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Henry James's "The Aspern Papers": Between the Narrative of an Archive and the Archive of Narrative
- The Henry James Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 39, Number 2, Spring 2018
- pp. 167-177
- 10.1353/hjr.2018.0012
- Article
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Abstract:
This paper reads James's "The Aspern Papers" as an enactment of the "archival drive," as an "absolute desire for memory" that remembers the past and recreates it by repeating and interpreting it, in an attempt to avoid the threat of closure. James's narrator epitomizes the Derridean notion of "archive fever" in his monomaniacal desire to preserve the eponymous correspondence from the increasingly likely prospect of its burning. Nevertheless, the reduction of Aspern's papers to ashes generates a proliferation of writing coming out of the ashes and invites the formation of a different archive that consists of narrative appropriations and second guessings.