12 Melancholy and the Archive

of reimpression, then we must also remember that repetition itself, the

logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according
to Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And thus from destruction.
Consequence: right on that which permits and conditions
archivization, we will never fi nd anything other than that which exposes
to destruction, and in truth menaces with destruction, introducing, a
priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument.
Into the by heart itself. The archive always works, and a priori,
against itself. (Derrida 1995, 1112)
If we read Derridas notion of the archive together with Blanchots idea of
the inevitable effect of the disaster on the subject, we can begin to see how
complicated the fi gure of the archive, the subject-as-archive, becomes in
contemporary fi ction, fi ction that is obsessed with the need to fi gure the
subject precisely as the site for history, for the event of history. In contemporary
fi ction, there is, to state it baldly, a thematization of a desire to
negotiate a relation with history. That desire presupposes at least two
things: one, that the event as such has occurred; two, the subject must fi nd
a site, be it within himself or some externalized material location, for that
history to be archived. This desire, however, is continually threatened by
precisely the ideas that Derrida and Blanchot articulate: the archive, as
such, is an impossibility; the subject, as such, is an impossibility. 9 And yet,
the desire, which now is fully realized as a melancholic attachment to an
impossible idea of history, persists, despite itself, perhaps to spite itself. This
aporiahistory must be preserved; history cannot be preservedis what
defi nes the project of the novelists I study here; this aporia, moreover, is
precisely that which defi nes the project of the archive, all archival projects, as
indissociably and forever, melancholic.

Auster, Mitchell, Saramago, Murakami

No choice of the object of study is an arbitrary one. The authors analyzed
here are, in my estimation, four of the most important writers currently
working. Their collective list of awards is perhaps testimony enough to their
importance, as is the infl uence their work wields on other writers. 10 I have
chosen them for reasons of recognition and infl uence but also because
there is an uncanny link binding their work together. That is to say, I believe
that when read together, the work of these writers speaks to a large, and
needless to say, international, concern with issues of loss, memory, subjectivity,
and the archive. In some ways this work speaks to Pierre Noras claim