"And be again undone": Displacement and Don Juan

by Mark Phillipson

Unlike the fitfully epic Don Juan, I'd like to begin in medias res, with the anger of Lord Byron. We join him thick in the struggle with a central concern of DJ's composition - the perils of transmission:

Pray when I send you a parcel or packet-do acknowledge it-I care nothing about my letters or your answers-I only want to know, when I have taken trouble about a thing that it has arrived.

By the time he fired off those impatient words to his publisher John Murray in 1821, Byron had been living abroad and publishing overseas for five years. They were years marked by drastic shifts of tone in his writing ­ from earnestness to playfulness in his poetry, and quite the reverse trajectory in correspondence with Murray. The relationship between best-selling poet and savvy publisher, certainly the most lucrative of its day, degenerated into recrimination and finally broke down altogether, thanks in large part to the "friction of distance." The distance that Don Juan's publication had to negotiate between author and press ­ all the land and water as well as political borders between Italy and London ­ cultivated the ingredients of miscommunication. It invited excruciating delay, crossed signals, censorship, confusion, if not outright misplacement. Frustrating to be sure, and yet, as I hope to suggest, such travails had their unexpected payoff - they goaded DJ into an innovative grappling with displacement-an inexorable force that both overrides a poet's authority and revives it, as a revenant, a potently disrupted address.

The kick-start to Byron's poetic career was Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Cantos I and II, inspired by an extensive continental tour in 1809-11. Even that early work was written overseas - yet, in those early days, Byron chose to carry his poetry back to London himself: the Napoleonic Wars were disrupting international mail, and anyway, before his famously overnight success, he had no established publisher to receive his work. When Byron left England for good in 1816, and took up Childe Harold once again, he still didn't trust the post; instead, he found close friends who were headed from Italy to London-friends who had inspired or supplemented Byron's work, such as Percy Shelley and John Cam Hobhouse-to carry Childe Harold back to Murray. The transmission of DJ's first two cantos went along similarly improvised, inside lines - with the distinction that the bearer of this new "cargo of poesy" was a only a minor acquaintance of Byron's, the roving Lord Lauderdale, who had no personal link to the lines he carried. The reader of Byron's letters of November 1818 finds many references to Lauderdale wending his way slowly towards London with verse Byron knew would make a big impact. Yet when he delivered DJ, Lauderdale also carried along with it unflattering gossip about Byron's Venetian dissipation. It was a marred delivery, with Lauderdale proving to be, Byron later wrote, a "damned old 'Ladro-& porco fottuto,'" a "'son of a Bitch for all his laced Coat.'" The personal courier meant a compromise of authority. Byron sent the remainder of DJ to London via the impersonal mechanism of the post.

That method of delivery, of course, offered its own hazards. The reestablishment of postal routs directly after the continental wars had to seem tenuous, disruptable, subject to official intervention. Packages from Italy would be channeled through Paris and enter England at Dover ­ a route strewn with Napoleon's desolation. To Byron, the rise and fall of that titanic "Desolator" was yet more evidence that "almost every day / Some sucking hero is compelled to rear, / Who / Turns out to be a butcher in great business" (VII.83). DJ's postal route to publication was indeed fraught with the dismembering effects of history. And history had a way of lingering: after Napoleon's defeat regular packet mail did resume, yet British inspection of possibly treasonable mail, officially established as far back as the 'war measures' of Walpole's Secret Service Fund, lingered on into the mid-nineteenth century, far beyond Napoleon and Byron. In 1819, the year of DJ's debut, Byron felt the need to censor himself in a letter to Hobhouse: "Of my concerns-which I explained to you before I set out-I shall add nothing at present on account of the Pontifical post-masters-who open letters." In general the continental post always offered the threat of waylaying or worse; in another letter to Murray, during the spring of 1820, Byron marked it as a field of suspense:

when parcels that have cost some pains in the composition, & great trouble in the copying are sent to you I should at least be put out of Suspense by the immediate acknowledgement [sic] per return of post.-I am naturally-knowing what continental posts are-anxious to hear that they are arrived.

