Borges and Joyce

by Patricia Novillo-Corvalan

  In addition to the highly disturbing visions of hell in A Portrait, Joyce conceived the Dantist ideology in terms of both linguistic innovation and political sub version, as Dante openly confronted the structural principles of Italian society, chiefly by advocating the literary use of the vernacular instead of Latin in De Vulgari Eloquentia, and in his denunciation of the corruption of church and state, as he unmercifully condemned popes and statesmen to the deepest confines of his Inferno. This ideological turn goes hand-in-hand with the Romantic re-evaluation and re-invention of Dante as the revolutionary medieval thinker capable of inspiring radical political changes in societies struggling for emancipation. According to Reynolds, ‘Joyce’s critical interest in the Divine Comedy is his perception of Dante as a critic of society. Joyce took seriously Shelley’s dictum that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind”, and architects of social change.’22 Furthermore, Reynolds highlights a relevant parallel between the situation of the Irish church in Joyce’s time and Dante’s medieval church: ‘In Joyce’s Ireland, the issue of anticlericalism, long since dead in England and France, was still as alive as in Dante’s time. There was a special attraction for Joyce in Dante’s indictment of clerical corruption and his images of simony.’23

  Unlike Joyce, Borges neither initiated his conversations with Dante via Roman Catholicism, nor engaged in a systematic study of the Italian language.24 Instead, he only aspired to read Italian in order to gain direct access to Dante and other Italian classics: ‘I learned a lot of Italian with Dante. And then I was also taught by Ariosto when I read his Orlando el Furioso. They were two magnificent teachers.’25 This strictly literary pursuit resembles T. S. Eliot’s similar confession: ‘I am not a Dante scholar; my Italian is chiefly self-taught, and learnt primarily to read Dante; I need still to make constant reference to translations’.26 Rather surprisingly, perhaps, for a voracious reader of the classics, Borges encountered Dante for the first time in his mid-thirties in an English translation by Dr John Carlyle (Thomas Carlyle’s younger brother), which contained a prose rendering in English side-by-side with Dante’s Italian (see A 44).27 From a biographical perspective, this literary meeting took place in 1937 while he was unhappily employed as a cataloguer for the Buenos Aires municipal library Miguel Cané. His daily attendance at this government institution involved long tram journeys across the city, which presented him with the opportunity to read an ample catalogue of books, including the Commedia (OC3 208). Just as Eliot argued that his ‘public school knowledge of Italian, a traveller’s smattering of Italian, and a literal translation beside the text’28 aided him during his reading of Dante, so Borges similarly claimed that the fraternity between the Romance languages and a solid Latin education in the prestigious Collège Calvin of Geneva — founded in 1559 by John Calvin29 — allowed him to read Inferno through a constant shifting from translation to original. This type of interpretative process enabled Borges and Eliot to perform a dual reading which offered the added advantage to constantly juxtapose two different linguistic and cultural systems, namely Dante’s fourteenth-century vernacular alongside the particular linguistic, historical and cross-cultural idiosyncrasies of the English rendering. This simultaneous reading across two languages goes hand-in-hand with Borges’s customary practice of accessing a foreign text in several translations. In his preliminary study of a Spanish edition of the Commedia, he ironically advises prospective readers not to perform a monolingual Hispanic reading of the text, but the type of bilingual exercise he had practised with Carlyle.30 In addition to his polyglot version of Dante, Borges developed a particular fondness for different critical editions of the Commedia. This led him to declare in a lecture at the University of Buenos Aires that he possessed in his personal library ‘unas once o doce ediciones comerciales comentadas de la Comedia, desde las más antiguas hasta las más modernas’ [about eleven or twelve annotated editions of the Commedia, from the oldest to the modern] and expressed his regret at not having ‘la edición de la Divina Comedia hecha por el padre de Rosetti’ [the Italian edition of the Commedia prepared by Rossetti’s father].31

  Contrarily, Joyce’s nomadic lifestyle combined with periods of severe impoverishment disallowed him from cultivating the type of bibliophily that was a characteristic feature of the ‘librarian author’, as John Updike liked to refer to Borges.32 As regards to Joyce’s editions of the Commedia, Mary Reynolds argues that he possessed a ‘little paperback copy of the Divine Comedy, an edition with full notes and commentary by Eugenio Camerini, published by E. Sonzogno (Milan) as a title in the Camerini series of inexpensive editions of the classics’.33 This, however, does not imply that Joyce had not consulted other critical editions and benefited from further exegetical analysis in his appreciation of Dante. As a matter of fact, Reynolds also informs us that Joyce ‘bought a copy of the Vita Nuova in Trieste, a book with some intrinsic value. It is an attractive boxed edition of 1911, with the illustrations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti [...]. It seems to have been bought for aesthetic reasons in addition to the obvious connection with Joyce’s interest in the pre-Raphaelites.’34 Borges, who according to Richard Burgin displayed his copy of Ulysses on a glass coffee table in his austere Buenos Aires apartment on the Avenida Belgrano,35 would have certainly treasured this type of edition in his library.

