PROLOGUE

The Empty Cabinet

by Sue Waterman

I was prompted to ask: what is history? Is it an account of events set out and approved by a dominant culture? Or does history possess another door, other doors, to be opened by strangeness… To be opened as if such a door or doors within the self unlock themselves all of a sudden? The doors within the self witness to an architecture of which we know little. The dark jester. Wilson Harris

C’est une anthologie d’existences. Des vies de quelques lignes ou de quelques pages, des malheurs et des aventures sans nombre, ramassés en une poignée de mots. Vies brèves, rencontrées au hasard des livres et des documents[…] Des vies singulières, devenues, par je ne sais quels hasards, d’étranges poèmes, voilà ce que j’ai voulu rassembler en une sorte d’herbier. Vies miniscules. Pierre Michon

Table of Contents

Prologue…………………… Rocks ……………………….. Wings……………………….. Glass ……………………….. Paper ……………………….. Epilogue…………………….

5 7 28 50 71 99

Prologue

Par où commencer? - where to begin. This question lies at the heart of any writing enterprise - where do you begin to tell a story? With what person or event or description do you open your narrative? It is the same question that is asked on the opposite shore; not as the writer, but as the reader. Where do you begin to analyze a text, to understand it? As any student of French knows, the technique of explication de texte is a method of analyzing a literary text by taking it apart, piece by piece. Its goal is to make sense of the text, to explain the allusions and metaphors, the connections and the echoes, so that the overarching structure and meaning suddenly become not only apparent but absolutely necessary, inevitable. The question of where to begin in such an analysis is easily answered: Par où vous voulez. Wherever you want. The trick is simply to find a thread, and pull on it. Tirer sur un fil, is what you are told, n’importe lequel. The same can be said of writing.

The long course of this book was begun by pulling on a single thread, names I found scribbled on a pamphlet among a collection of hundreds of pamphlets – Selys Longchamps – and next to it another - d’Omalius d’Halloy. Two names written in ink, found by chance on a scrap of paper amid dozens of document boxes crammed with old paper, some of it crumbling, edges ragged from a long confinement: two names were enough to begin. A fill-in-the-blank form for the Annuaire de la Noblesse Belge from 1891 held the two names: Walter Selys Longchamps and J.-J. d’Omalius d’Halloy. As an intern at the Library of Congress in Washington many years ago, my project was to make sense of these boxes of documents, to put them in order. A collection of 19th century prospectuses, purchased by the Library a few years before, the boxes held pamphlets and brochures printed by French and Belgian publishers, announcing new books and journals, soliciting buyers and subscribers. Exactly where they came from, who had collected and kept them, and why, was unknown. I was hired to organize the paper and make it useful for researchers, by placing each individual pamphlet in a new folder, labeling each folder with a name, and entering its information into a database. I was to process the collection, as if these papery objects would somehow be transformed into something other than what they had been. Over 1300 individual folders, over six months of work in the Jefferson Building on a project that should have ended with my internship. I would walk away, the job done, the paper remaining behind. However, my curiosity was aroused by those two names, and I began to do research, which 20 years ago meant searching in library catalogs for books about or by the men I had found by chance amid all that yellowing paper. Several years later, when the Internet was only beginning to be useful as a research tool, I cast their names into the randomness of the online environment, fishing for whatever arbitrary connections I could make. And I found something, enough to keep me going, enough to write something, and then to write a little bit more. The names I found belonged to two members of a prominent family in 19th century Belgium, a country long divided along two linguistic lines: French and Flemish. Walter de Selys Longchamps was the grandson of Jean-Julien d’Omalius d’Halloy, who had been a well-known geologist of the early 19th century. Walter’s father, Michel-Edmond de Selys Longchamps had been the president of the Belgian Senate and a prominent naturalist, and had married the eldest daughter of Omalius. The collection at the Library of Congress, my project, had come from the library at the Chateau d’Halloy, an estate outside Namur in French-speaking Belgium. Begun in the early 19th century by Omalius and then continued into the early 20th century, first by his sonin-law Michel-Edmond, and later by his grandson Walter, this was my first collection. The others followed as I continued to research these men: natural history specimens collected by Michel-Edmond, the geology collection of Omalius that must have once existed, and lastly, found by that random Internet search, a collection of photographs taken by the oldest son of Michel-Edmond, by Walter’s older brother, Raphaël. These collections are typical, each in their own way, of 19th century collecting activities, and represent the ultimate evolution of the cabinets of curiosities from earlier centuries. Those vast collections of disparate objects, both natural and artificial, had been ransacked by the 19th century, dispersed into separate layers, and organized into discreet series.

