Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (8 page)

His sterility was
infinite. It was part of the ecstasy.

¡XE. M. Cioran, Le
mauvais demiurge, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, "Pensees
ftranglees"

The conversation at
Pilade's had shown me the public Belbo. But a keen observer would
have been able to sense the melancholy behind the sarcasm. Not that
Belbo's sarcasm was the mask. The mask, perhaps, was the private
confessing he did. Or perhaps his melancholy itself was the mask, a
contrivance to hide a deeper melancholy.

There is a document in
which he tried to fictionalize what he told me about his job when I
went to Garamond the next day. It contains all his precision and
passion, the disappointment of an editor who could write only
through others while yearning for creativity of his own. It also
has the moral severity that led him to punish himself for desiring
something to which he did not feel entitled. Though he painted his
desire in pathetic and garish hues, I never knew a man who could
pity himself with such contempt.

FILENAME: Seven Seas
Jim

Tomorrow, see young
Cinti.

1. Good monograph,
scholarly, perhaps a bit too scholarly.

2. In the conclusion,
the comparison between Catullus, the poetae novi, and today's
avant-garde is the best part.

3. Why not make this the
introduction?

4. Convince him. He'll
say that such flights of fancy don't belong in a philological
series. He's afraid of alienating his professor, who is supposed to
write the authoritative preface. A brilliant idea in the last two
pages might go unnoticed, but at the beginning it would be too
conspicuous, it would irritate the academic powers that
be.

5. If, however, it is
put into italics, in a conversational form, separate from the
actual scholarship, then the hypothesis remains only a hypothesis
and doesn't undermine the seriousness of the work. And readers will
be captivated at once; they'll approach the book in a totally
different way.

Am I urging him to an
act of freedom¡Xor am I using him to write my own book?

Transforming books with
a word here, a word there. Demiurge for the work of others. Tapping
at the hardened clay, at the statue someone else has already
carved. Instead of taking soft clay and molding my own. Give Moses
the right tap with the hammer, and he'll talk.

See William
S.

"I've looked at your
work. Not bad. It has tension, imagination. Is this the first piece
you've written?"

"No. I wrote another
tragedy. It's the story of two lovers in Verona who¡X"

"Let's talk about this
piece first, Mr. S. I was wondering why you set it in France. May I
suggest¡XDenmark? It wouldn't require much work. If you just change
two or three names, and turn the chateau of Chalons-sur-Marne into,
say, the castle of Elsinore...In a Nordic, Protestant atmosphere,
in the shadow of Kierkegaard, so to speak, all these existential
overtones..."

"Perhaps you're
right."

"I think I am. The work
might need a little touching up stylistically. Nothing drastic; the
barber's snips before he holds up the mirror for you, so to speak.
The father's ghost, for example. Why at the end? I'd put him at the
beginning. That way the father's warning helps motivate the young
prince's behavior, and it establishes the conflict with the
mother.''

"Hmm, good idea. I'd
only have to move one scene."

"Exactly. Now, style.
This passage here, where the prince turns to the audience and
begins his monologue on action and inaction. It's a nice speech,
but he doesn't sound, well, troubled enough. ¡¥To act or not to
act? This is my problem.' I would say not ¡¥my problem* but ¡¥the
question."That is the question.' You see what I mean? It's not so
much his individual problem as it is the whole question of
existence. The question whether to be or not to be..."

If you fill the world
with children who do not bear your name, no one will know they are
yours. Like being God in plain clothes. You are God, you wander
through the city, you hear people talking about you, God this, God
that, what a wonderful universe this is, and how elegant the law of
gravity, and you smile to yourself behind your fake beard (no,
better to go without a beard, because in a beard God is immediately
recognizable). You soliloquize (God is always soliloquizing): "Here
I am, the One, and they don't know it." If a pedestrian bumps into
you in the street, or even insults you, you humbly apologize and
move on, even though you're God and with a snap of your fingers can
turn the world to ashes. But, infinitely powerful as you are, you
can afford to be long-suffering.

A novel about God
incognito. No. If I thought of it, somebody else must have already
done it.

You're an author, not
yet aware of your powers. The woman you loved has betrayed you,
life for you no longer has meaning, so one day, to forget, you take
a trip on the Titanic and are shipwrecked in the South Seas. You
are picked up, the sole survivor, by a pirogue full of natives, and
spend long years, forgotten by the outside world, on this island
inhabited only by Papuans. Girls serenade you with languorous
songs, their swaying breasts barely covered by necklaces of pua
blossoms. They call you Jim (they call all white men Jim), and one
night an amber-skinned girl slips into your hut and says: "I yours,
I with you." How nice, to lie there in the evening on the veranda
and look up at the Southern Cross while she fans your
brow.

