A brief note on Susan Howe's The Liberties.
Susan Howe's The Liberties is an exploration of Jonathan Swift and Stella’s relationship. More than that, it explores Howe’s own relation to Ireland (though she does not mention herself), her grandmother’s & mother’s relation to Ireland, and Cordelia position in literature (Yes, the one from Shakespeare). She quotes and writes through texts by Swift, Sheridan, and Yeats in this piece. Moreover, she fragments the official version of history in an attempt not to rewrite it but rather to “rescue” parts of it not seen, and she tells us why she is doing this in the beginning of The Europe of Trusts. She says, echoing Walter Benjamin, “History is the record of the winners,” and that she wishes she “could tenderly lift from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted—inarticulate”. Additionally, she says that “life opens into conceptless perspectives”. She’s positing a multiplicity of perspectives, and she is rescuing some of them from the covering over that has happened to them historically. Ultimately though, her rescuing of the voices can only be partial because that’s the nature of what we have left—the fragments of history. She tries to mirror that in the structure of the text. It starts off with the women, Stella and then Cordelia, as we have received them through other texts, and by the end, as she is completing her task of lifting them from history, the text literally grows fragmented—the forms explode.
Beyond rescuing historical figures in a fragmented way, what I suggest that Howe is doing with her sources is mapping out an identity for herself as a writer through the multiple narratives that she writes through. In other words, Howe denies any specific lyric authority in this piece through fragmentation and avoiding the “I.” In that, she’s denying a stable “I,” the “I” that we can see in so much of the contemporary lyric—subjective, stable, emotional, gendered (You can continue the list on your own). She is, however, through her combination of texts trying to map an identity for herself which is composed of many multiplicities, or historical strains, from past women associated with literature, portrayals of women in literature, and Irish women in general. In other words, while she denies a stable authorial identity, through her source texts, she is acknowledging an identity composed of multiplicities, one that is in flux as it reacts to different texts or rearranges an interpretive system of its own for dealing with different texts. We don’t have identity as controlled construct here, but we do have a construct, though highly fragmented, sorting through a fragmented landscape of past and present texts.
Susan Howe's The Liberties is an exploration of Jonathan Swift and Stella’s relationship. More than that, it explores Howe’s own relation to Ireland (though she does not mention herself), her grandmother’s & mother’s relation to Ireland, and Cordelia position in literature (Yes, the one from Shakespeare). She quotes and writes through texts by Swift, Sheridan, and Yeats in this piece. Moreover, she fragments the official version of history in an attempt not to rewrite it but rather to “rescue” parts of it not seen, and she tells us why she is doing this in the beginning of The Europe of Trusts. She says, echoing Walter Benjamin, “History is the record of the winners,” and that she wishes she “could tenderly lift from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted—inarticulate”. Additionally, she says that “life opens into conceptless perspectives”. She’s positing a multiplicity of perspectives, and she is rescuing some of them from the covering over that has happened to them historically. Ultimately though, her rescuing of the voices can only be partial because that’s the nature of what we have left—the fragments of history. She tries to mirror that in the structure of the text. It starts off with the women, Stella and then Cordelia, as we have received them through other texts, and by the end, as she is completing her task of lifting them from history, the text literally grows fragmented—the forms explode.
Beyond rescuing historical figures in a fragmented way, what I suggest that Howe is doing with her sources is mapping out an identity for herself as a writer through the multiple narratives that she writes through. In other words, Howe denies any specific lyric authority in this piece through fragmentation and avoiding the “I.” In that, she’s denying a stable “I,” the “I” that we can see in so much of the contemporary lyric—subjective, stable, emotional, gendered (You can continue the list on your own). She is, however, through her combination of texts trying to map an identity for herself which is composed of many multiplicities, or historical strains, from past women associated with literature, portrayals of women in literature, and Irish women in general. In other words, while she denies a stable authorial identity, through her source texts, she is acknowledging an identity composed of multiplicities, one that is in flux as it reacts to different texts or rearranges an interpretive system of its own for dealing with different texts. We don’t have identity as controlled construct here, but we do have a construct, though highly fragmented, sorting through a fragmented landscape of past and present texts.
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