I've been reading like mad this week. Picked up and finished Eco's Foucault's Pendulum in the last couple of days, with a break for more Jerusalem and the first third of The Tommyknockers. There might be something wrong with me
I clipped a publishers ad for Foucault's Pendulum out of a serious adult magazine when I was maybe 13, because the single short paragraph made it sound interesting. It wasn't like any of the other books I read-- mostly scifi and fantasy and horror-- but it seemed like the kind of book an interesting grownup could read. I taped the ad to the edge of the table where I painted my tabletop miniatures so I wouldn't forget to look for it when I had money; hardcover-book money, adult-book money. When I wound up in a studio apartment in downtown Minneapolis at 19, I found a mass market edition at DreamHaven. During the same shopping trip I also picked up Wilson & Shea's Illuminatus trilogy omnibus edition. And it's terrifying to think what could have happened if I'd read Illuminatus first and Foucault's Pendulum second.
Both books are playgrounds of conspiracy, occultism and history, and crucially, paranoia. But it is Eco's book that is, finally, an adult book. The Illuminatus trilogy could be the Plan that the editors in Pendulum have made up, a pastiche of sensational cherry-picked historical tidbits, stitched crazy-quilt into a grand all-encompassing scheme that provides an atlas to describe all the landscapes of history. Both books are a lot of fun: they dance right along the edge of plausible historical theories and batshit shenanigans.
The Illuminatus trilogy is the american version; all this shit is absolutely true and real, John Dillinger shot JFK, George Washington was Adam Weishaupt working hand-in-glove with the the Old Man in the Mountain and the Altanteans. Sex magick, tons of dope, evil rock bands and giant golden submarines- it's a playground of silliness, with the intent to overload the reader with all its absurdity. Of course, there are a lot of people who believe it's real.
Foucault's Pendulum is more sober, more continental and erudite, its conspiracies have bibliographies. It assumes the reader is at least passing familiar with Latin and four millennia of esoteric and philosophical history. It's still fiction, it's still fun and silly and outrageous, but it builds with real events, real facts and people and events. And crucially, especially to me when I was 19, it's made up. That paranoia is a central part of the novel. It feeds you these fantastic occult plots to rule the world, dragged through history's garden, turning up Templars and Merovingians and Manichaeism and cabals of Kabbalists, fantastic plots of telluric currents and the Navel of the World... and then it stops, it makes you take a breath, and look at the absurdity of it all. There are at least three distinct moments where the novel extracts itself from the feverish conspiracy and lays out some reality, like a drink of cold water when you've been drinking powerful espresso and smoking Galuoises all day and all night. The novel is at its core not about the conspiracies, even though they are tremendous fun; Eco is clearly having a fantastic time setting up all his toys and marching them across the world-island. It is about the desire for meaning, the siren call of the secret plot. It ropes you into thinking all these things sound plausible.. and then it unpacks why we want to believe these things, or any other too-tidy theory of history. It's seductive, believing these things. It lets you live in a world that makes sense, even if it's an implausible, bitter, cruel kind of sense. There is a Plan, and a Secret, and the Elect know what's going on, and now, so do you...
If I had read Illuminatus before I read Foucault's Pendulum, there is every chance I could have wound up far more disturbed and disconnected from reality than I already was. Reading Umberto Eco's calm and unhurried prose about why we want a Plan and Secrets helped me to rein in my most severe paranoid tendencies, when I was 19 and ever since. I think fondly of uncle Umberto all the time, when I want to retreat into simplistic reductions of history and world events.
And, also important? I only got 1/7th of what he was talking about when I read that book at 19. It's translated from the Italian but it assumes that you're conversant in French, German, Latin, and most of European history. I was floundering madly through most of the book, at a time when I couldn't just pull out my phone and look up the Black Hundreds or the Count de Saint Germain or Alamut or Mithraism. But I am delighted to report that each time I reread Eco's novels (and Pynchon's) I understand more of the references, and I can appreciate more of the jokes. It's very satisfying. I'm proud that I read these books even when I didn't always get what was happening, because now I do. If I had let myself be too intimidated by them when I was younger, I wouldn't know all this wild shit today
There is no discipline of forgetting; we are at the mercy of random natural processes, like stroke and amnesia, and such self-interventions as drugs, alcohol or suicide.
-- Focault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco (tr. William Weaver)
