Susan Howe's most recent work, The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, overflows with a series of questions that beg to be turned back on Howe's own poetry. At the beginning of this text, Howe questions the reader and the figure of Anne Hutchinson whom she has reinhabited:

you. Fate flies home to the mark. Can any words restore to me how you felt?

you are straying, seeking, scattering. Was it you or is it me? Where is the stumbling block? Thoughts delivered by love are predestined to distortion by words. If experience forges conception, can quick particularities of calligraphic expression ever be converted to type? Are words children? What is the exchange value? Where does spirit go? Double yourself stammer stammer. Is there any way to proof it? Who or what survives the work? Where is the patron of the stamp?

(4)

This passage asks the reader to discover the ways that Howe's analysis of “who or what survives” in the work of past authors theorizes her own place in literary history. Two general questions emerge from this passage and provide the contextual framework for this essay: How does Susan Howe's use of Melville in “Melville's Marginalia” reveal literary history and history itself to be a series of choices that must be rethought and rewritten? What are these choices, and where do they leave Howe's work for posterity? After a brief overview of Howe's approach to history and literary posterity, I shall examine the formal characteristics and implications of her poetics of cultural intervention, her reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street,” and the larger ideological questions provoked by her poetics of recovery. Howe's “discovery” in “Melville's Marginalia” of James Clarence Mangan as the historical figure who purportedly was the source for Melville's Bartleby reveals a poetics of cultural intervention that desires to change the ways the present perceives and creates history, literature, and “lost” authors. Ultimately, I would like to suggest that Howe's poetics seeks to determine Howe's place in posterity by finding and writing Howe, the female poet, into the past and by removing the threat of historical erasure from that past.

Howe's work, in its adherence to margins and lost texts, reveals a central concern with canon formation and cultural currency. As a whole, the recuperation of lost voices in her poetry combats the notion of a fixed canon or of any canon at all. In her interview with Edward Foster, Howe remarks: “I am suspicious of the idea of a canon in the first place. Because to enter this canon a violation has usually been done to your work no matter what your gender may be. And besides, the more you go into something the more you see that the canon is only the surface, only the ghost's helmet. Not the face underneath the helmet” (28–29). In this statement, Howe clearly reveals her belief that canon formation occurs in the service of a cultural and personal ideology. For Howe there is always a figure behind the canon who wears a “helmet” and who is at war with the work itself. According to Howe, academic institutions require that an author's voice be violated and stolen, that her intentions be erased and repossessed by a figure desiring to establish its own authority.¹ Howe's conviction that canon formation forecasts the inevitable erasure of a poet's voice is thematized in “Melville's Marginalia,” appearing most forcefully in lines headed “The Laughters”:

La Bruyère Works
          harden
          into
La Bruyère, Jean de. The Works
          ridicule
of M. De la Bruyère. In Two
          Name
Volumes. The Which is Added
utterly
the Characters of Theophrastus.
          forgot
Also the Manner of Living with
                                                            DESTINY
          he costs nobody

(102)²

As this poem describes the “hardening” and reduction of La Bruyère's oeuvre into a line from a card catalog, Howe suggests that erasure will occur even if an author finds a place in history and in the canon. The underwriting and splicing of “La Bruyère, Jean de. The Works / of M. De la Bruyère” by “ridicule” points to the ways in which the idea of a canon demeans an author's words. It is, however, unclear in this poem who is laughing at whom. The vague, unauthored title “The Laughters” intimates that it may, in fact, be the poets who are laughing at the critics from an autonomous space unconfined by cultural definition. “The Laughters” poses one of the central problems that Howe examines in “Melville's Marginalia”: how the poet can inscribe herself into history, into the canon, and preserve an individual and autonomous voice, a laughter and a possession of language that refuses to allow culture to “harden” and overwrite her words.

“The Laughters” reveals a paradoxical doubleness in Howe's relationship to literary history. At the same time that Howe deprecates the erasures inherent in canonization, she desires to find a place for her work in history. She wishes both to have the assurance of posterity promised by a place in the canon and to revise the loss of voice and the marginalization that are inherent in the idea of the canon itself. In “The Laughters” and in her oeuvre as a whole, Howe invokes an ideal world where the plural intentions and voices of an author, not a reductive blanket line from a library catalog, are remembered by history. Howe displays her problematic relationship to the issue of her own posterity in her response to Janet Falon's question, “Do you want people to know your work?”:

I did when I started. Sure I did. In fact, the desire for recognition is what screwed me up in the first place. I wanted to be in the theatre and to me that meant getting the best parts. I didn't become an actress for the right reasons to say the very least. That's why I wasn't any good and very soon fell by the wayside. Then I wanted my paintings to be shown. When I gave up painting I started at square one and I was thirty-three. I was older and wiser and although of course I sent out some poems most of them were rejected and I soon stopped thinking about writing in terms of acceptance. But it would be dishonest to claim that audience doesn't matter at all. These days poets have almost no audience but if you have even six people who really look at your work, that's a help. Now I have a couple of books in print; they are hard to find, but they are in print. They exist. What if I had no book? I wonder.

(“Speaking” 32–33)

Howe's digression about her aspirations to become an actress curiously skirts the question of her place in history. In this passage, Howe states that she was unable to become an actress because she lacked the “right reasons” and the sense of a calling that would make her “good.” If this logic is transferred to the idea of a literary career, Howe envisions a world where an author's conviction of her own literary merit and her refusal to search for an audience will result in “recognition.” While this passage centers on Howe's relative anonymity, her adherence to internal standards of “goodness” distances the possibility that her work will be forgotten. The reader is returned, in this passage as in “Melville's Marginalia” as a whole, to the fact that Howe's words “are in print. They exist.” They have achieved a foothold in history because we have looked at them and witnessed their very existence. Howe's concentration on an internally determined “goodness” increases the artist's control of the afterlife of her work and distances the random uncertainty of cultural transmission. Ultimately, when Howe raises the moot question, “What if I had no book? I wonder,” she tells the reader that while a fear of erasure and an awareness of the larger social dynamics of canon formation underlie her work, her poetry works through solutions to this fear. By focusing on individual negotiations between authors and readers, it creates erasure as a past possibility that the poet can contain by having her reader accept her own version of literary history.

