Emily Dickinson's Lyrical...

Search form

Dickinson's Transplantation of Citizenship in the Earth: An Un-Silencing by Beth Staley

            There is no Silence / in the Earth – so silent

            As that endured

            Which uttered, would / discourage Nature

            And haunt the World –

                                                —Emily Dickinson, Fr. 1004A[1]

Throughout her work and life, Dickinson explored a concept that measured belonging in nineteenth-century America: citizenship. In her work, citizenship was a measure of radical belonging for the human and nonhuman subjects gathered in her literary ecology. To be a citizen was to belong in this literary ecology, and her citizens were little, barefoot, winged, and spacious. In her life though, citizenship was a measure of national instead of radical belonging for subjects recognized within the United States. The distinction between citizenship in Dickinson’s literary ecology and the nation illuminates a key difference between radical and national belonging. While radical belonging can pertain to human and nonhuman subjects’ shared state (condition) despite borders, national belonging can only pertain to the citizen subjects who exercise rights in and with a shared state (nation). States of radical belonging, like the one cultivated in Dickinson’s literary ecology, are often imagined or sought to compensate for the restrictions or exclusions of national belonging.

A desire for the compensation of radical belonging might be traced to Dickinson’s home, where she was a United States citizen who did not enjoy the full national belonging guaranteed to adult white male property owners, and where the people she interacted with daily, Irish immigrant workers, had varying access to citizenship and its degrees of national belonging. If they never experienced the national belonging shared by citizens with equal rights, Dickinson and the workers who comprised her primary face-to-face contact in later years may have forged a gratifying radical belonging. Maggie Maher remained a devoted maid as well as confidante to Dickinson and her sister, and per Dickinson’s own funeral instructions, Maher’s brother-in-law Tom Kelley, also employed at the Homestead, was her lead pallbearer with five poor Irish Catholic laborers who carried her casket through the Homestead’s back door, garden, barn, and field to the family plot. Aife Murray confirms that this final wish might signal the intimacy shared by Dickinson and her workers (24). Likewise, Jay Leyda suggests that she might have used her procession to the grave as “a pageant of her allegiances” (265-67).[2]

If it’s possible to approach Dickinson’s portrayal of radical belonging in her literary ecology as an extension of the radical belonging experienced in her home, then it’s possible to read her exploration of citizenship in that ecology as a test for how it might measure radical instead of national belonging. As a measure of national belonging, citizenship was already being tested by the Civil War and influx of Irish immigration, only to reveal a major flaw. Citizenship metonymized all subjects’ bodies and nation spaces according to an arbitrarily integrative and disintegrative national belonging that served nation space.[3] In doing so, it committed soldiers to battlefields and graves, and it organized residents into community centers and undocumented margins like Kelly Square, a home to many of Dickinson’s workers that, confirms Murray, was never marked on a map or directory.[4] Invested in the hospitality of radical belonging rather than the hostility of national belonging, Dickinson’s literary ecology wonders about a citizenship that might be tested on a different common ground—neither nation nor center, but earth.

I deliberately use the word “earth” because it is also a body that endures metonymization with nation space under an arbitrarily integrative and disintegrative national belonging. Deak Nabers identifies how Thoreau approaches this arbitrariness by using natural law to insist on the abolition of slavery without, however, confirming whether it should be obeyed instead of or integrated into positive law. As a symbol for natural laws, Thoreau’s water-lily inspires “hope” when dependent on human behavior, and it stands for “integrity” when independent from it (Nabers 843). Instead of supporting abolition and equality from the perspective of national belonging, Dickinson does so from the perspective of radical belonging, so rather than pose something from earth to nation, as in Thoreau’s water-lily, Dickinson takes something from the nation and embeds it in the earth: citizenship.[5] Based on the metonymy that forces citizenship to serve nation space, she focuses on how that nation space is also ultimately earthen space. Across Dickinson’s literary ecology, I argue that she transplants citizenship in the earth by experimentally calling a variety of human and nonhuman subjects “citizens” who are rooted more by soil than nation. With this transplantation, Dickinson tests whether citizenship can thrive in the hospitality of radical belonging instead of withering under the hostility of national belonging. Because the earth is the common ground of radical belonging for all subjects—citizen and noncitizen, human and nonhuman, living and deceased—Dickinson has a more difficult time identifying the earth, like Thoreau’s water-lily, as separate from or outside of human behavior.

