'Reading Byron' Conference, King's College London, 22 February 2006

Abstract

It is axiomatic that self-consciousness is a distinguishing feature of Byron's greatest poetry, particularly his later work. At the close of Canto I of Don Juan, the author playfully envisages the fortunes of his poetic offspring: 'Go, little book, from this my solitude! I cast thee on the waters, go thy ways! And if, as I believe, thy vein be good, The world will find thee after many days.' When Southey's read, and Wordsworth understood, I can't help putting in my claim to praise - The four first rhymes are Southey's every line: For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine. (222) Despite their gleefully glib comic tone, these final lines suggest Byron's fascinated, self-conscious and serious engagement with the process of reading. The mockery of parental concern over the book's public reception hides Byron's acute awareness of his audience. His barbed assessment of contemporary culture's doyens bespeaks a revolted fascination with British reading habits, while the wry iteration of Southey's lines reflects a sophisticated awareness of the text as a material object, open to manipulation and subversion. In his finest poetry, Byron reveals himself as a consummate reader. Despite its innocuous name, then, a conference on 'Reading Byron' was a judicious choice. The title's promise to examine the essence of what reading means in relation to Byron was kept in highly impressive fashion. Proceedings got off to an auspicious start with Bernard Beatty's keynote lecture, 'Reading Byron'. Focusing primarily on unjust stigmatisations of The Corsair as an inferior, populist work, Beatty eagerly defended the virtues of 'tosh' against a tradition of denigrating 'easy art' deriving from the difficult aesthetic of Modernism in the 1920s. He made a convincing case for the marriage of lightness of touch and sophistication of artistry in this work, examining the interplay between Byron's easy, conversational tone and oratorical declamation. This tension merges familiarity with an estranging distance in a way analogous to The Corsair's recurrent references to reading strangers' faces. In Beatty's analysis, this was enacted at the level of composition, with Byron most creative when writing in 'inscribed', pre-existent narratives. Beatty provided an illuminating comparison of The Corsair's structure to an opera, noting its careful mixture of lightness of touch and sophisticated artistry as well as a plot in which perspectives and identities are modified when the conclusion is reached. The first session began with Gavin Hopps talking about 'Running On and Standing Still: Byron's Unheard Melodies'. Opening with a consideration of Rachel Whiteread's sculptures of empty architectural spaces, Hopps's fascinating paper examined Byron's metaphysical and poetic use of the negative and the vacant. Discussing The Prisoner of Chillon and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, as well as Cain and 'Darkness', Hopps described how Byron's fascination with the metaphysical issue of negative space influences his awareness of the material vacancy around his stanzas. Hopps showed how, through his use of caesura and enjambment respectively, the sense of Byron's verse is arrested and allowed to spill over into negative textual space. He deftly noted the way in which, in the Alpine stanzas of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the lines often break at the copula of verbs of being, producing a sense of life beyond mortal existence. The Byron Hopps depicted was a sophisticated versifier, enacting at the level of discourse the issues of freedom and existence described in the narrative. From negative spaces, Jonathan Shears's absorbing 'Varnish over his faults: Byron's Patina' brought us into the palpable world of painting technique. Shears took his cue from an often-overlooked metaphor in the Preface to Childe Harold III, where Byron muses over his treatment of the protagonist: 'It had been easy to varnish over his faults'. …