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homogenised for the exchange of the “Pearl” which in a sense indicated a label of qualification for the social domain of the particular “Town.” Reading this way, it is quite clearly and surprising to us that, examined in relation to the poem, the social order does less make one simple transformed into a new form of themselves than actually detach them from what they originally are. One is reformed with those sign-produced effects as an uncannily familiar but unfamiliar subject which is only devised for the participation in some social domain.
IV. The Abatement of Individuality
The de- or re-familiarisation and homogenisation of an individual by the social order, in a way, reminds us of a pathetic landscape of alienation. In such a landscape, one becomes not only split from his/her own original identity but also foreign to a form which is (re)framed for an aptness in a certain social domain. Concerning the manner of totalisation, what defines individuality and uniqueness is discernibly demolished, reduced, and abated. The responsive sentiment towards the abatement of one’s inborn characters and the sense of otherness are both illustrated in Dickinson’s writing. As her poem “Civilization – spurns – the Leopard!” (J 492) exemplarily records,
Civilization – spurns – the Leopard!
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Was the Leopard – bold?
Deserts – never rebuked her Satin – Ethiop – her Gold –
Tawny – her Customs – She was Conscious – Spotted – her Dun Gown –
This was the Leopard’s nature – Signor – Need – a keeper – frown?
Pity – the Pard – that left her Asia – Memories – of Palm –
Cannot be stifled – with Narcotic – Nor suppressed – with Balm –
Here, as embodied in the dramatic encounter between the afflicted “Leopard” and the demanding “Civilization,” it is the intensity of repudiation, along with socially cultivated despise and contempt, that serves to waver, dismantle, and even make tamely docile one’s intrinsic distinctiveness. Critics such as Helen Vendler and Lisa Marie Jones share a view that evaluates such sensitivity of the poem from the pitiful, pathetic position of the “Leopard.” They focus on the poet’s sentimental identification
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with this homesick, out-of-place, and socially rejected creature (Vendler 95; Jones 513).23 Wendy Barker, in a consistency of such critical attention, notices further in this wild-born, spotted “Leopard” the poet’s admiration of the untamed, undefined, and unsorted primitiveness which testifies to “a valorizing of that which is not fixed by social or religious decree” (86). These critical readings, whether pointing to a celebratory claim of self-worth or a mirror of personal situations, tend to unfold the fact that some personal characters are rejected by the whole edifice of the social domain. Critics here foreground not only the traumatisation of the “Leopard” but also the involvement of the poet’s explicit sensitivity towards this social reality.
Yet, when considered and read in careful collaboration with Jean Baudrillard, the reduction of one’s own values can be more nuancedly depicted. Indeed,
Baudrillard’s conception of “a liquidation of all referentials” serves as an effective access to a more sophisticated account of the way how one’s individuality is abated. It also helpfully re-examines the poem which epitomises the abatement. Not only can readers hereby be certain that the so-called “individuality” is abated and liquidated to
23 In her discussion of Dickinson’s “Leopard,” Lisa Marie Jones reveals that “The Leopard’s role in Dickinson’s poetry is one of identification and distance” (513). Jones recognises in the poem
“Civilization – spurns – the Leopard!” Dickinson’s self-recognition with and projection onto the creature in terms of their shared predicament of being rejected by society. Helen Vendler, in a consistency of the critical standpoint, further discloses in the same poem that recorded is a dialectical intensity between the masterly keeper and the submissive Leopard which sometimes knows self-defence of her intrinsic characters. See Helen Vendler. “276,” Dickinson: Selected Poems and
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be nothing but an effect of ambivalent terms which serve no relevance to any referents but their semiotic resurrection as labels, names, codes, and any indicating signifiers. A subordinate understanding of “a strategy of deterrence” of signs (Baudrillard,
Simulacra and Simulation 7) can also serve to pinpoint the retreat and irretrievability
of what recalls and defines one’s intrinsic distinctiveness and authenticity, which in effect eventually precipitates an excess of his/her sense of nostalgia for authenticity.24 For Baudrillard, signs in fact serve to deter reality; in a sense, their procession works on paralyzing, withdraw, and expulse any concepts what allude to authenticity and realness. As he reveals,
It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes (2).
