ABSTRACT
Writing on Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges argues that every significant writer invents his or her own precursors. A paradoxical feature of this law of criticism is that the phenomenon strengthens with the writer’s originality. Franz Kafka’s style is startling and new; critics therefore search for influences; as they do, hidden aspects of earlier writers emerge that appear to anticipate the later ‘original’. The process is reciprocal. Calling Bleak House Kafkaesque brings out the Kafka in Dickens, and vice versa. Literary history is thereby altered: new lines of affiliation become set, obscuring the appearance of things prior to the arrival of the strong writer (Borges 1964).
