"The East as an Island and Inspiration"

The East as an Island and InspirationVitana Kostadinova

The Mohammedans say that when they were cast down from paradise, Adam fell on the isle of Ceylon or Serendib, and Eve near Joddah (the port of Mecca) in Arabia; and that after a separation of 200 years, Adam was, on his repentance, conducted by the angel Gabriel to a mountain near Mecca, where he found and knew his wife, the mountain being thence named Arafat; and that he afterwards retired with her to Ceylon, where they continued to propagate their species. (Koran 5n)1

In 1816 Byron announced Venice and the East the greenest islands of his imagination (BLJ 5: 129). Geographically, one would think, Byron’s East was delineated by his 1809-1811 travels and could have synecdochically acquired the features of the isles in those “evergreen climates” that impressed the young man (BLJ 1: 241). “But,” to blend in the proposition of an archaeologist, “islands are more than physical land surrounded by water. Islands are ideas” (Robb 177). Utopias abound in these – sometimes authors picture the never-never land as an isle “not unlike a crescent” (More 77), sometimes as a “city of the sun” (Campanella), and sometimes it appears as a valley “surrounded on every side by mountains” ( Johnson 1). Thus, the Byron reader is tempted to puzzle over the greenest of imagined islands and redefine the concept as “something resembling an island, especially in being isolated or having little or no direct communication with others” (“island”). For the Romantics, the East loomed up as such a region of difference, and Saree Makdisi claims that “Byron turned to the East, in Childe Harold and his Tales, as a space towards which to escape – and from which to critique and contest – modernity and its claim on the space of Europe” (Makdisi

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148). Escapism demands some elucidation here since Byron was more a man of action and less a Romantic of imagination, who is “most deeply engaged” when he has moved furthest along his path “of displacement and escape” (McGann 1983, 124). Certainly no singer of the industrial revolution, Byron, however, reflects an essential trait of modern times when he calls attention to the individual. So, if he did not take to heart the technological aspects of modernity – as his speech in Parliament in defence of the Luddites would demonstrate – he never ignored its existential parameters: his hero is stamped by “the break with the universe” (Remak 44). It is the attempts to heal from this break that bring the Byronic hero in contact with different expressions of otherness, and the incidents of the encounter “are conceived and presented with a vividness not to be surpassed; and our impression from them is correspondingly clear and powerful” (Arnold 315).

Culturally, the East Byron envisaged incorporated the Oriental otherness of Muslims, and the Occidental parallels with Ancient Greece as the cradle of Western civilisation. Not being a poet of reductive dichotomies, he also obscured the distinctions between Eastern and Western, or European and Asiatic, for, to quote Michael Franklin, his “Orientalizing was simultaneously constructing both the East and the myth of himself, blurring the Eurocentric boundary of self and other” (70). It is this ever-shifting perspective, I would argue, that becomes inspirational and synonymous with the East, which is at once present and past, reality and fiction, us and them. In other words, the concept of Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 3) will have little or no place at all in this discussion, although Said’s understanding of the Orient as a place of Europe’s “deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (Said 1) will be paid tribute to.

When Byron made the important point about the sources of his poetic inspiration, he also defined his mindset in Coleridgean terms – complicating the convenient qualification of his works as poems of experience rather than of imagination. Imagination, says

178 Vitana Kostadinova

Coleridge, “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” (II: 16). Using this definition to set off a discussion of islands, this paper explores the meanings of the East in view of their function as inspiration for Byron’s imagination. It begins with the biographical facts of Byron’s encounter with the Orient and goes on to trace instances of how the West meets the East in canto II of Childe Harold’s Pilgramage, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Don Juan, suggesting that for Byron ambivalence is inspirational and has an impact on his constructions of identity and self-identity.

The Romantic association of an island with the poetic imagination we can blame on Shakespeare: in The Tempest, “the play that more than any other enacts the power of imagination” (Bate 4), he shows how the confined space surrounded by water can be featured as a corrective of reality. Of course, in the case of England, reality itself takes place on an island. Green evokes such connotations as “fresh” and “inexperienced” and the phrase “the greenest island of my imagination” calls to mind Byron’s boyhood. Biographical evidence confirms that an initial mental map of the Orient was sketched out by the poet’s early readings and his imagination was nurtured on texts about the East:

To the East he had looked, with the eyes of romance, from his very childhood. Before he was ten years of age, the perusal of Rycaut’s History of the Turks had taken a strong hold of his imagination, and he read eagerly, in consequence, every book concerning the East he could find. (Moore 119)

His biographer draws upon Pietro Gamba’s Narrative, which reports Byron to have said:

The Turkish History was one of the first books that gave me pleasure when a child; and I believe it had much influence on my subsequent wishes to visit the Levant, and gave, perhaps, the oriental colouring which is observed in my


poetry. (Gamba 149)2

Bernard Blackstone’s critical discussion of Sir Paul’s writing backs up the claim by declaring that

Rycaut concentrates and then expands in a very remarkable way all the Byronic interests in the Near East which I have come to think of as ‘the triple eros’—the synthesis of love, wisdom and power … (Blackstone 328)

