instance of what a Westerner could do with one kind of Orientalism. The kind that emerges from Byron's tales shifts the emphasis from locale to personality, from the textures of surface to the contours of the self. If the personalities in earlier Orientalism had been little more than sticks—The Arabian Nights is not a repertory of memorable figures—the personalities in Byron's version are at the center of interest. Vathek, his mother, and the gibbering figures that surround them are both intense and flat, their grossness never more than two-dimensional, their passions never quite credible. Byron handles his own figures very differently. Whatever the melodrama of his types they stay within the bounds of possibility. Their selves and their relations with each other are put forth with clarity and a contagious conviction. They have, within their strange and garish worlds, an unmistakable credibility. Yet this is more than a matter of making plausible personalities; once again it also involves the plausibility of the radically 9. The Works ofJohn Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1908), 35:149. See Michael Cooke, The Blind Man Traces the Circle. On the Patterns and Philosophy of Byron's Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 96.

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Other. Byron's efforts to convince us of the authenticity of his vision are directed, finally, toward authenticating a sense of human presence, toward convincing us that what we are being led to see is the actuality of an exotic selfhood. The Otherness to which the textures of his surfaces lead us is a human Otherness, one that shares in humanity with us yet is unequivocally very different in its kind of humanity. Byron's success in this difficult enterprise is frequently remarkable. Though his characters are embedded in their contexts they are rendered with so full a presence that we can separate them from those contexts with little difficulty, as Byron's contemporaries and subsequent history have tended to do. What his Orientalism sought to possess was the personality of the radically Other, and the possession was so intense that it has survived the melodrama and occasional silliness to assert the impressiveness of that personality's presence. Only Delacroix among romantic Orientalists could match him in such rendering. Thus, if Orientalism is, for us, an "antiworld," a lush and necessary Other "against which we pit ourselves for definition," Byronic Orientalism involves a pitting of self against self. It is precisely in that pitting, in the organizing of an order of selves in relationship, that his Orientalism conforms to some of the radical patterns that had been shaping themselves in his work. Byron's was always a poetry about the making of selves, and that making was seen to happen not only within individual poems but in the development of the canon as a whole. That is why we can speak of a continuity of selves within the work, which is not to say that they are all precisely the same (Harold and Manfred are in many ways mirror opposites), but that they all take part in the same process and each has a special place in that rapid thickening of selfhood which is one of the radical desires of the canon. In The Giaour the thickening was dependent, to a great degree, upon a system of likenesses, the congruence of antagonists. It is not simply that two are better than one but that two together make a curious and deadly oneness, a structure that can be fashioned only by counterparts who are partly alike and completely antagonistic. What we can see

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now, in the larger perspective of Orientalism, is that the arrangement of selves that gives cohesion to The Giaour is very much like the arrangement that is essential to Byron's reading of Orientalism: in both cases selves are pitted against selves, and the pitting, however innocent or vicious, results in a more nuanced understanding of the self. If, in The Giaour, the pitting is a murderous one, the Giaour's recognition that "so did he but what I had done" shows an understanding not only of what one or the other is but of what both are when they come together. The Giaour spends the rest of his life brooding over that recognition as well as over the loss of Leila. Orientalism is an equivalent pitting, a mode of self-making that deliberately searches out Otherness in order to understand itself; and that understanding, like the kind the Giaour achieves, is based not only on each alone but, necessarily and aggressively, on both together. Self-making, clearly, is not a parthenogenetic act. Whatever its self-centeredness the Byronic self is never solipsistic: it can be understood fully only in relation to that of which it is conscious, against which it is facing. This pitting of self against self cannot be entirely an encounter of opposites or else the shock of recognition that is central to so many of the situations could not take place. At the beginning of his study of Orientalism Said asserts that "European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self."10 There is plenty of evidence to indicate not only that such surrogateship exists as an important strain in the mode but also that the situation can become terribly complicated when the personality of the radically Other is seen to have aspects of one's own. Vathek is irrevocably Other and yet the sins he commits and learns to acknowledge are those any Western reader can share. Delacroix came to recognize in the citizens of Morocco a model of classical man. As for Byron, the continuity of selves within the canon confirms that the figures in his Oriental tales are of a piece with the other figures in the canon, which is not 10. Orientalism, 3.

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to say that he ignores the Otherness of the figures in the tales (the case is quite the opposite) but that they share enough of the texture and substance of the Harolds and Cains to qualify, though not compromise, their Otherness. Yet there is more to Byron's handling of the matter than this question of the substance shared among the canonical figures. T h e selves depicted in Orientalist texts have a relationship to the purveyors and consumers of those texts that is exceedingly delicate and finely poised. T h o u g h the figure is Oriental it is also a person; though it is O t h e r it is also a man or a woman; to whatever degree it is unlike the spectator it is also (and perhaps equally) like him or her as well; though it is strange it is also universal. The result is a radical tension in Byron's work, a dialectic of the alien and the local, that which is not ours and that which is ours and everyone else's as well. But the result does not end there. To the degree that we are h u m a n we are drawn into the text, sharing in its vital center: Hassan's world is our own insofar as we all share in a world. But we do not share in all of the world, and there is therefore a rebuttal of empathy as well as a persistent reminder of O t h e r ness. T h e effect of that rebuttal is twofold and profound, for eventually we are reminded that these figures and texts are representations, the spawn of artifice: the rebuttal and its attendant reminder tend to draw us away from our absorption in the text and to see it only as semblance. That necessary movement is the contrary, the refusal, the ironical Other of empathy, a very different kind of feeling that may well have a taste of repulsion attached to it. T h e dialectic of these opposing gestures c o m bines with the parallel dialectic of the alien and the local to create the compelling force of these texts, the energy apparent even in a cursory reading and at this late date. Those are the contraries which move the text forward. What we learn from all this is that the pitting of self against self that is necessary to self-making is also the maker of a set of interlocking dialectical patterns, and that those patterns take part in the process of selfmaking because they persistently recall what the self is as well as what it is not. We have seen similar patterns of recognition

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and rebuttal in the early Harold, enough to convince us that Byron did not need to learn his various dialectics from Beckford or any other Orientalist, and that his Orientalism makes possible a continuation of patterns that were already making themselves felt in his work. What we see, in effect, is a central element in Byron's possessing of experience, one that was to be tested in all sorts of ramifications until it found its finest fruition in Don Juan. Still, the interim fruition found in The Giaour, The Bride of Ahydos, and the other Oriental tales was not the whole story of those tales. There are areas in their organization of experience that show no realized dialectic, no necessary contrary to which the self can turn. As a result the self turns to itself, making itself the whole and locus of the dialectic. The outcome is inevitable, emerging in that fiercely self-corrosive recoil we saw in the passage on the scorpion from The Giaour. These lines, familiar as they are, take their full meaning only from the context in which we must place them, and from the position they hold in the compass of Byron's understanding of experience. They are at the point de depart, that initiating from which Byron's comprehension and possession of the world set forth. At the center there is a reading that results in a gesture, and though we cannot see the reading taking place we can see its results in the gesture. It is as radical as anything we shall ever see in Byron. It is worth repeating the point that the recoil of consciousness seems to be the essential movement in Byron's work. As a point of origin it is not only the perception from which all order appears to begin but also the shape of understanding that is endemic to Byron's management of experience. Utterance is a kind of management, and that is why we see the gesture as often as we do, both in the canon and out of it. The order of self-corrosiveness uttered in Harold and the Oriental tales is wonderfully coherent and self-contained, and it remains so until one succeeds in gobbling oneself up. We need no more than ourselves and our experiences to establish an autonomous system. The energies that make the self viable, that give it the impetus for an active interlocking with experi-

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ence, circle in upon themselves and turn lethal. We can gain a further understanding of how the recoil works, and of what and h o w Byron did with the corrosiveness of consciousness, by inspecting similar activities in some non-Orientalist predecessors, Chateaubriand's Rene for example. Europeans, Rene said, are compelled to build solitudes for themselves: "Les Europeens, incessamment agites, sont obliges de se batir des solitudes." 11 He made that observation as he was contemplating life in a monastery. At that time he was testing vocations, that is, seeking out adequate structures of consciousness, structures that would make it possible for him to function in a world he already knew to be alien. Further—and surely as a corollary to that knowledge—he knew that he had somehow to incorporate into the structures an essential sadness that he shared with his sister: "nous avions tous les deux un peu de tristesse au fond du coeur: nous tenions cela de Dieu ou de notre m e r e " (120). He has a way of being in the world that is prior to any conditions and so tenacious that it is impervious to any conditions. Whatever he did with himself he would always have to take that situation into account. T h e result is that consciousness becomes Rene's vocation, precisely as it was to do for Childe Harold. Like the Childe (though with a vagueness and slackness that leave r o o m only for sentimentality), Rene puts together what he is and what he has and becomes a traveling attitude, a peripatetic point of view. His travels make possible his vocation, which is essentially to objectify consciousness. This is not so much low-level romanticism as radical romanticism, a necessary ground and, for Rene and his kind, a sufficient horizon as well. O r so it seems: in fact, his consciousness is underemployed, so much so that even at a time of bliss it hungers for more exercise and objectification, for something else on which to test itself and flex its capabilities: "Dans m o n delire j'avais ete jusqu'a desirer d'eprouver un malheur, pour 11. Chateaubriand, Oeuvres romanesques et voyages, ed. Maurice Regard (Paris. Gallimard, 1969), 1:121. Subsequent parenthetical text references are to page number.

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avoir du moins un objet reel de souffrance" (132). He said this during an ecstatic time when he was reunited with his sister. The desire is, of course, realized in his separation from his sister, who has recognized the dark quality of her love for him and chosen to go into a convent, a stationary solitude in contrast to his traveling one. With the realization of that desire there comes also a realizing of the full capacities of consciousness, which shows that for Rene as for Harold the whole process was one of self-making. The feelings desired were as much for the self as of it, and if they came about in unfortunate circumstances there was at least the thickening of selfhood to look upon as a sort of silver lining in these dark and damp dilemmas. Yet there is more. Rene's relation to his sister is obviously a mode of self-fulfillment through another who is also a likeness. But she prevents the possibility of incest, the extreme of such fulfillment, by withdrawing into that sort of solitude where the dangers in her sisterhood to Rene are countered by becoming a sister to thousands and a virgin bride to Christ. Her kinship with Rene has been satisfying and unnerving; in the convent she eases those tensions for the sake of a sad safety in a larger clan. She does not shift the structure of the situation but its content, and thereby she both continues the structure and saves herself. And what she saves herself from, it is clear, is the potential of a form of self-devouring. An incestuous relationship puts a version of oneself out there (especially when, as in so many romantic instances, the sister and brother resemble each other), and the relationship is therefore a version of recoil, a turning upon oneself. Each is the other's likeness and contrary, and since they are so closely linked in so many ways we are very close to the situation we saw in Harold's song "To Inez," one in which the self is its own contrary, its own necessary Other. Of course an incestuous relationship, like so many other kinds, is a mode of self-making, but it is most closely allied to those solipsistic situations in which the self makes itself out of itself; indeed, incest is one of the aptest metaphors for such situations.

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Amelie fled into the larger condition to escape the potential for self-consumption that she foresaw for herself and Rene. But if she manages to avoid a recoil Rene not only finds one but welcomes it: ο mes amis, je sus done ce que c'etait que de verser des larmes pour un mal qui n'etait point imaginaire! Mes passions, si longtemps mdeterminees, se precipiterent sur cette premiere proie avec fureur. Je trouvai meme une sort de satisfaction inattendue dans la plenitude de mon chagrin, etje m'apercus, avec un secret mouvement dejoie, que la douleur n'est pas une affection qu'on epuise comme le plaisir. (140-41)

H e has found a way to give form to his shapeless feelings ("pas­ sions . . . indeterminees"), to appease the imagination's hunger. In an image that Samuel Johnson would have under­ stood, the craving of Rene's passions leads them to leap fer­ vently u p o n their prey because it is a way for t h e m to objectify themselves. Rene has come u p o n an inexhaustible source of stimulation for the self, one in which it forever feasts upon itself. Chateaubriand was fully aware of the i m p o r t of that ges­ ture, of its function as a recoil of self upon self and of what that meant to the way Rene was in his world. In the 1805 Preface to the text he points to an extract from the Genie du christianisme. There he speaks of y o u n g faculties that are "renfermees" and " n e se sont exercees que sur elles-memes, sans but et sans objet" ( i n ) . H e also points out h o w "le coeur se retourne et se replie en cent manieres" (112). And in a passage from the Genie that was not quoted in the 1805 Preface he goes on to say that "le vague m e m e ou la melancolie plonge les sentiments, est ce qui la fait renaitre; car elle s'engendre au milieu des passions, lorsque ces passions, sans objet, se consument d'elles-memes dans u n coeur solitaire" (1199). Chateaubriand understands the structure of the self-consuming personality and its secret j o y in finding an active order of self that the self, by its o w n efforts, seems forever able to perpetuate. Rene learns to feed u p o n his unending woe, creating for the self a continual supply of energy, a self-generating activity limited only by his o w n m o r -

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tality. This, it is clear, is the structure of consciousness that fits best with his built-in needs and desires, with the privileged tristesse that has priority over all other conditions and with the solitude for which he has had to build a way of being in the world. The fact that the order cannot last is finally less remarkable than the fact that it exists at all. There is no equivalent sense of satisfaction in the selfdevouring that consumes Byron's figures. They too feed upon their own substance, the Giaour most graphically, but there is in them no need to leap upon genuine pain in order to find a corollary from outside the self for the woes that were born within it. Even Childe Harold, the first victim of the corrosiveness of consciousness, is given at least a semblance of cause, the substance of his faqade. Harold's tristesse is not genetic but the result of too much fun, a great deal of self-pity, and a touch of frustration. If he is caught up in the contours of his selfhood those contours are not entirely the product of parthenogenesis. Even in the Hours of Idleness there is an understanding that the content of the self, however skimpily expressed, could not be self-generated to the extent that it was in Rene. There was always something out there to get things going. Rene's obvious pleasure in the unimaginary mal comes from a realizing of self, from a more satisfying intentionality. Byron's figures went through a different kind of history before they arrived at the condition of self-consumption that is most fully realized in the suicidal scorpion. But if those figures have long-standing cause to feed upon themselves, there is nothing in the Oriental tales equivalent to the attempt in Vathek to establish a saving dialectic. Beckford's comedy, as we have seen, was in part a willful distancing of the self from the mad grotesquerie that was so enticing in its excess, and one of the points of that distancing was to show a self so complex, so aware, and so in control that it could not be entirely taken in by all that luxurious self-consumption. The imperfect success of the distancing is less significant, finally, than the fact that it is there at all, and that Beckford was perceptive enough to see the need for it. Beckford in Vathek was more

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advanced than Byron in his Oriental tales. Of the variety of things Byron could have learned from his predecessor he was not yet ready to learn this difficult lesson in balance, or else he did not learn it sufficiently well to be able to use it as a contrary to the self-devouring that was endemic in his tales. We can only speculate on all the reasons for this but some seem clear, particularly the rush of texts and figures from Harold on, as though he were building his own museum, and also the urge to give substance to a selfhood (however corrosive) that could be fully in the world. Beckford leaped from Orientalism directly to damnation, spending little effort on the making of figures who would be more than pasteboard. But for Byron the human person was so central in the world, so much, finally, its essential point (however much the world was acid and overwhelming), that he had to inspect the content of the corroded self in all its plenitude. It is as though he had to establish the ground as fully as possible before he found a way to rise above it with a saving aloofness. Beckford's model of such a dialectic came too early for immediate use but it was surely one of the factors, however subliminally recalled, that went into the magnificent dialectic of Don Juan. But there was fruition of a sort even in his most garish Orientalism. When Byron is working at his best the tensions between the components of his dialectical patterns, particularly those in which Otherness is sought out for the sake of self-definition, resolve into the tensions and qualities of the text. Whether we argue, along with Said, that this making of tensions is a gratuitous and self-serving distortion—what one might call an imperialism of the imagination—or whether we argue, along with Crapanzano, that it is a necessary gesture— one in which a self and a culture are indistinguishable—it is clear not only that these acts of representation are ultimately acts of self-making, but that the satisfaction of this need explains one of the central paradoxes of Byron's Orientalism. When The Bride ofAbydos was in the final stages of production Byron sent to Murray what he called "a note for the ignorant" and added, "I don't care one lump of Sugar for my poetry—but

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for my costume—and my correctness on those points (of which I think the funeral was a proof) I will combat lustily" (LJ 3:165). Yet when we compare Byron to Beckford, who intrigued him, or Delacroix, who was moved by his representations, this poet with a passion for accuracy and authenticity is seen to be the least detailed of the lot. Though he points out that his work is more immediate than Beckford's, the immediacy he renders is less the touch of picturesque places than the feel of an exotic selfhood; and though the textures we touch can lead to that feel, though they are a necessary component of our ultimate understanding, at the center of self there is, for Byron, only the presence of absolute selfhood. Keats knew that at that center there would be only an "embalmed darkness," that in his pursuit of the nightingale he would go into depths where he could only guess at any sensuousness that was there. For Byron the center was beyond all sensuousness, beyond Beckford's many-faceted lasciviousness, beyond that touch of stuff and elegance of gesture which so fascinated Delacroix. •

And yet Delacroix seems to have understood this aspect of Byron, in part, surely, because it was congruent with elements of his own dramatic and intensely sensuous Orientalism. The scenes Delacroix took from Byron's poems and plays, Oriental or otherwise, are scenes of encounter or its aftermath, usually the making of a death or the dying of one. Delacroix shares Byron's sense that the meeting of antagonists in conflict is elemental and endemic, and that the rendering of such meetings is requisite in any comprehensive reading of experience, whatever the context or climate. To touch at an encounter is to touch at one of the essentials of our lives. For Byron, the purest of humanists, the encounters are either those among men or, occasionally, of men with the implacable Otherness of nature or the gods. The encounters were focused on—indeed, very likely to be caused by—the intensity of personality, and that was as true for his Oriental tales as for the exploits of Marino Faliero or Don Juan. This focus was one of the elements in the congruence

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of Byron and Delacroix. Delacroix's borrowings from Byron are inevitably explorations of personality, whatever the context, and the borrowings from the Oriental tales always center on events brought about by the energies of an extraordinary selfhood. Delacroix's earliest encounters with Byron's work centered on questions of energy and the conceiving of it. In a journal entry for 14 May 1824 Delacroix pondered the impulse to create that had been raised up within him by reading an account of Byron. 12 He speaks of the optimum conditions for creativity and of course he examines his own case. He sees in himself a requisite loneliness, a solitude that torments him but has to be at work if the self of the author is to function most effectively. For it is only in conditions of that sort that he can give himself completely to the treasury of self, undistracted by the need to give himself to others. His attention has to be centripetal, pointed within rather than without, self-centered in the most literal sense. He has to circle in upon himself—in effect, perform an act of recoil—in order to get at the best that selfhood can offer. That best, he argues, is the appearance of his selfhood within his work. Self will project itself into the painting, examine itself there, reveal itself constantly. When that happens his self will be able to contact others because all souls, he says, will meet in his painting ("toutes les ames se retrouvent dans votre peinture" [102]). Thus, to circle back into oneself does not mean that one foresakes others but, rather, that one will encounter those others within the world of the painting, on a plane where contacts of a special profundity, peculiar to that place and case, become possible. Putting aside other questions for the moment, we can see that Delacroix figures the process of art-making as a graceful, ener12. Eugene Delacroix, Journal, ed. AndreJoubin (Paris: Libraine Plon, 1950), 1:102. Subsequent parenthetical text references are to page number George Heard Hamilton has argued that Delacroix was reading Amedee Pichot's Essai sur le genie et le caraclere de lord Byron, published in 1823 and incorporated in Pichot's translation of Byron's collected works. See Hamilton, "Eugene Delacroix and Lord Byron," Gazette des Beaux Arts, 6th ser., 23 (1943): 108-110.

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getic curve, a line of subtle and elaborate symmetry that swoops down into the depths of the self and then swerves outward to come to rest within the world of the painting. It is a segment of an S-curve, a zigzag of the sort that Rene Huyghe sees as prominent in Delacroix's later work but that in fact can be found in much of his earlier work as well.13 Delacroix conceives of creativity in terms of an elemental shape that turns up often in his painting and lends to it a special sort of informing energy. But there is far more to the curve of creativity than its elegant, exuberant symmetry: it serves as a linking gesture connecting the world of the work and the world outside the work, keeping the distinctions between them clear but assuring that those separate worlds will be seen to have elaborate relations with each other. In its character as a unifying line this curve forms one of a series of shapes in Delacroix, the purpose of which is to bring together objects, creatures or elements that may be quite different from each other—indeed, that may well be antagonistic—but are linked for a moment in a highly charged relationship. The shapes tend both to circumscribe a meeting of forces and to unify those forces. For example, in the 1827 version of The Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha, imaging the battle in Byron's poem, the main antagonists stand over against each other, occupying, as a group, the central space of the painting. Winding among the figures is a series of interlocking rhythms, some parallel, some contrary—including, among other elements, the lines of the saddle, the contours of the horses, the scabbards and weapons. The series draws the figures into an intricate web in which each is linked to the other by lines of force, though they are literally separate. Further, the group as a whole is contained within a nearly rectangular outline whose stately rhythms are enlivened by the jutting curve at the lower right, which reaches out and encloses the crouching Arab. The curve brings him within the world of the web, just 13. Rene Huyghe, Delacroix, trans. Jonathan Griffin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), 416.

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at its edge, at the periphery of its deadly life; but the seated antagonists have eyes only for each other, just as they did in Byron's poem. The world, in the person of the crouching figure, threatens to intervene in their private encounter, though the rest of the world has no business there. But the curve that encloses the figure is an excrescence that has no place in rectangular structures, that is, in the shape that seeks to enclose the meeting of the Giaour and the pasha. The Arab on his knees is important because he is potentially deadly, a threat to the horse he seems to be seeking to hamstring. But, dangerous as he is, he remains irrelevant to the two figures who are linked in the fullness of their encounter and have no room within that fullness for the rest of the world, however rich the space that contains them. Delacroix puts the horsemen into a finely tuned relationship, not only with each other but also with the space within their tightly circumscribed arena and with the space outside that network. Though the lines of the web interflow, the figures sit tall and apart. Though each is at one with his horse, and the edges of the horses blend together, the antagonists sit as separate masses, occupying separate parcels of space within the form which encloses them. Balanced on the fine legs of the horses, which hardly seem firm enough to keep all this energy upright, the antagonists unite in their encounter but still stay distant enough to keep off death for a while. Separated from the rest of the battle they sit separately from each other, though each has a part in the intimate struggle that links them together. No event in Byron's text matches this scene precisely. Delacroix had been working with the poem for some time, at least since that date in May 1824 when a reading of Byron had set him meditating on the curve of creativity. Several days before that he had read part of The Giaour and felt compelled to do a series from it ("il faut en faire une suite" [98]). A day later he admired Byron's sublimity, mulling over scenes from the poem such as the death of Hassan, and the Giaour contemplating his victim, both of which were to figure in Delacroix's subsequent work. He was also taken by the image of vultures sharpening their beaks before the battle, which appears in the poem, and

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by the thought of "les etreintes des guerriers qui se saissisent" (99-100), which has no specific visual referent in Byron's text. That generalized image of embracing warriors, in part because it is generalized, has a far broader effect than any of the individualized scenes Delacroix imagines. It is a peculiarly intimate encounter ("etreintes"), which implies a kind of reflexive symmetry ("se saissisent"). It finds its counterpart in several formulations in Byron's text, for example this sentence from the Giaour's brief speech just after he has killed his opponent: "Her spirit pointed well the steel I Which taught that felon heart to feel." In fact these lines lead us back to Delacroix in several ways. With their reference to pointing and their placement of the sword at the middle of the sentence the lines are the nearest in the poem to the scene in Delacroix's 1827 painting, where the pointed sword juts out from the center of the tiny world in which the Giaour and the pasha face each other. The lines are also one of the Byronic counterparts to that symmetrical meeting of contraries, the embrace of antagonists, which seems to have obsessed Delacroix and also appears regularly in Byron's work. At this point Delacroix's fascination with Byron goes beyond the enticements of narrative and exotic locale and toward a perception of the contours of experience that is as deeply ingrained in Byron as it is in Delacroix himself. (We may well want to argue that part of Delacroix's fascination is, in fact, a shock of recognition.) Byron's sentence holds a symmetry that involves all the protagonists of his poem in a network of love and death, a web that binds them together in the survivor's mind long after the events are over. Its structure is not adventitious or tangential but crucial to the shape of the connections it describes and, ultimately, to the order of the poem in which they appear. What Byron does in the sentence stands as a microcosmic rendering of what he does in the poem, setting up a complex of interrelationships in which Hassan and the Giaour come to be linked in various ways through the death of Leila. Before the Giaour came to point his steel at Hassan, the unfaithful Leila had been killed. Just after her death the Giaour had ridden off, stopping once to stand in his stirrups and stare,

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brooding, back at the town (a scene Gericault made into a lithograph in 1820). Hassan himself could not escape the event. With an elaborate palace around him and a houseful of women to choose from, he still finds no satisfaction in his revenge. The murder he arranged affects him with as much pain as it affected Leila's lover. We saw the results of their bitter symmetry in the previous chapter. It is these qualities and relationships, these doublings of attitude and energy, that Delacroix images in his 1827 painting. The energies of the separate selves reach out into the world and link the antagonists to each other. The activation of those energies in space makes space itself a creator of meaning, a participant in shaping the import of this elegant, violent encounter. Space becomes an element of signification because the modes in which the figures occupy space themselves form an image of the ironic Briiderschaft, the grim and deadly doubling, that makes this meeting inevitable. If the forms of each horse-andrider combination are abstracted from their content, those forms show nearly identical contours; and the forms seem ready to be whirled around in a wild horizontal circle (going into the space of the painting and back out toward the picture plane) by the mirror-image linking of the horses' shapes. The antagonists are joined by the energy of their antagonism, coupled in a hatred that is the necessary result of the coupling in love of Leila and the Giaour. As all souls meet in Delacroix's painting, brought together by the curve of creativity, so do the souls of the Giaour and the pasha meet in the space of their hatred. But the encounter is not yet complete: there is still light and sky between the figures, still, therefore, an unfinished communion. Eight years later, in Delacroix's 1835 version of the theme, they came together to the ultimate point. The separate parcels of space fold in upon each other, collapsing into a single space and condensing the energies of encounter in the pressures of the final moment. The symmetries have grown dense and compressed, their components sharing in (and in part creating) the extraordinary force of this second of extremity. Where the

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1827 version caught our eyes by the gorgeousness of texture, here the surface is played down to permit the energy of the meeting of masses to hold our primary attention. The horses have been bloodied, the mirror-image symmetry of their earlier meeting broken up by the collapsing of space and the violence of encounter. The Arab who had been crouching on the right lies underneath and dead, separated from his knife: that maddeningly intrusive figure who sought to spoil the perfection of the duel has been crushed in and by the antagonism of the horsemen. The Giaour and pasha are left alone with each other, the earlier identity of separate forms giving way to their sharing of a single form in a lethal coupling. Delacroix has given shape to Byron's vision of their unification through violence. There is a sense, a very important one, in which Delacroix's reading of Byron is, at once, a reading of both. The congruence of antagonists, linked inside of a space that contains and defines the contours of their conflict, appears not only in these images from Byron but in a number of other works as well, scenes in which there is a sudden encounter between figures who may never have met but have come, for a fateful moment, into an intense (and most likely deadly) relation. The major lion hunts take these forms, as do many of the other scenes of animals combating men or at prey to each other. (Sometimes, as in his painting from Byron's Bride of Abydos, the linked figures are neither antagonists nor strangers, yet they too come together in the same feverish symmetry.) Those symmetries of structure in which antagonists take part in a harmonious shape without losing their antagonism turn up as often in Byron as they do in Delacroix, and with equal significance. It is finally in what those symmetries point to, the question of the productive ordering of energy, that Delacroix seems to have been touched most deeply by his reading of Byron. Energy fascinates, not only for its exuberance but for the challenge to order that it poses. Both Byron and Delacroix sought to contain energy, "contain" in this context meaning to have and to control, to own and to shape. They sought to possess violence rather than to be possessed by it. To be possessed is to be taken over by

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hostile forces; to possess is to take over those forces and turn them into patterns of active power—power that is productive even if it produces no more than lethal effects. That is precisely what Byron and Delacroix did in their respective giaours. The radical forms of encounter in the poem and the two paintings, the forms that embody both exchange (because each comes to share in the essence of the other) and enmity (because each wants to destroy the essence of the other), are instruments for controlling the potential for dissolution in the enactment of energy. The paradoxical act of making so much symmetry out of so much hatred is a means of centering energy and managing dissipation. In Byron's case the awareness of a tearing energy in the self links up with his intuitive search for counterparts for the self, and that linking makes possible a conception of literary order in which he can, in effect, do anything he wants. What W. H. Marshall has shown about the accretive structure of The Giaour is important for clarifying how Byron's poem got to be the way it is. But the point is that with so radical a conception as the congruent antagonists always in his mind, with that conception at the basis of everything he added to the poem, The Giaour would never lose its essential order, the essential form that shaped the experience. This was one of the most important lessons Byron learned from the poem, because it helped him to understand what he could do with Don Juan, which worked in related ways. But The Giaour is more than a prefiguration of Juan. It is a testing of possibilities, an experiment in so managing artifice that all the vagaries and corrosiveness of self could be eased into the felicities of form. Underlying this achievement is the persistent awareness that the self can be as destructive as the material it depicts. Delacroix, like Beckford and Samuel Johnson, spoke of imagination as a fatal gift. Only artifice, it seems, can counter that destructiveness by finding a way to use the compulsive thrusts of the self, to turn the corrosive into the creative. Delacroix's penchant for violence—the dandy fascinated by ferocity and engagement—shows that he was sensing much the same kind of thing that Byron knew. What we see in both is the

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search for a mode of possessing violence that would counter the self's possession by violence. That is one of the essential places where Byron and Delacroix met. There are other meeting places as well, though none has the radical importance of the one we have just explored. The surfaces of Delacroix's work do as Byron's did, that is, they press beyond themselves even as they are being established, and they press toward the mysteries of personality. Beyond those surfaces is a selfhood that is remarkably self-possessed, not only aloof in its Otherness but in that total self-containedness and autonomy that bespeak a complete personality, one that needs nothing beyond itself. This is as true of Delacroix's tigers as it is of his Turks and North Africans. It is as true of the women of Algiers as it is of Morocco's sultan. Indeed, it is as true in stasis as it is in violence, in those moments between encounters as in the encounters themselves. Delacroix's Orientalism, unlike Byron's, dwells as much on those interim moments as it does on those points of intensity. With the late exception of the harem scene in Don Juan, Byron had little interest in that languidness which was as much a part of popular Orientalism as were the images of human violence. There are few points of rest in his Oriental tales and none of that sense of sensuality in repose that was as characteristic of Delacroix's Orientalism as were the Byronic encounters. The women of Algiers stare at us and each other with an open curiosity that could, we imagine, quite easily become purposeful. So for that matter does the Sultan of Morocco, though clearly to a different purpose. In a work like The Smoker, for example, the figure reposes on a couch in subdued, easeful elegance, while the couch itself acts as a stage in surrounding and setting off the figure, making a central space in which that elegance can realize itself. Further, the drapery and the wall have all the function of a backdrop, closing off segments of space in order to put more fully to the fore that space in which the figure resides. And it resides there in the fullest self-containment, totally present to itself, needing nothing beyond its own immediacy, the pipe, and that enclo-

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sure complete with thick cushions on which the figure gracefully rests its weight. The handling of space makes possible that sense of presence while the handling of the figure, particularly the distribution of weight, lends the figure a tensile strength, a subdued intentness that makes its languidness alert with possibility, with a potential purpose. Yet Delacroix is taken not only with the self's presence, which his figure has absolutely, but also with the concomitant presence of the phenomenal world. From the lightly bejeweled turban to the tiger skin and the textures and patterns of the various stuffs, the painting pores over the surfaces of things, their repose the equivalent of the smoker's repose, their elegance the counterpart of his elegance, their presence as intense and self-sufficient as his own. That presence is not the result of a concentration in space but, quite the opposite, of the distribution of the emphatic surfaces: nearly every area of the painting contributes to that subdued but dense intensity which characterizes the surfaces. What we have in Delacroix slights neither self nor surface but, instead, sets up a dialectic of the two, an assiduous relation and alternation of figure and context in which the presence of each is offered as a counterpart and complement to that of the other. The dialectic is the result of a difficult and delicate balance, and that balance is at the center of Delacroix's understanding of Orientalism. In his study of Orientalism in painting Philippe Julian speaks of the association of the East with treasure, and of Delacroix as the most successful of painters in rendering that association.14 But Delacroix is doing more than perfecting a segment of popular Orientalism. If he is obsessed with those surfaces and things that make a context for the self, he is equally obsessed with the interplay of what we can touch and what we can only intuit. He differs from Beckford and Byron because his is an opulence of both treasure and personality, and that pairing means that the elements of his Oriental work differ in texture and relationship from those of his predecessors. That seems to explain, for example, why his surfaces do not often have the 14. Orientalism (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1977), 84

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sort of precise, hard-edged specificity one finds in the equally opulent Beckford. If Delacroix's surfaces are different from Beckford's that is because those surfaces have a different relationship to the totality of the world that he sees. Delacroix's representations are, like all representations, the result of an act of possession, and that possessing, in its turn, is the agent of an idiosyncratic way of seeing. Though Orientalism may be, from one point of view, an imperialism of the imagination, it must also be understood as a mode through which the self authenticates itself, not only by testing itself against Otherness but also by rendering the way in which it sees that Otherness and seeks to possess it. The Orientalisms of Beckford, Byron, and Delacroix speak not only of facets of popular culture but of modes of possessing experience. They are as much about the act of possessing as of what is being possessed; that is, they are about representation as well as being themselves representations. Orientalist works are put together by craftsmen who are necessarily very different from what they are seeing. Because of our awareness of that difference, of their separateness from their subject, we come to focus with special intensity on the work as a representation of that seeing, as the result of the artist's possession of that which is quite unlike himself. The sense of a gap is inseparable from our experience of Orientalism. Mallarme seems to have had something like this in mind when, in his "Preface a 'Vathek,' " he said that Beckford wrote his work in French because he wanted to be solemn about a task that was "differente de tout ce qui allait etre la vie."15 Orientalism is the composing of such differences but it is also the composing of selves, both those within the text and those which make and encounter it. What we should say, finally, is that it is the composing of selves in their differences, not only in their separateness from the Other but in their separateness from each other. It is about the Other in relation to Us but also, finally, about Us in our relation to ourselves. 15. Oeuvres Completes, ed Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Pans: Galhmard, 1945), 582.

4 Continuing Manfred IN HIS Byron: A Survey Bernard Blackstone points out some of the ways in which the beginnings of the four cantos of Harold relate to each other. The movement toward canto 4's comments on "the beings of the mind" recalls the movement in canto 3 toward "the soul's haunted cell." At that same point in canto 2 Harold plays Hamlet with a skull in view, a series of reflections echoing a similar sequence at just that point in canto 1.1 Blackstone is surely correct in his sense of the rhythms of repetition in Byron's poem, but those rhythms go much deeper and take in a far larger sweep of the canon and its concerns than the instances to which he refers. Indeed, those rhythms are so crucial to Byron's understanding of the way the world works (and the way the self works in the world) that they will occupy us, in one way or another, for the rest of this study. Yet they have already caught our attention: the echoes and mirrors of self that appear from the early Harold on are instances of those rhythms at work. Their movements grow more vigorous as the canon develops and as Byron comes to see the full extent of the rhythms' significance. They appear with particular vigor at the beginning of the third canto of Harold, which sets out an intricate interplay of disjunction and repetition, continuity and separation, endings and beginnings. Yet there is a sense in which that interplay began before the canto's beginning, because it starts out by stretching back to the conclusion of the previous canto to make one of its major points. This is a crucial and timely experiment in undoing beginnings and endings. It carries on the line of experiments with closure seen in The Giaour and other texts, all of them testings that lead eventually to the mode of Don Juan. In the last stanza of the second canto the narrator addresses 1. Bernard Blackstone, Byron: A Survey, London: Longman, 1975. ( 102 )

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"vain days": "full reckless may ye flow, I Since Time hath reft whate'er my soul enjoy'd." (2.98.7-9). Time is the maker of disjunctions, the fashioner of those snappings-off which this and the previous canto dwelt on from their earliest points. But the epigraph that begins the third canto has other comments to make about time and its workings, and they flatly contradict those which ended the previous canto: "Afin que cette application vous forcat a penser a autre chose. II n'y a en verite de remede que celui-la et le temps." Those lines are taken from a letter of Frederick the Great to D'Alembert. The latter having lost a friend, the king proposed "quelque probleme bien difficile a resoudre" as a way of diverting D'Alembert's mind (McGann, 2:76). Only such diversions, and time itself, are sufficient remedies. Time, then, is all that it was not just a few lines (and one canto) earlier: it is the undoer of disjunctions, the fashioner of those plasterings-over which, one has to hope, will follow in the subsequent cantos. The interplay of this and the previous comment is brief, incisive, and unsettling. It reneges on what it gives with a celerity matched only by the speed with which it gives (or seems to give) things back again. We are left with a handful of ironies and an awareness of what Byron has come to see of the perplexities of continuity. By linking the second and third cantos the echoes assert and reinforce the continuity of the entire poem. But by flatly contradicting what the earlier stanza said about the relations of time and disjunction, the echoes create the very disjunction they deny. And there is more of such play at hand. As though to assert that matters of repetition are to be found in every corner, that there are mirrors on every wall and that this world is made up of walls, Byron puts those matters into the makeup of the mode in which he discusses them. He does at the beginning of the third canto what he did at the beginning of the first, proffering, through an epigraph, a set of instructions for reading what is to follow. Thus, the mode through which he introduces the question of continuity contains an echo of an earlier gesture. That is, it acts out what it asserts. An introduction so intense, so dense and self-regarding, has the proper force and weight for what is to

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be so important an issue: difference and continuity are grounded deep within the canto, not only sketching the shapes of repetition but questioning, at times, whether repetition is fully, genuinely, possible. Canto 3 was published by itself on 18 November 1816, some four and a half years after cantos 1 and 2. No reader having the new volume in hand could be expected to notice the play of ends and beginnings that the prefatory quote introduces, and he would therefore have to receive his precise instructions for reading from other sources. Byron supplies them so liberally at the beginning of the canto that they come on like an onslaught. That sort of continuity which stems from the relations of parent and child turns up just after the epigraph from Frederick; and yet part of that linkage is questioned even as it is expressed, the speaker wondering whether his child's face is like that of her mother, whether it repeats or stops the pattern. Whatever the case, there is certainly no continuity in what he is doing now: when he and his child last parted they did so "not as we now part, I But with a hope" (3.1.3-4). Nor is there an unimpeded linkage in what he is now about to do: the uncertainty of a beginning—"I depart, I Whither I know not" (3.1.7-8)—is matched by the uncertainty of endings and beginnings accomplished by the epigraph. At this point in the text there are, it seems, only shifting grounds to stand on. Endings and beginnings are as hard to pin down as the junctures in the sea on which the narrator now sets out (the sea the aptest image for all the shiftiness he describes, the aptest place imaginable to tell of more of the same). His voice now clearly quasi-Byronic, he speaks in the first stanza about his setting sail from home, though, as he says, "the hour's gone by, / When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye" (3.1.8-9). Those lines arc a bold and open echo of Harold's departure from England at the beginning of canto 1. Perhaps, because of their boldness, the echo is apparent to many readers; yet this time it is the quasi-Byronic figure who is doing these things and not the melancholy Harold. If he echoes what Harold did he links up with his hero's earliest acts;

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yet since it is he who now does the departing and not his desolate hero, the continuity between the cantos is partly qualified, that is to say, partly dissolved into disjunction and difference. Still, even with that disjunction we can see a continuity among three selves. One is the self of the fictive hero, the second the self of the narrator (who shares characteristics with Byron but is, unlike Byron, a voice from inside the fiction, himself a fiction). The third is the self of George Gordon Lord Byron, who has a daughter named Ada and, as everyone knows, has written some melancholy poems and has left his wife and his country. In the second and third stanzas that interplay continues and affirms the continuity of selves, the third stanza in particular reminding the reader of "One, / The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind," whom the voice sang of in his own "youth's summer" (3.3.1-2). Yet Byron is much too canny to leave it at only the continuity of his canon and the selves attached to it. The second stanza repeated, in a manner not to be mistaken, the beginning of Lycidas: "Once more upon the waters! yet once more!" so patently echoes the first line of Milton's monody about death by water ("Yet once more, 0 ye laurels, and once more") that Byron's canto takes on another sort of life and other sorts of continuities. The literary life of these cantos is profoundly intertextual, reaching back through a slew of beginnings. If any is fully definitive—stopping at Milton or Spenser will in no way end their play—he never points it out. By the time one gets through the third stanza, the questioning of continuity that appeared so strongly in the first is likely to be a dim memory at best. It is therefore time to unsettle complacency, and the fourth stanza does just that. His young days of passion having unstrung the self as instrument (his "heart and harp"), he may not be able to continue his acts and his canon: "it may be, that in vain 11 would essay as I have sung to sing" (3.4.3-4); and yet he holds on to this "dreary strain," hoping to continue a linkage with the old so that it will "fling I forgetfulness around me" (3.4.7-8). The irony is at its brightest, fiercest, funniest at this point: he wants to hold on to the old so that he can break with the old, to remember so that

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he can forget. The celerity of his reneging is as startling as the flash of wit that brings it about. His giving and partial retaking echo the counterpart play of wit we saw in the epigraph. The paradox in stanza 4 is as precise, incisive, and unsettling as its predecessor, as effective in unloosing conclusions. By November 1816, these matters of sequence and fracture, begin­ nings and endings that do not quite do all we expect them to do, had become obsessive. We are less than two years away from the earliest cantos of Juan and the mode in which those matters found their finest, most fluent form. They take the form they do in this canto and the quizzical fourth stanza because he is setting about on a search for ways to dull parts of the self. The paradox of the fourth stanza continues in the fifth as he tells why thought moves into the "lone caves" of the self, those caves an updated version of the well-stocked larder of the self seen in the earlier cantos. Here they enclose a content composed of "airy images, and shapes which dwell / Still unimpair'd, though old, in the soul's haunted cell" (3.5.89). The paradox continues, as does the play of continuity and disjunction, because he is still seeking to fling forgetfulness around him, to break off the hold of the past by using elements from the past—this time old but unimpaired shapes that will figure in texts. It is usual to see these stanzas as showing how art becomes diversion, compensation, a patch for pain. And yet what the speaker seeks is much more complex than that, more respectful of art than that. It is as though he cannot bear the thought of the vacancy that would occur if he were to thoroughly blot out the past. He turns, for his own reasons, to doing what Harold did with Sap­ pho's landscape and what Manfred was to do all over his own: people the vacancy that is left. He tells in the fourteenth stanza of the Chaldean who "could watch the stars, / Till he had peo­ pled them with beings bright I As their own beams; and earth, and earth-born jars, / And human frailties, were forgotten quite" (3.14.1-4). Perhaps he populates places because, if they stay vacant, the old figures will return. Perhaps he does so because the self craves places where it can extend itself, keep on

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with its acts and encounters, and if the old places no longer w o r k then n e w ones will have to be made. All of these reasons are plausible, and there are more. The craving for a continuity of being that was figured at the beginning of the canto in the remedies life brings and in the linking with those we have borne appears here too. Here there are other beings we have made, no Ada this time, in w h o m our blood goes on, but those of the fancy, which continue our thoughts and feelings. In order to u n m a k e parts of his selfhood, to fracture links with the past, he sets out to make new selves to inhabit his texts. N o t only will those figures people the vacant spaces in the enclosure of self, but they will establish new continuities to replace the old that have been blotted out. "Gaining as we give I T h e life we image" (3.6.3-4), we increase the range of our selfhood by drawing on the larder the selfhood holds in some of its strata. To dip into that larder is in fact to stock other strata with more than they had before. And we also set up links with that which has newly come out of us, for not only do we gain additional life but we go where that n e w life goes: What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou, Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth, Invisible but gazing, as I glow Mix'd with thy spirit, blended with thy birth, And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feeling's dearth. (3-6 5-9)

Ending and beginning occur in the same act. Peopling blots and bears, unmakes and makes, all in a single gesture. It is becoming more and more difficult to speak of beginnings and endings with the ease and confidence we are used to, given the evidence we have seen of the uncertainties of each, of their refusal to stay put and rounded out. They too, it n o w seems clear, seek continuities for themselves. And the speaker seeks even more, what he has done not nearly enough to quench his compulsion for continuity—a compulsion that, we are n o w beginning to suspect, owes as m u c h to fear of disjunction as to the positive effects of linkage. In stanza 6 he j o y e d in being mixed with the spirit of his crea-

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tions, blended with their birth. That mixing and blending will appear once again in the famous stanzas on nature, which con­ tinue with passionate intensity the questions worked out in the introductory stanzas. Indeed, they so patently continue the ear­ lier stanzas that they take much of their life from what those stanzas were working out and from the instructions they offer for reading. In stanzas 5 and 6 the self stretches itself to go forth and traverse earth with its creations. Yet the self does not lose itself fully in its creations but holds on to its separate awareness of the world and its separate awareness of itself, "invisible but gazing." We have to note this careful balance because we cannot read stanzas 72-74 as though the dissolution they discuss, and which he says occasionally happens, is anything like total. "I live not in myself, but I become I Portion of that around me (3.72.1-2). . . And thus I am absorb'd, and this is life" (3.73.1). The sort of dissolution depicted in 72 and 73 prefigures the most desirable sort of all, the dissolving of the "carnal life." The latter is tested in 74, where what would be left after the unmaking of carnality would be pure mind, "free I From what it hates in this degraded form" (3.74.1-2). What he seeks in 72 and 73, and predicts in 74, is precisely what he says he achieves with his creations: it is a carefully crafted balance in which the self foregoes none of its autonomy (we are looking forward to Manfred's compulsions), in which the self is in no sense unmade, its integrity in no sense qualified. Indeed, it would be more integral than ever since the self in such a state is purely itself, in a wonderfully satisfying way both absorbed and selfsustaining. There is much of that careful balance even in the testing of the final state seen in stanzas 72 and 73, where his relation to the things of this world is seen to be the same as his relations to his own creations. Even at his most intensely Shelleyan, as in stanza 93, he never could say to the night or the tempest "Be thou me." That would tip the oxymoronic balance of integrity and dissolution too far to the side that unmakes. All of his careful delineation shows that it is in the chance of such tipping that the ultimate danger lies. The play of peopling and continuity goes on to the end of the

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canto, stopping along the way to meditate further on self and purification as well as to find a supportive double for some of the narrator's practices. After stating, in stanza 89, that all that lives and moves "hath a part of being," he turns once again, in stanza 90, to purity and the self. T h e "feeling infinite" that stirs within us is "a truth, which through our being then doth melt I A n d purifies from self" (3.90.3-4). "Self" means here what it meant so often in Clarissa and other texts that touch on internecine wars, those aspects of our being which harbor selfishness and self-interest. Stanza 104 reshuffles some of these issues as it meditates on Rousseau, the most likely candidate for the hero of this canto. Rousseau did not choose the lovely landscape of Clarens simply for the sake of "peopling it with affections." (Byron refers to Rousseau's comments in the Confessions about his daydreams of ideal people that became the Nouvelle Heloise). Rather, "it was the scene which passion must allot I T o the mind's purified beings," the emphasis clearly on "must." There was a necessity in the junction of this special place and R o u s seau's taintless beings, characters w h o are so much creatures of love that the narrator can call them "affections." When Rousseau peoples this place he fills it with the only sort of beings w h o can match the place, beings of the mind w h o have, in the mind, reached that condition of absolute purity which comes from a purification of "self." T h e speaker does not spell out for Rousseau what he spoke of earlier in regard to himself, the way in which we go about with and take part in the selves that we have made, but we can assume it. Rousseau, in fact, says something much like that when he discusses his beings of the mind in the Confessions.2 When we come to the end of the canto the speaker returns to specifics on h o w our creations continue ourselves. Once again he speaks of Ada: "Albeit m y brow thou never should'st behold, I M y voice shall with thy future visions blend, I And reach into thy heart" (3.115.6-8). There is ample impurity of self here, much of the turmoil that Rousseau's ideal beings 2. Book 9.

