In this final section I will argue that in broad opposition to the surplus of readily available data that prevails in the totalizing archives of Funes and Ulysses — particularly in the mathematical catechism of ‘Ithaca’ — are positioned the nonencyclopaedic memories of the first-person narrator of ‘Funes the Memorious’, and the strenuous recollection processes of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. In this manner, Funes may be said to resemble the meticulous catechist of ‘Ithaca’, the narrative mind who processes, collects, and classifies large quantities of data throughout the episode. Funes and the catechist intersect in their compulsive creation of taxonomies, endless lists, and in their larger endeavour to overmaster Western knowledge.
What, above all, unites Funes and ‘Ithaca’ is their industrious self-employment as archivists of an infinitely divisible reality. Funes composes sequences of metonymic associations in an attempt to process the myriad details of his swarming memory and, thus, create potentially vast enumerations linked by an associative system only coherent to his own mnemonic functioning. For Funes, the clouds that adorn the sky remain different throughout each day of his life and cannot be synthesized into a generic whole. This results, of course, in his need to construct further parallels with the countless disparate elements that inhabit his all-absorbing memory. Central to this associative process is the assumption that Funes’s correlation of the clouds of the southern sky ‘del treinta de abril de mil ochocientos ochenta y dos’ (OC1 488) [‘on the morning of April 30, 1882’] (CF 135) — significantly the year of Joyce’s birth — with ‘las vetas de un libro en pasta española que solo había mirado una vez’ (OC1 488) [‘the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once’] (CF 135), converges with the trajectory of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom across the city of Dublin. Just as Funes evokes the morning clouds, so the narrative mind of ‘Ithaca’, captures an example of parallax in the shared perception of a ‘matutinal cloud’ by Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom from two different points of observation in the morning of 16 June 1904: ‘Stephen attributed to the reapparition of a matutinal cloud (perceived by both from two different points of observation, Sandycove and Dublin) at first no bigger than a woman’s hand’ (U 17.27–42). In a 1984 interview with Osvaldo Ferrari, a blind and elderly Borges revealed his familiarity with this Joycean device: ‘[Joyce] da la hora exacta en que ocurre esa escena, para que uno pueda comparar ese capítulo, que corresponde a la mente de Stephen Dedalus, con el otro, que corresponde a la mente de Leopold Bloom, y entonces hay un momento en el cual los dos se fijan en una nube. Se entiende que ese paralelismo es precioso’59 [‘[Joyce] gives the exact time in which the scene takes place, thus allowing the reader to compare this episode [‘Telemachus’], which corresponds to the mind of Stephen Dedalus, with the other, which corresponds to the mind of Leopold Bloom [‘Calypso’], hence there is a moment in which both stare at a cloud. It is implied that this parallelism is precious’].
The principle of ordering that characterizes Funes becomes, in turn, the principal narrative mannerism of ‘Ithaca’. For instance, the ordinary action of boiling a kettle to make cocoa is turned into a detailed account of successive actions: ‘He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron kettle to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to let it flow’ (U 17.160–62). The supposedly inconsequential act of turning on the tap is transformed into a long descriptive report which engages in a regressive series of causalities that trace back the source to the water supply: ‘From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of 2,400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of filter mains [...]’ (U 17.164–66). The associative series that emerge from Funes’s mind, derive from his computer-like capacity that fails to limit the amount of information stored and, by the same token, lacks a system able to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant information, hence Funes’s response to a shocked narrator: ‘Mi memoria, señor, es como vaciadero de basuras’ (OC1 488) [‘My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap’] (CF 135). This faulty mechanical functioning that lacks the ability to select, prioritize and filter out unnecessary data, is also one of the main characteristics of Joyce’s ‘Ithaca’. In a 1921 letter to Frank Budgen, Joyce underlined that the reader of ‘Ithaca’ ‘[will] know everything and know it in the baldest coldest way’ (Letters I 160). As Walton Litz points out: ‘This is the technique of much of “Ithaca”, an accumulation of details which has no inherent “aesthetic” limits but relies on the epic impact of overmastering fact.’60 Yet ‘Ithaca’ also develops an opposing narrative aesthetic through which the information provided in the answers is either disproportionately long or, at times, annoyingly insufficient. In this sense, Karen Lawrence observes: ‘This narrative mind amasses facts with no regard for normal conventions of significance and relevance [...] the reader finds himself bombarded with a wealth of data.’61 Yet this principle of excessive cataloguing produces, on the other hand, an adverse effect of deliberate withdrawal, inasmuch as Funes and the catechist decide, at times, to repress the postulation of an answer or the compilation of a further list. In ‘Funes the Memorious’, this is evident in the character’s refusal to classify the memories of his childhood: ‘Lo disuadieron dos consideraciones: la conciencia de que la tarea era interminable, la conciencia de que era inútil. Pensó que a la hora de su muerte no habría acabado aún de clasificar todos los recuerdos de la niñez’ (OC1 489) [‘Two considerations dissuaded him: the realization that the task was interminable, and the realization that it was pointless. He saw that by the time he died he would still not have finished classifying all the memories of his childhood’] (CF 136). In ‘Ithaca’, likewise, the potentially extensive answer to a question is at times undercut by what seems a capricious refusal to answer, and the interrogation is followed by a monosyllabic or single-word response, standing in stark contrast with the elongated, explicative responses previously or subsequently supplied. These one-word rebuttals act as alternative versions that, rather than overstating the course of events, opt for the withholding of information:
Did either openly allude to their racial differences?
