The Poetics of Listing, Enumeration, and Copiousness in Joyce, Schuyler, Mccourt, Pynchon, and Perec
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2012 Twentieth-Century Catalogs: The Poetics of Listing, Enumeration, and Copiousness in Joyce, Schuyler, McCourt, Pynchon, and Perec Timothy Krause The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1429 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Twentieth-Century Catalogs: The Poetics of Listing, Enumeration, and Copiousness in Joyce, Schuyler, McCourt, Pynchon, and Perec by Timothy Krause A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2012 ii ©2012 TIMOTHY KRAUSE All rights reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Wayne Koestenbaum ___________________________ _______________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Carrie Hintz ___________________________ ________________________________ Date Executive Officer Rachel Brownstein Gerhard Joseph Wayne Koestenbaum Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract Twentieth-Century Catalogs: The Poetics of Listing, Enumeration, and Copiousness in Joyce, Schuyler, McCourt, Pynchon, and Perec by Timothy Krause Adviser: Professor Wayne Koestenbaum This dissertation examines the occurrence of catalogs and lists in the literary works of several twentieth-century authors, including James Joyce, poet James Schuyler, novelist and cultural historian James McCourt, the postmodern fabulist Thomas Pynchon, and the French experimental prose author Georges Perec. The dissertation seeks to trace how each author makes use of catalogs in his work, how catalogs form a central part of his style and subject matter, and how his use of catalogs can be read against the biographical, historical, and social contexts surrounding his life and work. A theoretical introduction situates my work among theorists of epistemology, narrative, objectification, and desire, theorists such as Foucault (order and classification), Deleuze and Guattari (rhizome vs. root systems), and Susan Stewart (the impulse toward collecting, the gigantic). Catalogs and lists are shown to be modes of literary representation with a millennial past, dating all the way back to Homer, and with strikingly contemporary resonances, especially for twentieth-first-century readers and critics living in the wake of Modernism and postmodernism. v Acknowledgments: Pace McCourt, to all who waited, but most of all to Grace, always vi Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Joyce’s Catalogs 46 3. “Let’s make a list”: James Schuyler’s Catalogs 104 4. The Magic Circle: James McCourt’s Mawrdew Czgowchwz 178 5. “What ruinous mosaic. .”: The Postmodern Catalogs of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow 234 6. Georges Perec’s Melancholy Catalogs 279 Bibliography 339 1 1. Introduction First, the word: catalog (or catalogue), from French catalogue, which derives from Latin catalogus, which in turn comes from Greek κατάλογος (transliterated as katalogos): a list, an arrangement of data in sequential units, a catalog. The Greek noun derives from the verb καταλέγειν (katalegein, from kata, “down” + legein, “to write”), which means “to choose, pick out, enlist, enroll, reckon in a list, etc.”:1 “to write down,” then, not in the sense of vertically down the surface of a scroll or tablet or monument (the Greeks wrote on papyrus and in stone), but down in the sense of into, on, thereupon, to inscribe: to write down, then, to inscribe, record, preserve; to write for memory’s retrieval; to write that nothing may be left out, nothing forgotten. Or, simply, to write, with, as the saying goes, emphasis added: an act of writing par excellence, of writing in one of its earliest, most direct and mnemotechnic forms. Henri-Jean Martin notes the origins of catalogs in ancient Mesopotamia, in the need “to commit to memory concrete bits of information”: This quite naturally led the Mesopotamian scribes to make a science of the art of organizing a list and using a clay surface to make selections and reclassifications in tables arranged in columns. Administrative lists, inventories, and accounts testify to their ingenuity. Above all the complexity of their script soon led them to make up lists of signs, lists that are true lexicographical compendia. These lexicons exclude verbs and adjectives to concentrate on the nouns that, in their minds, were closely connected with existence and reality. Not only did such lists provide materials for a number of specific definitions, they suggested ways to classify reality that extended to the ordering of all things.2 Catalogs were eminently practical, recording for easy retrieval any number of things in the real world: names of kings to be remembered to posterity for eternity; genealogies of one’s race, tribe, and family, illustrious patriarchs and forebears—rarely women—whose stern examples shone like lights from a darkened past; names of administrators and other subjects of the state, 1 OED, catalogue, n. 2 Martin, 88. 2 any of whom might be in need at a given moment; stores of provisions, foodstuffs, wine, grains, the culinary backbones of early civilizations, whose exact numbering was at all times critical to a community’s survival; names of gods to be propitiated by sinful, thankless man. In addition to their practicality as recorders of the quotidian, catalogs were also from the first invested with another dimension, one tending toward expressivity, uncertainty, play, juxtaposition, and chaos, one that belied the smooth lines of enumerated objects with a running subtext of unforeseen correspondences, and that even questions the possibility of comprehensiveness itself. Catalogs, by their very nature as finished, closed verbal objects, raise inevitable questions as to what has been excluded, what doesn’t fit, what the criteria for selection were, and a host of other linguistic-cultural issues as well: questions of epistemology and representation, how the human mind categorizes and describes the phenomenal world; questions of language, culture, power, gender, ideology, and class; questions of the sign’s relation to that which it signifies, and the eternally fraught relationship between the two. Sometimes catalogs provoke questions about their provenance, stability, and claims to truth through their sheer length, their taxonomic syntax shorn of qualifiers, their impenetrability: questions about the catalog’s claims to completeness; questions about its accuracy; questions about the sheer folly of trying to say anything accurate at all. This dissertation naturally inclines, from both its author’s disposition and the data uncovered during research and analysis, toward the latter pole of catalogs. Especially with the use of catalogs in literature, this second, more suggestive side of catalogs—a mode that eschews the strict utilitarian nature of catalogs in favor of associative speculation, metanarrative, aleatory links and haptic (not static, hieratic) knowledge-formation— presents facets and phenomena that outshine the literal. As Jean Bottéro notes of Hammurabi’s 3 law codes, so, too, all catalogs: they record “not only the common and commonly observable reality, but also the exceptional, the aberrant: in the end, everything possible.”3 While literary catalogs and lists are generally understudied, there has been some recent interest in catalogs, lists, and the poetics of enumeration, and this study has the good fortune to come after others that have broken ground. One study that has proved invaluable to mine is Robert E. Belknap’s The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing, published in 2004, the result of a revised doctoral thesis. Of particular use have been Belknap’s wide-ranging introduction, which spans the tablet-lists of the ancient Mesopotamians down to our own catalogs of hypermodernity, the top-ten and Amazon.com Listmania! lists—as well as his elegantly-focused reading of four great American Renaissance authors and their catalogs: Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau. Belknap has been an invaluable counter-example as well: this study, leaving behind Belknap’s pacific readings of a sunnier American nineteenth century, moves into darker, more discordant texts of the twentieth. Similarly, I eschew the tidy unities of four related authors (all nineteenth-century Americans aware of each others’ work), for a set of five authors chosen—like Carol Mavor’s immortal quintumvirate Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott in Reading Boyishly—partly by whim, partly by whatever secret affinities I’ve detected (created?) between them. The five authors are James Joyce, James Schuyler, James McCourt, Thomas Pynchon, and Georges Perec: five men, four novelists and a poet, three Americans and two Europeans, all singular practitioners of the art of the catalog. Another work influential for this study is Patti White’s Gatsby’s Party: The System and the List in Contemporary Narrative, which, while looking at different authors than mine— 3 Quoted in Manguel, 110. 4 American postmodernists such as John Barth