Borges and Joyce
Page 27
Throughout the story, ‘Borges’ pokes fun at Daneri’s pompous composition of an epic poem entitled The Earth in which: ‘Éste se proponía versificar toda la redondez del planeta [en] largos e informes alejandrinos’ (OC1 620) [‘He proposed to versify the entire planet [...] in long, formless alexandrines’] (CF 277). In this respect, Daneri’s encyclopaedic project may be read — as Emir Rodríguez Monegal has persuasively argued — ‘[as] a parodic reduction of the Divine Comedy’.74 This type of exercise recalls Borges’s parodic compression of Joyce’s Ulysses in ‘Funes the Memorious’ and, as we shall see in the next chapter, his miniature rewriting of Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy of Julius Caesar in the narrative vignette ‘La Trama’ [‘The Pattern’]. Further, the totalizing encyclopaedic impulses of Daneri function as a satirical mirror of Dante’s epic construction of the Commedia, in which he depicts the allegorical journey of Everyman towards the redeeming brightness of God. Contrariwise, Daneri’s attempts to seek neither Divine inspiration nor redemption, but to arouse the approval of his literary coterie and, ultimately, to win the Second National Prize for Literature that the first-person narrator believes should have been awarded to him. Borges, in other words, sets up a parodic interplay between Dante and Daneri in which their all-encompassing projects are constantly juxtaposed in an effort to expose the limitations of Daneri’s The Earth at the expense of Dante’s Commedia.75 In this vein, Borges invites his readers to observe a dialectic in his treatment of Dante that on the one hand proposes an (ir)reverent exploitation of the Commedia and, on the other, presents a reverential, eulogistic reading in his imaginative revision of the book as an infinite engraving that contains the whole of universal history. Ultimately, as Thiem has persuasively argued, it is possible to read Borges’s ‘critique of The Earth as a critique of the encyclopaedic epic of total vision [which] serves to throw light on Borges’s own predilection for brevity, on his peculiar use of Dante, and on the efficacy of his own poem of total vision, “The Aleph”.’76 This predilection for brevity is the fundamental force behind Borges’s affiliation and disaffiliation with Dante and Joyce, inasmuch as they become the structural models of his stories about total inclusion, and yet their epic proportions are counterpoised to the reductive principle of his fictions.77
Leopold Bloom's 'Irreversible Florin'
In ‘The Zahir’ the first-person narrator seeks refuge in a Buenos Aires bar after the wake of Teodolina Villar. He orders a brandy and is fortuitously given as small change a twenty-centavo coin, which he later discovers stands as the sacred Islamic symbol. The obsessed and disturbed narrator realises that the powers of the ancient Zahir have congregated in the ordinary Argentine coin, although he is aware that in previous cases the spirit of the Zahir is known to have lived in a tiger, a blind man, an astrolabe, a compass, and a slab of marble. At the moment of receiving the Zahir, ‘Borges’ compares it with eleven remarkable coins in literature and history, ranging from the Biblical coins exchanged by Judas in the name of Christ, the notes that a wizard turns into paper in The Arabian Nights, to ‘el florín irreversible de Leopold Bloom’ (OC1 591) [‘Leopold Bloom’s irreversible florin’] (L 192). Borges’s association of ‘The Zahir’ with Bloom’s florin — and the other pieces of silver, obols, drachmas, and pennies listed in the story — strives to create a generic monetary symbol that stands for the whole of universal history: ‘Pensé que no hay moneda que no sea símbolo de las monedas que sin fin resplandecen en la historia y la fábula’ (OC1 590–91) [‘The thought struck me that there is no coin that is not the symbol of all the coins that shine endlessly down throughout history and fable’] (CF 244). He also chooses Bloom’s florin et al. to meditate about the endless possibilities embodied in the possession of a monetary emblem, a reflection not at all dissimilar to Bloom’s frequent thoughts about money — albeit charged with Borges’s characteristic erudite remarks:
El dinero es abstracto, repetí, el dinero es tiempo futuro. Puede ser una tarde en las afueras, puede ser una música de Brahms, puede ser mapas, puede ser ajedrez, puede ser café, puede ser las palabras de Epitecto, que enseñan el desprecio del oro; es un Proteo más versátil que el de la isla de Pharos. Es tiempo imprevisible, tiempo de Bergson, no duro tiempo del Islam o del Pórtico
(OC1 591).