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began to feel only when their actions clustered into stories: "The child of love,—though born in bitterness, I And nurtured in convulsion,—of thy sire I These were the elements,—and thine no less" (3.118.1-3). All he can hope is that the fire will be more tempered in Ada than it has been in him. Here too there are continuities, but of a sort that bear a taint foreign to Rousseau in his movements of vision and to the speaker of stanza 90 who has known the feeling infinite that purifies from self. Continuity may not, after all, be fully pure, clean, and without stain. And in fact these concluding remarks reveal another line of argument that has been at work in the canto, a subtext that comes to the surface at moments in the canto's progress and undoes with incisive precision what the text has been bodying forth about matters of continuity. The interplay of fracture and sequence at the beginning of the canto gave us our instructions for reading. We have to follow those instructions carefully to gather the entire meaning of those movements in the canto. "I live not in myself, but I become I Portion of that around me": that gesture has all sorts of special tones attached to it, but it is not the only mode of the self's potential unmaking that the canto has broached. Earlier in the canto another mode of melding in which we blend into our surroundings was carefully spelled out, different in quality than this, put in a tone that is far less fine. Further, those earlier comments showed another way in which we can become what stanza 72 calls "a link reluctant in a fleshly chain." Stanza 28 carries the warriors of Waterloo from last night's dance to today's grave, a meeting of man and earth in which each dissolves into the other: "The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent I The earth is covered thick with other clay, I Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent, I Rider and horse,—friend, foe,—in one red burial blent!" (3.28.6-9). "And thus I am absorb'd," he was to say in stanza 73; and thus were they, their fleshy, fleshly selves, absorbed into the great arithmetic accomplished by Waterloo. Of such encounters of kinds of clay is the earth's continuity made; and that sort of continuity does its part in creating

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another sort, the rolling around of the seasons. The quasiByronic voice goes on to speak of his distant relation, "young, gallant Howard," and of how the narrator, standing on the field at Waterloo, saw the field revive around him "with fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring / Come forth her work of gladness to contrive" (3.30.6-7). The mouldering mentioned in stanza 27 and the blending of clays in stanza 28 have their part in this new greenness, the "next verdure" of stanza 27. These earlier stanzas play off against the later, Shelleyan sort to create a bitterly ironical pattern of absorption and continuity; and it is a pattern whose components—the modes of continuity—are so different in tone, quality, and accomplishment that, whatever their ironical likenesses, they create an aporia that can never be bridged over. After all, the thousands who were added to Waterloo's clay most likely knew nothing of Shelleyan linkages with "the sky, the peak, the heaving plain I Of ocean, or the stars" (3.72.8-9). There is nothing said in the Waterloo stanzas about the joys beyond carnality. The self's ironical arithmetic continues in the next two stanzas, but with other functions now at play. The addition of bodies like Howard's to the clay at Waterloo in fact created elsewhere a division, a fracture of sequence. The death of Howard and each of the thousands "a ghastly gap did make I In his own kind and kindred," the contrary to the blended clay that their deaths created (3.31.2-3). Death, it seems, adds, subtracts, and divides. The result is to create in the survivors the same desire seen in the narrator at the beginning of the canto, a wish for forgetfulness. The survivors seek to match the gap in kind and kindred with another gap, a blank of consciousness, a fracture of continuity to counter the thoughts of the ironic continuity that Waterloo brought about. Mourning but persevering they go on in the same way as "the hull drives on, though mast and sail be torn" (3.32.2). Stanza 32 describes the state of the survivors in terms used to describe survivors in Byron's canon from Harold on. "The ruin'd wall" that "stands when its wind-worn battlements are gone" is a figure applying as much to the voice that

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begins this canto and to the Manfred w h o was to be described in terms of a burned-out wreck of a star as to those w h o have kept on going after the gaps caused by slaughter. (Robert Gleckner's comments on the increasing universality of the voice in the later cantos are pertinent at this point. 3 ) Sometimes, of course, the images for this state seem to come too easily: "And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live o n " is, by itself, too tawdry a figure with which to speak of the consequences of gaps. And yet the figure is flaccid only for a m o m e n t and only in part. "Break" and "brokenly" are echoed straight away in the first line of the following stanza ("even as a broken mirror"), an echo leading into a rich and crucial image about a thousand vibrating echoes. That image sets up a series of complex ironies whose play echoes and reverberates to the deepest levels of the canto. T h e gaps and fractures in kind and kindred cause the self to collapse into fragments: Even as a broken mirror, which the glass In every fragment multiplies; and makes A thousand images of one that was, The same, and still the more, the more it breaks; And thus the heart will do which not forsakes, Living in shattered guise, and still, and cold, And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches, Yet withers on til) all without is old, Shewing no visible sign, for such things are untold.

(3.33)

T h e result is a sardonic parody of homeopathy: the fractures in kind and kindred cause fractures in the selves that remain. This unmaking of the self into a thousand images of itself is the most ironical version in the canto (and in fact in Byron's canon) of the peopling we perform when we are frightened by vacancy. And yet this incessant fracturing of self is curiously ineffectual. However often it occurs, however many fragments it makes, it is a breaking of what we are that cannot undo what we are: "the same, and still the more, the more it breaks." The 3. Ruins of Paradise, 251.

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doubling and duplicity of self seen in earlier texts like The Giaour is carried on in a painful multiplicity, as t h o u g h we were pierced by the shards that make the thousand reflections. To suffer, in this canon, is to be forever in the mirror stage. O n c e again we have come to an aporia: these assertions about the self cannot be reconciled with the assertions in the same stanzas on the self's at-homeness in the world, its rapturous continuities, its radical oneness with itself. O n c e again these sets of stanzas cannot be comfortably reconciled in substance, thrust, or tone. In late July of 1816 Byron wrote The Dream, a narrative that served as a sketchbook for present ideas as well as a testing g r o u n d for guesses at possible directions for the future. 4 The first stanza condenses, though in quite a different tonality, that blend of troubles and glories he had assembled in the third canto of Harold. Here is most of that stanza: Our life is twofold: Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world, And a wide realm of wild reality, And dreams in their dcvelopement have breath, And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy; They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, They take a weight from off our waking toils, They do divide our being; they become A portion of ourselves as of our time, And look like heralds of eternity; They pass like spirits of the past,—they speak Like sibyls of the future; they have power— The tyranny of pleasure and ot pain; They make us what we were not—what they will, And shake us with the vision that's gone by, The dread of vanished shadows—Are they so? Is not the past all shadow?—What are they? 4. McGann, 4:22-29. All references in citations following quotations from The Dream are to line. Literature on this poem is nearly nonexistent. See the brief comments in Blackstone, Byron: Λ Survey, and Glcckner, Ruins of Paradise.

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Creations of the mind?—The mind can make Substance, and people planets of its own With beings brighter than have been, and give A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.

(1-22)

O u r s is a binary sort of being. That with which we face the waking world has its own appointed time as m e n t o r and guardian of the self, maker of the self's waking face. This con­ dition is not, however, the same as that of Harold at the begin­ ning of the first canto, the state of a fagade or coulisse that has only a surface life. What we see in this maker is precisely and equally balanced by that which stands in the darkness behind it. Their relation is oxymoronic, for they are opposites that need each other, each working with its contrary partner to fashion their tense but coherent whole. And, as a corollary, each needs the other in order to be fully itself. Theirs is a relation beset by exchanges and give-and-take, a mixture of burden and benefi­ cence, as befits an o x y m o r o n : dreams, we are told, "leave a weight u p o n our waking thoughts . . . take a weight from off our waking toils." Their relationship continues, in a subtle and incisive m o d e , those doublings that have been building since the early part of Harold; but it continues the old interplay in a richly assertive way that seeks to clarify a point that has been only implicit up to now. T h e connection seen in the first stanza of The Dream argues that the pairing of the Giaour and Hassan, and other pairings of that sort, are finally only metaphors for the most b u r d e n s o m e doubling of all, the one that will not go away as long as we are present to ourselves, that doubling of self and the O t h e r which is both other and ourselves. We could, of course, figure those pairings in a somewhat different way, seeing the two sorts of combination in a m e t o n y m i c relation; and there is a sense in which that figuring is obviously correct (obviously if not completely). But this first stanza seems to be saying that the basis of the canon is not contiguity but identity. T h e Giaour, after all, can kill off Hassan only bodily; his enemy is so m u c h part of himself that the t w o have to die together for their relation irrevocably to dissolve. As for the O t h e r of " T o

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"5

Inez," it guarantees its indelible presence; it too can conclusively go only when Harold himself goes. The dreamworld laid out so cogently in the first stanza of The Dream has its own indelible ways, as potent and impatient, as certain of their stability, as any sort of Other. Byron was mulling over the status of this oxymoronic relation at a crucial point in his career, a point when, not coincidentally, he had turned much of his attention to the complex business of "peopling." He seems to be trying out various readings of this encounter of likenesses, all of them at the service of the self's comprehension of how it makes itself. The first stanza of The Dream shows some of the issues becoming clearer, their components coming to an understanding of how they fit in each other's existence. We should not, at this point, be surprised to find an elaboration of some paradoxes that Byron had already tentatively broached. Though all of these acts are at the service of the self's self-awareness, dreams are, in fact, unmakers of the self, making us "what we were not." "They do divide our being," an assertion we can take to have two meanings: they share in our being, divide it with our waking faces, becoming "a portion of ourselves as of our time"; yet they cause a division of being, undoing what appears to be its constituting wholeness. Dreams take their origin from some most untranquil moments and from a stratum of the self that has a reserved but apparently furious cryptic life of its own. We are back, from another direction, to that Other which inhabits us and lays claim to portions of our being. But we are back somewhere else as well, the result of that return an irony with extraordinary effects. "They become a portion of ourselves" echoes with sardonic precision "I live not in myself but I become I Portion of that around me," some of the most striking, memorable remarks from the Shelleyan phase of the third canto of Harold (which was to be published four months after The Dream was written, and was certainly very much in Byron's mind at that time). That wondrous union of self with its worldly surroundings has its own contrary double in another act of union that may have less desirable effects. The one sort of act sends the self out of itself, the other

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sends out a surrogate of that denizen of the self which is, at once, likeness and parasite. One union is sought for by the self, the other is forced upon it. The sending out of self appears at one more point in the poem, the narrative of which describes the stages of a dream. In the earliest stage, a scene with a young man and young woman (said to describe Byron's early love for Mary Ann Chaworth), the impassioned adolescent has given over self totally to his love: "she was his voice . . . she was his sight" (52-53). In fact "he had ceased I To live within himself" (55-56), another unmistakable echo of the lines from Harold ("I live not in myself"). There is nothing here of that blend of mockery and empathy that was to appear in canto 2 of Don Juan, its hero both lovesick and seasick. Yet there is another kind of irony at play in this and the related passage, the sort that pulls together the melding of self with world and that melding of self with self seen as an object of desire in the adolescent yearnings of one of the "beings in the hue of youth." This sec­ tion of the poem comments on more than these events. Its intertextual life sketches a brief, varied history of some of the self's vast potential, past and present, adolescent and mature; and as it does so those passages comment on these strange twinnings of actions and what they reveal to us of some of the self's most elemental gestures, its ways of making itself that cannot avoid taking part in unmaking. Finally, these goings-out of the self should be compared to the classic English romantic instances of such doings. Those are the acts of negative capability which put Keats inside of spar­ rows, pecking away at the gravel with them, becoming that which was around him in a temporary but compulsive yieldingup of the self's self-definition. But there is a very clear distinc­ tion between Keats and Byron on this issue. Wc have seen that such yielding as the speaker gives way to in the third canto of Harold is never quite complete, that he never empties the self in the way that Keats did in becoming the sparrow. This distinc­ tion is not minor. It is as basic to the difference of their modes, and finally to themselves as poets, as anything else about them.

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Dreams, it now is clear, are as difficult to pin down as their contents often are. For one thing they are texts, as much so as the poems in which we tell of them. As such they are subject to all the vagaries that texts go through and also to that odd outand in-reading which is intertextuality. Dreams, like other texts, never live by themselves alone but always as part of the context that has done so much to make them. In the largest sense of the term texts are what making is all about. And yet we have seen unmistakably that dreams are also ««makers that "do divide our being," perhaps only temporarily (for the sake of a greater, oxymoronic making) but effectively all the same. Still, as though to revive the expected meaning of "text" (our codes need their coddling), the stanza offers the alternate to this oneiric undoing. We have seen how, in the act of dividing our being (or, most likely, as a result of that act), dreams join up with our being, becoming "a portion of ourselves and of our time." Byron was coming most fruitfully to learn how unmaking and making can occur as part of the same gesture. The lesson was learned this time in terms of how one sort of text can do those things. Of course this echoes that sardonic mathematics (here, division and addition) which played through the newest Harold. It is coherent with those lessons and helped to enlarge their budding contours. That coherence continues in what the first stanza of The Dream tells of the business of the dream text. Dreams are not only texts but makers of texts. Most specifically, they turn us into something new, as is appropriate for makers of fictions. And in that mixture of lie and likeness which had been intriguing Byron since the days of the early Harold they add to this feigning a clear recapturing of that which we would rather forget: "they shake us with the vision that's gone by." These lines take us back to the beginning of the third Harold and those terribly difficult ploys in which we sought to dismiss the past by linking ourselves to it even more tightly. Here the attempt to undo the old visions draws on the ancient idea of dreams as insubstantial and therefore not really to be feared: "Is not the

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past all shadow?—What are they? I Creations of the m i n d ? " (18-19). And that move takes us back, on a different but related path, to another preoccupation of the beginning of the newest Harold, the act of peopling: " T h e mind can make I Substance, and people planets of its own / With beings brighter than have been, and give I A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh" (19-22). D r e a m s , like other texts, make better than our bodies can m a k e because they make that which is better than bodies. What follows in the p o e m is both recollection and prediction, the latter a surprise only if we feel that Byron had no idea where his w o r k was going. Stanza 2 is, as we have seen, straight per­ sonal biography. Stanza 3 comes directly out of the beginning of the early Harold, complete with the ancient family mansion and the love that could never be his, as well as that m o m e n t w h e n " o ' e r his face I A tablet of unutterable thoughts I Was traced, and then it faded, as it c a m e " (96-98). As it came he went, leaving the old hall on his steed, never to repass "that hoary threshold m o r e . " T h e stanza that follows is a bright and successful recap of the substance of the Oriental tales, complete with the "fiery climes," the golden columns, the grazing camels, even the m a n "clad in a flowing garb [who] did watch the while, I While many of his tribe slumber'd a r o u n d " ( 1 2 1 22). So m u c h for recapitulation. T h e eighth, penultimate stanza looks less to the past than the immediate future, the first two acts of Manfred, which were to be written two m o n t h s later: he lived Through that which had been death to many men, And made him friends of mountains: with the stars And the quick Spirit of the Universe He held his dialogues; and they did teach To him the magic of their mysteries; To him the book of Night was opened wide, And voices from the deep abyss revealed A marvel and a secret—Be it so. (193-201) The Dream, then, is not only a transition piece but an act of taking stock. If the third canto of Harold laid out a series of

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issues in which, in retrospect, we hear some of the sounds of the epic to come, The Dream condenses those issues and sounds (thereby increasing their intensity). It also lays out the lines of the canon in which those issues had been embodied and were to be given further body. The screws, in fact, were tightening. They had to be tightened even more before the necessity of writing Don Juan—already beginning to be understood—could no longer be put off.

The Prisoner ofChillon was written about a month before The Dream, perhaps on June 27-28, and it bears all sorts of relations not only to The Dream but to the third canto of Harold and other contemporary poems. 5 Those relations are so curious, not only in their content but their tone, that they add qualities to the context that complicate the whole considerably. But the poem is, in itself, quite a complicated business. Samuel Chew has argued that it was popular because "such thought as it was charged with was free from uncomfortable questionings in the domain of religion and morals."6 Yet that point about its freedom from questionings is so far from being the case that it turns the truth quite around, especially when we consider the prefatory sonnet which, as Chew himself noticed, is quite out of spirit with the poem. 7 When the two are taken together they result in a number of "uncomfortable questionings," not least 5 McGann, 4:3—16 Unless otherwise specified, all references in citations following quotations from The Prisoner ofChillon are to line. 6. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and other Romantic Poems (New York: Odyssey Press, 1936), 301. 7. Blackstone (Byron: A Survey, p. 126) seems almost alone in seeing a congruence between the prefatory sonnet and the poem. The most persuasive argument against congruence is in Marshall, Structure ofByron's Major Poems, 82-96. Marshall's study is, along with that of Rutherford (Byron: A Critical Study, 6675), among the best readings of the poem. Gleckner (Ruins of Paradise, 191) and most other modern critics argue against a positive interpretation of the poem as a "tribute to the unconquerable nature of the human mind." See also Cooke, The Blind Man, 87. Leslie Marchand (Byron- A Biography 2:632) supports the older, positive reading of the poem.

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of comforting readings of Byron's poems of the time. And their m o d e of being together, whatever its qualities of dissonance, is itself quite consonant with the canon's built-in tendencies. Being out of spirit is not unrelatedness but a special sort of relation. As we have seen throughout this study, that sort is characteristically Byronic. T h e "Sonnet on Chillon," added to the beginning of the whole after Byron learned more about Bonivard, continues the practice of prefatory instruments that proved so significant earlier in the canon. In this case, however, it takes the potential for irony in such conjunctions and works the potential in such a way that (as at the end of Harold 2 and the beginning of Harold 3) conjunction and disjunction come into being together, each created by the context, each intensifying the other. And yet those contraries are implicit not only in the conjunction but in the movement of the sonnet itself, though their import comes out most fully when sonnet and poem are taken together. T h e first line of the sonnet tells of "the chainless M i n d " (McGann, 4:3), a concept taken, in most readings, as the point of the poem's import. " M y mind to me a kingdom is" of course lies behind the phrase. N o enforced linkages are at play, nothing that ties the mind to anything but itself. Self has no true h o m e except within its o w n confines, no place in which it is inscribed except where it wants to be. Yet there are difficulties within the sonnet, potentials for contradiction that, though never pursued within it, set the stage for the undoing of the sonnet's ostensible thrust: Chillon! thy prison is a holy place, And thy sad floor an altar—for 'twas trod, Until his very steps have left a trace Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod, By Bonnivard!—May none those marks efface! For they appeal from tyranny to God. Self is so fully inscribed into this place that the floor of the dungeon becomes the site of a trace of Bonivard. Self turns its context into a text, a place of profoundest linkage between engraver

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and engraved. Mind (Bonivard's and all free ones), m e m o r y (ours of Bonivard and his like), and place (the dungeon and mind-as-place) come together into a system that lives as much by subterranean paradox as by unqualified declamation. T h e play of those ironies and contradictions pervades the following poem through all its interstices, surface and depth, act and emotion, theme and variation. A m o n g those ironies is the insistence that inscribing will be mutual, that there will be a sardonic justice in this matter of engraving: And in each pillar there is a ring, And in each ring there is a chain; That iron is a cankering thing, For in these limbs its teeth remain, With marks that will not wear away, Till I have done with this new day.

(36-41)

As he inscribes himself into his dungeon so do the instruments of the dungeon inscribe themselves into him, his flesh their text. Here too, though the roles have shifted, engraver and engraved cannot u n d o themselves from each other, whatever he may do to the literal chains that bind. Self and dungeon have a relation much like that which Delacroix saw in Byron, antagonists drawn together to make an oxymoronic whole, each stuck with (into) the other just as the Giaour is stuck with Hassan, carrying his enemy around with him though they have long since literally unlinked. And this is by no means the only instance of such practices in the poem. Chillon is very clearly taken by those long-standing obsessions with junction and disjunction, wholeness and fragmentation, self and context and their continuities, which, at this time of Harold 3, The Dream, and Manfred, had come to a point of crisis. Chillon itself contributes a particular twist to the crisis, its ironies based, in part, on the duplicity engendered by the sonnet—what are, in effect, its misleading instructions for reading. Yet we are misled on another level if we argue or assume that there is only absolute disjunction between sonnet and poem (just as we would be w r o n g to argue for such final fracturing between Harold and

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the O t h e r in "To Inez" or between the Giaour and Hassan, not to speak of other sets we have inspected). The play of likeness and otherness, continuity and separation, turns into an intricate mixture of seeing and nonseeing, absence (of a sort) and presence (of a sort), which makes The Prisoner ofChillon a difficult business to fix, to say that it is conclusively one thing or another. Most events within it turn into multivalent symbols of a terrible state of being where scission and sequence struggle for ultimate primacy. Neither wins, of course, nor could either be well pleased at the various turns of events. Byron builds those turns on the little he heard about Bonivard and the much he added to it—the matter of family, for example. There was nothing concerning family in what Byron heard about Bonivard, and the fact that he adds to the story a pair of imprisoned siblings shows that his interests are far less in the assertions of the sonnet than in the question of relation—here put in its most basic form—and its deep potential for fissure. He toys with sentiment about relation at various points in the poem, the toying signaled and initiated by the blunt echo of Wordsworth ("We were seven—who n o w are one") and carried on with the bird that comes and goes, leaving Bonivard bleaker than before. But relation at these levels of sentiment matters less, finally, than an existential sort that threatens to undo him. Here is stanza three: They chained us each to a column stone, And we were three—yet, each alone, We could not move a single pace, We could not see each other's face, But with that place and livid light That made us strangers in our sight; And thus together—yet apart, Fettered in hand, but pined in heart, 'Twas still some solace in the dearth Of the pure elements of earth, To hearken to each other's speech, And each turn comforter to each,

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With some new hope, or legend old, Or song heroically bold; But even these at length grew cold. Our voices took a dreary tone, An echo of the dungeon stone, A grating sound—not full and free As they of yore were wont to be: It might be fancy—but to me They never sounded like our own.

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(48-68)

T h e y are grouped yet singled out; together yet apart; unable to see each other yet "strangers in our sight." There is nothing firm to fix on in this place of aporia, nothing that does not bring along its dark and undoing twin; nothing, that is, except sound. In the bitterest irony of all, their voices come to be inscribed with the sounds of the place that enfolds them, so that the dungeon not only engraves itself into the prisoners' flesh but into the sounds of their voices as well: " O u r voices took a dreary tone, / An echo of the dungeon stone, / A grating sound not full and free, I As they of yore were wont to be." Poe would have understood this meeting of self, place, and text, where each becomes the other in the only absolute certainty that the dungeon will permit. It will not even permit irrevocable chaining; nor, scariest of all, will it permit the continued certainty of the self's existential location, that which should always remain, whatever else they take from him. In stanza 8 the last link with his "fading race" falls asunder with the death of his younger brother. In a parallel whose ironies pursue him for some time, he breaks his literal chain at just that point and rushes to his brother's corpse. In stanza 9 he loses touch with light and then with darkness (a state of total lack, impossible to conceive), and slips into an emptiness that has swallowed time and place, leaving him tied but tied to nothing, again beyond all logic: "vacancy absorbing space, / And fixedness—without a place" (243-44). Whatever it may seem, this is not to be considered a return to primal chaos, which, by its very nature, always ferments with possibility.

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There is here, in echoes of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, only the opposite of possibility, the inertia of that which has been moved so deeply that it can no longer move, of that which cannot rot (for rotting is too active) but simply sits: "silence and stirless breath I Which neither was of life nor death; I A sea of stagnant idleness, I Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless!" Any relation this condition takes to the fertility of chaos has to be parodic. Any awakening of the sort that happens with "the carol of a bird" has therefore to be equally parodic, a play on acts of rebirth. No wonder that the awakening leaves him not only alone but with another echo of Wordsworth that turns the screws even tighter: "Lone—as the corse within its shroud, I Lone—as a solitary cloud, I A single cloud on a sunny day, I While all the rest of heaven is clear" (293-96). Toward the end he manages to find a sort of fixedness, "a second home," in this place of spiders and mice. He also finds the sort of linkage that the term "communion" holds: "My very chains and I grew friends, I So much a long communion tends I To make us what we are" (391-93). Part of the space where acts of connection occur is once again filled in, enough to patch over some of the fractures but never enough to negate that aporia which pervades every level of the poem and leaves it beyond ultimate resolution. That final patching of connection serves also to give to Bonivard what Harold was never able to achieve, a viable tie to place. But what a tie and what a place! This shows nothing like a solution to Harold's ongoing task as a turner of the world's pages, nothing like the awakening achieved by Fougcret de Monbron, nothing of the happy prison Stendhal was to offer as an ironical optimum condition.8 Stendhal, indeed, as attuned to Byron's ironies as any one of his time, showed Julien Sorel to be happy in a special, unparalleled way but to have achieved such ultimate happiness by the gift of his life. Fabrice del Dongo fared somewhat better but ends with little of what he had in his 8. See Victor Brombert, La Prison Romantique (Pans: Jose Com, 1975), and also my Autonomy of the Self.

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paradisiacal prison. O f all Byron's heroes only Tasso is as closely tied to place as Bonivard, rooted in a way that Harold never was in the cantos we have about him. But that is clearly no answer either. T h e solution may well have to be a special place for the self that is no literal place at all. What we saw of the sad engraving in which prison and place become each other's text, making a kind of text a kind of place for the self to be, was, in fact, a very good guess at where the ultimate answer could lie. Here too the necessity of Juan was to grow more apparent. Yet this does not exhaust the canonic ironies (the ironies the canon engenders about itself) to which The Prisoner ofChillon contributes. T h e third canto of Harold was still very fresh in Byron's mind when he wrote Chillon, and one of that canto's central passages takes, in retrospect, all sorts of sardonic tones when seen (reseen) in the light of the linkages in Chillon: I can see Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee, And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.

(683-88)

T h e c o m m u n i o n that ends Chillon is an earthy, pathetic substitute for the mingling Harold's narrator calls for in his ecstatic, Shelleyan m o m e n t s . As happens so often in Byron the passages speak to each other in a way that uneases them both. But there is more. Bonivard was not a reluctant but a willing link in the fleshly chain that tied him to his brothers. The snapping of that link through his younger brother's death (paralleled by the snapping of the literal ties that bind) gets Bonivard a version of what Harold's narrator wanted; here too an earthy, pathetic surrogate for the narrator's chief desire. This canon has a way of realizing desire in a most undesirable manner, engendering its o w n private scandals. Manfred was Byron's next major step, and it took such bitter realizations into a deep cul-de-sac and one of the canon's major crises.

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T h e canon cannot, it seems, cease from commenting on itself, worrying h o w what it is fits in with where it has been. Such regular self-pondering shows the subdued but active presence of a subterranean pattern of continuing self-adjustment. It is, indeed, a kind of mapping, one of many simultaneous acts the canon performs as it goes along. Take, for example, Manfred, act 3, scene 3, the scene that ended the original version of the drama. Several of Manfred's retainers are hanging about the tower while Manfred is within it, pursuing whatever it is he does in his long vigils. Manuel, the oldest retainer, recalls Sigismund, Manfred's father and a figure as unlike his son in personality as any could be: I speak not Of features or of form, but mind and habits: Count Sigismund was proud,—but gay and free,— A warrior and a reveller; he dwelt not With books and solitude, nor made the night A gloomy vigil, but a festal time, Merrier than day; he did not walk the rocks And forests like a wolf, nor turn aside From men and their delights. (3.3.17-25)" This is an echo out of two pasts, that of the family and that of the canon. The description takes us back to the first stanzas of the earliest Harold, before Harold turned "aside I From men and their delights." Everything before that turn in Harold's m o d e of being is a species of prehistory. T h e turn was, at once, a gesture of self-enclosing (of self within its own contours) and of self-loosening (of self from manifold ties). Its end result is in this text, which has taken a moment, in the third scene of the last act, to go back into history and locate itself precisely. These m o m e n t s of self-locating are often pointers to conditions of crisis. When the text locates itself within the context of the 9. McGann, 4:51-102. All references in citations following quotations from Manfred are to act, scene, and line.

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canon it comes to see itself more clearly, work out with greater precision the import of its point of crisis. The fact that the drama once ended here (the tower suddenly, strangely, bursts into flame and Manfred is carried out dying) shows the unusual importance of the scene. All the more reason, then, for its need to place itself in the canon. The search for greater precision continues in what follows these lines. The thrust of Manuel's careful distinction between father and son, establishing nonresemblance, is countered with subtle force by the rest of his speech, where he speaks of intense resemblance. He tells of another person related to Manfred by blood; one who, we have already learned, is exactly like him in features and form and who, unlike his father, shares his thoughts and habits. She is, we are told, "the sole companion of his wanderings / And watchings" (3.3.43-44). We have come, once again, on a basic set of Byron's mind: "A" (here, Manfred's relation to Sigismund) cannot be fully understood until we have examined " B " (here, his relation to Astarte). Each needs a knowledge of the other in order to know itself more precisely and therefore to be fully itself. The emphasis falls on "fully." What we see at work in this passage is a very important segment of the self's search for integrity, for an unbreakable wholeness that would do for every purpose. It is the play of identity and difference that contributes most to the precision and thus, eventually, to the fullness. By this time Byron had become remarkably skilled at working resemblance and nonresemblance. He uses it here, as often elsewhere, as a rhetorical tool that not only manages the movement of ideas but echoes, in the handling of the text, the way in which the self meets and makes its world and itself. Manfred is set between Sigismund on the one hand and Astarte on the other, partaking in the blood of each, quite possibly even partaking in the features of each: Manuel's comment—"I speak not I Of features or of form"—could mean that father and son are similar in those aspects. Manfred differs from Sigismund in habits exactly as much as he matches Astarte. Put another way, a way that will lead us into the deepest

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structures in the drama, the relation of Sigismund and Manfred is a diachronic one, that of Manfred and Astarte a synchronic one. It is as though time were pressuring Manfred into greater and greater resemblance with those w h o are important to him, that increase in resemblance creating an increase in pressure: the m o r e time the m o r e likeness, the more likeness the more intensity, the more intensity the more likelihood that all will come undone. T h e implicit temporal thrust of Manuel's final speech opens dimensions in the drama that were not there before. C o m i n g as it does in what was to be the final scene, the speech seems designed not only to open out another perspective and a greater comprehension but to fuse that m o m e n t of insight with the ultimate catastrophe, the final, fiery undoing. Thus, the early version of the drama puts the play of distinction and likeness even closer to the center of focus than the later version does. What was added in the later version (the last meeting of Manfred and the abbot) brings in another sort of perspective, one that focuses on will and the self's autonomy; and yet that perspective turns out to be not entirely different after all, for it is, in part, closely related to the emphases of the earlier version. Indeed, an important aspect is frankly derived from those earlier emphases. Manfred's denial of the spirits' dominance and his echo of Milton's Satan assert that the self has sole power in making a time and place for itself: 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)

The echo is a pointed rejoinder to the import of Manuel's speech, his emphasis on the pressure that time knows h o w to exert on the self's acts and integrity. Manfred could not have heard the speech, but what happens at the endings, the old one and the new, shows that—whatever else is said—this permeating pressure cannot be put behind without some final c o m m e n t . It calls for a rebuttal just as arrogant as itself, just as

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insistent as it is on its own ultimate power. T h e accuracy of the rejoinder will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Manfred became a collecting point for most of the major matters that had been driving Byron's canon. O n l y Juan is more significant in that regard. Cain approaches Manfred in i m p o r tance as a place where so much comes together, but Cain is finally less crucial, in part because of its timing. Manfred takes those earlier concerns into that terminal softness where ripeness ends and decay begins. Harold 4 follows right after but, w h a t ever its considerable qualities, it is not the thesaurus that Manfred is. And it is by virtue of that status, by bringing it all together onto the field of its discourse, that Manfred shows more clearly than any Byronic text of its time w h y something had to be done, w h y things could go no further. In this and subsequent chapters we shall be looking at more of its preoccupations. We began this chapter with comments on one of them, the r h y t h m s of repetition. O f course those rhythms take one of their forms in the play of likeness and unlikeness that we have been following from the point where Harold thought of Sappho and encountered his somber semblable in "To Inez." Manfred takes those rhythms to a pitch that only Juan was to surpass. Byron seems to have wanted to seek out the purest case, distilled to essential elements, and test it to see what outcome it would bring. To begin with there are the numerous self-images studded throughout the drama, most designed to put echoes of Manfred into the world outside of himself, most quite heavy handed. To take two from the drama's first scene, Manfred, in addressing the spirits, speaks of the birthplace of his power as "a star condemned, I T h e burning wreck of a demolish'd world, I A wandering hell in the eternal space" (1.1.44-46). The seventh spirit tells Manfred that the star that rules his destiny "became I A wandering mass of shapeless flame, / A pathless comet, and a curse, I The menace of the universe" (1.1.116-19). Since the star the spirit refers to is surely the one from which Manfred drew his power, the spirit is telling him nothing he did not

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already know, including the blunt implication that Manfred is as the star is. Such images, vitiated by their crudeness, matter less in themselves than in what they show of Manfred and the question of relation. Further, the images point out the importance of the rhythms of repetition to the question of relation; how, in at least this case, the images turn those rhythms into a mocking commentary on the self's at-homeness in the world. Where Manfred's predecessors read the text of the world in what was (whether they knew it or not) a search for a way home, Manfred, in an essential sense, never leaves home at all. Wherever he looks in his world he finds himself mirrored, either in the heavens with the star, or in the Alps with its "blasted pines" and its deadly rocks that destroy only the innocent. Working busily beneath all this is another echo from Milton's Satan ("Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell"). More important, however, is the dreadful continuity of self and place, the ironical linkage of consciousness and the world in which the world becomes a text in which we read only of ourselves. Even the chamois hunter becomes, for Manfred, mainly an image of all that he is not (see 2.1.63-73). At one level this is a parody of third-rate narcissism. At another, however, it takes the theme of linkage and continuity implicit in every narcissism and infuses it with ironies appropriate to Byron's canon. Poolgazing and stargazing play off against each other, both acts the same, the emotions tied to the acts radically different. Narcissus's desire for connection and Manfred's for its opposite are enfolded in the same image, the same flexible and bitter myth finding room for both. And yet the myth is so flexible that—as the rest of the drama shows—it manages to contain, at one and the same time and all for Manfred alone, not only repulsion but desire, not only a quest for a final untying but also a compulsion for continuity with the figure of Astarte, a need that drove him once and drives him still. He is made to taste and feel every aspect of the myth, to apply its every contour to himself alone. Where the stars and the Alps lead him to wish for separation, Astarte led and leads him still toward the sort of linkage that Narcissus

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himself desired and, to his cost, got. In its original form that continuity was natural. Manfred is, we hear, related to Astarte by blood, the specifics never in doubt though never unequivocally put. The continuity grows subtler and more refined (and at the same time more intense, pushing him deeper into the culde-sac) when it comes to person and mind. Manfred tells the Witch of the Alps that Astarte was exactly like him in lineaments: "her eyes, I Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone I Even of her voice, they said were like to mine" (2.2.105-107). And, he continues, she was also his like in mind: "She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings, I The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind I To comprehend the universe" (2.2.109-111). What we come to learn about both brings them closer to a kind of fusion, to a classic sort of narcissism where self and what it stares at are perfectly alike. But Manfred and Astarte never get to that point of absolute likeness, and in never quite doing so they take this text back through the canon and all those elaborate instances of that image of ourselves which is not entirely ourselves. The passage in which Manfred describes their likeness also carefully spells out difference. She is not his precise counterpart but a tenderer version, the lineaments the same "but softened all, and tempered into beauty," her powers ("pity, and smiles, and tears") gentler than his own. The tenderness she had, he had only for her. The humility she had, he never had. And then the passage ends with a pair of potent statements that have no obvious connection to each other but seem to have one in Manfred's mind: "Her faults were mine— her virtues were her own— I I loved her, and destroyed her!" (2.2.116-17).

It is in passages like these that Manfred shows itself to be a surfacing of the implicit, designed to help the mind decide where it should go from there. In this case it is a question of the self's ties to the world. With both Astarte and the stars the same act occurs, a multiplying of self that keeps the self complete. The relation to Astarte adds special possibilities. Through it he can break out of the circle of self, resisting a suffocating entrapment of the sort to which Harold was prey. To extend the self

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b e y o n d its borders toward an Astarte w h o is not exactly oneself offers obeisance to the need to ward off solipsism, promising a partaking of the world that grants what seems to be the m o s t satisfying completeness. O n e achieves spiritual health by a crafty m o v e m e n t of self in which one carries m u c h of its con­ tent out beyond its edges. O n e leaves the circle in a way that is almost a not-leaving. If Manfred is a point of collection it is also the site of an experiment. It is an especially clever quizzing of possibility because it appears to satisfy every demand. Such practices, both with the stars and Astarte, continue that special creativity we have seen often before, the peopling of vacancy. I take the specific phrase from the chamois hunter's remarks to Manfred ("which makes thee people vacancy" [2.1.32]), though similar phrases occurred earlier. T h e y were to occur j u s t after Manfred at the beginning οι Harold 4, as follows: " F o r us repeopled were the solitary shore" (4.4.9); "Such is the refuge of our y o u t h and age, / T h e first from Hope, the last from Vacancy; I And this w o r n feeling peoples m a n y a p a g e " (4.6.1-3); " I can repeople with the past" (4.19.1). That last sort is the particular bent of the early Harold, continued into the later. It is Manfred's bent as well. O f course not every image that Manfred works out in his world is a self-image: the p e o ­ pling also occurs with the seven spirits and the Witch of the Alps, all of w h o m Manfred brings up, none of w h o m is (in some cases to his agony) at all like himself. But most important of all are those images that repeat the self. T h e text signals their importance not only by stressing the stars in the first scene but in w h a t Manfred says to the spirit of Astarte w h e n she has been raised up before him: And I would hear yet once before I perish The voice which was my music—Speak to me! For I have call'd on thee in the still night, Startled the slumbering birds from the hush'd boughs, And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name, Which answered me—many things answered m e —

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Spirits and men—but thou wert silent all. Yet speak to me! I have outwatch'd the stars, And gazed o'er heaven in vain in search of thee. Speak to me! I have wandered o'er the earth, And never found thy likeness.

133

(2.4.134-45)

T h e voice he wants to hear is—we have already heard him tell the Witch of the Alps—exactly like his own. In seeking for her likeness he is seeking his own, almost. Peopling as he prefers to practice it should be (almost but not quite) an act of selfmaking, (almost but not quite) a composition which is selfcomposition. The "almost" is, of course, the safety valve. The question is whether "almost" is able to do that j o b . In fact it is not. Going back to that curious pair of statements at the end of his description of Astarte to the Witch of the Alps ("Her faults were mine—her virtues were her own— I I loved her, and destroyed her!"), we can only conclude that, whatever the attempt at distancing involved in "almost," the faults in which they shared finally did Astarte in. This means that, t h o u g h Manfred says he destroyed her she must have been part of her o w n unmaking, participant to the degree that she shared in their dangerous faults. Astarte was done in by those rhythms of repetition with which Manfred had sought to enlarge the active territory of the self. Aspects of their continuity had undone the continuity, recoiling upon themselves and fracturing the wholeness he is n o w so painfully reseeking. 10 Such, then, was the essence of the testing that Byron p o n dered, the questions that were brought, in this text, to their u t m o s t clarity. T h e y were never put forth so clearly because Manfred and Astarte are paragons, the intensest of a kind. C o n sider the way in which their relation reaches a purity and refinement that have never been seen before. T h e pairing of Manfred and Astarte promised the self's absolute completeness and it gave them exactly that in a gift fraught with irony, a gift that 10. On the seeking of unity in the play see W. P. Elledge, Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor (Nashville. Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 91, and also Marshall, Structure of Byron's Major Poems, 100.

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picks up all the sly and subliminal ironies of the canon's previous pairings and brings them to their bitter pitch. The gift offers all that they asked and more: they were indeed autonomous, absolutely so, for just as they needed only themselves to reach the intensest sort of love, so did they need only themselves to destroy their union. They did not in fact need to leave the perimeters of what finally proves to be (despite the attempt in the "almost" to keep them slightly apart) only an extended circle of self. To commit incest means that one keeps within the family. But Manfred and Astarte carry the narrowing even further, taking it to its finest point, for theirs is narcissistic incest, a sort that reduces to its smallest reach the distance one needs to go to get outside of the self. If what one reaches for is the exactest cast of oneself, then one has hardly to reach at all. Taken from a different perspective, this is another way of looking at the narrowing cul-de-sac that informs the drama: as the extent one needs to reach outside in order to complete the self grows smaller and smaller, the walls close in more tightly, the pressure on the self increasing until it becomes nearly unbearable. With only a single step the cul-de-sac will reach its narrowest point, the place of the dead end and ultimate entrapment. Manfred has only to say that his mind is its own source of reward and punishment because it is its own place, its own maker of heaven and hell; to say, that is, that we never need to go beyond the confines of the self in order to be at home in the world, to be fully in the world. And he says exactly that in the final version of the text. This was one of the major reasons for adding the new material at the end. Byron saw the cul-de-sac developing and knew that he needed only a single degree of centripetence to take it to its conclusion. The logic of his conception of Manfred's situation is precise, inexorable, and brilliant. The self can go no further in the direction Manfred takes it than Manfred actually goes. At the dead end there is only himself, those closed-in walls and that bitter kingdom of the mind in which he is lord and subject and, he argues, his own destroyer.

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He is his own consumer as well. What we see at play in this drama is an especially telling instance of a familiar Byronic gesture, an act of consciousness that seeks to save consciousness from itself. Manfred's reaching for Astarte is an implicit recognition that the self by itself is subject to serious threats; yet in practicing what is, in effect, a lust for self, Manfred tries to have it both ways and ends with having it no way at all. Astarte is destroyed by the faults they share, Manfred by those and also the others he privately owns. An attempt at self-completion becomes an act of self-consumption, and it seems to do so inevitably; no other roadway is open. Of course that condition cannot be accepted; not, that is, if self and canon are to do more than stare at the impasse. Self-making and text-making, always intimately linked, will have to grow even closer than that. Indeed, we may have to come to think of them as essentially the same gesture in order to work this problem out. If that solution to the problem sounds suspiciously like part of the problem— the solution partaking in that narcissism which helps to do Manfred in—then that bit of homeopathy is yet another irony in a canon that seems to relish them; that, in fact, had better relish them since it finds them wherever it goes.

