Foucault's
Pendulum does produce its share
of mortality. The hapless scholar-magician Jacopo Belbo ends up dangling
from the Pendulum, and the denouement also claims another, even more significant
victim. This is the sometime kabbalist Diotallevi, whose death from cancer
is marked distinctly by a confusion of Inside and Outside. Cadaverous in
the final stages of the disease, Diotallevi's body exhibits "that absence
of the boundary between exterior and interior, between skin and flesh, between
the light fuzz of his belly... and the mucillaginous tangle of viscera..."
(465). In his final interview with Belbo, the dying man complains that he
"can't decide whether what you're telling me is happening only inside
your head, or whether it's happening outside" (465). But the distinction
is not worth observing, in Diotallevi's view, for he has come to understand
his dying as a direct consequence of his role in the conspiracy. As a student
of the Kaballah, Diotallevi is deeply schooled in verbal mysticism, the
ars magna of anagrams and the terrible possibilities of blaspheming
against the Name. "Rearranging the letters of the Book means rearranging
the world," he tells Belbo. "If you alter the Book, you alter
the world; if you alter the world, you alter the body" (466). And so,
as he sees it, when he plays with the reality of hieratic writings, redecoding
what had been hidden in fragments, he concomitantly shuffles his own body
chemistry, whose nucleic acids also constitute an alphabetic text. "For
months, like devout rabbis, we uttered different combinations of the letters
of the Book: GCC, CGC, GCG, CGG. What our lips said, our cells learned....
my brain must have transmitted the message to them. Why should I expect
them to be wiser than my brain? I'm dying because we were imaginative beyond
bounds" (467-68).
It is this formulation above all that gives Foucault's Pendulum its
suggestion of generic finality, or at least liminality. What does it mean
to be "imaginative beyond bounds?" When does paranoia cease to
be a fashionably decadent perversion and lapse back into psychopathology,
or perhaps a cultural disease? Like Le Carré and DeLillo, Eco seems
very interested in answering these questions, in finding proper limits for
the textually synthetic imagination. Which is no doubt one of the reasons
for his novel's enormously resonant title. For it was Michel Foucault who
most cogently theorized the evolution of language structures as a contention
between imaginative expansion and rational constraint (or taboo and explosion,
to recall Mailer's terms). As he says in the Discourse on Language:
... a certain fear hides behind this apparent
supremacy accorded [the word], this apparent logophilia. It is as though
these taboos, these barriers, thresholds, and limits were deliberately
disposed in order, at least partly, to master and control the great proliferation
of discourse, in such a way as to relieve its richness of its most dangerous
elements; to organise its disorder so as to skate round its most uncontrollable
aspects. It is as though people had wanted to efface all trace of its irruption
into the activity of our thought and language. (228)
Not explosion but irruption, an outbreak, breakthrough or breakdown.
Not the final Word that preempts all screaming, but the loud glossolalia
of a Babel event, the unrestrained multiplication of signs, the Revolution
of the Signifier ushering in a new dispensation of discourse and the code
or something like that, as the Bolsheviks once said. It is precisely this
radical outcome which the paranoid novel, and perhaps much of postmodern
narrative, has learned to fear. Rightly so, because if Inside and Outside
are one, then this irruption of the code threatens at a single stroke both
the boundaries of the imagination and the hygienic parameters of sound mind
in sound body, the Cartesian basis of the subject itself. If language is
a virus, then there may be certain forms of language which are especially
virulent, and which thus threaten to metathesize/metastasize the entire
word/world order.
No doubt this is stimulant talk again, or perhaps the hysterical discourse
of a racist, patriarchal, logocentric culture whose time has more than come.
And yet this culture continues to superintend your history and mine again,
witness Desert Storm for which unfortunate reason its discourse of irruptive
apocalypse demands a certain attention. The sagas continue. Foucault's
Pendulum both is and is not the last great novel of paranoia. If its
implicit critique of Foucault (and Pynchon) explodes or implodes the search
for "the real Text," it simultaneously causes the irruption of
a new discourse propagated around (or as) that Text. The evocative darkness
of the postindustrial wreckage surrounds us yet; and there is never any
lack of ramblers in that wreck. Eco limits himself by and large to an elegant
allegorical polemic against poststructuralism; but in less delicate hands
this revision of paranoia produces an argument of larger cultural ambit
(if also of greater generic conformity). Paranoia has freely embraced the
mode of information. Tyrone Slothrop's Swiss contact tells him that information
machines are the wave of the future. Jacopo Belbo discovers word processing
and BASIC programming. But it falls to the young American heirs of the paranoid
tradition, the cyberpunks who follow Burroughs and Pynchon, to make the
next crucial connection.
Diotallevi's kaballistic cancer is a metaphor, "a thrust at truth,
and a lie" as Pynchon calls such things (Lot 49, 95). Invoking
the canons of realism, we can choose to believe that the poor man's disease
is not actually caused by his tampering with hermetic texts. But we are
approaching a point in the western technologique at which psychosomatic
fantasies may no longer be so easily dismissed. Pynchon posits a semi-imaginary
form of induced epilepsy called "the Strobing Tactic" in Gravity's
Rainbow (648; see my article, "Strobe's Stimulus"). William
Gibson develops this into his notion of "intrusion countermeasures
electronics" or "black ice" in his story "Burning Chrome."
In Synners, Pat Cadigan imagines a scheme for neural/electronic connection
that transforms one man's cardiovascular accident into a computer virus
that nearly crashes the global network. And so we come to the notion of
the Great Crash ("the Big One," as Cadigan calls it), the ultimate
convergence of Inside and Outside into the ultimate holy Text: Infocalypse.
The word "infocalypse" is coined by a character in Neal Stephenson's
cyberpunk thriller Snow Crash. It refers to the great nightmare of
digital Manichaeanism: that the convergence of inner and outer states (which
according to both Freud and Pavlov is the root of paranoia) might result
in a practical technology for thought control. As the saying goes, even
paranoids have enemies. The cyberneticists, systems theorists, and cognitivists
have always told us that the brain is just another computer, which given
the right linguistic techniques could be programmed just like a computing
machine. That premise is enormously dubious, of course (see Penrose) but
Stephenson seems to accept it, if only for purposes of invention. His protagonist
(called Hiro Protagonist) explains: "Under the right conditions, your
ears or eyes can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language
functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak
words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink
right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system,
bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core,
enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine" (369). The
evil genius of the novel, a Texofascist called L. Bob Rife, learns these
magic words, which Stephenson variously identifies as (literal) viruses
from outer space or semi-mythical nam-shubs from ancient Sumer. Says
L. Bob (sounding uncannily like H. Ross Perot): "See, it's the first
function of any organization to control its own sphincters.... So we're
working on refining our management techniques so that we can control [proprietary]
information no matter where it is on our hard disks or even inside the programmers'
heads" (108). This is post-Fordism, not so much in-your-face
as down-your-brainstem.
|
next
title page
p18 index |