In all the small ways, Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" is the opposite of "Foucault's Pendulum". Where FP was a fairly sprawling book, focused on heterodox and occult ideas, with a plot that spans many years and covers both hemispheres in the present day, TNotR is a more focused (though still lengthy) book, focused on orthodox Christianity, with a plot that unfolds over seven days at a Benedictine monastery in the 1300's.
Still, both books share Eco's writing style, which tends to be what I think of as "accessibly baroque." It's fairly wordy and detailed, but flows extremely well. He also has a fondness for long dialog and monologue; in TNotR, in particular, you'll often get two monks debating a finer point of theology for several pages, or someone recounting a story for most of a chapter.
One of the things I like best about TNotR is how seriously it takes religion. This is partly out of necessity: because of its setting and time, the narrator and all the characters' lives orbit around the Church and its teachings, so to do otherwise would be out of place. Still, Eco goes above and beyond, not afraid of making copious references to Biblical characters, theologians, doctrine, heresies, etc. He also works in a fair amount of history, but that history is almost always portrayed as subordinate to faith: rebellions are linked to heresies, upstart rulers to the spiritual authorities they acknowledge. I don't know if Eco is a Christian or not, but he sure knows his stuff; late in the book, a character has a dream that involves a whole menagerie of people from the Bible and the saints. It's extremely clever if you understand why each character in the dream does what he or she does. (I'm guessing that I would have gotten even more out of it if I was more familiar with the Catholic saints.)
MINI SPOILERS
It's difficult to pin TNotR to a particular genre. At its core, it's basically a murder mystery. The murder happens just before the start of the book, and the protagonist (a close associate of the narrator) spends most of the book puzzling out who is responsible. Still, I hesitate to call it "just" a mystery novel. While the murder drives the plot, the writing tends to be much more focused on the spiritual and political conflict set as backdrop.
The book is set around the 1320s, as Europe is starting to climb out of the Dark Ages, and I have very little familiarity with this era. From the little research I've done, it seems like Eco was mostly accurate about the larger movements afoot. The Church is the dominant power of the time: it directly holds a great deal of land and most money, and it also indirectly confers legitimacy on other European rulers, most notably the Holy Roman Empire (which, if you'll recall from your high school history class, is actually a Germanic kingdom that's far from holy). The Church is widely corrupt, addicted to the pleasures of money and power. Several reform movements within the church have sought to reclaim its earlier focus on Jesus's mission. Most notable among these are the mendicant friar movements, such as the Benedictines and, later, the Augustinians, who forsake worldly goods and devote themselves to lives of poverty and spiritual contemplation. Some of these movements are accepted by the Church, while others are denounced as heresies. The church needs to walk a fine line - the orders' focus on poverty draws attention to the church hierarchy's conspicuous wealth, and so can be seen as implicitly challenging the church; however, the new orders also serve to attract many of the faithful who would otherwise be tempted to more directly rebel against the church. The orders are on shaky ground, and depending on the current year or pope, their status may rise or fall.
Speaking of pope, the book is set shortly after the establishment of the Avignon papacy, and most of the characters we meet are deeply opposed to Pope John. They despise John for his lush lifestyle and his doctrine; one of the minor comedies of the book is how a group of (say) Franciscans will mutter "John is a heretic!", "No, a heresiarch!" And yet, he IS the pope, and the nominal head of all Christians. It's a weird dynamic, one that I don't think we really see any more today: now, we're so used to schisms that, if you disagree with a leader that fundamentally, you join or start a new church. People hop between Catholicism and Anglicanism, or vice versa; they establish offshoots that keep the old doctrine you like and omit the new innovations that you dislike. In this era, though, there's just one Church. You can try to reform it from within, but if you actually set up another faction, you'll become a heretic (no, a heresiarch), be pursued by the religious and secular arms, defeated, and burned at the stake.
All that is backdrop, but as in Foucault's Pendulum, the backdrop is the most fascinating part of the book. The setting and characters also put in strong performances. The monastery is fully realized, along with a detailed map in the book's covers; throughout the story, we get to see how the monastery functions as a community, independent unto itself but also connected with the surrounding land. The key focus of both the monks and of the book is the Aedificum, an amazing library that hosts the largest number of books outside of the Vatican, including a collection of infidel and heretical tomes. The Aedificum comes with its own rules and risks, and a surprisingly elaborate culture of obscurity has grown up around it.
