Borges on Burning A Writer's Work

Dmitri Nabokov has finally decided to publish The Original of Laura,  the unfinished work his father asked him to burn after his death. Remember the recent kerfuffle? I thought of it again when I was reading the Paris Review interview with Borges. Borges had this to say about Kafka:

We only know that he was very dissatisfied with his own work. Of course, when he told his friend Max Brod that he wanted his manuscripts to be burned, as Virgil did, I suppose he knew that his friend wouldn't do that. If a man wants to destroy his own work, he throws it into a fire, and there it goes. When he tells a close friend of his, I want all the manuscripts to be destroyed, he knows that the friend will never do that, and the friend knows that he knows, and that he knows that the other knows that he knows, and so on and so forth.

So. Good decision, Dmitri Nabokov. Thanks to Maud for the link. I know you must all read Maud anyway, but she has two other links in her sidebar today that are absolutely not to be missed: this cartoon featuring David Foster Wallace stranded on a deserted island and this exchange between Rebecca Wolff, editor of the journal Fence, and an apparently mentally unbalanced poet who really, really wants his free contributor's copies.

Comments

[elizabeth ellen]

i don't know. personally, i cannot imagine treating a contributor like that...she sounds like the customer service person who's been doing her job way too long and is just waiting to be bitchy to the next person who asks for extra ketchup.