Indiana University Press

      And what the dead had no speech for, when living,      They can tell you, being dead: the communicationOf the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

(T. S. Eliot, from Little Gidding, part 1)

"Telepathy" may be the site of a certain fold, of a cutting or interruption. It may appear on occasion as some uncanny reading-machine, a sort of reader-response criticism in reverse. Elsewhere it will be linked with questions of divination and fortune telling, […] proper names and cryptonymy, doors and thresholds, poetry, hysteria and hypnosis, apocalypse and the so-called death-drive, silence, ghosts and writing.

(Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature)

The following cluster of essays was originally prepared for delivery in two mirror sessions organized by W. Speed Hill for the Society for Textual Scholarship's 2007 conference. Titled "Psychic Connections and Disconnections: Editors and Writers Choosing Each Other", the sessions interrogated the intersection of the discourses of editing and telepathy. In what sense is editing linked with questions of divination and second sight? Do we choose a text, or, rather, does a text foresee its addressee/editor? And if, across the apparently untraversable wastes of time and space, a text chooses us, singling us out to make us its willing or unwilling companion, to what extent does it then propel all of our future itineraries? Together, the accounts offered by Jack Stillinger, Donald H. Reiman, J. C. C. Mays, David Greetham, and W. Speed Hill trace the many dark paths by which editors are led towards, into, and, sometimes, away from texts. The essays are largely personal and occasionally almost private: they concern the lure of the physical document, the search, often doomed, for a surrogate father, the dialectics of presence and absence in the practice of editing, the confusion of choice and chance in life [End Page 3] and work. Yet while the essays seem to have so many points of contact with one another, so they may also be said to offer conflicting conceptions of editing. One hermeneutics conceives of editing as one in which a conversation between a living editor and a dead author is still possible and in which editing involves the "touching of [the author's] consciousness" (Peters 1999, 153). Another, more heretical hermeneutics imagines editing as a "shattered communication situation" (Peters 1999, 149). Here, editing is conceived as essentially solitary, only the interpretation of traces.1

Of the essays gathered here, it is Jack Stillinger's "Keats and Me" that is least marked by the experience of estrangement, least troubled by tears in time and space. In fact, as Stillinger points out, he and Keats "grew up together in Texas" in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Their relationship, from its earliest stages, "involved manuscripts [. . .] bits of paper". In Stillinger's graduate work at Harvard under the direction of Hyder Rollins, a welcoming mentor and unproblematic father figure, Stillinger trained first as a letters editor. Perhaps this long apprenticeship in editing the exchanges between Keats and his Circle, coupled with the material evidence in these communiqués of more spiritual connections among the interlocutors, convinced Stillinger of the power of reciprocity even beyond the grave. Moreover, as he discovered, the work of textual scholarship, particularly the intimate labors of transcription, could lead to the dissolving of distance between author and editor and, on rare occasions, to the beautiful and uncanny confusion of their hands: "In working with Keats's texts I have become so involved in the physical character of the manuscripts that I sometimes felt as though I had written them myself". In turning from Keats's letters to his poems, Stillinger retains his optimism. His editorial work is a salutary reminder that although our "communication with the dead may never reach them, [. . .] such elliptical sending is as important as circular reciprocity" (Peters 1999, 152). It is not the "address gap" between himself and Keats that Stillinger focuses on, but, rather, the fundamentally dialogic nature of letters and poems alike.2 The fanning out of address that occurs first within the boundaries of the Keats Circle itself and that expands naturally as Keats's work drifts out of its original historical and cultural contexts encourages Stillinger's critical investigations into the dynamics of multiple authorship and collaboration. Indeed, the apparent openness of Keats's works towards a plurality of worlds and interpreters fosters [End Page 4] Stillinger's imagination of the poet as "on the reader's side, taking pleasure in each fresh way of reading his work", and approving, at least tacitly, each age's editorial approach to his oeuvre.

