In “Serendipities,” Umberto Eco, novelist, literary theorist and professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, examines errors and fictional inventions that have shaped the history of linguistics. The word “serendipity” means to make discoveries by accident while investigating something different; its colloquial meaning refers to fortunate occurrences shaped by unexpected luck. In this book, Eco alludes to the first definition and shows how the world’s history is shaped by chance.
Although the style of the book is sometimes too erudite for entertainment reading, it’s a great source to understand cultural misinterpretations and provides historical sources of cultural stereotypes. It’s divided in five essays where the writer explores how some ideas we consider fable today have changed the world, and how other false beliefs lead to the discovery of things we now consider true.
The first essay, “The Force of Falsity,” discusses false medieval documents that propelled the discovery of the Americas and shaped the relationship between Europe and Asia. It’s a tribute to men of science and to the Renaissance discoverers. At the end of the essay, Eco summarizes his point in a phrase that resumes his own life; “the cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.”
In the second essay, “Languages of Paradise,” Eco considers theories on the perfect language and how they created the idea of the non-human barbarians: Classical philosophers didn’t distinguish between linguistic and mental structures, so the non Greek or Latin speakers were considered “barbarians,” those who shutter and have no language, thus, not human. During the Renaissance, this idea of lesser-developed beings marked the arrogant attitude of European explorers towards foreign cultures.
The third essay, “From Marco Polo to Leibniz,” traces the sources of the misunderstandings between cultures by dividing in five the ways in which two cultures interact. These modes are conquest, cultural pillage, exchange, exoticism and by familiar wisdom. The first describes a relationship where one culture considers the other “barbarian” and aims to “civilize” it. Some may see this as how Europeans dominated African and American cultures. Cultural pillage happens when one culture recognizes the other as bearer of “an unknown wisdom” and although the most powerful group may subjugate the other politically, it respects the other’s exotic culture, as seen by Ancient Greece and Rome in regards to Egypt. Exchange is a “two-way process of reciprocal influence and respect [and it] is certainly reflected in the early contacts between Europe and China.” Exoticism is an ideal image of a distant culture, frequently marked by fictional misinterpretations.
Finally, there is “familiar wisdom.” Cultural preconceptions define the way one culture gets to know the other, by trying to match some ideas of its past. Eco explains, “In Java [Marco Polo] saw some animals that resembled unicorns, because the had a single horn on their muzzles… the unicorns he saw were very different form those represented by a millennial tradition. They were not white but black. They had pelts as buffalo, and their hooves were as big as elephants.’ In fact, what Marco Polo saw was the rhinoceros.”
The remaining two essays, “The Language of the Austral Land” and “The Linguistics of Joseph de Maistre,” are devoted to single authors and are far more abstract than the previous. The first concerns Gabriel de Foigny’s parody of contemporary attempts to devise the perfect language, and the other explains the fictional view of language by Maistre that leads him to “risible etymological games.” Eco quotes Maitre, “Science, at its beginnings, remained closed within temples, where finally it became extinguished when this flame could serve no purpose save to burn.”
Eco’s erudite book is successful in unlocking riddles of the past and provides readers the anxious certainty that error has shaped history. Serendipities is a fabulous read for those concerned with present cultural misconceptions.
