Th n r n v r f b rt :

JoAnn Cannon

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 38, Number 4, Winter 1992, pp.895-910 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1388

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THE IMAGINARY UNIVERSE OF UMBERTO ECO:A READING OF FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM1

mfs

JoAnn Cannon

In the Introduction to The Role of the Reader Umberto Eco argues thata model reader is inscribed in the open work by its author. "An authorcan foresee an 'ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia' (as happenswith Finnegans Wake) able to master different codes and eager to dealwith the text as with a maze of many issues" (9). Umberto Eco wouldseem to be not only the ideal "model reader" but the only empiricalreader whose competence is sufficiently encyclopedic to do justice to TheName of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. Each of Eco's novels is in facta vast maze, a tangled web of arcane references, coded messages, met-aphysical speculation, and historical trivia which only the author cansuccessfully unravel. On the other hand, Eco's assertion that the authorshould die after his work is complete, in order not to block the path ofthe text,2 acts as a kind of challenge to the reader to fix upon an"unauthorized" interpretation of the text.3 Whether we pose as modelreaders, following the paths of a "faithful" reading predetermined bythe author, or whether we decide to break new, uncharted ground, theinterpretive paths we may follow seem endless. It has become somethingof a convention to open an essay on The Name of the Rose by inventoryingthe numerous if not infinite ways in which the text might be read.4 Nomatter what approach the critic chooses, she makes it clear that thereading in question is in no way privileged, that it "forecloses no others"(Artigiani 64). The critic who may seem to "go too far" with Eco's

Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 38, Number 4, Winter 1992. Copyright © by Purdue Research Foun-dation. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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text forestalls any objections by belittling the effort as a "monstrosity. . . doodled in the margins of [the author's] manuscript" (Mackey 39).If the critic chooses to deconstruct the novel, "to read the text againstits own conscious assertions," looking for the point where the author isnot in control, she must ask whether this particular strategy is not alreadyforeseen in the text.

Foucault 's Pendulum elicits from the critic precisely the same perplexityas Eco's first novel. Is it the critic's job to reconstruct the references onwhich this compendium of arcane knowledge is based? Should one readthe novel as an autobiographical projection of the author or as anexemplification of the author's theories? I have envisioned a somewhathybrid approach to Foucault's Pendulum, an approach which I will elaboratein the following pages. I will examine the central theme of the novelfirst in the context of the sociopolitical upheaval of post war Italy aridthen in the light of Eco's numerous theoretical works. Finally I willlocate the point where we may begin to unravel the text through areading which could be called deconstructive. Without deciding whetherthis is a moment of ambiguity or irony that is inscribed in the text orwhether it is instead a moment of blindness (and, of course, insight), Ipoint to the way in which Foucault's Pendulum puts into question Eco'stheoretical work.5

No reading oí Foucault's Pendulum can do justice to the novel withoutsituating it in the sociopolitical climate from which it emerged. Thenovel unsparingly satirizes the Italian political scene of the last decades.Foucault's Pendulum confronts head on events that in The Name of the Rosewere dealt with indirectly and allegorically. It will be remembered thatEco's first, historical, novel is prefaced by a note informing the readerthat the text is a translation of a manuscript which first fell into theauthor's hands in Prague in 1968, six days before the Soviet invasion.6Although the authorial note claims that the story is "gloriously" lackingin any relevance to contemporary Italy, the dust jacket of the Italianedition of the novel gives the lie to this disclaimer. Jorge da Burgos'fanatical belief in Truth with a capital "T" allegorizes, among otherthings, the political fanaticism of the Red Brigades. Through his fictionalalter ego, William of Baskerville, Eco denounces the devotion to a politicalabsolute which led Italy into the bloodstained "anni di piombo." Theseissues, which are dealt with only implicitly in Eco's historical novel, takecenter stage in Foucault's Pendulum. The real narrative time of Eco'ssecond novel extends from the period of revolutionary zeal of the latesixties to the fanatical terrorism of the seventies to the political disen-chantment of the eighties.

