David Foster Wallace Archives (HTMLGIANT, opening day)

TL;DR

Blake Butler's brief HTMLGIANT post from the day the Wallace archive opened (14 September 2010), with the comment thread it sparked. The post itself is three sentences; the value is the thread — the earliest candid record in this collection of the ethics debate the archive occasioned among writers: whether a suicide's marginalia should be exhibited at all, the voyeurism of reading a dead writer's working papers, and the counter-arguments (working materials are understood as working materials; an opened archive is not posthumous publication). A reception document for how the literary internet met the archive in real time.

Key claims

• Opening-day facts as reported: "The Wallace archives open today at the Ransom Center" at UT Austin, including "more than 100 books he owned, often annotated," and papers such as a "handwritten draft of the first page of Infinite Jest" (the post embedded an image of it).
• Butler's stated ambivalence: "I still feel slightly conflicted over the whole nature of archives," expanded in the thread: "i'm not sure that marginalia should always be exhibited, especially with someone who killed themselves, and maybe wasn't in the mind of laying vision over what would happen to his stuff when he was gone. it also seems really early … i am also a voyeur."
• The thread's most quoted flourish (commenter lorian): "what happened to attics and buried boxes and defiant wives and burning drafts and don't show this to anyone? is this what it's like to die in the digital age? do we eat death like chips?"
• Counter-positions in the thread: one commenter distinguishes "opening an archive" from "publishing posthumous material," arguing readers "generally understand the nature of working materials"; another reasons that if the drafts' release were against Wallace's nature, his editor or agent "would say some shit"; a third is more troubled by Dmitri Nabokov bringing out a novel's notes — "notes, no more" — "against his father's express wishes, stated in writing."
• The thread links the HRC's opening-night webcast and a gallery of annotated-book images — period pointers to the opening-day publicity apparatus.

Themes

Archive ethics (exhibition of a suicide's private marginalia; voyeurism versus scholarship); the digital afterlife of writers; opening-day reception of the collection among literary bloggers.

Cross-references

• theawl-bustillos-self-help-library — seven months later Bustillos wrote exactly the piece this thread worried about (reading the self-help marginalia of "someone who killed themselves"), felt the same qualm in print ("this literary sleuthing is also just prying"), and the estate then withdrew those books — the thread's concern, played out.
• bostonglobe-fehrman-lost-libraries and newsweek-walls-mixed-up-files — the contemporaneous accounts of what actually opened.
• themillions-shapland-cataloging-pale-king — the insider's version of the same ethical unease ("prying"), from the cataloger's desk.

Notable passages

• Butler: "i'm not sure that marginalia should always be exhibited, especially with someone who killed themselves … i am also a voyeur."
• lorian: "what happened to attics and buried boxes and defiant wives and burning drafts and don't show this to anyone? … do we eat death like chips?"