In the following interview, Caryn Radick gives us a few thoughts on her reading of fiction, her archival lens used in analyzing novels. She is speaking in response to my questions (ST).
Some of her consideration of this topic comes from experience she gained in writing the 2016 column on “Fiction through an Archival Lens” for Archives Outlook.
Radick is the digital archivist within Special Collections and University Archives at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She holds an MLIS from Rutgers, and an MA in Victorian Literature from the University of Nottingham in the UK. She twice served as a member of the jury for SAA’s Archives Short Fiction Contest, and has also worked as a consulting editor on several SAA monographs. One of the articles she mentions below concerns her “‘Complete and in Order’: Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ and the Archival Profession,” published in American Archivist 76, no. 2 (2013): 502–20.
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ST: Why do you think writers create characters who are archivists?
CR: I think when archivists are main characters, writers see them as being natural observers–it’s their job to sift through the materials of people’s lives in order to make sense and organize, so that lends itself well to acting as a narrator or even a detective. Authors may also like to play into or subvert stereotypes of archivists as quiet or as gatekeepers that you have to make nice with in order to get the information you’re looking for. And I think sometimes an author wants to focus on materials, like rare books or medieval manuscripts, which means their characters will have to interact with archivists, so in those stories, they may be more incidental.
ST: So yes, that lens. In Dracula there was no mention of archives but there was an emphasis on how he became modern through learning recordkeeping. He had to come to England to learn shorthand. In many respects that is what people do in learning technology; they decide to learn it as adults, to take up new processes. Does the word archivalalization ever cross your mind, the understanding that the characters are putting certain activities into a form that will last?
CT: One of my inspirations for looking at Dracula through an archival lens came from reading John Sutherland. He writes essays on mysteries in fiction–plot holes or questions that might arise about a character’s background that aren’t answered in the text. In his book Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? (and appearing in his later, Dracula-themed Who Is Dracula’s Father?) there is an essay “Why does the Count Come to England,” where he points out that Dracula’s journey to England is risky and wonders why not just stay in Transylvania? Sutherland contends that Dracula wants to go to England so he can be a part of modern society, where he can learn about innovations in technology he doesn’t have access to living so far out of the way. And when I read Dracula, I was impressed by that modernity and surprised to come across discussions of shorthand, typewriters, and phonographs. So, although the idea of “archivalization” as such didn’t come to my mind, as I remembered Dracula when I was in library school, I started thinking about how the book appears as a series of records and how the characters are constantly creating records and realize that they can start stitching them together to better understand what is happening. Then they also realize that despite being supernatural, Dracula leaves a paper trail that they can follow to track him.
ST: Is Dracula your favorite so far that you’ve reviewed from this archival lens?
CR: Definitely. I initially wrote about Dracula for an assignment in library school. The professor had said we could write on any records related topic we wanted, but the paper could be two pages at the most. I had already been turning over archives and records in other Victorian works I’d read–in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend there’s a preoccupation with looking through garbage heaps for a will. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White features a search for a marriage record and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has someone turn up with a record that changes the course of the novel. But between the page limit and finding Dracula so surprisingly rich in archival material, that was my starting point. And as I worked to expand that short paper into a presentation and an article, I found the more I looked at Dracula the more I saw. So, I have a soft spot for it. Also, it’s a story that is very familiar to people although they often know it from movie versions that don’t get into the record-keeping aspects of the books, so I enjoyed being able to show those archival aspects.
ST: You mentioned, in one of your writings on fiction in archives, how most books on archives return to the theme of dust. Do you also see one fictional work being quoted by archivists more often than others?
CR: Right. Often when books depict archives and archivists, they can’t resist using the word “dusty.” Arlene Schmuland discussed this in “The Archival Image in Fiction: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography ” and it’ve seen it in fiction and nonfiction since then. I know as a group, archivists have been over the dusty depiction for a long time, but it persists, at least when it comes to talking about old books and documents. For archivist quotes, I once got curious about what literary references I could find going through the American Archivist and found, albeit anecdotally, that Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass got quoted more frequently. There’s something about absurdity that seems to appeal to archivists–a bit of through the looking glass entering our world. I imagine there’s something in pulling from these well-known books from childhood.
ST: Is there a moment in a book where there is within you a jolt of recognition that even though the word archives or archivists are not mentioned that it is there, presented in such a way that you feel enlivened?
CR: I actually enjoy it when a book talks about archives or records without mentioning archives–referring to “old family documents” for example. In Stephen King’s The Shining, we see that Jack Torrance finds a scrapbook in the [dusty, messy] basement of the Overlook that serves as a catalyst for the events that follow. I think being able to apply archival knowledge in these moments appeals to the part of me that wants to feel like I’m picking up on something that not everyone will notice. But I do feel a “call to attention” when a book specifically refers to archives or archivists and am curious about what kind of portrayal we’ll get.
ST: Anything else you would like to add?
CR: Although I haven’t been writing on archives and fiction recently, I’m always pulled back instantly to the archival lens when I see characters referring to old documents. I still find myself wanting to make notes of books and passages where I find the archival lens showing up, especially when I wasn’t expecting it.
Keeping (and Telling) the Past 