Editor's Introduction: Archives and Alchemical Wills

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Editor’s Introduction:Archives and Alchemical Wills Robert L. Caserio As I arranged the sequence of this issue’s table of contents, it struck me that Eric Keenaghan’s review essay sounded a keynote for all the items in the collection. I have adapted his title in order to suggest an underlying unity in jml 39.3. “The archive” represents for Keenaghan the historical site and the source material out of which an artist’s creative vision grows; and “the alchemical will” denominates an artist’s means of transforming and transcending that origin. In the scholarship that Keenaghan assesses, he finds evidence of the fit between art’s sources and their creative outcomes, and he also finds evidence of the lack of fit. The result is a tension in art and in criticism that our essayists repeatedly reveal. This tension is revealed in Greg Barnhisel’s study of James Laughlin, which reminds us that earlier writers’ works — Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s in Laughlin’s case — become archives for their successors. Laughlin (and John Berryman and Randal Jarrell), according to Barnhisel, respected his inspirational origins yet also willed a creative break from them. He and the others wanted to knock modernism off its stilts. In the case of Laughlin’s poetry, the will to change did not succeed — although it found, and founded, an archive of its own: New Directions and its publication list. John Berryman achieved success with his poetry, Ben Rogerson shows, but he ran up against a newly inhibiting historical site: academic employment and the academic writing program. The constraints imposed on Berryman by university patronage inhibited the creativity that the academy promised to promote. Can the alchemical will come to terms with its archive, and liberate itself simultaneously? The question presses itself forward here, with diverse answers. In Nick Levey’s study of Thomas Pynchon, novelistic tradition is the archive, and so is the Internet. Levey reads Inherent Vice as uneasy in relation to both (“there is more uneasiness than joy accompanying the hardening of technological power”). Allison E. Fagan’s essay on glossaries in Latina/o literature evokes an alchemical will inherent in translation. The will flouts the proximity of a translation to an archive: its language of origin. Levey and Fagan clearly emphasize art’s distance from its sources. In contrast, Michaela Bronstein’s theory of “first [End Page v] reading” proposes that, instead of establishing a distance between a text and a considered review of it, we should keep faith with the process we undergo in a page by page flow of reading response. Bronstein, one might say, wants to reduce, even to eliminate, the tension between source and outcome, especially if the latter is said to be explained by the former. “Explanation” might be only a factitious way of attaching creative phenomena to where they supposedly originate — another mode of archiving, in effect. Johanna Winant’s reading of Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” points out that Stein sees contingency resisting our impulses to know what the archive of facts only apparently tells. Still, we need to read on, searching for better ways to bridge the distance between founts of inspiration and their effects. Colleen Kropp’s review of J. Hillis Miller’s criticism reminds us of a powerful model of reading. Is Hillis Miller’s mode a complement to Michaela Bronstein’s, or a contrast? Future criticism might answer. It is to that prospective dimension — the alchemy of prospective scholarship — that the other reviewers address themselves. If Don James McLaughlin’s review of T.S. Eliot’s collected prose turns back to a powerful body of source texts, the source is, nevertheless, a new archive awaiting metamorphic scrutiny from newer comprehensions of modernism. Michael Dowdy’s review of Urayoán Noel’s “archiving” of Nuyorican poetry notes, along with Noel, that the poetry and performance at issue resists “reproduction and transcription,” and challenges “representational and documentary forms.” It’s a paradoxical archive, then, but one that “cleverly sets the stage for future scholars,” who will have to be clever to find a fit with the paradox. Christian Moraru’s review of Jean-Michel Rabate’s Crimes of the Future...