MEGATRENDS AND MEDIA

TRANSFORMATION OF THE MEDIA GARDEN
leather that looks like a parchment inscribed by characters of a forgotten
or unknown language.
By each verse, the tiger from the poem becomes a more and more
complicated and hazy labyrinth of symbols, metaphors, images and
encyclopaedic informations. When the dreaming person wakes up, he
puts the dream tiger into contrast with a real tiger, which hypothetically
sits in a bush near the side of the river Ganges just when the poem is
created. The irst tiger, which is part of the nature and of the reality, is in
contrast with the second tiger, which is part of the mythology. We do not
think over which tiger is more real, neither the poem solves this problem.
It is something different that we consider important – it is depicted by
the words at the end of the poem:
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse. 2
Let us explain what “vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest” is Borges
talking about.
3 Between two worlds
At the end of the Borges’ poem we discover a metalepsis, as it is called
in the narratologic terminology. The poetic tradition understands the
metalepsis as a certain type of metonymy (the metonymical denotation
of the consequence by means of the cause and vice versa), but the
metalepsis in this poem exceeds this classic deinition. The inal lines of
Borges’ poem remove the limits between the “world in one tells and the
world of which one tells”. 3 The trope of metalepsis, which we found in the
poem by Borges, was irst identiied by the French narratologist Gérard
Genette in the early 1970s 4 and have been expanded by himself in his
book Métalepses in 2004. This kind of metalepsis is not a igure any more;
2 BORGES, J. L.: The Other Tiger. In: Dreamtigers. University of Texas Press,
1964, p. 71.
3 GENETTE, G.: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ihaca : Cornell UP,
1980, p. 234-235.
4 GENETTE, G.: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ihaca : Cornell UP,
1980, p. 234-235.
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