The Island of the Day Before

I just finished reading The Island of the Day Before, which was my second Umberto Eco after The Name of the Rose. While it seemed a little less well put together than the latter, Eco's charming prose and exuberant erudition were on point. William Weaver's translation skills cannot be overstated. The possibility that a certain word may not appear in any dictionary in the world does not deter him from using it. A side-by-side comparison of the English translation with the original Italian reveals that many of these obscure words are in fact adaptations of Italian words that Eco himself used. Faithfulness of this kind is seldom seen outside Mormon circles. I wonder if Eco's prose is just as far out there for his Italian readers. A lot of people thought The Island of the Day Before a weaker and more desultory opus than The Name of the Rose and that it didn't have much in the way of a plot. I can see why they might have thought so. There were certainly a few passages and chapters that I thought the book could have done without: for instance, the lengthy discourse on dove symbolism. I never devoted much thought to doves before, but now I abhor them and everything they stand for. They were uninteresting as symbols of peace, but the numerous examples of columbine horniness that Eco draws from the Bible and elsewhere in painting these glorified pigeons as symbols of love and lust of an pure variety made me wish nothing but misfortune on those avians. Roberto's love for Lilia was equal parts creepy and uninteresting, like Dante's infatuation with Beatrice. (How pretentious do you have to be to find this romantic? Even Twilight was a better love story.) But apart from these minor defects, the book was like a dream. It was like a long, epic dream in which you are Roberto, voyaging to undiscovered lands with a seventeenth-century explorer's knowledge of the world, along with all his misconceptions and prejudices. Roberto's fate in the story was far from what any sane person would call an adventure, but the sense of adventure you felt as the reader was very much real.

I tend as a rule to deprecate lengthy descriptions of physical objects in books. If I wanted to know in excruciating detail what objects were in a room and what their physical attributes were, I'd visit a hypnotist or the cast of Criminal Minds. But when Umberto Eco does it, it is art, thus showing that it is possible to appreciate the gourmet version of a dish whose street version (coughDanBrowncough) induces nausea. Umberto Eco is of the school of thought that a respectable list has nothing less than a hundred objects. If a character in one of Eco's stories comes upon a door with a hundred intricate carvings of mythical creatures on its surface, he will name each and every one of them. If he stumbles upon a room stacked with clocks from floor to ceiling, he will describe them all. If a Jesuit monk in the grip of religious fervor gropes for the correct description of a universal writing system on a mythical object called the Specula Melitensis, he will not be content until he has described it as a "Sphynx Mystagoga, an Oedipus Aegypticus, a Monad leroglyphica, a Clavis Convenientia Linguarum, a Theatrum Cosmographicum Historicum, a Sylva Sylvrum of every alphabet natural and artificial, an Architectura Curiosa Nova, a Combinatory Lamp, Mensa Isiaca, Metametricon, Synopsis Anthropoglottogonica, Basilica Cryptographica, an Amphitheatrum Sapientiae, Cryptomenesis Patefacta, Catoptron Polygraphicum, a Gazophylacium Verborum, a Mysterium Artis Steganographicae, Arca Arithmologica, Archetypon Polyglotta, an Eisagoge Horapollinea, Congestorium Artificiosae Memoriae, Pantometron de Furtivis Literarum Notis, Mercurius Redivivus, and an Etymologicon Lustgärtlein!" (Incidentally, many of these are references to works by the polymath Athanasias Kircher, who was apparently quite a hotshot in an age before Descartes. Sylva Sylvarum is a book by Francis Bacon, which deserves a excursis all to itself. See below.) And the reader swallows every item Eco enumerates for him like an addict. It's because Eco's descriptions, though often quaint, are always necessary to set the tone and the mood of a scene. His detailed descriptions of quaint mechanical contraptions of uncertain utility similarly draw you in like a fractal in a dream, exploding endlessly into intricate formations. I was particularly taken with a description of a water-powered organ on the ship Roberto was trapped on. Intensely so. It was perhaps the most oneiric scene in a book that I've already mentioned was oneiric. As a matter of fact, I'm inspired to copy out this entire section rather than attempt to paraphrase it:

