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Paper: part 2. April 18, 2007

Posted by jophine in : Criticism, Dramatic Plays, Hero , comments closed

Two beers and several hours of hard labor later…

*****

ii. Heroic evidence in Manfred, The Giaour, and “Prometheus”

            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 world”—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.

Paper: part 1. April 15, 2007

Posted by jophine in : Dramatic Plays, Hero , comments closed

*****

i. Cain as model

            Cain, published in 1921, is the penultimate work in this study, but it is an apt place to begin an examination of history. When the play begins, the world that Cain knows has had few events, and Byron focuses on the more dramatic of these: the creation of Earth and man, the loss of Paradise, and the introduction and threat of death. Cain initially constructs his identity based on this history, but his dissatisfaction with his present circumstance of laboring for his food prompts a curiosity when Lucifer offers him knowledge. “Let me but / be taught in the mystery of my being,” Cain entreats (Act I, lines 322-3), which begins the conflict of every Byronic hero: the acquisition and understanding of a greater history beyond the self and the ability (or inability) to reconcile history with the present. Because the history of man at this point is so short, Byron has a rare opportunity to clarify his philosophy about different types of experience, and thus Cain serves as a concise model for the Byronic hero’s attempt at historical reconciliation. 

            First, the Byronic hero must be dissatisfied. This discontent appears in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as wanderlust, in Manfred as unwanted memory. At the beginning of the play, Cain is troubled by the threat of Death, which no one has yet experienced. In Act I, he questions first the need to labor for life (lines 64-5), then the desire for life at all (lines 110-115). Because of the intrusion of death, he begins to doubt God’s goodness: “I judge but by the fruits – and they are bitter – / Which I must feed on for a fault not mine” (lines 78-9). Though initially self-concerned, Cain begins to see death and its unfairness in his surroundings, particularly in young creatures such as his son (Act III, lines 22-5), the sacrificial lamb (Act III, line 266), and all future lambs and kids “which fed on milk, to be destroy’d in blood” (Act III, 293). Byron portrays a Cain who does not seek God’s favor, but struggles to understand why he should worship a God who creates life which leads only to death. Though this argument is not original to literature or theology, Cain’s encounter with Lucifer leads to a sophisticated consideration of personal experience versus external history.

            From dissatisfaction comes the quest for resolution. Unable or unwilling to worship like the rest of his family, Cain asks a series of questions until, as if prompted, Lucifer appears to answer them. Byron uses “Lucifer,” light-bringer, instead of Satan to emphasize the knowledge that the fallen angel bears. In one of their first exchanges, Lucifer tells Cain not of the world of man, but the worlds, plural, which God has created (Act I, line 149). Cain replies, “Thou speak’st to me of things which long have swum / In visions through my thought: I never could / Reconcile what I saw with what I heard” (Act I, lines 167-9). Even before Lucifer’s involvement in the heroic struggle, the story of the loss of Paradise is troublesome to Cain. The history that his parents have told him has already become a focus of obsession; Cain relates to Lucifer how he stood by the gates of an Eden that he never experienced (Act I, line 172). This “heard” or absorbed history (as this paper will call it) is the focus of the Byronic hero’s conflict. Though Cain’s absorbed history is limited at first to the beauty and loss of Eden, Lucifer exposes the hero to a greater past: not the history of the world, but the history of all worlds.

            Byron devotes Act II of the play to an explorative journey, in which Lucifer frames his discussion of history with physical settings meant to give Cain perspective on his own earthly existence. Act II, scene 1 is set in “The Abyss of Space.” Perhaps Byron’s Lucifer is not anticipating space-travel, but in this scene he makes plain his role as a bringer of knowledge: “I will show / What thou dar’st not deny,– the history / Of past – and present, and of future worlds” (lines *****). Byron intentionally sets his discussion of the future in space, far from the fertile ground of Paradise—indeed, Cain has to admit that he can’t identify the one spot of Eden on the blue circle of Earth (lines *****). Here, Lucifer reveals the future history of Cain and man, but Cain, still tortured by the unfairness of death, says,

Here let me die: for to give birth to those

Who can but suffer many years, and die—

Methinks it is merely propagating Death,

And multiplying murder. (lines *****)

The immortality of the soul is no comfort to Cain, who does not want to be a progenitor of generations of men whose only destiny is to die. Even the knowledge of the immortal soul does not ease his teleological despair (“immortal despite of me”, lines *****), and he seeks more knowledge from being nearer to death. This discussion of the future and fertility becomes a part of Cain’s absorbed history, which he considers in the final lines of the poem; he recognizes the irony that he has prevented Abel from fulfilling this destiny of propagation (Act III, lines *****). The case of Abel’s death shows clearly that Cain is unable to reconcile his outrage at flesh-sacrifice and his knowledge that Abel would have populated the earth—if only God had not willed his murder.

