ABSTRACT
In this article, I examine how Emily Dickinson consigned her work to loss and powerlessness instead of profit and power in the light of Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of ‘the unworking’, a concept he developed in dialogue with French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Georges Bataille. The aspects of Dickinson’s writing practice that I relate to ‘the unworking’ are its materiality, strategies of address used in poems, spider poems, and the way she writes about dying. These aspects are marked by powerlessness, unemployed negativity and loss. Thinking about these elements in dialogue with Blanchot also provides a better comprehension of the relationship he established between ‘the unworking’ and literature.
1. The flood
When Emily Dickinson was thirty-three years old and at the peak of her poetic production, she wrote a poem that closes with the following stanza: ‘You cannot fold a Flood – /And put it in a Drawer – /because the Winds would find it out – /And tell your Cedar floor – ’.Footnote1 The image of a flood accurately represents her writing practice, not only because of its magnitude and uncontrollable force, but also because of its relationship to destruction and waste.
In an essay included in The Gorgeous Nothings (2013), the beautiful edition of Dickinson’s envelope writings, Jen Bervin recalls that she wrote a total of 3507 pieces before she died at age fifty-five. This includes ‘approximately 1800 distinct poems within 2357 poem drafts and at least 1150 letters’.Footnote2 Many of the poems she wrote between 1858 and 1864 were stitched together by the poet herself in homemade notebooks that are now known as fascicles, a term coined in 1890 by their first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd. Dickinson’s younger sister, Lavinia, found the forty fascicles along with ‘nearly four hundred poems arranged in the manner of the booklets, but unbound [referred to as “sets”]; miscellaneous fair copies; semifinal drafts; and worksheet drafts written on odds and ends of paper – the backs of envelopes and discarded letters, bits of wrapping paper, and edges of newspapers’.Footnote3 Lavinia opened the drawer in which an untamable flood was folded and kept.
Most scholarly work relating to the state of Dickinson’s manuscripts is aimed at revaluing her figure and work in the light of a history of mis-editing and mis-publication that has had effects on the representation of Dickinson’s figure and on her work’s place in literary history. However, in Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios (1995), Marta Werner gives her late loose texts a fictitious voice: ‘What is a work?’ These uncollected leaves whisper, ‘A theory of the work does not exist’.Footnote4 I wish that, in response, we could ask them if the opposite exists, a theory of unwork. Even though Werner’s position belongs to the scholarly trend of revaluing, her reflections take us elsewhere: ‘If we dared publish Dickinson’s late writings as she left them, they would deeply disturb the privileged idea of the work itself, so long associated in our accounts of literary History with the twinned concepts of closure and totality’.Footnote5 I’m interested in examining how Dickinson challenged the twinned concepts of closure and totality. Therefore, I will examine her work, which defies the logic of work, in the light of a philosophical discussion that theorises precisely on the interruption and withdrawal of this logic, and claims that literature is a site of ‘the unworking’ (désœuvrement). In this discussion the concepts of closure and totality aren’t only central to the idea of the book, but also to a predominant and dialectical understanding of the subject and communication. Making a connection between her poetry and this philosophical discussion is important to see, value and understand that Dickinson’s transgressions don’t just impact how we produce literature (which is the lens through which she is currently most critically studied) but how writing can also open and unwork the subject and communication.
2. The unworking
2.1. Materiality
In the 1980s, Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy held a discussion on community that is recorded in their works The Unavowable Community (1983) and The Inoperative Community (1983) respectively. They sought an alternative to thinking of community on the basis of a common essence or as the production of a common essence by its members, the State and institutions. The reflections developed in these two texts privilege relationality at the limits of the subject, language and the common. Even though these might seem to be strictly philosophical and political questions, the question of literature becomes relevant because, for them, literary language can suspend unity, totality and productivity. Because of this, their discussion contributes to transform and expand our understanding of the relationships that take place when we read and write.
Following Bataille, for whom a specific kind of communication releases the unreserved negativity of death, Nancy and Blanchot believe the specificity of literature is that it exempts address – and language – from their mediating and identifying purposes. The suspension of the process of mediation and the moment of identity is what they call ‘the unworking’ (désoeuvrement). In other words, ‘unworking’ refers to the interruption of a process in which something would be made and completed, assuring the openness, uselessness and unproductivity of a nothingness that would normally be negated in the process of becoming something. For Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy, it resists identity, production and unity at the level of writing, thinking, being and community.
