In Gorizia, Haya Tedeschi sits waiting for her long-lost son and endlessly sorts through the assembled contents of her life, which she has archived in a deep red basket that reaches up to the height of her knees. In Addis Ababa on the eve of the 1974 revolution, Hirut balances a flat metal box of photographs, letters and newspaper clippings on her lap, ready to give them back to their original owner Ettore, a Jewish Italian solider she encountered in the Fascist invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. In New York, a young family packs seven bankers’ boxes measuring fifteen by twelve by ten inches with double-thick bottoms and solid lids into the trunk of their car – boxes filled with materials that will both give form to and document their road trip south to New Mexico. In eighteenth-century Vienna, Josephine Soliman von Feuchtersleben writes three impassioned letters to Emperor Francis I of Austria, begging for the return for righteous burial of the body of her father Angelo, an African courtier to his uncle Joseph II, who Francis had stuffed on his death and displayed – wearing only a grass band – for the viewing pleasure of all the monarch’s guests.
In re-telling histories of empire, war, borders, and mobility through objects, Daša Drndić, Valeria Luiselli, Maaza Mengiste and Olga Tokarczuk collage together literary, archival and journalistic sources, traces of visual and material culture, song and photography, effectively assembling their books as mobile, living archives on display. Their works start with inventories or lists of contents, and build material archives of their own narration as they simultaneously work to question what these object collections signify, what knowledge they hold, and what purpose their accumulation serves within the construction of each novel. These are narratives that aim to supplement the material notion of the object collection with a sense of creative fabulation. In so doing, they enact an intimate, imaginative archive, mobile and wayward in its methods, that signals new directions in potential re-tellings of historical moments. Through a series object prompts taken from Trieste, Lost Children Archive, The Shadow King and Flights, my current book project shows that a critical understanding of museum practices such as collecting, curation, conservation and display can offer alternative methods of both reading and interpreting the vernacular, amateur or informal archives contained in contemporary world literature texts.
The museum is a constantly active and dynamic agent in creating the narrative of its own collection, and in so doing, creates its own narrative of history. This narrative can shift or it can stay the same, but either way, it requires a huge and collective effort to bolster, maintain, develop or overhaul. Each object in the museum collection is narrativized not only in its accompanying text label, but also through its position in relation to other objects, its physical display (in a case, on a shelf, in a drawer), and of course in relation to the overarching narrative constructed by the space of the building itself. This all combines into an enormous labour of storytelling. I believe that we can read objects, displays, rooms and whole exhibitions in much the same way as we can read literary fiction, and that these parallel processes of reading, writing and interpretation can shed new light on how history is written in both of these narrative spaces: the museum and the novel. Specifically, I want to argue that we can identify a new class of contemporary world literature novels that enact a set of museum practices (collecting, preserving, researching, interpreting, exhibiting) in order to create books that function as mobile object collections on display. If we learn to read texts in tandem with object displays and collections and texts, new strategies of encounter and engagement with both will allow us to enact a shift in what we think of as a museum, and what we think of as a text, and identify where the overlap between the two lies.
References
Daša Drndić, Trieste, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, London: MacLehose Press, 2012
Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive: A Novel, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019
Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King: A Novel, New York: W. W. Norton, 2019
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, London: Fitzcarraldo, 2017
The research introduced in this blog piece is funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize (Languages and Literatures), awarded to the author in 2019.
