The Neutralization of Scholarly Research
by S.E. Gontarski
“Why not appoint a scholar/editor to run a blog at the NYPL [or at Florida State University].” — Jed Birmingham, “A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive,” Reality Studio, 2016.
By the time the next round of fellowship/grant applications comes around we [can] have a special [journal] issue forthcoming. The manuscripts and the special issue [would] position FSU as the new place for research on this author [i.e., William S. Burroughs]. — Paul Ardoin to S. E. Gontarski, 2/9/2013
Theory and practice are not opposites, not even polarities, but integrated aspects of the archivist’s professional role and responsibility. Transparency of process about the archivist’s performance will facilitate this integration, stimulate the building of archival knowledge, and enable present and future generations to hold the profession accountable for its choices in exercising power over the making of modern memory. — Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz (2002)
This case study gathers documents, correspondence, and internal communications related to the recovery (2012), transfer, and subsequent institutional handling of a body of William S. Burroughs materials associated with the Nautilus Foundation in Lloyd, Florida and subsequently held under the auspices of Special Collections and Archives, Florida State University. It details how modern archival administration increasingly privileges ownership, branding, and custodial control over scholarly activation, interpretive collaboration, and open research ecosystems. The overall result is that once the Burroughs materials were acquired (through free donation) by the Florida State University Library’s Special Collections and Archives they were institutionalized and bureaucratized into systems often incompatible with open scholarly research. In this reading, the Burroughs archive becomes a paradigmatic example of what happens when research material, an archive in this case, is treated as a prestige acquisition rather than as a living research engine. This is the difference between possessing an archive and activating one—that is, once the Burroughs materials were physically acquired, they were intellectually neutralized. The archive thus becomes not a research site but a bureaucratically absorbed object. The issues thus are acquisition vs. accessibility, custody vs. scholarship, inventory vs. interpretative understanding, preservation vs. activation, institutional branding vs. intellectual community, and most importantly, technical digitization vs. scholarly editorial practice, the latter apparently beyond the ken of a bureaucracy with almost no understanding of literary scholarship. Taken together, the material detailed here traces the emergence of a research initiative centered on the archive, the expectations that accompanied its transfer, and the evolving institutional frameworks that shaped (and finally limited) its accessibility and scholarly potential. It’s guiding principal is articulated by Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz in a pair of issues of Archive Science, that much is gained through “Transparency of process about the archivist’s performance.”
The documents reproduced and excerpted below are presented in roughly chronological order. They include communications among members of the scholarly research team, representatives of the Burroughs estate, and university library administrators. The documentation that follows also reflect early efforts to position the recovered materials within a broader scholarly and institutional context, including proposals for editorial collaboration, digital publication, innovative bibliography, and the establishment of a dedicated research center.
At the time of the document recovery and transfer a research team simply called the Burroughs Project (a group active from 2009 when contact began with John Bennett, Burroughs editor and Curator of the Avant Writing Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at the Ohio State University) was already developing the academic research potential of the documents, publishing, subsequently, several essays on them and developing a number of primary-document PhD dissertations by FSU graduate students. On the prospect of recovering original, archival documents, English graduate student Christopher Higgs wrote on 23 September 2012, “You can imagine my delight at the idea that this could potentially be a big deal….I’m very excited to make that happen! Thank you very much for your time, support and encouragement on this…I’m eager to see it come to fruition.” The magical, fateful day was 12 October 2012, when graduate student Paul Ardoin sent the author the following email: “Found everything, [. . .] on our way back. —Paul.” Ardoin followed with an email on 2 November 2012:
turns out you were right, there were quite a few things still to be found. we left three boxes in your office today. the largest is filled with manuscripts and correspondence of [South African poet] Sinclair Beiles. The second largest is quite a bit more Burroughs correspondence, along with details of a negotiation for a large Burroughs archive to be purchased from someone in France [Vaduz, Liechtenstein, actually] (I suspect this ended up at NYPL or some other Burroughs archive, 19,000 pieces apparently [purchased by NYPL in 2006]), and some reviews Bucher commissioned from Burroughs about Bucher’s novels. Plenty of other stuff, too, though nothing as exciting (in my opinion) as what we found last time.
