The description of Byron

I won’t describe; description is my forte. (Don Juan, V.52)

On August 6, 1809, having just landed at Gibraltar, Byron picked up a golden pen (a gift from his old Harrow headmaster upon his departure from England four weeks prior) and began a letter home, relating his journey with John Cam Hobhouse through Portugal and Spain. Recounting his itinerary, he comes to their three-day residence in Seville: “Seville is a fine town, and the Sierra Morena, part of which we crossed, a very sufficient mountain.” He pauses in the middle of the description, however; the pen stops. Then: “—but damn description, it is always disgusting.”
The tourist reluctant to describe—particularly reluctant to describe scenery—is a role Byron adopts throughout much of the tour that would produce the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Teasing glimpses of “cloudless skies, and lovely landscapes” are given, then left unelaborated through a performance of conformity with a mysterious imperative to relate all in full later: “—But I must reserve all account of my adventures till we meet;” “—But why should I say more of these things? …Has not Hobby got a journal?;”“—But I will not describe, no, you must be satisfied with simple detail till my return, and then we will unfold the floodgates of Colloquoy.” It seems that Byron must be faithful to immediate and private experience at the expense of description—accounts will be related when later all can be recollected in tranquility. And though he hypocritically ends up describing vividly anyway, the effect of performing this lack of speech, of halting the pen, secures that immediacy by denigrating its representation. It promises through aphasia that a plenitude of private experience must disrupt any of its possible repetitions in description: to continue describing would be to only approach experience with disgusting signifiers that make a mockery of its bounty. And so without any description given, any proof of his having been in a place, we believe Byron has experienced that place to the fullest.
The maintenance of this posture throughout the tour seems to contradict much of our understanding of Byron’s descriptive practice, however. That is, from the reception of Childe Harold in 1812 to recent analyses by those like Phillip W. Martin, Jerome McGann, Richard Cronin, and Jane Stabler, Byron is conceived to be tenaciously faithful to immediate experience precisely through describing, not by deploying the suggestive mechanism of refusing to describe.
Rather than a virtuoso in sustaining a posture that consistently renders silence the signifier of experience, Byron is understood as a master in directing his descriptions towards the eclipsing of any silences or representative inadequacies possible in a private representation, marshalling the described into performing nothing less than the totality of experience in a place by opening up and sacrificing its private character to history. A thousand Venetian years superadd themselves to his merely private utterance on the Bridge of Sighs, and as he describes the hills of Spain those hills append the totality of experience they contain to what would have been a necessarily inadequate and disgusting representation of them:

On yon long, level plain, at distance crown’d
With crags, whereon those Moorish turrets rest,
Wide scatter’d hoof-marks dint the wounded ground;
And, scath’d by fire, the green sward’s darken’d vest
Tells that the foe was Andalusia’s guest:
Here was the camp, the watch flame, and the host,
Here the bold peasant storm’d the dragon’s nest… (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I.49)

The private representation of the mountains becomes more than private when that mountain is represented so as to embody the scars of the battle there between the French, Spanish, and British in 1809. The effect is what McGann argues famously in The Romantic Ideology and elsewhere—that Byron, ultimately, has no traditionally “greater Romantic” lyric voice within lyric poem: Byron’s private voice is sacrificed to a paradoxically historical lyric voice (“[Byron’s] Romantic subjectivity, whether reflexive or impassioned, regularly defines itself in spectacular terms. Studying and brooding upon themselves, Romantic poets produce cosmic theatricals from the dramas they write about their own lives, feelings, and experiences. In the lyrics of Wordsworth and much Romantic poetry, however, this ‘poetry of experience,’ as it has been called, typically erases or sets aside its political and historical currencies… Byron’s lyrical procedures are quite different in that they regularly draw upon a complex set of political social and world-historical mediations.” McGann, “Byron’s Lyric Poetry” 210-11 in The Cambridge Companion to Byron; cf. also The Romantic Ideology,123-125, 131-136). But the return McGann emphasizes is that Byron achieves a greater representation than a lyric Byron ever could. He can participate in an economy of experience where, even in the absence of any invocation of a Muse, merely walking by Parnassus can be asserted as equal in value to that invocation:

Of, thou! In Hellas deem’d of heav’nly birth,
Muse! Form’d or fabled at the minstrel’s will!
Since sham’d full oft by later lyres on earth,
Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill:
Yet there I’ve wandered by thy vaunted rill;
Yes! Sigh’d o’er Delphi’s long-deserted shrine,
Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still... (I.1)

Martin and, more recently, Stephen Cheeke, elaborate how what would have been the representative emptiness of the refusal to invoke (that is, Byron’s resultant silence) is filled by a reference to Byron’s experience of the historical spot and is therefore able to be exchanged (via “Yet”) with even a successful invocation. Since any invocation would be condemned as a representation to some distance from experience, the reference to Byron’s experience alone secures, in its promise of a more than personal representation issuing from that experience, its equivalence in value. Martin and Cheeke’s elaboration thus clarifies the conditions necessary for the exchange of the lyric and historic that McGann outlines, and renders his historical economy also touristic: the opening up of the private into the historical occurs precisely because they both conjoin in a specific place that could be visited, experienced, and potentially represented lyrically—Byron in a way must utter from the Bridge of Sighs in order for those years to expand around him. The operation of this touristic/historical economy is thus asserted to be the motor of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—Byron’s first significant poem in which he develops this technique—and Byron’s descriptive practice in general: “at the center of his entire achievement,” Phillip Martin asserts, “lies the illusion that a wealth of worldly experience, or at least a huge capacity for worldly experience, provides him with the essential qualifications of a great poet.” The illusion achieved in collapsing of representative distance through a private plenitude of historical experience in a place, renders Byron, as Cheeke calls him, the “brilliantly individual amanuensis to whom the European landscape is dictating its histories.”
But what would it mean to assert that Byron could only accomplish this by simultaneously deploying the mechanism of maintaining silence we have seen him act out on his tour? What would it mean to assert that Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage adopts both postures of the descriptive poet and the poet who refuses to describe?
(To be continued...)