The Figure of the Reader in Ann Lauterbach's and Susan Howe's PoetryBy James McCorkle
While much has been written on the figures, figurations, sites, conditions, and interventions of writers and writing in poetry, far less attention has been made of the figure and figuration of the reader in poetry. In part this may be due to a conflation of reading and writing, for example as in James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover reading the automatic dictation from the Ouji board and transcribing it seem the same action where Merrill becomes both reader and writer. Writing replicates the process of "reading" or interpreting an event or condition, thereby the modes of writing and reading are not distinguished. The traditional authority of the poetic voice overrides the figure of reading. The figure of the reader always risks becoming transformed into a metaphor of writing. Writing, of course, could be considered a supplement to writing in that one must already be reading so as to encounter writing and know it as such or to be able to write. Thus what I am considering in this brief paper do not pertain directly to issues of reception and reader's response theory, but rather I am considering the traces of reading and the construction of figures and figurations of reading in poetry, notably in several poems by the contemporary experimental poets Susan Howe and Ann Lauterbach. In particular, the work of Howe and Lauterbach is concerned with the formation as well as retrieval of a prophetic and oracular poetics. By shifting the attention from writer to reader there is a similar shift from prophet to prophesy, from the one who prophesies to the oracle's graphesis--its condition for reading. Prophecy entails not an appropriation or consumption of the language nor, the reversal, the swallowing up of ourselves. Prophecy agitates the space of language: it opens rifts, insists on waywardness, to be unhoused in and by language. Howe and Lauterbach read for us and offer for us to read what Heidegger would call an "openness to mystery." Gerald Bruns explains: "what happens in the hermeneutical experience is that we are placed in the open, in the region of the question--exposed to be sure, and ungrounded, but ungrounded in Heidegger's sense of letting-go rather than in the logical sense of being at an impasse or caught in a double-bind. The hermeneutical experience in this respect is always subversive of totalization or containment. . . this means the openness of tradition to the future, its irreducibility to the library or museum or institutions of cultural transmission, its resistance to closure, its uncontainability within finite interpretations (tradition is not an archive)" (8-9). Exegesis, in any normative, disciplined method, is eschewed. Continuing with Bruns's reading of Heidegger, contact with history involves stepping-back: "The 'step-back' does not mean a return to previous positions or the recuperation of lost ground. . . The 'step-back' is related to letting-go and listening, as in a conversation, where one's task is to listen to the other" (66). In such stepping back, one faces an ainigma or dark saying: "it is not to be penetrated or laid open to view," writes Bruns, "there is no way of shedding light on what it means in the sense of a content or message that can be conceptually retrieved" (69). Poetry then "is renunciation of meaning as that which grasps and fixes, that which produces determinate objects" (106). Introducing Heidegger, particularly through Bruns's inspired reading, gestures toward the concerns of Howe and Lauterbach--but also, their poetry reinforces Bruns's reading of poetry as in-spirited by Heidegger: Heidegger is not the philosopher of dwelling and unity, indeed, as Bruns writes, that is a gross caricature--rather Heidegger's thinking on poetry insists upon poetry as the "giving up of refuge in the familiar or the same" (185) and "exposes us to that which manifests itself as alien and inaccessible the way . . . language speaks as that which withholds itself" (184). If poetry is this renunciation and estrangement, working against the unified and foundational, then we must confront a re-visioning of ourselves as readers, to pose the question what we read for, that is to pose the question of linguistic mastery. Susan Howe's Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, a representative text of hers, prophesies and acts as a radical didactic process. Readings that seek to provide a literal outline or narrative, such as those by Marjorie Perloff and Linda Reinfeld, quickly acknowledge the difficulty of such an endeavor: Perloff begins by attempting to trace a narrative--and indeed that is our first response as readers--but she quickly breaks off that line of exegesis and notes that not only "does Howe frequently decompose, transpose, and re-figure the word. . . she [also] consistently breaks down or, as John Cage would put it, 'demilitarizes' the syntax of her verbal units" (305). Reinfeld argues, that "To the degree that language makes sense, to the extent that it forges connections, it risks falsity and bad faith: it becomes regimental, the enemy. Only those chosen are saved and only the poet--specifically, the poet set apart by a capacity for visionary experience--can hope to emerge from chaos with something like self-possession ("My voice, drawn from my life, belongs to no one else'). As we move toward meaning, "deep so deep my narrative," we move into a language so fluid that the rescue of reason becomes impossible" (140). Perloff, I think, interjects a specific polemic in her argument, by seeing in Howe's text a rebuttal to the packaged sentiments of a workshop poem and the need to re-vision history in poetry. Such a reading does locate rifts and locates Howe in particular contexts and lineages--but it also pulls away from any hermeneutical consideration, which I think the poem brilliantly offers. Reinfeld suggests a recuperative reading: that we do move toward "meaning"--implying that there is a point or final destination and that "self-possession" can be attained. Though the sense of self is left unclear, there is implied a unity of self--a movement from chaos to light or enlightenment?