"Turning the Knobs on Writers' Closets": Archives and Canadian Literature in the 21st Century

"Nothing is les reliable, nothing is les clear today than the word 'archive.'" for a like reason declared Jacques Derrida in his well-known address to the 1994 international conversation on Memory: The Question of Archives. Fittingly, the conversation took place in Sigmund Freud's last house in London, England, now the international midmost point of Freud studies and the repository-arkheion, the of greece word for domicile, address, and residence-of his archives. Derrida's discourse "The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression," appeared the following year below the title Mal d'archiv?©: Une impression freudienne (1995) Its English language translation, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996) has provided tremendous impetus to renewed, if not feverish, interest in archives, archival research, and archival theory, no les in Canada than from one extremity to the other of the world of scholarship. This collection of essays aims to contribute to the debates and discussions.

Central to Derrida's discussion is the mete archive itself, from the of greece arkh?«-"the commencement and the commandment... there where things originate ... there where men and the omnipotents command" (Derrida 1996, 1). It is the place of inter section between outset and commandment in archives that this collection recommends to explore. Notwithstanding Carolyn Steedman's contention that "nothing starts in the Archive, nothing at any time at all" (2002, 45), archives mark the point where, among other beginnings scholars begin what can evince to be a lengthy, sometimes lifelong, attachment to the unpublished legacy of their research subdue The act of commandment is, at least in its earliest stage, the work of the archons, the archival professionals, the "guardians" beneath whose "house arrest" the archives "speak the law" (Derrida 19962) Our object here is to examine this "uncommon place, where law and singularity intersect in privilege" (3) from the points of view of its sum of two units most visible and most powerful inhabitants, the scholar and the archivist, and in particular, their shared enterprise as it relates to Canadian literature.

There is a distinctly Canadian tradition of scholarly interest in the nature of communication, an area in which the archival record plays an essential part. Its greatest in quantity prominent trajectories have been traced by means of the work of Harold Innis, George Grant, and Marshall McLuhan. Innis, a historian and pioneering communications theorist, saw in Canada the representation of a balance between civilization and power. Grant, in contrast, ground "a lack of morality and vision in this technological dynamo, which also incorporated technocratic bureaucracies," while McLuhan relate toed himself with "the impact of technological media, which include the media of record, upon the user" (Taylor 2003, 174)' Arthur Kroker a more novel contributor to the discourse upon communication technology, has described Canada's unique situation "midway between the subsequent time of the New World and the past of European culture" (1984 7) He dioceses Canada "by virtue of historical circumstance and geographical accident to be forever marginal to the 'present mindedness' of American agriculture (a society which ... does not take pleasure in the recriminations of historical remembrance)" and as "incapable of being more than ambivalent upon the cultural legacy of our European past" (8) We will be considering the archive here in the adjoining matter both of cultural communication and of what Ursula Franklin has called "technology as practice" (1999 2) involving "organization, conducts symbols, new words, equations, and, greatest in quantity of all, a mindset" (3) This turn will also demonstrate that the ready availability of the more material ultimate parts of technology, particularly the Internet, has the couple illuminated and complicated the archival space for scholars and archivists alike.

In a special issue of English Studies in Canada (ESC) "The incident of the Archive," (March 2004) co-editors Michael O'Driscoll and Edward Bishop begin with the necessary question: just what do we mean through the term "archive"? There is no easy answer, they point without in part because the bourn has taken on so many different meanings in contemporary scholarship and criticism. Today the terminus archive is used in relation to a variety of institutions (libraries, museums, record repositories) and forms of inscription (monographs, photographs, film and video, databases, blog e-mail, websites, remembrancers paintings, and architectures), O'Driscoll and Bishop note, adding, "the archive is not just a many-splendoured thing; beyond the literal denotations of the bound the archive carries what have the appearances to be an ever more weighty metaphorical status" (2004 4) The limit has also taken on "figurai representation," notably of history, memory, consciousness, bodies, households, and power (O"Driscoll and Bishop 4) "Both literal and figurative, the couple a set of material practices and an result of discourse, both constituting and constituted by the agency of culture, archives are what Derrida might call 'undecideable' or what de Man would confine 'unreadable'" (O'Oriscoll and Bishop 4)2 Focussing upon the gerund form of the mete "archiving" as both a noun and a verb O'Driscoll and Bishop discuss archives as "a diachronic proces the ongoing and historical interanimations of human make submissives and those cultural objects that are the events of archival practices" (3). Brien Brothman also perceives archiving as proces individual "that provides people with the power to generate and share meaning and to establish, amongst themselves, the identities of all things within the world" (1999 65)