The title page of “Melville's Marginalia” announces the text's primary concern with eradicating the possibility of historical erasure. The title of the work is followed by an unattributed note:

March 20, 1639–40—
buried Philip Massinger
a stranger.

This opening page contains an implicit statement of the poetics of “Melville's Marginalia.” The reader is faced, in the blankness that surrounds Howe's title and this note, with the threat that words and literary stature can be reduced and written out of history. The placement of this note beneath Howe's own title implies that Howe's work is literally underwritten by the possibility that it, too, will become a “stranger” in history. The dialogue established between these two texts broaches the topic of Howe's own posterity. It suggests that “Melville's Marginalia” can be read as the poet's search through literary history to avert the potential of her own destruction. The anonymity surrounding this note, the absent citation of authorship, the question of who indeed Philip Massinger was, acts as an initial invocation to the reader. Howe refuses to assign agency to the hand that has written and underlined “a stranger,” and in this omission she implicates both the reader and herself in a collusion over the “burial” of authors. This absence also works as a tease to draw the reader into Howe's text. It asks the reader to contradict Howe and, in the act of proving that Massinger is not a “stranger” to her, to rediscover dead authors and to remove the names that time has written as “dead.”

According to Howe, a hand that could write an author into historical oblivion always exists. Somewhere, an author occupy the reader's attention. In her preface, Howe responds to Wilson Walker Cowen's theory that Elizabeth Shaw Melville erased many of her husband's marginal annotations:

Margins speak of fringes of consciousness or marginal associations. What is the shadow reflex of art I am in the margins of doubt.

(91)

In the act of titling her work “Melville's Marginalia.” Howe attempts to inscribe the “fringes of consciousness” at work on “Bartleby, the Scrivener” at the same time that she tries to preserve the freedom of “marginal associations” and the absence of definition that are inherent in margins. That this is a cultural project there can be no doubt. Margins speak of a space that has remained unwritten, new, and uncolonized. Contradictorily, they also speak of a space that fixes and immobilizes words, authors, and meaning on a page. A margin cannot exist if there is no writing on the page. If, as Howe's attention to sub-subtexts suggests, margins are the text we must read, her attention to this blank space makes cultural definition and textual dissemination the centerpiece of her own work. As a writer in the margins of the margins of the margins of Melville, Howe proposes her ability to inhabit a new poetic space. She wishes to change the definitions and the negative space surrounding the texts that have and have not achieved cultural currency. Howe's statement “What is the shadow reflex of art I am in the margins of doubt” can ultimately be seen as a recognition of the pitfalls inherent in this type of cultural poetics. First and foremost is the possibility that art and poetry will be unable to achieve posterity, to enact a “reflex” and an involuntary response in the individual reader that stays long enough to create a cultural “shadow.” Second is the possibility that the lyric “I” of the poet cannot be removed, that its movement into the margins inevitably colonizes and brings a central authoritative voice into the blank space that it wanted to remain plural and free.

While a fear that her work may be erased pervades Howe's texts, an inherent irony and assertion of the “shadow reflex” of her art lie behind her use of Massinger on the title page. The paradox of this first page is that Philip Massinger achieved renown during his lifetime and today is included in seventeenth-century studies. When Howe presents an author who has achieved literary posterity as a “stranger,” she calls attention to the construction of literary history as process. She asks that readers reexamine who we think Massinger is and the place we have given him in history. The title page raises the possibility of an author's disappearance, yet this historical removal is a surface threat that Howe easily contains. By placing a note on the death of an author beneath her own title, Howe formally broaches questions of erasure at the same time that she enacts strategies that prevent historical obsolescence and allow her own work to inhabit a place in history. The epitaph on Massinger may mask itself as a historical gap, yet beneath this potential absence Howe tells her reader that her words and her rewriting of Melville's Marginalia will stand on the pages of literary history as Massinger himself has done.

“Melville's Marginalia” ends with an evocation of Massinger that supports the argument that Howe uses the image of “a stranger” to frame her own ability to survive in history. The concluding image of Massinger gives the text a formal closure and a solidity that the surface instability of its collage strategies belies:

I put down my thoughts
Vulturism trimmed for binding
who will be interpreter
Spoke of the hearts of the poor
Light in which we were rushing
Life is so the merchant either
gains the shore both hands full
of dollars or else one day waves
wash him up on that sandbar so
what and Massinger smiled and he
said you know print settles it
Out of view of the rushing light
print is sentinel so sages say
Dollars he said and hoped they'd
have made a bed for him then he
would call whatever gaol a goal
Obedience we are subjects Susan
Scared millions and on he rushed

Here, Massinger changes from a “stranger” into a man who “smiled” and continues to live in the present literary world. Set apart from the “merchant,” from the commodity that washes up on “that sandbar,” Massinger emerges as an author whom Howe has breathed life into and transformed from a “stranger.” Howe writes at one point in the text, “my next attempt will be a Life” (142). This creation of a life is paradoxically the cultural project that “Melville's Marginalia” brings about. In this work, Howe puts herself into numerous characters who can be read as analogues for herself. By recovering the dead voices of figures like Massinger, Mangan, and Hutchinson, she narrows the questions of literary posterity to negotiations between individual authors and readers. If Massinger, as the title page argues, was once a lost author, Howe's rescue of him beneath her own title fights against the cultural forces that could make an author a “stranger” to history. The coupling of Howe's title with Massinger's recuperation suggests that the reader of “Melville's Marginalia” can “find” Susan Howe without her ever being lost to history. Implicit in this rehabitation of dead authors is the idea that Howe's poetics of recuperation can write death out of her work and “settle” her poetry in “print” for posterity. Like a “sentinel,” Howe breathes life into past voices and guards her work against death and erasure. She gives the poet's voice a plurality and a timelessness that cannot be commodified and “hardened” by critical interpretations. In this passage's absence of punctuation, Howe tells her reader that no “gaol” or confining critical structure can stop the flow and proliferation of an author's words in time because a poet has the ability to change something negative into something positive. Like Susan Howe herself, Massinger, in his final act of calling “whatever gaol a goal,” is able to transform a vague oppressive structure into a comfort. As an actor in the drama of historical erasure that Howe has created, Massinger rescues Howe from obsolescence. He speaks her wish to transform historical gaps into places where her words disseminate themselves in the external world and “rush” on unstopped by final periods and historically confining limits.³ As Howe's words and readers remain obedient “subjects” to the frame of literary endurance she has created, she envisions a cultural environment where she can achieve a historical currency that will “scare” and impress “millions” with the lasting power of her words.

