Byron's Corpse

I'm writing part of my dissertation on Byron's funeral, and the struggle over control of his meaning not only between his early biographers but also in the way Byron was buried.  My hope is that this story will give insight on how Byron is represented in J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace which, I argue, deals not only with Byron's ghost but with a liberal arts professor who mourns for Byron and the loss of the liberal arts system he comes to represent after his death.  Byron, literariness, and the humanities all become remnants of an imperial system whose fantasies are threatened by the postcolonial landscape of South Africa and the corporate 'realities' of the University.

Remembering Byron means remembering his cosmopolitanism as part of his aristocratic character, and merging his liberal political inclinations with his priviledge.  Byron's example, I argue, inspires both political liberalism and elitism, and the combination of the two becomes a central part of what emerges in the latter portion of the 19th century as liberal arts education--gentlemanly tourism or the study abroad system being an essential part of what makes the well-rounded intellectual. 

I was struck, then, at John Hobhouse's description of viewing Byron's corpse.  Hobhouse was one of Byron's lifelong friends and accompanied the corpse from Greece, where Byron died, back to England.  There seems to be something about how Hobhouse views Byron's corpse that defies the image of a perfect, cosmopolitan artist--something that defies Byronism--something that seems, though I can't argue this just yet, to unleash the uncanniness of Byron's aristocratic orientalism.   This is from the entry dated July 6, 1824. 

It [the corpse] did not bear the slightest resemblance to my dear friend.  The mouth was distorted and half open, showing those teeth, in which, poor fellow, he once so prided himself, quite discoloured by the spirits. His upper lip was shaded with red mustachios which gave a totally new colour to his face, his cheeks were long and bagged over the jaw, his nose was quite prominent at the ridge, and sunk in between the eyes, perhaps from the extraction of the brain.  His eyebrows shaggy and lowering.  His forehead, marked with leech-marks probably, his eyelids closed and sunken – I presume the eyeballs having been removed when he was embalmed.  His skin was like dull yellow parchment.  So complete was the change that I was not affected as I thought I should be.  It did not seem to be Byron.  I was not moved so much scarcely as at the sight of his handwriting, or anything that I know to be his. 

Byron's "handwriting" is more a trace of a lost essence than his body.   The rest, shrunken slightly from being embalmed in Greece, has a quality that invokes another side of the otherness Byron flaunted when he dressed in clothes from exotic countries.  Instead of an otherness Byron can wear as a fabric, this otherness is slowly creeping onto his shriveling body.  In fact, this Byron--this Byron who is not Byron--cannot inspire the same immediate emotion as the British poet who wrote Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and scandalized British society.  Wrenched from himself and his handwriting, Byron becomes his own doppelganger who, outfitted with a strange mustache that sets off his face in a different way, mocks the cosmopolitanism that defined Byron's market celebrity.  Byron's cosmopolitanism, at least as it was marketed to readers back in Britain, rested upon the exotic descriptions he included in his Oriental Tales.  Could it be that in death the double of "Byron the genteel cosmopolitan," rough, ragged, his skin yellow and shriveled takes over his body?  Could it be that Hobhouse is fearful that the otherness Byron encountered on his voyages was stripping him of his Britishness, that Byron's body couldn't return to the England from which he was exiled because his corpse was no longer English, that Byron was literally becoming the other he depicted in his tales?

 

Comments

[Matt]

Nice post, Roger. It may interest you (if you aren't aware already, that is) that likewise for Blanchot, if I remember correctly, the corpse is always something of an image par excellence, that is, in its unusual, (seemingly unprecedented), absolutely uncanny 'resemblence to itself' it is suddenly an image singular and primary (as opposed to being an image of some-thing, it is suddenly nothing but itself), which strikes us, paradoxically, as being not unlike an impersonator. The corpse reveals an otherness normally passed over or forgotten, precisely that otherness (Blanchot would say) which is perpetually concealed in images and words (recalling also comments in another context here).

Anyway, here's hoping for a series, as I would love to hear more about Byron, Coetzee and Imperial Arts.

[Roger Whtison]

Thanks Matt...I was afraid the post might not be appropriate to Long Sunday, but I guess I was wrong? Oh, and thanks for the Blanchot discussion. Do you know the reference for these remarks? I may incorporate them into the chapter. I'm looking for more quotes that tie the unexpectedness of the corpse to issues of nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

For Coetzee, it is precisely Byron's cosmopolitianism that makes him into a figure for the main character's lament for the liberal arts. On the one hand, there is an explicit political rivalry between cosmopolitanism and a postcolonialism that would challenge any universalizing tendencies of the cosmopolitan. On the other, you have Coetzee's belief in the salvific quality of aesthetic creation as part of a living through of fundamental questions about existence. The big problem here is the figure of Byron for whom you can't separate his aesthetic practice from his market personality (at least in Britain) from his cosmopolitanism. All are folded into the other. So, I might write more about this subject, especially if it proves productive and popular with the other readers of the blog.

