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harsh, disembodi edly donnish humor but is disastrously defi cient in human
fee lin g. Eco only spo radi ca lly remembers to animate hi s characters at all
in terms of any sentiment o ther than their consuming obsession w ith T he
Plan . Wheth er, then , we are looking fo r feeling between one character
and ano th e r , be twee n auth o r and charac t e rs, o r b etwee n au–
tho r/characters and oursel ves, most of
Fo ucault 's Pendulum
w ill fru strate
our naive request.
The Name of the Rose,
Eco's 1983 novel , tempered its arcane excesses
with memorable charac ters, a good suspenseful plo t, and an overall the–
mati c appropriateness o f mode to matter. If Eco was li able to divagate
into lengthy lec tures, desc ripti o ns, and specul ati o ns, well , it seemed
natural fo r Willi am to instru ct Adso in politi cs, o r for Ubertino to di s–
course on theoogy. As well as colltinually educa tin g the reader, all th ese
vo ices (a nd th ere are many more in
The Name of the Rose
than I menti on
here) throw a va ri ed nove listi c light on th eir own spea kers, giving
characters ri chn ess and depth .
The Name of the Rose
is Tolstoyan in its
many- sidedn ess and humani ty compared to
Foucault 's Pendlllum ,
a book
even longer, more packed with words, but where human talk is severely
subordinated to reading, or deciph ering, what has been encoded , word–
processed , e rased , hidden . This is a book no t about vo ices but about
writin g; it mi ght have been written to o rder as an illustrati on o f th e
kind o f poststru cturalist emphas is on th e
scriptible
di scussed by T erry
Eagleton in his
Litaary Theory:
All
Int roduction.
Eagleton writes :
the 'li ving vo ice' is in fac t quite as material as prin t .. . sin ce spoken
signs, like wri tte n o nes, work only by a process of difference and di–
vision , spea ki ng could be just as mu ch said to be a form of writi ng as
writing is a second-hand fo rm of speakin g.
Just as W estern phil osophy has been 'pho nocentric,' ce ntered on
the 'li ving voice' and deeply suspi cious of script, so also it has bee n in
a broader sense 'Iogoce ntri c,' committed to
J
beli ef in some ultimate
'word ,' prese nce, essence, truth or reali ty whi ch wiil act as the fo unda–
tion of all our thought, language and experience . It has yearned for
the sign whi ch will give mea ning
to
all o th ers - the 'tra nscende ntal
signifi er' - and fo r th e anchorin g, unqu estio nable mea ning to which
all our signs can be seen to point ...
T hat any such transce nd ent mea ning is a fict io n - tho ugh
pe rh aps a necessary fictio n - is o ne conseque nce of th e theory of
language I have ou tl ined .
Perhaps
FOllca lllt 's Pendulllm ,
wh ether or no t it is necessa ry , is itself a fi c–
tional consequ ence of deco nstru ctioni sm : a curi ous, rebarbative, talky
specimen of the Novel of Ideas.