[Money is abstract, I repeated; money is the future tense. It can be an evening in the suburbs, or music by Brahms; it can be maps, or chess, or coffee; it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold; it is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the isle of Pharos. It is unforeseeable [imprevisible] time, Bergsonian time, not the rigid time of Islam or the Porch (L 192).]
A detailed search for financial transactions in Ulysses reveals that during the long day of Leopold Bloom there are countless instances in which cash has been handled. Bloom’s capital day is so imperative that it concludes in the ‘Ithaca’ episode with a detailed one-page inventory — albeit incomplete — of his budget, setting off with a pork kidney and closing with a loan to Stephen Dedalus. The book also records other significant material transactions, such as Mulligan’s miraculous discovery of a florin: ‘Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round his fingers and cried — A miracle’ (U 1.453) or Mr Deasy’s Shakespearean imperative: ‘Put but money in thy purse’ (U 2.239) to an incredulous Stephen who is in turn reminded of the treachery of Iago. Finally, if we take into account Borges’s notoriety for including apocryphal references and imaginary authors in his fictional and critical works, and his famous confession that he had not read Ulysses in its entirety, it comes as a surprise to discover that his reference to Bloom’s florin is unequivocally corroborated in the mathematical catechism of ‘Ithaca’:
What rendered problematic for Bloom the realization of these mutually selfexcluding propositions?
The irreparability of the past: once at a performance of Albert Hengler’s circus in the Rotunda, Rutland square, Dublin, an intuitive particoloured clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the ring to a place in the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was seated and had publicly declared to an exhilarated audience that he (Bloom) was his (the clown’s) papa. The imprevidibility of the future: once in the summer of 1898 he (Bloom) had marked a florin (2/-) with three notches on the milled edge and tendered it in payment of an account due to an received by J. and T. Davy, family grocers, 1 Charlemont Mall, Grand Canal, for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible, circuitous or direct, return.
Was the clown Bloom’s son?
No.
Had Bloom’s coin returned?
Never.
(U 17.973–88)
This textual corroboration raises several questions in relation to Borges’s inclusion of Bloom in his catalogue of numismatic symbols. What happens when Ulysses enters the superstitious, enigmatic and magical world of ‘The Zahir’? Is Ulysses enriched by the distinctive attributes of Borges’s symbol? Does the Funes–Ulysses parallel as explored in Chapter 3, throw any light on the new Zahir–Bloom correspondence? First of all, it is undeniable that Borges used Bloom’s florin as one of the literary models for the Zahir. Just as Joyce’s disc is ‘marked with three notches on the milled edge’, Borges’s tells the reader at the beginning of the story that the Zahir ‘es una moneda común, de veinte centavos; marcas de navaja o de cortaplumas rayan las letras NT y el número dos’ (OC1 589) [‘is an ordinary coin worth twenty centavos. The letters NT and the number 2 are scratched as if with a razor-blade or penknife’] (L 189). Later in the story, after much speculation, ‘Borges’ decides to get rid of the Zahir and, similarly to Leopold Bloom, plunges the idiosyncratic coin into the waters of civic finance. If Bloom is reported to have tendered his florin in payment to the family grocers whose premises are located in south Dublin, ‘Borges’ operates an analogous transaction and uses his twenty-cent coin to pay for a drink at a local bar situated in the south of Buenos Aires. If Borges offers a metaphysical meditation about the abstract possibilities of financial ownership, Joyce offers a s
imilar speculation with the introduction of the coinage ‘imprevidibility’,78 which aims to draw attention to the unpredictability of material gain and loss. It also stands in converse relation to the ‘irreparability of the past’, as it brings attention to Bloom’s paternal anxieties and to his grief over the loss of his son Rudy, who, like the florin irretrievably submerged in the waters of civic finance, is forever lost in the waters of death, that ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’ (Hamlet III. 1. 81–82).
What Borges distinctively renders into Spanish as ‘el florín irreversible de Leopold Bloom’ opens a further intertextual connection with his story ‘The Disc’. The first-person narrator of this parable is a woodcutter who has long been a recluse in his hut on the edge of the woods. This mysteriously isolated character is one day visited by an even more mysterious elderly looking stranger who claims to be the king of the Secgens and to possess the disk of Odin:79
— Soy rey de los Secgens. Muchas veces los llevé a la Victoria en la dura batalla, pero en la hora del destino perdí mi reino. Mi nombre es Isern y soy de la estirpe de Odín.
