French Studies 2005 Sheringham 47 53

MEMORY AND THE ARCHIVE IN CONTEMPORARYLIFE-WRITING

MICHAEL SHERINGHAM

This article is part of an ongoing attempt to understand and map out theramications of a fascination with archives in contemporary westernculture. Archives can take numerous forms public, private, institutional,visual and manifest many degrees of organization or disarray. My title isitself symptomatic of a shift towards the singular, to a usage where we talkof the archive larchive. What is this essence of the archive that seemsto have become meaningful to us, and how does it relate to those recentinnovations in the sphere of memory with which this special issue ofFrench Studies is concerned? Talk of the archive reminds us of coursethat, until fairly recently at least, it has always been a place (in the Greekpolis the arkheon was the magistrates house where ofcial documentswere kept).1 While it undoubtedly essentializes, the singular pinpoints thearchives physicality, its three-dimensional spatial reality. Yet talk of thearchive also draws attention to what is generic and archetypal: not onlyto location, but to a number of gestures, routines and operations lumping together, singling out, rummaging, listing, counting, copying,decoding, transcribing, selecting. In addition, by drawing attention tothis generic space of activity or practice, talk of the archive releases agurative potential: it makes the archive shorthand for something, andin this context the vocabulary of the archive document, trace, vestige,memorandum also takes on a gurative richness. But what is thearchive shorthand for? In what follows I shall broach one type of answer:I shall suggest that, on the basis of a tradition of theoretical elaboration,the archive can be shorthand for a certain kind of encounter betweensubject and memory, where memory, even ones own, has become other.Initially, however, I shall rapidly sketch two main contexts for this recentfascination with the archive.First, the public sphere. A situation in which the fragile principles of

liberal democracy have combined with the aftermath of traumatic historicalevents the Holocaust, decolonization, cold war, terrorismwhere theseprinciples were often suspended: this situation has given prominence to thequestion of access to archives. And part of the gural power of the archivesprings from its association with what the social body often desires to

# The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for FrenchStudies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]

1 Jacques Derrida, Mal darchive (Paris, Galilee, 1995), p. 12.

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repress or keep hidden. In this regard the consonance of the archive, asspace and practice, with the matter of psychoanalysis is obvious andcrucial, if sometimes misleading. As a second main context I simply wantto point en bloc to the ways in which literary and artistic practices havecome to be inected by debates in such elds as ethnography or historiogra-phy, where the status of the archive is often an issue. These range fromliterary biography seen as a form of archival journey, to ctions focusedon archivists or biographers, to personal memoirs involving an individualsown archival quest.2 I shall illustrate this with three manifestations ofarchival consciousness or obsession in recent French culture.In the last chapter of his memoir LEcriture ou la vie (1994), Jorge

Semprun recounts his rst return to Buchenwald, after forty-seven years.He begins in media res with an interruption: non, il na pas ecrit ca: thespeaker is a bearded German who acts as a guide, and when Semprun,after building up to this core episode, arrives at its place in the narrativeof his return, he explains that the man had interrupted Semprunsaccount, reiterated for the benet of some young friends, of how on hisarrival at the camp in January 1944 the ofcial had been extraordinarilyreluctant to register his profession as student, eventually consenting grud-gingly. The guide rebuts this element in Sempruns testimony and dramati-cally brandishes from his pocket a copy of the entry in the camp dossier,retained in its archives. Il na pas ecrit etudiant, mais tout autrechose.3 Sure enough, the archival trace shows that, despite Sempruns insis-tence, the ofcial had indeed written Stukkateur stucco-craftsman rather than student. And by thus placing him in the category of usefulmanual labour the ofcial had probably saved Sempruns life. As astudent, he would almost certainly have been dispatched to the under-ground factory at Dora, where beatings were the norm and survival rare.Thus the archive holds the secret of Sempruns own survival, and in thenarrative chain of his text it manifests the link between writing and life,serving as an incitement to write about his past instead of trying toforget it. Opening the archive is shown to be benecent.My second example also shows the archive to be benecent, indeed too

much so for many tastes. In Caros and Jeunets lm Le Fabuleux DestindAmelie Poulain, it is the curmudgeonly greengrocer who berates Ameliefor her interventions in the archives du quartier which, spawned by aninitial encounter with a personal archive of cherished objects that sherestores to their grown-up owner, progressively turn Amelie into a

