SOURCE: “‘Out of My Texts I Am Not What I Play’: Politics and Self in the Poetry of Susan Howe,” in College Literature, Vol. 24, No. 3, October, 1997, pp. 124–38.

The recent publication by New Directions of Susan Howe's previously uncollected early work, Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974–1979, appears to mark a significant shift in Howe's writing career. Most obviously such a publication, which “brings together those of her earliest poems she wishes to remain in print, and in the forms in which she cares to have them last” demonstrates the authorial control of the established artist, the privileges and rights which Susan Howe has certainly not always been able to command (Frame Structures, jacket cover). The publication represents the contradictions emerging from Howe's role as a mainstream and yet experimental poet. This apparent contradiction undermines neither the significance of Howe's growing popularity nor her importance as a textually-experimental writer: the fascination of Howe's work actually appears rooted in the wider implications of this ability to extol equivocation.

The introductory essay to Frame Structures appears to embrace Howe's newly canonized status. An air of the established distinguishes it: the narrative moves from reminiscence to metaphysics with a daunting certainty: “Daddy held on tightly to my hand … Animal sense something about the ruin I think he said our human spirits being partly immaterial at that prefigured time though we didn't know then how free will carries us past to be distance waiting for another meeting a true relation (3).” The indeterminacy of the punctuation here paradoxically emphasizes Howe's possession of the poem at its opening: the reader is left scrambling to disentangle the words of the father from the poet, the past from the present, and simply meaning from this swift philosophical flight. The paragraph ends on an epigram that indicates how we might understand our confusion: “Historical Imagination gathers in the missing.” We are, one grasps as the poem moves to “Primitive Notions I,” being led into “the missing.”

What is so striking about this journey, which is in other ways quite typical of the historical narratives that figure largely in the poetry of Howe, is that we are travelling across the historical imagination of an authorial “I.” Within Frame Structures Susan Howe appears to construct an authorial persona whose absenteeism was one of the confounding characteristics of much of her earlier work. Frame Structures is built around personal anecdotes, relationships, a family lineage. In short it appears to provide Howe's rapidly expanding critical audience with an apparent antidote to her previous authorial liminality. Thus what is so contradictory about this text is that the journey into an historical imagination is self-evidently not into “the missing,” but into the “autobiographical, familial, literary and historical motifs” of the writer who creates the willful indeterminacy of the text (jacket cover).

Such personal intimacy is not totally unprecedented in Howe's work. “There Are Not Leaves Enough to Crown to Cover to Crown to Cover,” the introduction to the anthology The Europe of Trusts, shares some of the allusions made to childhood memories in Frame Structures. Central to both texts is the concern to narrate the disruption of family life precipitated by the Second World War. The central feature of this event is the betrayal associated with the father's departure: “Our law professor father, a man of pure principles, quickly included violence in his principles, put on a soldier suit and disappeared (Europe of Trusts 10).” “A parent figure scattered among others in favor of disobedience. ‘Well goodbye and don't forget me’” (Frame Structures 3).” The sharp pain associated with this separation from the father is inextricable from the adult's knowledge of the father's reasons for leaving—which are read in turn through the gendered, social, and international implications of war itself—“American fathers marched off into the Hot chronicle of global struggle but mothers were left” (Europe of Trusts 10). The childish indignation that inflects both narratives suggests an implicit challenge to the foundational role that war—the impersonal and barbarous—plays in constructing identity.

This bewildering recollection of the child's experience of war traces the violence that history wreaks upon the personal, upon what Howe elsewhere refers to as the Singular. Within Howe's account the violence of historical or narrative unity is placed against the confusion of individual fragmentation—“Substance broke loose from the domain of time and obedient intention. I became part of the ruin” (Europe of Trusts 12). The potency of this acutely subjective memory is thus not in its ability to delimit our readings of the text but in its very existence as an oppositional energy, an energy recovered from the way “women and children experience war and its nightmare … blown sand seaward foam in which disappearance fields expression” (Frame Structures 7). Howe's construction of these histories, of her history, is political precisely because it rescues the Singular from the homogenizing “malice [that] dominates the history of Power and Progress. History is the record of winners” (Europe of Trusts 11). Howe's use of her subjective memory is vital: it is only this, her ability to articulate the “fright formed by what we see not by what they say,” that can disrupt the possession of power by the “masters” of history.¹

