Borges and Joyce
Page 33
20. Harris, p. xiii.
21. Dibattista, Maria, ‘Joyce’s Ghost: The Bogey of Realism in John McGahern’s Amongst Women’, in Transcultural Joyce, ed. by Karen Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 21.
22. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York and London: Methuen 1987), p. 16.
23. Garber, p. 11.
24. Garber, p. 3.
25. Terence Killeen, Ulysses Unbound: A Reader’s Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses (Dublin: Wordwell, 2004), pp. 95–96.
26. Borges, El círculo secreto, p. 166.
27. Thomas Rice, ‘Subtle Reflections of/Upon Joyce in/by Borges’, Journal of Modern Literature, 24 (2000), 47–62 (2000) p. 61, n. 63.
28. William H. Quillian, Hamlet and the New Poetic: James Joyce and T. S. Eliot (Epping: Bowker Publishing Company, 1983), p. 34.
29. Quillian, Hamlet and the New Poetic, p. 5.
30. Rice observes that Borges’s fiction ‘The Circular Ruins’ closely resembles Stephen’s paternity theory: ‘In Borges’ account of the dreamer’s origins and conception of the consubstantial, dreamt father and son of “The Circular Ruins,” readers of Ulysses will likely notice subtle reflections of Stephen Dedalus’ account of the “greyedauburn” and “beautiful ineffectual dreamer” Shakespeare’s journey downstream from his village of Stratford on Avon, to London — an urban jungle perhaps’, p. 61, n. 63.
31. Schutte, p. 89.
32. Coleridge, ‘Table Talk’, in The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. by Jonathan Bate (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 161.
33. Kimble Loux, ‘ “Am I father? If I were?”: A Trinitarian Analysis of the Growth of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses’, James Joyce Quarterly, 22 (1985), 281–96 (p. 281).
34. New King James Version, Exodus 3. 13–14.
35. Agheana, p. 124.
36. See Tiffany, pp. 145–66, for an insightful discussion of Borges’s appropriation of Paroles’s lines.
37. In ‘The Memory of Shakespeare’ the narrator Herman Soergel uses Parole’s speech in a desperate attempt to regain his own individuality.
38. It is also possible to detect Keats’s theory of ‘Negative Capability’ in Borges’s protean conception of Shakespeare. Keats explained, in a letter of 21 December 1817 to George and Tom Keats: ‘[...] what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ See John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. by Robert Gittings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 41–42.
39. Shari Benstock, ‘Ulysses as Ghoststory’, James Joyce Quarterly, 12 (1975), 396–413 (p. 402).
40. Francisco de Quevedo, Marco Bruto, en Obras en prosa, edición clasificada y anotada por Luis Astrana Marín (Madrid: Aguilar, 1932), p. 616.
41. The branching possibilities of Stephen’s model of history also recall the labyrinthine pattern of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. Towards the end of the story Stephen Albert argues that ‘Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy’ (Borges L 53).
42. The homicidal knife also appears in ‘El puñal’ [The Dagger]. See OC1 156.
43. Claudette Sartiliot, Citation and Modernity: Derrida, Joyce, and Brecht (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), p. 20.
44. Schutte, p. 124.
45. Waisman, Borges and Translation, p. 139.
46. Richard Brown, ‘Translation and Self-translation through the Shakespearean Looking-glasses in Joyce’s Ulysses’, in Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, ed. by Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), pp. 339–59 (p. 357).
47. Vázquez, ‘La memoria de Shakespeare’, p. 483.
48. See Rodríguez Monegal, p. 113.
CONCLUSION The Afterlives of James Joyce in Argentina
James Joyce’s legacy in the twenty-first century emerges as a global, multilingual, and pluralistic cultural paradigm which is constantly pointing towards new directions. His revolutionary aesthetic, exploration of the human body, painstaking depiction of the city of Dublin, unprecedented linguistic experimentation rewriting of Western discourses, and his iconic image as a self-imposed exile have exerted a powerful influence in a great variety of cultural spheres worldwide. He incorporated into the wide and versatile canvas of his art his autochthonous Irish legacy, on the one hand, as well as a cosmopolitan consciousness, on the other. By virtue of this his work is upheld as a symbol which may stand for Irish politics, modernist innovation, or the more multinational light shed by the various European countries in which he resided. Yet Joyce’s oeuvre has resonated throughout a wider range of contexts which bear no strict correlation to his life. Most importantly, his work has made powerful waves on the other side of the Atlantic: Latin American countries which had broken free from the shackles of colonial domination in the nineteenth century recognized in Joyce’s early works and revolutionary novels their linguistic, literary, and cultural preoccupations. For Latin American writers, thus, inheriting the Spanish language from their European colonizer resembled Joyce’s conflictual — yet highly creative — relationship with the English language. Borges’s invention of Ireland as sister nation in ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’ — as we have seen in the previous chapter — cast a powerful spell over the imagination of Argentine readers, critics, and writers who have expanded upon the relationship between Ireland and Argentina on a range of artistic levels. While acknowledging the far-reaching impact of Joyce in the Hispanic world in general, I have explored his decisive presence in the work of Borges in particular from his pioneering 1925 review of Ulysses and fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’ to his 1982 visit to Dublin to commemorate the centenary of Joyce’s birth in Dublin (Bloomsday). For this reason, a study of the relationship between Borges and Joyce allows the creation of a broader dialogue between the literatures of Ireland and Argentina, between the point of view of two writers who considered themselves European outsiders, but at the same time embraced a whole Western tradition.
