Archives: Literary Perspectives On The Intersections Between History and Fiction

“A poetics of the archive” has been preliminarily defined by critics as a poetics of re-collection and re-membering, a poetics in which the so-called proofs are subject to re-vision. The aim of this essay is to elaborate this definition and to argue, referring to Derrida’s conceptualization of the archive, that the poetics of the archive is in fact a “process of recording,” a poetic mechanism of consigning repeated memory impressions to a mnemotechnical supplement—a recording device. Focusing on the Diasporic Hebrew and Yiddish poet Gabriel Preil, this essay suggests that the process of archivization can be understood in his verse as a metaphor for his Diasporic ruptured self. The recording device in Preil’s verse functions as an “interior prosthesis” of memory that allows him to “record” and bring closer voices from distant spaces and different times, to collect impressions of the “ancient,” to re-member, to re-arrange the past as well as institute the future in order to re-create and re-produce an inherent structural Diasporic “loss.” This essay endeavors to show how this mechanism of the poetics of the archive works, indicating Preil’s Diasporic condition and recorded state of affairs: lacking a spontaneous memory or source of identity, existing and writing always already in the second degree.

In his major treatise Memory, History, Forgetting, first published in 2000, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) thoroughly examines the relationship between facts, memories, and transmission, both collectively and individually. This ambitious meditation considers the use not only of scientific historical methods but also of fiction and widely refers to the notion of “images.” But it should be pointed out that the images under consideration in Memory, History, Forgetting are only mental or literary constructs; Ricoeur focuses exclusively on words as mnemonic tools to describe, remember, and forget.

Encompassing over six hundred pages, Ricoeur’s magnum opus thus overlooks a fruitful field of understanding coterminous to the processes he analyzes, if one also acknowledges the powers and efficacy of visual images, particularly of filmed images. Nowhere is this potential more visible and pregnant than in a consideration of the Holocaust—more appropriately known as the Shoah—which in its extreme consequences is at the very center of Ricoeur’s ruminations. Elaborating on the practices, theorizations, and polemics regarding the Shoah and filmmaking, this article shows how Ricoeur’s study can be further developed, in both perception and understanding, by calling upon the cinema and thinking with its images.

Out of twenty-four thousand tales documented in the Israel Folktale Archives named after Dov Noy (IFA), only two hundred center on rabbinic figures of late antiquity. This small corpus presents a clear, and curious, profile: while half of it addresses two figures who are venerated saints in contemporary Israel, and are thus the focus of mainly hagiographic narratives in which the figures are active agents in the present, the remainder of the tales, in which Rabbi Akiva is the prominent character, tend to characterize the rabbis as tricksters or to embed them in trickster-like narratives. Implementing semiotic and folkloristic tools, this article suggests that the underlying selection that informs the subgroup of rabbinic tales in IFA should be construed in the context of the IFA project itself, as an arena of conflicting motivations and discourses. Within the intricate and conflicted web of hegemonic and marginal forces, the stories and their tellers stage hidden transcripts, including one of trickster-like oppositions to the institutional hospitality offered by the IFA.