The Locked Box: An Argument for Opening It
Szymański-Weil, P. Vorpel Foundation Working Papers, RC-2019-4. August 2019. 7 pp. Circulated to Fellows.
The Vorpel Foundation has maintained, since the discovery of the Sussex trunk in the mid-1990s, a policy of studied paralysis regarding the object catalogued in Archive Note AN-07 as “the locked box within Volume VIII.”
The note itself, authored anonymously in 1961 and subsequently attributed by handwriting analysis to the younger Harbord-Finch, describes the box’s contents as “their nature” and records “the decision not to include them in the general catalogue.” The decision, one observes after fifty-eight years, has never been revisited, never formally ratified by the full body of Fellows, and never explained beyond the three words “their nature,” which explain nothing while conveying, with the efficiency of all great understatements, that someone found the situation uncomfortable enough to stop writing.
This paper argues that the time has come to open the box. It argues further that the reasons for not opening it, insofar as they have ever been articulated, do not survive scrutiny. And it argues, finally, that the box itself—the object found inside Volume VIII of the Vorpel Archive, resting within the trunk in that creaking Sussex house—constitutes, in its physical description alone, one of the most extraordinary archival objects this Foundation has encountered, and that allowing it to remain sealed on the basis of a three-word memorandum composed by someone who is now dead represents a failure of scholarly nerve that the Viscountess herself, on the evidence of her preface, would have found contemptible.
Let the object be described properly, which it has not been in sixty years of archival custody, because proper description turns out to be the first problem and the first argument for engagement. What the Foundation holds, in its climate-controlled archive room in the basement of Vorpel Park, is a book. Not the archive volumes themselves, but a separate and distinct object discovered nested within one of them: a volume of unknown date, unknown authorship, and unknown contents, whose cover presents itself in heavy dark leather embossed with the image of an ornate door. This door, as the physical examination conducted at the time of the trunk’s opening recorded in provisional notes subsequently circulated as RC-1997-1, appears to the eye as something more than decoration. Its carved frame carries tendrils of ivy and blooming roses, with small symbols—arcane is the word that leaps to any observer’s mind, though the more precise description would be: heraldic conventions of a type not standardly associated with the Vorpel family’s documented armorial record—in its corners. The door’s panels have a quality that every member of the original assessment team noted independently and none satisfactorily explained: they appear, under certain lighting conditions, almost three-dimensional, as if the leather has been worked to a depth that the material’s actual thickness cannot account for.
Securing this volume—and “securing” is precisely the right word, in both its physical and its psychological senses—is a clasp of extraordinary manufacture. Professor Adeyemi-Clarke, who examined it in 2003 during the preparation of the facsimile editions and whose notes on the subject run to eleven pages in the Fellows’ archive, described it as “a masterpiece of delicate engineering and artistry, crafted from threads of spun silver that interlace in a mesmerizing weave.” Her notes continue: “These slender strands, twisted and braided with extraordinary precision, form a latticework of shimmering filaments that both gleam and shadow in turn, catching the light like woven moonbeams caught in an eternal dance.” One might, in another context, suspect one’s colleague of overwriting. One does not suspect this of Adeyemi-Clarke, who has never overwritten anything in forty years of scholarship, and whose characteristic register sits closer to the forensic than the lyrical. If she writes “woven moonbeams,” she means that the object defeated her usual vocabulary and she reached for the available alternative.
The clasp’s form presents, as her notes observe, a tension between the geometric and the organic: “angular bands intersecting rhythmic curves, presenting a tension between stark clarity and intricate ornamentation.” Its surface carries “abstract heraldic symbols and mystical sigils, their meanings veiled yet hinting at protective power and timeless guardianship.” The Foundation has not, in twenty years of holding this object, made any systematic attempt to identify these symbols. This omission is, in the opinion of this paper, indefensible, and represents exactly the kind of methodological abdication that Quennell-Stratford diagnosed in his 2004 study The Trunk and the Archive when he noted that the “enthusiastic amateur” posed a threat to archival integrity through interpolation and forgery, while the excessive caution of professionals posed an equally serious threat through inaction. The symbols on the clasp of this volume sit unidentified in a Foundation dedicated to the study of, among other things, “arcane symbols” in the Vorpel tradition. The irony does not require elaboration.
At the heart of the clasp rests the keyhole. Every observer who has examined this object has noted it, and every observer has struggled with the same description. The keyhole takes the form of a duck. This is not, it should immediately be stressed, a crude or whimsical choice of form: the duck’s slender neck curves with what Adeyemi-Clarke calls “regal poise,” its feathers rendered in the interlocking silver threads with a fineness that requires magnification to fully appreciate, and at the centre of the bird’s head, functioning as the duck’s eye, sits a small polished gem. Adeyemi-Clarke identifies this as “a tiny polished gem that gleams as if imbued with silent wisdom.” The gem has not been identified by stone type. The duck has not been identified by heraldic precedent, though the Foundation’s own archive in Brandt-Voss’s OP-028 on “The Ditties” notes in passing that a duck appears with unexplained persistence in three separate pieces of Vorpel verse material dating from the seventeenth century, always in contexts of threshold-crossing and transformation. Nobody has connected this observation to the clasp. This paper connects it now, and notes that the connection should have been made fifteen years ago.
