To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. … In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Illuminations 255)

If History is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices. … Poets try to keep love safe from the enemy.

—Susan Howe, “The Difficulties Interview” (25-26)

Susan Howe shares Carla Harryman's concern that established literary forms and discourses might suppress or disallow certain modes of knowing. In particular, Howe focuses on historical discourse, putting knowledge of the past, as well as the processes by which history is socially and discursively constructed, into process in language.¹ Howe writes a poetry that is at once a critique of conventional historiography and a mode of historical inquiry. She hopes to “tenderly lift from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted—inarticulate” (“Poetics” 15). These are the “antinomian,” lawless and “feminized” voices that she feels have been nearly silenced in the ordering forms of conventional historiography and historical texts. Perhaps surprisingly for a project so politically motivated, Howe's is a poetry of unusual beauty, “a play of force and play / of forces / falling out sentences” (ET [The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems] 99). Her work's seductive logic often depends on a coherence derived from complex sound patterns, yet word choice never seems forced or artificial. On the contrary, assonance and alliteration seem a natural consequence of already necessary word combinations. But this is poetry for the eye as well as the ear: Howe makes use of the page as a painter does a canvas. As a result, language takes on a spacial as well as aural existence:

small boy-bird of the air
                    moving or capable of moving
with great speed
rapidly running                                        flying                                                  following
                    flight of an arrow
known for the swiftness of her soul.

(ET 163)

And fittingly, language is both her subject and her tool in this project: “[W]ords are like swords,” she explains. “‘S’ makes word a sword. When you slice into past and future, what abrupt violence may open under you?” (SSH 34). With each slice of her double-edged (s)word, Howe simultaneously seeks and subverts, discovers and disrupts; quoting textual fragments, thwarting narrative, disrupting syntax, and fragmenting words, she foregrounds language, emphasizing its materiality.

But at the heart of Howe's feminist project of historical recovery lies an apparent contradiction, similar to the paradox in H. D.'s work. Her poetics implies a positivist belief that historical “voices” are somehow really there to be recovered—that there is “real” content hidden beneath or within the literary representations of history. Indeed, Howe rejects the antifoundationalist view that past events are wholly the products of discourse, that “history is only a series of justifications or that tragedy and savagery can be theorized away.” After all, [t]here is real suffering on this little planet” (Birth-mark 164). Yet neither does Howe suppose that historical documents can be read unproblematically as transparent representations of a “real” past. Howe's entire project also depends on her view that history is discursively constituted. Howe's poetic-historical method is consistent with those poststructuralist and feminist theories of history which hold that historical truth is socially-discursively constructed.² But at the same time, Howe believes in truth. Aware of the paradoxical nature of her own project, she explains to Lynn Keller in an interview:

I think there is a truth, even it's not fashionable to say so anymore. … I believe with Walter Benjamin that the story is in danger of being lost the minute someone opens one's mouth to speak; but you've got to open your mouth to speak, and there is a story, and it's probably going to be lost anyway, but whatever that story is, whether you call it fact or fiction, or an original version, it's something real.

(“An Interview” 30-31)

It seems that Susan Howe rides the rift between empiricism and textuality, sharing the empiricist's interest in material details, but remaining suspicious of empirical methods of obtaining these details, which, she believes, can best or only be recovered textually. Like H. D., Howe seeks knowledge through writing while insisting that all meaning is ultimately textual. This paradox, rather than weakening or discrediting Howe's project, as might be expected, is in fact what drives that project, validates it, and gives her poetry such force.

Howe has devised a poetic strategy for writing history that seems a perfect example of what Jerome McGann conceives of as “a hermeneutics of a repressed or invisibilized content” (“Introduction” 4). Her poetic innovations with language and form create a kind of writing that both avoids the totalizing gestures she objects to in conventional history such as cause-effect explanations, coherence, and closure, and pays close attention to the particular, local, apparently minor details that resist these gestures. In this way, she performs the recovery of the past by letting it into her work (textually) instead of claiming to master it by means of “objective” representation of an extra-textual “reality.”

Since the truth that Howe seeks is that which has been excluded from or occluded by historical records, and so can often be found only in the “gaps and silences” (Birth-mark 158) of those documents, it is not the kind of truth that can be attained by means of any “Distant coherent rational system” (Singularities 17), such as scientific reason, according to which these voices were excluded in the first place. Historians who try to uncover the “truth” by means of rational explanation, “Sharpshooters in history's apple-dark,” will inevitably miss their mark (Singularities 22). Howe believes that it is possible to recover the marginalized voices of the past, but only when we give up any claims of objectivity. For Howe historical truth is not “Knowledge narrowly fixed knowledge / Whose bounds in theories slay” (Singularities 12), but an “Untraceable wandering / the meaning of knowing” (Singularities 25)—the kind of knowledge enacted in the processes of language, and therefore, indicative of a reality inextricable from the text in which such knowing is performed.

Howe's language-oriented feminist epistemology undermines the assumption that the “textual” and the “real” are distinct, opposing categories. This opposition is commonly taken by historians and literary critics alike to be natural and inevitable. But as poststructuralist historian Michel de Certeau convincingly argues, this distinction is maintained and reinforced in both disciplines by a network of related oppositions that were “legalized in the eighteenth century as a result of the split between the ‘humanities’ and the ‘sciences’” (Heterologies 17): subject and object, the objective and the imaginary, theory and practice, the past and the present.³ In her negotiation between the “textual” and the “real,” Howe explores the constitutive role that language plays in the production of historical truth as well as how gender, also discursively constructed, functions to maintain the power relations that determine what counts, at any given historical-cultural moment, as “truth.”

The language-oriented feminist strategies she devises in her poetry to do this transform the character of historical knowledge itself; no longer the goal of historical investigation, knowledge is that investigation, constructed as an interactive engagement with both the reader and the past. Howe offers ways of knowing historical truth that are not positivistic or empirical, but performative. In her poetry, language does represent historical truth, but only in the sense of McGann's “recovered” theory of representation, according to which, “art imitates not merely the ‘fact’ and the ‘ideal’ but also the dynamic relation which operates between the two” (“Introduction” 14). McGann argues that the poetic represents the real by performing this relation: poems are not “representations; they are acts of representation” (SVPA [Social Values and Poetic Acts] 245). I find in Howe's poetry what McGann later describes as “truth-functions which are not encompassed by the coherence and correspondence theories of truth” (Towards 6).⁴

Both the coherence and the correspondence theories of truth assume that the production and consumption of texts are separate processes. But Howe does not see it this way, and central to her poetics is a challenge to such distinctions between writing and reading. In a deconstructive gesture which, as I have shown throughout this study, is a shared tendency among language-oriented women writers, Howe posits writing as a mode of reading. Like H. D., Laura Moriarty, and Beverly Dahlen, she reads history, myth, culture, and the literary, religious and historical documents in which such cultural knowledge is preserved and disseminated—is constituted. Although Howe did not, of course, directly experience the past events that she writes about, she does sense that her own life and experiences are located within a particular history. What feminist historian Catherine Hall calls “the feminist injunction that you should always start with yourself and what you know and experience” is for Howe not so much an injunction as a compulsion (16). “I feel compelled in my work to go back,” she explains to Edward Foster in an interview, “not to the Hittites, but to the invasion or settling or whatever current practice calls it, of this place” (Birth-mark 164). Howe focuses in many of her poems on the history of early North America and its inhabitants, the history of which she, a white middle class intellectual woman raised in New England, is a part. In “Secret History of the Dividing Line,” collected in Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (FS), Howe writes a reading of the private journals of William Byrd, an early American surveyor of Virginia and North Carolina. In this poem, Howe examines the settling of the North American wilderness, the wars and migrations and “netting of fences” (96) that served to partition and divide the New World along property, gender, race, and class lines. “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time” continues this theme, focusing in particular on the experience of Hope Atherton, a minister of Hatfield, Massachusetts who accompanied Colonial troops in an attack on Indian settlements in the Connecticut River Valley in 1676. Howe wrote “Thorow” throughout the winter and spring of 1987 during which time she immersed herself in Henry David Thoreau's journals. In this work Howe is especially interested in Thoreau's representations of Native Americans and the wilderness.

But not all of Howe's works are readings of North American history; she understands that the European “invasion or settling or whatever” of this continent is part of the larger history of Western imperialism, and her investigations occasionally attend to moments in European and British history as well as Western myth and religion. Howe's collection of most recent poems, The Nonconformist's Memorial (NM), includes two such works. “A Bibliography of the King's Book or, Eikon Basilike” is Howe's reading of a book—or more accurately, of the textual history of a book—that was first published and distributed in England following the execution of King Charles I. And in the volume's title poem, “The Nonconformist's Memorial,” Howe conducts a reading of the very same text that H.D. “revises” in her poem Trilogy: the Gospel According to St. John. Whatever texts or discourses Howe takes as her subject in a given work, her intention is the same. She reads in order to recover certain elements that have been obscured or excluded from accepted historical accounts.

