Ligeia

Ligeia , illustration by Harry Clarke , 1919

Ligeia is an 1838 short story by Edgar Allan Poe that focuses on the reincarnation of one person in another.

action

The nameless first-person narrator met and fell in love with Ligeia in an “old, dilapidated city on the Rhine” and got married, a woman of great beauty as well as intelligence and education. He describes her as very tall, her hair and eyes black, skin white, with a deep voice and of incredible calm and serenity, beneath which a volcano of passion simmers. The first-person narrator becomes her student and allows himself to be guided through all areas of the spiritual . She is particularly fascinated by the idea that all life is will and that death is only based on a lack of willpower . Nevertheless, she falls ill, wilts, writes a resigned poem about the "conqueror worm" - and dies. The widowed first-person narrator can no longer stand it in the old town on the Rhine and buys from the rich legacy that Lady Ligeia left him, an old abbey in England, which he decorates in an antique and Egyptian way , especially the marriage bedroom afterwards he has found a new partner: the blonde and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion from Tremaine. Her family left her to him out of greed for money - but he is still under Lady Ligeia's spell and can only endure the new relationship in an opium intoxication . Lady Rowena also falls ill, recovers again, falls ill again - and dies. The burial has been prepared, the first-person narrator is sitting by her corpse, and she seems to be recovering - and falls back into rigor mortis. This terrible process is repeated several times, until Rowena finally rises from her death bed, the death band falls off her, she seems to have grown, her hair is black, her eyes are black, the first-person narrator recognizes Lady Ligeia in her with horror Willpower conquered death in her successor.

interpretation

Illustration by Byam Shaw to EA Poes Ligeia , 1909

As in Eleonora and Morella , it is also about the death and loss of a beloved woman who is overcome by an otherworldly force. If Morella lived on in her daughter (of the same name) and Eleonora in the soul of her successor Ermengarde, the already dead Ligeia succeeds in literally resurrecting Lady Rowena when she dies. Biographically, the two-woman problem in Poe's stories can be related to his early lost mother and cousin Virginia, whom he married, or to this and other female relationships that Poe either actually had or even imagined. The first version is supported by the fact that the narrator submits to Ligeia's leadership and upbringing like a child's mother. Neither Ligeia nor Rowena can be said to have had an erotic relationship; the latter falls under the explicit hatred of the first-person narrator immediately after the marriage.

However, it is not the poet himself who reports the story, but a first-person narrator as a role figure who at the same time contributes to a peculiar alienation and puzzling of the events. He describes Ligeia as his lover and wife, but is only able to give a few biographical details about her. It seems that he has forgotten the essential facts about her. He doesn't even remember where, how and when he met her. Since he tells the reader this at the beginning of the first sentence of the narrative, it indicates a deliberate de-individualization of the title character. With this narrative technique, by suppressing an individuating name, the description of the special occurrences of an individual case is raised to the level of the exemplary: instead of the family name, which the narrator said he never knew, is the mythopoetic, typifying designation as Ligeia im Meaning of "the melodic". In this way, the relationship between man and woman is alienated in an almost bizarre way in Poe's story ; the two do not stand opposite each other as persons, but as archetypes , which, however, are at the same time distorted and delimited.

The narrator's struggle for the memory and the vague, blurring features and characteristics of Ligeias, which he tries to trace in an area between the subconscious and the waking, make Ligeia appear like a dream appearance or vision , whereby all the more precise circumstances or backgrounds become irrelevant and in his own Memory can no longer be reconstructed. In the process of remembering as well as retelling the idea of ​​Ligeias assumes mythical - symbolic traits and is emphasized in the conscious as a solidifying term that "belongs to another sphere of the spirit". The narrator finally sees his marriage with Ligeia as "romance" (German: " romantic love") and thus reconstructs her image as part and result of his imagination , so that in the retro perspective, a new image of Ligeias in from chaotic emotions or sensations and associations the imagination arises. In this retrospect, the word “Ligeia” becomes a crystallization point at which the narrator penetrates from the level of the external world to the reality of the dream.

The material of memory in the story shows a dichotomy: life and death of Ligeias on the one hand and death of the second wife and resurrection as Ligeia on the other. At a central point in the central axis of the narrative is the quote from Joseph Glanvill, which precedes the story, as it were, as a motto, which has not yet been verified in research and is probably an invention of Poe: “Man only surrenders to angels or death the impotence of his weak will ”(in the original: “ Man doth not yield himself to the angels nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will ” ).

Edgar Allan Poe: The Conqueror Worm - illustration by Noel (around 1900)

Shortly before, there is a ballad-like poem Ligeias about human life, in which Ligeia, as in medieval morality, depicts human fate as a game on the stage of the great world theater, which is accompanied like a nightmare by macabre , fantastic effects. The first verse of the poem already shows eschatological features such as the fear of certain death and the premonition of its terror. In the dreamlike stage landscape, the audience are veiled angels who know the outcome of the play and shed tears over it. The performance is accompanied by a contrasting music of the spheres with cosmic echoes as an expression of the world spirit and a universal harmony in which the music soothes the universe. The music of the spheres swells up and down and sounds unevenly, so as to adapt to the subject of the drama on the stage, hope and fear.

