Borges and Joyce

by Patricia Novillo-Corvalan

3. Sarlo, A Writer on the Edge, p. 6.

  4. For other pre-texts of ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ see Barei, pp. 155–62.

  5. Ronald Christ, The Narrow Act: Borges’ Art of Allusion (New York: New York University Press, 1969), p. 133.

  6. ‘Funes el memorioso’ was originally published in the Buenos Aires daily La Nación, 7 June 1942.

  7. Gene H. Bell-Villada, Borges and his Fiction: A Guide to his Mind and Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 99.

  8. This biographic detail is not included in ‘Funes the Memorious.’

  9. Eric Bulson, ‘Joyce’s Geodesy’, Journal of Modern Literature, 25.2 (2001–02), 80–96 (p. 81).

  10. It is difficult to ascertain whether Borges had knowledge of John Joyce’s anecdote. He certainly knew, however, that Joyce had been trained by the Jesuits in Clongowes Wood College, an institution that was renowned for its memoriter pedagogy. This detail is mentioned in his 1925 review of Ulysses (Inq. 24) and in his 1937 capsule biography of Joyce (OC4 251). Significantly, Charles Duff, whom Borges had read in 1932, reported in James Joyce and the Plain Reader that Joyce was ‘gifted with a prodigious, even astounding, memory’. See Duff, p. 31. The same prodigious memory was characteristic, of course, of the Argentine writer.

  11. Joyce’s portrayal of Dublin as a compendium of street names, parks, public buildings and commercial shops with a statistical, topographical and temporal rigour, has been amply demonstrated in James Joyce’s Dublin: A Topographical Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses, by Ian Gunn and Clive Hart, with Harald Beck (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004).

  12. Fritz Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions, p. 16.

  13. Salgado, ‘Barroco Joyce’, p. 71.

  14. Waisman, ‘Borges Reads Joyce’, p. 69.

  15. Budgen, p. 69.

  16. Burgin, p. 166. Borges gives a similar account in an interview with Roberto Alifano. See ‘Funes and Insomnia’, in Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges, including a Selection of Poems: Interviews 1981–1983, conversations trans. by Nicomedes Suárez Araúz, Willis Barnstone, and Noemí Escandell (New York: Lascaux Publishers, 1984), pp. 27–29 (p. 28).

  17. Burgin, p. 166.

  18. Burgin, p. 166.

  19. Burgin, p. 166.

  20. Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, rev. edn (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 120.

  21. A similar theme runs through the 1936 poem ‘Insomnia’, in which Borges refers to himself as ‘un aborrecido centinela [an abhorred watchman] of the city of Buenos Aires (OC2 237). In twentieth-century Buenos Aires insomnia becomes the inward, textual recitation of a wakeful mind. Borges’s vision finally rolls up in a vivid mnemonic revelation that converges with the larger memory of universal history.

  22. Budgen, pp. 180–81.

  23. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 41. In this study Yates offers an unprecedented trajectory of the vast and previously uncharted terrain that constitutes the history of Western mnemotechnics. Yates’s survey begins with the legendary Greek poet Simonides of Ceos (the alleged inventor of the art) and is followed by a detailed exposition of the key role that memory played in the Roman sphere of classical rhetoric. She also surveys the art in Greece, paying particular attention to Aristotle’s De Memoria et Reminiscentia and Plato’s Phaedrus, which are considered amongst the most influential treatises of memory. Yates then moves to the art of memory that developed in the Middle Ages, mainly through the Christian discourses of Aquinas and Albertus. Her study subsequently concentrates on the more complex memory systems postulated by Giordano Bruno and Raymond Lully. Throughout this magisterial study, Yates emphasizes the enormity of her survey and the crucial fact that Memory conceived as Art and subject matter of a book-length investigation stands neither as an autonomous discipline nor as a complete field of study, but rather emerges as a scattered interdisciplinary project that consequently incorporates a vast array of subjects. The account of the art of memory that I provide in this article is deeply indebted to Yates’s study. For other studies on the subject of memory see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For an illuminating commentary of the art of memory in Joyce’s Ulysses, see Stephen Heath, ‘Joyce in Language’, in James Joyce: New Perspectives, ed. by Colin MacCabe (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 129–48. For an informative and insightful study of Joyce and memory see Jacques Mailhos, ‘The Art of Memory: Joyce and Perec’, in Transcultural Joyce, ed. by Karen R. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 151–73. See also his ‘ “Begin to Forget it”: The Preprovided Memory of Finnegans Wake’, in European Joyce Studies 4: Finnegans Wake Teems of Times, ed. by Andrew Treip (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994) pp. 40–67; Klaus Reichert, ‘Joyce’s Memory’, in Images of Joyce, ed. by Clive Hart, George Sandulescu, Bonnie K. Scott, Fritz Senn, 2 vols (Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1998), II, 754–58; and John S. Rickard, Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1998).

