By PETER MONAGHAN

Robert Belknap's argument for them may shut him out of academe

Robert E. Belknap is, according to his academic mentors, a reader of singular imagination,

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Robert Belknap's A-List of Lists

a writer of considerable craft, and possibly destined never to get a job in academe.

The renowned Harold Bloom, one of three readers of his recently approved dissertation at Yale University, calls it "marvelous." Another reader, Wai Chee Dimock, says the project was "one of the most exciting I've read." It was "learned and humble," she says, "it glowed with "literary delight," and it exhibited a broad knowledge of literature that makes Mr. Belknap "a rare bird in the profession, right now."

So why haven't colleges offered him a job? And why haven't book publishers snapped up his manuscript?

The title of his dissertation reveals little of its appeal: "Classification of a Chaos: the List and Its Deployment in the Works of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau." But Mr. Belknap's mentors champion his project as both curiously compelling and winningly curious. In it, he examines a literary device -- an "elusive, protean construct" -- that has been largely overlooked: the list.

When Mark Twain lists the "certain schoolboy treasures of inestimable value" to be found in Tom Sawyer's pockets -- "a lump of chalk, an indiarubber ball, three fish-hooks, and one of that kind of marbles known as a 'sure 'nough crystal,'" what is he up to?

Such lists, Mr. Belknap writes, "serve the work at large by making explicit the value system under which the novel will operate."

"Lists are deliberate structures, built with care and craft, and perfectly suited to rigorous analysis," he argues. And they've existed throughout the history of literature.

"They're everywhere. They are more places than you know," Mr. Belknap exclaims over an Italian soda in a cafe near Saint Mary's School, a private academy for girls where he and his wife live and teach English and French, respectively. The slender Mr. Belknap, Ph.D. in hand since May, seems to need prompting before he'll presume to share his wide-ranging literary knowledge. Homer in The Iliad, he says, compiled a catalog of ships and lists of the combatants at Troy, to evoke the "great sweep" of his invention and "the magnitude of the impending war." In ancient Sumerian texts; the Bible; works by Milton, Shakespeare, and Rabelais; and novels by modern authors like James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon, lists "have meanings that will fulfill greater purposes, something beyond the few seconds they take to read," he says.

The 16th-century poet Edmund Spenser included an outstanding one near the beginning of his immense allegorical romance, The Faerie Queene. It was a several-lines list of tree names -- "The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall,/The vine-prop Elme, the Poplar neuer dry ..." -- so deliberately constructed that the trees, as the critic A.C. Hamilton noted, were arranged by height. The list served, Mr. Belknap adds, "to associate the poet with other poets who have assembled well-known catalogs of trees," including Virgil, Ovid, and Chaucer.

Some medieval and Renaissance literary forms were essentially lists. The blason, a kind of poem, particularized a beloved's attributes, one feature per line. Another poetic form, the ubi sunt (Latin for "where are ... ?") those qui ante nos fuerunt ("who went before us"), simultaneously revivified the dearly departed and reconsigned them to the grave.

"The better listers," says Mr. Belknap, "have an understanding of the tricks that they can perform, sleights of hand they can pull. Anyone can make a list, but to make a purposeful list that will have more than its surface quality ... " Well, that is no easy task.

Growing up in Seattle, and then studying as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Mr. Belknap, 35, often noticed lists, but he was alerted to just how common they are by the concentrated reading he did for the qualifying exams for his Ph.D. A friend said, "Oh, I just skip over all those." But Mr. Belknap found himself thinking, "How can you skip over that? There's something fundamental here."

Nervously, he approached his dissertation supervisor, John Hollander, a prominent poet and English professor at Yale, to propose writing about the phenomenon, and found someone who "was totally receptive" to the idea. Word got out. Friends and acquaintances began to send him literary lists. He learned of Francis Spufford's Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings: Literary Lists (Chatto & Windus, 1989) -- which he calls "a beautiful (but incomplete) collection of literary lists."

He set about making sense of a large, disparate mass of examples. Lists, he argues in his dissertation, may "compile a history, gather evidence, order and organize phenomena, present an agenda of apparent formlessness, and express a multiplicity of voices and experiences."

As such a sentence suggests, Mr. Belknap is quite the precise taxonomer himself.

To make his project at all manageable, he zeroed in on a few authors: the 19th-century Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and two writers they influenced, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Inveterate listers all, they lived in an era when constructs like Linnaeus's classification of species had ushered in the rise of natural science. Thoreau, in particular, embraced the language of systematic natural history, compiling lists that espoused the Transcendentalist philosophy that all things were connected.

The four writers' poems and novels also exemplified Mr. Belknap's claim that, like larger devices such as plot, the list propels a poem's or story's action and develops its themes. So, for example, in Moby-Dick, when Ishmael presents an inventory of the supplies needed to outfit a ship -- "400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. of Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock fish." -- as well as firkins of butters and ankers of Geneva, whatever those may be -- he furthers Melville's goal of expressing "the entire compass of whaling life" and triggers digressions that drive the narrative and thematic development of the book.

