In the last post I asked a question related to David Greetham’s metaphor of membranous transmission between archives.
In conceiving of a text as an archive (of knowledge, voices, attitudes, values) consisting of inter-membranous citations, this text interrogates its tutor text, and also itself. How must Proust be read here through the collect of its church motif (citations) and through the heterogeneous images (also citations) that supplement it?
In the ensuing discussion I neglected to consider the obvious question of genre. What makes the membrane metaphor so rich is its basis in the notion of leaves — of a book. The Proust passages constituting the church motif have “crossed several membranes (membranae or ‘leaves’ of a book) to interrogate the integrity of the archives from which they have been drawn” (Werner and Voss 1). They have, first, been translated and revised (Enright revision of the Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation) from an original (to them) printed version in French, itself an edited variant of whatever beginnings it had in manuscript; second, been singled out through my acts of reading and interepretation; third, been transcribed into a spreadsheet by myself and the woman whom I subsequently married; fourth, been imported into a database that operates upon them in response to searches of their words and phrases, as well as the paratexts (associations, context notes, image properties, pagination) that form relations with them.
Hence, each fragment of the collect constituting the core text of this archive has passed through several leaves or membranes before arriving in its place here. Only one of those leaves surviving in the present constellation is in print; the other three are digital. In that way, the digital archive-text provides several functions that allow for an interaction of digital and print membranes through its multi-layered memorializing of readings. The digital text is a deliberately partial trace of the whole print text, and its native ability to be reorganized allows for a non-sequential reading of its component parts. Thus the fascicles (OED — “A bunch, bundle. Now only in scientific use. Formerly also fig.“; “A part, number, ‘livraison’ (of a work published by instalments)” — demarcate the points of loss in the original, allowing readers to reconstitute, to re-member the original narrative in meaningful ways by means of the pupil text.
Membrane — OED — “classical Latin membr
na a membrane (in animal bodies), parchment < membrum“
Memory — OED — “classical Latin memoria < memor mindful, remembering (a reduplicated formation)”
Memory as the act of preservation through reduplication (of the original, through writing), of committing to archival parchment, to a node in the database. Re-membering — collecting and reassembling the membranes, the planes of memory in the novel’s signifiers and (here) signifieds, the pieces of a motif extrapolated from an organic text. Proust’s churches as the archives of both personal and collective memory; his book as the same; this archive as… ?
Before addressing Barthes’ S/Z, I felt it necessary to broach this subject of the membranous layers between print book and digital archive. S/Z deliberately fragments (or “stars”) the text of Sarrasine in order to tease out the full ambiguity of its signifiers, to get as close as possible to the writerly text by operating methodically upon the minutiae of the readerly one. Barthes ultimately concludes that a full articulation of the text’s signifying structures is impossible because the text itself is not a closed system. This archive begins with that conclusion as an assumption, limiting its selection of citations but using the mobility of the digital medium to approach the writerly text of a narrative strain running through the original. The digital medium is perfectly suited to interrogate the valences of the print text by spontaneously realigning its parts to match the reader’s intent.
What can the digital archive see in the book from which it derives?
February 2nd, 2008
While looking over some materials from one of the courses that sparked this project, I came across some notes on archive theory that seem especially relevant. There is a strong connection between the poetics of the archive and the activity of archiving.
In The Poetics of the Archive, Marta Werner and Paul Voss remind us that recent theories shift aspects of physical archives onto the conceptualization of texts and discursive practices. The archive’s dual function as a guardian of memory and a mechanism for controlling access to that memory make it indistinguishable from the process of knowledge production.
If the first archons originally conceived of the archive as a space of pure knowledge, then for those who came after, including oursleves, the archive has more often revealed itself as an ideologically-charged space. This space, inseparable from the ensemble of operations deployed within it, confers order on its contents and creates a system whereby an official record of the past may be preserved and transmitted instact. The archive may be, in effect, a political space, a genedered space, a memorial space. (ii)
“This space, inseparable from the complex of operations deployed within it”: The Ecclesiastical Proust Archive is the search engine, blog, forum, image galleries and the operations readers use to access its records. What does it record? The entire collection of passages forming the church motif; my readings of those passages — in the form of the associations and context notes that appear as search parameters (if selected) and as paratexts in the results (if selected); the images that contain (archive) my memories — as well as those of hundreds of other people alive and dead — of churches in France that are also archived in Proust’s novel; potentially the readings of other researchers in the comments field and the forum; the many thousands of pharmacological and pornographic offerings of comment spam quarantined by a plugin.
In making the church motif of Proust’s Recherche the controlling idea of this archive, I have, as archon, already imposed an order and a system on the rest of its content. In so doing, I have also preconditioned the readings that take place here, making the interpretive discourse both a result of the archival function and a part of that function. As David Greetham points out, via Derrida, in “‘Who’s In, Who’s Out’: The Cultural Poetics of Archival Exclusion,” the exergue or collection of citations before the beginning of a discursive piece sets the tone, meaning, and form of what follows. The collection of passages in this archive therefore functions similarly to the miscellaneous citations that perform as epigraphs in Greetham’s essay: “they have thus crossed several membranes (membranae or “leaves” of a book) to interrogate the integrity of the archives from which they have been drawn (and redrawn) and the one into which they are imported” (Werner and Voss 1).
In conceiving of a text as an archive (of knowledge, voices, attitudes, values) consisting of inter-membranous citations, this text interrogates its tutor text, and also itself. How must Proust be read here through the collect of its church motif (citations) and through the heterogeneous images (also citations) that supplement it? This is where the reading of Proust alongside the relational attitude of the juxtaposed images generates much complexity. Some images depict an actual church named in the text (e.g. Chartres for “Chartres”) in a documentary attitude. Some depict a real church on which a fictional one was based (e.g. the église Saint-Jacques at Illiers-Combray for the “église Saint-Hilaire of Combray”) in a sort of demistifying, “source identification” attitude. [The hyphenation of that town's name in honor of Proust is another interesting example of archiving.] Because of the archontic rule I set myself for including an image for every passage, some images depict a real church for a fictional one that has no basis (or no single source) in reality (e.g. my ghostly black and white photos of Chartres porches for passages in which the narrator “dreams of meeting his love on the porch of some Gothic cathedral”), in which case the relationship is based on an analogue of architectural elements and/or an emotional affect held in common. While there are more combinations in the image/text relationships (and many more yet to be teased out), the question naturally arises of their effects upon other readers.
As the progenitor and editor of this archive, my readings are memorialized — inscribed in the very architecture — in a way that must necessarily hold greater sway over those who perform readings here later.
The history of the archive, on the one hand a history of conservation, is, on the other hand, a history of loss. The archives of antiquity have long since vanished; we receive their contents as fragments of only as citations in later works. (Werner and Voss i)
Much of recent theory considers archives compiled by single authors/editors, of which the present one is still an example. But what happens when the archive becomes collaborative, when the fragments of the original novel-archive are brought into new relationships with images or other texts by the editorial/authorial voices of other readers? How will the external forces of time, cultural and ideological shifts, and scholarly contribution alter its content and its meaning?
The complex relationship between the archive and memory is subject not only to external, historical forces, but also to its own interior dynamics: “the archive’s dream of perfect order is disturbed by the nightmare of its random, heterogeneous, and often unruly contents†that make it “always only partially decodeable†(ii). Hence, The Ecclesiastical Proust Archive deliberately embodies recent theories that question the archive’s teleological function: it self-consciously collects violently decontextualized citations and external heterogeneous images for the purpose of closely reading, and re-membering, a novel.
Its operation is thereby similar to Roland Barthes’ archive of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine, which will be addressed in the next post.
January 17th, 2008