Pins, a Catalog of Violence
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
In London, on June 5, 1994, Jacques Derrida gave a lecture entitled “Archive Fever” where he examined the etymology of the word archive; its derision from the Greek, Arkhé: the house of the ruler. In it he names both commencement and commandment: where the physical and historical commence and the story are set based on who is in command. At its essence, an archive is political: what’s left out or kept in. The story of authority.
Questions of two minds
arise: blooming hyacinth
stamped down or risen.
The House of Happy Walls is the dwelling that Charmian Kittredge London (the wife of author Jack London) built to tell the story of her life. She took decades to build it. The rafters in her bedroom looked like the bow of a ship because she loved to travel the world by sea. She used calabashes and nautilus shells she’d found on her voyages through the South Seas as lamps. There is a secret passageway – a winding staircase hidden in a closet – between the downstairs living room [the public space] and her private bedroom and office [the private space]. Now that it is a museum, the House of Happy Walls has become the place where her story has passed from private to public. Except until recently, the story that commenced there was false. The museum told the story of her husband while her story was unpinned, out of view. In this process, the facts were lost. She became a shadow figure. Someone we only saw glimpses of from behind her husband’s prioritized story. In the only biography of her life by Irving Stone, she became a woman who hindered her husband’s career more than helped it. The only evidence of her life, a glassed-in closet housing her fashionable clothes: red satin slippers, an emerald dress. Lost were the facts: she was the one pulling them toward adventure. She had written four books and helped her husband write many of his own.
What stories have burned
without even an ash? Years/
stars painted on the ceiling.
In his lecture, Derrida was building on a theory originally put forward by Freud. Derrida gave his lecture “Archive Fever” at Freud’s home [which had also been converted into a museum] to crowds of supporters who had never known the physical Freud, who had only known the historical Freud as he could be conjured from the archives. Sometimes history overlaps, is circular. According to her diaries, back in the 1930s, Charmian Kittredge London met Freud in Austria at his office [before the war dislocated him] when she was on one of her many European speaking tours. She was between speaking appearances where she spoke to crowds of over 20,000 people. In her diary she wrote she found Freud delightful and a small-featured, slender man of 74. Neither had any idea what history would make of their lives. What residue of their physical selves would remain as record. That Freud would become a refugee of the second World War, relocated to another home in England, and that he’d soon be diagnosed with throat cancer. When Virginia Woolf met him, soon after he fled Austria for England the cancer had eaten away nearly his entire mouth.
Tongue a butterfly
emerging from a shut mouth
how to find the air?
At the archive that houses the documents [her diaries, her letters, the photograph albums she kept religiously documenting the details of her life] a collection that could tell the story of Kittredge London’s life, one must navigate a number of oppressive restrictions. First, one must request access weeks in advance. Few are granted this access [you must have a letter of reference, or you must be a professor at an esteemed institution.] Your visit is scheduled. Once you arrive you must request each box from a collection that does not include Charmian’s name [there is no funding available to those who are studying an understudy, someone who isn’t considered important enough to name a collection after]. The boxes are hauled one at a time up from the basement to the reading room where you wait. You don white gloves and for hours, days, weeks, try to unpuzzle her flattened story from boxes labeled “The Jack London Collection.” You have to unthread her story from the story of her famous husband. And while many scholars have combed through the folders looking for Jack’s story, few have come looking for her story, or for his story as seen through her eyes. In his talk, Derrida said the archive “shelters itself from [its] memory which it also shelters: which comes down to saying also that [the archive] forgets.”
In the time of drought
blue stars of forget-me-nots
disappear from hills.
Charmian Kittredge London’s erasure began on the day she died. The contents of her messy desk – manuscript drafts with notes pinned carefully to each side – were stowed in boxes but not yet dismantled. That would come later. To Derrida, the archive preserves in an unnatural way because it is created by someone who may not understand the mind of the person being archived. An archive is interpreted and arranged by an outsider; thereby -if the person creating the archive does not understand the person being archived – they can enact archival violence. After she was cremated Charmian Kittredge London’s ashes were placed [unmarked] in her husband’s grave. Boxes containing her last book [unpublished] were sold to the Huntington Library. The lead researcher carefully disassembled each of her pinned manuscript pages. Some pages were tethered by 30 pins [constellations of now unknown information]. What was once celestial, cyclical, became crushed, trampled. Her story literally undone, and a new narrative inserted [the pins to the researcher signified she was mad/had lost her mind].
Above her home the
mountain called the beginning
shivers with low fog.
In her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Helene Cixous derived the term ecriture feminine to describe a writing style characterized by disruptions, gaps, and silences; things you might pin to a page to extend the idea orbiting your mind. At the archive, you can still read Charmian Kittredge London’s drafts in the catalogued files. Loose in the same folders float the lost planets of her notes. Untethered. Seemingly nonsensical. However, each pin has left its impression in the paper. There is no map, just evidence that each note, each event of her mind happened. It is in this way that the violence can be upended. That her story can be pinned down, unearthed, and rewritten.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle‘s fourth poetry collection, West : Fire : Archive, was published by The Center for Literary Publishing in 2021. Her biographies include Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and forthcoming Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press). She writes Finding Lost Voices, a weekly blog that brings back the voices of women who have been forgotten or misremembered.
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