| Birgit Eriksson. |
A NOVEL LOOK AT THEORY |
About Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose
and Foucault's PendulumThe Island of the Day Before Semiotics. |
Semiotics and novels
When Umberto Eco published his first
novel,
The Name of the Rose, in 1980, he was already a well-known intellectual
and writer. In Italy he had played
an important
role in all sorts of academic and more
popular
aesthetic, cultural and political discussions
for more than 20 years; he had published
books on a wide range of different
topics,
and every week he wrote in the magazine
l'Espresso.
Among academics he was also known internationally
as a literary critic and semiotician.
In
literary criticism his early book The Open Work (1962) and The Role of the Reader (1979) were influential for their studies
in the ambiguity of literary and other
works
of art, and for their invitation to
readers
to participate more actively in the
interpretive
and creative process. In the field
of semiotics
he was the author of important books
such
as A Theory of Semiotics (1976) and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), and although he likes to claim that
semiotics has existed the last 2000
years
he is often regarded as one of the
founding
fathers of modern semiotics.
It was therefore not surprising that
Eco's
best-selling debut as a novelist received
some attention, and for those familiar
with
his interests in James Bond, Sherlock
Holmes
and Thomas Aquinas nor should it have
been
too surprising that The Name of the Rose told the story of a complicated murder mystery
set in a 14th- century Italian monastery.
Page. 2.
Clearly there was a connection between the novel and his interests in both
popular culture and medieval history and
aesthetics. Nor was it difficult to see a
connection to his semiotics, and the novel
has often been read as 'really' being about
something besides the dark monastery murders:
for example as being just a fictionalised
version of his theoretical work. The point
I wish to make in this paper is that Eco's
novels are more than this. To read them as
an expansion of his theoretical work is certainly
interesting, but not because they are more
or less the same - rather they exceed the
theory and do it in a way that shows some
of the limits of theory.
When looking at the differences between Eco's
theoretical reflections and his fiction,
a place to begin is his own statements. He
deliberately draws attention to it, when
he, paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein on the
dust jacket of the Italian version of The Name of the Rose, states that "what you can't theorize
about, you'll have to tell about".
This
does not mean, however, that the material
to be treated in the two genres is
completely
different. They do not deal with different
parts of reality, and Eco does not
regard
one as more creative than the other.
The
important difference for him lies rather
in the mode of writing: While the novel
is
characterized by a multiplicity of
meanings
by showing how any emotion or situation
is
full of contradictions, scientific
or theoretical
writings have the mathematical formula
as
their ideal and try to establish order,
clarity
and exactitude.
What unites many of Eco's
theoretical writings is his interest in semiotics.
He has contributed to the development of
semiotics both as a general theory and as
an analytical tool. According to himself
one of his reasons for choosing semiotics
was that it could grasp everything and make
it possible for him to transgress some traditional
boundaries: for instance, to analyse both
high and popular culture, both literature
and other discourses. What semiotics does
is to regard all cultural expressions as
messages in a communication process: as systems
of signs that we use to describe the world
and tell it to one another.
Page. 3.
It was semiotics that actually made it possible
for him to talk about different phenomena
in a homogeneous way, and to make his different
studies - of medieval aesthetics and popular
culture, of modernist literature and television
programmes - meet and enrich each other.
We can see the method being practiced in
his essays, where he always analyses reality
as a communicative affair, no matter if the
topic is the avant- garde of the 60s, the
terrorism of the 70s, the occultism of the
80s or the ethics of the 90s. Semiotics
is
the method that enables him to talk
about
all of it at the same time: seeing
it all
as aspects of one and the same world
of significations
and interpretations.
That semiotics is a common denominator
in
Eco's writings does not mean that they
are
all highly theoretical. Right from
the beginning
of his intellectual career, and long
before
his debut as a novelist, Eco has not
only
written weighty books with systematic
and
general semiotic theories, but also
very
small and occasional texts, written
for specific
and local situations - like his mini-diary.
Most of these everyday texts were originally
published in papers and weeklys, and
as a
genre we can locate them somewhere
in between
theoretical and fictional discourse.
It is significant that
Eco has continued writing these small, unpretentious
texts after his worldwide success with the
novels. Unlike so many other writings in
literary history, they are obviously not
written just to earn money and thus to enable
the writer to concentrate on more important
and prestigious forms of writing. On the
contrary, it is possible to see the small
essays and the novels alike as a sign of
Eco's acknowledgement that it might be necessary
to use one language for saying what you cannot
say in another. And I think this acknowledgement
became more important for him with the general
recognition of what we now know as the post-modern
condition.
We can see it in Eco's essay from Faith in Fakes, "Language, Power, Force" (1979), where he deals with the modern or
post-modern sensation of living in
a universe
without a heart or a centre, only with
margins.
He ends this essay with the suggestion
-
following Foucault - that this universe is better grasped by fiction than
by theory.
Page. 4.
It might be because of this recognition that
he began to write novels. And it might also
be because of his sensation of a centreless
world that from the time of The Role of the Reader he turned from the general models of communication
to the more specific problems regarding
the
interpretation of literary texts. In
any
case it will be interesting to see
whether
he will continue writing novels now
that
he - with Kant and the Platypus (1997) - has turned his analytical and theoretical
attention away from the interpretation
of
literature again and towards a more
general
cognitive theory about the meeting
between
reality and perception.
