“L’archive ne dit peut-être pas la vérité, mais elle dit de la vérité”

Arlette Farge, Le goût de l’archive (41).

Playing with the feeling of truth and the effect of real. This is perhaps the best way to explain the fascination that the archive has always had for the researcher in the humanities: it feels like life itself. Arlette Farge, in her book Le goût de l’archive, senses what Michel Foucault and later Jacques Derrida highlighted as the fundamental aspect of perusing an archive: its unique way of presenting someone else’s discourse. Furthermore, she underscores the fact that what produces meaning is the way the archive’s words appear to be visible in a precise historical moment. Farge’s analysis implies that the researcher must also consider the influence of his or her own historical timeframe when interpreting the archived documents.

The encounter between the researcher and the archive creates a clear tension. On the one hand, this archive is a concrete representation: it is an institution’s way to conserve its documents. On the other hand, the archive is performed by the researcher as he or she reads and makes a selection of documents to be studied, highlighting specific elements contained in those documents while leaving aside, unvoiced, many other texts. In this process, the researcher transforms the archive and leaves a trace on it. It is what Walter Benjamin points out when referring to the memories that one can extract from an archive, as he believes that what the contemporary reader retrieves from the documents is of primary importance (Fritzsche 3). As Marlene Manoff puts it, “there is a growing self-consciousness about the fact that all scholarship is implicitly a negotiation with, an interpretation of, and a contribution to the archive” (13). For her, the historian has to be considered the human interpreter of the archival data. In that same line of interpretation, Peter Fritzsche disagrees with the notion of the archive as a collection of artifacts. He explains that the archive is not a mere compilation of documents, or something that a dead artist would have left for the next generations. Fritzsche posits that the archive cannot be deemed the result of arbitrariness; instead, it must be considered ––following Benjamin’s terminology–– a production of the “heirs” (3).

Nevertheless, for many researchers the archival document contains a unique “aura” and is synonymous with seduction. For Helen Freshwater, the archive becomes the source of the mythification of the historic document that, she says, is fixed in the exact moment of its construction (734). In her article, “The Allure of the Archive,” she at once highlights the researcher’s fascination with the “value conferred on the unique document” and the need for academia to thrive “on the lure of new material and undiscovered textual territory” (732), suggesting that the approach to the archive has been transformed to an academic concern when, in fact, it is an artifact that has clear jurisdictional functions.

My approach to the archive theory differs from all those interpretations. Even if the “voices of the past preserved in the documents” (Freshwater 734) are mediated by the persons and institutions that give birth to the archive, and even if the archive is a place from which institutions and governments can control society and history, I argue that we should investigate whether the construction of the archive predates its institutionalization. We should look for some kind of “proto-archive,” an individual movement toward the creation of an archive, that would sport the marks of the individual persona whose fashioning requires ––in his or her own view–– being cloaked in an archive. The creation of such a “proto-archive” may prove to be the result of an individual’s will to bequeath the recording of his or her own voice, thus establishing an originary trace that constitutes the seal of this particular and nonnegotiable arjé. That process reveals a rather different angle from what Jacques Derrida has stated as the necessity of controlling the archive for the political power to exist insofar as it is manifested from the individual node from which a singular version and definition of power springs.

My point of departure will be the analysis of documents that we attribute to the private sphere, like letters, and that most of the time are thought to contain the “authentic voices of the past” (Freshwater 734), an affirmation that I should like to question. From there, I will construct a theory that will reveal the private archive not as a symbol of spontaneous authenticity, but as the place where letters and works were written and compiled for a future use and where the researcher is invited to intrude, or even trapped to come in under the impression that he or she will actually create the archive by perusing it. My analysis will define the personal proto-archive as the set of strategies that serve to construct the conduit between private and public and between past and present.

The documents I will discuss are part of the personal archive of Catalan politician and composer Josep Anselm Clavé and are conserved in three bound volumes in the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya.

