Literary Lists: A Short History of Form and Function 3031283716, 9783031283710

Citation preview

Literary Lists A Short History of Form and Function

Roman Alexander Barton Eva von Contzen Anne Rüggemeier

Literary Lists

Roman Alexander Barton Eva von Contzen • Anne Rüggemeier

Literary Lists A Short History of Form and Function

Roman Alexander Barton English Department University of Freiburg Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

Eva von Contzen English Department University of Freiburg Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

Anne Rüggemeier English Department University of Freiburg Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

ISBN 978-3-031-28371-0    ISBN 978-3-031-28372-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28372-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support of a number of people and institutions who did not mind our obsession with lists. We would like to thank the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies for giving us the space to work in close collaboration, and Kalina Janeva, Matteo Schiavone, and Philomena Wolf for their critical feedback and editorial support. We were brought together by the project Lists in Literature and Culture: Towards a Listology (ERC-2016-STG no. 715021), from which this book takes root. It is dedicated to all lovers of lists and those who do not know yet that they are about to be hooked. Freiburg, January 2023

Roman Alexander Barton Eva von Contzen Anne Rüggemeier

v

Contents

1 Introduction: Writing the Literary History of Lists  1 2 S  eries: Superabundance and the Scale of Nature in Literary Lists of the Early Modern Period 11 3 I temisation: Enumerative Realism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 37 4 L  etteracettera: Experimental List-Making in the Age of Modernism 67 5 W  hite Noise: Postmodern Enumeration and Fragmented Selves 87 6 Epilogue: Towards a Literary-Historical “Listology”109 Bibliography117 Index

137

vii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Writing the Literary History of Lists

Abstract  This opening chapter provides an overview of the research landscape on literary lists as well as an introduction to the approaches scholars have taken to their analyses of lists in literature. There are (at least) four strands of scholarship: historical/diachronic, narratological, cognitive, and formal/rhetorical. This study combines all these perspectives. Keywords  Literary lists • Research overview • Approaches to lists • List-making and literature In Gary Shteyngart’s novel Our Country Friends, the protagonist, Alexander (Sasha) Borisovich Senderovsky, a novelist and creative writing instructor, is known for the following quasi-proverbial piece of advice: “When you run out of ideas, just write down a list. Readers love lists” (2021: 196). In the novel, it is not clear if Senderovsky is pulling his students’ legs or if he is serious. Do readers love lists? W. H. Auden regarded lists as the epitome of high-brow literary critical discourse: only a true literary critic could approve of “long lists of proper names such as the Old Testament genealogies or the Catalogue of ships in the Iliad” (1956: 48). For Umberto Eco, the list was the form par excellence of his writing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. A. Barton et al., Literary Lists, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28372-7_1

1

2 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

process. In his autobiographical Confessions of a Young Novelist, which he wrote when he was 77 years old, he admits that he did not realise his fondness for lists when he was younger; only as he grew older did he come to recognise the value of the list as a form. The lists of Rabelais and Joyce in particular “played a decisive role in [his] development as a writer” (2011: 129). Eco came to see the dynamic and flexible nature of lists, which can be playful or comic, or highlight sound patterns but also impose order and disorder, insinuate magnitude, convey the ineffable, express deformation, excess, overabundance, or chaos, and can frustrate and delight us in equal measure. Eco closes his Confessions on the following note: “Lists: a pleasure to read and to write. These are the confessions of a young writer” (204). Eco’s final lines are tongue-in-cheek. Lists may be a pleasure to write, but they are certainly not always, and not for everyone, a joy to read. One of the oldest forms of literary lists, the epic catalogue, has been met with much criticism and frustration over the centuries. The catalogues in Homer’s epics, first and foremost the catalogue of ships, became a sine qua non for poets writing in the Homeric tradition. Yet since antiquity, poets and critics have expressed their doubts as to the efficacy of the list form. In the twelfth century, Joseph of Exeter, author of a Latin poem on the Fall of Troy, claims that such lists do not actually please the Muses: on the contrary, catalogues hurt their tender ears.1 The historian Edward Gibbon, writing in 1763, likewise finds little value in the catalogue form: All epic poets seem to consider an exact catalogue of the armies which they send into the field, and of the heroes by whom they are commanded, as a necessary and essential part of their poems. A commentator is obliged to justify this practice; but to what reader did it ever give pleasure? Such catalogues destroy the interest and retard the progress of the action, when our attention to it is most alive. All the beauties of detail, and all the ornaments of poetry, scarcely suffice to amuse our weariness. (328)

This book is, firstly, about the form of the list and the challenges it poses whenever it is included in literary texts. There is hardly another formal device that elicits such strong reactions. Perhaps the list is the one element in literary texts that is the hardest to ignore: because lists require reading techniques that differ from the reception of continually and 1  See 3.417-18 of Joseph’s poem De excidio Troiae (edition: Gompf 1970; translation: Rigg 2005).

1  INTRODUCTION: WRITING THE LITERARY HISTORY OF LISTS 

3

coherently flowing texts, reading audiences can hardly look past the list and so are urged to take a stance. Should one follow the cues of the text and engage with the list as a list, embracing its formal openness, the gaps between individual items, and the looseness of syntactical embedding? Or should one reject the author’s invitation and opt for not reading? From shopping lists and to-do lists to inventories, genealogies, indices, and chronicles, human beings have always made lists. List-making is one of the most basic and oldest human practices that give utterance to cognitive processes: it articulates how we categorise and manage the knowledge of the world around us. Anthropologists have argued that the practice of list-making arose with the advent of writing and is hence closely connected with literacy (Goody 1977). As early as 2500 BC human beings made lists for administrative, religious, and educational purposes (Veldhuis 2014). In everyday life, we use lists when we go shopping, plan a workday, or invite friends to a party. Especially in the age of the Internet, lists and catalogues have seen a revival facilitated by new technologies and hypertext interfaces. When lists are included in literary texts, the list form undergoes a change: the everyday device is creatively transformed for aesthetic, narrative, and rhetorical purposes. Literary lists are not, or no longer, pragmatic; they do not fulfil any practical use for the readership. And yet, the pragmatic dimension of lists often remains transparent in literary contexts. In fact, this transparency of their pragmatic functions is one of the reasons why forms of enumeration in literature can feel forced and alien—and indeed alienate audiences and make them avoid reading long lists. On another level, the practical backdrop of lists accounts for a different kind of transparency. Whether one regards lists as a form of writing or as the expression of cognitive processes, lists provide insight into the ways people organise knowledge differently throughout the centuries. Beyond individual readers’ preferences and the challenges of reading lists, this book is therefore also about the historical development of the literary list. We start from the premise that lists have been an important literary device since the beginnings of (Western) literature. The literary history of the list form—what we term “listory”—is tied to moments of (historical, intellectual, and cultural) transition and change. We argue that literary lists absorb and reflect such changes in a particularly pregnant way: since lists are, in the widest sense, about order, literary lists often become sites for expressing and negotiating changes in the way in which the world is ordered and perceived. In crucial moments of transformation, the list

4 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

emerges as a versatile and flexible form: literary lists can be seismographs of change. The major epochs and movements we focus on are the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, modernism, postmodernism, and the Digital Age. Philosophical and aesthetic concepts were subject to a fundamental shift in meaning and function in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries (Foucault 1994). Thus, the rhetorical tradition of enumeration, the literary tradition of the epic catalogue, and the philosophical tradition of the series, all of which originated in antiquity, were transformed significantly. Due to the rise of empiricism and subjectivism, new functions of literary enumeration emerged between 1500 and 1800. Rather than representing “reality” predominantly in a figurative manner, as was mostly the case in the ancient epic and its catalogues, lists in early modern literature came to imitate the world as it appears to the human senses, in an experiential manner. In parallel with these developments, the differentiation between the literary and the non-literary (or practical) list re-entered on the side of the former. This “re-entry,” in the sense of George Spencer-Brown (1972: 69-76), is characteristic of the new genre of the novel, in which quasi-­practical lists produce a reality effect. What is more, literary lists came to represent sequential perception, that is, the train of impressions and ideas in the subjective mind as described by John Locke, David Hume, and others. As a result, narratives from the eighteenth century onwards have a tendency to “listify,” whereas the literary lists themselves often develop a narrative dimension. This is carried to the extreme in modernism when, in response to language scepticism, enumerative storytelling was sought out as an alternative to traditional discursive narrative. Thus, ultimately, the disbelief in the efficacy of language resulted in a radical “listification” that defined not only a range of modernist but also some postmodernist literature. This is a slim volume relative to such major themes, but we have kept our focus strictly on literary lists, and we have proceeded by example. Also, our focus is limited to literature that has been written in the English language, even though list-making is by no means an exclusively European or Western technique: literary lists also abound in non-European and non-­ Western literary cultures. In the small corner of the literary world we have chosen, we attempt to trace the history of the literary list and its functions in and for modern literature. We concentrate on narrative genres, especially the novel, but we also take into account poetry and, occasionally, drama. We use the term “list” as a hypernym that comprises a range of enumerative forms, including catalogues, registrars, rolls, indices,

1  INTRODUCTION: WRITING THE LITERARY HISTORY OF LISTS 

5

inventories, and schedules. In a prototypical model, “list” constitutes the often-­evoked “mere” list: a simple enumeration of isolated items, without syntactical embedding, vertically arranged. In literary practice, however, lists occur in diverse forms.

The (Literary) List: Terms and Approaches There is no such thing as the list. We can only ever approximate the list as an abstraction. Lists function on the basis of enumeration and accumulation. They may be longer or shorter, syntactically embedded or not embedded at all, vertically or horizontally arranged; they may consist of items that comprise one word or a whole paragraph, they may be ordered alphabetically or numerically, they may be chaotic or ordered, they may follow scientific classification or an individual’s mindset, and they may be infinite or finite. In the last decade, the study of literary lists has gained momentum, spurred also by research in other fields. In the context of collecting and collections, for instance, lists and the list form are often mentioned, whether in terms of exhibition catalogues, practices of arranging a collection, or the representation of collections in literary texts (Pomian 1986; Bal 1994; Assmann et  al. 1998; Sommer 2002; Schmidt 2016; Bronfen et al. 2016). Sociologists have researched lists and list-making in terms of their political implications: they have drawn attention to the oftentimes concealed processes of selection and inclusion/exclusion in the creation of lists, which can heighten the illusion of objectivity (de Goede/ Sullivan 2015; Stäheli 2016). Search engines, for example, easily lead their unsuspecting users to believe in objective results (Roehle 2008). In medical contexts, scholars have discussed the therapeutic potential of lists and list-making but also their usefulness for monitoring patients (Rüggemeier 2018, 2020). When it comes to the study of lists in literature, the field that has engaged most thoroughly with the form of the list is Classics. Due to the significance of the epic catalogue as a form in antiquity, classicists have inquired into various epic catalogues, their tradition, transmission, reception, and functions within poems, ranging from Homer to Renaissance poetry and contemporary epics.2 Outside of Classics and apart from a number of anthologies of literary lists (e.g. Spufford 1989; Eco 2009), 2  See, for example, Kühlmann (1973), Visser (1997), Hunter (2005), Sammons (2010), Reitz et al. (2019), and Kirk (2021).

6 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

there are only a handful of studies that deal with the list form from a more comprehensive angle (see Barton et al. 2022b). The analysis of literary lists tends to be restricted to a specific period and/or type of list. Examples include medieval lists and enumerations (e.g. Barney 1982 on Chaucer; Howe 1985 on Old English examples; Jeay 2006 on the French tradition; von Contzen/Simpson 2022 on medieval and early modern lists), the early modern context (Barton 2021; Johnson 2012; Müller-Wille/ Delbourgo 2012), and a number of modern and postmodern examples (Gilbert-Damamme 1989; White 1992; Thwaites 1997; Hall 2005; on detective fiction, Link 2023; on pop literature, e.g., Baßler 1994; Diederichsen 2006; on graphic narratives, Rüggemeier 2020; on life-writing, Rüggemeier 2021a, b, 2022). Systematic treatments of literary lists are rare. One exception is Sabine Mainberger’s monograph on the poetics of enumeration (2003 written in German). The book is structured around the various contexts and functions of lists: classification, definition, and description; mnemonic techniques and didactics; methods of recognition and self-understanding; rankings, canons, and manifests (which Mainberger calls “postulating” enumerations); commemoration; the depiction and passing of time; strategies of chronicling (dynamics of change); and ritual enumerations. Mainberger’s study is rich and compelling, in that it introduces a broad spectrum of enumerative forms in literature. The examples are taken mostly from European literatures, often in German or French, written between the Renaissance and the twentieth century. Another critic who discusses the literary list in a more systematic way is Robert Belknap. His 2004 monograph on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau begins with a succinct introduction to the list form.3 He emphasises the formal characteristics of lists, which he defines as “adaptable containers that hold information selected from the mind-deep pool of possibility” (2004: 19). Belknap’s contention that “lists are deliberate structures, built with care and craft, perfectly suited to rigorous analysis” (2004: 35) fundamentally informs this book, too. Belknap, like other critics before him (most notably perhaps Stephen Barney, discussing Geoffrey Chaucer’s listing techniques), attempts to define the list based on various parameters: order of the items; strategies of connectivity (paratactic/syntactic); layout (vertical/horizontal); length (finite/infinite); and function. Many of these

3

 See also Belknap (2000).

1  INTRODUCTION: WRITING THE LITERARY HISTORY OF LISTS 

7

parameters are binary, inspired by structuralist approaches such as Roman Jakobson’s. Belknap’s introduction in particular has been influential, not least due to his useful definition of lists “as frameworks that hold separate and disparate items together. Lists are plastic, flexible structures in which an array of constituent units coheres through specific relations generated by specific forces of attention” (2004: 2). Liam Cole Young, in his book List Cultures (2021), also begins with Belknap’s definition. Young assumes a media cultural perspective. Each chapter is devoted to one context of list-­ making: epistemology, administration, computation, and poetics. For Young, the list’s persistence across centuries, cultures, and media points to “the way data become culturally inscribed as knowledge” (2021: 15). He stresses that “lists teach us about the systems of order that surround and enframe us because they simultaneously conceal and reveal, enforce and subvert the contours of such systems” (ibid.). Apart from Young, the value of interdisciplinary as well as diachronic approaches to lists in literature and culture has been demonstrated in several edited collections and special issues of journals.4 The range and potential of interpreting lists in a comparative perspective is impressive; the articles and essays offer stimulating insights into selected contexts of list-making. What these studies do not provide, however, is a more coherent perspective on (literary) lists and their uses over time, within a certain period or in a specific genre. From a theoretical perspective, we can distinguish between (at least) four different approaches to the literary list: historical/diachronic, narratological, cognitive, and rhetorical/formal. The historical (and also, at least partly, diachronic) approach considers the changing forms and functions of lists over a certain period of time. The volume by von Contzen and Simpson proceeds diachronically (medieval to early modern), as do Doležalová and Barton et al. In these publications, the individual chapters provide snapshots of how literary lists were functionalised at different times and in different contexts, without any claims to exhaustiveness. The narratological approach considers literary lists as part of narrative contexts. The starting point is typically the insight that, when embedded in narrative texts, lists pose a number of problems: first, the functional background of lists as a practical device can threaten the status of the literary and run counter to aesthetic appeal. Second, lists are not easy to 4  See Lecolle et  al. (2013), Doležalová (2009), von Contzen (2016), Bleumer et  al. (2017), Neven et al. (2018), Rüggemeier (2021a, b), and Barton et al. (2022a).

8 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

decode: due to the gaps that necessarily occur between the individual items of a list, sense-making is impeded and requires greater cognitive input by the reader than other literary structures. Third, lists weaken the ties that bind a narrative together. Strictly speaking, a list does not narrate; it only narrates once we read it as a (proto-narrative) text and establish links between the individual items, or between the list and the narrative context in which it occurs. Similarly to descriptions, with which they often overlap, lists are characterised by a certain tension between the narrative progression (the horizontal axis of narration) and the halt they cause.5 In addition, the systematic study of lists is also of high significance for intermedial narratology. The typographic distinctness of the list crosses the boundaries to visual art, especially, though not exclusively, in postmodern texts (Vedder 2012). From a cognitive perspective, lists are intriguing because they have the capacity to make visible cognitive processes of order and categorisation. Thinking is fundamentally based on categorisation: human beings use principles of order to make sense of the world. In literary texts, lists and enumerations can be used to express such ordering principles. Entering someone’s (whether an individual’s or a collective’s) way of thinking through the list form is particularly suggestive when we consider literary texts, which can function as prisms of knowledge. Eva von Contzen and James Simpson suggest approaching lists as a Denkform, as a form of thinking, that is, “as a cognitive structure that plays out differently in different contexts” (2022: 8). The cognitive approach has strong affinities with reader-response theory. Literary lists require the reader’s input in order to be rendered meaningful to a much higher extent than other narrative elements: as part of a narrative, lists constitute a rupture and propel the reader to activate more complex cognitive strategies of sense-making. The “gaps” or “blanks” (Iser 1978) that necessarily exist between the items of a list need to be filled. The rhetorical or, more broadly speaking, formal approach to lists highlights the way lists are made for specific purposes. As a formal device, the list is characterised by its mobility, variability, and, to some extent, unpredictability (Belknap 2000; Wolfson 2006, 2010). The list form motivates function: because of their form, lists can trigger effects that make them highly productive when they are implemented in literary 5  See, for example, Sternberg (1981), Nünning (2007), von Contzen (2020), Fludernik (2022), and Rüggemeier (2022).

1  INTRODUCTION: WRITING THE LITERARY HISTORY OF LISTS 

9

texts. The identification and isolation of formal elements are not ends in themselves but the beginning of a hermeneutics of interpretation. Taking the cue from New Formalism (Levine 2015), Eva von Contzen has argued that lists can be characterised by sets of affordances that result from the interplay of structural arrangement, content, location, and the functions of a given list (2017b; 2018; 2020). The concept of “affordance,” which originates in Gestalt theory, describes the potential uses and functions of an object. Based on Levine’s general question of what forms may be capable of doing (2015: 6), we ask: what are lists in literary texts capable of doing?6 Depending on one’s focus, there are manifold ways to approach literary lists. It is our contention that lists are best approached from a wide angle that takes into account their formal parameters, their historical and cultural embedding, as well as their (potential) effects in the reception process. Our book is thus based on a combined approach that links the historical with a narratological and formal/rhetorical, as well as cognitive perspective. In the epilogue, we reflect on the categories that have emerged in our case studies and outline tentatively how rhetorical terminology may provide a useful systematic approach to the study of literary lists. With this collaborative study, we contribute in various ways to an emerging field of research into lists, which in our estimation are any or all of the following: Entertaining Numberless Unwieldy Multifarious Elusive Redundant Acrostic Tedious Informative Orderly Naught

6

 See also von Contzen/Simpson (2022: 8).

CHAPTER 2

Series: Superabundance and the Scale of Nature in Literary Lists of the Early Modern Period

Abstract  Since antiquity, poets have engaged with notions of cosmological order by producing lists that take the form of extended synecdoches. These enumerations, based on the relationship between a whole and its parts, suggest a concatenation of all things. However, following a groundbreaking epistemological turn in the Renaissance, literary lists increasingly made the human condition their focal point. As a result, they now articulated not only the confirmation of a given order but also re-orderings of the world under the sway of empiricism and subjectivism. The catalogue of trees, which features prominently in pastoral, epic, and georgic poetry, is a striking case in point. Its early modern transformations by Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and others came to represent, to varying degrees, the experience of an infinitely atomised world verging on chaos. Keywords  Renaissance • Epic catalogue • Great chain of being • Subjectivism • Empiricism • Encyclopaedism The list has always been closely associated with the concept of order, that is, the structured relationship between distinguishable parts of a complex

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. A. Barton et al., Literary Lists, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28372-7_2

11

12 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

entity or whole.1 Evidently, in that it organises, categorises, and hierarchises the plenteous universe, enumeration allows the writer to set the world in order. In the poetic realm, the list may, of course, represent order also in a figurative sense. It has been suggested that, for the most part, literary enumeration is a kind of synecdoche, a listing of parts that represents a structured whole pars pro toto.2 If this is true, then the poetic list, unlike the practical list, does not have to be exhaustive to convey an ordered totality. Certainly, not all enumerations in early modern literature are extended synecdoches, yet the relation between whole and part appears to be at the centre of much of literary list-making in the period. As this chapter will show, poetic enumeration had close affinity with a metaphysical idea of order that hinges on the integration of parts into a harmonious whole, and which was widely prominent up until the eighteenth century: the great chain of being.

Between Coherence and Infinity: The Great Chain of Being Enumerated Perhaps the most widespread cosmological concept in Western thought, the great chain of being, or scala naturae, harks back to the Homeric image of Zeus’s golden chain that reaches down from Olympus and holds all things together. This idea “was the supreme guardian against chaos” (Collins 2001: 14) in the Renaissance.3 As such, it was sometimes associated with two biblical motifs of the same nature, namely Jacob’s Ladder connecting heaven and earth (Gen 28:10-17) and the tree of life

1  The concept of order, as Lorand (1994) argues, is applicable only to manifold (rather than simple) entities, it requires an ordering principle that may be a pattern, rule, law, model, or formula, and it involves relative necessity between the ordering principle and the ordered set. 2  According to the authors of A General Rhetoric, “enumeratio or accumulatio [is] by its nature synecdochic” (Groupe μ 1981: 74). This idea is not further elaborated. Enumeration is here classified as metataxis because it is considered as one of those rhetorical figures that modify syntactic order in that they “open up the syntagm by multiplying aspects of attributes of one of its lexemes” (ibid.). See also the discussion of this passage by Schöpsdau (1994). 3  The influence of the concept of the great chain of being on early modern English culture has been explored at length by Lovejoy (1964 [1933]), as well as by Tillyard (1943), and, more recently, by Egan, who argued against the former two that, in the Elizabethan age, the metaphor of the chain also implied that there was tension in the cosmological order it describes: “within each category, there is a pull in two directions” (2011: 60).

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

13

branching throughout the hierarchical universe as an axis mundi (Gen 2: 9).4 The form of the list affords the representation of a well-ordered cosmos in which all parts are interrelated and form a single, fully integrated entity. This is perhaps due to the fact that the list is always the outcome of two basic operations: as suggested by its graphic appearance (its horizontal or vertical orientation on the page), this minimalist textual form allows an author either to itemise, to structure equal elements in a horizontal sequence, or, by contrast, to rank entities in a vertical train that suggests relations of above and below. This particular versatility of the list, its ability both to itemise and to rank, renders it congenial to a cosmology that pivots on the idea of a scale of nature in which all things in existence are related not only horizontally, on the basis of resemblance or contiguity, but also vertically, owing to a coherent hierarchical order. The great chain of being, commonly associated with the thought of Aristotle, Chrysippus, and the Neoplatonists, among others, is characterised by three main features: gradation, the continuity of these grades, and the plenitude of each grade.5 The idea of a gradated scale of nature is traditionally believed to originate with Aristotle.6 However, his hierarchy of nature extends only from humans to zoophytes (Generation of Animals: 732a25-733b17). In On the Soul, he also introduces the idea of continuity: every tier in nature’s scale shares one specific soul faculty with its lowly neighbour, and possesses one further ability that may connect it to that link which is its superior (414a29-415a13). Inanimate entities are thus gifted with internal coherence (hexis) only, plants receive the additional propensity to nourish themselves and reproduce (physis), animals are furthermore furnished with perception (psychê), and humans, finally, are provided also with reason (dianoia). As a result, the chain of being is characterised by the necessary (rather than the accidental) connection of

4  On the loose association of these three symbols in, among others, Jean Bodin, Johannes Reuchlin, and John Milton, see Kuntz/Kuntz (1987). The early modern transformations of the chain of being in the light of similar concepts are no doubt more manifold than the authors suggest. 5  See Lovejoy (1964: 24-66) for a discussion of the concept’s three key features. Lovejoy’s approach to intellectual history has been duly criticised (see, e.g., Hintikka 1976) in that it treats the great chain of being as a unit-idea with a stable meaning; for an account of the debate, see Wilson (1987). 6  Arguably, the idea of a scale of nature is already implicit in Plato’s account of the creation of the world in Timaeus (30a-37d).

14 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

its links and hence is a series in the original sense of the word.7 Much like Aristotle, the Stoic Chrysippus contends a gradation of the cosmos, which he explains more precisely with the uneven distribution of the fire-like generative power pneuma throughout the universe. The tissues of the cosmos that are thereby gradated are all in sympathy with one another on account of their being sustained by pneuma, but beings that belong to the same tier sympathise more closely (Diogenes Laertios: VII 138-39). In later Neoplatonist thought, the scala naturae descending from God to angels, humans, animals, plants, minerals, and so on, becomes an ontological scale, which is to say that the generic nature of every tier is emphasised (Lovejoy 1964: 59). Each element in the great chain is plenteous; it expands horizontally so as to include all possible forms and potentialities of its being. This pre- and early modern worldview readily translates into the literary list. Enumeration in Alexander Pope’s 1734 philosophical poem “An Essay on Man” demonstrates how the concept of the great chain of being remained influential until the first half of the eighteenth century, but also how the cosmology behind it, and the self-evidence of the synecdochic list through which it is represented, was becoming undone. The most pivotal enumeration in the work represents the entirety of the cosmos through the itemisation of its principal parts and is thus truly synecdochic: See, thro’ this air, this ocean, and this earth, All matter quick, and bursting into birth. Above, how high progressive life may go! Around, how wide! how deep extend below! Vast chain of being, which from God began, Natures aethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no eye can see, No glass can reach! from Infinite to thee, From thee to Nothing! – (ll. 233-41)

Pope here makes use of asyndeton, a series of words without conjunctions, thus producing a versified list in heroic couplets in which the listed items are separated by commas. The lack of connectives is striking because connectives could have given expression to the concatenation of all things 7  Traditionally, ever since Plato, the concept of the “series” implies a chain in which each member essentially depends on its neighbour, and the entire chain is determined by and originates in one first and independent entity (see Halfwassen 1995).

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

15

in nature’s chain. Indeed, gradation, more so than continuity, is the central idea in the first epistle of the poem, and it finds expression in, above all, the asyndetic enumeration of existents.8 Pope’s chain of being in list form descends, in various degrees, from God to lower forms of matter. Humankind is placed in the middle, connecting the spiritual and the material halves of the scale, as was customary. Remarkably, however, there is an anomaly in this series: humanity appears not once but twice in the hierarchy, both in the ethereal regions and in proximity to the beast. The implication may be that, contrary to all other links in the chain, humankind can ascend or descend the ladder of being so as to become either more angelic or more brutish, an idea that originates with Pico della Mirandola (Oration on the Dignity of Man: §74). This supposition must have struck a sympathetic chord in the eighteenth century, an age preoccupied with human improvement.9 At any rate, the anthropological concern is foremost in Pope’s take on the scale of nature, and his list suggests as much. This fast-­ paced enumeration, which follows his invitation to the reader to “See” (l. 233) the world’s plenty, conveys the amazement of the human subject surveying the chain of being. The poet addresses the issue of plenitude with a list of sights that is clearly insufficient. Tellingly, the chain that holds the world together is called vast rather than great: the emphasis here lies not on the greatness or majesty of this divine order but on its sheer imperceptibility. While Pope’s enumeration in its sequence still mirrors the traditional hierarchy in which God is placed at the top and the insect near the bottom, the list is horizontally dimensioned. Its situation on the page, its running from left to right rather than top to bottom, already suggests that Pope projects the ranking of the universe onto the horizontal plane of human affairs. Pope’s enumeration of the chain of being, written in the heyday of empiricism with its reliance on perception and experience, makes the condition of Man the focal point from which to view what is

8  Zoellner has argued that “a series of words” (1958: 159) often conveys the idea of the chain in the poem. He also claims that the use of the heroic couplet throughout the poem “gives the feeling of a linked, chain-like series of thoughts” (158), which is a little less convincing, since end-stopped units of iambic pentameter are very common in English poetry, and in Pope’s in particular, and were also  regarded as nearest to prose because of their simplicity. 9  See also Lovejoy (1964: 183-226).

16 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

above, below, and around.10 Ultimately, the list is epistemologically more so than ontologically dimensioned: the great chain of being breaks off when it descends into regions that “no eye can see!/No Glass can reach!” (ll. 239-40). What lies beyond human perception and the reach of manmade optical instruments drops off the list. At the same time, humankind, in attempting to view (or rather, imagine)11 the whole of nature, is faced with the “Infinite” (l. 240) or indeed the idea of “Nothing” (l. 241). Plenitude is no longer implied or contained in the ranking of metaphysical genera. Rather, the empirical plenty threatens the certainty of existence as it explodes the borders of the list, which thus, in its inability to represent humankind’s vision of the entire world, comes to suggest endlessness.12 This predicament of the infinite list, which characterises many early modern enumerations, is perhaps best described in Immanuel Kant’s elaboration on what he calls “infinite judgment.”13 The pivotal concept of that name originates in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, his 1781 work that seeks to categorise the elements of rational cognition. In stark contrast to the empiricists John Locke and David Hume, Kant rejects the claim that all contents of the mind are derived from sensation. He explores not the empirical but the “pure” notions of things, that is, those conceptions that are based on logic rather than perception. As a result, the Enlightenment philosopher points to the limits of empiricism: from the perspective of pure reason, he argues that the empirical method never discovers the absolute (“das Schlechthinunbedingte”), and so must produce endless lists. The division of a whole into its parts, that is, the itemisation of some entity, must progress indefinitely if that whole is merely the object of perception. Experience will never discover the thing-in-itself. In consequence, only a complete and hence infinite list can represent a thing in its tangible 10  Brown, discussing a similar passage from the second epistle of “An Essay on Man,” likewise observes that Pope is “placing the human in a relative position, in relation to which angels and apes are then defined” (2007: 232). 11  Although the vocabulary of empirical observation is used, the directives to look and see are of course an appeal to imagine the vast universe (Sitter 2007: 47). 12  At a later point in the poem, the breaking down of the chain-ordered world into “single atoms” to see the connection of all things, and their linkage in the “chain of Love,” again borders on the infinite list. The phrase “life dissolving” coincides with the act of listing apart the world’s constituents, all of which then again come together in “a summation of the cosmic survey […] the paragraph itself becomes a model of how ‘Parts relate to whole’” (Zoellner 1958: 48). Remarkably, atomization and consequent summation both find expression in the list. 13  We are grateful to Thomas Micklich for pointing this out to us.

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

17

entirety (Kritik der reinen Vernunft 475). Put differently, the summative or finite enumeration of an empirical reality has to be rejected as mere fiction. Traditionally, a literary enumeration of the parts attributed to some whole did not have to be complete or exhaustive to count as omnifarious: as an extended synecdoche, such enumeration sufficiently represented the whole pars pro toto, in a figurative rather than an empirical manner. The distinctly modern dilemma that the list cannot represent everything with regard to some matter or, more precisely, everything in sufficient empirical detail, and must therefore progress ad infinitum, casts into doubt the validity of synecdochic enumerations of the world. Hence the epistemological turn, a shift in attention from issues of metaphysics to questions concerning human knowledge, which was in the making throughout the Renaissance and came to fruition in the work of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and others, marks a first watershed in the modern history of the literary list. Enumeration in literature and beyond was now labouring under the notion of infinity.14 Pope’s itemisation of the chain of being, in that it both defends the order of old and proposes to make it new from the perspective of human experience, is a striking case in point for the manner in which the literary list in the early modern period existed in a field of tension between what Christopher D. Johnson has called centripetal and centrifugal impulses:15 Centripetal or orderly enumeration implies the coherence of God’s creation; […] centrifugal or disorderly enumeration, fuelled by scepticism of various stripes, despairs of a coherent, controlling vision; […] the enumerating,

14  Eco has asserted that, generally speaking, the list as a “form of representation […] suggests infinity almost physically, because in fact it does not end, nor does it conclude in form” (2019: 17). This claim that lists are and have always been logically infinite does not hold true, however. Goody’s pivotal study on ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian list-making argues that enumeration first of all “establishes the necessity of a boundary, the necessity of a beginning and an end” (1977: 105). Indeed, the term list, derived from the Old High German lísta and the Old English líste, originally signified a strip of cloth, a hem, or a border. According to the OED, it was used as a synonym for border up until the early modern period (“list, n3” 2022). 15  Similar questions have been raised by Schumann (1942, 1944, 1945), who observes that the literary list may be either “conjunctive” or “disjunctive”: enumeration can designate a whole, or else itemise a whole into its parts so as to destroy it. Likewise, Frédéric (1986) differentiates between énumération, homologique, and énumération chaotique.

18 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

increasingly atomized self […] struggles to find novel, often tangential ways to compass the chaos. (2012: 1106)

In other words, list-making was caught up in the long-standing struggle between traditional metaphysical realism and emergent scepticism. Lists in literature and beyond afforded both the affirmation of a given order, thus allowing readers to find their place in the world, and the re-­ ordering of the world against the backdrop of new discoveries and mentalities. The question of how this pull in two directions determines literary list-making in the early modern period has received little attention even in Johnson’s seminal study, which is concerned, first and foremost, with the ways in which enumeration fails to reflect Renaissance realities and, as a result, falls into redundancy or superabundance. What is more, and this too has not been studied in detail, disjunctive enumeration, which casts the traditional vertical order into doubt, occurs in different genres to different degrees: the “centrifugal” impulse may be more prominent in hyperbolic satire than in the Protestant epic.

From Order to Chaos: The Early Modern Catalogue of Trees The catalogue of trees, which, together with the troop catalogue, is one of the two archetypal forms of literary enumeration that has remained popular across centuries, neatly exemplifies how the tension between “centripetal” and “centrifugal” list-making remains unresolved in the early modern age, and how the ramifications of this ambiguity are often genre-specific. The enumeration of arboreal species, a mainstay in literature until the early eighteenth century and associated with eminent writers such as Edmund Spenser or Sir Philip Sidney, flourished in three genres in particular: didactic, epic, and pastoral poetry.16 Tree catalogues serve different functions, and take different forms in each of these genres, and so are more or less influenced by the epistemological turn that rattled the great chain of being, one feature of which is of course the plenitude of arboreal species. Following in the tradition of the Georgics (29 BC), Virgil’s didactic poem on agriculture that contains an extensive tree catalogue which 16  For a comparison of the tree species and their meanings in Spenser’s and Sidney’s catalogues of trees, as well as intersections with Geoffrey Chaucer’s arboreal list, see Berensmayer (2022).

