Lovecraft’s stories also contain characters who put on masks: Joseph Curwen in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Ephraim/Asenath Waite in “The Thing on the Doorstep,” and the Outer Ones in “The Whisperer in Darkness.” What is especially interesting about all three cases is that they are accompanied by “demonic” possession. Joseph Curwen is a dead necromancer who possesses the body of his descendent Charles Ward. He then proceeds to dupe Ward’s friends and family into believing that he is in fact the young man. Ephraim Waite forcibly switches selves with his own daughter, acts as a woman, marries Edward Derby, and proceeds to posses his body (resulting in Ephraim-in-Edward’s-body and Edward-in-Asenath’s-body). The Outer Ones, a group of extraterrestrials who are not so much malicious as malignantly indifferent to mankind, vivisect one Henry Akeley and use his body in such a way as to lure his correspondent, the narrator, into a false sense of security. In all these cases, assumption of a false self accompanies the assumption of another’s body-self.
Note that in four of the five examples, a “real” person is displaced. Only in the case of Scharlach as Ginzberg is the assumed personality utterly false. In the others, the assumption of an individual’s self is concurrent with that individual’s death. What does this tell us about the sanctity of the self for Borges and Lovecraft?
We learn two important things from these examples. One, to pretend to be another is a negative act. None of the characters presented have good intentions for assuming a false personality. Two, the question of fluidity of self has been raised again. If Vincent Moon had not told his story and admitted to being Vincent Moon in “The Shape of the Sword,” how would we have known that he was not, in fact, someone else? It is possible that Sharlach could have indefinitely become Ginzberg, a character who never existed at all. And in the case of “The Thing on the Doorstep,” one of the crowning horrors is the realization that Asenath, one of the main characters and the villainess throughout the story, has never actually been in the story. Instead, her body has been operated by Ephraim’s self the entire time.
Both authors present this body-self masquerade in a negative light. Why negative? Because the intentional misleading of others regarding body-self prompts the question: how can we know who is who? Furthermore, these cases answer the question: without luck on our part or an admission on the part of the masked self, we cannot.
Dirk W. Mosig leads us to another interpretation, however:
According to the Buddha, the idea of a personal or separate self is a delusion with no corresponding reality. “It results in harmful thoughts of ‘me,’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and problems. . . .” In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world. (99)
From the Buddhist perspective, the very act of claiming a self is wrong. From this viewpoint, the possession of Asenath by Ephraim is a symptom of a larger wrong, an earlier misunderstanding regarding the nature of the self. Vincent Moon cannot really pretend to be someone else, because he already is that someone. We have moved from the realm of wrongdoing to simple paradox. We will come back to this paradox and what it means to participants in the fiction of Lovecraft and Borges later.
The examples thus far have dealt with physical displacements. But what do Borges and Lovecraft have to say on the matter of time and the self?
The Third Barrier: The Sphinx’s Riddle
In the definitions for this essay, I claimed that physical changes can occur in a body and still render it recognizable as a particular body. Gradual change, in fact, is a natural element of a human body. Similarly, we expect gradual, or at least logical, change in the self over a period of time. We can draw a before/after line in a child’s life at the moment s/he touches a hot stove for the first time. The child before is one who has no qualms about touching a stove. The child after is one who would go to great lengths not to touch a stove. Are these the same self?
The immediate answer is that yes, they are. It would be silly to think that every minor experience invalidates the previous self and creates a new one. But as we consider the question, the idea that these are not the same selves makes more sense. In fact, we might even say after a traumatic experience, “X just wasn’t the same after that.”
Borges engages this problem in his short story “The Other.” Here, through a quirk of the universe, he literally meets a younger version of himself on the street and has a conversation. First, let us notice that he has refuted the notion of linear time without even calling attention to the fact. Two individuals (the same individual?) from different time periods are conversing. One of the first things they do is establish that one is not dreaming the other. Given our findings previously in this essay, we might say that their conclusion to the contrary is suspect. For the sake of argument, however, let us agree that they are in fact conversing.
The elder version of Borges finally realizes he “no podíamos engañarnos, lo cual hace difícil el diálogo. Cada uno de los dos era el remedo caricaturesco del otro” [“we could not deceive one another, making dialogue difficult. Each of us was the parodic caricature of the other”] (El Libro de Arena 15). All this is to say that even having experienced the life of the younger, the elder version of Borges can no longer comprehend him. If they cannot understand each other and must treat each other as Other, the two must be different selves. But this doesn’t fit perfectly, either.
The two are linked, yet we cannot say that they are the same. They are different, but we cannot completely separate them. This dichotomy of self across time brings us closer to the concept of the Self. Lovecraft shines some light on this problem.
Lovecraft’s fourth installment of the Randolph Carter cycle, “The Silver Key,” focuses on Carter’s attempt to regain his childhood. After succumbing to the real world and its lack of dreams, Carter pursues and meets with an ancestor in a dream who tells him of a silver key hidden in the attic. Upon taking this key to his old family lands, Carter suddenly finds himself ten years old again. Not only ten years old, but ten years old, in the past, and with no conscious knowledge that he has traveled back in time.