PART T W O

5 Lucid Contours T O W A R D the end of Manfred, the protagonist, waiting for his death in a condition of unaccustomed calm, is confronted by the abbot of St. Maurice. This surrogate of a transpersonal order comes into Manfred's life near its close, not to ease his soul out of its casing—the priest has no idea that Manfred is waiting for the devil—but to bring Manfred back to "the true church, and through the church to Heaven" (3.1.51). Manfred's sharp reaction is against the church as a mediating institution, an organized betweenness that would stand as agent for both himself and the transcendental in this difficult negotiation. For his part he claims moral autonomy, asserting, in effect, that his self has a self-sufficing order that is far more effective than the rituals of any institution. But the priest, w h o has a different understanding of the symmetries the self can have, ends by seeing the shape of Manfred's self as a radical shambles: This should have been a noble creature: he Hath all the energy which would have made A goodly frame of glorious elements, Had they been wisely mingled; as it is, It is an awful chaos—light and darkness— And mind and dust—and passions and pure thoughts, Mixed, and contending without end or order,— All dormant or destructive. (3.1.160-67) Manfred's self is composed of contraries that should have been put into productive relation by a dominating pair of opposites, order and energy. But in fact, the priest implies, Manfred has given himself only to energy, and as a result the components of his self are either stagnant or deadly, asleep or consuming the self from within. From the priest's point of view the energies of the self have to combine with the order of the institution, the ( 139)

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internal accepting the external within itself so that chaos may be overcome. Manfred, however, insists that his self does indeed have an order, a self-generated one, and that within this order there is a system that tortures the self for the pain it has caused: "there is no future pang I Can deal that justice on the self-condemned I He deals on his own soul" (3.1.76—87). Manfred does not counter the priest's orderliness with an image of disarray—this is no Werthcr sneering at Albert—but, quite the contrary, with the framework of an alternative order. He offers a pattern based on the encounter of contraries that seem to be self-sustaining, that seem neither to negate each other nor even to wear each other out. By phrasing it as he does Manfred implies that his way of ordering things has a tradition of its own: his statement echoes Plato's assertion that justice is harmonious order and that the orderly soul is a just one. But Manfred is only to that extent a Platonist. The essentials of his argument arc grounded in the tenets of Byron's o w n time, in a tradition in the making. What turns Manfred and the priest into antagonists is not only Manfred's insistence upon moral autonomy, with its echoes of Milton's Satan, but his contention that chaos is most successfully confronted by the acts of an aggressive consciousness. The destructive potential of the energies of the self can be met and countered by an order drawn solely out of the self. Versions of this dialectic, the product of a hard look at the implications of chaos, are endemic to the time, and they set into motion a series of possibilities for the self and its creativity that were explored in figures as diverse as Blake and Goethe, Byron and Friedrich Schlegel. The pairing of order and energy put forth by the Abbot of St. Maurice was prefigured in the dialectic of Reason and Energy in Blake's Marriage oj Heaven and Hell, where various figures enact some of the basic gestures of romantic polarities. These polarities work themselves out through a play of voices, not only of angels and devils but purveyors of hellish proverbs and makers of memorable fancies. And the point is not only to accent polarities but to argue for the practice of dialectic as the most pious of acts. Blake gives us

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instructions for reading as early in the text as he can, not only in the Argument, where the meeting of contraries is shown to make the desert fertile, but in the well-known passage that immediately follows: "Without Contraries," he says, "is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence."1 It is only with such cautions that we can listen properly to the first of the voices, that of the devil, who, as it turns out, is himself no mean dialectician. He sets up two positions, that of the "Bibles or sacred codes" as well as another that has no name but is clearly his own. The position of the sacred codes is profoundly dualistic, creating dichotomies of Reason and Energy, Body and Soul, that compel us to choose one side or the other. But the devil argues that there is no one or the other, no dualism or dichotomy, when it comes to Body and Soul: "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age" (34). Reason and Energy are therefore not only linked but have to work as one in order to hold Being in shape, to keep it from collapsing into the chaos that the Abbot of St. Maurice was to see in Manfred. Later in the text Blake is very clear about that threat to Being. In plate 16 he divides men into two classes, the giants who produce energy and the cunning who seek to chain it. These classifications quickly turn sexual, becoming the Prolific and the Devouring, each needing the other because "the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea recieved [51c] the excess of his delights" (39). God is neither one nor the other but both as they play their parts in their incessant dialectic. This means that to prefer one or the other or to seek to ease their tensions is to commit a blasphemous act, an act that is a threat to the very nature of Being: "These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence" 1 The Poetry of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), 34. Subsequent parenthetical text references are to page number

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(39). When Blake recalls Christ saying "I came not to send Peace but a Sword," he is arguing that the tensions of the dialectic keep existence from slipping into the peace of nonentity, the dead calm of chaos. Earlier in the text the devil put these issues in a more graphic manner but with much the same import: "Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy" (34). It is the business of Energy to push until it meets resistance; it is the business of Reason to be that resistance. Being is held in place by the encounter of an outward thrust and a containing contour. To reconcile that encounter is to undo the dialectic that keeps Being going, that keeps it, in fact, existent. And that, it would seem, is true not only for Being in general but for its separate manifestations as well, Being as it appears in selves. In the Descriptive Catalogue of 1809 Blake defends his linear art not only by comparing his work to that of Raphael but by arguing for the significance of outline in our works and lives (540). To lose outline, he says, is to lose all character, that which makes the object rich and complex in a way peculiar to itself. Such loss is to be found in the art of Venice and Flanders but not in that of Raphael or Mr. Blake, who knows that "neither character nor expression can exist without firm and determinate outline." The operative word here is "exist." The threats to the stability of Being seen in The Maniage of Heaven and Hell appear here too, and with equal force. The most viable sort of art, the sort in which character and expression speak for the stamina of that which they render ("expression cannot exist without character as its stamina"), needs that circumscribing line to sustain it, to give it such force and definition that it can hold its own in its world. Better a drawing on paper, Blake says, than "a Dawbing in Oil by the same master." But there is more here than the matter of drawing and painting. These comments hold implications not only for the sustaining of Being but for the practice of it as well, implications that Blake is quick to bring to the surface. He turns to that question of practice with the clearest possible statement: "The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp,

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and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art." Being in the world and being a Blakean sort of artist are seen to be closely related activities, perhaps even the same activity seen from different perspectives. To give outline to our lives is to give them coherence of Being, the same sort of coherence that we want from our drawing and painting. Self and text are therefore not only not separable but part of a single continuum, one that is shaped and given force by the wirey line that contains it. With that continuum firmly established Blake goes on to work out the implications, first for the separateness of self and then for the places it makes in the world and for its moral temper as well. Since outline establishes character, that rich and complex package by which we come to be ourselves, then the making of a bounding line will give our lives a coherent shape in which we are shown to be distinct from every other being that finds itself so enclosed. Outline not only encloses but separates, conferring the wholeness that comes from complete containment, conferring the identity that comes from difference. (On plate 18 ofJerusalem, chapter 1, Blake refers to "The Outline of Identity.") That which is fully circumscribed achieves the fullest definition: "How do we distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite inflexions and movements?" But even this ability to shape the self does not exhaust what outline can do in pulling text and self together. Blake goes on to show outline working on those places in which the self comes to be at home in the world: "What is it that builds a house and plants a garden, but the definite and determinate?" To make the self is one thing, a great thing. To place it is obviously the next that has to be done. After that must come the specific qualities of the self, how it is in the world, what it does: "What is it that distinguishes honesty from knavery, but the hard and wirey line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions [?]" It is clear that we can speak not only of the making of selves but the making of a linear morality. The fashioning of enclosing contours is redemptive as well as

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creative, the firmness of line shaping and denoting the equivalent firmness of moral constitution. And if that sounds as though we are getting back to the Abbot of St. Maurice, the guess is correct. Blake's final comments come around firmly to the same sort of complex the abbot was to see in Manfred, where energy without order leads back to the earliest condition of origin: "Leave out this l[i]ne and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again." When Being is deprived of outline it cannot be more than Being in potential, with much the same potential that there was in Genesis when the earth was without form and void and God had not yet divided the light from the darkness and the land from the waters. By this time we are entitled to suspect that the enclosing contour is the precise contrary of chaos, and that it stands as a principal tool in that radical division of the elements which brings a world into being. As the abbot speaks of chaos it takes on a deep shade of deadliness, its destructiveness turned not only upon all that Manfred touches but upon the radical condition of his selfhood, the mingling it has become. As Blake uses the term it speaks of all that the word "disorderly" can mean, both in the world and in the character with which we meet the world. Whatever the global forms of the chaos of which they speak, it takes its most immediate form as a state to which consciousness can arrive; and that which counters chaos, the bounding and wirey line, is itself a product of consciousness, the result of an act of consciousness that saves consciousness from itself. Without his version of the enclosing contour Manfred could go no further than the defiance with which he ends as his disordered, disorderly soul takes its own way down to hell. With the firm line of rectitude Blake not only creates a self but makes it coherent and upright, able to stand up against chaos. The making of outline, we now can see, may well be the best, the most salutary, gesture that the mind can perform. Sometimes it is a gesture that the mind will come to out of instinct or luck, a gesture that appeals to consciousness in ways that may seem obscure but—given the context we have been inspecting—have their own salutary logic. In his letter of 24

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July in book 1 Werther complains to his correspondent that, though he has never been happier, never understood nature better, his capacity for producing art seems to have slackened. The solidity of the world has weakened; its stability is undermined. As a result he cannot perform the most basic gesture of his art: "alles schwimmt und schwankt so vor meiner Seele, dass ich keinen Umriss packen kann."2 Outline ("Umriss") is an acknowledgment of the presence of stability. It is a way of holding in all the swimming and swaying ("schwimmt und schwankt") of things, of keeping them within that control which art has to have in order to happen at all. What we see at this point in the narrative is just what we saw in Blake, an analogy of self and text: as one is, so is the other; as one works, so does the other; as he is able to control the one so is he able to control the other. This interplay of self and text is basic to Goethe's tale. Indeed, Werther's talent ("meine vorstellende Kraft") is the bridge between self and text, and it shows its capacity to mediate insofar as it can make outlines. But "make," a useful verb in other comments on creation, does not get the point of this passage, though the sentence is sometimes translated with that verb. "Packen" ("dass ich keinen Umriss packen kann") denotes a grasping, a seizing or capturing, the thrust and intensity of the verb implying an equal, counterpart intensity in the self's reach for outline. Werther knows the importance of those contours and knows what not being able to fashion them means for his art. The rest of the very brief letter makes his knowledge plain. He imagines that if he had clay or wax, some three-dimensional stuff, he could do good work with it; and in fact, he continues, if this mood goes on much longer he will do that sort of modeling even if he only makes cakes. The slippage of the talent for creating contours is so scary that he wants to reach beyond outline to the three-dimensional, to handle material he can walk 2. Die Leiden desjungen Werther, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978), 41. "Everything swims and sways so much before my soul that I cannot seize an outline."

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around as well as define in its contours. That would show that he has not really slipped but, on the contrary, can control all sorts of dimensions, even if they are only the dimensions of cakes. And yet, he continues, he has tried Lotte's portrait three times with no success. All he can fashion is her silhouette ("Schattenriss"), and that will have to do. The play of "Umriss" and "Schattenriss" shows what Werther is about: here, at least, he can capture that radical fact, an outline. That act of artifice is a salutary gesture because it shows that he still can grasp those radical contours which form needs to exist. This is more than an act of self-consolation. It shows—he proves to himself—that he still can perform the gesture that controls the swimming and swaying. If that gesture were no longer possible there would be only swimming and swaying, and the result for text and self would be chaotic. And yet there is ambivalence in Werther, ambivalence so profound that it undoes not only his art but himself, and precisely in those conditions with which outline is concerned. A month earlier, in the letter of 21 June, he showed a profound respect for containment ("Einschrankung"), a condition that includes not only one's place but one's self. When he first came to Wallheim he had wished for something different, not for containment or the contours that give it shape but for the opposite, the loss of all definition (a wish that was to be echoed in Manfred three decades later). Looking down at the view from the summit of a hill he saw other hills and valleys, and wished he could lose himself among them: "o es ist mit der Feme wie mit der Zukunft! Ein grosses dammerndes Ganze ruht vor unserer Seele, unsere Empfindung verschwimmt darin wie unser Auge."3 Our feelings blend with ("verschwimmt darin") the distance, just as our vision does. All contours of self are gone, and we desire only pure surrender. Yet when There becomes Here all is as before, and we stand in our poverty, our circumscribed narrowness (our "Eingeschranktheit"). That is, we go 3. Ibid., 29. "Distance is like the future. A great dim wholeness lies before our soul, our feelings blend with it just as our eyes do."

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back within those bounds of our selves and our lives which we had sought to dissolve through that blending with the distance. (Schranken, the noun built into Einschrdnkung and Eingeschranktheit, are bounds or barriers, the sort that Reason would put around Energy. The word will become crucial in just such a context in Faust.) But this return to containment, he now argues, is no loss. Werther speaks of his joy in picking and stringing peas and cooking them in butter while he reads his Homer. Recalling the suitors of Penelope, who killed and ate their own cattle, he finds joy in what he sees as this circumscribed, patriarchal life at Wallheim. Yet this is not all there is to Werther's concern with containing contours. Two months earlier, in the letter of 26 May, he argued that rules made for the artist destroy the true feeling for nature and the true expression thereof.4 His imagined interlocutor would reply, he assumed, that he was being too hard on the rules, that they would only restrain him ("sie schrankt nur ein," bring him back within tight circumscription). Werther responded with an image that, taken with his other comments on contours, revealed his ambivalence fully. The torrent of genius so seldom storms in high stream and shakes the soul because the calm gentlemen on the banks have learned to protect their garden houses and cabbage fields with dikes and drainage ditches ("Dammen und Ableiten"). This comment cannot be reconciled with his other, opposite passion, the craving for contour. All these elements in Werther's attitude make up an illogical and dangerous package, one that never could hold together and eventually does him in. When Werther speaks of the slippage of capacity he bemoans the loss of his ability to sieze the articulated contour. When he speaks of the conditions at Wallheim he takes contented pleasure in the confines of his life. But when he speaks of the energy of genius he bemoans those containing contours which keep the stream of that energy under control. The conflicts are not only between his art and his life, the stream of genius and pea-picking at Wall4. Ibid., 14-16.

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heim; they also take in all his feelings about his talents and how to use them. The contradictions are patent, though never so to their possessor. Nor does he see them even when his imagery comes to life, when the figure of the raging stream is reified during a storm. In the letter of 12 December in part 2 Werther speaks of an inner, unfamiliar raging that threatens to take him apart and that is clearly to be compared to the flood he begins to describe.5 The river that runs through the region has overflowed its banks and put the whole valley of Wallheim under water. Standing at the edge of the flood Werther yearns to throw himself in, to lose himself in the delight of drowning his pain and his passion and then of storming about in the flood just as the waves do. The objective correlative is plain to us and most likely apparent to him. Yet what he does not see in the scene has a series of effects that send their echoes back through the narrative and deepen its ironies: this is the stream that was linked to genius, the image of creative energy that had rarely fulfilled its potential because of the restraining contours built by the calm gentlemen who lived on its banks. Now those contours have disappeared, gone as the contours in his art have gone—those defining and enclosing outlines which had long since collapsed under the press of his overwhelming passions. On 11 June he said that he had done a few sketches. By 3 November even that capacity was gone for good. The homology of self and text that has given the tale much of its sinew culminates in the scene of the flood. Self, place, and art are profoundly intertwined. Talent, genius, and contour resonate together and at each other. The salutary properties of outline, the relation of those properties to what we are and what we fashion, are put with a blend of irony and insight that was rarely to be matched in the literature that followed. Yet Goethe surpassed it in Faust, where Werther's flood becomes bigger and permanent, an archetypal threat that needs 5. Ibid., 98-99.

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an archetypal making as its match. And the homology of self and text continues. To win against this figure who says he is the much-loved son of Chaos ("Des Chaos vielgeliebter Sohn"), Faust must do precisely what the second part shows him doing, standing over against chaos with all the force of the aggressively linear. In fact, the second part of Faust is built on a complex series of symmetries that take a version of the dialectic we have seen in Blake and Byron and turn it into visible form, putting the self's redemptive gestures right out into the landscape. At the same time, it links those gestures with light, so that the contours the self has to make can be thought of as lucid contours, with all the fullness of meaning that "lucid" can hold. The first scene of the second part finds Faust, all those deaths behind him, lying in a field in a pleasant region ("Anmutige Gegend"). 6 Images of light and power play through the scene and the region and Faust's ambition, replaying the essential themes of the first part but this time in terms of the kinds of lucidity we can live with, not just the unbearable kinds. Ariel sings over Faust, urging that he be returned to the sacred light, and when the sun comes up to the sound of an enormous turmoil ("Ungeheures Getose") Faust revives, cleansed and quickened. Once again he seeks to see into a light he cannot endure and—in a gesture that looks back to the Erdgeist and forward to Sorge—the light blinds him. Putting the sun safely at his back he turns to look at the fall of a cataract. The scene ends with Faust facing a rainbow, its arc of colored light creating a beautifully lucid contour, the vapors of earthly waters combining with the light of heaven to image the shape of earthly existence. "Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben": in colored reflection do we have our lives. But the lives we have in that reflection do not take a consistent form: sometimes the reflection is purely outlined in the arc of the rainbow, sometimes it dissolves in air, the outline prey to the energies that 6 Faust (Munich. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977), 139-42.

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surround it. We are as the outline is, our precision and vulnerability mirrored in its own. The dialectic picks up again at the beginning of act 4 in the scene "High Mountains" ("Hochgebirg"). 7 Debating with Mephisto on the best way to realize his ambition Faust speaks of the sea and the wasted energies therein, the to and fro of the waves that gets nowhere but to more of the same. Excessive and unbridled, that energy produces nothing but the waste spaces of the beach. Yet there is more at play here than the wish to put to use the purposeless strength of the unharnessed elements ("Zwecklose Kraft unbandiger Elemente"). The towering of the sea, the outpouring of the waves, their storming of the beach, remind Faust of the arrogant energies of a self that, driven by its passionate, rebellious blood, puts the free spirit into a state of discomfort ("Missbehagen des Gefuhls"). With that simile Goethe shifts the stakes of Faust's adventure; or, more precisely, the simile brings to the surface all of the stakes that were already there. The energies of the sea and the energies of self stand to each other in a metonymic relation, each a figure for the chaos of experience and an instance of it as well. To give either one a lucid, containing contour is to learn to handle the other. The self that has sown destruction in its endless repetition of desire (it was the only sort of making of which that self was capable) sees the "zwecklose Kraft unbandiger Elemente" in its own doings as well. The redemption Faust proposes is manifold and multileveled, taking in some of the major metonymies that image the chaos of experience. The central gesture, of course, comprises the taming of the sea and the redemption of the land that occur toward the end of the drama. When the emperor grants Faust the coastline as his domain Faust has an opportunity like no other. The gift makes possible for him the aptest gesture available to show that the shaping of a restraining edge involves selves as well as coasts; indeed, that—carrying on the homologies seen elsewhere in Goethe—the coast is a kind of text and has to receive the appro7. Ibid., 292-300.

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priate treatment. The wanderer who returns at the beginning of act 5 is told that the breakers that once had shipwrecked and nearly smothered him are now far off behind a dike, walled away from the world by that earthy, redemptive contour which makes fertility possible. On this side of the dike is a garden, an image of Paradise renewed, complete with village, common, and wood, a classic locus amoenus. The land has been parted from the waters, Genesis regenerated in that imitatio Dei which is the radical creative act. But the purpose of the act has not been entirely fulfilled. Though Faust has become very old he still has unbounded desires, most of all a desire for total possession of all that he sees. The deaths by fire of Philemon and Baucis, whose cottage was blocking his vision, show that his making of lucid contours is not yet complete, that Faust has not yet achieved that lucidity of understanding which would make such completeness possible. Thus, his awareness that there is yet more reclaiming to do, that there are swamps that befoul the land and make its redemption incomplete, comes fittingly after the deaths of Philemon and Baucis. This blatant indication that he is not yet fully redeemed shows that the swamps are inner as well as outer, part of that which must be drained within him as well as out in the world. Thus, too, the appropriateness of his final comments in the last minutes before his death. He comes to see that the making of dams and dikes and the attendant draining of the swamps are not only ways of taming the waters but of having the earth come to terms with itself. To put walls between us and the sea is to give the earth that internal coherence which the abbot had wanted for Manfred and which Blake had pointed out in the interplay of Reason and Energy: Wie das Geklirr der Spaten mich ergotzt! Es ist die Menge, die mir fronet, Die Erde mit sich selbst versohnet, Den Wellen ihre Grenze setzt, Das Meer mit strengem Band umzieht.8 8. Ibid., 334. "How the clanking of the spades delights me! / It is the many

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The final reconcilement of self that will come from the draining of Faust's inner marshes has not yet occurred; but his awareness of what needs to be done is sufficient cause for redemption, especially since that seeing brings with it his ultimate moment of lucidity, wisdom's final conclusion ("der Weisheit letzter Schluss"). That conclusion has to do with the efficacy of his acts, the permanence of their results: however useful the making of those walls which keep out the waters, the strength of the waters is such that they have to be conquered again every day. No wall can be built for good but only for the time in which it will do. Just as the arc of that rainbow with which the second part began is sure to dissolve before it is shaped out again, so are the walls of the sea and the self threatened by the forces of dissolution in that dialectic of making and unmaking which drives the world. No gestures are complete, all acts are open-ended. The dialectic is sure, the dike and the arc never so. The result is a perpetual doing and undoing, a permanent need for repair, which finds wide and potent echoes in other voices of the time. Manfred was written about midway between the writing of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the writing of Faust's final speech. Both Blake and Goethe offered ways out of the dilemma Manfred had come to; and if those ways were unlikely to lead to more than a certain but transient success that had to be repeatedly reearned, they could promise at least that much. The order that Manfred claimed for the shape of his own selfhood could not do nearly as much, and what it seemed to be able to do was both dangerous and dubious. It worked only in its representation of moral autonomy, and even that was somewhat equivocal. His was certainly not a saving order, that is, an order that would contain within itself not only a judiciary function but a redemptive one. At the end Manfred is attacked by demons from hell, and he drives them away by insisting that he cannot be their prey because he has been, from the beginning, who slave for me, / who reconcile the earth with itself, / set a boundary to the waves, / put a firm bond around the ocean."

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his o w n destroyer. His logic may be somewhat askew but his awareness of the deadliness of his independence is perfectly accurate. In effect the energies of self have grown self-consumptive, turning upon their origin and devouring it in suicidal greed. The result is the dead end we saw in chapter 4, and B y r o n clearly could not condone it. He needed to deflect those energies into modes that would create, not consume, and would, at the same time, render with full honesty what it was like to be the prey of such forces. What he came to was an understanding of how irony could put chaos to work in the service of a seasoned selfhood, one that had been its o w n victim and knew that it might well be so again. We can see that understanding coming into shape in a stanza that Byron projected for the first canto of Don Juan but never used: I would to Heaven that I were so much Clay— As I am blood—bone—marrow, passion—feeling— Because at least the past were past away— And for the future—(but I write this reeling Having got drunk exceedingly to day So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling) I say—the future is a serious matter— And so—for Godsake—Hock and Soda water. (McGann, 5:88) M a n y stanzas in Don Juan are compact testing places for those practices of the later Byron which make him a prime romantic ironist, arguably the best in any language. This stanza offers a succinct rendering of some of those practices, especially those in which consciousness and the world come together in a tense encounter. It begins with the laying-out of the line of argument, a wish for some of that mindless oblivion which earlier heroes in the canon often looked for but never got: "I would to Heaven that I were so much Clay." There is an overplus of incessant liveliness, too much of that sort of consciousness ("marrow, passion—feeling") which keeps the past continually present and therefore not in its proper place. What follows is a fracture of the narrative sequence, a disruption that enters the

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stanza, seemingly from outside, and displaces the line of development. Yet, even as the disrupting element takes over the stratum where the narrative is happening it keeps itself aloof from that stratum: the whole interruption occurs within the parentheses that set it off from the rest of the stanza. Though the disrupter effects a change in the sequence, it seeks to keep itself sealed away, encapsulated within the parentheses as though afraid of the touch of the other (which in Byron always has the potential to turn out to be the Other). That which speaks and that which is spoken of, so the parentheses seem to say, can not—perhaps ought not to—be mixed, however much they share the stanza and the stratum of discourse in which they work. After the closing parenthesis the stanza shakes itself back into the original sequence, trying awkwardly to put the narrative back into business; but at the end there is only the pained and urgent call for an antidote to all that dizziness. This stanza is a prime instance of the way the later Byron performs when he sets off aspects of the self against each other, a practice we have seen in various forms since the first cantos of Childe Harold. The stanza has three parts, each with a different segment of the overall movement, each with a different content and with a different relation to the various aspects of the self. In the first part the stanza sets out to make a point about old pains and the persistence of memory. In the second (parenthetical) part there is a reference to today's hangover as well as the difficulties of getting the job of writing done under those conditions. That parenthetical section dislocates not only the solemn thoughts about passion and the past but the progressive and regular movement in which those thoughts are being presented. In the final part there is a return to regularity, or at least the beginning of one; but the return has within it some of the content from each of the previous sections, the temporal worries of the first and the hangover of the second. The disruption, it is clear, has had a permanent effect upon the narrative. And, perhaps not coincidentally, the disrupter has not been able to keep itself aloof. In fact, the parentheses fall away and the disrupter becomes not only a part of the main sequence but, at the end,

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the dominant part. The content of the second part wins out over that of the first, and the stanza closes with an exasperated, helpless surrender to the insistent dizziness. Who, then, is the "he" who gives in at the end? The voice that began the stanza has problems with time, and the second voice has problems with writing. Both have problems with the pressures of the body. When the concluding voice shows that it owns the temporal concerns of the first and the reeling hangover of the second; it reveals that both voices are actually aspects of the same selfhood, that the one that sets out to narrate and the one that steps in to disrupt are, in fact, elements of a seamless whole. One way to approach this stanza (which I shall call "Clay" for easy reference) is through its rendering of the processes the self goes through as it works out a mode of order. Like Keats's Ode to a Nightingale and some of Holderlin's Nachtgesdnge it records the ambulations of consciousness, the acts of the mind at work on the possession of experience. We can call it a poem of process. Yet unlike those in Keats and Holderlin it shows several sorts of possessing happening at once, and it shows those several sorts playing off against each other to become the essential gestures in the stanza. The speaker seeks a language that will offer a coherent reading of his wish to become so much clay. He seeks to possess the experience so fully that he can deliver it over to us. And yet the speaker is himself the object of an act of possession, in this case by those forces whose main implement is the hangover and whose main purpose, it seems, is to disrupt, sever, and destroy; or, if that sounds too conscious and deliberate, too Manichaean, say that their purpose is simply to express themselves in their own way just as the speaker is expressing himself through the words about clay. There are, then, two acts of possession and expression at work and in conflict, one working in words, the other on the worker in words. But we have seen that the disrupter and the disrupted come from the selfsame source, each an aspect of a single selfhood. What we are shown in the stanza, then, is an internecine war of possession in which one aspect of self, about its essential business of possessing the world through

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words, becomes the object of possession of another aspect of self that, blindly or seeingly, bluntly or cannily, pushes its way into the other's place and seeks to possess it wholly. The way out of this dilemma is the way of the romantic ironist, and no one handled that way better than Byron did. His solution is precise and effective: if there are two sorts of possession at war within the stanza there is a third that seeks to encompass them both, and does so with unusual success. That third is the sort which made "Clay," the words which report the internecine war. "Clay" is itself the result of an act of possession, for within it the war of self with self is shown in a stanza that records the war, possesses its tensions and contours, with perfect felicity. Further, it handles the disrupting forces with such skill that they can be seen at work within a frame that is never destroyed or disrupted by the likes of them, that can mock (mimic and make fun of) their sort of activity apparently at will. Further, the act that made "Clay" is as much an act of consciousness as any depicted in the stanza. It differs from those it depicts in being a successful act, one that, unlike the others, has managed to possess what it seeks to possess. What we come to, then, is this: there is an act of consciousness that convincingly renders the inner wars of self; but because the act can show those wars without itself coming asunder it confirms that consciousness can succeed in the face of the forces that seek to destroy it. This stanza shows one of the ways that success can happen; specifically, the way of the romantic ironist. And since all the forces shown in this stanza come from within consciousness itself, "Clay" can be said to be (not merely to show) an act of consciousness that saves consciousness from itself. The results are momentous for Byron's canon. Consider what happens in the stanza and compare it to what happened to Byron's heroes earlier in the canon. We have seen how the energies of the self were directed into an act that turns those energies back upon themselves and leads to self-consumption. Harold had broached the act, the Giaour carried it on and gave it the defining image of the scorpion, and Manfred carried it to its culmination. But it did not end with Manfred—

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indeed, it could not, given its depth and centrality and power— and it turns up again in "Clay," in a form so pure and pellucid that this version stands out as a model. In fact, that purity and precision of form should lead us to suspect that we are looking at a cannily crafted instance of the act of recoil, one made in so pristine a form for a special purpose. As we inspect the stanza in the light of the history of the canon up to that point the purpose grows clearer. We are shown a clean and vivid act of recoil because we are asked to see not only what it looks like at its most basic but also how it should be dealt with—more precisely, how it can be dealt with, given what it is, given what irony is. We learn to deal with recoil by turning the energies that impel the act from their usual end in the self-consumptive to a new end in the self-creative. The energies that led the scorpion to drive her sting into herself turned up, in other contexts, as those that threatened to undo the self through various self-directed agonies: Manfred's remorse, the Giaour's doublings, Harold's vaguer but always self-inflicted sorrows. But if we can mimic the taking-apart in a perfectly controlled gesture, make the undoing happen and then not happen as we choose, then we have learned a significant lesson—for some there was no more significant lesson—about the potential relations of consciousness to all that seeks to undo it. We have taken the destructive energies that threaten to pull all selves apart and turned them toward making an image of destruction, a semblance of it. The purpose of the semblance is not to attempt to temper the energies' fierce potential (neither Byron nor Juan's narrator is ever that sentimental), but to displace some of their thrust into doing, not undoing. It is in gestures of fruitful mockery, images of disorder that are canny parodies of disorder, that the work of the romantic ironist finds its function and moral force. He never underestimates the nemesis or its capacities (the canons of Byron and Hoffmann show just what the nemesis can do), but he argues that his special ways should have a salutary (redemptive) effect on the way we are in our worlds. Sometimes his characters absorb the lesson. The narrator of Don Juan is the

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direct descendant of Harold, the Giaour, and Manfred, a figure as susceptible as any but with a selfhood that has come through where theirs have not, a selfhood that gives in to its own selfconsumptive energies but watches that giving-in so carefully, with such sly and sardonic commentary on what is happening to him, that this narrator alone succeeds in doing what Harold, the Giaour, and Manfred could never do. He lets the energies that are seeking to undo him take their wonted course and then puts them to positive use, easing them into channels that will take him back to where he was before they appeared. He turns that which was eating him up into that which rebuilds him, which keeps him going through all the consuming that the world wishes upon him and that he sometimes wishes upon himself. Consider what we saw in Goethe, going from Werther to Faust. Goethe showed us a Werther who, reduced to silhouettes, finally gives in to the self-consumption that has been devouring him little by little, talent by talent. Self-consumption eats outline away until no contours are left, no dike to keep back the stream. At the end of Faust the same threats hold, the sea eating into the dikes that protect the city. The acts and images at the end of Faust acknowledge not only Werther but the need to keep those dikes always in order, for they are always under threat by those energies which work at their contours and seek to nibble them down to disaster. What happens in Goethe happens also in Byron, and for precisely the same reasons. The selfconsumption that was laid out early in Harold and carried through the canon is met and matched in Don Juan—never more than tentatively, always with the recognition that this text's equivalent of the dikes, its way of containing the forces within it, has to be watched and worked at continually or it too can collapse and give way to the pressures of self-consumptive forces. It is fair and accurate to say that this recognition is the turning point in Byron's canon: the awareness of the need to work at one's dikes and the awareness of how to do that working turned the canon in a direction that led to a supreme poetic achievement, one of the master images of the time. That

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act which turns the energies of recoil from disaster to the ironist's equivalent of dikes is an act of redemption—of self as well as of text, more precisely of self and text together. That saving gesture reaches deep into the canon's radical business. The disrupter that pushes through to the surface of the action in "Clay" is a late version of the Other that pushed through to Harold's awareness in "To Inez" and took over half of the field in the internecine wars of which the Oriental tales are allegories. The disrupter is that surprising aspect of self which confronts us and appears so different from what we expect to be ourselves, yet is shown—it is, after all, our own hangover—to be both Other and ourselves. This identity of the disrupter and the Other, of the sequence-shattering aspect that comes in and takes over the text and the exotic and tantalizing stranger who wears our own face, is one of Byron's major discoveries and one of the prime compelling forces behind his use of romantic irony. For the mode of romantic irony, the mode that seeks to mold and control the confrontation of disrupter and disrupted, is the best way Byron came to of handling that shattering meeting with the Other which haunted his canon from its beginnings. There is an uninterrupted line going from "To Inez" straight to "Clay," and at every point in that line there is an engagement with an antagonist whose face is sickeningly familiar. Not only is the mode of the later epic a reaction to the threats to the self's order that studded the earlier canon and gave it much of its force; it also develops in a new direction the submythology of the earlier canon, its narrative based on the encounter with the Other. Two kindred points must be made before we turn to pondering in more detail the relation of romantic irony to chaos. "Clay" makes both points clear. First, we can never be confident about the self, neither in having it under control nor in the equally urgent matter of knowing what there is within it. Byron could never have taken a trip to the Cartesian essence of self, finding that place where thinking proves being and we can go on building from there. The self is never fully knowable, no more available or predictable than those forces within the world

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of which it seems to be a metonymic echo. We can never have privileged access to its every recess, never know whether what we have seen is all that there is to be seen. Second, we cannot expect definitive closure from the works of the romantic ironist. To see the ironist's having come through, his having brought "Clay" to conclusion, as anything more than tentative and temporary, is to sentimentalize what he does. There are no great cyclical-circular journeys in Byron or any romantic ironist. To think of romantic irony as performing such compensatory patterns is to mistake what the ironist says. It is also to privilege consciousness to a degree that no ironist, however much he stands in awe of what consciousness can do, would ever accept. The contingency irony imitates is not only the world's but its own. If the mode of Don Juan masters con­ flicting forces for a moment, the mastery is only within itself and only for that moment. This is to say that the openness of romantic irony echoes—in fact, renders—its own impermanent success and the permanence of its need to keep on working at that success. The work of the romantic ironist is always work in progress.

The main product of Byron's understanding of what he needed to do was Don Juan. There he showed that he could put chaos productively to work by turning the shape of his poem into a dexterous impersonation of those forces in and out of the self which threaten its private order. Manfred admitted that he could not keep the energies of self from recoiling upon their source, from finding their end in their beginning. That admis­ sion is turned into the narrator's willed submission to an insta­ bility of form that finds its parallel in the work of Sterne and Diderot but finds its origin in the needs of Byron's conscious­ ness. The narrator of Don Juan is different from the Faust who builds dikes against the sea because he offers a kind of cooper­ ation with chaos. He knows that he cannot resist the impulses that promote narrative instability—those which come from within are simply too pushy or too delicious—but he takes part

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in a poem that is actually a meticulous rendering of that instability. And yet there is far more to the rendering than these scenes of incessant slippage. Don Juan may seem, in its way, to be an exemplification of Freud's late hypothesis, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that "all instincts tend toward a restoration of the earlier state of things"; that is, a return to the primeval disorder when darkness was upon the face of the waters.9 But in fact the submission to chaos is never terminal in Don Juan because it is part of a dialectic, one gesture in a set. When it occurs it is regularly countered by a clear if temporary (and tongue-in-cheek) return to the sequentiality of narrative and the traditional contract between the reader and the maker of the text. In terms of what we have seen in "Clay" we can call the return to narrative sequence a return of the actively conscious self-—in "Clay" that aspect of the self that was speaking of its desire to be so much clay—to itself. The Other that pushed through to the surface is pure id energy, something akin to a natural force that seeks only for the satisfaction of desire, only to be fully and openly itself. In a stanza like "Clay" or a poem like Don Juan, that force is held in check by the structure of the narrative, which puts everything under the compulsion of its own intense desire for an orderly progression to a rational end. That is the narrative in its classic Aristotelian form, a form of which the narrator of Don Juan is always fully aware. This mode of narrative line directs the movement of experience in a way comprehensible to man (it has, that is, a proper beginning, middle, and end, and shuns the excursive or the extraneous). Given the image of the disrupter as akin to an irrepressible natural force, the narrative line is unnatural, artificial, like the dikes at the end of Faust, like Blake's city of Golgonooza, which is his artifactual answer to the pressures of Vala, the natural force in things. The likeness of Aristotelian narrative to Blake's bounding line, as well as to that version of Reason which is "the bound or outward circumference of Energy," should also be 9. Trans. James Strachey (New York: Livenght, 1970), 31.

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evident. The narrative line, the Faustian dike, the Blakean city,—all are proof of the relation of the civil to confinement and repression. In fact, they can be seen as instruments of revenge upon that which seeks to wash over us, to inundate our borders and do in all we have built. Faust, as we have seen, makes the sea the appropriate image for it and so, at certain points, does Don Juan: when men are awash on the sea and hungry, the civilized contours go, as they do in canto 2. Perhaps it is because we carry within ourselves a piece of the sea that the Other that rages forth and seeks to take our texts apart does what the sea does to the dikes. The parallel is exact: the sea and the Other seem to be metonymies for some larger, self-serving force. And yet, as "Clay" and Don Juan show, we are caught up in a dialectic that, in the instances Byron gives us, can be depended on to continue because of the strength and stubbornness of the contending elements. It is not that either element loses but that neither ever wins out. Chaos never loses because its push is irresistible but consciousness is rarely at a loss (and never irrevocably so), not only because its role is to lead the narrative back into play but also—and primarily—because the vehicle of the dialectic is a poem that is the product of an extraordinary ordering consciousness. The risk of dissolution is always present in Don Juan, but Byron took the risk because he knew of no other way to tell the truth about the activities of the world and the self. In Don Juan modal order and moral perception mirror each other. Style is a rendering of the only way this consciousness can handle experience. The intent of such handling is to give chaos its due, to let it be all that it is, yet at the same time to give as much privilege as the truth permits to the system that contains it. Chaos has to be treated systematically, that is, in its relation to system. This is the way of the romantic ironists, of Byron, Schlegel, Tieck, and their predecessors, who understood that in their flouting of accepted structures and the privilege associated with them they had to supply new modes and new privilege, new relationships in the contract between reader and writer. The makers of outline at the end of Faust and in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and

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Hell create that kind of order which needs the confrontation of Reason and Energy, the dike and the sea, to keep itself in place. But ironists such as Byron and Schlegel find it possible to think of disorderly orders, dissolute structures, systems that not only abut chaos but embrace and represent it. The maker of Don Juan gives chaos a fertilizing role in an encompassing scheme. He puts into practice what Schlegel had prescribed some twenty years earlier: "Zur Vielseitigkeit gehort nicht allein ein weitumfassendes System sondern auch Sinn fur einjenseits der Menschheit."10 Schlegel's ironist owns a many-sided consciousness that can see outside of a system as well as within it. In fact, the fullest versatility recognizes not only that there is a chaos outside of each system but that what is needed is an oxymoronic order that comes from the conjunction of both: "Es ist gleich todlich fur den Geist, ein System zu haben, und keins zu haben. Er wird sich also wohl entschliessen mussen, beides zu verbinden."11 Shapeliness and the unshaped, making and unmaking, come together in mutual fructification. Only thus, the ironist argues, can he tell all of the truth. But there is more to the ironist's argument than the need for veracity, however central that issue. Romantic irony is a stance, a way of being in the world. It is a way of so organizing how one is in the world that one can handle all comers, not only chaotic ones but those others who, at the other end of the spectrum, are so lacking in lucidity that they offer systems with none of the flexibility the truth-teller must have. The need for lucidity and for the contours that reflect it is apparent in the quotations from Schlegel as well as in Byron's epic poem, the plays of Tieck, and the models for all these in Cervantes, Sterne, and Diderot. The combination of flexibility and lucidity 10. Ideen, no. 55, in Charakteristen und Kritiken I (1796—1801), ed. Hans Eichner, Kritischer Friednch Schlegel Ausgabe (Munich, 1967), 262. "Versatility requires not only a comprehensive system but also a sense for the chaos outside of it, just as mankind requires a sense for something beyond mankind." 11. Athanaum Fragmente, no. 53, Charakteristen und Kritiken I, 173. "It is equally deadly for the mind to have a system and not to have one. Therefore it must decide to unite both."

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that leads to a wary cooperation with chaos is characteristic of romantic irony. That is why Schlegel makes such a useful gloss for Byron, why the master theorist and the unparalleled practitioner can come together in mutual illumination. Yet at the same time we have to shun easy equation. If the exponents of such irony have a way of handling chaos that is somewhat different from that of others, if Byron's manipulation of system is a practical rendering of Schlegel's prescriptions, the chaos that inhabits the world of Don Juan has a far different ring to it, and gets a far different evaluation, than the chaos of which Schlegel speaks at the turn of the century.12 Sometimes Schlegel's comments seem neutral, as in the two we have just inspected, but at other times he takes a transparently favorable position in regard to the meeting of mind and chaos. When he says that "Ironie ist klares Bewusstsein der ewigen Agilitat, des unendlich voUen Chaos," the primeval state seems to present itself as replete with positive possibilities.13 That point is confirmed two aphorisms later when he says that "nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos, aus der eine Welt entspringen kann."14 Here chaos is presented as a well of creativity, a place of origin teeming with the seed of future worlds, much as it is in Holderlin's Heimkunft. Similar evaluations turn up in other Schlegelian aphorisms and in his Gesprach iiber die Poesie. All poetry, Schlegel says in the "Rede Uber die Mythologie," brings us back to "die scheme Verwirrung der Fantasie . . . des ursprungliche Chaos der menschlichen Natur."' s But at times he sees a special place for his kind of chaos in modern, that is, romantic, 12. There are important comments on Schlegel's ideas about chaos in Karl Pohlheim's Die Arabeske: Ansichten und ldeen aus F. Schlegels Poetik (Munich: Schoeningh, 1966). See especially the remarks on chaos and system, 122—25 F° r other comments on Schlegel's positive view of chaos see Hans Eichner, Friednch Schlegel (New York: Twayne, 1970), 62-64. 13. Ideen, no. 69, Charakteristen und Kritiken /, 263. "Irony is clear consciousness of eternal agility, of infinitely full chaos." 14. Ibid., no. 71, Charakteristen und Kritiken I, 263. "Only that confusion is a chaos out of which a world can arise." 15. Charakteristen und Kritiken 1, 319. "The beautiful confusion of fantasy . . . the original chaos of human nature."

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poetry. Indeed, the relation of this positive, fertile chaos to romantic poetry in general is made explicit in many comments by Schlegel, especially the fragments (see Pohlheim, Die Arabeske, for a n u m b e r of examples). That relation comes out with particular clarity and force in the following passage from August Wilhelm Schlegel's Vienna lectures on dramatic art: so ist die gesamte alte Poesie und Kunst gleichsam ein rhythmischer Nomos, eine harmonische Verkundigung der auf immer festgestellten Gesetzgebung einer schon geordneten und die ewigen Urbilder der Dinge in sich abspiegelnden Welt. Die romantische hingegen ist der Ausdruck des geheimen Zuges zu dem immerfort nach neuen and wundervollen Geburten ringenden Chaos, welches unter der geordneten Schopfung, ja, in ihrem Schoosse sich verbirgt.'6 Chaos is untapped potential, especially the potential in modern literature. The sense of energetic promise that comes out of the Schlegelian view of chaos is, as they see it, characteristic of romanticism as a whole. But chaos is not nearly that unambiguous in Byron or, for that matter, in the work of Sterne with which Schlegel was so taken. Chaos in Byron is very close to the sort that closes Pope's Dunciad, where chaos is the wielder of the "uncreating word." Chaos in Byron is a threat, not a promise. As the ending of Manfred shows, it is the self's prime antagonist, that which wins out when the self cannot put itself together with lucid contours. The ironical mode of Don Juan offers the kind of cooperation with chaos that Schlegel urged, but it does so because Byron felt that he could beat his adversary only by using it. Systems are shattered for the sake of greater systems—again, much as Schlegel urged—but Byron does that only because he sensed that he would lose out if he set up rigid, inflexible con16. Quoted from Rene Wellek, A History of Modem Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 2:363. Translation from p. 69 of Wellek: "Ancient poetry and art is a rhythmical nomos, a harmonious promulgation of the eternal legislation of a beautifully ordered world mirroring the eternal Ideas of things. Romantic poetry, on the other hand, is the expression of a secret longing for the chaos which is perpetually striving for new and marvelous births, which lies hidden in the very womb of orderly creation."

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tours. Chaos is never friendly in Byron. It is a source of creativity because to treat it otherwise would make it a source of disaster. What Byron had to work out in order to work with chaos was a process in which the self played Humpty-Dumpty, slipping off the wall into fragments and then finding that it could, after all, put itself back together for a while. There is more to the process than the conventions of illusion-breaking and sudden shifts of tone that are the commonplaces of this ironical mode. Those are manifestations of a stance and not the stance itself. Take, for example, the well-known scene in canto 2 where Juan is leaning over the rail of a ship, sad at leaving his mistress: "and much he sigh'd and thought, I While his salt tears dropp'd into the salt sea" (2.17.1-2). I7 This position at the edge of the ship turns out to be the right one to handle the nausea that suddenly overwhelms him and turns his wails into wretching. Juan is beset by two of the principal nemeses of order in Byron's world: his body accedes to the motions of the sea, and both sea and body unmake the order of his feelings. Byron had long sensed that the body was a prime source of chaos, that the weight of the flesh was sufficient to pull Humpty off his wall and leave all his pretensions in pieces at its feet; and the sea has always stood (as it does at the end of Faust) for the impact of chaos on our lives. Yet Juan recovers, as we expect, and the result is a self with new limits, one that has been through both lovesickness and seasickness and has been shaped into a new shapeliness which, we can be certain, will have to suffer an attack on its order (as it does in the shipwreck scene that follows). The process is repeated in the actions of the poem's narrator, who undergoes, on his plane of the poem, the same thrusts of destructive impulse that Juan goes through as a character. The energies within and without take apart the narrative he has been building, just as the energies of sea and body 17. McGann, vol. 5. This and, unless specified otherwise, all subsequent references in citations following quotations from Don Juan are to canto and stanza, or canto, stanza, and line, as appropriate.

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unmake Juan's sorrow. What we see in this narrator's actions, his handling of the poem's mode, is a performance of the self in which the self learns to cope with the thrusts against it, acceding to chaos, as it must, but recovering itself and continuing on, for a while, in a new and more vigorous order. That is why romantic irony has to be seen as a way of being in the world. The self uses its opponent to fashion an unending process that contains all possibilities. That process is the tentative success of the romantic ironical self, the best and most fruitful product of its hard-won lucidity. The effects of that lucidity carry back to the best-known products of this extraordinary canon; indeed, to the shape of the canon itself and to the way it sees itself. Juan's position on the ship is an exact, ironical echo of the position of Harold, early in canto 1, when the sad one is leaving England and sings "Good Night," his farewell to home. The situations call to each other in numerous ways. Their placement and function in the lives of the protagonists as well as in the text as a whole, the methods of travel, the emotions the characters feel—these factors are so much alike that anyone familiar with the canon will have to take these characters as counterparts, with the later a comment on the earlier. And it is a sardonic comment indeed. The self-serving solemnity and self-pity of Harold are echoed exactly in Juan, but the solemnity is undone by the unsolemn and unglamorous effect of the sea on the sorrower's stomach. The result is retrospectively contagious: the undoing of Juan's pomposities by the surging of the sea not only recalls Harold's own pomposities but makes them look equally foolish. This is a comment from within the canon on its own earlier propensities, part of its complex self-referentiality. The echoing of Harold in Juan is one of the finer, sharper instances of the beautiful self-mirroring that Friedrich Schlegel saw as essential to the ironist's work; but this time it is put in an especially sardonic way. The romantic ironist's business is to learn how to handle chaos wherever he finds it, even within his own canon. He does it here by matching the old and the new in a way that reshuffles the canon as a whole. The appearance ofJuan on the

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canon's scene does to the history of Byron's canon what T. S. Eliot, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," says that the really new work does to the history of literature: everything within that history takes on a new look, a new relation to the whole, a new place in the perspective.18 The unsettling of the established that is basic to romantic irony works with all we ourselves have made as well as all those aspects of the world that we would never have wished to make. The predecessors of Schlegel and Byron had made other ver­ sions of such unsettling, some occasional, as in Don Quixote, some more elaborate and radical, as in Tristram Shandy and Jacques lejataliste. Schlegel defined the essence of those gestures in a series of aphorisms that focus on the self as lucid performer of its own generation and dissolution, what he called the con­ stant alternation of self-creation and self-annihilation ("Selbstschopfung und Selbstvernichtung"). 19 At one point Schlegel speaks of an idea as that which is perfected in irony, "eine abso­ lute Synthesis absoluter Antithesen, der stete sich selbst erzeugende Wechsel zwei streitender Gedanken." 20 The making and unmaking of self seem similarly to draw their continuance out of themselves; but in that case, as Schlegel points out in a number of aphorisms, there is a third stage, what he describes as self-restriction or self-restraint (Selbstbeschrankung). That is, the dialectic has to lead to what Byron was to make out of it, a new and more limited pattern of self, born out of the lessons learned from the exuberance and annihilation that preceded it. It is at this point that the romantic ironists join with those other connoisseurs of chaos, the makers of outlines and dikes, who also knew that there was no possibility of progression unless limits were set to the unbounded. Self-restriction is a sign of progress, evidence that the self has transcended the insuffi18. Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 13-22. 19. Athanaum Fragmente, no. 51, Charaktertsten und Krittken I, 172. 20. Ibid., no. 121, Charakteristen und Kritiken I, 184. "An absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses, the constantly self-generating alternation of two con­ testing thoughts."

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ciency of previous stages and come to a new one that is both limited and creative. Yet there are kinds and kinds of progression, and although the successful connoisseur gets somewhere with chaos, where he gets to, and what his getting means, depend on his interpre­ tation of the relation of consciousness and chaos. However lucid the contours the ironist draws up there are differing potentials for achievement that make Schlegel and Byron stand for dif­ fering attitudes toward the purpose of romantic irony. For Byron the point of the process is to keep the self from terminal disorder, and nothing in his world leads one to foresee a time when chaos and consciousness will cease to confront each other. Nor does his version of the process point to anything beyond itself, a meaning outside of the system to which the system can finally lead. The beautiful self-mirroring that is essential to romantic irony is never countered in Byron's world by the possibility of mirroring anything else, of reflecting any­ thing else but itself. Schlegel not only shares Byron's passion for such reflexiveness but also his understanding that the process, when properly performed, is a continuing one. Yet there is more to Schlegel's awareness of the potential of these processes. His irony comes out of a realization that we are compelled to understand and speak about our world, but that we cannot do so fully. In his aphorism on Socratic irony he states that irony "enthalt und erregt ein Gefuhl von dem unaufloslichen Widerstreit des Unbedingten und des Bedingten, der Unmoglichkeit und Notwendigkeit einer vollstandigen Mitteilung." 21 Yet if irony has to live in such paradox it is able to point to what it is trying to speak about. Schlegel refers to irony as an "επίδειξις of infinity."22 Irony is all that the Greek term implies, a showing forth, a making known, a pointing to. If the process of irony 21. Lyceum, Kritische Fragmente, no. 108, Charaktensten und Kntiken I, 160. "Contains and incites a feeling of the insoluble opposition of the absolute and the relative, the impossibility and necessity of complete communication." 22. See Ingnd Strohschneider-Kohrs, Die romantische lronie in Theorie und Gestaltung (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, i960), 66 (including n. 238), 68.

