“Sumptuous - Despair:” The Function of Desire in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry(This is a revised and substantially enlarged version of a key address delivered at the 1995 International Emily Dickinson Conference / Washington D.C.)

1. The Deficient SubjectRecent criticism has focused intensely on the problematic status of the human subject, and poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, following the example of Nietzsche, Mach, Broch and others, have confidently announced its death - prematurely as it now turns out. This is hardly surprising. The subject or (disregarding terminological distinctions) the self was from the start a contested notion in Western civilization. It never had the conceptual stability that critics chose to attack. Even Descartes, commonly acknowledged as the creator of the self-dependent modern subject, felt constrained to introduce into his philosophical system some oddly inconsistent features in order to safeguard the rational self’s alleged autonomy. The Romantics in particular were intensely aware of the precarious status of the subject. It is to them that we owe in large part the creation of the modern individual self. Since Dickinson also worked within this tradition, a glance at the Romantic conception of selfhood is in order.

Initially, the Romantics had a tremendous faith in the self’s creative potential, but (as Manfred Frank has forcefully demonstrated) they also made the disturbing discovery that the subject, having lost its transcendental origin, cannot ground itself and that its autonomy is spurious. The celebration of individual selfhood, often experienced by the Romantics in religious terms (as conversion or rebirth), is at the same time subverted by attendant feelings of self-alienation - a state of exile brought on by the fall into consciousness and the ensuing loss of Edenic unity. Creative exuberance in Romantic texts thus tends to be threatened by a dark and dizzy “Abyss” (an image likewise found in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley), by a “Chasm” yawning beneath the apparent plenitude of life.

With Emily Dickinson, this sense of alienation is raised to a new pitch. She pictures her coming into existence as a “mighty Crack -/ To make me visible -” (P891). One of her youthful letters is signed: “Emily - I believe” (L829). The comical role-playing in her epistolary exchanges only serves to underscore her nagging doubts. The poet’s early phase appears to culminate in the pressing question: “What is life? . . . [I] wonder what I am and who has made me so?” (L172) In the poem “To be alive - is Power -” (P677) existence takes on the quality of “Omnipotence,” and the lyrical self’s creative “Will” pretends to equal the creative power of God. However, as the poem’s final line grudgingly concedes, the human subject is not self-sufficient: “Such being Finitude.” In a letter addressed to her girlfriend Abiah Root, Dickinson confesses: “I am sailing upon an awful precipice” (L10), and her late poetry

still probes the life-long dilemma: “A Pit - but Heaven over it -/ And Heaven beside, and Heaven abroad; / And yet a Pit -/ With Heaven over it.” (P1712) Dickinson’s cultural heritage - especially the paradoxical nature of Puritan selfhood along with the Transcendentalist emphasis on “Self-Reliance” - radicalized the problem for her, and she was forced to look for new tactics in her effort to reconstruct a viable New-England self.

As we may gather from the poems and letters alike, a fundamental lack or want pervades much of Dickinson’s oeuvre: “I have an aching void in my heart,” she complains, “which I am convinced the world can never fill” (L11). In many ways, her poetry is an expression of this “void” along with a bold effort to “fill” it. One could indeed argue that Dickinson attempts nothing less than to analyze and - if possible - to heal and reunify an alienated, a wounded and fundamentally flawed self. Hence, the central importance of the notion of desire in her work. Richard Wilbur’s brilliant article “Sumptuous Destitution” approaches her poetry through the Romantic credo in the superiority of the imagination over the limitations of reality. “[O]nce an object has been magnified by desire,” Wilbur (echoing Blake) points out, “it cannot be wholly possessed by appetite.” Desire is of course a signal feature of Romantic literature, best instanced by A.W. Schlegel’s famous definition of romantic literature as a “literature of desire;” in Goethe’s Mignon it has found one of its most memorable incarnations. And yet, it is a New England writer that has explored the self’s capacity for desire more deeply than any other nineteenth-century writer, and on a level of reflection nowhere paralleled in European and American Romanticism.

Using Wilbur’s notion of desire as a starting point, I propose to offer a revision and a sharpening of this concept. By closely analyzing the structure of desire in Dickinson’s poetry, I hope to throw additional light (1) on the nature of the lyrical self’s lack, (2) on the poet’s strategies in trying to fill this lack, and (3) on the reasons why Dickinson’s attempt can only succeed in the realm of the fictive. My principal interest, throughout this paper, centers on desire as the driving force behind the poet’s oeuvre.

What I cannot investigate in my essay is the exact place of Dickinson’s use of desire within the larger development of this notion whose history ranges from Plato and Aristotle via Cicero, St. Augustin, Dante, the scholastic desiderium naturale and Nicolas of Cues to the concept of desire as treated in the works

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of modern theologians, psychologists, sociologists, feminists, literary historians, and philosophers like Klages, Blondel, Scheler, Girard, Lacan, Livingston, Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva among others. Nor can I do full justice to the poetic strategies employed by Dickinson to express in language what is present in the mind (as the object of desire), but absent in external reality. Most regrettable of all, I am unable within the scope of this paper to appraise Dickinson’s notion of desire against the socio-cultural gender conventions of mid-nineteenth-century Victorian America. Fortunately, this crucial topic has extensively been discussed in feminist criticism (in particular by Gilbert, Gubar, Homans, Juhasz, Loeffelholz, Martin, Mossberg, and Pollak).

2. The Self’s LackIn “A loss of something ever felt I -” (P959), a poem indispensable to our topic, the lyrical self admits its ignorance as to the exact nature of this “loss.” Feeling abandoned, the child-persona hankers after the “lost dominion / Itself the only Prince cast out -” (Paradise lost and Adam/Eve in exile). Having grown up and being wiser, but also more skeptical, the lyrical I is “still softly searching / For [its] Delinquent Palaces.” What we notice here is a subject in search of a home. The original (utopian) unity, childhood’s citadel, is gone once and for all, and no way leads back to it. In the poem’s final quatrain the lyrical self speculates why it is “looking oppositely / For the site of the Kingdom of Heaven.” The self fails to grasp what is missing; all it recognizes is the painful truth that “the Kingdom of Heaven,” conventional faith, can no longer replace this loss. John Cody has suggested that young Emily Dickinson (dominated by an overpowering father) lacked a stabilizing and nurturing mother figure, a view that Richard B. Sewall and Cynthia Griffin Wolff apparently share. The many images of thirst and hunger may usefully be interpreted against the poet’s biographical background (as Margaret Homans contends, the mother is actively disappeared in the androcentric Victorian culture), but they also point to a larger cultural lack whose nature is at once epistemological, religious, and socially engendered.

