Journal articles on the topic 'New Caledonia language'

According to Ehrhart and Corne, Tayo is an endogenous creole that crystallized under the peculiarly plantation-like circumstances present at the St-Louis mission in the late 19th century. Noting some linguistic similarities with Reunion Creole, Chaudenson (1994) raises the question of whether Reunion Creole had had any influence on the development of Tayo. This notion is refuted both by Ehrhart (1994) and Corne (1994, 1995, 1999, 2000a, 2000b), although Corne (2000a) concedes that due to some linguistic and socio-demographic evidence, Reunion Creole influence on Tayo cannot be excluded. This paper revisits this debate and reopens questions that earlier researchers appear to have closed by discussing the implications of two texts written in Reunion Creole and published in New Caledonia. The first is a Georges Baudoux text containing the ‘Reunion Creole’ of Socrates, a black Reunion Creole taken to New Caledonia in 1870 to work as a coolie. The second is a political text attacking a ‘Creole’ candidate running for election on the Conseil Supérieur des Colonies published in 1884 by journalist Julien Bernier, an immigrant from Reunion. Accepting the authenticity of these texts raises questions pertinent to the debate on Tayo genesis. Given that réunionnais was being spoken in New Caledonia when Tayo was developing, were any speakers in contact with the Kanaks of St-Louis? What, if any, influence did their language have on the developing St-Louis patois? I discuss these questions by re-examining socio-historical evidence and by making some brief comparisons between the New Caledonian Reunion Creole texts and Tayo.

According to the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis, the core grammars of all "real" creoles should be alike to a significant degree. Real creoles are then defined as those creoles that were born on plantations, as opposed to those that appeared in so-called fort situations, that is, around trading posts and the like. The validity of the hypothesis depends on the precise characterization of what counts as a plantation situation, which is by no means an obvious task, contrary to what seems to have been assumed. An attempt toward such a characterization is made here. Tayo, a French-based creole spoken in the south of New Caledonia, can be considered a plantation creole and should therefore appear similar to, for example, Haitian and Isle-de-France Creole. That it differs radically from these languages in such basic domains as the determiner and the TMA systems, however, is easily demonstrated. Factors that might explain the difference are then examined, with the conclusion that only relexification from a substrate New Caledonian language can be retained as the primary reason for this difference. Although arguably a plantation creole, Tayo falls thus clearly outside the scope of the LBH, appearing rather as strong supportive evidence for the Relexification Hypothesis. Given the importance of the case for deciding between competing theories, further detailed investigation is urgently needed in order to ascertain whether Tayo is indeed a plantation creole, as it is seems to be, in view of the available historical and ecological evidence.

One of the peculiarities of New Caledonian is its French nuance, especially on the many French lexicons that either have integrated in the Javanese variant or are only borrowed. This study tries to answer the questions of what underlies the use of the French lexicons and how these lexicons integrated in New Caledonian Javanese. The data for this study were obtained through speech recordings as well as live interviews with a number of representative informants in New Caledonia. The data were collected through a qualitative manner in February 2013. Theories on language contacts, in particular with regards to loanwords, were implemented to analyze the data. The findings of this study indicate that the use of the French lexicons are caused by, firstly, the nonexistence of their equivalents in the recipient language (Javanese), secondly, Javanese speakers’ motivation to distinguish themselves from other speakers, and the tendency of the Javanese to find the practical and easier way in dealing with the French lexicons.

One of the peculiarities of New Caledonian is its French nuance, especially on the many French lexicons that either have integrated in the Javanese variant or are only borrowed. This study tries to answer the questions of what underlies the use of the French lexicons and how these lexicons integrated in New Caledonian Javanese. The data for this study were obtained through speech recordings as well as live interviews with a number of representative informants in New Caledonia. The data were collected through a qualitative manner in February 2013. Theories on language contacts, in particular with regards to loanwords, were implemented to analyze the data. The findings of this study indicate that the use of the French lexicons are caused by, firstly, the nonexistence of their equivalents in the recipient language (Javanese), secondly, Javanese speakers’ motivation to distinguish themselves from other speakers, and the tendency of the Javanese to find the practical and easier way in dealing with the French lexicons.

