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The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to James Joyce
By Umberto Eco
Quercus £35, 408 pages
FT Bookshop price: £28
You know how you’re going to be feeling post-turkey, don’t you? Listless. So, in the spirit of going through satiety and out the other side, why not reach for Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists, the Thinking Person’s literary equivalent to the Christmas pud: chockful of goodies, dense, dark and (mostly) delicious, studded with obscure, spicy ingredients and likely to make you feel a touch groggy – soaked as it is in heady erudition.
The book is a delight. Let me count (some of) the ways: profuse, plethoric, prolix, plentiful, playful, populous, picaresque, picturesque; copious, cornucopian, congested, clotted; incontinent, infested, infectious; omnivorous, orgiastic, odd; abundant, redundant; multifarious, multitudinous; glutted, gargantuan, inclusive, elusive, and ... exhaustive. But, at times, it can also be exasperating, indulgent, erratic, incoherent, wayward, whimsical, (occasionally) inaccurate and even, at times, incurious. If its pleasures easily overwhelm its irritants, that’s because the book has the charm of extreme greed.
The Infinity of Lists began as one of a series of curatorial collaborations between the Louvre and various writers. This inspired series of shows has produced its share of genuinely memorable illuminations – Jacques Derrida’s exhibition on blindness, for example, and Peter Greenaway’s on dreams of flight. The appeal of the book lies as much in its beautiful array of pictures as in Eco’s choice of exemplary texts. One staggers drunkenly through its 400-odd pages, from Hesiod’s endless recitation of the progeny of the gods – “Doto, Proto, Pherusa and Dynamene ... Potontopore, Leagore, Euagore and Laomeda” (a boon for all you pregnant parents out there who don’t want to call your baby Jason or Tracy) – to Huysmans’ equally relentless description of the gems with which he encrusted the shell of his pet tortoise: “the chrysoberyls of asparagus green, the chrysolites of leek green, the olivines of olive green” (well they would be, wouldn’t they?).
Although gorgeously reproduced, the images don’t always hit it off in happy consonance with the texts. The painting by 16th-century Dutch artist Pieter Aertsen, included to exemplify “the visual list” and described as an “omnium gatherum of emblems of transience”, is, in fact, a Christ in the house of Martha and Mary – an altogether different proposition. The painting set beside the novel Ninety-Three, Victor Hugo’s fabulously deranged tour through the National Convention, isn’t in fact an image of that militantly republican body but Jacques-Louis David’s “Tennis Court Oath” from the Estates General of 1789 (dated, somewhat desperately, as “18th century”). The iconographic difference isn’t trivial. David’s is a myth of orchestrated social harmony; Hugo’s Convention a theatre of hatred.
Many of the images represent congestion rather than enumeration, in the manner of a visual catalogue, and are repetitious rather than encyclopaedic in their crowded detail. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Damien Hirst’s shelves of cigarette butts constitute a series rather than a catalogue, even though each of the items differ slightly from each other. It’s a rhythmic thing: maximalist richness against minimalist inflection, Stravinsky against Philip Glass.
Anyone familiar with Eco’s brimming novels knows all about his obsession with the cumulative power of enumeration. In the teasingly brief essays that interleave his chosen texts and images, he identifies the addiction to lists that even the most austerely organised have (and don’t count me among them) as a hunger for the infinite; hence the uncharacteristically ungainly English title of his book. (The original Italian title, La Vertigine della Lista – The Vertigo of Lists – has a more authentically Ecovian ring to it.)
He compares the urge to list, and revel in the detail within, to the sensation of locating oneself beneath the numberless stars, an experience simultaneously intoxicating and sobering. But does the hunger for the boundless – a multiplicity that extends indefinitely beyond the frame of vision, a page or a painting – provoke us to rush off and count birds, beasts and blessings?
It seems to me that the two impulses that lead us to make, and dwell within, lists are at odds with each other. One is the “reality effect” of massively agglomerated detail: the illusion of panoramic omniscience augmented by thick texture. For example, when historian Fernand Braudel guides us minutely through the shift of tides, the perils of each riparian bay and estuary in his study of the Mediterranean, we travel over the surface of the 16th-century sea in a way inaccessible from a more stringently analytical description.
But the other impulse, much exercised by Renaissance encyclopaedists in picture and in text, is mystical: a revelation from broad sampling. So a trip through the welter of detail (say an eclectically stocked botanical garden or a menagerie) might yield an epiphany of cosmic “Wow”: the harmonic connection ties the discrepancies of the world together with a single ribbon of meaning. OK, this may not happen when you peruse a bulb catalogue, or the Yellow Pages, or the Top Hundred vampire movies, but don’t say that I – or Plato – didn’t warn you if it does.
In the meantime, especially in these lean times, why not just lie back and wallow in Eco’s bath of superabundance, and enjoy what he calls the motiveless “poetics”, by which he means, he eventually confesses, the pure joy of aimless excess. After all, how can you not be thankful for a book that supplies both a complete list of the names of angels – including, naturally, Iachoroz, Onomataht and Xanoryz – and Rabelais’ comprehensive guide to the wherewithal for wiping one’s bum? But be warned, Yuletiders, geese are involved.
Simon Schama is an FT contributing editor
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