-
The title of this essay may be a surprise to some
readers. We tend to associate Byron, particularly his
so-called "Turkish Tales," with
orientalism—that is, with stereotyped
and licentious depictions of the "East."[1]
In this essay, however, I wish to supplement this
by-now familiar reading by identifying within The
Giaour (1813) a countervailing strand of
"Occidentalism." In appealing to this term I am
inspired by a recent essay by Akeel Bilgrami entitled
"Occidentalism, the Very Idea," which considers whether
stereotypes of the West, distorting as they might be,
nonetheless create a space for critical engagement. His
answer is a qualified "yes," provided that
"Occidentalism" names not only non-western stereotypes
of the west but also a persistent response to
western-style modernity within the west
itself. As Bilgrami wants to define it, Occidentalism
is not only a property of modern Islamic fundamentalism
but is to be found in Gandhi, in Nietzsche, in aspects
of German romanticism and eighteenth-century English
deism. He aims to rescue talk of cultural difference
from both the neo-conservative rhetoric of the "clash
of civilizations" and from left-liberal
translations of culture into its underlying economic
and political strata. He is worth listening to on these
matters because he has written intelligently about
secularism before, most notably as a contributor to the
landmark collection Secularism and its
Critics.[2]
In this essay I will use Byron's poem to work my way
toward Bilgrami's rehabilitated Occidentalism, and then
propose that the poem itself points up some of the
limits of this rehabilitation.
Paradox
-
One could do worse than read The Giaour as
an allegory of pluralism, in which truth is determined
by context and presupposition, and whose larger textual
apparatus strives to bring rational order to a world of
competing loyalties and dispositions. For this reason,
the text can also serve as a document of pluralism's
complications and exclusions.
-
The first part of the poem, set in a homogenized
eastern location, presents several different voices
describing what the reader eventually understands to be
the murder of a slave woman named Leila for running
away from her master to join her lover. The master,
Hassan, has her tied up in a bag and thrown overboard.
Leila's lover, the Giaour, avenges her murder by
killing Hassan. The second half of the poem is the
Giaour's lengthy and unrepentant confession to a
nameless monk in a Christian monastery, once again in
an indeterminate location. The Giaour himself is a
stateless and nameless man who operates on the
borderlands of cultures, traditions, and beliefs. The
poem named after him, meanwhile, is a collection of
fragments apparently arranged by an editor, in which
different and anonymous voices take up small bits of
the story before themselves disappearing from it. The
same fictive editor also provides footnotes to the
fragments, and these footnotes vary in tone from
scholarly and pedantic to wittily informative to a few
in the first person that conflate the editor with Byron
himself. Taken together, these various elements place a
tremendous burden upon the reader: it is difficult
enough to figure out the plot, let alone who speaks,
whom to trust, and whom, in the end, to believe.
-
Against this world of interpretive complexity and
incomplete attempts to organize it through textual
apparatus, the poem sets two examples of orthodoxy. The
first is Hassan himself; the second is the monk to whom
the Giaour confesses. Both fulfill stereotypes of
(Islamic and Christian) religious orthodoxy. And
neither is of much interest to the editor, who goes so
far as to excise a harangue that the monk delivers to
the Giaour, telling us in a footnote that it will
interest nobody:
The monk's sermon is omitted. It seems to have had so
little effect upon the patient, that it could have no
hopes from the reader. It may be sufficient to say,
that it was of the customary length . . . and was
delivered in the usual tone of all orthodox
preachers. (204)
The poem, then, does not derive its energy
from a clash of civilizations; indeed, Christian
orthodoxy never meets Islamic orthodoxy, and in any
case both are so emptied of content as to become
literal invitations for readers to fill in the blanks
for themselves. Instead, the poem concentrates on the
complex space between orthodoxies, in which a curious
kind of understanding seems to be possible. For when he
makes his confession, the Giaour remarks that he and
Hassan are not so very different:
Yet did he but what I had done
Had she been false to more than one.
Faithless to him, he gave the blow;
But true to me, I laid him low:
Howe'er deserved her doom might be,
Her treachery was truth to me. (1062-67)
The Giaour says, in effect, that he would
have killed her too. He imagines himself in Hassan's
place, and from that perspective approves of what he's
done; he also imagines importing Hassan's perspective
into his own, taking it as a guide for his own future
actions. The Giaour's code and Hassan's code do not
reduce to the same thing, and yet, these lines suggest,
Hassan's code of conduct can be re-written in the
Giaour's language.
-
This may be simply a fantasy of liberal tolerance,
but if so its act of transposition depends upon the
alarming idea that Leila's fidelity to her lover meant
that she deserved to die. The translation is not
symmetrical: Hassan kills Leila because she is his
property, but the Giaour would kill for love (that is,
he would kill Leila because he loves her).
This difference is crucial to the poem's project; by
distinguishing between unfreedom (property) and freedom
(love) it keeps Hassan's code and the Giaour's code
from collapsing into each other. Hassan murders Leila
from within his tradition; as the poem's
"Advertisement" tells us, she was "thrown, in the
Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity" (167).
The Giaour, by contrast, imagines murdering Leila in
the name of a love described as unique and personal and
thus deliberately counterposed to all traditions. To
murder in the name of love is to murder freely; as
Gulnare tells Conrad in The Corsair, "love
dwells with—with the free" (II.502). Love, or
more specifically the death inevitably attached to it,
is thus linked to a freedom that orthodox tyrants like
Hassan cannot understand, and for which the poem's
code-word is "heart:"
To me she gave her heart, that all
Which tyranny can ne'er enthrall. (1068-9)
As the Giaour's sympathy for Hassan
suggests, the heart can understand orthodox tyranny.
But orthodox tyranny can never understand the heart.
When Leila chooses to follow her heart rather than the
dictates of her culture, she crosses from the realm of
orthodox unfreedom into an ambiguous space defined by
its distinction from culture and tradition.
