Byron, The Postmodern Romantic

John Xiros Cooper

In a letter from Bologna to his London publisher John Murray on 12 August 1819, commenting on his plan for his long poem Don Juan, Byron wrote, "You ask me for a plan of Donny Johnny -- I have no plan -- I had no plan -- but I had or have materials." This statement (as interesting for its nonchalance as for what it implies about the poem's unity) underlines Byron's curious position among the Romantics. He despised Romanticism and insisted that English poetry and culture never survived the blow of Alexander Pope's death. This has led literary historians to emphasize his connections to the tradition of eighteenth-century satire. Yet a close reading of Byron's major works in the light of his biography and the dominant structure of feeling of his time reveals a very different picture: we find instead a surprisingly modern artist, indeed a postmodern artist whose work addresses more openly than anyone else in the nineteenth century what have come to be seen in our time as postmodern concerns.

The project will investigate Byron's relationship to the following postmodern themes.

1. The obsessive and playfully ironic fabrication of multiple selves and the unmooring of subjectivity; the curiously contemporary idea that we can only know in any significant way the persona we invent for ourselves (“. . . it is only the self he invented that he understood perfectly.” T. S. Eliot, “Byron,” On Poetry and Poets [203]).

2. The deliberate toying with the norms and meanings of personal responsibility: the erratic swervings from the most outrageously frivolous behavior (at the Venice carnival for example) to the gravity (or vanity) of celebrity martyrdom on the altar of libertarian ideals at Missolonghi.

3. Sexual indeterminacy and the body as object and subject of desire; the body as erotic arena.

4. The practical subversion of narrative conventions, especially the 'untying' of Romantic ideas of organic unity.

5. The derisive interrogation of the ideology of Restoration imposed by the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon. This fifth theme anticipates the fate of culture and the production of works art at the onset of the first era of globalization, the age of European imperialism in the nineteenth century. In this sense Byron is one of the first literary intellectuals of Europe to find himself bound to the unavoidable postmodern contradiction, namely, to be complicit in and to resist the destruction of local cultures, settled identities, and given boundaries. His complex fate still defines the paradox of the dissenting artist in the imperial homeland.