INTERVENTIONS IN HISTORY: RECOVERING THE FEMININE

Before examining in greater detail some of the methods of recovery Howe employs in her poetic readings of these various texts and discourses, I would like to look at Howe's theories regarding why—and how—certain voices get silenced in historical discourse in the first place. Howe's poetry is difficult, to say the least, but I believe that in the context of her theoretical concerns and intentions, even her most eccentric poetic gestures may be understood as meaningful acts. Howe's most comprehensive statements of her poetic-historical theories may be found in The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history, her collection of essays on various topics in American literary history. In one of these essays, entitled “Incloser,” Howe explores the problem of literary and historical exclusion. She writes: “Every statement is a product of collective desires and divisibilities. Knowledge, no matter how I get it, involves exclusion and repression. National histories hold ruptures and hierarchies. On the scales of global power, what gets crossed over?” (45). Howe suspects that knowledge or “truth” is inseparable from relations of power, and that discourse functions to police this relation. Recalling Foucault's claim that “[e]ach society has a regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth … the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true” (“Truth and Power” 1144), Howe maintains that “when we move through the positivism of literary canons and master narratives, we consign ourselves to the legitimation of power, chains of inertia, an apparatus of capture” (Birth-mark 46). But Howe's efforts directed against such an apparatus of capture is informed by her sense that just as important as the question of how “the silenced factions waiting to be part of any expression” (DI 24) become silenced is the question of who those silenced factions are: Whose voices, perspectives, and experiences are deemed unrepresentable or irrelevant or incommensurable by a society's “regime of truth”?

Howe's sense that “in paternal colonial systems a positivist efficiency appropriates primal indeterminacy” suggests that she is alert to the role that gender plays in such processes of exclusion (Singularities 41). I do not mean to imply that Howe believes only or all women have been unfairly represented in historical documents. Rather, Howe seems to be joining feminist critics from Simone de Beavoir to Postcolonial and Third World theorists who have analyzed how certain cultural, social, and linguistic processes have relegated the category “woman” and all things conceived of as “female” or “feminine” to a position of object or “other” in Western thought and discourse, in which the speaking subject is inevitably constructed as male.⁵ In The Writing of History (WH), Certeau attributes the impulse to exclude to modern Western history's “differentiation between the present and the past,” subject and object, same and other. Certeau explains that “[I]ntelligibility is established through a relation with the other; it moves … by changing what it makes of its ‘other’—the Indian, the past, the people, the mad, the child, the Third World” (3). Although Certeau does not include “woman” or “the feminine” in his litany of types that usually play the role of the “other” in historical discourse, I find that his analysis elucidates Howe's feminist poetics.

Resisting the tendency in dominant discourse toward marginalizing all that is other to the patriarchal, Susan Howe often does center her attention in her writing on the actual women who really lived and whose “voices,” though “incoherent inaccessible muddled inaudible,” are nevertheless still discernible, she believes, in historical texts and discourses (Singularities 21). Sometimes their presence is most clearly indicated by their absence. In the introductory material to her poem “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,” for instance, Howe observes that “what the historian [of the battle between white settlers and Indians known as the Falls Fight] doesn't say is that most of the dead were women and children” (Singularities 3). Accordingly, Howe makes sure that the “Little figure of mother” finds a place in her poem, both as “She is and the way She was,” as a “Lost fact dim outline” as she appears to Howe in the historical records. In Howe's poem a woman's “Outline was a point chosen,” in order to ensure that her “Face seen in a landscape once” will remain visible (Singularities 37). In “The Nonconformist's Memorial,” Howe concerns herself in her reading of The Gospel According to St. John with “the obscure negative way” that a particular female figure, Mary Magdalene, is therein represented, “Dense in parameter space” (NM 33). And in an earlier work, “The Liberties,” collected in The Europe of Trusts (ET), Howe “rescues” Stella Johnson, Jonathan Swift's unacknowledged lifelong companion, whose letters to him were lost (perhaps destroyed by Swift himself for his own protection) and whose presence in literary history is thus limited to what is contained in his journals and letters to her. Howe has also written extensively in her poetic scholarly work about North American women, including Emily Dickinson and two Puritan women: Mary Rowlandson, author of the first Captivity Narrative written and broadly distributed in New England, and Anne Hutchinson, who, in 1637, was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her “heretical” preachings.

But not only women's voices are muffled in history's discourse. Howe's is an antiessentialist view of gender: whoever is outside the bounds of the law, order, and codes of behavior is equally subject to historical invisibility. In early American history, these “feminized” others include American Indians (who were never within the bounds of Puritan order to begin with) as well as whites of both genders who strayed beyond the bounds of Puritan law. Howe's interest in recovering not only the female but also the feminized might place her with those poststructuralist theorists who, according to Janet Todd, “have put … the idea of woman before the experiences of women” (14). But I would warn against any such simplistic categorizing of Howe or her methods. Howe's understanding of how certain voices get silenced in history depends on her notion of gender as, in Joan Scott's definition, an “analytical category.” Scott argues that historians must attend not only to the experiences of women, but also to the processes of “how gender operates historically” and how “meanings are constructed through exclusions” (22, 9).⁶ It seems to me that these are the very processes Howe refers to when she writes that “[l]awlessness seen as negligence is at first feminized and then restricted or banished” (Birth-mark 1). Howe has her ear tuned to the “muffled discourse from distance” of the banished, whom she seeks to rescue from their “Destiny of calamitous silence” (Singularities 25, 32).

Among the banished in North American history, Howe counts the land itself. One of the most symbolic and effective means by which white settlers contained and tamed (feminized) the “wilderness” (as such, already feminized) was to survey, parcel, and fence off the land. “I am trying to understand what went wrong when the first Europeans stepped on shore here …,” explains Howe. “Isn't it bitterly ironic that many of them were fleeing the devastation caused by enclosure laws in Britain, and the first thing they did here was to put up fences?” (Birth-mark 164). She explores this impulse in “Secret History of the Dividing Line,” which, as I already mentioned, is based on the journals of surveyor William Byrd.⁷ On the second page of the poem Howe introduces the central tension of the work, a tension between “the permanence / of endless distance” and the imposed boundaries that render “Frame of our Universe / Our intellectual wilderness / no longer boundless” (FS 90).

In these early pages, Howe is responding to the poet Charles Olson, who has also been an important influence on her work. He too was interested in the history of New England, dubbing its European immigrant citizens “THE LAST FIRST PEOPLE,” the irony of which Howe explores in her poem by beginning this section with this line. Howe is responding to Olson's oft-quoted statement, significantly not quoted in Howe's poem: “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America” (11). Howe explains in an interview: “I am a woman born in America. I can't take central facts for granted” (DI 21). The connection between the containment-destruction of the wilderness and the exclusion of women (and other “others”) from historical records is immediately apparent to Howe, for both gestures reveal the role that gender plays in the operation of power. Just as the American wilderness was divided by land surveyors and property owners, “discourse in the Massachusetts Bay Colony … was charged with particular risks for women, who were hedged in by a network of old-world values (Birth-mark 3). Thus the position of any woman in America is similarly defined and delimited, marked.

In “The Nonconformist's Memorial,” Howe shows how the same old-world values led to the partial erasure of Mary in the Gospel of John. Like Anne Hutchinson, Mary is a female figure whose

Preaching constantly
in woods and obscure
dissenting storms
A variety of trials

(NM 4)

was deemed threatening by the regime(s) of truth that police Christian religious discourse.⁸ “The act of Uniformity / ejected her” so that her presence in scripture is obscured in various ways: “Citations remain abbreviated” and “in Peter she is nameless” (NM 5-6). As Howe explains, “Mary, the disciple, the first one who witnesses the resurrection, the one whose story we go by, gets dropped away almost at once” (“An Interview” 11). The female is, again, the most readily feminized in discourses that resist “headstrong anarchy thoughts” such as Mary's in their strivings for coherence and unity (NM 6). Howe's choice of the word “headstrong” here emphasizes that the anarchy that Mary threatens is gendered, for very rarely does “headstrong” describe male behavior; the term is usually reserved to indicate willfulness in females. But Howe writes her poem to illustrate that it is through “this very process of her interruption and erasure” that Mary remains present in the Gospel, and we see “that she's continuing through these narratives” (“An Interview” 11).

