Reading colonial archives can psychologically destroy the colonial officer who produces them

Evidence

It is 1912. Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel, House of Glass, begins in the chill of the Dutch East Indies’ state archives and in the heat of colonial Java’s emergent Indonesian nationalist movement. Dutch authorities call on Jacques Pangemanann, a Eurasian former police officer, newly appointed native commissioner to the elite Indies intelligence service, to defuse the movement’s spread. His mission is to read the classified state archives, and spy, report on, and then destroy Minke, the movement’s leader. But this complicity undoes Pangemanann and ravages his soul. He hears voices, develops a verbal tick and high blood pressure, becomes estranged from his family and falls into alcoholic despair. His descent from colonial officer to “bandit,” and ultimately to archive-bound “terrorist,” is rapid. By the book’s end he will have destroyed his own hero, Minke, and himself. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 111

Categorization

• SEED: Potential essay angle: the archive as a consuming, soul-destroying instrument contrasted with the researcher’s own archival labor.
• BMF: Pangemanann’s destruction by reading the files he himself compiles resonates with the destructive archival/spy apparatus in The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s theme of complicity — though the fit is loose; more apt is the clerk destroyed by the system in We (Zamyatin), where the state’s own records and surveillance consume the individual.