[Celine]

What about his pal, PB Shelley? That boy's funereal pyre, er, fire rocked as well. Byron & Shelley--sorta the Batman & Robin of romance...........(one difference between B & S being that like nearly 10% of PBS's manga still holds up)

[Celine]

Which is to say, if the literary pros now situate the writing of PB Shelley (along with Byron's) in the euro-Imperialist camp, hail Caesar..........Shelleyan fire burns a hole right through stacks of futile marxist hack-prose, pop-irony, Freudian-flunkies, potboilers, zionist lit-racketeering ...............

[Infinite Thought]

A Shelley anecdote recounted to me this weekend. Officially, Shelley is said to have been sent down from Oxford for atheism. But apparently the real reason he got kicked out was his penchant for swapping babies in the prams local Oxford women used to leave outside shops whilst they bought their groceries.

We were wondering whether this was an act of generic humanist egalitarianism, anti-family anti-bourgeois rebellion...or simply student high jinks. Assuming it's true, of course...

[Roger Whitson]

Celine, I loved what you said about Byron and Shelley being the Batman and Robin of romance. I wonder, though, who is Robin and who Batman...if Shelley is Robin, would Polodori be that other Robin DC killed in 1989? Also, could you elaborate more on Shelleyan fire? Are you speaking about Shelley's afterlives and his contribution to British socialism? Or are you making a much larger argument about Shelley's relationship to lit crit?

Infinite Thought...I actually asked Nancy Mayer, a Shelley scholar, about this rumor. She argued that, at least historically speaking, it is an impossibility. Prams weren't actually in widespread use in Oxford until well into the 1840s (by which time, of course, Shelley was dead), and are usually considered a Victorian rather than Romantic convenience. Everyone other than poor people (who could have used wagons, but generally did not) had servants taking care of the babies. I think, had Shelley been able to steal babies from the prams it could have equally been anti-family radicalism AND student highjinks. He was obviously not that interested in his own children, at least unless it suited him to be so (much like Byron).

[Infinite Thought]

Ah! The disappointment of history! The story does seem curiously appropriate to PBS though, so perhaps he'd swapped babies in hospitals or something instead. Admire your commitment to research though, and I love the idea of a conversation with a Shelley scholar that would begin 'so, erm, did Shelley ever, you know, swap babies in prams outside Oxford shops?'

[Celine]

"""""Or are you making a much larger argument about Shelley's relationship to lit crit?""""

Yeah that's it mostly. Don't have time for some lengthy exegesis, but we suggest Shelley (the cosmopolitan celebrity and his writings) has hisself been commodified---perhaps the "canon" itself is a marketing tool, at least for the Ivy league or UC/Steinford sort of consumer-student.

Lit. types encounter Harry Bloom's spin on Shellay before they get Percy Byatch it seems. He's another name now, another artiste featured on the Greatest Hits of Western Lit.

SO professional Lit. mavens (like Bloom) misread, misconstrue and in general mock Shelley's complex philo-literary writing (sort of Pynchonian really, and polymathic, with a bit more class and authentici-tay), and that misreading then more or less replaces the real Shelley. Card-carrying Beatnik I am not, but I suspect Corso, Ferlinghetti and his cronies thought the same. Marx yawped some pleasant things about Shelley and Byron as well, if memory serves me well..........

infinite thought--yeah, history does the work of Oedipus sometimes (much like Deleuze said of the history of philosophy)...

celine--a useful book here (at least somewhat) is Paul Foot's 1980 _Red Shelley_ which actually attempts to make the same argument you are making here.

Both of the following quotes are from an interesting and extremely useful 1992 essay by Mark Kipperman entitled "Absorbing a Revolution: Shelley Becomes a Romantic, 1889-1903"

Engles on Shelley and Byron--"Shelley, the genius, the prophet, and Byron, with his glowing sensuality and his bitter satire upon our existing society, find most of their readers in the proletariat; the bourgeoisie owns only castrated editions, family editions, cut down in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today." from _The Condition of the Working Class in England_

Supposedly Eleanor Marx Aveling (Marx's youngest daughter) and Edward Aveling reported to the Shelley society that Marx considered Shelley a revolutionary artist and Marx reportedly said that "the real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand them and love them rejoice that Byron died at thirty-six, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism" (qtd in "Shelley's Socialism" [London: Journeyman Press, 1979], p.9)

This belief is reflected in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's _The Difference Engine_, which portrays Byron as an aging, somewhat reactionary, prime minister in Victorian England. Shelley seems untouchable--at least politically speaking--while Byron's more aristocratic demeanor (?) makes him problematic and more suseptable to becoming the reactionary he despised Wordsworth for becoming.