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confesses a final insufficiency, it knows of the fully sufficient, that which is beyond all transcendence. There is no such pointing in Byron, no similar hints of infinity. What you see is what there is; what you have is all you will get. He always comes back to where he begins because there is no other place to get to and nothing to hint at beyond all the making and unmaking. Yet there is, after all, a kind of gratification that moves through Don Juan, a sense that desire and capability have, for once, come together and prospered. It is not quite joy because there is little in the narrator's world to connect to such feelings. Part of it is the pleasure the rhetorical ironist takes in the workings of dissimulation, but most of it is the sort the romantic ironist takes in the workings of consciousness. However tentative the successes of consciousness, they do, after all, occur. Whether or not there is anything beyond, the making of a lucid contour is always cause for gratification.23 23. The book by Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs (see n. 22) is an excellent, comprehensive study that tends to find more coherence in Schlegel's writings on irony than I do. A number of other studies, of varying degrees of helpfulness, have come out since that book. Anne Mellor's English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980) leans heavily on Strohschneider-Kohrs for theory, offers an accurate if elementary reading of Byron as a romantic ironist, and stretches the concept unacceptably to include figures like Keats and Carlyle. David Simpson's Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1979), is far more satisfactory, taking the question partly in terms of the relations of language and authority, touching on themes consonant with the reading of irony by Paul de Man. His chapter on romantic metaphor is also particularly useful. Tilottama Rajan's Dark Interpreter. The Discourse ofRomanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) is the most brilliant of the recent books in English that looks at romantic irony, touching as it does on the radical ambivalence about self and text endemic to the period, taking a position that accepts neither the Abramsian or De Manian extremes (see chap. 8, below) though it does full justice to both. Leonard P. Wessell in Karl Marx, Romantic Irony and the Proletariat (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), takes a weak reading of romantic irony as the basis for an argument that Marx, in his early romantic poems, shows himself to be a mythic poet with a grounding in romantic irony. The recent books by Steven Alford and Lilian Furst came out after this study was essentially completed.

6 Irony and Organicism: Mind, Memory, and Place

A T THE END of act 2 οι Manfred there is a scene that takes the hero to the center of despair. He has asked Arimanes, the Prince of Earth and Air, to call up the spirit of Astarte, Manfred's dead lover. When the phantom rises up and stands in their midst Manfred is fooled briefly into thinking that Astarte is still alive, his perceptions prey to his wishes. Yet that moment of decep­ tion passes quickly, and Manfred sees that the "bloom upon her cheek" is "no living hue, I But a strange hectic—like the unnat­ ural red I Which Autumn plants upon the perish'd leaf" (2.4.98-101). In so saying, Manfred concedes to the truth, acknowledging that Astarte is dead; yet as his simile makes clear, the concession is not quite complete, and he has not quite finished fooling himself. All this talk of blooms and hues and autumn is the language of organicism, and the dead leaf to which he likens Astarte would be at the autumnal stage of its organic career, still present in all its redness, not yet dissolved into its component elements. His simile shows that Manfred has tried to convince himself that Astarte is still in the flesh if not in life. He is willing to acknowledge her death but not the insubstantiality of the figure that stands before him. That is why he asks Nemesis and Arimanes to compel her to speak. Though he begins by insisting on a final judgment from her ("forgive me or condemn me"), he ends by stating that he does not care what she says as long as he hears her voice: "I reck not what—but let me hear thee once— I This once—once more!" (2.4.148-49). To bring her voice back into immediacy is to give Astarte herself a kind of immediacy, and Manfred wants that even more than he wants Astarte to judge him. Two scenes before this he had been speaking of Astarte to the Witch of the ( 171 )

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Alps, and he described her with such intense detail that it is clear she lives in his mind with a fullness of presence and proximity that could never be diminished by death. Astarte is still a leaf in his mind, still there in both vernal and autumnal colors, and his plea for her phantom to speak is finally an attempt to balance the density of her presence in his memory with a like density in actuality—that is, Astarte would live in more than his subjective life, occupying all the dimensions of his world, inner and outer, just as she had done before. Byron arranges this scene so skillfully that we watch Manfred gradually and painfully unfooling himself, learning of the discrepancy between what he can ponder in the recesses of consciousness and what he can stare at in the halls of Arimanes. Earlier in the play Manfred sneered at the power of the seven spirits whom he had compelled to appear, saying that his mind was as potent as any forces they could muster. This point comes home with bitter irony in the scene with Astarte's phantom. There he sees clearly what he guessed at before, that the potency of the mind can give a fuller and more persistent presence to the irrevocably past than all the magic of the earth's sovereign powers. There are echoes of Milton's Satan here as there are elsewhere in Byron's text—no one knew better than Milton how hellish the potency of the mind can be—but the relations of memory and substance, and their embodiment in ambivalence and paradox, are classically Byronic. Manfred decries his own substantiality for good Byronic reasons ("my solitude is solitude no more / But peopled with the Furies" [2.2.130-31]) and so long as he is in the flesh there is no escaping what is inside of him. As he tells the phantom of Astarte: "hitherto all hateful things conspire I To bind me in existence" (2.4.128-29). To find the forgetfulness he craves he will have to give up the body that carries him. In practice, though, he cannot give it up, since in this play about all manner of power, the power of the conspiracy to keep him alive is as certain as its components are vague. Thus, when the Witch of the Alps asks how she can help him, Manfred offers her two choices: "wake the dead," he says,

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"or lay me low with t h e m " (2.2.152). As long as Manfred has palpability he wants the same for Astarte. Failing that, he wants to join Astarte in the descent into nothingness. Yet the witch could do neither for him, and what Arimanes did was finally so frustrating—waking the dead into minimal presence—that Manfred is left convulsed and forced to master his agony. T h e lesson is clear. What Manfred can do, with and against his will, is finally m o r e potent than all the powers of the witch and Arimanes. O n l y the acts of his consciousness can keep Astarte alive to him. M e m o r y is corrosive, eating away at all peace and stability, all clarity of the self ("I cannot rest. 11 k n o w not what I ask, nor what I seek" [2.4.130-31]); but it is only t h r o u g h m e m o r y that he can have the clearest contact with the source of past bliss and present torture. Put another way, if the presentness of the past hurts so much that he wants instant oblivion, it is only in that presentness that he can stay in touch with all that remains of his love. T h o u g h m e m o r y victimizes the place where it works it gives that place the only satisfying life it has. Byron's discourse on the nature of m e m o r y is a c o m mentary on the efficacy of consciousness as well as its requisite costliness. T h e place where m e m o r y works is, in fact, so entrancing to Manfred that all other places are secondary to it. Indeed, they take significance only when he can use them for his private benefit. Sometimes he turns to them in order to find oblivion: "Ye toppling crags of ice! / Ye avalanches, w h o m a breath draws d o w n I In mountainous o'erwhelming, come and crush me!" (1.2.74-76). Most often, though, as we have seen, he uses the Alpine world that surrounds him to define himself more fully, finding images of himself everywhere, as though he needed confirmation from outside places of the state of the mind's own place: To be thus— Grey-haired with anguish, like these blasted pines, Wrecks of a single winter, barkless, branchless,

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A blighted trunk upon a cursed root, Which but supplies a feeling to decay— And to be thus, eternally but thus, Having been otherwise!

(1.2.65-71)

Manfred wants nature either to obliterate him or assure him, to mash h i m into a mindless object or objectify him in its o w n contours. T h e desired function of nature is either to wipe out memories or to verify what memories can do to the self. But its actual function is otherwise. Nature is not there to help him forget but to remind him that forgetting is beyond him and will be so while he is in nature. There is a strange and uncertain imperiousness in Manfred's general attitude. Ordinarily he considers the facts of the world to be instruments for the mind's self understanding. Sometimes a kind of awe comes into that attitude (when he looks at his last sunset, for example) but it never stays around for very long. Deference to the things of this world, indeed, to the things of any world, does not come easily to Manfred. It is only in the desperation of considerable pain that he pleads for Astarte to be made part of the external world again, to be given that kind of substance which differentiates the matter of the world from the matters of the mind. Yet even at his most pained he could never take on the full subservience seen in works such as Lamartine's Le Lac, which, though it too is an ironical discourse on mind, memory, and place, puts those elements into a very different tonality. In Lamartine's poem the things of the world, the lake, caves, m u t e rocks, and dark forests, are implored to keep as part of themselves the m e m o r y of a marvelous night that cannot be relived. T h e tone of the poem is hortatory, urging the world that witnessed the past to do for the past what the mind has always done, keep it present and alive. But Manfred's confidence in the capacities of the mind is such that the deference of mind imagined in Le Lac could never have been imagined by him. Lamartine is at the other end of the spectrum from Manfred's accustomed arrogance. T h e spectrum these figures occupy is one of the central

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instruments of romanticism, concerning itself, as it does, with how the places of the world fit (insofar as they do) with the places of the mind. Blake sits somewhere near Manfred's end of the scale, particularly in his annotations to Wordsworth's Excursion, where he deplores the positive assertions about the linkage of inner and outer places: "You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted I know better & Please your Lordship."1 Blake knew very well what Wordsworth was doing. Wordsworthian fitting, as described in the passage Blake is discussing, offered neither deference nor imperiousness. Rather, it involved a coalescence of the world and the mind that implied a special likening, a similarity in power if not in kind. Of course that would be unacceptable not only to Blake but also to Manfred, even at his most pained. Blake's further comments on The Excursion are fierce instances of that uneasiness with the physicality of the world which troubled Byron and so many others: "does not this Fit & is it not Fitting most Exquisitely too but to what not to Mind but to the Vile body only & to its Laws of Good and Evil & its Enmities against Mind."2 With such an attitude it would be impossible to use the places of the world so that memory finds a niche within them. For memory to find its place one would have to shift to other points on the spectrum, going, perhaps, to that point where Lamartine pleads with place to keep memory alive, or to the Wordsworthian middle point where there is neither a plea nor a command but that recognition of exquisite fitting. In Tintern Abbey, a poem that shares many interests with Le Lac, Wordsworth meditates his own version of the discourse on mind, memory, and place. Romantic poems on the return to old places like to show how those places could never again be for the mind what they were before. Wordsworth's way in Tintern Abbey is, as we would expect, to acknowledge such change but also to show how it can be met by the mind, if not entirely mastered. Not only has the speaker deepened in his capacity to 1. Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 656. 2. Ibid.

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fit in with what is eminently finable, but he has brought along with him someone who enriches the scene for him in a special way. She does so because she is who she is and also because she is now what he had been before: "in thy voice I catch / The language of my former heart, and read I My former pleasures in the shooting lights I Of thy wild eyes."3 Thus, the speaker has by his side what both Manfred and the speaker in Le Lac could never have, a representative of the past who is substantially present. But there are further useful complications in the relations of speaker, companion, place, and time. He puts time at his service by putting at his side an image of his old self embodied in sibling flesh and blood. The extraordinary temporal complexity of Wordsworth's poem comes in part from having his past and present together in a place with a person who is and is not like himself. Wordsworth approaches these matters of change and continuation, of that which can never be otherwise and that which can never be the same, with a confident shrewdness. Take, for example, the matter of his own continuation. The landscape to which he returns after five years is essentially the same, his acts of beholding and reposing performed with the same objects in view. Five summers have gone and returned before he himself returns, his cycle of going and coming echoing the perpetual going and coming of the green season. The poem is all smiles as it makes its way into the situation. It begins by speaking of a recovery through repetition, a recovery that implies an affinity between a pair of actors—himself and summer—who must be very much alike because they can do the same kind of thing, return to the same place. But when the poem comes back to this matter of return some forty lines later, the speaker takes up another mode of movement through time, a mode based not on return but on progression. He is concerned now with all that happened to him while he was coming to this moment in time. As the poem moves on, it argues that in fact he is not much like summer after all, that the changes he has gone through have 3. Text from The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 2:259-63.

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brought him to a point where he can speak (as s u m m e r never could) of stages of being that are irrevocably past. This is the rhetoric of self-correction, its point not so much a rejection of the earlier likening of self and nature as a gentle nudge to tell it to move over and make r o o m for an opposite that is equally true. By the time he comes to speak of nature as his anchor and guide he has posited one position and then posited its contrary, his self-generated challenge leading him into a position that risks untenability. To stop with the assertion of likeness would be to risk sentimentality. To stop with the assertion of unlikeness would leave the poem between two poles and risk irresolution. Wordsworth begins his way out of this dilemma with a statement of what he will settle for: Nor perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay. Looking at her and reading in the language of her heart and eyes all that he was, he sees her as a renewal of his past self. That alone is sufficient, but it is only for the m o m e n t . Recognizing what has to come and hoping for an antidote to come along with it, he moves from his life to hers, from this stage of his experience to a hoped-for stage of her own. The last section envisions the possibility of his absence, but it also hopes for a kind of rectification through her continuation of his actions: Nor, perchance— If I should be where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence—wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together. T h e t w o uses of "nor perchance" locate his main points. T h e first begins the passage about her renewal of his old language. T h e second begins a passage in which he hopes that, in the future, she will do what he is doing now, ponder the relation of

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past and present, the cyclical and the irrevocably progressive. Then she will be his surrogate, not only on the banks of the Wye but in the act of remembering. She will not only remember him but remember for him, the old gestures of consciousness returning, and in the same place if not in the same person. Thus does the poem reconcile the compulsions of memory with the movements of the un-remembering, the need for repetition with the shift in memory's agents. Thus also does it adjust its earlier comments on likeness. The poem that began with one assertion of likeness ends with another, the rhetoric of self-correction leading him to see that his fullest likeness is not with nature but with his own kind, not with summer but with Dorothy. It is just such reconciliation that would be unacceptable to Manfred. He refers to the organic in that strange likening of Astarte to a dead leaf, but his likening is based on only one rhythm, the one that drives its participants forward into oblivion. There is nothing in his image about withered leaves quickening a new birth (as in Shelley's Ode to the West Wind) but only those unnatural reds which are the leaf's last natural color. For Manfred—and in fact for Byron at every stage of his career—the major rhythms of the world are unyieldingly linear. No other rhythms have, for them, the potency of the linear. Memories, therefore, are not acts of the mind that can be figured joyfully in the shape of the cyclical. Rather, they are acts in which the mind pits itself against those rhythms which take everything away. The rhythms in Manfred have nothing salutary or supportive about them; they are only harsh and peremptory antagonists. Still, there are hints in Byron's text of how they can be met. Manfred does better at preserving Astarte with the powers of the mind than Arimanes and Nemesis can do with all their magic. In so doing he shows an essential Byronic problem, the conflict of linearity and the self's desires; but he also suggests an essential Byronic antidote to that problem. Though he is too far gone in self-consumption to counter the threats of linearity, Manfred shows (haltingly, with great pain and little profit) that in Byron's reading of experience the mind

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is the only effective antagonist to the tug of the world's rhythms. All that Manfred can do, though, is show the possibility: he has devoured so much of himself that there is nothing left except ambivalent memories and an arrogant claim for the mind's autonomy. Byron's reading of the rhythms of the world was very different from Wordsworth's, but his dilemma was essentially the one that Wordsworth had faced two decades before—how to use those rhythms to support and augment the efficacy of consciousness. In two years Byron developed his answer. Don Juan is, at one level, a poem about counterpart rhythms. First (preexistent, asserting all the privileges of priority), there are the rhythms that order the world and disorder the selves that inhabit it. Second, there are the rhythms that order poems, especially but not exclusively poems like Don Juan. If those selves are subject to the rhythms that make up the world, the rhythms that inhabit the poem are subject to the mind of its artificer. The major rhythms that give form to our experience are the same as those which take us apart. Some of the rhythms that give form to Don Juan are an image of those which take us apart—in fact, a mocking replica of them—but because they are images, products of the mind as artificer, they are part of that canny puttingtogether which is Don Juan. All of the rhythms that make up Byron's poem acknowledge those which make up the world, but their ultimate acknowledgment, their ultimate respect, is to the making-up that is turning out Don Juan. We can see much of what Byron is about by looking once again at "Clay," the stanza projected for the first canto but never used. There is an essential sense in which "Clay," like Manfred and Tintern Abbey, is a discourse on the relations of mind, memory, and place, though it shifts those components in such a way that they take on a singular import. The memories here are the sort that plagued the Giaour and Manfred, the plea for the dullness of clay a continuation of their own. Mind, however, is something more than it was in its Byronic predecessors, more than an obsessed and passive scrutinizer of its own difficult condition, though that is certainly part of its makeup. It is also some-

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thing more than a commentator on the difficulties of putting a text together when one's head is coming apart. The commen­ tator is involved to the degree that he steps into the narrative sequence, but he is aloof to the degree that he never steps in fully, the parentheses signaling that he is somewhat apart from the flow of things. Mind as it appears in "Clay" is not just one of these aspects but all of them together. The stanza shows those components about their intricate business, and it also shows how they play off against each other for the sake of the whole. Of course, whatever their special business, each of the components is engaged in self-scrutiny, pondering its difficul­ ties and wondering what it can do for a remedy. The remedy for one condition is a greater dose of clay, for the other a dose of "Hock and Soda-Water." Yet there is still another problem to be pondered here, and that is the temporal order of the dis­ course—what happens to stanzas when they set out to make remarks in sequence and then find that the sequence is subject to disorder and potential disaster. The remedy for that, it turns out, is not in anything external like clay or soda water but in the capacity of the mind to take sequence apart and rebuild it at will. The stanza is an enactment of disaster, a fiction of it. It is therefore an instance of the opposite of anarchy, showing an ordering so precise and skillful, so certain of itself and what it can do, that it will take any chance, give shape to any conceiv­ able threat. The stanza is the site where the ordering capacities of consciousness practice dislocation. In this discourse on mind and memory the locale where the mind is shown to be pon­ dering is neither a stream in Britain nor the crags of the Alps but the stanza itself, the place where fictions take place. And it is in that locale that the ironist must show how he can manage a set of competing requirements based on what hap­ pens to linearity and to us. The flow of things takes us to inev­ itable disaster. To show otherwise is to lie about the world and about ourselves. Yet to show us as only carried along, the highest flotsam on the chain of being, is to negate all the argu­ ments made in Manfred and earlier about the mind's capacity for resistance. Byron's earlier heroes were aware that in the most

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difficult wars we stand alone, and that in those wars all we have to work with is what the mind can do. Manfred was the most complicated of those heroes, more capable than any of understanding the full capacities of consciousness. He went further in that he articulated the hunch of the previous heroes that the mind is not only its own place but the strongest place we have; yet, as we have seen, he never turned the energies of the mind into the making of places where the mind could effectively be. What happened between Manfred and the stanza we have been inspecting was Byron's recognition that there were indeed such places, that his stanzas themselves were the places. When he saw that, he also saw how to manage the demands of both mind and linearity, and to show, through that management, all the truths about both. The answer, as seen in "Clay," was to accept sequence and dissent from it, both at once. The stanza takes its origin from emotion recollected in a state of profound disturbance, and it ends with that disturbance confirmed and intensified by the new element of the hangover. In between, however, comes that dislocation of sequence in which consciousness flirts with anarchy. If there is a sense in which we are prey to linearity there is another in which we can play with linearity, divert its incessant energies, if only for a while. We can unmake linearity just as it unmakes us, and we can do so in a place, the stanza, that we ourselves have made. In Byron's mature ironic mode the mind has found its proper vocation: it mocks linearity by mimicking its effects upon us, and as it mocks its natural enemy it frees itself, temporarily, from full subservience to linearity. However powerful the pressures of experience they cannot make mock-ups of disaster, images of their own disarray. Only the mind can do that. Its job is to disrupt in order to show that there are conditions where linearity too is subservient. To paraphrase Wordsworth, we see the mind acting as if its whole vocation were endless dislocation. And there, it seems, he some of the differences between Wordsworthian acts and Byronic ones. The mind that made The Prelude did its work by closing up, not breaking up. Voca-

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tion in The Prelude is in great part a matter of pondering the meaning of old landscapes of the world and the self, and of seeking to lock those old landscapes into productive junction with the new. Where Byron fractures, Wordsworth connects. Times and places take their meaning from their relations with other times and places; or, if the place is the same, with the place as it was at other times. Byron's acts of redemption assert the strength of the mind and the will by setting linearity askew and momentarily unmaking its completeness, its continuity. Wordsworth's acts are not attacks upon such completeness but affirmations of it; indeed, instances of it at work. The regularity with which Wordsworth brings times and places together, fusing one with the other in the recesses of the mind, argues that the primary act of The Prelude, the act that determines what it is and what it does, is a copula, a gesture of connection. Several of the complexities of this issue come out in an appro­ priate place, the first book of The Prelude. Indeed, Wordsworth put into the introductory book some clear signals on how to read the rest of the poem. The book, we remember, shows Wordsworth at a point where he is less certain about the content of his vocation than about the vocation itself. He knows that he wants to make poems, channeling the energy that invigorates the "glad Preamble" into the same sort of vital work accom­ plished by the correspondent breeze. It takes him some struggle before he realizes that, whatever he is to write about later, his present business should be "a theme I Single and of determined bounds," something he can work at until he works out the grander issues.4 The theme has nothing to do with the exoteric but is, instead, the most immediate one of all—how he got to be what and where he is. He is thus brought to the ending of book ι, the frustrations into which he had slipped now replaced by a sense of purpose. 4. Text from The Prelude, ed Ernest de Sehncourt, 2d ed., revised by Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 1.640-41. This and subsequent parenthetical text references are to book and line.

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That act, placing a statement of purpose at the end of the book, is a remarkably shrewd one because the interplay between "end" in the sense of "purpose" or "result" and "end" in the sense of "conclusion" brings out much of the meaning of this introduction. The paragraph that concludes book 1 tells how his meditations on the past, on boating and skating, beauty and fear, have brought his mind back to life: "One end hereby at least hath been attained— / My mind hath been revived." The paragraph then goes on to speak about purpose and direction: "and if this mood I Desert me not, I will forthwith bring down / Through later years the story of my life. / The road lies plain before me." As the book comes around to its conclusion its last eleven lines show how he has reached one end, the goal of revitalizing his mind, and sets forth another, his newly discovered purpose, the recital of the story of his life. He will go back to where he began and bring it around to the present, completing a circuit. His end—his purpose—will be to seek his origin. The end—the result—will be a fuller understanding of how he got there. Wordsworth locates these matters at the conclusion of book 1 because he knows, as Byron does, that the places within a poem can be as significant and illuminating as the places of which he writes. His placement of these matters permits not only the interplay of purpose and termination but other junctures of comparable complexity. Those others come out in the echo from Paradise Lost that he puts into the conclusion, his statement that "the road lies plain before me." In the introductory lines of book 1, during the ecstatic first person of the "glad Preamble," Wordsworth phrased the echo as "the earth is all before me," a phrasing somewhat closer to Milton's original statement, "the World was all before them." The differences in tonality between the beginning and end of book 1, the ecstasy of the Preamble and the warm sobriety of the conclusion, emphasize the development he went through in this book. The ecstasy was chastened into a contained energy as he recognized all the difficulties of vocation. But the repetition of the echo

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from Milton emphasizes the continuity within that develop­ ment, the fact that it was he who went through both the ecstasy and the sobriety, the fact that his ambition was the same at the end as it was at the beginning though it had found a specialized focus. The beginning of book ι lives on in its conclusion, and both beginning and conclusion gain from that felicitous linkage. Put another way, book I recalls its beginnings just as he, to fulfill his ambitions, must learn to recall his own. Not only does the book tell him what to do but it shows him how to do it. His poem, it is clear, is peculiarly instructive. Yet of course there is more to the echo from Milton than the effect of its dual placement. Though the last words of Paradise Lost promise a new beginning, Adam and Eve leave Eden with considerable ambivalence, a combination of despair and hope that leads them to drop "natural tears" but immediately wipe them away. There is nothing like that at the conclusion of book ι of The Prelude or indeed at the conclusion of the poem as a whole. The capacity to be brings along with it an equivalent capacity to do. The conclusions of book ι and of The Prelude itself speak of a sense of achieved capacity, a capacity he has come to have because he has come to be that which he most admires. Wordsworth records the achievement of what Milton can only foresee, the making of a paradise within. The poem records his experience of a fortunate fall, the encounters with Godwinism and the French Revolution that led him to see what he was, what he could do, and where he belonged. The actions in book ι prefigure that result, showing his rescue from a dis­ comfort that was somewhat less perilous than his fall but was severely distressing all the same. In fact, those actions not only prefigure the redemption to come but show precisely how it will happen. "One end hereby at least hath been attained— I My mind hath been revived": the book shows his mind reviving itself from the flaccid state into which it had fallen. He has learned about self-generated redemption and how to accomplish it. Toward the end of his epic he acknowledges how nature and Dorothy had always been there to keep him from total disaster; but book ι puts the emphasis upon the mind's

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own capacity to remake itself, and the poem never loses its awareness of how much the paradise within is made from within. The conclusion of book 1 recollects the passions and ambitions of the beginning though it recollects them in sobriety rather than tranquillity. It foresees the ecstasies to come as well as the final sobriety that brings him around to the present. Meyer Abrams has shown how the conclusion of The Prelude recalls its beginning, how the poem as a whole is, in Abrams's words, "a prelude to itself."5 Abrams reminds us that at the end of the poem the narrative tells how Wordsworth came through with his powers as a poet finally confirmed, those same powers that made it possible for him to write the poem he has just completed. To Abrams's point we can add what we have learned of the function of the introductory book, which suggests the import of the whole. It is a prime example of the means whereby healing is to be accomplished, the transformation of the materials of the world into the immaterialities of consciousness. Yet, as the book and the poem show, it is not only the facticity of the world that he takes up into himself, but nature's rhythms as well. The shape of his experience is not only linear, showing the growth of the poet's mind, but cyclical as well, a structure of return like that of summer at the beginning of Tintern Abbey. He has learned to absorb the world at that stratum of experience where, as he sees it, the certainty of change is balanced by the promise of return. If the French Revolution was not a sufficient turning-around but simply more of the same old tyranny, there is another turning-around to which he can acquiesce and in that acquiescence find a healing. Of course the fact that he finds in it a healing shows his awareness of the costs of what he has come through. But in The Prelude, as in Tintern Abbey, he shows that a kind of payment is possible, and that his art is both the place and the method of payment. The primary gesture of The Prelude is seen at work not only in his linking of origin and end but in his bringing together in a salutary way, 5. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 79. See also 74-75, and 287.

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within the framework of a text, the radically contrasting rhythms of romantic experience. His art will be an imitation of that from which all creativity flows. It will imitate in the shape of its working and in the way it informs that shape. The Prelude is an assertion of our counterpart creativity, our capacity to generate an art that acts out both our own regeneration and the perpetual genesis that is around us. We have to be clear, however, about the sorts of origin and closure the text seeks to assert, as well as the sorts of fullness and wholeness that emerge from the text. The Prelude is as much a poem about irrecoverability as about gestures of self and nature that, somehow, come around. Indeed, the poem concerns itself as much with the possibility of reoriginating as with the act itself and with those aspects which return. 6 And if the round seen in The Prelude is clearly a salutary one, it has its endemic ironies that The Prelude does not play up but that appear with sour incisiveness in A slumber did my spirit seal. Further, the wholeness made by the rounding Abrams has pointed out has to contend, in The Prelude, with subverting moments of bleakness, emptiness, and loss (the spots of time, the meetings with old people whose lives may well prefigure his own). Those moments open out a subtext that no round can cover over and that calls into question the poem's own assertions about orderliness and plenitude.7 And yet the round that appears in The Prelude is not just a nostalgic urge for closure, but the limning of an actuality, a closure and return that have occurred. Despite the pressures of the subtext the round is still in place, its assertion of the possibility of return focused firmly in the shape of the text and the journey made by the self whose history unfolds within it. One can see why the ironist, the poet of incessant disjunction, could both admire and distrust the organicist, the poet of incessant copula. Though Byron is obsessed by the linearity of 6. For useful related comments see Simpson, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry, 44. 7. Tilottama Rajan has argued that "chaos and discontinuity" are "at least as primary" in The Prelude as organic unity. See Dark Interpreter, 16.

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experience he too is taken by beginnings; or, more precisely, by beginning states, states of innocence and creatures of innocence, states of profound foolishness that touch us so deeply that we can never keep from staring at them. The key instance in Don Juan is, of course, the idyll of Juan and Haidee, which, in its pervasive reference to Eden, speaks of our beginnings as a race as well as of the fall of Mediterranean innocence. The idyll is designed to contrast, in its openness, with all the duplicities of the affair with Donna Julia in canto 1. Its primary purpose, however, is to enact the nostalgia that infects us all and then to purge the nostalgia by the pity and fear generated by a hard look at its object. George Ridenour has shown how the imagery of Eden and the Fall goes all through Don Juan, localized not only in Juan's relations with Haidee but every where Juan meets the world. 8 Here, too, it seems, is a passion for beginnings. But if one of Wordsworth's points is that beginnings are fructifying, that to return to such conditions, if only in speculation, is to reseed the world, Byron's point is that they are marvelous and illusory, and that they lead to an inevitable shattering of illusion and occasionally to death. (We have seen in earlier chapters and shall see again in the next that he often comes to doubt whether beginnings can stay stable enough ever to be found at all.) Byron's beginnings differ from those of Wordsworth because they are as likely as not to have no positive potential, too often sufficing only for a brief continuance and a difficult finish. When we return to such beginnings—and it seems we can never stop from doing so—we should return with the full awareness of what is bringing us there. As Byron sees it, we do not go back to seed-times with a desire to renew fruitfulness but, rather, with an impulse to touch at old feelings that, even in their day, were never quite good enough, never quite serious enough to know fully what they were seeing. Further, beginnings can never be trusted: there is always something suspect about them, a definite balefulness that belies 8. The Style of Don Juan, Yale Studies in English, no. 144 (New Haven: Yale University Press, i960).

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all their promise. Though Juan survives into a series of sexual comedies, Haidee dies, and the child she and Juan began dies with her. The promises of Edenic beginnings are as good as those with which stanzas begin; and we know from Byronic practice that the promises of a stanza are not very firm at all. Stanzas start off as people do, moved by the potential of a new beginning. But stanzas and people are as likely as not to see the potential pushed aside by the pressures of other movements— the dizziness of a hangover, the teasing gestures of a Spanish lady's ankle, the lurching of a ship, a sudden anger at cant and venality. The ironist is obsessed by truth, in this case the truth about beginnings and all they promise. Further, he is not just a revealer of truth but, he would argue, a maker of it as well. His point is that the shape of his stanza and his poem, a shape in which beginnings are very likely to be derailed, is a closer approximation to the actualities of experience than any nos­ talgic circularity. Where the organicist reverences Genesis and its Eden, the ironist affirms the chaos that precedes Genesis. It is not that he worships disorder but, rather, that he wants to show that, if Genesis is regenerated as often as we are, so too is chaos. The final irony, of course, is that the ironic poet goes deeper into ordinary matters than the organicist, since what the ironist sees emerging in his poems and our lives is the earliest state of all, the true condition of pure origin. Still, there is more to the ironist's uneasiness with the shape of the world put forth in organicist thinking than the question of beginnings alone. The organic round is a mode of circum­ scription, a closing-off and closing-in that brings summer back to itself. The same sort of shape brought Wordsworth back to the site near Tintern Abbey and brought his epic around to the point where he was ready to start writing it. We have seen that circumscribing shape, taken in a very different modality, under circumstances that are nothing like the conditions Wordsworth describes. From the beginning of Byron's major work it fig­ ured in all those versions of recoil which never ceased to haunt the canon. That same enclosing completeness, that absolute continuity, that turns up in the organic round, appears in the

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canon's doublings, most graphically in The Giaour and Manfred. In every one of those cases the shape is a deadly one, the enclosure a mocking figure for the fatal embrace whose melodrama colored so many of the poems up to Juan. The deadliness of the clicking-shut that signals the completion of an enclosure must have been apparent to Byron, at whatever level of consciousness, from the time of Harold on. Surely he knew the cost of totalizing and knew that any system that seeks to thrust it into our lives may well be less beneficial than its claims seem to promise. The early Harold succeeded in turning himself into a cul-de-sac, his first song showing that his world was closed off but that it enclosed only himself and those aspects of consciousness which made the song. That condition clearly prefigures those of the Giaour and Hassan on the one hand and Manfred and Astarte on the other. Given the nature of the condition, especially its potential for entrapment, we have still another reason, perhaps the most radical one of all, for Harold's never completing his imitation of Monbron by making a circling return home. Further, all of the complex interplay of fracture and sequence in the third canto of Harold is in fact a toying with a linkage that has proved to be terribly costly yet has an intense fascination. Still further, all of this shows that, whatever the awareness of chaos that Byron and Schlegel shared with the crafty makers of outline, he could not tolerate for long the unyielding circumscription for which they incessantly seek. There is a clear and ironic sense in which the undoing of enclosure that chaos forces on our borders has, for this ironist at least, a certain welcomeness about it, though he is always fully aware of its capacity to undo contours to the point of absolute disaster. He argues that we need some undoing at times to break the claustrophobic hold, but never too much, not so total a fracture of the ongoing line of narrative that (like the one in Tristram Shandy) it can never be brought back into the onward roll of sequence. Are we justified then in seeing this ironist's practice of fracture as, in part, a busy seeking for safety and health? It would seem so. (Wordsworth, of course, finds his healing in precisely the opposite gesture, the coming-around.) We are also

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equally justified in seeing that the repetition of self and text that his p o e m s always play with is fascinating and difficult and may very well be deadly if carried out without a letup, some breakup of the pattern. Given the density and intensity of this uneasiness with enclosure, we can see h o w a stanza like "Clay" and a p o e m like Don Juan can take as implicit antagonist a poem like Tintern Abbey, and would have found their antagonism confirmed had Byron k n o w n of The Prelude. The absolute continuity built into the organic system, as well as the repetition that brings the continuity about, would have to be for this ironist an affair of considerable ambivalence, as ambivalent as the case of chaos. This ironist has to bridge both continuity and chaos, partake of the essence of both; yet at the same time he gives neither side unqualified adulation because each brings to our lives and our texts both beneficence and bane in what seem to be equal p r o portions. In the last full canto ofDon Juan Byron sets up the beginnings of a tense dialectic involving two kinds of w o m e n , Aurora Raby, thoughtful, deep, and Shakespearean, and Adeline FitzFulke, " w h o s e mind, I If she had any, was upon her face" (16.49.2-3), w h o had in her "a twilight tinge of 'Blue' " (16.47.1), and w h o thought Pope a great poet. Later in the canto, again comparing the two women, Byron tells h o w Adeline has that vivacious versatility, Which many people take for want of heart. They err—'tis merely what is called mobility, A thing of temperament and not of art, Though seeming so, from its supposed facility; And false—though true; for surely they're sincerest, Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest. (16.97.2-8) Byron's note to the stanza has much to say about mobility, which he defines as "an excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions—at the same time without losing the past" (McGann, 5:769). T h e selfhood that sees and records the world

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embodied in Don Juan is flexible and mobile in just that way. It has all the versatility that Byron saw in the temperament of Lady Adeline and that Friedrich Schlegel saw as requisite for the romantic ironist. Highly susceptible to immediate impressions it records all that it can catch, even if, in doing so, it sends the narrative off its track. Yet, though it is immersed in immediacy, this kind of selfhood never shakes off the past, either finding that it returns on its o w n or else seeking out the past under the pressure of nostalgia. In any case such a temperament is not quite pleasant to have, however much it gives pleasure to others: as B y r o n puts it, " t h o u g h sometimes apparently useful to the possessor [mobility is] a most painful and unhappy attribute" (McGann, 5:769). O f course even this fragment of self-pitying introspection is itself a m o o d in mobility, one more stage within it as it goes on in its exploration of every kind of tonality. It seems that nothing is fixed except the qualities of mobility and its incessant drive. N o end can ever contain it. It is held together only by its energies. This is one m o d e of romantic holding-together, related, in its reverence of the energies of consciousness, to Blake, and, in its compelling sense of ephemerality, to Keats and Shelley. T h e past is always with it, carried along as mobility takes the self through perpetual change. T h e Wordsworthian sense of the past is figured differently, not as something carried forward that can never be lost but as something that is part of a unified and unifying context, material buried so deep inside the context that no trace of its origin can be found: Who knows the individual hour in which His habits were first sown even as a seed, Who that shall point as with a wand, and say 'This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain'? (Prelude, 2.211-15) B y r o n knows as Wordsworth does that "each man is a m e m o r y to himself" (Prelude, 3.189), but Wordsworth conceives of those memories not as the baggage of mobility but as part of an interlocking complex:

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Hard task to analyse a soul, in which Not only general habits and desires, But each most obvious and particular thought— Not in a mystical and idle sense, But in the words of reason deeply weighed— Hath no beginning. (Prelude, 2.232-37) This is another m o d e of romantic holding-together, its model the organic system that, in its interlocking order, contains that self and all others. T h e kind of p o e m that emerges from it is itself drawn from that model. Self, world, and work make up a series of counterpart structures, just as they do—though structurally very different—in the ironic system, where the mobility of the energies of the world is matched by both the mobility of the self and the rhythms of a poem that is driven by linearity. T h e Wordsworthian m o d e of holding-together thinks of its business as containment, the fashioning of a unified enclosure that surrounds and enfolds and finds a place for everything within itself. T h e Byronic m o d e of holding-together resists containment because to contain means to round out and close in, and such gestures ignore that alternation of making and unmaking which is (and perhaps ought to be) forever upsetting our enclosures. To take either kind of holding-together as the exclusive truth about romanticism, or even the major truth, is to ignore all that the other sees and therefore to sentimentalize the one singled out. These are not successive states, like Blake's Innocence and Experience, but alternative ones, different modes of conceiving the world and of putting the results of that conception back out into the world in the shapes of poems. However different their modalities, The Prelude and Don Juan are poems of the mind in the act of learning sufficient ways of possessing experience. They unite in agreeing that the mind has to learn h o w to redeem itself, and the poet has to learn h o w to shape his poems so that the shape is, itself, an image of that redemption, an echo of the way it works. Shape and substance, form and gesture,

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should mirror and confirm each other, be versions of the same activity. However different the experiences recorded, both poems seek to get at the same salutary result. In The Prelude and Don Juan being and doing are shown, finally, to be one and inseparable.

7

Irony and Organicism: Origin and Textuality A FEW PAGES into E.T.A. Hoffmann's Kater Murr we enter the middle of a conversation between Meister Abraham and the Prince of Sieghartshof, the meister a kind of magician, the prince a thickhead who could not quite cram his vanity into his tiny country. More precisely, we come in at the beginning of a story about a lawyer who, walking across the Pont-Neuf on a stormy night, has his hat stolen by one grenadier, his cloak by a second, and his cane, topped with a golden knob, by a third. There is, Meister Abraham says, a similar story in Rabelais, a remark that leads the prince into confusing Rabelais and the lawyer, and leads Abraham into a mild, if exasperated, correction of the prince. But that is only one of the problems of identity that inform this fragment of conversation. The story Abraham tells has its immediate source in Sterne's Sentimental Journey, in a section entitled "The Fragment. Paris," where Yorick has his butter brought to him on a currant leaf that, in turn, rests on a scrap of waste paper that serves him as a plate. The scrap has on it a story written "in the old French of Rabelais's time," and the story is a version of the one Meister Abraham tells to the prince, the story he has insisted was similar to one in Rabelais. Yorick is not quite that unequivocal. All he says is "for ought I know [it] might have been wrote by him"; and in fact even that "might" is too strong a guess for, as Sterne's editors have pointed out, nothing like that anecdote is to be found in Rabelais.1 This quirky bit of comparatism leads i. See the editorial comment by Gardner D. Stout, Jr., in his edition of the novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). The quotations are taken from page 250 of that text. For an important essay on the modes of Sterne and Hoffmann see Steven Paul Scher, "Hoffmann and Sterne: Unmediated Parallels in Narrative Method," Comparative Literature 28 (1976): 309-25. ( 194 )

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nowhere but back to its makers, to Hoffmann, whose false attribution never even hints at the true one (though the Journey was one of his favorite books), and to Sterne, w h o leaves his guess open-ended though he knows Rabelais so well that the latter haunts the world of his work. The result is a deliberate muddling of origins, with novels two generations apart working in complicity and careful obfuscation. Sterne and Hoffmann together take the tale's intertextual life to the point where it has no clear and acknowledged begetter. O f course there is a sense in which this is part of Sterne's incessant self-parody, that perpetual turning upon self which Friedrich Schlegel was to see as essential for his kind of ironist. If Sterne is cagey about origins here, putting them forth with so much incertitude that they can easily be taken away, he begins Tristram Shandy with as close a look at originating as could be asked for. T h o u g h one is writing an autobiography one is not, in fact, autogenetic. To begin at the beginning should mean to be in at the begetting. To do so would put away any possibility of a lacuna, of the story being in any way fragmentary. Wholeness is the goal, the end of this glimpse of origin. Yet to explain the conditions of his begetting, Tristram is forced to explain his parents' attitude toward the act, that is, to analyze its origin; and from there he goes into a labyrinth whose windings bring it back upon itself more often than they take it toward some ultimate, ever-receding point of beginning. T h e mockery is not only of narrative modes and their quests for tidiness but of narrative images of wholeness, totalizing forms, and what such forms demand in the way of elaborate completion. Cervantes—who was, with Sterne, one of the main p r o genitors of romantic irony—played other, related games, not so much with narrative beginnings as with those boundaries where narratives meet the substance of their representations. In part 2 of Quixote there is incessant chatter about part 1, suggestions about correcting it, encounters with the characters w h o people it, queries by others about whether the part 2 from which they are speaking will ever appear—that same part 2 which holds the only kind of life they will ever have. D e m a r -

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cations among modes of existence, specifications of the place where one kind gives way and another takes over, where lives end and fictions originate, where fictions about fiction find their generation—all these become problematic and finally somewhat ridiculous. And that is how they were taken by the romantics who took Cervantes and Sterne as models for the making of ironical texts. Though Hoffman plays with obfuscations of origin his lineage as an obfuscator is clear and unmistakable, acknowledged in his understanding of textuahty. He grounds that understanding in Kater Murr, one of the deftest explorations of the relations of origin and wholeness put forth by a romantic ironist. The field he explores is that which opens up when the two narrative lines are played off against each other, the eponymous one containing the full text of Murr's autobiography, the other built from the random sheets of paper that give us all we come to learn of the biography of Johannes Kreisler. The line of narrative focused on Kreisler is incomplete, only occasionally consecutive, and coherent in some of its elements but not in all. The special character of this novel's textuality begins not simply with the coexistence of these lines (they could, after all, have run concurrently, one on the left page and one on the right, sort of a proto-G/aj) but with the predictable if unforeseeable assault of one upon the other, the shattering of the sequentiality of the cat's line by whichever scrap out of Kreisler's biography happens to have been used to blot a particular page. Yet that is only one pattern in the web of textuality. The scraps of paper that begin the first fragment from the biography, the scraps beginning with the story of the lawyer on the bridge, cut off the first segment of the cat's autobiography in the middle of a sentence. When the fragment of Kreisler's life comes to an end the cat's narrative resumes, beginning with the rest of the sentence that was cut off and going on until the narrative is once again disrupted. The fragments that disrupt that narrative have no such continuity, none of the neat linkage that makes it easy to pick up the thread of the cat's tale. They are related only in that they are torn from the same book, the same source of blotting paper. They cannot

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give to the text what the cat's line gives, a stubborn linearity to which the text always returns, as though a disruption were only an escapade, an explosion of energy that comes and dissipates and surely will come again in the next aleatory occurrence. If there is fragmentation there is also repeated certainty. If there is disjunction there is also a rigorous regularity of line within which chance has no place, which is always there to be returned to, which goes on in unyielding compulsion to bring to the tale the comfort of closure. Still, there is much more to these matters, and some of it has to do with the puzzle of endings that are not quite conclusions and have the oddest resemblance to beginnings. T h e last we hear of the stories comes from the disjunct biography of Kreisler. It ends with a broken sentence commenting on a letter from Abraham, a letter that, while telling Kreisler of imminent danger, invites him to the Furstin's name-day festival. Hoffm a n n could have finished his novel with M u r r ' s story rather than Kreisler's, concluding with M u r r ' s final comment that he has ended a major period in his life and that he is rounding out his text at that point. But Hoffmann prefers to stop with expectations, the broken sentence about the letter that points elsewhere than where we stop. There are corners to be turned even if we cannot see around them. T h e novel leaves us reaching out, poised to make those turns. And yet, as it happens, we have already made one of those turns, as far back as the first pages of the novel. For the festival referred to at the end as about to happen is the festival Abraham describes to Kreisler at the beginning of the text, in the first appearance of a fragment from the Kreisler biography. In m y end is m y beginning—though not quite purposefully so (contrast, e.g., The Prelude) because the references to the festival are part of the aleatory life of the novel and, given the logic of the aleatory, could have ended up anywhere in the text. With masterly shrewdness Hoffmann has it both ways at once, turning out a text that is, simultaneously, determinate and indeterminate; or, more precisely, that gives the feel of determinacy without the substance of it, comforting the reader with the fullest possible closure (what could be more

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enclosed than a shape whose end leads back to its beginning?) while in fact offering a closure that is a fluke, a freak, the kind of coincidence that creates superstitions. Closure is not quite a seeming, a figment—it does, after all, happen; but we ought not to give it more credit than it deserves, more substance than it actually has. And that has to be so even when we notice that Murr's autobiography ends with an event that is detailed in that same first fragment, Abraham's handing the cat over to Kreisler for a while and perhaps permanently. It has been argued not only that this links the lines of the cat and the kapellmeister but that it reveals the radical unity of Hoffmann's text. 2 Yet here too the logic of the aleatory has to dominate, and the result, once again, is to emphasize Hoffmann's shrewdness, his parody of totalization, his sardonic obeisance to our desire for it. That obeisance extends even further, to our desire for neatly demarcated beginnings. Murr's story has, as I have said, a proper beginning, one that initiates the novel. The origin of the Kreisler story is elsewhere than within this text, found in the printed book from which Murr is tearing the sheets as he needs them. But Hoffmann's novel is in fact full of other beginnings, a veritable plethora of them, because of all the stoppings and startings that occur within it. Each return to the one line or the other is not simply a matter of resumption but of reoriginating. In the line of autobiography it is a new return to continuation; in the line of biography it is the beginning of another fragment, another disjunctive snippet. Genesis is never finished, never just a jumping-off place. It is an act that stutters, repeating and renewing itself long after it is supposed to have done its work. In one aspect of this text origin is lost to our sight, because the beginning of Kreisler's story will be forever unavailable to us, locked into that book we shall never see; but as if in recompense for that permanent loss the text brings to us a continuing flood 2. See Robert S. Rosen, Ε.Τ.Λ. Hoffmanns Kater Murr: Aufiauformen una Erzahlsituationen, Abhandlungen zur Kunst-, Musik-, und Literaturwissenschaft, Band 81 (Bonn: H. Bouvier Verlag, 1970), 34; Dietrich Raff, Ich-Bewusstsein und Wirklichkeit bet E.T A. Hoffmann (Tubingen: Emmanuel Verlag, 1970),108.

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of beginnings that occur not only in the fragmented line but in the consecutive one, making for a perpetual regeneration of genesis. We are offered beginnings that can end only when the sheets of scrap paper are exhausted. Then the stories will end with those endings which point back to the start of all those beginnings. And yet with this plethora of geneses there is a curious muddling of origin, especially in the Kreisler line: Where precisely is the beginning of that line? Is there any place where it can be said to start? In the line that tells the cat's tale there is a master beginning that clearly asserts its priority and privilege; yet there is also a series of subsidiary ones, to none of which we can give priority or any sort of privilege. Whether taken together or separately the lines are so generous with geneses that origin slips into mystery, into a darkness where we are forever bumping into beginnings.3 Still, whatever these lines share in the fact of repeated beginnings, the beginnings that occur in each are necessarily different in kind. It is one thing to begin a semimonadic fragment, and quite another to pick up the rest of an interrupted sentence. The textuality of Hoffmann's novel grows largely out of the pressure of difference, the fact that, however much the lines echo each other, the texture of each is precisely what the texture of the other is not. In fact, it is only from the countenance of its opposite that each makes a countenance of its own. The differences are radical and ineradicable, obstinate and essential, endemic to the character of each line and inseparable from that character. Qualities of narrative line are actually qualities of being, not only ways qflife but ways of being in life. The quality of the way that sees as its essential effort the disruption of seamlessness is that of the romantic ironist. A clear image of this ironist's view of seamlessness, its claustrophobic qualities, the entrapment it inevitably entails, comes out in Kreisler's elabo3. In Der Sandmann Hoffmann plays with the matter and manner of beginnings and then decides, finally and well into the story, to give it no beginning at all. See Spukgeschtchsten una Marchen (Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, n.d.), 121-22.