Eco's last novel, The Island of the Day Before (1994), is literally about the lack of a
centre. It tells about the 17th century
after the scientific discovery that the earth
is not centre of the universe and before the modern invention, not least by the novel,
of the human being as the centre of
everything.
In The Island of the Day Before there is
no longer a centre in the universe
and not
yet a centre in man, whether in his
individuality,
reason or psychology. The novel's very
last
words state about its 17th- century
people
that "It was people without a
soul",
and for Eco this is obviously not a
loss.
By focussing on "people without
a soul"
it is possible for him to write a novel
where
he can play with rhetoric and metaphors
and
avoid anthropocentrism. More than anything
else The Island of the Day Before is this: a light-footed experiment with
the possibilities of the soulless or
centreless
novel.
In theoretical and scientific
discourses it is harder to make these experiments.
In post-modern and deconstructive theories
it has been tried, but the result - if the
author is not Jacques Derrida - is very often
also criticised for its lack of coherence,
not least by Eco, who has criticised many
sorts of irrationalism, hermetism and deconstruction,
not always being too cautious about the differences
between the three. According to Eco, in serious
arguments you do need a centre, a stable
position from where to see and write, and
he has insisted on reason and classical Aristotelian
logic as fundamental to all serious arguments,
but not to all discourses.
Page. 5.
Poetry and fiction for instance grant other
possibilities: Here you do not have to follow
reason or agree on one type of logic. Here
you can experiment with different types of
logic and experiences and rhetoric, have
different centres, change points of view
and 'points of speech' - and by doing so
you might get quite another result than what
you get if you insist on Aristotle's law
of identity (A = A), on his law of contradiction
(nothing can at the same time be A and not
A), and on his law of excluded middle (A
is either true or not true, tertium non datur
). In fiction there is very often not identity
and not an either-or; here we see other possibilities
and might discover that third ways exist:
tertium datur.
In the rest of my paper
I shall examine how these possibilities are
explored and what their consequences are,
first in The Name of the Rose and then in Foucault's Pendulum (1988).1 To begin with I shall look at the
novels as if they were theories and
then
I shall show how the theoretical positions
are transformed, because they are not,
in
fact, theories, but novels.
The Name of the Rose
The novel as theory
Taking a first glance at The Name of the Rose you might say that the world presented here
has a very strong centre. At least it has
a strict inner structure: The setting for
the novel is a medieval monastery with a
library, described meticulously in words
and images; the story unfolds in the course
of seven days, corresponding to seven murders,
and the days and the text are divided into
periods corresponding to the liturgical hours.
We get the impression of a strong religious
order, and the seven days of the composition
reinforce the impression by alluding to Genesis
and later to the Apocalypse of St. John.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
1 In the following I quote from The Name of the Rose , Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., San Diego
1983, and Foucault's Pendulum, Secker and Warburg, London 1989, both translated
from the Italian by William Weaver.
Page. 6.
Also on the thematical level the composition
is clear: In the detective story there is
the conflict between William, the detective,
and Jorge, the librarian; and in the historical
narrative there is the conflict between the
established church and the heresy, and thereby
also between William and the inquisition.
These conflicts are not at all as different
as they seem, since the two main threads
of the novel intertwine: The detective story
is not only about murders, but also about
the nature of laughter and forbidden knowledge.
And the historical novel is not only about
religious and political conflicts, but contains
murders too; only here they are in the name
of God. Both narrative threads therefore
require that the protagonists and the reader
make expeditions to the books of the library,
and both are also a questioning of truth
that involves a struggle between nominalism
and realism, between totality and detail,
and between empiricism and dogmatism. In
this way they can be regarded as versions
of the same fundamental conflict. But what
are the positions?
First of all there is
William, the hero of the novel. Politically
and religiously he is the tolerant and open-minded
Franciscan. Epistemologically he is the cautious
observer of particularities and the sensible
interpreter whose method is a combination
of sensuous empiricism, fallibilism and the
constructive skills of the mind. He is sceptical
about universals and ideas, which are only
signs, and tries to "discover things
in their individual truth" (The Name of the Rose, p. 317), but we also learn that the narrator,
Also,
had the impression that William was not at
all interested in the truth, which is nothing
but the adjustment between the thing and
the intellect. On the contrary, he amused
himself by imagining how many possibilities
were possible
(ibid. p. 306). |
On all levels - the political, the religious
and the epistemological
- William has two opponents: the inquisition
and, more importantly, Jorge of Burgos. For
different reasons, but with more or less
the same result, they both try to defend
the one and only perfect, fundamentalist truth and metaphysical
order - at all costs.
Page. 7.
And the enemy here is not only the modern
scepticism of William, but also heresy and
all other sorts of objects and activities
that might destabilize the established church
and order.
In short, we have a structure
with one open, modern position (keywords:
empiricism, humanism, fallibilism, nominalism,
reason) and one authoritative traditional
position
(keywords: metaphysics, truth, dogmatism,
intolerance, belief, philosophical realism).
These are by far the most important positions
in the structure of the novel and the development
of its plot, and are almost as mutually exclusive
as black and white.
