This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Z — Zebra

Somewhere (I cite from memory) Ortega y Gasset says that for Aristotle, the centaur is a possibility. This is not true for us, because biology forbids this.

The zebra, despite its visible presence among us, always produces bewilderment. His black and white stripes give him away. Without this stamp, he would be a horse. Thanks, however, to his singular design, he has bestowed a name upon both a butterfly (the papilio marcellus) and a plant (the zebrina, commonly found in Mexico and Guatemala). The fact that its name is reflected in things as dissimilar as a butterfly that reproduces several times a year, and a plant that creeps like a serpent and whose generic name in Spanish is araña, or spider, makes a person think that one day the zebra, like Ortega’s centaur, will be rendered inadmissible by logic but admissible by fantasy. Once upon a time, the zoologists tell us, there were zebras that only had stripes on their head, neck, and breast. One day there will be zebras that exist only in the imagination and that will be worthy representatives, as in this book (instead of Zanzibar, Zeus, Zacatecas, Zapata, zagal, zafarrancho, zapato, zanahoria, zorro, zumo, or zoology), of the most difficult letter in my personal A to Z.

Fantastic zoology. The novelty of the American continent is no stranger to the imagination of that continent. The chronicles of the Indies are replete with fantastic sightings of fauna that had never before been seen, adding indispensable detail to illustrate the very notion of “discovery.”

If the fantastic is, as Roger Caillois has defined it, a duel with fear, then imagination is the first exorcist of the fear of the unknown. The European fantasy of America evolved through the fabulous bestiarios, or beastly inventories, compiled in the Indies, where the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico are described as the habitats of mermaids that Columbus himself spotted on January 9, 1493. Apparently the mermaids “left at very high tide,” although the admiral also admits that “they were not as lovely as they were reputed to be, and in some way their faces in fact bore the contours of men.”

And then there was Gil González, explorer of the Panamanian isthmus, who traveled across a wide swath of dark sea to encounter “fishes that sang in harmony, as they say the mermaids do, and who sleep in the very same manner.” And Diego de Rosales tells of “a beast that rose up from the water and exhibited its frontal side, with the head, face, and breasts of a woman, well-formed, with cascading blonde tresses and manes, and a small child in its arms. As it dove back under, they noted it had a tail and the back of a fish. . ”

It may be that the feverish imagination of the sailors who explored the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico did not, in fact, see mermaids but whales, given that the latter were described as having “two breasts on the torso” (thank goodness) “so as to give birth and suckle their young,” as Fernández de Oviedo wrote.

More problematic, however, is the configuration of the so-called fish-sharks of these waters, also described by Fernández de Oviedo, with even greater anatomical precision this time. “Many of these sharks I have seen,” he writes in his Sumario de la Natural Historia de las Indias (Compendium of the Natural History of the Indies), “have their virile or generative member doubled. What I mean to say,” Oviedo adds, “is that each shark has two penises. . each one is as long as the distance between the elbow and the most extreme fingertip of a very tall man.”

“I cannot say,” the chronicler discreetly admits, “whether in practice he uses both of them together. . or each one separately, or at different times. . ”

As far as I am concerned, I can’t decide whether I ought to envy or pity those sharks in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, but I do recall, thanks to the chronicles of Pedro Gutiérrez de Santa Clara, that luckily these beasts only give birth once in their lives, something that seems to contradict the very existence of such an organ and its functions — one, abundant, and the other, barren. .

The letters of Pedro Mártir de Anglería, recounting the astonishing bestiaries of the American seas, were the object of scorn in papal Rome — that is, until a man named (also astonishingly) Juan Rulfo, who was both the archbishop of Consenza and the pope’s legate in Spain, confirmed the tales that Pedro Mártir had told and further broadened the realm of all that was “marvelous yet real” to include things like the guitar-fish that was capable of sinking an entire ship with its mighty horn; or the cocuyo, a glowworm whose light allowed the natives to “thread, weave, sew, paint, dance, and do other things in the nighttime. . they are the lanterns of the coasts.”

The pelicans that cloak the air in search of sardines. The vultures or buzzards that Columbus spied on the coast of Veragua, “repugnant, abominable birds” that would swoop down upon the dead soldiers and who were “an intolerable scourge to those of the land.” This is the night of the iguana, and Cieza de León does not know “if it is meat or fish,” but he does know that when young it glides across the waters, just grazing the surface, and when old it lumbers slowly across the floor of the lagoons.

The list of enchantments continues. The turtles with shells large enough to cover a house. Fertile tortoises that lay broods of a thousand eggs upon the sands of our seas. Beaches of pearls “some as black as jet, others tawny-colored, and others as yellow and resplendent as gold,” writes Fernández de Oviedo. And the mythical salamander that burned in its own skin but at the same time was so cold, as Sebastián de Covarrubias recorded in his Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana (Treasure of the Castilian Language), that “as it walks over coals it extinguishes them as if it were made of pure ice.”

The marvels of the seas and shores of the Discovery soon took their place among the great wonders of civilization, magnificently described by Bernal Díaz del Castillo as he and Hernán Cortés’s troops entered the Aztec capital, México-Tenochtitlán.

Bernal’s vision almost seems to take us into another branch of fantasy, that of science fiction. The most brilliant writer of this genre, Ursula K. Le Guin, notes that science fiction is almost always the history of the future, even though everything seems to occur outside of time in the fantastic psychomyths of fantasy literature — in the living region of the mind, as Le Guin conceives of it, where there is no temptation of immortality at all, where spatial and temporal limits no longer seem to exist. This, in turn, allows what H. P. Lovecraft, American master of the macabre, proposed to such resounding success: the invention of worlds that are not outside time and space, but that in fact possess time and space that are probable and perhaps even memorable. This is what the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem achieves in his marvelous story “One Human Minute”: he takes an inventory of each and every person inhabiting the earth, in one single minute.

Given that the “modern” list of these timeless writers extends from Voltaire (Candide) and Beckford (Vathek) in the eighteenth century through to Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, and Isaac Asimov in the twentieth, and given that their themes run from the evocation of the most remote past (Frazer and Frobenius) to the creation of a future that is quite close at hand (Verne and Wells), my own selection leads me from the fantastic imagination of the American explorers and their bestiaries of the Indies to the most repulsive form of replicating nature: the artificial creation of the human being in the scientific laboratory, the progress of mechanics, and the substitution of the divine: Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley envisioned the horror of an anti-birth: the conception of a creature created with the leftovers of death. Victor Frankenstein is the name of the father that wishes he were a mother and gives birth to the anonymous monstrosity that grows more and more like its creator — reclusive, cruel, born without a past, but different from the God who might also possess these characteristics because God is not curious, God is not the mother Eve who eats the apple from the Tree of Knowledge; God is not Pandora who spills the secrets of a box filled with calamities; God does not covet an identity, a name or a perception: God is, knows all; to name him is to diminish him.

Frankenstein’s monster is doubly monstrous: it is not a man, as its creator wishes it could be; nor is it a God, as its creator wishes he could be. Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus does not steal God’s fire: he goes out looking for it. But that flame is an illusion, it is the false fire of polar light, it is the funeral pyre that awaits creator and creature alike: the icy bonfire of science when it is not man who creates science but rather science that either creates or destroys man. Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus does not create a human being, she creates an anonymous one. Perhaps this is why the widow of the poet Shelley chose not to sign her book with her own name. Where could one find the name of such a monster, a monster that is the fruit of the union between an inquisitive man and a wordless death?

One stormy night during the summer of 1816, a group of people gathered at a rented villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. It included Lord Byron, who had rented the house, his friends Percy Shelley and his wife, Mary, the insufferable Doctor Polidori, and an assortment of women representing Byron’s various paternal, incestual, and amorous relations. Together they decided to tell horror stories to pass the time during the thunderstorm. Byron invented the vampire; Mary Shelley, the monster. Dracula and Frankenstein were born here. The Villa Diodati, as it is called, can still be visited today. The vistas have scarcely changed, though now there are jukeboxes, television sets, and Ping-Pong tables in the house. I prefer the vision offered by James Whale’s film Bride of Frankenstein, in which the actress Elsa Lanchester plays Mary Shelley in 1816, recounting a tale that occurs in 1935, and in which Lanchester also appears, this time playing the role of the monstrous woman that Dr. Frankenstein creates so that his first monster, played by the actor Boris Karloff, might have a mate. The time-game is fascinating, and is made even more compelling by the fact that these monsters, which literature either could not or would not properly name (how very brilliant and wise of Mary Shelley!) now bear the names lent them by their photographic images.

The monster has a name thanks to photography. And that name is the name of its creator. The audience names the monster after its creator, Frankenstein. This is like giving the name “God” to each and every one of his creatures. But, as Borges observed, isn’t the genre of fantasy the trunk of the tree, and theology one of its branches?

In the realm of fantasy literature, God has no greater enemy than Dracula, the man-vampire that conquers all laws divine and human. He fornicates without love, he drinks because he must, desires no one and nothing other than his own immortality, and conquers death. His image is reflected in no earthly mirror. He sleeps by day. He kills by night. And he travels to flee his own legend and to replenish his source of both life and pleasure: blood.

Roland Barthes has noted that in de Sade’s universe, travel has just one purpose: to shut oneself away. To isolate and protect lust. But also to experience confinement as a quality of existence, a voluptuosity of being. Does Dracula do anything other than this when he leaves his Transylvanian cloister and gets himself onto a death ship, hidden inside a box filled with newly dug earth, bound for the heart of the imperial, bourgeois metropolis, London? All characters of extreme identities, from the Gothic novel to the Surrealist film, embark on that journey, from one prison to another: they exhaust their place of origin and so they travel to a corruptible future.

