Dickinson's Misery (24 page)

To say that in remaining closed upon herself Dickinson managed to represent the self and therefore to become “characteristic of
our
life” is to trace in her poetry the syllogistic logic of address that, as we have seen, dominates postromantic theories of lyric reading. Put simply, that logic converts the isolated “I” into the universal “we” by bypassing the mediation of any particular “you.” This bypass or evasion serves the purpose of what Herbert Tucker has called “the thirst for intersubjective confirmation of the self, which has made the overhearing of a persona our principal means of understanding a poem.”
²³
The key term here is “
over
hearing”: the “intersubjective confirmation of the self” performed by a reading of lyric based upon the identity between poet and reader must be achieved by denying to the poem any intersubjective economy of its own. On this view, in order to have an audience the lyric must not have one. The paradox is audible in Shelley's 1821 “Defence,” and is fixed into definition by John Stuart Mill in 1833 in a moment to which reference was made in the first chapter on lyric discourse, though Tucker's self-conscious repetition of that moment makes it worth repeating here. “Eloquence is
heard
, poetry is
overheard
,” Mill writes, “Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.”
²⁴
In order to overhear such a radically internalized solitude, the reader is supposed to partake of a parallel—that is, identical—seclusion.
Mill's later figure for this parallelism is striking: lyric “song,” he continues, “has always seemed to us like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell, ourselves listening, unseen in the next.”
²⁵
Cell to cell, one prisoner to another, this form of address is sustained by the pathos of solitary confinement—but who or what has imposed the sentence?

When, in 1957, Northrop Frye repeated without alteration Mill's version of lyric as “preeminently the utterance that is overheard,” he went so far as to say that there is “no word for the audience of the lyric” because “the poet, so to speak, turns his back on his listeners.”
²⁶
In Frye's repetition of Mill, “the lament of the prisoner” has become the individual poet's choice; the poet “turns his back” on a real, historical audience in order to create (“so to speak”) a fictive one. In Frye's words, “the lyric poet normally pretends to be talking to himself or to someone else: a spirit of nature, a Muse … a personal friend, a lover, a god, a personified abstraction, or a natural object.”
²⁷
As the range of Frye's list suggests, by not addressing anyone in particular the poet “pretends” to address everything in general—to achieve a form of transcendentally apostrophic address. But Mill's prison scene poses questions that haunt Frye's modern lyric inwardness: why should the poet pretend? What are the conditions of such isolation? Is all lyric, then, imaginary address? Is there no difference between an apostrophe to a natural object and an intimation to a personal friend? Does the poet choose to turn his back or is he somehow constrained to do so—by history, by circumstance, or by the very theory of reading that defines lyric address as the subject's self-address, as not directed toward any specific destination and therefore universally applicable to objects of imagination, objects of tradition, objects of desire, objects of worship, objects of thought, and objects of perception alike?

It is worth noticing Mill's own shift in metaphors for lyric self-address in order to begin to answer these questions, especially since later lyric theorists in the Anglo-American tradition like Frye and Tucker tend to invoke the same metaphors almost word for word. In his 1833 essay “What is Poetry?” Mill begins by dismissing what he calls the “vulgarest” of the many answers to the title's question, “that which confounds poetry with metrical composition.” He thus does away with neoclassical distinctions between genres, preferring to emphasize that “the object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions.” Yet that ambition (which he attributes to Wordsworth) is not sufficient for Mill, since novels, for example, also act upon the emotions, and yet “there is a radical distinction between the interest felt in novels as such, and the interest excited by poetry.” Committed to a definition of poetry based on affective response, Mill's will to lyricize then takes a long turn through narrative and descriptive forms, which
he finally finds insufficiently direct in their address to the “human soul.” It is this further narrowing of what is “essential” in poetry to a form of direct address that necessitates Mill's famous distinction between poetry and eloquence.

In insisting upon address as the defining feature of the poetic, Mill risks making lyric into personally interested discourse. The metaphor of the “soliloquy” is a way for Mill to emphasize the effect of poetic address on its reader and at the same time insist that such an effect is unintentional. But is it? Mill's extension of the metaphor makes his double bind clearer: “it may be said that poetry, which is printed on hot-pressed paper, and sold at a bookseller's shop, is a soliloquy in full dress, and upon the stage. But there is nothing absurd in the idea of such a mode of soliloquizing…. The actor knows that there is an audience present; but if he act as though he knew it, he acts ill.” Of course, an actor
does
intend to produce an effect in his audience, so while the theatrical metaphor allows Mill to distinguish lyric from public or persuasive rhetoric, it also breaks down the distinction he wants to maintain: it makes lyric into a public performance that only pretends to be self-addressed.

It is this rhetorical predicament that may prompt Mill to alter or intensify the metaphor when he writes of the lyrical effect of music on its listeners. “Who can hear these words,” Mill writes, “which speak so touchingly the sorrows of a mountaineer in exile:

Who can hear those affecting words, married to as affecting an air, and fancy that he sees the singer? That song has always seemed to us like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell, ourselves listening, unseen, in the next.”
²⁸

Mill's substitution of the performance of a song (by Burns) for the performance of an actor's soliloquy, of “unseen” voice for stagelit speech, speaks volumes about the complexity of the figure of address he wanted to claim as the special object of the lyric. In 1833, Mill's definition of poetry as essentially lyric still needed to negotiate several genres, and not accidentally, he found what he was looking for in a genre that may be literally overheard rather than figuratively “overheard,” in an archaic version of lyric as song rather than in modern “poetry, which is printed on hotpressed paper, and sold at a bookseller's shop.”

This is to say that Mill's answers to the questions raised by what has become his definitive emphasis on lyric isolation were, in 1833, still enmeshed in the complexity of various genres of address, especially in written verse. Yet later critics of the lyric have often taken up Mill's influential metaphors for lyric address while ignoring both their generic complication and their concern about the relation between writing and voice. Helen Vendler, for example, introduced her 1997 book on Shakespeare's sonnets by explaining that “lyric, though it may
refer
to the social, remains the genre that directs its
mimesis
toward the performance of the mind in
solitary
speech. Because lyric is intended to be voiceable by anyone reading it…. The act of the lyric is to offer its reader a script to say…. The lyric … gives us the mind alone with itself. Lyric can present no ‘other' as alive and listening or responding in the same room as the solitary speaker.”
²⁹
Vendler includes at the back of her book a CD recording of herself reading the sonnets. By the late twentieth century, then, the normative reading of the lyric as normative poetic genre had collapsed Mill's fine distinctions into the reader's soliloquy, the reader's isolation, the reader's expression. That collapse was enabled by Vendler's complete erasure of the “other” Mill kept marginally alive, out of sight. Mill's fantasy that the reader of lyric is an unseen listener to distant music turns into Vendler's fantasy that her reader will, thanks to a medium unavailable to Mill, listen to the literary critic's voice reading the poet's script “in person” in the solitude created by Walkman or stereo.

The literary critical interpretation of Dickinson's writing as lyric has often veered perilously close to the scene of reading suggested by Mill and personified by Vendler. As Higginson and his contemporaries were the first to notice, Dickinson herself seemed to have made literal the seclusion of the lyric self in its solitary cell.
³⁰
Those readers were also the first to read that literal confinement back into metaphor, so that the listeners in the next cell become Mill's “ourselves.” The metaphor that supports such a reading is
the
lyric metaphor: the figure of the speaking voice. If we think of the lyric as “the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell,” or as “the performance of the mind in
solitary
speech,” then we must position ourselves as readers who are hearers or performers “unseen.” The metaphor of voice bridges the otherwise incommutable distance between one “solitary cell” and another, between two otherwise mutually exclusive individuals, two “soliloquies.” Most importantly, it does so by claiming to transcend the historical circumstances of those individuals or performances, by placing “us” in the same metaphorical moment with the “speaker” (“listening … in the next” solitude, or becoming that speaker ourselves).

I would like to suggest another way of placing ourselves in relation to Dickinson's structures of address. Rather than consider the lyric “I” as a
“speaker” or, as Tucker puts it, a “persona” who talks to herself and so speaks for all of us, I want to examine what happens when Dickinson's writing directly addresses a “you,” when that writing attempts to turn toward rather than away from a specific audience. In turning from “I” to “you,” and from the metaphor of speech to the act of writing, Dickinson's writing traced an economy of reading very different than the one that Higginson and Mill and Vendler projected for the lyric and most readers of Dickinson as a lyric poet have imagined: a circuit of exchange in which the subjective self-address of the speaker is replaced by the intersubjective practice of the writer, in which the writer's seclusion might be mediated by something (or someone) other than ourselves.

The way in which I address you depends upon where you are. If you are very near, I can whisper. If you are across the table, I can speak. If you are upstairs or just outside, I can shout. If you are too distant to hear (even to overhear) my voice, I can write. And in the illusion peculiar to written address, the condition of your absence (the condition of my writing) conjures a presence more intimate than the whisper—more intimate, that is, than the metaphor of the voice, of a speaking presence, would allow.
³¹
Dickinson acknowledges this property of writing often in her letters, as we noticed in the early letter to Susan with which we began. A little over a year later, she wrote to Susan that “as I sit here Susie, alone with the winds and you, I have the old
king feeling
even more than before, for I know not even the
cracker man
will invade
this
solitude, this Sweet Sabbath of our's” (L 1:77). As Dickinson writes, “
this
solitude” becomes an intersubjective space in which the deictics “here” and “this” can point away from what it is to be alone toward a moment in which, in writing, the writer is “alone with.” As Dickinson's emphasis suggests, it is the page itself that offers a communion that displaces in that moment what earlier in the letter she has called “
their
meeting.” Their meeting takes place in church; our meeting takes place in “the church within our hearts.”

And as she writes, the transmutation of church building to mutual sympathetic investment comes to depend upon the very transit that both threatens and enables such investment “within.” Within a sublime solitude (“the old
king feeling
”) uncompromised by public commerce (the comical “
cracker man
”) Dickinson's letter goes on to imagine a private commerce that does not oppose privacy to community or inside to outside but instead makes the first term inclusive of the second, turning the terms of solitude inside out. This reversal of the normal order (the order in
which the public space would include the private, outside would contain inside) takes place not through a logic of identity but by means of the difference which is the very medium of written address:

I mourn this morning, Susie, that I have no sweet sunset to gild a page for
you
, nor any bay so blue—not even a chamber way up in the sky, as your's is, to give me thoughts of heaven, which I would give to you. You know how I must write you, down, down, in the terrestrial; no sunset here, no stars; not even a bit of
twilight
which I may poeticize—and send you! Yet Susie, there will be romance in the letter's ride to you—think of the hills and the dales, and the rivers it will pass over, and the drivers and conductors who will hurry it on to you; and wont that make a poem such as can ne'er be written?