Borges and Joyce Read online

  (SNF 221).

  The immediate implications and overall significance of this declaration, as well as the Funes analogy, will be fully explored in Chapter 3. For the time being, it should suffice to mention that in the wider Latin American context the death of James Joyce did not pass unnoticed and was marked by another influential writer, the Cuban writer, poet and essayist, José Lezama Lima. His essay ‘Muerte de Joyce’ [Death of Joyce] appeared just one month after Borges’s obituary, in the March edition of the Havana review Grafos.27 Just as Borges took to further lengths the Anglophone and Francophone reception of Joyce’s works by incorporating critics such as Valery Larbaud, Stuart Gilbert, and Charles Duff, so Salgado claims that Lezama’s obituary ‘can thus be read as a concentrated, revisionist survey, a catalog of the main critical tendencies that surfaced in response to Joyce’s work during Lezama’s youth’.28 He is able to identify in it the numerous voices of ‘Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Valery Larbaud, Herbert Gorman, Stuart Gilbert, E. R. Curtius, and Borges himself among Lezama’s sources’.29 Salgado also reports that: ‘On the occasion of Joyce’s death, both Marechal and Carpentier published articles praising Joyce’s technical innovations in the genre while, at the same time, trying to distance their own creative projects from his influence.’30

  Salas Subirat's Magnum Opus: Ulises

  Yet the event that most resolutely laid claim to the final assimilation of Joyce in the Hispanic world is, undoubtedly, the complete translation of Ulysses by J. Salas Subirat. If the extent and scope of Joyce’s work had so far been represented by just three complete translations, Dámaso Alonso’s El artista adolescente (retrato), Ignacio Abelló’s Gente de Dublín,31 and Jiménez Fraud’s Desterrados, so the translation of Ulysses, commissioned by the Buenos Aires publishing house Santiago Rueda, certainly came as a breakthrough in the long-overdue translation of Joyce’s influential Ulysses. It is then valid to assume that the much-expected Spanish version would have accounted for a renewed interest in Joyce’s oeuvre within the intellectual circles of Argentina. Taking advantage of this lively atmosphere of anticipation, Santiago Rueda supplemented the promotion of Salas Subirat’s brand new Ulises with the publication of a Spanish version of Jung’s 1932 study of Ulysses, as well as a translation of Herbert Gorman’s biography,32 both of which were marketed as publicity stunts that aimed to attract further attention to their Buenos Aires Ulises. It is rather curious, however, that they opted for Jung’s psychoanalytical and not-so-congratulatory one-decade-old reading of the novel, rather than for book-length classics such as Gilbert’s, or Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1934).33 Be that as it may, this editorial strategy marked the beginning of a long-standing association between James Joyce and the field of psychoanalysis in Argentina. ‘When Joyce reentered Argentina in the 1970s’, affirms Francine Masiello, ‘it was through an unmistakable linkage to Lacan. Journals such as Literal (1973–75) and Sitio (1982–83) were devoted to Lacanian Joyce.’34 She also notes that: ‘In 1989, the magazine Babel framed Joyce in a single issue, and, in 1991, a seminar on psychoanalysis and literature that recruited some of Argentina’s most significant intellectuals was focused on Joyce and language, through the principal lens of Lacan.’35 The translation of Jung’s essay was reviewed by the poet César Fernández Moreno in the October 1944 edition of Sur: ‘Las solapas del librito que glosamos nos informan que próximamente la editorial Santiago Rueda dará a luz la versión íntegra de Ulises, lo cual nos hace pensar que esta publicación viene a manera de avanzada de aquella versión, a explorar el camino, y tantear por anticipado la reacción del público y los poderes públicos’36 [The dust jacket of this little book under review, informs us that the publishing house Santiago Rueda will soon bring to light the complete Spanish version of Ulises, which makes us think that this publication anticipates the translation, paving the way and testing the waters for the ensuing reaction of the general public and of public bodies]. Undeniably, Fernández Moreno is alluding to the scandalous publication history of Ulysses and the charges of obscenity, litigation procedures, and censorship in America and various European countries. But the biggest irony here is that at the time of the publication of Salas Subirat’s translation the president of the Argentine Republic was Colonel Edelmiro O’Farrell (1887–1980), a descendant of Irish immigrants originally from Co. Longford. Colonel Edelmiro O’Farrell’s father, John O’Farrell, embarked on his voyage to Argentina in the mid-nineteenth century and settled down in the district of Lanús located in Greater Buenos Aires, where Edelmiro was born.37 An army officer and close ally of Juan Domingo Perón, Colonel O’Farrell played a major role in a military coup which landed him the presidency of the country, with Perón standing as vice-president. Would it not seem paradoxical, then, for a president of Irish ancestry to press charges on the grounds of morality against a fellow Irishman? Fortunately enough, the publication of Ulises did not raise the alarm of any governmental organization, and the historical launch of the first Spanish translation of Joyce’s Ulysses was marked by the time in office of the first Argentine president of Irish descent.

