University of Cape Town – ELL 4068S
Peter Anderson
20 October 2017
‘A Citizen of Eternity’:
The Transcendent Informality of Lord Byron’s Cain (1821)
“It is as well to begin by admitting that Cain [sic] is as potent an affirmation of Byron’s bankruptcy as a philosophical poet as we are likely to find. Further, it is bad poetry and worse drama. But the poem need not simply be dismissed as a piece of incompetence. It can be regarded alternatively as a provocative work which is concerned less with its artistry than with an assault upon decorum which occasionally borders on literary vandalism.”
– From Philip W. Martin’s Byron: a poet before his public (1982:148)
“Lucifer is the patron saint of the visual arts. Colour, form, all these are the works of Lucifer.”
– Experimental filmmaker and satanist, Kenneth Anger
“I met the sons of darkness and the sons of light in the border towns of despair.”
– From the lyrics to ‘Dignity’ by Bob Dylan
“So it is you who is to get this letter./ The experiment may not be a success./ There’re many others who could do it better,/ But I shall not enjoy myself the less./ Shaw of the Air Force said that happiness/ Comes in absorption: he was right, I know it;/ Even in scribbling to a long-dead poet.”
– From W.H. Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’
Lord Byron’s drama Cain is perhaps the most interesting single failure by any of the great Romantic poets. As a potentially producible play, it is pretty much terrible; but, taken on its own terms, I think it attempts to become something almost uncanny. It re-envisions the Cain and Abel chapter of the Book of Genesis as a guided tour along the outside edges of all imaginable human knowledge and experience. In doing so, it also appears to pursue a parallel speculation on the future of visual drama as such. Cain’s abyssal discontent isn’t just the play’s content; its form too is affected by unhappiness. Its rhetoric is so ravished and enraptured by the seen and the suspected that it implicitly bewails the technical limits of the theatre of its time and shames the stage for assuming any comparison with the aesthetic supremacy of the word.
In its place, Byron unconsciously foresees Cinema. This is my own wild speculation. But it fits with the prophetic fact of his character, which would of course become the higher-cultured prototype of the Hollywood Star. And it illuminates the play itself as an explanation for the many anti-dramaturgical tendencies it showcases. And most of all, it projects back a story that summons the shared essentials of Romantic poetry and the movies – acknowledged death, objectified desire and a relentlessly restless relationship with reality.[1]
Byron was the rightful medium for this premonition because his own restlessness was determined by the prodigal, life-long battle between his entwined capacities for sincerity and contempt. He was the Romantic who knew how to sell the brand. He knew too how to write poems – like ‘Darkness’ (1816) and most of Don Juan (1818-23) – that bore a visionary value beyond the accentuation of his self-image. But he also cracked the code of how to recast his own ambivalence about his self-commodification as part of the package of his personality. Some aspect of the attraction of the all-encompassing figure of the Byronic hero[2]is surely the implicit presence of George Gordon (or whatever other alias you want to give his superego) amongst the massive audience for his exploits, as simultaneously hypnotized and bemused as any of them. Naturally, this iconic split-self preceded Byron’s fame. Literary narcissism only requires an imagined readership after all. But in 1812, after the (apparently literal) overnight success of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – his first sally at self-mythologizing his way out of boredom – he found himself in the unique position of being perhaps the first young writer ever to replicate the situation of Don Quixote in the second book of Cervantes’s novel: roaming about and performing an idealized self in a world in which the image of his character had unexpectedly taken on such a vital life of its own that everything he could do could only be received by the public as the continuation of a Romantic quest he had long since submitted his soul to pursuing. This was made doubly overwhelming by the fact that it was exactly what he had wished for. Harold is consciously a child of his zeitgeist, as well as the best reflection of his creator’s historic situation – a post-French Revolution wandering aristocrat, with high ideals, loose morals, liberal sympathies, endless opinions and a common touch.[3]And while he was still in England, Byron relished the role. His id now had an excuse to be irrepressible. He lead a social life scandalous enough to supersede all rumours. He dispatched bestseller after bestseller – ‘Lara’ (1814), ‘The Giaour’ (1813), ‘The Corsair’ (1814) – as fast as his pen could compose them. And he succeeded at living up to his own growing reputation without making any seeming effort to separate his self from his art. He was the exemplification of a piece of work.
Such was his success that it’s actually quite difficult to write about his life – even just as the context for a particular play – in unheroic terms. His quest’s target was to acquire the experience that would validate the world-weariness he and his protagonists had already assumed before reaching maturity.[4]No-one could say he didn’t pursue this challenge seriously. But having expended the trashy performances of his couplet-drenched exotic tales, and having finally gone too far in his personal perversities, his exile to the continent[5]in 1816 left him stranded in the shadow of his own living fiction. Byron was perhaps too arrogant to think of his lot in this way, but it appears clear to me that the remainder of his productivity was anchored by the search for a suitable style and subject for his confrontational consciousness.
