Reading Reality by E. Thomas Finan;

Author:E. Thomas Finan; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: IDENTIFIER: Finan
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2020-11-05T21:00:00+00:00

Opening Up Consciousness

The disruption of consciousness points to the broader possibility of reparative play in our lives—that we can recast experiences even in the light of seemingly confined and limiting narratives. So often Dickinson’s poems offer an experiment of disruption as a way of disclosing experience. This disclosure can grant us a new purchase on experience—reimagining supposed dualities, discovering peninsulas of thought and feeling, and rethinking our responses. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick finds that reparative reading means “organiz[ing] . . . fragments and part-objects,” and the project of consciousness’s experiment for Dickinson means continued reorganization. For her the enterprise of realization can mean an ecstasy that alienates the self from its conventional boundaries, and her poetry of “consciousness” offers a demonstration of such self-disruption.

When Dickinson invokes “consciousness,” she uses a term with great philosophical charge. By the middle of the nineteenth century, “consciousness” had arisen as a key term for typifying and describing the self, and one of the major themes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of consciousness is the notion that it may limit us in its mediation of our apprehension of the world. The limitations of consciousness may include the epistemic and the emotional or affective. While her philosophical predecessors often turn to consciousness as a unifying faculty through its capacity to assimilate instants of experience into a coherent whole (a “self”), Dickinson subverts that idea of conscious unity by suggesting that consciousness can disrupt itself through the act of self-reflection. Dickinson’s poetry of consciousness provides both a dramatization of and commentary on the conditions of individual consciousness, including the continuity of personality, the structure of a sense of self, and possible disruptions to this sense of structure or to this personal wholeness. She does not aim to offer a taxonomy of the self according to the conventions of contemporary academic philosophy and instead focuses on the tensions of the lived experience of consciousness. That attention to lived experience highlights one of the ways in which the trial of experience offered by the experiential real demands a return to (and not a flight from) the particular details of living; it is through that focus on lived particularity that a Dickinsonian reader can see what tensions really lie underneath.

In these experiments in subjectivity, she explores both how consciousness can limit us and how it can facilitate its own disruption. Fantasies of escape permeate her poetry of consciousness, as do moments of aperture, when sudden breaks herald the promise of liberty. Though many nineteenth-century discussions of consciousness invoke the language of possession and ownership, Dickinson’s poetry of consciousness instead often turns to dispossession; self-reference, which allows consciousness to unify, becomes a tool for interrogating our cognitive assumptions and for surrendering old certainties. In part because Dickinson finds relationality (how we relate to ourselves and to others) to be a major theme for consciousness, her poems of consciousness are inquiries into the limits, tensions, and possible disruptions of relation.

The way Dickinson inverts conventional narratives of conscious captivity (in which the seemingly limiting

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