Yet this use of the autobiographical “I” is not typical of Howe's work. Howe's textual experimentalism more often leads her to disrupt the conventions controlling the expressive self of a more mainstream American poetic. Her writing often seems to operate from within what she describes in her essay “Submarginalia” as an “intervening absence”—a subjective or personal voice is rarely overtly present in the challenges that Howe's poetry issues to authority (Birth-mark 27). Howe has thus been represented as participating within what Clair Wills describes as the limiting and “familiar division between formally conservative poetic practices that do not question the drive towards romantic modes of self-expression, the poetic voice, or the center of the poem as a speaking ‘I’ … [and] radical experimental artifice which deconstructs the possibility of the formation of a coherent or consistent lyric voice” (34).²

Howe's apparently contradictory ability to employ both an autobiographical persona and to construct an “intervening absence,” emptied of self, resonates throughout her work. It seemingly amplifies Wills's questioning of the usefulness of the apparent dichotomy between mainstream poets who are reliant on the expressive “I” and experimental poets who eschew the ideologies of selfhood and individuality that it seems so dependant upon. As Michael Greer suggests, reading the deconstructed self in the experimental text solely as a reaction to the mainstream and expressive poetic constructs a dichotomy from which we are unable to contextualize the specific historical and social impetus behind experimental writing.³ What emerges is the need for a critique capable of examining the political implications of the multiple ways in which self is signified—represented and made meaningful—in a specific poetic text.⁴

As I have already suggested, Howe's dominant representation of self is characterized by a transgressive absence. This authorial liminality is constructed as political in its subversions of hegemonic structures of language—this is a formulation that can be found in Martin Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought. That poetical language has an efficacy beyond narratives of subjectivity or history is central to his thesis in this text. The notion that language conceals meaning, that the poet can bring into the “open” alternative readings, is fundamental to Howe's poetry and her foundational aim, to “tenderly lift from the dark side of history voices that are anonymous, slighted—inarticulate” (Europe of Trusts 14).

Heidegger's use of language appears predicated upon the belief that language has primordial meanings that are denied to us in our everyday life through the act of self assertion. He understands assertion of self, the act of modern subjectivity, to be a form of Nietzsche's will to power. The desire to organize the world and to control the conditions of representation must be overcome, according to Heidegger, if we are to gain notions of subjectivity based not on mutually destructive self-assertion but on a comprehension of the meanings and forces that construct our lives. Hence he posits a system in which we understand the world and the individual's place within it, rather than understanding the world through the individuals placed within it. The assertion of self is contrary to the truth for Heidegger because it prevents the subject from attaining the openness of being of the “temporal context.” Freedom within the temporal context comes through replacing one's assertion against the “universal imposition” with a yielding to the “propriative act” of existence.

Poetic language is crucial to Heidegger because it allows the subject to relinquish the assertion of self, which allows the merely representational. It allows the subject to overcome the objectification of language in which subjects are fundamentally alienated. Going beyond the mere equipmentality of language in the technologized world, so he argues, can allow the individual to be opened up into his or her context, into the realm of his or her true meanings. Heidegger argues that it is not a metaphysical insight that art allows us, but the truth that has been concealed: “This surpassing, this transcending does not go up and over into something else; it comes up to its own self and back into the nature of truth” (132). Thus this operation of unconcealedness unleashes an energy that allows history and truth to emerge. “Genuinely poetic projection is the opening up or disclosure of that into which human being as historical is already cast” (132).

Heidegger constructs a relationship between the poet and historical meaning that appears to allow the poet an access to historical truth without having to negotiate the complicated politics of identity. However, as Richard Rorty argues, this is a poetic formulation that we must also be wary of. Rorty suggests that the concern of the Heidegger of Being and Time with the “sociohistorical situation of Dasein” gave way in his later work to a philosopher who rendered “‘Thought’ a substitute for what he called metaphysics. This led him to speak of language as a quasi-divinity in which we live and move and have our being” (340). The primordial energy that Heidegger attributed to language appeared, by Poetry, Language, Thought at least, to have gained a potency for which the subject, by its very nature, cannot be accountable. Unable to articulate a subjective agency, the individual can only “dwell” within the space that language allows.

