Dickinson's Misery (11 page)

As Werner interprets them, the parts of Dickinson's manuscripts not recognizable as poems are more lyrical than the lyrics they are not. The “chronology of the instant” is the oldest chronology in the book not only for Dickinson's lyrics but for the lyric as such; as we have seen, a “discontinuous series” of such instants is exactly what the print versions of Dickinson's poems have always represented: one instant after another, each surrounded by the white space of the page. The space surrounding the “souls” on the computer screen is thrillingly black, and the traditional investment
of lyrics with an inner life translates into the literal animation of the electronic medium: with a click on a torn corner or virtual straight pin, the reader/user can make the “souls” spin, unfold, attach and detach to and from other souls or move nearer to or farther from view (rather like the sexual intercourse of angels in
Paradise Lost
). Following Susan Howe's lead in
My Emily Dickinson
and
The Birth-mark
Werner's site spectacularly lyricizes precisely those Dickinson texts that have not been printed as poems (though they have sometimes been printed as letters); perhaps precisely because they have not been printed as lyrics, Werner can read them as hyperlyrics. The “fragments” that have not been identified as printed poems or as letters may remain for Werner “extrageneric” and therefore perfect exemplars of the lyric as a creature of modern interpretation.
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The “
absence d'oeuvre
” or perfectly abstracted book that dissolves into its own performance would be for Werner—as it was for Mallarmé—the ideal fate for the lyric that no longer has to mean but be. This is to say that Werner ventriloquizes a history of lyric interpretation in presenting Dickinson's “lyric nondiscourse” to view and in so doing she gives that discourse the voice of the lyric as such (though the words are, appropriately, from Novalis): “‘Where do I exit and go and how do I proceed?'” The implied answer, of course, is, as Werner puts it, “to the ends of the lyric”—that is, straight to you.
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Werner's lyrical reading of the outer edges of Dickinson's work as unmediated, free-floating, instantaneous hyperlyricism is in fact the way that Dickinson has been read for well over a hundred years. As I shall argue in greater detail in the third chapter on “Dickinson's Figure of Address,” at least since Higginson's introduction of the first edition of Dickinson's poems as “something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind” (
Poems
1890, iii), the interpretation of Dickinson's poems as un- and therefore self-directed has long made them the perfect fit for the characterization of lyric poetry as discourse immediately and intimately addressed to the reader precisely because it is not addressed to anyone at all. In the next chapter, I will examine the theoretical implications of modern thinking about the lyric as the public circulation of privacy, but first it is important to notice that the print, facsimile, and web editions of Dickinson—that is,
all
editions of Dickinson—turn Dickinson's private writing practices public, whether they do so in the medium of print, photographic reproduction, or digital hypertext. The exposure of Dickinson's private hand to the public gaze has thrilled readers since the nineteenth century, and though new Web technologies may provide more spectacular means for such exposure, it is not technology itself that determines interpretation. My argument that the imaginary lyric in print informs even unprinted editions of
Dickinson is not an argument about print per se; the electronic attempts to undo Dickinson's print history amply demonstrate the limits of technological determinist arguments. The fact that Werner's immensely technologically accomplished representation of the unprinted Dickinson ends in a fundamental form of lyric reading demonstrates that reading's dependence on the cultural mediation of any medium—whether print, pixels, or skywriting. As long as there is a cultural consensus that Dickinson wrote poems
and
as long as poems are considered essentially lyric
and
as long as the cultural mediation of lyrics is primarily interpretative and largely academic—indeed, as long as lyrics need to be interpreted in order to
be
lyrics—then the media of Dickinson's publication will not change the message.

