Byron and the Discourses of History by Carla Pomarè (review)

Carla Pomarè’s book takes a fresh look at Byron’s interest in history, here in relation to the nineteenth-century ‘crystallization’ of the ‘historical profession’ that saw the study of history become ‘increasingly defined by a set of practices and standards of research’ that favoured ‘“the grand narrative of European and Western history”’ over the ‘plurality’ of ‘romantic historicism’. The book’s argument is that Byron ‘escapes this impending crystallization and reflects instead the fluidity of the historical universe of his time’. It argues its case admirably through five chapters that engage with Byron’s ‘concrete use’, across a wide range of texts but especially in The Siege of Corinth, Mazeppa, The Prophecy of Dante, the Venetian plays and The Deformed Transformed, of both the content of specific historical narratives and ‘the epistemological models accompanying them’. Pomarè shows at length, and in detail, how the latter provided Byron with ‘models from which he drew’ some of his ‘trademark’ ‘textual practices’, in particular ‘the massive use of footnotes’ and other ‘paratextual’ devices such as prefaces, advertisements, and appendices. One of her argument’s central contentions is that Byron’s famous ‘insistence on facts’, which she calls ‘faux-naïve’, is ‘contradicted by many of his writing practices’, and that this signals ‘a striking awareness of the ambiguities of history and its discourses’ on Byron’s part.

Chapter 1, ‘Byron in the “Historical Department”’, offers an ‘introductory survey of the manifestations of Byron’s engagement with history’, which Pomarè sees as always a matter of both ‘poetical inspiration’ (subject matter for poems) and reflection on ‘historical accuracy, source documentation and […] the very nature of historical discourse’. No ‘single paradigm […] can account for Byron’s preoccupation with history’, says Pomarè, but she does demonstrate, through a close-reading of the Julia Alpinula, Cecilia Metella and Caritas Romana sections of Childe Harold III and IV, a ‘two-way relationship’ between past and present in Byron’s thinking, in which the present ‘gives new life to the past’ just as the past gives life to the present.

Pomarè’s second chapter, ‘Byron’s Paratexts and the Legacy of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire’ discusses Byron’s fascination with ‘the kind of encyclopedic learning to which Bayle’s Dictionary belonged’. As Pomarè points out, Byron owned ‘a vast array of works of a similar encyclopedic turn’, including other famous examples by the likes of d’Herbelot and Lemprière, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, another of Byron’s particular favourites. Pomarè focuses especially on this learning’s subjection of ‘facts’ to ‘a peculiar treatment, based on the interaction between text and notes’, and Byron’s manifest interest in this. Through an extended examination of the interaction between the text of Don Juan and ‘the longest note’ to the poem (the note to stanza 147 of canto V), Pomarè shows how Byron’s continual ‘refocusing [of] his readers’ attention’ testifies to his interest not in ‘freezing’ his ‘beloved “facts” in immutable form’ through the use of footnotes but, rather, in ‘the process’ through which history is ‘articulated in time and affect[s] the present’.

The book’s third chapter, ‘Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari: Rewriting the Myth of Venice’, turns to Byron’s attachment of long historical appendices to his Venetian dramas. Pomarè details the dominant readings of Venice’s constitution, from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries, that Byron may have had at his disposal (as Pomarè points out, he had his own copies of many histories of the city, dating back at least to 1751). However, she quite rightly lays particular emphasis on Simonde de Sismondi’s Historie des républiques italiennes du Moyen Age and Pierre Daru’s Historie de la République de Venise as recent ‘militant histories inspired by the critique of authoritarian regimes’. The main argument here is that Byron’s refusal ‘to satisfy’, ‘within the body of [either] tragedy’, our ‘curiosity’ about specific facts ‘crucial for the evaluation of...