Borges and Joyce
Page 14
Funes and His Precursors
In ‘Kafka and his Precursors’ (1951) Borges famously postulated a radical model of reading that dismantled the idea of chronological influence and proposed instead an inverted modus operandi in which ‘cada escritor crea a sus precursores’ (OC2 90) [‘each writer creates his own precursors’] (SNF 365). He argued that Kafka’s writings allow the construction of a network of shared idiosyncrasies with a series of pre-existent texts, since it is possible to recognize the voice of Kafka in the writings of Zeno, Han Yu, Kierkegaard, Bloy, Browning and Lord Dunsany. Whilst the later writings of Kafka connect all these heterogeneous pieces, without Kafka, the analogy uniting these literatures from different epochs and places would have not been noticed: ‘En cada uno de esos textos está la idiosincrasia de Kafka, en grado mayor o menor, pero si Kafka no hubiera escrito, no la percibiríamos; vale decir, no existiría’ (OC2 89) ['Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceived it; that is to say, it would not exist’] (SNF 365). In effect, Borges’s suggestion that texts are not isolated entities recalls the similar conclusion he reached in his 1935 essay ‘The translators of The Thousand and One Nights’, in which he stressed that certain works ‘sólo se dejan concebir después de una literatura’ [‘can only be conceived in the wake of a literature’] and as a consequence presuppose ‘un rico proceso anterior’ (OC1 411) [‘a rich (prior) process’] (SNF 108). The richness of this process lies in the conception of a text as the confluence of several pre-existing discourses, a hybrid composite that enters into dialogue with other texts. Borges proposes a retroactive model of reading through which the reading of Kafka will affect the reading of these texts and thus the texts themselves: ‘Su labor modifica nuestra concepción del pasado, como ha de modificar el futuro’ (OC2 90) [‘His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future’] (SNF 365). And yet, fundamental to Borges’s radical theory on the subject of literary influence is the assumption that ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ was not created ex nihilo, but rather stands as a continuation and development of T. S. Eliot’s seminal essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), which is duly quoted as its main intertextual source (see SNF 365). The main argument uniting both theses is apparent: Eliot postulates an aesthetic principle, through which writers are not read in isolation, but as part of a living tradition in which the new alters the old, the present modifies the past and, as a result, texts are continually re-valued from the perspective of subsequent texts:
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.1
If Eliot’s theory is applied not just to art but also to criticism, then Borges’s ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ (the really new) posits a modification to the existing order of Eliot’s literary system of values. But unlike Eliot’s inevitably canonical, Westernized conception of a tradition that strictly comprises ‘the mind of Europe’,2 Borges’s idea of a tradition is less prescriptive and more wide-ranging, conflating Western, oriental and marginal discourses alike, insofar as it exposes the perspective of a writer located, as Beatriz Sarlo puts it, ‘on the limits between cultures, between literary genres, between languages [...] Borges is the writer of the orillas, a marginal in the centre, a cosmopolitan on the edge’.3 Borges, therefore, irreverently articulates what Eliot’s innovative yet Eurocentric vision can only insinuate from an inescapably restrictive standpoint. In other words, Borges enlarges, enriches and synthesizes Eliot’s theory in the brief, egalitarian and paradoxical phrase: ‘cada escritor crea a sus precursores’ (OC2 90) [‘each writer creates his precursors’] (SNF 365). As a suitable application to his theory he unfolds a concrete case in point, namely a study of Kafka that thoroughly illustrates the idea of a synchronous tradition in which writers may influence both past and future texts. Thus Borges’s anatomy of literary influence obeys neither chronological nor coherently or culturally organized systems of thought. If any similarity prevails in his taxonomy of precursors, this is only justified by virtue of the fact that although the heterogeneous pieces do not resemble each other, they nonetheless resemble Kafka.