As a result, Dickinson’s lyrical self, sensing its lack, goes in search of what is missing. Yet how is the self to know what it should look for? Plato tackles this question in his dialogue Meno, and from The Symposium we learn that the power mediating between the two spheres of the human (finitude) and the

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divine is called Eros. Eros’ driving force is poverty: ‘want’ is the very cause that sets the daimon on its quest for beauty. To St. Augustine and the Christian tradition following him, it is the soul’s unrest (resulting from man’s fallen condition) that urges it toward God. However, the soul cannot not possibly find God, if God does not call it through an act of grace. The motif of being called, reinforced by the mood of religious revivalism in Dickinson’s time, plays a vital role in her poetry.

The Song of Solomon offers an additional hint: “I sought him, but I found him not.“ After vainly asking other people, the spouse quite unexpectedly exults: “I found him whom my soul loveth.” As suggested in Plato’s Symposium, it is the soul’s loving desire that sets the direction. In her poem “‘Why do I love’ You, Sir?” (P480), Dickinson gives the irrefutable answer: “The Sunrise - Sir - compelleth Me / Because He’s Sunrise - and I see -”. For Dickinson, as for Plotinus and his Neoplatonic heirs, the finite self’s desire for the divine Other is in the nature of things. The poet’s search for the Other thus turns out to be the self’s search for its lacking alter ego. Whereas Kierkegaard found the Other in the saviour figure of the Biblical God, Dickinson, at odds with religious orthodoxy, was thrown back on the evidence of the soul’s desire for the missing Other.

At this point, the sense in which I am going to use the concept of the Other requires some clarification. Lacking space to explore the full range of alterity, I shall have to disregard the Other in terms of Nature (the [negative] sublime), of other people, and of the ‘unconscious’ - a disturbing and upsetting Other for Dickinson. Nor can I elaborate on the Other in the guise of death, let alone the concomitant problem of its poetic representation (aspects I have tried to tackle in my monograph on Emily Dickinson). After this disclaimer, I now want to define the term more specifically. Without using the concept in a strictly psychoanalytical way, let us agree to distinguish between an externalized Other (that Lacan would spell with a small o), and an internalized Other. The externalized Other is the result of a projection in that the self looks for the Other outside itself. The internalized Other, by contrast, is grasped as an intrinsic constituent of selfhood. In this way, the Other assumes the twofold meaning of lack and expected fulfilment. Hence, the curiously unstable form of the Other as absence présente, present as the telos of desire, but absent in reality: “Within its reach, though yet ungrasped / Desire’s perfect Goal -” (P1430). It is the intensely self-reflexive (hence

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paradoxical) quality of‘having not having’ that provokes the self’s continuous search.

As Dickinson was to discover, the method of externalizing what ought to fill the self’s lack is bound to shipwreck. To search outside the self for a remedy will but deepen the self’s plight. The only alternative, then, is to look for the Other as an integral part of the self: “To fill a Gap / Insert the Thing that caused it -” (P546). Yet, how can one distinguish between self and Other, if the Other is firmly situated within the self, if it is in *a sense the self’s own creation? As a result, confusion is almost inevitable, and it is only to be expected that the voices of self and Other tend to get mixed up (an aspect I shall come back to). Although, as noted before, the Other may assume hideously frightening guises, it is at the same time the hoped-for realization of the lyrical self’s desire. “Heaven,” the endpoint of the poet’s wishes, is as “Vast - as our Capacity -/ As fair as our idea -/ To Him of adequate desire / No further ‘tis, than Here - “ (P370). Desire, then, or rather what desire implies, the desired Other, is Dickinson’s “Flood Subject.”

3. The Structure of DesireLet us now inspect the structure of desire more closely. In its movement toward the Other the creative self houses an inexhaustible source of riches; yet in recognizing its own finitude, its mortality, the self suffers a sense of abject poverty. If the poet’s focus is on this lack, the Other appears within a cluster of motifs centering on death. However, the same lack also opens a space for the self’s creative desire. As such, the Other appears as Eros, variously manifesting itself as God, Lord, or King. Eros and Thanatos - as readers of Dickinson well know - are the two fundamental poles of her work. If one of them prevails, the lyrical self either achieves a moment of ecstasy or else falls into a mood of profound despair. Jointly, they produce the characteristic paradox of “sumptuous - Despair” (P505). In its double quality of lack and desired fulfilment, the self’s want functions as Dickinson’s uttermost provocation. The poet’s “White Sustenance - Despair -” (P640) is at once the source of her creative energy (“Sustenance”) and the cause of her hopeless wish, doomed as it is to a restless search for the absent object. “Pursuing” the Other in its “transitions” (P1602) remains an unfinished quest. For that reason (and as I have argued elsewhere), Dickinson’s poetics, like Hölderlin’s, is a ‘poetics of process.’

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Sharon Cameron has astutely remarked that Dickinson invariably leaves alternative semantic spaces open. Reinforcing her insight, I would insist that the poet does so for an ulterior reason, namely, to keep desire - her central motivating power - alive. With Dickinson, the movement of desire is ineluctably a movement of language. That is precisely why “Poetry -/ Or Love - the two - coeval come -“ (P1247). As long as desire is alive, the Other is alive, meaning is alive. When desire dies, the Other dies, meaning dies. The basic tension, then. is that between stasis and dynamis, between movement and the stopping of movement. Most poems, in one way or another, bear out this tension. Stasis is the poet’s terminal threat, it is the feared dead end that “worries” the Dickinsonian subject “like a wasp.” “After great pain, a formal feeling comes -” (P341) is a striking example that pushes the sense of paralysis to its limit. Even in extremities like these, however, Dickinson desperately strives to keep a way open for the potential revival of desire. “I’ve dropped my Brain - My Soul is numb -” (P1046) is a case in point. In a bold countermove the lyrical self - paralyzed to the core - insists: “I’ve still a chance to strain // To Being, somewhere - Motion - Breath -/ Though Centuries beyond, / And every Limit a Decade -/ I’ll shiver, satisfied.”

