History’s Abyss, or, Monsters in the Vault
Below is the test of a guest lecture for McMaster’s History 2GR3 — History of Monsters class, delivered as a prelude to inviting the students for site visits. It’s fun to cast off the theoretical yoke from time to time & deploy the eye-rolling tropes we all rail against for a good cause.
Today we are going to talk about archives, libraries, and their uneasy hospitality to the monstrous and arcane. I know you’re reading Beowulf for this class, so I thought we might begin this lecture with a verse from another of the great Old English poems — listen to the rising and falling of the cadence, which evokes the ships’ oars which bore Beowulf from Geatland to Hrothgar’s high hall: Cen byþ cwicera gehwam | cuþ on fyre blac ond beorhtlic | byrneþ oftust ðær hi æþelingas | inne restaþ.” “A torch is known | to every being by its pale, bright flame | it always burns wherever the noble | gather within” This is the verse for the old English rune “Ken,” which signifies a torch or a burning brand of pine-wood, and by extension the fire of inspiration and creativity. This is a verse which has always spoken to me when thinking of libraries and archives as fonts of inspiration and learning where a sudden idea can seize hold of one’s imagination like a spark that kindles a great fire. A metaphorical fire — please note that open flames are not welcome in the library. And what do we do with that inspiration? Another verse from the poem comes to mind: Feoh byþ frofur | fira gehwylcum; sceal ðeah manna | gehwylc miclun hyt dælan gif he wile for drihtne | domes hleotan. “Wealth is a comfort | to everyone yet each and all | must share it out mightily if they wish to have | the Measurer’s mercy” This speaks to another sense of the library as we might imagine it — the obligation to share the metaphorical wealth of knowledge freely with one another and the world. This is what libraries, at their best, exist to do — not just to hoard the knowledge and artefacts of the past, but to share them and to safeguard them so that we can pass them on to those who come after us. So these are some fairly rosy conceptions of the library. But what if there were more to libraries than these lofty ideas? Is it possible for libraries to be sinister? Can the inspiration and wealth of the library make room for the uncanny, the strange, the unsettling, the ugly. To explore whether that’s possible, perhaps we might turn our attention to etymology rather than poetry. Let’s look first at the word “archives,” which denotes a particular kind of repository and a particular kind of historical record. In my field the word “archives” has a specific sense — in fact a number of them, which archivists take great glee in disputing with one another — but the word often serves as shorthand for any repository of old, rare, obscure, and curious written things. What does the word “archives” mean to you? If you’ll indulge me in some linguistic archaeology, the word “archives” comes to us from the very distant past. It begins life as “ἀρχή” in Greek. It comes from a distant root which simply means “to be the first.” Eventually this sense of origin or first principle was conflated with the exercise of influence and authority, so that “ἀρχή” also signifies “rule” or “government” — and by extension, power. It’s related to “ἀρχεῖον” — a building where an archon dwells, a place where civic decisions are made. We find the same root in “monarchy,” “oligarchy,” “anarchy”. The term “ἀρχεῖον,“ denoting a civic power centre, was artisanally filtered through the charcoal of Latin, where it became “archivum” — a term for a place which houses the written records of human dealings, intangible memory in physical form. So in this sense “archives” are power made manifest in documentary form through a deliberate act of remembering and bearing witness. It’s easy to imagine metaphorically that old books and papers have “power” of a sort, but we encounter this in a literal sense too. Is it possible for documents to effect material change in the world? Consider the example of a car registration. If you haven’t got it with you when a cop pulls you over, it doesn’t exist. It’s a talisman; power made manifest in a material object. It’s not enough to tell a police officer that your license and registration exist in potentia — they have to be physically borne by the driver in order to have effect. What does any of this have to do with monsters? Perhaps etymology might help us once more. "Monster" comes to us from the Latin "monere" which means “to remember, to remind, to admonish, to warn” from the proto-Indo-European root "men—" which means simply “to think.” We find the same root in “mental,” by the way! So in this sense the very word “monster” itself means “a memory” and “a warning” — an uncomfortable resonance for libraries and archives which are tasked, after all, with preserving written human memories and imaginings. What if the monster was coming from inside the library?
Derrida goes further, characterising archives & libraries not only as storehouses of memory, but mausolea of memory. Archives are places where written memories go to be physically interred. Like graveyards, they serve a twofold function — one is to hallow and sanctify the dead, the other to set them apart from the world of the living. In this sense, archives are where we bury the past at a safe remove, to mitigate the harm they might do us. By extension the very act of writing is an act of forgetting — once something is written it is fixed, losing the fluidity and infinite variability of speech. Writing can be uncomfortably final. There is a sense of invontrovertibility about it. How many of you have struggled to put something in words? There’s more than a little superstition in that feeling — the idea that naming something will make it real, that we will have no choice but to come to terms with our own characterisation of a feeling or an event. So for Derrida archives might contain power, but it is a dead power, a power which comes from dead things, and woe betide the living who meddle too deeply in its affairs. It’s a place where we bury memory. If we cast our minds back to the word “monster” we see that at its heart it contains a sense of memory, a sense of warning. So it’s not too much of a stretch to say that libraries are places where we hope we can lay the monsters of the past to rest. But it is an uneasy slumber. And of course the association of libraries and archives with monstrous and unsettling power is well-established in our imaginations. These are places where you find forbidden secrets, blasphemous grimoires, heretical ideas. They are places where you might find one of my favourite linguistic tongue-twisters — anthropodermic bibliopegy, books bound in human skin. We haven’t got any, sadly, but they do exist. For every Library of Alexandria containing the shining pearls of human achievement there is a Miskatonic Library containing the Necronomicon, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten, the Pnakotic Manuscripts. The latter reference might be a little too apropos — in Lovecraft’s work, the most monstrous presence of all is the author’s own corrosive racism. Taking inspiration from one of the great works of monstrous fiction, Frankenstein, in this class we are going to invite you to come interact directly with rare books from McMaster’s collection. You will play the part of the Doctor himself, playing with the stuff of dead memory to construct something uncomfortably yet urgently alive. You will be visiting the archives in groups to work directly with what may seem like random collections of rare books — but these collections are far from random. Each text speaks in some way to the monstrous, the uncanny, the forbidden, the occult — sometimes in ways that are not immediately obvious. Bear in mind that monsters can participate in text in a number of ways. Sometimes the protagonist is the monster — sometimes the author himself. Sometimes even heroes are monsters — consider the example of Cú Chulainn, the greatest of the Irish heroes. Does anybody know the story of Cú Chulainn? He’s held up as an outstanding example of both the heroism and the tragic pathos which underlies so much of Irish literary culture to this day. Cú Chulainn was a fairly run-of-the-mill adolescent demigod until one day, while a guest at a great man’s house, he is attacked by a ferocious guard dog. He kills the dog in self-defence, but in so doing he violates the sacred guest-oath of hospitality, so he offers to serve as Culann’s¹ guard dog until another can be trained. He goes by the name “Cú Chulainn” for the rest of his life. Over the course of that life, he undertakes many wondrous deeds, but his story is ultimately marked by tragedy. Disputes of honour lead him to kill his son and his own best friend. He is ultimately tricked to his death by an old woman by the side of the road who offers him a meal of dog meat.This is an unresolvable conundrum for Cu Chulainn, who is bound by a series of ritual taboos that are tied to his supernatural beauty and otherworldly fighting ability. One is the general precept, equally applicatble to all, that it is a grave dishonour to refuse an offer of hospitality; another is a specific provision that he must never eat of a dog’s flesh, for to do so would be an act of metaphorical cannibalism. Knowing this, his enemies conspire to set him up for failure before his final battle. He can only choose to break one or the other oath, and so his doom comes upon him. In this story Cu Chulainn is always held up as a hero, but with a different lens he is a monster. He’s a serial adulterer, a liar, a betrayer of trust, a fratricide, the murderer of his own son. Even his preternatural affinity for combat is monstrous — when angry he undergoes a physical mutation, a sort of wracking spasm which twists his body into an unrecognisable and grotesque thing. One eye swells to monstrous size; the other contracts into his head. His muscles bulge, his skin tears. One imagines it is profoundly painful and presumably accompanied by a series of sickening wet popping sounds, like the tropes we associate with werewolves in film. In these moments he is literally a monster, even leaving aside any of his moral failings. So sometimes the monster is not as obvious as we might prefer, and I encourage you to bring this sense of scrutiny to the reading room. And one more thing I would encourage you to bear in mind — our conceptions of the monstrous themselves change over time. Deeds that once seemed noble may now seem infamous. Leaving aside the monsters of fiction, archives and libraries contain many painful reminders of genocide, colonialism, superstition, misogyny, and hatred for the other. It is no small irony that these institutions which Derrida characterises as tombs of memory should contain narratives which are themselves capable of rot, decay — and unlife. Anyone who has ever thought about the pivotal role of revisionist and counter-revisionist history in political narrative can attest to that. And here too we see a sense of danger in archives — the notion that if resurrected, if brought again fully into the world of the living, the contents of these institutions might do us profound harm. Consider the ongoing “debate” over the high school yearbooks of political figures — including a recent Supreme Court nominee — in the United States. Of course sometimes trauma is itself cathartic — sometimes we must confront the past before we can move into the future, to look deeply and deliberately at the legacies of things gone by lest we instead be seduced and doomed by the whispering of history’s distorted and half-remembered ghosts. Sometimes we look to the records of the past not for inspiration or a good scare, but for justice — another preserve of ἀρχή, however construed. So in this exercise we hope to enfold a few senses of the concept of “archives.” We hope to communicate a sense of wonder and wealth, like the verses of the Old English Rune poem attest — but also a sense of unsettling power, the ability of long-written words to leap undead from a page into the living world of imagination and thought. In this we will be helped by the fact you will be working with original texts. These books are hundreds of years old. They have passed through countless hands to come to ours, in the process of which they have been read by many eyes. Some have been annotated, disbound, re-bound, stamped with their owners’ marks. In reading them, we should bear this in mind — we are all guests, momentary participants in the lives of these artefacts which, though dead and inert in a certain sense, are capable of living so much longer than we are. In that sense every book is a monster, both in the sense of a memory and in the sense of an undead & frightening thing. ¹ In Irish the name “Culann” undergoes lenition when it takes the genitive case, giving “Cú Chulainn”