Jorge Luis
Borges’s “Kafka and His Precursors” begins oddly: “I once premeditated making a
study of Kafka’s precursors.” The use of the verb “premeditate” is odd enough,
in the Spanish (“Yo premedité alguna vez”) as much as in the English, not least
because it is most usually found in juridical discourse: a premeditated crime
is one that is considered and planned in advance, as opposed to a crime of
passion or an outburst in the heat of the moment. This strange invocation of
legal discourse might suggest that some wrong-doing is afoot, or that we are
hearing some kind of confession. And yet–and this is the second strange aspect
of Borges’s opening gambit–it is also suggested that the crime was never
committed. “I once premeditated making a study” implies that the study remained
unwritten or unmade; it was only planned. We have the guilty mind (mens rea)
but not the guilty act (actus reus). The crime was averted, perhaps because
some flaw was found in what was otherwise a perfect plan.
But this
then leaves us asking ourselves about the status of the text that we have
before us, which (as the title promises and as further readings confirms) turns
out to concern precisely the topic of the projected but unwritten or abandoned
study: “Kafka and His Precursors.” Yet if this is not that study (perhaps
because it is too short, incomplete), nor is it the premeditation of that
study: at best it is an account of that premeditation, a summary and reflection
upon the preparatory “notes” that would have aided in the writing itself. It is
an intervention between the plan and its execution, between intention and act.
In short,
the text that we have here is perhaps triply parasitic, or three-times removed
from its ostensible object: it is the summary of notes towards a study of Kafka
and his precursors. It is also strangely located in time: it is the reflection
on a plan in the past to write a study that is still unwritten (and so is
postponed to the indefinite future) about a now-dead author and his precursors
that (we soon find) proceeds by enumerating them “in chronological order,”
beginning with the most far-distant.
As often in
Borges, the part mimics the whole or (perhaps better) we find an almost fractal
arrangement in which patterns are repeated at various orders of magnitude,
albeit to produce less the comfort of familiarity than a vertiginous sense of
the uncanny and a shattering of logic. Elsewhere, we see this effect in his
description of the “aleph,” a shimmering ball (found in the banal surroundings
of a Buenos Aires basement) that contains within itself the entire universe. But
Borges also suggests that such apparent oddities (or impossibilities) are
remarkably common, even quotidian: think long and hard about anything, and it
soon becomes (or is revealed to be) an aleph of its own. Here, these opening
lines anticipate the central problematic of the essay itself, which is about
the ways in which texts are related and how strange fissures or reversals upset
linear temporality, just as it in turn makes (or unmakes) its point through
performance as much as through argument or exposition: for this text about
Kafka and his precursors is in its own way about Borges and his precursors and
in it Borges himself rewrites our collective past and disturbs our conceptions
of sequence and priority.
Finally, if
what Borges is ultimately saying is that a writer (that writing) has the
strange power to intervene in history, to remake or remodel the past just as Kafka
creates his own precursors (by making us see an otherwise disparate collection
of historical texts as oddly “Kafkaesque” avant la lettre), he is also
unabashedly claiming that there is nothing new in this notion. This observation
precedes Borges and this text, and so confirms (what is now) his repetition of
what can present itself as an established fact. For in another detail, a
footnote–a classic paratext or parasite, neither fully part of nor fully
detached from the text itself–draws our attention to T S Eliot’s Points of
View, whose very title in this context becomes simultaneously uncanny and
revelatory. After all, is this entire essay not about “points of view,” and the
ways in which they are constructed, obscured, or undermined?
In a rather
good essay on Joyce and Borges Patricia Novillo-Corvalán, whom I am here myself
copying or appropriating to some extent, notes that “Eliot postulates an
aesthetic principle, through which writers are not read in isolation, but as
part of a living tradition in which the new alters the old, the present
modifies the past and, as a result, texts are continually re-valued from the
perspective of subsequent texts” (60). And Rex Butler’s “Everything and
Nothing” points out that what makes Borges original–what makes the greatest
authors the most original–is precisely the fact that they “can actually appear
unoriginal, to add nothing to literature, to repeat what has already been
written” (134).
At which
point, as I observe that I in turn am in large part simply “repeat[ing] what
has already been written,” remaking and remodeling it for my own purposes,
creating precursors who sadly are not quite as disparate (or quite as
unpredictable) as those of Borges and Kafka, perhaps it’s time to stop what is
after all only a first approach to these issues. It’s time to end, in other
words, so that we can at last begin.
Fuente : Posthegemony
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