Invasion and retreat: gothic representations of the oriental other in Byron's The Giaour.

Yuan, Yin

The Giaour is Byron's sustained and deeply sensitive meditation on the politics of oriental representation. To this extent, the poem's concerns with the (largely textualized) East manifest not only at the level of content, but also register as a distinct problem of form. Thus the conspicuous performativity of The Giaour, which flaunts its formal idiosyncrasies through a self-deconstructive narrative logic that suggests that its author cares not just about the story he is telling, but more significantly, the manner in which he tells it. Yet, where treatments of the poem's Romantic orientalism have ventured beyond the basic materialist framework to take up issues of form, they have tended to reiterate established aesthetic readings simply by relocating them within the context of imperialism. (1) Eric Meyer's deconstructive approach is a notable exception, with its thorough-going attention to the way the text's formal logic--its disruptions and lacunae--"problematizes the production of ideology in narrative." For Meyer, however, these disruptions are ultimately "unwitting" textual effects that elude and "refuse the desire of its assumed author": "despite the arguably deconstructive propensities of Byron's text, The Giaour remains a fundamentally hegemonic narrative, centered on the extension of Western cultural superiority over the East in an agonistic struggle of dominance contested and (re)confirmed in the dramatic battle of Giaour and Pascha." (2)

Meyer's cynicism stems from his reading of the colonialist position through Edward Said's framework in Orientalism. (3), Thus, Byron's The Giaour is a "text[] of Romantic Orientalism [that] must therefore be read as part of the cultural apparatus whereby the Orient is contained and represented by ideological frameworks that serve both to incite confrontation and to seal off contestation within the larger structures of imperial history." (4) Developments in the study of Romantic imperialism within the last two decades, however, have complicated Said's excessively rigid binary structure, highlighting the insecurities and ambivalences that haunt the discourses of empire. (5) Byron's anxieties about his own oriental productions have been critically and compellingly documented by Nigel Leask. I would like to develop Leask's insights by considering at greater length the formal strategies of The Giaour, a poem about which Leask does not say much beyond the way in which its stylistic and thematic departures from Samuel Rogers's The Voyage of Columbus point up "Byron's ambivalence with regard to the moral value of his own poetry." (6)

I suggest that The Giaour at once articulates and alleviates that moral ambivalence through recourse to the gothic mode, employing gothic's aesthetic strategies in order to present the poem's own critical perspective toward its oriental materials. The gothic allows Byron to contemplate and indict the violent work of empire through its drama of psychic fragmentation. More significantly, the gothic harbors within itself a crucial self-reflexivity through which the British orientalist poet can disclose the construction of narrative as an exercise of power that seeks to define and thereby colonize the other, even as its spectral effects are recruited to stage the failure of that same imperial will to power. Crucial here are two different but related meanings of the "other": the disparaged or exoticized other that is invented by the cultural imagination on the one hand, and the philosophical alter who must necessarily elude the ego's every definition and self-projection on the other. If the first becomes the occasion for Byron's self-conscious indictment of imperial logic, the second provides a way out of that logic by testifying to the ultimate transcendence of the other.

Rather unexpectedly, then, deploying the oriental and the gothic alongside each other in a mutually implicated set of moves allows Byron to legitimize his use of culturally suspect--because economically profitable, and therefore tied up in the project of empire--materials and thereby to disavow the charge of discursive imperialism. Even the sensationalist and lucrative aspects of the gothic, which were disparaged by a critical readership anxious to set itself apart from the popular taste, are thus purged through Byron's highly self-conscious deployment of the aesthetic. (7) The elusive qualities of the poem's representations, then, are not "unwitting" effects, as Meyer would have it, but strategic ones produced by the historical confluence of oriental and gothic discourses at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Reading The Giaour not just as orientalist or gothic, but a discursive hybrid of the two, can thus clarify the vexed nature of Byron's implication within the politics of representation. (8)

I. "Stranger in his native land": The Violent Estrangement of the Other

From its inception, the gothic has served a cathartic function in the way it allows readers and writers to project, explore, and thereby contain their fears toward cultural "others." In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the massive expansion of the British empire meant that colonial encounters were increasingly supplying the shapes of those "others" within the cultural imaginary. (9) As Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh have noted, "by 1820 200 million people--over a quarter of the world population--would come under British domination." (10) Violence, ranging from the extremes of bloodshed epitomized by the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt to the cultural assault implicit in Britain's Evangelical policy in India, haunted the national imagination. Simultaneously and in contradictory ways, national and personal identities were being consolidated by the inflow of mercantilist profit, defined against the growing varieties of cultural otherness, and fractured by the climate of violence proliferating at home and abroad.

The smothering atmosphere of the gothic, in which the eruption of what has been repressed threatens at every turn, well suits the articulation of fears and fantasies at the heart of the imperial project." But the extreme mobility of the aesthetic--its tendency to invade and infect in its characteristic disregard for boundaries--gives the gothic an ideological openness that allows for the expression of conflicting impulses. (12) Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert merely testifies to a widely known fact when she states, in the context of the national slavery debate at the end of the eighteenth century, "gothic literature would be invoked as often to give voice to the fears awakened by colonial realities as it was used by abolitionists to dramatize the horrors and tortures of enslavement." (13) Indeed, The Giaour would draw on the gothic to dramatize the imperial violence overshadowing Greece, which was during this time "the site of a pragmatic contest among the nations for world power." (14) The drama of psychic fragmentation that the gothic stages through the transgression of natural, temporal, and inter-subjective boundaries--the mysteries and secrets that vex the surety of rational knowledge, layer upon layer of mediated narrative, ghostly hauntings that register loss or anxiety--provides symbolic mechanisms through which Byron can contemplate the violent work of empire and its fracturing of every cross-cultural encounter.

As is well known, Byron's travels to the Levant between 1809 and 1811 inspired him to embrace, as a symbolic cause of freedom, Greece's struggle for liberation from the Ottoman Empire. (15) The first of his oriental poems, The Giaour, was composed, published, and subsequently (and repeatedly) added to between 1812 and 1813. Its subject matter is clearly influenced by the poet's Philhellenism, and the romantic triangle among Hassan, Turkish chieftain; Leila, Circassian slave; and the Giaour (the word is Turkish for infidel), Venetian renegade, has often been read as an allegory of the world-historical strife between East and West over the subjugated Greece. The usual binary between despotic East and enlightened West--a binary that drives the nationalistic literature seeking to justify Britain's expansion of empire--fails to obtain, however, as characterization aided by a complex narrative apparatus insistently points up the similarities between Hassan and the Giaour. Marilyn Butler reads the poem's animosity toward the Western Giaour as Byron's critique of the Christianity that the Giaour nominally embodies, and, more specifically, as a denouncement of the Evangelical campaign for religious proselytizing in India that was underway in Britain during this time. (16) Yet Venice is not Britain, and its location at the frontier between Occident and Orient, in addition to the fact of the Giaour's apostasy, suggests a more complicated understanding of the relationship between East and West at work. (17) There is a sense in which it is the poem's characters themselves who insist on the binary framework--the poem takes its title from the Muslim narrator's discursive othering of one whom he knew not and loathed, (18) and the Giaour ironically recommends his crime to the Caloyer Abbot on the basis of his victim's "paynim spleen" (1038-42)--and thus the possibility that the dichotomy within which the poem is locked is itself symptomatic of the intercultural violence that imperial work entails. (19)

