Odd Jobs (126 page)

In this self-consuming, heartless society of all margin, communication becomes an end in itself, a kind of floating brain without central content. The international exposition, as exemplified in Montreal’s Expo 67, builds on communicatory style pure and simple. “A country no longer says, ‘Look what I produce’ but ‘Look how smart I am in presenting what I produce.’ … Each country shows itself by the way in which it is able to present the same thing other countries could also present. The prestige game is won by the country that best tells what it does, independently of what it actually does.” The large temporary buildings at such an exposition function less “as structures to live in or pass through” than “as media of communication and suggestion”—the United States pavilion, a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, triumphed as a sign (“Mystical and technical, past and future, open and closed, this dome communicated the possibility of privacy without eliminating the rest of the world, and suggested, even achieved an image of power and expansion”), and in its triumph as container overshadowed its rather predictably American contents. The show
per se
, rather than the thing shown, matters more and more, whether the topic is sports discourse replacing sports, guerrilla publicity-seeking, or “the levels of institutional cultural showmanship that have been reached in the United States.” By the same trend, these essays, shaped by the semiotician’s interest in secondary meanings, have an air of removal that consorts awkwardly with their occasional reflex of Marxist terminology—e.g., “He [a visitor to a trade fair] has only accepted his role as consumer of consumer goods since he cannot be a proprietor of means of production.”
^*
Marx believed that the world in its true workings, in the structure of its layered power, could be analyzed and then actually altered; Umberto Eco’s reflections, generally amusing and often brilliant, glint off of the surfaces of processes simultaneously
elusive, inexorable, and feather-light. “Machines for communicating,” as Eco says of clothes, make up the human world, a shell of sheer significations like a suit of armor with nothing in it. Such a suit, in the delightful novella
The Nonexistent Knight
by Eco’s fellow countryman Italo Calvino, walks and fights and falls in love; but can there truly, we who are inside the world must ask, be nothing at all inside?

T
HE
A
DVENTURES OF A
P
HOTOGRAPHER IN
L
A
P
LATA
, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine. 169 pp. Dutton, 1989.

F
OUCAULT
’
S
P
ENDULUM
, by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 641 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.

The reputation of the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares is still associated, in the United States, with that of his friend and sometime collaborator Jorge Luis Borges. They wrote spoofs and parodies together, and worked on film scripts, anthologies, and translations; it might be said that Bioy Casares, though a generation younger, called the older man out of his shell, and inspired Borges’s first and most mind-blowing book of prose, the collection
Ficciones
. Bioy Casares is known, on his own, as the author of the betranced science-fiction novella
The Invention of Morel
, and of a number of novels few non-Latin Americans have read. His latest novel to be published here,
The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata
, is a slight and sly tale not apt to widen his local audience greatly, yet it has a charm and a sinister wit and a sudden sadness only an assured literary performer could deliver. It tells, in a terse and flat but not unfriendly style, of a young small-town photographer, Nicolasito Almanza, who arrives with his equipment in the city of La Plata, the capital of Buenos Aires Province. No sooner has Almanza emerged into the city from his all-night bus ride than he is hailed by a stranger—a tall, rosy-faced “older gentleman” who is leading an entourage consisting of two attractive young women, an infant in arms, and a
little girl. These, it develops, are the Lombardos, also newly arrived in the capital, from the district of Magdalena. Before the novel is over, our hero will give blood to save the father, Don Juan, from dying, and will sleep with both of Don Juan’s daughters—Griselda, the mother of the children, and Julia, who assists Almanza with his photography. The photographer is amply warned to disentangle himself from this family, who have evidently fled their native soil in some financial embarrassment, and whose patriarch is rumored to be none other than Satan, but a certain modernist glue prolongs entanglements, delays deliveries, and complicates arrangements in this plot, and Almanza extracts himself only when he moves on to photograph the sights of another city, Tandil. In fact no harm befalls him, except the loss of Julia, with whom he has, without the reader’s much noticing it, fallen in love.

The pleasure and the discomfort the book affords derive from what we might call the comedy of daily intercourse—the great amounts of time (the characters’) and words (the author’s) expended in going back and forth among boarding houses and restaurants, explaining and fulfilling or missing appointments, chasing disappearing suitcases and delayed remittances, observing obscurely motivated conversational courtesies. Hastening from place to place, “Almanza remembered a dream situation: being in a hurry and walking slowly with tired legs that weigh him down. The truth was that everything that day was taking too much time.” The grid of numbered streets whereon the characters pursue one another is indicated with a mathematical precision; upon the grid, however, human conduct oscillates unpredictably. Almanza and Griselda rent a hotel room for two hours for a tryst, but the electricity between them shorts out:

The encounter ends oddly; Almanza obeys “an impulse that was familiar to him” and takes out his camera and photographs Griselda, no fewer than twenty times. “She looked up coyly and shook her hair. He photographed her again.” The one thing that proceeds smoothly for him in La Plata is his photography of the city’s buildings and monuments; his lens cuts through the maze, as art saves us from life.

