[5]
The secret initiators of The Encyclopedia of the Dead. .
believe in the miracle of the biblical resurrection and they complete their vast catalogue in preparation for that moment. So that everyone will be able to find not only his fellow men but also — and more important — his own forgotten past. When the time comes, this compendium will serve as a great treasury of memories and a unique proof of the resurrection.
[6]
Danilo Kiš’s short story was published in 1983, long before the Internet was in widespread use. In skimming the encyclopedia, the manner in which the narrator finds and reads the biography of her recently deceased father is almost a literary foreshadowing of today’s navigation of the Internet. The narrator doesn’t really read, she skims the pages, she looks (“Then, as if it were all unfolding before my eyes”[7]), and sees that every detail of her father’s biography is intricately bound up with the details of other events.
For The Encyclopedia of the Dead, history is the sum of human destinies, the totality of ephemeral happenings. That is why it records every action, every thought, every creative breath, every spot height in the survey, every shovelful of mud, every motion that cleared a book from the ruins.
[8]
We don’t learn anything about encyclopedists, about the archivist, or about systematizers of human destinies from Kiš’s story. They remain hidden. Only The Book of the Dead (or The Encyclopedia of the Dead, or just The Book) exists, an all-knowing, all-seeing, and therefore, divine mechanism of memory, one that eliminates hierarchies, which belong to the human world, and restores a higher justice. This supreme mechanism of memory, which thirty years ago emerged from Kiš’s humanistic and utopian imagination, and his painful firsthand knowledge that the majority of human lives end as anonymous dust, has today, thanks to technology, slipped its ethical, aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical coordinates and become the dominant cultural obsession of our age. Superficially, this obsession is expressed as a mass orgy of self-representation. Below the surface breeds an anxious fear, the fear of death.
The Archive Is Real, Life Is Virtual
The archive (or, more accurately, an archivist) given voice by Pete Postlethwaite is the narrator of the film The Age of Stupid (2009). The film opens with devastated symbols of the contemporary world (London under water, the Taj Mahal in ruins, Las Vegas buried under sand, the Sydney Opera House in flames) before the camera leads us out across the oceans towards a giant platform shaped like a flower — a kind of Noah’s Ark stranded and suspended above the sea. “Welcome to the Global Archive!” the voice of the archivist greets us. The year is 2055, and with the assistance of a super touchscreen the archivist takes us back to our time, to the year 2008. The film is about global warming and how humankind, instead of salvation, chose suicide. The archive, located in the middle of nowhere, has been left for future intelligent beings as testimony to our existence. The archive, which to the man in the street first prompts associations with a secret police or state archive, and then perhaps a lonely and forlorn gathering place for eccentrics, works its way into the popular imagination as a virtual Noah’s Ark — one devoid of specimens of the human species, sent out in an unknown direction to an unknown recipient, like a message in a bottle. I suspect that those watching the film don’t actually notice the upended relationship between the virtual and the real worlds, a relationship the authors of this emotionally charged ecological manifesto simply disregard. Relationships are set up contrary to expectations: the archive is a real place, where real, physical exhibits are housed, and attended to by a real archivist. Humankind and its history are virtual, only coming to life when the archivist lowers his finger onto the touchscreen.
How Did That Happen?
For the man in the street the archive is a synonym for the original, the authentic. Whoever controls the archive possesses significant manipulative power. And for this reason the price of the archive on the market of our values is in constantly growing, irrespective of whether we are dealing with the shoes Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz or the archives of a writer. Writers who strike a deal on the sale of their archives in their own lifetimes guarantee themselves immortality. Even a certain Croatian poet cottoned on to the connection between the archive and immortality, and he gave his all to outlive his contemporaries. And he succeeded, dying in his one-hundred-and-first year on earth. He spent his whole life carefully building his archive, collecting everything — people say that he even kept his tram tickets. The only thing he messed up, tragically, was the context. He and his archive turned up in the wrong century, in the wrong country, and in the wrong circumstances.
Until the discovery of photography came along, the poor never left any proof of their existence. It was some time before the privileged let the less privileged have their turn in front of the camera, those who only could afford a single, once-in-a-lifetime shot. In Russian peasant huts there was a place called the “pretty corner”—krassnyj ugolok—set aside for icons and candles lit to honor God and the family’s patron saint. It was also some time before photos of the pater familias and other family members made their way into the “pretty corner,” before this miniature domestic shrine became a miniature home archive, before family photos made their way into boxes (inevitably shoe boxes), and then finally into family albums, at last uncoupled from God and the saints.
How did it happen, the transfer of power from the archive to the archivist, from the institution to the profession, and then, from the professional to the amateur archivist? The process began, I think, when photos were first placed in the household shrine, and continued with the destruction of the old order, with the deconstruction of systems of power, of institutions of state and religion, of history as a science, and with the emergence of psychoanalysis and the mass repudiation of established beliefs. Art, the Russian Revolution, and avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, Dadaism and Futurism, and their poetics of subversion of established values — whether aesthetic, moral, or of any other nature — all played their part.
In Russian culture the theme of archivomania begins with Russian realism (with its emblematic scrooge figures). A century later the theme of the archive sprung into life in the novels of Konstantin Vaginov, a Russian writer from the 1930s. Vaginov depicts a world of obsessive, half-crazed collectors and archivists, those who in a time of revolutionary chaos scavenge the flotsam and jetsam of the everyday. Svistonov collects books, newspaper cuttings, and even real-life characters for the novel he is writing. The heroes of Bambocciada found the “Society for the Collection of Trivia,” while the hero of Harpagoniana, a certain Zhulonbin, is a systematizer of all kinds of trash, from chewed pencils to cigarette butts and fingernails. These carnivalesque losers, inhabitants of the world of yesterday, are the antithesis of a revolutionary time (re)constructing life from the very beginning.