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By Peter S. Prescott
Newsweek, November 13, 1989
Now
that the formerly Evil Empire seems disinclined to take over
the world, who's left to do the job? In his second heavy novel
Umberto Eco proposes a light answer: the Knights Templar, an
order of monastic warriors who fought skillfully in the Crusades
and acquired great wealth and property before they were disbanded,
when their leaders were burned at the stake, in 1314.
We
all remember Eco, the Italian semiotician whose first novel,
The Name of the Rose, stretched an exegesis of medieval
theology over the frame of a detective story. More bought than
read (Eco admitted that he meant the first hundred pages to be
difficult), Rose has sold 9 million copies in 24 languages. Foucault's
Pendulum may be poised to repeat that success. An even bigger
boo, soaked in a scholarship that suggests its author has lingered
too long among genuinely loony texts, it found 400,000 buyers
in Italy within two months of publication. Elitism rarely succeeds
in the marketplace, yet the first printing here is 250,000 copies.
Granted
that everyone will buy this book, will anyone read it through?
Readers who need a plot may fall by the wayside, but on page
375 a plot actually begins. In time, the narrative will acquire
the velocity (and all the credibility) that Hergé brought
to his comic books about Tintin, or Carl Barks to Donald Duck.
Eco presents us with three editors at a small book publishing
firm in Milan. (Eco was himself once an editor with a publisher
in Milan and delivers the ultimate epitaph for his fraternity:
"We midwives who assist at the birth of what others conceive
should be refused burial in consecrated ground.") Bored
out of their skulls by the occult manuscripts they must read,
these three wretches amuse themselves by devising an elaborate
parody of their authors' obsession with secret meanings and imagined
conspiracies.
This
parody -- the Plan, they call it -- will explain and tie everything
together: the riddle of the pyramids, the authorship of Shakespeare's
plays, the quest for the Holy Grail, the possibility of immortality,
the early Jesuit's invention of the computer and the real reason
for the Holocaust -- all relate to a single plot. This plot has
been carried on for centuries by the descendants of the Knights
Templar. Legend has it that the Templars took their treasure
underground and will return. According to the Plan, they've been
among us all along, biding their time, secretly conferring every
120 years until, just about now, they can take over the world.
The
editors agree on "a fundamental axiom: the Templars have
something to do with everything." So grandiose a Plan necessarily
assumes a life of its own: pretending to believe, as the narrator
remarks, leads to believing, and in time the Templars emerge
to see what these editors, who know so much about them, are up
to.
Eco
may have had no choice but to make his novel as long as a small
encyclopedia. Like the Templars, it has "something to do
with everything," yet at times it groans under its burden
of esoteric lore. Toward the end, events take an appropriately
apocalyptic turn, but for much of its way the book lacks the
motion novels need: for most of its great length, men sit around
discussing hundreds of propositions about the secret history
of the world -- nearly all of the goofily wrong.
Jesus' wife: Such goofiness gives the novel its delightful
spin "Here's my interpretation," one of the editors
observes. "Jesus was not crucified, and for that reason
the Templars denied the Crucifix. The legend of Joseph of Arimathea
covers a deeper truth: Jesus, not the Grail, Landed in France,
among the cabalists of Provence. Jesus is the metaphor of the
King of the World, the true founder of the Rosicrucians. And
who landed with Jesus? His wife. In the Gospels why aren't we
told who was married at Cana? It was the wedding of Jesus, and
it was a wedding that could not be discussed, because the bride
was sinner, Mary Magdalene. That"s why, ever since, all
the Illuminati from Simon Magus to Postel seek the principle
of the eternal feminine in a brothel. And Jesus, meanwhile, was
the founder of the royal line of France."
If
you find the amusing, you'll find Foucault's Pendulum
a rich and witty book, even it its wit is all of the same cut,
theme, and variations, nearly without end. All praise to William
Weaver, who has made his great labor translating a difficult
text seem almost effortless.
A Talk with Eco
Conversation with Frances
Saunders
Umberto
Eco spoke with Newsweek's Frances Saunders recently in his labyrinthine
Milan apartment, where ordered chaos serves as kind of a metaphor
for his latest novel. He confirmed that there is indeed a real
"Foucault's Pendulum" -- a 19th century device
employed to demonstrate that the earth revolves upon its own
axis -- which hands today in Paris, at the Conservatorie des
Arts et Métiers. This pendulum plays a dramatic role at
the story's climax, but for Eco it has become an ironic symbol
as well. "It makes me laugh when people find things in my
work which aren't there," he says. "It's like the movement
of the pendulum: as the characters in the book pursue this search
for meaning, so the reader is gradually drawn into doing the
same." Some readers "really go too far, and I want
to say 'Hang on a minute, Calm down!'"
Eco
says he thinks of Foucault's Pendulum as "a novel
of ideas, an adventure of ideas. I would like to do with ideas
what Finnegans Wake does with words. But it's got to be
exciting, a shoot-out of ideas like a shoot-out in the Westerns."
He's annoyed when critics accuse him of rehashing ideas gleaned
from his literary predecessors. "Listen, so-called postmodernist
literature is the literature of citation. All literature has
always been a borrowing. It starts with Homer. What do you think
Ariosto was doing, or Cervantes? I would say that this continual
intertextuality is the principle characteristic of literature.
The difference is that now the game has become intentional, has
been discovered, whereas before it was covered over."
Eco
claims that he deplores the publicity that has attended his two
novels, but the only alternative would be not to publish, an
even more depressing prospect. "When I heard that people
were refusing to read the book on account of the hype in the
media, I was totally sympathetic. It's much better to let a good
interval pass before reading contemporary literature. Oh, God,
I'm only now reading Samuel Pepys!"
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