In his remarkable essay on the conjunction "AND" (Habitations of the Word, 1985), author William H. Gass describes the list as "one of the essential elements of a truly contemporary style." Not the shopping list or the hit list, the to-do list or the top-ten list, but what Gass calls "delightfully sheer enumerations."
Who enjoys a good list? Anyone who takes pleasure in the sounds and textures of language, Gass says--and in the various shades of meaning conveyed by words arranged in rows:
Lists, then, are for those who savor, who revel and wallow, who embrace, not only the whole of things, but all of its accounts, histories, descriptions, justifications. . . . Even the jeremiad is a list, and full of joy, for damnations are delightful. Lists are finally for those who love language, the vowel-swollen cheek, the lilting, dancing tongue, because lists are fields full of words, and roving bands of "and."The items in a list may be lined up with nothing more than commas between them (a sentence style known as asyndeton). Or they may be linked more exuberantly by Gass's "roving bands of 'and'" (polysyndeton).
Of course, in the hands of a good writer, these styles can be imaginatively combined in countless ways--as shown in these passages from Gass's own short story, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country":
- BUSINESS
One side section of street is blocked off with sawhorses. Hard, thin, bitter men in blue jeans, cowboy boots and hats, untruck a dinky carnival. The merchants are promoting themselves. There will be free rides, raucous music, parades and coneys, pop, popcorn, candy, cones, awards, and drawings, with all you can endure of pinch, push, bawl, shove, shout, scream, shriek, and bellow. Children pedal past on decorated bicycles, their wheels a blur of color, streaming crinkled paper and excited dogs. A little later, there's a pet show for a prize--dogs, cats, birds, sheep, ponies, goats--none of which wins. The whirlabouts whirl about. The Ferris wheel climbs dizzily into the sky as far as a tall man on tiptoe might be persuaded to reach, and the irritated operators measure the height and weight of every child with sour eyes to see if they are safe for the machines. An electrical megaphone repeatedly trumpets the names of the generous sponsors. The following day they do not allow the refuse to remain long in the street. - HOUSEHOLD APPLES
The country became my childhood. Flies braided themselves on the flypaper in my grandmother's house. I can smell the bakery and the grocery and the stables and the dairy in that small Dakota town I knew as a kid; knew as I dreamed I'd know your body, as I've known nothing, before or since; knew as the flies knew, in the honest, unchaste sense: the burned house, hose-wet, which drew a mist of insects like the blue smoke of its smolder, and gangs of boys, moist-lipped, destructive as its burning. Flies have always impressed me; they are so persistently alive. Now they were coating the ground beneath my trees. Some were ordinary flies; there were the large blue-green ones; there were swarms of fruit flies too, and the red-spotted scavenger beetle; there were a few wasps, several sorts of bees and butterflies--checkers, sulphurs, monarchs, commas, question marks--and delicate dragonflies . . . but principally houseflies and horseflies and bottleflies, flies and more flies in clusters around the rotting fruit. They loved the pears. Inside they fed. If you picked up a pear, they flew, and the pear became skin and stem. They were everywhere the fruit was: in the tree still--apples like a hive for them--or where the fruit littered the ground, squashing itself as you stepped . . . there was no help for it. - THE CHURCH
Friday night. Girls in dark skirts and white blouses sit in ranks and scream in concerts. They carry funnels loosely stuffed with orange and black paper which they shake wildly, and small megaphones through which, as drilled, they direct and magnify their shouting. Their leaders, barely pubescent girls, prance and shake and whirl their skirts above their bloomers. The young men, leaping, extend their arms and race through puddles of amber light, their bodies glistening. In a lull, though it rarely occurs, you can hear the squeak of tennis shoes against the floor. Then the yelling begins again, and then continues: fathers, mothers, neighbors joining in to form a single pulsing ululation--a cry of the whole community--for in this gymnasium each body becomes the bodies beside it, pressed as they are together, thigh to thigh, and the same shudder runs through all of them, and runs toward the same release. Only the ball moves serenely through this dazzling din. Obedient to law it scarcely speaks but caroms quietly and lives at peace.
(from In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories, by William H. Gass, 1968; reprinted by David R Godine in 2005)
"Perhaps 'AND' should be sewn on the flag," Gass says in his essay. "Life itself can only be compiled and thereby captured on a list, if it can be laid out anywhere at all."
Writing With Lists:
- Writing With Lists
- Lists in William Least Heat-Moon's Place Description
- Ian Frazier's List of Reasons in Great Plains
- Lists and Anaphora in Nikki Giovanni's "View of Home"
Image: William H. Gass. The David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Dr. William H. Gass was the 2007 winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin.
