Retrospective Excursions: Toward an Experimental Historiography

Abstract

This project centers on writers whose poetry and prose experiment with history, pushing it to the limits of intelligibility, and toward spiritual significance. In the texts examined throughout this piece, there are different ways to learn about the past—through research or through direct contact with the spirits of the dead—and there are different ways to write about it—poem, memoir, novel—but there remains a shared sense that the writing of history is not merely an academic pursuit, but a spiritual exercise that accomplishes transformative work in the lives of both individuals and communities.Chapter One explores H.D.’s synthesis of mysticism and history in her novels and memoirs from the 1940s. These texts transform history writing into a somersault through past lives and esoteric wisdom toward a new, more peaceful future. Chapter Two expands this cyclical movement of history. Like H.D.’s mystical somersaults into the past, Leslie Marmon Silko’s revolutionary histories make their way toward the future by going backward to the past. Borrowing an understanding of time from ancient Mayan almanacs, Silko reconceptualizes history as a revolutionary act of storytelling that harnesses the powers of the dead to save the living. In Chapter Three, Susan Howe stumbles through history, scrambling events on top of one another without trying to sooth the spirits of the dead through calming explanations. The Conclusion asks what it might mean to negate, or un-say history altogether. M. NourbeSe Philip’s historian in Zong! is both magician and censor, oscillating between conjuring spirits up and quieting them down. This apophatic movement acknowledges both limits and possibilities of language to respond to what has been and what is to come.