- 1 This work is based, on the one hand, on Boudon’s methodological individualism and, on the other, on (...)
- 2 A simple search on a search engine such as Google is enough to convince us of this, but above all t (...)
- 3 In France, see https://www.gouvernement.fr/on-te-manipule, and the Eduscol pages (Ministry of Educa (...)
- 4 For example, the Avia law or the " anti-fake news " law; Bronner also chaired the commission entitl (...)
1Many experts on conspiracy focus their analyses on cognitive biases and errors of reasoning (Bronner 2013), reducing the conspiracy phenomenon to its rational dimension. This purportedly scientific approach is based on an epistemology of “rational error”, aiming to rectify cognitive biases (Bronner 2007) and communicational distortions with a view to the right judgment, as far as possible1. From this point of view which has become a widespread reading in this field of studies2, conspiracy rhetoric is taken from a narrow angle, that of its argumentative content alone. Starting from the premise that beliefs themselves are merely a biased form of rationality, analyses focus on their ideational content alone, with conspiracy theories systematically interpreted as (inadequate) knowledge, and at the same time as militant discourse aimed at convincing their audience to adhere to the beliefs claimed3. This approach, relayed by numerous media outlets and public authorities who rightly see a considerable danger of political destabilization in conspiracy, has largely inspired institutional prevention and information initiatives4.
- 5 See, for example, lumieresurgaia.com (accessed 12.04.2024).
- 6 As defined by Danblon (2013).
2Yet the aesthetic and figurative dimension and the narrative pleasure are decisive in conspiracist discourse: why are they so rarely taken into account? Firstly, the political stakes are so high that interpreting conspiracist discourse in terms of narrative, eulogy, or even fable, risks underestimating or watering down the phenomenon. Implicitly, taking a discourse seriously seems to imply reading it exclusively from the argumentative angle of logos. But is this not another form of “cognitive bias?” If the rational dimension of conspiracy theories is often present (we are thinking of the endless technical debates of those who are in favor of reopening the file on the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 or the arguments of the “platists”), how can we ignore the fantasy, if not delusional, aspect of the vast majority of conspiracy theories? From “reptilians”, extra-terrestrial creatures supposedly ruling the world, to pinecones in the shape of pineal glands that some say can be observed in Vatican City5, imagination, far more than reason, seems to be in power. By what strange denial are we ignoring the full range of rhetorical devices and stakes, not the least of which is figuration6? The proliferation of testimonies, images (obviously read through a prism that owes much more to visual pathos, even hallucination, than semiological rigor), and stories should alert us: have we not underestimated the quest to “please”?
3We will focus here on the narrative and fictional aspects of some conspiracy statements whose storytelling closely follows the codes of popular fiction. We will start by showing the analogies between these two types of discourse, based on the “pleasure of being told stories.” For want of a sufficiently general demonstration, which would require an extremely substantial corpus, we will focus on the singular case of one author, Umberto Eco. He played a quite special role in the anti-conspiration movement that began in the 1990s and 2000s, before becoming embroiled in polemics about the ambiguity of conspiracy fiction. Thus, he seems to embody this field perfectly: he is an academic who has devoted much of his research to the indistinguishability between conspiracy narratives and the art of fiction, and a novelist who has put this porosity to the test.
4One cannot help but be struck by the obvious analogies between the sphere of so-called “para-literature” (detective fiction, spy novels, films, series, manga, video games, etc.) and that of conspiracy discourse, in terms of themes, narrative structure and figures. Firstly, as Luc Boltanski (2012) has pointed out, there is a historical concomitance between the emergence of the first modern “conspiracy theories” (or whatever we can put under that term) and the birth of the detective and spy novel genres7. From the 19th century onwards, authors of conspiracy pamphlets – of which Abbé Barruel’s (2005 [1798]) speculations on the Illuminati8 are a prime example – found material for their criticism in the novelistic fiction. A formidable polemicist in the service of counter-revolutionary circles, Barruel and his Scottish contemporary John Robison (1797) owed their success (which, against all expectations, still indirectly endures) not only to their argumentative qualities of proof9, but also to the recycling of this scenario by novelists such as Alexandre Dumas, whose novel Joseph Balsamo, published in 1846-1849 and based on the plot of the Illuminati, provided a powerful fictional relay for Barruel’s theses.
