This footnote is 18 pages long and I'm in the thick of it and I'm wondering and Hal is wondering why Orin (DFW) is fixating on Emily Dickinson.
Could it be the morbidity of her poems?
"Morbidity. Dickinson's poems reflect her "early and lifelong fascination" with illness, dying and death.[135] Perhaps surprisingly for a New England spinster, her poems allude to death by many methods: "crucifixion, drowning, hanging, suffocation, freezing, premature burial, shooting, stabbing and guillotinage".[135] She reserved her sharpest insights into the "death blow aimed by God" and the "funeral in the brain", often reinforced by images of thirst and starvation. Dickinson scholar Vivian Pollak considers these references an autobiographical reflection of Dickinson's "thirsting-starving persona", an outward expression of her needy self-image as small, thin and frail.[135] Dickinson's most psychologically complex poems explore the theme that the loss of hunger for life causes the death of self and place this at "the interface of murder and suicide".[135] "
Source > Wikipedia
Note: Emily herself did not kill herself as "Himself" and DFW did.
Composed on my Blogmachine on the Infinite Network
Fond of ED, you drive me to #110 for a looksee. To me, the scene is a throw-away, showing how over-educated brothers might goof around. I'd guess DFW had the same thought about her poems - that you can sing them all to the tune of The Yellow Rose of Texas - and saw a chance to put that gag in the novel. The ED quality most on display here being her cryptic styling, not morbidity.
ReplyDeleteFirst paragraph of Avril's letter reads a wee bit like a riff on ED's obsession with bumblebees. But I don't think that helps us.
Hmm. Cool. Thanks for the insight. I totally buy the cryptic styling. For DFW is all about that. And now YOU drive ME to bouncing over to doing a bit of ED reading. I don't think I've ever really read her - or it's been like since high school or something.
ReplyDeleteYou might like the last line of this one:
ReplyDeleteThere is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself --
A finite infinity
Typical agoraphobic self-justification.
I think DFW's "fixation" on Emily Dickinson can be partly explained by the poet's close assocation with the town of Amherst, Mass. DFW went to Amherst College (as I did) and a number of the Enfield Tennis Academy's features and students appear to refer to Amherst College. For example, there is an ETA student nick-named "Sleepy T.P", which was also a nickname for an Amherst prof who was teaching at the College when DFW was there.
ReplyDeleteCool. Thanks Gryff. Nice to know someone on the inside. We're just a bunch of anti-O.N.A.N. Canadians. I take it you've read all of IJ? As you may have noticed I'm about a third through. Perhaps it is me who is preoccupied with morbidity.
ReplyDelete