Indeed, The Giaour delivers a ringing condemnation of European and Ottoman projects of empire through the portrayal of a world that is steeped in violence, which shadows the path of each character and infects every link in the narrative. Violence is established at the outset of the poem: as Daniel Watkins has cogently demonstrated, the prefatory Advertisement and the opening eulogy on Greece each contributes to "emphasize[] that the specific historical moment of the story, rife with territorial dispute and plunder, and with savage military interventions, knew cruelty and violence on a level 'unparalleled even in the annals of the Faithful.'" (20) The tale proper likewise records a violent chain of events: after the illicit love between the Giaour and Leila is discovered, Hassan drowns Leila, then is himself slain by the avenging Giaour, who ekes out the remainder of his days in mental torment. Beyond just physical brutality, however, the violence of world-historical strife registers within the gothic text as what I will call a poetics of haunting--a series of structural and temporal dislocations that fissure the poem's presentation of its characters so that they appear as ghosts, uncanny symptoms of a violence so hegemonic it constitutes both premise and effect of The Giaours narrative trajectory. (21)

For violence configures every cross-cultural encounter that occurs in advance of, during, and subsequent to the narrative time of the poem. Take, for example, the battle between Hassan and the Giaour in the valley of Mount Parnassus. At the level of political allegory, their fight dramatizes the violent confrontation between the Ottoman and Western empires over Eastern territory. (22) Yet, the eruption of physical violence at this climactic moment is curiously diffused by the text's insistent gestures toward Hassan's certain death prior to the actual combat. The description of the chieftain on his journey through the mountain already foreshadows what is to come: he, as deck'd for war, Bears in his belt the scimitar Stain'd with the best of Arnaut blood, When in the pass the rebels stood, And few return'd to tell the tale Of what befell in Parne's vale. (523-28)

The stains of "Arnaut blood" anticipate the bloody combat with the Giaour's band "array'd in Arnaut garb" (615), yet the past tense governing the depiction--"stain'd," "stood," "return'd"--couches that foreshadowing in a past temporality, as if suggesting that an erstwhile battle with a different Arnaut band is being invoked here. This narratorial traversal across different temporal registers transforms the future into a repetition of the past, so that when the battle unfolds before us about a hundred lines later, there is an uncanny sense of deja uu, as if we are reliving an experience that has occurred once before. (23) Gothic repetition here enacts the refusal of cross-cultural violence to be confined and thereby neutralized through representation, as the physical violence of the actual battle becomes eclipsed by a psychological affliction.

Such narrative foreshadowing is, in fact, part of a larger textual strategy that works to convey Hassan's ghostliness. It is significant that Hassan is first mentioned in the poem as the inevitable victim of the Giaour's wrath. We are told that "The curse for Hassan's sin was sent / To turn a palace to a tomb" (280-81). The formulation already estranges Hassan in a number of ways: he is inextricably bound up with his imminent doom; he is referred to as object of another's curse--that is, he neither appears himself, nor is he ascribed agency; the consequences that he will suffer are themselves displaced, registering not on the material surface of his body, but rather in the transformation of his dwelling from palace to tomb. In all of these cases, Hassan first appears as absence and bleak immateriality, and our glance of him is oblique, mediated by the inevitability of his passing.

This impression is further developed in the next scene, which presents the tragic aftermath: "The steed is vanished from the stall, / No serf is seen in Hassan's hall" (288-89). Previously we have been taught to see the palace as a tomb; its former inhabitants now conjured up by memory consequently take on the cast of so many apparitions haunting the dwelling. The ghostly effect is perceptually reinforced by the replay of elapsed time across a scene now rendered immutable by death. The swift flight through time blurs Hassan in "Childhood" (308) into Hassan in "Youth" (312) into the negation of Hassan in "Age" (316), the chieftain's form gradually morphing until it turns into the very picture of absence, a veritable ghost. We see Hassan in all the impossibility of his being, for his waning self by the fountain is, aptly, an evanescent image evoked only in its own disavowal-"ne'er shall Hassan's Age repose / Along the brink at Twilight's close" (316-17; my emphasis). Meticulous description of the fountain, with its "wave of watery light" (306) and its "silver dew / [that] In whirls fantastically flew" (301-2), contributes to the scene's fleetingness by conveying a sense of the diaphanous. Indeed such details seem designed to be perceptually compelling, since, as Elaine Scarry teaches us, evocations of thin and flimsy objects are more readily imagined because they instruct the reader "to create an image whose own properties are second nature to the imagination." (24)

Here's a classic gothic trope: lord of the palace becomes the ghost who haunts. The disquieting power of Byron's text, however, lies not in its enlistment of terrifying devices but in the dissemination of dread as readerly affect. (25) As readers we are visited by Hassan's ghost before we even meet the living man, and the traumatic force of that visitation accrues from the fact that, rather than representing Hassan's ghost, the text makes us conjure it up. That perceptual exercise inevitably shapes Hassan's subsequent appearance, whose physical form seems altogether to be the material embodiment of hitherto indeterminate fears. Hassan appears as one who haunts, for the premise of his appearance--that he will die, indeed has died--makes him uncanny. He exists as a ghost in his native dwelling and a stranger in the text, structurally fulfilling the Muslim narrator's lament--"died he by a stranger's hand, / And stranger in his native land" (735-36)--before the fact.

What this temporal slippage dramatizes, indeed stages within its readers, is a keen sense of the way in which the violent confrontation between the East and West becomes the primal scene that contaminates, in advance, every encounter with the other. Hassan is in a sense dead before his actual battle with the Giaour--the battle, read all this while as political allegory, turns out to be merely one more data point that evidences the global intercultural conflict between the European and Ottoman empires. Cast simultaneously as type and instance, the battle points to the operation of intercultural violence as both the poem's premise and its end. The text that seems to offer up a version of the world becomes merely a fragment of that world, with a consequent blurring of the boundary between inside and outside that is symptomatic of the infectiousness of violence. (26) Indeed, the revelation of the Giaour world as a dynamic image of, and not a discursive mastery over, reality psychologically inflicts the violence that it dramatizes.

Crucially, this violence does not remain unidirectional or constrained by a power of hierarchal relations within which the East and West always assume the same positions. Violence perpetuates and violence redounds, as the figurative "curse [that] for Hassan's sin was sent" (280; my emphasis) turns into the literal curse called down upon the Giaour. Uncannily repeating the structural estrangement of Hassan who must be a "stranger in his native land," the curse that afflicts the Giaour makes him a "corse [which] shall from its tomb be rent; / Then ghastly haunt thy native place" (1756-57). As with Hassan, too, the Giaour's haunting is not merely the consequence of their particular combat, for the curse is in a sense fulfilled before its actual incantation. As David Seed observes, the Giaour's first appearance in the poem is already associated with death, so that "the merest suggestion [t]here of the Giaour's resemblance to an animated corpse proves to be predictive once we move towards the poem's conclusion." (27)

And not just predictive, I argue. Much like Hassan, the Giaour's ghostly condition defies narrative time because it transcends it, exposing the way in which intercultural encounter within the poem is determined in advance by the violent political climate purportedly beyond it. It bears further noting that the Giaour's ghostliness at the beginning of the poem manifests through the Muslim fisherman's perspective, so that the infliction of violence registers at the outset as a distinct problem of cultural estrangement. If Hassan died "by a stranger's hand," the Giaour is in a manner of speaking caught in a stranger's eye. Indeed, the shifting perspectives that characterize The Giaour establish intercultural encounter as the formal, not just thematic, logic of the narrative, which must be taken into account when considering the gothic nature of the poem's characters.

The poem's total investment in this relationship between self and cultural other makes the question of hospitality a particularly fraught one. This concept does important and sustained work within The Giaour, yet critical discussions have failed to consider its significance beyond the most basic level of plot. While critics frequently note the disruption of Islamic hospitality attending upon the Giaour's murder of Hassan, nobody to my knowledge has made anything of the fact that we first encounter the Giaour during the Bairam feast. Hastening along the coast on his charger, the Giaour is abruptly checked in his course by what he sees over the woods--"the crescent" (222), "[t]he Mosque's high lamps" (223), and "flashes of [the far tophaike's] joyous peal" (226), all of which are signs that "prove the Moslem's zeal" (227) during the Bairam feast. Marking the end of the holy month of fasting and prayer, the celebratory feast propels the usually extravagant Islamic hospitality to even greater heights. (28) Yet even this geniality proves incapable of accommodating the heretical "giaur," whose "foreign garb and fearful brow" (231) arouses such hostility in the Muslim narrator that it disrupts the rhyming rhythm of his paean: To-night--set Rhamazani's sun-- To-night--the Bairam feast's begun-- To-night--but who and what art thou Of foreign garb and fearful brow? (228-31)

The occurrence of "but" effectuates a syntactic and semantic rupture, doubly underscoring the foreigner's exclusion from the scene of hospitality. Both physically and psychologically, the Giaour remains beyond the pale, apart from the feast and alienated from the narrator's perspective. (29)

Cognitively, too, the scene's temporal ambiguity heightens one's sense of the Giaour's estrangement, since it foregrounds the alien's unknowability by further casting a shadow over his motives. For "[s]trange rumors" (447) will tell us later that it is on the eve of Bairam's feast when Leila fled to "wrong[] [Hassan] with the faithless Giaour" (458), calling into question the version of events that depicts the Giaour alone along the coast ("But others say ..." [467]), and that we have heard from the Muslim narrator two hundred plus lines before. The two accounts' simultaneous citation of the feast as a reference point leads to their mutual deconstruction, each proving the outlier that calls into question the other. Is the Giaour then pursuing Leila or Hassan, and is the goal of his pursuit to seduce, rescue, or avenge? The incoherence of narrative time renders the Giaour uncanny, but that uncanniness, which is intensified by the addition of the second account, aligns with the Giaour's estrangement in the first to reinforce the perceptual sense of Islamic inhospitality.

In his many writings on the subject of hospitality, Jacques Derrida distinguishes between conditional hospitality, which welcomes the stranger only insofar as he agrees to a set of pre-established stipulations, and absolute hospitality, which, in its radical commitment to all who are coming and all who are to come, must necessarily rest beyond the confines of law. For Derrida, genuine hospitality must always be absolute hospitality--the Law of hospitality requires the suspension of those laws of hospitality that work to delimit, confine, and thereby subvert the very idea of hospitality. (30) The site of Hassan's hospitality, however, seems conditional upon a certain set of cultural practices: to be welcomed, the "weary stranger" (342) must "bless the sacred 'bread and salt'" (343). As Byron's note to this line explains, the safety of the guest comes subsequent to the partaking of food; "his person from that moment is sacred." (31) Such imposition of the social practices of the host, according to Derrida, predicates an unequal exchange that is implicitly violent in nature. Those who do not accept the strictures, or are uninvited in the first place, necessarily stand unwelcomed, as is the case with the Giaour. But in matters of hospitality, what proves exception to the rule belies the rule, so that not just the Giaour, but Turkish stories and perspectives, too, become estranged, recounted as "strange rumors" and the reports of "others." Indeed, the proliferation of contradictory signs points to the poem's own hostility toward its readers, indicting a structural failure of hospitality that exceeds the immediate circumstances of plot pertaining to the scene at hand. (32)

To condemn the Giaour alone for the subversion of hospitality because he has murdered the Muslim chieftain, then, is to remain blind to the poem's structural, even endemic, failure of hospitality that underlies and indeed supersedes all such particular instances of failure. On the same count, it must be emphasized that Byron is not critiquing Islamic hospitality per se, either--on the contrary, he famously respects the charitable openness of those who profess the faith. Rather, what Byron records in The Giaour is his very real sense of the inevitable incursion of violence into every encounter with the other, so that hospitality as it unfolds in the contemporary climate of geopolitical strife has in a way always already failed.

Thus, Christian hospitality in The Giaour falls short just as Islamic hospitality does--if the Giaour feeds not on the "sacred 'bread and salt'" (343) of Hassan's palace, neither does he "taste[] the sacred bread and wine" (815) of the Christian monastery. In fact, the conditionality of Christian hospitality is more acutely exposed by the very substitutability of the "sacred bread and wine" as requirements of hospitality. The Giaour is allowed to seek refuge in the monastery despite his lack of piety, for " [g]reat largess to these walls he brought" (816). The acquiescence to money as an alternative to religious devotion only emphasizes the dependence of Christian hospitality on some kind of payment, be it worldly cash or otherworldly faith. The monk who scorns the Prior's compromise--"But were I Prior, not a day / Should brook such stranger's further stay" (818-19)--is thus no better himself, for he allows religious law to supersede the principle of charity. Given Byron's antagonism toward the kind of "enlightened imperialism" that uses religion to justify its colonization of the East, the failure of religious hospitality in The Giaour constitutes an explicit critique of the hypocritical self-interest that fuels the project of empire and renders any genuine encounter with the other impossible.

More significantly, this failure of hospitality brilliantly extends and elaborates upon the poetics of haunting that underlies the narrative, establishing the threatening figure of the ghost as at once product and perpetuator of hostility. In this regard, the antithetical roles that Derrida and Byron respectively accord to the ghost figure points up the radical extent to which hospitality has failed in The Giaour, if for Derrida absolute hospitality can properly manifest only as openness to the revenant, that is, the absolute stranger who comes from beyond the threshold of life, (33) Byron's ghost, on the other hand, names the very violence that both proceeds from and results in the failure of hospitality. Within The Giaour, the encounter with the cultural other is structured not by hospitality but rather hostility, which is not only incapable of an openness so radical as to welcome even the revenant, but indeed turns the other into revenant, a stranger who "ghastly haunt[s] [his] native place" (757).

The estranged and alienated victim of precisely such a hostile cross-cultural encounter, the Giaour feeds not on Bairam's feast but is instead cursed to "suck the blood of all [his] race" (758). Under Byron's intensely pessimistic vision, hospitality can only be conceived of as a kind of demonic haunting, in which the Giaour, already reduced into a specter by the inimical perspective of the Muslim fisherman, will himself from his nearest kin At midnight drain the stream of life; Yet loathe the banquet which perforce Must feed [his] livid living corse; (760-62)

Curiously, the vampirish feasting here deliberately parodies the Christian communion through an inversion of its terms. In the latter, the sinner participates in a spiritual banquet, gaining access to the divine Father by feeding on the body of Christ, the beloved son of God who has fallen for man's crime. In the former, however, it is the father who feeds on "one that for [his] crime must fall--/ The youngest--most belov'd of all" (767-68). Life gained in the one becomes life drained in the other. (34) On one level, the parody can be said to perform a scathing critique of religious hospitality, but on a more fundamental level, it compels a comparison between demonic feasting and Christian communion, foregrounding the Eucharistic concept of God's body as host in order to locate hospitality as the governing logic of the scene. That is to say, the parody underscores the dramatic distance between the two banquets and thereby establishes the vampirish feasting as the satanic perversion of hospitality.

It is only when one understands the sardonic dimension of the vampire curse that the critical place of the scene becomes apparent. Not merely an ideological gesture indicting Eastern superstition or a crudely "oriental" flourish, the event of the curse memorably clarifies and grounds the poetics ot haunting within the hostile site of intercultural encounter. Furthermore, the exoticized nature of the curse marks as victim not just the accursed Giaour but also the textualized East, confined as it is within an interpretive framework authored by the West and for the West. That is, Byron's textual exoticization of the Orient through his citation of the folkloric vampire figure constitutes just another instance of the sort of discursive violence that the Muslim narrator perpetuates in his perspectival alienation of the Giaour. The Muslim who hostilely estranges the Venetian is thus himself hostilely estranged by the Britain. Indeed, the chiasmic construction of the Muslim narrator's curiously-phrased "[a]s cursing thee, thou cursing them" (765) forcefully enacts this logic of reverberation that catches the East and West alike in an endless cycle of violence.

