Fragile Pages of Grey Ashes
Inoperative archives in Dubravka Ugrešić's The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress

Abstract

This essay begins with a consideration of the burning of the National and University Library in Sarajevo in 1992, drawing from a description of this event the problem of how to think of remainder and dispersal as the modalities of a common distribution. Posing the question of how to read an archive that is distributed through its vanishing, the article turns to two texts that have this question, but little else, in common. Evoking the contingent connections between two novels that would only uncommonly be read together, Dubravka Ugrešić's The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, I ask how such texts might be drawn together at a site that is nothing other than the remainder of a dispersal. Attempting to engage that question formally, through its own practice of writing, the essay concludes by theorizing a comparative methodology that moves away from models of address, reconstruction, commemoration, or mourning and toward a circulation of texts and memory that is meant to produce relations in an affective rather than hermeneutic manner.

Keywords:

• archive
• affect
• trauma
• distribution
• Dubravka Ugrešić
• The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
• David Markson
• Wittgenstein's Mistress

Notes

Ugrešić left Croatia during the war, amid sharp criticisms for her anti-nationalist and anti-war position. She currently resides in Amsterdam.

‘Post-historical’ is a reference to Francis Fukuyama's contentious claim that Western liberal democracy marks the end of history as such. See Fukuyama (1992). For a critique of Fukuyama's position, see Derrida (1994).