Borges and Joyce

by Patricia Novillo-Corvalan

  Over history, the encyclopaedic enterprise has been characterized by a drive to encircle or include all there is to know. However, this drive has always encountered problems, limitations built into the enterprise itself. No matter how much faith the encyclopaedist(s) may have in the possibility of mastering and communicating the body of knowledge at hand, the totality of this body is an elusive thing. The desire to comprehend knowledge is an erotics recognizing a loss at the very limit of its reach.32

  As direct descendants of this encyclopaedic tradition, Borges and Joyce are both lured by the magnitude of an enterprise that seeks to embrace all forms of knowledge, and aware that such projects are condemned to fail in their unavoidable incompleteness. Consequently, both emphasize the conflictual forces inherent in any totalization of knowledge by turning the encyclopaedic endeavour for completion into an unavoidable, yet humorous, record of incompletion. For instance, in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses the gigantic catalogues that irrupt into the narrative no longer fulfil any principles of systematic relevance, and instead include arbitrary and disconnected series. In this vein, the epic catalogue of ‘many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity’ (U 12. 176) lists legendary Celtic figures such as Cuchulin and the soldier Owen Roe, side by side a worldwide taxonomy of other historical, literary, and biblical counterparts, ranging from Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, Napoleon Bonaparte, to Tristan and Isolde, and Adam and Eve. As Karen Lawrence argues: ‘What begins as a principle of ordering becomes a vehicle of illogic; the category of Irish heroes that commences with Cuchulin suddenly includes the world.’33 The creation of a catalogue based on absurd and illogical laws of categorization is also one of Borges’s pet themes, particularly in ‘John Wilkins’s Analytical Language’. Just as the catalogue of ‘Cyclops’ incorporates any random element from the universe, so the disparate numerical system devised by Funes comprises a nonsensical nominal labelling for each number: ‘En lugar de siete mil trece, decía (por ejemplo) Máximo Pérez; en lugar de siete mil catorce, el Ferrocarril; otros números eran Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, azufre, los bastos, la ballena, el gas, la caldera, Napoleón, Agustín de Vedia’ (OC1 489) [‘Instead of seven thousand thirteen (7013), he would say, for instance, “Máximo Pérez” instead of seven thousand fourteen (7014), the “railroad”; other numbers were “Luis Melián Lafinur”, “Olimar”, “sulfur”, “clubs”, “the whale”, “gas”, “a stewpot”, “Napoleon”, “Agustín de Vedia” ’] (CF 136). Funes’s babble of disconnected words resembles the arbitrary lists of ‘Cyclops’, in their all-inclusive accumulation of details any possible element may validly be incorporated into their endless catalogues. What is at stake in Borges’s and Joyce’s projects, ultimately, is the need to draw attention to the fact that absolute forms of reasoning are condemned to partiality, hence emphasizing the arbitrariness of all systems of thought. As Borges concludes in ‘John Wilkins’s Analytical Language’, ‘no hay clasificación del universo que no sea arbitraria y conjectural’ (OC2 86) [‘there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and speculative’] (SNF 231).

