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The Emily Dickinson Journal 12.1 (2003) 53-79



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As there are Apartments:
Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts and Critical Desire at the Scene of Reading

Melanie Hubbard

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[Appendix]

Recent Dickinson scholarship has descried a distressing trend in manuscript studies: the fetishization of Dickinson's "body" in holograph. 1 A kind of fantastic certainty is being attributed to manuscript scholars, who now know, it seems, the answer to the question, What is a Dickinson poem. It is as if we no longer need to edit—we can simply reproduce her work in facsimile. Or, better—since "reproducibility" is suspect in this post-industrial, post-print age, only a pilgrimage to the archives will suffice. And there, at last (despite a certain winsome disarray), will be Emily herself, all her intentions intact: that shimmer, that presence. That's the fantasy, as destructive as it is sublime.

Perhaps manuscript scholars indulge the fantasy, perhaps not. But never fear: Dickinson has made a trip to the archives for us. As if she herself were the fetishizing manuscript scholar lately abjured, in certain compositions—poetic commentaries creating palimpsests over her own previous handwriting—Dickinson figures herself as a reader searching her manuscripts for a lost presence—either that of her past or absent self, or that of another—her dead father. And of course she isn't there. (Neither is he.) Neither in signatures nor in shopping lists is her "self" to be found somehow intact apart from the reading process itself.

The "function of Dickinson at the present time" appears to be to allow us to think about both representation (the problem of editing her texts) and the work of reading (our power to determine—or engage—those texts' meanings). The manuscripts need not be read as settling these questions at [End Page 53] all; they have in fact raised these questions, ever since Franklin's edition of the fascicles in facsimile. Indeed, I contend that Dickinson's very refusal to print—her choice to remain in manuscript and her refusal of editorial convention—allowed her to explore the materiality of representation, to undertake increasingly experimental forms of representation, and to deliver creative power to the reader. These special palimpsestic texts—in spirit so like the rest of her undecidable compositions—refuse to be rescued, recovered, or completed, even by Dickinson herself. There can be no containment, no immediacy, no 'authorized' version, even as Dickinson holds out the possibility of imagining an uncanny encounter in them with a reader/writer named "Dickinson."

That self is always receding. Dickinson is well aware throughout her oeuvre of the dangers of locating an "author"—or any fixed referent—behind the word; she eschews "authorship." There is only reading, and reading is precisely both the longing for meaning and its frustration. It is also a construction site. An elopement. Possibly a crime scene.

I offer an early poem to make this larger case first; then we'll get on to the palimpsests. In a fascicle poem dated about 1862 (J357, in Fascicle 29), Dickinson figures reading as an ongoing engagement with the material signifier. Disjoining representation from referent, this piece damns the 'author' as the end of reading.

God is a distant - stately Lover -
Woos, as He states us - by His Son -
Verily, a Vicarious Courtship -
"Miles", and "Priscilla", were such an One -

But, lest the Soul - like fair "Priscilla"
Choose the Envoy - and spurn the Groom -
Vouches, with hyperbolic archness -
"Miles", and "John Alden" are Synonyme -

(J357, Fr615) 2

The poem managed to offend a lot of people. 3 The scandal is that Dickinson paints God as a con artist, as a nasty trickster; he takes a soul against her will by the force of his logical authority. His insistence that his [End Page 54] "Word" (Jesus) is "Synonyme" with himself might be a reassurance to the saved; after all, the incarnation of the Word has always been read by the church as an assurance that to know Jesus is to know God. But God's dismissal of...

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