CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND LITERARY ETHICS:
UMBERTO ECO, DANILO KIS AND THE PROTOCOLS OF ZION
TO CONSPIRE MEANS literally to breathe together. And usually it's about bad breath. The word conspiracy
tends to be used pejoratively to designate a subversive kinship of others, an
imagined community based on exclusion more than on affection. Conspiracy
theory is a conspiracy against conspiracy; it does not oppose the conspiratorial
world view as such but doubly affirms it.
Because conspiratorial thinking, whether based on facts or on fictions,
produces vicious circles of analogy and paranoiac overdetermination, conspiracy
theory can become a cause of violence, not merely its effect. How, then, can one produce a critical
reflection on conspiracy that will not turn into a conspiracy theory? If conspiracy can be fictional, can fiction
conspire to undo it?
The terms of conspiracy and of narrative overlap: in both
cases one speaks about plots and plotting.
Although we might all be complicit in the desire for a plot, in what
Roland Barthes calls "the passion for making sense," ideally our plots exist in
the plural, not in the singular. In
contrast, the conspiracy theory that will be discussed here relates everything
to a single subterranean Plot, promising a comfortingly totalizing allegory
that leaves nothing to chance. In this
case narrative passion turns into paranoiac obsession. For a paranoiac-conspirator the other is
seen as another-more or less successful-paranoiac. The whole world appears as a kind of global village or new international
of double agents and conspirators, a secret society of those who are not with
us but against us. Hence the boundaries
between life and literature, fact and fiction become virtually irrelevant.
I will examine an extreme case in which reading for the
conspiratorial plot-with a capital P-presents
an ethical problem, and the conflation of life and fiction turns deadly. As a "secret" book that expounds the myth of
the Jewish plot for world domination, The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion were one of the most influential forgeries
of the twentieth century, having inspired and justified pogroms in Russia and
the Ukraine and Nazi policies of extermination. In this case a blatantly fiction conspiracy theory, not the conspiracy itself, contributed to tragedy. At the end of the twentieth century the Protocols have surfaced again from the subterranean
levels of international popular culture and enjoy new popularity in post-Soviet
Russia, Japan and the United States. I will
look at the making of the "secret" Protocols,
their ripple effect in contemporary culture, and at two recent literary works
that engage with conspiracy theories and practices: Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum (1988) and Danilo
Kis's short story "The Book of Kings and Fools" (1983). Since the Protocols themselves were a misread work of fiction, returning them
to the realm of literature will help to disclose some of their seductive and
persuasive tactics.