On Archives and Icons

Do you start writing without knowing what you want to say? Of course you do; that’s how it often works. “Idea” is what we called that when I taught writing to college students. Not theme or topic, but something more fluid that evolved as you figured it out on the page, so to speak. I have been delaying this draft all week because writing can be something of a cliff, but it’s time to leap. In this piece I’ll jump around and improvise.

Some firm ground. I attended a talk earlier this month that I haven’t really had a chance to process. For my Women Writing Women’s Lives seminar, Autumn Womack, a professor of literature at Princeton, gave a talk about her work in progress on the Toni Morrison archives there. She was one of the curators of a 2023 exhibit about those archives, which were curated and donated by Morrison before her death in 2019. They comprise 400 boxes of material, some of it charred by a 1993 fire in Morrison’s home that damaged some papers and destroyed most of the notes on Sula. According to the exhibit website, “rather than offering a career retrospective, the exhibition’s organization challenges notions of chronology and plays with time in much the same way that Morrison’s own writing does.”

Womack was fascinating on the problems this raised for her as an author herself, of a book that was not really a biography. First of all, her book arises from an exhibit, which emerged from the archive. That’s not a typical workflow. And all of them attempted to represent what she called “recursive time,” not chronology. By beginning with an archive, Womack also highlighted the problem of starting with a question: if you look for specific answers in a collection of materials that narrows your search. In contrast, she tried to approach Morrison’s archive with no set agenda or preconceptions. How is that even possible though— especially with an author of Morrison’s stature and influence? She was an icon.

Instead of questions and problems, Womack focuses on the metaphor of wondering and wandering, which she takes from Morrison herself, who in turn maybe borrowed it from Langston Hughes’ autobiographical volume I Wonder As I Wander (which may have been citing an Appalachian hymn of that name?) The archive’s website reproduces an interview with Morrison about her process in which she describes her initial ruminating around a literary idea:

Most of this wondering is wandering, and disappears sooner or later.

In addition to a typical finding aid, which sorts an inventory of items into a catalogue of objects by date and type, the Morrison exhibit and website organize the materials into six broad themes, one of which is Wonderings and Wanderings. The section gives one example of Morrison’s writerly process of working from an image to idea to question, with the question defiantly at the end. In this case, Morrison was struck by a James Van Der Zee photograph of a Harlem funeral in the 1920s and turned it into inspiration for her novel Jazz, set in that era.

Personally, I was also intrigued by Womack’s attention to the problem that she called “overidentification.” We go to archives, she points out, in search of intimacy with these people we may think we know (especially, perhaps, in the cases of novelists who share interior worlds with us). We want their secrets. We want to feel close to them. I know that I searched my father’s archives (such as they were and are) hoping to learn more about him and to understand his secrets.1 And yet, the archive thwarts that desire too— the subjects resist either structurally or intentionally. My father led a purposefully closeted life and was never very introspective, so there wasn’t that much to find. Morrison curated her own archives and intentionally left personal materials out of the collection she created for Princeton. She was a private person.

The biographers at Womack’s talk seemed baffled and frustrated by the limits of her archive. We were full of questions: did Morrison keep journals? (Yes, but they are not in the archive; they belong to her family.) What about letters? (Only professional letters to other writers and editors are included, not to family or friends). But…. then how will we find out what she was feeling as she wrote Beloved? We may not find out what she was feeling— but she shared materials from her composition process. This archive represents her writer-self, not her other selves. The title of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s documentary The Pieces I Am comes from Morrison and seems apt.2 She was a constructed persona in addition to being a person who once lived in the world.

The session with Womack ended with a moving and perhaps telling anecdote from one of my colleagues. This colleague had attended an event at Howard University in D.C. when Morrison received an award as an acclaimed alumna. At the event she saw Morrison sitting alone at one of those round event tables near the stage. Everyone watched her but no one went near. My colleague thought that was sad and went over and introduced herself and her daughter, and said how much Morrison’s novels meant to them. Morrison was friendly. Is that intimacy? It is at least a connection. Womack admitted that she was glad that she didn’t really know Morrison at Princeton. It made it easier to come to the archive without needs of her own.

Thank you for reading these wonderings of my own! I also attended AIPAD, the annual photography fair in New York City, for the first time yesterday and have thoughts — but not yet. I metabolize slowly, I guess. I will tell you about the interesting talk I heard there on Robert Frank’s book-making process another time. Til then, I look forward to your thoughts on archives and icons.