Borges and Joyce
Page 19
El Quijote, debido a mi ejercicio congénito del español, es un monumento uniforme, sin otras variaciones que las deparadas por el editor, el encuadernador y el cajista; la Odisea, gracias a mi oportuno desconocimiento del griego, es una librería internacional de obras en prosa y verso, desde los pareados de Chapman hasta la Authorized Version de Andrew Lang o el drama clásico francés de Bérard o la saga vigorosa de Morris o la irónica novela burguesa de Samuel Butler
(OC1 240).
[The Quixote, due to my congenital practice of Spanish, is a uniform monument, with no other variations except those provided by the publisher, the bookbinder, and the typesetter; the Odyssey, thanks to my opportune ignorance of Greek, is an international bookstore of works in prose and verse, from Chapman’s couplets to Andrew Lang’s ‘Authorized Version’ or Bérard’s classic French drama or Morris’ vigorous saga or Butler’s ironic bourgeois novel (SNF 70).]
If the absence of Greek ironically opens up, rather than hinders, an exciting new avenue of knowledge, then Borges and Joyce turned a state of ignorance to a state of enlightenment, and filled their linguistic gap with the overflowing corpus of Homer in languages other than Greek. ‘For Borges’, writes Levine, ‘the great virtue of Homer (Joyce’s model) was not his proprietorial originality nor his actuality but the fact that Homer effectively produced a library of English literature, enriching the lives of successive generations of readers.’3 The richness of the corpus that constitutes the history of Homer in translation is what Hugh Kenner, inscribing Joyce within an identifiable Homeric tradition, refers to under the title ‘Mutations of Homer’, as well as articulating the crucial and inescapable fact that ‘Homer has never been stable’.4
This Homeric mutability and/or errancy engenders a series of interrogations throughout Ulysses both as part of the underlying assumption that we are in front of a text that is constantly signalling its relation to a larger web of discourses — in this case Homer’s Odyssey — and to the fact that the work of Homer has been radically shifted across history, language, and culture. The only ‘Homer’ that Joyce can claim in Ulysses is a composite site inhabited by cultural difference and loaded by the several centuries of translation and criticism which have added different layers of meaning to a cultural heritage to which Umberto Eco has referred as ‘a case of overinterpretation’.5 Therefore when, in Ulysses, an enthusiastic Buck Mulligan proclaims: ‘Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original’ (U 1.79–80), Joyce conveys a mise-en-abyme effect, inasmuch as Ulysses is itself a sort of translation of the Odyssey and, ironically, Joyce himself was unable to read Homer in the Greek original. Just as in ‘Partial Magic in the Quixote’, Borges argues that the use of the literary device of Chinese boxes may provoke a reaction of confusion upon readers or spectators: ‘¿Por qué nos inquieta que el mapa esté incluído en el mapa y las mil y una noches en el libro de Las Mil y Una Noches? ¿Por qué nos inquieta que Don Quijote sea lector del Quijote, y Hamlet, espectador de Hamlet?’ (OC2 47) [‘Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet?’] (L 231). We can then transfer this interrogation to Joyce’s inclusion of Homer’s Odyssey within Ulysses, thus analogously asking: why does it disturb us that the Odyssey be included in Ulysses? And, equally, why does it disturb us that Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus be readers of the Odyssey? Like the tentative responses to Borges’s paradoxes, the answer to these questions would plunge us back again into a conception of literature, language, and translation that defies fixed meanings and proposes playful and irreverent reversals in which Joyce’s Ulysses may be read as a precursor of Homer’s Odyssey. Alternatively, Borges proposes the following metaphysical answer: ‘tales inversions sugieren que si los caracteres de una ficción pueden ser lectores o espectadores, nosotros, sus lectores o espectadores, podemos ser ficticios’ (OC2 47) [‘these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious’] (L 231).6
In this manner, as things stood for Joyce, his relationship with Homer’s Odyssey was mediated by the long chapter in history that constitutes the reception of Homer in English and other European languages. By this token, the paths that led Borges and Joyce to Homer are informed by a similar tradition of translations, rewritings, and critical assessments. As early as 1930 Stuart Gilbert insisted on Joyce’s reliance on Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, particularly highlighting the fact that, like the mercantile Semitic route in which Bérard situated the ancient Greek Homer, so Joyce conflated in Leopold Bloom a syncretic heritage of Hellenic, Semitic (and Hibernian) ancestries.7 We should also bear in mind, however, that Joseph Brooker has recently undermined Gilbert’s highly structured claim, arguing that: ‘By the 1950s it was argued that Joyce had pulled Gilbert’s leg in directing him to Victor Bérard’s study’.8 Writing on the occasion of Joyce’s obituary, an observant Borges also dismissed Gilbert’s argument: ‘Among these voluntary tics, the most widely praised has been the most meaningless: James Joyce’s contacts with Homer, or (simply) with the Senator from the département de Jura, M. Victor Bérard’ (SNF 221). If Borges’s contempt for Gilbert’s affected parallel demonstrates anything at all, at least it discloses the fact that he was acquainted with Bérard’s work and, like Joyce’s later critics, did not credit it with any relevance to Ulysses. For Borges and Joyce, the Homeric heritage was not only represented by the respected legacy of Chapman and Pope, or the more recent historical/anthropological investigation of Bérard, but also by the scandalously shocking reading of Samuel Butler in The Authoress of The Odyssey, where he claimed that the Odyssey was written by a woman, more precisely, by a young Sicilian princess who ‘had introduced herself into the work under the name of Nausicaa’.9 In Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares transcribes a 1957 conversation, in which he reports that Borges professed a preference for the Odyssey rather than the Iliad, as well as the important fact that he was informed by Butler’s theory of female authorship.10 In a similar vein, Brian Arkins dispels any doubt as to which ‘Homers’ Joyce had read in his lifetime by providing a useful list of the various editions he possessed.11 Equally useful is the information listed by W. B. Stanford who claims that:
Professor Stanislaus Joyce has kindly informed me that his brother had studied the following writers on Ulysses: Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Fénelon, Tennyson, Phillips, d’Annunzio, and Hauptmann, as well as Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey and Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, and the translations by Butler and Cowper.12
Moreover, Joyce openly and unreservedly confessed that his first acquaintance with the Odyssey did not take place via the revered authority of Homer, but through the abridged, highly moralizing Victorian adaptation, Adventures of Ulysses by Charles Lamb who, following the success of his Tales from Shakespeare, specifically adapted for a child readership.13 As Bjorn Tysdahl remarks: ‘No wonder that when Joyce was given the topic “My Favourite Hero” for an essay, he chose Ulysses (Ellmann 46), and that many years later he recommended Lamb to his aunt Josephine when she found his own Ulysses baffling.’14 By the same token, Hugh Kenner remarks that: ‘As the word “adventure” indicates, his first thoughts about the book [Ulysses] were rooted in his adolescent reading of Charles Lamb’s The Story of Ulysses [...] Encountered by Joyce at twelve, this version so impressed itself on his exceptional memory that he seems to have read versions of the Greek text as though they were expansions and rearrangements of Lamb.’15 Yet at the same time, the heavily mediated version(s) of Homer that Joyce interspersed throughout Ulysses reach as far back as the Latin epic model initiated by Virgil in the Aeneid. Gérard Genette suggests that: ‘The Aeneid and Ulysses are no doubt, to varying degrees and certainly on different grounds, two hypertexts (amongst others) of the same hypotext: the Odyssey, of course.’
