A Comparative Analysis by Denver Ellis
Umberto Eco’s 2003 book concerns the life and adventures of Baudolino as he travels across Western Europe and the Near East during the late Middle Ages. The novel explores the intertwined natures of fact and fiction through its intricate use of irony, paradox, and unreliable narration. These same devices are employed by the obscure pseudo-historical figure “Sir John of Mandeville” in his wildly popular account of his travels to the limits of the known world, (or the world known Europeans.) This essay is attempt to understand Baudolino through the lens of this historical counterpart.
Abstract:
What is the status of a “real fiction”? How do falsehoods produce truths and visa-versa? In this paper I will offer a brief, comparative analysis of Baudolino (2003) and The Travel’s of Sir John of Mandeville, (a modern novel by Umberto Eco and a popular medieval travelogue,) both tales that address these questions. My aim will be to describe the ways in which both works approach reality through fiction. Drawing from Eco scholarship, I content that Baudolino explicitly confronts the paradoxical nature of fiction and collapses this paradox into that of history by depicting history as a fictional — but real — construct. Analogously, The Travels of Sir John of Mandeville uses certain textual devices to imply its own constructedness and undermine its empirical veracity, while at the same asserting its status as a historical account. In my view, the primary similarity between these two works consist in their identical conception of history as appearing through — and not merely within — texts.
Introduction:
Extensive scholarship has been done on characteristic “postmodern” formal techniques of Umberto Eco’s corpus, particularly Baudolino. Generally speaking, critics and academics have emphasized the novel’s elaborate conflation of fact and fiction, the polysemous or layered associative nature of plot elements, and the persistence of esoteric details that lends a “detective thriller” aspect to this work. Furthermore, the novel is deeply indebted to several travel narratives and canon literary texts of the Middle Ages that we have encountered — namely, the anonymous Letter of Prester John, The Travels of Sir John of Mandeville, The Alexander Romances and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, among others. While acknowledging the importance of this scholarship concerning Eco’s semiotic intricacies and the polygeneric aspects of Baudolino, my goal in this essay is to connect this scholarship with some of the historical and literary themes concerning epistemology and ontology by
From a modern perspective, it may be tempting to dismiss these medieval sources as (at best) elaborate literary fancies or (at worst) misleading and unempirical products of a parochial mind-set. Using one of the novel’s intertextual references — The Travels of Sir John of Mandeville — as an example, I argue that Baudolino offers a model for understanding this source. Just as Baudolino suggests that fictions may speak to real desires and satisfy real needs (even if they are not “true” in a strict sense,) so can said medieval narrative be understood as serving an ideological — rather than strictly documentary — function.[1]
Section I:
“The problem of my life is that I’ve always confused what I saw with what I’ve wanted to see… with me, whenever I said I saw this, or found this letter that says thus and so (and maybe I’d written it myself), other people seemed to have been waiting for that very thing. You know… when you say something you’ve imagined, and others then say that’s exactly how it is, you end up believing it yourself” (Baudolino, p. 30.)
Baudolino follows the life of the titular protagonist during the latter half of the 12th Century and the beginning of the 13th Century, from his humble beginnings as a peasant in northern Italy, to his becoming the advisor and adoptive son of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederic Barbarossa, attending the University of Paris, and embarking on an epic peregrination to the far East to discover the legendary kingdom of “Prester John”. What begins as a seemingly conventional work of historical fiction gradually shifts into the genre of fantasy, though the precise borders between the two are obscured by the contiguity of the “realistic” West, (a Europe populated by actual historical figures and shaped by actual historical events,) and a “fantastic” East, (a land populated by the illusory kingdom of “Prester John” as well as “monstrous races” of humanoids.)
Most of the novel is represented as Baudolino’s autobiography, as recounted to Niketas Choniates, a Byzantine chronicler who was an actual historical figure. Against the backdrop of the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade (1204), Baudolino saves Niketas from the marauding bands of Western European invaders and promises a safe route out of the city for him while they take temporary refuge with Baudolino’s Genoese friends. Niketas tells Baudolino “I will repay you by giving you back the past you have lost,” that is, by listening to and chronicling Baudolino’s life story. (p. 12)
By means of a subtle framing device, Eco conflates the perspective of Niketas with the perspective of the reader, effectively placing the reader “in” the novel and interpolating her as Baudolino’s interlocutor; this is achieved as Chapter 2 begins, when it is revealed that the contents of Chapter 1 are an autobiographical document that Baudolino is presenting Niketas (in fact, a palimpsest.) (p. 11) Niketas (and so, the reader) is aware that Baudolino’s tale may include falsehoods, or indeed be entirely false, but he is also aware of Baudolino’s particular compulsion to tell his story: “It’s not that I don’t remember the facts,” Baudolino states, “but I’m not able to give them a meaning. After everything that’s happened to me… I have to talk to somebody or else I’ll go crazy,” though he expresses earlier the concern that his tale may be “meaningless,” to which Niketas responds, “no story is meaningless” (p. 22, p. 11.) As such, is not only up to Niketas to give meaning to Baudolino’s compulsive tale, but the reader of the novel as well.
