Invasion and Retreat: Gothic Representations of the Oriental Other in Byron’s The Giaour

Abstract

YIN YUAN Invasion and Retreat: Gothic Representations ofthe Oriental Other in Byron’s The Giaour T he giaour is byron’s sustained and deeply sensitive meditation on the politics of oriental representation. To this extent, the poem’s concerns with the (largely textualized) East manifest not only at the level of content, but also register as a distinct problem of form. Thus the conspicu­ ous performativity of The Giaour, which flaunts its formal idiosyncrasies through a self-deconstructive narrative logic that suggests that its author cares not just about the story he is telling, but more significantly, the man­ ner in which he tells it. Yet, where treatments of the poem’s Romantic orientalism have ventured beyond the basic materialist framework to take up issues of form, they have tended to reiterate established aesthetic read­ ings simply by relocating them within the context of imperialism.1 Eric i. For instance, Nigel Leask reads The Giaours multiply-framed narrative, eloquently ex­ plicated byjerome McGann and Robert Gleckner, as “the formal equivalent ofcultural deg­ radation which is the poem’s theme.” Following McGann and Marjorie Levinson, Leask traces this self-conscious narrative framing to a similar process of redaction in Samuel Rog­ ers’s The Voyage of Columbus, but goes on to also unpack the thematic connections between the two poems in order to highlight the Giaour’s ambivalent heroism. See Leask, British Ro­ mantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 30, 33, 13. My paper owes a considerable debt to Leask’s insightful and comprehen­ sive formulation ofByron’s anxieties toward his own “ ‘poetical policy’ oforientalism,” but I hope to extend the implications of Leask’s argument by examining at greater length the for­ mal complexities of The Giaour, many ofwhich have been passed over by critics of Roman­ tic Orientalism. For critical studies that have focused on The Giaours fragment form and multiple narrators as articulations primarily of Byron’s aesthetic, psychological, or otherwise existential concerns, see Robert Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 91—138; Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron’s Poetic Devel­ opment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 141—64; and David Seed, “‘Disjointed Fragments’: Concealment and Revelation in The Giaour,” The ByronJournal 18 (1990): 14— 27. Daniel P. Watkins and Maijorie Levinson investigate the poem’s political anxieties, but read its formal strategies as a symbolic abstraction or repression ofthose anxieties. See Watkins, “Social Relations in Byron’s The Giaour,” ELH 52, no. 4 (1985): 873—92; and Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina SiR, 54 (Spring 2015) 3 4 YIN YUAN Meyer’s deconstructive approach is a notable exception, with its thorough­ going attention to the way the text’s formal logic—its disruptions and lacunae—“problematizes the production of ideology in narrative.” For Meyer, however, these disruptions are ultimately “unwitting” textual ef­ fects that elude and “refuse the desire of its assumed author”: “despite the arguably deconstructive propensities of Byron’s text, The Giaour remains a fundamentally hegemonic narrative, centered on the extension of Western cultural superiority over the East in an agonistic struggle of dominance contested and (re)confirmed in the dramatic battle of Giaour and Pascha.”2 Meyer’s cynicism stems from his reading of the colonialist position through Edward Said’s framework in Orientalism.'1 Thus, Byron’s The Giaour is a “text[ ] of Romantic Orientalism [that] must therefore be read as part of the cultural apparatus whereby the Orient is contained and rep­ resented by ideological frameworks that serve both to incite confronta­ tion and to seal off contestation within the larger structures of imperial his­ tory. ”4 Developments in the study of Romantic imperialism within the last two decades, however, have complicated Said’s excessively rigid binary structure, highlighting the insecurities and ambivalences that haunt the dis­ courses of empire.3 Byron’s anxieties about his own oriental productions have been critically and compellingly documented by Nigel Leask. I would like to develop Leask’s insights by considering at greater length the formal strategies of The Giaour, a poem about which Leask does not say...