Archive Fever

Rick Gekoski contributes an anecdotal and vaguely Andy Rooney-ish piece to The Guardian, doubting the inherent value of literary archives. Of course, he admits, archives are useful and contribute to scholarly work, not to mention biographies and corrected editions, etc. But there’s also something ugly about them:

When first encountered, an archive…reminds me of a monkfish. When it is eventually served up to you in bite-sized morsels, accompanied by rice and a salad, it is enticing, but when you see it in an unfilleted state it is ugly, cumbersome and unappealing. I have spent a lot of time in attics, studies, and cellars, sifting through myriad unsorted boxes and cartons of a writer's manuscripts, letters, diaries and miscellanea – dust! damp! – and there is something lowering about the process, something dirty and invasive that makes you both literally and figuratively need a wash.

That ugliness, according to Gekoski, is specifically apparent in the potential of the archive to de-value the mystery of a text, its “inevitability.” Thus the text becomes an object of knowledge, as opposed to an object of art (though many people would surely balk at the distinction, or simply claim that the two are not mutually exclusive). At a time when archival research is valued highly by academic institutions (much more highly than, say, theoretical or speculative work), his question to a panel at a conference on archives seems especially relevant:

"The cost is that the special status of the final form of the text is mitigated. When we do not have any indication of the writing process – as we do not with, say, Shakespeare – the received texts have an inevitability about them, as if they could hardly be other than they are. And that adds, to me, to their otherness, and suggests some mystery in their composition. I am glad there is no Shakespeare archive. I like him as he is. Do you see any point in this?"

The panel, of course, did not see a point in his question.