Maneco Uriarte no mató a Duncan; las armas, no los hombres, pelearon. Habían dormido, lado a lado, en una vitrina, hasta que las manos las despertaron. Acaso se agitaron al despertar; por eso tembló el puño de Uriarte, por eso tembló el puño de Duncan. Las dos sabían pelear — no sus instrumentos, los hombres — y pelearon bien esa noche. Se habían buscado largamente, por los largos caminos de la provincia, y por fin se encontraron, cuando sus gauchos ya eran polvo. En su hierro dormía y acechaba un rencor humano
(OC2 421).
[Maneco Uriarte did not kill Duncan; it was the weapons, not the men, that fought. They had lain sleeping, side by side, in a cabinet, until hands awoke them. Perhaps they stirred when they awoke; perhaps that was why Uriarte’s hand shook, and Duncan’s as well. The two knew how to fight — the knives, I mean, not the men, who were merely their instruments — and they fought well that night [...] In the blades of those knives there slept, and lurked, a human grudge (CF 369).]42
Julius Caesar also appears in the episode ‘Hades’, into which Joyce inserts several lines from the play. Significantly, he appropriates lines that refer to death, interlacing them within a schema of Homeric correspondences that links the burial of Paddy Dignam in Glasnevin, north Dublin, to Odysseus’s descent into hell. Bloom’s interior monologue translates the words that Mark Anthony delivers to a shocked Roman audience: ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him’ (Julius Caesar, II. 3. 71) into his own discourse, as they are presented without quotation marks (U 6. 803). (This is an example of what Claudette Sartiliot refers to as ‘the eclipse of quotation’.)43 Moreover, much of the Shakespearean wisdom that has been injected into Bloom’s discourse, as Schutte points out, ‘consists largely of literary clichés, some of which he may well use without even knowing that he is quoting’.44 Bloom’s allusion to Julius Caesar is furthered in the next line by a reference that ironically links the soothsayer’s death-warning to Caesar, ‘Beware the ides of March’ (Julius Caesar, I. 2. 25), with Paddy Dignam’s less heroic and unpredicted death from apoplexy on 13 June 1904: ‘His ides of March or June’ (U 6.803). Bloom’s equation of Paddy Dignam with Julius Caesar is not the only time the ordinary Dubliner is associated with a Shakespearean hero of noble status. In ‘Circe’ a funereal Dignam, like the Ghost in Hamlet, haunts a tormented Bloom and echoes the Shakespearean lines already quoted by Stephen in ‘Scylla’: ‘Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam’s spirit. List, list, O list!’ (U 15.1219).
Joyce’s and Borges’s Shakespearean negotiations exhibit a conflicting dynamic that admiringly incorporates and adjusts the Shakespearean discourse to suit the requirements of their own narrative purposes of expansion (Joyce) and compression (Borges), and at the same time demystifies its canonical status by fusing it with other non-canonical or vernacular voices that are given equal treatment in their texts. Their mutual endeavour to chart a multidirectional map whereby Shakespeare voyages across language, culture, and history suggests that their revisions of the Bard strive to provoke as much as to reinvigorate a long-standing tradition. Their idiosyncratic guides infuse Shakespeare with a contemporary inflection, inasmuch as the forging of new afterlives of Shakespeare involves not the strict parochial limitation to nationalist tendencies, but, rather, unlimited access to the Western archive from a marginal point of view. In this sense, when Eglinton patriotically postulates the creative instruction that: ‘Our young Irish bards [...] have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet [...]’ (U 9.43-44), Stephen is aware of the impossibility of returning to a Celtic past as he seeks to create a form of art that transcends the nets of nationality, language, and religion.
