Lives and Archives Q&A

Some various points that people have raised in the discussion:

--When constructing a family or personal archive, or developing a narrative for that past, are we trespassing in some way? Is there an ethical dilemma embedded in a desire to uncover the past?

Nancy Miller and Leo Spitzer responded individually, noting that the problem is a real one, but that, for themselves, the extent to which the uncovered narrative impinges upon the living guides their work.

--What does the I-Hotel site look like today?

--How is language contributing to the creolization in Mauritius?

--What stories do we choose when we decide to narrate a life? Doesn't everyone have a story to be told? What criteria inform the choice to narrate this life?

Robert Warrior noted, in response, that there is an autobiographical element to the archivist's work: to some extent, we assemble the archives that provokes us to narrate it. Marianne Hirsch followed-up by reminding us that life writing/archive projects are proliferating. I would imagine that digital technologies will only increase those archival options in exciting ways. Here's one available to MLA Conventioneers.

Fictional Lives, Historical Lives

David Palumbo-Liu has just presented on the interplay between history and the poetic as we narrate lives. He focused on the stories surrounding the now-demolished International Hotel (I-Hotel) in San Francisco, which was an important site in the struggle for low-income housing in SF. The various artistic response to this past include historical fiction, film, community readings, and a remarkable artistic installment which makes use of the dust (more dust) of the original hotel.

Palumbo-Liu pointed out that these artistic responses generate a remarkable circulation of narratives that crosses various locations. Poetic activity, in this case, becomes an evolving archive still in the process of composition.

Resonance and Dust

I'm in the middle of the Presidential Forum, "Lives and Archives: Finding, Framing, and Circulating Narrated Lives Now." Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have just co-delivered a fine account of Ella, a young woman who fled from Europe to Bolivia in the face of the rising Nazi threat. The archive that she has left behind--photographs, some letters, a few journal pages--carries with it, in Spitzer's words, "dust," read here not simply as patina and symptoms of age but also vulnerability, the fragility of a life.

Dust also seems to fill the gaps that the archive necessarily produces, the fact that it is always incomplete. Those gaps prompt a reading for, as Hirsch puts it, resonance and dissonance, the necessarily conflicted response to a catastrophic situation.

Nancy Miller, in the second paper of the panel, notes that entering an archive always includes the sense of missing someone or something. That haunting seems to me to be connected to dust and resonance. We'll see how these concepts evolves as the panel continues.

Another Voice in the Narrative

My name is Paul Jaussen, another contributor to these dispatches from MLA 2011. I would like to echo Tim's thanks to the Simpson Center for sponsoring our blogging project. I recently completed my Ph.D. at the University of Washington. My research focuses on 20th-century poetry and poetics. I am particularly interested in the intersection of poetry and philosophy in the long poem. For the next few days, I will be attending the Presidential Forum on Narrating Lives, as well as panels dedicated to literary theory and 20th-century poetry. I will be posting notes, reflections, and observations as I go, and I welcome your comments and responses. Thanks for following along!