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  • Byron’s Ghosts: The Spectral, the Spiritual and the Supernatural ed. by Gavin Hopps
  • Anthony Howe
Byron’s Ghosts: The Spectral, the Spiritual and the Supernatural. Edited by Gavin Hopps. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Pp. 246. ISBN 978 1 84631 970 9. £70.00.

Books of essays suit Byron. They concur with the poet’s anti-systematic predilections and stand in the tradition of some of his most important precursors, notably Montaigne. They also minimise and relativise a widespread error of Byron studies: that of reading the poet out of his singularity and into the singular. A broad version of this mistake is identified in Gavin Hopps’s intelligent introduction to this volume, which raises timely questions about the nature of literary criticism and its prevalent tendency to accept the assumptions of scientific practice. The double insistence on objectivity and materialism – and the related ‘programmatic incuriosity about the immaterial’ – characteristic of contemporary literary scholarship is viewed as limiting with respect to a poet such as Byron who was so deeply curious about and open to life’s moments of wonder. The volume’s ‘enterprise’ to bring the ideas of ‘postmodern re-enchantment’ to Byron studies is, in these terms, entirely pertinent.

The essayistic tradition in which Byron can be placed should not be identified with a decided, mired sceptical haziness. Byron thought in concrete ways as well as in self-conscious ways that apprehend the limits of concretisation. This complex aspect of Byron is highlighted in Bernard Beatty’s ‘Determining Unknown Modes of Being: A Map of Byron’s Ghosts and Spirits’. This original and valuable assessment of ‘Byron’s spirit topography’ reveals some of the surprising ways in which Byron thought about different categories of immaterial being and offers a range of insightful localised readings along the way.

Next is the editor’s own contribution, ‘Shades of Being: Byron and the Trespassing of Ontology’. Drawing from the ideas of Derrida (without forcing Byron to inhabit them), Hopps highlights the dialectical nature of traditional ontology and its failure respecting those ‘bits of reality that the fabric of language doesn’t quite cover’. His account of how these ‘bits’ fascinated Byron and of how the poet’s written excesses evoke a supra-categorical reality is elegant [End Page 78] and valuable. I had some doubts about Hopps’s reading of the ‘divine faculty’ of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV, 127, which appears to overlook the partially synonymous relation that phrase bears towards ‘reason’ and the ‘right to thought’, things celebrated earlier in the stanza. Byron is not being a disciple of Enlightenment here in any straightforward sense, but his entangling – rather than separating – play between ‘reason’ and ‘divine’ may need another look.

Mary Hurst’s thought-provoking essay seeks to complicate easy notions about Byron’s aristocratic ennui. Rather than updating the poet’s diagnosis into the terms of late twentieth-century psychotherapy, Hurst looks back to the writings of the fourth-century Christian theologian Evagrius Ponticus on the ‘noonday demon’, as well as to the mediaeval concept of acedia. What emerges is a series of insightful reflections on the ways in which Byron resists the modes of secularisation typically understood as being central to Romanticism. There is more than one way, this volume rightly insists, of understanding Byron’s difference as a ‘Romantic’ than in terms of his Augustan, satirical inclinations.

Hurst’s cleanly delineated essay is succeeded by Dale Townshend’s rather bulkier consideration of spectrality, naming and mourning in Byron’s poetry. While some pruning might have brought the key ideas into sharper focus, the essay offers original insights, notably concerning the connection, in Byron’s thought, between inadequate mourning and the dynamics of spectral visitation. This was just the kind of thing that fascinated Byron and it is in pondering such oddities – if oddities they are – that this collection finds much of its critical force.

Another perspective is brought to Byron by Piya Pal-Lapinski’s comparison of the poet with Sade in terms of both writers’ tendency to (a fine phrase) ‘anatomize violence’. What emerges is an original account of how, in the final canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron negotiates between...

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