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Feverish Fragments and Dis-Eased Desire: the Archive As Fiction a DISSERTATION SUBMITTED to the FACULTY of the GRADUATE SCHOOL O

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Feverish Fragments and Dis-Eased Desire: the Archive As Fiction a DISSERTATION SUBMITTED to the FACULTY of the GRADUATE SCHOOL O Feverish Fragments and Dis-eased Desire: The Archive as Fiction A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Molly Lizabeth Kelley Gage IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Paula Rabinowitz June, 2012 © Molly Gage, 2012 i Acknowledgements I was able to complete this project only because a large group of committed individuals supported me. I am especially grateful to my advisor and my committee. My advisor, Paula Rabinowitz, taught the first class that stimulated my desire to read, write, search for, and save fragments, and, later, provided the insightful connections that helped to bring this project’s disparate pieces together. My committee also offered valuable scholarly support: Jani Scandura’s welcoming office hours enabled my maturation as a graduate student and scholar; Tom Pepper’s brilliant lectures provoked my commitment to my work; Lois Cucullu offered her honest, objective ear not only in this project’s initial stages, but in various versions of other projects, as well; and Pat Crain gave me the encouragement during my initial degree work that prompted its continuation. I am also grateful to the fellowships and grants that contributed to my completion of this project. The University of Minnesota’s English Department generously funded my first year of graduate work through the Ruud/Noland Fellowship, offered me several travel awards with which to present my research, and funded my work through the Graduate Research Partnership Program; The University of Minnesota’s Graduate School awarded me the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship; The PEO, a Philanthropic Educational Organization committed to the advancement of women, granted me a Scholar Award; and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly provided me several travel grants to participate in important conferences. Each of these awards allowed me a measure of freedom that significantly contributed to my project’s conclusion. In addition to my advisor and committee and the generous support provided by various scholarly organizations, I also want to thank the friends and colleagues whose readings of this project in its early stages prompted its development. I benefited in particular from the insights of Jessica Knight, Nick Hengen, Jewon Woo, Kevin Riordan, Lucia Pawlowski, Ryan Cox, Sara Cohen, Adam Schrag, Will Kanyusik, Anne Roth- Reinhardt, Josh Mabie, Lisa Trochman, and my Dad, Michael Kelley. My most patient and enduring reader was Katie Levin. Katie, my supervisor at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Writing, offered me her time, her enthusiasm, her advice and her friendship: without her energy, this project would be a thinner, lesser version of itself. My friendly colleagues were matched by the collegial friends and family members whose emotional support ushered me through my project’s latest stages. Friends Jessica Knight, Lauren Curtright, Becky Weinberg, Lydia Lunning, and Kerri Shaughnessy gave generously of their patience and consequently deserve at least the credit of byline for holding me up when my project, as do all projects of this length, held me down. My family, too, can be counted among my strongest supporters: I am grateful for my parents, Connie and Michael Kelley, my older sister Marnie Jones, and my younger sister Morgan Kelley—who bore the particular burden of being not just my sister but my closest friend—and for my mother-, father-, sisters- and brother-in-law, Betsy and Hal Gage, Maury and Kirk Wahtera, and Rosanna Gage, for their continued support even as my goals seemed sometimes to recede into the distance. Although my list is long, it is conspicuously incomplete without the addition of my best friend, partner, and husband, Nick Gage. It will remain my abiding task to adequately thank him, my most unflagging champion and my most stalwart support, for the sustaining love and patience he has constantly offered over this project’s duration. ii Finally, I am grateful to our son, Hal, who offered, and without even knowing it, the impetus and urgency that brought this project to its completion. iii Table of Contents Preface. The Archive’s Metastasis 1 Introduction. The Archive’s Allure 3 Chapter 1. The Archive’s Symptoms: A Burning A 25 Chapter 2. The Archive’s Dis-ease: Theoretical Germs 80 Chapter 3. Archival Agonism, or, the Feverish Desire to Save it All 132 Chapter 4. Archival Possession, or Archival Woman 191 Coda. Anarchivaria, or, Female Fevers and Fires 253 Works Cited 278 iv List of Figures Figure 1. Miss Barton’s Commonplace Book 88 Figure 2. Kollermaschine 141 Figure 3. Kollermaschine Files 141 1 