Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives

Personal Ethics: Being an Archivist of Writers

Personal Ethics: Being an Archivist of Writers Catherine Hobbs What does it mean to “do right” by someone’s archives? This is the question I ask myself before all others when I work with the archives of Canadian writers. The question has two components: “What does it mean to ‘do right’ by this person while treating his/her archives?” and “What does it mean to ‘do right’ by this writer’s literary oeuvre in dealing with these archives?” Archival theory has done a terrible job of accommodating the particular needs of individual people’s archives. By and large, archival procedures have been based on models for dealing with organizational records (from government or business), as if personal archives were just smaller and less organized versions of these. As I have argued elsewhere, this oversight is difficult to absorb into professional work.1 Archival theory has also made little effort to accommodate adequately the particular exigencies of literary archives. This lack of theory is ironic, since literary archives have been subject to early and active acquisition by archival and special collection institutions in many countries.2 Literary archives have a particular resonance for archivists precisely because writers are “creative wordsters, and therefore many of the documents writers produce are invested with a creative vision in ways not 18 1 18 2 c at h e r i n e h o B B s duplicated by any other archival genre.”3 Acts of documentation blend very closely (in space and time) with acts of literary creation. Words are the tools of both literature and textual records, which are the dominant form of documents in archives. Paper or digital forms, which mimic the printed page, are the foundation for both. Textual documentation is the birthing place for the new literary work in ways that even archives from the other arts cannot duplicate, because of the writer’s creative relationship to language . For example, a musician who may create a work either on the page (by notation) or on an instrument, makes the page one of several possible sites to document an idea, and notation one of a number of means. In literary archives the medium, language, and idea cohere together: literature exists within language and text. There are ways in which the interpretive imagination directs us to think of the “author of intention” (Hobbs, “New Approaches” 114):4 that is, a kind of fictional intent/self-representation behind all documents. There are ways in which authors use, reuse, and reconceptualize not just the facts of their lives but also their documentation to make new literary projects. Finally, there are ways in which a narrative or multiple narratives are suggested by personal archives;5 the perception of narrative is heightened because we are dealing with authors, after all, with the weight of literary intentions and creative use of language behind them. When working with personal archives, every question of contact, acquisition , treatment, and interpretation is ethically marked, insofar as the choices of the archivist reflect a perception of the life lived by a particular individual and the interactions with others around that individual. Working with literary archives also subjects archival procedures to ethical decision-making because documentation slips toward literary interpretations and archival practices might have very real implications for the later interpretation of that literature. For example, quite obviously intentional or unintentional reorganization of archives might affect literary biography as much as it can alter our sense of how that literature developed. The positions of the archivist are as follows: interlocutor about the archives with the creator, when the archivist makes contact with and then visits the creator; first stage interpreter, when the archivist identifies and describes documents in finding aids; and in some sense, preliminary biographer , when the archivist distills the facts of a person’s life and circumstances in order to interpret the documents.6 It is the archivist’s precarious privilege to be a first-comer (although in some cases not “the” first-comer) and to carry out an interpretation upon which other interpretations will be constructed.7 The forensic aspect (we destroy some evidence as we encounter and interpret it) is, by and large, an unexamined peril of the profession. P e r s o n a L e t h i c s : B e i n g a n a r c h i V i s t o F W r i t...