Rummaging / In and Out of Holds

Some fifteen years ago, while in that awkward phase of having outgrown other people’s syllabi and still hoping to find my unfound historical “real,” I came across the record of an archive called “Letters and Communications from Americans, 1662–1900.” The originals were housed at England’s premier scientific institution, the Royal Society of London, the addressee of the said letters, but this particular collection had been microfilmed and sent to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, which sent a diazo-print copy on to me. Each morning, for an entire winter, I would load up the reels, square myself onto my seat, poise my pen above a yellow legal pad, and try, well . . . not to die. Not to die of—not exactly the Mal d’Archives Jacques Derrida parsed through in his book of that name—but of a kind of vertiginously induced nausea, a motion sickness. This was partly the fault of the archival apparatus: the single sheets of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century handwritten pages, often with extra words scrawled on back flaps, now appeared, as a consequence of the filming process, as a continuous scroll of white-on-black script. As the backlit small white curving shapes cascaded in a vertical loop past my eyes, I began to feel dizzy to the point of queasiness. However, as you have probably already guessed, the feeling was not only in my stomach; it was also in my mind, for I am speaking too of a deeper sense of motion sickness, and of a nausea which is somewhere between boredom and hopelessness. The motion is historical and spatial, and the sense of sickness comes from the experience of not being able to make the crossing into other worlds of signification. Sometimes, you worry that you have crossed into their world, and frankly, it was not worth the trouble. In your better, and truer, moments of worry, however, you are plagued by patternlessness, by words and experiences being merely themselves, and by a facticity unrelieved by meaning. When you read, for example, a letter titled “A Recipe for Pickling Sturgeon” (1743), or another titled “An Account of a Stone taken out of a Horse at Boston” (1726), or yet another, by the same author, of “A Relation of a Mans Ear, Remarkably Fly blown and Cured” (1726), you—who are really just a fourth-year English Ph.D. student trained in the art of close reading—you think, maybe I am in the wrong place (Catesby; Dudley). Maybe this whole early American concept was a bad idea after all. Maybe they were right. A dreary, dull time, a prenatal penumbra, an embryonic ugliness, better skipped right over to the good stuff—the detectable and pleasurable aesthetic strategies of basically anyone handling a writing implement in New England after 1830.

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For Derrida, the trouble with the archive is its inherent apparatus of censorship. The same apparatus which takes things out of the flux of memory, out of “spontaneous, alive and internal experience,” and saves them, is at the same time bringing about the “originary and structural breakdown of the said memory” (11). In selecting certain things for a public and accessible house of memory, an archiving principle stabilizes and hence edits the fullness of history. Moreover, as Derrida’s etymology of the word indicates, “Arkhe . . . names at once the commencement and the commandment” (1). It establishes that which is given by law. The house of memory is the house of authority. The archive, as a memory prosthesis, is an outgrowth of the earlier technology of writing itself and is a premonition of the later technology of photography. Writing, the archive, and photography, all are meant to make memory durable, external, locatable—a thing to be pointed to. However, what is inherent in these saving technologies is their simultaneous losses—losses to human memory, to the voice, to that which is not collected, to the tender collapses of time.¹

Derrida strikes me as a canny witness to the instauration of the particular archive he was asked to mark, namely the remaking of Freud’s last house into...