Abstract Like other New Caledonian languages (see Ozanne-Rivierre 1998: 33–34 for Nyelâyu; see Bril 2002: 89–95, 2009, this volume for Nêlêmwa; see also Moyse-Faurie 2004: 15–61), Caac displays little categorial flexibility and, based on formal grounds, one can clearly identify two main syntactic categories: nouns and verbs, in addition to other small classes such as adverbs, adjectives or prepositions. Nouns, however, have the ability to be polyfunctional, and can function as the head of referential expressions as well as the head of predicative expressions in equative constructions, and in a certain type of presentative and spatial constructions, without undergoing any morphological change. By contrast, verbs require deverbal derivation in order to function as the head of referential expressions, a process mainly used for word creation purposes. There is in addition a small number of lexical bases which can function as the head of predicative and referential expressions indifferently. An analysis of the syntactic context in which they occur enables us to interpret them in a particular utterance. Similar lexemes in neighbouring languages have been analysed as flexible lexemes (Bril 2009: 2; in press). In this paper, I would like to explore the extent to which those lexemes can be differentiated from nouns (notably indirectly possessed free nouns) and verbs in Caac, depending on whether one puts the emphasis on formal or semantic criteria.

Between November 2018 and 2020, residents of New Caledonia will have three opportunities to vote on whether to become an independent state. Residents of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville will vote on the same issue in June 2019. Should the residents of either territory vote for independence, the issue of whether a language shall be designated the national and / or official language for the new state will arise. If the decision is to designate a language for the new state, the choice of which language will also surface. This chapter considers the language choices made by a number of countries across the linguistically diverse Asia Pacific region post-independence and in so doing, provides some models for the language configurations which may eventuate should either territory become independent. The linguistic configurations discussed here are divided into Category 1 - countries where a national and / or official language are legally specified or have de jure legal status. - and Category 2 – countries where no language is legally named but at least one language may be de facto national or official. Examples of Category 1 countries include Indonesia where Bahasa Indonesia is the only de jure national and official language and Vanuatu where Bislama is the de jure national language and is also a de jure co-official language with both English and French, the languages of the former colonial powers. Examples of Category 2 countries discussed here include Papua New Guinea where Tok Pisin is named as one of the possible languages needed for an applicant to become a Papua New Guinean citizen but does not have de jure national language status and the Solomon Islands where Pijin is the de facto national language and English is the de facto official language. Whilst the results of either the Bougainville and New Caledonian referenda are not clear, the different configurations already in place serve as a pointer to what may eventuate should the residents of either territory vote for independence.

The inhabitants of the overseas departments and collectivities of France have, of late, been reconsidering their relationships both to each other and to the former imperial metropole. In 2011 Mayotte, previously classified as an overseas collectivity, acceded to full French and European status as an overseas department of France following a referendum. This decision to, in the words of the social scientist François Taglioni, further ‘anchor’ the island in the republic has commonly been understood as a pragmatic decision as much as an ideological one. It was a way of distancing Mayotte from the political turmoil in neighbouring independent Comoros, as well as an indicator of the improbability of a small island nation achieving full sovereignty in a multipolar, resource hungry world. The narrative that self-determination must necessarily be obtained through national independence is still prevalent in the language of certain independence movements, including that of the Kanak people of New Caledonia. But it has been repeatedly tested at the ballot box, not least in November 2018 when New Caledonians voted in a referendum on their constitutional future. This referendum – and the further two due to follow it before 2022 – will be observed with interest by other self declared nations in waiting. Some anticipate, not a reclaiming of local sovereignty in the event of independence, but rather a transferral of economic hegemony from France to China, a prospect hinted at by Emmanuel Macron during a visit to Nouméa in 2018. However, the demographic minority status of the Kanak people whom the independentist Kanak and Socialist Liberation Front (Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste;FLNKS) claims to represent, coupled with divisions within the movement, means it is very hard to predict the contours of a future independent New Caledonian state.

Relative clauses in Tayo, the French-lexicon Creole of St-Louis (New Caledonia) which emerged in the late 19th century, reflect in their construction and their distribution typically Melanesian patterns, including a sub-ordinator derived from a personal pronoun, sa. Thematization similarly reflects Melanesian strategies, but may also be handled by clefting using a subordinator ki (< French qui). While this construction shows how the lexifier may be modifying Tayo, the emergence of a complex system of relativization and thematization, over three generations after the settlement of St-Louis in 1860, shows that French was not the "motor" of creolization, and suggests that creolization is, in effect, a special case of language shift and creation over some 50 or so years.

Abstract In constrast with Nêlêmwa (Oceanic, New Caledonia) whose lexemes are most generally subcategorised as nouns or verbs and undergo category-changing derivations, in Amis (Formosan), roots are pervasively categorially neutral, yet they contain semantic features and instructions that allow or disallow combination with primary derivational affixes which specify their class and category. Lexical categories are expressed after roots are derived into morphosyntactic words projected in a syntactic frame; they are then quite rigidly subcategorised as verbal, nominal or adjectival-modifying heads. Still, word forms display some functional flexibility; for instance, nouns and derived nouns, pronouns, numerals may be predicative in equative, ascriptive and focus constructions, simply by being in the syntactic position of the verb. Such functional flexibility is asymmetrical and does not apply to derived verb stems which must be nominalised to achieve argument function.

