In opposition to his negative view of Pound, Dasenbrock's verdict of Eliot's creative transformations of Dante remains highly encouraging: 'If modernism has a true "Dantescan voice", that is the voice of Eliot'.87 But his final words for Joyce are even more assenting: '[In] terms of creative imitation, this means that he was the best imitator of all.'88 If what is at stake is 'creative imitation' then Borges and Joyce emerge, above all, triumphant in their appropriations of Dante. Their exercises in rewriting are both idiosyncratic and multifaceted, advocating a playful, radical and transformative poetics that shift Dante's medieval world to their twentieth-century circumstances. In effect, what remains decisive for Dasenbrock is the fact that Joyce realised that in order to write a modern Commedia, he had to use the knowledge of his time just as Dante had used the knowledge of his. The end result of Borges's and Joyce's complex afterlives of Dante highlights not only the crucial historical, linguistic, and cultural transfer to which Dasenbrock is referring here, but also the ability to combine as much homage and parody in their composite transactions of Dante. If this is so, like the fictional Menard, Borges and Joyce opt for the more challenging method to arrive at the Commedia, not by trying to become Dante in fourteenth-century Italy, but via the experiences of Joyce and Borges in their contemporary Ireland and Argentina, and via the mediation of a whole Western tradition of Dantean criticism. Once again, Borges's method of 'anacronismo deliberado y de las atribuciones erróneas' (OC1 450) ['deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution'] (CF 95) may produce, at times, versions infinitely more subtle, or richer, than the original.
Afterword: James Joyce, Author of 'The Aleph'
Alternatively, as far as Borges unites the discourses of Dante and Joyce in the overlapping patterns of ‘The Zahir’ and ‘The Aleph’, it is also possible to read in Ulysses a complex tapestry of allusions interwoven around the concept of the Aleph. There are thus four interrelated occasions on which Joyce celebrates the Aleph. First, in ‘Proteus’ as Stephen walks along Sandymount strand he gazes at two midwives and then muses upon the navel-cords that secretly link together the whole of humanity: ‘The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos’ (U 3.37–38). This intersecting umbilicus pattern is subsequently extended into a telephone conversation to Eden: ‘Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one’ (U 3.37–40). Stephen’s code to Eden brings together the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the first letter of the Greek alphabet, followed by three numerals. If these letter-symbols are translated into cardinal numbers they become 11001, creating a figure that recalls the Arabian Nights effect of perpetuity as it adds one more digit to a series that represent a conceptual infinity, 11000.89 Therefore, Joyce articulates in ‘Proteus’ a relationship between the Aleph and infinity which not only recalls Borges’s similar correlation with transfinite numbers, but by situating his entry on the Aleph in conjunction with Stephen’s paradisiacal message from Earth to Eden, Joyce also brings to mind Borges’s Kabbalistic assertion that the shape of the letter Aleph ‘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) [‘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). As he walks through sand, pebbles and shells, opening and closing his eyes from time to time, looking up and down, Stephen speculates about theosophy, literature and metaphysics, and pronounces the letter Aleph. Thus, who other than Stephen Dedalus, who wonders about time and space with his rhetorical question: ‘Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?’ (U 3.18–19) represents Borges’s assertion about a man contemplating infinity and signifying the letter Aleph?
The second reference to the Aleph in Ulysses takes place in ‘Lotus-Eaters’ during Bloom’s early peregrination through the city of Dublin: ‘He crossed Townsend street, passed the frowning face of Bethel. El, yes: house of: Aleph, Beth’ (U 5.10–11). Don Gifford informs us that ‘Beth’ and ‘El’ signify ‘House of God’ in Hebrew: ‘After the city and holy place twelve miles north of Jerusalem, where the ark of the covenant was kept. This is the name of a Salvation Army hall that Bloom passes in Lombard Street East.’90 Significantly, Joyce’s ‘House of God’ takes us back to Borges’s house of the Aleph as we shift across time and space from the Biblical Jerusalem to Joyce’s twentieth-century Dublin, and from Townsend Street to Garay Street in Borges’s Buenos Aires. There is a proportionate effect of mutation in both houses of Aleph, particularly since Joyce denotes the transposition of the sacred house of Jerusalem to a Salvation Army hall in Dublin, while Borges signals the inevitable demolition of ‘la vieja casa inveterada de la calle Garay’ (OC1 622) [‘the old and deeply rooted house on Calle Garay’] (CF 280) that contained the Aleph, in order to allow the new venture planned by the landlords Zunino and Zungri.
