A Hypermedia Archive of Dickinson's Creative Work, Part II: Musings on The Screen and The Book (1996)

A Hypermedia Archive of Dickinson's Creative Work, Part II: Musings on The Screen and The Book Martha Nell Smith (bio) One must be an inventor to read well. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar" For more than a decade I have recommended that we, Emily Dickinson's readers, not content ourselves with studying her poetry and prose in print only but take advantage of opportunities to study her manuscripts whenever and wherever we can—in photographic reproduction in R.W. Franklin's The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, in his The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, on the three reels of microfilm featuring a majority of the manuscripts housed at Amherst College, and, if money and time and access allow, in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, the Frost Library of Amherst College, the Boston Public Library, the Jones Library, the Library of Congress, and other libraries with Dickinson holdings. Concomitantly I have noted that Thomas H. Johnson's instructive variorum is not infallible and is in fact problematic, as well as invaluable. Such suggestions have met with a wide variety of reader responses -excitement, frustration, eager anticipation, even anger (at me or at Johnson). In 1955 Johnson brought together all the writings that had been divided between the two competing editorial endeavors of the houses of Todd-Bingham (1890-1896, 1945-1955) and Dickinson Bianchi-Hampson (1914-1937) to produce a scholarly edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, "Including all variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts," and Adrienne Rich speaks for a multitude of readers when she observes that Johnson's tireless, painstaking efforts resulted in a presentation of Dickinson's poetry that foregrounded "the unquestionable power and importance of the mind revealed" (168). Thus to some, the very idea [End Page 18]that his print translations are not identical reproductions of the Dickinson holographs is anathema. Others have asked "Why bother?" with the picayune (the physical embodiment of "accidentals" like curviform and angled "dashes" straightened out and normalized by Johnson, e.g.) when most of the substance of the poetry pushes its way through in print translation? Each and all preferences, mine and everyone else's, reflect biases of history, training, theory, biography, class privilege. What emerges from these biases are different, sometimes contradictory, viewpoints with varying questions that can serve to enrich our understanding of Dickinson's poetic project, its edifications of her readers, and our wide range of stakes in studying the poet and her works. Crucial for continuing generative critical exchange is that we each and all rigorously assume responsibility for our readerly, scholarly preferences. Dickinson and her manuscript practices impel me to urge that her readers devote more energy to manuscript study. She emphatically declared that our standard medium of literary and intellectual exchange was not the field in which she cultivated poetic productions; in other words, our writing technology, print, was not hers—"I had told you I did not print" (L316), she avers to Thomas Higginson. Copyedited for final presentation, print renders the illusion of being finished. Yet Dickinson left much of her poetry in what to print-cultivated sensibilities appears to be an unfinishedstate: hundreds of poems in the fascicles are left with variant words and phrases among which readers (including Dickinson herself at a different time) can choose; various versions of a poem were often sent to different correspondents; and various versions are presented in different venues—of, in, with, or as a letter, and/or in a fascicle with other poems, and/or on one and among other scraps of paper posthumously recovered from her room. Franklin realized early on that "if we want the poems in a finished state, we must apply other principles of selection [than authorial intention] and must take responsibility for doing so" ( Editing131). Whatever the intentions of editors, inherent in all reproductive endeavors, however sophisticated, are dissolutions of fixed, stable, finished representations of the Dickinson codex. As his perplexed remark about the reader hardly being able to distinguish "where the letter leaves off and the poem begins" (Lxv) shows, Johnson was not as sure of generic distinctions as his division of printings into volumes of Poemsand Letters...