Also, I'm once again baffled that Danielewski, in of Leaves, never once references The Haunting of House, when he references almost everything else, and here the comparison is obvious (and, for that matter, so is Bilbo and Company wandering about in Mirkwood, and he never references that, either). But I digress.
This made me curious, because I didn't remember him referencing Borges, either, and the similarity, there is so overt as to (possibly) not need naming, and I wondered if it was the same thing, in effect, with Ms Jackson. I went to the wikipdeia entry, which led me to an author profile of Mark Z. Danielewski, wherein I found this (and remembered that I'd read it, before, at the beginning of my Borges obsession):
"Indeed, a direct reference to Borges appears in footnote 167 -- which is about the very question of similarities between of Leaves and its artistic predecessors!
"'167 In her elegantly executed piece entitled "Vertical Influence" reproduced in Origins of Faith (Cambridge Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) p. 261, Candida Hayashi writes, "For that matter, what of literary hauntings? Poe's The Fall of the of Usher, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting, ... many stories by Lovecraft, Pynchon's gator patrol in V., Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" in Ficciones, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, ...? To say nothing of ... Bill Viola's Room for St. John of the Cross or more words by Robert Venturi, Aldo van Eyck, James Joyce, Paolo Potoghesi, Herman Melville...? To all of it, I have only one carefully devised response: Ptoeey!' ( of Leaves, Footnote 167, pg. 131, 133, 135. The blue type is as it appears in the text"
But Neither Borges nor Jackson (nor anyone else in that extremely long list) appears in the Index of names and items... So. Damn. Strange.
That profile, in case you wanted to read the thing, in full: http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_infl_danielewski.html
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This made me curious, because I didn't remember him referencing Borges, either, and the similarity, there is so overt as to (possibly) not need naming, and I wondered if it was the same thing, in effect, with Ms Jackson. I went to the wikipdeia entry, which led me to an author profile of Mark Z. Danielewski, wherein I found this (and remembered that I'd read it, before, at the beginning of my Borges obsession):
"Indeed, a direct reference to Borges appears in footnote 167 -- which is about the very question of similarities between of Leaves and its artistic predecessors!
"'167 In her elegantly executed piece entitled "Vertical Influence" reproduced in Origins of Faith (Cambridge Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) p. 261, Candida Hayashi writes, "For that matter, what of literary hauntings? Poe's The Fall of the of Usher, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting, ... many stories by Lovecraft, Pynchon's gator patrol in V., Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" in Ficciones, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, ...? To say nothing of ... Bill Viola's Room for St. John of the Cross or more words by Robert Venturi, Aldo van Eyck, James Joyce, Paolo Potoghesi, Herman Melville...? To all of it, I have only one carefully devised response: Ptoeey!' ( of Leaves, Footnote 167, pg. 131, 133, 135. The blue type is as it appears in the text"
But Neither Borges nor Jackson (nor anyone else in that extremely long list) appears in the Index of names and items... So. Damn. Strange.
That profile, in case you wanted to read the thing, in full:
http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_infl_danielewski.html