ACTA UNIVERSITATIS SAPIENTIAE, PHILOLOGICA, 5, 1 (2013) 59–66

DOI: 10.2478/ausp-2014-0005
Inventing the Enemy.
When Propaganda Becomes History
Anca ANDRIESCU GARCIA
Valdosta State University, Georgia, USA
English Language Institute
garciaanca@yahoo.com

Abstract. Umberto Eco’s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, has a complicated
metatextual plot in which, as the writer himself stated, he attempts to create
the most repugnant of all literary characters, in other words, some sort of
“perfect loather” who detests everyone, including himself. I will discuss the
various stereotypes of otherness, the way these stereotypical images interact,
and how the author weaves the prejudices related to almost every European
nationality, but mostly to the Jews, into the image of the “supreme enemy,”
an image divested of any ornament and so presumptuous that it becomes
almost dense. Moreover, in relation to the image I mentioned above, I analyse
the mechanisms language uses as a vehicle of deception especially when it
describes what is familiar in propagandist texts. I also focus on the different
lctional llters applied to real historical events (and texts) in order to entice
the reader into trying to decipher a complex and factitious labyrinth in which
the barrier between truth and lction no longer matters, it is purely accidental,
and has only one purpose—to generate conspiracies.

Keywords: Enemy, Propaganda, Jews, Metatext

“Having an enemy is important not only to delne our identity but also to
provide us with an obstacle against which to measure our system of values and,
in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth. So when there is no
enemy, we have to invent one” (2012, 46), Umberto Eco wrote in the essay that
gives the title of one of his latest books, Inventing the Enemy. Indeed, this seems
to be the key metaphor at the beginning of his novel The Prague Cemetery, where
the main character, Simone Simonini, admits he loves nobody and, in fact, hates
everyone: for him the Germans, who “produce twice the feces of a Frenchman”
represent “the lowest level of humanity” (2010, 102) imaginable, the French are
“vicious” and “kill out of boredom” (134), while an Italian is from his point of
view nothing but an “untrustworthy, lying, contemptible traitor […], consistent
only in changing sides with the wind” (161). Later on this description will lt him
perfectly as he is a forger who works for whomever pays him the most, and who
60 Anca ANDRIESCU GARCIA

throughout the novel commits numerous murders, but never feels guilty. He also
hates the priests, among which “the worst of all, without doubt, are the Jesuits,”
yet that does not stop him to walk around disguised as one whenever it suits
him, their “blood brothers, the Masons” (181), and the women, in spite of what
little he knows of them. And if this revelation of his animosities was not enough
to convey a full image of his personality, the character makes it even clearer by
declaring emphatically at the end of his exposé, paraphrasing the well-known
Cartesian belief, “Odio ergo sum. I hate therefore I am” (222).
His lrst choice in the hierarchy of the most hated ethnicities would be, however,
the Jew who, as his grandfather told him, belongs to a nation of “the most godless
people,” who “work only for the conquest of this world,” and who, apart from
his monstrous being with “eyes that spy on you, so false as to turn you pale,
those unctuous smiles, those hyena lips over bared teeth, those heavy, polluted
brutish looks, those restless creases between nose and lips, wrinkled by hatred”
etc., embodies the maws of many other ethnicities combined being “as vain as
a Spaniard, ignorant as a Croat, greedy as a Levantine, ungrateful as a Maltese,
insolent as a Gypsy, dirty as an Englishman, unctuous as a Kalmyk, imperious as
a Prussian and as slanderous as anyone from Asti…” (90–94). The list of negative
stereotypes in the text is almost inlnite; it creates a textual labyrinth in which the
writer inserts elements of popular hatred and historical prejudices together with
Gothic, Mannerist, Balzacian, scientilc etc. collages, all meant to build the image
of a grotesque, utterly despicable character placed in the middle of a metatextual
harangue which puzzles the most sophisticated reader and which is obviously
meant to provoke an intense reaction of shock and repulsion.
As a character, Simonini will gain an even more ambiguous consistency at the
end of the novel when the writer reveals that he is “the only lctitious character”
in the story, everyone else, including his grandfather, Captain Simonini, a
“mysterious writer of a letter to Abbé Barruel” (Eco 2010, 5541), the well-known
conspiracy theorist in the nineteenth century, is a real, historical lgure. And
most of the book reviewers seem to be completely content with this statement.
Yet the name Simonini, which according to Eco is derivative from the name of a
suppressed Catholic saint, Saint Simon of Trent, allegedly killed by the Jews, can
be found in Eco’s essays, previous to the release of the novel.1 Moreover, in the
novel he has an obviously dual, schizoid personality: he writes a journal both as
Simonini and as the Abbé Dalla Piccola and, at some point in the text, assumes the
title of Captain in memory of his grandfather. The journal as a literary technique,
as well as the double are not new conventions, especially in the Gothic literature

1 In the collection of articles entitled Turning Back the Clock, published in 2006, Eco mentions the
Abbé Barruel, who believed the French Revolution was a result of the plot put together by the
Templars and the Masons, but whose views were amended by a certain Captain Simonini, “who
pointed out to him that those who pulled the strings were the perldious Jews” (Eco 2008, 314).
 Inventing the Enemy. When Propaganda Becomes History 61

with which the novel has clear aflnities, but the fact that the alter ego of the
protagonist addresses himself as “Captain Simonini” makes the lne line between
him as a character and the grandfather as a historical person according to Eco
even harder to delne. Moreover, in an interview with a Norwegian television
station when speaking about his novel, Eco points out that Simonini is meant
to be repugnant in order not to be taken seriously, and that he is absolutely true,
although invented. In other words, Eco’s character is impossible to be read in
a textual vacuum, as a regular narrative being because of an unconventional
dialectical game between his reality and his textual nature.
The journal itself, the pretext for the novel, represents another clue to this
dialectic. Simonini hates the Jews but writes at the suggestion of the Jewish
doctor Sigmund Froïde, an obvious reference to Freud, whom he met at the
restaurant Chez Magny. The character suffers from amnesia and tries to recover
his memory through writing and not through confession, being too afraid, for
obvious reasons, to talk about his past with the psychoanalyst. Apart from
Simonini and his alter ego who both use the lrst person narration, the novel
also includes a Narrator—some believe that this voice belongs to Eco himself—
whose role seems to be to put order into the journal. Freud’s presence in the
novel and these narrative instances could possibly be related, in my opinion,
to the Freudian well-known model of the mind structured on three levels:
unconscious, ego, and superego, with every one of these narrators corresponding
to a stratum. That explanation does not answer the question why the writer
would go to such great lengths, would create such a morid and complicated
textual scheme for such a disruptive, malicious, and, ultimately, nonsensical
character. After all, regardless of the mosaic of intertextual allusions, mainly
stereotypical, and the effort to recreate the image of the late 1800s, Simonini
is not exactly an innovative lgure and thus not very easy to digest (even the
culinary references do not make up for this!). I think, however, that the answer
lies not necessarily in his disruptive nature, but rather in the way this nature
and the entire plot of the novel position themselves toward reality and in how
their lctitiousness transforms into real throughout the novel.
Alain Badiou in the book entitled The Century asserts that when reconstructing
history the real question for philosophers is not what took place in a certain
period of time—his book speaks about the twentieth century—but rather what
people in that period believed in. He calls this a search for the “uninherited
thoughts” (Badiou 2012, 3) of the time. Only if we admit, for instance, that what
the Nazis did was a form of thought, and avoid categorising it religiously as
evil can we distinguish the truth about it. The best method to investigate the
last century is to extract from among the century’s productions the ones that
singularise it among the other centuries, the “documents or traces indicative of
how the century thought itself” (Badiou 2012, 3). In this way, in relationship
62 Anca ANDRIESCU GARCIA

with history, “we might manage to replace the passing of judgments with the
resolution of some problems” (Badiou 2012, 6).
Thus, from Badiou’s point of view, the evaluation of the twentieth century
must be done bearing in mind what he later on delnes as its “passion for the
real,” a construct “devoid of morality” because “morality is a residue of the
old world” (63). And, Badiou continues, there are two paths generated by this
“passion of the real” of the twentieth century—the one of “terroristic nihilism,”
one which is ultimately “hostile to every action as well as every thought,” and
“one that attempts to hold onto the passion without falling for the paroxysmal
charms of terror,” which attempts not to destroy the reality, but to purify it to
the point where it can detect the “minuscule difference, the vanishing point that
constitutes it.” Both paths are obsessed with the question of the new—hence the
image of the new man with two opposite meanings: for the fascists the new man
is “in part the restitution of the man of old, of the man who had been eradicated,
had disappeared, had been corrupted,” and in this process of purilcation the
goal is to return to a vanished origin; while for the marxisant communism the
new man is a new creation, who “emerges from the deconstruction of historical
antagonisms” (Badiou 2012, 65). The twentieth century oscillates between these
two extreme images—one of mythical origins, one antagonistic to everything
before it, and presumably completely new.
In Eco’s novel, the protagonist’s type of reasoning, because of or in spite of the
multiple racial and ethnic stereotypes, is situated beyond the limit of morality,
beyond good and evil, beyond the possibility of any judgment. His “Odio ergo
sum” is a mere thought, not a passionate statement. He is not charming, he is
delnitely not a hero, but he is not necessarily an anti-hero either because after the
lrst few pages the reader somehow grows accustomed to his vitriolic personality
which is so outrageous that it becomes benign. The focus shifts now towards the
plot of the novel which ultimately concerns a famous lction published for the
lrst time in 1903, although obviously written earlier, known as The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. In spite of the fact that the Protocols were not originals,
they indubitably inmuenced the past century because they became a central part
of Hitler’s propaganda, they were his “warrant for genocide” as the historian
Norman Cohn suggested, and thus I would call them, in Badiou’s terms, some of
the most important “forms of thoughts.”
As Eco noticed in Turning Back the Clock. Hot Wars and Media Populism, the
polemic which led to the writing of the Protocols started after Abbé Barruel wrote
his Mémoires pour servir à l’istoire du jacobinisme, in 1797. The entire nineteenth
century is thus shaped by the debate concerning Jews as the enemies, especially
in France. Hence when the Protocols were published the public opinion was
already prepared to believe in them in spite of their style resembling feuilletons.
They speak of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders conspiring to take over the
 Inventing the Enemy. When Propaganda Becomes History 63