The new Web presentation can deliver images of the archive no one who has not visited the institutional archives of Dickinson's manuscripts has seen, and Web images do give a better idea of Dickinson's compositional practices than any previous edition could.
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That increased access to the visual archive is itself immensely valuable—but does it make each of us an historian or a viewer? What kind of readers of those images do we become? We have yet to see if the screening of the archive will give us access only to images or to a critical sense of the archive as (in Brent Edwards's words) “a discursive system that governs the possibilities, forms, appearance, and regularity of particular statements, objects, and practices.”
⁴⁵
This second, interpretive view of the archive is the archive we construct as readers of a moment by definition different than our own—and, by definition, perhaps not viewable via the medium of the computer screen's illusion of immediacy. The alternative to that illusion may be closer to the interpretation imagined by Michel Foucault as a critical “archeology,” an analysis that “deprives us of our continuities; it dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history….”
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No edition of Dickinson will essentially change the interpretation of Dickinson if it is an edition of Dickinson's
poems.
It is not the medium but the genre that determines the message. And what determines genre?

The hermeneutic ambition of recent print, facsimile, and Web-based editions of Dickinson suggests one answer to the question of genre, the question that, as Claudio Guillén has put it, bridges “the gap between critical theory and the practice of literary criticism.”
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Of the many formal and historical influences on the formation of literary genres, the most persistent is the influence of critical theory itself—in Dickinson's case, the influence of what I am calling “lyric reading.” The theoretical existence of literary genres makes possible the practical existence of literary criticism. All editions of Dickinson to date seek to undo the limiting perspective of previous
editions in order to give Dickinson's poems a newer (and, by implication, better) interpretation. I have been suggesting that they do so because our idea of what a lyric is requires that Dickinson's private compositions be made ever more public and ever more immediately accessible—ever more
readable.
That is, the representation of Dickinson's work has depended on a critical theory of its genre (as privacy gone public, as present-tense immediacy, as an invitation to interpretation), and in turn critical theories of genre have determined the representation of Dickinson's work (as privacy gone public, as spots of time in the middle of a page or the center of a screen, as addressed to the interpreter). But what if everyone since Higginson has been wrong? What if Dickinson did not write lyric poems?

T
HE
A
RCHIVE

Those “fossil bird-tracks” in the Amherst Museum in Higginson's
Atlantic
article have turned into apt images of what every visitor to the Dickinson archive has expected to find: the poems' essential lyricism, resident in the peculiar traces of the poet's hand. Recent editorial and critical attempts to undo earlier print representations of Dickinson's manuscripts have reinscribed Dickinson's lyricism in every torn corner and watermark of her pages, thus repeating Higginson's gesture and participating in a later version of the discursive system that governs all statements about all aspects of Dickinson's writing as statements about lyric poems. In order to allow the archive to disrupt rather than confirm that system, to deprive us of our continuities, we will need to alter not only our view of Dickinson's materials as they emerge into view but we will need to change our interpretation of the genre into which we tend to fit those materials. That is not easy to do—or to undo.

