Umberto Eco, 2010 (November 2014)
Eco here creates one of the most repellant protagonists that I have
read, and puts him on display for examination. The thing that is worse is that,
while his character, Simonini, is a fictional creation, the rest of the
characters in the book are historical figures who share the hatreds that make
Simonini so appalling.
Briefly, the novel is the story of the forger who created
the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the Czarist secret service. A
thorough-going anti-Semite who also hates women and just about everyone else,
he is an amoral sociopath who grew up with his anti-Semitic grandfather in
Turin, may have had some nationalistic ideals in the Italian Risorgimento, but
found any ideals he might have had undermined by corrupt employers, secret
service agents and politicians. In addition to creating several of the major
forgeries of the nineteenth century (one reviewer cleverly calls him the Forest
Gump of anti-Semitism), he commits several murders and mass-murders and has
many people imprisoned in Devil’s Island. In all of this, he inhabits a
historical world of duplicity, betrayal, opportunism and genuine nastiness.
Eco shows all of this to illustrate the vile circumstances
that produced the Protocols and other historical fictions. He warns the reader that
this is a nasty character by introducing him with a long rant in chapter one
against Jews, Germans, French, Italians, Jesuits, and women. And he ends the
book with Simonini smirking that he has succeeded in setting in motion a
campaign to exterminate Jews. The book points to important themes about the use
of false stories to justify nationalist and ethnic campaigns, which are highly
relevant today. The portrait of the underworld of nineteenth-century politics
is as vivid and memorable as Dickens’ portraits of industrial England.
Eco lightens things up with some black humour and cynical
observations that have a crystal clarity about what people will believe.
But the novel fails on some key points. First, the story
doesn’t really hold together as a novel. The characters are grotesque caricatures,
never humans with depth. I think that readers will feel nothing for them but
revulsion. The story flits about briefly touching on many incidents but they
remain sketchy. What details Eco presents are atmospheric, but only a
background while the foreground remains vague.
And I’m not sure how to interpret Simonini’s split
personality. Clearly he has a diseased mind, which allows him to forget one
part of himself and occupy another personality. When he realizes that this is
happening, he writes his journals – the novel itself – and fills in details in
his other personality. He finally sees what he is doing in a psychological
crisis bringing together his fear of sex, his misogyny and his anti-Semitism.
But this seems to let him off too easily. Are the horrors of history to be
reduced to some shady operators taking advantage of one man’s psychological
illness? Or does his internal antagonism somehow represent the opposing forces
in historical fact and fiction?
I think Eco wants to point to the difficulty of
understanding history unless you recognize that historical documents are
produced in circumstances where not even their creators really know what they
are doing. All are suspect, and history must be seen as a matter of
interpretation and point of view. The meaning of a document or a message lies
not only on its surface, but also on its context. The Protocols (and who knows
what other historical stories) are the product of a mentally ill forger working
for secret agents with an agenda based on specific tactical objectives, often
opposed to each other.
So while the book creates a memorable picture of a
historical past that is relevant today, it is weak as a novel. I don’t mind
having to spend some time in this repugnant milieu, but I want it to work
better as an engaging story.
