rousseau byron

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Misreading Writing: Rousseau, Byron, and Childe Harold III Author(s): Jock Macleod Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Summer, 1991), pp. 260-279Published by: on behalf of the Duke University Press University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770661Accessed: 21-09-2015 17:49 UTC

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

JOCK MACLEOD

Misreading Writing:

Rousseau, Byron, and

Childe Harold III

S INCE THE PUBLICATION of Childe Harold III in 1816, comparisons between Byron and Rousseau have been frequently made.

Whether stressing similarities or differences, these accounts by and

large have compared the characteristics of the Rousseauian and

Byronic hero types, and often extended the comparison to the writers themselves. In doing so, they bypass an important consideration. For

English writers from Burke through the 1820s, Rousseau represented the primacy of sentiment over good sense, and of egotism over

community. Because Rousseau had been claimed by the Revolutionar- ies in France, his personal characteristics were used to represent the

political characteristics of the Revolution.' Writing about Rousseau, or about heroes with characters comparable to Saint Preux or even Rousseau himself, used Rousseau's iconic force for particular ends. Rousseau clearly functions in this way for Byron. As Duffy suggests,

Byron's Rousseau is the suffering servant of an energy that destroys himself as well as the ancien regime

.... Admitting all of Rousseau's faults, Byron nonetheless names

the man himself "all fire" and the man's purest epiphany the passionate but ideal eroticism of Julie. Such a characterization reverses the usual emphasis of English opinion. It acknowledges the tainted life of the man only to exalt further the

productions of the poet. (73)

Another critically important way Byron reads Rousseau as writer stresses "the productions of the poet" not as potentially revolutionary acts but as acts of personal justification. We gain a sense of this early in

Edward Duffy points out that comparisons between Byron and Rousseau in this context "presuppose a whole cluster of characteristics - egotism, sensibility, isolation, misanthropy - that the cultural arbiters of Regency England saw as interrelated symptoms of a personal pathology now spread to England" (75).

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ROUSSEAU & BYRON

canto 3 where Byron speculates on the reasons for revivifying Harold.2 In stanza four he argues that he will write

So that it wean me from the weary dream Of selfish grief or gladness - so it fling Forgetfulness around me.

(4)

In stanza six a seemingly different reason is proposed: 'Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now.

(6)

While these have sometimes been regarded as contradictory reasons, they are easily reconcilable. What Byron wants to forget is "the weary dream" of his excessive egotism (his "selfish" grief or gladness). And in order to set aside this egotistical world-weariness he needs "to create, and in creating live/A being more intense." Writing will offerjust that emotional intensity Byron needs to feel himself alive again. Indeed, this connection between writing and emotional intensity is prefigured in the earlier stanza in the conjunction of "heart and harp":

Since my young days of passion -joy, or pain, Perchance my heart and harp have lost a string, And both may jar.

(4)

The significant feature of these two stanzas is not so much the Byronic solution ("writing") itself, but the way the problem is perceived. The problem is the experience of loss. Byron feels he has lost the ability to deal with the world emotionally (through his "heart") and poetically (through his "harp"). "Heart and harp" here are not so much ways of being in the world, as ways of responding to it. In Childe Harold III Byron represents his loss as a loss of power in some of his sensing equipment. What he has lost, of course, is a wife, a daughter, and a reputation, the enormity of which is forcefully brought home to us when we read through his letters of 1816. These letters reveal an interesting ambivalence towards his predicament. Naturally enough, there is a bitterness towards the cant of English "society" which has excluded him. But there is also an intense desire to be readmitted to

2 Although a good deal of controversy has developed concerning the relation between Byron and Harold in this canto, commentators on the whole identify the narrator with Byron. To depart from this practice would raise questions tangential to my argument.

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that society, or at least, to be justified in its eyes." In addition to its

political function, the act of writing for Byron needs to be understood in this context of exclusion and self-justification, just as it does for Rousseau in his Confessions. This article aims to show that within such a context Byron's reading of "writing" as a mode of action in Childe Harold III runs radically against the grain of Rousseau's own project of

justificatory writing in the Confessions. His particular representation of Rousseau-as-writer within this thematics accordingly turns out to be a

misreading which is not only interesting in itself but suggestive in its

implications for Byron's own place in the history of English romanticism.

Childe Harold III is written from the stance of someone who "comes after": all that is left of a previous existence is in ruins, both in the

personal context and in the context of post-Napoleonic Europe. (It comes as no surprise that Napoleon joins Rousseau as the other great figure in the canto.) This stance is also found in Byron's letters of the time. By November 1816 he is writing to Thomas Moore that "my day is done" (5:125), and to his sister Augusta Leigh that his head feels as

though it is decaying (5:127). The preoccupation with death intimated in these comments is made explicit later that month in a letter to

Douglas Kinnaird, where he suggests he might as well be considered

"posthumous" (5:135-36). The similarity to Rousseau here is worth

noting, since one of the more frequent narrational stances in the

Confessions is that of writing posthumously. For Rousseau, too, death is the name given to that state which follows happiness. Thus, for

example, the incident of the false accusation at Bossey is likened to the

expulsion from Eden-the quintessential Christian meaning of death. More prosaically, when Rousseau is dislodged from Mine de Warens's affections by a younger rival, he is left "half-dead" (1:263) as a sensitive

being and his "ancien bonheur mort pour toujours" (1:270). To this

extent, Rousseauian "death" parallels the Byronic expulsion from

happiness. However, the posthumous stance has another function in Rousseau

which is lacking in Byron. For Rousseau, "fatality" and "fate" are connected in a way that establishes his narrative as a teleology. Put

simply, we could say that in the Confessions the direction of fate has its end in fatality-incidents, events, behavior, friendships, love, and the

:' Even after his arrival on the continent in May 1816, Byron was still hoping for a reconciliation with his wife (5:120-21), and when all thoughts of that possibility had disappeared his intention was still to maintain close links with his daughter Ada (his "whole hope-and prospect of a quiet evening"), and to return to England to "democ- ratize" it (5:110, 5:182).