Howe's sense of the interplay between what is represented and what is unrepresentable by the discourse of the Gospel is consistent with Certeau's claim that “any autonomous order is founded upon what it eliminates; it produces a ‘residue’ condemned to be forgotten, but what was excluded re-infiltrates the place of its origin … it inscribes there the law of the other” (Heterologies 3-4). Howe's poetry of recovery depends on such a Freudian notion of the inevitable “return of the repressed” (WH 4), which in turn allows for agency on the part of the poet. Instead of “aim[ing] at calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs” as Certeau accuses traditional historians of doing (WH 2), Howe devises modes of investigation and representation that make the lawless factions and voices of alterity more easily apparent. She presents Mary in her poem as one of history's repressed “others” who, like Certeau's ghosts, still haunts the text. “In the synoptic tradition Mary / enters the tomb,” writes Howe (NM 12). On perhaps the most literal level of all, the tomb she enters is the “scriptural tomb” of the text itself, to which the discourse of the Gospels of the New Testament would relegate Mary. But Howe ensures that this tomb will nonetheless become “No abiding habitation” for her by revealing that “The Gospel did not grasp” her “least coherent utterance” (NM 7, 23, 26). Such utterances make Mary's presence known, and the incoherencies in Howe's poem emphasize the irony of a discourse of testimony that attempts to muffle the voice of its most important witness.

Again, Howe traces this irony to the operations of gender in history: “If you are a woman, archives hold perpetual ironies,” she explains, “[b]ecause the gaps and silences are where you find yourself” (Birth-mark 158). The New Testament's regime of truth cannot “grasp” Mary's utterance—cannot fully contain, subsume, or expel from the Gospel the experiences and expressions that are incompatible with the ideological purposes of its various authors. Howe's belief that historical truth may be found in such traces and utterances finds support in Jerome McGann's idea that “these particulars always appear as incommensurates: details, persons, events which the work's own (reflected) conceptual formulas and ideologies must admit, but which they cannot wholly account for” (“Introduction” 14). McGann argues that the incommensurate is the source of positive poetic knowledge, and that the chief social value of poetic works lies in poetry's ability to represent the incommensurate.

Because Howe likewise finds poetic truth and value in these incommensurates, she is wary of historiography that represents history as unified, “As if all history were a progress,” or “A single thread of narrative” (NM 7). Such an image of what Foucault calls “total history” and identifies as illusory, a function of Western society's regimes of truth,⁹ is purchased at too high a cost for Howe, because in order for the past to appear unified and continuous, not only must antinomian voices be suppressed, but also the operations of gender, power, and language in the production of historical representation must be obscured, ignored, or even denied. Howe wants, rather, to reveal and foreground these elements and operations. Therefore, she works more in the tradition of Foucault's genealogist who concentrates on the minute and close-at-hand than in that of the traditional historian who chases the “corruptible first figure” (Singularities 17) of original causes. Howe believes that “every source has another center so is every creator” (Birth-mark 39). In renouncing her search for origins, the genealogist does not abandon her inquiry into historical beginnings, but rather than looking for sameness in these beginnings, she is sensitive to difference. Howe's poetic image of a “pitchfork origin” (Singularities 25) implies that she conceives of historical beginnings as instances of Foucauldian emergence. Foucault describes points of emergence as marked “not by inviolable identity” but by difference and disparity (“Nietzsche” 79). The several prongs of Howe's pitchfork would preclude the discovery of any single point of origin when probing the past with such an implement.

Although Howe's project cannot be characterized as entirely anti-narrative, relying as it does on a kind of philosophical-political-poetic quest narrative in the tradition of the twentieth-century long poem, she resists the kind of conventional, closed narrative that has been the preferred form of historical representations of “total history” since the Enlightenment. Such resistance is consistent with her poetics of recovery, for she suspects that “the true story … comes to / nothing” (ET 88) in historical representations that impose narrative form and closure.¹⁰ Much as H.D. does with the Trojan War legend in Helen in Egypt, Howe dismantles the narratives of the texts she reads and refuses to recast, even into revised coherent narrative, the elements she recovers, the “forgotten forgiven escaping conclusion” (Singularities 31). The exclusion of these elements is especially significant for Howe because she views this exclusion as inherently gendered: “Yes, she, the Strange, excluded from formalism” (Singularities 41). Howe attempts to include the strange, the incommensurate, in her poetry by thwarting narrative closure and coherence. “Exiles wander / and return from fiction or falsehood” (FS 105) in Howe's poems that deconstruct the texts they are readings of.

Howe's title, “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time” (not of time), announces her nonnarrative intentions with this work. Hope Atherton is the wandering exile who returns from falsehood in this text, and a feminized wanderer, at that. Howe's treatment of Hope in this poem illustrates her theory of the gendered operations of historical erasure as well as the specific strategies of recovery she employs to counteract that erasure. Because his experience, as well as his account of it, did not fit the master narratives of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, at that time struggling to maintain order and to distinguish its “civilized” communities from the “savagery” of the Indians¹¹—that is, because his narrative did not cohere into a moralizing closure in accordance with the discourse which his society “accepts and makes function as true” (Foucault “Truth and Power” 1144), Hope was rejected. Ironically, he was repudiated by both the Indians to whom he tried to surrender and, on his eventual return to Hatfield, his own townspeople who were unwilling or unable to accept his story. Howe recasts his address in an increasingly fragmented speech:

Loving Friends and Kindred:—
When I look back
So short in charity and good works
We are a small remnant
of signal escapes wonderful in themselves
We march from our camp a little
and come home
Lost the beaten track and so
River section dark all this time
We must not worry
how few we are and fall from each other
More than language can express
Hope for the artist in America & etc
This is my birthday
These are the old home trees

(Singularities 16)

The discontinuity from one line to the next seems to indicate the contesting discourses of which the history of the Falls Fight is comprised. Accounts given by Hope, the Indians, and white soldiers conflict; the historical record is incomplete; and Hope ended up on the opposite side of the swollen Connecticut River that was supposedly impossible to cross at that time. He died shortly after his ordeal in the wilderness. But in this stanza Howe overlays Hope's contested plea to his congregation with her own plea directed at her own contemporaries to resist and oppose the apparati of capture that continue to domesticate and suppress insurgent expression in both literature and history. She forges a linguistic link between the past and present by playfully recasting key words from the Falls Fight accounts such as “Hope” and “fall.”

Hope's name is especially charged with meaning for Howe, so that her representation of him as one of history's “feminized” others implies a more extensive critique of antifeminist historiography. “In our culture Hope is a name we give women,” she explains. “Signifying desire, trust, promise, does her name prophetically engender pacification of the feminine?” (Singularities 4). Howe is intrigued by the ways in which Hope's historical presence seems to frustrate the subject-object opposition on which Certeau believes Western history insists and depends—the same subject-object distinction essential to Western phenomenology that Leslie Scalapino, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Carla Harryman frustrate in their poetic projects. Describing her first impression of Hope, Howe writes: “He had this borderline, half-wilderness, half-Indian, insanity-sanity experience” (DI 25). He came out of the wilderness “same and not the same,” not classifiable as insider or outsider, civilized or savage (Singularities 17). By welcoming him into her poem in this unclassifiable, incoherent state, in an accordingly halting and thwarted narrative that “does not reduce” his experience “to conceptual finishedness” (McGann, “Introduction” 12), Howe “represents the incommensurable” (McGann, SVPA 72).

Although she does preface her poem with some narrative background in the form of a brief historical account of the events surrounding the Falls Fight, including an extract from a letter by Stephen Williams (also in narrative form), Howe does not “tell” Hope's story in her poem. Even in the section of the poem entitled “Hope Atherton's Story,” rather than narrating, she explodes and explores both the events and the language used in various historical documents in which the events were recorded. Thus, she performs the paradox of her own approach to historical “truth” in her treatment of Hope's story:

Two blew bird eggs plat
Habitants before dark
Little way went mistook awake
abt again Clay Gully
espied bounds to leop over
Selah cithera Opynne be
5 rails high houselot Cow
Kinsmen I pray you hasten
Furious Nipnet Ninep Ninap
little Pansett fence with ditch
Clear stumps grubbing ploughing
Clearing the land

(Singularities 8)

Certainly some narrative elements are still apparent through the fragmented syntax and peculiar diction and spelling in these lines. Temporal markers such as “before” and “again” suggest that events are ordered chronologically, however vaguely, and the combination of past and present tenses serves a similar function. But the presence of these various narrative elements in Howe's poetry does not necessarily result in the kind of totalizing closure typical of narrative historiography. Jerome McGann's theory of “dialogic discourse” is helpful in explaining why not. McGann acknowledges that in light of recent critiques of narrative such as Hayden White's and Certeau's, narrative may seem devoid of subversive power. But he insists that this is not necessarily or always the case. Discourse in which “the story … is continually subjected to a critique from other materials, including other narratives,” may be able to “invade the strongholds of … ideological narratives and force them to face their meanings and their limits” (SVPA 145, 151). Howe's use of narrative in “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time” seems to fit this model. The variety of verb tenses in the above stanza, for instance, while indicating narrative, at the same time thwarts the coherent development of any single narrative or chronology because the different tenses occur randomly, shift without warning, and do not seem to represent specific or distinct points in time or points of view. This example illustrates just one of a range of “invasion” tactics Howe employs in her poetry.

