The Ethic of the Archive.

In The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, Milan Kundera tries to get a handle on what exactly it is that makes the novel the novel. To the ethics that guide the work of the novelist, he contrasts that driving the researcher, and along the way, he says something important about archives:

The Ethic of the Essential
Bardèche sums up his verdict on Madame Bovary: "Flaubert missed his calling as a writer! And is that not bascially the judgment of so many Flaubert admirers who end up telling you, 'Oh, but if you read his correspondence, what a masterwork, what an exciting man it reveals!'"

I, too, often reread Flaubert's letters, eager to know what he thought about his art and that of other writers. Still, fascinating as the correspondence can be, it is neither a masterwork nor a work. Because "the work," l'oeuvre, is not simply everything a novelist writes--notebooks, diaries, articles. It is the end result of long labor on an aesthetic project.

I will go still further: "the work" is what the writer will approve in his own final assessment. For life is short, reading is long, and literature is in the process of killing itself off through an insane proliferation. Every novelist, starting with his own work, should eliminate what is secondary, lay out for himself and for everyone else the ethic of the essential!

But it is not only the writers, the hundreds and thousands of writers; there are also the researchers, the armies of researchers who, guided by some opposite ethic, accumulate everything they can find to embrace the Whole, a supreme goal. The Whole,
which includes a mountain of drafts, deleted paragraphs, chapters rejected by the author but published by researchers, in what are called "critical editions," under the perfidious title "variants," which means, if words still have meaning, that anything the author wrote is worth as much as anything else, that it would be similarly approved by him.

The ethic of the essential has given way to the ethic of the archive. (The archive's ideal: the sweet equality that reigns in an enormous common grave.)

Perhaps I have been reading too much about the Italian 1930s, but by this assessment the archive sounds almost totalitarian!

The pastness of the past, and its presence.

In Archive Fever, Derrida writes that

. . . the question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. (36)

Interesting, then, that it is not until page 527 that Saleem seems to bring his narrative to the present moment, making promises about tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

But this passage leads me back to the last paragraphs of Midnight's Children, where Saleem asserts, "I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet. But the future cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty . . . What cannot be pickled, because it has not taken place, is that I shall reach my birthday[. . .]" (532).

Is Saleem's treatment of the future, whether as "prophecy" or as emblematized by the empty jar, what Derrida had in mind when he said that the question of the archive is "a question of the future"?