Part One: My and We; Girl and Gun

My We

In the above quotation, which is the epigraph to Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, there are only two pronouns – a “they” and a “we”. The quotation stands alone on a page of Howe’s text; turn the page to her introduction, and you’ll see that the first word of her first sentence is “My”. “My book is a contradiction of its epigraph,” she writes.1 With this beginning, Howe stakes her territory, suggesting that she will be reading her book’s poet against the grain of an American great. She thus takes Williams’ Dickinson from her place in his textual garden, where she is “starving” while being subject to the starvation of “we who have ever been – starving”.

Howe’s My Emily Dickinson is itself a loaded gun, one that affords power and greatness to its owner or user. The “My” of both the book’s opening sentence and its title recurs throughout the text, including in ways that explicitly undercut the idea of possession. For example, Howe writes that the transmission of “My voice” to a page incurs loss of authority, autonomy and ownership:

Thus can we understand Howe’s possession – the reach of her book My Emily Dickinson – as the writing of a life (“My Life”). This life that “had stood – a Loaded Gun – / In Corners – till a Day –” inscribes a voice that echoes:

Does Howe, like Dickinson before her, merely echo “Him” who comes before all things?

Emily Dickinson is the Phallus

“Howe’s Emily Dickinson is the [Lacanian] phallus of American Literature.” This is my recollection of words spoken by Bruce Gardiner in a 1992 class I attended and that have returned unbidden to my mind each time I’ve since prepared classes on Dickinson’s poems. The words returned as I listened in 2020 to two of Bruce’s recorded lectures. These were not the 1992 lectures of my aforementioned recall, but rather two on Dickinson from Bruce’s “Six Lectures on Four American Poets” that he had delivered in 2020 and shared with me. In these lectures, Bruce’s Dickinson is an unflinchingly unsentimental writer whose attention to death concentrates poetic powers that deliver her enjoyment of solitude. While a poem such as “I’m Nobody! Who are You?” “sets us thinking about the social and cultural power of the proper name”,3 Bruce’s Dickinson also intensifies a stony individuality whose singularity he entirely sets apart from Whitman and his poetry of we and they – “His body is as theirs; their voices are as his.”4 Anticipating my contribution to this volume, I email Bruce to ask if he remembers describing Howe’s Dickinson as the “phallus of American Literature”. In his reply, Bruce does not discount the possibility that he spoke those words, and he later sends me photocopies of those very lectures. Did I “forget, erase, or recollect and deconstruct” words that may have been spoken rather than written down for class? Or did I attribute that voice and ear to him?

Giddy Pride in Her Own Power of Utterance

In an email reply sent to me in November of 2021, Bruce wrote:

What is the Proper Name of the “Nobody!”?

“Exposed as you have been in this schoolroom to [“I’m Nobody! Who are You?”], what do you make of Adrienne Rich’s condescension to little girls … and of her assumption that the poet’s seclusion is strange?” Bruce puts this question to his listeners at the end of the first of his “Six Lectures on Four American Poets”, in which he equips his students with four traditional motivations for why one might want to keep one’s poetry to oneself: 1) feminine modesty; 2) religious scruple; 3) psychological trauma or madness; and 4) aristocratic privilege and diplomacy.6 In this lecture, Bruce reads Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are You?” according to its unconventional uptake of the ballad form, which, deriving from early English and Anglo-Scots traditions, had been the source of private devotional hymns derived from popular culture. Bruce also states that Dickinson’s poems were originally written for women in her family, who, soon after Dickinson’s death, both readied and released them in time for the Christmas trade in gift books. He hints at the idea that Dickinson’s poetry honours the popular – rather than strictly religious – roots of the ballad when he notes the movement of Dickinson’s poems from the poet’s private hands to intimates to the commercial market. Throughout his close reading of certain of the poem’s formal elements, Bruce inimitably dramatises aspects of her poetry’s metrical and rhythmic character. Introducing both conventional and unconventional syllabic stresses and beats of the poem to new ears, Bruce compels his listener to hear Dickinson’s lyrical “Nobody!”

Gunshots From the Brain into Her Body

Biographer Lyndall Gordon gathers evidence from letters, journals and medical books to propose that Dickinson endured epilepsy, which condition, she argues in turn, influenced her poetry. In making this argument, Gordon notes the nineteenth-century stigmatisation of epilepsy as a “form of demonic possession” that led to certain victims being incarcerated “in asylums”. Gender and illness are not so much categories conditioning the passivity of the suffering female poet as they are obstacles to be heroically transgressed. “Females especially provoked genteel aversion as they broke the rules of ladylike control,” writes Gordon as she genders Dickinson’s epilepsy as a disability that the poet suffers and then overcomes:

Gordon departs somewhat from readings by Adrienne Rich and others that emphasise Dickinson’s poetry as evidence of the poet’s gendered victimhood or self-diminution, presenting the poetry instead as certain of its own “immortality” and greatness. Were it not for Gordon’s presentation of the poet’s own body as the battleground, her reading would amount to a shift in the terms of a longstanding gender war in which women are either maids or waifs to be either redeemed or defended. The loaded gun of Dickinson’s poem is read by Gordon as a literal manifestation of a neural shot from Dickinson’s brain that racks her body. Great poetry is here tasked with the military duty of guarding and protecting a body hostage to a cognitive disorder.