Other examples may be found in “The Liberties,” where Howe disregards certain conventions of historiography by combining and intertwining narratives of different types in a way that calls to mind Carla Harryman's transgressions of generic boundaries. For instance, she blurs the sanctified distinction between history and fiction by devoting nearly as much of the poem to reading-“recovering” the character Cordelia of Shakespeare's King Lear as she does to recovering Stella Johnson, and in one section of the poem, “God's Spies,” she brings Stella, Cordelia, and the ghost of Jonathan Swift together into a single scripted play. In the earliest scenes, Stella and Cordelia are in dialogue, responding to one another's questions and statements: “STELLA: Don't Leave me. / CORDELIA: I won't” (ET 184). But by the fourth scene the two are beginning to merge, to the point that they are finishing each other's speech: “STELLA: It is—/ CORDELIA:—Not true” (ET 187). And by the end of this scene they are fully integrated into the same fragmented speech:

TOGETHER (Urgently):
Space—room—gate—lid—
noise—ruin—heart—breast—years—family
souvenir—wedding ring—whatsoever—
clear as day—(Pause)
Hurdles. And stems of trees. (Pause)
Hearing at night when silence is deep—Unity—
something there—really nowhere—(Pause)
A path
into the light.
They return to the rock and sit down. CORDELIA pulls the coats out of her knapsack.
CORDELIA (Urgently):
put on one coat, two coats, three coats!
They bundle themselves up and sit closely huddled together for warmth. Complete darkness. Silence.

(ET 187-88)

By bringing characters from two different types of narrative together in this way, she is also, of course, subjecting both narratives—including the “fictionality” of one and the “historical actuality” of the other—to a mutual critique. The passage also implies that these female characters are able to help each other out of the darkened silence of their respective scriptural tombs by crossing the boundaries of subjectivity—boundaries rendered fluid in Howe's poetic language. Such mutual interrogation and integration function here as feminist survival tactics, guaranteeing that Stella and Cordelia will be equally fictional, equally real, huddled together in the dark into which the (illusory) binarism reality-textuality casts them.

Howe also invades the stronghold of ideological narrative through the entrance to that stronghold guarded by objectivity. She often reads narratives against and through her own life and history, thus drawing attention to her role in the production of her poem and the “history” it is a reading of. This is Howe's method of taking subjectivity into account. Although personal experience never seems to be the primary focus or motivation for her poetry—as it might be for Dahlen or Lubeski or even Berssenbrugge—Howe sometimes puts her “self” into process in language in ways that call to mind the projects of some of her language-oriented contemporaries. Howe's treatment of Hope Atherton's address to his congregation, which I have already discussed, is one such example. Another may be found in section III of “The Liberties,” where Howe acknowledges her interest in the Irish history the poem treats—an interest based on the very personal circumstance of her own Irish heritage:¹²

          Across the Atlantic, I
                    inherit myself
semblance
          of irish susans

(ET 213)

Such self-consciousness is another means of presenting a more “authentic” history:

I can re
trac
my steps
Iwho
crawl
between thwarts
Do not come down the ladder
ifor I
haveaten
it a
way

(ET 177)

Howe assumes that the most truthful narrative is the one found “between thwarts,” the one that can only be traced or followed once the coherence that we normally require in order to trace or follow the logical progression of events—the coherence that is after all imposed on events by discourse—has been “eaten away” by gestures such as self-reflexivity. Another such gesture may be found in “Thorow.” In the prose introduction to that poem, which Howe has tellingly titled “Narrative in Non-Narrative,” she offers the historical circumstances of the writing of that poem—her winter at Lake George, her experiences of reading Thoreau's journals. Howe suggests that this (personal) history is as much—inevitably so—the subject of the poem as any other “history” there explored. “I thought I stood on the shores of a history of the world where forms of wildness brought up by memory become desire and multiply,” she writes (Singularities 41).

None of Howe's poetic texts is reducible to any one version or vision of history-reality because she keeps them active, allowing elements from a variety of different narratives to play off one another. Howe opens “The Liberties,” for instance, with a factual history of Stella Johnson's life presented in an objective, “scholarly” voice. The section that immediately follows, “Stella's Portrait” subverts the objective authority of this opening narrative by (dis)continuing the history in a fragmented “portrait” of Stella. The “portrait” is a collage of details, facts, speculations, and excerpts from poems and letters, many written by Swift. Howe arranges the information in such a way that frustrates the reader's expectations that historical narrative will be meaningfully ordered according to causality, continuity, chronology: “Sometimes her eyes pained her. When she was twenty-four she shot and killed a prowler after her servants had fled the house in terror. William Tidsall proposed marriage. With Swift's encouragement she turned him down. Three poems she transcribed into a manuscript volume have been attributed to her.” Part of Howe's purpose in presenting material in this way is to demonstrate that “No authentic portrait exists”; the very notion of authenticity is problematic to begin with (ET 152). And this is a key component of Howe's performative poetics. It may seem contradictory for Howe to dedicate herself to recovering marginalized voices while claiming that objective access to a real past is impossible, but this contradiction is only apparent. Because all historical “facts” are never wholly separable from the modes of representation that give them form, the “real” is, to a great extent, also (already) “textual.” By parenthetically citing a variety of sources in a single sentence of “Stella's Portrait,” Howe suggests that a mode of portraiture that gathers and combines information from a variety of perspectives, even or especially when that information is contradictory, might be more historically accurate than a mode that obscures these processes of the production of historical “truth.” Much as Gertrude Stein created poetic portraits by means of repetition-with-variation that foreground the processes and medium in which they are constructed, Howe suggests in her portrait that these same interrelations among language, perception, and knowledge operate in representations of history: “She had raven-black hair (Swift), a pale and pensive expression (Mrs. Delaney), was plump (Some), extremely thin(Others)” (ET 152).

INTERTEXTUALITY AND THE MATERIAL WORD

Many of the elements that Howe brings together in her work are directly quoted from different narratives and versions; like Dahlen and Harryman, she culls text from written sources and lifts the fragments—words, phrases, passages, expressions—into her poems. “My writing has been haunted and inspired by a series of texts,” she acknowledges (Birth-mark 45). Howe's poems become rich fields of intertextuality, for she does not limit her reading to any one kind of text, or any one point of view, drawing equally from histories, orations, letters, encyclopedias, psalms, captivity narratives, sermons, literary manuscripts. Bits of Thoreau's journals are scattered throughout Howe's poem “Thorow” (the unique spelling of which is taken from one of Hawthorne's letters) and I have already mentioned that “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time” opens with excerpts from a letter. “Secret History of the Dividing Line” contains fragments from a variety of texts—not only Byrd's journals—including soldiers' letters:

Dear Parents
I am writing by candlelight
All right so far
after a long series of collisions
had a good night's rest.
Belief in the right of our cause
Tomorrow we move

(FS 91)

Howe also excerpts written accounts, perhaps from captivity narratives, of Indian ceremonies as glimpsed by white settlers:

A series of movements
half grotesque, half magical
whoops, yells, uncouth forms
RAIN FELL INCESSANTLY
IT BECAME QUITE DARK

(FS 117)

Howe brings these quotations into her poems not in order to reconstruct a total image of the past, nor to offer evidence in support of a particular interpretation of the past. On the contrary, quotations function in Howe's poetry to frustrate the development of any such complete image of the past, allowing for the conflicts and messiness that the posture of completeness always rejects. Howe's citational method results in a layered text, much like H. D.'s palimpsests, and functions, similarly, to deconstruct normative versions or visions of “reality” by allowing elements from different and contradictory discourses to exist simultaneously, in active, often contentious, relation to one another. “You open your mind and textual space to many voices,” Howe explains, “to an interplay and contradiction and polyphony that forms lines and often abolishes lines” (DI 24). The result is a poem-history (or “portrait”) constructed out of difference rather than sameness, to return again to Foucault's distinction between points of emergence and origin. But just as important, this collage is not static—and Howe does not intend it to be, as is clear from her use of the word “interplay,” and the value she places on the process of “forming” and “abolishing” lines. McGann's notion of incommensurability as a mark of poetic truth is again helpful here.¹³ Howe's poems are fields of action comprised of “details and prospects which are at odds or in tension with other details and prospects. What is central and what is peripheral, even what is present and what is absent, all make their appearance and shift their positions in relation to each other” (McGann, SVPA 7). Rather than smoothing over or blending the differences among the various historical and textual elements she brings together, Howe emphasizes the incommensurate. As a result, her detailed palimpsests never settle into stillness, and the tension among details never abates.

