In The Writing of History Michel DeCerteau evokes this amazing image of history and the writing of history, (ie. historiography) as a collection of dead bodies and ghosts inhabiting the present. He says the “dear departed find a haven in the text because they can neither speak nor do harm anymore. These ghosts find access through writing on the condition that they remain forever silent” (2). Here he points out how the past gains access to the present through the supposed immortality of the written word. However, that immortality requires a death in order to exist in the present. In a way spending time reading book and researching in an archive is communing with the dead.
I had an odd experience today when my “ghosts” suddenly switched identities on me.
I’m rehashing some previous research I was working on last fall about the YWCA in Minneapolis. I’m looking at how exercise for women at the turn of the century gave rise to women’s athletics, in a nutshell. So, I began transposing the monthly and annual reports written by the first director of physical training at the Minneapolis YWCA which begins around 1892. The first director was Abby Mayhew. Last fall I transcribed a couple of her entries in this journal of reports. Part of my goal this summer was to transcribe all of these reports.
First of all, I have to say that working with material this old is really interesting because the reports are all handwritten. As a result, the author’s body appears in ways that you can’t access with typewritten material. For instance, I can see all the moments when the ink in her pen begins to run out and she has to dip it back in the ink. Today I kept wondering how this affected her thought train. Did people think in different ways as they wrote? Stream of consciousness writing must have been a different mode.
As I’m going through these and typing them into my computer (also an interesting connection between this woman’s hand writing the words on the page and mine typing words into a computer) the writing breaks for several pages. There are probably like six or so pages that are blank. Then suddenly it starts up again, only the handwriting is different, the voice is different, even the pressure of the pen to the paper is different, and the entries are signed, “Respectfully submitted, Abby S. Mayhew.”
I pause. Wait a minute…she wasn’t writing before?
This identity whose body had so clearly been coming to me through her handwriting suddenly changed. Beside the fact that I’d already written a paper where I cited the earlier entries as if they had been entered by Abby Mayhew. Then my head began to buzz. What if neither is really her but an assistant who entered all the reports into a common log? Bascially enacting the same scenario I was transcribing someone else’s words into a convenient and easily accessible file?
I began to wonder about authorship and ownership. If these entries were compiled by multiple people could I still assert they represent the philosophies of Mayhew’s gym? Do I need to radically shift and discuss them much more amorphously and potentially homogenously as “the methods of the department of physical training” referring to them as a collective?
Then DeCerteau comes back at me again. For him writing about history “liberates the present without having to name it. Thus it can be said that writing makes the dead so the living can exist elsewhere” (101). Ouch. It’s all about me, really.
So how do I handle this dead body that speaks to me and through me not only with words, but with the pressure of the pen, the breaks to re-ink, the haste, the apathy, the sceintific fervor that the body of the words reveal about the body of their author?
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