Donald H. Reiman did not initially enjoy such cordial relations with Percy Bysshe Shelley. On the contrary, while very early in his life he was attracted to the "master spirits from previous centuries", the one master spirit who consistently failed to take hold of his imagination was Shelley. The author of Prometheus Unbound bored and mystified him, and the opening pages of his narrative "Means and Ends" constitute an elaborate tale of evasion that stretches from the short days of Reiman's childhood to his long years of graduate study. Thus only Reiman's chance encounter with and then total immersion in The Triumph of Life in preparation for his qualifying exams led to a reversal in his response to Shelley and, further, to a more than thirty-year career editing and writing about his works. Like Stillinger's, Reiman's editorial methodology reflects a commitment to physical documents and a belief that close scrutiny of the contents of the archive—the author's manuscripts, the cache of related manuscripts—may lead to the discovery and reconstruction of an author's original conception: "Painstaking study of The Triumph of Life [. . .] taught me that the best path to the authorial meaning of a poem was to follow the twists and turns of Shelley's drafts and fair copies—not just word by word, but often letter by letter—trying to imagine why he changed one word into another". Following in the line of descent from the Romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Boeckh, Reiman conceives of interpretation as a joint venture in which the editor is "called upon to reawaken in his own mind the idea conceived and expressed by the mind of the author".3 Yet he is also aware that the manuscript is never wholly transparent and that the editor's combined powers of sympathy and speculation may never be tantamount to a telepathic connection. "Did I choose Shelley? Did he choose me?" Reiman asks. At the end of his essay, instead of pursuing the psychic connection between himself and Shelley further, Reiman instead imagines a final severing of connections. The parting is all the more poignant, perhaps, given that his point of entry has been the last major fragment on which Shelley had been working before his death at sea: "In my later years, I've avoided tying myself to the mast of Shelley's spirit's bark, in which he, like Dante, wished to launch into the storm [. . .] to sail 'darkly, fearfully, afar'". If a manuscript is a map, an editor is bound to follow his author through but not beyond it.

Like Jack Stillinger and Donald Reiman, J. C. C. Mays has devoted the better portion of his scholarly career to the editing of a Romantic poet. His [End Page 5] account of his long association with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, however, begins where Reiman's ends: with a distancing. The Poetical Works are not a safe, secure house Mays lives inside, but a transitory shelter from which he is always already departing. In tracing the itinerary of his relationship with Coleridge—which begins, perhaps, at the end of Mays's undergraduate studies and with a chance remark by an anonymous interviewer that his voice appeared to "come from elsewhere" and does not end with the publication of the Coleridge's Works—Mays seeks to remind us of the strangeness and unpredictability of our personal and scholarly paths. Way does lead onto way, but the way that opens—and the beauty that attends it—is more random than we could have imagined and more various than we could ever record. From the beginning, then, Mays's "Uncalculated Variance" is marked by a deep misgiving about the very charge Speed Hill has given him, marked, that is, by a suspicion of our tendency to impose narrativity and causality on "all the numberless goings-on of life".4 Beginning with a brief meditation titled "beside oneself", continuing with a long fragment titled "events having no necessary connection", and concluding with a "supplement: 'never give all the heart' ", Mays offers us not a cohesive account of his editing of Coleridge, but, rather, a portrait in pieces. Moreover, in searching for any possible connection, Mays cites only their mutual feeling of "diffidence or detachment", the sense Coleridge described in his notebooks as "a cold hollow spot, an aching in that heart". The relationship between author and editor is oblique: they are strangers to each other. And yet, paradoxically, their remoteness from one another also constitutes a spaciousness in which a genuine encounter, not a projection, can take place. The failure to confuse self and other—though it may spell death for lovers—is salutary for editors. Writing from his "few sylvan acres" of solitude in "swampy Wicklow", Mays renounces once and for all the search for personal signs of connection with Coleridge to imagine a reading in which "private coincidences are left behind". Although he still finds himself "trawling through the collected edition, deflected into new channels of thought, [. . .] like any other reader [emphasis added]", his reading leads him to conclude that Coleridge's writing "creates a world to move out from, not to remain within".

