Abstract
The chapter introduces the form of the list as a tool for meaning-making and emphasizes the central role that different conceptions of knowledge play in creating and decoding lists. It argues that enumerative structures offer themselves as an entry point to examine how readers make sense of texts because those structures put on display the gaps and blanks that have to be filled in the reading process. It proposes to combine insights from (cognitive) narratology, new formalism, and reception theory to examine how lists work within the genre of detective fiction. The introduction provides a review of list-related publications and proposes a working definition of the central term “list” that is based on a prototype model.
You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF
[T]attoos, knots, ears, ciphers, bicycle tires, tobacco ash, newspaper types, perfumes, the development of English script, and names of American gunsmiths.
The items on this list seem fairly unrelated. Some are visible material objects (bicycle tires), some are abstract (names), some seem to be consumer goods, some are part of the human body, and one item even designates a timespan rather than a concrete entity. Lists invite us to group items together and to find a connecting principle that allows us to make sense of them as a unit. The above list makes this difficult because its items come from such a broad range of categories. However, once we can find a common heading to sort things by, their relation becomes immediately apparent, no matter how obscure it might have seemed a moment ago. The above list is taken from Ian Ousby’s Bloodhounds of Heaven, and it designates the various areas of knowledge in which Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes claims expertise (1976, 162). Seen from this perspective, the very variety of categories that initially made it confusing becomes the point of the list: it demonstrates the great range of areas in which Sherlock Holmes is considered an expert, and the uncommon, almost absurd, scope and unrelated nature of the list items create the impression that Holmes’s knowledge is so all-encompassing that potentially anything could fall within its range.
When looking at a list, readers have to perform cognitive work and actively fill in missing links to make sense of the listed items. The readers’ activity, in a way, resembles detective work in that they have a number of clues that need to be put together in order to reveal the bigger picture those clues represent. “To list,” writes Stephen Barney, “is to attempt to comprehend” (1982, 223); he thus points out the central role that cognitive processes occupy in the making and decoding of lists. It is, perhaps, not surprising that the popular literary genre of detective fiction teems with lists; they are used as meaning-making and ordering tools by fictional detectives and, at the same time, as devices to involve readers in the act of detection. Detective fiction often invites readers to put together clues in a way similar to how they would make sense of a list; frequently, the genre even chooses the form of the list to present readers with clues to make sense of.
The strategies that readers use to piece together information presented in lists are inextricably linked with epistemological concerns about how knowledge is generated, delimited, or manipulated within any particular story world. The various conceptions of knowledge that can be found in detective fiction are closely connected to the forms through which they are conveyed to readers and thus also to the readers’ positioning with regard to the story world. This tightly knit relation between the form of the list, the genre of detective fiction, and different conceptions of knowledge has hitherto remained unexplored but deserves critical attention. The study at hand is an attempt to close that gap.
Detective fiction is a well-researched genre with regard to its history,Footnote 1 and much attention has been paid to the work of individual authors.Footnote 2 Considerably less attention has been paid to the genre with regard to its formal properties.Footnote 3 Recent years have seen a revived interest in literary form across a wide variety of contexts. Caroline Levine’s study Forms (2015) makes a case for the importance of literary form for social, cultural, and political contexts, Verena Theile and Linda Tredennick’s edited volume New Formalisms and Literary Theory (2013) brings together scholars who explore the merits of new formalist approaches to literary criticism, and Elizabeth Kovach, Imke Polland, and Ansgar Nünning’s edited volume Forms at Work (2021) builds on Levine’s work to discuss the relevance of new formalism in the study of literature, culture, and different media.
Lists can be considered as forms in the sense proposed by Caroline Levine: they are structures crafted for a specific purpose (see 2015, XI), they are carefully arranged to assert a certain kind of order (ibid.), they stay recognizable throughout a variety of different settings and can thus be considered portable (see ibid., 7), and they are inextricable from practices that shape them into material form (ibid., 10). Levine’s new formalist approach to form carries explicitly political connotations, but it overlaps to a significant degree with approaches that focus on narrative form, for example, in its focus on the patterns and structures that underlie (narrative) texts. My analysis is centered on narrative representation and thus draws on the methodology and theoretical framework of postclassical narratology; at the same time, I am interested in the impact form unfolds beyond its strictly narrative contexts. As both a narrative and a Levinean form, the list is particularly well suited to an approach that views formal and narratological aspects of texts in conjunction with their wider socio-cultural implications.
The list’s ubiquity and adaptability to a sheer infinite number of different contexts may be the reason why the form, in both its literary and everyday variations, has drawn an increasing amount of critical attention across disciplines in the humanities over the past decade. As early as the late 1970s, Jack Goody has examined lists in the context of anthropology and administrative practices,Footnote 4 and decades later, scholars such as Liam Cole Young still draw on his work. Young refers to Goody’s study to examine lists from the perspective of media studies in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. Lucie Doležalová’s edited volume The Charm of a List (2009) takes a transdisciplinary approach to the study of lists that emphasizes the form’s ubiquitous presence across a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Both Doležalová and Young focus on demonstrating the omnipresence of lists across cultural and historical contexts. Rebecca Laemmle et al. place their focus on classical scholarship and explore the poetics of enumerative modes in an edited volume on Lists and Catalogues in Ancient Literature and Beyond (2021). Most recently, the edited volume Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary and Visual Enumeration (2022b) presents a selection of case studies that throws light on list-making as a cultural, visual, and literary practice. From a sociological point of view, Urs Stäheli focuses on the politics of the lists and on the power relations that lists can generate, conceal, or reveal (see 2011, 2016, 2017).Footnote 5
A more specific focus on literary lists can be found in Robert Belknap’s seminal study The List: the Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (2004), which provides a much quoted definition of the form of the list and highlights the form’s importance in the works of four canonical American authors. Sabine Mainberger’s Die Kunst des Aufzählens (2003) discusses lists and enumerations with a particular regard for the rhetorical and poetological aspects of the form in literary writing. Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists (2009) presents a kind of list of lists in the history of art and literature that aims for demonstrating the form’s prominence across times and contexts.Footnote 6 More recently, a special issue of the journal Style edited by Eva von Contzen provides a diachronic perspective and engages with Lists in Literature from the Middle Ages to Postmodernism (2016). Furthermore, in Literary Lists: A Short History of Form and Function (2023), Barton et al. trace the history of the literary list from the early modern period to postmodernism. A genre-specific approach is taken by a recent issue of the journal a/b Autobiography Studies (2020), which contains a forum that turns its attention to lists within the particular genre of life writing.Footnote 7
My own study of lists in detective fiction and their relation to readers and reading practices draws on the work of Eva von Contzen, who explores the cognitive dimensions that are inseparable from the simple form of the list.Footnote 8 Von Contzen’s approach to lists and list-making allows for seeing lists on a sliding scale of narrativity rather than positing the form as automatically opposed to narrative. According to Eva von Contzen, lists need not be considered as inherently narrative, but narratives can use lists as a mode to achieve certain effects. “[A]pprehended as narrative elements of change and transformation,” von Contzen argues, lists can “considerably shape the perception of a work” (2021, 45). This holds true for the lists that appear in detective fiction as well: although they tend to interrupt the continuous progression of plot in a text, lists hold great potential to engage readers and often function as triggers for the reader to fill in textual gaps and reshuffle information previously presented in the text.
A Narratological Approach to Lists in Detective Fiction does not pursue a cognitive approach in the narrow sense—it neither investigates narratives as a “resource for sense making” (see Herman 2013b, x) nor elaborates on the role of embodied cognition for the reading process in any detail. However, my exploration of how features of narrative discourse enable particular kinds of processing strategies strongly overlaps with cognitive approaches to literary studies, such as Torsa Ghosal’s cognitive approach to multimodality in contemporary fiction (see 2021). In investigating how readers engage with elements of a text that (seemingly) interrupt the continuous flow of narration, this book furthermore shares an interest with Karin Kukkonen’s recent study on Probability Designs (2020).
A Narratological Approach to Lists in Detective Fiction proposes to investigate how lists can facilitate access to story worlds through their capacity to both transport and shape knowledge about the fictional world. Starting from a conceptualization of the list that assumes this form requires readers to actively make sense of it, this book explores the functional potential of lists in detective fiction with regard to how they frame knowledge in the fictional world and thus guide the cognitive work readers perform when engaging with texts. My reader-based approach to the topic focuses on the idea of describing narrative potential, and thus aims to avoid discussing the responses of individual readers. In order to better be able to describe such narrative potential, this study will work with the concept of affordances. The concept of affordances originates in design theory and describes how a great number of potential uses can be inherent in one form or material, and that objects or situations can have different affordances relative to the person (or entity) interacting with them (see Gibson 1979, 127). Psychologist James Gibson argues that looking at objects in terms of what they afford may be a useful way of avoiding limiting and necessarily incomplete definitions (see ibid., 134). New formalist scholar Caroline Levine applies his concept to literary studies.Footnote 9 According to Levine, affordances “describe the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs” (2015, 6). In her monograph, Levine outlines the affordances, or potential uses of four exemplary forms, and lists, among others, the affordances of connectedness and a potentially infinite extensiveness as characteristic for the form she designates as “network” (see ibid., 113–117). The idea of form itself could be said to carry a number of affordances.
