{"id":7841,"date":"2016-09-25T23:55:22","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T06:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7841"},"modified":"2016-10-08T23:58:06","modified_gmt":"2016-10-09T06:58:06","slug":"the-power-of-an-ellipsis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/09\/25\/the-power-of-an-ellipsis\/","title":{"rendered":"“The power of an ellipsis…”"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Times Literary Supplement<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Byron burning<\/h1>\n

CORIN THROSBY\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

A sketch from The Wonderful History of Lord Byron &amp; His Dog by E. B. Pigot, 1807\u00a0\u00a9 Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin<\/em><\/p>\n

Byron knew, more than any author before him, the power of an ellipsis. Foreshadowing twentieth-century theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, who posited that it is primarily the reader who creates a poem\u2019s meaning by navigating gaps in the text, Byron filled his work with tantalizing omissions to fire the imagination. One of his bestselling poems,\u00a0The Giaour<\/i>, a classically Byronic tale of a brooding hero avenging his murdered beloved, was subtitled \u201cA Fragment\u201d to create an illusion that the full story lay elsewhere. The poem is riddled with as\u00adterisks that mark supposedly lost sections. \u201cAn outline is the best,\u201d Byron wrote in his final epic\u00a0Don Juan<\/i>, \u201c\u2013 a lively reader\u2019s fancy does the rest\u201d.<\/p>\n

The poet invited conjecture not only about his work but also about his personal life. Readers were quick to see a link between Byron\u2019s melancholic aristocratic heroes and the poet himself. In his preface to the work that made him famous in 1814,\u00a0Childe Harold\u2019s Pilgrimage<\/i>, Byron insisted that his character was not based on a \u201creal personage\u201d, but purely \u201cthe child of imagination\u201d. Yet he continually gave his heroes the same dark hair and pale brow that readers were seeing in reproduced portraits of the poet that hung in countless print shop windows, and he often dropped in teasing autobiographical references to ancestral homes and heroic acts abroad. Readers looked for coded messages that they felt revealed the real Byron amid the gossip, and the Byronic hero was just ambiguous enough for them to see in him whatever suited them.<\/p>\n

It is a wonderful dramatic irony, then, that Byron\u2019s memoirs \u2013 which might have finally provided the \u201ctruth\u201d about his life \u2013 were destroyed soon after his death. The story goes that three of his closest friends (his publisher, John Murray; his fellow celebrity poet, Thomas Moore; and his companion since his Cambridge days, John Cam Hobhouse), together with lawyers representing Byron\u2019s half-sister and his widow, decided that the manuscript was so scandalous, so unsuitable for public consumption, that it would ruin Byron\u2019s reputation forever. Gathered in Murray\u2019s drawing room in Albemarle Street, they ripped up the pages and tossed them into the fire. The incident is often described as the greatest crime in literary \u00adhistory. It has certainly served to fuel curiosity and conjecture about Byron\u2019s personal life for another couple of centuries. What was the damning secret his friends needed to protect? Domestic abuse? Sodomy? Incest? Probably all three, we imagine.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at The Times Literary Supplement<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Times Literary Supplement Byron burning CORIN THROSBY\u00a0 A sketch from The Wonderful History of Lord Byron &amp; His Dog by E. B. Pigot, 1807\u00a0\u00a9 Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin Byron knew, more than any author before him, the power of an ellipsis. Foreshadowing twentieth-century theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}