The poems amply demonstrate that, to Dickinson, reciprocity is a crucial feature of desire. What the lyrical I seeks to obtain is, at once, the Other as object of desire and the Other’s desire for itself. In religious discourse, this reciprocity is rendered by the time-honored expression of amor Dei. De Lauretis, from a feminist (and lesbian) perspective, perceives this doubling as “contradiction” and “duplicity,” designating a specific quality of female desire. However this may be, let us bear in mind that the double movement of desire - desire for an object and desire for desire (desirability) - underlies much of Dickinson’s work and also affects her poetic strategies.

One might legitimately contend that Dickinson’s desire for the Other reaches its apotheosis in her “Master” letters. These (unsent?) letters epitomize the poet’s paradoxical desire for guidance as well as for mastery, for intellectual recognition as well as for erotic fulfilment. Margaret Fuller’s letter to (the dead) Beethoven and her (imaginary) letter to the dying Goethe offer startling parallels to Dickinson’s (quasi-)epistolary and in many ways lyrical texts. Often resembling personal diary

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entries rather than genuine letters, these texts form part of a nineteenth-century genre that is not at all rare among educated women that - frustrated in their ambitions - reject the subject positions constructed for them by a patriarchal society.

4. Strategies of SelfhealingAfter sketching the paradoxical form of the self’s lack along with the double structure of desire, I now intend to examine Dickinson’s tactics in filling this lack. Passing over the multiple variations and permutations, and neglecting the complex interplay within and among poems, we note that she basically employs two methods in her effort to recover a complete self. The first may be described as a method of self-totalization, the second attempts to gain the same end through a totalization of the Other. Two alternative choices seem to be available to the poet. In trying to assure itself of the Other, the lyrical self either sets out to possess and absorb the Other, or else it wants to be possessed and subsumed by the Other. Both strategies, though antithetical in direction, aim at empowering the lyrical I so as to remedy its flawed selfhood. Hegel’s phenomenology of the subject (further developed by Friedrich Schlegel): The stoic I, the skeptical I, the split I of what he calls “unhappy double consciousness” (that of the Romantics), and the modern conflictual I (a disrupted or torn I) might offer an interesting model with which to approach Dickinson’s work. Further help could also be obtained from Bakhtin’s “three voices,” namely, the lyrical self (the first voice), the internal Other or alter ego (the second voice), and the external Other (or third voice). Attractive though they are, I shall forego these options in my essay.

For reasons that we shall examine later on, both methods - self-totalization and the totalization of the Other - run into problems, a fact of which Dickinson is acutely aware. To achieve a viable self, the poet therefore develops a third strategy. Avoiding the pitfall of projection (by relying exclusively on either self or Other), she attempts a dialectical synthesis in which self and Other are to be linked in a relationship of dynamic interdependence. The generative principle bringing about this vital union is called “love.” The state of fulfilled selfhood - variously named “Heaven,” “Eden,” “Paradise,” or “Home” - is a state of “Grace,” fusing the religious, the erotic, and the aesthetic. As I propose to show, it is only attainable in the fictive sphere of the poet’s “Circumference.”

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4.1 The Dominant Self Let us begin by examining the method of self-totalization. In relying on the creative self, the poetic I sets out to subsume the Other, thus hoping to become the Other. Whatever is outside the self - nature, people, the world at large - is absorbed into itself. Based on the Romantic faith in the creative imagination, the method is essentially one of incremental inclusion, often in a characteristic step by step argument. This tactic shows most pointedly in the metafictional poem: “I reckon - when I count at all -/ First - Poets - Then the Sun -/ Then Summer - Then the Heaven of God -/ And then - the List is done -” (P569). What first appears to be an upward gradation, culminating in the capstone, “God,” is in the second stanza radically reversed, with the lyrical I now trying to incorporate everything outside itself: “But, looking back - the First so seems / To comprehend the Whole -/ The Others look a needless Show -/ So I write - Poets - All -.”

Some of the hazards that Dickinson’s method entails are highlighted in the poem “The Brain - is wider than the Sky -” (P632). In a totalizing move the “Brain” easily absorbs the not-self, the two hemispheres (the sky and the sea), “and You beside.” Toward the end, it attempts to subsume God as well. At this point, the lyrical I begins to hesitate. Self and God, the poet muses, “differ - if they do - as Syllable from Sound.” Cameron has demonstrated how Dickinson ambiguates in her daring move to collapse “Brain” and “God.” The reason is not hard to discover. To pronounce the self’s absolute dominance would result in an act of self-divinizing and eliminate God as a separate entity. As a (post-)Romantic, Dickinson may have felt attracted to this audacious conclusion; as a “Daughter of the Puritans,” however, she must have faltered.

In what is one of her most bewildering poems, “If I may have it, when it’s dead -” (P577), Dickinson pushes the method to its logical extreme. Sirkka Heiskanen-Mäkelä has drawn attention to the poet’s “verbal magic:” If I cannot have the Other alive, let it die. One ought to notice, however, that the lyrical I pays with a sharp sense of guilt for its effort to wield omnipotence: “Forgive me, if to stroke thy frost / Outvisions Paradise.” The term “magic” seems all the more problematic as the poem’s semantic register is intensely religious (the scene resembles the Pietà representation of certain Baroque paintings in which Mary appears to kiss Christ lying dead in her arms). What is at stake in

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this poem is the self’s desire to own the Other unstintedly. That this move is ultimately self-defeating, the verse reluctantly admits.

The method founders because the totalized self, an arrogant and all-powerful self playing God, tends to eliminate the Other. Without the Other, however, the effort for a complete and fulfilled self must collapse. Dickinson was fully aware of the risks she incurred: “I could not care - to gain / A lesser than the Whole -/ For did not this include themself -/ As Seams - include the Ball?” The question mark underlines the poet’s dilemma. In its very act of appropriating the desired Other, the self is bound to lose it. But if the Other is lost, all is lost: “Without this - there is nought -” (P655).

