Fantastic Metropolis

Matrix, ©1983 Luigi Serafini

Subsequent research on my part revealed that, although the estimable Manguel makes no mention of the Codex in his Dictionary of Imaginary Places, he was in fact (inevitably?) present at the book’s public discovery, an event he describes in A History of Reading:

One summer afternoon in 1978, a voluminous parcel arrived in the offices of the publisher Franco Maria Ricci in Milan, where I was working as a foreign language editor. When we opened it we saw that it contained, instead of a manuscript, a large collection of illustrated pages depicting a number of strange objects and detailed but bizarre operations, each captioned in a script none of the editors recognized. The accompanying letter explained that the author, Luigi Serafini, had created an encyclopedia of an imaginary world along the lines of a medieval scientific compendium: each page precisely depicted a specific entry, and the annotations, in a nonsensical alphabet which Serafini had also invented during two long years in a small apartment in Rome, were meant to explain the illustrations’ intricacies. Ricci, to his credit, published the work in two luxurious volumes with a delighted introduction by Italo Calvino; they are one of the most curious examples of an illustrated book I know. Made entirely of invented words and pictures, the Codex Seraphinianus must be read without the help of a common language, through signs for which there are no meanings except those furnished by a willing and inventive reader.

To Ricci’s further credit, the book is still essentially in print, albeit at a price most people would find prohibitive. Ricci specialises in prestige editions printed on quality paper stock and materials; whether a book of 400 pages is worth 250+ Euros is a matter for the individual purchaser. A second-hand copy of the 1983 US edition is currently available via Amazon.com for anyone with a spare $1000.

As Hofstadter says, the mind is indeed staggered when considering the labour that went into the creation of this work, particularly for something that, in its willful hermeticism, subscribes to the Brian Eno recipe for originality: do something that’s so time-consuming or difficult that no one else would ever bother. If this makes it sound like a slightly more involved equivalent of those Guinness Record-competing constructions made of toothpicks, then the comparison is unfair. The Taj Mahal in matchsticks operates on something like the chimps-with-typewriters principle: any number of people, given enough time, application and boxes of Swan Vesta could do as much. The Codex Seraphinianus is rather more special than that. It may be a folly but, like all the best follies, it achieves its own aesthetic apotheosis through accumulation of detail, sheer inventiveness and the ultimate conviction of its own worth; like all the best follies it is also unique. It might even be argued that the Codex Seraphinianus is one of the purest works of fantasy, one that affects no compromise with supporting narrative or histrionic drama but aims straight for the gold.

If Borges’ story sparked the creation of the book (and it’s a good bet that this was the case), Serafini’s pictures, in style and content, seem to owe much to the cartoons and drawings of another master of baroque European fantasy, Roland Topor. Topor was an equally polymathic figure—cartoonist, writer, film maker—who still seems better known in his native France than elsewhere. He is perhaps best known for his 1964 novel Le Locataire Chimérique, which was brilliantly filmed by Roman Polanski in 1976 as The Tenant. He also collaborated with René Laloux for the animated feature La Planète Sauvage and can be seen portraying an appropriately unhinged Renfield in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre. Topor and Serafini share a certain naïve draughtsmanship which nonetheless is in the service of an enthusiastic and deliberately Surrealist (in the original sense of the term) level of invention. Topor’s bizarrely costumed characters created for the apocalyptic Ligeti opera Le Grande Macabre could have stepped directly from the pages of the Codex; the worlds of La Planète Sauvage, their inhabitants and creatures, buildings and habits, could conceivably occupy the same solar system as Serafini’s although Serafini’s imagination lacks Topor’s viciousness.

The Codex Seraphinianus remains a gauntlet thrown down to anyone considering the creation of an imaginary place. Like Finnegans Wake, it probably signifies a dead end, or at least the farthest point anyone would wish to take such an endeavour while remaining sane; even Henry Darger’s monumental Story of the Vivian Girls is written in English! Those of us who might wish to see more works like it are bound to be frustrated for some time yet. The best we can hope for is a paperback reprint from an enterprising publisher, something to popularise it a little more. Four hundred full-colour pages in an unknown language with no story—any takers?