No work—certainly no creative work—has a single trajectory, or a single, chosen addressee, but remains open to the chaotic field of heterogeneous forces that comprise reality. To different degrees, Stillinger, Reiman, and Mays remind us of the effects of chance on destiny, suggesting an alliance, rather than an opposition, between arbitrariness and motivation. It is by chance or [End Page 6] not that Stillinger "chooses" Keats, Reiman Shelley, and Mays Coleridge: the very openness of Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, their address to no one in particular, allows for all manner of strange couplings over time and space. And, also, for all manner of uncouplings. Thus in "How I Lost My Author(s)", David Greetham speaks of his failure to establish a telepathic connection first with John Trevisa and later with Thomas Hoccleve during his long years of editorial work on their writings. For Greetham, working far from the region of Romanticism and almost as far from the reach of Romantic ideology, the act of editing was never predicated on the sympathetic connection of souls. If, at times, Greetham's experiments seem to be possible only via a telepathic act—e.g., the importing of accidentals found in Hoccleve's autograph manuscripts into a work for which no autograph copy exists—so he is quick to remind us that such experiments may owe more to editorial hubris than to any secret interchange between the living and the dead. For Greetham, Trevisa the translator, "obscured not by a 'veil of print' but by scribal confusion and mistransmission", and Hoccleve, the anally-retentive bureaucrat-poet "writing about the inability to write", are not "companions"—"Did I really want to establish psychic confraternities with the faceless and / or the neurotic or depressed?"—but inspiration for fresh meditations on the contingency—cultural, historical—of the very ideology of editing. Indeed, it is precisely the failure of the psychic connection between Greetham and his authors that illuminates the hermeneutic rupture between an original work and all subsequent editions of it. More and more, editions appear to Greetham as crime scenes he cannot stop investigating. Greetham's casting off of authors is only a prefatory gesture to his abandonment of the praxis of editing altogether in order to engage himself more fully in the critique of the "unexamined hegemony of any editorial/authorial/ philosophical protocols that could be employed on any text". Like Surin's poems, which were inspired, Michel de Certeau writes, "by the act of hurling oneself" (1986, 104), so Greetham's editorial career seems driven by a desire to be unhoused. The centrifugal tendency of his thinking about editing reminds us that in this field "outsiders" may reveal as much if not more than "insiders" about the authors and the texts they grapple with, and that this "thought from the outside" (Foucault 1990, 16) may lead to a "textual jouissance" powerful enough to override the "editorial death wish".

Fortune, speed us!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .The swifter speed the better.

(Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, Act IV, scene iv) [End Page 7]

It remains for me to speak of Speed Hill's contribution to this collection, "The Psychic Link". He was to have delivered the paper on March 16, 2007, in the first of the two sessions he had organized, but the rapid progress of Parkinson's disease prevented him from attending. Barbara Oberg read the paper for him, unknowing, as were we all, that her voice carried Speed Hill's last message to his STS colleagues. Later that night, snow fell over New York City, grounding air traffic and threatening to bring the conference to an early end. In retrospect, the screen of falling snow seems like an uncanny interleaf, or the "site of a certain fold" (Royle 1991, 7), partly revealing, partly concealing Speed's final communication. What had he wished to tell us?

Hill's essay, conceived under the sign of a grave illness and already composed almost entirely in the third person, is a hauntingly private—even cryptic—text. It does not trace in any detail his long and intense association with Richard Hooker, the seventeenth-century English divine whose The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie and other writings he spent his life editing, nor does it allude even once to his connection with the Society for Textual Scholarship, of which he was, with David Greetham, a co-founder. Rather, Hill's last work reflects on his beginnings, not as an editor, but in the world itself, and it is Wordsworth and Freud, not Hooker, who serve as his muses here. For the "psychic link" Hill perceives is that between his earliest and latest selves, selves linked, paradoxically, by their experience of rupture. Thus the violent irruption of Parkinson's disease is also Hill's point of re-entry into earlier, only apparently forgotten memories of psychic splitting. These moments, which Wordsworth so famously called "spots of time" and Freud "screen memories," form the traumatic punctum of Hill's essay.

