Umberto Eco’s “Legendary” work (Logic of Lies, Part 1)

In my twenties, I turned my back on much of what I had been reading to that point. Comic books, Fantasy and SciFi novels, and indeed nearly any sort of fiction, started feeling disappointing to me. Instead, I pored over topics like history, comparative mythology, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and media theory. I rifled through books friends and family had left over from esoteric university courses, and searched lonely corners of libraries.

I would still occasionally read fiction, but only if it had been highly recommended; things like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Hundred Years of Solitude. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco was one of these.¹

Although some of the other novels I’d read might connect with one or another of my other interests, none did to quite the degree of Eco’s. Moreover, whereas the nonfiction I had been reading typically ran the gamut from somewhat stuffy to challengingly dry, he had managed to weave this same matter into a compelling work of fiction. Still more remarkable, even though it wasn’t at all dumbed down, this thriller was by turns funny, mysterious, sad, suspenseful, and many other things besides. Finally, there were numerous pop-culture references placed on an equal footing with all its lofty topics rather than being treated with disdain.

Of unabashedly arcane and dense books such as  his Foucault’s Pendulum, for which the internet provides annotations and concordances, Eco commented:²

I was always defined as too erudite and philosophical, too difficult. […] So probably I am writing for masochists. It’s only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

He was less sanguine beforehand, with some of his essays pondering who his audience was and even whether such readers existed. Regardless, I agree with his more recent sentiments in my own case. His unusual last name, handed down from his foundling grandfather, who was apparently so dubbed by an inventive civil servant as an acronym for ex caelis oblatus (L. “offered by the heavens”), which is certainly how the author seemed to me. I read everything by Eco I could get my hands on; novels, nonfiction works, essays, interviews, as well as many of the works he made references to, leading me down still other rabbit holes.

When Umberto Eco died in February of this year, I was pretty broken up about it. As part of my mourning process ,  I searched my local bookstores for anything of his that wasn’t already in my bookcase, and wishlisted the rest on Amazon—that’s not where I prefer to buy books, but it’s a good reminder of those I’m looking for. In any case, this is how I came upon The Book of Legendary Lands (BLL).³ This book contains a few disappointments, but is amazing in other ways.

It’s important to note that while the book’s title seems to suggest it’s some sort of fantasy roleplaying supplement, it’s anything but. It actually makes up a trilogy with History of Beauty and On Ugliness.⁴These may seem unrelated, but in the original Italian titles you can see they are all “histories”, though beauty and ugliness are certainly a more closely related pair. BLL actually is about places that never existed but were nonetheless obsessively searched for by explorers over decades, centuries, and even millennia, in the case of Atlantis.

Some of these “legends” relate to limited and misinterpreted information, but quite a few relate to tall-tales, forgeries, and outright lies. Eco explained why such topics intrigue him:⁵

As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying. A dog doesn’t lie. When it barks, it means there is somebody outside. […] From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.

That logic—how lies function, why they persist, what historical work they do—is the subject of this series. Eco laid the foundation in Serendipities, where he called it the force of falsity:⁶

[T]he false (not necessarily in the form of lies but surely in the form of error) has motivated many events of history […].

He observes beliefs which are entirely wrong can produce consequences which are entirely real. Columbus reached the Americas because he was wrong about the size of the Earth. The Donation of Constantine shaped European politics for centuries before anyone proved it was forged. The lie’s power does not depend on the lie being believed forever—only on it being believed long enough.

His final word on the subject, BLL, is less a book than a bibliography of that force at work—a guided tour through the places humanity has insisted are real despite all evidence. One downside of BLL is that there’s not much of Eco’s actual writing in it. Of course, as a fan, I missed it. Each chapter covers a grouping of legendary places, which he discusses the history and context of, and the writings that contributed importantly to each legend. Quotes from some of those sources round out the chapter. All of this (at least in my edition) is accompanied by amazing historical illustrations, which unfortunately is another place the book falls down: These really needed to be explained much more than they were in the brief captions afforded.

The positives definitely outweigh these issues. In many ways, this book acts as a key to Eco’s works. It’s a journey through his source materials—the writings he himself was fascinated by. One encounters The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the sewers of Paris central to the plot of The Prague Cemetery, The theories of the Antipodes and sympathetic magic of which appear in The Island of the Day Before, the fantastic Kingdom of Prester John we see in Baudolino,⁷ the false Holy Grail conspiracies on which Foucault’s Pendulum hangs, and many more. On this last point, there is also a thorough debunking of the historicity Dan Brown claims of his idiotic oeuvre on the topic, together with those that the overrated sham artist drew upon (not to say plagiarized wholesale).

Eco had a word for this: hyperreality. In Travels in Hyperreality, he describes the wax replica of The Last Supper promoted as superior:⁸

[T]he original […] is by now ruined, almost invisible, unable to give you the emotion you have received from the three dimensional wax, which is more real, and there is more of it.

The legendary land operates by the same logic. The fake place is more useful than real geography because it does work that real places can’t: it gives you somewhere to go, someone to blame, something to find. The land is legendary because it is hyperreal—more functional than the territory it replaced.

