Conspiracy theories and literary ethics: Umberto Eco, Danilo Kis and The Protocols of Zion

Comparative Literature, Spring 1999 by Boym, Svetlana

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 called "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 anothermore 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 fictional 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.

Conspiracy theories flourish at a time of crisis, of political and social change. Many modern conspiracy theories in the West can be traced to the English and the French revolution, or even to religious wars and crusades such as the massacre of Cathars in Southern France and the disappearance of the Templars. Yet twentieth-century conspiracy theories are rarely engaged with actual history. Instead they appeal to myth and end up exemplifying what Eco calls "Ars Oblivionalis" rather than the art of memory. The conspiratorial world view is fundamentally nostalgic. Its revival in modern times reflects a nostalgia for a transcendental cosmology and a quasi-religious world view dominated by an order of similarities and analogies. The conspiratorial world view is based on a single transhistorical plot that explains all historical events, and the specificity of modern circumstances is thus erased; modern history is seen as a fulfillment of ancient prophesies. Nostalgic for the mythical age of purity or innocence, conspiracy theories often forget or ignore actual collective memories of the recent past and abdicate any responsibility for actions in the present. Contemporary conspiratorial theater thus contains an element of the medieval mystery play and a touch of nineteenth-century melodrama: here premodern fantasies coexist with modern problems and postmodern technology.

The end of the second millennium has witnessed a rebirth of conspiracy theories. Left and right are equally prone to conspiratorial plottings-from the historically rooted conspiratorial imagination of Oliver Stone's JFK to the more transcendental world conspiracy of Pat Robertson's New World Order, the central text of the Christian Coalition. Conspiracy theories are as international as the supposed conspiracies they are fighting against; they spread from post-communist Russia to Japan to all parts of the globe. Usually there is a secret/sacred conspiratorial text-The Book of Illuminati, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Terence Diaries (favored by the American militia movement)-that functions like a Bible and is read as a revelation or a prophesy rather than a text written or compiled by an individual author; it invites incantation, not critical interpretation. Moreover, the production and distribution of these books is also secret and is executed "outside" the official "corrupt media magnates."