The statement of Randolph Carter
The statement of Randolph Carter or Randolph Carter's statement (original title: The Statement of Randolph Carter ) is the title of a fantastic horror story by the American writer HP Lovecraft , which was written in December 1919 and printed in May of the following year in the amateur magazine The Vagrant . In 1925 it appeared in Weird Tales magazine and in 1939 it was included in the anthology The Outsider and Others , with which the story of Arkham House began.
A German translation by Michael Walter appeared in 1979 in the 22nd and 1982 in the 71st volume of the Fantastische Bibliothek des Suhrkamp Verlag .
In his short story , Lovecraft describes a traumatic experience of the character Randolph Carter in a cemetery. With Carter, he introduced a character who had autobiographical traits and which he later had in other stories.
content
The work is conceived as a statement by Randolph Carter before the police , who have to decide on his detention . Carter was found confused on the edge of a swamp , while his friend Harley Warren has since disappeared. From the first person perspective , he tells in flashbacks of the events of a night in which his friend disappeared, and also goes into the history. Even under threat of execution , he could say nothing more about the incident than what he had already reported from his vague memory . It is quite possible that the testimony of a witness who claims to have seen the two on Gainsville Pike, from where they were moving towards a cypress swamp, is true .
During his five-year friendship, he had done some "terrible research" by Warren and read "books on prohibited subjects" which he could understand but few of which were languages. The characters of a "diabolical book [es]" from India , which Warren carried with him on the fatal night and whose contents he kept secret from him, were unknown to him. With a grisly expression on his face, he told Carter about a theory from this book that certain corpses would not rot and would rest in their graves for eons .
The following night, armed with lanterns, spades and instruments, the two go to a cemetery in a damp valley basin. The area is overgrown by wild grass and shows signs of decay with its crumbling grave slabs, honorary graves and mausoleum facades. They reach a weathered tomb, which they clear of earth and weeds, pry a heavy plate to one side and reveal a dark opening. In the light of their lamps they see a stone staircase leading into the darkness. Carter wants to accompany the initially self-confident Warren in depth, but is left behind despite his protests, because his weak nerves cannot withstand the horror of the work to be done and he would otherwise go mad, and probably die.
So Warren descends, but stays in touch with Carter over a long corded phone . After a quarter of an hour of anxious waiting, he hears the anxious voice of his friend from the receiver, whose nervous whisper seems more horrific “than the loudest scream.” He sees something terrible that he does not dare to describe in more detail, since no one can live with this knowledge and it beyond the imaginable. Soon he asked several times that Carter should close the grave again, push the plate back and flee ("Get out!"). However, he showered him with questions and decided to come to him, which Warren desperately refused - it was too late, he could only flee, they would not see each other again. In the end, Warren's whisper turns into a scream, followed by silence. Carter's anxious questions remain unanswered for a long time until he hears an indescribable voice that seems to come from the "unpredictable depths" of the grave: "You fool, Warren is dead!"
Emergence
As Lovecraft reported, he wrote the story down after a dream he had in early December 1919. There he saw himself and his friend, the poet Samuel Loveman, visiting an old cemetery where his friend met a cruel fate when he climbed alone into a crypt . According to Lovecraft, the dream was triggered by a long correspondence with Loveman in which his friend had pointed out new authors and works to him. Loveman later belonged to James Ferdinand Morton, Arthur Leeds, Frank Belknap Long and others to the so-called "Kalem Club", a literary circle that formed during Lovecraft's time in New York . Warren's passion for the books mentioned can be traced back to Loveman's impressive collection of first editions .
Lovecraft mentioned the dream on December 11, 1919 in an exchange of letters with Alfred Galpin and Maurice W. Moe, who formed the correspondence circle "Gallomo" (after the first syllables of the surname) with him. This "dream narrative" reveals that Lovecraft had edited the source material in order to be able to tell the circle an exciting story, which he ended with the dramatic words: "You fool, Loveman is dead". The comparison shows that he only exchanged the names here a little later.
If you compare the letter with the narrative, parallels in the plot and location can be shown. The graveyard of the dream tale lies in a “hideous hollow” overgrown with “ugly long grasses”. In the story the place is "overgrown by grasses, mosses and strange creeping plants". In the first text the facades of the tombs are "in the last phase of decay", so that the dreamwalker believes the area has not been entered for "many centuries". The decay is also palpable in the narrative, with “neglect and decrepitude” appearing everywhere, as if Carter and Warren were “the first living beings” to break the “deadly silence of centuries”. Another thing they have in common is the “pale, fading crescent” mentioned several times, in whose light the cemetery lies. Just as Loveman does not manage to push the record aside by himself in a dream, Warren needs Carter's support in the story. Loveman's remark that the grave was "not a place for someone to be scrapped" was not accepted by Lovecraft. In 1917 his admission to the National Guard of Rhode Island (Rhode Island Army National Guard) failed for "nervous reasons", which he found very humiliating.
