James Joyce’s Ulysses in Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial

The aim of this article is to analyse the presence of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) in Respiración artificial, the first novel by the Argentinean writer Ricardo Piglia (1941). Published in 1980, Respiración is a fictional representation of a near and tragic past, the last Military Dictatorship in Argentina, but it is also a literary re-assessment of earlier stages in the history of the nation, as well as a metatextual comment on western culture and on Argentine literature. James Joyce’s Ulysses is present in Piglia’s novel mainly through its main character, Emilio Renzi, who belongs to a literary genealogy that can be traced back to Stephen Dedalus and even Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of Stephen Hero. The analysis will focus on the many allusions and quotations of Ulysses in Piglia’s novel with the purpose of showing how they are resignified by Piglia in a different sociocultural context.


Introduction
The aim of this article is to analyse the presence of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) in Respiración artificial, the first novel by the Argentinean writer Ricardo Piglia (1941-). Published in 1980, Respiración artificial, as suggested by the polysemy of the title itself, is a fictional representation of a near and tragic past, the last Military Dictatorship in Argentina, but it is also a literary re-assessment of earlier stages in the history of the nation, as well as a metatextual comment on western culture and on Argentine literature. James Joyce's Ulysses is present in Piglia's novel mainly through its main character, Emilio Renzi, who belongs to a literary genealogy that can be traced back to Stephen Dedalus and even Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of Stephen Hero. Frustration, arrogance, anticonventionalism are some of the traits of these characters, through whom the authors achieve a parodic approach to themselves as writers. The analysis will focus on the many allusions and quotations of Ulysses in Piglia's novel with the purpose of showing how they are resignified by Piglia in a different sociocultural context.
Even if Piglia pays homage to James Joyce in most of his fiction, starting in some of his first short stories, and reaching his highest with the parody of Finnegans Wake in La ciudad ausente (1992) 1 , the analyses of the presence of Ulysses in Respiración artificial has a special interest because it centers on Piglia's recreation of Stephen Dedalus, the aesthete par excellence of the western literary tradition, and on the concept of spiritual paternity developed in Ulysses. My analysis will therefore concentrate on Emilio Renzi, the central character of Respiración artificial. I will approach him taking as a background model not only the character of Ulysses, but also his embryonic manifestations in the Stephen Daedalus of Stephen Hero and the Stephen Dedalus of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 2 .
As many great works of ficiton, Respiración artificial can be said to belong to different subgenres: it is an instance of the fictionalization of History, it is highly metafictional and it is also an enigma novel. It is divided into two parts. The epigraph of the first one, from T.S. Eliot, "We had the experience but missed the meaning, an approach to the meaning restores the experience", announces the enigmatic atmosphere that permeates the whole novel. The first part is mainly epistolary: it is made up of the letters exchanged between Emilio Renzi, Piglia's alter ego 3 and a character present in most of his fiction, and Renzi's uncle, Marcelo Maggi, a professor of Argentine History that lives in Concordia, Entre Ríos. Maggi has inherited documents written more than a hundred years before and whose meaning might involve the possibility of deciphering not only of a family story but the enigma of the History of the country itself.
The title of the second part of the novel is "Decartes". Providing a formal contrast to the first part, this second one is mainly made up of the dialogues that develop during a day and a night between Renzi -who has travelled to Concordia to meet his uncle-and Tardewski 4 , a Polish intellectual and a close friend of Maggi's -though the commentaries of another well-known local intellectual are also included. This second part is strongly metafictional, since, through these dialogues, it provides a critical interpertation of Argentine culture and literature, and of the western cultural tradition, with an emphasis on modern philosophical thought. Maggi never turns up -he has "disappeared", a victim of the military regime, the reader can infer-but he has left Renzi the book he is writing on the bases of the old family documents and the documents themselves. Renzi is now responsible for interpreting Argentine History, which he eventually does through fiction, apparently the only means to make sense out of the fragmentary information available 5 .
