Here’s another interesting look at how we view history, seems very much the topic du jour (see What We Can Know), this time by local author Flora Feltham, contained in a set of wandering essays that I enjoyed tremendously. Just the title, Bad Archive, tells you that this is going to be an opinionated work with something awry – slanting truths perhaps, ironic labels on ordinary things. Just the way I like my archives.
On Archiving is the opening story. Ella Mary Watson, born in the late 1800s, is the person being archived, by means of her diary, shipping schedules, birth records etc and the narrator (I’m assuming Flora) is collecting the remaining bits and pieces of Ella for prosterity. She calls this stuff the ‘raw data of history‘ and, as an archivist, hers is an unimaginative role. “We aren’t meant to imagine the deck of a ship or admit we bear witness to others’ secrets and that we tread silently in the footsteps of strangers.” We learn a lot about the dispassionate process of archiving and the Alexander Turnbull Library. As we’re being told Ella’s dramatic story of love and exile and longing we’re also told not to engage, but to order, catalogue sensibly and preserve. Yeah, right.
There are intimate stories in this collection. Her mother “spoken gently, crouched down at child height, as she buttoned up my padded jacket against the wind: “Could you call me Vicky, please?” had to leave David Washburn’s 21st because she threw all the empty champagne glasses into the fire. What a great way to describe your mum.
Husband Pat is a constant in the collection. We learn about him through the stories but when he is first introduced I get that loved-up feeling; it’s like watching a meet-cute in a movie and you just know this love is long-term. For a while he’s working away. “Every time Pat comes back from the island, I get used to his presence just as he leaves. He laughs on the phone to our friend. A new pile of seashells sits by the bathroom sink. I’m struck dumb when he touches me. My blood slows and my brain dims. The tide goes out a very long way.“
There’s a story about Proust and his memory theory. He “coined the phrase ‘involuntary memory’ to describe his biscuit method. It’s the way the past
sneaks up on us fiercely, the way the body stores what the conscious mind hasn’t.” Our narrator looks for her childhood walking the lino aisles of the Newtown New World for Wattie’s Cottage Pie.
Feltham writes: “I’m just the kind of woman who has soft, repetitive interests, if that makes sense? I like knitting and watching my cat.” ie. the dullest person in the world. However, another interlude shows her, Pat and friends wasted for weeks in Europe. At the Tisno drug and techo festival she’s off her head dancing all night (being very unsafe, says the mother in me). “Down on the lawn by the tiki bar, the Garden’s staff arrived and started to empty the cans and glasses from overflowing bins. A seagull cawed in the sky. They had two days’ break before the next festival started.” What’s an archivist to make of those contradictions?
There’s some pretty upfront honesty in these stories. Pat faces his drug and alcohol addiction and they go to therapy together – again, for me, these compelling memoir sections read as a glorious understated love story. There is also plenty of weird stuff in this collection – a third person short story about worms, pages and pages about gulls at the Wellington tip, spiced with observations and wry commentary. There is lots on weaving. Feltham’s weaving transforms the way she sees the world. “...the road, the hillside and houses all unfurled before me like a bolt of heavy cloth…I saw the seawall like a hem against the ocean. The ice flowers and rocks lining the shore resolved into the motifs of a rippling twill.”
Yep, it’s a bad archive, unsorted, impossible to categorise, full of slanting truths and irony. I pity the archivist, but, as lover of disordered history, I found Bad Archive thought provoking and utterly compelling.
Cristina Sanders' blog 