If the purpose of the visit to the cemetery remains unclear in the dream description, a clue is given in the narrative through Warren's theory that some corpses would not rot. In both texts, the researcher's initial fascination quickly gives way to horror, which is finally expressed in colloquial expressions. The repeated request “Get out of here!” (In the original Beat it! ) Is one of the early examples in which Lovecraft did without sophisticated language because of the effect.
While the dream is set in New England , the story lacks an exact location. The large cypress swamp and the "Gainesville pike" indicate a place near the city of Gainsville in Florida . In the third Carter tale, Harvey Warren is also described as "a man who lived in the south" with whom Carter stayed for seven years until they "one midnight ... in an unknown and ancient cemetery" experienced the horror "and only one left the site, ”which also speaks for a southern state . For these reasons, ST Joshi follows Arkham House's editor-in-chief James Turner and believes the short story is based in Florida.
The name Carter, on the other hand, suggests New England, which is the setting for the other Carter stories. Lovecraft knew that a family named Carter was long-lived in Rhode Island and immigrated from Virginia and had studied John Carter frequently. Carter was Benjamin Franklin's apprentice printer and worked for the Providence Gazette , the first newspaper founded in Providence in 1762 by William Goddard . He wrote to his Gallomo correspondents who lived in the Midwest that they couldn't imagine such a cemetery. With him in New England, on the other hand, there are "terribly old places where the slate stones are engraved with strange letters and grotesque drawings of skulls and crossbones." In a letter from 1929 he explained that the move to New England always strongly influenced his imagination and each other had an impact on his recurring, fictional character Carter.
Background and details
Lovecraft had Randolph Carter appear in other conceptually different works. They include the unnamable of 1923, one in Arkham playing short story, acting in Carter also as a narrator, his first name is, however, not named, and the long narrative The dream search for the unknown Kadath (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath) from 1927. It is influenced by William Beckford 's gaudy novel Vathek and prose by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany , whom he discovered in 1919 and later recognized in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature . Other works are The Silver Key (The Silver Key) from 1926 and through the gates of the silver key (Through the Gates of the Silver Key) from 1932, in which the figure of Harley Warren is also mentioned. It is the only cycle that Lovecraft has written about a character and their experiences, although the times of origin of the texts are not based on their inner chronology ( Dream Search - The Statement of Randolph Carter - The Unnamable - The Silver Key - Through the Gates of the Silver Key ) correspond.
Compared to the other Carter stories, the autobiographical elements are rather few and far between, since the reproduction of the dream-like report and the images of horror are in the foreground and the characters take a back seat. In the satirical short story The Unnamable, however, Carter's statements reflect Lovecraft's aesthetic view and reveal the influence of Ambrose Bierce and Arthurmachen , whom he also mentioned in his essay. A biographical detail in The Statement of Randolph Carter is at best the protagonist's “weak nerves”, which prevent Warren from taking him into the terrible depths.
In this story, which Lovecraft cherished all his life, the motif of the forbidden books is introduced for the first time , which he used in other works. Anders suspects than about George T. Wetzel, it is not in the "evil book" that Warren makes you want to explore the cemetery to the Necronomicon , as it is not in Arabic or another, Carter common language was written and Contained characters he had never seen before. Lovecraft presented the fictional grimoire 1922 in the short story The Dog (The Hound) before, while the name of the author, of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, already in the city without a name from 1921 was read.
As in most of his oeuvre, a narrator describes the events from the first-person perspective. As a (uncertain) chronicler, he is involved in the events that he portrays retrospectively and often gives the reason why he is telling the story at the beginning. As a participant in the events, he appears credible, conveys authenticity and helps the reader to get involved with the fiction and to overcome his skepticism. The type of impersonal narrator, which is comparatively rare in Lovecraft, is typically found in his fantasy , which shows little or no connection to everyday reality. Often, writings and reports play a role that are naturally first person, a method borrowed from other classics of eerie literature such as Poe's short story MS. Found in a Bottle or Bram Stoker's novel Dracula is known.
