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Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche

To be alive – is Power –Existence – in itself –Without a further function –Omnipotence – Enough –

To be alive – and Will!'Tis able as a God –The Maker – of Ourselves – be what –Such being Finitude! (J 677 / Fr 876) 1

Friedrich Nietzsche was an avid reader of Emerson. But the ruptures

he opens in Western philosophical culture find surprising echo in another of

his contemporaries, Emily Dickinson,. There are strong contrasts between

Dickinson and Nietzsche: in place although not in time; in language; in

religious context – Dickinson lived in the intense period of Protestant religious

revival of the Second Great Awakening and its wrestling match with

Calvinism, in which Amherst passionately participated; while Nietzsche's

background is Lutheran in a period of increasing positivism to which his

university experience exposed him. Not least, there is a contrast of gender

and attitudes towards it, with Dickinson's work a major voice articulating

senses of women's identities as these were being reshaped in post-

Revolutionary America, while in Nietzsche, "woman" remains a complex and

highly equivocal figuration.

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Yet there are likenesses. Neither married, although in Dickinson's case

this is seen as eccentric deviation and in Nietzsche as philosophical self-

affirmation.2 Dickinson from the age of 30 reclused herself in her home in

Amherst with her sister, mother, and father. Nietzsche at the age of 35 left his

teaching position at Basel to withdraw into a life of increasing isolation until his

collapse into mental breakdown in 1889, living out the last decade of his life in

seclusion under the care of his sister and mother. In both cases, the

posthumous writings (for Dickinson almost all of her poetry) went into the care

of the sisters with whom each lived, with the works of each suffering

disjunctive publication, Dickinson's in the context of family feuds and

Nietzsche's due to his sister's ignoble interferences.

Above all, the two shared certain premises, or perhaps sensibilities,

regarding the nature of the world: that ours is a world in continual flux,

foundationally a scene of change and multiplicity. Transition, transformation,

instability, rupture is the fundamental condition in which, for each, human

beings find themselves. Each fiercely, rigorously records and reiterates that

their immanent experience is one of profound temporality and inconstancy.

"Of this is Day composed," Dickinson writes: "of morning and a noon" that

"dower and deprive" (J 1675/ Fr 1692). One of the first aphorisms in Will to

Power declares man's "smallness and accidental occurrence in the flux of

becoming and passing away" (WP 4).3

The world for each, then, is firstly a world of becoming. As to the world

of metaphysical Being that traditionally served as stable anchor and ground

for earthly existence, this other "true" world both Dickinson and Nietzsche see

as failing adequately to account for, address, or interpret the flux of

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phenomena. The traditional orders, grounded in metaphysics, for explaining

the world's endless transformations seemed flawed and problematic in its

claims as well as in its failure to deliver on them. Both Dickinson and

Nietzsche thus balance on a volatile edge of metaphysics. Although neither

wrote in philosophically systematic ways – Nietzsche's poetic and in particular

his aphoristic style is another tie linking him to Dickinson4 – each offers what

emerges as a steadfast critique of traditional metaphysical premises, and a

dizzying confrontation with the consequences of such critique.

Dickinson's responses to the rupture of metaphysical certainty are

more ambivalent, more alarmed than are Nietzsche's. What had seemed

foundational had, as through a torn veil, suddenly shown empty; while what

stance might take its place remained uncertain. The tearing apart of the two

worlds – the tearing away of earthly life from, in Nietzsche's words, the

metaphysical "unity, Being, aim" (WP 12) that had purported to govern

phenomena – at times causes Dickinson to fall into an abyss. In complex

negations such as Nietzsche deploys, she calls metaphysical collapse "The

Crash of nothing but of All," and cries: "I cling to nowhere till I fall" (J 1503 / Fr

1532). But at other times Dickinson reaches out to embrace the world of

phenomena as her true and exhilarating arena. In, for example, the poem "To

be Alive is Power" (cited above as epigraph) Dickinson goes far towards a

Nietzschean declaration of allegiance not to any "further" world beyond this

one, but to "Existence – in itself – / Without a further function." This world

becomes a scene of "Power" which, as a way of being alive, is imminent, and

therefore limited and conditional: an "Omnipotence – Enough." Such yoking

together the absolute term "Omnipotence" with the limiting "Enough" verges

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on oxymoron, breaking open metaphysical meaning in ways Nietzsche

persistently does. "Omnipotence" rather than marking the divine is both

granted and sized to the human. We are alive in the world as the arena of our

"will." Within this inherent and immanent life and will, the human is "able as a

God."

As almost always happens in a Dickinson text, the concluding lines

complicate rather than clarify.

To be alive – and Will!'Tis able as a God –The Maker – of Ourselves – be what – Such being Finitude! (J 677 / Fr 876)

Truncated, with incomplete phrasing and unclear references, the poem leaves

obscure who is the "Maker" of "what" and in what sphere. It seems, though,

that Dickinson here celebrates a creative power which displaces, even as it

imitates, God's. It is we who are the "Maker – of Ourselves." "Such being

Finitude" again approaches philosophical oxymoron. "Finitude" and "being"

are in traditional metaphysics contradictory terms. But here they are linked.

Being is being in and as "Finitude" in this poem. The conditional, finite world

is the arena in which we are "alive" and "will," the realm of "power" as self-

definition and creativity.

Dickinson's work, like Nietzsche's, stares into the maelstrom of

metaphysical collapse and its consequences. Her work, like his, pursues a

critique in which metaphysical premises are shown to be wanting. Her work,

like his, provides an anatomy of the implications of such critique, of the

kaleidoscopic and assaultive and also transformative and generative energies

released by it. Given the world's multiplicity, the problem becomes for

Dickinson, as for Nietzsche, how to account for experience as meaningful in

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human terms, given its endless transfigurations. And this, for both,

increasingly turns on language and interpretation itself. For each, reality in its

multiplicity and transfiguration ultimately becomes constituted not by

metaphysical principles but by representation, interpretation, and the words

we use in their undertaking.

I. Linguistic Perspective

Despite the dispersions of her language both within texts and in her

opus as a whole, Dickinson's work pursues systematic steps of metaphysical

critique, tracing the reasons or impulses behind her often regretful inability to

accept other-worldly accounts of the earth.

For Death – or ratherFor the Things ‘twould buy –This – put awayLife’s Opportunity—

The Things that Death will buyAre Room –Escape from Circumstances –And a Name

With Gifts of LifeHow Death’s Gifts may compare –We know not –For the Rates – lie Here – (J 382 / Fr 644)5

"Death" here is entry into traditional immortality. As such it offers a series of

metaphysical promises: "Room" evokes eternal and infinite place; "Escape

from Circumstances" suggests essence as against accident, absolute design

as against conditions; and a "Name" promises fixed identity. But, as

Nietzsche summarizes in Twilight of the Idols, in a passage that Heidegger

cites as encapsulating Nietzsche's metaphysical critique, so here such

promises offered by the afterworld reflect not a metaphysical reality but simply

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the reverse and antidote to temporality, mutability and mortality – that is, the

conditions that we find painful in the world we inhabit. Thus writes Nietzsche:

The true world has een constructed out of contradiction to the actual world. To invent fables about a world "other" than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has gained the upper hand in us. We avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of "another" a "better" life. Twilight 484 6

"Room," "Escape from Circumstances" and "A Name" grant us the absolute

time and space that we lack in our earthly lives. But the attraction of this

compensatory fantasy does not guarantee its truthfulness. Indeed, Nietzsche

says that the contrary is the case:

The reasons for which this world has been characterized as "apparent" are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is indemonstrable. . .The true world – unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable. . .The true world – unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently not consoling, redeeming, or obligating. . .The true world – we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have abolished the apparent one.7

There is a fatal weakness to metaphysical design. Our position, viewpoint,

understanding and experience remain earthly. Any notion of another world is

thus based upon and ultimately situated in this one, not the other way around.