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ration on the meaning of his name. Speaking to the Ratin Benzon he insists that his name cannot be derived from kraus (curly) because that would make him a note curler (Tonkrausler) on the analogy of a hair curler (Haarkrausler). Its derivation has to be from Kreis (circle), which of course makes him a circler (Kreisler). And from this, in that fluent gliss of tonality that characterizes Byron as well as Hoffmann, he moves into an awed and pained disquisition on the circle of our being: Sie konnen nicht wegkommen von dem Worte Kreis, und der Himmel gebe, dass Sie dann gleich an die wunderbaren Kreise denken mogen, in denen sich unser ganzes Sein bewegt, und aus denen wir nicht herauskommen konnen, wir mogen es anstellen, wie wir wollen.4 Compelled into a sort of St. Vitus's dance the circler longs for the open and unbounded ("Hinausseht ins Freie"). And the deep pain of that longing may be the irony that characterizes this circler and informs his acts ("der tiefe Schmerz dieser Sehnsucht mag nun wieder eben jene Ironie sein, die Sie, Verehrte, so bitter tadeln"). Irony, then, is the gesture this circler makes. Irony finds its natural antagonist in circles, totalization, seamlessness—modes of enfolding that are, in fact, way's of enforcing confinement. The way of the ironist is therefore necessarily disruptive of all that which holds together and tolerates no outlet from itself. It was the way of Byron in Don Juan as well as of Hoffmann in Kater Murr, and it stands to romanticism as a whole not simply as a sassy and irreverent component that gives some spice to the solemnities of pantheism but, as it is in Kater Murr and Don Juan, an antithesis to the continuum, its commentator, challenger, and antidote. Hoffmann's novel and Byron's poem enact a central occurrence in romanticism, the encounter of continuum and occasionality. It is an encounter marked, on both sides, by stubbornness and aggression. In 4. Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, n.d.), 58: "You cannot get away from the word 'circle,' and may heaven grant that you might then think at once about the wonderful circle in which our entire being moves, and out of which we cannot come, whatever we do."

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Hoffmann's novel and Byron's poem the enactment appears in the business of narrative and what happens to it. In fact, Byron's poem begins with a discussion of the writing business, its first words those of the name of a contemporary poet whose repute, in some quarters, was questionable. The phrasing and presentation of the name—"BOB SOUTHEY!"—make room for an exquisite contempt as well as, two stanzas later, an obscene pun (Dedication, I . I ) . A set of names and titles follows—Poet-laureate, Tory, Epic Renegade, Lakers—their tonality colored by that of the name that begins the stanza. The tonality continues in the sardonic echo of the nursery rhyme ("four and twenty blackbirds [baked] in a pye" [Dedication, 1.8]), which reduces Southey and his cohorts in all kinds of stature at the same time as it locates them in a venerable subliterary context. Southey and his epic group are squeezed into the confines of a nursery rhyme just as they, as blackbirds, are squeezed into the pie, a momentous reduction in size since Southey has been an Epic Renegade, the adjective denoting not only the kinds of poems he writes but the degree of his renegation. That he and his kind can be shrunk into the blackbirds of that old and tiny fiction shows that his renegation is epic but weak, his apostasy as feeble as his poems. Never strong enough to become great renegades, he and his fellows find plenty of room in the pie for their four-and-twenty voices. At the end of the Dedication the poet takes time for a terminal crack at Southey's moral strength: "Apostasy's so fashionable, too, I To keep one creed's a task grown quite Herculean, / Is it not so, my Tory, ultra-Julian?" (Dedication, 17.6—8). His apostasy took epic proportions but true heroic prowess can be seen only in the opposite of apostasy, the keeping to a single creed. Such a keeping would be a Herculiad, which Southey could neither write nor live. The Dedication puts Southey and his cohorts into several categories of literary discourse, each, traditionally, seen at a very different level in the hierarchy of poetic kinds. The reduction of this community of epicists to the place of the chorus in a nursery rhyme is not only a squeezing into the confines of a pie

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and a kind of text but a slippage down the hierarchy of genres to the proper place for their apostate politics. The valorization of genres becomes a moral valorization. And yet the voice of this Dedication cannot give up on these apostates entirely. They are, after all, craftsmen in the craft he shares with them: "You're shabby fellows—true—but poets still, I And duly seated on the immortal hill" (Dedication, 6.7-8). Whatever their political differences they are members of a community, sharing in the continuity of generic tradition and that family of kinds which makes up the hierarchy of genres. The Dedication, we are coming to see, is about durability as well as apostasy, commonwealth as well as hierarchy. And it is from that specific combination of concerns that the Dedication takes its tonality. For apostasy is a fracturing, a digression from an established truth, the opposite of the keeping of one creed. Apostasy sets up a rhythm of disjunction and disruption that seems anything but that of epic, associated as epic is with grand and inexorable sweeps going from its invocations to its foreseeable conclusions, the death of Hector, the founding of Rome, the expulsion from Paradise. There is an odd air of incongruence in the Dedication, a sense that the communities to which it refers and the texts of which it speaks do not quite fit together with the acts it dwells on so nastily. The rhythms it ponders are both textual and moral, sometimes separately so, mostly simultaneously so. It is the pondering of just those rhythms that will occupy Byron's own epic for as long as it lasts. But first that epic has to begin, and the beginning of canto 1 shows the narrator occupied with ways of opening his epic. Continuing his concern with figures of modern life he goes over the names of military heroes, all of them, like the poets he refers to, "followers of fame," none of them quite suitable for the poem that is waiting to begin. This is much the same situation as in the first book of The Prelude, whose narrator ponders the possibilities of an epic theme, rejecting the historical sort as somehow less relevant and settling, finally, for the history of his nearest contemporary, himself. In The Prelude this pondering of theme takes place in the middle of the first book, the

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poem recording the anguish of its genesis, just as Sterne's Tristram recorded his own. Don Juan differs importantly because it does all its pondering as it goes on, its present-tense presentation matching the present-tense immediacy of the attack on the Tory Lakers. It does not tell of anguish in the past but of his difficulties, just at that moment, in choosing a theme; that is, in beginning his poem. But our legs are already being pulled at with all this ironist's vigor; the poem's incessant duplicities are already under way. For the narrator's chatty discussion of his concern with the choice of a subject is actually the first action in the poem, a beginning before the beginning. Don Juan is profoundly duplicitous, two-faced about its concern with its origins. While that concern is genuine because the poem is looking for a hero and the theme that would come with him, it is also duplicitous because the concern about origins is in fact the content of the poem's real origin, the question the poem ponders as it is setting out. This duplicity (doubleness) of origin has to have a correspondent doubleness of theme, each origin having its own theme, the earliest (the problem of how to make a poem) containing the later (the story of Don Juan). The poem is pregnant with origins and their attendant themes but it is a curious double pregnancy in which the origin that actually begins canto 1 contains within itself the origin for which he has been searching, the one that is to start, in a few stanzas, the story of Don Juan. The narrator, then, decides, for a hero, on Don Juan, whom "we all have seen . . . in the pantomime I Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time" (1.1.7-8). Juan, in fact, was sent to the devil not only ere his own time but the time of the soldiers and the Lakers as well, not to speak of the time of the Dedication itself (dated 16 September 1818). Juan's tale and the texts that embody it have an old and considerable history, as venerable as that level of literary discourse which includes the rhyme of the blackbirds in the pie. But several curious ironies come up in this business about temporality, not the least of which is the narrator's relation to his subject. In the first stanza of the first canto he speaks of "our ancient friend Don Juan," the phrasing a

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warm and general one, the word "ancient" and the subsequent reference to the pantomime showing that we are not dealing with immediate and intimate friendship but the sort of acquaintance one has with a figure of ancient legend—a Hamlet or a Faust—whom one has been hearing about for much of one's life. In the fifth stanza of the same canto the narrator, speaking once again of his decision on a theme, refers to "my friend Don Juan," a phrasing that can be taken as a personalizing of the previous "our" but that, by omitting the defining "ancient," introduces an odd ambiguity into the text (1.5.8). By speaking of "my friend Don Juan" the narrator speaks as though he were referring to someone he saw yesterday, last week, or a year or so ago. The change in phrasing offers not only a change in intimacy but, with a slight shifting of perspective, a potential change in temporality, a change of the ancient past, the past of the old plays and pantomimes, into the narrator's own immediacy. This is one of the canniest moves in a poem that is notable for such moves, and it has a complex, even spectacular, result. For once the tale gets going the narrator draws on this newly established immediacy to put himself into the story as an older contemporary of Juan, a friend of his mother and father, the recipient of "a pail of housemaid's water" dumped on him by "little Juan" (1.24.8), and then, at the beginning of the second canto, as one ofJuan's companions on the boat that was sailing to its shipwreck. All of this would have some plausibility if the narrator were, at the time of the telling, a very old man, one old enough to have been an adviser of this Juan's parents, to have lived through the siege of Ismail in 1790, the death of Nelson in 1805, Southey's laureateship (1813), and Wordsworth's Excursion (1815). Yet at the end of the first canto, in stanza 213, he tells us that he is now just thirty years old and worried about the graying of his hair; and we know, from the Dedication that preceded all this business, that he is not only a contemporary of Southey and Wordsworth but their rival as an epic poet. The issue would be somewhat (though not very much) clearer if there were evidence of a shift in voices between the

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Dedication and the beginning of the first canto; yet there is not only no such evidence but a patent continuation of voice and time scheme. Nor is there any change in the nature of the voice between the consideration of theme at the beginning of the canto and the commencement of the story ofJuan in the eighth stanza. Indeed, there is nothing that separates the voice that concludes the canto by quoting Southey from the voice that has just described Juan's first scrape and claimed for its description the authority of a contemporary. Where we would expect a distinction between voices we hear only one, and it floats in a curiously unfixed temporality that gives it considerable freedom and flexibility, the ability to claim all kinds of authority. It would simplify matters considerably to identify that voice with the personality of George Gordon, Lord Byron, the person whose name is under the title; but we have already seen that the voice that speaks from the text is profoundly concerned with the making of fictions, and to speak of the voice that speaks from this fiction as simply that of the author of the poem would make that voice and author uneasy. Yet the puzzles hardly end with this quandary because there is still another, a closely related one, which the voice of the text glides over as though it were no puzzle at all. The voice begins the canto with a reference to the ancient Juan and the pantomime in which he figured, yet the Juan whose life gets under way in stanza eight is no ancient at all but a figure of the second half of the eighteenth century—a lover, of course, but of Catherine the Great and not some person of the Spanish Renaissance; a fighter, but with a husband of midcentury Seville and not a cuckold of an earlier time. He shares with the older figure only a name and the outline of a similar history—a history so similar, in fact, that when the narrator says at the end of the canto that he "and several now in Seville, I Saw Juan's last elopement with the devil" (1.203.7-8) there is no way of telling whether it is the old or the new Juan who so eloped. The story the narrator tells has a multiple origin, fusing the Juans of several centuries, playing with the reader by substituting a new Juan for the expected one, playing with him further by refusing, on crucial

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occasions, to distinguish between them. Moving from a com­ ment about an ancient friend to the notice of a present one, the narrator not only slips himself into the story but makes its sources so slippery that we cannot always choose among the Juans now available. Yet there is still more multiplicity to come. When the narrator mentions, at the end of the canto, that "a panoramic view of hell's in training, I After the style of Virgil and of Homer" (1.200.6-7), t n e hero slips into the guise of both Odysseus and Aeneas, figures who have nothing whatever to do with the legend of Juan, having in common with it only some excursions to hell. At that point the origins of this epic take on an awesome multiplicity, making precision in the quest for the hero's origins impossible to achieve. This is precisely the opposite of the situation that emerged with the narrative voice: there we find a singleness where we expect a multiplicity, while with the hero we find a multiplicity where we expect the sin­ gleness of the ancient Juan. In one case there is no question of origin, in the other there is every question, or rather, a multi­ plicity of them. The text is simultaneously single and manifold, easy and impossible to fix, puzzling in one way because it is univocal, puzzling in another because there are so many voices, ancient and new, speaking at once within it. The text is a manyringed circus with a single ringmaster and a series of acts that seem to be always in each other's ring, each taking part in the other's performance. The experiments with the question of origin that began in The Giaour and continued in the third canto οι Harold culminate here, in and among these rings. Yet the voice that tells of all this is not only single but singleminded, bent on getting the text going in that voice's own epic manner and with its own kind of epic hero. Part of the reason for his speaking of epics in the Dedication, indeed for his dedi­ cating his new poem to his intellectual enemies, is to clear the ground by setting up opposites to himself, poets who write poems of the same generic kind but who are morally and intel­ lectually his contraries. And since their epics would have to be as stuffy, obtuse, and obscure as the poets who made them, the Dedication is not only a sneer at the longwinded Lakers but a

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hint, by implied contrast, at the qualities of the epic to follow. The only poem referred to by name in the Dedication is Wordsworth's "long 'Excursion' . . . a sample from the vasty version I Of his new system to perplex the sages" (Dedication, 4.3-4). This epic is enormous ("I think the quarto holds five hundred pages") and yet it is only an instance, as vague as Coleridge's metaphysics yet a segment of something so orderly that it can actually be called a system. Whatever else the Lakers are, it seems that they are not unsystematic. If apostasy is a deviation from what has been an orderly progression, there is no such disorder in the Lakers' obscure intellectual constructs. The latter are murky and orderly at once, a combination close to an oxymoron. Yet the point is not only in that quasi-oxymoron by which the Lakers live but in what the parts of the oxymoron do to each other, and especially in what happens to "system." The term and all that it stands for take coloration and moral tone from the partner in the oxymoron, so that "system" is both tinged and tainted by the company it keeps in that rhetorical figure which holds the Lakers' intellectual life. Some two years after the Dedication, Byron put the point with unequivocal precision in a letter to a friend. Speaking of "the Scoundrels of Scribblers . . . trying to run down Pope" he says that "this comes of Southey and Turdsworth and such renegade rascals with their systems" (LJ 8.253). The fact that system can work so closely with renegation, be found so often in such company, tells all that needs to be told of its susceptibility. Byron had always been unhappy with system ("when a man talks of system his case is hopeless" [LJ 6.46]). What he does in the Dedication is give it a tonality from which, for the rest of the poem, it can never escape. If part of the purpose of the Dedication is for the narrator to clear a space for himself, showing where he will work by showing what he is not, his space should have no place for system, no room for its apostate taints. And yet it not only has such room but flaunts its insistence on system in a mockery whose victims are multiple. Toward the end of his pondering on theme the narrator talks of the usual practices of epic poets, their tradition of plunging in medias res

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and then returning to earlier episodes to fill out the background of their story. But even this, he argues, is too irregular for him, too prone to digressive practices, too far astray from the straight and narrow. He does not want to start his epic story somewhere down "the heroic turnpike road" but right at the story's origin: "My way," he says, "is to begin with the beginning," as though he were as devoted to honoring origin as to writing his epic poem (1.7.2). Of course the careful reader holds back his full acceptance of this, sensing a tongue sometimes in cheek, sometimes stuck out at the Southeyan crew of epicists and all that they stand for. After what we have already seen of his muddying of his hero's origins and his linking of system and apostasy there can be no question of taking this attitude seriously, of giving assent to his solemn assertions. What follows, we argue, will therefore be a feigning, a carefully ordered duplicity, taking as its victims the apostles of system, Tory and otherwise. Yet what follows is in fact anything but a feigning, for it holds the proper and legitimate beginning of the story of the new Juan, a beginning so carefully systematized that it starts with the setting of the place where Juan was born and then moves to his father's genealogy. Indeed, to emphasize his systematic ways the narrator echoes those long and rigorous biblical genealogies made up of a series of names linked by "begat": "Jose, who begot our hero, who I Begot—but that's to come" (1.9.7-8). After this brief section on the father there occurs, as one would expect, a long analysis of the mother, including her education and especially those aspects of her selfhood which had to affect Juan from his earliest days. The honoring of origin can hardly go further than these gestures, for they not only create the origin of Juan's history but thematize the question of origin, making it the content of the story's beginning as well as of that pondering of epic introductions that preceded the beginning. Form and theme could not be more unified than they are at the outset of the poem's first canto, coming together, as they do, in intricate mutual reflection. Part of the purpose of this elaborate play is to entrap the reader, especially the careful one who has been watching the

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narrator toy with the matter of system. The quick or careless reader expects nothing other than what occurs, and is therefore not subject to entrapment by this beginning; but the reader alerted by—for example—the punning sexuality of the Dedication has been watching for something other than what he actually gets. This narrator knows that the order of readers is hierarchical, and he aims for its uppermost level. Eventually, however, he gets to them all, aware that every point on the hierarchy of readers has its own peculiar smugness and therefore its own form of vulnerability. This ironist knows all the kinds and leaves none out. Even the careless reader will see that the narrator cannot stick to his story for any length of time, while the careful reader will learn that the narrator has special tricks in store for him. Though the narrator says, just after his adulation of beginnings, that "the regularity of my design I Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning" (1.7.3—4), it is not long before he does go wandering, violating his earlier assertions of regularity, confirming the careful reader's sense that the narrator cannot bear what his enemies mean by system. Yet that careful reader can never be content in his smugness. If the narrator has been regular at the beginning he can be so again, and in fact he is frequently so, returning with embarrassment to the narrative line he has left. No one, it seems, will ever be able to hold this narrator, to say he is thus and so and that is the truth about him. His purpose is to make certain that we can never really define him, that we can say only that he is capable of any act at any time. He abhors that totalization which offers the completeness of anything, arguing, by his actions and his attitude toward us, that we shall never have him completely. That is, our knowledge of his selfhood will continually be deferred, forever unavailable, perpetually open-ended. He will always be flexible, lucid, and opportunistic, using whatever is at hand to make certain that he resists the embrace of the reader who seeks to surround and contain him. And all this slipperiness comes from a voice obsessed with texts, with all that goes into their engendering and continuation. He has promised regularity of self, and that stays always

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just out of our reach. He has promised regularity of text, and he keeps to it just long enough to lull his auditors, waking them into entrapment. Self and text make the same promise. In fact, there is only one act of promising, made jointly by self and text, each speaking for the other as well as for itself. Self and text have the same goals, the text both resisting and returning to system because it too abhors totalization. It resists not only the totality of the Aristotelian order of narrative but that inverse totality of texts like Tristram Shandy, which is so thoroughly opposed to the Aristotelian mode that it becomes that mode's predictable opposite. We know that Sterne's novel will always be aleatory, just as we know that Oedipus Rex and The Excursion will never be anything of the sort. With Don Juan we can only be certain that we will never really know such things, that it will be both Aristotelian and aleatory in a mixture that will never be predictable, never be capable of being fixed into either a design or an antidesign. The proper mode for the self is also the proper mode for the text. An open-ended selfhood calls for an open-ended textuality, each clearly the most desirable mode of its kind for the world that is shaping itself out in this epic. Self and artifact are thoroughly homologous, joining in the only acceptable totalization. Together they make a statement not only about a way of handling texts but a way of being in the world. (In The Prelude, where self and artifact are equally homologous, there is a statement comparable in kind if not in content.) Together they take on the status of pedagogues, teaching not only a way of being but a way of reading—most specifically, of reading this poem that will go on until the poet can write no more of it. Together they show that ways of being and ways of reading have to be taken conjointly, implying, ultimately, that they may well be the same thing, the same essential gesture. (The Prelude does the same kind of teaching, making, from its own position, the same sort of point about being and reading.) Once again the careful reader is being addressed, this time not in mockery but in the highest and most sympathetic seriousness. These acts of instruction are designed to bring us

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to the narrator's level of lucidity, to make us as clearheaded and flexible as he is. He will continue to put us off, staying elusive and untouchable, and he will continue to make certain that we will never be content in our smugness; yet he will also continue to instruct us about those homologies by which we ought to live, the likening of self and artifact, the consequent likening of being and reading. And he will do so even as he takes the text apart, making meaning not only in the making of texts but in their unmaking as well; more precisely, in that dialectic of making and unmaking which is his essential pedagogic device. He is the bull in the china shop but he is also the maker of the china and even the owner of the shop. Committed to the telling of the story and the undoing of the telling he is himself an oxymoron, his actions oxymoronic gestures; and yet that figure is not quite accurate because, like all figures, it implies a wholeness within which the parts do their work, and he will resist even an oxymoronic wholeness though it is the one with which he would naturally be most in sympathy. The rhetoric of doing and undoing pervades his text so fully that even the fullness of an oxymoron has to be suspect, always open to qualification. He seems so compulsive about causing disjunction that nothing except that compulsion can be said certainly to hold, just as nothing holds in the world of young Juan except that drive which keeps him going. Those compulsions are, in fact, the instruments of the self's own disjunction. "Clay," which ends with a call for a cure for hangover ("And so—for Godsake— Hock and Soda water"), shows how compulsions take him apart just as they take the text apart. It shows that what happens to the self happens to the text in what seems like a chain of necessity. The fragment also shows, as clearly as any other instance in the text, that the compulsions that do in the self are the same as those that do in the text. Here too there is a homology of self and text, their radical likening of act and contour seen in both form and mode. In this world of disjunction and difference, intermission and evasion, some things do mirror

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each other after all. The self that makes up the text and teaches us how to read it is both disjunctive and disjunct, a maker of mirrors of that which it is. Kater Murr is significantly different on the matter of narrative gestures, yet it acts out a kindred version of the homologies in Don Juan. In Murr there are a variety of originary voices and therefore a variety of narrative selves and stances within the text. The cat who tells his own tale, spun out of his (variously discreet) doings, is closer to the center of origin than either of the other narrators can be. The voice that tells what there is of Kreisler's story is as originary as that of any biographer, telling what he knows (and this one knows a great deal) about his subject's business. The third voice, that of the editor who put out this curious amalgam, is the text's immediate cause, originary in a way that none of the others can be, though at a greater distance from the matter of the texts than either of the other voices. The editor, it would seem, is edging toward the expansive mastery exercised by the narrative voice in Don Juan; and yet he only begins such edging. He has little definable presence, whatever the snippets of personality that come through in his remarks at the beginning and end. Rather than commanding the text he sits on its peripheries, foregoing all but an occasional comment as the cat and the kapellmeister work out their destinies. There is, then, none of that unitary voice which blurs the expected distinctions in Don Juan, and therefore no way of arguing that all the tonalities emerging from the text, all of its complex textuality, come out of (and define) a sole source, the narrator's selfhood. There is no supreme and encompassing level in Hoffmann's text and therefore no place for the fiction of an all-inclusive originary voice. Origin in Kater Murr is only two-thirds clear, the Kreisler line having that ever-receding origin we noted earlier. And yet it is in the relation of that third of unclarity to the remainder of Hoffmann's text that the busy textuality of the novel approaches its counterpart in Byron's poem. That relation makes possible an interplay of fuzziness and perspicuity on the matter of origin that matches precisely the interplay we have observed in Don Juan, where the surety of

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origin in the narrator's voice plays off against the obscurities of Juan's genealogy and the narrator's own unmeasurability. Whatever the levels on which they occur those events are essential, not only in defining the qualities of these texts but in defining their place in the romantic order. Such events are essential to the ironist's craft, offering that element of the indeterminate which is always present in romantic irony and a sign that we are dealing with the authentic sort. And then there is the likening of the ironists, those figures who are always, to some degree, the victims of the energies by which they victimize. Indeed, we can recognize the ironist, in part, by this double status (which surely relates to his habitual duplicity) as well as by the fact that he is so hard to hold on to, a creature of eternal deferral. The narrator of Don Juan is not only Southey's nemesis but his own, the energies he expends on Southey the same as those which derail his narrative; and if he is a certain origin for the narrative he is never, as we have seen, a fully graspable one. It is all of those elements together that make him a classical romantic ironist. The editor of Kater Murr ought to qualify for a similar status but he is too little defined to be more than a smiling ghost. Still, some one has to have those characteristics, and in Hoffmann's text it is the suffering artist who takes on the necessary functions. We have a completer hold on Murr than we do on Kreisler, which puts Kreisler in the same position as the narrator of Don Juan, forever just out of reach. That Kreisler is a victim is essential to our understanding of his position at the court and in the world: he is Hoffmann's cardinal instance of the artist at the world's mercy. That he victimizes himself comes through incessantly in the text, his ironies directed as much toward the face in the mirror as toward any other: his sufferings are caused, in part, by surges of subjective energy that always threaten disorder and sometimes hint at madness. That he victimizes others comes through not only in Kreisler's ironies but, with perfect aptness, in what his line does to the novel: though Kreisler is no narrator it is the Kreisler line that sunders the text's attempts at sequence. His line is disjunct in its essence, just as he is. In its

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turn it disjoins the line of the eponymous narrator, making that line the victim of the Kreisler line's disorder. Yet this linear victim picks itself up and carries through to a respectable end, just as the cat does for himself. As I am so is my line. I am a text, I am my text. I am the completer of a circle of unmaking or else the remaker of my former completeness; kapellmeister or cat. In the case of both Murr and Kreisler there is a parity of effect between self and text, between what happens to the hero of the line and what happens to the line itself. But that is not the only parity in the novel because, as we have seen, there is an exceptional likeness between what Kreisler does to his selfhood and what his biography does to the text. Those homologies are the same as those we saw in Don Juan, and all the homologies in both of the texts exist for much the same reasons. Those are the reasons of the romantic ironist, whose ironies are the kind the time requires to handle the insurgencies of self and text. There are other ways of handling those insurgencies than the romantic ironic sort, ways that acknowledge the potential of disjunction within the self but seek to counteract the threat of the potential and, failing that, to counteract the full force of disjunction. Those ways refuse the ironist's homology, shunning it as dangerous to literary order and therefore to the best the mind can do. The ironist accepts disjunction not only as a state of textuality but also as a condition of being; indeed, as the only honest statement that can be made about things. The organicist—the ironist's main antagonist in the competition among romantic modes of order—will acknowledge that selves can be seriously disjunct, some cripplingly so; but he will never grant that the order of self and the order of text ought therefore to be equivalent in mode and function, emerging in parallel forms of discourse. He will not grant it because the condition of being that the organicist affirms as the radical order of experience is not only not disjunct but, instead, the master image of closure, the essence of totalization. One ought therefore to seek to come up to that condition, to work out a homology of self and text that will see the ironist's homologies as, literally, unnatural. Whatever Wordsworth's ambivalence about the tug

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of the natural, he builds into The Prelude what Thoreau, with his own ambivalence, built into Walden, an order of text that mimics and affirms the organic circuit, that recognition of the end in the beginning and the beginning in the end which is the shape of organic order. In the ironic shape of things there is a focus not only on reiterated geneses but also on a special kind of closure that entices those geneses to occur and keep recurring. Behind that enticement is the image of the ironist as seducer, breaking off in such a way that breaking in once again will seem a most desirable thing to do. In the organic shape of things there is none of the kind of breaking off that can later become a breaking in. Further, there can be no real seduction because there is no way to choose or to refuse genesis, one's own or the world's. And the world's case—as every organicist learns at some point in his experience—is the only one where renewals occur to the same thing, inevitably and endlessly. All other denizens of the world go through that kind of totalization which completes with an irrevocable ending. (The lack of parity between those modes of closure makes for poems such as A slumber did my spirit seal and Ode to the West Wind.) It is this undisjunctable order that finds its echo in the shape of the organicist's text, if not always in the life the text depicts. That order will, on occasion, find its echo in some aspects of the order of the self that commands the text. In The Prelude, for example, the order of self reveals an ultimate holicity as the text makes its way to an end that is the condition for its beginning. Yet things do not always work out that way, even in the most determined of romantic organicists. Take, for example, Coleridge's Dejection. That poem shares with the Kreisler line in Kater Murr a concern with the kinds of anguish a romantic artist can have. Kreisler 's inability to find a comfortable and acceptable place in the court at Sieghartshof puts him at a tangent to the social order, as though he were broken off from the central body but still in company with it. His relation to social order is as disjunctive as the relation of the line that tells his story to the line that tells the cat's. Dejection is another tale of the self's disjunction from an

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encompassing order, this time not from the social but the natural sort. We are told that the speaker's order of self is askew, sadly malproportioned. The abstruseness that suited a part of the whole grew noxious and sickened the rest, and in so doing it took over the totality of self and now guides it. This imagery is an odd, almost baroque coupling of disease and disproportion, of infection and imbalance, telling of a relation of part to part and parts to whole that has not held up as it should and has left his capacities sadly crippled. The sickening that causes this undoing of relation within the self also undoes other kinds of relation, resulting in his separation not only from the coherent orderliness of his past but from the order of nature, the organic world of light and seasons and the produce that light and seasons make together. Indeed, the relation of all those elements was once so orderly that the image of nature's produce could be used as a fit instrument for defining his former state: "For hope grew round me like the twining vine, I And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine." Now he looks out at the light, and its beauty cannot penetrate the dullness of his sickened self. And the wind to which he has been listening on and off, which he calls (as he would like himself to be called) "thou mighty Poet," is out of cycle with the April season, blowing "with worse than wintry song," singing of a time of cold sterility rather than of the showers and "peeping flowers" that are actually out there in the world. What goes on out in the world goes on without him, as though it were an order unto itself from which he has been sundered, as though he were sundered from that order because of the sad and sick disproportion of his own unfruitful order. And yet there is that within him which belies so extreme a diagnosis of his condition. This poem about disproportion is itself gorgeously proportionate, not only in the complexity of its imagery, in the way it finds counterparts for the self in the workings of the wind, but in its total order, the radical life of the text. The poem begins with his reading of the wind and the voice of the "slant night-shower," and, after wandering through the self's joyless disorder, returns to the showers and the wind and the anthology of pain the wind seems to be uttering. The

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poem that ends by talking of natural cycles, of what April winds should be like, is itself as cyclical as the natural order of which it speaks, rounding itself out to its origin just as April does. The self that is so disordered and disjunct that it can never recover joy has in fact recovered enough of the "shaping spirit of Imagination" to make a most orderly poem, a poem that, in the shape of its order, images and echoes the shape of that organic system whose beauty the speaker can no longer feel, whose order is now so unlike his own. The order of text and the order of self are as different in design and condition as the stories of Kreisler and the cat in Hoffmann's novel. Personality and textuality, the self emergent in the poem and the text through which it emerges, are as different as fracture and seamlessness. We come to experience the self's disjunction through an image of that wholeness in which the self cannot share but which, in the ultimate irony, it can imitate. Self and artifact, in this poem, have a very different relation from that of their counterparts in Don Juan and The Prelude. In those epics the relation is, from the point of view we have been developing, a homology; from another point of view the relation is metaphorical, asserting equation if not quite equanimity. In Dejection there is clearly neither equation nor equanimity. It shows a relation so ««homologous that it is best seen as an oxymoron, metaphor's tense and multicolored contrary. Disjunction is part of the theme but not part of the text, not seen in the text's own order. Self and artifact live together in a curious kind of suspension whose existence is less amazing than its success. That suspension is also the order of the poem's odd tonality, which tenders and takes away, both at once. For a poem about incapacity, the inability to offer and assert, Dejection is curiously aggressive. The poem is patent about its shape, no more than a single reading being necessary to discover the return of April, that is, the reoccurrence of the beginning. There is nothing here like a mystery of origin. Quite the reverse, origin is open and perspicuous, brought before us with so perfect a clarity that we not only see it twice but see that we are being compelled to see it. (Coleridge's poem, like Hoffmann's novel and Byron's epic,

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enjoys repeating genesis; but the poem, unlike the novel and the epic, is content with a single repetition.) There is nothing here like that mockery of the quest for origin at the beginning of Tristram Shandy, or of Sterne's way of drawing the reader into the labyrinth that follows. Origin is not only available but extolled, paraded with an aggressiveness equal in intensity to the muddying of origins seen in parts of Hoffmann's novel and Byron's epic. But there is more than the matter of startingplaces on display here: the pondering of origins goes hand in hand with—indeed, is reinforced by—the emphatic shape of the text. Our scrutiny of starting places cannot be separated from our scrutiny of that structure which brings the start around once again. The ending of the poem not only closes the text but completes a structure that encloses it, giving to the text that pure shape of return seen in circles and cycles, making an enfolding system that embraces and contains the world of the poem. In Hoffmann's novel the mystery of origin is created and supported by the disjunct order of the text. In Coleridge's poem the clarity of origin is created and supported by that seamless text in which there are no perceptible junctures, no invitations left waiting to be answered. Seamless orders cannot, by definition, have loose ends. There is no place here for indeterminacy, for fractures or empty spaces, no more than there is in the cycle of the seasons, no more than on the Great Chain of Being, where there is a place for everything and something in every place. Nature abhors not only vacuums but disjunction, and so does Coleridge's text. The shape of the poem is as aggressively determinate as the organicism whose order it ponders. All of which comes to mean that there is a peculiar complicity in the poem, a situation in which there are insiders and outsiders and complex textures of guilt. The insiders are textuality and organicism, the text having, unlike its natural counterpart, a thorough self-consciousness of its shape and density. The outsider is the self that emerges in the text, its order neither whole nor coherent nor full, sharing with the text only an intense self-consciousness. That the relation of the self in this poem to the order of text and nature is a hierarchical one is

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never in doubt: the self in this poem is not only outside but inferior, as the speaker insistently admits. The speaker, that is, agrees with the discourse of organic order in the kinds of judgments it makes upon selves, particularly the judgment that the outsider is necessarily inferior. Organic discourse, the framework of life and death, cannot conceive of anything natural outside of itself. What is outside its framework is, by its standards, necessarily unnatural, literally or metaphorically so. Organic discourse cannot permit—in fact, cannot even imagine—any other judgment on the outsider; which is to say that the discourse itself determines the standards by which that which is within or without its framework is to be evaluated. The transition from the unnatural to the reprehensible is easy to make. It is made in this poem and, with remarkable frequency, elsewhere in romanticism. For one example: the discordance and disjunction of Werther's selfhood put him outside both social and natural order, as he freely admits, and he even agrees with the local lawgivers that he is guilty and deserves to be punished. For another example: at that point of despair in The Prelude where Wordsworth gives up moral questions because of the crushing incoherence of self, he sees himself as outside all forms of order, including that coherence of nature which did so much toward shaping his own earlier coherence; but unlike Werther he finds that nature is always willing to take him back, always open and available. The protagonists of Werther, The Prelude, and Dejection accept the conditions of evaluation implicit in organic discourse. They see themselves as that which is outside and different because its order is different, as that which is therefore unnatural with all the moral implications the term can have. What we face here is an essential romantic paradox: though the outsider is outside the organic order he never gets away from the frame within which it tells us what there is to see (a certain kind of cyclical, coherent system) and how to judge what we see. That is the peculiar complicity in Coleridge's poem, and he shares it with a broad spectrum of romantic peers. But we have also seen that there are those who refuse com-

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plicity (which is not to say that they refuse guilt), that there are texts like Don Juan that question not only the primacy of organic discourse but the latter's firm implication that its truths are the truths of the world. Irony is aggressive, pushy in its praise of indeterminacy, because it faces an arrogance of power. Irony sees itself—a text like Don Juan sees itself—not only as an alternative, another way of textuality, but as a requisite contrary. Textuality and voice are inseparable, so much so that textuality can be seen as a mode of voice, the text's way of speaking its understanding of the truths of the world. The ironist is arguing for a colloquium on those truths and not just the monologue of organicism that seeks to dominate (and indeed does dominate) romanticism. The privilege irony seeks is not only the privilege to speak its own way of textuality but the privilege of its own kind of discourse to define its own kind of truth. And yet this is not to say that irony seeks the democratic merely to make a chorus, that it wants to cut into the power of this ancien regime merely to share that power as one among equals. What we see of the handling of irony in texts like Kater Murr and Don Juan shows that it does not consider the opposition as a respectable competitor but as a smug and supercilious propounder of a self-defeating mode of discourse. In the story of Johannes Kreisler the image of orderliness is the Prince of Sieghartshof and his quarrelsome court. In Don Juan that image is introduced to us in the person of Donna Inez, Juan's mother, one of the main centers of hypocrisy in a poem with many such centers. The prince and the donna come to stand for all those kinds of discourse which identify order with wholeness and closure, which cannot define the word "order" in any other way, which see disjunction and dislocation as antonyms to order and not as alternative modes of order. Johannes Kreisler could not, in their view, be a hero of indeterminacy because it is not the sort of thing that has heroes. Yet to put the opposition to irony in this way, to reify it in the persons of the donna and the prince, is to show what the romantic ironist really thinks of the opposition. To make them the representative figures is to argue that discourses based on wholeness are likely to be sus-

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pect or fallacious, smug perspectives upon experience that only fools can hold. And it follows that only disruptive sorts like Kreisler or the narrator οι Don Juan are lucid enough to see that, to see not only the prevalence of disjunction but the ultimate vulnerability of those images of order of which organicism is the main romantic instance. Irony does not have the arrogance of power only because it does not have the power. The world of the ironic text shows how it would act if it did. Irony, it is clear, takes its opposite as its point of beginning. Its work is not only to tell its own kind of truth but to prove the absurdity of the other kind, its inefficacy in the face of all those disjunctive facts—in a poem like Don Juan, all those impulses of passion and memory, that seething of the untidy chaos within the self which the rest of the self seeks to keep down. Romantic irony cannot function without its opposite somehow lurking in the text, if not overtly then implicitly, acting as an instigator of what the ironist is doing. And the same may be argued for organic discourse, though it cannot admit that its opposite has any status whatsoever. It is impos­ sible to conceive of wholeness as aggressively as it is conceived in Dejection without suggesting its opposite, however the oppo­ site may be valued. The opposite is there by implication, as something that could exist, whatever we would choose to call it. The case is equally complex in Werther. as the hero declines in coherence of self his art thins out only to silhouettes, which are all he can make; yet it is still art, still conceived as such, just as his self is still a relatively coherent self, still functional enough to make at least a silhouette. Anything less like a coherent object of art, anything approaching the incoherence he will soon reach, could not be called a work of art under the stand­ ards implicit in the novel. Yet the parity of the self and its prod­ ucts implied in the relation of self and silhouette shows that the text envisions the possibility of such a work, suggesting it by its clear and evident absence. That work is in fact a shadowtext, present in the intensity of its absence. If the logic of the parity were to be carried to its utmost point there would be a fragmented work comparable in kind to his fragmented self, an

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incoherence of art as unacceptable as his final incoherence of self. The work that could have been is a ghostly presence in Goethe's text, a presence that could not have been reified but haunts the text all the same, haunting it in the shape of the shadow-text. Completeness and its contrary can never be divorced. Texts like Kater Murr and Don Juan are very different from Werther in that they contain both modes of discourse openly within themselves, figured overtly in both kinds of narrative line. They bring to the surface the implicit Other and make for a perceptible mutual presence, an open confrontation. To put it in another way, in texts like Werther and Dejection the matter of disjunction is thematized but not reified, part of the text's thematic order but not part of its textuality. Don Juan and Kater Murr turned that disjunction into textuality, showing that textuality has in itself a discursive force, that we can speak of a politics of textuality that is practiced not only by ironists but also—though far more covertly—by some of their organic antagonists. To put it in still a different way, each of the texts we have been inspecting stands as an example of a metadiscourse, a global discourse more encompassing than any variety of subdiscourse (organic, ironical, historical, exotic, sentimental, nihilistic) the times could possibly proffer. The ironist flaunts his encompassing text, reveling in metadiscourse because he sees its existence as a political gesture whose import is irrefutable and in his favor. The organicist and his equivalent, Dejection and Werther, may choose not to acknowledge their antagonists as legitimate; and yet their antagonists may well creep their way into those texts and make of the texts a more global discourse than the organicist can comfortably accept. There is more of Don Juan in The Prelude than The Prelude openly tells us—which does not make either text the more honest but makes both of them political instruments in a war where textuality and existential status come down to much the same thing, the same essential gesture. The ultimate paradox encompasses them both. Each realizes itself with a special fullness when the other is not only posited but implicitly or explicitly present. They work the same romantic turf, implying and

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implicating each other, appearing together in that simultaneity which is their actual condition. To read romanticism without that simultaneity is to risk sentimentality, whether in an organic or an ironic mode. In the next chapter we shall pursue in some detail the figurations these contraries imply. We shall also be looking at other implications of their simultaneous existence.

8 Irony and Organicism: Figures of Relation of metaphor to organicism, and the relation of both to the self, are the subject of some early comments in Goethe's Werther. The letter of 10 May begins with Werther likening the wonderful cheer ("wunderbare Heiterkeit") in himself to the same exuberant tonality in the spring mornings he enjoys so much. Saying that he cannot draw now, not even a stroke, Werther resorts to words to picture himself on such days, lying in the tall grass among a thousand smaller grasses, sensing the swarming of innumerable worms and insects, sensing the presence of the Almighty "der uns nach seinem Bilde schuf," who made us in his own image (echoing Gen. 1:29).1 The letter that began with a likening of self to spring thus moves toward the mirroring of God in man, encompassing within itself both natural and supernatural; and since the letter includes a sweep going from the Deity to worms and insects it also takes in the full range of the Chain of Being. The combination of range and mirroring culminates at the end of the letter, with Werther's yearning to breath life ("einhauchen") into images on paper so that those images will mirror his soul just as his soul mirrors the infinite Deity. The Great Chain of Being is transposed into a chain of reflections and repeated actions, for not only do souls and images on paper mirror their superiors, but Werther wants to breathe life into his images just as God "breathed into [man's] nostrils the breath of life" in the act of original Creation (Gen. 2:7). The various echoes of the beginning of Genesis show that this passage is about origin and acts of making. The various swarmings and sweeps of reference show that it is about matters of living connection. The various T H E RELATION

1. Die Leiden desjungm Werther, 9. ( 224 )

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modes of mirroring show that it is about likeness and the linking of diversity. Act and origin, linking and wholeness, soul and paper, come together in a characteristic relation whose essence has to be metaphor, that figure which, in an act of making, both links and likens. Yet this passage holds within itself other possible relations, and that holding is what makes it a paradigm for so many matters of romantic figuration. Take, for example, what the triad says of the relations'of paper and the soul. The paper that sits in front of Werther has two sorts of potential status, one that he can only long to fulfill and one that he fulfills because that is all he can do. Werther points out that he cannot draw at all, not even a stroke, so that the status for which he longs, the paper as drawing paper, can be no more than hypothetical, the place to put the strokes of his drawing pen if he had any such strokes to make. But with drawing no more than a desire Werther turns to words, the "Strich" now the stroke of his writing pen, so that the paper that mirrors his soul has the other, secondary status, the status of writing paper. Paper leads an oddly doubled life in this letter, longed-for and at hand, invisible and palpable, the place of a frustrated wish but also the place of a second-best action. Still another point has to be noted about paper and what happens to it. Though writing is second-best it shares a special capacity with drawing, the capacity to make sense with marks on paper, that is, with the kind of inscribing from which texts are made. What all this means for the soul should now be evident. Most of the matters taken up in this letter focus, in one way or another, on the soul—its modes of relation and the sort of place it is. Soul is literally central in the triad of God, soul, and text, a midway place where mirroring occurs, a place that is itself mirrored on the paper that Werther would enliven. The soul echoes the bliss of the Almighty just as the text, the marks on paper, echoes the ecstasies of Werther. The soul is therefore not only a maker of texts but itself the locale of a text, the place of God's ecstatic inscribing. The play of linking and likeness that makes metaphor so central to this letter shows that the soul is

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also like paper in having a curious double existence: the soul is doubled as receiver and maker, as a place where inscribing occurs and also as the source of further inscribing. T h a t is a paradigm from the Sturm una Drang. Paradigms in high romanticism abound, for instance in Coleridge's Eolian Harp, a p o e m that has long seemed a model of romantic likening. 2 It is a p o e m about harmonies of all sorts and at all levels—sexual, musical, mental, and natural. Further, there are not only the individual harmonies themselves—the consonance of the lovers, the sounds of the "simplest Lute"—but also the linkings a m o n g modes of harmony: that of the lovers is an analogy for that of the lute; that of the lute, an analogy for the assemblage of "organic H a r p s " about which the speaker speculates. It is the world of romantic metaphor envisaged with a breadth and intricacy so special that it seems a vast web in which a touch at any one kind of harmony, any juncture in the elaborate linkage, sends the whole into vibrating play: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely fram'd, That tremble into thought as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the soul of each, and God of all? All roads in the poem lead to that famous speculation. Given the order of what the speaker saw he could not have come to anything else but this piece of pantheism, this passage that makes the universe a place of manifold inscribing. O n e of the purposes of the passage (though the purpose was discovered long after the passage was written) is to give a character and a name to "the O n e life within us and abroad," the reference to which was added to the poem some twenty years after it was composed. 3 In so specifying, the speaker takes all linkages to 2. See Meyer Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 527-60. 3. They first appeared in 1817, in the Errata to Sybilhne Leaves.

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their fullest, to that which encompasses them all. The poem, as we have so far described it, is a record of the soul's adventures among metaphor. That romanticism is a matter of such adventures, that the organic world it posits has to use metaphor to figure its rela­ tions, is a point that has often been made by students of the period. The argument for the centrality of metaphor to roman­ ticism, and especially to romantic organicism, is put forth with particular cogency by Meyer Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp, which is based in great part on passages asserting what the letter in Werther and Coleridge's poem assert.4 Abrams makes clear in that study not only how art and nature are seen as analogous by romantic organicists but also how essential metaphor is to the functioning of organic theory, its ability to speak its speech: "Organicism may be defined as the philosophy whose major categories are derived metaphorically from the attributes of living and growing things"; or as he puts it in a particularly memorable sentence: "It is astonishing how much of Coleridge's critical writing is couched in terms that are met­ aphorical for art and literal for a plant." 5 Abrams builds his later readings of romanticism not only on mirrors and lamps but on spiral-shaped journeys of redemption and breezes that image the creative spiritus within us; and all those readings are based, 6 in one way or another, on the instrumentality of metaphor. What Paul de Man has called "the analogical unity of nature and consciousness" makes Abrams's brand of romanticism an epoch of linking and likeness and therefore (the logic is precise) of metaphor and symbol, figures that not only point to those qualities but exemplify them in their working as figures—the likening of tenor and vehicle in the metaphor, the symbol's way 4. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958). 5. Ibid., 168, 16. 6. The primacy of metaphor in the work of Abrams has been noted by a number of the contributors to Lawence Lipking, ed., High Romantic Argument: Essays for Μ. H. Abrams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). See in partic­ ular the essays by Wayne Booth and Thomas McFarland.