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

19

concludes with the dictum that there is no final count of the many species or names (2.83-108), some early modern authors enumerated trees in their poetical works in relation to their cultivation and harvesting. For instance, in Cyder (1708), a poem in blank verse on arboreal fruits and the apple in particular, John Philips instructs the planter on the choice of location and soil as well as the sympathies or antipathies of different fruit trees with one another, which are thus enumerated. Philips’s list with its 19 entries, which include “Peach,/Hazel, and weight-resisting Palm,” expressly evaluates “contiguous” (ll. 264-65) relations. Given the marked realism of the georgic genre, Philips’s tree catalogue is strictly horizontally dimensioned as it holds the mirror up to natured nature (natura naturata). The primary purpose, however, is didactic rather than mimetic. Expressions such as “Everlasting Hate/The Vine to Ivy bears” (ll. 151-52) evidently have a mnemonic function and betray the list’s purpose as a tool of learning. Ultimately, the notion of fermentation implied by the poem’s title suggests that the author’s transformative engagement with the georgic genre, much like the chemical process that produces cider, is an ennobling extraction. Due to this close allegiance to Virgil, no “centrifugal” forces are at work: Philips affirms whatever “Nature has decreed” (l. 50) and eulogises what “Nature’s Hand” (l. 346) procures. The vertical order is intact and the catalogue of trees merely unfolds one tier in the scale of nature.17 This is not necessarily the case with the epic catalogue of trees, no doubt the oldest and most widespread type of arboreal enumeration in Western literature. A short tree list of four entries is already included in Homer’s Odyssey when Odysseus proves his identity by describing his father’s garden through an enumeration of its arboreal species and the exact numbers of trees (24.336-44). Homer thus points to the mnemonic function of the list: Odysseus is able to recount the trees because he pictures himself as a child following his father through the garden and learning tree names. There is an obvious connection to the mnemonic device of the memory palace, a familiar mental space in which mnemonic images

17  Remarkably, the concord of nature is also the backdrop of the concluding lines, in which Philips praises the newly founded union of England and Scotland (ll. 646-70). This is in line with other early modern associations between the great chain of being and a well-ordered commonwealth: nature’s hierarchy translates to the hierarchy of the monarchy (see Aradi 2017).

20 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

are stored, and thus it has been suggested that the true origin of the tree catalogue may be in pre-Homeric didactic poetry (Reitz et al. 2019: 673). In the Latin epic, arboreal enumerations can be both more frequent and more extensive as they assume entirely new functions. One such catalogue that was well known in early modern Britain again originates with Virgil. The tree catalogue from the sixth book of his epic poem Aeneid (29-19 BC), later imitated in Statius’s first-century epic poem Thebaid (6.98-106), performs a metaphoric function. The enumerated trees felled for the making of a funeral pyre (6.179-82) are a figure for death: the catalogue immediately precedes Aeneas’s discovery of the golden bough and his subsequent descent into the underworld. Thus, the list of trees allows for the sorrowful meditation on how many companions have fallen like trees, a widely used simile of Homeric origin (Iliad 16.482-84).18 The catalogue of trees in the Aeneid hence does not only represent a forest pars pro toto but also serves as an extended metaphor with an elegiac purpose. In the early modern period, such arboreal enumeration lives on in the funeral poem, an example of which is Isaac Watts’s 1706 “A Funeral Poem on Thomas Gunston Esq” (ll. 250-59), in which the listed trees are called on to “drop your Leaves instead of Tears” (l. 255) and the bare trunks are figuratively associated with the dead man’s skeleton. A more remarkable transformation of Virgil’s tree catalogue, one that casts its synecdochic and metaphoric function into doubt, can be found in the satirical rewriting of the Aeneid by Maurice Atkins titled Cataplus: or, Æneas his Descent to Hell. A Mock Poem (1672). As expected, Atkins’s mock-epic catalogue is hyperbolic: Helter skelter every man In among the thickets ran, Where Snakes and Adders without number Did the ground and hedges cumber, 18  A respective passage on woodcutting for the making of a funeral pyre in Homer’s Iliad (23.114-20) does not include an enumeration. Virgil might have taken a cue from Ennius, who in his Annals (175-79), which has survived only in scattered fragments, lists five arboreal species in a similar scene. The Virgilian tree catalogue, insofar as it engages with Ennius, has been read as a metaphor for the secondary epic (Hinds 1998: 11-14), and, indeed, its further relation to the troop catalogue suggests as much. Tree-chopping elsewhere in the Aeneid has been associated with the colonisation of Latium by the Trojans; the tree is a “long-standing metaphor for the beginnings and ends of dynasties” (Gowers 2011: 88). However, tree violation was a key motif in Latin poetry that could serve a variety of functions (Thomas 1988).

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

21

Some with Hatchets, some with ChoppingKnives went up and down a lopping, Some with Hand-saws, some with crooks, Axes and wedges, pruning-hooks, Down went Crab-tree and bush of sloe, I marry, Elm, Oak, ground-ash too. (27)

The opening rhyming jingle, which signifies disorderly haste and symbolises the irregular movement of running feet (see “helter-skelter” in the Oxford English Dictionary), sets the pace for the ensuing enumeration that is more hurried than heroic. This jingling expression also points to the chaotic nature of the list. Indeed, the woods are not represented in an orderly series of their constituents; rather, the forest is portrayed as an impassable green of “thickets” populated by “Snakes and Adders” (27). This, no doubt, is a reference to the famous snake catalogue in Pharsalia (9.700-733), Lucan’s satirical take on epic poetry. The epic catalogue is one of the conventions that the Roman poet inverts so as to undermine its heroic character: the enumerated desert snakes are part of the caricature of Cato the Younger, whose Stoic philosophy is ridiculed when his soldiers, whom he leads through the desert, die unheroically of snake bites one after the other (9.734-838).19 Not only does Atkins’s remark on snakes signal that his epic is a mock poem in Lucanian fashion, but the mention of “Adders” is also a pun on the additive nature of the list that appends item after item in its futile attempt to chart what is “without number” (27). Accordingly, the enumeration that follows is “centrifugal” in the sense that it does not represent a coherent whole. The list’s very potential to serve as an extended synecdoche or metaphor is called into question by comical realism. This tree catalogue oddly includes the “Crab-tree,” a wild apple tree, and the “sloe,” two rather peculiar plants that are not part of the traditional taxonomy (consisting only of pine, oak, ash, and rowan), yet are common in the homeland of Atkins’s Aeneas, whom he has made into an Irishman speaking in dialect.20 The synecdochic character of the list, its ability to represent a whole figuratively, appears flawed in the face of such realistic detail. Moreover, as indicated by the colloquial discourse marker “marry,” which interrupts the enumeration, Atkins trivialises and 19  Lausberg (1990) discusses Lucan’s satiric catalogue of desert snakes as a generic hybrid in-between didactic and epic poetry: its reference to the troop catalogue is obvious, yet it also apparently rubs shoulders with zoology. 20  The hero is said to speak “With Irish note” (27).

22 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

hence demetaphorises the catalogue of trees that concludes not with a good strong tree that falls like a hero but the “ground-ash,” a small ash sapling that can be of no use to the building of a pyre that, as Virgil would have it, is like an altar and reaches up to heaven (Aeneid 6.176-82). Finally, the tree catalogue pales in comparison to the preceding list of tools used for cutting the trees. Employing an anaphora, Atkins enumerates seven instruments large and small, the last of which, the pruning hook, is well fitted to cut the sapling with which the tree catalogue ends.21 Thus, by elaborating on the mundane or practical dimension of woodcutting, the supplementary list of random tools further trivialises yet also explodes the arboreal enumeration. Evidently, the genre of the mock-epic poem— which all but supplanted serious epic poetry after the publication of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) that is often considered the last such work22—demands disorderly enumeration in a helter-skelter manner. Its catalogues are “centrifugal” almost by default. The heyday of the mock epic, which lasted well into the eighteenth century, witnessed the rise of much disjunctive list-making that contributed to the image of a world in disarray. Another Latin epic catalogue of trees that had a great (perhaps the greatest) formative influence on early modern poetry is the one Ovid included in his Metamorphoses (X.90-106). The Ovidian arboreal list, which with its 26 entries is one of the longest, is part of the story of Orpheus related in the tenth book. After the Thracian bard has lost his Eurydice for a second time in Hades, he sings of his woes and moves the trees of the forest, which are thus summoned to his side. As a token of their sympathy, they offer shade and shield Orpheus from the burning sun. The catalogue of these trees is metapoetic: it enumerates a handful of arboreal species whose genesis is explained elsewhere in the work as the result of physical metamorphosis.23 Hence the list commences with the  Virgil’s Aeneid only mentions the axe and the wedge (6.180-81).  The traditional view is that after Milton, the epic gave way to mock-heroic poetry, and was ultimately superseded by the long poem and the novel of the eighteenth century. This has been contested in more recent scholarship. Foy (2016) argues that the epic was in decline only insofar as it ceased to be a handbook for princes in Virgilian fashion, while epic poetry modelled on Homer, such as the poems attributed to Ossian, continued to be popular in the age of the Enlightenment. 23  Five of the listed trees refer to stories of physical transformation throughout Ovid’s episodic poem Metamorphoses. According to Reitz et  al. (2019), the work’s “quasi-catalogic macrostructure is mirrored in many of the catalogues the poem contains” (693), especially 21 22

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

23

explicit mention of the Heliades, who were turned into poplars as they grieved over their brother’s death (II.340-66), and concludes with the cypress, thereby introducing the story of Cyparissus, who mourned excessively over a dead deer (X.106-42).24 However, the catalogue is not just a series of intratextual links. It also relates some properties or uses that define each tree (perhaps a nod to didactic poetry) and it is metapoetic in yet another, more profound sense, namely in that it explores the notion that art is mimesis of nature.25 Unlike the Homeric list of trees, Ovid’s catalogue does not, in fact, describe a garden or a forest. Tree genera rather than individuals are enumerated, and even these are uprooted, as it were, to enter both the scene and the list. Their connection, and thus the principle of the Ovidian enumeration, is much more vertical than horizontal. The list’s items are related, firstly, on account of their “treeness,” their sharing of the same specific nature and, secondly, through their further sympathy with Orpheus, who is placed higher up in the scale of nature. The bard’s art moves in a triple sense: he moves the sounding strings (“fila sonantia movit,” X.89) and so moves the trees that in turn move towards him to offer shade (“umbra loco venit,” X.90). Evidently, Ovid’s cataloguing is grounded in a worldview that hinges on the idea of a harmonious cosmos in which all parts are akin to one another, in that they are co-affectively related not only horizontally, due to their specific nature, but also vertically, in a gradated cosmos characterised by all-prevailing sympathy. As a result, cosmological (rather than empirical) reality finds expression in this epic catalogue of trees. It may thus be read as an emblem of what has been called Ovidian “cosmic artistry”: “Ovid enacts the linked nature between cosmic and human craftsmanship” (Kelly 2022: 212). The suggestion that organic nature sympathetically responds to human art such as Orpheus’s song points to a notion of literary mimesis that encompasses not only the imitation of nature as a product (natura naturata) but also the performance of the artist’s given relationship to nature as a forming principle (natura naturans). As suggested by the cataloguing of tree genera (rather the tree catalogue. Furthermore, they point out that the pattern of this list in particular matches that of the troop catalogue: anaphoric order, apostrophe of specific contingents, and special focus on the last item (694). On the functions of Ovidian catalogues more generally, see Reitz (1999). 24  Remarkably, this last entry in the list casts an ironic light on the tragic fate of Orpheus. 25  Speaking with Reitz, epic catalogues are “privileged sites of poetic innovation and metapoetic deliberation” (2021: 10). This is especially true of the Ovidian catalogue of trees.

24 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

than of individuals), the Orphic poet masters not merely some phenomena of nature but its universal forms. His art is in sympathy with formative nature, which the enumeration of tree species represents pars pro toto as an extended synecdoche, and so it imitates how (rather than what) nature performs. Ovid’s arboreal catalogue thus also stands connected with the cosmogony with which his Metamorphoses commences.26 The arrangement of chaos into order by God and kindly nature (“deus et melior […] natura,” I.21) in the opening lines of the poem is the first premise of Ovid’s list-making. In other words, the Ovidian catalogue of trees is “centripetal” enumeration at its finest. Edmund Spenser firmly follows in the footsteps of Ovid: the first book of his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590/96) hinges on a similar arboreal enumeration, and it also addresses the Ovidian theme of tree metamorphosis.27 Spenser’s Protestant epic is, as the author himself has pointed out, “clowdily enwrapped in Allegorical deuises” (“Letter to Ralegh,” The Faerie Queene, 716). Each book in the unfinished work allegorises one of the 12 Aristotelian virtues that it reinterprets through the lens of Christian morality. The first book, which includes the tree catalogue, is dedicated to Holinesse, the piety that humankind owes to God. For Spenser, this is the key virtue upon which all other virtues are founded. Its opposite is Errour, which takes the form of a dragon-like monster that is slain by the Redcrosse Knight, the patron of Holinesse, who is travelling with Una, an allegory for the one true church. This initial conflict takes place in a “shadie groue” 26  Later in the sixteenth century, arboreal enumeration becomes part and parcel of poems on the biblical story of Genesis. Most notably, it features in Guillaume Du Bartas’s La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde, which was vastly popular in Scotland and England (see Auger 2019: esp. 95). The work was translated into English by, among others, Sir Philip Sidney (whose translation is now lost) and Josuah Sylvster, whose Devine Weekes (1605) were widely read. For an overview of English translations of Du Bartas, see Snyder (1979: 70-71). 27  Vaught (2001), who is interested in the intra- and intertextual dialogues established by the tree catalogue, is of the same opinion, whereas Burrow (1997: 147) points out that, as far as the wording and the themes are concerned, Spenser is furthermore indebted to Chaucer, notably The Parliament of Fowls (176-82) and The Knight’s Tale (2920-23). Allen (1990) and Herron (1998) believe that Geoffrey Chaucer is the primary if not the only direct source for Spenser, which appears unreasonable: the literary device of the catalogue is used in Chaucer’s dream visions to build interior spaces, similar to the classical conceit of the “memory palace” (Miller 2014: 482). Since Chaucer’s catalogue of trees is “a record of […] personal perceptions, despite the obvious rhetorical stylization” (ibid.), it is more closely aligned with the arboreal list in Sidney (see below). Berensmayer (2022) offers a comprehensive comparison of the various tree species and their meanings in the catalogues of Spenser, Sidney, and Chaucer.

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

25

(I.i.7.2) where the knight and his lady seek refuge from a storm. The forest tellingly keeps out “heauens light” (I.i.7.5) yet is so enchanting that the knight and his lady are “with pleasure forward led” (I.i.8.1): Much can they praise the trees so straight and hy, The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall, The vine-propp Elme, the Poplar neuer dry, The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all, The Aspine good for staues, the Cypresse funerall. The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still, The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours, The Eugh obedient to the benders will, The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill, The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill, The fruitfull Oliue, and the Platane round, The caruer Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound. Led with delight, they thus beguile the way, Vntill the blustring storme is ouerblowne; When weening to returne, whence they did stray, They cannot finde that path, which first was showne, But wander too and fro in waies vnknowne, Furthest from end then, when they neerest weene, That makes them doubt, their wits be not their owne: So many pathes, so many turnings seene, That which of them to take, in diuerse doubt they been. (I.i.8.5-I.i.10.9)

For one, this list is reminiscent of the tree catalogue in Metamorphoses because it includes some of the same items, notably the poplar and the cypress, the first and last items in the Ovidian enumeration. However, some list entries are clearly borrowed from other sources: for instance, the “sayling Pine” (I.i.8.5), with which the enumeration commences, is taken from Virgil’s Georgics (“navigiis pinos”; 2.443). The catalogue in The Faerie Queene is nonetheless mostly Ovidian, in that it has metapoetic and intratextual ramifications. Spenser appears to fashion himself as an Orphic poet who gathers a forest around him: like Una and Redcrosse, he treads in “pathes and alleies wide,/With footing worne, and leading inward farr” (I.i.7.7-8), namely as he engages with the long-standing tradition of the epic catalogue of trees, following in the footsteps of many a poet before

26 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

him (Vaught 2001). The depths of the forest are said to be of an inward kind and so present a collective memory palace, the history of the epic catalogue of trees, which over the centuries has been interpreted in various manners. As Una and Redcrosse get lost in this “labyrinth” (I.i.11.4) of meanings, the question arises: how are we to read (or not to read) the Spenserian list? Like the protagonists, we are “in diuerse doubt” (I.i.10.9) as to which path to take. One possible way of proceeding, besides charting intertextual allusions, is to conceive of the list’s members as connected horizontally in space, thus affording a description of an actual forest. The erratic nature of the list, its structural discontinuity, adequately represents the “too and fro” (I.i.10.5) of the protagonists’ movement, their getting lost in the woods. However, readers who merely take pleasure in the pictorial language, much like Una and Redcrosse take delight in the impressions of the forest, and are “with pleasure forward led” (I.i.8.1), will be ignorant of the allegorical meanings. They cannot see the forest for the trees. Thus, early on in the work readers are warned not to be beguiled by the mere imitation of natured nature but seek figural connections that would direct them towards a contemplation of the virtue of Holinesse.28 Another path to take would then be to read the list as a synecdoche for a greater whole on account of which the enumerated items are vertically connected. Since the 20 arboreal species mentioned here are characterised by their utility or commonplace associations, touching on diverse subjects such as seafaring, architecture, poetry, and war, but also pride, love, and death, it has been suggested that the catalogue is “an emblem of human life” (Hamilton 2007: 33). However, like the last item on the list, “the Maple seeldom inward sound” (I.i.9.9), the forest of humankind’s affairs has frailty at its core. Accordingly, when the Redcrosse knight wanders on the horizontal plane of human affairs and is eventually detained by pride (personified in the giant Oroglio), he is bent towards “Errours den” (I.i.13.6). The pun on the Latin errare, which signifies both to wander and to err, links the “wandring wood” (ibid.)—an expression clearly reminiscent of Ovid’s moving trees—with a road to falsehood. The knight and his lady are in the wrong because their wandering through life “makes them doubt” (I.i.10.7). Their lack of faith, due to which they are led astray by the enchantments of Archimago and Duessa, rids them of divine 28  This goes somewhat beyond Tuve’s claim that the Spenserian catalogue echoes the workings of an organising principle in nature (1933: 25-26).

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

27

guidance and so they must lose their way. Una and Redcrosse experience both frailty and doubt, which are allegorised in Fradubio and Fralissa, lovers who have been physically transformed into “two goodly trees” (I.ii.28.3) and are thus associated with the arboreal catalogue. This obvious reference to Metamorphoses emphasises that frailty and doubt are creatures of Errour’s woods as much as they are of the heathen world represented by Ovid, where the weaknesses of dubious deities, which frequently result in tree metamorphosis, take centre stage. The road to salvation for Spenser’s protagonists (and readers) is nonetheless tree-lined. In the concluding canto of the first book, Redcrosse encounters the two trees of Eden, which stand in contrast with the arboreal couple of doubt and frailty, yet are likewise called “goodly” (I.xi.46.1). The true significance (or goodness) of the tree metaphor is now assessed. “The tree of life” (I.xi.46.9) saves the champion of Holinesse from certain death by the grace of God (“eternall God that chaunce did guide,” I.xi.45.6). This tree, traditionally understood to connect all forms of being, represents divine creation: branching out towards heaven, it is a figure for the relationship between the world and God in Neoplatonist philosophy, which is believed to have had a formative influence on Spenser (e.g. Ellrodt 1969).29 At any rate, the emphasis here is on the vertical relationship between creature and creator, which in the horizontally dimensioned tree catalogue was overlooked. The undercurrent is more moral than cosmological: to realise that all things are vertically connected in God constitutes the virtue of Holinesse. Spenser’s tree metaphor then branches out so as to include all 12 virtues. “Another like faire tree,” namely the tree of “good and ill” (I.xi.47.6-8) bearing the forbidden fruit tasted by Adam and Eve, is the tree of life’s double. It represents the original vice and Fall of Man, yet confusingly, the same is said of its neighbourly partner: “The tree of life, the crime of our first fathers fall” (I.xi.46.9). Spenser appears to agree with theologians who claim that the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are in fact one and the same, seen from different perspectives.30 Accordingly, he paints the tree of life in moral colours: the 12 29  In contrast with Tuve (1966), Robert Ellrodt concludes that, although Spenser is indebted to Neoplatonism, he consistently foregrounds Christian themes (1969: 213). This view has since been contested by Borris (2009: 453-80), who sees Spenser more as an English Ficino. 30  For a survey of theological opinions concerning the question whether there are two trees or only one, see Mettinger (2007: 5-11).

28 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

different kinds of fruit it carries (Rev. 2:7) are to Spenser “great vertues [that] ouer all were redd” (I.xi.46.4). This doubled tree comes to represent the source of the 12 Aristotelian moral virtues which The Faerie Queene sets out to allegorise. Ultimately, Spenser’s arboreal catalogue and its intratextual offspring reveal to us how to read the poem as a whole. We get lost in the enumerated forest, the itemisation of tree after tree, unless we grasp what the connective of the list is: “treeness,” morally defined in the light of Genesis. Accordingly, with respect to the whole work, not seeing the forest for the trees means being so involved in the details of the narrative that the virtue under consideration, which in each book serves as a “unifying factor” (Tuve 1966: 369), is overlooked. Much like items in a list are connected chiefly through some ordering principle that transcends the confines of the dyadic enumeration, the component parts of Spenser’s epic fairyland are related, first and foremost, through their figurative relation to one of the moral virtues. The Renaissance gave prominence to arboreal enumeration also in the pastoral, the most notable example being Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590). This romance in sprawling prose includes interludes of bucolic poetry that imitate or transform yet another of Virgil’s works that enumerate trees, namely his Eclogues (42-35 BC). In the dialogic poetry competition in the seventh eclogue, where Corydon and Thyrsis sing of the woes of love, the Roman poet makes use of the arboreal catalogue to three different ends. First, in the speech of Corydon, tree enumeration creates a pastoral locus amoenus, an idealised pleasant place in nature, and is thus synecdochic as well as descriptive (7.53-56). The absence of the pined-for lover, Corydon insists, would upset this harmony in nature. In turn, Thyrisis claims a barren place would be rejuvenated by the arrival of the beloved (7.57-60). Nature is therefore in sympathy with the grieving lovers, much like in the Ovidian story of Orpheus. Second, the list establishes individual tree metaphors by associating select arboreal species with Roman deities (7.61-64). For instance, Venus, the goddess of love, is said to hold dear the myrtle, which figures as the tree of love (7.62). Finally, now in the voice of Thyrsis, the arboreal enumeration takes a didactic turn in that it points out in which landscapes various trees thrive: the ash in the forest, the pine in the garden, the poplar near the water, the fir in the mountains (7.65-68). The arboreal catalogue in Arcadia evidently builds on the conventional tree metaphors established by Virgil. In the first set of Sidney’s eclogues,

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

29

which likewise consists of poetical speeches before an assembled Arcadian audience, the two princes Pyrocles and Musidorus, who have taken on the disguise of the Amazon Cleophila and the shepherd Dorus, respectively, lament that their attempts to woo the duke of Arcadia’s daughters have so far been unsuccessful. Dorus versifies his observation “that better it is to be private/In sorrow’s torments than, tied to the pomps of a palace,/ Nurse inward maladies” (ll. 102-4). In typical pastoral fashion, the country retreat is pitched against courtly life. The prince goes on to praise the Arcadian woods, into which he freely projects his thoughts and feelings: And when I meet these trees, in the earth’s fair livery clothed, Ease I do feel (such ease as falls to one wholly diseased) For that I find in them part of my estate represented. Laurel shows what I seek, by the myrrh is showed how I seek it, Olive paints me the peace that I must aspire to by conquest: Myrtle makes my request, my request is crowned with a willow. Cypress promiseth help, but a help where comes no recomfort. Sweet juniper saith this, though I burn, yet I burn in a sweet fire. Yew doth make me bethink what kind of bow the boy holdeth Which shoots strongly without any noise and deadly without smart. […] And shall sensive things be so senseless as to resist sense? Thus be my thoughts dispersed, thus thinking nurseth a thinking, Thus both trees and each thing else be the books of a fancy. But to the cedar, queen of woods, when I lift my beteared eyes, Then do I shape to myself that form which reigns so within me, And think there she do dwell and hear what plaints I do utter: When that noble top doth nod, I believe she salutes me; When by the wind it maketh a noise, I do think she doth answer.  (ll. 113-45)

This arboreal catalogue no doubt takes after Virgil’s Eclogues, in that it presents conventional tree symbols. The laurel symbolises Dorus’s claims to victory in his pursuit of the fair beloved, the myrrh points to the fact that he is unsuccessful and saddened, the olive is the peace to which he aspires, the myrtle points to his continued plea for love, the willow marks his rejection. His thoughts on death take the form of the cypress, the juniper’s sweet scent, when set on fire, reminds him of the sweetness of his torments, whereas the yew, whose wood is commonly used to make an

30 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

archery bow, invokes the idea of Cupid and his arrows of love. There are eight more entries in the list in the same vein. Provided that readers share the princely shepherd’s knowledge of tree symbolism, they can follow the twists and turns of his thoughts. Dorus does not move about in the woods, nor does the forest move towards him, yet the list form invites the reader to perform a mental movement: the erratic or wandering train of ideas finds expression in the enumeration of trees, which constitute “the books of a fancy” (l. 140). The passage concludes with a very peculiar tree metamorphosis and is thus reminiscent of Ovid: Pamela, the object of the prince’s desire, is metamorphosed into a cedar in the imagination of Dorus, to whom the movements of said tree are meaningful gestures. The sorrowful lover yearns for a sympathetic response from “sensive things,” which he suspects may remain “so senseless as to resist sense” (l. 138), thus he paints with his fancy what his senses do not perceive. As a result, this Orphic poet’s relationship to nature is precarious. Dorus is not co-affectively related to natura naturans: he does not imitate the forms of nature, which arboreal genera commonly represent, and instead produces empty forms that are no more than the outpourings of his own “wholly diseased” (l. 114) mind. Traditionally, “pastoral offers, in the lament of nature, one of the most basic formative responses to chaos” (Lobsien 2022: 169). The synecdochic list, commonly associated with order, thus becomes one of its constituent features. In contrast to earlier pastoral poetry, however, Sidney’s Arcadian world is in disarray: “the world is rendered empty and inane, as nature, instead of responding to human grief, is sucked into a noise-filled, self-tormenting abyss of the mind” (Lobsien 2022: 159). Chaos encroaches on the idealised woods of the pastoral. No consoling locus amoenus is described in the arboreal list of the sorrowful lover, nor is nature, for which the trees figure partes pro toto, in sympathy with the Orphic poet. The arboreal catalogue in Sidney’s Arcadia is “centrifugal” in the finest sense in that it is represented as the creation of what Johnson has called “the enumerating, increasingly atomized self” (2012: 1106) of the modern age.

Lists of Abundance in Fictional Encyclopaedism The close affinity between the list and the metaphysical idea of an ordered whole comprised of fully integrated parts began to wane in the Renaissance. Although it is not necessarily true that, in literary enumeration across all

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

31

genres, the failure of language “to grasp or to induct the universal […] is now itself the subject” (Johnson 2012: 1098), some early modern lists indeed appear to anticipate this modernist commonplace.31 That is especially true for one crucial site of list-making where the “centrifugal” impulse reigns supreme: fictional encyclopaedism. This species of literary enumeration, which originates with Lucan, whose catalogue of desert snakes ridicules Pliny the Elder’s encyclopaedic Naturalis Historia (Ogden 2014: 299), was highly prominent in the early modern period.32 From the fifteenth century onwards, the literary list in encyclopaedic guise reacted to the decline of the humanist ideal of comprehensive education. With the advent of the printing press and the professionalisation of book production, the number of books available to both specialised and general readers increased significantly. This “experience of overabundance” (Blair 2003: 12), which called into question the idea of encyclopaedic knowledge, gave rise to new methods and techniques for managing the mass of texts, including selective reading, note-taking, and the creation and use of abbreviations and indexes.33 Many of these methods, if not all, relied heavily on lists. Indeed, one could say that early modern “information overload” (Blair 2003) became manageable again through the list form.34 In a somewhat paradoxical parallel to the scholars’ pressure  See our Chap. 4 next.  More recently, fictional encyclopaedism has featured in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, whose playful taxonomy of Chinese animals famously inspired Michel Foucault. See our Introduction. 33  Blair stresses that many of the techniques on which early modern readers and writers relied had already been well established in the medieval period: “the ‘before’ picture of any claim for changing practices in the early modem period would have to be complicated by the existence from the thirteenth century already not only of indexes and reference genres but also of features of textual lay-out that facilitated consultation: running heads at the tops of the pages of scholastic manuscripts, subdivisions of the text, into books, chapters, questions, distinctions, objections, often numbered and generally highlighted in some way on the page (e.g. through rubrication or the use of special initials). Rather than assuming that medieval reading consisted mainly of carefully ‘ruminating’ a few memorized religious texts, it is safer (I propose) to assume that in most periods proficient readers have deployed a range of different kinds of reading in different circumstances” (2003: 13). See Blair (2010) on reference practices in the early modern period; also Chartier (1994) on managing books in particular; Knight (2013) on practices of compilation. On a history of science perspective, see Delbourgo/Müller-Wille (2012). On the medieval practices, see, for example, Rouse/Rouse (1991) and Minnis (1988). 34  See also the 2003 special issue in Journal of the History of Ideas on the topic, esp. the introduction by Rosenberg. 31 32

32 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

to reduce and condense, the early modern period witnessed the emergence of the Baroque style of writing in writers and poets that was defined by amplification and abundance. Taking their cue from classical and medieval handbooks of poetry, early modern rhetoricians praised and recommended amplified writing in their poetics.35 Erasmus’s treatise On Copia of Words and Ideas, first published in 1512, is a key text in this trajectory. It claims that all writing must be abundant and various to enable new thought. The vertiginous enumeration of variants results in the conflation of things (res) and words (verba) (Johnson 2012: 1110-11). Put differently, the Baroque style envisioned by Erasmus was essentially the celebration of (verbal) excess. Alex Davis has drawn attention to the fact that On Copia was a very popular schoolroom text in the early modern period and one that is potentially problematic: the downside of eloquent abundance is the accumulation of words without any regulation or, in Davis’s terms, “the threat of a descent into a mere, sprawling listiness” (2022: 177). Redundant or excessive list-­making points to the failure of conventional genres and styles to represent the plenteous Renaissance world (Johnson 2012: 1097). The work of the French humanist François Rabelais, which had a lasting influence on English literature, is a striking case in point. Inspired by Erasmus as well as by Jean Meschinot and other French grands rhétoriquers, who recommend the use of asyndeton, polysyndeton, and other kinds of enumeration, Rabelais’s lists both represent multifarious Renaissance realities and satirise the scholasticism of his day. Using a broad range of scientific works as a source of inspiration, Rabelais made lists in extenso: the unwieldy and rich four books about Gargantua and Pantagruel, published between 1532 and 1552, and the posthumous fifth book, whose authorship has been contested, contain many lists that range from word lists, lists of culinary items and sententiae to, famously, a list of 139 books in the library of St Victor (II.7). Unsurprisingly, the work also contains a list of snakes (IV.64) that places Rabelaisian list-making in the tradition of Lucan’s satiric enumerations. Going somewhat beyond his ancient predecessor, Rabelais draws on the epistemic functions of the list to thwart playfully readers’ expectations of conventional ordering strategies. He puts common categories of knowledge to the test as he contrasts them with vulgar reality in all its plenty, most notably in his list of 58 ways to wipe 35  See, for example, Johnson (2010, 2012) and Ferry (1988) on lists in early modern poetry in particular.

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

33

one’s ass (I.13). Thus, for Mikhail Bakhtin, the enumerative style of Rabelais corresponds to a carnivalesque depiction of the world (1984: 454-65). Rabelais’s encyclopaedic list-making in a ludic vein found some imitators in Britain. The early modern translations of Rabelais into other European languages bear witness to a remarkable phenomenon in the history of the literary list: lists propagate themselves. In both the German adaptation of Gargantua by Johann Fischart in 1575 and in the English translation by the Scotsman Thomas Urquhart in 1653, Rabelais’s lists were added to considerably.36 For instance, Urquhart expands the list of euphemistic metonymies and metaphors for Gargantua’s genitals from 13 to 38 (I.11). Remarkably, his English translation shows a particular interest in the metonymic potential of the list.37 The Rabelaisian enumeration of hundreds of epithets for the fool Triboullet, which both implies and explodes a definition of foolery, is an interesting example. It consists of two columns, recording the bynames given to him by Pantagruel on the left and those attributed by Panurge on the right, which can be read from top to bottom but also from left to right (III.38). Rabelais here suggests the conceptual through the spatial contiguity of listed items: the “windy” is placed vis-à-vis the “ventilated” fool, the “rustic” is placed next to “country-side” fool. These twin lists, in which entries on the left and their semantically contiguous variants on the right may be permutable, thus partially exhibit a metonymic feature. In his transformative translation, Urquhart amplifies this tendency in that he shuffles the items about from column to column, substituting entries for one another. His rearrangement, which on account of conceptual contiguity connects the “Patriarchal” and the “Papal” (→ the “holy” father) as well as the “Celestial” and the “Lunatic” (→ the ethereal), wittingly highlights how listed epithets can figure as metonymies for each other.38

36  See in more detail von Contzen (2017a). Fischart’s work was published first under the title Geschichtsschrift, whereas the two later editions (1582 and 1590) bear the title Geschichtklitterung. On Rabelais in Renaissance England, see Prescott (1998); on Urquhart, see Craik (1993). 37  On a related note, Claviez (2016) counts Rabelais (together with Cervantes) among the originators of what he calls the “metonymic style.” 38   Compare III.38  in the French original and the transformative translation by Urquhart (1653).