2The many works one could cite here include Assia Djebar, LAmour la fantasia, Patrick Modiano,Dora Bruder, W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, Rachel Lichtenstein and Ian Sinclair, Rodinskys Room.3LEcriture ou la vie [1994] (Paris, Gallimard Folio, 1996), p. 356. For an excellent close reading of this

episode, see Susan Rubin Suleiman, Historical Trauma and Literary Testimony: Writing and Repetitionin the Buchenwald Memoirs of Jorge Semprun, Journal of Romance Studies, 4, no. 2 (summer 2004),120.

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missionary of the archives, whose ministrations seem designed to suggestthat there are really no dark corners, that everything can be made tocome out alright if you piece it all together. In Amelie Poulain we have aburlesque and fantasized version of the mal darchive JacquesDerridas phrase that permeates contemporary culture.My third example is a more recent text by Derrida, the lecture he gave at

the Bibliothe`que de France on the occasion of the gift of the archive ofHele`ne Cixouss papers. Throughout this text, sub-titled les secrets delarchive, Derrida underlines what he calls la structure retorse delarchive, a whole symptomatology that makes the recipients of thearchive less the beneciaries of municence than inheritors of Pandorasbox: larchive ne se laisse pas faire, elle semble resister, elle donne dumal, elle fomente une revolution contre le pouvoir meme auquel elle feintde se livrer, de se preter et meme de se donner.4

I turn now to the eld of life-writing, where the gure of the archive, andthe related vocabulary of document and trace, have become increasinglyprominent. This reects a number of shifts: from a focus on the individualto the interaction of individual and collective; from exploration of inner lifeto la vie exterieure (Annie Ernauxs phrase), where identity is a function ofthe encounter with others in social space; from a sense that the materials ofautobiography are personal to a sense that they derive equally from thesocial framework of memory.5 All these developments are evident in theevolution of autobiographical writing, in the second half of the lastcentury, towards a confrontation between an individual subject and theproducts of a quasi-archival practice. In the work of such writers asLeiris, Yourcenar, Perec, Barthes, Sarraute, Semprun and many others,we can see the accentuation of an archival dimension present in autobiogra-phy since St Augustine. But in the context I want to focus on here this iscarried a stage further. A project that is strongly autobiographical intenor, but conducted across a range of genres and writing practices,produces such complex works as Assia Djebars LAmour la fantasia,Pierre Michons Vies minuscules, Annie Ernauxs La Honte and PatrickModianos Dora Bruder.6 The distinctive slant towards the archival inthese texts and many others, as well as numerous artistic projects, lies inthe staging of a confrontation between an individual present and a pastthat is made up not so much of individual memories as of materialsbelonging to a middle or common ground: in Djebar, letters anddocuments relating to the conquest of Algeria and to later stages in thecountrys history; in Ernaux, the social topography of a provincial town,

4Gene`ses, genealogies, genres et le genie: les secrets de larchive (Paris, Galilee, 2003), p. 20.5La Vie exterieure (Paris, Gallimard, 2000).6 Pierre Michon, Vies minuscules (Paris, Gallimard, 1984), Annie Ernaux, La Honte (Paris, Gallimard,

1997). See also n. 2.