We might begin by noticing those continuities of the lyric into which Dickinson's writing, on closer view, does not seem to fit: rather than turning privacy public, her work tended to take all kinds of public and private, artificial and natural materials into the everyday life of a private person. Rather than give us immediate access to the private perceptions of that person, the literate traces of that everyday life tend to emphasize our distance from the time and place of her practice—of her culture. Rather than address themselves to an horizon of literary interpretation in the future (to future literary critics), Dickinson's manuscripts were addressed to particular individuals or to herself. Let us return, for example, to the lines on the split-open envelope with which we began (
fig. 5
). The fact that this is a rare instance of a Dickinson manuscript that has never been published as
a Dickinson poem (or even as an extrageneric lyric fragment) may seem to give us the opportunity to read this archival fragment as something else. Yet, as we have seen, while the lines, when printed or reproduced as a lyric, generate several possible lyric readings, it is hard to say what kind of reading they might generate if we regard them not as a poem but as, say, an envelope. That is because we do not
read
—in the strong sense of the verb that has, to some degree since the nineteenth century and certainly since the 1940s in the United States, defined the job of the literary critic—envelopes in the way that we
read
poems.
⁴⁸
When Higginson began his essay on Dickinson by reading her envelope as evidence of her lyricism, he was not only identifying Dickinson as a lyric poet but identifying himself as a lyric reader. On the other hand, the lines on the split-open envelope in
figure 5
are not an address; they are lines written on the inside rather than the outside of the envelope, and they are not directed to anyone we can identify. They fall into the alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines now associated with Dickinson's poems and in the nineteenth century associated with hymns as well as with a great deal of popular poetry, especially ballads. If scanned as three tetrameter lines followed by six alternating trimeters and tetrameters, the lines sustain a delicate series of slant variations on
n
sounds: undone / tune / (wait) / stone / on / slain / (hear) / Trans / undone. As we have already noted, the refrain or framing line gives the series the effect of closure or formal integrity. This is to say that even as a manuscript not printed as a poem, these lines exemplify the formal definition we attribute to poems. And as if that were not enough to make them a poem, they take the subject of birdsong as their theme and then associate that lyric type with the lyric “I.” The combination of such traditionally (even redundantly) lyric form and content invites, as we have seen, several different possible lyric readings. Thus if a lyric is defined as a self-reflexive aesthetic whole, there can be no question that the lines in
figure 5
that have never been printed as a lyric are a lyric.

Yet the fact that
figure 5
has not been published as a poem may mean that self-reflexive form does not (
pace
modern generalizations about the self-reflexive postromantic lyric), after all, itself determine our theory of genre. Instead, as Carolyn Williams has recently suggested, the “law of genre,” may be better understood as “the play of formalism and deformation in sociocultural terms.”
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Williams's understanding of genre would be a very un-Hegelian way of making the abstract category of genre contingent on social circulation rather than on a priori aesthetic criteria. In order to do so, she suggests that we “think of ‘discourse' and ‘genre' as a dialectical pair, one foregrounding synchronic study and the other foregrounding diachronic study; one emphasizing historical discontinuity and the other emphasizing historical continuity; one tending (potentially,
but not necessarily) toward the thematic and the other toward formalistic oversimplifications” (520). The advantage of Williams's way of thinking about genre is that it does not separate form from history. To say that lyrics are part of the Dickinson archive is not necessarily to say that the discursive system of the lyric inevitably governs everything that can be said about Dickinson's work. Dickinson may have used the nineteenth-century lyric as one of many discourses she employed in her writing, but that does not mean that what Dickinson wrote inevitably eventuates in the genre of the lyric. It is the literary criticism since Higginson that has created the discourse of lyric reading that in turn editors and readers have recognized in Dickinson. If, as Williams suggests, discourse and genre are a dialectical pair, then discourse is not something that is imposed on genre but is made out of genres.
⁵⁰
Thus to read
figure 5
as an old envelope need not mean not also reading the lines on the envelope as lyrical, and to read them as lyrical is not necessarily to read them as a lyric. As the most formally defined of modern literary genres, the lyric has been misunderstood as the genre most isolated from history—indeed, as the exemplary model of literary genre as a category separable from history. But Dickinson's work may be a model for an alternative approach in which the reading of genre and the reading of history are mutually implicated in each other.

As we shall see in the next chapter on lyric reading, that mutual implication has proven difficult to think about for literary critics. The source of the difficulty is on one hand the historical transformation of “genreness” itself. Michael McKeon eloquently phrases “the modern shift in the idea of genre—from an enabling hermeneutic to a constraining taxonomy,” and notes that this shift “is coextensive with the emergence of the novel…. The novel crystallizes genreness, self-consciously incorporating, as part of its form, the problem of its own categorical status.” This modern shift in notions of genre reflects, in other words, what Bakhtin called “the novelization of genre,” by which he did not mean that traditional genres all become more and more novelistic, but that in modernity genre itself becomes a mutable—though far from disappearing—category rather than “some sort of stylization of forms that have outlived themselves.”
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