The third and fourth references take place in ‘Circe’ and ‘Ithaca’ respectively, and are concerned with the significance of the letter Aleph in the Hebrew alphabet. In ‘Circe’ Bloom proclaims his Zionist adherence by displaying ‘The ram’s horns’ (U 15.1619) — which according to Gifford signifies a battle trumpet of the ancient Israelites91 — and utters the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet: ‘Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth’ (U 15.1622) in addition to a wealth of references to other Judaic traditions and celebrations. This exploration is revisited in ‘Ithaca’, as Bloom and Stephen perform a linguistic exchange in which they compare and contrast the Hebrew and Gaelic alphabets respectively:
How was the glyphic comparison of the phonic symbols of both languages made in substantiation of the oral comparison?
By juxtaposition. On the penultimate blank page of a book of inferior literary style, entituled Sweets of Sin (produced by Bloom and so manipulated that its front cover came in contact with the surface of the table) with a pencil (sup plied by Stephen) Stephen wrote the Irish characters for gee, eh, dee, em, simple and modified, and Bloom in turn wrote the Hebrew characters ghimel, aleph, daleth and (in the absence of mem) a substituted qoph, explaining their arithme tical values as ordinal and cardinal numbers, videlicet 3, 1, 4, and 100
(U 17.731–40).
It is significant that Joyce intercalates his reference to the Irish and Hebrew languages with a third discourse — albeit neither ancient nor sacred — the soft-core pulp-fiction of Sweets of Sin, a volume previously purchased by Bloom (for Molly) in ‘The Wandering Rocks’ episode. In a typically Joycean gesture, the two revered languages are desacralized through contact with the third profane language of Sweets of Sin. This deliberate mixing and clashing of registers produces an effect of hybridization in the novel, as Bakhtin argued in The Dialogic Imagination: ‘The novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another’.92 This juxtaposition brings back, once again, Borges’s debunking of Dante’s tradition of the woman-as-angel by including in the mystical revelation of the Aleph the pornographic epistolary correspondence of Beatriz Viterbo. Hence if Joyce authorizes a criss-crossing of the sacred Hebrew and ancient Celtic languages with the bawdy narrative of Sweets of Sin, then Borges intersperses the obscene language of Beatriz Viterbo with the mystical revelation of the Aleph.
Above all, the Aleph as an infinite point of convergence in Dante, Joyce, and Borges is best exemplified in Borges’s 1941 obituary of Joyce. He concludes the necrological note with a reflection on Joyce’s life and oeuvre that brings to mind Beckett’s Purgatorial ending in ‘Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’, as it emphasizes the Dantean imprint of the book:
El Ulises (nadie lo ignora) es la historia de un solo día, en el perímetro de una sola ciudad. En esa voluntaria limitación es lícito inferior que para Joyce, todos los días fueron de algún modo secreto el día irreparable del Juicio; todos los sitios, el Infie
rno o el Purgatorio
(S 169).
[Ulysses (as everyone knows) is the story of a single day, within the perimeter of a single city. In this voluntary limitation, it is legitimate to perceive something more than an Aristotelian elegance: it can legitimately be inferred that for Joyce every day was in some secret way the irreparable Day of Judgment; every place, Hell or Purgatory (SNF 221).]
Notes to Chapter 5
1. For a comprehensive examination of the way in which the Victorians appropriated Dante’ literary, political and cultural discourses, see Alison Milbank’s Dante and the Victorian (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
2. Joyce acknowledged the fact that Blake aspired to become an English dantisti in his attempt to learn Italian in order to access the Commedia in the original: ‘He set about studying Italian to read the Divine Comedy in the original and to illustrate Dante’s vision with mystic drawings.’ See Joyce, Critical Writings, p. 179. Similarly, Borges acknowledged Blake’s study of Italian in one hi lectures at the National University of Buenos Aires. See Borges professor, edición, investigación y notas de Martín Arias y Martín Hadis (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2001), p. 204.
