Poetics Today
Intention in Extremity:
Reading Dickinson after the Holocaust
Benjamin Friedlander
English, Maine
Abstract Trauma theory posits an unrepresentable excess to experience, but because
most studies of trauma deal with experiences that are known and named, at least in
general terms (for instance, the Holocaust), there is a tendency to treat the limits of
representation as objective borders determined by the inherent character of specific
events rather than as subjective borders determined by the way an event is experienced. In this essay I propose a different model. Taking as my example the work
of Emily Dickinson—a poet whose descriptions of psychic distress, often presumed
to be autobiographical, have no known basis in the historical record—I argue that
the limits of representation are best conceived as functions of the limits of intention. Further, because intention’s failure—whether conceived as an inability or as an
unwillingness to form meaningful utterance—is necessarily indistinguishable from
the unintended or purely random utterance, I argue that representation’s limits are
met at precisely those moments when interpretation founders in doubt.
An Arctic Region of the Mind
My topic in this essay is the epistemological and ethical status of doubt
in interpretation as exemplified in the work of Emily Dickinson. In keepAn earlier version of this essay was presented at the Fourth International EDIS Conference
(Trondheim, Norway, 2001) as part of the panel ‘‘Dickinson and the Moderns’’ and to an
interdisciplinary writing group at the University of Maine; many thanks to the members of
that group (Amy Fried, Leslie King, Liam Riordan, Nathan Stormer) and to Carla Billitteri,
Cynthia Hogue, Suzanne Juhasz, Lilach Lachman, Taffy Martin, Rachel Quastel, and Meir
Sternberg for their generous, incisive readings.
Poetics Today 26:2 (Summer 2005). Copyright © 2005 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.
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ing with the poet’s own method, I will turn to this topic indirectly, by way
of a discussion of Ruth Klüger’s citation of Dickinson in an essay on the
documentary film Shoah. A scholar in the field of German literature and
herself a survivor, Klüger is the author of a highly regarded memoir, Weiter
Leben: Eine Jugend (1992), now available in English under the title Still Alive:
A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001).1 Klüger’s essay predates her memoir by several years, but its vigorous, introspective analysis looks forward
to the later project and may even mark its true beginning.2 Published under
her married name, Ruth K. Angress, the essay concludes with the following
autobiographical anecdote:
There is a legend about a horseman who one cold winter night rode across Lake
Constance, when the huge lake was frozen solid, something that never happens.
When he arrived on the shore and had the firm ground under his feet again, he
looked back and realized where he had been and how unnatural was his trip and
his survival.Tradition says he died on the spot of the shock. I read that story after
the war and it struck me with the force of a sick joke. I think of it now, as I ride up
Broadway, where I used to take long walks at night as a teenager, mourning the
dead in a strange country, where everyone then said, forget, forget. Oddly, the
shock has not become less. It’s as if the intervening years had cleared our perspective so that nothing now obstructs our view of an arctic region of the mind
and of the past. The film Shoah, a look back, is memory that feels, in the words
of the poet, like ‘‘zero at the bone.’’ (Angress 1986a: 259–60)3
The special place accorded to poetry in this passage—Dickinson, unnamed,
is given the last word—is in keeping with Klüger’s treatment of the genre
in her memoir. There, Klüger’s own poems (from the war years and after)
take on an evidentiary significance quite apart from their significance as
art. Here, artistic significance is itself a form of evidence: proof that the way
a memory ‘‘feels’’ in itself deserves critical attention.
Unattributed, the quoted phrase comes from ‘‘A narrow Fellow in the
Grass’’ (Dickinson 1998: no. 1096). Written about 1865, at the end of the
Civil War, the poem presents a male speaker who vividly evokes the power1. The English edition appeared as I was completing this essay and includes an epigraph from
Dickinson absent from the German text, helping to confirm my present emphasis. The epigraph comes from the poem ‘‘After a hundred years’’: ‘‘Instinct picking up the Key / Dropped
by memory—’’ (Dickinson 1998: no. 1149).
2. In an epilogue to Weiter Leben, Klüger dates her turn to autobiography to a 1988 traffic accident, an origin often emphasized in commentaries (e.g., Lorenz 1997: 294; Rothberg 2000:
130). Yet two years before this accident, in her essay on Shoah, Klüger had already taken up
the task of memory, suggesting a far slower and more purposive evolution than her retrospective account would allow. (The epilogue to Still Living, substantially different from the
earlier text, agrees in principle on the matter of dating.)
3. Klüger repeats the legend in her memoir, in abbreviated form in the German text (1992:
237) and more fully in the English (2001: 184–85).
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ful presence of a snake, in part through exact description, in part through
a recollection of similar encounters in boyhood. Superficially, then, the
poem’s relevance for an understanding of Klüger’s essay is limited to the
quoted line, a memorable euphemism for terror. Indeed, for readers familiar with Dickinson’s poem and Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, Klüger’s
correlation of the two is likely to seem inapt: while ‘‘A narrow Fellow’’
records shock in an encounter with nature, Shoah is concerned instead with
‘‘man-made mass death’’ (Edith Wyschogrod’s [1985] apt phrase, proposed
to distinguish the Holocaust philosophically from plagues, disasters, and
small-scale human violence). In this sense, Klüger’s lack of attribution is
appropriate, a sign that she is quoting the poem out of context—that she is
using Dickinson’s phrase for a purpose divergent from the poet’s own.
Yet Klüger’s own strategies of articulation bespeak a deeper affinity than
her generic appeal to the authority of ‘‘the poet’’ would suggest. Her reliance on analogy, for instance, to represent an experience whose chief characteristic is its resistance to representation recalls such Dickinson poems as
‘‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’’ and ‘‘The Loneliness One dare not sound’’
(1998: nos. 340 and 877). Of such poems, Sharon Cameron (1979: 193) has
written that ‘‘we can see in Dickinson’s arduous struggle with words . . .
the violence with which designation pulled itself out of the grip of insensate experience’’—and in Klüger, too, we see a struggle for understanding
likewise fraught with the prospect of violent failure. Further, Klüger’s conflation of a landscape’s uncanniness with the mind’s apprehension of that
uncanniness—her seamless shift from the frozen lake to the ‘‘zero at the
bone’’ of shock—recalls a similar strategy in Dickinson’s ‘‘Like Eyes that
looked on Wastes’’ and ‘‘The Tint I cannot take—is best’’ (1998: nos. 693
and 696). Nor is this second strategy utterly distinct from the first, since, in
many instances, Dickinson’s meticulous descriptions of the landscape provide one-half of an analogy whose other half naggingly evades the poet’s
comprehension. As Barton Levi St. Armand (1984: 279) notes of Dickinson’s
landscape poetry in general, it is an attempt ‘‘to render the experience of
an experience’’; in Cameron’s terms, an internal effort at ‘‘designation’’ that
projects the violence of its representational project outward.4 One might
well say the same of Klüger’s anecdote.
The complexities of this anecdote merit further consideration. Initially,
the traversal of the frozen lake suggests an analogy to survival of the Holocaust alone. The deathly shock suffered by the horseman—a dramatization of the dangers of retrospection—is thus a legitimation of the oppres4. Kher (1974: 32) provides a detailed survey of this aspect of the work, observing pointedly
that Dickinson ‘‘thinks her objects and sees her thoughts.’’
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sive advice of nonsurvivors to ‘‘forget, forget.’’ This, presumably, is why the
legend struck Klüger, while still a teenager, ‘‘with the force of a sick joke.’’
Retold many years later, the story has undergone a subtle shift of meaning.
The frozen lake is no longer an analogue for the event alone but for the
event’s continued place in memory as well, that is, the Holocaust has now
become for her ‘‘an arctic region of the mind’’ as well as ‘‘of the past.’’ Likewise, the horseman’s ‘‘unnatural’’ journey no longer refers to survival alone
but to the persistence of memory. The implications are ominous: survival
itself must be survived.
At first glance, the quotation from Dickinson adds nothing new to Klüger’s argument; it merely corroborates the psychological wisdom of the
legend of Lake Constance by duplicating its association between shock and
freezing temperature. And yet, read in the context of the entire essay with
the entirety of the poem kept in mind, the phrase ‘‘zero at the bone’’ does
extend the legend’s meaning in one small but significant way. For, where
the horseman of Lake Constance—like the viewer of Lanzmann’s Shoah—
chooses to look back, Dickinson’s speaker has an unexpected shock and thus,
by analogical implication, an involuntary memory. Involuntary memory is,
in fact, an unspoken subject throughout Klüger’s essay, and in this respect
the four words recollected from Dickinson provide an especially fitting conclusion, pointing Klüger’s carefully worked through meditation on the past
beyond the limits of conscious reflection toward the more dangerous realm
of trauma.
