Italian literary archives: legacies and challenges Book or Report Section Published Version Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 Open Access La Penna, D. (2018) Italian literary archives: legacies and challenges. In: Sutton, D. C. and Livingstone, A. (eds.) The future of literary archives: diasporic and dispersed collections at risk. ARC, pp. 89-101. ISBN 9781942401575 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/76400/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . Publisher: ARC All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online i THE FUTURE OF LITERARY ARCHIVES ii COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT, CULTURAL HERITAGE, AND DIGITAL HUMANITIES This series publishes both monographs and edited thematic collections in the broad areas of cultural heritage, digital humanities, collecting and collections, public his- tory, and allied areas of applied humanities. In the spirit of our mission to take a stand for the humanities, this series illustrates humanities research keeping pace with technological innovation, globalization, and democratization. We value a var- iety of established, new, and diverse voices and topics in humanities research, and this series provides a platform for publishing the results of cutting-edge projects within these ields. The aim is to illustrate the impact of humanities research and in particular relect the exciting new networks developing between researchers and the cultural sector, including archives, libraries and museums, media and the arts, cultural memory and heritage institutions, festivals and tourism, and public history. Acquisitions Editor Danièle Cybulskie FOR PRIVATE AND Evaluation and Peer ReviewNON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY The press has every proposal independently evaluated by expert reviews before any formal commitment is made by the press to the author. Further, all submitted manuscripts are subject to peer review by an expert chosen by the press. iii THE FUTURE OF LITERARY ARCHIVES: DIASPORIC AND DISPERSED COLLECTIONS AT RISK Edited by DAVID C. 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ISBN: 9781942401575 FOR PRIVATE AND e- ISBN: 9781942401582 NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY https://arc-humanities.org Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY 89 Chapter 8 ITALIAN LITERARY ARCHIVES: LEGACIES AND CHALLENGES DANIELA LA PENNA Synergies and Scope Published two years apart, Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever and Maria Corti’s Ombre dal fondo illuminate our understanding of the complexities of the Archive in comple- mentary fashions. In his 1995 essay, the French philosopher addresses the “radical initude, […] the possibility of forgetfulness” inherent in what he calls the “archive drive,” a response to the death drive that deines our collective engagement with memory and its preservation (Derrida, 1995 , 18). As is customary, the etymological roots of the word Archive are exposed, their semantic productivity stoked: sim- ultaneously linked to Arkhé , the locus of origin, and to Arkheion , the place where magistrates would preserve and make available the texts of the law, the Archive in Derrida’s semantic slippage is inherently linked to justice, memory, and writing. 1 The Archive is presented as a place of longing and coercion, thus allowing archive fever to be deined as “an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesick- ness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (Derrida, 1995, 91). Published in 1997 by scholar and novelist Maria Corti, Ombre dal fondo also describes the Archive as a place of haunting, where scholars con- front the materiality of traces compounding the avant-texte , both of those works of literature that were delivered to the reader experience and those texts, postu- lating a multitude of possibilities, that would never be brought to completion, whether by accident or intention. Both Archive Fever and Ombre dal fondo take their cue from localized embodiments of the Archive: the Freud archive in London for 1 According to Derrida, Arkhé is a term where authority and origin are linked together: “[Arkhé] apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence — physical, historical, or ontological principle— but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command , there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given— nomological principle” (Derrida, 1995 , 1). For a discussion of the cultural signiicance of Derrida’s text, see Brian Treanor, “What Tradition? Whose Archive? Blogs, Googlewashing, and the Digitization of the Archive,” Analecta Hermeneutica 1 (2009): 231– 41. 90 90 DANIELA LA PENNA Derrida, and the Centro per gli studi sulla tradizione manoscritta di autori moderni e contemporanei in Pavia for Corti, its conceiver, founder, and indefatigable dir- ector for over twenty years. 2 It is the Archive rooted in a speciic geography and sheltering a speciic set of documents that drives their consideration of the way archives affect our ability to conceive of the past and conceptualize our relation- ship to the future. Both scholars come to terms with the Archive as a place where opposing conceptions of time meet: for Corti the Archive is the place where aion (the time of initude, of a life ended) and chronos (the time that extends into the future) compete with one another (Corti, 1997 , 7). For Derrida, the archive is not only “the place for stocking and conserving an archivable content of the past . [It] also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and its relationship to the future” (Derrida, 1995 , 17). In Corti’s Ombre dal fondo , the papers archived in the Centro are given a new lease of life by schol- arly dedication, and hitherto unheard of convergences can be discovered between the papers and the correspondence of the many authors which have found their new domicile within the walls of the Centro Corti single- handedly built. The deli- cate anthropology of learning, described by Corti, hinges on a notion of the Archive powerfully articulated by Derrida, and intended as both “memorial” and “reminder” of the past (Derrida, 1995 , 23). Derrida’s Archive is the place where we shore up against the ruinous experience of time and death, a place where we can gather and collect only what is left behind (the ironic and tragic supplementary nature of the archival document not only in relation to the event but also to the other types of evidence pulverized by destruction, what Derrida calls the “ash of the archive”) (Derrida, 1995, 91). This view is given an empirical translation in Corti’s “archontic” struggle to build a home for authors’ papers, increasingly acting as Arkheion against dispersal and material obliteration. Each collection located in Pavia reveals to Corti the paradox of the Archive: the documents surviving the author’s destructive drive (and relatives’ neglect, protective jealousy, or greed) are a permanent memento of those which have been destroyed, the very existence of the former a powerful reminder of the extinction of the latter. This paradox leads to another: iliation and domiciliation are not exclusively bound together. The author’s material traces can be scattered across various domiciles, preserved in different archives, in multiple territories and jurisdictions. The centrifugal power of dispersal, whatever caused it, is yet another reminder that the principle of universality to which the authority of the Archive aspires is hollow: archival jurisdiction and protection extend only to the tangible. Mindful of Derrida’s warning,FOR that PRIVATE “every archive AND […] is at once institutive and conservative” (Derrida, 1995,NON-COMMERCIAL 7), this exploration of the Itali an literary Archive will start by describing the legislative frameworkUSE ONLY that calls the archive and its contents under its purview. It will then proceed to discuss the main Italian collecting centres 2 On Maria Corti’s life and work see Maria Corti: Congedi primi e ultimi , edited by Renzo Cremante and Angelo Stella, Cristina Nesi’s Dialogo in pubblico , and special issue 47 of Autografo . 91 ITALIAN LITERARY ARCHIVES 91 and the web of connections that these have established with one another, and how these alliances have been transformed in the wake of the digital revolution. Filiation and domiciliation and how these relate to law and place are overarching concerns in Derrida’s Archive Fever , and by Corti’s own admission in Ombre dal fondo, it was the realization that these notions are not necessarily bound by reci- procity that led her to conceive and create a safe haven from the dispersal of Italian authors’ papers abroad.