  In the December 1944 edition of the review, Sur deemed it appropriate to salute the ensuing arrival of Ulises with a fresh essay by Stuart Gilbert, ‘El fondo latino en el arte de James Joyce’. This significant study also appeared in the Paris monthly literary review Fontaine, under the title, ‘L’ambiance Latine de L’art de James Joyce’.38 Indeed, Gilbert’s new emphasis on the Latin, rather than Hellenic elements of Ulysses, was the perfect anticipation for a translation in the Romance languages. The absence of a review of Salas Subirat’s translation in Sur, however, is explained by the fact that Borges decided to incorporate his 1946 essay, ‘Nota sobre el Ulises en español’ [A note on the Spanish Ulysses], in Los Anales de Buenos Aires, the official publication of the Buenos Aires National Library. (Borges’s review of Salas Subirat has been fully discussed in Chapter 1, particularly through the light shed by his fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’). It is significant to mention that Salas Subirat published his own apology for the translation in Contrapunto, a Buenos Aires review devoted to literature and the arts.39 The next (and final) appearance of Joyce in Sur took place in 1948 as part of a comprehensive study by the Argentine poet and scholar Enrique Luis Revol. Ultimately, Sur’s mapping of a Joycean trajectory through its miscellaneous articles and translations laid the foundations for the consolidation of Joyce’s work in the crucial decades of the 1930s and 1940s.

  El Hogar: Borges, Joyce and Popular Culture

  Unlike the avant-garde tendencies of Proa, or the strictly intellectual tone of Sur, El Hogar: ilustración semanal argentina para la mujer, la casa y el niño [Home: Argentine illustrated weekly for the lady, home and child], as the subtitle indicates, had been marketed since its inception in 1904 as a glossy, à la mode periodical publication, targeted at a female audience of Argentina’s upper and middle social strata. A distinctive feature of the magazine consisted in its numerous advertising spaces which featured a wide range of female and household commodities, such as upmarket lingerie, beauty products, homeopathic remedies, luxurious confectionery, and the current trends in ladies fashion. El Hogar, however, was more than a glossy-popular and had, as Borges’s biographer Rodríguez Monegal has observed, ‘some literary and cultural aspirations’,40 thus justifying the editorial decision to include the erudite and polyglot Jorge Luis Borges, as one of their regular correspondents.41 The contextual appearance of Borges’s literary notes side-by-side with a variety of publicity spaces destined for mass consumption, as well as in relation to the other not-so-literary columns included in the magazine, cannot be ignored. In effect, it re-inscribes the scholarly Borges within the larger context of popular culture. More importantly the criss-crossing of Borges’s literary contributions with columns on fashion and housekeeping resembles the type of publication Joyce’s romantic heroine, Gerty MacDowell, pleasurably reads in order to fuel her romantic dreams and gain expert beauty tips. As Don Gif
ford states, Gerty read ‘the Lady’s Pictorial, “a weekly illustrated journal of fashion, society, art, literature, music and the drama”, published in London on Thursday’.42 Indeed, we learn that Gerty obtains useful fashion tips from the Lady’s Pictorial: ‘A neat blouse of electric blue selftinted by dolly dyes (because it was expected in the Lady’s Pictorial that electric blue would be worn) [...]’ (U 13.150–51).