Such movement, the poem implies, is deadly.
-
One result of this contrast between love and
orthodoxy is that love itself comes to seem like a
substitute religion. This is only incidentally because
the Giaour uses religious language to describe his
love; primarily, love looks like religion in this poem
not because it is a feeling but because it is an
obsession. The Giaour spends his remaining days
mourning for Leila, dedicated to her idea to the
exclusion of all else, experiencing visions of her, and
unable even to hear alternative creeds such as the
orthodox sermon excised by the editor. The Giaour's
goal, he tells the monk, is "To die—and know no
second love" (1166). And he scorns inconstant men and
what he calls their "varied joys" (1175). Such
constancy is predicated upon the utter hopelessness of
his love. Because Leila deserves to die according to a
tradition that neither she nor her lover can alter,
there is nothing for the Giaour to do but mourn her as
the lost object whose very irrecoverability is the
condition of his constancy toward her.[3]
-
Is the heart, then, in opposition to orthodoxy, or
is it simply another kind of orthodoxy? More
abstractly: is human love the opposite of religion or
another version of it? Does the poem take love
seriously, and treat religion as its foil? Or does it
take religion seriously, finding in human love another
image of it? The Giaour himself says both things. Or
rather, he says that love is the opposite of
orthodox tyranny, but the poem forces him to experience
love as simply another and more complex kind
of orthodox tyranny: the tyranny of that very tradition
which he claims cannot "enthrall" the heart but which
in killing Leila has melancholically bound him more
firmly to it than it ever could have were she alive. At
the level of plot, moreoever, love and orthodoxy
must be mutually exclusive—for if they
weren't, Leila wouldn't have left Hassan, and so there
would be no plot. Two paradoxes, then: the
Giaour's capacity for understanding religious orthodoxy
depends upon orthodoxy's power to kill those who would
leave it—depends upon, that is, its intolerance;
and the poem's own motivating distinction between love
and religion is likewise a paradox, for if the poem is
to proceed that distinction must both exist (at the
level of plot) and not exist (at the level of the
Giaour's subsequent experience) at the same time.
-
I deliberately use the word "paradox" to name these
problems, for I mean to recall a central moment in the
history of literary study. In his essay "The Language
of Paradox," Cleanth Brooks undertakes a reading of
Donne's poem "The Canonization," in which the paradox
is precisely the one that appears in Byron's poem. Here
is Brooks (at some length):
The basic metaphor which underlies the poem (and
which is reflected in the title) involves a sort of
paradox. For the poet daringly treats profane love as
if it were divine love. . . . . The poem then is a
parody of Christian sainthood; but it is an intensely
serious parody of a sort that modern man, habituated
as he is to an easy yes or no, can hardly understand.
He refuses to accept the paradox as a serious
rhetorical device; and since he is able to accept it
only as a cheap trick, he is forced into this
dilemma. Either: Donne does not take love seriously;
here he is merely sharpening his wit . . . . Or:
Donne does not take sainthood seriously; here he is
merely indulging in a cynical and bawdy parody.
Neither
account is true; a reading of the poem will show that
Donne takes both love and religion seriously; it will
show, further, that the paradox is here his
inevitable instrument. But to see this plainly will
require a closer reading than most of us give to
poetry (11).
If the Giaour's philosophy of love is a
paradox, then, so is he himself a paradox—a
possibility hinted at in his name itself: just as
paradox literally "stands beside" the doxa, so the
non-Muslim "stands beside" the Muslim. More precisely,
the Giaour is a figure for the very paradox that
structures the poem's presentation of the conflict
between love and religion. Here we can appeal to John
Guillory's discussion of the New Criticism in
Cultural Capital, which nicely sketches the
theological resonances of Brooks's formulation of
paradox. Paradox, Guillory points out, gestures
toward doxa rather than naming or promulgating
a particular orthodoxy. "Paradox names the very
condition by which the poem does not name the
truth to which it nevertheless gestures," he writes
(159). In a manner to which we shall return later in
this essay, paradox thus becomes a technique for
skirting irreconcilable religious differences and the
clash of civilizations upon which competing versions of
orthodoxy are predicated. Positioned between
civilizations (the competing worlds of Christian and
Islamic orthodoxy), the Giaour is the site of a
"nameless spell, / Which speaks, itself unspeakable"
(838-39), the very figure of what he cannot say. His
unspeakable spell offers up the possibility of a
reading practice whose very elusiveness and indirection
avoids simply replaying a clash of civilizations.
-
The name for that reading practice is of course
largely coterminous with the New Criticism itself:
close reading. Glance again at Brooks's final sentence:
"But to see [paradox] plainly will require a closer
reading than most of us give to poetry." The close
reading of which "most of us" are incapable is a
reading that begins by recognizing the highly nuanced
way in which literary language gestures toward doxa
rather than naming it. In this way, close reading
displaces religious dispute, with its always-lurking
potential for violence, into the interpretive arena.
Where there was once the distinction between the
orthodox and the heretical, there is now the
distinction between those few who can read and the
majority who cannot. Although New Critical close
reading has sometimes been labeled crypto-religious,
then, it is important to understand that in replacing
orthodoxy with paradox, close reading is functionally
congruent with a secular project that seeks to restrain
religious violence by making it the proper domain of
interpretation.[4]
-
For Brooks, reading for orthodoxy reduces a poem to
doctrine: it simply extracts truths from a poem,
paraphrasing it rather than attending to the movements
of its language. Under the new, non-dogmatic
dispensation of paradox, paraphrase becomes a
deviation, literally a heresy from secular reading
practices. (Readers will recall that The
Well-Wrought Urn, which opens with a celebration
of paradox, closes with an essay entitled "The Heresy
of Paraphrase.") Literary language inspires endless
re-reading because there is always more meaning around
the bend; the heresy is to bring that process to an
arbitrary stop, and so to resist heresy means
constantly rescuing literature from the ravages of
naïve readers who still want it to fight their
cultural battles for them, who wish to flatten paradox
into paraphrasable doctrine and thus re-ignite a clash
of civilizations.[5]
The reader must be continually re-educated in the new
method, a method not content to rest on the surface, or
with an easy paraphrase, but that constantly searches
out that which is hidden—not in order finally to
say it, but rather to show how the text as it were
doesn't say it, for the "it" here is precisely doxa
itself, that which by definition goes without saying.
