Dickinson's Misery (28 page)

The complexity of this conditional temporality is very much like that of “I think To Live—” and it has, understandably, confused a reader as perceptive as Cameron. “Interestingly enough,” Cameron writes, “what prohibits union seems to be the fact that it has already occurred…. For although ‘Because Your Face / Would put out Jesus‘—' seems suppositional, two stanzas later the event is echoed, and located not in the future at all, but rather in the past:

The problem with this reading is the assumption that the slip into the past tense constitutes the ninth stanza as an “event.” As in the first stanzas of “I cannot live with You”, in which “Our Life” becomes “his Porcelain” when the figure is taken literally, the shift from the sixth quatrain's “Would” to the seventh stanza's “Shone” happens at the point at which the lines, for the moment, enter into their own fiction. Not incidentally, “… I esteem the fiction— /
^x
real [
^x
true]” at the very moment that the lines turn back upon the I's “Eye,” and the effect of that turn is blinding. In the fictive vision that the figure of apostrophe would make plausible, the illusion of a full presence would blind the I/Eye to the fact that “Your Face” would be an illusion, an effect of performative utterance (the variant for the “excellence” of figure's therefore ironically “sordid” Paradise is “consequence”). To mistake the performative dimension of apostrophe for a statement of historical presence would be to become the Sexton, for to imagine that “over there” is already here is to make sure that “You” will dissolve into figment.

As Dickinson wrote in other lines in 1862, also in a fascicle (13), that begin, “You see I cannot see—your lifetime—” (F 313), the representation of desire's object threatens to take the place of that object itself:

When what is now the ninth stanza of “I cannot live with You—” enters into the past tense of ideal union
as if
that union had already occurred, the
“translated faces” of desire tease the lines momentarily out of thought. If the lines ended here, we could say that apostrophe (or the fiction of address) had worked its charm. But the three stanzas that issue from this moment deny apostrophe its due, and in so renouncing the “saturated Sight” of figure they must find a way out of its “Haunting” and “Teazing” logic. They must reach toward, in other words, what “… only—can suffice!” without appropriating the object in a rhetorical illusion of sufficiency. They must give “You” a figure that is not a “translated face.”
⁴⁸

As in “I think To Live—,” where the inflections of the pen bear witness to what is “Beyond my limit to conceive— / My lip—to testify—,” the concluding movement of “I cannot live with You—” sustains an address to a “You” positioned just beyond apostrophe's limit. Stanzas ten and eleven withdraw from the fictive moment of absolute insight to reassert the fallacy of an identity between self and other, here and there. Thus the penultimate stanza sums the danger of a figurative logic of self-projection:

This last line is inflected by two important literary echoes: Satan's “I Myself am Hell” from
Paradise Lost
and Heathcliff's Satanic address to the dead Catherine in
Wuthering Heights
. The allusion to
Paradise Lost
has often been noticed, but it has not been noticed that Dickinson's Milton has been mediated here by Brontë's Miltonic hero who, “condemned to be” where Catherine is not, invokes her presence in his own tormented apostrophe, an invocation that grows directly from the question, “Where is she?”: “Not
there
—
not
in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! … Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! … Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only
do
not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable!
I cannot
live without my life! I
cannot
live without my soul!”
⁴⁹
Heathcliff, master of the egotistical sublime that he is, keeps Catherine with him and “Not
there
” in the very form of his address to her. In the novel, the performative force of his utterance actually works: Catherine stays, one of desire's “translated faces.” If the pathetic tug beneath the statement “I cannot live with You— / It would be Life—” has been all along “I
cannot
live without my life,” that pathos is finally qualified (or “rectified”) by the allusion to
Wuthering Heights
and Brontë's ambivalent portrait of her hero's fantastic act of identification through invocation. The concluding stanza of what is now Dickinson's poem suggests an alternative to the sort of romantic selfhood that
Heathcliff—and especially Heathcliff's use of the figure of apostrophe—represents.
⁵⁰

That alternative is sketched in lines that offer an appropriately tentative version of a form of address that would not be an act of appropriation and perhaps not even a fiction:

These lines are remarkable for what they do not say. They do not say, with Heathcliff, “Be with me always.” They do not locate the invoked “You” within the self; they do not claim that your “there” has been transmuted (or, in Dickinson's better word, translated) into my “here.” In other words, the lines recognize the threat inherent in the figure of apostrophic address; they register the way in which “this figure,” as Jonathan Culler has written, “which seems to establish relations between self and other can in fact be read as an act of radical interiorization and solipsism.”
⁵¹
In the second chapter, I suggested that the de Manian suspicion of figuration—especially de Man's suspicion of lyric figuration—that Culler invokes is bound up with an idea of the lyric as an ideal, ahistorical genre. The sort of diplomatically erotic “relations” that Dickinson's lines imagine at their close are predicated upon the rejection of such solipsism, as well as such lyric idealization: “You” remain “there—I—”—stranded between dashes—remain “here.” And as Cynthia Griffin Wolff has suggested, “what sense can there be in the lines ‘So We must meet apart— / You there—I—here—,' unless ‘here' refers to the very page on which the poem is printed?”
⁵²
What sense, indeed. If the directly referential function of “here” persuades us that what the deictic points to is the page we hold in our hands (but not exactly
that
page, of course, once the poem “is printed” and many pages are delivered into many hands), what would the referential function of “there” be? Wolff's solution, that “‘We,' reader and poet, do indeed ‘meet,' but only ‘apart,' through the mediating auspices of the Voice and the verse,” ignores the problem to which the extended final stanza is the solution.

What Dickinson offers instead in her last two lines is an alternative to the metaphor of the voice of the poet speaking to herself “here” in the poem we are reading. What we are reading is not a voice (or a “Voice”). It is, as Griffin Wolff herself points out, a page. The difference seems important in a poem so preoccupied with the effects of the very figure of opening
one's mouth to say “O,” to say “You.” Whatever “that White Sustenance—
^x
exercise
^x
privilege” may be taken to be, it is manifestly silent. That “White Sustenance,” like the white page on which she writes, is all that is left to the poem's I/Eye if the transcendence of figurative address is refused. The poem's “I” and “You” are sustained by that page in the sense that they are both (as pronouns) borne by it and (as subjects) hold it as they write and read, but compared to the imagined vision of Paradise, the slight weight of a page is small compensation. It is, in fact, no compensation at all in the Emersonian sense of an ideal reciprocity in which, as Emerson wrote, “the copula is hidden.”
⁵³
The page rather sustains the tenuous connection between “I” and “You” by materializing that copula, a relation as difficult to read as is the grammatical copula of the poem's last lines.

For in some subtle and disturbing sense, the “White Sustenance” of the page is at once a comforting material presence and as blank as the figure of a figure. The (agrammatical) placement of “are,” on which the catachrestic series of metaphors of the last lines depends, makes the identity between “… that White Sustenance—
^x
exercise
^x
privilege / Despair—” and the page much more difficult to hold in mind than the simile that I have just ventured can admit. On the basis of this single and singularly awkward copula, “the Door ajar,” a metaphor of place that would stabilize the relation of “there” and “here,” gives way to “Oceans,” a much less stable figure of place, and then to “Prayer,” a metaphysical displacement of presence. “Prayer is the little implement,” Dickinson wrote,

Such an ironic apostrophe, a futile “exercise,” a pathetic “privilege,” presses rather desperately against the “White” page that is itself the trace of apostrophe's ambition. Not I, not you, not here, not there, not this, but “that,” if White Sustenance” is a figure for the page then it is a figure without a face. It is the historical, as opposed to the fictive, material of address.

That address's capacity to mediate—to join “I” and “You” as subjects precisely by keeping the pronouns “apart”—depends, of course, on its successful passage from self to other. To return to the terms of Dickinson's letter
to Susan, “the letter's ride to You—” is what allows reading to take place at all. In giving selected lines from the fascicles the sort of attention to grammatical and rhetorical detail known as “close reading,” I have made them into the lyrics that they try so hard not to become. Like you, I first read them as lyrics in Johnson's and Franklin's editions, and perhaps like you, I am a literary critic. But Dickinson's highly literate incorporation of just about every literary convention in the book does not make her into a lyric poet—yet, like the white page and its pathetic apostrophe, literal and figurative address are almost impossible to tell apart after a over a century of lyric reading of her writing has rendered them identical. If we knew, for example, that the “you” in the lines “I cannot live with you—” was Susan, and that she would not “overhear” but
respond
to what Dickinson wrote to her, would that mean that the lines are not a lyric?
⁵⁴
If we knew that the lines were definitely never sent to anyone at all, that they were written to be locked into a box that Dickinson may or may not have intended for “the world” to see after her death, would that mean that the lines
are
a lyric? I have been suggesting that these questions became pressing for the twentieth-century interpretation of lyric poetry in a way that was not at all pressing for Dickinson. The pathos in Dickinson's writing is located elsewhere, in a place so alien to our reading of the genre we have attributed to her work that we have not been able to see it, though it has been there all along. What most of her “extrageneric” compositions worry about is whether they will literally reach the reader, and whether that reader will respond. Although Dickinson's specifically written forms of address mediate between self and other in a much more directed (Dickinson might say “plausible”) way than does the metaphor of lyric voice, as the tentativeness (and desperation) of the conclusion of “I cannot live with You—” suggests, in being more specific than the figure of the transcendentally individual voice, the medium of the page is also less sure of its destination. Though a letter or a poem to Susan might imply the historical Susan as its ideal reader, the letters and poems that have come into our hands have, in their passage, implicated us as readers as well. Rather than imagine ourselves voyeurs identified with a privileged lyric solitude or solitary readers of a fragmentary romance novel—that is, rather than worry about whether Dickinson wrote lyrics or letters or letter-poems—we might begin to take account of the way in which a third position has been built into Dickinson's structures of address.

Unlike the reader of a lyric or the reader of (someone else's) personal letter, the reader of the historical materials of Dickinson's various figures of address enjoys no intersubjective confirmation of the self. Far from it. The way in which Dickinson's writing often invites or assumes a reader other than its (often unavailable or out of reach) historical addressee, and
other than an imaginary, sympathetic eavesdropper or theatrical audience in the distant future, is difficult to characterize, or at least contemporary literary criticism has no language for it. But it is definitely there, in the writing—or perhaps it would be better to say that it is there
on
and outside the writing, or on the sheets of paper that sustained that writing and that may have passed between other people to whom it no longer refers. On a flyleaf from her father's copy of Washington Irving's
Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon
, for example, Dickinson penciled some lines that seem to be directly addressed (
fig. 23
):