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of being inseparable from that which it symbolizes.7 Subject and object participate together in the Coleridgean One Life, the Wordsworthian "something far more deeply interfused." It is surely an understanding of this sort that supports Roman Jakobson's insistence, in his distinction between metaphor and metonymy, that romanticism is essentially metaphorical; indeed, that "the primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has long been rec7. See De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality" in Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 199. Though Abrams and De Man rarely mention each other by name, their approaches fit together with an unusual symmetry, each a major representative of all that the other would not want to be. In "How to do Things with Texts" Abrams speaks of "the humanistic paradigm of the writing and reading of literature" that is threatened by the latest critical fashions from Paris (Partisan Review 45 [1970]: 566). In "The Deconstructive Angel" (Critical Inquiry, 3 [1977]: 425-38) he attacks the translation of the author "to a status as one more work among other works" (429), and in his reply to the papers in High Romantic Argument he mocks Derrida's "deconstruction of himself into a printed signature" (170). In "How to do Things with Texts" Abrams rejects the Foucauldian argument that the self is ultimately a product of a particular time, "a simple fold in our knowledge" ($67). In High Romantic Argument he makes his own position unmistakable: "I believe . . . that interpretation involves human beings at each end of the language transaction" (172). De Man, as I have noted, refers unfavorably to Abrams, Earl Wasserman, and other critics of romanticism in "The Rhetoric of Temporality," and Abrams would have to be included in his attack, in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven. Yale University Press, 1979), on traditional interpretations of romanticism. Those readings, he argues, are embedded in "the vocabulary of source, origin, distance, memory" (80), thus in a genetic pattern based on the language of organic totalities. And he suggests elsewhere in the book that the genetic pattern, which implies categories such as "subject, intent, negation, totalization, supported by the underlying metaphysical categories of identity and presence" (81-82), was challenged more firmly by the romantics themselves than by their later interpreters, those makers of what he calls at another point "the aberrant interpretation of Romanticism that shapes the genealogy of our present-day historical consciousness" (102) Also relevant in this debate is J. Hilhs Miller's review of Natural Supernaturalism in Diacritics 2 (1972): 6-13. There are brief comparisons of Abrams and De Man in Rajan, Dark Interpreter, 19-20, and Daniel T. O'Hara, Tragic Knowledge Yeats's Autobiography and Hermeneutics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 9-12.

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8

ognized." Though he does not elaborate further on the relation of metaphor to romanticism, Jakobson's argument for metaphor as the axis of similarity and substitution—the "likeness" in our pairing of linking and likeness—makes clear that he sees the sort of romanticism that Abrams and others have seen, a paradigmatic romanticism whose essence is based on likeness and whose workings are based on analogy. Metonymy could not be the property of romanticism, according to this view, because the axis of combination and contiguity, the syntagmatic axis, has nothing directly to do with likeness. Since the primary concern of metonymy is with context and the relations within it, the elements that make up the context can be as different as pigs and windmills and still have the proper figural relation. But that would not be a conceivable relation for the romanticism Jakobson posits, for it is one where, in Abrams's words, "nature is made thought and thought nature, both by their sustained interaction and their seamless metaphoric continuity."9 8. "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance," in Selected Writings, 2- Word and Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 255. See also Elmar Holenstein, Romanjakobson's Approach to Language: Phenomettological Structuralism, trans. Catherine Schelbert and Tarcisius Schelbert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 146. 9 "Greater Romantic Lyric," 551. That such a reading of romanticism would have difficulties with Byron is evident everywhere in the work of Abrams. And in fact he deals with Byron only to the extent that he acknowledges Byron's inability to fit into his reading of romanticism. In the essay on the greater romantic lyric he points out that "only Byron, among the major poets, did not write in this mode at all" (527). In Natural Supernaturalism he is candid on what Byron does to his scheme. "Byron I omit altogether; not because I think him a lesser poet than the others but because in his greatest work he speaks with an ironic counter-voice and deliberately opens a satiric perspective on the vatic stance of his contemporaries" (13). Later in the book he proposes to identify "what can properly be called Romantic" and lists as the writers among whom he will find those attitudes "in England Wordsworth, Blake and Coleridge, and in Germany Schiller and Holderlin," adding Shelley to the list because he "recapitulated to a remarkable degree the evolution of his predecessors from political to imaginative radicalism" (427-48). Byron finds no place in this proper romanticism. There is some evidence, however, that Abrams does have a place set out for Byron. Lawrence Lipking pointed out, in High Romantic Argument, that "on

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But there are difficulties with these monofigural readings, and they emerge even in so patently metaphorical a poem as The Eolian Harp. For if the poem shows the soul adventuring among metaphors it also shows the soul skirting among synecdoches, which are as rampant in Coleridge's poem as the varied acts of likening. Any one of the harmonies appearing in the poem—that of the lute, for example—can stand as a microcosm for the order of the whole. Thus, the lute can stand in a metaphorical relation to the harmonies of natural experience and in a synecdochic relation to the harmonies of the cosmos. Further, these manifold interrelations among different kinds of figures increase the range of the poem's harmonies, for the relations are themselves a model of the harmonious interaction that defines the world of the One Life. That is, the texture of the more than one occasion Abrams has spoken of another, yet unwritten version of Romantic history, a version that would give the center stage to Byronic irony" (131). The clearest example of this evidence is in Abrams's essay "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne Booth" (Critical Inquiry 2 [1976]), an essay that is essentially a response to some of the critics of Natural Supernaturalism. In it Abrams imagines a history of romanticism that would focus on "the ironic perspective in general and the theory and practice of'Romantic irony' in particular" (458). Its hero would be Byron, while Wordsworth "will inevitably drop to the bottom of the scale as the weakest and least representative of the prominent poets in this central mode of the Romantic imagination and achievement" (459)- This is a mode Abrams calls "not only a primary Romantic achievement, but the most important and forward-looking one" (458), a point that flatly contradicts the argument made in Natural Supernaturalism on "what is properly called Romantic." There is a recapitulation of the latter argument, asserting the centrahty of "the redemptive strain in Romanticism—Wordsworthian, Shelleyan, political and transcendental" in the review of High Romantic Argument by Christopher Salvesen in the Times Literary Supplement, 26 February 1983, 231. For other comments see my review of Natural Supernaturalism in Modern Language Quarterly 34 (1973), 206-213. For another example of a view like that of Abrams which identifies the essence of romanticism with wholeness and totalization, see the review by John Bayley of two books on Pushkin in the London Review ofBooks, 3—16 November 1983, 8-9. Bayley speaks of Boris Godunov as "an anti-romantic history tableau" in which "there is only the finality of openness." Pushkin, with his "genius for incompletion," would thus, in Bayley's terms, be an antagonist to romanticism; and Byron, of course, would have to be seen as equally unromantic.

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poem renders the harmonies of which it speaks and in fact contributes to those harmonies, adding yet another dimension to their scope. We miss these additional dimensions if we see the poem as monofigural, as only or primarily metaphorical. And there are still further difficulties to consider. Synecdoche is closer to metonymy than it is to metaphor, so much so that the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, as indeed they are by Jakobson himself. When he describes the relation of metonymy to realism he shows how the realist author, Tolstoy for example, "is fond of synecdochic details"; and taking an instance from the history of painting he speaks of "the manifestly metonymical orientation of cubism, where the object is transformed into a set of synecdoches."10 One of the principal difficulties here, of course, is that Jakobson distinguishes firmly between romanticism and realism on the basis of their handling of relation, with metonymy and synecdoche establishing the essential tonality of realism; yet we have seen the importance of synecdoche in a poem that is widely regarded as standing at the center of romantic experience. Other difficulties emerge when we consider the poem more closely. The harmony with which The Eolian Harp begins, that between the speaker and his "pensive Sara," suffers a sharp hint of dissonance because of the speaker's speculations about the vast organic diversity. Sara's "more serious eye" darts "a mild reproof" at the hint of heresy in his pantheistic thoughts, even though they go no further than a thoughtful "what if."11 Giving in to her quiet chastisement he returns to the requisite awe and humility before "the Incomprehensible"; returns, that is, into the community of orthodox belief. His speculations have threatened a split that would have turned his relation to the orthodox community from likeness to contiguity; that is, from a relation figured in metaphor to one that would have to be figured in metonymy. He would have shared space with that com10. "Two Aspects of Language," 255—56. 11 For further comments on this matter see my essay "The Hedging Consciousness in Coleridge's Conversation Poems," The Wordsworth Circle 4 (1973): 124-38.

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munity but he would not have shared in its beliefs. That threat is quietly averted when the speaker turns from the community of the One Life and returns to the orthodox community by reassuming the latter's humility and sense of awe. And it is clearly worthy of notice that as he returns he also turns back, and with gratitude, to the material with which he began the poem, "Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honour'd Maid!" The poem ends by coming full circle, as a greater romantic lyric ought to do. And as it does so the remarkable canniness of the speaker comes into fullest view. As he acquiesces to her mild reproof, as he brings the material around, praising her and their peace and their cot once again, the speaker affirms that organic shape which his speculations carried too far. The circular shape of the poem is (like that of The Prelude) an image of organic return, that swings back to the place of beginning which would, in the annual round, be the place of spring and the renewal of the world's old amorousness. In this poem, which begins and ends with young lovers, that amorousness is made specific and personal. The speaker does not quite subvert his recantation—in fact, he never really withdraws it—but, instead, finds another means for speaking of the completeness of things. If he cannot speak of that totality which includes all the organic harps, he can have the more modest wholeness that enfolds all the linkages described in the poem; that is, he can create and ponder the wholeness of the poem itself. In so doing, the speaker can, at once, acquiesce to his lady and affirm, by analogy, nature's rounded wholeness. In that dual gesture he establishes that grandest of poetic likenings which puts the shape of organic experience into poems that end by renewing their origins. The scene that threatened to decline into metonymy ends with a recovery of the safeguard of metaphor. The call was close, as close as metonymy is to synecdoche. It was to come much closer in other of Coleridge's poems. This much seems clear from our reading of Coleridge's poem: to confine romantic figuration to the primacy of metaphor privileges a particular view of the period (i.e., that its

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prevalent mode is harmony) and threatens the resultant readings with sentimentality. Such monofigural readings single out certain writers for centrality (as Abrams does with Wordsworth in Natural Supernaturalism) and frequently slight, within those same writers, all sorts of hesitations about their position at that center. Take, for example, the letter from Werther in which Goethe has Werther outline the triad of self, text, and the Deity. To speak of those relations as modes of mirroring is to mean them also as modes of doubling, that kind of bifold mimicry we have noticed so often in Byron's canon; and doubling, as we have also noticed, tends to come forward as an impetus toward (a fit condition for the fostering of) deception, that other main meaning of "duplicity." Doubling, it seems, ought not to be trusted, since "duplicity" contains meanings that are likely to work against each other. To double may mean to cause or reveal division, as it was to do in The Giaour and Manfred, and as it does in the passage from Werther. That passage begins with what seems a simple likening: "Eine wunderbare Heiterkeit hat meine ganze Seele eingenommen, gleich den siissen Fruhlingsmorgen, die ich mit ganzem Herzen geniesse."12 The doubling here, signaled by repetition ("ganze Seele . . . ganzem Herzen"), is of parallel states of the soul; in one case it is taken over by wonderful cheer, in another by the sweet spring morning to which he gives his entire heart. Werther tells here of a capture of the soul, the variations on "ganz" showing the completeness of the capture. Indeed, the invasion has been so total that the soul holds nothing back from the "Ganzheit" of its experience of the spring morning. We might argue that Werther has no selfhood left since he has given it all to the invaders; or we might, conversely, argue that the self is fulfilled in such a relation, and totally fulfilled in a total relation. In either case the introductory sentence sets up an image of fulfilled desire, implying, perhaps, that it is a paradigm for the way such doublings work. Further, to begin with so strong a figure inscribes doubling into the basic situation, and especially 12. Werther, 9.

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into the remainder of the letter: we shall never be able to ignore those parallel states of the soul and their cause in spring. Inscribed also into the passage is something in the nature of a promise about doubling, and the duplicities thereof: for the promise of total fulfillment would seem to extend to that other mirroring, the relations of self, text, and the Deity with which the letter culminates; and yet the promise is belied and betrayed because the mirroring goes askew and exists only in speculation, only in that place where those paintings exist which Werther admits that he cannot make. Though these relations are described precisely, it is a description of what ought to be happening and not what is actually taking place. This is a passage of yearning rather than performance, of self-deception rather than self-accomplishment. Werther shows no awareness of the fact that the triad he explains and extols, and of which he declares himself a part, cannot include him in its complex mirroring. He has failed in his end of the performance, his microcosmic inscribing that has to echo the acts of the Deity. And by failing in that special contribution he fails to carry the likening to its limits and complete the metaphorical relationship. Yet there is a curious and important sense in which Werther is caught between figures, establishing a special figural relation that was to characterize many who succeeded him in the literature of high romanticism. The actual conditions he describes stress his difference from the rest of the triad, his ««likeness where likeness was expected. He has gone, that is, from a relation that stresses resemblance to one where there can only be proximity. The threat averted in The Eolian Harp is fulfilled in this extraordinary letter, and quite without the subject's knowledge. Though he is part of the overall context of nature and the transcendental, of makers, souls, and texts, Werther's failure to function in that context emphasizes his uniqueness within the context, all that he cannot do within this world of successful doing. As he slips away from metaphor, with its emphasis on linking and likeness, he moves closer to a condition of metonymy, with its emphasis on mere contiguity. (The more

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comforting thought of synecdoche is not explored in the letter.) Metonymy stresses the sharing of a milieu, metaphor the sharing of characteristics. Suspended uneasily between both, Werther yearns toward the metaphorical, but the state he actually lives in leans more toward the metonymic. That state of unwilling suspension is the best he can hope for in a condition of so much difference. We see in Werther's letter what we saw in The Eolian Harp, a work that appears, on its surface, to trumpet the universal strength of metaphor, reinforcing the theories of Abrams and Jakobson. But no single rhetorical figure can encompass the activities seen in this letter, for it finds its fullest force in the relations it establishes between figures. The letter is polysemous, bifigural (at least) in its scope and indeterminate in its conclusion. It takes its character not from one or another trope but from its incomplete participation in two; that is, from a state of hovering that is the true home of Werther's soul. And there, as it turns out, lies one of the age's most elegant ironies, for Werther prefigured with elaborate precision the romantic state of suspension as well as the romantic triad of universal inscribing. The tilt toward metonymy appears everywhere in the period. It shows up where natural supernaturalism is extolled and even, in figures like Obermann, where every relation in nature is viewed with ambivalence if not with suspicion. It shows up with particular force in the condition of prophetic figures—the personae of Shelley and Holderlin, for example—for whom the inscribing of prophetic texts cannot be separated from their condition of being. Poems like Ode to the West Wind and Wie wenn am Feiertage put forth assertions about relationship that are challenged and then undermined as the poems unfold. Contiguity is mistaken for identity, metonymy for metaphor; the result is that surprised and unwilling suspension which comes from the pained recognition of difference. Shelley's Ode to the West Wind moves rigorously toward that recognition, working its way toward final understanding by working out a number of paradoxes. In one of the busiest of its contrary structures the poem celebrates nature's cyclicality and

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yet, in the same gesture, seeks to subvert its inevitable results. The praise of cyclicality has to take in that rhythm's content, the alternation of generation and engulfment that the poem puts into the acts of a pervasive autumnal wind that promotes dissolution and reparation (the wind as "destroyer and preserver"). To temper the potential for gloom he extends his impulse toward totalization even further, taking the cycle full circle, up to the "azure sister of the Spring" who will turn the seeds into pastoral flocks. The impulse is extended still further by the creation of a total geography, going from earth to sky and sea. Only then does the poem settle in on the figure of the speaker, the cartographer of the wind's tricks. And it is as the poem so settles that the pattern of subversion—the attempt to undo the result of that wonderful cyclicality—begins. The mood shifts from exultation, in a set of stanzas each ending with "oh, hear!," to what it is that he wants the wind to hear; shifts, that is, from the sights of cartography to the sounds of language, from a vast seeing to an intenser hearing.' 3 The shifts go from the optative to the imperative ("If I were . . . Oh, lift me"), and then, continuing the latter, to a series of appeals. A plea for a sharing of power changes to a plea for companionship, then to a plea for the wind to be his spirit, then—in one ultimate thrust of desire—to be him. It is only after that sad climax that he asks the wind, in a final plea, to be his surrogate in the spreading of his thoughts. Prophetic desires entwine and conflict with personal ones: he cannot separate what he must do from what he is, what he must say from what nature makes him suffer. He cannot accept all the implications of the cyclicality he extols, and therefore a dialectic of extolling and subversion comes into being to match the dialectic of death and resurrection that the poem enfolds. The alternation of making and unmaking acknowledged to be necessary for the health of things continues to be seen as healthy, but not for the seer. 13. Cf. Lamartine's Le Lac, which is equally hortatory and equally fruitless. The study of moods like the optative and imperative in terms of romantic mtentionality has yet to be done in a systematic way, and urgently needs doing

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All that wholeness he sees in the world has various ironies built into its makeup as well as at least one point of incompleteness. It is in order to counter those ironies that he goes through the litany of pleas, a series of overt gestures that hide none of their desire to subvert the costly effect of the whole, the fact that the cycle will cost him his life. But in fact his desperation makes him cannier. Werther, we have seen, begins his letter with a model of metaphor, seeking, by a kind of sympathetic magic, to spread its success through all that he sees. Shelley's Ode performs a similar trick, seeking out several grandiose linkages covering the fullness of space and the seasons. By finding and trumpeting these images he implies that no corner can be untouched by totalization, that there can be no breaks in the systems of things. Yet of course there is such a break: in this place of incessant likening and pervasive completeness there is one point where ««likening occurs, one type of desired completeness that does not work out, and that is in his own relation to the wind. Their relation is one of difference, whatever else he wished it to be, whatever else he sought to do by loading the poem with all that wholeness. He ends in that state of unwilling suspension which Werther prefigured, participating, as Werther did, in multiple figurations, none of them capable of offering the ultimate wholeness that he seeks. And yet, ironically, the poem ends by extolling what he could not have for himself, a perfect likening. In looking for the fullest likening to the wind, he sought to be, impossibly, a perpetual maker of inscriptions. At the end, acknowledging the gulf of difference, he seeks out a new likening, more possible because he seeks it for his work and not for himself. He asks that the leaves inscribed by his thoughts live up to their full metaphorical relation to the leaves scattered in the forest, quickening a new life for his words in the way that the others quicken new trees. Then, that patent likening established, he puts forth another, an unextinguished hearth whose sparks will inscribe his words into the world by burning them there. Overwhelmed by the cost of difference he seeks these final, possible hkenings,

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exhorting that wind which he cannot be like to help in this final making of metaphor. Where Shelley begins his ode with a dying whose contrary is carefully envisioned, Holderlin begins Wie wenn am Feiertage with an awakening—not only of the day but of Nature, now refreshed and joyful after a night of storms that have cooled the atmosphere. These are two of several awakenings in the poem, whose vision of things is substantially (though as we shall see, not completely) metaphorical, carrying through all manner of comparisons at various levels. Indeed, the first word of the poem is "wie," implying by its position and its call for an accompanying "so" (the two together making an extended Homeric metaphor) that the poem will have much to do with comparisons. It is, in fact, obsessed with comparisons and echoing relationships, an obsession we have already seen in the letter from Werther and the poems by Coleridge and Shelley. The initial "wie" points to a countryman ("Landmann") who is on holiday but still out inspecting the fields, the "so" to the poets who stand in that figurative fine weather ("gunstiger Witterung") which is the warmth of Nature's embrace.' 4 When Nature slips into her wintry sleep the poets too seem to mourn; and they foreknow what is to come, just as Nature does. The actions of the poets, in a most respectful imitatio, parallel and complement those of their divinely beautiful ("gottlichschone") mentor. When Nature awakes it is as it was of old, that time when the world emerged from chaos ("wie einst, aus heiligem Chaos gezeugt"). As the poet perceives the signs of that awakening a fire gleams in his eye like that of a man who conceives high things ("wenn hohes er entwarf"). Other modes of conceiving follow immediately: as Semele received the lightning of Zeus and gave birth to Bacchus, so do the poets drink heavenly fire and give birth to song, "die Frucht in Liebe geboren, der Gotter und Menschen Werk." The initial "wie" has signaled correctly, it seems: this is a world of interlocking comparisons 14. German text from Friedrkh Holderlin: Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 372—76

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and mirroring events, a world so full of likening that the acts of the poet find parallels in the doings of joyful and excited men and desiring and fruitful women. The awakening of the day is echoed not only in the awakening of spring but in that initial awakening from chaos which was our origin and is figured endlessly in all manner of subsequent analogues. Metaphor seems the essence of existence. Nothing, it seems, is ever really alone, ever really different. Part of the prophet's business is to make poems whose essentially metaphorical substance is an image of that truth. He has to show that nature is going through a vast renewal, its energies so fierce in their pervasive, aggressive creativity that only the language of weaponry can figure it properly: "Die Nature ist jetzt mit Waffenklang erwacht." This is a poem of multiple metaphor and manifold resurrection, versions of that time which Thoreau, in a different exaltation of morning and spring, saw as the fruitfullest one of all—the fruit in Holderlin's text being both song and Bacchus, each started into life by the touch of the gods, a ray or a streak of lightning. At this point the assertions of likeness, the implication that this is a world thoroughly metaphorical, start to be subverted. In a wonderful reification of the idea of the prophet as gobetween, Holderlin figures him standing out in the storm and receiving the lightning of the gods, wrapping it in his song ("ins Lied I Gehullt") so that men can safely receive it. The prophet can do this, however, only so long as he is pure; and this fragmentary poem ends with the prophet, having approached too near to the gods, cast down into the darkness, his purity compromised, his song now a "warnende Lied," a warning song. Into a poem that has so far shown the fruitfullest sort of making there comes a harsh, castigatory unmaking that completes the dialectic, resolving the making just as the "so" resolves the "wie." Yet the unmaking that occurs in the poem is not seen as happening in Nature but only in the poet, and as a result of his personal imperfections. He can sadden as Nature does in the winter, foreknow as she foreknows; but that is as far as the likening can go. That storm which has swept over the land turns out to be a cleanser of the world's impurities, and the

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world rises refreshed after the purifying rains have passed. Yet here, as in Goethe and Shelley, there is a single figure of unlikeness in this cosmos of pervasive likening; and that figure is the speaker. The prophet has come too close to the gods, forgetting, in his exultation at their presence, his difference from all that they are; and in forgetting that aspect of difference he makes yet another difference for himself, for he is the only figure of impurity left in this just-cleansed world. There are hints that he may have expected the possibility of this condition. He began and continued his poem in the way Werther's letter and Shelley's ode had begun, weaving in a rich number of likenesses as though to argue, as the letter and the ode had done, for a world that is fully metaphorical. And he performed that sympathetic magic in a most potent framework, drawing on a venerable form of figure, the extended Homeric simile, which brings along with it all of the grandeur attendant on the origins of epic. Yet all that reflected splendor has not been sufficient to spread metaphor through the entire cosmos. It has certainly not been effective in protecting the prophet from himself, in preventing him from slipping into the pain of mere contiguity. It could be argued that what we have seen in Goethe, Shelley, and Holderlin, and what we have seen threatened in The Eolian Harp, does not speak against the prevalence of metaphor but in fact supports it. What we have seen could be said to show only a deviation from an ideal, and if there is a gap between ideal and actuality the ideal still remains the point of reference and aspiration. Yet it is difficult to hold to that view in the light of what happens not only in the texts we have been inspecting but in others with other modes that can hardly be excluded from the conclaves of romanticism. The letter from Werther, the poems by Shelley and Holderlin, and even the poem by Coleridge, lead us into temptation in order, at the very least, to make us question the desires that took us there. By their deft manipulation of likeness in the introductory passages they tempt us into a surmise, into reading those instances of likeness as an implicit promise that the world will be as glorious throughout as it is in these beginnings. And they lead us into temptation in order to

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lead us out of delusion, a self-induced duplicity that can only bring pain. Of course it can be argued that the figures who suffer unlinking are loners in their worlds, that only these unfortunate extras are cut off from the vast coherence. Yet if we have one text after another, each of which depicts a single unlinking, and if we add up all the texts that are offered as versions of that affair, the result is a plethora of examples, a system whose size alone gives it great force in the romantic world. So much sundering in so many places does not make sports or deviations but another system of discourse, one that enters and infuses the world of organicism with the special sort of threat that all powerful aliens seem to have. The point of the inducement to surmise is to show us the significance of that system as well as the temptations our wishes are heir to. That showing is a metacommentary, a reading from within the work on those statements about the relations of self and world put forth by figures like Werther and the protagonists of the poems by Shelley and Holderlin. What the metacommentary in these texts shows is, on several levels, a matter of disruption. The upsetting of the surmise is a disruption of expectations, what we hoped and guessed would be happening on the basis of what we were initially offered. And that disruption is caused by and carefully linked to the disruption we see in the events of the text, the undoing of linkage suffered by the speaker. What happens on the level of reading happens also on the level of narrative. The text that plays with pervasive linkings plays also with its requisite antagonist, making the world within the text a far more multiple affair than the assertions of the speaker would seem to support. What, then, about The Prelude, the epoch's defining instance of the ways organicism can enter a text? The threat of mere contiguity was visited upon the speaker with extraordinary force, and he seems nearly to have succumbed to it; yet the poem testifies to the fact that contiguity does not always win out. It ends with areas of uneasiness still not fully resolved, especially those where the mind faces all that Emerson calls "the NOT-ME." Yet it ends with a firm affirmation about the

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maker and his capacity for making, the affirmation seen in that bringing-around of the text which echoes the bringing-around of the seasons, linking, through that striking homology, these allied modes of making. Whatever else the speaker has been through, whatever he has not yet resolved, that becomes possible. As for the threat of mere contiguity it becomes part of the essential grist for the conditions that succeed it. What all of this means is that within the discourse of organicism there is more than one perceptible condition: if there are the likenings of The Prelude on the one hand, there are the more problematic likenings of Werther on the other. Any plausible analysis of that discourse, and perhaps of any other discourse, has to speak of a play of figuration, that slippage which is never overcome even in the last books of The Prelude. Still, the play takes its tonality not just from the slippage but the slipping, that is, from that meaning of the word "play" which has to do with a perpetual looseness, a continual oscillation where we had hoped for a very tight fit. And what goes for the discourse as a whole goes for the separate texts within it. It would be difficult and perhaps impossible to find an organic text where the condition of slipping enforced by the discourse of difference is not implied or envisioned. Even a text emphatic about likeness is likely to be rife with attendant ironies about the relation of likeness and difference and therefore about the meaning of metaphor. We have noted an instance of that in Ode to the West Wind. There is another in A slumber did my spirit seal, a poem that relates to The Prelude in ways that are at once precise and sardonic. The poem plays incessantly with matters of metaphor, holding them up not only to examination but to mockery. The speaker has envisioned the "she" of the poem as radically different from all other creatures who shared the organic system with her: "She seemed a thing who could not feel the touch of earthly years." He is deluded about that, of course: she comes to be touched by earthly time in the utmost degree possible, the touch of death. It may be that because he saw her as different he became a traitor to metaphor. Whatever the case, his delusion

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about her difference could not put metaphor aside, for it will have its way, and it does so by drawing on a paradox built into the speaker's view of her; if she seemed a creature of absolute difference, unable to be affected by earthly years, she also seemed a thing, a noun of unusual force in a poet so conscious of objects. That point is the one at which he is most vulnerable, and it is there that he receives a reminder of the power of likening: she who seemed a thing now is one in actuality, one among the other things of the world "rolled round in earth's diurnal course." Likening has such extraordinary power that it can actually close the gap between figure and fact. And there are other ironic continuities: if in the past she seemed unable to feel the touch of earthly years, she is now, in her current state as a thing, still unable to feel that touch. She is now beyond all feeling, all ability to touch or be touched; and she is beyond such touching now because she was so heavily touched before. Though the heroine's static condition is a maker of the ironies of the text, the poem takes its force from the play of figuration within it, a play that, it cogently argues, seems to be essential to the context of organicism. And indeed that play may be essential not only to the special context of organicism but to the context of romanticism as a whole. Take, once again, "Clay," which at this point bears requotation: I would to Heaven that I were so much Clay— As I am blood—bone—marrow, passion—feeling— Because at least the past were past away— And for the future—(but I write this reeling Having got drunk exceedingly to day So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling) I say—the future is a serious matter— And so—for Godsake—Hock and Soda water. Whatever its ostensible business the aim of this stanza is to enfold diversity—to hold as many kinds as the stanza can conceive. That diversity takes in our bodies and the passions they

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are heir to as well as the clay from which they were made; takes in every aspect of time—a pained past, an uncertain future, a dizzy present; takes in the act of inscribing texts as well as the difficult conditions of self in which inscribing occurs; takes in, finally, the world of fictions as well as that other world in which we read them. Though this is a discourse that parades difference, the difference at work in this passage functions in a precisely opposite way from that in Werther's letter. There it results in undoing, easing Werther out of that triad in which he claims a part, keeping him within the full organic context but in a condition where only he is alone. Difference causes the unmaking of metaphor. But in this stanza from Don Juan difference is the maker of its vibrant life, a life that conies from the confrontation of contraries, one set after another adding the energies of its encounters to the growing energy of the whole. That whole is of the kind that emerges when antagonists come together to create the world of their antagonism, a world that contains only them and leaves out all that is extraneous to their difference (thus the relation of the life of this stanza to Delacroix's combats of the Giaour and the pasha, which are equally oxymoronic). The stanza is thus a statement about the productivity of difference. As such it takes basic issue with all that Werther sees as productive, and it takes issue in such a way that their statements can never be reconciled. Nor can there be reconciliation among the specific elements in the stanza. Clay and blood are forever antagonistic; past, present, and future will remain successive until timelessness takes over; the making of fictions will always be vulnerable to the effects of excess. This is the rhetoric of self-contradiction, built on a sequence of incongruous pairings that make a paradoxical whole, not only within the individual set but in the stanza that includes them all. If metaphor figures the likening that Werther yearns for, and metonymy the differing he actually endures, Byron's stanza is oxymoronic, the trope that draws its life from the productivity of difference. Oxymoron revels in difference. It shuns reconciliation or anything smacking of likening because they cut down on contradiction

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and therefore on the tension the figure must maintain. 1 5 If difference undoes metaphor, likeness undoes o x y m o r o n . Henri Morier calls o x y m o r a "antilogies" because the elements within the figure logically exclude each other; 16 but we can take the term further because o x y m o r o n , against all logic, pulls its selfcontradictory components into a special sort of completeness, a completeness that exists only as difference exists. Take, for example, the clashing elements within "Clay": chaos threatens the order of the stanza, which moves in a solemn if sprightly manner until the narrator's dizziness takes over, undoing that order for the space of the parentheses and then acceding to the narrative thrust, though with a parting, desperate plea for a hair of the dog. What happens in the separate oxymora happens in the stanza as a whole: the self-contradictory pairing whose tension ought to tear the pairing apart is actually driven by that tension. T h o u g h the narrative thrust wins out, it does so only under sufferance, and only when the power of its contrary has been carefully acknowledged. That power withdraws from the scene but clearly not from the stanza's environment. T o ease the stanza's self-contradiction would be to change its essential character. And that would also result in changing the stanza's status as a paradigm of the romantic ironic mode. Schlegel, we recall, spoke of irony as containing within itself the impossibility and necessity of total communication (Lyceum, no. 108). H e said in the Athenaeum that the mind must have a system and not have one, both at once (no. 53). And his radical definition of irony has self-creation and self-destruction as its requisite pairing of elements (Athenaeum, no. 51), a pairing in which neither takes 15. See Hemrich Lausberg, Handbuch der Literanschen Rhetorik, 2 vols. (Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1973), i.398:"Dasoxymoromstdiegerafft-enge syntaktische Verbindung widersprechender Begnffe zu einer Einheit, die dadurch eine starke Widerspruchsparmung erhalt." 16. Dictwnnaire de Poetique et de Rhetorique (Pans- Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), 287. See also the comments on oxymoron in Eleanor McCann, "Oxymora in Spanish Mystics and English Metaphysical Writers," Comparative Literature 13 (1961)- 16-25

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precedence and where neither can hold final sway. This is the rhetoric of self-contradiction established as the tenor of a literary mode, a mode that sets as its primary standard the inclusion of all sorts of warring compulsions that live in a permanent bonding because none can cancel the others out. Romantic irony is impelled by a zealous compulsion toward order that meets and never fully masters a concomitant compulsion toward chaos. And it is that never-fully-mastering which differentiates its sort of oxymoron from what seems a very similar phenomenon, the tense encounter of opposites seen in the version of organic text-making promulgated by Coleridge. Opposite and discordant qualities are as essential to the organicism of Coleridge as they are to the irony of Byron, but what is done by each with those qualities takes radically different forms. In Coleridge they are the elements that the imagination seeks to reconcile into unity, making them into the closed world of organic synthesis. Reconciliation, synthesis, the making of wholeness and therefore of closure, are at the center of Coleridgean organicism. It is, indeed, the essential gesture in the Coleridgean universe, its principal seeking if not its principal result.17 As Meyer Abrams puts it, "the same concept serves Coleridge as the root-principle of his cosmogony, his epistemology, and his theory of poetic creation alike."'8 As we saw at the end of the previous chapter, a text that would parallel the fragmentation of self in Dejection could not be art in Coleridgean terms, could not, in those terms, be a literary text at all. And yet we also saw in that chapter that there are other views of these matters, those of Hoffman and Byron for example, for which the Coleridgean reconciliation images no more than a universe of dream. Such reconciliations as there are in Don Juan and Kater Murr are never more than tentative and therefore, 17. For a rich study of this seeking and slipping see McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin. McFarland's placement of fragmentation at the center of romanticism would have to mean that romantic irony was there too. He acknowledges the pull toward wholeness seen in Abrams but, unlike Abrams, sees that pull as largely self-defeating. 18. Mirror and the Lamp, 119.

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arguably, never more than illusory. The return of Juan's narrator to the tale of his hero, the return of Hoffmann's novel to the tale of the cat, are elements in a dialectic, one that is as certain to undo return as it is to bring it about. Suspicious of all that closure implies, the dialectic emerges from a principle very different in kind from the one in Coleridge, a principle that is skeptical of the clarity of origins and very uncertain about ends, finding no place of beginning or end that is likely to be all that it claims to be. Of course this means that even our use of the figure of oxymoron to define aspects of romantic irony is itself an uneasy practice, as we noted elsewhere in the previous chapter. The world of the ironist is necessarily fluid, so much so that fixing his art within any figure may well imply a fixedness that he could not, in all lucidity, support. If the elements in the stanza from Don Juan come together in a form of wholeness, it is one that can never be certain of continuation. It is, we remember, the wholeness that occurs when enemies—Hassan and the Giaour—come together in combat. The issue of a static order is important in another way, for it separates the oxymoron of romantic irony from other modes of paradox. Oxymoron, it is generally agreed, is an especially tense form of paradox, as witness the classic oxymoron at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet: "o heavy lightness! serious vanity! I Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms! I Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!" (1.1). In her study of Renaissance paradox Rosalie Colie discusses elements of the mode that, from the perspective we have developed in this book, can be shown to link it with characteristics of romantic irony.19 For example, rhetorical paradox, which is both "antique and antic . . . had duplicity built into it" (5), and we know the import of duplicity (doubling, deception) for the functioning of romantic irony. Further, "paradoxes are profoundly self-critical . . . they comment on their own method 19. Paradoxta Epidemiol.' The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Subsequent parenthetical text references are to page number.

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and their own techniques [and therefore] paradox deals with itself as subject and object" (7). The relation of that attitude to much in Don Juan, as well as that aspect of irony signaled in Schlegel's "Poesie der Poesie," is evident. The following is also as applicable to romantic irony as it is to paradox as a whole: "Operating at the limits of discourse, redirecting thoughtful attention to the faulty or limited structures of thought, paradoxes play back and forth across terminal and categorical boundaries—that is, they play with human understanding, that most serious of all human activities" (7). And paradox confronts the accepted precisely as the plays of Tieck, the fiction of Hoffman, and the epic of Byron do: "the paradox is always somehow involved in dialectic: challenging some orthodoxy, the paradox is an oblique criticism of absolute judgment or absolute convention" (10). Finally, paradox, as Colie defines it, partakes in acts that, in Byron and Schlegel, are acts of the ironist's self-transcendence: "the implications of any particular paradox impel that paradox beyond its own limitations to defy its own categories" (11). And yet the traditional form of paradox, the one so brilliantly defined by Colie, is not precisely the sort seen in the oxymoron of romantic irony. Take, for example, the sonnets of Donne. Colie points out that there are few oxymora in those sonnets because oxymoron is a static phenomenon (she speaks of "oxymoron, with its static formal balance" [ i n ; cf. 138-39]) while Donne's sonnets are devoted to the exploratory, moving "from figures of speech into figures of thought" ( H I ) . What we saw about Coleridgean reconciliation, the finality involved in the idea of the static, the uneasiness of the ironist over fixedness, applies here as well. The oxymoron of romantic irony could never accept the static, nor indeed could Schlegel accept it in his definition of romanticism, which "ewig nur werden, nie vollendet sein kann" (Athenaeum, no. 116). The romantic ironic oxymoron has peculiar qualities of its own that give it a distinctive place within the tradition in which it takes part. That tradition and place continue in Heine, a postromantic

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ironist w h o shared in all these romantic preoccupations—the relation of organicism to irony, the uneasy categorizations of the figures of relation. In Heine, however, they take a particular twist, due in part to his status—a status to which he was especially sensitive—as a successor. (Byron's sense of himself as a successor to Pope has nothing of the ambivalence or ambiguity seen in Heine's sense of himself as a successor to the romantics.) Take, for example, Das Buck le Grand, that throwback to Sterne which is, at the same time, imbued with much that had happened to European literature since Tristram and Yorick. It includes a m o n g its concerns not only the organicism of some of Heine's romantic predecessors but also the ironic practices of other romantics. In chapter 2 the narrator ponders a frustrated love and then, in a rapid shift of roles, becomes the suicidal C o u n t of Ganges. T h e latter just as rapidly takes the narrative to a restaurant in Venice, where, staring into a glass of Rhine wine, he envisions his dear old h o m e near the Himalayas and a sultana w h o has been dead for three thousand years. When he leaves the restaurant, still suicidal, he recites a monologue that has to be quoted in full: In alten Marchen gibt es goldne Schlosser, Wo harfen klingen, schone Jungfraun tanzen Und schmucke Diener blitzen und Jasmin Und Myrt und Rosen ihren Duft verbreiten— Und doch ein einziges Entzaubrungswort Macht all die Herrlichkeit im Nu zerstieben, Und iibrig bleibt nur alter Trummerschutt Und krachzend Nachtgevogel und Morast. So hab' auch ich, mit einem einz'gen Worte, Die ganze bliihende Natur entzaubert, Da liegt sie nun, leblos und kalt und fahl, Wie eine aufgeputzte Konigsleiche, Der man die Backenknochen rot gefirbt Und in die Hand ein Zepter hat gelegt. Die Lippen aber schauen gelb und welk,

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Weil man vergass, sie gleichfalls rot zu schminken, Und Mause springen um die Konigsnase Und spotten frech des grossen, goldnen Zepters.20 This passage enfolds some profound curiosities. It begins with the medievalism of old tales whose fragile magic can be dissipated by a single word of disenchantment. Language destroys language. The power of the tonality of words is such that even a touch of the corrosive kind can undo a scene of charming artifice, turning its spectrum into gray and its castle into ruin. All this, it turns out, is a long simile for the speaker's relation to nature, which now lies dead to him, just as it did to the speaker in Coleridge's Dejection, who can no longer summon the joy necessary to reveal nature's life. Nature's state, in its turn, is then compared to the corpse of a king (the monarch of the shattered palace?) that has been imperfectly laid out. The falsity of the life that has been painted on the king becomes apparent because of the visible decay of the places someone forgot to paint. The truth of nature circumvents the artifice of paint. The movement in the passage is from artifice to nature to an image of artifice that seeks, unsuccessfully, to hold back nature, to subvert its dialectic. The artificial is compared to the natural and then the natural is compared to the (imperfectly) artificial. Therein lies some fascinating trickery, a profound and profoundly successful play with all sorts of duplicity. All that we know of the relations of nature and artifice, from the earliest pastoral to the prevalence of romanticism, makes them into contraries whose opposition is both fertile and (because we know its contours so well) comforting. Yet here there is a likening of those contraries. Each is used as a simile for the other, as though they live in an enclosed world where they have nothing to link to but themselves, a world where they are, it seems, so much alike that they can function as figures for each other. This is clearly not a conceit, where the elements are deliberately far apart, far-fetched. These elements have worked 20. German text from Heinrich Heines Werke m einem Band, ed. Hermann R. Leber (Salzburg: Bergland, n.d.), 842.

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for so long in the same context that, whatever their status as objects, their relation seems to have become metaphorical as well, all that contiguity creating an unexpected likeness. What has been achieved in this unforeseen linkage is therefore a subversion of that condition in both pastoral and romanticism in which the primacy of the natural is assumed, even extolled. The impulse toward metaphor endemic in organic romanticism is picked up in this postromantic ironist and reemphasized with peculiar force, but with a threat to turn the impulse on its head and also find likeness where the romantics found only the most comforting distinctions. Old certainties are threatened with undoing, just as words undid the old dream and nature undoes the king. To put it still another way: the relation of the natural and the artificial had been traditionally seen as oxymoronic. Yet Heine projects the possibility that the relation may also be metaphorical. Those modes ought to be working in permanent opposition, yet Heine puts them to play in the same situation, each figuring that situation from its own perspective. But that is not all: for if those elements have lived for so long in the same context, taking their fullest meaning from their places within that context, their relation has to be seen as metonymic, whatever else it may be. The divisions of figural categories give way under Heine's pressure, just as they do under Byron's. But Heine has played with us long enough—enough to build a subliminal, incremental uneasiness yet not enough to make it take over our relation to the text. At the point when that might well happen he comes up with what has long been expected, a twitting of artifice. He undoes the circle of similes and lets the corpse's decay and the liveliness of the mice win out. Nature is not dead but doing what it has always done, making rot and mice with equal facility. The threat of the similes, the menace to complacency that lies in the suggestion of absolute likeness, has been mitigated. And so has the challenge to our old ideas of hierarchy. What seemed like a subversion of the organic, a threat to its primacy over its old opponent, is absorbed into the established order of things. And so Heine lets us and the passage rest—that is, until his

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speaker begins to comment on it in the prose that follows. He goes into a typically Sternean and romantic ironic discussion about the choices that were open to him, as writer, at that point; that is, when he needed a soliloquy about death for the suicidal Count of Ganges whose voice he has, for the moment, put aside. As Byron did before him he ponders the intertextual life of his narrative, tying it not only to Shakespeare's canon but his own. He points out to Madame (the fictive addressee he took over from Sterne) that every potential suicide needs a soliloquy, and that most of them quote from Hamlet on such occasions. As it so happens he has a good one on hand from his (Heine's) play Almansor; and he has, in fact, just used it in the lines about old stories, nature, and the king. After all, as he says in the commentary, "jeder ist sich selbst der Nachste," each of us is closest to himself, charity begins at home. What the soliloquy does in the narrative of the count is gain the latter a little time in which, happening to see his beloved, he decides to choose life after all. What it does in the narrative of the narrative, that parallel fiction about fictions which had been running concurrently with the other, is return the text to the workshop. There the focus is not on life but on artifice, on the making of the text, on the chosenness, the writtenness, of it all. This is that "schone Selbstbespiegelung" which Schlegel admired in Pindar, the artistic self-reflection which, as Schlegel puts it, results in poetry that is also the poetry of poetry. It is that poetry which describes the producer and the product both at once, putting them together into the same world. The presence of the soliloquy also shows that this is an elaborately fashioned world and that here, indeed, is the hand of its fashioner, even his voice— or a good facsimile thereof. (Here we approach the question of the fictive surrogate that is basic to some views of Byron.) In fact, the fascination with the world of words carries over not only to the canons of Shakespeare and Heine but to that curious tradition which demands a soliloquy before death, what the suicide ought properly to do before he does himself in. At the point where life is to turn into death a bundle of verbal artifice stands between life, the contrary of artifice, and death, the con-

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trary of life. At the point where we are to leave life we go over to one of its antitheses, the made one, before we go over to the other, the one that does the terminal unmaking. The commentary on the passage from Almansor turns out to be an extension of one of the essential themes of the passage, the confrontation of life and artifice seen in the interplay of mice and makeup. From one perspective the speaker has stepped back from the passage to speak of the making of it, hovering above his work in one of the classic stances of the romantic ironist. From another he continues the import of the passage on a different plane, on that stratum of the text where the narrator of Don Juan spoke of his poem's making, where the narrator of Das Buch le Grand speaks of his choices, and where the reader is compelled to ponder artifice as well as his puzzling, dizzying, relation to the text. Wherever we go in this text we find life, nature, the organic world, confronting artifice and the power of words. Das Buch le Grand shows how Heine is obsessed with that confrontation; but so are other ironists who try out the romantic sort. It is Byron's obsession too. Yet Heine will not let us rest even at this point. The passage from Almansor has left artifice in a disreputable state, not sweet and genial as it was in the romance enchantments but sour and illusory. It makes for that doubling which is duplicity because it makes for a twofold world of pretence and reality, surface and (rotting) substance. Still, though the workings of nature win out in the passage they are themselves thoroughly unattractive. The only vestige of genial organicism is in the phrase "die ganze bluhende Natur," all of blossoming nature, and that nature is already far in the past and beyond the ken of the dejected speaker. And then comes the narrator's intrusion that, at its simplest level, recalls us to ourselves, keeps us from yielding to too much, or too unqualified, feeling, or to too much, or too unqualified, self-exposure. The intrusion should also remind us of the status of the soliloquy we have just gone through; it is, after all, crafted words about artifice, something made up about makeup. That, in particular, is what this ironist (any ironist) wants us never to forget. The reminder, in its turn, should pre-

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pare us for this narrator's fixation on words, especially the turning of words into the elaborate art of a soliloquy or the greater elaboration of a canon. And that fascination with language leads him to another view of artifice. If the soliloquy from Almansor has ended with artifice in a battered condition, ineffectual and somewhat disgraced, it starts to be quietly reinstated from the beginning of the paragraph of commentary. That comes, in part, from the name-dropping (if Shakespeare practices it how can it be bad?); in part from the place artifice takes as we get ready to take our exits; and in part, and most effectively, from its capacity to function at all sorts of junctures and yet continue as what it is. What we have seen of the king's yellow lips puts a taint in the glory of artifice, and it can never be taken away. Now, though, we can see that artifice has many faces, and the sort we see painted on the king is not the sort we see in Heine's text. Only by an awareness of all its faces can we see the full contours of artifice, clarifying the record for the sake of truth and lucidity. Now, with these distinctions made plain, one more adjustment has to be made. At the end of the commentary we move swiftly from the plane of the narrator back to the plane of the count he is impersonating. With that change life wins out as the count sees his ladylove walk by and renounces all thoughts of suicide. The commentary on the passage from Almansor seems therefore to be as balanced as the passage itself, and in much the same way, with the components in a similar order. Indeed, it doubles the passage, though in a tonality that is far more positive for all the components. And yet there is more. If we are recalled to a kind of balance, with an ultimate assertion of life, the recalling is done by and within this body of artifice. There may come a time when it will seem useful to quote Das Buch le Grand itself, bringing it into a later text just as Almansor has been brought into this one. After all, "jeder ist sich selbst der Nachste," and in so feeding off ourselves we could become like a Narcissus who has so many pools to look at, pools strung all in a row and endlessly reflecting each other, that he could gaze in bottomless rapture at the reflections of his reflections and never get out of that

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sequence. We are threatened, it appears, with a mise-en-abyme, a world of mirroring words from which there is no exit, no way to go but into more words that echo earlier ones. That is the ultimate possibility glimpsed in this section of Heine's text, the one that would encompass them all and hold them all in play forever. The mise-en-abyme is not, however, the beautiful selfmirroring to which Schlegel referred because there is nothing in Schlegel that is so self-enclosed, so absolute in its mode of disjunction, so potentially scary. We are, it seems, not far from the work of Paul De Man, for the uneasiness of Heine with all that this play of figure implies, the potential for this passage to end in a world of words from which there is no obvious outlet, places him in a line that arrives at the writings of De Man. In fact, the ironist's touchiness about metaphor, and therefore about the centrality of the Wordsworthian mode, is echoed throughout De Man, who argued from early in his career against the centrality of metaphor and symbol in modern readings of romanticism. "The Rhetoric of Temporality" is fervent on that point, chastizing Abrams and others for emphasizing a unity of subject and object that De Man asserts to be undemonstrable both in life and in art.21 By the time of his Allegories of Reading, metaphor had become, for De Man, no more than an instrument of nostalgia: "the inference of identity and totality that is constitutive of metaphor" placates our unconscious longings, offering in the fiction of figures what we can never recover in fact.22 De Man is clearly more sympathetic to irony, with its worries about organic wholeness and its awareness of pervasive disjunction. In an early essay on Lukacs's Theory of the Novel he shows Lukacs arguing that the novel is necessarily disjunctive and ironic because it is based on the Quixotic disparity between ideal and actuality, aspiration and possibility. In so doing Lukacs comes close "to reaching a point from which a genuine hermeneutic of the novel could start." This is confirmed when Lukacs states that the novel "can 21. See note 7 above. 22. P. 14.

