Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [72]
The participatory ‘surge’ in the brain, drawing on Dickinson, is marked in the innovative theatre of British director Katie Mitchell. Her staging of The Idiot as ‘. . . some trace of her’ uses Dickinson to extend Dostoyevskian intensity on the verge of seizure. A screen-filled photograph behind the actors distils a poetic image from the time-tied action on stage. Mostly, the scenes fixed on screen derive from the slow routines of nineteenth-century domestic life, much the same as Dickinson’s homebody in ‘I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—’ who puts new flowers in the glass, not expecting a strike to the soul. On Mitchell’s stage, basins are brought in for washing, tables are laid and disassembled, yet these scenes are shot through with extremes of experience like Dickinson’s whose voice ‘tells’: the shadow on the grass announcing what is to ‘pass’. On stage, a full-blown seizure embodied in a swiftly fluttering hand co-exists with mental suffering on a par with Dickinson’s ‘Hour of Lead’; in the darkness of the auditorium we’re compelled to participate in an act of creation. The point of each poem or scene is not so much the passing impact of horror and sublimity; more the continuous improvisation of a lit-up brain.
For Dickinson, the vital open-endedness of improvisation outweighed the permanence of print. Here was a positive reason to develop an alternative to publication: the well-established practice of circulating manuscripts. This was customary, of course, before Gutenberg invented printing, with one of the first books as we know them, Malory’s Arthurian legends, coming off Caxton’s press in 1485 and reaching a readership beyond the purview of the author. Private circulation of manuscripts would seem to be superseded; still, the practice did not end. During the Renaissance, aristocrats circulated sonnet sequences amongst themselves. In the early nineteenth century, Byron, as an aristocrat, scorned publication and affected to toss off poems with careless ease, though he did stoop to publish - upon persuasion - and in 1812 famously woke up famous. Dickinson outdid Byron in shunning the marketplace: ‘Publication’, she said, ‘is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man—’. In the first half of the twentieth century innovative Modernist works like Ulysses circulated in avant-garde milieus - Pound’s ‘Men of 1914’ and the Bloomsbury Group - before they were published, at first, in coterie magazines. It was part of the Modernist ethos to speak only to discerning readers, while in the Soviet bloc dissident literature was disseminated privately because publication was dangerous.
So, for aristocratic, political, or experimental reasons, texts continued to exist in private hands, often associated with contempt for the compliant herd. This elitism puts the unpublished text above the masses; it reverses the educative mission of print, to be found in mid-nineteenth-century novelists like Dickens, whom the Dickinsons read and quoted. All the same, despite his pleading for the poor, Dickens did not jar the well-to-do; he upheld social divisions.
It was not only sickness that kept Dickinson apart. She could not lend herself to the ‘surrounding Bog’ of banalities and she thought less well of her mother for wanting to hear the stale words of visitors. She threw ‘donkeys’ over her shoulder as she fled them. ‘The Soul selects its own Society / Then shuts the door’. That door of her intelligence opens to Susan, to whom she writes as ‘Rare to the Rare’; they are ‘sovreign People’. A poem jokes at the ‘altitude of me—’ when her speaker hangs a Christmas stocking too high for Santa Claus to reach.
Imagine this elevation conjoined with the status of royals, and we approach the private importance the Dickinsons felt. It capped that sense of importance to advance in the religious life. Emily Dickinson did reject the bombardments of evangelism; she did shake off the creepy