(U 17.2012–20).
Joyce’s extract has been enriched by W. B. Stanford, who has eloquently referred to this passage as:
A vast interstellar odyssey and a spectacularly heroic return [...] This is the supreme adventure of Bloom’s adventurous mind. It is a conception beyond anything in the previous Ulysses tradition, carrying with it much of that potent scientific romanticism which modern astrophysicists have inherited from ancient astrologers, and much, too, of the spirit of Dante’s doomed hero.47
For the blind and elderly Borges, a return to Joyce signals a return to Ithaca, a return that goes full circle in relation to his longstanding acquaintance with Ulysses and, similarly, from the perspective of the transformative variations of the myth. In his 1968 tributary poem ‘James Joyce’, a mature Borges, once again the explorer of Joyce’s epic geography, voyages through the vastness of his eternal day:
Entre el alba y la noche está la historia
universal. Desde la noche veo
a mis pies los caminos del hebreo,
Cartago aniquilada, Infierno y Gloria.
Dame, Señor, coraje y alegría
para escalar la cumbre de este día.
(OC2 361)
[From the depths of night I’ve seen
at my feet the wanderings of the Jews,
Carthage destroyed, Hell, and Heaven’s bliss.
Grant me, Lord, the courage and joy
I need to scale the summit of this day (SP 273).]
Like Dante’s Ulysses, who undertakes his last voyage at old age, a frail Borges poetically aspires to reach the summit of Joyce’s Ulysses. However, this is not a sacrilegious journey since, like Dante the Pilgrim, Borges beseeches God’s grace to grant him the coraje and alegría which are the indispensable qualities in any journey of exploration. As a lifelong traveller of Joyce’s topography, Borges knows beforehand that he will never reach the summit of Joyce’s monument, insofar as a journey through Ulysses involves not a one-way-trip, but infinite excursions into an inexhaustible and wide-ranging geography. Ultimately, in Borges’s and Joyce’s revisionary treatment of the Ulysses theme is encapsulated a whole epic tradition which, like Adorno’s interpretation of The Odyssey, preserves the myth through stasis and yet makes it new by ‘the endlessly renewed beating of the sea on the rocky coast’. In this sense, ‘The Immortal’ and Ulysses may also be read as an allegory of the ubiquitous presence of Homer in the Western tradition and as the inescapable, overpowering cultural heritage that has haunted Borges and Joyce throughout their lives. In ‘The Immortal’ Borges follows the grand epic curve of Homer, Dante, and Joyce in a conscious attempt to participate in the retelling of the Ulysses theme. But unlike his epic predecessors Borges reduces their encyclopaedic scale to a miniaturized, compacted form of the epic as short story, vignette, or ficción that aims to reduce several centuries of tradition to an economical five-page prose exercise. Even if Dante’s retelling is condensed in a single Canto, it still belongs to the larger scope of the Inferno and, even more, Ulysses becomes a recurring presence throughout the three Cantiche of the Commedia. In ‘The Immortal’, above all, lies Borges’s foremost tribute to Homer’s literary immortality, and an unreserved affiliation to a fascinating, yet multifarious tradition he had inherited in the wake of Dante and Joyce.