Ligeia, meanwhile, sings “a different song than Glanville”: In her ballad only the “ Conqueror Worm ” (in the German translation: “Der Erobererwurm” or “Der Menschheit Bezwinger - der Wurm”) sings as the sole hero of this tragedy, in which human fate inevitably leads to death. The phantasmagoria described here forms a counter-draft to the image of Ligeia that the first-person narrator creates of her in his memory: despite the conception of the inevitability of death embodied in her own poem, Ligeia rears up against death with all her strength Will on. However, their willpower is not to be understood in the current sense of the word, but as an original, "archetypal phenomenon that unites ideas and characteristics from other spheres and unites them into a complex agglomerate".

The first-person narrator presents his own role in his relationship with Ligeia as largely passive; this affects him like an inspiration to the poet , since he himself is unable to contribute anything to the creation of the song apart from his ardent desire or desire. The impressive description of this inspiration by Ligeia reflects the idea of ​​almost all romantic poets who understand poetic experience as a kind of mystical vision that arises from the very source of the soul and is put into words by means of imagination and ratio . So Ligeia enters the narrator's room inaudibly like a shadow or a divine vision; She only makes herself noticeable through the "magical timbre" and musicality of her quiet voice, which is in contrast to her "impetuous energy".

Much of the narrative serves to describe Ligeia's beauty, whose shape does not correspond to the classicist ideal of evenness and symmetry of the forms, but rather, in the narrator's description , can be associated with the play of forms of Mannerism , in which, as here, a stretching of the length of the figures is common. The narrator does not regard the inequality and asymmetry of the proportions as well as the irregularity of Ligeia's features as a lack of beauty; For him, true beauty only comes about through this deviation from the classical ideal, which establishes the magic of the unusual and the glamor of the mysterious. For the narrator, the peculiarities of Ligeia's external appearance are particularly evident in her eyes, which are “far larger than those of the gazelle- eyed women from the Nourjahad valley”; H. seem to be of unearthly, unspeakable beauty in the heated imagination of the narrator. In describing Ligeia's beauty, Poe tries, as Göller writes in his interpretation, " to capture in words the essence of poetic beauty, which by its nature is unspeakable."

At the same time, the narrator associates Ligeia's eyes with her willpower: the enumeration of the analogies to the beauty of her eyes culminates in Granville's quotation above. The tremendous intensity of Ligeiia's thoughts, deeds and language only appear to the narrator afterwards, after long pondering, as the result of her immense willpower and violent passion. From the point of view of the narrator (and poet), the emphasis on the will points to what is most original and essential in human beings, which, like love, cannot be destroyed by death. The narrator recognizes Ligeia's love on the day of her death as “the drive of her wild, unconditional desire for life”, which, as Göller explains, in its “vehemence and passion is ultimately identical with the will in general”. Accordingly, Ligeia does not love the narrator as a real person or individual , but "in him life as an expression of the metaphysical will which is at the same time in God , in contrast to the principle of death."

The narrator's marriage to Lady Rowena after Ligeiia's death, on the other hand, expresses the narrator's estrangement; his second wife is seen as a counterpoint to Ligeia's original poetic inspiration. In diametrical contrast to Ligeia, the narrator connects Lady Rowena exclusively with reality, which is particularly evident in Rowena's pursuit of gold and material possessions. The first-person narrator now projects his beginning madness into the furnishings of the room, which foreshadows or embodies his mental and emotional state. The absurd shapes and colors in the carving, cornice and furniture as well as carpet patterns correspond to the speaker's daydreams, distorted by his opium noises ; the enjoyment of opium as such also reflects his attempt to escape from reality and Ligeia's death in an intoxicating dream.

The narrator's description of Ligeia's resurrection clearly shows that his role is not limited to passively reflecting external events as a mirror, but rather shows that the narrator is actively involved in Ligea's awakening. As long as he turned to Rowena's corpse, it is the only dead body with which he dutifully deals. At the moment when he mentally turns back to Ligeia, the color returns to the corpse and further signs of life become recognizable. If the narrator then focuses on the body again, it falls back into a state of rigor. While the mere sight of Rowena's corpse suppresses the signs of life, the mental memory and evocation of Ligeias by the narrator helps to revive them. Ligeia's primal will finds its counterpart on the part of the narrator in the power of revitalizing inspiration.

Impact history

Poe's theory of the will shown in Ligeia takes up various literary and philosophical models ranging from Novalis to Coleridge to German poets and the philosophers of German idealism . Parallels to Poe's view can also be found in Schopenhauer , who regards the will as a thing-in-itself through which individuals are separated in space and time.