He was so rich, so acclaimed, so free, so uncaring about gossip, and so indulged in his privilege and hyper-masculinity, that he could achieve an unprecedentedly supreme perspective. His only real limitations were his mortality and the untested extent of his poetic talent. His defining dilemma was the question of where to find the reasons to continue writing. This was an entirely unrelatable condition, and so its unrelatability became representative for him of the inaccessible subjectivity of all human beings, and writing exclusively about the convolutions of his own mind became a reassuring form of protean self-assertion, meaning he never lacked the impulse to poeticize himself further. Childe Harold functioned as the announcement of his Byronically ironic project and his popular poems fantasized it into the dreamspace of Napoleonic Europe, but the works he would dispatch from Lake Geneva, Venice, Pisa and Ravenna were now necessarily uniquely experimental, in as much as they were obliged to demonstrate his self-created character’s unceasing development whilst also displaying his own irreparable contempt for any narrative form that could presume to contain his imagination. And he ultimately did achieve this through the open-ended ‘epic satire’ of Don Juan, which used the snarky dependability of its ottava rima verses to structure a shaggy-dog odyssey that he just continuously riffed out until his bathetic death fighting for the Greeks in Missolonghi. But facetious cantos still provided an insufficient platform for his personality. Hence, Byron turned to theatre.
The problem with this direction was that the popular drama of his time depended, much like ours, on the staging of interpersonal conflict. And Byron, of course, could only write one character – himself. His art was premised on the assumption that his struggles were cosmic enough to surpass the need for intellectual company. But his historic life, in all its flourishing facets, was already such a performance that the spiraling attraction of self-dramatization proved irresistible. His many plays, bookended by the signal achievements of Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821), were then mostly minor works confined to the proscenium vault of his mind. But don’t just take my word for it:
“Were I capable of writing a play which could be deemed stage-worthy, success would give me no pleasure, and failure great pain.” [6]
&
“His published verse plays, however, Byron repeatedly insisted ‘were not composed with the most remote view to the stage’ (CPW, vi, 16).”[7]
&
“Byron’s claim that his own dramatic works were written ‘without regard to the Stage’ but for the ‘mental theatre of the reader’ (BLJ, viii, 210) is entirely compatible with a wish for their eventual representation on a more suitable stage of the future.”[8]
His notion of a ‘mental theatre’, however, is manifold. It foremost refers, as you’d expect, to the self-reflexive staging of the competing strands of his intellect. But in offering it as a collaborative space with ‘the reader’, he pays us the self-serving compliment of assuming that our minds can keep up with the progression of his visions and appropriate the pioneering insights he seeks to dramatize as becoming also our own. The images we can conceive in the reading of his verses here defy the necessity of their presentation. They cast themselves as appearing so immediately, excessively new that they destroy their potential to be satisfactorily appreciated.[9] And they achieve this only by being set against the familiar backdrops of the most melodramatic of stage genres, so as to be more easily conjured in the imagination without the objective necessity of visual aids. This is the occasion in which Byron most transparently flails and scrambles for a story form to behoove his grand persona: Manfred could be predictably promoted as ‘Lord Byron does Gothic Castle Intrigue’; Sardanapalus (1821) as ‘Byron goes Classical’; The Two Foscari (1821) as ‘Byron in Venice (!)’; and Cain, of course, as ‘Byron gets Biblical’, and so on. The more histrionic the setting, the more necessary the avoidance of the play’s actual staging becomes, as the heightened ‘metaphysical’ import of each script’s oratory conspires with the heavy artifice of its escapist tradition to ensure that any attempt to tether it to the basic realism and essential relatability of live performance would lose the audience in minutes.[10]Naturally, this didn’t stop many of Byron’s contemporary showmen from trying, though all to no great avail. As texts, his plays are all entertainingly manic monodramas. But none accomplish their creator’s intention of seeming to anticipate a ‘stage of the future’; except for Cain.
In this case, the play does justify its own unproducibility. It doesn’t attempt to vie with Sophocles or Shakespeare on their own turf (Byron did know better than to be that self-confident), and neither does it try for the popular appreciation Coleridge finally managed with Remorse (1813) and Shelley desperately sought with The Cenci(1819). The universal acclaim Byron already courted only contributed to his moodiness, for the most part. Instead, in Cain, what he attempts is to invent and project the Genesis of his own person: “[his] radical conception makes Cain the direct ancestor of a tradition that has not yet exhausted itself, that of the artist not just as passive outcast but as deliberate criminal[11], seeking the conditions for his art by violating the moral sanctions of his society.”[12]In other words, he creates an avant-garde portrait of the first avant-gardist. But unlike Byron, Cain’s art manifests no object beyond his own experience. Nonetheless, he is introduced to us as the prototypical disappointment to his conservative family. His response to being the first man not to know any of the bliss of Paradise is to become the first child to protest that he never asked to be born:
Adam: But thou, my eldest-born, art silent still.
Cain: ’Tis better I should be so.
Adam: Wherefore so?
Cain: I have nought to ask.
Adam: Nor aught to thank for?
Cain: No.
Adam: Dost thou not live?
Cain: Must I not die?
Eve: Alas!
The fruit of our forbidden tree begins
To fall.