3. See Dante in English, ed. by Eric Griffiths and Matthew Reynolds (London: Penguin, 2005 for an up-to-date, detailed anthology of Dante’s reception in English from Chaucer to Seamu Heaney.
4. The presence of Dante in ‘The Aleph’ has been subject of much speculation. Emir Rodríguez Monegal states that Borges playfully disclaimed the story’s indebtedness to Dante’s Commedia ‘Critics [...] have detected Beatrice Portinari in Beatriz Viterbo, Dante in Daneri, and th descent into hell in the descent into the cellar. I am, of course, duly grateful for these unlookedfor gifts’ (see Rodríguez Monegal, p. 416). For a discussion of Borges’s failure to recognize the Commedia as a source see: Jon Thiem, ‘Borges, Dante, and the Poetics of Total Vision’ Comparative Literature, 40 (1988), 97–121.
5. Beckett, ‘Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, in Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber & Faber, 1929), pp. 5–22 (pp. 21–22). Further quotations from this essay are also from pages 21–22.
6. John L. Murphy, ‘Beckett’s Purgatories’, in Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative, ed. by Colleen Jaurretche (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 109–24 (p. 122).
7. David Wallace observes, ‘an Irish Dante (Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney) achieves things tha are beyond the grasp of the English and Americans’. See Wallace, ‘Dante in English’, in Th Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. by Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1993), pp. 237–58 (p. 237).
8. Reynolds, The Shaping Imagination, p. 3.
9. Reynolds, p. 3.
10. Boldrini, Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations: Language and Meaning in Finnegans Wake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 13.
11. Jennifer Margaret Fraser, Rite of Passage in the Narratives of Dante and Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), p. 1.
12. Humberto Nuñez-Faraco, Borges and Dante: Echoes of a Literary Friendship (Berlin: Peter Lang 2006), p. 15.
13. There are several essays that investigate the presence of the Commedia in ‘The Aleph’. Se Maria Bonati, ‘Dante en la Lectura de Borges’, Revista Iberoamericana, 100–01 (1977), 737–44 See also John Thiem, ‘Borges, Dante, and the Poetics of Total Vision’, Comparative Literature, 40 (1988), 97–120, and Matei Calinescu, Rereading (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 3–17. For the influence of Dante on ‘The Intruder’ and other stories see Sylvie Davidson, ‘Borges and Italian Literature’, Italian Quarterly, 105 (1986), 43–49. See also Julio Chiappini’s concise volume Borges y Dante (Rosario: Editorial Zeus, 1993) for a comparative synopsis and further references on the subject. See also the fourth chapter, ‘Blindness: Aleph and Lovers’, of María Rosa Menocal’s comparative investigation Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth From Borges to Boccaccio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 131–77.
14. For an interview about Dante, see Roberto Alifano, ‘La Divina Comedia’, in Ultimas Conversaciones con Borges (Buenos Aires: Torres Agüero Editor, 1988) pp. 123–30. See also Borges’s conference, ‘La Divina Comedia’, in Siete Noches (1980) (OC3 207–20) and ‘Mi Primer Encuentro con Dante’ (1961) in TR3 71–74.
15. Umberto Eco and Liberato Santoro-Brienza, Talking of Joyce, ed. by Liberato Santoro-Brienza (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998), pp. 61–62.
16. Wallace, p. 252.
17. The Ignatian model was used as a mnemonic guide for composing and delivering sermons and lectures, hence Stephen Dedalus’s invocation to Loyola as a patron saint of memory before presenting his Shakespeare theory in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ (U 9.163). See The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, trans. by Michael Ivens sj, with an introduction by Gerard W. Hughes sj (Leominster: Gracewing, 2004).
18. Yates, p. 95, p. 163. For a comparative discussion of Dante’s relationship with the art of memory, see Spender Pearce ‘Dante and the Art of Memory’, The Italianist, 16 (1996), 20–61. See also Jerome Mazzaro’s ‘The Divina Commedia and the Rhetoric of Memory’, Rivista di Studi Italiani, 17.1 (1999), 112–29. See also the ‘Introduction’ in Borges’s Nine Dantesque Essays whereby he discusses the differences between the infernal architectures of Dante and Milton, highlighting the contrast between ‘Milton’s fog and uncertainty’ in relation to the ‘strictly accurate topography by which Dante engineered his infernal plane’. He also argues that Dante ‘devised his topography of death as an artifice demanded by Scholasticism and by the form of his poem’ (SNF 267–68).
19. All references to Dante’s Commedia belong to La Divina Commedia, testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana, riveduto col commento scartazzianiano rifatto da Giuseppe Vandelli, dodicesima edizione (Milan: Editore Della Real Casa, 1944), (Inf XI, 10–12). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
20. All English translations of the Commedia belong to The Divine Comedy, trans. by Mark Musa, 3 vols (London: Penguin, 1986), Inf 168. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
21. Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, p. 5.
22. Reynolds, p. 18.
23. Reynolds, p. 18.
24. See Jorge Luis Borges, Nueve ensayos dantescos, con una introducción de Marcos Ricardo Barnatán y presentación de Joaquín Arce (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1982), p. 46.
25. Borges, Nueve ensayos dantescos, p. 46.
26. Eliot, Dante, p. 11.
27. See Alighieri, Dante (1933) La Divina Commedia: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, The Italian edited by H Oelsner, English translations by J. A. Carlyle, Thomas Okey & P. H. Wicksteed.
28. Eliot, Dante, p. 11.
29. For more details about Borges’s secondary education in the Collège Calvin, see Alejandro Vaccaro, Borges: vida y literatura (Barcelona: Edhasa, 2006), pp. 57–60.
30. See Dante Alighieri, La Divina Comedia, estudio preliminar por Jorge Luis Borges, traducción de Cayetano Rosell y notas de Narciso Bruzzi Costas (Buenos Aires: Jackson editors, 1949), p. xviii.
31. Borges, Borges professor, p. 257.
32. John Updike, ‘The Author as Librarian’, The New Yorker, 30 October 1965, pp. 223–46.
33. Reynolds p. 31.
34. Mary T. Reynolds, ‘Joyce’s Editions of Dante’, James Joyce Quarterly, 15 (1978), 380–82 (p. 382). Please note that apart from this single reference, all other citations from Reynolds belong to Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination.
35. Burgin, pp. 100–01.
36. See Reynolds, p. 83.
37. Andrew Hurley renders the title of the story as ‘The Interloper’. See CF 348–51.
38. Nuñez-Faraco, p. 20.
39. For an illuminating discussion of the Griselda figure see Robin Kirkpatrick, Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
40. Kirkpatrick, p. 231.
4
1. Antonio Carrizo, Borges, el memorioso (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982), p. 236.
42. Samuel Beckett, in ‘Foreword’ to James Joyce: An International Perspective, ed. by Suheil Bushrui and Bernard Benstock (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. vii.
43. Vegh, p. 95.
44. John T. Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 20.
45. See Salgado, ‘Barroco Joyce’, for an illuminating discussion of the numerous Joycean allusions in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, pp. 63–93.
46. This group of essays, originally written between the years 1945–1951, were published separately in several periodical publications. In 1982 Borges granted permission to his publisher, Emecé, to publish them together in book form.
47. Jorge Luis Borges/Osvaldo Ferrari, En diálogo I (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1985), p. 198.
48. Alberto Manguel, With Borges (London: Telegram, 2006), p. 66.
49. See ‘Dante’s Letter to Can Grande’, trans. by Nancy Howe in Essays on Dante, ed. by Mark Musa (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1965), pp. 32–47 (p. 37).
50. Boldrini, p. 35.
51. M. Keith Booker, Joyce, Bakhtin and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 82.
52. Calinescu, p. 12.
53. Sturrock argues that ‘The Aleph’ ‘makes a kind of pair’ with ‘The Zahir’, p. 70. See also Bell-Villada’s comprehensive discussion of both stories, pp. 212–27; and Calinescu, pp. 3–16.
54. According to Floyd Merrell: ‘The Aleph affords a realist image as opposed to the nominalism of the Zahir. One entails a transcendental revelation, the other a series of significant perceptual grasps, or in a way of speaking, one is synchrony, the other diachrony. One is a superposition of all objects, acts, and events in simultaneity, the other a serial collection of particulars with no determinate links.’ Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991), p. 8.
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