  Locke, Author of Funes

  Towards the end of ‘Funes the Memorious’, in an attempt to turn Funes’s memory into an even more unusual prodigy, the narrator extends the list of ‘precursors’ of his fictional character. Thus the next mnemonic analogy is linked to the nominalistic language postulated by the British philosopher and empiricist, John Locke. Much like the examples of extraordinary memories provided by Pliny, this new predecessor will be discredited when compared with the unique powers of Funes. The first-person narrator of the story reports thus: ‘Locke, en el siglo XVII, postuló (y reprobó) un idioma imposible en el que cada cosa individual, cada piedra, cada pájaro, y cada rama tuviera un nombre propio’ (OC1 489) [‘In the seventeenth century, Locke postulated (and condemned) an impossible language in which each individual thing — every stone, every bird, every branch — would have its own name’] (CF 136). It is no wonder that for Funes, even Locke’s impossible language in which every particular thing would require a particular name seemed far too general, as he would have devised an even more accurate nomenclature to describe the world: ‘Funes proyectó alguna vez un idioma análogo pero lo desechó por parecerle demasiado general, demasiado ambiguo’ (OC1 489) [‘Funes once contemplated a similar language, but discarded the idea as too general, too ambiguous’] (CF 136). John Locke’s nominalistic idiom ironically proves unsuitably wide-ranging for the supra-empiricist Funes. Indeed, in Of Memory: Reminiscence, and Writing, David Farrell Krell suggests that Locke’s impossible idiolect anticipated Funes: ‘Locke will not have had the advantage of being able to recall Luis Borges’ Ireneo Funes — “Funes el memorioso” (1942) — and yet he may have anticipated something of Funes’ fate. Which is, one must say, bound to be funereal.’34 At any rate, Locke participates in the dissemination of a Western mnemonic tradition and, in doing so, proposes an impossible language which, three hundred years later, would be refuted by Ireneo Funes in his nineteenth-century ‘arrabal sudamericano’ (OC1 490) [‘South American hinterland’] (CF 137). Funes transcends Locke’s nominalistic idiom by virtue of his ability to remember ‘[no sólo] cada hoja de cada árbol de cada monte, sino cada una de las veces que la había percibido o imaginado’ (OC1 489) [‘not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf’] (CF 136). Funes, then, refutes Locke with an even more unfeasible and impractical language which is bound to the flux of time, since any minuscule temporal modification would demand, in turn, a further denomination. These undetected modifications in the perception of average memories, reports ‘Borges’, highly irritated Funes: ‘No sólo le costaba comprender que el símbolo genérico perro abarcara tantos individuos dispares de diversos tamaños y diversa forma; le molestaba que el perro de las tres y catorce (visto de perfil) tuviera el mismo nombre que el perro de las tres y cuarto (visto de frente)’ (OC1 490) [‘Not only was it difficult for him to see that the generic symbol “dog” took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes, it irritated him that the “dog” of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog of three-fifteen, seen frontally’] (CF 136). But whereas Borges enlarges Locke with the creation of Funes, Locke nonetheless resorts to God as the supreme example of an infinite memory. In Chapter X of An Essay, in the subsection entitled ‘On Retention’, Locke states that the only memory devoid of forgetfulness or defect is the infinite memory of the Christian God: ‘The omniscience of God, who knows all things past, present, and to come, and to whom the thoughts of men’s hearts always lie open, may satisfy us of the possibility of this’.35 We may also add here that in his early essay ‘James Clarence Mangan’ (1902) Joyce had referred to the unbounded mind of God as, ‘that great memory which is greater and more generous than our memory, [for which] no life, no moment of exaltation is ever lost’.36 Joyce’s assertion that God is infinitus37 converges with Borges’s similar description in A History of Eternity that God’s eternity registers the simultaneity of all times, past, present, and future. If Locke and Joyce invoke the memory of God as the ultimate form of perfection since it lacks the defect of ordinary memories, namely, forgetfulness, then Borges views the infallible memory of Funes as a monstrous aberration, an inference that is extended, eventually, to the supreme memory of the Creator and to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (see SNF 133–34).

  Nietzsche, Author of Funes

  In ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (1873) the second essay in a collection entitled Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche proposes ‘a meditation on the value of history’,38 whereby he condemns Western scientific-historical systems of knowledge for their ‘costly superfluity and luxury’39 and their inability to serve life. As a substitute to this historical overf low, Nietzsche proposes a form of unhistorical living that turns its back on the surplus of historical information that has greatly contributed towards the imprisonme
nt of the individual. Therefore, the excesses of history can only be overcome through the opposite phenomenon of active forgetfulness, a redeeming process that is conceived as the amnesiac antidote to the superabundance of knowledge or excessive remembering. Nietzsche’s assault on history, however, should not be understood as a total denial of the importance of history to life. Rather, what is at stake here is that a defunct history, overburdened with useless facts, should give way to a living history infused with the power to serve the individual. In this respect, Edward S. Casey has convincingly argued that Nietzsche, alongside Heidegger, Ebbinghaus and Freud, belongs to a twentieth-century philosophical tradition that approaches ‘remembering through the counterphenomenon of forgetting.’40 This tension underlines the significant fact that the act of remembering only exists through its antithetical relationship to oblivion; Mnemosyne (the Greek goddess of remembering) gives way to Lesmosyne (the goddess of forgetfulness). In Greek mythology, the river Lethe purges the souls of the memory of their previous existences. In Book VI of The Aeneid, Virgil reports that: ‘The god calls in a crowd to Lethe stream / That there unmemoried they may see again / The heavens and wish re-entry into bodies’.41 In The Republic Plato describes the waters of Lethe as the final and inevitable passage towards forgetfulness, hence emphasizing the importance to preserve memories while alive: ‘And so, my dear Glaucon, his tale was preserved from perishing, and, if we remember it, may well preserve us in turn, and we shall cross the river of Lethe safely and shall not defile our souls’.42 These myths act as reminders of the frailty of the faculty of memory, becoming overt exhortations to remember in vita, as well as generating the fear of total oblivion, an horror oblivionalis which unceasingly validates the process of recollection. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur offers a compelling examination of the long-lasting dialectic of remembering and forgetting:

  The extraordinary exploits of the ars memoriae were designed to ward off the misfortune of forgetting by a kind of exaggerated memorization brought to the assistance of remembering. But artificial memory is the great loser in this unequal battle. In brief, forgetting is lamented in the same way as aging and death: it is one of the figures of the inevitable, the irremediable.43

  A vindication of forgetfulness overturns the Western binary opposition of memory/forgetting, in order to privilege the second term. In this vein, Nietzsche pro poses his own ars oblivionalis through active forgetfulness, in what he regards as an indispensable condition for the livelihood of humanity: ‘Forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic’.44 In a similar vein, Casey writes: ‘To value forgetting instead of vilifying it is to recognize that the forgetting of many details of daily life is not only practically useful — in order to become less distracted and preoccupied — but, in fact, necessary to our well-being, a basis for being-in-the-world.’45 Thus, Nietzsche offers the chilling parable of a man who was unable to forget:

  Imagine the extremest possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forgetting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of becoming.46

  It is thus clear that Nietzsche’s vision of a man condemned to a persistent memorious state anticipates the infallible memory of Borges’s Funes. In fact, Nietzsche’s allegory resembles ‘Funes the Memorious’ to such an extent that it may even be read as a plot summary of the story. If Nietzsche proposes ‘a man who did not possess the power of forgetting’, Borges replies that ‘His perception and memory were perfect’ (CF 135). By the same token, Nietzsche’s suggestion that his memorious man was incapable of believing in himself, recalls Borges’s assertion: ‘Su propia cara en el espejo, sus propias manos, lo sorprendían cada vez’ (OC1 490) [His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them] (CF 136). Without a doubt, the similarities between the two texts are striking. But at this point it is relevant to ask how familiar Borges was with Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. Roxana Kreimer has demonstrated that Borges was far more than just familiar with Nietzsche’s essay. She has proved that a copy of Untimely Meditations was found in his personal library, bearing significant ‘subrayado y anotado en los márgenes con su puño y letra’ [underlining and annotations on the margins with his own handwriting].47 Following this decisive evidence it is possible, as a result, to identify a further confluence between Borges and Nietzsche, which is based on the ultimate moral of Nietzsche’s parable: ‘Thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting’.48 Unable to exercise any form of ars oblivionalis and overwhelmed by his unrelenting powers of recollection, Ireneo Funes seeks refuge in death as the ultimate form of oblivion. As Salgado puts it: ‘The story of Borges’s disabled genius of memory helps Borges illustrate the empowerment, so crucial to the Nietzschean idea of the Will, that forgetting can bestow.’49 The family name of Borges’s character, Funes, let us not forget, is for this purpose equally emblematic, particularly in relation to Sturrock’s insistence that ‘his name Funes marks him as funes(to), as someone sad and unfortunate’.50 Furthermore, Borges confers on Funes the main side effect that Nietzsche assigns to his memorious being: total recall is paid for by the higher price of a constant state of insomnia. Nietzsche says: ‘A man who wanted to feel historically through and through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep.’51 Consequently this by-product of insomnia becomes an offshoot of the state of total recall. This insomniac feature is, moreover, the point where Borges and Joyce intersect: Funes becomes Joyce’s ideal insomniac since a total reading of Finnegans Wake would only be achieved with an infinite memory and abstinence from sleep. But if Joyce’s last two novels and ‘Funes the Memorious’ embody the excesses of remembering in their totalizing gestures, how do they in turn negotiate the memory/forgetting polarity? In other words, is it possible to recognize in Borges and Joyce an alternative discourse that is centred neither in total recollection nor in absolute oblivion, but which aims to achieve a higher synthesis out of the interaction of the two conflicting forces? As Paul Ricoeur puts it: ‘Could forgetting then no longer be in every respect an enemy of memory, and could memory have to negotiate with forgetting, groping to find the right measure in its balance with forgetting?’52