Translated from the political to the literary arena,
the clash of civilizations is thus remade into literary
paradox. The final withholding of the "it" is what
makes literature literature and not
orthodoxy.[6]
The Pause
-
Taken as a group, the Turkish Tales obsessively
thematize the figure we know as the Byronic hero: a
dark, brooding figure with some mysterious tragedy in
his past; always alone, even in a crowd, he displays a
world-weariness that nevertheless gathers itself into a
reluctant heroism at moments of crisis. Most
importantly, perhaps, he is an object of obsessive
curiosity for the ignorant crowd, who speculate
endlessly, and always incorrectly, about his inner
nature. The Byronic hero simultaneously invites close
reading and repels it: there is always more to be
grasped, though it is unlikely that the reader will be
up to the challenge. As Selim tells Zuleika in The
Bride of Abydos (1813), "I am not, love! what I
appear" (I.482). In The Corsair (1814),
Conrad's face "attracted, yet perplex'd the view"
(I.210). The Giaour, meanwhile, dwells at
length on the Byronic hero as a site of interpretive
complexity, in lines that strikingly anticipate
Brooks's distinction between inattentive reading and
close reading:
The common crowd but see the gloom
Of wayward deeds, and fitting doom;
The close observer can espy
A noble soul, and lineage high. (866-9)
Translating such lines into Brooks's
idiom, we can say that the "common" readers who only
see in the Byronic hero "wayward deeds, and fitting
doom" are lazy and casual; they wish to paraphrase the
Giaour, and therefore miss the paradox that makes him
what he is. Their focus on content ("wayward deeds, and
fitting doom") leads to a picture of the Giaour as a
cultural warrior. By contrast, the "close observers"
who can pick out a "noble soul, and lineage high" are
reading for paradox; these readers have no time for
orthodoxy because they are striving to get to that
mysterious and protean something against which
orthodoxy can be made to seem a relatively shallow and
culture-specific orientation. Of course that thing
cannot be named: as the narrator says, its very essence
is to be "unspeakable" (839); all that close reading
can do is produce what the poem calls the "nameless
spell," the evocation of mood, that is the
essence of the Giaour's noble soul. The Giaour's truth
is that he produces the feeling that one is in the
presence of a depth that cannot be spoken because to
speak it would be to render it superficial. His own
ideal of fidelity to the dead Leila figures the
fidelity of the close reader, who wants to get to the
truth of things but is forced to acknowledge that "the
truth of things" is at bottom the irreducible fact of
paradox itself.
-
In these poems, the invitation to read closely is
mounted most insistently around a characteristic
pause that marks the Byronic hero. The pause
arrives just before a moment of decisive action; it is
a moment carved out of time during which the hero seems
both to gather his strength and review his entire life
before diving once again into the flow of human
events—a lyric moment, in short, in the midst of
narrative time. In The Giaour, the pause comes
almost as soon as we meet the man himself:
A moment check'd his wheeling steed
A moment breathed him from his speed
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
His brow was bent, his eye was glazed;
He raised his arm, and fiercely raised,
And sternly shook his hand on high,
As doubting to return or fly. (218-9; 240-3)
And the narrator then reflects:
‘Twas but an instant he restrain'd
That fiery barb so sternly rein'd;
‘Twas but a moment that he stood,
Then sped as if by death pursued:
But in that instant o'er his soul
Winters of Memory seem'd to roll,
And gather in that drop of time
A life of pain, an age of crime.
O'er him who loves, or hates, or fears,
Such moment pours the grief of years:
What felt he then, at once opprest
By all that most distracts the breast?
That pause, which ponder'd o'er his fate,
Oh, who its dreary length shall date!
Though in Time's record nearly nought,
It was Eternity to Thought! (257-72)
In its elusiveness, its stripping away of
all manner of context and its characteristic
compression and stylization, the pause solicits close
reading almost to the exclusion of all else.[7]
And, indeed, the pause that marks the Byronic hero
becomes also the recommended procedure for the one who
would read such a hero. "[W]ho paused to look again, /
Saw more than marks the crowd of vulgar men" The
Corsair's narrator remarksof Conrad (I.199-200).
When the Giaour invites the monk to read the characters
upon his brow, he cautions: "Still, ere thou does
condemn me, pause; / Not mine the act, though I the
cause" (1060-1). And what follows immediately is the
paradox with which we began, in which the Giaour claims
to understand why Hassan killed Leila: "Yet did he but
what I had done / Had she been false to more than one"
(1062-3). And so the activity of close reading, an
activity characterized and also rendered necessary by
the pause, immediately leads the reader to confront the
poem's central paradox regarding the relation of
religion and human love.
-
If the pause characterizes close reading, it is also
dangerous for the Byronic hero. For Selim, in The
Bride of Abydos, the pause is "fatal" (II.565);
Conrad, in The Corsair, pauses when he has
unexpected forebodings about his latest adventure
(I.309). Because the pause figures a richness of
experience, memory, and history, it trails death in its
wake—not for the reader, but for the object being
read. As imaged in the Byronic hero's paradoxical,
nameless spell, close reading seeks to deflect such
possible violence into the interpretive realm. The
close reader is thus invited to share in the experience
of the hero being read, precisely on the grounds of
their shared anticipation and deflection of violence.
For the Byronic hero, that violence is encapsulated in
the necessary but dangerous pause; for the close
reader, the violence would be holding on to the pause
too long, thereby freezing the hero, paraphrasing him,
turning him into doctrine and pushing him back into the
violence of orthodoxy.
