Archives Tragic

In bed the other night I read Janet Malcolm’s latest book, Two lives, which is about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. A mention of Stein’s literary manuscripts leads Malcolm to note that it is at the Beinecke Library at Yale that most of Stein’s manuscripts “repose”.

Repose? Repose? I was reposing. One of my cats (the placid one, not the one suffering from ADHD) was reposing next to me. But do manuscripts - or any records - “repose” in the archives?

I love reading Janet Malcolm. She is a journalist and essayist who writes about people, especially famous writers and thinkers, but her books are not conventional biographies. They are about how we know, or think we know, about people. The evidence for our “knowing” is always close to the surface in Malcolm’s work, and since she herself as narrator is a source of our “knowing”, Malcolm foregrounds herself in her books too. The writing is elegant, sparkling and sharp as cut crystal, but playful, so the reader is drawn into it, page after page, and only slowly realises how complex the work is structurally.

So: “repose”? The choice of word is clever and stylish, typical Malcolm. Of course conventional thinking has it that archival records repose in the dark in acid free, climate controlled comfort. Their active lives are over. They are at rest in the “repository”. If summoned to the reading room they present themselves willingly to the greedy or weary (as the case may be) eyes of the scholar, but mostly they are left alone and at peace. Yes?

Well, no. The thinking archivist of today would not agree. The tiny fraction of records out there in the world that are selected for preservation as archives are not passive. The thinking archivist believes that by the choices archivists make, or are forced to make, to select, preserve, describe and make the archives accessible, they “co-create” the archives and “shape” the meanings that can drawn from them. The thinking archivist tries to make these processes visible and acknowledges that some archives are privileged, some are marginalised. The thinking archivist tries to suggest to the scholar that records and archives are not “transparent conduits” to knowledge.

What does Janet Malcolm think? Twice in Two lives she uses the word “repose” in relation to archives and perhaps she is being a little arch. Someone who writes constantly about the construction of knowledge would surely know that there is more to archives than meets the eye. Of Stein’s novel The making of Americans - this “strangest of strange books” - Malcolm says that Stein’s language is “not the transparent language through which we enter stories, forgetting we are reading. We never forget we are reading while reading The making of Americans.” Likewise, she adds, “Stein’s language draws attention to itself the way that the brushstrokes of modernist paintings do.”

I would like to see archives-based scholarship that draws attention to archives, like a modernist painter does with brushstrokes on canvas, to reflect on how recordkeeping and archiving influence what we think we know. Scholars need to dip their brushes in paint and be prepared to be messy.

Malcolm is not a thinker on archives but archivist Sue McKemmish has observed that Malcolm’s book The silent woman (about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes) has significant things to say about personal records and recordkeeping. I think that if one could “flood” Malcolm’s work (so to speak) with a coloured dye that would expose her recordkeeping insights and leave her other themes temporarily obscured, there would be much that users and carers of achives would find interesting.

Late in Two lives, after telling the reader an apparently odd little anecdote about Stein’s life in France during the Second World War, Malcolm brings us back to the main path with this:

The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties. Almost everything we know we know incompletely at best. And almost nothing we are told remains the same when retold.

You see what I mean.