Archive Fever: Literature, Illegibility and Historical Method
This essay explores the allure of illegibility in the archive. The author adapts methods from literary analysis and visual art in order to decipher an inscrutable fragment from the archive of Greek Egyptian novelist Stratis Tsirkas (1911–1980): a hastily written something on a 1929 film flyer advertising the screening of two Hollywood movies at the Ciné de Paris theater in Cairo. In her attempt to render the text legible, the author reconstructs the moment of the archival fragment’s production by developing a technique called “reverse calligraphy.” This sensory engagement with the archive’s materiality leads to a series of illuminations both with regard to Tsirkas’s biography and with regard to the role of creativity in historical inquiry.
SOFTLY LODGED BETWEEN A SET of invoices for a Greek Egyptian newspaper and a polite rejection letter from an Athenian editor is an old flyer advertising the screening of a film. According to this flyer, Sa dernière course—an MGM film from 1927—would be shown at the Ciné de Paris in Cairo, Egypt, between March 14 and March 20, 1929.1 “Sublime,” “tender,” “comical,” and “thrilling,” the film takes place in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, where a family of horse breeders find themselves on the brink of financial ruin following World War I. They are saved at the eleventh hour by Queen Bess, a mare that had fought alongside the family’s shell-shocked son in the trenches. Queen Bess wins the Kentucky Derby, restoring the family’s fortunes as well as the son’s spirits.
Few stories could be further removed from the social and political realities of early-twentieth-century Egypt, a British protectorate in the throes of a fiery nationalist movement that was also home to many European communities. Yet the flyer itself is indelibly stamped with a trace of those very circumstances: scribbled atop the printed film synopsis (in French) are four and a half lines of largely illegible handwritten text (in Greek). This hastily scrawled something would be banal—and would have all but guaranteed this fragment of 1920s Cairo being tossed in the trash—had it not been for the identity of the flyer’s owner, and his eventual fame.
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