Chapter 11 traitors and heroes theme

Thus, the Platonic year swept away the new conception of right and wrong, and brought the opposite old one; and all danced, and their steps entered a savage and clamorous beat. W.B. Yeats: The Tower Under the obvious influence of Chesterton (who wrote many elegant mysteries) and Privy Councilor Leibniz (who invented the doctrine of pre-established harmony), I have come up with this plot, which I may someday write, But I have nothing to do in the afternoon, so I will write down the outline first.This story has yet to be supplemented with details, tweaked and modified; some things are still unclear to me; today, January 3, 1944, this is how I imagine it:

The plot of the story takes place in an oppressed and tenacious country: Poland, Ireland, the Republic of Venice, South America, or a country in the Balkans... To be more precise, it was in the past, although the storyteller is a contemporary, he tells But it was the middle or early 19th century.For the sake of convenience, let us say that the place is Ireland and the time is 1824.The storyteller was named Ryan; his great-grandfather was the handsome young assassinated Fergus Kilpatrick.Kilpatrick's tomb was mysteriously excavated, his name appeared in the poems of Browning and Hugo, and his statue stood on a gray hill surrounded by red marshes.

Kilpatrick was the conspirators, the secret and honorable leader of their conspirators; like Moses, who gazed from Moab and could not reach the desired land, Kilpatrick died on the eve of the triumph of the uprising he had conceived and dreamed of.The centenary of his death is approaching; the circumstances of the crime remain a mystery; and Ryan, who works on the hero's biography, finds that the mystery goes beyond a mere police investigation.Kilpatrick was assassinated in a theater; the British police never found the killer; historians claim that this failure does not discredit the British police, which may have ordered the assassination themselves.Other aspects of the mystery unsettle Ryan.They are cyclical: events that seem to repeat or combine distant lands and ancient ages.Everyone noticed that when the bailiffs examined the hero's body, they found an unopened letter warning him of the dangers in the theater that evening; He had received a brief note revealing the plot of treachery and the names of the traitors, but he had not had time to read it.Calpurnia, Caesar's wife, dreamed that the tower built for him by the order of the Senate was pulled down; Kilpatrick was born in Kil'garvan.These (and other) parallels, both in the history of the retreat and in the history of an Irish conspirator, lead Ryan to think of a hidden form of time, a recurring pattern of lines.He thought of Condorcet's decimal history, Hegel, Spengler, and Vico's morphology, Hesiod's doctrine of the fall of man from the Golden Age to the Iron Age.He thought of the transmigration of souls, a doctrine so terrifying to Celtic culture that Caesar himself connected it with the Druids of Britain; Kilpatrick must have been Julius Caesar before him.A curious verification took him out of the recurring maze, and led him into a new, tangled mess: a few words a beggar said to Fergus Kilpatrick on the day he was killed , and these few words were previously shown by Shakespeare in his tragedy "Macbeth".History copying history is amazing enough; history copying literature is simply unimaginable...Ryan learned that in 1814, the hero's oldest companion, James Alexander Nolan, translated Shakespeare's major plays into Irish Dialect Gaelic, among them "Julius Caesar".He also found in the archives a manuscript by Nolan about a Swiss theater festival, a gigantic touring show that required thousands of performers to reenact real historical events that took place in cities and mountains.Another unknown document shows that Kilpatrick presided over a final conclave a few days before the finale, signing a death sentence for a traitor whose name was obliterated.The sentence was at odds with Kilpatrick's usual benevolence.Ryan investigates the incident (one of the stories' darkest secrets), and finally solves the mystery.

Kilpatrick was murdered in a theater, in fact the whole city had become a theater, with an innumerable cast, and the drama which culminated in his death lasted many days and nights.The situation is like this: On August 2, 1824, the conspirators held a secret meeting.The conditions were ripe for a nationwide uprising; but something always went wrong: there was a traitor among the members of the conclave.Fergus Kilpatrick commissions James Nolan to dig out the traitor.Nolan carried out his mission: at the leaders' plenary meeting, he announced that the traitor was Kilpatrick.He established the veracity of the charge with irrefutable evidence; and the conspirators condemned their leader to death.The leader signed his own verdict, but requested that the method of execution not harm the interests of the motherland.

So Nolan came up with a peculiar plan.Ireland adores Kilpatrick; the slightest suspicion of his shameful deeds jeopardizes the uprising; and Nolan proposes a plan to turn the execution of traitors into an aid to the liberation of the country.He suggested that the death of a condemned person by an unknown assassin should be dramatic and impressive enough to fuel an uprising.Kilpatrick vowed to cooperate, got the chance of redemption, and signed the plan to execute himself. Nolan, who came at the right time, did not know how to plan all the plots of this complex project completely; he had to copy another playwright, the hostile British William Shakespeare.He repeated scenes from Macbeth and Julius Caesar.Public and secret performances went on for several days.The condemned man arrives in Dublin, he argues, he acts, he prays, he denounces, he makes moving speeches, every act of honorable performance pre-ordained by Nolan.Hundreds of actors work closely with the main characters; some actors have heavy roles;What they said and what they did will go down in history and remain in Ireland's passionate memory.This careful arrangement of saving and burying Kilpatrick so excited him that on more than one occasion he gave improvisations and speeches which enriched the script the judge had provided.The well-acted drama unfolded on time until, on August 6, 1824, in a bleak theater box modeled on the one in which President Lincoln sat when he was assassinated, a long-awaited bullet was fired into the chest of traitor and hero, who Blood was sprayed twice, and it was almost too late to say the prepared words.

The passages imitating Shakespeare are the least dramatic in Nolan's work; Ryan guessed that the author inserted them for the purpose of revealing the truth later.He knew that he himself was part of Nolan's plot... After thinking hard, he decided not to talk about his discovery.He published a book of heroism; that was perhaps to be expected.