Fantastic Metropolis

listen:there’s a hell
of a good universe next door;let’s go

—e.e.cummings

When considering the canon of inventive, intelligent works of fantasy, it’s probably fair to say that if the Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it. Imaginary worlds are as old as the human imagination itself and will be with us for as long as imagination lasts, despite their currently rather devalued reputation as staples of bad science fiction and fantasy. Conveyor-belt proliferation aside, ‘We all love a mysterious country,’ as Nebuchadnezzar the dandy reminds us in David Britton’s Lord Horror, the words being a quote from M John Harrison’s ‘Egnaro’, a story that is, in part, an examination of the condition and effect of imagined worlds (and in Harrison’s story the quote comes from Lucas, a character based on David Britton—how’s that for a circular reference?) Most invented worlds, however, serve only as the backdrop for a narrative, whatever mythologies or ersatz histories might be created to substantiate their existence. The Codex Seraphinianus is unique in placing its invented world centre stage and, even more uniquely, purporting to be a product of that world itself. Its creation seems the inevitable result of a trend of fantasy writing that delights in invention purely for its own sake, particularly invention that goes to great lengths to seem authentic or authoritative, academic even. The great precursor here is Borges’ short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ which relates the invention of a Britannica-style encyclopedia describing with the greatest detail and authority a completely fictional world. Typically for Borges (as for Harrison), the story is also a commentary upon this kind of invention, as well as the effect it can have on our “real” world—for Borges and Harrison reality is more mutable than people like to think. Luigi Serafini takes the whole game a very difficult step further, by creating a complete work which describes his own fictional world in detail, with numerous colour illustrations and the whole written in a completely invented language and alphabet. I’ve never seen a comment by Borges that refers to the Codex but I’m sure he would have been delighted by it.

The Codex was first drawn to my attention not by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadaluppi’s excellent Dictionary of Imaginary Places (where it would be excluded anyway, since it doesn’t concern a place located on the Earth) but in a book by computer scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter called Metamagical Themas. Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize for non fiction with his first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Metamagical Themas is a collection of essays he wrote for Scientific American in the early 1980s when he took over the ‘Mathematical Games’ column previously written by Martin Gardner (Hofstadter’s title is an anagram.) Although Hofstadter’s books tend to focus on scientific and mathematical subjects, he is, like many of the best scientists, fascinated by the point at which logic grows fractal and meaning devolves into subjectivity. An essay entitled ‘Stuff and Nonsense’ discusses the nonsense tradition from Ben Johnson through to Samuel Beckett and John Lennon. Towards the end of the piece he describes the Codex:

Codex Seraphinianus is a much more elaborate work. In fact, it is a highly idiosyncratic magnum opus by an Italian architect indulging his sense of fancy to the hilt. It consists of two volumes in a completely invented language (including the numbering system, which is itself rather esoteric), penned entirely by the author, accompanied by thousands of beautifully drawn colour pictures of the most fantastic scenes, machines, beasts, feasts, and so on. It purports to be a vast encyclopedia of a hypothetical land somewhat like the earth, with many creatures resembling people to various degrees, but many creatures of unheard-of bizarreness promenading throughout the countryside. Serafini has sections on physics, chemistry, mineralogy (including many drawings of elaborate gems), geography, botany, zoology, sociology, linguistics, technology, architecture, sports (of all sorts), clothing, and so on. The pictures have their own internal logic, but to our eyes they are filled with utter non sequiturs.

A typical example depicts an automobile chassis covered with some huge piece of what appears to be melting gum in the shape of a small mountain range. All over the gum are small insects, and the wheels of the “car” appear to have meIted as well. The explanation is all there for anyone to read, if they can decipher Serafinian. Unfortunately, no one knows that language. Fortunately, on another page there is one picture of a scholar standing by what is apparently a Rosetta Stone. Unfortunately, the only language on it, besides Serafinian itself, is an unknown kind of hieroglyphics. Thus the stone is of no help unless you already know Serafinian. Oh, well… Many of the pictures are grotesque and disturbing, but others are extremely beautiful and visionary. The inventiveness that it took to come up with all these conceptions of a hypothetical land is staggering.