Dickinson's Misery (43 page)

16
. On the literary critics' identification of textual interpretation with scientific observation, see John Guillory, “Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines.” Guillory's observation that “literary study internalized the fault line between the sciences and the humanities” (35) during the development of English departments in the 1890s illuminates Stoddard's remark.

17
. Julia Ward Howe, “Battle-Hymn of the Republic” (1862), in Hollander, ed.,
American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century,
1:709–10.

18
. We might say that Michael Warner's gloss on Howe's lines captures something of the spirit of Dickinson's: “Here, in ‘The Battle-Hymn of the Republic,' violence does not appear as such. It does not say, ‘let us kill'; it says ‘let us die.' And it says that we should do this not to rule, but ‘to make men free.' It appears not as a program of cruelty, but as a redemption from cruelty” (“What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?,” 4). While Dickinson's gloss on the sentiment in Howe's lines emerged from the discourse of the Civil War, Warner uses Civil War discourse to respond to the discourses that were already emerging around the incidents of September 11, 2001.

19
. See Shira Wolosky,
Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War
, for a start in putting Dickinson in the context of Civil War discourse, and Karen Sanchez-Eppler,
Touching Liberty,
for some of the complications of that discourse that directly affected Dickinson.

20
. Millicent Todd Bingham, “Prose Fragments of Emily Dickinson.”

21
. William H. Shurr,
New Poems of Emily Dickinson,
1–2. Shurr's “discovery” of “a source of new Dickinson poems” in the letters serves as an example of the use of meter alone to separate genres.

22
. Ibid., 91.

23
. In “Emily Dickinson as an Editorial Problem,” Tanselle cites a review of a Dickinson exhibition at Harvard (organized by Mary Loeffelholz) in 1998 to the effect
that “‘Dickinson has always been to some extent the creation of her editors'” (79). Tanselle's response is that “this statement is misleading if it is meant to suggest that Dickinson is unusual in this regard: the judgement of editors mediates our approach to all authors” (79). I am agreeing here with Tanselle, but it is worth asking why each edition of Dickinson appears so “dated” almost the moment it appears, whereas editions of, say, Shelley, some of whose manuscripts were in worse shape at his death than Dickinson's, do not. Perhaps revisionary editing (by hands other than the writer's own) has more to do with debates in critical culture than with the condition of any author's manuscripts.

24
. Howe records her correspondence with Franklin in
The Birth-mark
(134), and, indeed, attributes to this correspondence the genesis of her book itself. In the chapters that follow, we will return to Howe's response to Franklin's editorial priorities, and particularly to her conviction that “the issue of editorial control is directly connected to the attempted erasure of anti-nomianism in our culture” (1).

25
. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, eds.,
Natural Histories of Discourse,
81. Linguistic anthropologists such as Silverstein and Urban could offer us new ways of thinking about Dickinson's practices of “entextualization,” ways that might give us some perspective on the narrow focus on modern literary textuality that has preoccupied editors and critics on all sides of the ongoing debates over Dickinson's manuscripts.

26
. Franklin,
The Editing of Emily Dickinson,
141–42. I will not reproduce here the arithmetic through which Franklin reaches his figure of 7680, but it is impressive.

27
. Wimsatt and Beardsley,
The Verbal Icon,
71.

28
. Foucault, “What is an Author?,” 118. See Meredith McGill's
American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting
for an extended consideration of what a dissolution of the “author function” could mean for a rereading of nineteenth-century literary culture.

29
. Jerome McGann,
Black Riders,
40. What McGann offers here is a succinct description of “genetic” editorial theory more generally, a theory that has, understandably, gotten a lot of mileage from Dickinson's manuscript and print situations.

30
. Margaret Dickie, “Dickinson in Context,” 322.

31
. In his facsimile edition of the fascicles, for example, Franklin includes an “Index of First Lines,” in effect presupposing that although they may be included on the same page or in the same collection, they are separate and separable poems. See
MB,
1429–1442.

