Umberto Eco’s Unique Form Of Cultural, Psychological And Sociological Commentary As Epitomized In His ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’
Descartes said: I think, therefore I am human.
Eco said: I seek meaning, therefore I am human.
Umberto Eco, the Italian writer, philosopher, cultural critic and semiotician, was one of the most prolific polymaths of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Eco is best-known for his early novel “The Name of the Rose”, but he has contributed far more than a best-selling novel or two. Eco originally studied medieval philosophy and literature, earning a Laurea degree in philosophy in 1954. Eco’s early works deal with Cultural Aesthetics, and although he focuses extensively on medieval aesthetics, his commentary stretches to the postmodern era. Eco had also written other works and essays on and lectured on topics that include semiotics (the study of cultural sign processes and the meaning they convey), linguistics, mass media and modern media culture, and morality.
Aside from having 7 novels and 39 works of fiction on various topics published, Eco also wrote 3 children’s books!
As an interesting side note, Eco is famous in geeky circles for his huge personal libraries. He had a 30,000 volume library in Milan and a 20,000 volume library in Urbino.
Eco already showed off his intellectual prowess and erudition with his first novel, “The Name of the Rose” (1983). However, with his second novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1989), Eco created such a complex and intricately layered web of fiction, that the novel has become regarded as one of those daunting works of fiction that can be named in the same breath as such literary giants as James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and the works of Thomas Phynchon, as far as depth, density, intricacy and allusiveness is concerned.
It’s very hard to succinctly describe “Foucault’s Pendulum”. From looking at the plot description, you may be forgiven for assuming that it is a book like “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, (1982) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, or Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” (2003).
There is an overlap in the fact that all three books deal with conspiracies that revolve around the mystical order of the Knights Templar, a Catholic monastic order founded in 1119 which was active from about 1129 to 1312. This order was among the most wealthy and powerful of the Western Christian military orders and its members were among the most prominent participants in Christian finance. The organization existed for nearly two centuries during the Middle Ages.
One of the aims of the order had been to take part in the Crusades to regain the Holy Land, and when the Holy Land was lost, the order soon fell into disfavor with the establishment. Since the order had acted as bankers, people like King Philip IV of France owed them funds.
Using a pretext, the latter had many of the order’s members in France arrested, and when they were found guilty by virtue of confessions obtained by way of torture, they were burnt at the stake.
Under pressure from King Philip, Pope Clement V disbanded the Order in 1312. This dramatic disappearance of an order which had been so prominent on the European medieval map, gave rise to speculation, legends, and conspiracy theories, which has kept interest in the Templar mythos alive through to the current day.
Other subjects that all 3 books deal with, involve the mystical and mythical quest for the Holy Grail, as well as mystical topics revolving around the Torah, the Bible, and various cults that have existed around all of the aforementioned cultural phenomena. However, this is more or less where the similarity between the books ends. Baigent et al’s “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” presents itself as non-fiction; as a serious thesis presenting an alternate history of Christ, Christianity and phenomena such as that of the myth of the Holy Grail and the true origin of the Knights Templar. The book was first published in 1982, and its authors apparently built most of their theory on the testimony of Pierre Plantard for their arguments. In contrast, Eco’s book is a satirical fiction which explores the many ways in which humans create their own reality. It is a work which interweaves a myriad of topics, all coated in a sparkling layer of subtle jest.
I would like to pose a suggestion that Eco’s novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum”, (which was first published in 1988), is to some extent reactionary to the popularity that several conspiracy theories built around the Templar mythos, the mythical quest for the Holy Grail, and aspects of the Jewish Kabbalah gained toward the end of the twentieth century, especially after a lot of readers had accepted as truth many of the claims made in “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” . Later, other books, such as “The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ”, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, which was published in 1997, made similar claims, although these books were published after Eco’s “Pendulum” and these authors claim to have stumbled across these ‘truths’ via their investigations into the Turin Shroud and Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper”.
The incredibly popular Dan Brown book, “The Da Vinci Code”, which bases many of its tenets on the aforementioned two books, and also cites a lot of the aforementioned as truth, was only published much later, in 2003.
The hoax that seems to have set these theories off, is the one that revolves around the ‘Priory of Sion’, an organization which was founded by Pierre Plantard in France in 1956 and dissolved in that same year by French authorities.
In the 1960s, Plantard created a fictitious history for the organization, describing it as a secret society founded by Godfrey of Bouillon on Mount Zion in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, conflating it with a genuine historical monastic order, the Abbey of Our Lady of Mount Zion. In Plantard’s version, the priory was devoted to installing a secret bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty on the thrones of France and the rest of Europe. As already mentioned, this idea was expanded upon and popularized by the 1982 pseudo-historical book “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail”, and echoed by the claims put forth in the book “The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ”, which also proposes a theory regarding the relationship between Jesus, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene. This was followed by a spate of other books making similar claims. Of course, Eco’s book, “Foucault’s Pendulum”, having been first published in 1988, predates many of these books and as such seems to oddly presage the popularity of the conspiracy theories that sprung up around the Jesus/ Mary Magdelene mythos and the Knights Templar.
Interestingly enough, Plantard’s claims around The Priory of Sion, were exposed as false in the 1980s already, but this fact seems to have been largely ignored by conspiracy devotees. Apparently Plantard had created the fiction as a framework for his own claim of being the Great Monarch prophesied by Nostradamus. Evidence presented in support of its historical existence and activities before 1956 was discovered to have been forged and then planted in various locations around France by Plantard and his accomplices. Even in the face of this evidence, the conspiracy theories survived, thrived, and multiplied.
In the novel under discussion, Eco has written an elaborate critique of hoaxes such as that of Plantard and of others like him who have made an appearance through the course of history. Eco’s novel exposes the perfidious at worst and delusive at best, nature of conspiracy beliefs and scams such as these, and while doing so, he shows the history of many theories and myths that have existed around secret societies and occult schools of thought through the centuries. Eco displays a delicious sense of humor, poking fun with many of the ideas and personages. (For instance, Eco even manages to work in, in a very humorous way, the controversy around the ‘real identity’ of Shakespeare and similar controversies, and it seems as if Eco might have featured Plantard himself in the novel, as the character Agliè). However, the novel is more than just poking fun with conspiracy theories. It also extensively delves into the fields of semiotics (the examination of the meaning of verbal and non-verbal signs and how they are interpreted) and epistemology (theories of knowledge), and even ontology (theories on the nature of existence and reality).
This brings me to make a confession: Not knowing my history of science well enough, I had initially not realized, until I researched Foucault’s pendulum because of its place in the novel (the actual scientific discovery around the mechanism of the pendulum), that the Foucault in the title of Eco’s novel is Léon Foucault and not Michel Foucault , the poststructuralist/sociologist/philosopher/psychologist I had assumed it was. I had initially immediately associated the latter with Eco, via the perceptual link of both of them being associated with linguistics and semiotics, since both had published work in these areas in more or less the 1960s to the 1980s. Because of already having made this link, my brain was much more likely to associate Michel Foucault with Eco rather than it would associate Leon Foucault, a physicist living in the nineteenth century, with him.
Perhaps I can be excused for my mistake, having fallen foul of the psychological phenomenon of tending to want ‘closure’ .
This perceptual psychological phenomenon can be illustrated more clearly by a similar phenomenon that we find in our brain’s cognitive function with regard to perception in general but which is most strikingly apparent when it comes to visual perception, where closure forms an element of visual reification.
As a demonstration of reification: In the image, a triangle is perceived in picture A, though no actual triangle was drawn in. In pictures B and D the eye recognizes disparate shapes as “belonging” to a single shape, and in C, a complete three-dimensional ball-shape is seen, where in actuality no such thing was actually drawn.
Gestalt (which means “unified whole”) psychology, is a study of visual perception originated by a group of German psychologists in the 1920s.
In fact, my error with the ‘wrong’ Foucault, perfectly illustrates the law of closure which states that individuals perceive objects such as shapes, letters, pictures, etc., as being whole even when they are not complete. Even if you literally ‘don’t have the full picture’ your mind will fill it in for you, because doing this tends to make our daily functioning more fluid and efficient, except on the off-chance that our brain filled the picture incorrectly, of course.
Most often though, the filling in it does, is quite adequate; since it bases its assumptions on previous experience. Our minds file all of our experiences in a sort of subliminal database which is often the source for a ‘sixth sense’ feeling about something.
I also fell foul of the law of similarity, which states that elements within an assortment of objects are perceptually grouped together if they are similar to each other. In my mind, Michel Foucault and Umberto Eco often get grouped together with regard to structuralist/poststructuralist theory, so I automatically grouped them together. But, with regard to the Foucault referred to in the novels’ title, I was WRONG!
Why am I embroidering on my little mistake for so long, you may ask? Well, because it so eloquently describes exactly the kind of thing Eco demonstrates in his book. Psychologically speaking, humans simply don’t like things to not make sense. We tend to group things together based on various associations, through likeness, symbolism, or a variety of other associations.
Humans also seem to have a deep need to feel that things happen for a reason, which is why, perhaps, in so many religions the emphasis is on belief as opposed to knowledge, on faith as opposed to proof, and why Jesus exhorts his followers to become as the little children [who believe blindly and innocently]. It is simply easier for people to believe that there is a ‘mystical reason’ for everything unexplained in life: “Your child died because God willed it so; He wanted your child to be with the angels, where he/she belongs better than on earth.”, for example. Other people again, believe in fate, and get their peace of mind by believing that whatever happens, was “fated” to happen.
If something does not make sense to us, we’ll fill in the missing bits out of what seems most reasonable to us, rather than to leave things unexplained. For instance, when people see strange flying objects in the night, it would 200 years ago most probably have been explained as those people having seen ghosts, whereas many modern people would prefer to believe that they saw UFO’s.
But in addition, humans are intensely social creatures, and we can conceptualize social phenomena as constructs which can regulate our behavior in emotional ways; for instance, we have a need to belong, we have a capacity to feel guilt, and we believe in cause and result. Many humans also have a desire for spiritual meaning — a need to believe that life has a “higher purpose”. These and other characteristics cause humans to often seek solace and meaning with various cults, religions and superstitions.
In Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco dissects the results of these tendencies. He shows us how myths are created, often through humans’ need for closure — so if there is something missing in our ‘picture’ of something, we tend to make up the missing bits to best fit in with our currently held needs and beliefs.
Eco eloquently demonstrates this when the central group of characters in the novel, three editors at a publishing firm, work out an elaborate esoteric explanation for some of the missing text on a partly destroyed piece of paper that they have been told holds a great secret concerning the Knights Templar; only to be shown up by the narrator’s wife, who deftly demonstrates that the partly obliterated text actually represents a shopkeeper’s goods delivery list, and that it was in reality nothing close to the two or three different interpretations that had been made by people who had assumed that it holds a tantalizing secret.
Fun of a similar manner ensues in various places in the novel, for instance when one of the editors aptly applies the shape and the meaning of the Mystical Kabbalah to the body and inner workings of a motor vehicle.
Eco shows us how easily connections are formed in the human mind, and how easily such a chain of associations can lead through the most unlikely chain of associations, right back to the origin again, if necessary.
Drawn in by the “game” of applying mystical symbolism to “everything”, our three editors devise a story which they call “The Plan”. The Plan works very much like a regular game of “Word Association” :
“In our game we crossed not words but concepts, events, so the rules were different. Basically there were three rules.
Rule One: Concepts are connected by analogy. There is no way to decide at once whether an analogy is good or bad, because to some degree everything is connected to everything else. For example, potato crosses with apple, because both are vegetable and round in shape. From apple to snake, by Biblical association. From snake to doughnut, by formal likeness. From doughnut to life preserver, and from life preserver to bathing suit, then bathing to sea, sea to ship, ship to shit, shit to toilet paper, toilet to cologne, cologne to alcohol, alcohol to drugs, drugs to syringe, syringe to hole, hole to ground, ground to potato.
Rule Two says that if tout se tient [the connections prove valid] in the end, the connecting works. From potato to potato, tout se tient [therefore it holds true]. So it’s right.
Rule Three: The connections must not be original. They must have been made before, and the more often the better, by others. Only then do the crossings seem true, because they are obvious. “
Throughout the book, Eco basically shows us that one can justify any theory, any line of thought, if there is a psychological or practical need to make the argument ‘work’, and that any theory, if you formulate it according to certain ‘rules’, can become accepted by a large group of people.
Hubris: Another theme of the novel is that our three protagonists become the victims of their own hubris. As one of the three editors, Diotallevi, points out, after their ‘game’ had drawn them in, it started consuming them with its addictive power and it started spilling over into reality in alarming ways, like a Frankenstein’s monster run wild: “ You’re the prisoner of what you created. But your story in the outside world is still unfolding.”
Eco also points out that when we create a story, whether meant to be fictional or not, that story takes on a life of its own, and it has consequences. …but even more applicable than when the story is presented as fiction, is when the story is presented as truth. When we meddle with how history is presented, we create consequences. As the cliché goes, history is written by the victors and is therefore almost always a subjective account of events, and Eco argues that we must be extremely careful when presenting versions of events. Versions of events are often skewed for personal gain, but, as Diotallevi asserts, when we make facts up or skew them just for fun (fake news seems to be a pertinent equivalent in our current society here) or as a game, this is particularly unforgivable, because whatever version of events that we’d put out there, still has consequences.
Interestingly, each person in the novel experiences the consequences of their deception in a different way. All of them experience guilt in various ways, … but let me stop there lest I put out too many spoilers.
The best part of the novel for me personally, was the poignant character sketch of Jacopo Belbo, the introvert who struggles to engage, who can never put himself in the midst of things, and who is always on the periphery, except for two glorious moments in his life, when Eco brilliantly makes him become the center of the universe.
IS ECO A PART OF WHAT HE SCORNS? Ironically, to some extent yes. In the novel, Eco himself is prone to showing off and legerdemain, almost as much as his characters who become a part of the conspiracies they have scorned. The novel is somewhat diminished by the many superfluous bits of knowledge that are offered, in what seems to be more showing-off sessions than being really functional with regard to the novel’s plot or theses.
With these flaws in mind, and despite them, Foucault’s Pendulum is a novel that showcases the astonishing range and depth of Eco’s erudition, and his remarkable ability to synthesize themes and clusters of knowledge. The way in which he drew so many threads together in a remarkable tapestry of history, epistemology, semiotics and characterization, is an amazing and memorable accomplishment. Best of all however, is the scintillating humor, the fine skeins of laughter, sometimes empathetic, sometimes disdainful, that echoes throughout.
