Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

by Umberto Eco

  Barruel’s Mémoires did not contain any reference to the Jews. But in 1806 he received a letter from a certain Captain Simonini, who claimed that Mani (the founder of Manichaeism) and the Old Man of the Mountain (grand master of the secret order of Assassins and allegedly a notorious ally of the early Templars) were Jews, that Masonry had been founded by the Jews, and that the Jews had infiltrated all the existing secret societies. It seems that Simonini’s letter had in fact been concocted by the agents of minister of police Joseph Fouche, who was worried that Napoleon, for political reasons, was getting in touch with the French Jewish community.

  Barruel was frightened by Simonini’s revelations and is alleged to have said in private that publication of the letter could cause a massacre of the Jews. Nevertheless, he composed an essay in which he accepted Simonini’s ideas, and, although he destroyed this text, rumors had already begun to spread. They did not produce interesting results until the middle of the century, when the Jesuits became alarmed by the anticlerical fathers of the Italian Risorgimento, such as Garibaldi, who were affiliated with Masonry. They adopted, as polemically useful, the claim that Italian carbonari were the agents of a Judeo-Masonic plot.

  But in the nineteenth century, anticlericals were likewise trying to defame the Jesuits by showing that they were plotting against mankind. This is true of many “serious” writers (from Michelet and Quinet to Garibaldi and Gioberti); but it was a novelist, Eugène Sue, who gave the greatest publicity to such allegations. In Sue’s novel The Wandering Jew, the evil Monsieur Rodin, the incarnation of the Jesuit world conspiracy, is clearly another romanesque version of the Unknown Superiors. Monsieur Rodin returns in Sue’s last novel, The Mysteries of the People, where the Jesuits’ diabolical plan is exposed down to the last criminal detail in a document sent to Rodin (fictional character) by the head of the order, Father Roothaan (historical figure). Sue also brings in another fictional character, Rodolphe of Gerolstein, from his novel The Mysteries of Paris (a real cult book, to such an extent that thousands of readers were sending letters to its characters). Gerolstein comes into possession of this document and reveals “how cunningly this infernal plot is ordered, and what frightful sorrows, what horrendous enslavement, what terrible despotism it would spell for Europe and the world, were it to succeed.”

  In 1864, after Sue’s novels had appeared, a certain Maurice Joly wrote a liberal pamphlet criticizing Napoleon III in which Machiavelli, who represents the dictator’s cynicism, talks with Montesquieu. The Jesuit plot elaborated by Sue (along with the same classical formula, “the end justifies the means”) is now attributed to Napoleon—and I have detected in this pamphlet no less than seven pages that are, if not plagiarized, at least laden with generous and unconfessed quotations from Sue. Joly was arrested for his anti-imperial writings, served fifteen months in prison, and then committed suicide. Exit Joly, but we shall encounter him again further on.

  In 1868 Hermann Goedsche, a German postal employee who had previously published false and libelous political tracts, wrote, under the pen name Sir John Retcliffe, a popular novel titled Biarritz in which he described an occultist scene in the cemetery of Prague. Goedsche modeled this scene on the meeting (described in 1849 by Dumas in Joseph Balsamo) between Cagliostro, chief of the Unknown Superiors, and a group of other Illuminati, who plotted the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. But instead of depicting Cagliostro & Company, Goedsche restaged the scene using representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel, who gather to prepare the Jewish conquest of the world, which is foretold in detail by their great rabbi. Five years later the same story was reused in a Russian pamphlet (“The Jews, Masters of the World”) but as if it were a serious report. In 1881 the French periodical Le Contemporain republished the same story, claiming that it had come from an unimpeachable source, the English diplomat Sir John Readcliff. In 1896 François Bournand again quoted the discourses of the great rabbi (whom he called John Readclif) in his book Les Juifs, nos contemporains. From this point on, the fictive meeting invented by Dumas, embellished with the projects invented by Sue, and attributed by Joly to Napoleon III became the “real” discourse of the great rabbi and reappeared in several other places.

  The story does not stop here. At the turn of the twentieth century, Peter Ivanovich Rachkovsky (not a fictional character, but worthy of being one), a Russian who had once been arrested for his involvement with leftist revolutionary groups and who had later become a police informer, joined the ranks of the extreme right-wing terrorist organization known as the Black Hundreds and was ultimately appointed chief of the Okhrana, the czar’s political police. In order to help his political sponsor, Count Sergei Witte, against one of his political opponents, Elie de Cyon, Rachkovsky carried out a search of Cyon’s home; there he found a pamphlet in which Cyon had copied Joly’s pamphlet excoriating Napoleon III—having “corrected” it, however, so as to attribute the same ideas to Witte. Since Rachkovsky, like any follower of the Black Hundreds, was a ferocious anti-Semite (and these events occurred about the time of the Dreyfus affair), he created a new romanesque version of that old text, deleting all the references to Witte and attributing the plot to the Jews. The name “Cyon” evoked “Zion,” and Rachkovsky figured that a Jewish plot denounced by a Jew could become highly credible.

