The tiger first entered Western literature as a fantasy, distant and vague image that has changed hands many times based on the traveler's story, and is an imaginary animal like a dragon. Over time, when Europeans actually saw tigers, the original imaginary image of the tiger changed, but not completely.
A major source of writing is imagination, as early as the fourth century BC, as Aristotle believed. For the practice-oriented successors of ancient Rome and Greece, the visible image of the eye was the main basis of perception, and the word phantasia (fantasia/fantasy, casual imagination) comes from the Greek phinomai (the first-person singular present form of the verb "appears", which can be literally translated as "I appear"). The English word "imaginary" is associated with the Latin imaole (appearance), which means "something to see," either with the naked eye or with the heart.
In the era when tigers were not visible, it did not prevent European writers from writing them into their own works, such as the works of the ancient Roman writer Virgil, when Bacchus appeared, he was always accompanied by cats such as tigers to show the cheerful and lively scene of Dionysus. Tigers were also an element of entertainment for the ancient Romans, appearing from time to time in celebration parades or colossal shows. The naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote about tigers in his work Naturalis Historia. So where did their fontasia and image come from? Not imaginative, of course, but deeply intertwined with the way painters of the time and even earlier represented tigers.
So, how do painters paint tigers? In the Middle Ages, most Europeans saw pictures (or textual descriptions) of tigers from the book Physiologus (by Aristotle and others), in which the illustrations were painted by unsigned painters, in addition to the tiger, they also painted griffins, basalt and legged snakes, as well as real animals as we now know them, but at that time these animals were more allegorical and symbolic, these beasts were symbols of human moral or spiritual truth.
In The Naturalist, errors in the so-called shape and character of animals abound. Edward Topsell, in his History of quadrupeds in the early 17th century, noted: "[At that time] people mistakenly believed that all tigers were females, giving birth to the next generation by mating with the wind. ”
The image of a tiger in a mosaic in an ancient Roman villa in Cassar, Sicily (this villa was built in the 4th century AD)
In early Anglo-Saxon texts, tigers were synonymous with cruelty and ferocity. Tigers are bloodthirsty, savage and have a power derived from nature. The distant, unknowable places where the tiger lives add to its mysterious power. Chaucer wrote in the 14th century: "Egre as is a tygre yond in Ynde" (bold as the tiger of India). In the 16th century, Shakespeare's Romeo came to Juliet's tomb to prepare for suicide and said: "My state of mind is very wild now, more ferocious and ruthless than a hungry tiger or a roaring angry sea, and you don't want to provoke me." Macbeth also boasted in the face of the ghost of the murdered Banko: "I dare to do what others dare to do: no matter what shape you appear in, like a rough Russian bear, like an armored rhinoceros, a tiger with claws, as long as it is not what you are now, my firm nerves will never tremble for half a minute." ”
In Bach's Passion of St. Matthew, Jesus in the dock is "the lamb under the claws of a tiger." An 18th-century encyclopedic author who had never seen a tiger explained that tigers were "more ferocious, crueler, and more savage than lions." "Although it is full of food and drink, its thirst for blood cannot be alleviated. After devouring a new prey, it tore it to pieces with the same anger and greed; it turned the place where it lived into ruins"
Behind this rhetorical description, there are all kinds of imaginary errors. Although europeans had seen tigers by then, they knew that tigers did have great predatory abilities, and they were fast and powerful. However, in literature, the role of tigers is more used by the value judgments of authors, and they invariably make tigers an endorsement of violence and barbarism, which is actually unfair to tigers.
As real tigers enter European zoos, the contents of The Naturalist are complemented by real observation. The zoo has also become a resource for painting and sculpture artists, such as Dürer and Leonardo in Milan. Of course, zoos have influenced or changed the imagination of writers to some extent.
At the beginning of the 17th century, zoos were found almost all over Europe. James I's favorite of The Tower Zoo (said to be the world's oldest zoo) was a tiger presented by the ambassador of the Duchy of Savoia in 1613. According to records, the tiger arrived in London on July 1 with a lioness and a lynx who died on the road.
