Ficciones de verdad: archivo y narrativas de vida por Patricia López-Gay (review)

At the end of the 19th century José Martí wrote in the “Prologue to Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde’s Poem of Niagara,” that the poets of his day had ceased to write national epics like Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, The Poem of the Cid, or Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. The newspaper, a product of the fast pace of modernity, had displace works like Dante’s Divine Comedy with the newspaper. Instead of writing on issues that affected society at large, argued Martí, contemporary poets wrote on the trivialities of their everyday lives. This was said by a politically engaged revolutionary who objected to what he interpreted to be modernity’s narcissism. Living during the first decades of the age of photography, for Martí the Archive was primordially national and historical. The political sovereignty of the emerging Latin American nations needed to forge their own archives, but neither the “vain villager” nor the Francophile “modernista” poet could care less.

Now, though Martí plays no role at all in Patricia López Gay’s Ficciones de verdad, a book that concentrates on the question of auto-fiction in relation to the Archive, I mention it because I believe it helps us to understand the most traditional and conservative notion of the Archive. To that end López-Gay begins her book with a description and a reference to Catalan visual artist, Montserrat Soto’s 2007 archive exhibition at Barcelona’s Museum of Modern Art, Archivo de archivos (1998–2006). López-Gay explains that the exhibition’s archive of archives included mementos, obituaries, source documents, biological memory, universal memory, and Internet digital/visual memory (p. 18). This is a well-chosen place from which to begin her study, for Montserrat’s Achivo de archivos nearly covers all the forms of archives treated in the book. Informing her theoretical framework, she tells us, is Derrida’s notion of the archive as elucidated in the seminal Mal d’Archive: une impression freudienne (1995). Interestingly, as she points out, the title of Derrida’s book was rendered into English as Archive Fever (1995—fever understood as the body’s physiological response to an infection, and clearly, and hence the “mal” (or malady) of the original French title. However, one possible problem with the English translation is that “fever” can also be understood as something positive: a metaphorical expression of enthusiasm, as in “dance fever.” And here one may recall the famous late 1970’s movie about disco dancing, Saturday Night Fever. I say this is a possible problem, because it may not be a problem at all, especially if one considers for a moment, Derrida’s “pharmakon” in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” where the pharmakon was both a remedy and a poison. Thought in this manner, fever could also be seen a killer as well as curative: for while an excessively high fever may kill, a low grade fever may be indicative of the body’s capacity to “fight” an infection. This would leave Derrida’s notion of the archive as undecidable as the question of writing vis-à-vis the metaphysics of presence. The archive, says our author, can preserve as well as discard (p. 20). The malady alluded to in Derrida’s “mal” would then be constitutive of the ontological imperative to preserve rather than to acknowledge the memory/forgetfulness difference. Are we witnessing today, perhaps, the definitive change from the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” to “I archive, therefore I am?” provocatively asks López-Gay. This last reformulation of Cartesian ontology, derived from Leonor Arfuch’s Memory and Autobiography: Explorations as the Limits (2020), is an apt description of the contemporary belief that one “does not exist” unless one participates in some kind of social network like Facebook or Instagram (22). Moreover, in the 21st century, to be, as Bishop Berkeley put it, is to be perceived (esse est pericipi). Not by God, of course, but rather by everyone in the universe...