  The Art of Forgetting in 'Funes the Memorious' and 'Ithaca'

  In Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, Edward S. Casey has persuasively demonstrated that Aristotle’s De Memoria et Reminiscentia has had a fundamental impact in the Western history of mnemotechnic, contributing to the development of two opposing theoretical approaches to memory, which he labels as ‘passivism’ and ‘activism’.53 In Aristotle’s treatise, this particular distinction emerges from his preliminary differentiation between ‘memory’ and ‘reminiscing’ (or ‘recollecting’), the first term being associated with a passive form of remembering, while the latter is related to the metaphor of the search as a deliberate attempt to recover the past.54 On the one hand, Casey points out that for the passivist model, ‘remembering is reduced to a passive process of registering and storing incoming impressions. The passivist paradigm is still very much with us, whether it takes the form of a naive empiricism or of a sophisticated model of information processing.’55 On the other, Casey argues that the ‘activist’ model ‘involves the creative transformation of experience rather than its internalized reduplication in images or traces construed as copies. Echoes of activism are detectable in Plato and Aristotle themselves, especially in the shared conviction that recollection takes place as a search.’56 If the passivist tradition privileges an operation of memory based on the effortless storage of experience — hence its analogy with the modern computer — the activist paradigm promotes a creative search that involve
s a retroactive process in which the past is re-collected through language and imagination. However, as John S. Rickard puts it: ‘Activist memory is always problematic, for many activist writers on memory doubt the availability of any final truth at the end of their search [...] Thus, the activist tradition sees memory as an intersection between actual experience and interpretation, imagination, and repression.’57 In this sense, active memory emerges as a deeply personal, subjective and inevitably ‘falsified’ version of events that overtly declares its impossibility to provide an absolute truth of the past. In the ‘Nestor’ episode, Stephen Dedalus sums up the core of the activist tradition with his citation from Blake’s A Vision of the Last Judgement: ‘Fabled by the daughters of memory’ (U 2.7). If remembering is ‘fabled’ by the muses (who in Greek mythology are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne) then the process of recollection is inevitably filtered through imagination and creativity. By the same token, Borges insists that creative processes are the result of a mixture of ‘omisiones y de énfasis, de olvido y de memoria, éste combina alguna de ellas y elabora así la obra de arte’ (OC4 310) [omissions and emphasis, memory and forgetfulness, which are mixed together to create the work of art]. ‘Memory in Ulysses’, writes Rickard, ‘operates in a contested zone constructed by modern philosophical and psychological discourses as well as by older epistemological modes, and thus, predictably, it contains elements of both the passivist and the activists visions of memory.’58 The same could be applied to Borges, who, as we have seen, analogously deploys a richly intertwined tapestry of discourses of memory and incorporates both activist and passivist undercurrents.