SOURCE: “Narrative Authority in Fiction and Film: The Case of Borges's ‘El Muerto,’” in Romance Notes, Vol. XXXI, No. 2, Winter, 1990, pp. 133-39.

Originally published in Sur in November 1946 and later included in one of Borges's most important collections, El Aleph (1949), “El muerto”¹ tells the story of Benjamín Otálora, an impetuous young compadrito from Buenos Aires, who flees Argentina after killing a man in a knife fight. The protagonist crosses the Río de la Plata carrying with him a letter of introduction from his ward boss addressed to a Uruguayan strongman named Azevedo Bandeira. After learning that the man whose life he has just saved during a barroom brawl is none other than Azevedo Bandeira, Otálora tears up the letter, hoping to win Bandeira's sympathies on his own merits. Although Otálora eventually succeeds in becoming one of Bandeira's gauchos, he comes to look with disdain on the honorable profession of cattleherding, preferring instead to join the strongman's smuggling operation. At first, he balks when called upon to humble himself by taking mate to his ailing boss. Later, in the story's final episode, Otálora is seen seated at the head of the banquet table, the place reserved for the one in charge.

Benjamín Otálora is an outsider, a stranger, an interloper. He is an urban tough guy, a compadrito, to whom the ways of the countryside and the gaucho are foreign. Thus, when he crosses the border between Argentina and Uruguay, he exposes himself to unknown dangers and loses control over his destiny. Authors likewise become powerless to control their literary creations when their texts cross generic boundaries and enter into the category of film. This is precisely the process that “El muerto” has undergone. The fictional work narrated by Borges has been retold and, in essence, recreated in a 1975 film directed by Héctor Olivera, a version for which Borges has expressed an intense dislike (Tyler 131).

The running time for the cinematic version, approximately one hour and forty-five minutes, is about average for a feature film. The short story, on the other hand, is extremely brief, taking up only about four pages in the Obras completas [hereafter abbreviated as OC] edition. Judging by this discrepancy in length, one would infer that Olivera has taken numerous liberties in expanding Borges's text. In fact, Olivera does make a few minor alterations to the plot. He fleshes out Borges's bare outline by providing the story with a historical framework and filling in background data on the principal characters. Generally speaking, however, his version remains faithful to the original story line.

Borges announces Otálora's fate in the first paragraph, in contrast to the film's straightforward cinematic narration, which does not allow for early disclosure of the outcome. In spite of this preparation for the inevitable conclusion, the reader is still somewhat surprised at the vertiginous rise and fall of the protagonist, the suddenness with which he encounters his fate, and the finality of the plot's resolution. We know where and how he will die—somewhere in Rio Grande do Sul, by gunshot—but Borges withholds the time and the cause of Otálora's demise. What follows this brief, yet essential preliminary paragraph is, in the narrator's own words, a summary of the key events. Pleading ignorance of all the facts in this case, Borges promises more information as it becomes available to him. In this sense, one could take the film as the promised expansion, since it does provide additional insight into character and setting, along with interpolated scenes and other details not found in the short story. While Borges's narrative technique may seem unorthodox, it is nonetheless an author's prerogative to give an outline rather than an intricate plot and to invert beginning and ending by announcing at the outset what will happen to the protagonist. In modifying and adapting the written text Olivera creates a separate and independent cinematic version subject to his direction. Thus, writer and director, each in his own way, exercise narrative authority over a particular text.

Borges's choice of words in reference to the story's conclusion—“La última escena [emphasis mine] de la historia” (OC 548)—seems to indicate that he views the work as a drama, or at the very least, that he realizes its potential for dramatization. Interestingly, this portion of the narrative provides the story's only line of dialogue, a single sentence which precipitates the action of the “final scene.” The interrelatedness of generic categories, a topic particularly applicable to “El muerto,” has been examined on countless occasions by numerous critics. In Film as Literature, Literature as Film Harris Ross offers the following assessment:

In terms of its narration, film would seem to be a rather curious hybrid, lying somewhere between the mimesis of drama and the diegesis of prose fiction. On the one hand, the filmic spectator directly apprehends the counterfactual world. On the other hand, standing between this world and the spectator is a narrating agent who chooses one vantage point over another, who chooses to display one action rather than another to the spectator. The argument advanced for the filmic narrator runs this way: film ‘tells’ its story through images as prose fiction does through words; because telling implies a teller, both film and prose fiction have agents of mediation, narrators, who control the flow of information about the fictional world to the spectator.

