Codex and the Maze: Labyrinthus Seraphinianus
If only Borges had the eyesight to read it: the Codex Seraphinianus, a book which doubled as a labyrinth. But publishing Luigi Serafini's chef
— By Jose-Luis Moctezuma | September 10, 2010
Borges’ parable, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” posits the existence of an anomalous conflation: a labyrinth which is also a book, and a book which turns out to be a labyrinth; “a labyrinth of symbols… an invisible labyrinth of time.” Within the complex layering of a compact narrative, Borges briefly limns the (fictional?) life of an ancient Chinese scholar named Ts’ui Pên who retired from public life to construct a labyrinth and write a book — “‘Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.’” Italian publisher extraordinaire, Franco Maria Ricci, has accomplished the nearest possible thing, except in separate phases: he financed the publication of the Codex Seraphinianus, an encyclopedia written in an indecipherable language that describes a bizarre alternate world; and, six years after retiring from publishing duties, Ricci focused his resources on constructing a real-life labyrinth, a seven-hectare bamboo hedge maze that is also the largest in the world.
The Codex Seraphinianus, whose lurid contents and chimerical language-script were authored by the architect-artist Luigi Serafini, can be considered the modern-day Voynich Manuscript. First published in 1981 in a two-volume limited edition of 5,000 copies (with an introduction by Italo Calvino), the Codex is likely the most famous work published by Ricci’s firm, FMR. Serafini, a reclusive man who hardly gives interviews (much like Ricci), spent the years of 1976-1978 holed up in his Rome apartment drawing and writing almost in a possessed state. Serafini admits that the asemic language that borders and “explains” the illustrations was more the result of a semi-conscious state of automatic writing than an involved linguistic project. The same laws of the unconscious were behind the design of the pictures, which began as absent-minded doodles and grew into a complex series of pictures and diagrams illustrating the history of an alien world whose flora and fauna, symbols and rituals, structures and architectonics are subliminally purloined from our own.
Justin Taylor — whose 2007 Believer feature article is a good introduction to the curious existence of the Codex — compares his discovery of the book to the events in Borges’ eternally anthologized story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Taylor’s encounter with the Codex in a college class leads him on a bibliographic detective search for the book’s origins — not to mention failed attempts to prod Serafini for answers — in similar fashion to the narrator’s discovery of an obscure encyclopedia article describing the existence of an imaginary planet named Tlön.
Franco Maria Ricci’s labyrinth, located in Fontanellato near Parma (where he was born), covers 17.5 acres, making it the largest permanent hedge maze in the world according to the Guinness Book of World Records. (Second, in case you’re wondering, is the Pineapple Garden Maze in Hawaii.) The maze is due to open to the public in 2012 after a visitors’ center is completed. The question remaining is whether it’ll be easier to navigate the Fontanellato maze or unravel the language at the heart of the Codex Seraphinianus. If the maze ends up being no different from the book, it is because (as Calvino describes it in his introduction) they share “in the contiguity and permeability of all the domains of being.”
oh. wow. i’m amazed! borges, calvino, labyrinths, imaginary languages and worlds.
great article, thank you!!
Thanks Fran. Like your music page too!