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ROUSSEAU & BYRON

like, can all be viewed as "fatal."' Rousseau utilizes these narrative moments as signposts that point toward his present posthumous condition. They are ways of linking the past with the present, of

explaining the posthumous present in terms of the past. Byron, on the other hand, does not try to make that connection publicly and directly. Only in letters to a few close friends does he directly refer to the social

(and largely financial) causes of his "posthumous" condition. His

"public" response is to turn his back on the past, an action hinted at in the letters of late 1816 and more apparent in those of 1817. Although he is socially dead (as he is well aware)," his public response (the writing of Childe Harold III and IV and Manfred) can only take issue with a

perceived emotional "decay." The effort of self-justification that domi- nates the letters is transformed in the poem into a desire for energy (in the form of imaginative consciousness).

For both Rousseau and Byron, the function of writing and the way it is structured as a theme cannot be understood apart from desire. This is not a theoretical claim, though it is consonant with much post- structuralist theory on the constitution of subjectivity as desire. I am

claiming-rather more simply-that desire structures the kind of act

writing purports to be, and furthermore, because desire is structured in quite distinct ways for these two writers, so is the concept of writing. In Byron's case, as we will see, desire is essentially a metaphysical desire. At first glance this would also seem to be the case in the

Confessions. Rousseau makes it quite clear there that for his desires to be satisfied they need to be imagined; and for his imagination to work

properly he has to be absent from the object of desire (see 1:171-72). But another structure of desire in that text is elided if we concentrate too much on Rousseau's need to have his desires satisfied imagina- tively. As Derrida has shown, the object of Rousseau's desire is always a substitute or "supplement" for an absent presence, and desire itself

necessarily remains an autoeroticism (203-34). According to Derrida, Therese was a supplement for Mamma (Mme de Warens), who in turn was a supplement for Rousseau's mother whom he never knew (225). Derrida offers this long quotation from the Confessions to support his thesis:

Ah, ma Therese!je suis trop heureux de te posseder sage et saine, et de ne pas trouver ce queje ne cherchais pas. [I1 s'agit du <pucelage>, que Therese vient d'avouer avoir,

- Cf. "moment funeste" (1:261, 1:414); "fatale conduite" (1:345); "amitie funeste" (1:350); "epoque fatale" (1:418); "amour fatal" (1:496); "l'aveugle fatalite" (1:525); "l'anecdote fatale" (1:648).

See his letter to Kinnaird of 20January, 1817: "Besides - Caroline Lamb - and Lady B[yron] - and my 'Lucy' and my 'Polly' have destroyed my moral existence amongst you" (5:162).

263




innocemment et par accident, perdu.] Je n'avais cherche d'abord qu'a' me donner un amusement.Je vis quej'avais plus fait et que je m'etais donne une compagne. Un peu d'habitude avec cette excellente fille, un peu de reflexion sur ma situation me firent sentir qu'en ne songeant qu'a mes plaisirsj'avais beaucoup fait pour mon bonheur. II fallait a laplacede l'ambition eteinte un sentiment vif qui remplit mon coeur. II fallait, pour tout dire, un successeur A Maman; puisqueje ne devais plus vivre avec elle il me fallait quel-qu'un qui vci6t avec son 6lve, et en qui je trouvasse la simplicite, la docilite de coeur qu'elle avait trouvee en moi. II fallait que la douceur de lavie privee et domestique me dedommagedt du sort brillant auquel je renongais. Quand j'etais absolument seul mon coeur etait vide, mais il n'en fallait qu'un pour le remplir. Le sort m'avait 6t6, m'avait aliene du moins en partie, celui pour lequel la nature m'avait fait. Des lors j'etais seul, car ii n 'y eut jamais pour moi d'intermidiaire entre tout et rien. Je trouvais darts Therese le supplment dontj'avais besoin. (225)

Derrida places great importance on the process of substitution that is at work. Fastening, too, on "with me it has been everything or

nothing," he comments that "la mediatete est le nom de tout ce que Rousseau a voulu opin itrement effacer ... le supplement [Therese] tient ici le milieu entre l'absence et la presence totales" (226).

When we attend carefully to the process of substitution, however, we note that Therese is not so much a substitute for Mamma, as for a successful social position: "to supply the place of my extinguished ambition... I felt it necessary that the gentle tranquility of private and domestic life should make up to me for the loss of the brilliant career which I was renouncing." In fact, Therese is not even a substitute for Mamma at all. The relationship between Rousseau and Therese is

exactly the reverse of that between Rousseau and Mme de Warens. In the earlier relationship, Rousseau is the pupil: "As I should never live with her again, I wanted someone to live with her pupil [i.e. Rousseau], in whom I might find the simplicity and docility of heart which she had found in me." That it is Rousseau who desires to usurp Mamma's place and take on an acolyte of his own is revealed both in his general analysis of the relationship with Therese, and more particularly in the very paragraph that follows the one quoted, which begins 'je voulus d'abord former son esprit" (1:332). Therese is to be his pupil,just as he was the pupil of Mme de Warens.

