Dickinson's Misery (21 page)

Crewe did not insist on the genre of the linguistic conventions smashed and grabbed by the wave-poem narrative, but his description helps me to do so. Suppose you are walking along a beach and you come upon a curious sequence of squiggles in the sand. You step back a few paces and notice that they spell out the following words:

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?

It is fair to say that the distinction between authorial intention and textual meaning disqualified and then reappropriated in the story of finding the Wordsworth poem would have to be made in a very different way for the Prelude to
Middlemarch.
Whether or not you recognize this prose as George Eliot's, chances are that it would not occur to you that in order to understand what this sentence means you would first need to determine the author's intention; even if the sentence washed up in two stages (and therefore could not have been etched with a stick by some previous beachwalker), wondering how these words appeared in this place and wondering what the words say would remain two distinct questions. In the imaginary context of the sand, the question the sentence poses might seem to have more to do with Saint Theresa or the nature of belief than it does in
the context of the novel, but that belief is not contingent on finding out whether this is one of “the varying experiments of Time” or whether ghosts or the sea are capable of writing. In “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” however, one does want to know something more about the identity of the “I” who “had no human fears” (when? of what?) and about this person's relationship to the “she” who “seemed” (like a poem?) an object of contemplation. Without thinking along these lines, neither the reader of the sand nor the reader of the book can make much sense of the two sentences of Wordsworth's lyric.

The problem raised by the “found” poem is a smashed version of the problem grabbed from the moment embedded within the poem as-it-isreceived-as-a-lyric—that is, as it becomes accessible to lyric reading. As Lukács wrote in 1914 (echoing Hegel's and anticipating Adorno's and Heidegger's lyrical notions), “such moments are constitutive and form-determining only for lyric poetry; only in lyric poetry do these direct, sudden flashes of the substance become like lost original manuscripts suddenly made legible; only in lyric poetry is the subject, the vehicle of such experiences, transformed into the sole carrier of meaning, the only true reality.
⁷⁰

We may notice just how much the beachwalker's failure to imagine “intentionless language” owes to this notion of the lyric's revelation of language
as
intentional. One's entrance into a lyric often delivers this very Wordsworthian “shock of mild surprise,” since to come upon such lines as “phainetai moi kenos theosin” or “voi ch'ascoltaie in rime sparse il suono” or “Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war” or “Jezt komme, Feuer!” or “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,” is to be privy to an experience for which we have no immediate context. In order to establish a context, we will inevitably have recourse to what we know about Sappho's fragments or to the sonnet sequences of Petrarch and Shakespeare or to Hölderlin's hymns or to Keats's occasional sonnets. Which is to say that in order to interpret these lines we will immediately ask a double-sided question concerning the intentions of the author and the intentions of the form. Both the correlation and the difference between these two sides of the question will depend (as they do in the Wordsworth poem and in Knapp and Michaels's allegorical version of it) on the relation between an irrecoverable past (“like lost original manuscripts”) and an isolated moment of illumination in the present (“suddenly made legible”). The question is how we get from past to present—or how a text read as lyric is “suddenly” discovered
as
a lyric, since it is unlikely that one will encounter it on a beach.

Indeed, alas, these days it is much more likely that one will encounter the transformation of lyric into “the sole carrier of meaning, the only true
reality” in literary criticism than anywhere else. In 2004, over twenty years after the publication and reception of “Against Theory,” Michaels returned to the question of literary intention by creating a complex conversation between Dickinson, Susan Howe—one of Dickinson's most prominent lyric readers—and Paul de Man. Although Michaels still does not raise the question of the lyric explicitly, all of his questions about literary meaning in
The Shape of the Signifier
revolve around lyric poets such as Dickinson and Wordsworth or lyric readers such as Howe and the New Critics and de Man. Thus Howe's deeply invested lyrical reading of the details of Dickinson's manuscripts in
My Emily Dickinson
and
The Birthmark
become for Michaels instances of a “commitment to the materiality of the signifier” that aligns her reading of Dickinson with de Man's opposition between “the materiality of actual history” and aesthetic ideology.
⁷¹
The fact that both Howe and de Man would be horrified by such a comparison, since Howe's version of textual materialism has everything to do with Dickinson's original poetic intentions and de Man's utopian view of “
historical
modes of language power” would by definition escape poetic intention, is part of Michaels's logic. His point in taking up the recent materialist interest in Dickinson's manuscripts and comparing it to de Man's interest in an illegible materiality is to return to the argument in “Against Theory” that “texts mean what their authors intend” (11). By making Howe and de Man say the same thing when they had intended to disagree, Michaels wants to raise the question “of what a text is—of what is in it and what isn't, what counts as part of it and what doesn't” (11). It is one thing to raise that question in relation to the relatively recent work of literary critics. In those cases, Michaels's conclusion that the answer to what a text is will always depend on the position of the reader, on “what's there to you, a question about what you see” (11) makes sense. Interpreters of literature do (sometimes despite themselves) offer their own perspectives. But how would we know what we are seeing when we already know that we are reading a lyric; if, say, a poem was written in 1799 or 1862, and we encounter it neither on a beach nor in a lost manuscript, but in a book or on the Web in the twenty-first century?

