1For anyone taking an interest in the poetics of collecting and, more factually, in how poetry collections are put together, Emily Dickinson is a central case, as evidenced by the complex editorial history of her poetic oeuvre. An overview of this history – from Dickinson’s death in 1886 to the third Harvard edition of her complete poems prepared by Cristanne Miller in 2016 – can be found in the chart below (Fig. 1), which presents a slightly simplified version of it. Excluded from the chart are the one-volume “reader’s” editions of the poems by Johnson and Franklin and of the letters by Johnson and Ward, which may seem a little baffling, especially to European readers long accustomed to Johnson’s single volume under the imprint of Faber and Faber. Yet it also says something about an urgent need to move forward and make way for a new Dickinson in the digital age.
Figure 1: A simplified overview of the complex editorial history of Emily Dickinson’s poetic oeuvre.
2Of course, the complexity of Dickinson’s publishing history primarily derives from the fact that Dickinson did not publish any of her poems in the traditional sense during her lifetime – except for the handful that were printed in newspapers.1 Instead she kept them to herself in a variety of states and composition stages – ranging from barely legible scribbles to neat fair copies – while sending quite a few to various correspondents, and sometimes different versions of the same poem to various correspondents. Shortly after her death, her sister Lavinia – to whom she had willed all her earthly possessions – found in her bedroom forty hand-sewn booklets or “fascicles” consisting of hand-written fair copies of her poems, alongside hundreds of unbound drafts, described by Dickinson scholar Dorothy Huff Oberhaus as:
[C]opies of nearly four hundred poems arranged in the manner of booklets, but unbound; 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. (Oberhaus 1995, 1)
3The bound – in this case, sewn or stitched – vs. unbound status of the poems is crucial to any discussion of Dickinson’s approach to the poetry book. Indeed, it raises many questions as to the nature and meaning of Dickinson’s gesture in preparing some of her poems for what looks like an editorial project (but, paradoxically, remained unpublished) while leaving others unbound (yet copied on sheets that may suggest they were meant to be gathered together) – an ambiguity captured by Oberhaus’ odd phrase, “in the manner of booklets,” which suggests critical caution and an interesting terminological discomfort. In fact, the unbound poems have misleadingly been called “sets” by many Dickinson scholars, following the lead of Ralph Franklin in his facsimile edition of 1981. By contrast, Alexandra Socarides, in her 2012 study of Dickinson’s material poetics appropriately entitled Dickinson Unbound, argues convincingly against this misnomer, as I will discuss later (Socarides 2012, 107-113).
- 2 T.W. Higginson (1823-1911) was a prominent man of letters as well as an American Civil War hero. As (...)
- 3 The issues related to the variants (or alternatives, as they are sometimes called) have been the su (...)
4To further complicate matters, the fascicles were immediately torn apart by the first people to whom Lavinia Dickinson turned in order to edit the poems she had found – first, Emily’s sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, who was the poet’s closest friend and collaborator of sorts; then when Susan Dickinson failed to act quickly enough, Mabel Loomis Todd – the wife of a Professor of Astronomy at Amherst College and also Austin Dickinson’s mistress – who, with the help of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, prepared the early editions of Dickinson’s poems in book form.2 Interestingly, the Susan Gilbert Dickinson vs. Mabel Loomis Todd case (or wife vs. mistress) was later complicated by a bitter feud over land property, with the side effect of dispersing Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts into two major collections, one at Amherst and the other at the Houghton Library of Harvard University, which explains why we have today two complementary, rather than competing, electronic archives (Fig. 2). The early editions by Todd and Higginson did not take Dickinson’s idiosyncratic groupings into account, organizing instead the poems into thematic groups of the editors’ own making (such as “Death,” “Nature,” “Love”) and adding titles to individual poems, while Dickinson had left all of them untitled. They also “emendated” the poems by standardizing Dickinson’s highly original punctuation and systematically choosing, among the variant words the poet had included even in her fair copies and fascicles,3 those that were the less problematic for the poems to make reasonable, rational sense, or that seemed to “improve” her poetic diction, according to the standards of the time; in effect, they neutralized the subversive potential of the poems and stabilized their shimmering textures.
