2 - Byron’s Cosmopolitan “East”

Summary

And once as Kaled's answering accents ceas’d,

Rose Lara's hand, and pointed to the East

Byron, Lara

In this chapter I focus on Byron's Eastern Tales, published in the period between the second and third cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. I explain how Byron's constructions of the lyric subject are forged directly by his early-career aesthetic and Orientalist inventions in his Eastern Tales. These racialized constructions provoke the development of Byron's “cosmopolitan” Romantic subject and its “Oriental” counterpart, a counterpart that serves to reinforce Byron's increasingly deracinated cosmopolitanism. I will show how this cosmopolitanism depends on a textualized and simulated “East”—a space of disidentification and defamiliarization that gestures back to Byron himself as an Orientalized figure. As a result, the Byronic subject ultimately inhabits a racially and ethnically flattened space such that neither the “Orient” nor the “world” is imaginable without the other.

Sir William Jones's description of “the finest parts of poetry” as “expressive of the passions” and “operat[ing] on our minds by sympathy” lends force and warrant to the eventual Orientalist sites, subjects, and settings that Byron deploys and re-imagines in the Eastern Tales (“On the arts, commonly called imitative” 216). Jones's description of the poets of the “Eastern nations” as “excel[ing] the inhabitants of our colder regions in the liveliness of their fancy, and the richness of their invention” (77), points to the “East” as a site of not only aesthetic novelty but an entrenchment of colonial, imperial, and racial logic. This logic makes the aesthetic act of turning to the “East” an appropriation of the “fancy” and “invention” of the East. The geographic “East” is discarded for an ornamental space of projection, one that writers like Byron capitalize upon to propel his early celebrity, or as Lady Byron called it, “Byromania.”

While cantos I and II of the Pilgrimage inaugurated Byron's celebrity, it was the Eastern Tales that followed—The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814), and Lara (1814)—that garnered him popular literary acclaim and readership. Multiple editions and reprints of these four tales turned Byron into not only a literary brand name but also a celebrated Orientalist.