A crucial component of this poetic method is Howe's sensitivity to the material dimension of language. Howe finds precedent for the poetic-historical methods she champions in the historical materialism of Walter Benjamin. She feels a deep kinship with Benjamin, whose commitment to recovering the silenced voices of history she shares. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Benjamin writes: “For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Illuminations 255). And, like Howe, his primary method of recognizing the past is to collect quotations from a range of sources and construct texts out of them. In a recent talk she gave on her own creative process and influences as a poet, Howe spoke of Benjamin's historical-materialist method almost interchangeably with her own, particularly when describing how quotations function in poetic texts constructed by historical materialists such as herself and Benjamin: “Fragments, details, sparks of spirit, letters in times, quotations can interrupt the transcendent flow of a poem or an essay … with a real force … you do not take a quotation because it's wonderful and you worship it but [because] it's like a piece of dynamite, it's like a shock interrupting some kind of transcendent flow” (“The Poet”). Howe also shares with Benjamin the belief that introducing such interruptions is valuable because it is the means by which the historical materialist “blast[s] open the continuum of history” (Benjamin, 262). Readers of Howe's poetry are thus unable to rely on continuity as an ordering principle. “[L]iberating divergence and marginal elements” (Foucault, “Nietzsche” 87), “slipping from known to utmost bound” (Howe, Singularities 19), Howe defamiliarizes. Readers are liberated from their associational habits, freed to experience an original encounter with language, and with understanding. But even if “Inarticulate true meaning / lives beyond thought” (Singularities 30) for Howe, it does not live beyond language.

Howe finds language to be meaningful to the extent that it is material. Notice the metaphors in which both Howe and Benjamin discuss the process of collecting quotations and historical fragments from the context and continuum of history. For Howe, quotations are “dynamite” and they “shock” the reader. Benjamin wants to “blast” history open. Howe has even described herself as one who must “quarry” in her reading of historical texts, as if she digs or cuts through the sediment of the past in search of precious rock (Metcalf 52). It seems fitting that both Howe and Benjamin conceive of their projects as mining operations, for mining is a process that yields a material product, but also has significant material effects on the land from which it is mined. The historical continuum, like the earth where a mine has operated, is left blasted open. Interestingly, mining is not the only process of extracting natural resources to which Howe's and Benjamin's historical materialism has been compared. Hannah Arendt takes the metaphor under water in her introduction to Benjamin's Illuminations in which she compares Benjamin to “a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths” (51). This description fits Howe as well in that she reverses the method of the traditional historian who, in his desire to make sense of history, privileges a coherent narrative at the expense of the insignificant (rich and strange) details that do not fit. Howe herself chooses an agricultural metaphor in order to suggest that truth is physical, not metaphysical: “Stripped of metaphysical proof / Stoop to gather chaff,” she advises, for the chaff, what is usually discarded, is more valuable than the grain (Singularities 27). Such a harvest seems to be precisely what Foucault's genealogist hopes to reap by “cultivat[ing] the details and accidents that accompany every beginning” (“Nietzsche” 80). But even when the metaphors are not so consistent or clearly developed, the terms in which Howe discusses her writing process are strikingly physical. She may be describing her own method as well as Emily Dickinson's when she writes: “Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text” (My Emily Dickinson 29).

Not only does Howe conceive of the reading/collecting process as physical, but just as significantly, she treats the products of the process, history's once-repressed and now-recovered “scraps, instants, rejectamenta … quotations, thought fragments, anagrams … the material details” (Howe, “The Poet”)—whether imagined as rock, pearl, coral or chaff—as materially manifest. Benjamin's notion of the monad is useful here: Because a text so constructed by the collector-historical materialist is, as Benjamin puts it, “based on a constructive principle” that releases each quotation, fragment, or thought from the causal connections on which the constructive principle of history-as-continuum depends, each fragment so released “crystalizes into a monad [the basic constituent element of physical reality]. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes … a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (262-63). Of significance here, is not only the materiality of the monad, but its scale in relation to other material forms, being the basic constituent element of any form. Arendt explains that “Benjamin had a passion for small, even minute things. … The smaller the object, the more likely it seemed that it could contain in the most concentrated form everything else” (11-12). Howe has a passion for minute elements of language and text—single words, sounds, phonemes, and fragments—and I understand her attention to these in the histories she reads as her attempt to encounter historical subjects as monads. In the context of her project of recovery, Howe's interest in linguistic monads suggests that she perceives history's operation of capture and silencing to take place most often, or most effectively—perhaps even alerting the least amount of suspicion or resistance—on this level of minute detail.

Just such an awareness, that the local and particular is where power manifests itself, might help account for Howe's attraction to Benjamin's notion of the monad; part of the “everything else” that a small textual or linguistic detail might contain is the very microphysics of power that Howe hopes both to reveal and to disrupt in her poetic readings of historical discourse.¹⁴ Along one branch of these microphysics of power, of course, lie “the silent and hidden operations of gender” (J. Scott 27). Joan Scott's Foucauldian analysis accounts for the way Benjamin's monadic method, in Howe's hands, becomes a feminist strategy, operating on two levels. First, the monadic elements Howe collects and presents carry traces of the voices that have been silenced, whether female, feminine, or feminized. By foregrounding them in her texts, Howe not only encounters them but also releases them from their tombs of silence. And in the process, she calls attention to the operations of gender according to which these elements were, at various historical moments, feminized in the discourses she is reading.

The social value of Howe's monadic method implied by identifying it as a feminist strategy becomes more plausible when that method is seen as an instance of McGann's “reconstituted” referentiality. The material minutiae that Howe gathers from the language and texts of history can never be purely linguistic, according to McGann's theory, because the literary system of which they are part “operates … in concrete social space and conditions which can be specified” (SVPA 4). Therefore, the particulars that comprise the palimpsest he so values and which Howe delivers, “are not mere data, objects, or monads; they are heuristic isolates which bring into focus some more or less complex network of human events and relations” (“Introduction” 12). Howe presents the material details that she gathers from the textual debris of history in such a way that permits them to function this way.

Furthermore, like Benjamin's historical materialist, a collector “who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones” (Benjamin 254), Howe does not classify elements or discriminate among them for the reader. Howe's poetry “preserves [heuristic isolates] in a state of (as it were) freedom. The particulars are grains of sand in which the world may be seen—may be seen again and again, in new sets of relations and differentials” (McGann, “Introduction” 12). “This is not to deny that quotations are staged by the quoter,” assures Howe (DI 24). Surely a poem constructed of difference is not necessarily less constructed than one that favors sameness. But, Howe explains, “data has generally been gathered by men from men telling their visions” (DI 24). Howe “stages” quotations according to very different criteria than those followed by the authors of the texts she gathers them from. In her poetry, quotations become monads or heuristic isolates, to be directly encountered in language, as language.

For example, Howe often arranges phrases, words and lines of poetry paratactically, placing them side by side rather than in the causal hypotactic relationships typical of analytical or chronologically ordered discourse. In many of her poems, she includes a few sections like the following in which words and word fragments are arranged equidistant from one another, in the form of a text block with justified left and right margins:

green chaste gaiety purity sh inca
deity snare swift leaf defile dispel
poppy sh snow flee falcon fathom sh
flame orison sh children lost fleece
sh jagged woof subdued foliage sh
spinet stain clair sh chara sh mirac

(FS 116)

This visual parataxis helps to disconnect the words and fragments from syntactical, grammatical, and logical relationships, so her readers may encounter them as monads. One result is that in these sections the sound of each word comes alive, becomes primary. Language is material. And words such as “anthen” and “uplispth” and “enend,” rather than referring to realities beyond themselves, assume immediate physical presences (Singularities 59). The sound of a word—its most physical characteristic—is the test of its truth value for Howe: “to an almost alarming extent … sound creates meaning,” she claims (SSH 31). Butterick notes that because of Howe's attention to sound in her work, “words survive at their primordial limits. The result is a report as from under hypnosis, where thresholds have been eased and language and its components, including mumbles, halts and even hisses, arise” (321). This survival is precisely what she is after. When giving a public reading of her work, Howe even whispers some words. “[T]hat way they sound like another voice—the hissing return of the repressed,” she explains (“An Interview” 11). By emphasizing the sound, shape, physical presence of language, Howe hopes to allow even the most uncontainable elements of history to persist and survive.

Howe spotlights word roots and cognates, fragmenting not only syntax but words themselves as if to see what they might contain. Unconventional—often archaic—spelling and the intermingling of Latin, Anglo Saxon, French, Indian, and Greek word forms are common in her poetry:

rest chondriacal lunacy
velc cello viable toil
quench conch uncannunc
drumm amonoosuck ythian
scow aback din
flicker skaeg ne
barge quagg peat
sieve catacomb
stint chisel sect

(Singularities 10)

This kind of fragmentation is what Andrew Schelling refers to as Howe's “ceremonial” etymology, a term that calls to mind H. D.'s “linguistic alchemy,” and that poet's very similar exploration of word roots and derivatives. Howe's poetry, by “breaking the impasse of philology,” Schelling explains, “locks literal tongues with the dead, activating the language they used, projecting their speech onto the page” (116). Howe believes that by encountering history on the level of the linguistic monad, she—and her readers—can encounter the past more directly. She even describes writing as “a physical event of immediate revelation” (Birth-mark 1) whose purpose is to render audible and visible the “sounds and spirits (ghosts if you like) [that] leave traces in a geography” (Birth-mark 156). Howe's sense that language can contact the “spirits” of history depends on a philosophy of language according to which “the spirit and its material manifestation are so intimately connected that it seems permissible to discover everywhere chance correspondences” (Howe, “The Poet”).¹⁵

If this notion seems Messianic, it is; in his Judaic studies Benjamin found himself drawn to the “theological type of interpretation for which the text itself is sacred” (Arendt 4) and in her studies in early American literature and thought, Howe is taken by the Puritans' belief that divine truth could be embodied in the written word—not only in the Bible, but in poetry as well, which often took scripture as its model.¹⁶ But, whatever the spiritual dimensions of such a position, neither Benjamin nor Howe arrived at this shared view of language through ascribing to the religious doctrines in which the theory has been articulated. Oddly, it seems more likely that both arrived at the idea by way of their political interests. Benjamin recognized in Marx's theory of the superstructure what Howe recognizes in the processes by which historical voices are feminized, exiled, and therefore recoverable: that language's relation to “reality” is not merely or simply one of representation; language is also constitutive of reality.

The sense that language is therefore an important site of the connection between spirit and matter expresses itself for both poet-historians as a view of language as numinous: plenitudinously meaningful, never reducible to any single or fixed meaning. In fact, language functions in Howe's historical materialism much as it does in H. D.'s spiritual realism. For both poets, words do function as containers or vehicles for meaningful content, but only to the extent that they themselves are the content; they cannot be exchanged for or replaced by their meanings. In “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,” words are so full of themselves that verbal expressions take on a three-dimensionality, moving across the page in the form of “Cries hurled through the Woods.” And Howe suggests that when we open up a verbal expression to look inside, what we find there is language: the cries are “open to the words inside them” (Singularities 23). This is the same discovery, remember, made by H. D.'s protagonist Julia while translating from the Greek, that “the words themselves held inner words” (Bid Me to Live 162). Howe's linguistic monads—whether words or fragments—function like H.D.'s hieroglyphs: they are meaningful for her to the extent that they are finally untranslatable, numinously indeterminate.

THE “VISIBLE SURFACE OF DISCOURSE”

Howe's notion of a nonrational, nontotalizing truth is consistent with her methods of poetic representation, which, as I claimed at the beginning of this chapter, may be seen as truthful to the extent that her poems are not themselves representations, but rather, enact representation. Because of what he calls the “‘performative’ aspect of the poetic” (SVPA 75), McGann insists in The Beauty of Inflections that “‘meaning’ in the literary experience will also be reconceived as the process by which literary works are produced and reproduced” (10). This process of production includes the “various institutional forms which are not themselves ‘literary’ at all” but in which literary works are encountered and constituted (“Introduction” 4). Of particular interest to both McGann and Howe are the publishing and printing institutions: McGann insists that textual criticism and bibliographical work must “be conceived of as central to hermeneutics” (BI 6); and Howe writes a poetry that activates the most performative material dimension of language, the typographical, bibliographical details that comprise both the texts she reads and those she writes.

Howe makes tangible the “Visible surface of Discourse” (Singularities 36) in a number of ways. First, she offers frequent reminders that historical events are inseparable from their textual embodiments, and these textual embodiments are never static or fixed, but are themselves events. Howe has a tendency, for instance, to narrate meteorological events in statements that simultaneously indicate textual conditions: in “Secret History of the Dividing Line,” “Flakes of thick snow / fell on the open pages” (FS 104); in “The Liberties” “sleet whips the page” (ET 100). Both images emphasize that textual production is a significant site of historical loss and recovery; antinomian voices are subject to bibliographical erasure. They can be washed away by the sleet of printing conventions, whited-out by the snow of copyright laws. Note, too, that the distinction between “natural” events and “cultural” acts is compromised in these images that insert texts into the natural landscape and bring rain and sleet into the pages of a book. Howe tries to counteract the weathering effects of textual history by reading bibliographically, as it were—attending to the bibliographical events according to which nontextual events are physically organized and produced as texts. She even integrates bibliographical descriptions into her poems. In “Eikon Basilike,” for instance, following ten pages of verse stanzas exploring the “Bibliography of the Authorship Controversy” surrounding the King's Book, is a prose block that includes information such as “the text is mostly black letter” and “This edition is Steele 3239. with coat of arms, no. 67, measuring 1 15/16 × 1 11/16 in.” (73). In several instances Howe presents textual variants in standard bibliographical form, such as in this stanza:

K CHARL ¦ WORKS ¦ VOL I
K CHARLE ¦ WORKS ¦ VOL II
Numbers of Prayers, 3.
pp. 1 - 102 ending “FINIS”
It has remains of light blue silk
strings

(NM 80)

Such bibliographical array is one example McGann offers of a form of discourse that “can maintain its own integrity within a narrativized field” as I mentioned earlier in the context of Howe's nonnarrative tendencies (SVPA 145). McGann explains that bibliographical description does not require narrative explanation or context in order to be meaningful. Since readers can refer to standardized guidelines for reading bibliographical discourse, “the entry, in its arrayed form, offers these (and other) materials in a discourse that is already full of significance” (SVPA 138). Furthermore, bibliographical discourse is especially full of significance because it offers a historical representation that includes a dimension of history's mode of production.

Additionally, in nearly all of her poems Howe disrupts printing conventions. She overlays lines of text, crosses horizontally printed lines with lines placed vertically and at various angles across the page. In some cases the whole page becomes a visual collage, comprised of words that function more like brushstrokes in a painting than linguistic signifiers. In passages such as these Howe's talent as a visual artist (in 1961 she graduated from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, where she majored in painting) clearly informs her poetic technique.¹⁷ In this example, Howe has also drawn attention to the textual construction of some individual words by allowing the letters within the words to fall out of line, as happens when the type is incorrectly or carelessly composited in letterpress printing. How does one “read” such a page of text? In places in “Eikon Basilike” the physical layering of text on text renders some of the words themselves completely illegible. In these cases Howe has emphasized the material nature of language to such a degree that its referential function is totally disabled. These words cannot mean in the normative sense; they simply are—they are physical presences on the page. The reader confronts language “[n]ot to look off from it / but to look at it” (Singularities 50). But in none of these examples are the words static or fixed presences: Howe's visual collages are fields of action, drawing the viewer's eye this way and that, highlighting points of intersection, the multiple direction of language at cross-purposes. These passages represent the most radically physical instances of palimpsest in Howe's poetry.

In “The Nonconformist's Memorial,” Howe creates a different visual effect by flipping a three-line stanza upside down and laying it over another three-line stanza that is printed right side up. Each upside-down line is placed directly under a right side up line, so that the two lines of text lie against one another, base line to base line, but without physically touching. The mirrored lines take on a three-dimensional quality, as if each is extending from a shared axis into a different plane. This mirrored quality is reinforced by a more precise mirroring that occurs between this verso page and its facing recto page: the lines are mirrored exactly so that the first line of text on the facing page reads “As if all history …” Howe explains that

The mirroring impulse in my work goes way back … At first when I used mirroring in my writing I was very sedate about it, and it involved repetition in a more structured way. But with “Thorow” I had done one scattered page and made a xerox copy and suddenly there were two lying on my desk beside each other, and it seemed to me the scattering effect was stronger if I repeated them so the image would travel across facing pages. The facing pages reflected and strengthened each other.

