Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (7 page)

In his right hand he
held a golden trumpet.

¡XJohann Valentin
Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz,
Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, I

In this file, I find the
mention of a trumpet. The day before yesterday, in the periscope, I
wasn't aware of its importance. The file had only one reference to
it, and that marginal.

During the long
afternoon at the Garamond office, Belbo, tormented by a manuscript,
would occasionally look up and try to distract me, too, as I sat at
the desk across from his sorting through old engravings of the
World Fair. Then he would drift into reminiscence, prompt to ring
down the curtain if he suspected I was taking him too seriously. He
would recall scenes from his past, but only to illustrate a point,
to castigate some vanity.

"I wonder where all this
is heading?" he remarked one day.

"Do you mean the
twilight of Western civilization?"

"Twilight? Let the sun
handle twilight. No. I was talking about our writers. This is my
third manuscript this week: one on Byzantine law, one on the Finis
Austriae, and one on the poems of the Earl of Rochester. Three very
different subjects, wouldn't you say?"

"I would."

"Yet in all these
manuscripts, at one point or another, Desire appears, and the
Object of Desire. It must be a trend. With the Earl of Rochester I
can understand it, but Byzantine law?"

"Just reject
them."

"I can't. All three
books have been funded by the National Research Council. Actually,
they're not that bad. Maybe I'll just call the three authors and
ask them to delete those parts. The Desire stuff doesn't make them
look good either."

"What can the Object of
Desire possibly be in Byzantine law?"

"Oh, you can slip it in.
If there ever was an Object of Desire in Byzantine law, of course,
it wasn't what this guy says it was. It never is."

"Never is
what?"

"What you think it is.
Once¡XI was five or six¡XI dreamed I had a trumpet. A gold trumpet.
It was one of those dreams where you can feel honey flowing in your
veins; you know what I mean? A kind of prepubescent wet dream. I
don't think IVe ever been as happy as I was in that dream. When I
woke up, I realized there was no trumpet, and I started crying. I
cried all day. This was before the war¡Xit must have been ¡¥38-a
time of poverty. If I had a son today and saw him in such despair,
I'd say, ¡¥All right, I'll buy you a trumpet.' It was only a toy,
after all, it wouldn't have cost a fortune. But my parents never
even considered such a thing. Spending money was a serious business
in those days. And they were serious, too, about teaching a child
he couldn't have everything he wanted. ¡¥I can't stand cabbage
soup,' I'd tell them¡Xand it was true, for God's sake; cabbage made
me sick. But they never said: ¡¥Skip the soup today, then, and just
eat your meat.' We may have been poor, but we still had a first
course, a main course, and fruit. No. It was always: ¡¥Eat what's
on the table.' Sometimes, as a compromise, my grandmother would
pick the cabbage out of my bowl, stringy piece by stringy piece.
Then I'd have to eat the expurgated soup, which was more disgusting
than before. And even this was a concession my father disapproved
of."

"But what about the
trumpet?"

He looked at me,
hesitant. "Why are you so interested in the trumpet?"

"I'm not. You were the
one who brought it up, to show how the Object of Desire is never
what others think."

"The trumpet...My uncle
and aunt from *** arrived that evening. They had no children, and I
was their favorite nephew. Well, when they saw me bawling over my
dream trumpet, they said they would fix everything: tomorrow we
would go to the department store where there was a whole counter of
toys-wonder of wonders¡Xand I'd have the trumpet I wanted. I didn't
sleep all night, and I couldn't sit still all the next morning. In
the afternoon we went to the store, and they had at least three
kinds of trumpets there. Little tin things, probably, but to me
they were magnificent brass worthy of die Philharmonic. There was
an army bugle, a slide trombone, and a trumpet of gold with a real
trumpet mouthpiece but the keys of a saxophone. I couldn't decide,
and maybe I took too long. Wanting them all, I must have given the
impression that I didn't want any of them. Meanwhile, I believe my
uncle and aunt looked at the price tags. My uncle and aunt weren't
stingy; on the other hand, a Bakelite clarinet with silver keys was
much cheaper. ¡¥Wouldn't you like this better?' they asked. I tried
it, produced a reasonable honk, and told myself that it was
beautiful, but actually I was rationalizing. I knew they wanted me
to take the clarinet because the trumpet cost a fortune. I couldn't
demand such a sacrifice from my relatives, having been taught that
if a person offers you something you like, you must say, ¡¥No,
thank you,' and not just once, not ¡¥No, thank you,' with your hand
out, but ¡¥No, thank you' until the giver insists, until he says,
¡¥Please, take it.' A well-bred child doesn't accept until that
point. So I said maybe I didn't care about the trumpet, maybe the
clarinet was all right, if that's what they wanted. And I looked up
at them, hoping they would insist. They didn't, God bless them,
they were delighted to buy me the clarinet, since¡Xthey said¡Xthat
was what I wanted. It was too late to backtrack. I got the
clarinet."

