At the similarly tender age of twenty, in
another poem entitled ‘‘To a Lady, on being
asked my reasons for quitting England in the
spring,’’ Byron set the double movement of banish-
ment—its charged, liminal,past-and-present inter-
change—into the fundamental terms of Genesis:
‘‘When man expell’d from Eden’s bowers, / A
moment linger’d near the gate, / Each scene recall’d
the vanish’d hours...’’ Such lingering would
actually last much longer than a minute for
Byron; one only has to recall the gate-shadowed
action of Cain (1821), taking place in ‘‘The land
without Paradise, ’’ to realize the constancy of this
setting in his canon—after thirteen years still giving
rise to ‘‘melancholy yearnings o’er the past,’’
(III.i.36) still prompting spectral walk-ons. Cain’s
lingering by ‘‘the inhibited walls’’ (I.i.80) of Eden
attracts Lucifer, the slippery ‘‘Master of Spirits,’’
(I.i.98) whose proud alienation (‘‘I dwell apart; but
I am great’’ [I.i.308]) evokes a long line of scowling
and once wildly popular Byronic heroes. Such fig-
ures, whose impact had faded to cliche long before
Cain, nonetheless prove surprisingly trenchant
haunters of Byron’s later verse, liable at any time
to come back from the world of spirits. Selim,
doomed hero ofThe Bride of Abydos(1813), specif-
ically waits to reemerge on the shoreline of his
lover’s cypress grove: ‘‘And there by night, reclin’d,
’tis said, / Is seen a ghastly turban’d head—/ And
hence extended by the billow, / ‘‘Tis named the
‘Pirate-phantom’s pillow’!’’ (II.725–28).
Even before he was cast aside by his author,
left to haunt Byron’s later verse as the relic of an
abandoned mode, the Byronic hero had been
more phantom than man. In the series of narra-
tives often referred to as Byron’s Eastern Tales—
best-sellers dashed off during his London Years
of Fame (1812–1816)—this breed of hero lives
and dies amid unsettling recollections of what
has vanished; expelled by force or temperament
from his homeland, he moves within a purgatory
of specters. His world is an uncomfortable blend
of spectral disenchantment: Childe Harold’s
death-in-life Greece (‘‘In all save form alone,
how changed!’’ he observes of a land populated
by ‘‘Shades of the Helots‘‘ (II.711, 726) defines
the general climate of the Tales.The Giaour
(1813), the first Eastern Tale, is set in the same
dead Greece (‘‘’T is Greece, but living Greece no
more! / So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, / We start,
for soul is wanting there’’ [91–93]); likeChilde
Harold, theGiaourwends through this waste-
land bereft of love, of soul, constantly nostalgic,
and doomed by a curse to origin-haunting
displacement (‘‘on earth as Vampire sent, / Thy
course shall from its tomb be rent: / Then ghastly
haunt thy native place, / And suck the blood of
all thy race’’ [755–58]). Byron’s later texts, even
as they take sharp turns away from the Eastern
Tales in format and tone, build on this early
obsession with perpetual dislocation and its
attendant hauntings; they teem with corrupted
settings and uprooted evocations of a figure
who, from the beginning, had been presented to
the reader as irretrievably alienated.
As such, Byron’s canon, however it may
seem to repudiate itself, stays faithful to his
early insight that the unsettling passage away
from the familiar, from a point of origin, gives
rise to uncanny emergence of what has been left
behind. Stocking his later texts with references to
outmoded protagonists, Byron was not mocking
his earlier career, or even ironically ‘‘exploit[ing]
a winning formula.’’ Instead he was preserving a
sense of disrupted origins that, ultimately, drives
the vast carnival of displacement comprising
Don Juan(1818–24): the open-ended unhousing
emblematic of what Edward Said has called
‘‘interpretive series.’’ The movement of Byron’s
career is from vortexes of disenchantment into
the paradoxical vision that was already apparent
to him as a youth on the brink of Eden’s bowers:
the improbable rise of close impossibilities. In
later texts, Byron’s exilic haunting gives rise to
double visions important and sustaining enough
to exemplify what Michael G. Cooke has called
‘‘the force of coincidentia oppositorum, an iden-
tification or interpresence between phenomena
that seem to deny each other.’’ The awareness of
displacement blooms into particularly charged
acts of binding in Byron’s work as his canon
turns back on itself: continual confrontations
of the past with what is replacing, even repudiat-
ing it.
Paul Elledge has characterized the promis-
cuity ofBeppo(1818)—its digressive presenta-
tion of an adulterous affair—as ‘‘a strategy by
which departure need not entail division, or sep-
aration necessarily forfeit attachment.’’We can
push that formula further: Byron’s embrace of
exile was commitment to a strategy of writing
whereby departure multiplies possibilities, divi-
sion leads to unlikely reemergence. The confron-
tation of a (nostalgic) present with an (uprooted)
past is bristling and unpredictable; the anach-
ronism alone (in Derrida’s terms, ‘‘a dis-located
time of the present...the joining of a radicallyWhen We Two Parted