Digging into the Archives

Circles & Boundaries is a collection of source documents from a field one might ludically call archaeanthroponarratology. In this miscellany of journal entries, stories, photos, and scholarly projects, arranged chronologically from 1977 through 1991, Kate Tarlow Morgan turns her attention to the body, consciousness, and the archive. With a desire to "achieve wider connections between real life, poetry and the social sciences," she moves back and forth between dance and literature, libraries and the streets. From 1979-1981, she tells us, her

job as documentary historian for the first major archaeological excavation in New York City [recorded photographically in "Fish Lab"]...was to present on paper the hologramatic story of a single city block through time.... During my time in the archives, I discovered a little known New York State festival called "Pinkster," which later became the subject of my Masters thesis at New York University.

Two "versions" of her research, "Circles & Boundaries," accompanied by Amy Arbus's photos of the early days of hip hop, and "Pinkster" are included here.

At first glance, the short stories "Fruiting Body" and "Brave, PA" seem out of place in a book largely comprised of academic fieldwork. However, these stories are also about bodies, ripe fungal bodies, and rooting and defecating animal ones. In "Fruiting Body," a young girl, Aude, engages in a tug-of-war with her father over the fate of her old truffle-hunting pig. In finally loosing the old sow in the forest, Aude rejects a life governed solely by necessity. In "Brave, PA," one family's sitting of its privy provokes a neighbor's unreasonable ire. The wider community becomes both audience and interested party to the dispute. In each of her investigations, from the dancer's platform to the property owner's lot line, Morgan theorizes the circle as "classificatory." As it pushes in closer or moves back to allow more room, the audience helps define the circle. "And so, groups arrange themselves according to what they prevent each other from doing as well as what they see each other do." "Fruiting Body" and "Brave, PA" are excellent short stories, but as Ammiel Alcalay comments in "Gifts (an afterword)," "all of the texts collected here are stories, in one form or another.... [T]hey are also stories about stories that never give up this very basic and ancient rite of passage, in which any story is, at the very least, also a commentary about itself."

Throughout Circles & Boundaries, Morgan proposes self-reflexivity (personal, social, and artistic) as salutary. At a time when many writers seem to have tired of the form of self-reflexivity we call irony, it's useful, I think, to recall irony's resistant nature, how it insinuates and subverts in order to uncover the facts of a situation. Morgan says, "My point would be this: that each text by itself is fiction, but each in relation to the others presents argument. That (argument) is fact." The term fiction here is key; in America, I suspect, its close kin is minstrelsy. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white American entertainers donned blackface to imitate black entertainers who, in their songs and stories, commented (ironically) on whites; later, black entertainers donned blackface to imitate whites imitating blacks commenting on whites. At the time, minstrelsy, with its buffoonery of stereotypes, got at truths about American history and society not accessible to "high" culture. The same could be said of the Pinkster revelers, breakdancers, and Go-Go performers that Morgan studies.

Spinning stereotypes into comedy, however, can be either a conservative or a radical move; it can reinforce those stereotypes or overturn them. In her research into the Pinkster festival that took place in New York "from approximately the arrival of the Dutch settlers in Manhattan until 1945, where it is recorded in various upstate New York counties," Morgan talks about the dual nature of laughter and "festival inversion behavior." Comedy critiques as well as supports the status quo: "In essence, laughter permitted the reflexive stance needed to face the impossible...