The concepts of centre and margins are of course, or ought to be, interchangeable: where we are is, in that sense, always the centre. However, no one would deny that in terms of culture, some 'centres' are more dominant than others. As a translator of Pacific texts, both from French into English and from English into French (as a co-translator), I have become acutely aware of what is at stake in the 'centre' of the Pacific, in particular on the islands of New Caledonia and French Polynesia. Focusing on texts from French Polynesia, I look at some of the ways in which indigenous Pacific authors writing in French 'deterritorialise' both genre and language conventions to create new forms of expression. Chantal Spitz, for example, employs a highly poetic style, even including traditional poetic forms in her prose. How can the translator respond to these strategies in such a way as to promote a reading 'from the inside out'?

Abstract Writing a 200-word abstract about the life of a 76-year-old scientist, in which luck played a significant role, is not an easy task. Even knowing this scientist well (for I am talking about myself) does not make it any easier. When you notice something is not right, do not fear changing your major (I changed twice before settling on Fisheries and Marine Science). For my PhD in neurobiology, I changed again. Grab opportunities when they arise. Join field trips and expeditions, attend conferences, and spread your interests widely. Spend time in different countries, learn new techniques and languages, and always stay curious. Remain humble. I carried out speleological research in Jamaica and France, participated in a 4-month South Atlantic Fisheries Research Trip and a 3-month Bioluminescence Expedition to the Moluccas, and pioneered comparative physiological and functional anatomical research in Antarctica and the Arctic. Be adventurous. My ethnobiological field work took me to Papua Niugini, NE-India, and Central Australia. Having lived in Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Jamaica, Japan, and New Zealand (I am a New Zealander currently living in Korea) and having spent sabbaticals in Brazil, India, New Caledonia, and North Korea, I consider myself a global scientist. You can become one too.

Pl@ntNet is an international initiative which was the first one attempting to combine the force of citizens networks with automated identification tools based on machine learning technologies (Joly et al. 2014). Launched in 2009 by a consortium involving research institutes in computer sciences, ecology and agriculture, it was the starting point of several scientific and technological productions (Goëau et al. 2012) which finally led to the first release of the Pl@ntNet app (iOS in February 2013 (Goëau et al. 2013) and Android (Goëau et al. 2014) the following year). Initially based on 800 plant species, the app was progressively enlarged to thousands of species of the European, North American and tropical regions. Nowadays, the app covers more than 15 000 species and is adapted to 22 regional and thematic contexts, such as the Andean plant species, the wild salads of southern Europe, the indigenous trees species of South Africa, the flora of the Indian Ocean Islands, the New Caledonian Flora, etc. The app is translated in 11 languages and is being used by more than 3 millions of end-users all over the world, mostly in Europe and the US. The analysis of the data collected by Pl@ntnet users, which represent more than 24 millions of observations up to now, has a high potential for different ecological and management questions. A recent work (Botella et al. 2018), in particular, did show that the stream of Pl@ntNet observations could allow a fine-grained and regular monitoring of some species of interest such as invasive ones. However, this requires cautious considerations about the contexts in which the application is used. In this talk, we will synthesize the results of this study and present another one related to phenology. Indeed, as the phenological stage of the observed plants is also recorded, these data offer a rich and unique material for phenological studies at large geographical or taxonomical scale. We will share preliminary results obtained on some important pantropical species (such as the Melia azedarach L., and the Lantana camara L.), for which we have detected significant intercontinental phenological patterns, among the project data.

New Caledonia has an unusual linguistic dynamic in comparison to other French overseas territories. While New Caledonia was established as a penal colony in 1853, the other French islands were settled as plantation colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. In these areas, French Creole is usually the lingua franca and has lower status than French. In New Caledonia, although French has official status and dominates in state institutions, it is the native language of only half of the population. There are 28 indigenous languages and a French Creole, Tayo, spoken mostly in the rural areas. The 2014 census population revealed a multicultural New Caledonian population, it did not however record the rate of multilingualism in speakers. The present study conducted in two stages addresses a gap in the research by focussing on patterns of language use and social attitudes of New Caledonians towards their own multilingualism. The same methodology was used to collect data in both stages of the research so that a comparative analysis could be carried out between urban and rural New Caledonia. This paper focuses on social perceptions of ancestral languages and cultures as well as challenges to their preservation in multilingual spaces, as New Caledonia transitions towards the thorny question of independence in a referendum, expected to be held between 2016 and 2018.Preliminary results from the study show a difference in the language habits between older and younger generations on New Caledonians of Melanesian descent. Although French is perceived as the lingua franca by all, English is more valued than ancestral Melanesian languages by the younger generations. In terms of cultural representations and links with family history, there seems to be a discrepancy between the younger and the older generations. Whilst the older generations perceive the Centre Culturel Tjibaou as a traditional space for Melanesian art and culture their younger counterparts on the contrary view it as a place associated with contemporary art and music performances.