Blanchot thinks about this in many other works too, for example, in The Infiinte Conversation he argues that culture ‘tends to conceive of and to establish as relations of unity relations that, on the basis of literature, give themselves as (…) irreducible to any unifying process’.Footnote6 He has in mind Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, where the idea of culture is described as the product of the work of the negative and, also, of the idea of work as labour. ‘[I]t is in separating and in recombining things in and through his discursive thought [the work of the negative] that man forms his technical projects, which, once realized through work, really transform the aspect of the natural [and] given World by creating therein a World of culture’.Footnote7 The relationship between these two notions of work lets us see more clearly how interrupting the work of the negative causes the bonds of projects to slacken, actuality cannot be articulated.
In the article, ‘A Poet without a Project? A Poetry without Scope or Structure?’ Gary Lee Stonum refers to David Porter’s Modern Idiom, a book in which the author
… accuses Dickinson of artistic irresponsibility for neglecting to publish, for neglecting to delete the chaff from the wheat in her work, for neglecting to title her poems and thus signal even the nominal finality and the minimal impress of authorial control that titles can supply, for neglecting to define or even broach an ars poetica, for neglecting to attempt the magnitude of a sustained poem (much less a deliberate chef d’oeuvre), for neglecting in any other way to rank her poems according to centrality of importance, for neglecting to develop or advance during the course of her career, and most of all for neglecting to provide any cumulative wholeness to the body of her work.Footnote8
Porter also stresses the absence of titles in her poetry and interprets it as a renunciation of authorial control. In an essay on Kafka’s famous parable ‘Before the Law’, Derrida introduces a reflection on the concept of titles in relation to the literary institution that Porter doesn’t manage to fit Dickinson into:
The title is usually chosen by the author or by his or her editorial representatives whose property it is. The title names and guarantees the identity, the unity and the boundaries of the original work which it entitles. It is self-evident that the power and import of a title have an essential relationship with something like the law, regardless of whether we are dealing with titles in general or with the specific title of a work, literary or not.Footnote10
This lack of authorial control sustains a principle of incompleteness that resists the ideas of the whole and the centre that the literary institution cannot handle (it can handle the ‘atom’ but not the ‘scrap’). This is the reason why to process and circulate her work it has to be transformed into a project; some editions organise the poems chronologically, others thematically, and most of them include an index in which the first line of each verse replaces the title. Of course, these aspects are all unified by and dependent on the book’s title, which every edition has. Porter stands as a representative of this institution when he accuses her of neglect; I argue that she defies it.
In ‘Satin Cash: Dickinson’s Reserves’, Daniel Katz tackles the relationship between Dickinson’s refusal to publish and religion. He argues that ‘Dickinson cannot be seen as appealing to religious authority in her decision not to publish because it is the Christian economy of publication which she is refusing’.Footnote12 He bases this argument on the poem ‘Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of a Man’ in which, following Protestant iconoclasm, ‘Christ is figured as the publication of God’s mind, as God’s worldly text, and his body is put in parallel with the printed page’.Footnote13 In other words, God is secularised economically through the connection of the body of Christ with the published product. Dickinson writes: ‘its Corporeal illustration – Sell /The Royal Air – / In the Parcel – Be the Merchant /of the Heavenly Grace – But reduce no Human Spirit / To Disgrace of Price … ’.Footnote14 The poem articulates the idea of published thoughts, ‘the auction of the mind of a man’, with incarnation, and criticises it from the perspective of economic circulation: the body of Christ is a parcel in the market.
This economy of publication would thus be one of the earliest constructs of the literary institution. It promotes the idea that the written work is a derivative product of a purer, higher and truer order, but also supports the idea that value can only be given to complete and finished products. On these grounds, we can see that Dickinson’s resistance to publish is also another form of resisting literary commerce. And, also, that her resistance to the whole, to the presentation of her texts as a corpus, responds to this patriarchal and logocentric logic by rendering the concept and commerce of incarnation impossible.
The resistance of her work to this commerce, and to investing in it through the project of a published book, has yet another side to it. Not only does her writing practice resist entering the realm of economic circulation but it also invests in loss rather than gain:
So, if the principle that says nothing can be lost has been transgressed, it’s because something is lost. At this moment the chemical principle turns into an economic one: the subject of this stanza is a Trust. ‘Trust’ could also refer to the value of confiding in someone else, but the references to destruction, fragmentation and loss make a stronger case for the idea that Dickinson is describing her own work, and that, whilst trust funds are made to prevent economic losses, this particular one has failed to protect and profit from its assets.
