Page 324 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes literal and metaphoric labyrinth of possibilities and obstacles, the library houses a forbidden
collection of heretical texts, which William links to the murders based on evidence of secret
symbols and coded manuscripts he uncovers there. In richly allusive passages that seem to fulfill
biblical prophecies of the Apocalypse, the Inquisition confounds William’s search for the truth,
but he eventually locates the banned text that incited the murderer—the legendary second volume
of Aristotle’s Poetics, which reputedly extols the therapeutic values of comedy. Foucault’s Pendulum
touches on many historical and religious mysteries of the last two millennia. The narrative centers
on a seedy publishing house in contemporary Milan. In order to relieve the monotony of reviewing
manuscripts on occultism, three editors playfully construct an extravagant conspiracy theory that
combines details from their work with the spurious contents of a coded manuscript delivered by a
mysterious stranger, who is later murdered. With the aid of a computer and some quixotic analogies,
they create a program called the Plan in order to decipher the document, which they surmise
contains a secret of the medieval Knights Templar, a papal order that fought in the Crusades. The
Plan yields a 600-year-long web of arcane correlations linking the mysterious Knights to the motives
of such historical figures as Rene Descartes, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Adolf Hitler; it also
determines the geographical location of a potentially devastating energy source: the historical site of
Foucault’s pendulum in Paris. As they reconstruct human history to fit their theoretical matrix, the
editors come to believe their own fabrication, and when ardent occultists learn of their secret, their
esoteric extrapolation precipitates murder and human sacrifice. As the novel follows the myriad
twists of the editors’s ruminations, it also ultimately condemns their illogical folly. As he ponders
how to reach a nearby island lying just beyond the dateline, his mind wanders through a dense
catalogue of seventeenth-century minutiae on the people, places, and things that defined the culture
of the 1600s. Among Eco’s later nonfiction works, The Search for the Perfect Language chronicles the
historic quest to recover the primal tongue of human language, while Serendipities considers how
false beliefs have both beneficially and adversely changed the course of human history.

Eco’s third novel, The Island of the Day Before, recounts the encyclopedic musings of an
early seventeenth-century Italian castaway, who cannot swim yet finds himself marooned
off the Fiji Islands along the international dateline.

29.3 Critical Reception

Before he wrote fiction, Eco had already established a brilliant literary reputation with his specialized
academic texts on medieval culture and semiotics, which many scholars have regarded as definitive,
so the exuberant critical and popular reception of his first novel astonished both himself and his
publishers, who have called its commercial success “phenomenal” by book-selling standards and
noted the cottage industry that sprung up around the novel. Praising both the scholarship and
imagination of The Name of the Rose, critics have universally acclaimed Eco’s literary skills in the
novel, especially his thorough treatment of different levels of meaning in the narrative and his
impeccably designed, intellectually stimulating plotting. But commentators’s opinions widely
diverged on Foucault’s Pendulum when it first appeared. Some critics disdained Eco’s highly allusive
style, describing it as laborious, encyclopedic, and inappropriate in a novel, yet others were intrigued
by the tone of his metaphysical enquiry, favorably comparing it to the humor of Rabelais’, Jonathan
Swift’s, and Voltaire’s satires. Eco once explained that Foucault’s Pendulum “was a book conceived
to irritate the reader. I knew it would provoke ambiguous, non-homogenous responses. …” The
success of his fiction writing has simultaneously renewed interest in his academic works, ushering
in the appearance of numerous English-language translations of his studies in medieval culture
and semiotics. Literary scholars in the United States have consistently remarked on the diversity
of Eco’s allusions and the range of his themes in his theoretical writings, identifying methods and
applying his paradigms to a broad spectrum of texts.

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