The Collins Foundation, the final recipient of Bucher’s material, followed up on 9 November 2012, shortly after the original find, offering additional material and support for the FSU documents transfer:
I was looking through an old trunk today and found the mortgage papers for Junction B [Burroughs’ property in Lloyd, FL]. It also includes a number of letters between François and Burroughs, as well as a few notes and letters from James [Grauerholz]. Tony wants to review it so we can scan in whatever documents we need to keep on file. As soon as he’s gone through them, I’ll let you know and you’re welcome to add them to the collection.
Ardoin very quickly saw the vast research potential of our discoveries and noted the willingness of Burroughs executor James Grauerholz to fully cooperate. Exploding with ideas generated by the recovered documents, Ardoin wrote on 9 February 2013:
Grauerholz is clearly focused on increasing awareness of and appreciation for Burroughs’ work. He writes, “I’m eager to help with your work,” and “My commitment is to William’s work,” and he’s been working on all his new volumes of letters [volume 2 of the letters, 1959–1974, had appeared in 2012]. Certainly, I hope he’ll share stories and manuscripts, but might it also be worth asking whether he might be interested in some collaboration?
What I’m specifically thinking of (another fine idea from [Paul’s wife] Fiona!) is proposing a special issue to Review of Contemporary Fiction (or somewhere else?), returning to Burroughs so many years after their last issue [spring 1984]. Perhaps I co-edit with Grauerholz and you write an intro to the issue that also serves as an intro to our digitization project; maybe [Dirk] Van Hulle [Director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project] contributes an essay? Perhaps you and I co-edit and Grauerholz writes an intro, includes some letters from the next volume [of Burroughs letters]? By the time the next round of fellowship/grant applications comes around we have a special [journal] issue forthcoming. The manuscripts and the special issue position FSU as the new place for research on this author.
A letter drafted on 31 January 2013 by the FSU Foundation laying out the terms for the transfer of ownership of the Burroughs documents from the Collins Center to the Florida State University Foundation, that is, not to the FSU Library directly, but to the office that accepts donations and the university division to which the entire Nautilus Foundation was originally donated before the university’s rejection:
Stanley E. Gontarski, Ph.D.
Florida State University
Department of English
405 Williams Building
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580
Dear Stan,
The Collins Center is delighted to donate the William G. [recte S.] Burroughs papers to Florida State University Foundation. It is wonderful to have found a suitable and useful home at Florida State University. Please accept this letter as our official notification to you, the FSU Foundation and the University that the Collection is now the property of FSU. I understand it is Foundation protocol for us to sign a deed of gift and I look forward to doing that, as well as receiving your official valuation document(s) once the Collection is appraised.
I could not think of a better place for the collection to be used by scholars, students, as well as university guests and visitors.
Please feel free to contact me at XXXX or by email at XXXXX
Best,
The phrase on access and use in the drafted letter is particularly poignant (if not ironic) given the aftermath of the ownership transfer, “the collection to be used by scholars, students, as well as university guests and visitors.” And that seemed to be the general plan as the Associate Dean of Special Collections and Archives gave an update on cataloguing the material to Ardoin, Grauerholz, and Gontarski on 1 December 2015, although the Associate Dean has already altered the terms of the transfer, now referring to the Burroughs material as “the François Bucher collection”:
By way of an overall update for all of you, we have just finished an initial processing of the first instalment of the François Bucher collection—this is the critical first accession that contains the Burroughs manuscripts & correspondence. We are tweaking our organizational scheme and inventory[!], but will have something to share shortly. The idea here is to provide full research access to this material, through the searchable inventory, as early as we can in 2016. (emphasis added)
Many of the Burroughs Project’s research goals are outlined in the epigraphs to the online “User’s Guide,” which are in keeping with the letter of ownership transfer. And, as Dr. Ardoin suggested early on, the Burroughs Research Group sought national funding for its implementation, with, as implied in the Associate Dean’s update, “full research access.” By December 2014, the Burroughs Research Group was ready to make a series of presentations of its initial work at the William S. Burroughs centenary conference at Indiana University in February 2014 under the renamed FSU research group, “The William S. Burroughs Laboratory for Manuscript and Genetic Study.” The panel included three members of the Burroughs/Nautilus recovery team and the Associate Dean of Special Collections and Archives. The centerpiece of the panel was a fully operational version of the Blade Runner (a movie) Genetic Edition, based on material wholly unknown to Burroughs scholars at the time of the Bloomington conference. Needless to say, the panel was enthusiastically received. Plans were quickly made to follow up the Indiana conference with one at Florida State University based on the FSU archival material with a full exhibit of not only Burroughs, but the larger Burroughs circle that would include the Brion Gysin and Sinclair Beiles material. Burroughs Centenary Conference presenters Blake Stricklin and Paul Ardoin published their Indiana University presentations, and Associate Dean of Special Collections and Archives sent letters of invitation to keynote speakers for the proposed follow-up Tallahassee conference. To that end, Associate Dean of Special Collections and Archives drafted a letter to Ardoin, Grauerholz, and Gontarski on 1 December 2015, referencing this time an “FSU Burroughs Archive”:
As Stan mentioned, we would very much like to host a Burroughs related event in Fall 2016 (or Spring 2017 at the latest)—I don’t have the shape of the event in mind yet, but it would be great to have you, James, involved and to bring Oliver Harris in. Stan & I have talked about putting together something that gives us an opportunity to publicize the FSU Burroughs Archive (in both analog & digital form) and to explore (to some extent) the Bucher/Burroughs connection…Definitely more conversations to have on this.