The joint use of two tools applied to plant description, XPER3 and Recolnat Annotate, made it possible to study vegetative architectural patterns (Fig. 1) of the Dendrobium (Orchidaceae) in New Caledonia defined by N. Hallé (1977). This approach is not directly related to taxonomy, but to the definition of sets of species grouped according to a growth pattern. In the course of this work, the characters stated by N. Hallé were analysed and eventually amended to produce a data matrix and generate an identification key. Study materials: Dendrobium Sw. in New Caledonia New Caledonia is an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, a French overseas territory located east of Australia. It is one of the 36 biodiversity hotspots in the world. The genus Dendrobium Sw. sensu lato is one of the largest in the family Orchidaceae and contains over 1220 species. In New Caledonia, it includes 46 species. In his revision of the family, N. Hallé (1977) defined 14 architectural groups, into which he divided the 31 species known at that time. These models are based on those defined by F. Hallé and Oldeman (1970). But they are clearly intended to group species together for identification purposes. Architectural pattern: A pattern is a set of vegetative or reproductive characters that define the general shape of an individual. Developed by mechanisms linked to the dominance of the terminal buds, the architectural groups are differentiated by the arrangement of the leaves, the position of the inflorescences or the shape of the stem (Fig. 1). Plants obeying a given pattern do not necessarily have phylogenetic relationships. These models have a useful application in the field for identifying groups of plants. Monocotyledonous plants, and in particular the Orchidaceae, lend themselves well to this approach, which produces stable architectural patterns. Recolnat Annotate Recolnat Annotate is a free tool for observing qualitative features and making physical measurements (angle, length, area) of images. It can be used offline and downloaded from https://www.recolnat.org/en/annotate. The software is based on the setting up observation projects that group together a batch of herbarium images to be studied, associating it with a descriptive model. A file of measurements can be exported in comma separated value (csv) format for further analysis (Fig. 2). XPER3 Usually used in the context of systematics in which the items studied are taxa, XPER3 can also be used to distinguish architectural groups that are not phylogenetically related. Developed by the Laboratoire d'Informatique et Systématique (LIS) of the Institut de Systématique, Evolution, Biodiversité in Paris, XPER3 is an online collaborative platform that allows the editing of descriptive data (https://www.xper3.fr/?language=en). This tool allows the cross-referencing of items (in this case architectural groups) and descriptors (or characters). It allows the development of free access identification keys (it means without fixed sequence of identification steps). The latter can be used directly online. But it also offers to produce single-access keys, with or without using character weighting and dependencies between characters. Links between XPER3 and Recolnat Annotate The descriptive model used by Recolnat Annotate can be developed within the framework of XPER3, which provides for characters and character states. Thus the observations made by the Recolnat Annotate measurement tool can be integrated into the XPER3 platform. Specimens can then be compared, or several descriptions can be merged to express the description of a species (Fig. 3). RESULTS The joint use of XPER3 and Recolnat Annotate to manage both herbarium specimens and architectural patterns has proven to be relevant. Moreover, the measurements on the virtual specimens are fast and reliable. N. Hallé (1977) had produced a dichotomous single-accesskey that allowed the identification and attribution of a pattern to a plant observed in the field or in a herbarium. The project to build a polytomous and interactive key with XPER3 required completing the observations to give a status for each character of each vegetative architectural model. Recolnat Annotate was used to produce observations from herbarium network in France. The use of XPER3 has allowed us to redefine these models in the light of new data from the herbaria and to publish the interactive key available at dendrobium-nc.identificationkey.org.

