2Two distinct examples of character construction that illustrate these concepts of the archive are the titular characters of Thomas Pynchon’s V. and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The two canonical novels provide a case study for the cultural function of memory in terms of the characteristics of the archive. The elements of memory are corporeally manifested in the body of the title characters whose function is the same, to mirror this process of the archival function within the realms of narrative. They represent the connection between mere thought and physical manifestation, the dead come to life, the word made flesh. So finally, although both characters are archival, the consequences of their construction and inscription actually diverge and reveal two distinct and somewhat contradictory ramifications when the archive is reanimated.

3Derrida explains in Archive Fever: “This name apparently coordinates two principles in one; the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence—physical, historical, or ontological principle—but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority is given, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given—nomological principle” (1, italics in original). The archive is a powerful entity that both creates and orders knowledge and, very significantly for his theory, has a temporal element—it lies in stasis ready for commencement—as well as a locative element—it is there in a place.

4The spatial and temporal arrangement of the archive promotes equivalency. All artifacts are given equal importance in their documentation and presentation. No one piece is documented with a more special number or placement within the physical archive than any other piece; so all artifacts within the archive are spatially equal, reaffirming the lack of movement within the space of the archive. Their spatial orientation is a matter of chance and artificial arrangement into the coding and organizational system of the given institution or person who has created the archive.

5The spatial equality is matched by an equality of time as well. All of the artifacts are also temporally equal in that they can be accessed in any order regardless of their past chronology. Thus, the debris is stripped of the time related to its origin.

6Although the pieces may be arranged by date, the date is an isolated organizational tool, not a way to create networks or connections between the artifacts. As there is no chronology, there is also no hierarchy. The debris lies equalized. If all materials are equalized spatially, they are also simultaneously equalized in time or, more specifically, outside of a time that passes. All the residue from the past is no longer in the past or of the past and becomes only present, and the times represented by the residue become horizontal but not linear, as if spread out on a table. Derrida’s notion of the “future anterior” speaks to this interchange between the residue of a past event and its continuous temporal existence. Any physical residue of the past carries with it the event of the past (its origin) as it also makes the material itself and the event present and future. Therefore, the artifact itself is outside of time. Time is essentially reduced to the duration in which the reader encounters the debris, resulting in an odd kind of metanarrative—the story of the encounter with the past and not a narrative about the past itself. This narrative is the experience of the characters in V. and Beloved who surround V. and Beloved. Therefore, the narrative act is necessary to chronologize the debris, which results in the reordering of the past and presenting a new hierarchy of events. A re-established hierarchy is both present and future-directed since the narrative reflects the present interaction with the debris and will be encountered by the audience in the future.

7In both novels, then, it is the ability or inability to narrate that signals whether or not the space and time of the archive has been ruptured, to find a way out of the closed system of memory return. In Beloved, the archival character disappears when she is no longer a “story to pass on” (274). The last chapter of Beloved repeats this hauntingly reminiscent phrase two times: “It was not a story to pass on” and then once “This is not a story to pass on.” Stories are fundamentally painful—the History that hurts, (88) as Jameson puts it—and they are not to pass on to the next generation. But simultaneously, they are not to be ignored either. They must be read, must be listened to, in order to find Derrida’s “future anterior,” the “what will have been.”

8By applying the concept of the archive to narrative and the concomitant character construction in the creations of the titular characters V. and Beloved, it can be shown that there is an intentional “construction,” in the classical narrative sense, a literal piecing together of their disparate physical parts, as well as an “inscription.” As J. Hillis Miller writes, the word “character” comes from the Greek for “to scratch” (241). These scratches are made into the edifice of the community, in whatever form it may be, within which they are created. Characters therefore are “marks” scratched into community culture; they have an inherent and physical relationship with the medium upon which they are scratched which transfers/transforms them into a part of that medium just as the carvings or reliefs on any building are not separate but inherent in its structure as soon as the marking is made. It is not just a singular, lone act of either construction or inscription but an aggregation and product of a greater community creating a larger architecture that informs, reflects, surrounds, and impacts the story.