To a certain extent, then, the vampire curse within The Giaour engages in the work of self-outing, harboring within itself the very indictment of its textual imperialism. Such ideological reversals, I suggest, are not "unwitting" textual effects, for they frequently occur at the juncture where the poem's exoticism becomes problematized by its own ghostly logic. Here, the discursive convergence of the gothic and the oriental, a literary phenomenon common enough in British Romanticism, reveals its own ideological expediencies. Not just a symptom of the violence that attends upon every cross-cultural encounter, the poem's ghostly atmosphere is simultaneously, and paradoxically, recruited as an affirmation of the elusiveness of the cultural other.

As I will go on to demonstrate, Byron's model of alterity is a phenomenological one in which the other, necessarily different from and indeed utterly opposed to the demonic other that the ego invents and projects, can never truly be encountered as such. While such a nuanced perspective testifies to his genuine respect for otherness, it must also be understood as part of the author's anxiety about the ideological nature of his own poetic project. In Byron studies, we hear much of the Philhellenist who takes pains to present an "authentic" picture of the East rather than fall prey to essentializing stereotypes that merely work to further the imperialist agenda, and whose writings on the Orient are legitimized by actual travels to the region. (35) It is true that the relationship between the Western self and Oriental other in Byron's writings is never simply a reductive affair of systematically hierarchized binaries. Yet, critics have also not failed to point out the degree to which Byron's experience of the Orient is itself mediated through Western writings on the subject, and his representations shaped by and implicated in orientalist stereotypes. (36)

Indeed, the very act of representing the Oriental other, even if organized as a critique of empire, necessarily implicates the British Byron in the work of discursive imperialism. That Byron was profiting from that representation on the literary market made his position an even more ambivalent one, given the intimate alliance between colonialist ambitions and the expansion of trade. (37) As Leask has compellingly demonstrated, the poet's flippant self-mockery of his own economic pragmatism conceals a deeper anxiety about his complicity. For Leask, this anxiety can only register within The Giaour as a paralyzed pathos, but I suggest that Byron in fact attempts to absolve himself of guilt by undermining his own oriental representations through recourse to the gothic. Looking ahead to the third and final section of my paper, I will argue further that the self-reflexivity of the gothic in fact allows Byron to disclose his construction and presentation of narrative as an exercise of power. In the last analysis, and as the culmination of his defensive strategies, Byron exposes the ideological contingency of his tale, anticipating and thereby disavowing the charge of discursive imperialism.

2. "That gemmed the tide, then mocked the sight": Oriental Imagery as the Materialization of Absence

It is Byron's distinct achievement to coordinate the exorbitant amount of onental detail that founds and propels his narrative with the spectral effects of form. Marilyn Butler is subtly reproachful toward The Giaour's orientalized storystuff, remarking that "Byron's concept of other nations' independence was that of an Enlightenment intellectual, who respected the autonomy of other cultures, but was inclined to admire them precisely for their otherness, their unreformed feudal 'romantic' features." (38) Yet, more than simply an uncritical valorization that risks becoming reinscribed as a crude oriental exoticism, in The Giaour Byron embraces these "'romantic' features" the better to disown them, marshaling them as so many impediments that produce, rather than obfuscate, the failure of cross-cultural encounter. What the poet recognizes here is the fact that stereotypical cultural attributes--Butler's "unreformed feudal 'romantic' features"--are not so much actual indexes of otherness as they are self-projections of the one seeking to colonize the other, elements of a fiction at once pernicious in their violent imposition and, in the last analysis, futile in their efforts. The ghostliness of the other, a textual construction through which Byron contemplates the violent premise and aftermath of every cross-cultural encounter (including the symbolic encounter between a poet and his characters), becomes simultaneously a way out of that violence, for what it does is to manifest Byron's respectful retreat from the colonialist desire to define and master the other.

This logic of retreat crucially underpins Byron's dramatization of the combat scene. Though a scene of devastating brutality, the violence that erupts in the clash between Hassan and the Giaour does not translate into any kind of stable power hierarchy from the reader's perspective, for the domination that the Giaour ostensibly achieves at Hassan's moment of death is curiously subverted by the description of clothing. As readers, we are not permitted visual access to Hassan's full form, but see only "(h]is turban [that] far behind him roll'd" (659), "[h]is flowing robe [that] by falchion torn" (661), and the "fragment[s] of his palampore" (666).

The "sever'd hand" (657), too, functions as the kind of banal gothic device that, like the oriental stereotypes in their discursive imposition, disrupts the cross-cultural encounter. From such an artless deployment of the gothic, the poem's more critical perspective seeks to distance itself. That is to say, the spectral effects that the poem disseminates through its formal strategies, and which organize the poem's critique of empire, are directed toward a simultaneous critique of sensationalist gothic. Such a double perspective toward the gothic has been comprehensively documented by Michael Gamer as a Romantic-era strategy to reclaim profitable gothic material for a critical audience. As Gamer argues, authors we have learned to associate with "high" culture seek to legitimize their own use of gothic materials--materials tainted by their popular success and substantial economic promise--by performing their critical distance from these same materials. (39) But if Byron's Giaour can be said to participate in this process, and Gamer argues that it does, one must bear in mind that it is not simply gothic matter that Byron must salvage, but gothicized oriental material. The economic taint becomes more insidious, and the need to purge that taint more urgent, when its implication in the work of empire is thus spotlighted. (40)

In the context of Hassan's and the Giaour's battle, then, the severed hand functions as one more stale convention that helps assuage Byron's anxiety toward his commodification of the Orient by failing to secure Hassan for the Occidental eye. This effect is compounded by the hand's deictic ambiguity, since we remain unsure as to whom it belongs until the Muslim apparel appears to confirm it as Hassan's, though that is still further complicated by the Western reader's difficulty in distinguishing between the chieftain's dress and the Giaour's "Arnaut garb" (615). Indeed, the hand's dislocation from a body--its corporeal decontextualization--suggests the arbitrary futility of gothic devices that have been deployed for their own sakes. Even when we, along with the Giaour, finally see "Fall'n Hassan" (669) at the end of that dazzling catalogue of clothing, the gaze that seeks to master is displaced by the grotesque posture of its object, whose lying form is described as casting its "unclos'd eye / Yet lowering on his enemy" (66970; my emphasis). The impossibility of that physical bearing subverts the imperialist logic of surveillance, as Hassan's being finally eludes physical and visual conquest. (41)

At the level of content, then, Byron denies the Giaour mastery over Hassan. At the level of representation, he denies his readers mastery over his oriental characters. Byron's recognition of the violence that structures every encounter between the East and the West thus proceeds alongside his desire to mitigate that violence by a discursive retreat--a movement of drawing back that accords the other the dignity of being beyond representation. The exorbitant description of oriental costume, which intrudes into and disrupts the lines of power configuring the cross-cultural encounter, becomes a literary strategy to accomplish that drawing back. It turns out that the very "correctness of costume," (42) for which Byron praises William Beckford's Valthek, produces, when implemented in The Giaour, the material impediments that prevent any direct encounter with the other. There is a curious sense in which Byron's oriental fabric itself becomes the materialization of an absence, the textured site of misalignment that dramatizes the failure to encounter the other on its own terms.

We see this same logic at work in the poem's representation--or rather, lack of representation--of Leila. As the prized love object over which Hassan and the Giaour, respective embodiments of the Ottoman and Western empires, engage in a world-historical territorial contest, Leila herself is conspicuously absent. Meyer reads this as "in keeping with her status as symbolic capital used to motivate the exchange between the two male figures." (43) Certainly, intersecting power relations at the nexus of imperialism and gender underpin the triangulated relationship among Leila, Hassan, and the Giaour. Simultaneously, however, a binary configuration between Western self and Eastern other unfolds according to the eroticized logic of imperialist gendering, so that, in relation to both the Venetian Giaour and the British author, Leila's material absence can be seen as the extreme figuration of Hassan's ghostliness--that is, as a symptom of the violence Leila suffers, and simultaneously, a pronouncement of her final elusiveness.

As with Hassan, the text locates our first encounter with Leila in her death, though the materiality of even her corpse is effaced in its objectification into what the Muslim fisherman calls "precious freight" (362), a phrase charged with undertones of commodification. This "freight" then transforms abmptly into the free-floating "it" of line 374, so that the increasing unmooring of this "burthen [the Emir] so gently [bore]" (360) from signification is reflected, at the level of syntax, by the conspicuous lack of a grammatical antecedent that could anchor the reference of the pronoun. The process of that transformation, which we can understand to have occurred through the casting of Leila's body only if we take "it" to mean Leila, is in fact obscured, materializing within the text only as two lines of asterisks. Lithographic form and narrative content thus mirror each other in an intimate interplay that underscores the total dissociation of the Emir's load from the individual person of Leila. Plunging through meaning as it plunges through water, "it" remains ultimately unidentified.

In other words, the text's fragmentation at the crucial moment of action forces us to do the work of reconstruction. Naming "it" Leila is a belated and interpretive imposition, rendered meaningful only by the Turkish custom of punishing adultery with drowning--for, as the editorial voice in the poem's Advertisement tells us, female slaves are "thrown, in the Mussulman manner, into the sea for infidelity" (182). Founded upon a stock idea of oriental despotism, the scene of drowning strikingly becomes the occasion for a structurally recursive disappearance, as the desired Leila turns first into corpse, then freight, then the unmoored, unidentified "it," ever diminishing till vanishing from view, Like lessening pebble it withdrew; Still less and less, a speck of white That gemm'd the tide, then mock'd the sight; (380-83)

Indeed, the juxtaposition of the blunt stereotype of "Mussulman" despotism and the actual obscurity of the object of desire points up precisely the failure of oriental presuppositions to embody or represent the other. Is the Emir Hassan himself? Is his "burthen" Leila? Is Leila alive or dead? Does he cast her into the water? Is the plunging "it" that same "burthen"? To insist on the Western interpretation of Turkish despotism is only to force a resolution that the text relentlessly suggests to be illusive. And it is to drive home this point, it seems to me, that the editorial gloss cajoles its readers into complicity with the imperialist project even as the narrative unforgivingly exposes the deluded nature of that project. Gothic fragmentation thus compels an ironic, self-reflexive perspective toward the ideological work of the editorial frame.

Even in physical descriptions given after the assumed fact of her death, Leila herself remains an enigma, tauntingly withheld from the reader's imagination through her express substitution by the figure of the Gazelle, a conventional trope of Arabic poetry. For in supplying matter only for "fancy" (475)--"a spectral apparition; an illusion of the senses" (OED, "fancy," n.)--the image, while ironically exalted as a worthy substitute capable of "assisting] [one's] fancy well" (475), works in fact to obfuscate Leila herself. If indeed Leila's "eye's dark charm 'twere vain to tell" (473), to persist still in telling is to reduce her personhood into the "jewel of Giamschid" (479), a market commodity whose value is derived from the fanciful matter of a mythological king. The western investment in oriental tropes and commonplaces neither respects nor reveals the essence of Leila's "Soul" (477), but serves only to commodify her into the "precious freight" (362) and jewels of a profit-driven economy.

What the oriental fabric in The Giaour weaves together is thus precisely the irreducible otherness of the other representable only in the impossibility of its representation. Byron's poetic indulgence in oriental detail is neither simply an uncritical valorization of the "unreformed feudal 'romantic' features" of the other, nor a triumphant flaunting of the depth of his own cultural knowledge. (44) To argue for either of those is surely to neglect the striking juxtaposition between, on the one hand, the vivid oriental detail bolstered and supplemented by the extensive editorial apparatus, and on the other, the insistently self-deconstructing, gothic form of the text that destabilizes character and plot alike. We have seen how the ambiguity of narrative time obscures the reason and object of the Giaour's pursuit, so that it is not clear whether he is flying to seduce, rescue, or avenge Leila in that opening scene along the coast. Holding together the mutually implicated and ceaselessly displaced scenes of seduction, elopement, and violence, the opening scene in fact stands as paradigmatic figuration of the encounter with the other--specifically, an encounter that is always already a missed encounter, within which seduction endlessly shades into conquest, then into annihilation: interminably inextricable because never truly begun and always in the shadow of a hegemonic, world-historical violence that subverts any narrative attempt to delineate and thereby master the process of intercultural (mis) encounter.

Nevertheless, oriental imagery does come in as ordering, always substituting the hackneyed tropes of a commodified literary form in place of an encounter that can never be represented as such. Accordingly, the most logical explication of erotic encounter within the poem unfolds as an orientalized simile, which marks in the amorous quest of the "blue-winged butterfly of Kashmeer" (45) precisely that sequential progress from temptation, through pursuit and conquest, to, finally, annihilation. The insistent self-deconstruction of the narrative, however, can only expose this provocatively beautiful image as chronically unsatisfying. Buttressed by oriental detail, the romantic trope within The Giaour works as if in the ideological service of empire, (46) only to subvert that enterprise by revealing its crude inadequacy.

3. "He who hath bent him o'er the dead": The Self-Exposure of the Colonialist Gaze

In cataloguing the rhetorical features of European colonialist discourse, David Spurr highlights the Western tendency to represent the East as a "disorienting Orient" in order that it may define its own rationality "in antithetical opposition to the perceived lack of such knowledge and definition in the Orient." (47) The Giaour seems to embrace the opposite representational strategy, marshaling disorientation to figure not a lack of knowledge in the Orient, but rather a lack of knowledge of the Orient. As we have seen, the poem's fragmented form draws attention to the partial nature of any single one of its multiple perspectives, undermining even the editorial frame in the latter's claim to rational knowledge and cultural mastery. In fact, such self-reflexivity allows Byron to meditate on the cultural implications of creating and presenting a narrative.

The question of who speaks at exactly what time in Byron's multiply-narrated poem is a well-documented one. Following the work of Gleckner and McGann, scholars generally allow for four distinct perspectives--the Western redactor who opens the poem with his eulogy on Greece, the Muslim fisherman, the Christian friar, and the Giaour himself (McGann counts an additional fifth one in distinguishing between translator and balladeer). (48) While critics almost never fail to note The Giaours stylistic debt to Samuel Rogers's The Voyage of Columbus, particularly in its use of fragments and the found manuscript device, few have fully considered the gothic resonances of such narrative framing. (49) Emma McEvoy, in an introductory piece titled "Gothic and the Romantics," notes in the few lines dedicated to Byron that "the very form of [The Giaour]--discontinuous, achronological, framed and narrated by a variety of speakers--carries on the tradition of Gothic fragmentation and bears strong similarities to works such as Frankenstein, Melmoth, or Justified Sinner." (50) In fact, The Giaour anticipates the elaborate framing of these later works, and is itself an inheritor of the antiquarian contrivance that, forty-six years before Rogers employed it in The Voyage of Columbus, launched the first "Gothic Story," Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto.

