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Abstract
This essay opens out a series of questions concerning matter and materiality in the age of the digital via engagement with the literary papers of Australian writer Eve Langley (1904–74), held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Among those papers is a single black and white snapshot labelled ‘The Manuscript Cupboard, 1970’, which shows three shelves of a household cupboard filled with exercise books, folders and paper-wrapped parcels. The same collection also contains a series of colour snapshots showing Langley’s manuscripts arranged in a variety of tableaux laid out across her untended lawn. That Langley should have first taken and then preserved such photos is perhaps not surprising given her deep attachment to material conditions of writing and, in particular, to manuscripts and paper. For Langley, to write was quite simply to inhabit paper and she framed the experience of writing as one of immersion, not just in ideas and words, but literally in paper. Framed by a consideration of the anxieties around materiality provoked by the emergence of digital technologies, this essay explores paper’s presence as an integral dimension of the experience of being in the archive and working with original materials.
Keywords:
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge the Department of Information Studies, University College London, where I was a Visiting Researcher during the writing of this article. I am also grateful to staff of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, for their assistance over the course of this research, especially Meredith Lawn and Kevin Leamon.
Notes
1. For a short biography of Langley, see Joy L Thwaite, ‘Langley, Eve (1904–1974)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, Canberra, 2000, available at <http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/langley-eve-10784/text19125>, accessed 15 May 2014.
2. See, for example, Anita Segerberg, ‘“Strangled by a Bad Tradition”? The Work of Eve Langley’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, no. 10, 1992, pp. 55–73 and Joanne Winning, ‘Wilde Identifications: Queering the Sexual and the National in the Work of Eve Langley’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 20, no. 4, 2002, pp. 301–15.
3. Eve and June Langley pictorial material, c.1860–c.1979. This material is catalogued under: PXA 1612, PXD 1268, PXE 1333, MIN 492 and ON 492. There are approx. 684 photographs.
4. Cath Ellis, ‘Review: The Pea-Pickers (1942) by Eve Langley’ [online], API Review of Books, Network Review of Books, Australian Public Intellectual Network, Perth, October 2001, para. 9.
5. The catalogue contains the following note: ‘Most photographs are apparently taken by Eve Langley, but were received from June Langley together with June’s papers in February 1981 (MLMSS 3898).’
6. On photographic itinerancy see: Gabriela Nouzeilles, ‘The Archival Paradox’, in The Itinerant Languages of Photography, Eduardo Cadava (ed.), Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ, 2013, p. 42.
7. The square aspect ratio was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. In square format images, the eye tends to travel around the image in a circular fashion rather than ‘follow the longer edge of the rectangle from side to side (or up and down in the portrait format)’. Andrew S Gibson, ‘Shooting in the Square Format’, Ephotozine, 7 December 2011, available at <http://www.ephotozine.com/article/understanding-square-format-18005>, accessed 14 May 2014.
8. Tim Schlak, ‘Framing Photographs, Denying Archives: The Difficulty of Focusing on Archival Photographs’, Archival Science, vol. 8, no. 2, 2008, p. 85.
9. Gillian Rose, ‘Practising Photography: An Archive, A Study, Some Photographs and A Researcher’, Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 26, no. 4, 2000, p. 558.
10. For a detailed discussion, see Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, ‘A Life More Photographic’, Photographies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2008, pp. 9–28.
11. For a detailed discussion, see Sigrid McCausland, ‘A Future Without Mediation? Online Access, Archivists, and the Future of Archival Research’, Australian Academic & Research Libraries, vol. 42, no. 4, 2011, pp. 309–19 and Alexandra Chassanoff, ‘Historians and the Use of Primary Source Materials in the Digital Age’, The American Archivist, vol. 76, no. 2, 2013, pp. 458–80.
12. For a more detailed discussion see Maryanne Dever, ‘Provocations on the Pleasures of Archived Paper’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 41, no. 3, 2013, pp. 173–82.
13. Lisa Adkins and Celia Lury, ‘Introduction: What is the Empirical?’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 12, no. 1, 2009, p. 6. Original emphasis.
14. Modern Language Association of America, ‘Statement on the Significance of Primary Records’, Profession, vol. 95, 1995, p. 28.
