Binghamton University The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB) Graduate Dissertations and Theses Dissertations, Theses and Capstones 5-8-2018 Enemy life: theorizing exile through Milton, Shelley and Byron Robert L. Berger Binghamton University--SUNY, rberger4@binghamton.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://orb.edu/dissertation_and_theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Berger, Robert L., "Enemy life: theorizing exile through Milton, Shelley and Byron" (2018). Graduate Dissertations and Theses.edu/dissertation_and_theses/61 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations, Theses and Capstones at The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB). It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB).
For more information, please contact ORB@binghamton. ENEMY LIFE: THEORIZING EXILE THROUGH MILTON, SHELLEY AND BYRON BY ROBERT L. BERGER BA Alfred University 2006 MA Binghamton University 2014 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature in the Graduate School of Binghamton University State University of New York 2018 ©Copyright by Robert Lester Berger 2018 All Rights Reserved iii Accepted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature in the Graduate School of Binghamton University State University of New York 2018 May 8th, 2018 Jean-Pierre Mileur, Chair Department of English, Binghamton University David Bartine, Member Department of English, Binghamton University John Havard, Member Department of English, Binghamton University Richard Lee, Outside Examiner Department of Sociology, Binghamton University iv Abstract This dissertation investigates the contemporary discourse and conceptions of exile as it is presented by Milton Shelley and Byron. Utilizing biopolitical theory as a lens, it posits that the Satanic iteration or narrative of exile embodies the reality of worldly exile.
As such the dissertation explores the complex framing and subsequent deconstruction of Satanic and human subjectivities found in Paradise Lost, Prometheus Unbound, Manfred and Don Juan. The dissertation examines Paradise Lost for its competing narratives of exile, Adam and Satan, and explores notions of home, transgression, the purification rituals which are the origin of sovereign Power and the parody that Satan’s exilic body presents. The dissertation examines Prometheus Unbound against the grain of many traditional reading, focusing on the agonistic-audial subjectivity it produces for its exilic subject and its stance in rehabilitating the exile as an integral member of society for their very apartness. Finally, the dissertation examines Manfred and Don Juan for its Ironic, decentered representation of exile as a fundamentally human, transgressive condition.
v Dedication To Marina vi Acknowledgements This work could not have been completed without the support of my family: my soon-to- be wife, Marina Malli and my mom and dad Allison and Louis Berger. I would also like to thank Jean-Pierre Mileur for his guidance and support throughout the dissertation process as well as David Bartine and John Havard for their revisionary notes and editorial patience. A special thanks to Colleen Bailey, Donna Berg and Rosaria Mcnierney and the entire English department staff and faculty here at Binghamton for all their contributions to getting me here. Finally, thanks to all my fellow English grad students who have struggled beside me during this taxing process.
vii Table of Contents Introduction. 1 Chapter I Adamic Exile. 34 Chapter 2 Satanic Exile. 83 Chapter 3 Shelley and Exile.
145 Chapter 4 Byron and Exile. 276 1 Introduction This work brings together a nexus of areas of academic interest: Paradise Lost, the Satanic School of British Romantic poetry, and contemporary theories of the exilic figure. I bring these areas into contact to address the discourse of the exile. This is a task that, in our divided and emotional political moment, has grown in urgency.
We live in a time in which Power uses the rhetoric of “the Enemy”, promise walls, perform banishments, incite panic and dread all in the name of security. At the same time, beings-in-exile continue to appear in every region of the world, in every aspect of our lives. We believe we see and know the forms and bodies of the “Mexican Immigrant” and the “Syrian Refugee” (to frame a few examples). We “see” them everywhere.
Yet our thinking is caught by the necessity of finding a way to give greater recognition to these displaced persons. One could say the worldly exile is central in the gaze of Western thought, yet still remains unseen. It was in observing this ironic motion, this movement of the exile in both its literary and worldly form, from the unseen center to the unobserved periphery and back again that I began to think contemporary theories of exile and the Satanic School involved with each other. In thinking this, my work represents a de-structuring of the ways the West regulates itself, its citizens and its exiles, not just by its form of thinking, but also by frame of its stories.
This is my reading of Paradise Lost. After this first movement, my work pivots to address the exile in the works of the Satanic School. I posit Shelley and Byron are thinking the exile in ways which are contemporary to the work theorists like Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy are performing now. Thus, this work is designed to bridge the narrow spaces between biopolitical theory, Paradise Lost and the Satanic School of literature.
2 The impasse to this work is the narrative, the framework of the exile that exists in the West today. This rather static form is found in the stories of exile in the news and entertainment media and in public political discourse. They function as what Foucault calls a mechanism of control or the micro-physics of power. Everyday fictions and frames of power mediate our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and our world precisely because they occur with an unobserved daily regularity.
