Romps with Ransom’s King: Fans, Collectors, Academics, and the M. P. Shiel Archives

Abstract

HOUSING THE ARCHIVES OF SUCH NOTABLE LITERARY FIGURES as Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, and Oscar Wilde, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas is a Mecca for academic researchers from all over the world. At the same time, it is a Mecca for a very different kind of researcher attracted to a very different kind of archive. Take Alex, for example, a self-professed goth who describes his pilgrimage to the Ransom Center to view the Aleister Crowley archives in his blog, Alex's Journal. (1) Among his other interests cited on the user info page, Alex lists death metal, body piercing, drinking, comics hurting peoples brains [sic], debauchery, subdural haematomas, and weirding out weird people. The sheer eccentricity of the Ransom's collections--which include high literary, mass cultural, and even counter-cultural material--make it a place where a professor earnestly poring over a Joyce manuscript might rub shoulders with a like Alex who describes his research on Crowley as having fun and taking some cool notes. In other words, it is a place where the academic and the come face to face. The essay that follows discusses this confrontation between the academic and the in the archive--not in a literal way--but through the story of the archive of M. P. Shiel, an obscure writer of mystery, detective, horror, science fiction and other popular genres. His archives at the Ransom Center owe their existence entirely to a select few fans of Shiel--namely, a drunken bibliophile and a right-wing millionaire plastics manufacturer--figures who, like Alex, present a stark contrast to the earnest academics we normally associate with archives. In telling the story of this archive, the essay considers the differing discourses of the academic and the and how these discourses come into conflict when fans become implicated with archives, when fans engage in scholarship, and when the academic confronts the inside him- or herself. At the same time, it reveals how the Ransom Center became the kind of eclectic research institution that would consider creating archives devoted not only to renowned literary and cultural figures, but also to popular and mass cultural figures, from the more enduring and notorious of these--such as Crowley--to the most obscure and forgotten--such as Shiel. Academic, Fan, and Collector Discourse One of the reasons the image of the earnest Joyce scholar rubbing shoulders with the goth of Crowley in the Ransom Center is so amusing is that implicitly we recognize the stark contrast between the ethos of the academic and that of the fan. Before going on to discuss how the Shiel archives bring academics and fans into conflict, I will briefly summarize the discourses that define the academic and the fan. I will also describe the discourse of another figure central to the existence of archives, one who bears a close relationship to the fan--the collector. While academics, fans, and collectors may be broadly characterized as having in common a deep investment in culture, there are great differences in what Matt Hills calls the imagined subjectivities of these distinct groups or, the guiding discourses and ideals of they adopt (8). (2) Broadly speaking, academic culture is founded on Enlightenment principles which value reason over emotion, objectivity over subjectivity (Jensen 21, Frith 581). An academic would never, for example, describe his or her archival experience as taking cool notes, as Alex, the fan, does. Fans, who have a strong emotional engagement with and who express enthusiasm for their areas of interest, do not fare well under such a discourse. (3) The term fan itself, a term derived from the word fanatic, suggests a form of engagement with culture antithetical to that of the reasoning and objective academic. Fandom, as Joli Jensen, Lawrence Grossberg, Matt Hills, and others have argued, has tended to be pathologized by academics and this practice has served to uphold an elitist us/them dichotomy between forms of engagement with cultural life. …