For the first issue of Franco Maria Ricci’s magazine FMR, Julio Cortázar was asked to write an essay on the bestiary of a little-known and eccentric nineteenth-century painter from the foothills of the Bohemian mountains whose name is Aloys Zötl. From 1832 to 1887—the year of his death — Zötl painted 170 achingly beautiful watercolors of animals inhabiting the ideal landscapes of his imagination. Years were kingdoms: 1832 ruled by fish, 1835 by reptiles, 1837 by the gentle tyranny of birds. André Breton called his bestiary “the most sumptuous ever seen.”
Instead of describing Zötl’s bestiary, Cortázar chooses to walk us through his own Deep Zoo. His essay is titled “A Stroll among the Cages” and it is a parallel journey on a path burning like alcohol that generously leads straight to Cortázar’s own holding ground of totems, just as it prepares our eyes for the sight to come: Zötl’s lucent tigeries and tigered lucencies:
And then a cock crowed, if there is a memory it is because of that, but there was no notion of what a cock was, no tranquilizing name, how was I to know that was a cock, that horrible rending of the silence into a thousand pieces, that shattering of space throwing its tinkling glass down on me, a first and frightful Roc.
This shattering of silence precipitates the infant Cortázar into a waking nightmare that would never abandon him entirely. It informs the beasts that follow — with a vaguely menacing shimmer.
“What comes next,” writes Cortázar, “has a Guaraní Indian name: mamboretá, a name that’s long and beautiful just like its green and prickly body, a dagger that suddenly plunges into the middle of your soup or drops onto your cheek when the summer table is set,” and there is always an aunt who flees in terror, and a father who authoritatively proclaims the inoffensive nature of the mamboretá while thinking, perhaps, but not mentioning the fact that the female devours the male in the middle of copulation. And Cortázar recalls the terrible moment when the “mamboretá would become enraged” with him for past torments and look at him from its branch, accusingly. Barking frogs come next (Zötl, by the way, was especially partial to frogs, and the lion’s part of his bestiary belongs to them), and swarming ants that “pass through a house like a detergent, like the fearsome machine of fascism,” locusts whose devastation brings Attila to mind, and a couple of amorous lions, their bodies trembling “slightly with the orgasm.” Cortázar fulfills his promise to us admirably: we have strolled among the animals, although to tell the truth, there were no cages anywhere. The vision is clear, unobstructed, and hot. Cortázar has given us totemic potencies; he has given us Aloys Zötl.
Now, because I cannot offer you Zötl’s paintings, and because Cortázar chose not to describe them, the task falls to me.
The imaging consciousness holds its object (such images as it imagines) in an absolute immediacy.
— GASTON BACHELARD, The Poetics of Reverie
Immediacy is precisely the word that characterizes Aloys Zötl’s bestiary. With few exceptions, he had seen his subjects in books only, yet painted them with feverish deliberation. I imagine it was chronic and unrequited longing that drove him on, for his bestiary surges with all the kaleidoscopic opulence of a mushroom-enhanced daydream. Spangled and lucent, Zötl’s beasts have been conjured hair by hair; one can count their whiskers, their feathers, and their teeth. (One thinks of Borges’s magician, dreaming hour after hour and one by one the infinite elements that make for a living man.) Zötl’s creatures take their ease in gardens as lavish as wonder-rooms; he has packed his pictures with rarities, so that the overall effect recalls the haunting superabundance of Max Ernst’s experiments with rough surfaces and sopping rags, those hieroglyphic landscapes haunted by hierophantic loplops. Or Borgesian dream gardens, which are the amalgam of all the gardens one has ever loved. Zötl’s pictures provide a glimpse of paradise: it is a first glimpse, prodigal and unfettered. In other words, Zötl has painted the potencies of Old Time, when to name a thing was to bring it surging into the real. Even his scattered stones are poised for speech.
But — what about tigers? It seems there are none. However, there is a leopard, completed in April 1837. He is the same leopard that haunts the fables of the Maya and, as all the rest, he is meticulously painted and he is very still. Clearly he has heard a sound that has frightened him.
Perhaps he has heard, and for the first time, the crowing of a cock. And perhaps this is the writer’s task: to make audible a sound of warning — which is also the sound of awakening.
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
— GASTON BACHELARD, The Poetics of Reverie
Back to Egypt, where things and their names were not seen as separate entities, but were instead in profound sympathy with one another. These perceived sympathies are often very playful, as in this story of Isis and Seth.
Seth, in the form of a bull, attempts to overcome Isis. Fleeing, she takes the form of a little dog holding a knife in its tail and evades him. In his thwarted excitement, Seth ejaculates and his seed spills to the ground.
When Isis sees this she cries, “What an abomination! To have thus scattered your seed!”
Where Seth’s seed has fallen, a plant grows called the coloquint (or bitter apple). In ancient Egypt, the word for “coloquint” and “your seed” is one and the same.
Within a writer’s life, words, just as things, acquire powers. For Borges, Red is such a word, as are Labyrinth and Tiger. And if Beauty in the form of a yellow tiger or a red rose “waits in ambush for us” (Seven Nights), beautiful words are the mind’s animating flame.
In his essay on his blindness, Borges recalls a cage he saw as a child holding leopards and tigers; he recalls that he “lingered before the tiger’s gold and black.” Nearly blind, he is no longer able to see red, “that great colour which shines in poetry, and which has so many beautiful names,” but it is the yellow of the tiger that persists, as does its beauty and the power of its beautiful name. In his story “The Zahir,” the Tiger is the Zahir; it is the face of God, God’s name, the sound he uttered when he created the world, the “shadow of the Rose” and the “rending of the Veil” (Labyrinths). Tiger is the power that brings the unborn universe surging into the real and, what’s more, it is the name of the infinite book you and I are writing; it is the letters of each word of this book; Tiger is the calligrapher’s maze and also the text hidden within that maze.
It is the shell that tigers Bachelard — that lover of intimacy and solitude. A creature with a shell is a mixed creature; it reveals and conceals itself simultaneously. You will recall that in ancient times a fossil shell acquired the potencies of the moon. Stones of unusual shapes were empowered by Osiris also; they evoked the myth of his dismemberment and his own scattered limbs. In the myth, Isis gathers the pieces of her husband’s broken body and makes him whole; she revives him. For Bachelard, “The fossil is not merely a being that once lived but one that is still asleep in its form.” He is speaking of the “spaces of our intimacy, the centers of (our) fate”; he is speaking of our memories, those powers that, “securely fixed in space,” remain coiled within us, ready to spring and inform our lives with immediacy and our thoughts with urgency.