keeping history a secret
by Douglas Messerli
Susan Howe Secret
History of the Dividing Line (New York: Telephone Books, 1978)
I describe Howe’s work as “eccentric” not because it is particularly
peculiar or odd, but rather because, in the best sense of that word, her
concerns are “out of the ordinary,” in fact, are extraordinary. Howe is one of
a special breed of authors (I can think of only one other contemporary writer,
Bernadette Mayer) who thoroughly explore the terrain between utterance and
gesture, between word and act, that narrow gap, as she puts it in Secret History, between “salvages or
savages.”
Indeed, Howe’s work suggests the world as actualized is a savage one; man in motion is a
terrible pagan, battling, plundering, raping his way through history like the
Vikings. Accordingly, any chronicle of man inevitably is filled with terror.
Man is a warrior, thus his history is always a tale of war; as Howe writes, “I
know the war-whoop in each dusty narrative.” Story-telling, then, becomes an
act of recreating its horror.
I search
the house
hunting
out people for trial
. . . . .
. . . . . . .
Needles
fell in strands
Daggers
like puppets scissored the sky
Millions
faced north
the
Emperor’s last Conscription
the year
One.
Some
craned away
some used
their elbows for meat
families
knocking their heads together
and
thanking the Gods outloud.
Even in sleep mankind moves through
its dreams, in Howe’s imagination, as “troops of marble messengers,” “half
grotesque, half magical,” enchanted speaking beasts “acting out roles.”
Simultaneously, however, Howe implies that the very language that evokes
this horrific vision, the very words that chronicle man’s mad actions, are also
his salvation, a potential salvage. With man’s enchantment, with his amazing
ability to record his own actions in speech, comes the gift of creation, which,
in turn, momentarily stops that flow of meaningless acts through time and
space. “Our law,” Howe observes, resides in “vocables/of shape or sound.”
Hence, language must be recognized as a thing apart from nature, as separate
from man’s headlong rush into chaos. For Howe, just as for the “language”
poets, “words need always be torn away” from the “icy tremors of abstraction,”
from their old associations, and brought to life instead as objects, as things
existing in reality in their own right. If language is to have any power, a
word must be recognized as a thing,
as “an object set up to indicate a boundary or position,” a “mark/border/bulwark....” Only then can
the word be used to heal the devastation like an “anecdote.”
Accordingly, the narratives of Secret
History are purposely attenuated; the history is kept at arm’s length, even
thwarted. History must be kept a
secret; it cannot be permitted to dominate, for that would be to abandon the
work to chaos, to the mere recounting of man’s terrifying inhuman acts. At
times in Secret History it is almost
as if the teller of the tale has been metamorphosed into a stammering,
absent-minded historian, as the tale, once present, fortuitously is lost to the
sound of human speech:
O
where ere
he He A
ere I were
wher
father father
O it is the old old
myth
. . . . . .
As Howe has put it in a more recent
poem (in Hawk-Wind, no. 2 [1979],
19), “the real plot was invisible.”
On the other hand, Howe recognizes that she must be careful always to
walk a fine line between story and speech. If she is to continue to explore
that dividing line between chaos and order, she cannot afford to give up the
tale. To do so would be to see man as a debilitated schizophrenic, as a
creature doomed to act in one way and to think (for to speak is to think) in another. Moreover, Howe
recognizes language as an object can be a dangerous thing to a creature in such
continual motion; the mark, order, bulwark can suddenly become a boundary,
impaling the animal “in a netting of fences.” The two, she indicates, must
always be superimposed: language, existing in its own space, necessarily must
coexist. “The Fortunate Islands,” Howe perceived in The Western Borders, “are in The Sea of Darkness.”
Such a controlled tension invariably results in a certain degree of
coyness; and behind that there even may be a kind of fear of permitting the
artist his full range as both actor and creator. Yet one is reminded in this of
the painfully brilliant fictions of Jane Bowles, a writer who, like Howe,
attempted to describe those subtle relationships between act and speech. The
tensions such as those inherent in works by writers such as Howe and Bowles
stem less from fear than from these authors’ commitment to their art, their
absolute belief in language and in its ability both to repeat and make new reality. One can ask no more of
any writer. That Susan Howe has so incredibly combined the tasks of both
remembering and creating is an added reward for her readers.
College
Park, Maryland, 1980
Reprinted from American
Book Review, II, no. 6 (September-October 1980).
No comments:
Post a Comment