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Conspiracy by the Numbers
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17381 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
2,207 Words |
| Author
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Edward N. Luttwak
Edward N.Luttwak holds the Arleigh Burke Chair in strategy at
York University's Center for Strategic and International
Studies and was 1989 Tanner Lecturer at Yale. He is author of
Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. |
II PENDOLO DI FOUCAULT
Umberto Eco
Bompiani: 1988
509 pp.
FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM
Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver
Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1989
641 pp., $22.96
A. Umberto Eco teaches semiotics, the theory of the "signs" that permit verbal and nonverbal human communication. B. Eco in an Italian intellectual; that is, he belongs to a tradition that still rejects any narrow specialization (dine with Italian economists and hear them talk of Latin American literature; dine with Italian literati and hear them talk of Soviet economies). A + B = a propensity for verbal artifice and metaphorical fireworks in the display of esoteric knowledge. Upon hearing Eco's title one therefore imagines a verbal pendulum, the usual metaphor for swings of opinion. But no: Jean-Bernard Foucault's pendulum, which swings in the Paris Arts et M¨¦tiers conservatory to prove that the earth rotates, is made of solid brass - though there is artifice all right (a magnet attracts the iron concealed in the brass ball).
The reader who stays the course through 503 pages (Eco should send a generous gift to the two or three who will, worldwide) encounters the pendulum on line 1 of page 1 and finds it used as a gallows on page 473 in the penultimate chapter (barely counting the last chapter as a chapter, for it is only one page long). In between, he will have followed the meandering first-person account of the researches of Eco's trio of chief investigators, the dour publisher Jacopo Belbo (evocative of dour late-medieval Italian merchant names), the mystic Diotallevi ("may-god-educate-you"), and the Sam Spade character, Casaubon, who will investigate assiduously in exchange for a Chandlerish daily fee, plus expenses. Eco himself calls him a Sam Spade character, to ensure that we know (i) that he knows (ii) that we know (iii) that he is writing fiction advisedly - that is, as an edifice of words construed not from life, but out of the words of earlier fictions. (Casaubon is George Eliot's all-knowing character in Middlemarch, as other reviewers have pointed out; but Eliot took that name from the celebrated editor of classical texts, whom Eco almost misdescribes as a philologist.)
What the researchers are investigating, with a minimum of action - there are no car chases or
...
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