1. The first volume contains family correspondence (letters to his wife Isabel, to his daughters Enriqueta and Aurea, and to his brother Antoni);
2. The second volume contains the letters written to Clavé by politicians or intellectuals such as Víctor Balaguer, Pi i Margall, Baltasar Saldoni, Pep Ventura, Abdó Terradas, Rius i Taulet, among others;
3. The third volume comprises political and private documents (passports, safe-conducts, government authorizations, political or press releases, drafts of newspaper articles, letters of change), documents in relation to the choruses of workers (statutes, fragments of programs, budgets, etc), and the composer’s lyric manuscripts (as in titles like La Flor de Mayo, L’Aplech del Remey, Junto a su puerta: Juguete cómico lírico, as well as unedited poetry, most of it signed by the author).

A collector bound each volume in leather before it arrived in the Arxiu. The archive was donated by the Carreras Patxot family in 2005. They inherited it from its last owner, Rafael atxot Jubert, who was a patron from Barcelona. The bindings can be dated to around 1950, and the documents have been inserted between blank pages, featuring a documentary folder. These thick volumes present the documents chronologically, establishing a distinction between received and sent letters, between political and personal ones, and between documents related to the choruses and those of a private nature. This cataloging indicates the early archivist’s aim to separate the personal from the public, and our approach to this archive must take this fact into consideration, the trace of someone else’s hand, someone who modeled what we are reading. The collection of documents to which we have access is the result of a series of decisions made by the person who bound and organized the manuscripts according to his or her own criteria. Therefore, we have to discern not only the materials we are reading, but also the silenced voices that have not been included as a part of the composer’s artistic and social legacy.

Perusing Clavé’s archive is problematic because of its fragmentary condition. None of the categories that I mentioned (lyric manuscripts, correspondence and administrative and political documents) seems to be complete if we take chronological criteria into account. However, the particularity of each of the documents in this archive is, without a doubt, the trace of Clavé’s awareness of ordering and constructing his own archive. Each work, be it a poem or a zarzuela, is thoroughly signed and dated with the time of day in the author’s own hand.

One might think that the analysis of this unedited personal archive could counteract what has been written about the choruses of workers in nineteenth century Catalonia. Those narrations (mostly biographies) were until now what constituted part of the historical archive on Clavé’s life, because most of those biographers, even if they wrote after Clavé’s death, claimed their contemporariness to the peak of the choral movement and to the results of Clavé’s labor as a public redeemer of the working class. In that sense, they constituted themselves as witnesses of his legacy: “Por mi edad, no he tratado ni siquiera pude llega a conocer personalmente a Clavé, fallecido en 1874. Pero tuve ocasión de convivir con su espíritu” (Caballé y Clos, 11). For the most part, those narrations have contributed to building a mythology and a hagiographical discourse around Clavé’s figure. Among his biographers, we find some important voices in the highly political debate on Catalan and Spanish cultures between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Josep Lleonart, a Germanophile poet linked to some of the most remarkable Catalan families; Tomás Caballé y Clos, an attorney, historian, musicologist, and a former member of the choral societies; Doménech Guansé, a journalist and Francophile writer, exiled after the Spanish Civil War and Josep Maria Poblet i Guarro, a republican nationalist, exiled after the Spanish Civil War, and ultimately a member of the leftist party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya after Franco’s death. The commonality of those biographies is that, besides the fascination that the authors have with the composer, they found their arguments on their closeness to or participation in the choral movement and present their narration as a tribute to Clavé (Lleonart, Caballé y Clos), and to his efforts to gather all of society regardless of age and social status. This last aspect made it possible to build a discourse on Catalan unity through culture’s serving ideological and political ends (Guansé, Poblet). However, some documents contained in Clavé’s personal archive help to elucidate historical moments and artistic statements that had been overtly fabulated by Clavé’s biographers and that have been frequently used to politicize Clavé’s projects and life in a certain direction. This fabulation could be considered a form of what François Dosse calls “récréation;” for instance, when he analyzes the biographer’s work in Le pari biographique, he explains that the use of fiction for the bibliographical work is inevitable (57). Clavé’s biographies, in particular those published in Catalonia during the civil war and Franco’s dictatorship, are specifically written to recreate the composer’s life and to emphasize specific events in order to adapt the narration to the idea that has been associated with Clavé’s project from the beginning: that of the “redemption” of the working class through music. In this sense, I do think that the biographers previously mentioned have created hagiographies, rather than biographies.

