The first time I got the two books from Amazon, I thought there must be some printing problems with them. Opening the books once more and reading them for many times and tasting them as they are, I suddenly have the feeling that these words are never exhausted with their meanings. Howe uses really poetic language to express her peculiar thoughts and feelings in an amazing way. She uses such a beautiful metaphor to talk about her opinions of “quotations”—“Quotations are skeins or collected knots…Quotations are lines or passages taken at hazard from piled up cultural treasures. A quotation, cut, or closely teased out as if with a needle, can interrupt the continuous flow of a poem, a tapestry, a picture, an essay; or a piece of writing like this one. (31) I think this “definition of quotation” explains what Howe is doing with the sentences of prose in her two books. Actually what she is doing is more like embroidering the quotations taken from their original contexts in a new circumstance. She takes her delight in cutting out the papers and then stitching these fragments together so as to make up a new poem of her own. Her appropriation practice of “quotations” makes me think of the way historians embroidering archives by themselves. What Howe is doing in her two books is more or less the same as what the historians are doing with the archives in a historical past—searching though the historical and cultural treasures, cutting some quotations from their original contexts and stitching them together so as to make an appealing embroidery. If there is still someone accusing Howe of doing some “misuse” of the archives, he should examine the process in which an archivist is doing with the historical fragments. What the archivist doing is to separate an archive from its original context and “stitch” them into a file folder with a name on it. As the practice of taking a quotation from its original context can be venturing too much for its sake, the way an archivist separates an archive from its original context can also become hazardous. Every time he takes out an archive from its historical context and combines it with other archives into a folder, he makes his own “appropriation” unconsciously. There is apparently the “intentional disparity” as Baron says in her book The Archive Effect. Jonathan Edwards’ letters, originally for correspondence, now become a member of a great number of archives in the library. The time an archive is separated from its historical context, it is always at the risk of being misused or abused by anyone. What we are seeing today in our historian books are the embroidery of historians—taking some “quotations” from a historical context and stitching them to make up his own artful design. It seems to me that there becomes an even blurring boundary between what the historians are doing with history and what the authors of appropriation works are doing with the archives.

The way that Howe plays games with the words also arrests my attention. Quoting the definition of “skein” from Webster’s dictionary, she looks upon words as “skeins, meteors, mimetic spirit-sparks”. (26) On another page, she talks about words for their sake and comes up with her questions on their nature —“Names are supposed to be signs for things, but what if things are actually the signs of names? What if words possess a ‘spirit’ potential to their nature as words?” (40) To me, her appropriation works are generally a visual feast of words arrangement for the viewers. She takes her delight in seeing words as something they shine through the pages with their own spirits. What she is doing reminds me of Harold Pinter’s speech on his receiving the Nobel Prize for his outstanding works of drama. He points out the fact that nowadays we are doing violence to our language. Apart from Howe’s pleasure in treasuring words for their own sake, people tend to impose their own power to the words and make language a tool of in the battlefield. In most of Pinter’s dramas, he explores different ways in which people use language as a weapon to attack their neighbors, friends, and relatives. Words in these circumstances are no longer the “skeins, meteors, mimetic spirit-sparks” as Howe sees them to be. (26) They are misused and abused by the speakers to achieve their own goals to get the upperhand in the field. This makes me to think further on the use of archives today. Are we also doing some violence to the archives? This also raises the question of the boundary between using and misusing archives. When the archives are separated from their historical contexts as the quotations are taken out from their original contexts, there are many possibilities to misuse the archives. Some nations are using the so-called archives to defend their ownership of an island, but it is just hard to detect the truth in the archives. Some of the historians are good at using the specific archives for their own interpretation. In the excess of the good number of archives, one fragment may give advantage to illustrate a specific period of the past while the other may not. In this circumstance, a nation can makes use of a certain fragment from the historical records and then even make some exaggeration of it to reach their own goals. But since the contexts of using a certain archive has been changing from time to time, it is also hard to detect the truth behind it. Every time we are “interpreting” an archive, we are at the risk of misusing or abusing it. Also we are, consciously or unconsciously, doing violence to the archives. We just cannot let them alone.