The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart (review)

In 2014, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami described his breakthrough moment after struggling for months to make any progress on his first novel; he decided that because writing in Japanese wasn't working, he would try composing in English:

Needless to say, my ability in English composition didn't amount to much. My vocabulary was severely limited, as was my command of English syntax. I could only write in simple, short sentences. Which meant that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around my head, I couldn't even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, everything arranged to fit a container of limited size. The result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose. As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, step by step, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape. … Writing in a foreign language, with all the limitations that entailed, removed this obstacle. It also led me to discover that I could express my thoughts and feelings with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, as long as I combined them effectively and linked them together in a skillful manner.

(2015:xiii)

The notion of constraint as generative/heuristic is confounding to some writers, and Murakami was the first author I saw explain how that worked for him. I'm not sure Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart's The Hundreds would make nearly the same sense it does without having seen Murakami's description of his struggle.

Although not impelled by failure to produce, nor by minimal working knowledge of the language, The Hundreds is the result of a similar project: seeing what happens when writers restrict themselves to a very limited way of composing complex ideas. Berlant and Stewart juxtapose two god terms (a la Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives [1945])—composition and new ordinary—in a series of 100 "poems/makings" each of which is either 100 or multiples of 100 words long. The poems/makings vary among three sorts. Some compose scenes of the "ordinary"; some compose accounts of their composing or considerations of textuality/textual theory; and some intertwine those two threads. Rather than using in-text citations, the authors list sources at the bottom of each piece, and then provide a list at the end of "Some Things We Thought With." Instead of a conventional index, they invited four colleagues to "index" the book, giving them free reign to do so however they chose; nobody produced a list of terms connected to page numbers in the book, except one that intersperses terms/page numbers with cartoons that draw from themes in the poems/makings. The others are affective reactions to ideas the indexers encountered, with no effort to be systematic. In short, if you want to know where to find things in the book, you need to make your own notes; fortunately, Berlant and Stewart provide a blank page for you to do that.

As I hope is already clear, The Hundreds is not a conventional academic text. It's not a report of a research project (although the authors certainly had questions that motivate the book and that they address, if not squarely answer). The authors actively resist some conventional academic forms (e.g., citations, indexing) in order to focus on a different formal concern: what happens when they allow themselves very limited (in terms of both length and flexibility) space to archive and reflect on seemingly routine human experiences: a broken-down car in the middle of nowhere, and interactions with people who stop to offer help ("Lifelines in the middle of nowhere"); the complex feelings one of the authors has on returning to a childhood home ("A return"); a kid overhearing very adult conversations in the teachers' break room at her school ("First Things"); the thoughts of a worker whose aspirations of fame didn't work out...