1. Glory and Nothing: Byron Remembers Wordsworth
- Author
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Peter T. Murphy
- Subjects
Power (social and political) ,Literature ,History ,Poetry ,Dramatization ,Nothing ,business.industry ,Phenomenon ,Context (language use) ,General Medicine ,Glory ,business ,Drama - Abstract
1 THE HISTORY OF THE CANON, THE STORY OF ITS CHANGING SHAPE, MIGHT be summed up thus: remembering and forgetting. In the last 25 years or so, we have remembered much of what the immediately previous generations of critics forgot. Byron, for instance, has benefited enormously from our remembering what might be called, simply, his "context." We have been able to remember Byron's stardom; "history" has helped us conjure up (something like) the presence of the Real Byron, the person who once lived, and who helped create and then underwrote the Byron Phenomenon, or "Byronism." (1) Valuing his pan-cultural presence in this way has involved not so much a recall of fact (for people always have remembered Byron, and his fame), but rather the broad re-creation of a former way of valuing Byron: creating the Byron Phenomenon was cultural work, and a kind of accomplishment we have remembered to recognize. Byron's poetic purpose, seen from the point of view of Byronism, is the dramatization of his titanic Self. Drama of Self also describes, of course, how so much of his poetry actually functions, the way the presence of the Real Byron underwrote, while he lived, the psychological drama of the poems. Byron's poetry, described this way, is both a cause and an extension of the Bryon Phenomenon, the multimedia event his life and works became; or, to employ a word he used often, his poetry is both a cause and an extension of his fame. Byron's poems had a palpable yet deliciously intangible relationship to Byron the person, someone you might meet, and he energized that relationship by circulating in London high life performing the role of the famous Lord Byron, "Bold Bad Bard Baron B.," as Wordsworth put it in 1816. (2) Had a relationship, instead of the has of the Critical Present: because Byron the person is dead and gone, and this relationship died with him. That is: remembering Byronism is not the same as experiencing it firsthand. In a famous and perhaps true story from the summer of 1816, the announcement of Byron's arrival at Mme. De Stael's villa, Coppet, was enough to render a woman at the party (a Lady Hervey, whom Byron describes as a novelist) unconscious. Like the sun, Byron radiated power, and those who got in his way felt it. But also like the sun, the Real Byron eventually set over the horizon of time, and even though so many later planets continued to reflect his light, eventually that reflection has diminished too. Without the burning source of Byron himself, the living person who makes it all happen, this kind of power, the power underwritten by the person, the person who looks a certain way, speaks to and touches others, becomes a name: a distant reflection of a reflection, a memory of the everyday phenomenon of fame. We forget; and the world forgets too. The radiation of our mortal effects out into the world--the evidence of our existence--eventually fades into darkness. The losses of mortality make room for the remembering of the" scholar, however, and these losses are enabling also. Forgetting creates the space for the story we call history. We want to remember Byronism, but we don't want to remember all of it. We do not faint upon remembering Byron, nor do we wish to. This part of the Byron Phenomenon is just like Anyone's Phenomenon, a story of mortality. Byronism may have been a pan-cultural development, but it depended on the bodily Byron, and eventually became writing on his tombstone. When we work to understand Byronism, we dig in his grave and exhume the past, but we have only remains to work with: his bones, his writings, the memories of others. Byron isn't coming back, no matter how many magazines from 1819 we read, and so, at the center of the story of the Byron Phenomenon, there is a hollow spot where Byron's body was. We can get some stuff back, but not all of it. Much of the textually centered criticism of the 20th century was proud of its refusal to fool around with moldering poetic bodies, and this refusal was entwined with a different way of valuing poetic work. …
- Published
- 2011