A story about reputation, the relations between truth and spectacle and the prison space of the ideal reader, story and telling are both so daring you gasp with delight. Borges is convinced that a short story can be absolutely anything he wants it to be – and why not. The tale concerns the dramatic assassination of a much-loved national independence hero, or rather the unravelling of what ‘really’ happened by the hero’s great grandson who is compiling his biography. The idea that stories should be, if not exactly original, then at least different from other stories, is demolished:
“The action transpires in some oppressed and stubborn country: Poland, Ireland, the Republic of Venice, some state in South America or the Balkans … Has transpired, we should say, for although the narrator is contemporary, the narrative related by him occurred towards the middle or beginning of the nineteenth century. Let us say, for purposes of narration, that it was in Ireland, in 1824. The narrator is named Ryan …’
This is not only a story that could happen in many times and places and has. It also bears uncanny resemblances to famous historical events and literary texts, as Ryan discovers. These likenesses both ground the story as the tale of a ‘true’ hero, and suggest complex, near-unbelievable duplicity.
First published in Spanish in Sur in February 1944. First published in English in Fictions, Jupiter Books, 1965, translated by Anthony Kerrigan. Also available, translated by Andrew Hurley, in Collected Fictions, Penguin, 1999
A Personal Anthology 