The simile as a rhetorical strategy to describe the unusual. Comparison between the fantastic fauna of the Shanhai jing (山海經) and that of medieval European bestiaries

Abstract

One of the various tasks of the metaphor is to name realities that have not been named; another, of utmost interest here, is to sift the new through familiar, less disruptive realities. Projecting a concrete and immediate z source domain (abeja, e.g.), onto an excessively strange, abstract or abstruse x meta domain (colibrí, e.g.), the cognitive impact caused by x is reduced, thanks to which the hummingbird not only gains visibility, but even becomes understandable having entered through what is common and known: pájaro abeja. The bestiaries and ancient choreographies were full of novelties that the public of the time found difficult to conceive: terra incognita, never seen fauna and flora. In order to imagine, or better yet, conjure an image of the exotic reality described, it was assimilated to a recognizable reality with which it bore some resemblance. Such a strategy, observed in works from very disparate traditions such as the Shanhai jing and the European bestiaries, seems universal. Descriptions of unusual creatures from the Shanhai jing and European bestiaries are reviewed in this article to verify this universality. All extracts from medieval bestiaries come from the classic work of Ignacio Malaxecheverría: Bestiario medieval; those of the Shanhai jing, from the original Chinese text.