You live by the cycle of
dawn and sunset, and know nothing else. One day a motorboat arrives
with some Dutchmen aboard, you learn that ten years have passed;
you could go away with these Dutchmen, but you refuse. You start a
business trading coconuts, you supervise the hemp harvest, the
natives work for you, you sail from island to island, and everyone
calls you Seven Seas Jim. A Portuguese adventurer ruined by drink
comes to work with you and redeems himself. By now you're the talk
of the Sunda, you advise the maharajah of Brunei in his campaign
against the Dayaks of the river, you find an old cannon from the
days of Tippo Sahib and get it back in working order. You train a
squad of devoted Malayans whose teeth are blackened with betel. In
a skirmish near the coral reef, old Sampan, his teeth blackened
with betel, shields you with his own body; I gladly die for you,
Seven Seas Jim. Good old Sampan, farewell, my friend.

Now you're famous in the
whole archipelago, from Sumatra to Port-au-Prince. You trade with
the English, too; at the harbor master's office in Darwin you're
registered as Kurtz, and now you're Kurtz to everyone¡Xonly the
natives still call you Seven Seas Jim. One evening, as the girl
caresses you on the veranda and the Southern Cross shines brighter
than ever overhead¡Xah! so different from the Great Bear¡Xyou
realize you want to go back. Just for a little while, to see what,
if anything, is left of you there.

You take a boat to
Manila, from there a prop plane to Ball, then Samoa, the Admiralty
Islands, Singapore, Tenerife, Timbuktu, Aleppo, Samarkand, Basra,
Malta, and you're home.

Eighteen years have
passed, life has left its mark on you: your face is tanned by the
trade winds, you're older, perhaps also handsomer. Arriving, you
discover that all the bookshops are displaying your books, in new
critical editions, and your name has been carved into the pediment
of your old school, where you learned to read and write. You are
the Great Vanished Poet, the conscience of a generation. Romantic
maidens kill themselves at your empty grave.

And then I encounter
you, my love, with those wrinkles around your eyes, your face still
beautiful though worn by memory and tender remorse. I almost pass
you on the sidewalk, I'm only a few feet away, and you look at me
as you look at all people, as though seeking another beyond their
shadow. I could speak, erase the years. But to what end? Am I not,
even now, fulfilled? I am like God, as solitary as He, as vain, and
as despairing, unable to be one of my creatures. They dwell in my
light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that
light.

Go in peace, then,
William S.! Famous, you pass and do not recognize me. I murmur to
myself: To be or not to be. And I say to myself: Good for you,
Belbo, good work. Go, old William S., and reap your meed of glory.
You alone created; I merely made a few changes.

We mid wives, who assist
at the births of what others conceive, should be refused burial in
consecrated ground. Like actors. Except that actors play with the
world as it is, while we play with a plurality of make-believes,
with the endless possibilities of existence in an infinite
universe...

How can life be so
bountiful, providing such sublime rewards for
mediocrity?

Sub umbra alarum tuarum,
Jehova.

¡XFama Fraternitatis, in
Allgemeine und general Reformation, Cassel, Wessel, 1514,
conclusion

The next day, I went to
Garamond Press. Number 1, Via Sincere Renato, opened into a dusty
passage, from which you could glimpse a courtyard and a
rope-maker's shop. To the right was an elevator that looked like
something out of an industrial archeology exhibit. When I tried to
take it, it shuddered, jerked, as if unable to make up its mind to
ascend, so prudently I got out and climbed two flights of dusty,
almost circular wooden stairs. I later learned that Mr. Garamond
loved this building because it reminded him of a publishing house
in Paris. A metal plate on the landing said GARAMOND PRESS, and an
open door led to a lobby with no switchboard or receptionist of any
kind. But you couldn't go in without being seen from a little outer
office, and I was immediately confronted by a person, probably
female, of indeterminate age and a height that could
euphemistically be called below average.

She accosted me in a
foreign language that was somehow familiar; then I realized it was
Italian, an Italian almost completely lacking in vowels. When I
asked for Belbo, she led me down a corridor to an office in the
back.

Belbo welcomed me
cordially: "So, you are a serious person. Come in." He had me sit
opposite his desk, which was old, like everything else, and piled
high with manuscripts, as were the shelves on the walls.

"I hope Gudrun didn't
frighten you," he said.

"Gudrun?
That...signora?"

"Signorina. Her name
isn't really Gudrun. We call her that because of her Nibelung look
and because her speech is vaguely Teutonic. She wants to say
everything quickly, so she saves time by leaving out the vowels.
But she has a sense of justitia aequa-trix: When she types, she
skips consonants."

"What does she do
here?"

"Everything,
unfortunately. In every publishing house there is one person who is
indispensable, the only one who can find things in the mess that he
or she creates. At least when a manuscript is lost, you know whose
fault it is."

"She loses manuscripts,
too?"

"Publishers are always
losing manuscripts. I think sometimes that's their main activity.
But a scapegoat is always necessary, don't you agree? My only
complaint is that she doesn't lose the ones I'd like to see lost.
Contretemps, these, in what the good Bacon called The Advancement
of Learning.''

"How do they get
lost?"

He spread his arms.
"Forgive me, but that is a stupid question. If we knew how they got
lost, they wouldn't get lost."

"Logical," I said. "But
look, the Garamond books I see here and there seem very carefully
made, and you have an impressive catalog. Is it all done here? How
many of you are there?"

"There's a room for the
production staff across the hall; next door is my colleague
Diotallevi. But he does the reference books, the big projects,
works that take forever to produce and have a long sales life. I do
the university editions. It's not really that much work. Naturally
I get involved with some of the books, but as a rule we have
nothing to worry about editorially, academically, or financially.
Publications of an institute, or conference proceedings under the
aegis of a university. If the author's a beginner, his professor
writes the preface. The author corrects the proofs, checks the
quotations and footnotes, and receives no royalties. The book is
adopted as a textbook, a few thousand copies are sold in a few
years, and our expenses are covered. No surprises, no red
ink."

"What do you do,
then?"

"A lot of things. For
example, we publish some books at our own expense, usually
translations of prestige authors, to add tone to the catalog. And
then there are the manuscripts that just turn up, left at the door.
Rarely publishable, but they all have to be read. You never can
tell."

"Do you like
it?"

"Like it? It's the only
thing I know how to do well."

We were interrupted by a
man in his forties wearing a jacket a few sizes too big, with wispy
light hair that fell over thick blond eyebrows. He spoke softly, as
if he were instructing a child.

"I'm sick of this
Taxpayer's Vade Mecum. The whole thing needs to be rewritten, and I
don't feel like it. Am I intruding?"

"This is Diotallevi,"
Belbo said, introducing us.

"Oh, you're here to look
at that Templar thing. Poor man. Listen, Jacopo, I thought of a
good one: Urban Planning for Gypsies."

"Great," Belbo said
admiringly. "I have one, too: Aztec Equitation."

"Excellent. But would
that go with Potio-section or the Adyn-ata?"

"We'll have to see,"
Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some sheets of
paper. "Potio-section..." He looked at me, saw my bewilderment.
"Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of
slicing soup. No, no," he said to Diotallevi. "It's not a
department, it's a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or
Pylocatabasis. They all fall under the heading of
Tetrapyloctomy."

"What's tetra...?" I
asked.

"The art of splitting a
hair four ways. This is the department of useless techniques.
Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build
machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if
Pylocatabasis belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair.
Somehow that doesn't seem completely useless."

"All right, gentlemen,"
I said, "I give up. What are you two talking about?"

"Well, Diotallevi and I
are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative
Irrelevance, where useless or impossible courses are given. The
school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly
increasing the number of unnecessary subjects."

"And how many
departments are there?"

"Four so far, but that
may be enough for the whole syllabus. The Tetrapyloctomy department
has a preparatory function; its purpose is to inculcate a sense of
irrelevance. Another important department is Adynata, or
Impossibilia. Like Urban Planning for Gypsies. The essence of the
discipline is the comprehension of the underlying reasons for a
thing's absurdity. We have courses in Morse syntax, the history of
antarctic agriculture, the history of Easter Island painting,
contemporary Sumerian literature, Montessori grading,
Assyrio-Babylonian philately, the technology of the wheel in
pre-Columbian empires, and the phonetics of the silent
film."

"How about crowd
psychology in the Sahara?"

"Wonderful," Belbo
said.

Diotallevi nodded. "You
should join us. The kid's got talent, eh, Jacopo?"

"Yes, I saw that right
away. Last night he constructed some moronic arguments with great
skill. But let's continue. What did we put in the Oxymoronics
department? I can't find my notes."

Diotallevi took a slip
of paper from his pocket and regarded me with friendly
condescension. "In Oxymoronics, as the name implies, what matters
is self-contradiction. That's why I think it's the place for Urban
Planning for Gypsies."

"No," Belbo said. "Only
if it were Nomadic Urban Planning. The Adynata concern empirical
impossibilities; Oxymoronics deal with contradictions in
terms."

"Maybe. But what courses
did we put under Oxymoronics? Oh, yes, here we are: Tradition in
Revolution, Democratic Oligarchy, Parmenidean Dynamics, Heraclitean
Statics, Spartan Sybaritics, Tautological Dialectics, Boolean
Eristic."

I couldn't resist
throwing in "How about a Grammar of Solecisms?"

"Excellent!" they both
said, making a note.

"One problem," I
said.

"What?"

"If the public gets wind
of this, people will show up with manuscripts."

"The boy's sharp,
Jacopo," Diotallevi said. "Unwittingly, we've drawn up a real
prospectus for scholarship. We've shown the necessity of the
impossible. Therefore, mum's the word. But I have to go
now."

