Lizard

Animal Series

by Boria Sax

Our storybooks are full of lizards, but we usually call them something else—dragons, serpents, dinosaurs or monsters. These stories vastly increase their size, bestow wings upon them, make them exhale flame, and endow them with magical powers. Lizards stimulate the human imagination unlike most other animals, despite generally being small, soundless, and hidden from sight in burrows, treetops, and crevices. They can blend into a vast range of environments, from rocky coasts to deserts to rain forests. Their fluid motion can make us think of water, while their curvilinear form suggests vegetation. Their stillness suggests death, while their sudden arousal is like resurrection.

This delightful book gives lizards their due, demonstrating how the story of lizards is interwoven with the history of human imagination. Boria Sax considers the lizard as a sensual being—a symbol, a myth, a product of evolution and an aesthetic form. He describes the diversity of lizards and traces the representation of the reptile in cultures including those of pre-conquest Australia, the Quiché Maya, Mughal India, and central Africa. Illustrated throughout with beguiling images, Lizard is a unique and often surprising introduction to a popular but little-understood reptile.

Genres: Nonfiction

Paperback

First published October 15, 2017

About the author

I first became interested in the literature of animals around the end of the 1980's, not terribly long after I had obtained my PhD in German and intellectual history. I was feeling frustrated in my search for an academic job and even study of literature. By accident, I came across an encyclopedia of animals that had been written in the early nineteenth century. There, without any self-consciousness, was a new world of romance and adventure, filled with turkeys that spoke Arabic, beavers that build like architects, and dogs that solve murders. Within a few months, I had junked my previous research and devoted my studies to these texts.

Today, I shudder how nervy the switch was for a destitute young scholar, who, despite one book and several articles, had not managed to obtain any steady job except mopping floors. But soon I had managed to publish two books on animals in literature, The Frog King (1990) and The Parliament of Animals (1992). Around 1995, I founded Nature in Legend and Story (NILAS, Inc.), an organization that combines storytelling and scholarship. It was initially, a sort of rag-tag band of intellectual adventurers who loved literature but could not find a niche in the scholarly world. We put together a few conferences, which generated a lot of excitement among the few who attended, but little notice in academia or in what they sometimes call "the real world."

From fables and anecdotes, I moved to mythology, and published The Serpent and the Swan (1997), a study of animal bride tales from around the world. This was followed by many further publications including an examination of the darker side of animal studies, Animals in the Third Reich (2000), and a sort of compendium, The Mythical Zoo (2002), and a cultural history of corvids entitled Crow (2003). My most recent book is City of Ravens: London, its Tower and its Famous Ravens (2011), and Imaginary Animals will be published soon by Reaktion Books in London.

When I embarked on the study of animals in myth and literature, even graduate students did not have to mention a few dozen books just to show that they had read them. In barely more than a couple decades, the literature on human-animal relations has grown enormously in both quantity and sophistication. NILAS, I am proud to say, has become a well established organization, which has sponsored two highly successful conferences together with ISAZ.

But as the study of animals, what I like to call "totemic literature," becomes more of a standard feature of academic programs, I fear that something may be lost. It is now just a little too easy to discourse about the "social construction" and the "transgression" of "boundaries" between animals and human beings. Even as I admire the subtlety of such analysis, I sometimes find myself thinking, "So what?"

Having been there close to the beginning, part of my role is now to preserve some the sensuous immediacy, with that filled the study of animals in literature when it was still a novelty. That sort of "poetry" is not simply a luxury in our intellectual pursuits. With such developments as cloning, genetic engineering, and the massive destruction of natural habitats, we face crises so unprecedented that traditional philosophies, from utilitarianism to deep ecology, can offer us precious little guidance. The possibilities are so overwhelming, that we hardly even know what questions to ask. But neither, I am sure, did the fugitive who once encountered a mermaid in the middle of the woods.

Reviews

[Margaret · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having read the book in the series on Hedgehogs by Hugh Warwick I was anticipating something as joyful and full of love as that. What I got was a small volume that was dry, dull, and sterile.

The subject matter was interesting, but the writer did not appear to be that involved in what he was writing about.

[M]

I liked it in the beginning and found some interesting facts in it, but I feel like it’s more about how humans perceive lizards (through art, imagination, depictions) rather than lizards themselves. If you’re curious about actual lizards, I don’t know if this is the book for you.


"Lizards even take on the colours that surround them, and they are sensually attuned to every motion or change in their vicinity. They lie so still that they can almost be mistaken for vegetation, yet they can react instantaneously if an insect comes in range. Lizards are a great many things that we are not, and that is why they fascinate us."

[Boria Sax · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost all of us have “informal theories,” ideas that cannot quite be parsed in academic terms yet help to organize our thinking. One of mine is that every sort of animal corresponds to something in the human psyche. For wolves and tigers, that is something frightening and glamorous. For swans, that is mysterious, beautiful and sad. For the most part, lizards seem to lack the charisma of those animals, yet, on a largely unconscious level, we respond to their blend of fierceness and melancholy. Otherwise, why would we constantly make lizards into dragons? Why would we vastly exaggerate their size, and then bestow uncanny abilities, like breathing fire, upon them? I address these questions in my book Lizard, a history of relationships between lizards and human beings.

[parth shah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a nice starting point to get started in the world of lizards. Touches upon the topic from various different angles such as culture, history, societal image, art, mythology and not just biology. Good read :)

[Sayre · Rating 3 out of 5]

some interesting facts but some wishy washy writing and iffy art history
great images, esp historical images of depictions of lizards