Dickinson's Misery (9 page)

But are lyric poems in manuscript the same poems in print? While Franklin's 1998 Harvard edition of the
Poems
would seem to argue that this is the case, his comments in 1967 point to the opposite conclusion, and indeed when in 1981 he and Harvard published a facsimile edition of
The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson
, he wrote that “the manuscripts of this poet resist translation into the conventions of print” (MB ix). Yet in his introduction to the facsimile edition, everything that Franklin says orients the manuscripts toward the horizon of print:

Emily Dickinson, although she did not publish, wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems and organized the largest portion of them with her own form of book-making: selected poems copied onto sheets of letter paper that she bound with string. In her isolation and poetic silence, these manuscript books, known as fascicles, may have served privately as publication, a personal enactment of the public act that, for reasons unexplained, she denied herself. In time the poems became an extended letter to the world, gradually published after her sister, Lavinia, upon finding the manuscripts, set about with determination to get them printed. Yet no edition of the Dickinson poetry has followed the fascicle order; indeed for much of the complex manuscript history the fascicles have been in disarray, divided between families and, finally, between libraries. This edition makes the manuscript books of the poet available for the first time, restored as closely as possible to their original order and, through facsimile reproduction, presented much as she left them for Lavinia and the world. (MB, ix)

As Jerome McGann has pointed out, Franklin's facsimile edition “acquires its significance by seizing the privilege of its historical backwardness.”
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Yet although, as Margaret Dickie long ago remarked, such regression may aim to take Dickinson's “work back to the point at which her sister, Lavinia, discovered the fascicles and from which every editor since
Mabel Loomis Todd has tried to rescue her,” its apparent erasure of Dickinson's print history presupposes that history, and the legibility of its manuscript images depends on the poems' prior existence in print.
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If Franklin's publication of Dickinson's “manuscript books” redresses what he had characterized in the 1960s as the New Critical error of divorcing poems from poets' intentions, then it does so not only by reclaiming the literal evidence of Dickinson's own compositional and editorial practices, but by presenting those practices to the public as evidence of Dickinson's desire to be an author—that is, to see her poems in print. For Franklin, poems in fascicle manuscript are the same poems in print because lyric poems are for him by definition private compositions intended “for … the world.” If Dickinson wrote lyric poems, then she intended them to be read as such—and, as all of his editorial work makes clear, Franklin is quite sure that Dickinson wrote discrete lyric poems, separable one from another.
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Franklin's speculation that the fascicles were for their author a “personal enactment of the public act that, for reasons unexplained, she denied herself” mirrors on the level of authorial intention what his idea of the lyric genre already assumes: lyrics in print represent privacy to a public readership; it follows that publishing privacy is what all lyrics want to do, so Dickinson left the poems “for Lavinia and the world.” Having found the destiny inscribed in their genre, the poems may now be restored to “the fascicle order,” since that is the order closest to that their author intended.
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Yet what Franklin cannot explain is the relation between the inherent intention of the genre (to be read while pretending not to be) and the apparent intention of the author (not to be read while pretending to be).

