Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Umberto Eco, the Dennis Miller of Semioticians   [Mike Potemra]

I loved Dennis Miller long, long before he became a right-winger. Back in the day, the rap on him was that his range of cultural references was far too wide — from highbrow to lowbrow and including everything in between — for viewers of Monday Night Football. (I thought it was delightful, and I’d start watching football again if they brought Miller back.) Umberto Eco has a new nonfiction book out called The Infinity of Lists, a very beautifully produced illustrated volume from Rizzoli, and there’s a positively Millerian moment in it. Writes Eco: “Then there is the list that becomes chaotic by excess of ire, hatred, and rancor, accumulating cascades of insults. A typical example is that of [the notorious anti-Semitic writer] Céline, who bursts out in a tide of abuse, not against the Jews for once but against Soviet Russia.” Here is just part of the very long quote Eco gives from Céline: “Bing! Badabing! They’re snuffing it! Bloated! By God’s guts! . . . 487 million! Of impalificated cossackologists! . . . In all the chancres of Slavonia! . . . Slimy, Rotten as cucumbers! . . . Stinking s***spreaders! Of rats****! . . . Tataronesque Mushymongoloids! . . . Stakhanovicious! . . . Floods! . . . Fungus-infested a***wipes! . . . The Tsar’s chamber pots for you and your filthy perverted a***holes!”

At the end of this long quotation, Eco remarks . . . that it “smacks curiously of Captain Haddock’s furious outbursts in Tintin.” Except for the four-letter words in the Céline translation, he could not be more scintillatingly accurate; for those unfamiliar with the delightful invective of Captain Haddock — one of the great joys of my life, ever since I discovered it as a boy — here's a good place to start.

10/28 12:31 AMShare