A Voice in the Archives: In Search of Woolf's Lost Tape

Summary

I want to begin this paper unconventionally, and to offer first my inspiration for writing it. If you'll forgive me, I'm going to be musing, while, I hope, telling you a rollicking good story, about a topic deserving of more exacting attention: archives, what they are, and why we're in them. I particularly want to think about why as feminist critics and historians of women's lives, we need to be in them more, and not alone: we need others—the living alongside the dead—at a crucial moment in our political history when the forces of cultural amnesia about the power of collective, and crucially, intergenerational feminisms, is, I fear, on the rise.

Amnesia, loss, gatekeepers, tangerine tinted trash-can fires as leaders of the free world (thank you, Samantha Bee) are all real and existential threats to progressive cultural memory. Searching for origins in the archives may, pace Derrida, be an exercise in infinite regress, but there is also joy and the rock-solid hope of connection that should drive us there, as academics, as humanists, and as teachers leading the new generation. Ted Bishop has described the jouissance of archival pursuit in terms that resonate with my ruminations today and connect with discussions begun at the MSA last November on Jane Garrity's panel “What Are We Doing When We Are in the Archives?”: “Part of the reason we work in archives is, I'm convinced, for the archival jolt, a portal to knowledge and, in itself, an assurance that we have connected with something real.”

For feminists, there are still many voices to be found, still more wily reckonings of self and other, to be unearthed in archives. What I'm going to recount here—essentially the story of my search for a cassette tape that promised a lost recording of Woolf 's voice—touches on all of those things, most particularly that self and other piece: that is, the often-uncanny ways in which what begins as a purely “academic” pursuit, can turn tail, surprising us with apparently unsought revelations. Archival work can make us feel that, far from being well-trained detectives in pursuit of that lost archival gem, the journey itself, for which the archive is the road, is pursuing us, telling truths about our collective lives as scholar-adventurers that propel us forward even in the murkiest of times.