ИСТИНА

I would argue that Byron’s poem allows to develop the rich potential of Nora’s broad treatment of lieux de mémoire from rhetorical topoi/loci to commemorative practices, institutions, texts and properly ‘places’. In Byron we have a commemorative ritual (the pilgrimage), geographically exact ‘devotional places’, significant poetical topoi (ubi sunt, sta viator, tempus fugit etc). The complex subjectivity of the poetic persona helps to illuminate Nora’s fundamental distinction between the traditional memory that relies on a primordial identification of act and meaning and the modern memory – its affective nature, unconscious of the deformations caused by remembering and forgetting, is haunted by critical historicism. Byron’s journey amalgamates very different commemorative patterns: a religious pilgrimage, an enlightened Grand Tour, a Romantic Grand Tour extended to the exotic ‘cultural periphery’, while the traveller himself owes both to the heritage of Voltaire and Gibbon and to the Romantic empathy towards the Other. It can be said that lieux de mémoire participate in the ‘re-enchantment’ of the secularized bourgeois world, and thus, the Spenserian poetics provide Byron with a medium to challenge the religious and rhetorical attitudes/practices that regulated a formerly normative domain of cultural memory with his subjective imagination of the past. Key words: lieux de mémoire, Child Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron, cultural memory, re-enchantment, commemorative practice