"What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time? / If thou remembrest aught ere thou came here / How thou camest here thou mayst".5 The first and most enigmatic of Hill's screen memories, the sudden and, to the child, inexplicable departure of his live-in nanny when he reached the age of six, is located at the very "twilight of remembered life", when memory seems most subject to revision.6 Yet as Wordsworth and Freud after him knew, what was a painful trauma for the child might become a source of power for the adult. Just so, Hill maintains that his early feelings of abandonment led to the redirection of his ambitions outward into the public sphere. His longing for acknowledgment, his (failed) search for a surrogate father, his elaborate acts of self-fashioning, even his editing of Hooker—all can be traced back to an originary and ever un-nameable bereavement. Following not only Freud, but, it [End Page 8] seems, Abraham and Torek, Hill implies that the introjection of primary loss establishes an "empty space" (1980, 316), a void from which speech and the significance of language emerge. In Speed Hill's late—latest—essay editing is figured as consolation and compensation for a primal deprivation. "What", he asks, "does my own model of the unconscious [. . .] have to do with textual criticism? What is the connection?". And again, the answer circles around "rupture": "Ruptures do not heal of their own accord [. . .] [They] destroy connections. Editors restore (textual) connections, repair textual trauma". In the early stages of his thinking about grief, Freud imagined that mourning reaches a decisive end when the subject severs his or her emotional attachment to the lost love object and reinvests his or her libido in a new object. In such an economy, Hill's extraordinary labors editing the works of Richard Hooker might suggest that he had indeed identified and embraced a new love object, and that mourning might come to its end.

Yet after many years of work editing Hooker, and when the publication of Hooker's "Works"—all but the Index of Works and Names—by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press seemed to signal that a final resolution was at hand, Hill returned to a meditation on loss. Editing, while it may bind together textual wounds cannot assuage non-textual damages. Moreover, the distance between words and the "thoughts too deep for words" is absolute: "The traumatic event with which I began is less susceptible to editorial closure. Indeed, those of us who live in a world of words, who convert words as counters for feelings, and who manipulate these symbolic counters so as to allow access to the world beneath the tympanum, will forever be frustrated". The elegiac quality of Hill's writing seems closer to Freud's work on loss post "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917). In his revised accounts of mourning, Freud no longer imagines the mourner as capable of coming to the end of loss, but, rather, as a "precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes", that is, as an incarnate history of lost attachments.7 Though the mourner may continue, unconsciously, to rage against these (lost) bonds, so he or she may also move from "rage to recognition, accepting his own contingency and welcoming a process of mourning that can never be completed" (Clewell 2004, 59).

Speed Hill's last spoken words are not known to us. They belong to the realm of the wholly private. But his last text, written when his relationship to contingency—his subjection to the mercy of chance—was no longer a theoretical matter but an immediate prospect has much to tell us about the contingent and time-bound nature of the editorial enterprise. Editing is an ephemeral act, elegiac in its very essence. Yet the transitoriness of the act of editing, Hill's [End Page 9] last work suggests, guarantees rather than negates its potential to mark out new zones of inquiry, to open up new points of rendezvous between authors and all order of readers—from the most naïve to the most sophisticated.

Coda

William Speed Hill passed away on 8 May 2007. I began editing these essays on the psychic connections between authors and editors in the late summer. As I worked, I found myself waiting for a sign from Speed. But none came, and I concluded that we had entered the "shattered communication situation". There were no more letters, no more telephone messages, no more direct dispatches at all. All that remained was the brief, veiled text printed here. In the fall, however, something like a sign may have appeared. It did not come directly from Speed—do true signs ever?—but from Jim Mays, who forwarded a digital snapshot of A. Drury's 1907 massive stone figure of Richard Hooker. The statue, found in the garden of Exeter Cathedral and the only statue of Hooker in the world, is an imposing one, undoubtedly meant to convey the weight of Hooker's Anglicanism. But at the very moment that this photograph was taken a pigeon alighted on Hooker's head. The bird, so the sender remarked, had reminded him of Speed. It is not necessary to believe in the transmigration of souls to spy Speed's spirit here. Indeed, in the search for signs of certain contact we are apt to miss more elliptical but no less important ones. In contrast to the gravitas of the stony Hooker, the bird seems ready to for flight. In gazing at it, I wonder: Did Speed pose the question about the psychic connections between editors and their authors to his friends and colleagues with no intention of answering it himself? Or with the intention of answering by leaving himself?

How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

(William Blake, A Memorable Fancy)

Good speed, Speed.

Marta L. Werner
D'Youville College
Marta L. Werner

Marta Werner is Associate Professor of English at D'Youville College. She is the author/editor of Emily Dickinson's Open Folios and Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Dickinson's Late Fragments. She is also co-author/editor, with Nicholas Lawrence, of Ordinary Mysteries: The Common Journal of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne.

Works Cited

Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torek. 1980. "Introjection-incorporation: Mourning or melancholia". In Psychoanalysis in France, edited by Serge Lebovici and David Widlocher. New York: International Universities Press. [End Page 10]
Betti, Emilio. 1988. "The Principles of the New Science of G. B. Vico and The Theory of Historical Interpretation". New Vico Studies 6: 31-50.
Blake, William. "A Memorable Fancy". In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. http://www.levity.com/alchemy/blake_ma.html. 12/7/2007.
Boeckh, Philip August. 1985. "Philosophical hermeneutics". In The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present, edited by K. Mueller-Vollmer, 132-47. New York: Continuum.
Clewell, Tammy. 2004. "Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud's Psychoanalysis of Loss". Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52: 11, 43-67.
Curtis, Jared, ed. 1983. William Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800-1807. In The Cornell Wordsworth, general editor Stephen Parrish. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
De Certeau, Michel. 1986. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Eliot, T[homas] S[tearns]. 1943. Little Gidding. In Four Quartets. London: Faber.
Freud, Sigmund. [1917] 1999. "Mourning and Melancholia". In The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey. London: Vintage.
———. [1923] 1999. "The Ego and the Id". In The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey. London: Vintage.
Foucault, Michel, and Maurice Blanchot. 1990. Foucault/Blanchot, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi. New York: Zone Books.
Hulme, Peter, and William H. Sherman, eds. 2003. William Shakespeare's The Tempest. New York: W. W. Norton.
Mays, J[ames] C. C., ed. 2001. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Poetical Works: Part I. Poems (Reading Texts). 2 vols. In The Collected Writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 16. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Menzell, Herbert. 1971. "Quasi Mass Communication: A Neglected Area". Public Opinion Quarterly 35: 406-9.
Orgel, Stephen, ed. 1997. William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parrish, Stephen, ed. 1977. William Wordsworth's The Prelude, 1798-1799. In The Cornell Wordsworth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Royle, Nicholas. 1991. Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind. Oxford: Basil Blackwood.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1986. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, edited by Heinz Kimmerle, translated by James Duke and Jack Forstman. Atlanta: Scholars Press. [End Page 11]

Footnotes

1. John Durham Peters's Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Comunication is foundational for my thinking in this essay about the hermeneutics of editing; see especially the essays "Phantasms of the Living, Dialogues with the Dead" and "The Quest for Authentic Connection" (Peters 1999, 137–76; 177–225).

2. The phrase "address gap" is Herbert Menzel's (1971).

3. Betti 1988, 32. See, especially, Schleiermacher 2002 and Boeckh 1985.

4. The lines are Coleridge's in Frost at Midnight; see Mays 2001, 452.

5. The lines are Prospero's from Shakespeare's The Tempest, I.ii.50–52; see Hulme and Sherman 2003.

6. The line is Wordsworth's, in The Prelude, 1.298; see Parrish 1977.

7. Freud's later account of mourning is found in his essay, "The Ego and the Id"; for this passage see Freud [1923] 1999, 29.

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