When studying the central role that Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ played in the composition of ‘Kaf ka and his Precursors’ it remains a highly instructive methodology to go back to Borges’s earlier writings, particularly to a lesser known essay ‘Eternity and T. S. Eliot’ (1933), originally published in the Buenos Aires review Poesía. In this revelatory journalistic piece, which in turn serves as an avant-text of ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, Borges quotes Eliot extensively, signalling, consequently, a vital interpretative process that foregrounds his subsequent use of the essay (see TR1 49–53). The existence of this article highlights the important assumption that the compositional process of ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ involved a much more complex interweaving of texts. This is signalled at the beginning of the essay, in which Borges warns the reader about the existence of a preceding series of reflections: ‘Yo premedité alguna vez un examen de los precursores de Kafka’ (OC2 88) [‘At one time, I considered writing a study of Kafka’s precursors’] (SF 363).4 Such a procedure emphasizes, once again, an integral aspect of Borges’s practice of writing, which is based on the creation of literary genealogies. Yet Borges’s fascination with genealogies is not only concerned with the work of others, but is equally drawn to his own writings, particularly in what Ronald Christ refers as: ‘[Borges’s aim] at creating in us an awareness of his “sources” or “fuentes”.’5 Just as Borges sets himself the task of constructing a network of Kafka’s precursors via Eliot’s seminal essay, so he equally subjects his own rhetoric to analogous exercises that aim to undermine the uniqueness of his writing, and instead privileges the activities of citation, rewriting and plagiarism. He prolixly lists his sources and precursors in the explicatory prefaces and afterwords of his fictions, generously mapping influences of the most varied origins. Central to Borges’s activity of appropriation is the assumption that, ultimately, all texts are woven out of preexistent texts, and no discourse is ever complete since it is always repositioned in relation to preceding or subsequent discourses. This type of intertextual exercise is similarly foregrounded in his 1941 obituary ‘A Fragment on Joyce’, in which Borges seeks to establish a network of forerunners for his then work-in-progress, ‘Funes the Memorious’. In this manner, he anticipates the literary precepts later postulated in ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ and creates his own precursors by recognizing the voice and mnemonic habits of his character Ireneo Funes in a series of preexistent texts. With unreserved audacity and customary cheek, he proclaimed Joyce’s Ulysses and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as the ‘monstrous’ pre-texts of his mnemonic character:
Del compadrito mágico de mi cuento cabe afirmar que es un precursor de los superhombres, un Zarathustra suburbano y parcial; lo indiscutible es que es un monstruo. Lo he recordado porque la consecutiva y recta lectura de las cuatrocientas mil palabras de Ulises exigiría monstruos análogos. (Nada aventuraré sobre los que exigiría Finnegans Wake: para mí no menos inconcebibles que la cuarta dimensión de C. H. Hinton o que la Trinidad de Nicea)
(S 168).
[My story’s magical compadrito may be called a precursor of the coming race of supermen, a partial Zarathustra of the outskirts of Buenos Aires; indisputably he is a monster. I have evoked him because a consecutive, straightforward reading of the four hundred thousand words of Ulysses would require similar monsters. (I will not venture to speak of what Finnegans Wake would demand; for me, its readers are no less inconceivable than C. H. Hinton’
s fourth dimension or the trinity of Nicaea) (SNF 220–21).]
For Borges, then, a consecutive, total reading of Ulysses demanded the creation of Funes, a fictional character equipped with an infinite memory and, hence, capable of assimilating, in one single reading, the sheer enormity of Joyce’s modernist novel. Thus Borges writes his Uruguayan gaucho Ireneo Funes as a Joycean fiction or, more precisely, as the ideal reader of Ulysses, and endows him with the all-encompassing memory of his predecessor. If Borges’s parenthetical addendum is considered part of Funes’s precursors, then his network is enlarged by discourses apparently as dissimilar as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, C. H. Hinton’s fourth dimension and the Christian dogma of the Nicene Creed. Funes, an avid polyglot whose auto-didactical method consists in memorizing entire dictionaries, embodies the type of intellect required for the reading of Finnegans Wake, and his persistent state of insomnia, moreover, turns him into Joyce’s ideal insomniac, ‘as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia’ (FW 120.12–14). As for Borges’s eccentric genealogy of Funes it suffices to say that it does not end here. On the contrary, it becomes subsequently expanded in the definitive version of the story that proposes a more extended genealogy, taking on board the names of Pliny the Elder and John Locke.6 If this is so, Borges’s Ireneo Funes acts as the unifying element without whom the network would not have been possible, therefore serving as the central node in an assembly of highly heterogeneous texts. Thus, my proposed sub-heading ‘Funes and his precursors’ equally aims to unlock Borges’s own textual predecessors: James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Locke and Pliny the Elder: all of which intersect in the mnemonic eccentricity of his nineteenth-century South American hero.
This chapter explores the pervasive presence of James Joyce in ‘Funes the Memorious’ both in its embryonic and definitive versions. It will demonstrate that in his 1941 obituary, ‘A Fragment on Joyce’, Borges uncovered a landscape of memory that charted a genealogy of Funes and his precursors, whereby he declared Joyce’s Ulysses as the infinite and monstrous precursor of Ireneo Funes, his Fray Bentos gaucho endowed with an infinite memory after a fall from a horse, and who ironically dies in 1889 of pulmonary congestion. It will argue that Borges’s 1941 obituary may be read as an anticipation of the literary precepts later postulated in ‘Kafka and his precursors’, since Borges searches for the voice and mnemonic habits of Funes in Joyce’s Ulysses. This chapter will show, meanwhile, that the analogies interlinking Funes and Ulysses, particularly in the ‘Cyclops’ and ‘Ithaca’ episodes, are centred on the subject of memory as an encyclopaedia and literary archive. At the same time, however, it will raise the central question, how do Borges and Joyce negotiate the remembering–forgetting polarity? The chapter will offer a number of answers to this question. Among these, it will underline the crucial fact that Borges and Joyce have incorporated alternative narratives in which they emphasize the conflictual forces inherent in any totalization of knowledge by turning the memories of Funes and the catalogues of the ‘Cyclops’ and ‘Ithaca’ episodes respectively into a humorous record of the impossibility and, ultimately, uselessness of a total categorization of knowledge.
James Joyce and the Making of Funes
In Borges and His Fiction, Gene Bell-Villada views ‘A Fragment on Joyce’ as a ‘fascinating documentary record of the artistic transformation of the character Funes in Borges’s mind’.7 Indeed, we have in front of us a multifaceted document that deploys several textual transactions at once: an early draft or pre-text of ‘Funes the Memorious’, a study in the subject of literary influence, an exercise in comparative literature, an obituary marking the untimely death of James Joyce in Zurich in January 1941, and a journalistic publication in the prestigious Buenos Aires literary review Sur for which Borges acted as a regular correspondent. If studied as a work-in-progress of ‘Funes the Memorious’, then, ‘A Fragment on Joyce’ constitutes a relevant example of genetic criticism, allowing the reconstruction of the crucial textual processes that took place during Borges’s gestation of the character Funes. Such complex exercise validates, moreover, Borges’s recurrent thesis that there is no ‘texto definitivo’ (OC1 239) [definitive text] but only a series of ‘borradores’ [drafts] in an ongoing interpretative process. In effect, the artistic growth of Funes is particularly determined by the several superimposed parchments that emerge as we map out his development from a journalistic column in Sur to a fully fledged story in Ficciones. This palimpsestual quality is particularly apparent in an extract from ‘A Fragment on Joyce’ which re-appeared almost verbatim in the 1942 version of the story:
Nosotros, de un vistazo, percibimos tres copas en una mesa; Funes, todas las hojas y racimos que comprende una parra. Sabía las formas de las nubes australes del amanecer del treinta de abril de mil ochocientos ochenta y dos y podía compararlas en el recuerdo con las vetas de un libro en pasta española que manejó una vez en la infancia
(S 167).
[We, at first glance, perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, every leaf and grape on a vine. He knew the shapes of the southernmost clouds in the sunrise of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory to the veins in the stiff marbled binding of a book he once held in his hands during his childhood (SNF 220).]
Nosotros, de un vistazo, percibimos tres copas en una mesa; Funes, todos los vástagos y racimos y frutos que comprende una parra. Sabía las formas de las nubes australes del amanecer del treinta de abril de mil ochocientos ochenta y dos y podía compararlas en el recuerdo con las vetas de un libro en pasta española que solo había mirado una vez.
(OC1 488).
[We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once (L 91–92).]
But we should not be fooled here by the similarities between the two extracts. Indeed, as Borges humorously demonstrated in ‘Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote’, even the ambitious translation undertaken by the French turn-of-the-century writer Pierre Menard failed to guarantee, despite its strict verbatim rendering, exact textual equivalence. What these nearly identical Funes extracts are fore grounding here is the central fact that the procedure of transferring a passage from a text (A) into another text (B) implies the shifting of meaning into a new context. This process produces, consequently, a certain degree of effacement of the textual circumstances of the original text in relation to the new signification it acquires under its new context. By the time Borges completed the 1942 story he made sure that he cleansed it of its previous associations with the 1941 obituary resulting, thus, in the omission of the preliminary comparison between Funes and Ulysses, as well as the disappearance of the Joycean frame in which Funes had been initially incorporated. This raises important questions, such as, for instance: what is the trajectory of Funes as a character from his evolutionary growth in ‘A Fragment on Joyce’ to his ensuing development into his own short story, ‘Funes the Memorious’? Does he, as the finished product of the 1942 story eventually published in Ficciones, preserve the layers of meaning of the 1941 obituary it has traversed? And, to what extent may the authorial validity of James Joyce, who was subsequently erased from the 1942 version, become, once again, visible through a retroactive reading of the 1941 obituary?
Let us consider, as a preliminary example, a key anecdote from Borges’s résumé of the brief life of Funes in ‘A Fragment on Joyce’, wherein he offers an interesting snapshot of a juvenile Funes engaging in a pictorial reproduction of two chapters from a school manual: ‘En la niñez, lo han expulsado de la escuela primaria por calcar servilmente un par de capítulos, con sus ilustraciones, mapas, viñetas, letras de molde y hasta con una errata...’ (S 167) [‘In childhood, he was expelled from primary school
for having slavishly copied out two chapters, along with their illustrations, maps, vignettes, block letters, and even a corrigendum’] (SNF 220).8 While the ordinary, generalizing memories of school children would only retain selected fragments from a book (or would only be interested in taking a small number of notes to synthesize the main ideas) Ireneo Funes contrarily aspires to a meticulous reconstruction that will allow him the retrieval of even the most infinitesimal and insignificant details. Here, then, Funes is already manifesting his subsequent incapacity for selection and abstraction, an intellectual impediment that Borges thereafter develops as his main mnemonic flaw in ‘Funes the Memorious’. Moreover, Borges’s reference to a precocious Funes, whose capacity for detail and endeavour for exact representation goes back to his boyhood years, bears a striking likeness to an early anecdote recalled by Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce, when his son James was only seven years of age: ‘If that fellow was dropped in the middle of the Sahara, he’d sit, be God, and make a map of it’ (JJI 28). This account of the young James charting at the tender age of seven (and in a god-like manner) the vertiginous landscape of the Sahara Desert, reveals Joyce’s future delight in cartography, and, as Richard Ellmann remarks, ‘his interest in minute detail’ (JJII 28). Drawing on John Joyce’s anecdote, Eric Bulson views this early account as an anticipation of the geographical realism and totalizing tendencies of Ulysses: ‘From one of its earliest recorded beginnings, James Joyce’s Ulysses was a book fated to be written with an encyclopaedic memory and a map’.9 In his tireless search for parallels between Ulysses and his South American gaucho, Borges may well have whispered to himself that if the young Joyce revealed a special knack for mnemonic exercises, so his young Funes should also exhibit early signs of a prodigious memory.10 Borges’s lesson here — if any at all — is that if Funes’s school anecdote anticipated his future predilection for taxonomies and absurd catalogues of potentially infinite series, so Joyce’s imaginary map of the Sahara foreshadows his fondness for orderly schemes, painstaking detail and naturalistic representation in Ulysses.11