Monthly Archives: February 2016

This week, my encounter with the Olive Allen Biller fonds unearthed questions about personality, performance, and authorial intent in what are typically considered ‘ordinary’ or ‘personal’ forms of writing. In her introduction to The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing, Jennifer Sinor contextualizes that, canonically speaking, narrative and story are the elements that distinguish “ordinary writing” from other more valued forms of literary works. Sinor remarks that the narrative lens through which we tend to approach and understand all forms of writing, further divides texts into those which are “crafted”, and those which are not – namely, ordinary diurnals (Sinor 6).

This reductive line of distinction being drawn between genres of writing has inherent consequences. The artificial binary, either/or approach imposed on how we view narrative in literary works effectively denies a writer authorial intent. However, as Sinor hopes to make visible in her reading of Annie Ray’s diary, personal documents and ordinary writings do participate in a process of story-telling: “of the self presenting or representing the self” (Hobbs 131). To me was clearly apparent in Olive Allen Biller’s collection of “ordinary” documents.

Allen Biller’s fonds included pocket-book diaries documenting day to day happenings, journals which recorded summer vacations in Trebarfoot, artwork, illustrations, poems, and photographs of both her time in England and Canada. While these documents may be classified generically as “personal”, not once as I was reading Biller’s journals did I have a moment where I felt I was encroaching on the individual’s privacy. In fact, the Trebarfoot Volumes were arranged in a way that would suggest Biller clearly intended these journals to be viewed and appreciated by eyes other than her own. A clearly meticulous, detailed, and aesthetic hand went into the creation of these journals. The lettering was polished and legible, decorative markings embroidered the pages, and there was a clearly intentional authorial voice emitted from the words on the page. Sketches, illustrations, poems and other works were included to further suggest that for Olive, such an ordinary genre was nothing but ordinary (in the canonical understanding of the term). Her Trebarfoot Volumes were something akin to a communal scrapbook in its layout and aesthetics. While the unstructured, scrapbook-like arrangement oftentimes made context difficult to follow as a reader not privy to the full details of Allen Biller’s day, the inclusion of photographs and signatures provided the journal’s potential reader with a fuller picture of vacation happenings.

I want to draw attention to evidence of authorial intent found Trebarfoot Volume 1, where Olive Allen Biller seems to be offering a commentary on the very practice of journaling. After providing a simple, daily log of activities occurring over the course of two-weeks, where the weather and evening pass-times were briefly recorded in point form, Olive writes:

“By the amount of snow, drizzle, and downright rain entered in this journal, the uninitiated might think we didn’t have a jolly time – but we did. Log fires are hosts in themselves. It takes a lot of people to blow them and pull them down, pile them up again, fetch more…”.

Allen Biller clearly appears to be addressing someone in her journals. After her previous, point-form mentions of daily remarks, Olive takes the time to further explain her two weeks for the “uninitiated” (us, the reader and researcher) in a more literary way.

Here’s is another example of Olive’s authorial intent surfacing in her ordinary writings:

“Nobody kept a journal. Perhaps five weeks of everyday doings might become a stale read. However, some of the principle events are chronicled in a certain blue diary…but she didn’t write it up…consequently much valuable information has been lost”.

Olive Allen Biller’s intent in creating these journals becomes evident as she addresses the potential reader -“the uninitiated”. These instance of personal, ordinary writing appear to be a deliberate attempts to create and memorialize the “self”.  The creation of the “self” within personal archives, whether elaborate, mundane, authentic, or fabricate, is a narratological construction, similar to that seen in literary works. As Sue McKemmish and Catherine Hobbs’ argue, personal archives are “narratives of the self”.

Works Cited:

Allen Biller, Olive. 1890- c.1950. Box 1. RBSC-ARC-1033 Olive Allen Biller Fonds. University of British Columbia Rare Books and Special Collections, University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver. 23 February 2016.

Hobbs, Catherine. “The Character of Personal Archives: Reflections on the Value of Records of Individuals.” Archivaria 52 (2001): 126-135. Web. 28 February 2016.

Sinor, Jennifer. The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray’s Diary. Iowa City: U of Iowa, 2002. Project MUSE. Web. 28 Feb. 2016.

After reading French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s seminal work, Archive Fever, I resolved to be cautious in seeking “origin”, “essence”, or inject meaning in the organization of the fonds in this week’s encounter with the archives. In other words, I planned on resisting “the irrepressible desire to return to the origin” (Derrida 57).  Because, as Derrida posits, will we ever really know if the origin resides in the archival documents, or if the archive is merely an external trace of the original inscription, which essentially remains hidden in the archive’s subconscious? Coupled with the insight provided by Douglas and MacNeil that I referred to in my last post, reading the archival fonds in order to gain a deeper understanding of the creator and their archival intent is perhaps a futile and ultimately impenetrable endeavour (Derrida 35). Furthermore, it cannot be refuted (especially for those archives which are closed and their creators long gone): our encounters in the archive are “monologues”, so to speak. So, in approaching my encounter with Anne Blades’ archives at UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library this week, I came prepared with a different set of questions.

To be honest, I had never heard of Anne Blades before. However, after doing some research into her work as an author and illustrator of children’s books set in British Columbia, I was interested in uncovering how Anne managed to capture and illustrate those secondary, canonically marginalized voices that emerge from her collaboration with an author who wrote a fictional tale about the experience of indigenous children in the earlier half of the 20th century.

Interpreting Box 7 of the Anne Blade Fonds was like reading a novel whose plot develops in a non-sequential manner. The box includes a series of sketches, drawings, and watercolour paintings, royalty documents, correspondences, and manuscripts relating to her work illustrating Jean Speare’s  A Candle for Christmas (1986). It includes evidence of many (at times indiscernible) voices: publishers, authors, illustrators, editors, managers, and printers. Often times there were no markings to indicate whose revisions were scribbled in the margins of manuscripts, or whose notes were attached to documents and sketches.

The way in which the contents of box 7 were revealed was in no way chronological, but nevertheless exciting. For every file I read, my understanding of the collection of archives and its contents shifted. Just as Derrida argues that archival meaning occurs in the retrospective, it was only overtime that a comprehensive understanding of Anne Blades’ materials was established (Derrida 30).

Reflecting on each new “revelation”, and the excitement of finally assimilating the contents of the box, I caught myself…Derrida was right. I was succumbing to the archive fever I had initially vowed to avoid in my archival encounters this week. So much for trying…there really is something ‘feverish’ about digging into the unknown.

While the contents of Box 7 were rather intriguing, I would like to connect Derrida’s Archive Fever to my archival encounters on a more macro level. While I could provide for you a ‘reading’ of the Anne Blades fonds that would hopefully give you a profound understanding of her work as an artist, my encounter with the archive is simply an act of interpretation. A psychoanalytic reading of Anne’s archive represses the possible meaning in the archival objects themselves. It places precedence on the “matriarchal” figure, ignoring the numerous and equally (if not more) important voices within the texts that document the production of Speare’s book A Candle for Christmas. This is a book where many individuals had a hand in its fruition. Anne Blades was only the illustrator. The box contained much more than merely evidence of her contributions and artistic process. Three revised drafts of Speare’s story were included, where over revisions, key figures are altered due to editorial suggestion (i.e. the nurse in the final draft was initially a nun). The documents of Box 7 demonstrate and document a truly egalitarian collaboration. Stressing psychoanalytical importance on the “creator’s” fonds, in this case, doesn’t seem right.

In thinking ahead to this weeks article by Kimberly Christen, those indigenous voices that murmur in the background of this collection are called to attention. What do we make of those voices which have not been offered a chance to speak, or are being spoken for without documented consent?

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques, and Eric Prenowitz. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics 25.2 (1995): 9-63. Web. 8 Feb. 2016.