ABSTRACT
Literature and art are different kinds of artistic objects and the academy provides different methodologies with which to engage their specific forms. A work of art is usually thought of as original in a different sense as a poem or a novel is. A novel comes to the reader in an edition and the reader may not typically think about the potential differences between this edition and the manuscript supplied by the author for publication; a work of art as received through its representation maintains a certain ‘originality’—there is an original version to be encountered in a museum somewhere beyond the representation. The question of ‘the original’ is not usually relevant to literature whereas for the interpretation of works of art it is a guiding principle.1 Yet, as Kathleen Weil-Garris reminds us in her discussion of the Sistine Frescos, a work of art is often received through pictorial mediation. We read a book about the Sistine Frescos rather than making the trip to Rome. So Weil-Garris argues that the reproduction becomes primary-that the original loses a particular function, perhaps what Walter Benjamin refers to as the aura of the work of art. How can we go about interpreting those pictures, those reproductions and where does that interpretation leave the original? What is the difference between an original artwork and its representation or reproduction? Does that difference matter? Weil-Garris Brandt suggests that the
reproduction or re-presentation takes on a life of its own. Representations of Emily Dickinson’s work in typographic print editions, facsimile book editions and in digital images in electronic productions, like the photographs of the Sistine Frescos, in Weil-Garris Brandt’s words “displace the original” holographic production: they invert the ‘scene of reading’ Dickinson so that the ‘original’ holograph in fact is mediated by the print edition through which we encounter Dickinson’s work: the representation becomes primary, the original secondary. It seems, then, that we cannot in any easy way speak of originals and copies. The ‘original’ holographic production can never be in any sense purely appreciated, even if we were actually to behold it or hold it in our hand, touch it and smell it. For we have come to appreciate it through an entire system of representing Emily Dickinson’s hand writing. The work of art or the manuscript holograph becomes a part of a wider text. This must be the starting point for thinking about Emily Dickinson’s work and the ways in which it is edited, archived, and read. The emphasis on the aura of the original must be questioned, for it represents a desire for an immediacy that is not attainable. And yet editorial projects that aim to represent the poems of Emily Dickinson or the writings of Emily Dickinson maintain a desire for the holograph. This desire is, as we saw in the last chapter, connected to a desire to figure the author, to better posit Emily Dickinson. But we cannot return to the site of production.