-
This is why the close reader, the reader who pauses
and searches out paradox, must be a secular
reader.[8]
Indeed her secularity is the necessary condition of the
cosmopolitan fantasy of the Byronic hero: the fantasy
of never being tied down, of never having to
"represent" anything in particular but of always being
more than the sum of your parts, more than either the
place you are from or the place that you are at the
moment, and of having a reader willing to come
along for the ride, a reader who understands the whole
business as a series of acts, gestures—parodies,
to recall Brooks, of an intensely serious sort. That
reader is made to recognize how simultaneously
necessary and deadly the characteristic pause is:
necessary, because it is the condition of close
reading; deadly, because it risks mistaking the
interpretive process for a fixed method, to be
performed once and then endlessly, orthodoxly,
reiterated. The ideal reader of the Byronic hero must
be constantly alert to the temptations of orthodoxy,
which the poem figures as the temptation to halt the
interpretive process.
-
We are now in a position to appreciate what is at
stake in the ideals of close reading (a method) and
paradox (its object). Note that in The Giaour,
the method's conditions of possibility are an
asymmetrical intimacy between orthodoxy and freedom,
forged over the body of a dead woman. Close reading is
a secular form, both in its relationship to the
orthodox reading practices known as "paraphrase" and in
the way it tries to blunt and divert religious passion
while still acknowledging it. But when we route a
genealogy of close reading through a poem like The
Giaour, we find that undergirding its secularism
is not an exquisitely balanced paradox but a violent
and asymmetrical one. Perhaps close reading doesn't
divert violence but simply covers it over. The link
between close reading's secularism and its possible
occlusion of violence will return in the next section
of the essay.
Romantic
Occidentalism
-
First, however, I turn to Akeel Bilgrami's
rehabilitation of Occidentalism. His essay
"Occidentalism: The Very Idea" aims to motivate
cultural difference as an object of analysis in its own
right without succumbing to the language of a clash of
civilizations. Samuel Huntington's much-discussed essay
"The Clash of Civilizations?" has been a frequent
target since it appeared in Foreign Affairs in
1993, in part because Huntington's thesis could itself
be accused of peddling Orientalist stereotypes.
Bilgrami, however, notes that the essay has also been
attacked on the grounds that "culture talk" is itself a
distraction from the historical and geopolitical
analysis necessary to understanding the current world
situation. Bilgrami detects this attitude in the
"tendency . . . on the part of much of the traditional
Left to dismiss the cultural surround of political
issues" in favor of an analysis of geopolitics,
globalization, or capitalism (388). According to this
analysis, to speak of cultural differences misses what
is really going on, where "what is really going on" can
be revealed through the act of translating culture into
its "proper" geopolitical cause. Bilgrami has his
doubts about such acts of translation.[9]
He wants to resist the tendency to think of culture as
a version of false consciousness; at the same time, he
wishes to avoid succumbing to a hypostatized language
of enlightenment versus enchantment, modernity versus
tradition, or civilization versus civilization.
-
In order to use and acknowledge "culture talk"
without resorting to Huntington's sweeping categories,
Bilgrami turns to modes of dissent and ambivalence
within enlightened modernity. The
"Enlightenment," as many have pointed out, was not a
monolithic entity; rather, it experienced its own forms
of internal critique almost from its inception.
Bilgrami's own example is the development toward the
end of the seventeenth century of a resistance to
"scientific rationality:"
The metaphysical picture that was promoted by Newton
. . . and Boyle, among others, viewed matter and
nature as brute and inert. On this view,
since the material universe was brute, God was
externally conceived as the familiar
metaphoric clock winder, giving the universe a push
from the outside to get it in motion. In the
dissenting tradition . . . matter was not
brute and inert but rather was shot through with an
inner source of dynamism that was itself
divine. God and nature were not separable as in the
official metaphysical picture that was growing around
the new science, and John Toland, for instance . . .
openly wrote in terms he proclaimed to be
pantheistic. (396; emphasis in original)
Bilgrami rightly emphasizes that the
dissenters were every bit as scientific as
Newton and Boyle. They opposed not science itself "but
a development in outlook that emerged in the
philosophical surround of the scientific
achievements" (396; emphasis in original). In other
words, theirs was a critique not of science but of a
certain "scientific culture."
-
Bilgrami's point is that the critique of western
enlightened modernity sometimes described today as
"Islamic" or "fundamentalist" picks up on this thread
of self-critique within the enlightenment itself.
Isolation, alienation, the ravages of a largely
unregulated market, the transformation or outright
destruction of indigenous and local forms of
solidarity—this is the disenchanted world that
Toland and other dissenters anticipated, and whose
effects they tried preemptively to blunt. And this
critique of modernity is not confined to the
contemporary non-Western world. Referring to the 2004
U.S. presidential race and the phenomenon of so called
"values voters," Bilgrami notes that "in the local
habitus of the West itself ordinary people have to
live in and cope with the disenchantment of
their world, seeking whatever forms of reenchantment
are available to them" (407; emphasis in original).
-
The conceptual point here is that geopolitical
analyses alone cannot account for those phenomena
variously labeled "values" in the mainstream media.
Ideology-critique or analyses of false consciousness
will not suffice here. In order to do their work, such
critical languages have to hold their objects steady.
But the reality is that things are always moving, that
cultures and historical moments differ internally from
themselves and are continually spinning off
counter-discourses and producing renegades. This is a
"multiple modernities" thesis: the fight is not between
rationality and irrationality, or modernity and
tradition, but rather among different accounts of what
gets to count as reason, and what gets to count as
modern. Indeed, the complexity of England's own
scientific revolution suggests how partial it is to
dismiss critiques of western enlightened modernity as
"irrational." That same epistemic generosity, Bilgrami
concludes, needs to be extended to modern-day critics
of the West, whether in Tehran or Topeka. Bilgrami's
second and equally important point, though, is that
there are still winners and losers. Thus
seventeenth-century deists, Islamic fundamentalists,
and opponents of evolution in Kansas are all
responding, in culturally various ways, to a particular
construction of what it means to be modern that has
systematically marginalized their ways of being in the
world.
-
Here I want to honor the attempt—no small
one—to put a concept like "enchantment" to work.
I also want to claim that this attempt is a romantic
one. I think we can get at its romanticism by returning
for a moment to the example of deism and the scientific
revolution. The example is important for Bilgrami
because it allows him to contrast the brute materialism
of the orthodox scientific revolution with the more
epistemically generous and thickly contextualized
dissenting pantheism of the deists. The point I wish to
make involves the congruence of this account with that
commonly attributed to romanticism. On at least one
traditional understanding, at any rate, romanticism is
but a short step away from a freethinking deism pitched
toward pantheism. Thus from Bilgrami's description of
"[a] desacralized world" that "could not move us to
engagement with it on its terms" (398) we
might move to Blake's statement in "There is no Natural
Religion" that "He who sees the Infinite in all things
sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself
only," and then on to Coleridge's claim in the
Biographia Literaria that "all the products of
the mere reflective faculty partook of death, and were
as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter," and then
finally to M. H. Abrams, whose seminal 1965 essay
"Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric"
sums up this romantic attitude as follows:
To the Romantic sensibility such a [dualist] universe
could not be endured, and the central enterprise
common to many post-Kantian German philosophers and
poets, as well as to Coleridge and Wordsworth, was to
join together the ‘subject' and ‘object'
that modern intellection had put asunder, and thus to
revivify a dead nature, restore its concreteness,
significance, and human values, and re-domiciliate
man in a world which had become alien to him. The
pervasive sense of estrangement, of a lost and
isolated existence in an alien world, is not peculiar
to our own age of anxiety, but was a commonplace of
Romanic philosophy.[10]
This story of romanticism's relevance to
modern alienation depends, of course, upon a series of
simplifications, which could be discussed at length. My
point, however, is to draw attention to the way that
this particular story of romanticism extends Bilgrami's
story of the enlightenment's own internal critique.
Taken together, the story stretches from the dawn of
the scientific age to the alienation of red-state
values voters, and it tells of a reaction to
enlightened modernity that, while not the exclusive
property of romanticism, has been given a powerful and
influential inflection by romantic writers and their
twentieth-century interpreters. I would guess, in fact,
that the very romanticism of this story is what
accounts for its appeal.
-
What Bilgrami calls "Occidentalism" we could thus
rename "Romantic Occidentalism"—adding the
codicil that it is a romanticism constructed by critics
of a certain kind: left-liberal agnostic humanists
whose intellectually formative years were the 1950s and
1960s, when anomie, alienation, and the Cold War seemed
greater threats to human values than did religious
fundamentalism. Ecuminicism was the spirit of the age:
the historical contexts of Abrams's "romantic
sensibility" must include the founding of the World
Council of Churches in 1948, the reforms of Vatican II
(1962-1965), the development of mythological criticism,
the growth of religious studies, and the widespread
agreement among sociologists and even some theologians
that if God was not dead, he was at any rate in
retreat. Bilgrami's account, that is to say, is secular
in the way that Abrams's romanticism is secular: not
because it is anti-religious (far from it) but because
of the particular kinds of spiritual
subjectivities it authorizes. At its center is a
certain ethos of spiritual generosity, able to grant
legitimacy to a variety of culturally embedded
orientations because it is not existentially committed
to any of them but can as it were see why somebody
might be existentially committed to them.
-
Can Romantic Occidentalism, forged in the era of
ecumenicism and anti-Communism, be retrofitted for the
age of fundamentalism and religious globalization? Does
it retain its critical purchase on our post-1979 world?
Bilgrami is apparently betting that it does. But if I
am right that it is the influence of a pre-1979
romanticism that helps him to forge connections between
red-state values voters and Islamic fundamentalists,
then we need to ask whether and to what extent that
older humanist romanticism can be updated, or whether
the appropriate romanticism for our own age must be
more empiricist, historicist, and ideological.[11]
-
Consider, in this regard, a document from that
watershed year of 1979, an article entitled "The Truth
About the World Council of Churches," published in
Foundation, a magazine of the California-based
Fundamental Evangelistic Association:
THE WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES IS FULLY COMMITTED TO
THE CREATION OF A NEW SOCIETY based on socialistic
principles and deceitfully called "The Kingdom of
God". They state: "The participation of the Church in
the creation of a new society is not a secondary or
derivative dimension of its existence. It begins at
the very centre in the celebration of the sacraments
as an anticipation of what the world is to become. .
. ." Dr. Philip Potter, WCC General Secretary, quoted
from a 1969 WCC Central Committee directive as
follows: "We call upon the churches to move beyond
charity, grants and traditional programming to
relevant and sacrificial action leading to new
relationships of dignity and justice among all men
and to become THE AGENTS FOR THE RADICAL
RECONSTRUCTION OF SOCIETY." . . . . Another WCC
document stated: "In the developed countries it means
changes in the production structure and employment
policies which will ONLY BE POSSIBLE THROUGH A
CERTAIN 'SOCIALIZATION' of decisions that have so far
been taken autonomously on the basis of interests of
the private sector." MR. BUSINESSMAN, MR. and MRS.
FREEDOM-LOVING AMERICAN—the World Council of
Churches has made it abundantly clear what their goal
is! Are you willing to sit idly by or even help
support this effort to destroy the very foundations
of our faith and freedom? (Reynolds)
So who is the Occidentalist here? Is it
the romantic World Council of Churches, with its
hopeful anticipation of what the world might become,
its critique of the dehumanizing effects of capitalism
and scientific rationality, its commitment to dialogue
and its dedication to "a radical reconstruction of
society"? Or is it the fundamentalist who rages at this
ecumenical sensibility, who finds in it yet one more
example of modernity's hydra-headed assault on his
values? Is it possible to do what Bilgrami asks, and
interpret this fundamentalist anger as more than simply
a false consciousness that causes it to make common
cause with what ought to be its capitalist enemy
(appearing here as the allegorical figure of "Mr.