  The text created by Rachkovsky was probably the first source of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The Protocols are clearly fictional, since in them the Elders brazenly spell out their evil projects; and though this might be believable in a novel by Sue, it exceeds the bounds of credibility that anyone would do this so shamelessly in reality. The Elders candidly declare, “We have unlimited ambition, an all-consuming greed, a merciless desire for revenge, and an intense hatred.” But—as in the case of Hamlet, according to Eliot—the variety of narrative sources makes this text rather incongruous.

  In the Protocols, the Elders want to abolish freedom of the press but encourage libertinage. They criticize liberalism but support the idea of multinational corporations. They advocate revolution in every country, but in order to arouse the masses they want to exacerbate inequality. They plan to build underground railways, so as to have a way of mining the big cities. They claim that the end justifies the means and are in favor of anti-Semitism, both to control the numbers of Jewish poor and to soften the hearts of Gentiles in the face of Jewish tragedy. They call for abolishing the study of the classics and of ancient history and want to institute sports and visual education (that is, education through images) to stultify the working class. And so on.

  As scholars have noted, it is easy to see that the Protocols were a product of nineteenth-century France, since they are full of references to fin-de-siecle French issues (such as the Panama scandal, and the rumors about the presence of Jewish shareholders in the Paris Metro Company). It is also clear that they were based on a lot of well-known novels. Alas, the story, once again, was so narratively convincing that many people had no trouble taking it seriously. The rest is History: in Russia, an itinerant monk named Sergei Nilus—a bizarre figure, half prophet and half scoundrel, who had long been obsessed with the idea of the Antichrist—in order to further his ambition of becoming spiritual adviser to the czar, prefaced and published the text of the Protocols. Subsequently, this text traveled around Europe until it fell into the hands of Hitler. You know the rest of the story.11

  Nobody realized that such an incredible concoction of sources (see Figure 14) was a work of fiction? Of course, some people did. In 1921, at least, the Times of London discovered the old pamphlet by Joly and realized that it was the source of the Protocols. But evidence is not enough for those who want to live in a horror novel. In 1924 Nesta Webster, who devoted her life to supporting the story of the Unknown Superiors and the Jewish plot, wrote a book entitled Secret Societies and Subversive Movements. She was thoroughly informed, was aware of the Times’s revelations, and knew the entire history of Nilus, Rachkovsky, Goedsche, and so on. (She was ignorant only of the connections with Duma
s and Sue, which are my own discovery.) Here is her conclusion: “The only opinion to which I have committed myself is that, whether genuine or not, the Protocols do represent the programme of world revolution, and that in view of their prophetic nature and of their extraordinary resemblance to the protocols of certain secret societies in the past, they were either the work of some such society or of someone profoundly versed in the lore of secret societies who was able to reproduce their ideas and phraseology.”12

  Figure 14

  The syllogism is impeccable: since the Protocols resemble the story I have told, they confirm it. Or: the Protocols confirm the story I have concocted from them; therefore they are true. In the same vein, Rodolphe of Gerolstein, coming from The Mysteries of Paris and entering The Mysteries of the People, confirms with the authority of the former novel the truth of the latter.

  How should we deal with intrusions of fiction into life, now that we have seen the historical impact that this phenomenon can have? I do not wish to propose that my walks in the fictional woods are a remedy for the great tragedies of our time. Nonetheless, these walks have enabled us to understand the mechanisms by which fiction can shape life. At times the results can be innocent and pleasant, as when one goes on a pilgrimage to Baker Street; but at other times life can be transformed into a nightmare instead of a dream. Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

  At any rate we will not stop reading fictional stories, because it is in them that we seek a formula to give meaning to our existence. Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived. Sometimes we look for a cosmic story, the story of the universe, or for our own personal story (which we tell our confessor or our analyst, or which we write in the pages of a diary). Sometimes our personal story coincides with the story of the universe.

  It has happened to me, as the following piece of natural narrative will attest.

  Several months ago I was invited to visit the Science Museum of La Coruña, in Galicia. At the end of my visit the curator announced that he had a surprise for me and led me to the planetarium. Planetariums are always suggestive places because when the lights are turned off, one has the impression of being in a desert beneath a starlit sky. But that evening something special awaited me.

  Suddenly the room was totally dark, and I could hear a beautiful lullaby by de Falla. Slowly (though slightly faster than in reality, since the presentation lasted fifteen minutes in all) the sky above me began to rotate. It was the sky that had appeared over my birthplace, Alessandria, Italy, on the night of January 5-6, 1932. Almost hyperrealistically, I experienced the first night of my life.

