On Umberto Eco, Dan Brown, Signs and Symbols
August 21st, 2009
Brown’s devices are rather stilted… contrived… Although I laughed at that scene when Brown was thinking of some woman in the past and then the police driver who fetched him asks: “Did you mount her?” The Eiffel, of course… harharhar!
One particular scene that I loved (not for any “high”/literary reasons but for the seeming naturalness of the playfulness of the characters) in “Foucault’s Pendulum” was when the narrator, Casaubon, was reading up on the Rosicrucians in bed, with his girlfriend Amparo. There are no narrative descriptions about what goes on. But Casaubon from time to time remarks, “Stop that!” or Amparo gets some food and eats and feeds Casaubon, too, and repeats a curious word or name or detail from what Casaubon reads aloud, and you know that they’re teasing each other and having some kind of a foreplay. Parang si Dumas din sa “Count of Monte Cristo.” Alam mo kung ano’ng nangyayari sa dialogue lang… sa tone, sa manner of responses and counter-responses… wala nang description o (kung sa play, stage directions).
Wala talagang binatbat ang “Da Vinci Code.” (A comparison can’t be avoided because both works talk about the knights templars, rosicrucians, the grail myth, conspiracies, etc.)
best regards,
ian
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An excerpt from “Foucault’s Pendulum” (This is Lia, Casaubon’s girlfriend (after Amparo) and mother of his child, talking to Casaubon.):
…she patted her belly, her thighs, her forehead; with her spread legs drawing her skirt tight, she sat like a wet nurse, solid and healthy — she so slim and supple — with a serene wisdom that illuminated her and gave her a matriarchal authority.
“Pow (Lia’s pet name for Casaubon – ian), archetypes don’t exist; the body exists. The belly inside is beautiful, because the baby grows there, because your sweet cock, all bright and jolly, thrusts there, and good, tasty food descends there, and for this reason the cavern, the grotto, the tunnel are beautiful and important, and the labyrinth, too, which is made in the image of our wonderful intestines. When somebody wants to invent something beautiful and important, it has to come from there, because you also came from there the day you were born, because fertility always comes from inside a cavity, where first something rots and then, lo and behold, there’s a little man, a date, a baobab.”
(I’m reminded of an exhibit by Gabby Barredo at Hiraya Galler in 1998 or 99. There was a monstrance (the thing where priests put the sacred host during an exposition of the holy sacrament), but instead of a host, what you find inside was a vagina. – ian)
“And high is better than low, because if you have your head down, the blood goes to your brain, because feet stink and hair doesn’t stink as much, because it’s better to climb a tree and pick fruit than end up underground, food for worms, and because you rarely hurt yourself hitting something above — you really have to be in an attic — while you often hurt yourself falling. That’s why up is angelic and down devilish.
“But because what I said before, about my belly, is also true, both things are true, down and inside are beautiful, and up and outside are beautiful, and the spirit of Mercury and Manicheanism have nothing to do with it. Fire keeps you warm and cold gives you bronchial pneumonia, especially if you’re a scholar four thousand years ago, and therefore fire has mysterious virtues besides its ability to cook your chicken. But cold preserves that same chicken, and fire, if you touch it, gives you a blister this big; therefore if you think of something preserved for millenia, like wisdom, you have to think of it on a mountain, up, high (and high is good), but also in a cavern (which is good, too) and in the eternal cold of the Tibetan snows (best of all). And if you then want to know why wisdom comes from the Orient and not from the Swiss Alps, it’s because the body of your ancestors in the morning, when it woke and there was still darkness, looked to the east hoping the sun would rise and there wouldn’t be rain.”