My point has been that we would only know that a poem intended (if poems could intend) to be a lyric once it has been critically rendered as such at various moments before the moment in which you encounter it. As in the instances of de Man's reading of Baudelaire's by then paradigmatic modern sonnet or Knapp and Michaels's reading of Wordsworth's iconic romantic lyric, or Howe's reading of Dickinson's every blot, dash, and swerve as poetry, what every literary interpreter must assume about such texts is that they are poetic texts. Further, since for twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics, all poetic texts are lyrics, all of these readers—
including Michaels—must assume some of the protocols of lyric reading in order to read them at all. In his latter-day version of an apparently innocent encounter with Wordsworth's poem, it is telling that this time Michaels situates that fantasy not on a beach but on Mars, within the genre of science fiction. Whereas in “Against Theory” Knapp and Michaels had to allow for the possibility that someone had written the words that you encounter on the beach, in
The Shape of the Signifier
(or on Mars) “where there are no other persons, you know right away that the marks have not been made by anyone and that if what you're looking at is a poem (a poem apparently about Earth), it is the planet itself that produced it” (57). “
If what you're looking at is a poem
”?

How would you know? It is by now apparent that the opening paragraph of
Dickinson's Misery
is a smashed & grabbed version of the literary theoretical problem of how to recognize a poem when we see one—not in a possible world but in the one in which we find ourselves at the moment. In the chapters that follow, I will argue that neither a purely theoretical nor a purely pragmatic answer can adequately address that problem, since the question of how to get from past to present—from lyric history to lyric theory and back again—requires a combination of the two. It requires us to think both historically and theoretically: in Dickinson's case, to think through the differences between what Dickinson's texts might have been at other moments (notes of consolation, say, or newspaper verse, or commentary on enclosed flowers, elegies for soldiers or a dog or a culture or a season, or thank-yous, or appeals for publication, or scandalous secret winks, or language surrounding a dead insect) and the lyrics they have become. Because we cannot go back to a moment before they became lyrics, or back to a moment before lyric reading was the only way to apprehend a poem, we must try to keep both their material and contingent as well as their abstract and transcendent aspects in view at the same time. As the history of lyric reading attests, that is not easy to do.

As we have seen in New Criticism and in de Man and in Knapp and Michaels and, again, in Michaels, one reason such double vision is so difficult is that what is at stake in it has come to be not only the definition of the lyric, but the definition of texts and even of persons and the worlds in which they encounter texts and make them into lyrics. In a recent impassioned plea for the understanding of poetry as “an anthropomorphic project,” Susan Stewart has ventured one solution to the problem of how to mediate between the abstraction of the lyric available to all interpretation and its historical and material contingency.
⁷²
“The cultural work of lyric,” Stewart writes, is the “work of individuation under intersubjective terms” (13). Against the tendency in literary theory to imagine texts on other theoretical planets, or to imagine that history is what poetry leaves out, Stewart
emphasizes “the human image as a consequence of representational practices rather than a prior referent. Only in this way can human subjectivity be viewed in historical terms” (342 n. 107). In the pages that follow, I will suggest that Dickinson's work accomplishes exactly what Stewart's humanist reading of the lyric would find there, but that it does so precisely because it so strenuously resists substituting the alienated lyric image of the human—the very image the modern reading of the lyric has created—for the exchange between historical persons between whom the barriers of space and time had not fallen.

I
N HER TRANSLATION
of Sappho, Anne Carson asks her reader to compare a fragment that begins,

to a letter that Emily Dickinson wrote to Susan Gilbert in 1851:

I wept a tear here, Susie, on purpose for
you
—because this “sweet silver moon” smiles in on me and Vinnie, and then it goes so far before it gets to you—and then you never told me if there
was
any moon in Baltimore—and how do
I
know Susie—that you see her sweet face at all? She looks like a fairy tonight, sailing around the sky in a little silver gondola with stars for gondoliers. I asked her to let me ride a little while ago—and told her I would
get out
when she got as far as Baltimore, but she only smiled to herself and went sailing on.

I think she was quite ungenerous—but I have learned the lesson and shant ever ask her again. To day it rained at home—sometimes it rained so hard that I fancied you could hear it's patter—patter, patter, as it fell upon the leaves—and the fancy pleased me so, that I sat and listened to it—and watched it earnestly.
Did
you hear it—or was it
only
fancy? Bye and bye the sun came out—just in time to bid us goodnight, and as I told you sometime, the moon is shining now.

It is such an evening Susie, as you and I would walk and have such pleasant musings, if you were only here—perhaps we would have a “Reverie” after the form of “Ik Marvel,” indeed I do not know why it
wouldn't be just as charming as that of that lonely Bachelor, smoking his cigar—and it would be far more profitable as “Marvel”
only
marvelled, and you and I would
try
to make a little destiny to have for our own.
¹

Carson points out that “more explicitly than Sappho, Emily Dickinson evokes the dripping fecundity of daylight as foil for the mind's voyaging at night. Almost comically, she personifies the moon as chief navigator of the liquid thoughts that women like to share in the dark, in writing” (371n). It is a long, odd, suggestive comparison, especially since the Dickinson passage seems on the face of it to have so little to do with the Sapphic fragment. The equation of Sappho and Dickinson as types of feminine lyricism is an old one—or rather, it is a specifically dated association, since as Yopie Prins has shown, “what we now call ‘Sappho' is, in many ways, an artifact of Victorian poetics” and, as we have begun to see, what we now call “Dickinson” is certainly an artifact of Victorian and modern poetics.
²
Thus Carson's note may associate Sappho and Dickinson on the basis of their exemplary lyrical status, or in order to attribute to Sappho a familiar modernity and to Dickinson an archaic Sapphism that would be simultaneously the desire for a woman and the desire for writing. Yet despite all the forms of literary and personal desire that align these texts with one another, one difference is obvious: Sappho's is a lyric and Dickinson's is a letter. Wherever or whoever or whenever Sappho's “you” was meant to be, Dickinson's “you” was Susan, and she was not there.