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Naming of Parts; or, The Comforts of Classification: Thomas Jefferson's Construction of America as Fact and Myth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Susan Manning
Susan Manning
Affiliation:
Susan Manning is Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, CB3 9DF, England.
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Extract

Henry Reed's poem of the Second World War offers a studied, ironic catalogue of some parts of experience silencing others. Here are observable facts, given as imperative command; knowledge of their use is for the future, rather than a possession of the present, however: one of the many things we (or you) have not got. Here also is the beauty of nature and its utter irrelevance to the human struggle. “Naming of Parts” excludes more than it includes: what is not said constantly overbears and threatens to break through what is. But the balance of information is precariously maintained, the unspeakable, the horror which is the truth of the war being disguised, expressed, and controlled in the naming of parts.

In a very different register, William Gass writes in his Habitations of the Word,

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , December 1996 , pp. 345 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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2 “And,” Habitations of the Word (New York: Touchstone Books, 1985), 178Google Scholar. It is not by chance that Whitman is the presiding spirit of Gass's observations: the greatest of American “literary list-ers,” his catalogues have provided a notable crux of criticism.

3 Donald Barthelme, interview 1980.

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6 Ibid., 20–26.

7 I am grateful to Clive Bush for drawing my attention, in correspondence, to Jefferson's connection with Camden and the English County Topographies, and for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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14 See, for example, Freneau's poem “To an Author” (1788): “An age employed in edging steel/Can no poetic rapture feel.”

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28 Though of course there is more to be said here; as I have indicated, all lists and all listing have their agendas and preferred modes of perception. Jefferson's are no exception: if these place him firmly in relation to the ethnology, botany, geology and aesthetics of the final quarter of the eighteenth century, they also suggest the extent to which his unique revolutionary and personal position enabled Jefferson to exploit the characteristics of their respective genera in a creative fusion of political and rhetorical possibilities.

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