The textual and media form of the list is as simple as it is complex. Lists are simple in that they adhere to certain patterns, are easy to identify typographically, abbreviate, and subsume. At the same time, they are complex, ranging across the most disparate fields of tension, in which they express their rhetorical and literary efficacy. Such efficacy includes matters of tellability and untellablity; cohesion and disintegration; homogenization and heterogenization; paratext and subordination; the wielding of and criticism of power, memory, and oblivion; and reification and subjectification.

The extent to which lists can generate cohesion or disintegration, the wielding of power or anarchy, depends not only on the listing agent and his or her categorizations and subsumptions but also on the listed items themselves—be they images, icons, or linguistic signs, or be they headlines, which abbreviate facts, circumstances, or cue words, which initiate a chain of associations. They belong to a range of categories and functional contexts: when a list gathers people (e.g., such as the women seduced by Don Giovanni and registered by his servant Leporello in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni; see Vedder 2001) or enumerates things (such as possessions recorded in inventories; see Vedder 2008) or records actions or events. Particularly revealing are those literary lists whose items thematize the process of writing, that is, those which evoke a “writing-scene” (see Campe 1991):

The term ‘writing scene’ is to be understood as the framed ensemble of instrumentality, gesture and language, provided that these factors do not become the object or source of possible or actual resistance. Where, on the other hand, this ensemble, in its reluctant heterogeneity and instability, resides and problematizes itself, we can speak of a ‘writing-scene.’ (Giurato 2012, 306)

While a “writing scene” (Schreibszene) is ultimately inherent in every written text insofar as it refers as a written text to the pertinent media, materiality, and writing agents, a “writing-scene” (Schreib-Szene) is characterized by its thematization of the resistance to writing, that is, by its heterogenization. A fundamental assumption in the following readings is that the list—in its conspicuous (and suspicious) form and with its structural tension—is a particularly suitable genre for this purpose: if its issue is writing, that is, in the context of a poetic list, it is to be understood as a writing-scene.Footnote 1

The following will focus on those “poetological lists” that, in the second half of the twentieth century, consolidate the self-reflexive potential of literary texts, gather seeds of narration in list form, stage the conditions for a non-linear narrative in the list, or even thematize the “genea-logic” of narrative and writing insomuch as “data, impressions and objects” which are strung together in lists are brought into a new “form liberated from their origin” (Pordzik 2017, 208). To this end, let us consider four lists from the most disparate of genres—lyric poetry, the manifesto, the novel, and the autobiography—each of which is poetically effective in its own way as a writing-scene. What is meant here are neither textual precursors (see Mainberger 2003) such as those known in the form of excerpt collections, word indices, or chapter listings for the writing processes of Jean Paul (register), Novalis (Brouillon), or Emile Zola (dossiers) nor paratextual elements such as indices.Footnote 2 Instead, the poetological lists considered below consist of a long poem (Inger Christensen), a manifesto (Jack Kerouac), a passage from a novel (Italo Calvino), and a section of an autobiographical text (Roland Barthes). Each of these lists reflects not only writing and poetics but also their respective genres.

Lyric Poetry

The naming and enumeration of that which exists is the simplest form for representing things and events. The act of registering something, meanwhile, is also a means of appropriation, which proceeds under the guidance of an order arising from the enumerator’s directive—indeed, it is also an act of creation: of order, of the world. In Inger Christensen’s equally simple and intricate long poem alfabet (1981), beginning with “a,” the world, speaking and enumerating, is inventoried and simultaneously recreated. This creation follows two orders: the linguistic sequence of the Latin alphabet and the mathematical one based on the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number represents the sum of its two predecessors (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, …). The section for the letter “a” thus contains one verse, “b” two verses, “c” three, “d” five, “e” eight, and so on. It not only lists what exists in the sense of an inventory of the world—“apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist”—but through repetition and creative combination the world is simultaneously reconstructed and conjured forth:Verse

