El libro de los seres imaginarios, de Borges, compendio de animales fantásticos,es comentado por el periodico Ingles The Guardian.
Caspar
Henderson: reading The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges
The Book of
Imaginary Beings, Borges's compendium of fantastic animals, tells of dragons
and Goofangs and fishes in trees. But nature's marvels are even more
extraordinary
In
"The Book of Sand" (1975), Jorge Luis Borges describes a volume of
inconceivably thin leaves in which no page is the first and no page the last,
so that wherever you open it there is a different story, written in various
indecipherable scripts. The narrator becomes obsessed with this extraordinary
object and ultimately horrified: "I realised that the book was monstrous.
It was no consolation to think that I … was no less monstrous than the
book."
The short
story echoes what is probably Borges's single most famous fiction, "The
Library of Babel" (1941), which depicts a library of astronomical size
containing everything that ever has been or could be written but in which
meaning is elusive. The later work, however, written towards the end of the
author's life, has a nightmarish quality that is less apparent in the earlier
story.
Falling
between these two is The Book of Imaginary Beings, a compendium of brief,
almost stark descriptions and stories about fantastic animals from many older
texts and sources, including the bestiaries of medieval Europe and their
classical antecedents, Chinese and Indian myth, folk tales, the legends of
indigenous peoples, and the minds of writers such as Kafka and Poe. First
published in 1957, at the very time when (as Borges later explained) the vision
that had gradually been failing him since birth had deteriorated to the point
where he could no longer read or see what he was writing, this cryptozoological
chiaroscuro is one of Borges's great creations.
In the
preface, Borges warns that Imaginary Beings is not meant to be read straight
through: "Rather, we should like the reader to dip into these pages at
random, just as one plays with the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope."
This is good advice. Though brief – less than 160 pages – Imaginary Beings is
dense and deep. I have read it several times over the years and am always
coming across new things in it.
Many of the
more than 100 entries are delightful – and amusing – from start to finish. The
beasts include the Upland Trout, which nests in trees and is a good flier but
scared of water, and the Goofang, which swims backwards to keep the water out
of its eyes. Others are simply weird. What are we to make of the Strong Toad,
which has a shell like that of a turtle, glows like a firefly in the dark, and
is so tough that the only way to kill it is to reduce it to ashes? "Fauna
of Mirrors", begins with what looks like a joke on erudition of
Shandy-esque proportions: "In one of the volumes of the Lettres édifiantes
et curieuses that appeared in Paris during the
first half of the 18th century, Father Fontecchio of the Society of Jesus
planned a study of the superstitions and misinformation of the common people of
Canton … "
Imaginary
Beings is also populated with creatures that, however bizarre, are far from
absurd. Notable are the various dragons of east and west – creatures of
enormous power but uncertain significance. "We are ignorant of the meaning
of the dragon as we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe," Borges
writes in his preface, "but there is something in the dragon's image that
appeals to the human imagination … It is … a necessary monster."
The book
is, then, something like a map of the endless labyrinth of human imagination
and its contents. It holds, as it were, a mirror up to dreaming. But where do
pleasant dreams shade into nightmares, or those from the past into those of the
future? Which dreams are wholly fantastical and which are visions or
distortions of what is real or has the potential to be so?
Such
questions might not loom so directly were it not for the magnetic pull of the
writing. The jovial opening to "Fauna of Mirrors" unfolds into a
story barely a page long that resonates as profoundly as many first-rate sci-fi
novels. At his best Borges is, like Dante, a master of the moment as a cypher of
a life. He can, like Elizabeth Bishop in remarkable poems such as "The
Man-Moth", create in just a few lines worlds that are fully imagined but
only partly revealed.
"Fauna
of Mirrors" also foreshadows one of a series of lectures given in 1977 in which Borges
describes his recurring nightmares (which, like much of his fictional output,
feature labyrinths and mirrors). In the most terrible of all, he sees himself
reflected in a mirror but the reflection is wearing a mask such as he had
feared greatly in childhood. "I am afraid to pull the mask off, afraid to
see my real face, which I imagine to be hideous. There may be leprosy or evil
or something more terrible than anything I am capable of imagining."
But The
Book of Imaginary Beings can be viewed in other ways than as a commentary on
re-enactment of human dreams. It can, for example, remind us of what is beyond
dream – the real forms of living creatures that exist without human agency.
Borges himself acknowledged as much in his preface: "Anyone looking into
the pages of the present handbook will soon find out that the zoology of dreams
is far poorer than the zoology of the Maker."
For we who
live in the light of what paleontology, evolutionary biology and genetics are
revealing about living forms, our response to the real may – will, if we are
truly awake – be one of astonishment and wonder at life's inventiveness. Even
ordinary-seeming animals are marvellous in the light of evolution: the chicken,
for example, is the closest living relative of Tyrannosaurus rex. Extraordinary
ones make those in the pages of a medieval bestiary seem poor indeed. Compared
to the leafy sea dragon (pictured, a cousin of the seahorse that looks very
much like seaweed and yet also like a dragon) and the sea slug Elysia chlorotica
(which photosynthesises with genes stolen from the algae it eats, and is as
green as a leaf), the mythical Barometz, or vegetable lamb of Tartary, is a
dull affair.
The
contemplation of natural history allows us to marvel at our place in the
universe. As Charles Darwin wrote early in his career, "If, as the poets
say, life is a dream, I am sure in a voyage these are the visions which serve
best to pass away the long night."
Yet another
way of reading The Book of Imaginary Beings is in the shadow of the future – as
phantasmagoric counterpart to the Anthropocene, the epoch in which humans may
be transforming life as radically as anything since the Cambrian explosion
about 530m years ago. A global rise in average temperature of 4C or more by the end of this
century, which many scientists now consider quite likely, will lead to a
disruption of the biosphere. One of the biggest extinction events in the
history of life may be unfolding. At the same time, we are on the verge of
creating new forms of non-human life, if we are not already doing so, as well
as new ways of being human (children with DNA from three parents, reproduction
without the union of male and female gametes, greatly extended lifespans). Such
endeavours may open up countless new ways to imagine and to be.
Borges
anticipates manipulation of life in an entry on the golem. The Kabbalists
sought to rearrange the letters of the ineffable names of God in their attempts
to make new life. Today, we are tinkering with the near endless potential
variations in the letters of DNA. How hopeful will the resulting monsters be?
How much light or darkness will they bring? "The light which puts out our
eyes," wrote Thoreau, "is darkness to us."
The Book of
Imaginary Beings tosses stone after stone into the subterranean caverns of the
reader's mind. It takes us along passageways and turns corners to reveal
strange shapes and images, some of which may precede and outlast anything
conceived by man. If we are attentive, the reverberations can help us trace the
dimensions of those spaces. We glimpse chinks of light and are then engulfed in
sudden dazzling floods of it.
Fuente :
The Guardian – Londres
Caspar
Henderson
The
Guardian, Friday 23 November 2012
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