The picture in the house

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HP Lovecraft, photograph from 1915

The picture in the house (English original title: The Picture in the House ) is the title of a horror story by the American writer HP Lovecraft , which he wrote on December 12, 1920. After a publication in The National Amateur magazine in the summer of 1921, it appeared in Weird Tales in 1924 and was added to The Outsider and Others collection in 1939 , which began the history of Arkham House .

A German translation by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem appeared in 1973 in the anthology Stadt ohne Namen in the library of the Usher book series , which was reprinted in 1981 in the Fantastic Library of Suhrkamp Verlag .

In his short story , Lovecraft confronts the first-person narrator with a case of cannibalism . With the fictional city ​​of Arkham and the Miskatonic region , he introduced scenes that formed the geographic background of many of his stories in the years that followed.

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At the beginning, Lovecraft sheds light on the oppressive atmosphere of New England , where "connoisseurs of the terrible" can enjoy the eerie impression of the "ancient, lonely farmhouses". In search of the genealogical data of the inhabitants of the Miskatonic Valley , the narrator is on his bike towards Arkham. When he is on a remote street far from any city and a thunderstorm approaches, he has no choice but to seek refuge in one of those ugly houses.

Since nobody reacts to his knock, he enters the unlocked building despite an instinctive defense and an unpleasant smell. In a dimly lit, sparsely furnished room, he notices books, papers and all kinds of antiquities, while his threatening feeling intensifies. A leather-bound book on a table catches his attention and he is surprised to find that it is a Latin edition of Antonio Pigafetta's depiction of the Congo region with engravings by the De Bry brothers . The chronicler Ferdinand Magellans had written the Regnum Congo according to the "Sailor Lopez" and published it in Frankfurt in 1598. He notices “Negroes with white skin” and Caucasian facial features and other strange illustrations that he would like to look at for longer if the book did not constantly open to a blackboard with the gruesome image of a “butcher's shop (s) of cannibal Anziques”.

While leafing through Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress , he hears noises from the room above and soon afterwards heavy, strangely cautious steps on the stairs. A gigantic old man with piercing eyes and a long white beard appears in the doorway, surprisingly speaking to him in a friendly manner and with a conspicuous Yankee dialect . After a while the narrator dares to ask the old man about the origin of the Regnum Congo . A short conversation develops, the narrator translates a few sentences into English and is amazed that the neglected old man childishly takes pleasure in the terrible pictures of a book that he cannot understand.

Increasingly lively, the old man raves about strange trees, mythical creatures with the head of an alligator and creatures that look "like half ape, half human" and announces that they want to show him the best. While his eyes get a peculiar glow and his voice becomes more and more indistinct, he chooses the frightening illustration, which has obviously been viewed more often, and feasts on the image of an ax-wielding butcher standing in front of a shop wall with severed human limbs .

While his talk turns into a hoarse whisper, he confesses how excited he was at the sight of the cut off head and feet and how much more fun it was to slaughter sheep afterwards . The narrator can barely understand the whisper, especially as the thunderstorm is getting stronger and the house is shaking with a clap of thunder. Finally, the old man explains how the picture left him “hungry for food” that he “could not produce or buy himself”, but assures that he has not given in to this inclination. Could one possibly extend one's life if one were to eat human flesh? Here it is suddenly interrupted - not by a reaction from the listener or the howling of the steadily growing storm , but by a splashing noise. A drop of blood can be seen in the picture with the cannibal . Looking up, the narrator recognizes a spreading red spot and closes his eyes when a sudden flash of lightning hits the “cursed house” and creates a “oblivion” that saves his “mind”.

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Arkham and the Miskatonic Region

Lovecraft Country (German Miskatonic Region )

Arkham was suspected to be in various locations within the state of Massachusetts . The American writer Will Murray believed that the city was in the center, while Robert D. Marten suspected it to be on the east coast , since Lovecraft had designed it based on Salem . Marten speculated that the city's name was derived from Arkwright , a former village in Rhode Island . Lovecraft, on the other hand, seems to have derived the name "Miskatonic" from the Housatonic River , whose sources lie in western Massachusetts and which flows through Connecticut .

The Yankee dialect used by Lovecraft is influenced, according to Jason C. Eckhardt, by James Russell Lowell's cycle of poems Biglow Papers . The poet himself had emphasized that the dialect he used had long died out. In speaking this idiom the man gives the impression of his supernatural age .

Pigafetta and Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley (1891)

Pigafetta, a Venetian scholar and explorer, accompanied Ferdinand Magellan on the first circumnavigation of the world and wrote a travelogue as his chronicler .

Lovecraft's detailed description of the Regnum Congo makes it seem like he has read Pigafetta's work. In fact, he only drew his information from Thomas Henry Huxley's collection of essays, Man's Place in Nature ( On the History of the Man-like Apes ), repeating some of the inaccuracies Huxley had made. Huxley, and thus Lovecraft, assumed that the first edition would have appeared in Latin and not in Italian and already contained the terrifying illustrations.