Undoubtedly, says Mr. Belknap, the list was something Melville "could revel in and enjoy," and use to show off his ability to recognize and construe the world's variety. If literary writing is a process of perceiving, imagining, and creating, then listing is a particularly self-conscious form of writing, suggests Mr. Belknap.

Walt Whitman -- "one great lister," according to Mr. Belknap -- went so far as to make the list a foundation of his whole writing project, he says. The poet compiled ecstatic catalogs in Leaves of Grass of mundane items -- such as workers' professions -- and items the poet considered resonant with significance -- such as American Indian place names.

From Whitman, lists "poured like the unrehearsed songs of the thrush," Mr. Belknap writes, evoking a kind of "unpremeditated improvisation" that resonated with the poet's vision of the spirit of innovative "plural America." In short, listing was key to Whitman's "genuine poetic innovation and purposeful challenge to English tradition."

Earlier work on literary lists is sparse, although in his introduction Mr. Belknap tips his hat to a long, halting tradition of critical writing. "I was surprised, and boy, was it helpful," he says. Particularly enlightening, he says, was the novelist William Gass's 1985 article "And," which explores the many and varied usages of that conjunction.

Most striking, perhaps, was Henry Peacham's 16th-century Garden of Eloquence, a copious catalog of rhetorical devices. It included several minutely differentiated categories of listing with such names as "Congeries" and "Dinumeratio."

The ecstatic, writerly delight that Mr. Belknap identifies in great listers echoes in his own carefully shaped prose. Mr. Hollander praises the dissertation for being "not only impressive and original but enjoyable to read, as well." The work's appeal to senior figures like Mr. Hollander is perhaps not surprising, as its close reading recalls New Criticism, the movement that held sway from the 1950s to the 1970s, and Mr. Belknap frequently cites theorists of that era. He "worked at it with only the writing itself, and his own learning, in mind, rather than with a sense of 'career' and what prudence might tell him he should do by way of a dissertation in order to get a job," says Mr. Hollander.

For Mr. Belknap, there's the rub. He has found very few job postings suited to someone of his research inclinations, and had just three interviews in the last year, and no job offers. And he has been unsuccessful in placing the dissertation with a publisher. The closest he came: His introductory chapter appeared as an article in the Winter 2000 issue of Literary Imagination, a journal established to counter the prevailing trends in literary studies.

Ms. Dimock, one of the Yale readers, says she warned Mr. Belknap that he needed to become more adept at "foregrounding what he's doing, calling attention to it, to say, 'This is new, even if it's going to look odd to you.'"

"No one really trained me for that at Yale," Mr. Belknap almost whispers. "So I wrote it the way I wanted to write it. I didn't want to scream loudly from the rooftops."

Should he have to? asks Mr. Hollander. And, what does it say about modern-day literary studies that he has no job?

Mr. Belknap senses, after a few unsuccessful job interviews, why he does not. "I like to be a generalist," he says. "I like to cross all over, and read everything." That makes things tough, says Ms. Dimock: "Looking at recent job listings, I'm struck by how precisely categorized they are."

Mr. Bloom doubts that anyone like Mr. Belknap should seek an academic job. With characteristic bluntness he says, "If I were 50 years younger, I would not pursue an academic career, as the profession has committed suicide."

Mr. Belknap continues to apply for jobs at colleges but is not certain that he would prefer one. "I love being in the classroom and teaching," he says, and working at Saint Mary's School -- amid verdant grounds that would be the envy of many a college. The school arranged a "pretty good package" for him and his wife, who have an 8-month-old daughter, that allows them to avoid a commuter relationship.

His dissertation's third reader, Amy Hungerford, an assistant professor of English at Yale, thinks that Mr. Belknap is being "realistic." While she says his work exhibits "beautiful readings," elegant writing, and "a very solid knowledge of the literary tradition," she gave it lower marks than did the other readers. She contends that a Yale doctorate should engage current scholarship, because to be unable, or disinclined, to do that is to be ill-equipped for the realities of academic employment.

"Now," she says, "we need people in Bob's generation who can take delight in reading and insert it into the current critical discourse and revitalize that discourse in light of the kinds of pleasure that New Criticism taught us."

Such charges, responds Mr. Hollander, amount to saying that Mr. Belknap's approach was "too personal or belletristic or insufficiently theoretical. It certainly is not; it's just that the theoretical speculations arise from the texts themselves rather than from a prior agenda."

What he means by "a prior agenda" is apparent when he adds, "There are still people who love and want to write about and teach literature, rather than some pre-programmed mode of social history or bracketed X Studies framed by a quasi-religious sectarianism, identity politics, et cetera."

Mr. Belknap does not put things nearly so provocatively. He says he took the approach he did because, while it is not currently favored in his discipline, "it seemed to suit the project."

ROBERT BELKNAP'S A-LIST OF LISTS

"The list has been a marvelous venue for literary and linguistic spectacle," writes Robert E. Belknap. Here are some of his favorites:

James Joyce: "Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale, York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious, and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes."

-- a description of the Dublin markets, from Ulysses

Henry David Thoreau: "I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house."

-- from Walden

Jorge Luis Borges: "... animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies."

-- from the essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins"

SOURCE: Chronicle reporting

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