This chapter discusses Canto III of Childe Harold and Manfred as marking a turning point in Byron’s writing career. Together, these two works detached Byron from the tragic universe of the Tales and pointed him towards the comic world of Don Juan. Childe Harold III turns from exploring the devastating trauma of painful memory – the Byronic Hero’s, the poet’s and post-Napoleonic Europe’s – to a quest for ways of forgetting pain through the imagination and communing with the natural world. Through these it finds a path into renewed, and new forms of, vitality, though these ultimately prove temporary and the return to the memory of pain inevitable. However, Manfred takes up Childe Harold III’s quest to discover the power of memory itself to console, comfort and revitalise. The result is a new, self-conscious, wilful, and appreciative acquiescence in the flow, and contrary flowings, of his own consciousness – indeed, his existence per se – even as he approaches his death. This prepares the way for Don Juan’s wholesale embrace of the spontaneous vitality, but also impermanence, of all human impulse(s) – an embrace that is fundamental to Byron’s comic vision.

This chapter is a detailed recollection of aspects of my birth and upbringing as a platform to think through the theoretical issues of memory and history and amnesia and loss. The dialectic between memory and forgetfulness here becomes the plane of authorial subjection. I explore a detailed exposure of how polyphonic voices become definitive to such recollections. As I recall such flashes of my early childhood, I realize in recounting the memories of our childhood that we are drafting entirely different, imperceptible, otherwise forgetful accounts of history – a history that has in fact not left its traces, as Gramsci had surmised, in us in cognitive and transcendental terms but in entirely fleeting and emotive terms on a plane of immanence that is in need of detection and discovery. Every shared memory, a memory I share and one that, in turn, triggers my readers’ similar memories, initially provokes a social, political, or cultural event beyond the reach of such memories, and as such it becomes a microcosm of something larger, something other than itself. But that is not all that there is to such memories. In fact, such allusions might be an impediment to a much more precious discovery. This triggering may first suggest itself as the social history of childhood, which we eventually lose in our adulthood, but every single such memory is also the microcosm of something other than itself, something other than history, something larger, more immanent, and thus, soon we realize what appears as social history is in fact an emotive history, a worldly history pointing to an ethereality other than itself, marking the moment when the world was being born anew, piece by piece, when we as a child for the first time realized there is a larger world, of which we had little to no awareness, over which we had no control.