I share Walter Stephens’s love of books, albeit not his boundless erudition. I must say that although I came across the work of Annius of Viterbo in my research into fakes and forgeries, what encouraged me to find all his works was Stephens’s weighty tome Giants in Those Days, with what I believe is a complete bibliography of all the forgeries by Annius of Viterbo and his pseudonym Berossos.1 So I can only agree about the function that Stephens assigns to bibliographical citation in my novels.
Paradoxically, I should say that most of my novels hinge on fakes and there is nothing better, in order to attest to the existence of a fake, than for it to have been actually produced and taken very seriously by someone. And in the course of writing for this volume I have touched on the function, in my view, of research into a fake: it is one of the ways of wondering whether something else is true.
But perhaps there is an additional element. My novels are fundamentally realistic. In talking about an epoch, especially if it is remote, I have always tried to have the reader understand something of that period. Even Baudolino, who lives by fake documents and fantasies of impossible worlds, talks about things that were taken very seriously at the time. The animals of the kingdom of Prester John did not exist but those who shared the legend of that mysterious realm firmly believed in them.
In order to be a realist in a novel it is necessary: (i) that the characters, even if imaginary, do or think what others really did; (ii) that the descriptions of lands and countryside—so to speak—be photographed from life (and that is what I did, visiting every country I described); finally, (iii) that even the books that the characters read or might have read must have really existed. Hence the tendency to quote works, as if they were characters or events in the story I tell. As Stephens puts it: “books are characters for Eco, as much as fictive or historical personages are.”
I like the fact that Stephens has elected as the central character—albeit not a very frequently cited one—of my stories the Philobiblon of Richard de Bury, seeing him (far too kind!) as my forerunner. This certainly holds for the love of books: as for the love for the incredible and the unusual I would have given preference to Athanasius Kircher—with whom, moreover, I started my semiological, curious, magical, lunatic, and pneumatic Library.
I am only too glad that Stephens decided to dedicate his learned thoughts to me.
U.E.
NOTE
1. Walter Stephens, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). [Ed.]