Neither
(U 17. 525–26).
Was the clown Bloom’s son?
No
(U 17. 987–88).
Funes’s inability to comprehend the narrator’s explanation about the validity of the decimal numerical system: ‘Le dije que decir 365 era decir tres centenas, seis decenas, cinco unidades: análisis que no existe en los “números” El Negro Timoteo o manta de carne’ (OC1 489) [‘I told him that when one said “365” one said “three hundred, six tens, and five ones,” a breakdown impossible with the “numbers” Nigger Timoteo or a ponchoful of meat’] (SNF 136), is echoed in the catechist’s inability to generate the adequate, commonsensical answers to certain questions. As Fritz Senn puts it: ‘It [the catechist] gets everything under control. And misses almost everything. In this sense “Ithaca” is a pedantic triumph and a “protracted failure” (U 17.1669) of the occidental preoccupation with taxonomy and intellectual mastery’.62 In a similar vein, Rickard views the incongruities of ‘Ithaca’ as ‘[an illustration] of the defects of voluntary memory, of the assumption that the past is a collection of facts and details that can be easily and simply reassembled’.63 Whereas most conventional narratives strive towards a foreseeable end, Funes and the catechist ignore the art of closure and would carry on their mnemonic gymnastics ad infinitum. Only with an early death of, ironically, pulmonary congestion is Funes’s recording engine finally switched off, and only with the sacrificial act of cancelling an answer to the question ‘Where?’ (U 17.2331), which is followed by a bowdlerized orthographical dot, the catechism of ‘Ithaca’ is finally stopped. ‘ “Ithaca” is an ending that is not an ending’, notes Andrew Gibson, ‘in its finality, it fails to finalize things.’64
But in opposition to the mnemonic tour de force lavishly displayed by Funes and the catechist, we can detect an alternative nar
rative that struggles to counteract the excesses of memory with the opposite phenomenon of active and selective recollection. Rickard has appropriately referred to the last three episodes of Ulysses as ‘a quiet explosion of memory [...], which are full of recollecting and reminiscing’, stressing that we can detect ‘a struggle to remember’ which is manifested in Stephen’s ‘super human effort to try and concentrate and remember’ (U 16.755) and in Bloom’s ‘irritation at not finding his key in his pocket “Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded himself twice not to forget” (U 17.77–79)’.65 In ‘Funes the Memorious’ the first-person narrator raises a fundamental problem in a story about a protagonist with an infallible memory:
Arribo, ahora, al más difícil punto de mi relato. Este (bueno es que ya lo sepa el lector) no tiene otro argumento que ese diálogo de hace ya medio siglo. No trataré de reproducir sus palabras, irrecuperables ahora. Prefiero resumir con veracidad las muchas cosas que me dijo Ireneo. El estilo indirecto es remoto y débil; yo sé que sacrifico la eficacia de mi relato; que mis lectores se imaginen los entrecortados períodos que me abrumaron esa noche
(OC1 487–88).
[I come now to the most difficult point in my story, a story whose only raison d’être (as my readers should know from the outset) is that dialogue of that century ago. I will not attempt to reproduce the words of it, which are now forever irrecoverable. Instead, I will summarize, faithfully, the many things Ireneo told me. Indirect discourse is distant and weak; I know that I am sacrificing the effectiveness of my tale. I only ask that my readers try to hear in their imagination the broken and staccato periods that astounded me that night (CF 134).]
In other words, how to recount and rearrange, on the level of discourse, a sequence of events that constitute the story of a man endowed with an infinite memory? This pattern reappears in ‘The Aleph’ wherein ‘Borges’ faces the analogous task of describing the infinite aleph, a point in space that contains a universe:
Arribo, ahora, al inefable centro de mi relato; empieza aquí, mi desesperación de escritor. Todo lenguaje es un alfabeto de símbolos cuyo ejercicio presupone un pasado que los interlocutores comparten; ¿cómo transmitir a los otros el infinito Aleph, que mi temerosa memoria apenas abarca? [...] Lo que vieron mis ojos fue simultáneo: lo que transcribiré, sucesivo, porque el lenguaje lo es. Algo, sin embargo, recogeré
(OC1 625).
[I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins. Every language is an alphabet of symbols the employment of which assumes a past shared by its interlocutors. How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain? [...] What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive. Something of it, though, I will capture (SNF 283).]
