Comic Power a Performance

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Comic Power: A Performance

Suzanne Juhasz, Cristanne Miller

The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 1996, pp. 85-92

(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/edj.0.0058

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SUZANNE JUHASZAND

CRISTANNE MILLER

Comic Power: A Performance

^ uzanne: Welcome to "Comic Power: A Performance." Today you are\J invited to attend a special workshop performance of two of Dickin-son's poems, Johnson's Number 700, 'You've seen balloons set Haven'tYou?" and Number 505, "I would not paint a picture ." What goes onwhen a reader encounters a poem; what dialogues ensue between audi-

ence and actor, when the poem is understood as a performance? Whyshould a poem function as performance, and how is gender implicated, naycreated, in such an event? What gender is thereby constructed? All thesequestions and more will be raised as you witness this exciting dramatiza-tion, in which two erstwhile Dickinson scholars transform themselves

before your very eyes into actor and audience, speaker and reader.Today's dramatization is an offshoot of our 1993 volume, Comic Power

in Emily Dickinson, in which we, along with our co-author Martha NellSmith, argue that Emily Dickinson was a comic author of note, using herpoetry to perform her critique and disruption of cultural conventions.Comedy, we observe, demands an audience in order to happen: ajoke isn'tfunny if nobody laughs. More broadly, we suggest that poetry is always per-formance, in that words on a page require the reader to perform them hear them, realize them, give them life and significance. But if the readeris a performer, so, too, is the poet, whose poem is a script that enables herown voice, or consciousness, or identity to be enacted. Both poet andreader are performers, participating jointly in the production that is the

poem. Especially in the case of Dickinson, whose writing deliberately leavesgaps and outrageous ambiguities which the reader alone can flesh out;whose personal reticence is counterpointed by 1700 such scripts, venuesfor going public.

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The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. V, No. 2

Dickinson is, of course, our premier woman poet, a point which we alsoassert forcibly in Comic Power, building on the work of two generations offeminist critics. What has performance to do with gender? Everything, asrecent cultural critics such as Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber haveargued. Social constructionism has taught us that identity should be under-stood as neither essential nor fixed. Gender comes into being is con-structed and assumed by means of how we look, what we do (how wedon't look, what we don't do) in the contextof our cultural living. For EmilyDickinson, the poem became an especially viable place for hypothesizingand constructing a gendered identity. Whereas in everyday life she utilizedmuch of the conventional gender paraphernalia appropriate to a nice

(white middle class heterosexual) girl the flowers, the cakes, the whitedress, in her writing she played more fast and loose with the forms and actsthat might designate "woman," when "woman" is part and parcel of "poet."In the act[ing] of the poem it is possible to construct a gendered identitythat unsettles and contradicts conventional gender arrangements so muchthat we might even want to think of it as another gender: woman / poet.

Today you will see these performances enacted. Performing Poem700, Cristanne Miller will talk as the reader who is interpreting a poem, asthe speaker of the poem, and as the poet, Dickinson, incarnated in the

poem. Suzanne Juhasz as audience will react, the first stage of any readingexperience. Then Cris (in a privileged moment hithertofore only privatelyexperienced) will respond to the responses answering the questions,offering observations of her own. This same encounter will be dramatizedagain, with Suzanne performing Number 505 to Cris as audience. Weinvite you to experience the processes of transformation through whichpoems arouse readers, readers vitalize poems, and poems construct poets.

Cris performs poem:

You've seen Balloons set Hav'nt You?

So stately they ascend It is as Swans discarded You,For Duties Diamond

Their Liquid feet so softly outUpon a Sea of Blonde They spurn the Air, as 'twere too meanFor Creatures so renowned

Their Ribbons just beyond the eye They struggle some for Breath And yet the Crowd applaud, below They would not encore Death

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Suzanne Juhasz and Cristanne Miller

The Gilded Creature strains and spins Trips frantic in a Tree Tears open her imperial Veins And tumbles in the Sea

The Crowd retire with an Oath

The Dust in Streets go down And Clerks in Counting RoomsObserve " 'Twas only a Balloon"

Cris: 'You've seen Balloons set Hav'nt You? . . .

