Dolors's Reviews > Foucault’s Pendulum

“ “Us two? All three of us are in this. If we don’t come out honorably, we’ll all look silly.”
“Silly to whom?”
“Why, to history. Before the tribunal of Truth.”
“Quid est veritas?” Belbo asked.
“Us,” I said.” ” (p.435)

Truth? What is truth? Truth is relative. Or isn’t it?
The fact that Umberto Eco portrays one of his characters quoting Pontius Pilate’s assertion that truth is hard to ascertain with some sort of consistent resonance of a Nietzschian Superman who has passed “beyond good and evil” is no coincidence.
There is nothing superfluous or redundant in Eco’s challenging and maybe even misinformative novel, which results to be an erudite map of connections throughout the history of humankind in a quest to find meaning to the mystery of existence.

Or so believe the three protagonists of this complicated historical fugue, Casaubon, Belbo and Diotallevi, when they decide to embark on a mission they call “The Plan” to decipher the encrypted message inscribed in an ancient parchment brought to Garamond Press in Milan, a firm where Belbo and Diotallevi work as editors, by a suspicious Knight Templar fanatic called Ardenti, who claims the document to be proof of the existence of a master plan of secret societies which has been passed down for centuries involving telluric energy that will give unlimited powers to whoever capable of unraveling its encoded enigma.

Casaubon, acting as an omniscient narrator and a Doctor whose thesis is focused in the Knights Templar and the collection of German secret societies in the 17th century called Rosicrucians, goes forward and backward in time to display the creation of “The Plan”, which starts as a harmless game involving random computing processes and the analysis of symbols and semiotics through historical facts only to develop into a full-scale obsession blending speculation with the most shocking conclusions about some historical personalities ranging from Francis Bacon and Shakespeare to Elizabeth I or Hitler.

Even the characters of the novel, the quotations at the beginning of each chapter and the division of the story following the Kabbalah esoteric tradition carry extra meaning to reinforce Eco’s trial of the Western arcane tradition.
Casaubon is presented as the epitome of logic and sense, the skeptic type as a counterpoint to ascetic Diotallevi, who is in turn convinced by his passion for Kabbalah that he comes from Jewish ancestry without any real evidence.
Belbo arises as the anti-heroic protagonist whose biggest frustration relays in his inability to become a writer after an alienated childhood that shaped him with insecurities and a low self-esteem. “The Plan” represents Belbo’s triumph over his past failures and he clings to it until it becomes a life consuming mania that transcends into fatal consequences.
Eco’s idea of femininity is presented in the dichotomy between the characters of Lorenza and Lia, the first conveying the reincarnated Gnostic muse Sophia, the forbidden fruit and the volcanic passion of love; the second depicting the idea of fertility, matriarchal authority and nourishing balance.

On Lia:
“You live on the surface. You sometimes seem profound, but it’s only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you tried to stand it up” (p. 365)

On Lorenza:
“For I am the first and the last. I am the honored and the hated. I am the saint and the prostitute.” — Fragment of Nag Hammadi 6.2. (p. 41)

Eco’s intellectual display of historical facts commingles with his deep knowledge of ancient traditions and ancestral esoteric beliefs while playing with the reader, who finds himself in a true terra incognita, lacking the necessary background to be able to discriminate factual truth from fiction, mesmerizing him with obscure spirituality and metaphysical philosophy concluding with the controversial Conspiracy Theory in the form of the quintessential battle among the forces of darkness.

What is the message behind this deliberate scholarly obfuscation?
Is there a hidden lesson to be learnt amidst this subtle intellectual and emotional manipulation?
Is Reason or Faith the conduit to find the meaning of existence, the truth of the making of History?
Is life the biggest joke we’ve been submitted to?
Eco laughs unashamedly at having pulled the reader’s leg and demonstrated his point with dexterous subterfuges and his disguised critic tone on spirituality.
But beware my fellow reader. Eco’s position, which has been delivered with much ambiguity, biplay and paradoxical meandering, might be a hard blow to take hitting the soul where it hurts the most because it proves the insignificance and the meaningless purpose of existence. And that is something I am not ready to accept as the fallible and imperfect human being I am.

“Where have I read that at the end, when life, surface upon surface, has become completely encrusted with experience, you know everything, the secret, the power, and the glory, why you were born, why you are dying, and how it all could have been different? You are wise. But the greatest wisdom, at that moment, is knowing that your wisdom is too late. You understand everything when there is no longer anything to understand.” (p. 640)