The MoreMarsh Question: A Note on Dr Thrufens’s Autobiographical Statement of 2014
From the Annual Report of the Vorpel Foundation
The Annual Report of 2014 is not, as a rule, the place where significant intellectual events occur. It records the Foundation’s activities across the preceding year in the measured prose of institutional life: grants administered, papers received, boxes transferred with varying degrees of success, positions reviewed and not filled. It thanks retiring members of staff. It notes the ongoing status of the Transfer Corridor supervisor position. It contains, in the section given over to departmental contributions, a two-paragraph autobiographical note from Dr Wanda Thrufens that runs to 187 words and constitutes, on close examination, the most concentrated instance of the phenomenon it dismisses that the Foundation’s archive contains.
Thrufens’s note begins with a biographical correction: she was born a MoreMarsh and married a Thrufens. She offers this not as information but as pre-emptive closure. “What of it?” she asks, immediately after supplying it, which is the rhetorical posture of someone who knows precisely what of it and has decided to address the question by making it sound unanswerable. She then proceeds to answer it across three sentences, which is the structure of a person who wishes to dismiss a subject while remaining unable to leave it alone. Several reviewers, she notes, have sought to associate her work on recursive categorisation with her upbringing in the East Anglian fens. This represents, she argues, precisely the sort of biographical determinism her paper rejects. The coincidence is noted only because three conference organisers insisted upon it, and because ducks, she concedes, were admittedly difficult to avoid.
Let us take the dismissal seriously, as it deserves to be taken, before doing anything else.
The case against biographical determinism is a good one, and Thrufens has spent the better part of her career making it. Her paper on filing cabinets argues explicitly that the categorical structure imposed on material precedes and shapes the material’s meaning—that the drawer labelled D–F does not reflect the contents but determines how the contents are subsequently understood. Applying this argument to her own life, she arrives at a legitimate position: the fact that she grew up in the fens does not mean that the fens made her. The biographical reading—MoreMarsh grew up in a marsh, MoreMarsh thinks in categories defined by what can and cannot be drained, MoreMarsh spent her career exposing the hidden architectures that contain and distort knowledge, in the way that a fen contains and distorts the landscape’s capacity to support weight—is precisely the kind of retrospective narrative construction that her work on recursive categorisation identifies as epistemologically suspect. You look at the life. You identify the field. You draw the line. The line feels inevitable because you drew it after the fact. This is what biographers do. It is not evidence.
Professor Ünsel, whose capacity for forewords appears to have no natural ceiling, contributed a profile of Thrufens to the 2015 edition of the Yearbook of Archival Theory in which he reproduced her autobiographical note and then, in the same breath, did exactly what the note asked him not to do. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “to read Thrufens’s upbringing in the East Anglian landscape without hearing in it the foundational anxieties of her mature thought. The fen is, after all, the territory that refuses stable categorisation: it is neither land nor water, neither productive nor waste, neither inside nor outside the administered boundary. A child raised in the fen learns early that the category is a fiction imposed on a surface that declines to hold it. Thrufens carries this knowledge into every page she writes, and the pages carry it whether she acknowledges it or not.” Ünsel submitted this profile without apparent awareness that Thrufens had, in 187 words published the previous year, specifically requested that nobody do this. He cited the autobiographical note in the profile’s third footnote as “Thrufens’s own account of her formative context,” which it manifestly is not. Thrufens, informed of the profile before publication and given the opportunity to respond, wrote a single line to the Yearbook: “Professor Ünsel has located in my upbringing a significance I do not find there. He is welcome to it.” The Yearbookpublished her response in the same issue as the profile, in a box set slightly apart from the main text, which gave it the visual quality of a correction while filing it under “Correspondence.”
The question of the name requires a separate examination, which the 2014 note carefully does not invite. Thrufens dismisses the surname she carries by noting that she acquired it through marriage. This is accurate and, as a logical move, reasonable: a married name is not a natal identity, and the onomastic drift argument, even in its strongest form, addresses the name one is born with rather than the name one acquires later. On this reading, Thrufens is not Thrufens in any cosmically significant sense. She is Thrufens by administrative procedure. The marriage certificate is in the archive. DeMallard typed the congratulatory memo.
