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Dickinson's Late Hand

In Dickinson's late work two broad scriptural styles, two "hands," one for rough-copy drafts, another for fair-copy drafts, reflect and translate two different phases of the compositional process. The handwriting style for rough-copy drafts, which remained constant even throughout the late years, is also the style of the dictation—a way of writing in speaking: the hand jolts into action. "But ought not the | Amanuensis also to | receive a Commission also -" (A 844), Dickinson asked in the final decade of her life. Executed quickly—it is possible to imagine involuntarily—these drafts or inscriptions reveal the unmediated quickenings of thought before their coalescence into a "work." Here composition is a state of emergency or rapt attention. The cometary pace of thought determines Dickinson's choice of materials—whatever lies close by—and is registered in a pulsational writing that often almost bypasses recognizable alphabetic symbols: the script is sometimes small and angular, sometimes large and loose, text is often superimposed over text, fault lines interrupt the narrative, and along the margins words and solitary letters appear sideways and upside down. Drafting within the very physical drive of writing, Dickinson reminds us of the impossibility of discerning final or original intentions; instead, her gestural messages keep us focused on trajectivity—on the path drawn by the hand in the present tense of writing

trajectivity