by Gautam Pemmaraju
He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.
In the 1930s there was a photographic lab assistant in Manchester whose body had absorbed so much silver in the course of a lengthy professional life that he had become a kind of photographic plate, which was apparent in the fact (as Ferber solemnly informed me) that the man’s face and hands turned blue in strong light, or, as one might say, developed.
Book components however, Steedman continues, were not seen as the cause of such hazards during these early investigations. Lacking bacteriological insights, these early studies attributed the ‘diseases of literary men’ to the lack of exercise, poor air, ‘passions’, ‘excitement of ambition’, while failing to recognise that glues, leather bindings, paper and parchment, and thereby the book itself, could well be the cause for certain scholarly afflictions. Thackrah mentions ‘the putrid serum of sheep’s blood’, harbouring the bacteria that produces anthrax spores, which, Steedman reveals further, was used in bookbinding, and in describing it so, he “produced the most striking and potent image of the book as the locus of a whole range of industrial diseases”.
It was well over fifty years later in 1892, that Anthrax became a notifiable disease in Britain. The bacillus, however, Steedman continues, was first discovered in 1850 by Pierre Rayner and Casimir Davain, and its life cycle studied by Robert Koch in 1876. As its malevolence came to be commonly understood, archivists, book traders, and historians alike, Steedman writes on, began also to describe ‘red rot’ – a kind of powdery crumbling found in vegetable cured leathers and particularly in East India leather. (See this entry on ‘diseased books’).
These dangers may have been overstated, Gerald S Greenberg writes in Books As Disease Carriers 1880 – 1920, for the ‘evidence is slight’ that books were ever major carriers of epidemics, and:
In 1895 the Library Journal reported the death of one Miss Jessie Allan of tuberculosis widely believed to have been contracted from a contaminated book. Stating only that Miss Allan was associated with a “delicate organization” that did “much good work in a good cause,” LJ sought to assure the library community (many of whom knew Miss Allan) that the real danger in such sad news lies in overestimating actual health risks posed by circulating books.
Writing on the French historian Jules Michelet’s visit to the Archives Nationales in Paris, Steedman invokes his oft quoted words describing the historian’s ‘act of inhalation’ that ‘gives life’ and ‘restores’ the ‘long deserted’ papers and parchments whereupon, “’…as I breathed their dust, I saw them rise up’”. Who or what rises up is ambiguous, Steedman argues, and rightly so, since it must remain indeterminate whether it was the manuscripts or the dead, or both, who were resurrected through the historian’s inhalation but,
…we can be clearer than Michelet could be, about exactly what it was that he breathed in: the dust of the workers who made the papers and parchments; the dust of the animals who provided the skins for their leather bindings. He inhaled the by-product of all the filthy trades that have, by circuitous routes deposited their end-products in the archives. And we are forced to consider whether it was not life that he breathed into the ‘souls who had suffered so long ago and who were smothered now in the past’, but death, that he took into himself, with each lungful of dust.
In Hindu cosmology, from the Bhagavata Purana to the writings of the Theosophists, there are several thoughts linked to origins from dust – multiverses emerging and passing through the corporeal body much like fine dust through pores and cosmically wandering about like dust particles in the sky, not to mention the eschatological incineration of the world(s). Brahma’s inhaling/exhaling and cosmic expansion/contraction, giving birth to multiple realms and dimensions, are popular conceptions as well. The common thread here is that the material world is constituted of and ultimately reduced to dust, only to be then regenerated. Similarly, as worldly human endeavour creates and preserves archives, arbitrating power, access, and ‘social memory’, fragmenting anonymity and oblivion, it immutably archives dust. (Wolfgang Stöcker of Cologne has an organized collection of dust; here’s a review of G Thomas Tanselle’s book on the history of dust jackets; and a photo gallery of ‘biblical’ dust storms).
The ‘incomplete’ archive, at once revealing and excluding, Brian Teanor (see here) argues as he invokes Derrida’s ‘spectral’ structure of the archive, its apparent unity, only understood in a binary juxtaposition to that which is absent from it, is much like Shiva (more precisely, the Trinity or Trimurti), “a site of both preservation and destruction”. But this dyad itself, he further argues, is somewhat illusory, “because, in terms of the archive, preservation is never perfect and destruction is rarely complete”.
The fevered search for the revelatory archival record, consigned to a dark, gloomy and dusty corner, is an enduring popular image. An ‘origin’ is thereby revealed; a mysterious, till then mythic document, hidden amidst languishing records, that the ‘historian’ or the ‘hero’ miraculously extricates, ‘dusting’ it off, thumbing it with growing excitement to eventually stumble upon the secret illuminated by an otherworldly, spectral shaft of light. Much like the secret, the dust which rises up is also revealed by this irradiated shaft of light, allowing then a ‘form of writing’ Steedman argues, which is, “made by the documents themselves; what they forbid you to write, the permissions they offer”.
As Karen Buckley interestingly points out (see “The Truth is in the Red Files”: An Overview of Archives in Popular Culture, Archivaria, 2008), the names used to synonymously indicate archives or repositories of some form in popular culture, are often ‘menacing’: the classified ‘Four-Zero Archives’ in Bourne Legacy, the ‘Ministry of Objectionable Materials’ in V for Vendetta, the ‘Information Retrieval’ and ‘Information Adjustment’ departments in Brazil, and the ‘Ministry of Truth’, in Nineteen Eighty Four. Pointing further to how archivists are often represented as ‘less than human’, automatons or fossils, or even robots, as is the guardian of the Worlfram & Hart Records Room in the TV series Angel who replies to a query on her characteristically encyclopedic knowledge with, “I’m Files & Records. That’s my job”, Buckley writes,
The three simple words “It’s my job”, constitute a telling statement: popular culture is very aware of the weight of authority that archivists bring to their role as society’s recordkeepers. Despite the usual stereotype of obstructionist fossils with no life beyond their narrow profession, popular culture has evidently also wholeheartedly embraced “the professional myth of the past century that the archivist is the…keeper of the truth” (citing Cook & Shwartz, Archival Science, 2002).
(See here & here for further thoughts on ‘fictional’ archivists).
Students are often warned of ‘the cult of archive’, Steedman writes in the preface to Dust, prevalent amongst “certain historians and those sad creatures who fetishise them”. Warned off the ‘seductions of the archive’ and ‘entrancing stories’, they are instead instructed on the foundational value of documented evidence.
Steedman writes that Roland Barthes considered Michelet’s inhalation of dust at the archives as ‘ingestion’ and, “Michelet actually ate history, and that it was eating it that made him ill”. “This ingested History was also Death”, she writes on, and quoting Barthes here adds, “’Michelet receives History as food and nourishment, but in return, he gives up his life to it: not only his labour and his health, but even his death”.
Last year, wrapping up my work, I gathered up the documents and books (dusty ones at that) to return them to the librarian in the state archives. Finding her missing, I stepped out into the corridor but could spot no one. I waited for a while, hoping she may return soon, from a short break perhaps. I then left all the material on her desk with a note, walked down the long empty corridor leading to the exit. I began to hear a highly modulated, theatrical voice from a room ahead of me. I stopped to investigate. The staff of the archives, including the errant librarian, had all gathered there to watch a magician’s show. I too watched awhile, as the magician performed the “Water of India” trick, ‘restoring’ in some surreal sense perhaps, a languishing memory, and ‘what was lacking’ in my gaze.