An introductory (incantatory) caveat

I am not born-digital – paper is my native format. Although I took to digital composition and communication when it came along, delighted by its speed and convenience, I always regard paper and the words recorded there – in letters, books, notebooks, even computer print-outs – as primary: because there is weight; because there is direct, unmediated experience of the text; because there are the impressions, and perhaps some of the essence, of the hands it passes through.

The Dalkey archive

On my first trip to New York, I visited the New York Public Library to see an exhibition of manuscripts from the Berg Collection. In a large, oblong room I walked up and down rows of glass cabinets, viewing papers of writers whose work I had loved and lived with: Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, John Steinbeck and many others. Seeing these papers, and especially the handwriting inscribed upon them, brought me into the authors’ presence – as material rather than only intellectual beings – in a way that reading their books hadn’t done. Here were marks, impressions, visible traces.

I’d stopped in New York on my way to Ireland. I was traveling as graduate assistant to a professor who was working on W.B. Yeats’ ‘Vision’ papers. We would attend an Irish Studies conference in Belfast, first going south to spend a few days with some papers – one typescript in particular – that then resided in a steel cabinet in the Dalkey home of Michael and Gráinne Yeats. Meg had been working from a copy; we were to examine the typescript and verify her transcription, making notes of any markings not visible or legible on the reproduction.

In such an informal archive, there were no snake weights, no catalog numbers. We sifted through boxes and folders to find the typescript and other relevant papers, pausing to examine other interesting pieces that emerged, spreading pages around the Yeats’ basement room. On one manila envelope, Meg pointed out traces of other scholars who’d been there before: This was Richard Ellmann’s handwriting. This note was written by Richard Finneran, and this one by her father, George Mills Harper. Again there was the sense of presence – intensified in this instance by the homely environment, rife with mementos of ‘the great man’: the poet’s (surprisingly large!) carved lapis lazuli, his portrait above it, and Michael, the white-haired spit of his father. These papers, generated by a great and famous poet, had lived with his children and been pored over by scholars, touched curiously and with reverence by many hands, — now including mine.

‘A meditation on silence in the archive’

‘Behold the historian,’ writes Jill Lepore, ‘His hand holds a pen. His eye lingers on the past.’ His hand holds a pen – an image already almost anachronistic, perhaps intentionally so. Lepore is, after all, writing about Benjamin Franklin, who composed his history – his autobiography – in an age when writing by hand was not just the best but the only means of recording one’s thoughts. In telling the story of Jane Franklin Mecom – what she can of it – Lepore explores the nature of history: how it is written, who it’s written by and who it’s written about. At the same time, she points out the ‘silence in the archive’ that regularly effaces the lives of ordinary people. It is against this silence, and history’s preference for the great and the bad, that she writes, telling the LA Review of Books , ‘I like the idea that a life that was just a good life is worth writing about… I like the story of a good person struggling with the everyday ordinary chaos of living a life and doing well in the world.’

As intriguing as the book proper are the several appendices in which Lepore outlines her methods and recounts her efforts to recover Mecom’s ‘remains’, to piece together her ‘life and opinions.’ ‘My difficulty was evidence,’ she writes, ‘I searched for what there was to find. I pondered its insufficiency.’ Tracing Mecom’s letters, 219 years after her death, through generations of descendants, through editors and auction houses, to institutional archives and personal collections, she finds 95 letters still extant, along with the document from which she takes her book’s title, Mecom’s ‘Book of Ages’. From these scant texts, along with other letters preserved in (often edited and redacted) transcription, and the many more available letters from Benjamin Franklin to Jane, Lepore composes a biography. This has always been the historians work: collecting remains, gathering fragments, piecing together a story.

