Sorrentino on Lists

Here’s a passage from Gilbert Sorrentino on lists and fictive creation:

The List: Let me propose the idea of a list of questions formulated about a given character and so proposed without complementary answers to the questions. This list forms a kind of discontinuous, scattered narrative unit. The questions allow us to fill in the absent answers, the asked-for information. This occurs whether or not the reader knows the answers, that is, whether or not the character has performed in such a way as to allow the reader to come up with the answers. If there has been no information provided, so that the questions cannot be answered, the reader is, nonetheless, strangely urged to answer them with data which the questions themselves imply. This list is a kind of system of negative narrational energy.

Now, this list of questions, initially proposed as finite, that is, a list sans answers, creates another list (of answers) if the writer decides, later, in perhaps another work, to answer them. This list creates another scattered narrative unit. If these answers are, by means of punctuation, combined or broken up, e.g., if two answers are made into one, if one answer is made into two etc., etc., this narrative unit becomes not only a set of answers to a set of questions but a curiously “sensible,” if slightly skewed, positive addition to the text(s). The answers detach themselves from the questions which occasioned them and shift onto another narrative plane. The manipulation of the answers by the application of punctuational choices let us sees a “truth” about the character nowhere prefigured in the texts. The materials concerning the character are enriched in ways that the “imaginative” could not succeed in doing.

What is most fascinating about such an enterprise is that the list of questions, despite a lack of cohesion, commonality of themes, unity of concerns, etc., etc., will produce a list of answers that form a coherence. It is as if the set of questions, drawn from whatever sources and with no expectation of being answered, has within itself a reliable narrative statement.

So far as I can tell, none of this will work if the answers are in hand as the questions are being drawn up, i.e., the questions must be “innocent” of expectation. In this procedure, what seems to be an aleatory exercise turns out to be exercise in prefigured form. It is another revelation of the enormous power latent in the list.

(Sorrentino, Gilbert. “Writing and Writers: Disjecta Membra.” Something Said (2nd ed). Dalkey Archive, 2001. 357-8)

Tags: lists, sorrentino

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