A book provides information architecture, complete with its own poetics (Fraistat 4). The table of contents as a special part of that architecture has been analyzed by Marjorie Welish in a poem called “Cities of the Table.” Much of her poetry, Welish says in an interview, concerns itself with the “scholastic book’s apparatus – table of contents, preface, endnotes, index -- . . . protocols for writing and reading” (Cooperman). This particular poem is comprised of six parts, each named first “Cities of the Table” and then, following a colon, a scholarly object: “Marginalia,” “Apparatus,” “Profile,” “Translation,” “Edit,” “Apparatus and Apocrypha.” Each part of the poem presents a table of contents, sometimes in quotation marks: Welish quotes exactly, and twice, the table of contents for Gerard Genette’s Architext (258, 261). Like her poem, Genette’s book-length essay performs an archeology of textual studies. Genette describes how literary critics since Plato and Aristotle have, by appealing to their authority (what Welish calls “rented advantage,” 257), attempted to “naturalize” and de-historicize “genre” (Genette 2-3, 36-38, 70-71). Like Genette’s Architext, her poem will analyze disciplinary objects.

    “Cities of the Table” opens with a refrain that is repeated in all sections but one: “Such as we see here / as here and above” (257). Though masquerading as the “Marginalia” specified in the section’s title, “here” immediately invokes spatiality (Cooperman): the poem will be about what we see populating this city-table, the table’s space. The poem puts the words “table” and “contents” through their various language games: “We are at table” (264); “the folding table” (264, 266); “Fragile Contents” (266); “is content [i.e., happy] to” (257). Doing so is a way of examining the “grammatical fiction” of things generated by the word’s behavior: “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar),” Wittgenstein says (103, 116). The poem also quotes all the dictionary definitions of table: “condensed enumeration,” “systematized data” (both twice, 257, 264); “pre-existing taxonomies” (262); “to remove from consideration indefinitely,” “having a plane surface” (264). Counterposed to these dictionary definitions are Welish’s own definitions: the table of contents provides “echoes . . . met in encrypted turbulence: / a topic”; its job is “articulating a convoy at full stature” – that is, in large type (264).

    Welish offers at least two stories about how the table of contents comes into existence: “From the content, the table / of that same content”: an epitome is abstracted from a pre-existing text. An alternative tale is this: 

In this case, a list comes first, and the text (the contents) re-thinks it in longer form, re-posing it, as it were. However, if in reading this passage one takes “Contents” to denote not the text but the table of contents – in practice, “Contents” appears as often on books’ preliminary tables as does “Table of Contents” – one gets another reading entirely. In this case, the table of contents is not simply a list but a list made (re)cognizable, breaking into the light repose of a mind that is about to engage in reading a book as the reader opens the first few pages. If the table of contents allows us to cognize what we see, to recognize it as meaningful, it does so through space (“here”) and type size (“stature”) – through interface. This “condensed enumeration,” she says, works “in zeros and ones, apparently,” its surface susceptible of being digitized on a screen.

    At one point in the poem, Welish puts Genette’s table of contents inside a text box set off to the left side of the page, her own poetic commentary running alongside, down the right side of the box (261). Later in the poem, one sees a table of contents in which each line ends with the refrains that have been repeated over and over again throughout the poem: here the text box has been removed, allowing her text and elements in a typical table of contents to mix in a way that produces nonsense (262). When you remove a table, if sentences in the same rows but separate columns run together, the words inside the table all run together, no longer making sense and revealing that layout does not simply cater to the eye but actually makes meaning. A table of contents needs to establish inviolable ground. The title of Welish’s poem misquotes, of course, Marcel Proust’s Cities of the Plain. This table is a plane, a plain, a field containing disciplinary objects made graspable by being set in view. A literary “field of study” is partly achieved by and partly reflected in the anthology’s table of contents insofar as it strews disciplinary objects around on a table, a visual field that is homologous with a physical field. The disciplinary anthology’s table of contents provides a “cognitive map” that “frames [the] interactive behavior” (Chen 22-23) that we call scholarly activity by creating the grammatical illusions constituting its disciplinary objects and naturalizing them, like flowers in a field. Our primary illusion has been, until recently, the canon.