For my introductory thoughts as I began re-reading Foucault’s Pendulum, click here.
We ended the short first part of the novel with Casuabon hiding in the periscope chamber, waiting for a mysterious event to happen in the museum.
HERE BE SPOILERS...
Hokhmah – the second Sephirot – embodying wisdom from nothingness!
In part two ‘Hokhmah’, Eco initially takes us back a few days. Casuabon had been instructed by Belbo that the answers were on his word processing programme ‘Abulafia’ as he called it (after the 13thC founder of the school of Prophetic Kabbalah). Remember we’re in the pre-PC and internet 1980s. He manages to get into the computer and prints out the file, several pages of which are included in the text. He recalls a conversation between himself, Belbo and Diotallevi, after Abulafia was set up, about anagrams of Yahweh/YHWH and the little program reproduced in the novel (in Basic, how charming!) to give all the permutations. As the section ends Casuabon is back in the periscope thinking:
… I had no proof that what I had learned from the printout was true. I could still take refuge in doubt. At midnight, perhaps, I would discover that I had come to Paris and hidden myself like a thief in a harmless museum of technology only because I had foolishly fallen into a macumba staged for credulous tourists, letting myself be hypnotized by the perfumadores and the rhythm of the pontos.
I had to look up those words in the last sentence (macumba: a Brazilian folk religion; perfumadores: scented – Spanish; pontos – a Greek sea god or the Black Sea in Latin). I rather enjoyed translator William Weaver’s refusal to dumb down the text by translating those foreign words into simpler, inevitably more bulky and inelegant language. You can get a rough sense of the intent of the sentence without looking them up – maybe not pontos (bridges? I thought at first), but you can let it go, there is no need for a glossary necessarily. However, I felt it was worth looking them up this time.
We close this second short section with an invitation to carry on.
And now, two days later, having achieved, I hope, serenity and amor fati, I can tell the story I reconstructed so anxiously (hoping it was false) inside the periscope, the story I had read two days ago in Belbo’s apartment, the story I had lived for twelve years between Pilade’s whiskey and the dust of Garamond Press.
I was really looking forward to what would come next by this time.
Binet – the third Sephirot – understanding; insight from raw data
This part begins with a rather charming little anecdote told by Casuabon:
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom. When I was ten, I asked my parents to subscribe toa weekly magazine that was publishing comic-strip versions of the great classics of literature. My father, not because he was sting, but because he was suspicious of comic strips, tried to beg off. “The purpose of this magazine,” I pontificated, quoting the ad, “is to educate the reader in an entertaining way.” “The purpose of your magazine,| my father replied without looking up from his paper, “is the purpse of every magazine: to sell as many copies as it can.”
That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.
He uses this story to illustrate his frame of mind when he first visited the Garamond Press at Belbo’s invitation to look at a manuscript on the Templars – for Casuabon is researching them and specifically their arrest and trial. They had been in Pilade’s Bar as usual…
In those days, Pilade’s Bar was a free port, a galactic tavern where alien invaders from Ophiulco could rub elbows peaceably with the soldiers of the Empire patrolling the Van Allen belt.
It is well-known that Eco was no snob, he was a fan of lowbrow as much as highbrow, and surely this description can only be in homage to the ‘Mos Eisley Cantina’ in Star Wars, even if he does go on to say that Pilade’s became a kind of Rick’s Cafe afterwards!
Those of you who have read The Name of the Rose will recall that it breaks off from the narrative fairly early in the novel to tell the story of the Popes of Avignon. In this section, we need to do the same for the Templars. This is done via the author of the manuscript sent to Garamond Press, Colonel Ardenti, but first they have a discussion between themselves, the others picking Casuabon’s brains.
“These Templars of yours were really crazy!” Dolores said with admiration.
“They remind me of Tom and Jerry,” Belbo said.
Another example of Eco’s love of popular culture!
The colonel appears at first to know his stuff, but to Casuabon the alarm bells of conspiracy theories begin to ring and the colonel spouts one after the other leading, of course, to the Grail! I thoroughly enjoyed all of this, whether it was the truth or embellished by conspiracy. After the Colonel leaves, the Garamond Press chaps decide to pass his manuscript onto a less academic house. However, the next morning they’re contacted by the police. Colonel Ardenti is dead!
The plot thickens…
What amazed me about this section of the novel was how Eco so skilfully did a massive info-dump on us and we hardly notice. By weaving in comments and interruptions to first Casuabon, then the Colonel’s flow from Belbo, Diotallevi and Casuabon himself, be they questions, jokes or other marks of incredulity (see how I use an Eco word there!) we get an entire potted history of the Templars, conspiracies and all in about fifty pages – and they miraculously speed by. I’d forgotten how funny Eco can be too.
I think we’re ready to discover more about the Plan, and what the three friends have got themselves into next, don’t you think?
