The shift from an Aquinas-map to a Russell-map is also applicable to Borges, whose Aleph incorporates Dante’s medieval model through a transformative process informed by other conceptions of the world and the latest developments in the field of science. Nonetheless, it should be made clear that Joyce and Borges adopt a Russell-map neither as an authoritative discourse nor a definitive orientation, as their emphasis is centred on the fact that there are no absolute or fixed truths in any form of reasoning. Unlike Dante’s strict adherence to Ptolemaic and Christian conceptions of the world, Joyce and Borges privilege the arbitrariness of all systems of thoughts. Most of all, this is exemplified in ‘Ithaca’ (coincidentally in the passage that Borges praised in Salas Subirat’s 1945 translation) whereby the catechist exposes Bloom’s disbelief in an afterlife and his refusal to adhere to rigid principles with an inventive string of neologisms. This sceptical impulse, which playfully undermines the foundations of Western beliefs, is also employed by Borges in ‘El Aleph’, as he presents an anti-climatic effect in the 1943 addendum to the story, which further demystifies and discredits the vision of the Aleph in the cellar of Daneri’s house as fake:
That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown
(U 17.1137–41).
Por increíble que parezca, yo creo que hay (o que hubo) otro Aleph, yo creo que el Aleph de la calle Garay era un falso Aleph
(OC1 627).
[Incredible as it may seem, I believe there is (or was) another Aleph; I believe that the Aleph of Calle Garay was a false Aleph (CF 285).]
This complex interweaving suggests, amongst other things, that Borges and Joyce had the ending of Dante’s Purgatory very much in their minds while they wrote ‘Ithaca’ and ‘The Aleph’ respectively. Another clear example is that they adhered to Dante’s image of a constellation of scintillating stars with which he closes each Cantiche:
e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle
(Inf XXXIV, 139).
puro e disposto a salire alla stelle
(Purg XXXIII, 145).
l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle
(Par XXXIII, 145).
[And we came out to see once more the stars (Inf 383).
Eager to rise, now ready for the stars (Purg 362).
By the love that moves the sun and the other stars (Par 394).]
If the Pilgrim is rewarded with a final stellar vision as he emerges from the realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, so Bloom and Stephen emerge, ‘silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden’ (U 17.1036–38), in order to witness the interstellar spect acle of ‘the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit’ (U 17.1036–39).58 Similarly, ‘Borges’ is transported from the dark cellar of Daneri’s basement to the cosmological, aweinspiring revelation of the infinite Aleph. A stellar vision, moreover, is conveyed in the final dedicatory of the story. Like several of his poems, essays, and short-stories, ‘The Aleph’ is dedicated to a female muse, in this case to the Argentine writer and translator Estela Canto,59 with whom Borges had been deeply in love at the time of writing the story. As Emir Rodríguez Monegal explained:
Even the person to whom Borges dedicates the story, a young Argentine writer named Estela Canto, has the right Dantesque name: Estela (Stella) was the word Dante chose to end each of the three Cantiche of the Divine Comedy; Canto was the name of each division in each Cantica. But the name ‘Estela Canto’ also means, in Spanish, ‘I sing to Estela.’60
From Beatrice to Beatriz, Teodolina, and Bella Cohen
‘The Aleph’ and ‘The Zahir’ follow Dante’s tradition of unrequited love. Both stories open with the death of their beautiful, yet disdainful heroines, Beatriz Viterbo and Teodolina Villar with whom ‘Borges’ had been hopelessly in love for many years. Like Dante’s lifelong devotion to Beatrice Portinari, the initial grief caused by the demise of these two ladies of upper-class (Teodolina) and middle-class (Beatriz) Argentine society soon represents for ‘Borges’ the final consolation of his long unrequited love, opening the unconditional prospect to consecrate in mortem an affection that had not been reciprocated in vita. Just as Dante declares at the end of La Vita Nuova: ‘Io spero di dire di lei quello che mai non fue ditto d’alcuna’61 [‘I hope to compose concerning her [Beatrice Portinari] what has never been written in rhyme of any woman] (VN 99),62 so ‘Borges’ similarly states in ‘The Aleph’, ‘muerta yo podía consagrarme a su memoria, sin esperanza, pero también sin humillación’ (OC1 617) [‘now that she was dead, I could consecrate myself to her memory — without hope, but also without humiliation’] (CF 275). Edwin Williamson points out that Borges ‘believed that it was the pain of thwarted love that had driven the immense narrative machine of the Divine Comedy’.63 If in Paradiso the Pilgrim comes to the realization that the transcendental face of Beatrice irradiates more and more beauty as they ascend through the heavenly spheres towards the blinding brightness of God, in ‘The Zahir’ Borges witnesses a necrophiliac revelation of Teodolina Villar as she miraculously regains her former youth and frivolousness, and grows in beauty and splendour on her deathbed:
En los velorios, el progreso de la corrupción hace que el muerto recupere sus caras anteriores. En alguna etapa de la confusa noche del seis, Teodolina Villar fue mágicamente la que fue hace veinte años; sus rasgos recobraron la autoridad que dan la soberbia, el dinero, la juventud, la conciencia de coronar una jerarquía, la falta de imaginación, las limitaciones, la estolidez. Más o menos pensé: ninguna versión de esa cara que tanto me inquietó será tan memorable como ésta; conviene que sea la última, ya que pudo ser la primera. Rígida entre las flores la dejé, perfeccionando su desdén por la muerte
(OC1 590).
