Practical and Poetic Lists

“The list is the origin of culture,” the writer Umberto Eco once said. He held an exhibit of lists at the Louvre (which should have improved security on its own to-do list); he compiled a book on the topic, too. Learn about Eco’s distinction between practical and poetic lists and consider—what kind of list is a to-do list? Then discuss with your team: are we more drawn to lists than we should be?

Key concepts

The Practical List: A finite, useful list that stands for real things and exists to be completed: a packing list, a class register, a library catalogue. Nobody wants a class register that hints at infinity, or a catalogue promising books the library does not hold.
The Poetic List: An open-ended list whose point is size rather than information: it names and names until you feel a vastness it never claims to cover. Walt Whitman's long lists of American workers and trades work this way. The list feels as if it could go on forever, and that is the point.

Every work — at a glance

Umberto Eco (person)

The Italian novelist and semiotician of The Name of the Rose who, given the run of the Louvre in 2009, chose as his subject not paintings but lists, and argued that enumeration — not storytelling — is where culture starts.
The Infinity of Lists — Umberto Eco (book)

Eco's anthology of lists from Homer to Dalí, in which only about 70 of the 400 pages are his own commentary, and which leaves no doubt that he prefers the boundless roll-call to the closed, finished picture of the world.
The Catalogue of Ships — Homer (poem)

The 350-line roll-call of Greek forces in Book Two of the Iliad that even devoted readers skip — Eco's proof that a list can be a poem, because its job is to make an army feel innumerable rather than to tell you who was there.
Achilles' Shield — Homer, the Iliad (poem passage)

Later in the Iliad, Hephaestus makes Achilles a shield with the whole cosmos inside its frame. Eco calls it 'finite form': a closed world with nothing outside it and nothing to add.
The Painted List — Umberto Eco (idea)

Eco finds lists in paintings, mostly still lifes and massacres, where the viewer knows there is more beyond the frame. Sculpture defeats him: a statue can hardly say 'et cetera'.
Ravel's Boléro — Maurice Ravel, 1928 (music)

Eco's favourite example of a musical list: one melody repeated over a steady drum, growing louder, that could, as the review puts it, just go on and on for ever.
The List of Kings (idea)

Lists also order, control and exclude: only a culture that can list its kings can fix one view of its history, and a list of territories is a foundation of imperial control.
The Telephone Directory — Umberto Eco (anecdote)

Asked in an interview for his desert-island book, Eco chose the telephone directory, which made his reviewer wonder whether the whole praise of lists was slightly tongue-in-cheek.

What to know

01
What kind of list is a to-do list? By Eco's own test, practical: finite, instrumental, pointing at real errands you can cross off. It behaves like the other kind anyway, because it regenerates — finish today's and tomorrow's is already forming — so you spend your life trying to complete something built never to end, and read the impossibility as a personal failing.
02
Eco's reviewer catches the distinction leaking. Homer says plainly that no other ships came, so his supposedly infinite roll-call is finite too; and elsewhere enumeration does the opposite of gesturing at vastness — a culture that can list its kings has fixed its own history, and an inventory of territories is how an empire holds them. Listing can open a horizon or close one, depending on who holds the pen.

Across subjects

History makes the claim almost literal. The oldest writing anyone has dug up is not poetry or law but inventory — Sumerian clay tablets from around 3200 BC counting jars of oil, cattle, and grain — and many scholars think writing was invented to keep accounts. People wrote lists before they wrote stories.

Theme connection

One list promises an end; the other was built to have none. Are we too drawn to them? On one side, listing is how a chaotic world becomes graspable — it made writing, museums and history possible. On the other, a list is the cheapest imitation of progress: writing 'revise Social Studies' scratches the same itch as revising.

Practice

Check what you've read

Pick the best answer — you'll see why each option is right or wrong.

Question 1 of 2

LITHephaestus seals a world inside the border of Achilles' shield. Eco's key difference is that the Catalogue —

Question 2 of 2

LITEco calls a guest list practical: it ends. Which practical list is MOST likely to grow by being crossed off?

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