Despite its grandiose ambitions, the self is eventually forced to acknowledge its finitude, usually in the form of a shattering experience. “I never hear that one is dead” (P1323) is an instance among many. In this verse the lyrical I is made conscious of its own mortality on hearing the news that somebody else has died. To face “The yawning Consciousness” without “vail” (sic) or “slant” would totally undermine human sanity. In a defensive gesture, the “Daily Mind” tries to ignore life’s “abyss.” How dismally the self fails in its effort is ironically proved by the poem’s unrelieved mood of anxiety.

4.2 The Overpowering OtherSo far, we have examined Dickinson’s attempt to heal the lyrical self’s lack by trying to subsume the Other. The poet’s second strategy, reversing the terms, consists in the self’s desire to be absorbed by the Other. If the former, as we could observe, employs a process of incremental appropriation, the latter tries to achieve its end through an act of surrender. The first is liable to dissolve the Other, the second courts the danger of self-annihilation.

It is only natural, therefore, that the self’s longing for a union with the Other is usually accompanied by the fear of self-loss. “The Drop, that wrestles in the Sea” (P284) illustrates the point. Despite the imminent danger, the lyrical I wishes to be one with the infinite sea: “The Ocean - smiles - at her Conceit -/ But she, forgetting Amphitrite -/ Pleads ´Me´?” Amphitrite, we remember, was raped by Poseidon, the Greek God of the sea (and became his wife). A different tactics of self-effacement is used in “Till Death - is narrow Loving -” (P907), a poem in which the lyrical I attempts a self-denying identification

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through imitation (in the manner of Thomas à Kempis). As the final lines imply, the self’s effort to reach the Other through “Resemblance perfect,” through an act of self-abdication, does not quite succeed.

The theme of the seductive and insistent Other - as tempting, visiting, alluring and, at its most intense, as overpowering Other - plays a crucial part in Dickinson’s poetry. “He put the Belt around my life -” (P273) and “Tie the Strings to my Life, My Lord” (P279) are notable examples that demonstrate the self’s yearning for surrender to the Other’s imperious and autocratic power. Dickinson’s “Master” letters also belong with this category. A thematic variant is found in the self’s hopeless adoration of an unreachable and indifferent Other. In “Ah, Teneriffe!” (P666) the lyrical self remains kneeling before the mountain of eternity - a posture reminiscent of the lover’s unavailing desire in medieval minstrelsy.

A number of poems, delightfully documented by “I started Early - Took my Dog“ (P520), enact the Other’s seductive “silver Call” (P398), followed by an attempt to move and overpower the self. The cluster of related motifs is, of course, part of the Christian meditative tradition and, in particular, of what mystics have described as the soul’s ravishment by God. The theme of seduction, of “Eden’s innuendo” (P1518), climaxing in the soul’s being taken by force, “that last Onset -/ When the King be witnessed - in the Room” (P465), is a vital feature of Dickinson’s work, supported as it is by the model of the Puritan conversion experience as well as by the sensuous style of the Song of Solomon, probably the most popular Biblical narrative in early New England. Most of the poems centering on the spouse or bride depend on this subtext and its allegorical significance. The critical view (as set forth by Donald Thackrey and Louise Bogan, and recently buttressed by Dorothy Huff Oberhaus) that Dickinson’s oeuvre displays a profoundly religious quality, anchored in the Western meditative and mystical tradition, finds ample support in these poems. The mystical quality is prominent, for example, in Dickinson’s motif of the precious and sweet wound, reminiscent of Saint Theresa’s “Suavidad - este grandisimo dolor.” Since the poet’s home - as she herself claims - is to be found in language (L438), it remains to that extent a qualified, a poetic mysticism, but this aspect is nonetheless emphatically present in her work.

One of the most memorable instances rendering the foreplay of the divine

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rape is offered by the metapoetic verse “He fumbles at your Soul” (P315). The sense of fear and pain is intolerably intense in that the divine Other - in purifying and testing the self - threatens to vanquish it: “He stuns you by degrees -/ Prepares your brittle Nature / For the Ethereal Blow.” In “scalp[ing]” the victim’s “naked soul” the Other triumphs by annihilating the lyrical self. The surreal montage of music, hammering, thunder and (Indian) scalping creates - compositely - a mind-shattering experience that ends in silence.

The sound of hammering, a frequent motif in Dickinson’s work, echoes yet another poem in this vein: “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?” (P365). In this verse, the experience of purification, a major step in the soul’s mystical ascent to God, results in sheer whiteness, “The Designated Light,” with the adjective hinting at the fact that the self is chosen for its role, but not yet installed. The challenge to the reader: “Dare you see” dramatizes the awesome quality of the soul’s situation. In some poems, “Doubt Me! My Dim Companion!” (P275) being a choice example, the excessive demand for total surrender, “the Life -/ Poured Thee - without a stint,“ arouses the self’s anger and frustration. Although accepting and even inviting the Other’s utmost testing: “Sift her, from Brow to Barefoot! / Strain till your last Surmise -,” the self eventually retaliates: “but hallow just the snow / Intact . . . Oh, Caviler, for you!” The final lines can only be fully appreciated if the reader is aware that the “Caviler” is itself part of the lyrical I. “The Soul,” as another poem affirms, may well be its own best “friend,” but it is also its most relentless “spy” and critic (P683).

Dickinson realized that the exclusive dominance of the Other was no solution. Her (surprisingly modern) attempt to look nothingness in the eye and thus reach a state of comparative peace and liberty without loss of selfhood is one way in which she tries to cope with the problem. The verse “‘Tis so appalling - it exhilarates -” (P281) exemplifies the poet’s tactic to perfection. By dying in full consciousness, without paying the price of self-loss, the lyrical I achieves a liberation of sorts, but the result remains unsatisfactory. What the self has gained is a “Ghastly, Holiday,” a ghostly kind of freedom, in fact. Having experienced “frost” or total stasis, the self now knows what to expect and is henceforth ready for it. Suspense is indeed conquered, but the desire and the hope for a positive outcome are also gone. The poem falls into a segment of Dickinson’s work that struggles with the unbearable part of human

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existence, namely, the threatening extinction of the conscious self. In such cases, death - wearing the delusive mask of Eros- not infrequently pretends to accost the lyrical I like a lover; bunt being in reality a harbinger of death the gallant suitor is intent on annihilating the self.

