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dream is intertwined with the principles of concealing and believe-making.
V. Conclusion
With the destiny of an ideal-fascinated dreamer examined, the poems discussed in the chapter can just suffice, for readers, to uncover an ultimately
comprehensive understanding of the deceptive mannerism of dream and dreaming. As explored in relation to Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra and simulation, the
deceptive mannerism of dream as fantasy about the ideal is derived from the logics of concealing and believe-making. This insight not only complicates the dream image in Dickinson’s work as simulacra. It also accentuates the conceptual vagueness of the reality-ideal division. The omnipresent fabrication of the so-called “reality,” with the work of the simulacral dream-fantasy, culminates in a bewildering landscape which invalidates an attempt to clarify reality from dream and an imaginary.
Consequentially, the fact that comes to a dreamer, as seen in Dickinson’s poems, is the state of being entrapped and being victimized as a plaything in his/her fascinating vision of what is ideally desired. A dreamer is left in a simulacral play of illusions and phantasms.
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Chapter Three
Dreaming in Society
I. Introduction
With such a postmodernist aspect of Dickinson’s poetics discovered, it is certain that these Dickinson lyrics serve to invite her readers to meditate hard on some difficult human situations. The postmodern landscape of hyper-reality the poems delineate, in particular, not merely imparts to us a critical understanding that dreams we desire can be just simulacral fantasies, neither imaginary nor falsely generated.7 More significantly, it also in the sense serves to inspire, educate, and enlighten us to apprehend in Dickinson’s poems that these simulacral fantasies exert a certain power of confinement, whereby one is reduced to pursue a sheer semiotic emptiness, with no content or real-imaginary differentiation survived in a seeming realness and
authenticity.
However, concerning the overwhelming—at times, traumatising—complexity
7 Though critics such as William Pawlett tend to understand simulacra as illusions which is formulated through an endless circuit of pure images (“Simulation” 71), it is still important to note that Baudrillard’s simulacra is actually a more paradoxical concept which in fact precedes the divisions of the true/false, and the real/imaginary. For Baudrillard, “the simulacrum is true” (Simulacra and Simulation 1). The claim of the trueness of the simulacrum critically suggests that one may wrongly understand the simulacrum if, while examining it, a focus on the true/false or real/imaginary
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implicit in her exquisitely constructed lines, we seem hardly to claim that such an analytic pattern is sufficient to exhibit a totalising perspective for understanding Dickinson’s poetry. As Robert Weisbuch contends, “Dickinosn’s poems are not about a subject matter but enact a way of seeing everything at once” (198). Not alone is the all-inclusiveness here regarded as characterising much of Dickinson’s poetry, which in a sense accentuates and celebrates the interpretive diversity of her every single piece of work. The implied inaptness here that one may insularly interpret Dickinson in sole consideration of one subject, in fact, to some extent, also proceeds to advocate a sense of critical broadness that issues in her poetry shall be more extensively
associated with a wider range of many different pieces, despite their subject-wise irrelevance at the outset.8 It is made clear that in Dickinson nothing is able to be plainly examined. There are always intense confluences where various perspectives come to join and encourage an abundance of inspections on her oeuvre as a whole.
In this regard, a worthwhile aspect that deserves further attention, for instance, can lie in the particular social aspect with which these simulacral dream-fantasies is arguably involved. For Baudrillard, the omnipresent penetration of simulacra is
8 Robert Weisbuch in fact here embraces the uncertainty of Emily Dickinson’s poetry which generations of critical essays however have long aimed to resolve. He encourages three “dogmatic orders” of reading Emily Dickinson as an interpretive access to this, as he names, “undogmatic poet”: “Don’t point; don’t pry; don’t settle for one truth” (197). See Robert Weisbuch’s article “Prisming Dickinson;
or, Gathering Paradise by Letting Go,” collected in The Emily Dickinson Handbook, pp. 197-223.