The role that Massinger performs in this work suggests that Howe searches in Melville for a frame that will testify to an author's ability to elude historical erasure. In her interview with Edward Foster, Howe explains her use of past authors: “As well as translation or transmission, there is a mystery of change and assimilation in time. I always have to back into the past for some reason. Where and how the English seventeenth-century voice becomes the seventeenth-century, the nineteenth-century and even twentieth-century American voice” (15). Howe reveals here that writing backward, both in the nonlinear form of her collage strategies and in her resurrection of forgotten authors, is a pursuit of origins. This search attempts to find a home and a lineage in the past from which her personal voice can develop. Howe writes, “If there are things Melville went looking for in books so too there were things I looked for in Melville's looking” (“Melville's Marginalia” 105). Howe directly connects the Bartleby figure of James Clarence Mangan to herself:

Why was I drawn to Mangan?

Only that I remembered the song called “Roisin Dubh” from childhood and my great-aunt's garden one summer years ago beside Killiney Bay near Dublin.

(105)

In this comment, Howe tells her reader that she is “looking” in the past and in Melville's work for herself, for a history that will establish her birthright to a place in the present. At one point in the work, Howe speaks to the reader and to Mangan in the letter-into-the-past form that she uses to evoke Anne Hutchinson in The Birth-mark: “I have traced what books I can find by or about you in America. I hope to return to Ireland someday but will always be a foreigner with the illusions of a tourist” (108). In the direct address into the past employed here, history unfolds as a one-sided conversation in the present between Susan Howe and the individual voices she rediscovers. Howe's rehabitation of past figures impresses upon the reader the presence and power of the first person “I.” While Howe's family lived in Massachusetts, where her father Mark was a Harvard University professor, Howe's mother Molly was Irish, and Howe spent a large part of her childhood in Ireland. Seen from the critical perspective of personal biography that Howe's text and method deliberately evoke, Howe's choice of Mangan as the Bartleby figure reveals a personal need to return to historical origins and to write out the part of herself that feels permanently excluded, marginalized, and exiled from a country and from a culture.⁴

Howe's vision of Mangan as the Bartleby figure is a type of cultural intervention that refuses, both from a personal perspective and from the more general viewpoint of literary history, to allow any aspect of an author to become extinct. From the first pages of “Melville's Marginalia,” Howe depicts her discovery of Mangan in terms of a predetermined Puritan calling:

During the spring of 1991 I was teaching Billy Budd for a graduate seminar in Philadelphia. One day while searching through Melville criticism at the Temple University Library I noticed two maroon dictionary-size volumes, lying haphazardly, out of reach, almost out of sight on the topmost shelf. That's how I found Melville's Marginalia or Melville's Marginalia found me.

(89)

Howe, in her poetic project, takes ideas that are “out of reach, almost out of sight.” She transforms obsolescence into an enduring frame. This passage describes the return of lost texts in the present with a sense of predestined inevitability. A poetics of (re)discovery will simply “find” and entrench itself in the present in a manner similar to the way Melville's Marginalia “found” Howe. As the speaker for this poetics of rescue, Howe achieves a kind of election. She has been “found” by history to speak for Melville's Marginalia, and her position as the translator and commentator on this work suggests that she, too, will be “found” by the reader and placed firmly in time.

In the section that follows the title page, “Parenthesis/Brief Chronology of James Clarence Mangan,” Howe rewrites the critic's proven ability to create figures which could be “included in a sentence, but which might be omitted from the sentence without injury to the meaning of the sentence” (93). Ironically, it is Mangan himself, the man forgotten by history, who authors these words that can be read both on a grammatical level and as a statement about the construction of the line and “sentence” of literary history. Ireland joins Mangan and Howe from the beginning of the text. The two poets are marked by the fact that they both foretell and author their own erasures. Howe predicts her potential erasure in moments like that of the title page when she places her words in the context of lost texts, and in statements like “You can't do writing that is a challenge to authority and have the authorities welcome you into their ranks” (“Speaking” 39). While Howe's portrayal of Mangan begins with a chronology that places him firmly in the past between the inclusive dates of 1803 and 1849, his character and work entrench themselves in the twentieth century because they are described in the present tense. The immediacy with which Mangan approaches the reader is revealed in the first parallel drawn between him and Bartleby:

1849 Dies in the Meath Hospital, Dublin, June 20, probably from starvation.

1853 At sunrise on November 8, 1853, there appears, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a figure, pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn, in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in New York City. It is Bartleby.

(87)

The final sentence of this quotation reaches out from 1853 into the reader's present and articulates the rebirth out of death that characterizes much of Howe's poetics. The use of the present tense in this chronology emphasizes Howe's ability to breathe life into death, Mangan, Bartleby, and Melville; it places her work within the context of new beginnings.⁵ The framework of a sunrise maintains a connection with the past at the same time that it highlights the ability of Howe's poetry to appear “suddenly,” to invade and change the present with the inevitability of election and of a higher calling.

