Borges' Work: the Relationship of Author and Audience - Book Report/Review Example

 Borges would have loved the internet. There he would have found a realization—in digital if not physical form—of the "The Library of Babel" with all of the knowledge of human civilization spread out in an endless array; but not quite all: the items that one wants most are hidden behind the tantalizing wall of Google Booksearch's snippet preview. Moving along a web-ring, one inevitably heads back to the point of origin through an unpredictable labyrinth of websites. The infinite maze is organized through the power of Google which uses mysterious and secret algorithms to seek out lost and hidden knowledge; the engine itself is named after the childish babbling that precedes human language. And what a mystery Borges would have found in the recursive structure of the number google itself: 10100 or 1010x10! In a quarter of a second, Google carries back 18,900,000 instances of Borges' name alone. One piece of yarn stretched through this labyrinth reveals the quote, "'I do not Know Which of Us Has Written This Page'" but the link that carries on that thread has been snipped by the cruel god 404, so, as with so many of Borges' stories, the end can never be known. But to what could that statement apply better than Wikipedia, the font of all knowledge and all lies, where one can never tell if one is reading of events that actually happened or a deliberately deceptive fiction, and where one can change the very nature of consensus reality at will? This rambling and random discourse already reveals all of the secrets of "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," for it is almost true that Borges wrote only two stories, and the one at hand does not involve an Argentine cowboy proving his manhood with five inches of naked steel. Borges sets at the top of his story a quotation from Yeats' poem, The Tower. The phrase "Platonic Year" in this quotation suggests the whole idea of Borges' story. In the Timaeus Plato says that the greatest gift of the gods to humanity was the orderly arrangement of the stars and planets in their courses because it is from their motion that the concept of time derives, and further leads to investigations into natural science that ultimately produce philosophy, the highest achievement of mankind in his view (47a). Just as the month is determined by the motion of the moon and the year by the (apparent) motion of the sun, he postulates a longer cosmic cycle when all of the planets and the fixed stars shall have moved from a particular configuration through all of their wanderings and then return to precisely the same position, just as the sun repeats the same circuit each year. Because of its great length compared to a single lifespan, human beings have never observed this greater year and have no name for it (39d). So far Plato. But, in the centuries intervening between Plato and Yeats, the idea took on a life of its own (Mann). It became associated with the Hesiodic ages of mythological history (Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron), and with the precession of the equinoxes (the apparent motion of the whole celestial sphere imparted by a slight wobble of the earth's rotation, not known until centuries after Plato's time), and with apocalyptic ideas of world ages in human history and their repetition; their exact repetition, so that another Argo will sail, Achilles will be born and die again (as described in Vergil's Fourth Eclogue). By Yeats' time, all of this had been mixed with modern historiography and Christian myth into a Theosophical, occultist mishmash of determinism, cycle, and apocalyptic. By invoking this overgrown theme through his quotation, Borges establishes the themes of determinism and inevitability moving through the ages for his narrative. Borges begins his story by telling the reader that he is not writing a story. Rather he intends to set down notes for a story that has not become entirely clear to him. This takes the reader entirely off guard. This is not how an author writes a story, it would seem, but how he would talk to a friend over dinner. This framework, unusual if not unheard of in any writer except Borges, creates a tremendous sense of plausibility. If what is printed on the page is not the Truth in the largest sense, it is at least true in the sense of really reflecting the author's thoughts in a direct way, or so it would seem. But this premise is in fact highly fictive: writers do not print their private ruminations meant for friends and colleagues. Its actual effect is to allow Borges to dispense with ordinary narrative conventions of plot and character and concentrate on the ideas he wants to express. If the author is just discussing his ideas, the reader will not expect a finished work. Yet the reader may find a highly finished work developed in a way he is