Cultural Signifier Lists

Cultural Signifier Lists are informal lists of cultural references or signifiers used in prose description; they provide a sometimes immersive cultural context to a fictional world. Author Thomas Pynchon uses Cultural Signifier Lists (which probably have a better name somewhere else) frequently in his descriptive prose.

Here's an example from Pynchon's novel Bleeding Edge (2013) describing a bathroom stall in a New York greasy spoon in 2001: "They sit there side by side, mutually invisible, the partition between inscribed in marker pen, eye pencil, lipstick later rubbed at and smeared by way of commentary, gusting across the wall in failing red shadows, phone numbers with antiquated prefixes, cars for sale, announcements of love lost, found, or wished for, racial grievances, unreadable remarks in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, a web of symbols, a travel brochure for night voyages Maxine has not yet thought about making."Pynchon strains credulity here, imagining a single bathroom stall's walls inscribed with more writing than is likely to be found in an entire public bathroom. I love getting lost in these descriptive clown cars when they trip off the tongue of the mind so well, and when the items listed blend satirical hyperbole (has anyone ever seen an American bathroom stall with a Cyrillic inscription?) with apt descriptions of the familiar. Reading them, I feel at once lost in the particular cultural-historical world Pynchon has half-imagined, half-transcribed, and at the same time encouraged to have fun with that world, as though its immersive qualities were both magic spells and jokes inviting play.

Here's another example from Pynchon, this one from the end (the last paragraph, in fact) of Inherent Vice (2009). In it, Pynchon describes the musings of his protagonist, the private detective Doc Sportello, as Doc drives through a dense fog in Los Angeles in 1970:"Doc figured if he missed the Gordita Beach exit he'd take the first one whose sign he could read and work his way back on surface streets. He knew that at Rosecrans the freeway began to dogleg east, and at some point, Hawthorne Boulevard or Artesia, he'd lose the fog, unless it was spreading tonight, and settled in regionwide. Maybe then it would stay this way for days, maybe he'd just keep driving, down past Long Beach, down through Orange County, and San Diego, and across a border where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo, who was anybody. Then again, he might run out of gas before that happened, and have to leave the caravan, and pull over on the shoulder, and wait. For whatever would happen. For a forgotten joint to materialize in his pocket. For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him. For a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride. For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead."In this example, Pynchon is not listing things or intertextual references but the potential futures imagined by Doc for himself, each future carrying with it different narrative possibilities. In this closing paragraph from the novel, Doc becomes (or is revealed as) his own novelist, and the obscuring fog (an echo of the marijuana haze in which Doc spends most of the novel) encourages his imaginings. And as with the previous example from Bleeding Edge, a list of concrete details becomes a list of increasingly imaginative speculations. At first, Doc lists the approaching freeway exits he might be able to use to escape the fog, and then, as he imagines driving through an impossibly vast fog all the way to Mexico, he begins to list the interesting things that might happen to him if he were to simply pull over on the side of the road and wait. In the immersive realities of the freeway system (or the materials used in bathroom stall inscriptions, etc.), Pynchon finds imaginative reverie.

Turning to a different author, here's a portion of a longer, already lengthy example from Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian (1985). In it, McCarthy describes a large party of Comanches charging on an outnumbered party of American mercenaries in Mexico in the 1840s: "A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond the right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."In this exhausting, exhaustive sentence, McCarthy uses a Cultural Signifier List to create an overwhelmingly dense image and perhaps a sense of doom. The apocalyptic paintings of Peter Bruegel come to mind, less montage than panorama. John Sepich, in his Notes on Blood Meridian, suggests that many of the details here are rooted in period descriptions of Commanche raids. And yet, it feels wrong somehow to say that McCarthy is being more literal simply because he's less inclined to imagine obviously impossible details to include his list. If less speculative, McCarthy still uses overt stylization (the extreme length of the sentence, the frequent references to history, both cosmic and concrete) to find imaginative reverie in concrete historical-cultural sets of details, chiefly by representing the dread of the American mercenaries, who look upon the Commanches like monsters from another planet.

