Just as in ‘Scylla’ John Eglinton summarizes Stephen’s public disquisition on the interrelationship of Shakespeare’s art and life at Ireland’s National Library as ‘He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory’ (U 9.141), so in his Anthology of Fantastic Literature Borges offers his own epigrammatic version of Ulysses as a supernatural tale that establishes a range of dialogic relationships with the other thirty-five interconnected pieces in an eccentric anthology of fantastic literature.13 Borges is exercising here what Beatriz Sarlo referred to as his idiosyncratic practice of reading obliquely: ‘Borges pone en acción algo que seguirá haciendo toda su vida: leer de manera desviada, buscando sólo lo que le sirve, sin ningún respeto por los sentidos establecidos’14 [Borges performs a lifelong action: reading with a parted eye, only searching for what he needs, and without any respect for the established conventions].
Searching for Shakespeare
Joyce’s and Borges’s afterlives of Shakespeare are based on the central premise that their revisions of the Bard have been largely constructed by means of an impressive blending of Elizabethan, Romantic, Victorian, and contemporary interpretations.15 William M. Schutte has convincingly argued that Joyce constructed Stephen Dedalus’s public disquisition on the interrelationship of Shakespeare’s life and art out of a wide variety of creative and critical sources, including the biographical scholarly research by Sidney Lee, Frank Harris, and George Brandes, the influential nineteenth-century interpretations of Coleridge, Keats, and Goethe, and the more recent French perspective afforded by Stephané Mallarmé.16 To this extensive list of sources, Richard Ellmann adds the French writer Dujardin, and the lesserknown volume A Day with William Shakespeare, by Maurice Clare, that Joyce had in his apartment in Trieste.17 An analysis of the sources used by Borges reveals a similar pattern of scholarship, which analogously includes the principal English and German Romantic creative and critical writings on Shakespeare, the presence of a French writer (albeit Victor Hugo, not Mallarmé), contemporary critical studies such as Crítica Literaria (1924) by the French-born Argentine intellectual Paul Groussac, and Introducing Shakespeare (1939) by the American scholar G. B. Harrison. Like Joyce, Borges was also indebted to Frank Harris’s biographical reading of Shakespeare, particularly as it is presented in his 1931 unauthorized biography of the Irish critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw.18 Not only did this scholarly investigation offer Borges precise details about recent discussions of Shakespeare’s life and art but the letter from Shaw that Harris included at the beginning of the biography furnished him with the principal source and outcome of ‘Everything and Nothing’. Indeed, in ‘A Note on (towards) Bernard Shaw’ (1951)19 Borges suggested that the title ‘Everything and Nothing’ (note that the title is conveyed in English in the Spanish original) had been inspired by this letter, in which Shaw declared to his biographer: ‘Also, you propose to endow me with a soul. Have you not yet found out that people like me and Shakespeare et genus omne have no souls? We understand all the souls and all faiths and can dramatize them because they are to us wholly objective: we hold none of them.’20
Joyce and Borges conflated several centuries of Shakespearean criticism in order to produce a literary and cultural transfer that articulated a version of Shakespeare as a spectre who, according to Stephen Dedalus, embodies the condition of ghost by virtue of death, absence, and change of manners. Hence, it is possible to read in their conceptions of Shakespeare as a ghost a larger metaphor for the cultural influence the canonical spirit has exerted throughout the centuries. In this vein, Maria Dibattista asserts that: ‘A ghost was Joyce’s figure for the phenomenon of transculturalism [...] Metempsychosis, the resubstantiation of ghosts Joyce took as his literary model in Ulysses, is always a transcultural act, since the reincarnated spirit inevitably returns to different times, altered ways of living.’21 Similarly, Marjorie Garber applies the ‘ghostly’ rhetoric employed by Walter Benjamin in ‘The Task of the Translator’ to Shakespeare’s legacy: ‘For translation and mechanical reproduction are, precisely, means by which the original and its primacy are put into question. And thus are ways of making — of calling up — ghosts.’22 In their afterlives of Shakespeare, then, Borges and Joyce utilize an equally recognizable uncanny discourse in a mutual endeavour to highlight the crucial fact that the haunting force of Shakespeare has become an overpowering cultural heritage that reawakens across different languages and cultures. Their converging views of the bard as ‘ghost’ and ‘shadow’ are clearly stated at the beginning of ‘Scylla’ and ‘Everything and Nothing’:
— The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre
(U 9.164–68).
