Kafka's precursors

 Another classic JLB text, on Kafka's precursors. It tell the same story as Pierre Menard, but without the magic. Several texts, written in diverse periods and places, have the air of what we would later associate with Kafka's writing. They are prophetic in that regard. And yet these texts do not resemble one another; without Kafka we would not perceive them as similar at all. The writer creates his own precursors. This seems anachronistic, but it is possible, simply because the reader creates these connections. They are as real as anything else. 

It follows that literary history is a fiction. It is a story we make up in order to explain these connections to ourselves.