The Haunting of Don Juan
The Haunting of Don Juan
This chapter offers an alternative reading of the English Cantos’ erotic spectral escapades and identifies a number of other ways in which the poem is haunted. These include the protagonist’s status as an intertextual revenant; the poet’s unstable blending of memory and imagination; the poem’s depictions of ‘the spirit-flesh amalgam that for [Byron] constitutes humanity’; and the semi-personified Platonic presences, such as Love and Philosophy, that appear throughout the poem. The chapter also presents a close reading of the Black Friar narrative. It argues that the ghost story of Canto XVI is ‘a narratological hybrid’, which draws upon the conventions of the Gothic supernatural tale but also upon the civilized comedy of manners, and in this way scrambles the signals that, unmixed, would indicate how readers should appraise the details. Contrasting Byron’s narrative with Jane Austen’s parodic blending of conventions in Northanger Abbey, the chapter draws an epistemological moral from the tale of the Black Friar, which encourages the reader to discard rigid preconceptions and to cultivate an open-minded, self-doubting attitude that’s receptive to all possibilities yet also sceptical about them.
Keywords: English Cantos, poetry, Byron, Black Friar, ghost story, Jane Austen
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