But we also have a third
position, which is neither traditional and
authoritative nor modern and rational. Here
we meet the laughter and the heretical movements,
the sex and the dreams, the religious satires
and the miniature paintings showing another
universe in the margins of the Holy Scriptures'
authoritative truth. These practices do not
criticise rationally, but experiment with
the invention of a world with everything
turned upside down. If we should generalize
these practices and their function in relation
to dogmatic truth, they are not really modern,
but rather post-modern destabilizing. If
apart from William of Occam and Roger Bacon,
William's position, with his love of signs
and abductions, reminds us of Peirce, then
this position could easily be taken from
Bakhtin's book about Rabelais and carnivalism.
But it could also be the position of deconstruction,
and it is tempting to read it as a comment
to both Bakhtin and Derrida when Jorge warns
against taking the deconstruction of the
hierarchies seriously as an alternative truth:
|
But if one day somebody, brandishing the
words of the Philosopher and therefore speaking
as a philosopher, were to raise the weapon
of laughter to the condition of subtle weapon,
if the rhetoric of conviction where replaced
by the rhetoric of mockery, if the topics
of the patient construction of the images
of redemption were to be replaced by the
topics of the impatient deconstruction and
distor tion2 of every holy and venerable image
- oh, that day even you, William, and all
your knowledge, would be swept away. (ibid.
p. 476)
|
Page.8.
William denies this, of course - believing
in his modern, experimental and sceptical
knowledge - but the question is whether the
novel also denies this. Exactly how much
does the laughter sweep away?
To answer this,
it is
necessary to look at it not only as
a synchronic
structure with positions, but also
as a diachronic
narrative with lives. If we look at
The Name of the Rose as a narrative rather than as a stable structure
of oppositions, it is remarkable that Eco
does not allow his hero, the clever semiotician,
to be successful. This is not a Hollywood
movie, William is not Sean Connery, and things
are not as black and white as the opposition
between his empiricism and interpretive openness
and Jorge's always already perfect truth
suggests. Like all theoretical minds, William
is tempted by the truth, and when he cannot
discover the first killings "in their
individual truth" he chooses the wrong
context - that is: the wrong book - to explain
them. He sees the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse
as the key to the murders, and like all hermeneutic
circularism, the interpreted object does
as is expected: Jorge finds out that William
believes in the apocalyptic connection and
adjusts to it. What we have, then, is not
crime and detection as simple, isolated events,
but a much more complex interactive process
where William and Jorge, or reader and text,
both adjust to and seduce each other. In
the end, of course, William solves the murders
and finds out about the other context, Aristotle's
dangerous book on the comedy, but the point
is that it is too late: When the library
burns down, and the inquisition continues
its murderous trials, Jorge is the one to
laugh, William the one to cry.
----------------------------------------------------------
2 In the English version the Italian words
"decostruzione" and "stravolgimento"
(Il nome della rosa, Bompiani, Milano 1980, p. 479) are translated
into "dismantling and upsetting",
which I have replaced with "deconstruction
and distortion", a more direct, but
in view of "decostruzione" also
a much more meaningful translation, since
Eco would not be Eco if he used this word
innocently.
Page. 9.
At the end of the novel, there are not many possibilities
left on the thematical level for making possible
worlds, and to stress the lack of success
the novel ironically follows the first and
'wrong' explanation when it lets "the
forces of hell prevail" (ibid. p. 480)
and the Western world's biggest collection
of knowledge burn down like in the world
conflagration of the Apocalypse. With our
historical knowledge we can of course claim
that in the long run William's modernity
will win and Jorge's truth lose. But this
optimism finds no support in the novel, where
with sustained irony the contemporary narrator
claims to be
| comforted and consoled in finding it immeasurably
remote in time (now that the waking of reason
has dispelled all the monsters that its sleep
had generated), gloriously lacking in any
relevance for our day, atemporally alien
to our hopes and our certainties (ibid. p.
5). |
The novel is thoroughly pessimistic regarding
the moral as well as the intellectual quest
for truth. What we have at the end is not
a perfect world order and not even a reasonable
one. Modern reason has not succeeded in sweeping
traditional truth away, so what kind of detective
story is this when possessing the truth does
not help at all, and neither the criminal
nor the detective wins? And can you do this
at all - "discover things in their individual
truth" and "imagine how many possibilities
are possible" - instead of going for
the same kind of truth as Jorge? Well, one
thing you could do is to stop focussing on
truths and theoretical positions and write
a novel instead. This is what Eco has done,
and in spite of its historical and epistemological
pessimism, he has written a novel that in
its own way is a perfectly happy one.
The novel as novel
Novels are, as Eco describes them in The Role of the Reader, machines for making possible worlds. And
these worlds are not meant to be universal.
In his famous treatise on the novel, The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt describes as one of the characteristics
of the genre that it rejects universals and
replaces
Page. 10.
| the unified world picture of the Middle Ages
with another very different one - one which
presents us, essentially, with a developing,
but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals
having particular experiences at particular
times and at particular places. 3 |
In short, the novel seems to be the place
to try out nominalism in practice,
to imagine
possibilities and "discover things
in
their individual truth". In the
following
I shall try to show how with The Name of the Rose Eco does exactly this - and try to answer
the question, if this becomes a new
truth
or if this too is swept away by deconstructive
irony.
