H. P. Lovecraft

Years ago, I attended an English department proseminar on postcolonial literature. I never did finish it, but it was a good proseminar; I would've written my paper on the "trial scene" in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which I believe closely parallels Meursault's trial in Camus's Stranger, and also similar scenes in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Elizabeth Costello.

One of the books we read for the proseminar was Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach, which I recommend. There are a couple of passages in Monkey Beach with allusions to dead people at the bottom of the sea and suchlike, and the teacher running the proseminar remarked he was reminded of Stephen King. I pointed out later that I felt the scenes were very strongly reminiscient of H.P. Lovecraft's work. Our docent was baffled and basically asked me who on earth I'm talking about. I wondered that he hadn't heard of Lovecraft, but he treated me as if I'd invented the man on the spot.

I was a little bemused by this. Like I said, I never did end up finishing the proseminar, but this August I've been trying to get back into the business of reading literature to prepare for some studying next year. A friend of mine has Paolo Coelho's The Zahir listed as one of his favorites on iRead, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Having learned it's based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, I decided to start with that, and got my hands on Borges's Collected Fictions.

Wikipedia tells us Borges is "widely regarded as one of the most important writers of the 20th century", and lists such suitably impressive influences as Dante Alighieri, Miguel de Cervantes, Franz Kafka, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Schopenhauer. He was passed over for the Nobel prize in literature, which was considered scandalous by many, and is in all respects very much a Proper Author.

I started with the short story collection called the Aleph, which contains the Zahir. The very first story is called the Immortal, and reading it I was struck by the fact that H. P. Lovecraft might easily have written it. Lovecraft had been dead for 12 years when the Aleph was published, so an influence was quite possible. As I kept reading, I couldn't help thinking that Borges must have read Lovecraft. There were a few other signs, but when I got to thinking about it, more came up. Borges is famous for inventing books and authors out of whole cloth. Who else can one easily think of who did this? Lovecraft, with his Necronomicon, which has acquired such wide fame that there are people who actually believe it exists. Borges never accomplished that!

I can imagine how a teacher of Proper Literature would scoff at the idea that one of the greats of the 20th century would have read some pulp horror author whose very existence they suspect. I would've been willing to defend my thesis that he was influenced by Lovecraft solely on the strength of the Immortal, but I couldn't really be sure there was an actual influence. Wikipedia also refuses to list Lovecraft as an influence. Imagine, then, my joy at reading Borges's short story There Are More Things. Its dedication? "To the memory of H. P. Lovecraft".