The second stanza affirms the poem’s metapoetic dimension. We have to take into account Dickinson’s insistence on the shattered quality of her work in order to understand why the Trust is fractured. Porter claims that ‘[u]nity is not, despite their compactness, a quality of Dickinson’s poems. The truth is that they disperse rather than hold’.Footnote16 The references to atoms in her poetry usually refer to the poems’ fractured quality. In a poem written a few years before this one, she writes: ‘I told my Soul to sing – // She said her strings were/ snapt – / Her Bow – to atoms blown’.Footnote17 In these lines the lyrical ‘I’s’ vocal cords are violently shattered, and the atoms refer more to these fractured residues than to an enclosed self-identity. Thus, in the poem in question, the metaphorical fractured Trust is the first reference to her oeuvre, but we can only assert this after reading the first lines of the second stanza.
The continuity between the lines, between the fractured trust and the faces of the atoms, connects them; the second stanza clarifies the first. The fragmentary nature of her work is described twice, stressing the force that form has in the transgression of the principle that says that nothing can be lost and the conception that a poem has to be whole. Hence, this poem is representative of her scrap-poetics, which resists turning into a profitable product and does not meet the standards of the literary institution. The poem describes a powerless oeuvre: the Trust, to atoms blown, enables disaster as it fails to protect and preserve its assets.
By the end of the poem, the ‘finished creatures’ have departed – perhaps they’ve been mailed, or maybe they’ve just gone astray. If Dickinson’s poems sustain a principle of incompleteness we need to ask how the departure of these ‘finished’ creatures affects their quality of being finished. When they depart, do they follow the chemical conviction that nought be lost or don’t they? If they don’t, does the poem a have a ring structure; does the beginning answer the end and is disaster enabled in each of these creatures? Does the fact that, once departed, they’re no longer under the author’s control make them prone to incompleteness? In the last line of this poem there is an alternative word:
+Departed / +EntrustedFootnote18
Franklin and Miller chose to use ‘Departed’ in the poem’s published version, but ‘Entrusted’ actually gives the poem a ring structure. If we read it at the end we repeat the sound of the word Trust from the beginning and, in this way, lexically tie the entrusted creatures to the fractured Trust above. But here the alternative word isn’t simply a possible substitution for ‘departed’. Both words are necessary in order to affirm what the poem suggests from the beginning: that we’re facing an economic twist in which loss (departed) and Trust (entrusted) have to be read in the same key. Here we also find a precise example of why Dickinson’s use of alternative words enable different readings of a poem that is never actually selfsame, because the alternative words bifurcate meanings within them and keep the poems open, unfinished: they unwork them. Interweaving both concepts in the unique and poetical way it’s done here, allows one to understand how Dickinson’s writing practices can be thought of as an investment in loss.
So let’s recapitulate and acknowledge two different elements that enable economic disaster in her work. First, the many formats in which it was written; this is to say, the fractured superficies of its inscription that resist becoming a book and turning into a whole. Second, the way her work was squandered by being kept from the institution of literature. Katz points out that her work ‘subverts the traditional conceptualizations of profit and loss, and that (…) loss is figured as the necessary reserve’.Footnote19 What this means is that Dickinson’s sense of squander is to fold the flood in the drawer. Since her father and brother ‘held long tenures as treasurers of Amherst College’,Footnote20 Katz suggestively remarks that ‘by assuming the role of a sort of literary treasurer, Dickinson ironically writes herself into the male familial heritage … ’.Footnote21 What’s ironic, as we see in this poem, is that Dickinson, the treasurer, is a squanderer and consequently defies the male familial heritage.
Her writing practice doesn’t only transgress and question patriarchal authority over literary history, but also strikes the very logic that makes authority itself possible by unleashing a movement of loss and powerlessness (the chaff) instead of one of profit and power (the wheat) and hence unworking the project of a finished work.
2.2. Address
In Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community relationality becomes an extremely important aspect of writing that unleashes the unworking. It is as if this excess negativity were nowhere else but in the address to the other. In this respect I think it is extremely suggestive that many of Dickinson late poems were written on envelopes, the material of address. But precisely, what I now want to show, is that Dickinson’s poems are not only unworked by their formats of inscription but also by her strategies of address, which affirm finitude and incompleteness. They introduce the subjects involved in the poetic event, such as the lyrical subjects and the readers they address, in mutual movements of loss that render an encounter based on mutual presence impossible.
