Borges and Issues of Authorship

"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."


"The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors."

...

As I have been thinking about questions of authorship both leading up to and since our class last Thursday I found myself continually returning back to some thoughts by Borges that have been a major influence in my own views on the topic. At just about two pages or so "Kafka and His Precursors," is more evocative than explanatory, and can hardly be called high theory in any sense of the term, but considering that he is writing more than a decade before Barthes and Foucault, I think he possibly provides an interesting bridge between postmodern theories of authorship and more traditional conceptions of the author.

The purpose of the essay, according to Borges, was to try and sketch out some precursors to Kafka, in his view a "singular" voice in literature. Borges then goes on to compose a surprising list of possible precursors: Zeno, Kierkegaard and Browning, as well as Bloy and Lord Dunsany (who?). An eclectic and in some ways surprising list (Browning?) jumbling together ancient and modern, the well known and the comparatively obscure. "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," he writes, "the second fact is more significant." He briefly fleshes out this idea: "in the critics' vocabulary, the word 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry," followed by the now-famous phrase: "the fact is that every writer creates his own precursors."

To our postmodern minds this might not seem a particularly radical statement (though if you're Harold Bloom they might constitute fightin' words). But it's the type of paradox that Borges loved, a complete disruption of the type of linear filial lines traditionally used to analyze history and literature and the tracing of authors and movements and their subsequent influence over time. In Borges's conception, a work is not simply an endpoint in a long and complex tangle of history, society, art, etc., but rather the starting point where, streaming backwards, alternative histories can be constructed filled with links and connections that might not have been accounted for, if they had previously been there at all.

Thinking of all of this within the context of our discussions of Barthes and Foucault, it struck me how I think this conception accounts for structuralist thought, but it doesn't kill the Author outright, something most of us still can't quite bring ourselves to do. Borges is in line with structuralism as he admits that as unique as Kafka's writing might seem, he's not, in fact, singular. Rather, his work draws from the vast body of knowledge(s) that historically preceded him, regardless of whether these influences were intentional or purely chance affinities. But Borges also seems to have no intention of considering Kafka-as-Author dead either, but seems to hold that his texts are indeed sites of individuality, that Kafka negotiates and arranges influences in a way that was never done in quite the same way. It is in that specific way he might truly be considered singular.

As I said in class last week, I am not convinced of the autonomy of the author, of the implicit Descartian "I" who maintains God-like control over her/his own work (and even processing his her/his own experiences). But on the other hand, I must admit, I'm not willing to kill and completely erase the presence of the author either. Borges has helped me negotiate this—for me, the author is certainly not an autonomous or singular entity/presence, but rather composes any work out of the tiny bits and pieces (or the morphemes, if you will) of art and history, and also language. In that sense, nothing that an author writes can ever be truly unique. But a singularity perhaps is possible, but of a particular type: singularity in the particular, idiosyncratic arrangement of the morphemes we-the-Author have been provided and can never escape from.

Kafka and His Precursors in its entirety can be read here (yes, it's that short).