The World as Archive

G. Thomas Tanselle

Common Knowledge, Volume 8, Issue 2, Spring 2002, pp. 402-406 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/7611

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 THE WORLD AS ARCHIVE

G. Thomas Tanselle

When historians speak of “archives,” they usually mean collections of documents

that accumulated as the by-products of the operation of organizations (often gov-
ernments) and business firms. Although gatherings of this kind may contain
drafts of published texts, in general they consist largely of material not intended
for publication. Obviously such collections have been subject, from their origins,
to the same vicissitudes that affect the survival of all other artifacts. The inven-
tory of any given group of documents is the product not only of accidents caused
by human beings and natural forces but also of human decisions. Chance causes
some things to be annihilated by fires, floods, and other catastrophes; and peo-
ple intentionally destroy evidence for many reasons, such as the belief that cer-
tain items are too unimportant to justify the space they occupy, or the desire to
control the conclusions that will be drawn by persons who later examine a par-
ticular archive. And of course archives suffer not only depletion but also inflation,
when documents are created after the fact either in a misguided attempt to be
helpful or in an effort to rewrite history. Randolph Starn’s piece, “Truths in the
Archives,” offers a learned array of examples of archival manipulation over the
centuries, examples that are interesting but not surprising.
Historians recognize that archives must be used with caution and that
attempting to reconstruct the past from archival documents requires incessant
acts of judgment. But historians do not always avail themselves of all the evidence
that archives have to offer. There is an irony in the fact, as noted by Starn, that

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Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press

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the nineteenth-century professionalization of historical study coincided with a
growing tendency to relegate the examination of physical evidence to specialists.
This indefensible split can only be condoned by those who fail to understand the

Peace and Mind—Postscript: On Cultivation

inextricability of verbal texts and their physical settings. Reading any document
with a critical eye involves extracting meaning from the object (the paper, the ink,
the structure of the leaves, the placement of the words, and so on) as well as from
the language. Yet historians tend to think of primary sources as language alone,
rather than as artifacts; thus they imagine, when they use a photocopy of an
archival document instead of traveling to where the original is located, that they
have employed a primary record. In doing so, they are being as naive in their own
way as if they had not recognized the need to approach an archive critically in the
first place. And when as professors they require their students to use archival evi-
dence but allow the students to rely on microfilms, they are failing to make a
coherent case for the role of critical judgment in evaluating archival documents.
Not only that: treating archives merely as collections of words and num-
bers shows no awareness of the fact that every physical characteristic of every

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document is the trace left by a human action or a natural event in the past. The

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artifact has its own story to tell, one that can never be separated from what the
words say or what the text as a whole signifies in social terms. That historians
commonly prize quotations from archival documents more highly than extracts
from printed books is paradoxically a by-product of their frequent obliviousness
to physical evidence: one text may be thought superior to another, but how can
one physical object be superior to another as testimony to its own existence at a
past moment? Nevertheless, there seems no doubt that historians do often regard
archival sources as more desirable than published ones. Starn, for instance, says
that “archives have been primary sites of the labor and legitimacy of professional
historians,” and he speaks of “the issue of truths in the archives” as “the rallying
point of modern historiography.”
Why not “truths in published books” as well? It is one thing — and not
objectionable — to have an intense interest in archival sources because they are
unpublished and may add new details to the mix of generally available evidence.
But it is quite another thing to yield to the temptation of believing that what can
be discovered in archives is more significant than what has been in front of every-
one’s eyes in printed books. To take such a position — to have the slightest ten-
dency toward such a position—is only to say, in different words, that unpublished
sources are truer than published ones, even after one takes into account the tam-
pering to which archives are subject. To take this position leads to ranking a his-
torical study that employs archival evidence higher than one that does not.
How did this odd idea gain as large a following as it has? Is there any rea-
son to believe that unpublished manuscripts contain more accurate information
than published books? The texts of both can be the products of an intent to
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deceive or of faulty observation; neither category is intrinsically more likely to

be correct. When the text of an unpublished manuscript and a printed book
report the same event (or financial transaction, or poem, etc.) but there are dis-
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

crepancies between them, the printed version may well turn out to be the cor-
rect (or more nearly accurate, or otherwise preferable) one. Among the ways such
a situation could happen are the following obvious possibilities: the printed text
was the product of a more careful writer with firsthand knowledge, or it was
based on a more accurate source than the surviving manuscript, or it derived from
a now-lost corrected version of the text in the surviving manuscript. This last
possibility is in fact one of the most common patterns of textual history for writ-
ings of the kind intended for publication: one has a manuscript and a first edi-
tion, but not the intervening documents (such as a revised manuscript, or
printer’s proofs on which the author made corrections and revisions). In such a
case, the printed edition is a primary source for the author’s intention—not infal-
lible, because it may contain printer’s errors or publisher’s alterations not author-
ized by the writer, but nevertheless the only source for some of the author’s
desired wording. And the surviving manuscript — like all other manuscripts,
including those containing texts that were never revised and indeed never
intended for publication — does not necessarily reflect what was intended at the
time of its composition, due to errors arising from ignorance or carelessness.
Authenticity, in other words, does not guarantee accuracy.
Even historians of publishing — in the now flourishing field of “book his-
tory”— are inclined to believe that printers’ and publishers’ archives are better
sources for book-production history than the books themselves. In believing so,
they are rejecting the large arsenal of techniques that analytical bibliographers
have developed for deducing production details from the clues embedded in
books (an arsenal that could be viewed as a detailed working-out for printed
books of the approach to manuscripts championed by Mabillon in the seven-
teenth century). When historians try to defend their attitude by saying that the
interpretation of such evidence is too speculative, they are ignoring two crucial
points: that the statements made in archival texts require just as much interpre-
tation as the nonverbal stories told by all objects about their own histories; and
that for many details of book-production history the primary evidence is the
actual objects that were produced, the books themselves. To be sure, the archival
documents, when they exist, should not be ignored, but they should be recog-
nized as secondary evidence for some aspects of the book-production process.
A primary source is a physical object surviving from the past time that one is
focusing on at a given moment. When it contains a verbal text, one must be sure
to read the words along with, and not in isolation from, the physical evidence
present in the object transmitting the words. If historians in general had more
fully understood the artifactual basis of retrospective study (a point now gain-
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ing attention in the burgeoning field of “material culture” studies), they might
have been more cognizant of the illogic of elevating archives above published
books — for they would have been prepared to see the implications of the fact

Peace and Mind—Postscript: On Cultivation

that manuscripts and printed books are not ontologically different. Both must
equally be examined with critical judgment, and neither can be regarded as inher-
ently more rewarding.
I am glad, therefore, that the phrase “national printed archive” has been
gaining currency as a way of referring to a collection (usually in a national library)
aimed at encompassing all items printed within a particular country. It is also
sometimes used to mean the totality of such items, scattered throughout all the
libraries where they happen to be held. The phrase triply extends the idea of
“archive”— to published material, to the output of more than one organization,
and to the total surviving inventory of such output, however widely it is dis-
persed. A printer’s or publisher’s archive would be thought of by many people
as the firm’s private records, but why should not all the printed or published items
resulting from the firm’s activity be included? Furthermore, there is no sharp

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dividing line between one firm’s archive and another’s: not only published mate-

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rial but also such documents as letters and bills emanated from one source and
were absorbed into the accumulations of other firms and individuals. (It is impor-
tant, by the way, to recognize that individuals, over the course of their lifetimes,
amass archives no different in kind from those preserved by firms, institutions,
and organizations. The difference in the professional handling and cataloguing
of individuals’ “manuscripts” and organizations’ “archives” is an artificial one.)
Any given set of holdings is likely to be incomplete — even aside from the losses
due to carelessness, nature, and intentional destruction —without recourse to
other sets, as when a retained carbon copy of a letter does not contain a postscript
added to the original, which can be found only in the recipient’s archive. And
of course copies of outgoing items are not always retained in any form. As one
thinks about these connections, the idea of “archive” inexorably expands.
This enlarged concept has been productively employed by Paul Needham
in one of his studies of the historical uses of paper evidence (published in the
2000 anthology Puzzles in Paper). Needham speaks of “retained” and “outward”
archives because the stocks of paper that any individual or firm owns at a given
moment find their way not only into the archaeological layers of that individ-
ual’s or firm’s records but also into the possession of other people and organi-
zations. This conceptualization usefully underscores the interconnectedness of
artifacts: the outward archive of any given person or firm links a large number
of retained archives, all of which have their own outward archives, forming end-
less overlapping networks. It is a short step from this realization to the under-
standing that all artifacts form one vast archive, the tangible residue of the activ-
ities of humanity.
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There is no logical reason for treating objects carrying verbal or numeri-

cal texts (published or unpublished) as if they can take us back to a former time
more directly or reliably than other objects. When we are looking at a nonlit-
COMMON KNOWLEDGE

erate culture, we have no choice but to use nonverbal artifacts as our documen-
tary, or archival, evidence. But whenever objects with verbal texts do exist, they
are still objects, and they do not necessarily speak to us more clearly, or with
greater “truth,” than objects lacking such texts. Words, numbers, and punctua-
tion are no less entwined in the objects carrying them than are the designs
applied to nonverbal objects; nor are the textures and shapes of verbal artifacts
any less relevant to the pursuit of history. We must always read all the evidence
that is available, verbal and nonverbal alike, and no matter where it is located,
testing every detail with informed judgment. This statement ought to be a tru-
ism, so obvious as not to need saying; but the widespread behavior of historians
toward archives belies its axiomatic status. (I am speaking of all who study his-
tory, not just members of academic history departments.) Yet when there are so
many ineluctable obstacles to pursuing the truth about the past (such as the selec-
tivity of evidence forced on us by the destructiveness of time), it is a cause for
profound sadness to watch people adding to these impediments an easily avoid-
able one, by placing evidence in an a priori ranking.
We may continue to employ the word archive in its traditional sense: it is
useful, after all, to have a term for retained papers. The problem comes when the
act of naming, and thus of classifying, reinforces the persistent urge to prejudge.
Archives (in the usual meaning) are simply one class of artifact, and their kinship
with the other classes is reflected in the ease with which we can apply the term
metaphorically to them all. Indeed, the inanimate world around us consists of
two great archives: one is made up of artifacts, the surviving products of human
(and other animals’) actions; the other is composed of what are usually called nat-
ural objects, the remaining evidences of geophysical forces. But even these two
archives, like the lesser ones, intermingle: natural disasters affect the stock of arti-
facts, for example, but so does human intervention change the contours and con-
tents of the landscape. To regard the truthfulness of archives as an issue for dis-
cussion is therefore pointless unless we understand that the question being asked
is how we find truth anywhere. Any truths we think we have located are of course
provisional, but they will have a very short life indeed if they are arrived at by
prejudged paths.