Borges and Joyce

by Patricia Novillo-Corvalan

  This chapter examines the ubiquitous presence of Dante in the works of Borges and Joyce. It explores their respective meetings with the Florentine writer from a literary, historical, and biographical viewpoint. Joyce encountered Dante through a Roman Catholic backdrop and a formative Jesuit upbringing, while Borges’s rather belated meeting with Dante took place in the 1930s, yet it became a pivotal and lifelong force in his writings. It argues that in spite of the different circumstances that compelled Borges and Joyce to develop an enduring interest in Dante’s works, their encounters are marked by several intersections. Both publicly expressed their unconditional admiration for their Italian predecessor with eulogistic declarations, and yet had the audacity to swap reverence for irreverence in their creative productions, daringly proposing versions of their illustrious maestro sprinkled with parody and unmistakably satirical impulses. Both professed a predilection for selected linguistic and thematic aspects of the Commedia, which they subsequently blended and moulded to fit the transformative process of their respective writings. Both participated in the post-Dantean tradition of the virtuous lady as a means to offer an inverted female model that endorses attributes far removed from Beatrice’s piousness and chastity.

  This chapter also investigates the crucial juncture at which Dante meets Joyce in Borges’s celebrated ficciones ‘The Zahir’ and ‘The Aleph’,4 where he interweaves a complex tapestry of references and allusions to Dante and Joyce respectively that become illuminated through a joint analysis of both stories. I argue that the decisive principle of Borges’s encounter with Dante and Joyce implies that their epic proportions can be re-imagined, re-fitted and contracted in the tight, yet infinite confines of a magical panel, memory, coin or minute iridescent sphere also known as the Aleph. It must, therefore, be emphasized that Borges’s affiliation with Joyce as a model of infinity and his counteractive disaffiliation as the epitome of fictional overload, brings into play the mediating figure of Dante who, so to speak, stands somewhere in the background or, at times, in the forefront of their conversation, just as Homer and Shakespeare equally participate in the pluralistic forum forged by their complex interactions. Equally, this chapter aims to raise several interrelated questions, such as, how do Joyce and Borges foster afterlives of Dante in the twentieth century? How does Borges create his own compressed, parodic version of the Commedia? And in what way is this exercise in rewriting and translation illuminated by his previous condensed version of Ulysses in ‘Funes the Memorious’? And, finally, what happens when Leopold Bloom’s florin embarks on a transcultural voyage from Dublin to Buenos Aires, following the similar journey previously undertaken by Molly Bloom in 1925, and also somehow fulfilling the thwarted expedition never undertaken by Eveline?

