The Index as a Form of Self-Archiving in the Works of Alejandro Cesarco and Joan Wickersham

Abstract

Contemporary life-writing, especially of an experimental disposition, increasingly demonstrates its wariness of narrative as an organising principle of auto/biography and favours structures that resemble an archive – a repository of autobiographical content, disconnected, fragmentary, and arbitrarily arranged. Over the last two decades, we can observe a rise in the popularity of self-archives adopting alphabetical structures such as the bibliography, the encyclopaedia, the glossary, and the index. Of all the alphabetical arrangements of the archive, the index appears the least likely form to be used in life-writing because of the rigidity of its structure and its aura of formality and academic detachment. However, as this article demonstrates, the index can be successfully used in life-writing as a method of processing and investigating one's past. The article begins with a theoretical discussion of the index – its historical and cultural significance, as well as its politics and poetics. It proceeds to analyse two notable uses of the index for autobiographical purposes: Alejandro Cesarco's long-term artistic project titled Index (2000–2015) and Joan Wickersham's memoir The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order (2008), a National Book Award's finalist for non-fiction. The article shows that whereas Cesarco employs the index primarily to catalogue and examine his intellectual and artistic influences, Wickersham uses it as a structural foundation for her personal search to comprehend and mourn the suicide of her father.