Dickinson's Misery (10 page)

As we have seen, the precedence of print to manuscript certainly makes the manuscripts more legible, yet as we have also seen, the prior existence of the poems in print makes it difficult for any reader to consider Dickinson's writing as anything other than a set of lyrics. The enumeration and separation of the texts in Johnson's print edition (reprinted in Cameron's analysis of that edition) imply an interpretation of the poems as single lyrics, while the sequence of lines that run along sequences of pages in the manuscript fascicles (reproduced by Franklin and again reproduced by Cameron) appear implicated in the context of one another across the page. Cameron chooses to interpret the context of the fascicles as an elaboration of Dickinson's lyrics—that is, to read literal context as proliferating figurative text. Other, much less interesting, recent attempts to interpret the fascicles have rendered them not as an elaborately lyrical sequence and cross-sequence but as narrative sequence; given the amount of text contained in the manuscript books and the number of variant lines, one can imagine the emergence of a critical literature around the fascicles almost as capacious as the work that has collected around the print editions of Dickinson.
³⁶
Yet to foresee that hermeneutic future is also to suppose that Dickinson's writing was always oriented toward it. That is, of course, what any edition of Dickinson must suppose, whether in print or manuscript facsimile—or must suppose if it is an edition of Dickinson's lyric poems. Before we return to the manuscript on the split-open envelope that has not yet been published as a Dickinson poem, we should turn to the most recent attempts to take Dickinson's work out of the double bind of generic edition—to give an even greater hermeneutic future to Dickinson's poetry by taking her writing not only out of print but out of the book.

D
ICKINSON
U
NBOUND

The electronic archive projects launched in the last decade of the twentieth century on the World Wide Web promise to use new media to reimagine Dickinson's message. The Dickinson Electronic Archives (henceforward DEA) (
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/
) presents itself as “a new type of critical resource” devoted to “examining the extent to which the poem as printed object has shaped the interpretation, circulation, reputation, and transmission of Emily Dickinson's writings and of how reconceiving them as scribal objects profoundly alters one's experience of
her literary presentations.” What web media can do that print media cannot is to “digitize images of [Dickinson's] manuscripts and provide diplomatic transcriptions and notes in searchable electronic form, thereby enabling new kinds of critical inquiry unimaginable within the constraints of the book, the machine that has made the object, ‘Dickinson's poem,' and that has determined how that object is seen, interrogated, and theorized.” What distinguishes Dickinson-on-the-screen from Dickinson-on-the-page, such statements suggest, is the difference between an idea of genre-as-medium and genre-as-work.
³⁷
Yet will a new conception of Dickinson's genres as media shift the reception of that writing as lyric poetry? It is worth noticing that the institutional, juridical power over interpretation with which Franklin credited “the contemporary critical climate” is in the editorial statement of the Dickinson Electronic Archive assigned to print itself; Web publication is cast here as the liberation of Dickinson's writing from the policing gaze of the print public sphere. What for Franklin was critical self-deception is for the Dickinson Editorial Collective (henceforward DEC) (general editors Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart, Marta Werner, and Lara Vetter) the “capital-driven” deception of the impersonal codex “machine.” While Franklin claimed in 1967 that readers cannot have both Dickinson's poems in legible print form and a book with only her name on it, the DEC claims to release Dickinson's poems from the constraining medium of the book altogether, virtually restoring them to their original status as “scribal objects” at the same time that the DEA wants to generate an alternative terminology for those objects (“Emily Dickinson's writing,” “literary presentations”) commensurate with the new possibilities of access allowed by the new medium of the Web and its altered phenomenologies of writing and reading. Yet does the alternative medium or that medium's alternative terminology enable us to think of Dickinson's work as anything other than the lyric poetry made by a century of print machines?

