SOURCE: Nicholls, Peter. “‘The Pastness of Landscape’: Susan Howe's Pierce-Arrow.” Contemporary Literature 43, no. 3 (fall 2002): 441-60.

It is appropriate that the first word of this “profound memory poem,” as Marjorie Perloff calls it, should be “constellations,” since the word's astrological connotations combine ideas of divination and destiny, of knowledge and inscrutability, which are deep-moving forces in Susan Howe's Pierce-Arrow.¹ As so often with Howe's work, the spatial implications of, say, a constellation seem to provide a better model for a poem which, especially in its first two main sections, exhibits a startling multifariousness of theme and allusion. At the same time, Pierce-Arrow recalls us to Howe's persistent concern with the opacities of personal and historical memory, but it does so by thematizing the limits to understanding in ways that deliberately invite comparison with the figural and ethical dilemmas of a philosophical Romanticism. This “memory poem” might seem, in fact, to conjure with the uncertain nature of sublimity, with its sense of (in Thomas Weiskel's words) “the inexplicable passage between one order of discourse and another” and its recognition that “there can be no sublime moment without the implicit, dialectical endorsement of human limitations” (Weiskel 17, 44).

The book's title alone indicates something of the ever-expanding network of associations and connections that Howe invokes. Pierce-Arrow: a luxury motor car that had its greatest success in the twenties (Amy Lowell brought her maroon one to London, along with a liveried chauffeur [Carpenter 252], while for Jean Toomer the car's “living beauty of line” made it the very emblem of modernity [20]). The company had its base in Howe's hometown, Buffalo, and the back cover of Pierce-Arrow shows the author posed against the now disused factory there. This image closes a temporal loop opened by the book's front cover photograph of Howe aged eleven playing the part of Astyanax in The Trojan Women (“Cold rushes little feet acting out” [27]). A further set of associations cluster around these autobiographical allusions. References to Homer and Euripides throughout the volume evoke the violence of ancient Greece, with its “Iliadic heroism” (26) which leaves so many grieving women in its wake. This “Ramping brute force” (29), echoed in the brutality of World War I (predicted by another of the poem's protagonists, Charles S. Peirce [24]) and in the arrogant luxury of the Pierce-Arrow, is here encompassed by a poetics of loss and remembrance which counters “progress” and restlessly interrogates the nature of human temporality. For the arrow is also “Zeno's flying arrow” (16), which for Howe exemplifies a fundamentally discontinuous temporality: “If the present is connected to the past by a series of infinitesimal steps (The Law of Mind) a past cannot be wholly past” (16).² Such a temporality also throws up curious conjunctions: Charles S. Peirce, it happens, lived on Arrow Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a time, and Joseph Brent opens his biography of Peirce with this sentence: “We are pierced by time's barbed arrow, and from that irresistible outward clash we know that our universe is irreversible” (1). But for Howe, as we know from her earlier work, poetry is itself a kind of figure for temporal reversibility, and “a past cannot be wholly past.” Her sense of the arrow's impact therefore far exceeds Brent's conventional poeticism, making the wound one of deep loss and desolation (“Antigone bears her secret in / her heart like an arrow …” [143]). Yet while there may be “arrows to / pierce dust and surf” (104), to what degree can we truly “pierce” the past, which seems peopled by “retreating figure[s]” (106, 144) whose faces are averted from us, denying us the immediacy of knowledge we feel compelled to seek? The question in its simplest terms is one that Howe has confronted in much of her work, but in Pierce-Arrow it is asked with an intensity of feeling that links the pain of personal loss to the poet's usual skepticism about the nature of historical knowledge.³

