The Daily Glance
deborah meadows' Representing Absence is a fascinating book that begins with what i take to be a palimpsest of Melville's Moby Dick then moves to a section titled "Not a treatise on the line segment," which after reading the first section feels like a palimpsest as well but is probably not.*** The last section is a "Faux" translation of a Baudelaire piece. Really, I could spend my entire time writing about each piece in this book. They are well-put together and full of insight. In "Chapter 4" we are told:
Made of patchwork, this self
interminable squares and palimpsest scrivened
language. . . .
Are we talking about the self of the speaker or just of the contemporary self? Or take these lines from "Chapter 9":
To represent an absence, a coward, strong suspi-
cion: find him not to be in the gullet, that rib-en-
cased agony glazed by answered entreaties enough
for any later stab. The Captain is any of us can trav-
el with paupers yet at the same time seek gold.
I don't even think I can diagram the first section because there are so many possible syntactical readings. For example, do "coward" and "suspicion" act like nominals renaming absence? Or do they function as part of a list that includes "absence"? Is the phrase "Find him not to be in the gullet" telling us how to represent "an absense . . ."? So, if we don't find "him," i.e. the absence, coward, or suspicion, in the gullet, then we have represented absence? Represented to whom? Ourselves? How does one write what cannot be found? This last question is one the book takes us as a whole.
***This book would be fun to teach in a class that pits classic works up against responses to them.
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