Rather than being generally known,
an individual
truth has to be experienced and expressed
by someone and from somewhere. If we
look
at The Name of the Rose as a narrative told from a particular place
and in a particular way, we soon lose the
apparent clarity of its thematical conflicts
and well- ordered physical and historical
world. Right from the beginning the story
is placed in a frame that is a whole nest
of Chinese boxes with a range of different
narrators writing from different positions
and different historical periods: The contemporary
authorial narrator finds a manuscript that
has travelled through a lot of hands and
been translated, appended and changed from
the 14th-century to the present day, when
he "out of pure love of writing"
decides to publish his "Italian version
of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version
of a seventeenth century Latin edition of
a work written in the last or next-to-last
decade of the fourteenth century" (ibid.
p. 4).
This ironic nest
of
Chinese boxes could be rejected as
just another
example of postmodernist play. But
beyond
playing Eco also draws attention to
the centreless
universe of the novel, stressing that
this
lack of a stable centre is not merely
a loss:
not having one central position from
which
to speak also represents the possibility
to create a more open world with room
for
differentiations and meetings between different
points of view and different discourses.
----------------------------------------------------
3 Ian Watt: The Rise of the Novel, The Hogarth Press, London 1987 (1957) p.
31.
Page.11.
This is obvious in the
beginning, which is not one, but three beginnings:
First the framework, which is "Naturally,
a manuscript": "On August 16, 1968,
I was handed a book written by a certain
Abbé Vallet, Le manuscit de Dom Adson de Melk, traduit
en français d'aprè l'édition de Dom J. Mabillon..." (ibid. p .1); then the prologue:
"In the beginning was the Word
and the
Word was with God and the Word was
God"
(ibid. p. 11), and finally the "First
day": "It was a beautiful
morning
at the end of November" (ibid.
p. 21).
With these three
beginnings
the novel not only introduces three
different
narrators, but also quotes three very
different
literary traditions: the literary cliché
about the long lost but now found manuscript,
the Genesis of the Gospel according
to St
John, and finally a literary universe
very
similar to the one we know from the
famously
unsuccessful beginnings of Charlie
Brown's
Snoopy.
All three are
very well-known
beginnings from the history of literature,
but also beginnings from what we normally
consider completely different realms
of this
history. We have here a mixture of,
confrontation
and play between traditions - the ones
already
mentioned but also the detective story
and
the historical novel, the gothic novel
and
the Bildungsroman, the religious satire
and
medieval chronicles, Christian mythology
and many others.
What is important
in this way of using literary traditions
is not only how on an aesthetic and stylistic
level Eco makes high and low, new and old
vocabularies meet in the very polyphonic
world that is the novel's own. The narrative
technique - or techniques - are also interesting
on an epistemological level, not because
one is more or less true than the other,
but precisely because it does not make any
sense to ask about the truth-value of literary
traditions. They are manifestations of different
ways of seeing, organizing and telling the
world, but they do not, as theories might,
exclude each other. They do not aim to be
universal, but can live together as individuals
sometimes can:
Page. 12
Snoopy does not need to eliminate the
Bible,
and Eco can test the possibilities
of his
own possible world.
That it does not
make sense to ask about truth-value does
not mean that all readings and depictions
of the world are equally good. What makes
sense is to ask about the usefulness - or
joy - of the different ways: what is good
in which situation. The novel also points
at the different possibilities by dividing
Also, the narrator's voice, into two discourses:
The old Adso looks back at the experiences
of his youth with a prudent, integrating
and unifying glance, but this alternates
with the fragmented, uncomprehending and
naive voice of the young Adso, who narrates
while he experiences. Adso thus alternates
between a vertical and a horizontal organization
of the events, just as the reader is forced
to alternate between the detective story
and the historical novel. The historical
descriptions interrupt every reading for
the plot, and the detective story points
at the fact that in spite of the reality
effects this is still 'just a novel'. In
this way they disturb each other's quests
for truth: for the perfect explanation and
for historical realism. They survive as narratives,
as possible ways of organizing the world,
but never as pure genres: The historical
novel contains serious realism, but also
play; the detective story is part of Western
logocentrism, but also part of popular culture;
and Adso's autobiographical discourse would
like to be teleological, but is also biological,
and also influenced by the fragments of arbitrary
texts he finds in the ruin of the burnt-
down library.
All in all, the linear
narratives exist in a polyphonic composition
where they are constantly played off against
the novel's bric-a-brac of quotations from
literary and philosophical traditions. Adso
calls attention to this when he warns the
reader that "nor do I promise you an
accomplished design, but, rather, a tale
of events..." (ibid. p. 18). By characterizing
his writing in this way (in Italian as "un'elenco
di fatti", a list of events) he returns
to a narrative mode previous to the novel:
to a simpler, but also more open way of narrating,
where he can list the facts one after the other without
trying to link them to each other causally
and without establishing a centre.
Page. 13.
The result is that we have a novel that on
the one hand is held together by medieval
time and space and by Adso's memories of
the events and on the other hand is divided
into a mosaic of quotations, of disjecta membra. The tension between these uniting and dividing
principles is absolutely central because
they also function as two interpretive
strategies:
one that learns from the medieval way
of
reading the world as similarities and
one
that follows the modern way of reading
through
individual qualities.