  Joyce and Borges, Readers of Dante

  The relationship between Joyce and Dante benefited from the early publicity undertaken by Samuel Beckett in his seminal essay: ‘Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce’ that constituted the first study of Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination of Work-in-Progress (1929). The chief purpose of this eccentrically titled collection of critical essays (which boasted twelve influential contributors, including the French writer and translator Eugene Jolas and the American poet William Carlos Williams) was to defend Work in Progress from the unwelcoming reception of the critics. Beckett’s four-way comparative methodology placed Joyce’s writings historically in relation to the chronological Italian lineage of Dante, Bruno, and Vico. In his exploration of Joyce’s affiliation with Dante, Beckett offers an ample discussion from a linguistic and literary vantage point in which he brings together Dante’s treatises and Commedia in relation to Joyce’s embryonic, untitled, and experimental Work-in-Progress. He concluded the essay with ‘a last word about the Purgatories’5 in which he forged a suggestive array of juxtapositions between Dante’s and Joyce’s purgatorial realms. He asserted that if Dante’s Purgatory is ‘conical and consequently implies culmination’, Joyce’s ‘is spherical and excludes culmination’. If in Dante’s ‘there is an ascent from real vegetation — Ante-Purgatory, to ideal vegetation — Terrestrial Paradise,’ in Joyce’s, contrarily, ‘there is no ascent and no ideal vegetation’. If in Dante’s there is ‘absolute progression and a guaranteed consummation’, in Joyce’s there is, ‘flux — progression or retrogression, and an apparent consummation’. If in Dante’s the ‘movement is unidirectional, and a step forward represents a net advance’ in Joyce’s, conversely, ‘movement is non-directional — or multi-directional, and a step forward is, by definition, a step back’. Beckett’s conclusion insisted on the redeeming, upward journey of Dante’s Purgatorio as a transitional space leading to Divine salvation, in opposition to Joyce’s polyvalent, unfinished, and purgatorial current leading to the further fluidity and uncertainty of an endlessly revolving linguistic motion: ‘Dante’s Terrestrial Paradise is the carriage entrance to a Paradise that is not terrestrial: Mr. Joyce’s Terrestrial Paradise is the tradesmen’s entrance on to the sea-shore’. To a further extent, Beckett’s intricate pattern of the complex relationship between Joyce and Dante can only anticipate and illuminate his own lifelong dialogue with the Florentine poet. Beckett’s ‘last word about the Purgatories’, paradoxically becomes the first word about his Purgatories, as his subsequent rewritings of Dante propose a series of unredeemed characters who are entombed alive in the most austere and desolate of purgatorial landscapes. Principally, Beckett participates in the transformation of Dante’s Christian epic of salvation as it conjures up a non-paradisiacal, unconsummated, and perpetual purgatorial model that follows up from his 1929 essay. Beckett foregrounds his appropriation of Dante’s vision of the afterlife in his poetic, prose, and dramatic works. In ‘Beckett’s Purgatories’ John L. Murphy asserts that: ‘The Catholic tradition — dissected in Joyce — for Beckett becomes another intellectual construction to be mined. While both resurrect Christian models, they reshape and refigure them to suit the needs of not a believer but an agnostic, one who, centuries after Dante, propagates a refurbished purgatorial vision.’6 Just as Beckett is advancing his own transformative exercise of Dante in the wake of Joyce, he is equally contributing towards the consolidation of a tradition of Irish writers openly engaged with the aftermath of Dante’s medieval vision as it voyages across history, language, and culture to twentieth-century Ireland.7

  After Beckett’s ‘Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, the most significant scholarly contribution charting Joyce’s relationship with Dante from his early epiphanies to Finnegans Wake is Mary T. Reynolds’s Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (1981). This ambitious study aims to examine the pervasive influence of Dante in Joyce’s entire corpus: ‘In all Joyce’s work Dante is a massive presence, judged, evaluated, and measured in every dimension.’8 Reynolds also makes the more subtle proposition that Dante stands at the heart of Joyce’s creative impulse or, as she puts it in the compound title of her work, Dante becomes ‘the shaping imagination’ of Joyce’s writing. Since this type of claim runs the risk of excluding other equally central discourses in Joyce’s complex intertextuality, she clarifies that Joyce’s full-scale literary engagement with Dante is only comparable to his affiliation with Homer and Shakespeare.9 Reynolds also provides a useful appendix with Joyce’s allusions to Dante throughout his entire oeuvre. Apart from Reynolds’s study, the Joycean scholarship has recently benefited from Lucia Boldrini’s Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations: Language and Meaning in Finnegans Wake (2001). This is an exhaustive investigation that surveys the ‘literary relations’ between Dante’s works and the Wake, in an attempt to comparatively demonstrate how Joyce’s linguistic plurality, polysemy, and experimentalism are closely intertwined with Dante’s treatises, Commedia and his epistle to Can Grande della Scala. Boldrini’s comparative study adheres to a methodology that aims to unearth what she refers to as ‘ “a Dantean poetics of Finnegans Wake”, [...] (a conception of the relationship between language and literature, and between theme, structure and style, as
well as of the scope of the literary work, and of how a text signifies) which is comparable to the poetics of Dante’s works.’10 Jennifer Fraser’s Rite of Passage in the Narratives of Dante and Joyce (2002), is likewise another insightful recent study which has enhanced and taken to further lengths Joyce’s fascinating relationship with Dante. Her study is carefully constructed around the symbolism of the ‘diptych’ which ‘in late antiquity’, she explains, ‘were made of wood or ivory, and they were hinged together to close like a book. The inner surfaces of the two panels had recessed surfaces of wax on which one could inscribe a message’.11 It is therefore suggested throughout the book that the literary works of Joyce and Dante conform to the rich image of the diptych.