The Wine-dark Sea
If for Adorno, the roaring of the sea stands as the sound of epic discourse, this ever-flowing resonance travels from ancient Greece to twentieth-century Ireland in order to converge in the gigantic aquatic catalogue meticulously described in ‘Ithaca’ (U 17.163–228). These oceanic proportions are generated by two questions. First, by the modest, three-worded, preterite interrogation: Did it flow? (U 18.163), and then by the more descriptive: ‘What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?’ (U 17.183–84). What Joyce listed in a far-reaching, epically inspired catalogue, the more economical Borges encapsulated in the name of a Greek deity of the sea: ‘Porque el agua es Proteo’ (SP 162) [‘For water is Proteus’] (SP 163), and synthesized its course throughout the globe with two of its ancient rivers: ‘Y tu fuga se llama el Éufrates o el Ganges’ (SP 162) [‘Your flights are called the Euphrates or the Ganges’] (SP 163). If ‘Ithaca’ reverberates with an exhaustive record of the various properties and uses of water, then ‘Eumaeus’ becomes the episode that most strongly suggests the Odyssean seafaring topos, elevating ‘Navigation’ as its Art and ‘Sailors’ as its Symbol. In fact, Mary T. Reynolds has pointed out an interesting parallel between the episode and Dante’s last voyage of Ulysses: ‘A showpiece is Bloom’s and Stephen’s encounter with the redbearded sailor, whose tale of shipwreck in the southern hemisphere is unmistakably parallel to Dante’s account of Ulysses’s last voyage in Inferno 26’.48 Reynolds seems to be referring to the gruesome story of Antonio, the Greek sailor and tattooist, who perished at sea eaten by sharks. However, if we consider the vast number of sea stories, both in the northern and southern hemispheres that are woven into the episode, a further series of parallels with Ulysses’s tale of shipwreck begin to emerge. Central to this topic are, equally, the many alleged expeditions undertaken by the sailor Murphy, as listed in his dubious record of the world, which he claims to have circumnavigated:
I was in the Red Sea. I was in China and North America and South America. We was chased by pirates one voyage. I seen icebergs plenty, growlers. I was in Stockholm and the Black Sea, the Dardanelles under Captain Dalton, the best bloody man that ever scuttled a ship. I seen Russia. Gospodi pomilyou. That’s how the Russians prays
(U 16.459–63).
Fundamental to the Ulysses theme in this episode is also the exotic postcard from South America, according to Derrida an open text, a public piece of writing,49 which Murphy suspiciously produces as matter-of-fact evidence to persuade his audience of the numerous perils and out-of-the-ordinary sights he encountered in his many adventures. The episode also displays a cross-current of maritime stories that adorn the (old) narrative of the episode, particularly at the point when ‘the others got on to talking about accidents at sea, ships lost in fog, collisions with icebergs, all that sort of thing’ (U 16.900–01). From the Flying Dutchman — the mysterious phantom ship that never returned home — to the tragic case of the Scandinavian ship Palme that sank in the Irish sea with its entire crew; from the English ship Lady Cairns which in 1904 fatally collided with the German bark The Mona with the loss of all crew, to the high-profile nineteenth-century ‘Tichborne’ (U 16.1343) legal case, in which, according to Gifford:
Arthur Orton (1834–98), a coarse, ignorant butcher [claims to be] Roger Charles Tichborne (1829–54), the heir presumptive of Sir James Francis Tichborne (1784–1862), [who] was lost at sea on the Bella in 1854, but his mother refused to believe him dead and advertised for information about his whereabouts.50
The other underlying narrative uniting this complex pattern of seafaring tales is put forward by Stephen Dedalus at the beginning of ‘Eumaeus’, wherein he alerts the reader about the ambiguous, slippery nature of identity throughout the episode: ‘Sounds are impostures, Stephen said after a pause of some little time, like names. Cicero, Podmore. Napoleon, Mr Goodbody. Jesus, Mr Doyle. Shakespeares were as common as Murphies. What’s in a name?’ (U 16.362–64). The underlying void that lies behind the façade of the impostor, or the signifier devoid of signified, becomes also the central theme of Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy (1935): ‘Patíbulos y piratas lo pueblan y la palabra infamia aturde en el título, pero bajo los tumultos no hay nada. No es otra cosa que apariencia, que una superficie de imágenes; por eso mismo puede acaso agradar’ (OC1 291) [‘Gallows and pirates fill its pages, and that word iniquity strikes awe in its title, but under all the storm and lightning, there is nothing. It is all just appearance, a surface of images — which is why readers may, perhaps, enjoy it’] (CF 5). To illustrate Stephen’s claim, the untrustworthy and hackneyed narrator of ‘Eumaeus’ refers to Murphy with a wide-
ranging onomastic record. Claire A. Culleton has compiled these various appellations: ‘Murphy becomes “the communicative tarpaulin” (16.479), “the Skibbereen father” (16.666), “the impervious navigator” (16.1010–11), “Shipahoy” (16.901), and “Jack Tar” (16.1456), almost as if he were given a newer, more animated, moniker with every mention.’51 Culleton omits, however, the further names of Ulysses Pseudangelos — as Joyce put it in the schemata — his Oriental counterpart ‘Sinbad’ (U 16.858) and ‘the ancient mariner’ (U 16.844), an allusion, of course, to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem heavily influenced by Dante’s Ulysses.