In his early essay The Crime of the Century (1915) he had already referred to Huxley's On the Methods and Results of Ethnology . In the sometimes racist essay, Lovecraft attributed a leading role in the world to the "Teutonic race" , referred to the Germanic peoples as the "pinnacle of evolution" and lamented the senseless "suicide" of the British and Germans in the First World War , which nevertheless played a leading role in the world should take over. He already used the term "Xanthochroi", which was coined by Huxley, with which he had referred to light-skinned northern Europeans ("Nordic race") from a now outdated perspective.

Pigafetta had written his text about the Congo region based on descriptions by the Portuguese sailor Eduardo Lopez and published it in 1591. Neither Huxley nor Lovecraft knew that the 1598 print was not the first edition of the report. After publication in 1591, a Dutch translation was written in 1596 and a German and English translation in 1597 . It was only in this that De Brys' illustrations appeared, which were then adopted in the Latin edition, for which A. C Reinius was not responsible for Pigafetta.

Cannibalism, Brazil. Engraving by Theodor de Bry

Huxley used two of the illustrations in his essay, including the fatal “Plate 12” with the “butcher's shop”, which is supposed to show the cannibalism of the Batéké (Anziques) and is reminiscent of an engraving by De Brys about a corresponding scene in Brazil . The words of the old man about the dragon-like mythical creature with the head of an alligator owe to Huxley's explanations, while the shape of the metal-clad and leather-bound book of medium size came from the imagination of Lovecraft, as the original looked different and was rather small.

The description of the disturbing butcher shop at the beginning of the story goes back to Huxley's comments in the appendix to his essay On the History of the Man-like Apes under the title "African Cannibalism in the Sixteenth Century". There he reproduces Pigafetta's information from the Regnum Congo, praises the illustrators and describes the picture as a facsimile of the original. In fact, it only refers to a woodcut inspired by WH Wesley. If one compares this with the table by the De Bry brothers from the Latin edition, there are some deviations that can be found in the horror story and which include the depiction of the " negroes " with white skin and Caucasian facial features.

The inaccuracies resulting from second-hand knowledge are all the more astonishing for Sunand T. Joshi as Lovecraft had accused Edgar Allan Poe of this. Lovecraft revered the influential predecessor as the creator of the modern horror story, without whom the short story in its present form would be inconceivable and against which all subsequent writers would have to measure themselves. In his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature , however, he did not want to forego the point that Poe was not free from flaws despite all of his “outstanding abilities [...]”. The pretense of "profound and obscure erudition" must be recognized and forgiven. Joshi rates the inaccuracies in Lovecraft as rather minor, especially since they hardly impaired the quality of his stories.

literature

Text output

  • HP Lovecraft : The picture in the house . In: Stadt ohne Namen , Library of the House of Usher, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, pp. 89–99
  • HP Lovecraft: The picture in the house . In: City without a name , Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1981, pp. 101-102

Secondary literature

  • Sunand T. Joshi : HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, pp. 482–487, ISBN 3944720512 .
  • Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Picture in the House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, pp. 206-207, ISBN 0-9748789-1-X .
  • Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Lovecraft and a World in Transition , Collected Essays on HP Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press 2014

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quotation from: HP Lovecraft, "Das Bild im Haus". In: Stadt ohne Namen , Library of the House of Usher, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 90
  2. ↑ HP Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House". In: Stadt ohne Namen , Library of the House of Usher, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, pp. 92–93
  3. ↑ HP Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House". In: Stadt ohne Namen , Library of the House of Usher, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 96
  4. ↑ HP Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House". In: Stadt ohne Namen , Library of the House of Usher, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 98
  5. ↑ Quotation from: HP Lovecraft, "Das Bild im Haus". In: Stadt ohne Namen , Library of the House of Usher, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 99
  6. ↑ So Sunand T. Joshi , David E. Schultz: Picture in the House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 206
  7. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Picture in the House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 206
  8. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Picture in the House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 207
  9. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Picture in the House, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 206
  10. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Crime of the Century, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 50
  11. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: Lovecraft and the Regnum Congo. In: Lovecraft and a World in Transition , Collected Essays on HP Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press 2014
  12. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: Lovecraft and the Regnum Congo . In: Lovecraft and a World in Transition , Collected Essays on HP Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press 2014
  13. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: Lovecraft and the Regnum Congo . In: Lovecraft and a World in Transition , Collected Essays on HP Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press 2014
  14. ↑ HPLovecraft: Die Literatur des Grauens , Edgar Allan Poe, Edition Phantasia, Linkenheim 1985, pp. 63–65
  15. ↑ HPLovecraft: Die Literatur des Grauens , Edgar Allan Poe, Edition Phantasia, Linkenheim 1985, p. 65
  16. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: Lovecraft and the Regnum Congo . In: Lovecraft and a World in Transition , Collected Essays on HP Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press 2014