Every time I thought of Ulysses, it was not the characters — Stephen, Bloom or Molly — that came to my mind, but the words which produced these characters. This convinced me that Joyce was first and foremost a poet. He was forging poetry out of prose. My subsequent discovery of Finnegans Wake and Pomes Penyeach confirmed me in this opinion.67
Borges elevates the linguistic virtuosity of Ulysses at the expense of the main characters, in spite of the fact that in 1925 he successfully rendered into the variant of River Plate Spanish the lyrically infused sexual reverie of the last two pages of Molly’s unpunctuated soliloquy. Borges’s disbelief in Joyce’s representation of the main characters of Ulysses led him to make yet another disparaging comment, ‘in the case of Ulysses you are told thousands of circumstances about the characters. You know, for example, well, you know that they went twice to the men’s room, you know all the books they read, you know the exact positions when they are sitting down or standing up, but you don’t really know them. It’s as if Joyce had gone over them with a microscope or a magnifying glass.’68 It may be said that Joyce deems a success what Borges considers a failure, thus, the Joycean victory is the inclusion of an unlimited polyvalency which may produce myriad neologisms, as well as disproportionate amounts of information that prolong the narration excessively. Joyce’s aesthetic of expansion both shocked and secretly fascinated Borges. In sum, what concerned him here was to exclusively brand Joyce’s art from the viewpoint of his aesthetic of compression and to refract Joyce’s epic scale through the brief and measured reading of a ficción, poem, or aphorism. This attitude reappeared in This Craft of Verse, a volume that collects the Norton lectures Borges delivered in Harvard between the years 1967 to 1968. Here, he invoked the closing lines of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’:
When I speak of night, I am inevitably — and happily for us, I think — reminded of the last sentence of the first book in Finnegans Wake, wherein Joyce speaks of ‘the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!’ This is an extreme example of an elaborate style. We feel that such a line could have been written only after centuries of literature. We feel that the line is an invention, a poem — a very complex web, as Stevenson would have had it. And yet I suspect there was a moment when the word ‘night’ was quite as impressive, was quite as strange, was quite as awe-striking as this beautiful, winding sentence.69
For Borges, Finnegans Wake comprises universal literature and ought to be cyclically conceived at the wake of a long Western tradition. For Borges, then, the Wake is none other than a book made up of an entire tradition, a literary microcosm, and a sort of Aleph enveloping a vast literary universe. Time and time again, Borges likes to praise the infinite qualities of Joyce, such as his ability to sum up the history of the English language. For Borges, thus, Joyce is the ultimate artificer, the successor of Shakespeare. And it is precisely this verbal and stylistic mastery that incorporates ‘centuries of literature’ which Borges deems both attractive, debatable and, ultimately, untranslatable.
Meanwhile, Borges concluded his El Hogar review of Finnegans Wake with a negative verdict of Joyce’s art of punning: ‘Finnegans Wake es una concatenación de retruécanos cometidos en un inglés onírico y que es difícil no calificar de frustrados e incompetentes’ (OC4 436) [Finnegans Wake is a concatenation of puns rendered in dreamlike English which it may be hard not to label as frustrated and incompetent]. As Waisman has pertinently suggested, this type of assertion ‘marks the beginning of Borges’s mostly negative reactions to Finnegans Wake [...] Borges concludes by suggesting that Joyce borrows from Jules Laforgue and Lewis Carroll in his verbal experiments, making his barb doubly sharp by asserting that Joyce’s precursors obtained better results that he did’.70