34 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

A better-known spiritual son of Rabelais in Britain where list-making is concerned was Laurence Sterne.39 His Tristram Shandy (1759-67), which thrives on digression and intentionally miscarries in the attempt to tell Tristram’s life history, makes ample use of the list as both a means of representing thought processes and an intrusive insert that interrupts the narrative. Sterne thereby responds to an epistemological change, much like Rabelais, whose extensive lists he quotes and imitates.40 More specifically, Tristram’s erratic enumerations engage with Lockean epistemology: the discontinuous and unsatisfying account of his life is, as he claims in defence of his digressive style, “a history-book […] of what passes in a man’s own mind” (57)  and thus, he insists, comparable to John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Indeed, the structure of the list—a sequence of entities that are marked as distinct—exactly corresponds to the operation of the mind as defined by Locke: “It is evident to any one, who will but observe what passes in his own mind,” the empiricist maintains, “that there is a train of ideas which constantly succeed one another” (2.14.3).41 As Wolfgang Iser (1988) argues, Sterne fictionalises Lockean epistemology by drawing radical conclusions from the sensualist premise that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience. It follows from this premise that no list can ever be comprehensive, or so Sterne suggests with his (mock-)encyclopaedic lists in Tristram Shandy. The failure of the list to give a complete depiction of the French capital, to name but one example, is foregrounded when Tristram contemplates that the proverb “That they who have seen Paris, have seen every thing” (318) might well be true, yet to see everything of Paris would mean walking down no fewer than 900 streets. In an attempt to navigate the town’s immensity, he reproduces a catalogue of the number of streets in each quarter of the city. The inability of this list to represent the whole of Paris (and thus “everything”) is immediately obvious and so Tristram concedes that a complete survey would have to examine these 900 streets “with all that belongs to them, fairly by 39  On the influence of Rabelais on Sterne more generally, see Howes (1984) and Lynch (2000). 40  Compare Rabelais (III.16) and Tristram Shandy (127). Sterne’s catalogue of the people of Strasburg who come to see a giant nose (170) is somewhat reminiscent of Rabelais’s tale of the giant Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. Furthermore, Tristram enumerates swear words (189), verbs and conjugations (259), ancient Roman dresses and shoes (281-82), sights to see in Lyon (330), and many more articles. 41  For a more detailed account of the relation between Lockean epistemology and the list, see Barton (2021: 199-200).

2  SERIES: SUPERABUNDANCE AND THE SCALE OF NATURE 

35

day-light  – their gates, their bridges, their squares, their statues  - -  - -” (319). Speaking with Kant, the division of a whole into its elements must progress into infinity, if that whole must be seen in “day-light,” that is, if it is given in visual perception only. Empirically considered, Paris is endlessly divisible, into its 900 streets, and every such street into its parts, and so on. Only a complete list of every part’s parts and—factoring in Lockean subjectivism—of the countless subjective perspectives on each of these, could adequately represent the French metropolis. The ability of enumeration to be representative of “everything” in an encyclopaedic manner is thus called into question just as its propensity to represent subjective mental activity is emphasised. Ultimately, what defines the literary list in the modern era is no longer the synecdochic relationship between whole and part, as was the case before, but the endless adjunctive sequence, which is constantly made new through the open-ended addition of new items, none of which are connected by (metaphysical) necessity. In other words, the modern literary list that emerged in the eighteenth century is much like Tristram’s train of impressions and ideas.

CHAPTER 3

Itemisation: Enumerative Realism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract  Most enumerations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature are potentially endless adjunctive sequences. In both the late epic and the early novel, the list, especially in the form of the inventory, is a recurrent device representing and reflecting on processes of itemisation that characterised contemporary discourses of commodification and imperialist accumulation. As lists lend themselves to both detailed novelistic description and data-driven empirical observation, they interrogate intersections of literary and scientific epistemologies. Enumerative passages also pervade the nineteenth-century novel and its vivid social descriptions. In a world of both excess and loss, the list functions as a means of linguistic control. Finally, in late nineteenth-century aestheticism, lists become auto-­ poetical: they turn away from realist representation to achieve the effects of lyrical condensation and decadent enchantment. Keywords  Mock epic • The novel • Commodification • Empiricism • Immersion • Collectors • Aestheticism In a surprising turn of events, the eighteenth century witnessed both the rise of the novel and the decline of the epic. Although epic poetry was still considered the pinnacle of literary endeavours by critics, many authors felt that after Milton’s Paradise Lost a “unique, epic depression” (Hägin 1964:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. A. Barton et al., Literary Lists, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28372-7_3

37

38 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

8) took hold: there was the notion that the genre had been exhausted and all efforts to appropriate it for the modern, enlightened age would prove futile. In this traditional understanding, the epic was superseded by the novel as the new quintessential high genre. This is not the place to speculate about the reasons for the change, which are no doubt complex and cannot be ascribed to a single factor. The novel was certainly not “invented” in the eighteenth century but had developed out of a range of textual forms and discourses—not least poetry—over the course of at least a century (Parker/Smith 2014). Meanwhile, given the instability of the poetic category of epic at the time, the genre may be said to have been in transformation rather than in decline (Foy 2016; Rawson 2010). The predominant variants of the epic in the eighteenth century were translations of ancient heroic poetry (which presented a way to write an epic by proxy), the discursive or philosophical poem,1 and the mock-epic poem that constitutes what Claude Rawson calls a “loyalist parody” (2010: 169) of the epic: the genre is celebrated as the epitome of poetry, yet it is also considered unavailable to the contemporary poet, whose parody hence does not ridicule the heroic literary form but the contemporary realities that fail to live up to the heroism of the classical age. The formal features of the epic, and epic catalogues in particular, were still in demand in the eighteenth century, yet the enumeration of trivial things was now the rule. At the same time, new species of lists, lists that quantify or collect, emerged in novelistic prose. Thus, in both the early novel and the late epic, itemisation played a pivotal role.

Mocking Epic Lists Shortly before the turn of the century, John Dryden published his translation of the Aeneid (1697). The six volumes of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad appeared between 1715 and 1720, followed by his collaborative translation of the Odyssey in five volumes in 1725-26. Eighteenth-century poets were engaged in classifying and defining the epic as a genre, based on theoretical considerations from previous centuries. For both Dryden and Pope, the engagement with classical poets was 1  The philosophical poem radicalises the “impulse to displace epic action to a high discursive mode” (Rawson 2010: 168) that was already characteristic of Miltonian epic. Perhaps the most prominent example is Pope’s “An Essay on Man,” which abounds with lists, see our previous Chap. 2.

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

39

one of imitation and translation, and their treatment of ancient texts was characterised by a deep anxiety over their meaning for the present. At the same time, they were aware of the chances that one could seize when transposing an ancient text to contemporary contexts. Pope even explicitly commented on the need for adapting the epic catalogue to one’s audience’s needs.2 Dryden’s and Pope’s treatments of the epic took different routes in their mock epics, which gave them greater freedom in handling the form and allowed them to play with the claims of the epic heritage.3 Also, by mocking epic conventions and satirising other writers poets could demonstrate their own artistic skills. Dryden’s satiric poem Mac Flecknoe, first published in 1782  in a pirated edition, targets the poet and dramatist Thomas Shadwell, whose defining heroic trait turns out to be dullness. Pope’s mock epic the Dunciad (1728-43) was inspired by Mac Flecknoe; its main targets were Pope’s fellow poets Lewis Theobald and Colley Cibber, who are praised by the goddess Dulness. The Dunciad’s complex publication history (first in three, then in four books) led Pope to add an excessive apparatus of prefatory material, notes, and annotations, many of which contain lists and enumerations.4 The urge to explain and verify can be seen as a symptom of the time with its overwhelming interest in the sciences and scientific methods, as well as in antiquarianism. At the same time, the sheer mass of these “paraphernalia […] reveal the gap between the majestic simplicity of epic and the plodding triviality of modern literary endeavor” (Johns-Putra 2006: 102).5 Literary activity itself becomes itemised so that it provides a striking parallel to the itemisation of  See Wall (2007: 55-56) and Pope (1996: 129-30).  For more detail on the tradition of mock epics in the eighteenth century, see Bond (1932), Broich (1990), and Johns-Putra (2006: 84-113); for the history of mock epics since Pope, see Robertson (2009). 4  See, for example, the “List of Books, Papers, and Verses, in which our Author was abused, before the Publication of the Dunciad” (Rumbold 2009: 367-72), and the list of immortal poets in Pope’s note to IV.6. All quotations from the Dunciad are taken from the edition by Rumbold. The Dunciad was first published anonymously in 1728 in three books. A year later a revised version, the Dunciad Variorum, appeared, to which Pope had added extensive annotations ascribed to “Martinus Scriblerus.” In 1742, he published a fourth book called The New Dunciad. In 1744, all four books were published together in a revised and annotated edition. In this version, the target figure is changed—it is no longer Lewis Theobald but Colley Cibber. 5  See also Hunter (1990) on the broader contexts of eighteenth-century literary writing and its focus on detail and scientific methods. 2 3

40 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

form—that is, both narrative and epistemic forms—one can observe within the mock epics. The four-volume edition of the Dunciad is framed by catalogues. At the beginning, the dedication to Jonathan Swift is made in the form of a catalogue: his literary achievements are listed (I.19-24), followed by a list of what is contained in the Cave of Poverty and Poetry (I.37-44), including “Journals, Medleys, Merc’ries, Magazines:/Sepulchral Lyes, our holy walls to grace/And New-year Odes, and all the Grub-street race” (I.42-44). The final lines of the poem describe how Chaos and Night assume control; presented in the form of a catalogue, they cause the flight and ultimate extinction of Fancy, Wit, Truth, Philosophy, Physic, Metaphysic, Religion, and Morality (IV.631-65). The fact that abstract concepts are enumerated points to the overall theoretical, almost allegorical dimension the poem assumes especially in the fourth book, in which action recedes behind the satiric, critical mode (Robertson 2009: 100).6 Most of the catalogues in the Dunciad are semantically and syntactically varied; each enumerated item tends to be accompanied by some details or qualifications. They thus follow epic conventions and, in a comic inversion of their content, are certainly not dull in their artistic effect. Most striking, perhaps, is a list that is not spelled out: towards the end, when Dulness is devising her reign and allocating responsibilities, she yawns—and in doing so puts religious and secular institutions, the government, and the army to sleep. Alluding to John Milton’s invocation to the Muse in Paradise Lost, which in turn echoes Homer’s invocation to the Muse right before the catalogue of ships in the Iliad, Pope’s narrator similarly implores the Muse to “Relate, who first, who last resign’d to rest” (IV.821) through Dulness’s yawn. What follows, however, is a line filled only with asterisks—and the subsequent line notes that the Muse, too, fell prey to Dulness’s influence: “In vain, in vain, – the all-composing Hour/ Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow’r” (IV.627-28). Dulness even manages to suppress the epic convention of cataloguing. It is Pope’s earlier (and shorter) mock epic, The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714), however, that is often taken as the epitome of the genre for its satiric reversal of epic conventions. The key plot element of the poem— the “rape” or theft of Belinda’s, the heroine’s, lock of hair—was inspired

6  Another notable list is that of the “dull” contemporary poets the goddess summons (III.139-212).

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

41

by a true incident, which had caused a rift between two families.7 Pope’s satiric poem was an attempt to reconcile them. By elevating an extremely trivial matter to the subject of an epic poem, Pope demonstrates his skills as a poet of mock epics. He sets out to show “What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things” (I.2),8 and it is indeed “Things” that play a crucial role throughout the poem: “things, not people, are the heroes” (Crehan 1997: 46). Human life and human agency become secondary to the dominant power of things, which highlight the commodification of social life in general, and of women in particular. “Trivial Things” are part of a network of commodities that signal the itemisation of human interactions. When Ariel commands the Sylphs, a kind of guarding spirit, to protect Belinda from any form of mishap, the list of potential disasters that may befall Belinda is curiously materialistic: Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law, Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw, Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade, Forget her Pray’rs, or miss a Masquerade, Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball; Or whether Heav’n has doom’d that Shock must fall. Haste then ye Spirits! to your Charge repair (II.105-11)

The verbs “break,” “stain,” and “lose” are used as zeugmas: one can break, stain, and lose something in literal terms, in which case the verbs refer to material objects (a porcelain jar, a brocade, and a necklace) but also in metaphorical terms. In the latter case, the verbs then refer to something immaterial (a law, someone’s honour, or one’s heart). In the catalogue, both senses occur side by side. The effect is one of cognitive dissonance: losing a necklace or staining one’s dress may be upsetting, but it is banal compared to Belinda falling in love or, worse, losing her good reputation, perhaps even against her will. The close proximity, even 7  In 1711, Lord Petre cut a lock from Arabella Fermor’s head; a mutual friend, John Caryll, commissioned the poem to reconcile the families. 8  In Paradise Lost, the narrator addresses the Muse before he begins his catalogue of devils and demons: Say, Muse, their Names then known, who first, who last, Rous’d from the slumber, on that fiery Couch, At their great Emperor’s call […]. (I.376-78) See Homer’s Iliad 2.488; 491-92. All quotations from The Rape of the Lock are taken from the edition by Tillotson.

42 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

conjunction of the immaterial and the material in the space of the catalogue leads to downgrading the immaterial concepts and values. In that they become itemised and part of the enumeration, tied together by the zeugmatic verbs, “Diana’s Law,” “Honour,” “Heart,” and, by extension, the “Prayers” are commodified. Belinda emerges as “a creature made of material things, a metonymically constructed subject composed in couplets” (Jenkins 2009: 82). The fragility of the objects mentioned further suggests the heightened vulnerability of women, whose agency is seriously questioned.9 Towards the very end, The Rape of the Lock features another catalogue that continues the theme of commodification of immaterial things. Belinda’s lock cannot be found, and some believe it may have entered “the Lunar Sphere,/Since all things lost on Earth are treasur’d there” (V.113-14). A list of these “things lost” unfolds: There Heroes’ Wits are kept in pondrous Vases, And Beaus’ in Snuff-boxes and Tweezer-Cases. There broken Vows, and Death-bed Alms are found, And Lovers’ Hearts with ends of Riband bound; The Courtier’s Promises, and Sick Man’s Pray’rs, The Smiles of Harlots, and the Tears of Heirs, Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea; Dry’d Butterflies, and Tomes of Casuistry. (V.115-22)

With the exception of the cages, chains, dried butterflies, and tomes, the list consists of immaterial, abstract things that cannot be kept, fixed, or counted. They are turned into objects; yet in the catalogue—in the Lunar Sphere—they become archived as if they were tangible and manageable. The “economy of ‘trivial Things’” (Crehan 1997: 47) that characterises the poem as a whole is carried to absurd extremes here. Discussing the principle of microcosmic representation as a key principle of literary form in eighteenth-century writing, Paul McGlynn writes that “the microcosm, like the catalog, suggests a completed picture, a fair and thorough selection” (1979: 374) of that which it represents. The catalogues in The Rape of the Lock thus operate like magnifying glasses: they highlight the commodification and fetishisation within the beau monde and its principles of politeness and honour, which are the main targets of Pope’s satire.  See also Deutsch (1996), Jenkins (2009), and Williams (1964).

9

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

43

Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: The List and the Realist Novel While epic poetry was losing its high status, the novel was progressively coming into its own over the course of the eighteenth century and beyond. Yet aesthetically binding formal rules for what would soon be known as “the novel” were only just emerging. In consequence, those English prose texts that we nowadays consider examples of the early British novel are typically characterised by experimentation with the literary possibilities of fictional world-making. In fact, early eighteenth-century novels do not generally present themselves in the form of coherent narratives but rather appear in episodic form. This can be attributed to the fact that the early novel develops in dialogue with other genres and print products of its time. These include, among others, the picaresque novel, the diary, the newspaper, as well as diverse kinds of administrative and legislative documents. The frequent inclusion and adaptation of non-literary text types also exemplifies the dynamic relationship between fact and fiction, which plays a crucial role in early English novels (Davis 1983). Writers typically make a particular claim to reality, which is evident not only in references to their stories’ supposed historicity but also in an increasing concentration on details.10 Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave: A True Story (1688) exhibits both the claim to historicity and the focus on detail in its very first pages. The book begins with the remarkable statement: “I do not pretend […]” (8), and the author further corroborates her credibility claim by declaring that she offers “History […] without the Addition of Invention” (8). She then assures us that she herself has been “an Eye-Witness” (8) to the events that follow. Afterwards she introduces the story’s setting, Surinam in the West Indies, and she does so by stringing together diverse kinds of lists and enumerations. What starts as a nicely ordered catalogue of traded goods (“Fish, Venison, Buffilo’s, Skins, and little Rarities” [8]) eventually evokes the image of a dazzling, colourful, and at the same time intriguingly alien world in the reader’s mind. As Lipking reminds us, “For those at home, the discoveries brought travels of mind: catalogs of the 10  Ian Watt describes the close interrelation between the new literary form of the novel and what he calls “formal realism” as follows: “the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its readers with such details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms” (1957: 32).

44 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

plant life and strange animals, collections of natural specimens of articles, a stage fashion for New World pageantry” (Lipking 1997: 75). The first-­ person narrator then lists and describes unknown and exotic animals, such as Marmosets, a sort of a Monkey as big as a rat or weasel, but of a marvelous and delicate shape […] and Cousheries, a little Beast in the form and fashion of a Lion, as big as a Kitten […] little Parakeetoes, great Parrots, Muckraws, and a thousand other Birds and Beasts of wonderful and surprizing Forms, Shapes and Colours (8).11

As Laura Brown has observed, “the marvels here are all movable objects, readily transportable to a European setting, where they become exotic and desirable acquisitions” (1993: 43). Behn’s enumerations of goods thus reflect the widespread discourse of imperialist accumulation that Brown characterises as “typical of both the economic and the literary language of the Restoration and early eighteenth century” (ibid.). Behn’s lists evoke a sense of incalculable quantity and seductively shimmering masses of colour and material, and therefore express the period’s fascination with imperialist acquisition. Eventually, the narrator proceeds from the portrayal of the natural world to a description of the arts and customs, and thus shifts the focus towards a description of the people of Surinam with whom the English trade these goods: We dealt with ‘em with Beads of all Colours, Knives, Axes, Pins and Needles; which they used only as Tools to drill Holes within their Ears, Noses and Lips, where they hang a great many little things; as long Beads, bits of Tin, Brass, or Silver […] Then we trade for Feathers, which they order into all Shapes, make themselves little short Habits of ‘em, and glorious Wreaths for their Heads, Necks, Arms and Legs […]. Besides these, a thousand little Knacks, and Rarities in Nature, and some of Art; as their Baskets, Weapons, Aprons, &c. (Oroonoko 9)12 11  See Brown: “Pets, in particular birds, were both sign and product of the expansion and commercialization of English Economy and society in the eighteenth century” (1993: 44). 12  According to Brown, “this expansion and commercialization found its most frequent cultural emblem in the figure of the woman. Female dress and ornamentation – perfumes, pearls, jewels, silks, combs, petticoats  – and the female territory of the tea table with its imported essentials of coffee, tea, and chocolate – came to stand for trade, prosperity, luxury, and commodification in a characteristic synecdoche that pervades the literary culture of this period from Defoe and Rowe to Pope and Swift” (44).

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

45

The inhabitants of Surinam are represented via discourses of itemisation: “Ears, Noses and Lips”; “Heads, Necks, Arms and Legs” (9). The narrative fragmentation of their bodies suggests that the English did not see the people of Surinam as equals. The dissection and dismemberment implied in these portrayals can be conceived as a foreshadowing of the further course of the story, which centres on Oroonoko, an African slave, who is brought to Surinam and, after inciting a rebellion, is dismembered and quartered. The (British) perception of the colonies’ inhabitants as inferior beings and as freely disposable commodities is represented through these listings of individual body parts. Oroonoko’s antislavery speech epitomises the treatment of human beings as animals and as exotic commodities (“we are sold like Apes, or Monkeys, to be the Sport of Women, Fools and Cowards” [52]). The speech clearly names what, on a formal level, the use of itemising lists has implied from the very first page: objects, animals, and human beings are rendered available as goods, ready to be captured for entertainment, trade, and exploitation. Ultimately the lists, in their mutual entanglement and serial concatenation, also point to the commodity chains typical for triangular colonial trade: in the novel, the British “treat African slaves as commodities in order to produce other commodities for an increasingly global marketplace” (Rosenthal 2005: 152). Evidently, lists in Oroonoko have diverse functions. They supply the required details that guarantee the early novel’s investment in credibility and contemporaneity. The detailed descriptions also satisfy contemporary readers’ expectations to be entertained with tales of marvel and exotic excess. Furthermore, the lists—especially those in the very first chapter— implicitly tackle the major themes that are more or less subliminally negotiated in the rest of the novel. The itemisation and the accumulation that the list performs on a formal level can be said to mirror the accumulation of colonial goods and the dismemberment and dismantling of whole families and cultures that, due to their status, were not considered as organic wholes but as freely available commodities for the European market.

Robinson Crusoe: Homo Oeconomicus, Homo Domesticus, and Master of Despondency Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is just one among numerous texts that show a certain “preoccupation with the list in the earlier history of the novel” (Birke 2016: 297). The most famous list-maker of the early novel is

46 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

probably Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1719), the list, mainly in its manifestation as an inventory, is a constantly recurring form that imports “a whole range of larger social discourses into the novel” (Birke 2016: 302). One of the first lists we encounter is the list of the things that Robinson retrieves from the shipwreck, which include, on the one hand, handicraft tools (“two or three bags full of nails and spikes, a great skrew-­ jack, a dozen or two of hatchets, and above all, the most useful thing call’d a grind-stone” [Crusoe 47]), and, on the other hand, weapons, which might be used either for hunting or for defence (“two or three iron crows, and two barrels of musquet-bullets, seven mosquets, and another fowling-­ piece, with some small quantity of powder more; a large bag full of small shot, and a great roll of sheet lead” [47]). As he has lost almost everything, each item gains in value for him.13 The tools allow him to build a house, raise fences, and thereby go through the different phases of human evolutionary history in a very condensed timeframe. While the listed items can be said to connect him to civilisation and thus to his past, they also represent his opportunity to make a home on the island and are therefore also closely related to his future survival. Scholars have made sense of Robinson Crusoe as a representative of two distinctive discourses that shaped and were shaped in the early eighteenth century. Some have interpreted Crusoe’s list-making as a sign of the book’s situatedness in discourses of commodification, circulation of goods, and “capitalist ideologies” (Richetti 1975: 23). According to this view, Crusoe’s lists convey the impression that he is a typical entrepreneur and homo oeconomicus.14 Another perspective has been provided by Pat Rogers, who interprets Crusoe’s inventories of food (“a great Hogshead of Bread and three large Runlets of Rum or Spirits, and a Box of Sugar, and a Barrel of fine flower” [49]) and household items (“two or three razors, and one pair of large Sizzers, with some ten or Dozen of good Knives and Forks” [49]) as reflective of contemporary discourses on housekeeping (Rogers 1974: 375). Besides the fact that Crusoe can be seen as an “embodiment of various ideologies” (Richetti 1975: 23), it becomes clear that his survival is made possible because he “organises what is present and available into manageable projects for the unknown 13  See Schmidgen, who also perceives the separation of the objects from their earlier contexts as leading towards “heightened visibility” (2001: 21). 14  Also see Novak (1962), Schmidgen (2001), and von Contzen (2022).

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

47

future” (Borsing 2017: 63). Evidently, we can summarise that Crusoe’s lists serve many purposes: they characterise him as a housekeeper, a manager, a capitalist, an optimist, and a cautious rationalist. Eventually, Robinson impresses us not only with his inventories of tools and provisions but also with the way in which he evaluates his external and internal needs via the repeated practice of convening “a Council […] in [his] thoughts” (Crusoe 47): I consulted several things in my situation, which I found would be proper for me, 1st, health and fresh water, I just now mentioned; 2ndly, shelter from the heat of the sun; 3rdly, security from ravenous creatures, whether man or beast; 4thly, a view to the sea, that if God sent any ship in sight, I might not lose any advantage for my deliverance, of which I was not willing to banish all my expectation yet. (Crusoe 51)

The sober way in which he analyses his needs and then plans his actions in this desperate situation might surprise us. The orderly enumeration evokes a sense of analytical control that seems to be diametrically opposed to the sense of abandonment and uncertainty that the castaway must experience at that moment. To review his personal situation, Robinson then lists the “good” and “evil” aspects of his current circumstances in the fashion of double-entry bookkeeping: I stated it very impartially, like Debtor and Creditor, the Comforts I enjoyed against the Miseries I suffered, Thus, Evil

Good

I am cast upon a horrible desolate Island, void of all hope of Recovery I am singl’d out and separated, as it were, from all the world, to be miserable

But I am alive; and not drowned, as all my ship’d Company was But I am singl’d out, too from all the Ship’s crew, to Be spar’d from Death; and He that miraculously sav’d me from Death can deliver me from this Condition But I am not starv’d, and perishing on a barren Place, Affording no Sustenance

I am divided from ManKind, a solitaire, one banished from human society

48 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

Evil

Good

I have no clothes to cover me

But I am in a hot CliMate, where, if I had Clothes, I could hardly wear them But I am cast on an Island where I see no wild Beasts to hurt me, as I saw on the coast of Africa: And what if I had been Shipwreck’d there? But God wonderfully sent The Ship in near enough to the Shore, that I have gotten out so many necessary things as will either supply my Wants, or enable me to supply myself, even as long as I live. (Crusoe 57-58)

I am without Defence, or Means to resist any Violence of Man or Beast

I have no soul to speak to, or relieve me

It seems that the analytical subdivision of his predicament into clearly defined and separated challenges helps him first to systematise and then possibly to manage his situation (“my Reason began […] to master my Despondency” [57]). Yet Defoe does not only separate good and evil, he also divides his own self into an experiencing and a reflecting one. John Richetti speaks of “a separation of the self from circumstances in order to master them” and adds further: “Crusoe begins to speak at this point as if he operated on himself […] as if he had a self which dealt in various ways with another part of himself” (1975: 40). After juxtaposing the positive and the negative aspects of his condition, Crusoe, in the fashion of a bookkeeper who makes use of a balance sheet, draws the line and subsumes (“Upon the whole […]”), even in “the most miserable of all conditions in this world […] we may always find in it something to comfort ourselves from, and to set, in the description of good and evil, on the credit side of the account” (Crusoe 58). His rational and moralistic reasoning in the face of acute distress is remarkable. At the same time, the form of the account book is by no means chosen at random. The initially odd combination of mercantile bookkeeping and self-­ reflection is not a unique combination practised by Crusoe alone but follows and condenses the prototypical emergence of self-accounting or “Seelenbuchhaltung” (Mainberger 2003: 192) from financial accounting.

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

49

The gradual appropriation of the account book as a form of self-­ examination demonstrates that “forms travel” (Levine 2015: 4), and this seems to be particularly relevant to the simple form of the list. From the lists of religious self-examination described by Lejeune,15 through the typical self-optimisation and time-management tables of Benjamin Franklin,16 and eventually to the digital and list-based procedures of the contemporary Quantified Self movement, one thing becomes clear: the practical lists of accounting are closely related to the forms of self-reflection and the recording of personal data as they occur in different epochs against the backdrop of different historical and cultural ideals.17 In Crusoe’s case, this development includes simple inventories of things, tabular lists that record and systematise both his material and his mental conditions, and, finally, the neatly dated journal entries (Crusoe 60-79) that list his ups and downs and, of course, the weather conditions: Oct. 20. I overset my Raft, and all the Goods I had got upon it, but being in shoal Water, and the things being chiefly heavy, I recover’d many of them when the Tide was out. Oct. 25. It rain’d all Night and all Day, with some Gusts of Wind, during which time the Ship broke in Pieces, the Wind blowing a little harder than before, and was no more to be seen, except the Wreck of her, and that only at low Water. I spent this Day in covering and securing the Goods which I had sav’d, that the Rain might not spoil them. Oct. 26. I walk’d about the Shore almost all Day to find out a place to fix my Habitation, greatly concern’d to secure my self from an Attack in the Night, either from wild Beasts or Men. Towards Night I fix’d upon a proper Place under a Rock, and mark’d out a Semi-Circle for my Encampment, which I resolv’d to strengthen with a Work, Wall, or Fortification made of double Piles, lin’d within with Cables, and without with Turf. From the 26th. to the 30th. I work’d very hard in carrying all my Goods to my new Habitation, tho’ some Part of the time it rain’d exceeding hard. (Crusoe 85-86)

Although critics have traditionally explained Defoe’s lists in terms of his capitalist values and saw them as proof of his “accountant’s mentality” (Seager 2008: 639), it is also worth mentioning that each insertion of a  See Lejeune (2009). See also our Chap. 5.  See Franklin (2004). 17  See also Rüggemeier (2019) for a condensed discussion on the relationship between accounting and self-accounting. 15 16

50 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

list, as it stands out from the prose monologue, presents a textual rupture that requires heightened attention and asks readers to reconsider the representative abilities of the novel’s prose narrative, on the one hand, and procedures of quantification and data accumulation, on the other. The tension between these two realms of “realistic” representation is also at the heart of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722).

Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year: Data, Death, and “The Ineffable” Defoe’s writings not only present but also perform the precise recording of detailed observation, a practice that is closely connected with eighteenth-­ century empiricism. Defoe worked as a journalist, and factual accuracy, close observation, and the precise rational weighing of probabilities inspired his work as a novelist. These skills never emerge more pointedly than in his Journal of the Plague Year, which oscillates between a sense of subjective expression and documentary objectivity.18 Defoe presents the novel as an eyewitness account of a man named H. F., who shares his experiences of the year 1665, in which the bubonic plague struck the city of London. Since Defoe was only five years old in 1665, the account is probably based on the journals of Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe. The book starts in medias res with an account of the very first case of the plague, soon interrupted by a simple table enumerating deaths by plague and the number of urban areas affected by the disease: Plague 2. Parishes Infected 1. (Plague Year 6)

Some lines later, the fictional autobiographer informs us that “the ordinary Burials increased in Number considerably” (ibid.). And he again confronts his readers with a list:

18  For a more detailed discussion of data, stories, and the poetics of list-making, see Anne Rüggemeier’s forthcoming article “Quantifizierung und Erzählung: Von pränarrativen Aufzeichnungssystemen in Daniel Defoes Journal of the Plague Year (1722) zum postnarrativen Auf-Zählen in Maggie Nelsons  Bluets (2009),” Poetik der Quantität. Eds. Niklas Schmitt et al. Bamberg University Press, 2023.

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

51

From Dec. 27th to Jan. 3 St. Giles’s – 16 St. Andrew’s – 17 From Jan. 3 to – 10 St. Giles’s – 12 St. Andrew’s – 25 Jan. 10. to – 17 St. Giles’s – 18 St. Andrew’s – 18 Jan. 17. to – 24 St. Giles’s – 23 St. Andrew’s – 16 Jan. 24. to – 31 St. Giles’s – 24 St. Andrew’s – 15 Jan. 30. to – Feb. 7 St. Giles’s – 21 St. Andrew’s – 23 Feb. 7. to – 14 St. Giles’s – 21 (Plague Year 7)

What we find here is the list as an insert (Fludernik 2016: 309).19 The embedding of the administrative document, the Bills of Mortality,20 sheds light on the list as an important transitional form. It is precisely the text’s multimodality that places the highly revered and also glorified figure of the author in continuity with the scribes and their often underappreciated daily work of copying, recording, registering, and filing.21 Defoe’s lists are close to the historical documents of the time,22 and he surely uses the administrative list form as a stylistic device to suggest the verisimilitude of his account. These lists showcase the procedures of descriptive statistics that served as the basic technology for the 19  Fludernik differentiates four types of lists: the narrative list (which lists actions), the descriptive list (a descriptive passage in the form of a list), the argumentative list, and the list as insert (quotation of a certain list or embedded text that shows a list). 20  The Bills of Mortality—usually designed as a means to keep track of and collect the number of burials in the parishes of London—were lists published once a week that informed citizens about the death rate by parish and by cause of death. Defoe had seen the records from 1665, and he reproduced one of the Bills in the Review in 1712 (see Seager 2008: 646). While reporting on the Marseille plague for Applebee’s Journal in 1721, Defoe became increasingly suspicious of the numbers. In his manual Due Preparations for the Plague, published in February 1722, he continued his criticism of the inaccuracies he found in the Bills. 21  C. Siegert/Vogl (2003), who claim that in European cultures, it is the incessant writing down and copying, recording, registering, and archiving of the secretaries that ultimately allows the representational cultural work of the author to emerge: the imaginary develops out of the factual reports of the real. 22  See John Graunt’s Reflections on the Weekly Bills of Mortality (1665) and Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality (1662). Graunt is often considered the first important English demographer. His ambition was to demonstrate the utility of statistics in guiding public policy.

52 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

administration of things, people, and their interactions. Deriving from the Latin statisticum (“referring to the state”), statistics are inextricably linked with the development of the modern nation-state, which relies on surveillance to administer and police its territories, its possessions, and its inhabitants.23 Media scholar Liam Cole Young characterises listing activities as “the infrastructure of culture” and argues that they “help us glimpse the techniques and technologies by which human societies administer, police and imagine themselves” (Young 2017: 10). It is astonishing how accurately Young’s observation describes the different functions of the list in this early novel. Defoe shows that lists both perform an administrative function (recording and data management) and serve as a means to police (monitor and control) the citizens of London. Yet, as we will see, the list also allows for insights into how the presented societies imagine themselves, how they make sense of their reality, and what kinds of epistemological shifts they experience. The origin of the novel coincided with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-­ century breakthroughs in empirical epistemology. Critics have emphasised that Defoe, especially in Plague Year, “undertakes a representation of the real whose empirical ambition and insistence are unprecedented” (McKeon 1987: 54). Empiricism and the revolution of science share with the early novel a propensity for exact observation, detailed description, and veracity. Yet, to a certain extent, the genesis of the novel also opposes the ideals of empiricism. The Royal Society (chartered 1662) institutionalised Francis Bacon’s advocacy for empirical inductions and, to its members, scientific observation meant moving away from words. As they aimed to accurately record their observations of the physical world, empiricists preferred to trust the supposed purity and plainness of numbers rather than the ornamental abundance and imprecision of words.24 While the New Sciences 23  The ways in which list-making and governmental action are interwoven with one another eventually also becomes visible in the list of “ORDERS Conceived and Published by the Lord MAYOR and Aldermen of the City of London, concerning the Infection of the Plague 1665” (Defoe 36-43), which Defoe also includes as an insert, and which he probably took from A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces (1721). 24  Thomas Sprat in his History of the Royal Society (1667) describes as one of the main concerns of science “to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words” (113). See also Graunt who boasts that he “reduced several great confused Volumes into a few perspicuous Tables, and abridg’d such Observations as naturally flowed from them, into a few succinct Paragraphs, without any long Series of miltiloquious Deductions” (quoted in Seager 2008: 644).

