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17. Lists
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234 17 Lists Lists fill textual space: they are descriptive, they classify things, and yet they may function instead of arguments. Students in composition classes are taught that lists should always be drawn from the same category of things (thus, “books, magazines, newspapers” or “blue, green, yellow, and pink” are fine, but “cats, dogs, hamsters, and Labradors” or “London , Milan, the Atlantic, and Tokyo” are not). Novelists, of course, do not need to obey such rules: they may have good reason for unusual associations . Lists are, in effect, collections of words, and collectors, as José Saramago points out, are those who “cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short time they manage it.”1 When we read for analysis, our aim should be to look for the organizing logic of the list. We need to ask not just why things are there, but if there is a particular order. Lists in novels may follow a focalizor’s attention moving through some place (listing things as they are seen), or they may reflect a logic of association—of ideas or rhymes and rhythm. The following list looks randomly chosen at first: Seems a pity somehow, I thought. I looked at the great sea of roofs stretching on and on. Miles and miles of streets, fried-fish shops, tin chapels, picture houses, little printing-shops up back alleys, factories, blocks of flats, whelk stalls, dairies, power stations—on and on and on. lists 235 Enormous! And the peacefulness of it! Like a great wilderness with no wild beasts. (George Orwell, Coming Up for Air, 1939, pt. 1, chap. 3) Orwell’s narrator is describing an English landscape, an area of the urban working class, and he emphasizes through phrases like “on and on” and “miles and miles” how vast this area is. Alliteration is not particularly important (though there is some in fried fish, factories, and flats; picture houses, printing shops, and power stations). This is a description of where people live and work—and at the heart of it we are given the key places: “blocks of flats” and “factories.” It opens with the “fried-fish shops,” “tin chapels,” and “picture houses,” which sum up the cheap pleasures of the people who live in this area. The food they eat is fried, and no doubt unhealthy; their religion is a cheap version of the “opium of the people”; and their imagination is fed by the fake glamor of Hollywood in “picture houses.” But there are also “little printing shops up back alleys”—traditional workshops where radical political thinkers might meet. After the factories and flats come the “whelk stalls,” last remains of a distinctive working-class culture and working-class taste in food, then dairies and power stations—sources of energy in differing ways in the peaceful English scene. The list is framed by a repetition. From a general picture of the “sea of roofs” it has moved in to focus on details, and then moved out again—emphasizing the endlessness of the modern urbanization with “on and on and on.” Overall, this list embodies an ambivalent reaction to the English social landscape. The narrator will not pass over what he sees as the depressing features of modern cut-price civilization, but at the same time he discovers human qualities, which are not without charm. He is expecting war (what was to be World War II), and this mixed landscape functions as a counter-image to fascist dreams of inhuman order: it is a “wilderness” perhaps, but one with “no wild beasts.” Instead of regularity or beauty, he sees “the peacefulness of it.” Orwell’s list describes a landscape; a list in Elizabeth Bowen’s Heat of the Day evokes a way of life: Balanced upon the bales, a tribe of tray-shaped baskets invited Stella’s inspection of their contents so carefully sorted out—colourless billiard balls, padlocks, thermometers, a dog collar, keyless key-rings, a lily bulb, an ivory puzzle, a Shakespeare calendar for 1927, the cured but [52.91.255.225] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:35 GMT) reading novels 236 unmounted claw of a greater eagle, a Lincoln Imp knocker, an odd spur, lumps of quartz, a tangle of tipless tiny pencils on frayed silk cords. (Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 1949, chap. 9...