The Author of History

Ryan is a good reader. That's his problem.

He's researching his great-great-grandfather, Fergus Kilpatrick, an Irish revolutionary hero assassinated in a Dublin theater in 1824. The biography should be straightforward — the man is already a legend, his grave famous, his statue presiding over "a gray hill amid red marshes." But Ryan keeps finding anomalies. The echoes are too precise. On the eve of Kilpatrick's death, a sealed letter warned him not to attend the theater — just as Caesar received a note he never read before the Ides of March. A circular tower allegedly burned — just as omens attended Caesar's end. The words of a beggar who spoke with Kilpatrick on his final day turn out to be lines from Macbeth.

Ryan considers explanations. A secret form of time, patterns cycling through history. The transmigration of souls — perhaps Kilpatrick was Caesar, in some deep sense. Hegel. Spengler. Vico. The morphologies of history. He is, as Borges writes, "rescued from these circular labyrinths by a curious finding, a finding which then sinks him into other, more inextricable and heterogeneous labyrinths."

The finding is this: James Nolan, the oldest of Kilpatrick's companions, had translated Shakespeare into Gaelic in 1814. He had written a scholarly article on the Swiss Festspiele — vast theatrical representations that replay historical events in the very places they happened. And Nolan had ordered the execution of a traitor whose name was deleted from the records.

The pattern Ryan discovered was real. He just misread its nature. The echoes of Caesar weren't coincidence, archetype, or soul-migration. They were plagiarism. Nolan, "urged on by time, was not able to invent all the circumstances of the multiple execution; he had to plagiarize another dramatist, the English enemy William Shakespeare." The parallelisms were manufactured. History imitated literature because someone made it do so.

The mistake Ryan makes is the interpreter's error: treating an authored text as a natural phenomenon.

This is exactly the mistake Borges builds into Pierre Menard as well, though from the opposite direction. Menard rewrites the Quixote word for word. The text is identical to Cervantes's. But, Borges argues, it isn't the same text — because the context of production has changed. What reads as historical color in Cervantes reads as deliberate archaism in Menard. The same words, different meaning, because a different hand placed them there.

In "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," the mechanism runs in reverse. Nolan takes Shakespeare's words and places them in history. Ryan reads them as history. But their meaning isn't historical — it's theatrical. He's reading Shakespeare echoes in a Shakespeare performance and concluding they indicate "a secret form of time."

Both stories are about what happens when you read without knowing who the author is.

In Pierre Menard, you know too much — you know both Cervantes and Menard wrote the same words, and must grapple with how that's possible. In "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," you know too little — Ryan doesn't know Nolan authored the history he's reading. The interpretive stakes are different but the mechanism is identical: authorship changes meaning even when the words don't change.

What's stranger is what Kilpatrick does inside the authored story.

He agrees to it. The conspirators have condemned him — he was genuinely a traitor, Nolan's accusation was accurate, the proof irrefutable. Kilpatrick signed his own sentence. But he asked that his punishment not harm his country. Nolan's scheme was the answer: die as the hero you failed to be, and give the country the martyred catalyst it needs.

So Kilpatrick "swept along by this minutely detailed destiny which both redeemed him and destroyed him, more than once enriched the text of his judge with improvised acts and words." He's performing a script he didn't write, but he's also improvising inside it. The script allows for this — Nolan couldn't have predicted every moment, and left room for what Kilpatrick would do. The martyrdom is both authored and authentic. The traitor IS the hero, not through redemption that erases the treason, but through a death that contains both simultaneously.

This is different from Asterion, who thought he was the host and turned out to be the victim. Kilpatrick knows what he is. He knows what he's doing. He improvises inside the constraint. His last words are "foreseen" — and yet he articulates them. The foreseen and the genuine are the same event.

Ryan, finally, understands. He is part of Nolan's plot too — one hundred years later, the researcher who might eventually find the truth. Nolan apparently anticipated even this: the Shakespeare borrowings "were the least dramatic" passages in the performance, and Ryan suspects Nolan inserted them precisely so someone, someday, might find the trail and hit upon the truth.

Ryan sits with this. He resolves to keep silent. He publishes the hero biography. "This too, perhaps, was foreseen."

There's no escaping it once you see it. Ryan's decision to keep silent isn't free — it's the decision Nolan expected. His book glorifying Kilpatrick is the final act of the drama Nolan wrote. He has become part of the performance, just as Kilpatrick was, just as the hundreds of actors who played their parts on those days in August 1824. He thought he was reading history. He was always inside it.

Borges frames the whole story as a plan for a story he "shall perhaps write someday." But you're reading it in a published collection. Either the plan is the story — which would mean Borges is performing Ryan's predicament in the telling, producing something that is and isn't what it says it is — or the plan is a fiction of a plan, a story wearing the mask of a story-idea.

Either way, you are Ryan. You read the Shakespeare echoes and thought they indicated something. You're reading the plan for a story and thinking it points to something beyond itself. Nolan is behind Borges is behind this story. The frame is always, in Borges, part of the content.

The good reader is the one who knows when to stop reading for pattern, and ask instead: who wrote this, and what did they need?