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

53

were critical of the verbosity of the newly emerging novel, H. F.’s comments demonstrate that there was also considerable scepticism towards the supposedly fact-based numerical truth on which statistical reference relied.25 This is why, for example, Nicholas Seager suggests that Defoe’s account of the plague should be read “as a reaction to rather than an endorsement of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century quantification projects” (2008: 640). Even though H.  F. repeatedly reproduces them, he also continually questions the reliability of the Bills of Mortality (“I am far from allowing them to be able to give any Thing of a full Account” [113]) and also draws attention to existing inconsistencies.26 H. F. attributes the inaccuracies to the fact that the authorities are simply overwhelmed by the situation in the city so that faulty data collection results in inaccurate statistics. For this reason, the quantified facts eventually stand out as possibly less trustworthy than the “wordy” story told by the fictional autobiographer, who—as an eyewitness—compiles his evidence as he walks through the city and with his prose narrative reminds us that there are “particular stories behind the numbers that comprise the Bills” (Seager 2008: 648). Seen in this context, the novel is a reflection on the question of how to represent reality most accurately. Defoe’s negotiation of the truth value of data-driven or story-based representation culminates in the scene in which H.  F. views the great burial pit at Cripplegate (Plague Year 53). As he peers over the edge, he admits defeat in his attempts at a narrative representation of reality: “It is impossible to say any Thing that is able to give a true Idea of it to those who did not see it, other than this; that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no Tongue can express” (53-54). Instead of a detailed description of what he sees or a portrayal of the effect the visual impression has on him, we are presented with a repetition and tautological overemphasis of an adverb that serves to represent an experience and a condition that is only referred to as “it.” Defoe later describes the epidemic as driving “us out of all measures” (184) and states that people are dying “by Heaps, that is to say, without account” (ibid.). This passage has been 25  See Hacking (1975) and Daston (1988) for comprehensive and insightful surveys of the history of induction and probability. 26  “I observ’d often, that in the Parishes of Algate, and Cripplegate, White-Chappel and Stepney, there was 500, 600, 700, and 800 in a Week, in the Bills, whereas if we may believe the Opinion of those that liv’d in the City, all the Time, as well as I, there died sometime 2000 a-Week in those Parishes […] Great Numbers went out of the World, who were never known or any Account of them taken, as well within the Bills of Mortality as without” (83).

54 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

interpreted as an indirect critique of contemporary science’s hubris and naïve belief in the truth, as well as of the representational abilities of numbers. In the face of people dying “by Heaps”—as the refusal to describe the scene at the burial pit suggests—both numbers and words fail to offer a representation of the real: people dying at an immeasurable rate cannot be accurately counted, and a mass of indiscriminate corpses observed from the edge of a pit defies description. Thus the scene at the burial pit supports the impression of constantly resonating “untold tales” (Napier 2016: 22) that could be excavated from under the surface of the episodic text. It is fascinating to observe how it is precisely at the limits of narration that the form of the list makes its reappearance. Defoe’s narrator, already overwhelmed as he stands next to the burial pit, must find the situation in the city as a whole even more overwhelming. In The Infinity of Lists, Umberto Eco asserts that, when “faced with something that is immensely large, or unknown, of which we do not know enough […], the author proposes a list as a specimen, example, or indication, leaving the reader to imagine the rest” (2009: 49). He later adds that “already Homer fell back on the list because he lacked the words, tongue, and mouth” (Eco 2009: 327). The same happens in Plague Year: to describe the chaos in the streets and the people “who were, as I may say, all out of their wits already” (25), Defoe’s first-person narrator makes good use of poetic lists. Yet, while the lists in the service of statistics “strive for unattainable certitude” (Seager 2008: 643), Defoe’s poetic lists of description have a contrastive effect: they indicate chaos, create ambivalence, and constantly point towards the ineffable. First, to indicate the changes in London, he merely lists its infrastructure and layout: “The Face of London was now indeed strangely alter’d, I mean the whole Mass of Buildings, City, Liberties, Suburbs, Westminster, Southwark and altogether” (Plague Year 17-18). Then he describes people as “addicted to Prophesies, and Astrological Conjurations, Dreams, and old Wives Tales” (21) that, according to his estimation, are triggered by books “such as Lilly’s Almanack, Gadbury’s Astrological Predictions; Poor Robin’s Almanack and […] several pretended religious Books; one entitled, Come out of her my People, least you be partaker of her Plagues; another call’d, Fair Warning, another, Britain’s Remembrancer, and many such” (21-22). H.  F. also enumerates all kinds of “quacks, and mountebanks, Wizards, and Fortunetellers” (33) and constantly resorts to phrases that point towards the topos of the ineffable:

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

55

It is incredible, and scarce to be imagin’d, how the Posts of Houses, and Corners of Streets were plaster’d over with Doctors Bills, and Papers of ignorant Fellows; quacking and tampering in Physick, and inviting the People to come to them for Remedies; which was generally set off with such flourishes as these, (viz.) I N F A L I B L E preventive Pills against the Plague. N E V E R-F A I L I N G Preservatives against the Infection. S O V E R A I G N Cordials against the Corruption of the Air. E X A C T Regulations for the Conduct of the Body, in case of an Infection: Antipestilential Pills. I N C O M P A R A B L E Drink against the Plague, never found out before. An U N I V E R S A L Remedy for the Plague. The O N L Y-T R U E Plague-Water. The R O Y A L-A N T I D O T E against all Kinds of Infection; and such a Number more that I cannot reckon up; and if I could, would fill a Book of themselves to set them down. (Plague Year 29)

By providing mere snippets, Defoe aims to evoke images of the conditions in the plague-stricken city in the readers’ minds. The recurrent employment of lists, which mainly contain names, keywords, and titles, help to shape a very limited but detailed account. As a result, the depiction triggers the readers’ imagination and creates an impression of excitement, confusion, desperation, and chaos. It is against this backdrop that Defoe eventually sets the Lists of Orders, which are Orders Concerning the Infection of the Plague (36-38), Orders Concerning Infected Houses, and Persons Sick of the Plague (38-41), Orders for Cleaning and Keeping of the Streets Sweet (41-42), and Orders Concerning loose Persons and idle Assemblies (42-43). All of these appear as neatly listed paragraphs with highlighted headings. What makes the insertion of these orders so effective is that not only the term (“Orders”) but also the neatly structured layout of the documentary text type stands in stark opposition to the chaos that actually characterised the city in those days. It is no coincidence that Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, depicts the plague, or rather the management of the plague, as giving “rise to disciplinary projects” (1977: 198). The sudden insertion of the neatly structured list of orders almost figuratively demonstrates how the plague as an essential disorder (which Defoe emphasises through abundant enumeration), is “met by order” (Foucault 1977: 197). Defoe’s novels present the form of the list as a promising starting point for interrogating intersections of literary and scientific epistemologies and for reflecting on the specific affordances of literature as opposed to other forms of knowledge. Both the discourses of quantification and the poetics

56 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

of enumeration feature in Defoe’s other novels as well. Rebecca Connor, discussing the balance sheets in Moll Flanders, claims that “Defoe had caught the quantification fever sweeping through England and Europe” (2004: 103). The tension between chaos and control in Plague Year, and the oscillation between agency and contingency in Robinson Crusoe, eventually also showcase the dreams and illusions connected to this “quantification fever.” Early statistics arose from the hope that social phenomena could be studied with the same precision as natural phenomena. Defoe’s critical comments on the reliability of the Bills of Mortality in Plague Year indicate that the ambition to capture society in its entirety was limited by practical shortcomings: both data collection and the procedures of their analytical evaluation were deficient. In consequence, numerical data were prone to be selected and interpreted according to ideologically and politically driven criteria. In England, as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko also shows, mercantilism promoted a view of human beings as commodities. Through their conspicuous use of literary and numerical lists, both Behn and Defoe negotiate the very practice of measuring human value, which reduces human life to capital value or to fodder for statistics.

Dickens and the List: Nostalgic Collectors, Controlled Linguistic Excess, and the Rhetoric of Reform As the novel developed into a well-established genre in the nineteenth century, the formal device of the list became more and more frequent. To demonstrate the importance of the list in novelistic discourse, we will first turn our attention to a writer whose very oeuvre has been described as an endless list of serialised prose fiction: Charles Dickens. Dickens describes his mission as a writer in the preface to the Pickwick Papers as an attempt “to place before the reader a constant succession of characters and incidents” (Buzard 2009: 191). Buzard suggests that “literary creativity simply meant, in this instance, the capacity for continual production of new material, the capacity to keep extending a list” (ibid.). Dickens published all his novels in serial form first. They appeared as weekly or monthly instalments in magazines and other periodicals. This method of publication made his fiction affordable to less affluent audiences. Strikingly, the individual instalments that were later revised and published in book form materialise the implication of a continuous et cetera that not only

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

57

characterises the publishing process but also the reading experience as such. Enumerative passages pervade Dickens’s novels: enumeration and accumulation allow him to flesh out and construct his vivid descriptions of mid-Victorian society and to showcase his unique humorous, often satirical, voice. An oft-cited example is the list of objects that Dickens introduces to depict Mr. Meagles’s collections in Little Dorrit (1855-57)27: There were antiquities from Central Italy, made by the best modern houses in that department of industry; bits of mummy from Egypt (and perhaps Birmingham); model gondolas from Venice; […] ashes out of tombs, and lava out of Vesuvius; Spanish fans, Spezzian straw hats, Moorish slippers, Tuscan hairpins, Carrara sculptures, Trastaverini scarves, Genovese velvets and filagree, Neapolitan coral, Roman cameos, Geneva jewellery, Arab lanterns, rosaries blest all round by the Pope himself, and an infinite variety of lumber. (192-93)

The listed objects are in fact not only a description of Mr. Meagles’s souvenir collection but also a covert characterisation of Mr. Meagles himself. “The purpose of this list,” as Monika Fludernik argues, “is to show up Mr. Meagles’s lack of discernment in failing to distinguish between authentic and fake items” (2022: 31). The randomness of his acquisitions implicitly communicates his mental disturbance. Dickens’s fascination with stuff is evident not only in the souvenir collections of Mr. Meagles but also in the numerous shops that are a recurring setting in his novels. One such setting is Solomon Gills’s shop of nautical instruments in Dombey and Son (1846-48), which “comprised chronometers, barometers, telescopes, compasses, charts, maps, sextants, quadrants, and specimens of every kind of instrument used in the working of a ship’s course, or the keeping of a ship’s reckoning, or the prosecuting of a ship’s discoveries” (32-33). We should also not forget Mr. Krook’s shop in Bleak House (1852-53), which is especially noteworthy because of its “quantities of dirty bottles: blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-­ beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles. […] There were a great many ink bottles” (49). It is through the climactic enumeration, which eventually culminates in the ink bottles, that this shop is connected to the Court of Chancery (the epicentre of the novel’s plot structure), “where gallons of ink are used for legal documents: the filth  See Orestano (2011) and Fludernik (2016).

27

58 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

and chaos of the former echo the moral corruption of the latter” (Chialant 2016: n.p.). The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) is another case in point: it is portrayed as “one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in old corners of this town and to hide their musty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust” (47): There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour here and there, fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters, rusty weapons of various kinds, distorted figures in china and wood and iron and ivory: tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams. (Curiosity Shop 4)

The passage lists objects that are unmoored from the cultural contexts in which they once were useful and meaningful. The colonial ivory figures and the medieval wood carvings have fallen out of time and space and thus become opaque. The inventory reflects a fundamental shift in the way people related to the material world: “In a world slowly being altered by new technologies and mass-produced commodities” (Frederick 2022: 1), more and more objects become obsolete. It is remarkable, however, that at this very moment, when things lose their value as everyday objects, the collector’s time has arrived. As part of a collection, objects are severed from their contexts of work and use. What remains is a trace of loss. The collector is a nostalgic figure (Finkelde 2001: 191). He tries to compensate for an experience of loss by establishing order, which sometimes, especially with respect to Dickens’s characters, comes very close to mere hoarding. Through the practice of collecting, people’s relationship to the world of objects changes. Odo Marquard (1994) once described three forms of collecting: first, collecting can be a form of making provisions, second, it can be a form of discovery, and, third, collecting is connected to the practice of preserving. In The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) the supplies in Mr. Crisparkle’s dining room closet (“pickle-jars, jam-pots, tin canisters, spice boxes” [79]) feature a collection that is meant for provision, Mr. Meagle’s souvenir collection represents an act of discovering the world, and the above-quoted scene from The Old Curiosity Shop stands for an act of preservation. At the same time, however, these curious objects are neither cared for nor cherished: they have already succumbed to decay and the accompanying adjectives (“fantastic,” “rusty,” “distorted”) evince their bizarre obscurity. While the forsaken objects with their fleeting meanings are preserved in this poetic enumeration, readers perceive a

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

59

sentimental notion that mourns the social transformation connected to modernity: what was once used and valued now turns into worthless remnants. Walter Benjamin, in “Unpacking my Library – A Talk about Collecting,” puts into words the bizarre ambiguity of collections that we also perceive in many of Dickens’s portrayals of collectors and their collections. On the one hand, Benjamin perceives collections as “magical encyclopediae” (389): the objects (similar to fetishes) afford to present (in the sense of making present) a more or less distant age, landscape, craft, and owner. On the other hand, Benjamin discerns the “as if”28 character of collections. The practice of collecting is shown as an “irrational passion” (Finkelde 2001: 181)29 that creates the illusion of temporal and spatial order, which ultimately only highlights the loss of the past reality that the collected objects seem to evoke. For this reason, Finkelde suggests that collections, in addition to Marquard’s three possible functions (provision, discovery, preservation), can also serve to showcase futility. They exemplify the condition of the subject in modernity, which, as it faces the loss of metaphysically predetermined order (such as the great chain of being, see our Chap. 2), clings to the past and tries to create new orders through the act of collecting. As Dickens’s lists, his often absurd amalgamations of things in various states of decay show, the practice of collecting devolves into the mere hoarding of an ambivalent mass that first and foremost highlights (at least for the reader) the futility of his collection. A list of bizarre objects that introduces us to another shopkeeper, Mr. Venus in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), impressively (and ironically) showcases a collector who strives to resist the futility associated with collecting. As a taxidermist (“Preserver of Animals and Birds” [69]) Mr. Venus’s work is dedicated to the classification of individual fragments, which are then reassembled into a whole: he attempts to fix what is broken and to restore what is already dead. As he invites his visitor to cast his eyes around the shop, he comments on its obscure interior: 28  He compares them to a condition he calls hovering above the abyss (“nichts als ein Schwebezustand überm Abgrund” [388]). 29  Finkelde connects the irrational passion of collecting to the irrational passion of hermeneutics: “Solitary individuals had to face a universe of unstable signs in which the accumulated objects no longer possessed an original purpose or religious meaning. […] The absence of a purpose or order in the collected objects turns collecting into an irrational passion, a work of hermeneutics” (Finkelde 2001, from the English abstract of an article published in German).

60 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

My working bench. My young man’s bench. A Wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls, warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. Bottled preparations. Warious. Skulls, warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. Bottled preparations, warious. […] Say, human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Dried cuticle, warious. Oh, dear me! That’s the general panoramic view. (Mutual Friend 67)

It becomes clear that preserving, and collecting in general, means holding onto something that is long since past, and in this respect, not to preserve but to exhibit what is already dead and gone. In view of the plethora of collectors in Dickens’s texts, we begin to suspect that Dickens is repeatedly returning to the figure of the collector not only because it allows him to reflect on historical change and the loss of certainties, but also because his enumerative passages allow him to reflect on the act of narrative mediation as such. Just as his characters collect things to gain a sense of order in the face of lost certainties, Dickens’s narrator makes use of the list to exert linguistic control over a world in flux. “The analogy between a shop replete with objects and a page full of words […] describes very effectively Dickens’s rhetoric of ‘excess’ as one of his crucial literary strategies” (Chialant 2016: n.p.).30 Freedgood draws attention to the same analogy when she states that “In the myriads of things that stack up in piles of overstocked paragraphs, Dickens seems to be trying to name all things, and to leave no thing lying around unconnected” (2006: 103). The limited space of the shop also stands for the limited space of a page and the limited space of a book, which likewise have to absorb the constant succession of incidents, discoveries, and developments that characterise mid-Victorian experience and have to be contained and stocked in one limited space. On the page, the temporal flux and the global expansion are condensed in the naming of objects that can be looked at and that can be formed into words and then be controlled in verbal lines of accumulation and enumeration. We would not do justice to Dickens’s lists if we were to regard them solely as means of linguistic control in a world of both excess and loss. His lists also serve to create immersion and illusion: readers are not just presented with a world; they are also drawn into it. One such enumerative passage, which merges the reader’s perspective with that of the protagonist, is found in the description of Oliver Twist’s experience of Smithfield,  See also Kucich (1981).

30

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

61

the London cattle market. Given the abundance of impressions that inundate him, Oliver feels overwhelmed and disoriented; and the list used to represent the boy’s experience transmits this feeling of sensory excess and incomprehension to the reader. As they read the following onomatopoetically rich and structurally complex list, which runs on without a full stop for several lines, the readers share Oliver’s experience of disorientation: Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant dim that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses. (Oliver Twist 153)

Stressing the passage’s experiential quality, Monika Fludernik has argued that it highlights the scene’s “impact on the character’s psyche” (2022: 31). Yet we might argue further that, while reading the passage, readers are placed in the world constructed by the text, which is therefore experienced by readers as reality. As the lists appeal to both the readers’ imagination and emotions, they eventually effect a “sensual entry into the textual reality” (Wolf 1993: 157; our translation). The list-based discourse not only mirrors the various perceptions as they are processed in Oliver’s mind, but also speaks directly to the readers’ minds. In consequence, the linguistic medium becomes more and more transparent. Readers feel so involved in the raw and exuberant experience that they may briefly forget that their world is distinct from the fictive world of Oliver Twist. It is precisely because these are “mere” lists and because there is not much in terms of narrative mediation that we almost forget about the fact that this is only a story. We mentally immerse ourselves in the storyworld as if we were in the mind of Oliver, or even, as if we were Oliver. Another one of Dickens’s novels that uses lists to achieve a merging of the character’s mind with the reader’s mind is Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39). In Chap. 8, titled “Of the Internal Economy of Dotheboys Hall,” Nicholas arrives at Dotheboys Hall, a school run by Mr. and Mrs. Squeers, where

62 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

Nicholas has accepted a job as a teaching assistant. It is fashioned after the example of those “cheap Yorkshire schools” that in exchange for fees took in unwanted or illegitimate boys (usually from the South of England), promising to educate them. In the preface, Dickens, who had investigated the schools on a winter journey before writing the novel (Collins 1963: 3-4), described the Yorkshire schoolmasters as “ignorant, sordid, brutal men to whom few considerate persons would have entrusted the board and lodging of a horse or a dog” (xv). Squeers warns Nicholas that Dotheboys Hall is not exactly a hall. When Nicholas enters the schoolroom for the first time, he even compares it to a barn. And then—gradually—he sees them, his pupils: Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. (Nicholas Nickleby 88)

The quoted passage does not provide us with just one but with diverse intersecting lists. As the first-person narrator incredulously tries to comprehend what he sees in front of him, he mentally breaks down the crowd into its individual components (“Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures […]”). Along with Nicholas, readers reconstruct the history of past cruelties from the empirical evidence presented to them in the form of the list. This passage thus allows us to approach the phenomenon of imaginative immersion (Schaeffer/Vultur 2005: 238). The verbal narrative provides visual data that subject the reader’s mind to a perceptual immersion of sorts. The scene has cinematographic qualities: while reading, we merge our mental processing with the first-person narrator’s gradual processing of what he sees. As readers engage with this perspective, they become part of the fictional world: Werner Wolf termed this process “perspectival identification” (“perspektivische Identifikation” [Wolf 1993: 151]). Just as Nicholas’s eyes need time to adjust to the poorly lit room, his mind needs time to apprehend the whole range of misery that awaits him at Dotheboys Hall. Just as the protagonist processes pieces of visual

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

63

information that slowly emerge from the darkness, the readers gradually make sense of the itemised bits of verbal information and then construct a mental image of the whole scene. This list, the enumeration of physical impairments of young abused bodies, maximises the immersion-inducing power of narrative. The list-based description creates a certain experiential immediacy, a rawness, that seems to precede narrativisation. We might even forget that the list of visual impressions is focalised through Nicholas because the impressionistic highlighting of the listed physical phenomena allows us to feel as if we were standing there in the den, where we perceive the scene with our own eyes. The first-person narrator continues his harrowing inventory of the traces of abuse: There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, brooding with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail, and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known and lonesome even in their loneliness. (Nicholas Nickleby 88)

The anaphoric list is less immediate than the enumerative description of the boys’ bodies. Its structure is much more coherent, regular, and rhetorically polished. The same is true for Nicholas’s assessment of the scene that culminates in another list, which is an increasingly grim enumeration and evaluation of what is going on in Dotheboys Hall: With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding here! (Nicholas Nickleby 88)

The exclamation mark at the end of this list, a tripartite climactic parallelism, lends expression to the emotionally charged workings of Nicholas’s mind, and simultaneously signals a rhetorically refined speech addressed to the reader. Especially contemporary readers, who, as members of British society, were in a position to take action against the suffering and the evils that occurred at schools such as Dotheboys Hall, are addressed on this second level of communication. The living environment of the boys and

64 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

the way they are treated is repeatedly characterised as befitting animals. This interpretation is further highlighted through the past progressive “was breeding” in connection with the setting described as a den and a barn. Dotheboys Hall gradually takes the form of hell. Dickens’s immersive description of the “Internal Economy of Dotheboys Hall” led to the closure of some of the Yorkshire schools and to amelioration of the conditions described. This might be partly due to the immersive power of Dickens’s lists, repetitions, and enumerations that, on the one hand, engross readers in the horror of someone who has to witness the scene and, on the other, function as a rhetorical device that vehemently convinces readers that this “hell” is inacceptable.

Lists and Aestheticism: Dorian Gray and Art’s (Thwarted) Mutiny Against Narrative Realism With the end of the nineteenth century, and especially in the wake of aestheticism, lists in the novel assumed further and distinct functions. In chapter 11 of Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the progress of narrative action is slowed down by the listed description of beautiful (and ugly) things that belong to Dorian. Chapter 11 functions like a caesura in the middle of the book, which is divided into three parts: chapters 1-10 form the exposition and the Sibyl Vane episode, then comes the obscure chapter 11, and then follow chapters 12-20, which include the murder of Basil, Jim Vane’s death, and the ending. In chapter 11, Dorian describes and enjoys his collections, and it is through lines and pages full of listed descriptions of perfumes, musical instruments, jewellery, and ancient embroidery (to name just a few examples) that Wilde, following the example of J.  K. Huysman’s Against Nature (À Rebours, 1884), reflects on the relationship between life and art. While in Huysman’s novel each chapter is devoted to one of Des Esseintes’s often perverted experiments to overcome his ennui, in Dorian Gray, all sensual experiments are condensed into one chapter. Wilde’s conception of Dorian owes much to Walter Pater’s interpretation of art in The Renaissance (1873), especially in its famous conclusion.31 Pater’s aesthetic doctrine of pleasurable impressions in a world in flux connects the

31  According to Pater, the main purpose of art lies in its ability to create moments of heightened intensity, passion, and ecstasy.

3  ITEMISATION: ENUMERATIVE REALISM 

65

practice of collecting to the endeavour to escape the laws of time and contingency. The purpose of Dorian’s collected objects is to produce sensations and pleasures. Put differently, they serve sensory experience, which is Dorian Gray’s obsession. His collections must be seen as part of his project “to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spirituality of the senses its highest realization” (Dorian Gray 101). Dorian further reasons that “Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself […] it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself a moment” (ibid.). To convey Dorian’s fascination with sensory experience (“You are what you can feel”; Waldrep 1996: 110), Wilde needs a literary technique that allows him to create a strong impression of immediacy, one that allows his readers to get lost in individual words, sounds, sensations, and associations, one that disrupts and makes them forget their constant need for contextualisation and coherent continuity. In other words, Wilde needs a form of linguistic expression that is autofunctional and poetic,32 and he finds it in the list. List language is autofunctional and poetic in the sense that it both relies on and performs the dominance of linguistic form over content: And so he would study perfumes wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flowers, or aromatic balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenards that sickens, of hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul. (Dorian Gray 103-4)

We might get tired, or bored, or enchanted when we read this passage. The lists create a rhythm and mesmerise us via their dense sound patterns. Though we may not perceive the perfume olfactorily, it is through the lyrical list, through its assonances and consonances, that we as readers can approximate this experience of sensory enchantment. We get lost in the 32  On the autonomy of poetic language, see Todorov (1985): “Poetic language finds its justification and hence its entire worth, within itself; it constitutes its own end, and is no longer a means. It is therefore autonomous or autotelic” (131).

66 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

moment, there is not much movement or external action: even the few verb forms we find in the paragraph (“wondering,” “elaborating,” “estimating”) stress reflection and not action. The listing of sensations creates an absolute and timeless moment in which the self-sufficiency of art is emphasised. Just like Des Esseintes, who “had deemed himself free of all bonds and constraints” (Against Nature 60), the enumerative passages in both writers’ works are autonomous, that is, independent from and even outside of the narrative progress of the story. Huysmans describes perfumery as an art distinguished by the precision with which it can artificially imitate “the aromas of real or natural flowers” (Against Nature 90). The perfumer extracts from the model its inmost individuality while adding that something that completes and improves the original odour. Art is thus depicted as more complete and more essential than nature itself. The same refinement happens, we might argue, in the process of listification: it removes language from the purpose of telling a story, the words are decontextualised from narrative linearity, progress, and cause. Thus, Wilde’s repeated usage of lists draws attention to individual words and phrases—their rhythms and sounds—as refined by the artist, the writer. Listing the scents achieves the effect of a lyrical condensation within the narrative. Although this lyrical condensation only lasts for one chapter in the middle of the novel, it seems that Wilde probes the effect of the list as a “mutinous” non-narrative element: his list-making serves to disturb the sequential and progressive logic of narrative realism. Shelton Waldrep says about Wilde’s Dorian Gray that “[t]he game of representation becomes one where that which is not named must be found in the details” (1996: 112). This statement might be true for many pieces of literature throughout the centuries. Yet, as we turn towards early twentieth-century modernism, and the literary representation of an increasingly complex world was becoming ever more challenging, enumeration was more and more considered an attractive alternative to conventional narrative.

CHAPTER 4

Letteracettera: Experimental List-Making in the Age of Modernism

Abstract  To a surprising extent, literary list-making in the modern era was a reaction to linguistic scepticism. Doubtful of the representational qualities of language, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and others negotiated the (im-)possibility of mimetic art in their work. From their nominalist point of view, linguistic determinism, the idea that language determines human thought, and the nullity of language, go hand in hand. As a result of this, they turned their back on cohesive narrative and explored enumeration as a non-discursive alternative. The “letteracettera” of modernist prose points to the liminality of language, yet it also presents a means of experimental storytelling. While some affordances of the literary list thus dwindle out of sight, others, notably those of the epic catalogue, re-­emerge in astonishing new ways. Keywords  Modernism • Linguistic scepticism • Experimentalism • Encyclopaedism “Wait! Hist! Let us list!” (Finnegans Wake 571). James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, arguably two of the most eminent list-makers of literary modernism, shared an interest in language scepticism and, on that account,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. A. Barton et al., Literary Lists, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28372-7_4

67

68 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

explored new ways of writing prose in which the list played a pivotal role. The long-standing debate over the philosophical influences on Joyce and Beckett in this respect has focused on the Austrian philosopher of language Fritz Mauthner, although certain parallels with the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Nietzsche have also been noted.1 According to Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann, the nearly blind Joyce introduced Beckett to Mauthner’s philosophy in 1932 when he asked him to read out to him passages from Contributions to a Critique of Language (Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [1901-2]), a work “in which the nominalist view of language seemed something Joyce was looking for” (Ellmann 1982: 649). Whether and to what extent this founding document of language scepticism had an impact not only on Finnegans Wake (1939), which Joyce was writing at the time, but also on his earlier works, is up for debate.2 Mauthner’s lasting influence on Beckett’s works from Murphy (1938) onwards is however considered a fact.3 The key takeaways from Mauthner’s Critique, which Joyce may have come across as early as during his stay in Zürich between 1915 and 1919 1  The meticulous study of Van Hulle (1999), which provides transcriptions of heretofore unpublished notes, analyses the relationship among Mauthner, Joyce, and Beckett (and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s son-in-law Heinrich Zimmer) in great detail. He concludes that there is no hard evidence that Joyce had read the Critique before he began working on Finnegans Wake, but he can demonstrate that the concept notes for Beckett’s Murphy are strongly indebted to Mauthner. The latter’s influence on Joyce has been briefly noted by Ben-Zvi (1982), who was the first to argue that Joyce used “words that are strikingly similar to Mauthner’s” (148). The similarities were discussed at greater length by Kager (2018), who finds that it is unlikely that Joyce would not have heard of language scepticism before the 1930s since Mauthner was widely read in the early twentieth century and his ideas were so close to Joyce’s. Ben-Zvi (1980) acknowledges Mauthner’s formative influence on Beckett, but points out that the latter had already been very familiar with the scepticism of John Locke and David Hume when he discovered the Critique. Similarities between Joyce’s and Wittgenstein’s arguments concerning the limitations of language have been pointed out by Singer (1990). For a discussion on multilingualism as a cause for scepticism in Joyce and Kafka, see Kager (2011). Van Hulle (1999: 143-44) has argued that language scepticism originates with Nietzsche, for whom words are already nothing but metaphors. 2  Joachim Kühn (1975) believes it is plausible that Joyce came across Mauthner while in Switzerland between 1915 and 1919, but Van Hulle (1999) has rejected this as mere speculation. Be that as it may, enumeration is a key stylistic feature of Finnegans Wake. See Benstock (1992), who claims that its lists are mock catalogues that place the work within the epic tradition. 3  See Van Hulle (1999:146-47), who in the same place also casts doubt on Ellmann’s claim that Joyce asked Beckett to read Mauthner to him; according to Beckett himself, he only borrowed the three volumes from Joyce.

4  LETTERACETTERA: EXPERIMENTAL LIST-MAKING… 

69

(Kühn 1975: 14n), are the following: Mauthner’s point of departure is the tenet of nominalism, according to which there is nothing general, abstract, or universal but names. From this nominalist point of view, linguistic determinism—the idea that language shapes all human thought—results in the nullity of language. In other words, Mauthner argues that language has no referential function, since “reality” exists only on linguistic terms. In effect, there is no certain knowledge of anything, and all speech is but in metaphors. The critic of language, seeing that human speech is naught, must resort to silence and laughter, or so Mauthner asserts in his wordy three-volume work.4 This radical linguistic scepticism marks a decisive watershed not only in the history of ideas but also, as this chapter will show, in “literary listory.” Joyce and Beckett responded to the so-called crisis of language—a notion which not only was known to readers of Mauthner but loomed large in the intellectual landscape of early twentieth-century Europe5—by negotiating the (im)possibility of mimesis in their work. With the mimetic function of language in doubt, they embraced enumeration as an alternative to realist narrative. The “letteracettera” (Finnegans Wake 339-40) of their experimental modernist prose no doubt points to the fact that whatever is listed has none but a linguistic reality.6 Furthermore, in both Joyce and Beckett, enumeration constitutes a new way of allusive storytelling that (literally) enlists the reader as collaborator.

Listing the Linguistic Turn in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man As any reader will be quick to observe, the author of Ulysses (1922) avails himself of the tradition of the epic catalogue in that he intertextually gestures towards Homer as well as Ovid. Furthermore, as scholars have argued, playful enumeration is the most recognisable feature of Joyce’s

 For a precise summary of Mauthner’s Critique, see Ben-Zvi (1980: 187).  Ideas similar to Mauthner’s have been expressed in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s widely read Chandos Letter (1902), which today is considered the epitome of language scepticism, and later in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921). Mauthner, Hofmannsthal, and Wittgenstein together contributed to what would later be called the linguistic turn. 6  This is also the view of Stan Fogel, according to whom literary lists such as those in Joyce’s “Cyclops” emphasise that literature is language, they “retard[] the referential character of language” (1982: 11). 4 5

70 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

experimentalism.7 As such, it marks his turn away from realist narrative, a turn that some have located within the “Cyclops” episode in Ulysses, which indeed abounds with lists.8 However, less attention has been paid to the fact that enumeration is a remarkable stylistic device already in Joyce’s earlier novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Here lists serve to demonstrate the young artist’s own “linguistic turn,” Stephen Dedalus’s developing awareness of the limitations of language. The first written work of the young artist with which the reader is made acquainted is, in fact, a list. Stephen attends Clongowes College, a Jesuit school for boys indebted to the teachings of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises (1548) make ample use of enumeratio. Indeed, the philosophical genre of spiritual exercises, which originates with Marcus Aurelius and earlier Socratic traditions, relies heavily on the practice of list-­ making. As pointed out elsewhere, enumeration is among the most common stylistic devices in those philosophical soliloquies that seek to place the self into the perspective of the whole.9 By allowing philosophers to adopt a “view from above,” they transform their understanding of the world. Taking cue from this genre of writing popular in the Jesuit curriculum that defines his schooldays, Stephen begins his literary career with a list in his geography book. Set within the context of topographical knowledge, the protagonist’s enumeration demonstrates his desire to find his place in what appears to be a finely mapped, well-structured (if bookish) universe:

7  For Pressman (2014: 102) and Emerson (2017), lists aid Joyce to develop a “database aesthetic” that follows an associational rather than a narrative logic and lies at the heart of Joycean experimentalism. Richard Ellmann’s daughter Lucy has acknowledged the ingenuity of Joycean list-making in her novel Ducks, Newburyport (2019), which consists of one long continuous list and is evidently a tribute to Joyce. 8  See, for example, Groden (1977: 195-96) and esp. Sandquist (1996), who identifies the catalogue of tree-named wedding guests as the decisive watershed. For Prier, the catalogues in “Cyclops” serve to imitate the archaic style of Homer and in so doing “attain linguistic verticality, that is, meaning” (1987: 52); they create meaning in the face of meaninglessness. On lists in Ulysses, see below. 9  According to Umberto Eco (1989), Joyce’s Portrait shows “the conflict of the artist who tries to give form to the chaos in which he moves yet finds in his hands the instruments of the old Order” (30). The lists in the manner of Ignatius de Loyola are no doubt among these antiquated instruments. On the functions of enumeration in the genre of spiritual exercise, and the philosophical journals of Marcus Aurelius and Lord Shaftesbury especially, see Barton (2021).