15. See Marlene Manoff, ‘The Materiality of Digital Collections: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives’, Libraries and the Academy, vol. 6, no. 3, 2006, pp. 311–25 and N Katherine Hayles, ‘Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’, Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, pp. 67–90.
16. One of the best-known expressions of this concern is Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, Random House, New York, 2001.
17. Mike Featherstone, ‘Archive’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 23, nos 2–3, 2006, p. 596.
18. Jon Rimmer, Claire Warwick, Ann Blandford, Jeremy Gow and George Buchanan, ‘An Examination of the Physical and the Digital Qualities of Humanities Research’, Information Processing and Management, vol. 44, no. 3, 2008, p. 1378.
19. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, ‘Working in the Archives’, Yale French Studies: Reading the Archive: On Texts and Institutions, no. 77, 1990, p. 103.
20. Ala Rekrut, ‘Material Literacy: Reading Records as Material Culture’, Archivaria, no. 60, Fall 2005, pp. 28–9.
21. Johanna Drucker, ‘Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality’, Parallax, vol. 15, no. 4, 2009, p. 8.
22. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, Thomas Scott-Railton (trans.), Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2013, p. 16.
23. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2004, p. 16.
24. Gumbrecht, p. xv and p. xiii.
25. Winning, p. 301.
26. See, for example, Thwaite. One reader’s report covered a total of seven submitted manuscripts and included reference by the editor, Nan McDonald, to ‘still more to come’. Reader’s report written by N[an] McD[onald] [c.1965]. Item 573. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, MLMSS 3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
27. Reader’s report for White Topee by N[an] McD[onald]. [c.1952]. Item 137. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, MLMSS 3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
28. See Angus & Robertson Ltd – Business Records, 1881–1973, MLMSS 3269, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
29. According to staff at the Mitchell Library, Meg Stewart, daughter of the writer Douglas Stewart, a long-time friend and supporter of Langley, delivered the majority of Langley’s personal papers around May 1975. She had been planning a film on Langley and it was she who reportedly discovered Langley’s body. The library staff recorded how the papers ‘were in the bush hut where Eve Langley died the year before. Conditions in the hut were very bad. [Stewart] dried out the water-damaged papers. Some other papers were so badly decayed they had to be left behind.’ In November 1975 a ‘further package of papers [was] handed in to custody of the Library which was “found among discarded material”’. Meredith Lawn (Archivist, Original Materials Branch, State Library of NSW), email to the author, 11 September 2013. This account suggests that some of the more eccentric (and suggestive) items in the collection (the aforementioned shopping lists) are likely to have been included more by accident than design, haphazardly gathered together in the effort to protect everything that may have constituted Langley’s ‘paperwork’ from the elements. Stewart completed her experimental documentary film on Langley, entitled She’s My Sister, in 1975 (dir. Meg Stewart; cinematographer: David Sanderson; distributor: Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative). She later made an ABC radio documentary entitled ‘The Shadows Are Different’. See Meg Stewart Further Papers, MLMSS 5147 Add-on 2077/Box 19 and MLOH 249/3–4. She’s My Sister is available through the National Film and Sound Archive (Canberra).
30. June Langley writes to Beatrice Davis that in her work at the Auckland Library Langley was ‘putting into practise an art learned in her first work at Walker and May’s [the printers] in Melbourne’. June Langley to Beatrice Davis, 14 March 1952. Item 183–5. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, MLMSS 3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
31. Eve Langley interviewed by Hazel de Berg, 9 May 1964. Hazel de Berg Collection, National Library of Australia, available at <http://nla.gov.au/nla.oh-vn201494>, accessed 14 May 2014.
32. Nan McDonald to Eve Langley. Angus & Robertson Ltd, Publishers to Eve Langley, 29 July 1955. Eve Langley Papers 1920s–1974, MLMSS 4188 (6), Item 12, Correspondence 20 April 1954 – 8 November 1972, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
33. ‘The Letters of Steve and Blue from 1925 to 1931 Gippsland. Mt Buffalo. Wandin Yallock’. Angus & Robertson Papers, Box 146: Eve Langley typescript literary works, MLMSS 3269, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
34. Eve Langley to Father Colgan (?), undated [c.1941]. Eve Langley letters, 1937–1942. Uncatalogued MS. Presented by D Beirne, Archivist of Catholic Diocese of Hamilton, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
35. ‘The Letters of Steve and Blue’.