(I. i. 26-31)
He invokes a lovably common sense against the dogmas of his loved ones and laments their own transgressions against the Father for not being extreme or rebellious enough: “wherefore pluck’d ye not the tree of life?/ Ye might have then defied him.” (I.i. 33-4) But he is still considerate enough to ask them to leave him to whine in soliloquy. Lucifer overhears these bootless cries against his raw deal and offers him the opportunity to feast on almost all the remaining fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. They travel to ‘The Abyss of Space’ to look back upon the “small blue circle” (II. i. 29) of the Earth amongst the “multiplying masses of increased/ And still-increasing lights” (II. i. 100-1) of the Milky Way. Then they pop in to ‘Hades’ to view “[t]he phantasm of the world” (II. i. 152) and the “swimming shadows and enormous shapes” (II. ii. 31) of spectres from the pre-Adamite biosphere. Eventually their only remaining Rubicon is the realization of either of “the two principles” – Heaven or Hell – as “to see/ Either of these, would be for [Cain] to perish!” (II. ii. 404-8) and death, regrettably, is not a frontier of knowledge so much as its immanent refutation. Dropped back in ‘the Land without Paradise’ for Act III, the play dutifully wraps up the original story, having Cain cherish his sister-wife, Adah, and baby, Enoch, then kill his brother in disgust for God’s preferment of Abel’s bloody sacrifice over his vegetarian altar, before Eve curses him and the Angel of the Lord marks his forehead with a benediction that ensures his suffering intellect will generate billions of like-minded descendants. Rarely, however, has the Bible ever been treated less like a sacred text.
Byron subtitles the play ‘A Mystery’, for reasons equally serious and mischievous.[13]In Genesis, the unresolved question in question is why Cain slews his brother in jealousy after God explicitly warns him: “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” (Chap. 4, V. 7) Thus, the original problem concerns the ethics of knowledge – why is Cain’s motive not affected by his awareness of evil? This is the detail of devilish drama, of Shakespeare’s Iago and Goethe’s Faust. Cain himself necessarily remains unreachable, as the narrative depends on his difference to validate virtue. But Byron abducts the story and uses it instead to problematize knowledge as such. We never stray from sympathy with his Cain because this instantiation takes his existence personally, as we all inevitably must for only ever being ourselves:
Cain: And this is
Life! – Toil! and wherefore should I toil? – because
My father could not keep his place in Eden.
What had I done in this? – I was unborn,
I sought not to be born; nor love the state
To which that birth has brought me.
(I. i. 64-9)
This itinerant subjectivity engenders a ravenously insecure desire for the truth. Lucifer then arrives as the supreme informant, the obligatory snitch on God’s discretion, and Cain snaps up his services:
Cain: [T]hou canst not
Speak aught of knowledge which I would not know,
And do not thirst to know, and bear a mind
To know.
Lucifer: And heart to look on?
Cain: Be it proved.
Lucifer: Dar’st thou to look on Death?
Cain: He has not yet
Been seen.
Lucifer: But must be undergone.
(I. i. 246-50)
The epistemological queries of the Biblical page and the contemporary stage are literally turned inside-out. Self-assertion reverses our concern from the unknown otherness of the mind to the mind’s unknowing of otherness. In literary terms, this is a ‘fall’ all its own. Our perspective is reduced from the third-person assurance of ‘the word of God’ to the first individual’s performance of infinite ignorance.[14]The irreconcilable violence of sibling rivalry is replaced by a non-conflicting conversation between the devil and his advocate. And Abel’s murder is eventually presented as the next best sensation to the bewildering climax of self-annihilation[15]:
Cain: This is a vision, else I am become
The native of another and worse world.
The earth swims round me: – what is this? – ‘tis wet;
[Puts his hand to his brow, and then looks at it
And yet there are no dews! ‘Tis blood – my blood –
My brother’s and my own; and shed by me!
Then what have I further to do with life,
Since I have taken life from my own flesh?
(III. i. 342-8)
The authority of the good book is finally countermanded completely by the very mode of Byron’s text. As both an unproducible play and an insufficient poem, it develops its presence in our imagination as something altogether spectral. Instead of being dictated to by a doorstop, we have to do the creative work of staging Cain in the ether purely for our own purposes. Our shared subjectivity with its hero is confirmed through its enframement as a half-complete enunciation. It roots itself in our reality, in a way the Bible never can, because it obliges us to read it as a collaborative fantasy.
Of course, all of this borders on blasphemy, if not heresy. But Byron’s brilliance was always in intuiting every available way to cross the line. Indeed,“[he] was born to say the things that people say one must not say.”[16] And Cain’s rejection of its ancient progenitor only mirrors Cain’s disobedience to his parents and his Father. This vital spirit of disrespect is specifically articulated through a marvelously stroppy tone in the play’s rhythm and diction[17]:
Cain: Why should I speak?
Adam: To pray.
Cain: Have ye not pray’d?
Adam: We have, most fervently.
Cain: And loudly: I
Have heard you.
Adam: So will God, I trust.
Abel: Amen!
(I. i. 23-7)
And
Cain: Show me.
Lucifer: Dar’st thou behold?
Cain: How know I what
I dare behold? As yet, thou hast shown nought
I dare not gaze on further.
Lucifer: On, then, with me.
Wouldst thou behold things mortal or immortal?
Cain: Why, what are things?
Lucifer: Both partly: but what doth
Sit next thy heart?
Cain: The things I see.
