The list is, if not the oldest kind of poetry, very possibly one of the oldest functions of it. The great poems of the days of old, the Epic, had the responsibility of archiving the knowledge of a culture. They would gather (configure), reality and the way it was perceived by that particular people. How to do this without enlisting what was important for that reality to stand for?
Robert Graves in his polemic book “The White Goddess” shows us how the Hanes Taliesin, inside the anecdote, and even beating down it’s assumed importance relegating it to a mere structural position, contains a list of gods, and it’s relation to sacred trees (and a list of them), and therefore, a list of medicinal plants, a list of days (a ceremonial calendar), etc. We can see, also in a work by Graves, this time “The Greek Myths” how many versions of the Argonauts there are, and how the crew member’s list has become the principal object of discussion around the myth, specially when each one of the names enlisted could give a sacred dynasty to a family or a town. Then we have Gilgamesh, for instance, in which the protagonist enumerates the impurities of Istar, and the narrator does the same with the days of suffering of Enkidu, or ones he has died, Gilgamesh again, in the must beautiful part of the poem, lists the people, lands and animals who should cry for the loss of his beloved friend*. Nearly at the end of the poem, there is also a list of the tragedies that would have been better instead of a flood; and about floods, in the bible, there is a very specific list of all the animals Noah took into his wing or in the Leviticus and the Deuteronomy, a list of pure and impure animals, among, I presume, loads of other listing. Scandinavian sagas use this resource too. The first half of the Egil’s Saga, for instance, is practically nothing but a genealogic list.
I could keep on listing examples forever, but I think my point is clear. It would be foolish to think of listing as a mere descriptive resource, existing only in function of the narrative. The list is an entity by itself, an entity that allows a budget to arise, a configuration to be built, a taxonomy to be structured. All of the things listed in these poems are a sort of extract of the epistemic context they come from. One by one, its components reinforce the system of representations of culture, giving unity to its discourse. Lists, so far, give unity, identity: A list is as much itself as it is what it excluded, and then, we can also find political implications in it.
Someone’s cultural background, social status, stile, interests, way of living, necessities, health state, etc, could be deduced by reading her (his) supermarket list, (starting, of course, for the fact that he (she) has a supermarket list, which already tells a lot), but here it is possible to go further. That list would evidently give us the information written on it, but it would also say a lot through the relations that the very order in which things are placed establish. Do sections structure it? Is it random? Why did you put the chocolate next to the movies and not with the food? Etc. When you are writing your supermarket list (if you do) things come to your mind and from there to your writing hand in an order, because lists are successive, consecutive.
This is the must important characteristic of the list. It is the ultimate and simplest configuration inside language, for language is, before anything else, consecutive. Language is a list itself, a list of chained sounds in which internal relations allow representation and meaning to happen.
The internal relations between the successive components of a list produce meaning further than the collection of them would by itself, and then we have Borges...
Lists like the one he uses to represent the universe in his tale “El Aleph”** or the one he talks about in “El Idioma Analítico de John Wilkins”*** (which Foucault would take afterwards as the base for his amazing book Les Mots et les Choses), are not a mere catalog. Through those lists, he not only gives unity like a regular list would intend to do. He destroys it, while pretending to produce it. He gives testimony of the impossibility of an objective catalogue. He puts in evidence how partial and limited budgets, taxonomies, configurations can be. He lists the unlistable and succeeds in his failure, and he shows us it is all about the relation between the elements. It’s taking the successive and fracturing it from the inside: ¿Cómo pude no sentir que la eternidad (…) es un artificio espléndido que nos libra, siquiera de manera fugaz, de la intolerable opresión de lo sucesivo?. (How could I not feel that eternity (…) is a magnificently artful device, that sets us free, at least for a glimpse, from the intolerable oppression of the successive?)****
After thousands of years of unitary lists, Borges proposes a different kind of list, an opposite one. A list that tears apart standardized meaning; disintegrator of fixed realities, quake for representation.
Borges produces abysmal gaps between the successive of his list’s components, or he arranges otherwise impossibly juxtaposed images. Without breaking the form itself, his lists step over consecutiveness, and reach for a place out of it’s intolerable oppression: For eternity, in his own definition.
My proposition is very simple: To take all this potential seriously. To realize that even though its boundaries might have been confused with those of literature and poetry (as much as with those of economy, housekeeping, carpentry, etc) Listery does not owe to narrative, neither to poetry, nor to anybody else. It is an entity of production of meaning by itself, and like that it should be taken. I am not pretending here to “create” a new gender, but simply to acknowledge it already exists, and to give it its place.
*And the beasts we hunted, the bear and the hyena,
Tiger and panther, leopard and lion,
The stag and the ibex, the bull and the doe.
The river along whose banks we used to walk,
Ula of Elam and dear Euphrates
Where once we drew water for the water-skins.
The mountain we climbed where we slew the Watchman,
The warriors of strong-walled Uruk
Where the bull of heaven was killed
All of the people of Eridu
Those who brought grain for your eating
Who rubbed oil on your back
Who poured beer for your drinking
The harlot who anointed you with fragrant ointment
The women of the palace, who brought you a wife,
A chosen ring of good advice,
And the young men and brothers
As though they were women
Go long-haired in mourning.
What is this sleep which holds you now?
You are lost in the dark and cannot hear me
** Vi el populoso mar, vi el alba y la tarde, vi las muchedumbres de América, vi una plateada telaraña en el centro de una negra pirámide, vi un laberinto roto (era Londres), vi interminables ojos inmediatos escrutándose en mí como en un espejo, vi todos los espejos del planeta y ninguno me reflejó, vi en un traspatio de la calle Soler las mismas baldosas que hace treinta años vi en el zaguán de una casa en Frey Bentos, vi racimos, nieve, tabaco, vetas de metal, vapor de agua, vi convexos desiertos ecuatoriales y cada uno de sus granos de arena, vi en Inverness a una mujer que no olvidaré, vi la violenta cabellera, el altivo cuerpo, vi un cáncer de pecho, vi un círculo de tierra seca en una vereda, donde antes hubo un árbol, vi una quinta de Adrogué, un ejemplar de la primera versión inglesa de Plinio, la de Philemont Holland, vi a un tiempo cada letra de cada página (de chico yo solía maravillarme de que las letras de un volumen cerrado no se mezclaran y perdieran en el decurso de la noche), vi la noche y el día contemporáneo, vi un poniente en Querétaro que parecía reflejar el color de una rosa en Bengala, vi mi dormitorio sin nadie, vi en un gabinete de Alkmaar un globo terráqueo entre dos espejos que lo multiplicaban sin fin, vi caballos de crin arremolinada, en una playa del Mar Caspio en el alba, vi la delicada osadura de una mano, vi a los sobrevivientes de una batalla, enviando tarjetas postales, vi en un escaparate de Mirzapur una baraja española, vi las sombras oblicuas de unos helechos en el suelo de un invernáculo, vi tigres, émbolos, bisontes, marejadas y ejércitos, vi todas las hormigas que hay en la tierra, vi un astrolabio persa, vi en un cajón del escritorio (y la letra me hizo temblar) cartas obscenas, increíbles, precisas, que Beatriz había dirigido a Carlos Argentino, vi un adorado monumento en la Chacarita, vi la reliquia atroz de lo que deliciosamente había sido Beatriz Viterbo, vi la circulación de mi propia sangre, vi el engranaje del amor y la modificación de la muerte, vi el Aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en el Aleph la tierra, vi mi cara y mis vísceras, vi tu cara, y sentí vértigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo.
***(…) those that doctor Franz Kuhn attribute to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Heavenly emporium of benevolent knowledge. In its remote pages it is written that animals are divided in a) belonging to the emperor, b) embalmed, c) trained, d) piglets, e) mermaids, f) fabulous, g) loose dogs, h) included in this classification, i) that shake like crazy, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, l) etcetera, m) that just broke the vase, n) that from the distance look like flies. (…)
(…) las que el doctor Franz Kuhn atribuye a cierta encyclopedia china que se titula Emporio celestial de conocimiéntos benevolos. En sus remotas páginas está escrito que los animals se dividen en a) pertenecientes al emperador b) embalsamados, c) amaestrados, d) lechones, e) sirenas, f) fabulosos, g) perros sueltos h) incluidos en esta clasificación, i) que se agiten como locos j) innumerables, k) dibujados con un pincel finisimo de pelo de camello l) etcétera, m) que acaban de romper el jarrón, n) que de lejos parecen moscas. (…)
**** Prologue for the last reedition of the History of Eternity while alive.