To clarify what I mean by danger, let me look more closely at Dickinson’s
poem as a whole:
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides—
You may have met Him—did you not
His notice sudden is—
The Grass divides as with a Comb—
A spotted shaft is seen—
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on—
He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn
Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot—
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone—
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Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me—
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality—
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone—
(1998: no. 1096B)
Misrecognized in childhood as a magical ‘‘Whip lash / Unbraiding in the
Sun,’’ the snake becomes an object of conscious attention, and yet this attention is insufficient to ‘‘secure’’ the object for further study. Strictly speaking,
the speaker is unable even to secure the object’s name, since the snake is
never named as such.5 Though correctly recognized in future meetings as a
possible danger, the snake, perhaps because of this very insecurability, has
now become a cause of unconscious, uncontrollable response: constricted
breathing, a sensation of iciness. Described here are two kinds of encounter
and two states of mind, the first active and confident, the second stunned:
on one hand, conscious reflection, ineffectual, but protected from shock
by the mind’s misattribution of its object; on the other hand, traumatic
recognition.6
That each mode of response occurs several times and perhaps even at
the same time suggests that their relationship is not simply a sequential
progression from the nonchalance of childhood to adult understanding of
danger. ‘‘More than once’’ Dickinson’s speaker has mistaken the snake for a
‘‘Whip lash’’ and tried ‘‘to secure it’’; at the same time, he has ‘‘never’’ come
upon the snake without experiencing terror.The second of these repetitions
is not surprising. If Dickinson’s speaker suffers from ophidiaphobia, each
encounter is bound to produce the same symptomatic response. But how
to explain the repeated misrecognition of the snake as a ‘‘Whip lash,’’ espe5. Dickinson 1866 includes a title, ‘‘The Snake,’’ almost certainly added by the editor (Monteiro [1992: 21] describes it as ‘‘the uncalled-for answer . . . to the riddle that this poem can
be construed to pose’’). Yet even if the title is Dickinson’s own creation, it remains external to
the poem proper—a frame for interpretation distinct from what the speaker himself presents.
In this respect, it functions as a title in the same manner as George Herbert’s ‘‘The Collar,’’
an insight into the poem’s meaning ‘‘offered the reader outside the story,’’ yet withheld from
‘‘the narrator who tells his story . . . even at the end of it’’ (Ferry 1996: 198–99).
6. Early readings of this poem focused on the vividness and accuracy of Dickinson’s description, but as Wolff (1988: 489) notes, ‘‘The progress of the poem moves the snake into some
undefined psychological relationship with the speaker, a move away from simple realism
toward a portent of danger.’’ Critics attentive to this portent have interpreted the snake theologically (e.g., Loving 1986: 72; Doriani 1996: 195) and sexually (Cody 1971: 437–38) or have
posed the problem of danger existentially (Yetman 1973: 136; Porter 1981: 16).
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cially if we take the poem’s ‘‘never’’ literally and assume that the speaker suffered his phobia even in childhood? We are left with two possible scenarios:
either the speaker, ‘‘when a boy,’’ continually misrecognized the snake for
something safe and magical, freezing in panic every time he stooped to pick
it up; or—the more Freudian perspective—he more than once enjoyed the
same fantasy, only learning later to recognize the snake as a snake, transforming pleasure through Nachträglichkeit into phobia. In the second scenario, a sustained fantasy gives way to an equally sustained phobia without
explanation. In the first, repression and terror coexist until repression gives
way and only terror persists. In each case, something mysterious is afoot—
a mystery that only deepens if we read the poem autobiographically, as a
conscious reflection on some insecurable experience in which Dickinson’s
misattribution of her subject protects her from incapacitation. I am proposing, in other words, that the ‘‘narrow Fellow’’ of Dickinson’s poem bears no
less oblique a relation to the object of her terror than the ‘‘Whip lash’’ does
to the snake but that a more direct treatment of experience would have left
her too stunned to write at all. The poem, like the repression it describes,
would be a coping mechanism.
Given this suggestion of repression, it is worth noting that the poem
immediately following ‘‘A narrow Fellow’’ in Dickinson’s manuscript book
is ‘‘Ashes denote that Fire was’’ (see figure 1), a memorialization more explicitly concerned than the snake poem with the cognitive annihilation of its
unnamed object of attention:
Ashes denote that Fire was—
Revere the Grayest Pile
For the Departed Creature’s sake
That hovered there awhile—
Fire exists the first in light
And then consolidates
Only the chemist can disclose
Into what Carbonates—
(1998: no. 1097)
That the two poems were linked in Dickinson’s mind as well as on the page
is suggested by the careful matching of the concluding terms of ‘‘A narrow Fellow’’ to the opening situation of ‘‘Ashes’’: where the first poem ends
with an icy chill, the second begins with a cooling ash; and where the first
poem ends with its object of attention ‘‘met,’’ the second begins with the
fact of departure. More significant still is the shift in focus from subjective response (terror) in ‘‘A narrow Fellow’’ to objective fact (annihilation) in
‘‘Ashes.’’ Taken together, then, the poems provide a comprehensive account
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The last lines of ‘‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’’ followed by the opening
stanza of ‘‘Ashes denote that Fire was.’’ Ca. 1865, reproduced from Dickinson 1981,
2:1139. Transcription: Without a Tighter / breathing / And Zero at the Bone—
/ /— — — / / Ashes denote that Fire / was— / Revere the Grayest Pile / For the
Departed Creature’s / sake / That hovered There awhile—.
Figure 1
of a problem of knowledge framed first in psychological terms, then in terms
of material substance. In each case, moreover, the poem itself becomes a
cognitive problem, with Dickinson’s purported object of attention (‘‘narrow Fellow,’’ ‘‘Departed Creature’’) serving as an instance of what Derrida
has called the ‘‘trace’’: ‘‘the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself ’’ (Derrida 1973 [1968]: 156); ‘‘that erases
itself totally, radically, while presenting itself ’’ (Derrida 1987: 177); and that
therefore has ‘‘the form of a seal, as if it were committed to keeping a secret
(Derrida 1992: 303). Thus, in ‘‘Ashes,’’ the identity of the ‘‘Departed Creature’’ is kept, in Derridean terms, forever sealed off from knowledge, with
what remains (‘‘the grayest pile’’) telling us more about the mode of annihilation than about the thing annihilated. In ‘‘A narrow Fellow,’’ the creature’s departure is not nearly so absolute—unless we interpret the unsecur-
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able, recurring snake (or, more precisely, the poem about this ‘‘snake’’) as
itself a trace vis-à-vis the original experience of terror. In this scenario,
‘‘Ashes’’ becomes a theoretical description of the psychological process put
into practice in ‘‘A narrow Fellow.’’ More precisely, the relationship between
ash and creature in the former provides us with a structural model of that
between language and experience in the latter. This relationship—a trace
structure—helps explain why Dickinson would present her description of
terror in the form of a riddle: the act of guessing the ostensible subject (the
snake) of ‘‘A narrow Fellow’’ prepares us for accepting this guess as a false
solution once we reread the poem in light of the one that follows.7
Reading Dickinson after the Holocaust
In linking these readings to Klüger’s essay, I mean to argue that the problems of representation raised by the Holocaust draw attention to significant aspects of Dickinson’s work that are by definition only intermittently
legible. In Klüger’s formulation, the Holocaust has cleared a perspective
that only intensifies the force of Dickinson’s writing and that only makes
it clearer how her writing emerged in a struggle with repression, amnesia, silence, secrecy, and erasure. My focus in this is Dickinson’s analysis
of trauma—of experience too extreme to be accommodated safely or adequately in consciousness or language—but this is not the only aspect of her
work that the Holocaust illuminates.8 In general terms, there are three such
aspects, the first communicative, the second ethical, the third psychological, though these distinctions are also somewhat arbitrary insofar as communicative, ethical, and psychological issues overlap and illuminate each
other, both in Dickinson’s writing and in writing on the Holocaust. Nonetheless, because their separate consideration helps to isolate the particular
relevance of trauma theory for a reading of Dickinson’s poetry, I will give
a brief account of each in turn.
