Latour Litanies and Gibbon

From here on out I will refer to Latour Litanies on this blog without quotation marks, as an established piece of terminology. But for those who may have missed the earlier discussions, Ian Bogost coined the term “Latour Litanies” for those lists of concrete entities that can pop up in various pieces of writing. They are useful in a number of different ways, but their primary value is to establish the autonomous force and personality of individual actors, rather than allowing them to be reduced to or swallowed up by some supposedly deeper principle. Hence, it should be no surprise that object-oriented philosophies (including my own) tend to gravitate toward the Latour Litany as a basic stylistic device. So for instance, in my books you will often find sentences like the one I’m about to make up on the fly: “On the windswept terrain of Whitehead’s cosmos, we find candles, priests, polar bears, sunflowers, and Viking longboats all placed on the same ontological footing, with no privilege granted to the humans in this armada of entities.”

Needless to say, Latour did not invent Latour Litanies. He simply does them as well as any writer of any era, and I assume that’s why Bogost coined the term. I’ve discussed the phenomenon in Prince of Networks. I don’t have the page number handy, but look up “Hiroshima” in the index, since I cite Richard Rhodes’s long Latour Litany of all the objects in Hiroshima that were destroyed by the atomic bomb. Rhodes’s stylistic point is similar: it is easy to lose sight of all the very specific things that were annihilated by that one bomb.

Here’s a Latour Litany taken from Gibbon:

“…the valour of the inhabitants resisted above five months the archers, the elephants, and the military engines of the Great King.”

Archers, elephants, and military engines. This tells us something about the weaponry the Great King had at his disposal. It gives a picturesque hint of the nature of the siege (lots of arrows and catapult stones flying), and adds a nicely exotic touch with the elephants. All of this would have been lost if Gibbon had written instead:

“…the valour of the inhabitants resisted above five months the army of the Great King.”

That’s somewhat boring, and loses the information just noted. However, in my opinion the passage is also weakened if we do this:

“…the valour of the inhabitants resisted above five months the army of the Great King, which included archers, elephants, and military engines.”

What’s the difference? Now the actor in the story is the army as a whole. The specific elements of that army are now merely listed in informative, descriptive fashion. They are not depicted in the very act of being themselves, which is one possible account (and not such a bad one) of what metaphor does.

In Gibbon’s original passage, however, the Great King’s horde is now an implacable assemblage pieced together from three autonomous components (archers, elephants, military engines) each of them having their own formidable powers, which every reader can easily imagine.

And the very implacability of that threefold army also breathes life into the first part of the sentence “the valour of the inhabitants resisted…” For a besieged city to resist an army valiantly for five months is surely admirable, but it also sounds like dull praise become cliché. Hooray for their resistance! It’s bland.

Yet things change when we learn that for five months the city resisted archers, elephants, and military engines. This is truly dramatic.

I’ve always felt that Aristotle was right to say that the gift for metaphor is the highest human gift. Without it, you are reduced to asserting the truth of your own verbal propositions and the falsity of the alternative propositions made by others. But once you see that every word is located somewhere along a continuum between blandness and beauty, then you can start to engineer the words in such a way that the blandness disappears, and bona fide realities start to appear in your sentences rather than the mere husks of reality known as accurate statements. The point is not that all statements are equally accurate (they’re not). The point is that our capacity for accuracy is limited by the nature of things, and that an oblique approach to describing the valor of the citizens of Dara is the only way to make that valor visible. “They valiantly resisted the army for five months” is accurate, but leaves little trace in the memory.