by Umberto Eco
Torquato Accetto, in his Dissimulazione onesta (Honest Dissimulation, 1641), does not praise simulation, which shows something to be what it is not, but dissimulation, which is not showing something for what it is—and practices the false modesty that Kant was to condemn. For Accetto (in a century of plots, deceit, threats, and ambushes):
prudent living comes with purity of spirit … on a path strewn with obstacles it is necessary to proceed with slow and sure steps … the Gospels invite us to be shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves … he who cannot feign cannot live … and dissimulation is none other than an industry, that of not letting things be seen as they are, a veil made of honest shadows … from which men do not fashion falsehood but give the truth a little rest … If someone were to wear a mask every day he would be better known than any other … but of the excellent dissimulators of the past and the present we know nothing at all.
Indeed, Accetto, who confesses at a certain point that he published his book in a bloodless sort of way “because writing about dissimulation obliged me to dissimulate,” was so successful in this that no one paid any attention to him, and we had to wait until Benedetto Croce rediscovered his book, lying forgotten on a dusty bookshelf.
On the other hand, although Descartes did not shun fame, after Galileo’s conviction he decided not to publish the book Le monde ou traité de la lumière, which he had been working on since 1630, and so he respected the motto bene qui latuit, bene vixit, or one who lives well, lives unnoticed.
It would be easy to say that, while Accetto praises dissimulation, Baltasar Gracián in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647) praises simulation. But things are not that simple, especially for a baroque Jesuit. Gracián never ceases to assert that politics must not be confused with deception, that “only truth can give true reputation”; he accuses Machiavelli of being a valiente embustero—that is to say, a valiant liar—who “seems to have candor on his lips and purity on his tongue but spits out hellfire that sets customs and republics ablaze.” At first sight it seems that what he preaches in order to survive in his day is prudence, discretion, and reserve—because one needs “judicious caution in telling the truth that even without lying should not be told all at once” and “nothing requires caution more than the truth; telling it is like having blood drawn from your own heart. As much skill is required to tell the truth, as is required to keep silent about it.”
But there is only a short step between extreme discretion and timid simulation. Gracián knew (as Machiavelli had already counselled) that you have to be both a fox and a lion, that practical wisdom consists in knowing how to dissimulate, that cunning is more valuable than strength, that “things are held in consideration not for what they are, but for what they appear to be” and that “to be worthy and to be able to show that worth is to be worth double,” that “what cannot be seen is as if it did not exist” and “showing your cards is neither useful nor pleasant,” that “there is no perfection that does not risk being seen as barbarous if the splendor of artifice does not assist it,” that “we should not always act openly because otherwise others will notice this uniformity and will forestall and perhaps frustrate our actions,” that we must support others to obtain what we want, not reveal our weaknesses, shift the blame for our mistakes on to others, and never keep the company of those who can belittle us, and that “a good toothpaste perfumes the mouth and knowing how to sell hot air is a great subtlety of life, because most things can be paid for with words …”
Finally, “Man’s life is a war against the malice of men. Sagacity fights with strategic changes of intention: it never does what it threatens, it aims only at escaping notice. It aims in the air with dexterity and strikes home in an unexpected direction, always seeking to conceal its game. It lets a purpose appear … but then turns round and conquers by the unexpected.”
Come now, Gracián is not Accetto, and this is why his maxims were so well received in the centuries after him.
Narrative Fiction
Certain phenomenological texts on lying cite narrative fiction as a secondary and admissible case. But narrative fiction is not lying. In saying that on Lake Como a curate was threatened by two bravoes, Manzoni does not intend to lie: he pretends that the story he is recounting really happened and he asks us to take part in his fiction, suspending—as Coleridge wished—our disbelief, just like a little boy who pretends that his stick is a rifle and asks us to play along with him by pretending to be the lion he has shot dead.
In narrative fiction we do not say something untrue in order to deceive anyone, or to do them harm: we construct a possible world and ask the complicit reader or spectator to inhabit it as if it were a real world and to accept the rules that apply to it as credible (talking animals, magic, humanly impossible deeds).
Naturally, narrative fiction requires the presence of signals of fictionality. Sometimes these signals are given by the “paratext,” from the title to the denomination on the cover that says “novel,” to the information given in the cover flaps. Within the text itself, the most obvious fictional signal is the introductory formula “once upon a time …,” but there are other signals of fictionality such as beginning the narrative in medias res, starting off with dialogue, persisting with an individual rather than a general story, and so on. But there are no incontrovertible signals of fictionality.
Narrative fiction often begins with a false signal of veracity. One example may serve for all:
The author of these Travels, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, is my ancient and intimate friend; there is likewise some relation between us on the mother’s side. About three years ago, Mr. Gulliver growing weary of the concourse of curious people coming to him at his house in Redriff, made a small purchase of land, with a convenient house, near Newark, in Nottinghamshire, his native country; where he now lives retired, yet in good esteem among his neighbors.… Before he quitted Redriff, he left the custody of the following papers in my hands.… I have carefully perused them three times.… There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbors at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it.
