Abstract
This chapter explores the exorbitant potential of animals to disrupt the representational frameworks into which they are placed, as exemplified by Luigi Pirandello’s 1915 novel Si gira! (Shoot!), which revolves around the on-screen killing of a tiger for a big-budget colonial adventure movie. This tiger serves as the focal point for Pirandello’s examination of the antinomies of reality and artifice, and yet the specific place and function of animality for his poetics has so far gone largely unnoticed. In this chapter, I read Pirandello’s tiger in relation to Akira Lippit’s claim that “animals resist metaphorization.” This resistance, arising from an irreducible discrepancy between the material and the semiotic—what the animal is and what the animal means—is, I argue, a central feature of zoopoetics.
Evening spreads in my spirit and I keep thinking.
that the tiger I am calling up in my poem
is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows,
a series of literary tropes ,
scraps remembered from encyclopedias ,
and not the deadly tiger, the fateful jewel
that in the sun or the deceptive moonlight
follows its paths, in Bengal or Sumatra,
of love, of indolence, of dying.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Other Tiger” (1999, translation modified), 117
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Driscoll, K. (2017). Fearful Symmetries: Pirandello’s Tiger and the Resistance to Metaphor. In: Ohrem, D., Bartosch, R. (eds) Beyond the Human-Animal Divide. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-93437-9_14
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