Shelf Life: Umberto Eco’s Novel Echoes Today’s World of Fake News

‘The Prague Cemetery’ reminds us that fake news didn’t start with Donald Trump.

A cover of Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery.

(Photo altered by The Quint)

(‘What are you reading?’ is a question we ask each other all the time before losing ourselves in meandering conversations around lives scattered between pages. This week, The Quint’s reader Priyale Chandra digs into a chilling novel to discover its resonance in today’s world.)

(Photo: The Quint)

This may be what the website WTOE 5 News had in mind last year when it posted that "news outlets around the world" were reporting Pope Francis's endorsement of Donald Trump for the US presidency.

Fun Fact

Fake news did not originate with the 2016 US presidential election.

US President Donald Trump (Photo: The Quint)

As the term becomes inseparable from our daily news alerts, one can be forgiven to believe that the phenomenon began with Russia and Donald Trump. But faking facts and disseminating them through mass media has always been a part of the modern world. Just like understanding the world and protesting against its atrocities has always been a key motive of literature.

When discussing which books are relevant for understanding today's scenario, 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale are necessary recommendations. One book, however, remains ignored despite illustrating how fake news shapes events. Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery offers readers a glimpse of how forgeries and lies have, in a sense, created our world.

The novel is set in 19th century Europe with Simone Simonini - a disagreeable and prejudiced spy, also a forger, as its main character. After a series of events, Simonini realises that he is missing his most recent memories. He also suspects that someone called Abbé Dalla Piccola knows his secrets. Simonini decides to try a talking cure by a doctor "Froide" to solve the mystery of his memory loss. He begins chronicling his past to recollect his memories.

A cover of Umberto Eco’s book.

The Prague Cemetery follows Simonini as he cheats, scams and lies his way through nineteenth century Europe. He spies for a number of secret agencies, forges documents and plays off different groups against each other. 

Simonini’s xenophobic, anti-Semitic mindset leads him to forging a document he regards as the masterpiece of his career - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: introducing a cabal of Jewish leaders plotting world domination.

(Photo: The Quint)

The premise might seem laughable now. But The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an actual forged document that appeared in the early twentieth century, marketed as the truth. Despite being proved as fake in 1921, it ended up as an influence, both direct and indirect, on many events of the modern world, including the Holocaust.

A book on the the Protocols of Elders of Zion. (Photo courtesy: Facebook/ underthewings)

Hitler made references to the Protocols in his memoirs. The Nazis also made versions of the text available in schools, thus preaching an indirect version of anti-Semitism to kids. Modern conspiracy theories - the New World Order or 9/11 being a hoax - also owe their origin to the Protocols.

The Prague Cemetery postulates that a lot of what happened in nineteenth century Europe might not have been possible without the easy spread of (mis)information. The casual and speedy way of spreading information of the era resulted in hardening of suspicious, xenophobic mentalities and policies. All of which, coupled with a race for colonies and markets, resulted in two world wars.

Umberto Eco(Photo courtesy: Facebook/ musticaguendalina)

Also read: Shelf Life: A ‘Sackett’ Who Changed My Life

Eco’s novel is filled with historical personalities from Sigmund Freud to Garibaldi. Simonini himself is one of the few fictional characters in the story.

Readers are immersed in a world filled with surveillance-loving militaristic states, xenophobic and misogynistic individuals, young people being seduced by ideologies advocating violence, and false reports created by groups interested only in furthering their own agendas. Sounds familiar?

You can fight a lie, but how do you win a shadow war against misinformation and disinformation? (Photo: iStock) 

This familiarity is what makes The Prague Cemetery so important today. Despite setting its plot in the nineteenth century, the book echoes a lot of present day events. It not only provides an understanding of how false facts have given shape to events, but also illustrates how easy it is to convince people to believe in false realities.

(Photo: The Quint)

The Prague Cemetery reminds us about the consequences of fake news, something we haven’t properly considered in the wake of debates on mail leaks and bogus news items. Like in the novel, the world today stands on the precipice between stability and destruction.

The Simoninis of today are thousands in number and rendered even more anonymous by the Internet. The continuing onslaught of fake news by them might just tip the balance towards destruction again.