Eco's Book of Lies

[Dave Monroe]

Eco's Book of Lies
Baudolino

Umberto Eco.
Translated by William Weaver

Review by Allen B. Ruch

"Lying about the future produces history."
--Umberto Eco

Near the end of Baudolino, a twelfth-century historian
asks advice from a fellow Byzantine, a philosopher
named Paphnutius who was blinded as punishment for the
failure of his inventions to perform on command. The
historian is writing an account of the ongoing sack of
Constantinople during the dissipated Fourth Crusade,
and is surprised by the inventor's suggestion to omit
certain details from his narrative: "Yes, I know it's
not the truth, but in a great history little truths
can be altered so that the greater truth emerges."
Seeing the wisdom in this, the historian nonetheless
laments the loss of a beautiful story; but the blind
man assures him that one day, sooner or later, a
greater liar than them all will restore the tale....

[...]

In this, his fourth novel, professional liar Umberto
Eco spins the yarn of Baudolino, a fellow artificer
hailing from Eco's hometown of Alessandria and
possessing more than a bit of the author's
personality. Like Eco, Baudolino is a master of many
languages, has a passion for history and politics,
takes pleasure in a good meal, and tempers idealism
with a wry sense of humor....  But most important of
all, both Baudolino and Eco take delight in a good
story.

It is this love of storytelling that animates the
entire novel, Eco's most light-hearted and comedic
work to date. Guided by Paphnutius' wise implication
that history is narrative, Baudolino operates on
several levels at once, combining a picaresque
adventure story with a fantastical flight of
historical invention.... Unlike Eco's previous novels,
however, Baudolino does not purport to be an unearthed
manuscript, nor is it an immediate, first-person
account.... The end result is a story within a story
within a story, each level supplying additional
falsehoods and distortions. (To call this an
"unstable" or "unreliable" narrative would be kind!)

That is not to say the story of Baudolino is difficult
to follow, only difficult to believe, which is half
the point....

[...]

Throughout this often confusing panoply of medieval
names, places, and events, Eco uses the character of
Baudolino as a shuttle, weaving together diverse
strands of history and legend into a unified tapestry
-- though one that reveals Baudolino's signature deep
in the pattern. Like Zelig, Baudolino is always
attendant in the background of important events;
though unlike Woody Allen's character, Baudolino has
the chutzpah to claim authorship, and does so with ...
casual familiarity and deadpan disavowal of his own
genius .... The book abounds with such playful
revelations, and Eco rewards the attentive reader with
dozens of historical ironies, amusing connections, and
absurd conspiracies. As might be expected, Baudolino
is also filled with wordplay and literary in-jokes
.... Eco even alludes to his own debut novel, The Name
of the Rose, which claims to be the manuscript of a
fictional fourteenth-century monk named Adso of Melk.
Baudolino ends his first attempt at writing by
complaining, "and as the man said my thumb akes" --
presumably an anachronistic reference to Adso's
concluding, "It is cold in the scriptorium, my thumb
aches."

While these cheerful layers of intertextuality provide
the novel its vertical depth, forward momentum is
gained via Baudolino's increasing enchantment with the
kingdom of Prester John. A persistent legend of the
Middle Ages .... Sensing both the cultural need for
such a powerful myth as well as its potential
political use, Baudolino sees no harm in perpetuating
the story, and he soon gathers a circle of like-minded
"believers" who further embroider the tale with their
own idiosyncratic threads.... 

It is here, however, that Baudolino reveals a deep and
unfortunate flaw. While this journey sounds like
fertile ground for complex characterization and rich
literary discussion, Eco spends far too little time
developing the individual personalities of his cast.
As a result, most of Baudolino's associates appear
faceless and interchangeable, leaving the reader few
points of access for emotional and intellectual
sympathy. Even their debates too often ring hollow
.... One hungers for the depth and intensity Eco
brought to the characters and conversations of his
other, more fleshed-out works .... Missing here is the
sense of an authorial intellect on fire, ideas fully
brought into play and folded into a rich, textual
density, characters that offer compelling studies in
human experience. As in The Island of the Day Before,
throughout much of Baudolino Eco bends his literary
talents to describing the fantastic with startling
realism, and elevating the mundane through poetic
fabulism....

Powerful stuff, and one wishes for more of it. Having
said that, Baudolino is still filled with enough
invention, wonder, and erudition to fill a dozen
lesser novels, and it's pointless to criticize it for
not having the same goal as his earlier works. After
three labyrinthine novels of endless conversation and
theoretical convolutions, who can blame Eco for having
a little fun?

And Baudolino certainly is an enjoyable read.... Eco
pulls out the stops, and the narrative unwinds in
increasingly more unexpected directions. Additionally,
Eco invests his tale with a dry humor and a sharp
sense of irony .... Baudolino is filled with peasants
and low-brow servants getting one up on their betters.
Like a Pynchon novel, Baudolino celebrates the profane
lives and "honest" cunning of the preterite, and if
they can exploit, dupe, or take advantage of the
elect, so much the better.... like all good comedy it
presents an image of the world that we instinctively
recognize as true. Like a Speculum Stultorum, or
medieval Mirror for Fools, Baudolino catches humanity
with our pants down, hands windmilling frantically to
divert attention from our exposed privates as we
shuffle offstage for a drink. And yet, burlesque is
born from fondness, not contempt ..... As in all Eco's
work, cynicism never sours to nihilism, critique never
bites down into mockery .... Like the writing of
Gabriel García Márquez or Thomas Pynchon, Eco's
fiction balances Romantic self-expression with
postmodern self-awareness ....  Although truth is seen
as relative, the dangers of belief are exposed, and
meaning is revealed as a construct, the reader is
still asked to critically engage with the thriving
multiplicity of the world and invest some faith in
hopeful stories -- Baudolino carries the message that
the individual is free to discover meaning and to act
with moral courage, whether in love or war.
In the end, of course, Baudolino is just another
story, and it can be read in many ways. Surely one
reading suggests that Baudolino's lies make history
meaningless; but a deeper reading, perhaps, proposes
that through narrative imagination we envision a
better future. And if it doesn't come true, what the
hell -- a greater liar will always come along.

http://www.themodernword.com/eco/review_baudolino.html

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