Abstract Systemic functional linguistics focuses on the study of language use within its registerial context of situation. The theory offers a meaning-based approach for the analysis of discourses in generic and culture-specific settings. When it comes to the analysis of conflict discourses across cultural boundaries, SFL may be integrated into a framework that relates language use to the notions of power and ideology and the dimensions of culture and history to provide a broader picture to inform future political decision-making. This paper presents a pragma-functional approach combining systemic functional linguistics, argumentation theory, critical theory and postcolonial insights. The analytical tool is illustrated with reference to the New Caledonian independence debate through the analysis of salient linguistic patterns and discursive moves in two open letters, published in April 1988, by Kanak independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou and former French President François Mitterrand.

This study presents two experiments aimed at investigating tune-to-text alignment and pitch scaling in Lifou French, a variety spoken by bilingual speakers of French and Drehu. Descriptions of New Caledonian French have focussed on language use of European descendants or the variety spoken in the urban region, neglecting emergent varieties spoken by the indigenous population in rural areas, like the island Lifou. Due to the reduced inventory of pitch accents, dialectal variation in French intonation has proved to be difficult to detect, which has led to the assumption that French has a relatively homogeneous intonation system across its varieties. This study shows that fine-grained phonetic differences in speaking tempo and at the level of tonal alignment as well as in the scaling of AP-final peaks can be attributed to dialectal variation.

