The Novel After Theory by Ryan Judith;

Author:Ryan, Judith;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Controlling Knowledge: Umberto Eco

Not all texts that reflect on social control through institutions of incarceration necessarily mention Foucault by name. Nonetheless, sometimes the best place to hide something is in plain view, as Poe’s tale The Purloined Letter so deftly demonstrates. Such is the case with Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), whose title refers to Léon Foucault (1819–68), scientist and inventor. Nonetheless, the later Foucault—Michel—is not far to seek.

Eco, a specialist in semiotics, had already alluded to the theories of Barthes and Foucault in his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose (1980).21 Not for nothing does a medieval scriptorium—the workplace of scriptors in the medieval sense of the word—constitute the location where texts circulate in that novel. The Name of the Rose takes place in a fourteenth-century abbey, partly in its scriptorium and partly in its library. Supposedly to help the reader understand the mysterious happenings in the library, the novel includes a diagram illustrating a cross-section of the tower library with its central staircase and its separate rooms and multiple niches. The diagram bears a strong resemblance to the illustration of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).22 To be sure, the library in The Name of the Rose does not have a central system of optical surveillance; still, it is subject to the abbot’s tight control. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes similarities between methods of control originally developed in the medieval monastery and those used in the prisons, hospitals, workhouses, and schools that came into being in the nineteenth century. One of these was the rigid daily schedule, adopted in workhouses and hospitals from the monastic communities to which they were originally attached (Discipline, 149). Eco includes a timetable in the opening sections of The Name of the Rose (xx-xxi) and then goes on to organize the narrative according to the set times for prayer. The fictional library is organized in an unusual way, however: not by author, but by the geographical places in which individual books originated. While this method of classification allows for anonymous texts and works collated from several different sources to be housed in meaningful groups, it gives more power to the librarian than is the case in a library where books are catalogued alphabetically by author. The librarian’s control over the books—which ones may be read or copied and by whom—mirrors the abbot’s control over the abbey to which the library is attached. Disguised as a detective story, The Name of the Rose explores problems of hermeneutics and literary history in the context of the larger social connections between knowledge and power.

Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) extends this reflection on control. Displacing the scriptorium and library in The Name of the Rose, the conservatory of the Paris Musée des Arts et Métiers—housed in a former priory—is the backdrop for the action in Foucault’s Pendulum. The large, glass-enclosed hall is full of strange machines, including, of course, the pendulum of the novel’s title. Madness and reason

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