4  LETTERACETTERA: EXPERIMENTAL LIST-MAKING… 

71

Stephen Dedalus Class of Elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The World The Universe (Portrait 13)

With the list form Stephen performs a spiritual exercise, assuming a perspective from further and further above. The result is an ascending series in which each successive item incorporates its predecessor, to which it is necessarily connected. The purpose of the protagonist’s enumeration is not a mere accumulation of things in horizontal sequence but a hierarchical, vertical structuring of the cosmos.10 The full significance of the list becomes evident when Fleming, a fellow student, transforms it (or parts of it) into a poetic sequence: Stephen Dedalus is my name, Ireland is my nation. Clongowes is my dwellingplace And heaven my expectation. (Ibid.)

This ridicule in verses leads to an important insight: Stephen observes that, while his vertical list can be read both from top to bottom and the other way around, this is not true of poetry. The latter is bound to linearity, whereas the former can be multidirectional, thus affording even greater linguistic experiments. Moreover, the cosmological series provokes ontological questions. Stephen asks himself whether there is anything beyond the universe, whether the list can be continued, and at last concludes that only God can tell. Finally, he weighs universalism against nominalism, claiming that “God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen” (ibid.) but also that “though there were different names for God in all the different languages […] God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God” (ibid.). In other words, he deliberates whether the deity is nothing but a name, but shies away from such nominalism to speculate that, since there  See also our Chap. 2.

10

72 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

is a word for the deity in all the different languages, there must be an intrinsic relationship between the reality of God and its linguistic signifiers. Put differently, he half-heartedly embraces philosophical realism. In the fifth and final part of the novel, the grown-up Stephen eventually sides with nominalism and, crucially, with language scepticism. He now finds himself surrounded with “heaps of dead language” (156) and so realises the nullity of speech in its referential function. The mimetic potential of language is cast into doubt as the young artist finds “His own consciousness of language […] trickling into the very words themselves” (ibid.). Again, the list form aids Stephen to come to terms with his scepticism. “Ivory, ivoire, avorio, ebur” (ibid.): his enumeration of terms for the material derived from elephant tusks in English, French, Italian, and Latin does not, as the different names for God earlier, vouch for the reality of the concept to which these words seem to refer. Rather, for Stephen, the enumeration proves just as meaningless (from the perspective of mimesis, at least) as any chance associological word sequence based on phonetic similarity, such as “ivory ivy” or “ivy whining” (ibid.). The linguistic argument for universalism does not hold water any longer: Stephen “found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right and left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense” (ibid.). The young artist’s language scepticism, once it is fully acknowledged, becomes a game changer both for his list-making and for his storytelling. This is evident from a remarkable enumeration in the closing section of the novel. Here Cranly asks Stephen to tell him about his father’s occupation and social standing, not an easy task for someone who has command of nothing but “dead” language. Thus Stephen recounts Simon Dedalus’s attributes not in the form of narrative (the mimetic function of which is now in doubt) but by way of enumeration: Stephen began to enumerate glibly his father’s attributes. – A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past. (213)

In marked contrast to his estranged father, the old-fashioned “storyteller” Simon Dedalus, Stephen experiments with the form of the list. Crucially, when Cranly remarks amidst his laughter that “The distillery is damn good” (ibid.), he points out the one listed item that metaphorically

4  LETTERACETTERA: EXPERIMENTAL LIST-MAKING… 

73

defines the pivotal function of Stephen’s enumeration. Indeed, this list is like a distillery in which the components of an entity are separated through selective condensation, or else a mixture is divided into its constituent parts. The biography of Simon Dedalus is “distilled” in that his occupations are itemised and thus neatly divided. No narrative that causally connects these stages of life is formed, or so it seems. Yet, far from being a sequence of randomly assembled utterances that may be re-arranged at will, this humorous list is coherent in the sense that it is interpretable as a man’s life history. The concluding alliterative phrase (“at present a praiser of his own past”) no doubt indicates that Stephen enumerates a temporal sequence, a biography ranging from the days as a university student to an advanced age characterised by want and nostalgia. Furthermore, Stephen’s intriguing list tempts readers to draw connections between any two succeeding items and find out their tertium comparitiones. The reader easily gathers that the “medical student,” embracing university life, became “an oarsman” in the rowing club, and that the “tenor” who sang at the college auditorium, where he took a liking to the stage, pursued a career as “an amateur actor.” In other words, this list exhibits cohesion, a continuity of semantic relations, and so suggests a connected series of events. Once the logic of the list is thus established, Joyce introduces a comic element. Further down in the list, proximity often indicates the ironic similarity between occupations otherwise considered distinct, for instance, between the “amateur actor” and the “shouting politician” (both experts of simulation), or the “taxgatherer” and the “bankrupt” (neither of whose books are in order). However, there is sufficient difference between, say, the “landlord” and the “secretary” so as to suggest a syntagmatic rather than a paradigmatic relationship of the listed attributes. Hence the impression of a temporal linearity is maintained in spite of some experimental flourishes. The Joycean enumeration exhibits a considerable degree of narrativity: it is mediated by the intradiegetic narrator Stephen, and it elicits a narrative response because it is sufficiently syntagmatic and cohesive to be suggestive of causality. Certainly, however, no causal connections are made explicit in the list. No list can ever do this as it is structurally dyadic: it can say no more than that some A relates to some B that relates to some C and so on. That A is related to B by way of some X is what all list-making omits. Thus, the enumeration does not provide plot, but it gives a sequence of events, a storyline. Joyce’s list evidently “enlists” readers as

74 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

collaborators and relies on their narrative sense-making to tell an interesting life history. As the modernist crisis of language loomed large in the early decades of the twentieth century, the task of making sense was increasingly being transferred to readers, and hence enumeration gained currency. Sceptical that there can be a shared language that represents objective reality, Joyce explored list-making as a means by which the author’s narrative “finally refines itself out of existence” (Portrait 189). The list, in other words, is the form he chose to make readers tell the story in their very own tongue.

Cataloguing Contingency: Lists in Ulysses In Ulysses, Joyce pushes language to its limits, and the list form is ideally suited to express precisely this liminality of language. On the one hand, lists can be the result of an unravelling of the threads that constitute the texture of the syntax. On the other hand, lists are also the precursors of texts—when the threads have not yet been woven together into a coherent whole. Joyce draws on a variety of literary and non-literary sources for his lists and enumerations: the Bible, homiletic traditions, liturgical practices (such as the litany), medieval Irish literature, satire, epic catalogues, Renaissance and Baroque traditions of excess and copia, encyclopaedic discourse, and, not least, factual and practical techniques borrowed from administration, advertising, insurance, and budgeting. While Ulysses in general teems with lists, a number of chapters stand out in particular for their listness, including “Wandering Rocks” (Episode 10), “Cyclops” (Episode 12), and “Ithaca” (Episode 17). We focus on these three episodes in greater detail because they illustrate three different approaches to the list form. “Wandering Rocks” consists of 19 brief—and interlocking—scenes in which we encounter various characters across Dublin. Throughout the scenes, the simultaneity of events is highlighted, even though the characters do not interact with each other directly. The list is the defining structural element of the chapter.11 The series of scenes, which are connected through time but not through space, performs on the level of narration that which is narrated: while the scenes are connected in time (as in the 11  See Hayman (1970) for the concept of the “Arranger,” a kind of editor entity that is responsible for this structural organisation (or other features such as the headlines in “Aeolus”).

4  LETTERACETTERA: EXPERIMENTAL LIST-MAKING… 

75

time of reading), they coexist in the same space (that is, the space of the list). On the level of plot, the scenes lack coherence. “Wandering Rocks” is a sceptical reflection on an ordered reality: instead of such order, the reader experiences “coincidence in time and proximity in space” (Lawrence 2010: 30; emphasis in the original). Here Joyce uses the list, understood as a cognitive tool for ordering and structuring the narrative material, on a macro level.12 In “Cyclops,” lists dominate—or rather, disrupt—the narrative discourse to the extent that narrative progression comes, at irregular intervals, to a complete halt. The radicality with which Joyce punctuates the chapter with material that is of little or no narrative value has led critics to argue that “Cyclops” is an early example of a postmodern text.13 The episode is set in Barney Kiernan’s pub and told by an anonymous first-person narrator (called “the Nameless One” or “I”).14 The narrator, who is a debt collector, scrounges drinks from the other men, in exchange for which he offers stories. He and another guest, the Citizen, start an argument with Bloom, who enters the pub slightly later. The Citizen, who is most clearly marked as the Cyclops figure of the episode—he wears an eye-patch—is just as (partially) blind as the narrator: they both reveal their antisemitic and Irish nationalist arguments in their exchange with Bloom. Reading “Cyclops” is not an easy task as the many lists and catalogues break up the narrative time and again. Brigitte Sandquist sees a parallel to the Homeric Cyclops: “The narrative seems unable to incorporate these catalogues, just as the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey vomits ‘gobs of human meat’, the undigested remains of some of Odysseus’s companions” (1996: 195). Often the basic principle and generator of a list or catalogue in “Cyclops” is a pun. This is also the case in the passage of the so-called Tree Wedding. When John Wyse Nolan, one of the pub patrons, makes a case 12  For a wealth of useful maps and diagrams depicting the careful arrangement of this chapter and Ulysses as a whole, see Gunn/Hart (2004). 13   For an overview of different approaches to Joyce’s postmodernist qualities, see Richardson (2000). Richardson refers to the techniques in the “Cyclops” episode as “unambiguously postmodern” (2009: 1039). Emerson sees in “Cyclops” the beginning of “an unmistakable overload of information” (2017: 51), which he ties in with the idea of a database: what may appear random and disconnected can be understood as the result of the organisational principle of a database, which operates “according to associational relationships between the pieces of information that are collected, organized, and then presented through an interface” (46). 14  If one reads “I” as a homonym of “eye,” the narrator, too, turns out to be a Cyclops figure (see Sandquist 1996: 200-1).

76 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

for the reforestation of Ireland, another patron, Lenehan, playfully Frenchifies Nolan’s name and imagines a bride whose name is “Miss Fir Conifer.” A catalogue of wedding guests unfolds: all the guests’ names are puns on tree names. The passage reads as follows: The fashionable international world attended en masse this afternoon at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs. Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs. Poll Ash, Mrs. Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs. Clyde Twelvetrees, Mrs. Rowan Greene, Mrs. Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs. Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall, Mrs. Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs. Gloriana Palme, Mrs. Liana Forrest, Mrs. Arabella Blackwood and Mrs. Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis graced the ceremony by their presence. (12.966-79)15

The catalogue is actually one long sentence, the names being the subjects—the verbal phrase comes as a surprising afterthought at the very end. Joyce draws on the long tradition of the catalogue of trees, which harks back to Virgil, Ovid, Claudian, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, and Keats, among many other poets.16 Ovid in particular, as we have already discussed, made the tree catalogue famous, and critics have noted that Joyce may have playfully transformed the Ovidian metamorphoses implied in some of the trees’ names (Sandquist 1996; Senn 1990). One major change concerns the transformation of common nouns into proper names in Ulysses: a botanical class is rendered in social terms. Given that in Ovid some of the trees are the result of a metamorphosis of women in response to gruesome acts of violence, there is something sinister and deeply disconcerting looming behind the ludic exuberance in the Tree Wedding catalogue (Sandquist 1996: 198-99). For all its verbal “gigantism,” “Cyclops” is also a deeply political chapter. The pub, after all, is the prototypical setting where “the common people” exchange their views on politics. The arrival of Bloom further inflames the patrons’ discussion on national and religious affiliation. On a  All quotations from Ulysses are from the edition by Gabler et al. (1986).  See also the discussion on the tree catalogue in our Chap. 2.

15 16

4  LETTERACETTERA: EXPERIMENTAL LIST-MAKING… 

77

formal level, the political dimension translates into epic style—albeit with a Joycean twist. From the very beginning, “Cyclops” is marked as an “epic” chapter: we encounter a series of eight catalogues, to be followed by an extended description of the Citizen (12.151-76) and another, long ekphrasis of the Citizen’s girdle, rendered in the form of a catalogue of names—of heroes and heroines of Irish history (12.176-99).17 The catalogue begins as follows: From [the Citizen’s] girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at every movement of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O’Neill, Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O’Donnell, Red Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan O’Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry Joy M’Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan […]. (12.173-83)

While the beginning is chronological, and one may still surmise that it will be a serious catalogue, things quickly go awry: Red Jim MacDermott and Francis Higgins are not heroes but traitors and scammers, Goliath is neither Irish nor a hero, and Dante as well as Christopher Columbus are evidently out of place.18 Yet the length of the catalogue makes it difficult to assume a critical stance towards that which is enumerated. As Susan Bazargan notes, “the sheer mass” of names “can impose on the observer a state of submission and intellectual abandon […] that blurs all distinctions” (1988: 753). The catalogue thus demonstrates what happens if one falls for a rhetorical strategy that communicates falsehoods. Rather than blurring distinctions, however, “Cyclops” demonstrates, even performs, what it means to draw certain distinctions for political reasons, which in this case include the Irish (against the English) and explicitly exclude Jews. The list form visualises these strategies of inclusion and exclusion (Bazargan 1988: 756) and invites the reader, if one remains alert and does not skip  On the epic quality of Joyce’s style in this passage, see, for example, Prier (1987).  Red Jim MacDermott was a traitor in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and Francis Higgins, “the sham squire,” pretended to be a country gentleman even though he was a clerk (see Gifford/Seidman 1988). For an analysis of the names in this list, see also Benstock/ Benstock (1979: 52-54) and Bazargan (1988: 753-55). 17 18

78 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

the catalogue, to question the items in the list—in other words, to question what is posited as a category in the first place. “But do you know what nation means?” John Wyse asks Bloom. Bloom’s answer—“A nation is the same people living in the same place” (12.1419; 1422-23)—points to a basic principle of the catalogue form: something is defined as “the same” because it is located in the same place, that is, it is contained within the same catalogue. And yet, as the catalogues in their openness and incongruity show, a nation is something total that cannot be totalised. These political undercurrents—and their critique—also translate into the form. We have already noted the heavy indebtedness to classical epic in the “Cyclops” episode. Traditionally, the epic has always been associated with totality: it represents a closed worldview, a self-contained whole whose coherence and logic pertain to both content and form. Paul Saint-­ Amour has argued that Joyce’s technique of “encyclopaedism” reverts the core ideas of the traditional epic. The catalogue of Irish heroes and heroines, he suggests, offers a demilitarised counterpoint to the Homeric tradition of the catalogue of warriors. Where the classical epic uses catalogues to present “exhaustive, coherentist views of domains that tend to be warlike” (Saint-Amour 2015: 256), Joyce resists, and thereby undermines, exhaustiveness by substituting it with “verbal pitfalls and naked violations of both category and ontology” (ibid.). Alternative systems of order—disorder, incongruity, multitude, or polyphony—replace the idea of a neatly structured universe.19 “Ithaca,” in contrast to “Cyclops,” is very much structured and rule-­ governed.20 The penultimate chapter of Ulysses follows the model of catechism: it consists entirely of questions and answers, which often show a meticulous, even obsessive attention to detail. There is some plot, however: we are at the end of the day of 16 June 1904; Stephen and Bloom have arrived at Bloom’s house, but Stephen declines the invitation to sleep there and leaves, whereas Bloom reflects on the day and prepares for the night. Among the things that are listed in response to the questions, there are abstract items, such as the topics Bloom and Stephen discussed during their stroll, events, places, and names, as well as concrete objects: 19  See Radak (2017-18) on the link between encyclopaedic modernism and Joyce’s method of countering epic totality by means of anticlosure. 20  Kim (2019), who analyses the mathematical ratios, fractions, scales, and the infinite series in “Ithaca,” goes as far as to suggest that the fractal, a mathematical curve in which every part when enlarged has the same statistical character as the original, is the organising principle of the episode.

4  LETTERACETTERA: EXPERIMENTAL LIST-MAKING… 

79

What impersonal objects were perceived? A commode, one leg fractured, totally covered by square cretonne cutting, apple design, on which rested a lady’s black straw hat. Orangekeyed ware, bought of Henry Price, basket, fancy goods, chinaware and ­ironmongery basket, fancy goods, chinaware and ironmongery manufacturer, 21, 22, 23 Moore street, disposed irregularly on the washstand and floor and consisting of basin, soapdish and brushtray (on the washstand, together), pitcher and night article (on the floor, separate). (17.2101-7)

The attention to detail echoes realist techniques of description, yet at the same time Joyce transgresses the realist paradigm in that many of the descriptions become too detailed to create a reality effect. Rather, the effect is one of estrangement or defamiliarisation of reality. Lists as the one just mentioned are at the tipping point between relevance and irrelevance, which Joyce playfully crosses (see Bowen 1989: 68). At the same time, there is a seriousness behind the catechetic form that points to Joyce’s own list-making propensity. Joyce’s letters and notes reveal that he himself was an avid list-maker in everyday life. His lists document, for instance, expenditures, places he visited, and food he consumed (see, e.g., Letters 2: 19-20; 30-31)—quotidian details of the kind we find in “Ithaca,” including a budget, in the form of a list, of 16 June 1904 (17.1455-78).21 Instead of a progressing, or even digressing, plot, “‘Ithaca’ is an anatomy of a chapter: it offers us an outline of events” (Lawrence 2010: 53). Narrative progression is superseded by rationalising: the scholastic form of reasoning becomes an entryway into Bloom’s thoughts and perceptions of the world.22 “Ithaca” is also the only chapter in Ulysses in which the word 21  On Joyce as a list-maker outside of his literary texts, see, for example, Brockman (1993), Iego (2015), and Montresor (1995). Madtes (1964) refers to Joyce’s practice of adding to his writing in the course of the editorial process as his “accretive method.” On Joyce’s creative practices, which included the use of diverse sources, see, for example, Crispi (2015). Mark Osteen (1995) has approached Ulysses through the lens of economy and economic discourses and argued that in “Ithaca,” the narrative voice is that of an accountant; the narrative is managed in terms of balances, compensation, and equilibrium. The overlapping of counting and recounting is especially strong in Bloom’s enumerative recapitulation of his day (17.2042-59). 22  Eco links the form of the catechism with Joyce’s interest in medieval philosophy (1982: 10-11), while Tymoczko (1994) makes a case for a connection to medieval Irish literature. Another source may have been Joyce’s early education in the Catholic tradition (see Bradly 1982). On the lists in “Ithaca,” see also Lawrence (2010), Madtes (1964), Senn (1996), and Thwaites (2009).

80 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

“catalogue” is used—as a verb and in the imperative. A mirror in the flat reflects the view of two bookshelves, upon which the narrator demands: “Catalogue these books” (17.1361). What follows is a list of book titles, always qualified by a note on their physical state and binding (17.1362-1407). The ancient Greek verb katalegein means both “to count” and “to recount.” In “Ithaca” in particular, Joyce playfully exceeds the limit of that which can still be called narrative. He moves from recounting to barely narrating to counting and back again.23 The gaps that are visible on the page as well—the blank spaces between questions and answers—are filled in the readers’ minds by constructing and reconstructing the two men’s relationship, their experiences throughout the day, and Bloom’s reflections. The question immediately following the catalogue is: “What reflections occupied [Bloom’s] mind during the process of reversion of the inverted volumes?”—to which Bloom answers: “The necessity of order, a place for everything and everything in its place” (17.1408-10). Through the neatly structured, anatomic lists and enumerations, Joyce creates a utopian outlook on an ideal world in which such order is reality, yet in the reality of his book, as in real life, such order can only be approximated—it is countered time and again by the contingencies of life. Throughout Ulysses, then, the idea of an epic worldview that suggests stability and totality is called into question.

Rejection and Elaboration of Joycean Enumeration: Woolf and Beckett Not all readers, however, were convinced by Joyce’s experimentation with lists. Virginia Woolf is a case in point. She famously disliked the Joycean masterpiece, Ulysses. It was published in February of 1922, and Woolf was keen on reading it, especially since many of her fellow writers and friends had already expressed their admiration for Joyce’s daring novel. Yet, for Woolf, the experience of reading Ulysses was cumbersome. In her diary entry for 16 August 1922 she notes that she was “amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters […] & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples” (Diary, Vol. 2: 188). She particularly dislikes the rawness of Joyce’s style: “When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?” (189). In the entry for 6 September of the same year, Woolf writes that she has now  See also Senn (1996: 33-34).

23

4  LETTERACETTERA: EXPERIMENTAL LIST-MAKING… 

81

finished the novel and calls it “a mis-fire.” She admits that it has “genius” but of an inferior kind: “The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts” (199). What Woolf describes as Joyce’s “brackishness” and “rawness,” we would argue, points to (among other things) his heavy use of enumerations in Ulysses. The various kinds of enumerative forms Joyce employs often play with creating impressions of the unready, the unfinished, and the fragmentary. Perhaps Virginia Woolf’s unease with Joyce’s Ulysses also stemmed from her interest in classical epic. In the passage in which Woolf comments on the “rawness” of Ulysses, she adds that she intends to reread “the classics” (Diary, Vol. 2: 189)—which she does. In the following weeks, she reads, among other authors, Homer, Plato, and the ancient Greek dramatists. And yet, Woolf’s own style is characterised by enumerative forms, too. Her approach is quite different from Joyce’s: her enumerations, often in the form of descriptions, are embedded into the narrative and far from being disruptive; they are stylistic embellishments or realist descriptions. One list in Woolf’s works stands out: in Orlando, first published in 1928, there is a shopping list, printed as a vertical list that provides the details of the things the eponymous protagonist buys: “To fifty pairs of Spanish blankets, ditto curtains of crimson and white taffeta; the valence of them of white satin embroidered with crimson and white silk … “To seventy yellow satin chairs and sixty stools, suitable with their buckram covers to them all … “To sixty-seven walnut tree tables … “To seventeen dozen boxes containing each dozen five dozen of Venice glasses …” (Orlando 63-64)

The time is the Renaissance. Orlando lavishly furnishes his family estate, which he has managed to keep after some adversity. The list is introduced as evidence that Orlando has set his mind on redecorating; it is called “an inventory of what he bought at this time, with the expenses totted up in the margin – but these we omit” (63). What would perhaps have been the most important detail, the actual costs, the narrator keeps to herself. The documentary quality of the list is further called into question by another omission, immediately following the list: “Already – it is an effect lists have

82 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

upon us – we are beginning to yawn. But if we stop, it is only that the catalogue is tedious, not that it is finished. There are ninety-nine pages more of it” (64). Woolf in effect mutes the list. Her meta-commentary on the form of the catalogue reveals her scepticism of the form. Towards the end of the novel, Orlando—by now a woman—goes shopping again, but she cannot concentrate on the shopping list she has brought along. The year is 1928, the time of shopping centres and a different kind of commodification. Orlando is distracted, but at the last moment she says aloud “the last item on her list; which happened to be ‘sheets for double bed’” (171). Thinking of linen makes her think of her former lover Sasha, of the time that has passed, and of lost opportunities. Orlando has something akin to a panic attack—but she is saved by the shopping list, which allows her “to reply with every appearance of composure” (172-73) that she needs something else (bath salts) and extricates herself from the situation. Here the shopping list is marked as a specifically female tool that extends to Orlando’s general interest in commodities. At the same time, the list as a rational instrument prevents Orlando from giving in to her reflections on her past love for Sasha. The list, however, prevents her from falling prey to her immoral thoughts and catapults her back into the world of profane objects. Woolf’s list is a strictly functional object, one that does not take over the narrative or suppresses narrative progression. And yet, the list is linked to the way her protagonist thinks and manages her thoughts and feelings. Woolf’s list, in this context, has a psychological function and, as such, is intimately linked to the plot. Its main purpose is to resist the lure of daydreaming. Joyce, by contrast, allows his characters time and again to succumb to the alluring potential of the list and to indulge in daydreaming; in fact, the narrator himself cannot help but digress and thus repeatedly falls for the list as a form. Joyce’s narrator is always ready to let go of any kind of “appearance of composure”: he lets the list loose, whereas Woolf controls it. Samuel Beckett, unlike Woolf, followed Joyce’s example in that he composed parts of his novels Murphy (1938) and Watt (1953) in an experimental enumerative style. These works are to no small extent what Beckett in his discussion of musical theatre calls “the comedy of an exhaustive enumeration” (Proust 92). He asserts that the music-hall routine or the operatic convention of the “da capo,” the directive to repeat the musical piece, epitomises “art that is perfectly intelligible and perfectly inexplicable” (ibid.). Beckett’s prose abounds with exhaustive lists, long

4  LETTERACETTERA: EXPERIMENTAL LIST-MAKING… 

83

enumerations of items that are identical or near-identical. In such redundant enumeration, “signification is written to its material limit,” as Laura Salisbury (2012: 87) has explained in reference to the list of Murphy’s biscuits of various flavours, the order of which the protagonist meditates to change and change again to achieve “total permutability” (Murphy 60).24 We want to suggest that such enumerative redundancy invokes the phonetic (or “da capo”) qualities of language and, in doing so, serves as an expression of Beckett’s linguistic scepticism, his insistence that although language is in itself intelligible, linguistic meaning is inexplicable because, in a nominalist view, language, like music, has no semantic function. Beckett’s perhaps most remarkable piece of enumerative prose is the long and rambling parting speech of Arsene, whom Watt is to replace as Mr. Knott’s manservant. While some of the lists which contribute to Arsene’s rant are redundantly repeated by himself, others, such as the contents of Mr. Knott’s one-pot meal, anticipate Watt’s dizzying enumerations later on in the novel.25 Lists supplant the narrative altogether when, over the course of one-and-a-half pages, Arsene tries to explain that his life has been “[a]n ordure, from beginning to end” (Watt 205). He enumerates, among other things, his regrets and his ancestors, and he bemoans the recurrence of weekdays and seasons, apparently maddened by life’s repetitiveness. These lists are separated by swearwords, which are synonymous and signify faecal matter: “an ordure. […] An excrement. […] A turd. […] A cat’s flux” (Watt 205-6). This congeries adds to the overall sense of redundancy, yet there may be more to it than that. If it is true that Beckett’s characters enumerate endlessly because they try to find the word that adequately represents their situation, as Ben-Zvi (1980: 192) argues, then it seems that the swearword, by nature expressive rather than representational, is the only form of utterance that will allow them to stop 24  The same may be said of Watt, who tries to come to terms with Mr. Knott’s strange establishment through list-making, which according to Ackerley (2006) has a Cartesian dimension: “Faced with the inexplicable, Watt takes refuge in Cartesian methodology, the attempt to enumerate and exhaust every logical possibility” (324). 25  Compare Arsene’s list of “sherrywine, soup, beer, fish, stout, meat, beer, vegetables, sweet, fruit, cheese, stout, anchovy, beer, coffee and benedectine, for example” (Watt 211) and Watt’s enumeration containing “soup of various kinds, fish, eggs, game, poultry, meat, cheese, fruit, all of various kinds […] absinthe, mineral water, tea, coffee, milk, stout, beer, whisky, brandy, wine and water” (Watt 237). The two lists are similar, but not identical, and both are in themselves redundant: the items “beer” and “water” appear twice in Arsene’s and Watt’s enumeration, respectively.

84 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

enumerating. The “representational fallacy” (Gontarski 2014: 349) of Beckett’s characters, their misconception that language can mean although in truth it can only express, is perhaps the reason for their incessant list-­ making. Such enumeration through which they attempt “to describe but as well to contain, to limit, to circumscribe” is, as Stanley E.  Gontarski observes, “a process in which the reader is often implicated” (ibid.). Rather than inviting readers to assist in sense-making, as Joyce’s lists had done, Beckett’s enumerations perform the “representational fallacy” of both characters and readers. Arsene turns to the form of the list that promises but never provides clarity, and readers are at fault if they give in to its charm. One of the lists in the said section merits closer attention because it encapsulates how Beckett makes use of the list to dramatise the modernist linguistic crisis. The terms enumerated in this list, some of which are obviously semantically cognate and are thus redundant, refer to expressions of violence or expressions of suffering from violence: “The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps” (Watt 205). Arsene does not explain what the cause for such violence might have been, whether it was him on whom it was inflicted, or if it occurred at all. Indeed, it would seem that none of this matters. Beckett’s list of mostly monosyllabic words suggests a series of blows: it is language itself which takes a beating in that it is reduced to a mere smacking noise. The beatings or beats provide a musical pulse. This is achieved not least by means of internal rhymes that follow a distinct pattern. The careful reader will have noticed that the list’s 14 entries are arranged as in an English sonnet: three sets of four items are connected by embracing rhyme (“whacks,” “moans,” “cracks,” “groans,” etc.) followed by a concluding rhyming couplet (“skelps,” “yelps”). The inclusion of “prayers” and “tears” does, however, create an anomaly as these terms do not rhyme. Readers may be tempted to search for the meaning of this: do prayers or tears point to an escape from meaningless redundancy? If readers do so, they share the character’s mistake of attempted sense-making: language scepticism implies the “total permutability” of all words. As has been explained above, for Beckett, a disciple of Mauthner, the only adequate response to the insight that language has no semantic but only a phonetic function is laughter followed by silence. Hence it appears that the said anomaly, which causes the rhyme scheme to end on “h-h” (as in “a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-g-h-h”), amounts to nothing more than a laugh (“ha ha”). Indeed, the section of Arsene’s

4  LETTERACETTERA: EXPERIMENTAL LIST-MAKING… 

85

profuse lists concludes with his performative laughter: “Haw! Hell! Haw. So. Haw! Haw! Haw!” (Watt 206). Beckett’s enumeration of whacks, moans, and so on is thus the “comedy of exhaustive enumeration” in a nutshell. It points to the author’s awareness of a linguistic crisis which finds adequate expression in redundant enumeration and the absurdist laughter it gives rise to.

CHAPTER 5

White Noise: Postmodern Enumeration and Fragmented Selves

Abstract  In postmodernist literature, the list signals a move towards self-­ reflexiveness and a radical aesthetic of autonomy. While postmodernism’s experiments with form make use of the metafictional quality of list-­making, lists in late twentieth-century blank fiction showcase media saturation and the persistent commodification of life. In pop literature, lists manifest in practices of ranking and self-optimisation, a trend that connects to the autobiographical trajectory of self-evaluation that ranges from meditations and spiritual exercises to contemporary self-tracking devices. In the context of life-writing, playful accumulations express the inexhaustible richness of life and a desire to preserve in language what is always already fleeting and evaporating. The fragmentary nature of the list form allows authors to stress the pre-narrative rawness of sensations and affords the expression of traumatic or complex experiences that defy narrative sense-making. Keywords  Postmodernism • Self-reflexivity • Life-writing • Fragmentation • Non-narrativity • Formal experimentation

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. A. Barton et al., Literary Lists, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28372-7_5

87

88 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

The postmodern and the list, it seems, go well together. Tom Thwaites identifies the list as the “figure par excellence” of postmodernism because the list is both a linguistic entity and on the margins of linguistic form. He argues that the list suggests seeing [the postmodern] as the site of a perpetual and constitutive leakage between word and event in its gestural knotting. A most peculiar knotting: asyndetic, provisional, retrospective and situational, forever in the process of being simultaneously unknotted and done up again. The coherence of asyndetic link is always at stake, and that is why the list proliferates indefinitely, even the shortest list: no finite number of elements can exhaust its reknotting. (1997: n.p.)

The metaphor of knotting and re-knotting recalls the etymology of “text” as something woven. We have used a similar image before, when we talked about the loose threads of the text and lists being a prime example of a “marginal” textual phenomenon.1 This description of what lists are and where they are located, linguistically and formally, pertains to the list form in general. Yet it is undoubtedly true that in the heyday of postmodern and poststructuralist writing—roughly from the 1960s onwards until well into the 1980s—the list form acquired special meaning because of what one could call its linguistic aloofness. Postmodernism famously signalled a move away from narrative coherence towards self-reflexivity and a radical aesthetic of autonomy. As part of this move, the referential and representational stability associated with realist writing was increasingly called into question and superseded by experiments with form that pushed the limits of referentiality. Deconstructionism in the vein of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, for instance, made a case for the infinite openness of signifiers across discourses. Proclaiming the death of the author, Barthes speaks of the text as “a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (1977: 146). The list form is a good fit for expressing the lack of a stable, identifiable figure or centre of origin. The reader becomes the only reliable source for meaning-making—if we can even speak of “meaning” in any coherent way.

1

 See our Chap. 3.

