“Changeable too—yet somehow ‘Idem semper’”; thinking through Byron from Fiery Dust to Radiant Textuality

In his first book, professor jerome mcgann contemplated byronic change at a macro-level: “[Byron’s] themes never really changed, nor did the personal tone of his works. Nevertheless, a change did gradually take place.”¹ Eight years later, he turned his attention to Byronic change at a micro-level: “When Byron ‘contradicts’ himself, he is not changing his mind but revealing its ability to see an idea or event in several different ways at nearly the same time. . . . In such mental habits Byron presents himself as a type of the human being.”²

There have been gradual changes in McGann’s work, but in some ways his themes never really changed and his scholarship always allowed us to perceive the likeness between creative and critical mental habits or, as he himself puts it (quoting Eliza Richards), the ways in which “the poetics of creation are inseparable from the poetics of reception.”³ This paper is an appreciation of McGann’s longstanding Byronic attention to the physicality of the reading experience and its cognitive implications for poet, critic, and editor.

In Fiery Dust, McGann’s interest in rapid creative changes of mind crystallized around Beppo’s appreciation of “forms which flit by us” in stanza 14.⁴ In 1968, McGann’s viewpoint on shifting objects of attention was as follows:

The simple, almost trivial, fact that a man may fail to find out where a lady lives comes to assume enormous importance in the context. . . . her value depends upon her physicality . . . each moment and each lady . . . have an absolute value. . . . Each particular is absolute to itself, and human life is a succession of such absolute moments. . . . Through this way of thinking Byron . . . has cut himself off from the usual forms of Christian thought completely. He thinks about life like the ancients, like the Jews, or like certain of the Greeks.⁵

McGann focused here on the different physical worlds of immediate and imagined presence, the way Byron’s cherchez la femme motif is realized in marks on the page which track a series of cognitive movements off the page. Receptiveness to immediate presence is defined by Byron as “mobilité” in Don Juan Canto 16 and disambiguated in his characteristically careful prose note:

In French, “mobilité.” I am not sure that mobility is English, but it is expressive of a quality which rather belongs to other climates, though it is sometimes seen to a great extent in our own. It may be defined as an excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions—at the same time without losing the past; and is, though sometimes apparently useful to the possessor, a most painful and unhappy attribute.⁶

(CPW, 5:769)

McGann’s critical writing inculcates sensitivity to Byron’s poetic mobilité in the seconds of real-time reading. But criss-crossed by other acts of attention, his readings also set that momentary yielding to impression in the context of critical reflection over a lifetime.

In Don Juan in Context, McGann’s interest in how Byron and his readers think focuses on the defining context. McGann examines the “dear Philosophy” stanzas in Canto 2 and the account of the narrator “chang[ing] his mind” in the course of stanza 20:

in reading Don Juan these sorts of veering responses are in fact what we register. The crucial general point to be seen is that the responses remain seriatim, and do not accumulate to some more comprehensive or formulative intuition. This happens because every idea or event in the poem is continually being observed in contexts which shift our point of view on the idea or event.⁷

McGann’s interest in succession of thought in Fiery Dust and seriatim thought in Don Juan in Context has remained idem semper [sic].⁸ His preoccupation with the lateral, contingent dynamics of poetic creativity and its escape from the various critical compartments which seek to unify and regulate recasts Byron’s dialogue with Coleridge in Don Juan. Unlike Coleridge, McGann argued, the Byron of Don Juan refused to prioritize unity over parts or...