Although Dickinson resists the literary institution, her poetry is influenced by another order: epistolary writing. Everything a letter implies, such as an envelope, a folded sheet of paper, a seal, and the action of mailing a letter to an absent addressee are central aspects of her poetics. In an article called ‘Dickinson’s Letters to Abiah Root: Formulating the Reader as Absentee’, Martin Orzeck accurately suggests ‘we should (…) treat the correspondence in general, but especially the early correspondence, as a kind of writer’s workshop … ’.Footnote22 I think this an extremely accurate and valuable insight that marks my own approach to the relationship between Dickinson’s letters and poems: epistolary correspondence as the model according to which she develops a structure of address in her poems. Epistolary drives can be transposed to poetry just as poetry’s stylistic elements are incorporated in the letters.
There are two main lessons she took from the model of epistolary writing and ascribed to poetry: the risk of epistolary silence or non-arrival and the notion that the addressee is always yet to come and never present. In this sense Decker argues that a ‘ principle of deferral drives her epistolary discourse: reunion, presence, closure become objects of perpetual postponement’.Footnote23 This is the reason why in many of the poems in which readers are directly addressed, their presence is never confirmed but posed only as a question or a deferred possibility.
In The Postcard, Derrida writes that a letter bears ‘within itself a force and structure, a straying of the destination, such that it must also not arrive in any way’.Footnote24 But this, he writes, ‘is not negative, it’s good and is the condition (…) that something does not arrive … ’.Footnote25 It guarantees the letter will never cease to be both singular and other because by not arriving the addressee won’t appropriate it, and, by sending it off, the addressor won’t be absolutely present in it. Non-arrival is not only the result of chance, but also a condition of address itself, which isn’t only an element that connects two points at the ends of a line, but a movement that affirms the separation between them. This separation has everything to do with space, time, and mortality. Derrida writes that the very notions of ‘destination’ ‘includes analytically the idea of death, like a predicate (P) included in the subject (S) of destination, the addressee or the addressor’.Footnote26 ‘A letter’, writes Dickinson herself, ‘is a joy of earth denied to the Gods’ (it is a mortal joy, a joy of destination).
The issue, for Dickinson and Blanchot, is that literary language always bears the possibility of impossibility, and incompleteness only opens up when language is pushed to its limit at the expense of negating its own (productive) value in the face the other. In The Work of Fire (1949), before Blanchot differentiated writing from speech (which he does only after reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology), he wrote: ‘My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated … ’.Footnote27
The epistolary strategies of address used in most of Dickinson’s poems create movements of deferral that stress this separation.Footnote28
My River runs to Thee –
Blue Sea – Wilt welcome me?
My River waits reply.
Oh Sea – look graciously!
I’ll fetch thee Brooks
From spotted nooks
Say Sea – take me?Footnote29
The poem is about sending, and what is being sent is a river, which turns into the only speaker of the poem in the last three lines. Initially, a lyrical ‘I’ sends it off to the sea, directly addressed as a ‘you’, and, in the second line, the sea is asked to welcome the river, but it is asked by the river, who becomes a second speaker. These two verses recall the action of mailing, but instead of couriers we have the river’s own movement, which flows to the rhythm of the written text. An external party sends it, and once it is on the way, the ‘mailed’ river speaks for itself and is left alone as the initial speaker is gradually dislodged from the poem (after the third line, the possessive is no longer used). Then, when the river asks the sea to look graciously, we enter the realm of risk and deferral. We become aware that reception is not a given and that the addressee might not have the chance or the will to look and read what has been sent. This is why it needs convincing, which is what the river does next by promising the sea access to soundless streams.
The last line gives the poem a metapoetic dimension that articulates its epistolary motifs and structure with Dickinson’s poetics of reception. The lack of a comma between ‘Say’ and ‘Sea’ makes an imperative out of what could have only been a gentle, playful, request and which would have looked like this: ‘Say, Sea, take me?’ This command is reinforced performatively by stressing the word ‘Say:’ Sea (or you, the addressee) say Sea (read it), that way you will Take Me. The act of reading, of saying ‘sea’, would thus be a way in which the river could be received. At this point the three versions of the poem gain significance:
F219a Written on notepaper: Say Sea – Take me? Owned by Amherst College, Amherst MA; Amherst Manuscript # 669
F219B Included in Fascicle 9 and used in reading edition: Say Sea – take me? Owned by Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
F291C End of letter 235 to Mary Bowles: Say – Sea – / take Me!Footnote31 Owned by Amherst College, Amherst MAAmherst Manuscript #291
In each version of this line the italicised words and punctuation change. Dickinson used italics frequently. As a reader and a writer, she hears how this stylistic stress affects the meaning and tone of what is said or written. In 1877 she wrote the following passage in a letter addressed to Higginson:
When a few years old – I was taken to a funeral which I now know was a peculiar distress, and the Clergymen asked “Is the Arm of the Lord shortened that it cannot save?”
