The rise of the Byronic man?

I was at lunch with my friend Chris yesterday. I explained to him that I'd been led back to reading some Lord Byron, a great literary love from my adolescence.

"You speak of this with such Byrony!" Chris smiled. It was an awesomely bad joke. But I loved the use of "Byron" as a term again, and I almost asked Chris if we should strategize how to define "Byrony" and then start some sort of underground Byron revival. He's a literary reference that we should know. He was the Hemingway before Hemingway, mind you!

I found an old paperback copy of selected letters and poems a few weeks ago, and on top of that I realized just a few days ago that Byron's broader conflict is the same one that Robert Pirsig prophesizes about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Chris says that every twenty-something worth their salt has to read this book at some point; I heartily agreed!). Both address the dichotomy of the romantic ideal and classical thought (abstract as a conflict, yes, but applicable to almost everything in our daily lives), but the difference is that Pirsig's professor is trying to find a solution to split the difference. Byron never really wanted to do that. Byron believed that assigning a person a distinct personality--adding up all the components of past actions and words and feelings to construct the "known person"--was a recipe for social disaster. Byron admitted that in love, for example, he had not just one personality but dozens. He was consistent perhaps in nothing "except in politics," he proclaimed, and only there because he possessed "indifference to the subject all together." How true. We are so calm about things we have no passion for. And how true that at some point or another we must all feel a bit boxed-in by the way our friends and family or the world more generally has categorized us. "So and so is a NICE guy." What the hell would that even mean anymore?

Now to my point, sorry. Here's the Wiki-definition of the term "Byronic hero":

high level of intelligence and perception
cunning and able to adapt, but suffering from an unnamed crime
a troubled past
sophisticated and educated
self-critical and introspective
mysterious, magnetic and charismatic
power of seduction and sexual attraction
social and sexual dominance
emotional conflicts, bipolar tendencies, or moodiness
a distaste for social institutions and norms
being an exile, an outcast, or an outlaw
"dark" attributes not normally associated with a hero
disrespect of rank and privilege
has seen the world
jaded, world-weary

The Byronic man is smart! He's educated in the classical, knows his stuff. He's figured out how the world works, but he doesn't like it. But instead of doing anything about it, he decides to be "dark," to brood, to embrace his jaded nature as a badge of honor, attracting women and friends with a passive coolness. So yes, if you want a literary benchmark to pull Byron out of the nineteenth century, look first to Hemingway's expatriates!

When I caught up with Lord Byron this week, I felt an old connection to him restored. I like the solemn sweetness of his love poems, classical in their form but laden with layers of life's little doubts and intrigues and, yes, ironies. Second, though, I was astounded to discover that Byron's contradictions reminded me of a lot of youngish (say, ages 20 to 40) men that I've come across. Hell, I've dated a couple of them (one of whom actually told me that we hadn't worked out because I was "one of those people who just can't quite embrace the darkness enough"). Maybe it's because I'm in grad school, in a college town [vacuum of sorts], where people are exceptionally brooding, or often frustrated because they're overeducated and underemployed or underloved. So maybe my personal sample set is off.

But I see see similar patterns in popular culture. It's why there's a Grizzly Bear song currently playing over a Volkswagon commercial, perhaps. The subsect of gravel-voiced/emo/pseudo-pop boy bands has become quite mainstream, eh? Vampire Weekend's new album just debuted at number one. TALK about prententious, lit-imbibed lyrics, although their sound is much more upbeat. The ennui's there, though, the "eff it" attitude. Let's quit our lousy jobs, drive through the night, and hit on some women in Wellfleet. Or let's just sleep on the balcony after class. MGMT, anyone? I saw them open for Sir Paul McCartney. Their most popular song is about moving to Paris, shooting some heroin, knockin' up some models, and, gasp, I mean, "What else can we do? Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning news?" Peeps, I'm not bashing this music. I love all three of these bands; their stuff is evocative, provocative, and makes me groove. Although I sound like an idiot writing that, particularly if you know me. My point is that this "eff it, I'm smart, I'm jaded, I'm young, I'm gonna do what I want to and have no remorse" sort of sensation is reflected in the music that the hipster-dude type is listening to.

This isn't a gendered thing, either. Plenty of women have this same sort of aura these days. I just think it's interesting to juxtapose the nineteenth-century Byron against a twenty-first century broken-boy Don Juan. You hear women speak of these men all the time, the "I can fix them, they're brooding but lovely" spiel. It's just time we recognize that their ranks are substantial, especially in the twenties and thirties crowds. Am I casting a value judgment? Not exactly. Although I think that anyone hiding in plain sight from reality/practicality/say, the opportunities in the everyday...is kind of an ass. Sometimes I want to shout (and REALLY so here in Athens on a Friday night): "Skinny jeans, Chucks, and an arm tatoo do NOT make you cool! Can you even speak properly?!"

Byron is immortalized because he wrote beautifully. At least he DID something, although some might argue that his politics and personal finaglings were scandalous enough to write him off as a jerk, not a literary hero of any sorts. Even when his contemporaries disparaged him, though, calling him a wannabe Shakespeare or even Satan incarnate, he shrugged them off with the personality theory. He wasn't one thing, he WAS many. Maybe he was Satan on Mondays.

And all this to say...I dislike the brooding, but I've really latched on to these idea of "several selves." I think sometimes we expect way too much of people because of what we know OF them, when really life often happens in mixed-up ways that make the most consistent of us falter. There are good ways, and bad ways, but for a person I don't think there is "one way."