The vicissitudes of Italy in these years are filtered through theconsciousness of a disenchanted intellectual, Jacopo Belbo, who sportsthe same birthdate and vital statistics as Umberto Eco. Born in 1932,Belbo (like Eco) was eleven years old at the time of the Resistance

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movement and, thus, was too young to take an active part in the partisanstruggle. Not only was Belbo cheated of the opportunity to participatein the Resistance but also to write as a "participant observer" of theexperience that inspired a whole generation of Italian writers, includingCalvino, Vittorini, and Fenoglio.7 Belbo, an "autore mancato," hasgiven up his dreams to settle for editing the books of others. As a youngman Belbo had come close to acquiring a "war story" when he wascaught in cross fire and stubbornly refused to take cover. When his unclepulled him to safety moments before a bullet struck the exact spot wherehe had been standing, Belbo lost his one opportunity to transcend therole of spectator which history had allotted him. This adolescent dis-appointment cast a pall of cynicism over his adult life. The one momentwhen he had at least half-heartedly attempted to "believe" in somethingwas in 1968. Convinced that the student protest movement of the latesixties represented the only possibility of redemption, Belbo had attendedthe rallies, sit-ins and occupations:

it was a settling of scores, a time of remorse, repentance, regeneration. We hadfailed and you were arriving with your enthusiasm, courage, self-criticism . . .We had to be like you. . . . We stopped wearing ties, we threw away our trenchcoats, and bought secondhand duffle coats. Some quit their jobs rather thanserve the Establishment. (200)

The possibility of redemption after the lost opportunity of the Resistanceproved to be an illusion. Toward the beginning of the novel, Belbodescribes to Casaubon, the university student whom he first meets inthe early seventies, his disappointment in the younger generation. Heparticularly indicts the university students who betrayed their youthfulideals either by selling out to the establishment or by gunning downtheir opponents in the street.

Eco's vivid portrayal of the danger inherent in the black and whitecertainty that led to Italian terrorism is coupled with a nostalgia for theclarity of the Resistance. That nostalgia is particularly acute in Eco'sgeneration, which was denied active duty in that ferocious but also, atleast in retrospect, reassuring period of Italian history. Next to the blackand white, or rather red and black, certainty of the Resistance movement,the events of 1968 and 1969 seem at best anti-climactic. The ideologicalconfusion of the seventies and eighties becomes even more bewilderingin contrast to a simpler time. In the days of the Resistance movement,the birth of history for Belbo's generation, the "two opposing sides weredistinct, marked by their colors, red or black, without ambiguities,"(272). In the postwar period, on the other hand, Italian politics hassometimes seemed to be a Pirandellian game in which ideological dis-tinctions blur and ambiguities abound.8 The blurring of ideological dis-tinction known in Italy as "transformismo" and vigorously denouncedby Leonardo Sciascia led to the Propaganda Due Scandal of the eighties.

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"Transformismo," endemic to Italian politics from the time of theunification of Italy, took on the proportions of a national conspiracy aspoliticians from the far right to the far left were shown to be exchangingfavors as members of a secret Masonic lodge (P Due).9 The Templarconspiracy theory later developed by the protagonists of // pendolo mimicsin its labyrinthine complexity this secret Masonic network, which seemsto have extended into every sector of Italian society.

It is significant that Casaubon and Belbo, who initially meet atPilade's bar during the last stages of the student demonstrations, resumetheir acquaintance precisely at this moment of extreme ideological am-biguity. Casaubon begins to freelance for Garamond, the Milanese pub-lishing house where Belbo and Diotallevi are employed. To while awaythe time in this period of political confusion Belbo, Casaubon andDiotallevi become co-conspirators in ει dangerous game, a search for anabsolute truth which for the three men begins as a pastime but becomesan obsession. As they review manuscripts for Garamond's illustratedhistory of the hermetic sciences, Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi aregradually drawn into the irrational world described by the Diabolicals.The three editors set out to construct a cosmic plot based upon theaxiom that the Templars have something to do with everything. Theybegin to feed bits of information (apparently unrelated to the Templars)into Belbo's computer, Abulafia. The editors' muse is a certain ColonelArdenti, an aspiring Garamond author who is convinced that the Tem-plars possessed the secret of an immense source of power which wouldallow them to control the Navel of the World. Calculating that it wouldtake six hundred years for the world to make the necessary technologicaladvances to harness that knowledge, the Templars kept the location ofthe point secret. The pendulum's intersection with a ray of light fromthe Chartres cathedral window will reveal the location of the critical

point upon a now missing map. Only by reassembling a message brokenup into thirty-six pieces and scattered throughout the world can the rightmap be reconstructed.