32
. See Franklin's comments in his “The Emily Dickinson Fascicles.”

33
. It would be interesting to speculate on what sort of interpretive community Grossman supposed or sought to create in composing his “Summa” as a set of “Scholia” designed as a “Primer” in an emphatically lyricized poetic literacy. His work has already become a primer for critics, as Cameron's and Stewart's work attests.

34
. Allen Grossman,
Summa Lyrica,
207, 209, 211–12.

35
. In addition to her association of Dickinson with modern poetry through her frequent citation of other modern poets, Cameron explicitly associates Dickinson's
poetics with Heidegger's phenomenology of “the Open,” a concept Heidegger develops in his reading of Rilke (CC 190–91).

36
. Other full-length studies of Dickinson's fascicles include Dorothy Huff Oberhaus,
Emily Dickinson's Fascicles: Method and Meaning,
and William H. Shurr,
The Marriage of Emily Dickinson: A Study of the Fascicles.
As the titles of these books indicate, they are interested in finding narratives in the discontinuous continuity of the texts of the fascicles. There seem to be many such narratives to find.

37
. The distinction between “genre-as-medium and genre-as-work” is Stanley Cavell's way of making the question of genre “more curious” in “The Fact of Television,” 243–45.

38
. Harold Love,
The Culture and Commerce of Texts,
145.

39
. I am paraphrasing McCluhan here in order to argue against his version of technological determinism. See Marshall McCluhan,
Understanding Media
and
The Gutenberg Galaxy.

40
. Martha Nell Smith, who is responsible for much of the institutional organization and support for the sites, has a utopian vision of the possibilities of access and response they will offer. One wishes that her vision were possible. See Martha Nell Smith, “Computing: What's American Literary Study Got to Do with IT?”

41
. Werner's definition is even more capacious than the modern definition of the lyric, yet within it her site makes many fine distinctions. To cite only her definition's
beginning,
the criteria for

inclusion used in the current version of
Radical Scatters
are as follows: all of the fragments featured as “core” texts have been assigned composition dates of roughly 1870 or after; all of the core fragments are materially discrete (that is, fragments have not been editorially excerpted from other compositions); and all of the core fragments are inherently autonomous, whether or not they also appear as traces in other texts, and inherently resistant to claims of closure. Excluded from this version of the archive are fair- and rough-copy message- or message-drafts to identified or unidentified recipients; brief but complete poem drafts; extra-literary texts such as recipes and addresses; quotations and passages copied or paraphrased from other writers' works; and textual remains preserved only accidentally because Dickinson used the same writing surface to compose other texts. Two apparent exceptions to the above criteria require explanation. First, in instances in which a message-draft also exists as an independent fragment, perhaps as a pensée or meditation, the text has been included among the archive's core documents (e.g., A 802). Second …

Werner's fastidiousness as an electronic archivist is matched only by her sweep as a lyric reader. See her e-text (later reprinted in a scholarly collection) “The Flights of A821: dearchiving the proceedings of a birdsong” for an exemplary instance of her interpretation of a “fragment” on pieces of an envelope closely related to the text in
figure 5
in the present chapter (1) as an exemplary lyric precisely because of its “snapping or short-circuiting of lyrical wires.”

42
. Elizabeth Wanning Harries argues in
The Unfinished Manner
that in the eighteenth century the fragment
was
a literary genre and not just a creature of interpretation. Compare Marjorie Levinson's argument in
The Romantic Fragment Poem
that the poetry that British romantic writers intentionally made as “fragmentary” invited the reader to fill in its blanks.

43
. The phrase “the ends of the lyric” is taken not from Werner but from a book by Timothy Bahti entitled
The Ends of the Lyric,
in which Bahti makes an argument for “reading as the end and consequence at the ends of the lyric” (2). I borrow Bahti's title in order to indicate the genericism of Werner's sense of the fragments' “extrageneric” address.

