Repeat that, repeat

When the Louvre invited me to organise 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.

Thus Umberto Eco on the genesis of this book, published simultaneously in Italian, French and English. Considering those parallel manifestations of the project, it was perhaps to be expected that this, its sole printed version, would be situated at the more ingratiatingly ludic end of the Eco spectrum. The Infinity of Lists is a work less of theory than of taxonomy. Flaunting his extraordinary erudition, but flaunting it modestly, if such an oxymoron is permissible, Eco basically draws up a list of lists, which he then proceeds to categorise, codify and exemplify under a capacious umbrella of rubrics: Lists of Places, Lists of Mirabilia, Excessive Lists, Incoherent Lists, Collections and Treasures, etc. Actually, in this specific context, ‘etc’ is as relevant to his propos as any word in the preceding sentence.

This is a bulging book about ‘etc’, about unsqueezable plenitude, frame-straining and paragraph-straining abundance. In fact, I’d be prepared to wager that the comma, that elementary punctuational unit of list-making, features here with rather greater frequency than in most other books of comparable length.

Much of one’s enjoyment derives from the quoted lists themselves. Some should be familiar to British readers — the opening chapter of Bleak House (‘Fog…’, etc), Kipling’s ‘If’, the Song of Songs, Borges’ bestiary of real and imaginary creatures (‘those that tremble as if they were mad; innumerable ones; those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush’, etc), John of Gaunt’s ‘This England’ speech from Richard II, even Gargantua’s fabulous inventory of bottom-wiping methods.