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Common Knowledge 8.2 (2002) 364-365


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Postscript on Cultivation
Editorial Note

Natalie Zemon Davis and Jeffrey M. Perl

A sixteenth-century Muslim traveler, himself captured by Christian pirates, thought back on centuries of erasures by conquerors of all stripes. The Romans had effaced the inscriptions of the ancient Berbers when they took over their lands, "removing the letters and memorable events recorded on their buildings and replacing them with their own, so that no memory would last but theirs." But then, the Visigoths had done the same to the Romans, and the Arabs to the Persians. And in his day, the Turks were taking down the paintings in Christian churches, and the Christians busy vandalizing each other. As he crossed North Africa, he took down inscriptions wherever he found them . . .

The scholar's—the collector's, archivist's, librarian's, curator's, conservator's—response to cultural destruction, to comprehensive vandalism, has a long record of success. Monks preserving, copying, and recopying manuscripts of pagan origin after the fall of Rome and well into the Christian era is a familiar image of that success, as is the image of rabbis redirecting Jewish energies from the Temple to the Talmud after the Roman flattening of Jerusalem. The impulse is to preserve and cultivate a culture hated—and just because it is hated—by clueless outsiders.

Cultivation has two relevant senses here: first, conservation, nurturing, maintenance; and second, maturity, refinement, sophistication. The first is an obvious admonition to those of us who—and who does not?—ourselves resent [End Page 364] the endless, burdensome accumulation of fancy things to dig out and know and quote from what little could be rescued from the fire. Archives exist, as Derrida writes, à même la cendre, "right on the ash." The other sense of cultivation admonishes those who forget that the moment of "archivization," deposit—one might add, redemption—"produces as much as it records the event" (again, to quote Derrida's Mal d'archive). To venerate the archive is both idolatrous and narcissistic—a worship of human handiwork that turns out to be one's own. As an expression, though, of retrieval, of keepsake, of pathetic response to the September 11ths of history, that reverence has all the beauty of fragile odds and brittle ends.

Leon Battista Alberti wrote in 1452 that "beauty has the power to disarm the raging barbarian; there is no greater security against violence and injury than beauty and dignity," then he devoted the rest of his life to the construction of immortal buildings. Alberti must have known, even as he wrote those words, that they are, while very pretty, false. Beauty is no deterrent when vandals are on the move. Yet, once the vandals have done what they came for and moved on: archives are the best revenge.

Discussion follows.

Varieties of Vandalism

Truths in the Archives

The World as Archive



 

Natalie Zemon Davis, Henry Charles Lea Professor Emerita of History at Princeton University, is currently adjunct professor of history, anthropology, and medieval studies at the University of Toronto and a senior fellow in the Center for Comparative Literature there. Her books include Fiction in the Archives, The Return of Martin Guerre, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Women on the Margins, Slaves on Screen, and, most recently, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France.

Jeffrey M. Perl, author of Skepticism and Modern Enmity, The Tradition of Return, and monographs on Friedrich Schlegel, Mallarmé, and T. S. Eliot, taught for many years at Columbia University and at the University of Texas, and is now professor of English literature at Bar-Ilan University. He is founder and editor of Common Knowledge.

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