Porphyry, in the geological sense of that vain, crystal-veined, purple-clad stone one finds in the company of the malachite and Parian marble worked into the colonnades of any Byzantine basilica; in the literary sense of Porfiry Petrovich, that soft faintness shaded into the text of Crime and Punishment; in the philosophical sense of Porphyrios, the Neoplatonic editor of Plotinus’ Enneads, a Plato to Late Antiquity’s Socrates (q.v The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, by Karl Marx); in the historical sense of Porfirio Diaz, Mexican plunderer, creator of the slogan pan o palo, famous for monopolizing pan, and panoplying palo.
Archive for the ‘Dictionary of Literature’ Category
Dictionary of Literature: Tiger
February 19, 2011
(1) a very large solitary cat with a yellow-brown coat striped with black, native to the forests of Asia but becoming increasingly rare.
(2) a Borgesian symbol for the infinite, the divine, and the inability of art to fully express the experience of existence. The tiger may also be a metaphor for the mirror in Borges’ oeuvre, reflecting back upon the reader whatever he or she sees in it. There are no words that can rune the tiger.
(3) mentioned in a famous poem by William Blake, as in Borges the tiger appears to represent the ineffability of nature. Strangely, similarly, and perhaps coincidentally, Blake’s own painting of the “tyger” is blue, and therefore possibly referenced in the title of Borges’ short story Blue Tigers, from which the quote in the previous entry is taken.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright.
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye.
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
