Kenneth Crowell

kcc0002@auburn.edu

“Surely They’re sincerest, Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest”: Mobility as

Sincerity from Byron to the B in Apartment 23

I know this paper is supposed to be about Byron and the Beekster but I want to start somewhere

else: with Hitler: Hitler and Vautrin, Balzac and German reactionists: colonialism and character,

and the relation between the two. While rereading Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism I

came across something that struck me. Césaire writes about the villains of French literature:

the animal has become anemic, it is losing its hair, its hide is no longer glossy, but

the ferocity has remained, barely mixed with sadism. It is easy to blame it on

Hitler. On Rosenberg. On Jünger and the others. On the SS.

But what about this: “Everything in this world reeks of crime: the

newspaper, the wall, the countenance of man.”

Baudelaire said that, before Hitler was born!

Which proves that the evil has a deeper source.

And Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautreamont!

[. . . .]

Monstrosity? Literacy meteorite? Delirium of a sick imagination? Come,

now! How convenient it is!

The truth is that [we have] only to look the iron man forged by capitalist

society squarely in the eye to perceive the monster, the everyday monster, his

hero.

No one denies the veracity of Balzac.

But wait a moment: take Vautrin, let him be just back from the

tropics, [. . .] accompanied through the streets of Paris by an

escort of Uruguayan vampires and carnivorous ants, and you will

have Maldoror.

The setting is changed, but it is the same world, the same man,

hard, inflexible, unscrupulous, fond, if ever a man was, of “the flesh

of other men.” (65-66)

Balzac’s Vautrin, whose original is Byron and Byron’s heroes; Byron’s Conrads, Childe

Harolds, Don Juans, and ultimately Byrons himselves; James Vanderbeek playing himself in

Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23: these eruptions of character, these hyper-characters, are not

aberrations of post-enlightenment narratives—of realism. Colonialism, murder and Hitler are not

opposed to narrative continuity. Colonialism and neo-colonialism are the ür-narrative of realism

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and romanticism. And hyper-characters that erupt from the imbalances created by both colonial

capital and literary form are the limits of these twinned aesthetic modes of colonialism. In other

words, Byronic characters, such as Balzac’s Vautrin, who transcend individual narratives, do not

destabilize narrative; they are the vehicle that creates narrative and makes it go—“the same

world, the same man”; formal violations of generic constraints, as Derrida might say, provide the

genre a form.1 In another formulation, transcendence grounds the real. The Byronic hero

provides and is provided with the form of second generation Romanticism, which then provides

the formative character of the realist novel—via Dickens, Thackeray, and ultimately Balzac’s La

Comédie Humaine—whose characterological comedy then becomes the basis for the twenty-

first-century serial, which retains the prior genre’s Byronisms in latency until they erupt at

narrative crisis points. And thus Byron begets the Beekster.

***

I want to trace the interplay of narrative and its violent eruptions at the level of form,

quintessentially Romantic form, and its persistence into our rather humdrum everyday of sitting

on our butts and watching bad sitcoms. First the Byronic hero, who is as much a formal as

thematic innovation. We all can list some of the characteristics of this ubiquitous character—

unhappy, alienated, hyper-sexual, attractive…tall, dark, and handsome—and point to later

manifestations; James Van Der Beek in The B in Apartment 23 is one irony saturated example

among countless others. However, in the case of Byron’s poetics, the Byronic hero is both such a

character and a prepositional permeability: a nexus of subject, author, and reader. From Childe

Harold I and II on, the Byronic hero is always attended by poetic pyrotechnics that call attention

1 See Derrida’s “Law of Genre”: “the law of genre . . . is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a

parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of

participation without belonging-a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set. The trait

that marks membership inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form . . . an internal pocket larger than

the whole; and the outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as singular as it is limitless.

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to the multiple chronotopes necessarily at play within his production. Byron, frequently through

the ambiguous use of prepositions, calls attention to both read time and write time. The

availability of both time periods for poetic reference, then, constitutes what Byron sees as

poetry’s modern mobility. Byron’s narrator describes this version of mobility through the much

commented on description of the person of Adeline in Don Juan XVI and note:

So well she acted all and every part

By turns—with that vivacious versatility,

Which many people take for want of heart.

They err—'t is merely what is call'd mobility,

A thing of temperament and not of art,

Though seeming so, from its supposed facility;

And false—though true; for surely they’re sincerest

Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest. (15. 97)

In the note accompanying the stanza Byron claims that mobility “may be defined as an excessive

susceptibility of immediate impressions—at the same time without losing the past.” So mobility

here is not so much concerned with physical movement, although Adeline seems to have

“moves,” but with surfaces and their “temperament.” In this case the surface is Adeline’s

demeanor in society, which finally has Don Juan “doubt how much of Adeline was real” (15. 96.

