Emily Dickinson's GPS

Le résumé fourni par la source

I never saw a Moor—I never saw the Sea—Yet know I how the Heather looksAnd what a Billow be.I never spoke with GodNor visited in Heaven—Yet certain am I of the spotAs if the Checks were given—So reads the holograph of one of Emily Dickinson's most famous poems. It is also one of her most baffling because of the word “Checks” in the last line. In Poems of Emily Dickinson (1890), edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Checks” was arbitrarily changed to “chart.” This emendation and others were carried over to E. C. Stedman's influential American Anthology, 1787–1900, in which the poem was also given the incongruous title “Chartless.” Dickinson of course never titled her poems.ChartlessI never saw a moor,I never saw the Sea;Yet know I how the heather looksAnd what a wave must be.I never spoke with God,Nor visited in heaven;Yet certain am I of the spotAs if the chart were given.The substitution of “chart” for “Checks” has persisted through innumerable reprintings of the poem, while attempts to explain “Checks” have been shots in the dark. Might it be a reference to bank notes? Or railroad jargon? Or cloakroom stubs? Or chess?The right answer, I believe, is found in the revised edition of Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1841). It is well known that Dickinson relied on Webster, but I'm not supposing that she relied on the definitions cited below. Webster took the usage of his contemporaries into account, however. Under “check,” the germane definition is “in popular use, checkered cloth; check for checkered.” The first definition of checker is “to variegate with cross lines; to form into little squares, like a chess-board.” The interpretive key appears among the definitions of “chart”: “a hydrographical or marine map; a draught or projection of some of the earth's surficies [sic] on paper, with the coasts, isles, coasts, banks, channels or entrances to harbors, rivers, and bays, the points of compass, the soundings or depths of water &c., to regulate the courses of ships in their voyages.”1 It is enlightening to combine the definitions: the points of compass refer to the little squares formed by the intersecting lines of latitude and longitude that crisscross a marine map in checkered patterns. The emendation of “Checks” to “chart” makes a certain sense if the (compass) point is missed. But “Chartless” as a contrived title makes no sense at all because the poem is about reliance on such abstractions as “Checks.”This is where Emerson comes in—as he often does in Dickinson's work—via his famous syllogism from the “Language” chapter of Nature (1836): Words are signs of natural facts.Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.Nature is the symbol of spirit.Or as Emerson quotes Emanuel Swedenborg to the same effect, “The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the [sun] dial plate of the invisible.”2 Language provides the correspondence of Nature with Spirit.Dickinson accepts the first proposition. Words are signs of natural facts, both those already seen (“Heather” and “Billow”) and those potentially seeable (“a Moor” or “the sea”). All natural facts are categorically equivalent because they may be checked by human senses. Neither Heaven nor God, conversant or not, can be substantiated by the senses. But its spot may nonetheless be ascertained as if the Checks were given, as if the latitude and longitude—the compass coordinates—were known. But such faith is necessarily conditional, founded on a correspondence between a particular natural fact and a particular spiritual fact.The ship is a natural fact; it is literally somewhere. But the spot where God dwells in Heaven is a spiritual fact marked by latitude and longitude. That is, the checks are symbols of spiritual facts. But the compass location, no matter its celestial accuracy, is an imaginary human invention: a pragmatic means of regulating “the courses of ships in their voyages.”In this regard, Dickinson anticipates Hans Vaihingen's Philosophy of “As If” (1911). To endure a fundamentally irrational world, Vaihingen argues, humans must create fictive explanations of natural facts “as if” they provided rational grounds for spiritual ones. Such “belief” amounts to a “true lie” or an “enabling fiction.”3 Dickinson was in many of her poems a believer in “as if.”

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.