Looking up an old tutor of mine who had impressed me, to see if his spoor of publications was distinguished in the field, I came across a lengthy tribute to a different professor - one I had not been engaged by nor vice versa of that I am sure. And popping out of this obituary, there was the surprise of an early appearance, decades before Derrida’s book, of the phrase “archive fever”:
“This archive fever lasts for life, I can see. There’s quite a company of the afflicted out here” - that’s Philip Jones, in 1957, talking about the joy of deep immersion in research, while in Italy poring over Medieval documents.
Does this mean the expression has a long if obscure history in English? (It is after all only the translator’s rendering of Jacquey’s mal d’archive which literally means either / both “illness of the archive” and “in need of the archive” - craving the archive, crazed from too long in the archive.
Ironic too that one of his students that he most likely would have seen as least likely to become a historian, did in fact become a historian, of sorts - poring over not manorial inheritance documents of the Middle Ages but old music papers. A victim of archive fever in his own right, or write..
But wait... the mystery deepens... by chance, reading, finally Borges's short story "The Library of Babel", I stumble on the phrase "feverish library"
But it is rendered as a quotation.... now is it in fact a quotation, a real one, or just a fictitious one that Borges pretend-cites?
The passage is much quoted on the internet but always attributed to Borges not to its "source" (if one even exists)
The Borges story dates to the early 1940s.
Back to Jones, my old tutor (RIP).
No, he was not one of my favorites, A rather dry, slightly tetchy fellow... who evidently found it a chore to have to sit through our execrable essays - in my case, always written at the last minute, in an all-nighter, so that during the tutorial I would be struggling to stay awake... my efforts did have the benefit of being short, brisk, and relatively stylishly written, unlike the offerings twice as long droned out by my fellow students... but Jonesy seemed to give more credence and respect to the dronework, since it evidenced a dogged diligence. Clearly he dearly wished to be back in his beloved archives, poring over primary sources, inhaling their sickly must, like the characters Friedrich N warned about in The Uses and Abuses Of History.
So it was with an unseemly amusement that I noticed that nearing the end of his eulogy, the scholarly colleague of Jones admitted, more or less, that Jones's grand opus on the Italian city-state was a dense, barely-readable affair, the work of someone who had succumbed to archive fever but not known how to conquer it or prevent it from rendering the resulting history unnavigable
But I take this not so much as spur to schadenfreude as a warning - a kind of memento mori even - that any kind of writing will sooner rather than later grow useless to later generations, outmoded, exposed, and just simply gathering dusty irrelevance with each passing decade.
Writing, then - like research - is only worth doing for the fever itself.
The library at the academic institute where I work part-time recently had a massive chuck-out. Scanning the tomes strewn across the tables, I was struck by the high proportion of reference books - encyclopedias, dictionaries, guides, thesauruses, -ographies of various types. Quite a few seemed to be just lists bound between hard covers - an inventory of modernist sculptures made in the UK between 1945 and 1972 along with their current institutional location; a list of works by female visual artists; a cataloguing of examples of land art.
Reference books used to be one of the most reliable generators of revenue within publishing. The sheer number of libraries around the world provided a guaranteed base level of sales, and there were other institutions that might have a specialist interest in particular reference works. Back then, you could also probably count on some individuals buying them as well - people with professional or obsessional reasons. Then with general knowledge encyclopedias, there was the association of owning a set with self-advancement and edification.
But it was the profusion of specialized reference works that grabbed my eye as I browsed the bargain-price tables in the library. It seemed to me that it must have been such a thriving market that publishers of these kinds of books were incentivized to come up with new subjects and concepts for reference works, to the point of inventing needs and desires that didn't necessarily exist until the idea was put out there. How else to explain some of the titles that I saw - like the Dictionary of Literary Characters. Or like these -
There were various other kinds of reference works that weren't exactly encyclopedias or dictionaries. I was fascinated by these bound volumes of New York Times theater reviews from just one single year in the early 1970s - attracted by the illustrations printed directly onto the burlap-like cloth covers, instead of onto a dust jacket, but also intrigued by the idea that these compendia even existed.
But thinking about it, for a drama school or a university theatre department, having these in book form would be much more preferable in terms of ease of use than having to scroll through back issues of the New York Times on micro-film. Each edition of the Times is vast and on micro-film there would be legibility issues. Ergonomically, and in terms of eye strain, micro-film readers are a nightmare.
