A Seeing and an Unseeing in the I

590 LINDA MUNK emendations are tactful, and if they err it is in the direction of restoring late ws by eliminating early M.E features, for example are> anre 24.10. Yerkes is to be congratulated for his archaeological and editorial achievement. A Seeing and an Unseeing in the I LINDA MUNK Greg Johnson. Emily Dickinson:Perception and the Poet's Quest University of Alabama Press 1<)85. xii, 231. $25.50 Emily Dickinson buried nearly eighteen hundred lyrics in a cherrywood bureau to be discovered, deciphered, and published after her death in 1886. About half of those were fair copies written in ink on eight-by-five-inch double sheets of paper, then bound with string into forty booklets or 'fascicles.' Along with the fascicles and numerous unbound fascicle sheets, Dickinson left what her first editor referred to as 'scraps' - worksheets and rough drafts of letters and poems written on discarded bills and programs, on scraps of coloured paper pinned together, on drug store bargain flyers from Amherst, on the insides of brown paper bags, on the reverse side of recipes, shopping lists, and used envelopes, on the margins of newspapers, on a wrapper of Chocolat Meunier. Thomas H . Johnson's edition of the complete poems with variant readings appeared over thirty years ago, its chronology - and thus the numbering we use to identify the poems - based roughly on Dickinson's handwriting. In 1981 Ralph W. Franklin, modifying the variorum order somewhat, published a handsome facsimile edition of the manuscript books, which includes both the 'fascicles' and the unbound fascicle sheets or 'sets,' but not the other manuscripts or the fair copies sent to friends. Still, despite this meticulous editing, anyone attempting to write a fuU-length study of Dickinson's poems faces the crucial problem of organization . How can the critic begin to order a sprawling collection of lyrics, all written more or less in ballad stanza, aU more or less concerned with death, nature, immortality, love? One way, of course, is to seize on the poet's biography - that at least had a recognizable order, if only chronological - and then allegorize. Thus appeared a line of criticism that, although now dressed in other, more fashionable weeds, is still going strong. More resourceful critics have approached Dickinson thematically , or have explored her place in the American Renaissance, in English Romanticism, in Modernism. Some read her within the structures of Freudian or Jungian psychology, or examine her life and work from a feminist perspective. At least one critic views the lyrics as one long poem in the tradition of Leaves ofGrass. Others - M.L. Rosenthal, for example - consider the fascicles to be poetic sequences in the tradition of The Pisan Cantos; Ruth Miller, the first to work with the fascicles, reads them as spiritual narratives that move from faith to doubt to renewed faith . UN1VERSITY OVTORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 4 , SUMMER 1987 EMILY DICKINSON 59' Greg Johnson's controlling structure is Dickinson's perception and the ways in which she examines and questions what she perceives, and that is a useful way to approach the lyrics with their hundreds of 'eyes.' To this he links the internalized quest, so that Dickinson's opus becomes a sort ofspiritual journalism that records her journey through 'states of consciousness' towards death, with whom she has her great romance. Leaving the question of perception aside, I would observe the obvious, thatinternalized quests did not begin with Harold Bloom's 'The Internalization of Quest-Romance' (1969). If Dickinson's journey leads towards spiritual knowledge or consciousness, as Johnson says, then she follows the parabolic models of the treasure hard to attain - grail legends, alchemical texts, Spenser, Bunyan, and so on.Johnson's habit of continually introducing and then deferring to established critics, no matter how brilliant, only clutters his otherwise intelligent study. I found it distracting, then annoying; moreover his thesis - if it is a thesis and not just an ordering device - doesn't need all that support. Presenting witnesses for something so evident as Dickinson's internal quest makes the reader question the critic's philosophical and psychological sophistication. Dickinson says, 'The Props assist the House I Until the house is built I And then the Props withdraw.' Butjohnson's house still has a good partofits scaffolding intact. And that would be fine if the props set up a metaphoric structure for Dickinson 's quest, or if they in any way helped johnson to define a basic theory of perception - why not consult Arnheim, for example, or Gombrich or Argiielles, even McLuhan, before analysing Dickinson's so-called 'perceptual theory'? But instead of