The Infinity of Lists PDF
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Published in Great Britain in 2009 by MacLehose Press an imprint of Quercus 21 Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2NS First published with the title La Vertigine della Lxsta in 2009 by Bompiani, Milan Copyright © 2009 RCS Libri S.p.A - Bompiani, Milan English translation copyright © 2009 by Alastair McEwen The moral right of Umberto Eco to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9781906694' 821 10 9 87 6 54-121 Printed and bound in Italy by Errestampa S.r.L. - Orio al Serio 0BG) Editorial Director - Elisabetta Sgarbi Editorial Coordination — Anna Maria Lorusso Editing - Federica Matteoli and Alta Price Picture Research - Ilaria Fabrizio Graphic Design - Polystudio Production — Sergio Daniotti This book is printed on paper from mixed sources, certified by the Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC) UMBERTO ECO THE INFINITY OF FISTS FROM HOMER TO JOYCE Translation from the Italian by Alastair McEwen MACLEHOSE PRESS AN IMi'ftl NT Of QULRCUS CONTENTS Introduction 7 1. The shield and its form 8 2. The list and the catalogue 1+ 3. The visual list 16 4. The ineffable 4-8 5. Lists of things 66 6. Lists of places 80 7. There are lists and lists 112 8. Exchanges between list and form 130 9. The rhetoric of enumeration 132 10. Lists of mirabilia 152 11. Collections and treasures 164 12. The Wunderkammer 200 13. Definition by list of properties 216 versus definition by essence 14. The Aristotelian telescope 230 15. Excess, from Rabelais onwards 244 16. Coherent excess 278 17. Chaotic enumeration 320 18. Mass media lists 352 19. Lists of infinities 362 20. Exchanges between practical 370 and poetic lists 21. A non-normal list 394 Appendix 399 The names in bold in the text refer to the extracts reproduced in the anthology at the end of each chapter. INTRODUCTION When the Louvre invited me to organize for the whole of November 2009 a series of conferences, exhibitions, public readings, concerts, film projections and the like on the subject of my choice, I did not hesitate for a second and proposed the list Qand as we shall see we shall also be talking about catalogues and enumeration). Why did this idea come to mind? If anyone were to read my novels he would see that they abound with lists, and the origins of this predilection are two, both of which derive from my studies as a young man: certain medieval texts and many works by James Joyce (and we should not overlook the influence of medieval rituals and texts on theyoungjoycej. But between litanies and the list of things contained in the drawer of Leopold Bloom’s kitchen in the penultimate chapter o/Ulysses there stand a good number of centuries, and many more centuries again stand between medieval lists and the model listpar excellence: the catalogue of ships in Homer’s Iliad, from which this book takes its cue. It is also in Homer that we find the celebration of another descriptive model: the one ordered and inspired by the criteria of harmonious completion and closure represented by Achilles’ shield. In other words, already in Homer it seems that there is a swing between a poetics of “everything included” and a poetics of the “etcetera”. While this was already clear to me, I had never set myself the task of making a meticulous record of the infinite cases in which the history of literature (from Homer to Joyce to the present day3 offers examples of lists, even though names such as Perec, Prevert, Whitman and Borges all came to mind right away. The result of this hunt wasprodigious, enough to make your head spin, and I already know that a great number of people will write to me asking why this or that author is not mentioned in this book. The fact is that not only am I not omniscient and do not know a multitude of texts in which lists appear, but even had I wished to include in the anthology all the lists I gradually encountered in the course of my exploration, this book would be at least one thousandpages long, and maybe even more. Then there is the problem of deciding what a figurative list may be. The few books on the poetics of listsprudently limit themselves to verbal lists, because it is very hard to say in what way a picture can present things andyet suggest an “etcetera”, as if to admit that the limits of the frame oblige it to say nothing about an immense number of other things. In addition, my research also had to serve to show things, both in the Louvre and in a book like this one, which follows in the wake of the two previous volumes On Beauty and On Ugliness. Hence a search that is a little less obvious than that carried out on beauty and ugliness, namely the search for visual etceteras, in which I was greatly aided by Anna Maria Lorusso and Mario Andreose. In conclusion, the search for lists was a most exciting experience not so much for what we managed to include in this volume as for all those things that had to be left out. What I mean to say, in other words, is that this is a book that cannot but end with an etcetera. Missor 'umi ("Shield of Achilles_) 4th-5th century A.D., Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France THE SHIELD AND ITS FORM 1. While Achilles is sulking in his tent, a prey to his grim wrath, Patroclus takes his weapons, fights Hector, is killed by him, and his arms (those of Achilles, that is) go the victor. But when Achilles decides to return to the fray, his mother Thetis asks Hephaestus to forge new arms for her son. Hephaestus gets to work and Homer devotes part of Book XVIII of the Iliad to a description of the shield he is preparing. Hephaestus, or Vulcan, divided this immense shield into five zones, in which appear the earth, the sea, the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, the Pleiades, Orion and the Great Bear. Then he modelled two populous cities on it. In the first he portrays a wedding feast, with the couple parading around by torchlight, and young men playing on pipes and kitharas. There is also a crowded forum where a kind of trial is going on, with plaintiffs, witnesses, advocates, gawking crowd, and the elders sitting in a circle who at a certain point grasp the sceptre and stand to pronounce the verdict. The second scene shows a beleaguered castle: on the walls, as in Troy, wives, maidens, and old men watch the battle. Led by Minerva, the enemy advances and, as they come to a river where they used to water the herds, they prepare an ambush. As soon as two unwitting shepherds come along playing on their pipes, the enemy attack them, steal their herds, and kill them. Warriors on horseback sally forth from the besieged city to pursue the enemy, and along the riverbank the battle begins. Among the combatants we see Strife, Riot, and Fate, covered in blood, clawing and seizing the living and the dead alike as the fighters try to save the bodies of their own dead. Then Hephaestus sculpts a fertile, well-ploughed field of grain 9
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