THE DEEP ONES: "There Are More Things" by Jorge Luis Borges

"There Are More Things" by Jorge Luis Borges

Discussion begins November 27th.

First published in the July 1975 Atlantic Monthly.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://vicusyd.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/borges-there-are-more-things.pdf

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?78660

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Book of Sand
Acolytes of Cthulhu

MISCELLANY

http://www.nyrsf.com/2013/03/until-someone-loses-an-ithe-deconstruction-of-self-...
http://tinyurl.com/kuyhw6q
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges
http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_biography.html
http://tinyurl.com/n3v97ed

I am so intrigued. Reading time has been the proverbial rare avis for weeks now, but this seems like a golden goose.

ETA Rara avis, rather. I should know better than to quote Latin from memory, I haven't any. (Latin, or memory.)

Acolytes of Cthulhu for me.

Note that The Book of Sand is also included in Collected Fictions, which I aim to snag at the public library tomorrow.

The Book of Sand for me, so the translation is by Norman Thomas di Giovanni.

Ah! A story I have on my shelf in Collected Fictions. When I spotted the title I grabbed the book and read it. I will now keep quiet until the 27th.

>1 gwendetenebre:

Glad you found it online, Kenton; I thought I was gonna have to sit this one out. 8)

>7 artturnerjr:

It's online for me too, Art. I just found an version of Collected Fictions that's a little easier to read than the first scanned link I posted above:

http://posthegemony.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/borges_collected-fictions.pdf

If you click that little "Toggle Sidebar" icon over on the left, you can then click on "Show Document Outline", which will let you jump directly to "There Are More Things".

This paragraph near the ends straddles the border between pastiche and lampoon:

What must the inhabitant of this house be like? What must it be seeking here, on this planet, which must have been no less horrible to it than it to us? From what secret regions of astronomy or time, from what ancient and now incalculable twilight, had it reached this South American suburb and this precise night?

But then the very last paragraph brings a fine chill:

My feet were just touching the next to last rung when I heard something coming up the ramp - something heavy and slow and plural. Curiosity got the better of fear, and I did not close my eyes.

"Plural" is a perfectly Lovecraftian word choice in this instance. I enjoy low-key horror tales like this which seem rather dry until the ending.

9 > I did like the bit about Earth being just as horrible to it as it to us. Tho on reflection, it ought have had some time to get used to earthlings by that point.

I found Borges's use of the readers' imagination to develop the horror perfect. It parallel's Hitchcock's approach and is so much more effective than anything an author can put on a page.

Like you, @KentonSem, I liked the last paragraph. It gave nothing away and left the reader to ponder inumerable possibilities.

At first I found the style somewhat abrupt, but soon got used to Borges jumping scene without warning or ceremony once he had delivered the information relevant to the story.

>11 pgmcc:

Speaking of abrupt:

One morning the milkman came upon the body of the sheepdog, decapitated and mutilated, on the walk.

I appreciated that nothing more was made of this statement.

There is some dryly subtle, sardonic humor to be found in the story as well:

I know that I am notorious for my curiosity, which has, variously, led me into marriage with a woman utterly unlike myself (solely so that I might discover who she was and what she was really like), into trying laudanum (with no appreciable result), into an exploration of transfinite numbers, and into the terrifying adventure whose story I am about to tell.

"Transfinite" - HPL would certainly have latched onto the concept of numbers more than finite yet less than infinite. Also, I wonder if the part about the marriage was a reference to Lovecraft and Sonia Greene?

'Life, which everyone knows is inscrutable, left me no peace until I perpetrated a story by H. P. Lovecraft, a writer whom I have always considered an unconscious parodist of Poe. In the end, I gave in; the lamentable fruit is entitled "There Are More Things".' - that's a quote from Borges' Afterword to The Book of Sand.

Unless that's false modesty, Borges evidently didn't think much of this story. Also, there's his rather acid summing up of Lovecraft.

I read Borges well before I read Lovecraft, but I can't remember how this story struck me when I first encountered it; although it would not have seemed massively different from his other fictions. I didn't, and still don't, see it as an artistic failure.

Rereading it now, this is what struck me: firstly there's quite a degree of similarity between the style and persona of both Borges and Lovecraft (did Borges notice the resemblance and feel uncomfortable about his own influences, R.L. Stevenson (perhaps surprisingly), for example, is one; "unconscious parodist" could be a bit of projection - we know from his correspondence that Lovecraft was well aware of his influences. Secondly the Casa Colorada, in the story, is a sort of small-scale Witch House or even R'lyeh, but the strange angles only go so far as confusing the narrator's perceptions: they don't actually extend into other dimensions. Obviously that might be a bit too "genre" for Borges' purposes but also, it might point to Lovecraft being a bit ahead of Borges in his thinking. I've read that Borges' thinking was rooted in 19th century metaphysics; whereas Lovecraft of course took an early interest in Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

Mattias Fyhr thought that the afterword comment was Borges's preemptive defense against suggestions that writing a Lovecraft pastiche was / should be beneath him.

Evidently, when I read this story (and all of Acolytes of Cthulhu with it) in 2008, my brain completely forgot it.

>9 gwendetenebre: Yes, it did seem a bit pastiche-like until the last line when it jumped up a level from being low grade strangeness to something more enigmatic and awesome.

>13 housefulofpaper: I've read very little Borges but, yes, Lovecraft did try to keep abreast of modern scientific developments and was, I suspect, much more interested in empirical scientific observations than Borges.

To me, this story had a very Platonic feel to it in the last stage. Instead of objects in our world representing some Platonic ideal in another dimension, the furnishings of Preetorius' house are representations of a weird, unearthly dimension.

Finally, mention of the "sort of long operating table" brought to my mind a line from David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers: "... gynecological instruments for mutant women".