The cosmic plot invented by the three editors in response to Ardenti'smad but intriguing theories in many ways allegorizes the political situationof the eighties in Italy. The Plan reads like the various conspiracy theorieswhich both entertain and dismay Italians as they are played out on thefront pages of the nation's newspapers. Just as commentators can explainthe recent political scene by assuming, perhaps correctly, that P Due(the secret Masonic lodge) is involved in every aspect of Italian society,from the Mafia to the Vatican to the highest levels of the government,so the makers of the Plan in Eco's novel assume that the Templars hadsomething to do with everything. At the same time the cosmic conspiracyreflects an understandable need for certainty, for a culprit, for an answerto the question "Whodunit" in a time of bewilderment and perplexity.10The pendulum of the title figures the unbeliever's nostalgia for certainty

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which, Belbo argues, is typical of his generation. "The idea that every-thing else is in motion and up above is the only fixed point in theuniverse. . . . For those who have no faith, it's a way of finding Godagain, and without challenging their unbelief, because it is a null pole.It can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate dis-appointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner" (199-200).

The commitment to the present which is implicit in the ironic prefaceto The Name of the Rose becomes explicit in Foucault's Pendulum. The novelis firmly situated in the cultural context and historical particularity ofpostwar Italy. The allure of the pendulum, the fixed point, must tosome degree be related to the numbing ambiguity of the Italian politicalscene of the past decades. But it would be too simple to ground Belbo'ssearch for an absolute entirely in Eco's personal history or in the culturalhistory of Eco's generation of Italian intellectuals. Eco himself locatesthe search for absolutes in the postmodern Zeitgeist. Several of his recentworks reveal a fascination with the current "crisi della ragione" in itsvarious forms, from the crisis of classical reason, to the crisis of technologyand science to the crisis in historicism." The author suggests that theresponse to that crisis may take two forms. One is to replace the conceptof classical reason with that of "reasonability" or weak thought.12 Thisis clearly the response advocated by Eco's recent theoretical work andallegorized in The Name of the Rose.13 Another response, one which Ecoperceives as quite common and consoling in our postmodern momentof crisis, is escape into irrationalism.

Foucault's Pendulum reflects Eco's interest in the various forms of"irrazionalismo" which have captured the human imagination fromancient times to our postmodern present. Eco projects that interest ontohis fictional publisher Garamond, who senses that the current fascinationwith the secret, the hidden, the occult, is evidence of a vast, untappedmarket. Under the umbrella term Project Hermes, he decides to com-mission two series on the hermetic sciences, one for the vanity pressManuzio and one for the serious press Garamond. Garamond's decisionto back Project Hermes through a scholarly series is based on the sameintuition of a "crisis of reason" which Eco has repeatedly pointed out.In an address delivered at the Frankfurt book fair in 1986, Eco citesthe boom in the sale of books dealing with alchemy, black magic andthe occult as evidence of a loss of faith in technology and science.14 Itis this loss of faith that helps to explain what Eco has called "the returnof the middle ages" both in popular culture and in serious scholarlystudies. As Eco describes the appeal of the Middle Ages and its antis-cientific nature, we get a sneak preview of Foucault's Pendulum, repletewith "occult philosophy . . . swarming with Knights Templars, Rosi-crucians, alchemists, Masonic initiates, neoKabbalists, drunk on reac-tionary poisons sipped from the Grail, ready to hail every neo-fascistWill to Power" (Travels in Hyperreality 61-85). Eco describes the contem-

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porary Zeitgeist to the publishers gathered in Frankfurt by citing the samepassage from Chesterton which appears in the conclusion to Foucault'sPendulum: "When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they thenbelieve in nothing: they believe in everything" (514).

Chesterton's intuition becomes a fitting epigraph to the protagonists'cosmic plan. The plan devised by the three editors is all inclusive. Likethe philosophers of the imaginary universe in Borges's' "Tlön, Uqbar,Orbis Tertius" Eco's protagonists "know that a system is nothing morethan the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to some one ofthem" (Ficciones 25). Beginning with the history of the Templars, theeditors devise a cosmic plot which includes and subsumes all of humanhistory. The editors playfully subscribe to Agile's idealistic, nineteenth-century historicism. Rejecting the notion that history is "a bloodstainedand senseless riddle" Agliè asserts:

there must be a Design. There must be a Mind. That is why over the centuriesmen far from ignorant have thought of the Masters of the King of the World,not as physical beings but as a collective symbol, as the successive, temporaryincarnation of a Fixed Intention. (261)

Agile's Templar conspiracy theory is a kind of parody of whatLyotard calls a "grand récit"—a master narrative or metanarrative whichwould give history meaning and closure.15 With a postmodern con-sciousness of the dissolution of the master narratives, the editors none-theless amuse themselves by creating "an immanent rationality of history."The Thirty Years' War and the French Revolution, the Freemasons,Rosicrucians, and Templars, the Arabs, Jesuits, and Jews all fit some-where into the fantastic cosmic conspiracy. Even the greatest mysteryin human history, the "reason" for the Holocaust, is "explained" bythe cosmic plot.16

Like Project Hermes, the editors' cosmic plot is inspired by thehermetic belief in the principle of universal analogy. This is the con-stitutive feature of hermetic thought as defined by Umberto Eco in TheLimits of Interpretation. Eco's latest book argues forcefully against theHermetic approach in contemporary interpretation. In the key essay inthat volume Eco locates the limits of interpretation by contrasting un-limited semiosis and hermetic drift. Eco takes issue with modern reading,which invariably posits "the inexhaustibility of the sense of any text"(20). He traces this interpretive strategy, whose most recent manifestationis deconstruction, back to Renaissance Hermetism. Eco argues thathermetic drift is not equivalent to the notion of unlimited semiosis firstadvanced by Charles Sanders Peirce and repeatedly cited by the authoras a characteristic feature of his brand of semiotics. Although I will referthe reader to the text for a detailed description of the difference betweenunlimited semiosis and hermetic drift, the end result seems to be thathermetic drift is based upon the idea that "interpretation has no criteria"

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(6). Eco argues against that notion not only in this essay but throughoutThe Limits of Interpretation. "In the Peircean line of thought it can beasserted that any community of interpreters, in the course of theircommon inquiry about what kind of object the text they are reading is,can frequently reach an agreement about it. . . . [T]o reach an agreement. . . does not mean either (a) that the interpreters must trace back tothe original intention of its author or (b) that such a text must have aunique and final meaning. There are 'open' texts that support multipleinterpretations" (41). While hermetic drift in the case of text interpre-tation suggests that any interpretation is valid, unlimited semiosis stillexcludes certain readings. "Thus, even though using a text as a play-ground for implementing unlimited semiosis, they can agree that atcertain moments the 'play of musement' can transitorily stop by pro-ducing a consensual judgment" (42). Eco goes to some length to pointout that "responsible deconstructionists" from J. Hillis Miller to Derridahimself recognize that not all readings are equally valid.17

Eco's insistence upon the imposition of limits of interpretation isparticularly interesting when considered in the light of his earlier the-oretical work, particularly his 1962 Opera aperta. In that work the authorargued that the reader plays an active role in producing the meaningof the text. The notion of the open work has often been interpreted asa carte blanche; the phrase seems to suggest that texts are open to limitlessreadings. In the introduction to The Limits of Interpretation, however, theauthor maintains that this is a misreading which he has set out to correct.After a period of what he sees as excessive deference to the rights ofthe reader, rights which Eco himself was instrumental in defining, hereasserts the rights of texts. The Limits of Interpretation is a cautionarytale, warning against the allure of infinite readings.

The protagonists οι Foucault's Pendulum fall under the very spell whichis denounced in Eco's recent work. Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotalleviread the liber mundi as an open work which is susceptible to infinitereadings. A driver's manual provides Casaubon with the pretext toperform a brilliant three page exegesis showing that the automobile isa metaphor of creation. The passage is reminiscent of an anecdote inStanley Fish's Is There a Text in this Class? Fish draws a frame aroundan assignment with the last names of five authors and tells the class itis a religious poem of the kind they have been studying. The interpretivebravura of the students in the face of this assignment helps Fish makehis point: with the proper kind of attention, the reader creates poetry(303-321). By the same token, with the properly "suspicious" state ofmind, Casaubon can find subtexts in a traffic sign or produce a mysticalinterpretation of the phone book. And what is the proper mindset? "Anyfact becomes important when it's connected to another. The connectionchanges the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of theworld, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its

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literal meaning, that it tells us of a Secret. The rule is simple: Suspect,only suspect" (314). As the plan comes to fruition, each of them is takenby it in a different way. Belbo, whose apparent skepticism masks a thirstfor the absolute, is converted to the plan, Diotallevi corrupted by it,Casaubon, who, thanks to Lia, is able to keep some distance, is merelyaddicted. Midway through the novel Lia warns Casaubon against fallinginto the "psychosis of synarchic plots." The one true answer, accordingto Casaubon's Beatrice, is that there is nothing to understand: "Synarchyis God" (266).

The cosmic Plan grew out of the interpretation of a text presentedto Garamond by Colonel Ardenti as Ingolf's message of Provins. Ingolf'smessage is, of course, written in a secret code which, when deciphered,proves to be the transcription of a partially damaged parchment. By aseries of surmises, or abductions, the philologist/semiotician reconstructsa text which deals with six knights appearing six times in six placesevery one hundred twenty years. The Plan to which Casaubon, Belboand Diotallevi devote a year of their lives rests upon the assumptionthat Ingolf's message charges these knights to carry out missions inparticular places every hundred and twenty years, beginning in 1344.But, following her credo that the simplest, most economical explanationis always the best, Lia elegantly demonstrates to Casaubon that themessage discovered in Provins was actually a laundry list.18

The misreading of the message of Provins dramatizes the pitfalls ofconjecture. The episode functions much like the conclusion to The Nameof the Rose, where Guglielmo correctly identifies the culprit by incorrectlysurmising that the murderer was following a plan based on the book ofRevelation. The Name of the Rose allegorizes the story of conjecture astold in such studies as Semiotics and Philosophy of Language and The Signof Three. Like Guglielmo, Colonel Ardenti takes some interpretive risks.Having already read in one of the histories of the Rosicrucians a theoryof the one hundred twenty years, he guesses that one of the incompletenotations is "post 120 annos patebo." This in itself is not a bad strategy.Indeed, as Guglielmo points out in The Name of the Rose, the first ruleof decoding a secret message is to guess what it means. But in this casethe Colonel's abduction is faulty. The notation transcribed as an "a"and interpreted by Colonel Ardenti to mean "years" is actually theequivalent of a cents sign and indicates the price of the order. Ardenti'serror, like Guglielmo's faulty abduction, comes to symbolize the basic"fallibilism" that governs human knowledge.19

The distinction between Ardenti's interpretation and Lia's is spelledout in The Limits of Interpretation. Although both characters base theirinterpretations on a suspicion, it seems that Lia's suspicion is a "healthy"one while Ardenti's is not. In a 1988 interview with Ferdinando Adornato,Eco speaks of suspicion as a necessary component of the great scientificdiscoveries such as Copernicus's intuition of heliocentrism.

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All knowledge is based upon the exercise of suspicion. To suspect is important.It is necessary, however, to distinguish between "healthy" and "sick" suspicion."Healthy" suspicion is one which lasts for only a limited period and one whichis made public. "Sick" suspicion on the other hand is one which creates aninfinite chain of suppositions which are all secret and are never proven. Semioticsis the science which allows us to distinguish between these two types of suspicion.

Ardenti and Casaubon, who base their abductions on what Eco wouldcall "infinite interpretive drift" (Limits 28), have developed the wrongkind of suspicion. Whereas Casaubon departs from a car manual andreaches a cosmology, Lia departs from a cosmic plan and reduces it toa laundry list. Yet it is Lia who is able to explain to Casaubon why heis attracted to the play of musement in the first place. "Mankind can'tendure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake, justbecause four brainless atoms bumped into one another on a slipperyhighway. So a cosmic plot has to be found—God, angels,devils. Synarchyperforms the same function on a lesser scale" (266). Foucault's Pendulumis a tale constructed around what Eco might call an "obsessive idea"20—in this case the idea of a cosmic plot. In the address delivered at theFrankfurt Book Fair in 1986, Eco suggests that contemporary culture hasinherited from gnosticism in particular the idea that man is a victim ofa cosmic plot. The notion of the cosmic plot figures prominently in thework of such diverse writers as Chesterton, Popper, Pynchon, and Borges.21Eco cites Popper's explanation of the origin of this notion both in theFrankfurt address and in the novel: "The conspiracy theory of society. . . comes from abandoning God and then asking: 'Who is in his place?' "(Popper 123, qtd. in Foucault's Pendulum 511).

But perhaps more than any other writer, it is Borges who in hisficciones has probed the attraction of the cosmic plot. Eco's reading of thismétaphore obsédante in Borges might also be used to characterize Foucault'sPendulum. "One is never confronted by chance, or by Fate; one is alwaysinside a plot (cosmic or situational) developed by some other Mind ac-cording to a fantastic logic that is the logic of the Library" (Eco Limits81). The fascination with the nonexistent plot in Foucault's Pendulum closelyparallels the fascination with the nonexistent planet of Tlön in Borges'Ficciones. "Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minuteand vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too,is ordered. It may be so, but in accordance with divine laws—I translateinhuman laws— which we will never completely perceive" (34). Theprotagonists οι Foucault's Pendulum understand too late that their enormouschess game offers mankind an irresistible consolation. "There can be nofailure if there is really a Plan. Defeated you may be but never throughany fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You arenot a coward; you are a martyr" (513).