Howe conveys the strong sense of newness behind her poetic project as she describes the moment when she realized that Mangan was Bartleby:

On a January morning, in the hushed privacy of the Anglo-European-American Houghton Library, I opened Poems by James Clarence Mangan, with Biographical Introduction by John Mitchel (New York: Haverty, 1859). I saw the pencilled trace of Herman Melville's passage through John Mitchel's introduction and knew by shock of poetry telepathy the real James Clarence Mangan is the progenitor of the fictional Bartleby. The problem was chronology. Melville wrote “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” during the summer of 1853.

Quite an Original

(106)

The final, unpunctuated “Quite an Original” of this passage reads both as a response to Mangan's and Melville's originality and as a statement of the newness of Howe's poetics. With this final phrase Howe writes the reader's response into her text. She further eliminates the possibility that she could be forgotten in time by creating her own reader and by telling us that we will see Howe in the open-ended and expansive terms of “Quite and Original.”

Howe's frequent use of an experimental collage strategy where words cover other words enacts a drama of destruction that cements the poet's new and “Original” project more fully in time. In the collage on page 104, the title “Melville's Marginalia” is underwritten and partly obscured by the phrase “Secret footsteps cannot bring him.” In this juxtaposition, as in the one on the title page, the poet creates a potential frame of destruction that, because it is her own creation, distances the possibility that her words will disappear. In this collage and in Howe's poetics as a whole, the poet usurps from the anonymous hand that wrote “stranger” and from the reader herself the right to determine literary endurance. In her text, Howe, and Howe alone, controls the possibility that her work could be forgotten. Erasure is an internal poetic structure that Howe adopts and, as the engineer of this frame, she can limit the potential of her own obsolescence. The statement “secret footsteps cannot bring him” is built on an ironic play on literary paralysis that mirrors that seen in the epitaph for Massinger. The suggestion that “secret footsteps” cannot bring James Clarence Mangan and Melville himself initially reads as the poet's testimony of her ineffectual attempts to bring forth a new and visible version of these authors. This apparent self-effacement, however, occurs against the reader's acknowledgment that Howe's tracings of Mangan and Melville are not “secret.” They have been written boldly and openly on the page. They “exist,” and they have thus effectively “brought him” and Susan Howe into history.

The form of Howe's poetry attests constantly to its newness. It breathes new life into hitherto neglected voices and allows them to speak their own words. The collage strategies that structure her work create a poetry that is infinitely regenerative. This writing, with its difficult layers and retracings, requires the reader to recognize erasures and to transform them into physical presences. Howe's collages create an ideal reader who is prevented from “reducing” and “hardening” her words. Her frequent use of words written upside down demands that the reader turn the text and acknowledge physically its ability to live in different spaces. As in the collages on pages 95 and 96, Howe's poems often appear to be mirror reversals of one another. Upon close comparison, however, the reader is led to enact her own discovery of what has been changed, erased, and recovered in the temporal progression from page to page. The reader is asked to recognize formally the possibilities of historical and temporal erasure that Howe's poetics raises. Often, as in “THE MANNER OF LIVING / WITH / GREAT MEN,” Howe's collages rewrite themselves (95). In the first collage from this series, the line “Those who have been wronged” partially obscures the final word of the phrase “now in literature” (95). This elision suggests that a new conception of literature is transforming itself out of the collisions between words in Howe's texts. “Those who have been wronged” and omitted from literature are no longer, in Howe's poetics, separable from the concept of literature itself. The “x” that stands in the middle of both of these collages testifies to an unmarked and uncolonized space that Howe wishes to keep open for herself and for the many as yet unsounded voices. The new definition of “literature” promised by the first collage is completed in the second as the “GREAT MEN” no longer occupy the topmost linear position in the hierarchy. In this second collage, “literature” and “the wronged” have successfully merged, and the first-person voice of “and birthright to insult me” is given a central and visible position. Here, the blindness evoked by the lyric voice's “Led I used not to see” is turned upside down and subordinated. The poet has now successfully “led” her readers to “see” a new version of literary history. In this history, the “GREAT MEN” lie with the dead “bark of parchment” at the bottom of the collage. They occupy the position furthermost removed from the freedom and the multiplicity of interpretations that are inherent in the “x.”

Howe's poetry enacts strategies that reflect a desire to prevent historical anonymity by resurrecting hitherto unheard voices and by making the reader play an active role in this process of recovery. In the preface, Howe explains her approach to both Melville and her reader:

Names who are strangers out of bounds of the bound margin: I thought one way to write about a loved author would be to follow what trails he follows through words of others: what if these penciled single double and triple scorings arrows short phrases angry outbursts crosses cryptic ciphers sudden enthusiasms mysterious erasures have come to find you too, here again, now.

(92)

Howe chooses to treat Melville through his relationship to other authors, through his personal act of writing in their margins. Her text intersects with Melville's at the moment when both she and he try to position themselves on the pages of a literary tradition. A central optimism and certainty about the success of her poetic project appears in this paragraph. There is no question mark after “what if … mysterious erasures have come to find you too, here again, now.” In Howe's poetry, the erasures with which she allies herself will always “find” the reader with an imperative that entrenches itself firmly in the “now.” The anti-interrogative tone of this sentence demands that the reader see and unmake erasure. In the act of turning Howe's pages, the reader will find hidden and obscured words. She will be forced to consider the endless and imperative “what if s” of the cultural realignments that accompany Howe's new mode of seeing.⁶

The description in this passage of Melville's “penciled single double and triple scorings arrows short phrases angry outbursts crosses cryptic ciphers sudden enthusiasms mysterious erasures” reads both as a depiction of Melville's marginal comments and of Howe's own collage strategies. In Howe's poetry, lines cross and recross each other like arrows. Lines point upwards, sideways, and upside down against the confines of the written page. They press against any preconceived notion of a concrete and definable center. The frequent pairing of one line written from left to right with another written upside down reveals Howe's conviction that the past can be returned to and rewritten to change the present. In the collage on page 95, the reader is given the canonical trajectory of literary history with “THE MANNER OF LIVING / WITH / GREAT MEN” written left to right. The splicing of these lines with the backward and upside down line “and birthright to insult me” suggests that a poet can fracture the authority and canonization of “GREAT MEN.” She can write backward into the past and fill the empty space after “THE MANNER OF LIVING / WITH” with her own and other voices. The revision of this collage on the following page physically manifests the poet's ability to change the present by returning to the past. In the first collage, Howe writes backward against “GREAT MEN.” In the second, this backward movement has created a place in the present where the “me” stands prominently and the poet's voice is heard.

