The list of lists in literature is a wonder in itself (Five of the best books shaped by lists, 20 September). Samuel Beckett may have had James Joyce’s glorious lists in mind when he referred to the “comedy of an exhaustive enumeration”. Joyce’s lists were in the tradition of Homer’s Iliad, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel and Walt Whitman’s poems, but with his own brilliant poignancy and humour. The Iliad has some 250 lines listing all the Greek commanders and their ships. The Canterbury Tales starts with a list of the people going on the pilgrimage. It lasts for 858 lines.
In my podcast on the website of the International Psychoanalytical Association, I have described some of the lists in Ulysses as evoking the endless childbirths of Joyce’s childhood, as in the Lestrygonians chapter: “One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second”, as well as evoking all our sins, as in Circe (Bloom and his “whores”). There are lists again in Finnegans Wake but, away from the grief in Ulysses, there is a loving mother/wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle, distributing presents to her 111 children. We are given more lists – all their names and presents – but there is now a very different mood of levity and compassion in Joyce.
Mary Adams
London
• Suzy Klein says correctly: “Art doesn’t just mean one type of audience. We have Sam Smith and Florence Welch featured at the Proms alongside Mozart and Beethoven” (BBC arts chief hits back at accusations from Dimbleby and Bragg, 25 September). But what she misses is that the Proms are a classical music festival, and including pop singers like Smith and Welch is exactly the kind of dumbing down Melvyn Bragg and David Dimbleby are critical of.
Dr Richard Carter
Putney, London
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