[Personal_archives] FW: Re: 'the fragmentary, shifting ice floe'

[Hobbs Catherine]

Good morning,

For my part, I agree with du Bois' propositions which you've outlined and think that this approach is very transferrable to the archivist.  >From this perspective, archivists need to foreground the facts that the fonds which survives is fragmentary.  This means including details in archival appraisal and description about the decisions and forces which made the fonds fragmentary in the first place. 

For my part, I do spend time asking creative writers if there was a time when they made a decision not to create documents or decided to destroy documents, or when moving house or moving a job (or a break in in their car) meant that part of their records were lost.  It seems to me that archivists are understanding of this when it comes to judging the rarety of what survives but they don't transfer this part of the story to the researcher through archival description all that often.  I guess there is also the next layer where part of the story becomes the creator's relationship to what was lost.  Was the fragmenting a decision to act (such as a bonfire which has never been regretted) or is the creator mourning the loss of certain documents because they relate to an earlier self and take on an ideal form?  These additional elements can help us to see the psychology of the documentor and hence better reveal the fonds.   

Of course, as the ability to "read fragmentarily" suggests, we need to be clear that there are gaps even when there is no clue to their context.  

(The Sylvia Plath example reminds me of the novel Swann by Carol Shields, black comedy where the scholars are ransacking the fragmentary archives of a murdered (in fact dismembered) poet whose ouevre was naive or possibly completely talentless--sorry, the literary references keep coming).  

Other thoughts on the practical aspects of this or reflections on particular archival fonds?

Catherine   

Catherine Hobbs,
Archivist, Literary Archives (English-language)
Library and Archives Canada
WS 598, 550 Blvd de la Cité
Gatineau, QC,  K1A 0N4 

Tel: (819) 934-8331 Fax: (819) 934-8333 
e-mail: catherine.hobbs at lac-bac.gc.ca 


-----Original Message-----
From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Maryanne Dever
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2008 7:16 PM
To: Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: [Personal_archives] Re: 'the fragmentary, shifting ice floe'

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)
>