The magician's return
The magician recurrence (English title: The Return of the Sorcerer ) is the title of a fantastic horror story by the American writer Clark Ashton Smith , which he completed in 1930 and in September 1931 in Strange Tales published, one of Harry Bates issued pulp magazine . In 1941 she was the first anthology Out of Space and Time of the publishing house Arkham House added.
In 1970 it appeared in the collection of short stories Saat aus dem Grabe , translated by Friedrich Polakovics , which was reprinted in 1982 in the Fantastic Library of Suhrkamp Verlag .
The magician's return is one of Smith's best-known stories, can be found in some anthologies and served as a template for an episode of the television series Night Gallery . With the ominous Necronomicon it contains references to the Cthulhu myth of his pen friend HP Lovecraft . The story tells of the terrible end of a black magician who is haunted by the remains of his victim.
content
The job-seeking first-person narrator Ogden introduces himself to John Carnby, for whom he is supposed to translate parts of the Necronomicon from Arabic into English. Carnby, a quirky private scholar, lives in a sprawling, ivy-covered house, the atmosphere of which already depresses him on the day of his introduction. Although he had some doubts creeping up on him in view of the man's nervousness and “fear of jumping ahead” and the darkness of the library, he accepted the job and moved into a room upstairs, as he was supposed to be available to his employer at all times. Carnby reacts relieved that loneliness has been a burden for him since his brother “started a long journey”.
At the other end of the corridor is his study, with skeletons , a stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling , stills , censer , crystals , skulls and old tomes of the medieval refuge of a magician . The books deal with areas of demonology and black magic, which Carnby claims to have studied for many years, but is currently stuck with a certain question because Olaus Wormius did not correctly translate some passages of the original, which is considered lost, into Latin .
When Ogden opens the ominous work of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in the presence of Carnby, the smell of decay hits him as if it had been lying in putrid graveyard soil for a long time . At the request of his excited employer, he translates a passage according to which the will of a magician, even after his death, has power over the mortal shell, which can be animated and the work not completed in his lifetime, in order to return to its earlier state afterwards. A powerful will could also set a dismembered corpse in motion, regardless of whether the limbs were doing the work individually or in "temporary union".
Carnby hangs on the translator's lips, who thinks the statements are blooming nonsense, but is so taken with the listener's sick look that he winces when he hears a strange grinding noise in the hallway. Sheer horror is reflected in Carnby's eyes, which only disappears after the noise, which he attributes to rats , has faded away in the distance. Another section turns out to be an exorcistic incantation , which must be spoken together with all sorts of demonic names and connected with the use of certain spices in order to be able to work. When asked about his fear, Carnby mentions a nervous condition and explains his fascination for evil , the occult and the supernatural with scientific curiosity.
When Ogden tries to retire to his room after midnight, he hears a noise and sees a monstrous something on the landing of the dimly lit corridor that seems too pale for a rat. It jumps from the landing to the step below and rolls down the stairs. Filled with fear, he crawls into his bed and sinks into a dull slumber. The next morning he tells himself it was a rat and hides the incident. Carnby withdraws to his study, from where occasionally solemn, evocative formulas read in a monotonous voice can be heard. When Ogden, increasingly suffering from the poisonous atmosphere of the house, is called to him after a long time, the air is filled with bluish fumes and a penetrating smell, as if oriental herbs had been burned in the censer, and on the floor there are parts of one to recognize the magic circle. Carnby seems more composed and hands him a few manuscripts that he has to type properly.
Later in the study she is startled again by the eerie noise from the corridor, which is approaching and soon becomes as loud as if a horde of rats is approaching them. When something knocks on the doorstep and it begins to rumble in the closet, Carnby sinks powerlessly on a chair. Without listening to his warnings, Ogden throws the door open and staggered back from the shocking image. On the floor lies a severed hand that has already decayed and whose nails are encrusted with grave earth. Horrified, he sees her move and run across the floor on her fingers like a crab .
Following their movements, he sees an arm , a foot , even a whole swarm of innumerable parts of the body that flood back towards the stairs.
“He is stronger than me,” Carnby begins his gruesome confession, “even in death! [...] because I cut up his body with a scalpel and a bone saw. "
With his twin brother, Helman, he had ventured into the depths of black magic, celebrated the Black Mass and served the devil . At some point he felt that his brother outstripped him and enjoyed greater favor with the powers of darkness. Driven by fear and hatred, he killed him, buried the body parts in the garden and kept his head in the closet in his study. Since then, no spell has helped against his brother's spirit of revenge, who was so powerful that even the incantation of the Necronomicon failed. Instead of killing his killer with the assembled body , the creeping pieces torture him to slowly drive him insane .
