Reverse Cannot Befall

Perhaps there is no thought, no chance for thought, no writing, no chance for writing, without the chance to reverse course: no chance for thinking and writing without the reof reverse, the prefix that challenges the very idea of pre-fixing, as the prefix reannounces that what is is not fixed. The prefix announces that the fix is not in (or on) and announces instead the possibility (the necessary possibility, let's say) of unfixing: what is has not been fixed or determined in advance (at least not absolutely). The prefix unfixes; reis a pre-unfix. It unfixes the preof the fix.

I have borrowed my title from the first line of a poem by Emily Dickinson in which the poet-speaker asserts that a fine prosperity whose sources are within cannot be reversed, a poem, in other words, that celebrates inner strength and resolve. If one's source of prosperity is within, then one will be immune to various reversals of fortune, as the poem plays on the phrase without using it. The chance for such a reversal is negated as if from the start. In this telling of the poem, reversibility is a risk. One does not want one's fortunes reversed, which assumes, of course, that one is content with one's current fortunes, the prosperity that one has by whatever means stored up within oneself. The threat of reversibility can be kept at arm's length, if one develops sources of prosperity that are within and so independent of others, independent of sources outside the self. This summary makes the poem sound like rather conventional self-help advice, or what has become rather conventional self-help advice along the lines of a caricatured reading of Emerson's "Self-Reliance" essay, and as such it is a particularly bad summary of the poem. Thankfully, it is only a summary of the first stanza. In the second and final stanza of the poem, the poet-speaker hints at a metaphorical comparison: a fine prosperity whose sources are within is like a diamond that can never be marred by external instruments. And Dickinson is quite specific: this relatively abstract prosperity is not like just any diamond but one in far Bolivian ground. In other words, the poem reaches for a concrete metaphor to describe an abstraction the poem never names, the self or mind or soul whose sources are interior, or names only as Prosperity. But the metaphorical analogy that centers the poem also raises difficult questions, questions that emerge when the terms of the metaphorical analogy are themselves reversed: A Prosperity immune to reversal is inorganic? Inanimate? Nonhuman? A commodity? What then of the imagined self, mind, or soul? Is reversibility good or bad if one can prevent it by making oneself into (or into something like) a mute, immovable, commodified object? At what cost, in other words, is this fine prosperity purchased?

I begin by placing Dickinson's poem in the context of a broader critical tradition wary of reversibility, where any simple reversal is at best a preparatory step and at worst a strategy for resisting critical thought. Does reversibility make anything happen? Does it, in Dickinson's idiom, make anything befall? In the context of these broader critical questions, questions that touch on available methods and models, I strain, in turn, to hear the "verse" in reverse, attending to the work of poetry in reversibility, and take reversing as a figure for reimagining, rethinking, rewriting, making less fixed the previously imagined, thought, written, or versed. The second stanza of "Reverse cannot befall" subjects the poem's opening declaration to reversal through metaphorical analogy (as the second stanza discovers a metaphor to describe again the Prosperity announced in the first), and this reversal also possibly reverses (turns on and turns around) the poem's opening declaration. How can verse help us to think about the force of reversibility? How can reversing help us to think along with and through poetry?

Reversibility

In The Limits of Critique, dissatisfied with the hermeneutics of suspicion and all of the critical terms that have...