Borges and Joyce

by Patricia Novillo-Corvalan

  But if Borges and Joyce begin their speculations on Shakespeare with the central premise that the playwright is ‘airy nothing’ — an unsubstantial ghost or shadow — their expositions gradually suggest that the Bard encapsulates everything. In ‘Scylla’ this fundamental shift begins to take place with Richard Best’s quotation from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: ‘A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him myriadminded’ (U 9.768–69). According to Quillian, ‘No criticism of Hamlet, not even A. C. Bradley’s, has had the enormous influence on subsequent interpretations as Coleridge’s fragmentary remarks. Single-handed, he invented the “myriadminded” Shakespeare, conceived, as he tells us, from a direct study of his “myriad-minded” hero.’29 (Borges singles out this quotation in his review of Salas Subirat’s Spanish version of Ulysses.) Yet the decisive turning point in ‘Scylla’ is John Eglinton’s crucial statement that temporarily resolves the dialectic of the episode with a reconciling synthesis: ‘The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all’ (U 9.1018–19). Unable to contradict such fundamental objection to his theory, Stephen Dedalus energetically agrees with Eglinton’s succinct formula: ‘He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five. All in all’ (U 9.1020–21). Eglinton follows with a quotation from Dumas père — wrongly attributed to Dumas fils: ‘After God Shakespeare has created most’ (U 9.1028–29). Stephen, who in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man equated artistic creation with ‘the God of Creation’’ (P 181) concurs with Eglinton: ‘The playwright who wrote the folio of the world and wrote it badly’ (U 10.46–47).

  Similarly, in ‘Everything and Nothing’ Shakespeare the creative artist becomes father of his entire race, just as God has created humanity. By means of his metaphysical search for substance and his quest for the personal identity he suspects has been denied to him, Shakespeare is able to transcend ‘el odiado sabor de la irrealidad’ (OC2 181) [‘the hated flavor of unreality’] (L 284). This allows him to exorcize, if only temporarily, the ghostly quality that has haunted his life so far. Therefore, Borges’s Shakespeare also becomes ‘all in all’, the ‘myriadminded’ man present in all his creations: ‘Nadie fue tantos hombres como aquel hombre, que a semejanza del egipcio Proteo pudo agotar todas las apariencias del ser’ (OC2 181) [‘No one has ever been so many men as this man who like the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality’] (L 285).

  If in A Portrait Stephen equates the artist with God, in ‘Scylla’ this comparison is projected onto Shakespeare, the creator par excellence, hence allowing Stephen to blend his paternity theories with the new formula of Shakespeare-God.30 In the interval between A Portrait and Ulysses Stephen has reconsidered his aesthetics of creation, particularly since he no longer aims to refine himself out of existence, instead, his theory of Shakespeare is modelled — as Schutte points out — ‘in his own image’.31 Like Coleridge’s own theory of Hamlet — ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so’32 — Stephen associates the link between Shakespeare’s life and works with his own life and anxieties about paternity. In Ulysses, his sombre pose, strict black attire, ‘Hamlet hat’ (U 3.390), and mourning for the death of his mother, render him as a self-conscious avatar of Shakespeare’s tragic hero. As Haines tells Stephen, ‘this tower [Martello] and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore’ (U 1.566–67). Further, in ‘Proteus’, as Stephen walks along Sandymount strand he reflects upon his estrangement from the tower: ‘I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore’s tempting flood’ (U 3.280–81). In short, Stephen’s Shakespearean enquiry incorporates his own ghost story — namely, the phantasm of his mother — which in the Anthology of Fantastic Literature Borges astutely places after his definition of a ghost. Ultimately, Stephen aims to answer Shakespeare’s (and his own) existential, theological, and creative dilemmas not only through the realm of the uncanny, but also through Christian doctrines of the Nicene Creed. In this manner, he challenges the orthodox Trinitarian doctrine of Nicaea (the Godhead is constituted by Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and proposes instead the notoriously contentious Arian (neither Son nor Holy Spirit are coeternal with the Father) and Sabellian (the Son and Holy Spirit are not Gods but rather aspects of the Father) heretical Trinitarian creeds. As early as ‘Telemachus’, for example, we see Stephen ruminating about ‘the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son’ (U 1.659–60) and, as Kimble Loux has argued, Stephen’s journey as an artist is reflected in his passage from one Trinitarian model to another: ‘Joyce depicts Stephen’s growing confidence in his abilities as an artist as he moves from the Nicene trinity formed by himself and his consubstantial parents, through the Arian and Sabellian trinities of young men.’33 Stephen’s manipulation of Arianism and Sabellianism, furthermore, privileges the supremacy of the Father as the only God over the Son and the Holy Spirit, henceforth allowing Shakespeare, the Father, to become at once the Ghost (King Hamlet) and his own Son (Hamnet/Hamlet). If Shakespeare is conceived as the ‘father of all his race’, then Stephen repudiates his begetter (Simon Dedalus) — ‘Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?’ (U 9.844–45) — in order to paradoxically become, as an artist, the father of his own father.