(“An Interview” 9)

The purpose of this visual presentation is not just to emphasize the materiality of language, but to draw attention to the textual history of the Gospel of John and Mary Magdalene's contested presence there. Howe continues:

The reversed line in between—“Actual world nothing ideal”—would be an interruption to the narrative that you're trying to start. Then the third line that's right-side up—“She was coming to anoint him”—that was what was happening, but the reversed text on either side was a kind of break-in, some other thought going in some other direction. It also conveys her erasure. I'm trying to illustrate what I'm saying by putting this part upside down.

(“An Interview” 9)

Howe is not just illustrating what she is saying; her poem is performing Mary's erasure, and performing it in such a way that the mode of production of the text that erases her is center stage in the performance—thus wandering her way through knowledge.

Howe intends such bibliographical performances to serve a hermeneutical function in her poetry. She believes that even the “tiniest tiniest essences, such as commas, blank pages, blots, erasures, all count” (“The Poet”); they count not only because they function, like all of Howe's textual minutiae, as heuristic isolates, but also “[b]ecause so many of the documents that come down to us have been homogenized or sanitized in favor of some eternal image of the past … even the subtlest changes in the original copies affect the truth” (Howe, “The Poet”). In The Birth-mark Howe writes, “I know records are compiled by winners, and scholarship is in collusion with Civil Government. I know this and go on searching for some trace of love's unfolding through all the paper in all the libraries I come to” (4). But in her introduction to “Eikon Basilike,” “Making the Ghost Walk about Again and Again,” Howe emphasizes that her hermeneutical bibliography is not based on the belief that truth can finally be located in authorial intention or “original” manuscripts. “Can we ever really discover the original text?” she asks. “Was there ever an original poem? What is a pure text invented by an author? Is such a conception possible? Only by going back to the prescriptive level of thought process can ‘authorial intention’ finally be located, and then the material object has become immaterial” (NM 50). Certeau describes this loss of materiality as a defining feature of normative historiography, and one of its most grievous shortcomings: “the real as represented by historiography does not correspond to the real that determines its production” (Heterologies 203). Howe avoids this fallacy in her own poetic historiography by never allowing the material to become immaterial. Howe's bibliographical hermeneutics, as well as her other poetic strategies that foreground the materiality of language, are aimed at recovering a historical truth that is material, located in the material of language. Howe displays the representational operations at work in her own poems even as she employs such a display to lay bare the modes of production of the histories she reads.

A POETICS OF ENCOUNTER

Howe's performative poetics demonstrate that she conceives of the texts she reads and those she writes much as McGann urges historical critics to appreciate any literary work, not “as an autonomous system of verbal signs, on the one hand, or on the other as the (free or determined) creation of reader and/or critic … [but] as a complex event in socio-historical space, the always particularized interchange of a present with a past” (BI 5). By (re)presenting historical details and particulars of the past as heuristic isolates—“lived realities” rather than static images of the dead past—Howe performs such particularized interchanges in her poetry. This allows her to encounter history's “others” in such a way that they are “not—to borrow Coleridge's phraseology—‘objects as objects’; rather, they are objects-as-subjects” (McGann, “Introduction” 11). Since her project depends on interchange with rather than distinction from the past, Howe's meeting ground with the past can never be the supposed neutral-zone of objective historical accounting, which, according to Certeau, is never really neutral, for “[i]n pretending to recount the real, [historiography] manufactures it”; the “‘past’ is the object from which a mode of production distinguishes itself in order to transform it” (Heterologies 207, 216). Rather, Howe meets her other in language, in the telling of the poem itself. “[T]he past is present when I write” she explains (DI 20), locating the encounter in a process—the process of language experienced in the act of writing or reading—rather than in any one fixed interpretation or moment, or in the text itself. In fact, the text “itself” does not really exist as such—the “texts” of Howe's poems are actualized only in the human (social) process of historical knowing, of interchange with. When I read her poetry, I feel at

Home in a human knowing
Stretched out at the thresh
of beginning
Sphere of sound

(Singularities 26)

In other words, historical knowing seems more “real” to me, in the sense of being immediately actual, than does any final product, such as “knowledge of the past” that is contained in (and by) historiographical texts that differentiate themselves from the “real” that they supposedly represent. Howe describes her own intent as being “not to explain … not to translate … but to meet the [other] with writing … to meet in time, not just from place to place but from writer to writer, mind to mind, friend to friend, from words to words” (Birth-mark 158).

In order to meet the other with writing, Howe is willing to venture from the safety of objectivity into the realm of the unknown, meeting her historical others on the terms and textual turf where she finds them: “Voices I am following lead me to the margins,” writes Howe, “[i]n order to hear them I have returned by strange paths to a particular place at a particular time, a threshold at the austere reach of the book” (Birth-mark 2, 4). For Howe the margin is quite literally a textual margin as well as a conceptual space on the edges of the dominant culture, for it is in the marginalia, what is written in the blank spaces of a text, that she finds traces of the voices that have been exiled from the privileged, centralized content. According to Peter Quartermain, Howe “treads borders, boundaries, dividing lines, edges, invisible meeting points. Her language returns to such cusps again and again, for they mark extremities, turning points, limits, shifts, the nameless edge of mystery where transformations occur and where edge becomes center” (186). This kind of transformation seems to occur within Howe herself as well as in language. She allows herself to become infused with the other, so that she writes in “Thorow,” as if addressing Thoreau, whose journals her poem is a reading of, “You are of me & I of you, I cannot tell / Where you leave off and I begin” (Singularities 58).

Not only does the historical other assume a subject rather than object position in Howe's writing, but so does her reader, who is invited to actively participate in the production of meaning. And this is what many of her readers find so pleasurable about her work. For instance, Bruce Andrews has commended Howe for not addressing her readers from the position of a “sovereign absent-one” in order to “guarantee a smoothed, anti-social address,” by turning the reader into a consumer. Instead, Andrews finds “a multiplicity of social intersections” in Howe's writing (69). Howe is in dialogue with both the present reader and the past, so that, in Certeau's terms, “[a] hierarchy of knowledges is replaced by a mutual differentiation of subjects” (Heterologies 217). Howe's writing restores ambiguity between all the oppositions that serve to enforce the perceived opposition between the “textual” and “the real”: subject and object, the actual and the imaginary, theory and practice, the past and the present. By taking this dialogic approach, Howe avoids the equally limited and limiting traps of both positivism and relativism. For neither does she claim to tell the whole story or history and to do it without bias, and nor does she allow that the “truth” of history is wholly arbitrary or detached from the social scenes of its (ongoing) construction.

My argument, as I have said, is that Susan Howe's poetic-historical project involves a deconstruction of the opposition textuality-reality on which most conventional historiography depends, and that, in turn, this deconstruction is a defining feature of the language-oriented feminist epistemology on which her project rests. Jerome McGann's insistence that “we must reconceive of the literary ‘text’ as the literary ‘work,’ i.e. as a related series of concretely determinable semiotic events that embody and represent processes of social and historical experience” offers a model of literary representation according to which such a deconstruction is not only possible, but inevitable (BI 10). McGann claims that while all literary texts are in this way performative rather than referential, it is in poetic texts that the incommensurability of the heuristic isolates, lived realities, differences, and changing truths that comprise social reality is most apparent. “The poetic work is a nexus of reciprocating expectations and intersections between the various persons engaged over and within the poetic event. Criticism, therefore, has to explain the way those communicative resources operate” (SVPA 85-86).¹⁸ Howe's poetry itself reciprocates and intersects with McGann's ideas, and gives them a peculiar feminist twist in her poetic-critical writing: her poetry attempts the critical function of “reading” history and historical texts by performing the incommensurability of historical reality, a reality comprised of “competing human interests by which meaning is constituted” (McGann, SVPA 72).

