Diagnosing Sandwyk

This week, I had the pleasure of digging through the fonds of internationally-renowned artist and author Charles van Sandwyk. Since the 1980’s, UBC’s Rare Book and Special Collections has been collecting his works, which include printmaking, watercolor and calligraphy. Sandwyk produces small-press publications as well as original works of art. A native of South Africa, Charles divides his time between Deep Cove, North Vancouver and the islands of Fiji.

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Print (RBSC-ARC-1713-2-2)

Box 2 (RBSC-ARC-1713-2) stood out particularly because its odd shape promised to hold some unconventional contents. I was not disappointed. Though rather large and cumbersome, the beautiful hand-drawn prints within were well worth all the unwrapping and rewrapping. More importantly, from my digs, I found traces in Sandwyk’s work which both speak to and against Jacque Derrida’s ground- breaking essay “Archive Fever.”

In File 2, Sandwyk recounts the origins of Savuti Press, a private press he formed with Waisiki Doughty. Savuti is named after one of their favourite hideouts in Fiji. He fondly recalls Jack Savuti’s house, a colonial sugar planter’s cottage itself originally built on the island of Suva that was taken apart and moved to Navuti, then finally “dragged piece by piece” and reassembled in Savuti by Jack’s sister Lucy. Like Derrida, for Sandwyk, this house is a metaphor for memory—the psychological archive. He writes (of this new press), “… we would like to try our hand at cobbling together some reminiscences from the nearly forgotten early years of south sea island life” (boldface added). In his essay, Derrida describes archive fever as the “compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire… to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (91). Sandwyk, in his desire to “cobble together” memory, shows telltale symptoms of this disease.

Savuti Point via Getty Images

Savuti Point via Getty Images

Yet, perhaps this is too simplistic a reading, for the way in which Sandwyk’s house exemplifies Derrida’s assertions prove uncanny. Jack Savuti’s repeatedly re-constructed shack neatly illustrates how entwined in the desire to archive is a cyclical force: the archive is the retention of a specific origin through repetition. Furthermore, the colonial history of the hut also gesture to what Derrida identifies as the originary violence of the “patriarchontic” archive as an institutional and ideological site: Law and authority has inscribed itself into nature from the start. Finally, the decrepit nature of this shack speaks to the distortion enacted by the archviolithic archive. Derrida brilliantly demonstrates that every hypomnesic memory (unconscious memory or archival memory) is not only a reminding memory but a distorted one, since according to Freud, we can only understand violence and trauma in its distorted form. These three factors taken into consideration, if we pursue a physiognomical reading of this house, then the ‘historical foundation’ of this press itself seems very much cognizant of archive fever.

Sandwyk continues, “We began this venture with the hopes of printing our artistic endeavours and philosophical wanderings on exquisite papers, and in small editions. Like the spit of land the press is named for, this is where our cultural tides converge, and where we mix the familiar with the new.” By recognizing the intertwining of familiar and foreign, of memory and philosophy, the founders confirm Derrida’s assertion that the archive cannot remain outside what it memorializes. Also included in this notion is that the relationship between the archive and what it archives is fluid. Derrida writes, “the technical structure of the archiving archive [which] also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event” (17).

Although Sandwyk and Doughty began publishing to establish an archive of their memories, they also recognized the potential and the inherent nature of the archiving technology to create, produce, and inspire new memories. Even in succumbing to archive fever, Sandwyk continues to resist it.

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  1. Hi Beatrice, this is a really great interpretation of some of van Sandwyk’s materials and I think you apply Derrida beautifully here. I’m intrigued by van Sandwyk’s own words about the “cobbling together” of memory. This suggests a necessary fragmentary quality, something disconnected and nearly forgotten being pieced back together. I wonder if it is not only van Sandwyk’s case of archive fever, but archive fever in general, that inherently contains within itself some notion of “cobbling together.” Would the “compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire” of archive fever exist in this incarnation if the act of remembering was easy? Perhaps archive fever always entails this kind of struggle — to borrow from Milan Kundera’s words, the struggle of memory against forgetting.

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