On page 24 of Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars, she writes, “One historical-existential trace has been hunted, captured, guarded, and preserved in aversion to waste by an avid collector, then shut carefully away, outside an economy of use, inaccessible to touch. Now it is re-animated, re-collected (recollected) through an encounter with the mind of a curious reader, a researcher, an antiquarian, a bibliomaniac, a sub sub librarian, a poet.”

The thing that really struck me about this passage, and from then on its representation in Howe’s works, are the ideas of re-animation and re-collection, or recollection. While Howe may be positing them as things that occur simultaneously when archives are encountered by curious readers, it seems to me as though re-animation and recollection are working in two very different ways in her pieces. Though not dealing here with the disembodied voices of the oral histories we’ve studied, the idea of the disembodiment of the written works Howe presents is brought forth in her visual representation of the archived material accompanied by her comments on the person who inscribed them—his/her handwriting, family, love-lost, etc. In this way, Howe conjures the archive affect in viewers/readers who are confronted with a piece in original form, contextualized in the life of a person since-past and thus separated from his/her intimate writings. This, I believe is the recollection side of handling/analyzing/presenting archives.

The reanimation, then, I believe arises when Howe takes her experience of the archives beyond their affect and into embodiment. Perhaps the best example of this comes in the beginning of This That when she not only presents the “furiously calm” (13) words of Sarah Edwards following the death of Jonathan Edwards, but embodies them, confronts, and struggles with them as she makes sense of the death of her own husband. In a much more subtle form of reanimating archives, Howe writes on page 31 of Spontaneous Particulars, “Running over affinities and relations, as was her practice, Dickinson could discover on the previous STI page of her Lexicon Companion the definition for STICH pronounced STICH.” Here, Howe takes on the practices of Dickinson, reanimating something she may likely have done in order to think through and puzzle together Dickinson’s experiences with some of her expressions. Another instance of this reanimation in Howe’s work arises in her conversation of Henry James. He says, “All our employment of constituted sounds, syllables, sentences, comes back to the way we say a thing, and it is very largely by saying, all the while, that we live and play our parts.” To this, Howe responds by questioning how to then pronounce James’ character “Theale” and what to make of the pronunciation. Here, Howe again seems to take on James’ mind, acting out the possibilities of what he may have considered in choosing to include the grapheme, “h.” Like the previous examples, Howe uses the embodiment of the possible techniques of the author of the archival material, coupled with his/her thoughts, in order to make sense of her own question.

The reanimation of archives, as Howe exhibits in these varying ways, seems to exemplify the words she quotes of Wallace Stevens speaking about W.C. Williams, for “whom writing is the grinding of a glass, the polishing of a lens by means of which he hopes to be able to see clearly” (Spontaneous Particulars, 24). In recollecting archives, Howe exhibits how we feel the past in this action, perhaps cultivate an emotional connection to it and its loss. In the embodiment of reanimating archives, though, we make sense of it in our own lives—we grind the glass, take on words and feelings that are not our own, in hopes of being able to see clearly.