SOURCE: Wicks, Ulrich. “Borges, Bertolucci, and Metafiction.” In Narrative Strategies: Original Essays in Film and Prose Fiction, edited by Syndy M. Conger and Janice R. Welsch, pp. 19-36. Macomb, Ill.: Western Illinois University, 1980.

[In the following essay, Wicks places the work of Jorge Luis Borges within the metafictional tradition of Miguel de Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, André Gide, and John Barth.]

Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “Partial Magic in the Quixote”

If we want to give Borges' story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”¹ a literary ancestry (and progeny), we might find it in a tradition of which the following historical sequence of fictions can be representative: Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615), Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-67), Gide's The Counterfeiters (1925), and Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968). These are all self-conscious, self-reflexive fictions whose central concern—technically and thematically, discursively and diegetically—is fiction making itself. In Part I of Don Quixote, Cervantes gives us a prologue about not writing a prologue, a signal to us that the fiction that follows is going to be similarly self-reflexive. Early in Part I, Cervantes introduces Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historiador whose fidelity to truth is often challenged (by the narrator, by the Moorish translator, and by Quixote himself) in the name of fiction; at one point he is called an Arab liar, and Don Quixote repeatedly confuses this historian with an enchanter, who transforms reality into illusion. Never do Don Quixote and Sancho Panza become aware of their book existence, but in Part II they become aware of the existence of a book about them. All of the events of Part II take place in a world which knows (and in which materially exists) Part I of the book we're reading. As characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have their real existence to contend with, a book existence that coincides with their immediate real past, and another book existence (Avellaneda's false continuation) that grew out of the first book existence but not out of their real lives (there is also, of course, the book that Don Quixote imagines will be written about him, but it is always in the future tense, though his imaginings coexist with his adventures). In absorbing Part I into itself, Part II of Don Quixote becomes a fiction that destroys its illusions behind itself as it creates further illusions ahead, a double movement in which book and world contain each other. Toward the end, Don Quixote meets Don Alvaro Tarfe, a character from the false continuation, the reality of which Cervantes simultaneously acknowledges and destroys by bringing to life in his fictional world a character from it. Don Quixote, so often touted as the first novel, is also a paradigm of all fictions; it is exemplary of fiction making itself. Cervantes, as has been pointed out, “is the patron saint of metafiction.”²

In Tristram Shandy we are presented with a self-conscious dramatized narrator for whom narrating time, because it flows on and accumulates, is never sufficient to contain narrated time; remembering takes up too much time itself, and so the remembered past is always incomplete. In Chapter 33 of Book VI Tristram loses himself and must begin the chapter over; in Chapter 39 of Book VI there is a blank page on which the reader can make his own contribution to the story; in Chapter 17 of Book IX, Tristram cannot narrate because his uncle, in a situation Tristram has just been rendering, is whistling a song. This one-to-one correspondence among content time, narrating time, and reading time leads us ultimately into the same perpetual and frustrating present we find in Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur (1955), where the borderline between experiential reality and constructed fiction ceases to exist.

In Gide's The Counterfeiters, Edouard, a novelist, is writing a novel which will turn out to be the very book we are reading, though Gide is ostensibly narrating the reality of the actuality from which Edouard will create his fiction. The book's theme is that all perceptions of reality are counterfeit. Edouard writes in his journal, “I am beginning to catch sight of what I might call the ‘deep-lying subject’ of my book. It is—it will be—no doubt, the rivalry between the real world and the representation of it which we make to ourselves. The manner in which the world of appearances imposes itself upon us, and the manner in which we try to impose on the outside world our own interpretations—that is the drama of our lives.”³ One of the stories in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is narrated by itself (“Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction”); another, the title story, stops repeatedly while the narrator assesses the very story he is creating, constructing a narrating labyrinth that parallels the funhouse which is part of the story's substance; and yet another (“Life-Story”) contains a deuteragonist who is you, the reader, in a story of infinite narrative regress: “Another story about a writer writing a story! Another regressus in infinitum! Who doesn't prefer art that at least overtly imitates something other than its own processes? That doesn't continually proclaim ‘Don't forget I'm an artifice!’? That takes for granted its mimetic nature instead of asserting it in order (not so slyly after all) to deny it, or vice-versa?”⁴ The labyrinths of Barth's funhouse of fiction are much like the “infinite book” Borges himself suggests in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a book “whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely,”⁵ a concept Barth has fun with in the Moebius strip fiction that begins Lost in the Funhouse.

These examples illustrate a broad tradition or context within which the Borges text works. Recently we have come to call such work “metafiction.” In apparently coining the term, William Gass justifies it by saying that “everywhere lingos to converse about lingos are being contrived, and the case is no different in the novel,” and defines it as that fiction in which “the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed”; moreover, it “is characteristic of this kind of writing to give overt expression to its nature, provide its own evaluation. …”⁶ Roland Barthes, though he is including much more in his term, would call a metafictional text a “writerly” (scriptible) one, which we value today because “the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.” (The “readerly” text, in contrast, is “a classic text.”) “The writerly text,” Barthes goes on, “is a perpetual present upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.”⁷ Robert Scholes sees metafiction as assimilating “all the perspectives of criticism into the fictional process itself. It may emphasize structural, formal, behavioral, or philosophical qualities.”⁸ He works out a diagram of four basic fictional forms, which correspond to the four dimensions of criticism: 1) fiction of ideas (myth)—structural criticism; 2) fiction of forms (romance)—formal criticism; 3) fiction of existence (novel)—behavioral criticism; and 4) fiction of essence (allegory)—philosophical criticism. And Robert Alter, who got the title for his book-length study of metafiction from Borges, reminds us (as I have tried to do with the examples I began with) that metafiction is at least as old as that which we have come to call, generically, the novel. From its beginnings, the novel has explored itself self-reflexively. Though Alter avoids the term “metafiction” he might as well be describing it when he says: “Knowing that a fiction is, after all, only a fiction, is potentially subversive of any meaningful reality that might be attributed to the fiction, while assenting imaginatively to the reality of a represented action is a step in a process that could undermine or bewilder what one ordinarily thinks of as his sense of reality.” This simultaneous avowal and disavowal “boldly asserts the freedom of consciousness itself. The imagination, then, is alternately, or even simultaneously, the supreme instrument of human realization and the eternal snare of delusion of a creature doomed to futility.”⁹

In the cinema, too, there is a long tradition of self-reference, ranging from films in which filmmaking itself is part of the subject matter to such films as Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924) and Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera (1929). In the Keaton film, a movie projectionist dreams himself onto the screen and becomes a character in the very film he is projecting; at the end, back in the projection booth and framed by its opening, he does not know how to behave toward his girlfriend without taking his cues from the images on the screen, which alternate with shots of him as seen through the window of the projection booth. In Vertov's film, we see the very film we are watching being made in front of us; toward the end, the camera itself walks on tripods and takes its bows. Robbe-Grillet's films, like L'Immortelle (1963) and Trans-Europ Express (1966), are similarly metacinematic. In Godard's Contempt (1963) director Fritz Lang provides a metafilmic dimension during the making of a film of Homer's Odyssey, and in Godard's Weekend (1969) the husband and wife grumble about not liking the film they are in because all they meet are freaks. Such self-reflexiveness is different from the orthodox reflexivity found in the typical Hollywood movie of a movie being made. Contemporary reflexivity in films like Contempt and Fellini's 8[frac12] (1963), is not brought to bear on a film within the film, but rather on the film—on film—itself. “In their work, reflexive techniques cause the films to lose their transparency and become themselves the object of the spectator's attention.”¹⁰ This kind of reflexivity means that film “is able to reflect not only upon itself as signifying discourse, but also upon its own broader contexts,”¹¹ the nature of the cinema itself.

Ultimately, the phenomenon of metafictionality, taken in its largest sense to apply not only to works of prose fiction but to any self-reference or self-reflexiveness whether the work be verbal, visual, or aural, forces us to contemplate the nature of the medium in which the work presents itself. We are no longer absorbed by illusion as we were by the realistic novel or the traditional Hollywood narrative film; rather, we are made aware of the power of representation to absorb us, while at the same time we reflect upon the nature of illusion making itself and upon our own perceptual and cognitive abilities to avow or disavow an illusion. All of the works we have glanced at, beginning with the paradigmatic Don Quixote, have in common this metafictionality: a self-reflexiveness in which the work of art is made and unmade before our eyes, a constant process of illusion-creating and illusion-destroying, in pursuit of the elusion of illusion.

I have just used two words to which I would like to add a third: elusion, illusion, and allusion. Elusion means an avoidance of or escape from (detection) by quickness or cunning, illusion is something that deceives by producing a false impression, and allusion is a casual reference, the incidental mention of something, either by implication or directly; yet they all have a common etymology, from the Latin ludere, which means “to play.” In providing a context within which to work with Borges' text, I mean to suggest that “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” like Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, The Counterfeiters, Lost in the Funhouse, and the other examples, plays with its own existence as a literary artifact. It is an allusive story about the elusion of illusion. The story itself demands that we pay attention to its textuality (elusion), its intratextuality (illusion), and its intertextuality (allusion). These terms will serve for analytical purposes, but, as we will see, no simple comparison will work ultimately, especially because these levels intermingle at every point in the text.

In Borges' four-page story there are no fewer than sixteen direct allusions to other texts: mythical, biblical, historical, philosophical, and literary. The story exists in the web of other larger fictions, ranging from the specifically historical (the assassination of Lincoln) to the fictionalization of history (Shakespeare's Julius Caesar) to the creation myth itself, the supreme fiction (Hesiod's Works and Days). “It is hard,” says Robert Scholes, “to see how fiction could insist more resolutely on its fictional character.”¹² Ronald Christ sees the device of allusion as a key to the work of Borges: “Allusion unites text and reference in a point of time and space which eliminates both the separateness of the passages and of their authors.” To make allusions is “to demonstrate the timeless universality of the human mind.”¹³ For Borges allusion destroys both linear time and discrete personality; the assassination of Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, and Fergus Kilpatrick are enactments of the same timeless gesture. The story is about illusion. Ryan discovers that historical truth is really false, and that the real truth is false history. Created by Nolan, with the collaboration of Kilpatrick himself and “hundreds of actors,” actuality becomes a vast fiction, which in turn becomes actuality recorded: history. As Jaime Alazraki comments, “When the fictitious is converted into historic reality, the historic … becomes fiction. … Perhaps as an echo of the Shakespearean ‘All the world's a stage’ or Calderon's Elgran teatro del mundo, reality is seen as a gigantic performance.”¹⁴

This fiction is perpetuated as history, patterned after literature, yet prefiguring, in the time scheme of the story, a future real event: the death of Lincoln. “Kilpatrick was killed in a theater,” Borges writes, “but the entire city was a theater as well, and the actors were legion, and the drama crowned by his death extended over many days and many nights.” But ironically, “the passages imitated from Shakespeare are the least dramatic.” Ryan discovers that history is framed by fiction (STORYrhistorylSTORY) and that fictions are framed by history (HISTORYrstorylHISTORY). John O. Stark provides an appropriate image when he suggests “a symmetrical arrangement of two mirrors endlessly reflecting each other with Borges and Shakespeare on the ends, their works inside them, and Ryan in the middle.”¹⁵ In the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” Borges himself uses such a mirror image when he quotes the encyclopedia text which reads that “the visible universe was an illusion. … Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.”¹⁶

Not only was Ryan's decision to publish a book dedicated to the hero's glory foreseen, but Borges' writing of this story, “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” is part of the spiral of fictions. The tentative fiction Borges wrote is capable of engendering an infinite number of finite fictions, like the one book of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”: “Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginative permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.”¹⁷ For Borges in this story of Fergus Kilpatrick's history, fiction and history are mutually interchangeable counterperceptions; one mirrors and implicates the other. Ryan's decision to “keep his discovery silent” is in fact his contribution to both story and history. To expose the truth, had he decided to do so, would only enlarge the fiction (as Borges is doing by telling us the story of Ryan); it would be as “foreseen” as the book he does write, “dedicated to the hero's glory.”

If the story in its intertextuality is allusive and in its intratextuality (its proposed diegesis and the discourse about it, what it plays with) creates illusion, we might say in its textuality it is elusion: not only is the story thematically concerned with the elusiveness of reality, that very theme and the effort of a text to express it are elusive. Reality and actuality, Borges says, constantly elude us, to be replaced by versions of reality whether we call them history, philosophy, biography, or fiction. Fergus Kilpatrick was a betrayer and was executed as a traitor; but he was also a rebel, martyred as a hero. Nolan's orchestration of the hero's death is no less real than Kilpatrick's orchestration of his own betrayal. When we name or label things in actuality, we are counterfeiting reality; no verbalization is ever adequate to the totality of the real or, rather, our perception of the real. Even the very word “real” and the concept behind it are in this sense fictions. To name is to factionalize and to fractionalize: Fergus Kilpatrick is half traitor, half hero. Each is simultaneously true and false. Story is in pursuit of history which in turn pursues and perpetuates story. The only stories we can write are stories about the fictions we cannot avoid being in. We must realize that we are all to some degree collaborators. That is why Borges' text will never, as the narrator of it promises to do “some-day,” become more than it is: it is already its story. It plays with us while we play with our fictions of it. All we can do, as Borges is doing with his story, Nolan and Ryan are doing in the story, and I am doing in commenting on the story, is spin fictions. “Metafiction” has emerged rather recently as a term for something that has been an aspect of fiction for a long time, but it is in need of more precise definition as a descriptive term for theory and criticism. For my purposes, I define as metafiction any narrative work (verbal or cinematic) which both in its discourse and story (insofar as these can be separated in analysis) insists on intertextuality for its existence, which in its intratextuality constantly mirrors discourse with story and vice versa, and which in its textuality is finally elusive as a fixed story or discourse. Metafiction rediscovers fiction in its essence; it glories in the powers of narrative. It is not a breakdown of narrative but rather of certain conventional and prescriptive forms of narrative. Despite the high abstract, even valorizing, connotations of the term, metafiction actually restores us to narrative and narrative to us.¹⁸

Intratextually, Borges' piece is both a story and not a story; it is the story of Kilpatrick but it is simultaneously not that story (“which I shall perhaps write some-day”). It is encoded with traditional narrative elements, plot, character, theme, but fails to meet the reader's expectations of those elements. It is a story about a story, which both does and does not get told, just as Contempt and 8[frac12] seem to be films about films that cannot get made and yet are being made in and by the very films we are seeing. Textually, Borges' “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” defies traditional analytical approaches. Because the story consumes itself in the act of telling, it is elusive—a verbal ouroboros, a vicious circle, like a picture of a snake consuming its tail. With its paradoxes and vicious circles, metafiction is both centrifugal and centripetal: it absorbs us in story, but it also distances us so that we see fiction making as an infinite circle. At its most elemental, metafiction as it works in Borges' “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” enacts and reenacts a primordial scene: we are sitting around the fire and Borges is telling us a story.

When a filmmaker adapts a verbal narrative text, as is so often the case, what is it he is adapting? In the specific case of Borges' “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” adapted as The Spider's Stratagem (Strategia del ragno) by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1969, how are verbal and filmic texts related? Though the narrational situation of each is obviously quite different from the other, do we ultimately have the same narrative experience with both, whether we read the story first or watch the film first? Of course, any specific narrative experience, even of the same text on a subsequent reading, is likely to be slightly different from any other; but insofar as we can measure likeness, is the experience of the verbal text more or less identical to the experience of the cinematic text? Does the whole metafictionality of Borges' story emerge from Bertolucci's film as well? Too often in analyzing the relationships between film and literature we limit ourselves by trying to be too literal in measuring the verbal text against its cinematic adaptation; we look for episodes, characters, and subplots that have been left out, put in, or rearranged, and we forget André Bazin's observation that this is only a minor aspect of the problem and that “it is more fruitful to speculate on their differences rather than on their resemblances, that is, for the existence of the novel to be affirmed by the film and not dissolved into it.” The emphasis ought to be on the “dialectic between fidelity and creation” which in a film like Bresson's The Diary of a Country Priest (1950), an extremely faithful adaptation, can become a dialectic between the cinema and literature. “It is a question of building a secondary work with the novel as foundation. In no sense is the film ‘comparable’ to the novel or ‘worthy’ of it. It is a new aesthetic creation, the novel so to speak multiplied by the cinema.”¹⁹

In setting a verbal text next to its cinematic adaptation, we can profitably focus on the differences resulting from what is specific to each medium and, following Bazin, explore the dialectic of film and literature by focusing on the tensions between sameness and difference, between fidelity and creation. We can explore this dialectic in two texts from different media through a modified structural approach since structuralism, as Claude Lévi-Strauss succinctly defines it, “is the quest for the invariant, or for the invariant elements among superficial differences.”²⁰ There has, however, been such a proliferation of terminology from the structural theories and analyses devoted to film and literature that it is impossible to use terms such as “narrative,” “story,” “discourse,” and “narrativity” without creating ambiguity, confusion, overlapping, and even contradiction. Let me, therefore, adapt some terms and define them for my purposes here.²¹ In the pure sense, story is an abstraction; it exists independently of any manifestation. That is what makes adaptations from one medium to another possible. A narrative is a medium-specific structure that actualizes a story. A given narrative represents and presents a story, thus absolutely necessitating a narrator whose voice we can identify to a lesser or greater degree even in the most objective of narratives. The relationship between the narrator and the story-as-presented yields the level of discourse, the everything-else that is being communicated in addition to the story-as-represented. Discourse implies readers and viewers who are being communicated with. Narrativity is the process by which a reader (viewer) actively constructs and tries to make meaningful the narrative and discursive levels. Of course, in the reading and viewing process, these levels co-exist; but in analysis, we must separate them in trying to account for the way the specific narrative embodying the story works. We move from story to medium-specificity of narrative, to narration, to discourse, this last level being as unique as the specific text itself; it is the text as experienced. It is the level, as Roland Barthes says, at which the other levels find integration: “the ultimate form of the narrative, as narrative, transcends its contents and its strictly narrative forms (functions and actions).” It is also the level which is not transposable: “What is untranslatable is determined only at the last, narrational level. The signifiers of narrativity, for instance, are not readily transferable from novel to film. …”²² What is most transposable from Borges' narrative, then, is the story. What is least transferable is its discursive level, along with the narrativity demanded of the reader by the metafictional coding: intrusion of the narrator; allusion (intertextuality); the story being invented as it is being told and yet not told; and other self-reflexive devices such as the spiral of fictions.

What, then, does Bertolucci adapt? Bertolucci's text is indeed faithful to the Borges text on the level of story. This non-manifest story is easy to adapt in verbal or cinematic narrative, and it goes as follows (with full acknowledgement that these five sentences no longer constitute the pure, independent story, but already a minimal narrative): 1) A man has been martyred. 2) History (either oral or written) proclaims and perpetuates him as a hero. 3) Many years later, a descendant investigates the life of that man. 4) He discovers that his ancestor has really been a traitor. 5) He decides to keep his discovery to himself and to preserve the public version of the (hi)story. This five-unit non-manifest story is what is most transposable from Borges' “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” to Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem. Let us examine the film on the level of the story-as-represented, moving then to the level of the story-as-presented, and finally to the discourse and narrativity themselves. We will be engaging, to use Barthes' terminology again, in both a horizontal and a vertical reading: “To understand a narrative is not merely to follow the unfolding of the story, it is also to recognize its construction in ‘storeys,’ to project the horizontal concatenations of the narrative ‘thread’ on to an implicitly vertical axis; to read (to listen to) a narrative is not merely to move from one word to the next, it is also to move from one level to the next.”²³ Understanding a narrative requires both an intralevel “reading” and an interlevel “reading out,” the latter meaning a “decoding from surface to deep narrative structures.”²⁴ Narrative translation is possible from one medium to another because roughly the same set of events and existents can be read out.

Borges' text, as we have seen, does not really represent the story it presents; it is synoptic and almost reads like a scenario, something to be represented (which “I shall perhaps write some-day”). In representing the story, Bertolucci has invented his own details for manifestation, but none of these alters the five-unit abstract story. In Borges' text, “the action takes place in an oppressed and tenacious country,” Ireland being chosen only for “Narrative convenience.” In Bertolucci's text, Fergus Kilpatrick is Athos Magnani, an anti-Fascist killed on June 15, 1936; a bust of him now dominates a square in the small Italian town of Tara, where the action takes place. Some thirty years after Magnani's death, in the present, his son (also named Athos) is called to Tara by his father's mistress, Draifa, after she has seen his picture in a Milan newspaper. The great-grandson (Ryan) in Borges' text here is a son, a difference necessitated by the narrative medium: people alive during the elder Athos' time must still be around to talk to the son. In Borges' text, appropriately, Ryan does his research through books. The Nolan of Borges' text has been multiplied into the three friends of Athos Senior: Gaibazzi (a sausage maker), Rasori (a schoolteacher), and Costa (a movie theater owner). Whereas, in Borges' text, Nolan initiates the fiction of the assassination, in Bertolucci's it is the elder Magnani himself. Borges, also, does not mention the actual drama performed in the theater when Kilpatrick is killed; in the film it is Rigoletto, the performance of which is climactic for both Magnanis (it is being performed in the present when Athos Junior finally discovers the truth). Finally, Borges' text gives us no motive for Kilpatrick's treachery; Bertolucci provides one.