An example involving a brilliant, privileged relationship between a “recreated” Clavé and Queen Isabel II will suffice to underscore this argument. Josep Lleonart’s Josep Anselm Clavé, published in Barcelona during The Civil War (1937), offers a narration of the choral concerts given in Madrid on June 15th, 16th, 18th and 19th, 1863. Lleonart was a twentieth century Catalan poet, playwright and translator, whose book aimed to enhance the interest that Clavé aroused in the public sphere. He wrote that Queen Isabel II attended all three concerts: “La reina … assistí al primer concert i als altres” (“The Queen … attended the first concert and the other ones”; 25). Nevertheless, Clavé, in the letters he wrote to his wife during his stay in Madrid, is very clear this event; the Queen only attended one of the concerts, the one held on June 18th:

Una carta en que el general Lemesich nos lo anuncia dice que recordando el rey con suma complacencia los bellísimos ratos que el Sr Clavé le proporcionó con sus lindas composiciones, en Cataluña, hablaría a la reina para que señalase día para asistir a la function … La reina dice que yo mismo la designe el día y hora en que deba venir de oir los coros lo que hará con indecible satisfacción. (“Carta a Isabel” June 17, 1863)

Two days later, he confirmed the royal attendance: “Querida Isabel: como habrás visto por el parte telegráfico remitido esta mañana a los diarios de esa [Barcelona], anoche obtuvimos un nuevo triunfo. Asistieron a la función los reyes” (“Carta a Isabel” June 19, 1863). The archive at the Teatro de la Zarzuela, where the concerts were held, explored by Emilio García Carretero in his study on that same theater, also indicates that Isabel II attended only this concert.[i] Lleonart’s text purposefully added elements to the history of the choruses in order to confer on Clavé an authority, a distinction (in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense) from other Catalan composers of that time. The Queen’s attendance at all four concerts was, more than a sign of honor, an assertion of Clavé’s rallying power in the public sphere. Lleonart, on the other hand, did not intend to write a historical text sporting all the external signs of academic history ––it lacks, in fact, all of them: historical references, footnotes and bibliography. Clavé’s history, according to Lleonart, circulated from 1937 onwards and, under the editorial seal of Barcino, created in 1924 by Josep Maria de Casacuberta i Roger as the axis of the history of Catalan cultures. This biography undertakes the “récréation” of Clavé’s life and projects during a specific historical crisis (the Spanish Civil War and the eve of General Franco’s dictatorship), remembering what a correspondent for The Musical Times in August 1, 1896 wrote after a festival in Madrid, Josep Anselm Clavé’s “name is almost a household word in the northern parts of the Peninsula ”(“Musical Festival”). The idea of Clavé as a household word was intended to serve as an immutable reference for the readers; it reveals the continued presence of the composer’s task and the importance of Catalan cultural production at a national level, expressed and remembered during twentieth century Spanish historical crises such as the Civil War. The name here functions as the house (a householding word) where history is stored and remembered. The “naming of the names of the dead” is, as Eelco Runia demonstrates, a rhetorical strategy through which we are affected by the past (“On Presence” 309). A biography written and published in Catalan during the Civil War tells us just as much about the biographer and the historical moment during which he is writing as about the object of the biography itself. Clavé is a household word, a lieu de mémoire, that just by being mentioned, immediately conjures symbols of identity, of group union and of community habits.

The personal proto-archive, then, would re-establish a truth that could be accessed through physical contact with the original sources and by listening to the voices of the past preserved in those documents. Nevertheless, it is not my aim to establish the primary sources as a repository of the authenticity that every researcher seeks when confronted with an unedited archive. I intend to delineate how Clavé was transformed into a household word and how he himself created his own specific archival practice and was cognizant of constructing his own artistic archive while writing and composing. Reading his archive unmasks Clavé as an artist eager to leave his trace in the transmission of his work, thus leading to the creation of a proto-archive. In this process, he laid out all the necessary arrangements to secure the order of the discourse of his own history, hagiography and legacy ––he marked the historical soil with breadcrumbs leading to the recreation of his biography.