Eco’s catalog is exhausting because the phenomenon is exhausting—legendary lands don’t stop being invented, and they don’t stop being believed. What BLL demonstrates, entry after patient entry, is that the lie is never the problem. The problem is that the lie is more useful than the truth. The lands are legendary because they do work that real places can’t—and that makes them the first entry in a longer ledger of lies.

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This article is part of the Logic of Lies series

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Notes

1. Italo Calvino, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller), 1979, Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy), ca. 1321, Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), 1967, Umberto Eco, Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault’s Pendulum), 1988.
2. Stephen Moss, “Umberto Eco: ‘People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged’”, The Guardian, 2011.
3. Umberto Eco, Storia delle terre e dei luoghi leggendari (The Book of Legendary Lands), Alastair McEwen, trans., 2013.
4. Eco, Storia della bellezza (History of Beauty), 2004, Storia della bruttezza (On Ugliness), 2007.
5. Eco in Moss, 2011.
6. Eco, Serendipities: Language & Lunacy, 1998.
7. Eco, Il cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery), 2010, L’isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before), 1994, Baudolino, 2000.
8. Eco, Il costume di casa (Faith in Fakes), 1973, collected in English in Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, William Weaver, trans., 1986.

Creating cool names while shouting out your heroes

Naming things in games is something I’ve always both placed importance on and enjoyed. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, it is a form of diegesis which, while even more constrained than haiku—generally, three or four words is as many as you get—places world story and flavor unavoidably in the player’s path, as well as presenting it in a way not intruding on interaction as other story-delivery methods often do.

And so the names of places, characters, skills, and many other parts of a gameworld receive much of my focus. Items in particular are important, particularly in RPGs, where they are typically a central element of gameplay.

In ChronoBlade, an example of an item name tying into the game’s narrative was Fylkir’s Lacrimator. Filkir the Maleficent was the name of the boss who dropped this item; many of these characters were named after members of the team, as this one was, but rather than using their names directly, I’d render them into an appropriate language and with a meaning  sensible to their role.

Here, the boss was named after level designer extraordinaire Philip Mallery. The area was a Viking-Age world, so I used the Old Norse word fylkir, meaning “commander”, modifying it with “maleficent” to hearken to his last name as well as to make the boss sound properly menacing.

The character was a Cronarch Lout, a ranged type who threw grenades at heroes, so I played on the idea of a common type of grenade: tear gas. This substance is technically termed a lachrymator, but as a weapon it also makes foes cry, so the name ticked all my boxes.

We included vanity equipment in ChronoBlade, a commonly used trope, especially for multiplayer games, as they allow an extra layer of avatar appearance customization. Our vanity equipment fell outside the canon of the gameworld, so I placed cool references at an even greater premium.

For example, we had some cowboy hat-and-mustache combos, Tombstone (1993) also has those things and the war of words between “Doc” Holliday (Val Kilmer) and Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn) is one of the best on film, so I took it as my inspiration.

Eventus stultorum magister was one of the awesome Latin barbs thrown therein. It’s drawn from a longer passage Livy attributed to Consul Quintus Fabius Maximus:¹

A ratio belli gerendi adversus Hannibalem est, qua ego gessi; nec eventus modo hoc docet, stultorum iste magister est, sed eadem ratio, quae fuit futuroque, donec res eaedem manebunt, immutabilis est.

The only way of conducting the war against. Hannibal is that which I adopted: nor does the event only, that instructor of fools, demonstrate it, but that same reasoning which has continued hitherto, and will continue unchangeable so long as circumstances shall remain the same.

The original’s context is thus the strategy and tactics employed to defeat 𐤇𐤍𐤁𐤏𐤋𐤟𐤁𐤓𐤒‎ (Khanibaʿal Barqa) in the Second Punic War.

The paraphrase’s intent is simply: results are the teachers of fools—a much fancier FAFO.

As the item was facial hair, I riffed on the phrase for the name, Barborum Magister, meaning “master of mustaches”.

The Daisy Drover and The Huckleberry Plainsman rounded out the collection, each coupling a period slang word for something excellent—both of which also appeared in the film in the context of the ongoing Holliday-Ringo rivalry—with the name of a type of cowboy hat.

When we decided for a group of sports-themed vanity items, our pugilist, Aurok, got modern boxing gear. I knew right away I wanted the reference to be to Muhammad Ali. We did this as a set (which was also named), which included all three item types (head, body, and prop).

The set name was The Jungle Rumbler, maybe the most direct reference to Ali as a participant in the Rumble in the Jungle, his match with George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1974.

I stuck with that theme for the body, naming the item Rope-a-Dope Threads. Rope-a-dope was the tactic that won Ali the bout, and “dope threads” is appropriately ’70s slang for stylish clothes, so these ideas joined to form the name.

I called the padded boxing headgear the Unmarked Face-Guard, referring to Ali’s frequent comments on his prettiness and specifically not having a mark on his face.

Finally, the boxing-glove props were Whale Tusslers; Ali claimed:¹

I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.

Requiescat in pace, champ.

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Notes

1. Titus Livius (Livy), Ab Urbe Condita Libri (Books from the Founding of the City), 22.39.9–10, 27–9 BCE, Daniel Spillan, trans., 1881.
2. I’ve since learned from the Eddie Murphy film, Dolemite Is My Name, 2019, that this originates in African-American folklore.