The literary image of the tiger in the West in the 18th century, and the range of emotions people projected on the tiger, expanded a lot. William Blake (1757-1827) was particularly different, instead of using the clichés of the tiger narrative in the past, he added elements of beauty and cuteness. As a printmaker and poet, the image of the tiger he painted in Song of Experience (published in 1794) was more accurate in appearance than many tigers seen at the time.
The image of a tiger in The Song of Experience (1794).
Whether the object of his painting is a real tiger in a cage or some painting by someone else, Blake is a true enlightened artist. The son, who was born into some sort of anti-church family, was passionate about the French Revolution and spiritual radicalism, and was also technically and emotionally fascinated by everything that materially created. He illustrated Darwin's Botanical Gardens and was interested in the scientific ideas and new technologies of the time, such as geology, iron smelting, magnetism, volcanoes, electricity, and stars.
An early printer who worked with metal, fire, and writing, Blake was keen to think about the suffering of the society around him that he had seen with his own eyes, and came to the conclusion that it was caused by demons. The factory in his poem Jerusalem is the "Factory of Satan in Darkness." The beautiful images he created necessarily addressed the origins of destruction, suffering, evil and barbarism in man and the world, one of which was the tiger. In his Proverbs of Hell, Blake says, "Angry tigers are smarter than domesticated horses."
In the two collections of poems, "Songs of Innocence and Experience," the tiger becomes a thing that represents many different, even incompatible, things at the same time. Once a simple and crude representation of ferocity, the tiger became another kind of symbol in the late 18th century, an expression of many open and imprecise meanings, sometimes industrialized, sometimes the French Revolution, sometimes human worship of the wild. Fierce and fragile, adventurous and aesthetic, creative and destructive, can all be dressed in a tiger coat.
Become a symbol of energy, sexuality, imagination
By the 19th century, British colonization of India had led to a new understanding of tigers for many British people, even though in many cases tigers were only hunted by British colonists in India. Tiger skins entered British cities in large quantities, and tiger skins, as trophies or living room ornaments, became a symbol of beauty. For the tiger hunter, the tiger is the highest prey, and its own fierce and savage image also establishes the admirable status of those who shoot it.
One of these tiger hunters, in addition to hunting, also knew nature and could write- James Corbett (1875-1955), hunting tigers was his main business and daily life for the first half of his life, and the official record of hunting lists recorded that he shot more than a dozen tigers and leopards, making him the best tiger hunter. But in the second half of his life, this British personality changed greatly, put down the shotgun, picked up the camera, and wrote some books, such as the famous "Man-Eating Beast" and "Jungle Legend", which once became literary classics.
It was also after him that the concept of animals in Europe began to change, more and more people joined animal protection organizations, and laws and regulations followed. Literature began to see things through animal perspectives, letting animals speak for themselves. Such as Anna. Sevier's Black Horse (1877), Felix Zaltten's Bambi (1926). In Alan Alexander Meehan's Winnie the Pooh (1926), the ferocious tiger becomes a tigger, a cute, well-intentioned and lively image that is still loved by children today. But at the beginning of the 20th century, the work was actually ironic.
In any case, in the imagination of Western popular culture, the image of the tiger began to be no longer a single one, but gradually became a strong, beautiful, energetic symbol of human qualities. In the 1967 film Le Samouraï (The Lone Killer), Alain Deron said: "A lonely jungle tiger like a samurai". Esso described adding their oil in its advertising words as "putting a tiger in a car's fuel tank." ”
Before world war II, tiger skins were popular in Britain not only for decorative beauty. The tiger is also a symbol of sexual energy, and in popular culture, it is not said that "he is like a lion in bed", but like a tiger.
The image of the tiger is no longer exclusive to men, and in pre-war London, there was a model named Betty May who played the tiger as a professional, known as the tiger woman, and she was best at licking a cup of brandy with her hands and feet on the ground. In her autobiography of the same name, published in 1929, she said: "I am convinced that I was born for adventure. There was a picture of her in the book, with black hair covering her face like a wolf child ready to bite. May caught the attention of the sculptor Joseph Epstein as the protagonist of his sculptures, and later Joined the Underworld in Paris, tangled with cocaine traffickers, and eventually settled in the Satanic sect of Sicily, and her life was in some ways like the symbolic influence of the tiger.