Belbo looked at me out
of the corner of his eyes. "You want to know if I dreamed about the
trumpet again?''

"I want to know," I
said, "what the Object of Desire was."

"Ah," he said, turning
back to his manuscript. "You see? You're obsessed by the Object of
Desire, too. But it's not all that simple...Suppose I had taken the
trumpet. Would I have been truly happy then? What do you think,
Casaubon?"

"I think you would have
dreamed about the clarinet."

"I got the clarinet," he
concluded sharply, "but I never played it."

"Never played it? Or
never dreamed it?"

"Played it," he said,
underlining his words, and for some reason I felt like a
fool.

And finally nothing is
cabalistically inferred from vinum save VIS NUMerorum, upon which
numbers this Magia depends.

¡XCesare della Riviera,
Il Mondo Magico degli Eroi, Mantua, Osanna, 1603, pp.
65-66

But I was talking about
my first encounter with Belbo. We knew each other by sight, had
exchanged a few words at Pilade's, but I didn't know much about
him, only that he worked at Garamond Press, a small but serious
publisher. I had come across a few Garamond books at the
university.

"And what do you do?" he
asked me one evening, as we were both leaning against the far end
of the zinc bar, pressed close together by a festive crowd. He used
the formal pronoun. In those days we all called one another by the
familiar tu, even students and professors, even the clientele at
Pilade's. "Tu¡Xbuy me a drink," a student wearing a parka would say
to the managing editor of an important newspaper. It was like
Moscow in the days of young Shklovski. We were all Mayakovskis, not
one Zhivago among us. Belbo could not avoid the required tu, but he
used it with pointed scorn, suggesting that although he was
responding to vulgarity with vulgarity, there was still an abyss
between acting intimate and being intimate. I heard him say tu with
real affection only a few times, only to a few people: Dio-tallevi,
one or two women. He used the formal pronoun with people he
respected but hadn't known long. He addressed me formally the whole
time we worked together, and I valued that.

"And what do you do?" he
asked, with what I now know was friendliness.

"In real life or in this
theater?" I said, nodding at our surroundings.

"In real
life."

"I study."

"You mean you go to the
university, or you study?"

"You may not believe
this, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. I'm finishing a
thesis on the Templars."

"What an awful subject,"
he said. "I thought that was for lunatics."

"No. I'm studying the
real stuff. The documents of the trial. What do you know about the
Templars, anyway?"

"I work for a publishing
company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while
an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings
up the Templars, he's almost always a lunatic."

"Don't I know! Their
name is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the Templars. How
do you identify the others?"

"I'll explain. By the
way, what's your name?"

"Casaubon."

"Casaubon. Wasn't he a
character in Middlemarch?"

"I don't know. There was
also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we're not
related."

"The next round's on me.
Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are four kinds of people
in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics."

"And that covers
everybody?"

"Oh, yes, including us.
Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of
these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a
moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of
these components, these four ideal types."

"Idealtypen."

"Very good. You know
German?"

"Enough for
bibliographies."

"When I was in school,
if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life
knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with
Chinese."

"My German's poor, so
I'll graduate. But let's get back to your typology. What about
geniuses? Einstein, for example?"

"A genius uses one
component in a dazzling way, fueling it with the others." He took a
sip of his drink. "Hi there, beautiful," he said. "Made that
suicide attempt yet?"

"No," the girl answered
as she walked by. "I'm in a collective now."

"Good for you," Belbo
said. He turned back to me. "Of course, there's no reason one can't
have collective suicides, too."

"Getting back to the
lunatics."

"Look, don't take me too
literally. I'm not trying to put the universe in order. I ¡¥m just
saying what a lunatic is from the point of view of a publishing
house. Mine is an ad-hoc definition."

"All right. My
round."

"All right. Less ice,
Pilade. Otherwise it gets into the bloodstream too fast. Now then:
cretins. Cretins don't even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble.
You know, the guy who presses the ice cream cone against his
forehead, or enters a revolving door the wrong way."

"That's not
possible."

"It is for a cretin.
Cretins are of no interest to us: they never come to publishers'
offices. So let's forget about them."

"Let's."

"Being a fool is more
complicated. It's a form of social behavior. A fool is one who
always talks outside his glass."

"What do you
mean?"

"Like this." He pointed
at the counter near his glass. "He wants to talk about what's in
the glass, but somehow or other he misses. He's the guy who puts
his foot in his mouth. For example, he says how's your lovely wife
to someone whose wife has just left him."

"Yes, I know a few of
those."

"Fools are in great
demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but
provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they
become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else
blunders helps to change the subject. But fools don't interest us,
either. They're never creative, their talent is all second-hand, so
they don't submit manuscripts to publishers. Fools don't claim that
cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking
about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when
they really offend, they're magnificent. It's a dying breed, the
embodiment of all the bourgeois virtues. What they really need is a
Verdurin salon or even a chez Guermantes. Do you students still
read such things?"