Amongst the critical approaches to examining Howe's construction of a poetic self have emerged two dominant readings. I want to outline these, before pointing to what I hope may constitute a third. Howe's initial critical reception, in magazines such as The Difficulties and Talisman, celebrated her Heideggerian ability to perform historical analysis in a poetic style that denied authority. Such readings often appeared to value Howe's opacity over an examination of the political implications of such innovation. Paul Metcalf's 1989 essay “The Real Susan Howe,” searched for the artist of plenitude without embodiment: “Her technique is almost absence of technique. Inventive and innovative as she is, she is not artful. … And this brings us back to Objectivism, the mistrust of metaphor, the shedding of herself from her lines. Here we do not have roles, voices, personae, etc.” (55). This insistence on Howe's absence, of self and of technique, self-consciously recalls George Butterick's early claim that the “astringency” of Howe's poetry emerges from “the host ego absenting itself” (148).

What is neglected by this criticism is an analysis of the politics of such authorial distance. Howe's subjective absence is valued without any analysis of its cost. David Landrey, for example, unproblematically places Howe alongside the “spider self” of Emily Dickinson, suggesting that if “poets are going ‘to keep love safe from the enemy’ … it must be by abandoning the self as some limited ‘identity’: it must be by projecting the self into an idea of grace as part of an infinite mystery in us but beyond us” (107). Landrey's apparently easy dismissal of Dickinson's lengthy marginalization and appropriation by the academy is indicative, I think, of the dangers in allowing a faith in an “infinite mystery” to replace an analysis of the political context from which the poetic text has emerged.

Howe appears to be well versed in the hazards of the infinite mystery. In an interview with Ruth Falon, published in the same journal as Paul Metcalf's essay, Howe speaks of the fear she feels in writing a verse that demands a moving beyond the subjective boundaries of the self. She describes how reading Woolf and Dickinson inspired her venture into language, yet links this questioning of the construction of subjectivity with her sanity: “I remember being afraid that if I worked too hard with words I might start hearing voices. I had this lesson of these two writers whose language was exemplary but whose mastery told the other story that a woman could go too far. When you reach that point where no concessions are possible, you face true power, alone” (33). Howe is acutely aware of the political risks of experimental writing. She connects her inability to jeopardize herself with her gender and its responsibilities: “Writing still seems more threatening to me than painting because it becomes so self-absorbing. I saw my desire as a threat to my children. … I kept myself in one piece because I had to for Becky and Mark. I had to accept that because I was also a mother it might take more time” (34). In this interview Howe appears to be candidly acknowledging that she does not perceive the waiving of the construction of the subjective self as an empowering abandonment of the politics of self. Indeed, Howe appears to perceive her prioritizing of language over narrative as actually dangerous in the risk it incurs. These risks are greater for a woman writer, Howe seems to suggest, because she is “alone”—what is lost, perhaps, is the security of a political, and potentially collective, identity.

The nineties have brought about theoretical readings of Howe sensitive to the political implications of her textual practices. Her use of an indeterminate poetic language, her emphasis on the ways in which the ambiguity and uncertainty of historical texts have been silenced, was seen to be inherently critical of the ways in which racial and gendered marginalizations are maintained and produced in homogenized readings of cultural artefacts. In her essay on Howe in The Pink Guitar Rachel Blau Du Plessis demonstrated how the poem “The Liberties,” for example, was able to question the derided status of the feminine within literary history while attempting to free women from such essentialist notions of gender: “[Howe is] a woman—a person mainly gendered feminine—writing “feminine” discourses, knowing and rewriting “masculine” discourses in the name of a critical feminist project that wants to transcend gender” (125).

The importance of Howe's sweeps along the marginalizations of white American culture and history has also been recognized. James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture cites Howe's relatively early My Emily Dickinson as an example of a text capable of disrupting the “narrative continuity of history and identity” in its attempts to “find a different way through capitalist America” (343).