  24. Bell-Villada, p. 97.

  25. Pliny, the Elder, Natural History, trans. with introduction and notes by John F. Healy (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 88.

  26. Pliny, p. 88.

  27. Pliny, p. 89.

  28. Roberto Alifano, Conversaciones con Borges (Buenos Aires: Editorial Atlántida, 1984), p. 80, my translation.

  29. Marilyn French, The Book as World: James Joyce’s Ulysses (London: Abacus, 1982), p. 26.

  30. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, the Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans. by Ellen Esrock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 33.

  31. Rice, p. 54.

  32. Hilary Clark, The Fictional Encyclopaedia: Joyce, Pound, Sollers (London: Garland Publishing, 1990), p. 20.

  33. Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 109.

  34. David Farrell Krell, Of Memory: Reminiscence and Writing on the Verge (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 79.

  35. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Roger Woolhouse (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 151.

  36. James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. with an intro. and notes by Kevin Barry, trans. from the Italian by Conor Deane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 60.

  37. This conception of a universal memory brings to mind Jacques Derrida’s reading of Joyce, in which he condenses Joyce’s legacy as, ‘[a memory] which is henceforth greater than all your finite memory can, in a single instant or a single vocable, gather up of cultures, languages, mythologies, religions, philosophies, sciences, history of mind and of literatures’. For Derrida, this type of memory surpasses human limitations in order to give way to the workings of a machinist contrivance, hence Derrida’s denomination of Joyce’s ‘hypermnesiac machine’, in what he refers to as the ‘quasi-infinite speed of the movements on Joyce’s cables’, as well as in his computerized version of Joyce, compounded in the portmanteau ‘joyceware’. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’, in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 145–59 (p. 147).

  38. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. by Daniel Breaseale, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 59.

  39. Nietzsche, p. 59.

  40. Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 7.

  41. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. by Robert Fitzgerald (London: Harvill Press, 1996), p. 186.

  42. Plato, The Republic, trans. by Desmond Lee, 2nd rev. edn (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 393.

  43. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Dellauer (London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 426.

  44. Nietzsche, p. 62.

 
; 45. Casey, p. 307.

  46. Nietzsche, p. 62.

  47. Roxana Kreimer, ‘Nietzsche, autor de “Funes el Memorioso” ’, in Jorge Luis Borges: intervenciones sobre pensamiento y literatura, ed. by William Rowe, Claudio Canaparo, Annick Louis (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2000), pp. 189–99 (p. 189). Kreimer claims Nietzsche as the only ‘author’ of Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’, clearly failing to account for the other precursors that similarly contributed to the creation of Funes. However, this is an accomplished and illuminating exposition of Borges’s relationship with Nietzsche.

  48. Nietzsche, p. 62.

  49. Salgado, ‘Barroco Joyce’, p. 72.

  50. John Sturrock, Paper Tigers: The Ideal Fictions o Jorge Luis Borges (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 109.

  51. Nietzsche, p. 62.

  52. Ricoeur, p. 413.

  53. Casey, pp. 15–17.

  54. See Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (London: Duckworth, 1972), pp. 47–60. This useful study provides a translation of Aristotle’s memory treatise De Memoria et Reminiscentia.

  55. Casey, p. 15.

  56. Casey, p. 15.

  57. Rickard, p. 10.

  58. Rickard, p. 11.

  59. Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari, Reencuentro: diálogos inéditos (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1999), p. 37.

  60. A. Walton Litz, ‘Ithaca’, in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, ed. by Clive Hart and David Hayman (London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 385–405 (p. 388).

