The seductive power of lists

Lists can be reductive, but on the eve of this year’s book prize season, it’s time to celebrate their particular strengths Tomorrow, the Orange Prize announces its 2011 longlist – and fires the starting pistol for the book prize season. For the next six months, until the grand finale of the Booker, interested literary parties of all stripes will be swamped with lists: who’s in, who’s out, who’s favourite, who’s a dark horse, who’s losing, who was robbed. Sometimes it can seem as if the ubiquitous list has replaced thoughtful critical discourse – and there’s no question that the shorthand of a list suits a culture with a limited attention span. Your list is swifter, and less challenging, than a fully articulated analysis; also, more assertive. Blogs have a love-hate relationship with lists. There’s nothing like a Top 10 to provoke controversy, as this blog knows only too well . But, since we’re coming into list-and-prize season, I’ve tried to arrive at a positive approach to the curse of the catalogue. First of all, I note that in Anglo-American fiction, there’s quite a good tradition of list making: Daniel Defoe, the father of the English novel, did not flinch, in Robinson Crusoe, from listing Crusoe’s stores after the shipwreck, or indeed his situation. On p52 of my Oxford Classics edition, he writes, “I had three Encouragements, 1. A smooth calm Sea, 2. The Tide rising and setting in to the Shore, 3. What little Wind there was blew me towards the Land.” See also, on p274, the list of luxuries Crusoe’s rescuer gives him ( “He brought me also a Box of Sugar, a Box of Flower, a Bag full of Lemons…” ) This approach has a long afterlife. Among contemporary writers, Nick Hornby has also turned list-making into a kind of art . In American fiction, Brett Easton Ellis made a memorable polemical point about consumer society in the brand name lists of American Psycho. He was hardly a pioneer. America’s greatest 20th century novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was a master of lists. Perhaps his most celebrated list occurs in chapter four of The Great Gatsby : the roll-call of those “who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality” in that discordant summer after the Great War: “From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Shoen and Gulick the State senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen… all connected with the movies in one way or another.” Wonderful stuff: three pages of it, painting a picture of a whole world. That’s the curse of lists. Part of their appeal is how much they leave out, and how much scope they give to the imagination. Robert McCrum guardian.co.uk

Posted by on March 15, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.