Joyce’s use of the motif of the impostor in ‘Eumaeus’ runs in juxtaposition to Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus, ‘that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end’ (Odyssey 13) uses the arts of deception, cunning, and disguise as his main heroic attributes. In Book XIV of the Odyssey, Odysseus is physically disguised through the intervention and protection of his Olympic guardian, Athena, in order to conceal his return from the treacherous suitors. On her divine advice, he seeks hospitality in the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus for whom he promptly fabricates a maritime tale of pirates, dangers, and adventures — not unlike his own Odyssey, or the various stories that appear in ‘Eumaeus’ — in order to conceal his real identity. The histrionic acts of role-play and disguise and the art of storytelling become the means by which imposture is achieved and a counterfeit façade is revealed, a device that Joyce takes to greater lengths in ‘Eumaeus’. As Gerald L. Bruns explains in his persuasive analysis of the episode:
It is good to dwell upon this notion of imposture, because, as it happens, this is the central theme of ‘Eumaeus’ — a theme around which a tale of masks and roles are woven [...]. The idea that ‘Sounds are impostures’ adumbrates a basic nominalist formula, according to which a discontinuity is said to prevail between words and things. In the context here the discontinuity is between names and persons, and as the situation develops we are led to wonder, first, whether the keeper of the shelter is really the historical Fitzharris, and, second, whether Murphy is really the romantic figure he purports to be.52
In his poem ‘Odyssey, Book Twenty-three’ (1964) Borges also explores the discrepancy between name and person in Odysseus, and elevates a rhetorical question that brings into the equation the nature of Ulysses as Everyman and Noman that Joyce had explored in ‘Ithaca’: ‘¿Dónde está aquel hombre / Que en los días y noches del destierro / Erraba por el mundo como un perro / Y decía que Nadie era su nombre?’ (SP 204) [‘Where is the man now / Who in his exile wandered night and day / Over the world like a wild dog, and would say / His name was No One, No One, anyhow?’] (SP 205). Just as Joyce developed the theme of imposture in ‘Eumaeus’, so in A Universal History of Infamy Borges offers the journalistic vignette ‘The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro’, namely a fictionalized account of the Tichborne legal case that Joyce had already introduced in ‘Eumaeus’.53 For comparative purposes, I have transcribed their versions of the same story:
The Tichborne case according to Joyce
And then, number one, you came up against the man in possession and had to produce your credentials like the claimant in the Tichborne case, Roger Charles Tichborne, Bella was the boat’s name to the best of his recollection he, the heir, went down in as the evidence went to show and there was a tattoo mark too in Indian ink, lord Bellew was it, as he might very easily have picked up the details from some pal on board ship and then, when got up to tally with the description given, introduce himself with: Excuse me, my name is So and So or some such commonplace remark
(U 16.1341–49).
The Tichborne case according to Borges
In the waning days of April, 1854 [...] there had sunk in the waters of the Atlantic a steamship christened the Mermaid, bound from Rio de Janeiro to Liverpool. Among the drowned had been one Roger Charles Tichborne, an English military officer brought up in France, and the firstborn son of one of England’s leading Catholic families. [...] Bogle decided that it was Orton’s duty to take the first steamer for Europe and realize Lady Tichborne’s hope that her son had not perished — by declaring himself to be that son
(CF 15).
The main question to ask here is this: was Joyce’s ‘Eumaeus’ the source for Borges’s story? The first tentative answer is no. As is norm with Borges, he provides an ‘Index of Sources’ and lists Philip Gosse’s The History of Piracy (1911) as its main source. However I agree with Luis Chitarroni that the most likely reason for this overlap is due to the fact that Borges and Joyce habitually consulted the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as an unlimited resource for their writings and, unsurprisingly, the Tichborne case was given a considerable entry.54 Yet at the same time Borges, who practised a fragmentary, yet paradoxically thorough reading of Ulysses, surprised the reader on several occasions with precise and detailed references from ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, ‘Circe’, and ‘Ithaca’, and may well have equally drawn this anecdotal account from Joyce.
In the investigation of the literary relationship between Borges and Joyce, perusing the different ways in which they appropriated a story constitutes a highly instructive and informative methodology. In this case, both versions of the Tichborne case are incorporated within a larger narrative frame: ‘Eumaeus’, and A Universal History of Infamy, in which the chief purpose is the narration of tales of shipwreck, deception, and falsehood. In their fictional adaptations of the historical account we get a glimpse of the sameness and difference of their creative impulses, thus revealing illumi nating aspects of the theory and practice of their writings, the fictional laws governing their epic and compressed tendencies, and their recurrent narrative procedures. The fact that Borges and Joyce became interested in the Tichborne case, the fact that they decided to subject it to their highly idiosyncratic, transformative spinning processes and, most of all, the fact that they plunged the finished product within the larger canvas of a book/episode about infamy/deception are significant factors that cannot be ignored. In this way, Joyce offered an additional seafaring interpolation to ‘Eumaeus’ and Borges a fully developed exercise in prose. Let us then examine more closely the intersections and divergences of their Tichborne versions.
If Joyce dedicates to the Tichborne case a section of ‘Eumaeus’ permeated by the infectious, clichéd locutions of the third-person narrator — as well as placing it in a dialogic relationship with the several interconnected reports about shipwrecks and deception that integrate the episode — Borges turns his Tichborne vignette into ‘ejercicios de prosa narrativa’ [‘exercise in narrative prose’] that reduces ‘la vida entera de un hombre a dos o tres escenas’ (OC1 289) [‘a person’s entire life to two or three scenes’] (CF 3). Whilst this synthetic technique appears as the fundamental trademark of Borges’s writing, we should not forget that in Stephen Hero Joyce proposed his theory of the epiphany, which is defined by Stephen as, ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself’ (SH 216). Rather than proposing a clear-cut analogy between Joyce’s epiphanies and Borges’s journalistic vignettes developed in A Universal History of Infamy, I shall argue here that it is possible to recognize some parallels between both forms. For example, Robert Adams Day identifies in the Joycean epiphany an ‘extended meditation on the performance of Dante and Ibsen’.55 Day’s endeavour to take the epiphany back to Dante interests us here, as Borges similarly located his concise method within Dante’s literary tradition. In his 1980 lecture ‘The Divine Comedy’ Borges argued that it is possible to recognize in Dante’s epic model a poetic artistry whereby the life of a character is captured and condensed in a few lines (OC3 213). In this case, Borges states that he has been wrongly praised for introducing this device to fiction, and in his usual self-effacing pose retorted that we owe instead this discovery to Dante’s Middle Ages. In retrospect (particularly through his relationship with Joyce) we can r
ecognize that, time and again, Borges approaches a writer from the standpoint of his aesthetics of brevity — in this case Dante — and searches for the fragmentary in the epic, thus turning an encyclopaedic work into a multiplicity of small segments. The invention with which Borges credited Dante is particularly apparent in the story ‘Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz’, which bears the following epigraph from Yeats’s ‘The Winding Stair’: ‘I’m looking for the face I had / Before the world was made’ (OC1 561). The story closes with the arresting line: ‘Cualquier destino, por largo y complicado que sea, consta en realidad de un solo momento: el momento en que el hombre sabe para siempre quién es’ (OC1 562) [‘Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever who he is’] (CF 213). The far-reaching literary implication we can deduce from this example is that Borges was informed by Dante, but at the same time we can hear some unmistakable echoes of Stephen Dedalus’s similar attempt to capture a ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’. ‘In philosophical and religious terms’, writes Vicki Mahaffey, ‘epiphany represents an idealistic, even platonic belief in the superiority of the spirit, its ability to transcend materiality.’56 Borges undoubtedly conveys this idealistic, Platonic search for the spiritual essence of a man’s life in the final lines of ‘Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz’. But unlike Joyce, who rapidly eschewed the underlying method of his aphoristic epiphanies for the ensuing novelistic scale of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Borges developed this aesthetic of compression and transmuted its essential creative ingredients into the ultimate gold of his Art, the quintessential Borgesian ficción. Yet it needs saying that, as Mahaffey points out, the epiphanies reappeared ‘in the richer contexts of Joyce’s subsequent works’.57
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