A Case of Fraud
SIEGEL, LEE
A Case of Fraud Foucault's Pendulum By Umberto Eco Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 641 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by Lee Siegel Imagine yourself a professor of semiotics at the University of...
...He very conspicuously cannot describe the Eiffel Tower...
...His method is all Eco knows...
...The new Causabon has a beautiful mistress, who nicknames him "Pow," because of his virility...
...It vibrates, adding to the aura of "erudition" touted by the book's promoters...
...Moreover, his computer corpus is arranged in 120 sections, iikeFoucault's Pendulum...
...It appears first "benevolent above the ocean of roofs, lighthearted as a Dufy painting...
...That first novel happened to work Ovidian wonders on your bank account and entered your name in the register of world literary figures...
...Gradually, The Plan, like a golem, stirs into life...
...Belbo is the writer who cannot write...
...Madame Bovary, you see, ce n'est pas lui...
...Eco hawks both yea and nay...
...It is no coincidence that the editors themselves conceive The Plan through such false analogies, tidy inversions, and contrived connections...
...T.S...
...Spite sneers on every page...
...Professor Eco has made his second toss...
...If you think the title refers to Michel Foucault, the fashionable French philosopher, you'renotwrong.The echo, so to speak, of his idea that history—not to mention literature—does not proceed progressively vibrates unmistakably in places...
...I once heard the author declare in a panel discussion that the critic's job was—to take one example—to finish Madame Bovary...
...Is he the grand signor himself...
...Beauty must be careful about whom she snubs...
...Cannily, he identifies fiction with dishonesty, creativity with bad faith, while daring readers to pass negative judgment on an "artist-hero" bold enough to insult their intelligence...
...Such a scenario might well have been the evolution of Foucault's Pendulum, a burlesque and debasement of the imaginative writing Eco used to make it part of his profession to study...
...Its ribs didn't form Euclidean curves, they ripped the very fabric of the cosmos, they overturned realities, they leafed through pages of parallel worlds...
...Amparo, the narrator'sBrazilian girlfriend "had spent some months in New York City, living in a neighborhood of the kind where even on quiet days you could shoot a TV series featuring the homicide squad...
...ButEco is a greater innovator than Gide, than any writer who makes meaning out of the world's mundane puzzles...
...Four-dimensional cube...
...For our best-selling author could not describe a grapefruit...
...Theme: Attempts to explain history with a single idea are dangerous and lead to attempts to control history...
...It is Eco's use of the Kabala, the medieval doctrine of Jewish mysticism...
...Great Art," he complains, "makes fun of us as it comforts us, because it shows us the world as the artists would like the world to be...
...If people praised the book for qualities you knew it didn't possess, it wasn't your fault...
...It is a novel with themes like the perils of having an imagination and the prevalence of chicanery and fraud...
...Meaning is arbitrary...
...So much for Paris...
...Now one might ask why Eco spends over 600 pages spinning out a conspiracy theory simply to show how silly and pernicious it is to do that...
...The threesome draw connections between the most disparate personalities and events to show there is nothing that has happened since the Crusades, when their tale begins, which cannot be accounted for by their theory...
...True, the book lacked every felicity a story has to offer...
...Nevertheless, he writes furtively on his computer, resolved to be not a "protagonist" who presents his books to the public, but an "intelligent spectator...
...Yet, after all, a writer writes about what he or she knows...
...And he goes on manufacturing more mundane puzzles...
...Don't get our author wrong...
...The pretext for this display is an immensely tedious plot that is like an empty space in a Henry Moore sculpture, without the rest of the sculpture...
...The character of Jacopo Belbo, a second Eco persona and Causabon's accomplice—along with the minor character Diotallevi, a Talmudist—in the invention of The Plan, especially reflects a fantasy-process of disowning unwanted features of the self...
...You were right...
...So here you are sitting in the castle you bought outside Milan, grading papers, and the Muse, or someone, calls a second time...
...But you wrote it, as they used to say in Paris, authentically, to prove a point about language—meaning is arbitrary —not for profit or gain...
...Eliot gets his comeuppance alongside Mickey Mouse...
...Shades of Eco on Madame Bovary...
...On the contrary...
...Belbo's computer, called Abulafia, after the 13th-century Kabalist Abraham Abulafia, creates The Plan by recombining data, just as the Kabala spoke of recombining the letters of the Torah to redeem the fallen world...
...Two of the editors are destroyed...