The object occupying the space was an organ, which was surmounted by about twenty pipes, from whose holes the notes of the melody issued. The organ was fixed to the wall and consisted of a wooden structure supported by an armature of little metal columns. On the upper level, the pipes were in the center, but at either side of them little automata moved. To the left, on a kind of circular base, stood an anvil certainly hollow inside, like a bell; around the base were four figures that moved their arms rhythmically, striking the anvil with little metal hammers. The hammers, of varying weight, produced silvery sounds in harmony with the tune sung by the pipes, commenting on it through a series of chords. Roberto recalled conversations in Paris with a Minim friar, who spoke to him of research into the Universal Harmony. Thanks more to their musical functions than to their features, he now recognized Vulcan and the three Cyclopes to whom, as legend had it, Pythagoras referred when he affirmed that the difference in musical intervals depended on number, weight, and measure.
        To the right of the pipes an amorino tapped out (striking a wand upon a wooden book held in his other hand) the ternary rhythm on which the melody "Daphne" was based.
        On a slightly lower level lay the console of the organ, its keys rising and falling according to the notes emitted by the pipes, as if an invisible hand were running over them. Below the keys, where as a rule the organist works the bellows with his feet, a cylinder had been set, in which teeth were fitted, large spikes, in an order unpredictably regular or regularly unpredictable, which suggested the way notes are arranged in rising and descending patterns, unforeseen breaks, vast white spaces and a density of crotchets, on the lines of a sheet of music.
        Below the cylinder was a fixed horizontal bar supporting some little levers which, as the cylinder turned, successively touched the teeth and, through a play of half-hidden rods, operated the keys--as they operated the pipes.
        But the most stupefying phenomenon was the reason why the cylinder rotated and the pipes received breath. To the side of the organ a glass syphon was fixed, whose form recalled the cocoon of a silkworm, inside which two perforated plates could be discerned, one above the other, dividing it into three separate chambers. The syphon received an influx of water from a pipe entering its lowest chamber from an open gun-port that also admitted light to this room, pouring in the liquid that through the action of some hidden pump was obviously sucked directly from the sea, but in such a way that, entering the cocoon, it was mixed with air.
        The water entered the lowest part of the cocoon with force, as if it were boiling; spun in a vortex against the walls, it no doubt released the air, which was inhaled through the two plates. Thanks to a tube linking the upper part of the cocoon with the base of the organ pipes, the air was transformed into song through artful movements. The water, which meanwhile had gathered in the lower part, ran off through another tube and, moving the wheel of a little mill, then poured into a metal shell below, whence it was emptied by another pipe, through the gun-port.
        The wheel turned a bar that, connected to the cylinder, transmitted its own movement.

Apart from these dream stills that Eco pauses every so often to paint with words, the historically faithful (I imagine) and recondite account of Baroque-era scientific and philosophical knowledge (tendentious because rooted so often in Christian dogma) and approach to acquiring new knowledge might answer any questions the reader might ever have had about a world in which the things that are common knowledge today - longitudes, the Copernican model of the solar system, Galilean and Newtonian mechanics, geography - had not even been or were just beginning to be posited, discovered, or accepted into the mainstream, even if the plot sometimes gets lost in these lofty ideas, as many who criticize the book tend to observe. For me, at least, the book was an intellectual and fantastical adventure, and finishing the book and moving on felt like parting with a state of mind entirely - like emerging from a chorale partita by Bach and hearing snatches of it whispered in the back of your mind hours later by the pipes of an organ similar to the one that Roberto stumbled upon on the Daphne.

On Sylva Sylvarum: I stumbled upon a scanned copy of this book while looking up the esoterica that Eco gleefully listed out in The Island of the Day Before. It was published in 1670, which, for those of you who are weak at math, was a long time ago. I know the printing press was invented two hundred years before then, but it still took my breath away when I saw how similar this book looked to books that are printed today: the frontispiece, title page, colophon. The seventeenth century wasn't that long ago, on the scale of things, but it's still rather quaint to see these proto-twentieth-century humans do things the way we do today. Of course, everything we do today must necessarily have had antecedents in the past; but I suppose I expected that we might have departed a lot more in certain respects from the ways of the past than evidently we have. Like they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same - a quote often attributed to the fifteenth-century polymath and rapper Leonardo da Vinci and one that I am aware I have not used correctly here.

Take, for another example, a draft by Thomas Jefferson of the Declaration of Independence: 

It's in a less font-like hand than the final version, showing a very similar cursive to that used today (or up until very recently, going by modern attitudes on any form of writing that doesn't resemble a three-year-old's scrawl). The numerous strikethroughs are proof that Jefferson was mortal. The carets when he wants to insert a word in the middle of a sentence, the brackets, are something that any of us might have come up with without being instructed in their use.

Seeing a work like this in an intermediate stage of revision is very interesting indeed. It sort of breaks the illusion that a work or work of art is a discrete entity that once did not exist and then existed in finished form. We hardly have any early drafts of Chopin's music, for instance, so we don't know how many strikethroughs he made on the draft of his fourth Ballade or whether he made any at all. Liszt left us plenty of drafts and works in various stages of revision, so we have the satisfaction of watching his compositions evolve. It's like watching a child grow up.