Nadie hubo en él; detrás de su rostro (que aun a través de las malas pinturas de la época no se parece a ningún otro) y de sus palabras, que eran copiosas, fantásticas y agitadas, no había más que un poco de frío, un sueño no soñado por alguien
(OC2 181).
[There was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one (L 284).]
Stephen’s supposedly groundbreaking theory, which is based on historical evidence that Shakespeare played the part of the ghost in Hamlet, postulates that Shakespeare identified with the ghost of King Hamlet, an argument that opposed the prevailing view of most nineteenth-century criticism — namely, that Shakespeare identified with Prince Hamlet. Joyce’s decision to base the fundamental premise of Stephen’s tale of Shakespeare’s reading on an uncanny plot twist is continued and developed by Borges in ‘Everything and Nothing’, where he extends the presiding gothic principle of his narrative by declaring that Shakespeare himself was nothing, as insubstantial and ethereal as a shadow, ‘un sueño no soñado por alguien’ [a dream not dreamt by anyone]. Later in the story Shakespeare’s phantasmal existence is by and large referred to as ‘el odiado sabor de la irrealidad’ (OC2 181) [the hated flavour of unreality] (Labyrinths 284). Likewise in ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’ the omnipresent ghost of Shakespeare is variously referred as ‘la memoria del muerto’ (OC3 397) [the dead man’s memory], ‘el espectro’ (OC3 398) [the spectre] and with the more general, albeit no less mysterious allusion to, ‘el otro’ (OC3 399) [the other]. In this story Daniel Thorpe offers the narrator (the Shakespearean scholar Hermann Soergel) the memory of Shakespeare: ‘Le ofrezco la memoria de Shakespeare desde los días más pueriles y antiguos hasta los del principio de abril de 1616’ (OC3 394) [‘I offer you [...] Shakespeare’s memory, from his youngest boyhood days to early April, 1616’] (CF 510). Soergel accepts the wondrous memory without hesitation. Yet, the magic gift, as in many Borgesian fictions, turns from joy into terror, and towards the end of the story the narrator re-allocates the memory of the ghost into somebody else’s memory. Like the teeming memory of Ireneo Funes, Shakespeare’s memory reveals an endless number of details and facts, but lacks the most important aspect of the playwright, his creative genius: ‘La memoria de Shakespeare no podía revelarme otra cosa que las circunstancias de Shakespeare. Es evidente que éstas no constituyen la singularidad del poeta; lo que importa es la obra que ejecutó con ese material deleznable’ (OC3 397) [‘Shakespeare’s memory was able to reveal to me only the circumstances of the man Shakespeare. Clearly, these circumstances do not constitute the uniqueness of the poet; what matters is the literature the poet produced with that frail material’] (CF 513). The memory of the ghost is neither capable of reproducing Shakespeare’s genius nor offering a coherent narrative of his life; instead, it elicits further gaps, uncertainties, and the eerie force of the supernatural. Ultimately, Borges’s metaphor reveals the cultural force of the inescapable ghost of Shakespeare which has h
aunted him and the crucial fact that the mystery of the bard as incerti auctoris remains, in spite of ongoing scholarly attempts, an unsolved case. Correspondingly, in ‘Scylla’ John Eglinton alludes to the obscure, uncharted areas surrounding Shakespeare’s life, ‘of all great men he is the most enigmatic [...] A shadow hangs over all the rest’ (U 9.359–61).