In review, the poet’s two principal strategies, the self’s desire to absorb and possess the Other and the reverse desire to be absorbed and possessed by the Other, are ultimately self-defeating. What may shock the reader is the fact that both methods, in pitting self against Other, tend to display an element of raw aggressiveness. The situation resembles Hegel’s “fight to the death,” a fight which none can win. Leo Bersani may be right in claiming that all desire is a struggle for power and thus inherently violent. Interestingly enough, the element of aggression is projected both into male and female personae. Mary Loeffelholz (like Cody, Cameron and others before her) argues convincingly that the pervasive element of aggression also results from the poet’s (largely suppressed) anger at woman’s reduced social status.

Although Dickinson is perfectly conscious of the risks and limitations that accompany both methods, she continues to be tempted by them, one promising an all-powerful self, the other the final tranquility that goes with the loss of consciousness, a sort of “easeful Death” that Keats and other Romantics yearned for but which (some rare cases apart) Dickinson could not accept, even though she recognized its attractions.

4.3 The Self in ParadiseIf pushed to their extreme, both methods discussed so far tend to eliminate one pole of the relationship with the fatal result that the movement of desire is at an end. It is only logical, therefore, that Dickinson searched for ways to avoid this impasse. As suggested earlier, she managed to develop a third strategy that allowed her to place both self and Other in a non-hierarchical and mutually dynamic relationship. The generative power that sustains this relation is called “Love.” It is through the concept of “Love” that Dickinson attempts (1) to keep the movement of desire flowing, (2) to preserve both self and Other intact, and (3) to create in poetic language what Rilke was to call Weltinnenraum, a fictive realm for the dialectical bond between self and Other. Although radically different in terms of space, time, and modality from our everyday world, this utopian realm functions as an indirect critique

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of the status quo.

Dickinson’s late quatrain “Circumference” (magisterially elucidated by Albert Gelpi) has given this ideal situation its enduring form: “Circumference thou Bride of Awe / Possessing thou shalt be / Possessed By every hallowed Knight / That dares to covet Thee” (P1620). The “Bride,” the fulfilled self-to-be, and “Awe,” a metonym for the divine Other (as well as for the self’s response to it), enact the hieros gamos in the boundless space of “Circumference” - the quickening domain of poetic wholeness. In this realm the apparent contradictions of male and female, self and Other, passivity and activity, possession and surrender, desire and fulfilment appear to be finally reconciled, and the broken-off hemispheres of the poet’s existence at last reintegrated into the perfect sphere of a complete self. Dickinson’s pairing of “Possessing” and “Possessed” echoes Shelley’s line from Epipsychidion: “Even as a bride, delighting and delighted” (much as Dickinson’s notion of “Circumference” harks back to Shelley’s use of this term), but the expression also recalls Goethe’s umfangend umfangen (from “Ganymed”), although it should be pointed out that Goethe’s poem lacks Dickinson’s dialectical quality.

The poem’s “hallowed Knight” is poet and reader in one. The verb “covet” throws into relief the motivating force of Dickinson’s poetry: desire. When the self’s desire for the Other and the Other’s desire for the lyrical I coincide, the flawed self appears whole again. Such moments are characterized by an emotional dynamics of incredible intensity in that both self and Other are conjoined through and sustained by a movement of mutual desire. “Wild nights” - in its very simplicity one of the great love poems of Western literature - provides an exquisite illustration: “Wild Nights - Wild Nights! / Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our luxury! // Futile -the Winds -/ To a Heart in port / Done with the Compass / Done with the Chart! // Rowing in Eden -/ Ah, the Sea!/ Might I but moor - Tonight -/ In Thee!” (P249).

The verse celebrates the desired union between the lyrical I and the Other, an ideal state that is perpetually held in eschatological tension without being realized. The quality of ecstatic boundlessness - reinforced iconically (with Martha Nell Smith rightly referring the reader to the manuscript) and acoustically - is accentuated by the self’s decision to throw all conventional rules overboard. The time of night, as elsewhere with this poet, denotes the realm of the imagination, of unlimited desire. The wanting self and the wanted

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Other are co-present here in perfect unison, each including, but not subsuming, its counterpart. Instead of exclusive possession, there is inclusive reciprocity. Self and Other - like rower and boat - are correlative notions: “Love thou art deep / I cannot cross thee / But were there two / Instead of one / Rower and Yacht some sovereign summer / Who knows but we’d reach the sun.” (P453) Apart, the two prove useless and idle, but in concert they can fulfil their roles in consummate fashion. The boat - Romantic image par excellence - alludes to the soul’s being ‘carried away,’ but it also hints at poetic language as the carrier and medium for the Other.

No wind, no outward help is needed. The self’s driving force is its own desire, love “its own rescue” and reward (L552). Having reached the “port” and being now securely at anchor, the lyrical I has finally found home. Yet there is no stasis. Rowing on the infinite sea of Eternity is nothing if not desire in (erotic) motion. This state resembles Plotinus’s transcendent vision where the soul comes into its own; or Yeats’s union of dancer and dance; but most nearly perhaps it anticipates Eliot’s “still point” (Burnt Norton), a state “[w]here past and future are gathered”and where there is “neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity.” The lyrical self “can only say: there we have been: but [it] cannot say where.”

Let us note that the encounter between self and Other takes place in the form of an event presented in the optative mode. In writing the poem Dickinson has, in a sense, enjoyed the experience, a veritable (Barthian) jouissance du texte. Let us further note that the poet’s principal scene is not the Romantic “Willkommen und Abschied” (emphasis mine), it is rather the curiously liminal and inherently paradoxical moment of ‘meeting as departure.’ A ‘visitor’ about to arrive or leave, or just having left - these are the situations which characterize many of Dickinson’s most memorable poems. One may well wonder whether Higginson, asking for a picture of his “partially cracked poetess,” could ever guess what Dickinson implied in her unforgettable self-description: “My hair is bold like the chestnut burr, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves” (L268).