5By depicting an Illuminati secret society intent on overthrowing the monarchy and coupling it with the legendary figure of Count Cagliostro, credited with supernatural powers of manipulation linked to a gift for hypnotism, Dumas gives “rational” discourse a whimsical, even magical dimension. What is he trying to achieve with his novel? Certainly not a work with a thesis, even if Dumas’s republican sympathies are visible. The response to the fiction, which is based on an indulgence in the occult that was fashionable at the time and acts as a genuine marketing device, is in no way reducible to its argumentative content. There is no doubt that readers of these serial novels, like many works of popular literature from the 19th century onwards (Letourneux 2017), were more sensitive to their esoteric tone and pleasures than convinced by their ideas. But is it not equally true of many of today’s “conspiracy buffs?”
- 10 Biarritz, published in 1868 under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe, according to Cohn (1992).
6Eugène Sue’s novels, moreover, and principally Le Juif errant (1844-1845) and Les Mystères du Peuple (1849-1857) have much in common with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), a forgery written at the request of the Tsarist secret police, but largely inspired by an 1864 satirical pamphlet, itself probably inspired by Sue’s novels (Eco 2018). Other experts see in the Protocols the influence of a fiction written by Hermann Gödsche10, itself taken up in a “serious” way by various polemicists (Eco 2018) who blur any boundary between fiction and argumentation, to the point of attributing to the author of the novel (albeit a pseudonymous identity) the source of the “information” thus revealed. But there is more: Umberto Eco, studying the genesis of these works, identifies in Gödsche’s novel borrowings from... Alexandre Dumas’ Joseph Balsamo (1846). Both play a role as characters in Eco’s novel The Prague Cemetery (2010).
- 11 See, for example, the symposium “Théories du complot : mythes et mythologies à travers les siècles” (...)
- 12 A UFO rumor dating back to the 1940s, forgotten for fifty years, before the success of the X-Files (...)
- 13 See paragraph 4 below.
- 14 For lack of space, we cannot go further into a discussion of the notion of fiction; on this questio (...)
7Without going into the complex details of intertextuality, and as Eco himself points out, we can only observe the extraordinary porosity that exists between fictional narratives and polemical texts, which intermingle spectacularly to the point of rendering rational argumentation and imaginary invention indistinguishable. Conspiracy theorists, such as Peter Knight (2020) and many others11 are aware that many conspiracy theories originate in fictional narratives interpreted literally, out of cunning or naiveté. There is no need to invoke one more “cognitive bias,” such as the one that “fake news spreads faster and more widely than real news.” The Roswell affair, for example12, or even more recently, hoaxes that have gone viral, such as those of the Luther Blissett group in Italy13, simply show that we are beings in which rationality occupies a fragile, and no doubt much reduced, place. Seduced by fiction, play, and dreams, we lack the time and courage to check our sources... but adore sensationalism, and rumors14.
- 15 Moreover, the now widely institutionalized approach of the Observatoire du Conspirationnisme and th (...)
- 16 In this sense, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand and One Faces (1949) has continued to exe (...)
8Are conspiracy theories, then, manipulations that pull out all the stops, using the resources of narratology to construct statements likely to trigger the greatest possible assent? It is a tempting hypothesis if we adhere to the “auctorial” reading of conspiracist discourse, i.e. a reading that attributes the initiative for such statements to one or more authors, in a manipulative logic based on ideological intentions (Taussig 2021)15. There is no doubt that such actors exist and exert considerable influence. The rhetorical use of narrative (and not just argumentative) devices such as storytelling, personalization, character polarization, and the highlighting of mysterious or paranormal elements, to capture the audience’s attention by playing on pathos and identification, is a commonplace part of the fundamentals of communication, known even to apprentice Youtube influencers. As Emmanuelle Danblon notes: “Storytelling, as it is known today, did not invent anything. It has the merit of reminding us that we are not just beings of deduction, but that we need to bring our arguments to life with the help of stories and images” (2015: 102-108). The standard structure of the traditional narrative, laid bare by research in narratology under the name of “actantial” analysis (Greimas 1966), highlights the importance of the initiatory quest and its successive stages in the impression of unveiling felt by the audience16, who will be inclined to adhere more readily to the theses conveyed by the narrative if they exist. And that is not counting the pleasure inherent in the performance itself, as Aristotle already pointed out (Poet.,1448b).
- 17 According to a 2018 IFOP study for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès and the Conspiracy Watch Observatory. (...)
9The notion of “storytelling”, exploited by politicians and advertisers, has been popularized by the general public, who are fond of fiction, have become partly experts, or at least less naive than in the past, and are more aware of the rhetorical devices used (Salmon 2017). For all that, does this reading of conspiracist discourse as marketing content elaborated according to a mass communication model, apart from appearing – and this is the last straw – itself conspiratorial in a way, address the globality of the problem? For, if we admit that certain “initiators” (and in France, we can think of major figures in the “complosphere”, as it is called in French, such as Thierry Meyssan, Alain Soral, Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala and others) do indeed have this manipulative posture, what about the thousands or millions of followers who relay these remarks in a far more naive mode, but also, sometimes, in a more playful mode, and not without a certain distance? Unless we think that the 79% or so of the French population who adhered to at least one “conspiracy theory”17 in 2018 are Machiavellian ideologues, we are forced to consider another hypothesis, namely that the audiences who encounter conspiracy rhetoric find themselves seized, more or less consciously and voluntarily, and to varying degrees of conviction, by discourses whose argumentative aspects, and even more so whose intentions, escape them totally or in part.
10To what processes are audiences of conspiracy content sensitive? As we have said, the use of narrative, with its actantial narrative structure on the one hand, and identification with characters capable of arousing emotion and empathy on the other, is decisive. But the problem lies in knowing how these processes are received, and whether or not this type of communication can be reduced to rational communication, where the audience adopts a priori the presuppositions expected by the author of the message, i.e. strategic intentionality and intellectual conviction of a political or ideological nature.
- 18 To clarify this orientation, the aim is to investigate the effects of discourse on the language pra (...)
- 19 Hence the success of these novels far beyond a working-class audience, and according to quite diver (...)
11We propose to think of discourses (ideological as much as fictional) in terms of reception, rather than the author’s intentionality18; we postulate that there is a continuity between audiences’ attitudes to fiction and to “conspiracy theories”, which have become relatively indistinguishable in the contemporary context of information overload. Just as the audience for fictional narratives, such as Dumas’ or Sue’s novels-feuilletons, is not very sensitive to political arguments (Sue, for example, despite his own political intentions, features rather ambivalent characters19), it may seem plausible that at least part of the audience for conspiracy enthusiasts is in the same situation. Identification with the more or less realistic characters of conspiracy stories would then take place on an affective register, that of pathos, inspiring more or less accentuated forms of “belief”, on a continuum ranging from absolute adherence to relative skepticism.
- 20 A four-year study of a panel of teenagers concludes that the overwhelming majority of students not (...)
- 21 Brown quotes them indirectly and maliciously as anagrams in the novel.
12But does the belief accorded to the discourse depend on whether the narrative in question is informative or fictional? Nothing is less certain if this presupposes a rational attitude of verification or systematic clarification, which everything seems to indicate is far from being universally shared, particularly among teenage audiences20. In many cases, the contamination between fiction and conspiracy theories makes these two discourses virtually indistinguishable, as in the case of Dan Brown’s famous novel The Da Vinci Code (2003): let’s not forget that novelist Brown drew his inspiration from an allegedly historical work, whose authors sued him for plagiarism21, and that many readers took the novel literally, to the point that ecclesiastical officials and professional historians had to publish several denials.
13What is at issue here is the failure to respect the “fictional pact”, the implicit contract that underlies the act of reading a novel, and which would have the reader know perfectly well what to expect when he or she undertakes such a reading. By accepting a momentary “suspension of disbelief,”, the audience would knowingly exercise a kind of lifting of censorship, allowing it to adhere momentarily, and within a well-defined framework, to beliefs that are obviously not in keeping with the situations of ordinary life. This pact, which can be revoked at will on each “come back to reality”, only exists in a problematic mode. While most readers know that Balzac or Zola, although labeled as realist or naturalist authors, write fiction, it should be noted that doubt persists in many cases: thus, the numerous phenomena of “roman à clés” or other “autofictions,” now so commonplace. Moreover, from the very beginnings of the novel genre, it has been under the auspices of a questioning of the fictional pact: thus, Don Quixote (Cervantes 1605-1615), often credited with the title of the first “novel” in history, is entirely devoted to the misadventures of a character incapable of distinguishing fiction from reality. This is precisely the case with the conspiracy theorist, who is prepared to believe (but to what extent?) that alien lizards have taken over the world, or that the Church has been hiding Jesus’ lineage for two thousand years. Isn’t there an “aesthetic” dimension to the success of these fables, in the sense that the pleasure of fantasy, and a certain wavering of certainties, outweighs any concern for veracity?
