Dickinson's Misery (45 page)

38
. See Jeffreys, “Ideologies of the Lyric,” 203. Jeffreys and I agree that “from a welter of other poetic genres, lyric gradually emerged as the most common catchall category, and only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was it mythologized as the purest and oldest of poetic genres and thus transformed into a nostalgic ideological marker” (197). As Jeffreys also points out, the view of the New Criticism as associated with a certain version of the lyric is hardly new: see Murray Krieger,
The New Apologists for Poetry,
and Gerald Graff,
Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma.

39
. For historicist accounts of the New Criticism (if not of the New Critical idea of the lyric), see John Fekete, “The New Criticism: Ideological Evolution of the Right Opposition,” Frank Lentricchia,
After the New Criticism,
and John Guillory,
Cultural Capital.
Guillory's assessment of New Critical culture resonates with Winters's
reading of “My Cricket”: “the effect of New Critical pedagogy,” Guillory writes, was “to produce a kind of recusant literary culture, at once faithful to the quasi-authority of literature but paying tribute at the same time to the secular authority of a derogated mass culture” (
Cultural Capital,
175).

40
. Blackmur, “A Note on Yvor Winters,” in
The Expense of Greatness,
167.

41
. For a recent example of the return to Winters as example of the moral authority literary criticism
should,
by some account, wield, see David Yezzi, “The Seriousness of Yvor Winters.”

42
. Allen Tate, “New England Culture and Emily Dickinson” (1932), included in
The Recognition of Emily Dickinson,
154. In
Becoming Canonical in American Poetry,
Timothy Morris argues that Tate “constructed a unitary central self for Dickinson” in his reading (76), though that seems a property of the genre that Tate attributed to Dickinson, and in any case it is not true that Tate is acting, as Morris claims, simply as a representative of New Critical “canonization” or as “a virtual Eliot” in his reading of Dickinson.

43
. R. P. Blackmur, “Emily Dickinson: Notes on Prejudice and Fact,” in
The Expense of Greatness,
118.

44
. On the creation of academic culture out of the reading of individual texts, see Gerald Graff and Michael Warner,
Professing Literature,
and Michael Warner, “Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature.”

45
. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren,
Understanding Poetry,
18.

46
. Theodor Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” 38.

47
. Actually, as Bruce Mayo points out in his useful introduction to the
Telos
publication of Adorno's essay, “Lyric Poetry and Society” was “originally broadcast as an adult education lecture over RIAS in Berlin” (51). The essay was then revised several times, though it remains tantalizingly brief.

48
. This is not to say that Adorno has had
no
effect on American lyric reading; critics have turned to “Lyric Poetry and Society” at various moments, yet it has had little influence in the
way
that poetry is read in the United States. As representative exceptions, see Fredric Jameson,
The Political Unconscious,
281–99; Annabel Patterson, “Lyric and Society in Jonson's
Under-wood,
” 162–63; Margaret Homans, “‘Syllables of Velvet,'” 570; Forest Pyle,
The Ideology of Imagination,
120–25; and especially John Brenkman,
Culture and Domination,
108–21. As the length and eclecticism of my partial list suggests, we are still trying to take what we can from Adorno's brief remarks on the lyric. In order to extend those remarks, we would need to look beyond “Lyric Poetry” and into Adorno's work as a whole, and especially to his theory of music. Robert Kaufman's work on Adorno promises to be the best guide so far to Adorno as guide to romantic and modern lyric reading: See Kaufman's “Adorno's Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity.” For a modern poetic meditation on Adorno's poetics, see Drew Milne, “In Memory of the Pterodactyl: the limits of lyric humanism,” and for a transformative sense of Adorno's scope, see Stathis Gourgouris,
Does Literature Think?

