Foucault's Pendulum - Comparison With Other Writings

Comparison With Other Writings

Foucault's Pendulum has been called "the thinking person's Da Vinci Code". The parchment that sparks the Plan and its multiple possible interpretations, plays a similar role to the parchments in the Rennes-le-Château story propelled to global prominence by Brown's novel and, earlier, in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, from which Brown drew inspiration. Eco's novel, which predated the Brown phenomenon by more than a decade, similarly concerns itself with the Knights Templar, complex conspiracies, secret codes, the Holy Blood conundrum (if mentioned only in passing) and even includes a chase around the monuments of Paris. It does so, however, from a much more critical perspective: it is more a satire on the futility of conspiracy theories and those who believe them, rather than an attempt to proliferate such beliefs.

Asked whether he had read the Brown novel, Eco replied:

I was obliged to read it because everybody was asking me about it. My answer is that Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel Foucault’s Pendulum, which is about people who start believing in occult stuff.
- But you yourself seem interested in the kabbalah, alchemy and other occult practices explored in the novel.
No. In Foucault’s Pendulum I wrote the grotesque representation of these kind of people. So Dan Brown is one of my creatures.

Eco was himself inspired by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, in particular the latter's renowned short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Eco's earlier best-seller The Name of the Rose was similarly indebted to Borges - this time "The Library of Babel" - as Eco tacitly acknowledges by assigning a key role to a blind monk called Jorge de Burgos, named in homage to the blind Argentine.

Foucault's Pendulum also bears a number of similarities to Eco's own experiences and writing. The character of Belbo was brought up in, and refers to many times, the region of Piedmont in Northern Italy. In an article compiled in Faith In Fakes, Eco refers to his own visit to a Candomblé ceremony in Brazil, reminiscent of the episode in the novel, and also describes a French ethnologist, Roger Bastide who bears resemblance to the character of Agliè.

The American newspaper The Boston Globe claimed that "one can trace a lineage from Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminati trilogy to Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum". The Illuminatus! Trilogy was written thirteen years before Foucault's Pendulum. George Johnson wrote on the similarity of the two books, that "both works were written tongue in cheek, with a high sense of irony."