Preface: The Archive’s Metastasis The next morning, almost as soon as the Central Registry had opened and when everyone else was at their desk, Senhor José half-opened the communicating door and said pst-pst to attract the attention of the nearest clerk. The man turned and saw a flushed face and blinking eyes. What do you want, he asked, in a low voice so as not to disturb anyone, but with a note of ironic recrimination in his words, as if the scandal of absence only confirmed the worst suspicions of one already scandalized by Senhor José’s lateness, I’m ill, said Senhor José, I can’t come to work. […] What’s wrong with you, he asked, I’ve got a cold, said Senhor José, A cold has never been a reason not to come to work, I’ve got a fever, How do you know you’ve got a fever, I used a thermometer, What are you, a few degrees above normal, Nor sir, my temperature’s well over 100. José Saramago All the Names ! On the first morning, I woke up in the hotel to the sound of my son whimpering in the crib, disoriented no doubt by the unfamiliar half-darkness of the closet in which his crib was wedged, pushed there by his parents’ desperate hope for another minute of sleep. The previous night we spent flying from Minneapolis to New Haven, the nursing baby in tow, so that I could spend three days (three days) researching the comprehensive commonplace book manuscript holdings, looking for I don’t know what, at the Beinecke Rare Books library at Yale. And the night before that I spent on the bathroom floor retching into the toilet, mostly obliterated by the stomach flu the baby had passed on to me (but not, and never, to his father), and, whenever it occurred to me (which was not often), despairing over the imminent, inescapable trip to the archive. On that first morning in New Haven, I woke up at the Omni Hotel, still feverish, sick-empty and haggard, to nurse and change a still feverish, still gray-faced baby, to shower and dress and pack my books, my notes, my bag, my computer bag, and my pump for the day’s research. It was cold and quiet in New Haven, but it was spring break and the cold wasn’t nearly as cutthroat as in Minneapolis. I walked across New Haven Green, across Elm Street, through Cross Campus, and to the Gordon Bunshaft-designed 2 honeycomb-catacomb Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in the Hewitt Quadrangle. There, I met a gray-faced security guard who searched my bags and radioed for female back-up to handle the unexpected and unavoidable materiality of my breast pump and my nonstandard requirement to use it in the bathroom stalls of the cloister scriptorium-styled sunken courtyard reading room of the Beinecke archive. While we waited, he looked at me, wiping his suddenly sweaty forehead with the back of his polyester sleeve, and blanched. Forcing out a strangled “excuse me,” he turned, vomited into the garbage can, and weakly fell into his seat. I realized then, or before then, that I had already been infected: to echo the words of Carolyn Steedman, who, in Dust, parrots the historian’s expostulates, “Archive fever, indeed! I can tell you all about archive fever” (10). 3 Introduction: The Archive’s Allure My dissertation proceeds from archivist Louise Craven’s suggestion in What are Archives? that “modern English and European literature,” such as José Saramago’s All the Names, with which the preface begins and with which my third chapter ends, informs “our understanding of the central place which archives have held historically and continue to hold in our culture today” (13). While Craven, Head of Cataloguing at the National Archives of England and Wales and the UK, articulates the impetus that drives much contemporary archival discourse, she and her international colleagues also claim that the dawn of the twenty-first century signifies a watershed moment for archival discourse. Previously, archival theory and discourse did not “normally have much to do with philosophical notions of any kind,” but the archive’s position at the turn of the twenty-first century, a position characterized by the archive’s dependence on overlapping historical and fictional paradigms, a growing recognition of the archive’s ordered and chaotic organization, and an emphatic realization of the archive’s influence on the documental facts of lives and deaths, requires “a new perspective” for its comprehension.1 Archivists, academics, and “users of archives” are no longer content, 1 I use the “documental” here and elsewhere in reference to “documentalism,” a term from the nascent information scientist of the late-nineteenth century, Paul Otlet, that has long characterized the archive. Documentalism both emphasizes the importance of documents to the making and transferal of meaning and information and expands the “document” descriptor beyond paper-bound missives to objects, artifacts, even animals— anything that has been made the object of information as process, knowledge, or thing.
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