reading a collection of a collection of one man's souvenirs

This is a little story about someone else's collection, or at least a small portion of it (4/51 of it, to be exact). In this case, the the collection itself consisted of 51 reels of microfilm representing almost all of John Muir's correspondence, journals, unpublished manuscripts and collected illustrations and photographs found in various repositories (U of the Pacific, Berkeley, the Huntington, the State of Wisconsin, and many others). Actually, then, the "collection" collects other collections of one man's souvenirs (among other things). I sliced off the 4/51 that I needed, and from it I re-constructed an entirely different story than I thought I would, or perhaps was intended.

I should back up and assign some roles to these characters. Using terminology we saw in the excerpt from Stewart's Objects of Desire, the role of "collection" will be played by both the bulk of The John Muir Papers 1858-1957 and the four reels of microfilm that I borrowed. The role of "souvenir" will be played by the individual items Muir himself kept—correspondence to and from various people throughout his working and personal life. Stewart says "the past is at the service of the collection" but that the "souvenir lends authenticity to the past and the collection." I read that to mean, basically, that the collection is representative of the past when the context of origin is erased (it is taken out of it's time and place), and the souvenirs are parts of a collection that can be examined both individually and in this new context. This gets a little tricky when Stewart then goes on to say that the collection is not "constructed by its elements" but that "it comes to exist by means of its principle of organization." Ok, fine—these souvenirs of a time, place, conversation are organized entirely by the date on the document or, in the case of an undated document, an editor's (collector's) reconstruction of events such that the souvenir was put back into its time.

My goal was to extract a story from a subset of a subset of the collection; namely, I was to look at all the correspondence between Muir and one man in particular (Robert Underwood Johnson) over a period of 15 years or so. I had a "guide" to this collection, and it looked something like this excerpt:

1877 Sep 28 I A103101631
Dec 13 I A103101669
1878 Apr 24 I A/O3/01735
1879 Feb 19 I A103101851
1880 May 20 I A/04/02047
1881 May 21 I A104102247
1884 Oct 28 I A105102636
1889 Jun 22 I A/06/03258
Jun 27 1 A106103265
JuI 18 I A106103308
Aug 1 I A106103316
Aug 21 I A/06/03318
Sep 23 I A106103339
Nov 21 I A/06/03350
Dec 19 I A10610336

I had dates and reference numbers, and sat down with microfilm to "read" the collection linearly. My entry into the collection was forced—I couldn't wander in and start at any point I wanted. Instead, I had to start at the beginning of each roll of film and scroll through items not on my list—items to/from other people, following a storyline not applicable to what I wanted to discover.

Or so I thought.

Although I was experiencing a tightly constructed, highly organized collection with a single purpose in mind, the sheer act of stepping linearly (one dimension) through the film in fact reconstructed the context of one year, then another, and then even more (multi-dimensions). Stewart noted that when we "'see' the collection, we cannot possibly 'see' each of its elements," and that certainly is true in my case. I looked at the collection as a means to an end—it housed a set of elements (souvenirs) that I needed, but what it really did was create a series of new beginnings. I am not ashamed to say that I sat in the microfilm area of the library for several days over Thanksgiving Break and laughed and cried over letters marking events unrelated to what I was actually researching. The individual elements produced numerous narrative threads that I just had to follow—some to dead ends (literally: Helen Hunt Jackson asked Muir for advice regarding going to Yosemite from San Francisco for "health purposes" and Muir wrote back with info and then she wrote back, setting up a time to visit, and then she died, so that story ends) and some over years and years (letters from Muir's family in Wisconsin, asking him when he was coming for a visit, which he rarely did, but still they tried) and some which were one-offs (a random, unrelated man also named John Muir writes to the John Muir and says "hello there! we have the same name! are you any good?") and so on. None of those narrative threads were the one I originally intended to follow, but by the time I got a letter in the narrative I was following, so much context had already been created by these other items that I know I had a better understanding of the story I was actually after.

In addition to the sheaf of paper I took away from my time with the microfilm, I also got a new tattoo in the deal. Oh yeah, and new and exciting lines of inquiry. And also a deep desire to own all 51 of those microfilm reels for my very own.

i am a theory whore

One of my classmates calls me a theory whore (apparently she means it lovingly). My committee chair tells me I have a skillful way with both the discussion and creation of theory. I accept it, but believe me, "theory whore" is not a moniker I thought would ever be applied to me. I'm still in the process of coming to terms with it.

You see, I empathize with Geoff Dyer and his experiences with the Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence. I had my love of literature killed by theory during my first experience in graduate school, in the early 90s. As my profs threw reams of structuralist/post-structuralist/deconstructed criticism at my feet, all I wanted to do was kick it to the curb. During classes, profs privileged these works far more than the literary texts themselves. Reading became painful. Discussion was non-existent, as most of us sat there with mouths agape wondering just what the hell it was these people were talking about and, more importantly, why. Talking and talking and talking about the theory, and not the text, seemed at least antithetical to the reasons most of us went to grad school in the first place—many of us coming from undergrad institutions that had little to no formal theory component to our programs, and the only "theory" we got was through the common New Critical lens that we didn't really know had a name—and at the most pure blasphemy.

With my love and understanding of literature promptly squashed, I promptly withdrew from school.

But I went back, eventually, when the Great Theory Wars had subsided enough for literary studies to become somewhat sane again, and lo and behold I found out that some theory was actually useful and fun and—horror of horrors—sometimes elucidating! The difference in these two periods of instruction was simply the point of view of the instructors—not the critical school to which they belong, but their view of theory in general: useful, but potentially overused and definitely dangerous in the wrong hands. Wielded by the wrong hands, theory can kill literature, one's love for it, and the idealism that tends to along with being a graduate student. But in the right hands, when you try on that critical lens and find it doesn't give you a headache, then you'll see that theory doesn't always suck.

Dyer reminds me of the profs who allowed me the opportunity to rediscover my love of literature, because they didn't shove a critical viewpoint down my throat. These profs allowed me the opportunity to find the lens that fit, and thankfully it wasn't one of those crazy supermetaultrapostpostmodern ones. That is to say, I don't think Dyer is anti-theory—he's anti-theory-for-theory's-sake. He advocates several types of criticism in his diatribe against criticism: there's some New Historicism, some genre studies, a little bit of reader-response, and more than a little intertextuality and textual studies in there. So, while I'd love to rail against Dyer for being so anti-theory, he really isn't. Sorry, folks.

writing in the field

My primary scholarly interests revolve around people who wandered out into the wilderness and took in all it had to offer—new plants, a new point of view, a new sense of self. But their place is not my place; my apartment in Pullman or my condo in San Jose is not the top of Mt. Kataadn or the Yosemite Valley. Although true that I could sit in my place and write an acceptable academic essay about Transcendental themes in Select-a-Thoreau-Essay or in Unpublished-Muir-Journal-Entry, I believe that to do so would be somewhat disingenuous. To fully comprehend the place from which and about which "my" authors wrote, I had to go into the field.

Frieda Knobloch writes in Botanical Companions that the field "is an exotic or removed scene"; for my work, not only did I have to go into the field but I had to gather my specimens for later study and inspiration—that's a lot of science for an English major. Of course, I wasn't chipping away rocks or pulling up plants; instead, I had to ensure that in that brief moment in the field I could sear into my brain the images that "my" authors saw, and somehow bottle the emotions for later recollection (in tranquility, of course).

To write successfully about Muir's preservationist rhetoric, I had to experience just what it that moved him to the fiery, reverent tone he used. I needed to go to his place and determine for myself why Muir wrote that "God's glory is over all His works, written upon every field and sky, but here it is in larger letters—magnificent capitals."

I had a hunch that I wouldn't truly understand Muir's statement about "magnificent capitals" until I stood in Yosemite Valley and looked up at El Capitan.

I was right.