Drawing the Curtain on The MidnightStephen Collis reviews
The Midnight, by Susan Howe
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Susan Howe’s The Midnight opens with a characteristically compressed and suggestive meditation on the tissue-interleaf bookbinders once placed between a text’s frontispiece and title page ‘in order to prevent illustration and text from rubbing together.’ The interleaf is a borderline, a site of interchange where ‘word and picture’ (which are ‘essentially rivals’) are held apart by the thinnest ‘tangible intangible’ margin — a fleshly tissue which, while separating, simultaneously “traces” image upon text and text upon image. Throughout Howe’s now considerable body of work the visual and textual have been held in close proximity — often to the point of being indistinguishable — for this is a poet for whom the textual is visible, the tangled and tangible and visceral remains of history’s textuality being her primary subject matter and formal constraint. The Midnight is, nevertheless, the most textually normative in appearance of Howe’s books to date, while at the same time being the book in which she includes the most illustrations (in the traditional sense). Thus, to the eye, the separations between image and text are clearly demarcated; however, the actual contents of the book’s ‘illustrations’ — often themselves photographs of texts — undercut such distinctions. The tissue interleaf works its mediating betweenness, becoming the governing figure for a series of interchanges which proliferate like a dreaming logic throughout The Midnight: poetry and prose (in alternating sections of which the book is composed), text and textile, waking and sleeping, public park and academic archive, inclusion and exclusion, Ireland and America. |
1. Curtain
The weaving together of text and textile is one of the primary ‘interleavings’ The Midnight is obsessed with. Beginning with the discovery of a copy of Bed Hangings: A Treatise on Fabrics and Styles in the Curtaining of Beds, 1650-1850 in the giftshop of Hartford’s Wadsworth Athenaeum, Howe proceeds to explore the relationship between the history of ‘opus scissum,’ the ‘cutwork’ that was ‘Queen Elizabeth’s favorite form of lace’ and the literary ‘cutwork’ of the poet-assembler who ‘cut[s] these two extracts from The Muses ELIZIUM’ by Michael Drayton. Text and textile rub against each other in typically paratactic proximity: ‘versification a counterpane,’ ‘a cot cover, an ode, a couplet, a line,’ in the mention of those who ‘Could weave and read at once,’ or in the following poem: Go too — my savage pattern
The use of the figure and definition of the ‘curtain’ itself becomes crucial here. The visual/textual merger — the interleaf — is itself a ‘curtain,’ as in the subsection of that name, which is solely comprised of the photographic reproduction of a ‘Page from Nathan Bailey’s An Universal Etymological English Dictionary,’ depicting a table of ‘Alphabets of the English, Saxon, Greek and Hebrew Characters.’ Bed sheet and scribal sheet come together, and both are sites simultaneously of insomnia and dream — one of the tensional subtexts of The Midnight. |
2. Cutwork
Curtains aside, there is the cutwork that both creates and destroys the cloth of bed and book sheets. The Midnight is replete with self-reflexive gestures that throw light upon Howe’s practice, both in this work and throughout her opus. She practices ‘an aesthetics of erasure’ where ‘non-connection is itself distinct / connection.’ Indeed, the latter statement describes the structural principle at work throughout The Midnight, which is itself a collage where the emphasis is on the subterranean dialogue between passages, anecdotes, citations, and dictionary definitions — as well as between the sections of narrative prose and disjunctive poetry. |
3. Relations
Thus, Howe’s concern is with what she calls ‘relational space’ — the space between text and image, between cut and assembled ‘extracts,’ between sleep and waking, between herself and her familial ‘relations.’ My mother’s close relations treated their books as transitional
And Howe in turn gathers gathering, her own book a keepsake, a transitional object, filled with cuttings, marginalia, photographs pasted in — weaving a scriptive bed hanging so she may sleep and dream Macbeth’s ‘curtain’d sleep.’ While Howe’s own family texts give the kind of access she is denied by Harvard’s glassed-in treasures, they nevertheless reveal another level of exclusion. Howe reproduces the fly-leaf marginalia from her great-aunt’s copy of The Irish Song Book which is inscribed : ‘To all who read: This book has a value for Louie Bennett that it cannot have for any other human being. Therefore let no other human being keep it in his possession.’ ‘[O]bsessed with spirits who inhabit these books,’ Howe is nevertheless excluded once again, a voice arising to admonish: ‘Go away and do something else, grave robber.’ We are deep in the magic of the interleaf here where ‘the same volume [can] contain so many different incompatible intrinsic relations,’ for while one voice excludes (‘Go away’) another includes: ‘Come away — This way, this way.’ ‘Nod to one extreme and the other extreme nods back.’ Interestingly, this inclusive voice comes out of the antinomian tradition of religious dissent so important to Howe — the ‘nonconformists’ of her The Nonconformist’s Memorial — spread by ‘charismatic itinerant ministers [who] have no doctrinal of institutional affiliations.’ Howe, too, is such an itinerant: ‘I cling to you with all my divided attention. Itinerantly,’ she writes. A fugitive near the cold
In ‘Melville’s Marginalia’ Howe had suggested that ‘one way to write about a loved author would be to follow what trails he follows through words of others.’ She carries this notion of ‘loved authors’ behind a very personal curtain in The Midnight, and yet reading Uncle John’s or Aunt Louie Bennett’s books is ultimately not so different from reading, say, Dickinson’s or Melville’s. In either case, ‘All who read must cross the divide — one from the other’ — in either case it is necessary to ‘Remember we are traveling as relations.’ |
Works Cited
Howe, Susan. The Midnight. New York: New Directions, 2003.
———. The Nonconformist’s Memorial. New York: New Directions, 1993.
———. Pierce-Arrow. New York: New Directions, 1999. |
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Jacket 25 — February 2004
Contents page |