Gentle Reader-Realist: Recuperative Violence in Howe’s The Midnight

by Kathryn Cowles

“I'm only a gentle reader trying to be a realist. Can you hear me?”

(Susan Howe, The Midnight)

1

Susan Howe’s great-aunt Louie Bennett wrote on the flyleaf of her copy of The Irish Song Book with Original Irish Airs, “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.” Howe, the book's current owner, decided to fix its split spine in an intrusive way: “Disobeying Aunt Louie’s predatory withdrawal, or preservative denial, I recently secured the spine of her Irish Song Book with duct tape. Damage control—its cover was broken. So your edict flashes daggers—so what.” That “so what” smacks of guilt. Howe sees that her duct tape covers up Louie herself. It is cruel, it is violent, and the duct tape isn't even cut straight. But this violence enacts on smaller scale the necessary violence that new art must inflict on history. History is itself a violent force against which new art must react violently if it wants to be self-possessed, even as it mourns the inevitable divide between the self and the past. So to minimize the damage, Howe puts her violence on the surface of the poetic gesture. She is violent, but she avoids the sly manipulation and insidious coerciveness of history's violence and of her Aunt Louie's original gesture. And she does not forbid future readers from touching her work with their bare hands. Thus Howe is a gentle reader—as gentle as she can be under the circumstances. She is also a realist.

2

In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin describes the Paul Klee painting “Angelus Novus”: “It shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Benjamin's angel of history is incapacitated by the accumulated junk of the past and the violently windy trajectory of the future, of progress. The angel can neither reassemble the smashed pieces of history nor turn away from them into something new. In such a world, one cannot make art. At least not new art. There's no room and no time.

3

In the title poem of Of Being Numerous, George Oppen describes a nostalgic kind of pre-history world when language was not tarnished with the garbage of history:

Families talked.

They gathered in council

And spoke, carrying objects.

They were credulous,

Their things shone in the forest.

This pre-history world is long gone, according to Oppen. He writes,

This [world] will never return, never,

Unless having reached their limits

They will begin over, that is,

Over and over

And then later:

unable to begin

At the beginning, the fortunate

Find everything already here. They are shoppers,

Choosers, judges;…And here the brutal

is without issue, a dead end

So the accumulated, nightmarish, dead past precludes one from beginning at the beginning in Of Being Numerous. But “shoppers / Choosers, judges” can recycle the dead stuff of the past and thus begin over and over and over—making things new again in the now. The brutal—the violence of the past—is “without issue” if those in the present pull things from the past but put them in what Susan Howe calls “scare quotes.” In order to survive the brutality of the past, one must recontextualize it—re-present it, make it present again. One can quote from the past, but the quotation marks around it must be stand-ins for the hands of the artist. The artist must re-piece history—break it up violently and hold it up gently.

Along these lines, the Multicultural Review once called Susan Howe “An icon-smasher, but one who saves the pieces.”

4

A common gesture among avant-garde artists of many movements has been to create art literally on the accumulated corpses of the dead art that came before—the dead strewn at the feet of Benjamin's angel of history. As Filippo Marinetti writes in his “Futurist Manifesto,” “Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice.” And later: “Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!…Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!…Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers, and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!”

This town's not big enough for the both of us.

In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg acquired a Willem de Kooning drawing for the purpose of erasing it—art built on the literal corpse of old art. Art unmarking another artist’s mark. The drawing is called “Erased de Kooning.” The erasure is violent; one must destroy art’s history to make space for the new art.

5

In The Midnight, Howe writes that Ralph Waldo Emerson “cut his dead minister father's sermons in manuscript out of their bindings, then used the bindings to hold his own writing. He mutilated another of Emerson senior's notebooks in order to use the blank pages.” This information about Emerson appears in the same section as Howe's duct taping of Aunt Louie's book. But importantly, Howe is not Emerson. She is not Marinetti either. She does not cut out the pages of historical documents, thus violently erasing the past, in order to fill them with new content—at least not exactly. What she does do is perhaps explained by family history.

Howe has apparently inherited a number of books from family members, especially her mother Mary, her uncle John, and her great-aunt Louie. Her relatives had strange relationships with their books. As she writes, “My mother's close relations treated their books as transitional objects (judging by a few survivors remaining 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—scissor work.” Howe's relatives, especially John Manning but others as well, turned their books into artifacts of their own history—accumulative autobiographies—pasting in materials that said more about the “paste-er” than the book into which they were pasted. Autobiographical collage.

The collage approach to visual art runs counter to the Futurist approach. Rather than destroying the accumulated junk of the past, collage recontextualizes the past according to the dictates of the artist. Make no mistake, the gesture is still violent. It's still making something out of the cut pieces—the “scissor work”—of something else, commandeering them for its own purposes. Yet the goal is not erasure but rather continuation in new form.

An escape plan from history. So far so good.

Where some of Howe's predecessors went wrong was in dictating how and if their copies of books ought to be read by future generations, as with Aunt Louie's proclamation on the flyleaf of her song book. In projecting their surface violence against the past into the future, they only reinstate the violence. Perhaps this explains Howe's quotation from Emerson in her section entitled “Scare Quotes”: “Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” This is indeed a scary quote for a poet writing in the present, as well as a quotation surrounded by scare quotes—a quotation Howe pulls from it's historical source and recontextualizes in her document in order to make it mean something new. She uses history but resists and resituates its old content.

