"The missing all": Emily Dickinson's apophatic poetics

Christianity and Literature, Autumn, 2008 by William Franke

   The words the happy say
   Are paltry melody
   But those the silent feel
   Are beautiful--

--Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson has long been regarded as a peculiarly enigmatic figure for her puzzling and oftentimes paradoxical poems, as well as for her evidently idiosyncratic religious faith. I will make no attempt to investigate that faith, except as it is expressed in the poetry. (1) However, if we focus on the faith together with the poetry as having the character of a negative theology, much that is enigmatic, without ceasing to be so, begins also to make a clear kind of sense. I contend that Dickinson's poetry is best understood as a form of negative theology, or as what I will call "apophatic" discourse. My guiding idea is that Dickinson's exploration of modes of negation in poetic language enabled her to discover and express what are, in effect, negatively theological forms of belief. I will use "apophasis," the Greek word for negation, to designate the sort of radical negation of language per se, of any language whatsoever--rather than only of specific formulations and of certain types of linguistic content--that characterizes this outlook, or rather sensibility, which suspects and subverts all its own verbal expressions.

This term "apophasis" and its adjectival form "apophatic" evoke in the first place the ancient Neoplatonic tradition of speculation concerning the ineffable One as supreme principle of reality. Likewise commonly designated as apophatic are certain traditions of medieval mysticism concerning an unutterably transcendent deity. In such traditions, the encounter, in incommunicable registers of experience, with the Inexpressible is marked by a backing off from language (apo--"away from" phasis--"speech" or "assertion"). Of course, this backing off is itself then registered in language, language that in various ways unsays itself. (2) The resultant apophatic modes of discourse, in their very wide diffusion throughout Western culture, especially in the domains of philosophy, religion, and literature, can be seen to have had a decisive bearing on Dickinson's writing. This can be inferred from the poetry itself, whether it is conscious and deliberate on her part or not. The apophatic tradition, I maintain, whether directly or indirectly, influences Dickinson's reflections on the limits of her ability to express the reality she endeavors to approach and the experience she aims to convey in her poetry. Precisely the impediments to expression become her central message in telling ways, for they tell obliquely of a "beyond" of language.

Dickinson's highly original writing makes her a maddeningly difficult poet, one whom eminent critics confess baffles them. Yet her poems become startlingly readable when read according to their apophatic grammar and rhetoric: the words and phrases fall into place--the place they make for what they necessarily leave unsaid but let show up distinctly silhouetted in their hollows and shadows. The poems selected to illustrate Dickinson's apophatic poetics in this essay generally thematize a negative method of thought and perception, but they are only the most explicit representatives of a poetic corpus that is, throughout, profoundly apophatic in nature and inspiration and that rewards being read as such, while it stiffly resists readings that ignore this orientation.

Dickinson Criticism and the Apophatic Paradigm

Although the poems often proved impossible for her contemporaries to penetrate, they have won immense appreciation in more recent critical appraisals, particularly those attuned to apophasis and the poetics of the unsayable. Even if rarely with explicit acknowledgment of the apophatic tradition as a primary context, this framework has already been operative in scholarship aiming to illuminate Dickinson's poems. Readings of Dickinson pointing in this direction have insisted on compression and abbreviation as features that distinguish her style, especially as against the stylistic canons of her own time. Cristanne Miller's analysis in Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar of Dickinson's versification shows ellipsis--the omission and deletion of logical and syntactical links--to be its governing principle. (3) Carla Pomare finds in this elliptical technique the means of producing the silence that paradoxically gives Dickinson her distinctive voice. Margaret Freeman, who analyzes Dickinson's poetry in terms of cognitive principles of discourse, similarly stresses omissions and absences as the signifying elements that grant the poetry its power, a power "through silence to capture the true essence of intimacy."

Beyond such attention to linguistic gaps and lapses, the apophatic logic informing Dickinson's poetics has been discerned in a more conscious and comprehensive way by Shira Wolosky, particularly in her essays interpreting Dickinson's poems in light of their translation into German by the post-Holocaust poet Paul Celan. Reading through this lens, Wolosky stresses the valence of silence not as affirming a metaphysical reality, a transcendent ultimacy beyond telling, but as indicating a cataclysm of history, an irruption of time into the presumably metaphysical order. This irruption is likewise beyond telling, though for a different reason: "silence represents the collapse of meaning within historical processes" (82). This view of silence builds a certain modernist bias into her readings. It foregrounds affinities with later writers more than with the ancient apophatic traditions from which these modes of expression hail. According to Wolosky, the realm beyond language has become contested and is agonized over by Dickinson and Celan alike: "What Dickinson's and Celan's poetry repeatedly traces is a rupture between earthly experience and transcendent reference" (68).