Book Review: From the Tree to the Labyrinth

From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and InterpretationBy Umberto EcoTranslated by Anthony OldcornHarvard University Press, 2014Umberto Eco’s countless readers over the last 30 years will find it as hard to remember what his countless students over the same period will find hard to forget: in addition to being a best-selling novelist, the man is also a professor of semiotics and medieval aesthetics. The author of best-selling novels like The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and 2011’s fascinating The Prague Cemetery in fact has a far larger resume of nonfiction titles concentrating on the linguist and philological explorations that filled so much of his day job. This latest volume, handsomely produced by Harvard University Press, is one of those nonfiction titles, an English-language edition of 2007’s Dall’albero al labirintho.The title is misleading in its “from” and “to.” There’s no organic structure to this book, since it’s entirely a collection of miscellaneous articles written for various publications and occasions over the last forty years. The gentlemanly publisher’s deception is understandable, of course – this is a tough enough book to sell to a general audience under any circumstances; calling it something like “miscellaneous semiotic essays” wouldn’t exactly have ‘em lining up at Barnes & Noble. In fact, given the comparative obscurity of the subject matter here, you’d expect Eco to make at least some kind of effort to increase the book’s chances in the marquee but cutthroat world of American hardcover publishing – but that doesn’t happen either. The thing’s English translation has an undated, unsigned one-page Introduction (it seems to want us to assume that its author is Eco himself, not either Anthony Oldcorn or William Weaver, the two translators involved here) that makes a wildly hilarious fling at popular reception: “I trust that even readers whose interests are not specifically semiotic (in the professional sense of the word) will be able to read these writings as contributions to a history of the various philosophies of language and languages.”Good luck with that. Certainly Eco is an unfailingly interesting writer, but there’s a limit to what even Mandrake the Magician could do with subjects like “The Linguistics of Joseph de Maistre” or “The Language of the Austral Land” (both those pieces appeared originally way back in 1998 in Serendipities, in case anybody was still clinging to “from” and “to”). Some of these essays, despite their abstruse subject matters, are carried across the threshold to the general reader mainly by dint of Eco’s exceptional abilities as a teacher. Take for instance the essay titled “The Dog That Barked.” Despite its dismaying sub-title “And Other Zoosemiotic Archeologies,” it works a fairly wonderful kind of pedagogical clarifying:

The Middle Ages was not insensitive to the presence of animals. Indeed it was almost obsessively concerned with them in its bestiaries. But, rather than speaking (as occurs in the tradition of the fable), those animals are themselves the signs of a divine language. They “say” many things, but without being aware of it. This is because what they are or what they do become figures of something else. The lion signifies the Redemption by canceling its tracks, the elephant by attempting to lift its fallen companion, the serpent by sloughing off its skin. Characters in a book written digito Dei (“with the finger of God”), the animals do not produce language, instead they themselves are words in a symbolic language. They are not observed in their actual behaviors, but in those attributed to them. They do not do what they do but what the bestiaries would have them do, so that they can express through their behavior something of which they are totally incognizant.

There’s almost always going to be a good deal of meandering in a grab-bag book like this one, but the happy flip-side of that fact is the likelihood of finding something interesting on almost every page – and amusing things as well, like this piquant little footnote:

On the other hand, let us put ourselves in the shoes of a hypothetical Adam who sees a cat for the first time, without ever having seen any other animals. For this Adam, a cat will be schematized as “something that moves,” and for the moment this quality will make the cat similar to water or to clouds. But one imagines that it will not take Adam long to place the cat together with dogs and hens, among moving bodies that react unforeseeably to his solicitation and quite foreseeably to his call. Thus he will distinguish the cat from water and clouds, which appear to move, but are indifferent to his presence.

… which may not shed much light on the schemata of semiotics, but which strongly suggests that Signor Eco has never met a cat.Writing about the medieval philosopher Ramon Llul, Eco tells us “all he had in mind was speaking of God and convincing the infidel to accept the principles of the Christian faith, hypnotizing them with his whirling wheels. So the legend that claims he died a martyr’s death in Muslim territory, thought it may not be true, is nonetheless a good story.” There’s a bit of reflection here, and it’s entirely to Eco’s credit: this latest ramshackle feast of a book has plenty of whirling wheels … and it’s full of good stories.But it’s most certainly for semioticians and the freakishly curious. Virginia Woolf’s “common readers” need not consider it for a bare second.