By Thomas Sanfilip

How a country’s cultural heritage finds its way to the future intact is a hidden miracle. The how and why is a mystery to most writers, particularly those who write serious literature. And pursuing a place alongside the best literary works of the past is a lifetime commitment. But as Amy Hildreth Chen reveals in her methodic investigation into the American literary archives market, there are many obstacles along the way for the aspirant. Often never accepted into an archive, she makes clear to point out generally, most writers lack the  “cultural pedigree” required to validate a lifetime of literary struggles.

Hildreth Chen treats all of this with an insightful eye, laying out what drives the major universities’ quest for the papers of specific authors, the profit and competition involved, and how prevenance and access play out in determining who receives the coveted prize of archival immortality. She destroys the myth that the very best writers ever rise to a level of real desirability in the eyes of archivists and scholars who ultimately choose winners and losers. They are the true gatekeepers who determine who are to be remembered.

Her study of what drives the literary archives market in the United States is clear and sobering—the market is ruled over by a handful of influential universities that compete for the papers of authors with cultural cache. She lays out a well-supported and well-documented argument that literary archives are, in fact, a multimillion-dollar market that generally ignores the work of the majority of writers.

“As the collections that institutions choose not to acquire are rarely documented and discussed,” she writes, “scholars believe their work shapes the direction of literary history rather than realizing that the individuals and institutions that comprise the literary market archives market decide what will be written long before they enter the reading room.”

This boils down to what Hildreth Chen points out is “the present and preceding needs of its stockholders” i.e. that select universities only engage in acquiring writers’ papers who have achieved so-called “cultural capital.” These institutions have, in her words, consolidated around acquiring the most privileged writers who have achieved some literary reputation in their lifetime.

And what is the gold standard they use to measure archival success? Acquiring the papers of any of the 102 writers represented in The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

But more than the The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Hildreth Chen claims that variables such as race, sex and age explain why there is this exclusivity of institutional interest in acquiring established authors’ writings above all others. Using a Marxist paradigm to explain statistical numbers of author holdings, she points out that women and minority writers are not represented adequately in the universities’ archival harvesting, and that archive holdings somehow are skewed to favor writers who are male and Caucasian.

I think she misses the opportunity to offer more cogent explanations for all this archival maneuvering for writers’ papers—having nothing to do with race and gender.

For one, she explains I believe quite accurately that the outright business of handling an authors’ papers is simply treated as another business transaction by their agents who view their client’s papers as simply another dollars-and-cents arrangement. Having nothing to do with literary value per se, an author’s papers merely become another item to put on the docket for sale to the highest bidder—that is, to any university willing to pay good money to acquire them.

She also misses the opportunity to explain how in a number of intriguing cases certain authors’ works attained their questionable market value beyond their gender. One such example is the late David Foster Wallace, male and Caucasian, whose literary value was by all accounts manufactured. As Amy Hungerford lays out in her book, Making Literature Now, it was only Wallace’s agent, his editor, a specific reviewer, and two publishers that gave Wallace a cultural visibility he would never have achieved with any honest appraisal of his writing.

I also think Hildreth Chen overlooks a comparative analysis of the internet and its impact on archival exclusivity. There is nothing stopping an author from posting their life work, past and present, in perpetuity on the internet, and charging a fee for access. Authors no longer have to trouble themselves over the dispensation of their papers when they can establish their own longevity online. And since she points out that digitization is too expensive for most universities to invest in, access via the internet solves the problem of exclusivity and exclusion.

Lastly, I think Hildreth Chen does not take into account the grab bag of critical theories that exist today, and in their way influence the whole idea of archival preservation—Structuralism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalytic criticism, Feminism, Marxism, Cultural Poetics or New Historicism and Post Colonialist theory. These are over blown, methodological inventions of a politicized culture that have managed to pollute the very notion of identifying an actual genuine, literary work.

As thorough as she is in her treatment of the subject, she misses the opportunity to expose the impact of these theories, the scholars that advocate for them, and how they influence archival choices in the first place.

In spite of these oversights, Hildreth Chen’s examination of this subject is impressive, long overdue, and invites a deeper look into the underlying forces, hidden and otherwise, that ultimately shape our cultural inheritance. It is a subject that cannot be ignored when politics has managed to force its way into almost every aspect of modern life. Who gains and loses in this game of literary preservation begs the question of how and why real literary value is ultimately established.

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References

Placing Papers, The American Literary Archives Market by Amy Hildreth Chen (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2020)

Making Literature Now by Amy Hungerford (Stanford Univ. Press, 2016)