He italicized the “cannot.” I mistook the accent for a doubt in Immortality and not daring to ask, it besets me still.Footnote32
In F219A ‘me’ is in italics. This makes the following point: once the river is taken in by the sea it will no longer be a river; the ‘I’ of the lyrical subject will become one with the ocean. If this is the case, the stress contributes to create and anticipate the identity split of the speaker. Nevertheless, it can also seek to show that the speaker(s) of the poem is a fiction. There is no doubt that Dickinson ‘clearly intuits the split between what Barthes has called “the one who speaks (in the narrative)” and “the one who is”’.Footnote33 In a well-known letter she writes: ‘When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person’.Footnote34 In this sense, Dickinson steps away from the romantic model of lyric expressivity in which the speaker of the poem is the outlet of the poet’s voice. On the contrary, for Dickinson, poems cast ‘Me from Myself – to banish’.Footnote35 Rather than a place for subjectivity to dwell in, poetry is a place for subjectivity to be displaced. On this basis, the italics might stress that me is the fictitious river and not the poet. But it can also be a modern recourse of estrangement that contributes to exhibit the metapoetic force of the poem by suggesting that ‘me’ is not the river but the poem as such. In this case, the poem is sent to the reader, who is strongly encouraged to ‘Say Sea’ through the act of reading that line.
In F219B ‘me’ loses the italics and the river’s fictitious voice is restored. In consequence, a reflection on lyric expressivity is not stressed, but a metapoetic reading of the poem is still possible, because the river stands as a metaphor of the poem itself, and of its movements and moments of address. These two versions end with a question mark, which leaves the sea’s reception of the river in the hands of expectation and the reader is asked to respond.
In F219C ‘Take Me!’ is used as a signature in a letter that ends with this poem. ‘Me’ appears italicised again and the question mark is replaced by an exclamation point. The split between the one who speaks (in the narrative) and the one who is acquires a new meaning because ‘Take Me!’ is in the place where the poet should have signed her name according to the conventions of epistolary writing. Therefore, the italics reverse the process that took place in the first two versions: instead of establishing that the representative of the verse is a fiction, it opens a personal relationship between the letter’s recipient and its author. Bowles is expected to Say Sea and feel closer to Dickinson. In the part of the letter that immediately precedes the poem, she tells Mrs. Bowles that no one in her family could send their love because they were busy, so ‘I brought my own – myself, to you and Mr. Bowles. Please remember me, because I remember you – Always’.Footnote36 In this context, there is no split between the writer of the letter and the lyrical ‘I’ of the poem. Basically, the difference between the two poems she kept to herself and this one is that the first do not express a feeling, like love, to an identified addressee, even if she is absent. They perform a movement of sending which is marked by the condition of separation intrinsic to epistolary writing.
We must also compare the role of the question marks in the first two versions to the exclamation mark that closes the final line of the poem included in the letter. Placing a question mark after the command to read leaves the reception of the river and the poem in the hands of expectation. Here Dickinson does what Derrida attributes to ‘master thinkers’:
Master thinkers are also masters of the post. Knowing well how to play with the poste restante. Knowing how not to be there and how to be strong for not being there right away. Knowing how not to deliver on command, how to wait and make wait (…) The post is always en reste, and always restante. It awaits the addressee who might always, by chance, not arrive.Footnote37
The poem included in the letter to Bowles ends with an exclamation point that helps avoid deferral and makes the poem more assertive and accomplished. This version literally carries a message (love) that will be received assertively when the addressee finishes reading the letter. This is also confirmed by the fact that the last line is in the place of the signature, which is the last thing there is to read in a letter, its physical conclusion. In this case, the poem’s intention is different: rather than stressing the epistolary condition of separation it manifests a desire to overcome it.
The experience of incompleteness offered by strategies of separation, loss and deferral that take place in her poems unwork the possibility of a reading based on recognition or appropriation. In an interview about Dickinson, the contemporary writer Marilynne Robinson says that ‘[i]n the oddest way, unless I utterly memorise them [Dickinson’s poems], they always seem new to me. There are very few of them that I feel I have “appropriated” at all’.Footnote38 This experience of powerlessness is common to many readers of her work, and is caused by the way in which the poems defer reception, making room for the illegible. When Higginson visited Dickinson in Amherst, she described her own experience of reading poetry as follows: ‘If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry’.Footnote39 Instead of emotional warmth or a sense of recognition or familiarity, the effects of poetry are described as a sort of physical and reflective numbness or derangement. In this way, she steps away from the traditional cathartic or hermeneutic receptions of literature, and describes an ecstatic effect in which the reader is put beside herself.
The issue is that her words are not consigned to gain but loss. Language withdraws as it communicates. Therefore, whatever editorial processes Dickinson’s work undergoes it will always encounter resistance to totality and identity. What makes her case so special, and her worklessness so demanding, is that Dickinson is a sovereign writer in Bataille’s terms: she decides to invest in loss, to consign ‘No’, to language. In The Infinite Conversation Blanchot writes:
[M]an is the being that does not exhaust negativity in action. Thus when all is finished, when the ‘doing’ (by which man also makes himself) is done, when, therefore, man has nothing left to do, he must, as Georges Bataille expresses it with the most simple profundity, exist in a state of ‘negativity without employ’(…). Should he come to sense this surplus of nothingness, this unemployable vacancy (…), then he must respond to another exigency, no longer that of producing but spending, no longer that of succeeding but failing, no longer that of turning out works and speaking usefully but of speaking in vain and reducing himself to worklessness … .Footnote40
2.3. Spiders
Spiders are disquieting presences in her poems, which scholars typically interpret in mainly two ways. One of the most traditional feminist studies of her poetry, by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), claims that Dickinson’s spiders represent a ‘spinster’s’ sexual decay, as well as, simultaneously, an emblem of an artist who stitches together the fragments of her fractured self.Footnote41 Since my research is on work and worklessness, I’m mostly interested in this second line: the spider as artist, which is predominant in later interpretations. The link between the spider and the artist is significant because it is grounded specifically on the artist’s work, rather than on her persona.
Interpretations that follow the spider-artist line vary in regard to the connection between the spider’s work and the artist’s work. Aliki Barnstone argues that the spider is the emblem of art, the voice of a ‘subterranean level of consciousness’ which ‘comes bringing ecstasies of creativity’.Footnote42 I agree with Alexandra Socarides, who, in Dickinson Unbound (2012), relates the spider’s work to Dickinson’s work on account of the ‘unemployable merit and genius of this creature who makes art amongst the items of the household’.Footnote43 Her take on the unemployability of the spider’s work is key to start understanding Dickinson’s spider poems as metapoems that reflect on writing’s worklessness. Let’s look closely at one of them.
This poem starts with a solitary spider, which no one sees and knows of, unwinding the material that it will weave the tapestry (the text) with. We might get the idea that the spider is representing a writer; but the focus is not on the subject but on the work that is being done. The second stanza speaks about the worklessness or surplus of nothingness that is been worked with: the spider plies from ‘nought to nought’, which can refer to both the content of what’s said as to the wherefrom and whereto, thus alluding to a poetic utopia and a temporality with no beginning or end. At the same time, it can also be interpreted as the two sides of address: from no one to nobody, or maybe just as the material with which it is (un)working: nothing. Maybe it’s all of these, but the next line fits the last two hypotheses best: no transaction can happen when there is nothing or nothing of value to transact. The nothingness that is being plowed cannot enter the realm of trade; it is not a commodity. The next four lines allude to the bright, transient glory of this worthless product, which is ultimately made from nothing and destined to nothing: to oblivion, the housewife’s broom – it’s only waste. This poem bears witness to a poet who seriously thought about her work. By choosing to describe the spider’s work this way it becomes evident that Dickinson was conscious of an unworking inclination to loss and squander.
Dickinson critics, editors, and scholars don’t know what to do with these powerless, unemployable tapestries. Her resistance of production through useless squander, of success with failure, and of utility with banality and waste, was initially explained through the myth of a romantic, withdrawn and repressed poet. The editing and marketing processes of her work supported this myth until very recently, which is why most editions and translated editions of her poems transform or leave out her formal, grammatical, material, and semantic transgressions. This doesn’t only misrepresent Dickinson as literary criticism has done with many other women writers; it is also an attempt to exclude writing’s illegible worklessness, its resistance to the moment of identity that would unify a book and turn writing into a profitable product limited to symmetrical transactions.
2.4. Dying
In the Dickinson editions most people are likely to own, the dashes in between words or at the end of lines are unsettling; they evoke much more silence and space than they actually show, like hauntings from her original manuscripts. These are traces of the worklessness that editors, and our reading habits, are inclined to overlook. The ‘disturbing’ strength of Dickinson’s poetry is the affirmation of an inexhaustible negativity that leaves its mark and is ceaselessly unleashed despite how it is published, although the closer we get to the original manuscripts the more traces of non-actualisable negativity we encounter.