As in some of Howe's other works, we begin with prose. The first section of “Arisbe” (named for Peirce's house) offers numerous perspectives on the logician's life and work, presenting him as a figure marginalized and undervalued in his time.⁴ Peirce, knocking fruitlessly at “academic portals” (51) and living in “semi-isolation” (90), echoes the plight of other Victorian writers in their old age (Algernon Charles Swinburne in “Putney semi-isolation” [91], for example). The biographical emphasis here is complicated by the continuing uncertainty about the origins and identity of Peirce's second wife, Juliette. She may have had a Romany background which, for Howe, means that she, too, led a marginal existence (“Whatever Juliette's age or her surname the couple made sure it remained a secret” [10]). Juliette would live on in poverty and isolation for another eleven years after Peirce's death in 1914. “Arisbe” now moves into verse, abruptly shifting the focus to ancient Greece. Remote though this world may be, it yields “another situation / of unstable identity” (26); at least Juliette's grief is mirrored in Hecuba's lament for the death of her two sons, Polydorus and Hector (26), the text weaving together episodes from Euripides' Hecuba and The Trojan Women.⁵ There follows a rapid and bloody excursus into “Iliadic heroism,” as “Hector tumbles / in the dust” (27) and Achilles' friend Patroclus is slain by “running war god brute Apollo” (28). The death of Astyanax, son of Hector and Andromache, adds another body to the pile of corpses (“Let him down gently …”), but not until much later in the poem will Andromache be able to voice her loss and “cry out in / winged words” (90).⁶

There will be “other archaic Greek messages” (42) in Pierce-Arrow, but as we move into the second section of the poem, “The Leisure of the Theory Class,” the tone is lighter and more playful, as the ironic titling predicts. One strand of this section seems clear enough, exploring themes familiar from Howe's other work: drawing on various memoirs, she records the last days of several major Victorian writers—George Meredith, Thomas Love Peacock, Swinburne, and Theodore Watts-Dunton—combining anecdotal, often comic detail with her customary fascination with the material forms of writing.⁷ Bibliophilia is rampant here, with one collector, “Mr. Edward Brooks / of Minneapolis” (120), searching out pens and pencils used by the great, and Howe seeming continually to probe the relation between human finitude and the afterlife of the written text. The element of pathos, however, is leavened by the defiant spirit of these writers in their final years, as, for example, in Peacock's “By the / immortal Gods I will not move” (61) and Swinburne's unrepentant atheism (54). Yet ultimately it is Peirce who becomes the very type of the marginalized artist, deprived of support and recognition, yet confronting general indifference with undiminished resolve. Howe is especially interested in the “unofficial” Peirce as she discovers him in the huge, neglected manuscript collection in the Houghton Library, the Peirce, that is, whose papers frequently have an unexpectedly graphic and comic quality. It is in the materiality of these inscriptions and images that she sees Peirce's logic somehow approaching the condition of poetry: “all his / handwriting to me shows / logic of this poetic tradition” (102). Elsewhere, Howe has suggested that “Peirce was trying both to get at something beyond reason and to diagram the logical structure of reality. … Many of his logical graphs, and also his calculations, are like poems” (Howe and Swensen 379). Pierce-Arrow includes reproductions of some of these manuscript pages, and certainly they show a side of Peirce one probably would not have discerned before. At the same time, Howe's allusions to his theories are lapidary and often difficult to construe, and she seems generally less interested in Peirce as a logician than as a kind of phenomenologist: “Phenomenology asks what are the elements of appearance. In my nature (cross out with) it is a sort of instinct toward (slash to) a solid (cross out visible) instinctive attraction for living facts” (14). As in the Swinburne manuscript pages reproduced in Pierce-Arrow, the deletions and corrections emphasize the temporality of writing, making it a “living fact” rather than a dead letter.

The thematization of “appearance,” however, also emphasizes Peirce's commitment to philosophical realism and his insistence that, as Howe puts it, “There are realities / independent of thought” (59).⁸ Peirce defines this realism in characteristically triadic form, in the categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Firstness he describes as “the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else” (“Letters to Lady Welby” 385). It is, he adds, something “absolutely simple,” or experience “prior to thought.”⁹ Secondness, says Peirce, is the domain of “the Brute Actuality of things and facts. I am confident that their Being consists in reactions against Brute forces” (“A Neglected Argument” 359). Thirdness is the category of mediation: “any mentality,” says Peirce, “involves thirdness” (“Letters to Lady Welby” 388). Of these categories, it would appear to be that of Secondness that primarily interests Howe. Peirce, she says, “calls secondness all naked feeling and raw life. Originality is in being such as thus this being is” (14). While Firstness can never be conceptually grasped, the category of Secondness is that of “struggle and resistance,” of “the hard efficient causation of brute fact, as contrasted with the ideal final causation of the spirit” (Stearns 201).¹⁰ “By secondness Peirce indicates the materiality that persists beyond any attempt to conceptualize it. Secondness, in other words, is what resists …” (Cornell 1).¹¹ The “Iliadic” conflicts evoked in “Arisbe” thus seem to dramatize almost literally Peirce's notion of resistance and “Brute Actuality”: “Actuality is something brute / Unspelled Firstness is first” (29). In a similar vein, Peirce remarks that “Generally speaking genuine secondness consists in one thing acting upon another, brute action” (“Letters to Lady Welby” 385). This is the realm of existence and of death; as Drucilla Cornell observes, “we may know secondness only indirectly, for example, in the death of a friend or lover, but the indirectness of this knowledge does not diminish the force of its impact” (1).