Left alone by butchers in great business, pontifical post-masters, or counter-revolutionary authorities, overseas delivery to and from London was at the very least sluggish. Reforms in the 1790's had swept out the bribery and mismanagement endemic to the British foreign packet service, but even as late as 1837 letters from Italy would arrive in Paris on Tuesdays and Fridays, often to stall three days awaiting dispatch, and the British continent-bound mail was dispatched from Dover only four times a week, often too slow to catch the Paris mail at Calais. The use of steam packet-boats, an innovation that dramatically whittled down delivery time, was not introduced to Dover until 1822.

Postal delivery not only delayed the transmission of DJ ­ it helped to constrict its manuscripts, leading to quite possibly permanent misrepresentations. Those manuscripts, so famously difficult to read due to writing in folds, words written cross-wise over other words, and ink leaking through thin paper, present the threat of erroneous transcription, thanks to Byron's efforts to cut down on mailing bulk. Furthermore, Byron's numerous changes of locations in Italy and, later, his voyage to Greece, meant that he often cut himself out of a crucial stage of publication: with the later cantos, he entrusted his publisher, or intermediaries like Mary Shelley or Hobhouse, to look proofs over, catch mistakes, even correct punctuation-introducing to DJ a particularly complicated editorial indeterminacy. As Mary Shelley wrote after making fair copies of the poem: "Your Lordships MS was very difficult to decypher, so pardon blunders and omission." Manuscripts was sometimes completely mislaid: in an enduring irony, given its parallel fate of displacement in the poem, Byron twice sent off to London copies of Donna Julia's valediction to Don Juan, and still the letter was never printed according to his corrections until Jerome McGann's 1985 CPW. We'll refer back to this letter, just as DJ so often does.

When Byron began DJ in 1818, these two transmission problems ­ delays and mistranscriptions ­ were already plaguing his relationship with John Murray. And right up to the poem's July 1819 debut, arguments about how it would first appear - whether it would be printed privately or widely, anonymously or not, censored or not, protected by copyright or not - were exacerbated by what Byron felt to be unreasonable delays on Murray's end. Murray, in fact, had plenty of reasons to hide behind the post's delay ­ to buy time in an effort to balance the appeasement of his most famous author with his publishing house's deep resistance to Byron's more libelous lines. Though Byron defended the "freedoms" of the poem by citing venerable predecessors such as Ariosto and Voltaire, DJ ­ however one felt about its politics - was a true threat to the operation of a publisher taking it on. The government's crackdown on radical publishers, the Six Acts of 1819, was causing enormous political tension in the presses. Here was a poem that parodied the Ten Commandments, sneered at marriage, tore down prestigious poets of the day, and called the Prime Minster an "intellectual eunich." Even Thomas Moore, Byron's great friend and the eventual steward of his memoirs, when called in by Murray to assess the first cantos, deemed DJ "on the whole, not publishable." The savage allusions to Lady Byron alone, he thought, "would disgust the Public beyond endurance."

Not surprisingly, then, a particularly vexed topic of the correspondence between Venice and London over DJ concerned editorial excision. In this struggle, moral, political, and legal concerns were only exacerbating Murray's tendency to tailor Byron's overseas writing for domestic consumption. Wrangling over the final shape of Byron's work had already reached large proportions in the 1817 publication of Manfred, when Murray had simply cut off, much to Byron's dismay, the hero's final acceptance of death-the eventually famous declaration, "Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die" (III.iv.151). "You have destroyed the whole effect & moral of the poem by omitting the last line of Manfred's speaking," Byron had fired off to Murray when he received a copy in Venice, "& why this was done I know not." It is no wonder, then, that when Byron was fixing the terms of DJ's publication he suspected Murray of dithering when given material he did not like, of trying to trim new work to look more like the old, commercially successful Eastern Tales, of even sabotaging efforts to establish a new satirical voice that led to so much legal trouble and unreliable sales. Byron called Murray's hesitations and worries and eventual decision to bring out DJ anonymously "half and half prudery," but then again the poet was not running a business in England.

