Bertolucci on Borges

According to Bertolucci, he took from Borges “the mechanism” of the story, that is, the very basic plot, which he then translated to the Italian context in which he is interested. There is something very appropriate in this change of setting. After all, as Borges notes, before deciding to actually narrate “Theme of the Traitor and the Her o” in Ireland: “the action takes place in an oppressed and resistant country: Poland, Ireland, the Republic of Venice. . .”. Moreover, the abstractness of Borges's presentation also permits it to be adapted to less clearly colonial, but still repressive, situations, such as the divided Italy of the fascist period.

Moreover, the text as written resembles a treatment for a film script. The story is summarized so that only the basic twists and turns of the plot are retained. In my opinion, it is not too far fetched to even imagine it as a kind of pitch for a movie idea. Borges, the would be filmmaker, telling a skeptical producer: “we can film this movie in the cheapest or more convenient of these locations.”

However, I can’t help feeling that Bertolucci misunderstands Borges’s short story. While Borges was interested “in the cyclical nature of things,” as the Italian filmmaker notes, and the topic is present in other stories, such as “The Library of Babel,” and was the subject of one of his essays, “Cyclical Time,”I think this is not the core idea explored in “The Theme of the Traitor and Hero.” Instead, I believe that the story is more concerned with the tenuous separation between hero and traitor, a topic in which the Argentine writer was also interested. (This blurring of the antinomy hero/traitor is part of Borges’s consistent undermining of binary oppositions in his stories). For instance, in “The Shape of the Sword,” another story (partly) set in Ireland, Borges narrates the story of an apparently Irish patriot, ironically known as the “Englishman” in the Uruguay where he now lives. However, at the end it is revealed that he is actually John Vincent Moon, traitor to the independence movement. In “Three Versions of Judas,” the archetypal traitor is presented as the true martyr and savior. In “The Theologians,” the deadly struggle between two fathers of the early Christian church—Aureliano and Juan de Panonia—culminates in their discovery that: “for the incomprehensible divinity he [Aureliano] and Juan de Panonia (the orthodox believer and the heretic, the hater and the hated, the accuser and the victim) constituted one person.”

I am not arguing that the Nietzschean “eternal return” is not present in the story, just that it’s not the main topic of the story. However, Bertolucci, who claims to have been particularly impacted by psychoanalysis when making The Spider’s Stratagem, may have been influenced by Freud when interpreting the story. For repetition compulsion is one of the core traits of the unconscious and, in particular, of psychological trauma. Breaking free from its “cyclical nature” is one of the goals of all psychoanalytic treatment.