As stressed in the introduction, Ulysses is constructed as an intertext of Respiración artificial mainly through Piglia's recreation of one of the protagonists of Joyce's masterpiece. I said that Piglia builds his character Emilio Renzi in the tradition of Stephen Dedalus. As we know, the germ of Stephen Dedalus is Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of Stephen Hero. Piglia has affirmed more than once 6 that these characters are "aesthetes". As already mentioned, this distinctive feature of Stephen's personality appears in Stephen Hero and is further developed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses. Towards the end of Stephen Hero, the character says that the function of a writer is to register the epiphanies with great care, since they are the most delicate and evanescent moments. He understands by epiphany "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself" (211). As Joyce himself, Stephen has been influenced by Walter Pater, whose famous conclusion of The Rennaissance stresses the capacity of art to allow a direct access to experiences of great intensity. It would be also necessary to stress at this point, that Daedalus, according to the classical mythlogy, was a famous artist that worked as an architect and sculptor in Athens. He was the one that built Minos' Labyrinth in Crete and suggested Ariadna the way to save Theseus. When king Minos knew about this, Daedalus was closed in the labyrinth together with his son Icarus. But Daedalus made wings for both, which he stuck with wax, and they flew away. Stephen's surname, as we can see, also alludes to the aesthetic activity. Even if it is true that together with the transformation of the surname in A Portrait of the Artist, there were important transformations in the character himself, and, that, the same as Joyce, Stephen Dedalus 7 was capable of becoming independent from Pater, he is still the aesthete that looks at the world from art and is absolutely conscious of this aesthetic look. This is the way in which Stephen explains this approach to Lynch in A Portrait of the Artist: In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or time [...] But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immesurable background of space or time which is not. (212) The aesthetic look is substantially different from the ordinary look. As stated a few lines bellow: The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure. (213) In A Portrait of the Artist, there is also a scene on the beach in which the narrator expresses Stephen's thoughts in a paterian style. The third episode of Ulysses includes another scene on the beach, which the reader cannot but relate with the one in A Portrait: Joyce's Mother has died between the two episodes 8 and the presence of death is overwhelming in the scene: "Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara"(37).
There is here an allusion to the importance that the epiphanies had had for him and on which he now ponders sarcastically.
Yet, the influence of the epiphanies of his first literary experiences persists in Stephen, at least from Piglia's point of view. In 1989, in an interview on the relationship between literature and life, referring to Renzi, Piglia says. "(...) there is here a whole literary genealogy that comes from Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, Faulkner's Quentin Compson, the young aesthete, fragile and romantic that tries to be unmerciful and lucic" (Crítica y ficción, 189). The same parodic approach to himself that Piglia expresses through Renzi is present in the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses. Dissatisfation, a critical attitude towards the recalcitrant aspects of Irish culture at the beginning of the XX century -its antisemitic attitudes, its provincial convencionalism, its narrow catholicism, censorship-these are all variants of the same mentality recreated in Piglia's novel. Joyce's attitude towards Irish culture compares with Piglia´s with respect to Argentinean culture: They both write in an attempt to decode their cultures and in this attempt they both achieve a profound revolution of the narrative forms.
The presence of Stephen Dedalus becomes stronger through allusions, quotations and commentaries. At the end of the first letter adressed to Renzi, Maggi writes: "History is the only place where I can get some alleviation for this nightmare from which I am trying to awake" 9 (18-19). Piglia has explained the meaning of this encoded message. In his essay "Novela y utopía", he says about this utterance: Of course, it is the inversion of Joyce's phrase, Stephen Dedalus's phrase, really, "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". Maggi transforms it to Renzi, he sends him a sort of coded message, because the nightmare, of course, is in the present, in 1976 [which is the date of Maggi's letter to Renzi]. History becomes the place where things can change and be transformed. In those moments when there seems that nothing changes and everything is closed and the nightmare of the present seems eternal, history, Maggi says, proves that there were identical closed situations and that finally a way out was found. The traces of the future are in the past, the tame stream of the water of history erodes the firmest stones. (Crítica y ficción 161) There is another instance in which Piglia evaluates Joyce by referring to Ulysses, through a quotation, this time. Again, Joyce and Ulyssess appear in relation to the theme of history in the context of the conversation between Renzi and Tardewski. Renzi says that he does not believe that adventure can have a place in the world of today (110). He thinks that parody has "stopped being, as Tinianov's followers believed at a time, the mark of literay change, to become the centre itself of modern life" (110); he insists that "parody has completely taken the place of history" and ends with a rhetorical question: "Or is not paradoy the negation itself of history?" (110). Immediately after these words Renzi quotes, cryptically, the beginning of the third episode of Ulysses "Ineluctable Modality of the Visible", which he attribues to "the Irish dressed up as Telemachus, in Trieste's Carnival, in 1921". It is not difficult for the competent reader to relate the phrase to Ulysses, since the clues are very clear. Joyce spent many years of his life in Trieste 10 and wrote part of Ulysses there; Stephen Dedalus is, on the other hand, a re-elaboration of Telemachus 11 . The words undoubtedly belong to Stephen.
Immediately afterwards, Renzi asks Tardewski if he really met Joyce. Tardewski answers that he saw him a couple of times, and adds: "He would have accepted, I suppose, your version that today only parody exists (because, as a matter of fact, what was he but a parody of Shakespeare's) (110). Renzi will then confirm that Stephen is a kind of Jesuit Hamlet, undoubtedly alluding to Joyce's and his character's education, and he will express what Piglia has repeatedly stressed in his interviews: "There is a sort of continuity: the young aesthete that only lives in his dreams and that, instead of writing, spends his time expounding his theories (...) I see like a line (..) let's say Hamlet, Stephen Dedalus, Quentin Compson" (144). The circle has been completed: Renzi belongs now not only to the tradition of Quentin Compson and Stephen Dedalus, but also to that of Hamlet's.