Eva von Contzen has explored the notion of affordances with regard to the form of the list. Drawing on Levine, she argues that affordance is an apt concept to describe “those aspects of an object or form that it is capable of” (2018, 317); it constitutes a way of illustrating both the specific properties and the general scope of an object of scrutiny (see ibid., 325). Von Contzen has used affordances to describe the reactions lists are capable of eliciting in readers. The concept is so useful because it can outline capacities without the need for making normative statements. Just because a list has the potential to evoke a certain response, that potential need not be actualized for every single reader confronted with the list (see ibid., 326). The same holds true for the study of lists in detective fiction. The capacity that the use of lists in this genre holds for involving readers merits closer attention even if individual readers may have different reactions.Footnote 10
But what exactly counts as a list? Even though the form looks deceptively simple and appears to be intuitively recognizable, as soon as one attempts to find a definition for the list, it is difficult to come up with one that is specific enough to be useful, yet inclusive enough to account for less prototypical specimen. There are a number of different approaches to defining lists, with the focus reaching from formal features to functions to aspects of reception. One list definition that has been quoted often, perhaps for its general scope, and that focuses on formal features is that of Robert Belknap:
At their most simple, lists are frameworks that hold separate and disparate items together. Lists are plastic, flexible structures in which an array of constituent units coheres through specific relations generated by specific forces of attraction. (2004, 2)
One of the merits of Belknap’s definition is that he draws attention to the twofold nature of lists and invites us to take into consideration both “the immediately recognizable form of the list as a whole, and the individual items that make up the list” (von Contzen 2022, 132). What makes a list cohere can either be found in what Belknap calls “specific relations” between the individual items on the list, or in the way it is framed as a whole, for instance, by a heading such as “stolen items” or “to do” (see ibid.). Von Contzen herself has proposed the minimalist definition of a list as “a set of items assembled under some principle in a formally distinctive unit” (2021, 36). Formally, lists are “characterised by several (usually three or more) distinct elements employed in direct succession and in loose, if at all, syntactic and conceptual coherence to both the other elements and the surrounding narrative material” (ibid.). Belknap’s definition is general enough to be fairly comprehensive, but it is also so broad that its usefulness in identifying concrete lists is doubtful. Yet, a more narrow determination of a list’s properties may exclude arrangements that readers would intuitively consider lists.
To circumvent the problem of being too general, von Contzen, and Sabine Mainberger, who defines lists and enumerations on a formal level as dependent on their characteristic visual appearance (see 2003, 5), add a cognitive dimension to their formal list definitions. Von Contzen states that “a list, even though it is defined by its form, is always also more than this form because of the cognitive processes required to decode its meaning(s)” (2021, 38). In a similar vein, Mainberger emphasizes that lists are tools for certain intellectual operations such as memorization or categorization (see 2003, 6). Others highlight aspects of reception in addition to form as playing a crucial role when thinking about lists (see Doležalová 2009, 5).Footnote 11
Yet another approach to defining lists that is, for example, taken by Jack Goody (1978) and Stephen Barney (1982) is to incorporate functional features of the list into its definition and to thus focus on what lists do. Goody combines formal and functional features when he writes that:
[t]he list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity; it depends on physical placement, on location; it can be read in different directions, both sideways and downwards, up and down, as well as left and right; it has a clear-cut beginning and a precise end, that is, a boundary, an edge, like a piece of cloth.Footnote 12 Most importantly it encourages the ordering of the items, by number, by initial sound, by category, etc. And the existence of boundaries, external and internal, brings greater visibility to categories, at the same time as making them more abstract. (1978, 81)
A functional approach to the form can be especially useful to describe lists as they appear within a certain professional or thematic field, and using a cluster of affordances as the basis for a definition raises the level of specificity and usefulness of the definition for a particular purpose. However, once again, it is impractical, if not impossible to phrase a definition of lists that includes all their potential affordances, and the more contradictory affordances a definition contains, the less useful it becomes. This is why, for the purposes of this book, I have chosen to merely outline a number of formal features that may help to identify lists and place them on a sliding scale of more or less prototypical with regard to their appearance. To do justice to the great variety of affordances that the form of the list can have, I will then discuss specific affordances with regard to my material in the individual chapters.
I propose to view the list through a model that is based on prototypical features rather than a strict definition, which always runs the risk of being too general or too restrictive. Prototype models are, for example, used in linguistics in the field of cognitive semantics to describe basic-level categories in a language (see Rosch et al. 1976), and they derive their appeal from their non-binary structure. Prototype theory is an area of cognitive science that features prominently in the work of cognitive literary scholars such as Monika Fludernik (1996) or David Herman (see f.e. 2008), perhaps because it allows to move away from the idea that we can draw clear-cut boundaries around (narratological) categories (see Alber and Fludernik 2010, 22).