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have nothing in common with the homogeneous, organic form of nature: it is founded on an act of consciousness, not on the imitation of a natural object."23 But that is as close to hermeneutic purity as Lukacs comes. In arguing for a sense of temporality in Flaubert he falls back to an embrace of time that "acts as a substitute for the organic continuity which Lukacs seems unable to do without." 24 By slipping at just one point Lukacs loses the clean and absolute lucidity that the De Manian ironist has to have. The purity of De Man's position comes forth most fully in Allegories of Reading, where the disjunction he saw as central to romantic experience is now seen to be definitive of all experience, that of Rilke and Proust as well as that of Rousseau. Now there is not only a radical fissure between word and referent but among the meanings in any text: "a literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode" (17); "rhetoric is a text in that it allows for two incompatible, mutually self-destructive points of view, and therefore puts an insurmountable obstacle in the way of any reading or understanding" (131). The result, of course, is aporia, an indeterminacy or undecidability endemic to all literature and even to critical discourse. In sum, "after Nietzsche (and, indeed, after any 'text'), we can no longer hope ever 'to know' in peace" (126). Irony, for De Man, is the condition that results from the impossibility of ascertaining meaning. On the last pages of the book he offers "a slight extension of Friedrich Schlegel's formulation" about irony as a permanent parabasis, an extension that ends with irony as no longer a trope but "the systematic undoing . . . of understanding" (300-301). As Geoffrey Hartman puts it in a related argument, " 'indeterminacy' is not a word to insist on. 'Irony,' if its history were kept in mind, would be preferable."25 23. De Man, Blindness and Insight, 56-57. 24. Ibid., 58. 25. Criticism in the Wilderness' The Study ofLiterature Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 278.

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What this means for the irony of Byron is not so patent as it may appear. Byron's refusal to assent to the dominant organicism of his times parallels De Man's refusal to assent to the belated organicism of the New Critics; and the parallel grows even closer when we remember the affinity of New Critical organic theory to that of the English romantics, particularly Coleridge. In both Byron and De Man the uneasiness with the organic starts from the organic's insistence upon wholeness and closure, a condition organicism needs in order to survive, both as a theory and as a mode of experience. But there is more yet, and that has to do with the place of disjunction in experience, the weight given to it, and its relation to other conditions. Take, for example, the emphases of Meyer Abrams, the primary spokesman in our time for romantic organicism. In his analysis of Sartor Resartus in Natural Supernaturalism Abrams places that text neatly within the categories he develops in the book: "The seeming disorder of the biography of Teufelsdroeckh is thus structured on the familiar Romantic model of a self-formative educational journey, which moves through division, exile, and solitariness toward the goal of a recovered home and restored familial relationship."26 Division is a stage in this journey, an essential but temporary time of separation not only from home but from those stable and familiar patterns that had mapped the quest up to that point. But what Abrams sees as a requisite juncture, an element within the whole but no more than an element, is seen by De Man and the ironists as a recurring condition. Repeated periods of disjunction are, for Schlegel, part of the inevitable state of things. For Byron too this is a condition we cannot avoid, in his case partly for what we are (the elements of selfhood forever in internecine war) and partly for what the world is, all that the sea comes to stand for in our lives and our relationships. For De Man division is radical and inescapable, built into the nature of our language as 26. P. 309

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well as into the essential conditions of history and understanding. Yet if De Man has ties to the past his irony has only an incomplete resemblance to classical romantic irony. Aporia is a dead end. One gets to the point in the reading of a text where the closure of decision is seen to be unattainable. That sort of irony cannot be productive, for out of it comes, literally, nothing, what De Man calls in Allegories of Reading "the void of signification."27 But the irony of Schlegel and Byron, that steady "Wechsel von Selbstschopfung und Selbstvernichtung," is not a dead end but a very lively one, a dialectic of break-up and renewal that, we recall, Schlegel identifies with its plethora of possibilities: "Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos, aus der eine Welt entspringen kann." As we saw in Kater Murr and Don Juan it is an incessant return to beginnings and therefore a mode of perpetual possibility—which does not mean that all possibilities are good (Byron and Hoffmann made careers out of showing us otherwise) but that there are always forms of reopening going along with the open-endedness. For De Man, however, there is only one eventuality, entrapment within the void of signification, and it will arrive sooner or later. At several points in his work he speaks of a mode of self-transcendence, one that bears a considerable likeness to the sort in Lyceum, no. 42, that transcendental buffoonery with which the self lifts itself above everything limited, even its own art. What he says in the essay on Lukacs puts the point plainly: "The ironic structure acts disruptively, yet it reveals the truth of the paradoxical predicament that the novel represents. For this reason, Lukacs can state that irony actually provides the means by which the novelist transcends, within the form of the work, the avowed contingency of his condition."28 De Man states that "this concept of irony as the positive power of an absence" stems from "Lukacs's idealist and romantic ancestors." But in De Man himself there is little to be seen that can be called the positive power 27. P. 214. 28. D e M a n , Blindness and Insight, 56.

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of an absence. He accepts with absolute lucidity the full implications of a position hinted at in Heine but held, in precisely that form, by none of the romantic ironists.

We have seen an incessant slippage, a compulsive sliding toward difference, to be endemic in all sorts of romantic poems and figures, whatever the claims to the contrary. It is endemic in Byron too, so much so that one of his essential tasks came to be the demonstration of the fecundity of difference. One way of putting the relation between Manfred and Don Juan is to speak of Byron's understanding that the pain of difference can be put to use, turning it into a major impetus for the basic job of the ironist, the business of making difference productive. There are passages in Don Juan where he shows that he knows his business so well that he can make difference productive by making fun of that restless slippage which seems never to be able to stop working. His most sustained comment on these issues comes in the sequence on Juan's enslavement, from the time he is sent to the Turkish mart as a captive (canto 4) to the end of canto 6, where the sequence is dropped. (In canto 7 Juan and a party reappear, having escaped from the harem.) The sequence is, in part, an allegory of figuration, thematizing the slippage we have been inspecting. It also brings these issues into line with ongoing obsessions of the canon, working with every meaning of duplicity and with images of self-unmaking as it explores the play of difference through a major comic episode. Studied instances abound. Juan's captivity begins in earnest with the chaining of the potential slaves, "lady to lady, well as man to man" (4.91.6). But this enforced linkage of likeness cannot work with all of the captives because "there chanced to be an odd male, and odd female, / Who, . . . [perforce] were link'd together" (4.92.2, 6). Juan is chained to a Romagnole with bright, black, burning eyes through whose "clear brunette complexion shone a / Great wish to please" (4.94.6-7). The play of sexuality runs all through the passage: the main chaining

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is based on a likeness of sex; the soprano, "after some discussion and some doubt, I If [he] might be deem'd to be male" (4.92.34), is placed as a safe scout over the women; Juan and the Romagnole are linked together, her eagerness to serve him seen in her eyes, hands, and limbs. This is, of course, a spectrum of likeness and difference. Layed out in just this order it sets up the issues precisely, linking matters of matching and unmatching with matters of sexuality, linking all of these intricate issues to questions of enforced association and degrees of submission. And at the end of that intricate spectrum Byron brings affairs of figuration into a place in the overall picture. Speaking of Juan's cold indifference to his eager linkmate he quotes with near accuracy from Richard the Second: " 'Tis said no one in hand 'can hold a fire I By thought of frosty Caucasus' " (4.96.5-6). We are standing at the edge of an oxymoron, a point especially apparent in the original lines from the play: "Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand, / By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?" (act 1, sc. 2, lines 294-95). That allusion also ends an illuminating subsequence within the passage. Raucocanti and the tenor are unluckily chained together, the tonality of their linking one of the intensest hate. With Juan and the Romagnole the potential tone of the chaining is one of unusual passion, the sort that has to end in sexual activity, the literal linking of difference. But the actual tone is something else: opposites are brought together but only under sufferance, their sole product the sustained opposition that makes for the life of oxymoron. There is a very important sense in which Byron is conveying instructions for reading, telling us in this early passage how to interpret the sequence that follows. Throughout the sequence he reinforces those instructions with careful reminders, pointing out where it is going and offering instances of basic obsessions. For example, there is the reference (in 5.61) to the "monstrous tale" of Semiramis's passion for her horse, an "improper friendship" that takes the matters of passion and difference to the point of the grotesque. This comes in while Baba is leading Juan and Johnson through the palace and into a situation where passion and difference will take on further sub-

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stance. By playing with grotesque tonalities the stanza jolts us into awareness of where the sequence has been; and the jolt further prepares us for—gives us a mind-set toward—where the sequence is going. All the play about queens and studs seen in the encounter of Juan and Gulbeyaz is colored by this " m o n strous tale." It sets up a commentary on their encounter, a c o m mentary from outside the passage that we carry with us as we read the passage. There is another w r y roadmark at the end of the fifth canto. To remind us of the shape of the theme and of the allegory of figuration, Byron plays with the Eastern and the classical in a stanza of appropriate (if sometimes improper) puns and allusions: Thus in the East they are extremely strict, And Wedlock and a Padlock mean the same; Excepting only when the former's pick'd It ne'er can be replaced in proper frame; Spoilt, as a pipe of claret is when pnck'd: But then their own Polygamy's to blame; Why don't they knead two virtuous souls for life Into that moral centaur, man and wife?

(5.158)

However moral the centaur of marriage (one suspects it to be as moral as Juan's mother), it is still a freakish morality. However m u c h the centaur knows, he is still part horse. We are not, after all, very far from Semiramis: her union with the stallion would have to produce a centaur. T h e pairing of the passage on Semiramis with that on the centaur ticks off Gulbeyaz and D o n n a Inez at once, striking not only at marriage but at all manner of enforced linkings. We are, with this pairing of stanzas, at the center of the sequence's thrust. T h a t center is acted out in Juan's enforced masquerade, which plays in multiple ways with matters of linking and likeness, dubiety, duplicity, and difference. Dubiety in questions of identity begins in the first stanzas of the sequence, just after Juan finds himself at sea in the slave ship. As the ship passes near Ilion the narrator pauses to speak of the geography and m o n u ments, but as he mentions particular points he brings up the

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possibility of error, undoing the certainties of his statements even as he makes them. Up on the hill at Cape Sigaeum is the tomb of Achilles; at least, "they say so—(Bryant says the contrary)" (4.76.4). There is a tumulus, "further downward, tall and towering still," but it could be of anyone, "Patroclus, Ajax, or Protesilaus." As for the facts of geography, "Ida in the distance, still the same, I And old Scamander, (if 'tis he) remain" (4.77.3—4). Coming as they do at the very beginning of the sequence these questionings of our knowledge, especially of that which is central to our heritage (the matters pondered in the early Harold), put an uneasiness into the sequence that never really leaves it. Phrased another way: the placement and reiteration of these passages show that, here as elsewhere, Byron is conveying instructions for reading. Questions of identity, our sameness with ourselves, are to be a force in the events that follow. And, as though to reinforce and to specify, he goes at the issue in a different way in the passage immediately following, on the Italian singing troupe. The question of the soprano's gender (92) ties dubiety to sexuality, carrying the queries into a channel that will remain the major track for the rest of the sequence. The slippage between identity and difference settles in early and comfortably, becoming a primary obsession in a passage where many show up. That interplay appears most forcefully in Juan's quasi-metamorphosis. Consider, briefly, some of its complexities. Something new has come into Juan's situation, and that is the business of himself as semblance. For the sake of his very survival he had better not appear to be identical with himself. His only hope is in practicing seeming, that is, in assuming (taking on the role of, causing others to assume) his difference. Yet his function in terms of Gulbeyaz is precisely the opposite; that is, whatever he is made to seem, he had better practice his difference, assert and even flaunt it, if he expects to keep himself going with any sort of stability. In fact, Gulbeyaz ponders, at one point, the threat of making him other than he is (though nothing like what he appears to be) after he refuses to do what she asks: "Her first thought was to cut off Juan's head; I Her

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second, to cut only his—acquaintance" (5.139.1-2). That second cutting can only mean that the thought of making him like Baba (a "neutral personage I O f the third sex" [5.26.1-2]) at least crossed her mind, though the thought of cancelling his virility was too much for her. (The same threat was made openly by Baba; see 5.75.) T h e sequence that began with the undoing of certainties threatens to end with the undoing of his maleness. Still, whatever all the seeming, and the threat to make him neuter, Juan will have none of the possibility that seeming should be taken for being, actual difference for apparent likeness. Let us not, for the sake of survival, take this for metaphor, for the true likening of Juan to the rest of the harem: "You fool! I tell you no one means you harm." "So much the better," Juan said, "for them; Else they shall feel the weight of this my arm, Which is not quite so light as you may deem. I yield thus far; but soon will break the charm If any take me for that which I seem: So that I trust for every body's sake, That this disguise may lead to no mistake."

(5.82)

To survive he must pretend; but for all to survive there should be no mistake about what he really is. If there is danger in duplicity there is an equal and opposite danger in letting it engender a mistake. There has to be, at once, both slippage and firmness, a faqade propped up by its opposite, or the structure will collapse into chaos, a j u m b l e of undone selves. T h u s , Juan has to practice slippage and act out, for the sake of survival, the play of difference—a play that some will always be aware of, some will never be aware of, and some must learn to respect although they are not aware of its presence. Put in terms of categories of figuration (which by this point are clearly quite inadequate), Juan must pretend both metaphor and synecdoche, act out likening as well as a place in a crowd where anyone can stand for the whole. Yet he must live by his hidden difference, and he wants it clearly to be k n o w n that others will

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live only if it is untouched. Metaphor is the face of the faςade, oxymoron the shape of the whole. That predilection for difference is more than naive male chauvinism or the need on Juan's part to protect his essential masculinity. From the beginning of the sequence on slavery the act of linking and chaining has been a threat to the integrity of self. Their slavery is first brought home to them when they are linked together on the ship. Most are chained male to male and female to female, in an ironic insistence upon likening as part of compulsory linkage. Juan, however, is chained to a female, as though the strength of his difference, his assertiveness of sex and sexuality, could not have permitted what happened to the others. But the situation reverses in the harem, where the thrust of difference is sublimated into play. The enforced linkage he went through on the ship becomes, in the harem, an enforced likening, a fiction of likeness that Juan lives in one chamber and undoes in another. If bondage threatens the self, unmaking its requisite freedom, so does the part Juan plays disturb that aggressive maleness essential to his conception of self. What­ ever the interim stage on the ship, likening and bondage are seen to be indissoluble, and both are potentially devastating to his intense sense of self. When Juan walked through the harem he "paced on most maiden-like and melancholy" (6.33.8). Joined to the array of odalisques he moves with them from room to room, "a virgin-like and edifying throng" (6.30.3), though they are no more likely to be virginal than they are to be edifying. That is, their likeness to virgins is as good as Juan's to maidens, as the narrator makes clear in still another bit of dubiety: "I know not . . . whether they were 'maids' who called her mother" (6.31.2, 4). But all their stately and edifying postures, their public gestures of imitation, are dropped when "their guards being gone . . . a truce [is] established between them and bondage." Loosening up, they "began to sing, dance, chatter, smile, and play" (6.34.8). Yet Juan must keep on feigning likeness, playing at metaphor, at least in this chamber. To do otherwise is to court disaster. Likening and the threat of the unmaking of self go together

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for Don Juan just as they did for the Giaour and Manfred. What we see in this epic sequence is a late version of an old obsession. Mirroring, for the Giaour, brought the death of Leila and Hassan as well as the Giaour's longstanding agony. Mirroring, for Manfred, brought only the destruction of Astarte as well as his own eventual undoing. As for Lambro and Haidee "they were alike, their features and / Their stature differing but in sex and years; / Even to the delicacy of their hand I There was resemblance, such as true blood wears" (4.45.1-4). No wonder that this ironist is so often uneasy with likening, and therefore patently uneasy with one of the bases of organicism. The history of Byron's canon shows that the linking and likeness endemic in the organic cosmos may well entail a threat to the self, certainly to its integrity and perhaps to its very existence. Juan's worries are proper and understandable. They have a rich and coherent history in the texts that precede their own. Yet the matter is even more general, touching, as it does, on the essence of romantic irony as practiced by figures like Byron and Hoffmann. Though Juan is in control of his immediate situation, the control is fragile at best, complex and difficult to manage and therefore constantly under threat. The possibility of unmaking meets him at various levels: in the situation as a whole, which could easily come undone; in his maleness, twice under threat; and in his selfhood, which, whatever its toughness, has to endure the lack of freedom and still remain intact. Thus, though Juan is no ironist he lives out the play of difference with which the ironist works, and he makes that difference productive just as the ironist seeks to do. In Juan's case what is produced is his survival. The ironist's case is nothing so drastic. Still, the mode of romantic irony, the mode that makes the most out of difference, was Byron's best and final answer to all of the assaults on the self seen in the dense history of his heroes. (The same can surely be said for Hoffmann.) That unmaking which, for this ironist, is the essential threat of experience, comes through in a text that mocks unmaking, evoking it, coaxing it into being as part of the business he has to perform. Juan has no such instrument through which he can dare to

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evoke the threat. He lives with the chance of unmaking throughout the entire slavery sequence, lives with that likening which seems so often to be involved with undoing. But the ironist, under no such compulsion, has the luxury ofopen-endedness, the parade of incessant beginnings that Juan can only covet. That is the ultimate effect of irony, what the mode is meant to do. By playing with the thrust of difference it manages to hold a world together.

PART THREE

9 Self and the Language of Satire

of Juan on the ship and in the harem take in a bundle of themes that, as the following canto shows, did not come together out of accident or coincidence but from profound and reverberative relations. The play of semblance performed at every point in the scenes has to do not only with questions of figuration but with the nature of language itself and some of the tricks it seeks to do. The same goes for the play of vitality and fertility imaged in our phrase "the productivity of difference"—a play that takes in several ominous elements like the threatened unsexing of Juan and Baba's condition as eunuch. Each of these radical themes continues in the material that immediately follows. They weave their elements together in ways that could only be hinted at in the ribald scenes in the harem as well as those on the ship of slaves. That weaving begins straight away, in the Preface to cantos 6-8, where Byron divides his comments between a defense that is no defense and a refusal to defend himself that is, in fact, a slashing assault. Castlereagh, whom Byron treated with scorn as early as the Dedication to the poem, had killed himself shortly before the writing of this Preface. Byron's sense of tact led him to call attention to the attacks on Castlereagh in the new cantos and to point out that he would have suppressed those attacks "had that person's Oligarchy died with him" (McGann, 5:295). Of course it had not, and with that opening Byron lights into the dead despot and, less directly, into those entities which had been Castlereagh's more or less willing victims. The victims, it appears, were complacently deaf, willing to settle for nonsensical sounds: England had been "insulted by a Minister (at least) who could not speak English," while Parliament had T H E SCENES

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"permitted itself to be dictated to in the language of Mrs. Malap r o p " (McGann, 5:295). The paragraph that follows drives the offensive harder, condemning the pageantry of Castlereagh's funeral and his burial in Westminster Abbey. It chides the n e w s papers for their "Syllables of Dolour yelled forth" (the allusion is to Macbeth), needles the coroner for his "harangue . . . in an eulogy over the bleeding body of the deceased," and reproaches Castlereagh's cohorts for their "nauseous and atrocious cant" (McGann, 5:296). Byron's attack upon the mourners occurs in precisely the same area in which he attacked the minister and his victims: their language, he charges, is the image of their souls. It is as degraded as they are—as sentimental, inflated, and corrupt. T h e remainder of the Preface takes up another issue, the moral objections to the cantos already published. Byron says that he will content himself with quoting two sentences from Voltaire, though in fact he goes on for a long and self-serving paragraph. What he implies with the Voltaire quotations carries on what he said earlier about the language of Castlereagh and his mourners, though this time it has nothing to do with inflated foolishness but, instead, with the capacity of language to shape a fraudulent reality: "La pudeur s'est enfuite des coeurs, et s'est refugiee sur les levres" . . . "Plus les moeurs sont depraves, plus les expressions deviennent mesurees; on croit regagner en langage ce qu'on a perdu en vertu." (McGann, 5:296)1 T h e first quotation speaks of pure sham, a modesty that is only a faqade of words. T h e second shows what is behind the faqade, the depravity that has replaced pudeur in men's hearts. The content of the faqade is circumspect and steady (mesurees); what is underneath is vicious and messy. Byron draws from Voltaire a sense of the structure of self in which the modalities of depth and surface play off against each other in a war of contraries that 1. " 'Modesty has fled from hearts and has taken refuge on lips' . 'The more morals become depraved the more expressions become measured. One thinks one can regain in language what one has lost in virtue.' "

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only the astute can perceive. This Preface, it seems, is as much about language as it is about society, and it is as much about language and the order of self as it is about the relation of language to social and moral order. Byron ends the Preface with another reference to his favorite annoyance, cant. "It would be well," he says, "if the adherents to the Classes from whence those persons sprung should abate a little of the Cant which is the crying sin of this double-dealing and false-speaking time" (McGann, 5:297). The persons referred to are Wellington, Castlereagh, and some "heterodox Prelates," while the classes are, of course, his own as well as theirs. The time to which they belong is double-dealing because it deals in doublings, duplicities, actions that are both twofold and deceptive. The actions of the time are necessarily binary: to do their double-dealing properly they must play two angles at once, dealing for their agent while they are dealing with their victims. They are deceptive precisely because they are twofold. The time is also false-speaking; that is, it deals not only in that meaning of duplicity which denotes a doubleness of intent but in that other, related meaning which involves a surface that utters one thing and a submerged expanse that cherishes another. This is a doubleness of structure, and it too is deceptive because it is twofold. The exponents of cant are therefore variously duplicitous. Their selves are as complex, as stratified, as tense in the relations of depth and surface as those Voltaire described; and the language of cant turns out to be that circumspect speech which Voltaire noticed, the sort which speaks for depravity without speaking about it. It is the speech of falseseeming, the sounds made by that part of the self which abuts the world. We cannot hear any other sounds made by the canting self unless we are as sensitive as Voltaire and Byron to the language of faqade. Theirs is a sensitivity so subtle and precise that it can hear all the sounds at once, the solemnity of measured expressions as well as the mutterings of deep depravity. Cant, it is clear, has a function. It is pragmatic, busy, and dutiful, a kind of rhetoric because it is designed to persuade a potential victim that it is what it seems and means what it

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says. If it cannot persuade the likes of Voltaire and Byron, that is because their sensitivity and lucidity, ever at play, find places where the faqade is thin, where the impenetrable wall turns out to be only a membrane. Their purpose is to counter cant's function with their own, to poke at the membrane and make certain that what they hear coming from beneath will be heard by everyone else as well. The relation of cant to the various senses of duplicity—and therefore to a mode of conceiving of language that is homologous with a mode of conceiving of self—is implicit in several of the OED's definitions of the term: "Phraseology taken up and used for fashion's sake, without being a genuine expression of sentiment"; "language (or action) implying the pretended assumption of goodness or piety." The second definition supposes that cant is naturally transparent, that surface statement and submerged implication are obviously there and obviously contradictory. But that is to posit a failure in the rhetoric of cant that cannot be so easily presupposed. Further, it is to play down or dissipate that tension between levels of intention which is the partner and counterpart of the tension between levels of self; and that is to miss some of the main points of duplicity. Cant is not that ineffectual and not always that transparent: the names Byron reels off are sufficient to show its efficacy. But cant is clearly vulnerable, not because it is obvious but because the structure that helps it to work is especially open to attack by the satirist. In fact, the particular enemy of cant is the Voltaire or Byron who goes about poking at membranes. The way Byron does that poking reveals a good deal about his attraction to cant. Clearly he cannot stay away from it. His satires have many objects—wretched writing, the lusts of an old queen, the dead minds of his native peers—but he is always, in some way, going after cant, fascinated by the multiple senses of duplicity. He saw that duplicity gives to cant a special quality that is not shared by other forms of venality and foolishness, and he saw also how that quality makes cant a special object of satire. In fact, Byron is attracted to cant because of its curious connections with satire. To begin with, the modes of cant and

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satire are exact mirror images of each other. A rhetoric designed to conceal while seeming to reveal is met and countered by a rhetoric designed to expose, to be so incisive that it not only finds all the membranes in the faqade but opens them up with varying degrees of gentility and gentleness. Cant and satire are modes of language that lock into place with each other because each is all that the other is not. Together they make a whole in which a pair of language's possibilities, concealment and revelation, are explored with that kind of fullness which comes when opponents are perfectly matched because they are so exact in their unlikeness. (The relation of cant and satire to the doublings in Byron and Delacroix should be obvious and may serve to explain some of Byron's considerable fascination with cant.) But that is only part of the relationship between cant and its opposition. The chief tool of satire is irony, particularly the rhetorical sort in which one thing is said and another, usually the opposite, is meant. Irony, like cant, is heavily dependent on duplicity. In both there is a structure in which surface utterance and depth intention stand at variance with each other. The language of cant disguises the depravity that initiates its version of the structure, while the language of rhetorical irony covers over the point of its barb. But it does not cover the point completely, and that makes for an essential difference between these curious cousins. When rhetorical irony is doing its job properly, the concealment, though it has to exist, can never be complete: we have to see what it is pretending to conceal. The utterance of irony is as double-dealing as that of cant, but with irony the doubleness has to show through and with cant it cannot. Thus, irony is as false about its duplicity as cant is about its singularity of intent. In some of the finest passages of Don Juan, Byron shows all these kinds of duplicity working at once. In effect he asks of the reader not only an understanding of rhetorical irony but also an awareness of the near homology of irony and its victim. At one point in the English cantos Byron says that he could write a true history of the beau monde, with all its

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secrets, but that such knowledge is not for the vulgar. H e concludes that what I throw off is ideal . . . The grand Arcanum's not for men to see all; My music has some mystic diapasons; And there is much which could not be appreciated In any manner by the uninitiated. (14 22 1, 5-8) This passage has multiple layers of duplicity in which the irony is part open, part concealed. Byron never hid his sense of the separateness of his rank, whatever his awareness of the venality of his kind or his involvement with plebeian interests. I was part of these things, he said in the previous stanza, and he said so in Virgil's Latin, a language the vulgar presumably could not share: " 'Haud ignara loquor: these are Nugae, 'quarum / Pars parva fui' but still Art and part" (14.21.1-2). T h e language itself seems to hide his point from the vulgar, concealing from those w h o are not of his kind his special involvement in his subject. This is an aside to the initiated, confirming his place in their culture, his oneness with the world he is about to describe. And yet the fact that he makes his point in Latin shows the vulgar that he is part of what he is describing, although they cannot k n o w that such is the import of the Latin statements. T h e kind of language Byron uses reveals what the language is saying, even as he pretends to conceal its content in the foreignness of his speech. T h e astute will get the point whatever their rank. B y r o n is too shrewd to identify the vulgar with the stupid. What follows, however, requires n o special astuteness. Since both truth and clarity are not called for, he will, he says, speak only of the ideal, treat the beau monde with an elevated smoothness that will smack of mystery. But this is so patently duplicitous, so openly subversive, that even the stupid could hardly be taken in. Those we see in the world of his peers are as vulgar as any c o m m o n crowd, as untouched by diapasons as they are by the grand arcanum; and we would be dunces indeed if we did not notice that his pretense of a music for the initiated

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has to be as transparent by design as his subjects are by indifference. Finally, though, there is a point that is understandable only by those aficionados of language who delight in watching language mock its own capacity for excess. Byron's language in this passage is the language of cant, pretending noble intentions, puffing up what he is about to do. Yet he is, at the same time, exposing that kind of puffery, and in order to get his point we have to see that his language is being something and undercutting that something, both at once. The language, at one of its levels, is an image of its enemy, a version of its victim. One subverts one's enemy by putting on his face. Imitation becomes a tool of this mode of subversive discourse. (This is precisely what Selim did in The Bride ofAbydos, acting out early in the canon the play of self and surface that Byron would explore in cant and other verbal duplicities.) Thus, there is a duplicity of structure we have to notice, a duplicity of intent we are meant to understand, and a duplicity even in the mode of language, which is and is not the language of cant. The opportunities offered by all this interplay and multiple mirroring explain why the language of Byron's satires is so often ironic. If the intent of satire offers the requisite opposite to the intent of cant, the structure of rhetorical irony offers a doubling that is in part a duplication of the doubling of cant but also, in part, an undercutting of that duplication. Satire is the complement to cant, standing against it in symmetrical opposition. Rhetorical irony is the parody of cant, mimicking the order of its duplicitous cousin. What we have seen thus far is one of the ways Byron conceived of the language of attack, that is, language used as a weapon, the essential function of satire. Because his satire is so often strategically ironical Byron is led to think of it in terms of shape and spatial placement, the look and structure of duplicity, the lay of the land that doubleness occupies. He perceives, in other words, the dimensions of such language. Indeed, to go further back, he perceives that duplicitous language has dimensions, that one cannot understand what it does until one understands what it is, that its success is due, in great part, to its mode

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of organization. Duplicity has a design as well as designs, structure as well as intent. T h e content of Byron's attacks upon cant, and his awareness of the structural relations of cant and its opponents, show him pushing toward an understanding of the being of duplicitous language, an understanding based on his perception of the being of duplicity itself. H e had come to see h o w the order of language is homologous with the order of self in both the satirist and the exponent of cant. The satirist as ironist is nearly as duplicitous in his order of self as is his canting opponent, but, unlike his opponent, he makes certain that the membranes are thin enough for us to hear the deep utterance underneath. T h e relations of self and the language of satire take other forms in Byron's work in addition to those we have seen, and those other forms depend, ultimately, on his understanding of satiric creativity. T h e study of cant helps us here too, this time not t h r o u g h h o m o l o g y but through opposition. Byron's bestk n o w n definition of cant occurs in his open letter to his p u b lisher about Bowles's comments on Pope: The truth is, that in these days the grand "primum mobile" of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. It is the fashion, and while it lasts will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the time. I say cant, because it is a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer, and more divided amongst themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum. 2 T h e passage is full of paradoxes. Cant is pervasive and p o w erful, found everywhere and inevitably seductive to "those w h o can only exist by taking the tone of the time." Yet cant is curiously ineffectual, unable to shape or move h u m a n actions at all, not to speak of shaping them in any way that is beneficial to our 2. Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero (London. John Murray, 1901), 5:542.

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moral selves. O f course there is irony here. Cant may m o u t h morality but, because it is radically duplicitous, it can have no moral efficacy. It is only verbal decorum, a linguistic stance, a way of speaking that is also a way of positioning oneself in the world. Cant can have no issue, no result in the world. It is radically sterile. T h e implications of these ideas for Byron's understanding of satirical language are considerable, if not immediately apparent. To draw t h e m out we need to begin by going back to the Preface to cantos 6—8 of Don Juan and particularly to the c o m ments on Castlereagh's language: "England has been insulted by a Minister (at least) w h o could not speak English, and . . . Parliament permitted itself to be dictated to in the language of Mrs. M a l a p r o p " (McGann, 5:295). Castlereagh's English is native but awkward and muddy, unintelligible to the people of England and to his peers in Parliament. It is also—like the language of M r s . Malaprop—incompatible with the occasion, unable to mesh with the scene of its utterance. Thus, the relation of his language to the objects of its utterance has to be contrasted to that of cant and its objects: cant is able to refer coherently, if duplicitously, to its objects, and it is therefore able to establish a stance for itself, create a verbal decorum; but the language of Castlereagh does not even have that limited kind of success. Language that cannot mesh with its surroundings has not succeeded in positioning itself in the world. Some of Byron's other comments on Castlereagh speak of the statesman as offering a model of unpositioned speech. T h r o u g h inevitable association a set of remarks on Castlereagh turns up in the stanzas on Catherine's court. We are told that a vague diplomatic phrase may be understood by studying Castlereagh's parts of speech; and in the strange displays Of that odd string of words, all in a row Which none divine, and every one obeys,

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Perhaps you may pick out some queer «o-meaning, Of that weak wordy harvest the sole gleaning.

(9-49)

Castlereagh's are words laid out on a line that goes nowhere. Put another way, the line goes only to more of itself, adding more parts of speech in a curious accretion of segments. (The relation of this kind of language to the spooky mise-en-abyme envisioned by Heine [see chapter 8] shows that the dangers of entrapment turn up on both sides of the fence.) It is as though Castlereagh's language were stuck in a rut of its own making, the parts unable to cohere in such a way that they can point outside of the rut. They offer a meaning that is "no-meaning," the italics arguing that the words are not simply vacuous but aggressively without import. A stateman's words are supposed to have reference, and these do not. They are supposed to make statements that have the substance that creates reference, and these do not. Substance involves not only parts but a whole, parts put together so as to make a whole, and these are simply parts of speech hung on a string "all in a row." Their form is no more than the result of their linear sequence. Byron's image of a string emphasizes the lack of dimensions of Castlereagh's language (it is univocal, not duplicitous, because it has no content to hide), while the pregnant term "no-meaning" emphasizes its unproductiveness. Words can influence actions only when they have import, but these words are precisely as influential as cant, which is "a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions." Castlereagh's words are only linguistic pieces, reflecting little more than their status as parts of speech. Yet the stanza also argues that they do indeed have an effect: though "none divine" them "every one obeys" them. This paradox is too good to dismantle, so in the next stanza Byron supports and elaborates it. It is not the language of no-meaning that is being obeyed, at least not directly. Castlereagh's "words would ever be a doubt, I Did not his deeds unriddle them each day." In a neat reversal of the expected practice it is not words that explain actions but actions that explain words. The language of no-meaning is unriddled by what Castlereagh does,

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which means that one approaches his words, the mediating instruments, mediately. Action is the elucidator of meaning, the explicator of intention. Words that are supposed to reach out and point to experience are, instead, pointed to by experience. This means, of course, that one goes back to the words long after they should have had their effect. Such belatedness would seem to make Castlereagh's language useless, not simply ineffectual. Yet, as the previous stanza argued, we do obey his words even though we cannot divine them. We have learned to obey that which we cannot understand because Castlereagh is a "sad inexplicable beast of prey," one whose words are ever in doubt but whose actions are sufficiently beastly to be patent in their import. If we cannot know what he says, we do know what he does, and that is enough to make us leap when he speaks. The implications of these comments on cant and the language of Castlereagh turn up in Byron's stanzas on the statesman in the Dedication to the poem. Castlereagh enters the poem as an "intellectual eunuch" (Dedication, n . 8 ) , one whose mind has been thoroughly gelded. Southey has just been compared with Milton, "the blind Old Man," whose incapacity did not get in the way of imaginative fertility. Byron underscores the point with a vicious pun in the third stanza, where Southey is compared to "the flying fish I Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob, I And fall, for lack of moisture, quite a dry, Bob! [Dedication, 3.6-8]" (The last words are slang for coitus without emission.) Castlereagh's inability is of another, related, sort. It brings an impotence of the intellect into his world and with it a host of woes for England and Ireland. In the stanzas that follow, Byron plays out the paradox we have noted with the minister's parts of speech. Though he seems incapable of having an effect upon things, Castlereagh has actually made a mess of a number of countries. Still, however potent his influence, Castlereagh is called "it" throughout these stanzas. He is a neuter of the intellect, and his language is not only a product of that intellect but a mirror of it. Castlereagh's words are as impotent as his mind:

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An orator of such set trash of phrase Ineffably—legitimately vile, That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise, Nor foes-—all nations—condescend to smile,— Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil, That turns and turns to give the world a notion Of endless torments and perpetual motion. (Dedication, 13) This does not mean that Castlereagh's language never blunders, but quite the reverse. Byron and M o o r e were ferociously witty about Castlereagh's ineptness with metaphor, his inability to reconcile tenor and vehicle or to follow a figure through to its ultimate logic. O n l y a mind of the most stubborn turgidity could have said: " A n d now, sir, I must embark into the feature on which this question chiefly hinges," a sentence for which B y r o n and M o o r e never forgave him. 3 Castlereagh's blunders are not "sprightly," lively, vivid, viable. His language is m o n strous, abortive, stillborn, just as productive as the mind that made it. Byron's figure for Castlereagh's language ("that Ixion grindstone") has much to offer. Zeus bound Ixion to an eternally turning wheel because the Lapithean king had sought to seduce or violate Hera; but before that, Zeus, the Olympian ironist, had formed a cloud-image of Hera and through it Ixion fathered the race of centaurs, half-men, half-beasts. Thus, this fable of oppressive power reverberates with images of a misplaced lust that results in monsters. But Ixion's progeny are lively where Castlereagh's are not. T h e grindstone of his language turns ceaselessly in sterile circles. Yet, again, if Castlereagh cannot make working words he is expert at "cobbling at manacles for all mankind" (Dedication, 14.6). T h o u g h his mind has been "emasculated to the marrow," though the fittest historical figure for it is Eutropus, a eunuch and minister at R o m e (Dedication, 15), that mind has forged so many manacles that B y r o n has to go to Italy to escape them. If Castlereagh's language is arid and barren, with no vital issue, his actions are 3- Cf. 5.87.

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hellishly potent, whatever the extent of his bungling. Gelded words and slave-making deeds are the products of this paradoxical statesman. What Castlereagh is and does stands in inevitable opposition to the being and doing of satire, a point Byron seems to have intuited though he never spelled out his intuition. We can make it clearer by returning to the origins of the mode, particularly as they are described in Robert C. Elliott's The Power of Satire. Elliott draws upon Francis M. Cornford's reconstruction of the phallic songs that were central to ancient fertility ceremonies. The rites were intended to "coerce by magical means the responsible spirits or powers" so as to promote fecundity.4 But part of those songs took on a special iambic form, an improvised component "directed at individuals—presumably stingy persons who had refused to contribute food or money—who were attacked by name."5 The abuse is apotropaic, designed to expel evil influences. Cornford argues that the invective that characterizes Old Comedy is descended directly, and with full knowledge of the participants, from its part in such ceremonies.6 Most significant for our purposes is what Cornford and Elliott imply about the relations of satire and fertility. Elliott argues that the harshness of invective would stand out, by its dissonance, from the joyful promotion of life that is the dominant tone of the ritual; yet this harshness clearly has a part to play in all that the ceremony supports. Satire, it would seem, is life-promoting. It has potency because it stands for potency, because behind it is the thrust of a desire for fruitfulness. Its point and purpose are to attack the opponents of fruitfulness, that is, the proponents of impotence. Those it seeks to expose and expel from our midst stand in the way of life and therefore must be compelled to stand aside. Satire differs in tone from the ritual joy surrounding it because it has a special role to play, the 4 Elliott, The Power of Satire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, i960), 5· 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid.

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singling out and driving out of all that hinders vitality. Those who hinder it would become, by a natural association, those who do not have it, who not only promote unfruitfulness by what they do but are themselves examples of it. To attack them is therefore directly to attack what satire abhors. The fact that Byron singled out the unproductiveness of cant, that he called Castlereagh a eunuch, a Eutropus, a spinner of wheels who cannot strike off a vital spark, shows that he sensed how satire, in its essence, is life-enhancing, and must seek out as objects of its invective those who are not. (It is not only organic systems that represent life and creativity but other systems as well that, under the appropriate conditions, may take organicism as an antagonist.) That sense of satire as lifeenhancing is one of the reasons for the prominence of Donna Inez in the first canto of Don Juan, which takes some of the themes introduced into the poem in the Dedication's passages on Castlereagh and gives them substance in a story. Donna Inez is the poem's first and most prominent exponent of order, and those ranged against her are therefore exponents of its opposite, or what she, at least, considers its opposite. Those with whom she has set up an adversary relationship are adversaries because they are involved in the free play of sexuality: her husband roams, her son and Donna Julia do what she hoped the former would ignore, and the edition of Martial used by Juan's tutors has all "the grosser parts" placed conveniently together at the back of the book. Inez is more than a bluestocking, more even than a prude. The full range of her reference brings her into line not only with the exponents of cant (she supports Donna Julia's chastity-belt Platonism) but also with Castlereagh and all that he comes to stand for. Castlereagh's intellectual eunuchism is neatly balanced by the position in which Byron places Donna Inez. Where he is the infertility he represents, she is placed over against the energies of virility though not herself unvirile (not only did she have a son but she had, after all, very likely been the lover of Julia's husband [1.66]). Once again Byron's instincts are accurate. If it is close to inevitable for Donna Inez to be disturbed by her husband's indiscretions, it is less inevi-

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table that she would be as disturbed as she is by her son's rather gaudy initiation, and it is least inevitable that she would make such a point of omitting natural history from his education. Byron's aim in setting these figures up as her adversaries is to place her in line with those who, like Castlereagh, are immemorial subjects of invective because they are the most ancient enemies of satire. Canto i, we might argue, is a discreet phallic song that spends more time on invective than usual because there is so much to be said about Donna Inez, the agent of unvirility. There is also much to be said about her language, especially the fact that her speech is not always fully productive. In stanza 10 we are told that she is "famed I For every branch of every science known— I In every christian language ever named," though we are not told that she knows those languages well (1.10.2-3). Her Latin and Greek are miniscule, she knows French well enough to read some romances, and she has no great care for her native Spanish. She seems to know some English and Hebrew, though quite imperfectly. "Her favorite science was the mathematical" (1.12.1), not the linguistic, which probably explains why "her thoughts were theorems" (1.13.7). Yet her utterance has nothing of the precision and clarity of mathematical language: "Her serious sayings darken'd to sublimity" (1.12.4), "her conversation was obscure . . . her words a problem, I As if she deem'd that mystery would ennoble 'em" (1.13.6-8). It is not, however, as though she could not communicate: "Some women use their tongues—she look'd a lecture, I Each eye a sermon, and her brow a homily" (1.15.1-2). Her looks work like a language, a mode of moral speech that is clear in its import though the words themselves are problematic and obscure. Donna Inez is several steps up on Castlereagh, who cannot command even this kind of clarity. Still, there is something askew in her situation: the order of her thoughts does not come out in her words but in her looks. There is a flaw in the process by which thought becomes language because her thoughts find a clearer outlet in body language than in the language ofspeech.

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To find the full meaning of this flaw we need to follow her son's doings through the shipwreck, his arrival on Lambro's island, and his love affair with Haidee. The latter tried to speak to the castaway in her native Romaic, which he could not understand (2.162), but then she found that, "by sympathy," she could get eloquent answers from his soul: "And thus in every look she saw exprest I A world of words, and things at which she guess'd" (2.162.7-8). Eventually they come to occasional verbal utterance but by then they do not need it: though their speech Was broken words, they thought a language there,— And all the burning tongues the passions teach Found in one sigh the best interpreter Of nature's oracle—first love,—that all Which Eve has left her daughters since her fall. (2 189.3-8)7 It is not only the content that asks us to compare this with the nonverbal language of D o n n a Inez. There are also the striking r h y t h m i c and syntactic similarities of the key phrases "she look'd a lecture" and "they thought a language," similarities indicating that Byron associated the practices of the mother and the lovers at several levels of consciousness. But that association is balanced by a profound disparity. Donna Inez, like Castlereagh, compels our attention because of what she does; what she says is compulsively murky. D o n Juan and Haidee, though initially strangers to each other's language, communicate with remarkable clarity in areas where g r a m m a r comes naturally. It is no coincidence that those w h o have a language but can only speak m u d are also those w h o are allied against virility. Those w h o represent fecundity can work with a scattering of words and a n u m b e r of actions, and for them that is enough to make everything possible. It is one thing to have only a few clear words to w o r k with and to use them productively, and another to have many languages but few words that make much sense. Byron sets Inez and the lovers up as a complex set of foils, since they 7. Cf. 4.14.

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are and are not alike. They are all successful at nonverbal speech but in the matter of words, few or many, Inez is a maker of murk and the lovers are makers of life. Byron turns the lan­ guage of satire upon Donna Inez and Castlereagh because the darkness and sterility of their speech represent the state of their souls. Murky language is fair game for the satirist because it abides with and symbolizes all that satire abhors, all that stands over against free and flowing fecundity. We remember that Castlereagh's is the language of no-meaning. Now we see that it is also the language of no-making, fecundity's contrary. By the end of canto ι virility has won and lost. Juan is sent on travels to France and Italy "to mend his former morals, or get new" (1.191.3). Julia is sent to the convent and predicts, in a letter to Juan, that he will "proceed in beauty, and in pride, I Beloved and loving many" (1.196.1-2). We would feel secure with that prediction even if we knew nothing of the legend. But Juan is no Faust, although his grounding in earthly things has destroyed a woman. He has begun to work out his role but learns little more than social confidence for what he does. Julia, in her turn, is no Gretchen, because she first came into the poem as an instance of cant's potential for self-deceiving duplicity. She learns not only what she wants to have but what that wanting exacts from her kind. This is the beginning of the poem's ambivalence about virility, its awareness of the costs of fecundity. Yet there is never any ambivalence about fecundity's con­ trary. Byron wrote Julia's letter to replace some stanzas on Henry Brougham that he left out of the published version of canto 1. The stanzas on Brougham are so close to those on Donna Inez and Castlereagh, and the stanzas with Julia's letter are so clearly part of the matter of virility, that the two sets stand as inevitable contraries. It is ironic that the contrary to Julia's letter leads a shadow life outside of the accepted text; yet that life is as devoted to muck and the unproductive as are its counterparts earlier in the text. In fact, the full import of Julia's letter—its place in the antagonism of making and no-making that the canto was developing—comes out only when it is

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viewed in the context of what it replaced. In the note that was to accompany the Brougham stanzas Byron says that Brougham is "remarkable only for a fluency in which he has many rivals at the bar and in the Senate, and an eloquence in which he has several Superiors."8 This limited compliment cannot go very far, and for various reasons. For one, "he has tried every thing & succeeded in nothing, and he may perhaps finish as a Lawyer without practice, as he has already been occasionally an orator without an audience." Brougham, then, is fluent and ineffectual, eloquent but without successful issue. It is no surprise when the text of the rejected stanzas not only shows him to be a coward who refuses the challenge he provokes but also a speaker of fallow words. Brougham is "famous for always talking and neer fighting" (1.3) but the talking for which he is known is "less for the comprehension than the ear" (3.6). His utterance makes sounds that have more to say about their character as sounds than about what they are supposed to point to. They have that kind of incompleteness we saw in Donna Inez, whose thoughts do not show in her words but in her looks. Finally, Brougham is likened to Thersites, Parolles, and Bobadil, all blusterers of little substance and no result (4.68). His bravado is matched in effectiveness by his unmeaning language and his feckless ambition: he has "all the arrogance of endless power, I Without the Sense to keep it for an hour" (3.78). Brougham cannot make it in the world or with words. Donna Julia, his substitute in the text, makes it only too well in the world (when she gives up cant she gains a world of love and the few words it needs); and it is because she makes it too well that she cannot have what she makes for long. She is this poem's first victim of a law that had long dominated Byron's universe. Still, the exponent of virility has the final say in the canto, replacing the one whose words could not mean much or make anything happen. The contrast of Brougham and Julia is 8. McGann 5:85-88. Subsequent parenthetical text references are to stanza and line.

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a sardonic affirmation of the relations between language and potency brought forth in Don Juan. The aspiring statesman and the unfortunate donna have to be viewed together because together they include all possibilities. And so it goes in a degenerate age, one part of which is pushed by generative impulses, the other by an active incapacity to generate more than more of itself. Put another way, the most acceptable mode of generation in these times is the sort that produces unmaking, decreation. Castlereagh, Brougham, and Donna Inez are exponents of unremitting chaos because they oppose that eager making which takes the disparate pieces of a world and puts them together in virile order. (They are, in an important sense, the opposite of the ironist, who sees chaos not only as potentially productive but as one pole in a dialectic that always swings toward diligent making.) As makers and proponents of murk these figures foster only the darkness that Genesis made coeval with chaos. Thus, their language is degenerative because it takes part in—indeed seems to foster—that return to unclarity which is always threatening civilization, that decline from lucidity which accompanies the unmaking of all sorts of order, the radical thrust explored in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. The Byronic self, from Childe Harold onward, lived under the menace of dissolution, prey to those extraordinary energies within itself which seemed eager to undo all internal stability. The disorder threatened upon the world by the forces of unfertility was the macrocosmic version of the cataclysm that was always ready to happen within the self. By the time of Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment, the sense of threat Byron lived with came to include not only the self, which was always in danger, but civility and the order of the civilized. Castlereagh's dark stupidities were a menace to the best products of mind not only because they were among its worst products but because all that the mind does best is done in opposition to chaos. As Pope had seen in The Dunciad, this is more than a question of murky and meaningless language, though language, for both Pope and Byron, becomes a great instance of the mess that uncivility can make. In fact, the

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final lines of Pope's poem are a precis of Byron's understanding of the relations of language, fertility, and lucidity: Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And Universal Darkness buries All.9 "Thy uncreating word" is the best phrase we have ever had for the language of Brougham and Castlereagh and their kind. We shall have to speak of it as Dunce-language, the speech that comes with—in fact, helps to bring about—the apotheosis of unmaking. The dying of the light is the slippage of lucidity, the loss of that brightness and clarity which Dullness, the goddess of clouds and mists, finds so unnerving. At the beginning of the final book the poet asks "dread Chaos and eternal Night" for "one dim Ray of Light" with which to finish the satire (4.1— 2). Enough light is granted to get most of the work done, though the poet is frustrated at the end when his last request to the muse ("Relate, who first, who last resign'ed to rest" [4.621]) cannot be met because the goddess has finally come and light has gone. But things had begun to darken even earlier as the consciousness of the world grew drowsy. The triggering action that resigned the world to rest had been the goddess's "Yawn of extraordinary virtue" (see the Argument to book 4), signifying the end of alertness and lucidity, and the beginning of the slide into unmaking. All fires go out as darkness falls from the air. Clearly, we are what we speak. Being and doing are inseparable, and speaking is a form of doing. Our speech-acts are gestures of self, and that is as true of the language of Byronic satire as it is of Dunce-language. Indeed, we can define the language and self of the satirist by examining the language and self of the Dunce. We have come to see that each is necessarily what the 9. The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), book 4, lines 653-56. Subsequent parenthetical text references are to book and line.

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other is not, whatever they share of a love of duplicity. Duncelanguage is the speech of mists. The language of Byronic satire is designed to expose not only the existence of mists but—like radar poking through a fog—what is actually going on within them. That language is therefore the speech of lucidity as well as of fertility: satire is one of the modes lucidity takes when it becomes active and aggressive in its pursuit of its opposite. In Byron's world as in Blake's, making is, or should be, the business of brightness and not of the dark. It is also the business of alertness, that wariness which Voltaire and Byron had to have in their hunt for cant and its corollaries. Dullness's enervating yawn makes a universal sleep in which there can be no vigilance and consequently no place for satire. It follows that Dunce-language is soporific, specializing in slackness and the unknotting of those tensions which keep wariness going. The language of satire is therefore the speech of heightened consciousness, alert to all that its nemesis can do and undo. That applies particularly to its opponent's doublings, which it mirrors and mocks: the forked speech of irony comes from the practice of creative duplicity, the sort that exposes the double-dealings of cant and the chaos to which they lead. The ironist attacks duplicity by using it, by taking one mode of duplicity and turning it upon another. His purpose is to purify duplicity by ridding it of a nasty and sterile branch of itself. Put another way, satire needs a victim; thus, satirical/ironical language and satirical/ironical duplicity victimize other aspects of language and duplicity—all for the sake of ultimate vitality and brightness. The homology of being and doing in the satirist means that his selfhood and its agents—consciousness and the imagination—are doubledealers in the service of fecundity and lucidity. The homology in his contrary is a mirror image of his own, yawning its way toward chaos in the comfort of encroaching darkness. The words of the satirist are there to make that passage difficult. Such struggles are binary and permanent and, as all parties knew, they were struggles for more than the words of men. Yet it is through words and against them that the struggles take place. Language is the instrument with which satire attacks

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absurdity and viciousness. Thus, there is an obvious danger in Byron's habit of attacking cant and no-meaning. He is turning language upon itself, turning language loose so that it can consume a part of itself in the fires of satire—those same fires which go out, one by one, as darkness falls in The Dunciad. This is risky business indeed. The assault upon fraudulent and meaningless speech has to be kept under control so that it is not language itself that is besieged but only those duplicities which seek to conceal themselves, and that vacuity of soul which can never be hidden. We know that the satirist has been held in suspicion because of his powers.10 We can guess that some suspicion is also directed toward his use of quasi-duplicitous language: since he has to pretend fakery he risks sharing in the taint that real fakery deserves. Further, we can be certain that in turning language upon itself he is aware of the risk of denigrating its capacities for meaning, of harming the instrument as a whole while assaulting its most ignominious products. Yet Byron seemed confident that he could handle these hazards. He saw that the instrument was so flexible that it could be made to recoil upon part of itself, that there was an element within language that polices and cleanses it. His purpose was to purify the language of the tribe and he drew upon language itself to do so, using an aspect of language to redeem language. Satire seeks to redeem men as a group by punishing those men who corrupt the species. The language of satire does its part by exposing that kind of language which corrupts language. By attacking the false and the fatuous it purifies the words of the tribe. Through those purified words it cleanses and redeems the tribe itself. io. Elliott, The Power of Satire.

ΙΟ

Satire and the Making of Selves

C A N T O 9 of Don Juan begins with a cannily ordered interim, a space set aside for speculation between the scenes of the siege of Ismail and Juan's sojourn at Catherine's court. The interim begins with a French pun on Wellington's name ("Vilainton" [9.1.1]), and after mocking Wellington's material rewards ("Great men have always scorned great recompenses" [9.8.1]) it settles into seriousness with a look at the results of Waterloo: "You did great things; but not being great in mind, I Have left undone the greatest—and mankind" (9.10.7-8). Wellington's strength is not in the feats of the mind but in those which pit bodies against each other, that sort of competitive undoing which only death can win. The lines that follow focus, accord­ ingly, on our bony components, and then on ideas about death and what we can know of it. The lines play over a series of commonplaces until the narrator, picking up Juan's story again, returns to thinking about mind. Commenting on Voltaire's flattering letters to Catherine of Russia, he argues that he cannot so comfortably fawn, and that he must fight autocracy with the implements he has on hand: And I will war, at least in words (and—should My chance so happen—deeds) with all who war With Thought;—and of Thought's foes by far most rude, Tyrants and Sycophants have been and are. (9.24.1-4) Catherine and other autocrats—perhaps because, like Wel­ lington, they are not "great in mind"—are inimical to the acts of the intellect. Their antagonism clarifies not only the kind but the locale of the battle the narrator threatens. Since bodies cannot be freed until thoughts are, the wars he wants to wage ( 291 )

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are necessarily wars of the mind, what Blake calls in the Preface to Milton "Mental Fight." Words are the inevitable weapons for such wars and, unlike bodies, they do not have to wait for special circumstances to go into combat: the opportunities for making words into instruments of aggression are always at hand. In fact, we can begin with as simple an act as name-play, working with language so that the words that single us out become those which define us: the wicked pun on Wellington's name turns the hero of Waterloo into a figure with a villainous manner and wretched taste. With this interim passage at the beginning of canto 9, the tonality of the poem shifts from the rapid narrative of the slaughter at Ismail, in which the narrator rarely comes forward, to an action of more moderate pace that takes place on the stratum of the poem where the narrator spends most of his time. There he is master and alone, his aim a war of minds, his opposition the makers of those manacles forged to enshackle the mind. Byron's instinct about language as the materiel of war was an accurate one, as we can gather from the previous chapter: what he did with the language of cant is clearly an act of war. Yet the relations of language and Byronic satire that we broached in the previous chapter go even further. In The Power of Satire Robert C. Elliott describes how ancient bards, the forerunners of our satirists, were put at the head of armies going into battle, the bards' purpose being to fling words of insult and shame at enemies and thereby bring them down as effectively as if they were struck with spears.' The potency of language made its wielder a warrior to be honored and feared. The bard was both soldier and magician, in touch with special forces that emerged in language and could be used with unsettling efficiency to unmake one's enemies. We can use Elliott's examples to see still other 1. P. 15. See also Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire (Baltimore. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967) and especially Michael Seidel, Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Alvin Kernan's comments on Don Juan in The Plot of Satire, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), have much of importance to say on the rhythms of the poem and their relation to the cadences of existence.

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associations, to find that there is logic as well as irony in the connection of the bard as a master of unmaking with the rituals designed to promote the group's fertility. In order for the group to prosper, to take its fullest part in that vast making the earth offers, a figure must come forth to perform an unmaking, to drive out of the group whatever elements within it have evil— that is, unfertilizing—influence. If those elements are a threat to fertility they must be themselves unmakers, and therefore the satirist is, with yet more irony, doing to them what they do to the earth. All these gestures imply that there has to be a dismantling before a new putting-together, much as fields are burned to make them more productive. The satirist, then, is the one who gets things going by taking things apart. His unmaking must be distinguished from Castlereagh's no-making because of the potency the ironist has, a quality noticeably lacking in the suicidal eunuch. Yet the ironist's potency is of an especially curious sort, one that does precisely the opposite of what we expect potency to do. Satire, in this aspect, is a negating force, the demolishing step in a dialectic whose aim is the promotion of an ultimate vigor. When Byron goes after the enemies of thought, the Catherines, the Castlereaghs, the Wellingtons, his language is at the service of the mind, his opponents all those who fight the fertility of thought with the sterility of their desolate selves. Medwin quotes Byron as saying that his love of liberty came not only from "the tyranny of the Turks in Greece" but also "the mental debasement of the Papal States, (not to mention Ireland)."2 Those who debase the mind have to be met and mastered by the instruments of the mind. Still, there is more to the mind's instrumentality than language, however effective. The satirist's words are wielded in a particular way, based on a special mode of relationship with the opposition. That is to say, satire is, like the various ironies, a stance, a mode of engagement, a way of being in the world. Rhetorical irony, satire's chief tool, is duplicitous: what I say is not what I mean, what I seem is not what I am; I have a face 2. Don Juan, Steffan-Pratt ed., 4.196.

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that meets your own but that face is a fagade, the countenance of appearance. Romantic irony, however different in its operations from the rhetorical mode, is based on the same sort of divergence between seeming and being. We think the world is stable and systematic, conformable to the ideas of order with which we are most comfortable, and it is not. We think that our modes of narration are certain and sure, that once we get into them we are in them until the end, and we are not. The romantic ironist is a satirist because part of his business is to arraign our foolishness about all sorts of order—cosmic, personal, and literary. He exposes our smugness in order to reform us: behind the actions of a Tieck or a Byron, behind the ridicule to which their readers are always subject, are standards of value that the reader must come to understand if he is to see the world with all the lucidity it demands. Satire is classically defined as a mode of censure whose purpose is not only to ridicule absurdity but to show the way to a better order. To return to our earlier terms, it unmakes for the sake of another and better making. It plays with duplicities by going double with values, holding up to our eyes those it wishes to destroy but keeping within our vision, though at a distance, those for whose sake the destruction is to be accomplished. We have to see both at once, just as we have to see that every ironist is part pretender. It is only with such doubleness of stance that satire and the various ironies can accomplish their business. The stance of satire is as elemental a part of its arsenal as its more apparent tools. Don Juan has its special version of such duplicities, a doubleness of intent based, in great part, on the nature of the world it depicts. It is a poem of love and war, and if it weren't so funny we'd weep. The first half of the surviving poem, up to the interim on Wellington in canto 9, takes us through several love affairs that are terribly costly to the women involved, a wreck that dismantles a ship and most of the lives in it, and a battle whose bloodiness is detailed with a bitter compassion matched only in Goya. Taken from that point of view the world Don Juan depicts has to be seen as fiercely and pervasively destructive, not only of innocents like Haidee, and harmless hypocrites

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like Julia, but the fatuous and the evil as well. Some of those left behind, like Lambro, might as well be dead for all the value of what they have left. The world unmakes those it has made with an intensity and alacrity—in fact, with a certainty—that Byron has been talking about since the early Harold. The unfocused melodrama of Harold's initial stanzas and the incisive demolition of the Lakers at the beginning of Don Juan are the poles of a spectrum of tonality that takes in all of Byron's major work. But the variety is strung on an obsessive singleness of seeing, a vision of the world's radical discordance and of the fearsome and pervasive threat that discordance poses to all the symmetries of the self. Thus, there is an inevitability in Byron's turn to an inclusive mode of satire in his last and longest work. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, whatever its amusing moments, was narrow and witty in the way of a smart aleck. Don Juan has another sort of wit, well-stocked and comprehensive in scope, its variousness the response to a varied poetic development. It is a massive act of self-reflexiveness, an end that is both comment and culmination. And if Juan is inclusive of all that the canon has tested, it also enfolds all those sights to which the testing has been a response. Don Juan holds so much because so much has been seen. Its inclusiveness is both an acknowledgment and a record. The poem's mode of acting is also a response to the nature of things. The vast unmaking that the world so skillfully accomplished could be countered by a mode of attack, a product of the mind's creativity, that was itself an image of unmaking. That is, the world was mocked through the parroting of its modes. Countering the destructive ironies of the world with the creative ironies of satire was itself an ironic gesture. The world and its despots would never get the point, but it was eminently satisfying to the satirist. Yet the ironies are by no means exhausted by these observations. It appears that the mirroring of elemental disorder may even be satisfying to those it depicts, so prone are they to being dupes and gulls. Swift's Preface to The Battle of the Books makes that point

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definitively in a way that is valid for all satirists: "Satyr," he says, "is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body's Face but their own; which is the chief Reason for that kind Reception it meets in the World, and that so very few are offended with it."3 But then Swift goes on to ponder other alternatives: But if it should happen otherwise, the Danger is not so great; and, I have learned from long Experience, never to apprehend Mischief from those Understandings, I have been able to provoke; For, Anger and Fury, though they add Strength to the Sinews of the Body, yet are found to relax those of the Mind, and to render all its Efforts feeble and impotent. If the subject comes to see that the image in the glass is an implicating one, that the glass is indeed a mirror, the result is an unstringing of the sinews of his mind, rendering the fool mindless if he has not been so already. Swift's mirror is not only a reflection of unmaking but an agent of it, a contributor to the chaos it depicts. Chaos, it is clear, will get through to us somehow, even if we think we are only watching it happen. It is too pervasive to be finally avoided. Swift's sense of our lives in the world as a vast dismantling was as intense and obsessive as Byron's, as devious in its implication of the reader, less concerned with the reader as a participant in the making of the text than with his position as an ignorant and helpless participant in his own demolition. Swift sees in us an unwitting complicity, an acceding to chaos that is our most foolish act of all. That is the point of his poems about The Progress of Beauty (1719), The Lady's Dressing Room (1730), and A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed (1731). In the latter, Corinna, the nymph "for whom no Shepherd sighs in vain," finishes her evening in 3. The Writings ofJonathan Swift, ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William S. Piper (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 375 I have found especially useful Edward W. Rosenheim Jr.'s Swift and the Satirist's Art, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). Subsequent parenthetical text references are to page number.

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Covent Garden, climbs the four stories to her bower, and p r o ceeds methodically to take herself apart: Then, seated on a three-legg'd Chair, Takes off her artificial Hair. Now, picking out a Crystal Eye, She wipes it clean, and lays it by. Her Eye-Brows from a Mouse's Hyde, Stuck on with Art on either Side, Pulls off with Care, and first displays 'em, Then in a Play-Book smoothly lays 'em. Now dextrously her Plumpers draws, That serve to fill her hollow Jaws. Untwists a Wire; and from her Gums A set of Teeth completely comes. Pulls out the Rags contriv'd to prop Her flabby Dugs and down they drop. Proceeding on, the lovely Goddess Unlaces next her Steel-Rib'd Bodice; Which by the Operator's Skill, Press down the Lumps, the Hollows fill, Up goes her Hand, and off she slips The Bolsters that supply her Hips.

(538-39)

And o n she goes to check out the current state of her running sores. In the earlier Progress of Beauty Swift shows the opposite practice at work. Diana leaves her bed, her first business a makingup, not a taking-apart; and what she makes up is not only her face but the regress the night has brought to her entire person. In "four important h o u r s " she becomes "the Wonder of her Sex," but the time put into that progress cannot counter the m o m e n t u m of the venereal disease that will rot her nose and eventually unmake the rest of her. Corinna and Diana are m e t aphors for what the world does to us, and what they do to themselves is finally a foolish refusal of lucidity. Satire and its attendant ironies do what these n y m p h s will never do—practice lucidity by separating seeming from being and true progress

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from the sort that is only a form of repair. The readers of satire have the chance to practice the same lucidity but Swift suggests that they are unlikely to do so, and will probably share in the undoing that does the nymphs in. The nymphs will never acknowledge the rot that appears in these mirroring poems, and even if they do acknowledge it The Battle of the Books tells us that their minds will unstring at the thought, and they will be unmade even further. The implicating reflection is also part of our experience of Gulliver's Travels. At the end the reader is drawn in when he is shown that the Yahoos are unmistakably human; Gulliver's moment of recognition is our own as well. The problem is in the degree of the reader's implication, the extent to which Gulliver's reaction is an inevitable one, a proper one, and therefore one in which the reader ought to share. To put it in terms of the satirist's stance, are we to agree that Gulliver's reactions are thoroughly understandable, that, however extreme they turn out to be, they are no more extreme in kind than the horror he sees? This would mean, of course, that we give up the duplicity by which we are distanced from the object of satire and therefore become one with it. Conversely, are we to keep our distance from Gulliver but at the same time acknowledge (as The Battle of the Books says we must) that there, with no sort of grace, goes one like us? In either case we see that Gulliver is one of our own. The question is precisely, how much? The conclusion of the Travels is difficult because it is patently ambivalent, the protagonist a pompous fool who has had the severest sort of shock a man can have. His bestiality has been made evident to him by more dignified beasts than those he sees in what turns out to be the most unsettling of mirrors. Gulliver's unease in the presence of such vicious flesh has in it none of the amusement the reader of satire has when he first sees the object of satire and enjoys the joke. But Gulliver and the reader of satire have precisely the same reaction when the shock of implication comes across and the image in the glass is seen to be one's own. As the reader suffers the unstringing of his mind, so does Gulliver come apart and become the disordered recluse of the final

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pages. Swift begins the demolition of Gulliver in Houyhnhnm country and—as though to emphasize the full range of its meaning—he begins it in an action that makes the mirroring literal: "When I happened to behold the Reflection of my own Form inn a Lake or fountain, I turned away my Face in Horror and detestation of my self; and could better endure the Sight of a common Yahoo than of my own Person" (243). In that reflecting upon himself which his master forces him to make, Gulliver goes through an act of recoil. As the image is turned upon him, so does he turn upon himself: the result of the reflection is a revulsion, and the result of the drawing back is a hatred of himself and all that is like him, a hatred that ends by undoing his remaining stability. Of course Gulliver refuses to acknowledge his full relationship to the Yahoos, arguing that his time with the Houyhnhnms has given him some distinction among his own kind: "I may, without Breach of Modesty, pretend to some Superiority [over Mankind], from the Advantages I received by conversing so long among the most accomplished Houyhnhnms" (257). That is, he acknowledges the likeness but rejects a total identification. As it turns out, the stance taken by Gulliver in relation to the Yahoos is a precise mirroring of one of the stances we could take toward him, that is, acknowledging his similarity to ourselves but refusing to admit that we are exactly alike. Indeed, this blend of nearness and distance is the stance most readers seem to take in pondering Gulliver. And in fact it is a trap: the sameness of these activities, our repetition in our lives of the stance Gulliver takes in his, leads to the destruction of that distance, that sense of difference, by which we protect ourselves from the contamination of the object of the satire. The sameness of activities leads us to see, in an inevitable connection, a sameness of substance: Gulliver is a Yahoo, whatever his attempts to draw himself aside in smug superiority; we are Gullivers, whatever our attempts to separate ourselves from him. We are as smug as he is, and also as essentially bestial. Our noses are forced up to the mirror, and we see in it not only the Yahoos but also that figure—sad and ultimately foolish—who

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will not yield to the truth. Eventually we see, in Swift's ensnaring stereoscope, that the face in there is a fusion of that fool's and our own. The book ends with the reader's entrapment, with the abolition of that distance which safeguards our precious dignity. But it also ends with a more violent event, the unmaking of Lemuel Gulliver. However much the implicating reflection unstrings the sinews of our minds, nothing happens to us that is as devastating as what happens to Gulliver. Swift may want us to see Gulliver as a horrible example, as one who went so far in the act of recoil that he could never bring himself back and find the necessary perspective. Alternatively, Swift may be so sickened at what he sees that he ends up with an image of the only position we can possibly take in the face of that ultimate horror. In either case, and whatever the object of Swift's satire, Gulliver is destroyed. However we interpret the cruxes of the ending, the Travels depict the unraveling of a selfhood that has always been vulnerable and is finally, thoroughly dismantled. Throughout the Travels Gulliver is, for the most part, a passive figure, more acted upon than acting. At the end he begins to act but he does so with an act of recoil, a product of the potency of hate, and it leads to nothing but his own unmaking. Gulliver is the first and most thorough victim of this satire, and whether he is victimized by himself or by the nature of things—most likely it is a combination of both—the book ends with its hero in shambles and with nowhere to go but madness. Gulliver, it is clear, sees his narrative as defining a process of understanding, that is, a process through which he has come to order and possess a disturbing and dangerous world. At the end of the process he finds the world so perfectly manageable and understandable that he feels he can make a moral document, an exemplum, out of what he has come to know. There is a sense in which Gulliver is perfectly correct about the nature of his actions, though hardly in the sense he imagines. Gulliver's gestures do in fact reveal possession but he is the object, not the agent. He does not possess the world but is himself possessed by it, as subordinate and subject to it as he imagines it to be to

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him. He is like Voltaire's Pangloss who, at the end ofCandide, persists in asserting the efficacy of a clearly impossible system; but he is unlike Pangloss because the latter ends with a modicum of control over experience, whatever his victimization by the world. Pangloss continues to putter away at his theories, though he has lost the tip of his nose, an eye, and an ear; but at the same time he works away at the plot of land his group has come to at the end of their separate, costly travels. Gulliver's probable madness finds its outlet in the masterful babbling with which he concludes the story of his life, his private unmaking. Voltaire's admiration for Swift was considerable, but he put an ending to his own babbler's travels that effectively turns the ending of Gulliver's Travels on its head, imaging an unmaking that is not a conclusion but a stage on the way to one. Voltaire spoke of Swift as a "Rabelais d'Angleterre," a "Rabelais sans fatras," that is, less cluttered, more orderly, leading his hero to an inexorable ending. 4 What Voltaire shows, however, is that such endings need not be inevitable, that the acts by which we seek to possess the world need not be as self-consuming as those with which Gulliver concludes his memoirs. What they do need to be, surely, is the contrary of those acts through which the world consumes us. Voltaire concludes Canaide with a bill of particulars, drawing up the tally of that feast at which the world has devoured (sometimes literally) his characters. The old woman does the addition for the assembled crowd and suggests what may be the worst fate of all: Je voudrais savoir lequel est le pire, ou d'etre violee cent fois par des pirates negres, d'avoir une fesse coupee, de passer par les baguettes chez les Bulgares, d'etre fouette et pendu dans un auto-da-fe, d'etre 4. Voltaire to Nicolas Claude Thienot, 2 February 1727, in Correspondence and Related Documents vol. 85 of The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneve: Institut et Musee Voltaire; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 314. There are useful comments in Sybil Goulding, Swift en France (Pans: Champion, 1924) See also Ahmad Gunny, Voltaire and English Literature: A Study ofEnglish Literary Influence on Voltaire, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, no. 177 (The Voltaire Foundation. At the Taylor Institute, Oxford, 1977).

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disseque, de ramer en galere, d'eprouver enfin toutes les miseres par lesquelles nous avons tous passe, ou bien de rester ici a ne rien faire?— C'est une grande question, dit Candide.s Boredom has not been their problem up to that point. For example, Candide's expulsion from the paradise of Thunderten-tronckh is paralleled almost immediately by his escape from the Bulgar army, where he was flayed alive. Within several more pages he is befriended by a compassionate Anabaptist, hears the first bill of horrid particulars from a gruesome beggar who turns out to be Pangloss, and watches the friendly Anabaptist drown. It is not only that the world does so much to them but that it does what it does in rapid sequence. Voltaire sets up a narrative pace whose purpose is to give us a great deal of the world's doings in as few pages as possible, pausing only for a mocking comment on optimism or for another tally that adds even more to the density of events. The world embodied in Candide is always at a stretch, taut, clear, and compact, driven by a self-generating energy whose main business seems to be the unmaking of that world's inhabitants. The only pause is for the interlude at Eldorado, Voltaire's version of the Happy Valley, but this fine place is clearly not enough for Candide. He returns to the world beyond the walls of the valley and that narrative which echoes the pace of the world's consuming energies. Eventually he links up with the other battered survivors (his own suffering was not nearly at a level with theirs), and they face the possibility of a tedium in which they have nothing to do but reminisce. A talk with a Turkish dervish shows them a way out of boredom and, more significantly, out of submission to the energies of chaos. The way out is not simply the cultivating of a garden, though that is the primary figure for it. Cunegonde, in her final ugli5. Voltaire: Romans et Contes, ed. Henri Benac (Paris: Gamier, i960), 219. "I would like to know what is worse, to be violated a hundred times by negro pirates, to run the gauntlet among the Bulgarians, to be whipped and hung in an auto-da-fe, to be dissected, to row in a slave-ship, finally to experience all the miseries through which we have passed, or else to stay here doing nothing." "That's a good question, said Candide."

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ness, becomes an excellent pastry cook. Paquette embroiders, the old woman does the laundry, brother Giroflee (now an honest man) turns into a fine carpenter. Each, that is, does what he can, countering tedium with productive acts, each according to his kind and inclination. In part their work is a pitting of physical acts against those of thought: "Travailler sans raisonner, dit Martin; c'est le seul moyen de rendre la vie supportable." It is not that thought has brought them to this pass but, rather, that it has not prevented this pass and offers nothing like an effective antidote. Their work is also a protest against scope, which has proven to be either dangerous or foolishly ineffectual: their thoughts were as broad in coverage as the travels that brought them to this pass, and the decision to make what they can out of their limited plot is a rejection of the temptations of extension. At the end Pangloss starts a speech on the perils of greatness, beginning with a list that goes from Eglon, King of the Moabites, through a sampling of universal history that ends with the Emperor Henry IV. Candide cuts him off with a curt reminder of the group's immediate needs; or, more precisely, the group's need to be local and immediate. Most of all, though, their final actions assert the importance of Act itself, especially of a making that counters the vast and obsessive unmaking the world has visited upon them. Out in the world they were the feckless and passive recipients of events; here they make things happen, however limited their scope. Gulliver, too, ended with acts, but his were the destructive sort that were essentially an acquiescence to chaos, a cooperation with it that led only to the imitation of its unmaking. Gulliver's vision of our physical nature drives him to take his selfhood apart; but the acts on Candide's farm take the world's physicality and generate something out of it. In fact, we are told that their little plot turns out to be remarkably productive. Voltaire's book is radically dialectical, though the proportions of its progressive movements are far from achieving parity. The rhythms of experience that inform the book lead to a turn only at the very end, indeed, only in the final paragraphs. Yet as tiny as that turn is, it is sufficient to show a dialectic at work, to bring forth a

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miniscule but certain making to counter the immense, degenerative unmaking performed by the incessant energies of the world. Thus, whatever position we take in relation to Swift, it is clear that Swift and Voltaire have differing relations to the dialectic of satire. We have seen that the first step in the satirist's work is the establishment of disorder, making chaos in order to challenge it. That is, he undoes so as to redo. Voltaire attacks the privileging of a way of accepting the world that is so deep into its self-made darkness that it cannot see the full contours of disaster. At the end of Candide, with his own variation of the satirist's dialectic, Voltaire has Pangloss continue to mutter his absurdities but mutter them while he is working hard to produce candied citron and pistachios. Pangloss is rendered harmless and helpful at once, neutralized by a productive garden. Yet there is more to the rhythms of the text than the neutralization of Pangloss, for the rhythms of Voltaire's satire are directed not only toward the foolishness of Pangloss but toward the viciousness of the world that unmade him. Pangloss is doubly a victim, not only the object of satire but of the world's hunger for demolition. Voltaire is doubly a performer, victimizing Pangloss but also saving him and, in so doing, rebutting the ferociousness of the world. Candide's garden is not only a remedy for the nuttiness of Pangloss; it is also a nose-thumbing at the chaos of experience. This satirist is duplicitous because he works on two planes simultaneously: in a single gesture he completes the rhythms of the satirical mode and counters the rhythms of the actual world. Candide's garden, it is clear, is a garden of the self, not quite the paradisiacal enclosure of tradition but, rather, something closer to the city that Faust seeks to build at the end of his days, the embattled paradise whose dikes would always need to be remade. Ludwig Kahn has argued that Voltaire prefigures Goethe in his emphasis upon Act, upon the necessity for the individual to do what he can in a world whose pressures seem

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6

to grow as it grows increasingly secularized. But there is more even than this, because the acts in the garden and those which set out to build a city are ultimately acts of consciousness that save consciousness not only from the world but from itself. The acts in Candide's garden are designed, in part, to put speculation aside and safely away from the center of their business. The acts that seek to make Faust's city divert those energies of consciousness which have consumed Faust partly and so many others wholly, turning the energies into forces both protective and potentially productive. In fact, the acts of consciousness that end Candide and Faust are directed, finally if not immediately, toward the same antagonist: Mephisto introduced himself to Faust as part of the chaos that surrounds us all, and Faust's terminal acts not only challenge chaos but try to lead to the cheating of this arch chaos-maker. At one level of its working, Goethe's text has some of the major properties of satire: not only does it expose the foolishness of Mephisto, showing him to be, after all, a devilish gull, showing him up not only to ridicule him but to point the way to a better order (Mephisto "muss als Teufel schaffen"); it also works out a series of gestures that, like those in Candide, imitate the destructiveness of the world but counter it with a creative turn. The garden of the self at the end of Candide is matched in task and efficacy by the envisioned city of the self at the end of Faust. Both texts offer the record of redemptive acts of consciousness, which can save itself from itself and the world because it has become humanized. In Voltaire's and Goethe's terms that means a consciousness that recognizes itself as both limited and creative, creative because it is limited, because it cannot do all that it wants to do but what it can do it does very well. There is yet another way to put this matter of the acts of the humanized consciousness. Such a consciousness knows what it knows only after an initial stage of flagrant unknowing: the 6. "Voltaire's Candide and the Problem of Secularization," PMLA 67 (1952): 886-88.

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unwise innocence of Candide is in its way as ignorant of the nature of things as is the jaded and unstrung selfhood of the Faust who picks up the vial of poison. Candide falls out of the paradise of Thunder-ten-tronckh into a postlapsarian consciousness that finds its place in another kind of garden. Faust is already fallen in much the same way that the early Childe Harold is fallen, that is, he is drained by "the fullness of satiety." If either Faust or Harold was ever innocent there are no marks of it left: we see only a Faust who learnedly bewails his ignorance, a Harold who knows only that all is not enough. But if Goethe's text is postlapsarian in the way that Childe Harold is, the full rhythm of Faust brings its hero to a kind of Higher Innocence, the sort that only the knowing can have, while the rhythms of Childe Harold take its hero to little more than more of himself as he was at the beginning. It is only in the Byronic canon as a whole that we see what Goethe shows in the fullness of Faust, the development of that postlapsarian understanding through which consciousness learns what it needs to put itself back together in an endlessly repeated act. What Goethe put into the fullness of a text that took most of his lifetime, Byron put into a canon whose landmarks are works like Childe Harold, Manfred, and Don Juan. George Ridenour has demonstrated that Byron's "Epic Satire" is pervaded by the imagery of the Fall, that it is a poem abut the unparadising of innocence.7 But one can go much further than this, not only in the imagery of Don Juan but in the way the poem works and in the relation oijuan to the canon as a whole. IfDon Juan is about the Fall, it is also, and equally, about Recovery. It is the climax to an entire canon about the Fall, a canon whose major acts are the struggles of a fallen consciousness, first to find out what has happened to it, then, gradually, to find a way out that is also a way up, a way up that is finally a (tentative) reassembling. If Don Juan is, as Hazlitt called it, "a poem written about itself," it is also about that special mode of making which is most appropriate for a fallen consciousness, those acts of self-making which save con7. The Style ofDonJuan (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1969).

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sciousness from itself. The poem performs acts very like those in Candide and Faust, but it performs them in a particular way, the way of a satirist who, as we have seen through much of this book, is also a master romantic ironist. More precisely, what we see in Don Juan is the romantic ironist as performer. A voice comes to us out of the text, telling us the doings of Don Juan and, on occasion, its own doings, absorbing itself in events like the siege of Ismail, showing itself being absorbed and even overcome by its memory of the ladies of Cadiz or its pride in its own lustrous performance. The speaker is both maestro and victim, master manipulator as well as martyr. At one point his voice comes to us out of the fiction to tell us that in fact there may not be any more fiction, that this poem into which he has drawn us may simply stop at that point. At the end of canto 8, the description of the siege of Ismail now over, the voice turns away from the narrative and toward us, claiming that it has fulfilled a great deal of its contract with the reader: Reader! I have kept my word,—at least so far As the first Canto promised. You have now Had sketches of love, tempest, travel, war— All very accurate, you must allow, And Epic, if plain truth should prove no bar.

(8.138.1-5)

But that contract does not guarantee the poem's continuance: "What further hath befallen or may befall I The Hero of this grand poetic riddle, I I bye and bye may tell you, if at all" (8.139.2-4; my italics). Of course the voice's hint that it might shut up shop is a threat to itself, because terminating the text would mean terminating itself. In any case its threat is not carried out, perhaps because it realizes what the gesture would do to itself, perhaps because the temptation to pun on Wellington's name is already at work and is too strong to resist. (Canto 9 begins right after this, with the evocation of "Vilainton.") There may be yet another reason, one that reaches deep into the canon, for fulfilling the threat would be an act of self-consumption, and he has learned how to mock such recoil but wants to

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take it no further than that. Elsewhere, of course, he is not nearly so drastic or menacing: the thought of the ladies of Cadiz so unnerves him that he has to give in to his lusting memory and go over—in spirit—their ankles and eyes. If we take the narrative sequence as the regulatory movement in the text we can see precisely where this performer does his work, and what the work consists of. The act with which he is ostensibly chiefly involved, the one epic tradition assigns him, is the telling of the story. All his other acts are at variance with that one, mainly because when he performs them he either slips out of the narrative sequence or falls out of it, depending on whether he is, at the moment, maestro or martyr. In either case there is an undoing of sequence, an untuning of the harmonious relations of teller and tale, an unmaking that may be chatty or violent, caustic or sentimental; but that unmaking is never terminal, whatever the maestro's threats. There is always a contrary gesture, and its phrasings are always alike: "But to our tale"; "Well, to renew"; "But to the narrative"; '"Tis time we should return to plain narration." If the narrative sequence is the regulatory movement in the text, the rhythm we hang the story on, there are ancillary rhythms that depart from the main one and return to it; they have to be seen as a package including a falling that is always dangerous but is always countered, however tentatively, by an ascent, a reinstatement, a return to the sequence of the narrative, a restoration of the order of the self. In Candide and Faust, respectively, the garden and the city are, as we have seen, places where Act takes place. Put another way, they are not only locales of self-making but symbols of that fundamental gesture. It is not simply that the self needs a place where it is remade but that the place has to be such as to show the making in action, opening out a garden, beginning some work that will end with walling in a city. Byron does not locate his poem's acts of restoration in gardens or cities. The only place comparable to a garden in Byron's text is Lambro's island, the locale of the idyll of Juan and Haidee, the place where they love and she dies. The cities touched on significantly in Don Juan are—aside from the plundered Ismail—

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Seville, Petersburg, and London, and they are the cause of satire, not restoration. Indeed, Byron does not locate the site of self-making in any palpable place at all but, instead, on that plane of the text where the narrator functions. There, the speaker's selfhood wanders as widely as that of Childe Harold but to far more purpose and with far more effectiveness. If his selfhood falls into temporary disrepair, carrying with it the formerly sequential narrative, the narrator shakes himself back into shape (like Manfred, he insists that he needs no help from outside) and renews the master rhythms of the text. In so doing he shows that putting himself back into order means putting the narrative back into order. As one falls, so does the other; as one is made, so is the other. My responsibility for my story and my responsibility for my selfhood are the same responsibility. In the difficult and dangerous world of Don Juan the only positive certainty sustained throughout is the relation of self and text, that making which is a making of both. The same is true of Candide and Faust. The narrator's acts of renewal are the equivalent of cultivating a garden or building a city because they are all redemptive gestures. The plane of the text where the narrator functions is his equivalent of those postlapsarian places where the fallen consciousness, now finally lucid, seeks to remake itself and its world, at once and in the same gesture. There are other significant equivalences between Don Juan and a traditional satire like Candide. The ancillary rhythms through which the romantic ironist loses and recovers narrative sequence are a precise counterpart to the rhythms of classical satire, its undoing for the sake of an eventual redoing. When the romantic ironist is also a satirist, his text is like an echoing hall in which patterns repeat themselves endlessly, in every dimension and at every point. Yet there is a difference between the treatment of those patterns in Don Juan and in a work like Candide, a difference that has to do with the special practices of the romantic ironist and also with Byron's sense of the repetitiveness of uncertainty. Candide shows its battered group of survivors having come to a stopping place, a place that never ceases to be active but is a terminus, not only of their travels but of the

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text. Though the cultivating is clearly to continue, its placement shows that it is there to round out and complete a statement. That is the place where they will stand; or, rather, bend to their work. But the practices of the romantic ironist permit no rhythms that result in a terminus. The rhythms of romantic irony, its perpetuation of the process of demolition and renewal, its sense that all fixities are suspect, that there is no place where one can stand and insist that from here we will go no further—those rhythms mean that the tumbling seen in the text is not single but repetitive, that we do not see a move to a terminus but an incessant closing and reopening of form. The mode of working of romantic irony made it as fit an instrument for the business of satire as was that traditional rhetorical irony with which satire is always associated. But in romantic irony the rhythm of unmaking and making is not rendered just once but, instead, is repeatedly echoed, seen again and again as the romantic ironist shows his world and his selfhood perpetually in threat of dissolution, perpetually drawn back to the old order. Both satire and romantic irony work as they do because of their awareness of the fallen state of things. For the classical satirist the world is seen as fallen but also with the potential for being restored. For the romantic ironist the world is not simply fallen but in a perpetual state of falling, the condition of a gerund rather than a past participle. That gerundive status gives a particular turn to satire when it is linked with romantic irony, adding a special dimension to its traditional modes. In that special dimension the essential instability of things comes forward with peculiar emphasis, not only because breakup and renewal are regular and repeated events but because they are shown happening both in the story the text reports and in the structure of the text itself. Chaos is not only in our lives but in our works; or, rather, as we have seen Byron imply, our lives and our works are so thoroughly wedded that chaos cannot enter the one without entering the other. Yet, as we should expect, the ironist offers a contrary to that reading, one that does not negate the reading but brings it into balance. The world's repeated instability is matched by that potency in consciousness

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which remakes the whole system, if only for a while. The romantic ironist brings to satire not only counterpart rhythms but a profound awareness of that kind of strength and lucidity which only the recovered fallen consciousness can have. In its emphasis upon the redemptive capacities of consciousness romantic irony counters the darkness of the world of the dunces with an ongoing instance of how the mind ought to be working in the face of the chaos that surrounds us all. In August 1819, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine published a review of the first two cantos of Don Juan that said that the poem was "triumphantly expressive of the greatness of [Byron's] genius" and also that it was basically immoral. 8 Byron reacted to that and similar reviews with hurt anger, complaining, in a letter to John Murray, that the reviews were "hyperbolical in their praise—and diabolical in their abuse," saying specifically of the Blackwood's review that "it is overdone and defeats itself—what would he say to the grossness without passion—and the misanthropy without feeling of Gulliver's travels?" (LJ 6:257). The analogy is illuminating. Byron, it is clear, read the Travels as a defeat of the mind, with Gulliver as the loser in Swift's war with humanity. It is also clear that Byron saw Don Juan as going in a contrary direction, arguing for the mind and humanity and doing so with considerable feeling. Some seven months earlier, Byron had written to Murray to tell him that the second canto οι Juan was on its way. In the same letter he responded to the suggestions of Murray and Foscolo that he write a great work, most likely a traditional epic: "Is Childe Harold nothing? you have so many 'divine' poems, is it nothing to have written a Human one? without any of your worn out machinery" (LJ 6:105). Κ Childe Harold is a human poem, Don Juan is even more of one, not only because it is an epic that puts away all machinery and puts the plot into the shape of our lives but also, and primarily, because it is by and about a humanized consciousness. That consciousness is humanized in the way that Voltaire's and Goethe's are, that is, 8. See Rutherford, ed., Byron: The Critical Heritage, 166-73.

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it knows all that it cannot do but is devoted to a kind of work that it can do particularly well. It is also humanized in a way that looks forward to future needs. At the end of The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard proposes as the ideal form what he calls the irony of the mastered moment. That sort of irony finds equilibrium in its poems by controlling and mastering "those spirits [of opposition] which obstinately seek to storm forth" in the work. As Kierkegaard's whole text shows, such mastery is the result of a Schlegelian Selbstbeschrdnkung: "The poet must himself," Kierkegaard says, "be master over irony."9 The fallen and humanized consciousness whose epic is Don Juan shows a related sort of mastery, mastering, for the moment, moments of opposition but, finally and most significantly, mastering itself and its own past. That consciousness is an answer not only to the misanthropy of Gulliver's Travels but to its own earlier conditions of being. It is a correction and a culmination, a rebuttal and a means of survival. If its past is past meditating, there is a sense in which its future needs no thought because conditions will never change and it has learned, once and for all, how to meet them. There is no New Jerusalem to be reached or even pondered, no heaven of fourfold dimensions, no ultimate pastoral valley. There is only the perpetual making and remaking of self and text, and the knowledge that one has learned how to do that very well. In the world of perennial dissolution described in Byron's extraordinary epic, those acts and that knowledge are the mind's sufficient good. 9. Trans. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 336.

SELECT B I B L I O G R A P H Y

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A B R A M S , Meyer. " T h e Deconstructive Angel." Critical Inquiry, 3 (1977): 425-38· " H o w to d o Things w i t h Texts." Partisan Review, 46 (1970): 566-88. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. N e w York: W. W. N o r t o n , 1958. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. N e w York: W. W. N o r t o n , 1971. "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne B o o t h . " Critical Inquiry 2 (1976): 447-64. "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric." In From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick Pottle, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold B l o o m , 527-60. N e w York: O x f o r d University Press, 1965. A L L E M A N , Beda. Ironie una Dichtung. 2d ed. Neske: Pfullingen, 1956. B E H L E R , Ernst. Klassische Ironie, romantische Ironie, tragische Ironie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972. B O U R G E O I S , Rene. L'ironie romantique: spectacle et jeu de Mme. de Stael a Gerard de Nerval. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires, 1974. D E M A N , Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 2d ed., rev., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. E L L I O T T , Robert C. The Power of Satire. Princeton: Princeton U n i versity Press, i960. G A R B E R , Frederick. The Autonomy of the Self from Richardson to Huysmans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Review of Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, by Meyer A b r a m s . Modern Language Quarterly, 34 (1973): 206-13. H A R T M A N , Geoffrey. Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today. N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. H O L E N S T E I N , Elmar. Roman Jakobson's Approach to Language: Phe( 313 )

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nomenological Structuralism. Translated by Catherine Schelbert and Tarcisius Schelbert. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. IMMERWAHR, Raymond. "Romantic Irony and Romantic Ara­ besque Prior to Romanticism." German Quarterly 42 (1969): 66585. "The Subjectivity or Objectivity of Friedrich Schlegel's Poetic Irony." Germanic Review, 26 (1951): 173-91. JAKOBSON, Roman. "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances." In Selected Writings 2: Word and Language. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. K A H N , Ludwig. "Voltaire's Candide and the Problem of Seculariza­ tion." PMLA 67 (1952): 886-88. KIERKEGAARD, Soren. The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates. Translated by Lee M. Capel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. KROEBER, Karl. Romantic Narrative Art. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, i960. LIPKING, Lawrence, ed. High Romantic Argument: Essays for Μ. H. Abrams. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. M C F A R L A N D , Thomas. Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Words­ worth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. M E I L O R , Ann K. English Romantic Irony. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. MILLER, J. Hillis. Review of Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, by Meyer Abrams. Diacritics 2 (1972): 6-13. M U E C K E , D.C. The Compass of Irony. London: Methuen, 1969. O ' H A R A , Daniel T. Tragic Knowledge: Yeats's Autobiography and Hermeneutics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. POHLHEIM, Karl. Die Arabeske: Ansichten und Ideen aus F. Schlegels Poetik. Munich: Schoeningh, 1966. RAJ AN, Tilottama. Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. SALVESEN, Christopher. Review of Natural Supernaturalism: Tradi­ tion and Revolution in Romantic Literature, by Meyer Abrams. Times Literary Supplement, 26 February 1983, 231. SIMPSON, David. Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry. Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1979.

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A. Greenberg and William S. Piper. N e w York: W. W. N o r t o n , 1973S Z O N D I , Peter. "Friedrich Schlegel und die romantische Ironie." Euphorion 48 (1954): 397-411. T H O R S L E V , Peter. "Incest as R o m a n t i c Symbol." Comparative Liter­ ature Studies, 2 (1965): 41-58. " T h e R o m a n t i c M i n d is its o w n Place." Comparative Literature 15 (1963): 250-68. V O L T A I R E . The Complete Works of Voltaire. Vol. 85, Correspondence and Related Documents. Edited by T h e o d o r e Besterman. Geneva: Institut et M u s e e Voltaire; T o r o n t o : University of T o r o n t o Press, 1968. Romans et contes. Edited by H e n r i Benac. Paris: Gamier, i960. W E L L E K , Rene. " T h e C o n c e p t of R o m a n t i c i s m in^Literary H i s ­ tory." In Concepts of Criticism edited by Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., 128-98. ( N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. W E S S E L L , Leonard P., Jr. Karl Marx, Romantic Irony, and the Prole­ tariat. B a t o n Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

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and Philosophy of Byron's Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. D E A L M E I D A , H e r m i o n e . Byron and Joyce Through Homer: Don Juan and Ulysses. N e w York: C o l u m b i a University Press, 1981.

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