"I do."

"Well, a fool is a
Joachim Murat reviewing his officers. He sees one from Martinique
covered with medals. ¡¥Vous etes negre?' Murat asks. ¡¥Oui, mon
general!' the man answers. And Murat says: ¡¥Bravo, bravo,
continuez!' And so on. You follow me? Forgive me, but tonight I'm
celebrating a historic decision in my life. I've stopped drinking.
Another round? Don't answer, you'll make me feel guilty.
Pilade!"

"What about the
morons?"

"Ah. Morons never do the
wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who
says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too,
and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all
the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus
are Athenians."

"Which they
are."

"Yes, but only
accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that's right,
but they say it for the wrong reason."

"You mean it's okay to
say something that's wrong as long as the reason is
right."

"Of course. Why else go
to the trouble of being a rational animal?"

"All great apes evolved
from lower life forms, man evolved from lower life forms, therefore
man is a great ape."

"Not bad. In such
statements you suspect that something's wrong, but it takes work to
show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right
away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the
way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of
paralogism. For an editor, it's bad news. It can take him an
eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons' books are
published, because they're convincing at first glance. An editor is
not required to weed out the morons. If the Academy of Sciences
doesn't do it, why should he?"

"Philosophers don't
either. Saint Anselm's ontological argument is moronic, for
example. God must exist because I ^can conceive Him as a being
perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses
existence in thought with existence in reality."

"True, but Gaunilon's
refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an island in the sea
even if the island doesn't exist. He confuses thinking of the
possible with thinking of the necessary."

"A duel between
morons."

"Exactly. And God loves
every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that
Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime purpose for
creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed Himself to
be: to unmask cosmic mo-ronism."

"We're surrounded by
morons."

"Everyone's a
moron¡Xsave me and thee. Or, rather¡XI wouldn't want to
offend¡Xsave thee."

"Somehow I feel that
Godel's theorem has something to do with all this."

"I wouldn't know, I'm a
cretin. Pilade!"

"My round."

"We'll split it.
Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans are liars. It must be true,
because he's a Cretan himself and knows his countrymen
well."

"That's moronic
thinking."

"Saint Paul. Epistle to
Titus. On the other hand, those who call Epimenides a liar have to
think all Cretans aren't, but Cretans don't trust Cretans,
therefore no Cretan calls Epimenides a liar."

"Isn't that moronic
thinking?"

"You decide. I told you,
they are hard to identify. Morons can even win the Nobel
prize."

"Hold on. Of those who
don't believe God created the world in seven days, some are not
fundamentalists, but of those who do believe God created the world
in seven days, some are. Therefore, of those who don't believe God
created the world in seven days, some are fundamentalists. How's
that?"

"My God¡Xto use the mot
juste¡XI wouldn't know. A moron-ism or not?"

"It is, definitely, even
if it were true. Violates one of the laws of syllogisms: universal
conclusions cannot be drawn from two particulars."

"And what if you were a
moron?"

"I'd be in excellent,
venerable company."

"You're right. And
perhaps, in a logical system different from ours, our moronism is
wisdom. The whole history of logic consists of attempts to define
an acceptable notion of moronism. A task too immense. Every great
thinker is someone else's moron."

"Thought as the coherent
expression of moronism."

"But what is moronism to
one is incoherence to another."

"Profound. It's two
o'clock, Pilade's about to close, and we still haven't got to the
lunatics."

"I'm getting there. A
lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn't know the
ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted
it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself
at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything
proves everything else. The lunatic is all id6e fixe, and whatever
he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the
liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of
inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the
Templars."

"Invariably?"

"There are lunatics who
don't bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most
insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden..."He
was about to order another whiskey, but changed his mind and asked
for the check. "Speaking of the Templars, the other day some
character left me a manuscript on the subject. A lunatic, but with
a human face. The book starts reasonably enough. Would you like to
see it?"

"I'd be glad to. Maybe
there's something I can use."

"I doubt that very much.
But drop in if you have a spare half hour. Number 1, Via Sincere
Renato. The visit will be of more benefit to me than to you. You
can tell me whether the book has any merit."

"What makes you trust
me?"

"Who says I trust you?
But if you come, I'll trust you. I trust curiosity."

A student rushed in,
face twisted in anger. "Comrades! There are fascists along the
canal with chains!"

"Let's get them," said
the fellow with the Tartar mustache who had threatened me over
Krupskaya. "Come on, comrades!" And they all left.

"What do you want to
do?" I asked, feeling guilty. "Should we go along?"

"No," Belbo said.
"Pilade sets these things up to clear the place out. For my first
night on the wagon, I feel pretty high. Must be the cold-turkey
effect. Everything I've said to you so far is false. Good night,
Casaubon."