A prototype-based approach to lists is thus in line with this book’s idea of form as a flexible and dynamic concept. The idea of prototypes draws together a number of phenomena (such as footnotes, maps, inventories, suspect profiles, and lists of questions) that may initially appear to be unrelated, but work according to the same list-based principles. There simply is “no one theory that allows for encompassing the many formal and functional facets of lists and the processes of sense-making their reception involves” (von Contzen 2021, 40–41). Von Contzen also speaks of “prototypical list[s]” (ibid., 36), and Mainberger comments on the restrictive nature of definitions and proposes to look at lists and enumerations in terms of family resemblances (see 2003, 6).
I consider the following formal properties as typical features of lists:
-
Lack of or minimal syntax
-
Visually distinct from the text surrounding it
-
Short enough to be taken in at one glance
-
Consists of three or more consecutive items
-
Individual items are marked with numbers, letters, or bullet points
-
Items are words of the same order, often nouns (see also Belknap 2004, 19)
-
The transition from one item to the next contains a visible gap that also exists on the level of content
A list need not contain all these characteristics to function as one, but the more boxes it ticks, the more obviously it can be identified as a list. I use the word list as an umbrella term for a number of enumerative forms that share a prototypical list’s formal properties or affordances but may have more specific applications. Items in catalogs, for example, tend to be more expansive than a single noun and frequently consist of full sentences (see von Contzen 2021, 37), and a table could be considered a list that extends to two or more dimensions.Footnote 13 While my definition focuses on formal criteria to define lists, these formal aspects need not necessarily be restricted to the written word and could, with only minor modifications, be used to describe enumerative structures in images as well. Barton et al. (2022a, esp. 12–15) also conceptualize the list as a phenomenon that is not limited to textual representations and, for example, discuss the idea of visual lists as defined by “the manifestation of a pattern of repetition and variation” and “the highlighting of the relationship between a whole and its parts” (ibid., 13).Footnote 14
The visual-formal level of the list, which my own definition is based on, also makes visible functional criteria that are inseparable from the dimension of form. Lists, for example, decontextualize items on the levels of both form and content—the (prototypical) list’s lack of syntax and its distinctness from the surrounding text, therefore, mirror, on a formal level, the decontextualization that also takes place on the level of content. Furthermore, the use of visual markers such as bullet points or numbering also takes on a dual role on the levels of both (textual) form and content if thought of as a framing device. Such parallels make it possible to project the formal criteria that are crucial to my definition of the list onto a conceptual-metaphorical level. A prototype-based and, therefore, flexible approach to defining the form of the list can therefore also accommodate forms such as diagrams or maps that can be considered list-like through conceptual-metaphorical extension (i.e., forms that share some prototypical features of textual lists through a conceptual-metaphorical link).Footnote 15
Lists can work as a tool to visualize thought processes. The following chapters will demonstrate their capacity to do so on both the level of (detective) characters and that of the reader. This book approaches narrative meaning-making from the perspective of postclassical narratology and also draws on the methodology of cognitive narratologyFootnote 16 in order to examine ways in which lists can make visible shifting horizons of expectations (of both readers and characters). Lists, therefore, can be used as a means to examine how readers construct story worlds. Since readers play a crucial role when it comes to making sense of lists, I will combine my narratological analysis with considerations that have their origin in reception theory, more specifically in the work of Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007). My interest in the reading process lies in a text’s affordances and the sense-making strategies that can be employed to decode it rather than in an empirical study of the responses of individual readers. Therefore, when I speak of how a text affects the reader, I refer to a hypothetical reader, who interacts with a text through its formally given properties.
In The Act of Reading, Iser refers to such a reader as the implied reader. The implied reader has all the attributes (such as cultural background knowledge or context- and period-specific attitudes) that allow them to decode the entire spectrum of potential meaning encoded in a text. According to Iser, the concept of the implied reader “provides a link between all the historical and individual actualizations of the text and makes them accessible to analysis” (1978, 38).Footnote 17 Any (fictional) text offers its readers a variety of perspectives (such as the narrator, the characters, or the plot). Each perspective invites the audience to take a certain stance with regard to the text and “provide[s] access to what the reader is meant to visualize” (ibid., 35). The implied, or ideal, reader is able to connect such perspectives with one another to draw meaning from the text (see ibid.). Furthermore, the implied reader is distinct from the narratee (a fact that takes on particular importance in the context of detective fiction), who may, for example, not be intended to be able to actualize the full meaning of a text.
