<p>The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room.  A researcher sits at her table, inert.  An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes.  (Can we get a close-up of a box, please, to show the label with the long call number? [note type="figure"]figtest[/note])  The archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back.  The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt.  She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading.  [note]notetest[/note](Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.)  Now she is reading, and now she truly comes alive; she bends towards the papers, taps her forehead in thought.  A sheaf of blank paper and a pencil appear on her table, and she begins taking notes.  Her fingers fly—and soon, so do the pages she is writing upon.  Caught up in eddies of excitement, they swoop to the ceiling and around the room and down to the floor, where they fall together into perfect piles.  Bindings sprout from the outer strata; the pages sew themselves into bright, tight, hard-cover books.  These the archivist gathers up and places on the shelves that line the room, next to other books and gray boxes.</p>
<p>I may have it backwards: in other versions of the fantasy, it is the archive that is first animated by the presence of the researcher, a Dr. Coppelius who waves a pencil and sets the dusty boxes to dancing.  But either way, the archival imaginary posits a symbiotic relationship between researcher and source, a photogenic pas de deux that leads to a finished scholarly product.  This work, in turn, enters the archive for the next generation of researchers; it might even be taken apart again so that its secret ingredients (notes, drafts, letters) can themselves be served up in a series of boxes.  Such a strangely private form of publication it creates, the coupling of researcher and source.</p>
<p>What Freudian trauma results from witnessing this sight?  Only the harm that myth inflicts.  This primal scene is a fiction, a dream of perfect union between researcher and source that ignores, first of all, the full cast of characters.  What about the archivist, who is rendered invisible?  What about all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor—acquiring, preserving, organizing, reading, cataloging, describing, interpreting, analyzing, debating, teaching, writing, editing, digitizing, referencing and publishing—the current project depends?  More a barn dance than a pas de deux: an archival encounter is an enactment of social authorship long before the researcher enters the room. [note]See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on the idea of social authorship, which could be described as “the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developed institutions of literary production” that help create a work, eg, printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).[/note]</p>