Emily Dickinson's Fascicles: Method & Meaning

The chief subject of my paper is my recently published book, Emily Dickinson's Fascicles: Method & Meaning. I will begin by describing how I went about studying the fascicles, then describe some of the discoveries I present in my book. And finally, by looking at the first fascicle's first poem, I will demonstrate how each fascicle poem is altered and illuminated when it is read in the larger context of the fascicular edifice.

My work on the fascicles began immediately after the publication of Ralph W. Franklin's 1981 Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. The first thing I did was to make typescripts of the fascicles, to enable me to study them more easily. As I studied my typescript fascicles, I initially found little to dispute the theory of many, that the fascicles are simply random gatherings. But then it occurred to me that if the booklets were, as they might be, literally "fascicles"—a term the dictionary defines as "divisions" or "installments" of a single book—there should be evidence of this in the fortieth fascicle, which would be the book's conclusion. Because I was making no headway by beginning with Fascicle 1 and reading them straight through, I decided to begin with a careful reading of Fascicle 40. By beginning with Fascicle 40, which is the central focus of my book, I have thus read the fascicles "backward." By doing so, I have followed the example of Emily Dickinson herself, and I have done so for precisely the same reason: as Dickinson wrote of another unidentified woman poet, she often read "her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned" her (PF30).

The years I spent decoding Fascicle 40 were quite simply the most thrilling in my life. I want to stress that I did not begin with a thesis and then search for evidence to prove my thesis. Rather, I was prepared to find whatever the text might reveal, even if the text contradicted my own long-held views—which happened in several cases. Nor did I work much with secondary sources, because there was in the 1980s (and still is to date) surprisingly little written about the fascicles, and also very little critical commentary on most of the twenty-one cryptic poems Emily Dickinson bound together in Fascicle 40. My modus operandi was therefore to become totally engrossed in Fascicle 40, to experience what Jacques Lacan calls the "jouissance" of a complete immersion in this strange, compelling text.

Without even intending to do so, I had quickly memorized Fascicle 40. This meant that if I took a morning walk, or awakened in the middle of the night, I could summon to memory a single poem, or even the whole fascicle, and ponder its meaning. And as I discovered, this is precisely what the F-40 poems require: deep and careful meditation. Just contemplating the F-40 poems was, of course, not enough. My major sources for decoding each poem were two books that Emily Dickinson herself had studied assiduously: Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language and the King James version of the Bible.

In the process of grappling with F-40's dense, riddling poems, I began to find evidence that beneath their apparent multiplicity lies a deep structural and thematic unity. As I discovered, the F-40 poems refer to one another, so much so that the referent for one poem's pronoun is sometimes found in another poem. As I also discovered, one cannot decipher F-40 unless one remembers the other thirty-nine fascicles. F-40 is an apologia pro vita sua, in which the protagonist recollects events that occur in preceding fascicles. This means that the reader, too, must recollect the preceding fascicles in order to comprehend Fascicle 40. I also began to find that clusters of F-40 poems, like many biblical passages, are linked by a key word or words. F-40's first four poems, for example, are linked by the word "Day." And its final five poems are linked by the word "Faith," an important clue leading to the discovery...