Most notable is the rhetoric of dismemberment that accompanied Byron's protests against decorum and circumspection. "Don Juan shall be an entire horse or none. In no way will I have the poem mutilated," he wrote after having sent the manuscript of Canto I, in the face of ominous silence from London. Two letters to Murray at the beginning of April 1819, announcing the immanent arrival of Canto II by post (sent in four packets), make the same point: "there shall be no mutilations in either [canto], nor omissions"; "I will permit no curtailments. You shan't make Canticles of my Cantos.. I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing." The protracted struggle over cuts in DJ' was remarkable and hard-fought; as Leslie Marchand puts it in his introduction to Byron's letters, "seldom in history has a publisher been scolded as Byron belaboured Murray." Their interaction became so charged with suspicion, that the merest printing blunder could take on drastic implications.

The scolding was to flare up once and for all over Murray's treatment of Cantos III, IV, and V-when Byron was accusing Murray of being "careless about this poem because some of your Synod don't approve of it." Mis-transcription had been an irritant even before such charged days; Murray's carelessness with the Beppo manuscript, in 1817, festered in Byron's mind until, with the reoccurance ­ 4 years later - of a number of printing blunders in DJ canto five, his reaction was nothing short of vitriolic. The author was dismayed to find "words added-changed-so as to make cacophony & nonsense." Pointing out to Murray the example of substitution of "Adriatic shore of the Bosphorus" for "Asiatic", a mistake particularly galling to his rigorous sense of geography, Byron protested being condemned in London by "the stupidity of your printer" and pushed every button he could: "All this may seem little to you-so fine a gentleman with your ministerial connections-but it is serious to me-who am thousands of miles off-& have no opportunity of not proving myself the fool yr. printer makes me-except your pleasure & leisure forsooth. The Gods prosper-& forgive you for I wont [sic]." In a corrected published copy of Cantos III-V, Byron adopted an even more bitter tone:

[The author] doth kindly trust-with all due deference to those superior persons-the publisher and printer-that they will in future-less misspell-misplace-mistake and mis-everything, the humbled M.S.S. of their humble Servant.

When Murray protested that the errors were not of his making, Byron erupted: "Dear Moray [sic]/-If errors are in the M.S.S.-write me down an Ass-they are not-& I am content to undergo any penalty if they be." This editorial carelessness, on top of Murray's delays in correspondence and reluctance to associate himself publicly with the poem, convinced Byron that his publisher had "behaved as shabbily about the 'Juans' as possible."

The remarkable result of Byron's efforts to get his poem published completely was his decision to break with Murray altogether after Canto V, in 1822, and embrace a the radical John Hunt, publisher of The Liberal, as the steward of the following ten cantos of the poem. This embrace was reluctant and somewhat accidental; it was the result of Byron's interest in appearing in The Liberal - a short lived venture whose first edition was anchored by Byron's satire "A Vision of Judgment" ­ as well as his uncomfortable sense of obligation to John's brother Leigh Hunt. At any rate, the drastic shift from Tory to liberal publisher meant that DJ was never published as a contiguous work until after Byron's 1824 death: it entered into the world snapped in two. John Hunt could not afford to buy the copyrights of earlier cantos from Murray; and it was, in fact, Murray who bid for the rights of Hunt's cantos in 1829, and finally brought out a complete edition of the poem in 1832.