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socially influential; it is our social life that Baudrillard pays much attention to and, mostly in his works, considers an imperative field which facilitates the fundamental operation of the machinery of simulacra. In his other important work Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard makes clear such an understanding of simulacra by
expounding that simulacra themselves “involve social relations and a social power”
(“Order” 52). As is obviously suggested, the “social relations and a social power”—
both qualities serve to sketch out the imperative understanding that the simulacrum is recognised as socially embroiled. It is clearly indicated that, the simulacrum, rather than an ultimate sign-structure with no referent, can more crucially point to a kind of social phenomenon which, inter alias, entails a considerable degree of control over a relational structure.
Concerning such a socially related perspective on Baudrillard’s simulacra, one key point that is especially worthy of a further look lies in what he identifies as “a social power.” In a sense, it consecutively directs our focus on the simulacrum to a more detailed picture of its social ascendency which orbits around its formulated orders.9 William Pawlett explains the orders of simulacra with a more complete sense
9 In “The Order of Simulacra,” included in his another characteristic works Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard maps out the genealogy of the three orders of simulacra: the counterfeit, production, and simulation. Each order points to the successive variation of the law of value since the Renaissance.
Though they separately parallel different periods of time, we must uphold a view that the three orders
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of socialness: “[t]he orders of simulacra are devices of social control, power structures which produce specific social relations based on binary disjunction” (“Simulacra,”
The Baudrillard Dictionary 197). Certainly, in reiterating Baudrillard’s focus on a
social power of simulacra, Pawlett’s explanation here poses clarity on the function of the simulacrum that, as a social controlling method, centres on the subjection of social relations to its operational model. However, more significantly, he comes to
supplement Baudrillard’s original words conceptually with its emphatic acuity on binary oppositions. It is seen that the simulacrum not just embodies a peculiar “order”
which disciplines our interactions with others; in a social milieu, it also more dynamically manipulates such an order with the join of binary oppositions.
With such a profundity of simulacra clarified, a promising connection is that Dickinson’s fantasies can be associated with their social entailment aroused by Baudrillard’s view on simulacra. Not only can the analysis of the alleged fantasies be aligned with the trajectory of the influences of simulacra in social life. A search for the ascendancy of Dickinson’s simulacral fantasies necessarily requires a propitious inspection of the social aspect of her works. It is important to elucidate whether and how the fantasies in Dickinson—since they are theoretically regarded as practicing the traits of simulacra—can formulate a certain “social power” that controls our
more details, see Baudrillard. “The Order of Simulacra.” Symbolic Exchange and Death, 50-86;
William Pawlett. “Simulation and the End of the Social.” Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality, 71.
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“social relations” with others under a power structure, especially in terms of binary oppositions.
To expound the questions, the social aspect of Emily Dickinson’s writing can be rather significant. It surely serves as a rather auspicious access which ushers in careful consideration of the nuances of simulacral fantasies in her poetry, in terms of their social qualities. Undoubtedly, the socialness of her works has always been an academically attractive subject. Numerous critical essays, despite their differences in critical focus, share a great interpretive zeal for revealing the poet and her poetry as the most socially devoted. Kenneth Stocks and Audrey Curtis, for instance, consider the poet social by not only regarding her as “a realist poet of the human social order”
(Stocks 86) but also identifying her independent spirit and mind from her deliberate decision on ignoring some social rules (Curtis 784-5). Some critics, such as Caroline Ann Morris, Helen Vendler, Sharon Leiter, to name a few, pose a more text-analytical standpoint which views her most famed poem on madness (J435) as her personal social criticism against the undiscerning majority (Morris 558; Vendler 273; Leiter 143). Further, there is even a philosophical focus held by Christopher Benfey, who unfolds the very socialness of the poet from her writing on the expressiveness of others with “a preoccupation with gesture and physiognomy,” and “an awareness of the human body as, in a sense, a landscape” (2). Benfey’s focus here on the poet’s
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social side circles mostly around an idea of “nearness” whereby the poet is seen to develop among her lines a careful view of relationality among people in general (64).
It is clear that these critical perspectives contrive to build up a rich landscape of manifold and various social insights of Dickinson—in particular concerning the problem of others and society.
Of these readings, our further attention shall be given to Kenneth Stocks’s study, which compellingly interrogates the issue of social order. His monograph Emily Dickinson and the Modern Consciousness: A Poet of Our Time not only defines
Dickinson as a modernist “realist poet of the human social order,” which apparently sheds light on a direct concern for the reality of a certain social order. More
compellingly, it also associates the poet’s insightful responses to the confronting crisis of such a social reality.10 For Stocks, Dickinson’s literary oeuvre often articulates an attempting quest for liberty and emancipation from predicaments of the reality of the abyss situation (88). In this sense in light of Stocks, it is the human social order that significantly becomes a pivotal arena where the poet intends to mediate the
difficulties derived from this reality. Emily Dickinson’s poetry, with “an acute, lyrically expressed, sense of loss of human value and potential” revealed, often
10 Stocks’s consideration of reality is clarified not as referring to an ultimate transcendental one, but instead the immediate one “of any accepted social custom, form or practice which obscures or violates the human” (66). For more details, see his another chapter “Reality as Abyss,” pp. 66-73.
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portrays the human social order as a negative role which reduces the real human values to a certain meaningless of what the critic later identifies as “mere
instrumentality in the service of things” (Stocks 93). Here, Stocks’s term
“instrumentality” not only crystallises the subtle victimization of an individual by the reification in a social reality. Impressively, it also illuminates the poet’s prescient sensitivity to the social order whose predicament still admittedly remains in our post-modern age.
With Stocks’s reading, it becomes perceptible that Dickinson’s poetics reveals a sentimental attitude towards a reality that reifies an individual as a sheer instrument in his/her exposition to a material-founded social domain. Undeniably, following these critical readings, we are in particular exposed to the richness of social keenness that is sketched in Dickinson’s writing. However, these critical readings, to some extent, also seemingly suggest their argumentative narrowness. Critical readings, which particularly pinpoint the inclination of her social criticism, entraps her readers to understand the poet in a simplistic binary antagonism between minority and majority, individual and society, and the normal and the abnormal. Such a simplicity, occasionally, not only coincides with the “one-dimensional Dickinsons” that Robert
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Weisbuch assails (198)11 but, in a sense, limits the interpretive potential of her works as well in a somewhat narrow sphere of understanding. The philosophical strand in Christopher Benfey’s view on a relation of “nearness,” likewise, also displays narrowness. His view less convincingly accounts for the entirety of what can be involved in social relations in Dickinson’s writing. One can even observe from Stocks’s perspective the inadequate clarification of his vocabulary about the social. It remains a mystery what “social order” Stocks exactly refers to as a leading factor for the instrumentality of human beings. Critically, his emphatic phrase “mere
instrumentality in the service of things,” in a sense, also deserves more inspection.
Not only should one examine how this phenomenon of the human-value reduction is formulated by the questionable “social order.” It is also worthwhile to probe further in what degree and manner such a reductive phenomenon suffices to manifest itself as influential in our life.
In fact, the social insights which Dickinson has written on are much more
11 Weisbuch’s emphasis on a plethora of interpretive potentials in Dickinson’s poems, in a sense, welcomes a comparison with Robert McClure Smith’s view on the mazy seductiveness of the poet’s writing, which with ambiguity or duplicity interrogated also pinpoints an excess of interpretations of her poetry. Viewing her texts as “open-ended” (5), Smith similarly suggests an openness of texts’
complexity that seduces and leaves a reader/interpreter a-mazed but forcibly active in text-production.
Smith argues that “The text entices the reader, leading him or her on and in, playing on the reader’s desire for meaning through a process that continually thwarts it, this culminating in a successful reader/text interaction that produces another text of the reader’s own making, which is, in itself, a complete poetic expression and not a mere copy of the original” (10). For more details, see his The Seductions of Emily Dickinson.
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nuanced, and the depiction of a “social order” in Dickinson’s writing is even diversely traceable in the Baudrillardian perspective. In particular, the freshly ignited inquiry on a social order surprisingly rhymes with our early concern about Dickinson’s writing on fantasies which entails the underlying modulation of simulacra of an order of social control. The study on Dickinson’s social order should be supplemented with a reading which collaborates with the concept of simulacra and discussions on fantasies in her texts. Thus, as distinct from the previous readings, I in this chapter will
interrogate the Baudrillardian perspective on simulacra and simulation—which, as seen previously, helps shed light on the simulacral nature of fantasies—and investigate several other Dickinson poems as examples. I will crystallise how her writing not only depicts “social order” as constructed through simulacral fantasies but also casts into question its imbued intensity with binary oppositions. A consecutive point worthy of more exploration lies in the effectiveness of this
simulacra-constructed social order in a milieu where our social relations are seriously regulated with our fantasies. In particular, I intend to suggest that part of Dickinson’s poetry distinctively manifests a subversive deepness which compels her readers to call into question the alleged authority of what society tends to normalise and nuancedly recognise its emptiness and simulacral manifestation.