What impact the text might have had on Byron’s beliefs is a controversial issue. Bernard Beatty does not accept Blackstone’s assertions regarding Byron’s loyalty to Calvinist predestination and its extension to the Islamic faith (Beatty 77). Even so, there seem to be no doubts about the inspirational effect of the exposure to the Oriental: Blackstone avers that “[t]he whole thing must have baffled the infant Byron […] intellectually—but stimulated emotionally” (329), while Beatty maintains “Byron’s Oriental Tales have an undertow of raw fear in them which is stimulated by unacceptable religious acknowledgements which, paradoxically, provoke Byron into creativity” (83). Translating his “feelings oriental” into poetry, Byron canonizes their source as a spot of Romantic pilgrimage. The East responds in kind: it turns its bard into an icon of Romanticism and a Bulgarian poet represents his spirit as a divine “winged sun” (Markovski 37).

The East provides a link between Byron’s childhood readings, the flights of his young imagination, and the experience of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the actual process of writing the Tales was informed by the imagined as well as by the experienced. Moore has added a Romantic spin to it by playing up the Wordsworthian notion of boyhood as much more imaginative than maturity (cf. the Intimations Ode):

In visiting, therefore, those countries, he was but realising the dreams of his childhood; and this return of his thoughts


to that innocent time, gave a freshness and purity to their current which they had long wanted. (Moore 119)

The Orient then was inspirational because it put the poet in touch with the imagination of his boyhood and “once more who would not be a boy?” (CHP II. 23). On the other hand it was instrumental in shaping up his adult thoughts. It was Moore’s judgment that “travel conduced … essentially to the formation of his [Byron’s] poetical character” (Moore 119). The trip to the Ottoman Empire influenced the subject matter as well as the style of his poetry; in Moore’s opinion,

Had he remained idly at home, he would have sunk, perhaps, into a querulous satirist, but, as his views opened on a freer and wider horizon, every feeling of his nature kept pace with their enlargement; and his inborn sadness, mingling itself with the effusions of his genius, became one of the chief constituent charms not only of their pathos, but their grandeur. (Moore 120)

Ever since his journey, Byron himself maintained that it was the actual experience of the East that provoked his muse:

I had projected an additional canto when I was in the Troad and Constantinople, and if I saw them again it would go on; but under existing circumstances and sensations, I have neither harp, “heart nor voice” to proceed. (BLJ 2: 92)

The expression of a preference for the real to the imaginary has the effect of inverting the evaluation of the islandish:

… but I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us, to


set our young men abroad, for a term, among the few allies our wars have left us. (BLJ 2: 34 – emphasis added, VK)

The double lens of reality and imagination is emblematic of Byronic discourse. In canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage the actual Venice that the poet encountered is juxtaposed to the one he had constructed through his readings. And, of course, it was Venice, next to the East, that was the greenest island of his imagination. Similarly, the Greece of canto II is at once “sad relic of departed worth” and “immortal, though no more” (CHP II. 73). The image created by the imagination is tested against the physicality of present-day circumstances: “Till the sense aches with gazing to behold / The scenes our earliest dreams have dwelt upon” (CHP II. 88). Byron found the tension between the real and the imaginary productive and turned it into a dilemma never to be resolved. This he bracketed together with the ambivalence characteristic of the nature of things, an ambivalence that became a trademark of the Byronic.

The duality of the East is what Byron found ever so captivating; he discovered it in the Albanese and they became his favourite “Arnaouts” – their indistinctness befittingly illustrated by this portrayal: “the Greeks hardly regard them as Christians, or the Turks as Moslems; and in fact they are a mixture of both, and sometimes neither” (CPW 2: 193). The characteristics that the poet highlighted were the ones that made his Orient double-faced, but this does not translate as a binary opposition of good against evil and right versus wrong. Byron did not react to the religious otherness of the Turks by vilifying them:

The Ottomans, with all their defects, are not a people to be despised. Equal at least to the Spaniards, they are superior to the Portuguese. …they are not treacherous, they are not cowardly, they do not burn heretics, they are not assassins… (CPW 2: 210)

Neither did he idealise the Greeks for their ancient glory, or disparage


them on the grounds of their poor reputation among westerners in the nineteenth century:

…it seems to me rather hard to declare so positively and pertinaciously, as almost everybody had declared, that the Greeks, because they are very bad, will never be better.Eton and Sonnini have led us astray by their panegyrics and projects; but, on the other hand, De Pauw and Thornton have debased the Greeks beyond their demerits. (CPW 2: 201)

The poet turns canto II into a palimpsest of cultural layers, allowing for the ethnical and religious diversity of the Ottoman Empire:

The wild Albanian kirtled to his knee,With shawl-girt head and ornamented gun,And gold-embroider’d garments, fair to see,The crimson-scarfed men of Macedon;The Delhi with his cap of terror on,And crooked glaive; the lively, supple Greek,And swarthy Nubia’s mutilated son; The bearded Turk, that rarely deigns to speak,Master of all around, too potent to be meek,[…] (CHP II. 58)

Unlike his contemporaries, Byron represents variety with a multiplicity of viewpoints and obscures the preferences of the speaker. Even though the beginning of a stanza may suggest partiality for the cross as a symbol of Christianity, the following verses would bring the reader to a religious cul-de-sac:

Here the red cross, for still the cross is here,Though sadly scoff ’d at by the circumcised,Forgets that pride to pamper’d Priesthood dear;Churchman and votary alike despised.


