Tag Archives: writing

Week 12: The Archival Function of a Novel

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In last week’s post, I went on a tangent about an essay that was cited by Jean-Christophe Cloutier in Shadow Archives: the Lifecycles of African American Literature. I’m glad to get to write a second post about this text, so that I can actually write about this text.

What struck me this week was Cloutier’s emphasis on the “archival function” of novels (24). Every novel is a collection of direct quotes from, indirect references to, and vague recollections of all the literature that the author has ever read. A novel archives the spirit of the time and place in which it was written. Both the archivist and the novelist must curate only what is essential from the entire available zeitgeist. Although they may serve different functions, both the archive and the novel are valuable research tools.

Cloutier recounts discourse on whether fiction can fill gaps left by the archive, an argument which relies on the premise that novels are less valuable than archives for scholarly research. My personal experience in the academy (and my life in general) has given me the view that there’s no single objective measure of a medium’s value in academic research. Different disciplines, and different niches within them, will all have their own standards for determining the value of different forms of media used in research. The question of whether fiction can be used in research doesn’t feel like much of a question anymore. Of course it can. Fiction doesn’t just fill gaps. It’s a vital part of history.

Fiction and other forms of creative writing like poetry and creative nonfiction offer individuals the chance to distill their personal histories and libraries into portable, sharable mini-archives. This is valuable work. As Cloutier says, “If a human being’s life can contain Whitmanesque multitudes, then a single literary collection can potentially refashion an entire field’s underlying architecture” (23). One powerful book can force institutional change.

One of Cloutier’s central arguments in Shadow Archives is that there are limits to the powers of the archive as a research tool. Archives are run by people who have biases. Even archives which do their best to limit bias will have physical and financial limitations. However, they have more power and access to resources than individuals. The archival function of an archive is to offer a broad view and a more distant reading of a cultural moment. The archival function of a novel is to offer a unique perspective and a close reading of a cultural moment.

The Book’s Influence on Writing

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The first chapter of The Book by Amaranth Borsuk discusses the evolution of today’s codex’s predecessors, the development of writing surfaces, and oral and written language. In the exploration of early forms of books, like tablets, scrolls, jiance, etc., Borsuk inevitably reaches the topic of written language as a natural consequence of the development of the book is the evolution of both written and oral communication. 

I had never considered that writing developed alongside the birth of book forms. For some reason, I just assumed writing simply developed from language and someone trying to visualize that language, as is the case in the creation of Hangul. I also certainly never considered how that could also shape a language. When Borsuk brought up cuneiform, I never considered that it was because of the resources available, being the reed for a stylus, that the Sumerians’ written language, composed of lines and triangles, was a result of it. It was more similar to early pictographic languages like hieroglyphics and Chinese. 

Another example of the format on which language is written influencing the written language is the jiance, which “influenced the very shape of Chinese writing” (Borsuk, 26). Borsuk details the crafting of jiance by cutting bamboo and tying the strips together to make a writable surface out of the abundance of bamboo in China. When visualizing the jiance process, I was confused about how writing on it worked since bamboo, even when sliced open, isn’t that big. Borsuk then revealed that “the traditional Chinese style of writing from top to bottom arises directly from the book’s materiality – a bamboo slip was too thin to permit more than one character per line” (26). Reading this explanation made everything click in my mind on how writing and books are intertwined in their influence on each other. 

This chapter solidified when we talked about the book being a physical thing that influences writing and works alongside it. Though the idea made sense, it was still abstract to me until now. I enjoyed learning about how different old script was compared to today and how written language was crafted to be easier for oration, at least in Greek and Roman culture. Considering how books and language are now, it’s amazing to see how we have changed communication to fit our cultural and societal needs.