The contradictions attendant on Franklin's publication of the manuscript books (as opposed to Howe's reading of the manuscripts themselves, to which we shall return)—handwriting not quite in print yet mass-produced, compositional order restored yet the identity of individual already printed poems left intact, the author's intentions represented but not determined—have been addressed most powerfully and at greatest length by Sharon Cameron. As the professional reader of Dickinson most dedicated to the difficult issue of Dickinson's lyricism, Cameron has consistently asked how Dickinson's writing might exemplify ideas of the genre itself. In her first book on Dickinson,
Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre
(1979), Cameron suggested that “the temporal problems in Dickinson's poems are frequently exaggerations of those generic features shared by all lyrics, and that it is precisely the distance some of these poems go toward the far end of coherence, precisely the outlandishness of their extremity, which allows us to see, literally magnified, the fine workings of more conventional lyrics” (LT 23). Thus Cameron articulated what had been implicit in Dickinson's reception since 1890: as the hypostatized
lyric had come to stand for poetry in general, so Dickinson had come to stand for the hypostatized lyric in general. Late in the history of distressed lyric criticism, Cameron could presuppose, as Hegel might say, a common assumption that “conventional lyrics” shared “generic features,” and that what Dickinson's poems did was to take up those conventions and push them to their limits. The central convention at stake for Cameron in 1979 was the lyric's representation of isolated spots of time. “Unlike the drama, whose province is conflict,” Cameron wrote, “and unlike the novel or narrative, which connects isolated moments of time to create a story, multiply peopled and framed by social context, the lyric voice is solitary and generally speaks out of a single moment in time” (LT 23). Most readers in 1979 would have shared Cameron's assurance that the solitude of the lyric voice was its transhistorical feature; like the broad taxonomic distinctions between the drama and the novel with their definite articles, this form of lyric reading did not depend on any particular historical situation or lyric subgenre. In Cameron's early reading, the lyric's generic solitude and temporal isolation mirrored the serial isolation of the discrete lyrics in Johnson's 1955
Poems
, and
Lyric Time
proceeds through a series of brilliant interdiscursive readings of those isolated representations of personal and temporal isolation.

After the publication of Franklin's
Manuscript Books
, however, Cameron revised the phenomenology of reading implicit in Johnson's print edition and elaborated in her own interpretation. In
Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles
(1992), Cameron elaborated instead the deeply problematic experience of reading lyrics that cannot be isolated from one another—a problem introduced by the altered images in Franklin's fascicle edition. Given Dickinson's practice of arranging poems in sequences, of suggesting but not excluding variants, of repeating lines in different parts of a fascicle, of arranging fascicles as collections yet not (as far as we know) announcing the rationale of her collections, of privately publishing and yet, privately, not publishing those collections, the interpreter of the fascicles must ask, as Cameron so succinctly does ask, “What
is
the poem?” (CC 5).

Or
where
is the poem? The question that Cameron allows the fascicles to pose is, again, how to recognize a poem when we see one—in context. As she writes, she means “to ask how reading a lyric in sequence is different from reading a lyric as independent, for to do the latter is to suppress the context and the relations that govern the lyric in context—a suppression generating that understanding of Dickinson's poems as enigmatic, isolated, culturally incomprehensible phenomena which has dominated most Dickinson criticism, including my own” (CC 5). Yet “what happens when context—when the sequence—is not suppressed” (CC 19)? One might think that the first thing that would happen for a reader as rigorous as
Cameron would be that the idea of the lyric as the genre theoretically determining Dickinson's practice would itself be thrown into question. Yet Cameron's second book on Dickinson holds tenaciously to the lyric as the genre governing Dickinson's composition and, more suggestively, governing the interpretation of that composition. While in her first book she argued that Dickinson's isolated lyrics exaggerated the isolated temporality of the lyric itself, in her second book on Dickinson she argues that “Dickinson's fascicles trouble the idea of limit or frame on which … our suppositions of lyric fundamentally depend” (CC 5). It should follow that if all lyrics depend on limits or frames, and Dickinson's writing turns out not to have such limits or frames, then Dickinson did not write lyrics—or did not write poems that conform to “our suppositions of lyric.” But that is not Cameron's conclusion.

