Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (review)

Abstract

dates from 1836. The American literary list thus parallels the rise of an emerging society where raw democratic energies and all-consuming material ambitions swept aside static hierarchy and received opinions. Such lists embody a kind of political self-mastery. Taking his cue from Emerson, Whitman in Leaves of Grass embodied a poetics of listing that is rich in sensual detail and incantatory exuberance. With Whitman, the poem as literary artifact became an unprecedented space flung open to objects, details, and references whose artful inclusivity, says Belknap, “becomes universally welcoming, open to all facets of life, according to his vision of a plural America” (74). Whitman’s richly modulated catalogs are, with Emerson’s Essays, radical literary expressions of the American democratic experiment. The lists in Moby Dick, by contrast, supply material density as a counterpoint to an unseen core of metaphysical nothingness. With his lists and symbolism Melville accentuated a Gnostic parable with the practical concerns of a nineteenth-century ship’s chandler and factoids about whales and whaling. And with regard to whales and the symbolism of whiteness, Belknap points out how Ishmael represses the association of whiteness with a book’s blank page despite the fact that “he has elsewhere been so conscious of the figurative aspects of books, swimming through libraries, bibliographically classifying whales” (163– 64). Here again, lists and listing establish connections among the most disparate spheres of existence, from browsing quiet library stacks to witnessing (and surviving) terrifying maritime events. Thoreau’s keen interest in natural history and his familiarity with classical languages helped him transform botanical observations into remarkably thorough lists and catalogs. The ordering of direct observations represented the kind of attentiveness to life and nature that signaled Thoreau’s rejection of occupational practicality (or professionalism) in favor of private self-fashioning. To the nominalism of bare public fact Thoreau opposed particularized facts, facts that “tell who I am, and where I have been or what I have thought. . . . [T]hey shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic” (197). In both Walden and his journals the catalog and the list record the evolution of an interiorized moral economy rooted in careful observations of the natural world. The list of American writers influenced by Thoreau would require a separate bibliography of American prose in various genres. Belknap has written an engaging survey of lists, listing, and textual catalogs, paying particular attention to their significance in literary production during the American Renaissance. As a rhetorical device the list enabled Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau to transcribe and reorder both private and public experiences. The enormous expressive range of these lists and catalogs—political, symbolic, factual, mythological, scientific, literary, notational—also makes a compelling case for their integral role in fashioning American cultural sensibilities.