Due to the large cast of characters, most of the people we meet are necessarily two-dimensional, but William, the protagonist, and Adso, his young scribe and the narrator, are very richly described. William is a man born two centuries two early; his intellectual curiosity and ontological humility grant him a perfect Renaissance temperament, which must be channeled into the acceptable profession of his day: serving as an Inquisitor and as an imperial negotiator. He also has a deep and fundamental sympathy for the positions of the Minorites, while being far too shrewd to risk associating with them in the inevitable purge. Adso is definitely subordinate to William, but makes up for his lack of intellectual rigor with a sweet disposition and earnest desire to learn.
There are way too many characters to describe here. The abbot is delightfully avaricious without being too cartoonish. Severinus is a decent and bright man, one of the few monks who can approach William on something like an equal footing. Where Severinus more or less supports William, Jorge opposes him, using his formidable skill at rhetoric and knowledge of scripture to firmly carve out their differences. Salvatore is probably the most original character in the book, speaking in a bizarre patois of his own creation, recounting some of the most awful stories within this book. And on and on - each monk has their own secrets, their own prejudices, their own agenda, and the fun in this mystery is peeling back the layers and trying to anticipate just what's going on.
END SPOILERS
I don't really have any other Eco on my to-read list, but I've been delighted by the two tomes I've already read. They're complex and intricate, but don't take themselves too seriously either. It's the kind of casual greatness that I love in writers like Neal Stephenson, and I'm glad whenever I can find examples.
Showing posts with label umberto eco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label umberto eco. Show all posts
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Abu Laugh At You
How on earth could I have gone this long without reading "Foucault's Pendulum?" I would have LOVED this book when I was in high school! I mean, I love it now, but high school was the height of my craze with the Illuminati and secret societies in general. And Foucault's Pendulum is even denser in secret societies than, say, Illuminatus! Unlike Illuminatus!, FP is unquestionably Good Literature, and it probably would have done me a lot of good.
My head is still kind of spinning, which I believe is sort of the point of this book. It's positively dizzying. Let me recap with some
MINI SPOILERS
So... plot summary time.
The narrator and main character, Casaubon, is a university student in Italy. He is writing his graduate thesis on the Templars, and runs into a man named Belbo, who edits books for a small press. Casaubon complains about how difficult it is to do research on the Templars, because there are so many crazy theories out there about them: for centuries, people have been convinced that the Templars were plotting to overthrow the state, and/or worshipping Satan, and/or protecting the Grail, and a whole host of other wild theories.
Belbo asks Casaubon to listen in on a person who is pitching a new book on the Templars to the publisher. This man has found an ancient text, decoded it, and found in it the rough outlines of a grand Templar plot. Spanning centuries, the note speaks of meetings to be held every 120 years, culminating in the 1940s, at which point they will rule the world. The man is hoping to publish the information he has in the hopes of flushing out others who may be able to supply other pieces of the puzzle. They decide that he's nuts and politely let him down.
Later that night, the man is found strangled in his hotel room. By the time the police arrive, the body has disappeared. Belbo and Casaubon are brought in for questioning, and they cooperate, although they don't discuss the details of the man's Templar plot. Also questioned is another employee of the publisher named Diotavelli, an Italian who's convinced that he's Jewish; he is obsessed with cabala. The three of them (Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotavelli) make an unspoken pact to not get further involved, and let it lie.
Casaubon graduates and follows a girlfriend to Brazil, where he encounters a variety of mystical cults and rituals. Introducing him to this supernatural world is a man named Aglie, who claims to be the Comte Saint-German, a character hundreds of years old. Casaubon is fascinated by this magical aspect of existence, though he doesn't feel a part of it. His girlfriend does feel involved, and is repulsed by it, and they eventually separate.
Casaubon returns to Italy, where his prodigious researching ability lands him a job with Garamond, the publishing house where Belbo and Diotavelli work. In addition to their scholarly work, Garamond also runs a vanity self-publishing operation that's essentially a scam - gullible people pay to print thousands of copies of their books, when only a couple hundred are actually printed to impress their friends. Garamond hits upon a grand idea: start a scholarly series on the history of magic and rituals, which will surely sell well in the burgeoning occult market. Because this will bring all the crazies (henceafter known as Diabolicals) out of the woodwork, it will also provide Garamond with a slew of victims for the self-publishing scam.
