Reading the Margins : The Futurity of Susan Howe's Archival Recovery(Kanto Review of English Literature)

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Archival space forms a central concern in many of Susan Howe's works. From My Emily Dickinson (1985) on, Howe has devoted her poetic and critical energies to stretching the meaning of archive both through prose and poetry, specifically by associating it with the act of recovery. Among others, Howe's "Melville's Marginalia" (1993) constitutes one of her extended meditations on archival recovery. At the heart of "Melville's Marginalia" is Howe's experience of reading the margins of Melville's books, and it pivots upon the issue of archival recovery of forgotten, silenced voices. What Howe seeks to achieve in "Melville's Marginalia," in short, is to bring to the forefront Melville's writings left in the margins, thereby subverting the hierarchy between the "central" and the "marginal." This essay interrogates Susan Howe's archival enterprise in "Melville's Marginalia" by focusing on the "epistolarity" that informs this work. By the term "epistolarity," I mean to foreground several aspects of the work's treatment of letters. First, "Melville's Marginalia" takes as its central subject Bartleby, the titular character of Melville's novella "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853), who is rumored to have worked in the Dead Letter Office. Second, when writing about dead authors, Howe employs an epistolary address: "you." Her recourse to prosopopeia makes it appear as if she were writing intimately to the dead. Third, Howe quotes a number of letters in "Melville's Marginalia," taking them as a primary object of her archival recovery. By shedding light on her investment in epistolarity, this essay ultimately aims to present Howe's archival recovery in "Melville's Marginalia" as communication between the living and the dead.