On the other hand, even if Tardewski's characterization of Joyce's novel as a porody of Hamlet might sound rather pejorative, from the point of view of a reader acquainted with the new meanings that the term "parody" has acquired in contemporary theory, the comment opens new possibilities of interpretations for Ulysses. Shakespeare is precisely the main theme of the episode of the Library in Ulysses, the best one for Piglia (Crítica y ficción, 16) and the one that is commented in Respiración artificial.
The commentary is a coded one. It develops in the Club Social in Concordia in a dialogue between Renzi and Marconi, a friend of Tardewski's who is a poet and literary journalist. After a long discussion on Argentine literature, Marconi says: "this sounds like a novel by Aldous Huxley", to what Renzi replicates: "Huxley? (...) I prefer the chapter in the Library, Scylla and Charybdis, in the Gaelic Telemachiad" (130). The episode of the Library is then explicitely presented as a term of comparison in the discussion on Argentine literature the characters have embarked on. Deciphering Renzi's cryptical message, Marconi replies: "Let's then disscuss about Hamlet" and he adds "Or aren't we going to demostrate through algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the spectre of his own father? Eh, Buck Mulligan?" (130). This is the end of the quotation that from the episode in the Library has passed to to the conversation of the first episode between Stephen, Buck Mulligan and Haines in the Martello Tower. Haines asks Stephen about his idea of Hamlet. And it is Mulligan who answers the question in the words quoted by Marconi. Curiously enough, Stuart Gilbert, in his famous study of Ulysses, begins his analysis of Scylla and the Charybdis with this reference to Mulligan's words. Let's remember that Gilbert's study on the parallelisms between Ulysses and the Odyssey is based on the correspondences given by Joyce 12 . From this point of view, each episode is given a time, space, symbol, colour, organ of the human body, literary technique and subtext of the Odyssey. Scylla and the Charybdis has the Library as a place, the time is two o' clock in the afternoon, the organ is the brain, the art, literature, the symbol, Stratford, London and the technique dialectics.
The quotation of Mulligan's words by Gilbert has as a purpose to put emphasis on the paternity motif, which according to the author plays a central role in the chapter (211).
Though the participants in the conversation -Stephen Dedalus, Mr. Best, John Eglinton, Mr. George Russell and the "Quaker-lyster" (the librarian), later joined by Mulligan-discuss the whole western tradition in literature and philosophy, from Socrates to contemporary writers, Synge, for instance, the discussion is centered on Shakespeare's and, especially, Hamlet's personality. Stephen's hypothesis, that he supports in a quasi Platonic dialogue, is that Shakespeare, who wrote Hamlet some months after his father's death, identifies himsel with Hamlet's father more than with the protagonist himself. Marking a difference with the Socratic model, Stephen's aim is not truth. As Gilbert has pointed out, for Sthephen, what really counts, more than the conclusion, is the intellectual interest, the aesthetic value of the dialogue. This interpretation coincides with the techinque stressed by Joyce in the letters he gave to Gilbert. As we know, in these letters Joyce put a lot of emphasis on dialectics 13 .
Eglinton's conciliatory solution, "He [Shakespeare] is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all" (200), accepted by Stephen, can be superficially interpreted in Mulligan's humorous comment: "Cuckoo! Cuckoo!" (201) alluding to Anne Hatheway's adventures mentioned during the conversation 14 , but they also point to a serious reading, as stressed by Gilbert: "The mystery of paternity, in its application to the first and second person of the Trinity, to King Hamlet and the Prince, and, by inference, to the curious symbiosis of Stephen and Bloom is always at the background of Stephen's exegisis of Shakespeare" (221). The central motif of the chapter is then paternity in its broadest sense: Promethean, Christian, human.
There is one last symbol to be analysed: Stratford, London, which can be connected with the title of the episode. Scylla is in fact the name of a geographic place in the Strait of Messina, which has suffered important changes if compared with the Homeric descriptions, due to the earthquake of 1783. In times of Homer, Scylla was an impressive stone clift with a cavern at the top where Scylla lived. In front of Scylla was the great whirpool of Charybdis, what turned the strait into a vary dangerous place for seamen. Gilbert explains the symbology of the stone clift by relating it to the stability of Dogma, Aristotle and Stratford, and the whirpool, to Mysticim, Platonism and Elizabethan London. Shakespeare, Jesus and Socrates, the same as Ulysses, go through the trial with strength and courage, though not without scars (224). Let's add to the symbolism of the chapter, that Shakespeare left Stratford for London; Joyce, Dublin for Paris.
To conclude, it is necessary to consider the meaning of this bitextual structure in Respiración artificial. First, let us remember that the reference to the Library episode is introduced by Piglia in the context of the discussion about literature at the club in Concordia. On the basis of this comparison, it can be inferred that Piglia also considers that the importance of the discussion lies to a great extent on the originality of the ideas developed, on the aesthetic value of the dialogue, as expressed by Gilbert. Piglia, from an inevitable postmodern standing, does not aim at a unique and true evaluation of