  I experienced it for the first time, since I had not seen that first night. Perhaps not even my mother saw it, exhausted as she was after giving birth; but perhaps my father saw it, after quietly stepping out on the terrace, a little restless because of the (to him at least) wondrous event which he had witnessed and which he had jointly caused.

  The planetarium used a mechanical device that can be found in a great many places. Perhaps others have had a similar experience. But you will forgive me if during those fifteen minutes I had the impression that I was the only man, since the dawn of time, who had ever had the privilege of being reunited with his own beginning. I was so happy, that I had the feeling—almost the desire—that I could, that I should, die at that very moment, and that any other moment would have been untimely. I would cheerfully have died then, because I had lived through the most beautiful story I had ever read in my entire life. Perhaps I had found the story that we all look for in the pages of books and on the screens of movie theaters: it was a story in which the stars and I were the protagonists. It was fiction because the story had been reinvented by the curator; it was history because it recounted what had happened in the cosmos at a moment in the past; it was real life because I was real, and not the character of a novel. I was, for a moment, the model reader of the Book of Books.

  That was a fictional wood I wish I had never had to leave.

  But since life is cruel, for you and for me, here I am.

  NOTES

  INDEX

  NOTES

  1. ENTERING THE WOODS

  1. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

  2. Ibid., p. 36.

  3. Ibid., p. 46.

  4. Achille Campanile, Agosto, moglie mia non ti conosco, in Opere (Milan: Bompiani, 1989), p. 830.

  5. Carolina Invernizio, L’albergo del delitto (Turin: Quartara, 1954), p. 5.

  6. Franz Kafka, “Metamorphosis” and Other Stories, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (London: Minerva, 1992), p. 1.

  7. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1982), p. 445.

  8. Roger Schank, Reading and Understanding (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1982), p. 21.

  9. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

  10. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); idem, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  11. Umberto Eco, “Il tempo di Sylvie,” Poesia e critica 2 (1962): 51–65; Patrizia Violi, ed., Sur Sylvie, special issue of VS, 31–32 (January-August, 1982).

  12. Gérard de Nerval, Sylvie: Souvenirs du Valois (Paris: Editions des Horizons, 1947). Originally published in La Revue des deux mondes, 15 July 1853. First published in English as Sylvie: Recollections of Valois (New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1887). The two English translations given here are mine.

  13. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1964), p. 215.

  14. On this subject I am particularly indebted to Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Roland Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,” Communications 8 (1966); Tzvetan Todorov, “Les Catégories du récit litteraire,” Communications 8 (1966); E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Michael Riffaterre, Essais de stylistique structurale (Paris: Flammarion, 1971); idem, The Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972); Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Donald F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); Maria Corti, An Introduction to Literary Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Charles Fillmore, “Ideal Readers and Real Readers” (mimeo, 1981); Paola Pugliatti, Lo sguardo nel racconto (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1985); and Robert Scholes, Protocols of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

  15. Iser, The Implied Reader, pp. 278–287.

  16. Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  17. Paola Pugliatti, “Reader’s Stories Revisited: An Introduction,” in Il lettore: modelli, processi ed effetti dell’interpretazione, special issue of VS, 52–53 (January-May, 1989): 5–6.

  18. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 34–36.

  19. Mickey Spillane, My Gun Is Quick (New York: Dutton, 1950), p. 5.

  20. According to Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987), the “paratext” consists of the whole series of messages that accompany and help explain a given text—messages such as advertisements, jacket copy, title, subtitles, introduction, reviews, and so on.

  21. See Harold Beaver, commentary on E. A. Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 250.

  22. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), p. 31e.

 
2. THE WOODS OF LOISY

  1. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, ch. 27 (“Apologia”), in Five Classic Murder Mysteries(New York: Avenel Books, 1985), pp. 301–302.

  2. Marcel Proust, “Gérard de Nerval,” in Contre Sainte-Beuve, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner, in Marcel Proust on Art and Literature (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984), pp. 147–153.

  3. Georges Poulet, Les métamorphoses du cercle (Paris: Plon, 1961), p. 255.

  4. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). On time and narrativity I am particularly indebted to Cesare Segre, Structure and Time: Narration, Poetry, Models, trans. John Meddemmen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); idem, Introduction to the Analysis of the Literary Text, trans. John Meddemmen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1988);Paul Ricoeur,Time and Narrative, trans.Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

  5. Proust, “Gérard de Nerval,” p. 154.

  6. On the differences among story, plot, and discourse, I am particularly indebted to Chatman, Story and Discourse; Segre, Structure and Time; idem, Introduction to the Analysis of the Literary Text; Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin: Mouton, 1982); and Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).

  7. T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), p. 145.