Foul Superstition! howsoe’er disguised,Idol, saint, virgin, prophet, crescent, cross,For whatsoever symbol thou art prized,Thou sacerdotal gain, but general loss!Who from true worship’s gold can separate thy dross? (CHP II. 44)

What Marilyn Butler attributed to The Giaour is incipient in the second canto of Childe Harold: “Instead of finding Christian morality necessarily advanced, it likens its backward, despotic tendencies to those of Islam, the other current imperial religion” (Butler 75). In terms of textual analysis, Empson’s fourth type of ambiguity is applicable here: “when two or more meanings of a statement do not agree among themselves, but combine to make clear a more complicated state of mind in the author” (Empson 133). With Byron, textual ambiguities are expressive of conceptual dualities and the meeting point of the cross and the crescent is a fascinating locality.

Historicising the representation of the East, we cannot deny that canto II brings together pre-modernity and anti-modernity by accommodating the chrono-topes of Hellenic antiquity, on the one hand,

But not in silence pass Calypso’s isles,The sister tenants of the middle deep;There for the weary still a haven smiles,Though the fair goddess long hath ceas’d to weep,And o’er her cliffs a fruitless watch to keepFor him who dared prefer a mortal bride:Here, too, his boy essay’d the dreadful leapStern Mentor urg’d from high to yonder tide;While thus of both bereft, the nymph-queen doubly sighed (CHP II. 29)

and of the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand:


He pass’d the sacred Haram’s silent tower,And underneath the wide o’erarching gateSurvey’d the dwelling of this chief of power,Where all around proclaim’d his high estate.Amidst no common pomp the despot sate,While busy preparation shook the court,Slaves, eunuchs, soldiers, guests, and santons wait;Within, a palace, and without, a fort:Here men of every clime appear to make resort. (CHP II. 56)

Thus, the East functions as a contemporary refuge from linear progressive Eurocentric development. It was Saree Makdisi who spelled this out and elaborated on the twofold pilgrimage to the Levant “as the cultural and historical ancestor of Europe” and “as the space and territory of the Oriental other” (Makdisi 127). The spatial overlapping of these two versions of non-modernity permits constructions of the region as an island of the imagination both from a philhellenic and an orientalist viewpoint. In Makdisi’s assessment, “Byron’s attraction to and obsession with the East is driven not only by a deep-felt interest in non-Western structures and spaces, but also by the desire (however chimerical) to experience the East ‘as such’, on its own terms and in its own sphere of existence – a sphere preferably, for Byron, protected from European incursion and imperial investment.” (Makdisi 133) This is indeed the sentiment prevalent in canto II but, by the time of canto IV, Byron’s pendulum of emotions has moved back to his native isle, the “inviolate island of the sage and free” (CHP IV. 8), and is reinforcing (even if temporarily) his Englishness:

Perhaps I loved it well: and should I lay My ashes in a soil which is not mine, My spirit shall resume it – if we may Unbodied choose a sanctuary. I twine


My hopes of being remembered in my line With my land’s language …(CHP IV. 9)

Such an insight and such an understanding of the poet’s own identity would have been impossible without the experience of the East.

The focus of the tales following the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage confirms that the East was Byron’s source of inspiration for years. The Giaour is a good example that the fascination of the Eastern is associated with ambiguities and with the analogies between seeming opposites. It is a poem of no unified viewpoint or narrative voice, the culmination of which seems to be that the main character “takes on the traits of his racial/ cultural adversary and so becomes the other” (Meyer 678). The protagonist, described in the beginning as pallid, with a “sallow front”, “pale as marble o’er the tomb, / Whose ghastly whiteness aids its gloom”, slowly starts resembling his enemy: “And o’er him bends that foe with brow / As dark as this that bled below” (Giaour 194, 238-9, 673-4). He is a Venetian and a Christian, who avenges the Muslim antagonist for the death of his beloved, and the reader would expect a clash of Eastern and Western values. Nevertheless, the Giaour displays the same attitude towards the woman he cannot live without for which Orientals are stigmatised:

Yet did he but what I had doneHad she been false to more than one;Faithless to him, he gave the blow,But true to me – I laid him low:Howe’er deserv’d her doom might be,Her treachery was truth to me;… (Giaour 1062-7)

Leila belonged to Hassan’s harem and her love for another was a betrayal justifiably punished, the narrative voice of the Giaour implies – he himself would have done the same thing if she had


been unfaithful to him. Thus, it is not only the physical likeness between the protagonist and the antagonist that comes with retribution; there is also a great similarity of ideologies blurring the boundary between Orient and Occident. This transformation of the Venetian into an Easterner suddenly gives new meaning to the phrase “Venice (next to the East) is the greenest island of my imagination” and suggests the orientalization of Venice. For Byron this is not a mark of deterioration though – on the contrary, the amalgamation of Eastern and Western is captivating both for the man and the poet. Even if the title suggests a Muslim take on the tale and its characters, the narrative technique does not prioritise the Orient or the Occident; the voices of the different story tellers reconcile the militant Islamic attitude of “I know thee not, I loathe thy race” and the Christian plea: “Saint Francis, keep him from the shrine!” (Giaour 191, 909). As a result, readers sympathise both with the Byronic hero, who dies because he has lost the love of his life, and with the Other, e.g. Hassan’s mother, whose “wildest funeral wail” (Giaour 323) severs the silence at the loss of her son. It is this “openness to oriental culture” (Rossington 20) that differentiates Byron’s approach to the East from that of the other Romantics, and it is the bivalence he finds there that fuels his imagination. Modern identity is flexible rather than permanent (Bradbury 5) and Byronic heroes highlight the instability of new times.