These readings of Howe's “different way” did not simply celebrate her absences but sought to politicize her construction of self. Marjorie Perloff suggests that Howe's critique of the politics of historical narratives is part of her striving for an identity that can acknowledge its necessary historical specificity without being limited by the powers that evoke these constructs:

Ostensibly absent and calling no attention to the problems and desires of the “real” Susan Howe, the poet's self is nevertheless inscribed in the linguistic interstices of her poetic text. … Howe is suggesting that the personal is always already political, specifically, that the contemporary Irish-American New England woman who is Susan Howe cannot be understood apart from her history.

(532–33)

In this reading Howe avoids the lyric “I” not because she is content to allow her poetry to participate in the “larger context” of an objective imaginary, but because the self-identification that such constructs require is reliant on the totalizing propositions that her poetry ultimately questions.

This reading persuasively constructs a political significance for Howe's questioning of the authorial role. The approach chimes neatly with the response by some feminists to Roland Barthes' ecstatic proclamation of the death of the author, which so fundamentally challenged the politics of authorial subjectivity and historical context. Nancy K. Miller infamously responds to Barthes' “foreclosing of the question of identity,” by advocating:

A critical positioning which reads against the weave of indifferentation to discover the embodiment in writing of a gendered subjectivity: … Not only to retrieve those texts from the indifference of the aesthetic universal, but to identify the act of reading as the act of subjectivity of another poetics, a poetics attached to gendered bodies that may have lived in history.

(272, 288)

Miller's reading of the politics of the subject parallels Perloff's reading of Howe. In both the formative relationship between subjectivity and language is acknowledged. The reader is empowered in the act of reading the significance of the self of the poet, which “cannot be understood apart from her history.”

Howe's critical essay “The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson,” a re-reading of an early captivity narrative, explicitly demonstrates the political rewards of Howe's reworking of historical narrative. Her re-reading of the text takes the form of a meta-narrative: its concern with imagining the stories that Rowlandson's captivity narrative conceals becomes an enquiry into the cultural appropriation of discourse itself. Howe describes the original narrative as a “microcosm of colonial imperialist history and a prophecy of our contemporary repudiation of alterity, anonymity, darkness” (89). She aims to challenge the mythologization of America's constructed history in order to demonstrate its continued influence in the present: she is keenly aware of the potent instability of such constructions. Her critique of the ways in which such apparently bald domination presented itself concentrates on demonstrating the linguistic and historical rifts that form such seminal narratives. Howe does not re-write a text to subvert history but to realize the subversion that the instability of such texts inherently reveals.

The accuracy of her poetical confrontation with what she describes as a “definitive version” of New England's history has recently been supported by growing scholarship seeking to examine the foundational role captivity narratives played in the construction of an American hegemony. Gary Ebersole's Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity attempts to reconstruct the contemporary consumption of Mary Rowlandson's contested text:

In general, then, the events of Mary Rowlandson's captivity were not in dispute in the late seventeenth century: at issue and of much greater import was the meaning of these and related events. Rowlandson's captivity came to have great communal significance for the Puritans. … The particulars of the captivity were properly to be understood by subordinating the specific instance and personal narrative impetus to a larger covenantal account or metanarrative of God's intervention in New England history.

(23)

Although Howe shares these basic premises, what the fluidity of her text seems capable of, where the orthodoxy of Ebersole's research falters, is a more thorough explication of the political and cultural significance of the linguistic structure of these “particulars” within the text. As Christopher Castiglia acknowledges, Howe's reading of Mary Rowlandson's text was “one of the earliest and most eloquent assessments of the deployment of the figure of the captive white woman to uphold patriarchal and imperialist ideology” (200). It is the suggestive plasticity of this “eloquence” that I think renders Howe's text so potent in revealing in such detail the cultural uses to which Rowlandson's text was—and is—put.

