Susan Howe's Landscapes of Language: Articulation of Sound Forms in Time and ‘The Liberties’

Abstract

Susan Howe's work explores the conditions for meaning—not as pre-existent, but as something that occurs as a result of interaction between subject and object, reader and writer. It is a phenomenological project in which Howe reduces things to their essence. The primary goal of this article is to reveal, through an analysis of two long poems published by Howe in the 1980s, her strategies in terms of the opening up of syntax in order to investigate patriarchal authority hidden within historical discourse. In these poems, the phrase, or other fragmentary elements, is Howe's unit. It is argued that by erasing elements such as the verb, Howe enacts an enunciative clearing. Occupying the territory of seventeenth-century New England, Howe engages the poem as contained social space in order to illumine the formative myths of a nation. Further, it is shown that by fracturing the language in which history is written, Howe fractures the myth history conceals. Although Howe has attracted considerable critical attention, there has been little attention paid to her work by stylisticians, including those working within cognitive poetics. Stylistics involves the systematic collection of data about the language of a text in order to draw new inferences or to support existing perspectives, thereby establishing connections between linguistic form and literary effect. Cognitive poetics concerns those processes at work in experiencing a literary text and thus emphasizes the reader's role in the construction of meaning.

Keywords:

• Stylistics
• cognitive poetics
• schema theory
• linguistic deviation
• conceptual metaphor
• phenomenology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹The phrase ‘Manifest Destiny’ itself was not coined until 1845, when John O'Sullivan described it as ‘the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence’ (‘Manifest Destiny’ 1992). The sense in which Howe is using it is nevertheless an accurate description in terms of the early expansionist policies in the Revolutionary period.

²Howe's early poem ‘Pythagorean Silence’ opens with a reference to a wood (Howe 1990b: 17). It also alludes to Ovid's Daphne, who is turned into a tree in order to avoid Apollo's attentions. Moreover, as Montgomery notes, a number of modernist poets, including Pound, Eliot and H. D., use the tree as a motif (Montgomery 2006: 617).

³In ‘Projective Verse’, Olson addresses the issue of the line in relation to the breath and the performing body. He does not really address the issue of syntax, other than to say that grammar is ‘inherited’, a convention which must be broken; that tense must be ‘kicked around anew’ in order to endow a poem with a greater sense of immediacy; and that the sentence itself is ‘lightning, as passage of force from subject to object’, the ‘VERB between two nouns’ (Allen 1999: 386–94). What Howe does is to remove even the verb, and hence tense; there is therefore nothing between two nouns, thus enacting a clearing.

⁴‘The Liberties’ appears in the 1990 The Europe of Trusts together with ‘Pythagorean Silence’, ‘Defenestration of Prague’ and a preface, which is a statement of poetics titled ‘THERE ARE NOT LEAVES ENOUGH TO CROWN TO COVER TO CROWN TO COVER’. This article uses this 1990 edition.

⁵Semantic deviation is when meaning relations are logically inconsistent or paradoxical in some way.

⁶Parts of Howe's essay ‘The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson’ were published in 1985 and later re-published in The Birth-mark (1993).

⁷Mildenberg is writing on Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. However, there are many parallels between Stein and Howe in their experiments with the formal qualities of language, and what motivates these.