Today, I’d like to welcome Carolyn Korsmeyer as guest author.

Carolyn Korsmeyer is both a novelist and a philosopher. She is especially interested in how the senses and emotions are engaged by works of art, themes prominent in three of her philosophy books: Things: In Touch with the Past, Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics, and Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy. She is keen to explore the ways that fiction can revive lives from long ago by engaging the reader in the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the past. Her first novel, Charlotte’s Story, imagines the life that Charlotte Lucas (of Pride and Prejudice) might have had after her hasty marriage. Little Follies is her second novel.

Details about Korsmeyer’s work can be found at her website: www.carolynkorsmeyer.com.

Thank you, Carolyn.

Exploring Archives

Carolyn Korsmeyer

There’s a place in many libraries set off from the main stacks that harbors remnants of the lives of those long gone: the archive. It is a treasure trove for historical novelists and for anyone else curious about the past. These days one can do a good deal of archival research remotely, since many collections have digitized their holdings and make them available online. This is a great boon for those in a hurry or unable to travel. Sitting at your computer, however, is hardly as enchanting as being in a place where you can handle the books that others read, turn pages that they turned, leaf through their correspondence, and see the marks that scanners might have left behind.

A character in my novel, Little Follies: A Mystery at the Millennium, is an archive lover. Adam is a historian delving into the document collection of a (fictional) museum in Krakow, Poland, and in the course of his research, he becomes enthralled with the writings of his eighteenth-century subject—not only his words, but also the traces of the man who wrote them. The individual personality of the handwriting, the cross-outs and smudges, and the drops of ink left on a page all captivate him and vivify a near-forgotten history. His affinity with the writings left by this man is so intense that it prompts an irresistible temptation. . .

Although I share few attributes with the fictional Adam, it was easy for me to imagine how enthralled he became with his old documents. I first explored archives myself some years ago when I researched a project on amateur drawing manuals—books for both children and untrained adults that instructed them how to sketch and paint. Once hugely popular, they came in different forms, from long, unillustrated books that relied on text alone, to simpler (and more useful) illustrated manuals, and even to sets of cards with outlines to trace and copy. Such instruction materials were often used by school children, who sometimes left their own unwitting testimonies to posterity. “I hate these cards!” declared one child in heavily inked capital letters marching up a margin. Another revised a template drawing of a person walking away by adding a sketch of a piece of paper pinned on his back that reads: “Kick me!” This kind of color commentary may escape digitization, for which unmarred copies are preferable; but it brings the schoolroom of the past vividly alive.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post for an institute at my university, intending (somewhat huffily) to set the record straight about its foundation by discussing a now-forgotten precursor organization. In order to decorate my piece with images of posters that I recalled sending to the university archive two decades before, I sat down at one of those solid, wide tables so perfect for research and ordered the relevant files. To my surprise, in addition to the documents I was looking for, I found memos and letters that I had written myself as well as copious margin notes in my own handwriting—little of which I remembered. Gossipy complaints penned to colleagues since departed, reminders to distribute flyers, discarded drafts, and enigmatic exclamation marks for points now lost to mind. It all brought back the energy of that time—the frequent and exhausting meetings, the exhilaration, the alternating rhythm of set-back and progress.

Those files appeared older than in fact they were, because shortly after these materials were assembled, such endeavors were largely accomplished by e-mail communication and by means of file-sharing programs. Had I merely donated digital files to the archive (if I had even kept them, for it is easy to press the delete key when a task is finished), how much blander would that record have been.

Not only is additional, sometimes literally marginal, information available from original materials, studying the actual papers others have left behind can deliver an extra reward. As Adam prepares to leave Krakow, he ruminates on the trouble he caused himself with his research and wonders if in the future the documents he studied might be digitized, giving later scholars easier access to old texts. He does not even remotely envy that possibility, for those future researchers would never experience the physical intimacy that he had been granted when he held in his hands the writings of a man long gone. Being in an archive reminds us that sometimes it isn’t only the act of reading old books and papers that we cherish; touching them carries its own thrill as well.