[At wakes, the progress of corruption allows the dead person’s body to recover its former faces. At some point on the confused night of June 6, Teodolina Villar magically became what she had been twenty years before; her features recovered the authority of that arrogance, money, youth, the awareness of being the crème de la crème, restrictions, a lack of imagination, and stolidity can give. My thoughts were more or less these: No version of that face that had so disturbed me shall ever be as memorable as this one; really, since it could almost be the first, it ought to be the last. I left her lying stiff among the flowers, her contempt for the world growing every moment perfect in death (CF 243).]
Similarly, in ‘The Aleph’, a deeply affected ‘Borges’ is transported through an iconographic vision — albeit photographically — into the life of his beloved Beatriz as her former beauty and arrogance is revealed in a wide gamut of interconnected images that crystallize her life in an everlasting stillness:
Beatriz Viterbo, de perfil, en colores; Beatriz, con antifaz, en los carnavales de 1921; la primera comunión de Beatriz; Beatriz, el día de su boda con Roberto Alessandri; Beatriz, poco después del divorcio, en un almuerzo del Club Hípico; Beatriz, en Quilmes, con Delia San Marco Porcel y Carlos Argentino; Beatriz, con el pekinés que le regaló Villegas Haedo; Beatriz, de frente y de tres cuartos, sonriendo, la mano en el mentón..
(OC1 617).
[Beatriz Viterbo, in profile, in color; Beatriz in a mask at the Carnival of 1921; Beatriz’ first communion; Beatriz on the day of her wedding to Roberto Alessandri; Beatriz shortly after the divorce, lunching at the Jockey Club; Beatriz in Quilmes with Delia San Marco Porcel and Carlos Argentino; Beatriz with the Pekinese that had been a gift from Villegas Haedo; Beatriz in full-front and in three-quarters view, smiling, her hand on her chin..
(CF 275).]
