To "foil the ingenuity of Pain": Byron's The Lament of Tasso

Abstract

To "foil the ingenuity of Pain":Byron's The Lament of Tasso Adam White (bio) A number of figures in Byron's poems and plays, from the prisoner of Chillon to Manfred and Marino Faliero, find themselves in states of mental distress. But less remarked upon is the way that several figures in Byron's poems and plays also suffer bodily pain. In this essay I analyze the under-scrutinized subject of pain in The Lament of Tasso. I argue that in dramatizing Tasso's confinement, the poem combines a Stoic emphasis ("our Stoical success" [Lament 103]) on preserving the powers of the "mind" and defying pain with a Christian notion of physical suffering as redemptive. The creative assimilation of certain elements of the Stoic and Christian traditions and their understanding of pain, as I would contend, is a hallmark of Byron's treatment of the subject in The Lament of Tasso and also, to a more limited extent, in The Two Foscari. Byron's attention to bodily, physical pain in The Lament of Tasso also complicates his poetic language of mental sufferance and patience; for example, "bear, borne, and bore" (97, 211). An analysis of pain in The Lament of Tasso, then, allows one to bring Byron's neglected place in the history of writing about pain into clear focus. In order to properly contextualize these arguments, I first provide a brief overview of how Stoic and Christian traditions might apply to Byron, followed by a summary of the dominant critical traditions in thinking on pain. Some analysis of the scenarios of pain in The Two Foscari then follows, before I turn to The Lament of Tasso. Pain in The Lament of Tasso is, as elsewhere in Byron's works, central to shaping an individual consciousness and identity. Byron's poem presents a scenario whereby abstract things such as injustice, scorn, and calumny appear to operate with material or material-like effects. They are generally considered productive of, in particular, bodily types of pain. In the introduction to their collection of essays, Byron's Temperament: Essays in Body and Mind, Bernard Beatty and Jonathon Shears argue that Byron "often settles for materialist explanations of mental/psychic behaviour.… And yet, he was never an out-and-out materialist for, more deeply, he was always some kind of Dualist in that he thought that a double explanation, often specifically self-contradictory, of the same phenomena gave more [End Page 57] insight than a single one" (2). The situation that Byron dramatizes in The Lament of Tasso certainly lends itself to a Stoic interpretation in regard to the idea of enduring pain with dignity, and this would also be the case with Byron's other great narrative of imprisonment, The Prisoner of Chillon. It is Stoicism's emphasis—particularly as represented in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations—on enduring pain with dignity and on the body as a potential barrier to the mind's capacity to achieve its highest potential that I want to emphasize in my reading of The Lament of Tasso. As William James Hoverd, drawing on the work of Judith Perkins's The Suffering Self, points out, "Stoicism regarded the individual as dualistic and was concerned with morality and self-mastery. Pain, material hurt, or loss ultimately did nothing to affect the soul. As a result, any disciplined individual could demonstrate their personal virtue through their reaction to physical adversity" (11). Hoverd outlines how this dualistic view of body and soul influenced early Christianity and its understanding that "the control of pain or suffering of the physical body should be understood as virtuous" (12). Indeed, Frans Willem Korsten, who attends to the root of the word "pain" as meaning "punishment," points out that in Christianity, the infliction of bodily pain is considered to be necessary for the just organization of history: "pain becomes, firstly, not something you have, but something you get in return for, or as a consequence of something. It is, therefore, always related to a history" (377). As we will see later, Byron's Tasso defines his past, present, and future in relation to bodily pain: "I bear and bore / The much I have recounted / and I...