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the faits divers of a teenage summer, and the rules and regulations of aCatholic school; in Modiano, documentary traces relating to the disappear-ance of a young Jewish girl in Occupied Paris.Rather than pursue these examples, I want to set these forms of archival/

autobiographical practice in the context of recent meditations on thearchive, principally those of Michel Foucault, Paul Ricur, JacquesDerrida and Arlette Farge. In Foucaults LArcheologie du savoir, thearchive ts into the account of those discursive formations he substitutesfor the periods, innovations and acts of individual genius that feature in tra-ditional history of ideas.7 To see a discursive formation as an archive ratherthan as, say, an ideology or a paradigm, is to foreground a number of keytraits anonymity, non-linearity and self-transformation. Utterances verbal performances are seen less as events than as the agents ofmeanings produced through quotation and re-combination. The Foucaultarchive is a system involving laws of preservation, accumulation and trans-formation. A dynamic of constant modication is engendered both by theprocess of layering and depositing itself, and by the strategic uses towhich the material is put. The archive places utterances into a networkand makes them available to future operations. Yet as part of his anti-subjectivist programme Foucault insists on what he calls the positivity ofdiscursive formations. The gure of the archive underlines the concreteness,the materiality of its constituents. Thus, what is compelling about theFoucault archive is the conjunction of the concrete and the systematic: weare dealing with human words and deeds, but these have become part ofa system, a logic that severs them from their agents and their interpreters.I turn now to Paul Ricur. In the third volume of Temps et recit (1985),

Ricur explicitly takes issue with Foucault and develops his own view ofthe archive. Throughout his discussion a central concern is to maintain notwithstanding the rift between past and present, which he fullyacknowledges the possibility and necessity for a dialogue betweenhistory and memory, rooted in the ways in which the historical pastimpinges on our present lives, giving human reality the character of anetre-affecte-par lhistoire. At the heart of this analysis is the notion ofthe trace as connecteur.8

Whilst he acknowledges the validity of Foucaults archaeology within itsprincipal sphere of application major discursive formations Ricurrejects the total severance of the archive from experience and tradition.Not, he insists, because he wishes to maintain the notion of a centred,sovereign consciousness, but because he rejects Foucaults assumptionthat any assertion of an active rapport between the present and the historical

7LArcheologie du savoir (Paris, Gallimard, 1975).8Temps et recit, III (Paris, Seuil, 1985), p. 204.


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past necessarily rests on a failure to acknowledge the de-centring of thesubject effected by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Against the antinomy thatgures the archive either as the place of an illusory plenitude and continuity,or as a locus of transformations occurring outside the framework of humanactions, Ricur construes it as a space of disjunction and decentring wherean active relationship to pastness, often marked by the recognition of a lackof mastery, is transacted. Far from providing a haven of plenitude, thearchive, by asserting its claim on us, and thus our continuity with it,disrupts our fantasy of self-containment. Rather than add something, theencounter with the archive may take something away.For Ricur, the notion of the archive leads, via that of the document, to

the trace. It may be naive to see the document as material proof of a paststate of affairs, independently of the constructions we put on it; but toforego this naivety does not dispose of the documents claim to somesort of authority. For Ricur, this resides in its signiance, that is, itscapacity to be interpreted, to found meanings, to be manipulated. Andthe signiance of the document derives from the fact that it maintains atrace of the past. But a trace is double it is both a vestige, a mark thatwe can see here and now in the archive, that the past has left behind itpossesses a caracte`re chosique; and at the same time it is the sign of anaction, a passage, a moment that is no longer visible. The trace conjoinspresence and absence: it is a connecteur between two modes of thought andtwo temporal perspectives. On the one hand, as imprint or impression, itmanifests a chain of cause and effect that it invites us to reconstruct; itshorizon is the calendar and the date. Yet at the same time we confrontthe trace as something that has survived erasure and absorption into thepast, and so remains indeterminate because we can never reconstitute thetemporal chain that separates us from the moment of its inscription. Sothe trace we have before us, en vis-a`-vis, also belongs to the temporalityof interpretation, to the abstract time of intellectual constructs. CitingEmmanuel Levinas, Ricur underlines letrangete de la trace qui nestpas un signe comme un autre because cest toujours un passage, nonune presence possible, quelle indique.9

In La Memoire, lhistoire et loubli (2000), Ricur inists that, while we mustnot confuse a historical fact (an abstract construct) with a real event, thisdoes not mean that the event is immaterial. Rather it persists as areferent ultime, and Ricur stoutly defends it: je plaide inlassablementen sa faveur [. . .] pour preserver ce statut de vis-a`-vis du discours historique[. . .] je pense honorer levenement en le tenant pour le vis-a`-vis effectif dutemoignage en tant que categorie premie`re de la memoire archivee.10

9 Ibid, p. 220.10La Memoire, lhistoire et loubli (Paris, Seuil, 2000), p. 229.


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Arlette Farges Le Gout de larchive, published in 1989, is a vigorousplaidoyer for the validity and power of the archival trace, notwithstandingthe constructed nature of historical truth. Writing as a professional historianwho has made a special study, based on judicial archives, of ordinarypeoples brushes with the legal apparatus, Farge (who collaborated exten-sively with Foucault) provides a phenomenology of archival work, celebrat-ing above all the physicality of the archival encounter. Describing thearrival of a liasse of dusty documents summoned up from the seeminglyinnite depths of an aptly named fonds, she recalls occasions when apiece of cloth or a few seeds lost among the old leaves had symbolizedthe acute sensation of apprehending the real, of encountering the tracesbrutes of individual lives, the irruption of a past event via a bre`che dansle tissu des jours seemingly making us privy to a few instants of crisis inthe lives of ordinary people.11

Farges vindication of the archive as the locus of a particular encounterwith the real constantly focuses on the notion of the trace as constitutingan exce`s de sens that cannot be readily assimilated to narrative or discur-sive order, and yet can provide a kind of evidence of the past that cannotsimply be brushed aside. In her view, the truth value of the archive doesnot derive from its use as evidence, its role in the construction of hypothesesabout past events. In fact, the power of the archival trace is related to thedisruptive character of the singular: aux constructions theoriques etabstraites, larchive oppose son poids dexistences et devenements minus-cules incontournables; larchive entretient toujours un nombre innide relations au reel. Citing Michel de Certeau, Farge asserts that thearchive is not a stock dans lequel on puiserait par plaisir but a manque,a kind of swirling black hole that sucks in everything that approaches itbecause it points to an absence, a void that can never be lled.12 Whileremaining faithful to Foucault, Farge insists that the archival encounter,and by extension an individuals negotiations with his or her own traces,is the locus of a certain kind of knowledge, and demonstrates how contem-porary meditations on the archive can serve to problematize the relationshipbetween individual and collective subjects and their individual and collec-tive pasts. In the context of life-writing, the archive gures at once the indis-putably social and historical nature of individual experience, and withinthe space of the subject the unbridgeable gulf represented by an archivaldimension that can never be assimilated into a coherent vision of the self asagent or experiencing subject.InMal darchive, Derrida questions in his turn the status of the archive as a

repository for the pasts traces. From a psychoanalytical perspective he

11Le Gout de larchive [1989] (Paris, Seuil, 1997), pp. 1214.12 Ibid, p. 70.


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identies in archivation a violence that opposes the drive to preservationwhich ostensibly obtains. At the same time, he insists that the desire forclosure for arranging and packing is never immune from the factthat each opening, addition, interrogation or mobilization of the archivetransforms it, so that the archive is always as much to do with the futureas with the past: il ny pas de meta-archive. [. . .] Larchive produit delarchive, et cest pourquoi larchive ne se ferme jamais. Elle souvredepuis lavenir.13

I asked at the outset what the archive has become shorthand for, and Isuggested that recent theorizations provided a context for a signicant re-orientation of autobiographical and biographical practices. As I have alsosuggested, this could be illustrated through many examples, from Leiristo Djebar, and from Yourcenar to Ernaux. To conclude, however, I shallsingle out one trait that seems to characterize the renascence of thearchive as a gure of memory. This is the way that as so clearly inLeiris archival practice involves a hiatus between the materials of thepast and the present act of manipulation. Derrida insists that an archive isnever a living memory, and yet it manifests Geist, or the genie ofCixous, in a particular way.14 The archival encounter has its own belatedtruths to offer, and these are the more potent for being hedged withuncertainty.

ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD

13Mal darchive, pp. 10809.14 See Gene`ses, genealogies, passim.


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French Studies 2005 Sheringham 47 53