Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [232]
“And then what happened?”
“See here, Casaubon, why are you so interested in my life?”
“Because you make it sound like a folktale, and folktales are part of the collective imagination.”
“Good point. One morning, X9 was driving along, out of his territory; maybe he had a date to meet the girl in the fields, to go beyond their kissing and pawing and show her that his prick was not as rotten as his teeth—I’m sorry, I still can’t make myself love him. Anyway, the Fascists set a trap for him, captured him, took him into town, and at five o’clock the next morning, they shot him.”
A pause. Belbo looked at his hands, which he had clasped, as if in prayer. Then he held them apart and said, “That was the proof that he wasn’t a spy.”
“The moral of the story?”
“Who said stories have to have a moral? But, now that I think about it, maybe the moral is that sometimes, to prove something, you have to die.”
97
I am that I am.
—Exodus 3:14
Ego sum qui sum. An axiom of hermetic philosophy.
—Madame Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 1877, p. 1
“Who are you?” three hundred voices asked as one, while twenty swords flashed in the hands of the nearest ghosts...”I am that I am,” he said.
—Alexandre Dumas, Giuseppe Balsamo, ii
I saw Belbo the next morning. “Yesterday we sketched a splendid dime novel,” I said to him. “But maybe, if we want to make a convincing Plan, we should stick closer to reality.”
“What reality?” he asked me. “Maybe only cheap fiction gives us the true measure of reality. Maybe they’ve deceived us.”
“How?”
“Making us believe that on one hand there is Great Art, which portrays typical characters in typical situations, and on the other hand you have the thriller, the romance, which portrays atypical characters in atypical situations. No true dandy, I thought, would have made love to Scarlett O’Hara or even to Constance Bona-cieux or Princess Daisy. I played with the dime novel, in order to take a stroll outside of life. It comforted me, offering the unattainable. But I was wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Wrong. Proust was right: life is represented better by bad music than by a Missa solemnis. Great Art makes fun of us as it comforts us, because it shows us the world as the artists would like the world to be. The dime novel, however, pretends to joke, but then it shows us the world as it actually is—or at least the world as it will become. Women are a lot more like Milady than they are like Little Nell, Fu Manchu is more real than Nathan the Wise, and History is closer to what Sue narrates than to what Hegel projects. Shakespeare, Melville, Balzac, and Dostoyevski all wrote sensational fiction. What has taken place in the real world was predicted in penny dreadfuls.”
“The fact is, it’s easier for reality to imitate the dime novel than to imitate art. Being a Mona Lisa is hard work; becoming Milady follows our natural tendency to choose the easy way.”
Diotallevi, silent until now, remarked: “Or our Aglie, for example. He finds it easier to imitate Saint-Germain than Voltaire.”
“Yes,” Belbo said, “and women find Saint-Germain more interesting than Voltaire.”
Afterward, I found this file, in which Belbo translated our discussion into fictional form, amusing himself by reconstructing the story of Saint-Germain without adding anything of his own, only a few sentences here and there to provide transitions, in a furious collage of quotes, plagiarisms, borrowings, cliches. Once again, to escape the discomfort of History, Belbo wrote and reexamined life through a literary stand-in.
FILENAME: The Return of Saint-Germain
For five centuries now the avenging hand of the All-Powerful has driven me from deepest Asia all the way to this cold, damp land. I carry with me fear, despair, death. But no, I am the notary of the Plan, even if nobody else knows it. I have seen things far more terrible; preparing the night of Saint Bartholomew was more irksome than the thing