As Dickinson writes, "The Rates – lie here." The other world in fact

suspiciously looks like an inversion, as Nietzsche insists, of the conditions

most dreaded in this one. Yet these form our only direct experience. As

against these immanent conditions, the other world remains "unattainable,

indemonstrable, unpromisable." This world is not the shadow of a higher one,

but rather the reverse is true. It is the other world that is a shadow, a lie,

projected out of our dark fears. "The Rates lie here" unmasks this lie. The

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pun on "Rates" invokes both temporality, pacing in time, and value judgment.

The measure of value in actuality is "here," not in some other world posited

against this one. Such reference to an other world is, then, not truth, but

fiction. It is constructed out of what is most disliked in this one world,

reflecting this dislike rather than some higher insight, and serving to deny the

actual world we inhabit. And what metaphysics calls lie is in fact truth, the

only truth we directly experience. The world of phenemena is then not mere

appearance, but is as actual as human experience gets, the only actual world.

Thus, to deny metaphysical reality is to accept the reality of the earthly world:

"With the true world we have abolished the apparent one."

Nietzsche raises such questions of truth and lie in Twilight of the Idols

and the nachlass variously collected as The Will to Power; 8 but they occupied

him from the beginning of his philosophical writings, as seen in his earlier

essay "Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense." This essay opens by

framing truth and lie in terms that he later calls "perspectivism" – the sense,

as he writes in a Will to Power aphorism, that reality "has no meaning behind

it, but countless meanings: Perspectivism" (WP § 481). 9 The variability and

partiality of perspective is the chastisement with which he opens "Truth and

Lying:"

If we and the gnat could understand each other we should learn that even the gnat swims through the air with the same pathos, and feels within itself the flying center of the world. . . So too the proudest man of all, the philosopher, believes he sees the eyes of the universe focused telescopically from all directions upon his actions and thoughts.10

Nietzsche's intuition of the variousness of perspective, and of how

perspective inevitably frames what we see and understand, is firmly shared by

Dickinson, who devotes many poems to how "We see – Comparatively" (J

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534 / Fr 580). But the greatest distortion of perspective is denying that that is

all it is. The biggest delusion, that is, is for a perspective to mistake itself to

be more than that, to be absolute comprehension or general truth. Thus in

the poem "Who Giants Know, with lesser men," (and Dickinson's terms of

measure are notoriously tricky), the "Giants" are those who in fact know that

they know less, the "lesser men" those who do not know that they do not

know. They mistake their own viewpoint for the whole world's, paradoxically

thinking their vision is larger, while the "Giants" see in ways that are more

penetrating because they know their understanding is limited. The "lesser"

are thus compared to, displayed by, "the Summer Gnat:"

The Summer Gnat displays –Unconscious that his single FleetDo not comprise the skies – (J 796 / Fr 848)

Like Nietzsche's "gnat" in "Truth and Lie" who "feels within itself the flying

center of the world," so Dickinson's "Summer Gnat" (here almost an anagram

for "Giant") wrongly takes "his single Fleet" – that is, either his own group or

his own flight, or his own temporal fleetingness – as if he comprised the whole

"skies" at large.

But perspectivism in Dickinson and Nietzsche ultimately takes shape

not in terms of vision, but of language. At issue is not so much how people

see but what and how they say. Wallace Stevens writes in one of his

aphorisms, "The Tongue is an Eye." This move from eye to speech is

pronounced in Nietzsche, and it is deeply consequential. As Richard Rorty

anatomizes in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the very act of positing

knowledge in visual terms is itself metaphysical, assuming the mind to have

some reflective power through which sense perception conforms to ideal

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structures man can perceive as the true Form to which phenomena refer. 11

Yet this vision-model also raises problems of communication and solipsism,

problems that become severe once the metaphysical Forms are questioned.

The trope of seeing situates comprehension within each individual mind, in

ways that can never be fully verified by others, since their interior experience

remains inaccessible to anyone outside themselves.12 Implying that

understanding is like visual apprehension places it inside each private mind in

ways no one else can share, check, or have access to. Perspective becomes

a self-enclosed subjectivity to which there is no exit. But language is by

definition social. It takes place between people.13 Moving our model of

apprehension from a visual grasp to a linguistic exchange relocates

formulation from interior space to an interconnecting web or network in which

humans are constitutively placed.14

The Nietzschean turn to language has been long recognized as the

decisive plunge forward into a post-metaphysical era. It projects the world as

something we formulate, indeed reformulate continuously. The formative and

indeed originary power of language is, however, already recognized in

Emerson and Dickinson. Emerson's "Nature" vigilantly equivocates between

giving nature priority or language. When he writes that "we are assisted by

natural objects in the expression of particular meanings" meanings seem to

be located in the mind, preceding the objects that become instruments of their

expression. But he also asserts that "Words are signs of natural facts" and

that nature in turn "is the symbol of spirit." This is to place nature as prior to

words, and spirit as prior to nature, in a metaphysically traditional semiotic.

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Or again, he seems to be imagining a back and forth, a back and forth where

nature and mind "corresponds" to each other because it is only through mind

that nature is known, but also vice versa: "Every appearance in nature

corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be

described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture." Yet even this

1 Dickinson texts will be cited by both the Thomas Johnson and the R.W. Franklin The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) poem numbers. The question of textual stability is itself a vexed and complex one, which I will not enter into here. I will say, however, that the textual instability of Dickinson texts concur with the argument in this paper towards the role of language as and in a realm of becoming.2 As Nietzsche famously said in The Gay Science III: 7 "Thus the philosopher abhors marriage and all that would persuade him to marriage, for he sees the married state as an obstacle to fulfillment. What great philosopher has ever been married?" trans. Walter Kaufmann, (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1974). Hereafter cited as GS.3 Friedrich Nietzsche The Will to Power (N.Y.: Vintage Books 1967). Hereafter cited as WP followed by section number.4 Much has been written on Nietzsche's aphoristic style. See especially Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation tr. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 5 This poem and its metaphysical critique I discussed in Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), where my focus was on metaphysical revolt as well as historical conflict.6 Martin Heidegger Nietzsche. Vol One, trans. David Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc. 1978), p. 202. 7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche ed. Walter Kaufmann, (NY: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 485.8 On nachlass questions9 Cf. a much cited aphorism in Will to Power, where Nietzsche writes that the world "has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings: Perspectivism" (WP § 481). Cf discussion in Lingis and Nehemas.10 "On Truth and Lying in a Extra-Moral Sense" in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language ed. Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, David Parent (NY: Oxford University Press, 1989) 246-257, p. 246. Hereafter cited as TL.11 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.12 Of course one of the Cartesian topics. A central problem in epistemology. Cf Gilbert Ryle eg the ghost in the machine.13 Another philosophical topic: the impossibility of private language. Wittgenstein. Kripke. Already in Saussure.14Such location of the human in conversation has become a principal topic in discourse theories, such as Habermas's. Note his critique of Nietzsche, Nehemas; but closes off potential readings.

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reciprocity is a linguistic one, the mind only able to be "described" through

"natural appearance" and vice versa.15

The sense of linguistic activism, of the role of language in shaping

representation, is a substratum of Dickinson's poetics. Her work

demonstrates the forms of language itself to have a primary role and impact in

experience. Thus, in the poem "Talk not to me of Summer Trees," nature

does not direct and command "Talk," which instead is linked to "Foliage of the

mind:"

Talk not to me of Summer TreesThe Foliage of the mindA Tabernacle is for BirdsOf no corporeal kindAnd winds do go that way at noonTo their Ethereal HomesWhose Bugles call the least of usTo undepicted Realms (J 1634 / Fr 1655)

Nietzsche writes in "Truth and Lie":

When we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers, we believe we know something about the things themselves, although what we have are just metaphors of things which do not correspond to the original entities. (TL 249)

In Dickinson's text, the "Foliage of the mind" rivals, indeed precedes, that of

"Summer Trees," which emerge as its reflection. The world is made in the

image of mind, not mind of the world. But the imaging is deeply rhetorical, a

matter of language and its arrangements. The "Foliage" becomes

"Tabernacle," an invocation of religious language pursued through the text,

but one in which other-worldly meanings are re-cast into immanent ones.

Thus "Birds" are of "no corporeal kind," winds are "Ethereal," and "Bugles,"

resonant of Biblical trumpets, "call" to "undepicted Realms." But in each case,

15 I have discussed Emersonian language theory in "Emerson's Figural Religion," forthcoming.

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not spiritual, but rather imaginary realms are intended. The "undepicted

Realms" are not apocalyptic ones but further poetic ventures.

Or, even more precisely, what is invoked is not simply imagination, but

the paradigms that govern it along with other human relations to the world,

and which are above all linguistic ones. The poem not only transforms

language, conducting it from the religious sphere to the imaginary, but also

concerns language. It deflects "talk" of "Summer Trees" to the "Foliage of the

Mind" – where leaves are themselves a traditional trope for pages or texts. In

a continuing linguistic imagery the bugles "call," a personification granting to

them linguistic action. "Undepicted Realms" is a complex trope. Instead of

apocalyptic realms, poetic and linguistic ventures are proposed. Undepicted

Realms" suggest a sublime tradition, which points beyond any given depiction

– a term connoting both visual image and word description. But in another

sense, they point to ever further and renewed depictions. They are

"undepicted" as yet, not as an absolute state that exists beyond human

achievement or expression, but rather as an ever mobile, ever advancing

linguistic pathway, tracing an ever receding, because never final description.

For, such finality does not exist. Rather, language marks a limit delineating

the world that humans inhabit. It is within linguistic realms that we depict, and

then depict again. Not least, the poem is cast as dialogue. The speaker

addresses an auditor concerning what can and cannot be talked of, about

forms of language and their powers.

II. Personification and Negation

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In the most famous passage from "Truth and Lie," Nietzsche calls the

linguistic forms that are decisive in shaping human understanding of the world

"anthropomorphisms, "

"What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned" (TL 250).

Nietzsche is supremely aware of the question of viewpoint: how each person

sees from within a context and according to a perspective that locates him or

her. But Nietzsche probes how viewpoint is itself a figure – a visual image for

what is also, indeed firstly, a linguistic praxis. It is the forms of language –

grammatical, rhetorical, philological – that articulate categories of

understanding, which thus prove to be projected from and within human

experience, not perceived or received by us. These categories, whatever

form they take, reside in the human. Therefore they can be grouped together

under the rubric of anthropomorphism, or, in traditional rhetorical terms, of

personification.

Personification is often treated as a sub-category of metaphor or simile.

It seems to be a kind of comparison, in which something – one term of the

comparison – happens to be human, and is compared to something that is

not. As metaphor, personification transfers a human attribute to a non-human

one. These transfers can register a range or variety of degree, across and

respecting a kind of chain of being. Human qualities can be transferred to

animals, but also to vegetables or minerals. Or, animate life rather than

specifically human attributes can be transferred down to plant or rock. Human

attributions can also be extended beyond specific metaphoric comparisons to

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larger topoi, as in the micro-macrocosmic correspondences that deeply inform

not only literary, but religious and also scientific thought. 16

But Nietzsche's analysis of anthropomorphism extends beyond the

specific rhetoric and topoi of personification. Rather, he sees it as

fundamental to all human language. (Human) language as such is a mode of

personification or anthropomorphism. Far from being a discrete trope, a

subset of metaphor and simile as a certain kind of comparison, personification

is the norm characterizing all language. For language, as spoken by

humans, necessarily and ineradicably humanizes. The categories of

language are human categories. This is the case not just when there is a

clear ascription of human attributes to something non-human, as in

personifying metaphors. Our very grammar, our very linguistic structures,

which is to say every verb, every adjective, every noun, reflects human

interests and orderings. Thus Nietzsche in "Truth and Lying" states that every

definition is

anthropomorphic through and through and does not contain one single point which is 'true in itself" real and universally valid apart from man. The investigator into such truths is basically seeking just the metamorphosis of the world in man; he is struggling to understand the world as a human-like thing and acquires at best a feeling of an assimilation. . . Such an investigator observes the whole world as linked to man, as the infinitely refracted echo of a primeaval sound, as the reproduction and copy of an archetype, man. (TL 251)

The world to humans is a humanized world. The world is a "human-like

thing," human seekers experience the world "as linked to man," in relationship

to human interests and orders.

16 See my "Personification" in The Art of Poetry, (NY: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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Thus, if the world seems to correspond to human understanding, this is

because humans find in the world what we ourselves have put there. What

has been taken to be correlation is in effect tautology:

What is the situation of these conventions of language? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do terms coincide with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? Only by forgetfulness can man ever come to believe that he has truth to the above-designated degree. Unless he wants to settle for truth in the form of tautology. (TL 248)

Nietzsche here challenges the notion that "terms coincide with things," that

language matches a reality predetermined outside it. Language as "adequate

expression" presumes that there is a pre-existent external reality that

language merely re-presents, as if expression were a secondary effect of a

prior determination. This correspondence theory of language posits that

language correlates with and repeats an external reality established in itself.

Instead, Nietzsche insists that the reason the world seems to match human

formulations is because our formulations set up our understanding of the

world. This is tautology, not causality. It is, Nietzsche goes on to say, like

someone who "hides an object behind a bush and then seeks and finds it

there” (TL 251). The world conforms to human understanding not because

we grasp it in itself, but because we arrange it, always in relation to our own

categories. Reality is not correlated to language; rather it is "language which

has worked originally at the construction of ideas."

