'I am indebted to everyone': Susan Howe's Inheritance

Abstract

This thesis articulates the interdependent concepts of inheritance and debt (material, political, cultural) as they pertain to the work of the U.S. poet Susan Howe (b. 1937). Drawing on scholarship in performance studies, pragmatist aesthetics, feminist psychoanalytic theory, sound studies and historical materialism, I read published texts and archival material from various points in Howe’s creative life alongside work by her interlocutors: Joan Jonas, Fanny Howe, and David Grubbs. As such, the thesis is also a study of the interaction of experimental poetry with live and time-based art, and of the process of collaboration. Each chapter explores a different category of possessing or perceiving something in common with another—synchronicity, likeness, and repetition—to argue that liveness and embodied aesthetic experience allow patrilinear generational history to be reconceived as indebtedness to the present, in the present. The thesis begins with an introduction that outlines the importance of the perception of doubles in Howe’s reading and writing practices, and then situates Howe in relation to her contemporaries and her Puritan heritage. Chapter One reads Howe’s work in tandem with that of her friend Joan Jonas, a performance artist. It traces a mirroring between The Liberties (1980) and Jonas’ practice of incorporating folk ritual and building installations with props used in previous performances. I show how, in The Liberties, Howe presents monuments to colonial power as a kind of stage set to reconsider the role of the historically powerless and especially the maternal in sustaining patrilinear inheritance. Chapter Two outlines an alternative model of inheritance by way of sibling likeness. I bring the elegiac, documentary essay ‘Sorting Facts’ (1996) into conversation with the work of poet and novelist Fanny Howe, Susan Howe’s communist, Catholic sister. The comparison between siblings allows me to show Susan Howe’s awakening sense of a materialist grace that evades linearity and ownership. In Chapter Three I develop this idea further by focusing on Howe’s collaborative performances with musician David Grubbs, as well as her rearticulation of Grubbs’ music in Souls of the Labadie Tract (2004). The chapter explores the implications of pragmatist genealogies of knowledge for Souls’ attempt to articulate a utopian soundscape in the monumental materiality of repetitive drone music. The thesis ends with a short coda that extends the analysis from Chapter Three to Howe’s most recent book. It presents an associative reading of Concordance (2020) alongside work by Howe’s daughter, the visual artist R.H. Quaytman, and others to illustrate Howe’s evolving investment in a Romantic, pragmatist commons in the present.