[Roger Whitson]

that last comment was by me, if it wasn't obvious. For some reason, LS didn't publish my name.

[Celine]

""""Marx reportedly said that "the real difference between Byron and Shelley is this: those who understand them and love them rejoice that Byron died at thirty-six, because if he had lived he would have become a reactionary bourgeois; they grieve that Shelley died at twenty-nine, because he was essentially a revolutionist and he would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism"""

Interesting. Shelley may have been "essentially a revolutionist", though most likely he leaned more to revolution via the "good" jacobins than via the sans cullottes (and maybe Menshevik instead of Bolshevik). Not sure PBS (after all, he read Sophocles in greek for kix, was fairly well read in sciences, history, metaphysic, etc. supposedly) would have agreed to being conscripted into the Peoples' Army (and the peoples might not have cared for him either). Yet Marx hisself claimed he was not a Marxist after the 1st internationale, right.....

That fiendish Fabian Bertrand Russell read his Shelley pretty closely reportedly (and admired PBS's politics and sublime lyrics, but thought him naive and a bit utopian (need citation--srry)). That's probably Shelley's faction, whether some doctrinaire marxists like it or no. PBS did sign his name "Atheist" near Chamonix, btw (that's in Bloom's Shelley for Dummies book methinx)

[Roger Whitson]

Some more information from James Bieri, who quoted the first volume of his biography of Shelley to me:

1. Shelley's expulsion from Oxford was probably related to his support for Lord Grenville over Lord Eldon for Oxford chancellor. He wrote a political article supporting the Whig candidate Grenville in 1809. Eldon and the Torys won, and this pretty much predestined Shelley for a fall when he arrived at Oxford.

2. Hogg reports in his biography that Shelley stopped a mother on Magdelen bridge at Oxford and asked if her infant could "tell us anything about predestination." Hogg, according to Bieri, links this odd behavior to Shelley's interest in Plato's (he says Socrates, but whatever) belief in reminiscences from an earlier life.

[Celine]

Re: Shelley/Whig/Tory

Do Whigs rate higher on the Gauche-o-meter than Tories? The standard story is that they do, but not always so obvious. Do you know if there was a Labour candidate? (probably not).

You probably recall Engel's essay on Utopian and Scientific Socialism. I would assert (a falsifiable assertion, however) that Shelley--the person, and the person's writing and "ideology"---fits in the class of Utopian Socialism more than it doth with Scientific Socialism. Literature, when it leans towards the left, still does so in a suggestive or persuasive manner. The writer of German Ideology, on the other hand, spends pages going over economic evidence, historical situations, even demographics. Literature is sort of inherently anti-structuralist, and Proudhonian, evocative; whereas Marxism is closer to economics and sociology--it is essentially empirical, though not of the strict Lockean sort of empiricism (the material dialectic--Hegel turned upside down---was how Marx dealt with philosophy of mind, or cognition if you will---yet Marx himself agrees to Lockean sensationism in many respects).

That may seem obvious (or structuralist, reductionist, etc.) but it should be recalled that Marx had some unkind words for "belle-lettrists": I think he was referring to GB Shaw. So what is the difference, sir, between the writing of a Shelley (who Marx seems to approve of) and/or a GB Shaw? Inquiring minds want to know. There may have been a bit of a romantic (and Utopian) to Marx as well, and Shelley brought that out............

[RatsinaHo'sGrave]

Bring back... the Byron Corpse. O Let it not rot in vain! ON the thorns of life, we fall and.........bleed.

[simon Raven]

Are you aware of this article:

'The Mystery of Byron's Corpse'

Innes-Smith R. Sunday Telegraph 1988

A witnessed account of what happened when Canon Barber opened Byron's tomb on June 15th 1938...

'After some deliberation, Canon Barber very reverently raised the lid, and suddenly I gazed upon the face of Lord Byron... The features, with the slightly protruding lower lip and the mass of curly hair, were easily recognisable from the many pictures we had seen. The body had been covered but the funerary clothing had decayed.
'The head was slightly raised as though it had rested on a pillow; parts of which could still be seen in the corners of the coffin. The colour of the body was dark stone. Both feet seemed to be normal. The right foot, however, had been severed just above the ankle, and lay in the corner of the coffin. I heard afterwards that in the doctor's opinion this was a skilful amputation made after death; and the cause of the poet's lameness was a deformed Achilles tendon. Neither foot was clubbed. The vault was finally sealed the following day.'

Canon Barber's account:

'Reverently, very reverently, I raised the lid, and before my very eyes lay the embalmed body of Lord Byron in as perfect a condition as when it was placed in the coffin 114 years ago. His features and hair easily recognisable from the portraits with which I was so familiar. The serene, almost happy expression on his face made a profound impression on me... I gently lowered the lid of the coffin-and as I did so, breathed a prayer of peace for his soul.'