Bioy Casares is a deadpan parodist, and what is parodied here seems to be the traditional novel itself—its solemn tracing of the psychological, erotic, perilous relational currents among “nervous, complicated people.” No wonder that Almanza, caught in the web of the Lombardos’ seductions, and beset by gossip from all sides, takes an interest, while in Griselda’s bedroom, in a magazine article that tells “how the great powers and even your country were only a smoke screen and how everything that happens on God’s earth—even what happens to you and me—depends on the decisions of a handful of men in dark suits sitting around a table.” In our hunger for a pattern behind things we entertain fantasies of conspiracy. At several points in the book, Almanza senses an echoing: “Everything happens to me in pairs.” When he and Julia part, she gives him a kaleidoscope, a toy that fetches symmetry out of accidental arrangements.

The novel’s mood, laconic style, and mechanisms—the careful notation of happenstance, the plurality of ominous characters—are those of a mystery novel, but one whose minor mysteries (What do the Lombardos want? Is Don Juan the Devil or a garrulous old con man with two daughters at loose ends?) and major mystery (What do the photographer’s seemingly aimless adventures add up to?) are left unresolved. The novel arrests our attention and wins our respect by the things it disdains to do: it does not overdramatize or moralize, it denies events a deeper meaning. A clean if desolate flatness results—the spookiness of the minimal, haunted by the absence of ghosts. Whodunit? Nobodaddy. In using the mystery-novel format to tease forth nihilist sensations,
The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata
resembles, among many other modernist works, Robbe-Grillet’s
Les Gommes
, Raymond Queneau’s
We Always Treat Women Too Well
, Borges’s story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and that surprising best-seller, Umberto Eco’s
The Name of the Rose
.

Borges inspired a character, the blind Jorge of Burgos, in
The Name of the Rose
, and also the book’s central image of a labyrinthine library, an essentially infinite library as a universal metaphor. Another Borgesian notion, that of a Cabalistic conspiracy running beneath things, staining and twisting history and putting men in touch with diabolical deities, informs Eco’s second novel,
Foucault’s Pendulum
, which, like his first, is bulky, recondite, intricate, and best-selling. Borges, in his short stories and in his highly individual literary criticism, could give us a shiver with the lightest, most offhand touch of his private supernatural. His stories often open with a creak of esoteric pedantry:

And, in fullest throat:

In attempting to expand one of these Borgesian
frissons
, with their union of curious fact and macabre fancy, their solemn conspiratorial tone, their expert trafficking along that shadowy borderline where knowledge becomes arcane and thought becomes madness, into a six-hundred-forty-page, one-hundred-twenty-chapter saga of research and rumor in modern Italy, Paris, and Brazil, Eco has not reckoned with the possibility that
frissons
are not endlessly expandable. Borges was always brief; he wrote with a poet’s ear; his own blindness and reclusive habits gave his mental explorations a peculiar and inimitable resonance, an earnest sorrow and uncanny repose. He had the voice of a sphinx. Eco, contrariwise, appears to be a postmodern intellectual as animated as he is intelligent, a mental extrovert whose cerebrations spill over into a number of disciplines.
Foucault’s Pendulum
is a monumental performance, erudite beyond measure, and, insofar as Eco’s brainy presence on the page is enjoyable, enjoyable. But as a tale of human adventure, erected upon the not quite interchangeable characters of three Milanese editors who prankishly cook up a secret sect called Tres (Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici) and are consumed by their creation, it totters and sags, and seems spun-out and thin.

The medieval characters of
The Name of the Rose
had at the least the solidity and color of their richly evoked fourteenth-century milieu. Those of
Foucault’s Pendulum
belong to our era, and they seem, rather than creations of the author’s erudition, victims of it. They are disposable plastic holders that pour out ribbons of information, of facts and quotations all looped around the central notion that the Templars—a monastic order of Christian knights founded in 1118 to protect pilgrims to the shakily held Holy Land and destroyed in 1314 by Philip IV of France, who wanted their money—in truth survived and, by means of a relay system of hidden initiates who are supposed to meet six times, in six different countries, at intervals of a hundred and twenty years, are invisibly progressing toward a secret concerning the earth’s “telluric currents” that will enable its holders to rule the world. Why they didn’t simply start ruling in 1314 may have escaped me—there is some tricky business about a map, and a beam of sunlight at a certain moment of the year on Foucault’s pendulum, a non-imaginary object which hangs in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. This great plot involves everyone from the Rosicrucians to the Jesuits, Francis Bacon to Cagliostro, the Freemasons (of course) to the Jews (perhaps), and was the real reason, it would seem, that Napoleon invaded Russia and Hitler perpetrated
the Holocaust. If this last jest seems in dubious taste, a better joke is that the three editors reason from a cryptic document—entrusted to them by a prospective author who then vanishes—that is finally demonstrated to have been simply a merchant’s delivery list. Better yet is the underlying jest that our human lust for conspiracy theories and secret organizations is so keen that a donnish parody of a cult becomes a murderously real one. There can’t be too many hermetic stones left unturned in this ransacking of texts, this orgy of citation and paraphrase for which Eco, he told an interviewer for
The New York Times Magazine
, “pillaged the bookshops in at least 10 cities in Italy, France and America,” acquiring “1,500 books on occultism plus 400 or so rare books.” He could be describing his own researches when he has his narrator write: