The Irresistable Lure of Repetition and Dickinson's Poetics of Analogy

Recent attention to the materiality of Dickinson's writing has made even clearer the centrality of analogy to her poetics. If analogy in the semantic structure of language is the evocation and representation of partial similarity between like features of two things, so, too, are the formal structures of many of her poems. Stanzas exist in appositional or analogous relation to one another, as do lines and also phrases. Her habitual use of the dash is particularly conducive to this structure. When we observe the materiality of her writing, we see how some of her habits of composition, especially her use of variant words but also an inclination to use the same sets of words more than once in different contexts, expand upon the work of analogy. ¹

Here I am using the concept of analogy to refer particularly to her habit of repeating, in the service of some kind of definition, the same idea or experience, but always analogously. The variant words in a poem may be viewed as analogues for one another in much the same way as the stanzas of a poem are analogues, in much the same way that a phrase such as "It was as if" will introduce an analogue, and then another one, and then another one: each phrase or image referring back both to the phrase that precedes it and to the original impetus for the analogue. Sometimes the original referent is never named (for example, Fr14, "As if I asked a common alms - "), sometimes its identity is complicatedly ambiguous (for example, Fr576, "The difference between Despair / And Fear . . . "), and sometimes, as in a poem that apparently functions as a definition for some concept or idea -- eternity, despair, death -- the analogical structure itself denies any literalness to the definition that has been advanced and ends, or does not end, really, by giving the reader the sense that definition is not conclusive but ongoing (for example, Fr720, "As if the Sea should part," which stops with the line, "Eternity - is Those - "). You can surely add many more poems to the list. Robert Weisbuch has noted how often the boundary of a Dickinson poem is neither scene nor situation but the movement of analogy. "Dickinson gives us a pattern in several carpets and then makes the carpet vanish" (16).

This figurative hocus pocus is a sign of her poetic genius, but it is also indicative of her poetic purposes. It is the act of making the words, words that tend to work analogically, that seems finally to be the most important gesture and not the arriving at a definitive endpoint. In fact, the overall structure of her oeuvre, the defining, or analogizing, or staking out the circumference (which might be her own word for the procedure) of a specific set of experiences -- love, death, spirituality, for example -- over and over again, is further indication of the process to which I have been pointing. In this paper I want to advance some ideas about Dickinson's writing process by relating it to the psychodynamic process of repetition. The irresistible compulsion to repeat, in forms of repetition that are re-creative, even transformative, seems to me to be the underlying impulse for the forms of writing in which she indulged.

The compulsion to repeat is a phenomenon that sits at the basis of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, as Freud noticed how certain elements of a past conflict are consistently reproduced in present activity. The repressed seeks to return in the present, whether in the form of dreams, symptoms, or "acting-out." These forms of behavior can be characterized as irresistible, write Laplanche and Pontalis, having that "compulsive character which is the mark of all that emanates from the unconscious" (78, 79). The repetition compulsion is usually invoked to discuss the systematic structuring of pain and the methodological disavowal of pleasure. In "Anxiety and Instinctual Life" Freud, noting our instinctive efforts...