Analogy as a method of constructing the Plan

Analogy as a method of constructing the Plan is the procedure by which Casaubon, Jacopo Belbo, and Diotallevi assemble borrowed ideas into a conspiracy that appears to explain history. Its three rules—connect by analogy, accept a chain if it comes full circle, and rely on connections made before—transform unrelated fragments into apparent confirmation. The method does not discover the Plan: it constructs one, then gives its believers a way to mistake construction for evidence.

The method and its three rules

The narrator compares the raw material to a crossword puzzle whose squares are empty and whose definitions are missing. The comparison matters because the task is not to solve a puzzle with a known answer, but to fill the spaces so that everything will fit. In the group’s version, the intersecting units are not words and letters but concepts and events. Their connections can therefore be made across very different kinds of material, with no fixed definition to limit what a crossing may mean.

The first rule permits connections by analogy. The method offers no immediate test for whether an analogy is good or bad, since, as the narrator observes, almost anything can be connected to anything else. The illustrative chain starts with a potato and reaches an apple by shared qualities; it then moves through biblical association, shape, use, and sound, passing from snake to doughnut, life preserver, bathing suit, sea, ship, and a sequence of associations that returns to the potato. The chain’s force comes not from a single strong link but from the abundance of possible links, each of which can carry the search onward.

The second rule makes closure stand in for proof: if the sequence holds together at the end, the connection is accepted as working. A path that begins with potato and returns to potato thus counts as right because it has completed a circuit. This circular test rewards the ability to make a chain cohere rather than requiring independent evidence that its connections describe a real historical relationship.

The third rule requires that connections not be original. They must already have been made by others, and repetition strengthens their apparent authority. A familiar association seems true because it seems obvious; its prior circulation is treated as support for its place in the new chain. In this way, the method can claim the weight of tradition without having to show that tradition establishes the Plan’s conclusions.

Tradition, selection, and the appearance of proof

The principle is linked to Signor Garamond’s publishing advice for the Diabolicals: their books should repeat what has already been said rather than innovate. Repetition preserves the authority of Tradition and supplies the group with a stock of recognizable connections. The Plan’s apparent depth is consequently assembled from old material, not generated by a new discovery. The method makes this borrowing productive by changing the arrangement while insisting that each piece already carries authority.

The narrator distinguishes the group’s construction from Colonel Ardenti’s earlier arrangement. Neither arrangement invents its pieces, but Ardenti’s is described as clumsy, and his more limited education leaves him with fewer pieces to work with. Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotallevi, by contrast, can draw on a larger body of material and arrange it more persuasively. Their advantage is not access to a proven secret but the ability to fit more fragments into a design.

This account also explains the difference between possession of fragments and knowledge of a pattern. The people who later accept the Plan may have all the pieces, but they do not know the crossword’s design. The three collaborators claim superiority because they have supplied that design themselves. Yet the design’s coherence is produced by the rules of the game: analogy allows the pieces to be joined, circularity declares the result successful, and prior repetition lends the links an air of inevitability.

From invented pattern to real consequences

The method becomes dangerous when its status changes in the minds of those who encounter it. The narrator compares this recognition to someone finding a ready-made formula for becoming famous: once an existing example supplies the pattern, the would-be imitator can identify with it and act. In the same way, people seeking publication can recognize themselves in Signor Garamond’s self-financed publishing scheme once it has been articulated, as though they had been waiting for it without knowing it existed. The example shows how a constructed pattern can feel like the explanation of a prior desire.

The collaborators invent a nonexistent Plan, but those who believe in it persuade themselves that they have belonged to it for ages. They reinterpret fragments of their confused mythology as episodes in the collaborators’ scheme, joining them through analogy, resemblance, and suspicion. Belief does not merely accept the Plan as a description; it reorganizes the believers’ own past so that the Plan seems to have been present all along.

The resulting reversal is the method’s central consequence. If a plan is invented and other people carry it out, the narrator concludes, it exists at that point. The statement distinguishes the Plan’s fictional origin from its real effects: its supposed historical design is manufactured, but the conduct prompted by belief is not. The story closes this reasoning with the prospect of crowds of Diabolicals roaming the world in search of the map. Their search testifies to the success of the method, while also exposing its trap: the more fully they act on the pattern, the more real the invented Plan becomes in practice.