Captivity narratives were most crudely used to erect the necessarily reassuring boundaries between the Native American and the colonizer. Such narratives worked to contrast the demonic threat that the wilderness held with the secure purity of the settled communities. The Puritan community saw peril everywhere. The first nations, the land, and women were felt to threaten the white masculine sanctity of the “new world.” The safe reinstatement of women to the colonizer's communities confirmed not only the secure possession of women and thus of paternity but, by implication, of the land itself. This idealization of the land and of the feminine was maintained by the ruthless treatment meted out to those who challenged its boundaries. Hence, for Howe, women became not only the “commodities” passed “between two hostile armies” but actually the scapegoats for their failures.

In a time when discourse itself was unstable, religion provided the zealous authority needed to contain this fear of uncertainty. Biblical rhetoric was the vehicle that enforced this binarization of cultural difference. Howe is acutely aware of the specific implications of a female appropriation of such religious discourse. The use of religious rhetoric within captivity narratives authenticated female articulation by bypassing it. Women proved that they remained culturally and sexually chaste through demonstrating a piety that negated them. The narrators “enveloped themselves within God's Plot to survive the threat of openness.” The act of narration thus became a sign of submission rather than of authority. Even the actual telling was “increasingly structured and written down by men” (89).

Howe's text challenges this retrospective illustration of conversion narratives as discourses of possession by synthesizing it with readings that highlight the subversions of this authority. She suggests that religious rhetoric, invoked to protect the female narrator from suspicion by circumventing her mortality, actually conceals the narrator's voice: “each time an errant perception skids loose she controls her lapse by vehemently invoking biblical authority” (100). The Bible is “counter-point, shelter, threat” (124). Rowlandson controls the “slide into Reason's ruin” that would result, for example, from her “list of specific criticisms of colonial policies” with an appeal to the “imperatives of wonder working Providence” (101). This equivocal use of theological certainty reaches its apex in the citation that Howe attributes to Rowlandson after the death of her infant daughter, Sarah. Rowlandson appears to be attempting to make sense through the Bible of the overwhelming senselessness of her child's death. What she writes actually seems full of a terse and angry awareness of the calamitous absurdity of her narrative: “The Lord brought me some Scriptures, which did a little revive me, as that Isiai. 55.8. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your wayes my wayes saithe the Lord. And also that Psalm 37.5 commit thy way unto the Lord, trust also in him, and he shal bring it to pass” (99).

The death of Sarah seems to mark a turning point in Rowlandson's writing: “After the war whoop terror and the death of her little daughter, a new management of the truth speaks to oppose itself.” This new truth emerges from the need to disrupt, with reality, the ideology behind New England's history. Rowlandson became “an author who cannot let some definitive version of New England's destiny pull her” (125, 126).

Yet however thorough Howe's reworking of the cultural potency of these captivity narratives may be, it is never clear that she wholly manages to “repudiate” the Western reliance on the construction of alterity. Although her reading is based on acknowledging the racial basis of captivity narratives, a curious act of prioritizing still occurs within them:

Mary Rowlandson has been condemned for her lack of curiosity about the customs of her captors (she was starving, wounded, weary), and her narrative has been blamed for stereotypes of native Americans as “savages.” … These critics skirt the presence in this same genre of an equally insulting stereotype, that of a white woman as passive cipher in a controlled and circulated idea of Progress.

(96)

Howe renders narratives of race and narratives of gender subtly incompatible in this comparison: the critic must, she implies, choose between who is represented in the text. Moreover, her defense of Rowlandson's racism actually undercuts, contradicts even, what I have earlier suggested she herself has read into Rowlandson's texts. Most obviously Howe is casting Rowlandson as a starving victim. Later in the text Howe details both the compassion of her captors and Rowlandson's ingenuity in bartering for food:

In return for a piece of beef she made a shirt for a squaw's sannup. For a quart of peas she knit another pair of stockings. Someone asked her to sew a shirt for a papoose in exchange for a “mess of broth, thickened with meal made from the bark of a tree.” … None of her captors harmed her. Many shared what little they had with her. … she never saw a single Native American die from hunger.

(100)

This apparent reversal is reinforced by Howe's terming Rowlandson as a “passive cipher,” when she is subsequently described as a woman who “saw what she did not see and said what she did not say” (128). What is so problematic about these differences is that Howe is overlooking the significance of self-representation: both her own and Rowlandson's. Her argument that Rowlandson's subversion of narrative allowed her a voice fails to take into account the silencing of the Native American that such articulation may actually be complicit with.