And yet the fundamental difference between Dante’s Beatrice and her Argentine counterparts resides in the crucial fact that, while Dante bestows upon his Beatrice a higher degree of grace, beauty, and wisdom as they ascend to the eternal light of God, contrarily Borges’s Beatriz and Teodolina only irradiate a type of beauty tied up to the earthly
sins of vanity, pride, and covetousness. Thus Beatriz only irradiates beauty in the snapshots that a fetishistic Borges worships at the beginning of the story, but is thereafter disintegrated in the shocking images exposed in the revelation of the Aleph: ‘vi en un cajón del escritorio (y la letra me hizo temblar) cartas obscenas, increíbles, precisas, que Beatriz había dirigido a Carlos Argentino’ (OC1 626) [‘[I saw] in a desk drawer (and the handwriting made me tremble) obscene, incredible, detailed letters that Beatriz had sent Carlos Argentino’] (CF 283). And also in the ‘reliquia atroz de lo que deliciosamente había sido Beatriz Viterbo’ (OC1 626) [‘horrendous remains of what had once, deliciously, been Beatriz Viterbo’] (CF 283). Nuñez-Faraco has argued that: ‘Both in “El Aleph” and in “El Zahir” the image of the dead woman stands as a reminder of the vanity of this world and of the transience of human life.’64 Borges’s satirical reversal of the angelic Beatrice Viterbo into the corrupt and narcissistic versions of Beatriz and Teodolina coalesces with Joyce’s similar degrading of Dante’s, ‘bella donna ch’al ciel t’avvalora’ (Par. X 93) [‘the lovely lady who strengthens you for Heaven’] (Par. 122) into the neither beautiful nor heavenly Bella Cohen, the ‘massive whoremistress’ (U 15.2742) who presides at the gates of Joyce’s brothel in the infernal confines of Nighttown. M. Keith Booker has convincingly suggested that ‘Bella Cohen is intended largely as a parodic revision of Dante’s ethereal Beatrice and that one of the targets of this parody is the sort of idealized view of women fostered by Dante’s project.’65 He argues that Joyce ‘manages to conflate the myth of woman-as-angel with the equally invidious myth of woman-as-threat, showing that each in fact implies the other and using each to parody and undermine the other.’66
It is clear, then, that Borges and Joyce are consciously inscribing themselves in Dante’s tradition of woman-as-angel but only as a means to subvert the beatific idealization of the lady in order to introduce the woman-as-threat or, as Booker also proposes, Joyce’s transvestite transgression of gender stereotypes with Bella/o Cohen.67 However, this female antithesis is also present in Dante in the figure of the Siren, who appears in the Pilgrim’s dream in Canto XIX of Purgatory. Dante demonstrates that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder as the Pilgrim’s gaze turns a hideous female into a beautiful and alluring Siren with whom he becomes instantly spellbound. By means of the divine intersection of a saintly lady, Virgil strips off the Siren’s seemingly beautiful façade in order to reveal her repulsive reality and a foul stench: ‘L’altra prendea, e dinanzi l’aprìa / fendendo i drappi, e mostravami ‘l ventre: / quel mi svegliò col puzzo che n’uscìa’ (Purg XIX.31–33) [‘He seized the other, ripped her garment off / exposing her as far down as the paunch! / The stench pouring from her woke me from sleep’] (Purg 203). This hideous revelation converges with Borges’s final horrifying vision in ‘The Aleph’ that exposes the macabre remains of the otherwise beautiful Beatriz Viterbo. Correspondingly, Joyce employs an analogous device in ‘Circe’ as the inanimate image of the nymph is rendered live in the phantasmagoria of ‘Circe’. Like the Pilgrim in Purgatory, Bloom is spellbound by the deceptive charms of the nymph: ‘Your classic curves, beautiful immortal, I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beauty, almost to pray’ (U 15.1366–67). The deceptiveness of the nymph is revealed once Bloom rips her veil off in order to expose her ghastly reality, ‘her plaster cast cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks’ (U 15.3469–70). In this respect, I concur with Booker’s conclusion that ‘Dante’s own use of the siren as a sort of degraded Beatrice prefigures Joyce’s depiction of Beatrice as Bella Cohen and in a sense authorizes the connection I am making here’.68
The deaths of Beatriz Viterbo and Teodolina Villar set in motion a fictional progression that leads to the narrator’s fortuitous encounter with the sacred Islamic coin and his mystical vision of the Aleph in Daneri’s basement. In other words, the unrequited love of both heroines and their sudden deaths, serve as the passageway that leads into a magical and mystical journey. In this sense, Borges’s narrative scheme goes hand-in-hand with his conviction that Beatrice’s disdainfulness towards Dante and her early death, served as the chief motives for Dante’s composition of the Commedia:
Enamorarse es crear una religión cuyo dios es falible. Que Dante profesó por Beatriz una adoración idolátrica es una verdad que no cabe contradecir; que ella una vez se burló de él y otra lo desairó son hechos que registra la Vita Nuova. Hay quien mantiene que esos hechos son imágenes de otros; ello, de ser así reforzaría aún más nuestra certidumbre de un amor desdichado y supersticioso. Dante, muerta Beatriz, perdida para siempre Beatriz, jugó con la ficción de encontrarla, para mitigar su tristeza; yo tengo para mí que edificó la triple arquitectura de su poema para intercalar ese encuentro
(OC3 371).