The use of semantic and grammatic indeterminacy underscores the fact that such moments of fulfilled presence can only be grasped in fictive form. The one tense normally excluded from Dickinson’s grammatical arsenal to render these moments is the present indicative. What the poet prefers to use instead is

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either a prospective or a retrospective point of view. If such experiences are narrated in the form of past events, as in “There Came a Day at Summer’s full” (P349), fictiveness is indicated by a variety of grammatical and stylistic means. Dickinson’s use of temporality is not that of linear time (in terms of grammatical tenses) but rather the (atemporal) aspect of states of consciousness, often expressed through non-finite forms. The poet’s most effective device, however, is undoubtedly modality, be it in the form of the subjunctive, the optative, and the hypothetical mood.

In the final analysis, then, Dickinson’s recovered self is an aesthetic self. Only in her poetic dominion does the poet manage to keep the movement of desire between self and Other alive. Most importantly (as Margaret Dickie, Cristanne Miller and Cynthia Hogue have variously remarked), the processual and self-reflexive nature of her poetry punctuates the fact that Dickinson had the courage to face the unsettling truth that a stable and truly reconstituted self cannot be achieved in life. The realization of an autonomous self - of ‘full presence’ - would in fact block the movement of desire and thus annul the finite state of human subjectivity. A poem like “On a Columnar Self -/ How ample to rely” (P789) seems to refute this claim, but on closer inspection it actually supports it. Dickinson’s work, we are led to conclude, resists all interpretive attempts to secure a coherent and unitary self by imposing a critical principle of harmony. The poet’s acute awareness of the human subject’s epistemological and existential limitations is part of her astounding modernity. The fulfilled self, realized in the vital union of self and Other, is unquestionably the horizon of desire for this poet, but it is a horizon that unceasingly recedes before the wanting self. In that sense, and in that sense alone, Jay Leyda’s dictum of an “omitted center” is correct. From a semantic perspective, however, the center of Dickinson’s poetry is never empty; on the contrary, it is extremely dense. What is missing in her verse is a referential axis; fixed reference would stop the movement of poetic meaning dead.

Bearing in mind Dickinson’s tenacious insistence on meaning as vital process, we also come to understand why the poet - not infrequently usurping the place of Mary, Mother of Jesus - tends to favor the divine Other over the conventionally religious figure of Christ. In an act of spiritual rebirth, itself a profoundly ‘Protestant’ act, Dickinson - “the undivine abode / Of His Elect

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Content” (P751) - interiorized, and in her poetry resuscitated, what must have appeared to her as the grotesquely reductive “Jesus” (P646) of Calvinist orthodoxy. Like Blake and other writers before her, she rejected the avatars of the dominant father, the merciless banker and the legalistic judge, as false impersonations of the Godhead - no doubt, a shrewdly subversive gesture.

5. Fuzzy BoundariesThe poem “Me from Myself - to banish -/ Had I Art -” (642) dramatizes the fact that all consciousness is inherently self-reflexive: “We’re mutual Monarch.” The same dialectical principle that obtains for the reciprocal bond between “Me” (the self as concrete, thinking ‘subject’) and “Myself” (the self as mentally reflected ‘object’ in the mind) holds for the relationship between self and Other. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that boundaries tend to get fuzzy. The verse “In lands I never saw” (P124) is an early illustration how the self comes to doubt its own identity: “Which Sir are you and which am I?” (P124). The lyrical self in “I make His Crescent fill or lack -” seems at first in a position of limitless power but is finally forced to give up its claim to autonomy. Self and Other “hold a mutual Disk,” and neither party knows “Which is the Despot . . . / Nor Whose the Tyranny -” (P909). In the late poem “He was my host, he was my guest” (P1721) the lyrical I still feels puzzled: “I never to this day / If I invited him could tell / Or he invited me / So infinite our intercourse.” The process is sometimes inverted. Instead of getting confused, the lyrical self’s unstable components threaten to split apart; “madness” beckons, and meaning collapses: “Sequence ravelled out of Sound / Like Balls - upon a Floor” (P937).

Usually, Dickinson manages to maintain a relation of dialectical balance between self and Other. “Like Eyes that looked on Wastes -” (P458) makes the point in a paradigmatic manner: “Neither would be a Queen / Without the Other - Therefore -/ We perish - tho’ We reign -” (P458). The following (early) verse is a striking, if somewhat clumsy, instance: “He was weak, and I was strong - then -/ . . . / I was weak, and He was strong then -” (P190). Rendering the Other weak, a tactics used in the poem “I bring an unaccustomed Wine” (P132), gives the self an opportunity to savor its own strength by offering help; it is a tactics that Dickinson also employs in her letters. All too often, however, death arrives first, and the disappointed self, losing the race, tries in vain to save the Other. In view of the Other’s

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indeterminate status (and potential weakness), the lyrical I feels called upon to appropriate its place. Should the Other succumb, the lyrical I “must take the purple wheel / To show the sun the way.” In her “Poetic Covenant” with the Other (cf. P1005), Dickinson exhibits Job’s firmness: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” No wonder, the self’s faith becomes all-important: “How dare I therefore stint a faith / On which so vast depends / Lest firmament should fail for me / The rivet in the bands” (P766). The risk is immense. If the self fails, the Other is lost in turn, and the cosmos breaks asunder. The conclusion seems inevitable that the stabilizing pole in Dickinson’s poetry is increasingly shifted from the Other to the lyrical self. This shift is probably the most conspicuous single marker signaling the poet’s turn toward Modernism.

Gudrun Grabher has persuasively argued that the loosening of semantic boundaries, a hallmark of Dickinson’s work, is the result of the poet’s Kantian revolution. With this writer, the traditionally fixed realms of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ begin to wobble. Her innovative use of the biform (including paradox) defeats all attempts to distinguish clearly between oppositional concepts like truth/fiction, life/art, earth/heaven, reality/dream, waking/sleeping. Clearly, thinking in oppositions is being replaced by dialectical reasoning. How complicated the relation between the various spheres has become may be studied in poems such as “Make me a picture of the sun -” (P188), “Doom is the House without the Door -” (P475), or in the vexing piece “We dream - it is good we are dreaming -” (P531). Dream, desire, and fiction form a cluster of motifs that would deserve a separate study.

