ABSTRACT
From the early Opera aperta to his latest collection of essays, Sulla letteratura, theoretical problems of interpretation have been central to Eco’s work.1 This is true not just of his more academic writings, but also of his first two novels, both of which show, behind the obvious differences in setting and structure, a striking similarity of theme. The Name o f the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum are stories with substantially the same moral, in each case made explicit through a concluding act of recognition on the part of the central characters. William of Baskerville discovers, at the end of the first novel, that the series of murders in the monastery was not the product of a single design drawn, as he had supposed, from the book of the Apocalypse, but had quite different causes and was in part determined by chance. Similarly Casaubon and Jacopo Belbo, the main characters of Foucault’s Pendulum, come finally to recognise that the Plan they had first invented and then taken as real, attributing to the Knights Templar a centurieslong underground scheme to pass on to successive generations the secret of the ‘telluric currents’ that run through the earth, had never existed: the supposedly coded manuscript on which their construction was based was probably a laundry list.