36. Eve Langley interviewed by Hazel de Berg, 9 May 1964. I am grateful to Dirk Baltzly for discussion on the question of Langley and synaesthesia.
37. Eve Langley to Nan McDonald, 6 February 1954. Item 273. Item 133. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, MLMSS 3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
38. Eve Langley to Beatrice Davis, January 13, 1960. Item 461. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, MLMSS 3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
39. June Langley to Beatrice Davis, 7 November 1950. Item 133. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, MLMSS 3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. This letter and its reply from Davis cover the matter of what is to become of the manuscripts and who should rightly act as custodian.
40. Eve Langley to Nan McDonald, 24 May 1954. Item 311. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, MLMSS 3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. Judging by the correspondence between Langley and Angus & Robertson, the publishers continued the practice of storing her manuscripts for safekeeping in what is variously referred to as their ‘strong room’ or ‘archive’ through until the 1970s.
41. Harry F Chaplin – album of papers concerning Eve Langley, 1938–c.1955, MLMSS 7154, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. The correspondence indicates that Langley sent Chaplin a series of her manuscripts and typescripts across the period 1954–56.
42. These appear in the bound volume that comprises MLMSS 7154, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
43. Harry Chaplin to Eve Langley, 22 June 1954, Harry F Chaplin – album of papers concerning Eve Langley, 1938–c.1955, MLMSS 7154, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. As Langley was working as a book repairer at Auckland Public Library across the period 1950–55, it is possible that she was either binding the manuscripts herself or having them bound in the library workshop.
44. See Dever.
45. June Langley to Beatrice Davis, 14 March 1952. Item 183–5. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, MLMSS 3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
46. Eve Langley to Ruth Park, 11 October 1941. Ruth Park Papers 1938–1976, MLMSS 3128/Item 1/21, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
47. Eve Langley to Mary Dobbie, 10 October [1941]. Letters from Eve Langley to Mary Dobbie, MLMSS 7487, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. Copies of originals held in MS Papers 8070–1, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
48. Eve Langley interviewed by Hazel de Berg, 9 May 1964.
49. Rimmer et al., p. 1381.
50. Eve Langley to Ruth Park, 11 October 1941.
51. On this point, see Farge, p. 55 and pp. 62–3 and Kiersten F Latham, ‘Medium Rare: Exploring Archives and Their Conversion from Original to Digital. Part Two – The Holistic Knowledge Arsenal of Paper-Based Archives’, LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research, vol. 21, no. 1, 2011, p. 10, available at <http://libres-ejournal.info/1039/>, accessed 12 May 2014.
52. Helen Wood, ‘The Fetish and the Document: An Exploration of Attitudes Towards Archives’, in New Directions in Archival Research, Margaret Procter and CP Lewis (eds), Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies, Liverpool, 2000, p. 38.
53. Farge, p. 55.
54. Latham, p. 1.
55. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, Durham, NC and London, 2010, p. 5.
56. This episode led to Langley’s fabled declaration, ‘I AM OSCAR WILDE. AND YOU’RE KILLING ME.’ Oscar Wilde [Eve Langley] to Nan McDonald, 12 April 1954. Item 269. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, MLMSS 3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. Original emphasis.
57. Eve Langley to Nan McDonald, 24 May 1955. Item 311. Angus & Robertson Correspondence and Readers’ Reports, MLMSS 3269/383, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney.
58. Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, Tate Publishing, London, 2005, p. 6 and p. 10. I am grateful to Amanda Lawson for suggesting this way of thinking about the photos.
59. There are parallel series of images capturing Langley’s desk and typewriter on the lawn.
60. Farge, pp. 62–3.
61. Latham, p. 1.
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Notes on contributors
Maryanne Dever
Maryanne Dever is co-convenor of the Archive Futures research network and is completing a new book of materiality and the archived page. She works at the University of Newcastle, Australia.