Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson Melanie Hubard (bio) Jed Deppman . Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2008. Cloth: $80. Paper: $26.95. Jed Deppman's catchily titled book takes Emily Dickinson seriously as a thinker. In Deppman's account, Dickinson, who was familiar with the available philosophical vocabularies of her day, adroitly steers between the Scylla of a materialistic Scottish Common Sense philosophy and the Charybdis of Transcendental idealisms based on Immanuel Kant. Deppman's careful close readings of rarely discussed (as well as familiar) poems make the case that Dickinson is a post-metaphysical thinker for our time. Engaging notions of Gianni Vattimo's "weak thought," Rortian neo-pragmatic "conversation," reader-centric [End Page 108] and process-oriented hermeneutic theory, and a generalized anti-foundationalism, Deppman demonstrates that Dickinson's poetry eschews a metaphysics of presence and that her poems do philosophy in their own right. Her writings constitute an artful appropriation of linguistic experience for philosophical experiment: if experience is mediated, linguistic, processual, and collective, then poetry is the site of especially fruitful investigations because, by instantiating such theories, it can then test and interrogate them. So Dickinson is a postmodern poet, in effect. If this is the strong claim of the book, the weaker claim is that "certain strains in postmodern thought can help make visible central aspects of her poetry, and her poetry has the power to illuminate and respond to contemporary situations"(8). The first two chapters set out to demonstrate both Dickinson's affinity with contemporary postmodern discourse and her poetry's ability to critique, say, Richard Rorty's insufficient accounting for the other in conversation (37). Deppman roots Dickinson's critical power in the vocabularies available to her, including Christianity and the radical experimental ethos of Francis Bacon. Such public schoolmasters as Isaac Watts make the "mind the site of resistance, study, and experiment" through which a thinker like Dickinson "produces the proto-Kantian results of failure, dissatisfaction, and repetition"(57). The finest statement of Dickinson's philosophical influences takes place in chapter three—alone worth the price of the book—as it sets out in helpful detail which thinkers were being taught at Amherst Academy and the College, who taught them, what their prejudices and predilections were, which books were read and borrowed in and out of the Dickinson household, and what sort of thoughtful conversations would have been available to Dickinson among her college-age (mostly male) peers. As Deppman puts it, "[o]n historical grounds alone the subject [of Dickinson's readings in philosophy] deserves to be integrated into the critical conversations"(78). After treating in detail both Scottish Common Sense philosophers (a heterogenous bunch) and the American interpreters of Kantian thought, Deppman deftly focuses on associationism as the site of contestation over the "irreconcilable vocabularies of 'Mind' and 'Brain'"(99). Chapter four pursues description (or definition) as such, demonstrating that the names we attach to things and the metaphysical (or cultural) logics that guarantee the validity of those names turn out to have high philosophical stakes, a point of which nineteenth-century lexicographers such as Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester were perfectly well aware. Dickinson's definition poems actively weaken certitude and fixity—reference—by emphasizing process, experience, and [End Page 109] conversation, and in this she echoes the theologian Horace Bushnell, who in 1849 startlingly averred that "'language as an instrument' is 'wholly inadequate to the exact representation of thought'"(qtd. in Deppman 119), let alone truth. Chapter five explores Dickinson's thinking about reading as a trope for female self-definition and negotiation with society, and chapter six treats death as the limit-thought that marks both our nearness to the sublime and our human inability to contain or think it. Deppman anticipates, in his introduction, the objection that his approach might be considered ahistorical (10), and it is, I think, a weakness that the book argues that there are affinities with postmodern thinkers otherwise quite alien to Dickinson, but not why. How, indeed, did Dickinson come to reject both Common Sense and Transcendentalism—especially Transcendentalism? The answer has to involve yet further historicizing. My money's on the...