/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20105378]

Supposedly Borges once wrote a review of Joyce's Ulysses. Does anyone know where I can find it? I've been able to find excerpts, but not the entire review.

[Anonymous No.20105500]

It's in that Penguin 'Selected Non-Fictions' volume

1/2

>Joyce's Ulysses
>I am the first traveler from the Hispanic world to set foot upon the shores of Ulysses, a lush wilderness already traversed by Valery Larbaud, who traced its dense texture with the impeccable precision of a mapmaker (Nouvelle Revue Francaise XVIII), but which I too will describe, even though my visit within its borders has been inattentive and transient. I will speak of it with the license my admiration lends me and with the murky intensity of those ancient explorers who described lands new to their nomadic amazement, and whose stories about the Amazons and the City of the Caesars combined truth and fantasy.
>I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.

>James Joyce is Irish. The Irish have always been famous for being the iconoclasts of the British Isles. Less sensitive to verbal decorum than their detested lords, less inclined to pour their eyes upon the smooth moon or to decipher the impermanence of rivers in long free-verse laments, they made deep incursions into the territory of English letters, pruning all rhetorical exuberance with frank impiety. Jonathan Swift acted like a corrosive acid on the elation of human hope, and Voltaire's Micromegas and Candide are no more than cheaper versions of his severe nihilism. Laurence Sterne unraveled the novel by making merry with the reader's expectations, and those oblique digressions are now the source of his multitudinous fame; Bernard Shaw is today's most pleasing realist; but of Joyce I will say that he exercises with dignity his Irish audacity.

>His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further. He was born in Dublin in 1882, into an eminent and piously Catholic family. He was educated by the Jesuits. We know that he possesses a classical culture, that he is not unfamiliar with scholasticism, that there are no errors of diction in his Latin phrases, that he has wandered the various countries of Europe, and that his children were born in Italy. He has composed lyrics, short stories, and a novel of cathedral-like grandeur, the motivation of this review.

>Ulysses is variously distinguished. Its life seems situated on a single plane, without those steps that take us mentally from each subjective world to an objective stage, from the whimsical daydream of one man's unconscious to the frequently trafficked dreams of the collective mind. ...

[Anonymous No.20105525]

>>20105500

2/2
> ... Conjecture, suspicion, fleeting thought, memories, lazy thinking, and the carefully conceived enjoy equal privilege in this book; a single point of view is noticeably absent. This amalgamation of dreams and the real might well have provoked the consent of Kant and Schopenhauer. The former did not deal with any distinction between dreams and reality other than that legitimated by the causal nexus constant in everyday life, and which from dream to dream does not exist. According to the latter, no criteria exist to distinguish dreams and reality, other than the merely empirical data provided by waking life; he added with meticulous elucidations that real life and the dream world are pages of the same book, and that custom calls real life the orderly reading, and dreams what we leaf through with lazy negligence. I wish, therefore, to remember the problem articulated by Gustav Spiller in The Mind of Man on the relative reality of a room seen objectively, then in the imagination, and lastly, duplicated in a mirror; he resolves that all three are real, and visually each takes up an equal amount of space.

>As one can see, Minerva's olive tree casts a gentler shadow than the laurel upon the worthy Ulysses. I cannot find any literary ancestors, except perhaps Dostoevsky in his later years after Crime and Punishment, and even then, who knows. So let us admire the provisional miracle.

>In Joyce's unrelenting examination of the tiniest details that constitute consciousness, he stops the flow of time and defers its movement with a pacifying gesture contrary to the impatient goading of the English drama, which encloses the life of its heroes in the narrow, thrusting rush of a few crowded hours. If Shakespeare—to use his own metaphor—invested in the turning of the hourglass the exploits of many years, Joyce inverts the procedure and unfolds his hero's single day into many days upon the reader. (I haven't said many naps.)

