The Materials of Modern Memory: Theorising the Literary Archive in the Early Twentieth Century

在谈到1959年《巴黎评论》的起草过程时，T·S·艾略特说，他更愿意把一首未完成的诗留在脑海中，而不是放在抽屉里的纸上。如果我把它放在抽屉里，它仍然是一样的，但如果它在记忆中，它就会变成另一种东西。虽然艾略特对信息存储形式的创造性区分似乎是一种作曲上的怪癖，但类似地，弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫在1939年的《过去素描》(A Sketch Of The Past)中的写作也是如此，她回忆说，她发现了一捆笔记，扔进了我的废纸篮子里。作为与她的记忆相关的一个主题，伍尔夫形象地将艾略特所说的两种截然不同的存储形式融合在一起；对伍尔夫来说，记忆可以通过物质容器成功地表现出来。艾略特和伍尔夫的评论属于一段复杂的历史，他们比较了精神和物质存储装置，以及它们作为档案的作用。杜威·德拉斯马的《记忆的隐喻》(2000)通过用来概念化我们的记忆能力的意象追踪了这一对话，注意到20世纪初随着技术进步为我们提供了新的隐喻可能性，发生了深刻的变化。尽管雅克·德里达在《档案狂热》(1995)中的介入为信息保留方法的理论方法铺平了道路，但德拉伊斯马的关键现代范例，包括弗洛伊德的《神秘的写字台》(1925)，尚未与作家的理论相比较，后者不仅探索作品中的材料和纪念性保存，而且积极实践他们的想法，将这些作品存档。从历史学、文化记忆和档案学的发展中学习，在这些领域，公正的档案员的概念几乎已经被根除，英语的重要著作围绕亨利·詹姆斯展开，调查他对文学文献的破坏如何等同于试图仅为纪念他而保存部分过去。当然，这也提出了一些现实问题：现代作家通过编辑档案，在多大程度上能够控制自己死后的声誉，这在多大程度上促成了新批评的兴起和对传记见解的完全拒绝？然而，也有证据表明，作家们不仅在实践上，而且在哲学上思考了他们的信息存储方法。通过将这项研究扩展到包括T·S·艾略特、R·G·科林伍德、赫伯特·里德和弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫在内的个人圈子，我们能够探索一个未被研究的知识分子网络的存在，他们将档案理论整合到写作和出版过程的每个阶段。因此，我们扩大了辩论的范围，从揭露某些作家的批判性声誉是自我构建的，到提出一种哲学，即在现代主义文学文化中利用材料和记忆存储的创造性能力。作为一种尚未建立的联系，这项研究不仅将审查这些人的作品以及与他们的执行者的通信，而且还将审查这些作品的存续方式。莉亚·普莱斯在维多利亚时代将档案汇编为选集的历史上取得了重大进展，她的书史研究将得到对未来几十年这些活动的公开理论的研究的很好支持。这种双重方法被文艺复兴时期的学者如罗德里·刘易斯成功地使用，在那里，普通文件的分类已经在Ars Memoriae传统中被背景所联系起来。随着艾略特和伍尔夫对这一时期的编纂方法特别感兴趣，奥登和福斯特甚至出版了他们自己的普通书籍，这种创造性笔记的不为人知的复兴及其与记忆和作文的关系，将在一个蓬勃发展的电子笔记研究领域提供一条新的途径

Discussing his drafting process with the Paris Review in 1959, T. S. Eliot remarked that he preferred to retain an 'unfinished' poem 'in the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it's in the memory it becomes transformed into something else'. Though seemingly a compositional quirk, Eliot's creative distinction between forms of information storage similarly occupied Virginia Woolf's writing for A Sketch of the Past (1939), as she recounts finding a 'sheaf of notes, thrown away into my waste-paper basket'. As a motif associated with her memory, Woolf's figurative 'basket' conflates the two forms of storage that Eliot claimed were so crucially distinct; for Woolf, memory can be successfully represented by material receptacles. Eliot's and Woolf's remarks belong to a complex history of comparing psychic and material storage apparatus, and their perceived usefulness as archives. Douwe Draaisma's Metaphors of Memory (2000) tracks this conversation through the imagery used to conceptualise our memorial faculties, noticing a profound shift in the early twentieth century as technological advances lend us new metaphorical possibilities. Despite Jacque Derrida's intervention in Archive Fever (1995), which paved the way for a theoretical approach to methods of information retention, Draaisma's key modern examples, including Freud's 'Mystic Writing-Pad' (1925), have yet to be compared with the theory of writers who not only explored material and memorial preservation in their works, but actively practised their ideas in their archiving of those same works.Learning from developments in historiography, cultural memory, and archival science, where the notion of the impartial archivist has been all but eradicated, important work in English has revolved around Henry James, investigating how his destruction of literary documents amounted to an attempt to preserve portions of the past for his memory alone. Of course, this raises practical questions: to what extent have modern authors been able to control their posthumous reputations by editing their archives, and to what extent did this contribute to the rise of New Criticism and a rejection of biographical insights altogether? Yet there is also evidence that writers thought not only practically, but philosophically, about their approach to information storage. By extending this research into a circle of individuals including T. S. Eliot, R. G. Collingwood, Herbert Read, and Virginia Woolf, we are able to probe the existence of an unstudied network of intellectuals who integrated archival theory into each stage of the composition and publication processes. As a result, we broaden the debate from exposing the critical reputations of certain writers as being self-constructed, towards a proposal for a philosophy of harnessing the creative capabilities of material and memorial storage within modernist literary culture. As a connection yet to be made, the research will not only examine the works of such individuals and correspondence with their executors, but also the manner in which those works have survived. Leah Price has made significant strides in the history of compiling archives as anthologies in the Victorian era, and her book-historical investigation will be well supported by an examination of the overt theorising of these activities in the following decades. This dual approach has been used with great success by such scholars of the Renaissance period as Rhodri Lewis, where a taxonomy of commonplacing documents has been contextualised within the ars memoriae tradition. With Eliot and Woolf in particular taking interest in methods of compilation of this period, and Auden and Forster going as far as to publish their own commonplace books, this unnoticed resurgence in creative notetaking and its relationship to memory and composition will provide a new avenue in a field that is thriving in the study of e