...Even more than in The Name of the Rose, in Foucault's Pendulum he conjures Culture, affirms it, then waves his hand like Cagliostro— the 18th century Italian charlatan mentioned several times in the novel—and scornfully reduces the beast to a 641 page corpse of little known facts...
...Certainly his habit of invoking and then slaying serious culture figures resembles Eco's...
...you want the excitement of its theft, you want the victim's resistance and despair...
...Reviewed by Lee Siegel Imagine yourself a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna and the author of The Name of the Rose...
...Indeed, the novel is an interminable example of ho w one can parlay a bullying narcissism into a fortune...
...Of course, you are full of doubts...
...The most offensive aspect of the book I have saved for last...
...Let readers have the wisdom to resist...
...Did he send the faithful Wagner out for a piss...
...So you again concoct a "novel" dense with what you know— obscure information, rare minutiae— one of whose principal characters is a writer who cannot write...
...Since this Ciccilina of Italian literature has such a great interest in Judaism, I would like to finish with an old Yiddish proverb: A fool can throw a stone in the water that it takes 10 wise men to retrieve...
...But that's all...
...We are teasingly told that Belbo started his secret scribbling when he was 50, about the time Eco began The Name of the Rose...
...A master plan —called "The Plan"—has, in their scheme, been passed down through the centuries to the present day from one clandestine sect of fanatics to another —Knights of Templar, Masons, Rosicrucians, et al...
...It is, however, also a transparent revelation of the author's dubious motives...
...When a sexual maniac approached, threatening, she would take his arm and say, 'Come on, let's do it.' And he would go away, bewildered...
...Arnoldian scolders, sentimental nihilists, adventurous philistines skillfully masquerading as one or the other, all flourish in the general disorientation...
...Shakespeare is travestied...
...Writing," the narrator tells us André Gide-like, "is the art of evasion and dissimulation...
...through his shrewd candor about his own fraudulence he tries to trick the reader into thinking there must be something genuine about the author after all...
...the third escapes a wiser man...
...People start to disappear...
...That is precisely Eco's brand of semiotics, a systematized artificial imagination—like deconstruction—for those who lack a real one...
...The Tower had a hundred windows, all mobile, and each gave onto a different segment of space-time...
...If sex is handed to you on a platter, here it is, go to it, naturally you're not interested, otherwise what sort of sexual maniac would you be...
...In Foucault's Pendulum he is a charlatan writing about charlatans...
...And his audacity in believing he would be able to evoke each of the sefirot the way Dante reimagined Christian eschatology, or James Joyce The Odyssey—he cannot write credibly about seduction, let alone divine love—is the book's sole comic touch...
...As real culture has become harder to characterize, the opportunity to claim an intimate relationship with it by crying yea or nay (from Allan Bloom to Andy Warhol) has grown larger...
...Apparently, Eco means to imply that in Foucault's Pendulum he has accomplished a Godlike task...
...The truth is that he is incapable of proving his point (as if writing fiction had anything to do with proving a point) any other way...
...It still hangs in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris, where some of the novel is set...
...In effect, he has made one of the most majestic achievements of Jewish spirituality—Kabalists figure in The Plan, too—the equivalent of the occult quackery he has chosen as a vehicle for his literary quackery...
...Here is Eco capturing the spirit of New York City, as he subtly explores the obscure depths of the human mind...
...Eco has also divided his chapters into the 10 sefirot, Kabalistic emanations of God's essence that constitute the primal attributes of existence, such as wisdom, intelligence, beauty, power...
...Now Eco takes his learned revenge on art...
...As for Goethe, Eco cracks, "Where is Faust...
...The reader might consider this an invitation to associate Eco the scholar with his protagonist...
...Three editors working for an occult publishing house and vanity press, inspired by their fraudulent writers, invent for their own amusement a vast conspiracy originating in distant history to harness the subterranean energy of the earth and rule the world...
...If so, Eco's annihilation of him at the end, done with a prolix and pompous solemnity, makes good psychological sense...
...When I asked if she wasn't afraid of sexual maniacs, she told me her method...
...If you're a sexual maniac, you don't want sex...
...The narrator, an Eco persona, has the name Causabon, after the pedantic cleric despised by his young wife in Middlemarch...
...Foucault's pendulum, by the way, was invented in 1851 by Jean Bernard Leon Foucault to demonstrate the rotationoftheearth...
...Then, as Eco's powers pick up speed La Tour becomes a "Tesseraci...
Vol. 73 • January 1990 • No. 1