Here, I think, we may begin to understand the profound ambivalence of Pierce-Arrow as the poem explores in its various ways the nature of grief and loss. Howe's mythic materials frequently exhibit a “dread pull” toward a “determinist” sense of “actual brute / predestined fact” (129), and this seems, initially, one lesson to be learned from the story of Tristan and Iseult. But several pages later Howe suggests that “There is a way back to the / misinterpretation of her / message TheseusTristan is / on the ship AegeusIseut / is a land watcher” (137). In the other myth, Theseus forgets to change his black sails on his return to Greece and his father Aegeus, believing his son dead, leaps to his own death. In weaving together the two stories, Howe may be suggesting that it is not fate that is at issue here, but rather error and accident (“misinterpretation”), a possibility that resonates with Peirce's “tychism” and his construal of natural laws as contingent and habitual rather than as predetermined.¹² The sea journey that ends in separation thus provides a powerful motif with which to explore the nature of division and loss, echoing as it does the oceanic tropes of poems such as Swinburne's “A Leave-taking,” “The Triumph of Time” (“But now, you are twain, you are cloven apart” [1: 37]), and, of course, Tristram of Lyonesse, which moves with the sound of the sea and “the ebb and flow of dying death and life” (2: 5). That motion, that “Love refrain of wind and / sea” (54), is unconstrained and unpredictable: “in spirit Tristram / is ecstatic song if / printed and confined / Love's sail is black.” The song seems to escape its “confinement” even as its fixing in print is the precondition of its existence and afterlife, and it is this kind of paradox that throughout Pierce-Arrow gestures toward some kind of intermediary or liminal language which might allow us to remember people and events from the past while fully reckoning with their absence. “It is strange,” Howe writes in “Either Either,” “how the dead appear in dreams where another space provides our living space as well. Another language, another way of speaking so quietly always there in the shape of memories, thoughts, feelings, which are extra-marginal, outside of primary consciousness, yet must be classed as some sort of unawakened finite infinite articulation” (111). What we experience is not, of course, the past itself, but, as Angelika Rauch puts it, “an unknowable scenario of the past which resonates in the present situation” (51). Howe's work, we might say, is caught up in a tension between the memory of a past which, as she says in Pythagorean Silence, “never stops hurting” (26) and its belated inscription in a language somehow disfigured by it (“It involves a fracturing of discourse, a stammering even. Interruption and hesitation used as a force. A recognition that there is an other voice, an attempt to hear and speak it. It's this brokenness that interests me “[Howe, “Encloser” 192]).¹³

It is this sense of “belatedness” and its implications for any account of how we might “know” the past that informs the last and finest section of Pierce-Arrow. Of the three poems that make up the volume, the darkly beautiful “Rückenfigur” is the most purely elegiac, recalling the death of Tristan (“love's sail is black” [54]) and “Orpheus grief stricken over / the loss of Eurydice” (132).¹⁴ As we might expect from the references to the Orpheus story, “Rückenfigur” is much preoccupied with weighing the risks and responsibilities of looking back. Interestingly, it seems that Howe composed this final section first, so in a curious way the first two sections are also a looking back to what will later be the end (Howe, “Letter”). The German word Rückenfigur (back figure) is an art historical term applied to staffage in painting which turns away from the viewer. It has been used most notably in relation to the many averted figures in the work of Caspar David Friedrich.¹⁵

In a study that seems to have provided important source material for “Rückenfigur,” Joseph Leo Koerner has analyzed Friedrich's art in terms of its capacity to make “the whole of represented nature … appear as the picture of the artist's inner experience of self and world” (74). Koerner is concerned with the ways in which Friedrich complicates the Romantic presentation of landscape as “an interiorized self-portrait of the artist” through his use of the Rückenfigur to create in the viewer a curious sense of belatedness and estrangement, of “both our identification with, and our isolation from, the painted landscape” (217). The presence of such figures makes our own experience of the scene both secondary and partial: “What we saw becomes what they had already been seeing in a past long before our arrival” (233), and their presence has the effect of blocking our view, the landscape thus yielding not a “view” but rather “the obstruction of view” (116). The original experience is veiled, as the figure's “face turns from us, and his gaze, the painting's origin, lies hidden. What we see is the artist in the landscape of a remembered Erlebnis” (192). Friedrich's use of the device, says Koerner, testifies to “an awareness that experience is constituted retrospectively, as always only a landscape of memory” (240). As Angelika Rauch has argued in a different context:

The text's memory hinges on the figurality of language which serves as a vehicle, a mnemonic device, by which the subject is figuratively transposed into his own past, in the representations which occur to him when he reads the text. As feelings are a sign of memory and refer us, unconsciously to the past, we can say that understanding is motivated by the past preserved in imagination and enacted in the signification of a text, in how the text signifies something for us.

(166)

The sense of “our own lateness” in the landscape, as Koerner puts it (233), opens a perspective on all our experience, reminding us not only that our present tense is closely entwined with our past, but also that the past we seem to remember may be something we have never experienced at all. The strong sense of déjà vu generated by Friedrich's images produces “nostalgia for a place I have never visited” (234); Ernst Bloch, in his account of déjà vu, speaks similarly of “the reliving of an experience that has never been lived through before” (201).

This version of Freud's Nachträglichkeit or “deferred action,” with its emphasis on a kind of doubled or divided temporality, has, of course, an initially problematic relation to the “simultaneous” art of landscape painting. Yet as Alice Kuzniar has observed, Goethe emphasized the Romantic artist's sense of the past and his ability “to depict temporality” (“Vanishing Canvas” 359). Koerner translates the relevant passage from Goethe's Maxims and Reflections as follows: “What is called ‘romantic’ in a landscape is a silent sense of the sublime in the form of the past, which is to say, of solitude, of absence, of seclusion” (234).¹⁶ In Kuzniar's words, Romantic landscape painting thus “signifies both the transience of the corporeal world as well as its own vain hopes of ever recapturing an immediacy now lost” (359). Koerner puts it like this: “what still commands our attention in the afterimage of that experience, is both an uncertain intimation of death through the absence or loss of vision, and a desire to find in nature the vehicles, signs and images of transcendence, and penetrate thereby into the fog, into another life, into the reflective surface of the canvas” (93). Goethe's way of defining the sublimity of painting through its sense of what Koerner calls, in a phrase borrowed by Howe (133), “the pastness of landscape” (251) aptly characterizes the profound ambivalence of this art whose scenes articulate a desire at once self-consciously bounded by mortality and yet at the same time galvanized by the dream of a transcendence it can never quite achieve (“by pointing to infinity the landscape expresses longing and imparts a sense of temporality” [Kuzniar, “Vanishing Canvas” 373]). Here we encounter central features of Romanticism, as, for example, its oscillation between ambition and failure, its sense of the fragmentary and of the unattainability of the whole (Koerner 185-86), and its fascination with chaos and ruins as exemplary forms of the artistic work.

I have spoken at some length of Koerner's work on Friedrich not just in order to illuminate a “hidden” source (though Howe's use of this volume is rather different from her handling of attributed quotation and allusion elsewhere in Pierce-Arrow), but because its approach to Romantic art resonates so strikingly with the aims and preoccupations of Howe's poem. Take the following lines from “Rückenfigur” which seem to “write through” passages from Koerner's text:

Lean on handrail river below
Sense of depth focus motion
of chaos in Schlegel only as
visual progress into depth its
harsh curb estrangement logic
Realism still exists is part
of the realist dual hypothesis
Dual on verso as one who has
obeyed acceleration velocity
killing frost regenerative thaw
you other rowing forward face
backward Hesperides messenger
into the pastness of landscape
inarticulate scrawl awash air

(133)

