The Origins Of Half-human, Half-animal Creatures

The Origins of Half-Human, Half-Animal Creatures By Jorge Luis Borges The following excerpts from Jose Luis Borge’s Book of Imaginary Beings (originally published in 1957) examine the origins of monstrous combinations of human and animal. The monsters are terrifying because of their perversion of what nature has kept separate: the human combined with a horse, bull, bird, fish, or lion. Borges was an Argentine writer whose works helped create the genre known as magical realism - a rendering of day-to-day life imbued with magical events. Among his many works are Ficciones (1944), El Aleph And Other Stories (1949), and Labyrinths (1962). A child is taken for the first time to the zoo. The child may grow up to be you or me, or conversely, we may once have been that child but have forgotten. At the zoo, that terrible “zoological garden,” the child sees living animals he has never seen before – jaguars, vultures, buffalo, and, strangest of all, giraffes. He sees for the first time the confused variety of the animal kingdom, and the spectacle, far from alarming or frightening him, delights him. It delights him so much, in fact, that a trip to the zoo becomes part of the “fun” of childhood, or what passes for fun. How is one to explain this common and yet mysterious occurrence? We can, of course, deny it. We can tell ourselves that children brusquely led into that garden become, twenty years down the line, neurotic, and the truth is, there’s not a child who has not discovered to be neurotic. Or we may assert that the child is, by definition, a discoverer, and that discovering the camel is no more remarkable than discovering mirrors, or water, or stairs. We may assert that the child trusts his parents, those who take him into that place filled with animals. Besides, the stuffed tiger on his bed and the tiger in the encyclopedia have prepared him to look without fear upon the tiger of flesh and blood. Plato (should he join in this discussion) would tell us that the child has already seen the tiger, in the world of archetypes, and that now, seeing it, he but recognizes it. Schopenhauer (still more startlingly) would say that the child looks without fear on tigers because he knows that he is the tigers and the tigers are he, or more precisely, that tigers and he are of one essence – Will. Let us move now from the zoo of reality to the zoo of mythology, that zoological garden whose fauna is comprised not of lions but of sphinxes and gryphons and centaurs. The population of this second zoo should by all rights exceed that of 1 the first, since a monster is nothing but a combination of elements taken from real creatures, and the combinatory possibilities border on the infinite. In the centaur, horse and man are mingled; in the Minotaur, bull and man (Dante imagined it with the face of a human and the body of a bull). Following this lead, it seems to us, any number of monsters, combinations of fish, bird, and reptile, might be produced – the only limit being our own ennui or revulsion. That, however, never happens; the monsters that we make would be stillborn, thank God. In the last pages of The Temptation of St. Anthony, Flaubert brought together all sorts of medieval and classical monsters, and even (his commentators tell us) attempted to invent some of his own; the total is not great, and those creatures that exert power over mankind’s imagination are really very few. Readers browsing through our own anthology will see that the zoology attributable to dreams is in fact considerably more modest than that attributable to God. We do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to man’s imagination, an