Stepping Carefully as “Lightning Punches Darkness”

At the end of his Lecture Two of “Six Lectures on Four American Poets”, Bruce cautions his students against a “widespread impulse” to read Dickinson “autobiographically and pathologically, as if she were incapable of writing about anyone or anything other than herself and her own life”. He continues:

Explicitly echoing the French writer Christiane Rocheforte, Bruce alerts his students to a tendency to read women writers “below the belt, personally” and according to a tradition in which male writers tend to be read at the “glorious level of the brain”. “A woman writer arousing our interest as a patient; a male writer arousing our interest as a diagnostician.” In place of reading the “I felt” of “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” as an instance of the poet feeling or emoting, Bruce proffers an alternative meaning of the verb “to feel” as the act of examining or investigating something cautiously, as in “feeling one’s way” or “feeling one’s pulse”, before suggesting to his students that “feeling one’s way” is also a way to poetry. “To feel poetically is to step carefully from one word to another close by” and these “small poetic steps are metonyms and metaphors”. Drawing further on the language of “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”, Bruce advises that metonyms “tread and creak cautiously across thresholds” while metaphors “break through and drop down, causing us to lose our footing as when ‘a Plank in Reason, broke’ and to lose our orientation when ‘Space – began to toll’”. The latter are mistakes that reveal a hidden truth, as “lightning punches darkness”.9

My Tinnitus

I am excited after listening to Bruce’s lecture on “I felt a Funeral in My Brain”, in which Bruce delivers his “extravagantly anachronistic analogy” that Dickinson is a head-banging, heavy metal rock chick who experiences the “psycho-physiological ecstasy” of music “followed by swooning disengagement and mortification that the music is over”.11 I write to Bruce to congratulate him and to broach my thoughts about Dickinson and tinnitus. It is not simply that my tinnitus comes to mind as I read the poem after listening to Bruce’s lecture. I also think about what heavy metal’s characteristically ear-piercing volume has meant for both its musicians and fans. I’ve been unable to locate the email concerned, but my recollection is that in Bruce’s reply he reiterated a point that is also a key takeaway of his lectures: it is neither necessary nor desirable to understand Dickinson’s poetry by identifying a personal condition – whether of epilepsy or tinnitus or other. To read Dickinson or any other poet in this way is to overlook what he calls the “literariness of literature, including its supra-personal, self-abstracting power”.12

My excitement turns to irritation, not because Bruce’s reply doesn’t strike me as true. It does! Rather, it irritates because it awakens me to the missteps and imprecisions of my hazarded email. My point had not been to read Dickinson autobiographically or pathologically. Instead, I had meant to communicate my ambivalent experience of tinnitus as something that is at once solitary (no one else can hear it!) and intrusive (it has at times distracted me to the point of disequilibrium). How might this contradiction awaken one to a “felt” sense of an elusive object? Like the consideration of lightning punching through darkness or the attempt to imagine the unheard frogs croaking in the miring bog of “I’m Nobody! Who are You?”, such thought about tinnitus might be analogous to attempting to catch the meaning of the lyric “I”, as Theodor Adorno elucidates this process in the quotation above. This is an “I” that is resonant – it resonates with the buzzes and rings of the external world – while learning to be unaffected by such ephemeral sounds, as well as sights and textures. Emerging out of “bustle and commotion”, Adorno’s lyric “I” defines itself in opposition to such distracting noise even while expressing a solitude that ultimately “restore[s]” rather than rejects the turbulence of the everyday.

Part Two: Irritation and Imitation

“the most exact portrayals of things we do not like to see in real life, the lowest animals, for instance, or corpses.”

Seeing and Hearing, Reading and Listening to Bruce Teach

Thought of the pleasure integral to Aristotle’s idea of mimesis comes to mind in a paragraph of Bruce’s lecture “The Chic, the Out-There, the To-Die-For: Modern and Contemporary Haute Couture, Aesthetics and Writing”, in which he gives his students a way to understand aesthetics. While in Aristotle’s Poetics, mimetic pleasure extends to the vulgar, the low and the grotesque, Bruce emphasises pleasure in beautiful things when he elaborates on the “scope” of aesthetic considerations:

I listen again to Bruce’s lecture on “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” towards the end of which he offers a reading of Dickinson’s signature dashes, which were deleted from the first editions of her poems and which were reinserted in Thomas H. Johnson’s 1956 publication and other scholarly editions of her poems. “I once attended a conference,” says Bruce, “at which the keynote speaker, having developed his habit over decades, punctuated every point he made with a loud snort [Bruce demonstrably snorts]. Are Dickinson’s dashes a habit of this kind?” Bruce’s loud snort at the relevant moment punctuates his point that Dickinson’s dashes can be understood as a quirky mannerism or tic.15 Removed by editors that Dickinson herself had chosen, the dash that is read by Bruce as analogous to a snort entertainingly dramatises his point “that we condescend to these first editors at our literary and moral peril”. For this listener, the pleasure of hearing an erudite teacher snort has something to do with Aristotle’s point about mimesis – a commonplace pleasure emanating from a mutual recognition of a likeness, especially when the thing being reproduced is as lowly as a pig or a frog in a bog.

Solids Becoming Voids and Voids Becoming Solids

I look at symbols Bruce has included in his unpublished paper, “Where did that penis go?” – the second section of his unpublished text, “Judith Butler. The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary. A Commentary”. As I consider the symbols indicating an exclamation mark, an inverted exclamation mark and a manicule (see Figure 11.1), the image of a black and white photograph comes to mind. It is Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait “ Louise Bourgeois” 1982, printed in 1991. In the image, the sculptor stands at a slight angle to the camera. Her fur-coated body appears from the waist up only. While she stands in a boldly upright posture, her eyes are caught in a sideways glance, as if having been frozen in a moment of playful movement with the camera that watches her, just as she watches it. The coat she wears is of jet black fur and its coarse, hairy tufts ruffle near the lined skin of her face while inching close to her one, visible hand. This right hand holds the pointed tip of an object, the erect shaft of which is tucked under her furry arm. The object she cradles is a large sculpted penis. Except for its much-larger-than-ordinary size, the object is characterised by anatomic correctness. It is tubular, it has a glans, which is held firmly in place by Bourgeois’ gentle hand, and it has two stony testicles. In their rocky hardness, Bourgeois’ testicles are obdurately there, seeming to proclaim their status as spherical things, despite the buoyancy with which they appear to float on the far side of the sculptor’s fur jacket. Like the results of a lesson taught by Salvador Dalí, the balls evoke the sense of a void as much as a solid, transcendence as much as thingness.

In the days preceding each of Bruce’s 1992 American Literature classes, I looked forward to seeing my teacher’s attire. For example, in the week in which we read writers from the cold Northeast, Bruce wore a shirt imprinted with tall, green pines, the height of which reached from the implied forest floor of the shirt’s waist to its treetop shoulders.

Only an Irritant

I write to Bruce to invite him to contribute to a special issue of Australian Humanities Review I am editing, which gathers together a range of scholarly and teacherly perspectives on Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive (2020). Bruce responds:

Solitaries Who Go in Company

Bruce was a singular teacher. While attending his classes, I was taking in elements of the teachings of others. Kate Lilley’s Susan Howe is house and book, walls and pages, ground and figure, biological family and literary genealogy, visual artist and writer, domesticity and détournement, a writer who scales up (fame; esteem) in order to scale down (from private house as installation space to book). She is at once ventriloquist and original, simultaneously “inimitable and derived from many sources”, a writer of “solitaries who go in company”.17

Susan Howe’s “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –”

Eclectic Irritations

The word maieutic is cognate with the French maïeutique and derives from “the ancient Greek μαιευτικός (lit. ‘obstetric’; used figuratively by Socrates in Plato Theaetetus 161 E) [and] μαιεύεσθαι to act as a midwife”.19

Sianne Ngai conceptualises irritation as one of several “noncathartic feelings” central to texts studied in her 2015 book Ugly Feelings.20 With Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) as her exemplar, Ngai presents irritation as an ideologeme enabling expression of categories registered textually and at the level of the epidermis.21 A “minor feeling”, irritation here indicates the over-determining function of identity categories as these condition imaginations of everyday life.

For Bruce, irritation is not so much a minor feeling as a structure of transmission through which unwritten knowledge is passed from teacher to student. The word maieutic speaks to the role of teacher as facilitator of life-giving knowledge rather than identifiable expert or authority. Very little is known about Ammonius Saccus, the “epitome” of the “maieutic theory” Bruce had mentioned in the email to me, and whose teachings were not written down. It is said that he lived circa 2 BCE, that he was raised by poor Christian parents, and that he left his job as sack bearer (hence his name Saccus) to become a philosopher. One of the first of the so-called Eclectic philosophers, he opened a school that drew disciples Origen, Heurenius and Plotinus. Eclecticism embraces no particular system but selects and takes from other systems – including the teachings of both Plato and Aristotle – those ideas that best comport with the truth.22

Bibliography