Such mediation means that when the Western subject receives an image or story of the exile, understanding is and has always been conditioned into a specific form by a long-perfected discourse of Power. Discourse and its fictions determine what individuals see before they see it. It is pre-figurative form of control and one cannot underestimate the influence of this consistent, pervasive re-framing. Examining the popular narratives of exile, the way in which Power show us the exile invokes the depiction of Satan, the adversary to God and Man in John Milton’s 17th Century epic poem Paradise Lost.
The likeness is uncanny. Satanic imagery and descriptors cross the boundary of “the Enemy” into use for the bodies and beings of exiles. Framed for us in this way, these figures of exile become “Enemy Life” (a term which I will define later) in the most righteous, vehement, fundamental sense, rather than as human beings. This is the root structure of the discourse of exile in our time.
This is the reason that the problem of the exile becomes so difficult to address. Almost every aspect of the exile is perceived to be an embodiment of the Enemy as formulated by a long standing narrative tradition in the West. And, as Paradise Lost demonstrates in detail, there are established punishments and corrections that must be brought to bear upon the Enemy. 3 Perceiving this distorted representation of exile, the de-structuring intellectual response and the necessary political disruption should naturally be akin to the poetic response of Percy Shelley and Lord George Byron.
These radical figures, who were as much outside the tradition in their time as they embody the tradition in ours, composed their works in the early 19th Century, in the shadow of the French Revolution and perhaps the dawn of modern Empire. They were the principle members of what was called at the time the Satanic School of English Poetry. Both Shelley and Byron found Satan to be Milton’s most human character and the being most in need of compensatory justice. The Enemy presented the human to them and they represented it in their work.
This is precisely the same effort that current theorists are putting forth in their own scholarly works when they move toward including the exile, such as Judith Butler in her works, Frames of War and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. The two schools seem to be working the same goal, and thus one might able to think through the questions posed by theory through poetical means. Literary and theoretical involvement is the method of this work in exploring exile. By siting the exilic being of Satan as a central motif in Western politics and utilizing the insightful re-framing tactics of the Satanic School, one can add to the theoretical conversation about how to foreground the exile to the Western tradition and the Western subject.
In this way, Paradise Lost and the Satanic School of British Romanticism become a contemporary theory of exile. An Overview of the Work The work is carried out in an introduction, four major chapters and a conclusion. The introduction demonstrates the reality of the exile in the world and in the tradition of Western literature. The first two chapters consider the two exiles of Paradise Lost Milton places most emphasis on: Adam and Satan.
The third chapter explores Percy Shelley’s Satanic, exile figure, 4 Prometheus, in Prometheus Unbound. The fourth chapter looks at Byron’s Satanic influenced Manfred, and also his revision of Satanic exile in Don Juan. The conclusion ties together the concepts and realities the chapters have produced and attempts to solidify what Enemy Life as a discourse of exile is. To draw this outline in more detail: the introduction is comprised of three parts.
First, I introduce “problem” of the various forms of exile and the figures involved with his “Enemy” status: the authorities, and the “mere” observers of exilic apartness. Second, I review exilic literature and foundational theory concerning not only political exile but also existential exile. Finally, I will give an overview of my method in theorizing the exile through the Satanic School. In Chapter One, I perform a reading of Paradise Lost that demonstrates its situation as one of the pre-figurative narrative of exile in Western politics.
I introduce John Milton and his situation, review the critical material on Paradise Lost and then examine the exilic narrative frame for Adam and show the correspondence the world formed in Paradise Lost with the world we inhabit. This chapter therefore represents an analysis of the fictional form of exile that Power and the tradition of literature are intent on creating as an ideology for its citizens. In Chapter Two, working to disrupt this accepted fiction of exile, I read for the nature of “Enemy” subjectivity and narrativity as Satan represents it. I explore the Satanic exile in its relationship with Power, focusing on the function of the ban, the ethos of God in during the banishment, and “treatment” of Satan as a madman, a criminal and even as blasphemous parody of Power.
This chapter represents a critique of how exile is actually framed and corrected by Power and narrative, corresponding precisely to the treatment of real-world exiles in our time. 5 In Chapter Three, I provide a brief history of the Satanic School of British Romanticism and then transition into a reading of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound that demonstrates the lyrical drama as a theory of exile. Shelley’s work demonstrates a tension between the traditional visual phenomenology of the subject, and more elusive iteration of subjectivity that can best be described as agonistic, performative and sublime. This new representation of exile transpires through auditory exchanges between Prometheus, the exile and the peripheral figures of drama who witness his disintegration and in turn act on his behalf to affect his rehabilitation.
Thus, this chapter serves to demonstrate how Shelley’s representation of the exile enables new stances of subjectivity, apart from Power’s purview, which have gone underexplored in the Western tradition, yet are currently being discussed by theorists such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Judith Butler.