Elizabeth Fay

Department of English
University of Massachusetts at Boston
EFAY@UMBSKY.CC.UMB.EDU

 

The term “the Byronic postmodern” is coined here specifically for the purpose of uncovering and exploring a congruency in the works of those artists invested in some aspect of the Byronic hero. The Byronic, which was both encoded by Byron and beyond his control, exudes a transgressive, dark, and seductive appeal that speaks to any artist interested in crossing boundaries. The Byronic postmodern, then, implicates a romanticism within postmodernism and a postmodernism within romanticism that is at odds with more general assessments of the postmodern as a self-romanticizing and self-conflicted phase in the modern era (see Kaplan and Elam), or as a counter-enlightenment and irrationalist philosophical and aesthetic movement whose “post” positionality precludes or throws over prior systems of knowledge.¹

 

The Byronic postmodern as defined here is not the ironizing superficial and self-aware contemplation that is usually considered to be the link between romantic irony and the postmodern aesthetic; nor do I rest easy in a Lyotardian alternation of modernist and postmodernist impulses. Rather, the Byronic postmodern redefines the historical and social formations called romanticism and postmodernism, and offers them instead as aesthetic impulses that appeal congruously to those artists whose sexual aesthetics overwhelm their perception of the art form. That is, in seeing the world bisexually or homosexually, the Byronic artist understands the nature of mask and the exchangeable subjectivity more clearly than does the artist confirmed in his/her normative sexuality. The relation between Byron and Mapplethorpe as Byronic artists cannot be confined to them alone, but they provide powerful parameters for artists of similar amplitude such as Baudelaire, Emily Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Andy Warhol.

 

What Mapplethorpe’s photography has to do with Byron’s poetry, or Byron’s art with Mapplethorpe’s, is an argument these two artists initiate themselves: Byron through his postmodernist self-display and questioning of frames, and Mapplethorpe through his critical reassessment of romantic self-presentation. Mapplethorpe’s romantic rereading is most overt in pieces such as “James Ford, 1979,” where the subject is depicted lying in a deep, tiled bathtub in a pose that cannot but recall David’s “Death of Marat” (1793); less obvious are his photographs of classical marble statuary. The clearest example of his romantic revisionism, however, is Mapplethorpe’s “Manfred, 1974,” a four-frame sequence that comprehends Byron’s 1816 poem Manfred more succinctly than literary criticism has been able to do. The significance of Mapplethorpe’s title is pointed; of all the Faustian texts available, including the extreme romanticism offered by Goethe’s version, the twentieth-century photographer fixes on the Byronic Manfred. In the agency of his revisionism, Mapplethorpe has captured the postmodern impetus that drives Byron’s powerful drama, and at the same time reveals the deep romanticism of his own art.

 

The role of sexual repositioning in Byronic postmodernism is crucial to the Byronist’s ability to reduce experience to a “staged” effect. This sense of staging is the outcome of a knowing difference, and a self-presentation that is at once the aestheticized self and serious art. Mapplethorpe’s choice of artistic medium makes his awareness of staging an open acknowledgement, as does his frequent use of dramatically posed portraiture and tableaux. But Byron’s self-staging required a sequence of transgressive events before he knew himself to be onstage.

 

At age eight Byron became heir to his great uncle’s title, inheriting it at age ten. He is seduced by his nurse, Mary Gray, at age nine, and probably by Lord Grey de Ruthyn (who was renting the Byron home) during a holiday from Harrow at age fifteen. In between these two events he fell passionately in love with his cousin, Mary Chaworth, when he was fifteen, and Lord Delawarr at sixteen. However, the first to return his love and thus capture his imagination was the younger John Edlestone. The precocity of Byron’s peership coincides with the precocity of his sexual initiations, and his response to the demands of adult experience was accompanied by confusion and guilt. He characterizes this period of his life with the secrecy and ambivalence that becomes typical of his later responses to his double sexual identity. To his step-sister Augusta he writes of Grey, “My reasons for ceasing that Friendship are such as I cannot explain, not even to you my Dear Sister . . . but they will even remain hidden in my own breast” (March 26, 1804); the next year he hints at his affection for Edlestone by writing, “My melancholy proceeds from a very different cause to that which you assign,” one which “you could not alleviate, and might possibly be painful (January 7, 1805; both quoted in Crompton, pp. 100-101). Melancholy, the term literary reviewers associated both with Byron and his poetic heroes, becomes a code word much earlier in his own mind for his `dark’ passions. For Augusta, this melancholy so changed Byron from his boyish disposition that she thought him transformed, almost unrecognizable. His beloved, Edlestone, thought the same when Byron lost more than fifty pounds of bodyweight by vigorous dieting and exercise. Both transformations–from joy to melancholy, from chubby to sleek–are bodily changes that correspond with a new bodily awareness. And this new awareness signifies an understanding that the body now has two kinds of admirers that desire it, and two kinds of passions itself. Yet these must be secreted, coded, costumed, and playacted in order to be legitimated at all: the one must be made to signify the other, or to cover it up, or to displace it momentarily.

