I’ve had a hard time sleeping lately, and I’m not entirely sure why. I always have trouble getting to sleep, and there have been periods where I’ve woken up every hour while sleeping for some unknown reason, but right now, I don’t sleep so much as I hallucinate. I thrash about, half-awake, the entire night with each physical discomfort I feel, each cold limb and pinched muscle, being incorporated into a vast conspiracy in my dreams. The irregular sleep I can’t explain, but the dreams and hallucinations I can.
I stared reading Foucault’s Pendulum this week, and now my brain turns all of the detritus of my day into conspiracy theories. I picked the book up because I had enjoyed The Name of the Rose, and I was hoping to be distracted by a literary thriller with a fast-moving plot. Despite the constant asides in Rose about heretics and banished Christian sects, people were dying with all over that monastery. I assumed, since it was about the creation of a conspiracy theory involving the Knights Templar and damn near every other occult anything from the history of Eurasia, that Pendulum would be equally filled with action. Verbose action, of course, in which the protagonists discussed minor rites of the Freemasons in between attempts on their lives. I was expecting the Davinci Code with erudition. And certainly, the novel has culture and a deep knowledge of occult “intellectual” history. But there is absolutely no action in the book.
That isn’t entirely true. The main characters go to five or six different occult rituals, a few parties, and eventually there’s a ritual in Paris where the characters do more than watch. But, in six hundred pages, the bulk of the action takes place in the conversations of the characters. The novel is more of a thought experiment on how to construct a conspiracy theory. Eco’s novel is about three characters brainstorming a novel. Or, really, an alternate history since the conventions of the novel aren’t observed within the conversations of the characters.
As these characters construct, they use the bizarre pseudo-logic of the occultists whose ideas they set out to mock. It’s the sort of logic that numerologists are so good at, finding patterns or specific numbers in everything they see. Because a prominent philosopher, Descartes for example, denied being a Templar, he must be a Templar. Every person whose initials are RC must be tools of the Rosicrucians or the Rosy+Cross.
Every character you meet in Foucault’s Pendulum, with the exception of the narrator’s wife, Lia, is batshit insane. They all have their pet conspiracy theory from believing that they’re reincarnated immortals to thinking that the growth of the subway system was all part of a Templar plot to hide their arcane knowledge from the world. And everything is related. The Pyramids, the Easter Island heads, the Eiffel Tower all become aspects of a single conspiracy. Early in the novel, when the narrator meets Belbo in a bar, they have a lengthy discussion of types of people, categorized based on their capacity for logical thought. Cretins are incapable of simple reasoning. They comb their hair with spoons and trip over their own feet. Morons display a faulty reason like in this argument:
All Great Apes descend from lower life forms. Man descended from lower life forms. Therefore Man is a Great Ape.
And it is that sort of logic that rules the day for the occultists. The Templars were too powerful an organization to be wiped out by one king, so when the Templars disappeared, they must have gone underground. And the only reason they would have allowed the king to appear to wipe them out is because it advances their hidden goal. Thus, the Templars still exist, and their original conspiracy from hundreds of years ago is ongoing.
All of this reasoning is exhausting if you try, as you read, to point out all of the fallacies. After a while, like the characters in the novel, you just let the insanity wash over you. And that leads to crazy dreams where your brain decides that your shoulder falling asleep is the result of a poisoning by Roger Bacon who was trying to take Shakespeare’s Dark Lady for his own.
I sincerely hope that when I put Foucault’s Pendulum back on my bookcase, my dreams return to normal. I rather miss dreaming about the zombie apocalypse.