Iser’s aesthetics of reception highlights how text and reader interact to produce meaning. According to Iser, texts contain “gaps” and “blanks” that interrupt the continuous flow of narration and thus stimulate the “constitutive activity of the reader, who cannot help but try and supply the missing links” (ibid., 186).Footnote 18 Iser’s text/reader model is of particular appeal for the analysis of lists and list-like structures, in which the reader’s involvement in creating meaning becomes especially obvious. Eva von Contzen similarly points out that “enumerative structures require the reader’s input in order to be rendered meaningful: the ‘gaps’ or ‘blanks’ that necessarily exist between the items of a list need to be filled” (2021, 49).Footnote 19 Iser’s notion of gaps and blanks provides a model to explain how readers supplement missing bits of information and integrate this information into the text (or under which circumstances they fail to do so). Although gaps and blanks exist in all kinds of texts, lists put them on display through their loose grammatical relations and, often, through the visual space left between items listed on a page. For this reason, enumerative structures are an ideal starting point to examine reader involvement and its close connection to knowledge in detective fiction.
Detective fiction, especially the clue puzzle subgenre, invites readers to guess at the solution of the mystery they present. George Dove even goes as far as claiming that “the reader cannot be excluded from the definition of the tale of detection” (1997, 1). It is perhaps no coincidence that lists abound in detective fiction; after all, their fragmented nature requires reading strategies that may also come in useful when trying to piece together the clues scattered through the text. The simple form and loose structuring of the list afford flexibility and allow for a number of different reading strategies. In the context of detective fiction, lists invite readers to create ever-new potential patterns of meaning.
Detective fiction plays with different ways of constructing knowledge that involve a reader’s familiarity with genre conventions as well as intratextual clues and extratextual reference points. The following chapters will take a closer look at different ways of positioning readers in relation to story worlds and detective characters through distinct ways of transmitting (or sometimes producing) knowledge that is necessary to solve the cases.
This book draws attention to three specific conceptions of knowledge in detective fiction: knowledge based on textual clues, knowledge based on referents outside the text, and knowledge as a signifier without a concrete signified. Intratextual knowledge, that is, knowledge situated inside the story world depends on clues explicitly presented in the texts. Bodies of knowledge will be labeled as extratextual if they comprise professional expertise that exists in real-world scientific fields and that characters lay claim to even though it is not explicitly presented on the discourse level. What I call imaginary knowledge, finally, is knowledge that detective characters draw on without referencing either real-world scientific contexts or clues that have been presented in the texts. A text’s choice of how knowledge is to be presented to readers crucially influences the role texts assign to readers and thus their (potential) degree of involvement in the investigation. To convey knowledge of any kind to readers, detective fiction resorts to the form of the list with particular frequency. In addition to being tools for narrators and detective characters to focus or divert the reader’s attention, lists can thus also serve as pointers to distinct knowledge conceptions evoked by a text.
The central aim of this book will be to show how detective fiction makes use of lists in order to frame various conceptions of knowledge that are crucial to decoding the texts and to demonstrate how readers can be engaged in the act of detection or manipulated into accepting certain propositions through their interaction with those lists. The second chapter of this book provides a brief overview over the history of the detective fiction genre and its close affinity for list-like structures in order to situate the analysis of select texts in their wider socio-cultural framework. My material, which ranges from one of the first detective novels published in 1865 to an early twenty-first-century TV show, is based around two moments of genre consolidation—the late nineteenth century and the Golden Age of detective fiction. During these periods, detective fiction was not only an especially salient genre, but many of the narrative strategies and ways of transmitting knowledge that still form part of the genre’s conventions were negotiated during that time. This selection is complemented by a reference to a contemporary TV show to demonstrate the list’s relevance across time periods and media. My material is grouped thematically rather than historically—according to different reader positions and conceptions of knowledge—because this structure better enables me to indicate parallels in the ways in which readers interact with lists.
The third chapter examines lists in the context of dossier novels and uses Charles Warren Adams’s The Notting Hill Mystery (1865) and the Murder Dossier novels (1936–1939) by J.G. Links and Dennis Wheatley as case studies. The chapter shows how the dossier format relies on list-based structures, such as footnotes, tables of contents, suspect profiles, and inventories to involve readers in tracking and (re-)organizing information and to invite them to act as detectives. The files collected in these dossiers contain the central clues necessary to solve the mystery. The lists the dossiers contain function as organizational tools that mobilize readers to reorganize fragmented pieces of information into a pattern that proves the guilt of a particular suspect. Dossier novels frame knowledge as the result of a process and as something attainable through diligence and exactitude. The communicative situation in all dossiers discussed in this chapter has the reader take on the role of the addressee of the text and imparts on them not only the power but also the (at least implied) responsibility to solve the crime.