The nonexistent plan fabricated by Diotallevi, Casaubon, and Belboas a hoax begins to intrude upon reality. As is the case with the imaginary

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planet, Tlön, "humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is thediscipline of chess players, not of angels" (Borges 34). Agliè and thegroup of diabolicals whose esoteric submissions gave birth to ProjectHermes believe firmly that the Plan is real and that they are a part ofit.22 Agliè lures Belbo to the Conservatoire des arts et métiers in Pariswhere they interrogate him as to the secret of the map that will revealthe location of the "Navel of the World." But Belbo, having regainedhis sanity, chooses not to cooperate in perpetuating the myth of thePlan. His response to Agliè and those who seek the Absolute, the secretof the world, is "Ma gavte la nata" ["Take out the cork"]. To anyonewho didn't understand his favorite Piedmontese expression, Belbo wouldexplain that you say it to one who is too sure of himself. Remove thecork stuck in his behind and he returns to the human condition. Belbo

dies a martyr to guard against the same fanatical certainty which char-acterizes the villainous Jorge in The Name of the Rose.

Belbo refuses to bow to "nonmeaning" by taking refuge in illusory,consolatory Plans. He rejects the idea that existence is so meaninglessthat we must take refuge in the illusion of a search for its secret. Atthe novel's conclusion Casaubon learns from Belbo's death the only"secret" worth knowing:There are no "bigger secrets," because the moment a secret is revealed, it seemslittle. There is only an empty secret. A secret that keeps slipping through yourfingers. The secret of the orchid is that it signifies and affects the testicles. Butthe testicles signify a sign of the zodiac, which in turn signifies an angelichierarchy, which then signifies a musical scale, and the scale signifies a relationshipamong the humors. And so on. Initiation is learning never to stop. The universeis peeled like an onion, and an onion is all peel. Let us imagine an infiniteonion, which has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Initiationtravels an endless Moebius strip. (514)

This example of infinite slippage is a celebrated hermetic argumentrefuted by Bacon.23 In The Limits of Interpretation Eco cites Bacon in hisown argument against hermetic semiosis (25).

The central theme of Foucault's Pendulum, indeed the moral of thestory, seems to be that this endless traveling along the Moebius strip isfruitless and empty. The image of the infinite onion, the search forsecrets which in order to remain secrets must be "empty" secrets,revealing nothing in an endless deferral, is clearly denounced in thenovel. Yet this negative image of the infinite onion, which has its centereverywhere and its circumference nowhere, corresponds to a positiveimage often used by Eco. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, Ecouses the image of the rhizome, which has no center, no periphery, andno exit, to characterize what he calls conjectural space.24 The rhizomaticspace of conjecture, which "can be structured but is never structureddefinitively," has an unambiguously positive connotation in The Nameof the Rose. Recognizing the absence of a single truth, Guglielmo discards

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structure for "structurability," reason for "reasonability." (Eco's notionof "reasonability" is closely related to the idea of "pensiero debole"[weak thought] advanced by Vattimo and Rovatti.25) That Eco wouldchoose the image of the onion/rhizome as the projection of all that iswrong with the world seems highly problematic. All of the tidy distinctionsbetween unlimited semiosis and hermetic drift, good suspicion and badsuspicion, respect for the text and deconstructive deferral and drift areswept away with this choice. As much as Eco insists upon a cleardistinction between good and bad suspicion, in fact the two begin tomerge. Perhaps, in the practice of decoding semiotic messages, in theexercise of conjecture, there may be a gray zone in which the threat ofdeferral or drift is always present.

The shifting of this key image in Eco's novel reveals an ambiguity.Is this a simple contradiction or a moment of "blindness and insight,"a moment where the text begins to deconstruct the author's explicitthematic concerns? The fascination with the occult, the guarding of"empty" secrets, is labeled a sickness, a cancerous growth which in theend claims Diotallevi's life. The novel in other words seems to dramatize

the danger of hermetic drift or excessive interpretation outlined in TheLimits of Interpretation. If we are to "respect" Eco's text at all,26 we mustconcede that on a literal level the novel should be read as a cautionarytale against the attraction of the game of uncovering "secret meaningsbeyond the letter" (467).27 Yet much of the appeal of this book is inwatching the interpretive bravura of the protagonists. Is this not a sicknessof which Eco himself suffers?28 Despite his distaste for this kind ofautobiographical reading, Eco cannot be blind to the fact that Diotallevi,Belbo, and Casaubon are so many authorial surrogates.29 Indeed, theauthor has gleefully planted autobiographical tidbits in the identities ofCasaubon, Diotallevi, and particularly Jacopo Belbo. The games whichthe three editors play cannot help but conjure up Eco the semioticianas he skillfully deciphers texts, from James Joyce's' Ulysses to CharlesSchulz's Peanuts. Is Eco consciously satirizing the games he himself plays?How do we account for the slippage between the "good" image of therhizome and the "bad" image of the infinite onion?

