The story of Foucault's
Pendulum is of three friends, named Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon, who
work for a publisher in Milan. They get to read manuscripts about occult
conspiracy theories after which they decide to invent their own conspiracy for
fun. They call this satirical intellectual game "The Plan".
Diotallevi, Belbo and
Casaubon engage themselves deeply into The Plan, they even not remember that it
is a game. When people learn about The Plan, they take it seriously. Belbo becomes
the target of a very real secret organization that believes he has the key to
the lost treasure of the Knights Templar.
The main plot comprises of a number of sub-plots leading to
the formation of “The Plan.” For instance -the Foucault pendulum at the Musée
des arts et métiers in Paris plays a major part in the novel.
The book opens with the narrator, Casaubon, who hides in
fear after closing time in the Parisian technical museum Musée des Arts et
Métiers. The name Casaubon refers to classical scholar Isaac Casaubon, and a
scholar character in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Eco’s Casaubon believes that the
members of a secret organization have kidnapped Belbo and are now after him.
Most of the novel is then told in flashback as Casaubon waits in the museum.
Then, we enter the
past of Casaubon when he was a student in 1970s at Milan. He had been working
on a thesis on the history of the Knights Templar. In this period, he met Belbo
who worked in the position of an editor in a publishing house. Belbo invited
Casaubon to look at the manuscript of a supposedly non-fiction book about the
Templars. There, Casaubon met Belbo's colleague Diotallevi, a cabalist.
The book, by a
Colonel Ardenti, claims that a hidden coded manuscript has revealed a secret
plan of the medieval Templars to take over the world. This supposed conspiracy
is meant as revenge for the deaths of the Templar leaders when their order was
disbanded by the King of France. Ardenti postulates that the Templars were the
guardians of a secret treasure, perhaps the Holy Grail of legend, which he
suspects was a radioactive energy source. As per Ardenti's theory, when the
French monarchy and the Catholic Church separated the Templars for heresy, some
knights escaped and established groups throughout the world. These groups meet
at regular intervals at different places to pass on information about the
Grail. At last, the groups will reunite to rediscover the Grail's location and
achieve world domination. Ardenti did some calculations, according to which, the
Templars should have taken over the world in 1944; evidently the plan has been
interrupted.
The book takes us to different places deals with a number of
issues as the plot moves ahead. The conspiracy gets more complex and people of
the secret organization begin to think that the THE PLAN indeed true. In the
middle of the book, you will find that how the three editors use the historical
events of great importance to create THE PLAN. The role of computer and
permutation and combination is also highlighted.
At the end of the book, we meet Casaubon who delved deeply
into the past sitting in the museum. It is unclear by this point how reliable a
narrator Casaubon has been, and to what extent he has been inventing, or
deceived by, conspiracy theories.
To understand, some of the theoretical issues highlighted in
the book, especially, the character Casaubon, Production of knowledge through
trash, replacement of old knowledge with new knowledge, read some critical
books and articles. One of such book - Umberto Eco : Rethinking of History and Fiction deeply study of these issues like –
(1)
How the character of Casaubon of Eco resemble to
the Casaubon of Middlemarch?
(2)
What are the similarities between THE PLAN and
MYTHOLOGIES of Middlemarch?
(3)
How the three editors create multiple histories?
(4)
What are the objectives behind the creation of
histories?
(5)
What is the relevance of multiple histories when
the book was published?
For more information, visit – Umberto Eco: Rethinking History and Fiction
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