5  WHITE NOISE: POSTMODERN ENUMERATION AND FRAGMENTED SELVES 

89

Postmodernist Experimentation In Flann O’Brien’s early postmodernist novel At Swim-Two-Birds, first published in 1939, the readers are faced with a playful narrative that verges on the pointless. The novel opens with three potential beginnings—as Jan Alber notes, a typical structural feature of postmodern writing that also happens to have the form of a list (2016: 348-50). The narrator is writing a book, of which he soon provides an extract. One of the characters, Finn Mac Cool, enumerates the sweetest kinds of music he has ever heard. At first, the passage displays a syntactically coherent form and even contains some variation: When the seven companies of my warriors are gathered together on the one plain and the truant clean-cold loud-voiced wind goes through them, too sweet to me is that. Echo-blow of a goblet-base against the tables of the palace, sweet to me is that. I like gull-cries and the twittering together of fine cranes. I like the surf-roar at Tralee, the songs of the three sons of Meadhra and the whistle of Mac Lughaidh. (At Swim-Two-Birds 13)

Soon, however, the syntax gives way to a long list of birds that delight Finn: I am friend to the pilibeen, the red-necked chough, the parsnip land-rail, the pilibeen móna, the bottle-tailed tit, the common marsh-coot, the speckle-­ toed guillemot, the pilibeen sléibhe, the Mohar gannet, the peregrine plough-gull, the long-eared bush-owl, the Wicklow small-fowl, the bevil-­ beaked chough, the hooded tit […]. (At Swim-Two-Birds 14)

The bird names refer to existing birds; the passage is thus, on one level, a subjective inventory of Irish bird life. In their accumulation, and in their precision, however, the items become devoid of meaning. Rather, it is their lyrical quality that stands out. What matters is not the correct scientific identification of the birds in question but their affective significance for the character. Readers are invited either to go along with the list and enjoy the passage for its acoustic and emotional effects, or to skip it once they have recognised the overall rubric. O’Brien’s list is an example of two common principles of postmodernist writing: what Brian McHale has termed “lexical exhibitionism” and a gravitation towards word lists (1987: 151; 153). The highly specialised bird names stand in the way of understanding the passage, and in parallel,

90 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

we slide from varied enumeration into “mere” listing, which further inhibits the meaning-making process. There are, no doubt, many more and certainly more challenging examples from postmodern literature one could adduce here, such as the medicalised description of the characters Furriskey, Lamont, and Shanahan later in At Swim-Two-Birds, or the library inventory in Gilbert Sorrentino’s novel Mulligan Stew (1979).2 A later author who also subscribes to these postmodernist rules of listing is Mark Z. Danielewski in House of Leaves (2000). Danielewski’s novel, in some ways similar to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), has excessive and extremely detailed lists that add (seemingly) pointless details to something mentioned in the main narrative: for instance, enormous lists of architectural styles, journalists, writers, and photographers. There is no recognisable ordering principle in the way the items/names are listed. To make matters worse, these lists are relegated to footnotes, or inserted in the margins or in little boxes, some of which are set back to front. The typography begs for not reading the passages: a marginal form is buried in another, quite literally, marginal form. These lists lack the allusive density of what Brian Richardson (2000) calls carnivalesque lists—lists that are playful and dense in their referentiality, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia.3 Rather, postmodern lists appear hollow and empty, and they may indeed seem like “a tired exaggeration for its own sake” (Richardson 2000: 1041). In his analysis of postmodern lists, Jan Alber highlights that such lists often appear random and lack order and orienting functions (2016: 343-45). Instead of providing order, they tend to be self-­ reflexive (e.g. by drawing attention to the status of fiction) and have a strong metafictional quality (343; see also 345-48). The reader, Alber suggests, can find “a happy sort of nihilism” in the reception of such lists: “if everything is meaningless anyway, we might as well enjoy ourselves” (2016: 345). While the lists in At Swim-Two-Birds, Mulligan Stew, and House of Leaves invite such a nihilistically complacent attitude, there are other postmodern lists that provoke a much grimmer reaction. The context is the critique of capitalism in view of the persistent commodification of life. The impact of consumerism, as well as of media saturation, is translated into the form of the list, which supplants coherent syntax. Ceaseless 2  See O’Brien (1967: 161) and Sorrentino (1979: 31), respectively. Alber (2016: 345-48) discusses these passages as examples of metafictional lists. 3  Joyce’s Tree Wedding would be a fitting example of a carnivalesque list, see our Chap. 4.

5  WHITE NOISE: POSTMODERN ENUMERATION AND FRAGMENTED SELVES 

91

trinities of brand names feature the enumeration of isolated and itemised signifiers. Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise is paradigmatic of this development. Many of the lists in White Noise are concerned with surface—which is, incidentally, one of the key features of postmodernism as well.4 DeLillo’s lists highlight the superficiality of a world ruled by materialism and capitalist desires. The protagonist’s, Jack’s family lives surrounded “by open cartons, crumpled tinfoil, shiny bags of potato chips, bowls of pasty substances covered with plastic wrap, flip-top rings and twist ties, individually wrapped slices of orange cheese” (1985: 8). Julia Böckling has coined the term “blank lists” to discuss DeLillo’s and similar consumer lists in the postmodernist tradition. The term is borrowed from the genre label of “blank fiction,”5 which is used to describe a group of American authors whose work centres on excessive, violent, and decadent lifestyles heavily influenced by consumerist ideologies. Böckling argues that “blank lists are affectless and detached in their prose. Similar to blank fiction, their main focus is on consumption and they feature lengthy enumerations of commodities or incorporate commercial slogans” (2021: 118). A similar blankness is also at play in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho (1991), another text full of lists of brand names. On one level, the brand names situate the novel in its time of writing and create a strong sense of realism. Yet the lists are so overwhelming in their length and density of name-dropping that the reader’s reaction is likely to be one of rejection, boredom, perhaps even repulsion. The information overload leads to meaninglessness; the brand names become empty signifiers: “Too much commodification turns poetic language and lists into meaningless containers of stuff” (Böckling 2021a: 137; emphasis in the original). The intersection of lists and ideology is also prominent in Fredric Jameson’s mode of writing in Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Jameson concedes in the introduction that “Postmodernism, postmodern consciousness, may […] amount to not much more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which consists primarily in the sheer enumeration of changes and modifications” (1991: xi). His modus operandi throughout the study, then, is by approximation, in other words, by listing aspects and concepts that pertain to 4  Jameson sees “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense” as “perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms” (1991: 9). 5  See, e.g., Annelsey (1998) and Grassian (2003).

92 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

postmodernism. In the conclusion, he acknowledges that his approach may appear to “lack agency,” yet, he writes, “it can be translated or transcoded into a narrative account in which agents of all sizes and dimensions are at work” (1991: 408). In theorising the postmodernist condition, it seems, we have come full circle: here the lists are no longer empty signifiers but prompts to reconstruct narratives after all.

Ranking Others, Improving the Self In parallel to the postmodernist experiments with lists, there have been many literary works of contemporary fiction that recall more conventional aesthetics. Sometimes, these developments have been subsumed under the heading of “post-postmodernism,” but the label does not do justice to the spectrum of works and literary techniques one could enumerate here.6 Reif Larsen is a writer who experiments with lists, in addition to typography and images. In his second novel I Am Radar (2015), there is a noteworthy list that combines playfulness, performance, and literary tradition. In the excerpt, Professor Funes (whose name is an allusion to a famous story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious”) tells his life’s story, which includes a long passage about the many books he read after recovering from a failed suicide attempt (because he could not bear the sight of the library he had built to be burned): “[…] And I read like an addict, like a man gasping for air.” His voice fell into a kind of trance. “I read Homer and the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes. I read Plato and Aristotle and Lucretius and Cicero. I read Virgil and Ovid and Sappho and Seneca. I read Defoe and Asturias and Sterne and Stendhal and Verga and Carducci and Blasco Ibánez and Hugo and Verne and Balzac and Stendhal and Flaubert and Baudelaire and Sand and Verlaine and Paz and Maupassant and Ibsen and Wordsworth and Austen and Coleridge and Shelley and Keats and Blake and Scott and Carpentier and Garciá Márquez and Puig and Cortázar and García Lorca. I read Dickens and Stevenson and Eliot and Wilde and Cabrera Infante and Onetti and Thackery and the Brontes and Proust and Borges and Carroll and Trollope and Ruskin and Hoffman and Nietzsche and Emerson and Dickinson and Whitman and Melville and Shelley and Poe […].” (Larsen 2015: 636)

6  See McLaughlin (2004) for a useful overview on the history of the term; see also Dubey (2011). Authors often named as examples of post-postmodernist writers are Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

5  WHITE NOISE: POSTMODERN ENUMERATION AND FRAGMENTED SELVES 

93

In the book, the final part of the enumeration has little arrows that point upwards or downwards printed above each name. The arrows signal the beats of a drum—another character starts accompanying Professor Funes’s words with his instrument. The passage offers a twist on the library catalogue topos, one of the few “traditions” of lists traceable throughout literary history.7 Rather than describing the inventory of a specific library, Funes recounts his own reading biography at a specific moment in his life. Due to the strict polysyndetic connections, the list quickly exhibits a rhythm of its own. The arrows and the mention of the drum invite the reader to read the passage aloud, perhaps even to drum along. Read outloud, the list has a powerful incantational quality that illustrates the trance-like state in which Funes is while he recites the authors’ names. The tendency to punctuate one’s life by means of lists is something that we can also detect in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, first published in 1995. High Fidelity belongs to “pop literature” in that it deals extensively with (rock) music as a popular culture phenomenon and lifestyle. It neatly captures the zeitgeist of the 1990s (Merbitz 2005: 179).8 The novel is an example also of so-called lad lit: analogous to “chick lit,” “lad lit” focuses on younger, male protagonists and their struggles in their everyday lives. Lad lit, like chick lit, typically features a first-person narrator and has a confessional tone.9 High Fidelity is told from the perspective of Rob Fleming, a 35-year-old owner of a music store in London. Rob, an ardent lover of rock music, uses best-of and hit lists as a means of structuring and commenting on his life. Recently left by his (now former) girlfriend Laura, Rob vows to change and visits the five girls whom he attests the worst break-ups ever. The plot of the novel is thus spurred by a list. At the very beginning, we read: My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order: 1. Alison Ashworth 2. Penny Hardwick 3. Jackie Allen 4. Charlie Nicholson 5. Sarah Kendrew (High Fidelity 1)

 The library in Mulligan Stew mentioned above is another example of this topos.  On pop literature and its heavy use of lists more generally, see Diederichsen (2006). 9  On the two genres, see Whelehan (2018). 7 8

94 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

While lists such as this one have the function of offering stability, purpose, and direction, in addition to storing memories, Rob also draws up lists to give voice to his dreams and desires. Rob builds his world, in which reality and fiction go side by side, by means of lists. In doing so, Rob cannot help but rouse sympathy, despite his misogynist and egoistic behaviour. As Barry Faulk puts it, “the book proffers the voyeuristic charm of getting to know male psychology at its most asocial,” yet we are not put off by the narrator because his subjective perspective creates the impression that he, ultimately, means well (2007: 154). Hornby cleverly uses two diametrically opposed affordances of the list form to achieve this effect. On the one hand, lists can signal objectivity and clarity—which Rob uses to structure his life as well as to convince the reader that he is in control of his (love) life. On the other hand, the very personal nature of the lists stresses Rob’s subjectivity so that we are drawn to his idiosyncratic view of the world and approach him less critically than we perhaps ought to do. The two directions of the list—the creation of order and control, and the insight into Rob’s psyche—unmask Rob as an unreliable narrator who is, in fact, not very much in control of anything.10 Reflecting on his current position in life, as someone who did not finish college and who compares unfavourably to his more successful peers, Rob says defiantly, “they have opinions and I have lists” (High Fidelity 199). Rob is aware of his social position as an outsider, and he finds comfort in his passion for rock music and the lists he can create around it. Rob even organises his record collection autobiographically, building an intimate musical CV that only he can properly access and reconstruct: I pull the records off the shelves, put them in piles all over the sitting room floor, look for Revolver, and go on from there; and when I’ve finished, I’m flushed with a sense of self, because this, after all, is who I am. I like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin’ Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening to “Sexual Healing” all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarrassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and Tommy. (High Fidelity 55)

10  Faulk calls him “dysfunctional” (2007: 154) and reads the novel as a problematisation of class and status issues in which Rob as a white man who loves classic rock is entangled.

5  WHITE NOISE: POSTMODERN ENUMERATION AND FRAGMENTED SELVES 

95

The list of records follows Rob’s love life—for Rob, music, love (and everything that pertains to the experience of love, such as infatuation, rejection, or longing), and his identity are closely intertwined. A text that one could almost read as a companion piece to High Fidelity is Helen Fielding’s chick lit novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996). Fielding’s protagonist, Bridget, who is also in her 30s, likewise struggles with her current situation in life. Yet, there is a crucial gender difference: Rob displays an uncritical, self-confident masculinity that leads him to overestimate himself constantly, whereas Bridget suffers from a lack of self-confidence that is coded as typically female and constantly underestimates her own strengths and agency. The confessional tone of the diary links Bridget to other first-person accounts of women’s experience, while the plot mirrors Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In contrast to the social context of Austen’s novel, Bridget’s greatest challenge is not so much the pressure to conform to a specific societal set of expectations (to marry well) but rather “the cultural imperative to strive for multiple and contradictory female ideals” (Guenther 2005: 86), that is, to have a successful career, a well-to-do boyfriend, an exciting social life, and perfect looks. Not only is Bridget Jones’s Diary structured according to the list-­ like form of a diary, but we also find numerous lists within the diary’s individual entries. The opening of the novel is telling already: the reader learns of Bridget’s—very ambitious—New Year’s resolutions. The list consists of two parts, printed on facing pages: “I will not” and “I will.” In each case, there is a list of resolutions: I WILL NOT Drink more than fourteen alcohol units a week. Smoke. Waste money on: pasta-makers, ice-cream machines or other culinary devices which will never use; books by unreadable literary authors to put impressively on shelves; exotic underwear, since pointless as have no boyfriend. Behave sluttishly around the house, but instead imagine others are watching. Spend more than earn. […] (Bridget Jones’s Diary 2) I WILL Stop smoking. Drink no more than fourteen alcohol units a week. Reduce circumference of thighs by 3 inches (i.e. 1 ½ inches each), using anti-cellulite diet.

96 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

Purge flat of all extraneous matter. Give all clothes which have not worn for 2 years or more to homeless. […] (Bridget Jones’s Diary 3)

The doubling of the resolutions is already humorous: Bridget wants to make absolutely sure that she sticks to her plan—and it goes without saying that she will fail. Her obsessive list-making has the function of improving herself and her habits. All her diary entries begin with a list of calories consumed, cigarettes smoked, and units of alcohol drunk. Yet by keeping track of her habits, she reveals time and again her incapacity for change— she always consumes more than she intends, and does not keep her resolutions. The lists thus expose Bridget’s weaknesses. And yet, readers sympathise with her failures. Apart from the obvious fact that there is something deeply human in the way Bridget cannot fulfil her good intentions, readers can also link their own experiences of making lists in their everyday lives with the kind of lists we find in Fielding’s novel. The lists reverberate with our own capacities for making lists; they are thus indicative of a special kind of experientiality: the bodily/physical dimension of list-making and the cultural backdrop of how and why we draw up lists are activated when we read Bridget’s notes (von Contzen 2018). For all its humorous overtones, there is also a problematic side to the depiction of the protagonist. Alison Case argues that diary entries, like epistolary narratives, are typical of female narrators because “by their nature these forms tend to deprive the narrator of the interpretive advantage of hindsight with which to shape a narrative” (2001: 177). Bridget Jones’s Diary also shows us a narrator entrapped by the form of the diary as well as by the list. In contrast to Rob’s creative handling of the form in building an identity around classic rock, Bridget’s list are examples of consumerist lists and lists in the self-help tradition that capitalise on an ideal of womanhood that is unrealistic to achieve.

Lists in Contemporary Life-Writing: Inventories of Body and Mind It is no coincidence that Helen Fielding resorts to the diary format to give her readers a supposed insight into the self-therapeutic lists of her heroine Bridget Jones. Bridget’s diary often assumes the function of an account book that helps her to keep track of her finances and the daily consumption of alcohol, nicotine, and calories. The intertwined connection

5  WHITE NOISE: POSTMODERN ENUMERATION AND FRAGMENTED SELVES 

97

between economic and personal data has a long tradition. In his monograph On Diary (2009), Philippe Lejeune explains that “the form of the account book probably acted as an inspiration or a model for the less financial and more personal journals that people began keeping of their other ‘properties’ in the modern era” (51). The gradual appropriation of the account book as a form for collecting and recording personal experiences and memories can be well observed in the “family books” of the Florentine merchants, which “were an off-shoot of their account books” (ibid.). Lejeune’s study also shows that the idea of self-improvement has always been present in young women’s diaries, although the areas to which value and importance are attached have been constantly changing. He reports “some religious journals kept by girls in the nineteenth century are laid out in columns like account books. They use one page for each week and one line for each day with two columns, one marked ‘V’ for victories (over the Devil) and the other marked ‘D’ for defeats with the total at the bottom” (ibid.). It is through the changing categories of self-examination that the values at stake at a specific cultural and historical moment become visible. Nevertheless, the idea of self-examination and self-perfection that is pursued by these lists is suspiciously constant. It is important to note that these attempts at self-observation and self-­ management are by no means limited to female writing. British writer Thomas de Quincey employed lists as a means of self-tracking to record his opium usage and to control his addiction,11 and the lists and catalogues in the Autobiography (1791) of Benjamin Franklin demonstrate how the born Calvinist carefully examined his behaviour and continuously polished his thoughts, habits, and daily routines to succeed with “the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.”12 In addition to documenting the supposed progress of his moral development, Franklin also used the list in the form of a daily schedule to work towards time optimisation and to maximise his effectiveness. The examples indicate that the list lends itself very well to the self-disciplined endeavour to optimise daily actions and to strive towards increasing efficacy. As a consequence, these self-trackers further strengthen the typical split of the autobiographical

 See Hatton (2020).  See Franklin (2004: 68). For a discussion on Franklin’s catalogue of virtues and the list as a form of “Seelenbuchhaltung” (“accounting of the soul”), see Mainberger (2003: 192). 11 12

98 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

subject into an observing and an observed one: they render the self into an object of investigation.13 In the contexts of life-writing the oft-quoted scholarly distinction between the practical and the literary list is always already blurred. Consequently, lists become relevant not only as ideal meeting points between fact and fiction, between data and stories, but also as potent reminders that these categories—at least in life-writing—have always been inextricably linked to each other. Often lists in life-writing appear as pre-­ narrative raw material, as pure enumeration of data, incidents, places, or impressions without narrativising linkages. Paul Auster’s Winter Journal (2012), for example, is saturated with lists. In fragmentary dialogues, addressed towards his own alter ego (“you”), Auster’s autobiographical narrator observes his scars as “a secret alphabet that tells the story of who you are” (5). Auster’s narrator writes his “inventory of […] scars” (ibid.) in the winter of his life; he is aware of the fact that his days are counted, and he represents the contingency and the richness of experiences and impressions by simply counting. He lists, in a most detailed and yet ambivalent fashion, the different environments his body has been exposed to: Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs, your body swimming in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, your body traipsing across muddy fields, your body in the tall grass of empty meadows, your body walking along city streets […] standing in shows […] sitting in auditoriums, walking slowly through museums, dribbling basketballs in playgrounds […]. (Winter Journal 58-59)

Sandrine Sorlin interprets Auster’s choice of the second-person pronoun as instrumental to the construction of an interpersonal connection with his readers: “Auster is me and not me, and this tensional identification-­ cum-­alienation, proximity-cum-distance, is warranted by the use of the same grammatical form” (2022: 78). In addition to making his own experience shareable, the you-narrative also creates an inclusive space: Auster lists sensual memories that his readers can not only relate to because they probably have a similar set of bodily experiences, but also feel encouraged to add to this list or even to start making their own. It is the list with its affordance merely to drop keywords (“your body walking up and down 13  Also, see Barton (2021) for a discussion on lists in the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s spiritual exercises Askêmata, which demonstrate an eighteenth-century author’s striving for Stoic self-improvement.

5  WHITE NOISE: POSTMODERN ENUMERATION AND FRAGMENTED SELVES 

99

stairs, your body swimming in ponds”) that renders Auster’s autobiographical style both deeply personal and universal. The same “personal universality” is communicated through the passage that enumerates the various things that people do with their hands over a lifetime:14 Opening and closing doors, screwing light bulbs into sockets, dialing telephones, washing dishes, turning the pages of a book, holding your pen, brushing your teeth, drying your hair, folding towels, taking money out of your wallet, carrying bags of groceries […] Your hands have held the bodies of your children, have wiped the asses and blown the noses of your children, dried the tears of your children, and stroked the faces of children. (Winter Journal 66)

American readers especially might connect Auster’s lists to those of Joe Brainard in I Remember (1970), a memoir that depicts Brainard’s childhood in the 1940s and 50s in Oklahoma as well as his life in the 60s and 70s in New York City.15 Auster himself wrote the introduction to the first UK edition and praised the book as “inexhaustible, one of those rare books that can never be used up” (2012: ix).16 Brainard’s memoir starts (and proceeds) as follows: I remember the first time I got a letter that said “After Five Days Return To” on the envelope, and I thought that after I had kept the letter for 5 days I was supposed to return it to the sender. I remember the kick I used to get going through my parents’ drawers looking for rubbers. (Peacock.) I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world. I remember pink dress shirts. And bola ties. (I Remember 3) 14  In fact, the enumeration of what hands do over the course of a person’s life takes its point of departure from an anecdote centred on James Joyce. Once a woman walked up to him and asked if she could shake the hand that wrote Ulysses and Joyce is said to have responded: “Let me remind you, madam, that this hand has done many other things as well” (see Winter Journal 165). It can be assumed that Auster’s mentioning of the anecdote is no coincidence. Rather, Auster drops the name to connect his work to the Irish list-maker as he offers his reader this portrait of the artist as an old man, which might well be read as a corresponding piece to Joyce’s classic novel about the artist as a young man (see our Chap. 4). 15  The book was followed by I Remember More (1972) and More I Remember More (1973). 16  Paul Auster was also the executive producer of Avi Zev Weider’s short film I Remember that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. The film is based on excerpts from Bainard’s book. The film has been described as a tapestry of recollections and events that are both deeply personal and widely universal at the same time (https://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0819693/).

100 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

Another autobiographical list-maker who even dedicated his book to Brainard is George Perec. The French author lists 480 numbered memories, all beginning with the phrase, “Je me souviens” (I Remember [1978]). The playful accumulation combines both personal and collective memories, individual moments, and public knowledge as it lists brand names (“I remember Hermes handbags, with their tiny pad-locks” [70]), places (“I remember the two cabarets in the Countrescarpe district: Le Cheval d’Or and Le Cheval Vert” [68]), and things (“I remember the time it was rare to see trousers without turn-ups” [68]). Relying on this seemingly unimportant knowledge that describes post-war Paris from the perspective of a young man, Perec draws our attention to “l’infra-ordinaire,”17 the overlooked commonplace that is always already fleeting, disappearing, and evaporating, and yet, simultaneously, is constitutive for most of our experience. For the son of French Jews who did not survive the Shoah, the recording of “l’infra-ordinaire” is also a way to reassure himself of his own existence. Saving the fragments of personal memories and the details of the inconspicuous everyday thus becomes a means to fight oblivion and annihilation.18 The attempt to name everything and to preserve as many detailed memories as possible is always accompanied and even motivated by a fear of losing, of forgetting. Preserving and losing, naming and forgetting become visible as mutually dependent interacting practices. The list form is a potent starting point for analysing these phenomena as they draw our attention to the absences, the blank spaces between the lines of listed items (Rüggemeier 2019). Contemporary life-writing does not only feature a high number of list-­ writers, but we also find an increasing number of (auto)biographers who reconstruct the life stories of others, often of their parents or grandparents, through the ancestors’ lists and notebooks. The interpretation of lists thus not only is demanded of readers but also presents a recurring activity of (auto)biographical protagonists. In her recent work Elizabeth’s Lists (2018), Lulah Ellender presents the reader with just such a story based on a “small red-brown, marbled hardback journal” (1), which contains her grandmother Elizabeth’s handwritten lists. For the life-writer, Ellender 17  See also the title of Perec’s posthumously published collection of stories: L’InfraOrdinaire (1989). 18  See also Perec (2010) to understand the importance of lists in Perec’s oeuvre.

5  WHITE NOISE: POSTMODERN ENUMERATION AND FRAGMENTED SELVES 

101

argues, the gaps typical of the personal lists that people jot down in notebooks “offer another space into which to write” (2021: 248). Through Elizabeth’s rather practical lists (inventories of household linen, a “register” of eggs laid by her chickens, or menu plans for a cocktail party), we can trace her eventful life and glimpse many of the roles assigned to her: a diplomat’s wife, a young mother suffering from postpartum depression, and a sister in mourning who has to compile an inventory of her late brother’s belongings. The resulting book, Elizabeth’s Lists, is a relational piece of life-writing that examines the impulses behind list-making, the human compulsion to establish order, and the limitations of what can be represented in a list. Another recent example of autobiographical writing that uses the term “list” in its very title is Clare Best’s The Missing List. Published in 2018, the book arose from a need to process memories of childhood abuse. Using lists in the creative process enables the autobiographer to record her memories in a form that allows her to remove things, to leave them unsaid, merely to mention them without any need to explore further or to connect. Best’s “List One – Scripts in Incestuous Families” reads as follows: 1. Deny. […] 2. Be loyal. […] 3. Don’t have needs of your own. 4. Accept that love means being hurt or used. 5. Don’t ask for help. 6. Don’t show pain. (104) In a recent reflection on her writing process the author explained that “Because I listed, I could write” (2021: 242). As a fragmentary form that reveals just as much as it conceals, lists provide protection from self-­ revelation and offer self-determination instead: “When items were too difficult, I listed them in my own code […]. My lists were safe” (ibid.). It is particularly in those autobiographies that deal with traumatic past experiences that list-making is used as a technique to bring into focus the “mismatch between narrative and life.”19 Narrative’s propensity for coherence and roundedness often clashes with the episodic and fragmented experiential realities that we inhabit. Life-writing texts that deal with trauma often rely on disruption and “gaps” (Kacandes 2008: 616) to  See Eaglestone (2018: 61).

19

102 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

signify “unclaimed experience” (Caruth 1996). The fragmentation and the gaps indicate that complex personal experiences of grief and loss defy narrativisation because they defy comprehensibility and, therefore, cannot be represented by a form that stands for coherence and intelligibility. This mismatch between life and narrative may also have prompted Primo Levi to write about his life in the form of a Periodic Table (1975), a book which, according to him, is not an autobiography “save in the partial and symbolic limits in which every piece of writing is autobiographical” (224). In the article “Saving the Self from Stories,” Joshua Landy has recently argued that choosing lists and tables is Levi’s way of “refusing to let other people efface his individuality by subsuming it under a collective narrative” (2022: 92). Landy’s guiding questions—“What if we aren’t just the stories we tell about ourselves? What if our identity also involves something beyond any possible narrative—something, indeed, that needs protecting from narrative?” (85)—seem to lie at the heart of many contemporary life-writers’ endeavours. Among these is also Maggie Nelson. In her generically hybrid Bluets (2009), she combines elements of memoir, essay, and philosophical meditation on themes such as grief, love, beauty, and language. The book consists of 240 numbered, paragraph-length sections clustered around an examination of the colour blue. Blue stands for eternity and beauty but also for the autobiographer’s grief and depression, for her loss of a lover and her sorrow for a friend whose life changed dramatically after an accident. Noticeably, these contexts are only briefly introduced, they are never fully narrativised or told in detail. Nelson’s decision not to tell but merely to list seems to pertain to the insight that the process of giving narrative form to events, impressions, or experiences for the purpose of making them intelligible is connected with the danger that the actualised narratives end up having less to do with the original “raw material” (Ryan 2008: 347) but with a certain conventionalising alignment to culturally pre-established narrative schemata. In her articulation of the promises attached to narrative and narrativisation, Amy Shuman states that “storytelling promises to make meaning out of raw experiences” (2005: 1). Nelson refuses to make use of this promise—arguably because she wants to keep her experiences “raw” and not simmer them in the stock of conventional narrative scripts. As she envisions a poetics of the enumerative, she decides against a mode of narrative sense-making that would suggest a mastering of experience in the sense of “putting aside and be[ing] done with” (Barton et  al. 2022b: 17). Not

5  WHITE NOISE: POSTMODERN ENUMERATION AND FRAGMENTED SELVES 

103

coming to terms with grief, sadness, loss, or trauma contradicts the “utilitarian logic” that, according to Sujatha Fernandes (2017: 10), guides storytelling in the neoliberal era. Even (or especially) in therapeutic contexts, storytelling is by no means just a matter of understanding life through the telling of one’s own story. Rather, therapeutic storytelling eventually turns into an act of self-improvement and self-enhancement, showing the extent to which the logic of optimisation has now reached not only the body but also the mind and the soul. Nelson interprets her refusal to narrate (and thus her not coming to terms with grief and loss) as an act of “civil disobedience”: 131. “I just don’t feel like you’re trying hard enough,” one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the plan? 132. That is to say: I have been trying to go limp in the face of my heartache, as another friend does in the face of his anxiety. Think of it as an act of civil disobedience, he says. Let the police peel you up. (Bluets 51; emphasis in original)

As the enumerative inhibits the primacy of the whole over the importance of the individual smaller details, Nelson’s work offers resistance to the hierarchical subsumption of particularities under naturalising schemata. Bluets opposes what Hanna Meretoja has described as “an ethos of appropriation” (2018: 104), which subsumes the singular under generalising practices of narrativisation. Instead, Nelson performs and encourages her readers to acclaim “an ethos of dialogic exploration,” a form of writing and reading in which “the singular has power to transform the general” (104).20 As contemporary life-writing experimentally moves away from stories and embraces enumerative practices (Rüggemeier 2022), it re-negotiates the traditional plot of autobiography, which relies heavily on the storying of the self and the narrativisation of personal experience. Not least due to digital formats of self-representation, which, by means of short and concise postings and snapshots,21 increasingly emphasise episodic over narrative self-representation, the storying of the self is perhaps countered and negotiated more vehemently than ever before.  This discussion on Bluets is a brief summary of what is examined in greater detail in Rüggemeier (2022). 21  See also Böckling (2021b). 20

104 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

Lists in 4.48 Psychosis: Mental Breakdown as Collapse of (Dramatic) Form It is important to note that autobiographical list-makers can also be found among poets22 and dramatists. Sarah Kane’s dramatic text 4.48 Psychosis (2000) has often been read as a suicide note (Billington 2000: n.p.). It was Kane’s last work, first staged at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in June 2000, nearly a year and a half after Kane’s death by suicide on 20 February 1999. To anchor this dramatic text solely in the story of its author’s life (or death) would, however, significantly diminish it. In fact, Kane’s last piece stands in continuity with the themes and formal experimentation of her earlier works.23 The play constitutes a complex, disturbing, and multi-layered text, which has been described as a “dramatic poem” (Gritzner 2006: 250) rather than a play.24 The text corpus consists of, among other things, inner monologues, dialogues without identifiable participants, case-report-like medical notes (“Symptoms: Not eating, not sleeping, not speaking, no sex drive, in despair, wants to die” [Psychosis 21]), typographical experimentation, numerical enumerations, and lists of words that seem to be unrelated except for “the logic of alliteration and negation […] as if untethered from a conscious mind” (Ovaska 2016: n.p.): unpleasant unacceptable uninspiring impenetrable irrelevant 22  Walt Whitman is only one of the poets known for their autobiographically inspired lists and enumerations. As Mattie Swayne has pointedly expressed: “If Whitman critics […] object to the catalog formula […] there is little left in his work for them to approve” (1941: 178). The catalogue formula with its ties to textual overpopulation, paratactic prose, and excessive enumeration and description is also an important influence on the Beat generation as Alyson  Brickey (2022) has demonstrated in her discussion of Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl.” 23  For a more detailed discussion of lists in Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis see Anne Rüggemeier’s forthcoming article “Krankheit, Tod und Sterblichkeit: Die arthrologische Gestaltung von Nacht-Zeiten in Drama, Lyrik und Comic am Beispiel von Sarah Kane, Philip Larkin und David Small.” Closure. Kieler E-Journal für Comicforschung. 24  See Tyler (2008): “The play text often seems more like lines of poetry than traditional dialogue, yet it builds dramatic tension” (26).

5  WHITE NOISE: POSTMODERN ENUMERATION AND FRAGMENTED SELVES 

105

irreverent irreligious unrepentant dislike dislocate disembody deconstruct (Psychosis 19-20)

The perception of this list as highly fragmentary is not only due to the fact that the individual items are difficult to connect semantically, but also because this is a list in the best sense of the word lîsta. It appears—due to the large empty space to its right—like a torn strip of cloth, which is actually part of something much broader, which has been lost or at least stays invisible and unexpressed. In a 1998 interview with Nils Tabert, Kane explains: “this has become so minimal and so much about language. At the moment it doesn’t have characters, all there is are language and images” (quoted in Saunders 2002: 111). The turn away from linear development and causal contexts represents an artistic turn towards the experimental and the post-dramatic. At the same time, however, it also marks a mimetic reference to the traumatising effects of psychosis and to the experience of loss of inner and outer coherence that the protagonist experiences. Eventually, the fragmented and collage-like dramatic text does not just represent but also allows us to experience the shattering of the first-person speaker’s psyche. The collapsing of the typical dramatic markers (distinguishable acts or scenes, stage directions, identification of individual speakers/characters) allows, or rather forces readers to experience the dissolution and disorientation experienced by the first-person speaker(s) as they suffer from depressive psychotic disorder. Ellen W. Kaplan describes the clinical picture as follows: Psychosis is thought disorder, characterized by hallucinations, disorganized speech and delusional thinking, all of which contribute to a feeling of gross sensory overload. […] Individuals have described dissolution of the bonds that constitute identity, including feelings of dislocation and dissociation from the body and a blurring of the boundary between inner life and external reality. (Kaplan 2005: 120)

106 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

Yet, not only the lack of clear boundaries and distinctions (“Where do I start?/Where do I stop?”; Psychosis 24) emphasises the fractured perception of world and self as it is experienced by patients of psychosis, but this dissolution is also part of the poetic programme of Kane’s theatre. The author commented on the play accordingly in November 1998: I am writing a play that is called 4.48 Psychosis. […] It’s about a psychotic breakdown and what happens to a person’s mind when the barriers which distinguish between reality and different forms of imagination completely disappear, that you no longer know the difference between your waking life and your dream life. And also you no longer know where you stop and the world starts. […] various boundaries begin to collapse. Formally, I am trying to collapse a few boundaries as well; to carry on with making form and content one. (Kane, quoted in Saunders 2002: 111)

The way in which Kane takes up the metaphor of “breakdown,” of psychotic collapse, in order to suggest the extent to which she also collapses (beyond recognition) traditional dramatic conventions (such as setting, temporal coordinates, and identifiable characters), shows that her formal experiments with lists are not only meant to depict psychotic “breakdown,” depression, and mental disorientation. Rather, they also serve to negotiate aesthetic questions about the nature of reality and its artistic representation. As she offers an experience of the world influenced by the symptoms of psychosis, Kane illuminates for her audience what it means to perceive the world from beyond the coherence of orderly narrative world-making. Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis has been repeatedly cited as a prime example of post-dramatic theatre, which, according to Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006), is not driven by plot or the development of a certain action but rather shows states or conditions. Illness is, above all, a state. In 4.48 Psychosis, the exploration and internal representation of a mental state is the action. Kane’s lists, especially those designed as simple repetitions of words (“Shame” [7], “FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU” [13], “Speak, Speak, Speak” [24], “No Hope No Hope No Hope” [16]) focus, with emphatic urgency, on the emotional experience and on the needs of the present moment. This strong impression of being present in the moment, which arises not least from the fact that the patient—partly because the medication is increasingly clouding her mind—is unable to construct meaning beyond

5  WHITE NOISE: POSTMODERN ENUMERATION AND FRAGMENTED SELVES 

107

the moment, is contrasted with the dominant impression of transience and loss: Everything passes Everything perishes Everything palls (Psychosis 19)

Early in the morning, at 4.48 a.m.—hence the title—it seems that the categories through which we normally think (time, place, bodies, and minds) are not as clearly demarcated as we might imagine. The possibility that our very categories might just be illusions is difficult to endure and brings us as readers and audiences close to the experience of psychosis: irrational irreducible irredeemable unrecognisable derailed deranged deform free form (Psychosis 21-22)

Kane’s lists express corporeal and social alienation, the feeling of disconnect between the self and the world, the body, and the mind. In the further course of the dramatic text, the fragmentation of the self is visualised through passages that introduce double and split texts in the form of irregular tabular lists (Psychosis 24). These passages not only express the protagonist’s divided self but raise awareness of the extent to which we as readers are dependent on or trained to expect (literary) texts to take shape materially as continuously printed lines of a coherent textual body. Even poets and dramatists usually rely on a mise-en-page that largely adheres to continuous vertically oriented textual arrangement of lines (although verses, in contrast to prose lines, generally do not use the entire space of a line). Remarkably, Kane’s dramatic text, as it disregards the notational conventions of the genre, confronts us with the limitations of a practice of reading (and writing and literacy) that solely relies on a unidirectional sequence of reception. Such a fixed order (from left to right and from top to bottom, at least in the West) can in no way do justice to the simultaneity of actual experience, nor to the overlapping perceptions,

108 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

thoughts, and feelings that mark our every moment. Annette Pankratz introduced the term “mind-spaces” (Pankratz 2010: 156) to emphasise the spatial arrangement of what is meant to represent the orchestration of inner voices in Kane’s play. Yet we need to keep in mind that this mise-en-­ page does not only represent conflictual memories and the inner argumentations of a divided self. Rather, the passage demands to be read as a formal critique: to represent the workings of the mind, stream-of-consciousness is not enough. The idea and the application of a (linear) stream is too one-­ dimensional to represent a reality that is actually never one-dimensional or simply linear. Thus, once again, Kane uses and exploits the disturbing mental experience of psychosis, characterised by fragmentation and dissolution, to stimulate important aesthetic questions about a renewal of the formal possibilities of drama25 and of literary texts in general.

25  Although these textual experiments might seem unusual for an art form such as drama, which does not rely on the reading of texts but on performance and on watching and listening, we might also argue that, especially in the theatre context, the text must be particularly provocative because it is the stimulating basis for what can then be created by the playwrights, the actors, and the audience. The dramatic text must irritate, disturb, and leave a lot of questions open, so that the artistic product of the performance is no longer bound by the playwright’s manuscript but is inspired by the innovative acts of fragmentation, which have “deformed” the dramatic tradition to “free (the) form” to be shaped and actualised as a play for diverse audiences.

CHAPTER 6

Epilogue: Towards a Literary-Historical “Listology”

Abstract  The list takes on various forms and functions throughout literary history. This concluding chapter reflects on the categories that have suggested themselves in the case studies and works towards a poetics of the enumerative. The traditional differentiation between literary and practical lists is conceptualised as one that re-enters on the side of the former: lists in literature may be emphatically literary, namely in that they are figurative, or they may be quasi-practical, thus creating a reality effect. Literary lists, more narrowly considered, are or are constituted by a literary device. The rhetorical figures poly- and asyndeton, ana- and epiphora, isocolon, and parataxis can serve as devices of literary list-making, and the poetic enumerations they produce may figure as metaphors, synecdoches, or metonymies. Keywords  Polysyndeton • Asyndeton • Anaphora • Epiphora • Isocolon • Synecdoche • Metonomy • Metaphor

To approach the literary list from a systematic angle is a challenging task. Often, the results leave much to be desired. Previous systematic studies have either produced an extensive functional typology or provided a set of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. A. Barton et al., Literary Lists, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28372-7_6

109

110 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

binary oppositions with which to differentiate enumerations in literature.1 While we have explained some of these dichotomies in their historical contexts,2 we want to conclude our study by providing a conceptual toolkit for the description of literary lists that moves beyond both the copious charting of specific affordances and the adoption of binary parameters. Our formal systematisation of the list, which complements the above discussion of historical, cognitive, and narratological aspects, does not claim to be exhaustive. However, since it builds on the findings of our diachronic survey, we hope that it will be serviceable to the study of literary lists of all epochs. This chapter points out which stylistic devices are instrumental to list-making in literature and furthermore explains how, conversely, lists can work as poetic devices. In so doing, this epilogue provides an apparatus for both the formal analysis of literary lists and the characterisation of their poetological functions. When working towards an enumerative poetics, the first differentiation to contend with is that between the literary and the practical list with which Umberto Eco defines the former ex negativo (2009: 113-6). Given that the epic catalogue likely originates in didactic poetry (see our Chap. 2), the definition of the literary list as non-practical appears fraught from the very beginning. However, enumerations in poetry are no doubt distinct from those in, for instance, administration because they use (or are used as) stylistic devices and have no or little referential meaning. One way to conceptualise the relationship between poetical and practical lists is to resort to what George Spencer-Brown has described as “re-entry.” In Laws of Form (1972: 69-76), he develops this figure of thought as a means to explain paradoxes. The initial differentiation between a marked and an unmarked space creates a form: for instance, the literary list is marked as distinct from the non-literary (or, by implication, practical) list. This differentiation, however, can re-enter on the side of the former so that within the confines of the literary list, “literary-literary” and “literary-non-­ literary” lists can thus be distinguished. This “re-entry into the form” (1972: 69) helps to tell apart poetic enumerations that are emphatically literary—because they are figurative—from those that are quasi-practical and thus serve to create a reality effect (see our Chap. 3). Literary lists that produce what Roland Barthes has called an effet de réel can do so by  See our Chap. 1 on Mainberger (2003) and Belknap (2004).  Notably, we have discussed how the dichotomies infinite vs. finite and vertical vs. horizontal underscore certain historical developments (see our Chap. 2). 1 2

6  EPILOGUE: TOWARDS A LITERARY-HISTORICAL “LISTOLOGY” 

111

imitating practical enumerations of all sorts, as we have noted above: the list of commodities, as in Behn’s Oroonoko, the bookkeeping list, as in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the surveyor’s list, as in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the list of spiritual exercises, as in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the ranking, as in Hornby’s High Fidelity, or the self-help list, as in Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. The principal purpose of such quasi-­practical enumerations is to add to the literary work’s effect of realism by drawing on the experientiality of the list.3 Mainberger (2003) has provided a helpful typology that charts the non-literary contexts to which lists in literature can refer, but she does not examine the poetological functions of enumeration in any detail. The literary list, more narrowly considered, is (or is constituted by) a literary device. Its entries may be composed of single words or phrases, clauses or colons, and even full sentences. Some figures of speech which have previously been associated with poetic enumeration are the following:4 (i) Polysyndeton/asyndeton: An enumeration of words, phrases, or clauses with or without conjunctions such as “and,” “but,” or “or.” While most stylistic devices which take the form of the list make use of either the one or the other, the prototypical list is asyndetic. (ii) Anaphora/epiphora: A repetition of a word or group of words at the beginning, or end, of successive clauses or lines of verse. When it continues across more than two sentences or verses, it can take the form of a list. (iii) Isocolon: Symmetry is the chief principle of this parallelistic scheme, in which the enumerated colons possess the exact same number of syllables or words. The most popular species is the tricolon. (iv) Parataxis: A succession of independent clauses that makes no use of subordinating or coordinating conjunctions. The short, simple sentences placed side by side may assume the character of a list. The above morphological and syntactic figures have proved immensely helpful for describing the formal features of literary lists throughout our study. We suggest placing them alongside the following three rhetorical

3 4

 On experientiality and the list, see von Contzen (2018).  Compare Belknap (2004: 7-8) and Johnson (2012: 1100-103).

112 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

terms that, in our estimation, are categorically different from the first set in that they can also function as semantic figures: (v) Enumeratio: The listing of component parts or details of some entity, to be distinguished from enumeration, which we define in a broader sense. An oft-cited example is the list of contents of Tom Sawyer’s pocket (in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: “[…] a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar […]” [15]). Commonly, it is considered a figure of amplificatio, the marked extension of a phrase or sentence for additional emphasis or explanation. (vi) Climax/anti-climax: An ascending or descending succession of words or phrases arranged in order of importance (as in Pope’s An Essay on Man, ll. 238-9: “angel, man/Beast, bird, fish, insect!”). Lists of this kind follow a more or less implicit hierarchy. (vii) Congeries: An enumeration of synonyms, near-synonyms, or cognate phrases and sentences may be a sequence of continuous semantic enrichment (as in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, III.2: “Friends, Romans, Countrymen”), or simply redundant. The first observation that needs to be made is that the stylistic devices in (i) through (iv) describe the means by which the latter three are brought into effect: enumeratio is often poly- or asyndetic; congeries is frequently based on an isocolon; (anti-)climax may be anaphoric or epiphoric, or else have a paratactic syntax. We thus propose that, as a matter of convenience, the formal description of literary lists makes use of the traditional rhetorical terms poly- and asyndeton, ana- and epiphora, isocolon, and parataxis. These are the stylistic devices that constitute literary lists. The figures in (v) through (vii) are traditionally differentiated by the relative status of the listed items: they are equally as important in enumeratio, of unequal significance in climax or anti-climax, and (near-)identical in congeries (see Schöpsdau 1994). While we do not wish to discard these terms, we see the need to elaborate on them and suggest an alternative typology of the literary list’s poetological functions, that is, of the ways in which enumeration itself may function as a literary device. In doing so, we consider lists in relation to the “master tropes” of metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy.

6  EPILOGUE: TOWARDS A LITERARY-HISTORICAL “LISTOLOGY” 

113

In the first place, the traditional set of rhetorical figures describing the poetic effects of lists does not take into account that enumerations may serve as extended metaphors. For instance, this is the case with Virgil’s catalogue of trees felled to make a funeral pyre, which figuratively refers to the dead heroes (see our Chap. 2). Vehicle and tenor are related by way of similarity: both the trees and the Greek heroes die in a heavy fall. Alternatively, a list can be composed of individual metaphors. In Sidney’s tree catalogue, the various arboreal species figure for sorrow, love, and death, among other things: the list’s items are all vehicles from the same source domain, but each vehicle projects onto a different tenor (see our Chap. 2). Stephen Barney, in his attempt to define lists in contradistinction to narratives, has suggested that all enumeration is metaphorical: “From the point of view of figurative discourse, a list is obviously paradigmatic and tends towards metaphor, whereas a story is syntagmatic and tends towards metonymy” (1982: 193). Barney’s observation draws on Roman Jakobson’s 1956 essay “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” which argues that these two poles are the basic modes of human thought as reflected in language. Jakobson connects the metaphoric, reliant on substitution and similarity, and the metonymic pole, founded on contexture and contiguity, to the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axes of linguistic expression, respectively. This is to say that whereas metaphor represents the possibilities of linguistic selection (as in the vertical row “child, kid, youngster, tot”), metonymy represents the possibilities of linguistic combination (as in the horizontal row “the child sleeps”). Ultimately, for Jakobson poetry is metaphoric rather than metonymic since the principle of equivalence, or similarity, is what defines its word sequences. Accordingly, Barney would have us “speak of a metaphor as a disappointed list” (1982: 193), that is, as a figure that might have been extended into an enumeration; while this may help to describe how the Homeric simile “the hero falls like a tree” was turned into a metaphoric list of tree names by Virgil, it is also true that not all literary lists are extended metaphors. Some, like the catalogue of Simon Dedalus’s professions in chronological order, represent a syntagmatic sequence, and thus can be read as a narrative (see our Chap. 4), while others have a synecdochic or indeed a metonymic function. Adopting Jakobson’s broader definitions of metaphor and metonymy for a formal description of lists thus proves inadequate. In stark contrast to Barney, Groupe μ have argued in A General Rhetoric (1981: 74) that most literary enumeration is in fact an extended

114 

R. A. BARTON ET AL.

synecdoche, a listing of parts that represents a whole pars pro toto. They make this remark, on which the following elaborates, because the classical term enumeratio, far from describing enumerative styles more generally, in fact refers only to the listing of a whole into (some of) its constituent parts. Although this stylistic feature is mostly considered as a syntactic device, it is also a semantic figure; speaking of synecdochic literary lists (rather than of instances of enumeratio) makes this sufficiently clear. Furthermore, the figurative and hence inexhaustive enumeration of a whole’s parts may be of two sorts. First, it can place equal elements side by side, which can potentially be re-arranged, as in the catalogue of trees that stands for a forest in Spenser and elsewhere, the familiar items of which are indeed shuffled about as this genre of list-making is transformed throughout the ages (see our Chap. 2). Second, the items of the synecdochic list may also be chain-linked, that is, their order may be necessary and thus fixed. Instances of such enumeration that follows the law of the series are Pope’s hierarchical list of the great chain of being (see our Chap. 2) and, at least in part, Joyce’s enumeration of Simon Dedalus’s occupations that represent the whole of his life and character. As the former example suggests, synecdochic lists may further be described as a climax or an anti-­ climax when they imply an order of importance. In other words, lists that figure as extended synecdoches may or may not be characterised by concatenation, and they may or may not express a hierarchy. Lastly, the term congeries describes the enumeration of items that are (near-)identical or contiguous. Christopher D.  Johnson has noted the penchant of this stylistic device for redundancy, the repetition of one and the same, yet he has also observed: “Congeries can offer permutations on the same idea or ransack linguistic resources to iterate new ideas or insights” (2012: 1101). In other words, while enumerations of semantically cognate elements can be simply redundant, they can also acquire a figurative function: its entries may work as metonymies for each other and so, in their succession, they can reveal different shades of meaning. Some of Rabelais’s lists and their translations into English are a prime example (see page 27 above). Rather than label these as congeries, a term associated with redundancy, we propose to call them metonymic. Besides its possible metaphoric, synecdochic, or metonymic functions, as well as its cognitive, experiential, and narrative capabilities, the literary list has a striking metapoetic potential. As many of our close readings have demonstrated, it often reflects on its own making and that of the work in which it is placed. The term’s etymology suggests as much: originally, the

6  EPILOGUE: TOWARDS A LITERARY-HISTORICAL “LISTOLOGY” 

115

Old English líste referred to a strip of cloth, often a hem, a braid, or a border (“list, n3”). Its metaphorical use in the field of writing was presumably established due to the semantic proximity of text and textile, derivatives of the Latin texere. The word list is thus associated with handiwork and the “wordweaving” of literature. If nothing else, this book shows that throughout the history of the literary list, the poiesis of literature has been foremost in the list-maker’s mind.

Bibliography

Primary Literature Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Trans. A. L. Peck. Loeb Classical Library 366. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942. Aristotle. On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath. Trans. W.  S. Hett. Loeb Classical Library 288. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. Atkins, Maurice. Cataplus: or, Æneas his Descent to Hell. A Mock Poem. London, 1672. Auster, Paul. Winter Journal. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. Bale, John. The Complete Plays of John Bale. 2 vols. Ed. Peter Happé. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985-1986. Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. Watt. Mercier and Camier. The Grove Centenary Edition. Vol. 1: Novels. Ed. Paul Auster. New York: Grove Press, 2006. Beckett, Samuel. Proust. New York: Grove Press, 1970. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave. Ed. Joanna Lipking. New  York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Best, Clare. The Missing List. A Memoir. London: Linen Press, 2018. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” Other Inquisitions 1937-1952. Trans. R. L. C. Simms. London: Penguin, 1973. 101-5. Brainard, Joe. I Remember. London: Notting Hill Editions, 2012. Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon, 2000. De Quincey, Thomas. The Works of Thomas De Quincey. 21 vols. Ed. Grevel Lindop. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. A. Barton et al., Literary Lists, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28372-7

117

118 

Bibliography

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. DeLillo, Don. 1985. White Noise. London: Picador, 2011. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist (1837-39). With twenty-four ill. by George Cruikshank and an introd. by Humphrey House. London: Oxford University Press, 1953a. Dickens, Charles. Nicholas Nickleby. With forty ill. by “Phiz” and an introd. by Dame Sybil Thorndike. London: Oxford University Press, 1953b. Dickens, Charles. The Little Curiosity Shop. With seventy-five ill. by George Cattermole and H. K. Browne. London: Chapman & Hall, 1905a. Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. With forty ill. by “Phiz” and an introd. by H. W. Garrod. London: Oxford University Press, 1953c. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. With forty ill. by “Phiz” and an introd. by Sir Osbert Sitwell. London: Oxford University Press, 1951. Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Ed. John Forster. London: Vintage, 2008. Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. With forty ill. by Marcus Stone. London: Chapman & Hall, 1905b. Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Ed. Margaret Cardwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Diogenes Laertios. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. 2 vols. Trans. R.  D. Hicks. Revised by George E.  Dimock. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1925. Ellender, Lulah. Elisabeth’s Lists: A Life Between the Lines. London: Granta, 2018. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Picador Classic, 2015. Ennius. “Annals.” Fragmentary Republican Latin. Vol. 1: Ennius: Testimonia. Epic Fragments. Ed. and trans. Sander M.  Goldberg and Gesine Manuwald. Loeb Classical Library 294. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 108-454. Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary. London: Picador, 1996. Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue. Ed. Alan Houston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gibbon, Edward. “An Inquiry whether a Catalogue of the Armies sent into the Field is an essential part of an Epic Poem.” The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq., with Memoirs of His Life and Writings. 5 vols. Vol. IV: Classical and Critical. Ed. John Lord Sheffield. London: Murray, 1814. 327-32. Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Volume 2: 1865–Present. Shorter 7th ed. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008. 1416-24. Graunt, John. Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made upon the Bills of Mortality. London: Printed by Tho Roycroft, 1662. Homer. Iliad. Trans. A. T. Murray. Revised by William F. Wyatt. Loeb Classical Library 170-1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924-1925.

 Bibliography 

119

Homer. Odyssey. 2 vols. Trans. A.  T. Murray. Loeb Classical Library 104-5. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Hornby, Nick. High Fidelity. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature (A Rebours). Trans. John Howard. Milton Keynes: Simon & Brown, 2013. Joseph of Exter. Iliad. Trans. A.  G. Rigg. Toronto: Centre for Medieval Studies, 2005. Joseph of Exter. Joseph Iscanus. Werke und Briefe. Ed. Ludwig Gompf. Leiden and Köln: Brill, 1970. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Text edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Joyce, James. Finnegan’s Wake. With an Introduction by Seamus Deane. London: Penguin, 1992. Joyce, James. Letters. 3 vols. Eds. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1966. Joyce, James. Ulysses. A Critical and Synoptic Edition. 3 vols. Eds. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior. New  York and London: Garland, 1984. Kane, Sarah. 4.48 Psychosis. London: Methuen, 2002. Kant, Immanuel. Werke in sechs Bänden. 6 vols. Vol. 2: Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956. Larsen, Reif. I Am Radar. New York: Penguin, 2015. Levi, Primo. The Periodic Table. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Schocken Books, 1984. Lucan. The Civil War (Pharsalia). Trans. J. D. Duff. Loeb Classical Library 220. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. London: Jonathan Cape, 2009. O’Brien, Flann. 1939. At Swim-Two-­Birds. London: Penguin, 1967. Ovid. Metamorphoses. 2 vols. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. Revised by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 42-3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916. Perec, Georges. L’Infra-Ordinaire. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Perec, Georges. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2010. Perec, Georges. I Remember. Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 2014. Philips, John. Cyder. A Poem. In Two Books. London, 1708. Plato. Timaeus. Critias. Cleitophon. Menexenus. Epistles. Trans. R. G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library 234. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929. Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Man.” The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One Volume Edition of the Twickenham Pope. Ed. John Butt. London and New  York: Routledge, 1963a. 501-47.

120 

Bibliography

Pope, Alexander. “The Rape of the Lock.” The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One Volume Edition of the Twickenham Pope. Ed. John Butt. London and New York: Routledge, 1963b. 217-42. Pope, Alexander. The Iliad of Homer Translated by Alexander Pope. Ed. Steven Shankman. London: Penguin, 1996. Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad in Four Books. Ed. Valerie Rumbold. Harlow: Longman, 2009. Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Oration on the Dignity of Man. Trans. A. Robert Caponigri. Introduction by Russell Kirk. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1956. Rabelais, François. The Complete Works of François Rabelais. Trans. Donald M.  Frame. With a Foreword by Raymond C.  La Charité. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. Ed. David Daniell. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomas Nelson, 1998. Shteyngart, Gary. Our Country Friends. New York: Random House, 2021. Sidney, Sir Philip. The Old Arcadia. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Sorrentino, Gilbert. Mulligan Stew. New York: Grove, 1979. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Spufford, Francis. The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings: Lists in Literature. London: Chatto & Windus, 1989. Statius. Thebaid. 2 vols. Trans. D.  R. Shackelton Bailey. Loeb Classical Library 207, 498. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. Ed. Judith Hawley. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. Swift, Jonathan. Complete Poems. Ed. Pat Rogers. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. The Bible. Authorized King James Version. With an Introduction and Notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: Sterling Publishing, 2004. Urquhart, Thomas Sir. The first [second] book of the works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, Doctor in Physick, containing five books of the lives, heroick deeds, and sayings of Gargantua, and his sonne Pantagruel, London 1653 (British Library, Reel position: Thomason / 183:E.1429[1]). Virgil. Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid. 2 vols. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. Revised by G.  P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 63-64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. 1996. New York: Back Bay Books, 2006. Watts, Isaac. “A Funeral Poem on Thomas Gunston Esq.” Horæ lyricæ: Poems, chiefly of the lyric kind. London, 1706. 219-47.

 Bibliography 

121

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Donald L.  Lawler. New  York: Norton, 1988. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. A Biography. Ed. J. H. Stape. Oxford: Published for the Shakespeare Head Press by Blackwell, 1998. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. 5 vols. Eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: Hogarth Press, 1977-1984.

Secondary Literature Ackerley, Chris. “An ‘Other Object of Note’: Circle and Point in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Watt.’” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 16 (2006): 319-32. Alber, Jan. “Absurd Catalogues. The Functions of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction.” Style 50.3 (2016): 342-58. Annelsey, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. Pluto, 1998. Assmann, Aleida, Monika Gomille, and Gabriele Rippl, eds. Sammler–Bibliophile– Exzentriker. Tübingen: Narr, 1998. Auden, W.  H. “Making, Knowing and Judging.” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1956. 31-60. Auger, Peter. Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Auster, Paul. “Introduction” to Joe Brainard. I Remember. London: Notting Hill Editions, 2012b. ix-xxi. Aradi, Csenge E. “A Diachronic Investigation of the Great Chain of Being Metaphor in Religious Political Discourses of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 7.6 (2017): 214-22. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Texas University Press, 1981. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helen Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Bal, Mieke. “Telling Objects. A Narrative Perspective on Collecting.” The Cultures of Collecting. Eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. London: Reaktion Books, 1994. 97-115. Barney, Stephen A. “Chaucer’s Lists.” The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W.  Bloomfield. Eds. David C.  Benson and Siegfried Wenzel. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982. 189-223. Barthes, Roland. 1968. “The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana, 1977. 142-49. Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. 181-90.

122 

Bibliography

Barton, Roman Alexander. “List-­Making as a Spiritual Exercise: On the Functions of Enumeration in the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Askêmata.” a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies 36.1 (2021): 195-203. Barton, Roman Alexander, Julia Böckling, Sarah Link, and Anne Rüggemeier, eds. Forms of List-­Making: Epistemic, Literary and Visual Enumeration. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022a. Barton, Roman Alexander, Julia Böckling, Sarah Link, and Anne Rüggemeier. “Introduction: Epistemic and Artistic List-­ Making.” Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary, and Visual Enumeration. Eds. Roman Alexander Barton, Julia Böckling, Sarah Link, and Anne Rüggemeier. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022b. 1-24. Baßler, Moritz. Die Entdeckung der Textur: Unverständlichkeit in der Kurzprosa der emphatischen Moderne 1910-1916. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994. Bazargan, Susan. “The Book of Punishment: Lists in the ‘Cyclops’ Episode.” James Joyce Quarterly 35.4-36.1 (1988): 747-63. Belknap, Robert E. The List: Uses and Pleasures on Cataloguing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Belknap, Robert E.. “The Literary List: A Survey of its Uses and Deployments.” Literary Imagination 2.1 (2000): 35-54. Benjamin, Walter. “Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus  – Eine Rede über das Sammeln.” Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. IV.  Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980. 388-96. Benstock, Bernard. “Cataloguing in Finnegan’s Wake: Counting Counties.” Joyce in Context. Eds. Vincent J. Cheng and Timothy Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 259-69. Benstock, Bernard, and Shari Benstock. “The Joycean Method of Cataloguing.” James Joyce Quarterly 17.1 (1979): 49-60. Ben-Zvi, Linda. “Samuel Beckett, Fritz Mauthner, and the Limits of Language.” PMLA 95.2 (1980): 183-200. Ben-Zvi, Linda. “Mauthner’s ‘Critique of Language’: A Forgotten Book at the ‘Wake.’” Comparative Literature Studies 19.2 (1982): 143-63. Berberich, Christine. “‘A Peculiarly English Idiosyncrasy?’ Julian Barnes’s Use of Lists in England, England.” American, British and Canadian Studies 2 (2009): 75-87. Berensmayer, Ingo. “The Epic Tree Catalogue in Medieval and Renaissance English Literature.” Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Eds. Eva von Contzen and James Simpson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. 155-71. Best, Clare. “Listing the Unthinkable.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 36.1 (2021): 241-44.

 Bibliography 

123

Billington, Michael. “How Do You Judge a 75-Minute Suicide Note?” The Guardian. 30 June 2000. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2000/ jun/30/theatre.artsfeatures. Date accessed: 28 April 2023. Birke, Dorothee. “The World is not Enough: Lists as Encounters with the ‘Real’ in the Eighteenth Century Novel.” Style 50.3 (2016): 296-308. Blair, Anne. Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Blair, Anne. “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64.1 (2003): 11-28. Bleumer Hartmut et al., eds. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 47.3 (2017), Special Issue “Liste”. Blümer, Agnes. “Between Order and Chaos: Lists in Children’s Literature.” Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary and Visual Enumeration. Eds. Roman Alexander Barton, Julia Böckling, Sarah Link, and Anne Rüggemeier. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 227-48. Böckling, Julia. “A ‘shimmering, glittering phrase, in which lay a world of possibilities’: The Narrative and Social Function of Consumerist Lists in Fiction.” PhD Dissertation, University of Freiburg, 2021a. Böckling, Julia. “Life Writing as Photo-­ Posting: Listing, Branding, and the Stylization of Life on Instagram.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 36.1 (2021b): 233-39. Bond, Richmond P. “-iad: A Progeny of the Dunciad.” PMLA 44 (1929): 1099-105. Bond, Richmond P. English Burlesque Poetry 1700-1750. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932. Borris, Kenneth. “Platonism and Spenser’s Poetic: Idealized Imitation, Merlin’s Mirror, and the Florimells.” Spenser Studies 24 (2009): 209-68. Borsing, Christopher. Daniel Defoe and the Representation of Personal Identity. London: Routledge, 2017. Bowen, Barbara C. Enter Rabelais, Laughing. Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Bowen, Zack. Ulysses as a Comic Novel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989. Bradly, Bruce S. J. James Joyce’s Schooldays. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1982. Brickey, Alyson. “Aesthetic Unrest: ‘Howl’ and the Literary List.” Forms of ListMaking: Epistemic, Literary, and Visual Enumeration. Eds. Roman Alexander Barton, Julia Böckling, Sarah Link, and Anne Rüggemeier. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 171-85. Brockman, William S. “‘Catalogue These Books’: Joyce Bibliographies, Checklists, Catalogs, and Desiderata.” Joyce Studies Annual 4 (1993): 119-36. Broich, Ulrich. The Eighteenth-Century Mock-Heroic Poem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

124 

Bibliography

Bronfen, Elizabeth, Christiane Frey, and David Martyn, eds. Noch einmal anders. Zu einer Poetik des Seriellen. Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2016. Brown, Laura. Ends of Empire. Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-­Century English Literature. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Burrow, John A. “Chaucer, Geoffrey.” The Spenser Encyclopedia. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 144-48. Buzard, James. “Enumeration and Exhaustion: Taking Inventory in The Old Curiosity Shop.” Contemporary Dickens. Eds. Eileen Gillooly and Dierdre David. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009. 189-206. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Case, Alison. “Authenticity, Convention, and Bridget Jones’s Diary.” Narrative 9.2 (2001): 176-81. Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books. Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the 14th and 18th Centuries. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Chialant, Maria Teresa. “The Shop in Dickens’s Fiction.” E-rea 13.2 (2016) http://journals.openedition.org/erea/4931; DOI: https://doi. org/10.4000/erea.4931. Date accessed: 28 April 2023. Claviez, Thomas. “A Metonymic Community? Toward a Poetic of Contingency.” The Common Growl: Toward a Poetics of Precarious Community. New  York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 39-56. Collins, Philipp. Dickens and Education. London: Clarendon, 1963. Collins, Stephen. The Influence of the Great Chain of Being on the Rhetoric Manuals of Sixteenth Century Tudor England. PhD Dissertation, Northwestern University, 2001. Connor, Rebecca. Women, Accounting, and Narrative: Keeping Books in EighteenthCentury England. London: Routledge, 2004. von Contzen, Eva, ed. Lists in Literature from the Medieval to the Postmodern. Special Issue in Style 50.3 (2016). von Contzen, Eva, ed. “Listen im Transferprozess: Zur englischen und deutschen Rabelais-­Übersetzung.” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 58 (2017a): 193-220. von Contzen, Eva, ed. “Die Affordanzen der Liste.” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 3 (2017b): 317-26. von Contzen, Eva, ed. “Grenzfälle des Erzählens: Die Liste als einfache Form.” Komplexität und Einfachheit. Villa Vigoni-Symposion 2015. Ed. Albrecht Koschorke. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2017c. 221-39. von Contzen, Eva, ed. “Experience, Affect, and Literary Lists.” Partial Answers 16.2 (2018): 315-27. von Contzen, Eva, ed. “Theorising Lists in Literature: Towards a Listology.” Lists and Catalogues in Ancient Literature and Beyond. Towards a Poetics of

 Bibliography 

125

Enumeration. Eds. Rebecca Lämmle, Cedric Scheidegger Lämmle, and Katharina Wesselmann. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020. 35-54. von Contzen, Eva, ed. “Don’t Trust the List: The Politics of Enumeration.” Forms of ­ List-­ Making: Epistemic, Literary, and Visual Enumeration. Eds. Roman Alexander Barton, Julia Böckling, Sarah Link, and Anne Rüggemeier. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 129-50. von Contzen, Eva, and James Simpson, eds. Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Craik, R. J. Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (1611-1660), Adventurer, Polymath, and Translator of Rabelais. Lewiston and Lampeter: Mellen Research University Press, 1993. Crehan, Stewart. “‘The Rape of the Lock’ and the Economy of ‘Trivial Things.’” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31.1 (1997): 45-68. Crispi, Luca. Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Characters in Ulysses. Becoming the Blooms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Damrosch, Leo. “Pope’s Epics: What Happened to Narrative?” The Eighteenth Century 29.2 (1988): 189-207. Daston, Lorraine. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Davis, Alex. “What’s in a List? Erasmus, Cromwell, Bale.” Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Eds. Eva von Contzen and James Simpson. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2022. 173-93. Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New  York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Delbourgo, James, and Staffan Müller-­ Wille. “Introduction.” Isis 103.4 (2012): 710-15. Deutsch, Helen. “The Rape of the Lock as Miniature Epic.” Resemblance and Disgrace. Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 40-82. Diederichsen, Diedrich. “Liste und Intensität.” Abfälle. Stoff- und Materialpräsentation in der deutschen Pop-Literatur der 60er Jahre. Eds. Dirck Linck and Gert Mattenklott. Berlin: Wehrhahn, 2006. 107-23. Doležalová, Lucie, ed. The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised Data Processing. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Dubey, Madhu. “Post-Postmodernist Realism?” Twentieth Century Literature 57.3/4 (2011): 264-71. Eaglestone, Robert. “Forms of Ordering: Trauma, Narrative and Ethics.” Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative. Eds. Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis. London: Routledge, 2018. 55-67. Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. Trans. Ellen Esrock. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

126 

Bibliography

Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists. From Homer to Joyce. Trans. Alastair McEwen. London: MacLehose, 2009. Eco, Umberto. Confessions of a Young Novelists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Egan, Gabriel. “Gaia and the Great Chain of Being.” Ecocritical Shakespeare. Eds. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 57-70. Ellender, Lulah “Finding Lives between the Lines.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 36.1 (2021): 245-51. Ellmann, Robert. James Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Ellrodt, Robert. Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser. Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1969. Emerson, Kent. “Joyce’s Ulysses: A Database Narrative.” Joyce Studies Annual (2017): 40-64. Faulk, Barry. “Love, Lists, and Class in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.” Cultural Critique 66 (2007): 153-76. Fernandes, Sujatha. Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Ferry, Anne. The Art of Naming. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988. Fies, Brian. Mom’s Cancer. New York: Abrams, 2006. Finkelde, Dominik. “Vergebliches Sammeln. Walter Benjamins Analyse eines Unbehagens im Fin de Siècle und der europäischen Moderne.” Arcadia 41.1 (2001): 187-202. Fludernik, Monika. “Descriptive Lists and List Descriptions.” Style 50.3 (2016): 309-26. Fludernik, Monika. “Non-Narrative Genres: Exposition, Lists, Lyric, etc.” Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory. Eds. Paul Dawson and Maria Mäkelä. New York and London: Routledge, 2022. 24-39. Fogel, Stan. “The Use of Lists in Contemporary Fiction.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 12.2 (1982): 11-12. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin Books, 1977. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994. Foy, Anna M. “Epic.” The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 473-94. Frédéric, Madeleine. “Énumération, énumération homologique, énumération chaotique. Essai de caractérisation.” Stylistique, rhétorique et poétique dans les langues romanes. Ed. Jean-Claude Bouvier. Aix-en-­Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1986. 103-17. Frederick, Samuel. The Redemption of Things: Collecting and Dispersal in German Realism and Modernism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022.

 Bibliography 

127

Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Gants, David L. “Lists, Inventories and Catalogues: Shifting Modes of Ordered Knowledge in the Early Modern Book Trade.” Worlds of Print. Diversity in the Book Trade. Eds. John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong. Newcastle and London: Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, 2006. 221-38. Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated. Revised and expanded edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Gilbert-Damamme, Béatrice. La série énumérative. Étude linguistique et stylistique s’appuyant sur dix romans français publiés entre 1945 et 1975. Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1989. de Goede, Marieke, and Sullivan Gavin. “The Politics of Security Lists.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34.1 (2015): 66-87. Goldberg, S.  L. The Classical Temper: A Study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961. Gontarski, S. E. “‘Ruse a by’: Watt, the Rupture of the Everyday and Transcendental Empiricism.” The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts. Ed. S. E. Gontarski. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. 345-52. Goody, Jack. “What’s in a List?” The Domestication of a Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. 74-111. Gowers, Emily. “Trees and Family Trees in the Aeneid.” Classical Antiquity 30.1 (2011): 87-118. Grassian, Daniel. Hybrid Fictions: American Literature and Generation X. Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company, 2003. Gritzner, Karoline. “The Fading of the Subject in Sarah Kane’s Later Work.” Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts. Ed. Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. 249-57. Groden, Michael. Ulysses in Progress. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Groupe μ. A General Rhetoric. Trans. Paul B.  Burrell and Edgar M.  Slotkin. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981. Guenther, Leah. “Bridget Jones’s Diary. Confessing Post-Feminism.” Modern Confessional Writing. New Critical Essays. Ed. Jo Gill. London: Routledge, 2005. 84-99. Gunn, Ian, and Clive Hart. James Joyce’s Dublin: A Topographical Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Hägin, Peter Felix. The Epic Hero and the Decline of Heroic Poetry: A Study of the Neoclassical English Epic with Special Reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost. Bern: Francke, 1964.

128 

Bibliography

Halfwassen, Jens. “Series I.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. 9. Eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 1995. 688-93. Hall, Dennis. “Listomania: The List as Popular Icon.” Studies in Popular Culture 28.1 (2005): 49-59. Hamilton, A. C. “General Introduction.” The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. New York: Routledge, 2007. 1-20. Hatton, Nikolina. “Lists in Thomas De Quincey’s Life Narratives: Evidence and Arbitrary Selection.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 36.1 (2020): 205-12. Hayman, David. Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. Helter-Skelter. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press, September 2022. www.oed.com/view/Entry/85762. Date accessed: 5 November 2022. Herron, Thomas: “‘Goodly Woods’: Irish Forests, Georgic Trees in Books 1 and 4 of Edmund Spenser’s Færie Queene.” Quidditas 19.5 (1998): 97-122. Hinds, Stephen. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hintikka, Jaakko. “Gaps in the Great Chain of Being.” Proceedings and Addresses of the APA 49 (1976): 22-38. Howes, Alan B. “Laurence Sterne, Rabelais and Cervantes: The Two Kinds of Laughter in Tristram Shandy.” Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries. Ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myer. London: Barnes & Noble, 1984. 39-56. Hunter, Paul J. Before Novels. The Cultural Context of Eighteenth-­Century English Fiction. New York and London: Norton, 1990. Hunter, Richard L., ed. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Constructions and Reconstructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Iego, Vivien. “Joyce’s Use of Lists.” Dublin James Joyce Journal 8 (2015): 122-30. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Iser, Wolfgang. Sterne: Tristram Shandy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Jackson, Tony E. “‘Cyclops’, ‘Nausicaa’, and Joyce’s Imaginary Irish Couple.” James Joyce Quarterly 29.1 (1991): 63-83. Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1956. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Jeay, Madeleine. Le commerce des mots: L’usage des listes dans la littérature médiévale (XIIe -XV e siècles). Geneve: Droz, 2006. Jenkins, Eugenia Zuroski. “‘Nature to Advantage Drest’: Chinoiserie, Aesthetic Form, and the Poetry of Subjectivity in Pope and Swift.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43.1 (2009): 75-94.

 Bibliography 

129

Johns-Putra, Adeline. The History of the Epic. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Johnson, Christopher D. “N+1, or a Late Renaissance Poetics of Enumeration.” MLN 127.5 (2012): 1096-143. Johnson, Christopher D. Hyperboles. The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Jolles, André. Einfache Formen: Legende, Sage, Mythe, Rätsel, Spruch, Kasus, Memorable, Märchen, Witz. 7th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968. Kager, Maria. “Of Sirens Silent and Loud: The Language Wars of Joyce and Kafka.” James Joyce Quarterly 49.1 (2011): 41-55. Kager, Maria. “James Joyce and Fritz Mauthner: Multilingual Liberators of Language.” The Germanic Review 93.1 (2018): 39-47. Kacandes, Irene. “Trauma Theory.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. New  York: Routledge, 2008. 615-19. Kaplan, Ellen W. “The Cage is My Mind: Object and Image in Depicting Mental Illness on Stage.” Studies in Theatre and Performance 25.2 (2005): 115-28. Kelly, Peter. “Cosmic Artistry in Ovid and Plato.” Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid as Philosopher. Eds. Gareth Williams and Katherina Volk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 207-25. Kim, Jessica. “‘A Series Originating in and Repeated to Infinity’: Identity, Relations, and the Fractal Imagination of ‘Ithaca.’” James Joyce Quarterly 56.3-4 (2019): 289-309. Kirk, Athena. Ancient Greek Lists: Catalogue and Inventory Across Genres. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Knight, Jeffrey Todd. Bound to Read. Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Kovach, Elizabeth, Polland, Imke, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. Forms at Work: New Formalist Approaches in the Study of Literature, Culture, and Media. Trier: VWT, 2021. Kucich, John. Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1981. Kühlmann, Wilhelm. Katalog und Erzählung. Studien zu Konstanz und Wandel einer Literarischen Form in der Antiken Epik. Diss. University of Freiburg, 1973. Kühn, Joachim. Gescheiterte Sprachkritik: Fritz Mauthner’s Leben und Werk. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975. Kuntz, Marion L., and Paul G. Kuntz. “The Symbol of the Tree Interpreted in the Contexts of Other Symbols of Hierarchical Order, the Great Chain of Being and Jacob’s Ladder.” Jacob’s Ladder and the Tree of Life: Concepts of Hierarchy and the Great Chain of Being. Eds. Marion L.  Kuntz and Paul G.  Kuntz. New York et al.: Peter Lang, 1987. 319-34. Landy, Joshua. “Saving the Self from Stories: Resistance to Narrative in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table.” Narrative 30.1 (2022): 85-103.

130 

Bibliography

Lausberg, Marion. “Epos und Lehrgedicht: Ein Gattungsvergleich am Beispiel von Lucans Schlangenkatalog.” Würzburger Jahrbücher 16 (1990): 173-203. Lawrence, Karen R. The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Lawrence, Karen R. Who’s Afraid of James Joyce? Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 2010. Lecolle, Michelle, Michel Raymond, and Sophie Milcent-Lawson, eds. Liste et Effet Liste en Littérature. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge, 2006. Lejeune, Philippe. On Diary. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Link, Sarah J. “Detecting Liminality. The List and Symbolic Form.” Beyond Narrative. Exploring Narrative Liminality and Its Cultural Work. Eds. Sebastian M. Herrmann et al. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022. 99-112. Link, Sarah J. A Narratological Approach to Lists in Detective Fiction. London: Palgrave, forthcoming 2023. Lipking, Joanna. “The New World of Slavery: An Introduction.” Oroonoko. Ed. Joanna Lipking. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. 75-89. list, n3. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press, September 2022. www.oed.com/view/Entry/108988. Date accessed: 5 November 2022. Lobsien, Verena O. “Sympathy Lost. Pastoral Responses to Chaos.” Chaos from the Ancient World to Early Modernity: Formations of the Formless. Eds. Andreas Höfele et al. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2022. 149-69. Lorand, Ruth. “The Concept of Order.” Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 43 (1994): 305-27. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Lynch, Jack. “The Relicks of Learning: Sterne among the Renaissance Encyclopedists.” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 13 (2000): 1-17. Madtes, Richard E. “Joyce and the Building of ‘Ithaca.’” English Literary History 31.4 (1964): 443-59. Mahrer, Rudolf, Turin Gaspard, and Monica Zanardo, eds. Genesis 47 (2018), Special Issue on “Entrer en listes”. Mainberger, Sabine. Die Kunst des Aufzählens: Elemente zu einer Poetik des Enumerativen. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003. Maresca, Thomas E. Epic to Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974. Marquard, Odo. “Wegwerfgesellschaft und Bewahrungskultur.” Macrocosmos in Microcosmos. Die Welt in der Stube. Zur Geschichte des Sammelns 1450 bis1800. Ed. Andreas Grote. Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1994. 909-18.

 Bibliography 

131

McGlynn, Paul D. “Microcosm and the Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century British Literature.” Studies in English Literature 19.3 (1979): 363-85. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen, 1987. McKendrick, Neil. “The Commercialization of Fashion.” The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-­ century England. Eds. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. 34-98. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987. McLaughlin, Robert L. “Metafiction.” Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Eds. Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale. London: Routledge, 2012. 212-23. McLaughlin, Robert L. “Post-­ Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World.” Symploke ̄ 12.1/2 (2004): 53-68. Merbitz, Anja. “The Art of Listing: Selbstreflexive Elemente in Nick Hornbys High Fidelity.” Self-­ Reflexivity in Litreature. Eds. Werner Huber et  al. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. 179-95. Meretoja, Hanna. “From Appropriation to Dialogic Exploration.” Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative. Eds. Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis. London: Routledge, 2018. 101-21. Mettinger, Tryggve N. D. The Eden Narrative: A Literary and Religio-­historical Study of Genesis 2-3. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2007. Miller, T. S. “Forms of Perspective and Chaucer’s Dream Spaces: Memory and the Catalogue in The House of Fame.” Style 48.4 (2014): 479-95. Minnis, Alastair. Medieval Theory of Authorship. Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Montresor, Jaye Berman. “Joyce’s Jewish Stew: The Alimentary Lists in Ulysses.” Colby Quarterly 1 (1995): 194-203. Napier, Elizabeth. Defoe’s Major Fictions: Accounting for the Self. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Neven, Evelien, Vervaeck, Bart, and Luc Herman, eds. Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 1/2 (2018), Special Issue Lists and Narratives. Novak, Maximillian E. Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. Novak, Maximillian E. “The Unmentionable and the Ineffable in Defoe’s Fiction.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 15 (1982): 85-102. Novak, Maximillian E. Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives: Finding the Thing Itself. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015. Nünning, Ansgar. “Towards a Typology, Poetics and History of Description in Fiction.” Description in Literature and Other Media. Eds. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart. New York: Rodopi, 2007. 91-128.

132 

Bibliography

Ogden, Daniel. “Animal Magic.” The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life. Ed. Gordon Lindsay Campbell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 294-309. Orestano, Francesca. “Charles Dickens and the Vertigo of the List: A Few Proposals.” Dickens Quarterly 28. 3 (September 2011): 205-14. Osteen, Mark. The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet. Ithaca, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Ovaska, Anna. “Sarah Kane’s World of Depression: The Emergence and Experience of Mental Illness in 4.48 Psychosis.” On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture 1 (2016). http://geb.uni-­giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2016/12057/. Date accessed: 28 April 2023. Pankratz, Annette. “Neither Here nor There. Theatrical Space in Kane’s Work.” Sarah Kane in Context. Eds. Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010. 149-60. Parker, Kate and Courtney Weiss Smith. Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered. Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2014. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1873 Text. Edited by Donald L. Hill. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Peterson, R. G. “Renaissance Classicism in Pope’s Dunciad.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 15.3 (1975): 431-45. Pomian, Krzysztof. Der Ursprung des Museums. Vom Sammeln. Trans. Gustav Roßler. Berlin: Wagenbach, 1988. Prescott, Anne Lake. Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Pressman, Jessica. Digital Modernism. Making It New in New Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Prier, Raymond A. “Joyce’s Linguistic Imitation of Homer: The ‘Cyclops Episode’ and the Radical Appearance of the Catalogue Style.” Neohelicon 14.1 (1987): 39-66. Radak, Tamara. “‘Poised on the Threshold’: The Unfinalizability of Joycean Encyclopedism.” James Joyce Quarterly 55.1-2 (2017–2018): 79-94. Rawson, Claude. “Mock-Heroic and English Poetry.” The Cambridge Companion to the Epic. Ed. Catherine Bates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 167-92. Reitz, Christiane: “Zur Funktion der Kataloge in Ovids Metamorphosen.” Ovid – Werk und Wirkung: Festgabe für Michael von Albrecht zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. Werner Schubert. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999. 359-72. Reitz, Christiane. “Reliability and Evasiveness in Epic Catalogues.” Lists and Catalogues in Ancient Literature and Beyond. Eds. Rebecca Laemmle, Cédric Scheidegger Laemmle, and Katharina Wesselmann. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. 229-43.

 Bibliography 

133

Reitz, Christiane, Cédric Scheidegger Lämmle, and Katharina Wesselmann. “Epic Catalogues.” Structures of Epic Poetry. Vol. 1: Foundations. Eds. Christiane Reitz and Simone Finkmann. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019. 653-725. Richardson, Brian. “The Genealogies of Ulysses, the Invention of Postmodernism, and the Narratives of Literary History.” English Language History 67.4 (2000): 1035-54. Richetti, John. 1975. Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Robertson, Ritchie. Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Roehle, Theo. “Dissecting the Gatekeepers. Relational Perspectives on the Power of Search Engines.” Deep Search. The Politics of Search beyond Google. Eds. Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2008. 117-33. Rogers, Pat. “Crusoe’s Home.” Essays in Criticism 24. 4 (1974): 375-90. Rosenberg, Daniel. “Introduction.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64.1 (2003): 1-9. Rosenthal, Laura J. “Oroonoko: Reception, Ideology and Narrative Strategy.” The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn. Eds. Derek Hughes and Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 151-65. Rouse, Mary, and Richard Rouse. Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Rüggemeier, Anne. “The List as a Means of Assessment and Standardization and Its Critical Remediation in Graphic Narratives About Illness and Care.” Closure 5 (2018). 55-82. Rüggemeier, Anne. “Lists in Life Writing: The List as a Means to Visualize the Trace of the Absent,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 34.2 (2019): 330-42. Rüggemeier, Anne. “Transformative List-Making: Challenging Heteronormativity and Ableism in Somatographies.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 11.4 (2020): 475-91. Rüggemeier, Anne. “Introduction: On the Manifestations, Effects, and Possible Uses of Lists in Life Writing.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35.3 (2021a): 183-94. Rüggemeier, Anne, ed. Life Writing and the Poetics of List-Making. Forum in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35.3 (2021b). Rüggemeier, Anne, ed. “Lists, Vignettes, Enumerations: Contemporary Life Writing and the Gesture of Refusal toward Narrative.” Poetics Today 43.2 (2022): 363-85. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Tellability.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman et al. London: Routledge, 2008. 589-91. Sammons, Benjamin. The Art and Rhetoric of Homeric Catalogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future. Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

134 

Bibliography

Salisbury, Laura. Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Sandquist, Brigitte L. “The Tree Wedding in ‘Cyclops’ and the Ramifications of Cata-logic.” James Joyce Quarterly 33.2 (1996): 195-209. Saunders, Graham. Love Me or Kill Me. Sarah Kane and the Theatre of the Extremes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, and Ioana Vultur. “Immersion.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman et al. London: Routledge, 2005. 237-39. Schmidgen, Wolfram. “Robinson Crusoe, Enumeration and the Mercantile Fetish.” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 35.1 (2001): 19-39. Schmidt, Sarah, ed. Sprachen des Sammelns: Literatur als Medium und Reflexionsform des Sammelns. Paderborn: Fink, 2016. Schöpsdau, Klaus.“Enumeratio.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Vol. 2. Ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1994. 1231-34. Schumann, Detlev W. “Enumerative Style and its Significance in Whitman, Rilke, Werfel.” Modern Language Quarterly 3.2 (1942): 171-204. Schumann, Detlev W. “Observations on Enumerative Style in Modern German Poetry.” PMLA 59.4 (1944): 1111-55. Schumann, Detlev W. “Conjunctive and Disjunctive Enumeration in Recent German Poetry.” PMLA 60.2 (1945): 517-66. Seager, Nicholas. “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Epistemology and Fiction in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year.” The Modern Language Review 103.3 (2008): 639-53. Senn, Fritz. “Ovidian Roots of Gigantism in Joyce’s Ulysses.” Journal of Modern Literature 15.4 (1990): 561-77. Senn, Fritz. “Entering the Lists: Sampling Early Catalogue.” Joyce in Context, eds. Vincent J. Cheng and Timothy Martin. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1992. 241-58l. Senn, Fritz. “‘Ithaca’: Portrait of the Chapter as a Long List.” European Joyce Studies 6 (1996): 31-76. Shuman, Amy. Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Siegert, Bernhard, and Joseph Vogl. Europa: Kultur der Sekretäre. Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2003. Simpson, James. “Reformation Lists: Syntax, the Sacred, and the Production of Junk.” Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Eds. Eva von Contzen and James Simpson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. 195-211. Singer, Thomas. “Riddles, Silence, and Wonder: Joyce and Wittgenstein Encountering the Limits of Language.” English Literary History 57.2 (1990): 459-84.

 Bibliography 

135

Sitter, John. “Pope’s versification and voice.” The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 37-48. Snead, Jennifer. “Epic for an Information Age: Pope’s 1743 Dunciad in Four Books and the Theater Licensing Act.” English Literary History 77.1 (2010): 195-216. Snyder, Susan. “Introduction.” The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur Du Bartas. Trans. Josuah Sylvester. Ed. Susan Snyder. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. 1-110. Sommer, Manfred. Sammeln. Ein philosophischer Versuch. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. Sorlin, Sandrine. The Stylistics of ‘You’: Second-Person Pronoun and its Pragmatic Effects. Cambridge University Press, 2022. Spencer-Brown, George. Laws of Form. New York: The Julian Press, 1972. Sprat, Thomas. History of the Royal Society. Eds. Jackson I.  Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones. Saint Louis: Washington University Press, 1965. Stäheli, Urs. “Indexing – The Politics of Invisibility.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34.1 (2016): 14-29. Sternberg, Meir. “Ordering the Unordered: Time, Space, and Descriptive Coherence.” Yale French Studies 61 (1981): 60-88. Swayne, Mattie. “Whitman’s Catalogue Rhetoric.” Studies in English 21 (1941): 162-78. Thomas, R.  F. “Tree Violation and Ambivalence in Virgil.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 18 (1988): 261-73. Thwaites, Tom. “Currency Exchanges: The Postmodern, Vattimo, Et Cetera, Among Other Things (Et Cetera).” Postmodern Culture 7.2 (1997). https:// www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/21/currency-­exchanges-­the-­postmodern-­ vattimo-­et-­cetera-­among-­other-­things-­et-­cetera/. Date accessed: 28 April 2023. Thwaites, Tom. “Molly and Bloom in the Lists of ‘Ithaca.’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 51.4 (2009): 494-502. Tillotson, Geoffrey, ed. The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. London: Chatto & Windus, 1943. Todorov, Tzvetan. “Three Conceptions of Poetic Language.” Russian Formalism: A Retrospective Glance. Eds. Robert Louis Jackson and Stephen Rudy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. 130-47. Turin, Gaspard. Poétique et usages de la liste littéraire. Le Clézio, Modiano, Perec. Geneva: Droz, 2017. Tuve, Rosemond. Seasons and Months: Studies in a Tradition of Middle English Poetry. Paris: Librairie Universitaire, 1933. Tuve, Rosemond. Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

136 

Bibliography

Tyler, Alicia. “Victim, Perpetrator, Bystander. Melancholic Witnessing of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis.” Theatre Journal 60.1 (2008): 23-36. Tymoczko, Maria. The Irish Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Van Hulle, Dirk. “Beckett-Mauthner-­Zimmer-Joyce.” Joyce Studies Annual 10 (1999): 143-83. Vaught, Jennifer C. “Spenser’s Dialogic Voice in Book 1 of The Fairie Queene.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 41.1 (2001): 71-89. Veldhuis, Niek. History of the Cuneiform Lexical Tradition. Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 2014. Visser, Edzard. Homers Katalog der Schiffe. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1997. Waldrep, Shelton. “The Aesthetic Realism of Dorian Gray.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 29.2 (1996): 103-12. Wall, Cynthia. “Poetic Spaces.” The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope. Ed. Pat Rogers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 49-62. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957. Whelehan, Imelda. “The Rise of Ladlit and Chicklit.” British Literature in Transition, 1980-2000: Accelerated Times. Eds. Eileen Pollard and Berthold Schoene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 230-43. White, Patti. Gatsby’s Party. The System and the List in Contemporary Narrative. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1992. Williams, Aubrey. “The ‘Fall’ of China and The Rape of the Lock.” Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope. Ed. Maynard Mack. Hamdon: Archon Books, 1964. 274-90. Wilson, Daniel J. “Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being After 50 Years.” Journal of the History of Ideas 48.1 (1987): 187-206. Wolf, Werner. Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst: Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstörenden Erzählen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993. Wolfson, Susan J. “Reading for Form.” Reading for Form. Eds. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. 3-24. Wolfson, Susan J. “Reading for Form without Formalism.” Literary Matters 3.2 (2010): 2-15. Young, Liam Cole. List Cultures. Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Zoellner, Robert H. “Poetic Cosmology in Pope’s An Essay on Man.” College English 19.4 (1958): 157-62.

Index1

A Accumulatio, 12n2 Administration, 7, 52, 74, 110 Affordance, 9, 55, 94, 98, 110 Amplificatio, 112 Anaphora, 22, 111 Aristotle Generation of Animals, 13 On the Soul, 13 Asyndeton, 14, 32, 111, 112 Atkins, Maurice, 20–22 Cataplus: or, Æneas his Descent to Hell. A Mock Poem, 20 Auden, W. H., 1 Auster, Paul, 98, 99, 99n14, 99n16 Winter Journal, 98, 99 Autobiography, 101–103 B Bacon, Francis, 17, 52

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 33, 90 Baroque style, 32 Barthes, Roland, 88, 110 Beckett, Samuel, 67–69, 68n1, 68n3, 80–85 Murphy, 68, 68n1, 82, 83 Proust, 82 Watt, 82–85, 83n25 Behn, Aphra, 43–45, 56, 111 Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave: A True Story, 43–45, 56, 111 Best, Clare, 101 The Missing List, 101 Bills of Mortality, 51, 51n20, 53, 53n26, 56 Blank fiction, 91 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 76 Bookkeeping, 47, 48, 111 Borges, Jorge Luis, 31n32, 92 Brainard, Joe, 99, 100 I Remember, 99, 99n16, 100

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. A. Barton et al., Literary Lists, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28372-7

137

138 

INDEX

C Catalogue, 1–5, 18–31, 18n16, 20n18, 21n19, 22–23n23, 23n25, 24n27, 26n28, 34, 34n40, 38–43, 41n8, 69, 70n8, 74–78, 76n16, 80, 82, 93, 97, 97n12, 104n22, 110, 113, 114 Catechism, 78, 79n22 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 6, 18n16, 24n27, 76 Chrysippus, 13, 14 Classics, 5, 81 Classification, 5, 6, 59 Climax, 112, 114 and anti-climax, 112, 114 Cognitive literary studies, 7, 8, 114 Collection, 5, 7, 44, 53, 56–59, 64, 65, 94 Commodification, 41, 42, 44n12, 46, 82, 90, 91 Congeries, 83, 112, 114 Control, 40, 47, 52, 56, 60, 82, 94, 97 Copia, 74 D Danielewski, Mark Z., 90 House of Leaves, 90 Deconstructionism, 88 Defoe, Daniel, 44n12, 46, 48–56, 50n18, 51n20, 52n23, 92, 111 Journal of the Plague Year, 50–56, 50n18 Moll Flanders, 56 Robinson Crusoe, 45–50, 56, 111 DeLillo, Don, 91 White Noise, 91 Descartes, René, 17 Description, 6, 8, 26, 44, 45, 48, 52–54, 57, 60, 63, 64, 77, 79, 81, 88, 90, 104n22, 110, 112, 113 Dickens, Charles, 56–62, 64, 92 Bleak House, 57

Dombey and Son, 57 Little Dorrit, 57 The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 58 Nicholas Nickleby, 61–63 The Old Curiosity Shop, 58 Oliver Twist, 61 Our Mutual Friend, 59 The Pickwick Papers, 56 Digital Age, 4 Diogenes Laertios, 14 Dryden, John, 38, 39 Mac Flecknoe, 39 Du Bartas, Guillaume, 24n26 E Eco, Umberto, 1, 2, 6, 17n14, 54, 70n9, 79n22, 110 Ellender, Lulah, 100 Elizabeth’s Lists, 100, 101 Ellis, Bret Easton, 91 American Psycho, 91 Empiricism, 4, 15, 16, 50, 52 Encyclopaedism, 30–35, 31n32, 78 Enlightenment, 4, 16, 22n22 Ennius, 20n18 Enumeratio, 70, 112, 114 Enumeration, 3–6, 12, 12n2, 14, 15, 17–25, 17n14, 17n15, 20n18, 24n26, 28, 30–33, 35, 38, 42, 47, 55–58, 60, 63, 66, 68n2, 69–74, 70n9, 82–85, 83n25, 87–108, 111–114 Epic poetry, 21, 21n19, 22, 22n22, 37, 43 Epiphora, 111, 112 Episodic form, 43 Epistemology, 7, 34, 34n41, 52, 55 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 32 On Copia of Words and Ideas, 32 Excess, 2, 32, 45, 56–64, 74 Experientiality, 96, 111

 INDEX 

F Fetishisation, 42 Fielding, Helen, 95, 96, 111 Bridget Jones’s Diary, 95, 96, 111 Fischart, Johann, 33, 33n36 Foe, Henry, 50 Foucault, Michel, 4, 31n32, 55 Fragmentation, 45, 102, 107, 108, 108n25 Franklin, Benjamin, 49, 97, 97n12 Autobiography, 97 G Gibbon, Edward, 2 Ginsberg, Allen Howl, 104n22 Great chain of being, 12–18, 12n3, 13n5, 19n17, 59, 114 H Homer, 2, 5, 19, 20n18, 22n22, 40, 54, 69, 70n8, 75, 81, 92 Iliad, 1, 20, 20n18, 38, 40 Odyssey, 19, 38, 75 Hornby, Nick, 93, 94, 111 High Fidelity, 93–95, 111 Hume, David, 4, 16, 68n1 Huysman, Joris Karl, 64, 66 Against Nature, 64, 66 I Ignatius of Loyola, 70 Immersion, 60, 62 Imperialism, 44 Infinity, 12–18, 17n14, 35 Inventory, 3, 5, 46, 47, 49, 58, 63, 81, 89, 90, 93, 96–103 Isocolon, 111, 112 Itemisation, 14, 16, 17, 28, 37–66

139

J Jacob’s Ladder, 12, 13 Joyce, James, 2, 67–70, 68n1, 68n2, 68n3, 69n6, 70n7, 70n9, 73–76, 75n13, 78–82, 78n19, 79n21, 79n22, 84, 90n3, 99n14, 111, 114 Finnegans Wake, 67–69, 68n1, 68n2 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 69–74, 111 Ulysses, 69, 70, 74–81, 75n12, 76n15, 79n21, 99n14; “Cyclops,” 69n6, 70, 70n8, 74–78, 75n13, 75n14; “Ithaca,” 74, 78–80, 78n20, 79n21; “Wandering Rocks,” 74, 75 K Kane, Sarah, 104–108, 104n23 4.48 Psychosis, 104–108, 104n23 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 35 Keats, John, 76, 92 L Language scepticism, 4, 67–69, 68n1, 69n5, 72, 83, 84 Larsen, Reif, 92 I am Radar, 92 Levi, Primo, 102 Periodic Table, 102 Life-writing, 6, 96–103 Linguistic turn, 69–74, 69n5 Listification, 4, 66 List-making, 3–5, 7, 12, 17n14, 18, 22, 24, 31–34, 46, 50n18, 52n23, 66–85, 96, 101, 110, 114 Locke, John, 4, 16, 34, 68n1 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 34 Locus amoenus, 28, 30 Lucan, 21, 21n19, 31, 32 Pharsalia, 21

140 

INDEX

M Mauthner, Fritz, 68, 68n1, 68n2, 68n3, 69, 69n4, 69n5, 84 Media saturation, 90 Mercantilism, 56 Meschinot, Jean, 32 Metafiction, 90 Metaphor, 12n3, 20, 20n18, 21, 27, 28, 33, 68n1, 69, 88, 106, 112, 113 Metonymy, 33, 112–114 Milton, John, 13n4, 22, 22n22, 37, 40 Paradise Lost, 22, 37, 40, 41n8 Modernism, 4, 66, 69–84 N Narratology, 8 Natura naturans, 30 Natura naturata, 19, 23 Nelson, Maggie, 50n18, 102, 103 Bluets, 50n18, 102, 103, 103n20 Neoplatonism, 27n29 New Formalism, 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 68, 68n1, 92 Nominalism, 69, 71, 72 Novel, 1, 4, 18, 22n22, 37, 38, 43–46, 43n10, 50, 52, 53, 55–57, 61, 62, 64, 66, 70, 70n7, 72, 80–83, 89–93, 94n10, 95, 96, 99n14 O O’Brien, Flann, 89 At Swim-Two-Birds, 89, 90 Order, 2, 3, 6–8, 11, 12, 12n1, 12n2, 12n3, 15, 17–30, 23n23, 44, 45, 48, 55, 58–60, 59n29, 70n9, 73, 75, 78, 80, 83, 90, 93, 94, 101, 106, 107, 112–114

Orpheus, 22, 23, 23n24, 28 and Eurydice, 22 Ovid, 22–24, 22n23, 26, 27, 30, 69, 76, 92 Metamorphoses, 22, 22n23, 24, 25, 27 P Parataxis, 111, 112 Parody, 38 Pars pro toto, 12, 20, 114 Perec, George, 100 I Remember, 100 Philips, John, 19, 19n17 Cyder, 19 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 15 Pliny the Elder, 31 Naturalis Historia, 31 Polysyndeton, 32, 111 Pope, Alexander, 14, 15, 15n8, 16n10, 17, 38–42, 38n1, 39n4, 44n12, 57, 112, 114 Dunciad, 39, 39n4, 40 “An Essay on Man,” 14, 16n10, 38n1, 112 The Rape of the Lock, 40, 41n8, 42 Post-dramatic theatre, 106 Postmodernism, 4, 88, 91, 91n4, 92 Q Quantification, 50, 53, 55, 56 R Rabelais, François, 2, 32–34, 33n36, 33n37, 34n39, 34n40, 114 Ranking, 6, 15, 16, 92–96, 111 Reader-response theory, 8

 INDEX 

Realism, 18, 19, 21, 37–66, 72, 91, 111 Redundancy, 18, 83, 84, 114 Renaissance, 4–6, 12, 17, 18, 28, 30, 32, 33n36, 74, 81 Rhetoric, 56–64 Royal Society, 52 S Satire, 18, 42, 74 Scientific method, 39 Self-examination, 49, 97 Self-help tradition, 96 Self-improvement, 97, 103 Serialisation, 56 Shteyngart, Gary, 1 Sidney, Sir Philip, 18, 18n16, 24n26, 24n27, 28, 30, 76, 113 Arcadia, 28, 30 Sociology, 5 Sorrentino, Gilbert, 90 Mulligan Stew, 90, 93n7 Spencer-Brown, George, 4, 110 Spenser, Edmund, 18, 18n16, 24, 24n27, 25, 27, 27n29, 28, 76, 114 The Faerie Queene, 24, 25, 28 Statistics, 51–54, 51n22, 56 Statius, 20 Thebaid, 20 Sterne, Laurence, 34, 34n39, 34n40, 92, 111 Tristram Shandy, 34, 34n40, 111 Structuralism, 7

141

Sylvester, Josuah, 24n26 Synecdoche, 12, 17, 21, 24, 26, 44n12, 112–114 T Trauma, 101, 103 Tricolon, 111 U Urquhart, Thomas, 33, 33n38 V Virgil, 18–20, 20n18, 22, 22n21, 25, 28, 29, 76, 92, 113 Aeneid, 20, 20n18, 22, 22n21, 38 Eclogues, 28, 29 Georgics, 18, 25 Visual art, 8 W Wallace, David Foster, 90, 92n6 Infinite Jest, 90 Watt, Isaac, 20 Whitman, Walt, 6, 92, 104n22 Wilde, Oscar, 64–66, 92 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 64 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 68, 68n1, 69n5 Woolf, Virginia, 80–85 Diary, 80, 81 Orlando, 81