by Umberto Eco
"What an awful subject," he said. "I thought that was for lunatics."
"No. I'm studying the real stuff. The documents of the trial. What do you know about the Templars, anyway?"
"I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he's almost always a lunatic."
"Don't I know! Their name is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the Templars. How do you identify the others?"
"I'll explain. By the way, what's your name?"
"Casaubon."
"Casaubon. Wasn't he a character in Middlemarch?"
"I don't know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we're not related."
"The next round's on me. Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics."
"And that covers everybody?"
"Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types."
"Idealtypen."
"Very good. You know German?"
"Enough for bibliographies."
"When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese."
"My German's poor, so I'll graduate. But let's get back to your typology. What about geniuses? Einstein, for example?"
"A genius uses one component in a dazzling way, fueling it with the others." He took a sip of his drink. "Hi there, beautiful," he said. "Made that suicide attempt yet?"
"No," a girl answered as she walked by. "I'm in a collective now."
"Good for you," Belbo said. He turned back to me. "Of course, there's no reason one can't have collective suicides, too."
"Getting back to the lunatics."
"Look, don't take me too literally. I'm not trying to put the universe in order. I'm just saying what a lunatic is from the point of view of a publishing house. Mine is an ad-hoc definition."
"All right. My round."
"All right. Less ice, Pilade. Otherwise it gets into the bloodstream too fast. Now then: cretins. Cretins don't even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble. You know, the guy who presses the ice cream cone against his forehead, or enters a revolving door the wrong way."
"That's not possible."
"It is for a cretin. Cretins are of no interest to us: they never come to publishers' offices. So let's forget about them."
"Let's."
"Being a fool is more complicated. It's a form of social behavior. A fool is one who always talks outside his glass."
"What do you mean?"
"Like this." He pointed at the counter near his glass. "He wants to talk about what's in the glass, but somehow or other he misses. He's the guy who puts his foot in his mouth. For example, he says how's your lovely wife to someone whose wife has just left him."
"Yes, I know a few of those."
"Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else blunders helps to change the subject. But fools don't interest us, either. They're never creative, their talent is all secondhand, so they don't submit manuscripts to publishers. Fools don't claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they're magnificent. It's a dying breed, the embodiment of all the bourgeois virtues. What they really need is a Verdurin salon or even a chez Guermantes. Do you students still read such things?"
"I do."
"Well, a fool is a Joachim Murat reviewing his officers. He sees one from Martinique covered with medals. 'Vous êtes nègre?' Murat asks. 'Oui, mon général!' the man answers. And Murat says: 'Bravo, bravo, continuez!' And so on. You follow me? Forgive me, but tonight I'm celebrating a historic decision in my life. I've stopped drinking. Another round? Don't answer, you'll make me feel guilty. Pilade!"
"What about the morons?"
"Ah. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians."
"Which they are."
"Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that's right, but they say it for the wrong reason."
"You mean it's okay to say something that's wrong as long as the reason is right."
"Of course. Why else go to the trouble of being a rational animal?"
"All great apes evolved from lower life forms, man evolved from lower life forms, therefore man is a great ape."
"Not bad. In such statements you suspect that something's wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism. For an editor, it's bad news. It can take him an eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons' books are published, because they're convincing at first glance. An editor is not required to weed out the morons. If the Academy of Sciences doesn't do it, why should he?"
"Philosophers don't either. Saint Anselm's ontological argument is moronic, for example. God must exist because I can conceive Him as a being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses existence in thought with existence in reality."
"True, but Gaunilon's refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an island in the sea even if the island doesn't exist. He confuses thinking of the possible with thinking of the necessary."
"A duel between morons."
"Exactly. And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime purpose for creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed Himself to be: to unmask cosmic moronism."
"We're surrounded by morons."
"Everyone's a moron—save me and thee. Or, rather—I wouldn't want to offend—save thee."
"Somehow I feel that Godel's theorem has something to do with all this."
"I wouldn't know, I'm a cretin. Pilade!"
"My round."
"We'll split it. Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans are liars. It must be true, because he's a Cretan himself and knows his countrymen well."
"That's moronic thinking."
"Saint Paul. Epistle to Titus. On the other hand, those who call Epimenides a liar have to think all Cretans aren't, but Cretans don't trust Cretans, therefore no Cretan calls Epimenides a liar."
"Isn't that moronic thinking?"
"You decide. I told you, they are hard to identify. Morons can even win the Nobel Prize."
"Hold on. Of those who don't believe God created the world in seven days, some are not fundamentalists, but of those who do believe God created the world in seven days, some are. Therefore, of those who don't believe God created the world in seven days, some are fundamentalists. How's that?"
"My God—to use the mot juste—I wouldn't know. A moronism or not?"
"It is, definitely, even if it were true. Violates one of the laws of syllogisms: universal conclusions cannot be drawn from two particulars."
"And what if you were a moron?"
"I'd be in excellent, venerable company."
"You're right. And perhaps, in a logical system different from ours, our moronism is wisdom. The whole history of logic consists of attempts to define an acceptable notion of moronism. A task too immense. Every great thinker is someone else's moron."
"Thought as the coherent expression of moronism."
"But what is moronism to one is incoherence to an
other."
"Profound. It's two o'clock, Pilade's about to close, and we still haven't got to the lunatics."
"I'm getting there. A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars."
"Invariably?"
"There are lunatics who don't bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden..." He was about to order another whiskey, but changed his mind and asked for the check. "Speaking of the Templars, the other day some character left me a manuscript on the subject. A lunatic, but with a human face. The book starts reasonably enough. Would you like to see it?"
"I'd be glad to. Maybe there's something I can use."
"I doubt that very much. But drop in if you have a spare half hour. Number i, Via Sincere Renato. The visit will be of more benefit to me than to you. You can tell me whether the book has any merit."
"What makes you trust me?"
"Who says I trust you? But if you come, I'll trust you. I trust curiosity."
A student rushed in, face twisted in anger. "Comrades! There are fascists along the canal with chains!"
"Let's get them," said the fellow with the Tartar mustache who had threatened me over Krupskaya. "Come on, comrades!" And they all left.
"What do you want to do?" I asked, feeling guilty. "Should we go along?"
"No," Belbo said. "Pilade sets these things up to clear the place out. For my first night on the wagon, I feel pretty high. Must be the cold-turkev effect. Everything I've said to you so far is false. Good night, Casaubon."
11
His sterility was infinite. It was part of the ecstasy.
—F. M. Cioran, Le mauvais demiurge, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, "Pensées étranglées"
The conversation at Pilade's had shown me the public Belbo. But a keen observer would have been able to sense the melancholy behind the sarcasm. Not that Belbo's sarcasm was the mask. The mask, perhaps, was the private confessing he did. Or perhaps his melancholy itself was the mask, a contrivance to hide a deeper melancholy.
There is a document in which he tried to fictionalize what he told me about his job when I went to Garamond the next day. It contains all his precision and passion, the disappointment of an editor who could write only through others while yearning for creativity of his own. It also has the moral severity that led him to punish himself for desiring something to which he did not feel entitled. Though he painted his desire in pathetic and garish hues, I never knew a man who could pity himself with such contempt.
FILENAME: Seven Seas Jim
Tomorrow, see young Cinti.
Good monograph, scholarly, perhaps a bit too scholarly.
In the conclusion, the comparison between Catullus, the poetae novi, and today's avant-garde is the best part.
Why not make this the introduction?
Convince him. He'll say that such flights of fancy don't belong in a philological series. He's afraid of alienating his professor, who is supposed to write the authoritative preface. A brilliant idea in the last two pages might go unnoticed, but at the beginning it would be too conspicuous, it would irritate the academic powers that be.
If, however, it is put into italics, in a conversational form, separate from the actual scholarship, then the hypothesis remains only a hypothesis and doesn't undermine the seriousness of the work. And readers will be captivated at once; they'll approach the book in a totally different way.
Am I urging him to an act of freedom—or am I using him to write my own book?
Transforming books with a word here, a word there. Demiurge for the work of others. Tapping at the hardened clay, at the statue someone else has already carved. Instead of taking soft clay and molding my own. Give Moses the right tap with the hammer, and he'll talk.
See William S.
"I've looked at your work. Not bad. It has tension, imagination. Is this the first piece you've written?"
"No. I wrote another tragedy. It's the story of two lovers in Verona who—"
"Let's talk about this piece first, Mr. S. I was wondering why you set it in France. May I suggest—Denmark? It wouldn't require much work. If you just change two or three names, and turn the chateau of Chalons-sur-Marne into, say, the castle of Elsinore ... In a Nordic, Protestant atmosphere, in the shadow of Kierkegaard, so to speak, all these existential overtones..."
"Perhaps you're right."
