Populous Solitudes: the Orient
and the Young Romantics
If Wordsworth had once wandered lonely as a cloud, Byron simply wandered, lonely. Unlike Wordsworth’s famous “inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude,” a mode of perception and reflection enlivened by “vacant” or “pensive mood”(s), Byron’s own inward eye can scarcely look at what he is or what he has become. The two versions of himself, although separated by fifteen months and thousands of miles of nameless “adventures,” are scarcely different—Byron cannot, in short, escape himself. Thus while Wordsworth’s memories of the receptive “host” of daffodils help bring him out of his wandering solipsism and work to enable a unified identification between the poet and external reality, Byron’s memories don “monstrous disguises” and march somnambulantly into the world.
In a deep sense, the manifold differences between Byron and Wordsworth (and perhaps between the first and second generation Romantics) are crystallized in their respective treatments of solitude and identity. For Wordsworth, the border between similitude and dissimilitude is always porous and subject to change. Wordsworth’s as a cloud is essential because the figurative as works to mediate between the solitary poet and the world—indeed, this as eventually links the poet to nature, humanity and his future self. Byron, on the other hand, always remains stubbornly skeptical of the process of identification—that which is the same, remains the same, and that which is different, remains different. Even within Byron’s optimistically imperialist survey of “the great quantity of very improveable land and sea” we are left with a bitter pun. Not only are these lands subject to improvement in a way that Byron himself is not, but these lands, and indeed the Levant and Orient generally, lack a certain reality—the lands, caught as they are in the narrative of progress, are un-provable, that is, potentially illusory. Byron cannot, once again, escape the unchanging solitude of himself. The imagination itself, Wordsworth’s engine of identification and unity, for Byron is something of an Orientalizing dream machine. And yet, in typical Byronic fashion, the tone of Byron’s plaint abruptly changes key. Having reached an apotheosis of isolation, Byron quickly declares that writing cannot heal any internal wounds or patch up friendships with former selves, but can only serve to distract one from loneliness: “the end of all scribblement is to amuse.” The remainder of the letter, in fact, goes on to relate a memory of Byron’s friend desperately, comically trying to save the unfinished manuscript of an “unactable” farce from a burning Drury Lane. Thus, despite the apparent differences in genre in these examples, we can see the two poets’ very different reactions to solitude: Wordsworth leaps into a mimetic play of memory, figuration and forgetting; Byron, like Childe Harold, seeks a “change of scene” in the Orient and, finding neither company nor Bildung, turns to farce. This ironic attitude, in fact, is carried through to the other side of Byron’s career when in his final work, Don Juan, his weathered and ironic narrator describes a young Harold- or Byron-like Juan as
Silent and pensive, idle, restless, slow,
His home deserted for the lonely wood,
Tormented with a wound he could not know,
His, like all deep grief, plunged in solitude:
I'm fond myself of solitude or so,
But then, I beg it may be understood,
By solitude I mean a Sultan's, not
A hermit's, with a harem for a grot (I, 87).
For Byron the problem of solitude is never resolved or dialectically incorporated, as in Wordsworth, but must
simply be endured and, subsequently, satirized.
The case can be made that the central problematic of the Young Romantics is that of solipsism. In terms of Foucault’s notion of ethical genealogy we can refer to solipsism as an essential site of problematization for the Young Romantics because the oneiric (or even onanistic) becomes for them “an object of concern, an element of reflection, and a material for stylization” (The Use of Pleasure, 23-4). Where the first generation Romantics saw a solution in the Self (as in Coleridge’s “I am that I am” or Wordsworth’s “bliss of solitude”), the younger Romantics saw only an endless desert of questions. We might speculate on the exact historical, social or psychological reasons for this particular site of problematization, but what is important is that solipsism gave these poets an organizing concern which cut across many different modes of discourse. Indeed, the problematic of solitude can be posed in a number of different ways: ontologically (the One and the Many); epistemologically (Self and World); ethically or existentially (Self and Other); politically (Individual and Community); sexually (Male and Female); or even culturally (Europe and the Orient). Byron, Shelley and Keats address the issue of solipsism on all of these different levels and nearly always through the lens of figuration. Thus even at the grammatical level we can see that this problematic conditions the Late Romantics’ poetic crafts. Each poet is a persistent gadfly on Wordsworth’s bounding roe, forcing each comparison to its crisis and remaining radically skeptical of all modes of poetic identification. Indeed, it can be argued that this radical skepticism concerning identity carries over into the Young Romantics’ respective treatments of ontology, politics and imperialism.
This complicated problematic of solitude is given its most sophisticated articulation in Byron, Keats and Shelley’s various stagings of the Orient, be they set in a contemporary setting or vague and mytho-poetic past. As we’ve already seen in the case of Byron, the Orient remains for each of these poets a point of both intense interest and intense uncertainty. If we look, once again, at the question of solitude and solipsism as a site of ethical problematization, then we can see the Young Romantics’ poetic treatment of the Orient as, among other things, a technique for establishing a critical distance between themselves and the problem of solitude. In Foucault’s terms, it creates the room for thought. In the case of the Young Romantics, however, this “detachment” of the self from the “object” of reflection is precisely the problem they are addressing in the first place. Establishing the Orient as a site of solitude and thus an object in opposition to the critical, thinking, imaginative subject simply amplifies the original problem of solipsism: how does one escape the prison of the self, or, in Byron’s terms, how does one ever even improve the self?
When this question is staged within what might already be an entirely constructed (imagined, Orientalized) setting, when even what appears to be an escape from the self turns out to be simply a mirroring of the self, the question becomes all the more forceful. It is therefore entirely logical and entirely paradoxical that the Orient becomes essentially a site of the encounter: between Self and Other, Self and Imagination/Illusion, Self and the boundaries of Self, Freedom and Tyranny, East and West. Thus what begins as an intensely personal or private concern (solitude, solipsism) quickly turns into an inescapably political problem.
“As for England, it is long since I have heard from it, every one at all connected with my concerns, is asleep, and you are my only correspondent, agents excepted.—I have really no friends in the world, though all my school companions have gone forth into the world, and walk about in monstrous disguises, in the garb of Guardsmen, lawyers, parsons, fine gentlemen, and other such masquerade dresses.—So I have shaken hands and cut with all these busy people, none of whom write to me, indeed I asked it not, and here I am a poor traveller and heathenish philosopher, who hath perambulated the greatest part of the Levant, and seen a great quantity of very improveable land and sea, and after all am no better than when I set out, Lord help me” (Letter to Francis Hodgeson—Patras. Morea. Octr. 3d. 1810).