Borges and Joyce Read online

  This urgency for the rebirth of a truly international discipline has recently become the subject of Gayatri Spivak’s reflections in Death of a Discipline (2003). Yet this is another apocalyptic warning by a leading figure in comparative literature, translation studies, and postcolonialism, as Spivak unambiguously warns us that her book will be read as the ‘last gasp of a dying discipline’.9 If the rebirth of the discipline must be at the cost of ditching the corpse of a nineteenth-century inheritance, then the new face of comparative literature, stresses Spivak, has to prioritize the ‘national literatures of the global South but also of the countless indigenous languages in the world [...] The literatures in English produced by the former British colonies in Africa and Asia [...] And who can deny the Spanish and Portuguese literature of Latin America?’10 But Spivak’s claim that the dying discipline could only survive through the exclusion of the ‘Western European “nations”'11 ought to be questioned, particularly since the convenient label of homogeneity can no longer serve as the defining characteristic of a European cultural identity. Indeed, as Lucia Boldrini has pointed out: ‘Many European countries have no imperial history if not a passive one, having themselves been “colonised”, subjugated or controlled by other political powers. A “decolonising” of the European mind needs to take place’.12 This is, above all, the case of postcolonial Ireland, and our understanding of Joyce lies precisely in recognizing Ireland as both an inward and outward force within Europe, in the sense that Joyce, as Emer Nolan notes, ‘[in his] writings about Ireland may not provide a coherent critique of either colonised or colonialist; but their ambiguities and hesitations testify to the uncertain divided consciousness of the colonial subject’.13

  Therefore I propose the comparative study of the literary relationship between Borges and Joyce as a suitable model for the type of comparatist practice which illustrates the cultural, literary, linguistic, and geographical concerns that the discipline is aspiring to address at this crucial junction. And in this vital comparative process of reading, studying, teaching, and translating literary texts, the relations of Borges and Joyce with the canonical tradition of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare remain at the forefront of the book. In this sense, a study of Borges and Joyce cannot ignore their complex interplay with the canon as is shown in their respective reinvention of a foundational body of writings from a marginal standpoint, as they infiltrate a vast European archive with their autochthonous Irish and Argentine viewpoints, deftly combining reverence and irreverence. Ultimately, Borges’s and Joyce’s idiosyncratic readings of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare stand as yet another metaphor for the fecund forces at stake in the act of translation, recreation, and transcreation, particularly if viewed through the light of the Brazilian translation movement known as ‘Cannibalism’, following the antropófago poetics proposed by Haroldo de Campos, who proclaimed that Western discourses are devoured by colonial writers through a transformative practice that absorbs their canonical nutrients and enriches them with elements from their own cultures.14 The Brazilian anthropophagi movement brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s groundbreaking essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923). Both translation processes involve the biological metaphors of death (original) and rebirth (translation). They endorse an inverted modus operandi in which the translation gives life to the original by extending and enhancing its lifespan, rather than vice-versa, as had been commonly held in traditional translation approaches. An apt view of Borges’s overall attitude towards the Western archive is skilfully conveyed by Suzanne Jill Levine: ‘As cannibalistic reader and fanatically original (re)writer par excellence, Borges made European writers such as the “excessive” Joyce his own. Like Joyce, Borges was drawn to the vast canonical works they both inherited as readers, particularly Homer’s epics and Dante’s encompassing allegories.’15

  As things stand, the lesson we can learn from comparative literature today is that the strength of the discipline lies in its utopian aspiration to embrace the concerns of a global, or planetary — as Spivak puts it — literary, linguistic, and cultural spectrum. This thirst for change and renewal, explains Robert Weninger, is why ‘Comparative Literature as a discipline is at yet another crossroads — except that the crossroads would not seem to be the same in every part of the world’.16 And these crossroads, these important global intersections, are also a characteristic of the international turn of Joyce studies, which is testimony to the proliferation of translations and creative responses worldwide. And these comparative (and Joycean) crossroads can be found along the several roads that lead to a number of worldwide destinations across both sides of the Atlantic.

