An Essay Of The Perfect Length

I’d like to begin with a minor spoiler for My Brilliant Friend which I recently enjoyed. The book tells the story of two poor Neapolitan girls, Lenu and Lila. The whole time, Lila is so clearer the titular “brilliant friend”. The book is narrated by Lenu who, along with the rest of the neighborhood, is perpetually awed by her friend’s intelligence, craftiness, and beauty. Every chapter reveals a new meaning of the word and how Lila embodies it. And yet, towards the end, it is Lila who calls Lenu her brilliant friend.

I mention this not only because it is a delicious literary misdirection, but also to spoil my own misleading title. Yes this is an essay about an essay of the perfect length, but it is not about itself as you could hopefully tell by the characteristic tangent you just read. Which means it’s also not about Elena Ferrante but another Italian, Umberto Eco and his humorous essay collection, How To Travel With A Salmon.

The summer after my first year of high school, at quizbowl camp, on a night of particular delinquency, my friends stole my phone and prank-texted our school librarian… asking for a book recommendation. She promptly replied with The Name Of The Rose, and I, apparently unable to resist a recommendation, read it a few years later. It would be unfair for me to review that book now as it’s been so long, but I remember it being very clever. I’m surprised to see that I rated it 5 stars on Goodreads despite that (or possibly because) I skimmed over the many long descriptive passages. When I discovered that Eco had an essay collection (which seemed a better format for both of us), I had to add it to my reading list and read it a few years later. And in timely fashion, I am reviewing Salmon within a year of reading it.

How to Travel with a Salmon is a collection of about 40 short, mostly humorous essays. About half (including the title essay) are the literary equivalent of airplane food standup material. It’s curious to see how low the pinnacle of the genre reaches. The rest are similar lifestyle observations with slightly more wit, insight, or foresight. Medium-height fruit but plenty ripe. These cover typical problems of the modern (1980s) world including faxes, bureaucracy, and people questioning the size of your personal library. There are one or two that go deep into linguistics or semiotics. I’m sure they were also intended to be non-serious, but they were too unintelligible to tell. And then there’s “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1”.

I’m sure I mentioned in one of my first posts that I always struggled to meet word count minimums. Often I would be impressed with myself if I could get to 2/3 or 3/4 of the word count. There are a few reasons for this, but the one that’s the most apparent to me is that I sort of believe that, if I can just figure out the right words, I can state any concept in a couple sentences. In a way, this is so obviously true it’s facile. I could say, “Drawing a Map” is an essay about drawing a map of a territory the same size as the territory itself, but clearly I’ve lost almost all the information contained in the essay. My statement doesn’t even really contain more information than the title of the essay itself. A more correct phrasing would be that I believe any concept can be compressed into a few sentences without loss of information.

This is not true, and it is obviously not true (ignoring arbitrarily long sentences). What’s more, I know it’s not true because I also hold the exact opposite belief, that there are some concepts which cannot be conveyed in words at all. I’m also going to define “concept” here as something that can be conveyed with words which unfortunately makes the belief trivially false :(

Just to recap: I have two contradictory, false beliefs. I believe concepts are infinitely compressible. I compress concepts too much and lose information to heat and hand-waving. I conclude that it is impossible to express those concepts with words. QED.

Once I watched some friends, unhappy with Pictionary’s selection of “Difficult” words, play a round using only abstract concepts like liberty, equality, and serenity. Sometimes there are go-to symbols to represent abstract concepts like giant copper statues and balanced scales, but what would you draw to convey serenity? You know it’s possible. Maybe you’ve seen a pastoral landscape painting, or a secluded reflecting pool, or your brother sleeping on Christmas morning and thought of serenity, but whichever of those you draw, the abstract concept of serenity will be overshadowed by the concrete subject of the drawing. Maybe if you draw all three, serenity will be the clearest link between them.

As your successful depiction is to serenity, so “Drawing a Map” is to concision. Yes, it is depicts the hypothetical construction of a map as described by Borges (of course it was) but only insofar as your Pictionary drawing depicts a pastoral scene or your brother’s sleeping face. The abstract concept it conveys and indeed exemplifies is concision.

There’s nothing I would add to or remove from “Drawing a Map” that would make it serve its purpose better. It sort of obliterated both my false beliefs in one go. To begin with, the concept of drawing a 1 to 1 scale map is utter nonsense. If there ever were a concept that was impossible to convey, it would be that one. And yet, faced with this nonsensical task, Eco calmly enumerates the requirements, possible methods, and impossibilities. He takes his time. He makes use of the words he needs to make his points but never beats around the bush.