8). “Mobile” surfaces are available to and changeable by reference points both of the immediate

present and those in the past. Adeline and her sort of organic mutability are susceptible to the

people around her and while at first this seems false, ultimately Byron shows this surface self to

be the ideal of society at all levels. Adeline’s mobility gives her her sincerity. To display a

character that uses her possible narratives arbitrarily and for the ease of those around her, giving

the lie to those grander ones, is the height of realistic writing: so, as the narrator of Don Juan

surmises, “Surely, they’re sincerest, who’re strongly acted on by what is nearest.” Byron’s

writing celebrates the realism of people’s susceptible surfaces, and indeed he cultivates his own

surface mobility, but what makes Byron quintessentially Byron is the extent to which his lines

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evince this same sort of sincere mobility that he describes in Adeline, which in turn shows

Adeline to be symptomatic of social formality even as she seeks to transcend social mores.

I want to take two more passages to display what I take to be the formal hallmark of

Byronic mobility. Here is an early stanza from Don Juan that is most emblematic of Byronic

form:

Julia had honour, virtue, truth, and love

For Don Alfonso, and she inly swore

By all the vows below to powers above,

She never would disgrace the ring she wore,

Nor leave a wish which wisdom might reprove.

And while she pondered this, besides much more,

One hand on Juan's carelessly was thrown,

Quite by mistake – she thought it was her own. (1. 109)

This stanza uses prepositions to conflate read and write time. Byron emplaces Julia’s vows on

the page of the book the reader is holding. They are there “below” on lines four and five, only to

be understood by compassing dual and competing deictic contingencies. Through this deictic

crisis caused by Byron’s prepositions, the multiple chronotopes of Don Juan enfold upon each

other. Julia’s “vows” now exist in both narrative and real time, as do their similarly deictically

ambiguous pair, “the powers above,” which are both absent and metaphysical but also just right

there, on line one: “honour, virtue, truth, and love.” Byron’s signature style of multiple deixis, I

would argue, is simply his signature style.

From this passage one gets the sense Byron would like to do away with metaphysics in

favor of a more humanist notion of love: a serious critique; but we also laugh at the bathetic

effect of echoing Julia’s confusion about metaphysical space with our own confusion about

literary space. And when Byron’s language can be used to emplot both the things within his

narrative and, in the form of the words-as-things on the page, the things of the reader that are

immediately at hand, one gets the feeling of sharing space and time with Byron. Byron is

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present: deictically emplotted at the writing desk, in the easy chair, or on the bedside table of his

readers—laughing along with them. This is what I would term the “Byron Effect.”

Here is an earlier example of Byron’s prepositional permeability from a suppressed

stanza of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I:

In golden characters right well designed,

First on the list appeareth one ‘Junot;’

Then certain other glorious names we find,

Which rhyme compelleth me to place below:

Dull victors! baffled by a vanquished foe,

Wheedled by conynge tongues of laurels due,

Stand, worthy of each other, in a row—

Sir Arthur, Harry, and the dizzard Hew

Dalrymple, seely wight, sore dupe of t'other tew.

Just as within Don Juan, Childe Harold’s narrator shocks the reader out of the narrative by

calling attention to poetic craft. And just as within Don Juan, Byron’s preposition “below” does

double deictic work, accentuating the satiric element of the verse and Byron’s presence within it.

Rhyme might compel the narrator/Byron to invert the order of the principle actors in the drama

of the Peninsular War’s Battle of Vimeiro, but so does his assessment of the blame and result of

the Convention of Cintra. According to Byron, Jean-Andoche Junot comes out ahead of Sirs

Arthur Wellesley, Harry Burrard, and Hew Dalrymple at Cintra. Accordingly, he places each in

the stanza according to his merits, embodying the reader’s geographic placement in space into a

character in the poem who is locked into sympathetic accord with Byron’s political evaluation of

Cintra. Byron’s prepositional effect, I think, is remarkable, but I want to suggest it is not reserved

only for Byron and foreign to more “traditional” narratives. Rather, this effect is a part of the

entire system of the literatures of post-Romantic colonialism, particularly those seemingly

innocuous narratives of realism that then become the inane narratives of the “bad” sitcom that

fills time during off nights in the weekly cycle.

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Byron’s prepositional work seems to ensure that readers hold their own time, the times of

Don Juan or Childe Harold, as well as the time of writing in the same view, each as real as the

other. Rather than threaten narrative denouement, however, this rupture enables the reading

contract by showing us (à la Coleridge) that we indeed have a disbelief to suspend. Prose

Realism, as Garrett Stewart noted,2 follows the same pattern, interpellating readers and authors

without ever letting us forget the act of interpellation. This is fundamentally Brechtian avant le

lettre: a breaking of the fourth wall. But more precisely, Byronic disruption of the narrative,

which is ever-present, provides readers with what Schlegel would term a “permanent parabasis,”

which in the case of realism means a narrative progression with its concurrent and concomitant

rupture by the realized time of reading. Paul de Man, in “The Concept of Irony,” via Proust, in

explaining Schlegelian parabasis, provides another rhetorical device that perhaps more precisely

describes Byron’s method, and that is “anacoluthon” (178). Anacoluthon is an unexpected

syntactical disruption. Fundamentally such a syntactical disruption is rooted in a jarring shift in

speaker and auditor positions, calling attention to the fiction of preconceived syntactical

progression. While Byron does not interrupt syntactical structures as in the more classical

definition of anacoluthon, the ambiguity of his prepositions jars his readers and himself from

subject positions absent but ever-present to the text, rendering his syntax an open rather than

closed system. This grammatical action is the organizing principle allowing the structure of

Byron’s poetry. The fundamental irony behind the shifting positions of reader, writer, and

narrator involved in the text of Byron’s poetry engender the digression and fragmentation at the

heart of not just Byron’s work but Romantic poetry generally and, subsequently, the realist

novel.

***

2 See particularly Dear reader.

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The Byronic is Ironic…permanently. And I think I have suggested throughout that the Byronic is

also both formal and characterological, as well as repeated through analogous formal structures

and characters within realist prose and modern television comedy. It is no coincidence that the

instability of the reader/writer contract has been internalized and normalized by popular culture’s

fetishization of Coleridge’s (1817) idea of the “suspension of disbelief.” As Coleridge and

Wordsworth suspected, to engender the quotidian we also need the fantastic. Or as Césaire would

posit, to sustain the primary colonial narrative we need the hyper-violent alongside the realistic.

Indeed, as eruptions of actual violence—such as Nazism, or the “Destruction of the Indies” as

narrated by Bartolome de Las Casas, or more recently Fergusson, MO—surrounding the colonial

project show, the hyper-violent outbreak and the exceptional, Byronic, characters are the real,

but through their formal adjacence to the ideality of the “realistic,” this violence grows and

sustains its opposite: the continuous narratives of everyday life such as the marriage plot, social

progress, the sun never setting on whatever empire.

Which brings us to James Van Der Beek and “bad” TV. Recently, much attention has

been bestowed on modern serial entertainment. In fact, NPR’s Serial reveals a critical mass of

critical attention, as finally the concept of seriality has taken the stage as its own character in

reality programming. Remarkably, NPR fictionalizes the true through self-conscious realism:

“Serial tells one story—a true story—over the course of an entire season. Each season, we'll

follow a plot and characters wherever they take us. And we won’t know what happens at the end

until we get there, not long before you get there with us.” There is much to be disturbed by here,

but one thing that is off-putting for me is that, generally, critical attention given to serial form is

given to such already hyper critical, aware of themselves productions: NPR’s offering, The Wire,

Madmen, Sopranos. Indeed, in a recent (really great) issue of Romanticism and Victorianism on

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the Net, Television for the Victorianists, each of these three shows, minus Serial, which had not

yet come out and which isn’t a television show anyway, were prominently featured. Notably

absent were treatments of the shows that make up the bulk of serial productions: the “mindless”

TV that takes up the majority of the prime time schedule and is designed for perhaps a three year

run: TV like Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23.

Don’t Trust the B came out to critical acclaim, but only lasted about two seasons. On one

hand the show was edgy, celebrating hedonism and referencing a host of New York subcultures

while insisting on its own amorality. But in another way the show was simply the de facto realist

narrative: person of questionable worth (June Colburn) moves from the periphery (Indiana) to

the center (New York) to establish herself and meets some setbacks, on the way revealing her

own value as an individual/character and through this value testing the true worth of others—

primarily that of her roommate Chloe and her roommate’s best friend, James Van Der Beek.

There is even a corrupt system of banking and law to contend with. Except for she just really is

not, June might as well be Esther caught up in Chancery: the Dickensian norm-character who

needs transgressive characters to get through the narrative. And, as with mostly all sitcoms (and,

mostly all realist novels), the show moved inexorably towards its own demise through coupling

and, presumably, if it had lasted another season, marriage during the farewell episode.

I turn to such shows not only because they echo classical realism and are primarily what

is watched nightly (although Netflix is changing this), but because such TV, with its blatant

repetition of the signature structures of novelistic realism, reveals how parabasis and hyper-

characters are indispensible parts of the realism churned out by and churning out the neo-colonial

narrative. Similar to Byronic character, or more precisely, similar to Balzac’s Vautrin or

Thackeray’s Lord Steyne, James Van Der Beek transcends the already semi-permeable borders

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of serial production as a Janus. Like Balzac’s Vautrin who is also at once a character and a real

person (the French detective Eugène François Vidocq), Van Der Beek maintains a mobility

allowing multiple subject positions.

In the screen capture above, during the second episode of Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23, the

character of James Van Der Beek confronts his past as Dawson Leery of Dawson’s Creek, as do

the show’s viewers. Giving a lecture at NYU about, well, about himself, but more particularly

about what he has learned about acting technique since Dawson’s Creek, Van Der Beek is forced

to replay for his audience his more famous scenes as well as gossip about fellow cast members.

The conjunction of his subject positions becomes the antagonism that structures plot. To sustain

the narrative we must hold three such positions together: James Van Der Beek, “James Van Der

Beek” as “James Van Der Beek” in Don’t Trust the B, and James Van Der Beek as Dawson

Leery. At once we suspend and de-suspend disbelief and must navigate our evershifting

relationship to the subject matter of the show through what becomes a visual, extra-syntactic,

anacoluthon. Our relationship to the show from the onset is ordered by the permanent parabasis

initiated by the hyper-mobile, and hypersexualized, character of James Van Der Beek, whose

Figure 1: James Van Der Beek as himself, teaching acting, trying to

not talk about himself.

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own serial production transcends the serial production of the show. James Van Der Beek, even

more so than Kristen Ritter’s (also hypersexualized and Byronic) character Chloe, establishes the

limit of the form through the affect of sincerity, reminding the audience that indeed this is only a

show.

Early in the second (final) season, Van Der Beek executes a similar maneuver. Note the

conflation in the screencap below, as June imagines she is watching Van Der Beek as Dawson

who then (within the walls of the serial) breaks the fourth wall to deliver a message to June that

it is super-lame to betray his trust and let his “kick ass SoHo loft” to strangers while he is in L.A.

for Dancing with the Stars:

In a certain sense this is just bad comic relief. However, in this episode, “Bar Lies,” as in the last

episode I discussed, this eruption of “Van Der Beekness” moves the show forward in the absence

of clear plotting. A character in the show ports the audience closer to the action making us, in

effect, deus ex machina through an absurd prepositional shift.

And this is no different than the Byronic poem, or the Victorian realist novel. Authorial

intrusion through eruption of mobile characters who draw viewers/readers into the action makes

us complicit in the vision and denouement of the sham-narrative. It is worth thinking about how

Figure 2: Present James Van Der Beek as Dawson's Creek James Van Der

Beek in a TV Screen.

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such formal structures of sincerity structure our responses to the text and the extent to which the

text pathologizes its readers through rhetorical maneuvers that then sustain it. It is worth thought

to the extent that aesthetic structures echo political and social structures. The banal, the

humdrum, and the realistic: the sitcom, or the reader who consumes these things, is part of a

formal structure that generally includes a violent explosion of Byronic character. In a show such

as the short-lived B in Apt. 23, that Byronic eruption is the Beekster; in the real life such

narratives both echo and remake, who is to say? What is at stake in our consumption and

normalizing of such mobile characters? What is at stake in our realist inability to imagine

denouement without transgressive hyper-violence? Césaire suggested 65 years ago just after the

horrors of Hitler that what was at stake was our humanity. Considering the ubiquity of modern,

Byronic narratives reinforcing that violence and prepositional displacement—even if only formal

violence and displacement—are necessary for the everyday, I would sincerely suggest that a

cancelled sitcom like Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23 is no laughing matter.

Ken Crowell

Auburn University

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Works Cited

“Bar Lies.” Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23. Nahnatchka Khan. ABC, 2013. Web. Netflix. 19

Mar. 2015.

Byron, Lord. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Lord Byron: The Complete

Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980. Print.

---. Don Juan. 1819-1824. Ed. T.G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W.W. Pratt. Int. Susan J. Wolfson

and Peter Manning. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review P,

1972.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 1817. Ed. Nigel Leask. Rutland: Charles Tuttle,

1997. Print.

de Man, Paul. “The Concept of Irony.” Aesthetic Ideology. Ed. Andrzej Warminski.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 163-184. Print.

Derrida, Jaques. “The Law of Genre.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York:

Routledge, 1992. 221-252. Print.

“Daddy’s Girl.” Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23. Nahnatchka Khan. ABC, 2012. Web. Netflix.

19 Mar. 2015.

Serial. WBEZ Chicago, 2014. Web. 19 Mar. 2015.