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Conspiracy by the Numbers
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17381 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1990 |
2,207 Words |
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Edward N. Luttwak
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II PENDOLO DI FOUCAULT
Umberto Eco
Bompiani: 1988
509 pp.
FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM
Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver
Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1989
641 pp., $22.96
A. Umberto Eco teaches semiotics, the theory of the "signs" that permit verbal and nonverbal human communication. B. Eco in an Italian intellectual; that is, he belongs to a tradition that still rejects any narrow specialization (dine with Italian economists and hear them talk of Latin American literature; dine with Italian literati and hear them talk of Soviet economies). A + B = a propensity for verbal artifice and metaphorical fireworks in the display of esoteric knowledge. Upon hearing Eco's title one therefore imagines a verbal pendulum, the usual metaphor for swings of opinion. But no: Jean-Bernard Foucault's pendulum, which swings in the Paris Arts et M¨¦tiers conservatory to prove that the earth rotates, is made of solid brass - though there is artifice all right (a magnet attracts the iron concealed in the brass ball).
The reader who stays the course through 503 pages (Eco should send a generous gift to the two or three who will, worldwide) encounters the pendulum on line 1 of page 1 and finds it used as a gallows on page 473 in the penultimate chapter (barely counting the last chapter as a chapter, for it is only one page long). In between, he will have followed the meandering first-person account of the researches of Eco's trio of chief investigators, the dour publisher Jacopo Belbo (evocative of dour late-medieval Italian merchant names), the mystic Diotallevi ("may-god-educate-you"), and the Sam Spade character, Casaubon, who will investigate assiduously in exchange for a Chandlerish daily fee, plus expenses. Eco himself calls him a Sam Spade character, to ensure that we know (i) that he knows (ii) that we know (iii) that he is writing fiction advisedly - that is, as an edifice of words construed not from life, but out of the words of earlier fictions. (Casaubon is George Eliot's all-knowing character in Middlemarch, as other reviewers have pointed out; but Eliot took that name from the celebrated editor of classical texts, whom Eco almost misdescribes as a philologist.)
What the researchers are investigating, with a minimum of action - there are no car chases or platinum blondes, and both are much missed - but with much use of a computer named Abulafia, is all available data on the history-long search for the secret locus from which it is possible to control the telluric force, that being the ultimate earth force of which gravity is merely a thin shadow. (Eco may not have heard of Tesla waves, whose controversial status in science would not suffice to redeem their excessive, fiction-fracturing, reality.)
Because knowledge of that secret spot on earth would yield - you guessed it - mastery of the world, it is natural that it should have been the subject of past investigation by (among others):
i. The Druids and even their predecessors (pre-Celtic Stonehenge naturally figures in the tale, as a telluric observatory, of
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