Indexical
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said to Alice, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Poor advice for constructing an index, since you need not begin at the beginning of the book, and when you come to the end, you cannot stop. In fact, you’re just beginning. It takes many tours through the typeset pages, scanning for different sights, before an index comes together. Lewis Carroll knew as much, having indexed both his family’s home journal, the Rectory Magazine, and his final, forsaken novel, Sylvia and Bruno, for comic effect.
When it comes to writing a book about the index, though, the King of Hearts may well be right. Dennis Duncan’s delightful Index, a History of the begins with the slow advance of alphabetical order against the mood of the Middle Ages, for which the arbitrary alphabet was “the antithesis of reason.” It ends with hashtags and online searches, neither of which can replicate the subject index, a creative artifact more akin to a Fodor’s guide than to Google maps.
On the way, we meet the poet Callimachus, alphabetizing the Library of Alexandria in the third century BCE, the philosopher Robert Grosseteste, who anatomized his reading in a conceptually-ordered Tabula distinctionum, c. 1230 CE, and the eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson, whose index to Clarissa became a work in its own right—a compendium of moral maxims and aphorisms.
Happily, a huge chunk of Duncan’s book is devoted to indexical humour. Turns out the index and its users were mocked, and self-mocking, almost from their point of origin. In 1532, Erasmus wrote a book in the form of an index, joking in its preface that many people read nothing else. In Shakespeare, Gertrude responds to Hamlet’s yammering with a quip:
Ah me, what act, That roars so loud and thunders in the index?
The joke turns on the fact that most contemporary books would place the index at the front; its migration to the back was not complete until the early eighteenth century—at which point, the satirist Jonathan Swift made fun of
Men who pretend to understand a Book, by scouting thro’ the Index, as if a Traveller should go about to describe a Palace, when he had seen nothing but the Privy.
Yet the index is serious work. The impulse to index is an impulse to opinionated order: the indexer imposes hierarchy, indicating what’s important and, by omission, what is not. This calls for insight and imagination. I’ve indexed every book I’ve written and I can’t conceive how anyone could do it well without knowing the ideas as deeply as the author does. Which is not to say that knowing is sufficient: there are authors who have indexed poorly and professionals who have done a better job. I am awed by the ambition of the pros.
More ambitious still is the desire to index all of human knowledge. Duncan cites some failed attempts, but doesn’t mention Peter Mark Roget, who aspired to index words themselves and, thereby, the world. Perhaps this is too patently absurd.
In the end, the index is a comical thing. There were seventeenth-century satirists whose primary mode was the ironic index. And the Victorian critic Henry Morley prefaced his edition of Henry Mackenzie 1775 novel, The Man of Feeling, with an “Index of Tears,” mocking its myriad weeping men.
My favourite joke in Duncan’s book appears in an endnote to the Coda. It’s about the joys of concatenation:
The index to Ralph Walker’s introduction to Immanuel Kant includes ‘happiness, 137, 151, 152, 156-8’, ‘masturbation, 158, 190’ and ‘wig-making, 158’. Walker’s text is exemplary, but page 158 will always be more delightful in the mind than in real life.
One of the quandaries of the indexer is whether to index the notes. The answer is yes, though it isn’t always done. Thankfully, this book gets it right:
Walker, Ralph Kant index, 297n1
Less obviously necessary, but still welcome, is indexical self-reference—
index, 309-40
—like the arrow on the trail map that announces “You Are Here.”
BONUS CONTENT: The brilliant Gill Partington on Alejandro Cesarco in the LRB.