Borges and Yeats

Somewhat hastily in class I mentioned that I wasn’t sure about what Borges thought of Yeats or, for that matter, whether “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” was influenced by the Irish poet. Of course, I had forgotten that a quote from Yeats, precisely on the “eternal return,” opens the story. However, I would still prefer not only to see the story as dealing principally with the tenuous difference between hero and traitor, but also as presenting a kind of social and structural view of the event narrated: given colonial oppression and concomitant anti-colonial resistance, events such as the ones narrated are bound to happen. The idea that history repeats itself does not strike me as necessary to an understanding of “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.” (Obviously, Bertolucci and Enrique disagree with me).

According to A Dictionary of Borges (Evelyn Fishburn and Psyche Hughes), in the story: “Yeats is presented as the prototype of the Irish poet, in opposition to the English Shakespeare, mentioned in the same context. The theme of betrayal and the ensuing desire to confess and make amends are well within the spirit of the lines spoken by Yeats on behalf of the Irish who repudiated Parnell.” While I do not agree that Yeats represents the Irish writer in “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” given that he is only explicitly present in the epigraph, Fishburn and Hughes point out intriguing possible links between the plot of Borges’s story and Yeats’ “Parnell’s Funeral.”

Yeats is a sporadic presence in Borges's writings. “The Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz” begins with an epigraph taken from the Irish poet. Some of his essays mention him, though mostly in passing. When writing about Walt Whitman, in an essay included in the translated Other Inquisitions, Borges presents Yeats as a precursor of Jung, who looked for “symbols that would awaken the generic memory”. Yeats is referred to in a footnote in his essay about the “Nightingale of Keats.” For Borges, the nightingale in question is the idea of the bird, not a specific bird. Yeats is presented as one of the many who misread the poem. Borges, in his anthology of fantastic stories, co-edited with Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, included a story by Yeats titled “The Sorcerers.” He refers to Yeats in his Book of Imaginary Beings when writing about “fairies” and “the double.”
Borges’s had a problematic relationship with Yeats’ writings. In his Introduction to English Literature (1965), co-written with María Esther Vásquez, he mentions Eliot’s statement that Yeats was the greatest poet of “our time,” but gives no personal opinion. In interviews, he frequently concurred with Eliot, only to point out that he enjoyed other poets more. He described his take on Yeats’ poetry to the Argentine writer Osvaldo Ferrari: “the fact is that his verses impress us, let’s say, as verbal artifacts; beyond what they attempt to mean.” The fact that he uses some of Yeats’s verses as epigraphs to two of his stories may be evidence of Borges’s admiration for these “verbal artifacts.”

Should one interpret Borges’s ambiguity towards Yeats as representing a kind of anxiety of influence? Although Borges tended to embrace his predecessors—a gesture represented in “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” by his mention of Chesterton—it may very well be that he felt threatened by Yeats’ achievement as a poet. After all, Borges, despite the brilliance of his prose, tended to identify more as poet than as a short story writer. But investigating the psychological aspects of this literary relationship is clearly beyond the topics we are examining in our course.