Suzanne: Me? Well, I guess I like balloons. But why do you devote a wholepoem to them? You seem to me like a magician, because it's you who are

creating this otherworldly scene. And as for these wonderful balloons,they, too, are performers before a fickle crowd that would abandonthem if they did not do their act perfectly. You reveal a tension to theirgrace and beauty that I hadn't understood before. For they would fall fromfavor both literally and figuratively if they did not manage to stayaloft, doing their death-defying high wire act.

Cris: "Their Ribbons just beyond the eye " . . .Suzanne: Oh no! What is happening? I can't bear to watch this creature

so special, so glamorous, so perfect like a movie star, like Marilyn Mon-roe coming to grief in this gruesome way? A death before my eyes: euch.

Cris: "The Gilded Creature strains and spins" . . .Suzanne: She's gone! And everybody has forsaken her! "Only a balloon"indeed. I am devastated and wondering if she had to die because she hadnowhere to go but up, because once we saw her up there, we would not lether come down. But how can anybody stay up there always? And that wasthe point of your poem, wasn't it? You began, after all, with the balloons'

setting. Then came the glorious ascension, but all along you were preparingher frantic struggle and death. What's funny about it? Nothing. But it wasfabulous those moments of rising and then flying. But then came theblood and gore. Was one the prerequisite of the other? (And why is theballoon a she?)

Cris: Ha! I tricked you, all right. You thought you knew what it looked likefor a balloon to go up and down, but now you'll see balloons differently that transformative ascension, the performance on high, the bloody end-

ing. No, this story isn't "funny"; it is humorous though the way it keepsyou guessing. And the ending is downright comic: the creature of gor-geous perfection trips up, heading into a heartrending tailspin and then

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The Emily Dickinson fournal, Vol. V, No. 2

acrobatically "tumbles in the Sea" it's tragedy at no cost. Those "Clerks"could be right, that the performance was "only a Balloon" and there arealways more of those. Like every good comedy, this one brings you full cir-cle, back to the obvious. This is drama, melodrama, and comedy in one;the genres are all mixed up, to keep "Clerks" guessing is it "death"? aballoon? something magical? a metaphor?

Wrell, it's a poet, of course. Because a poet is "Balloon" and judgmen-tal audience at once. She discards her daily chores for "Duties Diamond,"ascends to the heights and yet never ceases to be aware of who she isand never forgets that larger audience that can only "applaud" the act thatdisguises ordinary life and its gory messiness. The crowd just wants the

"movie star" the transcendent act; a poet like me, though, never justtranscends. That would be true loss of self, far beyond the display of flightand death here.

Think about what it feels like to float into a realm of metaphor, magi-cal gravityless ballet, and then smell the bread starting to burn. Becausethere always is a return: the poet dies, the drone returns, the balloon haspopped. Yet this is performance as well as metaphor, and as such canrecur: the vision remains, the poet reascends, "Balloons" is plural remember? And the vein-tearing drive is key to the performance because

that is what separates those able to be transformed themselves from the dis-missive "Clerks."Or, this balloon could be a poem. A poem, too, will always have a life,

an ascension, a miraculous moment, and then it's over, has "set" untilanother reader (or reading) launches it again. Or, my balloon could bewomen generally, or youth, or any creature or moment that strives forabsolute perfection, that is forced for one reason or another to be hyper-conscious of its performance of itself and, so, must inevitably fail. There-fore, she's a SHE: everything points to that!

Or, my balloon might be a poet's life and death into oblivionrather than renown, because SHE ("only a woman"?) achieved "Balloon"fame rather than a culturally more viable kind. Certainly if I read you this

poem as part a longer performance say the whole fascicle it is "set" in, itmight make you think of life and death.

