Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  An art not systematic but additive and compositive, ours and that of the Middle Ages: Today as then the sophisticated elitist experiment coexists with the great enterprise of popularization (the relation between illuminated manuscript and cathedral is the same as that between MOMA and Hollywood), with interchanges and borrowings, reciprocal and continuous; and the evident Byzantinism, the mad taste for collecting, lists, assembling, amassing of disparate things is due to the need to dismantle and reconsider the flotsam of a previous world, harmonious perhaps, but by now obsolete.

  Eco’s belief—easier to entertain, perhaps, in semi-anarchic, picturesque Italy than on the tame plains of the United States—that we are living in a new Middle Ages gave urgency and weight to his fourteenth-century novel, and a “coded” quality that added to its detective-story pleasures. These essays, too, take life from his historical passion, whether he is praising St. Thomas Aquinas, describing Marshall McLuhan as “someone who writes the Canticle of Sister Electricity,” or placing the Jonestown mass suicide in a dizzying context of medieval millenarian movements—the fraticelli, “the apostolics of Gherardo Segarelli, from which was born the revolt of Fra Dolcino,” the “endura,” the followers of Tanchelm and Eudes de l’Étoile, the Tafurs (hairy, dirty, cannibalistic), the Crucifers, “the secret Flagellants of Thuringia,” and so on. But our neomedieval world is also the global village of mass communication, and Eco takes as topics pop songs, Casablanca, 2001, how to trick the phone company and how “the system” builds such technological thievery into its balance sheets, and the procedure whereby interest in sports becomes interest in media discourse upon sports: “Born as the raising to the nth power of that initial (and rational) waste that is sports recreation, sports chatter is the glorification of Waste, and therefore the maximum point of Consumption. On it and in it the consumer civilization man actually consumes himself.”

  In this self-consuming, heartless society of all margin, communication becomes an end in itself, a kind of floating brain without central content. The international exposition, as exemplified in Montreal’s Expo 67, builds on communicatory style pure and simple. “A country no longer says, ‘Look what I produce’ but ‘Look how smart I am in presenting what I produce.’ … Each country shows itself by the way in which it is able to present the same thing other countries could also present. The prestige game is won by the country that best tells what it does, independently of what it actually does.” The large temporary buildings at such an exposition function less “as structures to live in or pass through” than “as media of communication and suggestion”—the United States pavilion, a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, triumphed as a sign (“Mystical and technical, past and future, open and closed, this dome communicated the possibility of privacy without eliminating the rest of the world, and suggested, even achieved an image of power and expansion”), and in its triumph as container overshadowed its rather predictably American contents. The show per se, rather than the thing shown, matters more and more, whether the topic is sports discourse replacing sports, guerrilla publicity-seeking, or “the levels of institutional cultural showmanship that have been reached in the United States.” By the same trend, these essays, shaped by the semiotician’s interest in secondary meanings, have an air of removal that consorts awkwardly with their occasional reflex of Marxist terminology—e.g., “He [a visitor to a trade fair] has only accepted his role as consumer of consumer goods since he cannot be a proprietor of means of production.”* Marx believed that the world in its true workings, in the structure of its layered power, could be analyzed and then actually altered; Umberto Eco’s reflections, generally amusing and often brilliant, glint off of the surfaces of processes simultaneously elusive, inexorable, and feather-light. “Machines for communicating,” as Eco says of clothes, make up the human world, a shell of sheer significations like a suit of armor with nothing in it. Such a suit, in the delightful novella The Nonexistent Knight by Eco’s fellow countryman Italo Calvino, walks and fights and falls in love; but can there truly, we who are inside the world must ask, be nothing at all inside?

  In Borges’s Wake

  THE ADVENTURES OF A PHOTOGRAPHER IN LA PLATA, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine. 169 pp. Dutton, 1989.

  FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM, by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 641 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

  The reputation of the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares is still associated, in the United States, with that of his friend and sometime collaborator Jorge Luis Borges. They wrote spoofs and parodies together, and worked on film scripts, anthologies, and translations; it might be said that Bioy Casares, though a generation younger, called the older man out of his shell, and inspired Borges’s first and most mind-blowing book of prose, the collection Ficciones. Bioy Casares is known, on his own, as the author of the betranced science-fiction novella The Invention of Morel, and of a number of novels few non-Latin Americans have read. His latest novel to be published here, The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata, is a slight and sly tale not apt to widen his local audience greatly, yet it has a charm and a sinister wit and a sudden sadness only an assured literary performer could deliver. It tells, in a terse and flat but not unfriendly style, of a young small-town photographer, Nicolasito Almanza, who arrives with his equipment in the city of La Plata, the capital of Buenos Aires Province. No sooner has Almanza emerged into the city from his all-night bus ride than he is hailed by a stranger—a tall, rosy-faced “older gentleman” who is leading an entourage consisting of two attractive young women, an infant in arms, and a little girl. These, it develops, are the Lombardos, also newly arrived in the capital, from the district of Magdalena. Before the novel is over, our hero will give blood to save the father, Don Juan, from dying, and will sleep with both of Don Juan’s daughters—Griselda, the mother of the children, and Julia, who assists Almanza with his photography. The photographer is amply warned to disentangle himself from this family, who have evidently fled their native soil in some financial embarrassment, and whose patriarch is rumored to be none other than Satan, but a certain modernist glue prolongs entanglements, delays deliveries, and complicates arrangements in this plot, and Almanza extracts himself only when he moves on to photograph the sights of another city, Tandil. In fact no harm befalls him, except the loss of Julia, with whom he has, without the reader’s much noticing it, fallen in love.

  The pleasure and the discomfort the book affords derive from what we might call the comedy of daily intercourse—the great amounts of time (the characters’) and words (the author’s) expended in going back and forth among boarding houses and restaurants, explaining and fulfilling or missing appointments, chasing disappearing suitcases and delayed remittances, observing obscurely motivated conversational courtesies. Hastening from place to place, “Almanza remembered a dream situation: being in a hurry and walking slowly with tired legs that weigh him down. The truth was that everything that day was taking too much time.” The grid of numbered streets whereon the characters pursue one another is indicated with a mathematical precision; upon the grid, however, human conduct oscillates unpredictably. Almanza and Griselda rent a hotel room for two hours for a tryst, but the electricity between them shorts out:

  Again she held him close. How strange, he thought, so slender and so strong. She looked beautiful but attracted him less than before, and at moments she irritated him a little. Perhaps because she had lied to him (not meaning any wrong, one must admit) and also, incredible as it seemed, because she had confessed her lie. He had discovered that he didn’t feel at ease with nervous, complicated people. While he was thinking this, a hard arm held him by the neck. He felt some pain and couldn’t move; meanwhile Griselda was rubbing against him. Suddenly, with noticeable force, she pushed him away. Almanza wanted to wipe his forehead with his handkerchief. He was still looking for it in his pant pockets and jacket, when he saw her fall as if she had fainted with her head hanging off the edge of the
bed, looking up wildly, her mouth half-open and her breast bare. One is always being manipulated, he thought and got angry again. He reconsidered: It’s not that bad.

  The encounter ends oddly; Almanza obeys “an impulse that was familiar to him” and takes out his camera and photographs Griselda, no fewer than twenty times. “She looked up coyly and shook her hair. He photographed her again.” The one thing that proceeds smoothly for him in La Plata is his photography of the city’s buildings and monuments; his lens cuts through the maze, as art saves us from life.

