KAFKA AND HIS PRECURSORS
by Jorge Luis Borges
translated by James E. Irby
I once premeditated making a study of Kafka's precursors. At first I had
considered him to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after
frequenting his pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his voice, or hi
s
practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods. I shall record a few
of these here, in chronological order.
The first is Zeno's paradox against movement. A moving object at A (declares
Aristotle) cannot reach point B, because it must first cover half the distance
between two points, and before that, half of the half, and before that, half of
the half of the half, and so on to infinity; the form of this illustrious
problem is, exactly, that of "The Castle", and the moving object and the arrow
and Achilles are the first Kafkian characters in literature. In the second text
which chance laid before me, the affinity is not one of form but one of tone. I
t
is an apologue of Han Yu, a prose writer of the ninth century, and is reproduce
d
in Margoulies' admirable "Anthologie raisonee de la litterature chinoise"
(1948). This is the paragraph, mysterious and calm, which I marked:
"It is universally admitted that the unicorn is a supernatural being of good
omen; such is declared in all the odes, annals, biographies of illustrious men
and other texts whose authority is unquestionable. Even children and village
women know that a unicorn constitutes a favorable presage. But this animal does
not figure among the domestic beasts, it is not always easy to find, it does no
t
lend itself to classification. It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf o
r
the deer. In such conditions, we could be face to face with a unicorn and not
know for certain what it was. We know that such and such an animal with a mane
is a horse and that such and such an animal with horns is a bull. But we do not
know what the unicorn is like." [1]
The third text derives from a more easily predictable source: the writings of
Kierkegaard. The spiritual affinity of both writers is something of which no on
e
is ignorant; what has not yet been brought out, as far as I know, is the fact
that Kierkegaard, like Kafka, wrote many religious parables on contemporary and
bourgeois themes. Lowrie, in his "Kierkegaard" (Oxford University Press, 1938),
transcribes two of these. One is the story of a counterfeiter who, under
constant surveillance, counts banknotes in the Bank of England; in the same way
,
God would distrust Kierkegaard and have given him a task to perform, precisely
because He knew that he was familiar with evil. The subject of the other parabl
e
is the North Pole expeditions. Danish ministers had declared from their pulpits
that participation in these expeditions was beneficial to the soul's eternal
well-being. They admitted, however, that it was difficult, and perhaps
impossible, to reach the Pole and that not all men could undertake the
adventure. Finally, they would announce that any trip - from Denmark to London,
let us say, on the regularly scheduled steamer - was, properly considered, an
expedition to the North Pole. The fourth of these prefigurations I have found i
s
Browning's poem "Fears and Scruples," published 1876. A man has, or believes he
has, a famous friend. He has never seen this friend and the fact is that the
friend has so far never helped him, although tales are told of his most noble
traits and authentic letters of his circulate about. Then someone places these
traits in doubt and the handwriting experts declare that the letters are
apocryphal. The man asks, in the last line:
"And if this friend were... God?"
My notes also register two stories. One is from Leon Bloy's "Histoires
desobligeantes" and relates the case of some people who posses all manner of
globes, atlases, railroad guides and trunks, but who die without ever having
managed to leave their home town. The other is entitled "Carcassonne" and is th
e
work of Lord Dunsany. An invincible army of warriors leaves an infinite castle,
conquers kingdoms and sees monsters and exhausts the deserts and the mountains,
but they never reach Carcassonne, though they once glimpse it from afar. (This
story is, as one can easily see, the strict reverse of the previous one; in the
first, the city is never left; in the second, it is never reached.)
If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka
;
if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is
more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a
greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not
perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem "Fears and
Scruples" by Browning foretells Kafka's work, but our reading of Kafka
perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not rea
d
it as we do now. In the critics' vocabulary, the word "precursor" is
indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or
rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work
modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.[2] In this
correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant. The
early Kafka of "Betrachtung" is less a precursor of the Kafka of somber myths
and atrocious institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.
[1] Nonrecognition of the sacred animal and its opprobrious or accidental death
at the hands of the people are traditional themes in Chinese literature. See th
e
last chapter of Jung's "Psychologie und Alchemie" (Zurich, 1944), which contain
s
two curious illustrations.
[2] See T. S. Eliot: "Points of View" (1941), pp. 25-26.
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