Spectacle Without Spectators: Suffering and Sympathy in Lord Byron’s Mazeppa
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This essay argues that Lord Byron’s Mazeppa (1819) functions as a critical nexus where three distinct historical discourses of spectacle are convened and ultimately interrogated. By presenting its central ordeal as a “spectacle without spectators,” the poem stages a three-fold rejection of these systems. First, it departs from the pre-modern spectacle of political terror expounded by Michel Foucault, as the Count rejects the public scaffold in favor of a private act of exclusion, reducing its protagonist Mazeppa to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” Second, the poem offers a textual resistance to the emergent spectacle of modern commodification. Analyzing the context of Byromania and the illegitimate theatrical hippodramas, this essay reads the protagonist’s unwitnessed ride as an anti-spectacular maneuver that dismantles the consumable heroic ideal. Finally, the poem intervenes in the eighteenth-century discourse of spectatorial sympathy, constructing a purely auditory spectacle that ultimately fails. As King Charles XII of Sweden, the only audience for Mazeppa’s tale of the pained body, “had been an hour asleep,” the poem demonstrates that physical agony can counter rather than elicit responsiveness. The textual collapse prefigures Susan Sontag’s critique of the passivity in our response to the experience of others’ suffering through image. This essay concludes by tracing the poem’s final irony in its afterlife: despite Byron’s intricate anti-spectacular design, the poem’s popular reception and reappropriation into paintings and sensational “equestrian” dramas immediately inverted the unwitnessed ordeal of the work into a spectacle as defined by Guy Debord. Mazeppa thus reveals a bleak prophecy, anticipating the modern benumbed spectators who, like King Charles, choose to sleep through the spectacle of suffering.
Abstract
This essay argues that Lord Byron’s Mazeppa (1819) functions as a critical nexus where three distinct historical discourses of spectacle are convened and ultimately interrogated. By presenting its central ordeal as a “spectacle without spectators,” the poem stages a three-fold rejection of these systems. First, it departs from the pre-modern spectacle of political terror expounded by Michel Foucault, as the Count rejects the public scaffold in favor of a private act of exclusion, reducing its protagonist Mazeppa to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” Second, the poem offers a textual resistance to the emergent spectacle of modern commodification. Analyzing the context of Byromania and the illegitimate theatrical hippodramas, this essay reads the protagonist’s unwitnessed ride as an anti-spectacular maneuver that dismantles the consumable heroic ideal. Finally, the poem intervenes in the eighteenth-century discourse of spectatorial sympathy, constructing a purely auditory spectacle that ultimately fails. As King Charles XII of Sweden, the only audience for Mazeppa’s tale of the pained body, “had been an hour asleep,” the poem demonstrates that physical agony can counter rather than elicit responsiveness. The textual collapse prefigures Susan Sontag’s critique of the passivity in our response to the experience of others’ suffering through image. This essay concludes by tracing the poem’s final irony in its afterlife: despite Byron’s intricate anti-spectacular design, the poem’s popular reception and reappropriation into paintings and sensational “equestrian” dramas immediately inverted the unwitnessed ordeal of the work into a spectacle as defined by Guy Debord. Mazeppa thus reveals a bleak prophecy, anticipating the modern benumbed spectators who, like King Charles, choose to sleep through the spectacle of suffering.