Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco, Franklin Library, 1989, Signed

Description: Attention all Umberto aficionados! And all you grand conspiracy fans! Another beautiful book from Franklin Library, this one from the Signed First Edition Society series. From the NYT original review by Anthony Burgess (https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/eco-pendulum.html): A CONSPIRACY TO RULE THE WORLD First, profound obeisances to William Weaver, the marvel of whose translation I am able to confirm, having read much of Umberto Eco's new novel in the original. The mountain of information in it was piled up from sources in many languages and gathered through many centuries, and its characters are masters of such obscure and mystery-laden arts that it is dizzying in any language. Carrying the whole thing over from one to another must have been a monstrous task. Not an easy book, ''Foucault's Pendulum'' is an encyclopedic detective story about a search for the center of an ancient, still-living conspiracy of men who seek not merely power over the earth but the power of the earth itself, and who in the end draw their pursuers into a circle where discovery of the truth is lethal. It is not meant to be easy. But neither was ''The Name of the Rose,'' which became a best seller, even though one wonders how many people actually read all of it. ''Foucault's Pendulum'' will almost certainly become a best seller as well, and great are the rewards for those who actually manage to read it. For while it is not a novel in the strict sense of the word, it is a truly formidable gathering of information delivered playfully by a master manipulating his own invention - in effect, a long, erudite joke. Mr. Eco heard all about the pendulum, which swings in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris, from Mario Salvadori, a professor of civil engineering and architecture at Columbia University, or so an article in the newspaper Corriere della Sera tells me. An extract from a letter by that learned man forms one of Mr. Eco's 120 chapter epigraphs. The pendulum was invented by Jean Bernard Leon Foucault (1819-68) to demonstrate the rotation of the earth. It seems harmless, the confirmation of a comforting permanence, but it turns sinister toward the end of Mr. Eco's novel. The novel as narration is put into the mouth of a character named Casaubon, who has written his doctoral thesis on the Knights Templar and, after a sojourn in Brazil, is back in Milan as a kind of Sam Spade of information. For a price, he will track anything down, but he already seems to know everything, except that he is named for the etiolated scholar of George Eliot's ''Middlemarch,'' who also knew everything, though it did him no good. He is found useful by a firm of publishers, for which Jacopo Belbo, a commonsensical Piedmontese, works. Belbo's favorite comment on pretentiousness is ''Ma gavte la nata,'' which means something like ''take out the cork and let the wind blow away.'' For all that, Belbo earns a living in what is termed vanity publishing, which allows cranks and obsessives to see their work in print so long as they pay for it. His associate in publishing is one Diotallevi, whose obsession is the cabala and who insists that, although his forebears were not Jewish, he is, and that he has an ''exquisite Talmudic understanding.'' One of the cranks is a Colonel Ardenti, who believes he has discovered a coded message about a plot engineered by the Knights Templar. The Knights, a papal order of crusaders founded in the 12th century and officially disbanded by the Pope in the 14th, are apparently still around in some form or other. Their plot, aimed at taking over the whole world through the deployment of telluric energy (the fundamental powers of the planet, named for the Roman earth goddess Tellus), is the ultimate conspiracy. ...The triumvirate of publishers - Diotallevi, Belbo and Casaubon - decide, as a game, to feed all the hermetic plots that ever were into their computer, which is named Abulafia after the medieval Jewish cabalistic philosopher. The disgorgements will go beyond crazy Colonel Ardenti's ultimate conspiracy: the cosmic plan will embrace opposites. It will also provide better interpretations than orthodox history ever did of certain past events. For instance, the Knights Templar may have been disbanded for homosexuality, but their kissing of each other's fundaments had nothing to do with unlawful love. They were honoring the great serpent Kundalini, which ''throbs gently, binding heavy bodies to lighter bodies. Like a vortex or a whirlpool, like the first half of the syllable om.'' A Christian body evidently had access to ancient Indian lore. But what everybody - Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, Masons, Jesuits, even Nazis - has been after is control of the telluric currents. The pre-Celts built Stonehenge; the Celts erected dolmens or menhirs; Eiffel contrived his tower. Why? ''The menhirs had sensitive devices, like electric valves, planted at the points where the currents branched and changed direction. . . . The cromlechs and Stonehenge were micro-macrocosmic observatories, where the Druids, with geomantic tools, attempted to map, by extrapolation, the global design.'' The patterns of the constellations give information about the telluric currents - ''because, as the Tabula Smaragdina tells us, what is above is isomorphic to what is below.'' The Eiffel Tower is only a super-efficient dolmen. Everything clear so far? Modern computer technology provides the key with which the cabalists sought to make their metaphysics come to life. ''Factor analysis. . . . Binary calculators. Cabala applied to modern technology.'' Strange, or not so strange, that Jesuit abbreviations should prefigure the computer, or that computers should have a spurious reverence built into their hardware. ''IBM: Iesus Babbage Mundi, Iesum Binarium Magnificamur. AMDG: Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam? Not on your life! Ars Magna, Digitale Gaudium. IHS: Iesus Hardware & Software!'' You can see why L'Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, is unhappy about Mr. Eco, who is termed ''a fabulatory pest who deforms, desecrates and offends.'' In some of the European newspapers, Mr. Eco has also been called anti-Semitic, a charge that has been thrown around irresponsibly about many authors. The accusation probably stems from his resurrection here of the specious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which naturally form part of the cosmic conspiracy. According to the computer Abulafia, Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews; he merely wanted to get at a cabalistic message in the possession of his eternal enemies. ''The striking thing about the genocide of the Jews,'' Belbo says, ''is the lengthiness of the procedures. First they're kept in camps and starved, then they're stripped naked, then the showers, then the scrupulous piling of the corpses, and the sorting and storing of clothes, the listing of personal effects. . . . None of this makes sense if it was just a question of killing them. It makes sense if it was a question of looking for something, for a message that one of those millions of people - the Jerusalemite representative of the Thirty-Six Invisibles - was hiding in the hem of a garment, or in his mouth, or had tattooed on his body.'' What Hitler was after, apparently, was identification of a point in the earth's hollow center that is also the exact center of the sky. This would have made him Master of the World. ''He must have possessed psychic powers,'' Causabon speculates. ''Perhaps, instructed by some Druid from his hometown, he knew how to establish contact with the subterranean currents. Perhaps he was a living valve, a biological menhir transmitting the currents to the faithful in the Nuremberg stadium. For a while it worked for him; then his batteries ran down.'' Diotallevi gets ill from this conversation, seemingly sickened less by the black magic than by the frivolousness of the Holocaust theory. He has to go home. It turns out that he is suffering from something worse than nausea. Soon he is to die. After that there will be another death. The game is not, after all, a closed system. It puts out feelers to the real world. But the feelers are comparatively local and feeble. If you could genuinely direct the telluric currents, what would you do? ''In the Telluric Navel you place the most powerful valve, which enables you to foresee rain and drought, to release hurricanes, tidal waves, earthquakes, to split continents, sink islands (no doubt Atlantis disappeared in some such reckless experiment), raise mountain chains. . . . From your control tower you telephone, for example, the president of the United States, and you say to him: By tomorrow morning I want a dodecadillion dollars - or the independence of Latin America, or the state of Hawaii, or the destruction of your stockpile of nuclear weapons - or else the San Andreas Fault will crack definitively and Las Vegas will become a floating casino. . . . Then you telephone the Supreme Soviet and you say: Comrades, by Monday I want all the caviar of the Volga, and I want Siberia as my frozen-food locker; otherwise I'll suck the Urals under, I'll make the Caspian overflow, I'll cut loose Lithuania and Estonia and sink them in the Philippine Trench.'' ''The power would be immense,'' doomed Diotallevi admits. ''The earth could be rewritten like the Torah. . . . Eliphas Levi said the knowledge of the universe's tides and currents holds the secret of human omnipotence.'' He did say that. Mr. Eco fakes nothing. The stuff on the software is genuine. The game is another matter. But there are people around to whom this is not a game. Genuine conspirators - ''they'' - believe that the triumvirate have hit on the final clue of global takeover. In the Conservatoire, where Foucault's pendulum blandly swings, the Synarchic Knights of Templar Rebirth assemble. They still Foucault's artifact and erect a larger version of it, a re-creation of the pendulum that the Templars experimented with 500 years before Foucault. They have captured Belbo. They wrap the wire of the pendulum around his neck. ''Now you will speak. . . . If you remain silent, you are lost. If you speak, you will share in the victory.'' All that the phlegmatic, defiant Piedmontese says is: ''Ma gavte la nata.'' But the modern Templars cry out, demanding a human sacrifice. For these people are diabolicals. All conspiracies are, au fond, in the Devil's service. Unfortunately, there is no God. Belbo's act of courage reconciles him with the Absolute, which is not necessarily God. Belbo swings, a pendulum that is not Foucault's. Casaubon, foreknowing that the Conservatoire, because of an obscure connection with Sir Francis Bacon, would be the locale of the kind of ceremony he has seen before, particularly in Brazil, witnesses all from his hiding place among the artifacts of the technical museum. He gets away through dangerous nocturnal Paris, seeing Eiffel's menhir looking malevolently down on him. He escapes to his girlfriend and their son. No more games, except with his son. It has taken more than 600 big pages to get from the first view of the pendulum to the last. These pages are crammed not with action but with information. I happened to be composing something for brass band in the intervals of reading the book, and I was not surprised to find a paragraph about the E flat bombardon. If you want to know about the Gregorian calendar, or the theory that the Holy Grail is really St. Mary Magdalene, you will find it here. The book clearly needs an index. Perhaps Mr. Eco has already got his semiology students to work on it. As there was a little volume of metafiction to supplement ''The Name of the Rose,'' his first novel, so we may expect something hermeneutic about its successor. You may call the book an intellectual triumph, if not a fictional one. No man should know so much. It is the work not of a literary man but of one who accepts the democracy of signs. Thus, Shakespeare appears in an epigraph only because of the cabalistic significance of his having written 36 plays. There are references to the film ''Casablanca,'' on which Mr. Eco has written a magisterial semiotic study, to the song ''Yankee Doodle Dandy,'' and to Captain Marvel and Mickey Mouse. To see what Mr. Eco is really getting at, the reader of his fiction or pseudofiction should consult his scholarly works, where observation and interpretation are not disguised as entertainment. I don't think ''Foucault's Pendulum'' is entertainment any more than was ''The Name of the Rose.'' It will appeal to readers who have a puritanical tinge - those who think they are vaguely sinning if they are having a good time with a book. To be informed, however, is holy. This explains the success of ''The Name of the Rose'' - it was all the information you could possibly need about medieval monastic life. All you ever wanted to know about the Rosicrucians or the Elders of Zion or the rituals of diabolism is here. Forests have been chopped down to print it. Pietro Citati in La Repubblica has called Mr. Eco a ''grande buffone.'' You should be such a big buffoon... BCMT1/2fr0

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