The clearly identifiable “me” in Howe's poetry and her discovery of Mangan by “poetry telepathy” calls the critical act into question and asks that the reader see any construction of literary history as a series of choices determined by a cultural and personal “I.” The statement that “the problem was chronology” openly discloses the shaky theoretical ground upon which Howe bases her Bartleby figure. Melville did not possess a copy of Mangan's poetry until 1862, and there is no empirical evidence that he knew of Mangan's work in 1853 when he was writing “Bartleby” (106). Howe's foregrounding of “the problem” inherent in her theory undermines any belief in objective academic certainty. According to Howe, the “problem” in any discourse about literary history is larger than the lack of a direct correlation seen in her specific example of Mangan and Melville. The “problem,” as Melville's Marginalia presents it, is that literary history has refused to admit the personal politics and cultural choices that are inherent in its “chronology.” Literary history in general has not examined and taken as its subject the way it harnesses “chronology” and manipulates history and individual authors to create an ordered present that is a coherent continuation and conflation of our personal past.⁷

In her honest unmasking of her poetical project, Howe leads the reader to recognize that her search for origins is an open disclosure of the move that every critic makes. Howe writes:

A
poet
does not relate
real
events
2. For then
she would clash
with the histo-
rian
connecting
them
by a verbal
association
in a strange
order
Crumple
and stammer out difficulty
Almost
Forced
Loans

(94)

In the differentiation between a “poet” and a “historian,” Howe casts doubt on the “objective” critical project of the historian. As this poem presents it, the historian makes connections between the past and present without consciousness. The historian does not start at the beginning, at the number 1. The poet precedes him in her recognition of the beginning assumptions that lie behind any attempt to write a discourse about history. She refuses to assign the number 1 to the place where her voice begins because she does not believe that history and “real events” have a single beginning and a clearly discernible trajectory. She thinks instead that history is plural, that it begins in the place where one voice attempts to find a path for itself among many voices and beginnings.⁸ The poet, unlike the historian, does not physically obscure the fact that a “connecting” between past and present is being made. She realizes that any return to history can only be “a verbal association in a strange order.” She “clash[es]” with the historian because her project sees the force that the need to reconfigure the present exerts over the past from which it borrows and takes “Loans.” Ultimately, the poet's “verbal association in a strange order” articulates both the past and the “difficulty” inherent in any approach to history. Her poetic project “Crumple[s]” the unheard voices and stammers of history together in a new noncanon that endlessly proliferates itself. At the same time, the complexity of her work forces the contemporary reader to acknowledge the innumerable new voices and the overwhelming choices that lie before our future acts of interpretation.

Howe's rewriting of “Bartleby” from the perspective of Mangan transforms Melville's story into a text that is centrally concerned with addressing an author's refusal to participate in the single and dominant discourses of history. Howe's interpretation of Bartleby as a “real” author makes Melville's story into a commentary on the same issues of narrative history that frame her own poetry. Bartleby, as Howe's author, refuses collusion with the narrator's attempts to interpret him and fix him in time. The narrator searches for a category and a single interpretation of Bartleby when he asks the clerks, “‘Turkey,’ said I, ‘what do you think of this? Am I not right?’” and “‘Ginger Nut,’ said I, willing to enlist the smallest suffrage in my behalf, ‘what do you think of it?’” (Melville 49).

From the perspective that Howe's interpretation opens, Bartleby's most memorable statement becomes his unwillingness to tell “who he was, or whence he came, or whether he had any relatives in the world” (Melville 56). Bartleby, as an author, is a partial reflection of Howe. He adheres to the margins, absences, and gaps of her own poetry, and he mirrors back to the reader her desire to control her own history. The narrator in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is confronted with Bartleby's refusal to act in accordance with his definition of history. The one thing Bartleby will not do is speak the words that will give the narrator the ability to define and remove him, through reduction, from the present. Confronted with a figure whom he cannot interpret, the narrator creates his own narrative about Bartleby's work in the Dead Letter Office. The narrator thus becomes, in effect, the real victim of the story. While Bartleby lasts in his uninterpretability and in his adherence to margins, the narrator remains unconscious of the universal narrativizing of past and present that Howe wishes her reader to recognize. Deprived of a history to ascribe to Bartleby, the narrator loses his own connection to the present. He can no longer define himself through the interpretation of another person's place in history. As he wanders aimlessly and “almost lived in my rockaway for the time” (Melville 70), he becomes a living example of the imperative behind Howe's call for her reader to become conscious of the personal and cultural choices that lie behind narrative history and our desire for an ordered present.

While the unmarked deaths of Bartleby and Mangan initially seem to reassert the threat of an author's historical erasure, a closer reading of Melville's text through “Melville's Marginalia” reveals Howe's manipulation of this story to distance the threat of historical oblivion. Howe's creation of Bartleby as an Irish poet curiously subordinates Bartleby's work in the Dead Letter Office. Howe's Mangan never worked with these letters. By removing Melville's locus from the United States to Ireland. Howe physically distances and contains the possibility that letters and words could be sent, but never received, in America. As Howe deletes the Dead Letter Office from “Bartleby” and uses the form of a letter into the past to address Mangan, she breathes new life into the Office of Dead Letters. She tells her reader that the death of American authorship that is implicit in the Dead Letter Office no longer exists because she is the recoverer of the secret traces of history and of all the letters and words that have been burned by “the cart-load” (Melville 73).

