Dickinson's Misery by Jackson Virginia;
Author:Jackson, Virginia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-01-02T05:00:00+00:00
But the lines that begin “I think To Live—” just keep doubling back on themselves. Why would Dickinson want to mark and remark, reach toward and away from the object of these lines’ address, to stage such a pathetic near-miss? The apostrophe that works retroactively to bring the object of address closer is qualified by its position at the edge of the lines’ temporal grasp. Captive of neither the Imaginary “Other” self with which the lines begin nor of the Symbolic register they surround, “Thee” is in the position that Lacan came to name the Real: that point on the horizon of language that sets desire (or language-as-desire) in motion but which language (or the subject constructed from it) cannot (in order to keep desiring) apprehend.46 To do so would mean to stop desiring, or to stop living—or to stop writing and rewriting.
What this reading of “I think To Live—” allows us to understand about the anxiety of the first lines of “I cannot live with You—” is that that anxiety stems not only from the distance that separates “I” from “You” but from the consequences of the apostrophe that separation invokes. While “I think To Live—” defers its apostrophe until its last word (so that, in effect, the apostrophe cannot become what de Man would identify as the personal abstraction of a prosopopoeia, cannot attribute to “Thee” a face, a figure), “I cannot live with You—” begins with the problem of keeping “You” in the Real, outside its own apostrophe’s reach. That reach, as the lines demonstrate at length (at fifty lines, this is one of Dickinson’s longest published poems) is extensive: it encompasses this life, death, afterlife, heaven, hell, memory, the self:
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