Italy's most celebrated public intellectual gathers five essays
that focus (more or less) on how lunatic misunderstandings
concerning the perfect language have led to new discoveries (sort
of). Eco (The Name of the Rose, 1983, etc.; Semiotics/Univ. of
Bologna) remains Italy's most successful and prolific writer. He is
a novelist, cultural commentator, essayist, literary critic, and
scholar of language. The present volume of essays is spun off his
work on the historical search for the "perfect language," i.e., the
language that God gave Adam, the one that was lost in the
catastrophe at the Tower of Babel. But the conceit with which he
rather unsuccessfully attempts to unify the book is this: the
search in the cases he explores always involves either outright
errors or otherwise fictional inventions that have somehow led to
positive discovery. After all, Columbus accidentally discovered the
New World owing to miscalculations about the size of the earth. Eco
sees similar situations in the history of language. For example, a
16th-century Jesuit, Father Athanasius Kircher, fancifully and
elaborately interpreted ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics as the lost
language of the Garden of Eden. "Kircher was wildly wrong. Still,
notwithstanding his eventual failure, he is the father of
Egyptology." This and similar disappointingly general findings do
not satisfyingly deliver on the promise that the errors
serendipitously produce truth. But all is not lost. The meandering
erudition of Eco's book is interesting enough in its own right. He
speculates, for example, that Dante believed his own Italian
vernacular, as distinct from official Latin, was in fact an echo of
Adam's perfect language. And, he examines philosophical attempts by
Leibniz and others to recreate a perfect language and Joseph de
Maistre's combination of linguistic mysticism and reactionary
politics. The genial Eco may have had the lay reader in mind when
he wrote these essays (which were originally lectures), but his
book of linguistic arcana is also of avowedly esoteric interest.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Best-selling author Umberto Eco's latest work unlocks the
riddles of history in an exploration of the "linguistics of the
lunatic," stories told by scholars, scientists, poets, fanatics,
and ordinary people in order to make sense of the world. Exploring
the "Force of the False," Eco uncovers layers of mistakes that have
shaped human history, such as Columbus's assumption that the world
was much smaller than it is, leading him to seek out a quick route
to the East via the West and thus fortuitously "discovering"
America. The fictions that grew up around the cults of the
Rosicrucians and Knights Templar were the result of a letter from a
mysterious "Prester John" -- undoubtedly a hoax -- that provided
fertile ground for a series of delusions and conspiracy theories
based on religious, ethnic, and racial prejudices. While some false
tales produce new knowledge (like Columbus's discovery of America)
and others create nothing but horror and shame (the Rosicrucian
story wound up fueling European anti-Semitism) they are all
powerfully persuasive.
In a careful unraveling of the fabulous and the false, Eco shows
us how serendipities -- unanticipated truths -- often spring from
mistaken ideas. From Leibniz's belief that the I Ching illustrated
the principles of calculus to Marco Polo's mistaking a rhinoceros
for a unicorn, Eco tours the labyrinth of intellectual history,
illuminating the ways in which we project the familiar onto the
strange.
Eco uncovers a rich history of linguistic endeavor -- much of it
ill-conceived -- that sought to "heal the wound of Babel." Through
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, and
Egyptian were alternately proclaimed as the first language that God
gave to Adam, while -- in keeping with the colonial climate of the
time -- the complex language of the Amerindians in Mexico was
viewed as crude and diabolical. In closing, Eco considers the
erroneous notion of linguistic perfection and shrewdly observes
that the dangers we face lie not in the rules we use to interpret
other cultures but in our insistence on making these rules
absolute.
With the startling combination of erudition and wit, bewildering
anecdotes and scholarly rigor that are Eco's hallmarks,
"Serendipities" is sure to entertain and enlighten any reader with
a passion for the curious history of languages and ideas.
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