The break with Murray altered fundamental strategies in the packaging of Byron's ongoing poem. From the beginning, DJ had been particularly prone to piracy and unauthorized continuations, thanks to its anonymous, serial presentation. Its pirating was pursued avidly by radical publishers eager for material and repressed by the Six Acts; while the sheer volume of fake "new cantos" of the poem were, as Samuel Chew puts it, "without parallel, it is safe to say, in the history of literature." To forestall such impingements, and also to help blunt seditious passages, Murray had courted a prestigious audience by pricing the first edition of Cantos I and II out of the range of all but the very rich or the very devoted - 1pound.11.6, or the better part of a week's wages for the working class. He had also gone to court to defend DJ's copyright, despite Byron's fears that an official judgment of blasphemy (besides obviating all copyright protection) would legally bar him from any paternal claims to his daughter. But by the time DJ fell into John Hunt's hands, Murray's increasing ambivalence had had its effect: the copyright had been trammeled and the courts had given their blessing to William Dugdale's piracy of the poem.

In a way nobody could have foreseen, Murray's resistance to full representation of Byron's words resulted in fresh proliferation of the Byronic text. Murray's own house organ, the Quarterly Review , documented the effect of DJ's lost copyright in April 1822:

...no sooner was it whispered that there was no property in 'Don Juan', than ten presses were at work. 'Don Juan in quarto and on hot-pressed paper would have been almost innocent-in a whity-brown duodecimo it was one of the worst of the mischievous publications that have made the press a snare.

John Hunt's only recourse against such legal piracy was to fight it with an initial flood of cheap genuine editions. His first edition of new cantos of DJ numbered up to 17,000, at a shilling apiece, the largest single edition of any volume of Byron to date. Thus DJ found its way into a wildly broadened audience; William St. Clair estimates that it "penetrated far deeper into the reading of the nation than any other modern book, with the possible exception of Tom Paine's Rights of Man [it was] probably read by thousands who read no other book of any kind except the Bible." A working class audience, which was to prove remarkably loyal to Byron in the nineteenth-century, came into engagement with DJ just as the poem itself, in its late cantos, shifted its setting to England.

While he was urging his friends in London to find an alternative to Murray, Byron had indulged in the fantasy of producing his own work: "You will have offers.-If not-I will set up a printing office of my own-and publish them in my own way." Nevertheless, Byron kept practical perspective, offering to "alter or omit if requisite or proper" In general, the obsession with fully fixing the terms of transmission abated in Byron's dealings with the later Cantos of DJ - he practiced a much slighter amount of revision, gave the task of making fair copies to the widowed Mary Shelley, trusted Hobhouse to check proofs in London, and left the packaging of a substantial amount of material-over half the poem-to Hunt's discretion. Byron's deference to Hunt is particularly notable; a letter from May, 1823 sounds the tone: "If you are the publisher-and I presume you will be-I shall leave to yr. discretion the mode and form of publication-but I join with you in thinking the cheap edition indispensable." A pressing adventure in Greece awaited Byron, and that distraction, along with the relief of finding a publisher who did not seem to be manipulating the disjunction of mail for his own purposes, left Byron relatively carefree about Hunt's editorial decisions.

It would be a mistake, however, to read the slackening of Byron's interest in controlling transmission, after his break with Murray, as disengagement from DJ. In fact, I would like to consider it as a further committal to the poem, an honoring of its basic dynamic. In resigning himself to an unpredictable rerouting of his words, Byron was in fact embracing a central lesson of his poem. Within DJ, he had all along explored the narrative possibilities of waywardness, digression, disruption. Even as Byron was lambasting Murray for omissions and alterations, the material in question portrayed a dynamic world wherein repression only proliferates suggestiveness, wherein thwarted passage only increases the fertile possibilities of plot, wherein Juan, despite his continual failure to settle anywhere with anyone, floats on and thrives -- and most suggestively, wherein the written word, in the form of a love letter vowing eternal attachment, is subjected to one of romanticism's most relentless displacements.

Donna Julia's Seal

Juan's first affair, at the age of 16-the catalyst for his disastrous, adventurous exile-is with Donna Julia, "Married, charming, chaste, and twenty-three." As Byron's narrator tracks Julia's betrayal of her 50 year old husband ("'Twere better to have two of five and twenty," he says), he takes pains to sympathize with her inconstancy. In fact, he marks it as part of an inexorable physical undertow disrupting intention and pulling words off track. From the start, the narrator's own figurative language crumbles into inanity whenever he tries to describe Julia - "charms in her as natural / As sweetness to the flower, or salt to ocean, / Her zone to Venus, or his bow to Cupid, / (But this last simile is trite and stupid)" (I.55).

Julia's wordy attempt to redefine the "proper limits" (I.81) of her passionless life with Platonic justifications is a further corruption of meaning; her contradictory surrender to the bumbling Juan makes a mockery of resolve, even as rhyme snaps into place ("A little she strove, and much repented, / And whispering 'I will ne'er consent'-consented" (I.117)). "But who, alas, can love," asks the exculpating narrator, "and still be wise?" Julia's transgressive grandmother "Produced her Don more heirs at love than law," (I.58) a suggestion that Julia's betrayal of marriage vows and misrepresentation of herself to herself is an inexorable process, prompted by genetics, genuine passion, and even climate:

'Tis a sad thing, I cannot choose but say,
And all the fault of that indecent sun,
Who cannot leave alone our helpless clay,
But will keep baking, broiling, burning on,
That howsoever people fast and pray
The flesh is frail, and so the soul undone.
(DJ I.63)

In fact Julia shows us that the flesh is not in the least frail; it is the phrasing that counters the flesh's dictates-avowals of innocence, justifications, explanations, protests-that proves frail. Almost caught by her old husband in flagrante, Julia stuffs Juan deep down in her bed and launches into some seventeen stanzas of bravura mendacity, one of DJ's most sustained set pieces. "Ungrateful, perjured, barbarous Don Alfonso," Julia declaims, "How dare you think your lady would go on so?" The rhetorical steam only builds from there: "'Yes, search and search,' she cried, / 'Insult on insult heap, and wrong on wrong! / It was for this that I became a bride!'" (I.145). This sustained berating of Alphonzo for his entirely justified suspicions is heady business, almost sublimely hypocritical. But the material world in DJ has its own power; nobody can master it for long, establish a channel of discourse inviolable to its upheavals. Despite all linguistic ingenuity, Julia is betrayed by the most pedestrian of physical clutter: Juan's shoes. When Alphonzo stumbles across these in his wife's chamber, it is clear that her performance cannot finally triumph over the rhetoric-blasting, material world.

Julia is exposed and ruined, and the narrator shifts his attention to Juan's exile, the shipwreck that disrupts that banishment, and his eventual rescue on Haidee's idyllic island ­ and yet Julia and her misadventures with language remain very much at the heart of Byron's poem. She bequeaths one final rhetorical set piece: a letter to Juan, written in a trembling hand on gilt-edged paper, sealed with vermilion wax, vowing eternal attachment. In this letter Julia declares herself forever Juan's: "To all, except one image, madly blind; / So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole, / As vibrates my fond heart to my fix'd soul." Stricken forever with the "passion which still rages as before," she insists on the permanence of her devotion, and, given Juan's banishment, the completion of her ruin. Her "misery," she writes, "can scarce be more complete."

As if all this fixity weren't already overdetermined, the letter comes sealed with another emblem of rooted devotion, the sun-flower, and the motto "Elle vous suit partout" (she follows you everywhere). Ironically lost when Byron tried to supplement his manuscript of Canto I with it, as I mentioned before, Julia's letter becomes, within the poem, the very emblem of displacement ­ and uncanny resurgence. In the end, Julia's missal is less remarkable for its evocation of the past - its retrieval of the dear "memory of that dream" she's shared with Juan - than for its misadventures in an unconceptualized future. Finally it is the unforeseen afterlife of this statement of closure that proves both its most fundamental undoing and its author's greatest reach.

