Archive Anxiety in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City

Abstract

How does the archive feel? In “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges creates one of literature’s most famous archives, describing what seems at first to be an orderly storehouse of all the world’s knowledge: “Each wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves; each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each line, approximately eighty black letters” (113). In the story’s opening paragraphs, the archive promises uniformity, rationality, and even physical comfort: shelves are built to the height of an average librarian, and each vestibule between the library’s hexagons features a sleeping compartment and a washroom (112). When a librarian deduces that the library is “total” – featuring all possible knowledge – Borges describes the initial response as “unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure” (115). This sense of promise echoes one of the most compelling seductions of contemporary technoculture, which proposes to harness Moore’s Law, the cloud, and the wisdom of the commons in order to organize and catalog the world’s information into an orderly and comprehensive archive. In his 2010 book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky highlights the creation of live-updating archives made possible by crowd-sourcing and digital technology. In his discussion of Ushahidi, a collective news platform used to track governmentsponsored violence and voter intimidation in developing countries, Shirky notes that “[a] handful of people, working with cheap tools and little time or money to spare, managed to carve out enough collective goodwill from the community to create a resource that no one could have even imagined even five years ago” (17). He argues that such efforts have enormous potential for the collection and organization of knowledge, noting that if the global population dedicated just 1% of the time they spent watching television on collaborating and participating in such projects, they could produce the equivalent of “more than one hundred Wikipedias” each year (23). The extraordinary potential of this intersection between digital technology and the archivization of knowledge led hundreds of Wikipedia editors to gather in Alexandria, Egypt in the summer of 2008. Popular historian James Gleick