The three friends are soon working full-time on the magic books, and become increasingly obsessed with the complicated world of conspiracy theories. They learn an incredible amount about the history and speculation regarding the Templars, Rosicrucians, Knights of the Gartar, Bavarian Illuminati, Alumbrados, Freemasons, the Scottish Rite, the Golden Dawn, Assassins, and more. They recruit Aglie, now living in Italy as well, who is connected with secret societies of all sorts, although he doesn't profess to actually believe any of them. Aglie takes them to see an initiation rite and various other occult practices.
Eventually, the three friends decide to start a game. They've noticed that all the Diabolicals' ideas are essentially the same. Nobody ever thinks of anything new, they just re-combine the same elements over and over in different configurations. Some will write that the Rosicrucians were secretly the heirs of the Knights Templar; others will write that similarities between the two groups prove that the Rosicrucians actually predate the Templars, and that the Templars were carrying out a more ancient plot.
Belbo has bought a computer, which he named Abulafia in honor of the cabalist. He writes a program which will combine random nouns from a set of existing theories that they feed it, and come up with conspiracy theories of its own. They call this evolving super-theory "The Plan," and enthusiastically document a fake history that "proves" their theory.
As the book goes on, they grow increasingly obsessed with The Plan. Eventually they even tie it in to the Holocaust, the Russian Revolution, and other major historic events. Diotavelli grows ill.
MEGA SPOILERS
Finally, The Plan is complete. They have succeeded in unifying every crazy theory they have ever come across, along with one they invented on their own, the Tres. In its full form, The Plan is roughly the following:
Telluric currents span the earth, and are responsible for storms, rain, earthquakes, and more. The Templars discovered the one location on Earth where all these currents converge, the Navel of the World. From this one spot, in theory, one could literally control the world - by manipulating the currents, they can cause land masses to rise and fall, cause famine or plenty, generally act like a god.
However, the Templars were not able to take advantage of this - the technology was not in place, and they had too many enemies. So they agreed to dissolve, and split into six sections, scattered from Portugal to Persia. Each group possessed a piece of information about a map to the Navel of the World. By placing this map underneath a pendulum, and watching the lines that the pendulum traces, they would re-discover the Navel at a time when they could take advantage of it.
However, something went wrong. The first meeting between the Portuguese and the English went fine, but before the meeting between the English and the French, the Gregorian calendar was introduced. France had adopted it, but England had not yet, at the time of the second meeting. In the resulting confusion, the meeting was missed.
At this point, The Plan seemed stuck. There was no back-up plan, and outside of the specified time and location, each group had no way of contacting the other. They decided to try and coax out the other side by releasing coded manifestos; these would appear to say one thing to ordinary readers, but true heirs of the Templars could read and understand what was meant. Thus were the Rosicrucians born.
Eventually, with The Plan interrupted, each faction began to try to gain advantage for itself. By directly stealing from the other factions, they hoped to get the map for themselves. Against this backdrop, all history for the last 500 years can be explained. Assassinations, wars, scientific advancements, everything is the result of a shadowy power struggle with the goal of reclaiming the telluric currents.
Belbo plays with Aglie by sharing the Plan and revealing that he, Belbo, saw the Map in a document from an anonymous contributor. Belbo claims to have memorized the Map, and then destroyed it, not believing its contents. Aglie not only believes - he REALLY believes, and embarks on a breathtaking plot of his own to force Belbo to share the secret.
This is actually where the novel begins - the bulk of it is told as sort of an extremely long flashback. The world has now turned upside down. The Plan, an entirely fictitious creation, has become real. By providing a grand unified theory that ties together every crazy belief, they have inadvertently united all the crazies together, for the first time providing them all with a single goal, a coherent story that explains their place in the universe. All they need is the map - something that does not exist.
Chilling. Wonderful. The climax is an incredible gothic piece of paranoia and dread. When I read the first two chapters, I thought they were way too over the top and overwrought. By the time the story returns to that point, and you have crawled inside the head of Casaubon, you completely understand why he thinks and behaves the way he does. The final effect is a mixture of horror, pity, dread, and a touch of humor. It's like little else that I've read.
