As previous posts have suggested, any absolute distinction between the strictly symbological text and the various forms of commentary, the multifarious sub-genres and ancillary discourses that surround it simply fails to take into account the real significance of the symbological in the contemporary cultural field. As we continue to explore the border regions of symbological fiction and thought, while we will continue to subject our starting hypotheses to rigorous critique, we will also investigate the applicability of the explanatory and generative models we have developed to a far more expansive field of objects. Ultimately, by doing so we will be able to situate such objects within a dynamic, constantly evolving system whose evolution is coterminous with the genesis of new objects within the shifting coordinates of the system. "A text is not only the product of a pre-existing combinatorial system," Todorov tells us, "it is also a transformation of that system." The exhaustive consideration of objects which would admit valid scrutiny along these lines would admittedly be a gargantuan and largely thankless task. Therefore, my undertaking for today, by elevating a particular object to the status of a representative sample, attempts to extrapolate broader conclusions about the combinatorial matrix that brought the text into existence and how, in turn, it alters the possibilities of production within that matrix.
The Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (hereafter CT), received accolades from most of the major critical organs of the mainstream press upon its appearance in 2004. These accolades assumed a remarkably predictable form, a fact which is unsurprising given that the book appeared within a year of The Da Vinci Code: almost all compare it to the latter work, specifically in order to assert that it is "better," "more cerebral," "better-written," "smarter," and so on, occasionally with the aid of a further comparison with The Name of the Rose or The Secret History. Now, the basic lexicon of such assessments should be familiar to us from the heterogeneous discursive area I have designated symb-pology (A). If the symb-pologists (A) who seem to have achieved unchallenged hegemony in the feuilletons of our nation over the past few decades were so eager to heap their endorsements on CT's debut, this should not surprise us, because, it seems to me, it was written largely for them and in line with their requirements, insofar as The Rule of Four essentially excludes the main destabilizing threat to symb-pology (A), which would be precisely the lure of symb-pology (B): namely, the existence and relevance of the referent. How indeed can we be so certain that the laudatory remarks published in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly refer to what symb-pological discourse tends to think of as "form" (although not generally using that word) and what we would classify as "the elaboration of the code"? Because it is impossible for our symb-pologist friends to be referring to anything else, since the novel never gives us anything other than the elaboration of the code. In other words, CT assiduously avoid what we might call the cacognostic seduction of the reader by refraining throughout the unfolding of the plot from the claim that the object of the code is anything other than strongly irrelevant. There is never the promise of an unsuspected point de capiton - the body of Mary Magdalene, the Benben Stone - which would supposedly, if brought to light, require us to reorient ourselves radically vis-à-vis the totality of our knowledge. Rather, we are presented throughout the novel with a pursuit of the code that is by definition only relevant to those already possessing a specialized knowledge of the Italian Renaissance, with scholarly advancement and recognition the only projected consequences of its successful decipherment, and even these never alluded to as particularly significant goals of any of the pursuers. Admittedly, the code unsurprisingly turns out to be, literally, a treasure map, and specifically purports to lead to a hidden stash of great Renaissance works of art rescued by humanist Francesco Colonna from the ravages of the fanatical Savonarola. However, because until the last few chapters of the novel we are given no sense whatsoever of what the code's referent might be, we are instead expected to devote all of our readerly attention to the ultimately rather tedious process of decipherment undertaken by the narrator, Tom, and his friend Paul - in other words, to the "puzzles" and "riddles" and "enigmas" so beloved of symb-pologists (A), entirely for their own sake. Furthermore, the only conceivable response to the final revelation about Colonna's secret chamber of masterpieces is to lapse into the same attitude of banal reverence towards an utterly generic, featureless, ahistorical version of the artistic heritage of the West that is the province of the average tourist visiting the Louvre, or Florence. Such an attitude, of course, plays a crucial instrumental function in the narrative unfolding of the strictly symbological novel, but to the extent that it is reasserted as a form of respectably secular pseudo-spirituality at the end (which it generally is), it serves to plug the gap created by the retraction of the possibility of cacognostic enjoyment of the referent. That is to say, for instance, that Langdon's (quasi-pornographic) appreciation of the Washington D.C. skyline at the close of The Lost Symbol compensates for the postponement of the promised irruption of the transcendental signified. The revelation that the code hidden within Colonna's Hypnerotomachia leads to a secret collection of lost masterpieces is, in contrast, in excess of what CT lead us to expect for most of the novel, during a good part of which the reader is inclined to concur with the systematic indifference of the protagonist's friends and girlfriend, who regard his pursuit of the code as an eccentric hobby.
The standard symbological novel represents the movement from mythognosis - that is to say, the enjoyment of the code for its own sake, which is the starting position of, say, Langdon - towards an imaginary orthognosis which is in fact identical to cacognosis - that is to say, the pursuit of the referent, understood as relevant and efficacious. The confrontation with the vacuity of the referent and the cacognostic villain's obscenely incongruous investment in it provides the exemplary induction into true orthognosis, which is none other than indifférance towards the strong irrelevance of both code and referent, permitting narrative closure (the cop-out) and ideological recontainment (the injunction to disseminate facile wisdom). In his scintillating analysis of Temple, Prandleforth noted that "In Reilly, there is one class and one position, that of the male cacognostic. The female characters are vapid sources of sexual contamination, and the orientals are comprehensively primitive and basically mute. The position of the mythognostic is empty, as is the position of the orthognostic. There are no Catherines in Reilly, no Poimandres. All the characters are cacognostics who believe in the literal significance and relevance of the code. Because of this, there is no progression from mythognosis through cacognosis to orthognosis - i.e., there is no plot, and no cop-out." To make explicit what I believe should be obvious by now, The Rule of Four gives us precisely the inverse situation: a world in which mythognosis - pursuit of the code for its own sake - is the only subject position available outside of the default apathy of the majority. CT populate their strangely orientalized Princeton with a few Langdons and Rutherfords, whose activities indeed generate the vortex around which the plot spins, but this is a world without Bezumovs, Mal'akhs and Silases, a world in which the latter are, in fact, unimaginable. The only two candidates for a cacognostic subjectivity, the grotesque Princeton professor Vincent Taft and his estranged friend and collaborator, art collector Richard Curry, differ neither in motive nor in approach from the mythognostic heroes, Tom and Paul, in that they do not seem to anticipate any major consequences of successful decipherment of Colonna's text apart from possible scholarly fame. The main problem is that their prolonged failure at deciphering the Hypnerotomachia has left them somewhat unhinged, evidently because they are unable to persuade themselves, in symb-pological manner, that the code is supposed to be "fun" - the same misunderstanding which turns Paul into a malnourished insomniac and estranges Tom from his girlfriend Katie, who understandably never manages to extract herself from the self-satisfied torpor of orthognosis (f). Both Taft and Curry, along with Paul and Tom's father, another Hypnerotomachia scholar, end up dead, but it should be further noted that both Paul and Taft exude a cadaverous aura throughout the novel: Taft a "misshapen ogre" whose "fat dangles from his arms as if the flesh were pulled from the bones" (132), Paul constantly underfed and skeletal - and this is not to mention Taft's research assistant and Paul's friend Bill Stein, the first character to be murdered, who is described as "a jangling skeleton of a man, an escaped ghost, a purse of bones drawn up too tight" (63). At the core of CT's novel, then, is what we might call the drive dimension of mythognosis, a Wiederholungszwang which converts the mythognostic into an undead automaton circulating around the vacuum of the absent referent of the code. If Paul is reborn in the final chapter, after vanishing years before into the catacombs beneath Princeton, supposedly having now discovered Colonna's stash, this only makes the point clearer: the endlessly postponed union with the referent only comes with his annihilation. And it is here, in any case, that CT reconverge with Dan Brown and other more orthodox symbologists: Tom's final redemption, in the concluding paragraphs of the novel, consists of an utterly banal fantasy of touristic pleasure in the sights of Florence ("On the ceilings where I am going there will be saints and gods and flights of angels. Everywhere I walk there will be reminders of all that time cannot touch"), reminding us that all any of us really need is a good holiday.
CT certainly accomplished one important task with their pioneering variation on the symbological genre, and for this they have been deservedly praised: they made the symb-pologist (A)'s job a lot easier. No longer troubled by the embarrassing forays into "wacko conspiracy theories," pleased with the seamlessness by which the irruption of the referent never even momentarily appears to coincide with anything other than the vigorous confirmation of obviousnesses, the latter may all the more readily assume his or her task of enjoining us to immerse ourselves with glee once again in the circuits of capital, reassured that automatistic circulation around a void is, of course, the province of eccentrics and academics.
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