"Few mod­ern writ­ers so remind me of the famous Vir­ginia Woolf quote about fic­tion as a "spi­der's web" more than Argen­tine fab­u­list Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attach­es his labyrinths is a librar­i­an's life; the strands that anchor his fic­tions are the obscure schol­ar­ly ref­er­ences he weaves through­out his text. Borges brings this ten­den­cy to whim­si­cal employ in his non­fic­tion Book of Imag­i­nary Beings, a het­ero­ge­neous com­pendi­um of crea­tures from ancient folk­tale, myth, and demonolo­gy around the world."
"Borges him­self some­times remarks on how these ancient sto­ries can float too far away from rati­o­ci­na­tion. The "absurd hypothe­ses" regard­ing the myth­i­cal Greek Chimera, for exam­ple, "are proof" that the ridicu­lous beast "was begin­ning to bore peo­ple.... A vain or fool­ish fan­cy is the def­i­n­i­tion of Chimera that we now find in dic­tio­nar­ies." Of what he calls "Jew­ish Demons," a cat­e­go­ry too numer­ous to parse, he writes, "a cen­sus of its pop­u­la­tion left the bounds of arith­metic far behind."
Labyrinthine fiction often aligns with a librarian's life, where narrative strands are anchored by obscure scholarly references. A whimsical, librarianly approach compiles a heterogeneous catalog of creatures drawn from folktale, myth, and demonology across cultures. Ancient stories sometimes drift from rational explanation into absurd hypotheses, exemplified by myths such as the Greek Chimera becoming a trivial dictionary definition. Vast categories of demonic beings proliferated through centuries as cultural exchanges among Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Christian Europe, and the Islamic world enriched a teeming middle realm. The resulting canon widened over time, integrating diverse supernatural figures across at least three continents.
Read at Open Culture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]