Invisible index (Ballard and Eco)

Ballard:

I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures - scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers - part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination [...]

My copy of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages I stole from the Beverly Hilton Hotel three years ago; it has been a fund of extraordinary material, as surrealist in its way as Dali's autobiography.

That's in User's Guide to the Millennium. And of course, his 1977 story 'The Index' proposed the index itself as the work of fiction (in Re/Search 8/9, War Fever or the Collected Stories).

Umberto Eco chose the New York City phone directory on Desert Island Discs, explaining that he could use the list of names to generate all possible stories.

Or you could take Finnegans Wake. Or shopping lists. And whilst some thriller writers appear to copy out the technical spec sheets of the armaments they fetishise, has anyone gone further in using Jane's Fighting Ships 1990-91 or Trafalgar's order of battle for literature?

Lists and indexes (indices?) are attractive because you can easily use them to create new, magpie slices through the data of a book or the phone company's records, with all the risks of laziness and discontinuity that this brings. Phone books and Yellow Pages are very much outside (invisible to?) the bodies that they index, perhaps making it easier to turn them to new uses.

Related: Borges saw Paris as "a city which you can consult like an encyclopaedia". And indexes and indexers in fiction.

Comments

[rafael]

Georges Perec's giant novel "La vie mode d'emploi" not only includes an index of names and places, but also parts of real or faked operations manuals, shopping lists and heterogeneous inventories, sometimes pertaining to a kind of collage of what Ballard calls invisible literature. Interestingly, it also contains "real" invisible literature : lengthy quotes of real writers -- Borges, Kafka, J. Verne, A. Christie, etc. -- included in the text, without a mention of origin or any other typographical or textual mark that a quotation appears, so that they are effectively made part of the narration.