world. It is, clearly, a text put together precisely to create a story of conspiracy,
but, as Eco notices, “the extraordinary thing about the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion isn’t the story of their production but that of their reception. […] Amazingly,
this fake is born again and again from the ashes every time someone comes up
with the cast-iron proof of its falseness” (Eco 2008, 317–318).

Moreover, the reasoning [of those who resist the evidence of their falseness]
is impeccable: ‘since the Protocols say what I say in my story, they conlrm
my words.’ Or: ‘the Protocols conlrm the story I have drawn from them,
and hence they are authentic.’ In other words, it is not the Protocols that
engendered anti-Semitism; it is the profound need to identify an enemy
that prompts people to believe in them. (Eco 2008, 319)

And it is not a lrst, as René Girard once stated: in many of the medieval
documents speaking about the Jew as the scapegoat, the source of evil, and
the violence of the persecutions that follow such beliefs, “the probable and
improbable interact in such a way that each explains and justiles the presence of
the other” (1986, 10). This “profound need to identify an enemy” and the will to
decipher the way public hatred focuses on a particular one is what makes Eco’s
literature become an exploration of how the history of ideas in the twentieth
century was shaped.
Seen as the core of the novel, the story of the Protocols casts a different light on
the character. He is, after all, another part of the almost impermeable labyrinth of
hoaxes and intertextual relationships that surrounds this lction which is in its
turn lctionalized in the novel. Simonini might be the result of a textual collage,
but his function is very specilc—his actions and picaresque adventures are
meant not only to explain the writing of the Protocols, but also to bring together,
in a plausible narrative scheme, all the real, historical players that are known to
have taken part, willingly or unwillingly, in the creation of the document.
Simonini’s grandfather is just the starting point of his journey—the character
will be an observer, even a tangential one, of all the major events of the time:
the Communist Manifesto, the Franco-Prussian War, the Dreyfus affair, and
Drumont’s book are among the most notable ones. Napoleon III, Dumas, Marx,
Garibaldi, and Dostoyevsky are just a few names mentioned in the text. Simonini
is a forger of legal documents and a seller of consecrated hosts, but in reality he
works for the French and the Russian secret services. In chapter 11 Lagrange,
the head of the French secret service, shows him a copy of Maurice Joly’s book,
Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, which is historically
proven to have served as one of the main sources of the Protocols. He inlltrates
the prison to speak with the author who represents the epitome of resignation:
“you cannot change the world through ideas” (Eco 2010, 2240), Joly says at some
64 Anca ANDRIESCU GARCIA

point, but the rest of the novel will prove him wrong. Simonini also dismantles
the mechanisms of conspiracy when he puts together a plot against Napoleon
III only to report it. Eco’s wit follows every single recipe of small level paranoid
machinations in order to, it seems, prepare the reader for the real story in the
following chapter. The novel is in this point serious and humorous in the same
time, the rhetoric surrounding the plot is built on the classical pattern of any
conspiracy which, according to P. Knight quoted by Adrian S. Wisnicki, takes
itself seriously, while also “casts satiric suspicion on everything, even its own
pronouncements” (Wisnicki 2008, 271).
This satiric tone is maintained in Chapter 12, the most important in the novel,
when Simonini has the revelation that

there was an anti-Jewish market not just among all the descendants of Abbé
Barruel (and there were quite a few of them), but also among revolutionaries,
republicans and socialists. The Jews were the enemy of the altar, but also
of the ordinary people whose blood they sucked. And they were also the
enemy of the throne, depending on who governed (Eco 2010, 2461).