Dracula seeks the blood that nourishes him. But this metaphor of horror conceals a love story. Dracula seeks recognition, even if he must turn the life that he needs and loves into death. And his victims, all those women so captivated by him, who always forget to close their windows at night, to sleep beneath crucifixes, or to hang necklaces of garlic around their throats — aren’t they invoking the presence of that “other” who, by identifying himself with them, allows them to identify themselves with him? Do Dracula’s ladyfriends seek the peculiar desire that can only be satisfied by the monster who desires nothing other than immortality itself, on the borderline between dream and nightmare?

Dracula and Frankenstein are literary zebras whose habitats preceded them: castles in ruins, Transylvania and the Alps, laboratories that work thanks to a kind of faith in progress, villages that are sanctuaries of millenarian tradition. . From its popular legends to the legacy of lineage, Europe possesses the landscape for fantastic literature. America does not. I mean English America, Protestant and Puritan North America.

Nathaniel Hawthorne complains of the lack of mystery in a country with nothing more than a rather common, ordinary prosperity, a country that has no shadows and no real age. How very imaginative a writer must be in order to discover mystery in that humdrum, prosperous world! Old maids that live in perpetual darkness, houses painted in blood, walls that murmur, and Hawthorne’s own mother, a widow locked away, her food growing cold at her bedroom door, a ghostly sister who only allows herself to be seen as night falls. .

The person who truly reveals the terror of the North American fantastic, however, is Edgar Allan Poe, whose great discovery is that fantasy occurs not in castles on the Rhine or in Roman dungeons but in the heads and hearts of human beings. “The Tell-Tale Heart” could be the title for everything he ever wrote, for he is an author who rejects the North American enterprise of happiness and progress (“I have no faith in human perfectibility,” he once said) and instead reveals the very opposite of North American optimism. His narratives do not take place in the solar meridian of the United States but rather in the murky daybreak of the Earth. It is at that hour of dawn, still not fully wrested from the night, that the most intranquil beings emerge. The dead listen. The tombs open. The ghosts rap their knuckles at the entrances to graves. With good reason it has been said that Poe was born and raised inside a coffin. Henry James takes this brand of imaginary terror to its highest degree: the duel with the world that occurs only inside the minds of his characters. There is no exterior setting as there is in Frankenstein or Dracula. London, Boston, English weekends, aristocratic society life, well-appointed country homes. No: his terror is inside the imagination, in the turn of the screw. .

Poe, who was Stalin’s preferred writer (a case of power fascinated by torture and terror), could also be, somewhat paradoxically, the favorite author of the most logical Cartesian of them all. The deductive logic of “The Gold Bug” and “The Purloined Letter” elevate reason to the level of mystery in a foreshadowing of that great Latin American fabulist, Jorge Luis Borges, the perverse neo-Platonist who first suggests a totality, only to immediately prove its impossibility. Borges opens many of his stories with the ironic premise of a hermetic totality. He evokes the age-old nostalgia of original unity. But then he immediately betrays all yearnings for the idyllic (which echo the founding utopia of the New World) with the comic incident and the peculiar accident. Funes the Memorious remembers everything (fantastic premise). But if he wants to live he must reduce, select, limit himself to a manageable number of memories (comical conclusion).

In the universe of Tlon, time is denied. The present is infinite. The future has no more reality than current hope. The past has no more reality than the present memory. And there is no dearth of people in Tlon who declare that all of time has already occurred and that our lives are nothing more than the falsified, mutilated, crepuscular memory of an irrevocable process. At the foot of the page, Borges makes note of Bertrand Russell’s theory: that the universe was created only a few minutes ago and was instantly provided with a human race capable of remembering a past that never occurred.

The literature of fantasy proposes that reality is found on the other face of things, just beyond the senses, in a place that is invisible only because we didn’t know enough, because we didn’t extend our hand in time to touch its elusive presence. This, then, is what was behind Julio Cortázar’s sweeping vision. He looked out at the parallel reality, just around the corner, a vast and latent universe filled with its patient treasures, the contiguity of beings, the imminence of the forms that wait to be summoned by a word, a brushstroke, a gesture of the hand, a melody hummed, a dream. .

Imagination: mediation between sensation and reason, but with the ulterior motive of dispelling any logical relationship between cause and effect. This forces us to re-create everything, once we are freed from the pressure of convention, from that quotidian normality that so bothered Hawthorne.

Gregor Samsa wakes up to find he is an insect. And Odradek, the most mysterious of all of Kafka’s messengers, rambles through the tombs of Prague in a work filled with invalid Hermes. Odradek is a flat, star-shaped spool made of various multicolored threads. Odradek is treated like a child; his immediate appearance is absurd, but he is a totality, a complete specimen of his genre. Odradek might seem like the kind of person who was once, but is no longer, useful — though this, Kafka warns us, would be a grave mistake. Odradek, who hides on the stairs, in the corridors, in the halls: in communication. Odradek, who disappears for months at a time and then returns, invisibly but faithfully. Odradek, the guardian spirit, the ghost of the House of Kafka. Odradek is a myth, half-living and half-dead, half-object and half-living being, forgotten but present, without origin; without future and without goal.

Is the literature of the fantastic the ghost that restores all that is forgotten among the living?