In the Spiegel interview he names Don Giovanni’s 2,063 lovers, the contents of Leopold Bloom’s drawers, and the many ships and generals specified in the Iliad as just a few of the classic lists and enumerations of Western culture.Įco’s research into and/or obsession with lists produced not just the exhibition at the Louvre but also a book, The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay. How, as mere human beings, do we impose order when we gaze up into infinity, down into the abyss - pick your metaphor of the sublimely, incomprehensibly vast? We do it, Eco thought, “through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.” The breadth as well as depth of the knowledge he accumulated throughout his 84 years - which itself could seem sublimely and incomprehensibly vast, as anyone who has read one of his list-filled novels knows - placed him well to explain the origins, functions, and importance of the list. It also wants to create order - not always, but often.” What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. “It’s part of the history of art and literature.
“The list is the origin of culture,” said Umberto Eco in a 2009 Der Spiegel interview about the exhibition on the history of the list he curated at the Louvre. But we also love lists: a great many of us click on those listicles, after all, and one might argue that the list, as a form, represents the beginning of written texts.
We hate lists, which have told us what to do since at least the days Leonardo da Vinci, and which now, as “listicles,” constitute one of the lowest strata of internet content. Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in Holland
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