It is with a slight feeling of guilt that I shall gloss this passage, partly because Howe has no manifest intention of directing us to her source here, but also because the lines she generates from it need no external prop to guarantee their effectiveness.¹⁷ At the same time, though, their fragmentary allusions to aspects of a Romantic aesthetic cast sufficient light on the poem as a whole to make exegesis hard to resist.¹⁸ For example, the first five lines of the passage collage phrases taken from Koerner's discussion of Friedrich's Augustus Bridge in Dresden (c. 1830) which remarks “the foreground pavement and handrail, the river that flows below, the Augustus Bridge with its arched piers, the row of intermittent trees, the ridge of hills and the sky's stripes of light and clouds” (114; emphasis added). Howe connects the “motion” of the waters with Koerner's earlier reference to Schlegel's contention that “We are potential, chaotic organic beings” (101), a notion of chaos that Koerner associates with the effect on the viewer of Friedrich's ambiguous handling of space: “Trapped within a play between proximity and distance, familiarity and estrangement, presence and absence, the microscopic and the colossal, we ourselves become discontinuous, able neither to enter into the represented world, nor to observe it as a whole, from some standpoint sub specie aeternitatis” (101; first emphasis added).¹⁹

In contrast to neoclassical landscape painters such as Claude who “ease the eye into depth,” Friedrich “foils our visual progress into depth by setting between us and the horizon a band running parallel to the picture plane and across the whole visual field” (114; emphases added). Such devices “curb” our movement into the background of the image, leaving us with a powerful sense of isolation and abandonment (“A similar logic is at work” in other paintings [118; emphasis added]). To “curb” the desire for transcendence is “harsh,” though it also means that “Realism still exists,” and that there is some kind of balance between the real and the transcendent. Koerner's discussion goes on to compare Wordsworth's Romanticism with that of Friedrich (his “art comes closest to the art of Friedrich in its genuinely dual emphasis on the radical specificity of nature, and on the constitutive role of an intervening subjectivity” [183; emphasis added]). This duality places us at some kind of turning point (or turning of the page: “verso”), just as in Friedrich's Early Snow the painter “fuses temporal extremes”: “The coming of winter may be the beginning of spring and the killing frost could just as well be a regenerative thaw (160; emphases added). Such pivotal moments punctuate Wordsworth's The Prelude, and none more memorably, perhaps, than that of the “stolen boat” episode, where the boy “gazes toward what he thinks are the limits of his world, rowing forward, yet facing back. This reversed gaze (Rücksicht) yields a deeper reversal. Something rises up from the bounds of the boy's horizon faster than he can row …” (238; emphases added). The mountain suddenly seems to gaze at the boy, and in his terror he can only turn back.

This figure of turning (the) back seems thus to denote the apprehension of some kind of limit: “this is what enables the viewer to identify with the Rückenfigur … : not an erasure of the boundary between self and world, but the establishment of boundary” (213). It is “the pastness of landscape” which, pointing to “the absence of what it depicts” (Kuzniar, “Vanishing Canvas” 359), makes of this boundary a potent sign of temporal disjunction. Or perhaps not so much a “sign” as a hieroglyph, an “inarticulate scrawl” which, like the words of the “messenger,” here associated with the Hesperides (daughters of Night and Erebus), is cast in permanent shadow. But we have not let go of that “handrail” yet, nor shall we overleap it. For Friedrich's Romantic vision is haunted by “visual barriers” (83) and gaps which prevent our “visual progress into depth” or any “access to an illumined, hopeful distance” (Kuzniar, “Temporality” 85). Howe evokes precisely this sense of division and blockage in the second section of Pierce-Arrow:

Barrier of trees a
darkened wood Evening
retreating figure

(106)²⁰

In Friedrich's Evening, the trees impose themselves between the viewer and an unearthly iridescence which lights the horizon. There are spaces between the thin trunks of the trees, but we cannot make our way through them because somehow the presence of the two Rückenfiguren (two, not one) has forestalled our attempt.

We might ask whether this kind of “blockage” and constraint yields only a kind of fatalism, which it might seem to do when compared with, say, Emersonian Romanticism. “Nature,” for example, famously opens:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?

