BOOKS
Text and Stories
FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM. By Umberto Eco. Translated from the
Italian by William Weaver.
Harcourt, Brace,Jovanovich.
$22.95.
THE SHAWL. By Cynthia Ozick.
Alfred A. Knopf.
$12.95.
Randall Jarrell once commented that the poems of the anthologist (and
poet) Oscar Williams had the air of having been written on a typewriter
by a typewriter. Update the technology, and you get a fair description of
the ambience of Umberto Eco's large new book,
Foucault's Pendulum.
Described on the jacket as a novel,
Fouca~dt's
Pendulum,
which is really
closer to a catalogue, compendium, or anatomy than it is to any form of
fiction, often seems to have been written on a computer by a computer.
Oscar Williams was presumably wounded by the comparison of his sensi–
bility
to
a typewriter. Eco's response, I suspect, would be a knowing
wink or a weary shrug, to the effect of "Yes - so?" Even if the book's
slickly mechanical surface isn't the whole point, I seem to hear Eco say–
ing, this text's texture is at least its
point d'appui
-
certainly it's nothing
to reproach me with.
Indeed. If intentionality still holds - if any effect, however disheart–
ening, is laudable so long as it's what the author was aiming for - then
presumably there's nothing wrong with the almost remorselessly con–
trived, anticlimactic air of the whole enterprise.
Almost
but not quite re–
morselessly; moving moments do occur in this colossal
jeu d'esprit,
but
they are simply outweighed by the not very buoyant mass of Eco's ency–
clopedic erudition.
Schematically cluttered and chaotically schematic,
Foucault's Pendu–
lum
is an exhausting, exhaustive, and vastly knowing book. A magpie's
nest of arcana, a beaver-dam of bricolage, a Rosetta Stone of the con–
spiratorial and the occult - these and many other comparisons suggest
themselves in lieu of plot summary. In fact there is no need to come up
with evocations, for the book teems with self-description. Few novels are
so packed with phrases each of which could serve as an epigraph to the
whole. Here are three among many more:
Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the
human race spends centuries deciphering the message.