The key presents the Foundation’s most singular and most extensively avoided problem. It rests, or rested, or exists in some condition not easily rendered by conventional tense, in a velvet-lined box found alongside the volume. The assessment notes from 1997 record, with the careful understatement of people who have encountered something they cannot explain and who are not sure their professional reputations permit them to say so, that the key is plain iron, simple and unadorned, cool to the finger—and that when one lifts the lid of the velvet-lined box to take hold of it, the key fades. This is not a report of an optical illusion, though the team considered that explanation first and found it insufficient. The key is present in the closed box, visible through the gap between lid and base, and becomes absent in the act of being seen directly. It has been photographed, with inconclusive results: three photographs show the box open and empty; two show something in the box that the photographic resolution cannot sharpen into a definite shape; one shows what appears to be a key and has been disputed by four Fellows and confirmed by two. Szymański-Weil’s own note on this photograph, recorded in RC-1979-5 in the context of his work on interpolated documents, was: “the image repays attention.” He has since upgraded this assessment.
Dr Renata Obasi-Mensah, whose work on archival self-reference this Foundation has drawn on extensively, argued in a 2016 seminar paper (The Object That Resists Its Own Description, unpublished, cited with permission) that certain archival materials function not as documents containing information but as what she calls “threshold objects”: physical things whose primary function is not storage or transmission but the marking of a boundary between what is known and what has been deliberately placed beyond knowing. She distinguishes these from objects that are merely mysterious—“mystery is an epistemological condition, resolvable in principle by the right approach”—from objects that are structurally resistant: “objects whose design incorporates the resistance as a feature, not a flaw.” The key that disappears on being looked at directly, the clasp that cannot be opened by the key one cannot hold, the door embossed on the cover that presents itself in three dimensions to a material that cannot achieve three dimensions: Obasi-Mensah’s category fits this object with a precision that suggests she had encountered it, or something like it, before.
The door on the cover of the volume demands separate attention, because it doubles the object’s threshold character in a way that the rest of its physical description only amplifies. The embossed door carries, in its carving, all the conventions of a grand portal: the dark aged timber of its frame, the metalwork in “sinuous patterns of sharp geometry entwined with delicate floral arabesques,” the rectangular panels framed in “bold linear bands that contrast with the flowing motifs within.” Its iron hinges echo the clasp’s aesthetic—“strong and striking with geometric precision, their rivets embossed in flattened knobs that resemble tiny shielded eyes.” The door, in short, depicts a door, which secures a book, which is secured by a clasp with a keyhole shaped like a duck, which requires a key that vanishes when examined. To open the book, one must first solve the clasp. To solve the clasp, one must use a key one cannot pick up. To use a key one cannot pick up, one must find a method of engaging with an object that has structured its own inaccessibility into its physical form.
The question is not, therefore, simply “should we open the box?” The question is whether “opening” is even the right category. Professor Reeve-Ashby, in his 2000 working paper on the metaphors the archive uses for itself, noted that the Vorpel documents frequently employ threshold language—crossing, entering, unlocking, revealing—without specifying what lies on the other side of the threshold, as if the crossing itself were the point rather than the destination. This volume, if it contains anything at all, enacts that logic in physical form. It does not merely use the metaphor of the threshold; it is a threshold, manufactured in leather and silver and gem-set duck-shaped iron by hands unknown, at a date the Foundation has not determined, for a purpose it has not attempted to establish.
This paper’s argument for opening the box rests on the Viscountess’s own principle. She declined to tidy history into something polite. She declined to pretend that the family’s adventures formed a moral parabola. She accepted, as she stated in 1928, that the fragments, trifles, and scraps in her archive were not obliged to match. The locked volume in Volume VIII is the Foundation’s most extreme version of a fragment that does not match. It does not match the archival conventions of any period in which the Vorpel family is documented. It does not match the known decorative vocabulary of the family’s material culture. It does not match the behaviour that objects are supposed to exhibit when examined. The Foundation, which takes its founding document seriously, should take this object seriously in the same spirit: not by explaining it away, not by restricting access to the discomfort it produces, but by engaging with it as the Viscountess engaged with the record she inherited—honestly, directly, and without pretending that the difficulty of the thing excuses one from looking at it.
The key, when it next appears, should be used.
Notes:
Received by Fellows, August 2019. Motion to open the locked box brought before the annual meeting, November 2019. Defeated four votes to three. Achterberg, I. abstained. Szymański-Weil, P. has requested that his dissent be recorded in the minutes.
See also: Achterberg, I., ‘On the Locked Box: An Argument for Leaving It Locked.’ RC-2023-1, January 2023. Szymański-Weil, P. has not responded.
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