The luminous trapezoid
The luminous trapezoid (original title: The Haunter of the Dark ) is the title of the last completed story by the American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft .
The written from 5 to 9 November 1935, and Robert Bloch dedicated factory was established in December 1936 in the magazine Weird Tales published in 1939 and in the anthology The Outsider and Others added, with the history of the publishing house Arkham House began. A German translation by HC Artmann appeared in the 19th volume of the Fantastic Library in 1972 .
The eerie tale, which Lovecraft prefixed with a quote from his poem Nemesis , belongs to the genre of fantastic horror stories and describes the last days of a writer who conjures up an eerie being through his research.
content
An unnamed narrator reports on the death of Robert Blake , who moved to Providence some time ago and “completely focused on the representation of myths, dreams, monstrosities and superstitions”. The death allows different interpretations, and the narrator pretends to orientate himself on the notes left by the deceased ( editor's fiction ) and leave it to the reader to decide which view he agrees with. While most observers assume that Blake was struck by lightning and attributed his fearful expression to muscle reflexes, there are some who use his bizarre diary entries as evidence for a different hypothesis.
Blake's own notes show how he often sits at his desk, lost in thought, looking out the windows of his office. He observes the roofs of the city, the sunsets and again and again the "ghostly (e) Federal Hill with its countless gables, roofs and towers." One day he noticed for the first time a large, gloomy church that rises above the others Building rises and its pointed tower stands out like “a black warning in the sky”. While the other towers are buzzing around by flocks of birds, this one seems to be avoided.
Blake decides to examine the building and goes on a long foray. He finally reaches the dark tower and sees that the church and the grounds are in a neglected state. "Abandonment and decay" hang over the scene like a "gloomy threat". A policeman who was addressed crosses himself and hesitantly explains to Blake that they are not talking about this place. Upon further urging, the man mentions a sinister sect that once drove their mischief there and conjured up forbidden things from unknown depths; an eerie, gruesome creature lived there and left its mark.
Blake gathers his courage and enters the abandoned church. In the sacristy he finds "forbidden writings" with "monstrous incantations, texts from the most ancient days of mankind and light-shy knowledge of things from the time when no one had ever set foot on this earth ..." He climbs up a spiral staircase Tower room, in which there are no church bells , but a stone plinth and chairs that surround it in a semicircle. His gaze remains as if spellbound on a trapezoid , which is located in an open box on the base and seems to glow. Alien planets with huge towers and mountain ranges appear before Blake's inner eye . Shortly afterwards he finds a mutilated skeleton in a corner of the room , examines the rotten clothing and finds notes that suggest that it must have been a reporter who was on the trail of a terrible sensation. When he suddenly feels himself being watched by a strange being from the depths of the faintly glowing polyhedron and perceives a disgusting stench, Blake closes the box and hastily leaves the eerie building.
In the coming weeks, however, the memories persisted; he deciphers a secret script in an old notebook he took from church and speaks of the luminous trapezoid as a "window to time and space" that was created in a distant world, the dark Yuggoth , and from the ancients to the Earth had been brought. Step by step, it becomes clear that Blake himself conjured up a being by looking into the trapezoid, because the residents have been hearing suspicious noises from inside the church since his visit and believe that the light-shy thing used the darkness during a power failure and is up to it descended the nave . Fearful, Blake has since called the power station regularly when a thunderstorm hits the city and writes in his diary: "The lights must not go out" and "It knows exactly where I am."
Blake can still not bring himself to remove the eerily glowing stone, but rather feels a "morbid longing" to return to the tower and look again into the depths of the trapezoid to see the strange worlds again. With increasing mental disorder he begins to sleepwalk , first waking up on the way to the church and later in the tower room itself. Finally, a storm breaks out , which causes the long-term power outage that he feared. The frightened Italian residents of Federal Hills perceive a strange smell and rumbling noise and gather around the church with candles until a gust of wind blows out many of the lights. Some people later report seeing a large, growing shadow in front of the dark wall of clouds, which drove away in an easterly direction. Blake meanwhile senses the impending disaster and knows that the being will come for him.
He is later found dead and already frozen at his desk with a frightened face. His last diary entries are: “What am I afraid of? Isn't it the avatar of the Nyarlathotep who […] appeared as a human being? [...] I'm Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark [...] I see it ... come here ... Hell wind ... Titanic cloud ... Black wings ... Yog Sothoth , save me. .. The three-lobed flaming eye ... "
Emergence
With his story, Lovecraft responded to Robert Bloch's The Shambler from the Stars , written in the spring of 1935. While in Bloch's story a character who is obviously based on Lovecraft is killed in the end, in his version Lovecraft now lets a character die who - as the first name suggests - clearly refers to Robert Bloch.
A reader named BM Reynolds had praised Bloch's story and suggested that Lovecraft retaliate and dedicate a story to the author. Lovecraft had previously experienced short that two of his largest works - Mountains of Madness (At the Mountains of Madness) and The Shadow of the time (The Shadow Out of Time) - in the pulp magazine Astounding should be published. Confirmed by this news, he took Reynolds' suggestion and wrote his story.
Many of the Federal Hills details mentioned by Lovecraft relate to the architectural features of the Italian - American neighborhood in Providence . With Blake's prospect, Lovecraft described his own, which he had from his study at 66 College Street , Blake's address being Bloch's current place of residence in Milwaukee . The description of the eerie church in which Blake awakens the being goes back to St. John's Catholic Church , the main Catholic church in the neighborhood, which was demolished in 1992. Lovecraft learned that the church tower was struck by lightning in June 1935 and destroyed.
influence
Lovecraft was influenced by Hanns Heinz Ewers ' short story The Spider , which was published in 1908 in the anthology The Obsessed and which he read in Dashiell Hammett's volume Creeps by night . In his extensive essay Supernatural Horror in Literature , he praised Ewers and mentioned the story by name. With Ewers, Germany's fantastic contemporary literature is superbly embodied by a writer whose works testify to a deep knowledge of modern psychology . The peculiarities of the short story The Spider and the novels The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Mandrake. The story of a living being would take these works to a classical level.
In the story of Ewers, the medical student Richard Bracquemont falls for a demonic seductress whom he observes from a hotel room in the apartment of a house opposite. Like Blake in Lovecraft's story, Bracquemont entrusts his experiences to a diary presented to the reader by an unnamed narrator. In agreement with the police, the student quartered himself in the room in which three people had previously "hanged themselves on the window cross". At first nothing unusual happens, until he notices the strange woman - he calls her Clarimonde - who works incessantly on a distaff and whose fingers seem to move like insect legs. A mute relationship develops in the network of which he literally becomes entangled and increasingly loses his self-control. Soon he sees through the deadly and voluptuous game of the spider woman, without being able to defend himself against her influence, because he loves her “in delicious fear” and enjoys the feeling of gradual defeat and the “wonderful pleasure” of “being defeated, this one Surrender in her will ”until she finally brings him, who has to imitate all her movements, to hang himself too . To write something, he repeats his name shortly before his end: "Just quick, just don't get your head around - - My name - Richard Bracquemont, Richard [...]", which is reminiscent of Blake's notes. The dead man's face is also marked by fear and confusion, as is that of the character from Lovecraft's tale.
literature
- Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Haunter of the Dark, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, pp. 105-107, ISBN 0-9748789-1-X .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, "Haunter of the Dark, The". In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 105
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The luminous trapezoid . In: Cthulhu. Ghost stories . Fantastic Library, Volume 19, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 86
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The luminous trapezoid . In: Cthulhu. Ghost stories . Fantastic Library, Volume 19, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 90
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The luminous trapezoid . In: Cthulhu. Ghost stories . Fantastic Library, Volume 19, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 94
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The luminous trapezoid . In: Cthulhu. Ghost stories . Fantastic Library, Volume 19, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 99
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The luminous trapezoid . In: Cthulhu. Ghost stories . Fantastic Library, Volume 19, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 109
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The luminous trapezoid . In: Cthulhu. Ghost stories . Fantastic Library, Volume 19, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 117
- ↑ HP Lovecraft: The luminous trapezoid . In: Cthulhu. Ghost stories . Fantastic Library, Volume 19, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1972, pp. 123-124
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, "Haunter of the Dark, The". In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 106
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, "Haunter of the Dark, The". In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 106
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, "Haunter of the Dark, The". In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 106
- ↑ HPLovecraft, Die Literatur des Grauens , Unheimliche Literatur auf dem Kontinent, Edition Phantasia, Linkenheim 1985, p. 57
- ↑ Hanns Heinz Ewers, Die Spinne , in: Die Spinne, Grausamewissenschaften von Hanns Heinz Ewers, Herbig Verlag, Munich, Berlin 1974, p. 7
- ↑ Hanns Heinz Ewers, Die Spinne , in: Die Spinne, Grausamewissenschaften von Hanns Heinz Ewers, Herbig Verlag, Munich, Berlin 1974, p. 47
- ↑ Hanns Heinz Ewers, Die Spinne , in: Die Spinne, Grausamewissenschaften von Hanns Heinz Ewers, Herbig Verlag, Munich, Berlin 1974, p. 48