14The fact that many modern and contemporary novels, from Kafka to Gracq, and to detective novelists, feature characters with a conspiratorial air, or, as in the case of Dan Brown, deliberately make fiction and history impossible to distinguish from each other, adds to the confusion. If the novel, since the 16th century at least, has been placed under the sign of a fundamental ambiguity of the fictional pact, is it any wonder that conspiracy theory enthusiasts are caught up in the same hermeneutic circle, that of an indefinite, and perhaps uncertain, suspension of disbelief? And who is to say, in the books of David Icke, the former footballer turned Reptilian expert, what part is madness, what part is staging, and what part is a highly lucrative business, that of conspiracy content on the Internet? When the author himself becomes a “character”, what is more important: the search for verisimilitude, or the pleasure of representation?
- 22 Some distinguish between “metalepsis of mode” (i.e., focalization) and “metalepsis of voice” (the n (...)
- 23 Among countless examples, we might mention Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1610-1615): this procedure still (...)
15The rhetorical devices used here may serve a prior purpose but can also be emancipated from the original author’s intentionality. Ultimately, this would be less a manipulation than a quasi-“autonomous” fortune for these tropes with a wider audience, far beyond the one previously targeted. Metalepsis, for example, originated in the rhetoric of Dumarsais, for whom it seems to correspond to a form of metonymy, but took off with Genette (2004), who deliberately placed it in the field of narratology22. Designating the transgression of the terms of the fictional pact, it corresponds to the irruption into the narrative of a real character, or to the irruption into reality of a fictional character, resulting in a certain disturbance in the relationship with the narrative. Any reader of 16th- or 17th-century novels can see how insistent this process is, whether in the practice of embedded narrative, the topos of the “found manuscript” or the deliberately ambiguous prefaces to the story’s status as reality23. In this sense, The Da Vinci Code (Brown 2003: 9), whose introduction states that “All the descriptions of monuments, works of art, documents and secret rituals evoked are true”, is fully in this vein, which can be linked both to the Baroque movement, with its play on reflections and illusions, and to the structure of certain contemporary fictional narratives (short stories by Cortazar or Borges illustrate).
- 24 According to Pier and Schaeffer (2005), metalepsis calls into question the double axis of metaphor- (...)
16But is this just a manipulative device, or even a device at all, aimed at capturing readers’ attention by creating a break in the thread of the diegesis? It is reasonable to think that the immense extension of this trope points to a fundamental question: when it comes to ensuring the boundaries between fiction and reality, does crossing these boundaries have the effect of weakening or even short-circuiting them, or of consolidating them24? It seems that the narrative act itself, as it strives to produce an authentic creative gesture, cannot avoid such an almost “ontological” questioning (Pier and Schaeffer 2005). But beyond the creator of narratives alone, isn’t every audience, reader, or spectator confronted, almost inescapably, with the same questioning? The very act of representation (which, for Aristotle, involved the spectator as well as the author) engages an awareness of the nature of the representational device, and a problematization of this mode (Leiduan 2021). But to what extent should we allow ourselves to be troubled by doubt about representation? It seems this metaleptic doubt is spreading today, due to the massive dissemination of content, to the point of threatening any control by an “auctor”.
17For example, the author of the remarkable book Q comme Qomplot (Wu Ming 1 2022) describes a quite disturbing process whereby content, initially published as a hoax, escapes its authors to the point of taking on an autonomous destiny, for better or worse. The Italian academic, who introduces himself as “Wu Ming 1”, belonged at the end of the last century to a group of international post-situationist intellectuals, collectively entitled “Luther Blissett”. Under this name, they produced and distributed fake texts, successfully misleading publishers and critics, and triggering so-called “viral” phenomena on a much smaller web than today, with the aim of both parody and social critique. Luther Blissett’s rhetoric of the false, which makes you dizzy because you end up not knowing whether the referent exists or not, multiplies the power stunts in the public arena, all of which are metalepses that have the effect of creating a reflexive and/or playful distancing from the society of the spectacle, which was, even then, also an information society. But fifteen or twenty years later, the members of this collective, authors of the novel Q (Blissett 1999), saw the reappearance of the letter Q, emblem of the conspiracy according to their fiction at the time, in the dismaying form of a conspiratorial ideological movement, Q-Anon, denouncing the pedo-satanist plot of the “Deep State” and supporting Donald Trump. What link can be established between the “Q” of the 1999 novel and that of the far-right group? The coincidence is not only troubling, it illustrates, much to the authors’ chagrin, the very thesis they have always claimed to demonstrate in deed: fiction has become indistinguishable from “reality” in advanced informational societies. But instead of a deliberate blurring for critical and emancipatory purposes, as Luther Blissett conceived it, today’s confusion takes place unintentionally, if not automatically, by the simple effect of the media “machine”. And it seems nothing less than liberating.
- 25 In particular, the epidictic genre, which would have the effect of guaranteeing belief in a just wo (...)
- 26 A branch of the sociology of communication that studies the proliferation (essentially on the web) (...)
18If the essential function of figuration is indeed, as Emmanuelle Danblon believes, to ensure the “disposition to the art of living together” (2013: 98; see also Danblon 2020), to make possible the collective and civic exercise of human reason25, we are dealing here with a kind of inversion, or perversion, of the rhetorical device. Far from guaranteeing belief in a just world, the conspiracy fable maximizes the risks of dissensus and ruins any possibility of consolation. Should this be seen as a perfidious attempt, by whom, to undermine reason and common sense? Or an emancipation of metaleptic logics, which have somehow spread by themselves, or rather by the replicative multiplication of content on the web and communication networks, in an anarchic and uncontrollable way (as the rise of the discipline called “memetics” seems to indicate)26? The case of Luther Blissett seems to confirm, if not demonstrate, what appears to be a full-scale social psychology experiment. Let’s now take a look at another such experiment, carried out against his will by a single author, this time claiming auctorial responsibility.
- 27 “Reflecting on the complex relationships between reader and story, between fiction and reality, con (...)
19As a famous Italian academic, semiologist, and novelist, Eco is a prime example of the paradoxes and misunderstandings of conspiracy rhetoric. It is safe to say that we are talking about rhetoric here: Eco has built and theorized a veritable machine for producing conspiracy statements. The literary device (which, as will become clear, goes beyond literature) he has set up from Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) onwards is designed to produce a mimesis of conspiratorial discourse, the genealogy of which Eco traces back to the sects and other Gnostic heresies of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As an intellectual strongly committed to combating anti-Semitism, Eco is not unaware of the immense danger posed by this mode of discourse, namely that of setting up mechanisms of exclusion and extermination focused on a scapegoat. Conspiracy theories, heirs to mythical beliefs, are said to be “fictional outgrowths of the social imaginary”, the result of a breach of the fictional pact: our perception of reality is said to be “contaminated” by fictional scenarios (Leiduan 2017). By “mimicking” these discourses to expose their inanity, Eco hopes to do a critical, if not cathartic, work: the pleasure taken by the reader in conspiratorial fiction, with a purely aesthetic aim, is supposed to divert him or her from conspiratorial beliefs in the social world27.
- 28 The “narrator-editor” thus has the function of distancing the beliefs of the “narrator-witness” inv (...)
20By “aesthetic”, Eco (1997) means an aesthetic that he describes as “neo-baroque”, detached from semantics, and which takes pleasure in repetition, in seriality: it would be a way of escaping from too “serious” a reading. In a kind of salutary short-circuit, which redoubles the metalepsis characteristic of conspiracy statements, Eco reveals the aberration of the paranoid scheme that attributes all social ills to a scapegoat. To achieve this, as Alessandro Leiduan, whose analyses we follow here, shows, Eco resorts to several narratological devices, such as the doubling of the narrators28, or the implausibility of the statements, which deliriously and grotesquely multiply references and hypotheses, citing Jesuits, Opus Dei, Cathars, Templars, etc. in a jumble of extravagant and contradictory discourses (Leiduan 2020). Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, however, is just as implausible and heterogeneous, with its gallery of “plotters” including, alongside the Templars and other Merovingians, da Vinci, Wagner, Walt Disney, and even François Mitterrand, without claiming (on the contrary), to emancipate the reader through irony.
21Is Eco restoring or transforming the fictional pact? If it is true that this pact has always been fundamentally vitiated, contaminated, by confusions, as in the case of the pseudo-complot of the Elders of Zion (where belief persists despite refutation and indisputable proof of their falsity), Eco is in turn going to disturb the enunciation/statement distinction, but this time in a purely playful way. In keeping with his “post-modernist” convictions, Eco uses play, irony, and parody in relation to “serious” or first-degree discourse and invites the reader to enter an equally distanced posture. The aim is to put the reader in crisis, to confront him or her with intertextuality (1979), in other words, to invite him or her to step out of the posture of a naive reader and become an expert reader, acquiring a different view of the act of reading and the fictional pact, ultimately likely to reinforce the latter, by giving him or her access to the notion of hermeneutic play and the “co-construction” of narrative (1990). But Eco also makes ambiguous use of devices that constitute a transgression of the fictional pact: the doubling of the narrators already mentioned, as well as irony, which is certainly marked but not necessarily perceptible to the naive reader (Leiduan 2020). This is precisely what happened: the success of Le Pendule de Foucault was largely due to a literal reading, or at least to the public’s passion for the novel’s esoteric and cabalist themes; on the other hand, Eco was pilloried by a section of Catholic and traditionalist opinion, who accused him of conveying dangerous ideas. A pamphlet is circulating, attributing authorship of the Luther Blissett collective to Eco (Wu Ming 1 2021: 58): yet this pamphlet is itself nothing more than... a hoax, emanating precisely from the Luther Blissett Project!
22A vertiginous mise en abyme of anonymous postmodernism leads to a fundamental uncertainty about the boundaries of reality and fiction. Was Eco the victim of a misunderstanding, or did he help to create one? In any case, it seems undeniable that Eco was aware of the risks: for catharsis to work, it would be necessary to ensure that the audience was capable of passing to an aesthetic level, which he believed would go hand in hand with “critical” reading, and sufficiently freed itself from a “first degree” of “naive” reading (1997: 147-148). By deliberately constructing an imitative fiction, meant to illustrate the very mechanism of contamination of utterance and enunciation, and by theorizing the infinite possibilities of interpreting a textual message, far beyond its author’s intentions, has not Eco opened Pandora’s box? At the very least, we can suspect that he was not unaware of the possible excesses of his novel’s interpretation. The aesthetic and playful search for pleasure in the “fable” seems to be of the same order as that of Luther Blissett’s situationists (even if officially – but will we ever know the truth? Umberto Eco did not take part!): a project to unveil gives rise to a deviation. The ironic posture only perpetuates the misunderstanding, and, according to its detractors, plays into the hands of the very conspiracy it is supposed to criticize.
23Admittedly, postmodernism has taken note of the disappearance of major value systems, and the advent of an information society in which the very overabundance of heterogeneous statements ends up creating a kind of aesthetic vertigo (Eco 1997). But the very gesture of creation, by taking refuge in the imitative game that dynamites any referential relationship to reality, runs the risk of “playing into the hands” of an emancipation of tropes rather than an emancipation of the reader, and of a drift of interpretation. There can be no argumentative critique here: the aestheticizing stance abandons any rational/reasonable aim.
24The Prague Cemetery (Eco 2010), published twenty years after Foucault’s pendule, is a kind of transposition of the latter, in an extremely similar mode. Focusing on anti-Semitic conspiracy (which is rather buffoonishly linked to all sorts of other conspiracies, notably the genesis of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), it tells the tribulations of a forger, a fictional character amidst a gallery of real historical actors: everything in the novel is true, it seems, except for the hero. It should be noted that the latter himself claims to be influenced by Dumas (in particular Joseph Balsamo), who serves as a model for the making of “false” plots; Dumas is also present in the novel, where he intervenes in the narrative thread. Eco’s penchant for subtly challenging the boundary between the true and the plausible, and above all, the implausible, is also evident.
25But here again, the ironic device hardly works. The distancing devices are the same as in Eco’s other novels: the doubling of the narrators is here even more particularly marked from the very first chapter (which is not given as a preface, and is itself a pastiche of the beginnings of 19th-century realist novels, but adopts a particular typeface): “The Narrator himself does not yet know who the mysterious scribe is, if he proposes to find out (in concert with the Reader) while both, as nosy intruders, follow the signs that the other’s pen lays down on paper” (Eco 2010: 14).