  On the other hand, a significant corpus of scholarship has demonstrated the noteworthy presence of Dante in Borges’s work. The most valuable contribution to date is Humberto Nuñez-Faraco’s Borges and Dante: Echoes of a Literary Friendship (2006). His study examines three aspects of Borges’s relationship with Dante: poetic language, ethics and love. Nuñez-Faraco states that the purpose of his study is ‘to reveal the way in which Borges’s interests in these issues manifested themselves in his appropriation of Dante and gained prominence within his work as a whole, paying particular attention to the years c. 1920–c. 1960’.12 In addition to Nuñez-Faraco’s book, there is a wealth of essays that investigate the influence of Dante — particularly the Commedia — in Borges’s fiction,13 a recognizable presence that may be identified in his short stories (‘The Aleph’, ‘The Intruder’, ‘Death and the Compass’, ‘The Other Death’, ‘The Wait’), poems (‘Of Heaven and Hell’, ‘Inferno V, 129’, ‘Hunger’, ‘Conjectural Poem’) narrative vignettes (‘Paradiso, XXX, 108’, ‘Inferno, I, 32’) and various references to Dante’s pagan animal mythology in The Book of Imaginary Beings (‘Cerberus’, The Minotaur’, ‘Acheron’). Furthermore, Borges, unlike Joyce, engaged in the critical reception of Dante, producing relevant essays in the 1940s which were later compiled in Nine Dantesque Essays (1982). He also gave several interviews and conferences on Dante in the last thirty years of his life,14 and composed the preliminary study of a Spanish prose edition of the Commedia translated by Cayetano Rosell with notes by Narciso Bruzzi Costas (1949). As a result of this, his fictional engagement with Dante has to be considered in conjunction to his critical output, particularly as there exists a substantial overlapping and inter-feeding between both productions.

  While Borges and Joyce shared a lifelong relationship with Dante, their respective meetings with the Italian poet differ considerably. Joyce’s encounter with Dante goes back to his childhood years as part of the religious inheritance of a strict Catholic upbringing which was in turn reinforced by the pedagogical training imparted by the Jesuits. It is also significant that during his studies at University College, Joyce learned Italian and read Dante’s Commedia in the original. For example, Eco and Santoro-Brienza observe that ‘From his early student years, Joyce studied Dante and valued him more than any other poet. Only Homer and Shakespeare are as ubiquitously present in all his writings as Dante is. And Joyce had no hesitation in calling him “the first of the Europeans” ’.15 Joyce’s admiration and emulation for Dante led Oliver Gogarty — as Ellmann reports — ‘to dub him a little later the Dante of Dublin’ (JJII 75). Joyce’s cultural entrenching in a Dantean universe is also emphasized by David Wallace:

  Joyce grew up knowing Dante as part of the Catholic culture of Ireland: he had a dour governess called ‘Dante’ Conway; he lived in a house in Blackrock with stained-glass panels in the hall door depicting Dante and Beatrice. His Jesuit educators (like their counterparts in Italy) employed the Commedia to enforce Catholic orthodoxy, ‘the spiritual refrigerating apparatus invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri’.16

