52 pages • 1 hour read
Valeria LuiselliLost Children Archive
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Language and Stories Within Words
One of the primary themes that stretches across Lost Children Archive is the use of language, both to tell a story and to insinuate double meanings. As a documentarist who records and edits sound, the mother narrator is acutely aware of how her choices—which words to use, which details to describe, what order to arrange things in—shape the listener’s sensation of the story she’s telling. When the novel opens, she worries over the necessity of providing a satisfactory story for her children about her impending divorce and the split of their family:
I’m not sure which parts of our story we might each choose to place and edit out for them, and which ones we’ll shuffle around and insert back in to produce a final version […] we’ll need to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. We’ll need to give them an answer, tell them a proper story (5).
For the narrator, the question of “editing out” certain unpleasant, difficult-to-digest details is always implicit in the process of telling a story.
As the children overhear radio stories of migrant children dying, being detained, or being deported, the question of “editing out” details of her marital strife (from the family story) gradually commingles with the question of “editing out” other people’s trauma. Hearing these news stories, the children demand explanations of terms the narrator isn’t always prepared to provide. For example, when the daughter asks what the term “refugee” means, the narrator muses, “[…] I could tell the girl: A child refugee is someone who waits. But instead, I tell her that a refugee is someone who has to find a new home. Then, to soften the conversation, distract her from all this, I look for a playlist and press Shuffle” (48).
The narrator also examines the ways certain words have been used as euphemisms throughout American history. When her husband tells the children stories about Geronimo and the Indian Removal Act, the narrator reflects that “the word ‘removal’ is still used today as a euphemism for ‘deportations.’ […]The more I listen to the stories he tells about this country’s past, the more it seems like he’s talking about the present” (133). Thus, she examines the ways language shapes public perception of an issue (and certain words themselves can perform the function of “editing out,” or erasing, experience).
Throughout the novel, different family members develop their own ways of reclaiming language (and finding personal meaning in language). The mother narrator spends long hours reading and underlining passages in her books. This process feels so deeply personal to her that she experiences a sense of betrayal when she finds one of her own underlined passages in her husband’s archive box. The boy and girl attempt to negotiate themselves into the stories they’ve heard of migrant children by mythologizing them, coining the term “lost children.” After visiting the Apache graveyard with 300 Apache “prisoners of war” who did not receive name markers on the graves, the children tellingly invent “Apache” names for every family member: Lucky Arrow, Papa Cochise, Swift Feather, and Memphis. These names become part of their “family lexicon,” gesturing to different places they’ve visited, details they’ve observed, and experiences they’ve shared.
The boy often finds himself translating language between his parents and his little sister, given his unique ability to convert many adult ideas into a child’s simpler language. For example, when they visit Echo Canyon, the boy needs to explain to his parents that his sister believes the echoes come from other people shouting back to them in response. He then reframes their explanations into language that his sister can access. The novel suggests that this process of reclaiming language—converting difficult ideas into language someone can understand—is its own kind of translation, or retranslation.
Archives and the Search for Collective Meaning
Just as the family seeks a shared sense of meaning in their shared language, they use archives—collections of themed materials—to establish connections with experiences beyond their own. Just as the book’s representations of language become increasingly convoluted, the book’s treatment of archives—and each family member’s feeling toward archives—changes and complexifies. At the beginning of the book, the New York City soundscape that the husband and wife collaborate on tellingly unifies their perspectives, bringing the family together, to the degree that they begin to record private moments of shared experience, such as the sounds of their sleeping children.
As the first section progresses, however, the husband and wife develop separate projects and separate archives that embody their irreconcilably different “searches” for meaning (and irreconcilably different methods of searching). The husband’s Apacheria-based “Inventory of Echoes” project is so personal to him and his impressionistic mode of documenting that he refuses to discuss it with his wife. Likewise, the mother narrator’s more journalistic project of recording migrant stories seems too “conventional” to the husband. These differences in their projects, ethos, and priorities—and the friction these differences cause in their marriage—are exemplified by the husband’s insistence on bringing five archive boxes with his books, notes, research, and recordings, leaving only one box for each other family member’s “lesser” archive.
Despite these feelings of separateness, however, the mother narrator searches for echoes of others in herself—and vice versa—describing the archive as a valley wherein ideas can bounce off one another—sometimes, with unexpected resonances. She finds echoes of her experiences in the books she reads and underlines, which she stores in her archive box. She literally echoes the text of Elegies for Lost Children by recording herself reading it. The boy also tellingly connects to Elegies for Lost Children with his own echoes (with chapter titles that mirror the mother narrator’s, and his own differently phrased retellings of previously narrated sections from Elegies for Lost Children). Thus, the mother’s archive begins to blend with the boy’s archive, a process that is affirmed when he modifies her archive by placing his Polaroid photos in her box, taking the book from her box, or adding a note to her box, for example.
The book’s exploration of the archive as a collection of collective meaning comes full circle in the boy’s narrated sections. Herein, the boy attempts to perform the roles of “documentarist and documentarian,” explaining, “I could be both, for a while, at least on this trip. […] Because I understood, even though Pa and Ma thought I didn’t, that it was our last trip as a family” (210). Thus, the boy’s archive is not only a body of documents attempting to share his perspective with his sister, but an attempt to unify the perspectives of mother and father. While the mother and father’s views are too disparate for them remain unified in life, the boy’s archive brings them together and preserves the moments in time when they were together.
Processing and Performing Others’ Trauma
Lost Children Archive uses this family of “archivists” to illustrate how many American families process the trauma of migrant families. At some points, these family members seem to feel distanced from these stories, wrapped up in the drama of small betrayals, disagreements, and impending divorce. At other points, their rage over these issues seems to subsume the issues themselves. This tension is illustrated through the boy’s reflections after the family witnesses “lost children” boarding a plane to be deported: “I wanted to remind her that even though those children were lost, we were not lost, we were there, right next to her. And it made me wonder, what if we got lost, would she then finally pay attention to us?” (208).
The family members also project themselves into the trauma of migrants. The children perform the roles of “lost children” in games they play at the back of the car. The mother narrator seems to subconsciously hope that finding Manuela’s daughters will reunify her family. Likewise, the boy hopes that his family will stay together once they find Manuela’s daughters. Of course, life doesn’t play out as neatly as these projections, and the boy’s sections are filled with scenes wherein his narrative collides with other narratives, wherein the “lost children” of his imagination—from reading the Elegies—collide with the “lost children” making their way across the border (to the point where reality becomes indistinguishable from fiction).
Both Luiselli and the mother narrator seem to recognize that there’s something grotesque about these performances of others’ trauma, as suggested by the narrator’s reservations about her migrant stories project. Nevertheless, both Luiselli and the mother narrator seem to acknowledge a certain necessity (or, at the very least, inevitable human need) that drives these performances.
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