Sensitive to the inseparability of earth and human behavior, Dickinson’s transplantation of citizenship is a broad un-silencing of the discord between radical belonging and national belonging. It is also an un-silencing of the very silence that results from that discord, as in the epigraph above: “There is no Silence / in the Earth – so silent / As that endured / Which uttered, would / discourage Nature / And haunt the World –” (Fr. 1004A/MS AC 90-5/6). Silence is particularly discouraging and haunting when it signals the triumph of an arbitrarily integrative or disintegrative national belonging over radical belonging. The location of silence in the earth reminds readers that the earthen subject, sometimes damaged or muted in this triumph too, comprises the only world for any kind of belonging. Dickinson’s transplantation of citizenship in this earth poetically anticipates Bruno Latour’s focus on the “metamorphic zone” as the source of agency where “actants” are located before they’re politicized as “actors” that might support either nature or nation (Latour 13). Latour’s goals are first, to discard the notion that “speaking of Earth” as a “living organism” is a return to animism, and second, to acknowledge a common world that can recognize more subjects because it isn’t fractured into an inanimate domain with no agency and an animate domain with all agency (Latour 13-14). In Dickinson’s literary ecology, the un-silencing of discord and silence itself is forged as subjects listen to and echo the agencies of others while, in turn, remaining accountable to others who are listening to and echoing their own agencies. Such listening and echoing aren’t rooted in the aural perception of one another. Instead, they’re rooted in the multisensory expectation of one another and the shared agencies, known and unknown, that will impact what Latour calls their “same shape-changing destiny” (15). 

Fig. 1. AC 90-5/6, “There is no Silence,” about 1865.

Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections.

 

Because Dickinson’s transplantation of citizenship in the earth is an act of un-silencing, it reveals that what citizenship can measure is not just any state of radical belonging—but an acoustic state of radical belonging. In this acoustic state, citizenship must be based on the nuances of listening and echoing instead of the contentment of shared space, sensory contact, or both shared space and sensory contact. In her elegies for a slave body ignored by a “Tract of Citizen” (Fr. 415A) and for a beloved “Citizen of Paradise” (Fr. 890B), citizenship measures belonging based on the shared spaces of ownership and mortality, so the acoustic state of radical belonging is burdened by power dynamics in those spaces. In her discovery of an orphaned “Barefoot Citizen” (Fr. 486A) and her address to nephew Gilbert as a “little Citizen” in a document of fragments (AC 887), citizenship measures belonging based on moments of sensory contact, so the acoustic state of radical belonging is as temporary as that contact. Finally, in poems that span human and nonhuman nature to identify citizens that include winged creatures (Fr. 1407A), unobservable forces of nature (Fr. 1176A), dwellers of an imagined “Republic of Delight” (Fr. 1147A, B) and inhabitants of a town formerly populated by ghosts and squirrels (Fr. 1069A), citizenship measures belonging based on sensory contact at and with earthen space, where listening and echoing are possible. Despite this seemingly ideal acoustic state of radical belonging, not all subjects are translatable to one another. Still, they keep trying to listen to and echo one another, prompting an unexpected inquiry: What happens when subjects are untranslatable to one another in an acoustic state of radical belonging, and what happens to the untranslatability of Dickinson’s vision of this acoustic state? This limit is especially palpable in her poems about the earth. Concluding with them, this article will trace hospitality not back to the home but to the earth itself.

*

Because citizenship is based on the shared spaces of ownership and mortality in elegies Fr. 415A and Fr. 890A, any acoustic state of radical belonging is altered by the power of ownership and mortality. In Fr. 415A (MS H 48), Dickinson elegizes a subject’s dehumanization and death by comparing him to a resource that can be owned by purchase after extraction from deep within the earth: coal.

            More Life – went out – when / He went

            Than Ordinary Breath –

            Lit with a finer Phosphor –

            Requiring in the Quench –

 

            A Power of Renowned Cold,

            The Climate of the Grave

            A Temperature just adequate

            So Anthracite, to live –

 

            For some – an Ampler Zero –

            A Frost more needle keen      

            Is necessary, to reduce

            The Ethiop within.

 

            Others – extinguish easier –

            A Gnat's minutest Fan

            Sufficient to obliterate

            A Tract of Citizen –

 

            Whose Peat life – amply / vivid –

            Ignores the solemn News

            That Popocatapel exists –

            Or Etna's Scarlets, Choose –

 

Fig. 2. H 48, “More Life – went out – when / He went,” about autumn 1862, in Fascicle 14.

Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

 

Having endured the “Power of Renowned Cold, / The Climate of the Grave,” she recalls how the subject was strong enough to survive as “Anthracite,” but when the temperature dropped further to an “Ampler Zero” or “A Frost more needle keen,” he was “reduce[d]” to “The Ethiop within.” Writing in 1862, Dickinson’s use of the term “Ethiop” refers to an African, and so the deceased subject compared to coal is one removed from his homeland, purchased as a slave in the south, and fated for injustice. The only end punctuation in the poem follows this line, signaling a shift into irresolution.

In the last two stanzas, Dickinson alludes to something within subjects that will “extinguish easier” than the slave’s strength and be “obliterate[d]” by a “Gnat’s minutest Fan.” What is extinguished or obliterated in these “Tract[s] of Citizen” keeps them silent amidst the slavery debates symbolized by the eruptive spaces of the Popocatapel and Etna volcanoes. The punctuated dash after the final word “Choose –” links it to the line “Ignores the solemn News,” confirming that that the quiet of such ignorance is a choice. With the circular syntax of the last two stanzas sans end punctuation, the elegy is trapped in that choice. Elegizing both the deceased slave and the quiet citizens accountable for his fate, the trace of discord between them, as silent as it is, is un-silenced as a threat to any acoustic state of radical belonging. Citizens must do more than quietly share space, especially in the face of injustice.

In Dickinson’s citizen elegies, citizenship as a measure of radical belonging based on shared space is problematic. If this acoustic state is not compromised by the territorialization of power, it will be limited by the boundaries of mortality, as in Fr. 890B (MS AC 91-7/8):

            A Coffin – is a small / Domain,

            Yet able to contain

            A +Citizen of Paradise                        

            In it's diminished Plane –

 

            A Grave – is +a restricted / Breadth –

            Yet ampler than the Sun –

            And all the Seas / He populates –

            And Lands He looks opon

 

            To Him who on it's / +small Repose                          

            +Bestows a single Friend –                 

            Circumference without Relief –

            Or Estimate – or End –

 

+a Rudiment +an inferior

+low +conferred –

Fig. 3. AC 91-7/8, “A Coffin – is a small / Domain,” about 1864.

Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections.

 

Despite being a “diminished Plane” and “restricted / Breadth,” this final resting place is “ampler” than “Sun,” “Seas,” and “Lands” because it contains the beloved subject. Beyond the grave, this “Citizen” or, per Dickinson’s variant, “Rudiment” of “Paradise” shares space with the speaker only in her imagination of that paradise, where a trace of their compromised acoustic state of radical belonging remains un-silenced. The elegy becomes, like the one above, for the dead as well as the living who are destined to “Circumference without Relief – / Or Estimate – or End –.” Alexandra Socarides finds a tension between the elegy’s generic requirement for closure and Dickinson’s resistance to that closure, especially at the level of her fascicle structure, as it extends time and space to engage repetitions and variations that deny return and obstruct consolation (80). In her elegies about citizenship based on the shared spaces of ownership or mortality, traces of a compromised acoustic state of radical belonging are un-silenced for deep mourning. In the case of Fr. 415A, mourning is a cause for urgency. Given the death count across citizenship’s history observed by Russ Castronovo, there is value in un-silencing these traces and assessing citizenship based on shared space. Dickinson’s poems that escape elegy outline the stakes of a citizenship based more on sensory contact than shared space.

*

Dickinson’s test of citizenship as a measure of radical belonging based on contact begins with the lost boy of Fr. 486A (MS H 167) whose story emerges from his brush with a “flake of snow,” a “Redbreast of the Barn,” and the wintered earth.[6] Despite his status as a “Barefoot Citizen,” his acoustic state of radical belonging with others is fleeting, and he remains homeless:

            He told a homely tale

            And spotted it with tears –

            Opon his infant face was / set

            The Cicatrice of years –

 

            All crumpled was the cheek

            No other kiss had known

            Than flake of snow, +divided with     

            +The Redbreast of the Barn –

 

            If Mother – in the Grave –

            Or Father – on the Sea –

            Or Father in the Firmament –

            Or Bretheren, had he –

 

            If Commonwealth below,

            Or Commonwealth above           

                        [page break]

            Have +missed a Barefoot / Citizen –              

            +I've ransomed it – alive –                  

                                                                                                           

            +imprinted swift +When hurrying

            to the town +lost

            +I've found it – 'tis alive –

Fig. 4. H 167, “He told a homely tale,” about late 1862, in Fascicle 23.

Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

 

Wondering whether the boy was abandoned by a dead mother or seafaring father or whether he wandered beyond the purviews of God or kin, the poem’s speaker qualifies the boy’s estrangement with if’s and or’s that can’t confirm where he came from or where he’ll go next. Listing all his communal and spatial absences—mother, father, Father, brethren, commonwealths below and above—inflects the speaker’s relief at his survival with sympathy. Like his fleeting moments of contact with snow, bird, earth, and speaker, Dickinson’s final descriptor, “alive –,” is only temporarily compensatory. The poem’s end dash and lack of closure suspend the boy citizen in an acoustic state of radical belonging that is in decay towards silence until the next moment of contact. In her recollection of their encounter, a trace of their brief acoustic state of radical belonging is kept un-silent yet also unresolved.

Ultimately, Dickinson’s citizen elegies and the poem above collect the traces of unsustainable acoustic states of radical belonging only to desire a more sustainable one. This desire suffuses the fragments across document AC 887, where Dickinson acknowledges the kind of contact and space that she shares with her nephew, “little Citizen” Gilbert. Included among the mostly extrageneric documents comprised of script across the surfaces of envelopes and scraps, this long horizontally-shaped piece of wrapping paper contains at least three texts, notably a draft message to her nephew Gilbert: “With the trust that the / little Citizen is already / a patriot I send him / the national Colors / or such of them as / I can find for hues / just now are few – / so minute a Veteran / will possibly / Excuse them –.”[7]

Fig. 5. AC 887, c. 1876-1886.

Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. 

 

Dickinson aligns herself with the child citizen by finding national colors, probably referring to a flower or other gift inclusion, that are just a bit off—enough so that a patriot might not confirm the reds, whites, or blues. Yet Gilbert, who is a “little Citizen” and trusted to have become “already a patriot,” will recognize them. Since their citizenship is based on sensory contact at and with earth’s symbols and hues instead of on the nation’s official symbols and hues, what woman writer and child addressee share is an acoustic state of radical belonging wherein they can listen to and echo one another endearingly. The whimsy of the note seeps into the text on the left side of the document’s verso: “Is not the Election / of a Daphne much / more / more signal than / that of a President – / for Beauty needs no / Magistrate and / Ecstasy is its only / mob – is a hushed / mob.”

Fig. 5a. AC 887a, about 1876-1886.

Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. 

 

When Dickinson’s transplanted citizenship measures the radical belonging she shares with a child, a daphne, and the earth itself, she un-silences “Beauty” from “Magistrates” to find a “hushed” mob of “Ecstasy.” On the common ground of earth above nation, Dickinson listens to and echoes what and who is other. In doing so, she feels patriotism for any hue, elects flowers instead of humans for recognition, and invites others to do so too. Because the symbol of this little earthen citizenship is a non-native flower, the daphne, it signals potential for the successful transplantation of citizenship from nation to earth where it will measure an un-silenced acoustic state of radical belonging. This is probably the flower enclosed with a fine copy of the note to Gilbert.

Yet, turn the page containing the “Election / of a Daphne” counterclockwise by ninety degrees, like an hour-arm going back to noon, and this hushed mob of ecstasy is silenced by another ecstasy that Dickinson mocks: “How inval – / uable to be / ignorant – / for by that / means one / has all in / reserve / and it is / such an / Economical / Ecstasy –.”[8] Two different subjects of “invaluable ignoran[ce]” emerge across the document’s repetition of the word “fool.” After a line drawn horizontally below the text about economical ecstasy, Dickinson describes the fool who resorts to wasteful “Consummation”: “Consum / mation is / the hurry / of fools – / but Expec / tation the / Elixer of / the Gods –.” And above the text about the election of a daphne, Dickinson’s upside- down script refers to the fool who surrenders to impulsive “Exhiliration [sic]”: “Exhiliration of fool.” The foolishness of these consumer and exhilarated subjects is discerned through the document’s counterpoints: between natural and national colors, the election of a daphne and a president, and the hushed mob of beauty’s ecstasy and the ignorant mob of economical ecstasy. One set of subjects operates by the exhilaration of shared contact in an unsustainable acoustic state of radical belonging, and the other set operates by the consumption of shared space under national belonging. Beyond the discord between radical and national belonging, the fragment laments citizenship based on fleeting moments of tenderness or beauty; it will only measure an acoustic state of radical belonging that is decaying into silence. To sustain it, citizenship must be based on shared space too. The daphne from earth to poet to note to child is a symbol of citizenship as a measure of radical belonging for those whose shared contact at and with the earth defies silencing.

