The Rainbow (Frerard) [underwater_sky]

August - An Archive (Part One)

            During her graduate degree, Jasmine worked as a research assistant. Her main job was to take all of the correspondences from a recent author and categorize them, go over her old manuscripts and footnote the changes, and also update her bibliographic profile. She was making an archive, she had explained to me, and it felt as if she was creating this person again out of stacks and stacks of paper. There was some art, too, and that was to be listed with numbers and letters and go in as appendixes and glosses. There were so many intricate details about the form the narrative could take as an archive, and though it was representing someone's life, it was cut-up in a lot of places. It was a more academic and fancier way of doing a collage, really. You were making the person again, from scratch, from the things that they had left behind and made themselves. This had been the first time when Jasmine really began to feel like a hunter. Before then, she had been reading about other people doing academic work, acting as a professor's shadow, and arguing with theory through words and footnotes. But an archive was more concrete than words on a page, and as she hunted through the piles that this woman had left before, she began to feel in control of what she was doing.

            "They cut my funding, though, about halfway through. Then they made me go through the ethics board so at that point I didn't even know if I could use the material I was finding. They ended up deeming it too 'sensitive' and it's like - of course it's sensitive. That's why it's here. That was why she left it behind for us to find," she explained to me.

            The author was dying of cancer, and part of Jasmine's job had been to go to her house and dig through her old desk and try to find any unpublished manuscripts. Jasmine had been doing her thesis work on a feminist publishing house and the crux of her research ended up being on two shoddy and water-stained manuscripts that she had found at the bottom of the author's closest. She was supposed to see how a book was produced from the author's legacy alone, as if conjured from thin air, and then sold to the mass market based on a familiar name. From that point, she was also interested in seeing how a narrative was produced through the name behind the words. This was her summer project. Using Barthes and Foucault, she wanted to see if an author was dead before they began writing or if they were kept perpetually alive through the inclusion and manufacturing of certain "secrets" or events into their life through the implementation of an archive. Could the story behind a story thus produce eternal life? Could an author that was dying and no longer writing, suddenly still produce new material? Could material be not the end result, but the mere genesis of something more? These were big questions that came forward once submerged knee-deep in paper and broken typewriters, feeding tubes and home-care nurses, and chemo therapy by proxy, but Jasmine lived for the big questions. She needed this project to keep her sane over the summer months when, as Callie and Dean could testify, the structure of school wore away and the professional student was suddenly at odds with themselves. Dealing with the ethics board over this, although tiring and maddening, was also a huge relief. Jasmine could beg for the catch that she had waited and watched for all afternoon. Hunting, like research and writing, she told me, was very solitary work. She never condoned the process of hunting, but on the very base level, she understood it. This project was her only ethical solution and it made her feel so utterly powerful, even when people were trying to take it away. It meant that it had been hers at one point and that the work she was doing was enlightening and in some way dangerous. Although this entire ordeal was supposed to be a summer pursuit that her publishing house had given her, it ended up taking her well into the next year when she was supposed to be writing her thesis. She almost changed her topic entirely and wanted to focus on the author's life and her archive, but it didn't feel quite right.

            "Outside of the ethics board, the reality of the situation was too overwhelming. The woman was dying, though she had done everything in her power to cover it up. She had the most amazing wigs and the best attitude I had seen. But not many people walk away from cancer once it gets to lymph nodes. I knew that she would have been okay with me doing the archive, since she saw me so often, and her husband and I were exchanging daily email at one point near the end of the summer, but the publishing house didn't care. They wanted legacy in the form of money, which I ended up giving them with those manuscripts. The archive was incidental to them. They acted interested when I had first told them my idea, but as soon as the losses did not equal gains in time and money, they cut back the funding entirely. I managed to keep working under my supervisor's grant, but it was not the same after. I knew this wouldn't be done for me or anyone else. The archive was done to remember her, to organize her for coherency later on. My professor used to always say 'you can't tell a masterpiece when you're standing in the middle of it. You need to back away or spread it out.' And so, since she was dying and we knew she would be finishing no more masterpieces, we needed to spread out what was left."