This contrast has been noticed by Lara Delage-Toriel. It appears in her article Disclosures under Seal: Nabokov, Secrecy and the Reader. Her article begins: "In his famous essay entitled “Kafka’s Precursors,” Jorge Luis Borges propounds the idea that great readers create their own writers in a retroactive way.1 We find no such latitude for the reader in Nabokov’s own statements. In fact he makes quite the opposite claim in his biography of Gogol, declaring that it is the privilege of great writers to create their own readers, which then form together a closed family-circle.2 The chicken-and-egg question of “who creates who?” may appear as a rather daunting point of departure, except that in many cases, the two positions are not mutually exclusive and may even be two sides of one same coin. Reading Nabokov’s biography of Gogol, one cannot help noticing that as a great reader of Gogol, Nabokov has also created his own Gogol. My point here is not specifically to contradict Nabokov’s statement, but rather to show that the relationship that exists between the writer and his readers involves a rather complex skein of desires which provoke a form of creativity on both parts, an impulse to invent. As the etymology of ‘invent’ reveals, the act of invention is closely linked to the discovery of something that is already there, but awaiting disclosure; this may explain why both writers and readers love secrets, as though the existence of a secret were part and parcel of the pact that binds them together." Cycnos | Volume 24 n°1 Vladimir Nabokov, Annotating vs Interpreting Nabokov-

Lara Delage-Toriel limited her introductory reference to Borges to a paraphrasis. Perhaps some of Borges's other lines are worth bringing up, to exploit his and Nabokov's views about the writer-reader relationship, emphasizing Delage-Toriel's observation that "the act of invention is closely linked to the discovery of something that is already there, but awaiting disclosure." The best example of this kind of "invention" is found in Borges's second article about Coleridge, when he mentions an ancient story about a prince who decided to build a pleasure dome in Xanadu. He thinks that - should this be a true fact - then the story behind Coleridge's dream antecedes Coleridge by many centuries, without having yet reached its final form.

However, still considering Delage-Toriel's thesis, there are several distinct elements to consider: Did Nabokov ("the great writer") invent or create his ideal reader?.When he refers to this reader as a character does he place him in the corpus of his novel, or does he allow him an independent existence in the world outside of his fiction? In my opinion, although Nabokov stimulates a reader's creative response to his works (and somewhere he describes the encounter between himself and the reader at the top of a mountain where they embrace in mutual recognition...) I don't imagine that he granted the reader an autonomous existence but kept him, as he did his characters, as a galley-slave. At the same time, I cannot exclude the hypothesis that some (very few) of his readers are included in the pantheon Nabokov inhabits, as an author and as a ghostly "someone in the know"(BS, unchecked quote). This ghostly dimension is one that, perhaps, is admitted by John Shade (the one who recently published, with no annotations, his poem "Pale Fire") when he writes about man's life as an unfinished poem.*

In "Otras inquisiones" ( where we find "Kafka's Precursors" and the articles on Colerige) Borges set down, as a premiss, that the difference between two literary works lies not as much in their texts, but in the way they are read ( “una literatura difiere de otra menos por el texto que por la manera de ser leída”)..He considers that the "first Kafka, of the "Bretrachtung" is less a precursor of the later Kafka, who wrote the sombre myths and attrocious institutions, than R. Browning or Lord Dunsany are." [the translations are mine and usually imprecise but I couldn't access the translated works by Borges, namely, Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (Austin: U of Texas P, 1964)]

Writing about XIXth Century Nathaniel Hawthorne, Borges devotes his attention to Hawthorne's short-story, "Wakefield," in which he detects the same flavor as he's found in some of Kafka's totally original creations. "If Wakefield prefigures Franz Kafka, the latter, in turn, modifies and polishes the reading of Wakefield and both authors are indebted to one another" since "a great writer creates his predecessors". He adds: "He not only creates his fore-runners but he also justifies them. What would have been of Marlowe without Shakespeare?" In another chapter he writes: "in the critical vocabulary the word precursor (predecessor) is indispensable, but it must be purified from issues related to any kind of rivalry or polemics about priorities. The fact is that every writer creates his predecessors, his work alters our conception of the past in the same way as it modifies the future." Psychoanalysts (particularly Freud, who coined the adjective "Nachträglichkeit", and C.G.Jung, and later Jacques Lacan who designated the " l'après coup" retroactive effect) may agree that any future reader will inevitably transform the works of all the writers of the past, but I suppose they'd avoid the stylistic emphasis used by J.L.Borges when he writes about writers who create their fore-runners....

In "The Annotated Lolita" Alfred Appel Jr. also quotes from Borges's "Other Inquisitions" in the chapter about Quixote. He mentions Borges's proposition that "if the characters in a work of fiction can become readers or spectators [he had just mentioned that Quixote reads Cervantes's Quixote and the play inside the play in Hamlet] we, as readers and spectators, may also be fictions." (and now we return to Nabokov's sentence about the great writer's readers).**