Traveller's Reviews > Foucault’s Pendulum

Descartes said: Cogito, ergo sum.
Eco says: I seek meaning, therefore I am human.

It's very hard to succinctly describe exactly what this novel is. From looking at the plot description, you may be forgiven for assuming that it is a book like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, or Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. There is an overlap in the fact that all three books deal with conspiracies that revolve around the mystical and mythical order of the Knight's Templar, (view spoiler)[who were among the most wealthy and powerful of the Western Christian military orders and were among the most prominent actors of Christian finance. The organization existed for nearly two centuries during the Middle Ages.

Officially endorsed by the Catholic Church around 1129, the Order became a favoured charity throughout Christendom and grew rapidly in membership and power. Templar knights, in their distinctive white mantles with a red cross, were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades. Non-combatant members of the Order managed a large economic infrastructure throughout Christendom, innovating financial techniques that were an early form of banking, and building fortifications across Europe and the Holy Land.

The Templars' existence was tied closely to the Crusades; when the Holy Land was lost, support for the Order faded. Rumours about the Templars' secret initiation ceremony created mistrust and King Philip IV of France, deeply in debt to the Order, took advantage of the situation. In 1307, many of the Order's members in France were arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and then burned at the stake. Under pressure from King Philip, Pope Clement V disbanded the Order in 1312. The abrupt disappearance of a major part of the European infrastructure gave rise to speculation and legends, which have kept the "Templar" name alive into the modern day. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_... )
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as well as the mystical and mythical quest for the Holy Grail,
and mystical aspects revolving around the Torah, the Bible, and various cults that have existed around all of the aforementioned cultural phenomena. However, that is more or less where the similarity ends. The Baigent book 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 Knight's Templar. Holy Blood, Holy Grail was first published in 1982, and its authors apparently built most of their theory on the testimony of Pierre Plantard for the argument in their book.

Now bear with me on this: One of the theses I'd like to pose in my review, is that Eco's novel, Foucault's Pendulum, (which was first published in 1988), is to some extent reactionary to this whole pallaver, which caused a big stink toward the end of the twentieth century, especially since many readers had taken the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail pretty seriously:

" The Prieuré de Sion, translated from French as Priory of Sion, is a name given to multiple groups, both real and fictitious. The most controversial is a fringe fraternal organisation, founded and dissolved in France in 1956 (abiding by the 1901 French Law of Associations) by Pierre Plantard.

In the 1960s, Plantard created a fictitious history for that 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. This myth was expanded upon and popularised by the 1982 pseudohistorical book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and later claimed to be factual in the preface of the 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code.

After becoming a cause célèbre from the late 1960s to the 1980s, the mythical Priory of Sion was exposed as a ludibrium created by Plantard as a framework for his 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. Nevertheless, many conspiracy theorists still persist in believing that the Priory of Sion is an age-old cabal that conceals a subversive secret.

The Priory of Sion myth has been exhaustively debunked by journalists and scholars as one of the great hoaxes of the 20th century. Some skeptics have expressed concern that the proliferation and popularity of books, websites and films inspired by this hoax have contributed to the problem of conspiracy theories, pseudohistory and other confusions becoming more mainstream. Others are troubled by the romantic reactionary ideology unwittingly promoted in these works. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priory_o... )

In the novel under review, 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. (Plantard seems to make an appearance in the novel as well, (view spoiler)[ in the form of the character Agliè (hide spoiler)]). 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 that don't usually have anything to do with the Knights Templar or secret societies as such.)

However, the novel is more than just that. It also extensively delves into the fields of semiotics (the examination of meaning and how it is interpreted ) and epistemology, and even ontology.

This brings me to make a confession: silly little me, not knowing my history of science well enough, had, until I researched Foucault's pendulum, (-the actual scientific discovery/mechanism, not the novel), not realized that Léon Foucault is not the same person at all as Michel Foucault , the poststructuralist sociologist/ philosopher/psychologist, the latter whom I would immediately associate with Eco, via the link of being associated with linguistics and semiotics, since both published work in these areas in more or less the sixties to the eighties, so I'd be much more likely to associate Michel Foucault with Eco rather than I would associate Leon Foucault, a physicist living in the nineteenth century, with Eco.

Perhaps I can be excused for having fallen foul of the psychological phenomenon of tending to want 'closure'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_...

This psychological phenomenon can be illustrated more clearly by a similar phenomenon that we find with our brain's cognitive function in regard to perception; and most strikingly so when it comes to visual perception. (See emergence and reification here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_... )
Reification: In the image, a triangle is perceived in picture A, though no triangle is there. In pictures B and D the eye recognizes disparate shapes as "belonging" to a single shape, in C a complete three-dimensional shape is seen, where in actuality no such thing is drawn.

A bit further down on the linked page, we see that :"The fundamental principle of gestalt perception is the law of prägnanz , (pithiness), which says that we tend to order our experience in a manner that is regular, orderly, symmetric, and simple. [And meaningful]. "

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 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 in WRONG.

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 experience 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 in regard to structuralist/poststructuralist theory, so I automatically grouped them together. But, as 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 is talking about in this book. Psychologically speaking, humans simply don't like things that don't make sense.

We tend to group things together based on various associations, through likeness, symbolism, or a variety of other associations.

We also need to see the 'sense' of things, we need to know the 'why' of things, which is why, perhaps, it was necessary for so many religions to put the emphasis 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]. The relevant religion then becomes the '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." or, "War and pestilence and sorrow and tsunamis and tornados and earthquakes happen because of original sin; because humans have, through their sins, caused that the world, God's perfect creation, has become an imperfect place, and we have brought all of these sorrows upon ourselves, just by dint of our being.

Also, 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, seeing strange flying things in the night, would 200 years ago most probably have been explained as 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 conceptualise social phenomena as constructs which can regulate our behaviour 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 us to often seek solace and 'meaning' with cults and religions.

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 Knight's 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 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: One of the themes of the novel is that our three protagonists become the victims of their own hubris. As one of the three editors, Diotallevi, points out, that 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 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 so 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. Certainly, history is written by the victors and is therefore almost always a subjective account of events, so we must be very very careful when presenting versions of events. Versions of events are often skewed for personal gain, but, as Diotallevi points out, when we do it as a game, just for fun, that is particularly unforgivable, because whatever version of events that we'd put out there, it 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, was the poignant character sketch of Jacopo Belbo, the introvert who struggles to engage, who can never put himself in the midst of things, who is always on the periphery, except for one 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.

BOTTOM LINE: Five stars for the astonishing range and depth of Eco's erudition, for his mischievous and clever sense of humor and his amazing accomplishment of drawing so many threads together in a remarkable tapestry of history, epistemology, semiotics and characterization; but minus a half star for the many superfluous bits of knowledge that are repeatedly offered, in what seems to be more showing-off sessions than being really functional with regard to the novel's plot or theses.