  61. Lawrence, Odyssey of Style in Ulysses, p. 181, p. 186.

  62. Fritz Senn, ‘ “Ithaca”: Portrait of the Chapter as a Long List’, in Joyce’s ‘Ithaca’, ed. by Andrew Gibson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 31–76 (p. 39).

  63. Rickard, p. 76.

  64. Gibson, Joyce’s ‘Ithaca’, p. 17.

  65. Rickard, p. 192.

  66. Sylvia Molloy, Signs of Borges, trans. by Oscar Montero (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 118.

  CHAPTER 4

  In Praise of Darkness: Homer, Joyce, Borges

  In his essay ‘On Epic Naiveté’ Theodor Adorno offers a view of the function of myth and narrative in Homer’s Odyssey which may be read as a descriptive note on the Western epic tradition and its unceasing transformative variations throughout history. Adorno argues that the Odyssey is:

  none other than an attempt to attend to the endlessly renewed beating of the sea on the rocky coast, and to patiently reproduce the way the water floods over the rocks and then streams back from them with a roar, leaving the solid ground glowing with a deeper color. This roaring is the sound of epic discourse, in which what is solid and unequivocal comes together with what is ambiguous and flowing, only to immediately part from it again. The amorphous flood of myth is the eternally invariant, but the telos of narrative is the differentiated, and the unrelentingly strict identity with what is simply identical, with unarticulated sameness, serves to create its differentness.1

  Adorno’s rhythmical and complexly argued account of the epic is worth looking at in more detail. This report invites us to view the Odyssey as a metaphorical flight of ever-recurring intersecting currents, an oceanic, mythical undertaking that generations of readers can recognize as part of the same tradition, and yet may be read anew each time. According to Adorno, this process is constituted by a twofold, continuous motion within the epic genre which offers two inter-dependent processes of movement (water) and stasis (rocks). The sound of epic discourse is, thus, oxymoronic, as it is solid and unequivocal (in relation to the rock) but also ambiguous and flowing (in relation to the sea). Much like Penelope’s intricate tapestry that involves endless cycles of weaving and un-weaving, the epic follows a similar incessant pattern that simultaneously implies stability and change. Adorno’s assertion may also be read, ultimately, as an illustration of the long-standing tradition of the Ulysses myth, from Homer’s resourceful wanderer as depicted in the Odyssey to Dante’s influential account of Ulysses’s last voyage in the Inferno; from Joyce’s transposition of Homer into the scenery of twentieth-century Dublin in Ulysses to Borges’s cross-cultural reading of the Ulysses myth in his 1948 essay ‘The Last Voyage of Ulysses’, and his 1949 short story ‘The Immortal’.

  This chapter examines the Ulysses tradition from the perspective of Borges’s revisionary account of the myth. It demonstrates that Borges conflates the Greek, Italian, and Irish avatars of the legendary hero through his use of the metaphor of the ancient explorer and a specific type of nautical imagery. In particular, it argues that Borges’s image of the explorer offers a generic category of the Ulysses myth as a journey, a daring quest that may equally stand for the many perils encountered by Homer’s Odysseus, Dante’s laborious and audacious writing of the Commedia, Joyce’s stylistic innovations and rewriting of Homer in Ulysses, the cutting-edge ethos of his Buenos Aires review Proa, his own challenging exploration of Joyce’s newly founded geography, and the journey of Joseph Cartaphilus in search of immortality. This chapter also discusses the complex Homeric pattern of seafaring narratives that Joyce develops in ‘Eumaeus’ and Borges in ‘The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro’. In addition, the preliminary section that follows offers an overview of the reception of Homer in English, in an attempt to highlight the crucial fact that Borges’s and Joyce’s retellings of the Ulysses myth were largely informed by the Homeric tradition they had inherited as twentieth-century writers.2

  Borges famously opened his seminal essay ‘The Homeric Versions’ (1932) with a provocative statement on the subject of literary translation:

  Ningún problema tan consustancial con las letras y con su modesto misterio como el que propone una traducción [...] Presuponer que toda recombinación de elementos es obligatoriamente inferior a su original, es presuponer que el borrador 9 es obligatoriamente inferior al borrador H — ya que no puede haber sino borradores. El concepto de texto definitivo no corresponde sino a la religión o al cansancio

  (OC1 239).

