Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives

“I want my story told”: The Sheila Watson Archive, the Reader, and the Search for Voice

I want my story told”: The Sheila Watson Archive, the Reader, and the Search for Voice Paul Tiessen Where the Voice Is Coming From During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Sheila Watson (1909–98) helped her husband Wilfred (1911–98) process his material, which went into his archive. Then, without help from him, she turned to the task of establishing her own. She wanted hers to find a home separate from his or, for that matter, from that of her dear friend, Marshall McLuhan (1911–80). She seems to have felt it imperative that the primary voice embodied in her archive—although it contained much by way of the respective voices of Wilfred and Marshall, just as theirs contained much of hers—should, in various ways, remain distinct from the primary voices in theirs. She might have also appreciated that among the three archives, hers, constructed last, would contain something of a last word.1 At the same time, her own agency in determining the course of her archive notwithstanding, Watson was aware that an archive involves a complex series of subjectivities, beyond those manifested in its material: for example, the interventions when there is an institutional reordering and renaming of its parts. There is also the reader, or the researcher— 2 6 3 “ 2 6 4 Pa u L t i e s s e n typically alone, and possibly unknown to the original creator—equipped with his or her own presuppositions and reading experiences, motives, and ambitions. A researcher, listening (as it were) to the archive, finds soon enough that a writer’s voice may seem strange and unexpected, as disembodied as it is embodied, and quite unlike that writer’s published voice—for with the published voice, an ongoing history of readers produces coherent clusters of meaning around it. The archive voice may seem intimate and unguarded, yet surprisingly indeterminate and vague, especially in the utter absence of a history of readers for that archival material.2 A Watson researcher might ponder in vain questions of tone or point of view in a few words or phrases scratched on a cigarette pack, or in images and shadows in a stack of photographs . A biographer—such as F. T. Flahiff, author of always someone to kill the doves: a life of Sheila Watson—contends with “facts” in an archive that invite unexpected interpretation. Flahiff happily had the opportunity to interrupt the archiving process and explore the Watson papers prior to their being processed according to institutional categories. A film/media history scholar interested, as in my case, in Watson’s “theory” of media and communication attempts to give to Watson’s little-known media interests the fullest possible expression, without losing sight of the historic moment in which she gave voice to them. Both a biographer interested in a hitherto little-known but dynamically lived life like Watson’s and a film/media history scholar interested in obscured debates by Watson about media, technology, and communication will very likely challenge fixed ideas and create new knowledge on the basis of the archive. Complications surrounding such re-presentation stem from the complex relationships among original creator, the reader or researcher, and the voices in the archive. Watson’s former colleague Rudy Wiebe offers a paradigmatic reading of such complications. In his “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” (which he wrote in Edmonton in 1971 when he and Watson were teaching at the University of Alberta), Wiebe identifies the ethically charged negotiations between a researcher and the original creator of the archive. He identifies dilemmas posed by the temptation of appropriation. When Wiebe’s researcher, in pursuit of “facts” about the historic Cree warrior Almighty Voice, is led finally to hearing “an incredible voice...a voice so high and clear, so unbelievably high and strong in its unending and wordless cry,” he can know only that he has no means to comprehend that voice (“Where” 143). He cannot contain its transcendent meanings, so incommensurable with his own reductive scientific methods. He makes an interpretative judgment based on and acknowledging his limitations: “I say ‘wordless cry’ because that is the way it sounds to me.” He does not, as he says, understand “ i W a n t M Y s t o r Y t o L d ” 2 6 5 the Cree language himself, and his lack of knowledge is underlined by the unavailability (as he...