  Towards Borges and Joyce

  This book examines the interface between two of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth century, James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges. The relationship consists of a fascinating series of parallels: both are renowned for their polyglot abilities, prodigious memories, cyclical conception of time and labyrinthine creations, for their condition as European émigrés and blind bards of Dublin and Buenos Aires, and, of course, for not being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet at the same time, Borges and Joyce largely differ in relation to the central aesthetic of their creative projects: the epic scale of the Irishman contrasts with the compressed ficción of the Argentine. Throughout this study I will argue that Joyce’s aesthetic of expansion and Borges’s aesthetic of compression, for all their self-evident disparity, may be bridged in order to create a tertium comparationis in which their textual conversation takes place.

  James Joyce’s work loomed large throughout all stages of Borges’s oeuvre. A chronological survey of the numerous writings Borges exclusively dedicated to Joyce reveals a most impressive and heterogeneous catalogue. As early as 1925 a youthful Borges published a pioneering review of Ulysses and a fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’ in the Buenos Aires avant-garde review Proa [Prow]. In the late 1930s a more mature Borges, on his way to becoming the modern master of the compressed, metaphysical ficción, continued and developed his dissemination of Joyce’s works with ensuing reviews of Work in Progress and Finnegans Wake, as well as a fascinating miscellany of papers on Joyce’s life and works which appeared in the cultural and artistic journal Sur [South] and the mass-marketed, à la mode women’s magazine El Hogar [Home]. In the 1940s he incorporated two excerpts of Ulysses into his Anthology of Fantastic Literature and declared in his 1941 obituary of Joyce that Ulysses stood as the precursor of Ireneo Funes, his Uruguayan gaucho endowed with an infinite memory. In the decades that followed, until his death on 14 June 1986 (two days before Bloomsday), he repeatedly returned to Joyce’s work in his poems, fictions, and in numerous interviews, whereby the lingering shadow of his blind predecessor grew larger and larger. The towering presence of a writer of the stature of Borges in the reception of Joyce’s works in the Hispanic world is, ultimately, indisputable, as is the important fact that in 1946 he penned a unique review of the first complete translation of Ulysses into Spanish by fellow Argentine writer J. Salas Subirat. It soon becomes clear that Borges invented himself as the unofficial Hispanic promoter of Joyce, holding behind him the torch that would illuminate the path onto Joyce’s works for successive generations of readers.

  If a writer of the stature of Jorge Luis Borges took part in the act of reading and disseminating Joyce, then the distinctive, compressed aesthetic of his ficciones strove to create an image of Joyce as the artificer of intricately woven labyrinths whose sheer size, encyclopaedic scope, and infinite nature, both fascinated and horrified him. Thus, I will argue that Borges sought to forge a version of Joyce refracted through his own condensatory impulses, hence offering a fragmentary translation of Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated soliloquy; the ideal insomniac reader of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in his celebrated short story ‘Funes the Memorious’; a gothic reading of Ulysses as a fantastic short story in his Anthology of Fantastic Literature; an irreverent résumé of Ulysses in several of his fictions; and the final affirmation that his arduous
journey through Joyce’s geography involved not a one-way trip but numerous excursions (or short cuts) through an inexhaustible and ever-shifting landscape. As in ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, the undeniable richness of an exercise in translation and rewriting is that we are now able to access a Borgesian version of Joyce, as much as Joyce’s distinctive cadences and metaphors resonate throughout Borges’s oeuvre. Alas, Borges and Joyce never met in life.

  In this way, this book argues that Borges created himself as a ‘precursor’ of Joyce (in the Borgesian sense of the word). This raises momentous issues. What kind of Joyce emerges, then, from Borges’s idiosyncratic reading? What kind of Joyce emerges from the perspective of a writer located, as Sarlo claims, in a ‘culturally marginal nation’17 and yet who indiscriminately drenched himself with world literature? The Joyce(s) that are refracted through Borges’s complex prism allow the creation of an infinite conversation 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. Above all, the Borgesian formula shifts Joyce’s epic proportions into the compressed and intricately woven microscosm of the ficción, thus allowing the reader to experience the novelistic scope of Joyce’s Ulysses within the confines of a nutshell. A Borgesian exercise of tremendous audacity, irony, and creativity, which fittingly describes his relationship with Joyce, was to reduce ‘la vida entera de un hombre a dos o tres escenas’ (OC1 289) [‘a person’s entire life to two or three scenes’] (CF 3),18 and, even more remarkably, to claim that it is a ‘desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor el de componer vastos libros; el de explayar en quinientas páginas una idea cuya exposición oral cabe en pocos minutos’ (OC1 429) [‘It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes’] (CF 67). Further, Borges set himself the task of offering summaries and commentaries of real and imaginary works, an undertaking he carried out, again and again, with Joyce’s oeuvre. A compulsive creator of literary genealogies, heterogeneous catalogues, and the study of a writer’s precursors, Borges exposed the endless possibilities of literary combinations which allowed him to freely compare, contrast, parody, and venerate an unlimited number of texts. This eccentric practice brings to mind the conclusion reached by the French critic Gérard Genette in his study Palimpsests, whereby he wrote that Borges created ‘the utopia of a Literature in a perpetual state of transfusion, a transtextual perfusion, constantly present to itself in its totality and as a Totality all of whose authors are but one and all its books one vast, one infinite Book’.19

  Borges's Infinite Conversation with Joyce

  For all the pioneering and creative impetus of Borges’s early reception, the reader may be surprised to learn that the journalistic papers he exclusively dedicated to Joyce remained dormant for nearly half a century in the dusty shelves of long-forgotten Argentine archives and have only been exhumed in the last two decades. Why, then, was Borges’s critical reception of Joyce plunged into the dark abyss of oblivion? First of all, this phenomenon ought to be explained by the crucial fact that the majority of Borges’s papers on Joyce (including his fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’) were originally produced for a series of Buenos Aires periodicals. The difficulties begin when we consider that a large proportion of Borges’s journalistic production was excluded from the authorized edition of the Obras completas [Collected Works]. Despite the claim of their title, the Obras completas only gathered the writings of Borges that had been previously published in book form, hence excluding a vast journalistic production, as well as a large proportion of assorted writings from his formative years. Moreover, Borges’s 1925 review of Ulysses — in which he proudly described himself as the ‘primer aventurero hispánico’ (Inq 23) [first Hispanic adventurer] of Joyce’s epic geography — was subsequently included in his essay collection Inquisiciones (1925) [Inquisitions]. Yet this book was subject to a similar fate, since later in his life Borges mercilessly excluded it from the Obras completas, along with El tamaño de mi esperanza (1926) [The Extent of my Hope] and El idioma de los argentinos (1928) [The Language of the Argentines] considering them baroque aberrations of his early years. Consequently, Borges’s journalistic papers on Joyce remained, until their recent re-emergence in the last two decades, a peripheral group of writings either unauthorized from the approved corpus of his Obras completas (as in Inquisiciones) or scattered in the various editions of the magazines in which they had been originally published. For example, Borges’s biographer Emir Rodríguez Monegal has argued that, far from presenting a totality, the incongruous partiality of the Obras completas aims to bring together not the total Borges, but rather the canonical Borges: ‘They are far from complete, and, in a sense, they are closer to being the official or canonical edition; that is, the edition by which Borges wants to be judged.’20 James Woodall, in his biography The Man in the Mirror of the Book, has humorously claimed that Borges, like Joyce, entrusted the disordered editions to the patient work of future scholars:

  The problems really begin with Borges himself. His habit of changing texts from edition to edition, of suppressing, or excising, sometimes re-introducing in modified form, words, phrases, lines — mainly in the poetry — has landed any potential bibliographer with a lifetime’s toil. A Borgesian joke of the highest order, it might be thought, recalling James Joyce’s comment that he wrote in the way he did in order to keep the professors busy for centuries.21

