Intimate Archives

Abstract

This article activates an archive of love letters written during the Second World War, using practice-as-research techniques to explore resilience and intimacy in periods of invasion. Originally found in a cardboard box in the house of the author’s deceased grandmother, the correspondence was archived at the Archive for Autobiography in France. It contains one letter for each day of the war between the newly-wed Marguerite and Alfred Bucquet, who was sent to the warfront. Spurred by the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the archive was activated as part of a seminar on performing memory, hosted by artist-scholar María José Contreras Lorenzini in New York University.

In devising an embodied response to the archive, questions on who within a familial lineage can engage with war-trauma arose, leading to reflections on Marianne Hirsch’s scholarship on post-memory. Interviews, personal archives and oral recounts allowed the creation of a rich study of the two protagonists, as well as a sense of the zones of oblivion that reside within the second and third generation. This paper also expands on the little-known anglophone scholarship of French scholar and founder of the Archive, Philippe Lejeune, who penned the ‘autobiographical pact’. This article engages with Lejeune’s ideas of truth-telling within an intimate repertoire and through a close reading of the letters, an opportunity to complexify the ‘pact’ by reading between the lines of highly mediated recounts of war trauma.

This article aims to use memory as a method to engage with the present, generating strategies of resistance and resilience. It emphasizes the importance of the autobiographical archive as a legitimate object of study, and how intimate objects create cartographies of care and persist within the archive a way for the past to be remembered through resilience.