“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Text of Bliss and Pleasure" (original) (raw)

Abstract

Drawing on Roland Barthes’s theory about the pleasure of the text, in this paper I examine Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a text of pleasure. This pleasure manifests itself in various guises and is enjoyed by both the reader and the poet. The reader derives pleasure from the way Byron tackles history, namely as a ritualistic process. In this respect, in Canto 1 and 2, the descriptions of war and death provide a simulation of death, which enables the reader to “rehearse his/her own death,” maintaining thus a pleasure experienced as resolution. In addition, the ritualistic aspect of history entails representations of seduction as well, as in for example the Spaniard Maid in Canto 1. As I argue, the reader of Childe Harold is ultimately seduced by the text, which is not a linear surface, but “an ever-shifting surface and involves the reader in the formation of that surface.” More specifically, the make-up of the poem consisting of various parts and generic forms “reveals itself in the form of the body, split into erotic sites” and it is this body that seduces the reader. By building the palimpsestic surface of the poem, the reader becomes an active collaborator, participates in the formation of history and in the ritualistic aspects of it. Finally, my paper also explores the ways in which Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage provides a playground for experimentation and pleasure for the poet himself. Byron has argued that the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are “experimental” (CPW, II, 3). Byron experiments with the construction of his alter-ego, a pleasureable process, since it results in an erotic union and the birth of “the child of [Byron’s] imagination” (CPW, II, 4).

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