In document AC 887, Dickinson’s term of resolution against silencing is “expectation.” If a catalyst for all these fragments is the blooming and gifting of a flower, then the word “expectation” refers to a time that precedes the note itself. It refers to spring, when subjects plant seeds, transplant seedlings, and nurture growth by anticipating how their agencies and the earth’s agencies can sustain a state of radical belonging, an acoustic one wherein no subject is taken for granted or silenced. “Expectation,” what Dickinson calls the “Elixer of the Gods,” sources the only future of citizenship as a measure of radical belonging for human and nonhuman subjects based on contact at and with the shared space of earth. To sustain this acoustic state of radical belonging, subjects must remain “a prey to / Expectation,” the last phrase under the vertically aligned document, just off-center on the page – the center (earthen, conceptual, and textual) around which all the fragments relate.[9]

*

In Dickinson’s poems about human and nonhuman subjects, citizenship is based on both shared space (as it is in her elegies) as well as sensory contact (as it is in her boy texts). Across Fr. 1407A, Fr. 1176A, Fr. 1147A, B, and Fr. 1069A, citizens include winged creatures, unseen forces of nature, dwellers of an imagined “Republic of Delight,” and inhabitants of a town formerly populated by ghosts and squirrels. When the problem of translating one another in this acoustic state of radical belonging arises, subjects listen as a kind of expectation of one other, translatable or not. They also remain accountable to the others who listen as a kind of expectation of them, translatable or not.  In Fr. 1407A (MS AC 110), citizenship is not only transplanted from nation to earth, but human items are also transported from the dining room to the forest ground in a social allegory about what is translatable across human and nonhuman realms:

            A Saucer holds a / Cup

            In sordid human Life

            But in a Squirrel's / estimate

            A Saucer holds a Loaf -

 

            A Table of a Tree

            Demands the little King                [“my” under “the”]

            And every Breeze / that run along

            His Dining Room do swing -          [“th” under “do”]

 

            His Cutlery - he keeps

            Within his Russet Lips -                [“between” under “Within”]

            To see it flashing when / he dines

            Do Birmingham eclipse -               [“Manchester” under “Birmingham”]

                                                            [verso]

            Convicted - could we / be

            Of our Minutiae

            The smallest Citizen / that flies      [“Dear friend. / You” below “The smallest Citizen”]

            Is heartier than we -                       [“Has more integrity.” under “Is heartier than we -”]

Fig. 6. AC 110, “A Saucer holds a / Cup,” about 1876.

Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections.

 

In the nonhuman world, Dickinson finds that a small saucer holds an entire loaf, a tree is a table, and breezes distinguish the earthen dining space. Between the squirrel’s lips, cutlery reflects sunlight instead of manufacture mark when its “flashing” blade “eclipses” Birmingham or, per the variant, “Manchester.” Even the last stanza confirms that the human conviction for minutiae has no meaning in the nonhuman realm. The transportation of these items from dining room to forest, like the transplantation of citizenship from nation to earth, asks readers to esteem the translatability of use value across human and nonhuman realms without ignoring the untranslatability of cultural value across them. Marveling at the untranslatability of cultural value, Dickinson claims that “The smallest Citizen / that flies / Is heartier than we –” and has, per her variant, “more integrity.” In this acoustic state of radical belonging, limits to translation are opportunities to listen and echo perceptively – even playfully.

Whether these opportunities are unsilenced or not depends on how subjects approach observation in Fr. 1176A (MS AC 293), a scientific allegory about what’s translatable across human and nonhuman realms:

            Nature affects to be / sedate         [“was known” under “affects”]                       

            Opon Occasion, grand

            But let our observation / shut         [“halt” beside “shut]

            Her practises extend                     [“qualities” under “practices”]

            To Necromancy and the

                                                            [verso]

            Trades

            Remote to understand                   [“astute” then “obscure” under “Remote”]

            Behold our spacious / Citizen         [“my” then “this” under “our”]

            Unto a Juggler turned –

Fig. 7. AC 293, “Nature affects to be,” about 1870.

Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections.

 

Dickinson penciled “was known” below the word “affects” and added “qualities” below “practices [sic],” so from poem proper to poem margin, fieldwork becomes specialized work done outside of or “Remote” from the field. Observation in the field may not perfectly translate what subjects can’t “understand” about nature or, per the variants, what is “astute” or “obscure” in nature. However, such observation keeps subjects listening to nature as a “spacious Citizen.” On the other hand, when specializations, like necromancy and trades, replace observation with knowledge and create the illusion of having translated nature, they transform it from a citizen into a predictable juggler. Here, Dickinson aligns with the “empirical holists” of the nineteenth century who, like the Humboldt-inspired Thoreau, studied pieces and parts of the world according to a changing universal whole; Laura Dassow Walls finds them differing from the “rational holists” who approached the universal whole itself as knowable (4). The “But let” of Dickinson’s poem is a red flag to specializations that prohibit an acoustic state of radical belonging between observer, observed, and unobserved.

Dickinson’s social and scientific allegories arise from the issue of translating something about herself too, specifically the vision of an acoustic state of radical belonging in her literary ecology. Allegorizing it is one way to approach the translational issues that keep it from becoming realized beyond this ecology, as in Fr. 1147B (MS AC 379):

    The Bird did prance – the / Bee did play -

            The Sun ran miles / away

            So blind with joy he could / not choose         [“full of” under “blind with”]

            Between his Holiday –                                 [“the” under “his”]

 

            The morn was up – the / meadows out          

            The Fences all but ran

            Republic of Delight, I / thought                                

            Where each is Citizen –

 

            From Heavy laden Lands / to thee               [“Climes” above “Lands”]

            Were seas to cross / to come

            A Caspian were / crowded –

            Too near thou art for Fame –                       [“close” under “near”]

Fig. 8. AC 379 (left), about 1869. Dickinson penciled an earlier draft of this poem (right) on the verso of the leaf. Courtesy of Amherst College Archives & Special Collections.

 

In this poem, birds prance, bees play, joy is blind, holidays cannot be chosen, morn arrives, and meadows roll—all culminating in the speaker’s reflection: “Republic of Delight, I / thought / Where each is Citizen –.” The cross of each “t” in “thought” is one long pencil stroke that underlines “Republic.” Joining the two words, the mark emphasizes that this republic exists only in the speaker’s thought, something that leaves the speaker uneasy in an earlier version of this poem where Dickinson cancels the line, “What hindered me,” above “Republic of Delight.” Although she and her vision may not be translatable beyond thought or poem, she listens for and tries to echo what or who is other in the world, and she remains accountable to others who might listen for and try to echo her, especially her vision of an acoustic state of radical belonging. In doing so, she encounters the unexpected.

Dickinson finds that her vision of an acoustic state of radical belonging—her “Republic of Delight”—is not alone. It echoes with (but not directly from or to) emigrants’ vision of America: “From Heavy laden Lands / to thee / Were seas / to cross to come / A Caspian were / crowded – / Too near though art for Fame –.” In the earlier draft of this poem, Dickinson cancels three additional lines after “From Heavy laden Lands”: “As Emigrants we come / Or pass too uncertain / Passengers.” In both versions, the last stanza charts the borders that emigrants “cross to come to” a republic that can only be imagined before arrival, and even then, it may only be reimagined against reality. Since the adverb “too” might be heard as the preposition “to,” emigrants pass other uncertain passengers, and they pass or turn into uncertain passengers themselves. The poem’s later version reinforces how her vision and the emigrant’s dream of an acoustic state of radical belonging are thoughts that remain “Too near” and “close” for actual “Fame.” Although they are un-silenced, they are not translatable. This untranslatability haunts Fr1069 too, when a town that was once a “Territory for the Ghosts / And Squirrels” acquires a legacy by a capitol “Distinguished for the gravity / Of every Citizen –.” The citizens, however, are strangers, like the inhabitant of the grave who motivates the poem. However, that very untranslatability is what keeps subjects listening and echoing into unexpected unison. Dickinson’s untranslatable vision still echoes with the emigrant’s untranslatable dream. An acoustic state of radical belonging is an un-silencing that validates untranslatability.

*

If the untranslatable vision or dream of an acoustic state of radical belonging must sacrifice real fame, it still acquires the “strange Fame” that reverberates in the earth of Fr. 1398A (MS AC 192):

              Gathered into the Earth,

              And out of story –

              Gathered to that / strange Fame -

              That lonesome Glory  

              That hath no omen / here – but Awe –

Fig. 9. AC 192, “Gathered into the Earth,” about 1876.

Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections.

 

Because the prepositions don’t relate back to a subject, the poem’s fragmentation is sonically resolved by the final word: “Awe.” The poem’s earthen location (line 1), story (line 2), fame (line 3), glory (line 4), and only omen (line 5) refer to and resonate through this “Awe,” a term that defines the moment when listening as a kind of expectation brings the unexpected. With the occasion of Levinas’s death, Derrida analyzes this awe. When someone’s death ends our ability to listen for them, it brings the long final awe that illuminates (by reflection) the awe we experienced with that person when it was impossible to accurately translate one another but not impossible to remain hospitable listeners to one another—when untranslatability echoed with untranslatability. Earth, not home, is the province of this hospitality because it “gives hospitality before all else” (93). Every act of hospitality is inscribed with the host’s “recollection” of having been the other or guest and the host’s “welcome” of the other or guest (36). Dickinson’s awe in this poem might be read as a recollection of, a welcome to, and (per the last line) an “omen” of the hospitable listening that un-silences an acoustic state of radical belonging without needing to overcome untranslatability.

While Levinas and Derrida align this hospitality with perception of the other in the face, Dickinson’s work reminds us that this face may be human, nonhuman, or earthen.[10] In her poems, hospitality finds its profoundest reverberation in face-to-face moments with the earth, as in Fr. 1754[A], the manuscript of which has been lost:

              He was my host – he was my guest,

              I never to this day

              If I invited him could tell,

              Or he invited me.

 

              So infinite our intercourse                    [“interview” is a variant for “intercourse”]

              So intimate, indeed,

              Analysis as capsule seemed                [“like” is a variant for “as”]

              To keeper of the seed.

In these lines, the listening and echoing between speaker and earth resonate so powerfully that the origin of hospitality gets lost in it. “Interview,” the variant for “intercourse,” emphasizes the degree to which the state of radical belonging is an acoustic one that poises the subject to face the earth as a “prey to / expectation” who will care for a seed and wait for its capsule. Read through Levinas and Derrida, turning to face the earth is like accepting a call from infinity; it is the unsilenced and untranslatable non-origin of all radical belonging. It helps subjects turn to face others and respond to them. Derrida explains: “It is necessary to begin by responding. There would thus be, in the beginning, no first word. The call is called only from the response. The response comes ahead of or comes to encounter the call, which, before the response, is first only in order to await the response that makes it come” (24). When Dickinson calls human and nonhuman subjects “citizens,” it is a response to listening for them in the first place. It is a response to their silenced call for belonging in the second place. “The most important population,” she writes in Fr. 1764[A], “Unnoticed dwell.” Even if she can’t find or translate them, she listens for them. Even if her vision of an acoustic state of radical belonging can’t be translated, it will echo with others’ visions. Transplanted in the common ground of earth, Dickinson’s citizenship is simply the privilege of being one of many guests.

Beth Staley, West Virginia University

Notes

[1] Dickinson’s physical line breaks are marked with a slash mark in all transcriptions.

[2] For the first edition of Dickinson’s poems published in 1890, Maher provided the daguerreotype of the poet that she salvaged despite the Dickinson family’s distaste for it.

[3] According to Giorgio Agamben, declarations of rights charge the bare life of humans with the substance of the nation and the sovereign, a metonymy that is dangerous for both its inclusions and exclusions. See Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford UP, 1995, pp. 128-29.

[4] During Dickinson’s life, citizenship as a measure of national belonging compromised an acoustic state of radical belonging in three ways. First, citizenship in the antebellum United States relied, says Christopher Castiglia, on “the interiorization of the social,” wherein subjects inaudibly possessed the multiple ideologies that the state valued or excluded but could not regulate (4). Second, Dana Nelson explains that as the interiorization of ideas sanctioned a desire for sameness, citizenship consolidated fraternity for white men who wielded authority from “the space of the son” in deference to the abstract founding fathers, a position that silenced difference among and beyond them (22). Third, Russ Castronovo describes the “necrophillic will” of citizenship to mute non-citizens through actual and social deaths and to repress “nonnational cravings for more complexly lived subjects” (4, 6). With the un-silencing of these deaths, though, citizenship might be oriented to what Castiglia calls “humanism without humans” (15).

