Borges and Joyce
Page 25
In the prologue to his Nine Dantesque Essays (1982)46 Borges fantasizes about an Oriental library that contains an infinite panel of uncertain origin in which are depicted countless legends, thousands of characters, and myriad shapes and colours. In a typical Borgesian manner, the ambitious panel grows boundless in its enclosure, yet minute in its dimensions in order to encompass the whole universe:
Imaginemos, en una biblioteca oriental, una lámina pintada hace muchos siglos. Acaso es árabe y nos dicen que en ella están figuradas todas las fábulas de las Mil y una noches; acaso es china y sabemos que ilustra una novela con centenares o millares de personajes. En el tumulto de sus formas, alguna — un árbol que semeja un cono invertido, unas mezquitas de color bermejo sobre un muro de hierro — nos llama la atención y de ésa pasamos a otras. Declina el día, se fatiga la luz y a medida que nos internamos en el grabado, comprendemos que no hay cosa en la tierra que no esté ahí. Lo que fue, lo que es y lo que será, la historia del pasado y del futuro, las cosas que he tenido y las que tendré, todo ello nos espera en algún lugar de ese laberinto tranquilo..
(OC3 343).
[Imagine, in an Oriental library, a panel painted many centuries ago. It may be Arabic, and we are told that all the legends of The Thousand and One Nights are represented on its surface; it may be Chinese, and we learn that it illustrates a novel that has hundreds or thousands of characters. In the tumult of its forms, one shape — a tree like an inverted cone; a group of mosques, vermilion in color, against an iron wall — catches our attention, and from there we move on to others. The day declines, the light is wearing thin, and as we go deeper into the carved surface we understand that there is nothing on earth that is not there. What was, is, and shall be, the history of past and future, the things I had had and those I will have, all of it awaits us somewhere in this serene labyrinth ... (SNF 267).]
Borges then discloses that the infinite engraving he has imagined stands for Dante’s Commedia: ‘He fantaseado una obra mágica, una lámina que también fuera un microcosmo; el poema de Dante es esa lámina de ámbito universal’ (OC3 343) [‘I have fantasized a magical work, a panel that is also a microcosm: Dante’s poem is that panel whose edges enclose the universe’] (SNF 267). An infinite book, a labyrinth, a microcosm that encompasses a universe, the encapsulation of eternity in a single work, this is, unquestionably, the type of rhetoric that Borges employs when referring to Joyce. Borges’s conception of Dante’s Commedia as an infinite work reappears again in his literary conversations with Osvaldo Ferrari, in a section appropriately entitled ‘Dante, una lectura infinita’ [Dante, an Infinite Reading], whereby he refers to the Commedia as ‘ese libro total [en el que] ya está todo’ [a total book [in which] is contained everything].47 Just as in 1925 Borges unashamedly expressed his inability to read Ulysses in its entirety, and yet paradoxically claimed to know the inexhaustible book ‘con esa aventurera y legítima certidumbre que hay en nosotros, al afirmar nuestro conocimiento de la ciudad, sin adjudicarnos por ello la intimidad de cuantas calles incluye’ (Inq. 23) [‘with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes’] (SNF 12), so in 1961 he similarly employed the metaphor of the manifold and ever-changing city in order to convey the vastness and unlimited quality of Dante’s triple architecture of the otherworld: ‘La Divina Comedia es una ciudad que nunca habremos explorado del todo’ (TR3 74) [The Commedia is a city that we shall never explore in its entirety].
Borges also relates his infinite conception of the Commedia through the numerous interpretations the book has elicited across the centuries. For example, in ‘The Pitying Torturer’ he examines the self-contradictory nature of Dante’s conception of Divine judgement which condemns Paolo and Francesca to the inclement winds of the second circle of the Lustful, in relation to the Pilgrim’s compassionate response to the eternal torments of the doomed lovers (see SNF 284). This incongruity, he explains, has contributed to the richness and ongoing fascination of the episode. Alberto Manguel also notes that Borges seldom equates his view of the Commedia as an infinite book with the infinite readings of the Scriptures via Scotus Erigena’s comparison with the iridescent plumage of a peacock:
Once, after noting that we read now Dante in ways that he couldn’t have imagined, far beyond the ‘four levels’ of reading outlined in Dante’s letter to Can Grande della Scala, Borges recalled an observation by the ninth-century mystic Scotus Erigena. According to the author of On the Divisions of Nature, there are as many readings of a text as there are readers; this multiplicity of readings Erigena compared to the hues on the tail of a peacock.48
In a larger way, Borges’s infinite conception of the Commedia is interrelated to Dante’s epistle to Can Grande della Scala, in which he famously discussed the Commedia according to the four-fold model of reading attributed to the Scriptures by Biblical exegetes: the literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical. The key term in Dante’s analysis of the interpretative significance of the Commedia is ‘polysemous, that is, having many meanings’.49 In this sense, Borges and Joyce aligned their works to Dante’s hermeneutical tradition in an attempt to construct their texts as complexly woven fabrics that challenge linear readings and envisage a practice of reading and writing founded on multilayered systems of interpretation. Lucia Boldrini draws attention to a scholarly practice that applies Dante’s theological model to the reading of Joyce’s oeuvre: ‘One of the received notions of Joycean criticism is that Dante’s theory of the four levels of meaning is important for all of Joyce’s works, and especially for Finnegans Wake, the “polysemous” [...] text par excellence’.50 M. Keith Booker has also remarked that ‘One of the most obvious parallels between Joyce and Dante is that both writers produce extremely complex texts that generate richly multiple meanings’.51 Correspondingly, in the Borges scholarship, Matei Calinescu has persuasively argued that Borges’s works should be approached not through a linear, single reading, but through a ‘Kabbalist [reading that] will try other methods of (re)reading, vertical or circular, intratextual or intertextual’.52 Despite the fact that Borges’s works do not pose the level of linguistic experimentalism in terms of lexical polysemy, neologisms, alterations in syntax and morphology characteristic of Joyce’s last two texts, his super-concise ficciones are, nonetheless, meticulously carved textual miniatures which compactly stage a wealth of intertextual readings, organized narrative structures, an orchestration of citations in several languages.
Writing Dante in the Twentieth Century
In most critical studies of Borges’s works, ‘The Aleph’ and ‘The Zahir’ are discussed in tandem, offering a compact case study of symmetrical narrative patterns, a play of interesting juxtapositions, and a pair of magical objects that possess the exceptional properties to simultaneously mesmerize and disconcert ‘Borges’, first-person narrator of both fictions.53 However, in spite of these various intersecting patterns, the magical objects depicted in the two stories do not share the same identical properties, insofar as they denote two religious credos (Hebraism/Islamism), two opposite letters (Alpha/Omega), and two antithetical, yet complementary types of infinity (synchronic/diachronic).54 According to ‘Borges’, the Aleph stands for the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which in Hebrew lore: ‘significa el En Soph, la ilimitada y pura divinidad; también se dijo que tiene la forma de un hombre que señala el cielo y la tierra, para indicar que el mundo inferior es el espejo y es el mapa del superior’ (OC3 627) [‘signifies the En Soph, the pure and unlimited godhead; it has also been said that its shape is that of a man pointing to the sky and the earth, to indicate that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher’] (CF 285). He also compounds the Judaic lore of the Aleph with the groundbreaking theory of set numbers proposed by the Russian born mathematician Georg Cantor (1845–1918) whose theorem about infinity adopts the letter Aleph as the symbol for his transfinite numbers, ‘para la Mengenlehre, es el símbolo de lo
s números transfinitos, en los que el todo no es mayor que alguna de las partes’ (OC1 627) [‘for the Mengenlehre, the aleph is the symbol of the transfinite numbers, in which the whole is not greater than any of its parts’] (CF 285). ‘Cantor’s unique contribution was to consider all the elements of an infinite set to be present (as he said) “at once”,’ writes Katherine Hayles, ‘and thus to posit the number system as a pre-existing, interrelated totality.’55 This simultaneity is, of course, carefully exploited in ‘The Aleph’, a point in space which, like Cantor’s infinity, contains all points. Borges became acquainted with Cantor’s theory in Bertrand Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919) and later in Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner and James Newman, which he reviewed in 1940 (see OC1 276–77). But it is essential to note, however, that Borges’s idiosyncratic fusion of algebra and Jewish mysticism is informed by the relevant intersection between mathematics and Christianity that takes place in Canto XXXIII of Paradiso. In ‘The Aleph’ the first-person narrator refers to his inability to describe the infinite Aleph on account of the restrictions entailed in a successive and limited linguistic system bound to culture, time, and history. This constitutes, above all, Borges’s continued exploration of the ineffability topos, which he also developed, as I have shown in Chapter 3, in ‘Funes the Memorious’, where the first-person narrator attempts to compose an inevitably partial narrative of a man endowed with an infinite memory. Borges is modelling the motif of the writer’s despair about capturing an infinite revelation with an inadequate language system on Dante’s similar linguistic apologia at his incapacity to lay down for future generations his final vision of the Godhead:
Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio
che ’l parlar nostro, ch’a tal vista cede,
e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio
[...]