Since the late 1990s, W. G. Sebald’s innovative contribution to the genre of prose fiction has been the source of much academic scrutiny. His books Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants and Austerlitz have provoked interest from diverse fields of inquiry: visual communication (Kilbourn; Patt; Zadokerski), trauma studies (Denham and McCulloh; Schmitz), and travel writing (Blackler; Zisselsberger). His work is also claimed to be a bastion for both modernist and postmodernist approaches to literature and history writing (Bere; Fuchs and Long; Long). This is in addition to numerous “guide to” type books, such as Mark McCulloh’s Understanding Sebald, Long and Whitehead’s W. G. Sebald—A Critical Companion, and the comprehensive Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook. Here I have only mentioned works available in English. I should point out that Sebald wrote in German, the country of his birth, and as one would expect much scholarship dealing with his work is confined to this language. In this article I focus on what is perhaps Sebald’s prototypical work, The Rings of Saturn. Of all Sebald’s prose fictional works The Rings of Saturn seems the example that best exhibits his innovative literary forms, including the use of lists. This book is the work of an author who is purposefully and imaginatively concerned with the nature of his vocation: what is it to be a writer? Crucially, he addresses this question not only from the perspective of a subject facing an existential crisis, but from the perspective of the documents created by writers. His works demonstrate a concern with the enabling role documents play in the thinking and writing process; how, for example, pen and paper are looped in with our capacity to reason in certain ways. Despite taking the form of fictional narratives, his books are as much motivated by a historical interest in how ideas and forms of organisation are transmitted, and how they evolve as part of an ecology; how humans become articulate within their surrounds, according to the contingencies of specific epochs and places. The Sebald critic J. J. Long accounts for this in some part in his description “archival consciousness,” which recommends that conscious experience is not simply located in the mind of a knowing, human subject, but is rather distributed between the subject and different technologies (among which writing and archives are exemplary).The most notable peculiarity of Sebald’s books lies in their abundant use of “non-syntactical” kinds of writing or inscription. My use of the term “non-syntactical” has its origins in the anthropological work of Jack Goody, who emphasises the importance of list making and tabulation in pre-literate or barely literate cultures. In Sebald’s texts, kinds of non-syntactical writing include lists, photographic images, tables, signatures, diagrams, maps, stamps, dockets and sketches. As I stress throughout this article, Sebald’s shifts between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing allows him to build up highly complex schemes of internal reference. Massimo Leone identifies something similar, when he notes that Sebald “orchestrates a multiplicity of voices and text-types in order to produce his own coherent discourse” (91). The play between multiplicity and coherence is at once a thematic and poetic concern for Sebald. This is to say, his texts are formal experiments with these contrasting tendencies, in addition to discussing specific historical situations in which they feature. The list is perhaps Sebald’s most widely used and variable form of non-syntactical writing, a key part of his formal and stylistic peculiarity. His lengthy sentences frequently spill over into catalogues and inventories, and the entire structure of his narratives is list-like. Discrete episodes accumulate alongside each other, rather than following a narrative arc where episodes of suspenseful gravity overshadow the significance of minor events. The Rings of Saturn details the travels of Sebald’s trademark, nameless, first person narrator, who recounts his trek along the Suffolk coastline, from Lowestoft to Ditchingham, about two years after the event. From the beginning, the narrative is framed as an effort to organise a period of time that lacks a coherent and durable form, a period of time that is in pieces, fading from the narrator’s memory. However, the movement from the chaos of forgetting to the comparatively distinct and stable details of the remembered present does not follow a continuum. Rather, the past and present are both constituted by the force of memory, which is continually crystallising and dissolving. Each event operates according to its own specific arrangement of emphasis and forgetting. Our experience of memory in the present, or recollective memory, is only one kind of memory. Sebald is concerned with a more pervasive kind of remembering, which includes the vectorial existence of non-conscious, non-human perceptual events; memory as expressed by crystals, tree roots, glaciers, and the nested relationship of fuel, fire, smoke, and ash. The Rings of Saturn is composed of ten chapters, each of which is outlined in table form at the book’s beginning. The first chapter appears as: “In hospital—Obituary—Odyssey of Thomas Browne’s skull—Anatomy lecture—Levitation—Quincunx—Fabled creatures—Urn burial.” The Rings of Saturn is of course hardly exceptional in its use of this device. Rather, it is exemplary concerning the repeated emphasis on the tension between syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing, among which this chapter breakdown is included. Sebald continually uses the conventions of bookmaking in subtle though innovative ways. Each of these horizontally linked and divided indices might put the reader in mind of Thomas Browne’s urns, time capsules from the past, the unearthing of which is discussed in the book’s first chapter (25). The chapter outlines (and the urns) are containers that preserve a fragmentary and suggestive history. Each is a perspective on the narrator’s travels that abstracts, arranges, and uniquely refers to the narrative elaborations to come.As I have already stressed, Sebald is a writer concerned with forms of organisation. His works account for a diverse range of organisational forms, some of which instance an overt, chronological, geometric, or metrical manipulation of space and time, such as grids, star shapes, and Greenwich Mean Time. This contrasts with comparatively suggestive, insubstantial, mutable forms, including various meteorological phenomena such as cloudbanks and fog, dust and sand, and as exemplified in narrative form by the haphazard, distracted assemblage of events featured in dreams or dream logic. The relationship between these supposedly opposing tendencies is, however, more complex and paradoxical than might at first glance appear. As Sebald warily reminds us in his essay “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio,” despite our wishes to inhabit periods of complete freedom, where we follow our distractions to the fullest possible extent, we nonetheless “must all have some more or less significant design in view” (Sebald, Campo 