[To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god. That Dante professed an idolatrous adoration for Beatrice is a truth that cannot be contradicted; that she once mocked and on another occasion snubbed him are facts registered in the Vita Nuova. Some would maintain that these facts are the images of others; if so, this would further reinforce our certainty of an unhappy and superstitious love. With Beatrice dead, Beatrice lost forever, Dante, to assuage his sorrow, played with the fiction of meeting her again. It is my belief that he constructed the triple architecture of his poem in order to insert this encounter into it (SNF 300).]
If Borges projects Dante’s pattern of unrequited love to ‘The Aleph’, he also inserts in the story a complex structure of nominal, symbolic, and numerological parallels. It is well known that Dante begins La Vita Nova with the central fact that his first encounter with Beatrice took place at the tender age of nine: ‘Nove fiate già apresso lo mio nascimento era tornado lo cielo della luce quasi a uno medesimo puncto quanto alla sua propria giratione, quando alli miei occhi apparve prima la gloriosa donna della mia mente’69 [‘Nine times the heaven of the light had revolved in its own movement since my birth and had almost returned to the same point when the woman whom my mind beholds in glory first appeared before my eyes’].70 Dante then proceeds to gloss a symmetrical chronology of further encounters and dates set on the same numeral. In a similar vein, Borges adheres to Dante’s insistence on the importance of numerology and provides an overly precise countdown of ‘Borges’s’ annual visits to Daneri to commemorate the anniversary of Beatriz’s birthday. Not insignificantly, ‘Borges’ informs us that Beatriz died on 30 April 1929, consequently adhering to Dante’s symbolic structure constructed around nonary patterns. Moreover, Matei Calinescu wonders about the meticulousness with which temporal markers are interwoven into the narrative and enquires whether this plethora of dates may conceal further secret meanings: ‘Are there other numero logical implications hidden in the dates, the names, or elsewhere in the text?’71 Calinescu explains that there is no single answer to the possible symbolic signific ance of numerical and onomastic references throughout the story and offers, as a way of explanation, the attempts by several critics to decipher the occult meaning of numbers, as well as a parallel with the importance of dates in Ulysses.72 Furthermore, Borges’s discussion of Dante’s carefully erected configuration of the Commedia in terms of its topographical, theological, hermeneutical, and romantic significance is articulated in his collection Nine Dantesque Essays: 1945–1951, with a title that acknowledges, once again, the significance of the numeral nine in Vita Nova and the Commedia. Borges also paid tribute to Dante in the title of the Argentine detective series El Séptimo Círculo [The Seventh Circle] — appropriately named after the Circle of Violence in Dante’s Inferno, for which he acted as chief editor alongside his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Like most of Borges’s translations and appropriations of existing texts, the process involved in ‘The Aleph’ is re-creative, radical, and, at times, irreverent. In this particular case, the main purpose of the application is to debunk a particular genre or fictional form, yet the exercise is paradoxically peppered with
the unmistakable admiration involved in Borges’s inscription of ‘The Aleph’ in a particular Dantean tradition, even if the end result appears more as a parody than as an act of homage. ‘The Aleph’ is not only about a narrative effect of mystical illumination, but also about the grotesque and humorous figure of Carlos Argentino Daneri, the first cousin of ‘Borges’s’ beloved Beatriz and the owner of the house in Garay Street that encloses the Aleph. To the clearly identifiable onomastic correspondence between Beatrice Portinari and her Argentine counterpart, Beatriz Viterbo, Borges adds the anagrammatical formula that rearranges the first syllable of Dante and compounds it to the last three letters of Alighieri, in order to turn them into the hybrid form ‘Daneri’, the parodic Argentine — hence Carlos Argentino — equivalent of Dante. Unsurprisingly, the narrator informs us that the Viterbo family possesses Italian ancestry and that Carlos Argentino’s speech and mannerisms betray the heritage of his ancestors: ‘A dos generaciones de distancia, la ese italiana y la copiosa gesticulación italiana sobreviven en él’ (OC1 618’) [‘At two generations’ remove, the Italian s and the liberal Italian gesticulation still survive in him’] (CF 275). Drawing on Borges’s humorous treatment of Dante, Bell-Villada observes: ‘Beatrice serves as Dante’s guide in Paradiso, leading him ever upwards to a joyous and highly contemplative union with God, the cosmos, and herself; here, by contrast, “Borges’s” guiding hand is not Beatriz but a tenth-rate Vergil named Carlos Argentino, who leads the narrator downward into a pitlike cellar.’73
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