In the context of many readings regarding collecting and archiving, it’s hard not to see Walter Benjamin’s scrapbook-style text, particularly “Convolutes,” as a hoard—an amassed pile of thoughts, reflections, photos, journal fragments, textual excerpts, and images of nineteenth-century (mostly Parisian, or at least Western) culture rendered through language. Through the litany of traces—“the rags, the refuse”—of the nineteenth-century culture and economy, and from thinkers and writers of the time, Benjamin attempts to undercut the singular (or maybe binary-based) narrative that often entraps historiographers (460). In fact, he quite clearly announces his intentions to ‘show’ instead of ‘tell’ through his method of “literary montage,” which renders a multitude of connections that a reader can follow like a single thread in a tangled mass.

The composition seems distinctly postmodern (although too early to be so?), including meta-discussions of the method itself—for example, the metaphor of the climber looking over a “panorama”—and utilizing juxtaposition rather than linear thought (461). However, other qualities seem to reflect the architecture of the arcade itself. In “Convolutes,” some fragments have thematic labels, such as “Weather” and “Awakening,” which suggests one thread that a reader could untangle—or, in terms of architecture, one store that a patron could duck into, the items ‘for sale’ displayed based on a theme. Each section of “Convolutes,” encyclopedia-like, also includes clear titles, which seems to serve as categories of thought—like placards labeling the offerings of a store. Section “O” really is about prostitution and gambling, although it includes everything from journal quotes that discuss women’s virtues to lists of names (“prostitutes, grisettes, old-hag shopkeepers…”) to reflections on the economic functions of prostitution (“the dialectical function of money in prostitution”) and so on (492-494). With Benjamin’s reflections (e.g. “Years of reckless financial speculation under Louis XVIII. With dramatic signage of the magasins de nouveautés, art enters the service of the businessman”) hanging next to photos, fragments of text from journals, book excerpts, or even lists (e.g. a list of arcade names), this cut-and-paste arrangement doesn’t put his ideas and gut reactions (“The influence of commercial affairs on Lautréamont and Rimbaud should be looked into!”) ‘in conversation with’ the “rags” as much as include his thoughts like water droplets in a indistinguishable river of droplets whose only connection is the time period—the universe that they briefly share (34, 37).

These chapters of amassed ephemera relating to notable subjects of the century do have a slight quality of what a researcher may see or take away from an archive. However, Benjamin has tried to include “everything one is thinking at a specific moment in time,” unlike a historian with a hypothesis would transcribe into their notebook in a reading room or the archivists themselves may choose to preserve. If Benjamin’s work reflects any archive—or a semblance of an archive, or maybe all archives—The Arcades Project reveals the actions of both the archiving itself and (the absence of) the historian’s development of a narrative from that archive. Benjamin has collected text like objects (more so images, in his terms), numbered them and put them in “folders.” This act could appear as a commentary on the archive, but Benjamin’s goals seem just as readily applicable to the researcher or the historian than the archivist. On a basic level, Benjamin shows that an archive is a composition, always, because it’s been collected and arranged. The archivist and a historian are composers. The best solution is to allow for as many interpretations as possible by resisting dialectical tendencies and swimming in a sort of echo chamber of language that holds all thoughts distinct but equal through form.

In “Exposés,” Benjamin states that “dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening” (13). Since Benjamin may have believed that synthesizing two ends of a binary does not lead to truth, but instead to typecasting, to novelty, to commodification, to myth, to the lie of progress, did he attempt to “include everything” in this manuscript to resist dialectical thinking in order to prevent “historical awakening”– to resist the archive? Or did Benjamin see himself “eternalizing” the nineteenth century and making the “progress” of that time a part of the performed routines of “history”–a master archive of archives (26)?

Surveying my options of which archives to visit, I found myself intrigued by both the Saturday Evening Girls club and City of Boston photography collections at The Healey Library archives. I emailed a day ahead to let the staff know my intentions to visit on Wednesday morning and received a courteous email within 24-hours from the librarian, stating that the collections would be ready for my viewing promptly at 10am. Of course, thanks to the recent transportation issues in the city, I was running late.

Exasperated by my own tardiness, I reached the library a half-hour past due, feeling a little like the scholar Arlette Farge describes in “She Has Arrived”—fumbling, inconspicuous, and hypervigilant in the dense silence of the reading room. Thankfully, having navigated The Healey Library archives a few times before (and informed the staff of my delay), I could fake the rest of my confidence as the kind man at the front desk directed me to a table. A gray metal cart bestowed one box of file folders from the Saturday Evening Girls collection and two smaller flat boxes from the City of Boston collection. The staff member informed me that the librarian had chosen the boxes as representatives of the full collections. “That’s our largest photo collection,” he said, referring to the City of Boston boxes. Dread knotted in the pit of my stomach. My short time at the archives—a brief sifting through the three perfectly labeled boxes—would not be enough. I would be trying to “conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater,” not only because the boxes’ contents are a fraction of the full archives (which are a fraction of the “infinite heaps of things they recorded”), but because I would not finish—“there will be something left unread, unnoted, untranscribed” before I left for my midday meeting (Steedman 1165). Resigning myself to the inevitable incompleteness of my proposed task, I started with the Saturday Evening Girls club box.

After gingerly pulling off the lid, I surveyed a row of folders, each numbered and arranged in ascending order. I pulled out the first folder. Right away I was sucked into a narrative: Fanny Goldstein, self-described as the first Jewish woman in charge of a public library in Massachusetts, had written a short autobiography, detailing her experiences in the city. The piece was published in the Saturday Evening Girls (SEG) club newsletter in 1954. Goldstein worked at The West End library branch since 1922. She never married. In the accompanying photo, she sits on a beach next to another woman, who is marked “unknown.”

Already, I am making things up: Fanny was there when the West End was nearly leveled, the public and private sectors transforming the area from a “slummy” immigrant community into a more gentrified downtown neighborhood. She never married because of her fierce independence, or her gender, or her sexuality (that could be her secret partner in the photo!). Clearly she only ends her autobiography with a patriotic love confession to America on behalf of her Russian family so she could temper her notable statement that “in the course of the years I have had the extraordinary, rarely experienced by other women,” in which she lists off citations, rewards, lectures, and travels with which she received or partook. Not only am I looking at the photo and written account for “a history of relationships of power,” attempting to “narrate a conflict” that may or may not exist, but I’m also abusively using Fanny Goldstein’s story “as the motor of [my] reflection, the source of [my] own narrative” (45). At the end of the day, the scholar’s point of reference can only be his or her own origin.

In fact, I knew that I would look for any whiffs of female oppression before I arrived at The Healey Library. Farge’s assertion that “it is not easy to separate the history of men and women from that of social relations and antagonisms” somewhat validated my subjective approach to my visit, but I felt guilty as I greedily poured over photo after photo of these women berry picking, folk dancing, glazing, embracing near some rocks at Wingaersheek Beach (44). I chose which narrative to see in these photos before I arrived, before skimming the folders labeled “pottery” (which include stunning photos of the primary-colored bowls, pitchers, and plates the SEG made and sold at Paul Revere Pottery) to peer more closely into the one’s labeled “women.” Filled with pictures of the group’s craft-driven joy and intimacy, I perhaps too presumptuously assumed this community of women existed tenuously in the male-dominated society that originally produced such a politically acceptable, economic-based training program. I chose this narrative over others.

And really, knowing that these photos and their accompanying letters from family members were gathered beginning in 1975, a time of emerging feminism when gender equality may have been a sexy political agenda in good ol’ liberal Massachusetts, a “revisionist history” may actually exist here in a way opposite of what one might expect. While I forgive myself for my imagination—I am in fact a poet more than a scholar—there’s an anxiety I have about “truth” each time I visit an archive. While Farge describes the records themselves as occupying “an ambiguous position,” an intensity and potential intangibility, it’s not the unreliability of the documents I’m worried about—it’s mine.