The stuff in this stacks-clearing sale was going dirt cheap and I was sorely tempted to rescue some of the orphaned tomes - but I was put off by the sheer weight of them (going to this place of work involves a lengthy commute by public transport) and also the knowledge that - after an initial flick-through - I would almost certainly pile them up in some corner and never look at them again, The house is already horribly cluttered - I must have around 400 unread books.
Still, there was something melancholy about these bereft books - I thought of all the effort, diligence, care that must have gone into their laborious construction. The sense of responsibility, based in the belief that what was being undertaken was of real value. And I'm sure they were valuable to users. Remember just how hard it was to find things out before the internet.
Of course, pathos suffuses the objects in any second-hand store - books, records, magazines, whatever. You think of the creative excitement behind each object - the labour not just of the authors but of everyone involved in making a project reach fruition and get out into the world: editors, designers, marketing etc. The anticipation of impact. DJ Shadow's comment comes to mind - about the record store basement as "a big pile of broken dreams".
But with music, there is still the possibility of a life in the culture - radio play or streams or YouTube views... crate-diggers unearthing things and sampling, bringing it back into circulation if often anonymously. The analogue husk of the music is not necessarily the end of the story. Fiction and non-fiction can get reissued or rediscovered by new readers. But reference books - here, it's the very function that has been voided. The internet has usurped the role of the bound ink-and-paper repository of information.
Before the internet took over, back in the 1990s, one of my main ways of procrastinating - putting off the work that needed to be done - was to pull a reference book off the shelves and flick through it. usually something to do with music. Often it was the Rolling Stone Albums Guide, which had somehow come into my possession - it's not something I would have bought. I'd skim through it and my eye would come to rest on an entry for the Allman Bros, or Bloodrock. Or I'd reread and be freshly bemused by the loathing directed at Sparks, or snort once again at the measly 3 out of 5 stars afforded My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything.
Thinking back to much earlier in my life, certain reference works were revelatory. Take The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - a thick, full-color book teeming with illustrations and reproduced covers of paperbacks and s.f. magazines, but also crammed with well-written, informative essays on various sub-genres and scenario typologies, and mini-thinkpieces by some of the great writers in the field (there's a terrific one by J.G. Ballard on the cataclysm novel).
The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was a present I asked for for my 14th birthday, or maybe it was Christmas 1977 - I'm not sure. Another present request was a pictorial dictionary - the one below. See, I fancied being able to recognise and name things like, say, all the different parts of a shoe, and to know all the different kinds of shoe as well... basically have at my command the names of appliances and tools and vehicles and garments and plants and creatures and ... every kind of object and substance in the world.
However although I never got rid of it - and recently was reunited with the book after years of it languishing in storage - I have never once found myself using The Oxford-Duden Pictorial English Dictionary. So I still couldn't identify the different bits of a shoe or name many types of footwear. I guess there's still time...
Among my late father's effects were a number of reference books, including Who's Who and Debrett's Peerage. But they were all too yellowed and crumbly to welcome into a home. I particularly regretted that his copy of Brewer's Phrase and Fable was not in salvageable shape. But of course, if I ever did need to know the origins of an idiom like Hobson's Choice, or "sent to Coventry", there's always the internet.
Still, perhaps there remains some demand out there for these kinds of work in solid form, use that is still made of them.
Indeed recently I was hired to do some consultation on a music encyclopedia (it just occurred to me I have no idea if it is ever going to exist in paper-and-ink form or is just going to be available online, through subscription). I also contributed a few entries.
Back in the 1990s, I did some things for Encyclopedia Britannica. The entries can be found online, credited to Simon C.W. Reynolds - but they have been updated by unknown hands, so after a certain chronological point in each entry, the style - and the opinions - are no longer mine. (Of course, they were probably not meant to have discernible personal style or a non-objective perspective in the first place). I don't know if any of these entries ever made it into the book form of the Britannica. Obviously I quite fancied the idea of being in this gigantic set that door-to-door salesmen used to flog to families who saw knowledge as aspirational, a form of status.
Then there's the Spin Alternative Record Guide, where being opinionated was valued, although there was also an emphasis on encyclopedic comprehensiveness (every last release by an artist had to be at least listed at the top of the entry and graded - but ideally mentioned in the entry itself, even if only passingly). There was also an element of faux-objectivity maintained for the grades awarded each recording (we as contributors were instructed to be restrained with our 10 out of 10s... but the editor was noticeably generous with his own favorites).
People of a certain age have testified what a lifeline the Spin Alternative Record Guide was in those days just before the Internet took off - especially if you lived somewhere remote. For there were no easily accessible sources of information or guidance when it came to left-field music. But beyond that the Guide was something to read for the pleasure of reading. The contributors were the best in the American business at that time - and they were expected to be stylish and individual rather than restrained and quasi-objective.
And there are other reference works that count as literature, guide books where the compiler's personality suffuses every sentence. Most famously: David Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of Film. A flickable feast of perceptions and descriptions to savor, sat right alongside gluey globs of facts (every last film a director made, an actor starred in).
I also love Have You Seen...? - DT's twist on the 1000 You Must See/ Hear / Read Before You Die format. I'm always blown away by the way DT deftly threads together background stuff about the making of pictures (money, the process of a script coming into being, disagreements over casting, conflict on the set) with aesthetic responses, zooms into details of scenes or performances, where a movie sits in the arc of a director's work, meta-thoughts about the nature of cinema. Here, reference and reverence, usefulness and ecstasy, coexist.
As long as I live I won't forget this line from his Blow Up entry.
"As long as I live I won't forget the breeze in the trees in that park"
Winging its way through the post, a little Christmas present to self.
postscript
Just remembered I recently got sent this attractive-looking and impressively detailed listening guide to genres of British popular music in the second half of the 20th Century -
Home-grown Sounds, Far-out Visions, conceived and written by Richard Costa with design by Leo Cooper. If you are stumped for a stocking filler (in the case of this large format book, stocking distender) for a music nerd, this is an ideal candidate.
Two weeks ago I was in Taipei for a terrifically stimulating conference titledA Future Slowly Cancelled, mounted by the Taiwanese arts organisation C-LAB. Most of the papers touched upon Mark Fisher's work and notions like lost futures, hauntology, acid communism, etc (including my own keynote speech).
The night before the conference proper kicked off, there was a showing of a 1983 film that amazingly (I ought to have my Hauntological Association membership revoked!) I had never heard of: Ken McMullen's Ghost Dance. And knock me down with a feather, who should pop up on screen, in a sort of acting role (playing himself), but ol' Jacques Derrida. It's 1983 but he's already talking the kind of ghost talk that would lead to Spectres of Marx, published a full decade later.
Quick as a flash, I start taking phone pix of Derrida talking about ghosts - the bright idea occurs to me that I can drop a few of these into the Google slide-show of my lecture just at the points where concepts like mal d'archive and hauntology feature. So it'll be the re-apparition of Derrida on the very same screen he'd appeared on the night before, mediated by the sort of tele-mediamatic technology of the digital era that JD alludes to in Archive Fever (albeit glancingly so). Levels of image degradation multiplied: faded made-for-TV video, shakily snapped on a mobile phone from a hasty distance, uploaded to Google, then reprojected in the lecture hall via my Chromebook. A ghost of a ghost of a ghost (of an actual ghost - a man no longer living). As academic wisecracks go, this ought to bring the house down. (Well, in the event, not quite... )
Here's another scene with Derrida and the "heroine" in it (she's his student, but she... )
Jacques looks very debonair and dashing with his plume of fair hair.
Now what is even more bizarre is that - although they don't share the screen at any moment - another major role in Ghost Dance is played by the young Robbie Coltrane. Who could have dreamed it - Monsieur Archive Fever and the future-Hagrid, in the same Channel 4-funded art movie.
There's an odd sequence at the end where there's a kind of ghosting of images - the faces of Derrida and other characters appear on a seaside ridge of rock (ever so slightly redolent of the ending - or one of the endings, there are different versions, I'm talking about the TV version - of Videodrome).
Pascale Ogier - tragically soon to be a ghost (she died in 1984 aged only 26, of a heart attack)
Here's the whole film for the watching - a poignant flashback to the days when Channel 4 did adventurous and experimental programming. Lost futures, eh?
There's some wanky overwrought bits, but many striking sequences and it's well worth a view, I'd say. Part of the slim corpus of hauntological cinema.
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