(II. i. 133-8)
In rhetorical terms, such conversations are really just one formal degree up from the snappy ping-pong of movie dialogue. The added emphases, the colloquial phrasing (“what are things?”) and the quickfire reactivity all contribute to another sense of the text residing in a ‘fallen’ state. It feels comically common, and composed as swiftly as it is spoken.[18]Patently it has none of the vaunt or thoughtfulness any reader would expect from the protagonists of scripture. And then the line-breaks create their own jarring effect of nigh-on anti-poetic realism:
Lucifer: But if that high thought were
Link’d to a servile mass of matter, and,
Knowing such things, aspiring to such things,
And science still beyond them, were chain’d down
To the most gross and petty paltry wants…
(II. i. 50-4)
And
Adah: Here, or
Where’er thou wilt: where’er thou art, I feel not
The want of this so much regretted Eden.
Have I not thee, our boy, our sire, and brother,
And Zillah – our sweet sister…
(III. i. 38-42)
And
Cain: The Other
Spake not of this unto my father, when
He shut him forth from Paradise, with death
Written upon his forehead. But at least…
(II. i. 72-5)
The constant effect for our eyes here is like to that of a typewriter jerking down and back to start a new, clumsier line with every jagged enjambement. The irregular iambs (“of this so much regretted Eden”) also break and bristle the flow of each line so as to prevent any somnolent appreciation of their argument. They are seemingly all afterthoughts, self-evident in their spontaneity, responding to the play’s philosophical unwinding with anxious snatches at meaning. They oblige us to sit wakefully on their edges, as if we could dare to interrupt with our own points. As such, the text entire reads as being deliberately uncrafted and underdone, bringing us back down to Earth and staying out of Paradise.
Byron’s ‘sharpness’ in this respect, “[his] refusal to be bamboozled by lavishness”[19], is also just the theatrical counterpart to the tirelessly playful irony of the narration of his Cantos. In his longer works, he luxuriated into a nonchalant accent that allowed him to marshal the widest spectrum of tones and registers into single unwieldy stories. The clearest example will always be the first stanza of Don Juan:
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not take care to vaunt,
I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan,
We all have seen him in the pantomime
Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time.
Immediately a vast distance is created, within the text, between the charming acidity of Byron’s own contemporary voice and the traditionally heroic tale he purports to tell. In Cain, as well as his other plays, a throughline sincerity is maintained in the diegesis but a similarly knowing aura hangs over the text just due to the transparency of its adaptation. Cain and Lucifer take their debates seriously, but their aforementioned divergence from their Biblical versions is too blatant for us not to appreciate. This singular dramatic irony acknowledges a severe distinction between conservative myth and tangible reality that serves double-duty as Cain’s intellectual paradigm and underlying subject. At one level, the play is almost an Empiricist manifesto and Cain himself Byron’s notion of the ur-scientist (on top of being the first transgressive performer). Like the 18th-century philosophes, he addresses the spirit of Inquiry as an absolute:
Cain: The snake spoke truth: it was the tree of knowledge;
It was the tree of life: -knowledge is good,
And life is good; and how can both be evil?
(I.i. 36-8)
But the ‘good’ of knowledge can lead only to the Schopenhauerian melancholy of grasping the universal dominion of death and suffering:
Cain: They pluck’d the tree of science
And sin – and, not content with their own sorrow,
Begot me– thee– and all the few that are,
And all the unnumber’d and innumerable
Multitudes, millions, myriads, which may be,
To inherit agonies accumulated
By ages!
(I.i. 444-50)
Therefore, he concludes, since delusion must be defeated, misery is ultimately the ‘correct’ state of mind:
Cain: I will have nought to do with happiness,
Which humbles me and mine.
(I. i. 465-6)
This masochistic pride is only bearable, both for Byron and Cain, because it is self-chosen, ethically unimpeachable and born out of a sublime faith in Reason, the one faculty which shouldn’t require belief to bolster but still does:
Lucifer: … [J]udge
Not by words, though of spirits, but the fruits
Of your existence, such as it must be.
One good gift has the fatal apple given –
Your reason: let it not be over-sway’d
By tyrannous threats to force you into faith
‘Gainst all external sense and inward feeling
(II. ii. 456-62)
And
Lucifer: … Nothing can
Quench the mind, if the mind will be itself
And centre of surrounding things – ’tis made
To sway.
(I.i. 213-6)
So the intellectual fortitude of the individual becomes synonymous with their freedom from oppression and capacity for authentic sensation – basically the unhindered ego. And to preserve its self-confidence and its certainty in the reality of the material world, this new subjectivity is obliged to create and discover new fields of inquiry and new obstacles to conquer and surpass. Thus, the Age of Reason culminates in the Romantic spirit of Adventure.[20]Science goes on the road.
