I found Susan Howe’s different re-uses of archival material interesting, and with regards to both That This and Spontaneous Particulars I could not help but think of Arlette Farge’s statements about the allure of archives and about Derrida’s association of the archives with the death drive. The death drive stood out to me as an important theme of Howe’s work, as she was obviously grieving for her lost husband and trying to make sense of this loss in This That. The sentence “Peter took eternal wordlessness into himself” (That This, 14) reminded me of the way in which the people who are found in the traces of archives (like the Parisians Farge discovered) are now eternally wordless, as in no longer capable of speaking for themselves. It is up to those who are left behind to reanimate the life that has been lost. In processing her grief over the sudden loss of her husband, Howe ruminates “Now – putting bits of memory together, trying to pick out the good while doing away with the bad” recalled Farge’s description of the archival research process. The historian must sift through the traces found in the archives, discard those that do not fit in with their narrative and keep those materials that work well.

Howe made several observations that conjured up debates about the authenticity of archival traces. “Even if ideas don’t exist without the mind, there may be copies or resemblances” wrote Howe (22), but do these copies or resemblances do justice to the original complex functions of the mind that generated those ideas? Howe’s discussion of names in both works really gets one thinking about the value of words and names as mere traces of what they actually represent. When Howe wrote “can a trace become the thing it traces, secure as ever, real as ever – a chosen set of echo-fragments” (That This, 29) this reminded me of issues surrounded authenticity, especially with regards to audio and other digital media. Can a digital or digitized item ever be as secure or real as the original? Can an audio recording of a person’s voice or of an event ever fully capture the essence and reality of the thing it has recorded as a trace?

I was initially not sure at all what to make of the second section of That This but after going over the segment several times the traces Howe used started to speak more to me. At first I was completely frustrated by this section, trying to impose some sort of order and meaning onto the disarray of text in the center of each page, but I came to have multiple interpretations of Howe’s chosen arrangement and presentation of these materials. The different sliced up and pasted selections of text reminded me immediately of absence and unfinished thoughts, and implicitly about the absences in historical records and archives. Some statements stood out as being intentionally separated and profound (“distemper I was seized with it” – p 55, “pursuing shadows & things” – p 62, “something delirious and therefore lost I was to a degree rational” – p 64). It is clear that Howe (for her own reasons) wanted these statements (or fragments of statements) to stand out to the reader. The fact that these are fragments and Howe intentionally placed gaps implied gaps in the historical record, even in the presence of such excess. In addition, I felt these gaps served to represent the void left behind after Howe’s husband passed away.

Howe wrote that “Maybe there is some not yet understood return to people we have loved and lost. I need to imagine the possibility even if I don’t believe it” (This That, 17). Though I think that Howe was speaking quite literally of somehow being reunited with the dead in some afterlife, I think that pouring through personal archives after someone has passed away is indeed a way to return to that person. We may never physically be with them again, but we can reanimate and reimagine them. “I’ll go to him – I’ll find him,” writes Howe. I often think these same thoughts when I stumble across the name of a long deceased person, involved with a movement I am researching. I resolve to go and find that person, to bring them back to life through research and writing. Howe expresses that she feels intrusive for looking over personal family items in her mission to “find him,” but this is what the historian does all the time in archival research. We are always the unintended reader, the unanticipated researcher come to disturb the peace of the deceased in order to reanimate them for our own purposes. The archival materials that are so necessary to resurrecting the past are usually “enclosed in a world of their own” and do seem “to offer reluctant consent to being viewed,” but these are the types of “secretive” sources that Farge would argue can reveal so much.