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.
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I'm reminded of Dave Simpson's "The Fallen" - his cataloguing of the lives of ex-Fall members. While I can *kinda* see the appeal of reviewing the post-Fall lives of Brix Smith or Craig Scanlon, obsessively tracking down that bloke who filled in on bass during two 1988 gigs in Peterborough, didn't strike me as the most productive use of the author's time...
Are you familiar with Far Out Magazine? They constantly run these mini-articles with headlines like The Beatles song which John Lennon described as
" unfinished ", or The Bob Dylan song which Mick Jagger described as his best. All this rock history minutiae spun out of isolated quotes from decades ago??
It's not so much retromania as retrophilia. These non-articles pop up on my phone with a regularity that is maddening.
The fever has a lot to do with completion compulsion, fending off the historical horror vacui of with new data, however trivial. If God is in the gaps, then so is the Devil.
No never looked at Far Out
Biographical research is a special category of archive fever. Encouraged by famous writers - amongst others - leaving all their papers to institutions for future researchers.
Warhol, prescient in so many ways, fed the fever from the other end. Every day all his ephemera - receipts, wrapping, packaging, pizza boxes, you name it, as well as more significant documentation - would be boxed up and sent to some warehouse. He also got into recording all his phone calls and some poor Factory assistant would transcribe them.
Of course now we are all mini-warhols self-documenting with photos, texts, posts, etc - a vast swollen spoor that mixes voluntary preservation and involuntary
Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier, but Borges was a master of two relevant rhetorical techniques: catachresis and hypallage. Basically, catachresis is the eccentric use of a word, so much so that it may be a misuse (malapropisms and spoonerisms shelter under the umbrella of catachresis). So, the phrase "unanimous night" from Borges' Circular Ruins would be catachresis (it's a common trick used by dadaists and surrealists, and fits with the oneiric theme of the Borges story).
Hypallage can refer to several things, but the type I'm talking about is the use of a modifier to refer to a different item other than the one to which it is linked syntactically. So, someone writing with a "vengeful pen" would be an example of hypallage: it is the writer that is vengeful, not the pen. I tend to think that the phrase "feverish library" is hypallage, since I would argue that the narrator suggests that epidemics have afflicted the occupants of the library (he says that the many librarians have died due to suicide and "diseases of the lung").
By the by, my favourite use of hypallage ever? "The Happy Mondays".
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