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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Henry Reed's poem of the Second World War offers a studied, ironic catalogue of some parts of experience silencing others. Here are observable facts, given as imperative command; knowledge of their use is for the future, rather than a possession of the present, however: one of the many things we (or you) have not got. Here also is the beauty of nature and its utter irrelevance to the human struggle. “Naming of Parts” excludes more than it includes: what is not said constantly overbears and threatens to break through what is. But the balance of information is precariously maintained, the unspeakable, the horror which is the truth of the war being disguised, expressed, and controlled in the naming of parts.
In a very different register, William Gass writes in his Habitations of the Word,
Lists, then, are for those who savor, who revel and wallow, who embrace, not only the whole of things, but all of its accounts, histories, descriptions, justifications.
1 Reed, Henry, “Naming of Parts,” A Map of Verona (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946; rpt. 1970), 22Google Scholar.
2 “And,” Habitations of the Word (New York: Touchstone Books, 1985), 178Google Scholar. It is not by chance that Whitman is the presiding spirit of Gass's observations: the greatest of American “literary list-ers,” his catalogues have provided a notable crux of criticism.
3 Donald Barthelme, interview 1980.
4 “See the Moon?” Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1968), 169Google Scholar.
5 Quoted by Fender, Stephen, American Literature in Context, 1620–1830 (London: Methuen, 1983), 16Google Scholar.
6 Ibid., 20–26.
7 I am grateful to Clive Bush for drawing my attention, in correspondence, to Jefferson's connection with Camden and the English County Topographies, and for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
8 24 March, 1782; quoted by Peden, , introduction to Notes on Virginia, xivGoogle Scholar.
9 Letters from an American Farmer (1782), ed. Stone, Albert E. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 69Google Scholar.
10 See also Ferguson, Robert A., “‘Mysterious Obligation’: Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia” American Literature, 52, no. 3, 388–389Google Scholar.
11 The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Koch, Adrienne and Peden, William (New York, 1944), 719Google Scholar.
12 Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Peden, William (1954; rpt W. W. Norton & Co., 1972), 91Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this edition are incorporated in the text.
13 Philbrick, Thomas, “Thomas Jefferson,” in Emerson, Everett, ed., American Literature 1764–1789: The Revolutionary Years (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 162Google Scholar.
14 See, for example, Freneau's poem “To an Author” (1788): “An age employed in edging steel/Can no poetic rapture feel.”
15 Jefferson, 's version of the Declaration of Independence in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Peterson, Merrill D. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 19Google Scholar.
16 Ibid., 23.
17 See his Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1977), 27Google Scholar.
18 Reflecting on Ernest Hemingway's programmatically paratactic style (and by extension a characteristic mode of American writing), Harry Levin identifies the recurrent device of anacoluthon, “the rhetoric of the gradual breakdown and the fresh start. Hence, the first half [of the sentence] is an uncharacteristic and unsuccessful endeavour to complete an elaborate grammatical structure which soon gets out of control. The second half thereupon brings the subject as quickly and simply as possible to its object, which opens up at once into the familiar Hemingway catalogue, where effects can be gained seriatim by order rather than by construction.” (“Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway,” Contexts of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 148Google Scholar. One might posit that at the level of textual structure rather than that of the sentence, Jefferson's Notes works in an analogous way.
19 22 February 1814. Quoted by Miller, Charles A., Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 34Google Scholar.
20 Introduction to The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings: Lists in Literature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989), 5Google Scholar.
21 “Foreward” to Thomas Jefferson's Library: A Catalog with the Entries in His Own Order, eds. Gilreath, James and Wilson, Douglas L. (Washington: Library of Congress, 1989), ixGoogle Scholar. Jefferson's classification became America's when Congress adopted the library and its catalogue entire.
22 Thomas Jefferson's Library, viiGoogle Scholar.
23 The Sage of Monticello (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981), 169Google Scholar.
24 Leaves of Grass, 1891–92 edition, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose of Walt Whitman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 611Google Scholar.
25 Peterson, Merrill, Introduction to The Portable Thomas Jefferson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), xiGoogle Scholar.
26 Ibid., xi.
27 The History of the United States During the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson, 1801–1805 (1889–91), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 188Google Scholar.
28 Though of course there is more to be said here; as I have indicated, all lists and all listing have their agendas and preferred modes of perception. Jefferson's are no exception: if these place him firmly in relation to the ethnology, botany, geology and aesthetics of the final quarter of the eighteenth century, they also suggest the extent to which his unique revolutionary and personal position enabled Jefferson to exploit the characteristics of their respective genera in a creative fusion of political and rhetorical possibilities.
29 Letters from an American Farmer, 86ffGoogle Scholar.
30 “The Poet,” Essays, Second Series, Riverside Edition of the Complete Works of Emerson, R. W., Volume III (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1885), 23Google Scholar.
31 “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1969; rpt. 1978), 67Google Scholar.
