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Truth is stranger than fiction
By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein |
November 18, 2011, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WHEN I was first learning quantum mechanics, I would occasionally feel compelled to lodge a complaint on behalf of common sense. My physics teacher would fix me with his twinkling gaze and intone, "Truth is stranger than fiction." He was right, and not only about the behavior of elementary particles. Umberto Eco's latest fiction, "The Prague Cemetery," is choreographed by a truth that is itself so strange a novelist need hardly expand on it to produce a wondrous tale. Eco forthrightly explains that all his major characters but one are historical figures; but a reader unaware of how close to the truth Eco is hewing might be inclined to award him more points for inventiveness than he earns. This is not to say that Eco doesn't earn points for inventiveness, nor that a novel can't succeed on other grounds. It is just to say that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
The truth that directs the plot of "The Prague Cemetery" concerns a famous fiction created in the late 19th century, a fiction plagiarized from earlier fiction, including works by the French novelists Eugene Sue and Alexandre Dumas. Despite such disreputable beginnings, this famous fiction went on to assume the imprimatur of a truth so galvanizing it played a role in some of the more momentous events of the last 100 years.
Fiction and truth thus penetrate each other with a creative abandon suggestive of inspired pornography. What we have here is a situation ready-made for a novelist with a Borgesian fascination with reality's perverse permeability by falsehoods. What we have here, in other words, is that famous fiction known as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
The "Protocols" are a forgery represented as the genuine minutes from a secret meeting of Jewish leaders conspiring for world domination, motivated by an unnatural will to power and an unappeasable hatred of Gentiles. They are dangerously indefinite on specifics - dangerous because the vagueness allows a great range of events to be thereby "explained" - but in general, tendencies like secularism, internationalism, communism, universal suffrage and universal education are all presented as tools dreamed up by international Jewry to subvert the morals, politics and finances of the Gentile world and deliver it into Semitic clutches.
The story of the "Protocols" is rendered even stranger by the labyrinthine history of plagiarisms and hoaxes that went into its making, and it is this astounding back story that Eco fictionalizes.
A great deal of the action of "The Prague Cemetery" consists of clandestine meetings where people lie to and blackmail one another, the shady dealings punctuated now and then by rants against a hated group, usually the Jews. And even if the best parts of "The Prague Cemetery" are those he did not invent, Eco is to be applauded for bringing this stranger-than-fiction truth vividly to life.
The truth that directs the plot of "The Prague Cemetery" concerns a famous fiction created in the late 19th century, a fiction plagiarized from earlier fiction, including works by the French novelists Eugene Sue and Alexandre Dumas. Despite such disreputable beginnings, this famous fiction went on to assume the imprimatur of a truth so galvanizing it played a role in some of the more momentous events of the last 100 years.
Fiction and truth thus penetrate each other with a creative abandon suggestive of inspired pornography. What we have here is a situation ready-made for a novelist with a Borgesian fascination with reality's perverse permeability by falsehoods. What we have here, in other words, is that famous fiction known as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
The "Protocols" are a forgery represented as the genuine minutes from a secret meeting of Jewish leaders conspiring for world domination, motivated by an unnatural will to power and an unappeasable hatred of Gentiles. They are dangerously indefinite on specifics - dangerous because the vagueness allows a great range of events to be thereby "explained" - but in general, tendencies like secularism, internationalism, communism, universal suffrage and universal education are all presented as tools dreamed up by international Jewry to subvert the morals, politics and finances of the Gentile world and deliver it into Semitic clutches.
The story of the "Protocols" is rendered even stranger by the labyrinthine history of plagiarisms and hoaxes that went into its making, and it is this astounding back story that Eco fictionalizes.
A great deal of the action of "The Prague Cemetery" consists of clandestine meetings where people lie to and blackmail one another, the shady dealings punctuated now and then by rants against a hated group, usually the Jews. And even if the best parts of "The Prague Cemetery" are those he did not invent, Eco is to be applauded for bringing this stranger-than-fiction truth vividly to life.
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