Dickinson's Misery (18 page)

One of the foundational texts of the culture that Blackmur projects as the lyric's proper sphere was published in the same year as Winters's essay on Dickinson (1938), a year after Blackmur's, and six years after Tate's. In the first edition of
Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students
, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren specifically reject moralist, subjectivist, historically representative, and purely mechanical approaches to poetry, instead recommending that we—that is, “we” teachers and students in college classrooms—think “of a poem as a piece of writing which gives us a certain effect in which, we discover, the ‘poetry' inheres.”
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It is an interestingly tautological recommendation. We read a
poem in order to discover “‘poetry' ”? Like Winters, Tate, and Blackmur, Brooks and Warren identify poetry as lyric, they identify the lyric as the literary, and they specify the literary as what they want to teach the student in turn to identify in poetry. The logic represents a seamless rationale for literary studies as a separate academic discipline. But what is this “‘poetry'” in quotation marks that English professors teach students to discover in poems? Dickinson is one of the poets Brooks and Warren select to analyze as an exemplary instance of the poetry in the poem. Their explication of “After great pain a formal feeling comes—” emphasizes the imagery of the poem line by line in order to lead to the following conclusion: “the formality, the stiffness, the numbness … is an attempt to hold in, the fight of the mind against letting go; it is a defense of the mind” (471). Could not the reader have come to that conclusion by reading the first line? Perhaps, but according to Brooks and Warren, the reader could not have discerned the “‘poetry'” of that conclusion, since such discernment requires that the imagery of each line be made the site of not just one reader's intersubjective experience but the common reference point for a select group of individuals who need to be directed to experience particular moments of intersubjectivity—of “reading.” As Brooks and Warren put it in their introduction, “poetry is not an isolated and eccentric thing, but springs from the most fundamental interests which human beings have” (25). The purpose of
Understanding Poetry
is to direct students' individual interests toward a common goal, a common culture of the class. That is where, after 1938, “‘poetry'” will be found.

As the many different cultural sites where Dickinson's poetry was found collapsed into the community of professional (or apprentice) readers, so the contingent details, referents, genres, enclosures, circumstances, addressees, occasions, secrets, and textures of her work were collapsed into an idea of the lyric generated by that community. It would be interesting to compare the abstractly useful model of the lyric that the New Critics developed in their conversation around Dickinson to Adorno's introductory apology in “Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957) to the effect that his title might make his audience think that “a sphere of expression whose very essence lies in either not acknowledging the power of socialization or overcoming it through the pathos of detachment … is to be arrogantly turned into the opposite of what it conceives itself to be through the way it is examined.”
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American readers have sometimes mistaken the object of Adorno's address here as New Criticism, especially since Adorno's essay first appeared in translation in the American Marxist journal
Telos
in 1974 next to an article by John Fekete on “The New Criticism: Ideological Evolution of the Right Opposition.”
⁴⁷
But New Criticism never pretended that the lyric is not social in nature—it simply claimed that the social is only
available in the lyric through linguistic and personal abstraction, since words and fictive personae are what the poem (or the book or class in which we receive the poem) gives us to read. Adorno comes to a strangely similar conclusion: “the paradox specific to the lyric work, a subjectivity that turns into objectivity, is tied to the priority of linguistic form in the lyric; it is that priority from which the primacy of language in literature in general (even in prose forms) is derived” (43). Yet the world of difference between the reasons that the New Critics and Adorno come to the conclusion that the lyric is an alienated, or objectified, formal structure that renders personal expression abstract may account for why Adorno's view of lyric has not had much influence on American criticism and pedagogy.
⁴⁸
His idealist view of the genre itself is derived from the European romantic tradition, in which the “genreness” of the lyric is not what is at stake in its interpretation. Benjamin's interpretation of Baudelaire is the more immediate subtext of Adorno's essay, and Benjamin's version of “A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism” (like the New Critics' reading of Emily Dickinson, also a product of the 1930s) would also seem to have found curiously little purchase in American lyric reading—though, as we shall see, American critics continue to try to integrate Frankfurt School thought about aesthetic abstraction into poetic interpretation.
⁴⁹

Instead, another European critic who then studied with the latter-day New Critic Reuben Brower (who coined the phrase “close reading”) and was the formative influence on the post–New Critical Yale School of lyric interpretation combined the European idealization of the lyric with the American academic will to power through interpretation.
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Paul de Man did not take up Emily Dickinson as his lyric example (he took up no American literary examples), but since I take the notion of “lyric reading” from de Man's interpretation of the genre, I shall consider his construction (which he claimed was a deconstruction) of the lyric in some detail. The complicated shorthand genealogy I have just given for de Man's approach to the lyric also betrays the extent to which the lyric became the creature of twentieth-century criticism: by the time of the conversation between Tate, Blackmur, and Winters over Dickinson in the 1930s, academic critical culture had already replaced the sociable versifying and verse-reading culture of Dickinson's contemporaries. The consequences and history of that shift have been the implicit subjects of these pages; in order to tell the full story, we would need to retrace the emergence of professional literary criticism out of familiar culture's path toward the genteel literary criticism that brought Dickinson's work into circulation. But since my purpose here has not been to trace a reception history but instead to trace in and through Dickinson a history and theory of lyric reading, de Man's post–New Critical focus on lyric reading itself becomes important to consider here. For although de Man did not
write about Emily Dickinson, he followed the New Critics' emphasis on the lyric by writing about virtually nothing but lyric reading, and his theory of lyric reading will bring us straight back to Dickinson as representative of the very reading practices de Man tried to take apart.