going to art theorists, or to Freud and Jung direct, or even to the great line of poet-questers, Johnson relies solely on literary critics as if they were sibyls with a private line to the numinous. To discuss Dickinson's or, for that matter, anyone's 'intemaJized quest/ as Johnson does, without using psychological referents to map her internal world, is confusing (Bloom's essay on internal quests is, after all, steeped in Freud and Freudian terminology). On the other hand, to quote approvingly one critic's remark about Dickinson's 'mind moving toward individuation' without defining the term or going to Jung is equally confusing. Why, instead of tottering on the edge of unfamiliar psychoanalyic theory, didn't johnson simply write about the poet's 'quest'? Whenever we set out to reread Dickinson entire, the poems tend to shift and rearrange themselves like pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. And that is part of their fascination. At the same time, for the critic to hold one pattern in place long enough to write several hundred pages of text is a tricky business that too often results in a cramped reading of the poems. A book is supposed to cohere, so we manipulate the poems until it does. Johnson usually manages to avoid this crux, first by concentrating on Dickinson's 'eye' metaphors and her ways of seeing, second by organizing his study loosely into ten chapters, which, in essence, are ten essays stuck together with cautious, often repetitive discussions about internalized quests and 'perceptual strategies.' In the last chapters, however, the death poems are coaxed and then pushed into his perception-quest pattern by such rhetorical ploys as these: 'This heightened awareness of the value of perceptual experience is Dickinson's majorachievement in her romance with death'; and 592 C. V. PONOMAREFF 'the poet's identity stands out in isolated splendor as she conducts her private quest romance - heractual romance with death and her speculative romance with the "compound vision" of immortality, a vision curtailed and heightened by the limitations of perception within time,' Besides its lyrical straining after the Latinate sublime, such clotted prose manages to resist interpretation. Despite aU this, Johnson's individual readings ofpoems and clusters ofpoemsthe 'pearl' poems, for example - can be sensitive, often provocative; and that, for some readers, will justify portaging over boggy transitions. 'But if the quest cannot be completed,' he says of Dickinson, 'or even organized into a single coherent thrust, individual moments of vision - attainments of true perspective can be recorded, shaped into discrete poetic wholes.' Whether or not Johnson has managed to complete his own quest, his study of Dickinson sometimes achieves the individual moments of vision, the true perspective he writes about. With a big shot of Emersonian self-reliance - something fast disappearing among literary critics - he could achieve an authentic voice also. Russia and Goethe CONSTANTIN V. PONOMAREFF Andr~ von Gronicka. The Russian Image ofGoethe: Goethe in Russian Literatllreof the Second Halfof the Nineteenth Century. Volume 2 University of Pennsylvania Press 1985. 268. $25.00 Andr~ von Gronicka published his first volume on Goethe in Russia in 1968. The present volume on Goethe's reception in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century, and including the Russian Symbolists of the twentieth, is as comprehensive, scholarly, and lucid as was his first. With its publication he can now be said to have closed an important gap in Russian-German cultural and literary relations. Though Victor Zhirmunsky's distinguished three-volume '937 study of Goethe in Russian literature has preceded his, it will not take the comparative reader long to recognize the pre-eminence of von Gronicka's contribution for its lack of Marxist bias and, as a result, its greater objectivity. The second volume adds substantial material to von Gronicka's basic contention that Goethe's impact on Russian writers and poets made a significant difference to Russian literary development . It deals with a wide spectrum of writers including liberals, radicals, and Slavophiles. Most interesting to this reviewer are his chapters on Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and the Symbolists. This volume provides a wealth of crucial insights into the study of GermanRussian cultural cross-currents. It becomes fairly obvious that the Russians on the whole had a rather narrow and self-serving view of Goethe, seeing him primarily through Werther, Fallst (the first part), and his ballads. Very few Russians in the course of a century were Goethe specialists, and to some, such as Turgenev, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 4 , SUMMER 1987 ...