not led to expect. Borges does not begin even with a summary of the story but speculates about its possible setting. What he wants is "an oppressed yet stubborn country" (143), where there was armed revolt in the nineteenth century, sometime in his grandfather's era. He gives a list: Poland or Ireland, Argentina or the Balkans; it doesn't matter.1 At random,2 for the sake of discussion, he picks Ireland, and settles on the year 1824. That date does not seem to have any obvious significance for the Irish independence movement, but all the better for Borges' fiction as he builds it up to a crucial turning point of revolution. Next Borges pulls from thin air the names of characters: the historian Ryan, great grandson of the famous Irish freedom fighter Fergus Kilpatrick. The event in question is supplied: Kilpatrick's assassination. As its centennial approaches (setting the story 20 years before the date Borges supplies for his own writing—"Today, January 3, 1944" (143)—fostering more realistic illusion), Ryan takes up writing a study of his famous ancestor. As Ryan investigates, he find many curious parallels between Kilpatrick's assassination in a theater and that of Julius Caesar in the Senate. Ryan does not like co-incidence and begins to think of some metaphysical connection between the two events. Borges gives an impressive list of names to support such speculation: Hegel, Spengler, and Vico. These all, in one way of another, express the thought of the next figure on the list: Hesiod with his myth of the ages, supporting Hegel's dialectic and Spengler's degeneration. Is metempsychosis the answer? Was Kilpatrick Caesar born again, just as Vergil foretold all the characters of Homer and Apollonius would repeat their lives? Ryan "is saved form those circular labyrinths," (144) when he discovers that, on the way to the theater, a beggar spoke to Kilpatrick words derived from Macbeth. Ryan might accept history replaying itself over and over, but not drama erupting into history. Ryan discovers that Kilpatrick's revolution colleague James Alexander Nolan was a considerable littérateur. He had translated Shakespeare into Gaelic and written an article "on the Swiss Festspiele—vast peripatetic theatrical performances that require thousands of actors and retell episodes in the same cities, the same mountains in which they occurred" (144).3 Ryan slowly pieces together what had happened; he reads, as it were, the drama that Nolan had written. Fitzpatrick was found to be a traitor to the revolutionary movement. Nolan had discovered this when Kilpatrick gave him the job of discovering a traitor suspected of being in the midst. When he was exposed to the other revolutionary leaders, Fitspatrick had enough loyalty to the cause to sign his own death warrant, and to wish not to harm the movement by having his reputation damaged. So Nolan had concocted a great drama. Kilpatrick was not exposed, but martyred. All of the famous events of that day, the trip to the theater, the encounter with the beggar, various prophecies, and the anonymous assassin, were scripted by Nolan. These were created as the elements of a myth that "would engrave themselves upon the popular imagination and hasten the rebellion" (145). His reconstruction of events seemed all too obvious to Ryan. Nolan must have realized that some later historian would discover the dramatic nature of the assassination, but loyal to the nationalist myth the event created, would not reveal them. Ryan himself is following Nolan's script. Yeats' The Tower illustrates for Borges not only the Platonic Year, but the whole of the story, not only the predestination of right and wrong, but all the generations of men trapped in the performance of a dance they cannot quit. Borges exposes in this way the relationship of author and audience. By using every stratagem available to him, Borges prevails upon the reader's confidence and shapes his thought so that by the end of the story the reader is happy to accept notions of causality that, if baldly narrated (as Borges pretends to do), would seem impossible, if not ridiculous. He is even able to congratulate himself that he is not like Ryan. While he turns himself over to Borges momentarily, he knows that Borges' work is fictive and can detach himself from it. But that does not make Borges much less of a puppet master than Nolan; he is merely scaled against the real world rather than the much smaller and simpler imagined world. Bibliography Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero." Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking, 1998, 143-46. Mann, Neil. The System of W. B. Yeats's A Vision. 7 Feb. 2009. . Plato. The Collected Dialogues including the Letters. Bollingen Series 71 ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Rolland, Romain. The People's Theater. trans. Barrett H. Clark. New York: H. Holt, 1918. Read More