By participating in the gothic penchant for interpretive frames and multiple narratives, The Giaour inherits what Peter K. Garrett has called the genre's "self-conscious reflections on the form and function of narrative itself." For Garrett, the multiplicity of narrators and narratives "presupposes the problematic distinction between its events and their discursive presentation that recurs in all efforts to grasp narrative form," and thereby constitutes gothic's "means of dramatizing the force of narrative as a social transaction, as an instrument of domination or resistance, an affirmation or questioning of shared beliefs." In other words, what the gothic foregrounds, so unforgivingly and disturbingly, is the recognition that "nothing but sheer power can decide between opposing narrative versions, that force alone determines meaning and value." (51)

This emphasis on "social transaction" and "power" seems to me to get to the heart of Byron's poetical policy in The Giaour. There, narrative fragments, voiced from different but always partial perspectives, call each other into question and destabilize any textual attempts to fix, explain, or define, whether those attempts be implemented through the perspective of a single character or the recuperating strategy of the editorial function. The limited nature of each of these accounts, and, as a natural if unfortunate corollary, the efforts that each commits toward the suppression of others, allows Byron to foreground not simply the distinction between an event and its discursive presentation, but more significantly, the violence that the elevation of any one of those accounts entails. At the root of these reflections, I argue, is Byron's ambivalence toward his own discursive exercise of power, for what the destabilizing interplay of sub-narratives points up is the similar partialness of the authorial perspective out of which they emerged. Ultimately, the British poet reveals his own positionality as a Western poet, deliberately and self-consciously participating in the ideology of discursive imperialism in order to expose the ideological interestedness that structures any representation of the Oriental other.

The ideological work of the editorial frame already gives away the Western provenance of the text. The closing footnote appears to privilege the Levantine perspective, even as it undermines that perspective by presenting the Western editorial "I" as "translator," whose "additions and interpolations ... will be easily distinguished from the rest by the want of Eastern imagery." (52) Though ostensibly an act of self-subordination, the very reference to a translator exposes the narrative as always already filtered through a Western perspective. Further, the emphasis on "Eastern imagery" as the authentic sign of the Turkish ballad-singer is ironically and self-consciously destabilizing. In the first place, its presence within the text relies on the extensive prose notes for illumination, which paradoxically legitimizes the editorial voice as the final authority. More significantly, it is precisely this "Eastern imagery" that functions to stage the impossibility of representing the Oriental other. All claims to any authentic experience of the Orient that the "Eastern imagery" supposedly anchors are thus deconstructed in one fell swoop.

Consequently, the multilayered narrative framework of The Giaour is not just a case of "balancing] the Western and Eastern points of view and impeding] the Western reader from reading Hassan with Western sympathies," as Butler would have it, for one must always keep in mind the represented nature of the Eastern point of view that the text itself so insistently points up. (53) More than just the perspectival battle between the editorial and the Levantine points of view, Byron emphasizes his appropriation of the Eastern perspective through the construction of a hierarchized series of glances within the text that exposes the ideological operation of the multiply-mediated narrative framework.

The Western narrator begins the poem by surveying the Greek landscape from his lofty vantage point, his gaze ranging freely over not just space but also time, from the general outline of the "blessed isles" (8) to the intricate detail of "one blossom from the trees" (18), the erstwhile peace of an edenic "paradise" (49) to a darkened land where "lust and rapine wildly reign" (60), the ancient glory of the "unforgotten brave" (103) to their "servile offspring" (111) who "[n]ow crawl from cradle to the grave" (150). Authorizing itself as adjudicator, the colonizing eye commands at once temporal, physical, and moral landscapes, becoming what Mary Louise Pratt calls "monarch of all I survey." (54) As Spurr notes, "the rhetorical construct based on visual authority acts as a concrete sign of the writer's privileged point of view in the larger political sphere" and is consequently instrumental to the discursive mastery of a non-Western world in the service of empire. (55)

What is striking about the omniscient perspective that opens The Giaour, however, is the way it works to demystify, and thus undermine, its visual hegemony by exposing its own mechanism. This it primarily achieves by the construction of a hierarchy of nested gazes, through which the omniscient perspective beholds one who is himself a beholder. Line 68 introduces an internal beholder who mourns the death of his beloved, "ben[ding] him o'er the dead" to trace the still delicate features of her who personifies a "living Greece no more" (91). The visual diction--"mark'd" (74) and "gazing" (82)--designates the sight as the mourner's, yet its consolidation into the panorama over which the omniscient eye reigns sovereign indexes the incursion of the omniscient perspective into the private scene of mourning. The description of Greece/mistress echoes and extends the imagery commenced at the poem's opening by the omniscient perspective, transforming the "gentle air" (19) into the "mild angelic air" (74), the "Ocean's cheek" "mildly dimpling" with "tints of many a peak" (12-13) into the "fixed yet tender traits that streak / The languor of the placid cheek" (76-77), and the rose's "fairest hue and fragrant sigh" (33) into the remnant "beauty with that fearful bloom, / That hue which haunts it to the tomb" (96-97). The linguistic echoes emphasize the later scene's enmeshment within two different gazes, with the external gaze invading into, and appropriating, the internal in order to gain visual mastery over the dead body of Greece.

At this point, the text's subtle divulgence of its own perspectival method provides the interpretive apparatus through which one can read the connection between the opening eulogy and the Turkish tale proper, for the relationship between the Western surveilling gaze and the (presumably Greek) mourner in the eulogy structurally anticipates that between the surveilling gaze and the Muslim narrator in the Turkish fragment. The Turkish fragment opens with a bird's-eye description of the homebound fisher who, fearing pillage by "island-pirate or Mainote" (171), rows steadily toward "Port Leone's safer shore" (177). Recalling the moment in the opening eulogy when the omniscient gaze observes a "pirate" (37) attacking a "gay mariner" (40), the logic of surveillance is here immediately evoked. At this point within the Turkish fragment the narrative abruptly breaks, resuming in the next section with an internal Muslim narrator who, stationed along the coast, hears and sees the Giaour. In contradistinction to the abrupt perspectival shift across the two sections, however, there is a smooth spatial progression from "blue sea" (168) to "safer shore" (177), and finally to the coast where, as the Muslim narrator observes, "The foam that streaks the courser's side / Seems gather'd from the ocean-tide" (185-86).

The implication then is that the fisher who was caught in the omniscient gaze has, upon reaching land, become the one who narrates, a supposition that is reinforced when, two scenes later, the same Muslim narrator reveals his vocation as boatman. (56) Tutored in advance by the perspectival appropriation within the opening eulogy, we are alert to the possibility that here, as before, the internal perspective has been invaded and taken over by the omniscient gaze--a gaze that, as the editorial apparatus has made clear, is thoroughly mired in Western consciousness.

Indeed, as both McGann and Gleckner have pointed out, within the Turkish fragment proper an omniscient perspective does frequently stray into and take over the limited point of view of its internal narrator. (57) What I want to emphasize in addition is simply the way in which the text itself exaggerates and thereby exposes this incursion. The Giaour, at the moment his "glance is fixed on those that flee" (213), is observed by the fisherman; the fisherman is himself observed by an omniscient perspective structurally equivalent to, and inextricably implicated in, the Western gaze that opens the poem, which the editorial perspective of the endnotes claims as its own. The text constantly imposes upon its readers a sense of watching and being watched, ruthlessly exposing its own operation in order to manifest within and through the text what is always already a condition for the existence of the text. For, in representing the perspectives of his Turkish characters, Byron is himself an invader and an appropriator. More specifically, as the outermost perspective governing the production of the poem itself, Byron does not so much invade the internal points of view of his characters, as colonize the real-life Eastern perspective by reinventing it within the imaginary realm of his text.