The point is, I won't tell; the poem won't. It's THAT kind of perfor-mance and that's another part of its "humor." It keeps you unstable,

between interpretations, never certain for long. The ascent is the tease,powerful enough to make even "Clerks" take notice, but the crucial act, the

poetic event is the dive. I demonstrate viscerally that complete transcen-dence is not supportable; dailiness, the body, always returns. Can youaccept the whole act, or am I "only a Balloon"?


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Suzanne performs poem:

I would not paint a picture

I'd rather be the OneIt's bright impossibilityTo dwell delicious on

And wonder how the fingers feelWhose rare celestial stir

Evokes so sweet a Torment

Such sumptuous Despair

I would not talk, like Cornets I'd rather be the One

Raised softly to the Ceilings

And out, and easy on Through Villages of Ether Myself endued BalloonBy but a lip of Metal The pier to my Pontoon

Nor would I be a poet It's finer own the Ear

Enamored impotent content The License to revere,A privilege so awful

What would the Dower be,Had I the Art to stun myselfWith Bolts of Melody!

Suzanne: "I would not paint a picture " . . .Cris: Why do you say "would"? And how is it that the act of looking is somuch more sensual than the feel of brushes on canvas, or holding those

brushes yourself? Or is it that you become the canvas as you make me imag-ine both your looking and what it feels like to look while you are stroked? Itstirs me up!

Suzanne: I like the way I've used the subjunctive here, because it unsettlesmy identity so neatly. Am I a painter? My grammar makes this possible,even while I describe at length what it's like to be the one affected by the

painting. "I would not paint": because I can't? because I can and choosenot to? I tease you. And intensify your interest, and suspicions, by puttingthe focus on looking instead of composing. For I have made the artist sogodlike that claiming any association with such a being would be a gesture

of incredible arrogance. I myself am so much more modest aren't I?Not really. Because my "looking" is not an inferior act at all. You pointout that it is so sensual, so sexual, I stir you up! Yes, because "how the fingers


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feel" is linked to what / feel: my sweet torment, my sumptuous despair. Ilike your notion that I become as well the canvas the fingers are strokingmy body, their touch evoking these intense sensations. The process thatthe performance of art turns out to be puts us all in a potent and recip-rocal relationship: the painter, the painting, the audience. And there'smore because in a surprising way I turn out to be not only an exciting(excited) audience but something of an artist myself. Painting a word pic-ture of me, participating in the process of art.

Suzanne: "I would not talk, like Cornets " . . .Cris: Now you seem to be the sound itself what enters my ears, makes

me hear music. This sure sounds like a kind of "talking" to me! Or is this alla big tease you tell me you don't want to be or do something and thenproceed to do it so evocatively that you make me FEEL it, too.Suzanne: Here is another example of art I would not make: music. But ofcourse, I suggestively use the word "talk." A metaphor for the soundthat the instrument makes or is it the other way round, music a meta-phor for talking? Here I describe myself as the one either moved by thesound or the sound itself. Or both. Either way, I am getting you to hear themusic, through the word picture I paint / sing / say. For both instrument

and musician are important primarily as they generate my experience. I"talk," you "hear" you feel what I feel, what I want you to feel.

Suzanne: "Nor would I be a poet " . . .Cris: Alia now you get to the subject I've been waiting for, but here youare just as slippery as earlier. The poet you describe is a lover, who dowersthe reader by stunning him, or her. (What gender are you, anyway? andwhy the disguise?) Yet, as reader yourself you hardly seem "impotent" or"content." Your responses are as potent as any action! You claim to play a

minor role yet suggest you have engineered the whole show playedevery role yourself.Suzanne: NOW, having brought you to just this pitch of awareness, I canreveal what I've known all along. If seeing me as viewer, listener, reader isso formidable, imagine what I would be like as writer! Sure, I've down-

played the role of the artist to this point, and one reason was so you couldpay attention to the powerful reactions that art can produce. Poetry stunsthe reader; it operates like bolts of lightning / melody. Well, you can't help

but think "lightning" when you hear "Bolts," so that "Melody" works like

lightning does stunning the listener into responses like those we haveboth experienced during this poem. I have already identified myself as audi-ence; now I am prepared to postulate that I might be poet as well. But only

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if you understand "poet" in my terms. I see the poet's power as that of woo-ing the reader, to evoke an equivalent kind of experience. I am such a poetbecause I am such a reader, and vice versa. I have the art to be stunned, the

art to stun myself. I do not want to distinguish so much between the twopositions as others may have done.