I am, of course, not suggesting that these two different trajectories in Howe's text are literally incompatible, but I am arguing that the historical specifity that she is intent on constructing against the discursive homogeneity of Rowlandson's texts is not extended within her work to the experiences of the Native Americans: the decimation of these first peoples by American colonization is given only the meaning that colonization gave it. This can be seen again in Howe's complicity, ironical as it may present itself as being, with the absence of narrative for Native Americans: “Wootonokanuske, Philip's wife, had been captured earlier that year with their nine-year-old son. They were both sold into slavery and so vanish from history” (127). The retention of such absences jars against the ostensible purpose of much of Howe's poetical agenda to discover presences within the scission of American identity. This omission also appears to be at work in Howe's use of Native American names and words: they are given no etymological specifity—for a poet otherwise so concerned with the historical power concealed in sounds this omission is rather stark.

Such omissions can be understood, in part at least, from the way in which Howe constructs her own relationship to poetry. “The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson” is in many ways similar to her earlier “critical” work My Emily Dickinson. In both texts Howe re-reads the writing of a canonized woman writer to reveal meanings that their very canonization has been predicated upon suppressing: she locates these disruptions within the concealed meanings of an indeterminate language. But the processes by which she unearths these political revisions are themselves loaded with contradictory meanings. In My Emily Dickinson, for example, she appears to suggest two quite opposing things. She recognizes that Dickinson's historical context is fundamental to understanding the specific subversions she attributes to her work, “givens of Dickinson's life: her sex, class, education, inherited character traits … all carry the condition for work in their wake.” Yet Howe also suggests that these things are irrelevant, not because they are suggestive of intentionalism, but because “the conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach, indifferent to worldly chronology.” (13).

Howe's reading of Dickinson is concerned to empower the ambiguity of this enigmatic and eclectic verse.⁵ She searches for the meanings that she imagines Dickinson salted away into the “slants” of her poetry. Her project is thus in some ways similar to other feminist acts of historical “re-vision.” Indeed Adrienne Rich, whose term this originally was, had performed just such a reading of the politics of Dickinson's covert subversions some ten years earlier. What is so interesting about Howe's reading of Dickinson is that she resists the straightforward connections between the political context of Dickinson's marginality and her employment of clandestine meaning. At the beginning of My Emily Dickinson she directly attacks Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, and Hélène Cixous for their attempts to understand the complexities of feminine writing through the constraints of a patriarchal society:

“The Laugh of the Medusa” by the French feminist Hélène Cixous is an often eloquent plan for what women's writing will do. The problem is that will too quickly becomes must. … Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar are perceptive about the problems and achievements of nineteenth century British novelists who were women. Sadly their book The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination, fails to discuss the implications of a nineteenth century American penchant for linguistic decreation ushered in … by Emily Dickinson. For these two feminist scholars a writer may conceal or confess all if she does it in a logical syntax. Emily Dickinson suggests that the language of the heart has quite another grammar.

(13)

Howe objects not to the consideration of gender by these three writers—she concedes that “gender difference does affect our use of language”—but to what she perceives as the formulaic aspects of feminist theory that reduce everything to the constructed nature of gender. Gilbert and Gubar and Cixous fail Howe's Emily Dickinson because they cannot allow for “possibility.”

Howe diverges from the accepted, although widely varied, feminist theorizing of Gilbert and Gubar and Cixous because she is unwilling to allow the connections between experimental writing and historical marginality to be framed only through context. Howe cannot accept this reading because of her controversial contention that there is a “mystical separation between poetic vision and ordinary living” (My Emily Dickinson 13).

Howe's implicit presence in her politicized use of language—her weaving herself into the “interstices” of her text in Perloff's words—is problematized by this assertion. Not only does Howe analyze history from a place beyond self, but she issues this challenge from a place beyond time. Her ability to disrupt history thus often appears to be predicated upon what is constructed as an inevitable breach between language and context. In an interview given to Edward Foster in 1990 Howe says: “I think that when you write a poem you use sounds and words outside time. You use timeless articulations. I mean the ineluctable mystery of language is something … it's just …” (“Interview” 172). This lacuna—this ineluctable mystery of language outside of time—is associated in Howe's poetry with an emancipation from authority. This space allows her “possibility”; it is here that the silenced voices of history find articulation.