9Here I want to make a move to this specific architecture of the archive. Both Derrida and Achille Mbembe point out the role that the physical presence, the architecture of the archive plays in legitimizing the existence, function and importance of the archive itself, in establishing its sacred place within the community. Thus, this architectural element, most prominently in the assembled bodies of the characters Beloved and V., establishes them as archival spaces, as sites of the possible sacred. The response of the community around them to their inherent architecture determines their status to the community. To expand upon this, there are two different but complementary parallel comparisons at play here; the first is spatial between the archive as a physical place in relation to both the physical bodies of the characters and the physical locations within the stories. In addition, however, there is a second relationship that is temporal--a relationship between archival time and the act of narration itself both of the novel and by the characters within the novel who also tell their stories in their own voices.

11In light of this description of the archive, Morrison and Pynchon can be seen to burrow through the layers of the debris in the archive and reassemble it in search of a complex web of knowledge, subjectivity, and origins. Both authors have corporealized memory (the bodies of V. and Beloved) and fixed it in a location (within the inscribed novel) in order to create it as physical material, just as the archive is a physical space in which the past is present. A storyteller cannot make a space, an emptiness, into a character—the interior of a room, for example, cannot “act.” It is within the space of the archive that memory is held in stasis as debris, waiting to be animated. So in order to “animate” memory, both Pynchon and Morrison have positioned memory in physical spaces and embodied memory in the characters V. and Beloved who are composed of assembled pieces of the past and who act within a chronological narrative as well as lend themselves to be read as narratives.

12Both texts establish that the bodies of the characters V. and Beloved are pieced together both physically and temporally, as the metaphor of the archive illustrates. V. appears in various guises in various time periods and is partly composed of prosthetic parts—a glass eye, a false leg, etc. Beloved appears to the other characters without origin and then disappears from them with no discernable natural end. Furthermore, Beloved too is made of pieces that come apart. In one scene, for example, she simply reaches into her mouth and easily removes a tooth. Therefore, physical fragmentation is a constant threat for both characters. This sense of dissolution or decadence occurs in both novels, and there is practically no difference in the two authors’ use of this metaphor.

13The similarity continues in their approaches concerning temporality. Both authors begin from the same perspective. Morrison stated in an interview that “I know I can’t change the future but I can change the past. It is the past, not the future, which is infinite. Our past was appropriated. I am one of the people who has to reappropriate it” (Taylor-Guthrie xiii-xiv). She literally means that one can change the past because the only knowledge, the only certainty humans have of the past, are the stories that we tell about it. Change the story—rearrange it—and you change the past. Similarly, Pynchon wrote in a 2006 letter that he sees himself as a writer of historical fiction who “must turn to people who were [present in the past], or to letters, contemporary reporting, the Internet until, with luck, we can begin to make a few things of our own up. To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good [...] is simply what we do” (“Words”). He also sees his work as a writer in terms of an interpreter of the record and thus a reinventor of the possible past. Pynchon’s and Morrison’s work is invested in the story of history, and as Thomas Schaub stated in an interview regarding Pynchon’s oeuvre, “A longing that it might have been different.” The authors gather the debris of the past together, recasting it in an ever-present narrative that envisions both the trajectory that the past did take and continues to create. However, the melancholy voice of the storyteller suggests a different story could have been told or still can be told even though it was not the original story. The difference in the two novels, however, concerns the narrative act and how it is or is not accomplished as well as the consequences and possibilities that are or are not opened up at the end of the narrative.

15The titular character exists in both the spatial and temporal aspects just as an archive does. Beloved embodies this archival space where the narrative process of piecing together the multiple voices of the past can begin. The archive is where multiple voices exist, so she is the physical intersection between the sacred memory of a people inherent in cultural memory as well as the profane experience of their daily lives, constituted by the debris within the archive which prosthetically replaces memory. Her position allows the joining of strands of a personal/family history, like the stories that Denver weaves, as well as a history that has been suppressed and unconstructed, and which is partially forgotten but still present nevertheless. She is possibility, and she is danger as much as she is in danger of destruction.

16This claim that Beloved does indeed contain the memory of both the profane and of the sacred is supported by the scene in which she berates Sethe for actions Sethe did not take, which resulted in Beloved’s creation: “Beloved accused her [Sethe] of leaving her behind. […] She said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light” (241). These “rememories” are first defined by Sethe as spatial, outside of time:

I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

“Can other people see it?” asked Denver.

“Oh, yes, Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else… it will be there for you, waiting for you.” (36-37)

17Here it is clear that rememory is not necessarily only the personal recollection of events themselves but the material evidence (“you bump into”) of the event that is past. So these rememories are not Beloved’s per se; they are slave experiences from the Middle Passage, proof that the character in the novel embodies not only her own personal memories but the memories of a multitude.

18Because Beloved’s body represents an archival space, she is not narrative per se because narrative is possible only with time that passes, and she cannot sort through or arrange the images she re-remembers; and so, as a character, she attributes all the pain and humiliation and fear to her mother. The desire inherent in humans to find origins to create our own stories is also circumvented for her because her mother should be the origin, the beginning of her. However, the maternal connection is missing for Beloved because of Sethe’s actions (when she slit her baby’s throat) and because of the violent dissolution of family ties that occurred as a result of slavery. So Sethe is haunted not only by the ghosts/memories of her real daughter but also by the ghosts/rememories of her entire ancestral history and the narratives told about that history from within the community and without.

19In Pynchon’s novel, too, the archival character of V. is used to recall voices from the past. The main character Stencil searches for the corporeal manifestation of his personal story. This search functions as the controlling device throughout V. as he encounters, via narrative, the various possible V.s, including Vera in Mondaugen’s story and the Bad Priest in Fausto’s story. This manifestation of the archive in V. is only language in the form of narrative, language chronologized and located. V. is an enigmatic character (or characters) not because she is a ghost or the reincarnation of the dead but because she is the locus of language in its most reductive and inscribed form. Therefore V., like Beloved, is an assembly of documents to be rearranged and narrativized as a story to be read and listened to, highlighting the schism between the written record often found in archives, what claims to be real and historical, and the stories usually not assembled or reanimated. These alternative histories are pulled from the material records of the past that the authors must study and reinscribe, and they naturally conflict with the authorized stories, the master narratives, because they are infused with the profane imagination of the author.

20Throughout Pynchon’s novel, for the character Stencil, finding V. is a quest to create his own story (just as the characters around Beloved need her to create their histories) and ultimately to finish his father’s story. The entity V. — for the reader never discovers exactly what or who V. is—is first mentioned in the novel by Stencil as he recalls an entry in one of his father’s journals or “unofficial log of an agent’s career.” He says, “Under ‘Florence, April, 1899’ is a sentence, young Stencil has memorized it: ‘There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what; what is she. God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report’” (49). The interactive aspect of language and myth plays on several levels here. First, Pynchon is sure to give a properly symbolic name to the character who searches for V. — Stencil, a stock pattern or model with which one can create letters or forms but which possesses no quality on its own, recalling Eliot’s line in “The Hollow Men”: “Shape without form” (83). His name allows play with the idea of the “original” or the archetypal in that a stencil allows one to make an endless numbers of copies.