In reading The Name of the Rose we are, just like Adso with his theocratic
hierarchical reading of the world and
the
bric-a- brac of the literary fragments,
placed
between two possibilities: to search
for
the uniting principle between the many
different
elements and read it as one text or
to read
the apparent unity, the book, as a
mosaic
of fragments that directs us towards
other
texts.
The point
is,
first of all, that if we follow only
one
of these interpretive strategies, we
end
up doing what the novel warns against:
searching
for purity and truth, either by integrating
all the details in an overall design
or by
digging up the sources of the quotations
and seeing them as some kind of deeper
truth
than the novel's own polyphony.
Second,
and just
as important: We can and shall not
totally
avoid either of the two strategies.
From
a theoretical point of view we can
choose
to support either Jorge or William
or deconstruction,
but in reading the novel we have to
learn
from Adso who resembles both Jorge
and William:
not trying to see a narrative unity
would
be boring and probably impossible,
and to
be completely blind to the intertextual
references
would deprive the reading of some of
the
novel's additional meanings - not only
its
post-modern ironical play, but also
how with
his additive composition Eco approaches
the
often anonymous medieval texts that
did not
have to respond to the modern requests of originality and authenticity.
4
Page. 14.
The additive composition can be read as a
strategy to avoid the central position of
strong authorial subjectivity and to gain
a complexity of references and echoes, which
he probably could not have achieved without
borrowing other voices. What Eco does, in
respect to Ian Watt's remarks about the novel,
is to tell how individual truths are not
necessarily centered in individuals, but
are also out there: in all the possible worlds
of literature. Reading The Name of the Rose,
the reader experiences what William has yet
to discover: that it is difficult to avoid
a position that resembles Jorge's: Like Jorge
we as well as William must admire the overall
design of its possible world, and to enjoy
it we must keep an eye on it and not let
all the intertextual references destabilize
the unity. But we must also do what the destabilizing
third position does and William tries: sometimes
forget the narrative unity and enjoy all
the possibilities that the novel's use of
literary traditions gives us for constructing
our own possible worlds. Like Adso we must
be able to do both - accept the hierarchies,
but also take a close look at the fragments,
with the risk or chance that they can turn
everything upside down.
Foucault's Pendulum.
Foucault's Pendulum tells the story of three friends - Belbo,
Casaubon and Diotallevi - and their idea
about the Plan, which is their own reconstruction
and reinterpretation of world history. We
follow the three men from when they first
meet at a bar in Milano in 1972 until the
end in 1984, when the Plan has already caused
the death of two of them, and Casaubon, the
narrator, is waiting for his pursuers while
looking back at what happened and trying
to discover the reasons for and logic of
how the Plan got out of control.
-------------------------------------------------------
4 Cf. Umberto Eco's introduction in Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, New Haven/ London, 1986 (Italian original, 1959).
Page. 15
The main thread of the narrative is thus
the development of the Plan, which we follow
fromthe three men's first discussion of Casaubon's
thesis about the Knights Templars, to their
publishing of a series of occult books and
their hereby inspired intellectual game in
which they construct a new world history
according to an occult master plan, and finally
to the fatal consequences when the Plan is
taken seriously. In the Plan world history
is described as a fight between secret societies
that have struggled over the centuries to
reconstruct a lost message that would ensure
them world hegemony, and the murderous consequences
are that reality strikes back: that some
secret and occult society takes the plan
seriously and comes to get the lost message.
Foucault's Pendulum thus deals even
more
explicitly than The Name of the Rose
with
the interpretations and narratives
we make
of the world: with how to connect events
and how to attribute meaning to them.
But
if we look at it 'as theory', which
means
as exposing a discussion between theoretical
or interpretive positions, it is also
quite
different from The Name of the Rose,
which
at least pretended to have a clear
opposition
between the detective and the criminal.
In
a way Foucault's Pendulum starts where The Name of the Rose ends.
Right from the beginning we know that Eco's
second novel will not be about a fight between
personified good and evil, or a "whodunit",
but will be about a seduction: about how
the Plan, which started as an innocent fiction,
could seduce its creators so that they, in
Casaubon's words, "were slowly losing
that intellectual light that allows you always
to tell the similar from the identical, the
metaphorical from the real" (Foucault's Pendulum p. 468).
If there
is an
opposition it is this one, which is
also
familiar to readers of Eco from The
Limits
of Interpretation and Interpretation
and
Overinterpretation: the opposition
between
getting seduced by the similar and
metaphorical
on the one hand and insisting on the
mind's
possibility to separate them from the
identical
and real on the other. But it is a
particularity
of his novel that the second position
is
almost empty: Casaubon's wife enacts
it,
but she plays a very small role; part
of
Belbo's biography can be read as representing
it, but both do it in a biological and existential
sense.
Page. 16
If we look for "the intellectual light"
of the above quotation, we find it only in
Casaubon's narrative intentions. The light
of reason is explicitly what he wants to
shed over the development of the Plan. As
stated in the beginning, he will "ask
the help of Science" (ibid. p.9) and
"Stick to facts, causes, effects. I
am here for this reason, and also for this
reason, and this..." (ibid. p. 17-18).