I really liked the lack of resolution and detail in the ending. But I found the abrupt transition from the meeting with Muir to the encounter with Iberra to be so jarring that it had me stuck on the page for minutes.

As a boy, I accepted those facts of ugliness as one accepts all those incompatible things that only by reason of their coexistence are called "the universe."

This sentence is a piece of epigrammatic pessimist philosophy that is every bit a match for the opening lines of "The Call of Cthulhu."

I also thought the story had a nice feel to it, though I do wonder what I would think had I come to it without provenance: didn't know the HPL dedication, didn't know it was written by Borges. It's so nuanced, really a shared commemoration among enthusiasts, rather than an exemplar of the genre.

As mentioned already, I appreciated the dry humour and interesting asides about astronomy, mathematics, architecture. These lent a decided if subtle background hum to the proceedings, which contributed well to the sense of unease.

It didn't occur to me immediately upon finishing, but I think Borges was particularly effective in his shift in narrative tone. So much of the story was told almost at a remove: very little dialogue, the narrator if anything relating something that had occurred in the past rather than relaying what was before him, but even more the "objective" descriptions of the universe, the landscape, the speculations of what the inhabitant "must be like", and so on. And abruptly, he is describing his descent down a ladder, and something coming up the ramp.

In many ways, this doesn't make sense from the standpoint of narrative structure. It's as though he ends his tale, frozen on the ladder, and we are suddenly cut off from his dialogue! But if so, how then has he relayed the tale up to now?! He must have survived, and if so, why end the story there? Don't get me wrong -- I think Borges' choice was absolutely correct, it heightens the effect to have this jarring shift. But technically, it's an odd choice. Borges didn't create any narrative frame as though it were a transcript of an interrupted dialogue, which he could have done, and again I think it was correct as written. An example of how an artistic decision needn't always follow the technical advice on how to write something.

I'm going to read through the rest of Book of Sand and am thankful for the Deep Ones for getting me to pick this book off my shelf again!

ETA Now I think on it, the "incompatible" narrative structure in some ways echoes the incompatible architecture of the Casa Colorado. Wonder if that was intentional on Borges' part.

> I'm going to read through the rest of Book of Sand and am thankful for the Deep Ones for getting me to pick this book off my shelf again!

I returned Collected Fictions to the public library, but put it on my wishlist as a book worth owning -- or at least borrowing again to read more in the future. The only Borges I own is The Aleph and Other Stories.

Borges once remarked of Kafka, "the fact is that every writer creates his own precursors." I wonder what sort of HPL is being created in this story?

#17how then has he relayed the tale up to now?!

That struck me as well, and it reminded me of the same situation in Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum. I do not feel it is always necessary to have a surviving narrator. If we are in the mind of the author as he is climbing down the ladders we feel the fear of the unknown approaching below. As a mind exercise it works for me.

> 17, 19

Yes, it seems like "the narrator must survive" is a rule worth breaking occasionally, whether or not that's the case here.

#20 ...whether or not that's the case here.

I think that very uncertainty adds to the power of the story.

>19 pgmcc:, 20

"Surviving Narrator" is a succinct way of putting the dilemma, and fully agree it's worth breaking that rule. As my daughter said recently while reading Harry Potter: "I know nothing's going to happen to him, there are 2 books left!" I've set myself the challenge of ensuring she is challenged on that point, eventually.

But it's also interesting to end the tale there, even if the narrator survives. I like that Borges did it this way, messes with literary expectations and makes the tale more about the evocation of cosmic horror, less about a report of historical events. I like pgmcc's phrase, "a mind exercise"!

#22"I know nothing's going to happen to him, there are 2 books left!"

I had the same experience when reading The Girl Who Played with Fire. The book was the second in a trilogy and I knew the main character was in the third book. She was subjected to horrendous beatings and ill treatment but I knew that even if she had been hung, drawn and quartered, she was going to survive. It took the edge off the book.

But it's also interesting to end the tale there, even if the narrator survives. I like that Borges did it this way, messes with literary expectations and makes the tale more about the evocation of cosmic horror, less about a report of historical events.

Lovecraft's tales often end with a more-or-less successfully terrifying revelation. It's surely deliberate that the "revelation" here is that the narrator saw, not what he saw; the ending tells us nothing further about the creature, the only insight into whose nature is the brief invocation of the amphisbaena earlier.

Ah yes! The amphisbaena!

I had only a vague recollection (quite inaccurate, it turns out) of what that was, and was prompted to track it down online. I mis-read the reference to Lucan, and was sidetracked into Lacan's The Object of Psychoanalysis, and in Ecrits, both available online.

It was curious, though, that Lacan used it in in Ecrits thus:

Captive head under the Virgin's foot, what will we see of the head that repeats you at the other end of the body of the amphisbaena? A mountain gnosis, whose local hereditary characteristics we would be wrong to neglect, grabbed it anew from the lacustrine retreat where it is still curled up, as Jung put it as he spoke to me of his canton's secrets." Page 588 in the Google books edition I used

I've not read Lacan, though I take him to be inscrutable even in the original French, unless the reader is well-versed in his particular form of literary psychoanalysis.

In any case, this is intriguing to find such a specific reference in Lacan, despite the fact Borges quoted Lucan, not Lacan! Lacan's reference sounded to me like a synopsis of an original myth, but I couldn't find a more complete telling. Based on just this snippet, I find myself speculating that Lacan was using a provocative idiom, perhaps warning the person who thinks they have such a serpent secured beneath one's foot, when in fact there is another head free. But also, wondering if the reference was perhaps to a Doeppelgaenger: that the second head of the serpent was one's own, a reflected self.

So! What did others make of Borges' reference to an amphisbaena?! And what are the odds Borges knew of both Lucan and Lacan's use of the term?