One Thing After Another: A Reading List for Lovers & Makers of Lists

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As freshly minted adults in Bangalore with a bit of cash to spare, we bought books. We rooted among the used piles at Blossom Book House by day, haunted Petromax-lit roadside tarp shops by night, and scoured the infant internet for information by dial-up. I came upon a 1942 essay by Borges. He said, of a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge: “In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.” 

A difficult and delightful outsider finally vindicated my love for lists. I was smitten.

We are not new to lists in the East. We are quite big on them, in fact. Take a look at how the Bhagavad-Gītā, the most intense part of the great Indian epic Mahābhārata, opens. 

The battlefield of Kurukṣetra. It is the war to end all wars. The Pāṇḍava and the Kaurava armies are arrayed for battle, warrior after legendary warrior, each named, each terribly prepared. Sañjaya, a minister temporarily granted clairvoyance, has been tasked with giving Dhṛtarāṣṭra, the blind Kaurava king, a blow-by-blow narration. On the Kaurava side, the grand patriarch Bhīṣma blows his tremendous conch, roaring like a lion, setting off horns and trumpets, cymbals and drums, heralding what is to come. On the Pāṇḍava side, Kṛṣṇa blows his conch Pāñcajanya, and the five brothers theirs, Arjuna, his Devadatta, Yudhiṣṭhira, his Anantavijaya, Bhīma, his mighty Pauṇḍra, and Nakula and Sahadeva, their Sughoṣa and Maṇipuṣpaka. Thundering across earth and sky, the great sound shatters the hearts of the hundred sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra.

A list. And the epic, which has all of life and then some, is strewn with lists. The form accomplishes a lot with a little. It builds scenes layer by layer. It accretes, elevates, and expands feeling—thrilling awe and power here; fear, futility, and despondency there; joy and victory elsewhere. It permits story after story to get in through osmosis, establishing epic architecture in the mind, until you have always known it, until you have never not known it. “No Indian ever hears the Mahabharata for the first time,” said A.K. Ramanujan, a noted poet and scholar.

Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, Eight Chapters, the foundational text of Sanskrit grammar that has influenced all of linguistics and computer programming, is a list. Patañjali’s famous Yoga Sūtras are a list. The sūtra form, like a bead on a string, is the basic unit of the list. The Buddha himself was a list maker extraordinaire. Take a look at this doorstop of a book. The form works.

We all make lists, if only to buy bread and milk. But we tend to forget how mythic and subversive (as we have just seen), joyful and maddening, enchanting and sobering, and utterly chilling lists can be—and what they can do. To love a list is to partake in letter and word, form and change. To make lists is to join a long line of list makers, to indulge in a timeless art, to break down the artificial wall that separates thinking and doing, thinkers and doers. 

We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die (Umberto Eco, Interview with Spiegel, November 2009) 

List making to comprehend infinity and ensure immortality! This interview succeeds in putting a spotlight on the list form by probing the mind and work of one of its most radical and vocal lovers. For Eco—a philosopher, semiotician, and novelist, whose own work teems with lists—the list is the creator, curator, and arbiter of culture, and by extension, civilization. He points out how Homer, in attempting to convey the size of the Greek army in The Iliad, “cannot find the right metaphor, and so he begs the muses to help him. Then he hits upon the idea of naming many, many generals and their ships.” As we saw earlier, the infinitely ambitious Mahābhārata, seven times longer than The Iliad and The Odyssey combined, uses the same technique to express the inexpressible. 

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order—not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists—the shopping list, the will, the menu—that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

What if… Listicles Are Actually an Ancient Form of Writing and Narrative? (James Vincent, Lit Hub, November 2022) 

This informative essay presents the list as “one of humanity’s oldest writing systems.” There are older oral (and enumerative) traditions across the world, but the written word seems to have originated with Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, China, and Egypt—particularly the Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer, through which the essay takes a gentle stroll. The earliest uses of the list were lexical and administrative. Nonetheless, all that naming, counting, and cataloging fed our big brains. Eco concurs, in a manner reminiscent of facet analysis, “The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions. The essential definition is primitive compared with the list.” Let’s hope the palate-sticking ickiness of the word “listicle” is no measure of our alleged advancement.

Lists may not seem like cognitive dynamite, but their proliferation appears to have helped develop new modes of thought in early societies, encouraging us to think analytically about the world. “The list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity,” writes anthropologist Jack Goody. “[I]t encourages the ordering of the items, by number, by initial sound, by category, etc. And the existence of boundaries, external and internal, brings greater visibility to categories, at the same time as making them more abstract.

As Goody argues, the process of constructing a thematic list “leads to increments of knowledge, to the organization of experience.” It is a precursor to organized philosophical systems, and, eventually, to science.

Literary Lists are Records of Female Desire (Cynthia Gralla, Electric Literature, October 2019) 

Eco’s The Infinity of Lists is always drawn upon in the matter of lists because it is vast and voluble on the subject. But as Gralla rightly notes, where are the women? And I must add, where is the other half of the world? It only covers the West. I suppose half of infinity is still infinity. Literature loves lists, and there is a lot of ground to cover. This delicate essay notes, “one of the archaic definitions of list is ‘to like, wish, choose,’ a cognate to the German gelüsten, ‘to desire or lust.’” “Lists are lusts itemized,” the author says, traversing a terrain dotted with Japanese court literature, French erotica, and contemporary poetry, fiction, and memoir, exploring and questioning their female authors and protagonists and their various desires and preoccupations.

Truth be told, literary lists catalog desire in all forms. One of the most famous examples is Casanova’s The Story of My Life, a compendium of conquests strained through the male gaze. In such a text, lists can amount to a fragmentation of the (usually female) body of the beloved— an additional, twisted conquest to complement the one made off the page.

Are women’s literary lists intrinsically different from men’s? It’s tempting to see them as a part of a larger effort by female authors over the centuries to claim agency through fragments like diary entries or letters. Unlike a collection, which subsumes parts in a whole, a list yearns with each entry, honoring its disparate items. In the case of many female lit listers, their catalogs desire to transform both author and readers through that longing.

Georges Perec: A User’s Manual (Matthew Gidley, Frieze, June 2000) 

In 1960 France, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais formed the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), better known as the Oulipo, with the stated aim of using rules and constraints, often mathematical, in literature. A list, as a form, is a fruitful constraint. Italo Calvino, a member of the Oulipo, put it to beautiful use in Invisible Cities, “I should now list the wares that can profitably be bought here [in Anastasia]: agate, onyx, chrysoprase, and other varieties of chalcedony …. ” and in If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. But it was Georges Perec who took the “love of taxonomy to its blazing reductio” with Life: A User’s Manual. Mapping a 10 x 10 chessboard to each cell of which was attached a series of lists, or “schedule of obligations,” onto the elevation of a Parisian townhouse, he made a “Knight’s Tour” of movements, which then became the novel. This sharp essay dissects his cataloging mind.

… Perec remained true to his favourite themes of classifying and schematising places and objects (such as alternative methods for the ‘art and manner of arranging one’s books’) – and he compiled lists. These ranged from a catalogue of all the different beds in which he had slept, to a detailed description of the evolution of the Rue Vilin over a 12 year period, and his notorious Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four (1976) – ‘one thrush paté… fourteen cucumber salads… seven pigs’ trotters… one chicken kebab… two guava sorbets… one Saint-Emilion ’61… four Guinness’. Another member of the Oulipo, Claude Berge, had proposed that a novel could be built around a theoretical mathematical structure known as a ten by ten Graeco-Latin bi-square, and Perec realised that by using this structure as a reference to a series of lists, such a novel would almost write itself. 

The Checklist (Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, December 2007) 

In this essay, which grew into the beautiful book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Gawande, surgeon and MacArthur Fellow, offers a thoughtful meditation on a simple idea for a complex world—the checklist. Drawing examples from fields of great complexity, such as flying advanced aircraft and providing critical care for trauma patients, where the total volume of knowledge far surpasses any individual’s capacity for retention and flawless retrieval, the author observes what a simple, unassuming tool might be able to accomplish. The willingness to use checklists, he suggests, is a welcome admission of human fallibility and a step toward addressing it. 

We have the means to make some of the most complex and dangerous work we do—in surgery, emergency care, and I.C.U. medicine—more effective than we ever thought possible. But the prospect pushes against the traditional culture of medicine, with its central belief that in situations of high risk and complexity what you want is a kind of expert audacity—the right stuff, again. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like exactly the opposite, and that’s what rankles many people. 

It’s ludicrous, though, to suppose that checklists are going to do away with the need for courage, wits, and improvisation. The body is too intricate and individual for that: good medicine will not be able to dispense with expert audacity. Yet it should also be ready to accept the virtues of regimentation.

Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India. She likes lists.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands