Benjamin's Response to Howe

Blog
Susan Howe

Susan Howe both writes poems and poetical prose...of sorts. In Midnight, she manages to combine the poem with the memoir, but doesn’t make Midnight come off as narcissistically personal. Howe combines history, personal history, and literary illusions to create...something. What that is, of course, I’m not entirely sure!
Howe’s ultimate objective, however, despite her myriad number of themes, is to hammer home the idea that a book, a collection, regardless of what it is, is inherently personal. A text is unique to an individual, and not necessarily just to the author, or the reader. In the case of Midnight, Howe attempts to create a book in the traditional of her family’s own “constructed” books, of sorts. In recollections of her family, Howe states,

“My mother’s close relations treated their books as transitional objects (judging by a few survivors in my possession) to be held, loved, carried around, meddled with, abandoned, sometimes mutilated. They contain dedications, private messages, marginal annotations, hints, snapshots, press cuttings, warnings*” (60).

Howe goes further to state:

“Every mortal has a non-communicating material self––a waistcoat or embroidered doublet” (60).

Howe connects her idea of the personalized text to another theme of the book, that of the textile, something that come through most in the first part of the text, “Bed Hangings I,” which will be enough to make you never want to hear mention of drapes or bed hangings ever again.
The most meaning of the text (or at least, the clearest) comes through in Howe’s prose sections, heavily on history as well as personal reflections that occasionally diverge into the completely incomprehensible. Still, this does not mean that Howe’s poem sections do not contain any meaning. To the contrary, “Bed Hangings 1” alludes to philosophy, religion, and various individuals referenced and expanded upon in the later prose.
In these prose sections, we see Howe fulfilling her family legacy, of taking a text and making it her own. We see “private messages” in her references to Alice and Wonderland, one of the most clever and obscure examples being on page 64 in the photograph of a torn up newspaper (the phrase “looking glass” can be seen in the top and middle of the image, above the picture of a woman), and “warnings” such as “Go away and do something else, grave robber” (60). Numerous pictures, paintings and pictures of textiles are mixed throughout the text.
In terms of history in the text, Howe utilizes real historical figures and events as a sort of inroads to her own personal experience. This in turn allows the reader to know of her personal history which leads to to her thesis of the personalized book. A very roundabout way of doing things, but sufficient nonetheless. For example, to speak of her own insomnia, Howe commonly references MacBeth, or Frederick Law Olmstead, and so forth. To lead into the history of her family member’s unique way of enriching (or defacing, depending on how you look at it) their books, Howe notes that figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson did similar things to books, ripping or removing pages and assembling an entirely new text of particularly special quotes.
Howe’s misdirection and escapades into the incomprehensible or really “out there” stuff, however, feel like a distraction from her main themes. However, I went along with Howe, stuck with her through some of the more bizarre sections of the text, and feel as if I got most of what she was trying to say. I will admit that attempting to read Howe isn’t easy. There’s no real easy way to enter into this text. It’s something I simply had to jump into, and sort of find a direction after I got about fifty pages in. In this sense then, The Midnight feels like a great ego trip, and we’re along for the ride. The Midnight is Howe’s, it defines her and it has meaning that can only be known to her. But that doesn’t mean we can’t derive meaning from it as well. Howe encourages us, or at least me, to want to make a text like this of my own!