Figure 2: “Overview” page of the Emily Dickinson Archive website.
Source: https://www.edickinson.org/about
Figure 3: An “envelope poem” by Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College.
Source: https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:16116
- 4 To a certain extent, we might say that hesitation is a paradigmatic feature of Dickinson’s writing, (...)
5On this last point, I want to follow Sharon Cameron’s major study of Dickinson’s fascicles, Choosing Not Choosing, which suggests that the variants are willfully “non-exclusive alternatives” on Dickinson’s part, rather than the traces of any indecision, or even an evidence of Dickinson’s immaturity and, ultimately, weakness (Cameron 1992, 41).4 However, Todd and Higginson’s practice should perhaps not be condemned too severely, if we consider that they were anxious to give Dickinson literary recognition and a central place in a canon dominated by strongly assertive male voices, essentially leaving little room to dissident forms. Even though their editorial tampering would no longer be acceptable today, it is extremely important to mention it because these altered versions are still largely available on the Internet. Consequently, a vast majority of “lay” readers today still have access to Dickinson’s poetry through collections whose editorial principles are outdated and have been partly discredited by scholarly work, in a paradoxical loop back in time that grants increased visibility and dissemination in various forms and contexts to inaccurate versions of the poems. What the patient work of re-collecting Dickinson’s poems has achieved – particularly with Cristanne Miller’s edition, whose purpose is to present them “As She Preserved Them” – is blurred by the remanence of editions that are problematic with regards to the original manuscripts. This situation is partly due to copyright issues: the editions of the 1890s are in the public domain, while the more accurate print editions of 1955, 1998, and 2016 are copyrighted to Harvard University Press. In parallel, the same digital medium grants access to those very manuscripts via the two electronic archives mentioned above.
6While it is true that the three scholarly editions of Dickinson’s poems are more difficult to access because they are copyrighted, I should perhaps add that the first volume of Johnson’s variorum edition has been digitalized – from a copy borrowed from Osmania University Library, in South India. But the website statistics indicate that the page has had only 12,334 views as of September 12th, 2021 – a very low figure considering that the book was uploaded in June 2005.5 The fact that only the first volume out of three has been digitalized creates the odd situation of an incomplete presence of a reliable version of the poems on the Worldwide Web. While we cannot discount the fact that one-volume reader’s editions are widely sold – Dickinson is a poetry bestseller after all – the three-volume variorum editions are expensive items most likely to be found only in libraries or on scholars’ bookshelves.
7To illustrate the complexity of the situation in our digital age, we can take a look at the Emily Dickinson page of a popular website, poets.org.6 There, the last (and longest) paragraph of presentation of the poems synthetizes the editorial cruxes mentioned above in a fairly accurate way, although it still does not take into account Miller’s edition, therefore wrongly claiming that Ralph Franklin’s facsimile edition of Dickinson’s manuscripts is “the only volume that keeps the order [of Dickinson’s ‘handbound volumes’] intact.”7 The selection of forty-six poems (a tiny fraction of Dickinson’s almost 1,800 poems) accessible on the website, however, confusingly references the poems using Thomas Johnson’s numbers while giving dates of first publication ranging from 1890 to 2016 (Fig. 4). Meanwhile the texts themselves are mostly taken from Ralph Franklin’s 1998 edition, duly credited with copyright mentions,8 but those dated 1890-1896 are referenced as being “in the public domain” and are taken from the outdated versions. Thus, the first poem (unnumbered) listed on the third screen of the website’s Emily Dickinson section is presented with a title, “A Day,” which was given to it by Todd and Higginson in their Second Series of Dickinson’s poems, published in 1891.
Figure 4: Page 3 of the “Emily Dickinson” section on poets.org.
Source: https://poets.org/poet/emily-dickinson#poet__works
8Importantly, this short collection is conceived as a pocket anthology, gathering some of Dickinson’s best-known poems such as “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” or “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”; the poems are not organized according to any discernible order, except perhaps the degree of popularity of individual poems. Thus, the first screen (out of five) lists in the following order “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”, “Because I could not stop for Death”, “Dear March – Come in –”, “Hope is the thing with feathers”, “I cannot live with You”, “I taste a liquor never brewed”, “I measure every Grief I meet”, “I heard a Fly buzz”, “Come Slowly – Eden”, and “It was not Death, for I stood up.”
- 9 See https://www.edickinson.org.
- 10 For a detailed list of these institutions, please check the archive’s “Overview” page: https://www. (...)
- 11 For a comprehensive presentation of the Emily Dickinson Archive, see the presentation made by Lesli (...)
9In stark contrast with this partial and confusing presentation of Dickinson’s poems online, the Emily Dickinson Archive gives the reader/viewer a very complete experience of Dickinson,9 since it not only provides images of her actual manuscripts as they are preserved at thirteen different libraries, most prominently the Houghton Library of Harvard University and the Jones Library Special Collections in Amherst,10 but it also environs each of them with typed transcripts of the various existing print editions, on the right side of the screen, as well as an overview of their editorial history at the bottom, in a scroll-down window entitled “Credits” (Fig. 5). This explains why the Archive explicitly describes itself as not being a new edition of Dickinson’s poetry (Fig. 2 above); rather, it brings together two possible embodiments of the poems, manuscript and print, allowing readers to have a comprehensive view of the material situation of Dickinson’s oeuvre, and even offering the possibility, for those who get a login, to add their own notes.11
Figure 5: Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in Possibility,” Emily Dickinson Archive. Manuscript held by Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Source: https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12174858.
10As things stand, therefore, Emily Dickinson’s online presence is polarized between outdated versions of her most popular poems on the one hand, and a highly sophisticated (if rather poorly designed) comprehensive presentation on the other hand. Neither of these two options, however, gives a proper sense of Dickinson’s self-edited fascicles or lets the reader understand the nature of Dickinson’s use of variant words in many poems. Obviously, the Emily Dickinson Archive does provide fascicle information for the images in the credits; and in the typographical transcripts, variants are given under the heading “Textual Notes,” which makes their status far from clear with regard to Dickinson’s practice and possible intention for them.
11Following Sharon Cameron’s aforementioned groundbreaking book, however, scholars now generally agree that the variants Dickinson incorporated into even her seemingly finished poems are not accessory to her poetry, nor do they point to a state of incompletion in the individual poems. Rather, they are consubstantial to what Roland Hagenbüchle called the “processual quality” of Dickinson’s poetics and poetry. Such characteristics would seem to have been restored by the colossal editorial work Thomas H. Johnson accomplished with his 1955 publication of Dickinson’s complete poems in three volumes “including variant readings critically compared to all known manuscripts.” And yet, Johnson’s edition did not account for the original forty fascicles either, choosing instead a chronological ordering of the poems based on a painstaking analysis of Dickinson’s handwriting, while in fact Dickinson had not arranged the fascicles chronologically, as Ralph Franklin later showed in his own editorial reconstruction. “Despite its careful annotation of textual variants, Thomas H. Johnson’s standard edition creates a false impression since his editorial decisions tend to erase what is a crucial feature of Dickinson's poetry: its processual quality,” as Hagenbüchle summarizes (Hagenbüchle 1993, 15). The chronological ordering of the poems by Johnson also granted them an additional layer of impersonality by numbering them (a practice that never was Dickinson’s), which greatly affected their reception as a continuous series of texts while at the same time fragmenting them, making them look of equal weight and position within the corpus.
- 12 See his remark that “[t]he present dating has had an advantage not enjoyed by Poems (1955) in that (...)
- 13 For more on this divide, see my “Emily Dickinson’s Line Breaks in Her Envelope Poems” (Cazé 2021, p (...)
12The second edition of Dickinson’s poems published under the imprint of Harvard (1998) should have benefitted from Ralph Franklin’s expertise on the fascicles and manuscripts; yet it repeated the same (revised) chronological arrangement, unbinding the body of Dickinson’s works and rebinding it according to editorial principles that were never hers. Even as he acknowledges the fascicles in his introduction,12 Franklin bluntly cuts short all criticism of his editorial work: “There can be many manifestations of a literary work. Hers was manuscript, this one is typographical” (Franklin 1998, 27). In doing so, he elliptically points to a quarrel of sorts that has been dividing scholars over the interpretation of Dickinson’s poetry project, with one side upholding the paramount importance of a manuscript “manifestation” (to take up Franklin’s interesting word) and the other championing a print one; or in other words, Susan Howe vs. Ralph Franklin, but also, in a very different way, Cristanne Miller (who insists that Dickinson’s composition unit is not so much visual as audial) vs. Alex Socarides (for whom Dickinson’s “material poetics” relies essentially on the paper sheet as not only a surface of inscription, but as a major component of the poems’ meaning and the poetry’s overall strategy).13
- 14 The presence of variants is unsystematic – some lines have up to fifteen variants consigned by Dick (...)
