Thursday, July 30, 2015

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (1988)

Right, so here's an interesting thing: I came across the phrase “the crew makes the welkin ring with its hurrahs,” so I highlighted the word “welkin” to make a definition come up, as you can do. And in the definition, I get this: “ make the welkin ring make a very loud sound: the crew made the welkin ring with its hurrahs.” Yes! The sample sentence appears to have been taken from the very part of the very book where I just saw it! That's not something that happens every day.

So the narrator of this book (Casaubon, named in reference to the arid intellectual in Middlemarch) is a student doing research on the Knights Templar, an order which was disbanded in 1312, but which is kept alive (in our hearts!) by all sorts of conspiracy theories about its alleged sub rosa survival (and not just sub rosa but also Don Rosa; see “The Old Castle's Other Secret”). He eventually gets hired by a vanity press that's decided to focus on publishing people who do this kind of theorizing (there's also a legitimate press associated with it, but that receives very little attention). You know the kind of thing: Templars (whom all famous people turn out to have been one of), Rosicrucians, Jesuits, Pyramids, Atlantis, telluric currents, Isis, Osiris, Hermes Trismegistus, numerology gone wild—whatever fits together, and if it doesn't fit together (which is typically the case), well, you can always find something. That's what's so fun about it! Allegedly.

Casaubon and his co-editors decide to amuse themselves by putting together their own pastiche of all this nonsense, and we're off to the races. The reasons why people engage in this sort of thing are certainly psychologically interesting. As Eco notes, it's really a matter of endless deferment; there's always this sense that something Big is going to happen, that will Change Everything—but it's important that the secrets of this thing remain forever just outside our grasp, or that when they're uncovered, they just point to more secrets, because if you get to the actual thing, you realize you don't have anything. This logic applies just as well to Christian endtimes enthusiasts.

So yes well but and or, the other thing about these conspiracy theories is: you want to consume them in moderation, because in excess, they get awfully boring awfully fast. And it turns out that this is the case even when you're talking about self-aware, parodic versions of them. The idea that doing this stuff can actually affect reality (shades of “Tlon Uqbar”) is interesting; there's some intriguing, Pynchonesque paranoia in places; and the climax is appropriately batty; but it's hard to get away from the impression that mostly, Eco is just amusing himself in the most massively self-indulgent way possible. Sure, there's loads of erudition here, but to what end? I find myself in the position of the people I criticized for complaining about The Name of the Rose.  I found the concept of this book hella intriguing in theory, but in practice...? Note, also, that there's absolutely no human interest here. The characters aren't anything, and Casaubon's several romantic relationships are kinda awful. This really, really seems like the kind of book that people are just going to give up on midway through. In spite of the odd glimmer of interest, I know that I was tempted. After The Name of the Rose, I had this idea that maybe I would just go ahead and read all of Eco's novels. Now I'm not so sure that's the world's greatest plan.


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