Just what is it about the following passage that fascinates us so? ‘Love, One. Happiness, One. Animals that change their colour, One. Propositions, Seventy-Four. Mines, Two. Honey, One. Laws, Twenty-Four. Juices, Five. Mistaken Pleasures, One. The Sea, One. Poetry, Two. Divinity, Six.’
These, according to Diogenes Laertius, the Dr Johnson of ancient philosophy, are some of the books written by the Peripatetic Theophrastus over the course of his long career. Yet perhaps you read that last paragraph just because you were curious to see what the connection would be, so we’ll try another one, and this time I’ll tell you exactly what the link is. In 1974 Georges Perec, figurehead of the avant-garde OuLiPo movement in France, sat down one morning in the square of St-Sulpice in Paris and tried to write down everything that he saw. Here is an excerpt: ‘Weather: Cool and dry. Grey sky. A few patches of sunlight.
‘Draft inventory for some of the strictly visible things: a few words, ‘KLM’ (on an envelope carried by a passer-by), ‘Taxis tête de station,’ ‘Rue du Vieux-Colombier.’ A few fleeting slogans: ‘De l’autobus, je regarde Paris.’ A few stones: along the edge of the sidewalk, around a fountain, a church, some houses… A fairly large portion of sky (perhaps 1/6 of my field of vision). The 84 goes to Porte de Champerret. The 70 goes to Place du Dr Hayem, to Maison de l’O.R.T.F. Exigez le Roquefort Société le vrai dans son ovale vert. A German bus. Colours: red (a Fiat, a dress St-Raphael, ‘no admittance’ signs), a blue purse, green shoes, a green raincoat, a blue taxi. The 70 goes to Place du Dr Hayem, to Maison de l’O.R.T.F…’
…and so on and so forth, til death us do part. Odd, isn’t it? Why should lists like this, from ‘raindrops on roses’ to ‘the hardy warriors whom Boeotia bred,’ exert this effortless charm over us, a charm greater than mere curiosity? Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists has no answers to this question.
Here, instead, you will find some interesting theoretical distinctions between the genera and phyla of lists – ‘closed’ (so that you do not want to know more) against ‘open’ (so that you do), ‘practical’ (where the things listed are what counts) against ‘poetic’ (where the list itself is the point), ‘chaotic’ against ‘coherent.’ They are not entirely convincing. Each chapter is accompanied by an hors d’oeuvres of examples plucked from art and literature, and often the types seem hardly to cohere, or else there must always be order in the examples of chaos.
Nevertheless, because this is Eco writing, it is engaging, and never less than stimulating. Eco is famous for thought-provoking and allusive historical novels like The Name of the Rose and Baudolino, but he is also a truly excellent critic and philosopher of language. Here he shows his trademark sensitivity to connections to full advantage, and for a man who owns forty thousand books he wears his erudition with a gentlemanly lightness.
His remarks on the way in which we use lists to describe what cannot be described – God, for instance, or the reason why we love – are elegant and backed by a superb selection of sources from Ausonius to Filippo Lippi. He sees our fixation with the list culminating in the World Wide Web, which ‘really does offer us a catalogue of information that makes us feel wealthy and omnipotent, the only snag being that we do not know which of its elements refers to data from the real world and which does not; there is no longer any distinction between truth and error.’
He fails, however, to get to grips with the lists that really count, the lists that underpin the whole of modern thought: the natural numbers, the progression of history, the accumulation of stories. Hobbes’ Leviathan describes imagination as being nothing more than the reassembly of things we have already experienced. If this is true, then what is creativity but the ordering of lists? That said, this book began as a companion piece to the Louvre, and is not so much a work of profound semiology as the catalogue to a universal museum. It is in the exhibits that the true value of the book lies: ultimately this is really a species of sentient coffee-table book.The lists themselves are, as you would expect, a real mixed bag. Some of the anthology is purple prose, some of it modernist poetry, some of it obscure flotsam from the late Latin world, some of it ecstatic nationalist praise poetry, some of it Homer…you get the idea.
There are many snapshots of Rabelais being Rabelaisian a three year old Gargantua telling his father all the torcheculs (‘arsewipers’) he tried before settling on the neck of a goose – and a relentlessly rude vituperatio puellae (like a love poem in reverse) from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy: ‘every lover admires his mistress, though she be…a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, a sneaker…and to thy judgement looks like a merd (‘shit’) in a lantern, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world, but hatest, loathest and wouldst have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosom…’
The Infinity of Lists is a beautiful book, a really beautiful book, worth buying if only as an anthology. But in the end, it only grazes the surface of its potential. This could and should be a work of lasting importance for culture, but ultimately it is just a very pretty plaything.
