It is thirty years since The Name of the Rose first appeared. It was not only the affirmation of an important novelist, but also the beginning of a new literary genre. A genre based on strict historical documentation, yet a page-turner filled with adventure.  Four more novels have followed. Now, in these restless times, we have The Prague Cemetery, a book that many readers will not want to miss.

Guido Vitale, editor of Pagine Ebraiche, met with the writer at the time of the book launching.

 

Guido Vitale: Professor Eco, what will happen during the next few days?

Umberto Eco: I don't know.  The only thing I can say is that I was amused while writing The Prague Cemetery. It was a long period of work with rigorous research, since the material I dealt with is very delicate and I wanted to report only the documented facts, to speak about people who really existed, about lives that were actually lived.

 

GV: Were they all real people?

UE: All except one, the protagonist. He is the connecting link in this infernal circle of manipulations, lies, crimes, base actions and venom. Simonini is certainly a character of this ilk.  He is driven by hate only and connects all the threads of the plot, before arriving at his masterpiece of infamous anti-Semitism.

 

GV: So he is the only imaginary character.

UE: He is imaginary up to a point.  We can say he is half invented and half true. 

 

GV: How is that possible?

UE: This lurid Simonini, who hatches the plots, is actually the grandchild of another Simonini, who, at the beginning of the 19th century, disseminated a long, deliriously anti-Semitic document.  He saw plots by Jews everywhere and he obsessively denounced their powers and schemes. He was a person who stirred up hatred and prejudice.

 

GV: So we can expect a book about history...

UE: In a certain sense, yes.  It is a way of telling the story, concerning events of the 19th century and those that shaped the 20th century, using the rhythm of the novel and the feuilleton.

 

GV: In the October number of Pagine Ebraiche, the cartoonist Enea Riboldi depicts you as sorcerer’s apprentice, with poisonous fumes exhaling from a cauldron with filled a mysterious brew.  Inside the cauldron, one can see the cover The Protocols of the Elders of Sion, a classic of falsehoods and hate.  Should we worry?

UE: Let's make it clear, my book does not talk about nice people, and the reader should be aware of this.

 

GV: In what sense?

UE: After dedicating one of my preceding works to my first grandson, I wanted to dedicate a new work to the second grandchild. However, in this case I didn't feel I should do it because the characters that fill the book are all undeniably unbearable.  They are really despicable.

 

GV: The book narrates the delirious obsessions and plots of an anti-Semite full of hate.  Why do you offer the reader this type of material?  Are you not afraid that reading it might stimulate morbidity, especially in those who are most easily influenced?

UE: Do you think that I meant to write with evil intentions? With malevolence?

 

GV: No. But do you see any risks in a book that is destined to become widely read?   

UE: The fact is that from this point of view, the book does not contain anything new. It is limited to rigorously reporting documents and materials that have already been published and widely disseminated. I have tried to discover what was behind them – how the mechanisms of hate function – who benefits by them, and why.

 

GV: So you do not think it is dangerous merchandise?

UE: A person who writes about chemistry can always expect that someone will use it to poison his grandmother. There are always ill-intentioned people.  However, I do not think they have to read my novels to obtain their ideas.

They can find anything they want in general circulation, beginning with the Protocols of the Elders of Sion. On the contrary, I have tried in my book to unmask them and bring their plots to light.

 

GV: This ignores the fact that the reader could identify with and harbor sympathy for the protagonist.

UE:  don't think so. All the characters in the book are despicable, lurid and cynical. I don't see any human traits with which a healthy reader could identify.

 

GV: Why did you make your latest novel revolve around hateful liars and such infamous writers?

UE: It was the result of an obsession that has been with me for some time.  I already wrote about it in the past, in several passages in Foucault's Pendulum and in my series of lectures at Harvard.  It is also in the preface to The Plot, the extraordinary work Will Eisner wrote about the history of the Protocols.

 

GV: In The Plot, the father of the graphic novel from New York traces the story of this falsehood destined to become the classic text of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. It has been exposed and proven to be false by the facts and by logic. Nonetheless, it has been reprinted a thousand times and brought to the attention of new readers, in order to renew their hatred of those who are different. The preface to The Plot is a brief essay devoted to the mechanism of hate. It describes why some people, despite all logic and the facts, believe in the theory of a Jewish conspiracy.

UE: There was a noted anti-Semite at the beginning of the last century who expressed it very clearly: “Of what importance is it to ascertain if the contents of the Protocols are true or false?  What matters most is that it is convenient, that it responds to our needs”.

 

GV: What needs?

UE: That of having an enemy. Someone who can be charged with the responsibility for what happens. Someone whose shadow causes fear.  An enemy on whom attention can be concentrated. Anti-Semitism is the mental illness of those who always need to be angry with someone, no matter how– out of cowardice or meanness.

 

GV: Someone observed that all the characters in The Prague Cemetery speak in the same manner, using the same language.

UE: Certainly, because the language of those who need to hate unites all those who are prisoners of it.

 

GV: Why did you choose the Jews?

UE: Well you know, you can't take on the “Hottentots”. An enemy is always necessary and it is better if he is in our midst and expresses a kind of omnipresence and a disturbing creativity.

 

GV: The Prague Cemetery exerts a strong fascination on the reader, due to its capacity to narrate history, a rigorous history written in the form of a popular nineteenth-century novel. There is also a knowledgeable use of a very particular iconographic apparatus that influences the reader. How were the illustrations (that accompany the pages) chosen?

UE: It is true that there is a close interdependence between the text and the illustrations. The images chosen are all authentic. For the most part, they come from my private collection and are images actually linked to the narrated facts. In other cases it is almost as if the image, which must have in some way captured my fancy, comes alive and writes the pages attached to it.

 

GV: There is another old vice of yours here – the book collector.

UE: That's true. I have become a bibliophile and a collector. But it is not an old vice.  It is a passion that grew with age and a little also with my success as a scholar, since it is an expensive passion. I am an old professor, but a young scholar.  I published my first novel only thirty years ago.

 

GV: In this case the semiotics professor and the young novelist have worked on a piano piece for four hands. Let's go back now to the hateful falsifiers who fill the cemetery.

UE: They are people capable of saying anything and the contrary of anything.  According to them, the Jews are full of diseases and yet live longer than other people; they have never created anything and yet control culture, the arts and the economy; they are repellent, but still the only girl who attracted the youthful Simonini was a young girl from the ghetto in Turin. Everyone cultivated his own clichés, no one was consistent.

 

GV: Here we are approaching our own times.

UE: I would say so. Here we are in the era of today’s dossiers, that fills the pages of newspapers. There is a tendency to stimulate suspicion by spreading contorted signals or fabrications. There is also a coarseness nowadays, increasingly diffuse in Italian society and in every academic or scientific environment, in companies and agencies that should be respectable. Managers and employees exchange insulting electronic mail messages, delirious insults, and gratuitous rudeness that extends to a growing number of readers.  There are rumors, malicious messages and lies pretending to be news. It ends up in a great universal brawl, a cloud of dust in which all questions are confused in a generalized humiliation.

 

GV: What are you referring to?

UE: Naturally to a certain kind of journalism, of conducting operations on a theoretical level and then bombarding the reader with colossal nonsense that ends up distracting attention from the real problems. And there is also the vulgarization of interpersonal and work relationships that we are all personally witnessing. There is a culture of “copy and paste” and an imprecision that is malevolent and drags us down.

 

GV: And in the end is it always blamed on the Jews?

UE: Yes, there is the risk that the history of the poison and lies of 19th-century anti-Semitism to which the book is devoted, is also our history: it still pollutes the present day. There is nothing new under the sun. The press has always been corrupt, journalists are often corrupt and the Jews have always been the object of it, because of their capacity to be subjected.

 

GV: What do you mean?

UE: The Jews are the depositories of book culture and of Culture and even though we are no longer in the era of the Rothschilds, and many differences in contemporary society are less marked, their imprint remains.  For this reason it is difficult for imbeciles to find a better enemy. Those with a weak identity need an enemy, and a mistaken group spirit or a mistaken patriotism are often, unfortunately, the last refuge of scoundrels.

 

GV: Today as well as yesterday?

UE: Yes, it seems to me today as yesterday. And I do not have to evoke the  hooligan culture in the soccer field. Populist rhetoric begins with the identification of an enemy. Berlusconi invented the communists when they no longer existed.

Translated by Nathania Zevi