L
YRIC
T
HEORY

When de Man suggested that “no lyric can be read lyrically, nor can the object of a lyrical reading be itself a lyric” in 1979 in “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” (
The Rhetoric of Romanticism
254), he was making the argument of
Dickinson's Misery
in reverse. I have been suggesting that New Critical readings of texts like “Further in Summer than the Birds” (or “My Cricket”) created an abstract personification in place of the historical person, and consequently created an abstract genre accessible to all persons educated to read lyrically in place of the verse exchanged by people with varying degrees of access to one another who may have read according to their own historical referents. I have also been suggesting some ways in which we might recover some of the practices that preceded critical lyric reading, and even some ways to retrieve some of those material historical referents. But because de Man began from the perspective of twentieth-century lyric reading, he took a different theoretical tack. For de Man to prove that the lyric was a modern critical fiction, he needed to begin by declaring that it did not exist: “The lyric is not a genre, but one name among several to designate the defensive motion of the understanding, the possibility of a future hermeneutics.”
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How could the genre for which de Man's own essay was named not exist? While the primary and much-debated aim of the essay was to question the phenomenal or experiential subject of lyric utterance (the infamous deconstructive dismantling, or death, of the subject), another and less noticed effect of the assertion that “the lyric is not a genre” is that critical reading has made it so. What de Man's reading performed was not the disappearance of the lyric subject, but the appearance of the critical subject of the lyric.

De Man proclaimed the death of the lyric with such bravado that it may obscure the fact that the latter contention that genres are not born but imperfectly made was hardly new by the end of the 1970s. In
Beyond Genre,
ten years before de Man's essay was published, Paul Hernadi had suggested that an essential account of the lyric genre seemed not to exist: “As for lyric poetry, I am not aware of any widely shared concept of its generic structure. While deep insights have been attained with regard to certain kinds of non-dramatic, non-narrative writing, critics do not seem to have succeeded in providing a unified conceptual map of this ‘no man's
land.'”
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Likewise, René Wellek had at around the same time complained that “lyrical theory” had led to “an insoluble psychological cul de sac.” According to Wellek, “the way out is obvious. One must abandon attempts to define the general nature of the lyric or the lyrical. Nothing beyond generalities of the tritest kind can result from it. It seems much more profitable to turn to a study of the variety of poetry and to the history and thus the description of genres which can be grasped in their concrete conventions and traditions.”
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Given this context of an unravelling lyric hermeneutics already beginning to forfeit the name of its object (“no man's land,” “the variety of poetry”) we can begin to see that de Man's sentence was (as he might put it) set in motion by a performative (“the lyric is not a genre”) masquerading as a statement of fact. This statement could only be said to be “true” if “the possibility of a future hermeneutics” had not already come to pass and begun to be surpassed. If “there is no significant difference between one generic term and another” because “all have the same apparently intentional and temporal function” (261), that
apparent
function makes all the difference. Since the lyric was already firmly in place as a critical convention—as a basis for the production and reception of poetry—saying that it did not exist would not unmake what literary tradition had already made. “Generic terms such as ‘lyric'” may be, as de Man argued, “at the furthest remove from the materiality of actual history” (262), but they are also themselves historical.

But rather than historicize the idea of the lyric, de Man chose to emphasize the alienation of that idea from history. De Man's reading of the lyric later became associated with the inherent ahistoricism of high literary theory in the academy, yet at the end of “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” it was history, of all things, that de Man thought might be salvaged from his deconstruction of the lyric. If generic terms are, according to de Man, “always terms of resistance and nostalgia,” (262), was de Man's point that “non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say, prosaic, or better,
historical
modes of language power” (262)
could
be recovered from their idealized or “defensive” or resistant or nostalgic categories of “understanding”? How? What would “the materiality of actual history” look like on the page? Like a flower, like an ad, like a dead cricket? The irony of de Man's assertion that the genre that was his criticism's central preoccupation did not exist is that Paul de Man—proper name for the scandals of late twentieth-century academic literary theory—appears to have intended to restore to his own and others' constructions of the lyric an aspect of contingent, perhaps even historical, practice.

This, at least, is one implication of de Man's lyrical unreading of Baudelaire's “canonical and programmatic sonnet ‘Correspondances'” (243). Like Benjamin, de Man took up Baudelaire as the iconic modern poet, and
he selected that poet's most iconic poem. The adjectives attached as introduction betray at the start that what is at stake in de Man's interpretation was what he elsewhere distinguished as “the canonical ‘
idée reçue
' of the poem,” as opposed to “the poem
read.
”
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Yet how could a poem possibly be
read
apart from its “
idée reçue
” or detached from its identity as
a poem?
The question should sound familiar to readers of
Understanding Poetry
as well as of the previous chapter of this book. Since the entire trajectory of de Man's essay is, as Jonathan Culler has remarked, “in effect, if not in principle, a reading of lyric” in the sense that it is “an exposition of [the genre's] constitutive conditions,” this turns out to be in de Man, as in Brooks and Warren and in “Dickinson Undone,” not only a tricky but perhaps a trick question.
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The conditions that make “Correspondances” a convenient paradigm for examining the lyric's “constitutive conditions” are the conditions of the sonnet's reception
as
paradigmatically lyrical, and this reception is, according to de Man, already inscribed in the intersubjective logic of the poem itself. In other words, in order to expose the lyric as a modern critical fiction, de Man adopted the very strategy of modern literary criticism: a close reading of the iconic modern poem as a purely linguistic artifact. The crux of this logic rests in the repetitively analogical structure of the lyric's rhetoric, a structure that, as de Man reads it, comes to an abrupt halt in the sonnet's final tercet in precisely the term for identity by analogy, the word “comme” (which, as de Man informs us, is not incidentally “the most frequently counted word in the canon of Baudelaire's poetry” [248]). In order to see how in de Man's
very
close reading a monosyllable could be seen to allow a reading that it then disallows, we need to consider the sonnet in its entirety: