Of the making of lists there is a grand tradition in (what we may still call) Western literature. I am not thinking of the lists found in Herculaneum or Pompeii, lists of papyri manuscripts stashed in private libraries, or those lists of groceries, household utensils or shipping manifests - casks and barrels, jugs and amphorae, salt and ale, rope and sail, thole and pin; not the catalogs in cuneiform of granary or warehouse, harem or household, tax office or counting house; not what we think of as laundry or (worse) "to-do" lists. Nor even of such awful and august lists as the list of our ten principle sins in the Bible, arguably the first novel of the Western canon.
I am speaking of the rich, rambling, allusive list as an integral form of imaginative literature in a tradition stretching from Cervantes' Sancho through Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel) to Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy), Jonathan Swift to Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy). Here for starters is one of Sancho Panza's typical rambling soliloquies in Don Quixote, stringing together (to Quixote's disgust) a medley of freely associated proverbs to make an obscure point:
“I can sign my name,” responded Sancho, “because when I was a steward in my town, I learned to make some letters like they use to mark on bales, and they said that it was my name. Besides, I can pretend that my right hand is maimed and I can have someone else sign for me. There’s a remedy for everything except death, and holding the power and the staff, I’ll do whatever I want. And what’s more, «he who has a bailiff for a father . . . or They’ll come for wool and go back shorn, and the lucky man has nothing to worry about. And the foolish remarks of the rich man pass for wisdom in the world. And being a governor and liberal at the same time, as I plan to be, they’ll think I’m flawless. Make yourself into honey and the flies will eat you up. As my grandmother used to say, you’re worth as much as you have. And you can’t take vengeance on the landed gentry . . . . My only wealth is proverbs and more proverbs. And right now four of them come to mind that fit the situation exactly, like peaches in a basket . . . . What better ones are there than never put your thumbs between your wisdom teeth, and to ‘leave my home’ and ‘what do you want with my wife?’ there’s nothing to answer, and if the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it’s bad for the pitcher? All of them fit perfectly. . . . So, why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye with never a thought for the plank in your own, lest it be said of him: the dead woman was frightened to see another with a slit throat. And your grace already knows the one about the fool knows more in his own house than the wise man in someone else’s.”
Or consider Rabelais's registry of curses the Parisians hurled at Pantagruel when the giant unzipped in urbe and let go a flood of piss as payment for the rude welcome they gave him:"God's plagues upon him! (There can't be a god.)
Mother of God, Francine!
By Christ's holy head!
Passion of God confound him!
God almighty!
By the belly of Saint Quenet!
O, the heavy hand of God!
By Saint Fiacre of Brie!
Saint Trinian help us!
By Christ's last supper!
By God's bright day!
The devil take me!
Pon'st a gentleman's honor!
Holy Saint Andrew!
By Saint Godegrin, stoned to death with his own apples!
By the saints Foutin and Vitus!
O Saint Mamica, you virgin martyr!
By all pigs in pokes! We've been drenched for a laugh!"
Robert Burton's Melancholia (1621) is a cornucopia of lists, not least in his enumerations of the various crannies in the brain where the animal spirits are stored - animal spirits being, as you will recall, the medium for such subtle events as our "thoughts, passions and imaginings, all sentiments light or heavy, joyous, melancholic, whether reasonable or mad, a highly refined and rarefied liquor whose subtle influence occasions the motions of the humors in all the assorted ventricles, chasms, receptacles, creeks, channels, conduits, rivulets, ravines, puddles and reservoirs, byways, courses serene or rapid of the brain, transmitting commands and volitions to the limbs and likewise transforming the perturbations and oscillations of the nerves into images, impulses, sensations, smells, sounds, appetites, wishes, perceptions, doubts, deliriums, visions and what have you."
The urge to list things as a literary mode seems to me a lost art, a glaring lacuna, a gaping loss, a deficiency of invention, a paucity of imagination, a timidity of thought, a malaise of vocabulary, a want of brio in the literature of (at least) the last two-and-a-quarter centuries. I may easily be proven wrong by the occasional counterexample, a literary lister who proves my rule by exception. My general point stands.
Listing in the course of a fine telling can strain the vocabulary to eloquence, exhaust or adumbrate the possibilities in the subject at hand, open the ventricles of the heart and the hibernated recesses of the brain, open the kidneys, stimulate the bowels, make the legs twitch and the eyes roll, cleanse the palate, clear the mental sinuses, open new vistas and reillumine familiar views. All in a few extra words. Which will perhaps not escape a commercial literary editor, a task which any reasonably intelligent person is well advised to take up on her own.
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