Truth and lies in Umberto Eco's Baudolino

Abstract

Is Baudolino an ambiguous game about truth and lies? Eco's medieval metafiction entertains with philosophical insights about the makings and meanings of truth. Systems of knowledge and the plurality of interpretation lead to a proliferation of truth-claims that show truth as being conceptional, provisional, manipulated by knowledge/power systems, or as dependent on perception. The confusion of textual worlds with the empirical world and a reversed logic of cause and effect produce paradoxical truth-effects, whereas possibility is the precondition for hope; hope that can bring into being the desires and dreams that are part of the stories we tell about ourselves.