16 What Genette is advertising here is an intertextual (or Borgesian) practice of reading that transcends chronological perspectives by situating two historically, linguistically, and culturally distant texts within a synchronic tradition. But, above all, Virgil and Joyce are compounded by a linguistic purpose and an onomastic intersection. In his attempt to bestow a national epic for the civitas of Rome, Virgil proudly demonstrated that the grand scale of the epic is as compelling in Latin as in Greek, as well as offering the alternative Latin-based versions of Greek names. Joyce, thus, follows the Latin innovation of Virgil in the Aeneid and the vernacular audacity of Dante in the Commedia, by composing a modernist version of the epic with a Hibernian inflection of the English language, as well as consciously adhering to a Latinate line that opts for the appellation Ulysses (the Virgilian form) rather than Odysseus (the Homeric form). In a similar sense Fritz Senn observes, ‘the book [Ulysses] bears in its title the Latin translation of a Greek hero’s name’.17
In a broader sense, Borges’s and Joyce’s Homeric heritage has been informed by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, which largely relied on Boccaccio’s Filostrato, and was firmly grounded in French translations/rewritings from Greek or Latin sources. This line is continued by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, who in turn adhered to Chaucer’s filtered, vernacular, and anachronistic tale of the Trojan lovers, and, even more significantly, by Chapman’s celebrated English translation of Homer. We then jump forward to Keats’s powerful testament to Chapman’s Elizabethan Homer in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, and the fascination of Romantic poets with the cult of the blind rhapsode.18 The modernist return to Greek mythology exemplified by Eliot’s Waste Land, and his celebrated 1923 review of Ulysses,19 sought to advertise a model that conjured up both a fragmented, de-canonized, paradoxically ‘new’ version of the ancient, as well as a retreat to an invented timelessness, a desire to return to a primeval past that will somehow restore meaning to an unstable historical moment. But, as we are going to see throughout this chapter, neither Joyce nor Borges can be pigeonholed in this convenient ‘mythical’ schema, which is far too restrictive and self-limiting in relation to the complexity of their exercises in translation and rewriting. As Joseph Brooker observes in relation to the appearance of ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’: ‘What is striking about [Eliot’s] focus is less its novelty than its narrowness, its refusal to take in any other aspects of the text in an article published twenty-one months after Joyce’s book appeared.’20 Thus the inscription of Joyce within the mythical tradition of Ulysses should not necessarily signal a unidirectional return to Eliot’s ‘mythical method’. In this way, as Vanda Zajko proposes, we have to start questioning whether Joyce’s relationship with Homer may transcend the limiting, yet highly influential structure imposed by Eliot’s mythical reading: ‘If we resist the idea that Joyce returns to Homer in order to lend authority to modernity, is it possible to figure the relation of Homer to Joyce in a more dynamic way?’21 The analysis that follows will testify that it is possible to rethink the relation of Homer and Joyce through Borges by means of a pan-European comparative approach that goes beyond the Eliotic model.
Greek, Italian, Irish, and Argentine Ulysses
Borges’s lifelong interest in the Ulysses theme is condensed in the generic assertion, ‘los hombres, a lo largo del tiempo, han repetido siempre dos historias: la de un bajel perdido que busca por los mares mediterráneos una isla querida, y la de un dios que se hace crucificar en el Gólgota’ (OC2 448) [‘throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified in Golgotha’] (CF 400). In ‘The Last Voyage of Ulysses’ Borges joins the scholarly debate concerning the eternal damnation of the Greek hero Ulysses, who is placed in the eighth circle of Dante’s Inferno, the section of the Malebolge in which offenders are punished for the sin of fraudulent counselling. At the beginning of the essay, he argues: ‘Mi propósito es reconsiderar, a la luz de otros pasajes de la Comedia, el enigmático relato que Dante pone en boca de Ulises (Infierno, XXVI, 90–142’) [‘My aim is to reconsider, in the light of other passages of the Commedia, the enigmatic tale that Dante places in the mouth of Ulysses (Inferno XXVI, 90–142)’] (SNF 280). Borges is referring, of course, to the compelling tale of the tragic voyage that emerges from the wondrous, elongated flame of the proud Greek hero, who painfully murmurs to Virgil a version of the myth that constitutes Dante’s enigmatic addition to the Ulysses legend. He is fascinated by Dante’s invention of a new ending, which produces a ramification in the Homeric story and adds further layers of meaning to a rich and complex mythological corpus.22 The importance of Dante’s story in the post-Homeric tradition is emphasized by W. B. Stanford: ‘Next to Homer’s conception of Ulysses, Dante’s, despite its brevity, is the most influential in the whole evolution of the wandering hero.’23 Borges’s fascination with Ulysses calls for further thought and a detailed reading of his critical essay will reveal the several interrelated motives that led to his exploration of the Ulysses myth.
Borges considers an ongoing critical polemic: why is Ulysses punished in the eighth circle of Hell? His exploration of the subject is informed by the two principal camps of scholarly debate surrounding the Dantean episode. One tradition argues that Ulysses is punished for his legendary deceitfulness, chiefly for his plotting of the ruse of the wooden horse that led to the fall of Troy. The other camp, however, states that his punishment results from his more daring, nautical enterprise to embark on a final sacrilegious journey to reach the lands forbidden to man.24 On discerning Mount Purgatory, Ulysses and his elderly crew incur not the customary wrath of Poseidon — the Greek Pagan deity presiding over the Homeric sea — but the more potent, inexplicable force of a Christian god who mercilessly condemns their human curiositas with a crushing death and eternal damnation in the confines of hell:
Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto;
chè della nova terra un turbo nacque,
e percosse del legno il primo canto.
Tre volte il fè girar con tutte l’acque:
Alla quarta levar la poppa in suso
E la prora ire in giù, com’altrui piacque,
Infin che ’l mar fu sopra noi richiuso25
(Inf XXVI, 136–42).
[Our celebrations soon turned to grief:
from the new land there rose a whirling wind
that beat against the forepart of the ship
and whirled us round three times in churning waters;
the fourth blast raised the stern up high, and sent
the bow down deep, as pleased Another’s will.
And then the sea was closed again, above us.]26
Borges’s interest, undoubtedly, lies in the second tradition, particularly as he is fascinated by the inevitable parallels and contrasts between Ulysses’s ‘folle volo’ and the otherworld voyage undertaken by Dante. ‘If Ulysses is in the eighth bolgia of the eighth circle because of the “art” of deceit,’ writes Boitani, ‘God drowned out his earthly life because he was reaching the land where no post-lapsarian mortal, with the exception of Dante Alighieri, is allowed.’27 If the daring Ulysses embarked on a voyage to a terra nova which eventually closed in death and subsequently led him into Hell, then Dante similarly sets out on a journey to explore the kingdom of the dead. Aware of the various critical currents that drew inverted correspondences between Dante and his antitype, Ulysses, Borges, quoting Carlo Steiner’s interpretation of Canto XXVI of Inferno, claimed: “‘Dante, nuevo Ulises, la pisará como un vencedor, ceñido de humildad, y no lo guiará la soberbia sino la razón, iluminada por la gracia” ’ (OC3 355) [‘ “Dante, a new Ulysses, will set foot there as a victor, girded with humility and guided not by pride but by reason, illuminated by grace” ’] (SNF 282). In his characteristically erudite way, Borges intermingles his reading of Dante with a quotation from a critical study by the German scholar August Rüegg which
adds a further dimension to the Dante/Ulysses parallel:
Dante es un aventurero que, como Ulises, pisa no pisados caminos, recorre mundos que no ha divisado hombre alguno y pretende las metas más difíciles y remotas. Pero ahí se acaba el parangón. Ulises acomete a su cuenta y riesgo aventuras prohibidas; Dante se deja conducir por fuerzas más altas
(OC3 355).
[Dante is an adventurer who, like Ulysses, walks along virgin paths, travels across worlds no man has ever glimpsed and aspires to the most difficult and remote goals. But the comparison ends here. Ulysses sets forth on his own account and risks forbidden adventures; Dante allows himself to be guided by higher powers (SNF 281).]
For Borges, what is at stake here is that the exploratory missions of Ulysses and Dante — whether sinfully transgressive or divinely approved — implied a burning desire to journey across regions unknown to man in search for uncharted territories. Borges may have also found compelling the implication of forbidden knowledge implicit in this model of literature. The metaphor of the daring explorer becomes paramount in the investigation of Borges’s relationship with the Ulysses theme. Equally significant, moreover, is the fact that the pair Dante/Ulysses as filtered through Borges’s idiosyncratic prism, travels across literary boundaries and exemplifies the new relationship between Homer, Dante, Joyce, and Borges. Just as Borges labelled Dante the new Ulysses, so in his 1925 review of Joyce’s Ulysses he similarly branded himself the Hispanic Ulysses of Joyce’s Hibernian exploration of the myth: ‘Soy EL PRIMER AVENTURERO hispánico que ha arribado al libro de Joyce’ (Inq. 23) [‘I am the first traveler from the Hispanic world to set foot upon the shores of Ulysses’] (SNF 12). Such reading compounds Borges’s interpretation of Dante even further, as it reveals the numerous intricate folds of the Ulysses myth.28 Thus, the central question to ask here is: can Borges’s examination of Dante’s Ulysses become a pre-text through which to revisit his previous excursions upon Joyce’s newly founded geography? And, equally, can his 1925 review of Ulysses and 1948 Dante essay be read as the intertexts of his 1949 short story ‘The Immortal’?