{"id":628,"date":"2017-04-21T11:39:15","date_gmt":"2017-04-21T11:39:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/?p=628"},"modified":"2017-04-21T11:40:35","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T11:40:35","slug":"archiving-from-below","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/2017\/04\/21\/archiving-from-below\/","title":{"rendered":"Archiving from Below: Parenthood, Mortality and the Historian\u2019s Dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Example<\/a>

\u2018I would like to go to lundn to see oll the peepl. I thinck it will be fantasck.\u2019<\/p><\/div>\n

I hesitate at gurning maw of the industrial paper compacter, suffering an existential crisis.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m at the council tip, clearing out my children\u2019s school exercise books.\u00a0 There\u2019s too many of them and they are cluttering up the house.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m at the other end of the historian\u2019s telescope; I\u2019m making decisions about archiving\u2014or not.\u00a0 And it\u2019s doing my head in.<\/p>\n

So many hours of work, from three small hands (two left, one right), are archived in these A4, paper-bound volumes.\u00a0 The maths is formulaic enough\u2014lists of near-identical sums and times-tables\u2014but there are also poems, stories, fragments of childish insight upon the world.\u00a0 I am throwing away my children\u2019s labours.\u00a0 I am throwing away my children\u2019s thoughts.<\/p>\n

I am throwing away my children.<\/p>\n

No, I correct myself: I am throwing away the fantasy<\/em> that my children can be frozen in time, and the relinquishment of that fantasy is to the good.\u00a0 A fond memory is a dangerous thing; it takes up house-room that is needed for present realities.\u00a0 What kind of parent wants to preserve their child as an innocent five-year-old?\u00a0 What kind of innocence would that be?<\/p>\n

Besides, if I keep the books, when will I look at them?\u00a0 When the children have left home?\u00a0 When I am old?\u00a0 Intolerable thought: it entails that I am facing death.\u00a0 Will I want to look at them if one of the children has died?\u00a0 Not merely intolerable: this thought is unthinkable.\u00a0 If I keep the book, I think superstitiously, I plan for the event.<\/p>\n

Then I catch the snag in this train of thought: I am presuming the books are mine.\u00a0 Ah, but if I ask the children, they will certainly want to keep them.\u00a0 They want to keep everything<\/em>: bus tickets, a sticky animal card from a box of sweets, a bit of hubcap they found on the roadside.\u00a0 So I must decide on behalf of their future selves.\u00a0 If I keep the children\u2019s books, will<\/em> they want them?\u00a0 Do I <\/em>regret the fact that I have no examples of my own school work?\u00a0 Not in the least.<\/p>\n

But suppose one of the children becomes famous, perhaps a novelist?\u00a0 Literature scholars will curse the fact that they have no insight into his earliest writing.<\/p>\n

I reprimand myself for my vicariously hubristic fantasy.\u00a0 Then I think, hell, someone<\/em> has to become a famous writer, and there\u2019s no reason why it might not be one of them.<\/p>\n

Who aspires to be a historical character?\u00a0 Surely only the self-entitled and the deluded.\u00a0 If only the self-entitled retain their records, then they manoeuvre themselves into their own historical afterlife.\u00a0 Perhaps their future history, proleptically enacted in the act of archiving, even makes their life \u2018successful\u2019.\u00a0 The act of archiving shapes the present in deeply conservative ways, re-engraving the same lines of historiography over and over again.\u00a0 The archive is destiny.<\/p>\n

However, it is no hubris at all to assume that the children will be part of some collective historical story whose outlines I cannot yet discern.\u00a0 Who am I to say what sources will speak to that story?\u00a0 Perhaps I owe it to historians to keep my children\u2019s material precisely because I believe they are ordinary, to dilute the archiving of the expected.<\/p>\n

So far as the individual concerned goes, being destined for success\u2014for a particular kind of success, as a writer, say\u2014might be regarded as a blessing or a curse.\u00a0 By throwing away I keep my children\u2019s choices open even as I hide them from the historical lens of success. \u00a0I gain my children mental health, but I remain conservatively passive with regard to the shape of future history.<\/p>\n

I console myself further with the professional thought that juvenilia reveals little: that psychologising of the infant subject is an unproductive research method.<\/p>\n

And yet\u2026<\/p>\n

My current research concerns a set of historical \u2018nobodies\u2019, a group of young science fiction fans in inter-war Britain.\u00a0 Their very non-importance to history is what makes them interesting to me\u2014they offer a precious clue into what (some) ordinary people thought about science: how they interacted with it.\u00a0 They have not left much by way of historical traces; even their census records from the period have been lost by fire.\u00a0 Their youthful enthusiasm is ephemeral, caught in a moment of hope before the Second World War, and all the more historically precious for it.\u00a0 I would be cock-a-hoop if I stumbled upon their school-books.<\/p>\n

And now I am making life difficult for future historians in exactly the same way.<\/p>\n

I am a thrower-away of my own potential archives.\u00a0 I can\u2019t bear the thought of people reading my letters, my drafts, my notes.\u00a0 I can safely assume that I won\u2019t be famous enough to cause a biographer to curse; but I am a part of stories that might be of future interest\u2014gender stories, stories about higher education, stories about science and society.\u00a0 Do I have the right to deny future historians their sources?\u00a0 Do I have a right to disinter the sources of others?<\/p>\n

I can’t help but notice that many of my historian colleagues talk about \u2018The Archive\u2019. \u00a0Is it mere chance that this strange singularity institutionalises the life of sources, removing them from their originators\u2019 choices about saving or discarding?<\/p>\n

Should a historian think more about her afterlife as a historical subject, and if so, how would this change her historiographical practice?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t have time to think about all this too much, at least, not whilst I was facing the compactor.\u00a0 I had to hurry away; my eldest son was in the car, a doctor\u2019s appointment due in ten minutes\u2019 time.\u00a0 He had a bacterial infection\u2014no big deal: the antibiotics he was prescribed are currently clearing it up nicely.\u00a0 A hundred years ago, he might have died from it.\u00a0 I know that from history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hesitate at gurning maw of the industrial paper compacter, suffering an existential crisis. I\u2019m at the council tip, clearing out my children\u2019s school exercise books.\u00a0 There\u2019s too many of them and they are cluttering up the house. I\u2019m at the other end of the historian\u2019s telescope; I\u2019m making decisions about archiving\u2014or not.\u00a0 And it\u2019s … <\/p>\n

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