bts@unc.UUCP (Bruce Smith) (01/10/84)
The following is from Jorge Luis Borges's, "The Book of Ima-
ginary Beings". (Penguin Books, 1974) I recommend this book
very highly-- *if* you can find it. Anyway, with respect to
Gene Wolfe's BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, Borges has this to say:
BALDANDERS
Baldanders (whose name we may translate as `Soon-
another' or `At-any-moment-something-else') was suggested to
the master shoemaker Hans Sachs (1494-1576) of Nuremburg by
that passage in the Odyssey in which Menelaus pursues the
Egyptian god Proteus, who changes himself into a lion, a
serpent, a panther, a huge wild boar, a tree, and flowing
water. Some ninety years after Sachs's death, Baldanders
makes a new appearance in the last book of the picaresque-
fantastic novel by Grimmelshausen, The Adventuresome Simpli-
cissimus (1669). In the midst of a wood, the hero comes
upon a stone statue which seems to him an idol from some old
Germanic temple. He touches it and the statue tells him he
is Baldanders and thereupon takes the forms of a man, of an
oak tree, of a sow, of a fat sausage, of a field of clover,
of dung, of a flower, of a blossoming branch, of a mulberry
bush, of a silk tapestry, of many other things and beings,
and then, once more, of a man. He pretends to teach Simpli-
cissimus the art "of conversing with things which by their
nature are dumb, such as chairs and benches, pots and pans";
he also makes himself into a secretary and writes these
words from the Revelation of St. John: "I am the first and
the last", which are the key to the coded document in which
he leaves the hero his instructions. Baldanders adds that
his emblem (like that of the Turk, and with more right to it
than the Turk) is the inconstant moon.
Baldanders is a successive monster, a monster in time.
The title page of the first edition of Grimmelshausen's
novel takes up the joke. It bears an engraving of a
creature having a satyr's head, a human torso, the unfolded
wings of a bird, and the tail of a fish, and which, with a
goat's leg and vulture's claws, tramples on a heap of masks
that stand for the succession of shapes he has taken. In
his belt he carries a sword and in his hands an open book
showing pictures of a crown, a sailing boat, a goblet, a
tower, a child, a pair of dice, a fool's cap with bells, and
a piece of ordnance.
_____________________________________
Bruce Smith, UNC-Chapel Hill
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