Filled with disgust and horror, Ogden ignores Carnby's pleading and walks through the corridor, which has sunk into the silence of the tomb, to his room to pack his things. Soon he hears rumbling footsteps coming up the stairs and trudging past his door. A crash echoes through the house, followed by a scream full of fear. Driven by someone else's will, he is drawn to the threshold of the shattered door. In the study there is a decapitated , shadow-like creature holding a bone saw and pausing, self-absorbed in front of its bloody work. It slowly disintegrates and breaks into pieces that crash onto the floor. He enters the room under external control and sees a mess of fresh and already decayed limbs. A severed head rests next to it, watching the bloody mix with malicious exultation. The magical will arises and releases Ogden, who can escape into the darkness of the night.
Creation and publication
On November 16, 1930, Smith wrote to his influential pen pal Lovecraft that for some time he had been receiving many gruesome ideas from which, with a little literary skill, one could construct gruesome stories. In this context he mentioned the idea of a "dismembered corpse [...] whose individual parts" the killer "buried in different places" and later sees the limbs crawling around to find the head he is in one Cabinet kept.
In his estate there was a summary for a work entitled "The Reunion" which was initially supposed to do without the supernatural element of magic: After the murderer had buried the parts of the dismembered victim in several places, he saw them delusional "Wandering around individually" and thinks they want to unite. At Lovecraft's suggestion, he integrated the motif of black magic and thanked him by introducing the Necronomicon in its original Arabic version.
His short story had different titles. When he first called it Dismembered and then A Rendering from the Arabic , he finally came up with The Return of Helman Carnby .
Interested in assessments, he sent a draft completed on January 4, 1930 to some pen pals, but continued to revise the text. He confessed to Lovecraft that he had made mistakes in some details and used incorrect expressions during the hasty writing. His friend recommended that the terrible ending should be concealed a bit and that "the blasphemous anomaly" that drives the narrator out of the house should rather be "hinted at or alluded to".
For financial reasons, Smith initially wanted to publish his story in the Pulp magazine Ghost Stories , where two cents per word were paid, which pushed back his doubts about the editorial principles. So far, he hadn't been able to sell the magazine, but at least received motivating reactions.
In a letter to Derleth he wrote that you couldn't publish stories there that work with a subtle atmosphere, while a drastic, suspense-aiming material had a higher chance of success. After the manuscript was rejected, Smith disarmed the ending and tried again. Again he received a rejection, which was now accompanied by a "most amusing letter from the editor". Reactions by “professional readers” would prove that the story was too horrific, and that Smith had sinned in this regard.
Farnsworth Wright also refused to accept the work for Weird Tales, writing that many readers would find it disgusting. Now Smith tried Strange Tales and chose the final title "The Return of the Sorcerer", under which his horror story was finally accepted by Harry Bates.
background
Clark Ashton Smith, who shows a closeness to decadence poetry in many stories , is, next to Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, often counted among the three musketeers of Weird Tales , and some lovers of the genre even rate them higher than Lovecraft himself.
Smith and Lovecraft influenced each other. So Smith created the Book of Eibon based on Lovecraft's Necronomicon, which took Smith's counterpart for The Shadow Out of Time , Dreams in the Witch's House, and The Shining Trapezoeder . In this, his last great story, Lovecraft again built the character Tsathoggua , which Smith had introduced in the story The Tale of Satampra Zeiros , which opened the Hyperborea cycle .
For Smith, literature was primarily intended to stimulate the imagination , in order to lift the reader above the boundaries of everyday life . For Steve Behrends, this attitude is also explained by his rather bleak and hermit existence, which he only tried to escape through his imagination.
The magician's return does without a “fabulous ambience”. While his stories, which are close to fantasy , are set in other time levels and exotic-imaginary landscapes such as Averoigne or Zothique , Hyperborea or Atlantis , the plot takes place in the present, which connects it with the short stories Genius Loci , Saat aus dem Grabe and Aforgomons chain .
reception
In the early 1970s, the story served as a template for an episode of the Night Gallery with Vincent Price in the double role of John and Helman Carnby and Bill Bixby as narrator Ogden. The anthology series, broadcast by NBC between 1969 and 1973, focused on subjects such as horror and the supernatural, and with Cool Air and Pickman's model also made use of short stories by Lovecraft. It was presented by Rod Serling , who had already made a name for himself with the Twilight Zone .
The American comic artist Richard Corben processed three short stories by Smith; In addition to The Return of the Sorcerer , he was also inspired by The Seed from the Sepulcher and The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis , Smith's first horror story to be set on Mars .
For Steve Behrends, Smith went a bit clumsy in his well-known, rather melodramatic story to conjure up a ghostly atmosphere and in some places adopted Lovecraft's controversial style . With the early hint from the Necronomicon that a dismembered magician could rise from the dead in order to take revenge , some of the tension was lost. While gruesome premonitions can be integrated into The Tomb-Spawn , a story set in Zothique, and are coherent, they would fail here in terms of narrative technology .
literature
- Steve Behrends: Clark Ashton Smith, A critical guide to the man and his work. Second Edition, Chapter Eight, Science Fantasies, Wildside Press LLC 2013 pp. 101-102
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Clark Ashton Smith : The Magician's Return. In: Saat aus dem Grabe, Fantastic Stories, Insel Verlag, 1970 Frankfurt am Main, p. 23
- ↑ Clark Ashton Smith: The Magician's Return. In: Saat aus dem Grabe, Fantastic stories, Insel Verlag, 1970 Frankfurt am Main, p. 28
- ↑ Clark Ashton Smith: The Magician's Return. In: Saat aus dem Grabe, Fantastic Stories, Insel Verlag, 1970 Frankfurt am Main, p. 36
- ↑ Quoted from Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, notes on the stories. In: Clark Ashton Smith: The Maal Dweb's Labyrinth. Collected stories Volume 3, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2013, p. 395
- ↑ Quoted from: Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, notes on the stories. In: Clark Ashton Smith: The Return of the Witcher, The Maal Dweb's Labyrinth. Collected stories Volume 3, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2013, p. 395
- ↑ Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, Notes on the Stories. In: Clark Ashton Smith: The Maal Dweb's Labyrinth. Collected stories Volume 3, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2013, p. 395
- ↑ Quoted from: Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, notes on the stories. In: Clark Ashton Smith: The Maal Dweb's Labyrinth. Collected stories Volume 3, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2013, p. 396
- ↑ Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, Notes on the Stories. In: Clark Ashton Smith: The Maal Dweb's Labyrinth. Collected stories Volume 3, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2013, p. 396
- ↑ Quoted from: Scott Connors and Ron Hilger, notes on the stories. In: Clark Ashton Smith: The Maal Dweb's Labyrinth. Collected stories Volume 3, Festa Verlag, Leipzig 2013, p. 397
- ↑ Steve Behrends: Clark Ashton Smith, A critical guide to the man and his work, Second Edition, Chapter One, Other weird fiction and horrors, Wildside Press LLC 2013, p. 18
- ^ Rein A. Zondergeld : Lexikon der phantastischen Literatur , Clark Ashton Smith, Suhrkamp, Fantastische Bibliothek, Frankfurt 1983, p. 229
- ↑ Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Smith, Clark Ashton. In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia, Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 247
- ↑ Steve Behrends: Clark Ashton Smith, A critical guide to the man and his work, Second Edition, Chapter Seven, Other weird fiction and horrors, Wildside Press LLC 2013, pp. 61-62
- ↑ Steve Behrends: Clark Ashton Smith, A critical guide to the man and his work, Second Edition, Chapter One, Other weird fiction and horrors, Wildside Press LLC 2013, p. 18
- ↑ To the classification: Rein A. Zondergeld: Lexikon der phantastischen Literatur , Clark Ashton Smith, Suhrkamp, Fantastische Bibliothek, Frankfurt 1983, p. 230
- ↑ Steve Behrends: Clark Ashton Smith, A critical guide to the man and his work, Second Edition, Chapter Seven, Other weird fiction and horrors, Wildside Press LLC 2013, p. 101
- ↑ Steve Behrends: Clark Ashton Smith, A critical guide to the man and his work, Second Edition, Chapter One, Other weird fiction and horrors, Wildside Press LLC 2013, p. 92
- ↑ Steve Behrends: Clark Ashton Smith, A critical guide to the man and his work, Second Edition, Chapter One, Other weird fiction and horrors, Wildside Press LLC 2013, p. 102