‘In many and reportless places –’

With The Gorgeous Nothings , Marta Werner and Jen Bervin remind us that we go to the archive not only to read but also, perhaps primarily, to look. Following Susan Howe, Werner and Bervin approach Emily Dickinson’s late writings on envelopes as art objects as much as texts, weighing the visual elements of each manuscript equally with its words. Even their transcriptions attempt to reflect ‘the spatial dynamics of Dickinson’s handwritten documents… through placement, kerning, leading, spacing, and type-point size within the line drawing of the envelope’ – to transcribe the space of composition as well as the words inscribed there. The transcriptions present ‘a clean, legible text to act as a key into – not a replacement for – the manuscripts’ [Bervin's emphasis]. This philosophy counterposes the traditional editorial task of constructing a final, authoritative printed text from manuscripts, taking Dickinson’s textual idiosyncrasies and modes of production as essential, rather than accidental, to her meaning.

In an interview with poetryfoundation.org, Marta Werner points out that, although the writings in The Gorgeous Nothings were all in print by 1958, most people can’t recall seeing them before: ‘And of course that’s because they haven’t seen them – they’ve only read them. Somehow… reading a manuscript is fundamentally different from reading in print.’ A manuscript does not – cannot – obscure the process of its composition in the way of its printed descendants. Particularly in these works of Dickinson’s, the slips and sleight of hand impressed on paper, the material traces, expose the text as contingent and any final or ‘authoritative’ version as merely one possible arrangement among many.

The ghost in the machine

There has been much hand-wringing over the fate of books in the age of e-readers, but it is not the printed but the written word that is in danger of annihilation – not the e-reader but the pixel writer that threatens an activity once thought of as the perfection of human communication. At its most basic level, preserving paper requires only that it not be thrown away. You put the paper in a box, the box in a closet. Eventually it becomes easier to keep the box and its contents than to get rid of them – or so says my experience. Given the nature of paper-filled archives, I presume it to be the experience of others as well: Not everything that presents itself to be archived is a thing someone set out to save. As our inter- and intra-personal communications become more exclusively digital, this ephemera (both the physical form and the linguistic content) disappears. Preserving ‘born-digital’ documents requires labor and intention; they take up less space than paper but degrade much more quickly. Most significantly, they are not self-contained and so require an additional level of preservation in order to remain accessible.

The prognosis is less dire for the digital ‘papers’ of already well-known figures. Emory University, for example, has created an emulation program by which researchers can experience Salman Rushdie’s Mac Performa as it appeared when the author last used it. This was possible because Rushdie included the computer itself in his donation of ‘papers.’ No doubt there is lots to read in this context, but what is there to see?

And what of those people in whom we don’t yet know we are interested – the Jane Franklin Mecoms of the 21st century? In the LA Review of Books interview, Jill Lepore reports that she herself is ‘a dedicated purger’: ‘I delete everything. There seems to be evidence that this is the era that will be the least documented in some ways… most of the stuff we write just goes away.’ Sounding a death knell for the social history she practices, Lepore shrugs it off as someone else’s problem.

The sense of impending doom that arises when I think of the born-digital archive – of the born-digital world – is largely aesthetic: Manuscripts are more beautiful than screen texts. I treasure my collection of letters far more than the two-decades worth of email I have so carefully transferred from one outdated storage medium to the next. There’s an aesthetic of practice as well, since the act of looking at, of interpreting, a manuscript is substantively different from reading print. An archive is more than a collection of words – it is a collection of evidence. The evidence – of artistic production and of everyday life – preserved in the archive of a born-digital world will, I fear, be far diminished from what we have enjoyed up to now.

 

Marcia Smith reads, writes, and tries to breathe in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Images

1. Typescript, page 17 in  Yeats’s Vision Papers, Volume IV: The Discoveries of Michael Robartes , George Mills Harper and Margaret Mills Harper, eds.

2.  Letter from Jane Franklin Mecom to Benjamin Franklin  – Pennsylvania Historical Society

3. From  The Gorgeous Nothings , Marta Werner and Jen Bervin, eds. – images from  thepoetryfoundation.org .

4. Screenshots from