The Intimate Archive: Journeys Through Private Papers
Maryanne Dever, Sally Newman and Ann Vickery
(National Library of Australia, 2009)
This co-authored book recounts journeys through the private literary papers of three quite distinct Australian literary figures: Marjorie Barnard, Aileen Palmer and Lesbia Harford. Dever, Newman, and Vickery tease out some of the issues involved archival research when it comes to the more intimate aspects of women writers' lives: love, romance, sexuality. These three stories deal in different ways with questions of how to read what we call 'the intimate archive'.
Adam Phillips describes lovers as 'notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders'. How more desperate then are the scholars who follow in their footsteps attempting to draw meaning and make conclusions from the scattered archival traces of love and desire. From Henry James' The Aspern Papers, and A.S. Byatt's Possession, through to Martha Cooley's The Archivist, novelists have attempted to represent the seductive power of writers' private papers over the readers and scholars who covet them. But literary researchers themselves have until recently shown a strange reticence on the subject of their own practices. While scholarly archival endeavour is regularly accorded the language of hunger, desire, and passion, these scholarly appetites are almost exclusively private and cloistered ones, seldom permitted to show themselves outside the four walls of the reading room. As Alice Yaeger Kaplan has observed, 'the archive runs on a passion that is anything but public and which is rarely talked about'. However passionate and possessed our archival exploits have been, researchers are almost inevitably trained to suppress these elements in the published accounts of their findings. They discuss what they found, but not the fevered paths by which they did so. 'The passion of the archives', Kaplan says, 'must finally be used to eradicate all personal stories in the interests of the dry archival report, fit for a public'.
Kaplan's injunction to the researcher 'to disappear behind the glory of her material', suggests there is a neat distinction between the process and the product of archival research. This book works from a different premise. The authors prefer the view that meaning and significance are not necessarily inherent in the archival artifact. They suggest that the fevered search and the passionate searcher play substantial, if not determining roles in producing meanings for, and attributing significance to, such artifacts. But placing greater focus on processes of reading and meaning-making in representations of our 'intimate' archival research, necessarily involves posing questions about who we are and how we operate as readers of others' most intimate records of loves and lives.
Dever, Newman, and Vickery speculate on such questions as what remains 'private' in a public archive, where are the boundaries between scholarly intent and voyeurism, how do scholars account for the pleasures of their own chase as they hunt down the passionate pursuits of others, and how do they construct meaning in the face of the evasion, ellipses, gaps and silences that inevitably punctuate any collection of personal papers. How do the insights gained through these searches shift the ways in which we understand these women and their writing? The book combines practical and methodological issues of scholarly research in Australian literary manuscripts and correspondence, with engaging reflections on what each author has found through their journey into the intimate archive.