What is at stake here is not so much a play of supplementarity as a

play of power. Even Rousseau's supposed desire to efface mediacy can be so understood, if we care to read his "everything or nothing" in the context of a different episode. Discussing the friendliness shown by M. and Mine de Luxembourg, Rousseau remarks that

jusqu'alors tout etoit convenable, et il n'y avoit point de mnal encore sij'avois su m'en tenir-la. Mais je n'ai jamais su garder un milieu dans rmes attachemens et remplir simplemnent des devoirs de societe.J'ai toujours ete tout ou rien; bientotje fus tout, et me voyant f~te, gite, par des personnes de cette consideration,je passai les bornes et me pris pour eux d'une amitie qu'il n'est permis d'avoir que pour ses egaux. (1:522)

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ROUSSEAU & BYRON

Here the "all" is not some metaphysical "presence" that Rousseau can handle only by infusing it with an absence ("rien"). It signifies, rather, the fulfilment of happiness that Rousseau believes can be attained in a society of equals. What he wishes to efface is not mediacy per se, but a particular kind of mediacy: that of codes and conventions (rules of behavior between people) predicated upon inequality.

In fact, when we work through the episodes where Rousseau dis- cusses his various imaginative satisfactions, we find two dominant structures consistently at work. On one level, there is a structure of desire holding absence and presence together through acts of the imagination. Here the usual consequence is the infinite postpone- ment of actual physical presence, which of course is the structure that preoccupies Derrida. However, when these episodes are analyzed in their immediate narrative context, we notice that in each case the fantasy is followed by a return to reality.

Take, for instance, the passage where Rousseau describes his mental state at the Hermitage in the months leading up to the composition of Julie. His memory has conjured up the images of women he had loved in his youth (1:427). Intoxicated by these memories, he says, "mon sang s'allume et petille ... et voila le grave Citoyen de Genive, voila' l'austere Jean-Jacques a pres de quarante cinq ans redevenu tout a

coup le berger extravagant" (427). This state of unfulfilled desire is significant because it immediately follows a realization that something is lacking in his relationship with There'se, and that he needs to find an object in the present to which this past-directed desire can affix itself. That object, as Rousseau himself notes, manifested itself as Mme d'Houdetot: "Elle vint, je la vis, j'etois ivre d'amour sans objet, cette ivresse fascina mes yeux, cet objet se fixa sur elle,je vis maJulie en Made d'Houdetot" (1:440).

Because Mme d'Houdetot has both a husband and a lover, it would appear that once again Rousseau has manufactured a situation where the desire can be satisfied only in the imagination. Such a condition is characterized both by desire and by fear of its completion. Yet if we return to the desire which triggers this (unrequited) liaison with Mme d'Houdetot, we discover that the fear ultimately has a social ground- ing. Very conscious of his public estimation ("the grave citizen of Geneva," the "austere Jean-Jacques"), Rousseau represents his desire in terms that indicate its inappropriateness in society. His fear, that is, relates to his position in a set of social relations: Cette ivresse, A quelque point qu'elle fut portee n'alla pourtant pas jusqu'a me faire oublier mon age et ma situation, jusqu'a me flater de pouvoir inspirer de l'amour encore,jusqu'a tenter de communiquer enfin ce feu devorant mais sterile dont depuis mon enfance je sentois en vain consumer mon coeur. Je ne l'esperai point, je ne le

265




desirai pas meme.Je savois que le tems d'aimer 6toit passe, je sentois trop le ridicule des galans surannes pour y tomber. (1:427)

If the social basis of Rousseau's fear is clearly evident here, it emerges even more in what follows. He recognizes the futility of this late intoxication, and his response takes a specific turn: "l'impossibilite d'atteindre aux etres reels mejetta dans le pays des chimeres" (1:427). In this land of chimeras there exists, not merely a number of desired

objects, but a variety of social relations that are as-morally pleasing to Rousseau as they are psychologically satisfying: Dans mes continuelles extasesje m'enivrois ' torrens des plus delicieux sentimens qui jamais soient entr6s dans un coeur d'homme. Oubliant tout a fait la race humaine,je me fis des societ6s de creatures parfaites aussi celestes par leurs vertus que par leurs

beaut6s, d'amis sfirs, tendres, fidelles, tels queje n'en trouvaijamais ici bas. (1:427-28)

On paper, this land of chimeras becomes the world ofJulie. And that world, where certain ideal social relations are made to obtain in order that the love story take its proper course, is patently a substitution for a real world whose social relations prevent the fulfilment of Rousseau's own desires.

Indeed, Rousseau's much vaunted inability to articulate his desires

directly in order to fulfil them is counterbalanced by the picture he offers of his early life at home, at M. Lambercier's, and at his uncle's. Desire there is constantly satisfied through verbal expression:

Accoutumt e une egalit4 parfaite avec mes superieurs dans la maniere de vivre, a ne

pas connoitre un plaisir qui ne fut a ma port&e, A ne pas voir un mets dont je n'eusse ma part, & n'avoir pas un desir que je ne temoignasse, a mettre enfin tous les mouvemens de mon coeur sur mes l'vres. (1:31)

Such a state is explicitly contrasted with his life as an apprentice. 'Je devins craintif chez mon maitre," Rousseau tells us, "et des lors je fus un enfant perdu" (1:31), until "tout enfin ce que je voyois devenoit

pour mon cceur un objet de convoitise" (1:32). The point is quite clear. Rousseau learned to desire and covet only because he was deprived of

everything ("uniquement parce quej'etois prive de tout," 1:32). And furthermore, this deprivation by a powerful and unjust master led him to covet in silence: "voila comment j'appris a convoiter en silence, a me cacher, ' dissimuler, 'a mentir, et a derober, enfin. .. La convoitise et

I'impuissance menent toujours li" (1:32). The "silent longing" which is so important in Derrida's construction of a metaphysical desire

simply does not apply in these circumstances. If Rousseauian desire is characterized at least in part by a strong

current of mediation whereby desire is linked to its fulfilment in a society of equals, the same cannot be said of Byronic desire in Childe Harold III. The difference, asJames Hill has argued in a discussion of

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Wordsworth and Byron, is between a psychology that is "ontogenetic and teleological" and one that "defines itself in dramatic or lyric terms, centering on the experience as it occurs and on the unpredictable but significant direction of the mind's response to the experience" (126, 127). Viewed in this light, Byronic desire in Childe Harold III can

readily be seen as metaphysical desire." Initially it has to be understood as an attempted escape from mere subjectivism. Structurally, this is achieved by distinguishing himself as narrator from Harold. It is developed thematically when Harold reaches the Alps. In the preced- ing stanzas the dominant preoccupation is the inability to resolve egotism's positive and negative aspects. A recognition of justified superiority is accompanied by a recognition of its worst consequences. Napoleon functions as the locus of this problem as it occurs in the political arena, but the character type in general is best encapsulated in the following representation:

But quiet to quick bosoms is a hell, And there hath been thy bane; there is a fire And motion of the soul which will not dwell In its own narrow being, but aspire Beyond the fitting medium of desire; And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore, Preys upon high adventure, nor can tire Of aught but rest; a fever at the core, Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.

(42)

What the Alps bring by contrast is the possibility of "true glory" which is the product of "the unambitious heart and hand/Of a proud, broth- erly and civic band" (64).

The source of this "true glory" is not consistent, however. If at firstwe

might believe it to be civic virtues (the following two stanzas offer historical examples), we soon realize that the community to which

Byron really wants to belong is no common earthly community, but a

spiritual one. This emerges quite clearly from the mountain imagery in this part of the canto. When he first glimpses the Alps, Byron's reaction is typically metaphysical. These "places of Nature" have "throned

Eternity in icy halls/Of cold sublimity" (62). And it isjust the element of sublimity ("All that expands the spirit, yet appals," 62) that suggests to him "How Earth may pierce to Heaven, yet leave vain man below."

" That he himself conceived of the third canto as a metaphysical piece is supported by his comment to Augusta Leigh that "it requires reading more than once, because it is in part metaphysical, and of a kind of metaphysics which everybody will not understand" (5:159). Byron's metaphysics here are partly Wordsworthian, partly Platonic; both strains can be traced to the influence of Shelley, who was staying with him at the time. My concern here is with the structure of this metaphysical desire.

267




Here the purpose of the distinction between Earth and Heaven is

specifically moral. Earth (humanity) can reach Heaven, but only by leaving its vanity behind. While it might be possible to read "vain man" more generally, the denial of vanity that characterizes "true glory's stainless victories" in stanzas 64 to 66 suggests that we are being asked to take the moral weight of the expression.

But in stanza 67, the mountains no longer connect Earth to Heaven

(the "pierce" of stanza 62). Rather they are equated with one side of the pair. Here the mountains are portrayed as a heaven whose immor-

tality is opposed to the '"just decay" of earth's empires: But these are deeds which should not pass away, And names that must not wither, though the earth

Forgets her empires with a just decay, The enslavers and the enslaved, their death and birth; The high, the mountain-majesty of worth Should be, and shall, survivor of its woe, And from its immortality look forth In the sun's face, like yonder Alpine snow, Imperishably pure beyond all things below.

Although the seeming intent of the stanza is to claim the immortality of the "deeds" and "names" of true glory, the thrust of the imagery is to remove any trace of earthly existence from that which is highly valued ("The high, the mountain-majesty of worth"): "And from its immortality look forth/.. .Imperishably pure beyond all things below." The "all" here gives the game away. No longer is only "vain" humanity to be transcended, but "all" humanity.

This direction of thought receives further impetus in the following stanzas. It culminates in a rhetorical question:

Is it not better, then, to be alone, And love Earth only for its Earthly sake?

Is it not better thus our lives to wear, Thanjoin the crushing crowd, doom'd to inflict or bear?

(71) whose answer is quite unequivocal:

I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me, High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture: I can see

Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee, And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.

(72)

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It is not human community Byron desires here. Nor is it any kind of earthly community. Though he gives it the name of "nature", that which is "around" him and with which he wishes his "soul" to "mingle," is an abstraction divested of any physicality whatsoever. Sky, peak, ocean, and stars are all physically very distant from the living subject. They can only be reached intellectually, as it were, or, more accurately, by an act of the imagination. Such an act of conjunction requires that subject and object be physically apart. Byron's desire, then, is to be so separated from the object that he can imagine conjunction with it.

These differences between the structure of Byronic and Rousseauian desire have an important bearing on the ways each writer conceives the act of writing. For Rousseau, writing too is structured as a mediation, notwithstanding Derrida's claim that in the Confessions he is

trying to install writing as "la restauration, par une certaine absence et

par un type d'effacement calcule, de la presence deCue de soi dans la

parole" (204). Arguing that Jean Starobinski "decrit la loi profonde qui commande l'espace dans lequel Rousseau doit ainsi se deplacer" (204), Derrida then quotes him: Comment surmontera-t-il ce malentendu qui l'empkche de s'exprimer selon sa vraie valeur? Comment echapper aux risques de la parole improvisee? A quel autre mode de communication recourir? Par quel autre moyen se manifester? Jean-Jacques choisit d'&tre absent et d 'crire. Paradoxalement, il se cachera pour mieux se montrer, et il se confiera A la parole ecrite. (204-05)