First are the representational problems posed by an event whose scale
7. Sciarra (1981: 37) hints at this reading, describing ‘‘A narrow Fellow’’ as a ‘‘riddle poem’’
but concluding her discussion (ibid.: 38) with the observation, ‘‘The riddle’s answer is unimportant; rather, it is the intensity of Dickinson’s emotions which reverberates.’’
8. There is no literature at present on Dickinson and trauma, but three intertwined strands
of scholarship have helped to prepare the way: (1) biographical studies focused on the poet’s
psychic distress, health problems, and withdrawal from society (e.g., Cody 1971; Phillips 1988:
42–75, 219–24; Garbowsky 1989; Guthrie 1998); (2) thematic studies of negative affect in her
work (Sherwood 1968: 93–135, 253–57; Weisbuch 1975: 78–132, 186–93; Pollak 1984: 190–
221; Wardrop 1996); and (3) philosophically inflected studies of her work’s approach to limit
experience and extreme states of mind (Cameron 1979; Budick 1985; Stonum 1990; Van Peer
1997; Juhasz 2000).
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and horror stretch the limits of comprehension.9 Ordinary modes of articulating experience or even of conveying information are insufficient, and yet
unconventional modes risk abandoning comprehension altogether. Klüger’s response to Lanzmann pays particular attention to this risk. His ‘‘task,’’
she (1986a: 253) writes, ‘‘demands our confrontation with absolutes, even
though we hear only of details. And it thereby provides a different experience from what we have come to expect of cinematic entertainment, including its documentaries and its avant-garde offerings. It depends on how
much we want to give this film and by the same token makes it possible, even
easy, to refuse cooperation.’’ The film’s length and apparently aimless accumulation of detail—not to mention Lanzmann’s tactless, perhaps unethical interviewing technique—provokes a wide range of responses from the
audience, including boredom, disgust, and outright rejection. ‘‘In other
words, we should not assume that a serious film that moves the imagination will move all imaginations seriously’’ (ibid.). Dickinson’s approach to
the writing of history is of course quite different from Lanzmann’s, but it
too depends upon an active engagement in order to be effective, as a survey
of the literature on Dickinson and the Civil War makes plain.10 Although
9. For key work in this vein, see Ezrahi 1980, 1996; Lang 1988; Young 1988; and Friedlander
1992. Early investigators, cognizant of Adorno’s warning about aestheticizing mass murder
yet necessarily involved in canon formation, tended to worry the distinction between adequate and inadequate response, often in the name of a defense of memory (Langer 1975;
Rosenfeld 1980; Friedlander 1984). Though this approach persists (for instance, in Bernstein
1994; Langer 1995; Clendinnen 1999), emphasis has shifted in the last decade or so to a more
insistently pragmatic account of the cultural work performed even by inadequate response.
As put by Huyssen (2001: 28), ‘‘The conviction about the essential unrepresentability of the
Holocaust . . . has lost much of its persuasiveness for later generations who only know of the
Holocaust through representations: photos and films, documentaries, testimonies, historiography, and fiction. Given the flood of Holocaust representations in all manner of media today,
it would be sheer voluntarism to stick with Adorno’s notion of a ban.’’ Examples of this shifted
emphasis include studies of Holocaust memorials (Milton 1991; Young 1993, 2000; Young
1994), studies of the Holocaust in popular culture (Flanzbaum 1999; Mintz 2001), and studies
of the Holocaust as it affects those born after the liberation of the camps, in particular children of survivors (Hirsch 1997; Sicher 1998; and the growing literature on Spiegelman 1986
and 1991). Recent work that takes up the problem of representation as such tends to bend its
speculation toward the related problems of ethics (Hatley 2000; Bernard-Donals and Glejzer
2001) and trauma (Friedlander 1993; LaCapra 1994; Rothberg 2000; Epstein and Lefkovitz
2001), taken up more directly below.
10. Because the Civil War is so central to my subsequent remarks, a summary of the key historical facts is perhaps in order.The poet’s father, Edward Dickinson, was a prominent lawyer
and conservative Whig; a member of the Thirty-third Congress, he participated in the House
vote on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and, like many of his peers, refused to become a Republican after the old party’s dissolution, viewing the new party as a threat to the Union. Once
the war began, however, he actively supported the Northern cause, serving on the local draft
board and speaking publicly at funerals and rallies. Emily Dickinson was thus especially well
poised to appreciate the constitutional crisis looming as the 1850s drew to a close and was
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Dickinson wrote more than half her datable verse (937 out of 1,655 poems)
during the four years of hostilities—and though her most obsessive theme
was death—critics took nearly a century to draw a link between this work
and the war, ignoring outright those poems (and there were several) that
dealt directly with the fighting.11 Arguably, this collective inability to read
bespeaks a cultural disposition that Dickinson’s overall approach to the subject of war confounded.12 Indeed, that her best critics could argue, as they
did until recently, that ‘‘there was no way for these poems of pure style and
almost certainly apprized of the war’s progress once the military campaign got underway.
Born in 1830, she only began writing in earnest in 1858. The maturing of her powers thus
coincided almost precisely with the onset of secession, while Dickinson’s own ‘‘secession’’ (her
agoraphobic retreat from public life) occurred during the war years themselves.
11. Wilson (1962: 488) is typical of the early reaction: ‘‘The years of the Civil War were for
Miss Dickinson especially productive, but she never, so far as I know, refers to the war in
her poetry.’’ Most scholars said nothing on the matter (Ford [1965] and Aaron [1973] are rare
exceptions), agreeing with Johnson, who certainly knew better, that Dickinson ‘‘did not live in
history and held no view of it, past or current’’ (Dickinson 1958, 1:xx). Only in the mid-1980s
did a new consensus begin to emerge, largely on the basis of Wolosky 1984 and St. Armand
1984. Working from a theological perspective, Wolosky (1984) argued that Dickinson’s writings ‘‘become less idiosyncratic, more unified, and acquire broader implications’’ (37) once
we recognize that her poetic presentation of a universe in crisis largely occurs in the context
of a war that ‘‘broadened the problem of theodicy beyond the question of consolation for
personal sorrow to embrace the whole order of existence’’ (68). St. Armand broached a more
insistently historical reading. Focusing on Dickinson’s response to the death of Amherst soldier Frazar Stearns, he (St. Armand 1984: 105) argued that the poet’s ‘‘vicarious participation
in the great conflict’’ occurred largely through imaginative identification with the sacrificed
soldiers. Subsequent treatments of this topic include Leder and Abbott 1987: 93–116, 204–5;
Lease 1990: 67–100, 145–51; Hoffman 1994; Friedlander 1999; Marcellin 2000; Dickie 2000;
and Lee 2000. For recent work on the historicity of Dickinson’s work more generally, see
Mitchell 2000 and Wardrop 2001.
12. Categorized by mode of representation, Dickinson’s response to the war takes six general forms: (1) poems that refer to specific events, either directly (as in ‘‘When I was Small a
Woman died’’ [1998: no. 518], about the battle of Ball’s Bluff ) or indirectly (as in ‘‘It don’t
sound so terrible—quite—as it did’’ [ibid.: no. 384], which circumstantial evidence permits us
to link to the battle of New Berne); (2) poems that discuss war in general but clearly draw their
inspiration from contemporary events (as in ‘‘It feels a Shame to be Alive’’ [ibid.: no. 524],
written in 1864) or allow themselves to be read as retrospective comments (as in ‘‘A chilly
Peace infests the Grass’’ [ibid.: no. 1469], written fourteen years later, in 1878); (3) poems
that take up martial themes (such as death, shock, honor, bravery, and loss) without, however, specifying their subject as war (as in ‘‘A Sickness of this World it most occasions’’ [ibid.:
no. 993]); (4) poems that discuss the Civil War, or war in general, but analogically, i.e., by
using a language or imagery drawn from nonmilitary subjects, especially nature (as in ‘‘The
name—of it—is ‘Autumn’’’ [ibid.: no. 465]); (5) poems that discuss subjects other than war
but by using a martial language or martial imagery, one that is sometimes anachronistic (as
in ‘‘No Rack can torture me’’ [ibid.: no. 649]), other times contemporary (as in ‘‘Did you ever
stand in a Cavern’s Mouth’’ [ibid.: no. 619]); and (6) poems that bear no obvious relation to
the Civil War at all, either in subject, vocabulary, or imagery, but which reveal, after close
reading, an indirect or even encoded response to the fighting or to some other aspect of the
crisis (as in the poems discussed below).