  In ‘Nausicaa’ Gerty’s mellifluous and over-sentimentalized discourse is blended with the report of the third-person narrator through Joyce’s masterful use of the technique of free-indirect style. Gerty is described as ‘slight and graceful, inclining even to fragility’ (U 13.53–54) (conventional romantic heroine), but the reader also learns that her beauty has been enhanced by ‘Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the Princess Novelette, who had first advised her to try eyebrowleine which gave that haunting expression to the eyes’ (U 13.109–12) (discourse of advertisement). Her facial appearance is also invested with the symbolic attributes of the Virgin Mary: ‘The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity’ (U 13.87–88) and her ‘hands of finely veined alabaster’ (U 13.89–90) bring to mind the typifying epithet of princess Nausicaa, Gerty’s Homeric predecessor, who is referred to in the Odyssey as ‘she of the white arms’.43 If we compare the complexly laced set of registers employed in ‘Nausicaa’ with the beauty pages of El Hogar, we soon realize that the Argentine lady reader would have been similarly exposed to the merging of religious, literary, and advertising discourses in the overall printed configuration of the magazine. For example, the Bloomsday June 1939 issue of El Hogar in which appeared Borges’s review of the Wake, featured a publicity space that recalls the type of ‘Madame Vera Verity’ discourse we tend to associate with Gerty: ‘La belleza de los ojos radica en gran parte en su claridad y su brillo’44 [the beauty of the eyes mainly lies in their sparkle and luminosity]. The beginning of the ad is clearly playing with Christian commonplaces which preached that ‘the eyes are the window to the soul’, a type of accepted wisdom which is confirmed in the gospel according to Matthew: ‘The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. / But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness’.45 The biblical metaphor of the eyes as the mirror to the soul may be also identified as belonging to the courtly love Neoplatonic tradition of the beautiful and virtuous lady whose eyes are able to transport the poet-lover to the higher realm of God. The luminous eyes of the angelic lady, whether Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura, act as a vehicle that connects the poet with the larger love that binds the universe through the eternity of God. Yet the idealized tone of the commercial soon gives way to the more explicit language of the marketplace: ‘Se comprende entonces que una sombra obscura colocada sobre los párpados les hace perder en vivacidad [...] Es necesario, sobre todo, una buena higiene de ojos: para esto es preciso lavarlos por la noche y por la mañana con agua de rosas [...]’46 [It is understood, then, that a dark eye shadow makes the eyelids lose their vivacity [...] It is important to have good eye hygiene: for this reason they should be washed every morning and night with rose water]. Unquestionably, this type of advert is targeting the set of religious and cultural beliefs of a female audience firmly rooted in a patriarchal, Roman Catholic society. Therefore, like Gerty’s fusion of Catholicism and fetishism in her devotion to lingerie: ‘As for undies they were Gerty’s chief care [...] She was wearing the blue set for luck, hoping against hope, her own colour and lucky too for a bride to have a bit of blue somewhere’ (U 13.171–81); a range of female targeted advertising spaces in El Hogar also amalgamated a Catholic upbringing with the world of consumerism in the dual female roles of virgin and femme fatale.

  Equally significant is that this same Bloomsday issue featured a note on the ‘Procession of the Corpus Christi’, which commemorated the sacrament of the Eucharist in the historical Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires.47 Like the pervasive mystical force of the men’s temperance retreat that lingers in the flirtatious and voyeuristic background of ‘Nausicaa’, so El Hogar also dramatizes within its pages a similar type of religious ceremony:

  It was the men’s temperance retreat conducted by the missioner, the reverend John Hughes S. J., rosary, sermon and benediction of the Most blessed Sacrament. They were there gathered together without distinction of social class

  (U 13.282–84).

  La tradicional procesión del Corpus Christi, que congregó en la plaza de Mayo a una verdadera multitud. El arzobispo de Buenos Aires, cardinal prima de monseñor Santiago Luis Copello, conduce, bajo el palio, el Santísimo Sacramento’.48

  The traditional procession of the Corpus Christi gathered together in a large crowd in the plaza de Mayo. The archbishop of Buenos Aires, cardinal prima do monsignor Santiago Luis Copello, conducts in his pallium, the Most blessed Sacrament.

  We can then conclude that just as in ‘Nausicaa’ Joyce juxtaposes the clichés of romantic literature, the language of advertising, and the influential religious discourse of Roman Catholic Ireland, so Borges’s articles in El Hogar negotiated a printed configuration that mirrored Joyce’s own heterogeneity and polyphonic discourse. Indeed, the manner in which the discourse of advertising is interwoven into Borges’s ‘high culture’ reflects the way in which ‘popular culture’, namely, newspapers, pulp-fiction, and a wide range of publicities circulate throughout Ulysses and indiscriminately merge with Joyce’s other literary, philosophical and canonical discourses. As Garry Leonard has observed: ‘Advertising — and consumer discourse in general — constitutes a dynamic force every bit as influential on Joyce as, say, the works of Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare or Bruno.’49 If Joyce incorporates into Ulysses canonical and popular discourses without imposing any system of hierarchies, so Borges’s texts in El Hogar dynamically embrace the production of an elite culture in a symbiotic relationship with the popular culture of commercials, pulp fiction, and columns on beauty and practical parenting. Moreover, we also find that the world of advertising infiltrated into some of Borges’s columns during this period. In a June 1939 article entitled ‘Cuando la ficción vive en la ficción’ [When Fiction Lives in Fiction] Borges began with a reference to a commercial commodity, an elaborate biscuit tin displaying a series of Japanese images which revealed to him the notion of infinite regress:

  Debo mi primera noción del problema del infinito a una gran lata de bizcochos que dio misterio y vertigo a mi niñez. En el costado de ese objeto anormal había una escena japonesa; no recuerdo los niños o guerreros que la formaban, pero sí que en un ángulo de esa imagen la misma lata de bizcochos reaparecía con la misma figura y en ella la misma figura, y así (a lo menos, en potencia) infinitamente...

  (OC4 433).