 

In comparison to Byron, the most Byronic of modern artists found an equally Grecian, equally bodily way to express the differences in his taste. Mapplethorpe’s sexual tastes may not have been bipolar, but his artistry was. His black gay friends and lovers are translated into hellenized athletes and gods, with a special emphasis on the textures made possible by photographing black skin in black and white, or countering it with white skin as a way to emphasize not sex but bipolarity as form and mode. Yet when he also photographed his women friends with exquisite sensitivity and sexual daring, his work resonates less to the bipolarized schemata of his male photographs than to Byron’s daring exploits with married and thus inaccessible women: safe and yet satisfyingly seductive adventures. Byron’s seduction of the strong-minded Lady Frances Webster, for instance, resonates to Mapplethorpe’s photography of Lisa Lyon, a woman bodybuilder whose very name suggests gender play.

 

Serious play becomes the byword for both Byron and Mapplethorpe as artists. The myth of the postmodern is that a series of tableaux produces a pastiche that is seamless truth. The tableaux by which Byron presents himself in his poetry and in society are also stitched together into a fated and apparently seamless narrative, marking him as postmodern and puzzling his romantic interpreters. Mappelthorpe’s work makes the tableau a dramatically postmodern image, imposing on the setpiece a dark, fated quality that signals his transgressive play in much the same way that Byron’s narrative poems do. Like Byron, Mapplethorpe’s apparent seeming comes from a literal seaming, a putting together to produce a new costume and new self. Dancing across the stage or camera’s eye focuses attention on the costume and bodily surface as a semiotic display of sign systems at war. Byron puts on Albanian dress, Mapplethorpe dons that of the Nazi secret police; both bespeak a sign system associated with homosocial fantasy life and self. The Byronic hero of either historical period is concerned in particular with harnessing sexuality, the display of identity, and the sheer play of a textual erotics. For textual erotics must be seen as sheer play, or it loses all signification; however, this is a specifically Byronic gesture which cannot be read into all postmodern texts. Within Byronic aesthetics, play is both a dance on the edge of the allowable/foreseeable/conditional, and a violence done to the sutures that hold–however tenuously–meaning, syntax, consent together.

 

Certainly desire is part of this behavior, but it is not the only mechanism at work. Dalliance with comprehension and violation are both attributes of depressive melancholy. The bi-polarity of manic depression becomes in the postmodern period hyperactivity, mania as frenzy. Romantic mania, however, is a slow, deliberately tasted dying into, a depressive move into a psychology without faith. Byron laughs at this debilitating gesture even as he exploits its charm. And the charm itself is seductively duplicitous, doubling back with an ironic laugh: “Postmodernism’s distinctive character lies in [a] kind of wholesale `nudging’ commitment to doubleness, or duplicity,” Linda Hutcheon notes (1). The duplicity amounts not to a loss of faith, but to a cynicism thrust at the very heart of belief: both Byron and Mapplethorpe exhibit this awareness of disrupted yet retained foundations via seductive posturing.

 

The allure that draws in the viewer is born of the wholesale nudge that allots both the one and the other a place onstage. The spectator who feels the safety of familiar principles is seduced and caught before feeling the shifting ground. The seduction for both Byron and Mapplethorpe begins by viewing the viewer as an initially antagonistic eye which must be converted, or mocked, or both. Two of Mapplethorpe’s works especially distill this gendered antagonism and recall earlier heroes of melancholy, metaphor, and misogyny.

 

“Manfred” (1974) provocatively speaks to Byron’s closet drama, as well as his closeted drama of self, presenting the Faustian man as a multiply-framed modernist who assumes his capacity to redesign the architecture that contains him. The first of the sequenced four frames in “Manfred” is stark white, its blankness signifying not only original purity but also the absence of myth, and therefore of identity. In the second frame, the youth’s pose allows him to fill the arch which is the central of three framings or sculptings of the space around him. He is classically nude and relaxed, a lover not an athlete, yet his frontal revelation mocks classical aesthetics, the contrapposto which makes the figure “a true acting unit,” according to Gardner (132).

