Polaris (short story)

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HP Lovecraft, photograph from 1915

Polaris ( English Polaris ) is the title of an early short story by H. P. Lovecraft , which was written in the spring or summer of 1918 and printed in December 1920 in the amateur magazine Philosopher . In December 1937 it was published in pulp magazine Weird Tales and in 1939 it was included in the first volume of Arkham House . A German translation by Michael Walter was published in 1982 in Volume 71 of the Fantastic Library of Suhrkamp Verlag .

It belongs to the group of fantasy stories and describes how an unnamed narrator by the light of the Polar Star is pursuing, dreaming traveling in a mythical land and will eventually confronted with the fact that his real world seems to be a dream from which he cannot awaken.

With Polaris , Lovecraft introduced elements that he was to process several times over the next few years. In addition to the Lomar region, these are the "Pnakotische Manuscripts", a fictional book that is later mentioned in the mountains of madness , the luminous trapezoid and many other works.

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Polaris

Through a north window, the narrator sees Polaris, who with its "glowing light" seems to be immobile, while constellations of the northern sky such as the Great Bear and Cassiopeia seem to be moving. At dawn he sees Arctur flashing above a cemetery and far to the east Berenike's hair shimmers ghostly, while the immobile North Star looks at him "like a waking eye" as if it wanted to convey a message. When the sky finally becomes cloudy after a flash of northern lights , he falls asleep and dreams that he is roaming the land of Lomar and the marble city of Olathoe with its pale walls, towers, columns and domes. He soon recognizes nobly dressed men whose language he understands even though he has never spoken it before.

After waking up, the dream does not go out of his mind, and soon he would like to leave his disembodied state in order to get in contact with the “dignified bearded men” and to be able to express his opinion. He finally feels the change, finds himself physically in the midst of the people and again no one seems to be a stranger.

His friend Alos, commander of the armed forces, speaks of the threat to Lomar from the advancing Inutos, "squat, hellish yellow devils" who are devastating the empire and besieging the cities. The ruthless warriors are not held back by the concepts of honor that inhibit the Lomarian people. In order to be able to send the men of Olathoe into battle, Alos reminds them of tradition and reminds them of the ancestors who bravely threw themselves against the "long-armed cannibals". He does not want the decrepit narrator, who tends to faint , on the war front , but assigns him the important role of guarding the capital from a tower , because despite spending many hours on the "Pnakotischen manuscripts" he has the keenest eyes in the city.

So he climbs the watchtower to give a fire signal from there and to warn the soldiers if the Inutos should approach. Since he has not slept for days, he is overwhelmed by a leaden tiredness and desperately fights against sleep. The North Star sparkles through a crack in the roof and peers at it “like an evil enemy and tempter”. With hypnotic monotony he whispers verses to him to lull him to sleep: "Slumber, watchman, let the spheres / circles and me return / after a good twenty thousand years / to the place where I was now." So he sinks into a sleep, and when he seems to wake up, he realizes that he is still dreaming and that he can look through his window at the "horribly swaying trees of a dream swamp". He begs the dream creatures to wake him up before the Inutos can take the city, but is not answered. Lomar would only exist in his imagination that the region had been covered in ice for eons and only inhabited by "yellow beings", the " Eskimos ". He is tormented by feelings of guilt for betraying Olathoe and feels the North Star blinking at him again.

Emergence

The inspiration for Polaris was a controversy carried out by letter with his friend Maurice W. Moe, whom he would later portray in his satirical short story The Unnamable in the character of Joel Manton. Here too it was about ideological and religious questions. In May 1918 he had written to him about a dream that was the germ of the story. He found himself in a strange city with "palaces and golden domes", which was surrounded by "terrible ridges". Disembodied, he roamed her, believing he had known her once. He struggled to remember her so he could travel thousands of years into the past at a time when something terrible must have happened. Many details of the dream can be found in the story. So the first-person narrator is initially satisfied to be able to move bodiless and watch the scene, but then wants to get in physical contact with the people. That he fears an unknown catastrophe and seems to be connected to the past are further parallels.

Moe was convinced that religious ideas were important for the moral and social order regardless of questions of truth. Lovecraft, for whom it was important to prove the differences “between dream and reality [...] appearance and being”, reacted polemically at times and wrote that this pragmatism led to having to regard his nocturnal vision as as real as conscious perceptions in the waking state . If questions of truth no longer played a role, he would be "indisputably an incorporeal spirit that hovers over a strange [...] very old city somewhere between gray, dead hills." This reductio ad absurdum can also be found in the story when the ego Narrator decides to get in touch with the Lomarians and tells himself he is not dreaming. In this way he could prove the “greater reality” of the other life that he spends in the house through whose north window the North Star is watching him. So it can be interpreted as a point against Moe that the first-person narrator ultimately considers his dream to be reality, but reality and his previous life to be a dream.