Maybe this is because I am a woman / poet. I am not interested in agodly sort of dictatorial power, subsuming others into my vision. Partly thisis because I am generous, but partly it is because I am insecure. I need yourcomplicity as assurance that you will not exert your power over me. Bal-anced, as we are, in the process as we perform it, the power is shared, whichsuits me nicely. Poetry is such risky business. A poem is so incendiary: a lot

is at stake, with a poem. Therefore I tease to guard my investment andresponsibility and to demand your participation. Tease heightens, as well,the erotic component of what we're doing together. Right, because that'show I understand poetry, as a passionate potentially orgasmic interchange.

One result of this interchange, for me, is that I come into being.Through our mutual performance, I become who I think I am, who I wantto be. Woman / poet, is my term for who this is.

Cris: Today we've tried both to dramatize a kind of exchange generated

between reader and poem that is crucial to any critical act and to imitatewhat as readers we learn from particular performances of these poems, see-ing both the poems and our own responses as performances that maychange with the circumstances of the reading. We ourselves increasinglyfind that Emily Dickinson's poems tend to be about their own processes, as

performance and as poetry. She constructs herself as a poet through thewriting of a poem that we read both in and as performance.

Through theorizing our own performance, we also learn how usefulthe concept of workshopping may be pedagogically and critically. This

might be expanded into a model for critical response generally a pro-cess that operates less self-consciously, with less formal turn-taking, butwith the same give and take, desire and resistance, empathy and exaspera-tion in all reading. Could we teach our students to read by having themthink of it as a "workshop" process they enact with us in class but in theirheads as they read? How do we teach our students to "perform" as theyread, thus to take responsibility for what they take from a page?

Key areas of Dickinson study receive little attention in this approach.Workshopping around the poem-as-aural-performance does not account

for the variant words or textual particularities of a poem; for example, onedoes not hear unmetrical line breaks, visual aspects of punctuation, or sizeof handwriting. Similarly, this kind of direct responsiveness downplays

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most elements of context where a poem might be placed in a fascicle,when in the poet's life it might have been written, who she might havemailed it to, what other texts it might echo, and so on.

One might, however, link performance with the visual materiality of atext by adapting Cameron's distinction between the POEM (that which is

performed with its clear metre, rhyming and other aural characteristics)and the TEXT (that which is read, with all its variants, complications ofstructure, and so on). To the extent that one juggles multiple possibilitiesof meaning or variants simultaneously, or that one places a poem contextu-ally, one studies a text. To the extent that one even silently, internally hears how a single variant or version or interpretive strategy plays itself out

in the poem as a whole, one performs a poem. These two activities comple-ment each other, in any detailed interpretive work.We see gender as closely linked to this performative display in a poem.

Workshopping is particularly suited to Dickinson's poetry because of theprevalence of elements of disguise, tease, tonal ambiguity, unclear orunstable gendering of a speaker, and shifting subject concerns elementsnot peculiar to female poets, but understandably emphasized by an ambi-tious nineteenth-century woman. Dickinson performs femininity and poet-hood both as challenges to her audience, she crosses the lines so often

between them that it becomes difficult to tell where one ends and the

other begins.Like gender, which is constructed contextually, that is, in relation to

what it is not, performance is relational. Any shift in one's own experienceor understanding may lead to a new performance of a poem. We believethat regarding Dickinson's poems as performed underlines the importanttransformative instability and vitality of her art and the similarly unstable

but potentially transformative potential of any reader's response.

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Comic Power a Performance

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