A good example of a character with a twofold identity is Selim from The Bride of Abydos, the descendant of a Pacha but also “son of a slave”, “Greek in soul if not in creed” (BA I. 4. 81, 87). The duality of Selim’s situation is revealed in his father’s attitude and choice of words: “He is an Arab to my sight, / Or Christian crouching in the fight” (BA I. 5. 144-5), as well as in his own speech. The Byronic hero refers to “our Prophet” (BA II. 12. 669; II. 17. 801), swears by the Koran (BA II. 12. 671), and appeals to Mahomet (BA II. 18. 807). Yet, he is very well acquainted with Biblical imagery and compares himself to “the nephew of a Cain” (BA II. 12. 686) while addressing his cousin thus: “Thou, my Zuleika! share and bless my bark / The Dove of peace and promise to mine ark!” (BA II. 20. 878-9). Even


though Byron provides a note, explaining why it is “no violation of costume to put the names of Cain, or Noah, into the mouth of a Moslem” (CPW 3: 440), the fact remains that the references he makes characterise the hero of the tale as bicultural. Teasing the imagination with such notions as that of double identity, the East remained a preferred theme in Byron’s poetry throughout the high tide of his popularity. The darling of the reading public in England, he did not seem to have a comparable source of inspiration at home, despite his Newstead Abbey poems. He was fascinated by what the trip to the Ottoman Empire had offered him, by the exoticism of the Orient but also by the ambivalence it afforded.3

Undoubtedly, the women of the East were an inspiration for Byron and the heroines in the Turkish tales are the necessary counterpart of the Byronic hero. After having featured Leila, who causes the clash that in effect deconstructs the opposition between Orient and Occident in The Giaour, the poet went on to outline a stereo female presence in The Corsair with the images of Medora and Gulnare. Nigel Leask comments on their “allegorical function”, as “two rival perspectives” and sees them as representative of philhellenism and orientalism (Leask 100). Certainly, the two heroines offer two different representations of femininity in the East: we’ve got loving submissiveness, on the one hand,

See, I have plucked the fruit that promised best, And where not sure, perplex’d, but pleased, I guessed At such as seemed the fairest: thrice the hill My steps have wound to try the coolest rill; Yes! thy sherbet tonight will sweetly flow, See how it sparkles in its vase of snow! The grapes’ gay juice thy bosom never cheers; Thou more than Moslem when the cup appears: Think not I mean to chide – for I rejoice What others deem a penance is thy choice. (Corsair I. 14. 423-432)


and rejection of passivity, on the other hand:

‘Tis done he nearly waked – but it is done.Corsair! he perished – thou art dearly won.All words would now be vain – away – away! Our bark is tossing, ‘tis already day. The few gained over, now are wholly mine, And these thy yet surviving band shall join: Anon my voice shall vindicate my hand, When once our sail forsakes this hated strand.’ (Corsair III. 11. 430-437)

While both women are overwhelmingly beautiful, it is the contrast between Medora’s self-destructive patience and Gulnare’s murderous rebellion against patriarchal tyranny that proves to be the vital source of poetic inspiration. A conflict, in which no choice is the right choice – still, if we regard the Byronic hero as a projection of some of the poet’s sentiments, we can see that the pirates’ isle is not the greenest isle of Conrad’s imagination – for the grass is always greener on the hills across the sea. Nevertheless, the Corsair’s isle is the one that inspired him to live as it was home for

The love of youth, the hope of better years, The source of softest wishes, tenderest fears, The only living thing he could not hate, … (Corsair III. 21. 526-629)

Thus, the isles of imagination must needs be associated with love, as initially outlined in Byron’s letter to Thomas Moore (BLJ 5: 129). The East inspired Byron with an understanding of love, which he kept going back to – we can detect it in The Giaour as a sublime feeling that “Heaven itself descends in” (Giaour 1136). The thought is reiterated in the last canto of the Pilgrimage, where “Their full divinity inadequate / That feeling to express, or to improve, / The gods become as mortals”, or alternatively, men “look like gods


below” (CHP IV. 52). Even if Byron’s personal choices seem to advise otherwise, his non-satiric poetry maintains the credo of love that sprang up in the East. Discussing Leila’s death, the Giaour says “Not mine the act, though I the cause” (Giaour 1061); similarly, Manfred’s explications of Astarte’s demise reveal the same strategy of characterisation – the use of fragments and mysterious silences, and he finds himself in a situation described in similar terms: “I loved her and destroy’d her! […] / Not with my hand – but heart – which broke her heart” (Manfred II. 2. 117-118). Seeing the ghost of the beloved woman is a narrative constituent in both poems, an Orphic gesture to bring back the one and only from the world of Hades, but the encounter triggers the reconciliation of the protagonist with death, which effectively means his own death. Without love Eden becomes inconceivable: “I want no paradise – but rest” (1270), says the Giaour, an assertion replicated by Manfred’s quest for oblivion. In other words, the East inspired Byron with ideas he retained in his later poetry.

