Borges observes after Johnson that no writer likes to owe something to his contemporaries, perhaps because they seem too much like us.[1] Looking for new things, the writer finds them more readily in the ancients. The need for social intercourse remains and is sublimated. Reading re-establishes the community. Reading also serves as a surrogate for the immediate social intercourse, as the superficial have long suspected. Books of the dead replace the living. Thus, a genuine writer does not read his contemporaries, the fellow islanders, avoiding them (as well as him/herself?) as much as possible.

Conversely, no writer likes to be lauded by his contemporaries. Writing serves as a surrogate here as well. The community is repelled. The contact is postponed, suspended. Shaw, among many others, provides a rationalization of this twofold self-excommunication:

No book that is received at once with general applause is worth reading except as a work of art. It is the book that is burnt by the common hangman that makes history. It has been said of me by the superficial that I hate to be agreed with out of mere perversity. There is no perversity in the matter: I know that if I write a book that everyone agrees with I am wasting my time bringing coals to Newcastle.[2]

The perversity perhaps remains, though. Here the necrophilia is projected forward. The process of mediation and objectification is reproduced. From book to book to book. The social intercourse is ossified in the hope that the communion will be preserved, re-established once again, on a true and lasting basis, and that the chain will remain unbroken by virtue of the writer’s premature and premeditated (or only rationalized?) death. Meanwhile, to assume the best, only the missing link is undoubtedly present, as a lasting document of an unbroken chain of missing links. Ritualized death as a precondition of eternal life of the species.

Footnotes

1. Borges, J.L., Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964, p. 61.

2. Shaw, B., The Rationalization of Russia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964, p. 96.