 

In the third frame, the youth has assumed clothing, jewelry, and thus identity; he is poised to step out of the arch or closet, at the same time putting on a dark and melancholic expression that reestablishes the closet as protective and chosen, the space from which he will emerge. He is the `angry young man,’ the rebel and dreamer: Manfred himself. The final frame again finds the youth nude, but this time in full erection yet equal relaxation. He asserts his self upon the frame by placing his arms on its edge, again stepping precisely on its boundary, half-in, half-out.

 

Outage, whether accomplished in emotional projection or physical projection, places dangerous demands on the dancer, as Byron’s Faustian hero discovered. The power of abstraction, of multiple identities beyond the socially condoned, leads both to love and to the leap of death, two modes of action that Bataille contends are reflexively identificatory. Mapplethorpe’s Manfred declines to indicate who has conjured whom, but the urge to death remains.

 

In his Hamlet-like “Self-Portrait, 1988,” Mapplethorpe examines himself in light of death, as a death mask, and as a dying Hamlet. In his journal for Feb. 19, 1814 Byron notes that “Kemble’s Hamlet is perfect; but Hamlet is not Nature. Richard is a man; and Kean is Richard.” Mapplethorpe also understands Hamlet as more than nature, more than man. The photograph’s subject transmits his pain and mortal angst as he stares directly at the viewer; his stare is all the eerier for being disembodied and slightly out of focus, as if already fading from this particular world. At the same time, his severed hand floats clearly in the foreground, grasping a death-head cane with intense strength. Hamlet’s existential worry over whether to be, as well as his graveside meditation, is troped here both melancholically and whimsically. And it is but intertextual play that the epigram Byron chooses for his “Manfred” is from Hamlet I.v: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Mapplethorpe’s Hamlet intimates this about death too.

 

Hamlet knew that death defined love, and that the love of a woman is defiling if it is unaccompanied by the proper view and frame. Improper women for Byron are “strumpets,” of whom he requests one friend to “never . . . even allude to the existence of the sex.” Unlike Greek verbs of amorous frenzy, Byron announces “I won’t even read a word of the feminine gender” (16 Feb, 1812). Mapplethorpe would read such words, but would code and frame them to redefine gender itself into the fascination created by the tease of the camera’s eye. This is the posture of Byron’s romanticism and of Mapplethorpe’s postmodernism, and of the improper artist who is poised to leap both because he is willing and because the leap defines and sexes him.

 

The Byronist’s internalizing of the specular takes place both between men, as well as within the dresser who must then seek other ways to display it. As such, it is an aspect of modernism Mapplethorpe will more fully exploit through the closely controlled space of photographic interiors, and through a cross-dressing which requires no clothes because it is written on the body. This is best incurred through a gender play that is both a natural outcome of specularization and an unnatural doubleness that is doubly enticing. Byron’s self-representations as the Byronic hero and Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits show the face as effeminate because it is seductive, the costuming as gender-play because it is teasing, and both offering relations between men. However, one important qualification must be made here: male costuming is not fashion in the sense of fashion photography because it does not pretend to be for a specifically women’s venue; its focus is the overt disruption of gender binaries rather than the covert exploitation of them. Thus, if women are seduced into buying Byron’s poems or making love to him, he can claim to have no agency in their desire since his overt offer seeks another comer: Women “ought to mind home . . . [and] to read neither poetry nor politics–nothing but books of piety and cookery. Music–drawing–dancing–also a little gardening and ploughing now and then” (Jan. 6, 1821, 1821 Journal). This difference in the visual contract specific to the Byronic postmodern allows for the incorporation of women’s bodies into men’s, and even women’s into men’s, as a statement of excess. Put another way: fashion photography, which can be seen as the extreme version of visual art, implies an absence (of the artist) predicated on the metaphorical use of the model’s body, as well as a covert expenditure of sexual energy between men. Male costuming in the Byronic postmodern posits presence rather than absence because the clothing literally (rather than metaphorically) implicates the artist, and it does so overtly. The clothing is so explicit in its homosexual seduction that it spells out what the fashion model suggestively hides: the clothes become the man. The model’s wardrobe fabricates sexuality, makes it up, while the transvestite poseur or dandy wears seduction as one aspect of his sexual identity.

 

Thus the artistry that finds itself to be Byronic marginalizes itself from normative aesthetic practices or exaggerates them. It expresses its uncentered status by seeking revenge on its audience through expressive violence contained within a visual stillness. The artist uses this containment beyond the cultural center to artifice alternative worlds of seductive exile; but because the staging is transient rather than verifiable, it threatens the viewer with the possibility of transgressed boundaries and frames. And because the revenge is as much self-annihilating as it is viewer-threatening in its excess, its seductive posture invokes a pathos and an invitation difficult to ignore.

 

The invitation is necessarily sexual, devastating in its promise to break through the frames of its staging; the Byronic postmodern is always a sexual or sexed violence, an exile caused by sexual transgression, a transvestism. Through this disruptive sexuality, the Byronic artist redistributes the contractual code between producer and consumer, forcing the viewer to make love to him by initiating and teasing out an active reciprocity and transgression.² This contractual aberration is not present in all postmodernisms; nor is it a generally accepted view of the most Byronic of artists, Byron himself. If we accept this precept, however, we accept that postmodernism is not a single current of artistic and intellectual conflux. We also accept that the Byronic artist is not a single manifestation of a single current, but a self-creator who is most himself when playing out the flux and its staging possibilities.

 

Closet drama may dispense with the need for visible costuming, but the multiple masks it allows the authorizing persona provide an arena for symbolic codes that costume disparate versions of the poetical self. The sexualities, genders, and temperaments that clothe closet characters virtually play out the alternative identities that transvestism frees up to the experiencing subject: closet dramas, at least for Byron, are in drag. Critics interested in Byron’s self-romanticism usually cite this aspect of Byron’s selfhood, finding the poet speaking not only as Sardanapalus but as each of the other main characters, not only as Don Juan but also as the poem’s narrator.³ They do so, however, to prove the biographical nature of Byron’s dramas, locating multiple Byrons (rather than multiple distributions of self) in order to sort out the more important family relations portrayed in the other characters; they do so most often in order to prove the Freudian nature of Byron’s self-obsessive narratives (see also Wolfson). But some critics go further; for instance, Jerome J. McGann argues that Byron exploited the self-identificatory possibilities of costuming from the very first. “Byron was operating en masque from his first appearances in print . . . Childe Harold, evolving from [his] earlier fictional selves, mutates quickly and repeatedly: the Giaour, the Corsair, Lara, Manfred, are all masks of Byron.” Similarly, Sardanapalus is “an autobiographical work . . . carried out in masquerade” (295-96). McGann reads Byron’s texts/masks as double-directed, but not in the contractual sense of artist-viewer; rather, McGann finds a doubled seeing which is, on the one hand, directed “`referentially’ toward certain socio-historical frameworks, and `reflexively’ toward the poetical environments within which they are aesthetically active” (296-97). In other words, the masks provide a way to deliteralize transvestite seeing without seeming to do so through a reflexive vision; at the same time, they reinstitute the metaphorical or referential nature of the homosocial visual contract. Doing so, McGann argues, allows the movement from theatrical to closet drama and thus into temptation: “Byron’s masquerades are requests (or perhaps temptations) for someone to play a correspondent part in the imagined scene,” but they are also “wicked and seductive invitations” (302). These invitations in the end “become the principal subject of his own fictions” because the move into private space allows the mask a literalizing power as well as a metaphorizing one, and thus a wicked dalliance with sincerity.

 

The wickedness, the temptation, is that of the homosexual openly beckoning within the privacy of the closet: this referential, and paradoxically socio-historical move (Childe Harold amid the battlegrounds of Europe) authorizes that wicked privacy toward the open and public market of the visual contract. The double-edge term which allows this conflation of the opposed ways of seeing (homosexual and homosocial) is “mask.” Mask is not the trickier “masquerade,” in which costumes allow one to put one’s face, person, and morals aside in order to allow the libido and the uncanny full rein; instead, masks are veritable faces, costumes that cannot so readily be put aside. The mask effectively makes the other a self–without making it the self, thus reserving the possibility of a `true’ or recuperable self. The mask also allows for a certain amount of controlled outage within the purview of the closet(ed) drama.

 

Masking locates this other-self in the face, the doubled site of vision and visage. But the face is itself the site of cupola and thus of excess; the multiplicitous connections it makes possible are different for each viewer, and not precisely controllable by the performer himself. The imprecise nature of the mask/face makes the performer a discourse facilitator through the visage/vision cupola by which he is seen by seeing. When the face is mask, as it forcefully is in the literal faces Mapplethorpe puts forth in his self-portraits, and as it figuratively is in Byron’s narrative voices, it acts as the focal point of the costume, of the other self, and thereby of sexualized difference. As the site of excessive sex, of the doubly male, it thus alters the visual contract in order to force the diffident artist on the viewer: he confronts us face-to-face.

 

One of the best texts in which to explore Byron’s use of masks, according to McGann, is Manfred:

 

Byron, like Manfred, ceases to justify himself or his romantic imaginations only when he makes those imaginations the self-conscious subject of his work. There is a power working upon Byron forcing him to display those aspects of the imagination that are seldom exposed to view.(303)

 
The power working on Byron or his mask, Manfred, is the power of the mask-face in a place of contained excess, the closet. Closet space internalizes the play, making the literal quality of dress, like Mapplethorpe’s Bondage and Discipline leather, unnecessary. Costume refutes metaphor and the need for a covert visual contract and installs a literalized invitation on the body surface; mask reinstates metaphor without refuting costume, and the conflation of the two at once–like the conflation of transvestism with homosexuality–provides a double being, a reference and a reflex, a writing on the body.

 

That is to say, Byron’s textual masks mark out the space of the Byronic postmodern as a closet space in which the relation between artist and viewer is specifically contracted through bodily inscription. The Byronic hero’s scowl and the feminine makeup and pseudo-Hamlet of Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits all point to the same conceit: that once the wicked invitation is inscribed on the body of the artist, he must then step in front of the artistic/photographic eye to become the feminized body over which contracts get made and invitations exchanged. For this reason Mapplethorpe’s subject-selves stare straight into the camera’s eye: they do not need the fashion model’s flirtatious glance because they know their eye (as artist and poseur) reciprocates the viewer’s gaze–they know because it is written on their face.

 

Byron’s eye, if not in his portraits then certainly in his poetry, also stares straight into the viewer’s eye, looking for internalized relations and closeted desires. Contemporaneous reviewers were made uncomfortable by the game Byron played, that was playing on himself, and their discomfort may have come in part from the Byronic artist’s self-conscious play with identity and agency. The reviewers as a body, in fact, see Byron as performing the opposite operation from an exchange of masks and identity switches; they read him as inhabiting each Byronic character as himself, without permutation. How the reader is led to see in a particular way becomes a critical question: How has Byron seduced us into this understanding of his person? And the danger of this wicked invitation is that both the viewer and the artist himself are seduced: “the text becomes a kind of precipice that draws one in–like Manfred, like Byron–either to the self or to the destruction of the self” (McGann, 311). Yet the precipice is not as sincere as the critics believe nor as sensual as Byron would have it: within the erotics of a self-constituting dance there is also the artist’s awareness of how that self is not making, is merely a dressing without the deep center so alluringly promised. As David Joselit writes of Mapplethorpe, his popularity “is often explained (or explained away) as a form of sophisticated naughtiness. . . . It is Mapplethorpe’s broader relevance that is typically denied to him–typically obscured by labeling him a subcultural fetishist–by ignoring the hauntingly unstable vision of masculinity and femininity his art proposes” (19).

 

What Byron and Mapplethorpe share is not merely in their transgressive sexual curiosity; it is also in their transgression into the exotic. Both artists construct travelogues into a fantasy land where costumes signify otherly selves against which the self must struggle or be seduced. And if Byron stepped further out, acting out the travelogue as well as imagining its space in fantastic verses, Mapplethorpe maintained an interior space that contained and transmuted his experience to an equally devastating and self-seducing degree.

 

Don Juan’s travels necessarily lead eastward, for the Spain of his birth is a Moorish land, and the Moors’ power originates in their hoarding of classical knowledge.⁴ Thus, underneath the oriental tales of Romantic imagination is a love of the Grecian. It was widely known that Araby had absorbed Hellenic culture and preserved it through the middle ages. But what Byron understands, perhaps most from donning his Albanian dress and Turkish masks, is how much this is like boys looking like girls. Pederasty, or Greek love, is the love of nubile boys who looked like girls, boys who are girls underneath just as Arabs are Grecian underneath. When Byron was seen leading young women in his madly promiscuous London period, he was assumed to have been closeted with young women dressed as boys. Don Juan reverses and replays this moment several times as Juan himself dresses in female costume, replaying the London escapades in which Byron was simply closeted with nubile boys who could seem either gender or both.⁵

 

The fascination Byron exhibits, no less than Mapplethorpe, is with that play between polarized positions, a play Araby exhibits even more than does Greece. Thus in his eastern tales Byron professes his desire for the Grecian costumed as its polarized contrary, the Turkish-Moorish-Arabian, and in doing so recasts his desire for cross-dressed or interstitial gendering. It cannot be surprising, then, to read art critic David Joselit assessing Mapplethorpe’s photographs as producing a “hauntingly unstable vision of masculinity and femininity . . . Mapplethorpe’s sexual aggression and submission–in men and women, heterosexual and homosexual–is clearly evident in the relationship he establishes between his own self-portraits and the photographs of his models.” Indeed, he “has envisioned a world in which masculinity is not stable but a constantly shifting terrain between hyperaggressiveness and submission” (Kardon, 19). Another way of saying this is that the Byronist understands sexuality as an unstable producer of identity. When Byron moves from self to self, and reproduces those shifts in variable dramatic masks, he understands sexuality as self in the moment of sex–not in the moment of self. And these shifts are always restricted by the calculable and incalculable audience response which is itself a thing of contingency and flux. If Mapplethorpe conceives the stillpoint of an erratic world through the classical moment of fixity–fixing the subject with a single frame of its dance across the stage, Byron embraces the fluidity of the shifting self as well as the return upon itself of each mask–and yet in doing so, he fixes his poetical character even more surely than does Mapplethorpe. The fix–the addiction to a dramatic moment of selfhood that one puts on in order to put over–is a mechanism of absolute charisma. And charisma, both in verse and on paper, demands a specular fixation.

 

Walter Benjamin (in many ways a postmodern romantic himself⁶) reconstructs the nature of that which is “hauntingly unstable” that we locate in both Mapplethorpe’s and Byron’s postmodern romanticism, as a problem of two other Byronists: Baudelaire and Proust. In his essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin recasts Proust–a spiritual Orientalist–by saying that, “[t]o perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return” (188). This point is specific to photography: whereas painting feeds imaginative appetites (“that of which our eyes will never have their fill”), photography operates within a different paradigm of perception (the mechanical reproduction of images). Painting portrays the living quality of being; photography records it but cannot imbue its images with life, or what Benjamin calls “aura.” Susan Sontag confirms this perception when she writes of Mapplethorpe that his works do not reveal truth, but rather “the strongest version of it”; this is a claim about the mystical ability of art to reveal truth, but it is a postmodern version in that it ironizes art’s attempt to provide a truth where there can be none.

 

What Sontag knows is that Mapplethorpe’s art gives life back to the viewer through the imbued object–through its aura. This gift, this truth, crosses transcendent boundaries so that the viewer is pulled into, or contracted into, the experience. In contrast, the romantic poet experiences and expresses epiphany while the reader vicariously witnesses its effect but does not participate. The Byronist achieves what we might describe as a sideways transcendence, a boundary crossing of epic proportions which nevertheless laughs at its own indecency.⁷ Benjamin’s “aura,” on the other hand, is meant to refer to a romanticized notion of the visionary’s artistry, the poet’s ability to capture `beauty in truth and truth in beauty,’ to paraphrase Keats. Yet that he comes to the notion of aura through Baudelaire with overtones of Proust means that the vision is available from both the sincere and the sardonic poet, that both assist the provision of what Kardon, after Sontag, calls the “aura of veracity” (12).

 

It is this aura, according to Benjamin, in which objects hoard the life we lend them through our active looking, and by it they mystically return our gaze from a distance determined by their inscrutability that is somehow yet recognizable. The subject who looks in the camera eye sees nothing, and thus loses his own gaze; at the same time, when he looks at the photograph of himself the lost gaze cannot be met or recaptured because there is no room for aura. The photographer, on the other hand, sees a different picture, or to put it another way, becomes the camera eye and–to rephrase–exchanges glances with the subject, which he can then recall and cast into his own aural perception of each photograph as the authentic aspect of the subject no longer present. These arguments permit us to reconstruct the magnetism of Mapplethorpe’s photographs as visual renditions of that intensely magnetic glance Byron had mastered both in his life and his art–a glance that so captured the passions of both women and men. When Joselit explains that “Mapplethorpe’s presence, in front of the camera as well as behind it, brackets every representation” (19), he is attributing to the photographer’s doubled glance a doubled presence and a double aura. Like the doubled sex of the girlish boy dressed as a boy and so taken for a girl in boy’s costume, as in Byron’s premarital flings, or like the doubly enticing bisexual Byron himself, the double aura works like a double penis, a twice present and twice authenticated contractual power. Bracketing a representation does not fix it within a historical moment, but releases it into the flux of the auteur’s own cross-historical and defiantly untranscendent staging.