My sense is that Pynchon, writing these lists, is indulging himself--exploring the reaches of his cultural knowledge, and giving free reign to his imagination to speculate beyond those reaches, to find whatever might be most interesting, real or no. Whereas McCarthy, rooted firmly in the real, is breathing life into experiences remembered only by the dead, piecing together facts and impressions to place the reader in the shoes of the characters. McCarthy's stylistic eloquence is both the means by which the prelinguistic experiences of his characters become communicable and a constant reminder of the inevitable distance between text and experience.

Cultural Signifier Lists are common to poetry as well as prose. William Shakespeare, for instance, used them often in his poetry and plays, as here in this section from the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy in Hamlet:     For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time, the Oppressor's wrong, the proud man's Contumely, the pangs of despised Love, the Law’s delay, the insolence of Office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his Quietus make with a bare Bodkin? Who would Fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of. Here, we might begin to distinguish between concrete Cultural Signifier Lists and personal Cultural Signifier Lists. This distinction, between types of a type that is already somewhat vague, is admittedly loose, but the basic idea here is that the "concrete CSL" examples from Bleeding Edge and Blood Meridian list a set of concrete details connected by their shared presence in a given time and place--the scribblings on the wall of Maxine's bathroom stall are there, even if Pynchon gets into fantastical territory describing them, just as the raiding Comanches in Blood Meridian are undeniably, frighteningly real. On the other hand, the "personal CSL" examples from Inherent Vice and Hamlet list a set of concepts, speculations, metaphors and so on sprung from the particular imagination of a fictional character and connected only by his circumstances and state of mind.

Whether this distinction is really meaningful, I'm not sure. Shakespeare's goals in the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, for instance, seem closer to McCarthy's in the Blood Meridian passage than Pynchon's in the Inherence Vice passage. As with McCarthy, through Shakespeare's (and Hamlet's) unnatural eloquence, we gain communicable access to the typically prelinguistic anxieties of a troubled mind. On the other hand, Shakespeare is writing the expressed thoughts of an individual, while McCarthy is arguably writing what might be seen by any observer in his passage's doomed party of American mercenaries, even a phantom observer with which the reader is synonymous. For both Pynchon in the Bleeding Edge passage and McCarthy in the Blood Meridian passage, the experiences conveyed in the prose do not belong solely to the fictional characters at hand but are posed as available to any and all. We are not drawn into an individual but rather into an experience unmoored from any one consciousness or set of personal circumstances. For the authors of these concrete lists, their items possess in aggregate a defined quality: the costumes the raiding Comanches wear in aggregate makes them terrifying, otherworldly, and apocalyptically cosmic in their connotative linkages to various civilizations and aspects of life all reduced to warpaint; the scribblings on Maxine's bathroom stall in aggregate makes them overwhelming, microcosmic in their various worldviews and intentions, impossible to reduce and yet confined to a single writing space. Is this the way McCarthy or Pynchon see their subjects? Or are they here also portraying fictional subjectivities, albeit subjectivities of a general kind, tied to a culture and a time and place but no particular person? Or are all subjectivities fictional when expressed? And all fictions subjectivities?

Let's try and simplify things a bit, since the distinction between subjective lists and concrete lists seems to be breaking down the closer I look at it. One thing these lists all have in common, and something that might distinguish them from your run-of-the-mill list, is that they are all microcosmic in some fashion, which is to say that they convey through a discrete set of details (a list) a whole range of experiences and concepts. Pynchon conveys a range of humanity living in New York in 2001 through the scribblings on a bathroom stall. He conveys a range of possible experiences that might naturally befall a character like Doc in Los Angeles in 1970 (and in the particular sub-genre of fiction he inhabits). McCarthy conveys much of the pre-1840s history of American conquest, and various aspects of the 1840s Mexican-American border experience, in the garb of the Comanche raiding party. Shakespeare conveys a range of injustices and sufferings that might befall a medieval Dane (or an Elizabethan Englishman, for that matter). Each gives the reader, through scattered details, a snapshot of a particular scope of human experience.