Instead, Cameron takes her supposition of “what is definitional of the genre” from Allen Grossman's “Summa Lyrica,” which was published in the same year as Cameron's
Choosing Not Choosing
(1992) by her colleague at the Johns Hopkins University.
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Grossman describes his text as “a primer or handbook of commonplaces … designed to befriend the reader of poetry (always supposing that the reader of poetry needs a hermeneutic friend) by constructing a culture in which poetry is intelligible.” Grossman is brilliantly open about his assumption that the principle of intelligibility at stake in the definition of the lyric is the principle of interpretation rather than the practice of composition; a poet himself, he is concerned about “the function of poetry … for everybody,” his ambition no less than “to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limits of the autonomy of the will.” Grossman's humanist enterprise influences not only the interpretive ambition of Cameron's readings, but also her ambitiously fundamental view of the genre those willful readings construct. “Lyric is the most continuously practiced of all poetic kinds in the history of Western representation,” Grossman writes; “as the kind which imitates man alone, lyric is the first and last poetic sort.”
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Grossman and Cameron are in good historical company in seeing the lyric as poetry writ large—and they also share the modern presumption that the lyric (that is, poetry) will not be culturally intelligible unless the interpreter makes it so. Thus Cameron's book on Dickinson's fascicles takes Grossman's proposition that “the frame of the poem” defines the lyric as the limit case and turns that definition of the genre inside out: if lyric is “the first and last poetic sort,” and “assumptions about boundedness are so fundamental to our suppositions about lyrics as in effect to become definitional of the genre,”
and
“Dickinson's fascicles trouble the idea of limit or frame on which, as Grossman reminds us, our suppositions of lyric fundamentally depend,” then, Cameron concludes, the interpreter of
the fascicles must expand her notion of the lyric to encompass a larger version of its frame (CC 5). Like Grossman, who supposes that “the reader of poetry needs a hermeneutic friend,” Cameron supposes not only that Dickinson wrote lyric poetry but that she did so in view of a hermeneutic future. If Franklin publishes the fascicles in order to reveal the order of the poems as Dickinson intended it, Cameron interprets the fascicles in order to reveal that intention as indeterminate, and thus open to infinite nuances of interpretation, since “the difficulty in enforcing a limit to the poems turns into a kind of limitlessness” (CC 6). Cameron takes seriously the suggestion that in 1967 Franklin considered absurd: she attempts to read the multiplying variety of poems made possible by what she takes to be the relation between poems and variants in the fascicles, and thus enters into the hermeneutic problem that Hegel identified as so awkward and that Franklin discounted. And because she tries to hold a definition of the lyric stable in relation to that very unstable or speculative problem, Cameron turns the material context of Dickinson's manuscript books into a limitless opportunity for lyric reading.

Thus far in this chapter, I have been arguing that an imaginary version of the lyric in print informs late nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpretations of Dickinson, and I have suggested that in the same period increasingly professionalized literary interpretation creates an idea of the lyric as poetic norm. That dialectical process reaches a fascinating turning point in Cameron's work on Dickinson's fascicles, since “it may well be the case,” Cameron speculates, “that Dickinson did not publish her poems because she literally did not know whether to publish them as a sequence or as single lyrics. Or because she could not publish them in both forms at once” (CC 54). As Cameron notes, while her book produces “an empirical argument about how the fascicles work, and about what the fascicles are, the basis of that argument is, and could only be, speculative” (CC 7n6). But one starting point for Cameron's argument that in the fascicles Dickinson wanted to represent both poems in and poems out of sequence, both individual lyrics and one big indeterminate lyric—in short, that the fascicles allowed Dickinson “to choose not to choose” whether or not to write individual lyrics—is not at all speculative: it is the prior existence of Dickinson's poems in print, the historical precedence of print publication to Franklin's manuscript publication. Cameron's frequent comparison of Dickinson's poems to modern poems by Yeats, Whitman, Stevens, and Rilke assumes the fascicles' separation into individual lyrics for the purposes of interpretation.
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And the way in which Dickinson's writing is printed in
Choosing Not Choosing
itself illustrates the lyric reading that the individual chapters of the book pursue. Not only are poems printed and analyzed in their forms and according to their numbers in Johnson's 1955
edition in Cameron's text, but the selected fascicles within Cameron's book are printed from Johnson's edition; only one fascicle (number 20) is then reprinted by Cameron in manuscript facsimile as an appendix.