It is thus especially significant that in his seminal lecture ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’ (1951) Borges declares Ireland a sister nation in view of its peripheral position in relation to mainstream Europe and famously postulates that the Argentine nation should follow the example of Irish writers who had subversively turned Western discourses to their own advantage: ‘Creo que los argentinos, los sudamericanos en general, estamos en una situación análoga; podemos manejar todos los temas europeos, manejarlos sin supersticiones, con una irreverencia que puede tener, y ya tiene, consecuencias afortunadas’ (OC1 273) [‘I believe that Argentines, and South Americans in general, are in an analogous situation; we can take on all the European subjects, take them on without superstition and with an irreverence that can have, and already has had, fortunate consequences’] (SNF 426). He also offers, as a further argument against parochialism, Shakespeare’s wide-ranging use of a vast number of traditions: ‘Creo que Shakespeare se habría asombrado si hubieran pretendido limitarlo a temas ingleses, y si le hubiesen dicho que, como inglés, no tenía derecho a escribir Hamlet, de tema escandinavo, o Macbeth, de tema escocés’ (OC1 270) [‘I think Shakespeare would have been surprised if anyone had tried to limit him to English subjects, and if anyone had told him that, as an Englishman, he had no right to write Hamlet, with its Scandinavian subject matter, or Macbeth, on a Scottish theme’] (SNF 423). We should note, in this respect, that in 1944 Borges offered yet another afterlife of Julius Caesar in his intricate story ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’. Here Borges transposes Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar not to a deserted terrain of the Argentine pampas, but to an Irish scenario in the first half of the nineteenth century: ‘La acción transcurre en un país oprimido y tenaz: Polonia, Irlanda, la república de Venecia, algún estado sudamericano o balcánico... [...] Digamos (para comodidad narrativa) Irlanda; digamos 1824’ (OC1 496) [‘The action takes place in an oppressed and tenacious country: Poland, Ireland, the Venetian Republic, some South American or Balkan state ... [...] Let us say (for narrative convenience) Ireland; let us say in 1824’] (L 102). Because Borges is aware that the notion of place is not a casual, arbitrary construct, but is deeply embedded in a complex set of historical circumstances, he scans various possibilities for a suitable ‘oppressed’ country that would fit the rebellious backdrop of the narrative and finally chooses (‘for narrative convenience’) Ireland. In this respect, Sergio Waisman claims that:
Here South America is figuratively paralleled with a handful of peripheral European countries. The fact that it is in the periphery where this story could have, and has, occurred is poignant: it is here that history and literature are displaced, mistranslated, rewritten with irreverence; where oppression meets tenacity. It is here that mistranslation functions as a site of innovation, seen as the potential for literary and historical renovation.45
In his doubly controversial ficción about an oppressed Ireland told from the marginal standpoint of an Argentine who was, in addition, a renowned Anglophone, Borges declares that the Irish rebellion against the English was strategically based on an act of plagiarism, in which the discourse of Shakespeare became the structural master plan for the uprising: ‘Nolan, urgido por el tiempo, no supo íntegramente inventar las circumstancias de la multiple ejecución; tuvo que plagiar a otro dramaturgo, al enemigo inglés William Shakespeare. Repitió escenas de Macbeth, de Julio César’ (OC1 498) [‘Nolan had no time to invent the circumstances of the multiple execution from scratch, and so he plagiarized the scene from another playwright, the English enemy Will Shakespeare, reprising scenes from Macbeth and Julius Caesar’] (CF 145). Borges thus practices and commends the art of stealing from Shakespeare, a talent which in 1945 he credited to two Irish writers: ‘George Moore y James Joyce han incorporado en sus obras, páginas y sentencias ajenas’ (OC2 19) [‘George Moore and James Joyce incorporated in their works the pages and sentences of others’] (SNF 242).
Afterword: Joyce and Borges, Translators of Shakespeare
The ghosts of Shakespeare summoned by Joyce and Borges highlight the crucial fact that in the sphere of textual negotiations no literary or historical narrative is ever complete, but is subject to continuous revisions and reincarnations. Thus, Joyce’s and Borges’s afterlives of Shakespeare draw attention to the fact that the act of reading Shakespeare involves taking part in
a pluralistic forum that negotiates a multidimensional textual space in which the Bard embodies a variety of meanings: from unconditional homage to parodic counterpoint, from critical reflection to intertextual framework, from biographical debate to an ambivalent, yet recognizable Shakespeare character in their narratives. In this sense, I agree with Richard Brown’s assertion that in ‘Scylla’ Joyce offers ‘a kind of Shakespearean translation, in the sense that it draws on a variety of continental European traditions for reading Shakespeare and in the sense that, for all its universality, it selected and performed various aspects of the life and work for a particular audience in a particular and highly charged historical situation.’46 This is the European tradition to which Borges refers in his 1975 lecture at Belgrano University: ‘Hamlet no es exactamente el Hamlet que Shakespeare concibió a principios del siglo XVII, Hamlet es el Hamlet de Coleridge, de Goethe y de Bradley. Hamlet ha sido renacido. Lo mismo pasa con el Quijote [...] Los lectores han ido enriqueciendo el libro’ (OC4 171) [Hamlet is not exactly the play Hamlet that Shakespeare conceived at the beginning of the seventeenth-century; Hamlet is also the Hamlet of Coleridge, Goethe and Bradley. Hamlet has been reborn. The same has occurred with Don Quixote [...] Their readers have enhanced them] (OC4 171).
Ultimately, Borges offers a version of Shakespeare filtered not only through a vast scholarly tradition, but also through his own creative concerns, as he negotiates the legacy of Shakespeare within his own historical and personal situation. In ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’, the blind scholar Herman Soergel projects a mirror of Borges himself who, in 1980, was totally blind.47 This connection is extended by further autobiographical symmetries such as the parallel of Anne Hathaway’s sexual initiation of Shakespeare and the narrator’s similar experience with a mature woman, an incident allegedly based on Borges’s own life.48 In this manner, Borges proposes a version of Shakespeare in the form of a composite triad, or hall of mirrors: Herman Soergel, the memory of the ghost and, finally, himself. Similarly, when in ‘Circe’ Joyce famously positions Stephen and Bloom in front of a mirror: ‘The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall’ (U 15.3821-24). The recognizable, yet unprecedented reflection of a cuckolded Shakespeare that gazes back at Bloom and Stephen emerges as a hybrid, Trinitarian fusion of the new formula Stephen/Bloom/Shakespeare. Joyce conjures up an ambivalent image, which, like the paradoxical statement pronounced by Shakespeare’s Troilus (another cuckold) in Troilus and Cressida, ‘This is and is not Cressida’ (V. 2. 146), offers us a complex Circean hallucination that reads this is and is not Shakespeare. Joyce destabilizes our canonical conception of Shakespeare by breaking his venerated image into an ambiguous composite that has been enhanced by Stephen’s and Bloom’s twentieth-century Irish signification. The Shakespeare that emerges is a richer, multifaceted construct that has been enlarged, like Menard’s Quixote, by centuries of reading and interpretation and by the new context in which its meaning has been redeployed. Shakespeare still incarnates the figure of the ‘myriadminded man’ proposed by Coleridge and quoted by Best, but among the myriad faces that constitute his multifarious reflection we can now count Bloom’s and Stephen’s. Like Borges’s Shakespeare in ‘Everything and Nothing’, the ghostly silhouette that gazes back at Joyce is at once ‘everything’, all in all, but also ‘nothing’, ‘a ghost, the king and no king’ (U 9.167). Above all, it is a linguistic, historical, and cultural heritage to be endlessly cited, adapted, and reinvented in their creative works.
Notes to Chapter 6
1. Antología de la literatura fantástica, ed. by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2003). The anthology has been translated into English, see The Book of Fantasy, ed. and intro. by Ursula K. Le Guin (London: Xanadu, 1988).
2. Rodríguez Monegal, p. 350.
3. Jorge Luis Borges/Osvaldo Ferrari, Reencuentro: diálogos inéditos (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1999), p. 148, my translation.
4. See The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Cultures, ed. by Daniel Balderston, Mike Gonzalez and Ana M. López, 3 vols (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 208.
5. See Santa Cecilia, La recepción de James Joyce en la prensa española (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1997), pp. 16–98.
6. See Walter Benjamin, pp. 15–25.
7. Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 1997) p. 32. He also offers a compelling analysis of the parable, see pp. 32–33.
8. Borges et al., Antología, p. 206.
9. Borges et al., Antología, pp. 206–07.
10. See Kristal, p. 87.
11. Matthew Creasy, ‘Shakespeare Burlesque in Ulysses’, Essays in Criticism, 55 (2005), 141–42.
12. Ezra Pound, ‘Guido’s Relations’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 26–33 (p. 33).
13. Borges thus stands as a forerunner in stressing the importance of Ulysses as a ghost story, particularly if we view his position in relation to such key texts of Joycean scholarship as Shari Benstock’s ‘Ulysses as a Ghoststory’, James Joyce Quarterly, 12 (1975), 396–413, which surveys ‘Joyce’s exploitation of the “ghostly” nature of Shakespeare’s play, and the process by which he makes it a vehicle in the ninth chapter’ and Maud Ellmann’s ‘The Ghosts of Ulysses’, in James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Casebook, ed. by Derek Attridge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 83–103 (p. 86), which argues that ‘Ulysses is a book about mourning: about the death of love and its return as fury; about the ghosts who vampirize the ego like the famished spectres of the underworld’.
14. Beatriz Sarlo, Borges: Un escritor de las orillas (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1995), p. 59. My translation.
15. The importance of Shakespeare in Joyce’s work has been long acknowledged by critics. See, for example, Morse, ‘Mr. Joyce and Shakespeare’, Englische Studien, 65 (1930–31), 367–81; William Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare: A Study in the Meaning of Ulysses (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1971); Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce (London: Faber & Faber, 1977); and Cheng, Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of Finnegans Wake (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1984). In contrast, the relationship between Borges and Shakespeare remains largely uncharted, still lacking full-length studies, comparable to Schutte’s and Cheng’s, to map a rich area of study in its full complexity and in-depth totality. As things stand, only a few critical essays have been partially devoted to the study of the relationship, for example, Ion Agheana, ‘Shakespeare’, in The Meaning of Experience in the Prose of Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), pp. 115–25; Vázquez ‘La memoria de Shakespeare’, Revista Iberoamericana, 151 (1990), 479–87; and Costa Picazo, Borges, una forma de felicidad (Buenos Aires: Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges, 2001). Tiffany’s ‘Borges and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Borges’, in Latin American Shakespeares, ed. by Bernice W. Kliman and Rick J. Santos (Madison & Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), pp. 145–66 is an important exception.
16. Schutte, pp. 153–57.
17. Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce, p. 59, p. 62.
18. Frank Harris, Bernard Shaw: An Unauthorized Biography Based on First Hand Information with a Postscript by Mr. Shaw (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931). In particular, read the chapter ‘Greater than Shakespeare?’, pp. 247–61.
19. See Borges OC2 125–27 or L 248–52.
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