Invisible Forms: A Guide to Literary Curiosities (review)

This entertaining and often accurate book addresses those more or less peripheral aspects of printed volumes that tend to be found, metaphorically and literally, in the outlying areas of the individual page and of the codex as a whole. Gérard Genette, the brilliant and deep-witted Hamlet to Kevin Jackson's Osric, calls them seuils [thresholds] in the title of his 1987 book, often cited and praised by Jackson. ¹ Neither work addresses the table of contents per se, but their tables of contents are similar. Both consider prefaces, titles, dedications, epigraphs or mottoes, and notes, as well as such frontier regions as pseudonyms and blurbs (ranged by Genette under the category "peritext" in the chapter in which he judges the covers of books). In addition, Jackson considers indexes, bibliographies, his precursor Isaac D'Israeli (whose often reissued compendium Curiosities of LiteratureJackson alludes to in his subtitle, though he makes no mention of a worthy descendant whose title is closer to his own, William W. Walsh's Handbook of Literary Curiosities [1892]), and—most relevant to his own colorful ambitions—"follies."

That chapter is largely about the French group Oulipo, whose members accept arbitrary constraints on the forms in which they write, constraints that force them into a resourcefulness that sometimes yields deep originality and power. (Georges Perec's La disparition, which eschews the letter eexcept in its author's name, is its most famous example; Perec said that in general he could not have written without constraints.) The chapter is in twenty-six sentences, following the letters of the alphabet; Jackson relies rather heavily on semicolons, however; this makes the exercise a bit less impressive. He ends it with a sort of valentine to Perec, writing (after a semicolon), "Who knows, he might have smiled at a piece about his work which ends with the word 'ends'" (223). More likely Perec, a connoisseur of the use-mention distinction, would have preferred a sentence that ended by both using and mentioning the uninflected form of the word with which this sentence also will end. Jackson's slightly too facile joke shows both the strengths and the weaknesses of his literary agility.

Jackson's happily named "invisible forms" are invisible because they tend to do their work in a conventional or generic manner, at least as regards their almost physical presence. They belong half to the world of design: the book needs a title; its back cover needs a blurb; it could use an author's note; and so on. Truly unperceived forms—say, catchwords or collating marks—are of little interest to general readers and of none to Jackson, although they are actually more like the purloined letter to which he compares his topic. That topic is really the use of potentially visible forms, their potential energy all the greater because we do not expect them to come to any special notice. This book aims to make them fluoresce as a genre, because in fact its subject is the vivid variation on the prosaic theme. Jackson, who guides both by example and by precept, generally succeeds in using the forms he mentions: lecturing us on lectures; dedicating his chapter on dedications to Ernest Klein, whose own dedication to his parents, murdered at Auschwitz, brought Nicholson Baker to tears; crowning his chapter on epigraphs with a wreath of mottoes; marking up his chapter on marginalia with a lot of often hostile notation in various hands (this chapter, which oddly does not mention Poe, who published his own marginalia, although Jackson cites him a great deal elsewhere, is a weak anticipation of the unrelated H. J. Jackson's Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books [2001]); and adorning his chapter on footnotes with a sheaf of asterisks, obelisks, dieses, and sections all anchored in a gravelly substrate of citational scree at the bottom of the page (in which the...