- 29 For example: “Everything seems unreal. As if I were someone else watching me. Write everything down (...)
26Both of us? Does this mean that the narrator and the writer are like twin brothers seen in a trompe-l’œil mirror? Unless it’s the reader himself who is challenged, and seen as a double of the narrator, co-author of the work, both spectator and creator in his own right. But there is more: the famous “scribe” who is the hero (or anti-hero) of the novel, Simon Simonini, is uncertain of his own identity: chapter two, which corresponds to the beginning of Simonini’s diary, is entitled “Who am I?”, and throughout the novel, a secondary plot (unless it is the main one) consists in the discovery of Simonini’s double personality, which is one with Abbé Dalla Picolla29. In fact, the two voices alternate in the newspaper’s editorial staff (as evidenced, once again, by the use of different fonts). There are thus no less than three more or less distinct “narrators”, one of whom is extra-diegetic, and the other two both confused and distinct (one writes only when the other is absent or asleep...) Is this disquieting strangeness entirely reducible to a strategy of distancing and emancipating the reader? The story’s deeply troubled, labyrinthine, and “tenebrous” character brings Eco’s rhetoric in his fiction to incandescence, to a point of transgression that can be seen as the ultimate metalepsis.
- 30 Eco himself theorizes the difference between what he calls “baroque simulation” and other forms of (...)
- 31 Anglo-Saxon psychoanalysis, notably Deutsch (1933) and Winnicott (1965) has been particularly inter (...)
27At the heart of the novel, the question of the false, which unfolds in both the author’s theoretical and fictional texts, is illustrated by multiple mises en abyme, in a post-modern aesthetic that borrows from Baroque topoï only to annihilate them: unlike the theatrical device typical of works from the Baroque period, Eco’s narrative frees itself from any ultimate referent30. Whereas the specular paradoxes of Cervantes and Calderon seem ultimately tied to a goal of restoring epistemic and social order and are supposed to guarantee a return to “truth” through the temporary medium of illusion, i.e., in narrative terms, through a restoration of the fictional pact, postmodern blurring devices assert nothing of the sort: metalepsis is not a momentary disquiet that leads back to truth, or even verisimilitude. It is an ontological vertigo that threatens the very possibility of reasonable thought, which becomes an “as if”31 thought, detached from reference.
28So are not Eco’s precautions and proclamations about the cathartic purpose of his work to be read as just another illusion, since the work by definition escapes its author and is disseminated in the infinite plurality of interpretations? Lacking an ultimate referent and a ground on which to anchor the discourse, the latter seems carried away in an “amplification” emancipated from its author, an uncontrollable slide by which he is led, almost automatically, to multiply transgressions. What other anchor point could he find, then, if not what Lacan calls “the beyond of the signifying chain”, i.e. death, the point d’abîme (1959-1960)? Thus, conspiracy rhetoric drifts almost naturally towards that point where the Shoah intervenes as the ultimate taboo:
I love peace, I’d like a world dominated by gentleness, where no one would understand the meaning of the word violence. If all the Jews were to disappear from the world, who with their finance support the gun merchants, we’d be looking forward to a hundred years of happiness. The Prague Cemetery – But so what? – And then, one day, we’ll have to try the only reasonable solution, the final solution: the extermination of all Jews (Eco 2011: 344).
29Even more so than with Foucault’s Pendulum, there are concerns about the real intentions of the author, who cannot be accused of anti-Semitism because of his personal commitments, but who is criticized by several interlocutors for cultivating ambiguity. Members of the Jewish community and the Catholic Church, as well as intellectuals such as Pierre-André Taguieff, accuse him of complacency, if not fascination, towards the abject theses of which he makes himself the secretary for almost six hundred pages. The ethos of this great humanist academic does not seem to have been enough to guarantee the reception of his novels, in a context of widespread suspicion and perversion of the very meaning of the notion of fiction.
- 32 In particular, Robert (1972).
