INDETERM INACY IN BYRON MERVYN NICHOLSON Cariboo College “The object is an abstraction of a relatively invariant form. An object is more like a pattern of movement than like a solid separate thing that exists autonomously and permanently.” (Physicist David Bohm, Whole ness and the Implicate Order) “The trace »s nothing, it is not an entity, it exceeds the question, What is? and contingently makes it possible.” (Derrida, Of Grammatology) A. key insight of recent theory is that what isn’t there is as important as what is there: the missing, so to speak, has arrived. Indeed, the image of the missing space and its paradigmatic function deserve scrutiny as objects of literary analysis themselves. The fascination with emptiness, with “the gaps which texts reveal” (Cohen 382) constitutes a paradigm found everywhere: in Todorov’s “hesitancy” ; in de Man’s “aporia” ; in Derrida’s “trace,” the negation of “presence,” the deferral of meaning; in the typifying argument of Foucault that the missing reveals more than the explicit; in feminist criticism’s “silences,” marking the repression of women; in analysis of the fantastic and Gothic as a repression of the irrational and the excluded; in Marxist analysis of discourse as what Jameson calls a “prison-house” to deny exploitation. Byron is especially relevant here, because he conspicuously uses missing spaces in his writing. Indeed, omitting things defines Byron textually — and biographically. One notes that his memoirs are missing — the memoirs of a poet everyone views as essentially autobiographical. It is a manysided irony that friends should deliberately destroy his apologia — written specifically to vindicate himself— in order to save his reputation.1 How Byron justified himself to a judgmental world constitutes crucial information about him. We have an image — but Byron himself we do not know. The first of his “Detached Thoughts” is a peculiar speculation on iden tity. He ponders all the figures the public (in five languages) have compared him to: Rousseau, Aretino, Napoleon, Timon of Athens, Shakespeare, Sa tan, Goethe, “the Phantasmagoria,” Henry the Eighth, Michelangelo, Lara, Mirabeau, Raphael, Diogenes, Childe Harold, Lara, the Count in Beppo, Pope, Milton, Dryden, Burns, Chatterton, Kean, Alfieri — not to mention E n g l i s h S t u d i e s i n C a n a d a , x v i , l, March 1 9 9 0 “An alabaster Vase lighted up within” (BLJ 9:38). Existential/biographical and fictional/textual rub shoulders as equals in this (incomplete) list. By ron concludes that he does not know who he is. One “Detached Thought” says “I have written my Memoirs, but omitted all the really consequential and important parts.” The secrets would “paralyze posterity” (BLJ 9:38). And thus the essential point of his (auto)biography is omitted. (Almost cer tainly one missing piece is that Byron was bisexual, a fact with disastrous implications, gay sex being a hanging crime [see Crompton].) More subtly, he implies that identity itself is inherently a mystery, cannot be a coherent unit or even self-explanatory. It is, finally, an unknowable; what must be left out is the determining part. The mystery of identity, a key motif in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature as well as in Godwin and Shelley, is also profoundly Byronic. For Byron, identity is self-creation, not a knowable quantum: there is, by definition, a gap in identity — not merely by accident. Byron did not need Lacan to explain to him (or fail to explain) that identity is not a monolithic unit. Byronic identity is a complex process of self-creation: hence a time-energy, not a completed object. Moreover, one is as much a function of society as individual property. In Bloomian terms, Byron was a “strong” poet of unexampled daring, flatly stating he writes what he pleases. Don Juan may well be, as Auden said, “the most original poem in English” — the most important poem, says Jerome McGann, published between Paradise Lost and The Prelude. Byron is unlike any writer in history. He was rich, famous — and bitterly envied. In a society dedicated to aristocratic privilege, he was a titled lord. He had undeniable charisma and sexual magnetism — and plenty of opportunities to discharge that...
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May 1, 1992
Toby Silverman Zinman + 1