Businessman")?[12]
If we are to grant the Fundamental Evangelistic
Association the dignity of Occidentalism, as Bilgrami
requests, then we need a reading of Occidentalism that
can accommodate the romantic pluralist and the
fundamentalist by interpreting both as epistemically
legitimate responses to the dehumanization perpetrated
by modernity.
-
This is a tall order. For what the passage from the
Fundamental Evangelistic Association suggests is that
the fundamentalist rejects the romantic's ethos of
generosity outright. That is, the language that
Bilgrami motivates in order to mount his ambitious
argument appears to the fundamentalist as a
symptom of the underlying problem of
modernity, a symptom that is all the more dangerous
precisely because it offers itself as a
solution to that problem by promising, in the
best natural supernaturalist manner, a new heaven and a
new earth: "THE CREATION OF A NEW SOCIETY based on
socialistic principles and deceitfully called
‘The Kingdom of God'."
Byronism and the wounded
mind
-
Perhaps this face-off between the World Council of
Churches and the Fundamental Evangelistic Association,
engaged as the era of romantic humanism was drawing to
dramatic close, can help us see how The Giaour
plays with the counters of romanticism, Occidentalism,
and fundamentalism.
-
As we have already observed, the close reading of
faces and figures is central to The Giaour's
operation, and particularly to its production of the
Byronic hero. But there is one moment in the poem when
the hero, instead of being read, actually tries to do
the reading. It comes after he has vanquished his
fundamentalist opponent. As Hassan lies dying on the
battlefield, the Giaour leans over him:
I gazed upon him where he lay,
And watched his spirit ebb away;
Though pierced like Pard by hunters' steel,
He felt not half that now I feel.
I search'd, but vainly searched to find,
The workings of a wounded mind;
Each feature of that sullen corse
Betrayed his rage, but no remorse. (1085-92)
Like the Giaour's earlier discussion of
why Leila in effect deserved to die, this encounter
demonstrates both an extraordinary intimacy between the
two men and a careful delineation of difference. In the
former instance, the difference was that Hassan killed
Leila for tradition's sake, whereas the Giaour imagines
killing her for love's sake. In this instance, as the
two men stare into each other's faces, the difference
is that the Giaour's face hides a "wounded mind," while
Hassan's hides no such complicated interiority. In
looking at Hassan the Giaour is apparently looking for
another version of himself, which is to say, he is
looking for one who acknowledges life's complexity and
tragedy but is also able to take up a meta-position
vis-à-vis such complexity and tragedy. Instead
he finds only rage. Thus can he conclude that Hassan
"felt not half that I now feel"; absent evidence of a
wounded mind, Hassan becomes simply an example of
mindless fundamentalist anger. And that anger, powerful
and all-defining as it may be, is denied equal
epistemic status with the Giaour's self-aware
woundedness. For the Giaour (and thus for the reader)
Hassan's face is not an interesting text; it is too
easy to read.[13]
-
The difference between the Giaour and Hassan,
couched in the language of a "wounded mind," may thus
be understood to be reflexivity itself. And
so, even though the two men seem remarkably similar in
their aims and in their behavior, the text insists once
again that in reality we are witnessing a face-off
between modernity and tradition—or perhaps more
accurately, we are witnessing tradition's rage
at modernity, with all its talk of complexity,
its complicated and self-aware position-taking in
relationship to its own beliefs.
-
But what the poem also documents, of course, is how
the Giaour subsequently slips into his own kind of
fundamentalism through his single-minded, fanatical,
melancholic devotion to the dead Leila. Earlier I
described this as a paradox in Brooks's sense of the
term. In other words, for this poem to work it must be
simultaneously true that love and religion are mutually
exclusive models of fidelity and that love and
religion model precisely the same kind of fidelity. We
can now identify the moment when the Giaour reads
Hassan's face as the hinge of this paradox, the point
at which the Giaour begins his gradual transformation
from reflexivity into fanaticism. Crucially, however,
even as he slides into fanaticism he retains his
wounded mind, and this makes him, as the poem
obsessively demonstrates, a text worth reading
precisely because it never gives up all its secrets.
That, indeed, is the appeal of the Byronic hero: that
he promises more than he will ever deliver, which makes
him an endlessly fascinating, because ultimately
unsatisfying, object of study. Such indeterminacy,
though, pushes the poem's motivating paradox to the
breaking point. For if we track the Giaour's
development from the figure who searches Hassan's face
to the figure whose face is searched by the curious
monks, we see that his single-minded devotion to Leila
is an effect of the very woundedness, the reflexivity,
that he celebrates. To take reflexivity as a
ground-level commitment is to make certain assumptions
about which one cannot reflect critically. This
occlusion at the very heart of things is the engine
that produces the unanalyzable, unspeakable, enchanted
thing called "Byronism" itself.
