If in his account of the Tichborne case Joyce remains closer to the historical facts, Borges blends fact and fiction in his deliberate incorporation of apocryphal elements. Hence, Joyce refers to the ship in which the legitimate Roger Charles Tichborne drowned by its real name, ‘Bella’ (significantly in Italian and hence highly appropriate in relation to the various references to the Italian language interspersed throughout the episode). Borges, on the contrary, opts for the Homeric name ‘Mermaid’, as a means to add a Hellenic ingredient to a sea story, as well as to insinuate that the ship was under the spell of the legendary creatures of doom, particularly as he states in The Book of Imaginary Beings: ‘La Odisea refiere que las Sirenas atraían y perdían a los navegantes’ (OCC 696) [‘The Odyssey tells us that Sirens attract and shipwreck men’].58 Borges also succeeds in providing a more detailed profile of the real Tichborne, which highlights his social and economical upper-class milieu. If in ‘Eumaeus’ Joyce alludes to the tattoo mark in Indian ink (U 16.1345) that the legitimate Tichborne had carved on his shoulder during his schooldays (thus setting up a correspondence with the other noteworthy tattoo that Murphy proudly displays to his nocturnal audience in the Cabman’s Shelter), Borges omits the reference altogether. On the other hand, as Bell-Villada points out: ‘In the Castro story, Borges takes on Bogle (briefly mentioned in the Britannica as a Negro servant who gave the real Orton a bit of coaching) and transforms him from the vague supernumerary which he originally was into Orton’s coprotagonist and mastermind.’59 Joyce, we learn, omitted the reference to Bogle. The decisive point at stake here is that Borges and Joyce are modelling their own fictional versions of the same historical material in an attempt to produce an anecdotal account that will fit the overall pattern of their creative projects. Both interlace it in a wider tapestry of stories about deception and/or shipwrecks.60 Therefore, Borges and Joyce also had the freedom to incorporate into their theme of imposture strands from other sources which added to the multiplicity of meaning they were seeking to convey. And yet, the moulds with which they give shape to their fictional accounts of the Tichborne case participate, moreover, in the larger syncretic tradition of the Ulyssean wanderer. At the beginning of the story Borges alludes to the call of the open sea:
Sabemos que era hijo de un carnicero, que su infancia conoció la miseria insípida de los barrios bajos de Londres y que sintió el llamado del mar. El hecho no es insólito. Run away to sea, huir al mar, es la rotura inglesa tradicional de la autoridad de los padres, la iniciación heroica. La geografía la recomienda y aún la escritura (Psalmos, CVII): Los que bajan en barcas a la mar, los que comercian en las grandes aguas; ésos ven las obras de Dios y sus maravillas en el abismo
(OC1 301).
[We know that he was the son of a butcher, that his childhood was spent in the gray meanness of the London slums, and that he harkened to the call of the sea. That story is not an uncommon one; ‘running away to sea’ was the traditional English way to break with parental authority — the heroic ritual of initiation. Geography recommended such a course, as did the Scriptures themselves: ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep’ (Psalms 107. 23–24) (CF 13).]
In ‘Eumaeus’ Joyce also refers to ‘the call of the sea’, but, in what is a highly ironic twist for a twentieth-century Ulysses, the uneventful life of Bloom has been starved of maritime adventures. In fact, his limited sea journey involved a boat trip from Dublin to Holyhead: ‘nevertheless it reminded him in a way of a longcherished plan he meant to one day realise some Wednesday or Saturday of travelling to London via long sea not to say that he had ever travelled extensively to any great extent but he was at heart a born adventurer though by a trick of fate he had consistently remained a landlubber except you call going to Holyhead which was his longest’ (U 16.499–504). Or, later in the episode the allegedly well-travelled Murphy gradually strips himself of his disguise of voyager, and angrily retorts: ‘— I’m tired of all them rocks in the sea, and boats and ships. Salt junk all the time’ (U 16.622–23). Like Borges’s 1954 preface to A Universal History of Infamy and like Stephen Dedalus’s warning at the beginning of ‘Eumaeus’, we are largely dealing with identities which are ‘impostures’ or ‘just appearance, a surface of images’. The palimpsestic quality of these Ulyssean identities whereby the outer parchment simultaneously reveals and at times contradicts the internal layer(s) of the narrative, become, thus, paramount in a book entitled Ulysses, or A Universal History of Infamy.