44
. The difference between Werner's earlier
Emily Dickinson's Open Folios,
her print edition of images of the late “fragments,” and the digitized images available on
Radical Scatters
is a good measure of how much more vivid the Web images can be; they can even be digitally animated to spin, open, and close. What the Web
almost
manages to do is to personify the manuscripts themselves.

45
. Brent Hayes Edwards,
The Practice of Diaspora,
7.

46
. Foucault,
Archaeology of Knowledge,
131. See Derrida's
Archive Fever
for a different view of the archive's relation to what Foucault calls “the discontinuities of history,” and see Carolyn Steedman's recent attempt in
Dust
to mediate between the two, and to offer her own autobiographical account.

47
. Claudio Guillén,
Literature as System.

48
. Actually, Kenneth Burke uses the address on an envelope as an example of “semantic” as opposed to “poetic” meaning in
The Philosophy of Literary Form,
122. For Burke, semantic meaning is determined as opposed to indeterminate meaning, an opposition it would be fruitful to compare to Herrnstein Smith's distinction between historical and fictive utterance in
On the Margins of Discourse.
Burke's example of the difference between determinate and indeterminate meaning on an envelope is worth citing: “Meaning, when used in the sense of ‘correct meaning,'” Burke writes, “leads to an either- or approach. ‘New York City is in Iowa' could, by the either- or principles, promptly be ruled out. The either- or test would represent the semantic ideal. But I am sorry to have to admit that, by the poetic ideal, ‘New York City is in Iowa' could
not
be ruled out” (125). On Burke's view, Howe's and Werner's readings of Dickinson's envelopes would represent “the poetic ideal.”

49
. Carolyn Williams, “‘Genre' and ‘Discourse' in Victorian Studies,” 520. Williams is in part elucidating Derrida's “The Law of Genre.”

50
. For the idea that genres are constitutive of rather than constituted by discourse, see Bakhtin,
Speech Genres,
and Benjamin Lee,
Talking Heads.

51
. Michael McKeon,
The Theory of the Novel,
4; Mikhail Bakhtin,
Speech Genres
, 318.

52
. Clifford Siskin,
The Historicity of Romantic Discourse.

53
. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 423.

54
. Sewall, in
The Life of Emily Dickinson,
537, reports that Todd coined the term “fascicles.”

55
. As Bingham reconstructed Todd's version of the story, “Shortly after Emily's death her sister Lavinia came to me actually trembling with excitement. She had
discovered a veritable treasure—a box full of Emily's poems which she had no intention to destroy. She had already burned without examination hundreds of manuscripts and letters to Emily, many of them from nationally known persons, thus, she believed, carrying out her sister's wishes, without really intelligent discrimination. Later she bitterly regretted such inordinate haste. But these poems, she told me, must be printed at once. Would I send them to some printer—as she innocently called them—which was the best one, and how quickly could the poems appear”? (
Ancestors' Brocades,
16–17).

56
. Higginson, introduction to
Poems
1890, iii. Higginson's citation from Emerson is taken from “New Poetry” in
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures,
1169.

57
. Barton Levi St. Armand, “Keepsakes: Mary Warner's Scrapbook,” in
Emily Dickinson and Her Culture,
5. St. Armand's introduction of the commonplace book as an obvious correlate to Dickinson's “fascicles” has invited much curiosity but, curiously, has not so far had much effect on the interpretation of Dickinson's genres.

58
. Helen Horowitz, in
Alma Mater,
describes the particular design of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as an intentional blend of the home and the school, with a common kitchen where students worked below and classrooms above (not incidentally the architectural design of the college was modeled on an insane asylum, perhaps the ideal combination of home and school). Mary Loeffelholz's
From School to Salon
gives the best account so far of the intimate relation of domestic and pedagogical spheres in nineteenth-century American culture, a relation that eventuated, as Loeffelholz puts it, in “a broad shift in the social locations in which American women gained access to authorship in the genre of poetry” (4). One might add that the shift Loeffelholz describes was also a shift in and of that genre.