#foucault's pendulum

[thirdity]

You must not think linearly... Nature doesn't; nature knows nothing of time. Time is an invention of the West.

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

[urclna]

my dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called "the plan" 😳 you'll be zonked out of your gourd 💯

me: yeah whatever. i don't feel shit.

12 years later: dude i swear the templars are after me

my buddy casaubon, pacing: the eiffel tower is lying to us

[maeve-is-annoying-about-books]

Me, dropping a bagel: Ah, this too must be The Plan.

[j-ayne]

I have been so intimidated by this while it's been sitting on my shelves for the past few months that I've decided to just jump in and see what happens. I found the first few pages confusing at first - I think because I had convinced myself that this book was too challenging for me to ever understand. But I reread those pages and a few more, and I'm enjoying it already.

When I was younger I used to read books and enjoy them despite some things going over my head. I didn't really worry about whether they were too smart for me, I would just do a bit of research here and there and enjoy myself. I think I've lost some of that confidence, but I hope I get back to reading in that way.

-

I was also reading a review of the novel, and it included this excellent statement from the author:

Does Eco expect his readers to bring a preexisting body of knowledge to his fiction, or does he expect them to have to work at the books? "There is no contradiction," he says. "Reading is a cooperative action in which the reader is supposed to fill up a lot of empty space. You write, and you want the reader to add a little more. The reader must collaborate. To communicate doesn't mean to tell everything. It means to cooperate in making the book grow." (Source here)

[endless-formsmostbeautiful]

He looked at my student card, turning it over a few times. 'Philosophy student, eh?' 'There are lots of us,' I said. 'Far too many.'

Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco (trans. William Weaver)

[thosearentcrimes]

Foucault's Pendulum is a novel by Umberto Eco, most famous for his excellent novel The Name of the Rose and for his essay Ur-Fascism. I liked it, though I would certainly recommend The Name of the Rose (and possibly The Prague Cemetery, though that one's more a matter of what you're interested in) over it.

I do not think I am spoiling anything when I say that the novel is an exploration of the natural observation a rational person immediately makes when encountering occultist or conspiracy theorist thought. "I could come up with a much more convincing theory than that." These people have extremely low epistemic standards, tend to be basically ignorant about history, and have no sense of chronology. Consequently, it seems trivial to identify spurious connections the way they do and weave them consciously according to the obvious narrative structures that support their beliefs. Now, I don't believe actually doing this is quite as easy as it looks, but it's a tempting notion. I've got one on the back burner revolving around the Ford Motor Company Sociology Department.

The novel makes other observations about occultist/conspiracy theorist thought. The tendency to interpret anachronism as prophecy, the intellectuals who believe under a pose of neutrality, the economics of it, how strange it seems that so many leading men of the Enlightenment were into it, the curious politics and anti-politics of conspiracy theorism. Some of these are handled through digressions, some are integrated into the plot, both are inoffensive to the structure.

The novel is well-executed, though Eco does love to get fancy with it. How willing you are to indulge his references, quotations, layers of narrative and nonlinear timeline will significantly determine whether you enjoy the book, but I don't think the book is really as difficult as I've seen critics suggest. You just need to decide that in-jokes and references you didn't get probably weren't that important, and the details of the plot don't really matter. I've also seen the book described as postmodern. A tempting designation given that Umberto Eco was very literally a postmodernist, but quite frankly by the standards people apply to justify the "postmodern" label you could probably make that case for the Epic of Gilgamesh as well so I don't think that's very meaningful.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom. When I was ten, I asked my parents to subscribe to a weekly magazine that was publishing comic-strip versions of the great classics of literature. My father, not because he was stingy, but because he was suspicious of comic strips, tried to beg off. “The purpose of this magazine,” I pontificated, quoting the ad, “is to educate the reader in an entertaining way.” “The purpose of your magazine,” my father replied without looking up from his paper, “is the purpose of every magazine: to sell as many copies as it can.”

That day, I began to be incredulous.

Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity. Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything. Or he believes in one thing at a time. He believes a second thing only if it somehow follows from the first thing. He is nearsighted and methodical, avoiding wide horizons. If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.

Incredulity doesn't kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don't believe in them, the collision of two ideas— both false—can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better.

—Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (1988)

[Robert Scott Horton]

[staticonscreens]

Foucault's Pendulum at the Museum of Time, Besançon

[firearmsandflashdrives]

my main problem with foucaults pendulum is that the flaws of its characters that it critiques are sometimes also the flaws of the narrative/novel as a whole…i feel this particularly with amparo and the whole part of the book set in brazil…like one of the primary flaws of casaubon/belbo/diotallevi is that they start to see the complexity of history and culture as mere symbols reflecting something secret and universal, but also therefore flat, as casaubon articulates in the end: “the moment a secret is revealed, it seems little. There is only an empty secret.” Right? but for eco too i think the brief brush with the long history and culture of brazil exists only to be part of that bigger secret…there is literally zero interest in examining it for what it is the way there is with the italian history of fascism/resistance or with the templars. like the moment of triumph for belbo that casaubon identifies is his holding the note of the trumpet precisely because it doesn't signify anything else. but the mix of cultures that exist in brazil is used in the novel only as a way of signifying something else--where the templars are originally discussed as a nuanced and varied group of men and are reduced to genius masters of the global plot as the protagonists lose themselves, brazil, the agogos, etc, are never anything but symbols.

I think this is most obvious in amparo's reaction to becoming "possessed"--she reveals this really deep internalized racism and hatred for her roots, calling herself a "dirty black girl," that the novel doesnt care to explore the way it does with belbo's feelings towards his moments of cowardice/bravery in the face of fascism and war--his italian roots. i think it's really revealing and honestly embarrassing for eco--it's treated like a neutral or even obvious thing for her to say and i think eco himself doesn't realize the extent to which it implies a rich and tortured inner life for amparo. the novel treats it as essentially the same feeling that casaubon has about his descent into conspiratorial thinking, but it's so obviously not--to be a white italian obsessed with the mysticism of european history is not the same thing as being a mixed-race brazilian woman embarrassed to find herself unable to be as intellectually detached from this aspect of her culture as her white boyfriend, as diotallevi says, you can't do whatever you want with the text. human history is not reducible to a struggle for control over telluric currents.

that's what makes it so frustrating for me--eco's racism, imperialism, and misogyny prevent him from seeing what could have been a really compelling avenue for furthering the themes of the text. but of course doing so would have involved actually giving a nonwhite female character a role in the text outside of furthering a white guy's character development

[thirdity]

You live on the surface... You sometimes seem profound, but it's only because you piece a lot of surfaces together to create the impression of depth, solidity. That solidity would collapse if you try to stand it up.

Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

[shamsaddinmegalommatis]

Cosmas Megalommatis, Is History Secret?

(Book review of Umberto Eco's book, Foucault's Pendulum); DIAVAZO, fasc. 235 (March 21, 1990), pp. 113-128

Η Ιστορία Μυστική; (Βιβλιοκρισία του βιβλίου του Ουμπέρτο Έκο, Το Εκκρεμές του Φουκώ); Διαβάζω, τεύχος 235 (21 Μαρτίου 1990), σελ. 113-128

Download the book review in PDF:

https://www.slideshare.net/MuhammadShamsaddinMe/ss-9cf1 https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/_b___b_/24720432

[maeve-is-annoying-about-books]

Agliè: "You need to know there's a secret or else there wouldn't be a point to life would there? Everything would only be as it is with no point."

Me, who has been reading this book trying to find out what The Plan is: Hey wait a minute.

[ronk]

a Foucault pendulum

[inga-don-studio]

Carbonation angel

AKA the first thing you see after nearly drowning while being attacked by an entire room of evil killer grampa clones

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[chicago-geniza]

Ohhhhh The City and The City is a Master & Margarita novel as well as a Platonov novel as well as a Schulz novel as well as a Kafka & Bros Strugatsky & Lem novel. We get each other Mr. Miéville