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Kim Taylor and Lina Maria Zangerl
Constructing a Metanarrative for Stefan Zweig’s Literary Estate
... the relations between the elements on the manuscript page ... can – and must be – sequential, but they can and will also be radial ...(Van Mierlo 2013, 24)
1. Introduction
When discussing literary archives, the construction of a metanarrative, and a bi-institutional undertaking such as theStefan Zweig Digitalproject – the goal of which, in brief, is to reassemble via digital means Zweig’s literary Nachlass, which has become separated over decades and circumstances (often tragic) and is largely held by institutions on opposite sides of the Atlantic ocean – it may provide benefit to understand first how the arrangement and description of these specific types of materials (i.e., literary manuscripts) aligns within the context of traditional approaches to Knowledge Organization (KO). More pointedly, such approachescan bequite limited when it comes to the accurate and comprehensive representation and navigation of manuscript collections, not leastliterary estates.Acknowledged by Birger Hjørland(2008, 88) as “difficult to define ... because there is no united theory that corresponds to this concept [of traditional]”,it is, nonetheless, helpful to at least identify those KO approaches considered under the moniker of “traditional” in order to briefly explain their limited usefulnesswithin the context of manuscript collections. Specifically, there are well established approaches which concentrate on classification of materials via such systems as Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), Library of Congress Classification (LCC), and Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). Although eminently successful when applied to library materials,such classification systems are not very applicable to the world of archives, in no small part because of the variant and unique nature of the collections themselves, even those emanating from a single creator. By their nature, archival materials necessitate an autonomous approach to their description, which is neither possible nor desired in the library world. They defy, in most instances, traditional classification, as they are typically unpublished and so manifestly organic in their nature.One attempt to address the bibliographic needs of the archives (and museum) communities, can be found in the emergence of FRBRoo. Put concisely by Patrick LeBoeuf, “... FRBRoo makes it possible to deal in a more satisfactory way with particular materials such as rare and unique materials” (2012, 105). It does so by enabling an object-oriented approach to bibliographic description, as opposed to the entity-relationship model of the FRBR family from which it stems, drawing heavily from CIDOC CRM[1] (Conceptual Reference Model created by the International Committee for Documentation/CIDOC of the International Council of Museums/ICOM). CIDOC CRM was designed specifically to address the descriptive needs of the cultural heritage sector of knowledge institutions.The merging of these two models (FRBRoo and CIDOC CRM) promises the greatest possibility yet for encouraging semantic interoperability within digitized cultural heritage collections particularly, which is especially important for the end goal of enabling narrative possibilities.
There still exist, of course, certain other KOS (Knowledge Organization Systems) considered “traditional” within the field of KO, which provide needed structure to the arrangement and description of archives.Controlled vocabularies, particularly those specific to manuscripts are, of course, essential in supporting both discovery and interoperability of archival materials. In North America, bodies such as RBMS (Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries) and the SAA (Society of American Archivists)provide standardized terminology for the Anglo-American linguistic world, alongside established North American rules for describing manuscripts and archives, DACS (Describing Archives a Content Standard). In the German-speaking world – certainly relevant because of the nature of the materials on which this paper is focused – RNA(Regeln zur Erschliessung von Nachlässen und Autographen) serves as the rough equivalent of the North American DACS.Within the digital realm, however, recent and emergingtechnologies and initiatives for information modeling such as LOD-LAM (Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums)and, once more, CIDOC CRM,are expanding possibilities for enhanced sharing and contextuality of cultural heritage materials via the Semantic Web.
Particularly in light of the veritable onslaught of massive digitization projects within the realm of cultural heritage, it becomes ever more crucial to approach such initiatives with a healthy respect for the complexities enabled in the digital environment. Many archivists and scholars would argue that there already exists an excess of virtually (in both the literal and figurative sense) useless digital surrogates of manuscript materials which, lacking any helpful attempt at arrangement, description, and, not least, context or relationships, results in what Lilly Koltun has termedbricolage (1999, 118). Archivists cannot escape the unique responsibility that comes with the curation of these materials in the digital environment. Helena Robinson astutely recognizes that archivesconstitute a distinct “epistemological genre” (2014, 218). While her discussion of domain-specific approaches to the arrangement and description of digital collections extends beyond archives to include museums and libraries, she very accurately concedes that the growing number of these virtual “knowledge utopias” (210) – enabled by what she terms “converged collections” (213) in the online environment – are only as useful to advancing scholarship as the quality of the presentation of materials contained therein, thus highlighting the absolute necessity of well-executed display and narration of such collections so that they may, in fact, exist as knowledge utopias of a sort.
Our obligations as archivists necessitate a full acknowledgment of our role as mediatorsbetween manuscript and scholar. This responsibility underscores the practice of administering exacting care when attending to matters of arrangement and description. Such attention constitutes what Yakel describes as “archival representation ... a fluid, evolving, and socially constructed practice” (2003, 1). Perhaps nowhere is this care more imperative than when it is applied to the building of collections comprised of digital surrogates of manuscript materials, especially in recognition of the fluidity that accompanies such representation, now so greatly enhanced within the digital realm. There is, as Helen Taylor observes, no going back: “There is increasing demand for archival material to be exhibited in lively way, shaped into narrative form and given new life ...” (2013, 189). If this is the case, we must apply a comprehensive knowledge of archival tenets alongside an acute awareness of that literature’s milieu which is represented in our holdings, and we must do so with a keen eye to enabling the narrative of those materials; to do otherwise risks creating nothing more than Koltun’s bricolage, or, more explicitly, “‘nuggets’ of raw knowledge”, meaning those (digital) items isolated and lacking any relational context (Tuffield et al. 2006, under “1. Introduction”).Tuffield et al. refer toMieke Bal’s (1985, 5) three concepts of narrative theory as a possible means by which to avoid this occupational hazard. Bal’s theory consists of the fabula (“a series of logically and chronologically created events”), the story (“a fabula that is presented in a certain manner”) and the narrative text itself (“a text in which an agent relates a narrative”). Although originally directed toward an audience of literary critics, the ideas behind Bal’s conceptsmay also servea useful function in helping the archivist to arrange and describe those literary fonds under her charge. Neither the original documents nor their archival representationcan serve their respective functions without operating within an established contextuality, whether it is one of the author’s own devising, as in the case of literary archives, or that which stems from the archivist’s intervention. The very act of imposing context (on the part of the archivist)concurrentlylends an element of narrative authority beyond that inherent to the archive itself (i.e., generated from its creator), thereby establishing a metanarrative – an archival aspect ever more salient in terms of contemporary technologies.If one of the functions performed by the postmodern archivist is “to rethink established principles and reformulate them in ways that incorporate new understandings of arrangement and description” (Deodato, 2006, 55), then the digital environment becomes the perfect domain for such exploration and reassessment.
To be clear, our aim with the Zweig Digital project is not to deconstruct the story of the original text; rather, we mean to encouragethe intrinsicnarrative possibilities of the archive in ways which will further scholarship and, we also hope, would be acceptable to its creator. With the full understanding, as well, that we are not charting unknown territory (the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project[2]is but one exemplary model wherein a geographically divided literary fonds has been reunited successfully in the digital environment), we intend that our approach sheds further light on metanarrative as both the cause and result of description and arrangement within “surrogated” literary archives, and, not least, the role of the archivist as inadvertent storyteller.
2. History ofStefan Zweig’s Nachlass
In the case of Stefan Zweig (the Austrian author of Jewish descent whoastutely chose to leave his native countryas Nazi influence and policy solidified) a considerable challenge is presented by the geographically disparate nature of so much of hisNachlass. Repositories on three continentshold sizable collections of Zweig manuscripts, among them the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, the National Library of Israel, the Literaturarchiv Salzburg (LS) and the Archives and Special Collections of the State University of New York at Fredonia (SUNYF) – the latter two being specifically represented in this study. Due almost wholly to Zweig’s transformation into an involuntary exile, and, as such, his relocation to three countries –he moved to England in 1934 and,followingbrief stays in the United States, finally settled with his second wife, Lotte, in Pétropolis, Brazil, where the couple would commit suicide in 1942 – his voluminous personal papers became unavoidably and widely dispersed. With the exception of intentional deposits by Zweig himself, which included shipments of select correspondence to the archives of the National Library of Israel (then called the Jewish National and University Library) prior to his move to England, the remainder of his literary estate was scattered among family, literary agents and, inevitably, private collectors. Most certainly, it will never be “whole” again in the physical sense, and this fact underscores the importance of a project such as Stefan Zweig Digital.