Where does the outside commence? This question is the question of the archive. There are undoubtedly Archive fever. Jacques Derrida no others.

It is invisible, the link that threads its way from the beginning of the project, through its completion, and into its expansion as I discovered more collections. The link in fact existed before I ever set eyes on those boxes. At first I thought it merely serendipity, being chosen for the project at the Library of Congress over other applicants. But in reality the choice was driven by a single factor – the French language. I spoke French. I have never said it aloud, but I have always known this: one of my most prized possessions is the French language itself. Like a room where I can go and close the door, a space apart that contains the memories of someone I once was, for me the French language, incarnated in the city of Paris, is a geographical place, as well as many points in time.

On the other hand, the collection offers us a paradigm of perfection, for this is where the passionate enterprise of possession can achieve its ambitions, within a space where the

everyday prose of the object-world modulates into poetry, to institute an unconscious and triumphant discourse. (a)

At first glance, the Belgian collections are disparate, and maybe even idiosyncratic. The fact that the collectors themselves are related, three successive generations of 19th century Belgian nobility, is enough to begin to examine their activities, but the blood relationship may be a tenuous thread indeed in tying together these collections. The oldest one, rocks, is dispersed and lost. Nothing remains of it save a single piece of paper in an archive in Brussels. The second, extensive and carefully preserved, consists of animal, bird, and insect specimens, reverently stored in a natural history museum, also in Brussels. The third, photographs, when formed was not even a collection in any material sense of the word, but now exists as one, and so properly named, le fonds Selys Longchamps, in the Museum of Photography in Charleroi. And the last, paper pamphlets, against all odds was collected, saved, and preserved, passed down somehow from person to person until purchased by the Library of Congress in Washington, where it now is known as the “Archive of French Publishing Prospectuses”. Four very different collections, collected by grandfather, father, and two sons, moving from rocks (lost) at the beginning of the century, to paper (carefully preserved) at century’s end. While of vastly different character: animal and mineral, solid and paper, text and image, organic and inorganic, analog and digital, they were nonetheless as good a place as any to begin.

The living past cannot rise up from the dead and speak to us like dead stones…We must pick our way among the remains, wrestle with and conjure the ghosts of the past, ply them with patient importunity in order to reconstruct the best story we can. The prayers and tears of Jacques Derrida. John Caputo

One of the most difficult things to grasp when studying the French language is the nature and use of the imperfect tense. Ce temps cruel, as Proust called it, whose use for him was une source inépuisable de mystérieuses tristesses.(1) One is taught to use it for a past action that continues into the present, or something that occurs over and over in the past, or a state-of-being that once existed, or something that occurred at an indefinite time, with an indefinite end. The vagueness of the grammatical rules seems to reflect the vagueness expressed by the verb tense itself. Eventually though one learns it, l’imparfait, not the conjugation, which is easy enough, but the sense of it. A peculiar mode of conjuring the past, it allows the subject to float there, allows the past to bubble imperceptibly to the surface of the present, lets it drift in and out of focus, and enables the presence of a lost trace to linger on, imperfectly. On many levels, my connection to Paris has subsisted in the imperfect tense. First glimpsed as black and white images on a scratchy filmstrip when I was very young, later a city where I lived and studied, then left behind, and finally a place to which I have returned over and

over again, Paris is a hidden layer of my life that becomes present at certain junctures in time, like a layer of granite becomes visible in certain landscapes. What does it mean to be haunted by a place? Is it any different than being haunted by a particular class of objects? The four collections of long dead Belgian men that I have so meticulously studied and pursued for 20 years have provided the means for reimagining my obsession with Paris, and building my own singular, spectral collection.

The Archive is this kind of place, a place that is to do with longing and appropriation. It is to do with wanting things that are put together, collected, collated, named in lists and indices; a place where a whole world, a social order, may be imagined by the recurrence of a name in a register, through a scrap of paper, or some other little piece of flotsam. The space of memory. Carolyn Steedman

It is one thing to unravel a tapestry by pulling on one thread; it is quite another to weave the many threads of your life into this strange tapestry. Anything - any name, any subject, any question could have sent me down the obsessive path of research. There is no significance to these men; their lives are a pretext, literally, something coming before the text I have undertaken to write. And the text? It has more to do with collecting, with traces, and with time, than with the men themselves. For it is time more than anything else that is woven between the spaces of a collection, and it is time that I have tried to stall, here, with these men and their objects, stall it long enough that it becomes transfixed, begins to crystallize around them, and makes of ordinary objects of unremarkable men an Archive, from which I have written a story. Told in layers and pieces, it is many stories, fragmented. And it is a collection of texts held together, as all collections are, by the vision and the heart of the collector.

Vitae

Jean-Baptiste Julien d’Omalius d’Halloy. 1783-1875 Belgian geologist and statesman, author of several books and many articles on geology; also wrote on the races of man and transformism (evolution). Devout Catholic and politically conservative, he served as governor of Namur during the Dutch regime, then for many years as a Senator in the Belgian Senate; 19 years as Vice-President. Eschewing geological theory, he carefully described rock formations and distributions in his writings, traveling over much of Europe on foot. Produced the 1st geological map of western Europe, and was recognized during his lifetime as one of the Fathers of Geology.

Michel-Edmond de Selys Longchamps. 1813-1900 Son-in-law of d’Omalius d’Halloy whom he considered as a true father; marrying his eldest daughter Sophie-Caroline. Renowned during his lifetime as a naturalist and collector, specialized in dragonflies and titmice, although he collected all forms of fauna. Also a wellbeloved politician who served as President of the Belgian Senate. Said to have lived simply and without ostentation; dedicated to his family, to his many responsibilities, and to the republican ideals of the French Revolution. Published one book (Faune belge) and numerous articles, and faithfully kept a detailed diary all his life.

Raphaël de Selys Longchamps, 1841-1911 Eldest son of Michel-Edmond and father of 6 children. Lived a relatively undistinguished but honorable life, managing several large estates including the Chateau de Longchamps. Became an amateur photographer in 1876 and was a member of the Association Belge de Photographie, leading the Liège section for many years. He used the wet collodion process, producing glass negatives, but also experimented with many cameras and techniques. Hundreds of his prints and glass negatives survive.

Walter (or Walthère) de Selys Longchamps. 1846-1912 Younger of Michel-Edmond’s 2 sons., Walter can be described as the “black sheep” of the family. While he ended his life as a Senator and well respected landowner, living out his days at the Chateau d’Halloy, he participated in radical student protests in Brussels while a university student, and lived for many years in exile from Belgium, in Paris and Switzerland. His extreme views on politics, religion, and sexuality set him apart for many years, not only from polite society, but from his own family as well.

NOTES

a. Baudrillard, Jean. “The system of collecting.” The cultures of collecting. Ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. London: Reaktion Books 1997, 8. 1. Proust, Marcel. Pastiches et mélanges. Paris: Gallimard, 1970, 221-2. [J’avoue que certain emploi de l’imparfait de l’indicatif – de ce temps cruel qui nous présente la vie comme quelque chose d’éphémère à la fois et du passif, qui, au moment même où il retrace nos actions, les frappe d’illusions, les anéantit dans le passé sans nous laisser comme le parfait la consolation de l’activité – est resté pour moi une source inépuisable de mystérieuses tristesses.]

COUNTERTEXTS Derrida, Jacques. Archive fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1996, 8. [Mais où commence Le dehors? Cette question est la question de l’archive. Il n’en est sans doute pas d’autre.]

Caputo, John. The prayers and tears of Jacques Derrida. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 274. Steedman, Carolyn. “The space of memory: in an archive.“ History of the Human Sciences. 11:4 (1998). 76.

IMAGES Prospectus. Analectes Belgiques, ou, Recueil de pièces inédites mémoires, notices, faits et anecdotes concernant l'histoire des Pays-Bas. Paris: L.P.Gachard, 1830. The George Peabody Library, The Sheridan Libraries, The Johns Hopkins University. Postcard of Paris/Eiffel Tower in fog. 1910. Author’s collection Photograph of Paris/Pont Neuf. 1975. Author’s photograph