Literature and the Archive: The Biography of Texts

Abstract

In this chapter I track the story of a literary text, the first novel written by a black woman in South Africa. This novel by Miriam Tlali was published in 1975 under the title Muriel at Metropolitan.1 Written by Tlali on a typewriter and now lodged in the archive of the National English Literary Museum (NELM) collection in Grahamstown, South Africa, the manuscript gives the original title of the book: I Am Nothing. The difference between the two titles is immediately striking: the new title does not reflect the spirit of the original title in any way. It is the sense of extremity that is lost, the notion of not being worth anything that is absent in the much more placid Muriel at Metropolitan.2 This difference, reflected in the two titles, marks the two texts throughout. How did I Am Nothing come to be Muriel at Metropolitan ? In the first part of this essay I discuss the two texts, one unpublished and yellowing in a makeshift folder and the other a now out-of-print but well-known novel, looking at what was left out and what was put in, and why that might have been. I focus on excision — the multiple excisions that mark the biography of Muriel at Metropolitan. I then move to a discussion of the questions for literature and for the archive that these and other texts raise. I argue that South African literature and the literary archive have been badly served by the mixture of belles-lettristic and New Critical formative pedagogical influences that paid little attention to the materiality and context of texts. In the third section, I move from the notion of excision to the notion of excess. I argue that the archive constantly moves between these two orders — excision and excess: between that which limits and that which is limitless. Finally, I consider how we can use the fecundity, the instability, of literary texts to rethink our notion of the archive itself: how we can project the dynamism of the literary project back onto the archive so that the border between the literary text and the archive begins to shift and refigure.