Corollas of Autumn: Reading Franklin's Dickinson

The impact of R. W. Franklin’s new variorum edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson on my own scholarship and teaching has so far been both sizable and, in a certain way, indirect. The publication of R. W. Franklin’s new edition, coinciding with with the triannual conference of the Emily Dickinson International Society, is being marked by an exhibition of the Dickinson materials held by the Houghton Library of Harvard University, an exhibition for which I am serving as guest curator — a form of intellectual work quite new to me, and one that by its nature perhaps tends to incite both competition with and defensive sympathy for the adjacent labors of editing. Imagining all the knowledgeable Dickinson scholars likely to come through the exhibition wondering (perhaps out loud) why this or that item was chosen over another, far more interesting, tidbit from the archive, I feel all the more sympathy for an editor’s necessary and necessarily difficult choices, choices that always entail further choices. On the other hand, the work of chosing primary materials, to be mounted ever so carefully in climate-controlled secure cabinets, ministers to desires in some ways quite opposite to Franklin’s primary aim in the edition that coincides with the Houghton’s exhibition.

In compiling the new variorum, Franklin has adhered to the fundamental “assumption that a literary work is separable from its artifact” (Franklin, “Introduction” 27). What Franklin represents in the variorum is “the multiple texts of poems, not their documents or artifacts” (Franklin, “Introduction” 36); what appears in the poem’s apparatus or not at all are what he considers the “incidental characteristics of the artifacts” (Franklin, “Introduction” 35) from which those texts are drawn — the slant of Dickinson’s dashes, the character of the paper on which she writes, the surrounding text of letters that modulate into poems, the manuscript line breaks that break up more or less conventionally rhymed and metered stanzas. The curator’s work by definition and by contrast highlights, indeed institutionally sacralizes, the incidents of the artifact. Where those artifacts are particularly difficult to decipher, the visitor to the Houghton’s Dickinson exhibition will find in the exhibition’s apparatus transcripts of poems and important parts of the letters — in other words, the texts. The work of mounting the Dickinson exhibition thus perfectly reverses the relationship between figure and ground, primary and secondary, document and apparatus, that obtains in Franklin’s variorum. It also, as it happens, reverses the direction of interest of my own scholarly work to date, which has tended to focus on Dickinson’s exchanges with certain of the print texts surrounding her, thus tacitly treating Dickinson’s works, despite their unpublished status, as texts among other texts rather than as artifacts, documents, or manuscript art — a focus that doubtless reflects some of my own anxiety over the authority of the inward-turning, uncirculating numinous thing.

As Franklin observes, noting the difference between the editorial practices shaping his variorum and those behind his earlier facsimile edition of The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, “There can be many manifestations of a literary work” (Franklin, “Introduction” 27); we would agree entirely, I believe, that the Houghton exhibition is one more manifestation, another representation and so, interpretation of Dickinson’s work, not a unmediated revelation of the numinous thing itself. But there are many versions of “many,” and there is uncomfortably more at stake here, as the lively controversies already started over Franklin’s variorum attest. ¹ It is not only a question of different “manifestations of a literary work”; it is a question of different versions of the literary. ² To set my work on the exhibition side by side with my reading of the new variorum is to experience a particularly intense version of those optical illusions so useful as pedagogical exempla to my graduate-school teachers at Yale: it is a face or it is a vase, but the eye can only ever alternate between these two visual constructions of the image, whatever the mind knows of their simultaneity. To adapt Paul de Man’s testiest version of the...