  I AM WHO I AM (Exodus 3. 14)

  In an essay entitled ‘From Somebody to Nobody’ (1950) Borges offers a narrative that surveys the philosophical doctrine of pantheism (whereby nature as a whole is understood as an emanation of God), and its subsequent applications into a clearly defined Romantic corpus of Shakespearean scholarship (Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Hugo) that shifts the pantheistic notion of God into the figure of Shakespeare himself:

  A principios del siglo XIX, ese dictamen es recreado por Coleridge, para quien Shakespeare ya no es un hombre sino una variación del infinito Dios de Spinoza. ‘La persona Shakespeare — escribe — fue una natura naturata, un efecto, pero lo universal, que está potencialmente en lo particular, le fue revelado, no como abstraído de la observación de una pluralidad de casos sino como la sustancia capaz de infinitas modificaciones, de las que su existencia personal era sólo una.’ Hazlitt corrobora o confirma: ‘Shakespeare se parecía a todos los hombres, salvo en lo de parecerse a todos los hombres. Intimamente no era nada, pero era todo lo que son los demás, o lo que pueden ser.’ Hugo, después, lo equipara con el océano, que es un almácigo de formas posibles

  (OC2 116).

  [At the beginning of the nineteenth century that opinion is recreated by Coleridge, for whom Shakespeare is no longer a man but a literary variation of the infinite God of Spinoza. Shakespeare as an individual person, he wrote, was a natura naturata, an effect, but ‘the universal which is potentially in each particular opened out to him... not as an abstraction of observation from a variety of men, but as the substance capable of endless modifications, of which his own personal existence was but one.’ Hazlitt corroborated or confirmed this: ‘He was just like any other man, but that he was unlike other men. He was nothing in himself, but he was all that others were, or that could become.’ Later, Hugo compared him to the ocean, which is the seedbed of all possible forms (SNF 342).]

  Borges offers an elaborate religious and literary pattern that begins with a survey of the various nominal appellations attributed to God and concludes his onomastics of the Creator with the nineteenth-century reinvention of Shakespeare as a symbol of all humanity, the infinite God-like figure that is both the Creator and every one of his own creations. It is evident that this idiosyncratic study of pantheism constitutes one of the chief sources of ‘Everything and Nothing’. This is especially apparent in the last paragraph of his parable, in which Borges demystifies the biblical dialogue in the Book of Exodus between God and Moses, by having his Shakespeare ask God to reveal Shakespeare’s own identity, not God’s:

  Then Moses said to God, ‘Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, “The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you”;
and they shall say to me, “What is His name?” what shall I say to them?’ And God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM’.34

  La historia agrega que, antes o después de morir, se supo frente a Dios y le dijo: Yo, que tantos hombres he sido en vano, quiero ser uno y yo. La voz de Dios le contestó desde un torbellino: Yo tampoco soy; yo soñé el mundo como tú soñaste tu obra, mi Shakespeare, y entre las formas de mi sueño estás tú, que como yo eres muchos y nadie

  (OC2 182).

  [History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: ‘I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.’ The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: ‘Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one’ (L 285).]