>A total reality teems vociferously in the pages of Ulysses, and not the mediocre reality of those who notice in the world only the abstract operations of the mind and its ambitious fear of not being able to overcome death, nor that other reality that enters only our senses, juxtaposing our flesh and the streets, the moon and the well. The duality of existence dwells within this book, an ontological anxiety that is amazed not merely at being, but at being in this particular world where there are entranceways and words and playing cards and electric writing upon the translucence of the night. In no other book (except perhaps those written by Gomez de la Serna) do we witness the actual presence of things with such convincing firmness.

[Anonymous No.20105535]

>>20105525
3/2

>All things are latent, and the diction of any voice is capable of making them emerge and of leading the reader down their avenue. De Quincey recounts that it was enough to name the Roman consul in his dreams to set off fiery visions of flying banners and military splendor. In the fifteenth chapter of his work, Joyce sketches a delirious brothel scene, and the chance conjuring of any loose phrase or idea ushers in hundreds—the sum is not an exaggeration but exact—of absurd speakers and impossible events.

>Joyce portrays a day in modern life and accumulates a variety of episodes in its course which equal in spirit those events that inform the Odyssey.

>He is a millionaire of words and styles. Aside from the prodigious funds of voices that constitute the English language, his commerce spreads wherever the Irish clover grows, from Castilian doubloons and Judas' shekels to Roman denarii and other ancient coinage. His prolific pen exercises all the rhetorical figures. Each episode exalts yet another poetic strategy, another private lexicon. One is written in syllogisms, another in questions and answers, another in narrative sequence. In two of them there is a silent soliloquy—a heretofore unpublished form (derived from the Frenchman Edouard Dujardin, as Joyce told Larbaud) through which we hear his characters think at length. Beside the new humor of his incongruities and amid his bawdyhouse banter in macaronic prose and verse, he raises rigid structures of Latin rigor like the Egyptian's speech to Moses. Joyce is as bold as the prow of a ship, and as universal as a mariner's compass. Ten years from now—his book having been explicated by more pious and persistent reviewers than myself-we will still enjoy him. Meanwhile, since I have not the ambition to take Ulysses to Neuquen and study it in quiet repose, I wish to make mine Lope de Vega's respectful words regarding Gongora:

>Be what it may, I will always esteem and adore the divine genius of this Gentleman, taking from him what I understand with humility and admiring with veneration what I am unable to understand.

>[1925]

[Anonymous No.20105572]

>>20105500
Jesus christ what a midwit. Thanks for stopping me from ever reading borges

[Anonymous No.20105582]

>>20105572
I wouldn't go so far as to say he's a midwit but i really dislike his writing. It's too ornate.

[Anonymous No.20105603]

>>20105572
his fiction is good, but yeah he was a lousy critic

[Anonymous No.20105606]

>>20105582
This reads like a random /lit/ poster decided to write a purposefully purple but meaningless post about a book he hasn’t read as some kind of parody of another writer to get (you)s in a bait thread

[Anonymous No.20105621]

>>20105606
Ah, but to have one of Perseus' arrows fired into the night sky as a flurry of rose petals descends upon the rivers of your anguished inner monologue as you have Anon!

[Anonymous No.20105665]

>>20105606
>hasn’t read as some kind of parody of another writer
What other writer could he possibly be parodying? I wonder

[Anonymous No.20105689]

He was like 25 when wrote that, and it shows lol. He admitted himself that he sort of detested his younger prose, for being too baroque and pretentious. From that period i've only read his poems, which are certainly more pleasant.
It probably does not help to read a translation either. I have read somewhere that his prose is innately english in its syntax, and that is why it is very unique within spanish literature, I can sense he is trying quite hard to be baroque with his prose here , but his instrinsic englishness does not help him,

Either way, learn spanish and stop being such anglo pseuds

[Anonymous No.20105708]

>>20105606
>>20105689
Borges, and especially at 25, was a sheltered kid. He spent all day in libraries reading and writing. I believe he had his first job at 30, and it was working at a library for the government or something.

[Anonymous No.20105744]

>>20105572
>implying you're not a midwit

[Anonymous No.20105748]

>>20105378
he has a book called Seven Nights which is a compilation of seven conferences he made on various literary topics, among them Ulysses. If you want to know what he really thought about it read that instead of the review he wrote when young.