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screened eye to take in the historical world’’ (Porter 1981: 183) itself makes
the case, albeit in negative fashion, for the radicality and disturbing quality
of Dickinson’s writing of history as such.
A second area of concern is the age-old problem of art’s compatibility
with ethics, a problem exacerbated in a world where, as Charles Olson
(1997: 174) put it in 1953, ‘‘man is reduced to so much fat for soap, superphosphate for soil, fillings and shoes for sale.’’ In the Holocaust context,
this problem has been marked, on the one hand, by Theodor W. Adorno’s
famous dictum that after Auschwitz the writing of poetry is ‘‘barbaric’’
(Adorno 1983 [1955]: 34; reaffirmed in 1992 [1962]: 87) and, on the other
hand, by his later admission that the poetry of witness (as it is now known)
makes an entirely different claim on our attention than does art conceived
in such traditional terms as craft, pleasure, beauty, and sublimity.13 ‘‘Perennial suffering,’’ Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics (1973 [1966]: 362–63),
‘‘has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream, hence it
may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write
poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after
Auschwitz you can go on living’’ (further developed in Adorno 1997 [1970]:
18–19). This subordination of art to expression of pain and of pain’s expression to the problematics of survival was reportedly sparked by the example
of Paul Celan, but Dickinson’s own work, I would argue, is no less opaque
from a purely aesthetic perspective. Nor am I the first to draw this correlation. Shira Wolosky’s influential study of Dickinson and the Civil War (1984)
grew out of a comparison of Dickinson and Celan, an exercise in diachronic
reading whose succinct thesis—‘‘the structure of his situation is already contained in hers’’—retains a general applicability quite apart from Wolosky’s
(1981: 237) specific concerns. To cite one prominent example of this structural affinity: Dickinson’s privileging of interpersonal communication over
publication (evident in her refusal to publish poems willingly shared in correspondence) enacts concretely Celan’s (1986 [1958]: 35) abstract sugges13. The response to Adorno—both positive and negative—is far too voluminous to cite here.
For a succinct summary of reverberations in German culture, see Olschner 1997. For a grappling with the implications of Adorno’s critique for critical theory more generally, see Eagleton 1990: 341–65. For a detailed commentary stressing Adorno’s later work, see Bernstein
2001: 371–456. This last work—an intensification of ethical concerns—is emblematic of a
general shift in Holocaust studies from a worrying over art’s complicity with violence to a
celebration of art’s non- or anti-aesthetic virtues. One measure of this shift is the recent interest in video recordings of survivor testimony, no longer conceived as primary source material
for historical research but, instead, as a privileged literary genre (e.g., Langer 1991; Felman
and Laub 1992; Hartman 1994). On the poetry of witness more generally, see Forché 1993. An
alternative approach to the problem of ethics and aesthetics ‘‘after Auschwitz’’ develops out
of the work of Maurice Blanchot; for a brief, incisive commentary on this work, see Kofman
1998 [1987].
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tion that the poem, ‘‘essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown
out to sea with the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow
wash up somewhere, perhaps on a shoreline of the heart.’’
A third area is trauma, which takes up the problem of representation in a
new way, and from a psychological perspective, extending our understanding of the poetry of witness from the giving of testimony and expression
of pain to the registration of effects and their signaling as affects—that is,
from a conception of language as communication to a conception of language as symptom.14 Not that these two conceptions stand in opposition;
indeed, their vexed relation is precisely the means whereby a writing of
trauma tests the limits of representation, since symptoms extend the work
of making meaning beyond the bounds of conscious or voluntary communication but at the risk of increasing unintelligibility.15 Peter Shabad makes
a similar point about symptoms through a pertinent analogy to art. On the
one hand, writes Shabad (2000: 207), ‘‘symptoms may be viewed as selfcreated communicative actions intended to build a lasting monument once
and for all to one’s experience of suffering.This self-revelatory urge to transform one’s forgotten experience into the objectivity of a memorable reality
14. In psychology, the concept of trauma has a history of a little more than one hundred years.
Prior to 1980, when post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) gained official recognition as a
psychiatric condition, clinical and theoretical research developed in response to a wide range
of experiences, including railway accidents, child abuse, concentration camp imprisonment,
and combat. On concentration camp syndrome in particular, see Eitinger 1980. On the clinical history of trauma more generally, see Trimble 1981 and 1985; Herman 1992; and Young
1995. Farrell (1998) looks closely—and skeptically—at the upsurge of interest in trauma in
the final decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leys (2000) offers a detailed critique of key texts and theories. Caruth (1991, 1995, 1996); Felman and Laub (1992); LaCapra
(1994); and Tal (1996) were among the first to draw on this body of work for the purposes
of literary criticism and theory. For more recent interventions, see Elmer et al. 1998; Belau
and Ramadanovic 2001; Ramadanovic 2001; Kalaidjian 2001; LaCapra 2001; and overlapping work in the evolving field of memory studies, such as Antze and Lambek 1996; LaCapra
1998; Bal et al. 1999; and Homans 2000. Nearly all of these texts make substantial reference
to the Holocaust.
15. Symptoms are surprisingly neglected as a concept. Garber (1998: 5) defines them as ‘‘ways
of speaking,’’ taking as authority Lacan’s (1977 [1966]: 59) statement, ‘‘The symptom resolves
itself in an analysis of language, because the symptom is itself structured like a language.’’
But as the ‘‘like’’ in Lacan’s formulation suggests, the symptom—for all its communicative
tendencies—is only quasi-linguistic in function. In this respect, Adam Phillips’ (1996: 82) definition, ‘‘the unconscious constraints on possibility that are called symptoms,’’ proves more
useful than Garber’s, as it highlights the problem of intelligibility that Garber—by collapsing the distinction between symptom and communication—obscures. (This collapsing, like
the confidence in interpretation it permits, is a legacy of Freud; see, e.g., The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life [1960 {1901}]: 199: ‘‘A person who is familiar with [the symptom’s] significance may at times feel like King Solomon who, according to oriental legend, understood
the language of animals.’’) For a thoughtful discussion that takes cognizance of the symptomcommunication distinction, see Schneiderman 1990. For a definition that sketches symptom’s
range of uses in the field of mental health, see Goldenson 1970, 2:1288–89.
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strikingly resembles the animating impetus to the artistic process.’’ On the
other hand, he (ibid. 207–8) continues, ‘‘because [the symptom] is an involuted work of ‘art’ with a very private language . . . its artistic aim of objectification through self-disclosure remains ever-elusive.’’ Applying these criteria to the problem of representation, we might say that on those occasions
when the symptom becomes interpretable through diagnosis, representation’s limits extend; and on those occasions when communication breaks
down—in Shabad’s terms, when the traumatized subject’s ‘‘lasting monument’’ becomes inaccessible to interpretation—the limits of representation
close in.
The involution identified by Shabad is necessarily more pronounced in
actual works of art—as opposed to lives constructed or studied on art’s
model—for reasons that become clear when we compare the form symptoms take in medicine and in literature. In medicine, the symptom is a
manifestation of the body that permits itself to be understood as a form
of language. Symptoms in literature are very nearly the opposite: manifestations of language that permit themselves to be understood as forms of
embodiment.16 Thus, where the medical symptom is a mode of articulation,
the literary symptom is, as it were, a mode of inarticulation, the linguistic
equivalent of a tic, limp, tear, blush, stutter, or fainting spell.17 This inarticulation is especially evident in poetry, where the affective possibilities
of language are heightened but only occasionally linked to specific meanings. Such poetic inarticulation—more precisely, the poet’s use of sound,
rhythm, and visual patterning to produce an insistently material text—is
in effect a structural subordination of clarity to impact. The end result is
an especially well-prepared medium for the manifestation of symptoms:
an embodied language straining to accomplish what language ordinarily
accomplishes through direct communication.
This ‘‘straining to accomplish’’ is important. It is not enough to posit, as
some theories of trauma do, an unrepresentable excess to experience staged
mimetically in language as disintegration. The contours of this excess need
to be traced and its attempted integration (however failed) distinguished
from disintegration pure and simple. For strictly speaking, it is not language
that fails in trauma but the traumatized subject’s capacity for using language
16. For hints toward a theorization of body as language, see Lacan’s (1977 [1966]: 166) ‘‘a
symptom [is] a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element.’’ For
hints toward a theorization of language as body, see Mackey’s (1986: 1) ‘‘musics which haunt
us like a phantom limb’’ (see also Mackey 1993: 235 for commentary).