Howe links her definition of “possibility” to the contradictions and ambiguities implicit in her construction of an authorial self: “my voice formed from my life belongs to no-one else. What I put into words is no longer my possession. Possibility has opened” (My Emily Dickinson 13). Hence Howe's acceptance of alterity, her openness to the voices of history, seems founded upon her ability to write a language that can transcend the limitations of a single subject position. Her subjective absence is deeply implicated in this, as if the theoretical restraint placed upon the author as originator of meaning is taken to allow, instead, for the transcendence of cultural context by the meanings in a text.

The apparently emancipatory quality of Howe's textual revision fails to challenge the authority of the written word. Indeed, it actually works to preserve it. Her challenges to the marginalization of historical narrative are less concerned to consider the cultural politics of the prohibited access to written documentation than to valorize the indeterminacy inherent in the written word: these two things are not the same. Howe fails to consider that the status of poetry as a vehicle for the elite, the educated, actually reproduces the dynamics that silenced the ghostly protagonists who people poems such as “The Liberties” and “Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.” The fundamental assumption of Howe, and Heidegger, that the “frontier zones” of language and of history are simultaneous, that the voices that have been written out of history can be found in the truth concealed by an ambivalent language, requires more scrutiny than is presently given.

The crucial relinquishment of self into textual narrative, for example, does not necessarily trigger a liberation of the narrative. In the case of “Mary Rowlandson,” the opposite is actually true. Howe's placing of herself into the historical narrative meant that her own inevitable and relative position of authority and cultural positioning went unchallenged. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's analysis of the politics of ethnography demonstrates that “the clearing of a subjective space from which to speak is unavoidable.” Spivak, examining Rudyard Kipling's use of indigenous names and words as simply markers of difference, suggests that a reluctance to acknowledge one's own subjective relationship to the context of signification results in an invasive translation: “Thus the incantation of names, far from being a composition of place, is precisely the combination of effacement and specifity and appropriation that one might call violation” (233). Howe's frequent evasion of actual historical specifity, in texts such as “Mary Rowlandson,” combined with her refusal to challenge her own subject position, problematizes our ability to simply discover liberation, the articulation of alterity, in her textualized exploration of historical texts.

It is not that Native Americans are denied historical specifity in Howe's texts simply because of her articulation of a gendered standpoint. Judith Butler's critique of Cixous and Luce Irigaray for assuming a binarized gendered position that is inevitably oppressive to alternative articulations of alterity cannot wholly explain Howe's racialized text. For although Butler's argument obviously does bear on Howe, it does not totally explain what is happening in Howe's re-reading of the captivity narrative.

In Howe's reading of texts it is not gender, but the meanings beyond gender that are constructed as essentially pre-discursive. Howe's unacknowledged whiteness is not a result of her acknowledged gender but a result of her desire, at times, to dismiss her own subjective presence. This desire to unleash the indeterminacy of language, to relinquish herself into her text, prevents her, at times, from acknowledging the full implications of her own cultural positioning.

What goes unexamined, therefore, are the limits that one's own subject position places on a concurrence of textual and cultural suppression. Howe's positioning within the dominant culture affects the marginalization of the Native American in her text because she is not even aware of it. The cultural decimation of the first peoples of America cannot be found in the interstices of Howe's reading precisely because it was not a textual event: it was written out of the histories which Howe reads. What Howe consistently fails to acknowledge are these fundamental differences between historical acts and textual silences—her refusal to recognize her own place within the text is part of this blindness. Howe's attempts to integrate her subjective self—her political agency—into the web of historical narrative are problematized when they render her incapable of acknowledging her own influence on the production of these narratives.

Notes

1. Recent Howe criticism has focused upon the importance of Howe's textually innovative historicism in challenging the hegemony of historical narrative. See Ma, Nicholls, Palatella.