In reality, however,
scientific and reasonable discourses do not
take up much room in the novel. The focus
is rather on vocabularies that do not respect
logics of causality or chronological order.
The three friends each have their own logic
and way of organizing the world, and these
are also compositional principles in the
formal structure of the novel:
First, the novel
is divided into ten parts taken from the
Sefirot tree of the Jewish kabala and hereby
referring to a cosmic order and an overall
metaphysical design. This is the principle
of faith, tradition and wisdom represented
by Diotallevi, the imaginary Jew. Second,
it is also divided into 120 short chapters,
all introduced by a quotation said to be
found on Belbo's computer, and with no obvious
logic other than a more or less arbitrary
combination from the huge archive of intertextuality.
Finally,
the
novel is structured like the narration
of
Casaubon, who, while waiting for his
presumed
pursuers, tries to discover the chronological
causality in their loss of control
over the
Plan. This is not an easy job, since
the
narrative includes the Templars' history
since 1344, the occult or hermetic
tradition
of the last two thousand years, and
some
of Belbo's computer files with childhood
memories and other personal writings.
Moreover,
the borderline between similarities
and identities
is not at all easy to define. Casaubon
starts
out having "a cultural investigation
agency", being "a kind of
private
eye of learning" (ibid. p. 224),
and
he soon discovers that the cultural
information
he finds is connected not only in linear
causalities, but also in networks.
In the
library he discovers that he can always
find
connections if he wants to, and as
a true
rhizomatic
Page. 17.
encyclopaedist he is able to associate from
sausage to Plato in five steps: "Let's
see: sausage, pig bristle, paint brush, Mannerism,
Idea, Plato. Easy." (ibid. p. 225).
The Plan is thus a mixture
of these three different types of logic:
Diotallevi's mystical insight is deprived
of its religious content and combined with
the computer's arbitrary combinations, which
are seen as signs of a hidden metaphysical
truth, and all is united in the encyclopaedic
Plan:
| wanting connections, we found connections
- always, everywhere, and between everything.
The world exploded in a whirling network
of kinships, where everything pointed to
everything else, everything explained every-
thing else... . (ibid. pp. 463-4). |
By ignoring traditional scientific virtues,
first they find superficial analogies between
historical facts, then they ironically interpret
these analogies as secrets, and finally they
attach some paranoid causal or symbolic value
to them. In this way they are able to construct
an esoteric, ironic and paranoid world history,
guided only by the aesthetic fascination
of their own intellectual game - and mistakenly
believing that their possible world is isolated
from the surrounding world, and that their
aesthetic play is without consequences in
the real world.
From Eco's theoretical writings we are familiar
with his critique of this kind of practice,
regardless of whether he finds it in historical
hermetism, in deconstruction or in contemporary
culture's fascination with irrationalism.
The question is therefore how this critique
presents itself in the novel. As far as I
can see there are two significant ways in
which Foucault's Pendulum differs from Eco's theoretical position.
One has to do with the novel's aesthetic
and stylistic strategy, the other with
the
plot development.
First,
it is obvious that Foucault's Pendulum is not only critical towards, but also extremely
fascinated by the Plan's ironic-aesthetic
strategy, which it unfolds at such
a length
that the novel itself adopts some of
the
characteristic features of the Plan.
Page. 18
In presenting the Plan it indeed follows
the superficial analogies and the paranoid
interpretations very far in warning
against
them, and the critique is thus expressed
in a vocabulary very similar to that
which
is criticised. There is, in short,
a remarkable
resemblance between what the novel
criticises
and its own aesthetic and stylistic
practice,
and this means that the novel warns
against
a fascination that seems to be necessary
for the reader's enjoyment of it. To
enjoy
its immense compilation of historical
information
we do not only have to follow the analogies
and interpretations of the Plan, but
also
to learn from it and construct our
own connections.
Second, there is an interesting
lack of consistency or at least an ambiguity
in the plot development. The Plan is described
as a construction of a possible world, with
the only problem that it gets more and more
real. The aesthetic construction has ethical
and existential consequences when the occult
somehow acts according to it: as if it were
true. By letting this happen, the novel does
two things: It presents the secret and dangerous
societies, both as the Plan's paranoid construction
and as a strong power in the world outside
the Plan: in 'reality'. And it lets reality
and fiction intertwine without giving any
reasonable logical explanation. In this way
the novel comes very close to constructing
its own paranoid, symbolic connection.
Casaubon points
at this
when he asks: "was it possible
for reality
not only to catch up with fiction but
actually
to precede it, or, rather, to rush
ahead
of it and repair the damage that it
would
cause?" (ibid. p. 171). The point
is
that the novel apparently agrees when
it
makes this possible: When it constructs
its
own similarities and ignores a chronological
causality in the plot development,
it resembles
the Plan, which is based on this ignorance
and, in Diotallevi's words, regards
"Space-time:
the error of the West" (ibid.
p. 469).
And when it lets the Plan be both made-up
and true, the consequence is necessarily
that as readers of the novel we are
no more
able than the creators of the Plan
to "tell
the similar from the identical, the
metaphorical
from the real".
Page. 19.
If Foucault's Pendulum had been a theory, this paradoxical lack
of consistency between what the novel
says
and does would have been a serious
problem.
