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  • Byron's Aposiopesis
  • Jonathon Shears

aposiopesis: A rhetorical artifice, in which the speaker comes to a sudden halt, as if unable or unwilling to proceed.

A variety of critics have commented on either the oral quality of Byron's verse and prose or the sense of theatre that Byron creates in his verse narratives and correspondence by making the reader aware of the timbre of his speaking voice: 'Byron scatters his [verse] with formulaic techniques proper to oral poetry'.1 Jerome McGann, John Jump, F. M. Doherty and in recent times Judith Pascoe, Paul Elledge and Timothy Webb have written at length about the way that Byron invites the reader into his text by exploiting the theatrical potential of the written word: 'all readers of Byron are aware that his best work has a distinct and recognizable sense of drama, and sometimes of theatre, whether the works are officially dramatic or not'.2 On a slightly different note, Michael Simpson has argued that in their drama, Byron and Shelley employed a political discourse that conceives of itself as theatre in order to construct a 'closet' audience.3 I agree with Doherty, however, when he writes that while critics concur on the presence of the dramatic in Byron, 'in what this sense of drama or theatre consists is not quite so clear or agreed' (Doherty, 148). Elledge establishes that 'the critical industry over the last decade has diligently rehabilitated "Romantic Theatricality" to such an extent that Romanticism as spectacle, spectatorship, and spectacular self-construction now threatens to overwhelm scholarly discourse on the culture' (Doherty, 12). Yet, one of the recurrent strategies that Byron uses to create a sense of theatre and to make the reader aware of the self-construction that allows 'Byron to become "Byron"'(Elledge, 4) has been overlooked. Aposiopesis, which is the sudden breaking off or interruption of a character or narrator, is one of the foremost idiosyncratic features of reading a drama or narrative poem by Byron. More particularly, aposiopesis is the interruption not by other characters but by oneself, a technique Byron repeats throughout his Oriental Tales and which becomes something of a modus operandi for the narrator of Don Juan.

Through the work of Elledge, Webb and others we know that Byron is a master of creating theatrical frames or settings in verse, drama and correspondence and that he often managed his public life as theatre. From his youthful appearances at the Harrow Speech Days, through his Gothic drinking parties at Newstead Abbey, to the swimming of the Hellespont and the final deathbed scene in Missolonghi, 'Lord Byron's theatrical imperative has never been in doubt' (Elledge, 13). Similarly in the verse we find memorable theatrical tableaux such as the tragic Kaled slumped next to Lara's unmarked grave, Manfred on the Jungfrau, the pyre of Sardanapalus or the farce enacted in Donna Julia's bedchamber. We also know that Byron deploys a series of verbal strategies that engage [End Page 183] the reader as though they were watching a play, often through raising expectations and deliberately withholding crucial information from view. The initial purpose of the present essay is therefore to add Byron's aposiopesis to this list of techniques. But while the drama of aposiopesis, or breaking off, plays a key part in creating the theatre of Byron's verse and prose, it leads to other important points of discussion that are perhaps less concerned with theatre than with metaphysics. It is also the purpose of this essay then to explore more fully the reasons why a primarily theatrical device becomes a Byronic calling card away from the stage. I do not intend to privilege the written word over the spoken or claim that the relationship between reader and poem is more sophisticated than that between audience and actor. Rather I want to mediate between the two in order to demonstrate that aposiopesis is not just a poetic trick transferred from the theatre. Self-consciously breaking off in mid-sentence is part of Byron's way of continually presenting himself as though he were present to the reader, 'feeling as he writes' (McGann, 3). Aposiopesis 'keeps us aware of the drama and the...

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