“Do Not Exaggerate the Cult of Truth”. Some reflections on the necessity of heroism in an Italian move of Borgesian inspiration

Abstract

Strategia del ragno, a television film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1970, does not occlude its debt to Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” originally published in 1944. Both texts explore the paradoxical identity of traitor heroes, or hero traitors: the former an Italian antifascist and the latter an Irish independist. Drawing from Scheler’s anthropological theories (1961), Bauzá’s classic philology (2007), and González’s narratology (2016), this article analyzes Bertolucci’s representation of heroism as a morally complex and aesthetically necessary representation of heroic action and its effects. Thus, we conclude that the filmic hypertext actualizes what was potentially outlined and suggested in the literary hypotext, producing a rich screenplay out of a plot Borges had no intention of writing.