In my Ph.D. program, I wrote an essay about Lord Byron’s Don Juan. (I also wrote about Don Juan as part of my dissertation on 19th-century Romantic drama and the Victorian theater – click on the link to read it.) In the essay, I cited Guinn Batten’s ideas about avoiding endings to analyze Byron’s writing style.
I have been thinking a lot about this essay – over ten years now. And a while ago, I thought about using Batten’s ideas about avoiding endings to think about how we binge watch TV shows. So here we go – this blog takes ideas from my scholarship about literature and uses them for cultural analysis. (If you like this kind of writing, please add a comment below, or send me a private message, and I’ll write more.)
Batten’s Orphaned Imagination
In The Orphaned Imagination, literary scholar Guinn Batten argues that major literary figures, including Lord Byron, were writing from a place of personal loss (particularly the loss of a father or a father figure) and that this “orphaned imagination” gave them a special insight into their culture. For Byron, this meant that he wrote poetry (and drama, journals, letters) as a way of not dealing with or confronting his problematic heritage.
Batten argues that this delay or refusal to deal with personal history can be seen in Byron’s specific writing style. Manuscript copies of Byron’s writing, particularly his epic narrative poem Don Juan, show that Byron originally wrote sections of narrative and then added his famous “digressive stanzas” (commentary and other observations not directly related to the narrative) in between the original narrative stanzas. Batten interprets this approach in a Freudian way to argue that Byron is adding extra content to the poem to prevent himself and the reader from reaching the end.
“Byron works ‘on’ and ‘in’ the boundaries between things, words, lines, and stanzas to make the void ‘matter,’ to fall into the middle of a middle and therefore to forestall the inevitable end of a narrative drive that … must end … in death” (Batten 46).
Lord Byron’s Writing Style
Let me first say that Prof. Batten’s book has greatly influenced my thinking about 19th-century poetry. As I mention above, I have been thinking about these ideas for more than ten years. I also totally agree with her analysis of the “orphaned imagination.” Byron, Shelley, and other writers in their generation saw themselves and wrote about their status as orphans and emigres, and this aspect of their writing is something that connected with me when I first encountered their poetry in high school. Their identity as emigres living in foreign land, but also as “universal citizens” who made a new home, connected with me very much because of my personal experience of crossing boundaries and changing cultures.
Having said all of this, the essay I wrote questioned the argument that Byron’s “digressive” and “accretive” writing style delayed endings. First of all, creative writing does not happen in one smooth outpouring of ideas and story-telling. Instead, writers go back and forth, and they constantly write, rewrite, edit, delete, and add content on a regular basis. This is certainly true with Byron as well. His writing may have sections where he wrote a first draft all at once to get the basic storyline on paper, but the manuscript also shows that he often changed words, poetic lines, and whole stanzas as he was writing. Byron constantly tampered with his text as he was writing so he could adjust the poetic meter, find rhyming words, create satire and humor, and incorporate quotes and allusions to other texts. Does this delay the end of the story? In a way, yes, but it is also the common practice of what writers do, and Byron’s habit of doing this does not show that he had a desire to delay endings while other writers who do the same thing do not.
In the age before word processors, writing, rewriting, editing, deleting, and adding texts in the margins, in between stanzas, and anywhere else there is room to write is how the poetic process happened. The layout of content on a page was simply more fluid, and we can’t make clear conclusions if the writer is emotionally struggling with the content or if he or she is simply trying to use the available room on the page. For example, when writing a letter, it was common to “cross-write” text perpendicularly to other text. In other words, the writer would first write on the page in “letter mode”’ and then twist the sheet to write in “landscape mode” on top of what had already been written. While this is not what Byron did, “cross-writing” shows that the way writers thought about space on a page may have influenced the way they treated their writing.
Byron’s Additions and Endings
Adding to the text was one way Byron revised, but it does not mean that he was less ready to confront endings and death with every revision. Certainly, adding to the middle of the poem did push the main character’s death further away. For example, in his famous narrative poem The Giaour, the main character’s death in the revised editions appears in lines 1319-34, while it originally appeared in lines 390-410 in the rough draft version. But Leila’s death appears in the first six lines in every version of the poem; her death is the very first thing the reader learns about in The Giaour.
Rather than interpreting all of Byron’s additions to the text as ways of “suspending” endings, it may be more accurate to interpret them as ways of complicating the overall theme of the text so that the whole text is richer with meaning and has more to offer. The constantly-evolving, new content may have also added the complexity needed for the reader to reach the end with a more complex frame of mind.
Finally, who wants to buy multiple versions of the same book? Publishing yet another “revised and expanded edition” may have helped generate new sales among established readers.
Even in Don Juan, Byron does not hesitate to confront finality. First of all, Byron writes in stanzaic poetic form, which means each poetic line has an ending after a few words, and each stanza has an ending after a few lines. In this poetic form, Byron was constantly coming up against endings.
Next, sections of Don Juan foreground endings in thematic ways as well. Originally, Canto III was over 200 stanzas, but Byron divided it approximately in half, and he writes about it in the poem. He also waxes poetically about sleep, the fall of heroes, and the end of nations and civilizations. If Byron was unwilling to confront endings, why did he bring the end of Canto III much closer to the beginning, and why does he explicitly write about death and dying as poetic themes? By doing so, he shows that the poem (and life more broadly) can be randomly stopped, and he points out the arbitrariness of divisions and endings both in poetry and in life. He makes similar comments about the randomness of endings and beginnings in other parts of the poem as well. In the middle of Canto XII, which was published years after Canto I & II, Byron says, “now I will begin my poem. ’Tis | Perhaps a little strange … | That from the first of cantos up to this | I’ve not begun” (54.1-4). These examples conflate beginnings and endings and suggest that it is one long process with no clear transition or meaning.
Binge Watching
We all do it. We get on Netflix, Disney Plus, YouTube, and even on social media, and we watch video after video. On Netflix specifically, we watch the whole season of a TV show from start to end in one sitting, and we even spend several days in a row watching season after season.
This “binge” watching has changed the way we consume content. We are no longer willing to watch shows “live” and wait both through commercial breaks and also between episodes. Instead, we wait until the show appears on Netflix (or another platform), we watch it all at once.
Why do we do this? Are we “addicted” to the platform, and do we easily give in to the feeling of instant gratification? Is the show that entertaining that it is able to sustain our attention for hours and days at a time? Do we enjoy watching the show all at once because we are able to keep track of the details, and this both makes the show more complex and more cohesive? Do we not have anything better to do? Or, are we trying to avoid the things we have to do – such as homework, exercise, chores, the work of life? Are we avoiding life? Why do we that? Are we afraid to confront the fact that it might end?
Please post your comments below.
Lirim Neziroski, Ph.D., MBA is an academic administrator and faculty member withexpertise in curriculum development, assessment, academic technology, and strategic planning. Contact Lirim for resources and for speaking, consulting, and writing opportunities.
Lirim Neziroski 
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