Emily Dickinson wrote on all kinds of ready-to-hand paper; some of what she wrote was printed during her lifetime in mid-nineteenth-century newspapers (including a paper in Brooklyn, New York, used to raise money for Union troops) and in the “No Name” series of gilt volumes of contemporary poems; some of the manuscripts that survived after her death were copied by hand and then transcribed letter by letter on Todd's World typewriter; between 1890 and 1998 thirteen editions and countless reprinted editions of Dickinson's poems were printed and sold in the United States; in the 1990s, the DEA began to unprint the manuscripts and display their images on computer screens around the world. On one hand, this simplified series represents a progressive narrative of ever greater public access to those papers in the locked box; on the other
hand, it represents a progressive abstraction of the pages Dickinson wrote, a movement away from the author as “the principle of thrift” toward an economy apparently out of anyone's control. As Harold Love has written,

a sub-spectrum along the axis chirography-typography-electronography might be formed thus: authorial holograph, scribal transcript, typewritten transcript without corrections, words printed from copper or steel engraved plates, computer printout, lithographic printing, raised surface printing, baked clay tablets, braille, skywriting with aeroplane, words seen on a TV screen or VDU, neon sign—by each of which the sign is progressively removed from an assumed source of validation in the movement of the author's fingers and relies instead for signifying power on its locus within an autonomous universe of signs.
³⁸

Dickinson's writing has been represented in all of these ways, and more—but does the medium change the message? If the message is taken to be determined by the author's hand (as Franklin would like critics to admit), then the answer is no; if the message inscribed by that hand becomes a part of a text that generates proliferating interpretations (as Cameron would lead us to think), then the answer is yes and no; if the semiotic spectrum in which the message is placed by its medium is indeed self-organizing (as the DEC imagines it might become), then the answer is yes. On the first view, if Emily Dickinson intended to write lyric poems, then a chirographic, lithographic, skywritten, or digitally displayed poem is a poem is a poem; on the second view, handwriting allows more interpretive range than does printing, and so may change the shape of the poem, but does not change the genre itself; on the third view, the reception of a particular medium determines the message's genre.
³⁹
The medium changes the genre—or so the DEC claims—by becoming its context. It may be too early to tell what new intersections between genre and medium might be made possible by the Web, but it is already clear that whatever the developing possibilities may turn out to be, the new media return the problem of genre in Dickinson to an old division between private context and public context—and specifically, to a division between private and public temporality.

It is, of course, a highly mediated and highly capitalized illusion that the Web makes publicly available “an autonomous universe of signs”: not everyone has Internet access, and those that do must pay for it or be granted the means by institutions; the signs displayed on the Web are encrypted by technology professionals and their relation to other signs is determined by the links established by the creators of the website and by the creators of the other websites accessible through those links. In the case of the DEA, anyone with access to the World Wide Web can see the site, but
you will need a password in order to read most of what is on the site. The DEC is well aware of the contradictions posed by its elected medium: the Collective wants to be a community effort sponsored by many editors and users, yet its structure is designed by a few editorial hands; it wants to be infinitely accessible, but most users will lack the password and will therefore be denied access (though one editor has asked me to publish the password here, in the interest of a greater public accessibility as of 2004: the “username” required is
dickinson
and the password is
ink_on_disc
). There is no question that the DEA is a tremendous resource for readers of Dickinson, and it will certainly change the collective reading of Dickinson in ways none of us can foresee. But will it change our reading of Dickinson's genre—or will readers still go to the Web as they have to the print editions in order to read more Dickinson poems? Won't readers still view—because they already expect to view—these poems as lyrics? Will the medium of the Internet have any effect on the imaginary lyric model that has guided the editing and interpretation of Dickinson for so long?