Verse 1 abrikostræerne findes, abrikostræerne findes 2 bregnerne findes; og brombær, brombær og brom findes; og brinten, brinten 3 cikaderne findes; cikorie, chrom og citrontræer findes; cikaderne findes; cikaderne, ceder, cypres, cerebellum 4 duerne findes; drømmerne, dukkerne dræberne findes; duerne, duerne; dis, dioxin og dagene; dagene findes; dagene døden; og digtene findes; digtene, dagene, døden 5 efteråret findes; eftersmagen og eftertanken findes; og enrummet findes, englene, enkerne og elsdyret findes; enkelthederne findes, erindringen, erindringens lys; og efterlyset findes, egetræet og elmetræet findes, og enebærbusken, ensheden, ensomheden findes, og edderfuglen og edderkoppen findes, og eddiken findes, og eftertidern, eftertidenFootnote

Christensen, Inger. 2001. alfabet / alphabet. https://sites.northwestern.edu/jac808/ 2014/02/28/alphabet-inger-christensen/. Translated by Susanna Nied: “1 apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist // 2 bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries; / bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen // 3 cicadas exist; chicory, chromium, / citrus trees; cicadas exist; / cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum // 4 doves exist, dreamers, and dolls; / killers exist, and doves, and doves; / haze, dioxin, and days; days / exist, days and death; and poems / exist; poems, days, death // 5 early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought / seclusion and angels exist; / widows and elk exist; every / detail exists; memory, memory’s light; / afterglow exists; oaks, elms, / junipers, sameness, loneliness exist; / eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar / exist, and the future, the future.”

This list poem spans between subjective openness and systematic sequence, conjuring up things in the worldFootnote 4 and, at the same time, taking aim neither at the sovereignty of the lyrical “I” nor at the wholeness of world (or of the alphabet, for the poem ends at “n” and thus shows for Christensen’s part what constitutes lists: reference to that which lies beyond the limits of their textual boundaries). Instead, the intersection of alphabetical and mathematical series reveals the varying degrees of order and dispersion in Inger Christensen’s strophic and list-like enumerations, which are generated by the coordinate axes:

There they sat, those words, on large pieces of white paper, words starting with a, with b, with c, and so on, and if I’d kept at it much longer it would have looked like an odd, unorganized dictionary, a wilderness of disjointed phenomena. And then came mathematics. For, since phenomena themselves never occur just because they are given names, it was my good fortune that, in my search for words (in a dictionary under f), I happened upon numbers, specifically, the Fibonacci numbers. (Christensen 1999, 23–24)

Herein lies the crossover between Christensen’salfabet and the principle of the list and enumeration, as Sabine Mainberger summarizes it:

Enumerations exhibit various degrees of connection and cohesion or disintegration and dispersion, i.e. the elements are more or less bound or independent. In enumerative passages of a text, one of two sides can come to force: either the structuring and grouping which creates order according to some principle can predominate – i.e. the organizing enumeration – or the ‘mere’ enumeration with its effects of fragmentation and diffusion and its propensity for formlessness is emphasized. (Mainberger 2018, 94–95)

But Inger Christensen’salfabet is not about escaping the “wilderness of disjointed phenomena” with the help of alphabetical-mathematical ordering patterns but about sounding out epistemological decisions, as indicated by the list form.Footnote 5 Moreover, the poem seeks to oppose in vigorous and persistent fashion the utter destruction represented by the cipher “atombomben finds”/“the atom bomb exists” (Christensen 2001), which is placed in the poem between “j” and “k” with slight variations. The constructive list, equally rational and magical in its capacity to create both worlds and continuance, thus simultaneously calls attention at its own composition and to its threatened nature, capable as such an elliptical writing-scene of evoking the world in its fragility. At the same time, alfabet insists on the sensuousness and reality of the world and hence also opposes—qua list form—“the stringent charge of aesthetic futility […] that a postmodern age hurls against poetic endeavors.”Footnote 6 In this sense as well, Christensen’slist poem represents a poetological commentary on the present.

The Manifesto

The list as an organon in which poetological considerations are formulated is also found in literary manifestos. Both in their potential for abbreviation as well as in their unique temporality, lists generally represent a suitable form for manifestos, which are characterized by their ability to fix in a pointedly programmatic, that is, non-narrative way, what “could or, more importantly, should occur in the future” (Rieger 2014, 135). For, on the one hand, it is the abbreviation as facilitated by lists—owing, for example, to their columnal form, the syntactic incompleteness of their items or their repetitive structure—which also characterizes manifestos with their catchy, beckoning formulations:

Nor does the manifesto develop any narrative flow. Rather, its syntax derives from an intrinsically tiered agenda, whose step-by-step processing gives the manifestos the form of a catalog of measures, whose individual items are occasionally just numbered. The texture is interrupted, thetically, structured by paragraphs, and sentences are often concluded with an exclamation mark. (Rieger 2014, 136)

On the other hand, the manifesto and the list, more precisely the “prospective list,”Footnote 7 are linked by a specific temporality. It is certainly true that lists, because they do not develop narratives, “do not possess any index of time.”Footnote 8 Yet, they exhibit—not only as genealogical lists with their chronologies and memorial component—a certain temporality, be it in the aforementioned prospective sense of a future or an ordering of time generated through the rhythmization of form. Both are exemplified in a manifesto written in list form by Beat author Jack Kerouac.

Under the title Belief & Technique for Modern Prose (1959), Jack Kerouac assembles a numbered list of 30 items. In these “Essentials,” as he refers to them, he captures his writing style—that of the “Beat Generation”—which focuses on everyday life and spontaneity, on his own body and his own life with its rhythm. Poetology is formulated in list form, which at the same time becomes performative within that same form: not only in its correspondence to the genre of the manifesto, which “is [generally] performative in its structure – as a speech act, as showing and as proclaiming something that becomes mani-fest” (Brandstetter 2017, 18), but also in the peculiarity of the Beat agenda.

In this manner, improvisation and spontaneity become apparent, which are thematized in the following items and which also appear in list form:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better (Kerouac 1992, 58–59)

Indeed, Kerouac’s “Essentials” do not form a well-formulated manifesto but rather give the impression of a spontaneously and hastily recorded list (in which “your” is abbreviated throughout as “yr” as if to write faster). Although the textual calculations can hardly be mistaken—this including the list format as an index of spontaneity—here the causality operates in the opposite direction: the choice of the list format is deliberately planned precisely because it opens up space for improvisation. Furthermore, the list requires a certain type of procedure—of rhythm and breathing—thus reflecting the Beat Generation’s nod to contemporary jazz and its practice of improvisation, rhythmization, and controlled breathing. Indeed, with the perpetually novel positioning of the numbered items, it is the role of breathing, along with a certain driving dynamic, which comes into focus, as Stefanie Heine claims: “Precisely where nothing is written or thought, in the space reserved for breathing, the idea for that which follows is generated. […] Kerouac consciously creates this space through the list form, which demands the repeated usage of a number void of meaning” (Heine 2014, 256). What’s more: with such breathing, life itself seems to animate the list as the Beat manifesto itself demands:

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

20. Believe in the holy contour of life

25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

Numerous subsequent pop-writers from Rolf Dieter Brinkmann (e.g., in Nichts, 1965, or In der Seitenstraße, 1966) to Rainald Goetz (e.g., in Abfall für alle, 1999) follow this poetological maxim with their list literature. Brinkmann’s poetological essay Der Film in Worten (1969) also explicitly refers to a list entry from Kerouac’s manifesto (see Meyer-Sickendiek 2018, 30–31):

26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

The mundane (“exactly what is”) demanded and practiced in the manifesto therefore also includes the contemporary media reality and with it a distinct visuality:

16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

In this sense, the list also functions, as it were, as a visual phenomenon which thematizes “seeing” in a performative manner. This becomes even more pronounced when lists are inserted into prose texts.

