We habitually think of “the humanities” with a capital ‘H’ and this obligatory capitalization, if not in letter then in spirit, reflects the aura of high-culture that we expect of the humanities. We like to think of the humanities as something imposing and towering—in a word, as something academic.

Our choice of the original 1954 Japanese film “Gojira” for the common text project was a deliberate attempt to deflate the ‘H’ in humanities without lessening its significance. In planning tonight’s events, Eve Zimmerman, Pat Berman, Yoon Sun Lee, and I were keen to place the humanities in its proper perspective by placing it in relation to something sublime and inhuman. For me at least, it was an attempt to recapture the experience of discovery, central to the humanities, that is exemplified, and perhaps only possessed, by a child who is taken for the first time to the zoo or who first sees a film like Godzilla.

In the forward to the first edition of The Book of Imaginary Beings in 1957, the Argentinean writer Jorge-Luis Borges speaks of the wonder of a child at the zoo. In a zoological garden, a child sees animals it has never seen before and sees for the first time a variety of creatures that blur the distinction between the real and the imaginary. Echoing a secret that we find in Heraclitus and in Nietzsche, Borges speaks of the child as by definition a discoverer—discovering the camel is no more remarkable that discovering mirrors, or water, or stairs. A child only knows a world that is rich horizontally for a child has yet to succumb to the vertical distinction of high and low. We can, Borges reminds us, of course deny the child and the creatures of the imagination. We can convince ourselves that children led into zoological gardens become, twenty years down the line, neurotic, and the truth is, there’s not a child who has not discovered the zoo and not an adult who is not revealed to be neurotic, when carefully examined. I agree with Borges that the imagination and neurosis are incompatible, and that the cultivation of unstudied wonder is the best safeguard against the neurosis of academic institutions.

In this spirit, Borges’ book of imaginary beings is populated with imaginary creatures from the history of world literature. We find therein Pliny’s description of the Amphisbaena confronted by Cato’s soldiers in North Africa; the Nagas from the Mahabharata; the catalogue of Monsters from Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony. Not surprisingly, the dragon appears more than any other imaginary creature under three different entries: “The Dragon,” “The Chinese Dragon,” and “The Western Dragon.”

Time, however, has considerably tarnished the significance and diminished the presence of dragons. We believe in lions as both a reality and a symbol; we believe in the Minotaur as a symbol, though no longer as reality; but we no longer believe in the dragon as either reality or symbol. As Borges remarks, the dragon is perhaps the best known though also the least fortunate of fantastic animals. It strikes us as a creature of childhood—undoubtedly due to the one-dimensional rap that dragons have suffered in knightly fairly-tales. We must not forget that this is a contemporary prejudice; the dragon has a presence in just about every culture; in the West, the last testimony to the real existence of dragons is, relatively speaking, not that old: we find it in Konrad von Gesner’s Historia Animalium from the mid 16th century. As a symbol, the last great dragon (of sorts: actually a sea serpent) is to be found in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.

Borges was, as far as I know, not much into the films of his times; his compendium of imaginary beings draws exclusively from world literature. I cannot help but think that if Borges were alive and here with us today, he would have included a separate entry for “Gojira” in his book of imaginary beings. As anyone familiar with Borges’s fictions must readily acknowledge, the book that I am imagining is already written, held in the library of Babel, simply because it is imaginable. Borges would include Gojira, if for no other reason that it is another brilliant exploration of his insight that we do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the image of the dragon that is both congenial and frightening to humanity’s imagination. A dragon is, one might say, a necessary monster, not some ephemeral creature like the chimaera or the animal dreamed by Kafka.