"Where?" Belbo
asked.

"It's Friday
afternoon."

"Jesus Christ!" Belbo
said, then turned to me. "Across the street are a few houses where
Orthodox Jews live; you know, black hats, beards, earlocks. There
aren't many of them in Milan. This is Friday, and the Sabbath
begins at sundown, so in the afternoon they start preparing in the
apartment across the way: polishing the candlesticks, cooking the
food, setting everything up so they won't have to light any fires
tomorrow. They even leave the TV on all night, picking a channel in
advance. Anyway, Diotallevi here has a pair of binoculars; he spies
on them with delight, pretending he's on the other side of the
street."

"Why?" I
asked.

"Our Diotallevi thinks
he's Jewish."

"What do you mean,
¡¥thinks'?" Diotallevi said, annoyed. "I am Jewish. Do you have
anything against that, Casaubon?"

"Of course
not."

"Diotallevi is not
Jewish," Belbo said firmly.

"No? And what about my
name? Just like Graziadio or Dios-iaconte. A traditional Jewish
name. A ghetto name, like Sholom Aleichem."

"Diotallevi is a
good-luck name given to foundlings by city officials. Your
grandfather was a foundling."

"A Jewish
foundling."

"Diotallevi, you have
pink skin, you're practically an albino."

"There are albino
rabbits; why not albino Jews?"

"Diotallevi, a person
can't just decide to be a Jew the way he might decide to be a stamp
collector or a Jehovah's Witness. Jews are born. Admit it! You're a
gentile like the rest of us."

"I'm
circumcised."

"Come on! Lots of people
are circumcised, for reasons of hygiene. All you need is a doctor
with a knife. How old were you when you were
circumcised?"

"Let's not
nitpick."

"No, let's. Jews
nitpick."

"Nobody can prove my
grandfather wasn't Jewish."

"Of course not; he was a
foundling. He could have been anything, the heir to the throne of
Byzantium or a Hapsburg bastard."

"He was found near the
Portico d'Ottavia, in the ghetto in Rome."

"But your grandmother
wasn't Jewish, and Jewish descent is supposed to be
matrilineal..."

"And skipping registry
reasons¡Xand municipal ledgers can also be read beyond the
letter¡Xthere are reasons of blood. The blood in me says that my
thoughts are exquisitely Talmudic, and it would be racist for you
to claim that a gentile can be as exquisitely Talmudic as I
am."

He left. "Don't pay any
attention," Belbo said. "We have this argument almost every day.
The fact is, Diotallevi is a devotee of the cabala. But there were
also Christian cabalists. Anyway, if Diotallevi wants to be Jewish,
why should I object?"

"Why indeed. We're all
liberals here."

"So we are."

He lit a cigarette. I
remembered why I had come. "You mentioned a manuscript about the
Templars," I said.

"That's right...Let's
see. It was in a fake-leather folder..."He tried to pick a
manuscript out of the middle of a pile without disturbing the
others. A hazardous operation. Part of the pile fell to the floor.
Now Belbo was holding the fake-leather folder.

I looked at the table of
contents and the introduction. "It deals with the arrest of the
Templars," I said. "In 1307, Philip the Fair decided to arrest all
the Templars in France. There's a legend that two days before
Philip issued the arrest warrant, the ox-drawn hay wain left the
enclave of the Temple in Paris for an

unknown destination.
They say that hidden in the wain was a group of knights led by one
Aumont. These knights supposedly escaped, took refuge in Scotland,
and joined a Masonic lodge in Kilwinning. According to the legend,
they became part of the society of Freemasons, who served as
guardians of the secrets of the Temple of Solomon. Ah, here we are;
I thought so. This writer, too, claims that the origins of Masonry
lie in the Templars' escape to Scotland. A story that's been
rehashed for a couple of centuries, with no foundation to it. I can
give you at least fifty pamphlets that tell the same tale, each
cribbed from the other. Here, listen to this¡Xjust a page picked at
random: ¡¥The proof of the Scottish expedition lies in the fact
that even today, six hundred and fifty years later, there still
exist in the world secret orders that hark back to the Temple
Militia. How else is one to explain the continuity of this
heritage?' You see what I mean? How can the Marquis de Carabas not
exist when Puss in Boots says he's in the marquis's
service?"

"All right," Belbo said,
"I'll throw it out. But this Templar business interests me. For
once I have an expert handy, and I don't want to let him get away.
Why is there all this talk about the Templars and nothing about the
Knights of Malta? No, don't tell me now. It's late. Diotallevi and
I have to go to dinner with Signor Garamond in a little while. We
should be through by about ten-thirty. I'll try to persuade
Diotallevi to drop by Pi-lade's¡Xhe goes to bed early and usually
doesn't drink. Will you be there?"