  In late nineteenth-century Ireland, more than six hundred years after the publication of Dante’s Commedia and another three hundred since the Basque Christian mystic and founder of the Jesuit brotherhood, St Ignatius of Loyola, composed his influential Spiritual Exercises,17 the Jesuit congregation of Roman Catholic Ireland still adhered to the educational technique based on scholastic conceptions of hell and Loyola’s religious and mnemonic technique of ‘composition of place’. In Book III of A Portrait, Father Arnall’s compelling rhetoric effectively borrows from Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises in order to deliver his dogmatic oration on the eternal punishments reserved for the damned souls in Hell:

  This morning we endeavoured, in our reflection upon hell, to make what our holy founder calls in his book of spiritual exercises, the composition of place. We endeavoured, that is, to imagine with the senses of the mind, in our imagination, the material character of that awful place and of the physical torments which all who are in hell endure

  (P 107).

  The efficacy of this pedagogical method is based in the intense visualization of the places of Hell and the lasting impression they make on an audience of adolescent boys, particularly under the extreme isolation of a spiritual retreat. Frances Yates argues that Dante’s Inferno stands amongst the most representative medieval memory systems, and refers to the Commedia as a ‘mystical art’ or ‘Dantesque art of memory’ which ‘could be regarded as a kind of memory system for memorizing Hell and its punishments, with striking images on orders of places.18 In this vein, Dante’s systematically organized architecture of hell, with its striking iconography of concentric circles, mountains, rivers, woods, icy landscapes, mythological figures, and law of divine retribution based on contrapasso (whereby the punishment is commensurate to the nature of the sin committed in life) becomes the exemplary monument of a whole Christian tradition that promotes the accurate and systematic remembrance of hell. Thus, Father Arnall also required that the memories of his ‘dear little brothers in Christ’ become a tabula rasa so that they more easily absorb his hyperbolic eschatological sermon: ‘Banish from your minds all worldly thoughts and think only of the last things, death, judgment, hell and heaven’, as ‘he who remembers these things, says Ecclesiastes, shall not sin forever’ (P 93). He also sprinkles his discourse with a further scatological horror, as the dark confines of hell are infused with ‘an awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer’ (P 101). This is the type of foul smell that in Canto XI of Inferno temporarily halts Virgil and Dante’s descent into the Sixth Circle of hell: ‘Lo nostro scender conviene esser tardo/ sì che s’ausi un poco in prima il senso/ al tristo fiato’19 [‘Our descent will have to be delayed somewhat/ so that our sense of smell may grow accustomed to these vile fumes’].20 The effectiveness of Father Arnall’s visual, olfactory, and auditory detour of hell leads to Stephen’s rapid shift from corporeal pleasures to a spiritual reawakening that culminates in his Act of Contrition and subsequent confession: ‘Confess, he had to confess every sin [...] Confess! O he would indeed to be free and sinless again!’ (P 118). In Dante’s scheme of damnation Stephen would be guilty of lust, an offence that belongs to the sins of Incontinence and is allocated to Circle II of his terra infernalis. Once Stephen is purged of his impurity through the sacrament of confession, his previous sinful existence is transformed into ‘a life of grace and virtue and happiness’ (P 123). But this new spiritual life that closes Chapter III is rapidly overtaken by Stephen’s ensuing literary, political and linguistic concerns, insofar as he leaves behind his religious potential as the ‘Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S.J.’ (P 136) in order to fully embrace the legacy of his mythological predecessor, the pagan Greek artificer Daedalus. In this sense, as Umberto Eco has pointed out, ‘Joyce loses his faith but remains faithful to the orthodox system’,21 thus resigning his church but not the medieval model inculcated into him by the Jesuit order in Clongowes and Belvedere. In ‘Wandering Rocks’ Buck Mulligan sarcastically blames Stephen’s existential anxieties and incapacity to fully incarnate his role as an artist to the theological system of thought imparted by the Jesuit order, particu
larly to the deeply distressing images of hell to which he was exposed as a child: ‘— They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell’ (U 10.1072). As he humorously puts it in ‘Telemachus’: ‘you [Stephen] have the cursed Jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way’ (U 1.208–09).