Some of the versions of Dickinson available in the DEA do seem to present alternatives to the tradition of lyric reading (especially the parts of the site authored by Martha Nell Smith on Dickinson's collaboration with Susan Gilbert Dickinson, to which we will return in
chapter 3
); some alter slightly the genre of the lyrics Dickinson wrote (for example, the section entitled “Letter-Poem, a Dickinson Genre”) but all parts of the site describe Dickinson as a lyric poet. According to the evidence so far on the electronic Dickinson sites, the greater range of access they promise is not actually a greater range of genre or interpretation, though accessibility may seem to offer new ways of reading by promising a shift in temporality.
⁴⁰
All of the versions of Dickinson posted by various hands on the Web partake, by virtue of their medium, of the new time frame of Web discourse: a text available at a click, an illusion of simultaneous production and reception, a public world of individual access viewed by the “global village” in the privacy of home or office. Most importantly, that access will appear unmediated and immediate, and will not appear to unfold through time. Whereas we know that the first edition of Dickinson's poems (or Dickinson-Todd-Higginson's poems) was printed by Roberts Brothers in Boston in 1890 (just before the passage of the international copyright law) in a white and gray gift book edition edged in gold leaf, the images of old manuscripts on the computer screen are as new as your screen. The inscription and successive publication dates of each manuscript on the site are meticulously noted, but the site itself seems to hover in electric air. The introductory image for the section “Letter-Poem, a Dickinson Genre” (
fig. 8
), for example, superimposes a typescript transcription of Dickinson's manuscript on a filmy image of that manuscript, and superimposes both transcript and manuscript on an enlarged background image of a printed page of critical prose about the relation between Dickinson's poems and letters. Theoretically, we can now read these formerly discrete levels of discourse and media simultaneously, thanks to the immediacy of Web transmission. Whereas print editions like Franklin's must choose between manuscript and print—or, like Cameron's book, choose not to choose between manuscript and print, and so go back and forth between one sort of page and another—manuscript and print may be represented at the same time on one Web “page.” We will return to the many implications of the convergence of private and public space and time in the electronographic representation of Dickinson, and we will return in a moment to the generic difficulties of reading the versified lines on the split-open envelopes with which we began—difficulties generated by the ways in which the manuscripts' material or historical aspects (their media) as well as their figurative content (their message) do allow us to speak of them as discourse unfolding in time. But first we should note that the capacity for historical temporal development—unfolding through time—is just the way not only Web discourse but lyric discourse is seldom understood. That is, while the electronic versions of Dickinson may aim to shift our idea of what it was that Dickinson wrote by altering what we read and how we read it, the immediacy of Web presentation closely allies all of Dickinson's writing with postromantic theories of lyric representation.

In an electronic archive entitled
Radical Scatters
and linked to the DEA (though it offers even more limited access than does the DEA, since it requires a site license that may be purchased only by institutions), Marta Werner, one of the editors in the DEC, has explicitly articulated the coincidence between the temporality of Web representation and the temporality of postromantic lyric reading. The primary aim of
Radical Scatters,
as Werner puts it, is “to foreground Dickinson's extrageneric compositions”—the “late fragments” that include such cross-written surviving pages as those in
figures 7a
and
7b
(though she does not include the lines in
figure 5
as a “fragment”).
⁴¹
Werner's site is a fascinating exemplification of the difference between description and interpretation and of the costs of moving from one to the other; in the presentation and transcription of the texts themselves, the site is meticulous and objective: one click will turn Dickinson's practically illegible script to legible print and back again (a great service, and the transcription here of
figure 7b
would have been impossible without it), and the citational field that surrounds each “fragment” is elaborate (there is even a “hand library” that archives the approximate dates of the many shifts in the character of Dickinson's writing). In sections separated from the bibliographic (or manugraphic, or webographic) empiricism of the archive proper is Werner's reading of the fragments, which are, writes Werner, “like souls, neither touching nor mingling, never composing a set, these positionless fragments depict the beauties of transition and isolation at once. Belonging to the chronology of the instant, a book of them would have to present them as a discontinuous series, a ‘book from which each page could be taken out.' ” This is not a reading of Dickinson's poems as iconic print artifacts removed from their makers (or the reading Franklin caricatured as New Critical); neither is it a reading of Dickinson's fascicle poems as unbounded lyrical possibility (or the reading pursued by Cameron), but it
is
an emphatically lyric reading. According to Werner, Dickinson's late fragments “inaugurate a lyric nondiscourse scattered in an infinity of singular articulations and manifested finally as an
absence d'oeuvre.
Untitled, unauthorized, and extrageneric, these whispers at the outer edges of Dickinson's work ask ‘Where do I exit and go and how do I proceed?'”