The spider (Ewers)
The Spider is the title of a fantastic horror story by Hanns Heinz Ewers , which he wrote in Ault , France in 1908 and published in the anthology Die Besessenen . The Mosse publishing house printed the text in the People's Daily , the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper and on 9 and 16 November 1908 zeitgeist , the cultural supplement of the Berliner Tageblatt .
At the center of his most famous story, dedicated to Franz Zavrel, is a demonic seductress who drives men to suicide by hanging . Ewers describes the development of a dangerous relationship between her and a student who watches her from a window over a period of three weeks.
The story has been published in numerous anthologies and was included by Dashiell Hammett in the English-language collection Creeps by night . It resembles the sinister story L'oeil invisible by the Erckmann-Chatrian couple , to whom it owes some details.
Structure and content
The detailed diary entries of the last victim are located between the introduction and the final comment by an unnamed narrator ( editor's fiction ) .
In a Paris hotel room, two guests hang themselves without revealing a specific motive for the suicide . You can find them on two consecutive Fridays on the window cross with a cord from the curtain cord. When a police officer who wants to solve the case dies exactly one week later in the same way, almost all the remaining visitors leave the cheap hotel. Two weeks later the medical student Richard Bracquemont quartered there with the agreement of the local police and records his experiences and impressions in a diary.
Nothing unusual happens at first, until he notices a strange woman - he calls her Clarimonde - who lives in an apartment across the street and is sitting behind the curtains. It seems to him that she is constantly working on a distaff , moving her fingers like insect legs. In the following days his thoughts revolve around her, so that a kind of silent relationship develops that gradually takes him captive. So they come to a game in which both have to imitate the movements of the other. He notices that she imitates his respective ideas almost instantly, as if she were mentally connected to him.
He is drawn to the window again and again and a little later realizes to his horror that he determines his movements, not hers. Although he senses the dangers of the game, he cannot end it and escape the influence of Clarimonde because he loves her "in delicious fear".
Unable to free himself from her demonic spell, he also went to the window last Friday and initially tried to resist until he finally gave in. In doing so, he enjoys the feeling of gradual defeat and the "wonderful pleasure" of "being defeated, this surrender to your will". He sees her taking off the curtain cord, making a noose and fastening it to the window and feels the "voluptuous compulsion ... in its inescapable cruelty". In order to escape her silent command, he writes down his name several times at the end of the diary.
Like the three predecessors, it can be found hanging on the cross window. Unlike the other victims, however, his face is contorted with fear and there is a large, bitten spider between his teeth. The inspector reads the diary, then examines the apartment opposite and finds that it has been uninhabited for many months.
Emergence
After a stay in South America, Ewers traveled by ship via Madeira and Lisbon to Boulogne-sur-Mer , which he reached on May 31, 1908. From there he drove via Paris to the Somme department . From June 12, 1908, he resided in the Villa Suzy in Bois de Cise and worked on his collection The Possessed , which includes his most famous stories in addition to the previous volume The Gray . After finishing Stanislawa d 'Asp's Last Will and the true story based narrative, The Play Box , he began to write The Spider . Similar to his story Die Tomatensauce , many readers initially thought it was a report because of its structure, its relevance to the present and the precise presentation of certain details, and asked for clarification.
Erckmann and Chatrian as role models?
Soon after the story was published, allegations of plagiarism were raised. Two letters to the editor already suspected that Ewers had copied them from Erckmann-Chatrian . On December 7, 1908, the author responded to these accusations in the spirit of the times and stated that he had not yet read a single line by the French authors; On the contrary, it had been difficult for him to find the alleged model that relates to the same event as his work. The dedicatee Franz Zavrel told him about the ghostly incident, which he dealt with in his story, who in turn had been informed by a Hofrat Hanel, professor of German law at Prague University. Both confirmed Ewers' information in the Berliner Tageblatt . As Hanel pointed out without citing the source, the eerie series of suicides is said to have occurred in Paris around 1866.
Wilfried Kugel doubts the portrayal of Ewers and considers his information to be unbelievable. The folk tales by Erckmann and Chatrian in particular were often used as material for French lessons and were probably translated into German by the young Ewers. Even pure A. Zondergeld assumes that Ewers on the French presentation of the author couple-oriented and this encouraged him to his story.
The story in question by Erckmann-Chatrian is L'oeil invisible ou l'auberge des trois pendus from the Contes populaires collection, published between 1875 and 1880 . It is about an old witch who can influence men with the evil eye . She forces three visitors to a hostel to hang themselves. A painter, who also lives across the street, observes and sees through the game of the ancients, known as bats , but can later hit them with their own weapons and get them to hang themselves.
While Ewers is a fascinating femme fatale to which men fall victim, the French author couple is about an old witch. In both stories, three enigmatic suicides occur before the actual plot begins; both the witch and Clarimonde influence their victims through eye contact from the window. Even if this is regarded as a coincidental correspondence, the parallel becomes obvious for Wilfried Kugel at the latest with the spider symbolism. The painter observes how the witch, who, like Clarimonde, sits on a spinning wheel and spins threads , catches a fly and places it in the web of a spider that is so big that he can see it from the opposite window - only this spider can feel " feel good in their company ”. Ewers goes back to the motif that can also be found in Erckmann-Chatrian, and uses it as a "symbolic subject", which he further expands and above all emphasizes the behavior of female spiders , often observed in nature , of becoming dangerous for the male .
Thomas Wörtche, on the other hand, relativizes this view. It is true that there are “similar basic requirements” and some common details, including the two women’s pointed teeth, reminiscent of a vampire; the extent to which the intertextual relationship goes beyond the motivic analogy must, in his view, be “left open”. However, he uses a strict standard and assesses the matches according to a “restricted concept”, in which the “template must actually be a dominant constructive factor for the adaptation”. For Wörtche, the differences between the two narratives predominate. The first story takes place in a stylized and “Hoffmannesque” Nuremberg, whereas Ewers' case takes place in metropolitan Paris. With him, the sequence of deaths with the "three consecutive Fridays" shows a clear pattern, he renounces "puppet magic", superstition and the ultimately victorious battle of good against evil . If the old woman with the terrible facial expression, the “bent back” and pointed chin reminds of the witch at Hansel and Gretel's or the apple woman from Hoffmann's fairy tale novel The Golden Pot , Clarimonde with the narrow face, the pale features and shadowy lids is the prototype of the vamp to recognize.
Influences and interpretive approaches
Another inspiration came from Théophile Gautier's story La Morte amoureuse (The Dead Beloved), rated by Rein A. Zondergeld as the “first really convincing vampire story in world literature”, which underlines the erotic aspect of the vampire myth . In it the priest Romuald falls for a beautiful courtesan , who is also called Clarimonde and who turns out to be a bloodsucker who kills her lovers. Michael Sennewald only refers to the verse tale Lamia by John Keats , in which a snake turns into a seductive girl and kills the man on the first night of love. As Wörtche explains, with the multiple appearances of the spider, Ewers creates exactly the uncertainty that determines the essence of the fantastic. It is reminiscent of Gautier's story and points to parallels. In addition to the name Clarimonde , there are certain external features that can be found in Ewers. The vampire at Gautier has "aristocratic, fine hands with long nails and transparent whites". The priest in love suspects that the devil has his fingers in the game and that perhaps only his claws are hidden under the beautiful woman's gloves. The Clarimonde at Ewers "always wears ... long black gloves", and the movements of the fingers are reminiscent of the crawling of spider legs.
Although the supernatural occurs in the story of the author couple, Wörtche does not assign them - unlike the story of Ewers - to fantastic literature. Ewers' text, on the other hand, should be classified as fantastic due to the "mutual ambiguity of the two narrative instances" (diary - and anonymous narrator). Here he is guided by the minimalist theory of the fantastic, which goes back to Tzvetan Todorov . According to her, one can only speak of fantasy if it remains open whether a process can be explained naturally or supernaturally . As soon as an event can be declared "natural" it is classified as scary ; on the other hand, if it is supernatural, it belongs to the sphere of miracle , a definition that was criticized by Zondergeld as well as Stanislav Lem, but it narrows the concept of the fantastic so much that it dissolves itself.
In Ewers' text, the spider not only symbolizes the overpowering woman who had something mysterious and dangerous for the author, which he himself summed up in the short formula Lilith , but also connects reality with the level of the fantastic . In the introduction, the narrator reports about a large black spider that is said to have been seen on two of the corpses and at the end he is shocked with the image of the bitten spider in the medical student's mouth, whose purple dots are reminiscent of Clarimonde's black dress.