There is, however, an unmistakable touch of irony, defiance, and playfulness at stake in Borges’s remarks on Finnegans Wake. How serious is the columnist of El Hogar, and how consistent are his views of the Wake? This question can only be answered through an examination of the review of the Wake which Borges publi shed five months later in Sur. For all the hostility and detraction with which Borges imbued these notes, we have to bear in mind that he still decided to have the Wake reviewed twice, and for better or worse he undertook the honour, once again, of becoming Joyce’s foremost Hispanic critic, which is no small feat when the book under examination is Finnegans Wake. A review based on an earlier review, here we get a glimpse of Borges’s compositional process as he recycles, expands, and edits his previous material. If in El Hogar the review occupied a single page column sandwiched between various adverts, in Sur the review is not laced with commercial registers and instead occupies a further two pages. What is then added to this second version? On the one hand, Borges had the opportunity to provide a more detailed account of the Wake and to offer a sequel to his Bloomsday review in El Hogar. It was as if he closed his first note with the to-be-continued promise, as he comfortably shifted from the mass-market readership of El Hogar to the more exclusive readership of Sur. On the other, the extra space afforded by Sur gave Borges free rein to develop one of his pet themes, the heterogeneous catalogue and the study of a writer’s precursors. Like the examination of Kafka’s precursors that he would publish more than a decade later, or the catalogue of Funes’s precursors he was to incorporate in his 1941 obituary of Joyce, Borges humorously theorized an idiosyncratic genealogy of Joyce’s forerunners in Finnegans Wake. If in El Hogar he suggested that the art of punning had been previously mastered by Lewis Carroll and Jules Laforgue, in Sur he extended this list with the wide ranging and disparate names of the English poet and critic Algernon Swinburne; the Buenos Aires minor writer Marcelino del Mazo; the Cuban poet Mariano Brull; the French writer (and Argentine resident) Paul Groussac; the English poet and artist Edward Lear; and the German satirist and translator Johann Fischart. This taxonomy is followed by a systematic exposition of Joyce’s coinages, nineteen examples in total, hence the title of the review ‘Joyce y los neologismos’. But the most noteworthy aspect of Borges’s review is his repeated allusion to Joyce’s coinages as ‘monstruos’ [monsters]. In this manner, the act of deciphering Joyce’s ‘monstruos verbales’ (S 164), he wryly purported, demanded a laborious effort, which was alleviated by the previous exegesis of Stuart Gilbert.71 According to Borges, the linguistic monstrosities of the Wake are grounded in the assumption that they fuse different words in order to create a hybrid linguistic teratology.72 Their degrees of monstrosity, he contends, vary accordingly, but he identifies some as ‘melancólicos’ [melancholic], ‘incomunicados’ [disconnected] and ‘desarmados’ (this may be read as ‘fragmented’ or ‘unarmed’, thus, meaning linguistically vulnerable) (S 165). But similarly to his El Hogar review of the Wake, the pose of the detractor at times gives way to an encomiastic gesture: ‘Secular phoenix, quizá el más memorable de todos’; [‘Secular phoenix is perhaps the most memorable of them all’], he wrote, ‘alude a cierto verso final de Samson Agonistes, en que se llama secular bird al fénix de periódicas muertes’ (S 166); [it alludes to some final line from Samson Agonistes, in which the phoenix of cyclical deaths is called secular bird]. Last, but not least, he also interpolated a large footnote in which he positively nodded, and creatively expounded, at what he considered ‘la más ilustre frase del libro’ [the most celebrated phrase of the book]:
The walls are of rubinen and the glittergates of elfinbone. Marfil, en alemán, se dice elfenbein, que debe ser una corrupción de Elefantenbein; Joyce traduce literalmente elfinbone: hueso de elfo. No de otra suerte los evangelios manuscritos del siglo nueve hacen de margarita (perla), mere-grot: piedra del mar
(S 166).
[The walls are of rubinen and the glittergates of elfinbone. Ivory, in German, is called elfenbein, which ought to be a corruption of Elefantenbein; Joyce translated elfinbone literally: bone of elfo. Inevitably, ninth-century manuscripts of the Gospels turn margarita (pearl) into mere-grot: stone of the sea.]
