Belknap's take on
The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing is a 5 chapter essay which refers to - as the 1st chapter reassures, rather than simply informing -
Literary Lists. In this endeavour, 4 American authors are dealt with thoroughly, each of them for unique qualities of their manner of listing.
First is
Emerson, the written collections of whom are said to abide by an ideal of 'intrinsic vitalizing capacity' [p. 51]; the method appears to be that of a 'seemingly random structuring': 'His lists seem to have less crisp distinction than those of other writers, unless they egregiously violate our expectations.' [p. 47]
Whitman is second, and here we learn that
A collection of items can be read sequentially, where there is a movement from one member to the next, or substitutionally, where there is an equivalence among members. Frequently in Whitman's verse the relation between list constituents is oblique, and the narrative of development through a series of terms is left to the reader. [pp. 86-87]
and also that:
One major application of the literary list is as a tool to suggest order, by either reflecting a perceived order or enforcing a desired one. [...] In The World Below the Brine and Germs, Whitman uses the list format to delineate the cosmos. Each poem is composed primarily of a list, and the intention of each is to map out a cosmography. [pp. 98-99]
Striking out for a new world of poetic form, Whitman likewise sang his characteristic songs, using variations of listing that seem to have all added grace of unpremeditated improvisation, poured spontaneously like the unrehearsed songs of the thrush. Leaves of Grass [is] a volume of such songs... [p. 118]
Penultimate is
Melville, who is said 'to consume his predecessors in his leviathanic work' [p. 132]. This is mostly an analysis of the meanings in
Moby-Dick, a novel 'so full of life and character and motion and humour and the grand compass of things, [which also] reveals itself as a profoundly disturbing expression of nihilism. [p. 158]:
For the White Whale, paradoxically, represents the absence of meaning, symbolises the meaninglessness of the universe.. The blankness of white is unreadable not because it is too complicated to be deciphered [...] but because the white field bears the imprint of Nothing. The attempt to interpret the unmarked is a confrontation with nothingness.
Final is the entry on
Thoreau, who is described as 'preternatural [...] in that its connotations of "extraordinariness" and existence literally "beyond nature" reinforce the indefinable separation that forever kept Thoreau on the outside of nature, as it were. [...] Not only was Thoreau's work solitary and labour intensive, but its worth was misunderstood by his contemporaries..' [pp. 175-176]. Over the passage of time this seems to have changed, since
Many readers have noted that Thoreau seems to write on two levels at once. Thoreau encoded his writing to reach a select audience within his general reading public in a way that required embedding one level of discourse within another. [...] Just as it takes a careful reader to catch all Thoreau's punning wordplay, so too must one read mindfully to fully appreciate his distinctive definitions and the frisson these definitions generate when considered alongside their popular significations. [...e.g.] For Thoreau, is the expenditure of living, a trade-off of time that would otherwise be spent in different pursuits.
All of the above are therefore seen as settings and modes of list usage in literary pursuits.
Lists serve a variety of functions in Emerson's essays, Whitman's poems, Melville's novels, and Thoreau memoirs, and Belknap discusses their surprising variety of pattern, intention, scope, art, and even philosophy.This exercise in literary analysis provides with an interesting selection, sampling the writers' overall styles; on my part, it elicited curiosity about a careful and, why not, creatively interpretative reading of the 4 authors' productions
: lists may be surprisingly crafted.
Labels: analysis, books, lists
