Umberto Eco speaks about his upcoming title, The Book of Legendary Lands, which will be published November 19.
Why do you focus on imaginary lands?
This book is not concerned with fictional places alone. There are excellent dictionaries of fictional places, and if I had to describe the infinite places told by narrators of every time, from the islands of Gulliver to the house of Madame Bovary, I would have needed hundreds and hundreds of pages. I am dealing instead with those places that many people believed to have really existed, like the Earthly Paradise or Atlantis. Occasionally I mention fictional places, but only when they have been "reconstructed" for touristic purposes, like Sherlock Holmes's apartment on Baker Street.
What appeals to you about imaginary lands?
I have always been fascinated by fakes and forgeries. I have dedicated to this subject many academic papers and a book that in America was entitled Travels in Hyperreality and in Great Britain appeared as Faith in Fakes. Once I wrote an essay about the "Force of False," that is, telling about historical events that have been created by imaginary documents. The letter of Prester John, a fake produced in the Middle Ages, speaking of a Christian empire existing in the Far East (and later in Africa), encouraged many travelers and explorers to visit unknown lands to find the kingdom. Some of the results of false documents were positive, others tragically negative: the forgery called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion contributed to the Holocaust.
Of the lands featured in your book, which one do you think really existed?
Many legends have been created about things that perhaps really happened. It is still debated if Atlantis truly existed in prehistoric times; it is not impossible. I am interested in the force of this legend that circulated and still circulates both among serious researchers and among mystery hunters. Other legendary lands stemmed from human desires, like the Eldorado with its fountain of eternal youth. Many travelers were convinced it existed and identified it with the newfound American territories. Their faith in the legend led to real explorations.
What about these lands appeals to you?
It is the story of human illusions and the desperate wish of human beings to believe in something better than the actual world. A typical case is the story of Rennes-le-Chateau, still visited by the readers of Dan Brown. It has been definitely demonstrated even by French tribunals that everything was due to a hoax concocted by a certain Plantard, starting from few disconnected rumors about the deed of a priest of this village in the Nineteenth Century. But authors like Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln produced a book (The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) about the legend that was immensely popular and that probably inspired The Da Vinci Code. The whole story of Rennes-le-Chateau is a contemporary legend, but all the visitors still going there are a reality, thus witnessing the power of our illusions.