Foucault’s Pendulum

I remember when the film version of the da Vinci Code for a number of reasons. I remember how my friends and I tried to get tickets for it, only to realize right before the film started that my online ticket purchase didn’t go through, which caused us to high-tail it to the other end of town to catch it in-progress. I remember the trauma I experienced due to Tom Hank’s hair, from which I’m still recovering. And I also remember the backlash at my university’s foreign language department.

I have to chuckle about it now, because it’s a very small but telling example between European and American mentalities. Most of the language staff was composed of Europeans who scoffed at Dan Brown’s simplified style. “Da Vinci Code? Try a real book like Foucault’s Pendulum,” they said. Even the books mirrored the difference between European intellectualism and American simplicity: most obviously simplicity in writing style and content as well as accessibility. Foucault’s Pendulum is an infinitely more difficult and trying read than The da Vinci Code, but the rewards are greater.

The novel, at a bulky 525 pages, definitely counts as something I never would have made time to read at home. At times, you wonder what Umberto Eco, the philosopher, professor, semiotics specialist, aesthetician and author of the book, is doing. The book itself is like one long semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, lesson. Eco overdoes the primary source documents that introduce each chapter and delves far too deeply into people and events that often don’t return. This is something I love about Roberto Bolano, because this technique enriches your reading. With Eco, it just feels like a bombardment of constant figures and facts that disappear as quickly as they appear.

Page after page of background information aside, the plot and characters make it possible to continue reading these hundreds of pages. Three brilliant editors at a small publishing company spend their time reviewing manuscripts largely focused on the occult. In the beginning, these manuscripts are generally pretty ridiculous to them. One day, a mysterious man comes into the office and tells them a story about the Knights Templar and their plan for world domination. It is then that “the Plan” begins: the editors begin putting information into a computer that then scrambles and connects the bits, creating a whole different story about the Knights, secret societies, plots for world power, and the interconnectedness of some of history’s largest figures. All kinds of mysterious characters come out of the woodwork as the Plan becomes less a work of random fiction and more a plausible version of reality. It crosses the line from a man-made creation to an obsession.

Although largely focused on the development of the Plan, Foucault’s Pendulum has a number of themes relevant not only to Italy during and after World War II but also to the world of publishing. All three of the main characters are editors, and one of them in particular is tormented by this fact. In his private writings, Jacapo Belbo agonizes that editors, although they leave a strong mark on published materials, still are not the original authors of what they edit. He is tormented that he cannot produce his own material, but instead must sift through the works of others. That private suffering is part of what makes Belbo the most interesting character in the book. Eco occasionally gives us small glimpses into what makes Belbo Belbo, but I always found myself wanting to explore Belbo more deeply. For one, he laments about being born at the wrong time; a feeling he shares with another editor, Casaubon, who was too late to participate in the upheaval of 1968. Belbo, who was too young to fight in World War II, spends his whole life wondering if he would have been brave enough and made the right decision to fight for the Resistance during the war. He feels that he is a coward, and this self-loathing leads him to his death. I think it is easy to identify and sympathize with Belbo because he is easily identifiable with others of his generation, one that was shaped by the horrors of war. Perhaps it was just me, but as Eco peels the layers off of the Belbo onion, it seems so realistic that you have to wonder how much is autobiographical. Maybe each of the editors, all so different, are all parts of Eco?

What makes the novel so difficult is its scope, which is clearly what differentiates it from da Vinci Code. I took about ten pages of notes just to figure out which end was up, including the following topics: Alex Nevsky; Picatrix; Borges’ Aleph and Golem; Aleister Crowley; Rosicrucians; Marcel Proust; Templars; Sefirah; Saracens; Temurah; Abraham Abulafia; the Piedmont; Tales of Hoffman; Parsifal; Cathars; Kabbalah; Golden Fleece; reliquaries; Alessandro Cagliostro; Caiaphas and the Tetragrammaton. Not even an education could prepare me for reading this book because I had to look a lot of things up. What can be said is that Eco’s knowledge and the information in the book necessitates a very active reading experience, which is already something out of the ordinary in our relatively mindless world.

Favorite quotes:
“Once I know that I can remember whenever I like, I forget.”
“Revealing to me that the thing that I desired, I feared.”
“You spend life seeking the Opportunity, without realizing that the decisive moment, the moment that justifies birth and death, has already passed. It will not return, but it was – full, dazzling, generous as every revelation.”

Next up: The Joke, by that despiser of women, Milan Kundera.