  In spite of the different religious and biographical circumstances that drew Borges and Joyce to a lifelong interest in Dante’s works, their literary relationship with the Italian poet is marked by several intersections. Both writers cultivated a highly honoured view of Dante and enjoyed expressing their admiration with superlative remarks. In a 1922 lecture Joyce stated that: ‘Italian literature begins with Dante and finishes with Dante. That’s more than a little. In Dante dwells the whole spirit of the Renaissance’ (JJI 226). Similarly, in a 1943 essay Borges made an equally definitive statement about Dante, but in a wider gesture to encompass universal literature: ‘La Divina Comedia es el libro más justificable y más firme de todas las literaturas’ (OC2 109) [‘The Divine Comedy is the most justifiable and solid book in all literature’] (SNF 238). And in a 1980 lecture he declared: ‘Si he elegido la Comedia para esta primera conferencia es porque soy un hombre de letras y creo que el ápice de las literaturas es la Comedia’ (OC3 217) [If I have chosen the Commedia for this first conference it is because I am a man of letters and I believe that the highest work of literature is the Commedia]. Both writers also agree in their predilection for certain linguistic and thematic aspects of the Commedia. Reynolds states that Oliver St John Gogarty reported Joyce’s fascination with the highly celebrated episode of Paolo and Francesca, in particular with the linguistic virtuosity and rhetorical effects of the passage, which culminates with the alliterative line ‘e caddi come corpo morto cade’36 that Joyce enjoyed reciting from memory. Borges also shared the long-standing interest for Canto V, and admired the same rhythmical consonance of the final line, which he also recited during his 1981 lecture (see OC3 211). In his poem ‘Inferno V, 129’, he offered a lyrical exercise modelled in Romantic readings of the Commedia that offered sympathetic views of the story of Paolo and Francesca. He celebrates an idealistic conception of love which is elevated into an ode that sings about ‘todos los amantes que han sido / desde aquel Adán y su Eva / en el pasto del Paraíso’ (SP 444) [‘all the lovers that ever were / since Adam lived with Eve / on the lawns of Paradise’] (SP 445).

  The adulterous love of Dante’s damned lovers also reappears in Joyce’s and Borges’s works, as they translate the amorous triangle of the two brothers, Paolo and Gianciotto Malatesta, and Francesca di Rimini into the Irish and Argentine fabrics of their works. In this vein, Joyce proposes the new conflictual formula of Bloom–Molly–Boylan in Ulysses — albeit with a pacifist resolution that shifts vengeance for equanimity — and the two sets of triads in Exiles (1918), a play in three acts that, amongst other things, draws attention to both Joyce’s and Dante’s condition as outcasts from Ireland and Florence respectively, and th
eir Roman Catholic inheritance. In his ‘Notes’ to the play, Joyce pondered:

  Why the title Exiles? A nation exacts a penance from those who dared to leave her payable on their return. The elder brother in the fable of the Prodigal Son is Robert Hand. The father took the side of the prodigal. This is probably not the way of the world — certainly not in Ireland: but Jesus’ Kingdom was not of this world nor was or is His wisdom

  (E 102).

  One of the heroines of the play is a twentieth-century avatar of Dante’s Beatrice, the twenty-seven-year-old Beatrice Justice, who has become the muse of Richard Rowan’s artistic endeavours, and is mysteriously described as ‘a slender dark young woman’ (E 3), hence bringing to mind not only Dante’s Beatrice Portinari but also Shakespeare’s dark lady. The play focuses on the complex range of love-triangles between Richard–Bertha–Beatrice, and Richard–Bertha–Robert, as it explores the character’s mixed feelings of love, jealousy and betrayal. Joyce returned to the jealousy motif in ‘Eumaeus’, as Stephen Dedalus identified the tension of the triangle integrated by Dante, Beatrice and her real husband: ‘the impetuosity of Dante and the isosceles triangle miss Portinari he fell in love with’ (U 16.886–87), partly to foreshadow the disadvantageous position of Dante (his side being smaller than the other two) and also as an anticipation of the new triad Bloom–Stephen-Molly that emerges in ‘Ithaca’.

