8 - Reassessing Dickinson's Poetic Project: A Postmodern Perspective

Summary

We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.

— Montaigne, as quoted by Jacques Derrida

Dickinson's poetry changes literary theory.

— Helen McNeil, Emily Dickinson (1986)

Rilke writes in one of the Duino Elegies, “Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away / in every direction —.” This is always the way with Dickinson. She is always somewhere else.

— Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark (1993)

LITERARY CRITICS TODAY not only deconstruct texts but, to paraphrase J. Hillis Miller, show how texts deconstruct themselves — by contradicting their own tacit assumptions that they refer to pre-existent features anchored in the world “out there,” that is, to transcendental signifieds. But as Ferdinand de Saussure theorized in his Course in General Linguistics (1916; trans. 1959), linguistic signifiers speak to, formulate, or reformulate mental representations (“signifieds”) of those language signifiers. Abolished was the assumption that words refer to transcendental signifieds — that is, to a universally agreed-upon objective reality. Jacques Derrida in turn argued that signifiers relate only to other signifiers, that “the absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification infinitely”(1978: 280).

Dickinson's Words

One of the biggest challenges that Dickinson scholars adopting a postmodern perspective face is that the poet already seems to be doing their job. Emerson blithely proclaims in Nature that words are “signs of natural facts” (197); but for Emily Dickinson,

A word is dead when it is said, some say.

I say it just begins to live that day.

(Fr278A.1; J1212)