Background and reception

Lord Dunsany

According to Sunand T. Joshi painted Lovecraft in Polaris no dream imagination, but rather a psychological obsession by an ancestor, as in his 1917 short story written The grave ( The Tomb ). With the poem woven into the story, he alludes to the great year or world year , which was already known in antiquity and was treated by Plato in his dialogue Timaeus , even if it referred there to the world cycle , after which the planets returned to meet a starting point. With this, Lovecraft indicates a period of about 26,000 years with which the first-person narrator travels into the past in order to unite with his ancestors.

For this reason, Lomar is not a dream region, but a prehistoric area that must be in the Arctic , as can be recognized by numerous hints. The Eskimos mentioned in the story and living under the Pole Star are descendants of the Inutos, especially since he wanted to allude to the Inuit self-designation with this name . The differentiation is important because some of Lovecraft's works are interpreted as "dream stories", although only two would correspond to this classification: The dream search for the unknown Kadath and Celephais .

Parallels between the short story and the work of Lord Dunsany , which Lovecraft only discovered a year later, are striking . He himself went into the similarities in 1927 and wrote that his short story was particularly interesting because he wrote it "in 1918, before I had even read a single line from Lord Dunsany." There are people who do not believe this could, but he could not only “give his word on it, he could prove it absolutely. It is simply a case of a similar view of the unknown and a similar supply of mythical and historical motifs. ”This is the reason for the matching atmosphere and treatment of the dream topic as well as the“ artificial terminology ”.

Edgar Allan Poe

There may be other reasons for the similarity. Both writers were influenced by Edgar Allan Poe , though this may be more obvious with Lovecraft. Dunsany confessed in his autobiography that he fell under the spell of Poe at a young age. In a school library he discovered and read his stories, "and the ghostly desolation and eerie gloom of the foggy grounds of Weir remained for many years something that seemed more gruesome to me than anything else in the world ..." Lovecraft let himself be mostly from horror stories how The Black Cat , The Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia influence, for Dunsany it was rather the prose poems and other texts that, in addition to the impulses from the King James Bible , shaped the colorful language of his early work. For Marco Frenschkowski , Polaris shows that the role model Dunsany only moved him in the direction that was already laid out in him.

In the essay Supernatural Horror in Literature , Lovecraft devoted a separate chapter to his model and described his ornate prose, which with its "archaic and oriental style", the "repetitions based on the biblical model and recurring leitmotifs " had a strong influence on later writers such as " Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsany ”.

While some critics pointed out the narrative inconsistency in assigning someone to security duty who tends to pass out, according to Joshi this is not particularly significant. Lovecraft has poignantly described with evocative rhythm and subtle pathos how someone seems to confuse dream and reality.

Text output (selection)

  • Philosopher , December 1920
  • National Amateur , May 1926
  • Weird Tales , December 1937
  • The Outsider and Others , Arkham House , 1939
  • Dagon and Other Macabre Tales , 1986
  • In the crypt and other macabre stories. German by Michael Walter , Volume 71 of the Fantastic Library, Frankfurt 1982

literature

  • Sunand T. Joshi . HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1, German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 3944720512 , pp. 325–328
  • Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Polaris . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, ISBN 0-9748789-1-X , pp. 211-212

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Polaris. In: In the Crypt and Other Macabre Stories. German by Michael Walter , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1982, p. 38
  2. ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Polaris. In: In the Crypt and Other Macabre Stories. German by Michael Walter, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1982, p. 39
  3. ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Polaris. In: In the Crypt and Other Macabre Stories. German by Michael Walter, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1982, p. 40
  4. ↑ Quoted from: Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Polaris. In: In the Crypt and Other Macabre Stories. German by Michael Walter, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1982, p. 41
  5. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 326
  6. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 327
  7. ↑ Quoted from: Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 327
  8. ↑ So Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 328
  9. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi : HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 325
  10. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 326
  11. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 326
  12. ↑ Quoted from: Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 326
  13. ↑ Quoted from: Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 326
  14. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 326
  15. ^ Marco Frenschkowski : HP Lovecraft: a cosmic regional writer. A study of the topography of the uncanny. In: Franz Rottensteiner (ed.), HP Lovecrafts kosmisches Grauen , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 62
  16. ↑ Quoted from: Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 326
  17. ↑ Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, pp. 325, 328