Let us defer the question of whether the novel is truly blind to itsown insights or whether it is a conscious allegory of blindness and insight.Let us consider instead the conclusion of the novel. According to Ca-saubon, Belbo's initial embracing of the Plan was not due to faith butlack of faith. His refusal to humor the Diabolicals and his rejection ofthe Plan is instead due to a rediscovery of meaning. Casaubon believesthat Belbo in the end finds "qualcosa che ha più senso del resto" (494)["something that has more meaning than the rest" (516)]. Casaubonvisits Belbo's country home where he discovers a "Key Text" in thecupboard. The text tells of Belbo's moment of boyhood glory when heis asked to play the trumpet at the funeral of two fallen partisans. Only

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at the end of his life did Belbo realize that the moment when he held

the long final note was his moment of glory, his opportunity, his Truth.You spend a life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisivemoment, the moment that justifies birth and death, has already passed. It willnot return, but it was—full dazzling, generous as every revelation . . . thatmoment, in which he froze space and time, shooting his Zeno's arrow, had beenno symbol, no sign, symptom, allusion, metaphor, or enigma; it was what itwas. It did not stand for anything else. At that moment there was no longerany [deferral],30 and the score was settled, (525)

The glorification of the non-semiotic from the pen of a semiotician,a masterful decipherer of symbols, signs, symptoms, and allusions, is,to say the least, striking. Belbo's desire of "the thing itself," a desireof presence which Derrida has taught us is characteristic of Westernmetaphysics, is denied by the very notion of the sign. For the conditionof possibility of the sign is deferral, "putting off into the future anygrasping of the 'thing itself" (Atkins 17). Why does the novel end withthis glorification of a presemiotic moment? While Eco is on the onehand satirizing the notion of loss or absence implicit in the Derrideannotion of sign, he also seems to share Belbo's desire of presence.

If Eco's theory were faithfully mirrored in his novel, this glorificationof the non-semiotic would not be the logical conclusion. It is interestingthat the conclusion of the novel does not reinforce the distinction in The

Limits of Interpretation between unlimited semiosis and hermetic drift,between good suspicion and bad suspicion that is made when Lia correctlyinterprets the message of Provins as a laundry list. Belbo's final choice,and the lesson Casaubon learns from that choice, is not between goodand bad suspicion, creative abduction and hermetic drift, but only be-tween bad suspicion, the search for secrets on the one hand, and on theother a presemiotic or non-semiotic moment of glory whose "presence"cannot be evoked by any sign.

The lack of perfect complementarity between Eco's theory and hissecond novel is one of the most intriguing aspects of Foucault's Pendulum.^1The "loose ends" I have pointed out make this book not simply aprimer of semiotics but a fictional text. On the dust jacket of // nomedella rosa Eco has written of his decision to write his first novel: "Se ha

scritto un romanzo è perché ha scoperto, in età matura, che di ciö dicui non si puö teorizzare, si deve narrare." ["If he has written a novelit is because he has discovered, upon reaching maturity, that what wecannot theorize about, we must narrate" (my trans).]32 Foucault's Pendulumfits this description much more than Eco's first novel. While The Nameof the Rose allegorizes or exemplifies Eco's theory, Il pendolo problematizesit. The novel reminds us that the questions raised in Eco's theoreticalworks cannot be tidily resolved. In our reading of the book of the worldthe distinction between interpretation and use, between good suspicionand bad suspicion, between creative abduction and hermetic drift, is not906 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

always so easy to discern. We can never be assured that our search forunderstanding is not an endless journey along a Moebius strip. This iswhy, despite his ardent defense of "reasonability," Eco understandsquite as well as Borges the fascination with the irrational.

NOTES

A brief version of this paper was delivered at the annual meeting of the AmericanAssociation of Italian Studies in April 1992 at the University of North Carolina.

See Postscript to "The Name of the Rose" (7), Indeed, Eco maintains that an author'sfavorite readings are readings he had not foreseen.

As Rocco Capozzi points out, however, each time the frustrated critic thinks (s)hehas found a new interpretive key to Eco's work, s(he) runs across a reference to thatauthor or title in one of Eco's own essays or interviews (236, n. 31).

See for example Walter Stephens, Robert Artigiani, and Theresa Coletti.See Atkins (24-25) for a clear and concise characterization of these two choices.This was also the moment when the Italian communist party broke with the Soviet

communists to form its own brand of Eurocommunism.

