Thanks to the Dictionary (1961)

Commentary

Quartermain, Peter. “Writing and Authority in Zukofsky’s Thanks to the Dictionary.” In Scroggins (1997): 154-174.

Sloboda, Nicholas. “Introducing the Ludic: The Poetics of Play in Louis Zukofsky’s Fiction.” English Studies in Canada 23.2 (June 1997): 201-215.

Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey. “Louis Zukofsky.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 22.3 (Fall 2002): 13-20.

Watten, Barrett. "New Meaning and Poetic Vocabulary: From Coleridge to Jackson Mac Low.” Poetics Today 18.2 (Summer 1997): 147-186. Rpt. Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Wesleyan UP, 2003. 1-44.

According to Quartermain, LZ primarily worked on this “novel” from July 1932 to Dec. 1934, although he continued to do some tinkering until 16 August 1939 when he settled on the sequential order (158-159). However, as with many other works from this period, it would not be until 1959 before the work partially saw print in Combustion 10 (May) and then appeared complete in the volume of his short fiction, It Was (Kyoto, Japan: Origin Press, 1961).

Chronological list of non-book publication of selections from “Thanks to the Dictionary” as follows:

1959     from Thanks to the Dictionary. Combustion 10 (May): 8-9 [from David and Michal: from “The twelve peers of France” to “I have been outspoken” (276-277) and from “She stood among the very numberous” to “…but she had become numberless” (279-280); from David and Bath-sheba: from “An aside of Bath-sheba sitting” to “from my being here, —our love again” (281-282)].

1968     from Thanks to the Dictionary. Buffalo, NY: The Galley Upstairs Press [a broadside with two brief quotations lineated and dated 1932: from “A visitor making a visit” to “It has become visitatorial” (273) and from “My three unequal and dissimilar axes” to “let’s make it liquid” (270)].
from Thanks to the Dictionary. Monks Pond 2 (Summer): 1-2 [Preface and from Young David: from “Not otherwise provided for” to “identical as their composition” (265-267)].

This work was constructed from the Biblical story of David and improvisations out of the dictionary. The basic method seems to have involved rolling dice to determine a page of the dictionary and then writing out of or with the words and definitions LZ finds on the designated page, which is why clusters of curious words appear in a given paragraph or passage of Thanks to the Dictionary. For a discussion of LZ’s method in writing “Thanks to the Dictionary,” see Quartermain 160-163, who states that LZ used two different dictionaries: Funk and Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary (1930) and Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1917).

Note on Text: There are two distinct printings of the Dalkey Archive edition of Collected Fiction (1990), which effects some of the pagination, although there is no indication of the difference in the later reset printing. In both editions, Little is photostatted from the original Grossman publication (1970), while the additional stories collected as It Was were set in a different and somewhat unsightly type, which apparently is why the latter was reset to make a more uniform looking volume in 1997. As a result, the pagination is the same for Little, but different for the other stories. In the notes I have referred to the most recent (1997) printing. In the paperback editions, the earlier printing has an all-white cover with a full front cover photo of LZ, while the 1997 printing has a mostly black cover with a reduced and cropped photo of LZ on the front.