--that the poem, in fact, swerves us away from. Indeed, Reinfeld falls pray to that "regimental" exegesis--the belief in a final dwelling of meaning--that she otherwise argues against. As useful as Perloff's and Reinfeld's readings are--and they are very, for they do overturn the charge that Howe's poetry is elitist and nonsensical--they also point to the entrapments reading confronts and the difficulty of eluding those traps. The title, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, poses the difficulty of reading: articulation is both linguistic practice as well as muscular kinesis; sound implies not only vocality, but also safety and value, particularly in regard to financial risks, as well as a body of water and the plumbing of that depth (as Thoreau did, seeing the ruins beneath the water's surface); forms engages both as noun and verb; and lastly, in time, suggests a border or margin, an extreme edge, a crisis averted. Howe presents the reader with a series of choices--not meaninglessness--but a series of choices whose reading will be dependent upon the cultural and historical positioning of the individual reader. This is not a re-invocation of the Emersonian ideal of the self-reliant individual, but a re-visioning of the significance of that individual as mediated (or disciplined) by her or his culture. To read becomes a series of retrievals--Howe own reading of Dickinson's poetry, particularly "My Life had Stood--a Loaded Gun," brilliantly defines this process. Texts allow memory and limit memory: in Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, the opening documents seek to limit memory, to sum it up and thereby dismiss or contain memory. Yet to unleash one memory is to release other voices, thus delimiting sources and origins. In her My Emily Dickinson, Howe states, Each word is a cipher, through its sensible sign another sign hidden. The recipient of a letter, or combination of letter and poem from Emily Dickinson, was forced much like Edwards' listening congregation, through shock and through subtraction of the ordinary, to a new way of perceiving. Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding. This re-ordering of the forward process of reading is what makes her poetry and the prose of her letters among the most original writing of her century. (MED 51). Howe's reading of Dickinson is a radical didactic, for in it we find the degree to which our reading of Dickinson has been policed, confined, violently pacified. With each word, Howe's text necessitates choice, as the opening segment from the second section, "Hope Atherton's Wanderings," of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time demonstrates:
Prest try to set after grandmother As many readers note, the opening word "Prest," plays upon soundings of oppressed, pressed, impressed, and the sense of set after. However, read with the segment's final line, Howe suggests an urgency in maintaining an identity as an inviolate object, an "I," rather than as a subject: the pres-sure of being (still) Hope Atherton, of being not reduced to someone's (Mr. Atherton) story. The risk is to become story and then become marginalia, a curiosity discovered among one's cluttered papers. Although this segment is most transparent, for the narrative of ambush, escape, and survival are apparent, so is the fragmentation and decomposition of the word. This is most apparent with ly. As Perloff notes, this little suffix makes possible bringing any number of words to join it, as well as to work as a decomposition of lie, itself an ambiguous word (305). The reader must address each word as a signal coming "through deep water," hence wavered, distorted, and transmuted. Hope Atherton becomes a mirror for ourselves as readers. Harried by both Indians--in their war for survival--and the British militia, he is the prey of military actions. What it is he saw must be confined, obliterated, or rendered silent. Only a certain reading is allowed, hence Hope Atherton is ostracized from his community, his story is not believed. Our condition as readers then is resolved by and reflects our condition as a community. "Mythology," writes Howe "reflects a region's reality" (MED 43). As the poem continues, with Hope Atherton's wanderings, the lines, writes Peter Quartermain on another of Howe's poems but applicable here, "seem to register a process of perception and thought subject perpetually and continuously to re-casting, re-seeing, re-vision. They register a process of cogitating, meditating and exploring an old enigma, endemic perhaps to all human culture but especially acute in the history of New England, perpetually evoked and invoked by the complex of the known and the unknown, the seen and the unseen, the cultivated and the wild: The relations between the real and the visionary" (187). Howe does not accommodate the reader: Atherton's wanderings become our own as we construct readings--and question their foundations--from the gatherings of words:
scow aback din In this ninth segment, with its crossed out but not erased fourth line, Atherton finds himself re-counting the miasma of his wanderings, yet we are drawn back to foundational words. For example, "ne" appears fractured and incomprehensible, yet it is an obsolete form for nephew, and more importantly, it is an archaic negative form, for not, and part of the negative structure of neither . . . nor. It also serves as a homophone for knee. If we follow the O.E.D., itself a lexicon of certain relations of history and power, "quagg" is identified with marshy, boggy ground, though it also forms a verb, to submerge, and as a descriptor for flabby, unsound flesh. Submerged in this quag is "skaeg," which is not found in the O.E.D., but which is homophonically related to "quagg" as well as suggestive of a fracturing of an American Indian word. Emerging from dialects and perhaps onomatopoeic formations, as well as mutations of words from American Indians, words such as "qaugg" make their first recorded appearance, according to the O.E.D., just prior to Atherton's wanderings and the early wars against the Indians as typified by the Falls Fight. Are we then caught in a miasma--a defilement--of sound and meaning, or are we asked to interrogate the origins of words for the latent struggles of power and meaning? If the latter, then what of the seeming directive of the excised, but not removed "sieve catacomb"? A notation against the excavation of word-tombs? A notation against the impulse to "chisel" and "stint" words into tombs or "sects." To "stint" a word, to stop its movement and flow, to assuage its pain, and the rupturing of instinct, is Hope Atherton's fate: his vision of the forest, the violence unleashed, is stinted by his sect. Howe directs us to this close, demanding (albeit this paper's demonstration is hopelessly brief and stinted), through her circular constructions, as in the fourteenth and fifteenth sections. This is not a palindrome, but an articulation of sound, that is the pronouncement of movement. In the articulation of movement back-and-forth, oscillation, retrieval and continuity become important rather than a shift to the symbolic ordering of Return and Organic Wholeness associated with the image of the circle. Reading the final words of section fourteen, "see step shot Immanence force to Mohegan," which are reversed to become the first words of the next section as well as typographically compressed, connections between words are fluid. Yet "Immanence," with its Dickinsonian capitalization, is destroyed. To lift out and isolate from the text a passage is to risk perpetuating violence, and yet such action is Howe's own compositional method. The third section of Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, "Taking the Forest," is comprised of twenty-five segments composed primarily in declarative couplets. The highly stressed, compact lines never rupture as they do in "Hope Atherton's Wanderings." Instead these lines seem set as "Letters sent out in crystalline purity" (22). Hank Lazer helpfully suggests that in Howe's writing there are "several noteworthy lyricisms: A lyricism of 'disturbance' (of syntax and the layout of the page), that concentrates attention on the individual word, or even the syllables or letters in a word, as well as the word's placement on the page; a lyricism of statement in which the 'philosophical' or didactic also sings; and a lyricism of historical fact, acting as an image or epiphanic vortex, often intensified by its opposition to accepted or normative historical accounts" (63-4). Lazer's "lyricism of statement" describes this third and final section. Single lines, a single couplet, or even a grouping of couplets often forms an oracular meaning. In segment seven, one of two (the other being the sixth segment) which is composed in single lines not couplets there is a tension between the line as isolated meaning or prophesy and the entire segment as narrative (a recapitulation of the Falls Fight):
Shouting an offering Howe names the condition "Lawless center," a cipher loosed from the draft of history, a rejection of that Yeatsian pleading vision in "The Second Coming," "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." That tightened circle of falcon and falconer, of unity (but also that celebratory predatory violence that sweeps through Yeats's work), is the early American town's green, that of stocks and "Scaffold places." Howe offers a spiritual history that forms an ongoing prophecy: the twenty-second segment opens with the line "Latin ends and French begins" thus compressing the transformation of languages that coincides with the shift of power, the rise of the vernacular, and the nation-state. By compression--an exercise of violence itself--Howe is able to delineate the history of the taking of the forest:
Caravels bending to windward Like Blake reading the already and always past, or Dickinson reading the Abstract and Luminous, Howe prophesies in what we know what we are becoming still. By moving toward prophecy, Howe eludes the claim of authorship. Heidegger's description of poetry, that of the renunciation of linguistic mastery and an opening to language's danger or mystery informs Howe's Hope Atherton. In every word, implies Howe at the poem's conclusion, the "Archaic presentiment of rupture" (38). |