END MEGA SPOILERS
Now, the comparisons...
This book is about secret conspiracies, but doesn't read like any other novels on the topic. The others that immediately spring to mind are Illuminatus! and Crying of Lot 49 (not coincidentally one of my favorite books). Illuminatus! takes the plot seriously, at least within the text. "Crying" is so effective because it maintains a perfect edge of uncertainty through the entire book - there's never quite enough to convince Oedipa that it is true, but there's far too much to just dismiss it. FP believes that the plots themselves aren't real, but the act of believing them or imagining them contains a power of their own.
FP is also more explicitly mystical than the other books. This is most explicit in the Brazil passages and the satanist sections, but the whole book is filled with similar details, from Baphomet to the mediums. The Illuminati has a kind of subtle magic behind it, but is primarily manifested in political actions. The Tristero have no magic, and have a sort of chilly technical sheen to their actions.
What I liked:
Abulafia was an excellent component in this book; I can't think of another book that has introduced a computer like this, and certainly not that's done it as well. I cried out for joy when I saw that Eco actually included a BASIC program within the text of the book - so cool! He perfectly captured the joy of creation and tinkering that I remember feeling when I first started playing with computers. I feel like this is something that we've lost now. In our current society, computers are so commonplace that they've become background... we often just notice them when they're irritating us. Early on, computers were mysterious, arcane objects that were only accessible by the elite in specialized buildings. FP is set during a brief and exciting cusp in history, after computers became common but before they became ubiquitous, and I love how he captures their fascinating appeal.
The overall sense of play in the book felt very invigorating. I enjoyed the constant tinkering of the protagonists, and their dry sense of humor as they proposed ever more bizarre scenarios for each other's amusement. The window into Belbo's writing career was similarly touching. I have to say, when he tries, Eco makes a very convincing mediocre writer. By far my favorite Belbo piece was the rambling piece that posited he wrote Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare wrote Bacon's texts, Bacon wrote Spenser's poem, and on and on. I've indulged in these sort of free-form exercises on my own sometimes, and his treatment was very convincing, especially the sudden and obvious anachronisms (from the Elizabethan Tower of London to Lorenza's pinball playing technique).
The overall cast of characters felt just about perfect - it was a good mix, with a few that you got to know extremely well, enough side characters to feel like they were living in a full world, but not so many that I ever got confused about who anyone was. That last point is especially important for a book this long and this dense. You ain't going to finish it in a single day, and fortunately Eco doesn't scatter around many minor characters who you're expected to remember when they pop back up weeks later.
END SPOILERS
I probably should have waited longer before writing this one up - my head is still kind of spinning - but in the moment, my response is that this is just an excellent book. The subject matter fits a long-standing fascination of mine, and the excellent writing fits my highest standards. It certainly isn't for everyone, but if you dig complex and funny works like Gravity's Rainbow, and especially if you enjoy mystery and history, this might be up your alley. A dark alley full of cultists looking to sacrifice you, sure, but an alley nonetheless.
My head is still kind of spinning, which I believe is sort of the point of this book. It's positively dizzying. Let me recap with some
MINI SPOILERS
So... plot summary time.
The narrator and main character, Casaubon, is a university student in Italy. He is writing his graduate thesis on the Templars, and runs into a man named Belbo, who edits books for a small press. Casaubon complains about how difficult it is to do research on the Templars, because there are so many crazy theories out there about them: for centuries, people have been convinced that the Templars were plotting to overthrow the state, and/or worshipping Satan, and/or protecting the Grail, and a whole host of other wild theories.
Belbo asks Casaubon to listen in on a person who is pitching a new book on the Templars to the publisher. This man has found an ancient text, decoded it, and found in it the rough outlines of a grand Templar plot. Spanning centuries, the note speaks of meetings to be held every 120 years, culminating in the 1940s, at which point they will rule the world. The man is hoping to publish the information he has in the hopes of flushing out others who may be able to supply other pieces of the puzzle. They decide that he's nuts and politely let him down.
Later that night, the man is found strangled in his hotel room. By the time the police arrive, the body has disappeared. Belbo and Casaubon are brought in for questioning, and they cooperate, although they don't discuss the details of the man's Templar plot. Also questioned is another employee of the publisher named Diotavelli, an Italian who's convinced that he's Jewish; he is obsessed with cabala. The three of them (Casaubon, Belbo, and Diotavelli) make an unspoken pact to not get further involved, and let it lie.
Casaubon graduates and follows a girlfriend to Brazil, where he encounters a variety of mystical cults and rituals. Introducing him to this supernatural world is a man named Aglie, who claims to be the Comte Saint-German, a character hundreds of years old. Casaubon is fascinated by this magical aspect of existence, though he doesn't feel a part of it. His girlfriend does feel involved, and is repulsed by it, and they eventually separate.
Casaubon returns to Italy, where his prodigious researching ability lands him a job with Garamond, the publishing house where Belbo and Diotavelli work. In addition to their scholarly work, Garamond also runs a vanity self-publishing operation that's essentially a scam - gullible people pay to print thousands of copies of their books, when only a couple hundred are actually printed to impress their friends. Garamond hits upon a grand idea: start a scholarly series on the history of magic and rituals, which will surely sell well in the burgeoning occult market. Because this will bring all the crazies (henceafter known as Diabolicals) out of the woodwork, it will also provide Garamond with a slew of victims for the self-publishing scam.
The three friends are soon working full-time on the magic books, and become increasingly obsessed with the complicated world of conspiracy theories. They learn an incredible amount about the history and speculation regarding the Templars, Rosicrucians, Knights of the Gartar, Bavarian Illuminati, Alumbrados, Freemasons, the Scottish Rite, the Golden Dawn, Assassins, and more. They recruit Aglie, now living in Italy as well, who is connected with secret societies of all sorts, although he doesn't profess to actually believe any of them. Aglie takes them to see an initiation rite and various other occult practices.
Eventually, the three friends decide to start a game. They've noticed that all the Diabolicals' ideas are essentially the same. Nobody ever thinks of anything new, they just re-combine the same elements over and over in different configurations. Some will write that the Rosicrucians were secretly the heirs of the Knights Templar; others will write that similarities between the two groups prove that the Rosicrucians actually predate the Templars, and that the Templars were carrying out a more ancient plot.
Belbo has bought a computer, which he named Abulafia in honor of the cabalist. He writes a program which will combine random nouns from a set of existing theories that they feed it, and come up with conspiracy theories of its own. They call this evolving super-theory "The Plan," and enthusiastically document a fake history that "proves" their theory.
As the book goes on, they grow increasingly obsessed with The Plan. Eventually they even tie it in to the Holocaust, the Russian Revolution, and other major historic events. Diotavelli grows ill.
MEGA SPOILERS
Finally, The Plan is complete. They have succeeded in unifying every crazy theory they have ever come across, along with one they invented on their own, the Tres. In its full form, The Plan is roughly the following:
Telluric currents span the earth, and are responsible for storms, rain, earthquakes, and more. The Templars discovered the one location on Earth where all these currents converge, the Navel of the World. From this one spot, in theory, one could literally control the world - by manipulating the currents, they can cause land masses to rise and fall, cause famine or plenty, generally act like a god.
However, the Templars were not able to take advantage of this - the technology was not in place, and they had too many enemies. So they agreed to dissolve, and split into six sections, scattered from Portugal to Persia. Each group possessed a piece of information about a map to the Navel of the World. By placing this map underneath a pendulum, and watching the lines that the pendulum traces, they would re-discover the Navel at a time when they could take advantage of it.
However, something went wrong. The first meeting between the Portuguese and the English went fine, but before the meeting between the English and the French, the Gregorian calendar was introduced. France had adopted it, but England had not yet, at the time of the second meeting. In the resulting confusion, the meeting was missed.
At this point, The Plan seemed stuck. There was no back-up plan, and outside of the specified time and location, each group had no way of contacting the other. They decided to try and coax out the other side by releasing coded manifestos; these would appear to say one thing to ordinary readers, but true heirs of the Templars could read and understand what was meant. Thus were the Rosicrucians born.
