Order, organization, clarity, a system; these are all expected when reading something. Any story has a story line, and whether the author decides to tell it straight through, or jump around in time, as long as it’s being told clearly, the story’s order remains the same in the end. In something like a dictionary, it has organization; usually alphabetically. The same goes for the fourth edition of The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray; it is structured alphabetically, but it really shouldn’t be.
If there is a glossary full of literary terms, it should be organized in a certain way. It should categorize the words based off of how they are used. For example, “archetypal criticism” should be placed near “new criticism”, because they are both types of criticism. However, because Murfin and Supryia’s glossary is in alphabetical order, these two terms are 262 pages apart. If somebody has to write a paper on different forms of criticism, they would have to flip back and forth between countless pages just to find all of them. “New criticism” is on page 286, “applied criticism” is on page twenty-three, and that page just tells you to go find “practical criticism”, but of course it doesn’t let you know that it’s on page 347. If the book was organized by category, they would all be next to each other. Another reason why using alphabetical order to organize this glossary is bad is because of the same reason that nobody likes looking up “practical criticism”; it just tells you to look up a different word. For example, the term “apologue” has a definition on page 22, and it just says, “see fable”. “Fable is on page 139, but it’s not like the book tells you that. You have to flip around pages for a minute before finally finding it. So, it seems that alphabetically is not always the best way to organize something.
In Percival Everett’s collection of poems, re: f(gesture), the first section is entitled (Zulus). The poems under this section are each represented by a different letter of the alphabet, so of course, they’re in alphabetical order. Although they’re technically are organized, most of these poems do not actually need to be in any special order, because they don’t relate. Some of them though, should be next to each other. In my last blog post, I mentioned that poems F and K relate to each other, sharing themes of both the trojan war, and the children of Leda, the queen of Sparta. So, in my mind, K should follow immediately after F. By keeping these poems five pages apart, it is likely that a reader will simply miss any sort of connections they have, just as I did the first time I read (Zulus). Other than those two poems, none of the other poems appear to relate to each other, so once again, it seems that alphabetically is not always the best way to organize something. His next set of poems is entitled (Body). Again, these poems have a structure, but this time it is not alphabetically. There is no visible structure at least, and since the poems in (Zulus) didn’t connect, one would assume that these don’t either. However, after reading them, it becomes clear that they do. I explained their connections in my previous blog post, “Celebrating Life”. The entire collection of poems is Percival Everett’s idea of celebrating life. He begins with attraction, moves onto passion, and ends it with birth. So, this in his first section, (Zulus), he organizes it alphabetically, although the order doesn’t actually matter. In (Body), he makes it look like it has no structure, but there actually is, and he uses the order to tell a story. The third and final section in re: f(gesture), entitled (Logic), is organized numerically. 1 is all about a single object. No object in specific, maybe not even an object, but still a singular thing. 2 is about X, the variable. 3 is about remembering someone, but also remembering if they even exist. So far, they do not relate to each other specifically, and only 1 related to its title. Reading on to 4 and 5, once again, we see that these poems do not have to be in any specific order either. This brings us to the final poem in the collection, 6.
“Seven men
can be obliterated,
burned or hanged
or drowned in a lake
and forgotten.
Men gone, but
not seven.
Seven men lost,
but not seven.
Seven is, will be.
All men will die
but not seven.”
To start off, this poem is entitled 6, but it’s all about the number seven. Everett is making the point that seven men can be completely wiped off the face of the planet, yet seven never changes. Sure, men died, but it was still seven of them. The men can disappear, but the fact that it was seven of them never will. So not only is the poem 6 all about seven, it’s about how it doesn’t matter what happens to something, what it is will never change. I see this as a way of saying that structure is not actually important. Whether something is organized alphabetically, numerically, or completely random, their meaning won’t change, and any of the that connected before will still connect in a different order. Maybe that’s why he structured (Zulus) alphabetically but made the two poems that connected to each other be 5 pages apart. So, maybe structure doesn’t matter.