Grove Koger
Those of us fascinated by imaginary places are surely akin to “islomanes”—individuals who, in Lawrence Durrell’s classic formulation in Reflections on a Marine Venus, “find islands somehow irresistible.” They “are the direct descendants of the Atlanteans,” Durrell continues, “and it is towards the lost Atlantis that their subconscious yearns throughout their island life.” Which leads us quite naturally to …
Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Newly updated and expanded. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 2000.
On a small enough island, you can enjoy the fantasy that you might well be the master of all you survey. But in the case of an imaginary one, you are the master. You share your kingdom with a writer and a few of his or her characters, of course, but if they behave tediously, they run the risk of being put back on the bookshelf.
In honor of this fascinating phenomenon, Manguell and Guadalupi published the first edition of their Dictionary in 1980 and new edition in 2000. It’s more than 750 pages in length—a testament to the hold that the concept’s possibilities have exercised on the minds of writers for millennia.
The earliest place I find discussed in the book is—no surprise—Plato’s perennially intriguing invention, which the famous philosopher described in the 4th century BCE. We read that Atlantis was “a vast island-continent submerged under the waters of the Atlantic towards the year 9560 BC; parts of it are still inhabited and can be visited.” The entry runs to three pages, thanks in part to a diagram of the island continent’s obsessively circular capital, and mentions that one Professor Maracot discovered Atlantis’s remains underwater in 1926, and that, what’s more, a party of Frenchmen happened upon other remains of Atlantis in 1897 in—the Sahara! A bibliography at the end of the entry helpfully identifies the specific dialogues in which Plato described his legendary concept, as well as two other works: L’Atlantide by Pierre Benoit, and The Maracot Deep by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. (I’ll be writing about both, along with Atlantis itself, down the line.)
Here also are Norman Douglas’s Nepenthe (from South Wind), Jan Morris’s Hav (from Last Letters from Hav and Hav of the Myrmidons), Anthony Hope’s Ruritania, etc., etc.
In describing their method, Manguel and Guadalupi write that “we would take for granted that fiction was fact, and treat the chosen texts as seriously as one treats the reports of an explorer or chronicler, using only the information provided in the original source, with no ‘inventions’ on our part.”
But why some entries and not others? “We can present no convincing excuse,” explain the two. “Ultimately we admit to having chosen certain places simply because they aroused in us that indescribable thrill that is the true achievement of fiction, places without which the world would be so much poorer.”
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According to information I find online, Alberto Manguel grew up in Buenos Aires, where he’s said to have met the great (but nearly blind) Jorge Luis Borges and become one of several people who read aloud to him regularly. Later in life, runs the account, he made the acquaintance of Gianni Guadalupi, who’s credited with books such as The Discovery of the Nile and Latitude Zero: Tales of the Equator. So far as I can determine, neither man is imaginary.
News from Nowhere, by the way, is the title of a socialist fantasy by noted English designer and writer William Morris (1834-1896). A number of his inventions show up in the Dictionary, but not this one, as it’s set in the future—an admittedly imaginary realm that nevertheless lies far beyond our authors’ otherwise wide-ranging explorations.
World Enough 