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Borges, Kafka and His Precursors

I once premeditated making a study of Kafka's precursors. At first I had considered him to be singular as

the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after frequenting his pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his

voice, or his 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 ofThe 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. It is an

apologue of Han Yu, a prose writer of the ninth century, and is reproduced in Margoulies' admirable

Anthologie raisonnee de la litterature chinoise (1948). This is the paragraph, mysterious and calm, which Imarked: "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 the unicorn constitutes a favorable presage. But this animal

does not figure among the domestic beasts, it is not always easy to find, it does not lend itself to

classification. It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf or 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

horns is a bull. But we do not know what the unicorn is like. (1)

(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 the last chapter of Jung's Psychologie and Alchemie

(Zrich, 1944) which contains two curious illustrations.

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 one 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 parable is the North Poleexpeditions. 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 is 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, and expedition to the North Pole. The fourth of these prefigurations I have found is

Browning's poem "Fears and Scruples,' published in 1876. A man has, or believes he has, a famous friend.

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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 Lon Bloy'sHistories dsobligeantes and relates the case of

some people who possess 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 'Carcass one' and is the 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 once they 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 the more significant. In each of these texts we findKafka'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 read 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 the 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 ofBetrachtung is less a

precursor of the Kafka of somber myths and atrocious institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.