Byron's Revisited Haunts

Abstract

1 BEFORE HE LEFT ENGLAND IN A FLURRY OF SCANDAL, AND BEFORE HE created that most disillusioned of expatriates, Childe Harold, Lord Byron was irresistibly drawn to self-exile. In particular he paid close attention to example of Shakespeare's misanthropic exile, Timon of Athens. Not only did Byron fashion Harold in mold of Timon, arranging for his character to escape, like disillusioned Athenian, from heartless parasites of present cheer (Canto I, line 75);(1) three years before splashy publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Cantos I & II (1812), young Lord Byron was looking in mirror and seeing Timon. Weary of love, of life, devour'd with spleen, / I rest a perfect Timon, not nineteen,(2) Byron wrote in Childish Recollections (1806)--though, perhaps to his credit, he later canceled line. Thanks to tumultuous events of his life, Byron, like Timon, indeed became an archetype of all towering persons whose stature forces a severance from their community.(3) But years before his actual departure from England, Byron's verse followed Shakespeare's king in discovering, within process of self-exile, displaced relics of past. Timon, digging for roots in woods, instead unearths gold, which he hails ironically as visible god, / That solder'st close impossibilities / mak'st them kiss (Timon of Athens IV.iii.391-93). As an improbable reminder of power and corruption he fled from in Athens, Timon's new gold is a glitteringly paradoxical discovery: a disruptive presence, at once a return of past and a measure of its displacement. As such, it acts as a ghostly incarnation of Timon's a revenant as defined by Jacques Derrida in his study of `hauntology': There is something disappeared, departed in apparition itself as reapparition of departed.(4) Byron's verse likewise embraces departure only to be haunted by ghosts, who recall past even as they embody its disruption. At similarly tender age of twenty, in another poem entitled To a Lady, on being asked my reasons for quitting England in spring, Byron set double movement of banishment--its charged, liminal, past-and-present interchange--into fundamental terms of Genesis: When man expell'd from Eden's bowers, / A moment linger'd near gate, / Each scene recall'd vanish'd hours....(5) Such lingering would actually last much longer than a minute for Byron; one only has to recall gate-shadowed action of Cain (1821), taking place in Land without Paradise, to realize constancy of this setting in his canon--after thirteen years still giving rise to melancholy yearnings o'er past, (III.i.36) still prompting spectral walk-ons. Cain's lingering by the inhibited walls (I.i.80) of Eden attracts Lucifer, slippery Master of Spirits, (I.i.98) whose proud alienation (I dwell apart; but I am great [I.i.308]) evokes a long line of scowling and once wildly popular Byronic heroes. Such figures, whose impact had faded to cliche long before Cain, nonetheless prove surprisingly trenchant haunters of Byron's later verse, liable at any time to come back from world of spirits. Selim, doomed hero of The Bride of Abydos (1813), specifically waits to reemerge on shoreline of his lover's cypress grove: And there by night, reclin'd, `tis said, / Is seen a ghastly turban'd head-- / hence extended by billow, / Tis named `Pirate-phantom's pillow'! (II.725-28). Even before he was cast aside by his author, left to haunt Byron's later verse as relic of an abandoned mode, Byronic hero had been more phantom than man. In series of narratives often referred to as Byron's Eastern Tales--best-sellers dashed off during his London Years of Fame (1812-1816)--this breed of hero lives and dies amid unsettling recollections of what has vanished; expelled by force or temperament from his homeland, he moves within a purgatory of specters. …