In point of fact, it culminates in the person (even the sensory body) of Byron as such, in so far as he succeeded in projecting himself as the living incarnation of this new religion of the sublime individual. Most of the general trajectories of the 18thCentury conspired to allow his possibility: the commercialization of literature built up a public audience for his spectacle, competitive colonization bloomed a general market for the Exotic, the polyvalent progress of the Enlightenment thinkers (especially Voltaire and Rousseau) established a beachhead of radical secularism in Western Europe, and the French Revolution scattered the nobility and broke the naïve monopoly the ancien regime had seemingly always held on the apportioning of the divine right. The awakened freedom of the Individual finally flew off to its extremities: utter havoc in the September massacres followed by the omnipotent command of a single citizen politician – Napoleon Bonaparte, of course. As with Byron, you could adequately deem him a living proof of concept. The deep fantasy of Enlightenment Humanism was the prophesying of a singular self-made Earthly divinity. The infinite potential of the Individual could, perhaps, only lead to the spiraling authority of an Individual, before whom all competitors would eventually necessarily submit so as to still support their self-delusion. And Napoleon seized the opportunity to attempt his own apotheosis in the realm of Politics just as Byron tried in the domain of Art.[21]All that either required for the task was the perpetual motion engine of their own self-belief. And each acquired this through submitting to the ideal of a deathless process of knowledge. Napoleon continually affirmed his power through endless military adventures, revolutionary law-making and archaeological enterprise. He couldn’t campaign in Egypt without reimagining its social contract or bringing home the Rosetta Stone. Byron, for once, had slightly less ambition. He supported revolutionary groups, but his self-awareness built in him the propaganda of his deserved sensational spoiling. This made “[his] work … in every sense, a poetry of experience.”[22]The divine individual had to replace God’s outdated omniscience with a vision of the borderless extent of their own potential understanding. And Byron sought this primarily on the personal frontiers of sex, travel and athleticism.[23] He tried to try a little bit of everything. But poetically and intellectually, his lifelong liaison with the Real translated into a defining intrigue with the imaginative boundaries of Science. This went beyond his more Wordsworthian “pleasure in the pathless woods”, and even surpassed the typical images of the Romantic sublime (the Alps, the Wind, the Waves etc.) which he mostly used just as metaphors for his own powers anyway. These sights were still too present for his liking. Instead, the cutting edge of Byron’s persona found its expression in describing the as-yet-unglimpsed discoveries of the cutting-edge of scientific observation.
In Cain, this effort is self-evident. The existential hysteria Cain voices is proof of the genius of Byron’s conceit as a whole: he reinterprets the first son’s grievance as representing the first literary example of that cheeky doubtfulness of received knowledge and tradition which constitutes the modern sensibility.[24] He reads and writes into the Bible itself a contemporary critique of orthodoxy. As such, the play is perhaps the highest critical coup and concept he ever actually completed. But he achieves it simply, by projecting Cain’s insistent self-consciousness into a universe believably replete with the observable mysteries of our own. Eve advises her son to “[c]ontent thee with what is. Had we been so,/ Thou now hadst been contented.” (I. i. 45-6) But the joke is that even having followed her own curiosity in first eating from the Tree of Knowledge, the Biblical Eve needfully knows next to nothing of the unraveling extent of what the ‘what’ is that Cain could possibly content himself with. A suggestion of it is likely what Lucifer refers to when he proclaims “I tempt none,/ Save with the truth…” (I. i. 196-7). The latent ‘truth’ being that the textual stage of the Bible, no matter the grandeur of its narrative, is still helplessly terrestrially-bound:
Cain: Can it be?
Yon small blue circle, swinging in far ether,
With an inferior circlet near it still,
Which looks like that which lit our earthly night?
Is this our paradise? Where are its walls,
And they who guard them?
(II. i. 28-33)
Cain: And yon immeasurable liquid space
Of glorious azure which floats on beyond us,
Which looks like water, and which I should deem
The river which flows out of Paradise
Past my own dwelling, but that it is bankless
And boundless, and of an ethereal hue-
What is it?
(II. ii. 178-84)
From the vague vacancy of ‘the Abyss of Space’, Cain is imagined as experiencing the opportunity of returning the furthest gaze humanity had yet sent out to the stars via telescopes by 1821. William Herschel had discovered Uranus in 1781 whilst Neptune would still remain unnamed until 25 years later, but these were the first major celestial bodies sighted purely by the prosthetic means of astronomy, and the fact that the existences of neither are even guessed at in the Bible aided the underlying intuition of the time – first probably sparked by Galileo’s pointing out of Saturn’s rings – that Religion could not be counted on to describe the totality of interesting stuff in the Universe. From the point between the two farthest planets, God’s dominion is made miniscule and the rest of reality appears annoyingly vast and unimagined. Byron and Lucifer thus put everything in stretched perspective, both for Cain and for us.
And then the first three dimensions are balanced by the fourth, as ‘Hades’ – “the realm of death” – is shown as a “shadowy” space of “dim worlds”, “full of twilight”, and serving as a purgatorial emporium for all the “mighty phantoms” of the pre-historic Earth flung to extinction by the localized apocalypses that “[t]hough rare in time, are frequent in eternity.” (II. ii. 1-84) Byron explains this in a Note to his Preface as a “speculation” adapted from “the notion of [the proto-palaeontologist, Baron] Cuvier [1769-1832] … that “the world had been destroyed several times before the creation of man” and proven by “the different [geological] strata and the bones of enormous and unknown animals found in them”. He even throws in the Atlantean idea, for Lucifer to voice, that some of these could be evidence of the ruins of pre-adamite “rational beings much more intelligent than man, and proportionably powerful to the mammoth”, before dismissing it in the same line as “a poetical fiction”. So this is patently the highest literary invocation of anti-Creationism. Indeed, Byron reads here like a far more handsome and likeable Richard Dawkins pointing out to the audience that the Bible never once deigns to mention dinosaurs (not even before the Flood). But again, the ambiguity of the scene’s featured details is such that Cain’s tour is only further enframed as showcasing the ever-growing extent of infinite ignorance Byron’s contemporary sciences were beginning to suggest even in their infancy:
Lucifer: Thy human mind hath scarcely grasp to gather
The little I have shown thee into calm
And clear thought…
(II. ii. 401-3)
Here there is no actual direction, in time or space, which bravely followed far enough would not lead to some great reckoning with human finitude and the frailty of our accepted conception of the Almighty:
Lucifer: Didst thou not require
Knowledge? And have I not, in what I show’d,
Taught thee to know thyself?
