Borges and Joyce

by Patricia Novillo-Corvalan

  First of all, for Borges, a perusal of Canto XXVI of Inferno implies, inevitably, an open and fruitful engagement with the other literary afterlives of the Homeric hero. At the end of ‘The Last Voyage of Ulysses’ he writes:

  Una observación última. Devotas del mar y de Dante, las dos literaturas de idioma inglés han recibido algún influjo del Ulises dantesco. Eliot (y antes Andrew Lang y antes Longfellow) ha insinuado que de ese arquetipo glorioso procede el admirable Ulysses de Tennyson. No se ha indicado aún, que yo sepa, una afinidad más profunda: la del Ulises infernal con otro capitán desdichado: Ahab de Moby Dick

  (OC3 356).

  [A final observation. Devoted to the sea and to Dante, the two literatures written in English have felt the influence of the Dantesque Ulysses. Eliot (and before him Andrew Lang and before him Longfellow) has implied that Tennyson’s admirable Ulysses proceeds from this glorious archetype. As far as I know, a deeper affinity has not previously been noted: that of the infernal Ulysses with another unfortunate captain: Ahab of Moby-Dick (SNF 283).]

  And yet just as Borges failed to mention Dante’s Commedia as one of the key sources of his story ‘The Aleph’,29 so he equally failed to mention Joyce’s Ulysses in his exami nation of the evolution of the Ulysses tradition. But as I will demonstrate here, this failure to acknowledge Joyce is answered, to a certain extent, by the fact that Joyce is tacitly present throughout his exploration of Homer and Dante. For example, the unmistakable Joycean flavour of ‘The Last Voyage of Ulysses’ led Daniel Balderston to include it amongst the various writings listed in the ‘James Joyce’ entry of his Borges: una encyclopedia.30

  My argument here is that the theme of the ancient explorer whose ambitious quest is the mapping of new terrains and the difficult endeavour to describe previously unseen geographies, is deeply interconnected with the Buenos Aires avant-garde magazine Proa, in which Borges’s 1925 review of Ulysses and fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’ was published. As has been previously discussed in Chapter 1, Proa aimed to offer new ways to navigate through the genres of narrative and poetry from a supposedly innovative and groundbreaking point. This is particularly conveyed at the beginning of the review in which Borges proudly describes himself as the first Hispanic adventurer of Joyce’s Hibernian Sea. Equally important is the fact that Borges astutely applied to Ulysses a recognizable type of nautical imagery, which turned Joyce’s experimental novel into a type of enterprise: ‘audaz como una proa y universal como la rosa de los vientos’ (Inq. 28) [‘as bold as the prow of the ship, and as universal as a mariner’s compass’] (SNF 14). Moreover, in ‘The Last Voyage of Ulysses’ Borges paid a further homage to his former avant-garde forays and did not fail to utilize the crucial noun ‘prow’ to denote the boldness of Dante’s Ulysses journey: ‘Cinco meses hendieron el océano, y un día divisaron una montaña, parda, en el horizonte’ (OC3 354) [‘For five months their prow cleaved the ocean, and one day they caught sight of a dark mountain on the horizon’] (SNF 280). Indeed — as we have seen in Chapter 1 — Borges was aware of Joyce’s deliberate juxtapositions between Ulysses and The Odyssey. But in spite of this, his 1925 reading of Ulysses did not aim to participate in the fashionable critical practice of unravelling parallels between Joyce and his Homeric predecessor but, instead, Borges sought to foster comparisons, or contrasts, with his own linguistic, literary and ideological circumstances in 1920s Buenos Aires.31 In this sense, it remains fascinating that Borges compared his literary discovery of Joyce’s Ulysses with a colonizing mission. The young Borges also speaks of Ulysses, ‘con la vaga intensidad que hubo en los viajadores antiguos, al describir la tierra que era nueva frente a su asombro errante y en cuyos relatos se aunaron lo fabuloso y lo verídico, el decurso del Amazonas y la Ciudad de los Césares’ (Inq. 23) [‘with the license my admiration lends me and with the murky intensity of those ancient explorers who described lands new to their nomadic amazement, and whose stories about the Amazons and the City of the Caesars combined truth and fantasy’] (SNF 12). In his interweaving of fact and fiction, Borges’s trick to the Buenos Aires readers of Proa is to set up a hall-of-mirrors of the prow symbol. Beneath the clear reflection of Joyce’s Ulysses in the avant-gardist glass of the review, lies a deeper, more complex image that reveals Borges’s authorial identification with the legendary Ulysses, in his attempt to offer a portrait of the young artist as an Argentine Ulysses, as he navigates upon the challenging waters of Joyce’s Irish variation of the myth. To a further extent — and as I have argued earlier — in the 1920s Joyce’s Ulysses was also forbidden territory, a prohibited book confiscated by several governmental authorities, as it had become outlawed in the United States, England, Ireland, and most English-speaking countries. At the beginning of James Joyce and Censorship, Paul Vanderham rightly quotes Joyce’s comment that Ulysses ‘was one of the world-disturbing sailors’.32 Hence any reference to Borges’s 1925 translation of ‘Penelope’ ought to take into account the crucial fact that the young avant-garde poet was aware that his voyage through Joyce’s Ulysses implied an excursion into an unlawful and forbidden geography. The youthful and intrepid Borges embarks on a voyage to Joyce’s terra nova, a newly discovered territory caught up between the forces of Law and Desire.

  In short, Borges traverses the vast ocean of Joyce’s literature in order to emerge in the Southern Hemisphere as the Ulysses of Buenos Aires. Hence, as we have seen, his subsequent 1948 speculations about Dante’s enigmatic version of the Ulysses story are intricately allied with his prior use of maritime imagery and the metaphor of the ancient explorer in his 1925 review of Joyce. Borges’s use of this navigational motif reappears in his poem ‘Elegy’ in which he proudly invokes his seafaring excursions: ‘Oh destino el de Borges, / haber navegado por los diversos mares del mundo’ (SP 230) [‘Oh destiny of Borges — / to have traversed the various seas of the world’] (SP 231). In another poem he also refers to the alluring call of the sea: ‘El mar. El joven mar. El mar de Ulises y de aquel otro Ulises que la gente del Islam apodó famosamente Es-Sindibad del Mar’ (OC2 496) [‘The sea. The young sea. Ulysses’ sea, whom the people of Islam famously called Es-Sindibad the Sailor’]. Moreover, in the poem ‘The Fourth Element’, he asserts: ‘Agua, te lo suplico. Por este soñoliento / Enlace de numéricas palabras que te digo. / Acuérdate de Borges, tu nadador, tu amigo. / No faltes a mis labios en el postrer momento’ (SP 164) [‘Water, I ask a favor. Through this indolent / arrangement of measured words I speak to you. / Remember Borges, your friend, who swam in you. / Be present to my lips in my last moment’] (CP 165).

  Yet for all his youthful navigational fervour, it should not be forgotten that the mature Borges identified more closely with Homer and Joyce than with the mythical Ulysses, since he shared with them the destiny of blind bard and weaver of many ‘songs for men to come’.33 The illustrious genealogy of the blind bard from Homer to Joyce and Borges becomes an identifiable narrative thread in their works. In Book VIII of The Odyssey the blinded minstrel Demodocus, who has exchanged eyesight for the gift of storytelling, sings the deeds of Odysseus at the court of the Phaeacians. It has been suggested, moreover, that the blind Demodocus singing about Ulysses is a reflection of the blind Homer singing his larger Odyssey of the Greek hero. In the ‘Lestrygonians’ episode of Ulysses a compassionate Leopold Bloom helps a blind man make his way through the streets of Dublin (U 8.1078–1108). In a wider epic dimension, the pathetic image of the blinded man ‘tapping the curbstone with his slender cane’ (U 8.1075) becomes Joyce’s tributary acknowledgment to Homer, as he shifts his ancient predecessor across language, literature, and history and finds a suitable analogy in the urban labyrinth of twentieth-century Dublin. ‘The figure of the blind man tapping his way around the city streets’, suggests Eric Bulson, ‘had a personal relevance for James Joyce. His exile and eye troubles made the darkness of the blind stripling immediate enough, and in this specific moment in Ulysses, he alludes to the paradox of physical absence and imaginative, geographical proximity.’3
4 Similarly Edna O’Brien notes that ‘[Joyce’s] principal model would be Homer — blind Homer, precursor to blind Joyce, who, after labouring the seven years it took to complete “Ulysses”, was to suffer from glaucoma, cataracts, and dissolution of the retina.’35 Like his Irish predecessor Borges also suffered from numerous eye ailments, undergoing his first cataract operation when he was only in his late twenties. It is feasible to conclude that Borges’s and Joyce’s perceptions of the world would have been deeply affected by their looming blindness. Furthermore, literary and physical blindness pervades the work of the mature Borges, particularly his 1960 collection The Maker, and his 1969 poetry book In Praise of Darkness. Significantly, Homer and Joyce — along with Shakespeare — are the central literary monuments of these collections. It is no wonder, then, that during the centennial celebrations of Joyce’s birth that took place in Dublin on Bloomsday, a blind octogenarian Borges travelled as a guest of honour and relished the irony that, like the blind man of Ulysses, he was also wandering across the Dublin of his blind predecessor ‘tiptapping his way through its streets with his probing stick’.36 This frail Borges leaned on a walking stick he had proudly bought in Dublin and reported with glee that a similar one is mentioned ‘at the beginning of one of the stories in Dubliners’.37 Another equally fascinating figure of the blind man is conjured up by the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott in Omeros, who envisages a chameleon-like Homer who, on his transatlantic journey from ancient Greece to the warm seas of the Caribbean and then back again to Europe, incorporates the afterlives of Homer, Dante and Joyce (and we may say Borges) and successfully blends them in the composite figure of:38

  the blind man [who] sat on his crate after the pirogues

  set out, muttering the dark language of the blind,

  gnarled hands on his stick, his ears as sharp as the dog’s.

  Sometimes he would sing and the scraps blew on the wind

  when her beads rubbed their rosary. Old St. Omere.

  He claimed he’d sailed round the world. ‘Monsieur Seven Seas’

  they christened him, from a cod-liver-oil label

  with its wriggling swordfish. But his words were not clear

  They were Greek to her. Or old African babble.

  Across wires of hot asphalt the blind singer

  seemed to be numbering things. Who knows if his eyes

  saw through the shades, tapping his cane with one finger?39

  The Quest for Immortality

  The topos of the audacious explorer also sets up the larger theme of the story ‘The Immortal’ in which Borges depicts the journey of a man in search for immortality: a man whose composite identity is gradually disclosed as Homer’s: ‘También me refirió su vejez y el postrer viaje que emprendió, movido, como Ulises, por el propósito de llegar a los hombres que no saben lo que es el mar ni comen carne sazonada con sal ni sospechan lo que es un remo’ (OC1 540) [‘He also told me of his own old age and of that late journey he had made — driven, like Ulysses, by the intention to arrive at the nation of men that know not what the sea is, that eat not salted meat, that know not what an oar might be’] (CF 191). According to Borges, the subject of ‘The Immortal’, ‘es el efecto que la inmortalidad causaría en los hombres’ (OC1 629) [‘is the effect that immortality would have on humankind’] (CF 287). The story is constructed as a complex tapestry in which are intricately woven strands from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante’s account of Ulysses’s last journey, Pope’s translation of the Iliad, the mythical figure of Homer himself, as well as allusions to the legendary figure of the Wandering Jew (chiefly under the name of Joseph Cartaphilus, one of the various onomastic variations of the legend) and the Arabian Nights story of Sinbad. Thus Borges depicts the long journey of Joseph Cartaphilus in search of immortality on the one hand, and his retrospective search for mortality, on the other, within a cyclical wandering40 in which his composite hero becomes an everlasting Homer who — like Dante’s Ulysses — embarked on a final voyage and, throughout his immortal trail has written (and forgotten) his Iliad and Odyssey, has fought in several wars, ‘[ha copiado] en el siglo trece, las aventuras de Simbad, de otro Ulises’ (OC1 543) [‘has copied down the adventures of Sindbad — another Ulysses’] (CF 194), and purchased the six volumes of Pope’s translation of the Iliad. In his customary way, Borges adds at the end of ‘The Immortal’ a dubious postscript which functions as a counter-narrative to the prior testimony narrated by Joseph Cartaphilus. A literary critic identified under the pseudonym Dr Nahum Cordovero launches an acid attack that undermines the authenticity of Cartaphilus’s narrative, and deems the document ‘apocryphal’, arguing that it had been plagiarized from the works of Pliny, Thomas de Quincey, Descartes, and Bernard Shaw (CF 195). Not arbitrarily, Cordovero’s review is entitled A Coat of Many Colours. Thus Borges uses the review device as a teasing, humorous ending which, if anything at all, may be read as a lesson in literary theory which foregrounds the important fact that in the sphere of textual interrelations literary discourses are not read or conceived in isolation, but are always positioned in relation to a wider network of pre-existent texts. ‘Ironically, then, Cordovero’s attack in the Post-script on the integrity of Homer’s text is our assurance of its universal validity’, writes Ronald Christ, ‘the more it is nothing in itself, the more the story is everything.’41

  Borges’s revisionary narrative of the Ulysses theme cannot but bring to mind Joyce’s similar creative endeavour in Ulysses. ‘Both Ulysses and “El Inmortal” are a repetition of the Odyssey and a voyage through literature’, remarks Dominique Jullien, ‘thus the story of the Immortal can be read as Borges’s response to Joyce’s odyssey of a Dublin Jew.’42 Indeed, Leopold Bloom embodies an Irish Jew who similarly becomes an avatar of Homer’s Ulysses, the legendary Wandering Jew, as well as several other nautical aliases, including Sinbad the Sailor.43 In relation to the Wandering Jew, Timothy P. Martin states that ‘In the Wagnerian canon he [Joyce] encountered a rich variety of characters who represent the problem of exile in its full complexity [...] None of Wagner’s exiles, however, made as powerful an impression on Joyce as did his “Wandering Jew of the Ocean,” the Flying Dutchman.’44 In relation to Sinbad, Robert Hampson writes: ‘Joyce’s knowledge of the Nights is well documented. Joyce owned an Italian translation in Trieste. When he moved to Paris, he replaced it with the Burton Club Edition. The Nights, like the Odyssey, was one of the works which was permanently part of Joyce’s library.’45 Borges’s lifelong fascination with the Nights is well known, particularly his fondness for a wide range of English, German, and Spanish renditions.46 Joyce’s foremost tribute to the Nights is conveyed at the end of ‘Ithaca’ as a weary Bloom invokes the journey of his Oriental predecessor in a rhythmical, alliterative, dreamlike sequence:

  Womb? Weary?

  He rests. He has travelled.

  With?

  Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer [...]

  (U 17.2319–23)

  So far, I have demonstrated that in 1925 the young Borges portrayed himself as an Argentine Ulysses navigating through the uncharted waters of Joyce’s new epic territory. I argued that Borges extended this metaphor of the explorer to Dante and labelled him the new Ulysses. I showed how this pattern of a journey to a terra incognita converges in his story ‘The Immortal’, in which he fuses the various Greek, Italian, Irish, Jewish and Oriental strands of the Ulysses theme in a man’s quest for immortality. To a further extent, this highlights the crucial fact that what attracted the exiled Dante, Joyce, and Borges to the Ulysses archetype was his legendary depiction as outcast or émigré, whether this state is voluntary or involuntary, permanent or transitory, or whether the traveller longs to return to Ithaca, Florence, Dublin, or Buenos Aires. In his poem ‘Ars Poetica’ Borges invokes the artistic and universal significance of the Ulysses legend: ‘Cuentan que Ulises, harto de prodigios, / Lloró de amor al divisar su Itaca / Verde y humild
e. El arte es esa Itaca / De verde eternidad, no de prodigios’ (SP 136) [‘They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels, / Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca, / Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca / Of green eternity, not of marvels’] (SP 137). The eternity of Ulysses to which Borges is alluding here recapitulates, above all, Joyce’s ambitious enterprise in his writing of Ulysses. The eternity of Ulysses is nowhere better portrayed than in the mathematical catechism of ‘Ithaca’, as the reader is afforded a view of the full arch of the Ulysses tradition in Leopold Bloom’s grand scale trajectory of the legendary hero:

  Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?

  Ever he would wander, self-compelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. [...] Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia