The Raiders and Writers of Cervantes' Archive

Citation

Cimino, A. (2010), "The Raiders and Writers of Cervantes' Archive", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 5, pp. 371-373. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011047073

The Raiders and Writers of Cervantes' Archive is an interesting descent into the secret world of archives, being now invaded and scoured as potentially traumatic experiences. Paul Kong delves into a process of re‐definition of such “wells” of knowledge, re‐structuring them in terms of a psychic entity from which subconscious or unconscious material may emerge.

The author focuses on how time itself might be re‐thought in accordance with Lyotard's distinction between “presenting present”, thus the actual present time, and “presented present”, thus the so‐called past. To people like González Echevarría, this opposition makes the archive a place of primeval instincts, feuds with the collective conscience, and ultimately a kingdom for absolute patriarchy accepting no other law than the one self‐imposed (p. 11).

The archive is re‐constituted not just a mere physical space, but rather as a frightening maze of a totalising and dominating nature, digesting, as Foucault argues, “all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes” (p. 14), but no longer guaranteeing the possibility for all of its information to be preserved.

Paul Kong also discusses Derrida's view of a “mal d'archive”, stressing the ambivalent nature of the archive as a shelter for concealing rather than just preserving, and how it may end up working “anarchivically”, that is, attempting to devour and disguise what is there to be safeguarded.

Archives are hence re‐established as psychic plateaux of “disappropriated consciousness”, where writers and readers are stripped of their monolithic roles and grow gradually more similar, approaching a common ground of exchange, up to the point of an eventual invasion of each other.

Cervantes' “archive” thus comes on the scene as an originating source for a series of literary mechanisms affecting many other authors such as Borges, Puig, and García Márquez, but also Umberto Eco and William Wordsworth. Indeed many of Cervantes' literary artifices are found duplicated in the works of other raiders, namely, tropelía, the “art of making one thing appear as another” (p. 39), the witch as a potentially threatening being with alluring looks and/or truths, and the cave as a place of perdition, some kind of macro‐symptom of an allegory propelled to the extreme or a reality violating the canons typically admitted as unchangeable.

The author manages to keep all these potential logical inconsistencies by a wise and engaging play of hide‐and‐seek, which the above‐mentioned writers resort to in order to disguise their intellectual debts to Cervantes. Actually the most strikingly riveting aspect of Kong's work is his ability to endeavour never to lose the focus of his analysis getting himself entangled in an archival cobwebs of cultural, philosophical, sociological, and of course literary (cross‐) references. His archives are thus raided, and sometimes despoiled, when identifying surprisingly compelling similarities between the boredom‐avoiding and eventually lust‐stirring conversations between Molina and Paz in Puig's Dialogue with the Spider Woman, and the life‐saving charming eloquence of characters like Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights, as well as with Cervantes' Cañizares (The Dialogue of the Dogs), and in a more grotesquely disturbing way, with María Alejandrina Cervantes in Chronicle of a Death Foretold by García Márquez.

Paul Kong problematises the archive as a dualistic source of power and delight but yet horrid, and violent because of its transgressive and trespassing shifts opposing real and non‐real, “fictionality and factuality”, leading the reader to wonder, for instance, if the homosexual intercourse in Puig's novel is to be interpreted as a real change in sexual tastes or as a libidinous consequence of Molina's raided and despoiled archive of true and invented stories. The future of archives is then projected as an accentuated continuation of their past ambiguity, now backed up by the ever‐metamorphosing pliant reality of the Internet, the twenty‐first century real archive of cultural reluctance and pervading availability.