Cain: Alas! I seem
Nothing.
Lucifer: And this should be the human sum
Of knowledge, to know mortal nature’s nothingness;
Bequeath that science to thy children, and
‘Twill spare them many tortures.
(II.ii. 418-24)
But the “immortal part” of Byron’s own humanity – his convincing power of poetic wonder – at least allows us to try to visualize the aesthetic splendour lost in the dry accounting of the scientific method. Thankfully, he demonstrates, we can somehow still be entertained in the midst of our complete humiliation.
Now we finally return to Cinema. I have just hinted at and circled round my speculative premise throughout this essay because I’ve wanted to establish every possible contributing testimony, both in and out of the verses, to the conclusion that Byron wrote Cain as a kind of self-defeating text. As a play, it is extravagantly obsessed with the integrity of the experience of witnessing the Real through direct sight alone:
Lucifer: [T]here is
A wisdom in the spirit, which directs
To right, as in the dim blue air the eye
Of you, young mortals, lights at once upon
The star which watches, welcoming the morn.
Adah: It is a beautiful star; I love it for
Its beauty.
Lucifer: And why not adore?
Adah: Our father
Adores the Invisible only.
Lucifer: But the symbols
Of the Invisible are the loveliest
Of what is visible; and yon bright star
Is leader of the host of heaven.
Adah: Our father
Saith that he has beheld the God himself
Who made him and our mother.
Lucifer: Hast thou seen him?
Adah: Yes – in his works.
Lucifer: But in his being?
Adah: No –
(I. i. 492-505)
Here it is made to stand against God that presently he can only be seen, and therefore known, through his works and not his person (whatever form that could possibly take). Whereas Lucifer is altogether deemed more trustworthy and compassionate because “[he] seem[s] that which [he is]”[25](II. I. 87) and he argues convincingly that he did not morph his appearance into that of the serpent to tempt Eve in Eden, showing the constancy of his fronted form. The narrative itself is an explicit valorization of the substance of spectacle, pinning nearly all of its climaxes on the moments of Cain’s deepest immersion in the sublimity of the sights before him:
Cain: Oh, thou beautiful
And unimaginable ether! And
Ye multiplying masses of increased
And still-increasing lights! What are ye? What
Is this blue wilderness of interminable
Air, where ye roll along, as I have seen
The leaves along the limpid streams of Eden?
Is your course measured for ye? Or do ye
Sweep on in your unbounded revelry
Through an aerial universe of endless
Expansion, at which my soul aches to think,
Intoxicated with eternity?
(II. i. 98-109)
As previously noted, there is also little drama or distinct character study to involve or distract us beyond this pattern of mutual viewing. But imagined onto a physical stage, these reactive lines fall fatuously flat. They lack Shakespeare’s world-casting prosody (“Now entertain conjecture of a time” etc.) or Shelley’s visionary zeal or Keats’s highly-wrought sensuality to transfigure any clapboard stage into a fantastical site of mimetic wonder. Each considered detail is either “unimaginable”, “interminable”, “unbounded” or “endless”, such that no ingenious lighting scheme or camera obscura projection – or at least none available in 1821 – could elicit any similar effect to similarly affect an audience. The entire point of the play is that such sights cannot be substituted for. ‘The Abyss of Space’ is not meant as a conceptual setting and should not be staged conceptually either.
But Cinema, in as much as it is a kind of aesthetic science of desire, would perhaps do the trick. Sweeping satellite shots of cascading galaxies could combine with the overlaid soundtrack of Cain’s overawed narration to construct a retrofitted Romantic counterpart to the splendor-drenched radiance of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos or Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Or his words could be cut completely and the work would retain the same impact. Byron wrote such overwhelmed reactions after all in response to the present absence of images he could foresee science was bringing ever nearer to our unmediated view. His aim was to successfully signify the failure of his own imagination to describe in poetry the perspectives future generations would live to suitably envisage. And on top of this you could even claim that he briefly glimpses some of the predominant imaginary content of the new medium set to structure these impressions. Along with the uniquely movie-like liveliness of the play’s dialogue, two images are suggested between Space and Hades that directly speculate into the realm of Computer-Generated Fantasy:
Lucifer: And if there should be
Worlds greater than thine own, inhabited
By greater things, and they themselves far more
In number than the dust of thy dull earth,
Though multiplied to animated atoms,
All living, and all doom’d to death, and wretched,
What wouldst thou think?
Cain: I should be proud of thought
Which knew such things.
(II. i. 42-9)
Cain: And yon immense
Serpent which rears his dripping mane and vasty
Head ten times higher than the haughtiest cedar
Forth from the abyss, looking as he could coil
Himself around the orbs we lately look’d on-
Is he not of the kind which bask’d beneath
The tree in Eden?