  The real implications of Borges’s editorial toil, suggest Helft and Pauls, became particularly noticeable after his death, which was followed by the gradua unearthing of a large collection of journalistic and miscellaneous writings which had been gathering dust in the archives of Argentine libraries for several decades.22 The most important compilation of Borges’s journalistic production was published in 1986 with the aptly titled collection Textos cautivos [Captive Texts]23 that gathers Borges’s numerous writings for the illustrated magazine El Hogar. The determining factor here is that in this collection was reprinted Borges’s 1937 biographical sketch of Joyce, as well as one of his 1939 reviews of the Wake. As expected, this edition was followed by a book-length volume of Borges’s contributions for the magazine of the newspaper Crítica,24 and then by a collection of his writings for Sur, thus adding the missing sequels to Borges’s most copious journalistic production. The Sur publication brought back to life Borges’s largely forgotten 1941 obituary of Joyce — in which he argues that Ulysses stands as a precursor to his short story ‘Funes the Memorious’ — as well as resurrecting his other 1939 review of the Wake. But far from being conclusive, these publications only heralded the beginning of what started to be seen as a series of proliferating addenda to an ever-increasingly deficient Obras completas. Only with the recent publication of an entirely new collection, appropriately titled Textos recobrados [Recovered Texts], which follows a similar principle of regaining, rescuing, and freeing a large body of Borges’s work that was already implicit in Captive Texts, have we begun to get a closer approximation of the extent of Borges’s oeuvre in general and of his lifelong obsession with Joyce in particular.25 Indeed, Recovered Texts was decisive in resuscitating one of Borges’s most fascinating early responses to Joyce: his 1925 fragmentary translation of Molly’s Bloom’s long unpunctuated soliloquy. The idea of picturing the youthful, avant-gardist Borges undertaking a translation of the last two pages of ‘Penelope’ cannot but stand at odds with the larger image of the blind Argentine bard later renowned, as much for his erudite fictions, as for his spartan, library-bound, mythical existence. Thus, it seems an irony that Jorge Luis Borges gifted the Hispanic world with a translation of Molly Bloom’s sexually charged reverie, particularly an excerpt that is included in Paul Vanderham’s list of passages ‘deemed obscene or otherwise objectionable by various governmental and editorial authorities between 1918 and 1934’.26 Looking back
on Borges’s writing career we become particularly aware of the large gulf that stands between his wholehearted embrace of Molly’s sexuality as an avant-gardist and passionate young man, and the ensuing metaphysical and asexual tone that the mature writer would develop in his ficciones. Further, the promissory aspect of Borges’s early journalistic reception of Joyce in the cultural Argentine scene may well explain why in the 1930s the owner of the Buenos Aires daily Crítica commissioned Borges with the difficult task of undertaking a complete translation of Ulysses into Spanish. According to an account by one of Borges’s colleagues of Crítica,27 Borges gave an unequivocal ‘Yes’ and the newspaper promptly telegraphed London, only to find out that the Joyce estate had already awarded the translation rights to Salas Subirat, whose complete translation of Ulysses finally appeared in 1945. Borges’s 1946 review of this translation, once again, has been reissued in Recovered Texts.

  The majority of Borges’s papers on Joyce, thus, formed part of a large corpus of writings which were produced during an industrious journalistic activity spanning several decades. On the one hand it is undeniable that the journalistic context in which the majority of these writings were produced provided a decisive medium for the diffusion of Joyce’s work in the Hispanic world — just think of the readers of the mass-marketed magazine Home reading a review of the Wake sandwiched in between publicity spaces for luxury chocolates and ladies’ lingerie. On the other hand this circumstance had the adverse effect of restricting their posterior status as peripheral writings, thus masking a significant aspect of Borges’s activity as a writer, critic, and translator. In this light, one of the most important lessons we can learn from this shift in Borges’s publication history is that the extent of his literary relationship with Joyce has finally come into full view. This raises important questions. What knowledge ought we to have of Borges’s lifelong fixation with his Irish predecessor and, at the same time, his inseparable thoughts on how to distance himself from Joyce’s aesthetic of expansion in his attempt to forge his super-condensed ficciones? In the same vein, did the young, avant-gardist Borges contemplate in the mirror of Joyce’s art a reflection of the creative tendencies he sought to emulate in the 1920s as he aspired to elevate the city of Buenos Aires to worldwide recognition, as Joyce had done with Dublin? And how did the mature Borges dramatize his complex relationship with Joyce in his public declarations and, most importantly, in the compressed ficciones that would eventually place him alongside Joyce, as one of the most revolutionary writers of twentieth-century literature? Any attempt to listen to the resounding echoes of the infinite conversation held between Borges and Joyce may only disclose the intriguing yet timeless quality of such exchange. To overhear Borges’s meditations on Joyce throughout his life, or what the young Argentine poet said of his Irish maestro — with whom he shared the Homeric affliction of an impending blindness — in his 1925 review of Ulysses and translation of ‘Penelope’, or, equally, by shifting chronologies and assessing what Joyce would have made of Borges, is to participate in a pluralistic forum that inscribes our blind bards within the larger canvas of world literature.28