Archive Fever

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.