Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dickinson's Dialectic

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/edj.0.0149

1096-858X

Charles Altierí,

Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity

Dickinson's Dialectic Charles Altieri (bio) I need my not unpretentious title in order to address what I suspect will remain the central evaluative question in Dickinson criticism: how do we correlate our anger with and distance from the narrowness of her life with the admiration that the poetry elicits? Most of the time readers feel they have to choose between the life and the work—either by turning Dickinson into some kind of existential victim-hero or by attributing to the work a transcendental textuality that runs the danger not only of bracketing Dickinson's own historicity but also of reducing the existential roles the poems can play for engaged readerly imaginations. I think we can improve the balance, can keep the life and the work intimately connected by concentrating on some of the poems that take up what Dickinson thought was at stake in her writing poetry. For then we have a clear model of work struggling to grapple with the general fears of impotence and submission enforced by the contingencies of her life. I call this struggle "dialectical." But to justify appropriating the aura and the philosophical analogues associated with that term, I have to flesh out my case by invoking an essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel attempting to demonstrate the impossibility of scientifically objective treatments of various aspects of subjectivity. Nagel explores a question that would not immediately leap to the mind of either philosophers or readers of Dickinson: "What is it like to be a bat?" We cannot answer this question by heaping up details about sonar navigation. For we are not asking how bats move but how they experience moving. And we cannot quite find any analogues in our own experience. We can almost imagine ourselves as bats, but that entails envisioning bats moving as we do, when we want to know "what is it like for a bat to be a bat." We have to grant bats enough perspectival orientation for there to be something that it is like to be a bat, but we [End Page 66] cannot specify what that might be. (Ironically Nagel thinks our best hope for characterizing that mode of existence might involve rejecting processes of empathic projection for a recast notion of how experience might have an objective character, so that we no longer have to depend on imagination to appreciate what takes place from a point of view.) I doubt that it is just because I am a twentieth-century male that I think the question "what is it like to be Emily Dickinson" has intriguing parallels to Nagel's case. While my analogue puts me in the unfortunate position of having to insist that no opproprium is meant by the comparison to a bat, it also introduces a way of getting at some of the evocative strangeness in Dickinson's poetry. While there is some distance entailed in any question what is like to be a certain person, we usually feel less distance in asking it of others than we do in asking it of Dickinson. In her case the poetry seems to project a gulf, a sense that being Emily Dickinson is a burden and a permission that we cannot simply identify with. We have to acknowledge a strangeness about her. And that is why metaphors of site are so crucial in reading her: we do not simply enter a conversation but work to share an imaginative locale within which certain experiences begin to take form and make sense. So if we are to approach this blend of the personal with the constructive and abstract, we seem forced to a distinctive version of Nagel's questioning: what is it like to be Emily Dickinson asking what is it like to be in the poems created in order to handle being like Emily Dickinson? In other words, one cannot ask what it is like to be Emily Dickinson without finding ways to ask how Emily Dickinson dealt with her own images of being Emily Dickinson. Consider for example the representative force of the following poem: I never heard the word "escape"Without a quicker blood,A sudden expectation,A flying attitude! I never heard...