-
Even though the Giaour himself is necessarily
oblivious to this effect, the poems's fictive editor
seems to grasp it. Thus while the editor is unable to
keep his hero from coming under the spell of his own
Byronism, he nevertheless arranges the raw materials of
the story in such a way that the reader can observe how
intimately the reflexivity at the heart of Byronism is
bound up with a melancholic self-enchantment that looks
more and more like the religious orthodoxy against
which it supposedly sets itself. This editorial
apparatus is crucial: unlike a theoretical text or a
lyric poem, with their single authoritative voices,
The Giaour offers multiple unreliable voices,
and in so doing it places the reader in a meta-position
considerably more reflexive than anything the Giaour
himself manages. If we take that wounded mind as a
figure for the reflexivity of the modern critic who
searches the face of fundamentalism for a shared
Occidentalism, The Giaour itself frames that
act within the context of a literary object. By doing
so, it demonstrates that there is no shared
Occidentalism here: Hassan's rage cannot be rewritten
as another (less sophisticated) version of the Giaour's
woundedness. Moreover, the poem's complicated
textuality shows what is behind the desire for such an
Occidentalism: namely, "Byronism" itself, in all its
powerfully attractive melancholy. And finally, if we
read it, the poem offers a genealogy of that melancholy
in the bonding that takes place between the Giaour and
Hassan over the dead woman they each would kill. The
source of Byronic melancholy is thus revealed to be the
Giaour's deep need for the tradition (what the poem
calls "The Musselman manner") that kills Leila. Earlier
I called this a paradox, and we are now in a position
to see that in this poem, the paradox at the heart of
Byronism, the paradox that solicits close reading, is
not the exquisitely balanced tension that Brooks loved
to find in poetry, but rather a deep asymmetry between
killing a woman freely (that is, for love) and killing
her because she is property (that is, for tradition).
It is too easy to simply point out that she dies either
way. What is tougher, perhaps, to swallow is that the
close reading that the poem solicits valorizes one of
these killings but not the other, and valorizes it
moreover as the condition of possibility for its
Byronism, its nameless spell, its paradox—in
short, as the condition of possibility for its
secularism.
Coda: Imaginary Terrorism
-
In an interview with Bill Moyers that aired in the
summer of 2006 as part of a PBS series called "Faith
and Reason," the writer Mary Gordon offered a scenario
that strikingly recalls Byron's:
MARY GORDON: And also, I believe that if a writer can
do her or his work, it is to try to imagine the
other, not the comfortable other. I'm actually much
more comfortable thinking of a suicide bomber as an
other than I am of Donald Trump. Donald
Trump—
BILL MOYERS: The inner life of a suicide
bomber—
MARY GORDON: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: —intrigues you more than the inner
life of Donald Trump?
MARY GORDON: I find it much more
comprehensible.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
MARY GORDON: I can very easily put myself in the
imaginative place of believing that something is
worth dying for and even worth killing for. And so,
my imagination can understand somebody who would say,
this is a life or death thing. This is about the
truth. I will give my life for the truth. And if I
have to take lives in order to defend the truth, I
will do it. . . . I think that Osama bin Laden was a
person who got disgusted. And sometimes when I look,
there are some things in the world that disgust me to
the point of despair. So that, for example, some of
the things that kids will do on the Internet now.
Somebody was telling me about young girls from very
good schools who will photograph each other having
sex, and put it on the Internet, so that people can,
you know, see them, access them having sex. Thirteen,
fourteen year old girls are doing that. And I see
something like that, and it makes me despair. And I
think there is something so wrong with this culture
that, wipe it out. Start from—start from zero.
It's too corrupt. It's too far gone. There's an
almost physical revulsion that I can have from some
of the glut and some of the—just some of the
ugliness that I see. And I believe that that's what
Osama bin Laden saw in the West. That he saw a kind
of disgusting corruption that made him feel very,
very, very sick. Conrad gives us the example of some
people who-
BILL MOYERS: Joseph Conrad.
MARY GORDON: Joseph Conrad, who was just disgusted by
a kind of behavior that they found incomprehensible
and so gross, that it made them want—it's as if
you were in a swamp. And you were covered with stink.
And you just wanted to be on a high, dry rock. And I
can understand that very well.
BILL MOYERS: I am sympathetic to the angst on the
Christian right towards popular culture.
MARY GORDON: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: Towards the banality.
MARY GORDON: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: The sheer ugliness of it.
MARY GORDON: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: And I share that sense with them. You
obviously do too.
MARY GORDON: Yes. And I think if you can put yourself
in that place and say, you know, and sort of ratchet
it up, you can say, I understand Osama bin Laden.
That, if I have to—I mean, this is
absurd—but if I have to look at all the
violence, all the stupid violence that's on TV and
some of the stupid violence that teenagers seem to
think is fine, and kids carrying guns. And kids
shooting other kids. And eleven and twelve year olds
having all sorts of sex that they can't possibly
really connect to pleasure. And the greed that this,
to tell you the truth, to see people driving Hummers
sometimes makes me feel so sick that, you know, I
want to just drive them off the road and say, okay,
in the name of Christ, in the name of peace and
justice, I'm just going to shoot you because you have
to get out of your car now. We live in a very stupid,
banal, gross, greedy and rather disgusting
culture.
BILL MOYERS: But it does not lead you to do what
Osama bin Laden did, to kill.
MARY GORDON: And I think that I have to go back to a
religious position, which is that if reading the
Gospel means anything, if Jesus means anything, it's
about seeing everybody, every human being as Jesus.
That's what makes sense. That—therefore, every
human being is of enormous value. Every human being
is sacred. So it seems to me the only thing that
stops me from going out and shooting people in
Hummers is a religious belief that, even though I
don't like them, they are sacred and valuable in the
eyes of God. And that does stop me. Because I could
really, you know, go out on quite a spree. (Gordon)
Read against the background of our
discussion in this essay, this exchange hardly needs
unpacking. Given the role that Leila's sexual
accessibility plays in the plot of the Giaour,
it begins to seem unremarkable that a good bit of
Gordon's revulsion turns on "young girls . . . who will
photograph each other having sex, and put it on the
Internet, so that people can . . . access them having
sex." The substance of Gordon's argument, moreover,
constructs an Occidentalist critique by bringing
together two disparate constituencies (American
religious conservatives and Islamic fundamentalists)
through the auspices of the "imagination." In short,
the literary imagination is Occidentalism: a
critique of the West, carried out by way of the
literary imagination, that forges a link to a
non-Western critic/terrorist. "Yet did he but what I
had done," is how the Giaour puts this particular
thought. Romantic Occidentalism makes Gordon a
potential terrorist: the imaginative identification
becomes so strong that she in effect loses herself in
it and almost becomes the terrorist she has only
imagined. This is the point at which she could "go out
on quite a spree."
