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Byron's Cain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Leonard Michaels
Leonard Michaels*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
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Extract

BYRON'S Cain, to no one's surprise, is a Byronic hero—disaffected, self-pitying, self-hating, suicidal—but he can be distinguished from such Byronically heroic figures as Lara and Manfred because, for one thing, he is not directly presented to us agonizing over his guilty past. Cain is presented in fact with no past except divine history and he protests, again and again, that this belongs not at all to him but to his blundering parents and God. There is no crime, then, no wretchedly sinful experience, for which this hero can be held responsible, and he is thrust upon us, embittered and complaining, without any personal history to account for the difference between himself and his pious community. Ultimately, however, there is the murder of Abel and, to compare Cain with other Byronic heroes, it should be said the murder replaces the sin or crime in the hero's past which Byron ordinarily leaves obscure. More relevant to my present concern is the fact that the murder has the effect of identifying Cain to himself and his community as none other than Cain, the infamous Biblical murderer. “Am I then my brother's keeper?” he asks.1 The addition of “then” to the notorious question suggests that Cain has read the Bible; it also reveals the curious way in which Byron has conceived this particular hero—as reliving rather than living the Biblical myth. In effect, Byron's Cain is a dramatic creature who plays Cain until, voilà, he murders his brother and discovers he is Cain.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , January 1969 , pp. 71 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969

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References

1 Quotations from Cain are from The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 7 vols. (London, 1898–1904), v; hereafter cited as PW.

2 Letter to Murray, 12 Sept. 1821; The Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, 6 vols. (London, 1898–1901), v, 361.

3 “Byron and the Politics of Paradise,” PMLA, lxxv (Dec. 1960), 571–576. This very useful article is incorporated in altered form in Bostetter's The Romantic Ventriloquists (Seattle, Wash., 1963). Part of it appears in the introduction to the book and the rest in a section on Cain, pp. 288–293.

4 “Byron and the Politics of Paradise,” pp. 571, 574.

5 “Byron and the Politics of Paradise,” p. 574.

6 PW, p. 208.

7 Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bk. i, Ch. vii. It is perhaps superfluous to say that many passages in The Institutes may be cited in support of the idea that Cain often reads like a simple, ironic inversion of Calvin's theological admonitions, especially in regard to our knowledge of God, the validity of scripture and human reason, the need for a spiritual guide, and the knowledge of self in relation to the knowledge of God.

8 Discussing modern literature in its a historical aspect, Georg Lukacs makes a general point very pertinent to our view of the structure of Cain: “… negation of history takes two different forms in modernist literature. First the hero is strictly confined within the limits of his own experience. There is not for him—and apparently not for his creator—any pre-existent reality beyond his own self, acting upon him or being acted upon by him. He is ‘thrown-into-the world’; meaninglessly, unfathomably. He does not develop through contact with the world; he neither forms nor is formed by it. The only ‘development’ in this literature is the gradual revelation of the human condition. Man is now what he has always been and always will be. The narrator, the examining subject, is in motion; the examined reality is static.” The passage appears in Realism in Our Time (New York : Harper and Row, 1964), p. 21.

9 Paul West offers several opinions about Byron's plays in Byron and the Spoiler's Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), which in a general way seem to coincide with the spirit of my argument. For example: “His mystery plays are stunts. [They] travesty our ideas of congruity” (p. 113). Unfortunately, West offers little close reading and, therefore, produces little that can be engaged for the purpose of analytical discussion. Other critics offer comments on Cain which very basically conflict with my argument insofar as they attribute ordinarily logical coherence to the play. Their comments may be discovered in the following places: Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, 1947), p. 199; W. Paul Elledge, “Imagery and Theme in Byron's Cain,” K-SJ, xv (1966), 56–57; William H. Marshall, The Structure of Byron's Major Poems (Philadelphia, 1962), p. 137; and Edward E. Bostetter, cited above in n. 3. Robert F. Gleckner's recent book, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore, Md., 1967), offers an analysis of Cain quite different from mine, but it coincides more or less in one major point. Gleckner says, “Cain, as I see it, exists in the very state of slavery he had rebelled against throughout the play” (p. 326).

10 This feature of the play is similar in some respects to what Allain Robbe-Grillet says about narrative in the contemporary novel. He thinks “linear plots, regular trajectory of the passions, impulse of each episode toward a conclusion” are all part of traditional narrative and no longer justifiable because they suggest an idea of order and stability in the world which is not consistent with contemporary ideas and with the formal obligations of contemporary writers. Beckett is offered as a normative example. Robbe-Grillet's comments may be found in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 32–33.