[5] Antebellum debates regarding abolition and African American citizenship were intensifying when Dickinson was ten years old, and her father Edward defended three men who hid an eleven-year old Amherst girl to prevent her from being transported south and sold into slavery. His alliance with one of the abductors was financial. Years later, the abducted girl’s uncle, Jeremiah Holden, would be the Dickinsons’ stableman. Aife Murray relates the historical details of the abduction, Edward Dickinson’s defense, and the intertwined destinies of those involved in her book about the servants in the Dickinson household. See Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language. U of New Hampshire P, 2009, p. 118. Richard Sewall cites an 1855 appeal by Edward Dickinson: “By the help of Almighty God, not another inch of our soil heretofore consecrated to freedom, shall hereafter be polluted by the advancing tread of slavery.” See The Life of Emily Dickinson. Harvard UP, 1980, p. 536.

[6] For Jane Eberwein’s analysis of “boy figures” that includes this poem, see p. 99 in Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation, Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1985.

[7] Images courtesy of Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson’s Fragments and Related Texts 1870 – 1886, digital archive, ed. Marta Werner, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, June 2007, radicalscatters.unl.edu.

[8] James McIntosh reads this line as an acceptance of what cannot be known; see Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown, U of Michigan P, 2004, p. 159.

[9] The term “prey” appears in other poems about listening, particularly Fr945, wherein the speaker’s hope for communication that is lively yet understandable is compared to a fox hunt.

[10] See Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford UP, 1999.

 

 

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford UP, 1995.

Barrett, Faith. “Slavery and the Civil War.” Emily Dickinson in Context. Edited by Eliza Richards. Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 206-16. 

Castiglia, Christopher. Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States. Duke UP, 2009. 

Castronovo, Russ. Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Duke UP, 2001.

Crumbley, Paul. “Democratic Politics.” Emily Dickinson in Context. Edited by Eliza Richards. Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 179-87.

Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford UP, 1999.

Dickinson, Emily. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. Edited by R. W. Franklin. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1980.

Eberwein, Jane. Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation. U of Massachusetts P, 1985.

Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History, vol. 45, no.1, 2014,: pp. 1-18.

Leyda, Jay. “Miss Emily’s Maggie.” New World Writing. New American Library, 1953, pp. 255-67. 

McIntosh, James. Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown. U of Michigan P, 2004.

Murray, Aife. Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language. U of New Hampshire P, 2009. 

Nabers, Deak. "Thoreau's Natural Constitution." American Literary History, vol. 19, no.4, 2007: pp. 824-48.

Nelson, Dana D. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Duke UP, 1998.

Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. Harvard UP, 1980.

Socarides, Alexandra. Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics. Oxford UP, 2012. 

Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. U of Wisconsin P, 1995.

Werner, Marta. Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson’s Fragments and Related Texts, 1870-1886. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, June 2007, radicalscatters.unl.edu.

 

Image Credits 

Fig. 1. AC 90-5/6, “There is no Silence,” about 1865. Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. For a link to the digital surrogate, see https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:17270/asc:17286

Fig. 2. H 48, “More Life – went out – when / He went,” about autumn 1862, in Fascicle 14. Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. For links to the digital surrogate, see
http://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/235569 & http://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/235570

Fig. 3. AC 91-7/8, “A Coffin – is a small / Domain,” about 1864. Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. For a link to the digital surrogate, see https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:11541/asc:11555

Fig. 4. H 167, “He told a homely tale,” about late 1862, in Fascicle 23. Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. For links to the digital surrogate, see http://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/235761 & http://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/235762

Fig. 5. AC 887, c. 1876-1886. Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. For a link to the digital surrogate, see https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:5426/asc:5429

Fig. 5a. AC 887a, about 1876-1886. Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections.  For a link to the digital surrogate, see https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:5426/asc:5430

Fig. 6. AC 110, “A Saucer holds a / Cup,” about 1876. Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. For links to the digital surrogate, see
https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:10479 & https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:10479/asc:10482

Fig. 7. AC 293, “Nature affects to be,” about 1870. Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. For links to the digital surrogate, see
https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:7675 & https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:7675/asc:7678

Fig. 8. AC 379 (left), about 1869. Dickinson penciled an earlier draft of this poem (right) on the verso of the leaf. Courtesy of Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. For links to the digital surrogates, see https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:3394 & https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:3394/asc:3397

Fig. 9. AC 192, “Gathered into the Earth,” about 1876. Courtesy of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. For a link to the digital surrogate, see https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:3333