Lists in Life Writing: The List as a Means to Visualize the Trace of the Absent

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

View correction statement:

Correction

Notes

1 Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

2 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p. 21.

3 Philippe Lejeune, On Diary. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009, p. 51.

4 Lejeune, On Diary, p. 51. Also see Goody, who writes on the Sumerian writing system (3000 BCE) that it “owes its origin to the needs arising from public economy and administration” and that it was administrative lists and not literary works that dominated the uses of writing in early Mesopotamia. Goody, Domestication, p. 82.

5 Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, p. 4.

6 Levine, Forms, p. 1.

7 Levine, Forms, p. 1.

8 Eva von Contzen, “Die Affordanzen der Liste.” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, vol. 3, 2017, p. 318.

9 Lejeune, On Diary, p. 51.

10 Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 68.

11 For a discussion of Franklin’s catalog of virtues and the list as a form of “Seelenbuchhaltung” (accountability of the soul), see Sabine Mainberger, Die Kunst des Aufzählens: Elemente zu einer Poetik des Enumerativen. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003, p. 192.

12 Franklin, Autobiography, p. 70.

13 See Stefan Selke, Lifelogging: Digital Self-Tracking and Lifelogging—Between Disruptive Technology and Cultural Transformation. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016.

14 In recent graphic memoirs such as Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? and Brian Fies’s Mom’s Cancer, the lists of self-examination have been taken up and critically commented on; see Anne Rüggemeier, “The List as a Means of Assessment and Standardization and Its Critical Remediation in Graphic Narratives about Illness and Care.” Closure—Kieler E-Journal für Comic Forschung, vol. 5, 2018, pp. 55–82, www.closure.uni-kiel.de/closure5/rueggemeier.

15 Also see Joe Brainard’s I Remember. New York: Granary Books, 2001.

16 George Perec, I Remember. Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 2014, p. 70.

17 Perec, I Remember, p. 68.

18 Perec, I Remember, p. 68.

19 Perec, I Remember, p. 68.

20 Also see the title of Perec’s posthumously published collection of stories, L’Infraordinaire.

21 Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2010, pp. 12–13.

22 Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting, p. 15.

23 Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead. London: Vintage, 2000, p. 96.

24 See Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning, “Conceptualizing ‘Broken Narratives’ from a Narratological Perspective: Domains, Concepts, Features, Functions, and Suggestions for Research.” Narrative im Bruch: Theoretische Positionen und Anwendungen, edited by Anna Babka, Marlen Bidwell-Steiner, and Wolfgang Müller-Funk. Vienna: Vienna University Press, 2016, pp. 37–86.

25 Robert Eaglestone, “Forms of Ordering: Trauma, Narrative and Ethics.” Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative, edited by Hanna Meretoja and Colin Davis. London: Routledge, 2018, p. 61.

26 Eaglestone, “Forms of Ordering,” p. 59.

27 Eaglestone, “Forms of Ordering,” p. 65.

28 Nancy K. Miller, What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011, p. 3.

29 Also see Anne Rüggemeier, “Beyond the Subject—Towards the Object? Nancy K. Miller’s What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, 2011 and the Materiality of Life Writing,” European Journal of Life Writing, vol. 5, 2016, pp. 36–54.

30 Aurelius Augustine, Confessions. London: Penguin, 1961, Book 10, p. XVI.

31 The book can be seen as a sequel to Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, which interweaved the story of her mother’s unsuccessful battle with cancer with the act of cataloging the record-shattering rise of the Great Salt Lake and its destructive effect on a nearby bird refuge. As this shows, the practices of cataloging and listing frequently appear in Williams’s oeuvre.

32 Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. New York: Picador, 2012, p. 1.

33 Williams, When Women Were Birds, p. 15.

34 Susan Sontag, On Photography. London: Penguin, 2008, p. 16.

35 Williams, When Women Were Birds, p. 21.

36 Williams, When Women Were Birds, p. 22.

37 Williams, When Women Were Birds, p. 24.

38 Williams, When Women Were Birds, p. 24.

39 “The ineffable” is a term used by Eco to describe one of the purposes of listing: we turn to listing when we cannot express the essence, but describe via enumeration. See Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists, p. 49.

40 Pat Mora, House of Houses. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997, title page.

41 Levine, Forms, p. 3.

42 See Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 4.

43 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, p. 25.

44 Another example that draws our attention to the fact that even ordinary arrangements like lists of content communicate certain ideologies while foreclosing others can be found in Mary Gordon’s Circling My Mother. As a relational piece of life writing in which a daughter tries to come to terms with her mother’s past to understand their difficult mother-daughter relationship, Gordon sets out not to essentialize the artist daughter’s perspective on the mother but to reconstruct her mother in connection to the various other relationships in which she was embedded. Via her list of contents (“My Mother and Her Bosses; My Mother: Words and Music; My Mother and her Sisters; My Mother and her Priests; My Mother and her Father”) she highlights her insight that “there is another mother, another life, the life of the woman not a mother, a woman who had a life before she was a mother, a life lived apart from the artist child” (p. 232). Writing about another person is ultimately “a job that is never completed, and never anything but a failed attempt” (p. x). Gordon’s list of contents implies the unavoidable tension underlying processes of list-making as the tension underlying every act of writing per se: the infinity of experience and the attempt to put it into form. Mary Gordon, Circling My Mother: A Memoir. New York: Pantheon, 2007.

45 “It is the work of form to make order. And this means that forms are the stuff of politics” (Levine, Forms, p. 3).

46 Michael Bamberg and Molly Andrews, Considering Counter-narratives: Narrating, Resisting, Making Sense, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004.

47 Cf. Levine, Forms, p. 4.

48 Also compare the network-like presentation of the “Contents” in Levine’s Forms.