Carter’s fifty-year-old self has performed a ritual to enter the body of his ten-year-old self. The ten-year-old self is not displaced, however. Rather, the fifty-year-old Carter seems to exist on a subconscious level, modifying the younger Carter’s self. This is especially evident given that action taken by the young Carter the very day “after” the synthesis. Without knowing why nor how, he seeks out a rock cleft and performs another ritual with the key. The culmination of this ritual, and of the Randolph Carter cycle, conclude in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” which also completes Lovecraft’s journey from self to Self.
The Fourth Barrier: All as One and One as All
In “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” Carter completes his ritual with the silver key, proceeds through a series of gates guarded by the Ancient Ones, and makes the final discovery: he is but one avatar of an infinite being. “On Earth, on October 7, 1883, a little boy named Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake Den . . . yet at that same moment, which was also somehow in the earthly year of 1928, a vague shadow not less Randolph Carter was sitting on a pedestal among the Ancient Ones in Earth’s transdimensional extension.” And these are but two of the avatars. He goes on to discover “Carters in settings belonging to every known and suspected age of Earth’s history . . . Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless . . . Carters having nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies . . .” (Dreams of Terror and Death 370).
In a sublimely Borgesian moment (predating Borges, which in and of itself might also be called Borgesian), Carter realizes that “Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings—that one no longer has a self—th
at is the nameless summit of agony and dread” (371, italics Lovecraft’s).
Compare this reaction to that of Aurelian in “The Theologians”: “en el paraíso, Aureliano supo que para la insondable divinidad, él y Juan de Panonia (el ortodoxo y el hereje, el aborrecedor y el aborrecido, el acusador y la víctima) formaban una sola persona” [“In Paradise, Aurelian learned that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox believer and the heretic, the abhorrer and the abhorred, the accuser and the accused) formed one single person”] (El Aleph 45). Borges has taken the opposite direction in this story. Rather than infinitely multiplying Aurelian, he has infinitely reduced him.
Infinite reduction and infinite multiplication are the same thing, though, as Borges concludes in “The Immortal.” Here Homer lives an infinitely long life, during which he can live every kind of life, be every kind of person. Homer is deified into every person. At the same time, every person is reduced to Homer. The self as an individual entity is no more. “Soy dios, soy héroe, soy filósofo, soy demonio y soy mundo, lo cual es una fatigosa manera de decir que no soy” [“I am a god, I am hero, I am a philosopher, I am a demon and I am a world, which is an exhausting way to say that I’m not”] (21). Barrechenea points out that this vision mimics that expressed in “The Cyclical Night” and “The Writing of the God” (89).
These explicit situations, in both Lovecraft and Borges, open a gate to a disturbing possibility. If Carter is many Carters, if Carter can be an insect from Yaddith and simultaneously a man from Earth, if he can be these things and yet be unaware of the fact, Carter can be every character in every story. If there is no difference in the eyes of God between Aurelian and John of Pannonia, between the opposite sides of a coin, what difference can there be between two things not even opposite? All men who speak a line of Shakespeare are Shakespeare. Homer is infinite and thus nothing. Both authors, through infinite multiplication and reduction, have negated the individual and separate self and replaced it with the Self.
Fear and Loathing in Las Cuentas: Reactions to the Self
I said at the beginning of this essay that the concept of Self utilized by Lovecraft and Borges approximates the Buddhist concept of interrelatedness. There is a problem with this analogy, however. In Buddhism, with the recognition of the illusion of the self comes understanding and peace. This recognition generally comes after a lifetime of study and meditation. For the characters in both Borges’s and Lovecraft’s fiction, however, recognition generally comes as a shock, no matter how well the characters think they have prepared for it.
In “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” for example, Carter decides to enter the body of an insectoid magician named Zkauba from the planet Yaddith. The first thing we should notice is that he has not in fact reached enlightenment. Were this the case, he would no longer distinguish between his own consciousness and that of Zkauba. Failing to realize this, however, he spends the remainder of the story in a battle over control of the body (incidentally, Zkauba is not enlightened, either, and disgusted at the presence of this mammalian mind within his body). For all his studies, despite knowing that he is an avatar of the Ultimate Being in the universe, Carter (and thus all humanity) is unable to fully comprehend the nature of the Self.
Another of Barrenechea’s observations on Borges is applicable to Lovecraft in this scenario. “Borges . . . is seduced by the power of joining the strong contrast of everything-nothing in a single phrase and of quickly passing from fullness to a complete vacuum” (90). While Carter does not enter a vacuum of nonexistence or oblivion, he does suffer a crisis of identity and quickly passes from an awareness of all beings to a reduced awareness in which he is not fully in control of his “own” body.