            Act II, scene 2 opens in Hades, where Lucifer gives Cain one final piece of history to absorb: the pre-Adamite past. Before this scene, Cain does not know that such a past exists. In Hell, Lucifer shows Cain the phantom of an ocean and “its inhabitants / The past Leviathans” (lines *****), and phantoms of earthly mammoths “ten-fold / in magnitude and terror” (lines *****). Byron populates a pre-human world with enormous beasts, but it is evident that he was influenced by the discoveries of his time. Georges Cuvier, a naturalist and paleontologist whom Byron refers to in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, had in the two decades previous to Cain’s publication identified the pterodactyl, the plesiosaur, and a giant mammoth (McCarthy 432). Additionally, Cuvier had proposed that reptiles, not mammals, had been the dominant fauna (Rudwick 158). Byron, who was clearly familiar with Cuvier’s work, seems to allude to this theory in the earlier scene; Cain asks if the seemingly infinite other worlds have serpents, and Lucifer replies, “Must no reptiles / Breathe, save the erect ones?” (lines *****). To Cain, the existence of these pre-human beasts is evidence that God is willing to destroy a world full of creations, including men. This history becomes a part of his chronicle of the world, and because – according to Lucifer – he is destined to populate Earth, he can see it only as a destiny for himself and his progeny.

            The history that Cain absorbs on his journey adds to the history he has been told about the fall of man. He does not experience one as a metaphor for the other, but has both chronologies within him, simultaneously witnessing the death of the dinosaurs and the death of men. The result is internal turmoil, and Cain tells his brother that these sights “have made [him] / Unfit for mortal converse” (Act III, lines *****). Though more knowledgeable, Cain recognizes now that he is less pious than Abel, and his direct address to God is his attempt to reconcile the history he has learned and the perceived unfairness of his present circumstances. Here, he gives God one last chance to be good in his eyes: God must choose between the innocent lamb and fruits of the earth which have not “suffered in limb or life” (Act III, line *****). History – more specifically, God’s history of killing the great lizards – has become a crucial component of Cain’s character, which influences his behavior and his sense of morality so much that he kills his own brother.

            Cain is ideal as a model because it shows the direct and extreme influence of history on the hero’s life. He is so consumed by history that he seeks to engage with it, as Byron himself did in the Greek wars of independence. However, life does not occur in the past, and eventually, the Byronic hero must attempt to reconcile his knowledge of history with his present actions. In the final scene of the play, Cain suffers the consequences of the murder and desires death (Act III, line 482). His punishment, however, is life—the angel marks his forehead, but Cain himself must accept and continue with life in order to enact a full reconciliation. Cain does not expect or desire the forgiveness of God, but instead makes his reconciliation with the earth, which he is doomed to wander: “Oh, earth! Oh, earth! / For all the fruits thou hast render’d to me, I / Give thee back this.—Now for the wilderness” (Act III, lines 542-4). This short declaration captures the spirit of the Byronic hero; when Byron’s hero commits himself to the wild, he succeeds—not because he has somehow defeated life, but because he proceeds to endure the weights of life and memory simultaneously.

            Cain’s success has a counterpoint in the failure of the play’s other hero, Lucifer. At the end of their journey, Lucifer gives one of the English language’s most potent speeches on freedom of thought, in which he concludes, “Think and endure,— and form an inner world / In your own bosom—where the outward fails” (Act II, lines 463-6). Cain has experienced outrage over what he perceives as an unjust God; his rebellion and the murder of Abel are a result of his thought, but the endurance springs from Adah’s love and the realization that he must live. Lucifer too shares his history: the fall of worlds and of Paradise, the conflict with God, and the ceaseless obsession with the past. Also like Cain, Lucifer is doomed to live, and he devotes his life not only to truth, but using truth to malign others against God “world by world, / And star by star, and universe by universe” (Act II, lines 435-441) without end. However, Lucifer is unaware that God is no longer battling him in the same, physical way as He did during the war in heaven. Instead, Lucifer has doomed himself to this immortality of hatred, not because the war with God will not find resolution, but because the war consumes him. As Jerome McGann said in an interview, the successful hero must end in a state of “resting without rest” (**Interview**); where Lucifer is a slave to his battle, Cain finds peace in his free will and resolution to endure.

            Cain portrays the fullness of Byron’s heroic vision. From a stagnant and uncomfortable beginning, the hero reflects upon his own history and an external history that he assimilates into his personality. His personal history is tragic, in part a cause of his present dissatisfaction. His absorbed history is universal, beyond the reaches of his experience, but grand enough that he wishes to engage with it. His struggle with these histories and with his present circumstance is the plot of the poem and Byron’s main concern: how do people live with trauma, either their own or the world’s? The rest of this paper examines the evolution of Byron’s philosophy up until the poetic moment in Cain.

*****

So that’s what I’ve got so far. 4.19.2007: edited, and clearer now.

Milton, Byron, and Intertextuality. March 23, 2007

Posted by jophine in : Childe Harold, Dramatic Plays, Hilarious Things, Miscellany , comments closed

Just got back from a third of the Milton Read-a-thon, having wimped out after only four hours. I had to put something down, though:


I have not loved the world, nor the world me;

I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bow’d


To its idolatries a patient knee,–


nor coin’d my cheek to smiles,– nor cried aloud


In worship of an echo; in the crowd


They could not deem me one of such; I stood


Among them, but not of them; in a shroud


Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,


Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued. (CHP, Canto III, stanza 113).

 

Versus:

This knows my punisher; therefore as farr
From granting hee, as I from begging peace:
All hope excluded thus, behold in stead
Of us out-cast, exil’d, his new delight,
Mankind created, and for him this World.
So farewel Hope, and with Hope farewel Fear,
Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least
Divided Empire with Heav’ns King I hold
By thee, and more then half perhaps will reigne;
As Man ere long, and this new World shall know. (Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 103-113).

This is so much cooler in my head. I have to reread Cain. Oh man, why didn’t I read Milton earlier?