SOURCE: “J. L. Borges's Lovecraftian Tale: ‘There Are More Things’ in the Dream Than We Know,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 37, No. 4, Winter, 1996, pp. 357–63.

In the following essay on Borges's debt to the writer H. P. Lovecraft, Buchanan discusses the nature of the minotaur in the Borgesian labyrinth.

This tale of Jorge Luis Borges, “There Are More Things,” is almost unremarked in Barton Levi St. Armand's wide-ranging, incisive essay “Synchronistic Worlds: Lovecraft and Borges.” We do find a slight reference to it, however, in this best collection of articles yet published in the field of the weird tale. St. Armand quotes Borges speaking in a 1978 interview with Paul Theroux: “I like Lovecraft's horror stories. His plots are very good, but his style is atrocious. I once dedicated a story to him” (300).

That story is, of course, the one presently under discussion. In other remarks, however, Borges indicates what amounts to...