Eventually, with The Plan interrupted, each faction began to try to gain advantage for itself. By directly stealing from the other factions, they hoped to get the map for themselves. Against this backdrop, all history for the last 500 years can be explained. Assassinations, wars, scientific advancements, everything is the result of a shadowy power struggle with the goal of reclaiming the telluric currents.
Belbo plays with Aglie by sharing the Plan and revealing that he, Belbo, saw the Map in a document from an anonymous contributor. Belbo claims to have memorized the Map, and then destroyed it, not believing its contents. Aglie not only believes - he REALLY believes, and embarks on a breathtaking plot of his own to force Belbo to share the secret.
This is actually where the novel begins - the bulk of it is told as sort of an extremely long flashback. The world has now turned upside down. The Plan, an entirely fictitious creation, has become real. By providing a grand unified theory that ties together every crazy belief, they have inadvertently united all the crazies together, for the first time providing them all with a single goal, a coherent story that explains their place in the universe. All they need is the map - something that does not exist.
Chilling. Wonderful. The climax is an incredible gothic piece of paranoia and dread. When I read the first two chapters, I thought they were way too over the top and overwrought. By the time the story returns to that point, and you have crawled inside the head of Casaubon, you completely understand why he thinks and behaves the way he does. The final effect is a mixture of horror, pity, dread, and a touch of humor. It's like little else that I've read.
END MEGA SPOILERS
Now, the comparisons...
This book is about secret conspiracies, but doesn't read like any other novels on the topic. The others that immediately spring to mind are Illuminatus! and Crying of Lot 49 (not coincidentally one of my favorite books). Illuminatus! takes the plot seriously, at least within the text. "Crying" is so effective because it maintains a perfect edge of uncertainty through the entire book - there's never quite enough to convince Oedipa that it is true, but there's far too much to just dismiss it. FP believes that the plots themselves aren't real, but the act of believing them or imagining them contains a power of their own.
FP is also more explicitly mystical than the other books. This is most explicit in the Brazil passages and the satanist sections, but the whole book is filled with similar details, from Baphomet to the mediums. The Illuminati has a kind of subtle magic behind it, but is primarily manifested in political actions. The Tristero have no magic, and have a sort of chilly technical sheen to their actions.
What I liked:
Abulafia was an excellent component in this book; I can't think of another book that has introduced a computer like this, and certainly not that's done it as well. I cried out for joy when I saw that Eco actually included a BASIC program within the text of the book - so cool! He perfectly captured the joy of creation and tinkering that I remember feeling when I first started playing with computers. I feel like this is something that we've lost now. In our current society, computers are so commonplace that they've become background... we often just notice them when they're irritating us. Early on, computers were mysterious, arcane objects that were only accessible by the elite in specialized buildings. FP is set during a brief and exciting cusp in history, after computers became common but before they became ubiquitous, and I love how he captures their fascinating appeal.
The overall sense of play in the book felt very invigorating. I enjoyed the constant tinkering of the protagonists, and their dry sense of humor as they proposed ever more bizarre scenarios for each other's amusement. The window into Belbo's writing career was similarly touching. I have to say, when he tries, Eco makes a very convincing mediocre writer. By far my favorite Belbo piece was the rambling piece that posited he wrote Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare wrote Bacon's texts, Bacon wrote Spenser's poem, and on and on. I've indulged in these sort of free-form exercises on my own sometimes, and his treatment was very convincing, especially the sudden and obvious anachronisms (from the Elizabethan Tower of London to Lorenza's pinball playing technique).
The overall cast of characters felt just about perfect - it was a good mix, with a few that you got to know extremely well, enough side characters to feel like they were living in a full world, but not so many that I ever got confused about who anyone was. That last point is especially important for a book this long and this dense. You ain't going to finish it in a single day, and fortunately Eco doesn't scatter around many minor characters who you're expected to remember when they pop back up weeks later.
END SPOILERS
I probably should have waited longer before writing this one up - my head is still kind of spinning - but in the moment, my response is that this is just an excellent book. The subject matter fits a long-standing fascination of mine, and the excellent writing fits my highest standards. It certainly isn't for everyone, but if you dig complex and funny works like Gravity's Rainbow, and especially if you enjoy mystery and history, this might be up your alley. A dark alley full of cultists looking to sacrifice you, sure, but an alley nonetheless.
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