Legendary Italian author Umberto Eco, the most postmodern of postmodernist writers, wrote his last novel, The Prague Cemetery, just a few years before his death. As would be expected, he combines different literary styles and genres with a variety of themes into a complex mesh of narrative threads. It combines the popular fiction scenarios of historical fiction and the espionage novel with thde more higher style of the picaresque novel, meaning the loose plot structure is secondary to the protagonist’s encounters with the people he meets and the situation he gets himself into, a style mastered by the likes of Rabelais and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. The overarching theme of this novel is the antisemitism of 19th century Europe but an under-acknowledged, and less obvious, theme is its commentary on writing, authorship, and the publishing industry.
The main, and highly repulsive, character is Simonini. As the novel begins, he is a secret agent, a forger of documents, and he lives in a junk shop in Paris as a cover for his clandestine activities, most of which involve the spreading of disinformation or fake news as we would call it today. He suffers from memory loss and begins writing a diary, telling his life story in an attempt to recall how he developed an alter ego named Dalla Piccola. He also wants to remember why he has four corpses hidden in the sewer under his shop. Maybe you can relate to this if you’ve ever woken up with a severe hangover, knowing that some really interesting things happened the night before but you can’t remember what they were. But you can’t worry too much because it will all show upon Facebook anyways.
His story begins with his childhood in Turin, the Piedmontese city that was part of France at the time. As he grows older, his grandfather begins indoctrinating him with ideas of antisemitism. This hatred of Jews is established early on as a false premise because his grandfather gets convinced of a Jewish plot to dominate the world by a senile, delusional old man who claims to be the Grand Master of all Masonic Grand Masters, claiming to have a first-hand account of the conspirators discussions. Simonini does not actually believe in the cause of antisemitism but as it grows in popularity, he sees the benefit in propagating it for the sake of advancing his own career.
Simonini gets recuited by a spy ring who send him on a mission to Sicily, posing as a journalist to gather information about Garibaldi’s uprising in an attempt to unify Italy and establish a republic, thereby ending the monarchical rule of Vittore Emmanuele. His ulterior task is to dig up dirt that will discredit the revolutionaries if they succeed. Later, Simonini is transferred to Paris where he is reassigned doing similar types of tasks. He liaises with members of the underworld, Jesuits, Freemasons, proto-fascists, anarchists, Germans, Russians, and Satanists, eventually ending up in his disguise as the Jesuit priest Dalla Piccola while attending a black mass. He even meets Sigmund Freud in a restaurant, calling him “Froide” because he is not sure how to spell his name properly; Simonini uses his contacts to score cocaine for the future founder of psychotherapy.
This varied milieu is significant because Paris is where Simonini begins working on his pet writing project, a work of antisemitic propaganda about a secret meeting of Jewish leaders in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. As his story goes, these Jews lay out plans to enslave the human race and dominate the planet because of their inherent lust for power. Simonini’s story is entirely fabricated and plagiarized, using materials lifted from books he finds at the library and other writers that he encounters. As Eco points out, conspiracy theorists never have any new ideas; they just keep recycling the same old stories dressed up in different clothes to make them more suitable for every generation that comes along. A lot of this novel is about how Simonini tries to sell this propaganda to other spies. While he wholeheartedly embraces anti-Jewish sentiments, his primary motivation is to make money so he can eat lavish meals at Paris’s best restaurants. Simonini is a 19th century foodie. While he perpetuates the stereotype of Jews being gluttonous, greedy, and dishonest it is easy to see that his beliefs are all projections of himself onto them because his own paradigm is one of gluttony, greed, and dishonesty. Everything he, and the other antisemites, accuse the Jews of are things they are guilty of themselves.
The careful reader might want to take not of what Simonini eats. In one restaurant he orders canard de la presse which in French means “pressed duck” while the word “canard” in English means “false story” and the press is obviously the media. Simonini’s culinary indulgences are a field of double entendres and word play.
So how does this all relate to writing? First off, Simonini is, above all else, a writer. He starts off by forging documents then moves on to plagiarizing materials to create a work of fiction to be passed off as fake news. He moves on to become a type of literary agent when he hires and collaborates with Taxil, a writer of sensationalized stories about Freemasons and their relationship to Jews and Satanists. This is done because the Jesuit Bergamaschi wants to spread anti-Masonic propaganda and the secret service officer Hubertene wants to distract the public by having ridiculous anti-Masonic propaganda published, tabloid style, so they won’t believe the ridiculous claims of the Jesuits. Simonini serves these two masters simultaneously. He takes a salary for Taxil from both of them but secretly keeps half the money for himself. The Jesuits act as a publishing house. Bergamaschi does not care how stupid Taxil’s stories sound because his publications sell thousands of copies. Taxil becomes a best-selling author and Eco takes a swipe at the publishing industry in this situation by portraying th Jesuit publishers as greedy, concerned more with sales than quality, and oblivious to accuracy and truth no matter what the long term consequences of their publications may be. Eco also satirizes the media when Simonini, at this point, is taken over by the persona of Dalla Piccola and goes to work for an antisemitic magazine whose editor admits the Jews are scapegoats who he demonizes solely for political purposes.
Eco’s satire takes aim at the media and the publishing industry but he also has something to say about writers. Simonini, despite all his awful qualities, does what all writers do. He takes information gathered from life and the people around him then fashions it into stories. He also borrows ideas from other literary sources. He combines all this, deletes what he doesn’t like, embellishes parts that are dull, misrepresents and alters ideas, decontextualizes and recontextualizes information to suit his own agenda, and draws connections between unconnected things for the sake of narrative consistency. Simonini also creates the character of Dalla Piccola as a disguise; he literally wears the priest’s clothes and acts out the part the priest is supposed to play. This is what authors do when they create characters. They walk around in another person’s shoes, get lost in their identity and imagine themselves acting the way their characters act so they can write about their subjective experience. In Simonini’s case, he gets so lost in Dalla Piccola’s persona that he he forgets who he really is, a risk that great authors take which might explain why so many of them become alcoholics or go insane.
William S. Burroughs, another author fascinated by the subject of espionage, once said that writers are akin to spies because they can take on the identity of the people they write about; they operate by becoming someone else. Vladimir Nabokov said he wrote Lolita because he wanted to write from the point of view of someone he completely disagreed with. Eco gets into the mind of Simonini the way Simonini gets into the mind of Dalla Piccola. Like Russian matyoshkas, it is a man inside a man inside a man, even though matyoshkas are usually depicted as peasant women, devotchkas or babushkas.
Just like in Norman Mailer’s underrated espionage masterpiece Harlot’s Ghost, Eco writes his fictional protagonist into real historical events, interacting with real historical people. Whether Eco deliberately borrowed this idea from Mailer or not is uncertain but the similarity does underscore one of Eco’s points. By having Simonini borrow his materials from other writers, Eco points out that literature is never original. In the sense of Walter Benjamin, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Originality in art is a myth since everything depicted is borrowed from something else. The postmodern author does not create their own ideas; they take ideas that already exist, reshape them, recombine them, and recontextualize them to make an entirely new product. Simonini does what Eco, the author, does; Eco takes historic events and repurposes them the same way that hip hop artists sample from old records. We are further reminded that the only reason Eco can do this is because history has been written down in books. Without those historical tomes, The Prague Cemetery would never have been written but in light of what Simonini does, we are reminded that the absolute accuracy of those books should be approached with caution abd skepticism. Historical narratives can never be perfectly accurate.
A further thought you might want to consider is what happens to a work of literature after it is released to the public. Simonini eventually sells his propaganda to the Russian secret service. They use it as the basis for the fabricated Protocols Of the Elders of Zion. Simonini gets from the Russians what he intended to get: money in exchange for his writing. Beyond that, two important things happen. One is that the Russian police plagiarize what was originally a plagiarized document, The other is the long range consequence of the document becoming a catalyst for the Holocaust. Although the time span of this novel does not reach as far as World War II, this is drawn to our attention by the chapter entitled “The Final Solution” which was Hitler’s euphemism for the mass murder of the Jews. Umberto Eco, the semiotician, points us in the right direction but we, the readers, have to make the connections on our own. What is being indicated to us is that once a piece of writing is written, the reception of it is out of the author’s control. If Simonini writes vicious propaganda so he can make enough money to eat like a pig and this writing results in the concentration camps being built, we might want to consider our own responsibility in what we write. While an author can not control how the audience receives his writing, they can minimize their chances of a disastrous result by being responsible enough to write with honesty and good intentions, two things which are entirely absent in all the characters of this book.
In The Prague Cemetery, Eco performs a good juggling act, keeping a variety of themes and narrative threads in the air all at once. It is far from a perfect book though. The biggest flaws are in the descriptions of the historical events. The Garibaldi war passage is easy enough to follow, even if you don’t know the details surrounding it. But the overthrow of Napoleon III and the establishment of the Third Commune of Versailles is a bit more muddled and the battle scenes lack the descriptive writing that would make it easier to visualize. The toughest passage is about the Dreyfus Affair. Eco deletes a lot of details from the story for the sake of brevity but it is easy to see how a reader not familiar with that history could quickly get lost. Reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Phantom Terror by Adam Zamoyski might give the dedicated reader the historical background needed to fully understand this story, but then again both of those books require a good deal of background reading to be comprehended too. Eco also has a tendency, especially towards the end, to over-explain; some details that are obvious to the reader get unnecessarily re-explained. This makes the narrative a little sloppy and awkward.
The Prague Cemetery is a brilliant book. It is bursting with so many ideas that at times it makes you brain feel as if it is bleeding information. Its obvious flaws are probably the result of Umberto Eco writing in his old age, trying to get one last great novel out before death. The antisemitism it portrays is ugly and disturbing but this racism serves a definite purpose. Eco exposes it, displays it, holds it up for us to see, and lays it out bare so we know what it looks like in all its dangerous stupidity. Unfortunately we live in a time when authoritarianism and fascism are becoming a real threat again and he wants us to see what it looks like so we can guard against it now before something terrible happens again. A surgeon must cut a body open to expose a tumor in order to remove it; the operation isn’t pretty or fun but the exposure and removal of such a sickness can save our life in the end. Approach this novel without fear. We’ll all be better for it in the long run.
Eco, Umberto. The Prague Cemetery. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston/New York: 2011.
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