when the archive reads like a horoscope

Most historians (esp. those who muck around in archives) have heard stories about how the archive speaks, and how it starts to produce its own narrative arc ("arc" being not unrelated etymologically to "archive"). But occasionally, the archive will even toss up some words to live by, words that resonate beyond their moment. Today's sessions yielded one gem in particular--this one designed not by Kenneth Burke but for Kenneth Burke. 

It's worth saying here that one of the distinct pleasures of working on Burke is the regular engagement with Malcolm Cowley, Burke's lifelong friend and most candid critic. Burke used Cowley as an editor, taskmaster, and secular priest (the number of alcohol-related confessions is astonishing). And unlike Burke, Cowley is quite a prose stylist: his writing is as deliberate as it is vivid.

In this instance, Cowley is losing patience with Burke (which he did many times, and me-oh-my do I understand where he's coming from). In any event, in the letter in question (dated February 28, 1952), Cowley orders Burke to stop moaning and pissing and finish his book already. The book in question, incidentally, is KB's book on ethics that--you guessed it--never showed. So much for Cowley's advice.

But not only is Cowley's diagnosis of Burke spot on, I think it is quite relevant for those of us who agonize over our work and won't let go--and this goes for dissertations too! Here's Cowley:

Also there’s something I’ve told you before and am telling you again and this time you had better listen while the hand is laid gently on your shoulder and before the hand takes you by the collar. Set finite and measurable limits now to the “on Human Relations” and stick to those limits and finish the book. Otherwise you will have so projected yourself into the book that it becomes your life and can’t be finished for fear of ending your life. And furthermore it won’t be as good a book as if you held it at a little distance and worked on it as an object or organism outside of yourself, because large parts of it will be too subjective and obsessional. It’s not you after all, but only something that you’re making, and the you has other sides that also have a right to be made clear.

Let's give it up for Father Cowley.   

Comments

[fns]

Thanks for the reminder, Malcolm... (and thanks to dhawhee for unearthing it!)

[caraf]

Heh. This is priceless. I'm going to print it out and stick it on the bulletin board above my desk. Incidentally, this is good advice for bloggers, too -- especially the part about not being too "subjective" and "obsessional" (present company excluded, of course).

[dhawhee]

yah, I like the hand on the shoulder v. the hand on the collar. It's a little *too* vivid.

[bonnie kyburz]

fns wants to advise bloggers to avoid being "too 'subjective' and 'obsessional'," but, in part, it is for me (writing at my web space) a sort of invention technique, even with the personal (esp w/ the personal, maybe) that is helping me to write at all (hopefully to complete a/my book). just as, perhaps, KB's correspondence w/ Cowley helped him to write (although maybe not in the case of the phantom book cited). just a thought (from a writer who is often "too subjective").

[dhawhee]

I hear you, Bonnie. I imagine the question here is what *isn't* subjective?

But, but. MC's last line in fact seems to honor the personal in a way that might be worth thinking about: even if we do twine our identities with our writing (which I try not to do for, ha, personal reasons), we can't possibly make them one and the same, otherwise our identities will be astonishingly reduced--and then, alas, readers [like mean anonymous reviewers] will get hold of them! For my part, I love the idea of seeing a book as something we're making, something that will ultimately be "out there," because the "out there" is what rhetoric is all about. And if it's out there all along, then maybe that somehow makes finishing easier. Or at least I think so, har.

And I should also say that Burke was a bit obsessional--unhealthily, unproductively so--about the Poetics/Ethics/Symbolic book.

I do take your point, though, for sure.

[bonnie kyburz]

Thanks for replying, Deborah. I hear you saying something that Victor Vitanza once said to me, although your saying it comes through somewhat obliquely while VV was quite direct (in the best possible way). I'm going to pull a David Lynch and avoid saying exactly what I'm hearing, but suffice it to say that i find it deeply and sincerely precious to be understood even as i'm being advised, like that last line (MC! that's kind of funny, really -- "out there" as some sort of club/land that is MC'd). Very fun, too, for me, is that I just this past minute finished reading Gibson's _Pattern Recognition_, which describes a mysterious film project released on the net, in installments, through clandestine means; it gains recognition through a sort of cultish "parlor" of participants/devotees (on a fetish listserv!). So the film, the thing that's "out there" . . . we find it by participating (in? with?) it, with the iterative moments of clarity it affords us as we go about being in our complicated (personal *and* networked) lives.

You've given me so much to think about, Deborah (and MC . . . and fns . . . and KB). I'm grateful. And I take your meaning very much to heart ("otherwise our identities will be astonishingly reduced"). I sometimes practice silence :)

[dhawhee]

Ooh, I love the Gibson book. And oh me oh my I don't know whether I'm advising you as much as thinking about stuff.

And: More oblique than VV, huh? Nice! (am smiling)

[planbreaker]

"I think it is quite relevant for those of us who agonize over our work and won't let go--and this goes for dissertations too!"

We (the soon-to-be-former-dissertators) are wondering if you are talking about one of us. Or all of us. Ha!

[dhawhee]

Planbreaker, That's hilarious. Nah, I was mostly thinking about all the many dissertators who come across this site. Though now that I think about it, if there were a "letting-go" competition among the three soon-to-be-former-dissertators, it would be close. But I think there would be a clear winner. haha

Oh, shoot, I'm totally going to miss you all. Speaking of not being able to let go!

[bonnie kyburz]

thinking about stuff works. i was identifying with the comment on subjective posts, so i was hearing your comments as advise. i'm way too sensitive for my own good :)

i used to be the girl who cut out all the lables. now, i don't so much mind (although i share Cayce's feelings about Hilfiger). but Prada?, i was thinking as i read . . . get over yourself, Cayce!

:)

[bonnie kyburz]

advice, that is. oops.

[dave mazella]

[read this yesterday in the newspaper, so assume it's true]

Parent: So how do you get the kids to paint such lovely pictures?

Teacher: I take them away before they're done.

Dave [at the start of another book]