who loves the sun: Lisa Robertson’s archive
transcript
The first essay I remember reading about the archive was Arlette Farge’s poetic “Traces by the Thousands,” from her 1989 book The Allure of the Archives. During her time in the chilly Bastille archive, she encountered intimate details of the lives of long-dead people, fossilized through bureaucratic interventions that occurred in the aftermath of some disaster, like a sudden stabbing or robbery. These events are now folded into delicate bundles of judicial paperwork that have survived their own disasters, such as a fire or flooding. Farge writes that the Bastille archive “was not compiled with an eye toward history” (7), and many of the moments she finds preserved in the archive are transcriptions of oral accounts that quote “did not follow from the same mental premeditation of the printed word” (6). There is a voyeuristic quality to this type of research and Farge addresses the archivist’s intimate proximity to these past lives when she writes “Gently, you begin undoing the cloth ribbon that corsets it around the waist, revealing a pale line where the cloth had rested for so long” (2), This “you” is the present and future archivist. It is Farge herself. When I entered a local university archive to do some research for an assignment, like Farge, I flipped through documents held in institutional grey boxes and, like her, I eventually pulled open a ribbon that opened a sheaf of papers, revealing what she described as — quote— “an unplanned glimpse offered into an unexpected event” (6).
There is a second “you” in the archives, that refers to the archived, the subjects that Farge encountered. At a conference, I listened to a librarian describe her time researching city council minutes from Lucca, Italy that were written out by hand during a plague. That writing grew fainter and fainter until it was replaced by another hand. During her presentation, the librarian addressed the unknown scribe whose writing had faded away as it described the sickness engulfing the city, saying to him, “I think I know what happened to you.” Although the archived person likely knows exactly what happened to them, they rarely did — or at least not fully — at the moment in which their spontaneous testimonies were recorded. This puts the archivist at an advantage. Although they may not choose to, the archivist can perceive with detachment, with irony, or, perhaps even worse, with pity, things that the archived experienced spontaneously and emotionally —. In the librarian’s case, I would say this gaze towards the archived is sympathetic, concerned. In any case, peeping at people of the past can easily make us more aware of potential future eyes on us and this can saddle us with self-consciousness. We are living through a self conscious time. The weight of history at the turn of the millennium — that moment of hauntology, of disappointed nostalgia, of past futures unrealized — grew heavier as archival technology grew more sophisticated. Importantly also at this time, reality television, viral videos, and increasingly manicured social media accounts began popping up with increasing frequency, dispersing documentation, often fragmented. Being documented, documenting others, and self documenting became a form of entertainment, and for some people a form of obsession and even addiction.
The archives I visited at the University — Simon Fraser University — did not record the uncontrolled experience of the unself-conscious oral reporter, questioned and recorded by an authority. The archives I visited were in the process of being built by living writers. The subject of this account, the poet Lisa Robertson’s archive, like the others I examined, contained press clippings, reviews, and carefully preserved manuscript changes. The school also possesses her journals, which will not be made public until her death.
The first archive I looked at belonged to a poet who had been my neighbour when I was eight. When I looked inside I realized that I was looking for her daughters more than I was looking for her. Finding a page with some colourful watercolour markings gave me a little thrill of delight. I had found Margaret and Isabel. I remembered playing barbies with them, running with them. In this archive the writer had preserved a few annoyed scribbles — the marginalia coveted by the archivist — on a printed rejection letter: “What academic elitist jerks” she wrote. And “phony!”
The second archive I examined was of someone who I sometimes reference in my typography classes. It had an enormous dead spider in it. This caused me to scream, which is not very archivally appropriate behaviour. However, a nearby archivist, hearing my exclamation, did some quick typing and a moment later reported that a large quantity of spiders in the writer’s barn had been mentioned in his fonds.
Lisa Robertson’s archive had no angry notes that I saw, and no dead spiders. Many of the pages had little stains, however, which I interpreted as indicative of a writing process that occurs in kitchens and cafés, perhaps evidence of her sociability. I found a paella recipe from publisher Ken Edwards; a congratulatory post-it from a copy-editor; and a snapshot of Robertson smiling. I also found marked up drafts of some columns and a polite note from Nest editor Matthew Stadler with suggestions and encouragement.
Ken Edwards’ imprint had published the UK edition of Robertson’s book of poetry The Weather. I had designed the cover for this book as a student. It was my first. No cover I’ve designed since has been described so often in a book’s reviews. In Robertson’s archive, I stumbled on one of these asides: “this book is a light and beautiful object,” the reviewer wrote, “with a smooth blue cover and three white bubbles of clouds.” (Levine) The archive’s catalogued items included my initial cover sketches, the proposals I had presented to Lisa and her publisher for what this design would look like. I had no memory of these. What had I presented? After signing out some of Robertson’s boxes, I found my sketches in a manila folder with no comments. The design that was chosen didn’t yet have the white border it would later have, and the blue of the sky was greyer and duller, and there was no gloss finish on the paper. Twenty years after presenting them, I could see errors invisible to me at the time, such as a spine set an inch wide — a ludicrous estimate for a new volume of poetry. When I saw the carefully kiss-cut spine of my mock-up, I was immediately taken back to my student days, trimming these designs at 2 a.m. (and trying to look ‘professional’ a few hours later during the presentation). This printed item, as an object, was infused with information and emotion which aren’t meaningful or accessible to anyone but me. Having designed projects for a number of artists around this time, it occurred to me that I might have small walk-ons like this in other archives. My potential permanent presence in such an archive never occurred to me during those hectic workdays. But even the assumption of privacy in daily life that I had then belongs to a past era.
Another box contained a stack of Nest magazines in pristine condition. Finding this, I turned my attention to Robertson’s “Decorator’s Horoscope” column for Nest (of which I am a fan). ‘Decorator’s Horoscope’ is a playful horoscope dispensing advice for interior design by star sign. There were few archival “clues” inscribed in these copies, On the first “Decorator’s Horoscope” column I noticed a tick marked in pen next to the star sign Cancer, which is Robertson’s sign. In this horoscope, Robertson counsels her stellar cohort to try thick bands of malachite and cherry or pinstripes of persimmon and butter, wryly suggesting they enhance these palettes with codeine. This little tick mark was the only marginalia I saw. And there were no notes tucked into the binding, no rippled pages showing evidence of time spent an inch above bathwater. Unlike Arlette Farge’s documents, these magazines were not only printed — making them premeditated — but they were also professionally bound, edited, published, and designed. So these preserved documents were ultra-premeditated. If Farge’s archive’s authenticity was bound up in how its contents were “not compiled with an eye toward history” (7), then what to make of an archive created by the author of such printed documents, curated and preserved for future eyes? Does it lose its spontaneity and, therefore, its authenticity?
The inclusion of the Nest magazines in Robertson’s archive was more important than I had originally thought. No local libraries hold copies and they aren’t digitized. The magazine, which ran from 1997 to 2004, was part of a wave of luxury art and design publications published at the turn of the millennium. These ran the gamut from avant-garde purple magazine to Williams & Sonoma catalogues. Within this genre, Nest was standard in its sizing and glossy finish, but the format shows signs of pressure from the emerging digital age in its design. When challenged by the ease, speed, and low cost of digital media, some print items began to showcase effects which are only achievable in print — emphasizing the printed item as an object rather than only a purveyor of information — an approach Nest amped up to a cartoonish degree. One issue is drilled through the centre, leaving every page composed around a hole, another is encased in a custom mini plastic slip cover. This format matched its contents, as described in Graphic Design, Referenced, a book highlighting iconic design: which explains “Whether the subject was the interiors of a submarine, an apartment covered in silver foil, or a house built out of beer cans, Nest’s contents shared not just shock value but displays of the unique living shelters individuals create for themselves — an endless parade of individuality that Nest reveled in.” (emphasis mine) (Vit, Armin, et al.)
The last Nest in the box turned out to be the first issue in which Robertson’s “Decorator Horoscope” appeared. It was the thirteenth issue; a summer issue. Nest had commissioned fashion designer Rei Kawakubo to design a mourning dress for the U.S. Capitol building, in preparation for — quote — “whatever calamity may befall us in the future” (Castle). Kawakubo had photoshopped a shroud onto the Capitol building and wrapped each copy with a black mourning ribbon (see fig. 2). Inside were cheeky pictures of various funerals and mourners. Robertson’s first masthead appearance — under the pen name “Swann” — shows her avatar photoshopped, along with other contributors, onto the faces of mourners at Andy Warhol’s funeral (see fig. 3). Opposite this page is an advertisement for a “Landscape & Wallpaper” exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, which, like Nest's offices, was located in New York City. The dates of the exhibit are April 24–October 14, 2001. I hadn’t noticed the date on the spine, and it took a beat for me to understand that this issue was released in the summer of 2001, in July. Aside from its unpremeditated — unprinted — contents, Farge had described the archival document as “a tear in the fabric of time, an unplanned glimpse offered into an unexpected event” (6). But it seems that there are limits to the premeditation of the printed page.