The project will make possible the re-joining of two known (and sizable) collections of Zweig’s manuscripts held by LS and SUNYF in such a way that would not have been possible prior to the advent of digital technology. Considering the resurgence in Zweig’s popularity among both academics and non-academics alike – via such films as Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and the more recent biopicVor der Morgenröte (2016), as well as a forthcoming critical edition of his memoir Die Welt von Gestern[3]– such an endeavor is not only timely, but critical in helping to further serious scholarship. Equally important in such an initiative as Zweig Digital is the capability of revealing Zweig’s own multifaceted interests directly through his original works, both fiction and non-fiction. Zweig’s prolific output during his lifetime provides fodder for scholars from vastly divergent fields, thusemphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of his writing. Known not only for his works of fiction (novellas, short stories, poetry, drama and the odd libretto, including that written for Richard Strauss’s Die schweigsame Frau while Strauss was head of the Reichsmusikkammer under the Nazi regime), Zweig also had a keen interest in the art of biography and, not superfluous to the Zweig Digital project, the collecting of autographs by writers and composers alike (most of which are found in the British Library[4]).
As a consummate collector of the autograph manuscripts of other writers, Zweig was acutely aware of the inherent value in tracing the evolutionary process of literary (and other) creation, as evidenced in his essay “Das Geheimnis des künstlerischen Schaffens” (“The spirit of artistic creativity”) wherein he touches not only on the act of creation, but on the incontestable evidential value of the author’s “traces” (Spuren): “Wenn wir dem Geheimnis der Schöpfung uns überhaupt manchmal nähern können, so vermögen wir es nur dank dieser zurückgelassenen Spuren” (1990, 451).Roughly paraphrased, Zweig’s point is that only through examining the traces of the literary process can we hope to understand a work’s creation (Schöpfung). Zweig scholarPardaad Chamsaz suggests that Zweig’s ongoing fascination with the collecting of literary manuscripts and their traces reveals his constant search for the ephemeral (Geheimnis): “Zweig’s depiction of the auratic atmosphere of the manuscript encounter dominates much of his attempted translations of this specific reading experience. This does not preclude a focus on the tangible material traces ... Yet this material focus is always accompanied by a magical element to creation, conjured in the world of autograph manuscripts” (2017, 42). Such interrelationships between the “auratic” and the “material” lend an essential north star for the archivist concerned with archival representation of the literary archive within a digitized context, as it is precisely these serendipitous moments which we hope to facilitate by such projects as Zweig Digital.
3. Archivist as storyteller: constructing a metanarrative for the literary archive
Narration of any kind involves the recounting and shaping of events. Description is not enough. (Lamarque 2010, 131)
In his postmodernist discourse, Jean-François Lyotard assigned to the term metanarrative a somewhat negative connotation in response to what he designated the “grand” or “master” narratives of the past. Built on the concept of a universality of the human experience, these overarching explanations of history thus subsumed the “little” narratives of local and heterogeneous sources (Currie 1998, 107). It is not in this sense that we employ the termmetanarrativehere, but rather, as referenced by Deodato in his discussion of postmodern approaches to arrangement and description of archives, “as metanarrative [italics added], as mediation, and as social construct” (2006, 55). What we mean to denoteis the term in its most literal sense: the story of the story. We use the word as a way to frame our discussion of archival representation of those records that inherently comprise the literary archive within a digitized environment. TheOxford English Dictionary defines “metanarrative” as “Any narrative which is concerned with the idea of storytelling, spec. one which alludes to other narratives, or refers to itself and to its own artifice.”[5] However, we find this definition somewhat limiting in terms of the focus of this paper; we would attach the caveat that, as archivists, we are not telling a story in the conventional way. The role the archivist plays in creating metanarrativehas less to do with the story as it is written than the story of the writing. While the nature of the materials that comprise a literary archive may come equipped with intrinsic narrative possibilities, the task of implementing a metanarrative is prone to its own unique challenges by virtue of the archivist’s constant awareness she is navigating a landscape imbued with pre-existing authorial intent. Given that the archivist’s mission in developing a metanarrative necessarily includes attention to both internal and external relationships, she must implement her ownknowledge of biographical, historical and, in this case, literary contexts. Her attention must extend beyond the “work” itself, beyond even the avante-texte (a phrase originally credited to Jean Bellemin-Noël and generally meant to include the physical traces of a work’s evolution – e.g., the drafts, proofs, sketches, scribblings).As such, she may assess that the navigation of certain territories is indeed best carried out by the creator of the texts – i.e., that the documents should speak for themselves. But if she assigned herself such limited involvement, her only duty would be to simply ensure an accurate inventory of the materials within her charge. Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook (among others) have long sought to disabuse archivists of this narrowview of their curatorial roles: “[U]ltimately, in the pursuit of their professional responsibilities, archivists – as keepers of archives – wield power over those very records central to memory and identity formation through active management of records before they come to the archives … and afterwards their constantly evolving description, preservation, and use” (2002, 2).A particularly important point to extrapolate from this assertion is that the nature of the description itself is not one borne of stasis (see Yakel’s identification of archival representation as “fluid”, discussed above), but is rather an evolutionary process informed, especially in the digital sense, by technologies and their potential to facilitate interactive relationships between the scholar and the digital archive. These relationships provide further benefit to the enrichment of the metadata – and,thus the collections themselves – in that ongoing scholarship imparts a better understanding of our holdings.
In returning to the notion of the metanarrative as applied to archival representation – specifically, the literary archive (i.e., the literary works in that archive and the documents that represent them) – what we mean, in essence, is a narrative of the evolution of those works, including the story of their genesis. Such an approach, as described by Van Mierlo, “emphasizes not the afterlife of the work, when the finished text is released to the public, but what comes before: the avant-texte, the text before it is ‘the text’” (2013, 16). The nature of that evolutionary saga, as it is displayed in the avante-texte, isaptly described by Archivist Jonathan Smith as being “formed by the manuscripts of creation when arranged in such a way as to mirror the process of authorship” (2013, 3).It has the potential to be comprehensively illustrated within the digital environment via such means as linked data and ontologies through which are built relationships – relationships between the documents comprising the avante-texte, relationships between the internal forces of creation and external societal forces as evidenced in other documents (i.e., correspondence, diaries), and (though outside the scope of this paper) even between the work(s) and external reception.
Our approach to the arrangement and description of the materials, wherein the evolution of the work is necessarily the focus, is devised to support scholarship – a service which we, as archivists, are bound to provide. In so doing, our efforts, encompass a“genetic” approach, albeit a digital one, to archival scholarship. To this, Marcondes and Campos define an “onomasiologic perspective” (2016, 497) to the context of structural narrative which stipulates that the archivist impose a narrative on the arrangement and description of the digitized materials in order to “make explicit and available the features and relationships that exist in and between cultural objects from [existing] collections ...” (500). In the case of Zweig Digital,this is drawn from within the collections themselves. Smith recognizes the importance of such methodology to the curation of literary archives when he states, “... avant-textes are not simply an end-product, but are both an integral part and a record of authorial process as it takes place over time ... It is precisely because it gives us evidence of the cognitive processes of the author, evidence which gives us a precious chance to investigate those processes, that we should take due care in the way in which we preserve, arrange and catalogue this material” (2013, 4-5).Thus, it is with caution that the archivist must traversethe grey area between the intellectual spaces of authorial intent and her inevitable, intentional decisionsmade to illuminate the contextual relationships that are essential in supporting the research process.In the case of Zweig’s fonds, as with many literary archives, the traces (i.e., avant-textes) are manifest in such instances as drafts, proofs, personal calendars, notebooks, correspondence, or the random library ticket from the British Museum which Zweig visited while crafting his biography of Balzac. Itemized in a traditional finding aid, these materials appear singularly and without a great deal of context aside from that which fortuitously appears between pages of a hard copy or during a random keyword search of an electronic version. Even EAD (Encoded Archival Description) can only go so far in promoting relationships, both intellectually and visually, within (or outside of) a collection. Thus, the use of existing and emerging applications within the digital realm (via such models as GAMS[6] and CIDOC CRM, which can navigate such data streams as EAD, Dublin Core, etc.) provides the necessary extensibility and structure needed to express these relationships, so that the results extend beyond “nuggets” of information previously referenced (Tuffield et al. 2006). Only then can the surrogate archive serve the desired narrative purpose for meaningful engagement with the materials. Tuffield et al. point to the importance of recognizing any narrative modeled on Bal’s concepts as the means by which “raw information [i.e. fabula] is expressed without being polluted by authorial intention” (2006, under “3.1 Ontological models of the fabula”). However, thisrather dismissive view of the author’s role would arguably also work against what our efforts strive to ultimately achieve with Zweig Digital: an enhanced ability to both identify and define relationships between the elemental traces of the work which cannot help but include a respect for, if not acknowledgment of, the author’s presence. Again, the navigation of such grey areas is challenging.