The "thing in itself"(which would be pure, disinterested truth) is also absolutely incomprehensible to the creator of language and not worth seeking. He designates only the relations of things to men, and to express these relations he uses the boldest metaphors. (TL 248)

In "Truth and Lie," then, language is formative. Personifying human

categories foundationally structure what they represent. But this is a concern

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of Emily Dickinson's poetry as well. Yet this need not mean that there is utter

collapse of meaning: that if there is no absolute truth, all is mere lie. To deny

correspondence theory is not to reduce all experience and expression to

arbitrary or solipsistic expression. Tautology in this sense is not simply

circular. It rather defines the parameters within which human experience

takes place as conditioned and finite, as partial and even fragmented.17

If there is no world pre-existing its linguistic formulation, no world of

"truth" that language merely reiterates, does that mean there is no world and

no meaning? In contemporary terms, the critique of correspondence theory

has posited instead a sign-theory in which no signified precedes a signifier.

The signifier is not merely the result, effect, vehicle, expression of a prior

meaning constituted without language. References do not subsist external to

the linguistic forms through which we experience them. Rather, our language

formulates our experience. This does mean that experience is never final or

absolute, is always represented, is always beckoning to reformulation. But

what then regulates the production of language so that it is not merely

arbitrary or imposed, both on nature and, crucially, on other human beings?

Dickinson suggests that it is exactly the insistence on the limits of claims, on

the sense of a space beyond what humans can know or represent absolutely,

curtails but also generates particular formulations. Therefore the negative –

what is not expressed, attained, granted – emerges as a central site, defining

even as – or rather, in that – it limits what is properly human.

The poem "The Tint I cannot take – is best –" examines and represents

such a dialectic of limitation. Written in the mode of Romantic imaginative

17 Nehemas's argument here is not consistent re reason not being critical unless via an exterior absolute standpoint. CC to N.

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power, it nonetheless crosses into this discourse a counter one that resituates

imaginative claims.

The Tint I cannot take – is best –The Color too remoteThat I could show it in Bazaar –A Guinea at the sight—

The fine – impalpable Array –That swaggers on the eyeLike Cleopatra's Company –Repeated -- in the sky –

The Moments of DominionThat happen on the SoulAnd leave it with a DiscontentToo exquisite – to tell –

The eager look – on Landscapes –As if they just repressedSome Secret – that was pushingLike Chariots – in the Vest –

The Pleading of the Summer –That other Prank – of Snow –That Cushions Mystery with Tulle,For fear the Squirrels – know.

Their Graspless manners – mock us –Until the Cheated EyeShuts arrogantly – in the Grave –Another way – to see – (J 627 / Fr 696)

Harold Bloom calls this a "poem besieged by perspectivism" within the

context of a Nietzschean affirmation in "our faith [in] the existing world" (WP

1046). As an "authentic American Sublime," the poem opens with a

characteristic Dickinsonian gesture towards the sublime as standing beyond

any actuality – a romance structure where what is not always exceeds what

is, with the ideal ever hovering before and beyond whatever concretely

exists.18 This is to recognize the realm of imagination as always surpassing 18 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, (Ny: Harcouty Brace & Company, 1994), pp. 304-309. The sublime of course is a major topic in Dickinson studies. See Gary Stonum, Joanne Fieht Diehl.

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what is actual. Yet, as Harold Bloom has theorized, such surpassing entails

an element of negation. The imagination doesn't simply fuse or reciprocate

with nature, but must counter it in order to open space for its own ventures.

Negation is thus imaginatively liberating and positive. But negation also has

a limiting function that works across the sublime. The sublime can imply

some endless reach of mind into ever greater extents. But it also signals, as

in Kant, a confrontation with the unbounded in which the imagination

experiences its own limits.19 This sense of negation points to what is beyond

as something unreachable, never to be attained. It recognizes

transcendence, but not as a second, eternal metaphysical world into which

one hopes to enter or reach. Transcendence instead acts as a barrier,

resending energy back into a beckoning temporality as the ever receding,

ever summoning next moment which ever remains our framework and

condition. Transcendence in this sense marks a limit that we, as humans,

never cross: a negative transcendence not to be grasped, but instead to stand

as guard against our attempts to claim and exceed what ever remains for us

finite positions and understanding.

19 Kant describes the sublime in Critique of Judgment , as involving "a representation which makes us remark its inadequacy and consequently its subjective want of purposiveness," finding "the whole power of the imagination inadequate to its ideas," II. 26. Lyotard's interpretation of this sublime as a chasm between representation and the unrepresentable is close to what is under discussion here. On the other hand, to Kant the sublime is ultimately a revelation of our own subjectivity, "true sublmity must be sought only in the mind of the subject judging, not in the natural object the judgment upon which occasions this state." As to Nietzsche, he read parts of the Critique of Judgment (CJ) in 1867, but both Kant's sublime and Nietzsche's relation to it are far too daunting a topic to enter into here. For discussion, see: Kevin Hill Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of his Thought, (NY: Oxford University Press, 2003); Michael Harr, Nietzsche and Metaphysics trans. Michael Gendre, (NY: Suny Press, 1996).

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Perspectivism in Nietzsche involves not only viewpoint but, more

radically, linguistic formulation. But this also resituates perspectivism away

from solipsistic subjectivism. Linguistic formulation is necessarily shared.

Language, as Saussure underscored, is itself a social institution into which

individuals enter and by which they are shaped. Its constructions are

common ones, with creativity working through and with common

constructions. Each individual version still assumes and depends on shared

language usage, as both a limiting function and also a power. "The Tint I

cannot Take" interestingly works between visual and linguistic construction

and the implications of each. "Tint," "Color," and "sight" all underscore the

question of vision and perspective as situating the speaker. But the next

stanza's "impalpable Array -- / That swaggers on the eye" at once asserts and

cancels the visual dimension: an "Array" can be seen by the "eye," but the

"impalpable" cannot. And this second stanza already moves into a sense of

language rather than vision as the structure of experience. "Swaggers on the

eye" is a personification, granting to "Array" an intentional and human action –

indeed, a braggadocio, of overclaiming. At issue is not only seeing but

saying. "Like Cleopatra's Company" is a likeness that is not perceptual, but

conceptual, made possible and indeed invented through the rhetorical

structure of simile itself. The verse then evokes a directly linguistic image:

"Repeated – in the sky." Like Nietzsche 's "echo," the act of the seeker as he

[she] "contemplates the whole world as related to man, as the infinitely

protracted echo of an original sound," the sky repeats the poet, not the poet

the sky. Indeed, this second stanza is followed by a quite Nietzschean

gesture involving, as in the poem "To be alive – is power" the question of

20 Wolosky EDFN

domination and will, again as linguistic phenomena. "The Moments of

Dominion" are those when the "soul" experiences creative surge.

But "Dominion" here is deeply paradoxical. It involves not expression,

but its limit; not possession but its evasion. It happens to "happen" on the

soul, rather than being directly willed by it. As an experience of power, it lasts

but a "Moment." As Dickinson writes in another poem, "Dominion lasts until

obtained" (J 1257 / Fr 1299). And it involves not command of nature, but

"Discontent" as nature never in fact corresponds with human desire. A

second negation then follows. "Too exquisite – to tell" makes the experience

at once linguistic and not so. As with all tropes of inexpressibility, there is a

complex paradoxicality of language that declares the inability to name

something beyond language.20 Dickinson is balanced on a boundary she

thereby defines or marks out, of the extent of linguistic power, and also its

borders and limits.

The poem continues its rhetoric of personification. "Landscapes" are

said to "look" – i.e. to see, not be seen; "Snow" to play a "Prank," "Squirrels"

to "know." These transferences of the human again move into linguistic

tropes, which again delimit as well as affirming subjectivity. The landscape's

"eager Look" turns out to signal something not seen: a "Secret" that is

"repressed." The "Summer" is described as "Pleading," a beckoning rather

than commanding speech act.

The conclusion of the poem again invokes an "Eye," but as "Cheated"

and finally as shutting. The desire to see absolutely is rebuked as arrogant.

Instead, its mortality is confirmed. The eye's vista shrinks to the "Grave." If

there is "Another way – to see," this is left ambiguous between further vision 20 Curtius on inexpressibility. See Language Mysticism.

21 Wolosky EDFN

and irony at the desire to gain it. Alongside this chastened visual imagery

persists an imagery of language, which is similarly bounded. Our efforts to

know what the summer pleads and what snow conceals "mock" us. Our

knowledge is not directly of nature but always through linguistic acts that

inevitably entail ourselves.21 Against the desire to grasp the world-in- itself,

nature remains "Graspless," beyond our comprehension and our possession.

In this poem, language does not reflect, nor simply echo external

reality. Rather, experience is itself inextricably and at once structured as and

through language. Speaking forms the world through words. A prior signified

does not determine language as referring or corresponding to it. Yet neither

does this leave signifiers arbitrarily unanchored or coercively imposed, as

Nietzsche's Will to Power is often taken to imply. Instead, what is traced here

is an immersion in or experience of signifiers as the realm of human meaning,

the only meaning we finally have, which is also one that is never final. This is

not to say that meaning is merely relativist or arbitrary or dominating.

Signifiers are not simply, freely, and independently posited. They are instead

fundamentally, one might say foundationally linked to each other in chains or

networks or, as Nietzsche repeatedly insists in "Truth and Lie," in

relationships. Man knows nothing of the "thing-in-itself" but only designates

"the relations of things to men and for their expression he calls to his help the

most daring metaphors" (TL 248). Such "relations" may seem only

expressions of personal human will. But Nietzsche continues:21 As Harold Bloom writes, the poem figures the "limits of her art," "an ungraspable secret, a trope or metaphor not to be expressed." This contrasts Sharon Cameron's reading that "the poem indeed if paradoxically grasps what it claims cannot be grasped," although does see dominion as "redefined as residing only in the momentary, in the particular piecemeal moments reiterated in this poem as both comprehensive and unforgettable." Choosing Not Choosing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 164-165.

22 Wolosky EDFN

What, then, is for us a law of nature? It is not known to us as such, but only in its effects, i.e. in its relations to other laws of nature, which in turn are known to us only as relations. All these relations thus always refer back only to one another and are absolutely incomprehensible to us in their essence; what we add to them --- time, space, hence relations of succession and numbers, is all we know about them. . . . But we produce these perceptions within ourselves and out of ourselves with the same necessity as a spider spins its web. . we are compelled to grasp all things only under these forms. (TL 253)

The fact that we do not know nature "in-itself" does not mean we don't

know it at all, or that we just make up what and as we please. While "reality"

remains in Dickinson's terms "Graspless" in-itself – as Nietzsche writes, "we

are compelled to grasp all things only under these forms" – there are other

"manners" in which we do know. These are exactly the patterns that we

weave in and through our language, articulating what Nietzsche calls "sums of

relations." "These relations," Nietzsche writes, "refer only to one another and

are absolutely incomprehensible to us in their essence." That is, they mean

only to and for us, not in themselves as some absolute noumena. Yet to and

for us they do mean. We conceive them in "relations of sequence," of "time"

and "space," which Nietzsche treats, as human categories, as personifications

or anthropomorphisms. Whether or not they subsist without us, they are

known to us only as we designate them, making out of them, in one of

Nietzsche's powerful images in "Truth and Lying," a "new world of laws" in a

"sky of ideas." Nor is there any unity or whole. Relations remain multiple.

Yet this very multiplicity also prevents them from being merely willful. As

Saussure wrote about linguistic signs, despite their lack of essential relation to

things outside themselves, their very multiplicity stabilizes a system which, in

order to operate at all, cannot shift terms and usages randomly or at will.22

22 Saussure Linguistics

23 Wolosky EDFN

This multiplicity and its regulatory force applies as well to Nietzsche's

language theory. Denying any tie to a signified exterior and prior to linguistic

formulation does not release the signifier into wanton assertion. While the

signifier is untied to a signified independent of it, the signifier is retied to other

signifiers. In this net of relationships humans live and mean, in relations to

each other that are regulated and not simply assertive or wayward.

In Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks Nietzsche posits the

"essential character of primal being as coming-to-be." Being is not fixed and

eternal, but everchanging and "indefinite."

This "indefinite," the womb of all things, can, it is true, be designated by human speech only as a negative, as something to which the existent world of coming-to-be can give no predicate. We may look upon it as the equal of the Kantian Ding an sich."23

The "indefinite" is a "negative" designation. It is not a "signified." It can be

given "no predicate." But this negation is in many ways a defining act. It

marks a transcendence as exactly what is beyond grasp. It thus defines our

experience as within phenomenal reality, at once limiting and delineating it.

Transcendence then is not a failed goal but a regulatory limit.

In this light, the opening "Tint I cannot take," which suggests an image

of point of view as a kind of coloring of how we see and promising some

further viewpoint as yet unattained, comes also to signal, in its negative

formulation, the impossibility of any final or absolute vision. Further, "tint" is

also a form of engraving, and "tint block" is a term in printing for a "lightly

colored background upon which an illustration or the like is to be printed."

Visual imagery verges into imagery of printing. But this moves the poem's

formulations from interior perception toward a shared world of exchange. 23 Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1962), p. 47.

24 Wolosky EDFN

Signifiers link together in a network of language that different selves

participate in. The move from vision to language redirects the poem from

subjectivism to negotiated, mutual and common understanding. Such

understanding is never absolute. Rather, intrinsic reality remains "Graspless,"

resisting our attempts to comprehend it. This is a limitation the poem insists

on, concluding in the defeat of any "Eye" which "arrogantly" tries to see

absolutely. Instead, the poem declares the world to be a "Mystery" beyond

our reach, whose "Graspless manners" – a near oxymoron suggesting a

mode of modelessness – demand that we acknowledge and respect what

cannot be grasped.

III. Veils and Circles: Modest Reflections

The linguistic world is one of mutability and participation, not of final

command. It remains bounded by limitation and ontological "Mystery." Such

"Mystery" is interestingly figured in the poem "The Tint I cannot take" as

"Tulle." Tulle in Dickinson is a highly gendered image, closely associated with

veils, with the female body itself, and also with language as material event in

the imminent world. Feminized senses of "Veil" have been a topic in

Dickinson, and also in Nietzsche studies. Regarding Dickinson, the veil has

been associated with a problematic of the Gaze, of seeing while not being

seen, within a nineteenth century discourse of gendered norms and

commodification. 24 Veils and associated images appear in such well-known

poems as "Because I could not stop for Death," where "Tulle" represents the

speaker's body (J 712 / Fr 479). In "A Charm invests a face," it an emblem of 24 Lisa Harper offers a sustained discussion of the veil and the Gaze in Dickinson in "The Eyes accost – and Sunder:" Unveiling Emily Dickinson's Poetics," Emily Dickinson Journal 9:1 21-48

25 Wolosky EDFN

the sublime which warns against exposure as lifting "her Veil / For fear it be

dispelled." (J 421/ Fr 430)25 Veil is also expressly a linguistic trope. In "A

Single Screw of Flesh" "Veil" figures both as body and as writing – the two in

fact as fundamental tropes for each other. In this poem, the poet remains on

her "side" of "the Veil" as body, separating the speaker from God – a side she

however clutches at, reluctant to let go to pass into another world. But veil is

also language, associated with "name" and the danger of losing it in erasure,

with the self itself figured as "printed" language (J 263/ Fr 293).26

The topic of Nietzsche's imagery of woman is too vast even to broach

here. But, as Derrida has particularly noted, there is a striking figure in

Nietzsche of the "veil" as feminine image, associated in complex layers with

both truth and lie.27 On the one hand, Nietzsche associates women with

"appearance" – "her supreme concern is appearance and beauty" (BGE 232)

Here she is an emblem of the world of becoming –in fact, a quite traditional

assignment. Woman's place within metaphysical system has persistently

been to mark what is not essence, what is not real, what is merely sensual

and apparent.28 But in his reassignments of truth and falsehood, Nietzsche

can also write: "Suppose truth is a woman" (BGE Preface). Here he implies

that "truth" has been through the history of philosophy in fact a fiction, which

25 Significantly, "dispelled" plays on spelling, while, in the poem's conclusion, reiterating the power of what is imagined over what exists, "Interview" combines a trope of vision with that of language: "Lest Interview – annul a want / That Image – satisfies" (J 271 / ).26 I have discussed "The Single Screw of Flesh" in Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).27 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 65: Nietzsche is "a thinker of pregnancy, which for him is no less praiseworthy in a man than it is in a woman." BGE 232 / GS 72 28 R. Howard Bloch discusses this traditional association with its implications for language and the sign in "Medieval Misogyny," Representations 20, Fall 1987, 1-24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

26 Wolosky EDFN

calling it "woman" exposes. As Derrida writes, "There is no such thing as the

truth of woman, but it is because . . . "untruth" is "truth" (51). Nietzsche wrote

in the Gay Science: "perhaps this is the greatest charm of life: it puts a

golden-embroidered veil of lovely potentialities over itself, promising, resisting,

modest, mocking, sympathetic, seductive. Yes. Life is a woman" (GS 339).

Derrida comments: "For him, truth is like a woman. It resembles the veiled

movement of feminine modesty. . . [a] complicity between woman, life,

seduction, modesty, all the veiled and veiling effects."

As Derrida's remarks reflect, the veil in both theoretical and historical

terms is an icon of modesty, invoking what remains concealed. In women's

history, this has persistently involved imposed constraint: a repression in the

Foucauldian sense that also activates, conjuring a female sexuality defined

from the standpoint of men and denying women's own subjectivity. Nietzsche

has been aligned with these as with other Foucauldian trends. His position

regarding modesty in any case will differ from Dickinson's. As Derrida writes,

Nietzsche may not fall into mere anti-feminism or feminism (57), but Nietzsche

generally regards woman from outside, as spectacle.29 Dickinson, in contrast,

inhabits her womanhood and speaks from it. Modesty in fact is among

Dickinson's most complex tropes, enacted, in both her life and work, as both

defiance and embrace. 30 Dickinson gazes not only at, but through the veil: of

body, of language, of limitation itself. At issue is the whole question of

boundedness and boundaries.

29 Eric Blondel, "Nomad Thought," The New Nietzsche ed. David Allison, (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1986), 150-175, p. 156. Blondel also discusses the veil in Nietzsche.30 Cambridge History IV

27 Wolosky EDFN

This is a question intrinsic to another core Dickinson figure,

circumference. Circumference has been largely interpreted in Dickinson as

ultimately transcending boundaries into infinity. Jane Donahue Eberwein,

who treats the trope extensively, sees it rightly as an aspect of Dickinson's

"Strategies of Limitation" but ultimately in order to "explode beyond them."31

Albert Gelpi sees it as an emblem of the absolute self, "more infinite than

infinity."32 In his discussion of Dickinson and Nietzsche in terms of "The Rites

of Dionysus," Dwight Eddins focuses on "the dialectic between boundlessness

and limitation" which circumference evokes. And he, too, ultimately sees

Dickinson's as a drive to a Dionysian boundlessness, tracing an "all inclusive

circle with the ultimate unity of Dionysian affirmation. There is nothing left

outside the circle, no "otherness" anywhere in nature. . . in an ecstasy of

omnipotence."33

Yet many of Dickinson's images of "circumference" are highly

equivocal. Rather than affirming the transcendence of boundaries, they

question that possibility. In the poem "I Saw No Way, the Heavens were

Stitched," the self is figured as deeply disoriented. Going out "upon

Circumference / Beyond the Dip of Bell" leaves the self precariously

suspended. (J 378 / Fr 633). Gelpi cites the poem "Time feels so vast" as

affirming continuity between the smaller circle of the self and an infinite

circumference (J 802 / Fr 858).34 But the poem registers tension, contest, and

discontinuity between smaller and larger, as Time's vastness presents a

"Circumference" that threatens to exclude "Eternity." In yet another poem,

"Circumference" is trope for "Ignorance," as inspired by the "Sunset" in a

vision of "Omnipotence" glimpsed by "Our inferior face" (J 552 / Fr 669).

28 Wolosky EDFN

Circumference then is not only a verge into the beyond, but also marks a limit

needed to sustain selfhood at all. This is strongly registered in the poem "His

mind of man, a secret makes." There Dickinson describes each self as a

"circumference / In which I have no part . . . Impregnable to inquest." (J 1663 /

Fr 1730). As she also writes, "The Suburbs of a secret / A strategist should

keep." (J 1245 / Fr ).

Circumference thus stretches on an edge between boundlessness and

boundary, but ultimately draws back into the world of limitation. In this it acts

like a veil and like negation itself, refusing the desire to exceed into absolute

realms. In the poem "Circumference thou Bride of Awe" the figure is clearly

feminized (J 1620 / Fr 1636). This poem is most often read as urging

possession; but there is also a suspicion against it. 35 The romance desire of

31 Jane Donahue Eberwein, Strategies of Limitation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 199. 32Gelpi, the Mind of the Poet 97; Gelpi, Mind of Poet 97; 105 "oblivious to the ethical preoccupations of Emerson and Thoreau; 108 cultivation of consciousness her religion In The Tenth Muse, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Gelpi pursues the psychological meaning of the circumference, as verging into eternity p. 270. 33 Dwight Eddins, "Dickinson and Nietzsche: The Rites of Dionysus," ESQ Vol 27, 2nd Quarter, 1981, 96-107, p. 101. Cf. Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963) p. 212, where he associates ecstasy with Circumference Eddins focuses mainly on The Birth of Tragedy and reads its Dionysianism as metaphysical, a reading that has been much contested. See David Allison, "Nietzsche Knows no Noumenon," bpimdary 2 9: 3 Spring autumn 1981 295-310 as non-metaphysical. Of course Heidegger famously saw Nietzsche as an inversion of Plato, and hence metaphysical in his anti-metaphysics. See Nietzsche. Vol One The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc. 1978), pp. 200-20; " the true and apparent worlds have exchanged places, ranks and forms But in this exchange and reversal just that distinction between a true and apparent world is maintained, (p. 622). Heidegger's metaphysical interpretation of Nietzsche considers the "Will to Power" as an in-itself, and eternal return as appearance in phenomena, duplicating traditional ontology. For discussion see Ernst Behler, "Nietzsche in the Twentieth Century," Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche,281-322, p. 312; David Farrell rell, "Art and Truth in Raging Discord: Heidegger and Nietzsche on the Will to Power, boundary 2 4:2 Winter 1976, 378-392.

