As someone who has experienced insomnia firsthand, and who has seen what insomnia can do to a person's writing, I can safely say that Howe is very true to form to that in "The Midnight." While it is a very well organized book, with every shift from topic to topic and with every picture having some sort of relevance, whether it be to something from earlier or later in the book or a reference to her life, or to her state of mind. In this way, it's actually a lot like Williams.
Williams' work was very informal, feeling more like a lecture that the professor didn't prepare for. It feels loose and disorganized, which makes it a very fun read, but rather difficult to understand unless the reader takes it slow. But Williams doesn't really throw in a lot of references. Instead, is more or less just musing about language as a whole, and while it does sound more like a rambling conversation, Williams does keep the topic centered completely on one topic.
Howe, on the other hand, has some focus issues, once again displaying the inability of someone who is sleep-deprived to focus completely on a single topic. The book is actually quite contradictory in this way though: The organization of the book makes sense, if you actually have time to sit down and think about the placement of each section and the pictures and poems contained therein. However, a casual glance makes it seem like there is no real rhyme or reason to what is being said. To make it even more confusing is the fact that Howe does not focus on a single topic, instead treating the book as an all-encompassing semi-biographical work, talking about herself, her upbringing, her family, poetry, language, insomnia, and so on and so forth, mixing them, switching between them, and while some of it sounds like a straight analysis or biographical statement, most of it can also sound like philosophical musings or ramblings.
In fact, the game is so heavy on rambling references, that it actually makes it hard to read straight through, since Howe loves to insert reference after reference to different literature and cultural ideas, almost at the speed of one per sentence. For someone who likes to look up references that they are not very familiar with makes this a very, VERY slow read.
It's a crazy book, something that represents the absolute frustration, but mild joy that one can experience when under sleep deprivation.
When I began reading Howe, I found it to be one of the more frustrating texts we had encountered solely for its format. Her style confused me because I was looking for a blatantly obvious train of thought and it was out of my reach. As I continued, the frustration settled into slight confusion as I came to terms with the organized chaos that was her work. The more we discussed her insomnia I was able to better understand her mind set which made reading more enjoyable.
ReplyDeleteHowe’s repetitive topics and references were part of the style, part of her goal to create a book that was relatively open to her readers’ interpretation. They were given the opportunity to look at the themes or “nodes” she presented them with and make their own connections. Despite allowing for personal variations she connected many of her “centers” together which is where I found things began making sense. Taking a step back Howe gave her readers all the centers, she created the web we developed in class herself, limiting just how far her readers could stray from her own intent.