Gustave Flaubert's novel, Bouvard and Pecuchet speaks of the power of lists and comparisons. Flaubert researched over 8,000 texts in preparation for writing the novel--which was never completely finished.

Bouvard and Pecuchet's two main characters engage in a series of escapades in the manner of our contemporary buddy movies. Yet their ideals are somewhat higher than car chases and explosions. Of course, there is an explosion, but it is from a chemical stew that our characters concoct in the hope of discovering a new way of seeing chemistry, or in the hope of making a contribution to science.

With lofty ideals, Flaubert takes a tour of some of the most arcane and interesting minutiae that in fact constitute a pantheon of what he would have called "received knowledge". Ideas that are unquestioned, flatly accepted as truth by the uneducated are received knowledge.

The compounding of information gives the novel a structure that quickly and delightfully accomplishes its satire. By putting all the humanities in with the sciences, received ideas in everyday life and in scientific folklore, Flaubert effects a leveling device. Now all the sudden, everything in the collection of minutiae is equalized. The aspects of received ideas in the humanities are searingly compared with those of the sciences, and the result, when the characters accomplish absolutely nothing except their copying trade, is that the received knowledge has no power either.

In the list, everything is compared to everything else. The very power of the list comes from its ability to level the power of any one term or item in the list to predominate. With Flaubert, we are impressed with his great and voluminous research, the collectable structure suggests vast knowledge, despite the fact that in Bouvard and Pecuchet it is an anti-knowledge.

If the web truly informs and makes us reflect on the vast amount of information at our fingertips, it has literary artists such as Flaubert to thank for signaling information overload, and the effect on our processing mechanisms. What was good for satire, now underlies internet databases and lists of information content. With the web as a growing but not necessarily totally reliable information source, we partake in global received knowledge, a vast knowledge. Perhaps the list is that philosophical reminder of how conglomerations of information can suggest power at the same time they can debunk the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake. Flaubert's voluminously constructed novel shows the limits of human knowledge that is just like the limits of our human capacities for knowledge, that we see when we do a search on a search engine and bring up 300,000 hits in a fraction of a second.

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