"I think I am. The work might need a little touching up stylistically. Nothing drastic; the barber's snips before he holds up the mirror for you, so to speak. The father's ghost, for example. Why at the end? I'd put him at the beginning. That way the father's warning helps motivate the young prince's behavior, and it establishes the conflict with the mother."
"Hmm, good idea. I'd only have to move one scene."
"Exactly. Now, style. This passage here, where the prince turns to the audience and begins his monologue on action and inaction. It's a nice speech, but he doesn't sound, well, troubled enough. 'To act or not to act? This is my problem.' I would say not 'my problem' but 'the question.' 'That is the question.' You see what I mean? It's not so much his individual problem as it is the whole question of existence. The question whether to be or not to be..."
***
If you fill the world with children who do not bear your name, no one will know they are yours. Like being God in plain clothes. You are God, you wander through the city, you hear people talking about you, God this, God that, what a wonderful universe this is, and how elegant the law of gravity, and you smile to yourself behind your fake beard (no, better to go without a beard, because in a beard God is immediately recognizable). You soliloquize (God is always soliloquizing): "Here I am, the One, and they don't know it." If a pedestrian bumps into you in the street, or even insults you, you humbly apologize and move on, even though you're God and with a snap of your fingers can turn the world to ashes. But, infinitely powerful as you are, you can afford to be long-suffering.
A novel about God incognito. No. If I thought of it, somebody else must have already done it.
***
You're an author, not yet aware of your powers. The woman you loved has betrayed you, life for you no longer has meaning, so one day, to forget, you take a trip on the Titanic and are shipwrecked in the South Seas. You arc picked up, the sole survivor, by a pirogue full of natives, and spend long years, forgotten by the outside world, on this island inhabited only by Papuans. Girls serenade you with languorous songs, their swaying breasts barely covered by necklaccs of pua blossoms. They call you Jim (they call all white men Jim), and one night an amber-skinned girl slips into your hut and says: "I yours, I with you." How nice, to lie there in the evening on the veranda and look up at the Southern Cross while she fans your brow.
You live by the cycle of dawn and sunset, and know nothing else. One day a motorboat arrives with some Dutchmen aboard, you learn that ten years have passed; you could go away with these Dutchmen, but you refuse. You start a business trading coconuts, you supervise the hemp harvest, the natives work for you, you sail from island to island, and everyone calls you Seven Seas Jim. A Portuguese adventurer ruined by drink comes to work with you and redeems himself. By now you're the talk of the Sunda, you advise the maharajah of Brunei in his campaign against the Dayaks of the river, you find an old cannon from the days of Tippo Sahib and get it back in working order. You train a squad of devoted Malayans whose teeth are blackened with betel. In a skirmish near the coral reef, old Sampan, his teeth blackened with betel, shields you with his own body; I gladly die for you, Seven Seas Jim. Good old Sampan, farewell, my friend.
<
br /> Now you're famous in the whole archipelago, from Sumatra to Port-au-Prince. You trade with the English, too; at the harbor master's office in Darwin you're registered as Kurtz, and now you're Kurtz to everyone—only the natives still call you Seven Seas Jim. One evening, as the girl caresses you on the veranda and the Southern Cross shines brighter than ever overhead—ah! so different from the Great Bear—you realize you want to go back. Just for a little while, to see what, if anything, is left of you there.
You take a boat to Manila, from there a prop plane to Bali, then Samoa, the Admiralty Islands, Singapore, Tenerife, Timbuktu, Aleppo, Samarkand, Basra, Malta, and you're home.
Eighteen years have passed, life has left its mark on you: your face is tanned by the trade winds, you're older, perhaps also handsomer. Arriving, you discover that all the bookshops are displaying your books, in new critical editions, and your name has been carved into the pediment of your old school, where you learned to read and write. You are the Great Vanished Poet, the conscience of a generation. Romantic maidens kill themselves at your empty grave.
And then I encounter you, my love, with those wrinkles around your eyes, your face still beautiful though worn by memory and tender remorse. I almost pass you on the sidewalk, I'm only a few feet away, and you look at me as you look at all people, as though seeking another beyond their shadow. I could speak, erase the years. But to what end? Am I not, even now, fulfilled? I am like God, as solitary as He, as vain, and as despairing, unable to be one of my creatures. They dwell in my light, while I dwell in unbearable darkness, the source of that light.
***
Go in peace, then, William S.! Famous, you pass and do not recognize me. I murmur to myself: To be or not to be. And I say to myself: Good for you, Belbo, good work. Go, old William S., and reap your meed of glory. You alone created; I merely made a few changes.