21A stencil then is not the original; it is a pattern from which many copies can be made—and no original of the form which the stencil outlines has to have existed before. In fact, the stencil is itself a “blank” or “empty” form—it is only an outline, not the form itself. Therefore, the character of Stencil is an empty archetype, and in his search he is looking for that which may perhaps fill in the blank. So in his particular story, he is a quest figure searching for that which is lost or lacking, which is identified in the most cryptic and mysterious way possible. Continuing the ambiguity of the traditional quest narrative, the letter V. conceals meaning since it is in and of itself meaningless other than the name of a voiced labiodental fricative or the most diminutive form possible of a human name. But Stencil’s quest, his activity, his imagining of the possibilities that are V., allow him to maintain his subject position, even his humanity, in that he is only animate due to the search. He can create a story, many stories in fact, which are what compose half of Pynchon’s novel, around his own knowledge of his world and his quest. Through that story, through the narrative, he is. Stencil’s “animateness” is created and sustained by the stories he hears, interprets and even imagines while searching for V.

22The urge to find V. is to apply order to disorder, to rearrange the historical debris that lies latent and force it into some sort of narrative chronological order. Sidney Stencil, towards the end of his life and just before the June Disturbances in Malta which predate the beginning of WWI, meets often with Veronica Manganese, another V. embodiment with whom he had a short fling twenty years earlier and who is directly tied to the inanimate through her last name. In the denouement of the novel, Stencil begins to feel that “the disease” (530) or the dehumanization of the world is progressing and that death is imminent. He asks Veronica, “Why should we continue to live?” (530). The narrator continues his thought: “Why should any of us” (530). This statement, formed as a question, does not end with a question mark. It is a repetition of a state of mind, a question that is really a statement and therefore requires no answer. Sidney Stencil recognizes that his individual existence, his individual story matters not in the chaos that has passed and the chaos to come. “With or without him the June Assembly would become what it would: blood bath or calm negotiation, who could tell or shape events that closely? There were no more princes. Henceforth politics would become progressively more democratized, more thrown into the hands of amateurs. The disease would progress” (530). The narrator had indeed summed up the disease: “It could only be age’s worst side-effect: nostalgia. A tilt toward the past so violent he found it increasingly more difficult to live in the real present he believed to be so politically crucial” (529). The archive will be the victim of entropy if it is never narrativized. Pynchon’s novel becomes the evidence of this process. The novels show that both futures are possible: “It was not a story to pass on” (274). The difference is that Morrison emphasizes telling stories and Pynchon emphasizes what occurs when the story is not told. One cannot pass over, ignore, the story.

23The two passages which end the novels V. and Beloved are eerily similar and thus illustrate these diverging consequences. First, the overwhelming theme is lack, a lack that exists, that is there in a place, the mal d’archive. In Beloved, there is no way to see the traces of history continuously, but they return if they are engaged by the body, the feet of an adult or child. The traces will reappear. In V., the traces have also disappeared from human view or interaction, and their return is impossible although they still exist.

Here is the last paragraph in Beloved:

Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there. By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss. Beloved. (275)

Here is the last paragraph in V.:

Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that circle, on the evening of the tenth, a waterspout appeared and lasted fifteen minutes. Long enough to lift the zebec fifty feet, whirling and creaking, Astarte’s throat naked to the cloudless weather, and slam it down again into a piece of the Mediterranean whose subsequent surface phenomena—whitecaps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch thereafter part of the brute sun’s spectrum—showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day. (533)

24In Beloved, “what is down there” are the traces of a people’s history which will reappear. In V. “what came to lie beneath” is no longer visible.

25The archive then can and does hold a type of power that can and is used to control, marginalize, and define those outside the sacred space of it. However, storytellers, the artists of the word, are able to interact with the archive and use it to give voice to those normally not given access—those “disremembered and unaccounted for” (Morrison, Beloved 274)—and engage in the production of what is true for their communities. The power available to the storyteller is through the archive in the context of the community where he/she can imagine stories that re-construct from the material of the archive in such a way as to open the possibility for other voices. Storytellers have a power that undercuts the master narratives—a power to resurrect a past that has been forgotten, to chase and face the monsters and ghosts and undead things that inhabit the subterranean spaces of our well-kept architecture or that have passed like the weather or have flowed beyond to the sea and been drowned there beyond man-made boundaries and neatly archived records. The traces are still there, and the artist can lift them from the subterranean past and fabricate stories again.