Without a doubt, such praise is a far cry from his pr
ior hostile labelling of Joyce’s puns as monsters. The promissory aspect of this final stance resurfaces almost three decades later in the Norton lectures he delivered at Harvard. Like an uncanny déjà vu, or as a further example of his prodigious Funes-like memory, a blind Borges recited an almost verbatim version of his 1939 review of lines from Book 2, part 1 of the Wake:
‘Glittergates’ is Joyce’s gift to us. And then we have ‘elfinbone.’ Of course, when Joyce wrote this, he was thinking of the German for ‘ivory,’ Elfenbein. Elfenbein is a distortion of Elephantenbein, ‘elephant bone.’ But Joyce saw the possibilities of that word, and he translated it into English; and then we have ‘elfinbone.’ I think ‘elfin’ is more beautiful than ‘elfen.’ Besides, as we have heard Elfenbein so many times, it does not come to us with the shock of surprise, with the shock of amazement, that we find in that new and elegant word ‘elfinbone.’73
Borges ended this lecture with a final allusion to Joyce which may be read as a public reconciliation with the Irish writer or, more precisely, with the aesthetic of the baroque: ‘I think writers like Góngora, John Donne, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce are justified. Their words, their stanzas may be far-fetched; we may find strange things in them. But we are made to feel that the emotion behind those words is a true one. This should be sufficient for us to tender them our admiration’.74 This is precisely the reconciliatory attitude he portrays in his 1982 interview with Heaney and Kearney, whereby he invoked a deeper fraternity with his Irish predecessor: ‘Looking back on my own writings sixty years after my first encounter with Joyce, I must admit that I have always shared Joyce’s fascination with words, and have always worked at my language within an essentially poetic framework, savouring the multiple meanings of words, their etymological echoes and endless resonances.’75 If Borges claimed a kinship with Joyce’s linguistic artistry, which are then the Joycean echoes, particularly Wakean, that we can find concealed in the complex layers of his fictions?
Borges's Wakean Twists and Turns
The most compelling example of Borges’s Wakean virtuosity may be found in his celebrated story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, written one year after his 1939 review of Finnegans Wake. What concerns us here, principally, is that Borges devised a sentence in the conjectural, idealist language of Tlön, which brings to mind Joyce’s dismantling of grammatical conventions in the composite language of Finnegans Wake. It is, we may speculate, as if Borges asked himself the question: what would the language of an imaginary planet devoid of nouns look like? We know that he had recently examined and reviewed Finnegans Wake twice. Therefore, Borges was aware that the only real, concrete answer to a wide range of linguistic conjectures was contained in Joyce’s inventive polyglot and polysemic novel. For example, ‘Borges’, first person narrator of the story, observes that our accepted grammatical construction ‘surgió la luna sobre el río’ (OC1 435) [‘the moon rose above the river’] (CF 73) is rendered in the imaginary language of Tlön — whose chief characteristic is the lack of nouns — as: ‘hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö’ (OC1 435), which is in turn translated in Spanish as: ‘hacia arriba (upward) detrás duradero-fluir luneció’ (OC1 435). A more succinct Spanish translation (attributed to Borges’s friend Xul Solar who was renowned, among other things, as an inventor of languages) is provided: ‘upa tras perfluyue lunó’ as well as its English equivalent: ‘Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned’ (OC1 435). If we look more closely at the concise English translation we realize that the phrase bears a thematic and morphological likeness with the passage from ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ that Borges had quoted in his 1939 El Hogar review of the Wake. Central to Borges’s coinage of this grammatically subversive passage is his adherence to specific Joycean verbal arrangements, such as the compounding of nouns with monosyllabic prefixes and suffixes, as well as the incorporation of a gerund at the end of a noun. In this manner, Borges compounds the noun ‘stream’ with the preposition ‘on’ and the gerund verb form ‘ing’ in order to suggest the rhythmic flow of the river: ‘onstreaming’. Likewise, Joyce generates an analogous construction by compounding the noun ‘river’ with the gerund ‘ing’ in order to evoke the similar image of ever-flowing currents at night-time: ‘rivering waters of’ (FW 216.4). It is important to mention that Robin Fiddian has also emphasized the underlying Joycean ‘affinity’ in Borges’s phrase, but instead reads it in relation to Stephen Dedalus’ vision of a ship: ‘Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails trailed up on the crosstress homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship’.76 Here Fiddian makes an equally convincing claim about Borges’s borrowing of certain linguistic patterns from Joyce in order to compose a highly experimental phrase. Whereas Borges remained hostile to Joyce’s linguistic monstruos, he none the less saw Joyce as his literary model for the linguistic speculations of the Berkeleian world of Tlön.