Here, as clearly exposed, deterrence functions along with the exhaustive interference of signs in where reality is processed, generated, identified, defined, and given meanings to. And, with such a semiotic interference, it operates as a mechanism
24 Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation contends that “When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes tis full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality—a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity” (6-7). I therefore suggest that the rash of what serves to describe or claim reality is, verily, the ultimate effect and consequence of signs’ strategy of deterrence which occurs as a compensation when reality becomes irretrievable.
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which tries to hinder what serves to articulate the “real” from the ordinary and normal operation of some associated meaning. In this manner, authenticity becomes
fundamentally a dubious and mysterious concept which is only achievable and traceable in the sense of nostalgia that feeds one’s retrospective thinking for reality and any referents to what is originally real.
In this Dickinson “Leopard” poem, there is indeed an echo of the insight on the semiotic reduction and the precipitated withdrawal of what alludes to the
fundamental and the real. The intrinsic nature of one’s distinctiveness, as examined in the poem, is not only seen explicitly as reduced, dislodged, and fragmented to several semiotic particles. More critically, it is also revealed as retrievable only nostalgically in the field of recollection where the fractions are pieced together. As exemplarily elucidated, the boldness of the “Leopard” in “Civilization” is in fact intertwiningly defined by the fragmentation of its inborn nature which exhibits its composition upon several signifiers, such as “Satin,” “Gold,” “Customs,” “Gown”, “Tawny,” “Spotted.”
Even the notes that indicate the geographical references such as “Deserts,” “Asia,”
“Ethiop,” and “Memories – of Palm –” also serve informative clues of shaping its individuality and uniqueness which are not only termed as bold but also signalled as exotic.
Yet, it is also discernibly for the semiotic texture of the fractions that the
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eccentric, exotic individuality of the “Leopard” intensifies the sense of feeling out-of-place and self-alienation. These fractions of character are purely the products of signs not only because they serve the function of labelling a certain thing, but also because they are only traceable in a nostalgic sense that memories, images, signifiers, and signs are given way to their fabrication and prevalence. In this manner, the shift between both stanzas in the poem serves more arguably as a retrospective tendency to absorb oneself in one’s glorious origin (which can be just simulacral or illusion). In this sense, the distraction from the distorted presence of the self clarifies the trajectory of the transformation from the full identity “Leopard” to its castrated form “Pard.” It is visible that the homesickness is never a suffering of the “Leopard” but of the castrated “Pard,” who can be at times strongly reminiscent of its intact but now split identity in its displacement into a rejecting social structure. The “Pard” clearly suffers not only from the aftermath of the rejection of the “Civilization” but also the
eventuality of alienation which nostalgically points to an irretrievability of a certain past when an intactness of its nature could be claimed.
The identity crisis of the “Leopard/Pard”, in a sense, clearly epitomises the hardship of one individual whose individuality in a social domain is also spurned, reduced, and made depart from who he/she is. With this respect, it is discerned that there is always distance between what may genuinely represent an individual’s
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distinctiveness and these remembrance, the fabricated signs. It is also hardly deniable or ignorable that there is always alienation between the complete body of identity and signs that serve to retain the split, spoiled, ruined, and even demolished identity.
V. Conclusion
The final predicament of the perpetual distance between one’s individuality (along with his/her identity) and some semiotically resurrected materials not only conclusively serves to determine an impressive sketch of how an abated individual ends up being developed in a social domain. It also arguably brings us to witness an exquisite landscape of how (simulacral) fantasies are proceeding in their penetration to everywhere in our social life and irresistibly affecting a network that concerns all of us as a whole. Such an inescapability can be best articulated in Jean Baudrillard’s account of simulacra in Simulacra and Simulation: “[e]verywhere we live in a universe strangely similar to the original—things are doubled by their own scenario”
(11). Read with Baudrillard, Dickinson’s writing surprisingly depicts a similar in terms of the insights on our social life that are abundantly implicit in some of her works. Along with our examination of her works as examples, Dickinson’s social insights can never be simply estimated as displaying and claiming certain sentiments of irreconcilable antagonism. Nor can they be seen as her personal defence against the
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undiscerning public or the spurning society as a whole. Instead, there are more nuancedly cultivated views on the issues of language, identity, and the semiotic, etc., which in her works are not only called into question but also wavered, mocked, distorted, played, noticed cautious, and rendered discreditable in a somehow consistency of the Baudrillardian conception.
Interestingly and significantly, the poetic creations of this eccentric but memorable author, as critics such as Robert Weisbuch and Robert McClure Smith celebrate, indeed prove their flexible openness for showing the excellent richness of interpretive potentials. As Weisbuch puts it, this impressive textual openness of Dickinson in fact comes importantly to suggest a decentred, de-canonised way of interpreting her works which circles around “a letting-go, a releasing of interpretive habits and idiot-questioner demands” (197). It is also a way that the critic tends to regard as echoing Dickinson’s intention and means “To gather Paradise –,” as he refers to one of her poems “I dwell in Possibility” (J657). Yet, the conception of what is referred to as “Paradise” for Dickinson, in light of her works, can be genuinely complex. It is in particular worthy of a note, when read with Jean Baudrillard, how and with what significance the so-called Dickinsonian paradise, or other related concepts, can be examined under the critic’s very remindful comment of “a universe strangely similar to the original,” which is distorted and, again, flooded with some
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semiotic structures such as fantasies, signs, signifiers, and so forth. Questions as such are clearly set as ushering in our consecutive discussions in the following chapter.
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Chapter Four
Dreaming in a Utopian/Dystopian Dreamscape
I. Introduction
Certainly, with such a postmodernist light of reading Dickinson’s dreams and fantasies, it is seen that signs actually function as the most essential and powerful medium throughout the entire social domain for its peculiar manner of actualising what is desired and what is pursued. Scarcely can their effectiveness be even gauged as of limited significance as their decisive property of shaping one’s perception of a society is taken into account. It is equally certain that, with the peculiar artificiality and malleability of signs, a meticulous landscape of what people envisage as the best and the most desirable is surely formulated in a discernible way. And, further, as paramount in every respect, the landscape also comes to dominate the designation of what perceptively and conceptually constructs a society. Such a landscape, occupied so intimately by a plethora of signs of dream and fantasy, seems to some extent triumphant in displaying a form of “dream”-scape. This particular dreamscape, by its very name, serves to denote an overabundance of the semiotic as well as an
everlasting inescapability between what is real and non-real. The conceptual exposure and awareness of uncertainty in the realness dilemma, critically, gives a sudden hint
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to readers to a joint where Jean Baudrillard in the bulk of his philosophy hints on exactly the arrival of a hyper-reality in human social environment.
However, concerning the equivocality of simulacra and signs as well as the dubiety of the collective desire of a social majority, there are still a few questions that seemingly deserve further consideration: Does the overwhelmingly prevailing
dreamscape, which in essence is driven and composed by the collective desire (and fantasy) for the ideal, provide already an auspicious path that sufficiently brings the dreaming others closely to what is expected. Does the dreamscape become clear and less questionable in terms of a solidity of its positivity? It stays an enigma, too, if this seemingly positive formulation of dreams in a vast, excessive scale can genuinely suggest a certain form of goodness in a persuasive way, as the expression “for the public (common) good” would promise. Since the idea of “pursuit” denotes a clear hint of optimism that one brilliantly expectant future is implied as attainable via the gesture (or sheer assumption) of wish-fulfilment, the concept of goodness to some extent seems also worthy of attention. A point that should be delved into lies in the doubting of whether the pursuit of the ideal can promise as much positivity as the term literally is supposed to wish on. Since, in particular, the pursuing of what is desired also involves a severe scale of “deprivation,” a further suspicion of doubt here can be even thus given to not alone the only question of whose “good,” but the
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question of whether and how a dream-motivated society demonstrates itself as an auspiciously developing structure that not only prospers in itself but also thrives in the way as a majority likes and dreams of it.
