The Aesthetics of Mythical Cityscapes from Cubism to Ultraísmo: The Metaphysical Quests for Collective National Identities in Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires

While many scholars like Joy M. Doss have compared James Joyce’s manifestation of “antihistoricism, relativism, and simultaneity” with that of Picasso (8), his possible encounter with Cubism in 1912 at the United Arts Club in Dublin (Kennedy 16) in an Irish context has been hugely neglected. Considering the history of British invasion in Ireland, it is necessary to identify Joyce’s incorporation of Celtic elements into European Cubism in relation to his mythical allusions to Celticism and Catholic medievalism in his portrayal of Dublin. Not long later, young Jorge Luis Borges departed from Argentina to visit Europe in 1923. Along with his reading of Joyce, his immersion in the Spanish art movement of Ultraísmo, particularly the principle of the synthesis of images, gave birth to his project of the creation of a “poetic myth for Buenos Aires” (Williamson 205) and his aesthetics of mise-en-abyme. While he borrows Joyce’s mythical method in his writing, he also engages with Ultraísmo, the “Spanish iteration of the European avant-garde of the 1920s,” to react against European High Modernism (Ochoa 629). Joyce’s mythical Dublin lives its afterlife in Borges’ postmodern cityscapes as they both draw on mythical elements and incorporate them into their writing to “make the reader aware of the dynamics between two distant things” from different temporality (Christ 4-5) to seek the collective memories of Irish and Argentinean. I argue that just as Joyce appropriates European Cubism into a new form of Cubist aesthetics to recreate a mythical Dublin, Borges’ appropriation of Joyce’s mythical method and Ultraísmo into an Argentinean context mythologises Buenos Aires to dismantle imperial histories through “manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (Eliot 177). Through comparing the metaphysical topography of Dublin in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Borges’ imaginary versions of Buenos Aires, in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), I examine how the visual aspects of the two reinvented cities function as allegories to implicate their search for collective national memories as contemporary ‘peripheral’ writers.