Literature is unique for Blanchot because he believes it can suspend the work of the negative, the process in which nothing turns into something and meaning appears. For him, literature ‘arrests the movement of death as such, arresting the dialectic that allows language to mean. (…) Literature seeks to grasp the movement of negation or dying that is its condition of possibility by means of the way in which it would use words’.Footnote45 This understanding of literature contributes to a better understanding of Dickinson’s poems, which also release unemployable negativity by arresting ‘the dialectic that allows language to mean’ and associate this suspension with dying. Let’s read the following late, loose, text from 1884Footnote46:
Before the narrator appears as an ‘I’ in the second column, there is no lyrical subject, and what’s written has a very interruptive form: there are wide gaps between words and two of them, ‘dangerous’ and ‘moments’ are cut off by line breaks. This relates to the text’s topic too, since it describes certain moments in which meaning is interrupted: things lose content or, rather, meaning ceases to be transmitted, no signal (the poem is syntactically ambiguous as to which of the two it is). The text announces that this suspension is dangerous but significant for those who go through the limit experience, which we may not survive – and here a ‘we’ is designated for the first time, the poem speaks to us. It tells us that a dangerous momentary lack of meaning might expand us. It’s not clear what this expansion would consist of, but it would not make us more inclusive or whole but less closed upon ourselves, these moments unwork us too. This follows from the subsequent lines: ‘if we do not, but that is Death whose if is everlasting’. The syntactical ambiguity of: ‘if we do not, but that is’ sheds a new light on what had already been said, which was that ‘Life stands straight – and punctual’ when meaning is suspended.
When death is introduced with this syntax, it envelops the poem all the way back to the beginning; as if everything that had been said were death too. Of course, not surviving means death, which is the reason why this line is situated where it is: if we do not survive that is death. The issue is that it literally reads: ‘if we survive them they expand us, if we do not, but that is death whose if is everlasting’. Coherent with Dickinson’s poetics of incompleteness and multiple possibilities, this syntax allows us to interpret the reference to death in more ways than as a consequence of not surviving. Death also becomes a name for the dangerous moments in which meaning ceases to come forth. These moments expand us with the same interruptive logic that transverses the poem visually and thematically: things lose content just as our being is fissured by the non-actualisable negativity that has always made us incomplete. We seek names for it since childhood, i.e. Death, Tarry Town; and even if we come to grips with it being our ‘wherefore’, it still exceeds us; one way in which it does this is that we don’t know how it will happen, perhaps in ‘avalanche’ or ‘avenue’, a question the poem asks as it evokes the mysterious – or simply arbitrary – works of Fortune.
In Dickinson’s poems and letters the idea of incommunicability is most often stressed whenever death comes up. In this way dying and the very particular relationships it creates are also an experience of language and its limits, which we actually come into contact with as we read the previous poem and our eyes shift from blank to blank. As we are physically exposed to language’s unemployable vacancy, an intimate form of relation takes place, but an intimacy without interiority. We accept the blank spaces between us, and the way they performatively put us in relation with the poem through separation. A relationship based on incompletness and strangeness is, precisely, an unworking community in the sense Blanchot was thinking about in the 80’s. Dickinson points to these unavowable relationships beautifully in this envelope poem: ‘Unknown – for all / the times we met – / Estranged, however / intimate – / What a dissembling / Friend – ’.Footnote47
3. End
Looking at Dickinson’s poetics in the light of the unworking not only shows that she thought of literature, meaning, the idea of the book, relationships and work in ways that defy social, literary and ontological values and norms that are still dominant today, but also that her writing transgresses them performatively. Her writing practices open the possibility of relating to and reading one another within a range of limits and impossibilities that require we stop reducing our use and understanding of language to ‘that which represents, and (…) [to] that which receives and gives meaning’.Footnote48 Her unworking texts unleash a surplus of nothingness and open unemployable vacancies in which we must let ourselves get lost.
Opening a dialogue between Dickinson and Blanchot to identify and explore the connections between writing and incompleteness, literary address, the exteriority of ectasis and death, and the surplus of nothingness that exceeds signification, not only provides us with a better understanding of what’s at stake in Dickinson’s writing practice and how it unworks the concepts of the work, subject and communication; it also provides an answer to why literature was considered by the French writer a form of the unworking, which was always and never strictly a political and ontological question.
