Byron and Romanticism: An Interview with Jerome McGann

James Soderholm: In one of your most recent pieces, I'm struck by your insistence on objectivity regarding your essays on Byron. ¹ Is this "objectivity" as in "20/20 hindsight" or objectivity as a rhetorical pose: the mask of Kantian disinterestedness? Or have you another, perhaps more Byronic slant on the meaning of this objectivity? It's odd to see an historicist and post-Nietzschean using the anathematized "O" word. Kindly explain.

Jerome McGann: Positivist and postmodernist takes on the idea of "objectivity" have always fed on each other, it seems to me. My references to my objectivity are therefore partly mischievous and rhetorical. Philosophers--I'm not one--would probably call my views "critical realism." Just because I wrote those essays doesn't mean I can't look at them in a critical way. Nor is that option simply a function of a temporal gap. Surely we all strive for a critical view of what we do or think, even in the immediacy of these events. But then no one ever escapes an horizon of "subjective" interests and purposes--to make an ideal of such an escape is ludicrous. So there I am, like yourself, looking "objectively" at my essays and at my immediate reflections on those essays. The look is full of purposes and interests many of which, no doubt, I must be quite unaware of. My unawareness is as much an "objective" condition, even to me, as my awareness. That I might have a limited view of my situation is certain. But everyone's views are thus limited. Self-reflection is no more liable to subjective limits than any kind of thought or perception.

JS: What are some of these purposes and interests--the ones you are aware of? Why collect these particular essays at this particular moment in your life? Your "General Analytic and Historical Introduction" sheds light on these purposes, but perhaps you also have an afterword or two to say. Is the very attempt to shape and publish this collection an attempt at self-criticism?

JM: I grow to realize that my least self-critical impulse is this passion for self-criticism. Being right, in either sense of that word, seems deplorable to me--a feeling that itself must be deplorable in ways I have difficulty realizing. (Some of the farthest right thinking I know, by the way, now comes from the left.)

But to answer your question: no, I haven't collected these essays as "an attempt at self-criticism." I take such "attempts" as a given of any thinking at all. My conscious purpose was more polemical. I was thinking of the Cultural Studies legacies that came with the "return to history." A backwash of these currents has begun to be noticed--a relative neglect of the minute particulars of literary works as they are literary and aesthetic. The New Critical origins of much of my work, which has been noticed and sometimes attacked during our New Historicist years, may perhaps gain a new salience at this moment. I just saw a revival of Stoppard's The Real Thing and was struck by the relevance of one of its key moments: an extended apology for language "as such" by the playwright character.

And Byron is central to what I have in mind (as he has been, along with his avatar Wilde, so central to what Stoppard has done). Because while Byron has always been a kind of magical being, his writing--his prose and his poetry--remains relatively neglected--when compared, say, with the kind of attention that Wordsworth's or Keats's writings continue to draw from academics. My own New Critical history suggests how and why these currents run as they do. Thematics remains a preoccupation of academic criticism when it tries to engage "the literary." But Byron's importance as a writer--like Wilde's, like Stoppard's--is a function of his writings...