  Just as Joyce transposes Dante’s triangular conflict in Ulysses and Exiles, Borges reallocates the amorous triangle of Canto V in the outskirts of turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires. ‘The Intruder’37 is a study of love, jealousy, and betrayal that stages the filial conflict between two brothers and a woman, Juliana de Burgos, whom they mutually love and, ultimately, decide to sacrifice in order to strengthen their brotherly love. If in Dante’s Inferno the dishonoured brother enacts his revenge upon Paolo and Francesca who are eventually condemned to Dante’s circle of the lustful, in Borges’s story of chauvinistic pride and female subjugation the death sentence falls upon Juliana de Burgos, who accepts her sexual and psychological ordeal with total submission. The story ends not with an infernal law of retribution, but with the triumph of the two brothers who reinforce their fraternal ties by means of a shared, secret murder: ‘Se abrazaron, casi llorando. Ahora los ataba otro vínculo: la mujer tristemente sacrificada y la obligación de olvidarla’ (OC2 406) [‘Almost weeping, they embraced. Now they were linked by yet another bond: the woman grievously sacrificed, and the obligation to forget her’] (CF 351). Nuñez-Faraco suggests that in the story Borges ‘makes use of the narrative technique Dante employed in the episode of Francesca da Rimini (Inferno V, 73–142), having one of his characters speak for himself as well as for the other — in this case two rival brothers in love with the same woman.’38 Borges’s story about the victimization of Juliana de Burgos by her two male aggressors follows the medieval narrative tradition of the tale of ‘patient Griselda’ — the literary symbol of the virtuous and long-suffering lady — with existing versions by Boccaccio in Day 10 of the Decameron, Petrarch’s Latin translation of Boccaccio’s story, and Chaucer’s reworking of the vernacular Italian and Latin versions in ‘The Clerk’s Tale’.39 Kirkpatrick suggests that the ongoing fascination with the tale of Griselda derives from a post-Dantean cult of the image of the lady: ‘The Griselda-figure herself offered the post-Dantean writer a number of opportunities to develop the significance of the Lady-image, and to modify according to his own lights the cultural implications of that image.’40 Interestingly, Joyce refers to the tradition of the tale of patient Griselda in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, where an absorbed Eglinton commands Stephen to expand his unorthodox views of Anne Hathaway: ‘ — We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best’s approval. We begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if at all, as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stay-at-home’ (U 9.618–20). Eglinton adds to the generic categorization of the virtuous-lady-as-Griselda, the female narratives of Penelope and Shakespeare’s Anne Hathaway, especially as the ‘virtue’ of the latter is in the process of being destabilized by Stephen’s idiosyncratic theory of Shakespeare’s art and life and, ultimately, by Ulysses as a whole with the inverted correspondence of Molly Bloom as the unfaithful antitype of Homer’s chaste Penelope. Thus the idealization of the lady figure in Dante becomes a literary motif that enables a succession of writers from Petrarch to Joyce and Borges to follow not only a tradition but also to adapt it to their own cultural systems and literary conventions. What Borges performs, in the end, in ‘The Intruder’ is the masculine translation of a female body (Griselda/ Juliana) whom he places in a narrative infused with a predominant patriarchal discourse that focuses on the victimization of a helpless heroine.

  'A panel whose edges enclose the universe' (SNF 267)

  In his celebrated story ‘The Library of Babel’ Borges postulated the existence of an infinite library composed of hexagonal galleries, a secret universe known to contain all possible books on all subjects and languages. In ‘The Book of Sand’ he toyed with a variation of the same idea and conceived a magical book whose number of pages is infinite. Likewise, in ‘The Disk’ infinity is contained in Odin’s irreversible circle, an unfathomable object that defies the laws of physics and possesses only one side. In ‘The Zahir’ he fantasized with a twenty-cent coin that convoked a tapestry of infinitely intertwining figures and had the uncanny power to be unforgettable. The reverse of ‘The Zahir’ — as Borges once declared41 — is ‘The Aleph’, which shifts from Islam to Jewish mysticism, and is another microcosm, a minute iridescent sphere that congregated all places in the universe. At the same time, Borges was extremely fond of constructing his own catalogues of infinity and enjoyed unlocking the infinite potential of certain works. In his essay ‘Avatars of the Tortoise’ (1932) he confessed to having once attempted to compile ‘[la] móvil historia’ [‘the mobile history’] of infinity (OC1 254), paradoxically poking fun at the fact that an infinite series presupposes no history, since it cancels the sequential notions of beginning and end. While his Biografía Infinita never materialized, he nonetheless postulated his own tradition of infinity and included Joyce’s Ulysses and Dante’s Commedia as exemplary works. In Chapter 3, I demonstrated how Borges created Joyce’s Ulysses as a precursor of ‘Funes the Memorious’ and fused them in a double gesture that comprised both an absolute memory and the sheer monstrosity involved in the act of total recollection. Borges elaborated a critical rhetoric of Joyce that conceived Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as infinite works, or more precisely, as dense, impenetrable labyrinths. He also enjoyed inventing a larger-than-life version of Joyce that conceived him as the enigmatic, resourceful Irish artificer eternally occupied in the creation of infinite enterprises. This mythical projection featured in his work as: ‘[el] intrincado y casi infinito irlandés que tejió el Ulises’ [‘the intricate and near-infinite Irishman who weaved Ulysses’] (SNF 393), and ‘arquitecto de laberintos, también; Proteo literario, también’ (OC4 435) [‘also an architect of labyrinths; also a literary Proteus’] (SNF 162). Borges’s making of a legendary, almost fictional version of Joyce converges with the memorial statement pronounced by an elderly Samuel Beckett on the occasion of Joyce’s centennial celebrations: ‘I welcome this occasion to bow once again, before I go, deep down, before his heroic work, heroic being’.42

