Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum by eco foucault (important books to read .txt) 📗

rooms inall, books piled in every corner, shelves sagging under theirweight. The table with the computer, printer, and boxes of disks. Afew pictures in the space not occupied by shelves. Directlyopposite the table, a seventeenth-century print carefully framed,an allegory I hadn't noticed last month, when I came up to have abeer before going off on my vacation.

On the table, aphotograph of Lorenza Pellegrini, with an inscription in a tiny,almost childish hand. You saw only her face, but her eyes wereunsettling, the look in her eyes. In a gesture of instinctivedelicacy (or jealousy?) I turned the photograph facedown, notreading the inscription.

There were folders. Ilooked through them. Nothing of interest, only accounts, publishingcost estimates. But in the midst of these papers I found theprintout of a file that, to judge by its date, must have been oneof Belbo's first experiments with the word processor. It was titled"Abu." I remembered, when Abulafia made its appearance in theoffice, Belbo's infantile enthusiasm, Gudrun's muttering,Diotallevi's sarcasm.

Abu had been Belbo'sprivate reply to his critics, a kind of sophomoric joke, but itsaid a lot about the combinatory passion with which he had used themachine. Here was a man who had said, with his wan smile, that oncehe realized that he would never be a protagonist, he decided tobecome, instead, an intelligent spectator, for there was no pointin writing without serious motivation. Better to rewrite the booksof others, which is what a good editor does. But Belbo found in themachine a kind of LSD and ran his fingers over the keyboard as ifinventing variations on "The Happy Farmer" on the old piano athome, without fear of being judged. Not that he thought he wasbeing creative: terrified as he was by writing, he knew that thiswas not writing but only the testing of an electronic skill. Agymnastic exercise. But, forgetting die usual ghosts that hauntedhim, he discovered that playing with the word processor was a wayof giving vent to a fifty-year-old's second adolescence. Hisnatural pessimism, his reluctant acceptance of his own past weresomehow dissolved in this dialog with a memory that was inorganic,objective, obedient, nonmoral, transistorized, and so humanlyinhuman that it enabled him to forget his chronic nervousness aboutlife.

FILENAME: Abu

O what a beautifulmorning at the end of November, in the beginning was the word, singto me, goddess, the son of Peleus, Achilles, now is the winter ofour discontent. Period, new paragraph. Testing testing parakalo,parakalo, with the right program you can even make anagrams, ifyou've written a novel with a Confederate hero named Rhett Butlerand a fickle girl named Scarlett and then change your mind, all youhave to do is punch a key and Abu will global replace the RhettButlers to Prince Andreis, the Scarletts to Natashas, Atlanta toMoscow, and lo! you've written war and peace.

Abu, do another thingnow: Belbo orders Abu to change all words, make each "a" become"akka" and each "o" become "ulla," for a paragraph to look almostFinnish.

Akkabu, dullaakkanullather thing nullaw: Belbulla ullarders Ak-kabu tullachakkange akkall wullards, makkake eakkach "akka" be-cullame"akkakkakka" akkand eakkach "ulla" becullame "ullakka," fullar akkapakkarakkagrakkaph tulla lullaullak akkalmullastFinnish.

O joy, O new vertigo ofdifference, O my platonic reader-writer racked by a most platonicinsomnia, O wake of finnegan, O animal charming and benign. Hedoesn't help you think but he helps you because you have to thinkfor him. A totally spiritual machine. If you write with a goosequill you scratch the sweaty pages and keep stopping to dip forink. Your thoughts go too fast for your aching wrist. If you type,the letters cluster together, and again you must go at the pokypace of the mechanism, not the speed of your synapses. But with him(it? her?) your fingers dream, your mind brushes the keyboard, youare borne on golden pinions, at last you confront the light ofcritical reason with the happiness of a first encounter.

An loo what I doo now, Itak this pac of speling monnstrosties an I orderr the macchin tocoppy them an file them in temrary memry an then brring them bakfrom tha limbo onto the scren, folowing itsel.

There, I was typingblindly, but now I have taken that pack of spelling monstrositiesand ordered the machine to copy the mess, and on the copy I madeall the corrections, so it comes out perfect on the page. Fromshit, thus, I extract pure Shinola. Repenting, I could have deletedthe first draft. I left it to show how the "is" and the "ought,"accident and necessity, can co-exist on this screen. If I wanted, Icould remove the offending passage from the screen but not from thememory, thereby creating an archive of my repressions while denyingomnivorous Freudians and virtuosi of variant texts the pleasure ofconjecture, the exercise of their occupation, their academicglory.

This is better than realmemory, because real memory, at the cost of much effort, learns toremember but not to forget. Diotallevi goes Sephardically mad overthose palaces with grand staircases, that statue of a warrior doingsomething unspeakable to a defenseless woman, the corridors withhundreds of rooms, each with the depiction of a portent, and thesudden apparitions, disturbing incidents, walking mummies. To eachmemorable image you attach a thought, a label, a category, a pieceof the cosmic furniture, syllogisms, an enormous sorites, chains ofapothegms, strings of hypallages, rosters of zeugmas, dances ofhysteron proteron, apophantic logoi, hierarchic stoichea,processions of equinoxes and parallaxes, herbaria, genealogies ofgymnosophists¡X and so on, to infinity. O Raimundo, O Camillo, youhad only to cast your mind back to your visions and immediately youcould reconstruct the great chain of being, in love and joy,because all that was disjointed in the universe was joined in asingle volume in your mind, and Proust would have made you smile.But when Diotallevi and I tried to construct an ars oblivionalisthat day, we couldn't come up with rules for forgetting. It'simpossible. It's one thing to go in search of a lost time, chasinglabile clues, like Hop-o'-My-Thumb in the woods, and quite anotherdeliberately to misplace time refound. Hop-o'-My-Thumb always comeshome, like an obsession. There is no discipline of forgetting; weare at the mercy of random natural processes, like stroke andamnesia, and such self-interventions as drugs, alcohol, orsuicide.

Abu, however, canperform on