The study of Borges’s reception of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in the 1930s has involved charting the journey of Joyce through Argentina, which guided the reader through the literary itinerary of Sur, the mass-marketed, à la mode pages of El Hogar, and on to the cultural scene of Buenos Aires at the historical time that marked the publication of the first translation of Ulysses into Spanish. Yet at the same time, this orientation underlined the important fact that a larger map of the trajectory of Joyce in Argentina needed to be drawn, and that the specificity of this book in relation to Borges and Joyce could not fully address the ample and rich repertoire of the critical and creative responses to Joyce from 1945 onwards. The conclusion to draw here, therefore, is that the study of the literary interface in Borges and Joyce has taken us all this way, but is able to take us much further. A book-length investigation documenting and analysing the complex interactions between Ireland and Argentina, including the cultural effects of the Irish Diaspora, the construction and dissemination of Ireland in the Argentine imagination, and the ongoing dialogue between Irish and Argentine writers, would indeed offer the appropriate sequel to a study of Borges and Joyce.1 On the whole, the legacy of Borges’s reception of Joyce has been crystallized in the development of a particular line of Argentine literature. The reception of Joyce in Argentina in the wake of Borges uncovers the larger project of an influential generation of writers who extended the trajectory of Joyce’s works to the linguistic, historical, and literary circumstances of twentieth-century Buenos Aires in an attempt to renew, transform, and develop the literary production of Argentina. One of the most remarkable events is undoubtedly constituted by the first complete translation of Ulysses into Spanish, in 1945, by J. Salas Subirat.2 We then move onto the experimental city novel Adán Buenosayres (1948) by Leo
poldo Marechal, widely considered to be the first novel in the Spanish language deeply indebted to Ulysses. Equally significant is Julio Cortázar’s innovative Rayuela (1963) [Hopscotch (1966)] which emulates Joyce’s Ulyssean tradition by his experimental use of the Spanish language; invention of an infinite work; transgression and parody of previous novelistic traditions; disintegration of linear models of reading; creation of a polyglot, multilayered textual labyrinth; use of the variant spoken in the River Plate area; and his artistic condition as émigré from his native Argentina.3 As one of the most prominent representatives of the boom generation Cortázar offered an experimental work that would change forever the landscape of Spanish American fiction. In this respect, Cortázar’s Hopscotch did for the Hispanic world in the 1960s what Ulysses had done in the 1920s to Europe and the Anglophone world.4 Another important successor of Joyce is the post-Latin American boom writer Manuel Puig. In his novels Boquitas Pintadas (1969) [Heartbreak Tango (1973)] and The Buenos Aires Affair (1973) [The Buenos Aires Affair (1976)] he employs a particular stylistic feature of Ulysses, namely the sentimental, rose-tinted world-view and clichéd linguistic register of the ‘Nausicaa’ episode. Puig continued and developed the peculiarities of Joyce’s thirteenth episode, and in doing so stretched its creative possibilities to book-length proportions, blending it with other significant devices, such as the epistolary genre and a potent mixture of politics, psychoanalysis, and romantic Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s. (This aspect, of course, takes us back to the contextual appearance of Borges’s notes in the ladies’ journal El Hogar.) Finally, it is also imperative to examine the pervasive presence of Joyce in a contemporary writer such as Luis Gusmán, especially his complex novel En el corazón de junio (1983) [In the Heart of June]. This intricate novel tells the story of Señor Flores, a Hispanic namesake of Leopold Bloom, who has recently undergone a heart transplant and begins a journey of physical and metaphorical self-discovery in search for his donor. The motif of the search sets the stage for a series of parallels with Joyce’s work. The most important of these is centred on the political events that took place in Buenos Aires, 16 June 1955, in which thousands of people congregated in the Plaza de Mayo in an attempt to overthrow the Argentine Head of State, Juan Domingo Perón. Therefore Gusmán suggests that the longest day in literature, 16 June 1904 (Bloomsday), acquires a wider historical signification in relation to one of the longest days in Argentine history, 16 June 1955 (Bombsday) that witnessed an unsuccessful coup d’état against president Perón in which hundreds of innocent people died. Gusmán’s novel may also be read through the light shed by Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial [Artificial Respiration (1994)], an experimental novel that aims to give voice, or breathe air into, the thousands of people who disappeared during a military dictatorship that lasted almost a decade (1976–83). In mapping the afterlives of James Joyce in Argentina it is also crucial to consider the translation history of ‘Penelope’ particularly since two leading Argentine critics and translators, Enrique Pezzoni and Ramón Alcalde, followed in Borges’s footsteps and undertook the translation of the two final pages of Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated soliloquy.5 We may conclude, for the time being, that the fascination of Argentine writers with James Joyce found fertile soil in the hospitable climate of Buenos Aires, literally in its ‘good air’, and nurtured the seeds that would continue to grow throughout a timely episode of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Notes to the Conclusion
1. For a full exploration of the literary and cultural relationship between Ireland and Latin America see Laura Izarra and Patricia Novillo-Corvalán (eds), Irish Migration Studies in Latin America, 7.2 (2009).
2. See Carlos Gamerro, El nacimiento de la literatura argentina y otros ensayos (Buenos Aires: Norma, 2006), for a panoramic overview of the reception of Joyce in Argentina.
3. See Novillo-Corvalán, ‘Rereading Cortázar’s Hopscotch through Joyce’s Ulysses’, Moveable Ty pe, special issue: ‘The Idea of the New: Discovery, Expression, Reception’, 4 (2008), 56–84 (56–57).
4. Novillo-Corvalán, ‘Rereading Cortázar’s Hopscotch through Joyce’s Ulysses, 74.
5. See Enrique Pezzoni and Ramón Alcalde, ‘Molly por Joyce, Borges, Pezzoni y Alcalde’, Voces, 9 (1995), 18–27.
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