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Emily Dickinson’s poetry, albeit ambivalently, indeed sketches a profundity with which a kind of social order is emphatically reiterated. In one of her most famed poems “Much Madness is the divinest Sense” (J 435) one can, for example, easily discern a serious depiction of a certain social order which serves to determine the social relationality between an individual and a majority, under the umbrella of the madness-sanity polarity:
Much Madness is divinest Sense – To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
’Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail – Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous – And handled with a Chain –
In this poem, not obtusely can one detect the poem’s overt aggression against such social connections. Noticeable among many critical readings is the poem’s overall tone of harshness towards the arbitrariness which the social order features. Some readers may thus immediately give consent to Caroline Ann Morris’s argument that
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the poem is “a biting social criticism” (558).12 In a critical sense, one may also enthusiastically agree with Audrey Curtis, who observes that the poem showcases Dickinson’s wilfulness to either ignore or defy many of the rules of etiquette—
especially in the Victorian age (784). Sharon Leiter’s reading, which pinpoints how the repressed anger of the poem reciprocates society’s treatment of non-conformity, might equally satisfy one’s hermeneutic excitement for comprehending Dickinson (“Much Madness” 143). A consistency of similar critical foci on the Dickinson piece, for some readers, can even find expression in Helen Vendler’s analysis in which this particular attitude of rebelliousness is examined in an emotionally sensitive way.13 Built upon these readings, a brief concluding point is that aggressiveness against the social order indeed serves as a foremost dominant access to the significance of the poem.
12 For Morris, this poem is rather critical, or, say, even a bit cynical. By announcing a deliberate inversion of the madness-sanity system, it indeed practices its sharp sarcasm against such existing criteria and tends to promote “sanity up to a higher standard,” a diviner value which requires better insights (Morris 558). Here, with Morris’s reading, not only can the poet’s disdain for and withdrawal from this rob-like, undiscerning majority be intensely read, as the poem writes that “’Tis the Majority / In this, as All, prevail –.” More significantly, the definitional parallelism that “Much Madness is divinest Sense – / . . . / Much Sense – the starkest Madness –” also serves to crystallise her obvious distrust for the established social norms which are measured out of a “discerning Eye.”
13 Visualising the social position of any defiant and demurring minds from the poet’s treatment of the consequence of “chain handling,” Vendler in fact reports a vivid but chill-blooded testament of the existing rules which entails the intensity of “the social exclusion and revenge”: “If you demur, eight words [in the poem] are necessary to see the dangerous You excluded, ‘handled,’ and chained” (“620”
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However, concerning the interpretive diversity that Dickinson’s writing involves, such a way of understanding this Dickinson poem in fact wavers the
significance of social order. Readers seem likely to be entrapped in a certain surge of antagonism within the poem. Critically, the social order in Dickinson can be more nuancedly examined. Read with Jean Baudrillard, the social order as such in the poem is more arguably seen as fabricated by simulacral fantasies which, through the
operation of simulation, accumulate their semiotic referential of binary oppositions.
In his conception of simulacra and simulation, Jean Baudrillard fundamentally interrogates the fabrication of an order in the postmodernist social condition of the hyperreal. Not only for him is the order observed as socially practiced,14 but, in his Simulacra and Simulation, he also perceives that “law and order themselves might be
nothing but simulation” (20). It is pinpointed that the models of control which serve to
dominate our society are the produced effects of simulacra whose perfectness is accomplished along with their radiant fascination.15 One can see that, in Baudrillard’s concern, what is generally referred to as an order is the assemblage of artificial
14 As William Pawlett supplements, “the orders only come about and are maintained through social
14 As William Pawlett supplements, “the orders only come about and are maintained through social