When the fatal relationship develops, Richard Bracquemont observed one day, as the female of a spider is prowled by a much smaller males careful and eventually embarking on mating. After the lovemaking, the male escapes, but is caught by the oversized playmate, dragged into the middle of the net, spun there, sucked out and then thrown as "pathetic, unrecognizable lump (s) ... contemptible ... from the net", one Scene that later becomes more important. While he initially wants to distance himself - “I'm glad I'm not a spider boy” - he takes up the subject again shortly before the suicide: “I feel as if I am walking in a large circle around them, coming here a little closer, pull me back again [...] Until I finally - and I know that for sure - I have to go to her. Clarimonde is sitting at the window and is crazy. "
Precisely because he merely maintains a factual, analytical view, suspecting the possible dangers, but then rejecting them as absurd, the vortex continues to drag him along. The fact that he cannot escape him as a doctor and scientist shows, typical of the genre, how difficult it is for the respective protagonists to defend themselves against the influences of the supernatural. The medical student can no longer escape - he is already too much trapped in the sticky meshes of the net and enjoys the shudder of humiliation and destruction. He himself writes: "So I, who was so proud to influence your thoughts, it is me who is so completely influenced." For Michael Sennewald, this is not about hypnosis , but about an erotic attraction that emanates from the overpowering woman. Indicated by the obvious symbol of the spider that eats the helpless male, here, too, it is eros to which the man is at the mercy. In Richard Bracquemont love and death combine into a masochistic ecstasy of happiness. Imitated strangulation is the perverted symbolic union with the beloved. Shortly before his end, it suddenly becomes clear to him that he has fallen victim to a demonic illusion, and in the final and reflexive rise of his strength, he kills the spider and pulls the sorceress with him into the abyss.
reception
HP Lovecraft took up some elements of the story in his last completed story The Shining Trapezoeder and pictured how the writer Robert Blake conjures up an eerie being from the depths of space to which he himself falls victim.
In his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature , he dealt with other European authors of the uncanny, Erckmann-Chatrian and Hanns Heinz Ewers and particularly emphasized L'oeil invisible and The Spider . The author couple succeeded in an incomparable way in creating an oppressive night atmosphere, and only “few short stories offer greater horror than The Invisible Eye ”. Ewers is a connoisseur of modern psychology and embodies contemporary fantastic literature in Germany like no other. Outstanding features 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. Like Richard Bracquemont in the story of Ewers, the writer Blake entrusts his experiences to a diary presented by a narrator to the reader, in the end he writes his name down in despair and dies with a face contorted with fear.
For Michael Sennewald, the uncanny pages of Clarimonde serve only the superficial and intoxicating entertainment of the reader. In his opinion, she is not a supernatural, demonic spider, but, like Lilith, embodies the strong powers of eros and libido , which for some can be fatal. The story is equally an expression of the author's personality as well as of certain literary currents and popular motifs, including the vamp who accommodated the weakness of the decadent man who failed to meet reality. The literary design was also attractive to Ewers because it corresponded to his interest in archaic mother cults. In his opinion, Die Spinne is Ewer's contribution to the vampire genre of the fin de siècle , with which he took up literary traditions, relocated the events to the present of a big city and instead of the diabolically beautiful woman imagined a being from the dark realms of nightmares . With Clarimonde he presents a seductress who typologically can be traced back to Cleopatra , Herodias , Diana and the Sphinx , the demon of destruction.
literature
- Wilfried Kugel : The Irresponsible One - The Life of Hanns Heinz Ewers . Grupello Verlag, Düsseldorf 1992, ISBN 3-928234-04-8 , pp. 129-131.
- Michael Sennewald: Hanns Heinz Ewers - Fantasticism and Art Nouveau . Anton Hain Verlag, Meisenheim 1973, ISBN 3-445-01022-6 , pp. 158-164.
- Thomas Wörtche : Fantasticism and indecision . The structural criterion of a genre. Studies on texts by Hanns Heinz Ewers and Gustav Meyrink. Corian-Verlag Heinrich Wimmer, Meitingen 1987, ISBN 3-89048-113-2 , pp. 170-181.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Wilfried Kugel : The Irresponsible - The Life of Hanns Heinz Ewers , Grupello Verlag, Düsseldorf 1992, p. 128
- ↑ Thomas Wörtche : Fantasticism and Indecision , On the structural criterion of a genre. Corian-Verlag Heinrich Wimmer, Meitingen 1987, p. 170
- ↑ Full title: L'œil invisible ou l'auberge des trois pendus . The German title is: The invisible eye or The hostel of the hanged
- ↑ So Rein A. Zondergeld and Wilfried Kugel, while Thomas Wörtche relativizes the relationship between the texts.
