‘Like Skulls at Memphian Banquets’: The Mouth and Mortality in Byron’s Don Juan

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between appetite, mortality, and laughter in Lord Byron’s Don Juan . While the vegetarian Percy Bysshe Shelley argued that human appetites could be directed away from cruelty and death, Byron presents appetite as both naturally carnivorous and inextricably linked to mortality. Furthermore, by examining the role of laughter in Don Juan ’s Canto II and Canto IX, I argue that the Byronic laugh is also mimetic of Death’s triumphant appetite: a response to the inescapable link between human appetite and Death as well as an imitation of Death’s role as the laughing archdevourer of life. However, in the latter part of my article, I argue that in the last canto of Don Juan , Byron tentatively theorizes a metaphysical appetite that may exist beyond Death and laughter. In so doing, Byron posits a utopian vision of appetite – a vision that, interrupted by the poet’s own death, remains unresolved.