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Byron, Poetics and History
Michael O'Neil
Wordsworth Circle. Volume: 34. Issue: 4.
Publication Year: 2003.
Byron, Poetics and History
Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History
(Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 251. $55.00.
The many virtues of Jane Stabler's Byron, Poetics and History include a valuable ability to hold in a single thought different perspectives. The winner of a British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay award in 2003, the book is illuminating about and alert to the current state of Byronic and Romantic criticism, yet it sustains a bracing, graceful independence. It reveals a high degree of aesthetic sensitivity, even as it deploys original historical and contextual knowledge.
The Introduction is a model of its kind: economical, teeming with ideas, and insight, and showing a quiet brilliance that has learned from and has more than a smack of Byron's own mobility. Stabler recognizes that digressiveness is at the heart of Byron's work, and requires on his critic's part a loose if expert hold on the reins of theory. Applying to her own procedures Byron's rejection of "system" ("When a man talks of system, his case is hopeless," quoted on p. 14), she asserts that "literary theory informs this book non-systematically" (p. 14). Her deft way with theory always takes us back to the particular nature of Byron's achievement, and defends him against over-zealous appropriation. It is at work in the following "yes, but" response to deconstruction's explanation of Don Juan in terms of "infinite 'unresolvability'" (p. 15): "Derridean deconstruction can offer suggestive models for a dynamic of disruption, undecidability, and moments where reader and writer are be-labyrinthed in language, but its elating momentum defers forever the urgency of readerly discrimination, construction and responsibility for one's decisions, all of which are vital to the fabric of Don Juan" (p. 16). The flickering irony of "elating momentum" checks any headlong gallop towards inevitable chasms of aporia; the final half of the sentence reminds us that, for all his unstable ironies, the highest form of poetry, in Byron's view, was the "ethical."
For Stabler. "Byron's writing resists the totalising discourse of any one theoretical model." It is a poetry that requires attention to its "formal properties" (p. 17), demands that we recognize "the urgent involvement of the reader" (p. 16), and the political implications of that involvement, and insists that we find a critical language answerable to our "momentary experiences of pleasure and surprise" (p. 17). The success of Byron, Poetics and History lies in its capacity to practise what its Introduction so capably preaches. Chapter One supplies "a reader-centred view of digressive poetics" (p. 18), in particular, the views of Byron's contemporary reviewers, many of whom shared Francis Jeffrey's "fear of ambiguity and indeterminacy" (p. 40). Jeffrey himself read Byron's emphasis on "relativity of value" as typifying what he took to be "a system of resolute misanthropy" (quoted on p. 40). Others saw in Byron's mixed modes and tones challenges to political, philosophical, and gender certainties and norms. After his death, Thomas Moore was able to read Byron's digressiveness in merely bigiographical terms, the reflex of "the versatility of genius" (quoted on 41). Stabler conjectures that Moore's reading dictated future nineteenth-century biographical readings of the poet and his work.
Chapter Two is a further--and remarkable--act of critical negative capability, as it explores the "shapes the unexpected was expected to take" (p. 42) in the Romantic period. This exploration involves a fascinating account of the digressive in "eighteenth-century critical discourse" (p. 43). Hugh Blair may have wished the transition-happy poet to "preserve the connection of ideas," thus proving "the Author to be one who thinks, and not one who raves" (quoted on p. 45), but Charles Churchill, the subject of Byron's poem "Churchill's Grave," offers precedents for the Romantic poet's lawless practices. So, Churchill's use of similes in The Ghost sponsors Byron's provision in The Vision of Judgment of "a menu of similes from which the reader is invited to choose" (p. 55). Matthew Prior, too, provides his own model of "conversational individualism designed to appeal to a fickle, ambitious class of purchasers" (p. 59). The chapter is both a tour-de-force in itself (and likely to be hugely influential in Byron studies) and at the centre of Stabler's concern to enmesh the workings of form and the politics of reading. Among other things, she analyses perceptively the connection between allusion and digression in Byron's work, the former seen as often working as a local instance of the latter and serving to threaten "tonal stability" (p. 67).
In the next chapter, Stabler turns her attention more fully to "Byronic intertextuality," focusing on his Hints from Horace, and bringing out with a dazzling attention to relevant details that is not easily paraphrased how the poem contains "layers of allusion in sometimes uneasy dialogue with a number of different audiences" (p. 75). She discusses the implications of both the published 1811 version and the rewritten 1820-1 version, and demonstrates that changes in the 1820-1 version (including the omission of a note about the origins of Augustan satire in "personal feelings," quoted on p. 97) reveal a situation of some complexity: as Byron moved away from the "political culture" represented by Murray and Gifford, he was moving towards their pro-Augustan "literary values" (p. 99). At the same time, Stabler excels at pinpointing the difference between the satiric certainties of Pope and the digressive uncertainties of Byron. Chapter Four takes as its subject the uses of inter-textuality in Don Juan, and makes us look with new eyes at a subject we may have thought we knew well. The argument is simultaneously elegant and unafraid of local complexity as it investigates Byron's "experimental art of digression" (p. 109). This art shows itself, for Stabler, in the Shakespearean allusions, especially to Othello, in canto VI of the poem. Her account of how Byron assumes in his narrative voice inflections associated with the main characters of Othello is especially astute. She describes Byron as lago, for example, threatening to disclose "each reader as a potential hypocrite" (p. 113), and is equally persuasive, if necessarily more speculative, when she connects the canto's attitudes to sexuality with the Queen Caroline affair in support of her argument that "Threads of allusion are enmeshed in historical circumstance" (p. 115). Possibly the finest material in the chapter involves illustration of the way Byron uses digressive methods to "expose the poem still further to the chanciness of readerly participation" (p. 124). Here Stabler reveals and puts to good argumentative effect her own and her poet's fondness for analogy (our participation in the poem is full of hazard and chance, as is the winning of military renown by the likes of Wellington).
The fifth chapter looks at Byron's dealings in Don Juan with contemporary journalism. These dealings accommodate the accidental and contingent, and give license to the "digressive mode of the narrator" (p. 136). Drawing on gazettes and newspapers such as and especially Galignani's Messenger, Byron is able to offer alternative views to those peddled by the British government. At the same time, he recognizes, in the very "materiality" of such newspaper "snatches," the politically ambivalent fact that "readers will only notice what they have chosen to see" (p. 141). The chapter also contains significant material on the way that Don Juan "feminises digressive activity" (p. 150), Byron assuming a "feminine" right to be capricious and inconstant. Stabler sees that the poem is "packed with misogynistic jokes" (p. 154), but her exploration of digression in gendered terms is highly suggestive. Her final chapter offers a detailed account of Byron's "last digressions," and loads every ore with perceptions. Stabler points out that Byron's use of couplets in The Age of Bronze mimics "how mediocrity reproduces itself" and reveals "a hyper self-conscious, doubly ironic use of form" (p. 190). Discussing The Island, she argues that the poem, haunted like other late poems by earlier poems, "is a verse romance that keeps interpolating other frames of reference" (p. 194) in order to unsettle and surprise. An eloquent last sentence argues that "Byron's digressions allow us to enjoy the exquisite performance of historical uncertainty" (p. 197). Byron, Poetics and History is itself an "exquisite performance," though one that is never precious. At once demanding and rewarding, alive to the pleasures of form and the pressures of history, properly concerned with the rights and responsibilities of the reader, its insights into "Byron's digressions" will be central to future understanding of the poetry.
A Review by Michael O'Neill
University of Durham |
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发表于 2007-9-18 12:07
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