On the Question of Whether This Is Fiction, Archive, or Tapestry, and the Foundation’s Characteristic Refusal to Choose:
A Reply from the Department of Romance and Historical Fiction, Top Floor, Building 3R, Vorpel Park
Submitted to the Fellows’ Circular by the Department of Romance and Historical Fiction, which notes, for the benefit of colleagues who have apparently not visited the top floor of Building 3R, that the view from up here is excellent, the light is good, and the coffee, made in the small kitchen adjacent to the room where we keep what the Viscountess called “the more speculative volumes,” is considerably better than whatever is being produced in the basement. We have read all five preceding papers with interest and professional admiration, and we offer this response in the spirit in which all our work is offered: not as correction, but as embellishment.
The previous paper from the Department of Textile History, Sewing, and Tapestry Studies drew a distinction that this department wishes to examine before accepting: “The Vorpel Foundation is not an archive. It is a tapestry.”
The distinction is elegant and well-argued and almost certainly true, and the Foundation will eventually refuse the “not.” This is not a criticism of the argument. It is a description of how the Foundation works. Its characteristic move, in this department’s experience of forty years in this building, is not replacement but incorporation. It does not say: we were wrong about X; X is in fact Y. It says: X is what Y becomes under certain conditions of observation, and the distinction, while interesting, appears to be disciplinary rather than ontological, and the ontological question will require a further Research Circular.
This is what makes the Foundation unusual and, in the opinion of this department, correctly situated at the intersection of all the categories the preceding papers have proposed. It is an archive and a tapestry and a fiction, and it refuses to nominate one of these as primary because it has spent a very long time noticing that the nomination of a primary category is itself the move that closes down inquiry rather than opening it. One can imagine a later Research Circular—this department has drafted one, pending the consensus that will never quite arrive—stating something in the register of: “Archives are what tapestries become when viewed by librarians. Tapestries are what archives become when viewed by weavers. The distinction appears disciplinary rather than ontological.” And then someone will respond that “disciplinary rather than ontological” is itself a disciplinary distinction, and that response will be filed under “persistence,” and the Circular will be added to the bibliography, and the locked box will remain locked, and we will all go on.
This department’s particular contribution to the current discussion begins, as our work generally begins, with the Viscountess. She is our patron in a more specific sense than she is the patron of other departments, because our existence rests on her explicit instruction, recorded in the archive and cited here from the facsimile edition prepared by Harbord-Finch: she prefers, she wrote, “to leave no stone unturned, especially if it may prove to be a magic stone with a princely frog beneath.”
This sentence has been read by colleagues in other departments as a charming eccentricity, a period piece of aristocratic whimsy sitting comfortably alongside the Viscountess’s more philosophically austere instructions about moral parabolas and unpolished family histories. This department reads it as a founding methodological statement, and we read it with the seriousness it deserves. The Viscountess does not say: we will examine magic stones on the chance that they prove to be metaphors for something real. She says: we will turn the stone. We will see what is there. And she attributes to the stone the possibility of magic, which is a statement about the epistemological status of the unexamined, not about the supernatural status of stones. Before the stone is turned, magic is as plausible as any other hypothesis. After the stone is turned, one has data. The Viscountess preferred to keep turning.
The witches of Lefame require the same treatment. The Foundation’s archive contains, in Volume VI, references to several of the Viscountess’s ancestral family in Lefame—a line whose precise relationship to the ducal succession this department has been investigating for fifteen years, to the productive non-conclusion that has become characteristic of Foundation research—who may, depending on the framing, have been practitioners of folk medicine, adherents of a pre-Christian religious tradition, women of unusual social independence in a period that found such independence suspicious, or witches. These are not the same thing, and the differences between them are historically, legally, socially, and spiritually significant. They are also, in certain contexts and from certain disciplinary perspectives, distinctions without a practical difference: the women were treated identically by the institutions that responded to them, regardless of which category most accurately describes what they were doing. This is what the Department of Romance and Historical Fiction means when it says that it does not invent stories but embellishes them. The women were there. The records of how they were treated are there. What is not there—what is never there, because it was never recorded by the people doing the recording, for reasons the Department of Textile History has enumerated with characteristic precision—is an account of what these women said about themselves, what they believed about themselves, what they made of their own situation. That absence is where embellishment begins.
Dr Miriam Osei-Tutu, whose work on women’s visibility in the Vorpel documents has been foundational to several departments’ research programmes, noted in her 2021 contribution to the Foundation’s journal—“The Stories We Tell About the Silence” (Persistence, vol. 71, pp. 85–101)—that “the archive does not merely preserve the past. It enforces a particular version of the past by determining what counts as a record, which is itself a determination made by people with interests in the matter. The stories that were not recorded are not therefore stories that did not happen. They are stories that were not considered worth the trouble of writing down, which is a very different thing.” This department takes Osei-Tutu’s argument as its operating premise. The stories that were not written down are the ones we write. Not because we know what they were, but because we know the silence is shaped—that it has a form, a contour, a set of absences that are specific rather than general—and the shape of a silence is the best evidence available for what the silence is about.
Professor Geraint Llewelyn-Moss, in his 2009 study Historical Fiction as Epistemology: What Stories Know That Arguments Do Not, argued that the fiction writer working with historical material occupies an epistemological position that is, in certain respects, more honest than the position of the historian proper. “The historian,” he writes, “claims to tell you what happened. The historical fiction writer claims to tell you a story that is consistent with what happened, which is a weaker and therefore more accurate claim, since what we can know about the past is at best consistency rather than truth. Fiction makes the epistemological limitation explicit by genre convention. History often does not.” This department has added Llewelyn-Moss’s formulation to its working definition of what we do: we produce accounts that are consistent with the archive, that follow from the archive’s evidence as one possible development of what the evidence contains, and that acknowledge by their fictional status that other consistent accounts are possible and that ours is not the only one.
The Viscountess herself operated in this mode more than she usually receives credit for. Her preface does not claim to tell the truth about the family archive. It claims to present the fragments without tidying them—a different operation, one that preserves the possibility of multiple consistent readings rather than foreclosing them in favour of one. She is, in the terminology Llewelyn-Moss uses, a historical fiction writer avant la lettre: someone who presents the materials and declines to impose the single authorising narrative. The difference between what she does and what this department does is one of degree rather than kind. She presents; we embellish. The embellishment is not decoration. It is the act of following the archive’s implications into territory the archive cannot reach, because the archive is limited to what was written down, and what was written down is limited to what the writers thought worth recording, and what the writers thought worth recording is limited by what the writers were and who had given them the pen. The Department of Romance and Historical Fiction has, in a sense, found another pen.
The mechanism by which this department’s work enters the wider intellectual life of the Foundation is one that other departments sometimes find puzzling and occasionally find irritating, and this paper addresses the irritation directly: the work travels through the Vorpel publishing enterprise to a reading public, and internally as a Research Circular or Occasional Paper, and in both cases it travels as fiction that is also research, which does not fit the standard categories of either. Our stories about the women of Lefame are cited in the Department of Textile History’s working paper on unnamed women’s labour in the archive. Our embellished account of the third duke’s diplomatic career has been used by the Department of Political History as a speculative framework for interpreting gaps in the documentary record. Our novel-in-progress about the construction of the Vorpel chapel—based on three Archive Notes, one water-damaged building account, and a sketch of uncertain date found in Volume III—has been cited in a preliminary bibliography by a doctoral student in architectural history who found our account more useful than the surviving documents precisely because it had to make explicit the assumptions the documents left implicit.
This is what “adjacency of potential” means in practice: not that fiction sits next to research, but that fiction is research conducted by other means, in territory where the conventional means cannot reach. Dr Renata Obasi-Mensah, in the draft paper on “epistemology of alongside” that two previous papers in this series have now cited, includes a passage that this department received with the relief of recognition: “The scholar who embellishes takes a risk that the scholar who analyses does not take: the risk of being wrong in a way that can be seen, rather than wrong in a way that can be footnoted into ambiguity. The embellishment commits to a version, and the commitment is legible, and the legibility is, in the end, a form of methodological honesty that the footnote does not always achieve.” We have put this on the noticeboard above the coffee machine.
The question with which this series began—is the Foundation fictional?—has acquired, by this paper, a fifth layer, and this department proposes to leave it there rather than resolve it. The Foundation is an archive, in the sense that it accumulates and preserves. It is a tapestry, in the sense that it is constructed from the underside by hands that cannot see the surface they are making. It is a fiction, in the sense that its most honest accounts of itself acknowledge that consistency with the evidence is the best it can claim, and that other consistent accounts remain possible. And it is a piece of Romance and Historical Fiction, in the oldest and most technical sense of that genre: a narrative that takes the materials of history and follows them into territory where history cannot go, because history requires documentation and the most interesting territory is precisely where the documentation runs out.
The witches of Lefame are waiting at exactly that border. The duck in the keyhole came from somewhere, and the ditties know where, and the ditties are not telling, and this department is currently on chapter four of an account of how the duck got into the silver and what the woman who made it was thinking when she set the gem into the eye. We do not know if she was a witch. We know she was skilled. We know her name was not recorded. We know her work outlasted everyone who thought her work was not worth naming.
That seems, in the context of everything the preceding papers have established, like enough to be going on with.
Works cited:
Miriam Osei-Tutu, “The Stories We Tell About the Silence,” Persistence: Journal of the Vorpel Foundation, vol. 71 (2021), pp. 85–101; Geraint Llewelyn-Moss, Historical Fiction as Epistemology: What Stories Know That Arguments Do Not (University of Wales Press, 2009); Lena Svavarsdóttir, The Underside of the Image: Scaffold Stitches, Backing, and the Hidden Architecture of Mediaeval Tapestry (Brepols, 2007); Renata Obasi-Mensah, “The Epistemology of Alongside” (draft, circulated to Fellows 2023, unpublished); Cecily Harbord-Finch, Introduction to The Vorpel Archive: A Facsimile Edition, vol. I (Vorpel Foundation Press, 2001); Imani Achterberg, Between Languages: Identity, Thought, and the Classical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2014).
This department’s novel-in-progress is tentatively titled The Duck and the Key and is expected to require at least two further Research Circulars before the plot resolves. Fellows with specialist knowledge of late mediaeval silver-working, the heraldic uses of waterfowl, or the genealogy of the Lefame connection are invited to correspond. All correspondence will be treated as potential source material.
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