This has been a long time going that I have been meaning to put this blog up...I wrote it out in class one day and never put it up here. Well here it is!

I was thinking about what Sexson was saying with lists and their seemingly magical qualities. My mind was specifically intrigued by Nabokov's list of Dolores Haze's classmates, and his connection to the fact that language was first invented to keep lists (that is to allow accountants to keep track of bills). Sexson (and Humbert Humbert) argue that the role list is really poetry, and in that sense it has literary value. I was thinking about Foucault, and what he was saying about what exactly is a text in his essay What is an Author.

Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theoretical and technical. When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche's works, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published, but what is "everything"? Everything that Nietzsche himself published, certainly. And what about the rough drafts for his works? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms? Yes. The deleted passagesand the notes at the bottom of the page? Yes. What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum (Foucault).

Foucault is arguing that since we do not consider everything written by an author to be a work (i.e. a "laundry list") then we must first consider the literary significance of a text before we can call something someone writes a work. It might seem that Sexson and Foucault are at odds in their respective ideologies, but they are actual after the same goals. Dolores Haze's role list to Humbert Humbert (and to Sexson and to many others) is poetic and therefore can be considered a work in Foucault's classification. But what does that mean for artistic intention if a random list of names can be considered art? How many people must consider something art for it to be art? Can anything, theoretically, be art? I don't believe any of these answers can be simple, but there seems to be answers to them...