Surrealism is a genre that invites us to put aside our store of familiar associations, to forget the logic of cause and effect we have become comfortable with by daily repetition. It presents a world arranged according to a different set of rules, woven from different threads than those which hold our familiar world together. It has elements of both humor and horror, as the unexpected can make us laugh by subverting our expectations, just as it can trigger our sense of the uncanny and unnatural.
The Codex
The Codex Seraphinianus, a work of surrealist art in the form of a book by the Italian architect Luigi Serafini, originally published in 1981, is a unique object that does not easily fit into any classification, and portrays within it scenes with no counterpart in the mundane world. Like the encyclopedia of a fantastic world that Borges imagined in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the Codex takes the form of a reference work of encyclopedic scope, but referring to nothing recognizable as part of the world we know. Filled with colored-pencil illustrations of impossible plant-life, animals, costumes, vehicles and architecture, of scenes of recreation, work and warfare, everything that you would need to populate a world, these elements are blended together, rearranged and re-imagined in ways that render our standard set of interpretations useless. The illustrations are surrounded by lines written in a loopy, cursive script that you assume to be explanatory text, but which is actually a form of automatic writing meant to give the appearance of an alien writing system.
There is no unifying theme here, other than that of subverting your every expectation. Each page brings a new vision of a fantastic world, where a deer’s head planted in a pot of soil takes root and grows branches as antlers, a salamander-like creature creates its own thread and, with a naturally occurring needle as an appendage, weaves an aquatic hive for shelter, and people eat using a plate fitted with mechanical jaws that break down their food, which is then sucked up through a straw.
While the Voynich manuscript is an obvious analogue in its resistance to decipherment—to this day it has not been completely accounted for—with the Codex there is no mystery about its origins; we know when and why and by whom it was written. It nevertheless presents the reader with a challenge: to attempt their own project of interpretation. The experience of reading the Codex is that of an epigrapher attempting to decipher a script left behind by an ancient, remote people, no representative of which survives to guide us.
What Does It All Mean?
With no interpreter, we are required to try to puzzle out the meaning of what we see ourselves, and one of the most interesting aspects of the book is how Serafini imbues each page of meaningless pseudo-writing with the appearance of meaning, the sense that if you just stare at it long enough it will start making sense, like a tricky piece of code. While the forms on the page are bizarre and unworldly, they nevertheless are clearly presented in the form of a reference work, as something that is meant to inform rather than puzzle. This effect is enhanced by the way that the “text” is arranged, with headers, page numbers, lists, diagrams and sections with the appearance of mathematical formulae, each of which helps create the sense that information is being conveyed, that it is full of facts about this world that are as commonplace in their own context as 2 x 2 = 4.
The mirage of meaning that fills the Codex is partly created by the patterns and motifs that appear in the chaos, some of them in the form of variations on a theme, such as a pair of pages presenting rows of multi-colored creatures, depicted in one illustration as inhabitants of a series of holes lining an artificial rainbow, and laid out in a grid with an underlaying label, as if they were specimens on display in a museum. Some of the patterns are established using the gestalt principles of similarity, proximity and continuity to indicate relationships between the pseudo-paragraphs, illustrations and diagrams. All of these serve to create the sense that these markings are deliberate rather than aleatory, that there is knowledge here, but a knowledge sealed off by our inability to translate it.
Fill in the Blanks
I say that it is indecipherable, but of course you should feel free to help yourself to whatever meaning you can find here. The human mind is a pattern matching engine, and when confronted by such a menagerie of fantastic forms, it will naturally engage itself in trying to make sense of what it sees. If this is a puzzling world, it is also a puzzle, a game in which you piece together a larger picture by searching through the scattered pieces, looking for connections.
Despite its strangeness, I have the sense that, if this book could ever be translated, it would be a rather dry read, containing mostly facts and figures and systematic explanations of natural phenomena. You can imagine the young inhabitants of this world groaning when told they have to memorize a chapter of this book for a quiz.
It is similar, in a way, to another work of mysterious fantasy, Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, which consists of a series of black and white illustrations, each of them a single scene coupled with a title and a single line of text, and each appearing to have been plucked out of a lost story. All three elements, illustration, title and text, combine to create an atmosphere of mystery while inviting you to imagine the missing context. The sense of catching a glimpse of a story in progress is compelling, almost haunting, and the mind naturally attempts to extrapolate backwards to the circumstances that lead up to the moment captured in the scene, and forwards into what might be found on the next page in the story, if it existed. Both books engage the part of the mind that, when confronted by what has no place in our waking world, tries to tease out a sense, to fill in the blanks and create a context in which the unfamiliar can be made familiar, and in which the singular can be made part of a whole.