“Sweet Skepticism of the Heart -/ That knows - and does not know -” perfectly encapsulates Dickinson’s epistemological stance. Uncertainty is usually accompanied by a “transport thrilled with Fear -”(P1413), by a sense of numinous suspense in the presence of which the ”Certainty” of facts drops into insignificance. Whereas the term “Skepticism” reflects Dickinson’s modernist stance, the adjective “Sweet” as well as the romantic “Heart” evince her resistance to the nihilistic strain of Modernism which began to make itself felt in Victorian America at least since the middle of the nineteenth century - with the old dispensation shaken and the new order not yet established. Allen Tate was right in claiming that Dickinson’s historical time was the “perfect literary situation.” It ought to

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be recalled, however, that this ‘opportunity’ came to Dickinson at a heavy price.

6. A Test CaseUsing the concept of desire as an interpretive key may help us solve some of the puzzles that have teased readers and critics alike. Choosing the balladesque “My life had stood - a Loaded Gun -” (P754) as a test case, I hope to reveal the poem’s ‘figure in the carpet.’

Starting out with the premise that the flawed self needs the Other, that it desires to be found and identified by the Other, and that such desire is a central motif of Dickinson’s poetry, we can hardly deny that the verse presents these features in a superb manner. The image of the loaded gun expresses the lyrical self’s poetic potential that must first be recognized - and activated - by the “Owner,” before it can actually “speak.” The ecstatic moment of identification is evoked through the self’s (ravished) sense of being “carried away.” Self and Other, “Gun” and “Master,” belong intimately together - just as in popular parlance the gun is called the bride of the soldier. Singly, they would remain inert and ineffective. Jointly, however, they become powerfully alive, with the “Gun” now “speak[ing]” for its “Owner” and “Master.” The poetic word is not the self’s exclusive property; language (as the French symbolists were to discover) radically depends on the Other; indeed, what the gun “speaks” is in a vital sense the Other’s voice.

The chase takes place in “Sovereign Woods,” in the aesthetic domain of Dickinson’s univers poétique, with the adjective “Sovereign” hinting at the forest as the Master’s (the King’s) property. Hunting creates the (e)motion indispensable to Dickinson’s supreme moments. The element of desire appears most graphically, perhaps, in the doe which the ‘two’ are chasing, but it is also noticeable in the (female) “Eider-Duck” that has first to be killed before the “Pillow” can be stuffed (at the same time, the Eider-Duck’s” filling her nest with her own feathers alluedes to the self-reflexive act of poetic creation). The pervasive element of ‘killing’ has frequently been interpreted as the murderous quality of language, an aspect mentioned in a number of Dickinson’s poems. However, the metapoetic quality of the verse (the ‘linguistic chase’) should not obscure the attendant element of desire. And it is this element that will help us unravel the curious paradox with which the

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poem’s final stanza confronts the reader.

A prominent feature of this poem is the simultaneous presence of Eros and Thanatos. From this perspective, the deadly aim of hunting, the act of wording as killing, reveals itself as a metonym for desire. Sheer desire, as the poem contends, is superior to the fulfilment of desire: “‘Tis better than the Eider-Duck’s / Deep Pillow - to have shared -.” What the poet and what poetic language in their quest for the Other can accomplish is to give expression to this desire. What is totally beyond the author’s power, however, is the art to still desire: “For I have but the power to kill, / Without - the power to die -.” If we set these lines against the final verses of yet another (and equally intriguing) poem, “I would not paint - a picture - I’d rather be the One” (P505), the desire to lay desire to rest once and for all becomes fully explicit: “What would the Dower [a bride’s dowry or a widow’s inheritance] be, / Had I the Art to stun myself / With Bolts of Melody!” It is the only art denied the poet - else she would have ceased writing.

What is pondered, elaborated, and reworked in Dickinson’s oeuvre - from all angles and in all its complexities - is the poet’s desire to be a full self: “I deem Myself what I would be - “ (P801). Her poetry, as Chase was the first to point out, centers on the self’s hope for change. The desire to achieve status is underscored by adjectives like “new,” “royal,” “different,” “changed,” by nouns denoting social rank such as “Bride,” “Wife,” “Queen,” “Empress,” and by a plethora of other stylistic and thematic devices. What this essay has tried to clarify is the role that the dialectical relation between self and Other plays in the poet’s search for self-identity: “Till it has loved - no man or woman can become itself - Of our first Creation we are unconscious.” (L575) Dickinson knew that her pursuit of wholeness could find no rest. Desire, then, is both the generator and the matrix of her poetry: “Perhaps you laugh at me. Perhaps the whole United States are laughing at me, too! I cannot stop for that! My business is to love. . . . My Business is to sing”(L269).

7. Post Script The term ‘desire’ should not mislead us to restrict its meaning to emotion alone. The longing for the Other is both a search for emotional fulfilment and

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a quest for knowledge. To this poet, desire has a distinctly cognitive dimension. Thought and feeling, “The Heart and the Mind,” form “A single Continent -” (1354). What Eliot admired in Donne’s poetry, namely, the “sensuous apprehension of thought,” is no less Dickinson’s achievement. For her as for Donne, “A thought was an experience.” In many respects, she is a “metaphysical” poet writing in the Romantic tradition. The fusion of thought and feeling, we ought to remind ourselves, is among the most ambitious aims of the English high Romantics. Why it is possible that desire, being the result of a fundamentally flawed self, yet tends to award this New-England writer with a powerful sense of self-confidence, is a paradox I can only speculate on.

Dickinson’s question, addressed to Mrs. Holland: “is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me it’s name!” (L873) may well be a rhetorical question, but it is a question that touches the poet’s whole existence. To her, death is the self’s ultimate threat, love the victorious antagonist of death: “Love - is anterior to Life -/ Posterior - to Death -” (P917). To Whitman as to Dickinson, “a kelson of the creation is love.” Love, as one of her poems phrases it, is the world’s “Initial” and “Exponent” (P917). Yet it is death, finally, that remains the poet’s deepest provocation. In anticipating the process of “dying” Dickinson tests to the utmost “how Conscious Consciousness - could grow -” (622). In the last analysis, death’s “cool - concernless No -” (P287) is the very cause of her desire for self-transcendence; it is also the source of her creative drive and the originator of meaning. If the self’s lack reminds Dickinson of her mortality, the soul’s desire to fill this lack is evidence of her “immortal” existence, it is proof that she is “of the sky” (P1643). Once, however, death comes to be viewed as meaningless, existence reveals itself as trivial, and desire is demystified as an “ignis fatuus” (P1551), as life’s grand illusion, inviting the specter of nihilism. As her verse throws in bold relief, the poet - in her lifelong fight with the “angel” (P59) - was intensely conscious of her daring “gamble.”