The Novel

Another poetological list can be found in a novel that is not just about novels—and how to become immersed in them—but which also consists exclusively of the beginnings of novels: Italo Calvino’sIf on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1993 [1979]). In addition to writing, Calvino’s self-referential novel construction focuses primarily on reading, from the intimate act of reading in bed to reading guided by theses and theory:

Lotaria wants to know the author’s position with regard to Trends of Contemporary Thought and Problems That Demand a Solution. To make your task easier she furnishes you with a list of names of Great Masters among whom you should situate him. (Calvino 1993, 44)

This list “of Founders of Schools of Thought”Footnote 9 does not receive further elaboration but joins those lists in the novel that prevent pleasure reading. This includes word lists based on digital text analyses of novels according to word frequency. A novelist (who makes reference to Calvino) is confronted with these lists by the literary scholar Lotaria, who does not read his novels herself but has them evaluated by a “computer system,” as she explains:

What is the reading of a text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic recurrences, certain insistences of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of the frequencies, which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggests to my critical study. (Calvino 1993, 186)

Calvino’s novel cites several of these alphabetically ordered lists and ironizes the scholarly conclusions drawn by Lotaria, which, for example, derive literary depth from the frequency of “under”:

underarm, underbrush, undercover, underdog, underfed, underfoot, undergo, undergraduate, underground, undergrowth, underhand, underprivileged, undershirt, underwear, underweight…

No, the book isn’t completely superficial, as it seemed. There must be something hidden; I can direct my research along these lines. (Calvino 1993, 187)Footnote 10

While these word counts, despite Lotaria’s thesis, are certainly not poetological lists, one such list can be found right at the beginning of Calvino’s multifarious novel. The first chapter describes the difficulties of even finding and buying the book in a bookstore in the first place, which will then begin with the second chapter. To that end, the novel exploits the poetological as well as visual potential of lists:

Verse

Verse With a rapid maneuver you bypass them [other books] and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Book Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not easily Justified. (Calvino 1993, 5)

Yet, what is described here as a dynamic attack which is said to have a certain speed in its forward movement—a stormy conquest of the bookstore as well as a tumultuous plunge into its reading—yields retarding effects. Such effects are due to the resistance of the books, which might prevent the acquisition of Calvino’s novel and whose victory is not yet assured at this moment in the narrative. And, on the other hand, the retardation results from the list that unmistakably obstructs the narrative, even in a visual sense: while the first part of the enumeration, owing to the unusual use of capitalization, evokes a horizontal frontage—a kind of palisade that must be breached—the vertically arranged obstacles in the second part reveal, typographically speaking, as it were, the obstructive piles of books as “towers of the fortress.”Footnote 11

In terms of economizing narrative, the list here represents a retarding, non-narrative moment, the poetological self-reflection consisting in the fact that it is also about the retarding moments of reading which might prevent the reader from reading the book. Readers do read these interruptions but do so in a different register of signification:

As lists are usually not plot-bearing but rather break up the plot, pause and digressively or additively prolong it, they work against the narrative context in which they are embedded by introducing a structure of simplicity that places the responsibility of making sense in the hands of the reader. (von Contzen 2017, 222)

Yet, just as Italo Calvino’sIf on a Winter’s Night a Traveler consists not only of lists but offers a wealth of narratives and narrative formats, which, despite their perpetual discontinuation, always captivate the novel’s internal “you”-reader (as well as Calvino readers) anew, the novel is not a postmodern swan song to narrative. On the contrary:

The narrative that does not end because it cannot be finished stands in contrast to the narrative that does not end because the storytelling will never cease. (Moses 1990, 121)

Nevertheless, the highly reflective writing (and reading) scene of this novel from 1979 clearly emphasizes its theoretical-aesthetic contemporaneity, especially in the act of non-narrative list; this contemporaneity exists, for example, in Roland Barthes’ writings both on narrative and reading (Le plaisir du texte, 1973; Poétique du récit, 1977) and on non-narrative text orders (roland BARTHES par roland barthes, 1975; Fragments d’un discours amoureux, 1977).