Critically, in a more provoking way, the questioning of the authoritative texture of the concept “good(ness)” seems also to hint at a less distanced relatedness to the paradoxical complexity between the utopian and the dystopian. It is rather plausible and radically analytical to ponder: In consideration of the optimistic pursuing of the ideal, does the thereby sign-fathered dreamscape also essentially and characteristically stand for any utopian visualisation of desire, where a form of idealism is dominantly served? The question of whether and how the dreamscape, or the constellation of fantasies, is utopian or not indeed touches upon a significance that, in addition to dream’s problematic nature, the idea of utopia can be equally ambivalent in its essence. The very idea, as a nearly highest output of perfection, is even controversially self-contradictory in its referentiality of idealism, which in a critical way leads to a paradigm shift marking, by contrast, the idea of “dystopia”.25
25 The word “utopia,” which is widely known for its Greek denotation as “no place,” does carry the serious weight of perplexity in its paradoxical relatedness to another term “eutopia,” which however means in Greek “a good place.” The “good-place-no-place” inter-referential structure between the words here indeed contradicts and makes suspicious the solidarity of the idea of goodness originally in the word “utopia”, seemingly insinuating the unpractical existence of a place which qualifies a label as “good.” The thorough unpracticableness of goodness in the word utopia seems to facilitate
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Not surprising as it is, the paradoxicalness in the polarity between the utopian and the dystopian still deserves critical attention from any readers in the postmodernist age, and for reading Dickinson, who has been greatly valued as a precursor of
postmodernism (Deppman 7-8), it is even true that the problem (or doubting) of the utopian and/or the dystopian indeed occupies particular significance in a great many of her poems. The in-betweenness and the openness played within the tension of both conceptual camps are clearly among the subjects that the poet often concerns, aims for, and even sides with in her elusively deployed language of poetry.
Thus with this literary indulgence, the issue of dreamscape seems given a vantage point of view relating to the attitude of Dickinson’s. It is a question whether the poet considers in her poems the vagueness of what defines the utopian/dystopian in constellation with the idealistic dreamscape led by a majority for what is generally pictured as a good society. How does she write of, with regard to the public
dream(ing) of some societal condition, her meditation on the zealous enthusiasm of a social majority, and lead a critique of it? Can her literary treatment of the
utopian/dystopian weigh or undermine the mass omnipresence of dreams, thereby
of utopia that reports the denial of goodness. The Oxford English Dictionary also reports (or
implicitly displays) the fundamental ambivalence of the term utopia. While the term means a place of perfection, it meanwhile also suggests an impossibility of realisation of this perfection. It is a fantasy in essence, which hints at its nature of dream. Goodness in the term is less clear and dangerously become vague with its inverted form “dystopia.”
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proposing a horizon that interrogates the peculiar dreamscape?
Yet, in Dickinson, a suspicion of utopianism, or of “dystopianism,” is
nevertheless textually an opaqueness, which in ways may hinder an intent of analysis from tracing through at the very outset. In fact, rarely does she deploy a term that exactly articulates the idea of utopia or of dystopia. The absence, or silencing, of the direct wording, in a way, seems also to import an extra question of whether the dreamscape is able to be posited in the “light” of the binary oppositions, especially when with the intervention of the semiotic the boundary of dichotomies has barely sustained in a solid and firm form. As famously judged and questioned in the poem
“There’s a certain Slant of light” (J 258), the designation of meaning(s) in any vehicles, linguistic or cultural, is always a problematic task which, with its less valid functionality, is eventually doomed to waver in the dim glow of difference.26 The meaning of the quest for determining a property of the dreamscape, under such a context, seems equally left in an evident state of flux, which radically not only indicates an overwhelming deferral in a flood of signifiers, but, perhaps, also a
“There’s a certain Slant of light” (J 258), the designation of meaning(s) in any vehicles, linguistic or cultural, is always a problematic task which, with its less valid functionality, is eventually doomed to waver in the dim glow of difference.26 The meaning of the quest for determining a property of the dreamscape, under such a context, seems equally left in an evident state of flux, which radically not only indicates an overwhelming deferral in a flood of signifiers, but, perhaps, also a