If you look at the frontispiece and first page of the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels (1726): the name Lemuel Gulliver is given as the author of a truthful autobiography whereas there is no mention of Jonathan Swift as the author of the work of fiction it is. This is a bizarre but not infrequent case: if, given the signals of fictionality, everything appearing in the narrative goes under the heading of pretense, the cover, which excludes and denies fictionality, would in fact be mendacious. We could say that in those days the public was ready to recognize the fictionality of the “utopian voyage” genre, and that, from the True History by Lucian of Samosata (second century) onwards, exaggerated assertions of truthfulness sounded like a signal of fictionality, but often narrative fiction contains such a tightly bound assortment of precise references to the real world that, after spending a little time in a novel, and having become confused by its fantastic elements and references to reality, readers no longer know exactly where they are.
Hence the phenomenon of readers who take novels seriously as if they dealt with things that really happened and who attribute the opinions of the characters to the author. And as a writer of fiction I can assure you that beyond, say, ten thousand copies there is a shift from a public accustomed to reading novels to an unsophisticated public who see novels as a series of true statements; just as in the old Sicilian puppet theatre where, at the end of the show, the spectators would try to lynch the perfidious Gano di Maganza.
Bad Faith
Thus far the lie has seemed to be a dyadic relationship between the deceiver and the deceived. But there is a lie based on a monadic relationship and one based on a triadic relationship.
Bad faith is a monadic relationship, through which someone, who nevertheless knows the truth, lies to himself—and usually e
nds up believing it. In cases of bad faith the person who is lied to and the person who lies are one and the same, which means that, as a deceiver, I ought to know the truth that I am concealing from myself, the deceived. Perhaps the most beautiful pages on bad faith were penned by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943), where he tells us the story of a lady who agrees to go and visit a man who she knows desires her, and who should understand that, from the moment she enters that apartment, her fate is sealed. But she denies this to herself, takes her host’s words at face value when he says he admires her, and understands this admiration in a spiritual and not in a carnal sense. She refuses to perceive her host’s desire for what it is and recognizes it only insofar as it transcends itself toward admiration. But then at a certain point her host takes her hand. If she leaves it there it means that she has accepted that the relationship has taken a new turn. If she withdraws it, she will break the “troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm.”
The aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible. We know what happens next; the young woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that she is leaving it. She does not notice because it happens by chance that she is at this moment all intellect.… And during this time the divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished; the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion—neither consenting nor resisting—a thing.
The page in question is perhaps a little male-chauvinistic, but if we think of Sartre’s physical appearance, it is rather pathetic. Who knows what the lady was like.
Irony
Irony may instead be a triadic relationship, though not necessarily. With irony we say the opposite of the truth (“That’s very clever of you,” “But Brutus is an honorable man”), and irony works if the interlocutor knows what the truth is. To help him, signals of irony are used (see Harald Weinrich, The Linguistics of Lying) such as winking, clearing the throat, using a particular tone of voice and, in writing, the use of quotation marks, italics, or even (the shame of it) suspension points. And at this point irony becomes fiction. But if your interlocutor is stupid, no signal of irony is enough, and so you might as well make fun of him. And this is where irony presupposes a triadic relationship. The victim does not understand the liar’s irony (and therefore gives credence to the lie) and only a third witness to the exchange understands what the ironist meant to say—so that the ironist and the witness make fun of the victim.
Falsifying
Is there another case of the triadically structured lie? Yes, in line with the principle of falsification or counterfeiting.
The counterfeiting of a pseudo-double lends itself to false identification that occurs when A (legitimate Author), in historical circumstances t1, produces O (Original Object) while C (Counterfeiter) in historical circumstances t2 produces CO (Counterfeit Object). But CO is not necessarily a forgery because C could have produced CO as an exercise or for fun. It is likely that the Donation of Constantine was initially produced as a mere rhetorical exercise and only in the following centuries was it considered (in good or bad faith) authentic. But we are interested in the intentions of the false identifier (Identifier I) who asserts that CO is indiscernibly identical to O. Only then does CO become a Fake, and that is why false identification brings a triadic relationship into play (in which, of course, Counterfeiter and Identifier may coincide, in which case we are looking at a manifest lie, while if the Identifier is not the Counterfeiter he might make his judgment of identity in good faith, and therefore would not be lying even though he would still be saying something untrue).
For a forgery to be successful, there must be a notion of identity between two objects or individuals. And in order not to lose ourselves in Leibniz’s notion of the identity of the indiscernible, let us content ourselves with that of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (V, 9, 1018a): two things that are supposed to be different are recognized as the same if they occupy the same portion of space at the same time.
The difficulty, in the case of counterfeits, is that normally something present is put on display as if it were the original whereas the presumed original (if it exists) is somewhere else. It is therefore not possible to prove that there are two different objects that occupy two different spaces at the same time.
The counterfeit, obviously, is a success if the copy is in some way similar to the original, or to the community’s idea of the original. Otherwise, given Raphael’s widely discussed Vision of Ezekiel, no one would believe its counterfeit was similar and the problem would not exist. But certainly, with the exception of the experts, people are puzzled by the two works: which of these two paintings is a fake?
In our everyday experience, the commonest case of error owing to similarity is the one where we have difficulty in distinguishing between two tokens of the same type, as when during a party we put our drink down next to another, and then we do not know which one is ours. But in that case we are dealing with confusion between doubles.
A double is a physical token that possesses all the properties of another physical token, insofar as both have all the pertinent features prescribed by an abstract type. In this sense two chairs of the same model or two sheets of A4 printing paper are both doubles of each other. Doubles do not lend themselves to purposes of falsification and deception because, even though they are not indiscernible, they are interchangeable. It is true that a microscopic analysis could prove that two sheets of A4 paper have quite significant differences, but we usually consider that, for our purposes, one is worth the other.
Instead, we are dealing with pseudo-doubles when only one of the tokens of the type assumes, for one or more users, a particular value. In the case of collecting, particular value is attributed to a token when only one or a very few copies of a certain stamp survive, or the copy of an antique book bears the signature of the author. At this point it becomes interesting to forge a double and this is what happens with rare stamps. For the purpose of everyday trading, two banknotes of the same value should be considered doubles, and therefore interchangeable. But from a legal point of view they are different because they carry a different serial number—even though this difference becomes relevant only when a certain banknote has been used to pay a ransom or is the result of a bank robbery.
Nonetheless, interesting questions such as this one have been posed. Can we consider authentic a banknote printed (with fraudulent intent) on genuine watermarked paper, with the machinery of the issuing authority, by the director of the issuing authority, which is assigned the same number as another banknote, printed legally a few minutes before? If ever it was possible to establish which was printed first, only the first banknote would be authentic—as in the case of the birth of two royal twins, but there, however, it has been insinuated that the twin conceived first is the second to be born. Or should it be decided to destroy one of the two notes at random and consider the remaining one to be the original, which was perhaps the system used for the Man in the Iron Mask?
If the one we have examined is a case of false strong identification, we have false weak identification or presumption of interchangeability when we know perfectly well that CO cannot be identified with O, but it is held that the two objects are equivalent in terms of value and function and, since there is no precise notion of authorial originality, one is used as the equivalent of the other. This was the case for the Roman patricians who considered themselves aesthetically satisfied with a copy of a Greek statue, and perhaps had it signed “Phidias” or “Praxiteles.” And it is the same with tourists who admire a copy of Michelangelo’s David outside Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, unconcerned by the fact that the original is kept in the Galleria dell’Accademia. Perhaps the Californian visiting public admire the reproduction of the David in Forest Lawn cemetery as an original, which means that they do not have a precise idea of what an original is. Again in California I visited a wax museum in Buena Park, where the public probably enjoyed the version of David present there as an original.
Someti
mes C transforms the authentic object into a counterfeit version of itself. For example, unfaithful restorations are carried out on paintings or statues that transform the work, censor parts of the body, and break up a polyptych. Strictly speaking, those ancient works of art that we consider originals have instead been transformed by the action of time or men—and have undergone amputations, restorations, alteration or loss of color. We need only think of the neoclassical ideal of a “white” Hellenism, whereas the original temples and statues were multicolored.
But, given that any material is subject to physical and chemical alterations from the very moment of creation, then every object should be seen as a permanent counterfeit of itself. To avoid this paranoid attitude, our culture has developed flexible criteria for deciding on the physical integrity of an object. For example, from an aesthetic point of view, it is usually said that a work of art lives on its own organic integrity, which is lost if it is deprived of one of its parts. But from an archaeological point of view it is thought that, even if the same work of art has lost some parts, it is still authentically original. It so happens that the Parthenon in Athens has lost its colors, a large quantity of its original architectural features, and some of its stones. But those that remain are presumably the same ones laid down by the original builders. The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, was built in accordance with the Greek model as it appeared at the time of its splendor; it is formally complete, so much so that it is the Greek Parthenon that should be considered an alteration or a counterfeit of the one in Nashville. However, the half-temple located on the Acropolis is considered to be both more “authentic” and more “beautiful” than its American facsimile, not least because it stands in its context. In fact, the fundamental flaw in the Nashville Parthenon is that it stands on a plain and not at the top of an Acropolis.