The unnamable

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HP Lovecraft, photograph from 1915

The unnamable (original title: The Unnamable ) is the title of a fantastic horror story by HP Lovecraft , written in September 1923 and in July 1925 in the magazine Weird Tales published. In 1943 she was included in the anthology Beyond the Wall of Sleep published by Arkham House . A German translation by Michael Walter was published in 1982 in Volume 71 of the Fantastic Library of Suhrkamp Verlag .

This is the second work by the autobiographically inspired character Randolph Carter . In the story, which is mostly designed as a dialogue , she serves as the mouthpiece of Lovecraft's aesthetic theories, which Carter exchanges with a friend in a cemetery until an encounter with a monster occurs.

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The narrator Randolph Carter and his friend Joel Manton sitting on a dilapidated grave of the 17th century, located in a cemetery of the New England town of Arkham is, and talk about the "unnameable". Next to them is an abandoned house with a crumbling facade. Looking at a huge willow tree, Carter observes that its roots would probably take “unspeakable nourishment” from the ground, resulting in a dispute that clarifies the two different points of view.

While Carter believes that certain horrific things cannot be expressed and suggests this in his stories by often leaving the characters linguistically overwhelmed at the end, Manton, principal of a local school, rejects the idea of ​​"unnameable" things. Since everything is known through the five senses or religious inspiration, it must also be clearly representable. Only empirical experiences have aesthetic significance for him, which is why one should avoid the mystical . The artist shouldn't try to arouse strong emotions and should limit himself to describing everyday things accurately. Carter believes that his cause is safe, especially since he knows that Manton, despite his ostensible sense of reality, believes in certain supernatural things and insists that cemeteries in particular are teeming with the "incorporeal intelligence of generations."

Taking advantage of the oppressive atmosphere of the place, which is slowly sinking into the twilight , he speaks of "terrible evidence" that he processed in a story and that goes back to the 17th century. It is about a monstrous being that Cotton Mather mentioned in his "Magnalia Christi Americana" ("more than a cattle, but less than a person"). Frightening details can be found in the diary of one of Carter's ancestors , which he found nearby and used for his story. It describes the testimony of a witness who claims to have seen the monster near the place where they are currently located. There is much evidence that at the time it was in an old house with attic windows, the door of which was not opened for a long period after the owner's death.

Manton, noticeably quieter, admits that the monster probably existed; but it was not unnameable. Carter replies that he himself discovered the house, examined it and found monstrous bones in it, and shocks the now curious Manton with the remark: "You saw it - until dark." Manton makes a choking sound, and as if Answer, the two hear how a window of the nearby house is creaking open. A cold breeze catches them from this direction, and in the next moment they are thrown to the ground by an invisible force, they lose consciousness and only wake up in the hospital. Manton is more seriously injured than Carter and must have watched the incident better, which he is keeping secret from the doctors. On the other hand, he tells the inquisitive Carter of a gelatinous being who had "a thousand unthinkable forms of horror", only to finally admit: "Carter, it was the unnameable!"

background

Since the first name "Randolph" is not mentioned, some performers did not consider The Unnamable as part of the other Carter stories. The doubts about the identity of the first-person narrator are dispelled by a reference from the story The Silver Key , in which Lovecraft describes the development of Carter's philosophical convictions over a long period of time and connects this with the two previous stories. He refers to Harley Warren , who is described in it as a "man who lived in the south" and whom he accompanied for seven years until it came to the horrific end in the cemetery. When he returned to Arkham, he had bad experiences "in the midst of the age-gray willows and swaying hipped roofs" and then sealed pages "in the diary of an ancestor gone mad".

The short story contains satirical elements and shows the cynicism of the esteemed Ambrose Bierce as well as influences of the Welsh writer Arthur Make . Lovecraft had discovered Bierce - alongside Lord Dunsany - in 1919, while he read Arthurmachen in 1923.

In places it is reminiscent of a fictionalized essay in which Lovecraft developed and defended his own literary theory, which can be found similarly in the short stories The Premature Burial and The Imp of the Perverse by his model Edgar Allan Poe .

Another element is the uncanny nature of the landscape , which was already heard in the horror story The Image in the House and forms a dominant topos in Lovecraft's later work. Although the events are set in Arkham, the model for the cemetery with the eerie tree, the trunk of which "had devoured an ancient, illegible slab", is the Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem , on which a grave slab is still located today overgrown by the roots of a willow tree.

With the figure of Joel Manton, the decadence aesthetic advocate Lovecraft portrayed his friend Maurice W. Moe, a teacher at the West Division High School in Milwaukee , with whom he often argued about religious issues. In addition to Alfred Galpin, he belonged to the correspondence circle "Gallomo", in which Lovecraft had presented a dream story on December 11, 1919, from which his first Carter story emerged a little later. The contradicting utterances of Manton, who on the one hand rejects the extravagance of fantastic narratives, on the other hand believes "much more comprehensively in the supernatural" than Carter, can be seen as a point against Moe's religiosity . Anyone who believes in God and the resurrection of Jesus cannot convincingly refuse to portray supernatural processes.

Manto echoes some of the typical objections to the eerie fantasy - plot absurdity and escapism - that Lovecraft probably heard more often and to which he responded with justifying theories. In three essays (“In Defense of Dagon”) in 1921 he responded to criticism of the “Transatlantic Circulator”, a group of journalists and amateur writers, had justified the fantastic literature and developed a theory of the supernatural.

literature

  • Sunand T. Joshi . HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1, German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 3944720512 , pp. 594-595
  • Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Unnamable, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, pp. 283-284

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Das Unnamnbaren In: In der Gruft and other macabre stories, Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 108
  2. ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Das Unnamnbaren In: In der Gruft and other macabre stories, Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 110
  3. ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Das Unnamnbaren In: In der Gruft and other macabre stories, Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 112
  4. ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Das Unnamnbaren In: In der Gruft and other macabre stories, Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 115
  5. ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Das Unnamnbaren In: In der Gruft and other macabre stories, Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 116
  6. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, "unnamable, The". In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 283
  7. ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: The silver key. In: Cthulhu, Horrorgeschichten, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2009, p. 104
  8. ↑ 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
  9. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi. HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 594
  10. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: III. Thematic and Textual Studies. Humor and Satire in Lovecraft. In: Lovecraft and a World in Transition , Collected Essays on HP Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press 2014
  11. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 595
  12. ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Das Unnamnbaren. In: In the crypt and other macabre stories, Fantastic Library, Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main 1982, p. 108
  13. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 595
  14. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 461
  15. ↑ So Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 594
  16. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 594