UMBERTO ECO, FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM

Umberto Eco. FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM. Trans. from the Italian by William Weaver. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.
BIOGRAPHIC AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC
Originally published in 1988, Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri Bompiani, Sonzogno Etas S.p.A., Milano. English translation 1989 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

This paperback edition is 533 pages.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Eco's table of contents contains 120 chapters. They are organized in sections headed by a Hebrew word from the kabbala (we think).

SELECTED SUMMARY NOTES ON THE TEXT
NOTE ON THE SOURCE OF THE TITLE, Foucault's Pendulum: Because of the prominence of Michel Foucault in postmodern literature, it helps to know before starting this book that the title refers not to our postmodernist but to Jean Bernard Leon Foucault (1819-1868). He was a French physicist who originated the pendulum that demonstrated the earth's rotation. (He also invented the gyroscope and took the first clear photograph of the sun.) [Judith S. Levey and Agnes Greenhall, ed. The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia. New York: Avon, 1983. p. 300.] The site of the pendulum in the Museum of Mechanical Arts holds the key to the fabricated Plan made up by Casaubon and friends. It also is the instrument of Belbo's bizarre death by hanging: the Diabolicals wrap the cord of the pendulum around his neck and away he goes!

WOW! That seems like the right response on completing this novel. Eco rewrites the history of western culture as a grand scheme of a secret organization to seize the hidden truth that can control the world through control of the "telluric currents." His narrator, Casaubon, and his associates at a publishing firm start with a laundry list of uncertain vintage and construct their elaborate hypothesis about the Plan. It takes them into a critique and explanation of major events and players on the world stage, including Napoleon, Bacon, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. When one of them divulges the Plan to a crackpot who believes in such conspiracies, Casaubon and friends get into serious trouble "for real." The band of crackpots, dubbed "the Diabolicals" for their devilish fascination with the occult and arcane, believe the associates truly know the secret; death comes to Belbo, Casaubon's associate, as a result and the narrator leaves us at the end expecting his own death at the hands of the crackpots.

QUOTABLE QUOTES
"If you invent a plan and others carry it out, it's as if the Plan exists. At that point it does exist." (p.513)

Belbo secretly wrote about the Plan on "Abulafia," his computer. Casaubon, after Belbo's death, figures out the password and reads Belbo's files. In a late file, after Belbo divulged the existence of the Plan, he wrote: "You mocked the creators of illusion, and now...you write using the alibi of a machine, telling yourself you are a spectator because you read yourself on the screen as if thewords belonged to another, but you have fallen into the trap: you,too, are trying to leave footprints on thesands of time. You have dared to change the text of the romance of theworld, and the romance of theworld has taken you instead into its coils and involved you in its plot, a plot not of your making." (p. 417)

SIGNIFICANCE, EVALUATION, AND RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORK
Foucault's Pendulum exemplifies the importance of ONTOLOGY in postmodern fiction. Brian McHale defines this characteristic for us. Eco's novel plays with the preeminence of language in the making of a world. By writing their Plan, Casaubon and friends succeed in calling a world into being, one which is so real that it destroys Belbo. The theme seems to be: Be careful what you write; it will come true.

Eco is a cornucopia of information. He is a prestidigitator of ideas. While the platform of his fiction rests on the critical theories of postmodernism, he writes with the zip and calculation of a pulp fictioneer. Story, story, story. Suspense, suspense, suspense. He tells, holds something back, tells that, holds something else back, tells that, and so on, bounding down the main and hidden corridors of the Western experience. Whatta guy. Try to make a meaningful comparison of this book with one of the great modernist works, say, The Sound and the Fury, by Faulkner. We see a similar impulse to tell the story with a kind of suspense. We see an assumption that the family/folk experience at issue had/has depth, has existence, apart from text. Eco is on another path; it was not something to interest Faulkner.

28 March 1996; updated 30 March 1996
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