-
But if this exchange is a further example of what I
have been calling Romantic Occidentalism, Gordon's
final comment also contrasts that Occidentalism to an
ideal of reading familiar from our discussion of Byron.
For the activity that calls a halt to her imaginative
over-identification with terrorism is "reading the
Gospel." What that reading extracts is the paradox of
the incarnation, with its message of "seeing . . .
every human being as Jesus." Appropriately enough, the
figure of a crucified Jesus, the thing that calls a
halt to Gordon's slide into fundamentalism, here comes
to stand for the very kind of reflexivity that The
Giaour had celebrated as "wounded."
-
Perhaps counter-intuitively, then, the reading of
the Gospel that Gordon performs here is a secular
affair. The figure of Jesus operates as a figure of
reflexive self-distancing that halts the slide into
fundamentalist mindlessness and murderous rage of the
sort Hassan stands for in The Giaour. Gordon
produces her figure of Jesus through an interpretive
practice ("reading") that is secular insofar as it
presupposes that dramas of interpretation are at the
center of a religious life—a particularly modern
presupposition. For once it begins to seem at the very
least tasteless, and at the most positively
bloodthirsty, to continue asserting the exclusive
claims of one particular religion or sect, it becomes
desirable to deflect cultural conflict into the
hermeneutic domain—to turn "reading the Gospel"
into a plea for tolerance rather than an excuse for
bloodshed. Paradox, on this understanding, offers one
possible answer to the inescapable fact of pluralism.
Given the co-existence of a variety of mutually
exclusive truth-claims upon which apparently hang the
salvation of millions and in the name of which people
are willing to die and to kill, paradox offers a method
of reading that replaces violence with the indirect and
ultimately inarticulable feeling that one is
in the presence of something beyond words. To read for
paradox, as I am suggesting that Gordon does here, is
thus to participate in a history of reading intimately
bound to the transformations of religion promulgated by
secularism.[14]
-
Getting here, though, requires just the sort of
literary attentiveness that usually goes by the name of
"close reading," with its faith in an idea of the
distinctiveness, however attenuated and compromised, of
the literary—most especially, as I have been
pointing out throughout this essay, in the ability of
the literary to deflect cultural conflict into the
interpretive realm and thereby contain it. Paradox and
complexity are made available to those who read texts
in a certain way. The literary is both the carrier of
religious transformation and the agent through
which we come to understand the ambivalences that such
transformations necessarily entail. Insofar as it is
presupposed by the literary itself, that ambivalence
needs to be understood, and historicized, as a product
of secularism.
-
On at least some definitions of the term,
cosmopolitanism is another name for the
collection of values I have been gathering here under
the headings of reflexivity, reading, and literariness.
These are secular values, as I have said, in that they
place the ultimately human drama of interpretation at
the very center of things. They are cosmopolitan for
the same reason—particularly if we think in terms
of that version of the "new cosmopolitanism" that
remains committed to a dialectic of universal and
particular, and that takes seriously the modern drama
of reflexivity and self-consciousness. In his response
to Bilgrami's "Occidentalism" essay, Bruce Robbins
voices a cosmopolitan suspicion of enchantment itself,
particularly what he sees as a tendency in Bilgrami's
interest in pantheism and deism to introduce Nature as
a proxy for enchantment. Robbins worries that this will
carry with it related temptations to naturalize
prevailing social mores and norms. And as with Nature,
so with Art: "these forms of enchantment do not always
embody politically desirable items like value,
community, tolerance, and so on," Robbins writes. "This
is why you can't trust the enchantments of art. It's
why art needs critics. And it's why critics need
rationality—though we don't always admit this,
since it makes us seem traitors to our subject" (639).
It seems clear that Robbins's concerns about
enchantment are also worries about romanticism,
specifically the way that romanticism mixes up
aesthetics with politics, or smuggles in norms under
the heading of facts, and thus he seems to join the
ranks of those intellectuals who regard romanticism as
insufficiently secular.
-
In fact, however, romantic enchantment (including
the enchantment isolated by Romantic Occidentalism) is
already secularized. This not because its
content has been transformed, in the manner of natural
supernaturalism, but rather because, as Talal Asad has
noted repeatedly, the very notion of enchantment has
remade religion into a private, spiritual, and
putatively universal affair.[15]
What this means is that religion can be translated into
some other, "deeper," language—not into
geopolitics, but simply into what Bilgrami calls "the
desire of ordinary people for enchantment, for
belonging, for the solidarities of community, for some
control at a local level over the decisions by which
their qualitative and material lives are shaped, in
short, for . . . substantial democracy" (408). The
Moyers-Gordon exchange makes such acts of translation
more bluntly: Gordon's thought experiment writes an
aesthetic and moral revulsion in the language of
religiously-inspired terrorism, making it clear that
her act of identification with Osama bin Laden is
achieved not on religious grounds but on secular ones.
A different and I believe more productively complex
attempt at translation can be glimpsed in the Giaour,
as he searches in vain for evidence of Hassan's
reflexive woundedness. At such moments the poem offers
the literary itself, and its proper reading, as that
which can bring together fundamentalism and
romanticism. But the poem also documents the degree to
which such a notion of the literary is itself
problematically tied to a secularism that seems to
occlude the violence that is its condition of
possibility. By thematizing reading as a form of
critical engagement, a poem like The Giaour
models an ongoing critical practice. Like the famous
duck-rabbit optical illusion, we might have to trade
off between literariness and critical engagement;
perhaps this is the best we can do when it comes to
tracking the various costs of secularism. Whether we
can have it both ways—whether The Giaour
can be both secular and a means to see around
secularism's corners—has been the dilemma of this
essay.
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