  In the remainder of this chapter, I shall reveal that Borges wove a pattern of Joycean motifs in the stories ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, ‘The Zahir’, and ‘The Disk’. The extent of Borges’s complex refraction of Joyce into the tight confines of his ficciones has been discussed by Beatriz Vegh, who sees Borges’s position as ‘a deviation from Ulysses’s expanded novelistic format and dreamlike account (especially in “Circe”) of a minute totality, towards the condensed fictional format and the hallucinatory accounts of the same minute totality that Borges’s own short stories shaped from the mid-1930’s.’43 Thus the question to ask here is, how does Borges translate Ulysses and Finnegans Wake int
o his compressed short stories? Or, more precisely, how does he transmute the epic into the aphoristic in his endeavour to offer, like his epigraph from Hamlet in ‘The Aleph’, infinity bounded in a nutshell? (CF 274). To begin with, the detectivesque, labyrinthine pattern of ‘Death and the Compass’ (1944) features a mysterious character named Black Finnegan, who owns a tavern in which the ‘Third crime’ took place and is described as ‘un antiguo criminal irlandés, abrumado y casi anulado por la decencia’ (OC1 502) [‘a former Irish criminal now overwhelmed, almost crushed, by honesty’] (CF 150). Borges presents an avatar of a converted H.C.E. who has expiated his previous crimes and is ironically slotted in the dream-like murder scenario of his mathematically engineered story. A further reference to Finnegans Wake appears in another labyrinthine tale of espionage, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (1941), published in a collection of homologous title. In this story, the long misunderstood, complex work of Ts’ui Pen, ‘que fue gobernador de Yunnan y que renunció al poder temporal para escribir una novela que fuera todavía más populosa que el Hung Lu Meng y para edificar un laberinto en el que se perdieran todos los hombres’ (OC1 475) [‘who was governor of Yunan province and who renounced all temporal power in order to write a novel containing more characters than the Hun Lu Meng and construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way’] (CF 122), stands as a veiled analogue of Joyce’s Wake. Stephen Albert, the eminent English sinologist unlocks the enigma of Ts’ui Pen’s novel by revealing the main secret of his infinite masterpiece about the simultaneity of all times, past, present, and future. Albert’s speculations about the possible nature of an infinite work are clearly grounded in the cyclical pattern of Finnegans Wake: ‘Yo me había preguntado de qué manera un libro puede ser infinito. No conjeturé otro procedimiento que el de un volumen cíclico, circular. Un volumen cuya última página fuera idéntica a la primera, con posibilidad de continuar indefinidamente’ (OC1 477) [‘I had wondered how a book could be infinite. The only way I could surmise was that it be a cyclical, or circular, volume, a volume whose last page would be identical to the first, so that one might go on infinitely’] (CF 125). ‘Borges had a striking example of such circular work fresh at hand in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake’, writes John T. Irwin; ‘the book had appeared in 1939, and Borges had discussed its linguistic innovations in a brief essay published in Sur in November of that same year.’44 The curvilinear pattern of the Wake — theoretically grounded on Giambattista Vico’s recurring conception of history — revolves around the continuous regeneration of the four cycles of man’s history which in turn converge with the circular movement of the reader whose own ‘recirculation’ is potentially endless in a book that possesses neither beginning nor end. Hence its last inconclusive sentence ‘A way a lone a last a loved a long the’ (FW 628.16–17) that demands a return to the opening paragraph of the book, ‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay’ (FW 3.1–2).45 If in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ Borges models Ts’ui Pen’s magnum opus on the manifold pattern of Finnegans Wake, so in ‘The Zahir’ he incorporates Leopold Bloom’s distinctive florin as part of an eclectic catalogue of numismatic symbols.