2. Attempts to define the avant-garde practices of “Language” poetry, especially, have concentrated on the political implications of opposing constructions of self by the poetic text. See, amongst others, Altieri, Bartlett, Greer, and Hartley. For work that has included Howe within an analysis of these divisions see Reinfield, Perloff, and Quartermain.

3. Greer suggests Marjorie Perloff's definition of language poetry enacts these problems as it leads her to “dismantle the discourse of language poetry [to] separate the aesthetic component of the writing from its political contexts and impulses, and isolates its forms from its history” (338–39).

4. For a discussion by language poets of the varied ways in which political significance is attributed to these challenges to the construction of the expressive self see Bernstein, Perleman, Silliman and Watten.

5. Howe primarily reads Dickinson's poetry in order to uncover the violence that the academy continues to perpetuate against Dickinson's work in its misreadings and mispresentations of her original manuscripts. This project of Howe's—to have access to and eventually publish the original and unchanged version of Dickinson's manuscripts—has recently come to fruition with the publication, by a student of Howe's, of Dickinson's manuscripts. See Werner.

Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

———. “Some Problems of Agency in the Theories of Radical Poetries.” Contemporary Literature 372 (1986): 207–37.

Bartlett, Lee. “What is Language Poetry?” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 741–52.

Bernstein, Charles. Politics and Public Policy. New York: Roof, 1990.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990.

Butterick, George. “Endless Protean Linkage.” Hambone 3 (1983): 148–53.

Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Literature and Art. London, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

Du Plessis, Rachel Blau. The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. London, New York: Routledge, 1990.

Ebersole, Gary. Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity. Charlottesville, London: UP of Virginia, 1995.

Greer, Michael. “Ideology and Theory in Recent Experimental Writing or, The Naming of Language Poetry.” Boundary 2 6.2/3 (1989): 335–55.

Hartley, George. Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Howe, Susan. “The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.” In The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Wesleyan: UP of New England, 1993.

———. My Emily Dickinson. New York: North Atlantic, 1985.

———. The Europe of Trusts. New York: Sun and Moon, 1990.

———. Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974–1979. New York: New Directions, 1996.

———. Interview. “Speaking with Susan Howe.” With Janet Ruth Falon. The Difficulties 3.2 (1989): 33–42.

———. “An Interview with Susan Howe.” With Edward Foster. Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 4(1990): 14–38. Rpt. in Howe, Birth-mark 155–81.

Landrey, David. “The Spider Self of Emily Dickinson and Susan Howe.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, 4 (1990): 107–09.

Ma, Ming-Qian. “Poetry as History Revised: Susan Howe's ‘Scattering As Behavior Toward Risk.’” American Literary History 6 (1994): 716–37.

Metcalf, Paul. “The Real Susan Howe.” The Difficulties 3.2 (1989): 52–56.

Miller, Nancy K. 1986. “Arachnologies: The Woman, the Text and the Critic.” In The Poetics of Gender. Ed. N. Miller, New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

Nicholls, Peter. “Unsettling the West: Susan Howe's Historicism.” Contemporary Literature 37.4 (1996): 586–601.

Palatella, John. “An End of Abstraction: An Essay on Susan Howe's Historicism.” Denver Quarterly 29.3 (1995): 74–97.

Perelman, Bob. Writing/Talks. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1985.

Perloff, Marjorie. “Collusion or Collision with History: The Narrative Lyric of Susan Howe.” Contemporary Literature 30.4 (1989): 518–33.

———. Poetic License; Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990.

Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Reinfield, Linda. Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. Baton Rouge: Louisiana SUP, 1992.

Rich, Adrienne. “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson.” Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose. 1975. Ed. B. C. Gelpi and A. Gelpi New York: Norton, 1993.

Rorty, Richard. “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language.” The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Ed C. B. Guignon. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Silliman, Ron. In the American Tree. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Imperialism and Sexual Difference.” Oxford Literary Review 8.1–2 (1986): 225–40.

Watten, Barrett. Aerial 8: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory. Washington Edge, 1995.

Werner, Marta L., ed. Emily Dickinson's Open Folio: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.

Wills, Clair. “Contemporary Women's Poetry: Experimentalism and the Expressive Voice.” Critical Quarterly 36.3 (1994): 34–52.