This is less a coherent essay about fantasy and more a riff on a theme. To be honest, I’ve been busy with another project that’s wrapping up now, and haven’t had much time to read or think about anything else, even with the world on lockdown. But I wanted to open up a space for conversation tonight, and to assure you I’m not dead, not even a little. It was occasioned by a great friend telling me that he was re-reading Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, one of my favorite books.
My friend told me he found it hard-going; he had forgotten how dense the book is, and he found he was not much liking it. I told him I adored it, if only because in it Eco accomplishes the damn near impossible. That’s not all of it, but it’s a big part.
If you haven’t read the book, skip this next paragraph, because there be spoilers. Okay?
Foucault’s Pendulum is about conspiracy theory and the power of belief. The main characters, as a scam, pitch a group of eccentric and true-believing nutjobs on the idea that they can trace down what one might call the Unified Field Theory of Conspiracies—that a powerful cabal secretly runs everything and has left hints and traces of their machinations all around through history and culture, mostly in hermetic texts. The money’s good. Halfway through the novel, they (and we as readers) begin to believe that the crackpots might just be right. After convincing us that this secret brotherhood really is behind the scenes pulling all the strings, Eco flips the script and shows it all to be a sham. Except now the true believers think that their researchers are in on the plot and have betrayed them. The book ends with the narrator waiting for his murderers to arrive because he’s out of places to run, and they simply can’t accept that they might be wrong. It’s a master stroke: Eco takes us from skepticism to belief and back to skepticism. Which is damn near impossible to pull off, but he does it.
Granted, Foucault’s Pendulum is a tough read. I tend to think it’s a book that goes down best in great gulps rather than, say, Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, which is best sipped and savored. It’s a testament to the power of True Belief which, when it goes wrong, is one of the most destructive forces on the planet.
Can you see where I’m going with this?
So I’ve been jogging around with Foucault’s Pendulum in my head. Then Orhan Pamuk’s Snow and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist joined in and radical pastors in the U.S. called for the faithful to break quarantine and go to church for Easter, pitting public health against personal belief, and I’ve come to think that one of the main consolations of novels is that they feed our skepticism. They’re our innoculation against falling into fanaticism of all kinds. People who are steadfastly sure of their personal truths have no room for anyone else’s; novels require you to slide into someone else’s skin. They explicitly warn against narrow-minded belief.
In the Foreigner series, C.J. Cherryh makes the same point, repeatedly, but rarely as explicitly as this speech by Nomari in Convergence:
I think you know—that there was a faction, and may be a faction, so convinced that humans will change us, that they changed us….I know very little about humans, but I care very little about them, too. They are not the monsters. The monsters were the ones who killed their own brothers and sisters so we could then go kill the humans. (p. 228)
Cherryh makes this same point with other cultures and in other novels as well—that believing so steadfastly in one thing makes monsters of us. It enables us to be inhumane; being right requires everyone else to be wrong. And that’s not only arrogant and uncivil, it’s plain stupid. It leads to cruelty; it leads to murder. It can lead to genocide—it has before and will again. Unquestioning belief demands absolute obedience, and both dystopic literature and current political events offer proofs of just how much a true believer has to give up in order to belong to the body of true believers.
It’s a point that’s been heavily on my mind lately; with so many strident voices in public life each declaring it has a monopoly on truth, with well-funded political forces assaulting the very idea of truth, holding on to skepticism in the service of humanity is a fine goal. One that might even get us through quarantine—that, and a big library.