The Autobiography

Roland Barthes’autobiographyroland BARTHES par roland barthes (1975) does justice to his fragmentary, scattered concept of the subject through the form of alphabetically sorted fragments that yield neither an exemplary confession nor a narrative identity or continuity. Accordingly, the section titled “The order I no longer remember”/“L’ordre dont je ne me souviens plus,” reads: “The alphabetical order erases everything, banishes every origin.”Footnote 12 Admittedly, there exists the danger of generating meaning from the alphabet by mere chance (“This order, however, can be mischievous: it sometimes produces effects of meaning”).Footnote 13 In contrast, however, Barthes puts forth the idea of an “antistructural criticism,” which would “not look for the work’s order but its disorder,”Footnote 14 namely by viewing each text as an encyclopedic list of disparate objects which represent “the work’s antistructure, its […] polygraphy.”Footnote 15 This proves all the more true for an autobiography à la Barthes’, which stages and reflects its own author/subject position as an effect of such polygraphic text operations.

Hence, among the fragments is the entry, “J’aime, je n’aime pas”: a typical demonstration of ego-determination through the enumeration of what the “I” likes and dislikes, at least in the first part of the entry. This constitutes a bundled but expandable (“etc.”) list of heterogeneous elements, which represents a biographical-subjective accumulation as emphasized in the ever-recurrent first-person singular:

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, […] etc.

I don’t like: […] telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.Footnote 16

What unifies the arbitrary items is hence, on the one hand, the list mode and, on the other, the subjective perspectivation. Here something along the lines of subjectivity arises out of “a list of heterogeneous objects” (Barthes 1977, 148), for this list is “a subjective evaluation system which arbitrarily assigns the same value to things, conditions, circumstances, actions and ownership of highly variable value and which cannot be meaningfully generalized” (Tauber 2018, 139). The intricacy of this becomes a systematic point in the second part of the entry:

I like, I don’t like: this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes, a kind of listless blur, gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation.Footnote 17

Barthes thus subjectivizes himself even as he calls that very act into question. Yet, he is able to declare in the form of enumeration: this is contingent, this is just who I am… His “J’aime, je n’aime pas” list hence appears first as a simple exercise, as a child’s game, in order to then form the starting point for a complex analysis of the self as a writer: an analysis that in turn proceeds through the simple, certainly not high literary writing of lists, which thereby demonstrates the arbitrary fashion in which an author is made an author. The fragments do not aim at instances such as “History, Ideology, the Unconscious.”Footnote 18 “Instead, Barthes profiles the movement of continuous writing” (Erhart 2015, 273), when he states: “the latter [part of the text] is nothing but a further text, the last of the series, not the ultimate in meaning: text upon text, which never illuminates anything.”Footnote 19 It is therefore a matter of writing on (das Weiterschreiben), text upon text, which drives the list, which in this case is not only polygraphic but also poetological. For as little as writing has a telos and as little as autobiography stabilizes an avowed ego, the list format seems appropriate here; and indeed, the “paradigmatic structure of equivalence of the list does not allow for any metaposition” (Schaffrick and Werber 2017, 312).

Conclusion

With regard to the poetological lists considered here from 1957 (Kerouac), 1975 (Barthes), 1979 (Calvino), and 1981 (Christensen), a concluding remark is in order concerning their literary-theoretical contemporaneity with Beat culture and postmodernism. Insofar as lists draw attention to their writing-scenes, they represent a simple and sophisticated tool for poetological reflection and for the performative staging of writing and authorship together with the areas of contention surrounding them. In its constitutive incompleteness, the list is not only a critical instrument against cessations of meaning and narrative but also alludes with its non-narrative and arbitrary elements to reality (saturated with the extra-literary) as well as to (intertextually resonating) text materials. Sans metaposition, no strong authorship is restituted here; instead, the list form generates and represents both a kind of writing from the “poetic strain […], in which various pitches – high and low, trivial and cerebral – lie close to one another, both spatially and in meaning” (Pordzik 2017, 229), as well as a polygraphic procedure of text upon text, that is, non-linear but continuous writing. That this is by no means monotonous or artless can be attributed to, on the one hand, the “mechanisms of friction and alienation – these disrupting or heteroclitically supplementing the regular repetition of syntactic structures, certain word types, word groups or individual words –” (Rakusa 2016, 319) and, on the other hand, to the pleasure of lists, le plaisir des listes, for their repetitive schemata, tonal rhythms, semantic hollowing, “for yr own joy.”