4). It is not so much that we must choose, absolutely, between form and formlessness. Rather, the point is to understand that some seemingly inevitable forms are in fact subject to contingencies, which certain uses deliberately or ignorantly mask, and that simplicity and intricacy are often co-dependent. Richard T. Gray is a Sebald critic who has picked up on the element in Sebald’s work that suggests a tension between different forms of organisation. In his article “Writing at the Roche Limit,” Gray notes that Sebald’s tendency to emphasise the decadent aspects of human and natural history “is continually counterbalanced by an insistence on order and by often extremely subtle forms of organization” (40). Rather than advancing the thesis that Sebald is exclusively against the idea of systematisation or order, Gray argues that The Rings of Saturn models in its own textual make-up an alternative approach to the cognitive order(ing) of things, one that seeks to counter the natural tendency toward entropic decline and a fall into chaos by introducing constructive forces that inject a modicum of balance and equilibrium into the system as a whole. (Gray 41)Sebald’s concern with the contrasting energies exemplified by different forms extends to his play with syntactical and non-syntactical forms of writing. He uses lists to add contrast to his flowing, syntactically intricate sentences. The achievement of his work is not the exclusive privileging of either the list form or the well-composed sentence, but in providing contexts whereby the reader can appreciate subtle modulations between the two, thus experiencing a more dynamic and complex kind of narrative time. His works exhibit an astute awareness of the fact that different textual devices command different experiences of temporality, and our experience of temporality in good part determines our metaphysics. Here I consider two lists featured in The Rings of Saturn, one from the first chapter, and one from the last. Each shows contrasting tendencies concerning systems of organisation. Both are attributable to the work of Thomas Browne, “who practiced as a doctor in Norwich in the seventeenth century and had left a number of writings that defy all comparison” (Sebald, Rings 9). The Rings of Saturn is in part a dialogue across epochs with the sentiments expressed in Browne’s works, which, according to Bianca Theisen, preserve a kind of reasoning that is lost in “the rationalist and scientific embrace of a devalued world of facts” (Theisen 563).The first list names the varied “animate and inanimate matter” in which Browne identifies the quincuncial structure, a lattice like arrangement of five points and intersecting lines. The following phenomena are enumerated in the text:certain crystalline forms, in starfish and sea urchins, in the vertebrae of mammals and the backbones of birds and fish, in the skins of various species of snake, in the crosswise prints left by quadrupeds, in the physical shapes of caterpillars, butterflies, silkworms and moths, in the root of the water fern, in the seed husks of the sunflower and the Caledonian pine, within young oak shoots or the stem of the horse tail; and in the creations of mankind, in the pyramids of Egypt and the mausoleum of Augustus as in the garden of King Solomon, which was planted with mathematical precision with pomegranate trees and white lilies. (Sebald, Rings 20-21)Ostensibly quoting from Browne, Sebald begins the next sentence, “Examples might be multiplied without end” (21). The compulsion to list, or the compulsiveness expressed by listing, is expressed here in a relationship of dual utility with another, dominant or overt, kind of organisational form: the quincunx. It is not the utility or expressiveness of the list itself that is at issue—at least in the version of Browne’s work preserved here by Sebald. In W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity, Long notes the historical correspondences and divergences between Sebald and Michel Foucault (2007). Long interprets Browne’s quincunx as exemplifying a “hermeneutics of resemblance,” whereby similarities among diverse phenomena are seen as providing proof of “the universal oneness of all things” (33). This contrasts with the idea of a “pathological nature, autonomous from God,” which, according to Long, informs Sebald’s transformation of Browne into “an avatar of distinctly modern epistemology” (38). Long follows Foucault in noting the distinction between Renaissance and modern epistemology, a distinction in good part due to the experimental, inductive method, the availability of statistical data, and probabilistic reasoning championed in the latter epoch (Whitehead; Hacking). In the book’s final chapter, Sebald includes a list from Browne’s imaginary library, the “Musæum Clausium.” In contrast to the above list, here Sebald seems to deliberately problematise any efforts to suggest an abstract uniting principle. There is no evident reason for the togetherness of the discrete things, beyond the mere fact that they happen to be gathered, hypothetically, in the text (Sebald, Rings 271-273). Among the library’s supposed contents are:an account by the ancient traveller Pytheas of Marseilles, referred to in Strabo, according to which all the air beyond thule is thick, condensed and gellied, looking just like sea lungs […] a dream image showing a prairie or sea meadow at the bottom of the Mediterranean, off the coat of Provence […] and a glass of spirits made of æthereal salt, hermetically sealed up, of so volatile a nature that it will not endure by daylight, and therefore shown only in winter or by the light of a carbuncle or Bononian stone. (Sebald, Rings 272-73)Unlike the previous example attributed to Browne, here the list coheres according to the tensions of its own coincidences. Sebald uses the list to create spontaneous organisations in which history is exhibited as a complex mix of fact and fantasy. More important than the distinction between the imaginary and the real is the effort to account for the way things uniquely incorporate aspects of the world in order to be what they are. Human knowledge is a perspective that is implicated in, rather than excluded from, this process.Lists move us to puzzle over the criteria that their togetherness implies. They might be used inthe service of a specific paradigm, or they might suggest an imaginable but as yet unknown kind of systematisation; a specific kind of relationship, or simply the possibility of a relationship. Take, for example, the list-like accumulation of architectural details in the following description of the decadent Sommerleyton Hall, featured in chapter II: There were drawing rooms and winter gardens, spacious halls and verandas. A corridor might end in a ferny grotto where fountains ceaselessly plashed, and bowered passages criss-crossed beneath the dome of a fantastic mosque. Windows could be lowered to open the interior onto the outside, and inside the landscape was replicated on the mirror walls. Palm houses and orangeries, the lawn like green velvet, the baize on the billiard tables, the bouquets of flowers in the morning and retiring rooms and in the majolica vases on the