In the film, the story-as-represented is fairly straightforward, using flashbacks from four different characters to allow the younger Athos to build the story of his father and discover what happened; that truth, of course, is falsehood. Bertolucci also embeds his represented story in the political and psychological context of Fascism. In an analysis of the film focused primarily on this aspect of the film, Robert Chappetta argues that Bertolucci is criticizing the romantic hero as showman and illusionist, more absorbed in giving the appearance of being a hero than in taking effective action.²⁵ Thus, for Chappetta, the romantic hero (Athos Senior) carries the seeds of betrayal within him, since the show is always uppermost. He quotes a telling passage from Mussolini's diary: “Hitler and I are a pair of madmen who have given ourselves up to our illusions; our only hope is to create a myth.” Indeed, the first time we see Athos Senior, he is indulging in illusions; bragging to his friends that he can make the dawn come early, he crows like a rooster, arousing the real roosters to announce the dawn in the middle of the night. The Italian equivalent for machismo is gallismo, derived from the word for “rooster.” Thus our first glimpse of the elder Athos is that he is living a cock-and-bull story; cows and bulls bellow on the soundtrack thoughout, particularly counterpointing the scenes when the rebels make grandiose, theatrical plans to kill Mussolini, and also in the scene when Athos confesses and Rasori charges him like a bull and Costa rides him (in the latter, we hear, in sharp contrast to the rooster-crow of Athos' first appearance, the sounds of a chicken squawking). When the Fascists play their anthem Giovinezza to insult anti-Fascist Magnani, he in turn insults them by dancing to it. But the irony is, as Chappetta makes clear, that “despite his gesture of defiance he is still dancing the Fascist tune.” He is like a son in rebellion against his father who, ironically, is much like the father (Mussolini) he is trying to kill. Athos Junior is related to Athos Senior as Athos Senior is related to Mussolini; the son resists but gets trapped in the story, and the father resists Fascism but ends up a collaborator. The son, paralleling his father's assassination attempt, desecrates his father's tomb, but all he destroys is the outward show. His light throws a weblike pattern on the tomb even as he tries to escape the fictional web; in trying to destroy, he too becomes a collaborator. In the final scene, Athos Junior is literally buried in the father's past when the train does not come and the tracks are overgrown with weeds (it is also a mockery of Mussolini's boast that the Facists made the trains run on time). Perhaps the Fascist past is very much present in Italy, as suggested by the likeness of people in past and present; Fascism, like religion, has to be invented and reinvented so that people can have the illusion of resisting what is, after all, an illusion. We note, too, that the name Athos suggests ethos, the fundamental character or spirit of a culture, the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society. Looked at this way, Bertolucci's depiction of both the elder and the younger Athos is an indictment of Italian character: the readiness to construct fictions, only to destroy and then reconstruct them. But Athos also alludes to the Greek root for atheist, one who believes in nothing and, therefore, perhaps in everything and anything. Magnani is exactly the right name for a man whose theatrical flamboyance can find expression only in an operatic assassination plot. Draifa, whose name evokes a call to justice and freedom, actually wants to imprison. And the town seems frozen in time, populated by old men displaying their machismo, by sexually ambiguous rabbits and children (the scene in which Athos Junior and a boy argue about the sex of the latter's pet rabbit and the scene in which Athos Junior thinks Draifa's young servant is a boy). This ambiguity is echoed in names: Draifa's first name is from a man's last name, and Athos bears a famous woman's last name. In a town that has only the lived illusions of the past and the projected illusions of the future, Athos Junior is the only one who seems to represent the present: the generation that is missing in Tara is precisely that of the younger Athos.

Bertolucci gives a motivation to Athos that is absent from Borges' portrayal of Kilpatrick. Athos betrays because he realizes his impotence. The escaped lion from a German circus, being pursued by men brandishing whips, is fairly docile when we see it the first time, but when Athos looks at it we get a subjective shot in which it is growling ferociously. That same lion is a toothless, stuffed effigy of itself when it is later borne operatically on a platter, as Athos watches soulfully: he sees a mirror image of himself as he would have been but is not. His lion-self has been deflated (by Draifa) but it nourishes (both symbolically and literally, because it is eaten) a new fiction, one in which he will become a hero by first becoming a traitor. Athos Senior can become a hero only by becoming a coward; there is significance in the mirror in front of him when he is killed during the last act of Verdi's Rigoletto, the plot of which involves multiple deceptions that backfire on the deceivers. Athos has now become Mussolini: he is being assassinated in the plot intended for Mussolini and, in a sense, has become the thing he wanted to destroy, just as Athos Junior becomes the father he is trying to destroy. We see this in the scene when he is running through the woods and is alternately dressed in his own clothes and in his father's.

Also exploring the Fascist theme of the film, but with a psychoanalytical emphasis, Robert Zaller comments that for Bertolucci “Fascism is as much an historic defect in the Italian national character, a product of Latin bombast, as of textbook Marxist factors.”²⁶ We see that, though the town reveres the image of an anti-Fascist who wasn't really one, it is still under the power of Baccacchia, the overt Fascist who seems to be menacing the younger Athos (the slammed shed door, the punch in the face, the crowd of old men harassing him). It is Baccacchia who is blamed for the actual murder of Athos Senior, just as he is blamed for Athos Junior's symbolic murder of his father through the desecration of the tomb; but the overt Fascist is actually passive, while the supposed anti-Fascists commit the violent acts. The Spider's Stratagem is a film about the complicity between ruler and ruled, on which dictatorship ultimately rests, Zaller argues; tyranny depends on avoidance of freedom and “a collective consent to illusion.” In adding Fascism to his story-as-represented, Bertolucci has amplified and multiplied Borges' notion of the spiral of fictions: Fascism is the fiction that breeds all the fictions the characters in the film live by.

In addition to these studies of the film's politics, the film invites Lacanian psychoanalytic investigation; it is, as many reviewers pointed out, very much like a dream. Bertolucci has said that he made the film “in a state of melancholic happiness and great serenity,”²⁷ calling the film “a sort of psychoanalytic therapy, a journey through the realm of pre-conscious memory.”²⁸ We have done a fairly traditional analysis of some of the possible meanings of the story-as-represented in the film. Bertolucci is certainly faithful to the story, but in adding the Fascist context he is also being creative: his depiction of Fascism reinforces the illusion and the elusiveness of (hi)story that are at the heart of Borges' text. It seems that in adaptation it is the traditional elements that get transposed—the story, its plot, characters, setting, and theme. If Bertolucci were merely a literal adapter, he would have no trouble with Borges' text, and he in fact does not; he treats it as a scenario and fleshes it out in a medium-specific narrative. Precisely the metafictional dimensions of the borges text interest him: the dimensions that involve the narrator, discourse, and narrativity, levels least transposable from one medium to another.

