IV

The Mourning That Is Language

And now it was a name I sought, in my memory, the name of the only town it had been given me to know . ... And this name that I sought, I felt sure that it began with a B or with a P, but in spite of this clue, or perhaps because of its falsity, the other letters continued to escape me . ... And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate . ... Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no

names but thingless names. -Samuel Beckett

The mirror is a contrivance for seeing things not visible directly by the eye, such as ones own face, and the object seen is called a virtual image because its position in touch-Space is that from which the rays of light would come if the real luminous point were there.

-Samuel Alexander

'"IT IS FINISHED' can never be said of us" (L 555), Dickinson wrote, and her poems on death, as if to insist on the literal interpretation of such a reading of experience, push the point. For while the most pro­found estrangement is that precipitated by death, in Dickinson's poems death is not loss for the dying person but is rather reunion. So, at least, is the poems' premise: life must be sacrificed, selfhood go by the way, all defining characteristics dismissed, but the recompense for these exac-

1 tions is the end of the solitary self, the loss of the boundary between self and object, not because they are dead to each other but rather because

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they are fused with each other. Perhaps the fantasy accounts for why Dickinson's speakers practice dying with frequency. In so doing they court not death but rather union; indeed, as I have commented before, many of Dickinson's formulations on death are explicitly sexual. She had written: "Death is the supple Suitor/That wins at last-" (P 1445). The world, then, is not destroyed for the self as a consequence of death but is rather reconstructed, and there are poems in which speakers implicitly imagine death as the phenomenon that makes relatedness possible. 1

Hence a dying speaker becomes one with the death's-head that at that moment is also the personification of otherness. The union of subject and object requires death because it requires the cessation of time, just as it requires the collapse or transformation of spatial distinction. For the death world is a purely symbolic one in which the body is exchanged for meaning; or, to put it differently, it is a world in which meaning is not hindered by limitations of any sort, and relatedness not defined by, or as a consequence of, identic separation. If only the end could not be, or could be survived beyond, there might yet be hope for the abolition of the more iatractable: boundary, the one that separates selves.

The immortality myth2 implicit in the poems on death that we have examined in the previous chapter is not especially unique. In the words of another, older text, when St. Paul in the Letter to Romans (7 :24) asks "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" the terms of deliverance seem also to be the loss of the body if that loss could be followed by a higher union. It is in the service of union that the dis­placements in Dickinson's poems unfold: the "failed Windows," the ''Gazing Grain-," -all the projective fusions discussed in the last chapter are symptoms or manifestations of the desire to be one with the object of one's longing. Thus displacement itself must be regarded as a phenom­enon devised to counter those boundaries that impose the intolerable distinction, and Romanticism, so obsessed with the point at which relationship becomes fusion because it cannot help it (or because it does not wish to help it), must recognize its desires, pushed to the extreme, in that longing for death which will deliver it to coincidence.

The dead speakers in Dickinson's poems resist transformation; they stubbornly remain their mortal selves. Death is a phenomenon subject to the speaker's reconstruction; either she cannot imagine it at all ("and then/ I could not see to see-" [P 465 J) or she must imagine it as other than it is. Thus in the hierarchy of Dickinson's formulations, loss comes after death. She herself stated this matter-of-factly when she wrote: