After I read The Book of Imaginary Beings, I was struck by the similarities between Borges’s description of the mythical creatures and Columbus’s description of the natives in The Four Voyages. While the similarities obviously lend themselves to rant on Columbus’s racism and disregard for human rights, I want to focus on what these similarities in diction and mood reveal about humankind’s approach to the unfamiliar.
Both Borges and Columbus approach the unknown through anthropological analysis. As we discussed in class, Borges and Columbus describe the unknown in terms that they understand. For example, Borges describes the Balanders as a creature with “the head of a satyr, the torso of a man, the outspread wings of an eagle…”(Borges 27) and so on. Similarly, Columbus notes that the island women wear bracelets that “we too wore in ancient times.” (Columbus 196). In doing this, both writers attempt to familiarize and demystify the unknown.
Simultaneously, Borges and Columbus also categorize the unknown as mystical and mythical so that they do not have to intimately explore the differences between the familiar things that the unknown creature is “like” and unknown creature itself. While Borges explicitly mythologizes the creatures he discusses, Columbus links the unknown to previously established mythology, such as the women “from which arose the story of the Amazons” (197).
In my opinion, these contradictory tactics of approaching the unknown reveal humankind’s paradoxical need to always be right and to always know more.
This is interesting. I also think myths speak to the human need to categorize and label things. By labelling the morphological and physical features of a beast, animal, or mythical creature, we are able to classify the creature as “something” by relating it to what already now. Perhaps this is also paradoxical in the sense that many of us think that we can related to others well, we often need the help of literature and myths to help accomplish that. For instance, just as you mentioned, the story of the Amazons.