2014_05_19_FYL_That history should copy literature is inconceivable.

The group of research in Recent History (GIHRE) of the University of Navarra invited last Friday, May 16, Professor Sonia Thon, from Acadia Universityin Nova Scotia, Canada -who currently enjoys a sabbatical year-, to give a seminar on the "Historical and political context of the short story "topic of the traitor and the hero" by Jorge Luis Borges".

This story was published in the Argentine magazine "Sur" in 1944 and is one of Borges' shortest, which also has two endings (the second version dates from 1956). Professor Thon used the simile of the layers of onion to delve into the complexity of this story. Although one could also speak of a game of mirrors, or of Russian dolls. The understanding of "topic of the traitor and the hero" depends in part on the historical-cultural background of the reader.

 "Borges' fantastic tales reveal much more than what is understood at first glance. They integrate fiction and reality; it is the reader who has to try to elucidate what he wants to explain. Borges was very calculating. He put the stories together, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge ," said Professor Thon. That is to say, his work, in this case, is not the result of an inspiration, but the result of an express will to denounce a contemporary historical fact: the dictatorship of General Perón.

The participants at seminar had had the opportunity to read the story before. The author explains at the beginning that it is only a plot that he has imagined "under the notorious influence of Chesterton (discursive and exornator of elegant mysteries) and of the academic advisor Leibniz (who invented the pre-established harmony)" and that "details, rectifications, adjustments are missing; there are areas of the story that have not yet been revealed to me". Professor Thon commented on the importance of testimonial literature; "there are those who claim that this subject story is not history, but it seems interesting to see how Borges interprets the moment and draws a parallel between the betrayal of Caesar, who crossed the Rubicon ignoring Pompey -which represented the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire- and Perón, who violates neutrality to ally himself with the Nazis and divides the Argentine armed forces". "That history should have copied history was astounding enough; that history should copy literature is inconceivable," writes Borges in the story under study.

"topic of the traitor and the hero" tells the story of a researcher, Ryan, who is commissioned to write the biography of his great-grandfather, Fergus Kilpatrick, who was killed in a theater on the eve of the revolution he had planned. The plot of the story is an enigma. The description of reality, imprecise; it seems to be written in the present of 1944 although it is later retracted to move to 1824. Also from entrance the space is indefinite; then we are in Ireland.

Ryan discovers mysterious coincidences between the circumstances of Julius Caesar's death and those of the Irish revolutionary hero Kilpatrick. And in turn the character in the story also discovers coincidences between the conversation Kilpatrick had with a beggar on the day of his death and Shakespeare's play "Macbeth". Kilpatrick ordered the execution of a traitor at the last conclave before the revolution. Nolan discovers that the traitor they were looking for was Kilpatrick himself, but in order not to harm the revolution - whose main representative for the people was Kilpatrick - he decided to use the execution of the traitor to encourage the revolutionary outbreak. Thus, he planned all the words Kilpatrick would say, everything he would do before being killed by a mysterious character in a theater in Dublin, based on Shakespeare's plays.

"topic of the traitor and the hero" was adapted to the cinema by Bertolucci in the film "The spider's strategy" (1970).