Borges and Joyce

by Patricia Novillo-Corvalan

  If Funes stands as the ideal reader of Joyce’s epic proportions, namely, as the boundless recipient able to process the whole of Ulysses, Borges conversely imposes a principle of compression in his capacity to exemplify a reduced or abridged version of Joyce’s book. Just as Fritz Senn argues that ‘In some sense Ulysses is such a radical translation of the Odyssey, from ancient Greek into modern Irish’,12 so in ‘Funes the Memorious’ Borges provides in turn his own radical translation of Ulysses, from Hiberno-English into River Plate Spanish, and above all, from Joyce’s grand epic scale to a compressed narrative expression. Yet Borges’s miniaturized version of Ulysses is constructed as a satirical, compact re-creation of Joyce’s gargantuan tendencies. Borges mimics Joyce’s endeavour to provide an accurate reconstruction of the Dublin of 16 June 1904, and confers upon Funes the equivalent impulse to provide a round-the-clock reconstruction of an entire day, which in turn demanded another whole day: ‘Dos o tres veces había reconstruído un día entero; no había dudado nunca, pero cada reconstrucción había requerido un día entero (OC1 488) [‘Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day’] (CF 135). This parodic effect has been noted by César Augusto Salgado: ‘ “Funes the Memorious” can be interpreted as a parody of the baroque modernist novel in its ultimate forms: Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Proust’s Recherche. Funes’s magical, absolute memory recalls Ulysses’ attempt at the total recollection of Dublin on Bloomsday’.13 Whereas Joyce dedicated seven years to achieve the enormous scope of Ulysses, Borges offers a succinct form of rewriting, a parodic miniature of Ulysses that occupies no more than three pages. In the 1941 foreword to The Garden of Forking Paths (significantly written the same year as Joyce’s obituary) an unashamed Borges pronounces his aesthetics of abridgment: ‘Desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor el de componer vastos libros; el de explayar en quinientas páginas una idea cuya perfecta exposición oral cabe en pocos minutos. Mejor procedimiento es simular que esos libros ya existen y ofrecer un resumen, un comentario’ (OC1 429) [‘It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them’] (CF 67).

  Only Jorge Luis Borges, the acclaimed master of metaphysical brevity, can blamelessly get away with an irreverent appropriation of Ulysses. At this point Borges exhibits one of the most fascinating readings of Joyce to date, that deliberately distances itself from either unconditional eulogy or disapproving critique, in order to propose a dual consciousness that reveals two opposite impulses coexisting within the same discourse. He constructs his dialogue with Joyce as a fruitful dialectic that is both fascinated by Joyce’s ability to depict a total reality, and full of scorn for the sheer magnitude of the book. If from this conflictual process is to emerge any possible synthesis, then Borges’s resolution is the depiction of a character equipped with an infinite memory (as a cognate to Joyce’s total inclusion) in the most thoroughly concise narrative fashion. This fosters the construction of Ulysses as precursor of ‘Funes the Memorious’ or, what is more, if we apply Pierre Menard’s technique of ‘anacronismo deliberado y de las atribuciones erróneas’ (OC1 450) [‘deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution’] (CF 95) readers would be encouraged to read ‘Funes the Memorious’ as though it was written by James Joyce. In a further ironic twist, Borges teasingly invites his readers to view Funes as a multum in parvo version of Ulysses. The critic and translator Sergio Waisman has eloquently summarized this complex meeting point between two of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth century:

  Joyce asks a question: what would a novel look like that tried to account for every aspect of every single moment of a single day. The answer he gives is Ulysses for the daytime, and Finnegans Wake for the nighttime. Borges takes this same question, in response to Joyce, and answers with Funes: a short, clear and concise story that contains a character able to do (because of his perfect memory) what Joyce tried to do.14

  Just as a total reading of Ulysses presupposes the infinite memory of Funes, so the myriad details, lists, catalogues and directory entries in Ulysses evoke (and exemplify) the teeming world of Ireneo Funes. Since Funes’s memory is infallible, unselective and devoid of abstraction, his reading of Ulysses would envisage, of course, less an interpretation than a replication. This totalizing gesture recalls the colossal enterprise of Borges’s obsessed cartographers who produced a map of the Empire ‘que tenía el tamaño del imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él’ (OC2 225) [‘whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it’] (CF 325). Therefore in his transmutation of Ulysses into Funes, Borges is still at his most Joycean, carrying to an extreme Joyce’s often-cited observation to Frank Budgen (whether taken seriously or not): ‘I want, said Joyce [...] to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book’.15 If Joyce claims to have reconstructed the myriad aspects that correspond to his conception of Dublin, then Borges engages in a similar procedure by conferring upon Funes not only the mastery of naturalistic representation through his total reconstruction of one entire day of his life, but also an omniscient and omnipresent supremacy: ‘Más recuerdos tengo yo solo que los que habrán tenido todos los hombres desde que el mundo es mundo’ (OC1 488) [‘I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began’] (CF 135).

