The second section of Howe’s This That, called “Frolic Architecture”, was, I’ll admit, mysterious to me. It consists of copied passages from Hannah Edwards’ diary that have been fragmented and stitched together, separated from their initial context. Often, the words overlap and confound meaning. “Frolic Architecture” refuses interpretation unless the reader can make meaning of the spliced, severed, and hidden words on each page. If the reader is to draw any meaning from this (in itself, rather than from its surrounding texts), it must be from the arrangement of certain words and sounds, or, perhaps, from extrapolating the surrounding words from the fragment. What is most frustrating, is that any way that this work is interpreted becomes entirely subjective. Howe has fragmented the archival document to the point of illegibility, further fragmenting what is already a fragment of history.

This, I think, is the point. Howe is playing with our interpretation of archival documents and our desire to craft a narrative to make the archival fragment whole. Yet, she is also showing how these fragments (a metonym of a metonym) relate to one another when she splices passages—after the splicing we no longer see these fragments as separate, they are related if only in the sounds the words convey. I see Howe referring to this practice in Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives when she quotes Henry James from a preface to one of his collections:

… Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so….All of which will perhaps pass but for a supersubtle way of pointing the plain moral that a young embroiderer of the canvas of life soon began to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of the tendency inherent in his many-coloured flowers and figures to cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes. The development of the flower, of the figure, involved thus an immense counting of holes and a careful selection among them. That would have been, it seemed to him, a brace enough process, were it not the very nature of the holes so to invite, to solicit, to persuade, to practice positively a thousand lures and deceits (22).

This metaphor seems to perfectly define the archival fragment, the gap in the archive, and the homogenizing narrative that forces meaning. It’s impossible to gain recordings or documents that could fully and truthfully depict a historical event (Baron, 110). Thus, those who create history from the archive, must “cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes”, yet the “careful selection among them” inevitably leads to the possibility of “a thousand lures and deceits”.

The archive, in “Frolic Architecture” is thus laid bare as a collection of fragments that intersect and relate, but that are meaningless without intervention from the viewer. Indeed, Howe’s practice provides more possibilities for deceit—a document that is fragmented from its meaning can serve whatever purpose that the viewer can imagine.

This is certainly an exaggeration of the appropriation of the archival fragment/gap, but in revealing our need to contextualize and create narrative around these broken passages, I think Howe is also emphasizing our desire to contextualize language itself—and asks us to explore language as the metonym rather than the archival document. I’m drawn to this passage from “The Disappearance Approach”: “Somewhere I read that relations between sounds and objects, feelings and thoughts, develop by association; language attaches to and envelopes its referent without destroying or changing it—the way a cobweb catches a fly” (13). Much like the archival document is only a fragment of a historical narrative, language is itself a fragment of archival documents, referring to the object, yet never fully describing it. These broken passages indicate Hannah Edwards’s words, but they cannot fully indicate her meaning. Much like an archival document, words cannot provide a comprehensive and final meaning for her object.