Chapter 4 analyzes lists in novels written by Agatha Christie with regard to how they invite readers to adopt certain patterns of thinking. The chapter draws on sociologist Urs Stäheli’s work on the political dimension of lists to demonstrate how lists create naturalized patterns of classification and reduce complexity in order to conceal connections. The visible gaps that lists contain can be used to gloss over gaps in a text’s content or chain of logic. Christie systematically uses lists and their affordances to mislead readers through playing with their genre expectations, or what George Dove calls the “detection formula[, which] ‘programs’ the gaps and blanks of the text” (1990, 27), and thus predetermines the most likely patterns in which gaps will be filled. Christie uses the list itself as a device that becomes tied to her readers’ expectations about order structures. Like the dossier novels, Christie’s texts promise the reader that the knowledge necessary to solve the case can be found in the text in the shape of clues. Yet, what these texts readily present as knowledge concerning the investigation is deceptive and thus requires a reading strategy different from the diligent cross-referencing in the dossier novels. To successfully compete with the fictional detective in finding the solution, readers need to think outside the knowledge structures that lists present as seemingly evident. Christie seems well aware of the importance of all aspects of order in her genre and uses the list’s close entanglement with classification structures as the basis for manipulating her readers’ attention.
Chapter 5 consists of a short excursus that focuses on Austin Freeman’s detective Dr. Thorndyke. Contrary to Christie’s novels, Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke stories do not invite readers to take on the role of detective themselves and solve the mystery based on clues provided in the text. To corroborate Thorndyke’s conclusions, the stories instead rely on expert knowledge that can only be verified by readers with real-world expertise in a range of scientific disciplines. Knowledge in these novels is situated outside the story world, and the reader is supposed to share the role of Thorndyke’s assistant. Rather than becoming active as a co-detective, the reader’s role is to constantly be amazed by Thorndyke’s exceptional deductive powers and, through him, by the explanatory power of science itself.Footnote 20 Thorndyke’s lists of hypotheses and the list-like explanations—that at times verge on the didactic—become a narrative strategy to endow Thorndyke’s statements and interpretations with an air of being scientific and objective. The list’s close entanglement with a number of scientific practices allows the form to transport the authority and semblance of objectivity from the scientific contexts in which it originates to the contexts in which Thorndyke uses it (e.g., when he analyzes evidence). Such list-based references to real-world scientific practices endow Thorndyke’s statements and interpretations with authority and a veneer of scientificity. The scientific nature of Thorndyke’s statements is thus based on a narrative strategy that relies on listing techniques for its effect.
Chapter 6 expands on the previous chapter’s exploration of how lists discursively construct knowledge. The chapter takes a closer look at the famous detective Sherlock Holmes in both Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes stories and the BBC show Sherlock (2010–2017), which features a modernized version of the character. Both versions of Sherlock Holmes capitalize on the affordances of visibility and comprehensiveness inherent in the form of the list in order to make the mere reference to the bodies of knowledge they draw on stand in for the knowledge itself. The actual referent remains unmentioned and thus interchangeable at will. Doyle’s detective uses the list-like paper technologies of sorting, selecting, and summarizing,Footnote 21 and the frequent mentioning of reference works to create the illusion that his deductions are based on a reliable and sound method, and Sherlock Holmes in the BBC’s Sherlock makes use of the Internet in a similar manner. Through enumerative practices, references to knowledge are made visible in these texts and ultimately make Holmes himself appear like a personified encyclopedia that promises a comprehensive explanation for every conceivable problem. Since visualization is a central element of this strategy, the chapter uses Bruno Latour’s essay “Drawing Things Together” (1990) as a basis to point out the shared affordances of lists and related forms such as maps that are not usually the center of narrative analysis. The BBC’s Sherlock serves as a case study to discuss how both maps and lists can function to visualize cognitive processes and thus unfold their persuasive force by ordering, illustrating, and conveying knowledge.
The concluding chapter highlights how the various conceptions of knowledge discussed in the previous chapters are inseparable from the roles the novels assign to their readers and from the lists and list-like devices that are crucial to defining those roles. It draws together the previous chapters’ findings about the affordances and functions that lists take within the genre of detective fiction, and it points out how epistemological concerns are closely linked to the forms that transport them and to the ubiquitous form of the list in particular.
Detective fiction’s concern with orderFootnote 22 makes it particularly receptive to the workings of form. A study of the form of the list as a dynamic and flexible category makes it possible to put forms that have hitherto been considered as unrelated—such as lists and maps—in dialogue with one another. The shared affordances and strategies of meaning-making between these forms are not restricted to the genre of detective fiction and can easily be transferred to other contexts.
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The keyword “Arthur Conan Doyle,” for example, yields more than 2000 search results in the MLA international bibliography.
- 3.
Notable exceptions are Tzvetan Todorov’s “The Typology of Detective Fiction” (1966), George Dove’s The Reader and the Detective Story (1997), and the essay collection The Cunning Craft (1990) edited by June Frazer and Ronald Walker, which takes a look at the detective fiction genre through the lens of various literary theories.
- 4.
- 5.
On the politics of the list, see also the special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space edited by Marieke de Goede et al. (2016).
- 6.
Francis Spufford’s The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings (1989) takes a similar approach that focuses on demonstrating the form’s ubiquity rather than situating it within theoretical or diachronic frameworks.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
In The Epic Catalogue: List Form, Cognition, and Reception from Paradise Lost to Beowulf (forthcoming), Eva von Contzen points out that the first person to adapt the concept of affordances to literary studies was James Gibson’s wife Eleanor Gibson (see E. Gibson and Levin 1975; see also von Contzen n.d. forthcoming).
- 10.
From this perspective, arguments such as the one made by Robert Rushing that “real readers” may not or “do not attempt to solve the puzzle” presented in a work of detective fiction (2005, 90) miss the mark. The interest of the study at hand lies with potentials and affordances rather than empirical studies.
- 11.
Some scholars, such as Müller-Wille/Charmantier at least implicitly include the reader in their definition when they write that “the simplest form of a list—that is, the arrangement of entries in a linear series that is read from top to bottom, while each individual entry is to be read from left to right” (2012, 748, my emphasis).
- 12.
Etymologically, the term “list” goes back to the Old English líste, which was used to designate a strip of cloth or a hem. The OED lists “A border, hem, bordering strip” as by now obsolete meaning of the word “list” (see OED Online, s.v. list, n.3, accessed 15.12.2022).
- 13.
The OED lists “an orderly arrangement of particulars, a list” as an obsolete meaning of the word table (see OED Online, table, n.14. Accessed 15 December 2022).
- 14.
Barton et al. also point toward a conceptual distinction between the terms “list” and “series” (see 2022b, 13–14). While the term series suggests a strong semantic relation between items, the unifying effect of a visual list can follow more variable principles of coherence (such as the relationship between a whole and its parts (see ibid.)).
- 15.
- 16.
Cognitive narratology is considered a branch of postclassical narratology (see Herman 2013a, §5).
- 17.
The term implied reader was coined by Wayne C. Booth (see 1983). Iser’s concept of the implied reader remains highly contested in narratological debates and has, for example, been criticized for its lack of precision (see Schmid 2014). I see merit in Iser’s concept for the study of lists in detective fiction and do not wish to get entangled in the ongoing debates around the term. For a detailed discussion of the term, see Schmid (2014).
- 18.
Iser’s aesthetics of reception draws on Roman Ingarden’s conception of literary schemata proposed in Das literarische Kunstwerk, which lie at the heart of the indeterminacy inherent in literary works (see Ingarden 1931).
- 19.
See also Mainberger, who writes that enumerations depend on practices that give them meaning (2003, 12).
- 20.
S.E. Sweeney considers this reader role the norm for all detective fiction and argues that the detective’s sidekick “personifies the ideal reader of the text” (1990, 8).
- 21.
In Too Much to Know, Ann Blair discusses these paper technologies in the context of knowledge production in more detail (see 2010, 3).
- 22.
While detective fiction foregrounds the ordering and structuring functions of lists, other genres employ the form to evoke a fundamentally chaotic impression of linguistic proliferation. For an exploration of the functions of lists in postmodern literature, see Jan Alber’s article on Absurd Catalogues: The Functions of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction (2016). For further examples of lists that evoke chaos, see f.e. Eco (2009).
Works Cited
Alber, Jan. 2016. Absurd Catalogues: The Functions of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction. Style 50:3: 342–358.
Alber, Jan, and Monika Fludernik. 2010. Introduction. In Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, ed. Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, 1–31. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
Barney, Stephen. 1982. Chaucer’s Lists. In: The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry Dean Benson and Siegfried Wenzel, 189–223. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press.
Barton, Roman et al. 2022a. Introduction: Epistemic and Artistic List-Making. In: Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary and Visual Enumeration, ed. Roman Barton et al., 1–24. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barton, Roman et al., ed. 2022b. Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary and Visual Enumeration. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barton, Roman et al. 2023. Literary Lists: A Short History of Form and Function. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Belknap, Robert E. 2004. The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Blair, Ann. 2010. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Booth, Wayne C. 1983 [1961]. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
de Goede, Marieke, Anna Leander and Gavin Sullivan. 2016. Introduction: The Politics of the List. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34:1: 3–13.
Doležalová, Lucie, ed. 2009. The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised Data Processing. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Dove, George. 1990. The Detection Formula and the Act of Reading. In The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. June M. Frazer and Ronald G. Walker, 68–85. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press.
Dove, George. 1997. The Reader and the Detective Story. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press.
Eco, Umberto. 2009. The Infinity of Lists. New York: Rizzoli.
Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
Ghosal, Torsa. 2021. Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
Gibson, Eleanor J. and Harry Levin. 1975. The Psychology of Reading. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gibson, James. 1979. The Theory of Affordances. In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, ed. James Gibson, 127–146. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Gitelman, Lisa. 2014. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press.
Goody, Jack. 1978. What’s in a List?. In The Domestication of the Savage Mind, ed. Jack Goody, 74–111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Herman, David. 2008. Description, Narrative and Explanation: Text-Type Categories and the Cognitive Foundation of Discourse Competence. Poetics Today 29:3: 437–472.
Herman, David. 2013a. Cognitive Narratology. In The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al., n.p. Hamburg: Hamburg University. https://www-archiv.fdm.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/node/38.html. Accessed 31 January 2023.
Herman, David. 2013b. Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hess, Volker and J. Andrew Mendelsohn. 2010. Case and Series: Medical Knowledge and Paper Technology, 1600–1900. History of Science 48:3/4: 287–314.
Ingarden, Roman. 1931. Das Literarische Kunstwerk: eine Untersuchung aus dem Grenzgebiet der Ontologie, Logik und Literaturwissenschaft. Halle (Saale): Niemeyer.
Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Knight, Stephen T. 1980. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan.
Kovach, Elizabeth, Imke Polland and Ansgar Nünning, ed. 2021. Forms at Work. New Formalist Approaches in the Study of Literature, Culture, and Media. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
Kukkonen, Karin. 2020. Probability Designs: Literature and Predictive Processing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Laemmle, Rebecca, Cédric Scheidegger-Lämmle and Katharina Wesselmann, ed. 2021. Lists and Catalogues in Ancient Literature and Beyond. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Latour, Bruno. 1990 [1986]. Drawing Things Together. In Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, 19–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Link, Sarah J. 2020. Detective Facts|Detective Fiction: Listing the Tools of the Trade. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35:3. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1815374.
Mainberger, Sabine. 2003. Die Kunst des Aufzählens: Elemente zu einer Poetik des Enumerativen. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Isabelle Charmantier. 2012. Lists as Research Technologies. Isis 103:4: 743–752.
Ousby, Ian. 1976. Bloodhounds of Heaven: the Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rosch, Eleanor et al. 1976. Basic Objects in Natural Categories. Cognitive Psychology 8:3: 382–439.
Rüggemeier, Anne. 2020. Life Writing and the Poetics of List-Making: On the Manifestations, Effects, and Possible Uses of Lists in Life Writing. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35:3. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1815371.
Rushing, Robert. 2005. Traveling Detectives: The “Logic of Arrest” and the Pleasures of (Avoiding) the Real. Yale French Studies 108: 89–101.
Schmid, Wolf. 2014. Implied Reader. In The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al., n.p. Hamburg: Hamburg University. https://www-archiv.fdm.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/node/59.html. Accessed 31 January 2023.
Spufford, Francis. 1989. The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings: Lists in Literature. London: Chatto and Windus.
Stäheli, Urs. 2011. Das Soziale als Liste: Zur Epistemologie der ANT. In Die Wiederkehr der Dinge, ed. Friedrich Balke, Maria Mühle and Antonia von Schöning. 83–101. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos Berlin.
Stäheli, Urs. 2016. Indexing—The Politics of Invisibility. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34:1: 14–29.
Stäheli, Urs. 2017. Traveling by Lists: Navigational Knowledge and Tourism. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 47:3: 361–374.
Sweeney, S. E. 1990. Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction, Narrative Theory, and Self-Reflexivity. In The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. June Frazer and Ronald Walker, 1–14. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press.
Symons, Julian. 1985 [1972]. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Theile, Verena, and Linda Tredennick, ed. 2013. New Formalisms and Literary Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Todorov, Tzvetan. 1966. The Typology of Detective Fiction. In Crime and Media: A Reader, ed. Chris Greer, 291–301. London: Routledge.
von Contzen, Eva, ed. 2016. Lists in Literature from the Middle Ages to Postmodernism. Style 50:3.
von Contzen, Eva. 2017. Grenzfälle des Erzählens: Die Liste als Einfache Form. In Komplexität und Einfachheit, ed. Albrecht Koschorke, 221–239. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.
von Contzen, Eva. 2018. Experience, Affect, and Literary Lists. Partial Answers 16:2: 315–327.
von Contzen, Eva. 2021. Theorising Lists in Literature: Towards a Listology. In Lists and Catalogues in Ancient Literature and Beyond, ed. Rebecca Lämmle, Cédric Scheidegger-Lämmle and Katharina Wesselmann, 35–54. Berlin: de Gruyter.
von Contzen, Eva. 2022. Don’t Trust the List: The Politics of Enumeration and Capitalist Discourse in the Novel. In Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary and Visual Enumeration, ed. Roman Barton et al., 129–149. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
von Contzen, Eva. n.d. The Epic Catalogue: List Form, Cognition, and Reception from Paradise Lost to Beowulf. Unpublished manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Link, S.J. (2023). Introduction: Reading Lists, Listing Clues. In: A Narratological Approach to Lists in Detective Fiction . Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33227-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33227-2_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-33226-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-33227-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)