6

Mina Loy, who ran at times in Futurist circles, commands readers, at the end of her “Aphorisms on Futurism,” to

ACCEPT the tremendous truth of Futurism

Leaving all those

—Knick-knacks.—

One such knick-knack is surely the Futurist goal of “scorn for woman” Marinetti expresses in his “Futurist Manifesto.” Loy's poetics make room for the partial embrace—for believing one part without believing the whole. Her politics even require it. She takes the baby out of the bathwater.

One part of Futurism Loy accepts is the idea of continual newness and the denial of experience or reliance on history in the present moment; in Songs to Joannes, she writes,

I must live in my lantern

Trimming subliminal flicker

Virginal to the bellows

Of Experience

The new is necessarily and circumstantially virginal, Loy argues, so even if she experiences “the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment,” she is still a virgin experientially because past experience has no part in the present (or should have no part). Every moment should be a virgin, and if it's not, it's not Futurist either. Or new. Thus, Loy writes,

To you

I bring the nascent virginity of

—Myself for the moment

No love or the other thing

Only the impact of lighted bodies

Knocking sparks off each other

In chaos

Loy's virginity is perpetually momentary. The stuff of history loses its history and becomes absolutely new in every moment. It's not fixated on violence, like the dead art of Oppen's post-history non-producers. It doesn't allow for accumulated meaning, like the angel of history with garbage at its feet. It is totally new, even if its parts are not.

Indeed, in Songs to Joannes, Loy is suspicious of something as seemingly benign as love when it has potential for inflicting permanence on a person by requiring location in time. Even sex—one way to read “the other thing” with which Loy compares linear love—is located in time and thus able to produce experience. Instead of love or sex, Loy prefers to focus on impacting bodies in the perpetual present tense. They are what they are in a moment, untainted by time's interpretation of their virginity, or lack thereof; they are, as Loy puts it, nascent—always in the process of being born or created.

7

In “Photo After Pogrom,” Loy describes a woman's corpse on a pile of dead bodies, “her body hacked to utter beauty / oddly by murder” (122). The poem ends, “Corpses are virgin.” The line is loaded. Loy has taken a specific female dead body, aestheticized it as beautiful, then generalized about all corpses. Importantly, she doesn't say, “corpses are virginal” as in literally chaste, but rather, “corpses are virgin.” She is recuperating the violence of murder through her theory of virginity. She's not excusing the murderers, but teaching herself as artist to survive violence. Her own form of newness is violent to the actual body in the sense that it erases individual identity in the past—it wraps the body up in scare quotes in the present. But Loy's reframing also saves the body from the violence of its circumstance. Yes, Loy violently commandeers the dead body for the purposes of her own art. She has to in order to survive the photo—in order for there to be an “After Pogrom” for her. So she puts the violence on the surface of the poetic gesture, effectively framing her poem, as a photo would be framed. With the last line about the virgin corpses, she exposes the mechanisms of her violence. She shows us her cards, her winning hand. She is a gentle reader and a realist. Simply to make art requires a certain amount of violence. But her art promises virginity to its subject—virginity and a new frame.

8

And after all, Rauschenberg loved and respected de Kooning. That’s why he chose to erase that artist’s work in particular. And de Kooning specifically chose the drawing Rauschenberg would erase, saying, “It’ll have to be something I’ll miss” and “I’m going to make it so hard for you to erase this.”

9

Throughout The Midnight, Howe distributes photographs she has taken of historical artifacts that are meaningful to her either because of some family connection or because of a literary or place-based relationship. What's fascinating about these photographs is the framing. Howe incorporates tissue paper, sometimes from the book's tissue interleaf, to blur or partially obstruct pictures. Sometimes, she forces the reader's focus using a magnifying glass and light—positioned on one part of a picture in one frame, and another part of the same picture later. She frames her gesture of scare quoting; she points at the pointing. The photographs are about recontextualization. And they exist in a book with huge white-space frames around many of its poems and pages. A book with, importantly, no admonitions saying, “To all who read. This book has a value for Susan Howe that it cannot have for any other human being. Therefore let no other human being keep it in his possession.” Howe fights for her own right to possess her ancestors’ books and, by implication, for our right, for MY right, to possess her book after it has left her hands. What violence she inflicts as poet does not extend forward to the future, but only back to her predecessors, and even then, only via the present tense of her scare quotes.

10

Susan Howe wants me to write all over my copy of The Midnight and make it my own text. She wants me to put my scare quotes all over it. I submit for a selfish reason. I want to survive a violent history, if to survive gently by exposing my own hand. In my copy of The Midnight, I have written on photographs and across pages. I have inked the pages up. My goal is not to write on the dead body of an old piece of art. That would only create what Oppen calls a “dead end.” Instead, I want to help Howe avoid future violence with her texts (as she helped her book-donating ancestors avoid future violence by nipping their violence in the bud). There is no way to get away from violence in poetry and art. It is always already there in the history, in the process. One does the best one can. And the best we can do is read, and write, as gently as possible, from inside our realist bodies.