Of course it should not be forgotten that Eco, like the other experimentalist writersof the Gruppo 63, had decisively broken with neorealism. Thus, there is a certain amountof irreverence in Eco's treatment of the Resistance as the ultimate literary theme,

See Sciascia's "Nota" appended to // contesto (121).See Denis Mack Smith (175) for a discussion of transformismo beginning in the post

unification period.One culprit in the P Due Scandal seems to be Licio Gelli, the head of the secret

Masonic lodge. Gelli's connections to the Vatican and to the Italian political establishment,particularly Andreotti, have never been fully understood. See Luigi Malerba's // pianetaazzurro for a highly fictionalized account of this murky scandal.

See "The Crisis of the Crisis of Reason," in Travels in Hyperreality .For a brief but informative overview oipensiero debole see Stefano Rosso, "Postmodern

Italy."See Eco "Horns, Hooves, Insteps" and "Antiporfirio" in The Sign of Three. See

also Cannon, Postmodern Italian Fiction and De Lauretis, Umberto Eco.This keynote address was delivered by Eco at the Frankfurt Buchmesse on October

6, 1986, and later published in Alfabeta as "L'irrazionale ieri e oggi."See Jean François Lyotard for his characterization of postmodernism as the period

of the dissolution of the master narratives.Belbo maintains that the "incredible bureaucracy of this genocide," the strip

searching, the sorting and storing of clothes, only makes sense if the Nazis were lookingfor something, the map that would allow Hitler to determine the exact point under theearth's concave vault where the telluric currents converged. This episode has sparkedaccusations of anti-Semitism from some reviewers. It should be remembered, however,that the pain Diotallevi experiences as Belbo expounds his mad theory reflects the author'sperception of the obscenity of any theory purporting to "explain away" the holocaust.

See The Limits of Interpretation, particularly Chapter Three, where Eco argues thatalthough "it is very difficult to decide whether a given interpretation is a good one, it is,however, always possible to decide whether it is a bad one" (42),

See The Limits of Interpretation (5) for a discussion of the virtues of the simple oreconomical hypothesis.

See The Sign of Three (218) for a discussion of Peirce's idea of fallibilism.20See Postscript to "The Name of the Rose" (81).

I am grateful to my colleague Peter Hays for pointing out this similarity betweenEco's work and Pynchon's.

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Again there is a parallel to The Name of the Rose. Agliè falls captive to the cosmicconspiracy theory just as Jorge da Burgos believes that he is part of a nonexistent planbased on the Book of Revelation.

In Parasceve ad Historiam Naturalem et Experimentalem Bacon raises an objection to thecelebrated Hermetic argument, based on the fact that "the plant orchis has the same formof human testicles." Eco cites Francis Bacon's discussion of hermetic semiosis in The Limits

of Interpretation (29).See Postscript to "The Name of the Rose" (57).The image used by the debolisti to describe the always provisional, often fallible,

traveling along the cluster of messages is the image of the net. See Gianni Vattimo,"Bottle, Net, Truth, Revolution, Terrorism, Philosophy" (24).

See Chapter Three of The Limits of Interpretation for a discussion of respect for therights of the text and an explanation of the distinction between use and interpretation.

Rocco Capozzi argues that the denunciation of hermetic interpretive practices isquite explicit in Eco's novel (227).

Eco makes no secret of the fact that he has in his private collection about 1500volumes on the occult! See interview with Adornato.

In Postscript to "The Name of the Rose," Eco treats with disdain the idea that anauthor identifies with a particular character and suggests that authors identify with theadverbs.

I have translated the Italian "rinvio" as "deferral" rather than "deferment," theterm used in the William Weaver translation. "Deferral" is the term which Eco uses

repeatedly in The Limits of Interpretation and which captures all that is wrong with hermeticdrift.

In his essay on The Name of the Rose, Walter Stephens was the first to formulatethe question of the degree of complementarity between Eco's theory and his fiction inprecisely these terms,

This statement appears only on the dust jacket of the first Italian edition of thenovel; it does not appear in the English translation .

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Indiana U P, 1979._____Semiotics and Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1984._____Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, 1986.Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1980.Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.

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Mack Smith, Denis, Storia d'ltalia. Bari: Editor! Laterza, 1969.Mackey, Louis."The Name of the Book." Sub-Stance 14 (1985): 30-39.Malerba, Luigi. // planeta azzurro. Milano: Garzanti, 1986.Rosso, Stefano. "Postmodern Italy: Notes on the 'Crisis of Reason,' 'Weak

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