13As we have seen, the editorial re-composition of Dickinson’s poems gives rise to two intersecting sets of issues: first, whether or not to choose variants as an integral part of the finished poems and second, whether or not to favor a manuscript edition over a printed one. In a culture of the book, and in an editorial tradition where poetry commonly comes in the shape of collections, the manuscript state of Dickinson’s poems, reinforced by the presence of variants,14 has given the impression that these poems were left by their author in an unfinished state requiring the intervention of an editorial hand. In fact, both options are consubstantial to the way in which Dickinson composed her poetic oeuvre; in the absence of any authorial instructions, and given the diversity of her compositional methods – which could be seen as either irrelevant (Todd/Higginson; Johnson) or, on the contrary, as encrypting patterns of a higher esoteric nature (Oberhaus) –, they both have had momentous consequences on the way successive editors have later tried to put together collections of Dickinson’s poems. Thus, one could see her entire poetic project as a wide-ranging criticism of the very acts of grouping or scattering poems. Claire Malroux has accurately perceived the experimental nature of Dickinson’s relationship to collecting when she describes the fascicles (or “cahiers cousus” as she likes to call them) as characterized by “duplicity, multiplicity, simultaneity,” adding in poetic terms that:
From one booklet to the next, there is no linear development. […] The mode of composition is symphonic: it picks up motifs, introduces variations, discovers new meanings by deepening the vocabulary, enriches (sometimes impoverishes) the main theme. It is as though each of the fascicles was diving again and again into the depths of a sea of fluctuating meanings, or was moving along the course of concentric waves in the pursuit of some inaccessible truth. (Malroux 1998, 18, my translation)
- 15 Let’s take the example of “In other Motes –” (Fr 1664, M 734), a poem included in a letter Dickinso (...)
14This is particularly true if one bears in mind the fact that, while Dickinson adopted various means of gathering her poems (most famously, into fascicles), she concomitantly disseminated them through her correspondence (a practice which could be viewed as an “external” equivalent of the inclusion of variants within the very body of the poems). Such dissemination resulted in the major difficulty of even deciding, in some cases, what exactly counts as a poem in Emily Dickinson’s work. Some editors like Thomas Johnson – and, in a more questionable attempt, William H. Shurr in his New Poems of Emily Dickinson (1993) – “rescued” fragments of the often metrical prose characterizing Dickinson’s letters to turn them into poems in their own right, hence producing what Shurr called the “New” poems of Emily Dickinson. In those cases, presenting Dickinson’s texts as collections of poetry lines is open to potentiality rather than stabilized. Shurr’s decision to publish an entire book gathering such “found poems” is an extreme example of editorial intervention picking up fragments from Dickinson’s writings and shoring them against the ruins of her oeuvre. To a lesser extent, choices made by Johnson in his edition sometimes add an extra line to a poem, taken from the letter in which it was included.15
15In other words, the editorial history of Dickinson’s poems makes it clear that there are cases when the gathering or scattering gestures are rendered extremely fluid, including by the writer herself; consequently, her poems fail to fall neatly into the editorial paradigms ruling the making of books, as evidenced by the apparent fluctuations in her compositional methods. In a first period of her writing she wrote poems on individual sheets of paper; then between 1858 and 1865, Dickinson created her hand-sewn fascicles totaling the number of forty, produced more or less intensively throughout the period, while she continued writing on separate sheets; after 1865, she seemed to revert to writing on loose paper sheets, even though in the early 1870s she again gathered her poems in a seemingly more systematic way; finally, in the last decade of her life, she mostly wrote fragments on various materials such as envelopes, producing what Dickinson scholar Marta Werner suggestively refers to as “radical scatters.” It is as if Dickinson had started out writing without a plan, then at the height of her career had contemplated the idea of an editorial project (and there’s no denying that the fascicles corresponded not only with the American Civil War, but also with her most intense desire to get public recognition) before lapsing back to her earlier practice. Such a summary of Dickinson’s career, however, continues to view her proto-editorial work on the fascicles as the supreme achievement of her poetic project, even as it embraces the material “manifestation” of Dickinson’s corpus. In doing so, it fails to take into account Dickinson’s wholesale refusal of any grand design (including God’s, in a painful act of renunciation carried out throughout her entire life). A fascinating example of this failure is Dorothy Huff Oberhaus’ extremely well-researched and well-crafted investigation into the structures of Dickinson’s last fascicle (#40) comprising twenty-one poems, which the critic calls:
[A] work of great sophistication and artistic complexity, a rich tapestry of interwoven themes and structural principles. […] an architectural tour de force […] [that] bears some striking substantive and structural similarities to [George Herbert’s] The Temple and is in some ways comparable to both Ulysses and The Waste Land. (Oberhaus 1995, 10)
- 16 See Socarides’ conclusion that “Franklin and Cameron’s attention to sequence makes visible the very (...)
16Oberhaus’ truly admirable piece of scholarship sets out to reveal the esoteric designs which Dickinson’s practice as a whole dramatically deconstructs. “[H]ow did Emily Dickinson go about composing this final fascicle?” she asks, before offering an answer: “Because its poems are so intricately interwoven and its structural principles so complex, she obviously did not simply write twenty-one separate poems, then stitch them together” (Oberhaus 1995, 53). But pitting this simplicity against that complexity makes short work of Dickinson’s stitches, which certainly never were so inconsequential; stitching and sewing were indeed one of Dickinson’s metaphors of choice for writing.16 Echoing Oberhaus’ question about composing the fascicles, Malroux asks “How to read the Fascicles?” and proceeds to answer with her characteristic acuity:
In truth, each rather appears to be the collection of fragments from a diary, the daily continuity of which would be intimately denied. Emily Dickinson arrests the states of mind she experiences outside of time. Everything is lived in the flash of an instant or the simultaneity of emotions. (Malroux 1998, 19, my translation)
17Favoring a rhizomatic poetics of experimentation that challenges the construction of any stable sequences, however complex they may be, Dickinson also experiments with the possibilities of poetic sequencing and collecting, through the fascicles and beyond. My contention here is that she needs to go through this problematic way of stitching poems together the better ultimately to discard it. Far from being a regression, therefore, her decision to stop making fascicles illustrates her need to further explore the unraveling of sequence, a poetic decision which required a sequence in the first place in order to unravel it. I am borrowing those words from Dickinson’s poem “I felt a Cleaving in / my Mind,” reading it in a metapoetic way in keeping with Alexandra Socarides’ own interpretation:
I felt a Cleaving in
my Mind –
As if my Brain had
split –
I tried to match it –
Seam by Seam –
But could not make
them fit –
The thought behind, I
+ strove to join
Unto the thought before –
But Sequence raveled
out of + Sound –
Like Balls – opon a
Floor –
+ tried + reach –
(J937/F867/M423)
18A transitional poem between the fascicles and the incorrectly named “sets,” this poem can be read as an oblique commentary upon Dickinson’s struggle with poetic sequence, since it unfolds in both space and time, as exemplified by the use of “behind” (l. 9) and “before” (l. 11) illustrating the tension between linguistic continuity (given the formal similarity between the two) and categorical discrepancy (since one is spatial while the other is temporal). The poem is written “on the second side of a sheet of folded stationery” (Socarides 2012, 105), begging the question of its own “match” with the first side so that one is tempted to say that it “seams,” i.e. gives a semblance of continuity by foregrounding the metaphorical nature of a “Seam by Seam” method of composition. “As Dickinson confronts the limitations of sequence as structuring device,” Socarides writes:
[T]he unit of the sheet is itself thrown into question. Dickinson’s interrogation of the coordinates of sequence is a reaction to the ways in which the fascicles, in being sewn together, were made to function like sequences even if […] they resist this designation by being sheets that were stacked as individual clusters instead of nested to make books.
(Socarides 2012, 112-113)
19The implicit tension between sequencing and collecting, making Dickinson’s fascicles a site of resistance against book publication even as they seem/seam to gesture towards it, reveals how intensely the American poet struggled with how to materially embody her poems and make them visible. The lack of a clear practice on her part suggests that the “Cleaving” she felt was a permanent, and permanently unsolved, condition which should however not be seen as an incapacitating mental condition, but rather as a bold exploration of, and experimentation with, alternative modes of putting one’s thoughts out to the world – i.e. to publish them.
20Before concluding this essay with a brief description of Marta Werner and Jen Bervin’s edition of Dickinson’s “envelope poems” in the volume entitled The Gorgeous Nothings, it thus seems fitting to return to the specific question of Dickinson’s refusal to actually see her poems published in print – a refusal that, as we now understand, is inseparable from a lifetime’s reflection upon how to build a collection of poems that radically unbinds the book format by experimenting with contradictory material “manifestations” or “embodiments” of the poems it scatters in the very act of gathering them. “Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man,” Dickinson famously wrote in a poem dated circa 1863, thereby expressing an apparent distrust of, and disdain for, standard ways of putting one’s writings out into the world:
Publication – is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man –
Poverty – be justifying
For so foul a thing
Possibly – but We – would rather
From Our Garret go
White – unto the White Creator –
Than invest – Our Snow –
Thought belong to Him who gave it –
Then – to Him Who bear
It's 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 –
(J709/F788/M386)
- 17 This is Paul Crumbley’s argument, too, in his critical study on Dickinson and the rise of democracy (...)
21This particularly complex statement has received a good deal of critical attention, resulting in diverging interpretations of Dickinson’s position on the topic of publication. All commentators have noted that the poem deals with it both directly and obliquely, by referring the process of publication to issues of both slavery politics and gender. Indeed, the word “Auction” in a poem composed about 1863, particularly when combined with the repeated adjective “White” (l. 7), cannot fail to suggest the “auction blocks” on which slaves were commonly sold at the time. Regarding gender issues, to associate the “Auction / Of the Mind of Man” to a “foul” thing that defiles the purity of a writer’s production suggests, as critic Shira Wolosky has written, “a kind of prostitution, a (sexual) betrayal of white purity” (Wolosky 2002, 137) – and one knows that the meaning of the adjective “public,” in the phrase “public woman,” is very different from what it refers to in “public man.” In her perceptive reading of this poem, Wolosky concludes to Dickinson’s constitutive ambivalence regarding publication, which appears as both a betrayal and a necessity for the text of the poem to be embodied at all: “In this poem,” she writes, “Dickinson mediates these tensions to some extent by leaving open the possibility of some intermediate state between published embodiment and a textuality that is written, but not made public” (Wolosky 2002, 137). This reading certainly echoes the idea that Dickinson’s idiosyncratic mode of “manuscript publication” is a way of valuing process over product, and the potential over the actual. In his no less brilliant essay “Emily Dickinson and Class,” Domhnall Mitchell also concludes to the ambivalence of Dickinson’s poem, although on a very different account, as he sees it fraught with political tensions between a progressive sympathy for the abolitionist cause on the one hand, and great concern for the loss of class privileges on the other hand. Indeed the rise of market economy had profoundly transformed the relationship of authors to their creation and their readership – an evolution that compounded the difficulty for women writers to speak and write truly for themselves.17 “The poem,” Mitchell writes, “is an excellent example of how a conservative motive for writing (the encroachment of trade on a previously noble or genteel activity) can coincide with an apparently more radical agenda (a plea for the abolishment of all slavery)” (Mitchell 2002, 200). Here again, one might wonder to what extent Dickinson’s hybrid self-editorial practice may reflect these contradictory impulses, placing her texts halfway between public and private modes of circulation.
- 18 Crumbley pointedly reminds us that “to invest” also means “to clothe”: “She understands all too cle (...)
22I would like to point out something of a contradiction between what Dickinson’s imagery for the status of any textual incarnation implies, and the associations commonly made with print or manuscript versions of her poems. Indeed, it seems here that the poet’s “Thought” is doomed to be reduced (“disgraced,” as she writes in the last line) no matter what form its textual embodiment takes: the “Corporeal illustration” robs the “Mind” of its infinite capacity by the mere fact of appearing (“shining” with the luster of “illustration”) on any page, be it in print or manuscript. For if the auction of publication reduces thought and mind to commercial items by impoverishing them through the standardized visual appearance of the poem on the page, the unpublished version appears no less ascetic in the purity of its “white snow.” On the face of it, the latter seems to be even more “divested” (to take up one of Dickinson’s verb choices) of substance than its printed counterpart could ever be.18 Taking the metaphor a step further, one might easily identify a looming connection with the writer’s blank page: the paradox here is that by Dickinson’s reckoning, writing becomes best “illustrated” by its negation, blanked out by its very inscription. And yet, given the fact that late twentieth-century scholars tend to value manuscript over print, there is a sense that the reverse is true, that somehow the manuscripts, like magically illuminated scrolls (since “illustrate” used to mean “illuminate”), will allow Dickinson’s texts to be rescued from print, which threatens to blank them out by its standardized and standardizing procedures. It is as if the return to the “purity” of an original – contra the debasement its mechanical reproduction cannot but entail – could only be achieved through the re-embodiment (or re-emergence) in manuscript form, the only incarnation of the poet’s thought able to make its spiritual aura palpable.
23In producing Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings, Dickinson scholar Marta Werner and visual artist Jen Bervin created an impossible art object that remediates Dickinson’s manuscript into the bookish format of a collection – in the museum sense of the word as much as in its poetic sense. The artist’s book gathers the whole of what is commonly known as Dickinson’s “envelope poems,” poems or fragments that she wrote on used envelopes, obviously taking pleasure in playing with the possibilities of this writing space as well as its limitations. There is a blatant irony for Dickinson to write poems on envelopes that she received and never addressed to anyone but herself, thus reversing her own practice of sending out poems in envelopes. Building upon the paradox of these unaddressed envelope poems, Werner and Bervin have created a collection of fragments that were essentially meant to be uncollectible. As Jen Bervin writes in her introduction:
The envelope writings are not a series or discrete body of works. Each envelope has its own complex constellation of affiliations with manuscript drafts one can trace through sources in the Directory (page 243). These envelopes, spanning the years 1864 through 1886, are culled from 1,414 contemporaneous poem drafts and 887 letter drafts. (Bervin and Werner 2013, 10)
24In other words, we are meant to understand that this paradoxical collection of “scraps” actually envelop(e)s not so much the poems and letters comprising Dickinson’s oeuvre, but the otherwise invisible network of their scattered relations. In sum, this book is the perfect Dickinsonian collection, rife with paradoxes, simultaneously gathering and scattering. In addition, it includes transcriptions of the manuscripts in a hybrid format by which the exact spacing and layout of the words is reproduced in print. It is important to underline the fact that this transcription method – presented opposite the facsimiles of the actual envelopes – had already been experimented with by Marta Werner on her website Radical Scatters (Fig. 6a & 6b).19
Figure 6a : A page from Marta Werner’s Radical Scatters showing a manuscript fragment.
Source: http://radicalscatters.unl.edu/mss/a331.facs.html. Screenshot from the Website Radical Scatters reproduced with permission. © CDRH, University of Lincoln, Nebraska. Material copyrighted by The University of Nebraska-Lincoln and The University of Michigan.
Figure 6b: The transcription of the manuscript fragment from Marta Werner’s Radical Scatters reproducing the spatial arrangement of the lines, words, and letters.
Source: http://radicalscatters.unl.edu/mss/a331.tran.html. Screenshot from the Website Radical Scatters reproduced with permission. © CDRH, University of Lincoln, Nebraska. Material copyrighted by The University of Nebraska-Lincoln and The University of Michigan.
25Building on the experience of the website, The Gorgeous Nothings brings together print and digital incarnations thanks to the mediation of the manuscript. Such an intermediary and intermedial object, both obscuring print and illuminating the manuscript in an implicit dialogue with a wider digital substratum, reenacts Dickinson’s complex gesture of stitching and unraveling, coming as close as possible to the poet’s intention without substituting crippling editorial practices for her experimental writing processes.
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