If Melville immortalizes Bartleby in his story, Howe eternalizes Mangan and the possibilities of historical recuperation in her rewriting of Melville's frame. Bartleby himself provides a perfect model to forecast the endurance of Howe's own poetry because his language disseminates itself in a manner that belies the possibility of his ever being forgotten. The narrator describes Bartleby as “this intolerable incubus” (Melville 66), and Bartleby's language contaminates the voices of the other clerks, as their repetition of his “I would prefer not to” causes the narrator to remark, “so you have got the word, too” (Melville 58). Howe's proposal that Bartleby is Melville's representation of a lost author works to contain erasure in a manner similar to her use of Massinger because Bartleby's words are not, in fact, lost within his story. Although Mangan visibly disappeared from history, Melville gives him a lasting voice. Bartleby's words entrench themselves in his physical environment and in the “sunrise” of the twentieth-century reader. Howe's poetic project gains support from Melville because both are joined in their desire to forecast the inevitability of an author's words gaining cultural and historical currency. If Melville intended “Bartleby” to recover Mangan and to testify to the fact that an author can never be lost to history, Howe rescues Melville's intentions from “Bartleby.” She combats the “hardening” and “violation” of canonization and affirms the ability of Melville and herself to stand in history and to possess their “original” intentions and voices.

The immediacy of Bartleby's return to the present suggests that a poetics, like Howe's, which structures itself around the containment of erasure will invade the vision of its audience and disseminate itself. The poem on page 123 reveals the positive assertion of historical endurance that “Melville's Marginalia” is built upon. Howe writes:

Coffin the sea
Coffin th se a
Coffin th s woorD
r e wr t ebly quell
in pencil s c atte
but poetry
Coffin th se aw
Coffin th se w
Coffin th se woorD

In this poem, “coffin” operates as both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it suggests that “th se woorD” or “these words” of Howe's are dead. As a verb, however, it suggests that death, the death of the voices of lost authors, is being packaged and carted off in “Melville's Marginalia.” The lines “r e wr t ebly quell / in pencil s c atte / but poetry” at the center of the wordplay in this poem intimate that Howe, in her unauthoritarian lower case i, writes both “Bartleby” and “ably.” Her poetry is able to preserve Bartleby's gaps and his refusal to be fixed, placed, and killed by the narrator's single interpretation. Her writing is formed by layers, collisions, and multiple word possibilities. Here, the poet's “i” is a bridge. It is an i.e. that links her both to Bartleby and to an “ire” that challenges confining limits and death. As Howe presents it, her words create a space characterized by the freedom and limitlessness of personal choice and preference. At the same time, they are able to “quell” erasure and death in the saving, unauthoritarian medium of “but poetry.”

Howe's description of her transcendent and elect calling embodies her poetics with a subtle claim to the creation of an “original” second American Renaissance that revises both the 1850s and the literary criticism of the 1940s. In her introduction to The Birth-mark, Howe places F. O. Matthiessen within her frame of forgotten authors and reveals one of the cultural moments she reinhabits. Howe's Matthiessen becomes a man who channeled his passion into letters to his male lover and who was ultimately driven to take his own life:

The public, critical Matthiessen divorced himself from the immediacy of Whitman the maternal enthusiast. Scholarship should be applied for good, not for pampering. Love in an earlier beginning is here consigned to the immature margins: feminized—with mothers. Matthiessen's rebukes and defenses of Whitman may be the expression of a war in himself between a covenant of faith and a covenant of works. We will not read it here. “It is blank here, for reasons.” … An ocean of inaudible expression. An American educator. A careful citizen. A mind so terribly aware.

(17)

In this passage, Howe exposes the difference between the personal and “immediate” Matthiessen and the distanced objective critic. This division is exactly the separation she refuses to allow in her own poetry when she foregrounds the importance of her personal background. When Howe depicts Matthiessen as a man at “war in himself,” she authors a type of second American Renaissance that will attempt to reconcile the critic with the “immediacy” and antinomian enthusiasm of her own personal meetings with past authors.

Howe's work attempts to revitalize poetry in America by suggesting that poetry has the ability to remake culture, history, and literary criticism. Howe says, “If History is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices” (“Difficulties Interview” 25), and her poetry tries to inscribe a plural and unauthoritarian “i” in history. Howe's collages present the reader with a layering of choices. Her strategies of erasure question whether the reader can maintain the freedom and plurality inherent in the “x” or whether any critical act must acknowledge the possibility that it is complicitous with the destructive hand that wrote “stranger.” Both Matthiessen and Perry Miller were friends of her father. Howe describes Miller in her interview with Foster:

But how did I know him? Only as a lecherous character who drank too much. He is supposed to have been an inspiring teacher. To us daughters of professors, he was the object of great scorn, because we knew that if he was at one of our houses, he would quickly get red-faced and then his hands would start wandering. His wife, Betty, who I believe did half of his research for him, was silent and shadowy. What she must have endured.

(19)

Whether Howe's comments on Miller are deserved or not, they reveal the flip side of the margins she professes to resurrect and the absences she tells. The rewriting of erasure frames Howe's poetry, yet this frame also promises a destruction of authority that is founded in its own assumption of an authoritarian voice and silencing. Howe tells Foster, “Behind the facade of Harvard University is a scaffold and a regicide. Under the ivy and civility there is the instinct for murder, erasure, and authoritarianism,” and “I mean that's why I am concerned that so much of my work carries violence in it. I don't want to be of Ahab's party. I want to find peace. Anyway you balance on the edge in poetry. I did say in My Emily Dickinson that poetry is dangerous” (34).⁹

The “edge” Howe speaks of in this interview parallels the “Vulturism trimmed for binding” she articulates in the closing pages of “Melville's Marginalia” (149). In this “vulturism” and “edge,” Howe acknowledges one of the inherent dangers of her poetics and of any act of literary interpretation. While the poet's words are moved by a desire to make herself and her literary creations live in the present, the idea that this project can be accomplished without unconsciously implementing its own authoritarian methods of destruction remains on the “margins of doubt” for both reader and poet. A poetics of margins forces the poet to walk a fine line of “authoritarianism.” Howe wants to impress her “I” on history. She wishes to eradicate the reduction and exclusion that are inherent in the academic canonization Miller represents, yet she must also claim some authority of her own, or else her poetry is in danger of becoming so dispersed that history will never see the Susan Howe who “scared millions” and “rushed” on (150).

