Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum - a phantasmagoria of esotericism and avarice

Foucault’s Pendulum recounts the tale of three young men, who, having started a conspiracy theory based on the occult out of boredom and a sense of satire, find themselves caught and sucked deeper and deeper in a vortex of their own creation. Termed by someone ‘the thinking man’s Da Vinci code’, the book packs an intellectual punch. Having enjoyed very much his historical murder mystery ‘The Name of the Rose’, with its cheeky and non too subtle winking homage to Arthur Conan Doyle, and having great expectations to the book that has been called the smart man’s Da Vinci code, I can’t help been somewhat disappointed in this novel. Its scale is grand, the story is clever, the history it covers and summarises and draws from is deep as time. And therein lies the rub.

The arcane nature of the book – the history of the Rosicrucians which spans centuries, the linking together of various historical characters from Shakespeare, Bacon, St Germain and other giants of the enlightenment, makes one feel slightly light-headed. There are simply too many details and dates and names. As the characters in the book, scholars in history and Western esotericism and Hermeticism among others, were all seemingly more than a little familiar with the subject, there is also little explanation on some of the historical and philological details. The frequent insertions of Latin, French, and other lingua frankas, quotations and allusions, are lost to the less enlightened souls. I felt as if I need to be Eco or someone on par in terms of knowledge to appreciate the subtleties and intricacies of ‘the plan’. As it is, unworthy as I am, I can only glimpse a fragment of the majesty of the narrative.

The ending, too, felt slightly anticlimactic. The start is riveting, but the anticipation curdles after 500 pages of explanations and back stories. There is a lack of catharsis, a feeling of suspended limbo. Perhaps this was meant to be. After all, Eco deliberately avoids the trap of making Foucault’s Pendulum another third rate conspiracy novel and instead focuses on the effect that such conspiratorial thinking has on the psyche of the characters and the utter futility and emptiness of pursuing such phantoms. In this way, it can be thought of as a critique and satire on novels such as Dan Brown’s outpourings, poking fun at those conspiracy theory nutters who love drawing obscure links as ad hoc proof to some obscure and revealing preconceptions. The more obscure the link, the more they believe (sort of like religion, rather, now come to think of it, exactly like religion – after all, faith is believe in the absence of evidence. How much more obscure can you get?). But, somehow deeper, the story also alludes to the interconnectedness of knowledge in the world. One comes to appreciate this as one begins to amass enough pieces. One of the greatest joys I find is when allusion and connections are realised between pieces of seemingly random information. That under the multi-coloured kaleidoscope of scattered information, books and knowledge, there are veins of truths that permeate through the different presentations. It is, I think, what underlies the deeper form of ecumenicism of serious theologians. The idea of gnosis rather than blind faith, of knowledge and truth transcending what Freud would term the narcissism of small differences. Instead, what is promoted is the search for the ultimate truth through different paths of inductive reasoning. Or even the older Greek idea of Henosis – the unification of oneself with the fundamental reality with the ultimate end being the apotheosis of the individual through acute understanding of truths. One being the realisation of the interconnectedness of the microcosm and the macrocosm, the interconnectedness of things.

The ultimate point of the book, in my view, is its portrayal of avarice, for love, for immortality, for knowledge, for prosperity. The different shades of avarice that colour our lives, for good or for evil, that dominates the different characters is a most interesting subject. The protagonist, unlike the antagonist, hits a truth – that immortality can be got, and perhaps only be got, through one’s children. The only other way I can think of is through words. Litera scripta manet. This exploration is an interesting facet of the book. And pointing out the often overlooked splendour of what is right in front of us. The utter unlikeliness of us being alive in the first place and the happiness to be got from immersing oneself in the pursuit of knowledge. As Keats said in Ode on a Grecian urn: ‘truth is beauty and beauty truth, - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Also, from the Epics of Galgamesh:

“What you seek you shall never find. For when the Gods made man, They kept immortality to themselves.Fill your belly.Day and night make merry.Let Days be full of joy.Love the child who holds your hand.Let your wife delight in your embrace.For these alone are the concerns of man.”

Perhaps if I were to re-read it in 10 years, with a better grasp of history and philosophy, I will be able to better savour the complex palate of this book.