Monday, June 11, 2007

Species of Indices



One of the most interesting ideas Mark Scroggins raises in his recent post on the aesthetics of indexing is that the index constitutes a "re-seeing" of the text to which it refers:
Or – the index as a re-seeing of the volume, a re-reading of what one has already written. Zukofsky’s own indices: the index to Prepositions, which is nothing but concepts; the collaborative index to “A” – LZ indexed only “a,” “an,” and “the,” and his wife Celia did the rest, chiding him that no-one would find a three-word index of any earthly use. As if anyone “uses” the index to “A” that way.

Reading the index after the Chicago Manual — and thus perhaps pointing at a more normative and normalizing function to this peculiar text, or adjunct to a larger text — Scroggins notes that it affords the reader capability of "getting to the heart of the book & tearing it out."

Index, then, as veins that carry us, returning, towards the book's heart; and as eyes that revise the text, redirecting our attention. This revision relocates the book's heart. And because an index, of functional necessity, rearranges the text according to arbitrary alphabetization, it remarks upon strange juxtapositions: word and work are, logically enough, adjacent in "A", where Eros and Eskimo surprise.

Witihin indices, there is a special pleasure in those concepts, names, terms, etc. that appear only once within the text. As in "A":
clematis, 553
clover, 18
coconut, 400
[...]
invariance, 509
invention, 131
iris, 103
As a revision — and as a relocation of the book's center to its extremities and examples — this list calls out for special attention to these details, where others have been necessarily left out, lest index become complete concordance and overtake the book proper. Inviting us to imagine the book anew, they seem to work as an act of salvage, asking that we not overlook something for its scarcity, as though that very scarcity were accidental, or should be repaired.

Among indices, then, Georges Perec's for Species of Spaces stands out. No term listed appears more than once — or, at least is indicated as having multiple locations within the text's space. Perec invites our attention to the details, to the transitory, rather than to the generalizations or key concepts within the text. Or, to take up terms he deploys elsewhere: the index provides refuge for the fugitive ideas within the text. How else but through such an index to recall his reference to Forbidden Planet in his meditation on doors? This example — along with passing references to ice-creams and a large red O, to marshmallows and to monkey-wrenches — would risk being lost among concepts and ideas.

How else, too, to not forget that he invokes crayfish in an account of utopia? And this utopia provides a way of thinking such an index. Perec here describes a village in terms of the sort of familiarity a well-written index, used as well as it is written, might afford: "You'd know whether it was going to rain by looking at the shape of the clouds above the hill, you'd know the places where there are still crayfish."



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