On 17 March 2016, Oliver Harris responded, “The prospect of a conference sounds great and I would be honoured to be involved. Keep me posted.” Harris was particularly interested because the FSU group was planning a follow-up Genetic Edition of Dead Fingers Talk, and it had applied for NEH funding for “Digital Innovation” and other “Collaborative” projects in 2012. Harris had agreed to be one of the grant’s recommenders. It turned out that Harris was simultaneously working on a new edition of Dead Fingers Talk, and he was interested in transatlantic collaboration. He also mentions the need to be in the United States to work at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, which bought what was called the “Vaduz Archive” in 2006, the collection that was offered to, but rejected by, the FSU Library in 1978 and again in 1982 (see Chapter 1).
Harris subsequently inquired about the results of the FSU grant proposals and our developing research plans on 14 March 2016, and this essay, in good part, finally answers that lingering question he posed in 2016:
Dear Stan,
I was just wondering—post your NEH and ACLS [grant] bids—what happened and how’s your project going?
All best Burroughsian wishes!
Oliver
I replied to Harris on 17 March 2016:
Most of our energy is in transferring and redesigning our web page, which is not only designed to digitalize the holdings but to move to full collations of the documents we have. The one example we have is that done by Paul Ardoin for his (second) Ph.D. thesis at the University of Antwerp, and we are transferring the Burroughsarchive.org site to Florida state, a project that nears completion [overstated!]. Since the site is now on the FSU server and not (yet) open to the public, you need a password to access it. I’ll send a copy of this note to our Special Collections Dean, Katie McCormick, whom you met in Bloomington, and perhaps she can figure out a way for you to have access to the site. This is important since it is the model we are trying to follow for all the Crawdaddy pieces on which we are now working [overstated!]. We are also developing an electronic edition of the book never published in the United States, “Dead Fingers Talk” as part of another Ph.D. thesis [by Blake Stricklin], and my students have been publishing pieces in places when studies of Burroughs have never appeared, like PBSA, where the “Blade Runner” piece by Paul Ardoin was published.
My assessment, we now know, turned out to be uninformed since the library team by then had decided, privately, to reverse direction and not to follow what I outlined to Harris as the library’s primary scholarly goals, interests, and research direction. In effect, its unannounced, undisclosed decisions to reverse course all but shut down Burroughs research activity at Florida State University, which has not become the projected “new place for research on this author.”
At his end, Harris kept working, of course, and finally published a comprehensive, illustrated, 40+ page essay, “Making Dead Fingers Talk” in 20201, and a portion of that material would certainly have been the centerpiece to his proposed keynote presentation at the Florida State Burroughs Conference that never materialized. Harris followed up by publishing a new edition of Dead Fingers Talk: The Restored Text with Alma Books in 2020, and he wrote a lengthy “Introduction” to the 3rd edition of Blade Runner (a movie) (London: Tangerine Press, 2019), with slight reference to the FSU material but without directly referencing or using the Genetic Edition. The post-Burroughs Centenary energy and enthusiasm generated grand plans for follow-up activity; then without notification or explanation, shortly after speakers had been contacted and invited, all library connected activity and communication—on developing a Florida State Burroughs conference, on follow-up projects to the Genetic Edition of Blade Runner (a movie) based on additional FSU documents, particularly its Crawdaddy material, and a Burroughs-focused center for scholarly research—were halted, and to this day they have never been mentioned again.
The goals of the Burroughs Research Group were not those of the library, it turns out. and the library administration’s subsequent U-turn suggests that it felt no obligation to honor the terms of the gift, nor to follow up with the plans developed and set in motion at the Burroughs Centenary conference in 2014. It would not, in fact, establish a William S. Burroughs archive and research center at all, but, instead, it would follow its own lead with neither academic input nor oversight. The results were no follow-up conference, no library-initiated grant proposals, no support from the library for English Department research grants proposals, and, instead, a coherent core of archival material was distributed under a variety of rubrics among the papers of the material’s previous owner, François Bucher, a decision the library has deemed “common practice.” One result of such reversal is that, to date, no central, integrated, coherent research site or center for the study of the William S. Burroughs archival material has been created at Florida State University, and no systematic way currently exists for scholars and researchers to work on site with direct access to pertinent research materials or even to know where to look to find what is available. At best, one can use the newly created “Finding Aid” available for the Bucher Papers: Bucher Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida. But, in essence, researchers have to know in advance what they are looking for, and much supporting research material remains in the open access stacks of the library.
It should be emphasized, moreover, that the digital Genetic Edition discussed herein, almost unique in design and implementation, was created by scholars at the University of Antwerp Center for Genetic Study as part of Paul Ardoin’s 2014 PhD thesis, “Product and Process: Making and Unmaking Films with Beckett and Burroughs,” for his Doctor in Literary Studies (doctor in de letterkunde) Universiteit Antwerpen. This dissertation included an early but fully functional, digital Genetic Edition that was presented at the 2014 University of Indiana Burroughs centenary conference to universal acclaim, and it was subsequently migrated to and reconstituted by FSU Library’s digital staff. But Florida State University had no part in its conception, theory, design, or scholarly development other than trying to modernize the completed site it inherited. One might suggest that FSU’s participation in the project was technical, mechanical, and without understanding of the project’s scholarly goals and significance which went well beyond just another catalogue entry. Plans to continue the Genetic site with other Burroughs archival material, repeatedly promised, have failed to materialize, as have plans to continue supporting the current Burroughs holdings with further library acquisitions.
One result of such administratively induced dispersal is that the Florida State University remains unmentioned among listings of significant William S. Burroughs archives, nor is its cache of material cited in contemporary research. Operation Total Exposure makes the following comment about the work of pre-eminent Burroughs textual scholar Oliver Harris: his
acknowledgments list [contains] the usual suspects from the well-known Burroughs archives: the librarians and curators at Ohio State, the New York Public Library, Arizona State, and Columbia. Along with the Burroughs estate and Grove Press, this is the official bureaucracy of the Burroughs industry. It should be noted that unlike many other bureaucracies associated with 20th Century writers, Burroughs’ is particularly enlightened. They realize the value in access and availability. (emphasis added)
In this regard, the all-but-unmentioned, little known, substantially under-developed, mostly un-curated Florida State University Special Collections and Archives Burroughs material is an exception, and the library’s handling of its valuable research material not only makes finding and using the material difficult but also complicates citing it in publications by those few who do use it since no central Burroughs finding aid or reference point has been established.
The issues are further compounded since the Burroughs archive resists precisely the kind of textual stability upon which traditional copy-text theory depends. The editorial assumptions inherited from Greg and Bowers presuppose, at least implicitly, a recoverable hierarchy of documentary authority culminating in a relatively stable final authorial intention. Burroughs’s compositional methods, however, together with the material history of his manuscripts, typescripts, and photocopied revisions, frequently dissolve such hierarchies. What survives is less a linear sequence culminating in a definitive text than a constellation of overlapping and continuously revised textual states.
This instability is particularly evident in Blade Runner (a movie), where the surviving archive preserves not a singular terminal document but multiple variant states of what appears to have been the final typescript. That typescript—often corrected or mediated through Burroughs’s longtime associate and amanuensis James Grauerholz—was subsequently photoduplicated, after which further revisions, annotations, and corrections were introduced independently into separate copies. The archive therefore records not simply revision but revision through mechanical reproduction, creating parallel textual witnesses whose authority is distributed rather than centralized.
Under such conditions, McKenzie’s sociology of texts becomes especially valuable because it relocates editorial attention from the recovery of a singular ideal text to the material and social processes through which texts are produced, circulated, and transformed. The photocopy machine, editorial mediation, publishing procedure, and archival preservation become integral components of textual meaning rather than merely incidental features of transmission. In the Burroughs archive, reproduction itself becomes compositional. Each duplicated state potentially generates new textual authority, blurring distinctions between manuscript, copy, revision, and publication.
The resulting textual field resembles what George Bornstein describes as a versional rather than singular model of textuality, one in which the editor’s task is not solely to establish a final reading text but also to preserve the relations among competing or overlapping documentary states. Such a model is especially appropriate for Burroughs, whose works frequently exist less as discrete, self-contained artifacts than as recursive and interconnected textual performances. Barry Miles’s observation that Burroughs’s writings “have to be seen as one giant multivolume book including all the different versions” aptly characterizes both the archive itself and the editorial challenge it presents.
The present edition therefore approaches Blade Runner (a movie) not as a work moving neatly toward a single definitive form but as a dynamic textual process documented across multiple material states. Rather than subordinating variant documents to an idealized final authority, this edition attempts to preserve the evidentiary and interpretive value of those variants as part of the work’s ongoing textual history.
It should be emphasized, moreover, that the research engine developed as the digital electronic edition and the documents detailed in this case study confirm a sequence of events that illuminate the uneasy relationship between document recovery, scholarly research initiative, and rigid institutional practice. The Burroughs archive at Florida State University is emblematic of a broader crisis of the managerial university: the separation of librarianship from humanities scholarship; bureaucratic governance replacing intellectual leadership; digitization without interpretive vision; and institutional emphasis on acquisition metrics rather than scholarly outcomes. The material detailed provides a case study in how expectations for access, collaboration, and research development are shaped—and sometimes reshaped, even mis-shaped—by shifting bureaucratic priorities. Such details offer a supplementary documentary perspective on questions central to the study not only of William S. Burroughs but to archival research more broadly: ownership, access, organization, and the conditions under which materials are permitted to become available for interpretation.
Endnotes
1. S. E. Gontarski, ed., Burroughs Unbound: William S. Burroughs and the Performance of Writing (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 121–65.
Archival Theory, Power, and Institutional Control: Further Reading Annotated
Cook, Terry. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2, nos. 1–2 (2002): 1–19.
[This article serves as the general introduction by the guest editors to the first of two thematic issues of Archival Science that will explore the theme, “archives, records, and power.”]
Cook, Terry, and Joan M. Schwartz. “Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance.” Archival Science 2, nos. 3–4 (2002): 171–85.
[Guest editors of two special issues of Archival Science which are devoted to the theme of “Archives, Records, and Power.”]
Cook, Terry. “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms.” Archival Science 13, no. 2–3 (2013): 95–120.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
[A foundational meditation on archives as instruments of authority, repression, memory, and institutional power. Essential for theorizing archival custody versus interpretive access.]
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
[Especially useful for thinking about systems of classification, institutional discourse, and the production of knowledge through archival ordering practices.]
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
[Important for understanding the materiality of digital archives and the mediation of digital textual objects.]
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
[Particularly useful for discussions of compositional process and born-digital textuality.]
Manoff, Marlene. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 1 (2004): 9–25.
[Excellent overview essay connecting archival theory, power, memory, and institutional practice.]
Manoff, Marlene. “Archive and Database as Metaphor: Theorizing Digital Libraries.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 10, no. 4 (2010): 385–98.
[Particularly relevant to digital archival organization and access structures.]
Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 19–27. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.
[A concise but influential essay on archives as technologies of state and institutional authority.]
McGann, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
[Foundational for understanding texts as socially produced entities rather than isolated authorial artifacts.]
McGann, Jerome J. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
[Especially valuable for digital genetic edition discussion.]
McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. London: British Library, 1986.
[A landmark work arguing that textual meaning is shaped by material and institutional conditions of production, transmission, and preservation.]
Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
[A major work on the archive as fantasy, desire, bureaucracy, and material residue. Particularly resonant for the discussion of recovery, dispersal, and institutional mediation.]
Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
[One of the most important contemporary works on reading archives not merely for content but for the institutional logic embedded in their organization and administration.]