In ‘Everything and Nothing’ Borges defers any explicit reference to Shakespeare’s name until the end of the parable, when the Divinity finally utters the name ‘Shakespeare’ from a whirlwind. Yet, paradoxically, the reader is also aware throughout the parable that the unnamed protagonist is William Shakespeare. ‘Everything and Nothing’, thus, deploys the motif of the search on two levels: the playwright’s incessant search for an identity and reality that evades him, and the reader’s own search for the haunting and slippery construct known as ‘Shakespeare’. In this sense, Joyce’s and Borges’s view of Shakespeare as a ghost converge with Marjorie Garber’s observation that: ‘ “Shakespeare” is present as an absence — which is to say, as a ghost. Shakespeare as an author is the person who, were he more completely known, would not be the Shakespeare we know.’23 In essence, Shakespeare’s persona is contradictorily ‘known’ by his self-effacing canonical status, establishing his identity through a biographical void, and in what Garber refers to as the long-standing investment in the authorship controversy that aims to find ‘the “real” ghost writer’.24
In ‘Scylla’, Joyce offers a travesty that mocks these very inquiries. Upon hearing the subject of Stephen’s lecture, Buck Mulligan derisively remarks: ‘Shakespeare? He said. I seem to know the name’ (U 9.508), and later in the episode Stephen compounds his onomastic verdict of the authorship controversy with a pluralized version of Shakespeare’s ghostwriters: ‘Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet’ (U 9.866). When asked by John Eglinton if he believes in his own theory, Stephen elicits one of the most negative retorts in Ulysses (U 9.1065–67), and yet still expects to receive payment for his intellectual labours. For Stephen, the art of the Shakespearean Question is not a search for a definite answer but an aesthetic journey merely justified by its own creative — and financial — endeavour, inasmuch as, ultimately, all theories of Shakespeare are equally partial and subject to further refutation. Yet when George Russell objects that Stephen should refrain from ‘prying into the family life of a great man’ (U 9.181), Stephen, who initially addresses his interlocutors ‘superpolitely’, rapidly shifts to less courteous retorts: ‘Bosh! Stephen said rudely’ (U 9.228), and then disregards Russell entirely in order to deliver what John Eglinton calls a ‘ghoststory’, adding; ‘Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh creep’ (U 9.142–43). Later, moreover, Buck Mulligan’s burlesque intrusion provides a sort of comic relief to Stephen’s solemn and erudite performance.
Central to Stephen’s exposition of Shakespeare’s condition as a ghost is the assumption that a mature and attractive Anne Hathaway played a vital role in the seduction of the youthful and inexperienced William:
He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself
(U 9.256–60).
According to Stephen, then, the forceful Anne Hathaway was the cause of Shakespeare’s ensuing feelings of sexual insecurity, suggesting that the trauma inflicted by her near rape would therefore haunt him forever. Stephen also contends that, while Shakespeare stayed in London, an unfaithful Anne — like Gertrude in Hamlet — cuckolded him with his two brothers, Richard and Edmund. Stephen henceforth concludes that Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, turned his supposedly adulterous brothers into the arch-villains of his tragedies, amalgamating sibling rivalry and betrayal in his tragedies Richard III and King Lear. On a different level, however, another cuckolded figure that fits Stephen’s Shakespearean thesis is Leopold Bloom, who is always in the background of ‘Scylla’, searching for the files of the Kilkenny People in the National Library. Stephen’s adulterous motif thus also creates a parallel between the unfaithful Anne Hathaway and Molly Bloom. ‘Bloom similarly is a ghost by absence’, writes Terence Killeen, ‘voluntary absence from 7 Eccles Street, where he has left a clear field for Blazes Boylan [...] Bloom has in fact been usurped by Blazes Boylan, as Shakespeare allegedly was by his brothers and Bloom had a son who died young, as Shakespeare’s did.’25