Héctor Olivera's camera thus serves as the “narrator” of the film El muerto. His version tells the same story—Otálora's tale as recounted by Borges—by means of a series of selected visual images rather than just words. That is, viewers see only what he chooses to show them. The film's opening scene, for example, is the knife fight in a dark city street in which Otálora kills a man. Borges had only alluded to his incident in his short story as the motivating force behind Otálora's flight.

Another way to illustrate this kind of narrative control is with the metaphors of dictatorship and divine authority. Azevedo Bandeira, the local caudillo who, along with his gauchos, operates a smuggling ring is, in symbolic terms, a dictator figure. In his epilogue to El Aleph Borges characterizes Bandeira as “una tosca divinidad” (OC 629). Don Azevedo has absolute power within his circle, but even he is subject to a higher command, that of the narrator, Borges. In the poem “Ajedrez” from the collection El hacedor (OC 813), Borges addresses the question of ultimate authority, the notion of a divine force directing the actions of individual human beings. A brief look at this poem will shed light on Borges's view of the role of fate in human destiny as depicted in “El muerto.”

In the poem the phrase “los jugadores rigen las lentas piezas” illustrates the control Bandeira exerts over his men, especially Otálora. The chessboard is described as a field where “se odian dos colores.” In the film Olivera exploits this motif in the famous Borges poem by setting El muerto within the historical context of the age-old Uruguayan political struggle between the blancos and the colorados. The chess game itself is a rite or ritual which is timeless, infinite. It is a ceremony in which innocent pawns are sacrificed. In Borges's story and Olivera's film Otálora is the pawn and his role will be that of sacrificial victim in a kingship ritual, a point which will be examined below. Borges notes that the game of chess originated in the Eastern world: “En el Oriente se encendió esta guerra.” Here, the word “Oriente” is a signifier which calls to mind the name often given to Uruguay, la Banda Oriental. The “encarnizada Reina,” by association with the word encarnado (the color red), suggests Bandeira's red-haired mistress. Although Bandeira directs the actions of his gauchos like a chess player moving his pawns, he, at the same time, is being manipulated by another “player,” a god-figure (the author Borges/the director Olivera). Therefore, with reference to the fictional work and the film, the poetic line “Dios mueve al jugador, y éste, la pieza” might read as follows: “Borges/Olivera mueve a Bandeira, y éste mueve a Otálora.” Likewise, the poet's question “¿Qué dios detrás de Dios la trama empieza?” could be restated as: “What authority greater or higher than the author/director is responsible for setting this sequence of actions (the plot) into motion?”

As Roberto González Echevarría has shown in his study The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature, an implied relationship exists between the concept of a literary author and the dictator figure. Bandeira the patrón is also the “author” of a “text.” He is the king, the absolute sovereign with reference to the other characters, whose lives he controls just as an author manipulates the actions of his literary creations. His narrative “authority,” which derives from his role as “author,” is equated with his voice in its most characteristic function—the giving of orders. In the only line in the story spoken by a character Bandeira's voice is heard issuing a command: he orders the red-haired woman to kiss Otálora in full view of everyone attending the fiesta. With this ritualistic kiss of betrayal the woman, in this context a Judas-figure, identifies the one who is to be put to death. The reader/spectator also understands that it is Bandeira's voice which has already given the order for the execution of Otálora, whose premeditated murder fits the mold of an ancient ritual sacrifice.

The slaying of Otálora occurs at a New Year's Eve celebration, an annual ritual characterized by music, drinking, and the partaking of freshly slaughtered beef.² In the midst of all this merrymaking Otálora is unaware that he is actually the main attraction, the central player, at the feast which will be his “last supper.” Ironically, this is the status he had been seeking all along, to become the patrón. However, on this occasion his role is not that of high priest but rather pharmakos (scapegoat).

In The Golden Bough Sir James George Frazer discusses an ancient Babylonian ceremony performed annually at the New Year festival in which the king renewed his power and his claim to the throne: “it would appear,” notes Frazer, “that in remote times … the kings of Babylon or their barbarous predecessors forfeited not merely their crown but their life at the end of a year's tenure of office” (327-28). In one variation of this pattern, the king, as his rule was nearing its end, would temporarily abdicate the throne in favor of a substitute monarch. The substitute was “dressed in the king's robes, seated on the king's throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, and to lie with the king's concubines.” But, at the end of a predetermined period, “he was stripped of his royal robes” and executed (328). According to Frazer, this temporary king was usually a condemned criminal. Since this was to be a substitutionary death, every effort was made to imitate the royal lifestyle as closely as possible during this brief reign.

Otálora's situation closely parallels this primitive rite. From the start he is considered a criminal. He is a marginalized individual, a compadrito, who comes not from the central district of Buenos Aires, but rather from an outlying area (“un hombre del suburbio de Buenos Aires” OC 545). Otálora lives on the periphery of the city as well as peripheral to Argentine society. To compound his estrangement, he is forced to go into exile. It is recognition and acceptance that he seeks, and in order to attain these goals he must achieve a position of power and command. Once Otálora joins Bandeira's gauchos he abandons their legitimate enterprise, cattleherding, for the more exciting (and more lucrative) criminal activity of smuggling. These gauchos are also “outsiders” in the sense that they represent society's marginal elements. They operate outside the law, literally and figuratively. Their domain is the territory along the border between Uruguay and Brazil, a remote locale beyond the jurisdiction of the central legal authority. It is a precinct whose very designation, border area, connotes lawlessness.

Otálora is allowed to assume control of Bandeira's smuggling operation—he becomes “capitán de contrabandistas” (OC 545)—and, for a short period, he enjoys all of the trappings of this position only to lose everything at story's (and film's) end, including his own life. His death completes a series of cycles: he dies at midnight, the end of the day, on December 31, the final day of the calendar year (Bell-Villada 181). Director Olivera goes Borges one better by placing the final scene on December 31, 1899, at the close of the century. Otálora takes the boss's ornate saddle, rides his horse, and sleeps with his mistress. In the film he even appropriates a fourth symbol of Bandeira's power when he sits in the old man's chair, an act which is tantamount to usurping the throne, the seat of power. In the end, however, death comes at the appointed time³ at the hands of Bandeira's bodyguard, Ulpiano Suárez, a man whose initial portrayal as “un jinete sombrío” (OC 547) solidifies his association with death.

If Ulpiano Suárez is death incarnate, what then does Otálora represent? In an interview conducted by Richard Burgin, Borges made the following observation: “‘The Dead Man’ may be … a symbol of all men. Because after all what happens to the dead man is what happens to all of us, I mean, we are given everything, or we are given many things and then they are taken away at one fell swoop” (100). If one accepts the author's interpretation, then this apparently simple story set in Uruguay and Brazil in the 1890s becomes much more than just a historical adventure tale with a regional flavor. At the very least it provides the reader with insight into Borges's ideas on fate by dramatizing the cycle of one man's life—that of Benjamín Otálora, a timeless Everyman.

“El muerto” also offers a working model of the concept of narrative authority, which, in turn, serves as a metaphor for the idea of ultimate authority. Within the framework of each text, the literary document as well as the cinematic adaptation, Azevedo Bandeira wields absolute power and functions as the author of Otálora's destiny. In like fashion, Borges and Olivera exercise control over characters and actors, just as God directs the hand of the chess player in the poem “Ajedrez.” These hierarchical relationships illustrate various levels of authorial power at work in the creative process. By examining the two texts of “El muerto,” both reader and spectator can witness the artistic application of this principle and, at the same time, gain a fuller understanding of its metaphorical and metaphysical implications.

Notes

1. All textual references to works by Borges are to the Obras completas edition, hereafter designated OC.

2. Bell-Villada (181) suggests that an element of ritual is present in this episode.

3. In a scene carefully orchestrated by Bandeira, Otálora's death takes place according to the script, a text which don Azevedo has authored. Similarly, in “El milagro secreto” (OC 508-513) the protagonist's captors, who have plotted his execution, apparently carry out the death sentence as scheduled. In this story, however, the protagonist is granted a reprieve when a higher authority intervenes and postpones his ultimate fate for one year.

Works Cited

Bell-Villada, Gene H. Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras completas, 1923-1972. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974.

Burgin, Richard. Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Avon, 1970.

Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Abridged Ed. New York: Macmillan, 1951.

González Echevarría, Roberto. The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.

El muerto [The Dead Man]. Dir. Héctor Olivera. Aries, 1975.

Ross, Harris. Film as Literature, Literature as Film: An Introduction to and Bibliography of Film's Relationship to Literature. New York: Greenwood, 1987.

Tyler, Joseph. “Borges sobre el cine: Entrevista bilingüe.” The Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe 5 (1978): 131-38.