Two Ways of Looking Back

On Kafka, Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman, and Bananas

In “Kafka and His Precursors,” Borges argues that certain writers so definitively etch an attitude and style, we look back at writers who lived before them—in the case of Kafka, at Zeno, Kierkegaard, and the 9th Century Chinese writer Han Yu—and read their work retrospectively as Kafkaesque. Kafka bends time in both directions, changing how we regard th…