[Personal_archives] Re: ‘the fragmentary, shifting ice floe’

[Maryanne Dever]

Hi everyone,

Hello. Thanks for the opportunity to participate in this. I’m really 
looking forward to the discussion over the week. 

So, how to approach ‘the fragmentary, shifting ice floe’? And how to 
live with ambiguity?

On this question I’ve been really intrigued by the work of classics 
scholar, Page duBois, which I’ve found quite productive when pondering 
this.  I thinking here of her book ‘Sappho is Burning’ (University of 
Chicago Press, 1995). While those of us who work on contemporary 
literary subjects and their personal papers might be able to avoid 
confronting the question of the fragmentary nature of the material we 
find in the archives, as a classical scholar working with the 
fragments of ancient texts (such as surviving portions of Sappho’s 
lyric poems), duBois has no choice but to address the question pretty 
much head-on. This is why I find her work so refreshing. 

She writes of how our attention to the artefacts of the past is 
inevitably shaped by a desire that is precisely ‘a longing for what we 
cannot have’ (p.33).  DuBois is more than familiar with the 
epistemological challenges routinely thrown up by contending 
with ‘broken things’, those ‘bits of the past assembled for our gaze 
through random events and destruction and discovery’ (p. 31). (This is 
a little bit like what Jacqueline Rose talks about in her book ‘The 
Haunting of Sylvia Plath’ where -- drawing on psychoanalytic 
frameworks -- she characterizes Plath’s archive in particular – as 
the 'corps morcele' or body-in-bits-and-pieces  -- as opposed to the 
fantasy of corporeal unity. Rose is interested, in the same way as 
DuBois I think, in how to contend with an archive that is 'scattered 
and broken'.)

du Bois highlights the extent to which researchers involved in various 
kinds of archival work consciously and unconsciously understand 
themselves as agents of recovery and reconstitution, despite the 
impossibility of such projects in the face of ‘what is in fact 
irrevocably lost’. She contends that we ought to examine more closely 
our insistent drive to ‘mend’ the past, to make it ‘whole’ in the face 
of its fragmented and dismembered material legacy. DuBois suggests 
that what we need to do is to hold that ‘dream of wholeness’ in 
tension with our recognition of what is irretrievable. 

What I take from duBois is that the skill we have to learn is to how 
to ‘read fragmentarily’.  I think this links to the question 
of ‘ambiguity’ or perhaps to ‘contingency’. As literary/historical 
researchers we have to realize that when we build a narrative from the 
assembled fragments in an archive, for all that we have invested in 
the idea of ourselves as playing a restorative role, we are 
essentially putting pieces together to tell our stories, not accessing 
some fully-formed story that lies there waiting for us. In short, the 
fragments gain their evidentiary status – their seeming significance 
and seeming coherence – primarily from the ways in which they are 
incorporated into our stories. The challenge as I see it is how to 
make that contingent element manifest in what I write. 

I’ll start with that for now and come back to those other elements 
(the role of chance and the self-censorship and role playing of the 
creator question) next.

Cheers,
Maryanne

-- 
Assoc. Prof. Maryanne Dever
Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Monash University, 
Melbourne
President, Australian Women's and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA)

Visiting Scholar, McGill Center for Research and Teaching on Women 
(MCRTW), Apr-Jun 2008

Bank of Montreal Visiting Scholar in Women's Studies
University of Ottawa, Jan-Mar 2008

Mailing Address:
Centre for Women's Studies & Gender Research
School of Political & Social Inquiry
Faculty of Arts
Monash University
Victoria 3800 AUSTRALIA

Tel. 61 3 99053259
Fax. 61 3 99052410
http://arts.monash.edu.au/womens-studies/



----- Original Message -----
From: Hobbs Catherine <catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca>
Date: Monday, April 21, 2008 10:55 pm
Subject: [Personal_archives] Welcome to our SISPA discussion
To: Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu

> Good morning,
> 
> 
> I am very pleased to welcome Maryanne Dever (of Monash University) to
> the personal archives listserv.  Today is the beginning of a weeklong
> open discussion of issues arising from our reading of her 
> articles.  I
> hope many questions and examples from our own work have come to 
> mind and
> that these can be bandied about this week.   (Just a reminder to
> participants to send replies and questions to the entire list and not
> just the last speaker). 
> 
> 
> So to begin the discussion... 
> Maryanne, it's wonderful to have you with us.  Thank you for 
> agreeing to
> participate.  I was a real pleasure to reread your articles in
> preparation for this, particularly because you have such a way of
> enticing the reader with vivid examples in combination with
> well-informed interpretation and criticism of existing assumptions 
how
> we approach archives. 
> 
> 
> One of the most important themes arising in both articles, and a good
> place to start I think, is the idea of the "fissured archive" that is
> that the archival fonds which is brought into the archives is (as you
> put it) like a fishnet...  threads "held taut over pockets of
> nothingness".  That the personal life is always, inevitably more than
> the sum of the remains and inevitably ineffable. 
> 
> 
> As Carol Shields put it in her novel Small Ceremonies, 
> "So much of a man's life is lived inside his own head, that it is
> impossible to encompass a personality. There is never enough 
material.
> Sometimes I read in the newspaper that some university or library has
> bought hundreds and hundreds of boxes of letters and papers connected
> with some famous deceased person, and I know every time that it's 
> nevergoing to be enough, its hopeless, so why even try?"   
> (Couldn't resist one of my favourite quotes!)
> 
> 
> There are other aspects which you discuss to show how this fissured
> archives is further complicated such as the role of chance and the
> self-censorship and role playing of the creator.
> 
> 
> So how do you think that you as a scholar interpreting archives 
> and we
> as archivists should approach this fragmentary, shifting ice floe? 
> I
> wonder if you could comment further  on how to 'live with 
> ambiguity' ? 
> 
> 
> Catherine  
> 
> 
> (SISPA Chair)
> 
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