The source for this line of thinking is Rousseau's comment, "Le parti que j'ai pris d'ecrire et de me cacher est precisement celui qui me convenoit. Moi present on n'auroitjamais su ce queje valois" (1:116). It would certainly seem from this that the connection between writing and hiding is organized spatially, which, of course, suits Derrida's

purpose since presence and absence are fundamentally spatial con-

cepts. Once again, however, Rousseau's statement should be read in its

narrative context. In this instance, Rousseau has been recounting the

early, efforts of Mme de Warens to find him a suitable career. One incident causes him to break off the narrative mode and become self-

analytical. M. d'Aubonne, a man of some influence to whom Mme de Warens had introduced Rousseau, had judged him to be "tout 5a fait inepte" (1:113). According to Rousseau, this was the first of several such judgments about his character, and he is now concerned to put the reader right. He explains that while he has lively emotions, his ideas are "lentes t naitre, embarrassees, et... ne se presententjamais qu'apres coup." Consequently, successful thinking requires time: the operative verb is "attendre." It is the operative verb in the act of writing too:

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Mes idles s'arrangent dans ma tate avec la plus incroyable difficultY. Elles y circulent sourdement; elles y fermentent jusqu'A m'emouvoir, m'&chauffer, me donner des

palpitations, et au milieu de toute cette emotionje ne vois rien nettement;je ne saurois ecrire un seul mot, il faut que j'attende. Insensiblement ce grand mouvement

s'appaise, ce cahos se debrouille; chaque chose vient se mettre At sa place, mais lentement et apres une longue et confuse agitation.. .Si j'avois su, premierement attendre, et puis rendre dans leur beaute les choses qui s'y sont ainsi peintes, peu d'Auteurs m'auroient surpass&. (1:113-14)

Rousseau claims that the extreme difficulty he has in writing results from this (1:114). Clearly his desired "absence" here is not so much

spatial as temporal. Rather than seeing it as an "effacement" of self in the sense propounded by Derrida, we can view it as a tactic of power exposed, at least in the abstract, in confessions such as "ensuite ... rien ne m'&chappe" (1:115).

But it is not only a matter of power in the abstract, but also of concrete social power. After all, the impetus for Rousseau's analysis is his early failure to impress powerul people in the community. The

implicit connection between expression and power is revealed even more forcefully in the following passage. In it, Rousseau recollects his introduction to the powerful Mme Dupin in 1742, well before the success of his first Discourse, and just as he was starting to penetrate the Parisian world of letters. The passage needs to be reproduced in full to

give the proper context: Elle 6toit encore, quandje la vis pour la premiere fois, une des plus belles femmes de Paris. Elle me rerCit a sa toilette. Elle avoit les bras nuds, les cheveux epars, son peignoir mal arrang&. Cet abord m'etoit tris nouveau; ma pauvre tete n'y tint pas: je me

trouble,je m'egare; et bref, me voila 6pris de Mad" Dupin. .. Je mourois d'envie de parler;je n'osaijamais. Plusieurs raisons renforcoient ma

timidite naturelle. L'entree d'une maison opulente 6toit une porte ouverte a la

fortune;je ne voulois pas dans ma situation risquer de me la fermer. Made Dupin, toute aimable qu'elle etoit, etoit serieuse et froide; je ne trouvois rien dans ses manieres d'assez agacant pour m'enhardir. Sa maison, aussi brillante alors qu'aucune autre dans Paris rassembloit des soci&tes auxquelles il ne manquoit que d'etre un peu moins nombreuses pour etre d'elite dans tous les genres. Elle aimoit A voir tous les gens qui jettoient de l'&clat: les Grands, les gens de lettres, les belles femmes. On ne voyoit chez elle que Ducs, Ambassadeurs, cordons bleus. [There follows a list of such notables] Si son maintien reserve n'attiroit pas beaucoup les jeunes gens, sa societe d'autant mieux composee n'en &toit que plus imposante, et le pauvreJ.J. n'avoit pas dequoi se flatter de briller beaucoup au milieu de tout cela. Je n'osai donc parler, mais ne

pouvant plus me tairej'osai &crire. (1:291-92)

Rousseau's coupling of sexual and social power is seldom more

apparent than it is here. This, of course, is no mere idiosyncrasy of his. We know the power wielded by rich women amongst the literati in

eighteenth-century Paris, and early in his own career Rousseau was advised to win the support of powerful women if he wanted to become successful. In rhetorical terms, the relationship between Mme Dupin 270



ROUSSEAU & BYRON

and her circle is synecdochal. For Rousseau, she "stands for" the power which membership in her circle signifies. By possessing her, he conquers the circle. It is not a matter of giving priority to either the sexual or the social here. The point is that there is a social aspect involved, as well as the sexual. The only way Rousseau could deal with that power-social as well as sexual-was through writing. And although in this case his writing (a letter) was rejected, he had estab- lished a pattern that would be repeated throughout his life.

Why does Rousseau write? Ifwe ask the question as bluntly as this, the answer presents itself in a fairly obvious way. Faced with such naked power as Mme Dupin represents, "le pauvre J.J." has to find a realm where the power structure is reversed, or at least broken down. Writing can achieve this because in the act of writing the situation is imaginary: the writer has significant control over its content. Such power, of course, is merely illusory, as Robert Ellrich has noted in his study of Rousseau's rhetorical strategies in the major works. Ellrich argues that Rousseau prefers writing to speech "because the writer is alone, and freer to fantasize than the speaker. The control that is the essence of fantasy permits not only the protection of a narcissistic self-image, but the illusions of autonomy, power, and gratification of desire" (221). Viewed accordingly, writing can be understood as an autoerotic act, "anticipating or re-enacting in fantasy the actual contact" (221). The answer to the question "why does Rousseau write?" is, in this view, that writing is an autoerotic substitution, a fantasy land where the refracto- riness of the real world is conveniently avoided.

But is fantasy always an element in writing for Rousseau? He is well aware of the structure of fantasy himself, and on numerous occasions throughout the Confessions writes of his love for it. One significant analysis is proffered in his description of the 1732journey from Paris to Lyon and eventually back to Chambery. Regretting that he never kept diaries of his travels, Rousseau claims that he existed more vividly and was more "himself" during those travels than at any other time of his life. This is because walking "animates and quickens" his thoughts (1:162). Walking "mejetta en quelque sorte dans l'immensite des &tres pour les combiner, les choisir, me les approprier a mon gre sans gene et sans crainte.Je dispose en maitre de la nature entiere" (1:162). His heart, consequently, "s'entoure d'images charmantes, s'enivre de sentimens delicieux" (1:162). This is just the quality of fantasy that Ellrich claims for Rousseau's writing. Indeed Rousseau himself calls it "le pays des chimeres" (1:163), and affirms that he did not want to leave it ("car sentant qu'a Lyon j'allois me retrouver sur la terre, j'aurois voulu n'y jamais arriver," 1:163). Yet a curious shift occurs when Rousseau asks himself why he never wrote down those "idees," as he

271




calls them. He argues that he does not control them after all. 'Je ne

prevoyois pas quej'aurois des idees; elles viennent quand il leur plait, non quand il me plait. Elles ne viennent point, ou elles viennent en

foule, elles m'accablent de leur nombre et de leur force" (1:162-63). This seeming contradiction occurs because for Rousseau writing implies the presence of certain social constraints (he frequently bemoans the "profession" of writing, against which he wants to pit the

spontaneity of genius).' In order to forestall that possibility, his "fantastic" thoughts have to remain free from the constraints that

writing would impose. So while they are his products (and therefore in a sense under his control), they are nevertheless presented as being free so that we in no way could regard them as partly society's products (which would be the case if they were committed to paper).

For Rousseau fantasy and writing are not the same. The difference lies first of all in the absence or presence of a reader. In his fantasies there are no interlocutors ("que m'importoient des lecteurs, un public et toute la terre, tandis que je plfanois dans le Ciel?" 1:162); the

implication is that writing, by contrast, is precisely for readers. (The Confessions as a whole makes this abundantly clear in its constant addresses to its readers.) More generally, the reader is a representative of society. In the episode we have just considered, fantasy and walking are linked. Fantasy occurs between concrete social situations-between

departure and arrival. It exists as pure release from them

("l'loignement de tout ce qui me fait sentir ma dependance, de tout ce qui me rappelle 'a ma situation," 1:162). Writing, too, is constructed as ajourney, and one that Rousseau often wants to prolong ('Je suis en racontant mes voyages comme j'etois en les faisant; je ne saurois arriver," 1:172). Writing, however, is a directedjourney. Its "end," which

may never be reached, is to "explain"Jean-Jacques to the readers he is

addressing. The difference is illustrated in this same episode. A dozen or so pages after it begins (with his regret that he never kept diaries of his travels), it ends with an apology for "ces longs details de ma

premiere jeunesse" (1:174). The narrative constructed from these "details" closes with his arrival at Chambery, and the news of an

impending job with the Intendant General. Its purpose, Rousseau

implies, has been to present the journey" of his character: 'J'ai promis de me peindre tel que je suis et pour me connoitre dans mon age avance, il faut m'avoir bien connu dans majeunesse" (1:174).

'Je voudrois pouvoir en quelque faCon rendre mon ame transparente aux yeux du lecteur, " he goes on, "et pour cela cherche 't la lui montrer

7 Cf 1:514, where Rousseau specifically links his distaste for "le metier d'Auteur" with the inequalities inherent in association both of "des gens de lettres" and "des gens du monde".

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sous tous les points de vue, 'a l'eclairer par tous lesjours, 'a faire en sorte qu'il ne s'y passe pas un mouvement qu'il n'appergoive, afin qu'il puisse juger par lui-m me du principe qui les produit" (1:175). This

"principle," of course, is "le merite" (his excellence, his talent) he is holding up against "des outrages de la fortune" (1:96). Rousseau wishes to bejudged worthy of being readmitted to the society of equals on the basis of his principe, his true, continuous self, as it were, which is presented as his talent as a writer. This is why "writing" should be read as a "directed" journey, as distinct from the kind of journey that characterizes fantasy. Thejourney is even more directed in the second half of the Confessions, where it becomes the analysis or explanation of a "plot." But whether the plot is seen as centering on the outrages of fortune or on deliberate persecution, its writing is directed predomi- nantly towards society, and Rousseau makes it clear he wants it understood that way. For Rousseau, writing can give the truth precisely because it is a social activity, even if the social element at the same time tends to corrupt the truth.

In Childe Harold III, on the other hand, writing is ultimately seen as futile. For Byron, Rousseauian eloquence impassions and brings to life, but ultimately destroys. The image he uses to portray that elo-

quence is "lightning" (78), and it is precisely in terms of lightning that Byron casts the discussion of his own poetic enterprise. As he says in the famous lines of stanza 97,

Could I embody and unbosom now That which is most within me,-could I wreak My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, All that I would have sought, and all I seek, Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe-into one word, And that one word were Lightning, I would speak; But as it is, I live and die unheard, With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.