In examining these levels, we, in Barthes' words, “describe the code by which narrator and reader are signified throughout the narrative itself.”²⁹ In narrating his story, Bertolucci creates a film that is as intertextual as Borges' text. Like Borges, Bertolucci uses allusion: historical (Mussolini, Dreyfus), musical (Schoenberg, Verdi's Rigoletto and A Masked Ball), literary (Shakespeare, Victor Hugo's Hernani) and theatrical (Magnani). There are allusions to the visual arts: Bertolucci composes some of his frames to evoke the early work of Giorgio de Chirico, whose sterile colonnaded streets, sliced by sharp shadows and cold sunlight, suggest some ominous mystery (see especially Nostalgia of the Infinite, 1913; The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914; and Metaphysical Landscape, 1929). Toward the end of the film there is a scene in the square with umbrella-holding men and women that evokes René Magritte's Golconda (1953). Bertolucci has said that he showed his cinematographer Vittorio Storaro some Magritte paintings, especially The Empire of Light, to explain how he wanted the film to look.³⁰ Toward the end, the younger Athos alludes to a line from Borges himself: “No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men.”³¹ When the townspeople listen to the opera piped outside through loudspeakers, we catch sight of a stooped, silhouetted man leaning on a cane, who may well be an allusion to Borges himself. Bertolucci alludes to other films (Gone with the Wind, and those of the movie posters we see in the scene at Costa's outdoor movie theater) as well.

The narrative self-reflexiveness of Borges' fiction finds creative expression in Bertolucci's composition of the frame. Almost every shot is a flourish, emphasizing the camera filming as much as the contents of the frame. “For me,” Bertolucci has said, “the cinema is an art of gestures. … I move the camera as if I was gesturing with it.”³² In the outdoor movie theater, when a giant screen is rolled up to reveal lush vegetation behind it, Bertolucci is playing with his medium in the same way that Borges does with his: he is letting us see the screen behind the illusion that is the projected image, and then rolling up the screen to reveal actuality, as though the screen we are watching were also being rolled up. In this scene, Bertolucci is self-reflexive not only toward his own film but toward the cinema as such with its powers of illusion, just as Borges in his verbal narrative reveals the storying and de-storying powers of narrative. As Christian Metz points out: what unfolds on the screen may be more or less fictional, “but the unfolding is itself fictive.” Thus “every film is a fiction film.”³³ The signifier itself is recorded, is not there.

Throughout the film, characters are framed: by colonnades, in windows, in mirrors, by the boxes at the theater, against pictures and murals, down corridors and streets. In the flashback scene when the elder Magnani creates his fiction, he is silhouetted against and framed within a series of arches, beyond which the town of Tara looks like a technicolor stage set. Sometimes the camera remains stationary while characters walk out of, then back into, the frame. There is much tracking and panning, the latter emphasizing the circularity of the story as well as of the narration, as in the 360° pan when Athos Junior first arrives at Draifa's vine-covered villa, and in the use of subjective camera when Athos looks at his father's statue. The camera does not revolve around the statue; the statue revolves with the camera, its blank eyes always facing Athos at the same angle. In the flashback when Athos Senior is told the news that Mussolini is coming to Tara, he turns slowly toward us, like a statue on a revolving pedestal, and says, “We must kill him.” It is the beginning of the circular story he creates for himself.

In another flashback, when Draifa encircles the elder Athos in bandages, another vicious circle is enacted on the level of discourse. On the level of story-as-represented, Draifa's telling Athos Senior he is a coward makes him see the hollowness of his anti-Fascist heroism and psychologically probably motivates his betrayal of the assassination plot. In the present, Draifa's first reception of Athos into her villa involves her circling around him several times; and later, when she tells him “You can't go away anymore,” she puts the father's jacket on him as the camera follows them into a semicircular corridor. The mosquito coil she lights is another spiral. The whole town of Tara seems to be encircled by a highway—beyond which we may assume there is a real world. The town of Tara has decided to stop particpating in actuality since it created its own illusion of reality on the day Athos Senior was killed. The town is a stage set which Bertolucci's camera brings to life. Early in the film, when the younger Athos looks at the sign of a street named after his father, the camera reads from right to left along “VIA ATHOS MAGNANI,” signalling us that Athos Junior is on a journey back in time that will lead him to his father—will make him simultaneous with his father. But, more significantly, on the discursive level of the film this is also a sign of reading, calling our attention to the reading of the film itself, to the circling from story to discourse to story to discourse.

Having the actors portray themselves in time present and time past without any changes in makeup to denote youth or age further emphasizes the indistinguishability to past from the present, the illusory from the real; but it calls attention as well, again on the discursive level, to Bertolucci's departure from classical narrative films which seek to hide their codes of narrativity. As Barthes points out, “our society takes the greatest pains to conjure away the coding of the narrative situation. … The reluctance to declare its codes characterizes bourgeois society and the mass culture issuing from it: both demand signs which do not look like signs.”³⁴ Bertolucci, like Borges in his text, overtly codes the narrative situation in a way that forces the viewer into a more active narrativity than he is asked to perform in a traditional film.

Other aspects of the film's discourse and narrativity separate it from classical narrative films while emphasizing its self-reflexivity: the punctuation, the use of the displaced diegetic insert, and the final shot. There were twelve fades in the film, six of which occur in rapid succession within a single syntagmatic unit: when Gaibazzi talks to Athos Junior while inspecting the sausages. No really significant time elapses during each one; they call attention to themselves as cinematic punctuation rather than easing us into a different unit of narrative. While almost no time is passing in each brief segment, Bertolucci discursively emphasizes that a great deal of time has passed. Gaibazzi's story is continuous, but the fades disrupt it, fragmenting it until we are aware of a story being told diegetically and of the film's telling of that telling. In the film, there is constant storytelling within the story (the flashbacks of the three friends, Draifa, and Baccacchia). Bertolucci is telling the story of Athos Junior, who in turn—along with us—is being told the story of Athos Senior, who in turn created (lived) a story of his own making, which in turn entraps Athos Junior in its plot. This story of stories (and of storeys) expands until there seems to be no dividing line between reality and fiction, between history and story; yet, as a finite narrative structure, The Spider's Stratagem must contain this expansion within its own physical duration. The film calls attention to itself narrating while Gaibazzi is narrating part of the story that the film is narrating. In addition to the twelve fades, there are four dissolves in the film (not counting the credits), three used conventionally to move to flashback, but one shows a simultaneous image of the boy at the hotel setting down a tray and lying on the bed, both within the same frame setup. This dissolve, which has no real diegetic purpose except to indicate a little time passing, is entirely too obtrusive and calls our attention to the film itself, to the film narrating, to the film discoursing, and thus to the viewer's need for active narrativity: the traditionally transparent codes of transition here become opaque signifiers themselves, signifiers of metafiction.

The displaced diegetic insert is defined by Metz as “an image that, while remaining entirely ‘real,’ is displaced from its normal filmic position.”³⁵ Such an insert occurs first in shot three of the film, then four times in alternation with the flashback of Athos Senior's confession, and next to the last shot of the film; it also occurs twice at night, only once as part of the diegetic action. In all, it occurs eight times as a displaced insert. The shot is across a cornfield and the building appears to be the theater, which, from this angle, dominates Tara, is Tara. Who sees this image? It can't be Athos, given his position when the image is inserted. This is an autonomous shot, emphasizing the narration itself and thus, again, forcing the viewer through narrativity to examine the discursive level of the film. This displaced diegetic insert moves us as spectators from the diegesis to narration and finally to discourse and narrativity; it makes us conscious of the film as film and inscribes disavowal into our very avowal of the film's illusion.

The last shot of the film, a traveling shot of railway tracks, evokes the first when the train arrived and Athos disembarked after the thud of the sailor's bag on the platform (the sailor gets off after Athos). The sailor, a troublesome character because he is never seen again until just before the end of the film and has nothing to do with the story that unfolds and entraps, is functional only on the discursive level—he is the viewer in the text. The thud of his bag is our investment in the story just as it starts. In the second shot of the film the sailor is meandering behind Athos as the latter walks toward camera from the station; suddenly, the sailor stops, executes a sharp military step behind Athos, cutting a definite path between the station and Athos. Then he sits down on a bench (as we sit in our movie seat?), opens his arms, and says “Tara!” as though to say, “Here is your stage; let your story begin.” The next shot (shot 3) is the first use of the displaced diegetic insert: the theater dominating Tara. The sailor leaves the film just at the point when Athos Junior is about to be entrapped in the story, which, as he tells Draifa before leaving her, “no longer interests me.” Athos has already been lured back from the platform when the sailor rushes past and shouts goodbye. When he leaves, we too, in a sense, leave the story and enter the discourse. At the very end, Athos' bag (which he had earlier forgotten at the station) is left standing as he surveys the grass and weeds overgrowing the tracks. These tracks are the means of coming and going into Tara, into and out of the film that creates Tara. The camera that read the street sign right to left now moves left to right, returning us (but not Athos) to where he and we came from. The story is ended: there is closure to the diegesis, but the filmic discourse opens up here to its widest. The story (screen as space filled in by narrative) is over; the discourse (screen as mirror, self-reflexive, looking at us as we look at it) takes over and simultaneously lets us in on and frees us from the narrative rendering.

We are released from a fictional web in which we have been as completely trapped, in a sense, as Athos Senior and Junior in theirs. Athos Junior swallows the story and is swallowed up in it. He is the film's negative image of the kind of viewer the film demands: one who maintains the balance between distanciation and appropriation. For Athos Junior the story has become simultaneously a discovery and an entrapment; his role is fated in the fiction, and he cannot get out of the fiction of his fate.³⁶ We the viewers are released from the story, at least from this particular story, in order to contemplate, on the discursive level, the power that fictions have over us. Christian Metz has observed that “behind any fiction there is a second fiction: the diegetic events are fictional, that is the first; but everyone pretends to believe they are true, and that is the second.”³⁷The Spider's Stratagem disturbs us not only for its troubling excursus into the problematics of illusion; it is disturbing precisely because we have watched the film. Its fixing us for 97 minutes in its duration is itself the stratagem. The ultimate signified of The Spider's Stratagem is this film itself in its fictive power.

It is true that Bertolucci's film is not metafictional in the overtly frame-breaking way that Sherlock Jr. and The Man with the Movie Camera are, just as Borges' text is hardly a piece of flamboyantly experimental fiction, the kind in which we shuffle the pages at random, or plough through seven sets of quotation marks (as in John Barth's “Menelaiad” in Lost in the Funhouse). This kind of experimental narrative, or surfiction,³⁸ is a special kind of metafiction, one which seeks to break new ground in radical ways. The type of metafiction we have been examining in Borges and Bertolucci is more indirect, more in the tradition of Cervantes than of Vertov. Borges and Bertolucci insist on traditional narrative structure: both texts, after all, tell stories with a beginning, middle, and end; there is also plot, theme, and characterization of varying degree. The Spider's Stratagem, nevertheless, is more metafictional than films like Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), Kelly and Donen's Singin' in the Rain (1952), Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), Truffaut's Day for Night (1973), and Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust (1975). These films are reflective of filmmaking, but they are not self-reflexive, except incidentally. Making films is part of the closed diegesis of each. Their narratives are conventionally transparent and employ none of the frame-breaking codes Bertolucci uses to make The Spider's Stratagem not only reflective but self-reflexive as well. These films are examples of orthodox reflexivity, while Bertolucci's film is an example of modernist reflexivity. The difference between the two modes is the same as the difference between James's “The Lesson of the Master” (1888) or Mann's Death in Venice (1911) and Borges' “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” or Barth's Funhouse stories. The former are reflective, certainly, and reflexive in a conventional way, while the latter are reflective, reflexive, and self-reflexive.

The same relationship that exists between The Spider's Stratagem and “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” exists between Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) and the Cortázar story from which it is adapted (“Blow-Up” in English but “Las babas del diablo” or “The Devil's Drool” in Spanish). The film Blow-Up has been described as “a series of photographs about a series of photographs” which constitutes “what might be called a metalinguistic metaphor, a highly self-conscious and self-reflexive meditation on its own process.”³⁹Blow-Up and “Blow-Up” and “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” and The Spider's Stratagem are metafictional in the same way; without violently breaking from traditional narrative, they nevertheless manage to make narration and fiction making their central concern. That is how they are self-reflexive. They portray a world and themselves; they are consciously stories and self-consciously not stories: “The world of the self-conscious artwork is the world in which artist and audience confront each other across a proscenium both know to be ‘true’ but deliberately agree to consider ‘false’; however, as neither is allowed to forget the fiction of fiction, both continually probe the truth of their encounter, as well as the truth of the lie that accepts its falsehood. The dynamics of this confrontation give rise to the illusion that the work is aware of itself, directs itself, conceives itself: that a self-conscious film, for instance, can be its own mindscreen.”⁴⁰

In putting Borges' text on film, Bertolucci, like Borges in his text, has made a fiction on fiction. The process is not a matter of simply looking for cinematic equivalents for verbal narrative and discursive elements; it is a matter of exploring the range from fidelity to creation, of seeing how faithfulness to story can be accompanied by a creative and inventive dimension that multiplies, to use Bazin's term, story and discourse. Just as Borges' text is a performance of self-assured virtuosity, so Bertolucci uses a self-conscious camera style that emphasizes the very showiness his film is thematically criticizing. He glories in the power of film to create illusion and to make us avow; yet, on the discursive level, he signals us also to disavow: there is danger in the pleasure of illusion. Borges' text partakes of a metafictionality that is as old as the novel itself, and Bertolucci's text uses metafictional devices that have existed since the beginnings of cinema. In talking about modernist cinema, Metz makes just this point when he says: “The new cinema, far from having abandoned the narrative, gives us narratives that are more diversified, more ramified, and more complex.”⁴¹ Borges in “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” Bertolucci in The Spider's Stratagem, restore narrative to us through a metafictional presentation and through the narrativity this demands of us.

Notes

1. “Tema del traidor y del héroe” (1944), trans. James E. Irby, in Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp. 72-75.

2. Margaret Heckard, “Robert Coover, Metafiction, and Freedom,” Twentieth Century Literature, 22 (1976), 215.

3. André Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: Random House, 1927), p. 205.

4. John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 114.

5. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 25.

6. William Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Knopf, 1970), pp. 24-25, 109.

7. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 4-5.

8. Robert Scholes, “Metafiction,” Iowa Review, 1 (1970), 106. This is now incorporated into his Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1979), pp. 105-23. For Scholes, fabulation is the larger term and metafiction but one of its forms: “Fabulation … means not a turning away from reality, but an attempt to find more subtle correspondences between the reality which is fiction and the fiction which is reality” (p. 8).

9. Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), pp. 15, 18.

10. William C. Siska, “Metacinema: A Modern Necessity,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 7 (1979), 285-89.

11. Don Fredericksen, “Modes of Reflexive Film,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 4 (1979), 307.

12. Robert Scholes, Elements of Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 84.

13. Ronald Christ, The Narrow Act: Borges' Art of Illusion (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 34, 35.

14. Jaime Alazraki, Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 36-37. See also Howard D. Pearce, “A Phenomenological Approach to the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor,” PMLA, 95 (1980), 42-57: “The audience and playwright and play and characters are accomplices in making and sharing a world of meaning according to the rules of their game” (p. 56).

15. John O. Stark, The Literature of Exhaustion: Borges, Nabokov, and Barth (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1974), p. 15.

16. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 4 (italics in the original).

17. Borges, Labyrinths, p. 13.

18. For a selective bibliographical survey see my “Literature/Film: A Bibliography,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 6 (1978), 135-43 and especially James Goodwin, “Literature and Film: A Review of Criticism,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 4 (1979), 227-46.

19. André Bazin, “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” What Is Cinema? ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), pp. 143, 142.

20. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (New York: Schocken, 1979), p. 8.

21. I am adapting my terms mostly from Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 37, 20, 41, and Robert Scholes, “Narration and Narrativity in Film,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 1 (1976), 283, 285, 286. See also Dudley Andrew, “The Structuralist Study of Narrative: Its History, Use, and Limits,” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 8 (1975), 45-61.

22. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 115, 121.

23. Barthes, “Introduction,” p. 87.

24. Chatman, p. 41.

25. Robert Chappetta, “The Meaning Is Not the Message,” Film Quarterly, 25 (Summer 1972), 10-18.

26. Robert Zaller, “Bernardo Bertolucci, or Nostalgia for the Present,” The Massachusetts Review, 16 (1975), 807-28.

27. Amos Vogel, “Bernardo Bertolucci: An Interview,” Film Comment, 7 (Fall, 1971), 26.

28. Richard Roud, “Fathers and Sons,” Sight and Sound, 40 (Spring 1971), 61.

29. Barthes, “Introduction,” p. 110.

30. “Dialogue on Film: Bernardo Bertolucci,” American Film, 5 (January-February 1980), 41.

31. Borges, “The Immortal,” Labyrinths, pp. 114-15.

32. Vogel, p. 26.

33. Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” Screen, 16, 2 (Summer 1975), 47.

34. Barthes, “Introduction,” p. 116.

35. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), p. 125.

36. See Donald G. Marshall, “Plot as Trap; Plot as Mediation,” The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 10 (1977), 11-28.

37. Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” p. 70.

38. See Raymond Federman, ed., Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975).

39. John Freccero, “Blow-Up: From the Word to the Image,” Yale/Theatre, 3 (Fall 1970), 15-24. Also see Terry J. Peavler, “Blow-Up: A Reconsideration of Antonioni's Infidelity to Cortázar,” PMLA, 94 (1979), 887-93.

40. Bruce F. Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 50-51.

41. Metz, Film Language, p. 227.