29 Wolosky EDFN

the "hallowed Knights" to possess this "Bride of Awe" is suspected, not

lauded, as coveting. The phrase "Possessing thou shalt be/ Possessed"

makes unclear who possesses whom. Perhaps "Possessing" itself will be

"Possessed;" or perhaps there is a mutual implication rather than command of

ownership. Above all, "Awe," like "Mystery," projects a powerful boundary in

Dickinson, pointing towards a relation to the world as transcending her: not in

the sense of a metaphysical other world, but as the immanent world that

remains beyond her ownership and command. In this she affirms both

selfhood and its limits. 36

Dickinson's circumference may be compared to the core circle image in

Nietzsche, the Eternal Return. Just what and how Nietzsche means by

Eternal Return has continued to be debated. But one clear implication is that

it brings back into phenomena and becoming the value that metaphysics,

according to Nietzsche, drained from them. Eternal Return affirms the world

of time and change, to the point of embracing their eternal enactment.37 It

draws a circle within this world of time and language, not as mere restriction

but as power-generating embrace.

In one of Dickinson's most famous texts, it is as language that circle

imagery emerges in, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant / Success in circuit lies"

(J 1129 / 1150). Is "Truth" here a pre-established Idea that resists expression

into partial and inadequate language? An in-itself that, as the poem goes on

to say, "must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind," requiring

circumlocution to mediate its overwhelming presence? Or is "Circuit" here not

a detour but the only path for telling a "Truth" which only emerges within the

tropes and images of its representation? "Success in Circuit lies" itself plays 34 Tenth Muse, p. 269

30 Wolosky EDFN

on lie and truth, making them difficult to tell apart: does linguistic circuit lie, or

is it the only form of truth we ever experience? Does circuit mark a boundary

to be protested and transcended, or a limit to be embraced as both necessary

and generative? Yet in the poem, truth only appears, only happens in the

world, as slant, as figure. Indeed, the pull of the poem brings truth into the

process of language and the language of process. Any attempt to strip away

figuration is to try to penetrate to what is "Too bright for our Infirm Delight" –

35 Both Eberwein and Gelpi read this poem as accomplishing Romance possession of knight to bride, a "union of bride and knight, Circumference and Awe" (Gelpi, Mind of Poet; p. 126) "Art pressing perpetually at the limits of mortal expression" as a "knight on a quest for this great boon representing the ultimate reach of human aspiration" circumference as death joined in loving union with Awe" 194 as stronger mysterious force beyond humanly experienced boundaries."36 Cf the interplay of "possession" and "awe" in:Peril as a Possession 'Tis Good to bearDanger disintegrates SatietyThere's Basis there –Begets an awe That searches Human Nature's creases As clean as Fire (J 1678 / )Here "Possession" is itself a "peril." To think we claim, we own, creates a "Satiety" that is ultimately stultifying. Conversely, the "Danger that disintegrates" "Begets an awe" over what we do not possess. "Human Nature" itself is not unitary nor seamless, but (in an imagery of sewing) riven with "creases." At this poem's center is an apparent tautology, but in fact works as oxymoron: "There's Basis there." For "Basis," foundation, is precisely what is not "there." Neither self nor experience nor world constitutes a stable, possessible ground, but only an incessantly changing position, a disintegrative force dangerous to "Satieties." The final image of "Fire" may recall the Heraclatean one so central to Nietzsche, with fire, as Giles Deleuze notes, a Nietzschean trope of transformation.? The only "Basis" is one that keeps shifting, launching further standpoints that never, however, securely stand.37 This is Michael Haar's interpretation of eternal return, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 28, 31-32. He quotes Nietzsche, "Let us impress upon our life the image of eternity," and comments: "The 'circle' is itself imperfect. The totality of Return is a shattered totality." Cf. Thomas Altizer "Eternal Recurrence and the Kingdom of God" 232-243. check Heidegger.

31 Wolosky EDFN

where "Delight" itself inheres in our infirmity, our human imperfection. As

Wallace Stevens writes: "The imperfect is our paradise."

There are readings of Nietzsche's "Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral

Sense" that see it, in its denial of a signified truth outside of language, as

tracing a collapse of all meaning. Nietzsche appears then to be digging out

the very ground on which he stands, in a self-undoing of language that

undermines meaning itself.38 What then remains, notably in the

interpretations of Nietzsche in Foucault and Deleuze, is language as an

unanchored proliferation of signs, functioning within exercises of power that

emerge as the only continuing principle – indeed, a power that seems to act

as a itself a metaphysical principle, the substratum of all that is or occurs.39

In such interpretations, Nietzsche prefigures post-modernism in the sense

summarized by Cornel West as anti-foundationalist, anti-realist, as

detranscendentalizing the subject, and relativist. But there are other

possibilities. West himself suggests that "Nietzsche believed such moves

lead to a paralyzing nihilism and skepticism unless they are supplemented 38 This is De Man's reading in "Rhetoric of Tropes (Nietzsche), 103 – 118. Referring to "Truth and Lie," De Man sees the fact that language is "rhetorical" rather than "representational" 106 as a dissolution of the "literal" and hence any sense of truth altogether: "By asserting in the mode of truth that the self is a lie, we have not escaped from deception" 112. The Nietzsche text is itself one of self-undoing: "The authoritative claims that it seems to makecan be undermined by means of statements provided by the text itself." 117. J. Hillis Miller similarly reads language in Nietzsche as an irresolvable "entangling net," in which he is caught as an "impasse he is attempting to describe" p.42. reading in "Disremembering and disremembering in Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense" boundary 2 (Vol. 9, No. 3) Syposium Why Nietzsche Now" (Spring-autumn, 1981) 41-54.39 Foucault's famous essay on "Freud, Described by Alan Schrift in "Nietzsche's French Legacy" (CC to N): Foucault focused not on the subjects of power but on power relations, power relations in the absence of a sovereign subject; 340 Foucault: Each sign is in itself not the thing that presents itself to interpretation, but the interpretation of other signs. Nietzsche, Freud, Marx in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context 59- 67 Deleuze;

32 Wolosky EDFN

with a new world view, a new "countermovement" to overcome such nihilism

and skepticism," although West sees contemporary philosophy as having

failed as yet to achieve such a countermovement. 40 Some indication of a

constructive deconstruction in Nietzsche can be seen in the work of Jean

Granier, who argues that "Perspectivism" projects not solipsism but, rather,

multiple interpretations. These are generative rather than nihilistic or merely

relativistic, exactly in that Nietzsche resists dogmatic insistence on one

version as alone true. Nietzsche instead insists on "the impossibility of a

definitive interpretation that would exhaust the richness of reality."41 This

possible constructive deconstructivism sees the Will to Power not as a self-

aggrandizing imposition on others but rather, in accordance with

perspectivism, as a partiality of any power. Multiple versions may compete,

but, especially when cast in terms of language rather than vision, they would

do so in forms and forums of mutual negotiation. The denial of a single truth

would become the ground for new interpretive creation, while paying homage

to the limitation of each before the versions of others and the greater mystery

of the world. Limitation remains pivotal. In the Will to Power, Nietzsche

describes nihilism as caused by metaphysics itself, in its faulty and

40 Cornel West, "Nietzsche's Prefiguration of Postmodern American Philosophy" boundary 2 Vol 9 no. 3, 241-269, pp. 241, 243, 264. . check critical reader41 Jean Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation" in The New Nietzsche 190-200, 194-195, 197. Granier writes other positive readings: cf essays in Yirmiyahu Yovel, ed. Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1986). Other positive readings of Nietzschean nihilism can be found in Alexander Nehamas "Nietzsche, modernity, aestheticism" 223-251 disputes what he takes to be Rorty's view of Nietzsche as abandoning himself to a blind contingency. (231) and mere goallessness. 232 No real world doesn't mean no world, Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche ed. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (NY: Cambridge University Press 1996)Alan White describes Nietzsche in terms of pluralist models, p. 135. Lyotard, too, reads Nietzsche in terms of multiple and discordant voices.

33 Wolosky EDFN

devaluating accounts of experience. "The "meaninglessness of events" he

calls the "consequence of an insight into the falsity of previous interpretations,

a generalization of discouragement and weakness." But it is not, he goes on,

"a necessary belief." Indeed, Nietzsche goes on to describe nihilism as a

form of hubris, of "the immodesty of man: to deny meaning where he sees

none" (WP 599). Nietzsche urges instead a "plurality of interpretations [as] a

sign of strength. Not to desire to deprive the world of its disturbing and

enigmatic character! (WP 600).42 Here, like Dickinson, Nietzsche

acknowledges a mystery beyond possession in any final form. Beyond any

account man gives, the world retains its "disturbing and enigmatic character"

– a removal that yet generates our linguistic energy, as both a creative and a

conditional force.

Thus, Nietzsche's critique of traditional metaphysics does dismiss

claims to ground language in a signified truth that exists outside language.

Nonetheless, this dismissal of metaphysical truth need not entail either willful

imposition of subjective versions or chaotic collapse of all meaning. It may

instead point to newly directed structures or modes of signification. These

would deny originary forms of "Truth" and would claim that the only shape our

world has for us is that of figuration, conducted in language. Language and

its figures would then no longer be "lie," since there would be no "truth" to

which they need or fail to refer.

Towards the conclusion of "Truth and Lie" Nietzsche names the42 Cf. WP 605 The ascertaining of "truth" and "untruth," the ascertaining of facts in general, is fundamentally different from creative positing, from forming, shaping, overcoming, willing, . . . to introduce a meaning – this task l remains to be done, assuming there is no meaning yet. Thus it is with sounds, but also with the fate of peoples: they are capable of the most different interpretations and direction toward different goals.

34 Wolosky EDFN

"impulse towards the formation of metaphors" as the "fundamental impulse of

man," in which "new figures of speech, metaphors, metonymies. . .constantly

show [the] passionate longing for shaping the existing world of waking man. .

This impulse seeks for itself a new realm of action . . . in Art" (TL 254). The

figures of language impel and conduct the endless human making of "new"

realms to inhabit, as the very action of "Art." Art emerges as Nietzsche's focal

and defining activity, caught or taut between the drive to form and the ever-

altering energy that he named in The Birth of Tragedy (written shortly before

"Truth and Lie") Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Dickinson's verse traces

this shaping power of trope in both its impulse to order and its refusal of final

shape or absolute claim. The world emerges in one sense as an aesthetic

venture. In another sense, its mystery, marked as negation, prevents the

aesthetic from reducing the world to its own terms, while also generating new

forms. In "Truth and Lie," Nietzsche declares: "Nature knows of no forms or

concepts. . . but only an X that is inaccessible and indefinable for us." (TL

250). Nietzsche here is unmasking a delusion, the delusion that reality can

ever be unmasked. He does so in both disappointment and defiance.

Dickinson is never as adamant as Nietzsche. Hers ever remains a "Sweet

Skepticism of the Heart / That knows – and does not – know" (J 1413 /

Fr1438). As poet, her task is to negotiate the space abandoned by

metaphysical certainty with the language forms that never resolve, respecting

their own limits, but that venture and create.

This aesthetic and indeed specifically linguistic power, as well as the

limitations that at once restrict and yet also launch creativity, is traced in one

35 Wolosky EDFN

of a series of Dickinson poems of dawn, through the arc of presence and then

disappearance of bird's song:

At Half past Three, a single BirdUnto a silent sky Propounded but a single term Of cautious melody

At Half past Four, ExperimentHad subjugated testAnd lo, Her silver principle Supplanted all the rest.

At Half past Seven, ElementNor Implement, be seen –And Place was where the Presence wasCircumference between. (J 1084 / Fr 1099)43

The scene of this poem is radically temporal and radically linguistic. The

circles of clock measure intensify the condition of becoming, of time and

change, as the context for human experience. That experience itself is

represented as one of linguistic activism. Against a "sky" that is "silent," the

"Bird" figure introduces a "melody" figured as a "term" that is "Propounded" –

that is, as language.44 The relation of the bird to the sky is one almost of

43 This is one of the Dickinson poems translated by Paul Celan. I have analyzed it and its translation in "Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan: Trajectories of Mysticism" Ein Vogel, einer, um halb vier:dem Himmel, der da schwieg,den einen Laut trug er ihm ansparsamster Melodie.

Das war die Probe. Um halb funfgingsu ber sie hinaus,und sieh: ihr silbernes Zuerststach alles andre aus.

Halb sieben: weder Elementnoch Werkzeug weit und breit.Ein Ort hier, dort die Gegenwart,mit einem Zwischenkreis.

36 Wolosky EDFN

address or dialogue; yet it remains "cautious," even modest, with the bird

explicitly feminized as "Her" in the next stanza.

The second stanza does break into power. "Experiment" displaces "Test,"

subjugating and supplanting "all the rest." The song here asserts what

Nietzsche called the "impulse towards the formation of metaphors," one that is

not only inescapable, but also defining of human existence in the world. Yet

this proves but a moment in an ongoing course that the poem too pursues.

The projection of voice in time becomes empty space. "Place was where the

Presence was." "Circumference" here marks language balanced on the edge

of itself, of what it can, and cannot, offer and accomplish. The art of song is

celebrated; but it is also retracted, limited in its power to shape or govern or

command a world that is ever changing, every escaping from it. In her writing

it emerges as a boundary that both generates power and defines its extent –

both as to its reach and what it cannot reach beyond.

44 This linguistic imagery is evident in a companion poem, "The Birds begun at Four o'clock" (J 783) where the the birds' song is described as "Voices" that "multiply."