Foucault’s Pendulum—Umberto Eco

May 24, 2005 on 2:53 am | In 书斋札记 | No Comments

这是一个颇有讽刺意味的小说。小说的主人公,一个研究中世纪Templar 的博士Casaubon,一个出版社的编辑Belbo,对历史上的神秘宗教神秘组织充满着强烈的好奇心,一 次偶然和某个作者接触激发了他们两个reconstruct history of Templars after the fourteen century的兴趣,于是他们在各种有关occultism的书籍中寻找线索,寻找各种connections,最后写成一本小说,about the Plan, a plan will change the whole world and establish a new order, an order of Templars。It’s a story of revenge. The key to this Plan is a map. When finishing their reconstruction, they never realized that there in reality exists a group of people who regard themselves as heirs of this Plan. Since the chain of the Plan has ever been broken due to the wars, this group of people also are trying every method to discover the secret of the Plan. When they got to know the fictional idea of Belbo, they thought that Belbo should be the one who knows the whole secret. So they arrested him and finally killed him without getting the secret, because Belbo had no secret to tell. What’s a secret? A secret is an empty secret, no secret to share. 这是一个很有哲学性的问题和回答。Enlightenment开发了人类的智慧,push人类去认识世界,认识自我,认识一切,to understand something, trying to understand anything, brings lots of trouble to human beings. Peace is to understand nothing. In some sense, it’s an anti-Enlightenment statement. Should we slow our progress?

小说中有一段关于Word的论述让我想起Derrida的一些哲学。We live on Word, which creates and sustains our world. When we try to play game with Word, with Book, we’ll get punishment. 虽然很有点神秘主义的色彩,但还是回到了前面的Anti-Enlightenment,回到Modernism,回到Habermass的断言, Modernism is an unfinished project。

女性在小说中的角色是另外一个有意思的点。最初吸引 Casaubon开始创造这个novel的原动力是因为他们得到了一张被认为是original document of the Plan by Templars,中间包含了解码学和数学的游戏。当他的妻子看到这张document,他妻子interprets it just as a laundry list, it’s a most simplest interpretion, but more valid than others. 也许在一些混乱深奥的状况中,纯朴的女性比博学的男性更能看出事物的真相,某种感觉上,让我想起歌德的Faust,一个启蒙之后的学者,一个渴望认识整个 世界的孜孜不倦的学者,最后Margare的母性,拯救了aggressive Faust。

最后是一点自我的陶醉。小说的另一个主人公Belbo,born in Piedmont, skeptism is one of the most salient characters of the people in this place,前面的章节中,有些类似diaries的片断,like, Belbo felt himself, too young to attend the war, too old to join the student movements after the war,这些散文式的心情写真给我一种错觉,作者把自己的一些影子投放在了Belbo这个角色上。google出来,确实,Eco born in 1932 in Piedmont,confirm了我的错觉,然后很得意地和老公说,我非常有literature intuition,哈哈,满足一下神经的虚荣心。

No Comments yet »

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Powered by WordPress with theme based on Pool theme design by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS. ^Top^