  [No problem is as consubstantial to literature and its modest mystery as the one posed by translation [...] To assume that every combination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft nine is necessarily inferior to draft H — for there can only be drafts. The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion (SNF 69).]

  Borges is challenging fixed notions of authorship and stable conceptions of literary texts. Unlike conventional theorists of translation, he celebrates derivative rather than original creations, inverting the conventional hierarchy, and questioning the notions of originality and the traditional belief in the superiority of the original. This complex process by virtue of which texts are neither situated in a chronological axis nor assessed from strictly canonized standpoints goes hand-in-hand with the type of re-creative translation strategy he practised in his 1925 fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’. If Borges ended his 1946 review of Salas Subirat’s complete translation of Ulysses into Spanish with a verdict that urged prospective translators of Joyce to adopt a re-creative translation practice, so he concluded ‘The Homeric Versions’ with a position that similarly illustrated his disbelief in the possibility of attaining a ‘faithful’ rendition of the original:

  ¿Cuál de esas muchas traducciones es fiel?, querrá saber tal vez mi lector. Repito que ninguna o que todas. Si la fidelidad tiene que ser a las imaginaciones de Homero, a los irrecuperables hombres y días que él se representó, ninguna puede serlo para nosotros; todas, para un griego del siglo diez. Si a los propósitos que tuvo, cualquiera de las muchas que trascribí, salvo las literales, que sacan toda su virtud del contraste con hábitos presentes. No es imposible que la versión calmosa de Butler sea la más fiel

  (OC1 243).

  [Which of these many translations is faithful? My reader will want to know. I repeat: none or all of them. If fidelity refers to Homer’s imagination and the irrecoverable men and days that he portrayed, none of them are faithful to us, but all of th
em would be for a tenth-century Greek. If it refers to his intentions, then any of the many I have transcribed would suffice, except for the literal versions, whose virtue lies entirely in their contrast to contemporary practices. It is not impossible that Butler’s unruffled version is the most faithful (SNF 74).]

  Since ‘none’ or ‘all’ of these translations is faithful in relation to conveying the ‘irrecoverable’ cultural and linguistic circumstances of Homer’s historical Greece, a tongue-in-cheek Borges then proposes that Butler’s Victorian, ‘unruffled’, prose Homer may be read as the most ‘faithful’ of them all. Like the cultural abyss that separates the realities of Aristotle and the Islamic philosopher Averroës, in ‘Averroës’ Search’, whose endeavour to translate The Poetics is defeated by the fact that he ignores the meaning of the words ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’, so the translation of Homer participates, to some extent, in a similar process of cultural and linguistic irrecoverability. And yet, this irrecoverable essence — as Borges playfully points out — depends on the eyes of the beholder, as much as the third-person narrator in ‘Averroës’ Search’ seeks to reconstruct the complex circumstances of the historical Averroës about to embark on the translation of The Poetics: ‘Sentí que la obra se burlaba de mí. Sentí que Averroes, queriendo imaginar lo que es un drama sin haber sospechado lo que es un teatro, no era más absurdo que yo, queriendo imaginar a Averroes, sin otro material que unos adarmes de Renan, de Lane y de Asín Palacios’ (OC1 588) [‘I felt that the work mocked me, foiled me, thwarted me. I felt that Averroës, trying to imagine what a play is without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than I, trying to imagine Averroës yet with no more material than a few snatches from Renan, Lane, and Asín Palacios’] (CF 241). Ultimately for Borges — and I am also thinking of Walter Benjamin — what becomes paramount here is that a translation is inevitably necessary, despite its questionable inaccuracies, inasmuch as it extends the life of an original, thus inscribing it within a constant need for translatability and, therefore, creative transformation. Where Benjamin, using an identifiably messianic and ghostly terminology, refers to the ‘afterlife’ of a given work, Borges, in line with his aesthetics of compression and his idiosyncratic practice of writing built on pre-existing texts, unaffectedly utilizes the word borrador [draft], to denote the mutability and fluidity inherent in all literary works. The inversion of the original–translation dichotomy is further promulgated by a playful Borges, who praised his own ignorance of Greek as the key factor for his subsequent discovery of a multiplicity of ‘Homers’: