an anti-catalog describing the consequences of darkest night

Dear Lori,

In her Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart describes a passage from Hesiod’s Theogony as “a catalog of depletions rather than additions, an anti-catalog describing the consequences of darkest night.” She continues by describing the genealogical relationship each ensuing item has to the previous, the way by which, even in negation, even in creating an “anti-catalog,” the items in Hesiod’s list effect each other.

Stewart goes on to describe the the final item in the list, an oath “intended from the outset as a lie.” Twenty-five hundred years before theory, mathematics, and experimentation identify entropy’s centrality to the second law of thermodynamics, Hesiod describes how physical and social breakdown snowball toward “Disorder, Disaster—neighbours to each other.” But these are the penultimate landmarks on the road toward total chaos. The final is “Oath, who most harms men on earth, / when someone knowingly swears false.” Stewart reads Hesiod to mean, “It cleaves the good faith in language by means of which all reality-making discourse proceeds.” We’re left afterward in “an unintelligible autonomy.”

In fairness to Susan Stewart, this is from the very start of her brilliant book on poetry and its bilateral influence on human correspondence with the material world, neither does it necessarily reflect her own arguments so much as her reading of this section from Hesiod. With those caveats, I’m considering what role “good faith in language by means of which all reality-making discourse proceeds” has in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, a novel whose overlapping character-narrators make numberless interwoven realities, and especially in the way they employ catalogs to do this.

On one hand, it would be difficult to fill 1,300-plus pages without including a few lengthy lists; on the other, the book doesn’t limit itself to simple lists of simple nouns. As often, Vera Cartwheel insists on multiple descriptions of singular events, items, or ideas. She seems to suggest to us the way by which language always cleaves good faith in itself. It will always fall short of its aim. It both can and cannot transport what it ultimately only gestures toward to stand in front of us. And yet, not only does it describe reality to the best of its user’s ability, it invents worlds that never existed until their inception in the sentences that narrate them. In Miss MacIntosh, My Darling we begin to see how the latter might be the means to the former.

What’s more, in its multiple attempts, in its repetitions with a difference, the novel shows language not only as unfaithful to reality but to itself. List items do seem to follow each other, but this includes contradiction and non sequitur.

I realized while considering Marguerite Young’s catalogs here the way any sufficiently complex syntax would be a catalog of a sort. In realizing this, however, I realized, in its ordering of sense and nonsense, maybe even simple grammar is an exercise in list making. Certainly narrative of any and every sort is. Which orders will we take for granted and which will create for ourselves? Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and its gymnastic veracities opens reality’s veil a little wider and gestures toward how many alternate ways we might spell out our indices.

Bilaterally,
Anthony

Dear Anthony,

I’m so glad that you raise the issue whether Vera’s narration throughout the hundreds of pages of this novel, merits our good faith? Do her narratives, her “repetitions with a difference,” serve as warnings that we shouldn’t have faith in what she depicts? That Vera herself lacks faith or belief in what she is telling us?

We’ve discussed the liminal expanse between reality and fantasy/dream in which our characters reside. (With the exception, so far, of Miss MacIntosh, perhaps.) But as we read Chapter 5, I become interested in the question of faith, generally, in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and what role it may play in this book.

In Chapter 5, Vera is subject to the rant of the long-haired, drunk, bus driver, Moses(!) Hunnecker. Moses, it seems, has lost faith in God and country. He questions whether living is really a death. He is disillusioned about government and politics. He is unmoored, eternally driving his damned bus, around and around. Perhaps Moses is demonstrating what was lost in 20^th century America, and his destination-less tour of the byways and highways of Indiana symbolizes the futile search for a higher power and purpose? A purgatory of sorts; a hopeless quest to reanimate his existence with some kind of spiritual meaningfulness.

I hope that fellow readers who understand more about Young’s spirituality and can read the biblical or secular clues in the text better than I will help us to think about the forms and contents of spiritual quest in the novel. I’m excited to learn if this idea of seeking spiritual fulfilment gains momentum as we make our way through the chapters. 

I realize that this idea of faith differs from the “good faith” reliability about which you wrote in your letter. Nonetheless, maybe for Vera, Moses and the rest of our gang faith might prove Good.

Faithfully,

Lori

PS What beautiful serendipity to see you quote Susan Stewart on the cataloging in Hesiod’s Theogony, which also is one of the texts that Umberto Eco excepts in his chapter “The List and the Catalogue,” in The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to Joyce.