Re-read review: Baudolino, by Umberto Eco
It is a sad commentary on our times that if you type “Umberto Eco” into a search engine, one of the first suggestions will be “…Ur-fascism”, his essay on identifying the essential features of that ideology. It is an excellent article1, but Eco was primarily a professor of semiotics (communication of meaning) and a writer of historical fiction. “The Name of the Rose” is probably best known, since it got a movie adaptation starring Sean Connery. But I would argue that as a novel “Baudolino” is a more accessible option, being a fanciful adventure with a charismatic protagonist as well as an exploration of how we find meaning in our own story and those of others – with less of an assumption that the reader speaks 3 or 4 languages!
1. In describing his qualifications for writing it, Eco notes: “I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.” The partisans were his childhood heroes.
The titular Baudolino is an usually upwardly-mobile 12th century Italian peasant and an extremely unreliable narrator. We - and the historian Niketas to whom he is telling his tale - meet Baudolino at the sack of Constantinople during the 4th crusade. He isn’t a crusader, though. The one thing that is almost certainly true about Baudolino’s story is that he hates killing - if only because this statement is tantamount to admitting cowardice in that violent age - and will use all his considerable wiliness to avoid it. He is an unreliable narrator, though, as he himself admits:
“The problem with my life is that I’ve always confused what I saw with what I wanted to see…whenever I said I saw this, or I 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.”
With that begins a singular tour of the Medieval world, which only gets stranger the farther from his homeland Baudolino travels.
Young Baudolino always had a gift for languages. In his first try at writing his own story he said:
My father Gauliaudo always used to say I must have a gift of Santa maria of Roboreto because since I was a little pup if someboddy say just V words I could do their talk right off…anyway even when I met the first Alamannii in my life who were laying seege to Terdona, all Toische and nasty and they say rousz and Myn got…and they woiud say to me Kint go find us a pretty Frouwe…lousy shitty Hunns, you needn’t think I’m going to tell you where the Frouws are, I’m no informer, keep jerking off. Mamma mia, they like to killed me.
But he gets lucky with guiding one German through the fog, who proves to be the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick, AKA Barbarossa. Frederick sort of adopts Baudolino, after the boy lies him up a miraculous vision of victory. He is taught to read and write and is even sent to the university in Paris. But, before that, his tutor plants in his mind the idea of Prester John, a Christian prince living somewhere in the far east, noting that a quest for such a land could give their beloved emperor a purpose that would lift him out of his eternal wars in Italy and toward something greater.
In the meantime, Baudolino makes friends in Paris and falls in love with the empress (who is only a few years older than he). He writes imaginary love letters back and forth between them that I strongly suspect are those most dubiously attributed to Abelard and Heloise. He and his friends discuss the kingdom of Prester John, and start crafting a letter2 from John to Frederick. They work in all sorts of wonders, including the holy grail…though they have some trouble agreeing what that is!:
“But what’s this Grasal like? Devil take it!” “Don’t curse. It’s a cup.” “How do you know if it’s under a velvet cloth?” “I know because I know,” Boron said stubbornly. “They told me.” “May you be damned through the centuries and tormented by a thousand demons! You seem to have a vision, and then you tell us what you’ve been told and can’t see? Why, you’re worse than that asshole Ezekiel...” “Peace, you blasphemer!” Solomon interjected. “…The Bible is a holy book also for you, you loathesome gentiles!”
Baudolino returns to his homeland to find a new city being raised to oppose Frederick. The emperor, of course, feels obliged to lay siege to it, but Baudolino is able to bring a peaceful end to the war with another of his tricks. He gets married, but his young wife dies in childbirth after getting trampled, and the stillborn child:
“It was a little monster…like the ones we imagined in the land of Prester John…with little arms that looked like a polyp’s tentacles. And from its belly to its feet it was covered with fine white hair…I was a liar and I had lived the life of a liar to such a degree that even my seed had produced a lie…I decided that if this was my fate, it was useless for me to try to become like other men.”
That actually turns out to be some interesting foreshadowing…if, of
course, Baudolino isn't just borrowing from what really happened to fuel his lies.
2. There is indeed a forged letter purporting to be from Prester John that circulated in 1165, probably originating from the Byzantine court. Baudolino claims this was plagiarized from his version! It does seem to contain Italian and Hebrew words.
Baudolino and his friends, carrying a “holy grail” that is really his birth father’s old wooden cup – appropriate for the son of a carpenter, as Indiana Jones figured out! - join Frederick on the 3rd crusade. However, while staying at a castle in Armenia, they find the Emperor mysteriously and suddenly dead. Fearing they will be blamed (and, indeed, they even suspect each other somewhat) they take Frederick to the river, for he was fond of early morning swims, and pretend that he drowned. Then they set out after the one member of their company who has fled, toward the kingdom of Prester John, carrying several fake heads of John the Baptist to finance their journey. Before he returns to Constantinople and meets Niketas, Baudolino becomes responsible for several more stories and false relics, including the Shroud of Turin.
The tale frequently plays with which is more fantastical – the real world or the things we imagine. After all, when one fellow tells Baudolino of the origin of silk: “In Tzinista there exist some tiny eggs…they produce little worms. These are set on mulberry leaves, which nourish them. When they are grown they spin silk from their bodies and wrap themselves in it…”, Baudolino’s thought is: “There’s no trusting a man who wants to make you believe silk comes from worms.” Similarly, the land ruled over by the Deacon John is full of all the fantastical monsters imagined by medieval geographers that we know don’t exist – headless Blemyae with eyes where their nipples should be, Skiapods with one giant foot, Ponces with horse hooves and their penis on their chest – but each race holds a specific real Christian heresy and say all the others "think wrong". The arguments sound so silly you’d think they were made up, but they at one time had very real consequences. Baudolino also tells the Deacon tales of the West that make reality fantastical:
“I told him how the Alps are covered with a soft white substance that in summer dissolves…I listed for him the wondrous animals of my country, the stag, who has two great horns in the form of a cross…the lizard, which is like a crocodile, but so small it can pass beneath a door, the cuckoo, who lays her eggs in the nest of other birds”
Which pieces of the Medieval mindset get carried through into Baudolino’s
way of telling his story is perhaps slightly inconsistent. Baudolino is a
pretty chill and tolerant guy, even by our standards. He becomes a close friend
of one of the Skiapods who is, therefore, humanized. But among the “fantastical
beings” are pygmies and Nubians, who are seen as both violent and childlike,
and Baudolino never really gets to know one to dispel that idea. Similarly, it
is a little disturbing that of the “hypatias” - a group of female philosophers
who are the intellectual descendants of Hypatia of Alexandria - the
only individual we get to know falls a bit into the “born sexy yesterday” trope, finding Baudolino amazing mainly because he’s the only man she’s ever
seen. At least there Baudolino realizes, in retrospect, that his dream of taking
her home as his bride would have ruined her life! She does give a pretty good description of Gnosticism.
Overall recommendation: Worth checking out, if you are a fan of fantasy and/or medieval history. It is a little dense, but you can certainly learn a lot looking up which bits of Baudolino’s story are actually true - more than you’d probably guess on first reading, and even the bits he makes up are indeed things that used to be taken as fact.