Poe's philosophical stance on German idealism, which is expressed in Ligeia and understands the will as the central human force, is even more evident in Poe's short story Morella , which was written in 1835. Morella deals with Fichte's pantheism and Schelling's theory of identity ; the narrator (and with him the poet) tries to break free from the spell of these mystical writings. Here, however, the narrator never made love to Morella; his alienation from the first day of marriage leads to her death, which the narrator longed for. After her death, however, Morella's identity rises again in the form of their daughter, like the phoenix from the ashes. In Eleonora , the third female figure in this group of Poe's short stories, the title character is reincarnated after the death of the title character in the form of the even more brilliant, radiant and more comprehensive Lady Ermengarde. This corresponds to the romantic idea of ​​the poetic act as a repetition of a mystical unio with nature. In each of these three short stories, Poe represents the second appearance as a mystical beauty and an ecstatic , divine reflection of the pure or absolute idea .

Ligeia and these related short stories correspond to Poe's poetological conception, according to which the short stories should be just as “strongly mystic” as his poems. Below the superficial meaning, the short story is supposed to have a subliminal, deeper or suggestive layer of meaning, which, however, eludes a clear conceptual definition or interpretation. It is precisely this "undercurrent of suggestive meaning" that constitutes the short story according to Poe as an ambiguous or ambiguous work of art . So Ligeia can be read before any subtle interpretation on the one hand as the story of “the wonderful and fairytale overcoming of death by a beautiful, loving and beloved woman”, but also as the story of the “ hallucinatory experiences of an opium addict”. These interpretations are not mutually exclusive, but complement each other to create a “unity of poetic charisma” in the sense of the “unity of effect” called for by Poe in The Philosophy of Composition .

Title, motto and miscellaneous

Ligeia is the name of one of the sirens , who is also a doom demon. The name (originally derived from the Greek Λιγεία , dt. Bright, loudly sounding), which already suggests associations with death and mourning as an epithet , then appears more frequently in the sphere of death and burial. In Latin literature she becomes Nereid , the daughter of the sea god Nereus and his wife Doris , a mermaid who enchants mortals with her enchanting song and beauty, but also knows the way to the Hesperides from her father . Poe himself quite consciously intended this type of association; Already in his early poem “Al Araaf” (1829), Nereid was associated with “beauty, melody and will”.

Poe linked the name Ligeia with the idea of ​​inspiration and spiritual or poetic beauty, the perfection of which not only in words, but also in pure poetry, i.e. H. in Melos , is to be grasped. The sound body of the name with its exotic-strange sound supports musical, mytho-poetic suggestions with subliminal echoes.

The author of the motto, which is repeated in the text, is said to be the English author and philosopher Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680), whose main work Sadducism Triumphatus , an apology of witchcraft and ghost belief, is one of the most important sources of the novel "The Monk" by Matthew Lewis heard. However, none of the verses quoted can be found in the entire work of Glanville, so that it can be assumed that Poe himself is the author.

Lord Verulam is the nobility title of Francis Bacon .

With Ashtophet, Poe probably alludes to the Hebrew name of the Astarte : Ashtoret.

Azrael refers to the angel of death in Jewish mysticism.

Film adaptations

• Roger Corman processed the subject in 1964 in The Tomb of Lygeia . It was the last of the director's eight Poe films.
• In 2009 Edgar Allan Poe's Das Grab der Ligeia by Michael Staininger was released based on a script by John Shirley . This film adaptation brought history to the present.

German translations

• Ligeia . Transferred by Helmut Wiemken and Christel Wiemken. In: Edgar Allan Poe: Master narratives , ed. by Günter Blöcker , German Book Association, Berlin a. a. 1960, pp. 201-221. [Reference edition used here]

Secondary literature

• Karl Heinz Göller : PoeLigeia . In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 69-81.

Web links

Wikisource: Ligeia  - sources and full texts

• Original English text
• German translation by Gutenberg
• Engl. Wikipedia about Joseph Glanvill

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Karl Heinz Göller: Poe · Ligeia . In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 72 f.
2. ↑ See Karl Heinz Göller: Poe · Ligeia . In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 73.
3. ↑ Edgar Allan Poe: Master Tales . Selected and ed. by Günter Blücker, Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft Berlin et al. 1960, pp. 201, 205 and 210. Cf. also Karl Heinz Göller: Poe · Ligeia . In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 70.
4. ↑ See Karl Heinz Göller: Poe · Ligeia . In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 70 f.
5. ↑ Cf. German text, p. 206. See also the interpretation approach by Karl Heinz Göller: Poe · Ligeia . In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 74 f.
6. ↑ Cf. German text edition p. 204 as well as the interpretation approach by Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 74 f.
7. ↑ See German text edition p. 205 f. and 208 as well as the detailed interpretation by Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 74-78.
8. ↑ Cf. German text edition p. 210 ff. As well as the detailed interpretation by Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 78 ff.
9. ↑ See German text edition pp. 217–220 as well as the interpretation approach in Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 79.
10. ↑ Cf. on the literary-philosophical models of Poe's conviction, the detailed explanations and evidence in Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 76-78.
11. ↑ Cf. on these references and parallels also Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 78 f.
12. ↑ On the various readings and possible interpretations, cf. the presentation and references in Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 80 f.
13. ↑ For details on the meaning of the name and on Poe's knowledge and use of the name Ligeia Karl Heinz Göller: Poe · Ligeia . In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 71 f.
14. ↑ See Karl Heinz Göller: Poe · Ligeia . In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American short story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , p. 72.