The final couplet notwithstanding, this stanza is frequently regarded as just one more expression of Byronic extremism. The discursive act of which this stanza is an element, however, is a discourse upon the

authority of writing to present the truth of the writer's feelings. Like Rousseau, Byron wants to be believed. Indeed, a considerable part of his mental energy at this time was devoted to making people realize he was hurt, and that his feelings were genuine. This emerges very clearly from his letters. The following comment in his Alpine Journal to his sister Augusta is not unusual: on the 28th of September he writes that the Alps have not enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty & the power and the Glory

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- around - above - & beneath me - I am past reproaches - and there is a time for all things - I am past the wish of vengeance - and I know of none like for what I have suffered - but the hour will come - when what I feel must be felt - & the - but enough. (5:105)

Like Rousseau then, Byron writes in order that he may be believed. Unlike Rousseau, though, he does not have an epistemological ground for belief that sets up writing as a mediating activity.8 For Rousseau, the

"principle" of the self-the true, genuine self which is worthy of readmittance to society-is knowable through this mediating activity. That is the assumption upon which the Confessions rests. For Byron, on the other hand, writing fails to function as a mediating activity. It functions immediately: lightning or silence, all or nothing.

The fundamental problem in Byron's quest to be believed as genuine is consequently the relationship between language and reality. His

hope at the end of the canto is "that there may be/Words which are things" (114), that language and reality will be fused, and that therefore what he says will be taken as the truth. Rousseau's function is to act as a yardstick against which Byron's own enterprise can bejudged. For

Byron, Rousseau is pre-eminently the writer in whom language and

passion are one. This is indicated to us in the first instance by a

similarity in imagery. Rousseau's words, we are told, are "like sun- beams, dazzling as they past/The eyes" (77), and his love, a kind of "ethereal flame" sparked by "lightning" (78). The indication is made

explicit when Byron tells us that this love became

In him existence, and o'erflowing teems

Along his burning page. (78)

However, once the possibility is raised that Rousseau's "burning page" might actually have an effect upon readers, Byron curiously shifts tack from the issue of belief to that of world historical events. Rousseau's

inspiration, he says, brought forth "oracles" which "set the world in flame" (81). The possibility of bringing about another French revolution with its attendant evils ("But good with ill they also overthrew,/ Leaving but ruins," 82) suggests to Byron that there is a danger in

aspiring to be like Rousseau. The significant feature here is not the content of Byron's argument, but the direction it has taken. By choosing to take the question of language and reality away from the

S I have argued elsewhere that the concept of sentiment establishes this epistemological ground for Rousseau insofar as it mediates between sensation and intellect, between the realms of nature and freedom (see esp. 118-123). The concept of writing manifests a parallel function for Rousseau in the way it mediates between "inner" and "outer." Williams also sees a parallel between writing and sentiment in Rousseau, but he draws a different conclusion (see esp. 58-61).

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concrete and specific (where the problem of belief is paramount), and into the realm of abstract causes of historical events, he circumvents any analysis of the problem. Instead, it is converted harmlessly to the traditional opposition between the calm of nature and the strife of the human world:

Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake, With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring.

(85)

That it is "the wild world Idwelt in" suggests to us the convenience for

Byron of invoking the French revolution. It has effectively enabled him to avoid the real issue raised by the question of belief, which is that of community. (If we are to present ourselves as genuine, we have to have a community to be convinced. Without that we are merely posturing.)

Byron certainly raises the issue of community, but it too is displaced into an abstraction, the full sense of which can be grasped in two stanzas (89 and 90) redolent of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey":'

All heaven and earth are still - though not in sleep, But breathless, as we grow when feeling most; And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep:- All heaven and earth are still: From the high host Of stars, to the lull'd lake and mountain-coast, All is concentered in a life intense, Where not a beam, nor air, not leaf is lost, But hath a part of being, and a sense Of that which is of all Creator and defence.

Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone; A truth, which through our being then doth melt And purifies from self: it is a tone, The soul and source of music, which makes known Eternal harmony, and shed a charm, Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone, Binding all things with beauty; - 'twould disarm The spectre Death, had he substantial power to harm.

Insofar as this is a description of a fairly common spiritual experience, it is perfectly appropriate. The "feeling infinite" (akin to Wordsworth's

"sentiment of Being" and Rousseau's "sentiment of existence") can only be felt in solitude, and in the silence of nature. However, insofar as a description of this experience is only part of the larger issue of the

genuineness of human emotion and experience, and therefore of the

S'Wordsworth himself believed the third canto to be a plagiarism of "Tintern Abbey."

275




relation between language and reality, it is a withdrawal from that issue. Byron's experience of community can only occur at a quasi- mystical level, where language is unable to work. The reason for this is the way he conceives of such an experience. It is firstly a truth which

"melts" through our being, and purifies it from its ego. And secondly it is a "tone" which "makes known" an "Eternal harmony." These are both images of sensation. The dissolution of the self in order to purify it is a typically Romantic notion deeply bound up with explorations of human sensuality. Even the element of "knowing" is reduced to the sensation of hearing. The whole experience of community that Byron is invoking is based, then, on sensation (or perhaps more accurately, on imagined sensation).

When we recall that one of Byron's aims in writing this poem was to create "A being more intense" (6), and that the all that "is concentered in a life intense" (89) can only be grasped as sensation, we can begin to see the problem which for Byron greets the question of writing. For sensations cannot be verified publicly. This is argued convincingly by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations. Asking himself "how do words refer to sensations," he concludes that words do not "describe" sensations but "replace" them (s.244). One consequence of this is

particularly relevant to our considerations:

In what sense are my sensations private? - Well, only I can know whether I am really in

pain; another person can only surmise it. - In one way this is wrong, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word "to know" as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know when I am in pain. -Yes, but all the same not with the certainty with which I know it myself! - It can't be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean - except perhaps that I am in pain? (s.246)

Byron's problem is that he wants to speak of his feelings, and convince us that they are genuine. However, because he conceives of them as sensations (at one point he speaks of "the sensation of resentment," 5:121), any possibility of "knowing" them is lost. As

Wittgenstein's comments make clear, the issue raised by sensations is not epistemological but ontological ("I am in pain"). Byron has

prevented the question of knowledge from arising. At most, there is

merely a state of sensations (which in his particular case means a kind of attenuation of sensations) which can never be described or verified.

This is why lightning-as an image of writing-has to fail in the

Byronic project. Although in its natural state the lightning has a

reciprocal effect ("But every mountain now hath found a tongue,/And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,/Back to thejoyous Alps, who call to her aloud!" 92), when Byron wants to take on its mantle, the

reciprocity takes the form of sensation. His request is to be a "sharer" in

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ROUSSEAU & BYRON

both the lightning and the night it pierces: Most glorious night!

Thou wvert not sent for slumber! let me be A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,- A portion of the tempest and of thee!

(93)

Here, much more acutely than in the case of Rousseau, we have an

example of writing as autoeroticism. In sexual terms, Byron wants to be both male and female. Speaking, then, or writing-as lightning-is not an act which assumes reciprocal acts within a social framework. It is, rather, an experience or sensation. What Byron wants in this

experience is the sensation of individuation (the concentration of

energy in discharge) and of dissolution (the blackness of the night). Here the thrill of proximate annihilation is associated with the power of selfhood, but as in Manfred, the poet retreats from the brink.

Byron always has to retreat from the brink because of the nature of his project's assumptions. At no point does he conceive language as a

mediating activity as Rousseau does, nor does he conceive his feelings as "sentiments" in Rousseau's sense. Because his feelings are structured as sensations, and because such sensations can only be known

"immediately"-as by lightning, which is a realm outside human life and temporality-Byron is forced to recognize that they cannot be known at all. And consequently they cannot be verified as genuine.'" However we interpret Byron's argument in Childe Harold III, as a

linguistic act which attempts to convince the reader that he has

genuine feelings, it fails. That Byron himself was sensitive to that failure is clear from the tone of the whole piece. That he did not grasp the reasons for his failure is equally clear. If feelings are to be regarded as sensations, and if expression itself is to be felt as a sensation, then the

possibility of knowledge is denied. These assumptions about the status and function of writing manifest

what has sometimes been regarded as Byron's ambiguous position in

English Romanticism. If, as W.J.T. Mitchell has cogently argued, writing-the republic of letters-is associated in many English Ro- mantic minds with the rationalism and materialism of the French

'" Byron, however, still trapped by his assumptions, argues that love might provide the context for language's fusion with reality. The stanzas on Clarens (significantly the most communal environment in Julie) press this argument, but that he himself is unconvinced can be gleaned from stanza 114 where his claim that there may be "Words which are things" is undermined by the resigned tone of "Though I have found them not." Indeed, what hope there is is deferred to his daughter: perhaps her life, infused as it is by his genes ("blood" is the term Byron uses in stanza 117) will be the justification his writing cannot provide.

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Enlightenment and their consequences in the French Revolution,"

Byron's construction of writing in Childe Harold III radically under- mines his putative liberal faith in the fundamental principles of the

Enlightenment. Rousseau's own relationship to the French Enlighten- ment is also deeply ambivalent. Accused frequently by the philosophesof being a Platonist or an idealist, largely because of his critique of

materialism, Rousseau nonetheless shares with them a profound sense of the "sociality" of truth. His understanding of the act of writing is part of this. In the Discours sur l'origine de l'inegalite his aim is not to replace society with nature but to find "social" equivalents of the equality manifested in "natural" arrangements. Speaking is appropriate in the natural state because relations in it are between equals. Writing is needed in the inequality of the social state to reconstruct equality between writer and reader. (It is not the author as "author" who is

absent, but the author as "social inferior.") Because truth can prevail only in conditions of equality (we recall that Rousseau only learns to lie when he is made conscious that he is a mere apprentice), writing-for all its limitations-is the most likely site where this can occur in an

unequal society. Although Byron inherits this faith in writing as a vehicle for the truth, Childe Harold III indicates it no longer works for him.12

Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia)

Works Cited

Byron, Lord. "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." The Complete Poetical Works. Vol.2. Ed.J.J. McGann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.5 vols.

---. Letters and Journals. Vol.5 (1816-1817). Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. 11 vols.

Derrida,Jacques. De la Grammatologie. Paris: Editions de minuit, 1967.

Duffy, Edward. Rousseau in England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

Ellrich, RobertJ. Rousseau and His Reader. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 1969.

" See Mitchell 51-63. Cf. also: "I think there really was a fear of 'writing' in a much more ordinary, familiar sense (i.e., the printed as opposed to the spoken word) in the

early nineteenth century. This fear was based on the widely shared perception that the

printing press, in Hazlitt's words, was a 'remote but direct' cause of the French Revolution" (88).

1Byron's success as a writer-judged in terms of the size of his readership-is of course quite a different issue. Given the characterization of the European bourgeoisie by Balzac, Flaubert, and Nietzsche, amongst others, it might even be possible to understand his popularity among the bourgeois partly as a consequence of this very construction of writing as sensation rather than truth.

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Hill, James L. "Experiments in the Narrative of Consciousness: Byron, Wordsworth, and Childe Harold, cantos 3 and 4." ELH 53 (1986):121-140.

Macleod, Jock. "Rousseau and the Epistemology of Sentiment. "Journal of European Studies 17 (1987):107-128.

Mitchell, W.J.T. "Visible Language: Blake's Wond'rous Art of Writing." Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fisher. Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1986.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Oeuvres completes. Vol.1. Ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel

Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. 2 vols.

Williams, Huntingdon. Rousseau and Romantic Autobiography. London: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1983.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974.

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