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Jul. 1st, 2013
Umberto Eco "Foucault's Pendulum" (Vintage)
Foucault’s Pendulum begins with the narrator, a man with the unlikely name of Casaubon, preparing to hide past closing time in a Paris museum. Here, at midnight, he expects to observe some sort of rite practiced by a secret and dangerous society. He also hopes to find a clue to the disappearance of his friend and mentor, Jacopo Belbo.
We then go back a number of years to the point where Casaubon, then a graduate student in Milan, first meets Belbo, a publisher. Casaubon is working on a thesis about the Knights Templar, and it just so happens that Belbo has a meeting scheduled with a retired army officer who claims to have uncovered profound secrets about the Templars which he is ready to reveal to the public, not the least of which secrets is that the Templars are still in existence and poised to seize control of the world. Belbo and Casaubon interview the man, whose conspiratorial conjectures they are inclined to dismiss as whimsical until they learn that the officer was found dead in his hotel room that night, only to have his body mysteriously disappear by the following morning.
Years elapse as Casaubon, Belbo, and a third friend named Diotallevi gradually explore the world of secret societies, eventually making it a specialty of Belbo’s publishing firm. The Templars, they find, are linked by some theorists to the Rosicrucians, and thence to the Freemasons. The circle of conspiracy broadens to include groups as diverse as the Druids and the Elders of Zion. Among the people implicated are Sir Francis Bacon, Napoleon, Voltaire, and the head of the Czar’s secret service. The artifacts of the conspiracy include the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Holy Grail, the great Gothic cathedrals, and the Eifel Tower. Eventually it seems that half the elite of Europe are involved in guarding some great secret, but it appears that not even the guardians themselves know what the secret is.
Connecting symbols, meanings and ideas across languages and cultures is an element of semiotics, the branch of learning pioneered by Umberto Eco. His characters follow clues across historical and literary trails, finding hidden meaning in seeming coincidences, decoding complex messages from isolated fragments, and seeing patterns in distant events. Like others before them, however, their findings are all too likely to conform to their expectations and desires. Finally, and to their peril, they lose the ability to distinguish their discoveries from their inventions.
The seemingly endless litany of secret societies, obscure authorizes, and ancient texts can be mind-numbing at time, but this is a novel that fully rewards perseverance. The concluding chapters are not only very suspenseful, but we also find that the author’s exploration of how we evaluate meanings and associations has led us to much more philosophical observations on how we evaluate and find meaning in life itself.
Foucault’s Pendulum begins with the narrator, a man with the unlikely name of Casaubon, preparing to hide past closing time in a Paris museum. Here, at midnight, he expects to observe some sort of rite practiced by a secret and dangerous society. He also hopes to find a clue to the disappearance of his friend and mentor, Jacopo Belbo.
We then go back a number of years to the point where Casaubon, then a graduate student in Milan, first meets Belbo, a publisher. Casaubon is working on a thesis about the Knights Templar, and it just so happens that Belbo has a meeting scheduled with a retired army officer who claims to have uncovered profound secrets about the Templars which he is ready to reveal to the public, not the least of which secrets is that the Templars are still in existence and poised to seize control of the world. Belbo and Casaubon interview the man, whose conspiratorial conjectures they are inclined to dismiss as whimsical until they learn that the officer was found dead in his hotel room that night, only to have his body mysteriously disappear by the following morning.
Years elapse as Casaubon, Belbo, and a third friend named Diotallevi gradually explore the world of secret societies, eventually making it a specialty of Belbo’s publishing firm. The Templars, they find, are linked by some theorists to the Rosicrucians, and thence to the Freemasons. The circle of conspiracy broadens to include groups as diverse as the Druids and the Elders of Zion. Among the people implicated are Sir Francis Bacon, Napoleon, Voltaire, and the head of the Czar’s secret service. The artifacts of the conspiracy include the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Holy Grail, the great Gothic cathedrals, and the Eifel Tower. Eventually it seems that half the elite of Europe are involved in guarding some great secret, but it appears that not even the guardians themselves know what the secret is.
Connecting symbols, meanings and ideas across languages and cultures is an element of semiotics, the branch of learning pioneered by Umberto Eco. His characters follow clues across historical and literary trails, finding hidden meaning in seeming coincidences, decoding complex messages from isolated fragments, and seeing patterns in distant events. Like others before them, however, their findings are all too likely to conform to their expectations and desires. Finally, and to their peril, they lose the ability to distinguish their discoveries from their inventions.
The seemingly endless litany of secret societies, obscure authorizes, and ancient texts can be mind-numbing at time, but this is a novel that fully rewards perseverance. The concluding chapters are not only very suspenseful, but we also find that the author’s exploration of how we evaluate meanings and associations has led us to much more philosophical observations on how we evaluate and find meaning in life itself.
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