Howe's description of Miller effectively dissipates the image of the “inspired teacher” and problematizes the afterlife of his texts. The poet here is not the poet who evokes a lyrical landscape of New England in “Thorow”: “I moved into the weather's fluctuation. Let myself drift in the rise and fall of light and snow, re-reading retracing once-upon” (Singularities 41). This Susan Howe undermines Miller's authority as a canon-making critic by criticizing him personally. She concentrates on his personal character in a manner that bears similarities to the ways nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics have used the private lives of women authors to invalidate their work. I do not question here Howe's right to revise Miller's views and “research” but the personal form in which she has chosen to couch this criticism. Regardless of the varied versions of Susan Howe the poet that her sketch of Miller provides, one issue remains clear. This poetry curiously resists and prevents the reader from criticizing Howe for her potential “vulturism.” If the reader perceives Howe's personal criticism of Miller as one of the contradictions of her poetics of recovery, she becomes the “vulture” pointing the finger at Howe, and the focus shifts to her own conscious act of destruction. At the same time that Howe's work raises questions about the destruction inherent in any act of interpretation, her frame of erasure defends her project. Her focus on the intimate meeting of author and reader, on the biographical rehabitation of lost voices, prohibits the reader from achieving any critical distance on Howe's project. Readers who condemn Howe for her portrait of Miller because it looks as if she attacks the academic canon through the personal and succumbs to the same destruction she wishes to challenge are left trapped in a place where they assume the very responsibility for erasure that Howe's poetics desires to provoke. In this position, they are faced not with a poet who cannot make her words and project cohere, but with a poet who will always possess intentionality and control her poetic frame. This poet, this Susan Howe, has the ability to make her poetics forever disseminate themselves. She has the power to elude me and to maneuver critics into a place where we must confront the choices and personal shortcomings that lie behind any desire to taint Howe's poetical project with failure and to remove it from history.¹⁰

In her response to Miller, Howe chooses to concentrate on Miller's personal misuses of power. This personally and ideologically determined series of choices returns the reader to the “figure” of Susan Howe and to the place in history that the contemporary female poet desires to possess. Howe's rewriting of her childhood enables her to find a voice in a personal past where she was previously silent. It allows her to entrench women firmly in American studies. Formerly, Howe's criticism of Miller had been the whispered “scorn” of daughters spoken in the shadows of professors. When she returns to this moment, she eradicates Betty Miller's silence and her own. She refuses collusion with the double frame of institutional and familial authority that Perry Miller and Mark and Molly Howe represent. When Howe raises the question of what Betty Miller “must have endured,” she writes a place into the American Renaissance for a woman's voice to be heard. If, as Howe suggests, Betty Miller did “half” of Perry Miller's research, American studies has a long history of female voices. Women like Betty Miller “endured” to give the contemporary female poet a birthright and a tradition. They have legitimated the place in American studies where Susan Howe now stands, and their work justifies a poetry that now subverts the notion of a single, patriarchal version of history.

Given the magnitude of the cultural undertaking that lies behind Howe's inscription of herself in history, I wonder if my questioning of Howe's own methods of destruction is in fact a larger part of this cultural project. In the course of “Melville's Marginalia,” Howe leads the reader to assume consciousness of the erasures and choices that are inherent in any attempt to narrativize history. Perhaps the ultimate mark of the endurance of Howe's poetics lies in my final ability to read Howe's project backward into her words in a reflection of her own collage strategies. As I “find” the moments of potential “vulturism” in “Melville's Marginalia,” I continue the active search for erasure and recovery that Howe's collage strategies advocate. I leave Howe's work conscious of the voices that Howe has recovered and removed, and I become a living testimony to the endurance of her poetics. In the course of this work, I have been “found” by “mysterious erasures” and “secret footsteps.” I have acknowledged the innumerable new voices and choices that must be recovered in the search for a female poetics and a critical language that will someday no longer need to raise questions of destruction to forecast its own authority and endurance.

Notes

1. The conjunction of ghostly figures and canonical texts in Howe's comment to Foster is reminiscent of the merging of literature and history that Howe evokes in “Eikon Basilike”: “King Charles I was a devoted patron of the arts. He particularly admired Shakespeare. His own performance on the scaffold was worthy of that author-actor who played the part of the Ghost in Hamlet. The real King's last word “Remember” recalls the fictive Ghost-king's admonition to his son. The ghost of a king certainly haunted the Puritans and the years of the Protectorate. Charles I became the ghost of Hamlet's father, Caesar's ghost, Banquo's ghost, the ghost of King Richard II” (48). While this essay quotes extensively from The Birth-mark and from other works by Howe, I am wary of making overarching pronouncements about the development of Howe's oeuvre. Howe's refutation of a single, authoritative history seems to preclude this type of metacriticism. As Howe herself does in so many of her texts, I have chosen instead to put forth an interpretation of a single work. I hope that my interpretation of “Melville's Marginalia” will provoke agreement, thought, and dissent, and most of all that it will lead the reader back to Howe's other texts in an attempt to understand and locate the larger themes of her work.

2. Quoting from Howe poses a problem in that her work cannot be easily divided into excerpted passages without the risk of lines being taken out of context. The very form of Howe's poetry makes it difficult for the critic to disembody and “harden” her words. When writing of Howe, the critic is forced to be aware of the choices and splices that have made her own interpretation possible. It is thus that she is endlessly driven back to Howe's original words.

3. As I previously noted, the metaphor of drama is peculiarly fitted to Howe's own life in view of her earlier certainty that she would become an actress. For another moment when Howe describes her desire to become an actress, see Howe, “Speaking” 37.

4. The post-exilic tone surfaces at other places in Howe's work. In her interview with Janet Falon, Howe speaks of her torn and double allegiance to Ireland and the United States: “I've spent a lot of my life in Ireland. One of the problems I have always had has been the pull between countries. A civil war in the soul. I can't express how much I adored Ireland, especially when I was young. But at the same time at that very moment of loving it I felt an outsider and knew there was no way I could ever really be let in. If you can't decide where your allegiance lies you feel permanently out. I had to feel at home somewhere and I think that was another reason it was so urgent for me to write the Dickinson book” (“Speaking” 37).

5. In Beneath the American Renaissance, David S. Reynolds proposes one alternative to Howe's interpretation of the historical origins of the Bartleby figure: “Much of the imagery in ‘Bartleby’ is directly related to popular sensational literature. In particular, a series of sensational exposes about New York life by George Foster, a popular novelist in Melville's circle, are especially pertinent to ‘Bartleby.’ In Nero York in Slices (1849) Foster had portrayed Wall Street as a totally dehumanizing environment producing puppetlike people and universal misery cloaked by gentility” (294–95).

6. In her interview with Lynn Keller, Howe illuminates the movement behind her collage strategies when she discusses the way she reads her poems (15) and explains their physicality: “You impose a direction by beginning. But where Marcia [Hafif] was using gestural marks, I used words. It was another way of making word lists but now in a horizontal rather than vertical direction, so there was a wall of words. In this weird way I moved into writing physically because this was concerned with gesture, the mark of the hand and the pen or pencil, the connection between eye and hand”(6).

7. While Howe's work argues that literary history has historically denied its own constructedness, the recent work on canonicity that has been performed by texts such as The Heath Anthology and Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery provides a current counterexample to the trajectory of literary history that Howe notes.

8. Peter Quartermain's Disjunctive Poetics offers one important historical context within which to place Howe's adherence to plural voices and beginnings. Quartermain suggests that one of the major influences on the twentieth-century American writer has been the influx of immigrants. The pluralization of American culture has challenged notions of a monolithic culture, language, and history (12). The authors Quartermain examines share a historical context characterized by “[t]he increasingly uncomfortable misalignment, which relegated certain writers to submerged, eruptive, and insurrectional activity within and beside accredited modes.” This position “was exacerbated in America by the linguistic disruption and even demolition of empowered cultural patterns through the agency of foreign immigration” (9).

9. Linda Reinfeld is one of the only critics of Howe to approach this element of “violence” in Howe's work. Reinfeld evokes both the implicit feminism in Howe's poetics and the dangerous “edge” she balances upon in this project: “Howe's art, in ‘Thorow,’ may well be read as an act of complicity and violence-or as the liberation of woman's voice in a literature dominated by men. Or as both: ‘complicity battling redemption.’ I greatly admire Howe's accomplishment, her ‘talent of composition,’ but hesitate to take it for my own. I do not know whose scalps are in her boat” (103).

10. Howe's poetry continually asks the reader to employ the critically precarious analysis of an author's intentionality and personal biography. Howe reacts against Miller, yet her attack on him is complicated by the similarities between their projects and methods. Howe describes “finding” “Melville's Marginalia” in a cycle of electron, recovery, and nostalgia that is strikingly similar to Miller's description of his own critical project in Errand into the Wilderness—the book he dedicates to Howe's parents, Mark and Molly Howe. Like Howe, Miller describes his scholarship in terms of a personal and emotional calling: “It was given to me, equally disconsolate on the edge of a jungle of central Africa, to have thrust upon me the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States, while supervising, in that barbaric tropic, the unloading of drums of case oil flowing out of the inexhaustible wilderness of America. … I have difficulty imagining that anyone can be a historian without realizing that history itself is part of the life of the mind; hence I have been compelled to insist that the mind of man is the basic factor in human history” (viii–ix). Just as “Melville's Marginalia” finds Howe in the library at Temple University, history “finds” Miller to speak and recover “the inexhaustible wilderness of America” and its potentially “barbaric” and violent components.

    Howe's merging of the roles of poet and critic can, in some sense, be seen as a continuation of Miller's challenge to an objective historical certainty. While Miller uses the traditional polar opposition of two wildernesses, a barbaric Africa and an inexhaustible America, to define the United States, he complicates the stance of the “historian” who conceives of history as a single trajectory and makes connections between the past and present without consciousness. Like Howe, Miller conceives of history as plural. He may use traditionally racist Western iconography to define America, yet he also locates this construction of history not in Africa but in the subjective and personal experience of “the mind of man.” Miller's use of the first-person voice asks the reader to understand that his work and his depictions of the past have been formed by his personal choices, by his desire to find definition and a place for his “mind” as he stands, “disconsolate” and lost, on the “edge” of a modern “jungle.” The similarities between Miller and Howe were suggested to me by Michael Kaufman and the distinction between Miller's two wildernesses by Rachel Blau DuPlessis.

Works Cited

The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Gen. ed. Paul Lauter. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1990.

Howe, Susan. A Bibliography of the King's Book, or, Eikon Basilike. The Nonconformist's Memorial 45–82.

———. The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1993.

———. “The Difficulties Interview.” With Tom Beckett. Susan Howe Issue. Ed. Tom Beckett. The Difficulties 3.2 (1989): 17–27.

———. “An Interview with Susan Howe.” With Edward Foster. Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 4 (1990): 14–38.

———. “An Interview with Susan Howe.” With Lynn Keller. Contemporary Literature 36 (1995): 1–34.

———. “Melville's Marginalia.” The Nonconformist's Memorial 83–150.

———. The Nonconformist's Memorial: Poems by Susan Howe. New York: New Directions, 1989.

———. Singularities. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1990.

———. “Speaking with Susan Howe.” Interview. With Janet Ruth Falon. Susan Howe Issue. Ed. Tom Beckett. The Difficulties 3.2 (1989): 28–42.

Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.” Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Ed. Warner Berthoff. New York: Harper, 1969. 39–74.

Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1956.

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.

Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zutofsky to Susan Howe. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Reinfeld, Linda. “On Henry David (Susan Howe) ‘Thorow.’” Susan Howe Issue. Ed. Tom Beckett. The Difficulties 3.2 (1989): 97–104.

Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1988.