Equally significant is the fact that Borges’s biographer Emir Rodríguez Monegal states that in the summer of 1940 Borges composed a valid example of the polyglot writing he had identified in his 1939 reviews of Finnegans Wake: ‘When Silvina [Ocampo] and Bioy [Adolfo Bioy Casares] married in the summer of 1940 [...] Borges was the best man. To inform Bianco [editor of Sur] of the event, which had been decided on rather suddenly, they sent him a telegram written in a language they invented, comprised of English, Italian, and Spanish words.’77 Adhering to the multilingual and portmanteau principles set forth by Joyce in Finnegans Wake,78 Borges et al. concocted the following message: ‘Mucho registro civil, mucha iglesia, don’t tell anybodini whateverano’.79 The point Rodríguez Monegal is making here is that despite Borges’s condemnation of Joyce’s excessive punning, he nevertheless ‘was not immune to that type of verbal wit’.80 In all the complex ambivalence of Borges’s literary relationship with Joyce, a one-time assertion may be readily contradicted by another, and a previous antipathy may become a new sympathy.
Tales from Ireland: Joyce, Yeats, Gogarty, O'Brien
In his search for a Ulyssean tradition in the twentieth-century novel Borges offered a pertinent commentary of Joyce’s Irish successor, namely, the Irish novelist and political commentator Brian O’Nualláin, better known under the pseudonym of Flann O’Brien. Borges was particularly impressed by O’Brien’s self-reflexive novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds (1939):
At Swim-two-Birds no sólo es un laberinto: es una discusión de las muchas maneras de concebir la novela irlandesa y un repertorio de ejercicios en verso y prosa, que ilustran o parodian todos los estilos de Irlanda. La influencia magistral de Joyce (arquitecto de laberintos, también; Proteo literario, también) es innegable, pero no abrumadora, en este libro múltiple
(OC4 435).
[At Swim-two-Birds is not only a labyrinth: it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive the Irish novel, and a repertory of exercises in prose and verse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland. Joyce’s magisterial influence (also architect of labyrinths; also a literary Proteus) is undeniable, but not disproportionate in this manifold book (SNF 162).]
Borges identified in O’Brien a number of fundamental aspects of Joyce’s work: the figure of the labyrinth, a twentieth-century parodist, a multilayered work, and the inevitable inscription in an Irish literary tradition. In this way, Joseph Brooker has recently described the work of O’Brien as: ‘The most vivid and protracted response to Joyce’.81 The storyline of At-Swim-Two-Birds — which displays a wide range of metafictional devices — would have struck a perfect chord with Borges who at precisely this time started writing the revolutionary ficciones that would eventually give him worldwide notoriety. It is also remarkable that O’Brien’s book (published in London, March 1939) was already being reviewed by Borges in El Hogar as early as 2 June 1939. An essential pioneering impulse lies at the heart of Borges’s early reception of O’Brien in Latin America, just as in 1925 he had also deemed himself Joyce’s first Hispanic adventurer. Indeed, Borges was tirelessly looking in the vast mirror of Irish art, searching for the manifold fi
gures and reflections that he would later transpose onto his own creative experience. The fraternity between the literatures of Ireland and Argentina — or the way in which the Argentine writer must look to an Irish tradition as an exemplary literary model — remained at the forefront of Borges’s seminal lecture ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’. Across the gulf that separates Borges’s utter conciseness and Joyce’s (and O’Brien’s) novelistic tradition, are hidden a fascinating series of symmetries. For example, Borges’s summary of the story line of At-Swim-Two-Birds reads, ironically, like a Borgesian fiction:
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