582
PARTISAN REVIEW
In the absence of any transcendent sign, meaning refuses to stand
still and be understood; restlessness prevails. I found I could bear to read
Foucault's Pendulum
only in short snatches, and preferably if I was in mo–
tion - pedaling away on the stationary bike at the health club, for ex–
ample. People on either side of me were plugged into their Walkmans,
but
r,
on a high cultural plateau, could read about Casaubon searching
Belbo's computer files, or the secret role of the Rosicrucians in the
writing of Shakespeare's plays. The passages that inspired me to dog-ear
pages (pedaling all the while) never had anything to do with action ; they
were clever, paradoxical comments on the irresistible, frantic, doomed
search for meaning.
In the midst of all this self-consciousness, an element of shoulder–
shrugging, of not quite concealed indifference, came to predominate .
Perhaps it was all those hours on the bike (though for the figure to be
really apt the bike would have to be a treadmill) that prompted the im–
age of a squirrel rapidly shuffling through a pile of leaves in search of a
buried nut. I was the squirrel; so was any reader of
Foucault's Pendulum;
so were Casaubon and Belbo. The squirrel is well fed and glossy, if not
positively overweight; its search is sheerly reflexive, instinctive on the one
hand and increasingly halfhearted on the other. In the midst of its scrab–
bling, it slows down, pauses, and seems to forget what all the hustle and
bustle was about. No real appetite impelled it anyway. No real hunger
kept me reading this novel - habit, or reflex, had to take the place of
appetite, and habit soon flagged. The nuggets I found were dwarfed by
the enormous amout of verbal baggage the book carries around - bag–
gage which began by being predi ctable and soon became something
more aggressive, a series of insistent pokes from an incorrigible mono–
loguer who knows perfectly well that his listeners long to escape. For
deconstructionists, says Eagleton, literature "testifies to the impossibility
of language's ever doing more than talk about its own failure, like some
barroom bore." The innumerable decodings, rewritings, and revisions in
Foucault's Pendulum
come to have something of this deadly inevitability,
as does the plot. If
r
had the courage of my postmodern impulses, if I
could really give rein to discontinuity instead of merely pedalling at it,
then I could read Eco's book every which way, back to front, upside
down, and find designs everywhere. My expectations were too staid, and
they were frustrated.
Cynthia Ozick's
The Shawl,
on the other hand, is a work (really a
single work, though strictly speaking it consists of a story and a novella)
that not only can but must be read at a sitting. I read it sitting still in an
armchair at home, with tears running down my face. I didn 't feel irked
or overburdened by learned clutter; I felt pity, grief, and gratitude. Is
Aristotle suddenly hovering in the vicinity? Ozick isn 't precisely writing
