BOOKS

The BCD of everything

Anita Brookner

FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by William Weaver Secker & Warburg, £14.95, pp.636 Anew twist here: the novel as Final Examination, success in which will bring with it full admission to the post-modern world. The syllabus has been wide-ranging, if not exactly comprehensive: computer literacy, the Torah, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the art of profitable pub- lishing, Voodoo, infantile experience, 1968, and the topology of the Paris sewers. To add to the severity of the test, the syllabus has been devised without a read- ing list, although glimpses of various arcane treatises are allowed, hinting at an immense substructure of sources to which limitless but confusing reference is made. The course outline, devised by Professor Eco and ludically entitled Foucault's Pen- dulum, runs to 636 pages. The advanced Diploma in Hermeneutics will be awarded to those who accept the world as a vast network of signs or anagrams, and behave accordingly. Foucault's Pendulum exists. It is to be found in Paris, in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, which was once the priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs and was cre- ated a museum of technology by the Directoire in 1799. Its purpose is obscure: perhaps its purpose is simply to be a pendulum. In the crucially irrational world of this novel, the pendulum plays a signifi- cant role, for at a certain moment, when the rising sun illuminates an uncoloured spot near the junction of two leads in a certain window on the feast of the summer solstice, a point will be revealed which will indicate the Navel of the Earth, from which it is possible to control everything.

This theory has apparently obsessed anyone or everyone who is convinced of the existence of a fund of secret know- ledge, hidden but made manifest in sym- bols whose meaning will lead to the de- cipherment of other symbols, the origins of which can he found in the Temple of Solomon. It is this theory — belief or madness — that has bound together Temp- lars, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Napoleon, the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Hitler. At some point, it is held, all will be revealed. This secret knowledge does not exist, as one of Eco's puppet characters realises at the conclusion or exhaustion of the novel. But to admit, on pain of death, that it does not exist, as does another of his characters, is merely to stimulate the search for it all over again, for if the secret is too precious to be admitted, then, ergo, it must exist.

Foucault's Pendulum is so dangerously volatile that it makes The Name of the Rose appear, in comparison, to be a model of brevity, lucidity and discretion. Anthony Burgess is quoted on the jacket flap as saying, 'This is the way the European novel is going'. He defines it as a novel, or rather he describes it as such, although many would not recognise the form. A novel contains characters and a plot, and these, to be fair, can be vestigially glimpsed in this compilation, which is really a history of magic, but a history which is not linear. Hints of Le Neveu de Rameau can be noted in its construction, but Diderot had the wit

to keep his anti-novel short. Huysmans is a far more serious contender for the role of antecedent, particularly the Huysmans of La-Bas and La C4thedrale, in which char- acters who are mere talking heads spout hermetic gossip. There is an echo of The Songlines, as well as an acknowledgement to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. But the original part of the work — the logorrhoea, the fabulation, the smoky en- thusiasm — all belong to Professor Eco himself. He is not a novelist; he is a demiurge, his attribute a relentless onslaught of verbal ratiocination applied to matters which defy logic. We are dealing with the occult and its many signs, and the reader may be advised to apply Occam's razor from time to time or risk recruitment to one of Professor Eco's conventicles.

There is a plot, but it is a mere pretext. Three men, Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotal- ' levi, are involved in work for the Gara- mond Press, an academic publishing house in Milan. A subsidiary of the Garamond Press is Manutius, a vanity imprint which will become profitable by putting out an occult series under the general title of Isis Unveiled. Casaubon is writing a thesis on the Templars; Diotallevi is an amateur cabalist; Belbo is a failed writer, failed fighter, and failed trumpeter who confides his private fantasies to his computer, which he calls Abulafia, after the mediaeval Jewish mystic of that name.

A certain Colonel Ardenti visits the office one day with a theory which interests Casaubon. Ardenti, too, is obsessed with the Templars, who play a major part in the narrative and occupy the first half of the book. The Templars were monastic knights who took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience but were allowed to carry shields and swords to defend pilgrims to the Holy Land, where they were housed in the cloister of the old Temple of Solomon. Some time after their foundation in the 12th century they may have gone native and fraternised with certain esoteric Mos- lem sects. When the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem ended in 1291, the Templars, without function, dispersed. They were by now enormously rich, since they attracted numerous donations and paid no tithes. A sovereign order beyond royal control, they were branded as heretics, idolators, and homosexuals.

Colonel Ardenti has an idea where they may be now. He refuses to believe that they are extinct, for he knows that the Templars had a plan for world conquest which will only be realised in the year 2000. His thesis is that when the Templars returned to France, their leader, Jacques

de Molay, burned at the stake for the errors lightly sketched above, entrusted the order to his nephew, the Comte de Beaujeu, who escaped from Paris in a hay wain, and moved the centre of Templar activity to Provins, in Champagne. Colonel Ardenti claims to have found a document, discovered by one Edouard IngoIf in one of the many underground tunnels of Provins. This is the Plan. It is, of course, in secret writing. Secret writing and sacred mathematics are essential to the unfolding of this narrative, which is embellished with hieroglyphs, computer print-outs, and ear- ly attempts at cartography. The decoding of the document, and Colonel Ardenti's interpretation of it, contain gigantic leaps of illogic, runic calculations, and trans- mythological hypotheses. By now the three publishers (for Casaubon has become a consultant) are intrigued; the field looks promising. This conviction grows in Casaubon during a visit to Brazil, where he and his girlfriend witness several Voodoo rites:

Suddenly it all seemed to come together: satanic and Moorish rites in the Temple of Jerusalem, African witchcraft for the subpro- letarians of the Brazilian Northeast, the message of Provins with its 120 years, and the 120 years of the Rosicrucians.

For by now the Rosicrucians have joined the melee.

Ardenti disappears. Because he knew too much? A certain Count Aglie, who may also be the Count de Saint-Germain, an 18th-century trickster reputed to be immortal, takes his place in the narrative. Aglie is of immense assistance to the Garamond Press, which has hit on a stunning wheeze. One day Belbo upsets certain files, picks up the scattered papers, puts them together in no sort of order, and discovers a new way to make money: by promoting occult books which are them- selves occult because they are random and meaningless. Aglie is co-opted as a reader. He knows a great deal, has access to certain rituals, to which our heroes are introduced, and turns up at the very end in the Conservatoire des Arts et Mdtiers where Belbo is brought to trial by a crowd of homunculi. Strapped to the Pendulum, he refuses to reveal the fact that there is no secret (but we have forgotten that by now), watched by Casaubon who has taken re- fuge inside the pedestal for the model of the Statue of Liberty.

Numerous quotations from occult sources adorn the chapter headings, bear- ing witness to Professor Eco's tongue-in- cheek adherence to these matters. Even the computer is not what it seems: it may be a golem, as many users have already discovered. And it is to the computer that Belbo confides his and Eco's secret, and the secret of his method.

Invent, invent wildly, paying no attention to connections, until it becomes impossible to summarise. A simple relay race among symbols, one says the name of the next, without rest. To dismantle the world into a

saraband of anagrams, endless, And then believe in what cannot be expressed. Is this not the true meaning of the Torah? Truth is an anagram of an anagram. ANAGRAMS = ARS MAGNA.

There is a note of feeling here which is missing from the main text. Curiosity, enthusiasm, brain fever, mystification, even heresy have been encompassed, but not feeling. It is possible to see Eco as a condemned man, a sort of sorcerer's apprentice, doomed to perpetual activity among his symbols and signs. There is even a certain exaltation about the idea. Novel readers of a more conservative disposition, however, will have to look elsewhere.