The Old and the New in Jorge Luis Borges’s and Julio Cortázar’s Bestiaries.

Lo antiguo y lo nuevo en los bestiarios de Jorge Luis Borges y Julio Cortázar

Abstract

Very popular in the Middle Ages, bestiaries are a literary genre of old origins, a sort of encyclopedia, blended with moralizing allegory. They recover animal symbolism of earlier traditions and are filled with real or imaginary animals and monsters. Each era and culture has developed bestiaries of all kinds. This genre has had a boom in the twentieth century, recycling many influences of the past and reconciling many aesthetic and philosophical directions, mostly imitating its brief form, and not the religious admonition, already obsolete at that time. In Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, combining tradition, art and personal references, wrote works such as Handbook of Fantastic Zoology (The Book of Imaginary Beings), and Bestiary and Cronopios and Famas. They propose a contemporary approach to medieval perception of the world, appropriating the ancient symbolism of biological wonders of dubious reality and real animals to renew and give them new life. Mythological and literary figures, in the case of Borges (the Golem, the amphisbaena, the Minotaur, Kafkaesque beings, etc.), original creations, in the case of Cortázar (cronopios, famas, mancuspias...), both authors often treat real animals (tigers, rabbits, axolotl ...) assigning them mysterious qualities which show the anguish and difficulty of living in a world as complex as ours.