The Aleph and Other Stories 
by 

Jorge Luis Borges

 

Down and Out in Lovecraft and Borges

At some point (but not today) I intend to do a review of Borges and Lovecraft together. Not to say anything important but merely to understand how they depend on one another. I think it is clear that Borges borrowed from Lovecraft. And I think it is just as clear that we read Lovecraft in light of what Borges did with the genre of fantasy/horror. 

At least a half dozen stories have been identified by readers as ‘cross-overs’ as it were from Lovecraft to Borges. And it is difficult to conceive of an interpretation of the genre that doesn’t presume the philosophical challenges put by Borges. But I think the influences may be much more widely seen in the detail of the stories. 

One obvious connection is the way both authors use the Arabic world, and Islam especially, as a focus for spiritual mystery. Borges admitted to trying to write in the Arabic tradition during a seminar in the 1970's. Lovecraft flirted with Islam in his young adulthood and clearly is familiar with Islamic, particularly Sufi, mythology. 

Another connection between the two authors is their use of space in a story to represent spiritual awakening, often in an inverted form: Lovecraft tends downward, inward into the earth and to the South when he enters the realm of the soul, hell, and fear. Perhaps this reflects his New England upbringing and the remnants of Puritan myth. Borges also goes downward but then typically rises upwards and puts his most primitive worlds in the North. Could the swamps and relative wildness of Uruguay and the Ibera Wetlands be a sort of gnostic symbol of earthly chaos directly opposed to Protestant certainties? 

Who knows, maybe in my twilight years something will emerge.