30How is it, once again, that distancing fails? Where postmodernist staging and subtle metalepses are supposed to educate the naïve reader, scholarly readers consider the game to be risky, or rigged. Is this a refutation or confirmation of Eco’s theses? It’s hard to say. One thing is certain: it’s not so much the author’s intentions as the destiny of the narrative and its figures that are to blame for the deviations. In any case, this is what Eco would have us believe, at the risk of blurring the auctor’s responsibility. According to his conception, novelistic fiction is like a “graveyard”, such as the Prague cemetery (Houry 2011). Only death could possibly put an end to the emancipation of tropes: and even this is not sure, since interpretation somehow survives it. Metaphor or metalepsis? The cemetery (and not just any cemetery: the one where the piled-up bodies of the Jewish community’s greatest scholars are laid to rest) becomes the figure par excellence of the place where the spoken word (charged with History and the sacred) outlives its enunciators, but also the place offered up to the ultimate transgressions, those that aim to annihilate even memory, in the name of destructive impulses that attack bonds right down to their roots. This raises the question of nihilism, so dear to Eco. A detour into the psychoanalytical clinic, and its considerations on literary creation32 would perhaps be instructive in measuring the weight of death drives and raising the question of the emancipation of discursive statements beyond the conscious will of the enunciator. After all, doesn’t Sigmund Freud also figure prominently in The Prague Cemetery?
31Given the corpus mentioned, which includes both several fictional works of fiction (Dumas’ Joseph Balsamo, the novels of Eugène Sue, those of Umberto Eco and Dan Brown) and conspiracist discourses (the Mémoires... de l’abbé Barruel, les Protocols of the Elders of Zion, among others), we were able to identify two essential characteristics of “conspiracy-style” statements: the not exclusively argumentative, but aesthetic and “figurative” dimension of the narrative, and the crisis of the fictional pact, which is supposed to delimit well-identified and marked-out spaces that guarantee the validity or non-validity of belief in narratives. While any act of novel creation may involve a certain amount of questioning of this pact, the conditions of this questioning must be circumscribed. However, in the context of the mass and accelerated circulation of statements, it is to be feared that this transgression of the boundary between fiction and reality may escape the author’s intentions: the meta-narrative device, admittedly inherent to the novelistic genre, which consists in “disturbing” the boundaries between statement and enunciation, would then evade control. The automatic replication of content, fictional or otherwise, makes it indistinguishable from one another, giving rise to increasingly frequent reversals, from the fictional to the denotative register, and vice versa. The rhetoric of the conspiracy – marked by a mise en récit, a polarization of characters, and the highlighting of mysterious or paranormal elements to hold the reader’s attention – is so similar in both cases that only the author’s ethos would be likely to discriminate the plausibility value of the statements. However, if statements spread in an anarchic, automated fashion, this reference to ethos can no longer serve as the ultimate guarantee. Has the appropriation of discourse, whatever it may be, by an author become definitively obsolete?
- 33 In Foucault’s Pendulum (Eco 1988), he names the computer after Aboulafia, a great Kabbalist of the (...)
- 34 In the sense of Gaulejac, Hanique and Roche (2007)
32At a time when statements are disseminated via the web and networks, the postmodern ideology of the “death of the author”, intended to liberate, has been transformed into an involuntary and sometimes potentially destructive proliferation of fables whose emancipatory virtues remain dubious. By the 1980s, Eco had already recognized the formidable and mysterious power of algorithms33, which he associates with the occult and encyclopedic knowledge... and randomness, making a new image of his own creation. Should we stay with his chaotic, anonymous version of the circulation of signs, that erudite graveyard from which subjects have disappeared, or rethink the conditions of possibility of “true speech” (in Lacan’s sense)? Subjects are not entities whose speech acts obey a simple intentional pattern. Cognitivist communication models, which reduce the message to its argumentative content alone, clearly fail to grasp the complexity of conspiracy discourse, which is replicated on the web in a “viral” and anonymized fashion, sometimes far removed from any political or purely intentional context. But the study of conspiracy theories from the perspective of the rhetoric of narrative could reveal a completely different image of these narratives, which are emancipated from their authors: that of discourses whose affective, figurative scope indicates that they are rooted in the unconscious. It would therefore be up to a rhetoric informed by clinical sociology34 to study the way in which tropes, and metalepsis in particular, betray an impulsive source. A figure of transgression, metalepsis, brought to incandescence by generalized conspiracy narrativity, would indicate an irruption of death drives, supposedly providing an illusory anchor point, or end point, to the proliferation of statements. It is this fundamental illusion that we wish to denounce.
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