lexicography/pher as a literary/philosophical motif

[Soelve I. Curdts]

Dear Toma,
	I've just seen this wonderful thread you triggered... Here are my two cents:
Cent number One: For Flaubert, I'd use all of Bouvard et Pécuchet. There is also some discussion of Flaubert's travels, musealization, note taking (or the necessary absence / failure thereof) etc. i.e. the encyclopedic endeavour with all its illusions and delusions in Adrianne Tooke, Flaubert and the Pictorial Arts. Then there is Jacques Neefs on Flaubert and La Bêtise (e.g. la haine des grands hommes au XIXe Siècle), and a very nice article by Stathis Gourgouris, "Research, Essay, Failure" on reading, travels, and encyclopedic impossibility... There is also Anne Herschberg-Pierrot on "Barthes and Doxa." You may have looked at this collection Flaubert and Postmodernism (eds Naomi Schor and Henry Majewski) which would, I think, work nicely for you. I am also thinking of Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus, Die Rhetorik des Schweigens und die Poetik des Zitats (with a very nice piece on Homais - "Homais parlait", what else needs saying, right?). There is also Philippe Dufour on "La Prose du Silence" and his (long!) thèse which goes back to Romanticism, Schlegel in particular. If you think about the dictionary in conjunction with repetition, Grand in La Peste comes to mind... OK, enough engrossing in the Bourgeoisophobus!
Cent number two: There are some great lists in Elke Schmitter's Frau Sartoris (works nicely with Madame Bovary by the way) and Philip Roth's American Pastoral. The former contains a kind of listing of clichés, the latter turns a seemingly harmless list into a furious enumeration of things suffered. 
One of my all time favorites is, of course, Baudelaire's self-description as a lexicomaniac in his account of Théophile Gautier. Gautier asks him if he reads dictionaries, as others would ask you whether you prefer novels over travelogues. This has particular significance, because there is a whole miniature poetics in this account, in rich tension with Baudelaire's own poems and prose poems - Gautier is a point of poetic ambivalence throughout, think e.g. of the dedication of "ces fleurs maladives..."
If you think about the dictionary / the encyclopedic as a kind of claim to (total?) recall, Musil has a great line in The Man Without Qualities about "Erinnerungsbereitschaft", the kind of recall of Benjamin's world of "information" that lacks "universal council" and/or actual remembering.  
I am also thinking of Adorno's great question of who is better "equipped" in a foreign language: the person using a dictionary, or the person using contextual approximations? A plea for Heisenberg's Unschärferelation?
Oh well, for whatever it's worth...
Cheers,
Soelve



Soelve I. Curdts, Ph.D.
Department of Comparative Literature
Princeton University
133 East Pyne
Princeton, NJ 08544



From: Toma Tasovac <ttasovac at princeton.edu>
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:40:08 +0200
Subject: [SEELANGS] lexicography/pher as a literary/philosophical motif
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu

Dear colleagues,

I'm interested in the literary and philosophical treatment of
lexicography and the figure of the lexicographer on his/her elusive
quest for meaning, identity and satisfaction in and against language,
which runs the gamut from mediocrity (Flauber't ridicule of Charles
Bovary's extensive and systematic use of the French-Latin dictionary,
for instance) to madness (Roget's obsessive-compulsive compilation of
lists of all sorts, or the celebrated case of the committed -- in
both senses of the word -- OED contributor William Chester Minor).

I'd like to dip into the collective brain of this list and solicit
examples -- Slavic or non-Slavic -- of poetry (e.g. Neruda's Odo al
Diccionario), fiction (such as Bruno Frank's Der Reisepaß, Pavic'
Хазарски речник), essays written by non-lexicogrphers
(e.g. Sartre writing about the fascinating pictures in Nouveau
Larousse illustré, or Borges' preface to Diccionario enciclopédico
Grijalbo), dictionaries written by non-lexicographers (Voltaire's
Dictionnaire philosophique, Flaubert's Dictionnaire des idées
reçues, Solzhenitsin's Русский словарь
языкового расширения) or any other literary/
philosophical texts in which the theory and practice of collecting
and defining words plays a thematic, metaphoric or structural role.

Any tips or references, no matter how small, would be appreciated.
Many thanks in advance.

All best,
Toma

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