 

Mapplethorpe has been called a classicist because of his painterly approach to photography, but he also deserves the term for his deliberate fostering of aura in both his human and inanimate subjects. It is this relation to the living that both Mapplethorpe and Byron share, for where Mapplethorpe produces works that return one’s gaze, Byron’s works are so aurally replete with his own identifiable persona that they vibrate with his seductive or scorning glance. Annabella Milbanke recalls Byron’s haughty, disdainful posturing at salons she attended before his first marriage proposal; his careful poses and distancing survey of the room both converted his shyness into a powerful tool, and increased his charismatic appeal.

 

Mapplethorpe’s calm yet distancing stare into the camera in his self-portraits exude a similar aural fascination; significantly, the portraits that convey the same defiance and yet appealing plasticity are those of the two women friends he photographed numerous times: Patti Smith and Lisa Lyon. In two years Mapplethorpe produced more than a hundred photographs of Lyon, works which Kardon notes, reveal “his talents as an impresario, his ability to create images . . . . He discovered some of her latent personas and probably invented others” (11). The “probably” that qualifies Kardon’s insight is also the cupola on which Mapplethorpe provokes Lyon and Smith to become alternative masks for his own continual self-exploration.⁸ For it is through photography that Mapplethorpe “could touch `forbidden’ acts and states of consciousness, using the camera as an instrument of provocation,” according to Kay Larson. Using sexual positioning instead of mystical auras, Larson identifies the Byronic attitude as postmodern: “There is a kind of sexuality–the kind we think of as modern–that pursues self-interest to its limits, and sublimation be damned” (15). The transgression Mapplethorpe pursues in his art–across the bounds between classicism and eroticism, homo and hetero, male and female, pleasure and pain–are precisely the terms of Byron’s journey east, across the transcendental alps to the transnationalism of the Byronically Grecian aesthetic.

 

In his last years Mapplethorpe begins to photograph Greek statuary, but by evading the cracks and missing limbs in order to imply a perfect whole, he nonetheless conveys the fragmentary nature of existence. The statement produced is that of death in life and life in death, a doubled concept that recalls the Grecian underdressing of Araby, the girl under the boy and boy under the girl, the transvestism of erotic spectacle. For both Byron and Mapplethorpe, classical culture provides a Rosetta Stone for a homoerotic aesthetic. “The Greeks, of course, were the first in Western civilization to erect a culture–a literature, an art, a philosophy–around the homoerotic . . . . Homoeroticism, Mapplethorpe suggests, has been around since the beginning of the world” (Larson, 17). And if Byron learned to write of his wrong-sexed, illicit adventures in the code of Greek phrases and oblique references to fellow sodomists, Mapplethorpe also learned the lexical value of classicism. The Byronist both voices and obscures the homoerotic aesthetic when he turns the classicism of a marble statue or a perfect flower inside out to produce the eroticism already inherent in it. The societies that contextualize both artists also knew and did not know this: Byron’s publisher and closest friends burned his memoirs and altered his letters to hide the first term of the Byronic aesthetic, while the intent of the prosecution of Dennis Barrie, the Cincinnati museum director who exhibited Mapplethorpe’s photographs, was to figuratively burn those photographs that leave no room for sentimental misreadings. Charged with pandering and obscenity charges, Barrie had to defend his “exhibition” of the very sexuality Mapplethorpe intentionally provokes us by: Barrie is indeed a panderer, but of the spirit and not the flesh, for it is the aura Mapplethorpe imparts to his work that so threatens and unsexes us.

 

Certainly it is part of any Byronist’s threat to the viewer that the artist’s own aura is retained in his endless self-portraiture through sequences of masks and counter-masks. Photography “is a process of two-way looking: looking at, and being looked at,” as Larson notes. Each artist continues to entice the viewer into a witting and unwitting appreciation for a titillating aesthetics. Mapplethorpe is both a “voyeur” and a “provocateur,” writes Larson, and as such “he is not averse to running guns into forbidden territory” (16). The reference is to Mapplethorpe’s excursions into the nightworld of Bondage and Discipline, but it is a wonderful comment on Byron’s own particular form of gun running. He is still remembered in Greece today for his liberatory endeavors there before dying of disease. Like Byron, Mapplethorpe also died young by disease, and his Hamlet-like self-portrait of full-blown AIDS concurs that both artists associate themselves with self-annihilating heroes. As such, both might say with Manfred when the summoning Spirit pronounces, “But thy crimes/ Have made thee–“: “I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey–/ But was my own destroyer.” There is a sanctity in this statement that is leveled in the aura, the gaze returned–precisely the seductive threat of both Byronists’ postmodern works.

Notes

 

1. Christopher Norris takes to task those critics who essentialize postmodern thought in this manner, including Habermas, Rorty and Gasche. Although Norris supports Habermas’ critique in such works as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), he asserts that Habermas misunderstands Derrida’s self-positioning within philosophical traditions as “a species of latter-day Nietzschean irrationalism . . . that rejects the whole legacy of post-Kantian enlightened thought.” See Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), esp. pp. 49-76.

 

2. The contract itself has recently been revitalized as a romantic term, however with tonalities other than the visual, by scholars such as Jerome Christensen and Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi influenced by Carole Pateman’s The Problem of Political Obligation (1979; Berkeley, 1985) and The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988). The conceptual contract as I understand it here, however, is itself artwork, and as such is specifically set in visual terms. I borrow these terms from de Lauretis, esp. p. 105, and Fuss.

 

3. Byron’s journals, written with at least an intimate audience in mind, if not simply to the audience of himself, exemplifies the rapidity of his mood and voice shifts. Commenting on a journal passage regarding Napoleon’s abdication, Peter Manning writes: “Byron confessed that he was `utterly bewildered and confounded,’ and the threat to his own identity produced a dispersal of voices notable even in his habitually echoing prose” Reading Romantics, 146).

 

4. Dorothee Metlitzki provides an important overview of the relation between Orientalism and romanticism in The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977); the final chapter, “The Matter of Araby and the Making of Romance,” is especially helpful (pp. 240-250).

 

5. Louis Crompton notes that “[t]hough his involvements were overwhelmingly heterosexual, various stories circulated, all at second hand, about how he disguised his inamoratas as boys to deceive his mother or others . . . Since Byron was often attracted by boys with girlish looks, Marchand suggests that some of the boys in his company were in fact mistaken for girls in disguise” (110).

 

6. Benjamin’s elusive prose, and the `open-sided’ character of his individual phrases, evinces his particular kind of Byronic dancing. That he partakes of the romantic is evident in his mystical claims about art as being behind history; that he is romantically postmodern is productive of his interest in fragmentation and the occasional essay form.

 

7. When Karl Kroeber describes the improvisational methodology of Don Juan as “open-sided,” he provides an apt term for the whole of Byronic aesthetics, an idea which Peter Manning underscores in introducing his Reading Romantics (4).

 

8. Bataille states in “The Solar Anus” that, “It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form . . . because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another . . . . But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies” Visions, 5).

Works Cited

 

• Bataille, G. “The Solar Anus.” In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985.
• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1969.
• Christensen, J. “Setting Byron Straight: Class, Sexuality, and the Poet,” in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons. Ed. Elaine Scarry. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.
• de Lauretis, Theresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
• Elam, D. Romancing the Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Fuss, Diana. “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 713-37.
• Gardner, Helen. Art Through the Ages. Sixth Ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
• Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
• Joselit, D. “Robert Mapplethorpe’s Poses.” In Janet Kardon, 19-21.
• Kardon, J. Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment. Ed. Janet Kardon. Philladelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art/ Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1988.
• Kaplan, E.A. “Introduction.” Postmodernism and its Discontents: Theories, Practices. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London and New York: Verso, 1988.
• McGann, J. “Hero with a Thousand Faces: The Rhetoric of Byronism.” SiR 31 (Fall 1992): 295-313.
• Manning, P. Byron and His Fictions. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1978.
• Marchand, L., ed. Byron’s Letters and Journals, 6 vols. London: John Murray, 1973.
• Sontag, Susan. Preface to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Certain People: A Book of Portraits. Pasadena, CA: Twelvetrees Press, 1985.
• Thorslev, Jr., P. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1962.
• Wolfson, S. “`A Problem Few Dare Imitate’: Sardanapalus and `Effeminate Character.'” ELH 58 (1991): 867-902.