Julia's letter does indeed bear out her intention to follow Juan everywhere he might roam, but in ways it never could anticipate. Juan, reading the letter on the choppy seas that are carrying him away, is inspired to enter into its rhetoric of yearning ­ even as a competing, more immediate imperative disrupts his words: "Sooner shall earth resolve itself to sea, / Than I resign thine image, Oh, my fair; / And mind diseased no remedy can physic-- / (Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick." Still Juan struggles on with his vow: "'Sooner shall heaven kiss earth-' here he fell sicker." . Byron makes much of the uncomfortable joke that nausea trumps love, but what is notable is Juan's vaunting against inexorable odds, a perseverance that recalls Julia's own rhetorical flights. 'Oh Julia!-(this curst vessel pitches so)- / Beloved Julia, hear me still beseeching!' / (Here he grew inarticulate with reaching.)" (II.20). The wretched pun on "reaching" is particularly paradoxical, suggesting communion even at the moment that address finally breaks down altogether. Both lovers have had their words wrenched out from under them, as it were. In experiencing this, Juan is carrying Julia's ruin with him, experiencing its afterlife. And for all the letter's rhetoric of closure, it is the afterlife of ruin that it finally represents. Its lament that women have "but one" resource, "'To love again, and be again undone,'" (I.194) in fact feeds into the central dynamic of Byron's poem, which famously declares itself "born for opposition," suggesting a vitality that exists most in 'undoing'.

The sea gets choppier and choppier, Juan's ship goes down, and soon Julia's letter is subjected to further disaster: the distribution of its shredded remains as lots that will determine which of the passengers huddled onto a life-raft will be the first to be eaten. "Having no paper, for the want of better, / They took by force from Juan Julia's letter." (II.74) "'Twas nature gnaw'd them to this resolution" (II.75): the unhappy storm victims are physically compelled to fragment and pervert Julia's fulfilled task into fresh agency. It is a savagely unsentimental demonstration that, as the narrator of DJ later phrases it, "words are things" (III.88): their subjection to physical passage, in an unpredictably heaving world, can reroute a polished, traditional act of closure into "materials that much shock the Muse" (II.74). As such, the letter's subjection to physical distortion lends to it the "shock-effect" Lyotard has identified at the heart of the sublime; the misrouting of Julia's words shows that their power lies in the "happening" of corrupted transmission. Appropriately enough, even after it is so decisively ripped apart and scattered, Julia's letter continues to make its misrouting ­ and by extension her ruin and her presence ­ felt. As Juan bobs on the sea and makes his way to the safety of Haidee's island, the letter's physical trappings, detached, reemerge with an uncanny frequency, in an unfixed and evolving sense redeeming Julia's sun-flower seal. This seal, and its corruption, indeed follow Juan everywhere.

The trope of the sunflower firmly associates Julia with the germination of "indecent sun" (I.63), her sexual flowering typical of "sun-burnt nations" (I.69)-and this association ensures that whenever sun is mentioned in DJ, Julia's broken seal is evoked, however indirectly. Indeed, Julia's sun-craning flower must follow Juan's later adventures in other sun-burnt nations; the play of physical and metaphorical limitation transforms the seal from a sentimental delusion to an example of how such sentiment is uncannily invigorated by displacement. Julia's metaphor is basically clumsy-almost provocatively so-displaced from the start: Juan is no sun, cannot himself get out from under the sun; Julia, as a rooted flower, cranes towards the power that has driven him away ­ "that indecent sun," we remember, who drives desire,

Who cannot leave alone our helpless clay,
But will keep baking, broiling, burning on.

In reaching towards the sun, Julia's seal yearns towards what most symbolizes her own passion, an unsettling, natural force that burns up rhetoric.

Every subsequent reference to sun in DJ, then, recalls Julia's tripped up words, the torn seal that represents them, and the stubborn repetition of material upheaval. Juan, in this sense, lives the corruption of Julia's seal over and over. The doomed ship may carry Juan away from Julia, but he does not escape a sun that signals disruption. Through the wisdom of seamen's lore, the sun becomes the herald of the violent squall that brings down the ship: "The sun rose red and fiery, as sure sign / Of the continuance of the gale" (II.62). Still the sun also attracts hope-"A glimpse of sunshine set some hands to bale" (II.38)-and it all but gives birth to the refuge of Haidee's island: the uneaten watchman on the raft sings out, "If 'twas not land that rose with the sun's ray / He wish'd that he might never see more" (II.97). DJ's sun presides over a world of vastly changing circumstances; whoever follows it everywhere tracks a world hostage to its ever-amending vicissitudes.

Nursed back to health in Haidee's cave, Juan is for a time allowed a respite; he is kept among rocks "which the sun / Had never seen" (II.115), where "the excluded sun, / Troubled him not, and he might sleep his fill" (II.137). But his nurse, Haidee, is as sun-tethered as Julia, more so: "Haidee was Passion's child, born where the sun / Showers triple light, and scorches even the kiss / Of his gazelle-eyed daughters" (II.202); she rouses her slaves to attend Juan "with some pretence about the sun" (II.139); she walks down to where he is sleeping "While the sun smiled on her with his first flame" (II.142); she awakes in Juan "feelings, universal as the sun" (II.167). Haidee's father Lambro returns to his island to find, within "his white walls shining in the sun" (III.26), an elaborate pageant of love; Haidee and Juan preside over the proceedings on scarlet cushions, "from whose glowing centre grew / A sun emboss'd in gold, whose rays of tissue, / Meridian-like, were seen all light to issue" (III.67). Grown into the very ensign of passion, the sun's rhythmic setting becomes ominous; Haidee, on the evening Lambro will destroy her idyll with Juan, suffers through twilight foreboding: "That large black prophet eye seem'd to dilate / And follow far the disappearing sun, / As if their last day of a happy date / With his broad, bright, and dropping orb were gone; / (IV.22). If a helpless subjection to imperatives of the sun had been Julia's undoing, it is also Haidee's, and by extension Juan's and Lambro's: universal indeed. Displaced and scattered about, such subjection takes on an inexorable quality. Haidee too is ruined, Juan tumbles on against his will to Gulbeyaz, "'Bride of the sun'" (V.144).

Other materials from Julia's letter are punningly evoked in Haidee's parallel ruin, further marking the "mystic seal" of a love letter (XIV.27) as resurgent displacement. "Seal" itself oddly literalizes in Haidee's ominous dream just before she and Juan are torn apart by Lambro-a dream which allows her "with sealed eyes to see" her impending disaster (IV.30). The dream anxiously restages Juan's shipwreck and rescue (the threat of drowning (IV.31); the discovery on the beach of something that "escaped her as she clasped" (IV.32); the impossibility of clearing away froth from Juan's brow (IV.34)), before taking a odd turn into a cave "Where waves might wash, and seals might breed and lurk" (IV.33). These hypothetical seals seem a bit gratuitous unless we strain the pun. Even the wax from Julia's seal seems to find its way into Haidee's eyes, which "wax'd full of fearful meaning" once awakens into the reality of this dream, the unbearable and inevitable position of the wrecked woman (IV.64).

Reference to sun in all modes of description, repetition of the admittedly common words "wax" and "seal": it is difficult, of course, to prove that Byron worked the ripped up enclosures of Julia's letter into the next stage of DJ deliberately, in the way he clearly meant to shock readers with the letter's shredded dispersal during the shipwreck scene. Still it's notable that the rainbow that so brightly hangs over the sky as Juan drifts from Julia to Haidee contains yet more fragments of the seal of Julia's ill-fated letter :

Now overhead a rainbow, bursting through
The scattering clouds, shone, spanning the dark sea,
Resting its bright base on the quivering blue;
And all within its arch appear'd to be
Clearer than that without, and its wide hue
Wax'd broad and waving, like a banner free,
Then changed like to a bow that's bent, and then
Forsook the dim eyes of these shipwreck'd men.

It changed, of course; a heavenly cameleon,
The airy child of vapour and the sun,
Brought forth in purple, cradled in vermilion,
Baptized in gold, and swathed in dun,
Glittering like crescents o'er a Turk's pavilion,
And blending every colour into one,
Just like a black eye in a recent scuffle,
(For sometimes we must box without the muffle).
(DJ II.91-92)

The rainbow is dynamic, changeable: it waxes and forsakes; like the seal of Julia's letter, which was likewise vermilion, it gives a patently transient illusion of enclosure. But what most characterizes this rainbow, amidst a scramble of metaphors that seek, and fail, to fasten meaning onto this bright phenomenon, is violent dispersal: it comes "bursting through," "scattering" the clouds, and ends up suggesting, despite a quasi-religious emergence, the bloom of a black eye. Unmuffling in an upheaving world is dangerous indeed; all metaphors, sentiments, constructs of deliverance sent forth are likely to get knocked off course by the continual shift of elements. And yet it is through this distorted transmission that Julia's letter finds its way up into the "celestial kaleidoscope"(II.93) that presides over DJ's most shocking displacement, and predicts the unpredictable regeneration of all its displacements. In this rainbow, the airy child of upheaving water with the broiling sun, Byron presents the flourished arc of recontextualization that begins and ends with the matter in transition on earth.

Midway through its unfolding, thanks in great measure to the strain of corrupted transmission, DJ became a displacement of itself-a production of Murray or Hunt, shuttling between two agencies of representation. The later half of the poem thus grapples with an extra amount of self-consciousness about disjunction. Hunt's cantos evoke their estranged brethren, the Murray cantos, by undertaking a retrospective tour of English society: the mid-teens Regency Society in which Byron had risen to astonishing prominence and produced the most profitable poems for Murray. Byron's picture of this world, after eight years of distorted correspondence from abroad, is defined by shattered perspective:

'Where is the world,' cries Young, 'at eighty? Where
The world in which a man was born?' Alas!
Where is the world of eight years past? 'Twas there-
I look for it-'tis gone, a Globe of Glass!
Cracked, shivered, vanished, scarcely gazed on, ere
A silent change dissolves the glittering mass.
Statesmen, chiefs, orators, queens, patriots, kings,
And dandies, all are gone on the wind's wings.
(XI.76)

What remains, despite such cracking, shivering, vanishing dissolve, is a world of fervid transmission: roads humming with speed, post boys dashing every which way, a great national jockeying for position in a land where nothing stays in place. Juan, by now the veteran of countless displacements, discovers in England a "postillion's Paradise" where "wheels fly" every direction (XIII.42); "how swiftly speeds the post so merry!" (X.71). "The turnpikes glow with dust", even as aristocrats outrun their creditors with faster post-horses: "Away! Away! 'Fresh horses!' are the word, / And changed as quickly as hearts after marriage" (XIII.46). 'Cosi Viaggino i Ricchi' (XIII.47) read the thousands of purchasers of Hunt's cheap editions, or of the even cheaper pirate editions. Such lines, requiring translation, announce themselves as the product of diverted address; the less socially positioned a reader might be to apply the wisdom of Byron's anachronistic "microcosm on stilts, / Yclept the Great World," (XII.56) the more charged his words are with the displacement they describe.

In the cultivated anachronism of the English Cantos, DJ's late visit to the time and place Byron left behind ­ a world whose very specificity marks it as a distant author's distant memory - the poem comes as close as possible to delivering itself over to the future. It deliberately subjects its address to unconceived purpose. It is an open-endedness that preserves a sense of validity only within the process of being - inevitably, inexorably - displaced. Frustrated by the process of long distance publication, obsessed with the perversion of address, Byron finally gestures to the materiality that has sidelined him, rendered him a ghost presenting ghosts to an unknown futurity. "'Why then publish?' Byron asks himself in late passages of a poem that would never be fully published - and his answer seems one of the most straightforward in DJ: "what I write I cast upon the stream, / To swim or sink-I have at least my dream" (XIV.11). Studied carelessness, surely; petulance, perhaps ­ but there is more, the legacy of writing over distance: a sense of authority that most comes to life by being undone.