  Ideal Insomniacs

  In a crucial 1976 interview with a group of writers and scholars, later edited by Richard Burgin, Borges revisited the parallels between ‘Funes the Memorious’ and Ulysses that he had publicized in 1941. This testimony emerges by means of another vital link, namely, the persistent insomnia he experienced in the mid-1930s during a scorching summer that he spent in the Hotel Las Delicias, located in Adrogué, a city in Greater Buenos Aires:

  When I suffered from insomnia I tried to forget myself, to forget my body, the position of my body, the bed, the furniture, the three gardens of the hotel, the eucalyptus tree, the books on the shelf, all the streets of the village, the station, the farmhouses. And since I couldn’t forget, I kept on being conscious and couldn’t fall asleep.16

  Borges then adds that the antidote to his insomniac state lay in his awareness that James Joyce had experienced an analogous situation of acute mnemonic recollection: ‘Then I said to myself, let us suppose there was a person who couldn’t forget anything he had perceived, and it’s well known that this happened to James Joyce, who in the course of a single day could have brought out Ulysses, a day in which thousands of things happened’.17 The significance of this confession lies not only in the fact that Borges seeks refuge in Joyce as a consolatio memoriae but also in his conception of Ulysses as a consolatio infinitus, a type of boundless book that according to him ‘contains it all’.18 Hence Borges argues that the idea of Ulysses as an infinite book led to the creation of ‘someone who couldn’t forget those events and who in the end dies swept away by his infinite memory’.19 At this point Funes and Ulysses amalgamate or, more precisely, Borges confers unto Joyce the authorship of Funes. More importantly, this account forges a mutual reciprocity between Argentine and Irish writers: just as Joyce saves Borges by composing a ‘monstrous’ book that partakes every detail from reality and rescues him from his lucid nights of insomnia, so Borges complements Joyce by creating an equally ‘monstrous’ character who not only serves as the ideal reader of Ulysses, but also presages the ‘ideal insomniac’ of Finnegans Wake. Significantly, Roland McHugh traces back this Wake passage to the French fin-de-siècle writer J. K. Huysmans, who proposed in his 1884 novel A Rebours [Against the Grain] that ‘The novel should be a communion between a magic writer & an ideal reader’.20 Given that Borges endows his hero with a persistent insomnia and an infinite memor
y, who else but Funes would succeed in transubstantiating this spiritual amalgamation, in other words, author-izing a communion between Borges and Joyce?

  Borges’s chronic insomnia is projected, then, into his fictional creation Ireneo Funes. In ‘Funes the Memorious’ the first person narrator remarks: ‘le era muy difícil dormir. Dormir es distraerse del mundo’ (OC1 490) [‘It was hard for him to sleep. To sleep is to take one’s mind from the world’] (SNF 137). In the foreword to Artificios Borges declared that the story stands as ‘una larga metáfora del insomnio’ (OC1 483) [a long metaphor for insomnia], thus privileging the insomniac over the mnemonic states, although for Borges total recall and extreme wakefulness are inextricably linked together.21 Furthermore, the motif of insomnia — together with the implications it produces on the powers of recollection — appears as a significant biographical link between Borges and Joyce. For instance, Frank Budgen’s celebrated account of Joyce’s prodigious memory highlights not only his ability for committing entire verbal passages to memory, but also the powers of a memory that did not even recede in the hours of the night:

  Joyce’s memory for the words of his own compositions and for those of all writers he admired was prodigious. He knew by heart whole pages of Flaubert, Newman, de Quincey, E. Quinet, A. J. Balfour and of many others. Most human memories begin to fail at midnight, and lapse into the vague and à peu près, but not that of Joyce [...] We had been talking about Milton’s Lycidas, and I wanted to quote some lines of it that pleased me. My memory gave out, but Joyce said the whole poem from beginning to end, and followed it up with L’Allegro.22