(7)

Yet for Friedrich—and this is surely the attraction of his work for Howe—the temporality of art and the forms of perception it instigates make the “retrospective” view integral to experience itself, pitting the various forms of textual mediation against the nostalgia for some unattainable “original” relation—hence that imbrication of art and philosophy that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (12) discern in German Romanticism and Koerner (95) finds in Friedrich's work. Hence, too, the preoccupation in Pierce-Arrow, as throughout Howe's oeuvre, with writing, calligraphy, the materiality of manuscripts, and the problematic status of the “original.” With our progress into the sublimity of painterly “depth” tantalizingly blocked or “curbed,” the artistic medium, which should be our means of “passage” or transport, seems to turn its back on us, becoming the material “boundary” which entraps us even while allowing the only—unoriginal—relation we can have to the past.²¹ This barrier or blockage (an “icy limit” [134]) marks the essential separateness of the viewer, the Rückenfigur thus providing not a site of identification and mediation, but something quite the opposite, as Koerner observes: “The viewer's ability ‘to think himself into’ the Rückenfigur's place becomes the very instance of separation” (213). So the “pastness of landscape” is, we might say, the condition which Howe explores to discern the limits of elegiac emotion. In the first poem of “Rückenfigur,” the story of Tristan and Iseult tells of “Your soul your separation” (129), and in the remainder of the sequence we find that while “Separation requires an / other quest for union” (136), that quest is ultimately doomed to failure: we are left, in a poignant phrase, with “Ysolt's single vision of union” (143).

This is not, of course, a failure that can easily be accepted; as Howe remarks in “Ether Either,” “when souls are separated the atmosphere becomes electrical anxiety” (111), and the play with disguise and doubling in the story of Tristan (“two Iseults,” etcetera [131]) expresses a desire to see “single vision twin soul half” (137).²² Yet it is ultimately the achievement of “Rückenfigur” to grasp separation as the very condition of lyric poetry, and in the closing lines we read:

I have loved come veiling
Lyrist come veil come lure
echo remnant sentence spar
never never form wherefor
Wait some recognition you
Lyric over us love unclothe
Never forever whoso move

(144)

“Lyric” thus acknowledges separation but at the same time affords some protection (“over us”). It will not allow us to “pierce” the veil and rediscover union, but instead of positive knowledge it allows “echo” and “remnant” to emerge from the sounding board of memory (“How do sounds speak to memory?” [Howe, “Either Either” 119]). In the intricate play of echoes and lexical “remnants” in these lines, we may detect the fullest realization of Howe's own version of Peirce's Secondness, as phonic and rhythmic effects are deployed to express a comparable sense of nonconceptualizable materiality—the matter of memory, which is always partially veiled and known only indirectly as it retreats from us. The injunction to “Wait some recognition” is coupled with a sense of phantasmal presence and dispersal, as Howe weaves together a complex mesh of /o/ and /v/ sounds that creates a shimmering uncertainty around “never” and “for(ever),” so that, for example, we hear “whosoever” even though we do not actually read it.

Here we can understand the relevance to “Rückenfigur” of the myth of Orpheus and the “retreating figure” of Eurydice, for, as Maurice Blanchot puts it, “Writing begins with Orpheus's gaze” (176). “He loses Eurydice because he desires her beyond the measured limits of the song, and he loses himself, but this desire, and Eurydice lost, and Orpheus dispersed are necessary to the song, just as the ordeal of eternal inertia is necessary to the work” (Space 173).²³ And again: “the work's demand is this: that Orpheus look back. That suddenly, desire should wreck everything” (14); we are left, says Blanchot, with a relation that “is not [one of] cognition, but of recognition, and this recognition ruins in me the power of knowing, the right to grasp” (31). Howe's injunction to “Wait some recognition” rather than accept some easily grasped “form” seems similarly weighted. In each case, in Blanchot's words, “art is linked … to what is ‘outside’ the world” (75), and so “The act of haunting is not the unreal visitation of the ideal: what haunts us is the inaccessible which one cannot rid oneself of, what one does not find, and what, because of that, does not allow one to escape it. The ungraspable is what one does not escape” (Gaze 84).

This idea of writing being bound to some kind of “other” which it can never fully express seems relevant indeed to Howe's “Rückenfigur,” with its articulation of blocked desire. Glossing Blanchot's account, Jean-François Lyotard emphasizes the destructive effect of the Orphic gaze:

[T]he artist did not plunge into the night to put himself in a condition to compose a harmonious song, to reconcile night and day, to become renowned for his art. He went in search of the figural agency, the “other” of his very work, the unseeable or death itself. The artist is one in whom the desire to see death even at the price of dying is stronger than his desire to create. We must stop looking at the problem of art in terms of creation.

