The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (review)

Abstract

The universe may be defined as a random series of interminable lists. Robert Belknap posits the list and its ordering structure as both a literary and utilitarian construct, with some overlapping and shading among various literary lists that link “dissimilar modes of factual and poetic thinking” (182). To an obvious degree all lists are disjunctive and combinative, “organized blocks of information . . . the sum of its parts and the individual parts themselves” (15). Apparently simple, the list is implicated in a broad array of epistemic, rhetorical, and cultural constructs. Lists usually transform meaning through accretion, juxtaposition, and contrast, to mention only their most salient features. This is an old theme. The Homeric list of Greek forces in book 2 of the Iliad, for example, described the individual ships of a vast naval armada soon to be hurled into war. Bibliographic lists in the Alexandrian Library provided access to different versions of Homer’s epics as well as access to Homeric commentaries. For millennia census lists have provided summary information on people and property. Today, lists have exploded on the World Wide Web, shaping our engagement with commerce, art, popular culture, and learning. The list is a ubiquitous feature of cyberspace, generating automatic algorithmic responses to “queries” in electronic library catalogs and Google-like search engines. It is omnipresent in commercial bibliographic databases, online booksellers, and innumerable proprietary websites. Lists are implicated in surveillance; to be added to or stricken off a list might spell disaster or salvation. In a bureaucratic twist on Bishop Berkeley, it might be claimed that to be is to be listed. With the enormous impact of Gutenberg the list, in addition to its diverse imaginative uses, began to function metaphorically as a kind of textual maneuver against information overload and the geographic dispersal of books. Specific examples of this include Rabelais (gastronomy and scatology) and Conrad Gesner (protobibliography). Francis Bacon’s empiricism is in some measure a by-product of his brisk accumulation and listing of facts. The droll logorrhoeic carnival in The Anatomy of Melancholy is heightened by an encyclopedic accumulation of definitions and allusions, presumably enlisted by Burton to elude the onset of melancholy in himself and the reader. A little later nature itself comes under the simplifying gaze of Linnaeus’s famous taxonomic list, a precursor to other scientific lists like the periodic table or what Belknap calls the pragmatic list, “whose finely distinguished categories, with the official validation of science, could be shuffled and arranged with analytical precision” (168). Some five hundred years after Gesner, modern bibliography posits specialized lists to encompass the book as both a material and a cultural/historical artifact. Robert Belknap situates the story of the literary list in the American Renaissance, taking as his starting point the Transcendentalist catalog, with its panoramic dynamism and philosophical assumptions about the commonality underlying seemingly discrete objects. The foundational text, Emerson’s Nature,