Foucault's Pendulum does produce its share of mortality. The hapless scholar-magician Jacopo Belbo ends up dangling from the Pendulum, and the denouement also claims another, even more significant victim. This is the sometime kabbalist Diotallevi, whose death from cancer is marked distinctly by a confusion of Inside and Outside. Cadaverous in the final stages of the disease, Diotallevi's body exhibits "that absence of the boundary between exterior and interior, between skin and flesh, between the light fuzz of his belly... and the mucillaginous tangle of viscera..." (465). In his final interview with Belbo, the dying man complains that he "can't decide whether what you're telling me is happening only inside your head, or whether it's happening outside" (465). But the distinction is not worth observing, in Diotallevi's view, for he has come to understand his dying as a direct consequence of his role in the conspiracy. As a student of the Kaballah, Diotallevi is deeply schooled in verbal mysticism, the ars magna of anagrams and the terrible possibilities of blaspheming against the Name. "Rearranging the letters of the Book means rearranging the world," he tells Belbo. "If you alter the Book, you alter the world; if you alter the world, you alter the body" (466). And so, as he sees it, when he plays with the reality of hieratic writings, redecoding what had been hidden in fragments, he concomitantly shuffles his own body chemistry, whose nucleic acids also constitute an alphabetic text. "For months, like devout rabbis, we uttered different combinations of the letters of the Book: GCC, CGC, GCG, CGG. What our lips said, our cells learned.... my brain must have transmitted the message to them. Why should I expect them to be wiser than my brain? I'm dying because we were imaginative beyond bounds" (467-68).

It is this formulation above all that gives Foucault's Pendulum its suggestion of generic finality, or at least liminality. What does it mean to be "imaginative beyond bounds?" When does paranoia cease to be a fashionably decadent perversion and lapse back into psychopathology, or perhaps a cultural disease? Like Le Carré and DeLillo, Eco seems very interested in answering these questions, in finding proper limits for the textually synthetic imagination. Which is no doubt one of the reasons for his novel's enormously resonant title. For it was Michel Foucault who most cogently theorized the evolution of language structures as a contention between imaginative expansion and rational constraint (or taboo and explosion, to recall Mailer's terms). As he says in the Discourse on Language:

    ... a certain fear hides behind this apparent supremacy accorded [the word], this apparent logophilia. It is as though these taboos, these barriers, thresholds, and limits were deliberately disposed in order, at least partly, to master and control the great proliferation of discourse, in such a way as to relieve its richness of its most dangerous elements; to organise its disorder so as to skate round its most uncontrollable aspects. It is as though people had wanted to efface all trace of its irruption into the activity of our thought and language. (228)


Not explosion but irruption, an outbreak, breakthrough or breakdown. Not the final Word that preempts all screaming, but the loud glossolalia of a Babel event, the unrestrained multiplication of signs, the Revolution of the Signifier ushering in a new dispensation of discourse and the code or something like that, as the Bolsheviks once said. It is precisely this radical outcome which the paranoid novel, and perhaps much of postmodern narrative, has learned to fear. Rightly so, because if Inside and Outside are one, then this irruption of the code threatens at a single stroke both the boundaries of the imagination and the hygienic parameters of sound mind in sound body, the Cartesian basis of the subject itself. If language is a virus, then there may be certain forms of language which are especially virulent, and which thus threaten to metathesize/metastasize the entire word/world order.

No doubt this is stimulant talk again, or perhaps the hysterical discourse of a racist, patriarchal, logocentric culture whose time has more than come. And yet this culture continues to superintend your history and mine again, witness Desert Storm for which unfortunate reason its discourse of irruptive apocalypse demands a certain attention. The sagas continue. Foucault's Pendulum both is and is not the last great novel of paranoia. If its implicit critique of Foucault (and Pynchon) explodes or implodes the search for "the real Text," it simultaneously causes the irruption of a new discourse propagated around (or as) that Text. The evocative darkness of the postindustrial wreckage surrounds us yet; and there is never any lack of ramblers in that wreck. Eco limits himself by and large to an elegant allegorical polemic against poststructuralism; but in less delicate hands this revision of paranoia produces an argument of larger cultural ambit (if also of greater generic conformity). Paranoia has freely embraced the mode of information. Tyrone Slothrop's Swiss contact tells him that information machines are the wave of the future. Jacopo Belbo discovers word processing and BASIC programming. But it falls to the young American heirs of the paranoid tradition, the cyberpunks who follow Burroughs and Pynchon, to make the next crucial connection.

Diotallevi's kaballistic cancer is a metaphor, "a thrust at truth, and a lie" as Pynchon calls such things (Lot 49, 95). Invoking the canons of realism, we can choose to believe that the poor man's disease is not actually caused by his tampering with hermetic texts. But we are approaching a point in the western technologique at which psychosomatic fantasies may no longer be so easily dismissed. Pynchon posits a semi-imaginary form of induced epilepsy called "the Strobing Tactic" in Gravity's Rainbow (648; see my article, "Strobe's Stimulus"). William Gibson develops this into his notion of "intrusion countermeasures electronics" or "black ice" in his story "Burning Chrome." In Synners, Pat Cadigan imagines a scheme for neural/electronic connection that transforms one man's cardiovascular accident into a computer virus that nearly crashes the global network. And so we come to the notion of the Great Crash ("the Big One," as Cadigan calls it), the ultimate convergence of Inside and Outside into the ultimate holy Text: Infocalypse.

The word "infocalypse" is coined by a character in Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk thriller Snow Crash. It refers to the great nightmare of digital Manichaeanism: that the convergence of inner and outer states (which according to both Freud and Pavlov is the root of paranoia) might result in a practical technology for thought control. As the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies. The cyberneticists, systems theorists, and cognitivists have always told us that the brain is just another computer, which given the right linguistic techniques could be programmed just like a computing machine. That premise is enormously dubious, of course (see Penrose) but Stephenson seems to accept it, if only for purposes of invention. His protagonist (called Hiro Protagonist) explains: "Under the right conditions, your ears or eyes can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system, bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core, enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine" (369). The evil genius of the novel, a Texofascist called L. Bob Rife, learns these magic words, which Stephenson variously identifies as (literal) viruses from outer space or semi-mythical nam-shubs from ancient Sumer. Says L. Bob (sounding uncannily like H. Ross Perot): "See, it's the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters.... So we're working on refining our management techniques so that we can control [proprietary] information no matter where it is on our hard disks or even inside the programmers' heads" (108). This is post-Fordism, not so much in-your-face as down-your-brainstem.

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