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Notes
1 Emily Dickinson, Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them, ed. Cristanne Miller (Harvard: The Belknap Press, 2016), p. 266. Hereafter abbreviated DPP.
2 Emily Dickinson, The Gorgeous Nothing, ed. Jen Bervin and Marta Werner (New Directions, 2013), p. 8.
3 Dorothy Huff, Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles. Method and Meaning (The Pennsylvania State UP, 1995), p. 1.
4 Marta Wener, Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 47.
5 Ibid., p. 36.
6 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 400.
7 Alexandre Kojève, ‘The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel’, in D.K. Keenan (ed.), Hegel and Contemporary Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 399.
8 Gary Lee Stonum, ‘A Poetry Without a Project? A Poetry Without a Scope or Structure?’ (E.D. Critical Assessments, 2002), p. 509.
9 In ‘Gathering and Scattering Emily Dickinson’s Poetry’, Antoine Cazé plays with the title Dickinson Unbound (a book by Alexandra Socarides about the way Dickinson left her poems open to simultaneous possibilities that defy editorial norms), to describe how Dickinson’s writing practices thwart the logic of the book: he argues that she unbinds it. In this article the author studies Dickinson’s publication history and the way her writing practice has challenged editorial efforts. Cazés revision is most significant because it includes the digital archives and excludes her most popular reading editions. See: Antoine Cazé, ‘Gathering and Scattering Emily Dickinson’s Poetry’, Sillages critiques [En ligne], 33 | 2022, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2022, consulté le 19 janvier 2024. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/13464; https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.13464.
10 Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, Acts of Literature, trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston (Routledge, 1998), pp. 188–9.
11 Dickinson, Emily, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas Johnson (The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1958), p. 414.
12 Daniel Katz, ‘Satin Cash: Dickinson’s Reserves’, in Jean-Jacques Lecercle (ed.), L’Argent comme échange symbolique (Université Paris X, 1999), p. 57.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 DPP, pp. 480–1.
16 David Porter, Modern Idiom (Harvard UP, 1981), p. 111.
17 Dpp, pp. 168–9.
18 Manuscript owned by Amherst College; Amherst Manuscript #set 92, accessed https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12176618.
19 Daniel Katz, ‘Satin Cash: Dickinson’s Reserves’, p. 61.
20 Richard Sewall. The Life of Emily Dickinson, p. 10.
21 Daniel Katz, ‘Satin Cash: Dickinson’s Reserves’, p. 53.
22 Martin Orzeck, ‘Dickinson’s Letters to Abiah Root: Formulating the Reader as Absentee’, in Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch (eds), Dickinson and Audience (The University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 153.
23 Ibid., p. 143.
24 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 123.
25 Ibid., p. 121.
26 Ibid., p. 33.
27 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’, in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandel (Stanford UP, 1995), pp. 323–5.
28 If interested in more examples see Tania Ganitsky, Unworking Poetic Address. A Comparative Work on Emily Dickinson Paul Cel an, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot (The University of Warwick Repository, 2018).
29 DPP, p. 107.
30 Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition (The Belknap Press of Harvard Up, 1998), p. 246.
31 These manuscripts are owned by Amherst College and Houghton Library, Harvard University, and were accessed here: www.edickinson.org [Date accessed: 14 April 2017].
32 Dickinson, Emily, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, p. 583.
33 William Decker, ‘A Letter Always Seemed to Me Lime Immortality’, in Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 143.
34 Dickinson, Emily, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, p. 412.
35 DPP, p. 345.
36 Dickinson, Emily, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, p. 377.
37 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, p. 191.
38 Thomas Gardner, ‘Interview with Marilynne Robinson’, in A Door Ajar. Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson (Oxford UP, 2006), p. 54.
39 Dickinson, Emily, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, p. 473.
40 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 206.
41 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale UP, 2000), p. 632.
42 Aliki Barnstone, ‘Houses within Houses: Emily Dickinson and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “A New England Nun”’, New Centennial Review, 28.2 (Michigan State UP, Spring 1984), p. 138.
43 Alexan dra Socarides, Dickinson Unbound, Paper, Process, Poetics (Oxford UP, 2012), p. 43.
44 DPP, p. 251.
45 Iyer, p. 77.
46 I will use Werner’s transcription from Open Folios, since it is typed but respects the spacing and the marks (she even uses a pen to do the latter). The pages are not numbered.
47 Emily Dickinson, The Gorgeous Nothings, p. 152.
48 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 261.