Sunshine Recorder

Absent Things as if They Are Present

Essay on the practice of erasures in literature.

The dictionary defines erase as “to scrape or rub out (anything written, engraved, etc.); to efface, expunge, obliterate.” Its Latin root roughly translates as “to scrape away.” These definitions imply loss and destruction. They call to mind Richard Nixon’s audio-tape gaps, the photographic manipulations of Stalin, the Archimedes Palimpsest, the missing fragments of Sappho. Death.

Heidegger practiced erasure as a way to define nihilism (in an indefinite sort of way). In a 1956 letter to Ernst Jünger, Heidegger wrote the term being, then crossed it out: “Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since the word is necessary, it remains legible.” Here erasure, or what philosophers call sous rature (“under erasure”), illustrates the problematic existence of presence and the absence of meaning. Crossed out, being becomes unreliable and indispensable at once.

Literary erasure has its own definition. To erase is to create a new work out of an existing one: canonical, obscure, wonderful, terrible, it’s the erasurist’s choice. When Mary Ruefle whited out select words from A Little White Shadow, an obscure nineteenth-century book published “for the Benefit of a Summer Home for Working Girls,” lines of captivating poetry emerged: “It was my duty to keep the piano filled with roses.” Wave Books brought out a facsimile of her erasure, preserving the appearance of her small, whited-out copy, under the appropriate (and appropriated) title A Little White Shadow.

Why erase the works of other writers? The philosophical answer is that poets, as Wordsworth defines them, are “affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.” The more practical answer: compared to writing, erasing feels easy.

But I am here to convince you: to erase is to write, style is the consequence of a writer’s omissions, and the writer is always plural.

To erase is to leave something else behind.