Brian Kiteley
Three-Dimensional
Thinking
The
contemporary, accepted meaning of the word list
is a catalogue or roll consisting of a series of names, figures, or words. In early use, a list was a catalogue of the
names of persons engaged in the same
duties or connected with the same
object (useful to keep that in mind—a gathering of details around one
concept). The word list derives from an old French word for a strip of paper. Obsolete uses of the word include art,
craft, or cunning. Pleasure, job, and
delight, as well as longing and appetite, precede the notion of inventory. One also lists, inclining to one side, as a
ship or a drunk does. An inventory is a detailed list of such as
goods and chattels, or parcels of land, found to have been in the possession of
a person at his decease or conviction, sometimes with a statement
of the nature and value of each. Inventory and list both represent a mortal accounting of the things left of a
life. Novels have had similar urges, to
account for the things and actions left behind by a life (E. M. Forster said
the novel represents “life by time,” as opposed to the more ancient
desire to portray “life by values”).
The
inventory story (Charles Baxter’s phrase) might seem like a relatively
rare phenomenon. I propose that it is
not so rare. We are accustomed to the
cause and effect of narrative. Steve
Evans, a critic of poetry, says “mimesis is tied to
conformity.” There is, he
suggests, an “overwhelming urge to do what others do when representing
reality.” The list as an operating
metaphor for narration is also linear (as is most traditional fiction), but it
cuts off the notion of cause and effect at its roots. An ancient inventory story is the myth of Cadmus, who slew a dragon and sewed the dragon’s
teeth into the earth. Up grew an army of
soldiers. The myth is supposed to
represent the new preference for alphabetic languages (over hieroglyphic
languages). The dragons’ teeth are
the alphabet, another list. Priests of
fierce learning were the only men able to read hieroglyphics. The alphabet was more accessible, making
written language the domain of generals, as well as priests. This new language system moved the power away
from the intellectuals and into the hands of the military/industrial complex.
There’s
a line I like from one of the Star Trek
movies. Spock is advising Kirk on how to
battle Khan, a 20th century result of a eugenics experiment gone
bad, brilliant and megalomaniacal (he was frozen and revived in the 23rd
century). Spock says as much—that
Khan is very smart, but his tactics betray two-dimensional thinking. The implication is that Kirk has been trained
in space wars, where you have to look not only in every direction along one
plane, but up and down, with planes intersecting you at every possible
angle. The inventory story is
three-dimensional thinking.
•
• •
The Annals of Saint
Gall
709. Hard Winter.
Duke Gottfried died.
710. Hard year and deficient in crops.
711.
712. Flood everywhere.
713.
714. Pippin, mayor of the palace, died.
715. 716.
717.
718. Charles devastated the Saxon with great
destruction.
719.
720. Charles fought against the Saxons.
721. Theudo drove the Saracens
out of Aquitaine
722. Great crops
723.
724.
725. Saracens came for the first time.
Hayden White, in The Content of the Form, comments on
this list (The Annals of Saint Gall):
This list immediately
locates us in a culture hovering on the brink of dissolution, a society of
radical scarcity, a world of human groups threatened by death, devastation,
flood, and famine. All of the events are
extreme, and the implicit criterion for selecting them for remembrance is their
liminal nature.
Basic need—food, security from external enemies, political and
military leadership—and the threat of their not being provided are
subjects of concern; but the connection between basic needs and the conditions
for their possible satisfaction is not explicitly commented on. Why “Charles fought against the
Saxons” remains as unexplained as why one year yielded “great
crops” and another produced “floods everywhere.” Social events are apparently as incomprehensible
as natural events. They seem merely to
have the same order of importance and unimportance. They seem merely to have occurred, and their
importance seems to be indistinguishable from the fact that they were
recorded. In fact, it seems that their
importance consists in nothing other than their having been recorded.
Janice Gangel-Vasquez:
The
burden on deaf children who are learning to read goes well beyond decoding a
written system. Andrews and Mason note
that the isolation of most deaf children creates knowledge gaps in their
worldview, which interferes with their ability to understand relationships
between ideas. For example, deaf
children perceive stories as lists of discrete lexical signs, unlike hearing
children who more quickly perceive the structure as a series of connected
events.
Jess Row, in Slate:
Another kind of
disembodiment takes place in Susan Sontag's
"Project for a Trip to
This way of
presenting a story by alternate means was very much in vogue in the late '80s and
throughout the '90s. The story could
take the form of a sequence of photographs in a wedding album (Heidi Julavits, "Marry the One Who Gets There First"),
a personal bibliography (Rick Moody, "Primary Sources"), or a group
of reviews (Anthony Giardina, "The Films of
Richard Egan"). Implicit in the
inventory form is a certain structural irony: The surface text (whether a
"catalog," a "project," or a "bibliography") has
its own logic, and the story emerges in spite of that logic—through gaps,
omissions, parenthetical remarks, footnotes.
It's surely no accident that the inventory-story became popular at a
time when we swam in a sea of trivial, distracting, often useless
data—stock quotes, "factoids," logos, advertising jingles,
spam. Sontag
herself might have pointed out that it bears a certain resemblance to the
collage, which became popular in the 1920s and '30s, in an era of anxiety about
the mass reproduction of visual images.
An exercise from
my own book, The 3 A.M. Epiphany:
Listful. Write a
story that is a list. A story that
relies on the qualities of a list as its form or operating metaphor can be
dandy. A grocery list that includes a
wife’s complaints about her husband’s slothful habits is one
example. You might also write about
collections that appear on your own or friends’ shelves—books,
DVD’s, videos, CD’s, records, trophies, glass figurines—some
commentary on the nature of this list is acceptable, but don’t get
carried away explaining the contents.
Stick to the notion that this is a list as much as you can—not a
list that devolves into a traditional story.
600 words.
A lesson this exercise should impart is that
narrative moves forward in many inventive, unexpected, and unusual ways, even
without the traditional trappings of story. A good example of this kind of story is Tim
O’Brien’s story “The Things They Carried,” from the
book of stories with the same title. The
story details the contents of the backpacks a platoon of soldiers carries off
into battle or on their long marches.
The contents dictate the direction of the story, rather than a more
traditional approach, which would have been to let the story organize the
telling of the contents. The list does
not need to be part of a fictional world.
William Gass’s beautiful book of philosophy
and literary criticism, On Being Blue,
is not much more than a verbal collection of blue things in the world and
things called blue. Gass’s
great story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” operates
similarly as a list of things to hate about a small
A Night to
Remember, a book about the doomed
ship The Titanic, ends with a simple
twenty-page list of the people on board the ship when it sank. Names in regular font died; names in italics
survived—a powerful and moving set of stories keyed to modest
typography. The list also breaks down
the survivors and the dead according to class, and in the Third Class section
according to nationality, another cruelty that was in keeping with the way the
story was reported at the time.
When Maya Lin proposed the Vietnam War Memorial in