Truths in the Archives

For Robert Brentano, Gene Brucker, and Natalie Zemon Davis
—Masters of the Archives

A lot of us have been concerned lately with theories and practices of authenticating the past—a reaction, among other things, to the stark choice between relativizing and essentializing dogmas that confront us, or are said to confront us, in the academy and even in real life. To such abstract certainties, my response has been to investigate how the authenticity of texts and artifacts has actually been established or invalidated, over time, by such fundamental authenticating institutions as the library, the museum, and the archives. These are repositories of record where evidentiary credentials are checked and claims to knowledge about the past are actually tested, not just talked about. For historical understanding, these repositories have become surrogates of God, and of the devil too.

Archives have existed in one form or another since the beginnings of recorded history—they are one condition of having a historical record in the first place. But it is only since the nineteenth century that archives have been primary sites of the labor and legitimacy of professional historians, their equivalent of laboratories or fieldwork. Most historians still suffer professional rites of passage in the archives as ordained by Leopold von Ranke and the founding fathers of the modern discipline of history; nonarchival historians are likely to feel at least a little defensive. But even though we routinely sift through and evaluate our documents, we tend to use archives without thinking much about them as institutions and, at the end of the day, remain committed to archives as a source of historical truth, despite having good reason to know that their truth-value is questionable. Since archives house what record-keepers choose to admit, archives are partial in all senses of the word. They are subject, besides, to dismemberment, damage, and destruction; in some times and places, archival fraud has been a kind of tradition. The historian Bonnie Smith relishes in the exposure of "fantastic foundational metaphors," the tropes of feverish quest, seductive romance, and heroic conquest that underwrite the self-consciously scientific archival turn made by nineteenth-century historians. Actually, disdain for the authority of archives is a very old complaint. One fundamental truth of the archives, surely, is that they are not to be trusted. ¹

There is a powerful pair of contrasting images of the archive—the temple of fact, objectivity, and omniscience; the factory of deceit, distortion, and prejudice. Truth-telling and fiction-making are both persistent truths about archives. ² I do not mean, though, to suggest a stand-off, either a shrug or a confession of faith, any faith. We must not be naive about our ability to authenticate the past in the archives; but it will not do, either, to give up to the ideologues and opportunists. I will begin with two favorite literary examples, not only because the images are so vivid but also because the perspectives of the two, while seemingly irreconcilable, implicate one another in a double vision that we can bring to the institutional history of archives.

Danilo Kis's story "Encyclopedia of the Dead" is a treasury of tropes of the archive as truth. ³ While attending a professional conference in Stockholm in the late 1970s, a Serbian theater scholar from Belgrade is take 0n by an efficient Swedish colleague to a famous archive containing registers of the lives of the dead. Once admitted by a gruff official keeper (scholars who have worked in archives will recognize the type), the visitor finds row upon row of volumes kept through the ages by the scribes of an unimpeachable religious society—a combination, one imagines, of cradle-to-grave Swedish Social Democrats and Latter-Day Saints. The visitor spends the night reading the record of her recently deceased father's life. The documentation is astonishingly detailed and efficiently organized. It is wholly factual but transportingly evocative; it reveals both commonplaces and secrets (the father's adulteries, the cancer that killed him...