  Bioy Casares is a deadpan parodist, and what is parodied here seems to be the traditional novel itself—its solemn tracing of the psychological, erotic, perilous relational currents among “nervous, complicated people.” No wonder that Almanza, caught in the web of the Lombardos’ seductions, and beset by gossip from all sides, takes an interest, while in Griselda’s bedroom, in a magazine article that tells “how the great powers and even your country were only a smoke screen and how everything that happens on God’s earth—even what happens to you and me—depends on the decisions of a handful of men in dark suits sitting around a table.” In our hunger for a pattern behind things we entertain fantasies of conspiracy. At several points in the book, Almanza senses an echoing: “Everything happens to me in pairs.” When he and Julia part, she gives him a kaleidoscope, a toy that fetches symmetry out of accidental arrangements.

  The novel’s mood, laconic style, and mechanisms—the careful notation of happenstance, the plurality of ominous characters—are those of a mystery novel, but one whose minor mysteries (What do the Lombardos want? Is Don Juan the Devil or a garrulous old con man with two daughters at loose ends?) and major mystery (What do the photographer’s seemingly aimless adventures add up to?) are left unresolved. The novel arrests our attention and wins our respect by the things it disdains to do: it does not overdramatize or moralize, it denies events a deeper meaning. A clean if desolate flatness results—the spookiness of the minimal, haunted by the absence of ghosts. Whodunit? Nobodaddy. In using the mystery-novel format to tease forth nihilist sensations, The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata resembles, among many other modernist works, Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes, Raymond Queneau’s We Always Treat Women Too Well, Borges’s story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and that surprising best-seller, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

  Borges inspired a character, the blind Jorge of Burgos, in The Name of the Rose, and also the book’s central image of a labyrinthine library, an essentially infinite library as a universal metaphor. Another Borgesian notion, that of a Cabalistic conspiracy running beneath things, staining and twisting history and putting men in touch with diabolical deities, informs Eco’s second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, which, like his first, is bulky, recondite, intricate, and best-selling. Borges, in his short stories and in his highly individual literary criticism, could give us a shiver with the lightest, most offhand touch of his private supernatural. His stories often open with a creak of esoteric pedantry:

  I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

  [“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”]

  No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man came from the South and that his home had been one of those numberless villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain, where the Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek and where leprosy is infrequent.

  [“The Circular Ruins”]

  In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic conventicles.

  [“Three Versions of Judas”]

  And, in fullest throat:

  Those who write that the sect of the Phoenix originated in Heliopolis, and make it derive from the religious restoration which followed the death of the reformer Amenhotep IV, cite texts by Herodotus, Tacitus, and inscriptions from the Egyptian monuments; but they ignore, or try to ignore, the fact that the denomination of the sect by the name of Phoenix is not prior to Rabanus Maurus, and that the most ancient sources (the Saturnalia, or Flavius Josephus, let us say) speak only of the People of Custom or the People of the Secret.

  [“The Sect of the Phoenix”]

  In attempting to expand one of these Borgesian frissons, with their union of curious fact and macabre fancy, their solemn conspiratorial tone, their expert trafficking along that shadowy borderline where knowledge becomes arcane and thought becomes madness, into a six-hundred-forty-page, one-hundred-twenty-chapter saga of research and rumor in modern Italy, Paris, and Brazil, Eco has not reckoned with the possibility that frissons are not endlessly expandable. Borges was always brief; he wrote with a poet’s ear; his own blindness and reclusive habits gave his mental explorations a peculiar and inimitable resonance, an earnest sorrow and uncanny repose. He had the voice of a sphinx. Eco, contrariwise, appears to be a postmodern intellectual as animated as he is intelligent, a mental extrovert whose cerebrations spill over into a number of disciplines. Foucault’s Pendulum is a monumental performance, erudite beyond measure, and, insofar as Eco’s brainy presence on the page is enjoyable, enjoyable. But as a tale of human adventure, erected upon the not quite interchangeable characters of three Milanese editors who prankishly cook up a secret sect called Tres (Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici) and are consumed by their creation, it totters and sags, and seems spun-out and thin.

  The medieval characters of The Name of the Rose had at the least the solidity and color of their richly evoked fourteenth-century milieu. Those of Foucault’s Pendulum belong to our era, and they seem, rather than creations of the author’s erudition, victims of it. They are disposable plastic holders that pour out ribbons of information, of facts and quotations all looped around the central notion that the Templars—a monastic order of Christian knights founded in 1118 to protect pilgrims to the shakily held Holy Land and destroyed in 1314 by Philip IV of France, who wanted their money—in truth survived and, by means of a relay system of hidden initiates who are supposed to meet six times, in six different countries, at intervals of a hundred and twenty years, are invisibly progressing toward a secret concerning the earth’s “telluric currents” that will enable its holders to rule the world. Why they didn’t simply start ruling in 1314 may have escaped me—there is some tricky business about a map, and a beam of sunlight at a certain moment of the year on Foucault’s pendulum, a non-imaginary object which hangs in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. This great plot involves everyone from the Rosicrucians to the Jesuits, Francis Bacon to Cagliostro, the Freemasons (of course) to the Jews (perhaps), and was the real reason, it would seem, that Napoleon invaded Russia and Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust. If this last jest seems in dubious taste, a better joke is that the three editors reason from a cryptic document—entrusted to them by a prospective author who then vanishes—that is finally demonstrated to have been simply a merchant’s delivery list. Better yet is the underlying jest that our human lust for conspiracy theories and secret organizations is so keen that a donnish parody of a cult becomes a murderously real one. There can’t be too many hermetic stones left unturned in this ransacking of texts, this orgy of citation and paraphrase for which Eco, he told an interviewer for The New York Times Magazine, “pillaged the bookshops in at least 10 cities in Italy, France and America,” acquiring “1,500 books on occultism plus 400 or so rare books.” He could be describing his own researches when he has his narrator write:

  I found myself in a morass of books, in which it was difficult to distinguish historical fact from hermetic gossip, and reliable information from flights of fancy. Working like a machine for a week, I drew up a bewildering list of sects, lodges, conventicles.

  The enterprising Italians have already p
ublished a dictionary of Eco’s strange words and quotations—Dizionario del pendolo di Foucault. William Weaver has performed nobly (and with praiseworthy speed) in producing an English translation that hums imperturbably along, through tunnels of French and Latin and Hebrew, around ancient graven illustrations, in an emblematic variety of type styles. Foucault’s Pendulum is a dense and inventorial novel that lacks, and needs, an index.

  It also needs more blood, more human juice. It has some. Casaubon,† the narrator and the Templar expert who provides most of the scholarly ingredients of the three editors’ witches’ brew, fathers a baby in the course of the novel, and the birth inspires a few sentences striking in their unlayered simplicity, their humble celebration of the Ding an sich. Absorbed in an interview with a sinister taxidermist, Casaubon is late to the hospital, where his consort, Lia, has already delivered:

  Finally—I don’t know how—I found myself in a room. Lia was pearly pale but smiling. Someone had lifted her hair and put it under a white cap. For the first time I saw Lia’s forehead in all its splendor. Next to her was the Thing.

  “It’s Giulio,” she said.

  Amparo, an earlier woman friend, a Brazilian mulatto, occasions some salty verbal exchanges, a little sexual heat, and an episode, in Brazil, that is psychologically interesting: attending a macumba ceremony as a disdainful, educated spectator, she is caught up in the dance and possessed by the she-devil Pomba Gira. Her lewd and rigid movements and her sweaty, breathless dismay afterward get Casaubon, as it were, to look at her. In general, even in bed, he is too busy reading to give his women enough attention to make them real to any reader but himself. Eco, who was born in 1932, has had experience of being a child, a university student, and an intellectual in these last, stormy years of Italian history; whenever he drops his occult texts and describes a village war between the resistance and the Fascists, or a student riot of the Sixties, or the bar where the idle wits of Milan gather, reality breaks through, a breezy sense of witness, suggesting what he might write a novel about if he could ever forgo his ingenious schemes of signification and self-deconstruction, of encyclopedic foolery.