Historical Redux of the Catalog

1836

The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens

• “Stenographic” talk of Samuel Weller
• Takes out the verb: human actions become a list of objects
• Narrative of events turns into list of objects

1843

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

• Lists of food show the catalog as a tool for representing/producing plenitude

1850

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

• 342: Steerforth’s description of Little Em’ly resembles Weller’s stenography
• 412: Traddles the compiler (also, Strong’s Dictionary)
• 717, 743: stenographic speech occurs b/c of emotional intensity

1851

London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew

• Catalog’s London’s streets
• Economic criteria (what do you sell?)
• Geographic criteria (where are you working?)

1859

Origin of Species, Darwin

• ”...I shall, unfortunately, be compelled to treat this subject far too briefly, as it can be treated properly only by giving long catalogues of facts.” (introduction)
• Catalog comes in when other modes of proof are inadmissable or impossible

1884

A rebours, J. K. Huysmans

• The whole book is a catalog: the arch-modernist catalog
• The blueprint for “modernism you can buy”
• Proven through Picture of Dorian Gray

1886

The Bostonians, Henry James

• Harvard’s library card catalogue system

1890

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

• Chapter 11, copy of Huysmans, shows someone taking up catalog for style

1901

The Ambassadors, Henry James

• Description of Madame de Vionnet’s home (object-cosmo)

1922

Ulysses, James Joyce

• Presentation of Dublin is itself a catalog of Dublin
• Literalizes the idea of the catalog (not stylistic tool)

1924

A Passage to India, E. M. Forster

• pp 91—Illustrated Bird Book: British defined by necessity to catalog (categorize) to understand (cf 101 “she was labelled now”)
• pp 94—Account of car crash is in catalog form (anti-verb; cf 354: another crash, not catalogic)

1925

Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos

• Catalog is not repetitious but a collage (does it count?)

A Saturday Life, Radclyffe Hall

• Heroine progresses through history of Western civ as she grows up
• Catalog is a tool for historic periodization
• Progression of a life—bildung—replaced by historical periods

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

• Style of sentence formation is catalogic
• System of semicolons and commas creates categories
• Addition of objects upon objects to create feeling of plenitude, immanence

1926

Paris Peasant, Louis Aragon

• Second section is a catalog of a neighborhood, Le Passage de L’Opera
• For example, see hairdressers’ shops’ things, 95-6

1927

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

• Army & Navy Stores catalog that James cuts images out of (recurring image)
• Knowledge as alphabet A-Z: Victorian mania for organization

1937

The Years, Virginia Woolf

• A family’s genealogy: the historical catalog of periodization again