Fortunately, however, it is not a theory,
and in the following I shall argue
that the
paradox gives the novel a special quality,
and that it would have been much more
problematic
if the ambiguity had not been there.
The problem raised by Foucault's Pendulum deals with the relationship between reality
and our fictions, readings and interpretations
of it. Like The Name of the Rose, it relates that fictional or interpretive
practice can change the world because
they
have a seductive power with unpredictable
effects. Reality might adjust and make
the
fiction come true, not as mimesis,
but in
a much more unpredictable way. Fiction
and
reality, interpretation and history,
are
not identical, but they do meet, and
this
meeting raises aesthetic as well as
epistemological
and ethical problems.
But how
do we
read, then? How does the novel want
us to
read itself and the world when it apparently
cannot make up its own mind: Just as
it is
both a grand fiction and warns against
making
one, it also criticises and parodies
all
the other ways of reading that it sketches,
such as for example its own reading
of the
lives of the two protagonists, Casaubon
and
Belbo: Casaubon's biography is horizontal,
a story without important conflicts,
hidden
depths or crucial moments; Belbo's
is vertical,
uncovering the motivations underneath
and
pointing at decisive events and absolute
existential choices of an almost revelatory
character. In the first biography everything
is equally important, in the second
there
is a sharp distinction between the
significant
and the insignificant. The first monotonous
pragmatic reading is not very interesting,
the second radical existential one
arouses
our curiosity, but is also described
with
an ironical distance. Again, the novel
will
not choose, but lets both unfold, and
all
in all it seems to agree with Belbo,
who
divides people into idiots, fools,
blockheads
and lunatics, and sees no other solution
than to mix these in reasonable quantities
- just as it seems to agree with Casaubon,
who cannot find the
Page. 20.
right vocabulary to describe the Knights
Templars and thus describes them as
belonging
to a range of different genres including
the comedy, the John Ford movie, the
tragedy
and many others (ibid. p. 102).
But what do you
do if
you cannot choose one style or genre
or way
of reading? What Eco does with Foucault's Pendulum is apparently to include them all. The question
of how to reorganise and deal with texts
and knowledge is not only treated in the
Plan's paranoid unity, but also in the fragments
without unity of which the novel also consists.
If we look at the formal structure of the
text, it is rather a system of differences
than one big synthesis. With all its explicit
and implicit quotations and with all its
different narrative modes, it confronts a
whole range of particular rhetorical approaches
to the world: the neo-realism in Belbo's
childhood memories, the romantic longings,
the modernist fragmentation and postmodernist
eclecticism in his fictions, the critical
satire in Casaubon's social realism, the
irony, the earthbound simplicity and many
more.
All of these, even
the
irony, are treated ironically or parodied.
This can seem like an unbearable know-it-all
attitude from the author, but I think
it
is important to notice that the critique
and parodies do not change the fact
that
all the approaches are actually present
in
the novel. In spite of their unreliability
and ridiculousness they are included
in a
pragmatic polyphony that is hard to
read
as a unity but rather seems like the
loose
network of an encyclopaedia, where
some units
connect more easily than others.
But what exactly is the
difference between this encyclopaedia and
the Plan? Actually, it is hard to define.
The novel does not establish a fundamental
difference; Eco's theoretical writings do:
they insist on a clear distinction between
reasonable and paranoid, hermetic interpretations.
In the novel it is otherwise: here there
is no external enemy5 and no absolute distinction;
the 'heroes' are also the 'criminals', and
the problem is not presented as an either-or,
but as slight differences of meaning.
-----------------------------------------------------
5 This is also confirmed by the fact
that
Belbo's biography and Casaubon's method
in
many ways resemble Eco's own.
Page. 21.
You might be seduced by similarities
that
are too superficial, or you might be
too
suspicious in your interpretations,
but it
is a question of degrees and excess,
not
of essential differences.
This lack of a
clear
distinction might, like the above-
mentioned
lack of consistency, be seen as a weakness
of the novel, but I would prefer to
see it
as an opening that dissolves Eco's
apparent
know-it-all attitude. His encyclopaedia
or
fiction might be a non-method or a
non-style,
but it is also a text that in its all-embracing
pretensions resembles the Plan, and
in this
way the irony or ambiguity also includes
both the author and the reader, who
compared
to the heroes of the novel do not have
any
privileged position or method. If the
impression,
after reading Foucault's Pendulum, is one of a lack of control, then it is
not only because of the overwhelming quantity
of material, but also because of the novel's
lack of centre when it does not act according
to its own warning, and when it shows that
the difference between creative combinations
and paranoid interpretations cannot be defined
in advance, but only along the way, when
you see how the world reacts.
You can try to
secure this experimentalism by avoiding hermetism,
in the sense that rather than keeping your
discourse secret and closed to the world,
you let readers and other discourses confront
and interfere with it. But this is, in short,
not a question of essentials but of pragmatics
- which Eco knows when he very often also
ignores the 'time-space'-rules of causality
in his theoretical writings. I am sure that
many readers find it paranoid when he, for
instance, compares medieval scholasticism
with modern structuralism, or traditional
hermetism with contemporary deconstruction.
But he finds similarities when he suggests
that the first two see the world as a stable
and understandable system with synchronic
and universal structures, and that the last
two both stress the lack of referentiality
in language, suspiciously look for things
hidden under the literal meaning, and are
opposed to the rationalistic principles of
Aristotelian logic.
Page. 22.
In the world we find similarities that
are
hard to explain as cause and reason,
and
sometimes they are very productive,
also
for our recognition of differences.
Foucault's Pendulum is productive in this way because it is
composed in such a way that it does
not only,
like the universal Plan, explode "in
a whirling network of kinships, where
everything
pointed to everything else, everything
explained
everything else". It rather explodes,
like a universal encyclopaedia, in
a whirling
network of differences that may point
to,
but certainly do not explain, each
other,
and where the myriad of textual elements
seems much more important than the
overall
plot development.
Paradoxical novels, theoretical ambiguity
In The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum there are some almost identical formulations
of how reality can catch up with and overtake
the plans and constructions made by humans,
and how things may happen that do not belong
to any plan. And in the narrative development
of both novels the potential danger in this
is shown.
What exactly is the
solution that the novels suggest, if any?
It is apparently not to quit making fictions
and interpretations. Eco has continued writing
novels in spite of the unpredictability and
risks about which they tell. In so doing
he has shown that the recognition of the
possible fatal consequences of too much ethic
or aesthetic purity or of the impossibility
of pure reason does not mean that you cannot
experiment with the possibilities of these.
He warns against it and tries it out at the
same time. And he also tells how important
the experiments are: What happens in both
novels is that at the end of their lives
the narrators describe what they could not
control. The problem that the novels deal
with is that you cannot methodologically
control in advance the readings of the world.
You can - like Adso and Casaubon - try to
do it at the end of your life, i. e. afterwards,
but this is based on lives, on experiences.
You cannot see the borderlines until you
have
Page. 23.
crossed them, and if you never try to cross
borderlines you end up as closed and dogmatic
as the Christian or hermetic library of truth.
And again: the advantage of the novel is
that with one hand you can do all you can
to cross the borderline, while with the other
hand you point at all the risks in doing
so.
In Eco's novels this
is enacted in different ways: In The Name of the Rose laughter, irony and ambiguity stand out
as very positive because of their subversive,
deconstructive and liberating potentials.
In Foucault's Pendulum they have the same potentials but are also
shown to be problematic. But these 'theoretical
truths' are turned upside down in the writing
of the novels: as a rhetorical strategy irony
is employed far more frequently in the second
novel, which thematically presents it as
problematic, than in the first.
Regarding reason we have
the same paradox, just the other way around:
in The Name of the Rose the carnivalistic
movements are liberating when they
turn order
and reason upside down, but reason
still
has its place in the protagonist William
and in the very reasonable and logical
criminal
plot. In Foucault's Pendulum the constantly
expanding analogies are criticised
for their
lack of logical coherence, but this
critique
is itself put forward in a narrative
that
often forgets causality and follows
expanding
analogies. In spite of its critique
of order
and reason, The Name of the Rose is much more organised and reasonable than
Foucault's Pendulum. And in spite of its critique of irony and
deconstruction, Foucault's Pendulum is much more ironic and deconstructive than
The Name of the Rose. Thus, the thematical and the formal aspects
'complement' and contradict each other in
such a way that you cannot translate them
into theoretical positions and choose between
them.
This ambiguity between
the enunciate and the enunciation opens up
the fictions and gives them a special complexity.
In a theoretical discourse it is different;
here the ambiguity can be rather annoying,
at least to Eco, who in Interpretation and Overinterpretation criticises Richard Rorty for the lack of
consistency between what he says and does.
In Eco's own fictions, however, there is
this lack: he does not do what he says and he does not say what he does.
Page. 24.
And if you had to be that consistent - always
do what you said and say what you did - it
would probably be the end of all experiments
and really be authoritative. Fortunately,
Eco is not that consistent. He continues
constructing possible worlds and making them
ambiguous so that his readers can do the
same - even if he knows that they might all
of a sudden become more real than ever intended
or wanted.
Rather than insisting
on consistency, Eco insists on openness:
that it is necessary to confront your possible
world with other worlds and other vocabularies.
What is described as dangerous in Jorge's
library and in the Plan is most of all the
isolation, the defensive focus on the internal
correspondences in their own one and only
- mimetic or symbolic - vocabulary, which
turns out to be an exclusion of all confrontations,
differences and dialogues. If the discourses
here are dangerous, it is because they wish
to be closed and universal at the same time.
In the version of the first novel - the library's
dogmatic realism - the texts are conceived
as repetitions of another and truer God-given
reality, and as destructive to the possible
worlds of the imagination because texts and
readers are condemned if they do not do as
the authoritative original prescribes.
In the version
of the second novel - the Plan's aesthetic
self-referentiality - the texts are taken
as having nothing to do with another prosaic
reality; this also destroys the possible
world because in its isolation the Plan becomes
too pretentious, because at one and the same
time it wishes to include everything and
in reality excludes all communication in
striving for its own perfection.
In this way Eco's first
two novels give us two images of how bad
it can get, both if you take fiction to be
identical with truth and reality and if you
take it to have nothing to do with truth
and reality. One is too much and the other
too little, and the same can be said of the
relationship between Eco's fictional novels
and his theoretical truths: the novels and
the theory are not identical, but they are
certainly related.
|