But MoreMarsh is another matter, and Thrufens knows it, which is why she names it first and disposes of it quickly. MoreMarsh is the name she was born with, raised with, and published under until her marriage in what the Foundation’s records indicate was sometime in the late 1980s. Her early papers—a monograph on redundant classificatory systems, a conference paper on the epistemology of the index card—appear under MoreMarsh. She built her initial scholarly identity under a name that means, with a directness the English usually reserve for road signs, more marsh. Not merely marsh. Additional marsh. Marsh beyond what you have already encountered, which was itself already marsh. It is the name of a landscape feature expressed as a comparative, pointing in one direction: further in, more of the same, deeper than you think, and wetter.
Dr Rosalind Feld, who has engaged with the onomastic literature longer than she would perhaps prefer, noted in a private communication cited by Brandtner in a 2017 addendum to her von Entenbraten monograph that “the MoreMarsh case is the one example in the literature that I find genuinely difficult to dismiss. It is not that the name determined the work. It is that the name describes the intellectual terrain the work inhabits: the territory that refuses stable categorisation, that yields under examination, that extends further than the boundary suggests. I am not saying MoreMarsh became Thrufens because the fens made her. I am saying that someone raised in additional marsh, and named for it, and who later spent her career arguing that every category conceals what it cannot hold, has produced a body of work that the name describes with uncomfortable accuracy. This is either coincidence or something the onomastic literature lacks the vocabulary to discuss.” Feld does not, here, use the word “Boulderdash,” but the space she leaves after “uncomfortable accuracy” has the shape of it.
Thrufens’s concession—that ducks were admittedly difficult to avoid—deserves more weight than the note’s tone allows it to carry. She offers it as a comic aside, the kind of geographical observation that anyone raised in fenland might make: there are ducks in the fens, as there are ducks anywhere near water, as there are ducks in the Vorpel Foundation’s south lawn memoranda, as there are ducks in Bet deMallard’s name, as there are ducks—roasted—in Atlas von Entenbraten’s. The duck is the AHDH’s recurring motif, its displaced waterfowl reporting anomalies, its navigational habits providing material for seven memoranda, its ontological status somewhere between mascot and methodological principle. That Thrufens grew up somewhere ducks were difficult to avoid, and has spent her career in an institution where ducks accumulate across decades of internal correspondence, and carries in her birth name a suffix—Marsh—that describes the duck’s preferred habitat, is either a chain of coincidences long enough to constitute a pattern or a chain of coincidences long enough that calling it a pattern would be precisely the error her paper identifies. She is aware of this. This is why she notes it.
DeMallard, who has followed the MoreMarsh question with the attentiveness of someone who processes the Foundation’s correspondence and therefore reads everything, offered an observation to the present account that she asked not to be attributed but which she then attributed herself by saying, with characteristic clarity: “I can put this on the record if it’s useful. I have known Dr Thrufens for twenty-two years. She worked harder than anyone I have seen at the Foundation, and she worked hardest on the things she found most difficult to pin down. She says the fens had nothing to do with it. I believe she believes that. The fens are full of things that are difficult to pin down, and she has been arguing with them, one way or another, since before I knew her. You can make of that what you like. I have filed it under ‘No Comment.’”
The last sentence of Thrufens’s note—that three conference organisers insisted upon the coincidence, and ducks were admittedly difficult to avoid—performs, without appearing to intend this, the central argument of the onomastic drift memorandum it implicitly addresses. The memorandum argues that the relationship between name and field is not chosen but accumulated: the researcher does not pursue their name’s implications, but the implications catch up. Thrufens does not say she pursued the ducks. She says she could not avoid them. This is the passive construction of a person who usually writes in the active voice and has, in this instance, chosen the passive with some care, because the active voice would require her to be the subject of a sentence she has decided to leave without one.
The Annual Report of 2014 is not the place where significant intellectual events usually occur. Thrufens’s note is 187 words in a document that runs to sixty-three pages. It is filed in the Foundation’s archive in a clearly labelled folder—deMallard’s work—under “Annual Reports: 2010–2019.” Volume Nine of the catalogue contains the onomastic drift memorandum, its three marginal annotations, and, three pages further on, a photocopy of the 2014 autobiographical note that someone has filed there without explanation. In the margin of the photocopy, in a hand that has not been identified, someone has written “cf. MoreMarsh” and drawn a small arrow pointing at the word “coincidence.” Below the arrow, in the same hand, is a single word: “Boulderdash.” Below that, in different ink, clearly added later: “And what’s wrong with that?” The third annotation has not yet appeared on this copy. Possibly it is still coming. The archive remains open.
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