  [I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood. On one side of this exceptional object was a Japanese scene; I do not recall the children or warriors who configured it, but I do remember that in a corner of the image the same biscuit tin reappeared with the same picture, and in it the same picture again, and so on (at least by implication) infinitely ...

  (SNF 160).]

  In the remainder of the note Borges points out that the suggestive iconographic packaging of the confectionery product resembles the metaphysical internal duplications of Josiah Royce, the hall-of-mirrors effect of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, the tale-within-the-tale devices of The Arabian Nights and Don Quixote, the inner play in Hamlet, and the Chinese-box effects in Meyrink’s The Golem and Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds (SNF 160–61). What remains crucial in this trajectory of infinity represented by the tantalizing Japanese figures is that Borges challenges traditional conceptions of high art by constructing a rich meeting point between the world of culture and the marketplace. In this particular case, Borges is drawing attention to the fact that the discourse of culture may also borrow from the discourse of advertising. If Borges
published his papers on Joyce in the mass-marketed El Hogar which allowed the polyphonic cohabitation of several discourses, so Joyce published his early stories ‘The Sisters’, ‘After the Race’, and ‘Eveline’ in The Irish Homestead, a weekly journal in association with the Irish Agricultural Society. Garry Leonard has persuasively demonstrated that one of the advertisements which featured alongside ‘The Sisters’ also infiltrated the fictional fabrics of the story:

  Joyce’s first short story was printed in an agricultural journal just above an advertisement for mineral water (‘Sparkling Montserrat. The Drink for the Gout & Rheumatic’) [...] It was only after Joyce saw the story printed that he introduced Eliza’s famous verbal slip ‘rheumatic wheels’ instead of ‘pneumatic wheels’. Thus the eminently forgettable soda advertisement (‘The Drink for the Gout & Rheumatic’) generates the momentary slip of the tongue.50

  During his four years at El Hogar (1936–40) Borges was assigned the fortnightly page of ‘Libros y Autores Extranjeros’ [Foreign Books and Authors], which consisted of four small sections entitled: ‘Essays’, ‘Concise Biographies’, ‘Reviews’, and a closing (super-) concise section entitled ‘Literary Life’. Silvia Barei regards Borges’s columns for El Hogar as ‘una especie de “guía de lecturas”, de mapa o de recorrido literario que ciertamente cubría las expectativas de los lectores medios de la época’51 [as a sort of ‘reading guide’, a map or literary trajectory that unquestionably fulfilled the expectations of the general reader of the time]. Barei also admits, however, that these journalistic pages were at times over-elaborated, and draws attention to Roberto Alifano’s claim that the housewives for whom the magazine was produced would not have been able to fully appreciate the wide cultural background of Borges.52 Or we may equally claim that what is implied here is that Borges’s remarkable level of erudition and fluency in several European languages would have presented a challenge not only to the female readership of El Hogar but also to the general reader, male or female. Indeed, Borges’s discussion of the experimental and notoriously difficult work of James Joyce would corroborate the view that some columns may have exceeded the cultural expectations of the journal. On the other hand, the conciseness of the notes, the attractiveness of the illustrations and advertisements that accompanied them, and the fact that Borges was aware he was writing for a non-specialized readership lent them an air of accessibility and readability. For instance, Rodríguez Monegal reports that he encountered Borges for the first time in El Hogar as a fifteen-year-old boy and read with relish ‘a note headed “Literary Life” that was devoted to Joyce and included an anecdote of his meeting with Yeats’.53 Another childhood testimony of the special gravitation of El Hogar in a middle-class home of Argentine society is given by Barei, who warmly evoked the years in which the magazine was purchased by her paternal grandparents.54 In his introduction of Textos cautivos, Enrique Sacerio-Garí seeks to construct a picture of El Hogar as ‘texto sociológico’ [sociological text], which may act as a mirror of ‘las imágenes que se proyectaban en la Argentina y el ritmo de vida que esas imágenes perpetuaban semana tras semana en el público lector’55 [the images that were projected in Argentina, as well as the everyday resonance that those images perpetuated in the weekly audience of the magazine]. Above all, what remains crucial here is the assumption that in the late 1930s Borges discusses Joyce’s work not for the select group of scholars, or the limited readership of strictly literary periodicals such as Sur, but that he opens up and disseminates his notoriously difficult work to a mass audience. What kind of Joyce emerges, then, from Borges’s journalistic notes in El Hogar? Or, more precisely, what are the aspects of Joyce that particularly interested Borges? During his four-year employment for El Hogar Borges dedicated to Joyce: a capsule biography, ‘James Joyce’ (1937); a book review of Finnegans Wake, ‘El Último Libro de Joyce’ [Joyce’s Latest Novel] (1939); two anecdotes in the section ‘Literary Life’; and numerous references in other notes published in the magazine.