Eco writes elsewhere, apropos fiction: “the basic rule in dealing with a work of fiction is that the reader must tacitly accept a fictional agreement: The reader has to know that what is being narrated is an imaginary story, but he must not therefore believe that the writer is telling lies… [T]he author simply pretends to be telling the truth. We accept the fictional agreement and we pretend that what is narrated has really taken place” (Eco, quoted in Nishavita Murthy: “Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History: Representation in Select Novels of Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk”, p. 60.) This begs the question: if fictionalized accounts — like the novel and Baudolino’s tale — are meaningful, (as Niketas and Eco suggest,) what constitutes their meaning, especially if the reader tacitly agrees that they are not strictly true? What, if anything, distinguishes Baudolino from a liar?
Sabine Mercer describes Baudolino’s narration as “a persuasive tale of serendipitous events in which he claims to be the catalyst of many historical myths, legends and fables that were passed on because they satisfy a deeply rooted human need for explanatory stories to make sense of the world” (Mercer, p. 19, emphasis added.) If we accept this description, what Baudolino offers Niketas and the reader is the satisfaction of a “need” for a coherent view — or “sense” — of the world, an ideologically potent cosmography. Speaking to this ideological potency, Eco has put a version of the liar’s paradox in Baudolino’s mouth, effectively barring his narrative from being either strictly true or strictly false and thereby making it almost impossible not to attribute some “sense” to his tale. Niketas points out: “You [Baudolino] are like the liar of Crete: you tell me you’re a confirmed liar and insist I believe you” (p. 40.) The metafictional implications of such a statement are somewhat dizzying. If Baudolino insists he is a liar in a work of fiction, is he not telling the truth? Then does not the work cease to be fiction? It is both true and false at the same time, a true fiction.
Further, the liar’s paradox is particularly adapted to main historical themes of Baudolino. Through Baudolino’s prowess as a raconteur and fabulist, he effectively creates and disseminates a cosmography according to specific spatial and geographical dimensions, based on traditional European notions of the far East, shaping world events according to the lies he tells. For example, While at the University of Paris during the first half of the novel, the kingdom of Prester John figures as a spectral presence invoked by the rumors of his peers and his prodigious assimilation of various literary texts. Eco positions Baudolino as an ideal conduit for invoking Prester John’s mythical presence, for not only does he have an almost supernatural aptitude for learning languages, but he is a voracious reader who “ransacks” the libraries of Paris. (p. 68) What begins as a pipe dream that Baudolino shares with his cohort about a Christian kingdom in the East soon bleeds over into reality, and the group even produce their own contributions to the medieval literary cannon by forging the legendary Letter of Prester John. The letter highlights the dazzling surfeit and mirabilia of the Christian king’s realm with the intention to convince Frederick Barbarossa to support an expedition to the far East. However, the letter is filched by a rival, the letter begins circulating in the courts of Europe, and as it becomes an influential document, Baudolino and his companions begin to believe the “lies” they have fabricated. And Baudolino’s manipulation of history does not end there. He later steals a cup from his father’s house and “transforms” it into a holy relic: the “Grasal” or “Holy Grail”. When Niketas hears this, he quickly accuses Baudolino of bearing “false witness” and committing sacrilege, to which Baudolino responds: “That cup may truly have existed, if Our Lord had used it… I was restoring the Grasal to Christianity. God would not have contradicted me. The proof is that even my companions believed in it immediately” (p. 280, emphasis added.) According to Baudolino, it is the authenticity of belief that constitutes “proof” of something — and indeed, it is difficult to contradict him when one considers the prevalence and influence of a myth like that of Prester John, which continued to compel European world explorers into the 16th century. (Of course, it is also impossible to contradict him given the nature of the liar’s paradox.) Elsewhere, in his non-fictional work, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, Eco formulates this constructivist position as follows: “our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false… the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on a constant awareness of the fallibility of our knowledge [so we should] constantly call into question the very tales we believe to be true…” (quoted in Farronato, Eco’s Chaosmos : From the Middle Ages to Postmodernity) By revealing the real potency of what we now recognize as falsehoods, both Eco and Baudolino point to the real-world impact of falsehoods — in constituting a persuasive Weltbild, and thus causing the categories of the true and false to overlap.
***
Baudolino and his friends eventually embark on their journey to the land of Prester John. On their way to Prester John’s Kingdom, they eventually arrive in the land of Pndapetzim, a supposed vassal of Prester John inhabited by the same monstrous races that feature in Pliny and Mandeville’s travels. (see Section II) Although Baudolino and his friends are struck by the monstrous races’ physical appearances, the latter distinguish themselves from one another not based on physiological features, but based on whether or not they “think right” theologically speaking; each race has adopted a distinct heterodox brand of Christianity that has historically been suppressed in Western Europe: Arianism, Bogomilism, Manichaeism, Messalianism, etc. (p. 368) Here, notably, race and personal identity are products of belief. what distinguishes the land of Pndapetzim from Baudolino’s Europe is a precise inversion of values: what is orthodox in one, is heterodox in another; yet they both operate in the same register established through the course of the novel: that is, a world in which belief constitutes fact.
As if to further underscore this relation of defining oneself against an “other”, the it is telling that the inhabitants of Pndapetzim are riddled with anxieties about their own racial outsiders, a group of warrior nomads that are called “The White Huns”; and that furthermore, this section culminates in Baudolino’s sexual and romantic congress with a centaur, Hypatia, a member of a race of female Amazon warriors (also representing an inversion of traditional European values, in this instance patriarchal authority.) This would all seem to suggest a Weltbild based on a system of complementary inversions.
Finally, the novel ends with Baudolino, now an elderly man, departing once more towards the land of Prester John. Niketas, in conversation with his friend and fellow chronicler, Paphnutius, decides not to record the chronicle of Baudolino, and holds the following exchange with the latter, not without a degree of metafictional irony: “‘It was a beautiful story. Too bad no one will find out about it.’” Paphnutius responds: “‘You surely don’t believe you’re the only writer of stories in this world. Sooner or later, someone — a greater liar than Baudolino — will tell it’” (p. 521.) Of course, paradoxically, Eco is that liar.
Section II. Mandeville’s Antipodes
“History, although ultimately a material reality (a presence), is shown to exist always within ‘textual’ boundaries. History, to this extent, is also ‘fictional’, also a set of ‘alternative worlds” — Patricia Waugh (quoted in Sabine Mercer, “Truth and Lies in Umberto Eco’s Baudolino”)
Like Baudolino, The Travels of Sir John of Mandeville interweaves a number of texts and literary traditions concerning Asia and Africa (or “the antipodes”); and also like Baudolino, Mandeville’s Travels includes a number of formal devices that seem both to affirm undermine its own veracity. I argue that they both suggest a virtually identical cosmography.
Beginning with “Greece” (Byzantium) and the Holy Land (Jerusalem and its environs) the first half of Mandeville’s Travels is an extensive (if not exhausting) mapping of holy places and holy relics, an effective transposition of Biblical texts onto the landscape. Though he is depicting unfamiliar lands (at least unfamiliar to most Western Europeans,) Mandeville implicitly confirms the common understandings of his readership, largely through his reliance on contemporary European accounts. In his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, (cited below, pp. 9- 42) C.W.R.D. Mosley specifically identifies at least thirteen texts that Mandeville’s Travels definitely uses as “sources” (p. 19), whether directly or indirectly, from which he derives details that are subsumed in the itinerary-like master narrative of the Travels.
Also as in Baudolino, the depiction of monstrous races and outlandish polities and nations in Mandeville’s Travels to naturalize “the other” by containing it within a polarized framework of what is normal and what is extraordinary,in a geographical framework. Exotic lands are not represented as they are in themselves, but as the obverse of known (Western European) civilization, as illustrated by Mandeville’s peculiar climatological scheme. Mandeville states that “each part of the Earth and the sea has its opposite, which always balances it. And understand that to my way of thinking the land of Prester John is exactly below us…. They have day when we have night and we have night when they have day…For just as it seems to us that those men there are under us, so it seems to them that we are under them” (pp. 128–129.) Further, “because Saturn is slow moving, men who live under her in that climate [that is, India’s] have no great desire to move about much,” as opposed to English men, who, because they are in the “climate under the moon… the traveler’s planet”, are supposedly more travel-oriented. (p. 120) In the vision of the world described in Mandeville’s Travels, these antipodean lands embody inversions of conventional values systems withal, featuring a litany of “monstrous races” that — as in Baudolino — still possess something of a universal degree of humanity, being described as “men that grow in different shapes”, men that eat their children, children that are born with grey hair, etc., etc. (p. 118, p. 127, p. 136, emphasis added)
Finally, there are several devices the narrator uses to point to the textual — if not fictional — nature of his account. For one, he makes repeated references his audience in the second person, references which seem to urge the reader to verify his claims for themselves rather than simply take Mandeville at his word. For instance, frequently begins sentences with variations on “you must understand” (p. 81, p. 76, p. 86) and “you ought to know p. 91, p. 104, p. 111], among other injunctive formulations that shift the burden of proof away from Mandeville. When the narrator does refer to his personal experiences, he often diminishes them, relying on episodes that are impossible to verify — such as a private audience with the Sultan (p. 107) or drinking from the Fountain of Youth with a band of (conveniently) unnamed travelers (p. 126); moreover he often ends his descriptions with the conclusion that he cannot speak of certain, for instance, because he “has not been there,” or that he “does not know; only God knows,” again stressing the contingency of his account on his own fallible perception. (p. 92, p. 103, p. 184) If Mandeville — who is not known to have actually existed — was merely a narrative device to consolidate a variety of conventional “historical” sources into a global text, why include this admission of perceptual limitations at all?
“There are many other countries and other marvels which I have not seen, and so I cannot speak of them properly; and also in the countries I have been to there are many marvels which I have not spoken of, for it would be too long to tell of them all… and so I shall cease telling of the different things I saw in those countries, so that those who desire to visit those countries may find enough new things to speak of for the solace and recreation of those whom it pleases to hear them” (Mandeville’s Travels, p. 188.)
These concluding lines of Mandeville’s Travels seem to confirm Waugh’s characterization of history — namely, that although history refers to something that actually exists, it is only communicated through textual representations that may be fictional, but not necessarily false. While By stating that it “would be too long” to tell of all his experiences, Mandeville establishes the length of his writing, the delimitations of text itself, as determining the content thereof.
Conclusion
To conclude briefly, if a text is a kind of “world”, as Waugh indicates, then both Baudolino and Mandeville’s Travels are both highly intertextual, in addition to being intermundial (or existing between worlds); for not only are they structured around existing texts and conventional tales, but they are both engaged in consolidating those worlds into an overarching scheme that includes acknowledgements — tacit, implicit or explicit — of its own constructedness. My goal in this presentation to sign-post the manner in which this Weltbild is achieved by formal gestures that reach beyond the text rather than detail the contents of these “worlds” exhaustively. In Baudolino this gesture is presented by the liar’s paradox, but in Mandeville’s Travels this overreaching gesture is indicated by the constant reinscription of the content-conditioning limits of the text in the form of an implicit disclaimer that the narrator — if real in any sense — somehow exceeds the text; he does not know everything that he references and has not included everything that he knows.
Perhaps now we can explain Mandeville’s claim halfway through the Travels, that “now that I have told you of the many kinds of people who live in these countries, I will once more turn to my theme and tell you how one can return from those countries to these.” (p. 99) It is as if Mandeville — the character, the narrator, the author, maybe the text itself — is saying: “Go and see these things for yourself. Don’t take my word for it, but go beyond my word and see the Earth with your own eyes. ‘I have not myself been there.’ And if I had, it would be too long to describe that here.” []
Bibliography
Eco, U. (2000). Baudolino. New York: Harcourt Inc.
Mandeville, S. J. (2005). The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. (C. Moseley, Trans.) London: Penguin Classics.
Farronato, Cristina. (2003) Eco’s Chaosmos: From the Middle Ages to Postmodernity, University of Toronto Press.
Murthy, Nishevita J. (2014) Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History: Representation in Select Novels of Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Mercer, Sabine. (2011) Philosophy and Literature; Baltimore; Vol. 35, Iss. 1, 16–31.
[1] I use “ideology” throughout the paper in an admittedly broad sense, simply as shorthand for historical belief system, effectively substitutable for the “common knowledge” of a given time period. For a more precise exploration of the material basis of ideology and its concrete systems of distribution, see Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1971), accessed on: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm
Image Credits
Beatus Map: John Williams, The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the Illustration of the Commentary on the Apocalypse, Volume I:Introduction
Monsterous Races: Image accessed at http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_travels_of_sir_john_mandeville