(142)

Howe's “Not look back oh I would” (35), its implied circularity reflecting the curve of the pivotal “oh,” expresses not only the desire to look back but also the acknowledgment that the turn (or trope) will entail the destruction or veiling of the loved object. The figure whose face cannot be seen (Eurydice as Rückenfigur) is as resistant to meaning as the figural quality of writing which, according to Lyotard, “borrows operations from a realm of the signifier that is different from that of the language of communication. This enables it to oppose a certain density to the commentary, comparable with that of a painting or carving, in this respect at least” (135). Pierce-Arrow employs devices familiar from Howe's other work to obtain this figural “density”: the jammed, verbless line, for example (“ruin garland effigy figment / sensible nature blue silver” [142]), the loosely determined first person (“Assuredly I see division / can never be weighed” [134]), and the subjectless verb (“Saw the mind otherwise / in thought or other sign” [135]). But since “Rückenfigur” is, like Friedrich's art, thematically and formally concerned with barriers and gaps, Howe also subjects her short three- or four-stressed lines to abrupt internal divisions that pit emphatic caesuras against the forward drive of enjambment: “His name of grief being / red sound to sense sense / in place of the slaying” (135) and

Blind flight do we win
at last trusting to mad
strife in blindness not
holding to be mortal in
afterlife with arrows to
pierce dust and surf …

(104)

Not quite in the deliberately. “stuttering” manner of some of Howe's earlier work, this writing creates rhythmic figures which phonically and syntactically parallel the “visual barriers” deployed in Friedrich's landscapes.²⁴ There is a stylized holding back, an almost ritual vacillation which acknowledges some outer constraint on expression and the movement of memory that the writing itself seems to accept and internalize as the very condition of elegiac speech.²⁵ It seems to me that it is this recognition, that the past has, as it were, its back turned toward us, that lies at the core of Pierce-Arrow. If this is indeed a “profound memory poem,” in Marjorie Perloff's phrase, it is one because, paradoxically, Howe reckons with the impossibility of any “passage into depth” even as she finds in poetry a means of expressing an undiminished desire for one.

Notes

1. Marjorie Perloff is quoted from the dust jacket of Pierce-Arrow. Howe may also echo Adorno's use of the word “constellation” (see Adorno 162-63). The poem beginning “Constellations” appears below the dedication “For David” in the preliminary pages of the book.

2. Zeno's paradox was intended to deny the possibility of motion. See, for example, Copleston: “The Eleatics, then, deny the reality of multiplicity and motion. There is one principle, Being, which is conceived of as material and motionless. They do not deny, of course, that we sense motion and multiplicity, but they declare that what we sense is illusion: it is mere appearance. True being is to be found, not by sense but by thought, and thought shows that there can be no plurality, no movement, no change” (76). Compare Howe, “Either Either”: “Zeno's arrow again. The philosophers of the Eleatic school see only pure illusion in spatial movement and change in general” (122). Charles S. Peirce observed that “it was an axiom for Zeno that continuity is incomprehensible, and therefore false” (qtd. in Ketner 319).

3. Howe's husband, the sculptor David von Schlegell, died in 1992. Pierce-Arrow is dedicated to his memory. For Howe's view of historical knowledge, see Nicholls, “Unsettling the Wilderness.”

4. The name “Arisbe” alludes to the Iliad, as Howe notes (16). Her source is Max Fisch, “Peirce's Arisbe” (15).

5. Hecuba opens with the dead Polydorus appearing onstage. Howe's reference to the “remnant of / Cloth” probably alludes to Agamemnon's exclamation on seeing the corpse: “A Trojan, too, I judge / by what remains of his tunic” (lines 948-49). “Hecuba and chorus address the / shield as tomb” of Astyanax (26) in The Trojan Women (lines 1156 and following).

6. Howe's emphasis on the “Ramping brute force” (29) of the Iliad might be compared with the similar emphasis of Simone Weil: “The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which men's flesh shrinks away” (3).

7. Howe's main sources here are George Meredith's letters, along with volumes of reminiscences by Lady Butcher and Clara Watts-Dunton. Howe also draws on the autobiography of bookseller Walter T. Spencer.

8. Compare Peirce, “Critical Review of Berkeley's Idealism”: “The real is that which is not whatever we happen to think it, but is unaffected by what we may think of it … [it is] independent of our thought” (80).

9. Compare Brent: “Firstness is the chaos of sense experience before it is thought about. It is original, fresh, immediate, spontaneous, and it cannot be articulately thought or asserted, since articulation implies otherness and assertion implies negation of something else” (333).