At this crucial juncture in both stories, Borges foregrounds the limits of language and representation in a form of meta-commentary that brings the narration to a halt in order to examine its own fictional laws and procedures. These remarks also function as a narrator’s apologia that highlights their mutual ineffability to capture in words, and through imperfect recollection, their infinite revelations. This narrative impasse, however, is reciprocally resolved through the acceptance of the impossibility to attain a total reconstruction of the events. The infinite qualities of Funes, writes Sylvia Molloy, ‘only exist in perception itself; it cannot be told. While Funes’s undistracted attention is busy summoning terms, the narrator wishing to transcribe the series must “clear a space” for narration if he wished to refer the experience — the enumeration of an infinite series — ever so partially.’66 The counter-narratives of ‘Funes the Memorious’ and ‘Ithaca’ are accomplished, thus, through active remembering and a self-confessed quota of forgetfulness. For ‘Borges’ and for Bloom, the telling of the tale implies, inevitably, an incomplete and imperfect report of the principal facts. Therefore, their deliberately flawed accounts may be re-branded, justifiably, within the sphere of creative recollection.
In ‘Ithaca’ the catechist stresses that the Hebrew–Celtic cultural exchange between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom culminated in Bloom’s partial intonation of the Zionist hymn: ‘Why was the chant arrested at the conclusion of this first distich?’ The reply goes thus: ‘In consequence of defective mnemotechnic’ (U 17.761–66). Here, ‘mnemotechnic’ should not be read as another word for memory, but as an artificial device for the aid and improvement of natural memory. His ‘defective’ answer notwithstanding, Bloom gets away by substituting the missing information with ‘a periphrastic version of the general text’ (U 17.767–68). Whereas the catechist would have presented a full version of the hymn, Bloom seeks refuge, instead, in the paradigmatic axis of language that enables him to substitute one word for another. The act of lapsing into an instance of forgetfulness forges a wide gamut of linguistic and creative possibilities, inasmuch as a lacuna simultaneously takes away meaning but also strives to replace the missing layer with a new script. Moreover, later in the episode, with the imperative command ‘catalogue these books’ (U 17.1361) the catechist provides a minute inventory of Bloom’s shelves. This sequence generates a further series of questions about the polarity of memory and forgetfulness:
Which volume was the largest in bulk?
Hozier’s History of the Russo-Turkish War.
What among other data did the second volume of the work in question contain?
The name of a decisive battle (forgotten), frequently remembered by a decisive officer, major Brian Cooper Tweedy (remembered).
Why, firstly and secondly, did he not consult the work in question?
Firstly, in order to exercise mnemotechnic: secondly, because after an interval of amnesia, when, seated at the central table, about to consult the work in question, he remembered by mnemotechnic the name of the military engagement, Plevna
(U 17.1414–26).
The redeeming power of amnesia offers, once again, the possibility to fill in a space, to effectuate through the art of memory the recollection of a particular fact. Therefore, Bloom’s memory is inevitably affected by ‘the access of years’ and by ‘the action of distraction’ (U 17.1916–20). What this makes clear, principally, is the crucial fact that the ordinary memory of Leopold Bloom is condemned (or gifted) with the distortion and partial recollection of facts, like the memory of the first-person narrator of ‘Funes the Memorious’. Bloom’s memories are dissolved by a combination of lack of attention and the inevitable passing of time. Moreover, Bloom’s memory will be gradually swept away by the inexorable current of that mighty usurper of Memory: Death. Borges, in turn, proposes a testament to oblivion at the end of ‘The Aleph’: ‘Nuestra mente es porosa para el olvido; yo mismo estoy falseando y perdiendo, bajo la trágica erosion de los años, los rasgos de Beatriz’ (OC1 628) [‘Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness; I myself am distorting and losing, through the tragic erosion of the years, the features of Beatriz’] (CF 288). The only antidote to the mystical revelation of the three-dimensional Aleph is the remedy of forgetfulness, since the potent effects of infinity may only be overcome with an inevitable, yet necessary, void. Death — that other guise of oblivion — is the redeeming force that finally rescues Ireneo Funes from his infallible powers of recollection. Just as Borges clears up the excesses of memory with death and forgetfulness, in ‘Ithaca’ Joyce proposes a similar redemption by means of a non-heroic formula that merges forgetfulness with forgiveness. If Joyce argued that ‘[Ithaca] is in reality the end as Penelope has no beginning, middle or end’ (Letters I 172), then, the longest day in literature, 16 June 1904, culminates with a weary Leopold Bloom breaking free from his Homeric counterpart as he opts for a pacifist acceptance of Molly’s infidelity rather than a bloodthirsty revenge on her suitor (Blazes Boylan). This forgiving attitude can only be achieved through forgetfulness, in other words, through the sentiment of ‘abnegation’ that, as the catechist states, exceeded ‘jealousy’, jus
t as the sentiment of ‘equanimity’ surpassed ‘envy’:
Why more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity?
From outrage (matrimony) to outrage (adultery) there arose nought but outrage (copulation) yet the matrimonial violator of the matrimonially violated had not been outraged by the adulterous violator of the adulterously violated
(U 17.2195–99).
After kissing the ‘plump mellow yellow smellow melons’ (U 17.2241) of Molly’s rump, a worn out Bloom loosens himself to the forgetfulness of sleep, while the restless Molly begins her insomniac recollection, so that the book can remember itself infinitely.
Notes to Chapter 3
1. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 15.
2. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 16.
Borges and Joyce Page 17