  In a 1938 letter to Daniel Brody, Joyce seems to have applied his own precepts of ideal insomnia to himself, declaring that the completion of Finnegans Wake was taking ‘all day and all night as well’ (SL 193). (It is also significant that Joyce unfolds Molly’s unpunctuated record of past and present memories as an insomniac revelation, albeit with a less lucid power of memory). The theme of insomnia reappears in Borges’s work in 1981, in a catechetical piece entitled ‘Two Forms of Insomnia’, which is strongly reminiscent of what Joyce referred to as the ‘mathematico-astronomico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico’ discourse of ‘Ithaca’ (JJII 501). Borges poses two questions: ‘What is insomnia?’ and ‘What is longevity’ (SP 427). In the answer to the first question, he relates, once again, the state of insomnia with acute mnemonic recollection: ‘Es pronunciar fragmentos de párrafos leídos hace muchos años, es saberse culpable de velar cuando los otros duermen [...]’ (SP 426) [It’s uttering lines from books read many years ago; it’s blaming yourself for staying awake while the others sleep] (SP 427). In the same vein, in a 1981 interview Borges described his literary relationship with Joyce as an infinite textual conversation caught up in an endless act of memory: ‘Yo sé que en algunas de sus inextricables páginas está Joyce esperándome en pasajes que me han acompañado toda la vida’ (TR3 367) [I know that Joyce is awaiting me in one of his intricate pages, in passages that have accompanied me all my life].

  Pliny, Author of Funes

  In ‘Funes the Memorious’ a crippled and socially isolated Ireneo Funes greets the narrator with a verbatim recitation, in Latin and Spanish, of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History:

  Ireneo empezó por enumerar, en latín y español, los casos de memoria prodigiosa registrados por la Naturalis historia: Ciro, rey de los persas, que sabía llamar por su nombre a todos los soldados de sus ejércitos; Mitrídates Eupator, que administraba la justicia en los 22 idiomas de su imperio; Simónides, inventor de la mnemotecnia; Metrodoro, que profesaba el arte de repetir con fidelidad lo escuchado una sola vez. Con evidente buena fe se maravilló de que tales casos maravillaran

  (OC1 488).

  [Ireneo began by enumerating, in both Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory catalogued in the Naturalis Historia: Cyrus, the king of Persia, who would call all the soldiers in his army by name; Mithridates Eupator, who meted out justice in the twenty-two languages of the kingdom over which he ruled; Simonides, the inventor of the art of memory; Metrodorus, who was able faithfully to repeat what he had heard, though it be but once. With obvious sincerity, Ireneo said he was amazed that such cases were thought to be amazing (CF 134).]

  Not insignificantly, the subject matter of the passage is none other than Memory. Herein, Pliny offers an inventory of outstanding cases of memory which, nonetheless, seem utterly insignificant to the arrogant Funes. Yet this catalogue of mnemonic prodigiousness has been much admired throughout history, as Frances Yates states in The Art of Memory, ‘[Pliny’s] little anthology of memory stories in his Natural History [was] constantly repeated in the memory treatises of after times’.23 Regarding Borges’s inclusion of Pliny, Bell-Villada asserts that Borges’s narrative device proposes ‘a typical hall-of-mirrors effect: someone with a perfect memory reciting from memory a passage on memory’.24 Just as Pliny offers a testimony of exceptional memories from the classical world, so Borges presents his own South-American mnemonic curiosity, insofar as the first-person narrator of the story informs the reader that his account of Funes will contribute to a volume in honour of the Uruguayan prodigy: ‘Me parece muy feliz el proyecto de que todos aquellos que lo trataron escriban sobre él; mi testimonio será acaso el más breve y sin duda el más pobre, pero no el menos imparcial del volumen que editarán ustedes’ (OC1 485) [‘I applaud the idea that all of us who had dealings with the man should write something about him; my testimony will perhaps be the briefest (and certainly the slightest) account in the volume that you are to publish, but it can hardly be the least impartial’] (CF 131). But it should be taken into account that whereas Pliny’s compact treatise of outstanding memories seeks to provoke admiration, the context of Borges’s short-story strips it of its original power to amaze, since by proxy to Funes’s absolute memory, the cases that once provoked general amazement become, mutatis mutandis, an outdated record of mnemotechnic. And yet it should be noted that Borges omits two relevant details from Pliny’s enumeration. First, in Historia Naturalis Pliny precedes his list of outstanding memories with a warning about the difficulty of determining which is the most exceptional: ‘With regard to memory, a most essential tool in life, it is not easy to say who was the most exceptional since so many men have gained fame for it’.25 Unlike the more egalitarian Pliny who attributes identical favours to all the men listed in the compilation, Borges confers the entire mastery of mnemotechnic to only one individual, Ireneo Funes, and hence cancels out any other possible exempla that may overshadow the unique powers of his hero. Therefore, Borges deleted the only example from Pliny that might have challenged Funes’s mnemonic powers. This is the extraordinary case of Charmadas, who was celebrated in Greece for repeating ‘the contents of any volumes in libraries that anyone asked him to recall, just as if he was reading them’.26 The action of quoting verbatim entire volumes is precisely one of Funes’s most coveted attributes, as a shocked narrator becomes the inner audience of Funes’s recitation of Pliny. By incorporating Pliny’s Natural History into ‘Funes the Memorious’ Borges is, ultimately, writing Funes as a post-scripted addendum to Pliny’s mnemonic compendium. On the other hand, Borges deviates from Pliny’s precepts of memory, since Funes’s infallible memory miraculously emerged after his fall off a horse, in an accidental lapsus that simultaneously robbed him of his physical mobility and gifted him with a prodigious memory. Borges’s pattern of fortuitous mnemonic acquisition contrasts, for instance, with Pliny’s concluding report about the vulnerability of the faculty of memory: ‘No other human function is equally susceptible to upset’.27 Pliny reports that physical injuries, especially falls, typically inflict upon the victim partial or complete loss of memory. Contrarily to Pliny, Borges overturns previous accounts on the frailty of memory in order to propose the opposite effect, an anomalous case whereby memory is extraordinarily bestowed in a riding accident: ‘Me dijo que antes de esa tarde lluviosa en que lo volteó el azulejo, él había sido
lo que son todos los cristianos: un ciego, un sordo, un abombado, un desmemoriado’ (OC1 488) [‘He told me that before that rainy afternoon when the blue roan had bucked him off, he had been what every man was — blind, deaf, befuddled, and virtually devoid of memory’] (CF 134).

  If Borges uses Pliny’s treatise as a Chinese box insertion from which to draw further parallels and contrasts with Funes, in a larger scale Pliny’s Historia Naturalis stands as a metaphor of ‘Funes the Memorious’. An ambitiously exhaustive catalogue of facts, or ‘history’ of natura as the universe, Pliny’s Historia Naturalis stands as a totalizing attempt to integrate a wide range of knowledge and physical phenomena in the confines of a single volume. In a conversation with Roberto Alifano, Borges commented: ‘I believe that the first inventor of the encyclopaedia was Pliny, the author of Historia Naturalis, in which he compiles in thirty-seven volumes a record of the knowledge of his time and the most diverse materials’.28 In this sense, ‘Funes the Memorious’ stands as a parodic commentary of Historia Naturalis, turning the principles of cataloguing, classifying and recording every possible aspect of the world into a reductio ad absurdum. Just as Funes stands as a successor of Pliny’s encyclopaedic impulse, so Joyce’s Ulysses stands as another avatar of Pliny, another Book as World, as Marilyn French puts it: ‘Joyce literally set out to create a replica of the world — not a metaphor for it, but a copy of it — reproducing with it all the coincidences, mysteries, and incertitude that pervade actual life’.29 Similarly, Umberto Eco insists that: ‘Joyce thus conceived of a total work, a Work-as-Cosmos [...] The book is also an encyclopedia and a literary summa.’30 Therefore, Borges and Joyce modelled Funes and Ulysses respectively according to totalizing encyclopaedic impulses that aimed to incorporate the whole world in their categorization of knowledge. In a fascinating coincidence, Thomas J. Rice remarks: ‘both writers [evinced] an apparent fondness for the ‘ “Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica”.’31 Yet, as the leading parodists of the twentieth century, Borges and Joyce transgress the taxonomical logic that prevails in the supposedly all-inclusive, ordered catalogues in an attempt to underline, among other things, their inadequate claim for completion. In The Fictional Encyclopaedia, Hilary Clark highlights this dialectic between a desire for totalization and the inevitable limitations of the enterprise: