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Eco's Echoes: Ironizing the (Post) Modern

1992; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/465234

1080-6539

Linda Hutcheon, Umberto Eco, William Weaver,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

When one theorist publishes a book-a novel, at that-which contains in its title the name of another theorist, the academic reader is likely to be unable to resist looking for "in-group" ironies.When that novelist-theorist is Umberto Eco, who just happens to be someone who rarely mentions Michel Foucault by name, puzzlement may jostle for position with irony, even if we realize that Jean Bernard Leon Foucault was a nineteenth-century physicist whose famous pendulum hangs in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris.Nevertheless, I want to argue that it is almost impossible not to think of Michel Foucault when reading this novel.But as the puzzlement dissipates, the ironies remain.Eco has made it his specialty to write learned novels, bringing together his two worlds as creative writer and critical theorist, media darling and dissertation fodder.He has also made it difficult for reviewers and critics to engage with those novels, despite the tantalizing lures, because he selfreflexively ironizes the position not only of author but also of reader, thus reminding critical commentators of their secondary, even parasitic role.Given that, what do we do with a novel likeFoucault' sPendulum that ironizes all attempts at either deconstruction or construction of meaning?What happens when pages of contradictions get welded into a totalized vision of order, when life imitates art, when the narrative structure, while seemingly loose and baggy, is in fact obsessively ordered around the form of the occult Tree of the Sefirot?And what has any of this to do with Michel Foucault?Despite its overt trappings and publicity blurbs, Foucault' s Pendulum is not really an adventure story, a thriller, or a detective story, like The Name of the Rose, Eco's first novel.Foucault's Pendulum ends, rather than begins, with the requisite deaths.There is a plot-or rather, a plethora of plots-all brought together into something called the "Plan."Instead of the causality we have been taught to expect in traditional plotting of popular genres, this Plan is governed by what Eco elsewhere calls "a sort of spiral-like logic of mutually sympathetic elements.If the universe is a network of similitudes and cosmic sympathies, then there are no privileged causal chains" [The Limits 19].And this novelistic universe is just such a network, as we shall see.Michael Holquist has argued in "Whodunit and Other Questions" [135] that the detective story is to postmodernism what myth and depth psychology were to moderism.In Eco's perverse version of the postmodern, however, the detective as the metaphor of order and logic is ironized by the decisive diacritics 22.