Do Borges’s characters fare any better? If we return to the man in “The Circular Ruins,” he understands his fate “con alivio, con humillación, con terror” [“with relief, with humiliation, with terror”], but the story goes no further than his revelation (Ficciones 66). His lack of self is not explored. We do not learn Aurelian’s reaction to the discovery that, to God, he and John of Pannonia are the same.
The closest we come, in fact, to discovering the personal reaction to the Self is in the characters named Borges. Daniel Balderson points out in The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges that the individual most commonly named is Borges himself (xvii). Yet this Borges is not always the same Borges. Borges is often the name of a narrator, or one to whom a story is told. But let us look especially at his famous essay “Borges and I.”
This essay is generally recognized as metaphoric. “The other one” to whom he refers is conceived as his public image, that aspect of him which writes. Yet he questions, even in something so transparent, “si es que alguien soy” [“if, indeed, I am anybody at all”] (“Borges y yo”). He laments that he tried to free himself from this other Borges and was unable. Within his own body, he recognizes that there is more than one self, and his terminology seems to imply that this is more than just a question of Jungian personae. By his very reactions, flight, feelings of loss, he obviously does not embrace the Self. There is still a latent desire in him to claim a self, to resist becoming part of the collective Self. As opposed to the fear present in Carter, Borges meets this inevitability with a sigh.
Finally, it is interesting to note some numerical figures. Norman R. Gayford finds that in fifty-six stories by Lovecraft, fully twenty-six of them have first-person anonymous narrators, that is to say, narrators who could be anyone (13). Another thirteen stories are narrated by eight different first-person “defined” identities, but consider that among these are Randolph Carter, the Delapore who narrates “The Rats in the Walls,” and Nathanial Wingate Peaslee. We have examined Carter in detail, Delapore slips through a number of languages (and personalities) at the end of his story, and Peaslee is very specifically the subject of a body exchange in “The Shadow Out Of Time.” There is certainly more to explore in this vein, then, than the Randolph Carter cycle.
Besides himself, the most-mentioned characters in Borges’s works are: “God, Jesus Christ, and then, in descending order, Shakespeare, Schöpenhauer, Cervantes, Plato, Virgil, Quevedo, Whitman, Homer, Milton, Poe, Lugones, Dante, Stevenson . . .” (Balderston 50). Of these fifteen individuals, I can immediately identify six of them as somehow associated with multiple selves or avatars. God and Jesus Christ are part of the Christian Trinity, as well as being divine and human avatars of what is supposed to be the same deity. Shakespeare is Borges’s well-known “everyman.” Schöpenhauer was a proponent of the Self. Cervantes’s most famous character, Don Quixote, was a schizophrenic and possibly subject to demonic possession (Kallendorf). Whitman famously stated “I am large. I contain multitudes.” Homer acts as another “everyman” in “The Immortal.” Dante forms the split between Dante the Poet (who is writing the Commedia) and Dante the Pilgrim (who is participating in it). I believe that research into the other individuals will find that a sizeable portion have some kind of representation of multiple selves or avatars.
Summation (Reduction)
H. P. Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges inexorably disassemble the concept of a unique, unchanging self in their fiction. By interrupting time and space, introducing the element of untruth, and blurring the line between dream and reality, they reveal that the popular notion of self is an illusion. They each plant these seeds in characters that appear in multiple stories, thereby repudiating their solidity even in a bibliographic sense. Furthermore, while introducing this fact, they highlight humanity’s inability to comprehend and accept the deconstruction of the self. The reason why they cannot take the final step is a topic for another essay, but perhaps G. M. Goloboff comes close when he says of Borges “La fama alcanzada, y hasta las glorias literarias, le hicieron sentir, y aun predicar, que como Homero, Shakespare o Whitman, era todos y Nadie. Su propia literature, en cambio, es la única que, en el proceso de dibujar al mundo, puede también dibujarlo” [“The fame he achieved, and even the literary glories, ma
de him feel, and even proclaim, that like Homer, Whitman Shakespeare, he was everyone and no one. His own literature, however, is the only one that, in the process of drawing the world, can also draw him”] (69, italics Goloboff’s). While they explore, intentionally or not, the Postmodern Self (which is, after all, not so different from nihilism), both are rooted so firmly in the need for identity (specifically the ability to identify with a glorious literary past and to make their own), they cannot portray this Self except as an inevitable power, a horror, a set of facing mirrors.
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JeFF Stumpo lives in Martin, Tennessee.
Works Consulted
Balderston, Daniel. The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1986.
Barrenechea, Ana María. Borges the Labyrinth Maker. Edited and translated by Robert Lima. New York: New York University Press, 1965.
Barrientos, Juan José. “Borges y Lovecraft.” Actas del X Congreso de la Asociación de Hispanistas, I-IV. Barcelona: Promociones y Pubs. Universitarias, 1992.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Sand. Translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977.
——. Everything and Nothing. Edited by Donald A. Yates. Translated by Donald A. Yates, James E. Irby, John M. Fein, and Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions, 1999.
——. “Borges y yo.” (1960). In El Hacedor.
——. Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations. Richard Burgin, ed. Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 1998.
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