Tiger Girl Betty May
Caged tiger
Another peculiarity of the 20th century was that literary creators, especially poets, focused their attention on the thing between the self and the tiger, the cage of the beast, which was made of iron and sturdy as a perfect symbol of despotism, totalitarianism, and any other kind of inhibition that people tried to get rid of. And even heavier, the cage is a powerful, wild animal. The tiger can express anger at the closure and captivity: "I broke that stupid lock with a single blow with my claws. ”
Literary writers examine the caged tiger, and the beauty of a living and powerful life is so misaligned from the situation in the cage. This undoubtedly brings creators endless imagination. The poem "Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock" (1923) by the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) depicts people returning home after a day's work, still stressed, and even in their dreams, they were locked in cages and had no freedom. They don't "dream of baboons and giraffes." On the street, however, an old sailor "got drunk and fell asleep in his boots," reminiscing in the mist of an exotic dream he had once had in a distant place—"catching a tiger on a hot day." "By dreaming of a tiger, you are saved from the "disillusionment" of the cage of modern life.
The tiger is indescribable
Louis Borges (1899-1986) was the first to comprehensively summarize and apply the image of the tiger in Western literature and even culture. Although Borges was born in Buenos Aires, he learned English before learning Spanish and was deeply influenced by British and American literature. In 1914, he moved with his family to Geneva, where Borges studied French and German and earned his degree. After World War I, the family lived in Spain, where he published his first poem in a style very similar to that of Whitman. In 1921, he returned to Buenos Aires to settle down and began his career as a writer.
Borges was fascinated by tigers in his childhood, and tigers often appear in his works. As a child, Borges kept drawing tigers. He enjoyed going to the Buenos Aires Zoo. He wrote in Dream Tiger that there was always "the smell of candy and tigers" there. In Borges's work, the tiger often symbolizes an unattainable absolute organism and pure sensibility, as it lives in a world without language.
Borges's poem "The Other Tiger" also argues that the human imagination cannot make a tiger a reality. The poet imagines a tiger and longs to touch the tangible, languageless animal itself; but he cannot. He was not in the jungle. He was in Borges's prototype space, a library. The poem found that writing a poem about a tiger meant failing to write a real tiger, its power, innocence, and footprints in the dirt. Thinking about the tiger gives the library books a distance for the poet, but the real distance is the distance between the poet sitting in the South American library and a real tiger on the banks of the Ganges River in India. He told Tiger that all he could do was "dream of you." But the tiger he dreams of is "made of symbols and shadows." It is "a set of literary images, / fragments remembered from the encyclopedia". The poem attempts to outline the real thing that the tiger lives the life of a tiger, but only succeeds in making what humans make, a fiction. The real tiger is "unattainable by all myths".
The painter Peter Paul Rubens is also a tiger obsessive, and the painting is called La Chasse au Tigre (Hunting Tigers)
In a poem titled "The Other Tiger," Borges associates the tiger with himself, with the tiger with literature, but these are melancholy:
Darkness spreads infinitely in my heart,
I call your name in poetry: Tiger,
I think you're just an illusion of symbols,
A series of collages of literary metaphors,
Or a comprehensive picture in an encyclopedia,
And not Sumatra and Bangladesh
Mighty Beast King...
Borges's tiger is a confrontation between human imagination and the limits of language, and that tiger tells us that words and language cannot fully reach reality.
This is also the place of the tiger in the Western literary imagination, which has never had its own image, and because it exists only in travel notes and legends, it once represented creativity and imagination, and even the reality that imagination could not reach. With more information about tigers and the truth of what people see in zoos, tigers began to symbolize more human qualities, especially as the culture itself changed over time, and its wild characteristics related to energy and sexual desire became more and more respected. So it can be a tiger roaring in the mountains, a beast, or even a terrible mouth, as Kennedy said: those who foolishly ride on the back of a tiger in pursuit of power will eventually be swallowed into the stomach by the tiger.