I was reading a review this morning of a poetry anthology, and the reviewer, one Dr. Martin Duwell I believe, said that the book “encourages the taxonomist in me”. Ah, I thought, a person after my own heart … because I too have a taxonomical bent in my approach to literature. (I am, it has to be said, a librarian/archivist by training/profession, but I suspect the choice of profession followed the bent, rather than vice versa!). Anyhow, back to the topic in hand.

It is natural I think to apply some level of taxonomical* thinking to reviews of anthologies. How have the poems/stories been organised? It’s rarely random. Sometimes it’s simply chronological or alphabetical (as in The best Australian poems 2009 that I mentioned in a recent Monday musings); sometimes there’s a clear thematic grouping, with headings perhaps (as in Dorothy Porter‘s The bee hut); sometimes it’s more subtle, more organic, with the component parts flowing from one to the other, in which cases the reader may or may discern the connection; and sometimes, perhaps, it really is random. The challenge for we taxonomical reviewers of course is to work out whether the last truly is the case – or, have we missed something? It can exercise the brain exceedingly!

Cahill Expressway loop - not the painting but this image can be used! (Courtesy: Angus Fraser, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-2.0)

Having considered the organisation issue, the next thing the taxonomical reviewer thinks about is: are there over-riding themes or styles or [pick your issue]? Sometimes, there is and it’s very clear, such as in those short story collections specifically gathered around a theme. I have a few in my collection, including Sisters compiled by Brigid McConville (in which the writers explore – well – it’s obvious from the title, isn’t it?) and Expressway compiled by Helen Daniel (in which the writers were invited to respond to Jeffrey Smart‘s painting “Cahill expressway”). But sometimes it’s not so obvious, as in, say Nam Le‘s highly-varied-in-voice-and-subject matter collection, The boat. Besides the possibly cop-out but nonetheless valid-enough idea (given the author’s personal history) that it’s about the diversity of human experience, I did glean a theme of survival running through the collection. I may be right, or I may be wrong, but it satisfies my need to comprehend the work as a whole, as well as its component parts.

But, the truly taxonomical reviewer (reader), will also approach a single work like a novel, taxonomically. And I – we, I presume – do this largely by looking at the structure. How has the work been put together, and why. Is it told chronologically in one voice? Is it a multiple point-of-view novel? Is the voice first-person, third person or even, occasionally, second-person? Where, in particular, writers have diverged from the more traditional chronological-one voice structure, why have they done so?  And, more importantly, has it worked? Why did Martin Amis write Time’s arrow in rewind? Why did Jim Crace use his four-part backwards-forwards structure in Being dead? Why did Jane Austen set up her “sense” and “sensibility” (or “pride” and “prejudice”) dichotomy? Why, and I will be discussing this in a coming review, did Mario Vargas Llosa use the rather complex multiple-point-of-view structure in The feast of the goat? The answers to these questions often help me locate the essential meaning of the work. That is, the meaning of the work for me.

I realise that this may all sound rather mechanistic and, if applied rigidly, it could be – but I think that for we taxonomical reviewers this approach is just one of the pens in our pencil-case. Sometimes there is nothing really to categorise/dissect or the categorisation/dissection is straightforward, but sometimes it can help. Sometimes, in a large, complex, unwieldy and/or diverse work, it can help us get to the core. The trick, though, is to be flexible. Elinor and Marianne in Sense and sensibility may, respectively, stand generally for those two character traits, but if we try to bind our analysis too closely to those dichotomies, not only will we tie ourselves in knots, but we’ll miss the fundamental humanity of Austen’s worldview. In other worse, to paraphrase Hamlet, it doesn’t do to think too “precisely on th’ event”. Rather, keep it loose, and meaning just might appear …

* I define “taxonomical” loosely to mean, categorising, ordering, structuring.