Faith in fakes: Secrets, lies, and conspiracies in Umberto Eco’s writings

Abstract

This paper offers a re-reading of the works of Umberto Eco, be they academic, journalistic or literary, with a pseudologic tone: his desire to investigate the mechanisms of lying, and their relation with fiction, falsification, error, secrecy, and conspiracy. The study will review some of his main academic texts in the fields of semiotics, rhetoric, and aesthetics, and will make some references to his recent novels and essay compilations, as well as offer an explanation of how the evolution of his thoughts takes a pessimistic turn. The face of the lie, which initially was aesthetic consolation and consumerist delusion, and then a game of intelligence, a creative stimulus and an interpretive challenge, changes when serves the purpose of extortion, manipulation, and war. In short, it could be argued that Eco became increasingly disappointed by deceptions, and lost faith in fakes and forgeries.

Extremes of ‘narrative by proxy’: ‘Memory’ in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and The Prague Cemetery and ‘Oblivion’ in Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words and Whereabouts

“…The historian cannot anymore affirm that a historical fact is reality and there is a recursive confusion between reality and fiction (Benvenuti, 2012: 20–21). As Eco (1994b: 118) affirms in his Norton Lectures: “Since fiction seems a more comfortable environment than life, we try to read life as if it were a piece of fiction.” In this respect, Rodríguez-Ferrándiz (2019: 10) discusses that Eco in his novels Baudolino , Foucault's Pendulum , and The Prague Cemetery makes use of “fake historiographic documents” that had a significant impact on history.…”