The Plan

The Name of the Rose hid a real lost book in a library and poisoned the pages. Foucault’s Pendulum hides nothing, and that is worse.

Three editors at a vanity press have spent a year with manuscripts about Templars, Rosicrucians, and the shape of the earth. They know how the connections are made because they have had to typeset them. One night they decide they can do it better. The Plan is not a volume. It is a dossier, a timetable, a secret society they named so that history would have someone to be about. Casaubon — Eco named him after George Eliot’s ruinous mythographer — keeps reminding himself they are creating, not discovering. Then the created thing acquires a readership. If you invent a plan and others carry it out, Casaubon says, it exists.

Lia, who has had a child and has not been playing, looks at the founding parchment for a day and a night and hands them a laundry list. The sentence does not save them. Belbo cannot produce the map because there is no map, and the people in the Conservatoire need there to be one more than they need him alive.

File it next to Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies. Both are systems that mistake connectedness for knowledge. Eliot’s is sterile and dies with the man. Eco’s is fertile and does not.

On the readability rating. Described at length, quoted in fragments of computer file and conversation. There is no Plan to open. That was the joke, and then it wasn’t.