Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [289]
Rule Two says that if tout se tient in the end, the connecting works. From potato to potato, tout se tient. So it’s right.
Rule Three: The connections must not be original. They must have been made before, and the more often the better, by others. Only then do the crossings seem true, because they are obvious.
This, after all, was Signor Garamond’s idea. The books of the Diabolicals must not innovate; they must repeat what has already been said. Otherwise what becomes of the authority of Tradition?
And this is what we did. We didn’t invent anything; we only arranged the pieces. Colonel Ardenti hadn’t invented anything either, but his arrangement of the pieces was clumsy. Furthermore, he was much less educated than we, so he had fewer pieces.
They had all the pieces, but They didn’t know the design of the crossword. We—once again—were smarter.
I remembered something Lia said to me in the mountains, when she was scolding me for having played the nasty game that was our Plan: “People are starved for plans. If you offer them one, they fall on it like a pack of wolves. You invent, and they’ll believe. It’s wrong to add to the inventings that already exist.”
This is what always happens. A young Herostratus broods because he doesn’t know how to become famous. Then he sees a movie in which a frail young man shoots a country music star and becomes the center of attention. Herostratus has found the formula; he goes put and shoots John Lennon.
It’s the same with the SFAs. How can I become a published poet whose name appears in an encyclopedia? Garamond explains: It’s simple, you pay. The SFA never thought of that before, but since the Manutius plan exists, he identifies with it, is convinced he’s been waiting for Manutius all his life; he just didn’t know it was there.
We invented a nonexistent Plan, and They not only believed it was real but convinced themselves that They had been part of it for ages, or rather, They identified the fragments of their muddled mythology as moments of our Plan, moments joined in a logical, irrefutable web of analogy, semblance, suspicion.
But if you invent a plan and others carry it out, it’s as if the Plan exists. At that point it does exist.
Hereafter, hordes of Diabolicals will swarm through the world in search of the map.
We offered a map to people who were trying to overcome a deep, private frustration. What frustration? Belbo’s first file suggested it to me: There can be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr.
You don’t complain about being mortal, prey to a thousand microorganisms you can’t control; you aren’t responsible for the fact that your feet are not very prehensile, that you have no tail, that your hair and teeth don’t grow back when you lose them, that your arteries harden with time. It’s because of the Envious Angels.
The same applies to everyday life. Take stock-market crashes. They happen because each individual makes a wrong move, and all the wrong moves put together create panic. Then whoever lacks steady nerve asks himself: Who’s behind this plot, who’s benefiting? He has to find an enemy, a plotter, or it will be, God forbid, his fault.
If you feel guilty, you invent a plot, many plots. And to counter them, you have to organize your own plot. But the more you invent enemy plots, to exonerate your lack of understanding, the more you fall in love with them, and you pattern your own on their model. Which is what happened when Jesuits and Baconians, Paulicians and neo-Templars each complained of the other’s plan. Diotallevi’s remark was: “Of course, you attribute to the others what you’re doing yourself, and since what you’re doing yourself is hateful, the others become hateful. But since the others, as a rule, would