  Unlike Moses, Borges’s Shakespeare is no longer interested in finding out the identity of his creator insofar as the revelation of his own identity discloses that God is also made of ‘such stuff as dreams are made on, / and our little life is rounded with a sleep’ (Tempest, IV. 1. 156–58). Borges extends Shakespeare’s search for his own identity to God, who, like the playwright, not only dreams his world but is also someone else’s dream, thus creating further levels of illusion. In this sense, I concur with Ion T. Agheana’s assertion that ‘the encounter with God does not resolve Shakespeare’s dilemma’.35 As with the metaphysical concern raised in ‘Partial Magic in the Quixote’, in which Borges asks: ‘¿Por qué nos inquieta que el mapa esté incluído en el mapa y las mil y una noches en el libro Las Mil y Una Noches?’ (OC2 47) [‘Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet?’], the proposed answer — ‘Tales inversiones, sugieren que si los caracteres de una ficción pueden ser lectores o espectadores, nosotros, sus lectores o espectadores, podemos ser ficticios’ (OC2 47) [‘These inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious’] (L 231) — only blurs the boundary between reality and illusion and elicits, in turn, further interrogations. Moreover, in ‘A History of the Echoes of a Name’ (1952) Borges postulates that God’s reply to Moses (‘I AM WHO I AM’) may also be read through the prism of Shakespeare’s Paroles, the miles gloriosus of All’s Well that Ends Well, who says to his audience: ‘Captain I’ll be no more, / But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft / As captain shall. / Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live’ (All’s Well, iv. 4. 308.311). According to Borges, Paroles’s speech transforms Paroles from one man into all men.36 If this is so, Paroles is at once ‘the thing he is’ and the thing that ‘everyone is’, just as God equally is ‘what he is’.37 In a cyclical way, Borges returns to Paroles’s key speech in his aptly titled poem ‘The Thing I Am’ included in The History of the Night (1977) whereby the poetic voice searches for his elusive identity in a personal and cultural archive that uncovers his paternal and maternal genealogies and the boundless memory of a whole Western tradition which resonates in the works of Plato, Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Angelus Silesius (OC3 196–97). In ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’, moreover, the narrator, Herman Soergel, uses Parole’s speech in a desperate attempt to regain his own individuality. The ability to be many selves results in the impossibility of being one-self, thus circularly returning to Borges’s ‘Everything and Nothing’ and to Shaw’s declaration in Harris’s biography.38 Finally, in ‘A New Refutation of Time’ (1952) Borges argued that the ‘self-less’ readers of Shakespeare become Shakespeare himself: ‘¿Los fervorosos que se entregan a una línea de Shakespeare no son, literalmente, Shakespeare?’ (OC2 141) [‘Are the enthusiasts who devote themselves to a line of Shakespeare not literally Shakespeare?’] (SNF 323).

  So far, therefore, it is possible to identify in Joyce’s and Borges’s reinvention of Shakespeare the use of a mixture of discourses borrowed from literary, historical, and theological sources, particularly in their intermingling of fact (the probable), fiction (the improbable/the supernatural), and religion (the superhuman) in their reconstructions of Shakespeare’s life. Above all, their interweaving of sources illustrates the extent to which the ghost of Shakespeare loomed large throughout all stages of their works and the complex ways in which they negotiated his ubiquitous presence. This is also epitomized in Stephen Dedalus’s presentation of a ‘theolologicophilolological’ (U 9.762) concoction of Shakespeare. We may conclude, then, that Borges’s fondness for rhetorical questions and mystical and metaphysical dilemmas — as highlighted in his appropriation of the Biblical episode — explains his decision to include Stephen’s ‘Definition of a Ghost’ in his Anthology of Fantastic Literature. Indeed, as Borges may have been well aware, Stephen’s initial interrogation — ‘What is a ghost?’ (U 9.147) — is triggered by additional supernatural lines of enquiry based on Shakespeare’s own ghost story in Hamlet: ‘Who is the ghost from limbo patrum, returning to the world who has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?’ (U 9.150–51). Just as in ‘Everything and Nothing’ Borges’s Shakespeare asks God who he is, so in ‘Scylla’ Stephen Dedalus raises a similar biographical and existential concern, as he metaphorically seeks to explain the elusive identity of Shakespeare through the unreality of a ghost, a shadow of a shadow, like Borges’s dream of a dream. As Shari Benstock has suggested, Stephen’s question also echoes ‘the opening of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“Who’s there?” asks Bernardo, and the five-act drama which follows is an attempt to answer the question).’ Benstock argues that ‘Stephen’s analysis provides answers to both these questions, but the answers are woven into the fictional fabric which is “Scylla and Charybdis”: the ghoststories we know as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Joyce’s Ulysses unfold anew as Stephen tells the tale.’39 For Borges, then, the questions raised in Hamlet, the encounter between Moses and God, the various Romantic speculations about Shakespeare’s life, Shaw’s letter to Frank Harris, and Stephen’s definition of a ghost are intertwined precisely because there is no definitive answer to the mystery of the Bard, but rather a series of shifting contexts of reading and interpretation, a version of Shakespeare constantly in motion, travelling across linguistic, geographical, and historical boundaries.

  Transcultural Shakespeare

  In ‘La Trama’ [‘The Pattern’], a concise narrative vignette included in The Maker (1960), Borges equates the death of the historical Julius Caesar (particularly as it is recorded in Shakespeare’s and Quevedo’s literary versions of his celebrated final words) with a knife-fight amongst a group of gauchos. In Shakespeare and Quevedo the betrayed Caesar realises that he is about to be murdered by his beloved Brutus and pathetically exclaims: ‘Et tu, Brute?’ (Julius Caesar, III. 1. 79); ‘¿Y tú entre éstos? ¿Y tú, hijo?’40 [And you among these? And you, son?].