10. Isabel Stearns also observes that Firstness “signifies the thing in itself, and that primary limit to our thought which can never be conceptually grasped in its original state” (199). Is it for his corresponding attention to the flow of immediate experience that Howe introduces Edmund Husserl into the poem? She draws on Eugen Fink, collaging passages from the introduction to Sixth Cartesian Meditation (xxi-xxii) in Pierce-Arrow (112). More obscurely, she directs us to the “first three / paragraphs the Sixth / Meditation” (87) where, for example, we read, “Thus the immediate and first thing given in the phenomenological reduction is the transcendental existence [Existenz] of the egological stream of life in the full concreteness of its living present.”

11. Nicky Marsh helpfully emphasizes the application of secondness to writing: “Secondness is the naked fact of the physical sign before it has been constructed as meaningful in the mind of the interpreter. Howe's concern with ‘secondness’ becomes a meditation on the sign as object, on the sign before it is translated into the mind of the interpreter” (245).

12. Howe refers to Peirce's repudiation of Hume's conception of natural laws, noting that “Occamists frequently commit / mistakes Hume falls into / error” (58). Compare Peirce, “Laws of Nature” (308-9): “Hume falls into an error which is very characteristic of the kinds of mistake which the Ockhamists frequently commit, and particularly of their conception of laws of nature.” Hume's error is to misconstrue “single instances” as “independent ‘evidences.’”

13. See also Nicholls, “Poetics” (158-70). Rauch speaks of “the Freudian mode of representation in which nothing is cognized but only pleasurably (dis-)figured” (105).

14. Swinburne's account of the sail reads, “And she that saw looked hardly toward him back, / Saying, ‘Ay, the ship comes surely; but her sail is black’” (2:147).

15. In the letter just cited, Howe also told me that in her work for the “Either Either” essay she saw the F. W. Murnau film version of Dracula, which contains an image of a woman turned, like a Rückenfigur, and looking out to sea. She noted that Murnau was much influenced by Friedrich's paintings.

16. The sentence comes from Goethe's Art and Antiquity; see Goethe 21.

17. Fiona Green confronts the same problem in regard to the discussion of Howe's sources but concludes rather briskly that “even if her borrowings from numerous texts and idioms are not motivated by any desire on her part to send us back to them, the work done in and by Secret History of the Dividing Line cannot be properly examined without reference to the textual materials from and in relation to which it was made” (84).

18. The importance of this passage is perhaps indicated by its publication as an excerpt, “From ‘Rückenfigur,’” in 1997. This precedes the publication of the whole sequence in 1998 and suggests that the passage may have been the germ of “Rückenfigur.”

19. Koerner's own reference is to the discussion of chaos and fragmentation in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Literary Absolute (50-54; the quotation from Schlegel is on page 51). Koerner continues: “The human condition, here imagined as a purgatorial state between a lost unity, mythicized as Eden and theorized by Schiller and others as the ‘naïve,’ and an always future restoration of unity, informs the Romantic conception of order and formal coherence in art. Produced within this purgatory, the work of art must express both the chaos of its origins and the order which is its prophetic ‘potential’” (101).

20. Friedrich's Evening (c. 1821) is reproduced in Koerner 205. There are in fact two Rückenfiguren in the middle ground of the picture. Both Koerner (83, 107) and Kuzniar (“Temporality” 85, 87) speak of “barriers” and “gaps” as Friedrich's key pictorial devices.

21. See also Hertz 40-60.

22. So too “the linnet episode” in “Rückenfigur” enables another Tristan to experience “shared identity” for a moment (139). Howe is referring to François Tristan L'Hermite's seventeenth-century novel Le Page disgracié (67-68), where, she says, “the linnet's / silence provokes Tristan's je” (139) and the Page speaks for the first time in the story (“Sir, if the linnet says nothing, it is not because it is not thinking” [my translation]).

23. Compare Howe, “Sorting Facts”: “A documentary work is an attempt to recapture someone something somewhere looking back. Looking back, Orpheus was the first known documentarist: Orpheus, or Lot's wife” (332).

24. For a discussion of “stuttering” in Howe's earlier work, see Nicholls, “Unsettling the Wilderness” 597-98.

25. This mode seems particular to the preoccupations of Pierce-Arrow. Compare the noticeably more fluid movement of the short lines used in the excerpt from Howe's work-in-progress “Preterient.”

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