Manipulating a variety of textual strategies made operative through the self-deconstructive tendencies of the poem, Byron obsessively exposes the ideological nature of his own project in order to insulate himself against the charge of discursive imperialism. This intention becomes even clearer when contrasted with the Giaour's monologue in the monastery, where Byron's self-consciously elusive anti-plot becomes, in the Giaour's telling, a conventional love story. In prosaic formulations, the Giaour recounts a love triangle involving "[t]he maid I love--the man I hate" (1018), a tale of tragic passion culminating in blood shed from him "for her, who died for me" (1034). Rid of its ambiguities and fissures, its creative juxtapositions and irresolvable contradictions, the tale becomes a perpetuation of exactly that imperialist trope of romance in which the Western colonizer "knew but to obtain or die" (1113). (58) While Meyer argues that the monastery setting and the Giaour's pompous language "reassert the ideological centrality of Western culture" (680), my point here is that it is precisely by foregrounding the shift in locale that Byron exposes the ideological nature of Western cultural narration. The narration from within the Caloyer monastery across the sea thus figures as that imperialist site of enunciation that seeks to stabilize and master the cultural other, becoming the negative form of literary Orientalism against which Byron can define himself. (59)

Indeed, the colonialist ambitions of the growing British empire, and Byron's sense of his own implication within these national ambitions, powerfully and inevitably shaped his preoccupations with the relationship between self and cultural other in The Giaour. Simultaneously navigating the discursive registers of the gothic and the oriental availed Byron of a range of literary strategies and allowed his advancement of contradicting projects--the categorical indictment of the violence of empire; the respectful, and I think relieved, acknowledgement of the final irreducibility of the other; and ultimately the anxious reflections on what it means to participate in the exercise of imperial power. What we end up with is a poem that is at once vivid and ghostly, steeped in local color only to have that color whirling off into whiteness, "Still less and less, a speck of white / That gemm'd the tide, then mock'd the sight" (382-83). In thinking along the lines of a binary model, Byron does not simply participate in the ideological work of "othering" that differentiates merely for the elevation of oneself and mastery of the other. On the contrary, wrestling with the idea of the unbridgeable gap between every self and other must necessarily prompt, on the one hand, a humble acknowledgement of the self's limited and subjective point of view, and, on the other, a respectful recognition of the transcendence of the other. The materialist, world-historical struggles that are being staged by geopolitical powers do not render this philosophical point moot, but rather more urgently demand its critical consideration.

Boston College

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(1.) For instance, Nigel Leask reads The Giaour's multiply-framed narrative, eloquently explicated by Jerome McGann and Robert Gleckner, as "the formal equivalent of cultural degradation which is the poem's theme." Following McGann and Marjorie Levinson, Leask traces this sell conscious narrative framing to a similar process of redaction in Samuel Rogers's The Voyage of Columbus, but goes on to also unpack the thematic connections between the two poems in order to highlight the Giaour's ambivalent heroism. See Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 30, 33, 13. My paper owes a considerable debt to Leask's insightful and comprehensive formulation of Byron's anxieties toward his own " 'poetical policy' of orientalism," but I hope to extend the implications of Leask's argument by examining at greater length the formal complexities of The Giaour, many of which have been passed over by critics of Romantic Orientalism. For critical studies that have focused on The Giaours fragment form and multiple narrators as articulations primarily of Byron's aesthetic, psychological, or otherwise existential concerns, see Robert Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 91-138; Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 141-64; and David Seed, '"Disjointed Fragments': Concealment and Revelation in The Giaour," The Byron Journal 18 (1990): 14-27. Daniel P. Watkins and Marjorie Levinson investigate the poem's political anxieties, but read its formal strategies as a symbolic abstraction or repression of those anxieties. See Watkins, "Social Relations in Byron's The Giaour," ELH 52, no. 4 (1985): 873-92; and Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 115-28. For Marilyn Butler's seminal reading that has established the materialist terms of the poem, see "The Orientalism of Byron's Giaour" in Three Oriental Tales, ed. Alan Richardson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 306-21.

(2.) Meyer, "'I Know Thee Not, I Loathe Thy Race': Romantic Orientalism in the Eye of the Other," ELH 58, no. 3 (1991): 672, 673, 676.

(3.) Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).

(4.) Meyer, "'I Know Thee Not,'" 661; my emphasis.

(5.) For a collection of works that, according to its editors, "share a common concern to articulate in detail the instabilities, ambiguities and contradictions which Romantic-period texts reveal at the heart of colonialism's discourses" (11), see Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, eds., Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

(6.) See Leask, British Romantic Writers, 33.

(7.) Michael Gamer makes this argument in Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which I will return to later.

(8.) Critical studies of The Giaour have tended to do one or the other. Leask and Meyer do not consider the significance of Byron's deployment of gothic conventions in his "Eastern tale." Ellen Brinks reads the poem's gothic code as Byron's dramatization of the discursive effacement of homoerotic desire. See Brinks, Gothic Masculinity: Effeminacy and the Supernatural in English and German Romanticism (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 68-90. Michael Gamer notes that the poem "call[s] upon a host of conventions familiar to readers of Gothic and oriental fiction," but focuses on the ways in which Byron seeks to legitimize the sensational nature of his material "within this most unrepentantly Gothic of Byron's works." See Gamer, "Gothic Fictions and Romantic Writing in Britain," in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 98, 99. Matthew J. A. Green likewise refers to the The Giaours combination of "Gothicism and Eastern exoticism," but reads the "Gothic aesthetics of the body" as an intervention into "current theoretical critiques of freedom and community." To use Green's own words, "what our present reading produces is not a response to the question, 'What was Byron's attitude toward Greek freedom circa 1813?,' but rather 'How can The Giaour inform current understandings of violence, freedom, and community?'" See Green, "'That lifeless thing the living fear': Freedom, Community, and the Gothic Body in The Giaour," in Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror, eds. Matthew J. A. Green and Piya Pal-Lapinski (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 15, 16, 23.

(9.) See Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, "Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean," in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 229-33.

(10.) Richardson and Hofkosh, "Introduction," in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780-1834, eds. Richardson and Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 3.

(11.) Patrick Brantlinger calls the sub-genre of Victorian novels fascinated with this return of the repressed, in which Western rationality is subverted by the very primitive superstitions that it pits itself against and that legitimize its imperial project, the "imperial Gothic." See Brantlinger, "Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880-1914," English Literature in Transition 28, no. 3 (1985): 243-52. This fascination can be said to have reached its peak along with the expansion of empire during the Victorian era, but British literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century can already be seen as participating in this mindset. Howard L. Malchow has argued, for example, that the Frankenstein monster articulates contemporary anxieties toward Caribbean slave revolutions, and that "reaching into childhood fantasy and imagination, [Mary Shelley] dredged up a bogeyman that had been prepared by a cultural tradition of the threatening Other--whether troll or Giant, gypsy or Negro--from the dark inner recesses of xenophobic fear and loathing." See Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 18.

(12.) For a reading of the gothic as an inherently subversive mode, see "Introduction: Gothic Excess and Transgression," in Fred Botting, Gothic (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1-20. For a survey of the critical debate that variously reads the gothic as subversive, conservative, or embroiled within its own irresolvable ambiguities, see Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London: Routledge, 1995), 8-10.

(13.) See Paravisini-Gebert, "Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic," 230-31.

(14.) Butler, "Orientalism of Byron's Giaour," 306.

(15.) See Butler, "Orientalism of Byron's Giaour." For the nuances of Byronic Philhellenism and its impact on Byron's poetry, see Caroline Franklin, " 'Some samples of the finest Orientalism': Byronic Philhellenism and proto-Zionism at the Time of the Congress of Vienna," in Romanticism and Colonialism, 221-42.

(16.) See Butler, "Orientalism of Byron's Giaour," 310-12. As Butler writes, "The imminent fall of the Ottoman empire was certain to lead to a scramble for pickings by the Christian European powers, who now in the later war years found the swelling religious revival handing them new moral justifications for annexing Eastern populations. If only to protect Greece's chances of real independence, it was most important for Byron to play down the religious implications of the brewing storm there" (310).

(17.) For a detailed reading of the place of Venice in Byron's poetic thought, see Malcolm Kelsall, " 'Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee ...': Byron's Venice and Oriental Empire," in Romanticism and Colonialism, 243-60.

(18.) George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Giaour, in Three Oriental Tales, ed. Alan Richardson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), pages 180-226; here, lines 190-91. All quotations are from this edition, hereafter cited in the text by lines.