It is noticeable that the narrator presents his motive right at the beginning or explains certain behaviors and idiosyncrasies. If he wants to warn in the long story Mountains of Madness about the fossil hunt , the melting of the ice caps or drilling in the Antarctic , Pickman's model is about the fear of using the subway, while the motif in The Testimony of Randolph Carter ( or in the horror story Das Ding auf der Schwelle ) justifying character.
reception
Authors such as Gene Wolfe or Brian Lumley , who took up the Cthulhu myth , also built the figure into their works. Lovecraft's pen pal Clark Ashton Smith , who was influenced by him, was able to recognize himself in the character of the third Carter story The Silver Key . According to him, he wrote the short story The epiphany of death (The Epiphany of Death) on 25 January 1930 in just a few hours down after the statement of Randolph Carter had read again and sent Lovecraft two days later a dedicated copy. With the atmosphere and the hint of horror, it was better than he remembered; he could find no traces of immaturity in her. Lovecraft was flattered, the work described as "poignant and most compelling story" that he "had read for eons," and praised the style with his "solemn somber (s) ... Music," which it to Edgar Allan Poe remember . Randolph Carter's testimony served as a template for several films, including The Unnamable II .
For ST Joshi , it is Lovecraft's most interesting 1919-1921 horror story that shows his progress as a writer. Lovecraft wanted to transfer the mood of his nightmare to her and indicated this through memory gaps and narrative leaps from Carter, whose statements looked as if he was still dreaming. This also applies to the end of the story with the ultimately unexplained nature of the being, which can only be heard over the phone.
Text output (selection)
- The Vagrant , May 1920
- Weird Tales , February 1925 and August 1937
- The Outsider and Others , ed. August Derleth , Donald Wandrei, Arkham House 1939
- The invisible eye. A collection of phantoms and other eerie apparitions, Ed. Kalju Kirde . German by Michael Walter , Volume 22 of the Fantastic Library , Frankfurt 1979
- In the crypt and other macabre stories. German by Michael Walter, Volume 71 of the Fantastic Library, Frankfurt 1982
- Cthulhu , horror stories. From the American by Andreas Diesel and Felix F. Frey, Festa Verlag , Leipzig 2009, ISBN 978-3-86552-066-1 .
literature
- Sunand T. Joshi . HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1, German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 3944720512 , pp. 461–466
- Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Statement of Randolph Carter, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, pp. 250-251, ISBN 0-9748789-1-X .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The statement of Randolph Carter. In: Cthulhu, Horrorgeschichten, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2009, pp. 90–91
- ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The statement of Randolph Carter. In: Cthulhu, Horrorgeschichten, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2009, pp. 90–91
- ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The statement of Randolph Carter. In: Cthulhu, Horrorgeschichten, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2009, p. 97
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Statement of Randolph Carter, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 251
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 463
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: IV Studies of Individual Works.. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward . In: Lovecraft and a World in Transition , Collected Essays on HP Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press 2014
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Statement of Randolph Carter, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 251
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 461
- ↑ Quoted from: Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 464
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Statement of Randolph Carter, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 251
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 465
- ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Der silberne Schlüssel In: Cthulhu, Horrorgeschichten, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2009, p. 104
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work . Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 462
- ↑ Quoted from: Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - Life and Work . Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 462
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: "Statement of Randolph Carter, The". In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 251
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: "Statement of Randolph Carter, The". In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 251
- ^ Marco Frenschkowski: HP Lovecraft: a cosmic regional writer. In: HP Lovecrafts kosmisches Grauen, Franz Rottensteiner (Ed.), Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 63
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, "unnamable, The". In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 283
- ↑ So Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Thematic and Textual Studies. Autobiography in Lovecraft . In: Lovecraft and a World in Transition , Collected Essays on HP Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press 2014
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: On Lovecraft's essays Poetry and Letters. History of the Necronomicon. In: Lovecraft and a World in Transition , Collected Essays on HP Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press 2014
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Statement of Randolph Carter, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 251
- ↑ Michael Koesler: Notes on Howard Philips Lovecraft's storytelling. In: HP Lovecrafts kosmisches Grauen, Franz Rottensteiner (Ed.), Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 107
- ↑ Michael Koesler: Notes on Howard Philips Lovecraft's storytelling. In: HP Lovecrafts kosmisches Grauen, Franz Rottensteiner (Ed.), Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 108
- ^ Fritz Leiber : A literary copernicus. In: HP Lovecrafts kosmisches Grauen, Franz Rottensteiner (Ed.), Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 45
- ↑ Michael Koesler: Notes on Howard Philips Lovecraft's storytelling. In: HP Lovecrafts kosmisches Grauen, Franz Rottensteiner (Ed.), Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 106
- ↑ Lumley, Brian In: Rein A. Zondergeld: Lexicon of fantastic literature. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1983, p. 162
- ↑ Letter to HP Lovecraft eldritchdark.com
- ↑ Quoted from Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, notes on the stories. The epiphany of death. In: Clark Ashton Smith: The Vault of Yoh-Vombis. Collected stories Volume 2, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2012, p. 392
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 461
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 465