Reading Dickinson’s poetry today makes us painfully aware of what our culture has lost - or forgotten. To the reader, her work operates like a litmus test, a fact of which the poet herself was not unaware: “The Voice that stands for Floods to me / Is sterile born to some -” (P1189). With this author, the sense of want still arouses the contrary desire to fill this want. Contemporary writers and critics, by contrast, start out with the Lacanian assumption that desire is “a derangement of instinct,” that the subject’s fundamental lack

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cannot be filled, and that the self’s longing for the Other (le sujet supposé savoir) in the hope of making up for its lack is vain and illusory. Meaning, it is claimed, peters out in an endless chain of metonymic substitutions, and all we are left with is a free-floating signifier. “Mean something!” one of Beckett’s characters sneers, “Ah that’s a good one.”

In Dickinson’s eyes, we are all “permanent temporarily.” Our brief existence is but “the Hyphen” in-between. Like Pascal. she defines man as the hiatus between nothingness and eternity, as “Finite infinity” (P1695). For Edward Taylor, writing a century and a half before Dickinson, “Infinity and Finity Conjoin’d” (Meditation One) is the central Christian paradox that sets forth Christ’s double nature. Dickinson would have felt unable to accept Taylor’s dogmatic assumptions, but in their love and desire for the Other both writers engage in a common quest. “It’s my desire,” Taylor exclaims, “Thou shouldst be glorified” (First Series, Meditation 22). And again: “Oh! that thy love might overflow my Heart! / To fire the same with Love: for Love I would.” In the terminology of contemporary criticism, the literary subjects of Taylor and Dickinson are both ‘desiring subjects.’

Whereas the Puritan Taylor firmly expected to encounter a transcendent reality after death, Dickinson never tired of pursuing the Other in her poetry, enacting the transcendence of limited selfhood in the here and now through the soul’s movement of desire. This (she wrote in a letter) was her way of “praying.” Unlike Taylor she could never decide whether “Desire, or Grant - Be wholly beautiful -” (P801). In the end, it was desire, not grant, that turned “Destitution” and “Despair” for Dickinson into sumptuousness: “How sweet I shall not lack in Vain -/ But gain - thro’ loss -/ Through Grief - obtain -/ The Beauty that reward Him best -/ The Beauty of Demand - at Rest -” (P968). At rest? Yes, in the ‘house’ of language (L438), and in death’s “White Exploit” (P922) - possibly.

Delays and digressions, as in a successful narrative plot, or in love, are necessary to the suspense that augments, by deferring, the pleasures of the end. But if the hoped-for end is never reached at all, then, the soul’s innate desire, as several poems complain, would be unmasked as a cynical joke, and the quest for the Other as a mocking mirage. The nagging suspicion that she might be trapped by consciousness within a self-enclosed fictive realm never stops troubling Dickinson, much as it continues to worry Hawthorne, Melville and

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Poe. In addition to the poet’s unrivalled artistry, it is the unsettling tensions of her oeuvre - situated as it is in the historical threshold period between Romanticism and Modernism - that keep challenging the reader.

Roland Hagenbüchle

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List of Works Cited (a Selection)

Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston, 1969).Cameron, Sharon. Choosing not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles (U of Chicago P, 1992).Chase, Richard. Emily Dickinson (New York, 1951. American Men of Letters Series).Cody, John. After Great Pain. The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge UP, 1971).De Lauretis, Teresa. “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation.” Theatre Journal 40.2 (1988): 155-177.Dickie, Margaret. “Dickinson’s Discontinuous Lyric Self.” American Literature 60 (1988); 537-553.Eliot, T.S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” Selected Essays (London, 1932). 281-291.Foucault, Michel, Les mots et les choses (Paris, 1966).Frank, Manfred. Das Problem ‘Zeit’ in der deutschen Romantik (Paderborn, 1990).Gelpi, Albert. The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (Cambridge, 1975).Grabher, Gudrun. Emily Dickinson: Das transzendentale Ich (Heidelberg, 1981).Hagenbüchle, Roland. “Das mythische Du.” Emily Dickinson: Gefahr der Selbstbegegnung / The Risks of Self-Encounter (Tübingen, 1989).---. “Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Covenant” (extended and rev. version). Anglia 112. 3-4 (1994): 309-340.Heiskanen-Mäkelä, Sirkka. In Quest of Truth. Observations on the Development of Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Dialectic (Jyväskylä, 1970).Hogue, Cynthia. “‘I didn’t Be - Myself’: Emily Dickinson’s Semiotics of Presence.” Emily Dickinson Journal l.2 (1922): 30-53.Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton 1980).Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (repr. Harmondsworth, 1979).Leyda, Jay. The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. (Yale UP, 1960). Loeffelholz, Mary. “Violence and the Other(s) of Identity.” Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory (Urbana and Chicago, 1991).Miller, Cristanne. Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Cambridge, 1987)Oberhaus, Dorothy, Huff. Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles: Method and Meaning (Pennsylvania State UP, 1995).

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Sewall, Richard, B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. (New York, 1974).Tate, Allen. “Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963). 16-27.Taylor, Edward. The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, ed. Thoms H. Johnson (repr. Princeton UP, 1971).Thackrey, Donald. Emily Dickinson’s Approach to Poetry (Lincoln, 1954).Wilbur, Richard. “Sumptuous Destitution.” Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963). 127-136.Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson (New York, 1986).

For an excellent introduction to the concept of desire, see Elizabeth Wright, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (Oxford, 1992), vide ‘desire.’

AcknowledgmentsThis essay has greatly benefited from the stimulating criticism of my students. In particular, I wish to express my thanks to Gudrun Dreher, M.A., to Marietta Meßmer, M.A., and to Dr. Josef Raab.

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