When the Modern Library admitted recently to
voting
irregularities in its list of the century's top 100 books, the news evoked the
kind of take-no-prisoners bloodlust usually reserved for shamefaced Bill Clinton
fumbles. Not satisfied with an
honest mea culpa,
lettered
fussbudgets came
out and criticized the whole concept of ranking great books, some even going
so far as to suggest that weighted hierarchies of value in any medium, artificially
imposed by wise men, is a bad thing! Coming hard on the heels of like
controversial pseudo-events (The AFI's best films, People's 50 Most
Beautiful, Time's 100 People of the Century, etc.) Entertainment Weekly
was
even moved to make sport of the whole list-making enterprise, by compiling a
Borgesian
list
of lists.
Now, I'm not going to say that ranking one's betters is not presumptuous and
self-serving. I mean really, what can anybody add to James Joyce's reputation by
saying
that he beat out all contenders, second seeds, runners up and Miss Congeniality?
(Joyce, of course, is a favorite of list makers because he wrote the greatest
novel of
the twentieth century, the greatest
short stories of
the nineteenth century, the greatest novel of the
24th
century, and the
worst play ever written).
Sales figures, such
as the ones the Modern Library's and the AFI's lists were meant to goose,
are a more objective, egalitarian measure. But so what? Once a list stops
being magisterial and subjective, it becomes just another meaningless
statistic. What would Oskar Shindler be if he hadn't made his list himself?
From the Great Chain of Being to the Fortune 500, its contemporary
equivalent, lists have indeed served the interests over the years of the
people who make them. In America in particular, a vast and disparate mass
of consumers made certain statistical lists necessary, and the wave-particle
mystery of audience behavior has made them absolute. The Neilsen ratings,
the Top 40, the New York Times Bestsellers and other ordering mechanisms
have done what little they could to keep up at least the appearance of
genuine democracy. (As any voter will tell you, being 1/260,000,000 of a
generalization doesn't count for much in the reassurance department.) But
they exert uttery tyranny within their respective industries. The
hypnotic appeal of numbers ("I will count backward from 100...") has an
elemental pull on the body politic. By setting finite limits to something
which threatens to overwhelm us, authorities such as Aristotle or Casey
Kasem make our lives manageable. If we could send the whole internet into outer
space, the aliens would simply abduct Lisa
Boyle; but if we could send them a gold record of Earth's
greatest hits, they might be moved to dial our 800 number and order
the whole series.
![[the list giver]](img/listmaker2.gif)
The Kevin Bacon Game, the Holiday Death Toll, The National Debt Clock: the
American urge to put everybody in their place manifests itself everywhere.
Quantification is for suckers: you have to have numbers mounting to make
sense, and the first one has to be the best one of all. High culture
traditionally has resisted these lists, seeing in them a mindless assent to
the one-dimensional vocabulary of the marketplace. But
in the torpid battles over the Western Canon, the pretense was dropped once
and for all. Far from an arbitrary sampling of "the best that has been
thought and said," educators had to come out and say that there was in fact
an A-list, and if you didn't like who was on it you could go to Apex Tech
where you belonged. Whether they were right is another story.
A battle of the ants to be sure. But while this clash of literary King Fridays and
Lady Elaines occupied the front pages of endless magazines, there didn't seem to
be such a backlash against the idea of lists per se. Maybe that's because
even postmodernists recognize that you have to make students read a certain
number of novels, or they will study cashed bowls in their place. But as
freakish abominations like nonlinearity, fuzzy logic, and chaos theory have
come to seem au courant, the man of sense these days finds himself standing
up for the very thing that will tear his mind to pieces.
If anything, The Modern Library didn't go far enough. By letting its sages
off the hook, they missed a rare opportunity to strike a blow for
old-fashioned linearity in the face of the mindless, inchoate future that is
predicted for the information age. Nonlinear thinking is the animal
kingdom's default setting. Curt refusals to get with the program and put
our various houses in order are far from heroic and free thinking: they are
downright seditous. Maybe 1 and O is good enough for you, Mr. Negroponte;
but I'm an American, educated by the Book of Lists, the chef who holds all
the pies and then drops them on Sesame Street, and the top eight seeds in
the Eastern Conference.
And this time, history is on our side. Because when the Year 2000 bug - that avenging
seraph of linear thinking, lays waste to postmodernism with fire and the sword, it's
not going to be
the weirdos in their geodesic domes who get to speak the big I Told You So. It will
be the great American listophiles. And gloating will be our very first
priority.
![[simpleton]](img/simptitle.gif)
![[the list maker]](img/listmaker.gif)
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![[walking tall]](img/walkingtall.gif)
![[ebert]](img/eberthead.gif)