TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030689/03068900.054

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.4 KB | 126 lines

                û                                                              BOOKS, Page 71

Return of Ecomania


A successor to The Name of the Rose sweeps Italy

By Otto Friedrich  -- With reporting by Cathy Booth/Bologna


    Many a university professor daydreams about someday casting
aside his footnotes and writing a splashy novel that will sell
zillions of copies and make him rich. Umberto Eco, 57, a bearded
and bespectacled professor of semiotics at the University of
Bologna, fulfilled exactly that daydream eight years ago, when
he concocted his mega-macro-medieval-mystery hit The Name of the
Rose. He wrote part of the best seller in a 50-room country
retreat near Urbino that he bought and restored himself and
where he spends his leisure hours expanding his 40,000-volume
collection of antique books and playing the recorder in his
bathroom (because the acoustics are best there).

    That bizarre scenario might seem impossible for even a
semiotician to duplicate. But guess again. Eco has produced
another novel, Foucault's Pendulum, which has sold more than
half a million copies in Italy since it was published last
October and at one point outsold the next highest best seller by
15 to 1. Translation rights have been assigned in 24 countries,
and an English version by William Weaver will be published in
the U.S. next October. Once again the Italian press has
orchestrated what it calls Ecomania with cries of delight and
outrage. One newspaper praised Foucault's Pendulum as "the novel
of the '90s," while the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano denounced
it for "vulgarities."

    Not the least odd aspect of the affair is that Foucault's
Pendulum is not so much a thriller as a complicated parable that
contains pages and pages of erudite details about such medieval
phenomena as the Knights Templar, the Cathars and the Order of
Assassins. And Eco steadfastly refuses to explain what his
mysterious novel is all about. "This was a book conceived to
irritate the reader," he says in his drafty university office,
lighting up another of the 60 cigarettes he puffs every day. "I
knew it would provoke ambiguous, nonhomogeneous responses
because it was a book conceived to point up some
contradictions."

    The plot, embedded in the 500 pages of mystic history,
concerns three editors in a Milan publishing house who are
working on a series about the occult arts. They become
fascinated by a secret plan supposedly concocted by the Knights
Templar to dominate the world by harnessing its magnetic
currents. The Templars, Eco explains in a 20-page aside, were
one of the great military monastic orders at the time of the
Crusades and were suppressed after the King of France accused
them, probably falsely, of homosexuality and sorcery.

    The editors become convinced that they can somehow unravel
the Templars' scheme if they put a secret map under Foucault's
pendulum, a device invented by the 19th century physicist
Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault to measure the earth's rotation. The
pendulum, which still stands in Paris today, will supposedly
indicate a site at which the earth's vital currents can be
controlled, earthquakes can be created, and so on.

    Eco periodically interrupts his narrative for learned
disquisitions on magic and the supernatural, on the Arians, the
Druids, the Cabala, the Freemasons, modern-day Brazilian
Umbanda, on such celebrated 18th century sorcerers as
Cagliostro and the Count of Saint-Germain, even on such hoaxes
as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. While the three
explorers are pursuing their experiment, some occultist zealots
find out about it and threaten to kill them unless they
surrender the Templars' secret.

    Only in a rare interview, in La Repubblica, did Eco venture
to explain that his novel "is the story of all the cosmic plots
that people truly imagine. It is the story of a cancer
afflicting the spirit. The thriller aspect, the anguish, the
uncertainty, are the consequences of this psychosis of
suspiciously interpreting nature, society, the world, the
text." Is that all quite clear?  "The answer is there in 500
pages," says Eco, parrying further questions.  "If I had a
shorter answer, I would have written a book of 200 pages." As
for anyone else's answers, Eco simply says he does not want to
"impose my interpretation on the reader."

    The Italian press, of course, has offered all kinds of
answers.  Maria Corti, writing in L'Indice, declared that Eco's
chief message is that "a rational explanation of the world is
improbable, even unlikely." Critic Enzo Golino, writing for a
socialist magazine, suggested that "Foucault's Pendulum is a
gigantic psychoanalysis of history that questions a revealing
aspect of today's Western civilization: the return of
irrationality and the illusion of rationality." Others have
been less respectful, using semiotic signs like faticaccia
(exhausting work) and uggiosissimo (roughly, dullsville to the
max). Some magazines have published elaborate plot outlines,
diagrams, glossaries of occult terminology. Eco, theorizes
sociologist and critic Francesco Alberoni, "satisfies some deep
need . . . not to remain at the superficiality of things." The
magazine L'Europeo suggested that the only people who like the
book -- or indeed have read it -- are the author's friends.

    Eco will at least offer some thoughts on how his book came
about. "One answer," he says, "is that at age 48 I wrote the
first novel of my life, and then I had the problem of
understanding whether it was an exception, a mere accident or
the beginning  of something new. Suppose a vicious dog chases
you, and to escape you jump over a river.  Once you've done
this, you wonder if it was chance or could you do it a second
time? Also, obviously I had something more to say." Whatever
that might be.

    Now that he has made a second killing in the fiction
sweepstakes, Eco is trying to return to the decent obscurity of
academe (he still lectures three days a week to some 200
students in Bologna). In April the Harvard University Press
will reissue two scholarly works. He is working these days on
what he describes only as being "on the borderline of semiotics
and philosophy." He is still fascinated by St. Thomas Aquinas
and Superman, on both of whom he has written learnedly. He is
readying a collection of scholarly essays in English, and he
has no plans for any new novels. One every ten years, he says,
is quite enough.