"The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future"
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Borges is smuggling a time bomb into what sounds like a calm literary observation: influence doesn’t flow politely forward. It loops. The writer isn’t just shaped by tradition; the writer retroactively edits tradition, rearranging the family tree so it looks inevitable. That’s the sly Borges move - treating literary history not as an archive but as a mutable text, a labyrinth where the exit you choose redesigns the corridors behind you.
The intent is partly defensive, partly liberating. If originality is a trap - the modern anxiety that every sentence arrives late to the party - Borges proposes a workaround: you don’t have to defeat the past; you can rewrite what counts as the past. Once Kafka exists, suddenly certain parables in Kierkegaard or the bureaucratic fog in Dickens start reading like early Kafka, even if no one could have named it that way at the time. “Precursors” are often manufactured after the fact, the way constellations are drawn by connecting stars that were never meant to touch.
The subtext is a critique of tidy canons and linear progress narratives. Literary reputations aren’t fixed monuments; they’re arguments won and lost by later readers, later styles, later obsessions. Borges, writing in a 20th-century moment saturated with modernism, translation, and cosmopolitan cross-pollination, is also quietly leveling the playing field: if the past is reinterpretable, then a writer from the margins can reorganize the center. The future will do the same to him - which is both humbling and, for Borges, deliciously inevitable.
The intent is partly defensive, partly liberating. If originality is a trap - the modern anxiety that every sentence arrives late to the party - Borges proposes a workaround: you don’t have to defeat the past; you can rewrite what counts as the past. Once Kafka exists, suddenly certain parables in Kierkegaard or the bureaucratic fog in Dickens start reading like early Kafka, even if no one could have named it that way at the time. “Precursors” are often manufactured after the fact, the way constellations are drawn by connecting stars that were never meant to touch.
The subtext is a critique of tidy canons and linear progress narratives. Literary reputations aren’t fixed monuments; they’re arguments won and lost by later readers, later styles, later obsessions. Borges, writing in a 20th-century moment saturated with modernism, translation, and cosmopolitan cross-pollination, is also quietly leveling the playing field: if the past is reinterpretable, then a writer from the margins can reorganize the center. The future will do the same to him - which is both humbling and, for Borges, deliciously inevitable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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