The Infinity of Lists Umberto Eco. 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, 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.
This book is printed on paper from mixed sources, certified by the Forest Stewardship Council A. The shield and its form 8 2. The visual list 16 4. The ineffable 5. Lists of things 66 6. Lists of places 80 7. There are lists and lists 8. Exchanges between list and form 9. The rhetoric of enumeration Lists of mirabilia Collections and treasures The Wunderkammer Definition by list of properties versus definition by essence The Aristotelian telescope Excess, from Rabelais onwards Coherent excess Chaotic enumeration Mass media lists Lists of infinities Exchanges between practical and poetic lists A non-normal list When the Louvre invited me to organize for the whole of November 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. 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. 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.