(19.) Here, the two meanings of the "other" become crucial for an understanding of the poem's logic. The prefatory advertisement and poem's narrative strategies adhere to the East vs. West framework, but, as I will demonstrate later, Byron himself adopts a more complex perspective toward that framework even as he concedes--indeed insists upon, for its cultural ramifications--the phenomenological point that the other is finally irreducible to the impositions of the self. If the poem's perpetuation of the dichotomy functions as the occasion for the dramatization of intercultural violence, that dichotomy nevertheless allows Byron to rescue the other from the imperial will to mastery. Or, to put it another way, if intercultural encounter against the violent backdrop of world-historical strife cannot be conceived as anything but a production and articulation of demonic otherness, recognizing the gap that inevitably prevails between that articulation and the transcendent alter arguably returns some measure of dignity to the other.

(20.) Watkins, "Social Relations," 875.

(21.) The Giaour's fragmented form and multiply-mediated narrative has been extensively commented upon by Gleckner and McGann, but the gothic nature of that fragmentation has been largely glossed over. I will argue later that attention to the gothic provenance of The Giaour's elaborate framing can help us discover the way in which Byron's self-reflexive engagement with narrative form allows him to meditate on the implications of his discursive representation.

(22.) See McGann, Fiery Dust, 156.

(23.) McGann argues that the shift to the past tense is usually an indication that the ballad singer, the ostensible narrator of the "Turkish Tale," has assumed the perspective of one of his internal narrators. See McGann, Fiery Dust, 146. I argue that this temporal shift can simultaneously convey deja vu, since its abruptness produces the illusive experience of a temporal shift within the narrated story itself.

(24.) Scarry, "On Vivacity: The Difference Between Daydreaming and Imagining-Under-Authorial-Instruction," Representations 52 (1995): 13.

(25.) Byron's avoidance of sensationalist material can be seen in Marjorie Levinson's remark that The Giaour "contains little or nothing of the supernatural or superstitious--nothing that need be legitimized by the postulate of a primitive cultural source." See Levinson, Romantic Fragment Poem, 116.

(26.) As Eve Sedgwick notes, gothic energy springs from the breach of arbitrary barriers between duplicate spaces, a breach that is attended by violence. See Sedgwick, "The Structure of Gothic Conventions," in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (North Stratford, NH: Ayer Company, 1999), especially 20-23.

(27.) Seed, "'Disjointed Fragments,'" 18.

(28.) See, for instance, Peter Cochran, "Byron and Islamic Culture," Keats-Shelley Review 21, no. 1 (2007): 65-78. Amy Hackney Blackwell notes the significance of Ramadan hospitality in Ramadan (New York: Chelsea House, 2009).

(29.) For this scene's presentation of the Giaour as a figure of profound existential alienation, see Watkins, "Social Relations," 878, 879. I argue that the Giaour's cultural otherness is a key reason for that alienation. Though one might argue that it is the Giaour who first violates hospitality by seducing Leila, it is surely significant that we are first granted an image of the Giaour's exclusion before we are privy to the details and thereby subject to the rational imperative that would hold the Giaour culpable for his own exclusion. Indeed, the temporal disordering that relentlessly subverts the claims of objective knowledge and, accordingly, its assignment of praise and blame, seems to be precisely the point. The striking image of the Giaour standing apart, looking at the very signs that "prove the Moslem's zeal," then, delivers a critique of Islamic hospitality that works at the perceptual, rather than objective, level. More suggestively, the Muslim narrator is, like the poem's readers, similarly uninformed, so that his instinctual hostility toward the infidel becomes an indictment of the same "Moslem's zeal" that he exalts.

(30.) See Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

(31.) Byron, The Giaour, note k, page 221; my emphasis.

(32.) Ellen Brinks reads this moment in The Giaour as having the effect of converting readers into fascinated voyeurs, which is Byron's way of dramatizing society's effacement of sexually oppositional acts. See Brinks, Gothic Masculinity, 77, 74. Nevertheless, there is a basic sense in which the poem's rejection of the very interpretive act that it compels is hostile.

(33.) See Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), for a detailed explication of the idea.

(34.) The idea of a new life in Christ is a recurring concept in the Bible. See for example, 2 Corinthians 5:17 and Colossians 3:1.

(35.) As Naji B. Oueijan observes, "Byron's ability to become a participant [in the culture of the Orient] is unique among his contemporaries, and this characteristic makes his observations of and experiences in the East highly authentic." See Oueijan, A Compendium of Eastern Elements in Byron's Oriental Tales (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 18.

(36.) See Richardson, "Introduction," Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 10--12; and Peter Cochran, "Introduction: Byron's Orientalism," in Byron and Orientalism, ed. Peter Cochran (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), 3.

(37.) As Leask memorably puts it, Byron's attitude toward his oriental material echoes that of "a Levantine or East India merchant who has tapped a lucrative source of raw materials in a newly opened up Orient, which he feels will make a splash on the home market." See Leask, British Romantic Writers, 13.

(38.) Butler, "Orientalism of Byron's Giaour 312.

(39.) Gamer's monograph considers this strategy as it is variously deployed by Wordsworth, Baillie, and Scott. See Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic. His article, "Gothic Fictions and Romantic Writing in Britain," in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 85-104, treats its operation in The Giaour.

(40.) Thus, while it is enough for Gamer to argue that the "oriental antiquarianism" of Byron's Giaour, like the scholarly footnotes that supplement Baillie's dramas and Scott's poetry, "bestow[s] upon [the] text's most Gothic moments an historicized and enlightened distance," it seems to me that the partiality of such "oriental antiquarianism" must itself be exposed and subject to critique. See Gamer, "Gothic Fictions," 99, 94. As 1 demonstrate later, the self-reflexivity of the gothic in fact allows Byron to do just that.

(41.) For surveillance as a discursive construct that seeks to produce the domination of the colonizer over its colonized other, see David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 13-27

(42.) Byron, The Giaour, note q, page 226.

(43.) Meyer, "'I Know Thee Not,'" 670.

(44.) For an explication of the latter position, see Cochran, Byron and Orientalism, 12.

(45.) Byron, The Giaour, note p, page 222.

(46.) Eroticizing the colonialist project allows the construction of an entire people as being available for discovery and domination. See Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 170-83.

(47.) Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 142.

(48.) See McGann, Fiery Dust, 144-45; and Gleckner, Ruins of Paradise, 98-99.

(49.) See, for instance, McGann, Fiery Dust, 142-44; Levinson, Romantic Fragment Poem, 116; and Leask, British Romantic Writers, 27-33.

(50.) Emma McEvoy, "Gothic and the Romantics," in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London: Routledge, 2007), 24.

(51.) Garrett, Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 3, 46, 27; my emphasis. See especially the chapters "Introduction" and "Gothic Reflexivity from Walpole to Hogg."

(52.) Byron, The Giaour, note q, page 226.

(53.) Butler, "Orientalism of Byron's Giaour," 313.

(54.) Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transmigration (New York: Routledge, 1992), 201.

(55.) Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 19.

(56.) While it is not entirely certain that the one who observes the Giaour is the one who witnesses the drowning, most critics generally agree upon their common identity.

(57.) See Gleckner, Ruins of Paradise, 113, 115; and McGann, Fiery Dust, 146.

(58.) The narrative in the monastery has its own complexities, and there are ways in which the trope of romance is, even there, problematized. Relative to the narrative that unfolds in Greece, however, its operation is more straightforwardly imperialist. Tellingly, Peter J. Manning, in Byron and His Fictions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), sees Byron's decision to include the Giaour's monologue as an artistic failure, arguing that "the collapse of the structure into the Giaour's blindly self-justifying monologue diminishes the perspectives available to the reader" (35).

(59.) "The sea from Paynim land he [the Giaour] crost, / And here ascended from the coast" (807-8). Narration now proceeds from within the site of imperialism, which accounts for the shift in narrative logic.