- ↑ Hanns Heinz Ewers: The Spider , in: The Spider, Grausamegeschichte by Hanns Heinz Ewers, Herbig Verlag, Munich, Berlin 1974, p. 47
- ↑ Hanns Heinz Ewers: The Spider , in: The Spider, Grausamegeschichte by Hanns Heinz Ewers, Herbig Verlag, Munich, Berlin 1974, p. 48
- ↑ Hanns Heinz Ewers: The Spider , in: The Spider, Grausamegeschichte by Hanns Heinz Ewers, Herbig Verlag, Munich, Berlin 1974, p. 49
- ^ Rein A. Zondergeld: Ewers, Hanns Heinz . In: Lexikon der phantastischen Literatur, Suhrkamp, Fantastische Bibliothek, Frankfurt 1983, p. 91
- ^ Michael Sennewald: Hanns Heinz Ewers - Phantastik und Jugendstil , Anton Hain Verlag, Meisenheim 1973, p. 158
- ↑ Wilfried Kugel: The Irresponsible - The Life of Hanns Heinz Ewers , Grupello Verlag, Düsseldorf 1992, p. 130
- ^ Rein A. Zondergeld: Erckmann-Chatrian . In: Lexikon der phantastischen Literatur, Suhrkamp, Fantastische Bibliothek, Frankfurt 1983, p. 90
- ↑ Rein A. Zondergeld: Erckmann-Chatrian , in: Lexikon der phantastischen Literatur, Suhrkamp, Fantastische Bibliothek, Frankfurt 1983, p. 90
- ↑ Wilfried Kugel: The Irresponsible - The Life of Hanns Heinz Ewers , Grupello Verlag, Düsseldorf 1992, p. 130
- ↑ Quotation from: Wilfried Kugel: The Irresponsible - Das Leben des Hanns Heinz Ewers , Grupello Verlag, Düsseldorf 1992, p. 131
- ↑ Wilfried Kugel: The Irresponsible - The Life of Hanns Heinz Ewers , Grupello Verlag, Düsseldorf 1992, p. 131
- ↑ Thomas Wörtche: Fantasticism and Indecision , On the structural criterion of a genre. Corian-Verlag Heinrich Wimmer, Meitingen 1987, p. 171
- ↑ So Thomas Wörtche: "Fantasticism and Indecision", on the structural criterion of a genre. Corian-Verlag Heinrich Wimmer, Meitingen 1987, p. 173
- ^ Rein A. Zondergeld: Gautier, Théophile . In: Lexikon der phantastischen Literatur, Suhrkamp, Fantastische Bibliothek, Frankfurt 1983, p. 100
- ↑ Wilfried Kugel: The Irresponsible - The Life of Hanns Heinz Ewers , Grupello Verlag, Düsseldorf 1992, p. 131
- ^ Michael Sennewald: Hanns Heinz Ewers - Phantastik und Jugendstil , Anton Hain Verlag, Meisenheim 1973, p. 158
- ↑ Quotation from: Thomas Wörtche: "Fantastic and Indecisive", on the structural criterion of a genre. Corian-Verlag Heinrich Wimmer, Meitingen 1987, p. 176
- ↑ Thomas Wörtche: “Fantastic and Indecisive”, on the structural criterion of a genre. Corian-Verlag Heinrich Wimmer, Meitingen 1987, p. 181
- ↑ So Rein A. Zondergeld: What is fantastic literature? In: Lexikon der phantastischen Literatur, Suhrkamp, Fantastische Bibliothek, Frankfurt 1983, pp. 11-12.
- ↑ Michael Sennewald: Hanns Heinz Ewers - Phantastik und Jugendstil , Anton Hain Verlag, Meisenheim 1973, p. 164
- ↑ Hanns Heinz Ewers: The Spider in: The Spider, Cruel Tales by Hanns Heinz Ewers, Herbig Verlag, Munich, Berlin 1974, p. 31
- ↑ Hanns Heinz Ewers: The Spider in: The Spider, Cruel Tales by Hanns Heinz Ewers, Herbig Verlag, Munich, Berlin 1974, p. 36
- ↑ Hanns Heinz Ewers: The Spider in: The Spider, Grausamegeschichte by Hanns Heinz Ewers, Herbig Verlag, Munich, Berlin 1974, p. 46
- ^ So Michael Sennewald: Hanns Heinz Ewers - Phantastik und Jugendstil , Anton Hain Verlag, Meisenheim 1973, p. 161
- ^ Michael Sennewald: Hanns Heinz Ewers - Phantastik und Jugendstil , Anton Hain Verlag, Meisenheim 1973, p. 162
- ↑ HPLovecraft: Die Literatur des Grauens , Unheimliche Literatur auf dem Kontinent, Edition Phantasia, Linkenheim 1985, p. 59
- ↑ HPLovecraft: Die Literatur des Grauens , Unheimliche Literatur auf dem Kontinent, Edition Phantasia, Linkenheim 1985, p. 57
- ↑ Michael Sennewald: Hanns Heinz Ewers - Phantastik und Jugendstil , Anton Hain Verlag, Meisenheim 1973, p. 164
- ^ Michael Sennewald: Hanns Heinz Ewers - Phantastik und Jugendstil , Anton Hain Verlag, Meisenheim 1973, p. 163