Shady Beasts, Animal Transgression, and Identity
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of interaction with others collide. The act of mourning extends from the
author to the imagined reader in a gesture of incredulity. The passerby
caimot possibly be a friend. It may be that Byron is invoking a theory of
impossible perhaps through the use of the word “perchance.”'*
The “Ye” who “perchance” arrives to look upon the monument
would certainly not be a friend, for a real friend would have already
accounted for both the dog and the author in anticipative mourning. The
epitaph, necessarily anticipating and mediating the future of the reader
even while paying reverence to the literally past, is the device of the
perhaps par excellence, except that rather than anticipate the death of the
friend—^that has now occurred—the epitaph turns to memory and
anticipates the death of the memory of the friend, specifically through the
death of the self remembering. There must be always already a
connection between the height of human interactions and the depths of
interiority through the imagined impossibility of death brought into close
enc