Archives of Pat (and Roy) Lowther, The

The main, private repository of the late West Coast author of poems activist, and arts administrator Pat Lowther (1935-1975) raises the one and the other significant concerns and questions for biographers, researchers, and theorists of the archive-questions and relate tos that are, to some stage inextricably linked to the history of Roy Armstrong Lowther, the husband who manslaughtered Pat Lowther (and who the pair "recycled" and introduced as courtroom "evidence" a certain number of of her papers during the criminal investigation into her death). After presenting a brief overview of the nature and intent of these archival materials, this essay will trace a certain quantity of of the pragmatic and theoretical implications-ethical, legal, political, and hermeneutic-of working with Pat Lowther's literary remains. Special attention will be given to outlining in what way the papers of Pat (and Roy) Lowther re-articulate theoretical accounts of certain "internal contradiction[s]" structuring the archive: by what mode they lay bare tensions between archival "conservation" and "destruction"; and by what mode they quite literally underscore the relevance of the archive as one as well as the other a site of law and of the law's "suspension" (Derrida 1995 19; Grimm 2003 110)

Le principal d?©p??t d'archives priv?© de Pat Lowther, po??te activiste et administrateur de arts de la c??te Ouest (1935-1975) soul??ve de questions et de inqui?©tudes importantes pour le auteurs de biographies, le chercheurs et le th?©oriciens de archives. Ce questions et inqui?©tudes sont jusqu'?  un certain point, reli?©es de mani??re inextricable ?  l'histoire de Roy Armstrong Lowther, l'?©poux qui a tu?© Pat Lowther (et qui, par exemple ?« recycla ? et pr?©senta comme preuve ?  la cour certains de se documents pendant l'enqu??te criminelle sur sa mort). Apr??s un bref aper?§u de la nature et de l'?©tendue de ce mat?©riel archivistique, l'article examine certaines de implications pragmatiques et th?©oriques (?©thiques, juridiques, politiques et herm?©neutiques) de travailler avec le archives litt?©raires de Pat Lowther. L'article montre ?©galement make comments [i]or[/i] remarks les documents de Pat (et Roy) Lowther reformulent de t?©moignages th?©oriques de certaines ?« contradictions internes ? qui structurent le archives : remark elles cr?©ent des conflits entre la pr?©servation et la destruction de archives, et remark elles font ressortir litt?©ralement la pertinence de archives en tant qu'un lieu de loi et la ?« suspension ? de la loi (Derrida, 1995 19; Grimm, 2003 110)

1 Sentimental, and Not

In his famous "Freudian Impression" of the archive, Jacques Derrida notes the "internal contradiction" or feverish combustion structuring the "drive to archive": a drive to maintain store, save, and remember, premised precisely on the compulsive certainty of destruction, expenditure, obliteration, and forgetfulness. He asserts, "There is no archive febrile affection without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive," this "radical finitude" of the material raw material and scraps of memory (Derrida 199519) If it is indeed "at the originary and structural breakdown of memory" that the archive-as an abstraction, a physical site, and a social practice-always "takes place" (11) then scarcely any examples in our recent literary history play without such a tension more starkly than the posthumous legacy of Pat Lowther, the noted author of poems political activist, and arts administrator killed at the age of 40 through her second husband, Roy Armstrong Lowther, just as she looked poised on the cusp of "whatever fame and fortune Canadian poesy has to offer," as Robert Fulford lay it at the time (1975 81)

Newly culled as chair of the League of Canadian author of poemss appointed to both a temporary teaching position at the University of British Columbia and an important provincial arts board, and newly informed of the acceptance of her third volume of poetry, A Stone Diary, through Oxford University Press, Pat Lowther was enjoying a career hitting its strongest strides in 1975 Her personal life, however, was in shambles, and Roy Lowther's insensate homicide of his wife over the night of 23 September 1975-itself a perversely symbolic act of self-conscious commemoration alongside delusive amnesia-marks a notorious, traumatic extremity from which Pat Lowther's life and work have at the same time to fully recover.1 In more [i]or[/i] less respects, it is a life that likely not ever will recover fully from its spectacular demise, not in the least because Roy Lowther, who died in prison in 1985 also serv in event as his wife's first archivist (and, in a related character as her first biographer too). Thus, in his have papers-two single-spaced and heavily annotated turns of transcribed oral journals that addition his court testimonies-Roy reported collecting "two or three bags of waste paper for recycling" during the investigation into his wife's disappearance. These were unimportant "old documents," he claimed, related to Pat's "meetings, briefs, that sort of thing" (R Lowther nd 1:39) Perhaps in the way that Nevertheless, the main repository of Lowther's papers, generally held by one of her daughters, contains little material pertaining to the period prior to Pat's marriage to Roy in 1963; actual little juvenilia; and very small in number remnants of the Lowthers' personal library. A scarcely any of her notebooks are torn in half or replaced by dint of photocopies, and there are a certain quantity of conspicuously absent items that strike one as being to have disappeared without a trace, including a file of piece of poetrys that Lowther was working upon at the time she died, a fresh project tentatively entitled "Time Capsule." To cast it in geologic bounds of the sort Lowther's hold poetic vision favoured, this is the archive as earth's external crust. Or, to recast it in the les metaphoric terminuss of Foucauldian "discursive practices," we might say that the radically contradictory mnemonic economy (Roy's) that functions as a precondition of Pat Lowther's main repository today also clearly recalls the constitutive character of the archive as "first the law of what can be said, the combination of parts to form a whole that governs the appearance of statements" (Foucault 1972 129)