terrace, the birds of paradise and the golden peasants on the silken tapestries, the goldfinches in the aviaries and the nightingales in the garden, the arabesques in the carpets and the box-edged flower beds—all of it interacted in such a way that one had the illusion of complete harmony between the natural and the manufactured. (Sebald, Rings 33-34)This list shifts emphasis away from preconceived distinctions between the natural and the manufactured through the creation of its own unlikely harmony. It tells us something important about the way perception and knowledge is ordered in Sebald’s prose. Each encounter, or historically specific situation, is considered as though it were its own microworld, its own discrete, synecdochic realisation of history. Rather than starting from the universal or the meta-level and scaling down to the local, Sebald arranges historically peculiar examples that suggest a variable, contrasting and dynamic metaphysics, a motley arrangement of ordering systems that each aspire to but do not command universal applicability. In a comparable sense, Browne’s sepulchral urns of his 1658 work Urn Burial, which feature in chapter I, are time capsules that seem to create their own internally specific kind of organisation:The cremated remains in the urns are examined closely: the ash, the loose teeth, some long roots of quitch, or dog’s grass wreathed about the bones, and the coin intended for the Elysian ferryman. Browne records other objects known to have been placed with the dead, whether as ornament or utensil. His catalogue includes a variety of curiosities: the circumcision knives of Joshua, the ring which belonged to the mistress of Propertius, an ape of agate, a grasshopper, three-hundred golden bees, a blue opal, silver belt buckles and clasps, combs, iron pins, brass plates and brazen nippers to pull away hair, and a brass Jews harp that last sounded on the crossing over black water. (Sebald, Rings 25-26)Regardless of our beliefs concerning the afterlife, these items, preserved across epochs, solicit a sense of wonder as we consider what we might choose for company on our “last journey” (25). In death, the human body is reduced to a condition of an object or thing, while the objects that accompany the corpse seem to acquire a degree of potency as remnants that transcend living time. Life is no longer the paradigm through which to understand purpose. In their very difference from living things these objects command our fascination. Eric Santner coins the term “undeadness” to name the significance of this non-living agency in Sebald’s prose (Santner xx). Santner’s study places Sebald in a linage of German-Jewish writers, including Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan, whose understanding of “the human” depends crucially on the concept of “the creature” or “creatureliness” (Santner 38-41). Like the list of items contained within Sommerleyton Hall, the above list accounts for a context in which ornament and utensil, nature and culture, are read according to their differentiated togetherness, rather than opposition. Death, it seems, is a universal leveller, or at least a different dimension in which symbol and function appear to coincide. Perhaps it is the unassuming and convenient nature of lists that make them enduring objects of historical interest. Lists are a form of writing to which we appeal for immediate mnemonic assistance. They lack the artifice of a sentence. While perhaps not as interesting in the present that is contemporary with their usefulness (a trip to the supermarket), with time lists acquire credibility due to the intimacy they share with mundane, diurnal concerns—due to the fact that they were, once upon a time, so useful. The significance of lists arrives anachronistically, when we look back and wonder what people were really up to, or what our own concerns were, relatively free from fanciful, stylistic adornment. Sebald’s democratic approach to different forms of writing means that lists sit alongside the esteemed poetic and literary efforts of Joseph Conrad, Algernon Swinburne, Edward Fitzgerald, and François René de Chateaubriand, all of whom feature in The Rings of Saturn. His books make the exclusive differences between literary and non-literary kinds of writing less important than the sense of dynamism that is elicited through a play of contrasting kinds of syntactical and non-syntactical writing. The book’s closing chapter includes a revealing example that expresses these sentiments. After tracing over a natural history of silk, with a particular focus on human greed and naivety, the narrative arrives at a “pattern book” that features strips of colourful silk kept in “the small museum of Strangers Hall” (Sebald, Rings 283). The narrator notes that the silks arranged in this book “were of a truly fabulous variety, and of an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty as if they had been produced by Nature itself, like the plumage of birds” (283). This effervescent declamation continues after a double page photograph of the pattern book, which is described as a “catalogue of samples” and “leaves from the only true book which none of our textual and pictorial works can even begin to rival” (286). Here we witness Sebald’s inclusive and variable understanding as to the kinds of thing a book, and writing, can be. The fraying strips of silk featured in the photograph are arranged one below the other, in the form of a list. They are surrounded by ornate handwriting that, like the strips of silk, seems to fray at the edges, suggesting the specific gestural event that occasioned the moment of their inscription—something which tends to be excluded in printed prose. Sebald’s remarks here are not without a characteristic irony (“the only true book”). However, in the greatercontext of the narrative, this comment suggests an important inclination. Namely, that there is much scope yet for innovative literary forms that capture the nuances and complexity of collective and individual histories. And that writing always includes, though to varying degrees obscures, contrasting tensions shared among syntactical and non-syntactical elements, including material and gestural contingencies. Sebald’s works remind us of what potentials might lay ahead for books if the question of what writing can be is asked continually as part of a writer’s enterprise.ReferencesBere, Carol. “The Book of Memory: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz.” Literary Review, 46.1 (2002): 184-92.Blackler, Deane. Reading W. G. Sebald: Adventure and Disobedience. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2007. Catling Jo, and Richard Hibbitt, eds. Saturn’s Moons: A W. G. Sebald Handbook. Oxford: Legenda, 2011.Denham, Scott and Mark McCulloh, eds. W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006. Fuchs, Anne and J. J. Long, eds. W. G. Sebald and the Writing of History. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Gray, Richard T. “Writing at the Roche Limit: Order and Entropy in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.” The German Quarterly 83.1 (2010): 38-57. Hacking, Ian. 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