The ribbon Farge untied served a purpose: it held together unbound documents. Kawakubo’s ribbon was designed with no such purpose, since the magazine it wrapped was already bound, and the tragedy being mourned was hypothetical. What shifted was simply that ribbon’s context. The archived artist is permanently vulnerable to shifts in context, whether through a sudden disruption of the archive’s physical location or of its cultural associations. Part of Jacques Derrida’s concept of the archive is attached, etymologically, to the Greek arkhē, which he relates to shelter and to the home. An archive is a shelter so unassailable that it, in Derrida’s terms “also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters” (2). The home of Robertson’s column is dedicated to the home, and the collections which define specific homes. The collections showcased by Nest are explicitly unorthodox; they are unique collections. Part of their appeal is their unapologetic pleasure in irony, kitsch, and transgression. In Nest, immaculately organized Farrah Fawcett memorabilia is repositioned as equal to more easily commodified collections in mainstream décor publications. Writing in 2006, literary scholar Terry Castle described Nest’s unconventionality with some skepticism, writing “Despite the rad profile, Nest was as knee-deep in bathos and bourgeois denial as any other shelter mag” (Castle). “Shelter mag” was Castle’s name for the many interior design magazines she subscribed to when she investigated their “allure” in 2006. Her wording caught my attention. The allure of the shelter mag, according to Castle, was not just in its aesthetic images, but the carefully staged spaces in which the reader could project themself. These spaces give clues as to their inhabitants, but rarely include them. Furthermore, each new inhabitant makes the space their own, largely through the collections of belongings they bring in. As for the previous inhabitants, q “every trace of them must be removed” (Castle). This process of expression and erasure is central to each shelter mag’s narrative.
Castle was feeling a bit sick as she evaluated her “addiction” to these “shelter mags” during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Looking back at September 11 , she wrote that, “Home, after all, is what terrorists set out to destroy: the everyday illusion of comfort and safety, the rolling-along-as-usual feeling that is bourgeois life.” (Castle) Two details of September 11 surfaced in my mind upon reading this. One was the word “cloudless”, which was repeated in news descriptions and retellings describing that morning in New York. The second was the reports of personal documents that rained from the towers: printed emails, to-do lists, a piece of I.D., and other small items that blew into the street or a random back yard. The pathos of these documents was the contradiction between their familiar orderliness and the chaotic destruction quietly indicated by their displacement: As the librarian had said about the disappearing scribe from Lucca they provoked in me that response, “I think I know what happened to you.”
In her essay, Castle touches upon the anxiety of our moment: the limitations of the institution and the limitations of the shelter such institutions provide. Depending upon the person, this anxiety might take the form of distrust of the institution or a fear of its death. Regardless, these institutions were partially formed by ink and have been fortified by print. We know that we are destabilized by digital media, but we can only describe this disruption to the “you” of the future archivist, whose context is a mystery to us. We are left to guess: “what happens to us?” Reading Derrida’s shaky grasp of emerging digital technology, his uneasy grasp of the significance of what he called at the time “electronic mail,” provides little reassurance that even the cleverest among us know where we are headed. If the institution is destabilized — by which I mean disrupted, not ended — then what is the role of the institutional archive now? What I do know is that Lisa Robertson has an Insta; and on Twitter, people have documented themselves reading her; she has written work and written about that work, and has been interviewed in magazines about it. This is a time when writing is frequently called “content.” At the heart of this constellation of activity is still poetry, though, and still books. With all that said, I feel that print is still the dominant language of institutional archives (and publishing) for the moment, but the situation is obviously in flux.
Even that “rolling-along-as-usual feeling” Castle associates with bourgeois life feels like just a fantasy about its own stability. Robertson’s namesake Swann, the protagonist of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, is a character formed by nostalgia who is struggling with the recognition of what has been lost. Sitting surrounded by palm trees, photographs, and “fans and bows of ribbon,” Swann is offered his choice of lemon or cream for his tea. He wants cream, to which his server smilingly replies, “A cloud!” (Proust 242) And near this drawing room in Paris, as organized on my bookshelf, at least, is Stephen Dedalus in Dublin, recalling his recently deceased mother’s preference for cream, which, rather than forming a cloud “wound curdling spirals through her tea” (U. 53; IV. 6). When offered milk or lemon, the Irish Dedalus prefers lemon, in the French style. He wants to escape to Paris, wants to walk its lemon streets among its lemon houses. Swann’s and Delaus’ bursts of emotion and chains of association are translated into printed typographic sheets, where they retain their colour in black-and-white. Through Dedalus, his creator James Joyce might be remembering looking forward to leaving Dublin for Paris himself, but I also interpret this passage to mean that Dedalus simply enjoys a French-articulated fantasy of Frenchness. Here, Joyce is perhaps onto something: we organize our archival activities through French-conceived structures and systems. Farge points out the French terminology of the archive, such as the sources (wellspring) and fonds, which call to Farge’s mind the depths of the ocean (4). An Irish priest surveying the same landscape as Dedalus, seeing white clouds passing in the wind, recalls the French word moutonner , a word which describes the formation of fluffy sheep-like white puffs. Waves moutonnent, and so do clouds. The sky and the sea mirror one another’s actions. The context is different, but the process is consistent. The rhythms and disruptions occurring cannot permanently alter or arrest this process; rather, they form it.
Farge describes the work of an archivist as a reproductive process through which the allure of the archives reveals itself. She accesses single-edition documents that are so delicate that she must copy down their words in pencil, claiming that it is through “this action that meaning is discovered” (17). However, it seems unlikely for this action to remain the default, since we haven’t continued to produce official documentation in the same way. Any such specific action, I argue, is arbitrary to that meaning. However the recording is translated, the process of slogging through tedium in the service of a sublime moment of human connection seems to me to be the universal aspect, one that expands outside of the role of the archivist. “I think I know what happened to you” — that’s what we all want to know, and what we fear knowing more than anything, so it’s no surprise that the archive is emotionally charged. When the archivist and the archived are a single person, as in Robertson’s case, the vulnerability of the archived might lift. Robertson, like other living artists, is curating an official repository of her work, which includes both print and digital recording; and like all kinds of people, she is also archiving herself on social media. This week, she’s been gardening and reading Baudelaire. She’s eating fresh violets. She’s thinking about Ukraine. The context for these ephemeral posts could shift in many directions, in ways only our future self knows: there’s the seed of that idea, there’s what that historical event felt like in your home, or that was the vase you broke that Easter, or that was the morning you realized ____. It’s both public and private.
The standout item in the archives Arlette Farge describes in “Traces by the Thousands” is a little packet of wheat, stored in rust-stained twill, and fastened with a pin. The seeds were submitted to the archive by a country doctor, along with a letter that claimed that they had been issued from the breasts of a “sincere and virtuous” girl (10). Farge opens the seeds and a few spill, which she describes “rain[ing] down on the yellowed document, as golden as they were on their first day, a brief burst of sunshine” (10). The accidental nature of the discovery q “communicate[s] the feeling of reality better than anything else can” (10). This is a subjective report. I think these seeds could only dazzle anyone to such a degree in the context of a sterile, grey archive. Conversely, only language could make this bizarre discovery appear so beautiful; to record its discovery so vividly. The seeds themselves are unimportant, but they remind the reader that, just as in life, the records of lives contain surprises. We are reminded that, alongside our impulse to control and index, we retain a desire for — and an inability to avoid — surprise. Farge’s archive is freezing, she writes by way of introduction, whether summer or winter: A place where currents of time are frozen and where seeds lay dormant until rediscovered.
Works Cited
Castle, Terry. “Home Alone.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 1 Mar. 2006,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/03/home-alone/304581/.
Colford, Paul D. “3 Magazine Start-Ups Boldly Enter the Fray.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times,
27 Nov. 1997, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-nov-27-ls-58312-story.html.
Derrida, Jacques, and Eric Prenowitz. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. The U of Chicago P,
1996.
Farge, Arlette. The Allure of the Archives, Yale University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/lib/sfu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3421277.
Joyce, James, et al. Ulysses. 21st ed., Vintage/Random House, 1986.
Levine, Stacey. “Eccentric Research: The Inventions, Durations, Discoveries, Quotas, Forgeries of
Lisa Robertson.” The Stranger, 25 July 2002, p. 39.
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Penguin , 1983.
Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University Library. Cynthia Flood fonds,
MsC-106-0-1-5-0-2. Fred Candelaria to Cynthia Flood. 27 November 1980.
Swann. “Decorator's Horoscope.” Nest, Summer 2001, pp. 200–201.
Vit, Armin, et al. Graphic Design, Referenced : A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and
History of Graphic Design, Quarto Publishing Group USA, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/lib/sfu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3399781.
Wieland, Alexandra. Email to Robin Mitchell Cranfield. March 9, 2022.