SOURCE: Saltzman, Arthur M. “In the Millhauser Archives.” Critique 37, no. 2 (winter 1996): 149-60.

In the following essay, Saltzman analyzes the role of lists in Millhauser's fiction.

The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

If it is true that God is in the details, then a writer's hubris and his humility are equally evident in his lists. The making of lists praises and competes with Creation at the same time. Lists are at once mannered in their disciplined salvage and promiscuous in their insistent battenings. Lists are literature's representative democracies; their stylized reductions suggest that the world that is so much with us could always be more so.

The penchant for et cetera runs from Walt Whitman's capitalized processions to Stanley Elkin's dilations on the heraldics of vocation. Each list contends that virtue lies in the aggregate, yet each is...