‘The memory that is inherited from all […] in geometric progression.’ The shared geometric visions of Jorge Luis Borges and William Butler Yeats.

Abstract

The twentieth-century Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges played a leading and early formative role in the reception of Irish modernist literature in Latin America. However, his interest in the Irish writer William Butler Yeats has received little critical attention to date, and this thesis endeavours to redress this imbalance. Specifically, this thesis considers Yeats’s use of geometric imagery in his writing, and how Borges appropriated this imagery to suggest an affinity between the temporalities of modernity and changing cartographies of Ireland and Argentina in the early twentieth century. Underpinning this thesis, and included as an ‘Appendix’, is my Borges/Yeats Index of References, which outlines the references that Borges made to Yeats, and the thematic contexts in which these references arise. This Borges/Yeats Index facilitates an analysis of both the quantitative and qualitative significance of these references, which are examined in greater detail in each chapter. Specifically, this thesis situates my Borges/Yeats Index in other scholarly attempts to organise Borges’s work, and it offers significant attention to two of the most important references that Borges makes to Yeats, which are the lines of Yeats’s poetry he chooses as epigraphs to two of his short stories. This thesis also contextualises these references in Borges’s broader interest in other Irish writers and Ireland, and considers the specific affinity that Borges proposes between the literature of Argentina and Ireland, and the crucial role that Yeats played in the formulation of these ideas. Following on from these discussions is a consideration of the specific Yeatsian symbols which occur frequently in Borges’s references to Yeats, and Borges’s assimilation of these symbols into his own work. Another theme which occurs frequently in these references is memory, and this thesis considers Borges’s association of Yeats with the notion of ‘great memory’, and ideas regarding literary precursors and intertextuality that are associated with this term. The final consideration of this thesis is Yeats’s geometric systemisations, and the ways in which Borges utilises the totalising aspects of these systems to explore and subvert systemisations of time and history in his own work.

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