Harmonious Disarray

What do artists’ still lifes, jazz, Japanese gardens, and literary lists have in common? The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley identified one thing, at least, in a letter in verse he wrote in 1820 while staying at the house of his friend Henry Revely (Henry once saved Shelly’s life after he fell into a canal, and the two were now planning to establish a steamship company between Marseille and Genoa. Nothing came of those plans. Two years later Shelley drowned, at age 30, while sailing near Spezia.) Central to the long poem is a list of objects in Revely’s workroom:

Upon the table…
A pretty bowl of wood…
A hollow screw with cogs…
…bills and calculations much perplext…
…a range of mathematical
Instruments…
A heap of rosin, a queer broken glass
With ink in it; — a china cup…

Near that a dusty paint box, some odd hooks,
A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books,
Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms
To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims,
Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray
Of figures, — disentangle them who may.

There are several levels of harmony in this disarray. First, of course, Shelley moves things around for the purposes of rhyme and meter and for the chant-like pleasure of saying them. But the objects he selects also construct a biography: the screw with cogs, the bills, and mathematical instruments for the planned steamboat company; the china cup and ivory and rosin (residue of turpentine used to manufacture varnish and ink and to treat violin bows) that might someday serve as cargo; the half-burnt match that ignites the boiler that fires the engine (and maybe the figurative match that fired the poet at his desk); the logarithms of the French mathematician Laplace, whose theory of tides was an aid to navigators; an artist’s paint box made dusty with misuse, perhaps, by this foray into the business world.

Shelly’s phrase “harmonious disarray” was seized upon by one of my favorite writers, Guy Davenport, to describe the art of still life in his brilliant study, Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature. The phrase serves equally well to describe the art within certain kinds of lists, inventories, and catalogs in literature.

A list is a tricky thing. Used carelessly it freezes the reader out. But when arranged artfully, with attention to the music of the words and the accumulating feeling of abundance and especially the startling juxtaposition of incongruous things, it can be delightful, powerful, intoxicating (more about all this in future posts). To test the power of a list, all you have to do is read it aloud. The listings in a telephone book probably don’t work. The merely random usually doesn’t. But try it on the examples below to see if you, too, get carried away:

Margaret Atwood in Good Bones: “The basic Female Body comes with the following accessories: garter-belt, panty-girdle, crinoline, camisole, bustle, brassiere, stomacher, chemise, virgin zone, spike heels, nose-ring, veil, kid gloves, fishnet stockings, fichu, bandeau, Merry Widow, weepers, chokers, barrettes, bangles, beads, lorgnette, feather boa, basic black, compact, Lycra stretch one-piece with modesty panel, designer peignor, flannel nightie, lace teddy, bed, head… The Female Body has many uses. It’s been used as a door-knocker, a bottle opener, as a clock with a ticking belly, as something to hold up lampshades, as a nutcracker, just squeeze the brass legs together and out comes your nut. It bears torches, lifts victorious wreaths, grows copper wings and raises aloft a ring of neon stars; whole buildings rest on its marble heads.”

Padget Powell in Typical: “I wish I were a redheaded Fort Worth millionaire ten times. I’d have a good truck, jewelry, ironed jeans, neat house, docile wife, decent daughters, busy eyebrows, pithy maxims, damn nigh aphorisms now, and very little trouble except possibly nagging prostate. And good boots. Preferably Luccheses, settle for Sanders.”

Philip Roth in the prologue to The Great American Novel, a litany so luscious and lengthy (it goes on for many pages) that he had to alphabetize it: “Call me Smitty. That’s what everybody else called me — the ballplayers, the bankers, the bareback riders, the baritones, the bartenders, the bastards, the best-selling writers (except Hem, who dubbed me Frederico), the bicyclists, the big-game hunters… and thirty-one others – And that’s only the letter B, fans, only one of the Big Twenty-Six” …O what a race we are, fans! What a radiant, raffish, raggedy, rakish, rambunctious, rampaging, ranting, rapacious, rare, rash, raucous, raunchy, ravaged, ravenous…rundown, runty, ruthless race!”

Oh what a race indeed!