[Anonymous No.20105901]

>>20105708
Yep.

[Anonymous No.20105911]

>>20105708
Based

[Anonymous No.20105957]

>>20105572
Read Tlon and and the Circular Ruins, and stop saying midair. It's common.

[Anonymous No.20106277]

>>20105748
Very interesting. I'll check it out.

I'm actually the OP, and I'm currently at work on some major academic writing involving Ulysses. I'm a huge Borges fan, and I know he had such interesting opinions about literature, so when I heard he'd talked about Joyce and Ulysses I knew I had to track his opinion down.

I've used Borges' commentary on Nathaniel Hawthorne before, in another piece of academic writing. Borges is a fun critic to play around with.

[Anonymous No.20106406]

>>20106277
https://youtube.com/watch?v=i_ZTt_JQXRU

[Anonymous No.20107126]

>>20105500
>>20105525
>>20105535
Argentine here, this wasn't written by /that/ Borges, it was actually written by Samuel Borges Louis, a Jewish-Argentine author of BA that was a minor success before being suppressed by Peronist rule. Since many of his books were destroyed, some librarians took to binding his essay collections in covers by the much more obscure 18-th century Chilean poet Jorges Louis Borges, which has since led to the present confusion not only in the Anglo world, but also in much of Latin America.

Of course in an ironic twist of fate, the young writer and librarian Georgie Francisco Acevedo would then take up the name of the obscure poet, being greatly influenced by a collection of Samuel Borges Louis' essays concerning literary criticism, which itself contained the seeds to much of his later style (however was much less refined, and much much more pretentious).

/That/ Borges, the famous librarian, did in fact write a review of Joyce's Ulysses, but it's much more sublime and clever than the one posted in this thread. As far as I can tell it's never been translated into English, which is probably because much of the meaning and beauty of the essay comes from riffs on obscure Spanish puns and opaque references which slowly drift of into a sort of irreverent self-reference which can't be translated or even understood by people who weren't born and raised in a specific milieu around a couple culturally distinct city blocks of downtown Buenos Aires. I did once encounter a copy of this essay while browsing the "Pescador Marrón" Provincial Library of Salta, so perhaps you could try getting in touch with them.

[Anonymous No.20108104]

>>20107126
That you JLB?

[Anonymous No.20108232]

>>20105708
Wow literally me

[Anonymous No.20108296]

>>20105708
>especially at 25, was a sheltered kid. He spent all day in libraries reading and writing. I believe he had his first job at 30
that sounds EXACTLY like /lit/ posters

[Anonymous No.20108819]

>>20107126
Based poster

[Anonymous No.20109317]

>>20107126
now this is a good post. thanks anonito.

[Anonymous No.20109369]

>>20105572
yeah he's shit

[Anonymous No.20109814]

>>20107126
>As far as I can tell it's never been translated into English, which is probably because much of the meaning and beauty of the essay comes from riffs on obscure Spanish puns and opaque references which slowly drift of into a sort of irreverent self-reference which can't be translated or even understood by people who weren't born and raised in a specific milieu around a couple culturally distinct city blocks of downtown Buenos Aires. I did once encounter a copy of this essay while browsing the "Pescador Marrón" Provincial Library of Salta, so perhaps you could try getting in touch with them.
Diego Armando/10

[Anonymous No.20110076]

>>20105689
>I have read somewhere that his prose is innately english in its syntax
kek Anglos still seething and coping to this day that Borges didn't write in English

[Anonymous No.20110431]

>>20110076
It's not like Borges loved the language either

[Anonymous No.20110619]

>>20110431
>My destiny is the Spanish language. -JLB
He accepted it one way or the other.

[Anonymous No.20110943]

>>20110619
A few lines later he talks about Spanish being "Quevedo's bronze"
Accepting something isn't liking it

[Anonymous No.20111823]

>>20107126
based and borges-pilled

[Anonymous No.20111851]

>>20110943
I never said it was. But he could've written in any language (he knew French and English, some German) yet he chose Spanish. Taking Borges' humor literally is also a beginner's mistake.