If “Love has become a surrogate religion” in The Giaour (Cardwell 160), and indeed in most of the Tales, the beauty of the women of the East appears to be its altar: “in those climes where I have late been straying, / […] Beauty long hath there been matchless deem’d” (CHP I. “To Ianthe”. 1-2). The association of the two becomes a conditioned reflex and orientalises his heroines. Thus, the addressee in “To Ianthe”, Charlotte Hartley, has an eye “wild as the Gazelle’s” (line 28). The simile is all the more meaningful since the gazelle in Muslim culture is a symbol of female beauty: “The virgins of Paradise, the houris, are by definition girls with large eyes similar to those of the gazelles” (Behrens-Abouseif 15). In the context of Byron’s oeuvre, the young English girl, already mythologized when named with the classical Greek Ianthe, is depicted as though akin to Leila, whose “eye’s dark charm ‘twere vain to tell, / But gaze on that of the gazelle, / It will assist thy fancy well” (Giaour 473-5). In that letter of 17th November 1816 that the discussion keeps evoking, Byron revealed he was in love with a woman, who was “in her appearance altogether like an antelope” and who had “the large, black, oriental


eyes, with that peculiar expression in them which is seen rarely among Europeans” (BLJ 5: 129-130). It comes as no surprise then when in canto I of Don Juan we learn that Donna Julia, “whom to call / Pretty were but to give a feeble notion / Of many charms in her as natural / As sweetness to the flower,” is granted a Moorish origin and an “oriental eye” (DJ I. 55. 435-9; I. 56. 441). Further on, Haidee, “so very beautiful” that her great dower could not compare to her looks, is associated with the “gazelle-eyed daughters” of the East (DJ II. 128. 1019; II. 202. 1612). In spite of her “soft Ionian face” (DJ V. 117. 931), she is provided with a Moorish mother (DJ IV. 54. 431). Now these mixed backgrounds may have something to do with the cult of feminine morality since, in Caroline Franklin’s judgment, “Byron was in a unique position to challenge the new Puritanism” (82). Furthermore, Franklin relates Haidée’s spontaneity to the fact that she is “not constrained by Christian morality or social considerations,” and claims that “[t]he libertarian ideal of the Haidée episode […] privileges the relaxed sexuality of primitive Southern society, over European rigid Christian morality which seeks to suppress the laws of nature” (83). This critical mapping of ethics calls to mind Vesna Goldsworthy’s discussion of European hierarchies:

A symbolic map of Europe, in the context of images of privilege and inferiority, reveals a system of discourses of ‘Otherness’, a sequence of ‘nesting Orientalisms’, which balkanise European territory by creating a seemingly endless series of imaginary Others within its boundaries. While an ‘enlightened, democratic West’ defines itself in terms of contrast to a ‘despotic East’, the ‘industrious’, rational cultures of the North claim a position of superiority over the ‘undisciplined’, passionate cultures of southern Europe, establishing a kind of European hierarchy in which the north-west represents the highest and the south-east the lowest symbolic value. (Goldsworthy 9)


In Byron’s discourse, nevertheless, the East is not inferior to the West; on the contrary, it is a haven for the imagination.

An indispensable complement to Byron’s East is the concept of Eden. A powerful representation of this is the Juan-and-Haidée episode, in which the Eastern isle that the heroine is the heiress of is transformed into a paradise of love: “And they were happy, for to their young eyes / Each was an angel, and earth paradise” (DJ II. 204. 1631-2); though for Byron the words paradise and Eden are almost interchangeable “They were alone once more; for them to be / Thus was another Eden” (DJ IV. 10. 73-4). The Oriental savour of this heaven on earth is achieved through meticulous description and is additionally signposted with this comment on Haidée’s origins: “Her mother was a Moorish maid from Fez, / Where all is Eden, or a wilderness” (DJ IV. 54. 431-2). If Eden is to the East and wilderness is to the east of Eden (as in Byron’s Cain), the Orient acquires this double valence for the Romantic poet which translates as inspirational. The Mediterranean isle was turned into “a place of pleasure” for Juan and Haidée (DJ III. 39. 306), abounding in Eastern drinks and dishes (DJ III. 62-63), supplemented by an eastern interior (DJ III. 64-69) with “oriental writings on the wall” (DJ III. 65. 513), and featuring the appearance of the heroine: her Turkish dress (DJ III. 70), the Tunisian symbols, her nails “touched with henna” (DJ III. 75. 598), and topped by the splendour of gems and precious metals (DJ III. 70-72). Byron’s text echoes the descriptions of the “gardens of delight” in the fifty-sixth sura of The Koran where the righteous would repose “on couches adorned with gold and precious stones,” while youths “go about to attend them, with goblets, and beakers, and a cup of flowing wine: their heads shall not ache by drinking the same, neither shall their reason be disturbed: and with fruits of the sort which they shall choose, and the flesh of birds which they shall desire,” in the company of “fair damsels having large black eyes; resembling pearls hidden in their shells” (Koran 435).

The parallel between Paradise and the East was certainly not Byron’s invention. According to Darian’s cultural historiography The


Ganges in Myth and History, “paradise was a living reality located at the eastern end of the world” and “the earliest graphic representation is a mappa mundi drawn by an anonymous geographer of Ravenna (around A.D. 650) showing paradise as an island off the coast of India and facing the Ganges. The writer seems to have relied heavily on Greek sources but here the Sacred isle is transposed to the eastern sea” (Darian 175). The fact that Byron lived in Ravenna for a while is intriguing but, more significantly, the literary representations of an “insular Earthly Paradise that is situated in the middle of an Ocean” in the East go back to Milton and Dante: “Dante Aligieri similarly placed the Garden of Eden on an island. […] As it turns out, this was the same Indian Ocean placement of Eden, just as it was so vividly figured in Dante’s epic poem, that was to be reiterated centuries later, by John Milton” (Krumrine 27). This said, “the textual tradition of Paradise as an island is perhaps even older than the Bible itself ” and the authors of Art and the Native American draw upon Hesiod, “who said (Works and Days, 60-65) that beautified souls ‘lived untouched by sorrow in the Islands of the Blessed along the shores of deep swirling Ocean’”(Krumrine 27).

In the Oriental Paradise constructed for his sake, Don Juan had to be orientalised: on the first morning after discovering him on the shore Haidée and her maid “dress’d him, for the present, like a Turk, / Or Greek” (DJ II. 160. 1276-7). On the other hand, the Fall is inscribed in the curse of Babylon: the hero “did not understand Romaic” (DJ II. 161. 1288); but he was willing to learn, so “He begun / To hear new words and to repeat them” (DJ II. 167. 1329-30). The uncertain status of what is Turkish or Greek points to Byron’s ambivalent perception of this part of the world. Makdisi has argued that in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage the poet “narrates a voyage to two different and mutually-exclusive spatial-temporal constructs (that he himself produces): first, the Levant as the cultural and historical ancestor of Europe; and second, the Levant as the space and territory of the Oriental other” (Makdisi 127). In the Juan-and-Haidée episode chronology allows the coexistence of Greek and Turkish. Don Juan and Haidée come to symbolise this


duality of modern Greece. With her father a Greek and her mother of Moroccan descent, speaking Romaic and dressing like a Muslim, the heroine personifies the Eastern otherness that the Western imagination would be looking for. In his mimicry of local colour, the hero cannot avoid stepping into a similar double identity and his newly acquired clothing is either Greek or Turkish or both at once.

A somewhat different type of ambiguity underlies “The Isles of Greece”, “an imitation revolutionary Greek ballad” (McGann 2002, 44) inserted in canto III of Don Juan. With its reference to “The Scian and the Teian muse” the poem invokes Homer and Anacreon, the models of heroic and amatory verse celebrated in Western Europe; it defines Greece as the country “Where grew the arts of war and peace,” a binary opposition constituting the pressing dilemma of those seeking Greek independence; it draws attention to Delos, associated with both Apollo and Dionysus. If the pathos of the poetic introduction is interpreted as patriotism rather than as uncertainty, the bard deflates the nationalistic message with his appeal to modern Greeks to “(l)eave battles to the Turkish hordes, / (a)nd shed the blood of Scio’s vine” (DJ III. 86. 9. 739-40); the elegiac juxtaposition evolves into contrasting Turkish barbarity and Greek culture, destruction and preservation. It is tragic and yet ironic that the speaker, who seems to have resorted to drinking as a more cultured practice than fighting, would give up his Greek identity: “A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine” (DJ III. 86. 16. 783), and would still remain a merely passive critic of contemporary mores. Thus, if the Juan-and-Haidée episode borders on the utopian, the so called hymn must function as a dystopian infiltration into their paradise.

Notwithstanding the sad trimmer’s culture of passive drinking, the narrator of Don Juan maintains that “in the East all arm” (DJ III. 27. 215) and relates Lambro’s return home to find his domestics “dancing / like dervishes” “the Pyrrhic dance so martial, / to which the Levantines are very partial” (DJ III. 29. 229-232). The ambivalence of the Eastern island is retained in the comparison of Greek war rituals with Muslim religious practices and the collective name “Levantines” validates the indistinctness. Lambro himself stands for


the belligerence of the Orient: “he had no ardent love for peace” and waged “war with every nation” (DJ III. 55. 437, 439). Anne Barton has drawn attention to the Shakespearean connotations of Lambro’s island but, unlike Shakespeare’s Prospero, who is in full control of the situation when he confronts his defiant daughter and her shipwrecked beloved, the Greek father needs to reinstate his authority. His choice of action stamps the Byronic construction of the East and reinforces the stereotype of the Oriental tyrant.

After the fall from paradise Don Juan comes round to encounter a group of Italian opera singers, all on their trip to slavery. The change of characters seems charged with a contrast between Eastern barbarity and Western civilization, but also between the unartful Eastern beauty he is in love with and the Western “bella donna” whose profession is the art of playing roles. The most tempting attribute of the Romagnole seem to be her “eyes that look’d into the very soul / …as black and burning as a coal” (DJ IV. 94. 747-9) recalling the Oriental ideal and challenging the binary opposition, but only as long as the reader remains unaware of the subtle reference to a Shakespearean heroine “with two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes” (Love’s Labours Lost III. i. 197). The double take challenges the stereotypical prioritisation of the West over the East once again. The varying perspective on the geographical hierarchy develops with the introduction of each new character. Juan’s interlocutor in canto V demonstrates the condescending attitude of Britons:

‘My boy’ said he, ‘amidst this motley crew Of Georgians, Russians, Nubians, and what not, All ragamuffins differing but in hue, With whom it is our luck to cast our lot, The only gentlemen seem I and you; So let us be acquainted, as we ought: … (DJ V. 13)

This is a projection of the “imagined map of Europe”, outlined by Goldsworthy, at the top of which we find the North-West and its


British standards, whereas the South-East represents the lowest symbolic value: “‘Britishness’ and ‘Balkanness’ stand at opposing ends of the hierarchical diagonal. In view of this contrast, the self-image of British authors, as well as British projections of Balkan identity, is particularly interesting” (Goldsworthy 9). The poem expands these nineteenth-century mind-maps of European space in order to include some non-European markers of Byron’s Orient. Johnson’s condescension condemns the East as disreputable but, needless to say, he is not the ultimate authority in the poem. Being sold into slavery is a critical moment for anyone’s identity and sociologists explain that “the construction of a collective identity is a phenomenon experienced by each social group when it is placed in proximity to different social groups. In order to belong to a given social group, individuals need to master the full catalogue of real or imaginary traits of the ‘in-group’ and to correctly differentiate the ‘in-group’ from the ‘others’.” (Schippers 19) To what extent Juan identifies with Johnson remains for the reader to find out. The narrator, however, keeps up the dynamics of the story-telling and does not readily associate with the in-group of the westerners, addressed in the second person:

(Of which I might have a good deal to say, There being no such profusion in the North Of oriental plants et cetera, But that of late your scribblers think it worth Their while to rear whole hotbeds in their works Because one poet travell’d ‘mongst the Turks;)–… (DJ V. 42)

The stanza appears to echo Byron’s letter of 28th August 1813 as though claiming that authors have followed Madame de Stael’s recommendation to “stick to the East” as the only poetical policy. Thus, in an ironic mode, as well as in all sincerity, Byron validates the role of the Orient as a literary inspiration. It is at once existent and imagined, a real-life location he has visited and an artistic topos:


“Each villa on the Bosphorus looks a screen / New painted, or a pretty opera scene” (DJ V. 46. 367-8). The contrast between Eastern and Western then does not encourage readers to choose the one or the other; it is there to imply that one’s sense of identity surfaces only when confronted with otherness and the other.

The distinction between East and West is further complicated by the harem episode. The Orient becomes a place of transformation. The introduction of the cross-dressing incident orientalises the western heroes and deconstructs the codes of difference between cultures:

… ‘this soil Seems fertile in adventures strange and new; One’s turn’d half Mussulman, and one a maid, By this old black enchanter’s unsought aid.’(DJ V. 83)

The ultimate potential of thus fluctuating religious or gender identity would be to shift disparity into identification. More pertinent to the narrative logic, Don Juan’s outfit allows him into the forbidden area of feminine residence and surfaces the Occidental imagination of the East as a haven of “relaxed sexuality”. Guiding his readers through the inaccessible labyrinths of the sultan’s seraglio Byron introduces a few more formulaic associations with the Orient: barbaric vengeance (“Their duty was […] / As is the custom of those eastern climes, / To give some rebel Pacha a cravat,” – DJ V. 89), “Oriental scrupulosity” (DJ V. 148), tyranny (DJ V. 113), lack of privacy that makes one’s nightmares everybody’s business (DJ VI. 70-84). To recapitulate, the Orient is both fascinating and threatening and therefore, in a sense, sublime, although it is the nature of satire to overturn the lofty and descend into the commonplace. Even if the narrator distinguishes “feelings oriental” that the westerner John Johnson cannot oblige, Don Juan “who was much more sentimental” keeps up the dialogue between East and West (DJ VII. 75).

The Orient inspires the narrator and pervades the tropes he uses,


deposing the contrast with the Occident: “he was a noble fellow, Johnson, / […] he could kill his / Man quite as quietly as blows the Monsoon” (DJ VIII. 39). Thus, the character’s disregard for the Orient is deconstructed. In everyday language comparisons are used to make unknown things familiar or abstract notions concrete; in literature similes are figures of speech that “strip the veil of familiarity” and render the commonplace poetic. Byron translates his imagery into the idiom of the East: having compared the British gentleman to the monsoon, he is free to portray the emotions of the Russian empress in a similar manner: “Glory and triumph o’er her aspect burst, / As an East Indian sunrise on the main. / These quenched a moment her Ambition’s thirst – / So Arab Deserts drink in Summer’s rain” (DJ IX. 59). The fact that oriental imagery is applied both to his Eastern and to his Western characters confirms that Byron did not set out to exoticise the Orient – unless we consider Johnson’s geographical location as the sole explanation of the comparison with the monsoon and identify exoticism as “the artistic exploration of territories and ages in which the free flights of the imagination were possible because they lay outside the restrictive operation of classical rules” (Stevens 17). A more political definition, however, exonerates Byron of ideological sins: “to a Westerner (considered here the “subject” or the “self ”) the Orient (the “object” or the “other”) is exotic because it is remote and different” (Oueijan 30). At any rate, on the level of figures of speech, the poet parodies preconceptions and invites re-consideration of values.

Reassessment is particularly relevant for Byron’s East, which facilitates the opposition of self and other, helping define what one is by virtue of what one is not. In his discussion of canto II of Childe Harold, Makdisi claims that,

In the very process of producing an Oriental other, Byron has to produce the image of himself: a narrative persona of himself as a man, an Englishman, a European. Even if one of the aims of Childe Harold and of Byron’s flight and exile from England in 1809 was to escape the realities


of his self-identity and his status as an Englishman and a modern European, his voyage to the Orient only forced him into greater awareness (or, rather, the “discovery”) of those identities and realities. His despair stems in part from the realization that any attempt to escape self-recognition only strengthens it, especially in the narrative field of the other. (Makdisi 129)

The fact that Byron changed the title of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers from British bards so as not to include the Welsh means that he was sensitive to the connotations of British as opposed to English. But whether he regarded himself as more English than British would seem a nebulous area since, for instance, he once postulated that he was so perfectly a citizen of the world that whether he passed his days in Great Britain or Kamschatka was to him a matter of perfect indifference (Moore 42). Given that Linda Colley explains that during Byron’s time Britishness was defined as a sense of Scottish and English Protestantism united against continental and Catholic Other, Byron’s love of continental culture is nicely balanced against his typical ambivalence with reference to employing specific terms like Englishness and Britishness that do not exactly cohere. Even if Byron did not shake off his inherited Englishness, or for that matter a protestant sense of Britishness, he was nevertheless willing to see the world with the eyes of the Other and was ready to reconstruct his own identity:

Where I see the superiority of England (which by the bye we are a good deal mistaken about in many things) I am pleased, and where I find her inferior I am at least enlightened. – Now I might have staid smoked in your towns or fogged in your country a century without being sure of this, and without acquiring anything more useful or amusing at home. (BLJ 2: 35)

It was his own flexibility that prompted him to ridicule his valet


in a letter to Mrs Byron and indeed Fletcher seems the one to fit Makdisi’s formula:

Besides the perpetual lamentations after beef and beer, the stupid bigoted contempt for every thing foreign, and insurmountable incapacity of acquiring even a few words of any language, rendered him like all other English servants, an incumbrance. – I do assure you the plague of speaking for him, the comforts he required (more than myself by far) the pilaws (a Turkish dish of rice & meat) which he could not eat, the wines which he could not drink, the beds where he could not sleep, & the long list of calamities such as stumbling horses, want of tea!!! &c. which assailed him, would have made a lasting source of laughter to a spectator, and of inconvenience to a Master. – After all the man is honest and in Christendom capable enough, but in Turkey… (BLJ 2: 34)

The East expanded Byron’s horizon and challenged the givens of previously constructed concepts. Even though he retained his preference for islands, the author of the Turkish Tales and Don Juan was no longer the islander who set out on his first trip abroad in 1809. What the Orient provided was an alternative point of view and Byron was not the person whose opinions and identity would stagnate as a result. Going back home certainly helped him appreciate that he had escaped the narrowness of England but that he was now in no man’s land: his views were not those of a foreigner but they would never be as British (i.e. as islandish) as they had once been.

In the long run, the East proved a timeless source of inspiration for Byron: his readings about the Orient had moulded the imagination of his younger self; the trip to the Ottoman Empire had offered an alternative to the reality that the young man wanted to leave behind; the women of the East had enchanted him with their beauty and influenced his notion of paradise, providing the poet with an


ideal of love that he held on to. Ultimately, the ambivalence of distinguishing between self and other allowed re-evaluating and re-shaping identities and, whenever Byron went back to that state of indefiniteness, he could let his imagination free and come up with different versions of his heroes or indeed of himself.

N O T E S

1 This explanatory note in the 1856 edition of the Koran was taken from HERBELOT, Bartholomé d’, Bibliothèque Orientale ou dictionaire universel contenant généralement tout ce qui regarde la connoissance des peuples de l ’Orient (Paris, Compagnie des Libraires, 1697), 55.

2 For other sources see Massimiliano Demata, “A Bibliography of Byron’s Oriental Reading: Addenda and Correction” in Notes &Queries 46.1 (March 1999), 39-41.

3 For a discussion of Byron and exoticism see Naji Oueijan’s “Western Exoticism and Byron’s Orientalism”, Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 6 (1998), 27-39.

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"The East as an Island and Inspiration"

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