Oh quanto è corto il dire e come fioco
al mio concetto! e questo, a quel ch’ i’ vidi,
è tanto, che non basta a dicer ‘poco’
(Par XXXIII, 55–57; 121–23).
[And from then on my vision rose to heights
higher than words, which fail before such sight,
and memory fails, too, at such extremes.
[...]
How my weak words fall short of my conception,
which is itself so far from what I saw
that ‘weak’ is much too weak a word to use
(Par 392–93).]
Arribo, ahora, al inefable centro de mi relato; empieza, aquí, mi desesperación de escritor. Todo lenguaje es un alfabeto de símbolos cuyo ejercicio presupone un pasado que los interlocutores comparten; ¿cómo trasmitir a los otros el infinito Aleph, que mi temerosa memoria apenas abarca? [...] Lo que vieron mis ojos fue simultáneo: lo que transcribiré, sucesivo, porque el lenguaje lo es. Algo, sin embargo, recogeré
(OC1 625).
[I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins. Every language is an alphabet of symbols the employment of which assumes a past shared by its interlocutors. How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain? [...] What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive. Something of it, though, I will capture (SNF 283).]
If Borges follows Dante’s tradition of the human inability to fully grasp and/ or describe a vision that transcends our limited intellectual understanding and our inadequate linguistic system (notwithstanding the fact that Borges finds a successful solution with the device of chaotic enumeration), so Joyce equally revisits this problem in ‘Ithaca’ from the vantage point of geometrical quandaries, as the catechist refers to Bloom’s failed attempt to square the circle in 1886:
Qual è ’l geomètra che tutto s’affige
per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova,
pensando, quel principio ond’elli indige,
tal era io a quella vista nova
(Par XXXIII, 133–36).
[As the geometer who tries so hard
to square the circle, but cannot discover,
think as he may, the principle involved,
so did I strive with this new mystery
(Par 394).]
Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?
Because some years previously in 1886 when occupied with the problem of the quadrature of the circle
(U 17.1070–72).
Dante correlates his inability to describe the mystery of the trinity with the geometer’s ongoing and unsuccessful attempts to square the circle. Dasenbrock and Mines argue that Dante introduces this simile in an attempt to emphasize the discrepancy between human and divine understanding: ‘The analogy is a close one for Dante: for him, the “new sight” is not capturable by the methods of mathematics because the methods of mathematics are the methods of human beings, and the Divine or the infinite escapes our human comprehension.’56 Like Dante, Borges exemplifies his difficult task to transmit to future generations his vision of the Aleph with a catalogue of theological and mathematical perplexing notions:
Los místicos, en análogo trance, prodigan los emblemas: para significar la divinidad, un persa habla de un pájaro que de algún modo es todos los pájaros; Alanus de Insulis, de una esfera cuyo centro está en todas partes y la circunferencia en ninguna; Ezequiel, de un angel de cuatro caras que a un tiempo se dirige al Oriente y al Occidente, al Norte y al Sur. (No en vano rememoro esas inconcebibles analogías; alguna relación tienen con el Aleph.) Quizá los dioses no me negarían el hallazgo de una imagen equivalente, pero este informe quedaría contaminado de falsedad. Por lo demás, el problema central es irresoluble: la enumeración, siquiera parcial, de un conjunto infinito
(OC1 625).
[In a similar situation, mystics have employed a wealth of emblems: to signify the deity, a Persian mystic speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds: Alain de Lille speaks of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; Ezekiel, of an angel with four faces, facing east and west, north and south at once. (It is not for nothing that I call to mind these inconceivable analogies; they bear a relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods would not deny me the discovery of an equivalent image, but then this report would be polluted with literature, with falseness. And besides, the central problem — even partial enumeration, of infinity — is irresolvable (CF 282).]
Joyce’s adventurous foray into the field of mathematics owes much, like Borges’s, to his acquaintance with Bertrand Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, in which they not only learned about ancient geometrical pursuits but also became acquainted with theories of infinity. What these examples demonstrate here is that a whole scientific and theosophical tradition becomes the common locus in the infinite conversation between Dante, Joyce, and Borges. Whilst Borges and Joyce reveal a clear pattern of Dantean allusions in the complex texture of their narratives, they equally draw attention to the inevitable disparity between Dante’s medieval world and their twentieth-century circumstances. In this sense, I concur with Dasenbrock and Mines’s assertion that:
Rather than taking over Dante’s material, he [Joyce] is taking over Dante’s attitude towards his material. Instead of an Aquinas-map, or a Euclid-map, he has what we might call a Russell-map. Like Dante, he is structuring his work with an eye to the best contemporary mathematics and science; the difference is that mathematics and science have changed, and so must the organization of his work.57