Anne Hathaway’s sexual initiation of Shakespeare is no less important in ‘Everything and Nothing’, as her vigorous seduction increases Shakespeare’ feelings of unreality and insecurity: ‘después consideró que en el ejercicio de un rito elemental de la humanidad, bien podía estar lo que buscaba y se dejó iniciar por Anne Hathaway, durante una larga siesta de junio’ (OC2 181) [‘Later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon’] (L 284). Borges continues the theme of Anne Hathaway’s seduction in ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’, although in this case sexual initiation is mediated through the personal experience of Hermann Sörgel: ‘Recordaría a Anne Hathaway como recuerdo a aquella mujer, ya madura, que me enseñó el amor en un departamento de Lübeck hace ya tantos años’ (OC3 396) [‘I would remember Anne Hathaway as I remembered that mature woman who taught me the ways of love in an apartment in Lübeck so many years ago’] (CF 511). Equally, Shakespeare’s ‘long June afternoon’ finds a suitable correspondence in Bloom’s marital proposal to Molly and her climatic ‘Yes’. In his 1980 prologue to Shakespeare’s works Borges insists: ‘Anne Hathaway, con la que se casaría en 1582, parece haberle revelado el amor’26 [Anne Hathaway, whom he married in 1582, appears to have initiated him into love].
Extremely fond of imaginary authors, apocryphal sources and deliberate mis-readings, Borges adopted Stephen’s tale about Shakespeare’s tortuous relationship with Anne Hathaway and his ambivalent condition of ghost-in-life. In this manner, Borges and Joyce present Anne Hathaway as the key dramatis persona in Shakespeare’s drama and project her early influence as the determinant force in the subsequent scenes of his life. ‘Like Stephen’, writes Thomas J. Rice, ‘Borges notes that the young Shakespeare “allowed himself to be initiated by Anne Hathaway” and, subsequently, “went off to London” having in some sense lost his identity, his manhood, by this sexual initiation.’27 Rice has also suggested that Borges’s fictional retelling of Shakespeare’s life follows Stephen Dedalus in employing ‘local colour’ (U 9.158), a literary method which, according to William H. Quillian, resembles the one employed by his nineteenth-century predecessors in that: ‘[Stephen] assembles a biography of Shakespeare’s life, including details about the social life of Elizabethan England’.28 Just as Stephen sprinkles his lecture with detailed topographical references to Shakespeare’s life, such as ‘Shakespeare has left the huguenot’s house in Silver street and walks by the swanmews along the riverbank’ (U 9.159–60), so Borges describes Shakespeare’s customary visits to public houses and places of ill repute in London: ‘Así, mientras el cuerpo cumplía su destino de cuerpo, en lupanares y tabernas de Londres’ (OC2 181) [‘And so, while his flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh in the taverns and brothels of London’] (L 284).
Both men’s accounts of Shakespeare’s life are also enriched by allusions to and citations from his plays, in an attempt to sustain their arguments with histrionic speeches that act as coded allusions to his life. In ‘Everything and Nothing’ Borges draws attention to the meta-theatrical utterances of Iago and Richard III, whose self-reflexive lines confess to an audience their evil machinations and their dual identity of actors/characters in order to further his argument about Shakespeare’s existential concerns: ‘A veces, dejó en algún recodo de la obra una confesión, seguro de
que no la descifrarían; Ricardo afirma que en su sola persona, hace el papel de muchos, y Yago dice con curiosas palabras no soy lo que soy’ (OC2 181) [‘At times he would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays the part of many and Iago claims with curious words “I am not what I am” ’] (L 87). Like Borges, Joyce embeds Stephen Dedalus’s Shakespearean thesis with carefully manipulated quotations. In his attempt to impress his library audience, Stephen indiscriminately draws from an inexhaustible Shakespearean archive and certifies that Shakespeare’s life is written ‘between the lines’ of his works (U 9.1010).
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