— Yo no venero a Odín — le contesté. — Yo venero a Cristo.
Como si no me oyera continuó:
— Ando por los caminos del destierro pero aún soy el rey porque tengo el disco. ¿Quiéres verlo? [...] — Es el disco de Odín. Tiene un solo lado. En la tierra no hay otra cosa que tenga un solo lado. Mientras esté en mi mano seré el rey
(OC3 66–67).
[‘I am the king of the Secgens. Many times did I lead them to victory in hard combat, but at the hour that fate decreed, I lost my kingdom. My name is Isern and I am of the line of Odin.’
‘I do not worship Odin,’ I answered. ‘I worship Christ.’
He went on as though he’d not heard me.
‘I wander the paths of exile, but still I am a king, for I have the disk. Do you want to see it?’ [...]
‘It is the disk of Odin,’ the old man said in a patient voice, as though he were speaking to a child. ‘It has but one side. There is no other thing on earth that has but one side. So long as I hold it in my hand I shall be king’ (CF 478).]
The covetous woodcutter decides to murder the king in order to gain possession of the magical disk. But, in a typical Borgesian twist, the death of Isern also implied the irretrievable loss of the disk. In this sense, if the mathematical catechist of ‘Ithaca’ unambiguously states that Bloom’s florin ‘never returned’, Borges articulates a more subtle proposition that validates a dual meaning. He converts Bloom’s disc into an ‘irreversible florin’, which implies both an un-returning florin, as well as a florin that, like Odin’s disk, possesses only one face. In this vein, Bloom’s florin acquires greater meaning in relation to the posterior work of Jorge Luis Borges, allowing the construction of a network of shared idiosyncrasies between the two writers. If according to Borges ‘cada escritor crea a sus precursores’ (OC2 90) [‘each writer creates his precursors’] (SNF 365), then we are able to read Joyce in a manner that would not have been possible without Borges’s ‘The Zahir’. This intersection creates a literary fraternity between Bloom’s florin and its Borgesian avatars, the Zahir and the Disc, as Borges confers onto Joyce’s coin the magical, infinite qualities characteristic of his own creations. It is also significant to point out, however, that in his 1925 review of Ulysses Borges had also performed a numismatic reading of Joyce: ‘En su comercio, junto al erario prodigioso de voces que suman el idioma inglés y le conceden cesaridad en el mundo, corren doblones castellanos y siclos de Judá y denarios latinos y monedas antiguas, donde crece el trébol de Irlanda’ (Inq. 27) [‘Aside from the prodigious funds of voices that constitute the English language, his commerce spreads wherever the Irish clover grows, from Castilian doubloons and Judas’ shekels to Roman denarii and other ancient coinage’] (SNF 14). What is, then, the ultimate effect of Borges’s lacing of Ulysses into the fabrics of ‘The Zahir’? I propose two interrelated answers.
First, ‘The Zahir’ continues Borges’s complex pattern of a magical, yet monstrous object whose main attribute is the supernatural capacity to envelop a whole universe, and whose acquisition produces a side effect of insomnia. In this vein, the Zahir is — like Funes’s memory — a magical entity that augments the powers of recollection and cancels the possessor’s capacity to forget it: ‘El tiempo, que atenúa los recuerdos, agrava el del Zahir’ (OC1 594) [‘Time, which generally attenuates memories, only aggravates that of the Zahir’] (CF 248). Just as in ‘A Fragment on Joyce’ Borges labels Funes and Ulysses as monstrous entities in their attempts to achieve a totalization of experience (SNF 220–21) so he refers to the Zahir with the same qualifying adjective when he alludes to its ‘monstruosa imagen’ (OC1 594) [‘monstrous image’] (CF 247). Hence it becomes clear that Borges associates Joyce’s writing with an infinite, disturbing object/memory that produces in the narrator a dual sentiment of attraction and repulsion. As I have stated in Chapter 3, Borges confessed that during the 1930s he suffered from insomnia and as a result sought refuge in the fact that Joyce had also suffered from the same ailment and had forged an infinite book, Ulysses, ‘in which thousands of things happened’.80 The decisive moral to be deduced from Borges’s insomniac account is, therefore, that while Joyce rescued Borges from his nights of insomnia, so Borges fills a hermeneutical gap in Joyce’s work by creating the ideal reader, Ireneo Funes, to undertake the total, consecutive reading of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Just as Funes stands as a metaphor of insomnia, so the magical forces of the Zahir produce an alarming state of wakefulness in the narrator, who consults a psychiatrist and ingests sleeping tablets in order to alleviate his lack of sleep. Ultimately, ‘Borges’, like Funes, longs to swap his state of mnemonic augmentation for the anaesthetizing state of forgetfulness: ‘Para perderse en Dios, los sufíes repiten su propio nombre o los noventa y nueve nombres divinos hasta que éstos ya nada quieren decir’ (OC1 595) [‘In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of God until the names mean nothing more’] (CF 249). If oblivion may be bestowed through the spoken rehearsal of theosophical onomastics, equally ‘Borges’ hopes that: ‘Quizá yo acabe por gastar el Zahir a fuerza de pensarlo y repensarlo; quizá detrás de la moneda esté Dios’ (OC1 595) [‘Perhaps by thinking about the Zahir unceasingly, I can manage to wear it away, perhaps behind the coin is God’] (CF 249). Whether ‘Borges’ encounters God behind the coin is uncertain, but he certainly encounters Leopold Bloom’s florin, which underlies his complex and intricate relationship with Ulysses. In addition, as Borges stated in his conversation with Richard Burgin, by invoking the name of James Joyce over and over again during his insomniac nights, he conceived the plot of ‘Funes the Memorious’, an otherwise miniature version of Ulysses. In the most paradoxical of manners, the infinity of Ulysses allowed him to regain his sleep: ‘Each time I suffer from insomnia, I can free myself from memory because this book contains it all, and I can sleep’.81
Finally, through the phenomenon of metempsychosis or trans culturation, Borges sets Bloom’s nomadic coin on a transatlantic voyage from Dublin to Buenos Aires as the Zahir, the new Islamic/Argentine coin. This numismatic diaspora mimics the similar journey undertaken by a 1922 Shakespeare & Company edition of Ulysses from Paris to Buenos Aires, which culminated in Borges’s conflation of Molly Bloom’s Hibernian and Gibraltarian identities with a newly invented River Plate fluency. These various forms of migration symbolically fulfil the frustrated elopement of Eveline to Buenos Aires, hence fostering an Argentine version of Joyce, as well as mapping the waters for further encounters between Borges and Joyce or, eventually, for the dissemination of Joyce’s work in Latin America.
Borges and Joyce, Authors of the Commedia
If in ‘Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote’ Borges proposes a ficción of a Frenchman who sets himself the arduous task of rewriting Cervantes’s Quixote, similarly Reed Way Dasenbrock postulates that a whole generation of Anglophone
modernist writers aspired to rewrite Dante’s Commedia, ‘One of the ways we could describe an aspiration of virtually all the major modernist writers in English is that they were all trying to write the Commedia of the twentieth century.’82 By the same token, Allen Thiher asserts that: ‘In Dante the encyclopedia of the real is given in one self-enclosed book, which, with appropriate adjustment, is a succinct description of the modernist project from Proust and Joyce through Musil and Mann, not to mention the parodist versions thereof later found in Borges and Queneau.’83 But unlike Borges’s fictional Menard who successfully achieved a verbatim, yet paradoxically different, complex exercise in the art of reading across time, culture, and language, not all these modernist transpositions proved equally successful. In particular, Dasenbrock is putting forward a specific case against Pound’s much criticized Cantos, describing his modernist attempt to reproduce Dante’s epic design as ‘a disastrous failure’.84 On the other hand, Pound’s Dantist legacy needs to be examined not only from the vantage point of his thwarted efforts to write a Commedia of the twentieth century but, principally, from his influential theories of translation that, very much like Borges’s Menard, focused on the practice of reading and interpretation. Not insignificantly, in After Babel George Steiner includes the name of Ezra Pound amongst the most influential translation theorists of the twentieth century and views his writings on translation as ‘the most telling reports on the activity of the translator, and on relations between languages’.85 Similarly, in Translation Studies, Susan Bassnett praises Pound’s pivotal contribution to the field: ‘The work of Ezra Pound is of immense importance in the history of translation, and Pound’s skill as a translator was matched by his perceptiveness as a critic and theorist.’86