Central to Borges’s and Joyce’s retelling tales of the Ulysses myth is the assumption that their revisionary, composite fabrics are stitched together with remnants from several cultures, religions, and traditions. Borges and Joyce composed a series of narratives that participate in the Ulysses theme and, therefore, borrow the topos of the navigator, the metaphor of the ancient explorer, and the art of deceitfulness. In the difference and sameness of their exercises in appropriation and rewriting, in their complex dialectical relationship we find, once again, the vast novelistic scale of Joyce contra the tight confines of Borges’s ficción, but equally important, we can also discern the epiphanic mode of Joyce’s early writings in synthesis with Borges’s economical prose by virtue of Dante’s medieval model. Finally, the figure of Homer that looms large in Borges and Joyce may be illustrated with the ending of Borges’s moving parable ‘The Maker’. In this narrative, a nameless individual, later identified as Homer, experiences a sudden revelation before turning blind:
En esta noche de sus ojos mortales, a la hora que descendía, lo aguardaban también el amor y el riesgo. Ares y Afrodita, porque ya adivinaba (porque ya lo cercaba) un rumor de gloria y de hexámetros, un rumor de hombres que defienden un templo que los dioses no salvarán y dos bajeles negros que buscan por el mar una isla querida, el rumor de las Odiseas y las Ilíadas que era su destino cantar y dejar resonando cóncavamente en la memoria humana. Sabemos estas cosas, pero no las que sintió al descender a la última sombra
(OC2 160).
[In this night of his mortal eyes into which he was descending, love and adventure were also awaiting him. Ares and Aphrodite — because now he began to sense (because now he began to be surrounded by) a rumor of glory and hexameters, a rumor of men who defend a temple that the gods will not save, a rumor of black ships that set sail in search of a beloved isle, the rumor of the Odysseys and Iliads that it was his fate to sing and to leave echoing in the cupped hands of human memory. These things we know, but not those that he felt as he descended into his last darkness (CF 293).]
In this parable of shifting mirrors the blind Borges imagines the precise moment in which Homer conceived his epic oeuvre and yet descended into darkness. Therefore, we can similarly ask, what did Borges and Joyce feel as they created their work and descended into blindness? Like Borges, the blind Joyce looks back to Homer as a means to imagine a further rumour of Odysseys, listening to the incomparable music of dactylic hexameters, closing his eyes in order to gain a clear picture of what the eyes of the imagination can only see ‘shut your eyes and see’ (U 3.9) says Stephen Dedalus as he walks into eternity along Sandymount strand. ‘I am getting on nicely in the dark’ (U 3.15) may well have been Joyce’s — and also Homer’s, Milton’s, and Borges’s — poignant response at the end of his life. ‘Open your eyes now’ (U 3.25) and the light of the imagination — or the luminocity of the epic tradition — brightens the path of Joyce’s and Borges’s writings, so that in the eternal sea of literature generations of readers can listen to the ‘endless renewed beating of the sea on the rocky coast’.
Notes to Chapter 4
1. Theodor Adorno, ‘On Epic Naiveté’, in Notes to Literature, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 24–30 (p. 24).
2. For an ample treatment of this large subject see Homer in English, ed. by George Steiner, with the assistance of A. Dykman (London: Penguin, 1996). See also The Cambrid
ge Companion to Homer, ed. by Robert Fowler, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Simeon Underwood’s English Translators of Homer: From George Chapman to Christopher Logue (London: Northcote House, 1998) is also a very useful study.
3. Levine, ‘Notes’, p. 354.
4. Hugh Kenner, ‘Mutations of Homer’, in Classic Joyce: Joyce Studies in Italy 6, ed. by Franca Ruggieri (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1999), pp. 25–32 (p. 25).
5. Umberto Eco with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 52.
6. Regarding this issue of Ulysses and the Homeric original vs. translation, see Keri Elizabeth Ames, ‘Joyce’s Aesthetic of the Double Negative and his Encounters with Homer’s Odyssey’, in Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative, ed. by Colleen Jaurretche (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 15–48 (p. 15). Her essay ‘The Oxymoron of Fidelity in Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses’, James Joyce Studies Annual, 14 (2003), 132–74 is also a useful discussion of Joyce’s affiliation with Homer.
7. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Study, 2nd edn (New York: Vintage, 1952), p. 82.
8. Brooker, p. 65.
9. Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey: where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, & how the poem grew under her hands, 2nd edn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922), p. 8.
10. Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges, edición al cuidado de Daniel Martino (Barcelona: Destino, 2006), pp. 290–97; see also p. 375.
11. See Brian Arkins, Greek and Roman Themes in Joyce (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1999), p. 22.
12. W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), p. 276, n. 6.
13. Charles Lamb, Adventures of Ulysses, with an intro. by Andrew Lang (London: Edward Arnold, 1890).
14. Bjorn Tysdahl ‘On First Looking into Homer: Lamb’s Ulysses — and Joyce’s’, in Classic Joyce: Joyce Studies in Italy 6, ed. by Franca Ruggieri (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1999), pp. 279–89 (p. 280).
15. Hugh Kenner, Ulysses, rev. edn (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 23–24.
16. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests, p. 5.
17. Fritz Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. by John Paul Riquelme (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 140.
18. See especially Timothy Webb’s up-to-date, informative synopsis in, ‘Homer and the Romantics’, in Fowler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Homer, pp. 287–310.
19. See T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. by Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975).
20. See Brooker, p. 43.
21. See Vanda Zajko ‘Homer and Ulysses’, in ‘Homer in English Translation’, in Fowler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Homer, pp. 311–24 (p. 316).
22. It should be noted that Borges had similarly endowed the Argentine cult gaucho poem, Martín Fierro, with an alternative ending and fictional resolution. See Borges, ‘El Fin’ (OC1 519–21).
23. Stanford, p. 178.
24. For an illuminating analysis of these two traditions of scholarship see Piero Boitani, ‘Shipwreck: Interpretation and Alterity’, in Dante, ed. by Jeremy Tambling (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 68–85. For a discussion of the evolution of the Ulysses hero from Dante to Joyce and Walcott see also Boitani’s essay ‘Ulysses in Another World’, in Classic Joyce: Joyce Studies in Italy 6, ed. by Franca Ruggieri (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1999), pp. 33–51.
25. All references to Dante’s Commedia belong to La Divina Commedia, testo critico della Società Dantesca Italiana, riveduto col commento scartazzianiano rifatto da Giuseppe Vandelli, dodicesima edizione (Milan: Editore Della Real Casa, 1944), (Inf XXVI, 136–42). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
26. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Mark Musa, 3 vols (New York: Penguin, 1986), (Inf XXVI, p. 309). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
27. Boitani, ‘Shipwreck’, p. 79.
28. Borges’s use of the motif of the explorer is ambivalent in relation to the critical tradition that drew parallels between the voyage of discovery Dante attributes to Ulysses and the subsequent discovery of the New World. See, for instance, his 1981 postscript in ‘The Last Voyage of Ulysses’ (SNF 283). It may be then inferred that he is using the topos of the explorer in a non-historical, mythical way. However, I agree with Piero Boitani’s assertion that: ‘At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Ulysses stands on a triple threshold, that on which, in Dante’s conscience, the death of the classical world, the end of Christian philosophy, and the advent of a new world finally clash’. See Boitani, ‘Shipwreck’, p. 83.
29. Borges’s omission of Dante is discussed in Chapter 5.
30. See Daniel Balderston, Borges: una encyclopedia (Buenos Aires: Grupo editorial Norma, 1999).
31. Also, we have to remember that since the publication of Stuart Gilbert’s 1930 study, Borges rejected the systematic, over-elaborated parallels between the Odyssey and Ulysses: ‘The constant but insignificant parallels between Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey, are still hearing — I will never know why — the impetuous praise of the critics’ (OC1 417–18).
32. Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship, p. 1.
33. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fitzgerald (London: Harvill Press, 1996), p. 154. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
34. Bulson, p. 80.
35. Edna O’Brien, ‘Joyce’s Odyssey: The Labors of “Ulysses” ’, The New Yorker, 7 June 1999, pp. 82–90 (p. 82).
36. See Kearney, p. 47.
37. See La Nación, 6 de agosto 1982, p. 9. The story to which Borges is alluding here is ‘A Painful Case’, in which Mr Duffy is described ‘carrying a stout hazel’ (D 104).
38. See Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, ‘Literary Migrations: Homer’s Journey through Joyce’s Ireland and Walcott’s St Lucia’, Irish Migration Studies in Latin America, 5.3 (2007), 157–62, also available at http://www.irlandeses.org/0711novillo1.htm, for a discussion of the literary kinship found in the works of Joyce and Walcott.
39. Derek Walcott, Omeros, pp. 17–18.
40. It is significant that in ‘The Immortal’ Borges also alludes to Giambattista Vico’s cyclical theory of history which becomes, of course, the main structural pattern of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: ‘In 1729 or thereabouts, I discussed the origin of that poem with a professor of rhetoric whose name, I believe, was Giambattista; his arguments struck me as irrefutable’ (CF 193).
41. Ronald Christ, p. 199.
42. Dominique Jullien, ‘Biography of an Immortal’, Comparative Literature, 47 (1995), 136–59 (p. 140).
43. This seafaring motif is discussed in the next section.
44. Timothy P. Martin, ‘Joyce, Wagner, and the Wandering Jew’, Comparative Literature, 42 (1990), 49–72 (p. 50).
45. Robert G. Hampson, ‘The Genie out of the Bottle: Conrad, Wells and Joyce’, in The Reception of The Thousand and One Nights in British Culture, ed. by Peter L. Caracciolo (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 218–43 (p. 230).
46. See Borges, ‘The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights’ (SNF 92–110).
47. Stanford, p. 221.
48. Mary T. Reynolds, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 38.
49. Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’, in A Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses, ed. by Margot Norris (Boston, MA, and New York: Bedford Books, 1998), pp. 69–90 (p. 73).
50. Gifford, p. 554.
51. Claire A. Culleton, Names And Naming in Joyce (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), p. 23.
52. Gerald L. Bruns, James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays ed. by Clive Hart and David Hayman (London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 363–85 (p. 369).
53. Tom Castro was the Hispanic alias
of Arthur Orton. Since Borges wrote the stories for the popular Buenos Aires daily Crítica, it is understandable that he privileged the Hispanic over the Anglophone version of the name.
54. See Luis Chitarroni, ‘Borges y Joyce’, in Joyce o la travesía del lenguaje:psicoanálisis y literatura, Nada Lasic — Elena Szumiraj (compiladoras), (Buenos Aires: Fondo De Cultura Económica, 1993), pp. 17–25 (pp. 20–21).
55. Robert Adams Day, ‘Dante, Ibsen, Joyce, Epiphanies, and the Art of Memory’, James Joyce Quarterly, 25.3 (1998), 357–62 (p. 361).
56. Vicki Mahaffey, ‘Joyce’s Shorter Works’, in The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. by Derek Attridge, 4th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 185–211 (p. 192).
57. Mahaffey, p. 193.
58. Borges, Book of Imaginary Beings, p. 132.
59. Bell-Villada, p. 56.
60. In this sense it is significant that in ‘The Widow Ching — Pirate’, another of the narratives that integrate A Universal History of Infamy, Borges included a reference to the female pirate Anne Bonney, whom he describes as ‘una irlandesa resplandeciente, de senos altos y de pelo fogoso, que más de una vez arriesgó su cuerpo en el abordaje de naves’ (OC1 306) [‘a magnificent Irishwoman of high breasts and fiery hair who risked her life more than once in boarding ships’] (CF 19).
CHAPTER 5
Architects of Labyrinths: Dante, Joyce, Borges
The act of reading Dante through the prism of Borges and Joyce implies a radical rethinking of a Western tradition whose interpretative potential has been extended, affected, and reinvigorated by a complex process of literary transactions. The Dantean corpus inherited by twentieth-century Irish and Argentine writers already incorporated six crowded centuries of Dantean scholarship that infused and informed their own afterlives of Dante. By means of these decisive and central historical and cultural negotiations, the Dantean episteme which they encountered constituted a composite legacy that incorporated a vast array of discourses: from Chaucer’s pioneering translations/adaptations of the Commedia in The Canterbury Tales, Milton’s inheritance of Dante’s Christian epic tradition in Paradise Lost, Henry Cary’s influential late eighteenth-century rendering of the Commedia, to the apogee of Dante’s reception in the nineteenth century, particularly in the translations, rewritings and critical re-evaluations of the Romantics, with poets such as Shelley, Byron, Keats and Coleridge openly proclaiming their admiration for Dante. If the Romantics chiefly contributed to the popularization of Dante in English, this reverential dissemination was continued and extended by the Victorian imaginations of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the significant contribution by the Rossetti family.1 Equally central is William Blake’s innovative visionary iconography of the Commedia as depicted in his watercolour illustrations.2 Therefore, it may be argued that the twentieth-century fascination with Dante’s Italian tradition — particularly of writers such as Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Borges — was fundamentally owed to the critical investment that had previously taken place during several centuries of Dantean scholarship.3 For example, in his essay ‘Realism and Idealism in English Literature’ Joyce energetically documented the significance Italian writers had had on English literature, insisting that ‘its masters were Boccaccio, Dante, Tasso, and Messer Lodovico. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are a version of the Decameron or the Novellino; Milton’s Paradise Lost is a Puritan transcript of the Divine Comedy’ (CW 164). As we have already seen in Chapter 4, Borges also recognized the pervasive influence of Dante — chiefly through his Ulysses — in English writing on both sides of the Atlantic (SNF 283). Borges, who proclaimed in ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’ his right of unlimited access to the Western archive from the marginal perspective of an Argentine, proudly inherited Dante’s writings as part of this recognizable English corpus. As he affirmed in a 1961 conference: ‘Llegué de un modo laberíntico a la obra maestra, desde la literatura de una isla septentrional que se llama Inglaterra. Llegué a través de Chaucer, del siglo XIV, y de una versión que no he mirado hace muchos años, la de Longfellow’ (TR3 71) [‘I arrived to this masterpiece [the Commedia] in a rather labyrinthine way, through the literature of a northerly island called England. I arrived by means of Chaucer in the fourteenth century and a version of Longfellow that I haven’t read for several years’].
Borges and Joyce Page 22