Today’s post is the second in a series of eight being published as part of Trinity Week which has SILENCE as its theme. The School of English and the Library have collaborated, using the Library’s Beckett collection to address the theme.

Samuel Beckett is the kind of person whose words will always be listened to. As Dr Julie Bates noted in a recent blog post, Beckett is ‘so highly respected that even the drafts of texts that he abandoned as scraps and scribbles are lavished with attention by scholars.’ She then posed the question: ‘What about people in less privileged positions than Beckett, who are themselves underdogs and silenced by society, but have tried to make their voices heard through writing?’

As part of Trinity Week, an exhibition has been curated in the Old Library which addresses these issues. On display are images of Beckett directing the San Quentin Drama Workshop, a theatre group made up of former prisoners, and a still from Beckett’s play Catastrophe, which was dedicated to the imprisoned playwright Vaclav Hável (1936-2011). The silent protagonist in Catastrophe is a tribute to Hável whose defence of human rights led to his own voice being silenced. The play was directed by Antoni Libera, the Polish writer and translator who, in the 1970s, also lived under an oppressive political regime. Linking the themes of dramatic voices and enforced silence is a letter written by imprisoned hunger striker Bobby Sands (1954-1981). One of the demands for which Sands went on strike was the right to receive a letter a week. The letter in the exhibition, which had to be smuggled out of prison, was written on the only materials he had, which was toilet paper.

The curation of an exhibition has a number of elements. Firstly there is the research to select exhibits to illustrate the theme of the exhibition. In this instance the selection, to address the theme of ‘silence’, was done by Julie. Then the exhibition labels have to be composed and there is great pressure on the word count; clarity cannot be sacrificed but the font has to be a reasonable size for accessibility and the labels mustn’t take up too much space in the already tightly-packed exhibition case. The exhibits themselves have to be assessed for suitability (in terms of their physical condition), and mounted on card or perspex, by the conservators in the Library. They have to be imaged by colleagues in Digital Imaging, for social media and other outreach activities. Only then is the exhibition ready to be installed.

Something other than the ‘story’ of the exhibition takes over at this point because a display, under glass in a museum, is a visual experience for the viewer rather than being a linear narrative. Therefore, what looks good has to take precedence over other considerations, and issues of placement and light predominate.

The differences which might exist between artifacts in the ‘real’ world, in terms of what has intrinsic value and what is ephemeral, become effaced once they become part of an research collection in a library or museum. Whether an item is a scrap of cheap paper written on by a Nobel Laureate, or a piece of toilet paper written on by a prisoner, it handled in the same way by exhibition curators and conservators.

Dr Jane Maxwell

Manuscripts & Archives