'A Congeries of Beings and a Single Being'

The first thing to know: it’s singular. And plural. Congeries is one of those collective nouns, so confusing to people learning English and certain native speakers. I found it again in John Updike’s introduction to his friend L.E. Sissman’s essay collection Innocent Bystander: The Scene from the 70’s (1975):

“A sensible, decent man: that is the voice. His poetry is both more tender and more cruel than his prose ever is; his audience, we feel, has shifted in his mind from the single unshockable inner attendant to whom a poet addresses himself—has shifted to a congeries (another of his pet words) of fallible, woundable, only slightly educable fellow mortals.”

 

Sissman himself uses the word in “The Village: The Seasons” (Hello, Darkness: The Collected Poems of L.E. Sissman, 1978):

 

“Dense

As gander-feather winter snow, intense

As inextinguishable summer sun

At five o’clock (which it now is), the noise

Of Walker’s congeries of girls and boys

Foregathered in their gabbling gratitude . . .”

 

The OED defines congeries as “a collection of things merely massed or heaped together; a mass, heap.” Dr. Johnson gives us “a mass of small bodies heaped up together,” which sounds rather like a scene out of Fellini.  Etymologically related to congest, the word sounds like Congolese and a variation on conger eels. I’ve never used it except when quoting other writers. I probably first encountered the word in 1968, when Page Stegner edited an anthology, Nabokov’s Congeries. Yeats achieves a new level of risible incoherence in A Vision (1925) when he observes that “reality is a congeries of beings and a single being.” In his “Postscript” to Twelve Stories (1997), Guy Davenport writes:

 

“To see that Thoreau could achieve a spiritual music in words you have only to look at any page he wrote. His frustration is the habitual anguish of all writers. A congeries of essences must find a form, and the form must be coherent and harmonious.”

 

The writer who best embodies the art of congeries is Robert Burton. In “My Mistress Melancholy,” Mary Ann Lund writes of the Anatomist: “His favourite rhetorical technique is congeries, the piling-up of words.” Anthony Powell concludes Hearing Secret Harmonies, the final novel in A Dance to the Music of Time, with a passage from The Anatomy of Melancholy that virtually defines such a “piling-up of words”:

 

“I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms,” and so on, for another two-hundred words.

 

I could never seriously write congeriately, but I love Burton’s congeries.