Franz Kafka, Roberto Bolaño, and the “Artificial Intelligence” of Posthumous Authorship

This article undertakes a comparative reading of the lives and legacies of Franz Kafka and Roberto Bolaño in order to explore the nature of their authorship after their deaths. To this end, this article considers the implications for the construction of posthumous authorship as a category of reception and production if it were viewed metaphorically as a form of artificial intelligence. This article then proceeds to undertakes a critical act of fabulation in reading “Josefine die Sängerin; oder das Volk der Mäuse” (“Josefine the Singer; or the Mouse People”) and Bolaño’s short story “Policía de las ratas” (“Police Rat”), a posthumously published sequel-of-sorts to Kafka’s tale, as one combined metatextual and metaphorical commentary on the condition of posthumous authorship and the forms of referentiality that may be discerned between literary works by deceased writers.