Thus Simonini decides “to work on the Jews” and he gets the chance to do so
right away when Lagrange asks him to meet his Russian counterpart represented
by colonel Dimitri, who plans to gather information in order to direct the Russian
peasants’ discontent against the Jews instead of the government. The passages
that follow are a masterful analysis of what makes manipulation and propaganda
easy to believe and thus extremely dangerous. As “revelations have to be out
of the ordinary, shocking and fantastical” because “only then do they become
credible and arouse indignation,” the “convincing framework” which Simonini
will choose is completely lctional, namely “the Masonic gathering on Thunder
Mountain, […] Joseph Balsamo’s plan and the Jesuits’ night in the Prague
cemetery” (2540-2545). Eco’s character is very aware that conspiracy is primarily
a combination of truth and fantasy and knows perfectly well how important the
setting of it is: he chooses the cemetery as the background where the Jewish rabbis
meet because it instills fear. Unlike in Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s novels where, as
Adrian S. Wisnicki observes, what generates the paranoia associated with the
conspiracy are not the machinations of a genuine one, but rather the fear of the
protagonists that a conspiracy of huge proportions could be possible, in Eco’s
novel the mechanisms generating the fear are totally exposed, deciphered, and
thus almost made friendly. The forged document must sound familiar—namely
containing elements of the popular rhetoric of hatred towards the foreigner—
and innovative at the same time. Simonini’s choices are Dumas, Sue, Joly, and
Toussenel. Later on he will add Goedsche’s novel Biarritz to complete the list
of the main sources of his document (and, of course, of the real Protocols, as
 Inventing the Enemy. When Propaganda Becomes History 65

well). Centered on the well-known fear of the “Jewish plan for the conquest of the
world” (Eco 2010, 2545), the text addresses all parts of the society: monarchies,
government, clergy, socialists, anarchists, and revolutionaries alike, and it “had
to appear in the form of an oral testimony by a witness to that terrible night [of the
meeting]—a witness forced on pain of death to remain anonymous” (2560). After
this point of the novel Simonini’s lctional dimension does not matter anymore—
the forgery exists and it will claim its place among the “thoughts” that shaped the
world throughout the twentieth century. What is even more extraordinary is the
fact that he begins to believe in it himself, just because it was his own creation.
He paradoxically becomes a historic villain and a victim of history.
The novel makes the reader aware that “the people who become our enemies
often are not those who directly threaten us […], but those whom someone has an
interest in portraying as a true threat when they aren’t” (Eco 2012, 110). Later in
history the Nazi propaganda used the Protocols and anti-Semitism as a narrative
model that explained real events. Hitler denounced the Jews as a foreign element
responsible for all the German problems; then he and his leading propagandists
“brought [the Protocols] up to date and meshed it out with the names and faces
of recognizable prominent lgures” (Herf 2006, 173). Eco’s novel warns its reader
about the human temptation to believe in fabricated stories and about the use of
language as a vehicle of deception, especially when it describes what is familiar.
It manages to deconstruct the two great antagonists in the writing of history—
lction and reality—but its purifying operation, as stripped of any ornament as it
is in the end, is not meant to return to an originating point, a vanished origin as
Badiou called it, but rather to explain an outcome.
And even more—The Prague Cemetery is not just a canonical metatextual
novel in which literature returns to itself and investigates its own resources. It
goes beyond that—it represents the proof that lction and reality can function
together and that any lction, once recorded, is able to create its own reality.
Its plot seems to be meant to place literature at the conmuence of anthropology,
iconography, history, and philosophy, all of which are spiced with humor and
irony. Its function transgresses the regular use of literature which, as Gabriele
Schwab once described it, “unsettles the status quo of habitual cultural codes”
and “generates emergent forms of subjectivity, culture and life in processes of
dialogical exchange with its readers” (226), but actually explores reality as if it
were lctional and conveys the real with a place in lction. It places itself beyond
any type of judgment (and in this aspect those who accused Umberto Eco of anti-
Semitism cannot be further from reality) illustrating how the history of humanity
can be explored taking a journey back, from the “form of thoughts” that shape it
towards reality and not the other way around.
66 Anca ANDRIESCU GARCIA

Works cited
Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Century. Malden: Polity Press.
Eco, Umberto. 2008. Turning Back the Clock. Hot Wars and Media Populism.
Orlando: Harcourt Inc.
—. 2012. Inventing the Enemy. (Kindle edition.) Boston, New York: Houghton
Mifmin Harcourt.
—. 2010. The Prague Cemetery. (Kindle edition.) Boston, New York: Houghton
Mifmin Harcourt.
Girard, René. 1986. The Scapegoat. (Kindle edition.) Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Herf, Jeffrey. 2006. The Jewish Enemy. Nazi Propaganda during World War II and
the Holocaust. (Kindle edition.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Schwab, Gabriele. (year not mentioned). Imaginary Ethnographies. Literature,
Culture, and Subjectivity. (Kindle edition.) New York: Columbia University
Press.
Wisnicki, Adrian S. 2008. Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian
Fiction to the Modern Novel. (Kindle edition.) New York and London:
Routledge.