(II. ii. 190-6)
Byron off-handedly sprinkles the fleshed-out notions of Aliens and Monsters into the text as the potential denizens of the cosmic dreamscape seen from these conquered twin poles of space and time. They are waiting on the next level of visual wonder after the Bible has been entirely transcended, at least for the sake of fresh subject matter.
Finally, at one point Lucifer makes a far more inadvertently direct comment on the cinematic experience itself, saying to Adah before voyaging with Cain:
Lucifer: … [H]e shall come back to thee in an hour;
But in that hour see things of many days.
Adah: How can that be?
Lucifer: Did not your Maker make
Out of old worlds this new one in few days?
And cannot I, who aided in this work,
Show in an hour what he hath made in many,
Or hath destroy’d in few?
Cain: Lead on.
Adah: Will he
In sooth return within an hour?
Lucifer: He shall.
With us acts are exempt from time, and we
Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour into eternity:
We breathe not by a mortal measurement-
But that’s a mystery…
(I. i. 527-39)
Here the demonic spirit and the subjective aesthetic journey are finally conflated into one prophesied technique of Blakean expanded time. This “breathes not” because it is a reality frozen and reconstituted to present the audience with their most convincing and overwhelming illusions. It makes a montage.
The ‘stage of the future’ that Byron envisions in Cain is then perhaps not exactly Cinema as we know it. But it immanently accomplishes an overlapping of subjective and objective experience that comes close to the definition Pier Paolo Pasolini once offered for the seventh art – “a non-conventional and non-symbolic language that expresses reality through reality itself.” It ‘fails’ poetically and dramaturgically because it attempts to alchemically combine these older forms into a work that retains both the ideality of pure language and the vital particularity of performance so as to gather to it even a small residue of sublime reality. This I suppose is the ‘magic’ that the screen takes for granted for making its material out of the pre-existent substance of actors and their spaces. But just as Cain finds in his own self-awareness a primal sympathy for the coming sufferings of all his descendants, Byron’s creative irony here erupts in a praise-song of the unimaginable extent of visible sights and survivable experiences latent in the universe. As such, the neutron-star of his ego does go beyond itself and his unbearable pretension to prophecy is proved somewhat correct by history. Byron’s materialist sense of fantasy, his unprecedented power for making his own dreams come true, survives still in the living spirit of the Silver Screen.
Reference List:
Bloom, Harold. 1961. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. London: Faber and Faber.
Chew, Samuel C. 1964. The Dramas of Lord Byron: A Critical Study. New York: Russell & Russell Inc.
Martin, Philip W. 1982. Byron: a poetv before his public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McGann, Jerome J. 2000. ‘Introduction’ to The Major Works by Lord Byron. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perkins, David. 1967. Introduction to ‘George Gordon, Lord Byron’ in English Romantic Writers(Ed. by D. Perkins). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.
Richardson, Alan. 2004. ‘Byron and the theatre’ [pgs. 133-50] in The Cambridge Companion to Byron(Ed. by D. Bone). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ricks, Christopher. 2002. Allusion to the Poets. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stefan, Truman Guy. 1968. Lord Byron’s Cain. Austin: University of Texas Press.
[1]This is just developing some of the ideas I applied to Keats’s ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ two years ago of course but Byron is the better example to build my ongoing case around and I hope the extended length of this essay helps make all the cinema-poetry-theatre entanglements a little more lucid for you.
[2]Just so we know what we’re talking about, here’s David Perkins’s nice definition: “He is a man greater than others in emotion, capability, and suffering. Only among wild and vast forms of nature – the ocean, the precipices and glaciers of the Alps – can he find a counterpart to his own titanic passions. Driven by a demon within, he is fatal to himself and others; for no one can resist his hypnotic fascination and authority. He has committed a sin that itself expresses his superiority: lesser men could not even conceive a like transgression. Against his own suffering he brings to bear a superhuman pride and fortitude. Indeed, without the horror of his fate there could not be the splendor of self-assertion and self-mastery in which he experiences a strange joy and triumph. Here Byron sounds a note that reverberates throughout the nineteenth century, running below or outside the surface optimism. For the Byronic hero has a metaphysical significance. He defies the Power that made and doomed him. Or rather he must submit, but will not acquiesce in the vast wrong. He embodies an ultimate refusal, a rebellion against the injustice, as it is felt, of limitation, suffering, and death. But he also embodies a form of nihilism; he can find no ground of action or value outside his own will.” (1967, 782) Cain is the exemplary example.
[3]Historic too was the way in which he presented this precise position as the all-but-official embodiment of the individual liberty the recent Revolutions – American and French – had both been fought for: “The bleeding heart which Byron trailed across Europe became the expression of an epochal experience only because it was first and fundamentally the expression of a single identifiable person.” (McGann: 2000, xvii)
[4]“The fantasy of poetic greatness is structured around a fantasy of his experience of life, whether received or expected: he is prepared to believe in himself as a great poet because he is prepared to believe in his capacity for the kind of experience upon which he thinks great poetry is founded. But to perpetuate the illusion of his capacity for life, Byron needs his poetry. Paradoxically, it becomes the surrogate for the life he has not had, or for the life that he has not felt as intensely as he considered himself bound to feel.” (Martin: 1982, 3. Italics his)
[5]What else could you call it? He was escaping from so many self-inflicted problems that he might as well have driven himself out of London.
[6]From his Preface to Marino Faliero (1821) (Quoted in Stefan, 1968: 24)
[7]‘CPW’ being Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-93) (Quoted in Richardson, 2004: 135)
[8]‘BLJ’ being Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973-94) (Quoted in Richardson, 2004: 136)
[9]This is also just Byron playing the trick of convincing us that his failure to actually produce a visionary theatre only shows up theatre’s immanent failure to ever produce the full realization of his vision. His arrogance is such that the greatest proof of his success as an impresario is displayed in his complete inability to put on a show.
[10]Though maybe, given his dramaturgical context and the parallel swelling of the middle class, I can’t blame Byron for ramping up the showiness all-round: “One problem inhered in the design of the theatres themselves: in an effort to increase profits, theatre managers had insisted on an absurdly enlarged house, and many spectators simply could not hear the actors’ spoken lines as a result. Gesture, attitude, and declamation were relied on to convey action and emotion, resulting in what was widely seen as a loss of nuance and a constant temptation toward ‘ranting’ and other forms of overacting.” (Richardson, 2004: 134)
[11]Imagine who you might add to this throwaway lineage:
Sappho, Petronius, Catullus, Rabelais, Caravaggio, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Marquis de Sade, Percy Shelley, Delacroix, Courbet, Rimbaud, Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Wagner, the Comte de Lautreamont, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Jarry, James Ensor, August Strindberg, Wyndham Lewis, Raymond Roussel, Antonin Artaud, Filippo Marinetti, the Dadaists, Louis Aragon, Robert Johnson, Jean Genet, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Vladimir Mayakovsky, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Jean Cocteau, Sergei Eisenstein, Frida Kahlo, Bertolt Brecht, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Kenneth Anger, Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Jean-Luc Godard, mid-60’s Bob Dylan, the early Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, Amiri Baraka, Jim Morrison, Hunter S. Thompson, Fela Kuti, Nina Simone, Iggy Pop, 70’s David Bowie, Joy Division, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joe Orton, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Polanski, Robert Crumb, Joseph Beuys, Derek Jarman, The Sex Pistols, N.W.A., J.G. Ballard, Martin Amis, Gaspar Noe, Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leos Carax, Kathy Acker, Nagisa Oshima, Chantal Akerman, Catherine Breillat, Bret Easton Ellis, Michel Houellebecq, Harmony Korine, Lars von Trier, Roberto Bolano, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Aphex Twin, Sarah Kane, Will Self, Banksy, Earl Sweatshirt, K. Sello Duiker etc.
Mostly French, but something of Byron and/or Cain in all of them, I suppose.
[13]“[Cain] is in three acts, and entitled “A Mystery,” according to the former Christian custom, and in honour of what it probably will remain to the reader” – pg. 128 (Quoted from LJ. V, 368) (‘LJ’ being his Letters and Journals, Quoted in Chew, 1964: 128) and “To the average literary man of Byron’s day … a Mystery play invoked connotations of immorality, profanity, comic bad taste, and possibly theological controversy.” (Martin, 1982: 165)
[14]God is not dead in Byron’s universe but his silence probably still indicates his wisdom, in as much as Cain and Lucifer would surely have talked over him if he had at any point raised his voice.
[15]“Cain’s destruction of his brother completes an act of knowledge” and is presented as “a crime of Imagination, not of passion or society.” (Bloom, 1961: 246 & 248)
[17]“The essentially provocative nature of Cainis implicit in the tone of its poetry, a tone at once comic and juvenile, so much so, indeed, that at times Byron seems to be defying his readers to challenge the freedom allowed to his infantilism…” (Martin, 1982: 152)
[18]“‘Of all my writings, Cainhas stirred up the most annoyance in England and within my family. I wrote it when I was drunk. When I reread it later I was astonished’” (CC, p. 342) (Quoted in Martin, 1982: 150)
[20]“The obtrusion of the reason into those portions of human experience properly the domain of the imagination was abnormal. The imagination, thwarted but restless, was driven forth into barren places. Rationalism produced extravagance because it failed to provide nourishing spiritual food. Not children only need Arabian romances, monkish legends, and “tales that charm away the wakeful night”, for
“Something in the shape
Of these will live till man shall be no more.
Dumb yearnings, hidden appetites are ours,
And they must have their food.” (The Prelude V, 504 f.)
From the desperate ennui of the time two avenues of escape offered, leading respectively to the remote in space or in time.” (Chew, 1964: 2)
[21]And even G.W.F. Hegel contemporaneously tried for a similar madness in Philosophy, in as much as his systematic attempt to think ‘the Absolute’ lead him to assert that his intellect could potentially foresee the End of History.
[23]Let’s just not forget to note the evidence here that without even really reaching middle-age he traversed most of the Mediterranean, slept with many hundreds of people from the majority of races and genders (including his half-sister) and swam the Hellespont in just over an hour despite being born with a club foot.
[24]As well as Byron’s own of course, in as much as his most characteristic catch-phrase was probably “I deny nothing, but I doubt everything.”
[25]Again, a little example of Byron’s wit in modernizing the Bible, changing the metaphysical essentialism of God’s “I am that I am” in the original to the Devil’s open-handed performance of ‘seeming’ the truth of himself here.
Categories: Essays/Prose