What makes Howe's language-oriented epistemology, already so accurately theorized by McGann, also a feminist epistemology is that she highlights in much of her work the operations of gender in the constitution of meaning, and in the competing human interests that go into the making of the past. So, Howe's focus on the material, textual dimensions of history allows her to explore “how history operates as a site of the production of gender knowledge” (J. Scott 10). Such an analysis depends on a deconstruction of the textual-real binary opposition in all its guises, for it rests on the assumption that “experience only exists through its conceptual organization” (56). Susan Howe's poetic project is the best example I know of what Joan Scott, herself a historian, describes as “not simply a literary technique for reading but an epistemological theory that offers a method for analyzing the processes by which meanings are made, by which we make meanings. This theory is, moreover, profoundly political in its implications for it puts conflict at the center of its analysis, assuming that hierarchy and power are inherent in the linguistic processes being analyzed” (8-9). Instead of resolving conflicts by excluding the voices that disrupt the narratives of history, Howe puts conflict at the center of her analysis, letting it take place in poems that do not pretend to master the past. But at the same time, it is Howe's McGannian conception of the literary “work” as not merely a text but a constellation of social acts that enables her to perform this kind of language-oriented analysis while avoiding the danger Scott warns against, of conflating “language,” “even when carefully defined, with ‘words,’ ‘vocabulary,’ and literal usage” (67). To Howe, the world of language and the world of the human are one, “For we are language Lost / in language” (ET 99). And language is the “Mortal particulars / whose shatter we are” (Singularities 50).

I like Andrew Schelling's choice of the term “ceremony” to describe Howe's language acts. A ceremony is an action that is performed, usually serving a social function. Similarly, in Howe's poems it is the gesture that language performs, not what it refers to, that makes language most meaningful. Howe puts language into action, drawing on the numinousness of language, its materiality, its social reality, to perform “Immediate Acts” of feminist recovery. And these are acts of love, “Love for the work's sake” (NM 23).

Notes

1. Susan Howe's books, in addition to those cited in this study, include Hinge Picture (Telephone, 1974), Chanting at the Crystal Sea (Fire Exit, 1975), The Western Borders (Tuumba, 1976), Secret History of the Dividing Line (Telephone, 1978), Cabbage Gardens (Fathom, 1979), Pythagorean Silence (Montemora, 1982), Defenestration of Prague (Kulchur, 1983), Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (Awede, 1989), and A Bibliography of the King's Book or, Eikon Basilike (Paradigm, 1989).

2. By presenting Howe's sense of the past in the context of poststructuralist and feminist theory, I do not mean to imply that she is familiar with all of the theorists I cite in this chapter or that she has developed her poetics of history according to their ideas. As the notes to many of Howe's scholarly writings attest, she has read Foucault as well as other French theorists such as Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Walter Benjamin is of great interest to Howe, as I discuss later in this chapter. But Susan Howe began writing poetry before she began reading theory, and the theorists she has since discovered to be most useful to her are those who, as Lynn Keller phrases it in her recent interview with Howe, “have provided a kind of space for” the work Howe herself was already undertaking (“An Interview” by Keller 29).

3. In The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading, deconstructionist Barbara Johnson argues that all such binary oppositions, including the opposition man-woman, are inherently hierarchical. Relevant to my reading of Howe's poetry is Johnson's view that one term in a binary opposition is always privileged, but that this apparent primacy of one term depends on “a binary difference that is … an illusion. … The differences between entities … are shown to be based on a representation of differences within entities, ways in which an entity differs from itself” (xi).

4. McGann claims that “from the point of view of science and philosophy, truth may be measured in one of two ways.” He goes on to quote Hilary Putnam in defining these ways as the correspondence theory of truth, according to which “truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things”; and the coherence theory of truth, according to which truth “is some sort of ideal coherence of our beliefs with each other and with our experiences … and not correspondence with mind-independent or discourse-independent ‘states of affairs.’” McGann finds that both theories “equally posit an ideal of part-to-whole orderliness” (Towards 5-6).

5. For a variety of such theories, see Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, Margaret Homans' Women Writers and Poetic Identity, Trinh T. Minh-ha's When the Moon Waxes Red, and Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak's In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics.

6. Joan Scott takes as her starting point Foucault's idea that gender is produced in discourse and that discourses on sexuality, in turn, sustain power relations according to which gender hierarchies are created and legitimized. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault claims that “[w]hat is at issue,” in determining the relationship between power and sexuality, “… is the overall ‘discursive fact,’ the way in which sex is ‘put into discourse’” (11). Scott agrees, arguing that “gender is a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated” and not an essential, biological category (95). Therefore she believes that “we cannot write women into history … unless we are willing to entertain the notion that history as a unified story was a fiction about a universal subject whose universality was achieved through implicit processes of differentiation, marginalization, and exclusion” (197). It seems to me that Susan Howe is more than willing to entertain this notion in her poetry that seeks to undo these exclusions.

7. Byrd's public account of this same expedition bears the title The History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina. The Heath Anthology of American Literature describes the differences between Byrd's public and private accounts: “instead of depicting public events, The Secret History narrates the private exploits of the surveyors. While the public history offers ‘an account of the good’ the team did, this history offers what one ‘smart lass’ they meet suggests be told as well, ‘an account of the evil’” (Lauter 541).

8. As Howe is very aware, The Gospel According to St. John is both of unknown authorship and not the work of any one author. An untraceable history of revisions, additions, deletions, and variants comprise the text. Each modification took place in a particular circumstance of power relations, so, in keeping with Foucault's idea that regimes of truth do not exist a priori or independently of the social discourses in which they operate, no single or fixed regime of truth can be identified as having more or less control than any other such regime over Mary's presence (or lack thereof) in the Gospel.

9. Foucault rejects the idea that “at the root of what we know and what we are” lies some deep, essential meaning such as “truth or being,” believing this to be a normalizing notion that supports oppressive thought systems (such as the notion that gender differences are essential, natural, fixed) and allows “regimes of truth” to enforce their laws in discourse (“Nietzsche” 81). In contrast, Foucault claims that “What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity” (“Nietzsche” 79). Foucault therefore encourages historians to forego the search for origins and instead practice “genealogy.”

10. Hayden White's analysis of the operations and effects of narrative in historical representation is helpful here. White claims that narrative serves a legitimizing, moralizing function by imposing an order and coherence on events that we associate with “truth.” Narrative closure, in particular, serves this moralizing impulse: “The value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary” (The Content of the Form 24). In Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, White explains that “Providing the ‘meaning’ of a story by identifying the kind of story that has been told is called explanation by emplotment. … Emplotment is the way by which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind” (7). White relies on Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism in his identification of four major modes of emplotment: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire. For White, the most significant problem with emplotting historical events into familiar narrative forms is not that history is thereby somehow falsified—for he believes that historical reality is always already figurative—but rather, that in the process of making historical events understandable, narrative dispels the “very strangeness of the original” events it recounts, what he calls “the dynamic and disruptive forces in contemporary life” (Tropics of Discourse 50, 88).

11. In his introduction to American Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, Harrison T. Meserole explains that “Whatever their genealogy (there was some conjecture that the Indians might have been descendants of one of the biblical Lost Tribes), the Indians assumed diabolical dimensions during the brutal King Philip's War of 1675-76. Their image in verse was then ‘Scare-crows clad with oaken leaves … Like Vulcans anvilling New Englands brains’” [sic] (xx). According to Cecelia Tichi, the Indians were often “regarded as a going indication of God's disposition toward the tribe whose mettle was being tested” in Puritan historiography (63).

12. Stella Johnson lived most of her life in Ireland near Swift, and Susan Howe's mother was born in Ireland. Howe herself has spent a great deal of time there and considers her Irish heritage to be an important component of her identity.

13. McGann takes as the starting point for his “recovered” concept of referentiality the method of an historian, Milman Parry. Parry chose to represent the past as “a picture of great detail.” But McGann faults Parry's representations with falling short of accurately representing the truth of the past because “when he actually made the picture for his audience, the layers and intervenient distances tended to disappear.” Susan Howe is not guilty of “this blurring of the palimpsest” (“Introduction” 11).

14. Here I rely on Foucault's theory that the operations of power are most apparent on the level of the local, minute, particular—especially the body. For an excellent explication of Foucault's analysis of the “microphysics” of power, see Lois McNay's Foucault: A Critical Introduction.

15. Here Howe is quoting loosely from Arendt's introduction to Benjamin's Illuminations (11).

16. In “The Honeyed Knot of Puritan Aesthetics,” Michael Clark explains how the scripturalism of the Reformation “led the Puritans to value language—especially but not only that of the Bible—as a significant domain in itself independent of the supplementary, interpretive connection to the world that Calvin described” (71).

17. For Howe's comments on the visual dimension of her poetry, see Lynn Keller's “An Interview with Susan Howe” and Janet Falon's interview, “Speaking with Susan Howe.”

18. How McGann distinguishes, then, between poetic texts and texts in general is not entirely clear. As elucidating of Howe's poetics as I find McGann's theory, I do share Michael Fischer's uneasiness with what he calls in his review of Social Values and Poetic Acts “McGann's essentialist talk of ‘the poetic’ …” in which “‘poetry’ or ‘poetic discourse’ seems static, defined (by McGann) once and for all” (36-37).