House of Leaves owes a great deal to
Argentine writer
Jorge Luis Borges. A common conceit in
Borges's writing is the review of non-existent literature
[1]; his
fiction generally exhibits a
blurring of the line between
fiction and
non-fiction. There is also the rather obvious matter of Borges's
obsession with
labyrinths
[2], echoed in
House of Leaves.
Zampanò, in fact, is more or less loosely based on Borges: he is a
blind old man who writes ``non-fictional'' analyses of nonexistent works.
In addition, the text of House of Leaves pays direct homage to Borges. In particular, I am thinking of footnote 49 on p. 42 (a quote from Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote followed by an identical quote from a 20th-century writer). The passage quoted:
. . . la verdad, cuya madre es las historia, émula del tiempo, depósito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir
Is precisely that quoted in
Borges's ``
Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote''. Note the the name in
House of Leaves is the same as in the
Borges piece.
A quote from `Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' that may be relevant:
Bioy Casares had come to dinner at my house that evening, and we had lost all track of time in a vast debate over the way one might go about composing a first-person novel whose narrator would omit or distort things and engage in all sorts of contradictions, so that a few of the book's readers---a very few---might divine the horrifying or banal truth.
Those who have read
House of Leaves will know what I am talking about.
\1: See, for example, ``Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'', ``A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain'', ``Three Versions of Judas'', ``Brodie's Report'', and ``Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote''.
\2: See ``The Garden of Forking Paths'', ``The Library of Babel'', ``The House of Asterion'', ``Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth'', ``The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths'', and other works.
Note: All the referenced Borges works may be found in Collected Fictions, ed. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.