49
. As in the case of Adorno, Benjamin has become for many critics a figure of what criticism
should
or
would
do in relation to the lyric if we could only figure out
how to do it, a figure of utopian critical possibility rather than a model for practice. See Fredric Jameson,
The Political Unconscious,
and especially Jonathan Arac, “Walter Benjamin and Materialist Historiography,” in
Critical Genealogies,
177–214. Arac's suggestive comparison of Dickinson and Baudelaire under the auspices of Benjamin is especially relevant to the present study, though in light of my argument here, Dickinson and Baudelaire begin to seem comparable not, as Arac would suggest, because they do or do not share some essentially modern experience, but because they have both become such paradigmatic instances of the lyric.

50
. De Man's place in the Yale School is much discussed, but his relation to Brower, who was also an influence on other exemplary lyric readers such as Vendler, Poirier, Hertz, and Orgel, and who coined the phrase “close reading” in
The Fields of Light
has been less discussed. My thanks to John Guillory, whose point it is that Brower coined “close reading,” for pointing me toward Brower.

51
. Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” in
The Rhetoric of Romanticism,
261. This is the sort of statement that prompts Barbara Johnson to remark that “Anthropomorphism and Trope” is “one of the most difficult, even outrageous” of de Man's essays. See her reading of the essay in “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” 206. It is also the sort of statement that makes it clear that Jonathan Arac was right to make explicit “the beginnings of de Man's work in countercommentary, more an intervention within criticism than a direct response to works of literature” (
Critical Geneologies,
239).

52
. Paul Hernadi,
Beyond Genre,
79.

53
. René Wellek,
Discriminations,
252.

54
. Paul de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription,” 35n.

55
. Jonathan Culler, “Reading Lyric,” 105. For a genealogy of what de Man means by “lyric reading,” and of one sort of lyric reading leading directly to de Man, see also Culler's “Changes in the Study of the Lyric.”

56
. Charles Baudelaire,
Les Fleurs du Mal,
translated by Richard Howard, 193; 15.

57
. Baudelaire,
Les Fleurs du Mal,
254; 77.

58
. For an extended answer to this question (though not with reference to “Anthropomorphism and Trope”), see Rei Terada,
Feeling in Theory
. I hope that it will be obvious in these pages how much I owe to Terada's eloquent insight that “poststructuralist thought about emotion is hidden in plain sight” (3).

59
. Paul de Man, “Tropes (Rilke),” in
Allegories of Reading,
37.

60
. See especially de Man's reading of Mallarmé's “Tombeau de Verlaine” in “Lyric and Modernity” in
Blindness and Insight,
166–86; the elaborate allusion to Porphyry's esoteric interpretation of the Homeric ode “The Cave of the Nymphs” in de Man's reading of Yeats in “Landscape in Wordsworth and Yeats” in
The Rhetoric of Romanticism;
and, most suggestively, his reading of the figure of the pyramid in Baudelaire's “Spleen II” as “un immense caveau” in “Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory.”

61
. I hope that the trope of authority that I attribute here to de Man will not be confused with Frank Lentricchia's argument in his essay “Paul de Man: The Rhetoric of Authority” (in
After the New Criticism
). There Lentricchia claims that de Man “has always given the impression of having a grip on the truth” (284) and then
indicts that “impression” as “the realm of the thoroughly predictable linguistic transcendental” (317). I would argue instead that the impression of authority in de Man's discourse derives from a much more complex identification with the “transcendental” literary moment that holds the critic, despite himself, in its unpredictable and contingent grip.

62
. Paul de Man, “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,” in
Blindness and Insight,
31.

63
. Sigmund Freud,
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,
37–38.

64
. For a similar recognition of this “typical” critical gesture see, for example, Neil Hertz's tribute to Derrida's “remarkable ability to both fish
and
cut bait” in
The End of the Line,
208.

65
. My sense of de Man's prose as “in mourning” for its subject is indebted to conversations with Eric Santner; see Santner's suggestive discussion of de Man's “uncompromising elegiac rigor” in
Stranded Objects,
13–19.

66
. For a reading of de Man as a figure for “theory,” see Guillory, “Literature After Theory: The Lesson of Paul de Man,” in
Cultural Capital,
176–265. I intentionally leave aside here the scandal of the “discovery” of de Man's career in Europe around World War II, but obviously the surcharge of de Man's personification of “theory” derives from that scandal.

67
. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” originally published in
Critical Inquiry
8, no. 4 (Summer 1982), and reprinted in
Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism,
ed. W.J.T. Mitchell, 11–30. The Mitchell volume includes the essay itself alongside most of the relevant immediate critical responses to it, as well as Knapp and Michaels's “A Reply to Our Critics” (
Critical Inquiry
9, no. 4 [Summer 1983]); hereafter citations from the essays included in this volume will be designated AT.

68
. See, for example, E. D. Hirsch Jr.,
Validity in Interpretation,
227–30 and 238–40; P. D. Juhl's revision or refinement of Hirsch's use of this example in
Interpretation,
71–72; J. Hillis Miller, “On the Edge: The Crossways of Contemporary Criticism”; and M. H. Abrams, “Construing and Deconstructing,” both in Morris Eaves and Michael Fisher, eds.,
Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism.
It is Abrams who recalls that Hirsch's previous use of the poem was already an attempt to adjudicate the conflicting claims of still earlier readers: Cleanth Brooks and F. W. Bateson (145n27).

69
. Actually, as William C. Dowling suggests, what Knapp and Michaels had was a paradigm of New Critical interpretations based on the distinction between author and speaker. “What Knapp and Michaels make clear,” Dowling writes, “is that the formalist argument succeeded in its season by exploiting to the fullest an intentionality that is already and inevitably entailed by the very notion of meaning” (AT 94). Or by lyric meaning?

70
. Georg Lukács,
The Theory of the Novel,
63. Adorno's theory of the lyric as “a sphere of expression whose very essence lies in defying the power of social organization” would seem to grow directly out of Lukács's Hegelian rendering of the lyric (as opposed to the novelistic) subject. Likewise, Heidegger's widely influential idealization of poetry as “the saying of the unconcealedness of what is” seeks
to isolate the lyric subject from “the world's outer space,” orienting it at the extreme verge of “the world's inner space” (
Poetry, Language, Thought,
74). For an explicitly Heideggerian reading of Dickinson's poetry, see Sharon Cameron, “The Interior Revision” (CC 190–94).

71
.
The Shape of the Signifier
, 9. Michaels's reference here is explicitly to the essays in the posthumously published
Aesthetic Ideology
, essays in which de Man explored the contradictions of textual materialism to which he gestured at the end of “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric.” The implications of Michaels's argument as well as his deep reading of de Man (among much else) reach far beyond what I can discuss in these pages, though it is worth noting that his eloquent conclusion that “history, as of this writing, is still over” (182) is not unrelated to de Man's utopian and elegiac sense that history is by definition what cannot be represented in theory.

72
. Susan Stewart,
Poetry and the Fate of the Senses
, 2. Stewart's ambitious project is also an attempt to bridge what has become an intellectual and institutional divide between poets and critics, or to re-establish the American tradition of the poet-critic (a tradition to which Susan Howe also belongs). Because there is some perception that this divide, which dates from the twentieth-century shift between figures like Higginson (a poet-critic who did not teach at a university) to figures like Tate and Winters (poet-critics who did), was more recently a schism caused by literary theory, Stewart explicitly opposes her project to de Man's. In a long footnote, Stewart counters de Man's argument that “the linguistic basis of … anthropomorphization is always a kind of defacement, inadequate to its object,” by writing that she “would argue that this approach constantly reinscribes the very allegory it seeks to discover” (341–42, n. 107).

C
HAPTER
T
HREE:
D
ICKINSON
'
S
F
IGURE OF
A
DDRESS

1
. Anne Carson,
If Not, Winter,
fragment 96, 191; note 96.3, 371; (Dickinson L 56).