Everything and Nothing: On Jorge Luis Borges's “Kafka and His Precursors”

Abstract

This article is an analysis of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges's short text “Kafka and His Precursors.” Although appearing to be an example of literary criticism, Borges's essay is in fact the exploration of a certain logical paradox. It is a paradox that is to be found throughout Borges's work, with the result that “Kafka and His Precursors” can be read as a disguised literary manifesto on the part of Borges. I also explore the consequences of Borges's essay for thinking about questions of cultural transmission. I argue that Borges’ work lives on—like those literary, religious and philosophical traditions he admires—because its most profound subject is the relationship it has with the person who reads it.

Keywords:

• Borges
• cultural transmission
• Kafka
• logical paradox

Notes

1. It is notable that, in the original running order of Otras inquisiciones, “Kafka and His Precursors” was followed by the essay “Avatars of the Tortoise” (1939). “Avatars of the Tortoise” is another of Borges's essays, after such early efforts as “The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise” (1929), to grapple with the difficulties of Zeno's paradoxes of motion; but, more importantly for our purposes, Borges relates these paradoxes to Aristotle's well-known argument concerning the “third man.” This was Aristotle's attempted refutation of Plato's doctrine of forms, insofar as Aristotle contends that an infinite regress is implied in the attribution of the same form or archetype to a number of different instances. As Borges puts it in his essay, “If there is a separate being that incorporates the attributes of many different beings, and is different from them (as the Platonists claim), then there must be a third man” (Other Inquisitions 111). But then, as Borges goes on to reason, following Aristotle, insofar as this is so, there must also be “a fourth, who will be in the same relation to the third and to the idea and to the individual men.” Finally, as Borges concludes, “Two individuals are not actually needed; the individual and the class are enough to determine the third man postulated by Aristotle” (111). And this is exactly the same problem as we see in “Kafka and His Precursors,” in which each attempt to speak of the Kafka that his various precursors have in common requires another “Kafka” to say what this Kafka and his precursors have in common. Indeed, as Aristotle suggests, this problem of the “third man” is implied from the very beginning: even that first comparison with Kafka is not a mere comparison but already an attempt to say what all other possible comparisons stand in for, to be in effect that “third man” between Kafka and his comparisons. This connection between the two essays is now lost in the Obras completas edition of Borges's work, in which “Avatares de la Tortuga” has been taken out of Otras inquisiciones in Obras completas 1952–1972 and included in Discusión (1932) in Obras completas 1923–1949. It is a connection that is now also lost in the English collection of Borges's non-fiction, The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–1986, with the decision not to reprint “Avatars of the Tortoise.” The two essays are still to be found next to each other in both Spanish- and English-language versions of Otras inquisiciones, and were originally joined in English in the best-of collection Labyrinths.

2. With this in mind, it is interesting that in a lecture delivered even before “Kafka and His Precursors,” “Nathaniel Hawthorne” (1949), Borges is already comparing Kafka to yet another author: the 19th-century American novelist and short story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. As Borges says:

• The circumstance, the strange circumstance, of perceiving in a story written by Hawthorne at the beginning of the nineteenth century the same quality that distinguishes the stories Kafka wrote at the beginning of the twentieth must not cause us to forget that Hawthorne's particular quality has been created, or determined, by Kafka. ‘Wakefield’ prefigures Kafka, but Kafka modifies and refines the reading of ‘Wakefield'. The debt is mutual; a great writer creates his precursors (“Other Inquisitions” 56–57).

• La circunstancia, la extraña circunstancia, de percibir en un cuento de Hawthorne, redactado a principios del siglo XIX, el sabor mismo de los cuentos de Kafka que trabajó a principios del siglo XX, no debe hacernos olvidar que el sabor de Kafka ha sido creado, ha sido determinado, por Kafka. Wakefield prefigura a Franz Kafka, pero éste modifica, y afina, la lectura de Wakefield. La dueda es mutua; un gran escritor crea a sus precursores (“Obras completas” 56).

• Again, Kafka is at once only this endless series of comparisons with nothing in common and the one single thing that potentially all of the world's literature has in common.