Motorcycle riding fuels the art of archival research
May 28, 2004
by Geoff McMaster
|
|
|
Dr. Ted Bishop |
The comparison might seem a tad strained, a case of everything looking like a nail to the proverbial hammer. But Bishop has given the analogy a lot of thought, and has recently been awarded $60,000 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)--one of two grants University of Alberta faculty members have received from the council's new pool of funds for work in the fine arts--to explore it further in a book.
"I'm using the motorcycle ride as a kind of metaphor for talking about the materiality of the archive," said Bishop, a professor in the Department of English. "But it's also a narrative, because I actually rode the motorcycle to Texas on a research grant to do this work."
The thing about archives, he said, is that unlike libraries, they are never the same. "You go in never knowing exactly what you're going to get. Robert Pirsig (author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), once said, 'When you're in a car, you're in a box. But when you're on a motorcycle, the frame dissolves. You go for the experience of the ride. Getting there is the least important thing."
The idea for the book originated in a paper Bishop wrote for an English department talk three years after a motorcycle accident that almost took his life. It touched on how recovering from such an ordeal shaped his approach to reading, making him acutely aware of the physiological process involved in processing language.
His new work, much of it written and some of it previously published, will take the form of creative non-fiction, or using the devices of fictional narrative (scene and character creation, for example) to explore more academic subjects such as modernism and print culture history. Hence the fine arts hook.
What interests Bishop most, however, is the material nature of the archive--the feel and smell, all those intangible elements that accompany handling an original manuscript. He recalls, for instance, unexpectedly coming across Virginia Woolf's suicide letter in the British Library. The contents were well known to Woolf scholars, but Bishop was nonetheless "completely sandbagged" by it.
Bishop also describes meeting a researcher at one archive who was smelling letters written during a plague in France. When Bishop asked what he was doing, the researcher explained he was checking for vinegar, a sign the house in which the letter was written may have been disinfected: "The smell then, actually becomes part of the text of the letter.
"The physicality of the archive tells you something. Unless you can see or feel that, you're not going to know it," he said. It's much like the smell and feel of the road while riding a motorcycle.
Bishop also once discovered a first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses once owned by Lawrence of Arabia. The book was covered in oil stains and crumbs.
"I did some research and found out that Lawrence in fact hated Ulysses--it took him five years to read it. But he had it with him on the air base out at Kurachi, and the men loved to borrow from his library.
"What I think, but can never prove, is that that those marks were from other readers out there on the base reading this on their tea breaks." One of the things Bishop asked for in his SSHRC grant was money to track down some of these readers.
"If we try to pretend archives are libraries, then the research we produce just reproduces a certain kind of knowledge and ignores these other things."
The kind of knowledge that intrigues Bishop now is most often found in the footnote to a research paper, that line of inquiry the writer wanted to follow but felt it didn't go anywhere. Or that offhand comment a conference presenter makes that seems irrelevant to the point at hand but prompts the most lively discussion.
It all comes down to "surrendering to the ride," he said. "I would be disappointed if the archives didn't take me off the map in some way."
Related story
Reflections on crashing a motorcycle (ExpressNews, February 15, 2001): http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/expressnews/articles/news.cfm?p_ID=291&s=a
Related links – internal
The U of A Department of English website: http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/english/
The U of A Faculty of Arts website: http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/arts/
Related link – external
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council website: http://www.sshrc.ca/
This article originally appeared in the University of Alberta's ExpressNews