17. Of course, the distinction I am making here between medicine and literature is blurred in
psychiatry: witness the intermixture of physical and linguistic evidence in most case studies.
Shabad, a clinical psychologist, is primarily concerned with behavioral symptoms, such as
addiction.
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in the integration of experience.18 Not that all versions of trauma theory give
equal weight to this distinction. In some, the ‘‘disintegration of language’’ is
a general effect of history objectively manifested by heterogeneous groups,
not a specific effect subjectively registered by individual members. In the
first instance, seemingly obvious examples of disintegration may turn out
to be the product of writers in complete control of their language, since a
general effect will by definition manifest itself in writers who are deeply and
superficially wounded alike. (Indeed, insofar as disintegration serves as a
signifier for trauma, it becomes a mode of representation that any writer
can wield, whether traumatized or not.) Only in the second instance does
the problem of individual capacity take precedence.19 Yet more is at issue
in these contrasting definitions than the problem of capacity, for the difference between the two formulations necessarily leads to a more fundamental distinction between trauma as a cultural phenomenon and trauma as a
phenomenon in psychology—the former in effect an analogical derivation
from the latter.20 A notable example of such analogical derivation is Walter
18. The third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders (1980: 236) defined trauma as ‘‘an event that is generally outside the range
of usual human experience,’’ a formulation that conceives of trauma’s aftereffects as a problem of integration, that is, of assimilating within experience an event ‘‘outside’’ its normal
range. The APA (1994: 424) subsequently revised its description to remove the implication of
a norm, but insofar as PTSD’s ‘‘essential feature’’ remains ‘‘exposure to an extreme . . . stressor’’
(emphasis added), the spatial metaphor continues to hold, and with it the conceptualization of
experience as integration to an internally structured self. The APA’s perspective on this issue
is, of course, behavioral; for a theorization of integration grounded, instead, in the problem
of representation, see Caruth 1995: 151–57, 1996.
19. The difference between the two formulations is crucial in the field of mental health.
Davidson (1994: 1) notes that PTSD is one of the ‘‘few psychiatric disorders . . . defined on
the basis of etiology’’ but emphasizes the fact that a single event ‘‘may have widely differing effects on two people’’ and that, in working up a diagnosis, ‘‘specific details need to be
understood about each experience, including characteristics of the event itself and the perceptions, affects, and interpretations on the part of the victim.’’ O’Brien (1998) explores these
issues in detail, broadening the perspective to include post-traumatic illnesses (PTIs) more
generally. See, in particular, his discussions ‘‘Normal Reactions to Trauma’’ (ibid.: 35–52) and
‘‘Aetiology and Predisposing Factors’’ (ibid.: 83–118).
20. Arguably, the psychological concept is itself an analogical derivation from the field of
medical traumatology. Adam Young (1996: 89) proposes a ‘‘genealogical’’ relation, largely in
order to emphasize a continuity of ‘‘bodily mechanisms (surgical shock and nervous shock)’’
rather than a discontinuity of ‘‘orders of event (bodily and mental traumas).’’ What matters
most in the present context is the increasingly abstract nature of the ‘‘wounding’’ at issue as we
move from medical to psychological to cultural definitions of trauma (the relation between
the first and third of these three concepts being decidedly analogical, whatever the relation
between the first and second). For an attempt to define cultural trauma concretely, however,
as a contributory factor in identity formation, see Eyerman 2001. See also Sadler and Hulgus
(1994: 261–62), who take issue with the APA’s assumption ‘‘that social systems or communities, families, and couples as units do not have psychopathology or disturbed mental functions,
only individuals do,’’ and who propose as a rectification a ‘‘syndrome of context’’ and ‘‘nosology
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Benjamin’s (1983 [1939]: 117) discussion of Charles Baudelaire as ‘‘traumatophile’’ in his response to modernity, a discussion explicitly based on Freud’s
account of shell shock in ‘‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’’ (1955 [1920]).
Sometimes, moreover, the two versions of trauma theory become blurred.
For instance, in Ulrich Baer’s Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of
Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (2000), Celan is treated without strict differentiation as a poet of modernity on the model of Benjamin’s
Baudelaire and as a Holocaust survivor whose ‘‘testimony’’ follows the psychiatric and psychoanalytic models of trauma established by Henry Krystal
(1995), Dori Laub (Felman and Laub 1992) and Judith Herman (1992).21
In order to highlight some of the issues raised by trauma for the practice
of literary criticism, let me return to Dickinson. I said a moment ago that
the relationship between symptom and communication is vexed. In poetry
written by those who were traumatized (like Celan) or by those conjectured
to have been traumatized (like Baudelaire and Dickinson), this vexed relation manifests itself in two primary ways. First of all, the incapacity of language can always be interpreted as poetic mastery, since the symptomatic
elements of a text are only identifiable as symptoms at those moments when
their meanings become subject to a reader’s ‘‘diagnosis’’—that is, when they
become recuperable as communication.22 A good example of this would be
the staccato repetition of the syllable ‘‘or’’ in Dickinson’s ‘‘Four Trees—opon
a solitary Acre’’ (1998: no. 778), a repetition that may or may not signify
the presence of ‘‘war,’’ half articulated, in the communicative elements of
the poem proper—elements that present thematically, in Wolosky’s (1984:
3) apt phrase, ‘‘a world of radical disorder.’’ 23
of context,’’ that is, ‘‘an assembling of psychiatrically relevant environmental and historical
factors into . . . a contextual parallel with the classic concept of syndrome’’ (ibid.: 269).
21. LaCapra (2001: 64) identifies an analogous slippage, which he addresses by making a distinction between structural trauma and historical trauma—the latter, a specific condition
grounded in historical ‘‘loss’’; the former, a general phenomenon derived theoretically from
a ‘‘transhistorical’’ notion of ‘‘absence’’ (ibid.: 77). My own terms, cultural and psychological,
refer exclusively to what LaCapra would call the historical but likewise mark out a distinction
between general phenomenon and specific condition.
22. The recuperation of ‘‘incapacity’’ as ‘‘mastery’’ is especially common in fiction, where
a speaker’s symptomatic language is invariably the conscious construction of an author; yet
even in that context, as Yacobi (1981: 122–23) shows, a doubt arises as to the status of ‘‘textual
weaknesses and incongruities.’’
23. The poem’s ‘‘or’’ sounds occur in ‘‘Four,’’ ‘‘Or,’’ ‘‘order,’’ ‘‘or,’’ ‘‘Morning,’’ ‘‘Neighbor,’’
‘‘or,’’ ‘‘Or’’ and ‘‘or’’—i.e., in nine of sixty-five words spread out across seven of the poem’s
sixteen lines—and once more in the variants written out at the poem’s end in manuscript.
(My reading here is indebted to Budick [1985: 17], in particular her insight that ‘‘the poem
proceeds through a bombardment of optically and aurally disrupted words and images that,
although they may seem, on one level at least, to imitate natural disunities, really, in an even
more profound way, rival and surpass them.’’)
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Second, however, insofar as a ‘‘diagnostic’’ reading attempts to recuperate for communication seemingly random or nonsensical aspects of a poem,
it will invariably strain credulity, outstripping the conventional parameters
of literary critical evidence and argument. I am assuming, for instance, that
the diagnostic reading of ‘‘or’’ just given will not convince most readers,
even when supplemented with a number of other symptomatic suggestions—for instance, the numerous words with military associations (‘‘order,’’
‘‘action,’’ ‘‘signal,’’ ‘‘attention,’’ ‘‘general,’’ ‘‘plan,’’ ‘‘retard,’’ ‘‘promote,’’ and
‘‘hinder’’) and such haunting echoes as ‘‘fortress’’ in ‘‘Four Trees,’’ ‘‘assault’’
in ‘‘a solitary,’’ and ‘‘ache’’ in ‘‘Acre.’’ 24
Diagnostic reading thus faces a complementary set of problems. On the
one hand, a symptom’s seeming randomness—a proof of its unconscious
or involuntary character—undermines our confidence in its interpretation.
On the other hand, persuasive interpretation undermines our confidence in
the original assumption of unconscious or involuntary origin. Dickinson’s
poem highlights these problems by equivocating between a description of
the ‘‘Four Trees’’ as ‘‘Without Design’’ and as participants in a ‘‘Plan’’ that
must remain ‘‘Unknown’’:
Four Trees—opon a solitary Acre—
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action—
Maintain—
The Sun—opon a Morning meets them—
The Wind—
No nearer Neighbor—have they—
But God—
The Acre gives them—Place—
They—Him—Attention of Passer by—
Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply—
Or Boy—
What Deed is Their’s unto the General Nature—
What Plan
They severally—retard—or further—
Unknown—
(1998: no. 778)
24. Small (1990: 144) touches on such suggestions of meaning, ‘‘defined by convention as
‘excess,’ ’’ but ultimately steers her attention away from ‘‘the strange chaos at the core of language’’ (forms of language that produce new meanings through homonyms, rhyme words,
and associations of sound), choosing, instead, to emphasize etymological wordplay and musical structures (forms of language that contain meaning within consciously controlled parameters). Her detailed demonstration of Dickinson’s heightened sensitivity to sound nonetheless
provides circumstantial evidence for the more ‘‘excessive’’ manipulations conjectured here.
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Taking the poem as an allegory of its own composition, ‘‘Four Trees’’ offers a
disclaimer of knowledge regarding its own ‘‘Design’’ upon the reader. Positing a meaning—a ‘‘Plan’’—in its disorder of signs would thus be tantamount
to claiming a knowledge of the trees’ purpose in occupying a particular time
and space and, indeed, of nature’s purposes more generally. In this respect,
however, it is important to note that the poem does allow that the trees’
purposelessness may only be ‘‘Apparent.’’ In fact, by poem’s end Dickinson describes this lack of action unequivocally as a ‘‘Deed,’’ a word whose
double meaning (‘‘act’’ and ‘‘legal title’’) suggests, in context, an inheritance
of meaning that no beneficiary could ever hope to collect.
In this reading of ‘‘Four Trees’’ (a poem written ca. 1863, in the midst of
the Civil War), I have assumed that the war is unrepresented in the poem
because psychologically unrepresentable, hence that the war’s symptomatic intrusion through repetitive sounds, excess meanings, and homonymic
suggestions is not a matter of conscious intention (i.e., mastery over experience) but is, rather, an unconscious signaling of affect (that is, a loosening of
control over some aspects of language intricately fitted to Dickinson’s poetic
mastery over others).25 One might well ask, however, if a writing of trauma
is only marked by unconscious effects—that is, if all symptomatic effects are
involuntary in the strict sense assumed above. As Dominick LaCapra (2001:
184–85n3 [quoting Caruth 1996: 154]) remarks with specific regard to the
Holocaust, there are ‘‘reasons for a survivor’s reluctance to speak’’ besides
‘‘the traumatic event’s ‘essential incomprehensibility’ or ‘affront to understanding’’’: for example, ‘‘the sense that one will not be understood’’ and ‘‘the
pain and feeling of shame attached to the event.’’ Certainly it makes sense,
given Dickinson’s physical safety during the Civil War, to imagine a conscious reason for eliding the reference to it in ‘‘Four Trees,’’ especially since
this ostensibly unrepresentable experience is represented more directly in
other poems, though not, perhaps, with the same sense of ‘‘radical disorder.’’ Recalling ‘‘A narrow Fellow,’’ one might suppose, for instance, a
conscious elision of reference (the euphemism ‘‘narrow Fellow’’ for ‘‘snake’’)
flagging thematically an absolute elision of the poem’s actual subject (whatever ‘‘snake’’ stands in for), leaving open the question of why this actual sub25. The correlation of poetic mastery and loosened control hypothesized here is taken up
thematically in the lines quoted at the end of this essay. There, the poem is a ‘‘Blossom’’ of the
poet’s own brain but grown from a ‘‘Seed’’ for which she disclaims all credit through a ‘‘process’’ of which she disclaims all knowledge. Yet despite these emphatic disclaimers of volition
and self-knowledge, the poem is not simply a ceding of mastery to God, for God too is an
author of imperfect control. In his case, however, the limitations on mastery are functions of
reception: he can ‘‘Lodge’’ and ‘‘fructify’’ the seed, but he cannot specify its fate. Nor is this
limitation benign: the poem’s fate and the fate of its author are intimately tied, suggesting a
theological allegory for traumatic utterance.
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ject was elided. Was it unrepresentable in the strict sense (‘‘an affront to understanding’’) or repressed for more conscious reasons (such as pain, shame, and
the fear of being misunderstood)? Indeed, without blurring the distinction
between the two types of repression—and thus between the two types of
trauma, psychological and cultural—one might well read Dickinson’s work
as a manifestation of both and even as an exploration of their interrelation.
Consider the following undatable poem (the manuscript is now missing),
structured as a comparison of past and present ‘‘griefs’’:
Softened by Time’s consummate plush,
How sleek the woe appears
That threatened childhood’s citadel
And undermined the years.
Bisected now, by bleaker griefs,
We envy the despair
That devastated childhood’s realm,
So easy to repair.
(1998: no. 1772)
Two exacting moments of ‘‘despair’’ are set in exact proportion. The earlier
is said to have ‘‘undermined the years’’ that have nonetheless ‘‘softened’’
the speaker’s perspective, if only by delivering something far ‘‘bleaker’’ into
consciousness. This later grief is not named; only its action is described—
a bisecting that may or may not be a euphemism for secession ( just as the
‘‘woe’’ attributed to childhood may or may not serve phonetically as a prefiguration for ‘‘war’’). What the speaker does describe, albeit vaguely, is
the now-envied trauma of long ago: a threat to ‘‘childhood’s citadel,’’ a
‘‘despair / That devastated childhood’s realm.’’ The emphasis on place
in this description suggests an upheaval in the home, perhaps something
Dickinson experienced in the splitting of the family house after her grandfather’s bankruptcy.26 There is no way of knowing, of course, even assuming
that the poem’s analysis of trauma is also a form of autobiography, if this
splitting was itself the cause of despair or only a means that Dickinson is
here employing for expressing a cause less susceptible of representation.
Nonetheless, even as a partial disclosure, the image of a ‘‘threatened . . .
citadel,’’ a ‘‘devastated . . . realm,’’ helps explain the apparent traumatism
in Dickinson’s conjectured response to the Civil War, for there too ‘‘a house
26. The poet’s father and grandfather jointly owned the Dickinson ‘‘Homestead.’’ Bankruptcy forced her grandfather to sell his half interest in 1833, when Emily was three years
old; the family stayed on until 1840. After the new owner’s death in 1854, the house again
came on the market, at which time her father repurchased the ‘‘Homestead,’’ and the family
returned for good.
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divided’’ (in Lincoln’s memorable phrase) brought devastation to the realm.
Arguably, it is only a consciousness of the war’s manifestly more devastating impact that allows Dickinson to speak of childhood grief at all. Cultural
trauma illuminates psychological trauma, allowing the latter to speak tentatively in the language of the former.27
Intention in Extremity
I began this essay by invoking the dangers of retrospection. Insofar as
trauma registers as an aftereffect, hence as an injury to memory, the avoidance of retrospect, however self-preserving, is itself a sign of the injury’s
existence. Yet memory is not simply an interior process; the ‘‘arctic region
of the mind’’ bears an essential relation to some arctic region of the earth,
however arbitrary that relation might originally have been. Klüger (1986a:
250–51) takes up this arbitrariness early on in her essay, in a long passage
that I quote as much for the dexterity with which she works through these
issues as for the analysis itself:
I don’t believe in going back. Lanzmann does. The museum culture that has
sprung up around the concentration camps is based on a sense of spiritus loci
which I lack. What was done there could be repeated elsewhere, I have argued,
conceived as it was by human minds, carried out by human hands, somewhere
on earth, the place irrelevant, so why single out the sites that now look like so
many others? I don’t go back to where I’ve been. I have escaped. Lanzmann
goes back to where he has never been. No landscape, I have always believed, can
recall what happened, for the stones don’t cry out. Lanzmann believes they do.
Standing on a rutted road where the dead and the dying once accidentally fell
out of the killer vans, and if the exhaust fumes hadn’t quite choked them, they
were shot while crawling in the mud, he reminds us that those who have knowledge of these things haven’t really escaped. As the hours pass the audience will
have that knowledge too, and some will try to escape it by letting their attention
drift. The ‘‘boredom’’ of this film is of a very special kind.
Like all survivors I know that Auschwitz, when the Nazis killed Jews there,
felt like a crater of the moon, a place only peripherally connected with the human
world. It is this ‘‘otherness’’ of the death camps that we have such difficulty con27. Owing to a lack of space, I can only cite here, without analysis, the final stanza of a
poem that bears directly on my attempt to ‘‘coax a syllable’’ from writings that master their
originating traumas (so I would argue) through silence:
Best Grief is Tongueless—before He’ll tell—
Burn Him in the public square—
His Ashes—will
Possibly—if they refuse—How then know—
Since a Rack couldn’t coax a syllable—now
(1998: no. 753)
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veying. But once the killing stopped these former camps became a piece of our
inhabited earth again. When I was a child there in the summer of 1944, a former
teacher showed me a blade of grass and said, ‘‘You see, even in Auschwitz there is
grass, things grow.’’ He meant it as a life-affirming statement, and I understood
it as such and in my hard-boiled, childish way I despised him for it. He was a
Central European humanist, steeped in a gentler tradition than I, who had lived
all of my short conscious life under Hitler and the last 18 months of it in starving, crowded, disease-ridden Theresienstadt. I felt contempt and bitterness that
a grownup should tell me as a kind of comfort that here in Auschwitz the grass
might survive while we didn’t. The teacher was probably killed, for few survived
the June 1944 gassing of B II b, the ‘‘family’’ camp that in its earlier stages figures
prominently in the second part of Shoah. There is plenty of grass in Lanzmann’s
long shots of the camp site today. I look at its technicolored image and I think of
that middle-aged man who was trying to tell me something about the resilience
of life in general when I felt only naked 12–year-old terror for my own particular
life. If I could, I would take back my rejection of him by filling in a blurred memory. And so, after a full six hours of film, I begin to understand why Lanzmann
cares about place.28
Although Klüger begins by declaring, ‘‘I don’t believe in going back,’’ it is
not a far cry from ‘‘going back’’ to ‘‘looking back’’ or from ‘‘looking back’’ to
‘‘remembering,’’ as Klüger herself soon acknowledges.Working through the
multiple meanings of ‘‘escape,’’ she thus moves from an equation of escape
with physical survival pure and simple (‘‘I don’t go back to where I’ve been.
I have escaped’’) and a strict distinction between survivors and nonsurvivors (‘‘Lanzmann goes back to where he has never been’’) to a recognition
of the limits of such a view in the persistence of traumatic memory (‘‘those
who have knowledge of these things haven’t really escaped’’) and the possibility of empathetic identification and thus of cultural trauma transforming
the opposition between survivors and nonsurvivors into a more nuanced
relation (‘‘As the hours pass the audience will have that knowledge too, and
some will try to escape it by letting their attention drift’’).29 At the same
time, this movement of recognition risks a rejection of ‘‘escape’’ per se, that
is, a negative valuation of escape as repression (in the form of ‘‘boredom’’
on the part of Shoah’s audience, as ‘‘blurred memory’’ in the case of sur28. Klüger also recalls her former teacher in her memoir (1992: 119–20 and 2001: 101). Her
reference, earlier in this passage, to stones crying out brings to mind Freud’s Latin motto ‘‘Saxa
loquuntur! ’’ [‘‘Stones speak!’’] (Freud 1962 [1896]: 192), a primary metaphor for the manifestation of psychic distress.
29. The opposition is also at issue in Klüger’s memoir, where ‘‘the communicative abyss
between survivors and others’’ (Goertz 2001: 171) is complicated by differences of gender, generation, and nationality as well. For a discussion of trauma’s cultural dissemination through
empathetic identification, see LaCapra 2001.
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vivors). Indeed, survival itself risks a negative valuation. In a later passage,
in response to the testimony of Filip Müller (‘‘whose mind,’’ she writes, ‘‘is
stocked for the rest of his natural days with the details of the deaths of
some of my childhood friends’’), Klüger describes herself from the following detached perspective: ‘‘I sit slumped in my seat and offer his brightly
colored image the irrelevant facts of my own survival’’ (ibid.: 252). The task
she sets herself is thus extremely difficult: a reassimilation of the past that
avoids, on the one hand, the temptations of redemptive narrative and partial amnesia and, on the other hand, the risks of disassociation from the
living and from life itself.30
The conjunction of memory and place is also a point of interest shared
by Dickinson and Celan. According to John Felstiner (1995: 96, 305n24),
Celan—one of Dickinson’s earliest German translators—once noted the
phrase ‘‘real memory’’ in a bilingual edition of Dickinson’s work, then
copied out the entire poem, in which memory is figured as a cedar.31 As
with the Klüger citation of ‘‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass,’’ Celan’s notation
invites a closer examination, for it is not immediately obvious why a poem
that equates ‘‘real memory’’ with the fixity of a tree rooted in stone should
appeal to a poet whose own memories survived transplantation from the
decimated Jewish community of the Bukovina. Here is the poem (written
about 1880) in the form Celan knew it:
You cannot make remembrance grow
when it has lost its root.
The tightening the soil around
and setting it upright
deceives perhaps the universe
but not retrieves the plant;
real memory, like cedar feet
is shod with adamant.
30. Klüger identifies a related set of risks in her afterword to a reprint of Ilona Karmel’s
1969 novel An Estate of Memory: ‘‘Ilona came from Boston to visit me one afternoon. . . . She
filled my house with flowers, suggested a walk, and refused to be interviewed. . . . I understand her reluctance to speak of her background. . . . People ask, ‘How did you escape?’ and
in response one either tells pathetic-sounding tales that invite a sentimental, condescending
response, or one tells adventure stories of a cruder kind. In the second case . . . a debt that
the survivor owes to her past becomes lost in the story of her escape’’ (Angress 1986b: 454).
Here, the choice is not between a falsifying narrative and disassociation from the living, but
between two different kinds of falsifying narrative: one that promotes a facile bond with nonsurvivors, another that disrupts the survivor’s bond (through memory) with the dead. The
meaning of silence in such a context puts Dickinson’s famously uncompromising reticence
in an interesting light.
31. The bilingual edition was Dickinson 1956 (see Celan 2001, 2:382), picked up by Celan in
the late 1960s, probably after the book was remaindered in 1967 (see Gellhaus et al. 1997: 475).
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Nor can you cut remembrance down
when it shall once have grown,
its iron buds will sprout anew
however overthrown.
(1956: 186)32
One might have expected Celan to note the last four lines, which describe
memory as ineradicable, but this is not the case. He was drawn instead
to the poem’s opposition between real and deceptive memory, one living
the other dead—an opposition that resembles Pierre Nora’s (1989: 7, 13)
influential distinction ‘‘between true memory, which has taken refuge in
gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the
body’s inherent self-knowledge,’’ and memory ‘‘transformed by its passage
through history, which is nearly the opposite: voluntary and deliberate,
experienced as a duty.’’ According to Nora (ibid.: 22), the former (memory proper) ‘‘attaches itself to sites,’’ whereas the latter, history, ‘‘attaches
itself to events,’’ although these events can be set upright and the soil tightened around them (as Dickinson would put it) in cemeteries, monuments,
plaques on buildings, and other such forms of material culture. Yet there is
something ambivalent in Dickinson’s formulation that marks an important
difference from Nora’s self-certain privileging of memory over history. The
very fact that her ‘‘Remembrance’’ has feet, for instance, implies, on the
one hand, that its fixity of purpose is unnatural (and even a kind of bondage) and, on the other hand, that memory’s power to tear free from this
fixed purpose remains latent. Indeed, the poem’s imagery surreptitiously
proposes that when memory does, finally, uproot itself from the ‘‘Real,’’ its
‘‘Adamant’’ tromp will cause as much damage as the leaden boots of ‘‘I felt
a Funeral, in my Brain,’’ a soldierly procession that effectively breaks ‘‘a
Plank in Reason,’’ putting an end to ‘‘knowing’’ altogether (Dickinson 1998:
no. 340).
These implications of trauma become much more pronounced when we
read the poem Celan noted alongside an earlier one (written about 1867)
in which the phrase ‘‘cedar Feet’’ also appears. Remembrance is not mentioned directly here, but the poem does evoke the burden of memory in an
image of battle drawn, I would argue, from the recently ended hostilities
between North and South:
32. The English text given here was based on Dickinson 1945: 273 (where the lines are left justified and begin with capital letters).The most recent scholarly text (Dickinson 1998: no. 1536)
presents a single stanza differing slightly in capitalization; the wording is the same except
for an extra line added at the end (‘‘Disperse it—slay it’’), apparently the beginning of a lost
continuation.
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There is a strength in proving that it can be borne
Although it tear
What are the sinews of such cordage for
Except to bear
The ship might be of satin had it not to fight
To walk on seas requires cedar Feet.
(1998: no. 1133)
The ‘‘cedar Feet’’ that signify enrootedness in 1880 indicate here the godlike power ‘‘To walk on seas.’’ Nor are these seas free from strife: a ‘‘satin’’
ship would be sufficient, we are told, if one did not need ‘‘to fight’’ as well as
float. Whether this fighting is against the elements or other ships remains
unsaid, but I would note in this context the homophonic suggestion of
‘‘seceder’’ in ‘‘cedar’’ and the fainter suggestion of ‘‘Confederate’’ in ‘‘cedar
Feet.’’ Indeed, the entire line is a visual and aural meshwork of disassembled
meanings. I say meshwork because the line’s encoded meanings reassemble
according to two intertwined orders of relation, one organized by letter, the
other by sound (see figure 2). ‘‘Cedar,’’ for instance, links up anagrammatically with ‘‘on’’ and ‘‘feet’’ to spell Confederate and links up by sound with
‘‘seas’’ to form seas-cedar (seceder). Nor is this the only meshing of letter and
sound: the half-articulated war in ‘‘walk’’ is anagrammatically completed
by the r of ‘‘requires,’’ while the overlapping req (wreak) joins anaphonically
with the now-completed word ‘‘war’’ to form the phrase wreak war. Likewise,
the ire of ‘‘requires’’ links anagrammatically with the f of ‘‘feet’’ to spell fire,
while the already-utilized ‘‘seas’’ completes the phrase cease fire (seas-f-ire), a
counterpart to wreak war. The end result is a telegraphic encapsulation of
what was then recent history: Confederate seceder wreak war cease fire.
As in my speculative reading of ‘‘Four Trees,’’ this attention to possibly
symptomatic details does not contradict but corroborates and even amplifies the poem’s overt meaning: in ‘‘Four trees,’’ written in 1863, by suggesting
that the world’s ‘‘radical disorder’’ was due to war; in ‘‘There is a strength,’’
written shortly after the war, by suggesting that the ‘‘ship’’ whose ‘‘cordage’’
was tested and even torn was the ship of state. Returning, moreover, to ‘‘You
cannot make remembrance grow’’ (1880) in light of this speculative reading, one sees, perhaps for the first time, the social dimension of memory
proposed by the etymology of the later poem’s key words, that is, the suggestion of ‘‘Real Membership’’ in ‘‘Real Memory,’’ and of ‘‘Re-membership’’ in
‘‘Remembrance.’’ The implications for a historical interpretation are ominous, for they lead to a distinction between the re-membering of the Union
(which ‘‘lost its root’’ and ‘‘Deceives perhaps the Universe’’) and the remembering of the ’ceder-footed Confederacy (whose ‘‘Iron Buds will sprout
anew / However overthrown’’).
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Figure 2 The last line of ‘‘There is a strength in proving that it can be borne,’’ highlighting suggestions of secession and war. I take the distinction between ‘‘anaphony’’
and ‘‘anagram’’ from Ferdinand de Saussure’s notebook study of encryption in Latin
poetry (see, e.g., Starobinski 1979: 14), though my use of these terms is somewhat
different than his. In the present context, anaphony describes the reproduction of a
word’s component sounds in a manner equivalent to the anagram’s transposition
of letters.
I do not mean to argue that Celan understood Dickinson’s poem as I do
when he copied it out, only that he was drawn to a phrase whose complexities withstand the scrutiny of a post-Holocaust reading—that Dickinson’s
meditations on memory have a psychological profundity that derives, in my
understanding, from a working through of trauma. Whether Celan grasped
this profundity directly from his overall knowledge of Dickinson’s work or
merely sensed it in the density of her language matters less than the fact that
his notation bears witness to an affinity and that this affinity, like Klüger’s
citation, can illuminate the more shadowy reaches of Dickinson’s art.These
‘‘shadowy reaches’’—limit cases for interpretation—are in my account the
refuge of a memory in distress; there, random syllables assume meaning-
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ful patterns, and meaningful patterns disintegrate into random syllables,
throwing into doubt precisely those intimations of trauma most likely to
have touched the limits of representation.
I am suggesting, in other words, that representation’s limits are not objective borders set in advance by the specific character of traumatic events
but subjective borders determined by each individual according to his or
her capacity for integrating such events in experience. Putting the psychological aspect of this formulation more emphatically: I am suggesting that,
in the context of trauma, the limits of representation are functions of the
limits of intention and that these latter limits are discernible, if at all, only at
the point where plausible meanings (what I earlier termed communication)
give way to improbable, even implausible signalings of affect (symptoms).
Framed in this way, the difference between communication and symptom
becomes precisely indeterminable, a marker of doubt in the validity of
this or that interpretation.33 The doubt is essential and not only as a safeguard against misreading.Though trauma theory posits an unrepresentable
excess to experience, there is no way of knowing for sure if the evidence
of ‘‘unrepresentability’’—encoded language, silence, noise—is evidence of
anything at all, since if we could be sure of its meaning, it would scarcely
point outside the limits of representation. Doubt alone determines the
parameters. Moreover, once we step outside those parameters, meaning
can only become perceptible as trace: as something produced, like ash, in
a fragile form that crumbles when we grasp it. Put forward and withdrawn
in the same gesture, traumatic utterance becomes, in effect, a de-positing of
meaning: something kept safe in language through its very removal from
the ordinary channels of communication. In this respect, Celan’s copying
out of Dickinson’s words—like Klüger’s citation—may itself be a trace: a redepositing but also re-de-positing of what the original utterance intended—
or failed to intend—to articulate.
33. For an alternative model of reading that likewise extends the possibilities for valid interpretation, see Shoptaw 2000. Starting from the noncontroversial assumptions that a poem’s
sound ‘‘doesn’t just echo or underscore or otherwise pattern the sense but actually helps produce’’ it (ibid.: 223) and that ‘‘the poet intends the phonic and physical shape of the poem’’
but not ‘‘all the meanings that might result’’ (ibid.: 240), he situates writing in ‘‘an unraveling, unfinished matrix of recorded events and interpretations that exerts its own pressure
on poetic production’’ (ibid.: 244). His essay thus explores a relationship between ‘‘pressure’’
and ‘‘poetic production’’ similar in its textual effects to the one explored here through trauma
theory. For Shoptaw, however, poetic production is not simply a function of the author; it
includes the work of the reader as well, witness his inclusion of interpretation in the matrix
of pressures that give shape to meaning. My own interest in ‘‘Lyric Cryptography’’ (Shoptaw’s term) is thus the opposite of his, though our strategies of reading remain fairly close:
Shoptaw would find meaning where it breaks free from identifiable intentions; I would find
intentions where they break free from identifiable meanings.
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It is this last possibility, the ‘‘failure to intend,’’ that haunts my various
interpretations, since the meaning of this failure—epistemologically, ethically, and psychologically—bears directly on our understanding of Dickinson’s address to the future. The stakes of such an understanding are quite
high and in themselves justify the effort at interpretation, however inconclusive the results. For intention—what Dickinson called ‘‘Design’’—is not
simply a desire to control meaning; it is also (as in Celan’s ‘‘letter in a
bottle’’) a form of hope, and it makes an appearance in that form even in
those poems where aimlessness or secrecy would provide a measure of safety
from discovery. For hope, like memory, is often involuntary and rightly so,
since its realization is often of little earthly use to the one in whom it is
‘‘Lodged.’’ Yet the consequences of a failure are extreme, at least in Dickinson’s account, as she wrote in a poem from 1865:
This is a Blossom of the Brain—
A small—italic Seed
Lodged by Design or Happening
The Spirit fructified—
Shy as the Wind of his Lodgings
Swift as a Freshet’s Tongue
So of the Flower of the Soul
It’s process is unknown—
When it is found, a few rejoice
The Wise convey it Home
Carefully cherishing the spot
If other Flower become—
When it is lost, that Day shall be
The Funeral of God,
Opon his Breast, a closing Soul
The Flower of our Lord.
(1998: no. 1112)34
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