  Borges proposes instead a parallel scenario in which a godson kills his godfather who exclaims, albeit in Argentine slang: ‘[¡]Pero, che!’ [hey, you!] (OC2 171). In order to emphasize the importance of the vernacular, Borges then adds that these words should be heard, rather than simply read on the printed page. In this way, the locution ‘che’ (an idiomatic expression characteristic of the variant of Spanish spoken in Argentina and Uruguay) offered Borges the appropriate idiom with which to translate the historical tragedy of Julius Caesar into the tradition of the gaucho, albeit by ironically — and anachronistically — linking the historical scene in the Roman capitol with an isolated terrain in the south of the province of Buenos Aires. Interestingly, at the tender age of nine James Joyce had also creatively engaged with Caesar’s last words, when in response to Tim Healy’s role in the public humiliation and downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell, he ‘wrote a poem denouncing Healy under the title “Et tu, Healy” ’ (JJII 33).

  There is yet another aspect to Borges’s and Joyce’s afterlives of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, after Caesar has been assassinated, Cassius, who is one of the assassins and also the main conspirator, dramatically drenches his h
ands with Caesar’s blood and then exclaims: ‘How many ages hence / shall this our lofty scene be acted over, / in states unborn and accents yet unknown’ ( Julius Caesar, III. 1. 112–14). Cassius’s complex speech may be read in several ways. On the one hand, it disrupts the illusion of the theatrical performance as it draws attention to the play as play, and to his condition as an actor impersonating the role of Cassius in one of the many productions of Julius Caesar. On the other hand, Cassius’s statement may also be read as an anticipation, and validation, of Borges’s subsequent staging of the ‘lofty scene’ of Julius Caesar in a remote location of Argentina (the state unborn), and a regional variation of River Plate Spanish (the accent yet unknown). Borges, an attentive reader of Shakespeare had paid careful attention to Cassius’s speech. At the end of ‘The Pattern’ he even offers a translation of Cassius’s lines: ‘Lo matan y no sabe que muere para que se repita una escena’ (OC2 171) [They kill him and he does not realise he dies so that a scene may be repeated].

  What Borges deploys as a modern Argentine rewriting of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Joyce transposes into the new historical and geographical context of twentieth-century Dublin. Ulysses constitutes not only a radical transposition of Homer’s Odyssey into the modern Irish scenery of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom, but also Shakespeare’s Hamlet has in turn been superimposed upon the already adapted Homeric frame. If Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and — as we have seen in the previous chapter — Dante’s Commedia, constitute the principal intertextual sources in Ulysses, the history of Julius Caesar — both in its Roman and Elizabethan variations — appears as a significant narrative that is woven into several of the novel’s episodes. In ‘Nestor’, for example, Joyce’s version of the historical account focuses (like Borges’s) on the instant of the stabbing, but adds a further philosophical argument from Aristotle’s Metaphysics: ‘Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted’ (U 2.48–51). In other words, Stephen’s concern is primarily with the potential ramifications or ‘infinite possibilities’ of the other events that could also have been, and which have been ‘ousted’ by the actual historical event that took place: in this case Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar.41 The Roman tragedy reappears in ‘Eumaeus’. When Bloom urges Stephen to eat more solid food, the latter reacts with the dramatic imperative: ‘But O, oblige me by taking away that knife. I can’t look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history’ (U 16.815–16) — in response to which an incredulous Bloom glances at ‘a blunt hornhandled ordinary knife with nothing particularly Roman or antique about it to the lay eye [...]’ (U 16.818–19) and gently moves it out of Stephen’s sight. Amongst the many irreconcilable intellectual differences between Stephen and Bloom is the crucial fact that Stephen conceives the knife that killed Caesar as a generic instrument able to embody, at once, its previous murderous deeds, while Bloom is able to see only a specific, ordinary object devoid of any abstract or historical signification. In this sense, Borges’s ‘The Pattern’ offers a genealogy of the knife that converges with Stephen’s generic view of the object, and hence the same filial tragedy is symmetrically translated into the customs of the Argentine gaucho, rendering the homicidal Knife as the enduring perpetrator of the deed. This theme is fully developed in Borges’s later story ‘The Encounter’ (1970) about the epic reunion of two knives, in which the duel between the gauchos Uriarte and Duncan (a name that clearly alludes to Macbeth) is justified not by their brawly, murderous impulses, but by the ever recurring violence inherent in the daggers: