Paper: part 2. April 18, 2007
Posted by jophine in : Criticism, Dramatic Plays, Hero , comments closedTwo beers and several hours of hard labor later…
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ii. Heroic evidence in Manfred, The Giaour, and “Prometheusâ€
         The six years between the publications of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage cantos two and three were without a doubt the height of Byron’s popularity (McCarthy *****). In this intervening time, Byron refined his vision of the hero through poetry that spanned all of his travels. Though the poems written during this time period are starkly different in subject matter, they connect thematically through the trials of their heroes. Preceding a group of poems called The Turkish Tales, The Giaour contrasts Muslim Greece and Christian Venice. Nestled deep in the Swiss Alps, Manfred confronts supernatural and powerful spirits. “Prometheus†gives a Romantic voice to an ancient myth. Each of these poems has a hero who nearly destroys himself because of history, and the success or failure of the hero is contingent upon his reaction to the reconciliation of his past with his present. Using poems such as The Giaour, “Prometheus,†and Manfred, Byron sharpened his sense of the heroic to create his autobiographical reconciliation in the finale of Childe Harold.
         Byron summarizes the dissatisfaction of all of his heroes in the first monologue of Manfred. Though Manfred “live[s], and bear[s] / The aspect and the form of breathing men†(lines 7-8), he has somehow transcended humanity. Manfred’s words are the direct ancestor of Lucifer’s final speech; he proclaims his insomnia due to “a continuance of enduring thought†(line 4), and that his eyes “but close / To look within†(lines 6-7), presumably at an inner world that he cannot purge from his mind. Like Cain, Manfred draws from the same image of the trees in Eden in lines 10-12; though he knows much, the truth he knows brings only depression. Later in this passage, he lists his life’s accomplishments, only to dismiss them one by one: “But [they] avail[’d] not†(lines 17, 19, 21). Manfred has enormous earthly power: his sorcery can call spirits who can grant him “subjects, sovereignty, the power o’er earth†(Act I, lines 140-1) and he can visit the palace of Arimanes, based on the Principle of Darkness in Zoroastrianism (Byron 1038). However, Manfred has only one desire to ask of these powerful forces: “Forgetfulness†(Act I, line 279).
         The Giaour also desires forgetfulness. Because his “memory now is but the tomb / Of joys long dead,†he feels as if it would be “better to have died with those [joys] / Than bear a life of lingering woes†(lines 1000-3). At the beginning of each work, both the Giaour and Manfred are balancing memory with a poorly-maintained life. This balanced life appears most tangibly in the present suffering of Prometheus, who is chained to a rock with a vulture to eat his innards—knowing that he will live, but with a constant possibility of dying. Nevertheless, Byron makes the titan’s circumstances match his other heroes: Prometheus bears a “suffocating sense of woe, / Which speaks but in its loneliness†(lines 10-11), which directly echoes the line from The Giaour. The similar language in the three poems – with its almost oppressive emphasis on present suffering – shows a landscape of dissatisfaction that the Byronic hero is currently enduring, and has endured for an indefinite amount of time.
         Some traumatic event—usually involving a woman—is most often the source of the hero’s anguish. Cain has a personal history familiar to Western culture, but in The Giaour, Byron uses local eastern legends unfamiliar to his readership and explains the trope of the revenge tale in his footnotes (Byron *****). Several characters reveal the plot: the Giaour[1] fell in mutual love with Leila, a woman in the harem of the Sultan Hassan. As punishment, the sultan kills her, and the Giaour avenges her death by cutting Hassan’s head off. The Giaour describes the revenge in his first monologue: “My wrath is wreaked, the deed is done, / And now I go—but go alone†(lines 686-7), but the Giaour’s loneliness is not limited to the loss of Leila. Later, he claims to have “nothing more to love or hate, / No more with hope or pride elate†(lines 988-9). Frederick Garber, in his essay on doubling in Byronic heroism claims that “the Giaour is stuck with Hassan, carrying his enemy around with him though they have long since literally unlinked†(236). The Giaour therefore mourns not only the loss of his love, but he also loses an evenly matched enemy. Robert Gleckner, whose work tracks the editorial changes in The Giaour, shows that Byron continuously changed the manuscript to reinforce the heroic images of the Giaour and Hassan “as fallen, finite men, betrayed by their own passions, [who] destroy rather than create or sustain peace and love and beauty†(394). The Giaour shows a man entirely consumed by his personal history, who as a result has nothing left to feel for the world.
         Manfred’s personal history is much the same, but unlike the Giaour, his supernatural power allows him to attempt to communicate with his lost love Astarte. Before this, Manfred has only revealed that her death was his fault, “Not with my hand, but heart—which broke her heart— / It gazed on mine, and withered†(Act II, lines 118-119). Though much of his speech in his conversation with the witch is choppy, this passage is especially illustrative of the intentional ellipsis in Byron’s play. He never reveals fully the circumstances of Astarte’s death; his incomplete thoughts belie an incomplete understanding of the one human he feels close to. The pain of Manfred’s memory therefore must partially stem from a confused motivation—he seeks to change the past only when he is out of it, and does not recognize that humans are embedded in the present (Act II, lines 172-3). Even when he calls Astarte to the human plane, he asks only for mortality; he wants to have lived a life so happy that he will crave death, or as he says, “a future like the past†(Act II, line 130). This entrenchment in the past compels him to ask questions of her that a spirit cannot or will not answer; he does not merely want Astarte to speak to him, but to speak to him lovingly as she once did (Act II, line 155). By speaking to a shade, Manfred engages in a fruitless dialogue with history, not recognizing that he cannot change the past to resemble the present. This scene echoes book six of The Aeneid in which Aeneas calls out to Dido: “In vain he thus attempts her mind to move / With tears, and prayers, and late-repenting love†(http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext95/anide10.txt). Both heroes for that moment have forgotten that their respective loves are dead and cannot grant them mortal absolution. Unlike the Giaour, who loves Leila in both her past and present forms, Manfred is unable to see Astarte as anything but the woman he loved—he wants her spirit to love him as before, entirely missing that it was that very love which killed her. Manfred sees the past with detriment to the present.
         In these intermediary works, Byron is experimenting with what kinds of history an individual can absorb, and he struggles to balance his efforts with his own historical concerns. Before Astarte entered his life, Manfred was obsessed with the geological history of the Earth. Alone on the cliffs of the Jungfrau, Manfred comments on the beauty of the Alps and the planet in general, then expresses concern over the man’s ecological abuse, saying, “But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we / Half dust, half deity… make / a conflict of its elements (Act I, scene 2, lines 39-42). Manfred here regrets a long history of manipulating nature along with other “sovereigns,†by which Byron may mean either sorcerers or world leaders in general. Here, Byron introduces a paradox. Manfred connects himself to geological history, not only reveling in the Alps as they are today, but also by imagining a scene in which nature has conquered Rome (Act III, scene 4), an image that he returns to in Canto Four of Childe Harold. He addresses the moon, and claims that it “fill’d up, / As ‘twere, anew, the gaps of centuries; / Leaving that beautiful which still was so†(lines 34-6). And though he claims to be a misanthrope entirely throughout the play, he also acknowledges the greatness of past rulers, “the dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule / Our spirits from their urns†(lines 40-1). On the other hand, Manfred himself is not faultless in this great historical movement: in act I, he demonstrates a great destructive power, when he casts a “tyrant-spell, / Which had its birthplace in… / The burning wreck of a demolished world†(Act I, scene 1, lines 43-5). Byron portrays two absorbed-historical conflicts: the tyrannical power of man and the time-altering power of nature. These two forces, until the end of the play, confuse Manfred and make him indecisive about his powers and his actions.
         At first glance, The Giaour and “Prometheus†have no equivalent absorbed history—in both poems, the hero himself is entirely consumed by his own past. However, Byron as poet was unable to abandon his own historical concerns and embedded them within his texts. The fisherman narrator of The Giaour extols Leila’s virtues at length between lines 473 -518. Gleckner, conscious of the changes between editions, notes that Byron inserts an “opening hymn to Greece†in the initial description of Leila (395), and based on the opening and the fisherman’s description suggests, “Byron carefully identities pristine Greece with an unstained Leila… But she is also present-day Greece, still lovely by a slave to Hassan, and the Giaour thus becomes an emancipator†(396). Both Jerome McGann and Hadley Mozer, examining Byron’s desire for a hero, have concluded that he conflates himself with the savior of Greece: “Five times, written in the margins of his [Byron’s] enthusiastic scrawl, the ambitious poet has answered [who will save Greece] with a single word: ‘Byron’†(Mozer 41). The convincing arguments of these various scholars suggest that the Giaour’s metaphorical historical concerns—the idea of the Western world somehow revenging an enslaved Greece—were Byron’s actual concerns; thus, Byron’s absorbed history of Greece becomes the Giaour’s.
         With “Prometheus,†Byron more clearly encourages humans to see its titular hero as “a symbol and a sign†(line 45) and through him absorb knowledge of the future. Like Prometheus, man is “part divine†(line 47), which echoes the “half deity, half dust†description from Manfred. Through the character Prometheus, Byron means to show that man too is chained to a rock, and can see “his wretchedness, and his resistance, / And his sad unallied existence†(lines 51-2). Similar apocalyptic images appear in the poems “Darkness†and The Vision of Judgment, and Byron alludes to the possibility of doom in human life. His preoccupation with a dark future, much like his obsession with the past glory of Greece, becomes a history that man must absorb and confront.
         Though Prometheus is unquestionably one of Byron’s heroes, he serves as an example of a failed hero, “a mighty lesson†(line 44) on how to live life. Here, Byron presents a possible solution to the troubles of the hero who can see and understand his fate and must live with it: death (line 59). But is death truly a solution for the Byronic hero? Though Cain and Prometheus are both cursed with life, Prometheus’s eternity is a “wretched gift†(line 24) from which he cannot escape, whereas Cain leaves of his own volition; Prometheus compares readily to Lucifer, two non-human heroes who are doomed to suffer helplessly. With The Giaour and Manfred however, Byron studies the ways in which the hero can die, and by contrast what manner of death makes a heroic success.
         Byron puts emphasis on the attempt at reconciliation by giving the narrative voice to The Giaour. The arrival of the Giaour, the affair, the murder and revenge—the plot of the poem—occupies 674 lines. Byron devotes almost as much attention to the Giaour’s reaction to his past, which takes the form of a deathbed confession to a monk in Venice. While Byron had written a dialogue between the monk and the Giaour, in his notes he says, “The monk’s sermon is omitted. It seems to have so little effect upon the patient, that it could have no hopes from the reader†(Byron 246). Byron suggests by his omission that the Giaour is, at this point, incapable of change. Stagnant and dying, the Giaour lives constantly in the past, and he tells the monk his feelings for Leila, “’Tis all too late—thou wert—thou art / The cherished madness of my heart!†(lines 1190-91).The mid-sentence correction from past to present evinces the Giaour’s inability to move beyond past events into his present circumstances. Here, Byron creates another poetic ellipsis; the reader cannot know how much time has passed since the events leading to Hassan’s murder. This gap in time does not show how the Giaour mourns, only the extent: until the day, the minute that he dies. Garber adds, “It is[sic] as though he cannot bear the thought of the vacancy that would occur if he were to thoroughly blot out the past†(230) – the hero fears that by not loving Leila, his former love for her will vanish. This is not to say that the Giaour needs to forget Leila to succeed; he is simply unable to live simultaneously with her memory and without her person.
         Unlike the Giaour, Manfred is able to enact a reconciliation. After his failed dialogue with history in the form of Astarte’s ghost, Manfred resolves to die. In addition to this resolution, however, he decides that his death will be controlled neither by heaven in the form of the abbot who comes to save him nor the spirit who tries to claim him for hell. To the demon, he declares,
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine:
…………………………………………………………………
I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey—
But was my own destroyer, and will be
my own hereafter. (lines 127-8, 138-140)
The beginning of Manfred’s speech echoes the “inner world†of Cain, and Manfred recognizes fully at this point that the “outer worldâ€â€”heaven, hell, and earth—have failed him. However, he has decided to bear the weight of memory alone, acknowledges it, and decides that his self-torment has been sufficient. The psychological agony he endured before was simply the pain of memory; after talking to Astarte herself and gaining no absolution, Manfred knows that if there is any forgiveness, it can only come from himself. Instead of forgiveness, however, he resolves to punish. Though the demon tries to convince Manfred that his life made him wretched, within the same line Manfred cries “Thou false fiend, thou liest!†(line 109). Manfred’s success, then, is in his reconciliation of his life of stagnation with his history of destruction and choosing death as punishment.
         By examining the works written between episodes of Childe Harold, the fruition of Byron’s hero becomes plain. From Prometheus to Manfred, he moves towards a message of hope, that it is possible for the Byronic hero to accept past trauma, even if the acceptance results in a self-imposed death sentence. Throughout this time period, Byron crafted a model that he could illustrate in clear terms with Cain. Before that point, however, he had to examine his own life with the same model. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron applies his experience with crafting a heroic message to himself and his life, and the hope that he discovers by the time he writes Manfred shines in the later cantos.
[1] Non-Muslim.